Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners
 
 

Quote of the Day:


“To change early at one's own desires is best. To wait until forced by circumstances looks bad. To not change at all is to fail.” 
– Robert Jones


“We have slain a large dragon, but we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways, the dragon was easier to keep track of.”
– James Woolsey

"Whoever relies on the Tao in governing men doesn't try to force issues or defeat enemies by force of arms. 
For every force, there is a counterforce. 
Violence, even well-intentioned, always rebounds upon oneself.

The Master does his job and then stops. 
He understands that the universe is forever out of control, and that trying to dominate events goes against the current of the Tao. 
Because he believes in himself, he doesn't try to convince others. 
Because he is content with himself, he doesn't need others’ approval. 
Because he accepts himself, the whole world accepts him."
– The Tao


1. Putin: 'A Very Savvy Gangster' Who Won't Stop at Ukraine, Says Former US Envoy to Russia John Sullivan

2. Diplomatic Dexterity - United States vs. China - A Great Power Competition Report

3. Has High Tech Made Artillery Obsolete?

4. How the CIA tries to recruit Russians to spy on their country

5. How Do You Change a Command's Culture? This General Tried Being Direct About War with China.

6. Selling America: The Army’s fight to find recruits in a mistrustful, divided nation

7. Harris Could End America’s Era of Hubris Abroad

8. Ukraine launches massive drone attack on Russian energy infrastructure

9. Nuclear Weapons Always Stopped Invasions. Then Ukrainian Troops Poured Into Russia.

10. Ukraine Strikes Moscow Oil Refinery in Massive Drone Barrage

11. Putin, cash and guns prompt ‘explosive’ rethink of Swiss neutrality

12. ‘Moneyball’ for gun crews: Surprising data have Army division reshaping its gunnery training

13. America isn’t ready for another war — because it doesn’t have the troops

14. Foreign Nationals Indicted for Swatting Attacks and Bomb Threats Against U.S. Victims

15. Israel’s Strategic Dilemma—and Iran’s

16. Why the U.S. isn't ready for wars of the future, according to experts

17. The Challenges of Next-Gen Insurgency

18. Among America’s “Low-Information Voters”

19. Nazis demanded to know if ‘The Hobbit’ author was Jewish. He responded with a high-class burn.





1. Putin: 'A Very Savvy Gangster' Who Won't Stop at Ukraine, Says Former US Envoy to Russia John Sullivan


A sobering assessment here.


Excerpts:


Given his rude treatment by the temperamental Trump and the faults he found with Biden’s policies, I asked Sullivan in the podcast who he planned to vote for this fall.
He struggled a bit to come up with an answer. 
“I don't support either candidate,” he said. “You know, it's difficult for me. I've said it before that I'm a lifelong Republican and that's always been my—I was about to say the word default, but that's not the case. I was an enthusiastic voter for Republican presidents starting with Reagan in ‘80. If and when I vote for Trump in November of 2024, it's only because I believe It's my duty to vote and it's a binary choice.” 
But that said, Sullivan says, it is Putin who may be the ultimate winner. 
“You know what, Michael, my perspective on this is—and it's something I talk about in the book—the type of political division we have in the United States today is as bad as it's certainly been in my lifetime. That's catnip to the Kremlin, the fact that we can't have a civilized, even modest civilized political dialogue. I mean, in some sense, Putin really doesn't care. Putin could care less about Trump or Harris, Republicans or Democrats. What he really thrives on is division in the United States. He wants to crush our hope in the future. He wants us to think, we Americans to think, we are as bad, we are the same as he.” 
In that sense, his sometimes setbacks on the battlefield notwithstanding, Sullivan suggests, the Russian leader has plenty to celebrate.





Putin: 'A Very Savvy Gangster' Who Won't Stop at Ukraine, Says Former US Envoy to Russia John Sullivan

https://www.spytalk.co/p/putin-a-very-savvy-gangster-who-wont?utm

Trump was chaotic, Biden timid, adds the former ambassador, who also chides fellow Republicans for not backing Ukraine


Michael Isikoff

Aug 31, 2024


During the height of the Vietnam War, the top American general William Westmoreland famously reassured policymakers in Washington that there was “light at the end of the tunnel.” But today, when it comes to another seemingly endless war, this one in Ukraine, John Sullivan, who served both Presidents Trump and Biden as ambassador to Russia, sees no flicker of light at all—only pitch black darkness.

Sullivan signing copies of “Midnight in Moscow” at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC Aug. 12. (Photo by Jeff Stein)

“This is gonna be a bloody sore on the face of Europe for a long time to come,” said Sullivan in an interview for the SpyTalk podcast when asked to assess the state of the conflict. 

Sullivan is the author of a fascinating new book, Midnight in Moscow, that recounts his experiences overseeing the U.S. Embassy in Russia—“behind enemy lines,” as he puts it—while Vladimir Putin launched a naked war of aggression aimed at toppling the Kyiv government of Volodymyr Zelensky and turning Ukraine into a Russian vassal state. 

It was a nail-biting experience, during which Sullivan was regularly piped into secure National Security Council conference calls as the Biden White House mobilized western support to punish Moscow with economic sanctions while rushing billions of dollars worth of military hardware to Ukraine to repel the Russian invaders. 

But more than two and half years after Russia’s invasion, the war has turned into a gruesome and protracted conflict with no clear path to victory for either side. In his book, Sullivan depressingly concludes that the Ukraine war could drag on for “decades” or, as in the case of Korea, never really end at all. 

To be sure, the recent Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Kursk region—during which Kyiv’s forces broke through thinly manned defenses and captured dozens of towns and villages—has bolstered the country’s morale and given Zelensky’s government  new hope. Sullivan calls it “the biggest change on the battlefield” since 2022 and a huge “embarrassment” for Vladimir Putin. But, he also concedes, it will also likely only harden Russian resolve to win back its territory, even as the country’s military plows ahead in Ukraine itself, with punishing drone attacks on civilian infrastructure 

“The Russians will, as they've done throughout history, rally from the initial setback and swarm the invaders,” said Sullivan. “So maybe the Ukrainians get pushed back, but I don't think there's gonna be a big change between now and next spring.”

In short, the world may be looking at a stalemate—prolonged, costly and increasingly bloody with no indication either side is prepared to back down. 

“The Ukrainians aren't gonna forgive and forget,” he said. And “Putin is never going to surrender his objectives to ‘deNazify’ and ‘demilitarize’ Ukraine.”

If that is the case, doesn’t that strengthen the argument for a diplomatic “off-ramp,” a territorial compromise that ultimately recognizes the harsh reality on the ground that there may be no strategic path for the Ukrainians to expel the Russians from Donbas and Crimea?

Shades of 1939

Sullivan demurs. While he concedes that “it’s difficult to imagine at this point the Ukrainians pushing the Russians out,” he quickly adds: “When I hear my fellow Republicans, particularly members of Congress who say things like, ‘why are we defending Ukraine's borders? I don't care what happens to Ukraine,’ they're focusing on the wrong thing. The most important thing for the United States is to oppose Russian aggression. 

“This is all about Russian aggression,” Sullivan continued. “It happens to be directed at Ukraine, which is why the point of the spear is sticking into Ukraine, but it won't end there. And I draw the analogies, many analogies in the book, to the Second World War and the start of the war in the 1930s and the late 30s.

“I have to be careful because I'm not saying Putin is Hitler, and I'm not saying the Russian Federation is Nazi Germany. But there is a comparison to be made to an American saying in the summer of 1939, ‘Why do we care about Poland? All wars ended in negotiations. Stop the bloodshed, let's negotiate.’ You got to be careful with historical analogies. It's not perfect, [but] that's the way I think of it.” 

Just as the United States and its allies stood fast against Hitler’s aggressive wars in Europe, so too must it stand up to Putin’s, he argues. “We've got to oppose Russian aggression all we can.” 

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The portrait of Putin in Sullivan’s book is a striking one. Far from the isolated, deluded ruler cut off from reality, as he is sometimes described in the West, Sullivan depicts Putin as a cocky, swaggering, “very savvy gangster, unbound by facts, law, morals or truth.” He compares him at one point with Whitey Bulger, the late, legendary longtime crime boss in Sullivan’s native Boston. 

But the more important historical point is Putin quite openly sees himself as a “Chekist,” an heir to the notorious Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, which morphed over the decades into the KGB and later, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the FSB. (When he became chief of the FSB himself in 1998, Putin kept a statue of the Cheka’s founder, “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky on his desk.) As such, Sullivan suggests, Putin used his Chekist training in deception and misdirection to play the American government, masking his plans for invading Ukraine so well that the Biden White House was caught off guard until it was too late. 

“He's got incredible self-discipline…and I mean down to his facial expressions,” said Sullivan, who met with Putin in Moscow and observed him at multiple international conferences. When Putin met with Biden in Geneva in 2021, “Putin was as relaxed as you can imagine. He was cracking jokes. He was very calm. 

“I look back on it now and I think, this was a guy who felt very confident in what he was about to do in June of ‘21 because months later, just months later, he's going to launch the ‘special military operation,’ right? Based on his accusation that the United States has started a war against Russia in Ukraine. He has the opportunity to discuss this with the president of the United States, face to face in Geneva [and] never talks about it. He’s cracking jokes, putting everybody at ease. That's a Chekist right there.”

 (As if to underscore the Cheka mentality that still thrives in Putin’s Russia, Sullivan says he was warned by Paul Nakasone, the former chief of the NSA, that the FSB would try to hack his laptop and get access to the manuscript of Midnight in Moscow before it was published. “They love it when government officials write books,” he says Nakasone told him. “The FSB wants to see it before it goes through the security review” by the State Department.) 

Although Putin looms large in Sullivan’s book, his portrayal of the two presidents he worked for may ultimately get more attention. He hits Biden hard for his disastrous pull-out from Afghanistan.

From Trump to Biden

“The blow to American credibility and standing was in some ways immeasurable,” he writes in his book, suggesting that, by projecting weakness, it played a role in Putin’s calculus to invade Ukraine. He chides the president for his verbal mishaps—stating at a press conference as Russian troops were massing on the border that the U.S. might not respond if there was only a “minor incursion.” (“We want to remind the great powers that there are no minor incursions and small nations,” Zelensky tweeted in response.) And, most serious of all, he says the Biden administration was “slow and erratic” in providing Ukraine the offensive weapons—long range missiles, tanks and F-16’s—it needed to respond to the Russian attack. (Sullivan says Vice President Kamala Harris was in the National Security Council meetings on Ukraine he participated in but doesn’t remember any particular views she expressed.) 

But for all that, Trump comes off far worse. Sullivan, a lifelong Republican and lawyer—and the nephew of William Sullivan, the last American ambassador to Tehran before the 1979 revolution—had served in top legal jobs at the Defense and Commerce Departments under President George W. Bush. After Trump was elected, Sullivan—on the recommendation of the new Defense Secretary Gen. James Mattis—was originally tapped to be his general counsel at the Pentagon. But he was quickly switched to deputy secretary of state under Trump’s first pick at Foggy Bottom, Rex Tillerson, placing him smack in the middle of the chaos that defined Trump’s foreign policy-making as president. 

Sullivan’s account of those days is withering, filled with references to the “disorder,” “stress,” and “unpredictability” of working for a volatile president with no experience in Washington. Trump blew up and nearly fired Sullivan after the new deputy secretary approved sanctions on Russia for its use of Novichok, a banned chemical nerve agent, in a bungled attempt to assassinate a defector, Sergei Skripal, on British soil. Trump also cut Tillerson out of his plans to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and then fired his secretary of state—who Sullivan viewed as “a model of strength, decorum and wisdom”—with a tweet.

Sullivan also recounts how he was forced to fire the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, even though she was serving admirably, because Rudy Giuliani had convinced the president to ax her (apparently because she was seen as an obstacle to a business deal being pursued by Giuliani’s dodgy associates.) After two years on the job, Sullivan was burned out and preparing to resign when, with the resignation of U.S. ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman, the post in Moscow opened up.  

Sullivan, who says he was fascinated by Russia since childhood, raised the idea of taking over the ambassadorship with his new boss, Mike Pompeo, and, upon learning of the White House’s approval, was eager to meet with Trump before flying off to Moscow as the president’s personal representative. But Trump blew him off because Chris Christie showed up at the White House that day and the president scuttled his schedule, chatting with his formal political rival for two hours while Sullivan was left “stewing in the reception area of the West Wing” for an audience that was never granted. 

“I marveled at the president’s lack of discipline, but I was not completely surprised,” Sullivan writes in his book. “It was just another reminder that Donald Trump had no interest in the ordinary duties of his office, like conferring with the ambassador he was sending to a challenging and critical post,” he writes. 

Given his rude treatment by the temperamental Trump and the faults he found with Biden’s policies, I asked Sullivan in the podcast who he planned to vote for this fall.

He struggled a bit to come up with an answer. 

“I don't support either candidate,” he said. “You know, it's difficult for me. I've said it before that I'm a lifelong Republican and that's always been my—I was about to say the word default, but that's not the case. I was an enthusiastic voter for Republican presidents starting with Reagan in ‘80. If and when I vote for Trump in November of 2024, it's only because I believe It's my duty to vote and it's a binary choice.” 

But that said, Sullivan says, it is Putin who may be the ultimate winner. 

“You know what, Michael, my perspective on this is—and it's something I talk about in the book—the type of political division we have in the United States today is as bad as it's certainly been in my lifetime. That's catnip to the Kremlin, the fact that we can't have a civilized, even modest civilized political dialogue. I mean, in some sense, Putin really doesn't care. Putin could care less about Trump or Harris, Republicans or Democrats. What he really thrives on is division in the United States. He wants to crush our hope in the future. He wants us to think, we Americans to think, we are as bad, we are the same as he.” 

In that sense, his sometimes setbacks on the battlefield notwithstanding, Sullivan suggests, the Russian leader has plenty to celebrate.

Sullivan also talks about his coded conversations with American Paul Whelan, wrongly jailed as a spy, in a Russian prison. Listen to the entire interview here on Simplecast, or via whatever platform you prefer. It’s everywhere.

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2. Diplomatic Dexterity - United States vs. China - A Great Power Competition Report



​Charts and graphics at the ink.



  • 3 hours ago
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  • 11 min read

Diplomatic Dexterity - United States vs. China

A Great Power Competition Report

https://www.strategycentral.io/post/diplomatic-dexterity-united-states-vs-china?utm

Strategy Central

By Practitioners, For Practitioners

By Monte Erfourth – September 1, 2024




THE COMPETITION REPORT SERIES

The Strategy Central Great Power Competition report series details the United States and China’s great power competition in the first half 2024. It offers an analysis to help strategists grasp the current rivalry between these two superpowers regarding national power, economics, military power, and diplomacy. This is the last segment covering great power competition between the U.S. and China and will focus on diplomatic competition.  



This article focuses on the diplomatic dynamics that have shaped U.S.-China relations throughout the first half of 2024. In the evolving landscape of great power competition, diplomacy emerges as a critical tool for both the United States and China, shaping their strategic maneuvers on the global stage. This article delves into the diplomatic efforts of these two superpowers in the first half of 2024, highlighting their contrasting approaches to asserting influence and managing global relations. While China has aggressively expanded its diplomatic footprint through high-profile events and strategic partnerships, the United States has focused on strengthening alliances, promoting democratic values, and addressing global security challenges. The report underscores that the United States holds a strategic advantage through its deep-rooted alliances and partnerships and its commitment to multilateral engagement. It offers a compelling analysis of how diplomacy continues to be a decisive factor in the rivalry between these great powers.

 

 

The Situation

Diplomatically, U.S.-China relations have been fraught with tension over issues such as human rights, Taiwan, and strategic alliances. The Biden administration maintained a tough stance on China's human rights record, especially concerning Xinjiang and Hong Kong, leading to diplomatic protests from Beijing. Additionally, U.S. support for Taiwan, including arms sales and political backing, has been a significant point of contention, with China repeatedly warning against any form of Taiwanese independence. Diplomatic engagements have been cautious, aiming primarily at risk management rather than substantive resolution of disputes. This cautious engagement was highlighted during the November 2023 summit in San Francisco, which, while easing immediate tensions, did not address the underlying issues that continue to drive U.S.-China competition.

 

Major Diplomatic Efforts by China

During the first half of 2024, China engaged in several significant diplomatic initiatives to strengthen its global influence and foster international cooperation. These efforts were diverse, covering various regions and issues and highlighting China's strategic priorities in its foreign policy.

 

·      High-Level Diplomatic Events

China hosted several key international events to bolster its diplomatic presence and showcase its leadership. These included the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, the Boao Forum for Asia, the China International Import Expo, and the Forum on Global Action for Shared Development. These events focused on themes such as fostering prosperity with developing countries, enhancing regional cooperation, promoting trade and globalization, and implementing the Global Development Initiative.

 

·      Strengthening Bilateral and Multilateral Relations

China emphasized the importance of high-level exchanges and strategic communication with major powers and regional partners. This included efforts to deepen strategic mutual trust and cooperation with Russia, enhance relations with the European Union, and improve ties with neighboring countries and BRICS nations. These initiatives aimed at building a new type of international relations based on mutual respect and shared interests.

 

·      Engagement in Conflict Resolution

China actively participated in efforts to resolve global and regional conflicts. It played a constructive role in promoting peace talks and providing public goods conducive to world peace and development. Specific areas of focus included the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the Ukraine crisis. China’s diplomatic activities in these areas were part of its broader Global Security Initiative, which advocates for fairness, justice, and the promotion of peace through dialogue.

 

·      Strategic Initiatives in Southeast Asia

China's diplomatic activities in Southeast Asia, particularly in Myanmar, were notable. Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang visited Myanmar and engaged with military leader Min Aung Hlaing, signaling China's support for the Myanmar military junta while pushing for the advancement of the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor. This move highlighted China's strategic interests in the region and its intent to consolidate its influence amidst ongoing conflicts.

 

·      Enhancing Global Partnerships and Multilateralism

China continued to advocate for a multipolar world and genuine multilateralism. It called for upholding the principles of the United Nations Charter and participating in the reform of the global governance system. China's efforts included promoting the Global Civilization Initiative, which aims to foster exchanges and mutual understanding among different civilizations, and the Global Development Initiative, focusing on inclusive economic globalization and supporting the development capacity of other countries.

 

·      Diplomatic Engagements with the United States

Following the November 2023 summit between President Xi Jinping and President Joe Biden, China worked to implement the consensus reached during the meeting. This included exploring ways to manage competition and fostering strategic stability. Despite ongoing challenges, this effort marked a significant attempt to stabilize and manage the complex relationship between the two major powers.

