Quotes of the Day:

"With the benefit of historical hindsight, we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all." 

- Elizabeth II

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

“Don’t bother with churches, government buildings or city squares; if you want to know about a culture, spend a night in its bars.”

- Ernest Hemingway

1. Navy Orders High-Level Outside Investigation of SEAL Course

2. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 9 (Putin's War)

3. Ukraine: CDS Daily brief (09.09.22) CDS comments on key events

4. All Warfare Is Based on Deception—Troops, Vets Targeted by Disinformation Can Fight Back

5. Ukraine: The Counter-Offensive - Lawyers, Guns & Money

6. Why the Russian Military Brutalizes Ukraine

7. What Ukraine drone videos tell us about the future of war

8. How the US monkeypox response failed to learn COVID’s lessons

9. In Major Advance, Ukraine Drives Russians Out of Key Eastern City

10. Ukraine claws back some territory; nuclear plant in peril

11. Does Iran have a secret plutonium bomb program?

12. Taiwan Strait Crisis Strengthens US Resolve to Support Taiwan, Counter China

13. 10 Fascinating CIA Missions - CIA

14. The Queen’s Diplomacy

15. Ukrainian Forces Take Key City, Igniting New Phase in War

16. Russia confirms big retreat near Kharkiv as Ukraine offensive advances

17. The Hypnotist in the Kremlin

18. U.S. Military Aid to Ukraine Grows to Historic Proportions — Along With Risks

19. Who will win the ammunition war in Ukraine? Russia is buying shells from North Korea; the U.S. is burning through its stockpile of weapons.

20. ​​Why the U.S. Is Being Ominously Compared to Hungary and Turkey

21. Air Force Special Ops Testing Amphibious MC-130

22. Rules of Civility in a Sometimes-Uncivilized World — SMERCONISH

23. Jamie Lynn Spears Competing In Celebrity Special Forces Training Reality Show

1. Navy Orders High-Level Outside Investigation of SEAL Course

This is going to feed into the "proper oversight" argument. E.g., service versus ASD SO/LIC (in the ADCON chain of command) and USSOCOM. What is the division of authority and responsibility for training?

Troubling excerpts:

The retired SEAL said when he had qualified in the 1990s, BUD/S was hard, but the focus had been largely about learning teamwork and mental toughness. What his son experienced, he said, was more like “Lord of the Flies.”

The parent asked to be anonymous to protect his son, who is still in the Navy.

Four of the recent BUD/S candidates said that sailors had been using drugs to get through the course and that when instructors had briefed their classes on drug use, the emphasis was on not getting caught.

Navy Orders High-Level Outside Investigation of SEAL Course

nytimes.com · September 9, 2022

The punishing selection course for the Navy’s most elite force has come under new scrutiny after a sailor’s death exposed illicit drug use and other problems.

Navy SEAL candidates in the Basic Underwater Demolition course in Coronado, Calif., in a photo commissioned by the Department of Defense.Credit...Abe McNatt/Naval Special Warfare Command

The Navy has started an independent investigation of the brutal selection course for its elite SEALs after a sailor’s death this year revealed a tangle of physical abuse, poor medical oversight and use of performance-enhancing drugs in the course.

The order for the new investigation came from the highest levels of the Navy — the outgoing vice chief of naval operations, Adm. William K. Lescher. It was given to a rear admiral from outside the SEALs, signaling that the Navy had given it high priority and wanted it to be independent.

Admiral Lescher issued the order in a letter obtained by The New York Times. The letter is dated the day after The New York Times reported that the sailor’s death had exposed a number of problems at the harrowing selection course, known as Basic Underwater Demolition/SEALs, or BUD/S for short.

Among the problems were a damaging ethos of forced suffering that often dismissed serious injuries and illnesses as weakness and a growing subculture of students who saw illicit performance-enhancing drugs as the only way to get through the course.

Admiral Lescher’s letter ordered investigators to focus on a broad swath of issues in the course, including its safety measures, the qualifications of instructors and medical personnel and its drug testing policies for students. It also asked what, if anything, had changed at the course since February, when a 24-year-old former elite college athlete, Kyle Mullen, died hours after completing its most punishing phase. The vice chief gave investigators 30 days to report their findings.

The Naval Special Warfare Command, which includes the SEALs, had been looking into Seaman Mullen’s death and the surrounding issues on its own, and its findings were supposed to have been released in August. But they were held back after top Navy leaders indicated that they thought the report placed too much blame on the sailor and not enough on failures in the SEALs, according to a Navy official who is familiar with discussions about the report. The official asked not to be identified by name because he was not authorized to comment on an unreleased report.

The vice chief’s letter now directs the Special Warfare Command to stick to a very narrow inquiry into whether Seaman Mullen’s death occurred in the line of duty and to leave the larger questions to the outside investigators.

Asked about the admiral’s decision to start the new investigation, a Navy spokesman issued a statement saying that “the Navy remains committed to transparency and ensuring the final reports are thorough, accurate, impartial, and that confidence and credibility are maintained throughout the entire process.”

The BUD/S course takes place on the gritty beach sand and in the cold ocean waters of Naval Amphibious Base Coronado near San Diego. It has a reputation as the most physically grueling selection course in the military. Candidates endure weeks of carrying heavy logs and inflatable boats, lengthy sessions of situps and pull-ups in frigid surf, “drown-proofing” exercises underwater with bound hands, and days and nights spent cold, wet, sandy and exhausted.

The SEALs say they need that kind of unforgiving rite of passage to select the rare individuals who can perform some of the military’s most challenging missions.

Few sailors who attempt the course complete it — over the past 20 years, an average of just one in four — and the proportion has been shrinking.

According to Navy data, the average passing rate plunged suddenly in February 2021 to about half of what it typically had been in prior years. Since then, in some classes, only 7 percent of sailors have made it through.

More on U.S. Armed Forces

• A Culture of Brutality: The Navy SEALs’ selection course is so punishing that few make it through. Many of those who do resort to illicit and dangerous tactics.
• Civilian Harm: Following reports of civilian deaths from U.S. airstrikes, the Pentagon announced changes aimed at reducing risks to noncombatants in its military operations.
• Recruitment Woes: Facing headwinds from the pandemic, a tight labor market and demographic shifts, the armed forces are experiencing large shortfalls in enlistments.
• Monument Officers: A group of art experts received intensive training to become part of the U.S. Army Reserve. They will help save cultural treasures in war zones.

Several SEALs and BUD/S candidates said that the course had recently become even harder and that warnings to commanders about dangerous changes had largely gone unheeded.

The drop roughly coincided with the arrival of a new command team led by Capt. Bradley Geary, a decorated officer who served for a time in the SEALs’ most elite and secretive counterterrorism unit, known to the public as SEAL Team Six but referred to by SEALs as DevGru.

In December, the Navy gave Captain Geary an award for outstanding leadership in a previous command assignment. His acceptance speech included a quotation from Francis Bacon: “Prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.”

While Captain Geary was in charge, several changes were made at BUD/S, according to four current and former Navy personnel with knowledge of operations there. They asked not to be named because they feared retaliation from the tight-knit SEAL community.

A key change, they said, was removing a number of senior civilian advisers — all of them retired SEALs — whose job had been to watch over training, guide young instructors and step in if they saw unnecessary abuse or alarming medical problems.

The instructor staff was packed with men recently moved from DevGru, and instructors were given greater leeway to run classes as they saw fit, three of the Navy personnel said. With few civilian advisers around, they said, the leash was effectively off.

Captain Geary, who SEALs say is respected in their community, was transferred from command of BUD/S to his next assignment on schedule in June. He did not respond to several requests for comment.

Five sailors who were BUD/S students in 2021 or 2022 described a savage intensity that few SEALs before them had seen. The sailors asked not to be identified because they feared retaliation. They said instructors had hit, kicked and otherwise abused students and had often devised ways to try to drive them to quit.

Each BUD/S class is assigned a proctor — a SEAL instructor whose job is to be an ally and mentor for the students. But several of the sailors said their proctor would use his nightly mentoring sessions to inflict more punishment, having students run for miles in the dark and plunge repeatedly into the ocean.

Injured BUD/S students were called weaklings and quitters, and at times they were punished for seeking help. Medical personnel often stood by silently, or in some cases participated in the abuse, the sailors said.

Students were often allowed only two or three hours of sleep a night in the first weeks of the course, they said, even though their days were jammed with extreme physical toil. Exhausted immune systems broke down. Diarrhea, vomiting and pneumonia became common, but the sailors said students had tried to hide symptoms from instructors who seemed to target the injured.

One man who entered BUD/S in 2021 said he had gone to instructors at 5 a.m. one day with a painfully swollen leg, telling them that he believed it was broken and that he needed to see the medical staff. He said instructors had responded that the medical clinic did not open until 7 a.m. and had then ordered him to wait the two hours in the cold Pacific surf while the rest of the class was ordered to chant his name and tell him to quit. Medical personnel stood watching for an hour before pulling him from the water with hypothermia, he said.

Medical documents show that he ended up in the hospital, where he had to have surgery to remove a flesh-eating infection.

SEALs who went through BUD/S years ago said they had never experienced that kind of abuse.

A retired SEAL whose son recently tried to complete BUD/S said in an interview that when he had seen his son two weeks into the course, the young sailor was so swollen and covered with abrasions that he looked as if he had been in a motorcycle wreck. The father secretly got his son to a civilian doctor to get help without attracting the ire of instructors, he said. The son dropped out in the third week from exhaustion and injuries.

The retired SEAL said when he had qualified in the 1990s, BUD/S was hard, but the focus had been largely about learning teamwork and mental toughness. What his son experienced, he said, was more like “Lord of the Flies.”

The parent asked to be anonymous to protect his son, who is still in the Navy.

Four of the recent BUD/S candidates said that sailors had been using drugs to get through the course and that when instructors had briefed their classes on drug use, the emphasis was on not getting caught.

Parents, former SEALs and other Navy employees said in interviews that they had reached out to the SEAL chain of command, warning about dangerous conditions. The Navy official with knowledge of the investigative report said some changes had been made at BUD/S in response to those warnings, allowing students more sleep and dialing back the hardest parts of the course.

It was not enough to prevent a death.

The pace at BUD/S did not relent even after Seaman Mullen died in February. The next class passed even fewer students, and a number of sailors dropped out because of infections or broken bones.

The Navy official said that a number of instructors had been moved out of BUD/S training since February but that none had received any official punishment. Many are still instructors in later stages of SEAL training, he said.

nytimes.com · September 9, 2022

2. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 9 (Putin's War)

Maps/graphics: https://www.iswresearch.org/2022/09/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment_10.html

Key Takeaways

• Ukrainian forces have captured an estimated 2,500 square kilometers in Kharkiv Oblast in the Kharkiv counteroffensive as of September 9.
• The Kremlin is rushing resources to Kharkiv Oblast in response to effective Ukrainian operations.
• Ukrainian forces reached the outskirts of Kupyansk and are advancing on Izyum from the northwest, north, northeast, and southeast as of September 9 and will likely sever Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCS) to Izyum within the coming days.
• Ukrainian forces may have advanced north of Hrushivka towards a Russian logistics hub in Velykyi Burluk, northeastern Kharkiv Oblast.
• Ukrainian forces are continuing counteroffensive operations in southern Ukraine, including interdicting Russian GLOCS, degrading Russian morale.
• Russian forces conducted ground assaults north of Kharkiv City and across the Eastern Axis.
• The United Nations released a report detailing poor Russian treatment of Ukrainian POWs and detained civilians.

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 9

Kateryna Stepanenko, Grace Mappes, George Barros, Layne Philipson, and Mason Clark

September 9, 11:15pm ET

iswresearch.org · by Alexander Mitchell · September 10, 2022

Kateryna Stepanenko, Grace Mappes, George Barros, Layne Philipson, and Mason Clark

September 9, 11:15pm ET

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

Ukrainian forces have captured an estimated 2,500 square kilometers in Kharkiv Oblast in the Kharkiv area counteroffensive as of September 9. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Valery Zaluzhnyi stated on September 8 that Ukrainian forces liberated over 1,000 square kilometers between September 1-8 – a day before Ukrainian forces reached the southern approach to Kupyansk and the Oskil River on September 9.[1] Ukrainian forces are likely clearing pockets of disorganized Russian forces caught in the rapid Ukrainian advance to Kupyansk, Izyum, and the Oskil River, given the influx of observed pictures of Russian prisoners of war in the past 48 hours.[2]

Ukrainian forces may collapse Russian positions around Izyum if they sever Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) north and south of Izyum. Ukrainian forces continued to advance on Kupyansk and towards Izyum on September 9, and are undertaking measures to isolate the Russian Izyum grouping of forces. If Ukrainians are successful in severing the Russian GLOCs, then they will have an opportunity to create a cauldron around Izyum and collapse a major portion of the Russian positions in northeastern Ukraine.

The Kremlin is rushing resources to the Kharkiv City-Izyum line in an attempt to halt Ukrainian advances after Ukrainian forces achieved remarkable operational surprise. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) and Kremlin wires published footage of Russian military convoys reportedly en route to reinforce Kupyansk, Izyum, and the general Kharkiv direction but did not acknowledge Ukrainian successes in the area.[3] While Russian milbloggers largely welcomed the reports of reinforcements, some criticized the Kremlin for first relocating units away from the Kharkiv City-Izyum line, only to deploy them again to the same location.[4] Russian forces have been redeploying out of southern Kharkiv Oblast to reinforce Donetsk Oblast and the Southern Axis to address the threat of a Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kherson Oblast and to resume offensive operations west of Donetsk City for several weeks.[5] The successful Ukrainian counteroffensive is upending the Kremlin’s effort to make Izyum an economy of force area. Some milbloggers also noted that September 10 will be a decisive day if Russians are unable to generate reserves and capable command in time.[6]

The Kremlin is refusing to publicly address Ukrainian successes in Kharkiv Oblast, but the counteroffensive likely prompted Russian President Vladimir Putin to convene a meeting with top Russian security and political officials on September 9.[7] The Kremlin did not discuss the topic of the security council meeting, and the Kremlin’s Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated that the Kremlin will not comment on the “situation around Balakliya and other events in the special operation zone.”[8] Peskov directed all inquiries regarding the issue to the Russian MoD.

Ukraine’s counteroffensive operation in Kherson Oblast to degrade Russian forces on the Southern Axis is continuing simultaneously with Ukrainian operations on the Kharkiv City-Izyum line. Ukrainian forces are continuing to target Russian pontoon and ferry crossings daily, which indicates a long-term commitment to consistently destroying re-emerging Russian GLOCs. Ukrainian forces are maintaining a strict operational silence in southern Ukraine, which may appear as if Ukrainian forces are not advancing. Ukrainian forces are also likely operating in several directions in Kherson Oblast.

Key Takeaways

• Ukrainian forces have captured an estimated 2,500 square kilometers in Kharkiv Oblast in the Kharkiv counteroffensive as of September 9.
• The Kremlin is rushing resources to Kharkiv Oblast in response to effective Ukrainian operations.
• Ukrainian forces reached the outskirts of Kupyansk and are advancing on Izyum from the northwest, north, northeast, and southeast as of September 9 and will likely sever Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCS) to Izyum within the coming days.
• Ukrainian forces may have advanced north of Hrushivka towards a Russian logistics hub in Velykyi Burluk, northeastern Kharkiv Oblast.
• Ukrainian forces are continuing counteroffensive operations in southern Ukraine, including interdicting Russian GLOCS, degrading Russian morale.
• Russian forces conducted ground assaults north of Kharkiv City and across the Eastern Axis.
• The United Nations released a report detailing poor Russian treatment of Ukrainian POWs and detained civilians.

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

· Ukrainian Counteroffensives – Southern and Eastern Ukraine

· Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and two supporting efforts);

· Russian Subordinate Main Effort- Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast

· Russian Supporting Effort 1- Kharkiv City

· Russian Supporting Effort 2- Southern Axis

· Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts

· Activities in Russian-occupied Areas

Ukrainian Counteroffensives (Ukrainian efforts to liberate Russian-occupied territories)

Eastern Ukraine: (Vovchansk-Kupyansk-Izyum-Lyman Line)

Ukrainian forces reached the outskirts of Kupyansk and are advancing on Izyum from the northwest, north, northeast and southeast as of September 9. Ukrainian forces will likely sever Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum within the coming days, possibly collapsing Russian positions in this area. A geolocated image confirms Ukrainian forces reached the southern outskirts of Kupyansk on September 9 along the R79 highway, and Russian sources reported ongoing tank battles in the area.[9] Ukrainian strikes have damaged the Kupyansk bridge over the Oskil River likely beyond usability, which will degrade Russian forces’ ability to supply and reinforce their positions against Ukrainian assaults.[10] Russian sources reported that Ukrainian forces also reached the west bank of the Oskil River at Senkove and advanced south on the R79 at least as far as the northern outskirts of Horokhovatka (20km northeast of Izyum).[11] Unconfirmed reports state that Ukrainian forces reached Oskil (7km east of Izyum), which would severely disrupt the Russian GLOCs from Izyum to Lyman and degrade the ability of Russian forces in Lyman to support defensive operations in Izyum.[12] Russian sources reported that Ukrainian forces launched ground attacks in the Lyman area.[13] A Russian source expressed worry that Ukrainian forces intend to either pin Russian forces in Lyman so they cannot reinforce Russian forces in Izyum or seize Lyman and advance on Izyum from the southeast.[14]

Russian forces and occupation authorities in the rear of occupied Kharkiv Oblast are panicking to reinforce Russian positions and “evacuate civilians” amid the high pace of the Ukrainian advance. Geolocated Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) footage shows Russian military convoys in Raihorodka, Luhansk Oblast driving north reportedly to reinforce Russian forces in unspecified areas of Kharkiv Oblast.[15] This footage is so the Russian MoD’s only acknowledgment of the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kharkiv Oblast. Russian sources reported that Russian forces are reinforcing Kupyansk and Izyum with manpower, armor, and other vehicles via ground convoys and transport helicopters.[16] A Russian source claimed that some Russian units previously redeployed to unspecified axes far from the Kharkiv Oblast Axis are being rushed back to the Kharkiv Oblast Axis to defend against the counteroffensive.[17] Kharkiv Oblast occupation administration head Vitaly Ganchev announced the evacuation of civilians from Kupyansk, Velykyi Burluk (about 42km northwest of Kupyansk), and Izyum, reportedly towards Svatove, Luhansk Oblast, a major Russian transportation node connecting eastern Kharkiv Oblast with northern Luhansk Oblast.[18]

Ukrainian and Russian sources also suggested that Ukrainian forces may have advanced north of Hrushivka (12km west of Kupyansk) towards the Russian logistics hub in Velykyi Burluk, but these reports remain ambiguous and unconfirmed. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled a Russian assault in Plotske on September 9.[19] There are 16 known villages named Plotske in Ukraine, and only one village - located three kilometers southwest of Velykyi Burluk - is near Russian-occupied territories.[20] NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) remotely sensed data showed fires about eight kilometers southwest of Plotske. The Ukrainian General Staff also reported that Russian forces conducted a strike on an unspecified settlement called Yuriyivka, which could suggest a strike at the Yuriyivka 7 kilometers north of Velykyi Burluk.[21] The Ukrainian General Staff did not specify the Oblast or location of the Yurivka village. Former Russian military commander and milblogger Igor Girkin also claimed that Ukrainian forces are launching attacks in the direction of the northernmost Russian logistics hub in Vovchansk.[22] Girkin’s directionality is vague and notional, but Velykyi Burluk is in the direction of Vovchansk if Ukrainians are moving from Hrushivka. Ganchev’s evacuation order for Velykyi Burluk may also suggest that Ukrainian forces are within artillery range of the settlement. Russian sources also previously claimed that Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups conducted an unspecified operation near Vovchansk and Hnylytsya (approximately 15km west of Velykyi Burluk) on September 7.[23] Ukrainian and Russian sources previously reported on Ukrainian activity on the eastern bank of the Pechenihy Reservoir, which may indicate that Russian forces hold positions closer to Velykyi Burluk rather than the reservoir.[24] ISW will continue to monitor the situation and update its assessment of Russian control of terrain.

[Source: NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System over Plotske, September 9 and Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics, and the GIS User Community]

Southern Ukraine: (Kherson Oblast)

Ukrainian military officials kept their operational silence regarding the progress of the Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kherson Oblast on September 9 but reiterated that Ukrainian forces are continuing to interdict Russian logistics in southern Ukraine.[25] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command stated that Ukrainian missile units struck two Russian pontoon crossings in Darivka and Nova Kakhovka over the Inhulets and Dnipro rivers.[26] ISW previously reported that social media users witnessed explosions near the Darivka bridge on September 8, which is consistent with the Ukrainian official statement.[27] Ukrainian aviation and missile units reportedly struck a ferry crossing in Nova Kakhovka, two ammunition depots in Beryslav Raion, and several command-and-control posts throughout Kherson Oblast.[28] Odesa Oblast Military Administration Spokesperson Serhiy Bratchuk stated that Ukrainian forces struck barges in Hola Prystan (about 12km southwest of Kherson City) that Russian forces likely intended to use as a pontoon crossing over the Dnipro River.[29] Local reports corroborated Baratchuk’s statement, but the Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces shot down Ukrainian HIMARS and Olkha rockets in the vicinity of Hola Prystan.[30] Local Telegram channels reported the activation of Russian air defense systems in Nova Kakhovka, and many residents reportedly heard explosions in unspecified parts of the city.[31]

Ukrainian military officials stated that Ukrainian counteroffensives in southern Ukraine are continuing to degrade morale among Russian servicemen. The Ukrainian General Staff also reported that Russian forces are intensifying air patrols over Babenkivka Druha (22km northwest of the Kherson Oblast-Crimea western border) due to the increasing number of Russian deserters.[32] Social media footage previously reported that six Russian jets flew over Chaplynka (about 22km due northeast of Babenkivka Druha) on September 1, which may indicate that Russian forces are conducting air patrols along the Kherson Oblast-Crimea border.[33] The Ukrainian General Staff added that some unarmed Russian servicemen moved through the southwestern part of Kherson Oblast to Crimea and noted that Russian forces are prohibiting civilians from leaving Velyka Oleksandrivka on the Inhulets River to use them shields” against Ukrainian counteroffensives.[34]

Ukrainian and Russian sources identified three areas of kinetic activity in Kherson Oblast on September 9: near the Ukrainian bridgehead over the Inhulets River, south of the Kherson-Dnipropetrovsk Oblast administrative border, and northwest of Kherson City. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled a Russian assault on Bezimenne (approximately 12km southeast of the Ukrainian bridgehead over the Inhulets River), and the Russian MoD claimed that Russian artillery continued to strike Ukrainian military equipment and personnel in Bezimenne.[35] Local Telegram channels published footage of Ukrainian forces raising a flag in Blahodativka also on the eastern bank of the Inhulets River, confirming previous Russian milblogger claims that Ukrainian forces advanced to the settlement on September 3.[36] Russian forces notably launched air and missile strikes on Barvinok (about 14km north of Kherson City) and shelled Novovoskresenske (about 20 km south of the Kherson-Dnipropetrovsk Oblast border), areas in which ISW assesses Russian forces are operating.[37] The head of the Kherson Oblast occupation regime, Kirill Stremousov, claimed that Ukrainian forces are not conducting offensive operations in Snihurivka (about 60 east of Mykolaiv City), but have shelled the settlement with artillery.[38]

The Russian MoD claimed that Ukrainian forces made several unsuccessful assaults along the Kherson Oblast border.[39] Milbloggers significantly decreased their coverage and discussions of the southern counteroffensive in favor of reporting on the Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kharkiv Oblast.

Russian Main Effort- Eastern Ukraine

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

Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed ground assaults near Siversk on September 9 and continued routine strikes on Siversk and the surrounding settlements.[40]

Russian forces conducted ground assaults south of Bakhmut on September 9. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults on Zaitseve, Mykolaivka Druha, and Maiorsk, all within 20km of Bakhmut.[41] Geolocated footage posted on September 7 shows that Wagner Group elements advanced to a power station in northeastern Vesele Dolyna (southeast of Bakhmut) to conduct an ambush on an unspecified date.[42] The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed that Russian forces conducted airstrikes on Bakhmut.[43] Russian forces continued routine artillery strikes on Bakhmut and the surrounding areas.[44]

Russian forces conducted limited ground assaults on and near Avdiivka on September 9. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian ground assaults on Avdiivka and Kamyanka (18km north of Donetsk City).[45] Russian forces continued routine artillery strikes on Avdiivka and the surrounding settlements.[46]

Ukrainian forces reportedly conducted an assault southwest of Avdiiivka on September 9. Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces attempted to seize Pisky but that Russian and DNR forces repelled the attack.[47]

Russian forces conducted a limited ground attack west of Donetsk City on September 9. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled a Russian ground assault on Pobieda, 4km west of Marinka.[48] The Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces struck Hulyaipole and Rivnopillya (11km north of Hulyaipole) in eastern Zaporizhia Oblast.[49] Russian forces continued routine artillery strikes along the western Donetsk Oblast-eastern Zaporizhia Oblast line of contact.[50]

Supporting Effort #1- Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Prevent Ukrainian forces from reaching the Russian border)

Russian forces attempted limited ground assaults north and northeast of Kharkiv City on September 9. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Prudyanka (north of Kharkiv City on the T2117), Ruski Tyshky (20km northeast of Kharkiv City), and Kostyantynivka (13km north of Zolochiv), and Udy.[51] Russian forces continued routine artillery and airstrikes on Kharkiv City and surrounding settlements.[52]

Supporting Effort #2- Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)

Russian forces maintained defensive positions in western Zaporizhia Oblast and maintained their shelling and missile campaign throughout the Southern Axis on September 9.[53] Melitopol Mayor Ivan Fedorov reported that Russian forces have turned five schools in Melitopol into military bases and noted that Ukrainian partisans already destroyed one such base.[54] Social media users also reported a large unidentified explosion in Berdyansk.[55] Russian forces conducted missile strikes on settlements in Mykolaiv Oblast, fired at Nikopol with heavy tube artillery, and launched an airstrike on Radushne in Kryvyi Rih Raion.[56]

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) did not identify the responsible party for the shelling of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) on September 8-9. The shelling may prompt Ukrainian officials to shut down the ZNPP’s operations. IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi stated that there is now a low chance that reliable off-site power can be restored at the ZNPP because of increased shelling targeting Enerhodar.[57] Grossi noted that the shelling on September 8-9 (which resulted in a power blackout in Enerhodar) affected the Zaporizhzhia Thermal Power Plant (ZTPP) that serves as an offsite power source for the ZNPP. Grossi said that the IAEA understands if Ukrainian nuclear operating enterprise Energoatom decides to shut down the remaining operating reactor at the ZNPP due to continuous shelling, but warned that Energoatom will not be able to restart ZNPP operations unless they re-establish offsite power. Grossi called for the establishment of a safety zone around the plant. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) blamed Ukrainian forces for firing 27 shells at Enerhodar and bombarding the city six times resulting in a power outage.[58] The Russian MoD maintained its narrative that Ukrainian authorities are deliberately attempting to create a “man-made disaster” at the ZNPP.

Russian and proxy sources claimed that Russian forces stopped a series of Ukrainian special operations in western Zaporizhzhia Oblast on September 9. Proxy officials claimed to have stopped the landing of Ukrainian special forces in Enerhodar, Dniprorudne, and Vasylivka (all on the southern bank of the Kakhovka Reservoir).[59] Ukrainian special forces previously conducted a successful operation in Kamianka-Dniprovska (west of Enerhodar) on September 5, and Russian sources may be attempting to information conditions to accuse Ukrainian forces of targeting the ZNPP or civilian infrastructure.[60]

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

Russian Armed Forces are continuing to offer financial incentives to attract fighters to fight in Ukraine. A Russian milblogger reported that Russian Armed Forces are forming “Storm” assault detachments and are offering individual recruits financial rewards for every square kilometer of land captured in Ukraine.[61] The milblogger specified that the Russian Armed Forces are forming these new assault detachments with elements of the failed Russian Combat Army Reserve (BARS) initiative.[62] ISW previously reported that the Armavir City Military Recruitment Center in Krasnodar Krai previously also promised each serviceman 50,000 rubles (about $840) for each kilometer that a recruit advances on the frontline.[63] This new effort indicates that Russian recruiters are desperate to lure any men into assault detachments with the promise of financial rewards and motivate them to make advances, despite previously failing to generate recruits with financial incentives through prior recruitment campaigns such as BARS and the formation of volunteer units.

Former Security Minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Alexander Khodakovsky called on Russia’s military command to better supply existing units on the ground before announcing new recruitment campaigns or declaring mobilization.[64] Khodakovsky added that Ukrainian forces managed to launch counteroffensives in Kherson and Kharkiv Oblasts because Russian units lack the necessary equipment to repel Ukrainian advances. Khodakovky’s argument highlights the Kremlin’s tendency to commit additional inexperienced and unprepared “cannon fodder” forces to the frontlines, without investing in adequate equipment or establishing logistic support necessary to support combat forces.

Benefit payment disparities among members of Russian volunteer units and BARS servicemen may cause rifts within combat forces. A wounded BARS serviceman published an appeal addressing the Chelyabinsk Oblast governor, stating that the oblast government failed to pay him regional bonuses promised to other participants of the Russian “special military operation” in Ukraine.[65] Chelyabinsk Oblast officials, in turn, stated that regions only provide special bonus payments to recruits within the Chelyabinsk volunteer battalions. Russian opposition outlet Novaya Gazeta previously reported that although BARS elements and volunteer units are subordinate to the Russian Ministry of Defense under the same military contract, they may receive different payments.[66] The Ukrainian Strategic Communications Center also reported that BARS servicemen did not administratively have the Russian MoD as a specified payee on their military contacts, which overcomplicates bureaucratic processes such as filling for veteran benefits, medical treatment, and payments.[67] These complications are likely to degrade the effectiveness of Russian recruitment efforts and degrade morale among personnel who receive disparate benefits despite serving in similar capacities.

The Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported that Ukrainian forces destroyed the Russian 237th Guards Air Assault Regiment (of the 76th Airborne Division) and that the regiment “ceased to exist due to the death or injury of all servicemen.”[68] The GUR also added that Russian military commanders are dissatisfied with new recruits operating in the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast direction because most of them are 55 to 60 years of age.[69]

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

The United Nations (UN) released a report on September 9 detailing poor Russian treatment of Ukrainian POWs and detained civilians. Head of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine Matilda Bogner stated that Russian authorities are preventing UN officials from visiting Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs) currently held in Russia and Russian-occupied territories.[70] Bogner stated that the UN has documented instances of torture, poor treatment, and lack of adequate food, water, healthcare, and sanitation in POW sites.[71] Bogner also reported infectious disease breakouts at a Russian penal colony in Olenivka, Donetsk Oblast, likely the same colony where Russian forces killed 53 Ukrainian POWs on July 28.[72] Bogner stated that the UN has recorded instances of Russian authorities preventing Ukrainian POWs from contacting their families to inform on the POWs’ detention, location, and health.[73] The UN recorded that Russian authorities in occupied Ukraine have arbitrability detained or enforced the disappearances of 416 Ukrainian civilians, of whom 166 were released and 16 were found dead.[74]

Ukrainian forces continued efforts to demoralize Russian forces and civilians in occupied Crimea. Odesa Military Administration Spokesman Serhiy Bratchuk reported that television channels in occupied Crimea are broadcasting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s August 30 speech calling for the deoccupation of Crimea and warning local residents to stay away from Russian military facilities.[75] Ukrainian hackers previously hacked Crimean television channels and a sign on the Kerch Strait Bridge to show pro-Ukrainian messaging on August 20.[76]

Russian occupation authorities are likely artificially inflating claimed local support for annexation referenda in Russian-occupied territories. Advisor to Kherson Oblast Military Administration Head Serhiy Khlan stated that Kherson Oblast occupation authorities are spreading falsely inflated poll numbers of civilian support on propaganda sites. Khlan stated that one poll claims that 71% of Kherson Oblast residents are ready to vote in the referendum and that 76% support annexation, while a second poll claims 61% are ready to vote and 63% support annexation.[77]

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

[1] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=623947606116526; https://suspilne dot media/279834-z-1-veresna-zsu-zvilnili-vid-rosian-ponad-tisacu-kvadratnih-kilometriv-zelenskij/

[2] https://t.me/rybar/38458; https://t.me/rysnya200/3354; https://t.me/rysnya200/3322; https://t.me/rysnya200/3309

[3] https://t.me/rian_ru/177285; https://t.me/mod_russia/19693; https://t.me/mod_russia/19696; https://t.me/readovkanews/41483; https://t.me/readovkanews/41490

[4] https://t.me/wargonzo/8180; https://t.me/vysokygovorit/9349; https://t.me/vysokygovorit/9344; https://t.me/vysokygovorit/9342

[5] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-14

[6] https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1568164134423756800

[7] https://www dot moscowtimes.eu/2022/09/09/putin-sozval-sovbez-posle-fiasko-armii-pod-harkovom-a24108; http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/69324

[8] https://tass dot ru/politika/15705793/amp; https://t.me/kommunist/9164

[9] https://twitter.com/Tendar/status/1568185811002179584; https://t.me/andriyshTime/2791; https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/40083; https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=6054753574554594&set=a.186802391349771&type=3; https://t.me/wargonzo/8188; https://t.me/kommunist/9169; https://t.me/historywarweapon/13240

[10] https://t.me/rybar/38507; https://t.me/epoddubny/12215; https://t.me/boris_rozhin/63130

[11] https://t.me/rybar/38499; https://t.me/rybar/38485; https://t.me/kommunist/9179

[12] https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1568170721024647169; https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1568207998408966146

[13] https://twitter.com/WarMonitor3/status/1568289990244810752; https://t.me/rusich_army/5041; https://t.me/vladlentatarsky/15992; https://t.me/rusvesnasu/22156; https://t.me/wargonzo/8192; https://t.me/wargonzo/8191; https://t.me/wargonzo/8190; https://t.me/milinfolive/90224

[14] https://t.me/boris_rozhin/63155; https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/40116

[15] https://t.me/rian_ru/177285; https://t.me/mod_russia/19693; https://t.me/mod_russia/19696; https://twitter.com/tinso_ww/status/1568187754894315521; https://mobile.twitter.com/Archer83Able/status/1568194028679696385; https://mobile.twitter.com/kr007t/status/1568219413916143617

[16] https://t.me/boris_rozhin/63139; https://t.me/miroshnik_r/8629; https://t.me/miroshnik_r/8630; https://t.me/RVvoenkor/25441; https://t.me/RVvoenkor/25442; https://t.me/readovkanews/41478; https://t.me/readovkanews/41465; https://t.me/vrogov/4781; https://t.me/readovkanews/41483; https://t.me/readovkanews/41490; https://t.me/vysokygovorit/9349; https://t.me/vysokygovorit/9344; https://t.me/vysokygovorit/9342; https://t.me/wargonzo/8180

[17] https://t.me/wargonzo/8180

[18] https://argumenti dot ru/world/2022/09/788684; https://t.me/grey_zone/14949; https://t.me/wargonzo/8188; https://t.me/readovkanews/41465; https://t.me/readovkanews/41465; https://t.me/readovkanews/41465

[19] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02R8eXRURpPbVj82gL1satFU2jsm4JDc9bNg4m4wNh6Ux9rthzBD2naXPwA7M3rCKgl

[20] https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%BB%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B5

[21] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0vbgHqUpDiUsCL8PG6gbbKbFo795cATKH7Z98vrwQJz5z8LTLhyrr8Rwd8DREp2E

[22] https://t.me/strelkovii/3192

[23] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-september-7

[24] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-4; https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-july-15; https://www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/Russian%20Operations%20Assessments%20July%2014.pdf

[26] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=3995528694006661; https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=775414780341517

[27] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-september-8

[28] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0vbgHqUpDiUsCL8PG6gbbKbFo795cATKH7Z98vrwQJz5z8LTLhyrr8Rwd8DREp2ESl; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0vbgHqUpDiUsCL8PG6gbbKbFo795cATKH7Z98vrwQJz5z8LTLhyrr8Rwd8DREp2ESl; https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=3995528694006661; https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=775414780341517

[30] https://t.me/mod_russia/19690; https://t.me/hueviyherson/25638; https://t.me/hueviyherson/25639

[31] https://t.me/hueviyherson/25652; https://t.me/hueviyherson/25655; https://t.me/hueviyherson/25631

[32] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0vbgHqUpDiUsCL8PG6gbbKbFo795cATKH7Z98vrwQJz5z8LTLhyrr8Rwd8DREp2ESl

[34] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0vbgHqUpDiUsCL8PG6gbbKbFo795cATKH7Z98vrwQJz5z8LTLhyrr8Rwd8DREp2ESl; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02R8eXRURpPbVj82gL1satFU2jsm4JDc9bNg4m4wNh6Ux9rthzBD2naXPwA7M3rCKgl

[36] https://t.me/hueviyherson/25651; https://t.me/stranaua/62787; https://www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/Russian%20Operations%20Assessment%20September%203.pdf

[37] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0vbgHqUpDiUsCL8PG6gbbKbFo795cATKH7Z98vrwQJz5z8LTLhyrr8Rwd8DREp2ESl; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0vbgHqUpDiUsCL8PG6gbbKbFo795cATKH7Z98vrwQJz5z8LTLhyrr8Rwd8DREp2ESl

[38] https://t.me/Stremousov_Kirill/289

[39] https://t.me/mod_russia/19690

[40] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0vbgHqUpDiUsCL8PG6gbbKbFo795cATKH7Z98vrwQJz5z8LTLhyrr8Rwd8DREp2ESl; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02R8eXRURpPbVj82gL1satFU2jsm4JDc9bNg4m4wNh6Ux9rthzBD2naXPwA7M3rCKgl