 

·      Diplomatic Engagements with Europe

Chinese diplomatic efforts with Europe have focused on repairing strained relations and expanding economic ties, particularly following controversies such as China’s attempt to dump electric vehicles (EVs) on the European market, which the European Union blocked. China's approach has included high-level diplomatic engagements to ease tensions and promote mutual economic interests. Still, these efforts have been met with growing skepticism from key European nations due to China’s perceived support for Russia amidst the Ukraine conflict. Despite hosting several dialogues emphasizing cooperation and multilateralism, China’s diplomatic overtures have struggled to overcome European concerns about its strategic intentions and alignment with authoritarian regimes, highlighting Beijing's challenges in gaining trust and influence in Europe.

 

China's diplomatic efforts in the first half of 2024 were characterized by a mix of high-profile events, strategic bilateral engagements, and active participation in global conflict resolution. These initiatives reflect China's broader goals of enhancing its international standing, promoting cooperative development, and shaping a multipolar world order over which it can exert more control.

 

United States Diplomatic Efforts

The United States led eight separate diplomatic efforts from January to July 2024:

 

·      U.S.-China Relations

Throughout early 2024, the United States continued its diplomatic efforts to manage tensions with China, focusing on economic cooperation, technology restrictions, and military posturing in the Indo-Pacific region. Notably, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other senior officials engaged in discussions with Chinese counterparts to address issues related to Taiwan, trade disputes, and human rights concerns. This included discussing easing export controls on advanced technologies while balancing national security considerations.

 

·      Middle East Peace and Security Initiatives

The United States maintained its diplomatic engagement in the Middle East, particularly concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The U.S. worked to broker talks and promote peace initiatives, including supporting normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab nations. Additionally, U.S. diplomatic efforts focused on addressing the ongoing humanitarian crises in Syria and Yemen, promoting ceasefires, and providing humanitarian aid.

 

·      Russia-Ukraine Conflict

The U.S. played a significant role in supporting Ukraine amidst the ongoing conflict with Russia. Diplomatic efforts included rallying international support for Ukraine, implementing sanctions against Russia, and providing military and economic aid to Ukraine. The U.S. also worked closely with NATO allies to strengthen Eastern European defenses and maintain a unified front against Russian aggression.

 

·      Reviving the Iran Nuclear Deal

Diplomatic negotiations continued in 2024 to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran. The U.S. engaged in indirect talks with Iran, facilitated by European allies, to explore potential pathways to return to the agreement or establish a new framework that would prevent Iran from advancing its nuclear weapons program.

 

·      Climate Change Diplomacy

The United States continued to lead global efforts on climate change, engaging in diplomatic initiatives to promote the implementation of the Paris Agreement and encourage countries to commit to more ambitious climate targets. In early 2024, the U.S. hosted a climate summit that focused on international collaboration, financing for green technologies, and addressing the impacts of climate change on vulnerable nations.

 

·      African Diplomatic Engagement

The U.S. ramped up its diplomatic efforts in Africa, focusing on countering China and Russia's influence on the continent. These efforts included visits by high-ranking officials, increased economic assistance, and initiatives to promote good governance and human rights. The U.S. also prioritized building stronger partnerships with key African nations to address security challenges like terrorism and regional instability.

 

·      U.S.-European Relations

Diplomatic efforts with European allies remained robust, focusing on strengthening transatlantic ties and addressing common challenges, including cybersecurity, energy security, and economic collaboration. The U.S. also worked closely with the European Union to coordinate responses to Russian aggression in Ukraine, support democratic institutions, and handle emerging threats from non-state actors.

 

·      Summit for Democracy 2024

In March 2024, the U.S. hosted the second Summit for Democracy in an effort to bolster global democratic norms. The summit brought together leaders from democracies worldwide to discuss strategies for countering authoritarianism, combating corruption, and promoting human rights. It also focused on technological governance and protecting democratic institutions from digital threats.

 

These diplomatic efforts reflect the United States' focus on addressing global security threats, promoting international cooperation, and maintaining its leadership role on the world stage.

 

Cooperation

Diplomatic efforts have focused on stabilizing the bilateral relationship and preventing further deterioration. A key outcome was the establishment of a counternarcotics working group aimed at combating the production and trafficking of fentanyl and other narcotics. This initiative highlights a critical area of shared concern with direct implications for public health in both countries. Additionally, discussions were initiated to address the risks associated with artificial intelligence, particularly its military applications, and to explore global AI governance frameworks.






The Head-To-Head Competition

Despite deep-seated strategic and ideological differences, both nations have shown a willingness to engage in constructive dialogue and collaborate on issues of global significance. These efforts, while limited, represent a concerted attempt to manage competition responsibly and seek common ground where possible. Despite responsible moves by both nations, the period from January to July 2024 has seen U.S.-China relations characterized by deepening economic, military, and diplomatic disputes, with both countries taking steps to manage but not resolve their strategic competition.

 

While China made inroads in the Middle East last year, brokering a truce of sorts between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the effort largely fell apart with the Hamas attack on Israel and subsequent fighting in Gaza since October 2023. China has been unable to encourage Iran to make safe passage for its ships through the Bab Al Mandeb without Houthi attacks. China’s leverage has been somewhat diminished in the region. In Europe, China had to work to repair relationships after attempting to dump EV cars on the Euro market but was blocked by members of the European Union. Talks with key European nations did not go well, with growing resentment towards China for backing Putin over Ukraine. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have significantly increased economic, security, and diplomatic collaboration over the past year.

 

The Lowey Comparative Advantage shows that the U.S. is gaining ground over China, except for diplomatic influence and military power. Increases in economic relationships, defense networks, and cultural influence with Iran, Russia, and the global South offset Chinese advantages. China has room to grow, whereas the United States has maximized most of its relationships with the more powerful nations.




In 2024, the U.S. State Department has been actively engaged in significant global diplomatic efforts, reflecting a multifaceted approach to addressing international challenges and strengthening alliances. One key area of focus has been enhancing security partnerships and addressing geopolitical tensions. For instance, the U.S. played a pivotal role in the NATO Summit held in Washington, D.C., which marked 75 years of the alliance. This summit advanced robust deterrence and defense strategies, showcasing NATO's unity and commitment to collective defense in the face of evolving threats. Furthermore, the State Department has been involved in extensive discussions and coordination with international partners to address the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and counter Russian aggression, highlighting a commitment to upholding international norms and supporting allies.

 

In 2024, the U.S. State Department has significantly engaged in diplomatic efforts across the Middle East, focusing on strengthening alliances, addressing regional conflicts, and promoting stability. Secretary of State Antony Blinken embarked on a comprehensive tour of the region in January, visiting key nations, including Turkey, Greece, Jordan, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the West Bank, Bahrain, and Egypt. This tour addressed various issues, such as regional security, economic cooperation, and ongoing conflicts. In Saudi Arabia, discussions centered on regional security and the Yemen conflict, while in Israel, talks focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and steps toward a two-state solution. The visit to Iran explored possibilities for diplomatic normalization and cooperation on regional stability and the nuclear deal.

 

Furthermore, the State Department facilitated a historic agreement between Israel and Lebanon to end their maritime boundary dispute formally. This agreement, achieved after months of U.S.-mediated negotiations, is expected to enhance regional stability and cooperation, particularly in energy resource development. The U.S. also emphasized the importance of diplomatic solutions and economic collaboration during Blinken's visits to UAE, Qatar, and Egypt, addressing issues from counterterrorism to economic partnerships. These efforts reflect a broader U.S. strategy to foster peace, stability, and prosperity in the Middle East through robust diplomatic engagement.

 

Additionally, the State Department has strongly emphasized public diplomacy and strategic communication. This includes countering misinformation and enhancing the U.S.'s global image through public diplomacy initiatives. The Global Engagement Center has been at the forefront of these efforts, working to expose and counter foreign propaganda and disinformation. The department has also focused on promoting global health security, as demonstrated by the 2024 U.S. Global Health Security Strategy release, which aims to strengthen international health systems and improve preparedness for future pandemics. These initiatives reflect a comprehensive approach to diplomacy, integrating security, public diplomacy, and international development to address complex global issues and foster international cooperation.

 

Conclusion

In the first half of 2024, the United States and China have intensified their diplomatic efforts, each pursuing distinct strategies to bolster their global influence. The United States has focused on reinforcing alliances, addressing global security concerns, and promoting democratic values. At the same time, China's approach has been characterized by fostering economic partnerships, advocating for multipolarity, and deepening ties with authoritarian regimes. Despite China's extensive diplomatic engagements, including numerous high-profile international events and initiatives to enhance bilateral relations, the United States appears to hold a diplomatic edge. This advantage stems from its ability to forge and maintain robust alliances, its leadership in addressing global challenges such as climate change and health security, and its commitment to upholding international norms.

 

While China boasts more embassies worldwide, suggesting a broader diplomatic presence, the effectiveness of its diplomacy is often hindered by its alignment with contentious regimes and its aggressive stance on territorial disputes. In contrast, the United States' diplomatic efforts are bolstered by its longstanding partnerships, particularly within NATO and with key allies in Asia and Europe, which provide a more cohesive and strategic approach to global challenges. The primary lesson of this report is that while numerical superiority in diplomatic outposts may enhance visibility, the depth and quality of diplomatic relationships and the ability to leverage international alliances are more critical to achieving sustained global influence. As the great power competition unfolds, the United States' diplomatic strategy, grounded in coalition-building and multilateral engagement, positions it more favorably than China's more insular and contentious approach.





 



BIBLIOGRAPHY

 



3. Has High Tech Made Artillery Obsolete?


Long live the KING of battle.


Critical commentary of the USMC.


Excerpts:


Ukraine illustrates that at both ends of the modern combat spectrum—high tech and brute force—the U.S. has fallen perilously behind. Of course, artillery is not obsolete. The Marines and the other services just pretended it was because they were out of money.
What to do? Two suggestions. First, advocate for a dramatic (10% a year) increase in Defense spending. But we know that without a shocking attack, such an increase won’t happen. Nonetheless, a steady drumbeat of concern is better than silence. Our generals and admirals disappoint by not speaking out in unmistakable language.
Second, produce items offshore where costs are much cheaper, adding sensitive items back here in the States. Reliable counties like Poland can produce artillery shells for a third of our cost. At the high-tech end, Ukraine has shown that a dozen countries can produce cheap drones. Fine, contract for them to do so, and contract with U.S. companies to add any sensitive items here at home. But again, the populist sentiment infusing our domestic politics makes it highly unlikely we will do so. All of us together—our elected politicians, our press, and the few who read this essay—are gambling America will never again fight a major war. “Great civilizations are not murdered,” Toynbee wrote. “They commit suicide.” Perhaps we are exempt from history.
As a grunt, I’m grateful for the fire support that let me live so long. I am concerned that my fellow Marine grunts can’t call on the same volume of artillery if they are stuck somewhere, alone. I have grandsons who have volunteered to serve. Put me down on the side of arty—lots of it.



Has High Tech Made Artillery Obsolete?

https://www.hoover.org/research/has-high-tech-made-artillery-obsolete?utm

For the past fifteen decades, explosives, not bullets, have inflicted most of the destruction in a land war. In the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, Krupp's breech-loading cannon annihilated the French army. His enormous guns were featured at the World’s Fair in 1876, leading to the sobriquet that artillery was the “king of battle.”

Friday, August 30, 2024  4 min read

By: Bing West

Research Team: Military History in Contemporary Conflict Working Group


For the past fifteen decades, explosives, not bullets, have inflicted most of the destruction in a land war. In the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, Krupp's breech-loading cannon annihilated the French army. His enormous guns were featured at the World’s Fair in 1876, leading to the sobriquet that artillery was the “king of battle.”


The Germans fired one million shells on the opening day at Verdun in 1916. During World War II, the Red Army fired two million rounds into Berlin, a city about to collapse from airstrikes. In three weeks at Hue City in 1968, one U.S. Army brigade fired 52,000 rounds. The volume of artillery in Vietnam was prodigious. In the two-month incursion into Cambodia in 1970, for instance, 847,558 rounds were expended.

Artillery doesn’t require sophisticated communications, or clearance through several echelons of command in the rear. It responds immediately, 24 hours a day, regardless of weather. Artillery protects your flanks, your rear, and your frontlines. Troops can never have enough fire on call. It is inexpensive and expendable. Fire and forget; force the enemy to remember to duck.

The problem was that America did forget the power of artillery, neglecting its role as the military budget was severely reduced, forcing dramatic tradeoffs. Defense spending was 11% of GDP during the Korean War in 1953, 8% during the Vietnam War, and 5% in 1990. In the decade after the Soviet Union disintegrated, the Defense budget dropped to 3%, where it is today.

The rationale thirty years ago was that Defense could be cut because our only military peer, the Soviet Union, had disintegrated. Defense manufacturers consequently shrank from dozens to an oligopoly of five corporations, accounting for 70% of all Pentagon contracts. Between 2000 and 2020, the salaries, layers of bureaucracy, and lobbying budgets of the oligopoly skyrocketed. Both the providers (the mega corporations) and the consumers (the military services) of their products turned toward very high tech, very expensive systems.

This was called “info-centric” warfare. At the start of the 21st Century, no nation could match our technological wizardry. For two decades, it proved successful. Our satellites and drones identified targets, and then our drones and aircraft picked them off, one at a time. One shot, one kill. There was no need for much artillery. In 2003, our forces drove 400 miles from Kuwait to Baghdad, easily shattering the Iraqi army. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, our drones roamed over hundreds of miles, pinpointing and killing individual terrorists with single shots. The combat results seemed to bear out the wisdom of investing in quality over quantity.

Artillery shells were a high volume, low profit item that seemed vestigial. The apparent solution was to add high tech in the form of GPS devices into each shell. Each long-range, GPS-equipped shell, called Excalibur, was envisioned as destroying a sensitive target 25 miles away. Excalibur costs more than $100,000 per shell. At that price, corporations profited due to cost plus fixed fee contracts, while the services supposedly gained by needing many fewer shells, with less logistics. Precision strike had replaced the brute force employment of cheap, bulk explosives.

In 2020, the U.S. Marines—of all services—provided the headstone for the grave of “the king of battle” by reducing their artillery battalions from 21 to 5. The Marine command decided that a few missile systems would produce, through precision, better fire support than the 96 artillery tubes that were jettisoned.

Most retired senior Marine generals and combat grunts like me disagreed. In 1966, North Vietnamese soldiers closed in on my Force Recon patrol. No friendly unit could rescue us; we were a dozen miles outside our lines. To save five of us, our brothers unleashed 22,000 pounds of explosives. There was no “precision target”; our artillery battalion hammered the jungle with hundreds of shells. But in 2021 the Marines did away with those battalions because that kind of war seemed antique.

Oops. Four months later, Russia invaded Ukraine, reminding everyone of the perpetual reality of ground combat. Nothing is harder to kill than an armed man who knows you are trying to kill him. Artillery was applied in massive quantities. After two years, the Ukrainian front lines resembled World War I, with muddy trenches protecting against the Russian artillery barrages.

Artillery was causing 80% of the casualties.

Yes, drones had emerged as the new weapons. But like a boxer, you need both a left and right hand. Drones complemented rather than substituted for the smashing effect of constant shelling. Artillery suppressed electronic warfare systems, permitting the drones to seek out enemy vehicles and individual soldiers. However, the ubiquitous drones made it imperative that artillery batteries move away very quickly after each fire mission.

The Ukraine war had caught the U.S. military out of position. On the one hand, the Pentagon did not anticipate, let alone adapt to the commoditization of high tech. Impoverished Ukraine was producing annually in its garage shops one million cheap (less than $700 per copy) drones; the Pentagon paid thirty times as much, due to our pricing and cost structure. Nor did Congress adapt; it has authorized a Defense budget that rubber stamps the Pentagon’s request for expensive manned aircraft and ships, instead of shifting at least 20% into unmanned systems.

On the other hand, Pentagon and American business practices made impossible the production of raw munitions, especially cheap artillery shells. The cost of the 155 mm shell produced by the United States or other NATO countries was a minimum of $5,000, while the Russian 152 mm shell costs $1,000. Russia was firing 10,000 artillery shells per day, compared to 2,000 the U.S. and NATO were providing to Ukraine. As disturbing, electronic measures have taken away the advantage of sophisticated GPS-guided shells like Excalibur, despite their per unit cost exceeding $100,000.

In early August, the Congressional bipartisan Commission on National Defense warned that “the threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945 and include the potential for near-term major war. The United States is not prepared today… a real risk, if not likelihood, that conflict anywhere could become a multi-theater or global war.”

The Commission recommended a minimum annual real increase in the Defense budget of 4%. But a 40% increase is needed to get Defense back to 5% of GDP, where it was before we faced the three-headed enemy of Russia, China, and Iran plus its proxies. Four percent a year is a token; yet 40% seems far beyond the consensus in Congress and in foreign policy circles.

Ukraine illustrates that at both ends of the modern combat spectrum—high tech and brute force—the U.S. has fallen perilously behind. Of course, artillery is not obsolete. The Marines and the other services just pretended it was because they were out of money.

What to do? Two suggestions. First, advocate for a dramatic (10% a year) increase in Defense spending. But we know that without a shocking attack, such an increase won’t happen. Nonetheless, a steady drumbeat of concern is better than silence. Our generals and admirals disappoint by not speaking out in unmistakable language.

Second, produce items offshore where costs are much cheaper, adding sensitive items back here in the States. Reliable counties like Poland can produce artillery shells for a third of our cost. At the high-tech end, Ukraine has shown that a dozen countries can produce cheap drones. Fine, contract for them to do so, and contract with U.S. companies to add any sensitive items here at home. But again, the populist sentiment infusing our domestic politics makes it highly unlikely we will do so. All of us together—our elected politicians, our press, and the few who read this essay—are gambling America will never again fight a major war. “Great civilizations are not murdered,” Toynbee wrote. “They commit suicide.” Perhaps we are exempt from history.

As a grunt, I’m grateful for the fire support that let me live so long. I am concerned that my fellow Marine grunts can’t call on the same volume of artillery if they are stuck somewhere, alone. I have grandsons who have volunteered to serve. Put me down on the side of arty—lots of it.



4. How the CIA tries to recruit Russians to spy on their country


"the heart of espionage is the human source."


How the CIA tries to recruit Russians to spy on their country

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/08/30/how-the-cia-tries-to-recruit-russians-to-spy-on-their-country.html


Published Fri, Aug 30 2024 8:00 AM EDT

CNBC.com staff

@CNBC



The lobby of the CIA Headquarters Building in Langley, Virginia.

Larry Downing | Reuters

At the CIA's covert training facility near Williamsburg, Virginia, commonly called "The Farm," recruits are trained in the world of espionage and the many ways to get people to provide secret information.

Jim Olson, the former Chief of Counterintelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency who served as a CIA officer for 31 years including a stint in Moscow during the Cold War — where he tried to recruit Russians to betray their country — told CNBC Senior Washington Correspondent Eamon Javers that "the heart of espionage is the human source."