[41] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0vbgHqUpDiUsCL8PG6gbbKbFo795cATKH7Z98vrwQJz5z8LTLhyrr8Rwd8DREp2ESl; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02R8eXRURpPbVj82gL1satFU2jsm4JDc9bNg4m4wNh6Ux9rthzBD2naXPwA7M3rCKgl

[42] https://twitter.com/chris__759/status/1568047484164874250; https://twitter.com/TheHumanFund5/status/1567564029635207168

[43] https://t.me/mod_russia/19690

[45] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0vbgHqUpDiUsCL8PG6gbbKbFo795cATKH7Z98vrwQJz5z8LTLhyrr8Rwd8DREp2ESl; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02R8eXRURpPbVj82gL1satFU2jsm4JDc9bNg4m4wNh6Ux9rthzBD2naXPwA7M3rCKgl

[46] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0vbgHqUpDiUsCL8PG6gbbKbFo795cATKH7Z98vrwQJz5z8LTLhyrr8Rwd8DREp2ESl; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02R8eXRURpPbVj82gL1satFU2jsm4JDc9bNg4m4wNh6Ux9rthzBD2naXPwA7M3rCKgl

[47] https://t.me/boris_rozhin/63138; https://t.me/stringer_donetsk/3778; https://t.me/strelkovii/3195

[48] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0vbgHqUpDiUsCL8PG6gbbKbFo795cATKH7Z98vrwQJz5z8LTLhyrr8Rwd8DREp2ESl

[49] https://t.me/mod_russia/19690

[50] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02R8eXRURpPbVj82gL1satFU2jsm4JDc9bNg4m4wNh6Ux9rthzBD2naXPwA7M3rCKgl; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0vbgHqUpDiUsCL8PG6gbbKbFo795cATKH7Z98vrwQJz5z8LTLhyrr8Rwd8DREp2ESl

[51] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02R8eXRURpPbVj82gL1satFU2jsm4JDc9bNg4m4wNh6Ux9rthzBD2naXPwA7M3rCKgl; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0vbgHqUpDiUsCL8PG6gbbKbFo795cATKH7Z98vrwQJz5z8LTLhyrr8Rwd8DREp2ESl

[54] https://t.me/ivan_fedorov_melitopol/538; https://suspilne dot media/280029-rosiani-rozmisuut-vijskovi-obekti-na-teritorii-osvitnih-zakladiv-u-melitopoli/

[55] https://t.me/stranaua/62711

[58] https://t.me/mod_russia/19690

[59] https://t.me/vrogov/4775; https://t.me/vrogov/4771; https://ria dot ru/20220909/ukraina-1815579580.html; https://t.me/kommunist/9156; https://www dot interfax.ru/world/861325; https://t.me/kommunist/9168; https://t.me/readovkanews/41467; https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/40064

[60] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-september-5

[61] https://t.me/rybar/38488

[62] https://t.me/rybar/38488

[63] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-21

[64] https://t.me/aleksandr_skif/2369

[65] https://eanews dot ru/news/chelyabinets-trebuyet-ot-vlastey-vyplatu-za-raneniye-v-khode-spetsoperatsii-v-lnr_09-09-2022; https://vk.com/wall-173961957_158434

[66] https://novayagazeta dot eu/articles/2022/08/10/pekhota-pushche-nevoli

[67] https://t.me/AFUStratCom/5349

[68] https://gur.gov dot ua/content/kontrnastup-syl-oborony-ukrainy-prymushuie-okupantiv-prosyty-dopomohy-v-chervonoho-khresta-ta-tikaty-na-vkradenykh-velosypedakh.html; https://t.me/Bratchuk_Sergey/18335

[69] https://gur.gov dot ua/content/kontrnastup-syl-oborony-ukrainy-prymushuie-okupantiv-prosyty-dopomohy-v-chervonoho-khresta-ta-tikaty-na-vkradenykh-velosypedakh.html

[70] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-briefing-notes/2022/09/press-briefing-situation-ukraine-matilda-bogner

[71] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-briefing-notes/2022/09/press-briefing-situation-ukraine-matilda-bogner

[72] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-briefing-notes/2022/09/press-briefing-situation-ukraine-matilda-bogner; https://www.facebook.com/sergey.khlan/posts/pfbid0qQoamtt2DhBXEdMuLvqxF4W27sfyNmRALzEcyhr8opcEVUTiSpsVswCkkhFYPxSrl

[73] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-briefing-notes/2022/09/press-briefing-situation-ukraine-matilda-bogner

[74] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-briefing-notes/2022/09/press-briefing-situation-ukraine-matilda-bogner

[75] https://t.me/Bratchuk_Sergey/18323

[76] https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPR/status/1560904609564184577; https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1560969597699883008

[77] https://www.facebook.com/sergey.khlan/posts/pfbid0qQoamtt2DhBXEdMuLvqxF4W27sfyNmRALzEcyhr8opcEVUTiSpsVswCkkhFYPxSrl

iswresearch.org · by Alexander Mitchell · September 10, 2022

3. Ukraine: CDS Daily brief (09.09.22) CDS comments on key events

CDS Daily brief (09.09.22) CDS comments on key events

Humanitarian aspect:

As of the morning of September 9, 2022, more than 1,126 Ukrainian children are victims of full- scale armed aggression by the Russian Federation, Prosecutor General's Office reports. The official number of children who have died and been wounded in the course of the Russian aggression increased to 383 children killed and more than 743 children injured, respectively. However, the data is not conclusive since data collection continues in the areas of active hostilities, temporarily occupied areas, and liberated territories.

In Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, at night, the Russian shelled the Nikopol district. No victims were reported. Country houses and farm buildings are damaged.

In Kharkiv, a three-story administrative building in the Saltivskyi district burned down due to shelling, and there was a hit in the Kyivskyi district. In total, 3 people died in Kharkiv during the last day, and 7 more were injured.

On September 9, Russians heavily shelled the Shevchenkiv district of Kharkiv with anti-aircraft missiles. A kindergarten was damaged, and a gas station was on fire, the city's mayor, Ihor Terekhov, reported. The preliminary number of injured civilians is 14 people. Among them are children aged 3, 11 and 15 years.

On September 8, 12 civilians were killed by enemy shelling in Donetsk Oblast: 8 - in Bakhmut, 2

- in Zaitseve, 1 - in New York and 1 - in Fedorivka. Another 23 people were injured. At night, the Russians shelled the Pokrovsk, Kramatorsk and Bakhmut districts of the Oblast. In Bakhmut, 20 private and 6 high-rise apartment buildings, 4 shops, a palace of culture and an administrative building were damaged. In addition, the market came under fire — 107 containers were damaged. The city has been without water and electricity for the fourth day — repairs are impossible due to active hostilities. In Slovyansk, warehouses and a college building were damaged. In Kostyantynivka - an enterprise and a house. Two houses were damaged in Rai- Olexandrivka.

During September 8 and the night of September 9, the enemy shelled the Mykolaiv and Bashtan districts of the Mykolayiv Oblast. No victims were reported. In the village of Shyroke, the Administration Center and the school were destroyed.

The enemy constantly shelled Sumy Oblast. Ukrainian Media reported

7 wounded as the result of the morning shelling of a hospital in Sumy Oblast. Without crossing the border of Ukraine, Russian enemy aircraft fired at a hospital. The premises have been destroyed, said the head of Sumy Military Administration, Dmytro Zhyvytskyi.

In Zaporizhzhya Oblast, on September 8, the Russians shelled the Polohy, Vasyliv and Zaporizhzhya districts of the Oblast. Twenty-eight objects of civil infrastructure were damaged.

Occupied territories

The Kharkiv Regional police returned to the liberated territories of the Oblast. Starting September 9, law enforcement officers began to record the facts of the occupiers' crimes and are also ready to counteract possible provocations by enemy sabotage and reconnaissance groups.

Filtration measures will be carried out in the liberated Balakliya. Their goal is to identify collaborators and Russian agents.

Operational situation

It is the 198th day of the strategic air-ground offensive operation of the Russian Armed Forces against Ukraine (in the official terminology of the Russian Federation – "operation to protect Donbas"). The enemy continues to concentrate its efforts on establishing full control over the territory of Donetsk Oblast, maintaining the captured parts of Kherson, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhya, and Mykolaiv Oblasts.

In the Bryansk region of Russia, units of the 106th airborne division (from Tula) of the Russian Airborne Forces and the 144th motorized rifle division (from Smolensk) of the 20th Army of the Western Military District continue to be deployed for the protection of the state border of the Russian Federation.

The enemy constantly conducts UAV aerial reconnaissance and continues attempts to improve the logistical support of its troops.

Over the past 24 hours, the enemy launched 45 air strikes and 5 missile strikes, in particular at Kharkiv, Kostyantynivka, Tsyrkuny, Radushne of Kharkiv Oblast, Senkivka in Chernihiv Oblast, Myropilske, Veliky Prykil and Prohody of Sumy Oblast. There are victims among the civilian population.

Military exercises have begun on the territory of the Republic of Belarus, during which it is planned to work out the issue of "liberation of captured territories". There is still a threat of launching missile and air strikes on the territory of Ukraine from the Republic of Belarus.

In connection with the Ukrainian troops' offensive in some areas of the Kherson Oblast, units of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation are switching to the tactics of terrorist actions against local civilians. Thus, according to available information, in Velyka Oleksandrivka, the Russian occupiers use the local population as a "human shield". The village is closed for entry and exit.

Units of the Ukrainian Defense Forces heroically hold their positions and prevent the enemy from advancing. They successfully repulsed the enemy's offensive in the areas of Uda, Kostyantynivka, Virnopillya, Ploske, Mayorsk, Bezimenne, Kamianka, Dovgenke, Dibrivne, Hryhorivka, Soledar, Pervomaiske, Nevelske, Maryinka.

Ukrainian Defense Forces are conducting a successful counteroffensive in the Kharkiv direction. Thanks to the skillful and coordinated actions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, with the local population's support, they advanced almost 50 km in 3 days. According to intelligence, some enemy units suffered significant losses. The Russian troops are trying to evacuate wounded personnel and damaged military equipment to the areas of Vilkhuvatka and Borodoyarske. Personnel of the occupying forces in civilian clothes resort to desertion and try to return to the territory of the Russian Federation; more than 15 such cases were recorded during the day.

Missile troops and artillery of the Ukrainian Defense Forces continue to perform tasks of counter- battery combat, disruption of the enemy command and control system and logistical support, and destruction of enemy manpower and combat equipment.

During the past 24 hours, to support the actions of ground groupings, the Ukrainian Air Force carried out more than 32 strikes and destroyed four platoon strongholds, 21 areas of concentration of manpower and military equipment, 5 anti-aircraft missile systems, 6 UAVs and a Ka-52 helicopter.

During the past 24 hours, the enemy launched four rocket attacks at Kostyantynivka, Tsyrkuny, Bereznehuvate and Kharkiv, there were victims among the civilian population, and 15 air strikes on military and civilian objects in the areas of Temyrivka, Krasnohorivka, Volodymyrivka and Novomykhailivka.

The Russian military fired more than ten rounds of "Grad" and "Uragan" rocket launchers at Serebryanka, Platonivka, and Tavriyske.

As a result of the successful actions of the partisan movement in cooperation with the artillery of the Ukrainian Defense Forces, the enemy units have significant problems with logistical support in the temporarily captured territories of the Kherson region.

To counter the leakage of information about the movement of occupation units at the railway station in Sokologhirne, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation have strengthened their filtering measures.

The morale and psychological state of the personnel of the invasion forces remain low. Kharkiv direction

• Zolochiv-Balakleya section: approximate length of combat line - 147 km, number of BTGs of the

RF Armed Forces - 10-12, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 13.3 km;

• Deployed enemy BTGs: 26th, 153rd and 197th tank regiments, 245th motorized rifle regiment of the 47th tank division, 6th and 239th tank regiments, 228th motorized rifle regiment of the 90th tank division, 1st motorized rifle regiment, 1st tank regiment of the 2nd motorized rifle division, 25th and 138th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 6th Combined Arms Army, 27th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 1st Tank Army, 275th and 280th motorized rifle regiments,

11th tank regiment of the 18th motorized rifle division of the 11 Army Corps, 7th motorized rifle regiment of the 11th Army Corps, 80th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 14th Army Corps, 2nd and 45th separate SOF brigades of the Airborne Forces, 1st Army Corps of so-called DPR, PMCs.

The enemy continued firing from barrel and jet artillery in the areas of Udy, Sosnivka, Duvanka, Tsupivka, Prudyanka, Dementiivka, Velyki Prohody, Pytomnyk, Ruski Tyshki, Petrivka, Peremoha, Bayrak, Kostiantynivka, Svitlychne, Nove, Male Vesele, Cherkaski Tyshky, Staryi Saltiv.

The enemy troops tried to hold on to the Novy Burluk - Kupyansk line, which would have allowed them to concentrate reserves in the Artemivka - Shipuvate - Prosyanka - Chervona Khvyla areas.

In the occupied part of the Chuhuyiv district of the Kharkiv region, the enemy began active measures to mobilize the local population forcibly. Men of conscription age are detained and sent to Vovchansk, to the so-called "recruitment center".

Kramatorsk direction

● Balakleya - Siversk section: approximate length of the combat line - 184 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 17-20, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 9.6 km;

●  252nd and 752nd motorized rifle regiments of the 3rd motorized rifle division, 1st, 13th and 12th tank regiments, 423rd motorized rifle regiment of the 4th tank division, 201st military base, 15th, 21st, 30th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 2nd Combined Arms Army, 35th, 55th and 74th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 41st Combined Arms Army, 3rd and 14th separate SOF brigades, 2nd and 4th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 2nd Army Corps, 7th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 1st Army Corps, PMCs.

The enemy is concentrating its primary efforts in the Siversk direction. The enemy troops shelled the positions of Ukrainian units with barrel and rocket artillery and tank weapons near Dolyna, Krasnopillia, Sloviansk, Mykillske, Virnopillia, Nova Dmytrivka, Bohorodychne, Novomykolaivka, Serebryanka, Siversk, Verkhnyokamyanske, Ivano-Daryivka, Spirne, Rozdolivka, Hryhorivka, Pryshyb, and Pereizne.

Donetsk direction

● Siversk - Maryinka section: approximate length of the combat line - 235 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 13-15, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 17 km;

●  Deployed BTGs: 68th and 163rd tank regiments, 102nd and 103rd motorized rifle regiments of the 150 motorized rifle division, 80th tank regiment of the 90th tank division, 35th, 55th and 74th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 41st Combined Arms Army, 31st separate airborne assault brigade, 61st separate marines brigade of the Joint Strategic Command "Northern Fleet", 336th separate marines brigade, 24th separate SOF brigade, 1st, 3rd, 5th, 15th, and 100th separate motorized rifle brigades, 9th and 11th separate motorized rifle regiment of the 1st Army Corps of the so-called DNR, 6th motorized rifle regiment of the 2nd Army Corps of the so-called LNR, PMCs.

The enemy's main efforts were focused on the conduct of hostilities in the Bakhmut operational direction. The enemy troops shelled the positions of the Ukraine Defense Forces near Yakovlivka, Soledar, Bakhmutske, Bakhmut, Vesela Dolyna, Zaytseve, New York, Vesele, Kamianka, Avdiivka, Pervomaiske, Vodyane, and Opytne.

Zaporizhzhya direction

●  Maryinka – Vasylivka section: approximate length of the line of combat - 200 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 17, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 11.7 km;

●  Deployed BTGs: 36th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 29th Combined Arms Army, 38th and 64th separate motorized rifle brigades, 69th separate cover brigade of the 35th Combined Arms Army, 5th separate tank brigade, 37 separate motorized rifle brigade of the 36th Combined Arms Army, 135th, 429th, 503rd and 693rd motorized rifle regiments of the 19th motorized rifle division of the 58th Combined Arms Army, 70th, 71st and 291st motorized rifle regiments of the 42nd motorized rifle division of the 58th Combined Arms Army, 136th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 58 Combined Arms Army, 46th and 49th machine gun artillery regiments of the 18th machine gun artillery division of the 68th Army Corps, 39th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 68th Army Corps, 83th separate airborne assault brigade, 40th and 155th separate marines brigades, 22nd separate SOF brigade, 1st Army Corps of the so-called DPR, and 2nd Army Corps of the so-called LPR, PMCs.

The enemy did not carry out active offensive actions. They shelled the positions of Ukrainian troops with tanks, mortars, barrel and rocket artillery in the areas near Maryinka, Paraskoviivka, Novomykhailivka, Velyka Novosilka, Novoukrainka, Prechystivka, Mykilske, Krasnohorivka, Vuhledar, Novomayorske, Yehorivka, Novopole, Vremivka, Poltavka, Zaliznychne, Chervone, Orikhiv, and Novoandriivka.

Kherson direction

● Vasylivka–Nova Zburyivka and Stanislav section: approximate length of the battle line - 252 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 27, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 9.3 km;

●  Deployed BTGs: 114th, 143rd and 394th motorized rifle regiments, 218th tank regiment of the 127th motorized rifle division of the 5th Combined Arms Army, 57th and 60th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 5th Combined Arms Army, 135th, 503rd and 693rd motorized rifle regiments of the 19th motorized rifle division, 70th, 71st and 291st motorized rifle regiments of the 42nd motorized rifle division, 51st and 137th parachute airborne regiments of the 106th parachute airborne division, 7th military base of the 49th Combined Arms Army, 16th and 346th separate SOF brigades.

The operational situation is unchanged.

Kherson-Berislav bridgehead

●  Velyka Lepetikha – Oleksandrivka section: approximate length of the battle line – 250 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces – 22, the average width of the combat area of one BTG –

11.8 km;

● Deployed BTGs: 108th Air assault regiment, 171st separate airborne assault brigade of the 7th Air assault division, 4th military base of the 58th Combined Arms Army, 429th motorized rifle regiment of the 19th motorized rifle division, 33rd and 255th motorized rifle regiments of the 20th motorized rifle division, 34th and 205th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 49th Combined Arms Army, 224th, 237th and 239th Air assault regiments of the 76th Air assault division, 217th and 331 Air assault regiments of the 98th Air assault division, 126th separate coastal defense brigade, 127th separate ranger brigade, 11th separate airborne assault brigade, 10th separate SOF brigade, PMC.

The enemy fired at Ukrainian troops with mortars, barrel artillery and MLRS in the areas of Arkhangelske, Novovoznesensk, Myrolyubivka, Novovoskresenske, Biloghirka, Novohryhorivka, Shevchenkove, Lyubomirivka, Ternovi Pody, Stepova Dolyna, Myrne, Olhyne, Oleksandrivka, Tavriyske, Bila Krynytsia, Pervomaiske , Lyubimivka, Zeleny Hai, Petrivka, Pravdyne, and Ivanivka.