"We are in the head-hunting business, as we call it," Olson said. "We have to find individuals that we can induce to cooperate equally with us to give us their secrets."

In CNBC's new original podcast series "The Crimes of Putin's Trader," Javers has been retracing the mission to put Russian entrepreneur Vladislav Klyushin, accused of running a massive hacking operation that was stealing corporate earnings reports from U.S. companies and trading on that information, behind bars.

After Klyushin was arrested in Switzerland by U.S. authorities, one of the claims his lawyer made was that American intelligence officers had attempted to recruit Klyushin as a spy for the U.S. upon meeting him for the first time.

However, as Olson explained to Javers, the way that intelligence officials approach that process is far different, something that he called "the recruitment cycle."


Vladislav Klyushin, an owner of an information technology company with ties to the Russian government, is seen in an undated photograph attached to a U.S. Department of Justice filing. 

U.s. Department Of Justice | Via Reuters

"It's a seven-step process, it's very systematic," Olson said. "The starting point is that every human being has needs. It sounds cynical, but it is true. And our job is to find those foreigners who have access to secrets that we need and want for our own security, and who are willing to give us those secrets in return for something we offer. And our job is to identify what their needs are and hope that those needs are compelling enough, that they will commit treason against their country, they will risk their life if we satisfy that need."

That can require several meetings, getting to know that person in more depth and leaning into their interests, whether that's running into them at the gym, hosting them at a dinner party or sharing a drink at a bar, Olson said.

While that leads to a personal relationship, it's what Olson calls a "false friendship, because I have an ulterior motive from the beginning."

The latest episode of the original podcast series takes listeners through the intricate dance of spycraft and how intelligence officers, whether from the U.S., China or Russia, obtain critical information.

"I serve my country. Our country needs intelligence. I serve the American people. And I serve them by collecting intelligence. And to do that, I have to be manipulative, I have to be living a lie, I have to deceive. It just goes with the territory. You can't do it any other way," Olson said.



5. How Do You Change a Command's Culture? This General Tried Being Direct About War with China.


Excerpts:


Minihan will cede command to Lamontagne in a Sept. 9 ceremony.


Has his brash approach helped or hurt his cause?


"I don't wake up and try to be me," Minihan said with a chuckle. "I realize that my style is different and that perhaps it stands out. But if you boil down my style to just urgency and action, then I've been consistent over my career."


Newman argued Minihan's "persona of a general from the 1940s," his passion for service and his small kindnesses toward airmen and their families have won him support as he tries to take the command to a new level.


After Minihan hangs up his uniform for the last time, he'll move into a house two blocks from his parents in St. Petersburg, Florida, and look for ways to continue supporting the mobility world from the outside.


He doubts he'll sport a post-service beard or a man bun. But he plans to grow his hair long enough to touch his ears and to see whether he can sleep past 4:30 a.m.


"I'm looking forward to attending football games with my son," he said. "I'm looking forward to flying with my youngest daughter. I'm looking forward to working with my oldest daughter. I'm looking forward to growing old with my wife. And ... I'm looking forward to a healthy, sustainable rhythm."


How Do You Change a Command's Culture? This General Tried Being Direct About War with China. | Military.com

military.com · by Rachel S. Cohen

Gen. Mike Minihan needed people to listen.

In 2021, fresh off his previous role as deputy commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Minihan knew that a massive overhaul of the world order was potentially underway. Air Mobility Command, his new post, needed to prepare to beat China.

The 6-foot-5 four-star burst onto the national scene in September 2022 with a fiery speech he hoped would inspire mobility airmen to see themselves as active players in America's military legacy despite not flying flashy fighter jets.

"When you can kill your enemy, every part of your life is better. Your food tastes better; your marriage is stronger," he roared to thousands of airmen and other attendees at the Air and Space Forces Association's annual conference outside Washington.

"Why is the mobility guy talking about lethality?" he asked. "Everybody's role is critical, but Air Mobility Command is the maneuver for the joint force. If we don't have our act together, nobody wins. Nobody's lethal."


He again grabbed the global spotlight with an early 2023 memo that urged airmen to be "unrepentantly lethal" in preparation for a war with China he believed could come in 2025. That timeline is comparable to the predictions of other top brass, including former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley, who have cited U.S. intelligence in estimating that China aims to strengthen its military to be able to attack and seize Taiwan by 2027.

Nearly two years later, Minihan said the directive was "never about predicting" when war might erupt.

"It was about driving [the] readiness that this force needs to deliver on [a] mission that everybody else is expecting us to do," he told Military.com in an Aug. 7 interview.

His approach -- publicly calling out another world power with very direct language about threats -- wasn't always well received at the Pentagon.

Then-Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles "C.Q." Brown -- now the Joint Chiefs chairman -- told Military.com in March 2023 he was "disappointed in" aspects of the memo and that the phrasing "detracted from the key message of the sense of urgency that is required."

But some of those under Minihan's command say that the bucket of cold water was needed.

"[His] leadership style, candor and his credibility changed the way AMC operates -- in a good way," said Carlos Berdecía, a recently retired colonel who worked under Minihan. "He was the right leader to make everyone know that AMC needs to be at the table. No one is successful without us."

Minihan is aware that his style is very specific.

"I realize that, for some, it's an acquired taste," he said. "But I think that the transparency and the genuineness are essential factors of creating that unity of effort, creating a force that understands what's at stake, creating a force that can take the battlefield and not only be ready, but deliver that decisive victory or that deterrent ... that our civilian leaders demand."

Now, with less than a month left running Air Mobility Command, Minihan, 57, is set to hand the reins to a new commander and retire from military service in early September. It will serve as the end of 34 years in uniform. He wonders whether he's done enough.

"You can't command and be fully invested and think that you got everything done that you wanted to get done," he said. "There is always more work to do, and there's always things to improve, and there [are] always more people to take care of."

Aggressive Change

Minihan arrived at AMC headquarters at Scott Air Force Base -- a military hub about 25 miles outside St. Louis in southwest Illinois -- in October 2021, weeks after the command played a critical role in orchestrating the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and four months before Russia's invasion of Ukraine would throw America's efforts to ship weapons to its beleaguered partner into overdrive.

The realization that this command would require more of him hit home on a trip to visit his parents in early 2022. Minihan had been on the job for a few months, and the command's focus had shifted to supporting NATO forces as the war in Ukraine began to unfold. The responsibility of the role and the magnitude of his plans for the years ahead weighed heavily on his mind.

"It was clear to me that I had to change some personal things to drive the stamina and the judgment and not have it come at the expense of me," he said. "I quit drinking, I quit caffeine, I doubled down on my physical training, and I vowed in March '22 to come out ... stronger than when I entered."

As he underwent a personal transformation, he pushed the limits of the nearly 107,000 uniformed and civilian employees under his command to see what tactics and techniques may be possible in an emergency.

He's tried to introduce new communications tools across the fleet to ensure airmen aren't flying blind into potentially dangerous areas. Those kits can make airmen more flexible -- and safer -- during missions where they wouldn't otherwise be able to contact ground forces, particularly in areas like the vast Pacific.

And he's encouraged airmen to embrace unusual ideas, like cutting aircrews to a single pilot and a loadmaster, refueling jets around the globe during nonstop flights lasting dozens of hours, and launching air-to-ground cruise missiles from cargo jets.

Some of those operations have drawn criticism from service members who contend they're gambling with an unsafe level of risk and pushing troops too hard. But Minihan views the flexibility as necessary and says that the command often leans on its Guard and Reserve forces to fill in when active-duty units need time to recover.

His experiments converged at Mobility Guardian, a massive biennial training exercise in the summer of 2023 that rushed around 3,000 troops from seven countries to the Pacific to practice using the so-called "Second Island Chain" -- stretching from Japan to Indonesia -- as a logistics hub in case of a Chinese attack on Taiwan.

The command saw firsthand where bureaucratic miscommunication can leave troops stranded; where letting go of America's penchant for process can make the military more effective; which long-neglected Pacific airfields hold promise as future forward bases, and more -- lessons it hopes will lead to success in a crisis.

Together, the preparations have strengthened AMC's units and built trust with commanders around the globe who are interacting with more responsive, flexible mobility forces, Minihan believes.

"He's accomplished some very aggressive culture shifts within the command," Chief Master Sergeant Jamie Newman, AMC's senior enlisted leader, told Military.com.

He's gotten airmen to run at a tempo that "probably hasn't been seen in 30 years," Newman said. "His personality did that."

But airmen haven't had the luxury of focusing on training alone. After Minihan spearheaded Air Mobility Command's after-action report on the Afghanistan withdrawal in the early weeks of his tenure, attention soon turned to supporting NATO forces and shipping weapons to Ukraine in 2022. Then followed Mobility Guardian, the start of the war in Gaza, humanitarian aid and security missions in Haiti, and the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Chad and Niger -- among the Air Force's other responsibilities for routine training and transport missions.

That pace of operations has further strained a group that's already among the U.S. military's most relied-upon forces.

The mission-capable rate -- a metric that shows what percentage of aircraft are ready to fly and support troops at any given moment -- has dropped on most of the cargo and tanker aircraft that AMC relies on.

For instance, the C-130H Hercules airlifter fell from 69% in fiscal 2021, the year encompassing the Afghanistan withdrawal, to 44% in fiscal 2023, which ended days before the Israel-Hamas war erupted.

The figure has become a key metric for measuring the state of the military, though some leaders argue it doesn't show a holistic picture of whether a unit is prepared for action.

As a result of Minihan's work to break down barriers within the force and make troops more responsive, Newman said, airmen now collaborate more closely at the tactical and strategic levels, and have a better understanding of air mobility's role working with troops from all of the services and why it matters.

Handing over the Baton

Minihan will spend his final days in command smoothing the path for his successor, Gen. John Lamontagne, to hit the ground running.

Lamontagne, now the deputy commander of the Air Force's Europe and Africa operations, will take over the push to outpace China, the jet-connectivity initiative, Minihan's efforts to encourage airmen to prioritize mental health, and plans to bring new tanker and transport airframes into the inventory.

Lamontagne will also inherit the troubled KC-46 tanker program, which has been plagued by several major manufacturing failures that have kept airmen from being able to clearly see the aircraft the jet is refueling and limiting what cargo it can carry, among other problems.

Minihan believes the tankers will be fully operational, without flight restrictions in place, by 2028 -- 13 years after the KC-46 made its first flight.

"I trust American industry," he said of Pegasus manufacturer Boeing, which has so far lost more than $7 billion on what was launched as a $4.9 billion program due to the jet's flaws.

Minihan will cede command to Lamontagne in a Sept. 9 ceremony.

Has his brash approach helped or hurt his cause?

"I don't wake up and try to be me," Minihan said with a chuckle. "I realize that my style is different and that perhaps it stands out. But if you boil down my style to just urgency and action, then I've been consistent over my career."

Newman argued Minihan's "persona of a general from the 1940s," his passion for service and his small kindnesses toward airmen and their families have won him support as he tries to take the command to a new level.

After Minihan hangs up his uniform for the last time, he'll move into a house two blocks from his parents in St. Petersburg, Florida, and look for ways to continue supporting the mobility world from the outside.

He doubts he'll sport a post-service beard or a man bun. But he plans to grow his hair long enough to touch his ears and to see whether he can sleep past 4:30 a.m.

"I'm looking forward to attending football games with my son," he said. "I'm looking forward to flying with my youngest daughter. I'm looking forward to working with my oldest daughter. I'm looking forward to growing old with my wife. And ... I'm looking forward to a healthy, sustainable rhythm."

military.com · by Rachel S. Cohen



6. Selling America: The Army’s fight to find recruits in a mistrustful, divided nation




Democracy in America

Selling America: The Army’s fight to find recruits in a mistrustful, divided nation


Recruiters are contending with a confounding array of political, social and economic crises that have made it harder than ever to find citizens willing to serve

https://css.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/30/army-recruitment-numbers-low/



By Greg Jaffe and Missy Ryan

August 30, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT


TOMS RIVER, N.J. — Sgt. 1st Class Dane Beaston had endured the stress, frustration and disappointment of one of the worst recruiting slumps in the half-century history of the U.S. military’s all-volunteer force.


Now he was trying to do his part to end it. It was early June and his central New Jersey recruiting station was on the hook to find seven recruits who were willing to join the Army — the station’s highest monthly quota of the year. Beaston scanned a color-coded list of about 30 prospects on the station’s radar.


“That’s not nearly enough,” the 31-year-old sergeant told his recruiters as the month began.


If Beaston and his team didn’t deliver, he knew his Army career was in jeopardy. “You can do all the work 100 percent of the time,” he said. “But if you don’t find the right person, you’re out of luck.”


The unrelenting pressure Beaston and his six-person team were feeling reflected the high stakes for the military and the country. Each of the services — except for the Marine Corps — missed its 2023 recruiting goal. The Army, which had come up short two years in a row, was aiming to bring in 55,000 recruits in 2024 — about 10,000 fewer than last year’s missed goal. The new target wasn’t determined by the threats facing the country, the amount of money that Congress was willing to spend or the number of tanks and helicopters the Pentagon could field.


Rather it was a reflection of how many people senior Army officials believed the service could find. Beaston and his team had put nearly 40 people in the Army since the beginning of the fiscal year in October — a solid start. But he knew how hard it was to find qualified and willing candidates in today’s America.


Across the country, recruiters were struggling to find soldiers among a shrinking pool of qualified young people. Only about 23 percent of all Americans between the ages of 17-24 meet the Army’s physical, moral and educational standards.


Beaston and his recruiters were also searching for prospects at a time when Americans’ confidence in their country was crumbling. He and his team weren’t just pitching a job. They were asking young people to put their trust in their country’s leaders, who could send them to war, and in their fellow citizens, who would fight alongside them. They were selling America.



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Whenever they left the office, people would thank them for their service. But it was getting harder and harder in an increasingly polarized and pessimistic country to find young people who wanted to swear an oath to the Constitution and serve.



Beaston, center, at a morning team meeting with recruiters at the Army recruiting office in Toms River, N.J. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)


Only about 9 percent of young people say they are likely to consider military service, down from 16 percent in the early years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, according to Defense Department surveys. Pentagon officials blamed some of the recent drop on the hot job market. But they also knew that the low unemployment rate couldn’t explain the totality of the problem.


Trust in all American institutions — the Supreme Court, Congress, police, public schools — has in recent years plummeted, according to Gallup. The armed forces, though still relatively popular, have not been immune: In 2023, about 60 percent of Americans said they had a “great deal” of confidence in the military, the lowest percentage since 1997, Gallup found.


“There’s a relationship between that propensity number and a lot of what you see in surveys about trust in institutions, pride in country and levels of patriotism,” said Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth in an interview.


Today, U.S. soldiers are spread across the globe, training Ukrainian troops to fight the Russians and working alongside allies to deter China, North Korea and Iran.


“If we get too small, our ability to do those things is at risk,” she said. The success or failure of those missions and America’s future as a superpower began with soldiers like Beaston.


There were 27 days left in the month. To meet the station’s quota of seven recruits, everything would have to go right for Beaston and his team. And he knew from experience that rarely happened.



Beaston takes a breather at a park in Little Egg Harbor, N.J. After a 12-hour day of recruiting, he shifts gears and goes into family mode. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)


‘Ever thought about joining the Army?’


Beaston and his recruiters gathered around a table at the center of the station to review their best active prospects.


There was an 18-year-old who had dropped out of high school and was taking his GED, or General Educational Development test, later in the week. If he passed the exam and cleared his physical, he could enlist in June.


Several other possible recruits were waiting on waivers for medical conditions, such as asthma or ADHD, a slow and bureaucratic process that could take weeks or in some cases months.


One promising candidate had recently smoked marijuana, which is legal in New Jersey but disqualifying for the U.S. military, and was waiting for the THC to clear his system.


Not one of the prospects was a sure thing.


After their morning meeting, Beaston and Staff Sgt. Ken Dziminski headed out from their station, which sits in a strip mall next to a bagel shop and a nail salon. They were carrying a stack of fliers offering “up to $27,100” a year in tuition assistance.


Their region along the Jersey Shore is mostly middle class and White, though the fastest growth of late has been among Latino immigrants working in construction and tourism. The two soldiers navigated the suburban sprawl, tacking the fliers on bulletin boards in the back of stores — a Wawa, a Lowe’s hardware, a smoothie shop.


At each stop they scouted the aisles for prospects: 20-somethings stuck in dead-end retail jobs, high school athletes, teens decked out in patriotic gear.


“Ever thought about joining the Army?” Beaston would ask.


A 30-second interaction with a stranger in a smoothie shop wasn’t likely to produce an enlistment contract. But Beaston reasoned that the conversations were a way of planting a seed with a population that typically gave almost no thought to military service.


The push that made Beaston want to be a soldier had come on Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. His school closed early that morning and Beaston, who was in the fourth grade, spent the rest of the day at home with his mom in East Bridgewater, Mass., about 30 miles south of Boston, watching video of the burning towers on the news. “In my head, I was like, ‘I am going to join,’” he recalled. “I didn’t know which branch. I just knew I was going to join.”



Beaston, sits with 4-year-old daughter Thea. The word “loyalty” is tattooed in large red and blue letters on his forearm. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)


Beaston plays peekaboo with his son, Ronin, 3. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)


Beaston and his wife, Joanna, swing Thea and Ronin at a park. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)


He shipped off to basic training at age 17 and did a one-year tour in Afghanistan repairing Blackhawk helicopters. Now, more than a dozen years later, he was married with two preschool-age children and a plan to stay until he hit 20 years of service and could retire. The word “loyalty” was tattooed in large red and blue letters on his forearm. He’d picked it out on a whim when a pretty girl from basic training had asked him to go with her to a tattoo parlor. The longer Beaston stayed in the Army, the more the tattoo seemed to fit him.


“It’s who I am,” he said. “That’s me to a T.”


He and Dziminski finished posting the fliers. In the car, the two recruiters — both Afghanistan veterans — began talking about the ways the country had changed since they had joined the Army. Almost all of today’s prospects were born after the 9/11 attacks. Most viewed the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as a distant historical event or a costly mistake.


The biggest change, though, was political. The Republican and Democratic presidential candidates were bombarding the country with warnings that the most dangerous threats to America came from within its borders; that their opponent, if elected, would plunge the nation into autocracy.


Beaston and Dziminski agreed that they never wanted the country to go through another terrorist attack. “But I wish we all could come together the way we did on September 12th,” Dziminski said as they approached the Toms River station, one of about 1,500 scattered across the country.


Each Army recruiter is expected to produce at least one enlistment contract a month. Beaston’s job, as the Toms River station commander, was to make sure the station hit its overall goal.


Shortly before the station shut down for the day, his company commander, who oversees seven New Jersey recruiting stations, dropped by the office. June was shaping up as a lean month for the entire company.


“What are you projecting for the month?” Capt. Ben Kottraba asked.

The station wasn’t likely to meet its seven-person goal, Beaston replied, but five seemed possible. The commander grabbed his hat and headed toward the door.


“Is there anything else you need from me?” Beaston asked.

“Contracts,” the commander replied.



Five-year-old Anthony Keiling challenges Staff Sgt. Travis Hill to a push-up contest on the boardwalk in Seaside Heights, where the Army recruiting office in Toms River set up a tent kiosk in hopes of meeting possible recruits. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)


Lost in translation


Early the next morning, one of Beaston’s recruiters, Staff Sgt. Jesus Ramos, greeted one of those potential contracts at the door of the Toms River recruiting station.

He was a skinny, soft-spoken 19-year-old with thick black hair named Jeremy Calvo. Calvo, who was born in the United States but raised in Mexico, spoke limited English. He was about to take the military’s entrance exam — the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery or ASVAB — for the third time. A month earlier, he had scored in the 15th percentile, one point shy of the minimum he needed to be eligible for the Future Soldier Preparatory Course, an intensive program that the Army launched in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.


The pandemic and school shutdowns accelerated long-standing, negative trends eating away at the pool of eligible recruits. The number of young people taking prohibited medications for depression or ADHD surged. Obesity rates rose, and scores on the ASVAB fell.


The new course is a nod to post-pandemic reality. Some enlistees, who spend three weeks at military bases in South Carolina and Georgia, receive tutoring in math and reading comprehension to help them raise their ASVAB scores. Others get physical training to drop body fat. So far this year about 23,000 recruits have participated in the program, which was being hailed in the Pentagon as a success.


Ramos could see that Calvo was nervous about the test, so the 38-year-old sergeant draped an arm over the young prospect’s shoulder. “Tranquilo,” Ramos told him. “You know how it is, so you’ll be good this time.”



Beaston and his team talk with young men on the boardwalk in Seaside Heights. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)


Beaston waits for the next visitor after giving a tour of a Humvee to a woman and child at the Ocean County Fair in Bayville. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)


Hispanics account for about 10 percent of the population in Ocean County, which makes up the bulk of the Toms River recruiting area, up from about 5 percent in 2000. They are an even larger percentage of the region’s working class. The Army had begun seeking out Spanish-speaking sergeants, such as Ramos, and assigning them to recruiting duty in regions with large or rapidly growing Latino populations. But senior Army officials said that they still didn’t have enough bilingual recruiters.


At Toms River, Ramos’s biggest problem was finding native Spanish speakers with the English skills to pass the ASVAB exam, an area where Ramos had some personal experience.


The first time Ramos, who grew up in Puerto Rico, took the test he scored in the sixth percentile. Eventually, he hit the minimum that he needed to enlist, but his English was still shaky. So the commander at his first duty station, in Upstate New York, forced him to practice by answering phones and greeting guests in the unit’s reception area. Slowly, he improved.


Many of the prospects Ramos encountered in Toms River worked in restaurants where the kitchen staff only spoke Spanish, worshiped at Spanish-language churches and hung out with Spanish-speaking friends.


Ramos urged them to change the language on their phones from Spanish to English and turn on English subtitles when they were watching television. But often it wasn’t enough; what they really needed were English lessons, which the Army has been reluctant to provide on a widespread basis. Some senior Pentagon officials said it wasn’t the military’s place to offer English classes. Others equated recruits’ lack of fluency with a lack of will.



Army recruiter Staff Sgt. Ken Dziminski, left, and Beaston ride above the Army kiosk on the boardwalk to check out crowds in Seaside Heights. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)


Motivation didn’t seem to be an issue for Calvo, who reckoned that enlisting in the Army wasn’t going to be more dangerous than living in Mexico, where cartels and corrupt officials preyed on ordinary people.

“Have you been studying?” Beaston asked.

“Yeah,” Calvo answered.


“A lot or a little?” Beaston pressed.


“More,” Calvo replied uncertainly.


Several hours later, Beaston checked Calvo’s results online. He had come up short. Because it was his third failure, Calvo would have to wait at least six months before he could try again.


Ramos broke the news to him at the station. For now, Calvo’s plan was to go back to his job working double shifts filling bottles with pills at a pharmaceutical factory. “I don’t know if I’ll come back,” he said in Spanish.


He headed for his car in the sweltering parking lot. Inside the recruiting station, Ramos terminated him from the station’s list of active prospects.


Two men pass an advertising truck in Lakewood Township, N.J. The truck has various video consoles, and the public is invited inside to play simulation scenario games. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)

Joining the team


Over the next couple of weeks, everything that could possibly go wrong for the Toms River station did. Beaston and his recruiters lost prospects to last-minute cases of cold feet, low ASVAB exam scores and time-consuming medical waivers.


The Army had urged medical personnel to speed up the waiver process, which often requires recruits with disqualifying conditions to get approval from Army doctors and sign-off from senior commanders. And it had successfully petitioned the Pentagon to reduce the time that candidates needed to be off drugs for ADHD and depression before they required a doctor’s consult and a waiver. The changes had helped, but recruiters across the country complained that the process was still too slow.


With 10 days left in June, the Toms River station still hadn’t put anyone in the Army. First Sgt. Juan Valencia, the company’s senior enlisted soldier, called Beaston to check in and prod him to push his team harder.


“It’s been a series of unfortunate events,” Beaston explained. “It’s not for lack of trying.”


The line went silent for a second. “Trying is subjective,” Valencia told him. Beaston’s job was to produce contracts.


Twenty months earlier, when Beaston took over Toms River, it was mired in a devastating slump. In fiscal 2022, it made only 23 percent of its active-duty Army recruiting goal. Morale in the station was “miserable,” Beaston said.


The new station commander had grabbed a whiteboard and written “HOW TO FAIL” across the top, then listed 40 mistakes that he had made or seen others make as recruiters: “Be arrogant. Blame circumstances. Never ask for help. Never train. Expect others to save you.”


Under Beaston’s leadership, the Toms River station rapidly improved. Last year it hit 44 percent of its active duty goal and was doing even better this year. The whiteboard, though, still sat on the floor by Beaston’s desk.


Sgt. First Class Bryan Glass, a field artilleryman doing a three-year stint as a recruiter, was working with the Toms River station’s best prospect for the month. Glass had found Seven Wattley via a GED tutoring program run by the New Jersey National Guard.



Seven Wattley, 18, is a recent Army recruit. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)


Wattley gets a kiss from his dog Ruby at the home where he lives with his mother in Bound Brook. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)

The 18-year-old had cleared his medical screening and passed the ASVAB. The only problem was Wattley’s mother, who didn’t want her son to enlist and was staunchly opposed to his joining the infantry, his top job choice. Glass, 31, tried to bring her around by talking about all the Army had done for him. He had lost his father to cancer at age 13. His mother struggled with addiction, and he spent his teenage years in the foster care system in rural Maryland. “I didn’t want to be someone else’s problem,” he said of his decision to join the Army.

​  

Now he was a married father of two with a house, a new boat and two RVs that he rented out on weekends. Glass’s story was typical of the draft-era Army and the early years of the all-volunteer force when military service was a powerful engine of upward mobility.


With the end of the Cold War, the Army got smaller, more selective and isolated from the rest of the country. “We’re closing in on ourselves,” Wormuth, the Army secretary, worried. Today, 81 percent of Army recruits come from military families. In Pentagon surveys, young Americans and their parents said they knew little about the armed forces.


Recruiters, like Glass, were finding it harder than ever to break through. “Does anyone know anybody who’s interested in serving their country?” he recalled writing on his neighborhood’s community page in late June.

“Not with the state of this country,” Glass recalled one person replying. A second commenter chimed in with a similar sentiment before the page’s administrator warned that the forum didn’t allow political conversations.

“No politics here,” Glass replied. “I’m just looking for people interested in a great job with unmatchable benefits.” A few minutes later, the administrator deleted the entire exchange.



Wattley with his mother, Angela Arroyo. She was initially reticent about her son joining the Army but has since offered her support. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)


On June 24, Glass picked up Wattley at his father’s townhouse and drove him to a nearby military base where Wattley was going to pick an Army job and, if all went as planned, enlist. He didn’t own a phone, so Wattley borrowed Glass’s and called his mom from the base.

“Hello, we’re at the place signing papers,” he told her.

“Signing what?!” she exclaimed.


Wattley chose a basic training ship date in August. Then it was time to select a job. His mom begged him to pick “something with computers,” but Wattley told her that he wanted to stick to his original plan and go infantry.


“It’ll literally be three years of hiding from people, getting shot at and shooting,” she replied. “I don’t know why you want to do this.” She took a deep breath. “But I’m going to respect it,” she said.

Wattley hung up the phone.


“You ready?” Glass asked. “You wanna do it?”


Wattley walked to the front of the room, raised his right hand and swore an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” The Toms River station had finally secured its first enlistment contract of the month. There were six days left in June and six more contracts needed to meet the monthly quota.


Wattley and Glass walked out of the building and into the warm sun. A few months earlier, Wattley was a high school dropout who spent most of his waking hours playing video games and working at McDonald’s, where he once had to scrub feces off the bathroom walls. That was his low point. Now he felt like he was finally on his way to doing something big and important.


“This is like so surreal,” Wattley said as he climbed into Glass’s car. Glass handed Wattley his phone, and he dialed his mom.

“I’m officially part of the team,” Wattley told her.



Army recruiter Staff Sgt. Jesus Ramos, left, greets recruit Sebastian Villaorduña at his home in Seaside Heights. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)

American dreaming


With four days left until the end of the month, the Toms River station kept losing prospects. One of Glass’s recruits opted for college. A second vaped marijuana at a party and had to cancel his Army physical. He probably wouldn’t test clean for 90 days.


The latest round of losses guaranteed that the station would finish June with only one enlistment contract — its worst month of the year. A few hours later, Beaston got some bad news about July. Two of the station’s best remaining prospects — rising high school seniors who planned to enlist via the Army’s Future Soldier Preparatory program — were going to have to wait. The Army was temporarily ratcheting back access to the remedial training program. No one at the station knew precisely why the changes were being made or how long they would last.


Beaston had been hoping a strong July could make up for June’s struggles and get the station back on track. Now he was worried that the slump was going to follow the station deeper into the summer.


“Take a breath. Take a breath,” Beaston said to himself. “It’ll work out.”


He pulled out the station’s color-coded list of prospects and stared at it in silence for nearly a minute, his face resting in his hands. The most solid name on the list was Sebastian Villaorduña, who had gone with Ramos earlier that morning to take his first stab at the ASVAB test. His score was likely to post online at any minute.


“C’mon, Villaorduña,” Beaston pleaded.


The 23-year-old recruit had arrived at Newark Liberty International Airport from Peru last year, reuniting with his mother, who had left him behind a decade ago. At first, she didn’t recognize him. She had come to the United States illegally, via the Texas border, where she was intercepted by immigration officers who stuck her in a cold cell with 50 other migrant women. A couple of weeks later, they moved her to a detention center in Louisiana, where she stayed for another four months.


“The American Dream,” she recalled ruefully. “But we had to put up with it.”



Beaston shows Villaorduña the paper listing when and where he will start. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)



Ramos, left, discusses possible job options with Villaorduña. At right is Beaston. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)

Villaorduña’s stepfather, a U.S. citizen, had sponsored him. Soon he began working at a restaurant on the boardwalk that served Mexican and “classic American-style” fare — burgers, tacos and $14 margaritas — prepared by a kitchen staff that hailed from central and South America. The 12-hour shifts left little time for socializing.


Ramos told Villaorduña about the places he’d visited since joining the Army: the Grand Canyon, Los Angeles, Yankee Stadium. He had met people from all over the country.


“I never thought I would be able to do these things,” he said.


Villaorduña listened attentively. So many young Americans saw the military as a detour from the life they envisioned for themselves or as something beneath them. For Villaorduña, joining the Army was a pathway to becoming more fully part of a country that offered promise and possibilities beyond his reach in Peru.


Villaorduña’s scores posted around 2:30 p.m. Beaston immediately called Ramos with the news. “What he got?” Ramos asked nervously.

“He did great,” Beaston replied.


Ramos, joyful and relieved, shouted an expletive cheer.


Villaorduña wasn’t going to be able to enlist in June. He still needed to take his Army physical. But if he cleared the medical screening, he’d be able to join in July when the Toms River station was going to be on the hook for six more recruits.



Beaston, joined by Dziminski, chats with potential recruit Kiley Toti, 17, at the Army recruiting office. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)

‘They’re out there’


Beaston was determined not to let the Toms River station backslide into the dark days when it almost never made its monthly goal. So he had stayed up late preparing a presentation for his recruiters, who were now sitting around him at a table in the center of the station.

“Someone hit the lights,” he said.


The recruiters turned to face a screen that was playing an excerpt of former president Theodore Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” speech, an homage to those who “strive valiantly,” fail often and keep fighting.

“That’s what this job is, right?” Beaston told them. “It’s continuously failing in order to get that one success … that yes.”


Next came a video of a talk from a submarine commander on the importance of taking initiative. Their situation, Beaston said, was similar to that of a submarine crew operating on its own beneath the ocean. Beaston and his recruiters weren’t working on a big military base, surrounded by officers. They were stuck in a central New Jersey strip mall.


In Washington, senior Army officials were working to provide support to stations like Toms River. They rolled out a new ad campaign and were testing artificial intelligence tools that they hope will help recruiters identify the most promising candidates amid tens of thousands of leads.



Beaston gives an intense talk to preview the interview Villaorduña will have the next day at the Army recruiting office. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)



Beaston and his team at work on a busy day at the Army recruiting office. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)

So far, the initiatives seem to be helping the Army dig out of the hole left by two years of shortfalls. Officials expect to exceed this year’s 55,000 goal by several thousand recruits and set a higher target for 2025, even as they caution that societal forces could continue to shrink their applicant pool. “This isn’t one of those things where you say we kind of have it figured out and we’re good to go,” said Gen. Randy George, the Army’s top officer.


Beaston wanted his recruiters to see beyond the station’s disappointing month and focus on how far they had come. Last fiscal year, the station hit only 43 percent of its regular Army goal. This year it was already at 72 percent with three months to go. In June, the station got two more recruiters, part of an eight-month effort to add about 800 recruiters nationwide.


“Next year you all should be crushing it,” Beaston said. “There’s going to be a line outside Toms River recruiting station. I’m telling you. I cannot wait.”


“I wish it was that easy,” Glass replied.


“Nah, man,” Beaston promised, “we’re going to get there.”


Outside, cars zipped past the Toms River station, full of people headed to work or the beach — a typical summer morning at the Jersey Shore. “They’re out there,” Beaston said. “I know they are.”

He and his recruiters just needed to find them.


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By Greg Jaffe

Greg Jaffe is a national reporter with The Washington Post; he has spent more than a decade covering the military. He’s the co-author of “The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army.” Twitter


By Missy Ryan

Missy Ryan writes about national security and defense for The Washington Post. She joined The Post in 2014 and has written about the Pentagon and the State Department. She has reported from Iraq, Ukraine, Egypt, Libya, Lebanon, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mexico, Peru, Argentina and Chile.


7. Harris Could End America’s Era of Hubris Abroad


Excerpts:


The interplay of hubris and intellectual humility, defined as an “awareness of the limits of one’s knowledge,” has been fodder for historians since Herodotus, who blamed the downfall of kings such as Croesus and Xerxes on their arrogance.
The US today is mightier than any empires of yore and has no need to prove its strength. In the hands of arrogant leaders, such power becomes dangerous. Wielded wisely and humbly, though, it can keep the country safe and the world stable. That seems to be Harris’s intuition, too. Perhaps, like George W. Bush in 2000, she should say that in a debate, and then actually live up to it.


Harris Could End America’s Era of Hubris Abroad

George W. Bush once promised a “humble” foreign policy and delivered the opposite. Harris could do that in reverse.

August 31, 2024 at 8:00 AM EDT

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-08-31/kamala-harris-could-end-the-era-of-us-foreign-policy-hubris?sref=hhjZtX76


By Andreas Kluth

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.



“If we are an arrogant nation, they will resent us,” George W. Bush said during a presidential debate in 2000; “if we’re a humble nation, but strong, they’ll welcome us.” Having promised humility as a candidate, Bush then went on to succumb as president to hubris, launching ill-fated and quasi-messianic wars in Iraq and elsewhere in the name of the foreign-policy fad of the time, called Neoconservatism.

Such cognitive dissonance is a reminder that it’s well-nigh impossible to predict how politicians running for the Oval Office will conduct themselves once they’re in it. We may conjecture about the possible foreign policies of Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, but these theories are likely to explode on impact with the vagaries of world events — such as, in Bush’s case, the terrorist attacks of Sep. 11, 2001.

That said, Harris has shown signs that she could chart a trajectory that would be roughly the obverse of Bush’s. As a female candidate running against a wannabe strongman, she must signal that she’d be at least as tough as Trump: “As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” she promised at the Democratic convention. Once in office, though, she’s likely to strive for the ideal described by Bush the candidate, not Bush the president: strong but humble.

We can infer this from the people she’s chosen to advise her on national security, who are likely to occupy some policy perch if she wins. One of them is Philip Gordon, who also served in the administrations of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Another is Rebecca Lissner, a diplomat and scholar.

Gordon has long talked about “the need to bring a certain humility to the notion that there is some simple solution to any of these big challenges” in world affairs. While at the Council on Foreign Relations between the Obama and Biden terms, he wrote a book with the telling title Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East.

His narrative charts the failures, follies and unintended consequences of US interventions in the region. Those include the ouster of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 (which, via many twists and turns, gave us today’s anti-American theocracy in Tehran), Bush II’s misguided invasion of Iraq (which spawned, among other ills, the Islamic State and left Iran as the paradoxical winner), as well as misadventures in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and elsewhere.

Gordon has a keen eye for the hubris that so often accompanies American exceptionalism, the naive belief that, by virtue of its supposedly unique characteristics, the United States can fix anything and save the world. He recognizes instead the limits of American power, and the need for humility in a fundamentally uncertain and unknowable world. As a Russia hawk, he’s not coy about asserting US might when necessary. But as a practitioner, he’s ever aware of the unforeseen snafus. When Biden and Harris deliberated on withdrawing from Afghanistan in 2021, he apparently warned about the chaos that in fact ensued and urged a residual military presence to prevent it; he lost that argument, obviously.

The book that Lissner co-authored, which was published at about the same time as Gordon’s, hews to similar themes. Her conclusion is that the US nowadays lacks the means to police the world as “hegemon,” or to defend the so-called “rules-based international order.” Instead, she favors scaling down American grand strategy to more achievable goals such as preserving some modicum of open exchange that would keep the US prosperous.

The public profile that Harris has burnished as vice president checks other, and more traditional, boxes on the foreign-policy spectrum. According to those parameters, she’d largely continue in the vein of her current boss, in sharp contrast with Trump.