Azov-Black Sea Maritime Operational Area:

The forces of the Russian Black Sea Fleet continue to project force on the coast and the continental part of Ukraine and control the northwestern part of the Black Sea. The ultimate goal is to deprive Ukraine of access to the sea and connect unrecognized Transnistria with the Russian Federation by land through the coast of the Black and Azov seas.

Along the southern coast of Crimea, there are two enemy missile carriers, a frigate and a small missile ship. Up to 16 enemy Kalibr missiles are ready for a salvo. Additionally, more than ten other enemy warships and vessels of the auxiliary fleet of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and the Caspian Flotilla are at sea, providing reconnaissance and blockade of navigation in the Azov-Black Sea waters.

Three Russian patrol ships and boats are on combat duty in the waters of the Sea of Azov on the approaches to the Mariupol and Berdyansk seaports.

Most large amphibious ships are in the ports of Novorossiysk and Sevastopol for replenishment and scheduled maintenance. There are no signs of preparation for an amphibious assault on the southern coast of Ukraine.

One enemy project 636.3 submarine is on high alert in Sevastopol; three submarines are in Novorossiysk.

Enemy aviation continues to fly from Crimean airfields Belbek and Gvardiyske over the northwestern part of the Black Sea. Over the past day, 10 Su-27, Su-30 and Su-24 aircraft from Belbek and Saki airfields were involved.

On the evening of September 8, another sea mine was washed up by the sea to the Odesa beach. The mine was defused by a unit of the Navy of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Over the past two

months, more than 10 cases of washed-up sea mines onto the coast of Odesa and Mykolaiv Oblasts were recorded.

The humanitarian corridor for grain export from the Ukrainian ports of Odesa continues to function. During his speech at the Eastern Economic Forum on September 7, Russian President Putin threatened to stop the free movement of ships because most grain cargo goes to European countries. According to him, only 2 out of 87 ships were loaded under the UN World Food Program, which provides assistance to the "most needy countries".

This statement does not correspond to reality and is yet another manipulation. As of September 8, 54 ships with 1.04 million tons of grain were sent to Asian countries, 32 ships with 0.85 million tons to Europe, and 16 ships with 0.47 million tons of agricultural products to Africa.

Operational losses of the enemy from 24.02 to 09.09

Personnel - almost 51,900 people (+650);

Tanks – 2,122 (+10);

Armored combat vehicles – 4,575 (+18);

Artillery systems – 1,237 (+11);

Multiple rocket launchers (MLRS) - 306 (+1); Anti-aircraft warfare systems - 159 (0); Vehicles and fuel tanks – 3,399 (+55); Aircraft - 239 (0);

Helicopters – 211 (+1);

UAV operational and tactical level - 888 (+4); Intercepted cruise missiles - 214 (0);

Boats / ships - 15 (0).

Ukraine, general news

In the second quarter of 2022, Ukraine's GDP fell by 37.2% compared to last year, according to the Bloomberg agency. The current drop in GDP is the largest in the previous ten years.

Ukraine will demand reparations due to the war in the amount of at least $300 billion from Russia, Minister of Justice Denys Malyuska told the publication of the Funke media group, DW writes.

International diplomatic aspect

"We are far from the end of this destructive process", said the Russian Permanent Representative to the UN that called an extraordinary meeting of the Security Council. He believes that Western weaponry is not playing a decisive role on the battlefield, "regardless of what the Ukrainian vassals are saying". Vassily Nebenzia accused the US of "pumping" Ukraine with weaponry, which is used against civilian objects, and the EU of violating their "Common Position" rules, which ban

the licensing of arms exports if it creates a violation of international humanitarian law. He dared to accuse UAF of targeting civilians, including "the carnage in Olenivka." However, he didn't mention that Ukraine uses its right to self-defence against Russia's unjust, unprovoked, illegal war of aggression. Neither he accepted responsibility for numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Russian Armed Forces. He also provided no evidence of an absurdist claim that it was a Ukrainian HIMARS system that targeted 50 Ukrainian POWs in Olenivka nor explained why Russia still hasn't allowed a UN investigation team to arrive at the crime scene.

"The Russian Federation has not provided access to prisoners of war held on its territory or in territory under its occupation," stated the head of the UN's human rights monitoring mission in Ukraine. "This is all the more worrying since we have documented that prisoners of war in the power of the Russian Federation and held by the Russian Federation's armed forces or by affiliated armed groups have suffered torture and ill-treatment," said Matilda Bogner.

The UK Permanent Representative stated that Ukraine has every right to defend itself, legally and morally. It is fighting not just for its existence but in defence of the principles of the Charter of the United Nations itself. The US diplomat clarified that the meeting was just an attempt to distract from the one a day before on the forced displacement of Ukrainians amid reports of torture associated with Russia's "abhorrent" use of filtration camps. Richard M. Mills, JR. stressed that the US "will not stop our support to Ukraine just because Russia is frustrated that its attempt at regime change has not gone to plan."

The Ukrainian diplomat blamed Russia for paralyzing the main UN body, "It is solely the presence of Russia in the permanent seat of the Soviet Union that has immobilized the Security Council in relation to ensuring the peace and security of Ukraine". Sergiy Kyslytsya stressed that Ukrainians are defending themselves, Europe, the world and the UN Charter, and they will keep on fighting until the last inch of the sovereign territory of Ukraine, including Crimea, is liberated. He explained the logic behind defence support to Ukraine, saying that the evil of Putin as that of Hitler before him requires a global response. This was the case during the Second World war. This is the case right now, and Ukraine and its allies are doing their best to ensure such a response.

The US Treasury announced sanctions against Iranian companies involved in selling drones to Russia for the war in Ukraine. Currently, there are no indications that new sanctions will be imposed on North Korea, which is providing Russia with legacy munitions. Pyongyang also expressed its interest in sending some 10,000 workers to reconstruct cities and towns of Eastern Ukraine after the Russian Armed Forces levelled them.

In the meantime, the Government of Ukraine, the European Commission, and the World Bank, in cooperation with partners, estimate that the current cost of reconstruction and recovery in Ukraine amounts to $349 billion, which is expected to grow. The Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment (RDNA) assessed that over the next 36 months, US$105 billion is needed to address urgent needs such as restoring education and healthcare systems and infrastructure, preparing

for the upcoming winter through the restoration of heating and energy to homes, support to agriculture, and repair of vital transport routes. The EU finance ministers in Prague agreed to speed up the next part of macro-financial assistance to Ukraine of €5 billion. "The new loan in the amount of five billion euros will go to the normal operation of the state and ensure the operation of critical infrastructure in the country, such as offices, schools or hospitals," said Minister of Finance of the Czech Republic Zbyněk Stanjura.

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4. All Warfare Is Based on Deception—Troops, Vets Targeted by Disinformation Can Fight Back

"Can" and must.

Excerpts:

“Many Americans—U.S. service members included—have not been viewing TikTok as a national security threat,” FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr told lawmakers last month. “They consider it to be just another app for sharing funny videos or memes. But that’s the sheep’s clothing.”

That worry—that military members will view and share something that inadvertently furthers narratives designed to sow discord and division, undermining national security—is the reason Wendoloski and others see addressing mis- and disinformation in the ranks as so critical.

“People in the military, you’re kind of formed around a common ethic or common values,” Wendoloski says. “You take an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against enemies foreign and domestic. And potentially, you’re willing to share something, click the share button, and further an adversary’s message. That’s not what you signed up to do.”

All Warfare Is Based on Deception—Troops, Vets Targeted by Disinformation Can Fight Back

thewarhorse.org · by Sonner Kehrt · September 8, 2022

Type “#MilTok” into the search bar on TikTok and you’ll be greeted with page after page after page of military videos. Soldiers trash-talking sailors. Sailors trash-talking soldiers. Military memes, uniform hacks, service members waxing long about their boot camp experience, half-dressed Army bros showing off their abs. TikTok allows for an extraordinary window into daily military life and culture, inconceivable a few decades ago.

A poster describes the dangers of disinformation on social media, as well as how to detect and counter it. Graphic by Senior Airman Adam Smith, courtesy of the U.S. Air National Guard.

It’s also an extraordinary source of information broadly, the scope of which was similarly hard to predict not long ago. As content multiplies, so does misinformation. TikTok, where millions of users upload short videos, is particularly notorious for misleading content. In the second half of 2020 alone, TikTok removed or added a warning label to more than three-quarters of a million videos that showed unsubstantiated content, misinformation, or evidence of manipulation.

The military officially banned TikTok on government-issued devices two years ago. But as #MilTok makes evident, the app is popular with service members, who access it on their personal devices. This usage highlights the novelty and complexity of mis- and disinformation. Unlike more traditional threats that target military members, this one is more likely to appear while you check your phone at a bar than as you maneuver on the battlefield.

“Historically, disinformation has always been out there,” says Capt. Adam Wendoloski, an instructor at West Point who spoke to The War Horse as an expert in disinformation, rather than as a representative of West Point. “But given the way everything’s digitized now … you’re going to walk away from your job or go home from work and pull up Facebook on your phone, and chances are some of that stuff you’re looking at came from an adversary.”

A poster explains not all social media accounts belong to real people. Graphic by Senior Airman Adam Smith, courtesy of the U.S. Air National Guard.

Countering the threat must be similarly novel and complex, and calls are increasing for policies to address disinformation that targets troops. But the military community can take fairly simple steps now—such as talking about how information campaigns typically work, understanding the research into counteracting them, and mapping out specific threat landscapes—that go a long way toward stopping mis- and disinformation from spreading. And while the military, in particular, is targeted by disinformation campaigns, its experience with identifying and combating threats also positions service members to lead the way to fight back against them.

“To me, it’s enemy contact,” Wendoloski says. “It’s no different than any other weapon on the battlefield.”

‘Why Developing a Healthy Skepticism Is Important’

In recent years, as the scope of the threat misinformation poses becomes clear, high-level efforts to prepare for and defend against it have expanded. Last year’s National Defense Authorization Act extended the authority of the Department of State’s Global Engagement Center, which was set up in 2018 to direct and coordinate the federal government’s mission to counter foreign disinformation efforts. DARPA has been working on the issue, including a 2020 project to develop technology to detect and track disinformation campaigns. And in recent years, the various services have beefed up their information-warfare efforts, standing up new units and positions dedicated to information, communications, and cyberwarfare.

READ MORE

Second Suicide Battalion: Where Military Justice Weaponizes Mental Health

But the Defense Department lacks a comprehensive strategy to address mis- and disinformation, and has paid little attention to disinformation readiness at the troop level—although last year, the Air Force added digital literacy as a foundational competency for all airmen. Airmen can complete a self-assessment of their digital literacy skills. The Joint Chiefs of Staff also offers an optional “influence awareness” course that addresses threats in the information landscape but does not go into great detail about the tools available to address them.

Information systems technicians assigned to the amphibious assault ship USS Bataan pose for a group photo with Bataan Communications Officer Warrant Officer Nkosa Morris, second from right, for Women’s History Month. Photo by Mass Communication Spc. 2nd Class Anna E. Van Nuys, courtesy of the U.S. Navy.

Misinformation experts say the size and scope of the threat misinformation poses calls for a broader defense—and that starts with beefing up the defenses of would-be targets. In an ideal world, that would happen early. In Finland, for example, which has mounted a country-wide initiative against misinformation, even young schoolchildren receive misinformation counter-messaging and training. But in the absence of a broader campaign, experts see opportunity in the military, which is particularly well-versed in providing the platforms and training to shape people in specific ways.

“People come into the military with all sorts of different beliefs and skills or lack of skills,” says Peter Singer, author of the book LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media and senior fellow at New America. “The military doesn’t say, ‘Well, this person already knows how to have two-factor passwords on their email. I guess I’m not going to require them to get that cybersecurity refresher training.’ We train them. It’s the same thing here.”

Some of the training showcases the many publicly available tools, like fact-checking sites such as factcheck.org, Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact, or snopes.com, which has been debunking online rumors since the 1990s.

Reverse image search engines, like TinEye, let anyone enter an image and see its origin, as well as whether it has been digitally altered. During the George Floyd protests in 2020, for instance, images circulating on social media that purported to show rioters had actually been taken earlier, in entirely different contexts.

‘Teach Students How to Think, Not What to Think’

But preparing for an incoming attack on a belief system requires awareness—not just of the steps needed to verify a piece of information, but why taking those steps is important. It also means developing a broader understanding of how information moves online and why certain posts or search results appear for certain people. This set of skills is known as digital literacy. Its emphasis isn’t on what specifically is true or false, but rather on the skills needed to evaluate the tidal wave of information we each encounter every day.

“There’s an important emphasis that needs to be made on teaching students how to think, not what to think,” says John Silva, senior director of professional learning at the News Literacy Project. “Part of that is about understanding why developing a healthy skepticism is important.”

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Troops, of course, can be taught those skills. Organizations like the News Literacy Project and others have apps and games that teach things like how to spot misinformation and how to fact-check social media posts. Browser plugins, such as WeVerify, provide contextual information to help internet users evaluate the veracity of YouTube videos and images on social media. And myriad organizations, like Calling Bullshit, a product of two professors at the University of Washington, provide tools and reading material to help make developing a healthy skepticism fun.

The U.S. Army created a misinformation/disinformation prevention campaign for social media in 2021. Photo by Staff Sgt. George Davis, courtesy of the U.S. Army.

The military creates highly standardized training, with a one-size-fits-all approach—a necessity given the sheer amount of information that needs to be conveyed to hundreds of thousands of service members. But given the way disinformation campaigns work, static training doesn’t make sense, says Marine Maj. Jennifer Giles, who has written about disinformation in the military. People are far more likely to incorporate the skills they learn into daily habits if the utility of those habits is clear from the beginning.

For instance, if service members encounter misinformation on TikTok, but can’t use TikTok on government-issued devices, misinformation training conducted on government devices might not obviously translate. Rather than a static, click-through course, military misinformation training needs to evolve as content does and meet troops where they are.

“People need to practice media literacy skills on the devices that they use most often,” Giles says.

Trainees check their cell phones and update family members at the Solomon Center on Fort Jackson in 2017. Photo by Robert Timmons, courtesy of the U.S. Army.

People also need to encounter mis- and disinformation and practice countering it in the media ecosystems they inhabit. Disinformation can appear in different forms to different people. Learning to debunk manipulative information isn’t just about verifying any one post. It’s about a broader understanding of how it is designed to manipulate us.

“If you and I were sitting in a classroom, and you looked up ‘sandwiches’ and I looked up ‘sandwiches,’ we might get very different things…,” Giles says. “That’s important when we’re looking at things that are more important than sandwiches.”

‘The Majority of People Feel Frustrated’

In the burgeoning field of countering misinformation, inoculation theory has inspired hope. The approach takes its name from the idea behind vaccines: Give someone a little piece of something harmful, and when it comes around again, they’ll recognize it and mount a stronger defense.

The idea originated in the 1960s, stemming in part from fears that U.S. troops fighting abroad might be susceptible to psychological persuasion by the enemy. William McGuire, a social psychologist who later became chair of the Yale psychology department, pioneered the idea of what he called “a vaccine for brainwash,” arguing that it’s easier to tackle a problem early than to scramble to root it out after it’s taken hold.

Today, the idea generally holds that pairing a warning about an incoming threat to a person’s belief system with information that refutes the messaging likely to be in that threat helps people recognize and reject manipulative information.

“The idea is repeatedly debunking after the fact doesn’t work. What you need to do instead is what’s known as pre-bunking,” Singer says. “Don’t wait for the person to become sick. Give them the ability to defend themselves.”

A checklist educates people about how to spot fake news from both traditional and social media news sources. Graphic by Master Sgt. Renae Pittman, courtesy of the U.S. Air Force.

Given the “everyday” nature of the problem, just having everyday conversations about it to increase awareness is important, Giles and others say.

“I really believe the majority of people really feel frustrated about just the abundance of low-quality information online,” Giles says. “A lot of people have those questions.”

Understanding how and when disinformation campaigns are likely to proliferate is an important part of “pre-bunking.” Wendoloski points to the upcoming midterm elections as an example. Disinformation campaigns often follow news cycles. Thinking about what is coming down the pipeline can give potential targets a chance to prepare.

“I’m not going to get into the weeds about the candidates, because I want to try to stay apolitical, but knowing that this stuff’s going to start getting thrown around there and the environment, and maybe thinking about how to have a conversation about a sensitive topic …” he says.

Countering misinformation also requires understanding the varied nature of the threat itself. Misinformation proliferates on many platforms: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Parler, Telegram, TikTok, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Pinterest—the list goes on and on.

“There’s just all kinds of stuff,” Wendoloski says. “You’re a leader—‘I got social media. I use Facebook.’ But then your newer soldiers might be using something like Discord.”

That doesn’t mean everybody needs to be on every social media site, Wendoloski says. But taking misinformation seriously means taking the time to understand the platforms those around you use, the types of information—and misinformation—they may encounter, and the particular challenges they pose.

The U.S. Air National Guard used humor in its posters to encourage airmen to think and investigate before they believe a post on social media. Graphic by Senior Airman Adam Smith, courtesy of the U.S. Air National Guard.

Just this summer, for instance, Buzzfeed reported about leaked audio from TikTok that purported to show that Chinese engineers repeatedly accessed private data from U.S. users. And Newsguard, an organization that rates the reliability of online information, found that, in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, TikTok showed new users misinformation about the war in less than 40 minutes—without users even searching for Ukraine videos. In other countries, TikTok users have masqueraded as legitimate politicians ahead of elections.

“Many Americans—U.S. service members included—have not been viewing TikTok as a national security threat,” FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr told lawmakers last month. “They consider it to be just another app for sharing funny videos or memes. But that’s the sheep’s clothing.”

That worry—that military members will view and share something that inadvertently furthers narratives designed to sow discord and division, undermining national security—is the reason Wendoloski and others see addressing mis- and disinformation in the ranks as so critical.

Our Journalism Depends on Your Support

“People in the military, you’re kind of formed around a common ethic or common values,” Wendoloski says. “You take an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against enemies foreign and domestic. And potentially, you’re willing to share something, click the share button, and further an adversary’s message. That’s not what you signed up to do.”

This War Horse investigation was reported by Sonner Kehrt, edited by Kelly Kennedy, fact-checked by Ben Kalin, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Headlines are by Abbie Bennett.

thewarhorse.org · by Sonner Kehrt · September 8, 2022

5. Ukraine: The Counter-Offensive - Lawyers, Guns & Money

Conclusion:

All of this seems to be positive news, but keep in mind that we’re not getting the full picture. I’d worry about whether the Ukrainians are overstretching their own logistics by attacking in too many places at once, but they do enjoy interior lines of communication at this point in the conflict and that obviously matters. It’s also the case that the Russian forces apparently haven’t been doing rotations and so may well be at the point of exhaustion.

As always, follow Michael Kofman, Rob Lee, the ISW, and Mick Ryan for updates.