Like Biden, she would lean toward “internationalism” instead of Trump’s isolationism. She’d cultivate alliances and multilateral organizations, whereas Trump would go unilateralist and nationalist. She’d blend realism and idealism by considering America’s national interests and values alike; her opponent would espouse a caricature of realism, chasing national interests one deal or photo op at a time.

Arguably, though, temperament and the wisdom formed throughout a politician’s life determine actual foreign policy more than such abstract labels. And in that light, there’s absolutely nothing humble about Trump. The man is pure narcissistic megalomania; he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.

Biden may not come close to Trump’s arrogance, but he did acquire his chops during an era of national hubris, entering the senate when the US was a superpower and joining the foreign-relations committee when the US was briefly a hyperpower in a unipolar world. He’s wont to borrow the messianic language of exceptionalism, describing America as “the indispensable nation” and a “beacon” for the world. Early in his presidency, he experimented with a grandiose framing of geopolitics as a moral contest between democracies and autocracies, which he quickly had to ditch in order to get anything done.

The interplay of hubris and intellectual humility, defined as an “awareness of the limits of one’s knowledge,” has been fodder for historians since Herodotus, who blamed the downfall of kings such as Croesus and Xerxes on their arrogance.

The US today is mightier than any empires of yore and has no need to prove its strength. In the hands of arrogant leaders, such power becomes dangerous. Wielded wisely and humbly, though, it can keep the country safe and the world stable. That seems to be Harris’s intuition, too. Perhaps, like George W. Bush in 2000, she should say that in a debate, and then actually live up to it.

More From Bloomberg Opinion:

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.



8. Ukraine launches massive drone attack on Russian energy infrastructure




Ukraine launches massive drone attack on Russian energy infrastructure

Russia said it downed 158 drones in what appeared to be one of the largest Ukrainian drone attacks yet. Fires broke out at energy facilities, including in Moscow.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/01/ukraine-drone-attack-russia-energy/



Ukrainian soldiers change a tire in Russia's Kursk region on Aug. 18. (Ed Ram for The Washington Post)


By Siobhán O'Grady

September 1, 2024 at 6:19 a.m. EDT


KYIV — Russia shot down 158 drones overnight, including 11 over Moscow and the surrounding region, its Defense Ministry said Sunday, as officials across the country scrambled to respond to what appeared to be one of the largest Ukrainian drone attacks on Russia yet.


The assault targeted energy infrastructure, including power plants and oil refineries, and fires broke out at several facilities, including in Moscow. Officials said dozens of the drones were shot down over the Kursk region, where Ukraine launched a surprise incursion on Aug. 6. Russia still controls part of the region.


The mayor of Moscow, who updated Telegram regularly through the night, reported the presence of drones in various suburbs of the city. No deaths or injuries related to the drone attack were reported in Russia.

The attack came after an especially intense week of repeated Russian bombardments on Ukraine, including on energy infrastructure, worsening power blackouts throughout the country and killing civilians​.


Ukraine’s allies have imposed restrictions that prevent it from using many weapons inside of Russia, especially for long-range strikes. A delegation of Ukrainian officials are in Washington this week requesting changes to that policy, which Kyiv says has left it fighting with one hand tied behind its back.



Following World news

Following


Instead, Ukraine has relied on domestically produced drones to strike targets deep inside of Russia.


“It is only fair that Ukrainians should be able to respond to Russian terror in exactly the way necessary to stop it,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on Telegram on Sunday. “Every day and every night, our cities and villages are under enemy attacks.”

Natalia Abbukamova in Riga, Latvia, contributed to this report.


9. Nuclear Weapons Always Stopped Invasions. Then Ukrainian Troops Poured Into Russia.



For a change it is good to see someone like Putin not protect his red line.



Nuclear Weapons Always Stopped Invasions. Then Ukrainian Troops Poured Into Russia.

In testing Putin’s red lines, Kyiv is sparking a rediscovery of Cold War-era ideas about nuclear escalation


https://www.wsj.com/world/nuclear-weapons-always-stopped-invasions-then-ukrainian-troops-poured-into-russia-7c5ccea5?mod=latest_headlines

By Daniel MichaelsFollow

Updated Sept. 1, 2024 11:54 am ET

Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk isn’t just a brash bid to upend Russia’s invasion. It also marks the first time that a declared nuclear power has faced invasion and occupation by another country. 

For decades, nuclear-escalation theory has presumed that countries with atomic weapons were largely immune from attack because an aggressor risked triggering armageddon. Relatively small states including Israel, Iran, North Korea and Libya have pursued nuclear arms in part to deter attacks by larger, better-armed adversaries.

Nuclear powers have scuffled: India has had border skirmishes with China and Pakistan. Palestinian Hamas militants in October stormed into Israel, which is widely believed to have nuclear weapons. But generally the threat of annihilation has protected nuclear-armed countries from large-scale attack and kept peace between them.

Ukraine isn’t a nuclear power and is outgunned by Russia, yet Kyiv has managed for more than three weeks to control territory now totaling almost 500 square miles. It is a stunning twist. Strategists over the years have frequently envisaged countries from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization grabbing Russian turf in a fight, not a beleaguered underdog doing it.

Now Western leaders, military thinkers and nuclear theorists are puzzling over what current events mean for prospects of Russian escalation—and for future war gaming. Theoretical risk faces a real-world test, forcing a re-examination of the role nuclear weapons can play in deterrence.


A Ukrainian vehicle in Sumy, near where Ukraine mounted the first large-scale invasion of Russia since World War II. Photo: Roman PILIPEY/AFP

Russia’s published nuclear doctrine says Moscow would only resort to atomic weapons if the country’s sovereignty or territorial integrity were threatened. Although Ukraine occupies a chunk of Russian soil, neither side appears to consider the Kursk region strategically vital, so Ukraine’s attack—however embarrassing to the Kremlin—shows no sign of crossing a Russian red line.

But ambiguity and uncertainty are integral to nuclear gamesmanship.

“No one really knows the Russian red line—they’ve never given any precision,” said Nikolai Sokov, a former Soviet and Russian arms-control negotiator. “We may find out later that we crossed the red line two months ago,” said Sokov, who now briefs Western military leaders on Russian strategic thinking.

One wild card Sokov notes is that the Kremlin and President Vladimir Putin seem to consider threats to his regime as sovereign threats to Russia. In a sign of how events are affecting deterrence calculations, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov on Sunday said that the Kremlin would adjust its nuclear doctrine based on analysis of the war and the West’s role, according to state news agency TASS, reiterating a pledge Putin has made several times.

Fear of crossing Russian red lines has shaped President Biden’s approach to the war. Not wanting it to become a direct fight with NATO, he has hesitated to give Ukraine weapons it has begged for, including tanks, advanced missiles and jet fighters. Kyiv eventually got most of them, prompting Ukrainians and their Western supporters to argue that Putin’s red lines were flexible.

Ukraine aims to show with its Kursk incursion that another taboo can be broken without dire consequences. Part of the aim is to convince the White House that Ukraine should be allowed to use more lethal and precise U.S. weapons to attack Russia.  

Many Western officials, particularly in Washington and Berlin, remain more cautious because Putin is so unpredictable.

Uncertainty over where Russia’s red lines lie is “the fundamental challenge of strategic ambiguity,” said Janice Gross Stein, a professor of conflict management at the University of Toronto. Testing limits and signaling through threats or pledges of restraint form what she calls a “contest between a strategy to manipulate uncertainty and a strategy to reduce uncertainty.”

Gaming out events triggered by Ukraine’s push into Kursk harks back to the Cold War, when escalation theory was a widely studied discipline. When the Soviets developed an atomic bomb in 1949, four years after the U.S. had, Western strategists tried to envisage how the terrifying weapons might figure into combat. 

Their massive destructive power—and the far greater danger from thermonuclear weapons, starting in 1952—prompted creation of a new field, nuclear deterrence thinking, and analytical tools to support it.

Game theory, pioneered in the 1920s by mathematician John von Neumann, flourished as an approach to assessing nuclear brinkmanship. To tackle weighty unknowns, the Rand Corporation, created as a Pentagon think tank, used theoretical constructs such as the so-called prisoner’s dilemma—a situation where two parties that are unable to communicate must separately decide whether to cooperate for mutual benefit—to play out how the U.S. and Soviet Union might act and react in conflict scenarios. 


Nuclear-deterrence theory advanced in response to events including the Soviet Union’s 1961 test of the Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated. Photo: Cover Images/The Ministry of Medium Machine Building of the U.S.S.R./Reuters

Theorist and economist Thomas Schelling in 1960 codified the analysis in a deeply influential collection of scholarly articles, “The Strategy of Conflict,” which presented an intellectual path for assessing deterrence and escalation. 

Nuclear theorizing drew brilliant thinkers. Schelling won a Nobel Prize in economics. Escalation theory was advanced by the work of Nobel-winning economist John Nash, subject of the film “A Beautiful Mind.” 

Yet nuclear strategizing and determining an adversary’s red lines remain a high-stakes game of chicken.

“It is like we’re walking in the dark toward a cliff,” said Christopher Chivvis, who has assessed nuclear-risk issues at Rand and as a U.S. intelligence officer. “It is out there somewhere. We just don’t know where it is.”

Putin has more or less directly threatened to use nuclear weapons at several points since launching his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But already a decade ago, Russia’s seizure of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula marked a new level of post-Cold War aggression that prompted escalation theorists to dust off their textbooks.

About six years ago, political science professor James Davis, chair of international relations at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, realized that nuclear decision-making had faded as an academic field but was returning as a concern. He began teaching courses on it, including one titled “Fundamentals of Arms Control.”

Now he’s reassessing some long-held assumptions.

“We always thought nuclear weapons weren’t good for anything but deterrence,” he said. “We really didn’t think a nonnuclear power would invade a nuclear power.”

Communicating uncertainties of escalation theory outside the classroom, to the general public, can be even more puzzling. Specialists note that 75 years of successful deterrence doesn’t mean the approach can always prevent nuclear war.

“It is a difficult messaging task for people who think about this full-time,” said Chivvis, who is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “You don’t want to be warning about this all the time, but you don’t want to say it’s not going to happen.”

Write to Daniel Michaels at Dan.Michaels@wsj.com


10. Ukraine Strikes Moscow Oil Refinery in Massive Drone Barrage




Ukraine Strikes Moscow Oil Refinery in Massive Drone Barrage

Russia’s Defense Ministry said more than 150 drones were fired against targets across the country on Sunday

​https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/ukraine-strikes-moscow-oil-refinery-in-massive-drone-barrage-89cd6736?mod=latest_headlines


By Matthew Luxmoore

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Sept. 1, 2024 8:51 am ET



Firefighters at a site of a Russian missile strike in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Photo: vitalii hnidyi/Reuters

Ukraine struck a major oil refinery in Moscow and other targets across Russia in one of its largest aerial barrages since the start of Russia’s invasion, expanding a campaign of drone attacks on energy facilities and further highlighting the vulnerability of strategic infrastructure deep inside Russia.

Russia’s defense ministry said on Sunday that its air defenses had intercepted or shot down more than 150 drones in 15 regions. At least one of them detonated over a major refinery in Moscow that is owned by state energy giant Gazprom, officials said, while another hit a power station in the neighboring Tver region.

Videos posted on social media showed large explosions engulfing parts of the oil refinery’s sprawling complex, located southeast of the city center. The videos couldn’t immediately be independently verified.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said one of the drones that struck the Moscow refinery had caused damage to an “adjacent technical facility” at the plant, without elaborating, and later said emergency services had put out the flames. He added that there were no casualties and the functioning of the plant hadn’t been affected.

Kyiv didn’t immediately comment on the attacks.

Russia and Ukraine have been carrying out regular strikes against targets tied to the adversary’s military and energy industries. Last week, Russia fired what Ukraine described as the largest rocket-and-drone barrage of the war, leading to temporary blackouts in some Ukrainian cities.


One drone hit a power station in the Tver region. Photo: Andrey Shevchenko/ Shutterstock

Ukraine has in recent months increased the pace and scale of its drone strikes on Russia, including on energy facilities deep inside the country. It has hit Russian air defenses and fuel and ammunition stores.

“It’s completely justified for Ukrainians to be able to respond to Russian terror precisely where it’s necessary,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday morning.

Zelensky said that in the past week, Russia had fired 160 missiles, 780 glide bombs and 400 explosive drones against Ukraine. On Friday, a Russian glide-bomb strike on a residential area of Kharkiv in Ukraine’s northeast killed at least six and left nearly 100 injured, according to local officials.

Kyiv’s accelerated campaign comes as its forces are seeking to consolidate control over a chunk of Russian territory they seized during a lightning incursion into the Kursk region last month. Moscow’s forces are, meanwhile, pressing forward in eastern Ukraine, threatening the strategic city of Pokrovsk.

The wave of attacks on refineries and other petroleum infrastructure are intended to disrupt fuel supplies to the front line and damage Moscow’s most important export industry. In March, drones struck a major refinery operated by Lukoil, Russia’s second-biggest oil company, as well as oil-storage tanks in a region near the Ukrainian border and a town near St. Petersburg that hosts another large refinery.

Russian refineries were built according to Soviet construction codes that provide protection against catastrophic damage and traditional air bombing. But the Ukrainian attacks have caused damage severe enough to prompt monthslong repairs, which have been made harder by sanctions that limit Moscow’s access to crucial Western parts that helped build and expand its energy industry over recent decades.

The impact on Russia’s military fuel supply from the attacks is difficult to estimate. Refineries are crucial for Russia’s war effort as tanks, ships and planes need refined products such as gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.


Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said emergency services had put out a fire at a refinery. Photo: Sergei Savostyanov/Zuma Press

The Gazprom-owned refinery in Moscow is one of Russia’s largest, and any damage to its operations could cause further disruption to Russia’s exports of fuels. Ukrainian attacks have contributed to a rise this year in global diesel and gasoline prices, energy experts say, while crude prices have remained relatively stable.

Ukraine has few long-range missiles of its own and is barred by the U.S. and others from using Western-provided, longer-range missiles inside Russia. The Biden administration loosened restrictions on the use of American-supplied weapons after Russia reinvaded Ukraine’s northern Kharkiv region in May, allowing Kyiv to use artillery and fire short-range rockets from Himars launchers against command posts, arms depots and other assets across the border there. But the policy didn’t give Ukraine permission to use longer-range ATACMS missiles inside Russia.

Developing a homegrown drone industry has helped Ukraine strike targets deep inside Russia without relying exclusively on Western-supplied missiles. But in recent weeks, officials from Zelensky’s administration have been lobbying the U.S. for permission to use ATACMS inside Russia.

Zelensky said in his nightly address on Saturday that Ukraine needed Western allies to give it more missiles—and permission to use them on Russian territory—to force Russia to seek an end to the war.

Defense Minister Rustem Umerov said on Friday that Kyiv had presented the U.S. with a list of targets that it hopes to strike with ATACMS missiles if the ban on their use in Russia is lifted. 

“We have explained what kind of capabilities we need to protect the citizens against the Russian terror that Russians are causing us, so I hope we were heard,” he told CNN.

James Marson contributed to this article.

Write to Matthew Luxmoore at matthew.luxmoore@wsj.com



11. Putin, cash and guns prompt ‘explosive’ rethink of Swiss neutrality





Putin, cash and guns prompt ‘explosive’ rethink of Swiss neutrality

Politico · August 30, 2024

After 500 years of non-alliance, a bombshell report recommends closer cooperation with the EU and NATO.

Switzerland currently spends 0.76 percent of GDP on defense — far less than any NATO member except Iceland, which doesn't have a military. | Erwin Scheriau/APA/AFP via Getty Images

August 30, 2024 4:20 am CET

Switzerland isn’t keen on getting involved in wars but likes making money.

The clash between those values — plus worries that Russian President Vladimir Putin poses a risk to the whole of Europe — is prompting the country to rethink its defense stance.

In a bombshell report released on Thursday, a group of experts recommend to the government that the country, which has been neutral since 1515, work on a "common defense capability" with the EU and NATO.



"Since the Russian attack on Ukraine, neutrality has once again become the subject of political debate, both at home and abroad. Pressure on Switzerland to clarify its position is growing," reads the report, calling for a "revision" of its neutrality policy.

One of the many drivers is how Switzerland's neutrality has affected arms sales; another is how to better defend a country surrounded by two groupings to which it doesn't belong.

The potential policy upheaval is yet another sign of how Russia's 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine is changing Europe's security landscape. The unprovoked attack prompted Sweden and Finland to ditch their neutrality and join NATO.

The experts preparing the report — including diplomats, senior officials, a former head of the Swiss army and Wolfgang Ischinger, the former director of the Munich Security Conference — delivered their findings to Swiss Defense and Security Minister Viola Amherd, who is also president of the Confederation for 2024. The recommendations will inform Switzerland's 2025 security strategy.

Allowing arms exports

Switzerland's arms exports fell last year by 27 percent to less than 700 million Swiss francs (€746 million) compared to 2022 — due both to strict arms export provisions and to the one-off effect of Qatar ending air defense systems purchases tied to its hosting of the 2022 World Cup.

Bern bans the sale of weapons to countries at war, and that's had a ripple effect on relationships with other countries wanting to send arms to Ukraine that might include Swiss components.



"The re-export ban must be lifted," urges the report.

Switzerland has blocked delivery of weapons and ammunition to Ukraine from several European countries. It took months of pressure for Switzerland to agree to ship surplus Leopard tanks to Germany to replace those sent to Ukraine. Its refusal to allow Swiss-made ammunition in Germany's stocks to be sent to Ukraine for use in donated Gepard anti-aircraft systems helped prompt German armsmaker Rheinmetall to boost ammunition production in Germany.

Experts also want to strengthen the Swiss arms industry by boosting offset policies and gaining access to EU and NATO armament programs.

'Explosive' proposals

The report was controversial before it was even released, as opposition parties accused Amherd of appointing mainly NATO and EU enthusiasts to the experts committee.

It's likely to meet pushback in the Swiss parliament, especially from pacifist left-leaning parties and the nationalist far-right; Amherd is already under fire for the country's increasingly close ties with NATO.

While it's unlikely Switzerland will be invaded, the country is already the target of hybrid warfare including disinformation, espionage and cyberattacks, according to the report. | Stefan Wermuth/AFP via Getty Images

"The report makes it clear that Switzerland is a Western country and therefore supports Western values," said Jean-Marc Rickli, the Geneva Centre for Security Policy's head of global and emerging risks.



However, "calls for increased military cooperation with NATO and the EU will very likely stir lots of debate within Switzerland," he added, agreeing with assessments that the report is potentially "explosive" domestically.

The experts stop short of suggesting that Switzerland entirely scrap its neutrality and join NATO, but they do urge deeper ties with the military alliance and the EU on joint training, defense against ballistic missiles and bilateral and multilateral exercises.