Amazing video of a Russian T-72 fleeing Ukrainian troops, discarding men and then crashing into a tree. pic.twitter.com/0hqrQtJ09S— Cᴀʟɪʙʀᴇ Oʙsᴄᴜʀᴀ (@CalibreObscura) September 9, 2022

The Counter-Offensive - Lawyers, Guns & Money

lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com · by Robert Farley · September 9, 2022

By Viewsridge – Own work, derivate of Russo-Ukraine Conflict (2014-2021).svg by Rr016Missile attacks source:BNO NewsTerritorial control sources:Template:Russo-Ukrainian War detailed map / Template:Russo-Ukrainian War detailed relief mapISW, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=115506141

I have been hesitant to write about the success of Ukraine’s counter-offensive around Kherson and Kharkiv because the information sources are very jumbled and because it’s always difficult to assess what’s going on in a major military operation in the first hours and days. However, at this point there is apparently some grounds for optimism. Dan Parsons:

Ukraine’s multipronged offensive that kicked off about a week ago has punched miles into Russian-occupied territory in multiple sectors, with dozens of towns recaptured, scores of prisoners taken, and many pieces of abandoned equipment seized.

Brig. Gen. Oleksyi Hromov, Deputy Chief of the Main Operations Department of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, said Thursday that Ukrainian forces had pierced Russian lines around Kharkiv in the north and pressed more than 30 miles beyond. In a matter of a few days, they have liberated at least 20 settlements, Hromov told the Kyiv Independent news service. Anton Gerashcenko, an advisor to Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs, also confirmed the progress on Sept. 8.

The offensive near Kharkiv seems to have been well-planned and resourced, and also seems to have taken the Russians completely off guard. There continue to be serious communications and logistical issues that are at least partially driven by Ukrainian use of HIMARS. There are also reports of significant numbers of prisoners, and of Russian forces that are refusing to fight. Operationally, there seems to be some chance to create a major pocket around Izyum:

This map shows claimed advances by Ukrainain forces towards Kupiansk, in the Kharkiv countryside. Not all of these claims have been visually verified.

A breakthrough in this area puts serious stress on Russian positions in Izyum and Lyman as Kupiansk is a key supply node. pic.twitter.com/0IQmyuA0W4— Nathan Ruser (@Nrg8000) September 8, 2022

This would be a big deal; the optics of letting a pocket of 20000 soldiers wither on the vine aren’t any better now than they were in 1942, and it’s unclear that the Russians have the metal at the moment to break a Ukrainian encirclement. However, it also does not seem like the Russians are yet in the mood to call for a cease-fire. That will be the first real indication of panic in Moscow over the military situation. I should hasten to add that Ukraine absolutely should NOT take the first ceasefire offer that Russia dangles, especially if it’s in a position to take more ground and inflict more damage on Russian forces. It certainly appears that there’s some unhappiness on the Russian side:

Unbelievable screed from a pro-Kremlin military blogger telling Russian occupation officials to stop denying Ukrainian advances when there's literally photos of their soldiers in liberated towns. Every other word of this post is a curse-word. pic.twitter.com/vOcfDVQ4gF— Matthew Luxmoore (@mjluxmoore) September 9, 2022

We know less about what’s happening around Kherson, which probably isn’t surprising given the concentration of Russian forces there. Michael Kofman does not think that the advance on Kherson was a feint:

Despite the success of UA breakout by Kharkiv, I don’t see Kherson as a diversion. These appear to be interrelated offensives. Kherson likely intended as a more deliberate, sequenced advance. Kharkiv to take advantage of favorable conditions & attain a rapid breakthrough.— Michael Kofman (@KofmanMichael) September 8, 2022

All of this seems to be positive news, but keep in mind that we’re not getting the full picture. I’d worry about whether the Ukrainians are overstretching their own logistics by attacking in too many places at once, but they do enjoy interior lines of communication at this point in the conflict and that obviously matters. It’s also the case that the Russian forces apparently haven’t been doing rotations and so may well be at the point of exhaustion.

As always, follow Michael Kofman, Rob Lee, the ISW, and Mick Ryan for updates.

Amazing video of a Russian T-72 fleeing Ukrainian troops, discarding men and then crashing into a tree. pic.twitter.com/0hqrQtJ09S— Cᴀʟɪʙʀᴇ Oʙsᴄᴜʀᴀ (@CalibreObscura) September 9, 2022

lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com · by Robert Farley · September 9, 2022

6. Why the Russian Military Brutalizes Ukraine

Why the Russian Military Brutalizes Ukraine

The Atlantic · by Tom Nichols · September 9, 2022

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

War is always a brutal business, but why is the Russian military so determined to inflict civilian casualties on neighboring Ukraine? I talked with a fellow Russia expert.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

• Are annual COVID shots a good idea?
• How she did it
• What the student-loan debate overlooks

Run Amok

I spent years teaching military officers who served in conflicts all around the globe. I am not naive about the viciousness of war, and I am grateful that I have never been touched by it. But I am startled by the sheer sadism of the Russian war on Ukraine. Russia’s armed forces are engaging in actions such as leveling cities, intentionally attacking civilian targets, and other apparent war crimes that we would associate with a war of extermination.

I turned to a friend and fellow Russia expert for a more thorough consideration of this. Nick Gvosdev holds a Ph.D. in Russian history from the University of Oxford; he and I taught together at the U.S. Naval War College for many years. (He still teaches there, and his comments here are his personal views and not those of the U.S. government.) We are both Eastern Orthodox Christians ourselves, which adds an especially painful aspect for us to this immense tragedy. We have had many conversations about the war, the latest of which I now offer to readers trying to understand this terrible conflict.

Tom Nichols: Nick, international-relations experts will hash out the “great power” dimensions of this war, but at the ground level of the actual fighting, why is the conflict so brutal? Is it really enough to say that the Russians are reacting to the humiliation of losing almost from the start?

Nick Gvosdev: To some extent. At all levels of Russian society, from the cab driver in the street to the Kremlin insider, there was a strongly held belief that Russian forces would be greeted as liberators, especially in the Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine. Indeed, the initial Russian military plan was based on the assumption that Ukrainian soldiers would refuse to fight and Ukrainian politicians would defect. This turned out not to be the case. Even more striking, it was the two largest Russian-speaking cities in Ukraine—Kharkiv and Odesa–which proved to be focal points of the successful blunting of the Russian invasion.

Nichols: That last point seems to be important.

Gvosdev: Yes. Western Ukraine—at least those areas that were never under Russian imperial rule and were part of the Habsburg realm—stressed their separateness from the Russians and were always the heartland of Ukrainian nationalism. But almost all the atrocities we’ve seen have targeted people precisely in those parts of Ukraine that are part of the Russian-speaking world. There does appear to be a strong undercurrent of giving these “traitors” their due recompense.

Nichols: I don’t think this is fully understood in the West. The Bucha massacre, for example, was aimed at Russian speakers—almost as if they infuriated the Russians more than Ukrainian nationalists did.

Gvosdev: Bucha was a special target, for sure, given its position as a bedroom community for Ukrainian government workers and military officers. But this is all a direct outcome of appropriating a World War II narrative in which the Ukrainian government is routinely described as a Nazi regime and those fighting the Russians are fascists. Meanwhile, Russian social media routinely uses the term “Allied forces”—with all the connotations from the Second World War that description carries—to characterize the Russian military and the militias of the Donetsk and Luhansk republics. So, think about it: If the Ukrainian military and government are the modern-day successors of the Nazis, then of course no quarter should be given to those who fight on the side of the fascists—and especially those who’ve betrayed their kin.

Nichols: What about the Russian military? Is there something in their training and background that makes them harder to control? They certainly haven’t improved since the Soviet days in their effectiveness as a fighting force.

Gvosdev: Russia tried to create a professional all-volunteer army, but it’s still living with Soviet-era “traditions,” including brutalizing its own recruits—the so-called dedovshchina—and a strict hierarchical command structure. Add to this the ongoing problem of corruption within the military and you create an ethos where brutalizing others is preferable to being subject to it yourself. One other point: The Kremlin is anxious to avoid calling for a general mobilization, and so, as the U.S. did during Vietnam, a number of soldiers fighting in the Russian military in Ukraine chose military service rather than prison.

Nichols: I almost didn’t believe that when I saw it.

Gvosdev: Worse, Russians have also been relying on mercenaries and militias, another place where people with criminal records can end up. In many of these cases, atrocities were the result of some of these people being allowed to run amok with no particular supervision or discipline from the top other than general directions to punish “traitors” or eliminate “Nazis.”

Nichols: Ukraine, by contrast, figured out that having a solid and reliable noncommissioned-officer corps works wonders in the field.

Gvosdev: Absolutely. Ukraine’s military reforms over the last several years, along NATO standards, also allowed its military to carry out more decentralized operations.

Nichols: It seems like the most powerful “force multiplier” in the Russian military is resentment: You’ve betrayed us, you live better than we do, you’ve elected your own government, and so … you’re Nazis and we can do to you what we did in World War II.

Gvosdev: That’s the logical outcome, and how you get from “brothers and sisters” to wholesale carnage. Ukraine, in Russian eyes, has turned its back on its brother Russia, and by seeking to integrate with the Western world, has driven a sword into the heart of the “Russian world.” Russian politicians and pundits hammer those themes every day. This “betrayal” narrative is linked to the overall Russian resentment of Europe and the West. Some of it is connected to living standards, to be sure, but it is also driven by the sense that Europeans—and now Ukrainians as well—look down on Russia as not quite European, definitely not Western, and maybe not even civilized. And that resentment leads to a Russian determination to make others share in Russia’s misery, whether by bombarding Ukraine or by sparking an energy and economic crisis in the rest of Europe.

Nichols: I’m feeling an uncomfortable parallel here with events in the U.S. and some other countries.

Gvosdev: The politics of resentment are always the doorway to legitimizing mindless fury and anger—and ultimately violence—against those you deem to be traitors or evildoers as being a justifiable response to “being looked down on.” Russians don’t have a monopoly on this.

Related:

• Ukraine is waging a new kind of war.
• The doctors who are now prisoners of war

Today’s News

1. King Charles III delivered his inaugural speech on his first full day as monarch, emphasizing his sense of duty following the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II.
2. A federal judge dismissed Donald Trump’s lawsuit against Hillary Clinton. Trump had accused the former secretary of state of spreading false information that his campaign had colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential race.
3. The Justice Department asked Judge Aileen M. Cannon to lift her block on the investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents. Earlier this week, Cannon granted Trump’s request for a special master, which could prevent federal prosecutors from accessing key evidence.

Dispatches

• Unsettled Territory: Imani Perry on the uneasy link between the Little Rock Nine and today’s Jackson, Mississippi water crisis.
• Work in Progress: Derek Thompson offers five pieces of career advice particularly useful for this “wobbly economic moment.”
• The Books Briefing: When writers draw from older stories, they have an opportunity to provide a new perspective, Maya Chung writes.

Evening Read

(Tyler Comrie / The Atlantic; Getty)

Crypto’s Core Values Are Running Headfirst Into Reality

By Will Gottsegen

Crypto was taking off, and governments were finally starting to act like it. In 2013, when a young writer and software developer named Vitalik Buterin wrote an impassioned screed defending the blockchain gospel for his publication, Bitcoin Magazine, cryptocurrencies were still a niche curiosity. But a series of regulations was spooking the nascent industry, threatening the sort of anti-government ethos that has always been core to the project. For Buterin the panic felt a little overblown. Crypto, he argued, couldn’t truly be regulated. After all, this was the whole point of the new system: an internet with no masters, no mediators, and no guardrails. “The future of crypto-libertarianism is fine,” he wrote. “Stop worrying.”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• The problem with kindergarten
• Zero COVID has outlived its usefulness. Here’s why China is still enforcing it.
• Where the hatred comes from
• Photos of the Week: Drum major, ox catch, ferret race

Culture Break

Ian McEwan (Eva Vermandel for The Atlantic)

Read. Ian McEwan’s new anti-memoir, Lessons, in which the author’s alter ego explores how McEwan’s “charmed life” could have gone wrong.

Watch. How people across America celebrate their Saturday nights. From a queer bar in Florida to a havdalah ceremony in Massachusetts, our Atlantic interactive staff shares photos and videos from around the country.

Do. Get your tickets for The Atlantic Festival, live at The Wharf in Washington, D.C., (as well as virtually) September 21–23. For a limited time, Daily readers can use the code SPECIALACCESS for complimentary in-person registration. Find out more here.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

In Wednesday’s postscript, I noted the brief time when Russians looked with open eyes at their own history. One of those Russians was a Soviet army general and historian named Dmitry Volkogonov, once so hard-line a communist and so trusted by the regime as both a military officer and a scholar that even in the 1970s and early 1980s he was given access to highly restricted Soviet historical archives. Volkogonov (whose own father was arrested and shot during Stalin’s purges) was so shocked by what he found in the secret documents that he turned against Soviet communism. He later wrote several books drawing from these archives, including magisterial and damning biographies of Stalin and Lenin, for which many of his former comrades reviled him as a traitor. Shortly before he died in 1995, he said: “The only thing I can be proud of—the greatest merit of my life—is that I was able to fundamentally alter my views.” He left behind works that revealed the many sins of the Soviet regime, including Autopsy for an Empire: The Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime, which makes for especially fascinating reading today as Vladimir Putin tries to re-create the old Soviet Union.

—Tom

Kate Lindsay contributed to this newsletter.

The Atlantic · by Tom Nichols · September 9, 2022

7. What Ukraine drone videos tell us about the future of war

Videos at the link: https://www.theruck.news/p/what-ukraine-drone-videos-tell-us

What Ukraine drone videos tell us about the future of war

theruck.news · by Paul Szoldra

WE CAN LEARN SO MUCH about where warfare is going by watching drone videos from Ukraine.

There are countless examples of these videos, shot from both small drones that can be bought online and larger ones made solely for military use, all with similar themes: background techno music overshadowing the lethal voyeurism, confusion as you try to pinpoint the unwitting soldier below, the release of the explosive, the impact, the blast, the casualty-producing effects of shrapnel and metal and dirt, and then, eventually, the high-definition production of that casualty slumped on the ground—another added to the rolls of the tens of thousands of dead and wounded Russian and Ukrainian soldiers in a six-month-old war that is increasingly likely to last much longer than that.

There is, however, much more to unpack from what you can see on your screen. It doesn’t necessarily matter whether a drone kills or wounds; its mere presence over the battlefield and what it suggests to a soldier is terrifying—that the enemy can see you and thus, can potentially kill you. And there are a lot of drones flying over Ukraine. Meanwhile, the videos themselves—drone or otherwise—often shot from the Ukrainian perspective and captioned in English, help fuel popular support for Kyiv and sow doubt about Russian capabilities.

So, the U.S. military is paying close attention. Aside from the intelligence value of seeing how Russian troops actually operate in the field and the propaganda value of seeing them cower in fear, the videos help American troops and Pentagon brass learn how to counter and potentially defeat the myriad drones they face in the future. But here’s the dirty little secret: This is one of our toughest problems.

“I have ground commanders look at me and say the thing they are most concerned about are drones flying above them,” said Air Force Lt. Gen. Clinton Hinote, the service’s deputy chief of staff, on Tuesday. “That was unexpected for me to have the commander of one of our storied ground divisions say that to me. That’s a really sobering thing. People are waking up to it. We will adapt. We will get there.”

What probably has commanders of storied ground divisions far more worried are not the cheap, off-the-shelf quadcopter drones that drop a grenade on an unlucky soldier’s head (though that’s still a nuisance). It’s the drones you don’t even know are there, potentially watching and sending back the exact positions of your troops to an artillery or rocket battery.

Notably, the Russian military showed just how powerful this combination was on July 11, 2014, when it used multiple drones to target a column of Ukrainian soldiers near Luhansk with rocket fire. “Within three minutes, the Russian forces destroyed nearly two battalions and decimated the 79th Airmobile Brigade,” a U.S. Army officer wrote, summarizing the incident.

That was then, of course. Russian soldiers in Ukraine are now resorting to outfitting their own cheap quadcopter drones to drop hand grenades on opposing trenches.

Still, the ability to ‘reach out and touch’ an adversary gets a whole lot easier once you gain the ability to see exactly where they are. Forward observers of the past had antenna radios and binoculars. These days they have those plus lasers and encrypted satellite communications. Down the road, they may well have multiple drones to help locate and destroy targets with great precision.

“Adversaries will most likely use UAS [unmanned aerial systems] to detect, locate, and observe…as part of their targeting process,” wrote Marine Capt. Justin McCann in an award-winning essay for the U.S. Naval Institute in 2016. “The enemy’s most dangerous course of action, however, is to use [radar-homing drones] to deliver munitions or flying a UAS into vulnerable assets. Flying a UAS into an air intake of an F-35B while taxiing, for instance, will neutralize a $251 million asset.”

This is the concern for U.S. troops potentially facing Russia or China. It’s a big one.

There is promising news: A lot of interesting concepts are being pursued on countering these things on the civilian and military sides. And there are many ways being considered: the “kinetic” approaches like shooting bullets, artillery, lasers, nets; and the “non-kinetic” like electronic signals that jam the connection between the drone and the operator or even using good old-fashioned birds. Meanwhile, at the ground level of the U.S. military, troops are practicing drills to avoid being spotted.

But there is an equally interesting amount of research happening in the area of drone swarms—picture one of those fantastic laser light drone shows (ooh! ah!) being refashioned with precision targeting and explosives. “Most foreign governments and non-state actors will likely consider adding swarms to their military arsenal,” cautioned two U.S. Army officers in a recent essay for Small Wars Journal.

That’s a much more difficult threat to mitigate.

“I believe there is always going to be a need for EW [electronic warfare] non-kinetic systems” that can hack enemy drones to stop them, said Army Maj. Gen. Sean Gainey, in a talk last month, adding: “I want to have the ability for a kinetic solution.”

Gainey is the head of the Pentagon’s nascent Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aerial Systems office, an outfit of about 75 people charged with developing the training and doctrine U.S. troops may need—and are no doubt learning now—from the ongoing war in Ukraine.

He estimated the U.S. military services have around 60 different anti-drone systems currently out there, a “quite challenging” training proposition. But, a joint school dedicated to countering the drone threat was created in 2021. And Gainey envisions an Army in which every soldier learns and practices their own personal counter-drone drills (sort of like the “5 and 25-meter checks” to spot roadside bombs). To be sure, air defense soldiers will be dedicated to taking out the high-flying drones, but the average G.I. will be trained on ‘drone buster’ guns to take out the small ones.

Yet this former grunt-turned-observer tends to think the proliferation of drones will be similar to that of roadside bombs; a cat-and-mouse game between the makers of the killer devices and those who try to stop them through physical or electronic means, and we’ll all be caught in the middle for a very long time.

Aside from Ukraine, Gainey offered a movie that best captures the drone future: Angel Has Fallen. “My son kinda looked and asked, are we good?” Gainey said with a laugh.

“The technology that we are working on is designed against the hardest problem set that is out there,” he said.

The Ruck is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

THAT’S ENOUGH ABOUT DRONES for the moment, though it is sure to come up in future issues. Moving on to an incident I found particularly interesting when looking for history to unpack this week occurred in 1942: the first and only attack on the U.S. mainland during World War II.

“A real understanding of history means we face nothing new under the sun.”

On Sept. 9, 1942, less than a year after the Pearl Harbor attack, Japanese pilot Nobuo Fujita launched a seaplane off the deck of a submarine heading towards the Oregon coast. The 30-year-old warrant officer later dropped a total of four incendiary bombs in the hope they would light forest fires, but they fizzled due to damp conditions. Fifty years later, he returned to the forest where his bombs were dropped, according to the city of Brookings, Oregon, planting a little redwood tree that he called a “symbol of friendship and peace.”

History Net has a full account of Fujita’s life and exploits here.

 Open Sources

I’m going to keep this one short and sweet, but I did want to put a few things on your radar:

• A new report out in Politico reveals that the F-35 has components used in its engine made in China. Deliveries of the jets have been halted for now as Lockheed Martin investigates. But the weird thing is, this isn’t all that surprising to readers of Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War by Peter W. Singer and August Cole, which has a fictionalized scenario of Chinese parts in an F-35 being used to disable the jet amid a conflict. I asked Singer for his comments on what he called the latest #GhostFleet moment to come true:
• “One of the key lessons of Ghost Fleet was how vulnerabilities baked into our systems and supply chain could have drastic, even battle-losing, consequences,” Singer told THE RUCK. “Like so much of our work, it was a bit more of a forward-leaning idea back when we started in 2013. Indeed, part of why we included the research endnotes in the novel was to show how the vulnerabilities weren't something we made up, as well as defend against the inevitable pushback by interested parties, trying to claim whatever was the bad thing couldn't happen. Now, the idea of supply chain vulnerability and exploitation is more accepted. But the problem is still there.”
• If you haven’t seen it yet, the Pentagon’s latest report on sexual assault in the military is deeply concerning. Oh, to hell with that: It’s downright disturbing. “Rates of sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and workplace hostility increased for women through the Active force,” it concluded. [PDF]
• Aside from pointing out the obvious—that having a significant portion of U.S. military service members fearing their fellow service members is quite bad, the message that reports like this and the headlines they generate of a sexual assault report showing a ‘tragic’ rise in cases tend to hurt military recruiting and they certainly don’t help counter messages from adversaries who are all too eager to tout a “record number of sexual assaults” in the U.S. ranks.
• Here is a recent Congressional Research Service report with a worrying title: Russian Military Actions at Ukraine Nuclear Power Plants. The four-page insight report provides a sobering look at the potential issues raised by Russia’s recent shelling of Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. [PDF]
• Finally, I was on a new podcast called Military Cheat Codes. This was recorded a while ago when I was still the editor-in-chief of Task & Purpose. The hosts are way too nice, and I don’t think I can accept being called the “voice of a generation,” but I’m certainly humbled by it. You can find links to listen here.

Thanks for reading,

Paul

Leave a comment

theruck.news · by Paul Szoldra

8. How the US monkeypox response failed to learn COVID’s lessons

How the US monkeypox response failed to learn COVID’s lessons

BY ANTHONY RUGGIERO, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 09/09/22 9:00 AM ET

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL

The Hill ·· September 9, 2022

The Biden administration’s failed response to the spread of monkeypox has highlighted America’s inability to respond to large-scale disease outbreaks. These problems are bipartisan and were also evident in the Trump administration’s flawed response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Solving them will require bipartisan cooperation.

The United States must fix its public health system or suffer the consequences of the next disease outbreak, which could be deadlier and more difficult to contain.

Treating monkeypox should not have proven as challenging as treating the coronavirus. Monkeypox, after all, was discovered in 1958, and the first human case was recorded in 1970. A vaccine, known as Jynneos, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2019 and is effective against both monkeypox and smallpox.

Before 2022, outbreaks of monkeypox were mostly limited to people in central and western African countries, people who had traveled to those countries, and people who had been exposed to imported animals. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) notes that prior to this year, monkeypox cases in the U.S. were “very rare.” Yet since May, there have been more than 19,000 confirmed cases in the United States.

COVID-19, on the other hand, materialized as a novel virus with no vaccine or known pharmaceutical treatments, and quickly spread to tens of millions of people. China’s obstruction and obfuscation of critical information, like human-to-human and asymptomatic transmission, made it more difficult to contain the disease. The development and distribution of a vaccine took more than a year.

The playbook for containing the spread of monkeypox should have looked similar to the world’s belated approach to COVID-19. A combination of vaccines and non-pharmaceutical interventions could have been effective at limiting the spread, especially if they had been deployed early in an outbreak. A robust testing regimen could have provided insights into whether confirmed cases were the full story or just the tip of the iceberg.

Yet the Biden administration has struggled to make testing for monkeypox widely available. The Washington Post reported last month that only about a dozen tests per day were being performed nationwide in early June. The administration has expanded testing capacity to try to meet the current demand. The woefully inadequate initial response raises the question of whether America’s public health system is irreparably broken.

The monkeypox outbreak at the moment is largely limited to a specific population — men having sex with men. Vaccinations should have been the first line of defense for the concerned population. Those who were unsure if they had the disease or had been exposed could protect themselves through vaccination and safer practices.

The Strategic National Stockpile had doses of Jynneos — but not enough to contain the emerging monkeypox outbreak. The United States had purchased millions more doses but they were in Denmark in the manufacturer’s factory waiting to be turned into vaccines. The FDA had to inspect the plant before the vaccines could be used in the United States. That finally occurred six weeks after the first U.S. case was identified. It is not immediately clear why the administration did not prioritize that effort. But the delay likely led to additional cases of the disease.

The Biden administration’s recent actions, however, are finally matching the urgency of the moment, including increasing access to vaccines and treatments. In particular, Washington has begun to address flaws in the public health infrastructure. In mid-August, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky announced changes to the organization in response to its abysmal performance during the COVID-19 pandemic, including improving communications and accountability within the organization and with the public, and publicizing scientific and data findings faster.

But not all the changes are productive. For example, the Department of Health and Human Services has elevated the assistant secretary for preparedness and response — the senior official charged with responding to public health emergencies — to the same level as the FDA and CDC, a bureaucratic change without much impact. Those two organizations had the worst track records responding to the COVID-19 pandemic and are not shining models to emulate.

When the monkeypox outbreak is over, we need a rigorous review to understand why America was slow to react to a disease outbreak … again.

Let’s save America’s Atlantic salmon History repeating itself? Biden and Trump not the first to use ‘rage rhetoric’ for political gain

A bipartisan solution should begin with an impartial evaluation of the flawed COVID-19 and monkeypox responses. Congress and the administration are not adequately positioned to do it because it would devolve into partisan fighting. Instead, President Biden and senior Republican and Democratic leaders should publicly support the creation of an independent, bipartisan commission. The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the 9-11 Commission) is a good model to follow.

The United States must fix the broken public health system. The next disease outbreak may be deadlier, and we will not have the time to fumble another response.

Anthony Ruggiero is senior director of the Nonproliferation and Biodefense Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (@FDD). He previously served in the U.S. government for more than 19 years, including as senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense on the National Security Council (2019-2021). Follow him on Twitter @NatSecAnthony. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

The Hill · · September 9, 2022

9. In Major Advance, Ukraine Drives Russians Out of Key Eastern City

In Major Advance, Ukraine Drives Russians Out of Key Eastern City

Ukraine marks its biggest strategic gain since mounting offensive this week, closing in on vital town and cutting off supplies to thousands of Russian troops

https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-major-advance-ukraine-drives-russians-out-of-key-eastern-city-11662807160?mod=hp_lead_pos2

Ukrainian forces seized most of a strategically vital city in northeastern Ukraine on Saturday, cutting the main supply line to thousands of Russian troops near the eastern city of Izyum and marking the biggest strategic gain Ukraine has made since the start of an offensive this week.

Photos from Russian and Ukrainian channels on Telegram showed Ukrainian soldiers holding the country’s flag in front of the city hall in Kupyansk, and Kremlin-loyal Russian military correspondents said Moscow’s forces had pulled back across the Oskil River to the eastern part of the city.

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Ukraine’s control over the critical infrastructure of the city and the success of this week’s advance signal to Western backers the effectiveness of weapons the U.S. and Europe has given to Kyiv.

The Kupyansk rail and road hub located in the western half of the city was the last artery connecting Russia with thousands of troops on territory that represented the bulk of Russia’s gains in May and June. Ukraine’s control of the road network also threatens Russia’s hold on Izyum, a city Moscow had planned to use to launch further attacks on Ukrainian-controlled parts of the Donetsk region in the country’s east.

Russian military vehicles move through the Kharkiv region in an image released by the Russian Defense Ministry.

PHOTO: RUSSIAN DEFENCE MINISTRY PRESS S/SHUTTERSTOCK

The U.K. Defense Ministry said Saturday that Izyum was becoming increasingly isolated. Analysts say Ukraine is aiming to encircle a pocket of Russian troops around Izyum east of the Oskil River.

“Izyum will soon be ours,” said a Ukrainian commander fighting near the city.

In the weeks leading up to Ukraine’s offensive, Kyiv’s forces used Western-made weapons, including High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or Himars, against Russian supply lines and front-line positions. With the Ukrainian thrust east building steam, Russian resistance has folded in recent days.

Earlier

Video Dispatch: Ukraine Launches Southern Offensive as Residents Flee the East

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Video Dispatch: Ukraine Launches Southern Offensive as Residents Flee the East

Play video: Video Dispatch: Ukraine Launches Southern Offensive as Residents Flee the East

Ukraine has launched an assault in the south of the country in an effort to reclaim the Russian-occupied Kherson region. Meanwhile, Russian shelling has forced some of the last residents of Ukraine’s east to flee. WSJ’s Matthew Luxmoore reports from near Ukraine’s front lines. Photo: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images

Russia’s Defense Ministry said Saturday that it was holding positions and returning fire at the Ukrainians.

The Ukrainian gains have put Russia on the defensive not only on the battlefield, but also at home. Russian television has carefully tailored its narrative on the war to keep support for the invasion high, particularly ahead of this weekend’s voting in parliamentary and municipal elections.

Moscow hasn’t responded to gains Ukraine has made in recent days, and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s only appearance on state TV on Saturday was to promote the Kremlin’s online voting system.

Shelling damage on a road in Hrakove.

PHOTO: DAVID RYDER/ZUMA PRESS

On a widely watched Russian news talk show Friday evening, a national guard commander, Apti Alaudinov, said Kupyansk had no extraordinary military importance. He was quickly contradicted by Russian military expert Mikhail Khodaryonok, who said Ukraine’s recapturing the city would signify an important gain.

Areas controlled by Russia

Ukrainian counteroffensives

Belgorod

RUSSIA

Kharkiv

Oskil River

Kupyansk

UKRAINE

Recent

Ukrainian

advances

Izyum

Area of detail

UKRAINE

Slovyansk

15 miles

15 km

Note: Control areas as of Sept. 8

Source: Institute for the Study of War and the American Enterprise Institute's Critical Threats Project (control areas)

“Kupyansk is undoubtedly a tasty target for the Ukrainian Armed Forces insofar as it is an intersection of railroads and highways and is a logistical base that supplies materiel for practically all our troops west of the Siverskyi Donets River, so the stakes are very high,” he said.

The advances made by Ukrainian forces are important for Kyiv’s forces, which have been facing their own hardships with supplies of artillery and ammunition.

On Saturday, Oleh Synyehubov, the head of the Kharkiv region, where the bulk of Ukraine’s gains has been made in recent days, praised the armed forces from the city of Balakliya, which was taken from the Russians earlier this week.

“Guys and girls of the Armed Forces, today you are creating a new history of a free Ukraine,” he said.

Dozens of Kharkiv-area towns and villages have been recaptured in the latest offensive, according to Ukraine’s president.

PHOTO: DAVID RYDER/ZUMA PRESS

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday that his country’s forces had retaken control of more than 30 towns and villages in the Kharkiv region in recent days and that measures were being taken to secure the gains. It couldn’t immediately be determined what reserves Ukraine has available to shore up the territory it seized and expand on its gains.

Vitaly Ganchev, the head of the Russian-installed administration in the Kharkiv region, appealed to those in the areas where fighting was under way to leave their houses to prevent civilian deaths.

But many residents have stayed on to welcome incoming Ukrainian soldiers, sometimes with tears of joy after months of Russian occupation. One video showed Ukrainian soldiers in Balakliya clambering on top of an armored personnel carrier to tear down a Russian-propaganda banner reading, “We are with Russia! One people!”

Evan Gershkovich contributed to this article.

Write to Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com

10. Ukraine claws back some territory; nuclear plant in peril

Ukraine claws back some territory; nuclear plant in peril

AP · by HANNA ARHIROVA and YURAS KARMANAU · September 9, 2022

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian forces on Friday claimed new success in their counteroffensive against Russian forces in the country’s east, taking control of a sizeable village and pushing toward an important transport junction. The United States’ top diplomat and the head of NATO noted the advances, but cautioned that the war is likely to drag on for months.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy commended the military for its gains in the east, saying in a nightly video address that Ukrainian troops have reclaimed more than 30 settlements in the Kharkiv region since the start of the counteroffensive there this week.

“We are gradually taking control over more settlements, returning the Ukrainian flag and protection for our people.” Zelenskyy said.

Ukraine’s military said it also launched new attacks on Russian pontoon bridges used to bring supplies across the Dnieper River to Kherson, one of the largest Russian-occupied cities, and the adjacent region. Ukrainian artillery and rocket strikes have left all regular bridges across the river unusable, the military’s southern command said.

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Anxiety increased about Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, which was operating in emergency mode Friday for the fifth straight day due to the war. That prompted the head of the U.N. atomic watchdog to call for the establishment of an immediate safety zone around the plant to prevent a nuclear accident.

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The six-reactor Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant came under the control of Russian forces early in the war but is being operated by Ukrainian staff. The plant and surrounding areas have been repeatedly hit by shelling that Russia and Ukraine blame on each other. The last power line connecting the plant to the Ukrainian electricity grid was cut Monday, leaving the plant without an outside source of electricity. It is receiving power for its own safety systems from the only reactor — out of six total — that remains operational.

In other advances, the Ukrainian military said it took control of the village of Volokhiv Yar in the Kharkiv region and aimed to advance toward strategically valuable town of Kupiansk, which would cut off Russian forces from key supply routes.

Pro-Russian authorities in the Kupiansk district announced that civilians were being evacuated toward the Russian-held region of Luhansk.

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“The initial signs are positive and we see Ukraine making real, demonstrable progress in a deliberate way,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in Brussels, a day after visiting Kyiv.

“But this is likely to go on for some significant period of time,” he said. “There are a huge number of Russian forces in Ukraine and unfortunately, tragically, horrifically, President (Vladimir) Putin has demonstrated that he will throw a lot of people into this at huge cost to Russia.”

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, who met with Blinken, said the war is “entering a critical phase.”

The gains “are modest and only the first successes of the counteroffensive of the Ukrainian army, but they are important both in terms of seizing the military initiative and raising the spirit of Ukrainian soldiers,” Mykola Sunhurovskyi, a military analyst at the Razumkov Center in Kyiv, told The Associated Press.

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Energoatom, Ukraine’s state nuclear operator, said Friday that repairs to outside electric lines at the Zaporizhzhia plant are impossible because of the shelling and that operating the plant in what is called an “island” status carries “the risk of violating radiation and fire safety standards.”

“Only the withdrawal of the Russians from the plant and the creation of a security zone around it can normalize the situation at the Zaporizhzhia NPP. Only then will the world be able to exhale,” Petro Kotin, the head of Energoatom, told Ukrainian TV.

Earlier, Kotin told The Associated Press the plant’s only operating reactor “can be stopped completely” at any moment and as a consequence, the only power source would be a diesel generator.

There are 20 generators on site and enough diesel fuel for 10 days. After that, about 200 tons of diesel fuel would be needed daily for the generators, which he said is “impossible” to get while the plant is occupied by Russian forces.

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Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Friday that there was little likelihood of reestablishing reliable offsite power lines to the plant.

“This is an unsustainable situation and is becoming increasingly precarious,” Grossi said, calling for an “immediate cessation of all shelling in the entire area” and the establishment of a nuclear safety and security protection zone.

“This is the only way to ensure that we do not face a nuclear accident,” he said.

Fighting continued Friday elsewhere in Ukraine.

Russian planes bombed the hospital in the town of Velika Pysarivka, on the border with Russia, said Dmytro Zhyvytskyi, governor of the Sumy region. He said the building was destroyed and there were an unknown number of casualties.

In the Donetsk region in the east — one of two that Russia declared to be sovereign states at the outset of the war — eight people were killed in the city of Bakhmut over the past day and the city is without water and electricity for the fourth straight day, said governor Pavlo Kyrylenko.

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Four people were killed in shelling in the Kharkiv region, two of them in the city of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest, according to governor Oleh Syniehubov. The shelling of the city continued Friday afternoon, Mayor Ihor Terekhov said, wounding 10 people, including three children.

Ukraine this week claimed to have regained control of more than 20 settlements in the Kharkiv region, including the small city of Balakliya. Social media posts showed weeping, smiling Balakliya residents embracing Ukrainian soldiers.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Friday refused to comment on the alleged retaking of Balakliya, redirecting all such questions to the Russian Defense Ministry.

But Vitaly Ganchev, the Russian-installed official in the Kharkiv region, confirmed Friday that “Balakliya, in effect, is not under our control.” Ganchev said “tough battles” were continuing in the city.

Helicopters and fighter jets streaked over the rolling plains of the Donetsk region, with the jets heading toward Izium, near where Ukrainian forces have been carrying out a counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region. The jets fired flares and black smoke billowed in the distance.

—

Associated Press writer Elena Becatoros in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, and Frank Jordans in Berlin contributed to this report.

___

Follow all AP stories on the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine.

AP · by HANNA ARHIROVA and YURAS KARMANAU · September 9, 2022

11.  Does Iran have a secret plutonium bomb program?

Excerpts:

But if enriched Uranium-235 is one way to produce a nuclear bomb, a plutonium bomb is also possible – and Iran has pursued both. It is worth considering that Iran could have a hidden plutonium program – or, alternatively, is acquiring plutonium from outside.

North Korea produces plutonium at its Yongbyon reactor complex situated 60 miles north of Pyongyang. It appears to have surplus plutonium and is aiming to produce even more. North Korea, Iran and Syria cooperated in building a clone of this reactor in eastern Syria at Al Kibar. That reactor was destroyed in a complex Israeli operation on September 5-6, 2007.

For the record, the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement declared all plutonium production off limits for Iran. Iran was required to halt the construction of a plutonium reactor at Arak and was said to have filled the reactor’s core with cement.

Does Iran have a secret plutonium bomb program?