The report also calls for military expenditure to reach 1 percent of GDP by 2030. Switzerland currently spends 0.76 percent of GDP on defense — far less than any NATO member except Iceland, which doesn't have a military.

While it's unlikely Switzerland will be invaded, the country is already the target of hybrid warfare including disinformation, espionage and cyberattacks, according to the report. The experts recommend moving toward "global defense," meaning preparing the whole of society — not only the military — for a potential conflict.

Cozy with EU, NATO

In the past months, the Swiss federal council, which runs the country, has signaled a willingness to cuddle up to both NATO and the EU on security and defense.

On Wednesday, a Swiss delegation traveled to Luxembourg to meet with NATO’s Support and Procurement Agency (NSPA). One of the meeting’s goals was to assess potential synergies and opportunities for cooperation with the agency.



Earlier this month, the federal council also approved participation in two of the EU's Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) projects, one on military mobility that aims to facilitate border crossings and another one on cyberdefense.

According to Rickli, Switzerland wants to prove it's playing its part in case the neutral country needs military help from EU countries or NATO.

"There's a reputational element of Switzerland potentially seen as a free rider who doesn't cooperate with European states," he said. "If it wants to benefit from the help of its European partners, it has to give something back."

Related Countries

Finland Germany Russia Sweden Switzerland Ukraine

Related People

Vladimir Putin Wolfgang Ischinger

Related Organizations

NATO

Politico · August 30, 2024



12. ‘Moneyball’ for gun crews: Surprising data have Army division reshaping its gunnery training



Oh no. The bean counters (bullet counters) could have a field day with this.  


Is the right question how do we assess gunnery proficiency? Or is the more important question how do we assess combat proficiency? Is there a sufficient correlation between gunnery scores and combat success without sufficient live fire training (and the accompanying question is what is the correct amount of live fire training that contributes to success in combat?)


Yes I am old school and I know my bias (without data) is that there is no substitute for the muscle (and crew drill) memory attained through live fire training.


While this may accurately assess the proficiency of a tank crew in gunnery does it accurately assess the proficiency of a crew in combat?


That said I know we have to reduce the exposure of crews to concussion and noise because of the long term health effects on our soldiers. We do have to find the right balance so that our troops are successful in combat (to include the "first battle") while minimizing the long term negative health effects. We owe both to our soldiers.


As an aside regarding fire commands, my experience as an infantryman being range OIC of the 3d Infantry Division Tank Table 8 and Table 12 in 1985, was that the most proficient (speed and firing accuracy) platoons used no fire commands for platoon gunnery (Tank Table 12). But they were from the CAT (Canadian Army Trophy) Company which fired as much live ammunition in preparation for the CAT competition as the entire division fired in a year.


Excerpts:

Before developing the statistical model, Bate and his team assumed that a soldier's performance during the live-ammo segments would be the best predictor of final-round performance. Instead, it was Table Three, which is the first time soldiers combine their operational knowledge and muscle memory.
“It was really unexpected to us,” Bate said. “But it turns out, [Table Three] really evaluates the crew command's crew proficiency. Shows if they can use the right fire commands, like, 'troops in the open'...and using the right terminology before you engage a target, and acquiring the target. That was the thing that was correlated with better Table Six qualification scores.”
If more data proves that Table Three is a reliable predictor of qualification, it would allow crews who aren’t quite up to snuff to be sent back for more training, which could save time and money, Bate said.




‘Moneyball’ for gun crews: Surprising data have Army division reshaping its gunnery training

You can spot a proficient crew with less shooting than you think.

defenseone.com · by Lauren C. Williams

FORT CARSON, Colo.—For an infantry crew, nothing can replace the experience of riding in a big truck and firing guns at targets hundreds of yards away. Shell cases clinking as they collect on the roof, the smell of diesel and gunpowder, the thump of recoil, the sound of the team’s voices in a headset—the tactile practice is crucial for creating muscle memory and prepping the brain for the sensory experience of battle. Or is it?

Brig. Gen. Eugene Ferris, the 4th Infantry Division’s deputy commanding general for maneuver, asked his team to find out.

“We’ve got all this gunnery data” but “do we know what's correlated with better success?” recalled Lt. Col. Jonathan Bate, who leads the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment in the division’s 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team.

They didn’t. So Bate’s brigade put together a team to answer that question. The result was what they call “the Moneyball approach,” affectionately named after the 2011 baseball movie that starred Brad Pitt as the Oakland As’ general manager. The approach uses statistics to determine what skills and metrics best predict whether soldiers will qualify for crew gunnery certification the first time around.

A gunnery crew must pass six types of tests, or tables, to earn its marksmanship certifications: a written test, a simulation, in-person range training with lasers and blanks, two live-ammo sessions, and the final qualification round. These semi-annual and annual certifications are required across multiple weapons platforms, such as tanks, Strykers and Bradley ground vehicles. For Strykers, there’s a crew of three—a driver, a gunner, and a vehicle commander, but only the gunner has to qualify on the table exercises.

“We found that, out of all the tables, there was one table that turned out to be statistically significant, correlated with achieving a first-time qual”: the laser-and-blank range, Bate said.

Before developing the statistical model, Bate and his team assumed that a soldier's performance during the live-ammo segments would be the best predictor of final-round performance. Instead, it was Table Three, which is the first time soldiers combine their operational knowledge and muscle memory.

“It was really unexpected to us,” Bate said. “But it turns out, [Table Three] really evaluates the crew command's crew proficiency. Shows if they can use the right fire commands, like, 'troops in the open'...and using the right terminology before you engage a target, and acquiring the target. That was the thing that was correlated with better Table Six qualification scores.”

If more data proves that Table Three is a reliable predictor of qualification, it would allow crews who aren’t quite up to snuff to be sent back for more training, which could save time and money, Bate said.

“If you score below, let's say like an 800 or 850 out of 1,000 on that table, you go back and retrain, because you only have a 70 percent chance of achieving a first-time qual. So it saves us time. It saves us ammunition and resources, and helps us overall become more successful,” he said.

Now, Bate wants to build an automated tool using machine learning to “take all of these factors and then pop out a predicted score on table six,” to flag crews that need retraining.

“The tools are out there. It's really just a fight for the data, for the will to use it,” he said.

Challenging assumptions

Bate said the revelation that a training exercise where gunners shoot lasers instead of live ammo was a good indicator of marksmanship came as a bit of a shock.

“A lot of soldiers would think that Table Three is not important. And so this gave us evidence,” he said. “And for leaders, it's a good dipstick check for, like, maybe your crews aren't ready to move on, because they're just gonna go and fail at Table Six. And once you shoot it, you can't reshoot it again.”

This insight hinged on the “qualitative common-sense knowledge from brigade master gunner or sergeant,” Bate said. We had “very smart lieutenants doing the data analytics and then we had a really smart sergeant with the common sense—the experience. We put that all together, and he helped us interpret the results from the data.”

A quick Google search for “Army Table 3 gunnery training” supports that notion, as most results are for tables four through six—the parts of the certification that require live ammo. Targets aren’t knocked down in Table Three even though the lasers are firing, so there’s no haptic feedback.

The typical reasoning is that the number of targets shot would be most important “because you're like, ‘Oh, the gunner is accurate, so [they’re] probably going to qualify the first time.’ This one shows that the communication with the crew in the rehearsal of working together is actually more important,” said Lt. Col. Nate Platz, commander of the 704th Brigade Support Battalion in the 4th Infantry Division’s 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team.

The division wants to improve its data collection, expand it to improve the model, and learn more about the crews and their experiences such as “how many gunneries have they shot before? Are they having any personal issues or stressors?” Bate said.

“We don't have Table One and Two scores,” Bate said. So there’s a need to “really expand the data set…we just scratched the surface. There's probably a lot better ways to do this.”

defenseone.com · by Lauren C. Williams



13. America isn’t ready for another war — because it doesn’t have the troops


Another view of this misunderstood and publicly overlooked national security crisis.


Excerpts:

Absent a draft or major structural reform to AVF recruiting and retention, the US military will struggle not to shrink. A shrinking force will propel a vicious cycle, as a smaller military carries the same load of overseas deployments. A worsening deployment-to-dwell ratio will hurt retention, as the strain on family life of lengthy deployments becomes intolerable. Lower retention will then necessitate higher recruiting goals, even as exiting troops would serve as walking negative advertisements for American military life.
The recruiting crisis is a greater national security threat to the United States than the wars that currently dominate the headlines. If there is one lesson America’s leaders should take from the conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, it is that troop mobilization and depth are still essential for fighting wars. As both Israel and Ukraine have learned, no amount of high-tech wizardry has changed this enduring reality of warfare. Should the United States fail to fix its military recruiting, it will risk losing a great power war — with enormous consequences for all Americans.


America isn’t ready for another war — because it doesn’t have the troops

The US military’s recruiting crisis, explained.

by Gil Barndollar and Matthew C. Mai

Sep 1, 2024, 8:00 AM EDT

Vox · by Matthew C. Mai · September 1, 2024

Coverage of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza is mostly dominated by talk of weapons. Reporters and analysts focus on suicide drones, on shell deficits, on targeting algorithms. But for all the attention devoted to modern weapons and munitions, both conflicts are proving that modern war still comes down to people.

In Ukraine, battlefield deaths on both sides were estimated to number more than 200,000 by the fall of 2023. Though US weapons and munitions have been critical to Kyiv’s war effort, it was territorial militias and hastily trained citizen-soldiers who helped save Ukraine from total conquest in 2022.

At the same time, it was a partial mobilization of more than 300,000 troops that stabilized Russia’s lines and prevented a potential collapse in late 2022. Today, the war has settled into an attritional slugfest, with both sides desperate to keep the flow of new recruits going, to the point where ranks have opened to older men, women, and convicts.

The situation is much the same in the Middle East. On October 7, Israel’s heavily automated Gaza perimeter was breached by well-trained but low-tech Hamas terrorists. The attack was eventually repulsed by conscript soldiers and armed volunteers — even in the “start-up nation” that prides itself on its technological prowess, security depends first and foremost on people. Similar to the Russian mobilization before the invasion of Ukraine, the immediate calling up of 360,000 reservists enabled Israel to conduct its campaign against Hamas and deter other non-state foes in the West Bank and Lebanon.

America did away with the draft 51 years ago, waging its many wars and interventions since with the All-Volunteer Force (AVF). But “all-volunteer” is a misnomer. Americans aren’t lining up to serve, and the AVF is really an all-recruited force. Its previous annual recruitment of about 150,000 mostly young Americans, who are individually located, pitched, and incentivized to serve, comes at considerable effort and expense.


The United States got through two foreign wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with the AVF — though neither war was a victory. A war with Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea would be an entirely different proposition, with the possibility of more casualties in a few weeks than the United States suffered in the entire Global War on Terrorism. But as crises overseas multiply, the immediate existential threat to the AVF, and ultimately to US security, is at home: there aren’t enough Americans willing and able to fill the military’s ranks.

Not enough soldiers

Three of America’s four major military services failed to recruit enough servicemembers in 2023. The Army has failed to meet its manpower goals for the last two years and missed its 2023 target by 10,000 soldiers, a 20 percent shortfall. Today, the active-duty Army stands at 445,000 soldiers, 41,000 fewer than in 2021 and the smallest it has been since 1940.

The Navy and Air Force missed their recruiting goals too, the Navy failing across the board. The Marine Corps was the only service to achieve its targets (not counting the tiny Space Force). But the Marines’ success is partially attributable to significant force structure cuts as part of its Force Design 2030 overhaul. As a result, Marine recruiters have nearly 19,000 fewer active duty and selected reserve slots to fill today than they did as recently as 2020.

A decrease in the size of the active force might be less worrying if a large reserve pool could be mobilized in the event of a major war or national emergency. But recruiting challenges have impacted the reserve components even more severely than the active duty force. The National Guard and Reserves have been shrinking since 2020. Last year, the Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve each missed their recruiting targets by 30 percent. The Army Reserve had just 9,319 enlistees after aiming to recruit 14,650 new soldiers. Numbers for the Navy Reserve were just as bad — the service missed its enlisted and officer targets by 35 and 40 percent, respectively.

Should a true national security emergency arise, America lacks the ability to mobilize as Israel and Russia have done. The Individual Ready Reserve (IRR) — comprising former active duty or selected reserve personnel who could be reactivated by the Secretary of Defense during wartime or a national emergency — is designed to act as a bridge from the AVF to a revived draft. Almost forgotten even by servicemembers, the IRR earned brief notoriety when some servicemembers were “stop-lossed” during the Iraq War — pulled from the IRR and returned to active duty involuntarily, usually to deploy again.

Today, there are just over 264,000 servicemembers in the entire IRR. The Army’s IRR pool has shrunk from 700,000 in 1973 to 76,000 in 2023. Forget building new units in wartime: the IRR is now incapable of even providing sufficient casualty replacements for losses from the first battles of a high-intensity war.

And even if more Americans could be encouraged to sign up, they may not be able to serve. Before Covid, fewer than 3 in 10 Americans in the prime recruiting demographic — ages 17 to 24 — were eligible to serve in uniform. Those numbers have shrunk further since the pandemic began. Only 23 percent of young Americans are qualified to enlist without a waiver, based on the most recent data. Endemic youth obesity, record levels of physical unfitness, mental health issues exacerbated by the Covid pandemic, and drug use have rendered the vast majority of young Americans ineligible for military service. Scores on the ASVAB — the military’s standardized exam for recruits, which tests aptitude for service — plummeted during the pandemic.

The introduction of a new military health system in 2022, MHS Genesis, has also hamstrung recruiting. Recruits used to be able to omit mention of disqualifying factors like years-old sports injuries, the use of an inhaler, or mental health counseling — often after some coaching from recruiters. But Genesis combs through civilian health records and automatically flags anything that runs afoul of the military’s medical standards. While Genesis has undoubtedly hurt recruiters’ ability to meet their quotas, it has done so by finally holding the AVF to its own enlistment standards.

An Army of none?

Even among those who actually remain eligible to serve, far fewer have any apparent desire to do so. Fewer than 10 percent of Americans aged 16 to 21 say they would seriously consider signing up, according to a 2022 poll from the Pentagon’s Office of People Analytics. Those interested in serving are largely motivated by material factors. Respondents cited pay, college tuition aid, travel opportunities, health benefits, and acquiring career skills as the top five reasons for considering military service. Only 24 percent said they would join the military out of a sense of pride or honor.

Though the US population has increased by more than 50 percent since the end of the draft, the AVF has come to rely on a smaller and smaller share of the nation. In the all-recruited force, it is military families that have inexorably become the primary providers of new recruits. Nearly 80 percent of recent Army enlistees have a veteran in their family — for almost 30 percent, it’s a parent. In the half-century since the AVF’s birth, the US military has become a family business.

This entrenchment of a “warrior caste” presents a long-term danger to democracy: a citizenry disconnected from its military can become indifferent to the missions it performs. Civilian oversight and accountability suffer when the military is insulated from public scrutiny and understanding. The percentage of veterans in Congress has declined precipitously in the 50 years of the AVF’s existence. But the immediate danger is more concrete. Should the majority of military families decide the nation is unworthy of their children’s service, as may already be happening, the AVF will become unsustainable.

The worst of the recruiting crisis is still to come. American birth rates plummeted after the 2008 financial crisis: a “baby bust” saw almost 2.3 million fewer children born between 2008 and 2013 than had been projected before the crisis. The number of American 18-year-olds is set to peak in 2025 at 9.4 million, before dropping to about 8 million by 2029. With another baby bust during the Covid pandemic, the following generation will likely be even smaller.

Potential solutions to the recruiting crisis depend on one’s diagnosis: in the language of the marketplace, is the AVF a bad product or just badly pitched?

Those who argue that the recruiting crisis is a marketing failure point to young Americans’ general ignorance of basic facts of military life. Forty-nine percent of Gen Zers in a 2022 Army-commissioned survey thought that American soldiers received no personal time off and no vacation days. Army surveys of Americans aged 16 to 28 conducted in 2022 revealed that the top two reasons this cohort wouldn’t consider serving were fear of death and concerns about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The reality is that less than 15 percent of enlisted military personnel are assigned a combat role, and far fewer ever find themselves in a firefight. Despite the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza, fewer American servicemembers are facing potential combat missions now than at any time since 9/11.

A record dented by two decades of defeat has undermined the US military’s self-anointed status as the “finest fighting force the world has ever known,” leading to a significant decline in public trust. Though some might call the US military “America’s team,” it hasn’t won a game since Desert Storm, before most of its current members were born. A 2019 Pew Research Center survey found that 58 and 64 percent of veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively, say those conflicts were not worth fighting. A political horseshoe effect has helped cement this: both leftists and right-wingers publicly advocate for refusing to fight what they call unnecessary, unwinnable wars, with an especially sharp decline in enlistments by white men and women.

Policymakers’ refusal to cut missions and offload defense burdens to wealthy allies greatly exacerbates the strain on the All-Volunteer Force. Though the United States is not at war, its military remains highly active, with constant deployments to Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Some branches and military communities, like armor, air defense, and aircraft carriers, struggle to maintain even a 2-1 ratio of “dwell to deploy” (the Pentagon’s desired ratio is three years at home for every year overseas). This unsustainable pace burns out soldiers, erodes morale, and helps fuel an epidemic of military suicides.

Some more mundane elements of the military lifestyle are also contributing to rising disillusion within the warrior caste. Poor on-base housing, potential food insecurity, and a high spousal unemployment rate are unappealing for young Americans looking to start their careers and families. Relocation for servicemembers, which occurs every 2.5 years on average, puts additional stress on families and runs counter to the desire for stability people generally gain as they age. And the strong post-Covid labor market has limited the economic appeal of military employment.

Dissatisfaction with the product isn’t just limited to military families. Gen Z, which already constitutes about 40 percent of military personnel, views serving in the armed forces through a different lens than the millennials who came before them (and who made up the majority of the fighting force in Iraq and Afghanistan). This “network generation” is immersed in the digital world, distrustful of institutional authority, and often viewed as psychologically fragile. However you view Gen Z, accommodating them is a tall order for a military that prioritizes hierarchy, physical and mental fortitude, and self-sacrifice.

The “D” word

Whether the recruiting crisis is primarily a problem of product or pitch, one thing should be increasingly clear: going back to the standard AVF recruiting playbook — signing bonuses, waivers for substandard fitness or education, new slogans, and expensive ad campaigns — is unlikely to solve the problem.

To attract civilians in highly specialized and increasingly vital fields like cyber operations, some analysts have proposed that the US military relax its standards to acquire more technically skilled recruits. But such a move risks undermining the universal standards that undergird the military’s egalitarianism and common culture — critical advantages in the crucible of combat. And despite the drones and the tech, modern war still requires soldiers who can endure the physical demands of high-intensity combat. As seen in Ukraine, the deployment of mobile surveillance systems in combination with mass precision strikes require constant battlefield mobility merely to survive. Combat is still a young man’s game.

So what can be done? The Army has taken a dramatic step toward increasing its recruiting pool by standing up the Future Soldier Preparatory Course, a remedial program for motivated recruits who nonetheless fail to meet initial entry standards. Future Soldier Prep will take in nearly 20,000 recruits this year, which may enable the Army to make its lower recruiting mission. But the long-term potential and performance of soldiers who require that much additional help just to make initial standards is unknown.

A longer-term solution could involve minimizing the friction of moving between civilian life, reserve service, and active duty service — a concept known as “permeability.” Flanked by oceans and friendly neighbors, America has the luxury of time for mobilizing its armed forces, even in an age of intercontinental missiles. Such efforts could ensure both broader access to talented potential servicemen and women who know they’ll be able to better balance civilian and military life, and a far better understanding of and appreciation for military service.

But breaking down the existing barriers to both entering and leaving service strikes at the heart of the US military’s view of itself as a profession, not a part-time job. Even limited moves toward lateral entry — allowing civilians in specialist fields like cyber operations to enter the military at a mid-career level — for exceptional individuals have yet to be embraced by the services.

Perhaps a serious national security threat will motivate more Americans to join the military. But even that might not be enough: the massive militaries that fought existential conflicts like the American Civil War and World War II were filled not merely with volunteers, but millions of conscripts. Even Ukraine, currently in a fight for national survival, is having trouble enlisting sufficient soldiers. Having been burned by massive threat inflation over terrorism in the post-9/11 era, Americans may be understandably skeptical of the gravity of the Russian or Chinese threat to the United States.

Finally, there is the “D” word: the draft. There has been no serious attempt to restore American military conscription since compulsory military service ended in 1973. But several key American allies, including South Korea and the new NATO members Finland and Sweden, still man their militaries with partial or universal conscription. While America is unlikely to ever again need the 12 million servicemen and women it had in 1945, clearly failing recruiting efforts may at least prompt a reexamination of compulsory service.

Absent a draft or major structural reform to AVF recruiting and retention, the US military will struggle not to shrink. A shrinking force will propel a vicious cycle, as a smaller military carries the same load of overseas deployments. A worsening deployment-to-dwell ratio will hurt retention, as the strain on family life of lengthy deployments becomes intolerable. Lower retention will then necessitate higher recruiting goals, even as exiting troops would serve as walking negative advertisements for American military life.

The recruiting crisis is a greater national security threat to the United States than the wars that currently dominate the headlines. If there is one lesson America’s leaders should take from the conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, it is that troop mobilization and depth are still essential for fighting wars. As both Israel and Ukraine have learned, no amount of high-tech wizardry has changed this enduring reality of warfare. Should the United States fail to fix its military recruiting, it will risk losing a great power war — with enormous consequences for all Americans.









​14. Foreign Nationals Indicted for Swatting Attacks and Bomb Threats Against U.S. Victims



Foreign Nationals Indicted for Swatting Attacks and Bomb Threats Against U.S. Victims

  • Aug 30, 2024 Updated Aug 30, 2024 

mykxlg.com

{KXLG – South Dakota} An indictment was unsealed today, charging two foreign nationals with being part of a years-long conspiracy to perpetrate “swatting” attacks and bomb threats against U.S. victims, including senior government officials.

Thomasz Szabo, 26, of Romania, and Nemanja Radovanovic, 21, of Serbia, are each charged with:

  • One count of conspiracy
  • 29 counts of threats and false information regarding explosives
  • Four counts of transmitting threats in interstate and foreign commerce

According to the indictment, Szabo, Radovanovic, and others were part of a conspiracy that began no later than December 2020 and continued through January. The conspirators obtained personal identifying information, including home addresses, for their intended victims and then carried out “swatting” attacks by falsely reporting emergencies to provoke a police response at the victim’s home.

Szabo allegedly organized and moderated chat groups where the conspirators communicated. They used various monikers, including:

  • For Szabo: “Jonah,” “Jonah Goldberg,” “Plank,” “Rambler,” “War Lord,” “Shovel,” “Cypher,” “Kollectivist,” “Mortenberg Shekelstorms,” and “NotThuggin2”
  • For Radovanovic: “XBD31,” “XDR,” “Angus,” “Thuggin,” “Thug Hunter,” “NotThuggin,” “DCL,” and “AOD”

Victims and Impact

The indictment alleges that the defendants committed swatting attempts against:

  • 40 private victims
  • 61 official victims, including members of Congress, cabinet-level executive branch officials, senior officials of federal law enforcement agencies, and state officials

Additionally, the defendants committed bomb threats against:

  • Four victim businesses
  • Four victim religious institutions
  • One victim university

“Swatting is not a victimless prank — it endangers real people, wastes precious police resources, and inflicts significant emotional trauma,” said U.S. Attorney Matthew M. Graves for the District of Columbia. “We will use every tool at our disposal to find the perpetrators and hold them accountable, no matter where they might be.”

“I am proud of the extraordinary investigative work done by Secret Service agents at the Washington Field Office in this case,” said Special Agent in Charge Matt McCool of the U.S. Secret Service (USSS) Washington Field Office. “The perpetrators of these crimes left a trail of victims across the United States, abusing critical law enforcement resources to terrorize elected officials, public figures, and private citizens. We will never waver in our commitment to bring individuals like this to justice.”

“Today’s charges demonstrate how seriously the FBI takes the crime of swatting, which can prevent law enforcement resources from getting to people who actually need them, as well as put lives in danger,” said Assistant Director in Charge David Sundberg of the FBI Washington Field Office. “The FBI and our law enforcement partners will continue to pursue and bring to justice those who commit this dangerous crime, no matter where they reside.”

The USSS Washington Field Office and Criminal Investigative Division, FBI Washington Field Office, FBI Minneapolis Field Office, and the U.S. Capitol Police are investigating the case. Assistance was provided by the USSS’ Bucharest Resident Office, Miami Field Office, Syracuse Resident Office, Springfield Resident Office, and U.S. Attorneys’ Offices for the Western District of Washington, District of South Dakota, Middle District of Florida, Southern District of Florida, Southern District of Illinois, and Northern District of New York.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Conor Mulroe for the District of Columbia is prosecuting the case.

An indictment is merely an allegation. All defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.


mykxlg.com


15. Israel’s Strategic Dilemma—and Iran’s



Israel’s Strategic Dilemma—and Iran’s

Will Tehran give up on Hamas or pay the price for trying to save it?

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/israel-dilemma-ceasefire-deal-gaza-iran-hamas-hezbollah-hassan-nasrallah-505507a7?mod=latest_headlines&utm


By The Editorial Board

Follow

Aug. 30, 2024 5:47 pm ET



The northern Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona faces Hezbollah rocket fire and explosive drones, Aug. 29. Photo: Israel Hadari/Zuma Press

The Biden Administration likes to frame Israel’s options in stark terms: Cut a deal in Gaza or face regional escalation. Iran and Hezbollah offer Israel the same choice, and many atop the Israeli security establishment agree. They would like Israel to give up on key terms in negotiations with Hamas. But Israel’s leaders won’t do so because they see the strategic dilemma differently.

Last weekend was set to prove President Biden right. There was no deal—Hamas deemed Israel’s concessions insufficient—so Hezbollah moved forward with an escalation. Its Sunday morning missile launch might have sparked a major war, the one forecast to topple towers in Tel Aviv and leave Beirut looking like Gaza.

It didn’t happen. Instead, Israel pre-empted Hezbollah, destroying thousands of rockets, and Hezbollah scaled down its attack. Israel took the initiative to prevent escalation. That may be the missing third option.

Israel took the initiative again late Tuesday night, launching a surprise operation to sap the West Bank’s escalatory potential. Iran had ramped up its weapons smuggling to the local terrorists, and Hamas had called for suicide bombings. Amid the operation on Thursday, Israel killed Islamic Jihad commander Abu Shujaa, considered the most dangerous man in the West Bank, and arrested his deputy. They were hiding in a mosque. On Friday the Israelis killed Hamas’s chief in Jenin.

At least for now, there is no deal and no escalation either. “We proved them wrong,” says a senior Israeli official. The view is that Hamas doesn’t want a deal. “It didn’t matter what the Americans called it—‘final,’ ‘last-chance final,’ ‘never-again final’—Hamas rejected it.” Hamas wants escalation on other fronts to force Israel out of Gaza. “But when we are able to deter those other fronts, then Hamas is screwed,” the senior official says.

The latest signals can’t have Hamas feeling good. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei hailed as a great victory Hezbollah’s firing of 210 rockets Sunday, hitting a chicken coop and not much else. That won’t get it done for Hamas.

Mr. Nasrallah now tells the Lebanese people to “take a breath,” even as Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar may be running out of air. Mr. Khamenei in Iran says that “war has many forms,” and that “it doesn’t always mean holding a gun. It means thinking correctly, speaking correctly, identifying correctly, aiming accurately.”

Iran, more than Israel, now faces the strategic dilemma. Would it rather lose Hamas as a meaningful fighting force, or pay the consequences for intervening to try to save its proxy? To Israeli eyes, Iran doesn’t seem eager to find out what those consequences would be.

U.S. forces are arrayed to shoot down Iran’s missiles—or more. Israel is ready to retaliate, and its air force and intelligence agencies have demonstrated the ability to strike anywhere in Iran. Iranian domestic opposition to costly involvement in faraway wars is also growing. But it’s the regime’s choice.

The less hope Hamas has of an Iranian rescue, and the less daylight Hamas sees between the U.S. and Israel, the more likely it will be to settle for a cease-fire.


16. Why the U.S. isn't ready for wars of the future, according to experts




Why the U.S. isn't ready for wars of the future, according to experts

August 31, 20246:00 AM ET

By 

Mary Louise Kelly

, 

Erika Ryan

, 

Katia Riddle

, 

Matt Ozug

NPR · by By · August 31, 2024


AI and technology will be at the center of modern warfare, experts say. Anton Petrus

Earlier this month, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, and the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, wrote an article for Foreign Affairs arguing that the future of warfare is here.

They say that the U.S. is not ready for it.

Their article opens with Ukraine and describes warfare that features thousands of drones in the sky, as AI helps soldiers with targeting and robots with clearing mines.

The authors argue technological developments have changed warfare more in the past several years than the decades — spanning from the introduction of the airplane, radio and mechanization to the battlefield. And while this new tech has been used minimally in current conflicts, it is only the beginning.

“Today, what we're experiencing is the introduction of drones on the ground and drones at sea, and also driven by artificial intelligence and the extraordinary capability that that's going to bring,” General Milley told NPR.

Sponsor Message

“Now, it's not here in full yet, but what we're seeing are snippets, some movie trailers, if you will, of future warfare. And you're seeing that play out in Gaza. You're seeing it play out in Ukraine. You're seeing it play out elsewhere around the world.”

You're reading the Consider This newsletter, which unpacks one major news story each day. Subscribe here to get it delivered to your inbox, and listen to more from the Consider This podcast.

Evolution on the battlefield

Schmidt says that this transition is going to happen much quicker than some may expect.

“Autonomy and abundance are going to transform wars very, very quickly,” he told NPR.

“The only reason it hasn't happened is, thank goodness, the U.S. is not at war, [but] others are. If you study Ukraine, you see a glimpse of the future. Much of the Kursk invasion that recently happened was due to their ability to use short and mid-range drones to support combined operations on the ground.”

Now that the human element of physically being on a battlefield can be replaced by remote operations, Schmidt argues that this will set a new, more precise method of fighting that would also be dramatically less expensive than traditional methods.

Sponsor Message

“I'm worried, of course, that this will ultimately set a new standard and actually lower the cost of war. But if you think about it, this technology is going to get invented one way or the other, and I'd like it to get invented under U.S. terms.”

Feeling underprepared

Both Milley and Schmidt say that even if major efforts are made to address this change, the red tape involved with approvals from the Pentagon make it difficult to take quick, effective action.

“Not even the president of the United States can fix the procurement process of the Pentagon,” Schmidt said.

“The procurement process is designed for weapon systems that take 15 years. In the Ukraine situation, innovation is occurring on a three to six-week timeline, and we need to find a way to get the Pentagon on that tempo. The only way to do that is with other authorities and other approaches, and with an understanding that you don't design the product at the beginning and then develop it over five years. You do it incrementally, which is how tech works.”

Milley agrees that in order to keep up, entire systems of operating within the military will need to be revolutionized.

“We are in the midst of really fundamental change here. And then from that, you have to have an operational concept. And then from that, you've got to identify the attributes of a future force. And then from that, change the procurement system in order to build the technological capabilities, modify the training, develop the leaders, et cetera. Our procurement systems need to be completely overhauled and updated.”


NPR · by By · August 31, 2024



17. The Challenges of Next-Gen Insurgency


For all those who think we no longer need to be concerned with insurgency (which is a 4 letter word after the GWOT).


Steve's 15 page essay can be downloaded here: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3301&context=parameters


Excerpts:


In the future, highly motivated but weak organizations will still be willing to use violence to alter the power distribution. They will, however, reflect very different military, economic, political, informational, technological, and social conditions. Successful organizations capitalize on conditions to find methods that states and their security and intelligence services are unprepared to confront. Hence, next-gen insurgents will sustain the nature of insurgency with a very different character. 

State security and intelligence services continue to mistreat Maoist-style insurgencies as paradigmatic. No nation has fully grasped that the “people’s war” reflected the military, economic, political, informational, technological, and social conditions of its time. Security services tend to look backward when considering insurgency, assuming next-gen insurgents will be hinterland guerrillas or urban terrorists. This lack of preparation and foresight allows insurgency to gestate. Sometimes, states innovate and reconfigure quickly enough to defeat insurgents. If they succeed, the time taken to innovate makes the conflict more dangerous and destructive than it could have been with better preparation. Imagine the difficulty traditionally configured security and intelligence services would have with this hypothetical insurgency’s global swarming and adaptation of new technology and modes of conflict. 

Next-gen insurgency is coming, even if it does not closely resemble this hypothetical scenario. Time is short. The strategic environment and the nature of conflict are undergoing rapid change. States and their security and intelligence services must think about what insurgency will be rather than what it has been— and prepare.



The Challenges of Next-Gen Insurgency

Authors

Steven Metz

Abstract

States and their security forces often assume future insurgency will be versions of Mao Zedong’s “people’s war,” and counterinsurgency remains backward looking without a theoretical foundation to situate it within broader global security environment and armed-conflict trends. Next-gen insurgency will be networked, swarming, global, and focused on narrative-centric conflict and integrated cost imposition, and social media and the virtual world will be its central battlespaces. No nation has fully grasped that the “people’s war” reflected the military, economic, political, informational, technological, and social conditions of its time. Through an examination of insurgency’s nature, character, patterns, and trends and a thought experiment about next-gen insurgency, states and their security and intelligence services can think about what insurgency will be (rather than what it has been) and prepare.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.55540/0031-1723.3301

Recommended Citation

Steven Metz, "The Challenges of Next-Gen Insurgency," Parameters 54, no. 3 (2024), doi:10.55540/0031-1723.3301.



18. Among America’s “Low-Information Voters”




​American political culture today.


Among America’s “Low-Information Voters”

The New Yorker · by Charles Bethea · August 22, 2024


Letter from the South

Donald Trump has dominated in polling of people who pay little attention to political news. What do they have to say?

August 22, 2024


Illustration by Patrick Leger

Monica Sheppard lives in Rome, Georgia, where she runs a bee-themed arts-and-crafts shop. Rome is a right-leaning town in the rural, poor, and intensely conservative northwest corner of the state. Education rates are low, and mainstream news does not easily take root. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who became the district’s congresswoman in 2021, was elected in part because, for many voters, identifying with the QAnon conspiracy theory, as she’d recently done, was less troubling than identifying with the Times. Sheppard, who is fifty-seven, is an occasional Times reader, but she has plenty of friends in the area who do not share her news-reading habits or her mostly liberal views. And, despite what Sheppard calls the “brick-wall-head-beating of it all,” she often engages with them over political issues online. “I guess I’m just fascinated by how people think,” she told me.

Recently, Sheppard showed me one of many Facebook posts that have concerned her. A friend named Scott had shared a meme from a Facebook page called The Absolute Truth, which takes scattershot aim at science, liberals, the media, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, and the TV show “The View,” among other things. Its ethos is neatly outlined in one of its posts: “You get used to it, I don’t even see the news anymore. All I see is false flag, psyop, bullshit.” The meme that he posted showed an image of a Chili’s storefront. “Another major American franchise bites the dust,” it read. Scott added in his post, “I saw on U tube that 10 other big chain restaurants are on the endangered list including Fudruckers, Krystal, Red lobster, and others you know!” Some commenters noted other “major American” restaurant chains on the brink of collapse, and others made mocking reference to Joe Biden’s economic policy (“Build back better you know”), which they seemed to hold responsible for the closings. Still other commenters pointed ominously to larger forces at play. “A BIG reset is coming,” one woman wrote.

After stumbling across this discussion on Scott’s Facebook page, Sheppard told me, “I did a quick Google search and found multiple articles about these viral memes about restaurants closing that are not true.” Beneath Scott’s post, Sheppard wrote, “This actually isn’t true.” Scott responded gracefully, by the standards of the medium, but without quite giving in. “I do hope you are right but business closing and layoffs are appearing more each day for some apparent reason?” he wrote. A woman named Deena added, “Show us how it isn’t true?” Sheppard replied, “All I had to do is search ‘Chili’s closing all stores’ and found many news stories about it not being true and about a rash of viral memes like this one . . . none of which are true.” She went on, “It is always wise to research a meme before taking it as fact!” Arguing ensued about how many stores Chili’s was closing—fewer than twenty, it turned out, out of more than fifteen hundred—and what this meant. Many suggested that the meme was pointing to deeper truths: the economy was bad, Biden was responsible for it, and anyone saying otherwise was not to be trusted. “We also know that the media lies,” Deena said.

A commenter named Heather questioned Sheppard’s methodology. “And you believe google?” she wrote. Sheppard decided to log off. “I found it scary that she would trust a meme that her friend posted on Facebook, but would not trust Google providing multiple sources from which to choose for more reliable information,” Sheppard told me. She noted that this was not her first encounter with poorly informed Georgians. A family member, she said, gets some of her news from televangelists.

I reached out to Scott, who works in private equity. He stuck by his guns. “I love Monica,” he told me. “But I think Monica goes directly to sources of information.” This, he suggested, was not the right approach. “Use common sense,” he went on. “Food is much higher now. There’s so many things against restaurants right now.” The Biden-Harris Administration was at fault, he concluded. “They created this.” He mentioned a right-wing YouTube channel called Liberal Hivemind, where he gets some political news. The only other person from the Facebook thread whom I reached was Heather, a real-estate agent. She was friendly on the phone, and we spoke as she prepared for a cookout she had planned that evening. She told me that she is “very, very conservative,” and, like Scott, would be voting for Donald Trump, but that she doesn’t consume a lot of news beyond what she gleans from the right-wing TV network Newsmax. She also engages in political discussions on Facebook, adding, “I probably shouldn’t.” She went on, “It’s hard for me to even watch the news, because it kind of nauseates me.”