JCPOA required Tehran to stop all plutonium production but there is good reason to believe it clandestinely continues

asiatimes.com · by Stephen Bryen · September 8, 2022

The UN’s IAEA has reported that Iran has 55.6 kilograms (122.6 pounds) of 60% enriched uranium. The body says this means Iran is able to produce up to 25 kg (55 lbs) of 90% enriched uranium, enough for a nuclear bomb.

The real story could be even more concerning. Consider the hoary phrase, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” Similarly, there’s more than one way to make a nuclear bomb.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has said that it might be possible to produce a fission-type nuclear weapon with as little as 15kg (33 lbs) of highly enriched uranium. The Hiroshima bomb, which was uranium-fueled, required 64kg (141 lbs) of enriched uranium.

But if enriched Uranium-235 is one way to produce a nuclear bomb, a plutonium bomb is also possible – and Iran has pursued both. It is worth considering that Iran could have a hidden plutonium program – or, alternatively, is acquiring plutonium from outside.

North Korea produces plutonium at its Yongbyon reactor complex situated 60 miles north of Pyongyang. It appears to have surplus plutonium and is aiming to produce even more. North Korea, Iran and Syria cooperated in building a clone of this reactor in eastern Syria at Al Kibar. That reactor was destroyed in a complex Israeli operation on September 5-6, 2007.

For the record, the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement declared all plutonium production off limits for Iran. Iran was required to halt the construction of a plutonium reactor at Arak and was said to have filled the reactor’s core with cement.

But in 2020 Iran’s atomic energy chief, Ali Akbar Salehi, announced that the JCPOA-required optic was only for show. “When they told us to pour cement into the tubes,” he recalled, “we said: ‘Fine. We will pour.’ But we did not tell them that we had other tubes. Otherwise, they would have told us to pour cement into those tubes, as well.”

Fereydoun Abbasi, a member of the Iranian parliament’s energy committee, said this week that Iran should build a plutonium reactor in addition to enriching uranium. While Abbasi claimed plutonium was needed for peaceful purposes, his declaration could nonetheless be decoded to signify that Iran already has an active plutonium program.

An Iranian nuclear power plant. Photo: thebulletin.org / Creative Commons

What seems to be true is that, for Iran to be able to assemble a significant nuclear weapons arsenal, it will need plutonium in addition to uranium – on the simple basis that Iran, like the United States, would never be able to enrich enough uranium for bombs.

The story of the Hiroshima bomb may tell us something about Iran’s program and may illustrate that it is not depending on uranium to make nuclear weapons.

In 1945, the US was developing both uranium- and plutonium-fueled atomic weapons. The US bomb that struck Hiroshima was a uranium bomb while the one that was dropped on Nagasaki was a plutonium bomb.

The US Manhattan Project during World War II was primarily enriching uranium at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Three programs operated there: two uranium enrichment plants (K-25 and Y-12) and a liquid thermal diffusion plant (S-50). The Y-12 plant used electromagnetic separation to extract the weapon’s grade enriched uranium using calutrons.

It is worth noting that Iraq also used calutrons to extract uranium – and a nuclear reactor for plutonium production – although it never got to the point of producing a nuclear weapon.

The Oak Ridge K-25 plant was a massive complex using gaseous diffusion to extract uranium, which was then sent to the Y-12 plant to raise the level of enrichment.

At Oak Ridge, there also was an early graphite reactor, based on the work of Enrico Fermi and his team at the University of Chicago – work that finally resulted in a huge installation at Hanford, Washington state, for producing plutonium.

Even today there is some controversy about the Manhattan Project’s weapons-grade uranium manufacturing program. The controversy is over whether there was ever enough enriched uranium even for the Hiroshima bomb.

What is indisputable is that at the end of the day there was so little production that only one bomb was built. Additionally, prototypes of that bomb were never tested because of the lack of fissile material.

Perhaps related: In May 1945 after Germany’s surrender, German submarine U-234, an XB-4U type, surrendered at sea to the US Navy and the submarine and its crew were taken to the US Navy base at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The submarine was carrying uranium and was originally ordered to take its cargo to Japan.

Surrender of the German U-boat U-234. Photo: Wikipedia

The type of uranium on board remains unclear. There are claims from some crew members that the submarine was carrying lead-encased containers marked U-235 (enriched uranium). For other types of uranium, lead containers would not have been needed because the uranium would not have been radioactive.

In any case, one theory is that the uranium was quickly moved to Oak Ridge and used as part of the material put into the Hiroshima bomb.

Even with the sub’s uranium cargo available, the US turned to plutonium, which was being produced at Hanford. In late 1945, the US had enough plutonium for about five bombs and from there the production of atomic weapons ramped up.

The IAEA thinks Iran, probably in one or two years, will be able to produce a small number of nuclear weapons. If these mirror the explosive power of North Korea’s nuclear weapons, their size will be roughly equal to the bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They may even be significantly smaller in yield.

But what if Iran also has a plutonium program? That would require a reactor and plutonium extraction capabilities, but all are within reach. Given that major parts of Iran’s weaponry program are underground and inaccessible to inspection, it is impossible to rule out the possibility.

Iran also could be getting plutonium from outside, possibly from North Korea.

Iran is getting closer and closer to having nuclear weapons, but plutonium will be needed to give the Islamic Republic a credible arsenal – perhaps 20 to 25 weapons (similar to North Korea’s arsenal) in the next few years.

Instead of focusing solely on uranium enrichment, monitoring authorities need to obtain more intelligence on what Iran might be doing to produce plutonium or smuggle it into the country.

Follow Stephen Bryen on Twitter at @stevebryen

asiatimes.com · by Stephen Bryen · September 8, 2022

12. Taiwan Strait Crisis Strengthens US Resolve to Support Taiwan, Counter China

Excerpts:

As the administration promised, the United States resumed on August 28 publicized warship transits of the Taiwan Strait with two battle cruisers, significantly larger and more powerfully armed than the usual single U.S. destroyers used in such transits. China’s public response was muted.

Politico reported – later publicly confirmed by the White House – that an arms sales package featuring advanced missiles and a sophisticated radar system collectively worth $1.1 billion was being notified to Congress.

Congress also carried out other business as usual, seeking to finish the 117th Congress with several major legislative achievements countering China’s challenges. And in early September the Biden administration rolled out its plan to spend $50 billion on advanced computer chip manufacturing targeting China. It also put aside U.S. industry lobbying in implementing tougher export controls, cutting off China’s military and civilian artificial intelligence enterprises from needed components.

On the other hand, the administration and congressional supporters reportedly worked to head off legislation to overhaul U.S. policy toward Taiwan. A bill that would have substantially advanced U.S. political and other relations with Taiwan was poised to pass the Senate in August. However, the legislation was held over until after the summer recess, allowing for planned revisions to modify language seen especially sensitive to Beijing.

In sum, the situation is subject to change, but the Washington Consensus remains united and the direction of U.S. policy toward both China and Taiwan is clear.

Taiwan Strait Crisis Strengthens US Resolve to Support Taiwan, Counter China

The Washington Consensus remains united and the direction of U.S. policy is clear.

thediplomat.com · by Robert Sutter · September 10, 2022

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China created acute tensions in the Taiwan Strait with four days of unprecedented and provocative military exercises surrounding the island in response to the visit to Taiwan by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on August 2. In the aftermath of the exercises and withdrawal of forces, China’s military pressures on Taiwan remained strong, though Beijing’s threatening rhetoric subsided. Renewed Chinese military escalation could further change the situation.

For now, the impact of the crisis has strengthened U.S. government resolve to counter Chinese challenges over Taiwan and other issues.

U.S. Reactions and Debate

Reactions to the crisis saw an outpouring of alarmed media and specialist commentary sharply critical of the Pelosi visit for endangering U.S. national security. More limited administration and congressional commentary targeted China for overreacting and trying to reverse increasing U.S. support for Taiwan. The debate gave greater prominence to important differences among Americans over U.S. policy toward China and Taiwan.

On one side of the U.S. debate is the so-called Washington Consensus, featuring bipartisan majorities in Congress that worked closely with Trump and Biden administration officials in a years-long overall hardening of U.S. policy, creating a “whole of government” effort to counter Beijing’s security, economic and governance challenges.

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Since 2018, two challenges have been seen as particularly dangerous, existential threats to fundamental U.S. national security and well-being. The first is the Chinese effort to undermine U.S. power and influence in Asia, allowing Beijing to dominate. The second is the Chinese effort to seek dominance in the high technology industries of the future. Such dominance would make the U.S. subservient to Chinese economic power and, because such technology is essential to modern national security, subservient to Chinese military power.

Supporting Taiwan as an important partner in dealing with these challenges remains a high priority.

On the other side of the U.S. debate are many American China and foreign policy specialists and commentators of various stripes, along with large business and investment firms and universities and their high technology specialists with strong institutional and personal interests in close collaboration with China. In broad terms, they oppose the U.S. hardening toward China, including greater support for Taiwan, arguing it is based on an excessive view of Chinese challenges, counterproductive for U.S. economic development and innovation, and increasing the danger of China-U.S. war. A focus is placed on establishing an overall U.S. relationship with China acceptable to both sides. In the recent Taiwan crisis, the United States was advised to understand fully and take into account Beijing’s concerns over U.S. intentions toward Taiwan, which Beijing sees crossing its so-called “red lines.”

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By contrast, the Taiwan government and its American supporters judge that such U.S. reassurances to China in the past have diminished U.S. support for Taiwan. Notably, in reaction in the danger posed by Chinese provocative actions during the last major Taiwan Straits crisis in 1995-96, the Clinton administration in 1995 sharply turned against Taiwan and privately accommodated Beijing, moving to end restrictions imposed after the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown and welcoming a summit meeting long sought by Chinese leaders. Only toward the end of the nine months of off-and-on Chinese military displays in 1996 did the administration send two aircraft carrier battle groups to face off with Chinese forces threatening Taiwan.

To those in the Congress and the administration focused on defending the United States in the face of very threatening challenges from China, putting a priority on offering U.S. reassurance to Beijing over Taiwan seems out of place. U.S. reassurances to Xi Jinping’s government were tried repeatedly by the Barack Obama government; they were seen as allowing for Chinese exploitation and manipulation as U.S. efforts to counter Chinese expansionism and other adverse practices failed badly.

Many point recently to China’s strong alignment with Russia. Beijing’s strident opposition to U.S. measures to sanction Vladimir Putin’s government and support Ukraine with advanced U.S. weapons are viewed as emblematic of the stark danger the United States faces from China as well as Russia, warranting ever greater U.S. resolve. The fates of Ukraine and Taiwan are mixed together in arguments for greater U.S. resolve to counter China. The bipartisan passage in August of the multi-billion dollars CHIPS and Science Act as well as the many anti-China features in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 – a produce of unusual unity among Democrats – reflected strong administration and congressional focus to counter Beijing.

U.S. Government Actions

Overall, U.S. government actions up to now reflect continued resolve against China’s challenges and support for Taiwan.

Despite China’s aggressive response to Pelosi’s trip, there was no change in U.S. congressional visits to Taiwan. Other congressional delegations used the opportunity of the summer recess to go forward with visits less than two weeks after Pelosi’s visit prompted the military crisis.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration moved forward with negotiations seen leading to a sophisticated and closer Taiwan-U.S. economic relationship in several ways, in line with the bilateral free trade agreement long sought by Taiwan and by many congressional backers of Taiwan. A Taiwanese delegation focused on agriculture is set to ink several deals in a high-profile visit to Washington, D.C., next week.

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Despite various disclosures of U.S. administration angst over the Pelosi visit and the Chinese reaction, the public posture of the Biden administration remained firm in criticizing China for overreacting. The administration avowed repeatedly that the United States would not be intimidated. The Washington Post reported on August 20 that Biden refused a private request by Xi Jinping a few days before the Pelosi visit that the administration block the visit.

As the administration promised, the United States resumed on August 28 publicized warship transits of the Taiwan Strait with two battle cruisers, significantly larger and more powerfully armed than the usual single U.S. destroyers used in such transits. China’s public response was muted.

Politico reported – later publicly confirmed by the White House – that an arms sales package featuring advanced missiles and a sophisticated radar system collectively worth $1.1 billion was being notified to Congress.

Congress also carried out other business as usual, seeking to finish the 117th Congress with several major legislative achievements countering China’s challenges. And in early September the Biden administration rolled out its plan to spend $50 billion on advanced computer chip manufacturing targeting China. It also put aside U.S. industry lobbying in implementing tougher export controls, cutting off China’s military and civilian artificial intelligence enterprises from needed components.

On the other hand, the administration and congressional supporters reportedly worked to head off legislation to overhaul U.S. policy toward Taiwan. A bill that would have substantially advanced U.S. political and other relations with Taiwan was poised to pass the Senate in August. However, the legislation was held over until after the summer recess, allowing for planned revisions to modify language seen especially sensitive to Beijing.

In sum, the situation is subject to change, but the Washington Consensus remains united and the direction of U.S. policy toward both China and Taiwan is clear.

Robert Sutter

Robert Sutter is professor of Practice of International Affairs at George Washington University.

thediplomat.com · by Robert Sutter · September 10, 2022

13. 10 Fascinating CIA Missions - CIA

​A potential useful resource at this link: https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/ten-fascinating-cia-missions/.

10 Fascinating CIA Missions - CIA

cia.gov

Did you know that we secretly plucked a soviet submarine off of the ocean floor, used a fake movie production company to rescue six American diplomats trapped in Iran, and dug a secret tunnel beneath Berlin to spy on Soviet communications during the Cold War?

In celebration of our 75th birthday on September 18, we wanted to share with you these and other fascinating (now declassified) missions from the last 75 years.

Below, you’ll find short summaries of the missions and links to where you can learn more about each captivating tale.

* * * * *

1950: CAT Airlines/Air America

In August 1950, the CIA secretly purchased the assets of Civil Air Transport (CAT), an airline that had been started in China after World War II by Gen. Claire L. Chennault and Whiting Willauer.

CAT would continue to fly commercial routes throughout Asia, acting in every way as a privately owned commercial airline. At the same time, under the corporate guise of CAT Incorporated, it provided airplanes and crews for secret intelligence operations and missions.

In 1959, CAT was renamed Air America, but continued to fly commercial routes while providing transport for secret intelligence operations. Air America was dissolved on June 30, 1976.

https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/cias-clandestine-services-histories-civil-air-transport

James McGovern was flying a Civil Air Transport aircraft to deliver supplies to French forces in northern Indochina when he was shot down by Communist anti-aircraft fire. This painting is part of CIA’s Intelligence Art Gallery.

1954: The U-2 Spy Plane

President Eisenhower approved the development of the U-2 aircraft on November 25, 1954. The first U-2 mission was over eastern Europe on June 20, 1956, and the first U-2 mission over the Soviet Union was flown a few weeks later on July 4.

On May 1, 1960, the Soviets shot down a U-2 flight piloted by Francis Gary Powers over Sverdlovsk. Powers survived the crash and was taken into custody by Soviet authorities. This led to the famous prisoner swap on the Glienicke Bridge in 1972 depicted in the Hollywood blockbuster, Bridge of Spies.

However, arguably the U-2s most consequential mission was on October 14, 1962, when CIA conducted overflights of Cuba. U-2 pilots photographed and confirmed the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles capable of reaching the U.S., precipitating the Cuban Missile Crisis that took place October 15-28, 1962.

https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/books-monographs/the-cia-and-the-u-2-program-1954-1974/

U-2 after flight at Groom Lake. Courtesy of TD Barnes and Roadrunners Internationale.

1955: The Berlin Tunnel

The Berlin Tunnel (Operation GOLD) was the brainchild of CIA officer Bill Harvey and allowed the CIA and British Intelligence (MI-6) to tap into Soviet cable lines in East Berlin. The tunnel was completed on May 11, 1954.

Unknown at the time to CIA and MI-6, the KGB—the Soviet Union’s premier intelligence agency—had been aware of the Berlin Tunnel project from its start (although they didn’t know its precise location).

George Blake, a KGB mole inside MI-6, had informed the Soviets about the secret operation during its planning stages. To protect Blake, the KGB allowed the operation to continue until April 1956 when they “accidentally discovered” the tunnel while supposedly repairing faulty underground cables.

Nevertheless, the Berlin Tunnel operation is considered a successful mission because of the troves of information we were able to collect on Soviet military capabilities and intentions.

https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/berlin-tunnel

A photograph of the Berlin Tunnel being constructed.

1957: CORONA

CIA and the U.S. Air Force begin developing the first imaging reconnaissance satellite, codenamed CORONA, on December 4, 1957.

Known to the public as the U.S. Air Force’s Discoverer program, the classified CORONA project operated during the height of the Cold War to collect pictures over the denied areas of eastern Europe and Asia.

During its operational life, CORONA collected more than 800,000 images in response to the national security requirements of the time.

https://www.cia.gov/legacy/museum/exhibit/corona-americas-first-imaging-satellite-program/

Part of the CORONA Satellite. The quality and value CORONA provided dramatically improved over its lifetime.

1962: A-12 OXCART

CIA developed a highly secret, supersonic aircraft known as the A-12 OXCART as the successor to the U-2 spy plane. The A-12 was intended to meet the nation’s need for a very fast, very high-flying reconnaissance aircraft that could avoid Soviet air defenses.

CIA awarded the OXCART contract to Lockheed (builder of the U-2) in 1959. In meeting the A-12’s extreme speed and altitude requirements, Lockheed—led by legendary engineer Clarence “Kelly” Johnson—overcame numerous technical challenges with cutting-edge innovations in titanium fabrication, lubricants, jet engines, fuel, navigation, flight control, electronic countermeasures, radar stealthiness, and pilot life-support systems.

The A-12 OXCART made its first official test flight on April 30, 1962, in the Nevada desert at a secret Air Base called Groom Lake; also known as Area 51.

In 1965, after hundreds of hours flown at high personal risk by an elite team of CIA and Lockheed test pilots, the A-12 was declared fully operational, attaining the design specifications of a sustained speed of Mach 3.2 at 90,000 feet altitude.

https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/oxcart-vs-blackbird-do-you-know-the-difference/

A painting of the A-12 Oxcart from CIA’s Intelligence Art Gallery.

1962: Project COLDFEET

What do James Bond, Batman, Agent Sidney Bristow, and John Wayne have in common? They all used the Fulton Skyhook system in daring and over the top moments on film. However, we did it first in Project COLDFEET.

In 1961, the U.S. found an abandoned Soviet research station on a floating ice island in the Arctic. The Soviets had abandoned it because the ice was breaking apart and transportation was now impossible… or so they thought.

On May 28, 1962, the CIA secretly flew two Navy pilots to the arctic, who parachuted down onto the ice. The tricky part, however, was how to retrieve them and the information they collected.

The solution: A B-17 rigged with Robert Fulton’s Skyhook, a unique airborne pickup device that included a nose yolk and a special winch system.