A few weeks later, Sheppard alerted me to another Facebook conversation. This time, someone had posted a chart that compared the Biden and Trump Administrations using metrics like inflation rates, average hourly earnings, and the costs of gas, groceries, and electricity. The chart made a compelling case for Trump. But there was a problem: a label added by the platform’s fact checkers noted that it included “partly false information.” Sheppard pointed that out in a comment. A man named Danny responded, “Whole Lotta stuff be labeled ‘not true’ on Facebook. Almost like Facebook has its own agenda.” Sheppard asked him what news sources he trusted. “I don’t trust any media . . . nor google . . . nor Facebook,” he said. “I trust what I see.” Sheppard later told me, “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I’d be electing my cat if I only relied on the behavior that I see!”

In April, NBC News released the results of a poll that looked at how a thousand respondents consumed political news, and how they planned to vote. At the time, Biden was the overwhelming favorite among people who read newspapers, watched network news, and followed online news sites. Trump, meanwhile, led among those who frequently got their information from social media, cable news, and YouTube. The poll also showed that Trump most dominated among a subset of people described as “low-information voters.” Definitions of this group vary among experts, some of whom begin by pointing to the ubiquity of ignorance. “If you know what the F.T.C. did last week, you’re a freak,” David Schleicher, a professor at Yale Law School, told me. There were gaps in basic political knowledge even among law professors he knew. “It’s just a matter of degree,” he said. Nonetheless, he continued, low-information voters tend to have “fewer observations about politics with which to make vote choices.”

Joshua Kalla, a professor of political science at Yale, notes that being low-information is not necessarily a problem. A better question is whether voters know about the specific things that matter to them. “You may think, incorrectly, that the 2020 election was stolen—but, if you know which party will cut your taxes and that’s all you care about, then does it matter?” Kalla asked. “The important thing is that you’re informed on issues you care about.” Of course, finding good information is increasingly difficult. Decades ago, there were just a few channels on television; the Internet has broadened the choices and lowered the standards. “Now people might seek out information about a particular candidate on a particular policy and think they have genuine info, but they’re being misinformed or misled,” Kalla said. The decline of newspapers has led to a decrease in split-ticket voting: voters know less about the candidates in their districts, so they simply vote along party lines. This has helped to nationalize politics. Cable news, which voters increasingly rely on, “carries a lot less information than the New York Times,” Schleicher said.

Richard Fording, a professor of political science at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, who has written about low-information voters, told me that they “generally just vote in Presidential-election years—if they vote at all.” These voters seem to have once been spread pretty evenly between the political parties. Low-information voters who turned out for Bill Clinton in 1992 may have known little more than that he played the saxophone; some George W. Bush voters may have simply associated the former governor of Texas with the South. Partisan pundits have long blamed the successes of candidates they oppose on such voters. In 2012, the late right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh pointed to them to explain Barack Obama’s popularity. “We’re gonna have to redefine low-information voter,” Limbaugh said. “They’re not just people watching TMZ. In fact, I would venture to say that over half of the average, ordinary Democrats voting for Obama have no clue what they’re really doing.”

By 2016, Fording told me, low-information voters appeared to be moving to the right. (His analysis specifically examined white low-information voters, whom he defined as those unable to correctly answer two of the three following questions: how long is a U.S. senator’s term, which party currently controls the House, and which party controls the Senate.) “Trump’s whole playbook was to attract these people,” Fording stated. Low-information voters, he found, are more likely to embrace stereotypes of other groups, and less likely to fact-check claims made by politicians. “Trump was kind of the perfect candidate for them,” he said. After the “Access Hollywood” tape leaked, and voters largely stuck with Trump, Fording dug deeper into the low-information category. He came across a metric in psychology called the “need for cognition” scale. “A question that really caught my attention on the scale is an agree or disagree: ‘Thinking is not my idea of fun,’ ” Fording recalled. He and a colleague ran a study to see whether agreement with the statement correlated with support for Trump. It did.

Fording admits that the concept “sounds very condescending.” But, he told me, “it’s been extensively studied for decades: people vary in terms of the enjoyment they get out of searching for new information.” It’s not a measure of intelligence, and, though it correlates with education level, it’s not the same thing: some low-information voters have college degrees. Whatever their education, low-need-for-cognition voters are less likely to seek out alternative views, and more likely to trust people they respect. In November of 2016, as Fording had anticipated, they showed up in significantly larger numbers for Donald Trump than for Hillary Clinton. Given that they are not highly mobilized voters, Fording said, “it was kind of an impressive feat Trump pulled off.”

Americans have been believing bad information since long before birtherism, or the idea that the 2020 election was stolen. How many people, Schleicher asked me, believe conspiracy theories about the assassination of J.F.K.? “More than you’d think,” he said. But, he cautioned, “this does not mean people are stupid.” He brought up Joseph Schumpeter, the famous Austrian economist and political scientist from the nineteen-thirties, who found that many people demonstrate a high degree of intelligence in their day-to-day business affairs, but suddenly sound like fools when they talk about politics. Schumpeter wondered why. “The answer is they have incentives to know something about their business,” Schleicher said. “And their incentive to know specifics about politics is extremely weak.”

The stakes, in any case, are high. “Lower-information voters may only account for a one- or two-point difference in this election, in the end,” Schleicher said. “But that could be decisive.”

Jan Pourquoi runs a small carpet factory and a logistics business in Dalton, Georgia. Dalton calls itself “the carpet capital of the world,” and, like nearby Rome, has about forty thousand residents. Pourquoi, who is now in his sixties, moved there from Belgium nearly four decades ago, and he’s cultivated a Tocquevillian view of his adopted home and its politicians. Some of them he has come to detest. In 2022, Pourquoi paid for a thousand signs to be produced and distributed around the district, which, as best he could recall, read “Save Democracy! Stop the Lies of Marjorie Taylor Greene & Her Treasonous Cult.” “I was a Republican,” Pourquoi told me. “But she and Trump are too far.” He noted an increase in the G.O.P.’s “political misfits, power-seeking opportunists, and”—before Tim Walz made it a mainstream critique—“weirdos.”

Pourquoi gets his news from the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and The Economist, along with a broad sampling of network news. He has plenty of quibbles with the “woke leftists,” as he calls them. But he worries about the voters around him. “Everybody is a journalist and a scientist now,” Pourquoi said. He offered a few examples. “Just this morning, a guy told me that the funeral homes see a lot of dead bodies from people who took a COVID vaccine. He said that their blood thickens and becomes a string in their veins. And they are told by the Biden government to keep it quiet.” He went on, “The same guy asked me a few months ago if I had noticed that many ‘illegals’ are very young. He said, ‘I wonder what the Democrats do with all these children.’ He believes that the Democratic Party is involved in organized pedophilia.” Pourquoi continued, “Even more widespread is the ‘news’ that Democrats want to make a law that can force parents to subject their children to surgery to change their genitalia.” He sighed. “There is no end to the uninformed nonsense.” I asked where to find such folks, and he said that they were everywhere: “Just go to the Walmart parking lot. You’ll see.”

On a hot day in late June, I pulled my truck into the parking lot of a Walmart in the town of Calhoun, a little south of Dalton. Among Calhoun’s claims to fame is a giant tree house made from the salvaged parts of a boat, a plane, and a prop submarine that was supposedly used in a movie starring Elvis Presley. The first person I talked to was Drake Mickley, a twenty-seven-year-old garbage collector. When I asked him where he got his news, he replied, “I don’t really pay attention to it, man. I’m on social media. But I try to avoid politics there as best I can.” He said that he was “neither a Republican or a Democrat, you know. But I definitely do not like Biden.” He did plan to vote in November: “Probably just do what my daddy says.”

A middle-aged man who introduced himself as Chuck, and said he worked in cell-phone sales, told me that he found his political news on the Internet—“mostly YouTube.” Chuck, who is Black, said that he was leaning toward voting for Trump: “I feel more at ease with him.” A bearded white man in his sixties, who wore a Black Sabbath shirt, told me that he got his political news from “people in the neighborhood. Friends. I don’t got no TV or nothing.” He had a felony on his record, he said, and couldn’t vote. “Biden is a pedo,” he added. Another shopper waved me away, and pointed to his bumper sticker: “HOW ABOUT WE WATERBOARD THE MEDIA TIL THEY TELL THE TRUTH?”

I walked over to a stand selling fireworks in the parking lot. Stepping up to the counter, I cautiously began my spiel once again. “It’s O.K.,” Riley Charnote, the young man at the cash register, said, gently cutting me off. “I listen to NPR.” He said that he was “exhausted” by the misinformation he regularly encountered around him—talk of stolen elections and poisonous vaccines. “The older people tend to fall for it,” he said. “Just be careful. If you say the wrong thing . . .” Eventually, a security guard rolled up in a truck. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but you can’t do it here,” he told me. I left and headed to a nearby Kroger. I asked a woman named Juanita, pushing a cart loaded down with watermelons, where she got her political news. “My husband watches it sometimes,” she said. “Trump news. . . . We don’t have Internet.” She continued, “I usually get my news from the Bible.” A Kroger official briskly approached us. “It’s the end times,” Juanita added. “It’s almost here.”

Plenty of voters defy easy categorization: evangelicals who vote for candidates connected to porn stars, prison abolitionists who vote for career prosecutors. Fording, at the University of Alabama, pointed out another example: the kind of voter who does enjoy thinking, but who uses dubious information to “connect the dots in weird ways.” There is now so much bad information floating around that thoughtful people, skeptical of the mainstream news, can do their own research and reach their own conclusions: The COVID vaccine will kill you. The Bidens are felons. These people can influence the low-information voters around them.

Before I met Michael Faulk, I read his views in the Press-Sentinel, based in Jesup. The newspaper covers Wayne County, in southeast Georgia, and features a predictably light stew of local concerns: softball scores, school-board budgets, the latest crimes. It also has an opinion page, which, in addition to political topics, serves up benign community messages about things like self-care and picking up pennies. These days, Faulk’s submissions are “in a class of their own,” according to the paper’s editor, Drew Davis. Faulk has authored as many as a hundred politically oriented opinion pieces, by his own estimate, with titles like “The Late, Great, United States of America,” and “America has a serious problem.” Davis told me that, as far as he knows, Faulk holds the Jesup political opinion-writing record. “He gets mad when his stuff gets edited and says he just won’t write anymore,” another Sentinel employee told me. “Then suddenly there he is. He’s currently on the outs with us, but I don’t expect that to last.”

In a piece, from March, published under the title “Truth vs. falsehoods,” he writes, “Biden is no question a corrupt criminal. Fact!” After a few more “facts,” Faulk concludes, “I do not print lies or propaganda; I print the truth.” Faulk has claimed that Biden’s Administration has increased the U.S. debt more than any previous President (untrue), that America was “energy independent” under Trump (untrue), and that Biden’s justice system disproportionately punishes conservatives (untrue). In his “factual articles,” as he calls his opinion pieces, he avoids vulgarities, but he will readily describe the Democratic Party as a “malignant cancer.” He sometimes deploys all caps to further stress a point.

When I met Faulk at a restaurant in Jesup, in June, Fox News was on a TV in the main dining room and pumped into the bathrooms. Given the tenor of his writing, and a strong hunch that I was a member of what he calls the “liberally biased and propaganda-spewing media,” I was slightly on guard. But he disarmed me with an avuncularity: “So, what do you want to know?” He sounded like a football coach, which, he said, he once dreamed of being. Faulk grew up in Enterprise, Alabama, where his father sold construction material and his mother was a bookkeeper for a newspaper. “If you ever said anything bad about Franklin Roosevelt in front of my grandmother, she’d chew you out,” Faulk told me. His parents were Democrats, too, and the family watched Walter Cronkite deliver the evening news. “Their belief was that the Democratic Party cared about small Americans, and Republicans cared about rich Americans,” Faulk said. He would have voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976, when he was nineteen, if he’d understood the importance of voting. After getting a master’s degree, he started teaching high-school history. It wasn’t until Ronald Reagan ran for President that he began voting Republican. He credits his political turn to his reading of history. “I started digging into the Democratic Party,” he recalled. “The K.K.K.? Democratic Party. Jim Crow? Democratic Party. Segregation? Democratic Party.”

Now sixty-six, Faulk lives with his wife and his elderly father. They mostly subsist on Social Security, which he expects to soon dry up. They watch some cable news. “When we get back to the bedroom, sometimes my wife will turn on ‘Hannity,’ ” he said. “Occasionally—and it is rare—I’ll throw on CBS, ABC, or NBC. I don’t watch the Commode News Network,” his pejorative for CNN, “or the Malignantly Stupid Nutcase Bullmanure Company,” MSNBC. He doesn’t read newspapers, except the Sentinel, “for the headlines and sports scores.” His political views, he told me, are largely informed by conservative films and books. He’s especially fond of Mark Levin’s “The Democrat Party Hates America” and “American Marxism,” Glenn Beck and Kevin Balfe’s “Arguing with Idiots,” and Michelle Makin’s “Culture of Corruption.”

Biden, Faulk insisted, has used his Presidency to enrich his family. “Now granted, a lot of politicians have done it,” he said. “But for him to go around and accuse Donald Trump of being a felon? O.K., they convicted him. But you are a felon.” After Biden dropped out of the race, in late July, Faulk felt disappointed: he wouldn’t have the satisfaction of watching Biden lose. “But, since Harris is even worse than Biden, she should be hammered even worse,” he told me. Faulk believes that Kamala Harris is “weak” and not very smart. “She also has one of the most annoying laughs in the world.” That last part, he said, was just an opinion, “not necessarily a fact.”

No one in Faulk’s life challenges his political beliefs, he told me. The only real pushback had come from a retired local mechanic named Alan Henry. “I read the paper,” Henry told me recently. “I watch ABC and CBS. I try to be as informed as I can.” He had come across a few of Faulk’s opinions in the Sentinel. “I just saw him as living in an alternate reality,” Henry said. In February of this year, Henry wrote a rebuttal, calling one of Faulk’s pieces “full of nonsense.” He disputed Faulk’s claims about immigration, the border wall, energy independence, inflation, and the prosecution of Trump. “I didn’t think he’d change,” he added. “But I wanted to set the record straight.”

Henry’s response didn’t move Faulk to do any new research. His views were set. “I’ve looked at who won,” Faulk told me, referring to the 2020 election. “Do I believe that Joe Biden got eighty million legitimate votes? No. I know that there were over a thousand people that came forward talking about voter improprieties. I’ve seen a documentary called ‘2000 Mules.’ It focussed on two thousand people stuffing ballot boxes.” I noted that a production company behind “2000 Mules,” which was written and directed by the right-wing political commentator and conspiracy peddler Dinesh D’Souza, had publicly apologized for making misrepresentations in the film and removed it from distribution just a week earlier. “You can count that maybe as one of my wrong sources,” Faulk replied.

He then pivoted to another “fact” related to his belief that the Democrats cheated in the 2020 election. “Late at night, Trump was leading in a lot of states,” he said, referring to Election Night. “Mathematicians said that what Biden did was almost mathematically impossible. Almost totally impossible. So that got my attention.” I asked him which mathematicians had said this. “Well, I got it from Fox,” Faulk said. He went on, referring to Trump, “With him leading that late in the game, it was almost impossible for him to have lost. So, yes, I’m trusting that source. But I didn’t check it out.” 

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Charles Bethea is a staff writer at The New Yorker.


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The New Yorker · by Charles Bethea · August 22, 2024



19. Nazis demanded to know if ‘The Hobbit’ author was Jewish. He responded with a high-class burn.


I did not come across this when it was originally published. A great story from history.


I knew J.R.R. Tolkein was a great writer. We should all have the presence of mind to write such a brilliant response in similar situations.


Please go to the link for proper formatting to see the actual letter.


https://www.upworthy.com/nazis-demanded-to-know-if-the-hobbit-author-was-jewish-he-responded-with-a-high-class-burn-rp4




Nazis demanded to know if ‘The Hobbit’ author was Jewish. He responded with a high-class burn.

J.R.R. Tolkien hated Nazi “race doctrine” and no problem telling his German publishing house about it.

Tod Perry

Upworthy Staff

08.31.24


J.R.R. Tolkien by Public Domain/ Wikimedia Commons Joseph Goebbels by Vitold Muratov/Wikimedia Commons

In 1933, Adolf Hitler handed the power of Jewish cultural life in Nazi Germany to his chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels established a team of of regulators that would oversee the works of Jewish artists in film, theater, music, fine arts, literature, broadcasting, and the press.




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Goebbels' new regulations essentially eliminated Jewish people from participating in mainstream German cultural activities by requiring them to have a license to do so.

This attempt by the Nazis to purge Germany of any culture that wasn't Aryan in origin led to the questioning of artists from outside the country.

Nazi book burning via Wikimedia Commons

In 1938, English author J. R. R. Tolkien and his British publisher, Stanley Unwin, opened talks with Rütten & Loening, a Berlin-based publishing house, about a German translation of his recently-published hit novel, "The Hobbit."

Privately, according to "1937 The Hobbit or There and Back Again," Tolkien told Unwin he hated Nazi "race-doctrine" as "wholly pernicious and unscientific." He added he had many Jewish friends and was considering abandoning the idea of a German translation altogether.

The Berlin-based publishing house sent Tolkien a letter asking for proof of his Aryan descent. Tolkien was incensed by the request and gave his publisher two responses, one in which he sidestepped the question, another in which he clapped back '30s-style with pure class.

His publisher sent the classy clap-back.

In the letter sent to Rütten & Loening, Tolkien notes that Aryans are of Indo-Iranian "extraction," correcting the incorrect Nazi aumption that Aryans come from northern Europe. He cuts to the chase by saying that he is not Jewish but holds them in high regard. "I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people," Tolkien wrote.

Tolkien also takes a shot at the race policies of Nazi Germany by saying he's beginning to regret his German surname. "The time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride," he writes.

Here's the letter sent to Rütten & Loening:

25 July 1938 20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

Dear Sirs,

Thank you for your letter. I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.

My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject — which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.

Your enquiry is doubtless made in order to comply with the laws of your own country, but that this should be held to apply to the subjects of another state would be improper, even if it had (as it has not) any bearing whatsoever on the merits of my work or its sustainability for publication, of which you appear to have satisfied yourselves without reference to my Abstammung.
I trust you will find this reply satisfactory, and
remain yours faithfully,

J. R. R. Tolkien

assets.rebelmouse.io

This article originally appeared on 2.15.22






De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
 
 
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161



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

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