On June 2, using Skyhook, the CIA successfully snatched up the pilots and the trove of intelligence they collected: including more than 150 pounds of paperwork, samples, and equipment left behind by the Soviets.

https://youtu.be/ZY4Uq-xgXf4

The 7-day mission in the Arctic yielded valuable intelligence on advanced Soviet technology. This painting is part of CIA’s Intelligence Art Gallery.

1974: Glomar/AZORIAN

Imagine standing atop the Empire State Building with an 8-foot-wide grappling hook on a 1-inch-diameter steel rope. Your task is to lower the hook to the street below, snag a compact car full of gold, and lift the car back to the top of the building. On top of that, the job has to be done without anyone noticing.

That describes what CIA did in Project AZORIAN.

In 1974, CIA built a ship called the Glomar Explorer to secretly snatch a wrecked Soviet submarine from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

The cover story was that billionaire Howard Hughes was conducting marine research at extreme ocean depths and mining manganese nodules lying on the sea bottom. However, news reports on March 18, 1975 exposed the Glomar Explorer and its secret mission.

Nevertheless, it was one of the greatest intelligence successes of the Cold War.

https://www.cia.gov/legacy/museum/exhibit/project-azorian/

While the public believed the Hughes Glomar Explorer to be a vessel for deep sea mining, CIA was really using the ship to search for a sunken Soviet submarine.

1980: ARGO

On November 4, 1979, militant Islamic students took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran, and took hostage 66 U.S. personnel inside. Avoiding capture that day were six U.S. State Department employees who took refuge in the homes of Canadian Embassy officers.

The U.S. Government, with the help of the Canadian Government, developed several major operations to address this national crisis.

Among them was a scheme developed by a small team of CIA disguise and false-documentation specialists to exfiltrate the “Canadian Six” (as they became known) from the country by pretending to be a film productions team scouting for a suitable filming location in Tehran. To help facilitate the rescue, the CIA team set up “Studio Six Productions” and titled its new production “Argo.”

On January 28, 1980, CIA successfully exfiltrated the six U.S. diplomats from Iran.

https://www.cia.gov/legacy/museum/exhibit/rescue-of-the-canadian-six-n-a-classic-case-of-deception/

From our Intelligence Art Gallery, this painting titled “ARGO” depicts Tony Mendez (a CIA Trailblazer) creating items for the daring mission.

2001: JAWBREAKER

In the aftermath of the tragic terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush ordered CIA Director George Tenet to launch operations against the al-Qa’ida terrorist organization and its Taliban supporters in Afghanistan.

This order called for the CIA to collect real-time, actionable intelligence to help shape the battlefield and to use all means to target al-Qa’ida.

On September 26, 2001, within 15 days of the attacks on U.S. soil, the first team of Americans—the CIA officers of Operation JAWBREAKER—were on the ground and operating in Afghanistan.

https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/cias-mi-17-helicopter-comes-home/

Following the September 11 attacks, CIA was first on Afghan ground to target al-Qa’ida. The specialized teams endured hostile conditions to carry out their operations.

2011: Abbottabad Mission

On May 1, 2011, a U.S. military raid on an al-Qa’ida compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, killed Usama Bin Ladin, America’s most wanted terrorist.

The mission’s success was the culmination of many years of complex, thorough, and highly advanced intelligence operations and analyses led by the CIA with support from partners across the Intelligence Community.

The operation, authorized by President Barak Obama on April 29, was a surgical raid by a small team of special operations forces designed to minimize collateral damage and to pose as little risk as possible to noncombatants on the compound or to Pakistani civilians in the neighborhood. In the aftermath, Bin Ladin was positively identified via several independent means.

https://www.cia.gov/legacy/museum/exhibit/the-final-chapter-in-the-hunt-for-bin-ladin/

An illustrated diagram of the Abbottabad Compound.

14. The Queen’s Diplomacy

Although we are at Royal reporting saturation this may be worth a skim.

Excerpts:

In her support for the Commonwealth, the queen showed her considerable skill in reinventing the monarchy for a postimperial world. Yet in doing so, she also showed the limitations of royal influence. Perhaps by its nature, a monarchy is not the best constitutional framework for encouraging a more egalitarian society, and although the United Kingdom is a far less stratified country than it was 70 years ago, it remains a deeply divided one. An arguably greater problem lay in the queen’s tendency to present the United Kingdom’s relations with Commonwealth member states as a universal good, while making no similarly sustained personal effort to reconcile the country to its membership in the European Union. This was despite the strong links between the royal family and Europe, and the fact that the queen herself spoke fluent French, her husband, fluent German. Of course, British membership in the EU was politically contentious. But so, for periods of her reign, was the persistence of the Commonwealth. The queen remained properly neutral during the 2016 Brexit referendum, despite the attempts of some tabloids to draw her in. But by then, arguably, popular opinion had been allowed to drift for too long.

It is a further irony that Brexit may lead to the breakup of another entity that was close to the queen’s heart: the Union of the United Kingdom. The divorce from Brussels has given fresh momentum to the Scottish independence movement. (A majority of Scots voted against leaving the EU.) It has also created a new EU border across the island of Ireland, leading to a special status for Northern Ireland that may, in turn, encourage closer integration of the island’s north and south—and, ultimately, reunification between Belfast and Dublin. But if the British public is beginning to feel sellers’ remorse over the decision to leave the EU, the blame can hardly be said to lie with the queen. She was in almost every respect a textbook case of what a constitutional monarch should be in both domestic and international affairs: above party politics.

The Queen’s Diplomacy

Why the Commonwealth May Be Elizabeth II’s Greatest—and Most Fragile—Legacy

By Philip Murphy

September 10, 2022

Foreign Affairs · by Philip Murphy · September 10, 2022

There are few points of comparison for a head of state who remains in office for seven decades. In June 2022, Queen Elizabeth II, who died on September 8, surpassed even Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej to become the longest-reigning monarch in the industrial era. Only Louis XIV of France, who ruled for 72 years in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, spent more time on the throne. All the more remarkable, during these decades as sovereign she weathered extraordinary upheavals in British foreign policy—from decolonization to the war on terror, from the rise of the European Union to Brexit—that few could have anticipated when she became queen in 1952.

But the queen’s reign was as distinctive for its geographical scope as for its chronological span. At her death, the queen ruled over 15 so-called realms, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and a handful of countries in the Caribbean and the Pacific—the remaining parts of the Commonwealth of Nations, or simply the British Commonwealth, that had retained her as their sovereign. Over the course of her reign, she had also been head of state of 32 independent countries across the globe. In 2021, Barbados joined 16 other states, including Ceylon, Ghana, Pakistan, and Trinidad and Tobago, which during her reign spent a period as independent Commonwealth realms before making the transition to republics.

These changes are themselves symptomatic of the tectonic shifts in the United Kingdom’s geopolitical status that took place under her watch. In 1952, the country was still basking in the afterglow of its moral and military triumph in World War II. Queen Elizabeth was surrounded at her coronation by her first prime minister, Winston Churchill, and other architects of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany, who rather hubristically hoped her reign would usher in a new era of British global leadership. Over the next two decades, the opposite would happen: the United Kingdom lost most of what remained of an empire that at its height covered a quarter of the earth’s surface. With an economy devastated by war, it struggled both to pay for its worldwide defense commitments and to defend the pound sterling as a leading international currency. The United Kingdom was increasingly relegated to a supporting role in a superpower struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union and seemed uncertain whether its future lay with Europe or the Atlantic alliance.

But then there was the Commonwealth. To most observers, this loose organization was little more than the faint impression left on the globe after the British Empire dissolved. In fact, its history was more complicated and its function more significant. For the queen, the Commonwealth gradually became a defining mission, a way for the United Kingdom to reassert its influence and leadership in the face of decolonization and diminished military and economic power. At its best, the Commonwealth served to shape and even amplify British foreign policy. Among the challenges now facing King Charles III is helping to secure the survival of this entity at a time when the monarchy itself, even as a symbol, appears increasingly anachronistic.

Political Change, Palace Preservation

To many observers, the queen’s affection for, and frequent championing of, the Commonwealth was slightly curious. Apart from members of the Commonwealth’s various governmental and nongovernmental organizations, the queen was one of the few people who would casually slip the word “commonwealth” into a sentence, as though it had an obvious physical presence in the world, like a bank or a grocery store. To most people, the Commonwealth was barely visible, if at all. To understand her attachment to it, it is necessary to look more closely at how the entity developed, as well as the House of Windsor’s pivotal role in the British Empire that preceded it.

The United Kingdom’s imperial legacy shaped Elizabeth’s rule from the start. Commentators have repeatedly referred, for example, to the pledge of service she made to the nation in a broadcast from South Africa on her 21st birthday, in 1947. The precise words she used are worth recalling. She promised listeners: “My whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great Imperial family to which we all belong.” As the historian David Edgerton has recently argued, the United Kingdom did not acquire the full trappings of a modern nation until the second half of the twentieth century. Before that, it was essentially the core of an empire: the royal family was at its apex, and reflecting the class-bound nature of British society, London envisaged the empire in strictly hierarchical terms. When the queen’s coronation was being planned, the Colonial Office was asked to rank in order of precedence all 300 guests to Westminster Abbey from the colonial territories. At that point, although the United Kingdom had already relinquished its South Asian empire, British officials still expected that most of the remaining colonial territories would stay under British control for decades to come. When it quickly became clear that this would not happen, the queen needed a new way to sustain the royal family’s central role in the British state. The Commonwealth provided an appealing answer.

The queen needed a new way to sustain the royal family’s central role in the British state.

In fact, the Commonwealth was already taking shape in the early twentieth century. Between the wars, the self-governing parts of the British Empire—the so-called dominions of Australia, Canada, the Irish Free State, Newfoundland, New Zealand, and South Africa—asserted their constitutional autonomy from the United Kingdom, and the term “commonwealth,” which was first coined in the 1880s, was increasingly applied to this group. World War II tested the limits of these countries’ independence from British control, with the Irish Free State (which left the Commonwealth in 1949) remaining neutral and South Africa, where there was considerable sympathy for Germany, hesitating before entering the conflict on the Allied side. Following the war, India and Pakistan also joined the Commonwealth, and in 1949, British and Indian diplomats came up with a formula that allowed India to remain in the Commonwealth as a republic, thus removing the one factor that had hitherto bound member states together: common allegiance to the crown. The agreement entailed India recognizing George VI not as its sovereign but in the ill-defined role of “head of the Commonwealth.”

For Queen Elizabeth, who ascended the throne three years later, this agreement would be a means to modernize the monarchy. For one thing, in contrast to her father, who bitterly regretted the loss of his title of emperor of India, she enthusiastically embraced the advent of the “new” Commonwealth ushered in by Indian independence. Buckingham Palace kept a healthy distance from the futile efforts of British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, who sought to topple Egypt’s General Abdel Nasser during the Suez Crisis of 1956 and thus end his anticolonial influence in Africa and the Middle East. And the queen made clear that she did not resent the political forces that pushed British colonies in Africa and the Caribbean to seek independence in the 1960s and 1970s. She seems to have fully subscribed to the “official” explanation that this process was the natural outcome of enlightened British tutelage (despite that fact that, early in her reign, the United Kingdom had conducted brutal counterinsurgency campaigns in Cyprus, Kenya, and Malaya).

Indeed, the monarchy was not even inclined to fight a rear-guard action to dissuade countries that had become independent as “realms” from then making the further transition to republics. In recent years, many analysts have speculated about what would happen in the remaining realms when the queen died. But change was already afoot in the Caribbean in the final years of her reign, with Barbados’s decision to renounce the monarchy and become a republic in 2021. Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Belize, and Jamaica seem likely to follow. Yet throughout the queen’s reign, the palace has always been adamant that as a constitutional monarch, she could not be embarrassed by political changes in her realms so long as they took place by constitutional means. What mattered to her was that they remained a part of the Commonwealth. In this light, Charles’s visit to Barbados to represent her at the ceremony marking the country’s transition to a republic was a powerful signal of continuity.

Less Empire, More Friends

Most notably, the queen turned the title of head of the Commonwealth—an abstract diplomatic construct created to keep a democratic India loosely in the British orbit—into something far more tangible. She did so by a steady series of gradual accretions over the course of her reign: she visited almost all the Commonwealth’s member states; supported the Commonwealth Games and the annual Commonwealth Day service in Westminster Abbey; attended countless meetings with heads of government; and even made a royal palace, Marlborough House, available to the Commonwealth as its headquarters. She also augmented the conventional diplomatic role of European monarchs—participating in inward and outward state visits—by cultivating warm personal relations with many Commonwealth leaders, which sometimes stretched over generations. In doing so, she eased the process of losing an empire for the United Kingdom and won it friends around the world.

Independence movements were the natural outcome of enlightened British tutelage.

Some of her diplomatic achievements were noteworthy. The crusade against South African apartheid was a signature issue for the Commonwealth in the 1970s and 1980s, and the queen sometimes appeared more inclined to side with many member states than with her own prime ministers, some of whom seemed unduly close to the South African government. When, in 1986, a boycott of the Commonwealth Games was threatened by countries who disapproved of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s opposition to economic sanctions against South Africa, the queen’s press secretary briefed The Sunday Times about the queen’s own concerns about Thatcher, in what appeared to be a signal to the rest of the Commonwealth that the queen was on their side. Since the British Empire turned Commonwealth was by its nature multiethnic, multicultural, and multireligious, the queen sought to emulate that diversity at home. By making a point of meeting community and religious groups from the country’s ethnic minorities—she was the first British monarch to visit a mosque in the United Kingdom—she strove to make the United Kingdom a more welcoming place for newcomers, as mass immigration from the Commonwealth gathered pace from in the second half of the twentieth century.

But the queen was not able to escape the larger reality that, particularly in later decades, the Commonwealth did not have a clearly defined political purpose. Ironically, the advent of majority rule in South Africa in the 1990s, although it was a victory for the Commonwealth, robbed it of the issue that had given it international diplomatic prominence. At the same time, the end of the Cold War meant that the Commonwealth lost its value as a way for the British government to keep open friendly channels of communication with countries that might have been in danger of coming under Soviet influence. In recent years, attempts to reinvent the Commonwealth as a “values based” organization have faltered, not least because many member states have fallen far short of the Commonwealth’s purported standards on issues of democracy and human rights. Poor leadership and growing doubts about the value of the organization’s activities have meant that, increasingly, it has only tended to be regarded as newsworthy if a story about it has a royal angle. Since the 1990s, the monarchy has increasingly seemed like a life-support system for the Commonwealth; hence the decision in 2018 to name Charles as its next head. If the organization does ultimately collapse, it will be despite the queen’s best efforts.

The Limits of Monarchy

In her support for the Commonwealth, the queen showed her considerable skill in reinventing the monarchy for a postimperial world. Yet in doing so, she also showed the limitations of royal influence. Perhaps by its nature, a monarchy is not the best constitutional framework for encouraging a more egalitarian society, and although the United Kingdom is a far less stratified country than it was 70 years ago, it remains a deeply divided one. An arguably greater problem lay in the queen’s tendency to present the United Kingdom’s relations with Commonwealth member states as a universal good, while making no similarly sustained personal effort to reconcile the country to its membership in the European Union. This was despite the strong links between the royal family and Europe, and the fact that the queen herself spoke fluent French, her husband, fluent German. Of course, British membership in the EU was politically contentious. But so, for periods of her reign, was the persistence of the Commonwealth. The queen remained properly neutral during the 2016 Brexit referendum, despite the attempts of some tabloids to draw her in. But by then, arguably, popular opinion had been allowed to drift for too long.

It is a further irony that Brexit may lead to the breakup of another entity that was close to the queen’s heart: the Union of the United Kingdom. The divorce from Brussels has given fresh momentum to the Scottish independence movement. (A majority of Scots voted against leaving the EU.) It has also created a new EU border across the island of Ireland, leading to a special status for Northern Ireland that may, in turn, encourage closer integration of the island’s north and south—and, ultimately, reunification between Belfast and Dublin. But if the British public is beginning to feel sellers’ remorse over the decision to leave the EU, the blame can hardly be said to lie with the queen. She was in almost every respect a textbook case of what a constitutional monarch should be in both domestic and international affairs: above party politics.

• PHILIP MURPHY is Director of History and Policy at the Institute of Historical Research, London, and the author of Monarchy and the End of Empire: The House of Windsor, the British Government, and the Postwar Commonwealth.

Foreign Affairs · by Philip Murphy · September 10, 2022

15. Ukrainian Forces Take Key City, Igniting New Phase in War

Ukrainian Forces Take Key City, Igniting New Phase in War

nytimes.com · September 10, 2022

Here’s what we know:

Russia’s Defense Ministry confirmed its forces had withdrawn from Izium. Ukraine’s lightning offensive in the northeast has reshaped what had become a grinding war of attrition.

• Ukraine drives Russian forces out of Izium, a strategic railway hub in the northeast.
• These maps show how Ukraine is rapidly advancing around Izium.
• The southern counteroffensive has been a battle of river crossings. So far, Ukraine has advanced.
• Rebuilding Ukraine will cost at least $349 billion, a new report estimates.
• Russians vote for the first time since the invasion.

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian forces entered the key Russian military stronghold of Izium on Saturday, continuing their rapid advance across the northeast and igniting a dramatic new phase in the more than six-month war.

“Izium was liberated today,” the city’s mayor, Valeriy Marchenko, said in an interview. While he was not yet in the city himself, he said that he was in contact with the police and that emergency services were working to clear it of possible hazards before residents could return.

Russia’s Ministry of Defense — which a day earlier had said that it was moving to reinforce its defensive positions in the region — confirmed on Saturday that it had pulled its forces out of Izium, six months after its forces laid siege to and then seized the city. In a statement, it presented the retreat as a preplanned move, intended to strengthen its efforts in the east where its army has been bogged down for weeks.

Maintaining control of towns and cities has at times proven tenuous over the course of the war, and it was not immediately clear how secure Ukraine’s control over Izium was and what efforts Russia might take to try to win it back.

But the loss of Izium — a strategically important railway hub that Russian forces seized in March after a bloody weekslong battle — could mark a turning point in the war, dwarfed only by Russia’s humiliating defeat around the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, in the spring.

The first signs that Russian forces would retreat rather than fight emerged late on Friday.

“Yesterday evening, Russians put a white flag nearby the railway station,” Yevhen, a Ukrainian officer who participated in the liberation of Izium, said in a telephone interview. “There was street fighting all over the night.” He asked to be identified by only his first name out of concerns for his security.

Much about the Ukrainian offensive in the Kharkiv region, where Izium is, was shrouded in uncertainty amid a lack of official confirmation, and military analysts cautioned that it was a fast-moving situation that could change by the hour.

But the lightning offensive in the country’s northeast has reshaped what had become a grinding war of attrition. In a matter of days, Russian front lines have buckled, Moscow’s troops have fled and one village after another has come once more beneath Ukraine’s yellow and blue banner — like the town of Kupiansk just north of Izium, which sits on key supply routes to the eastern front line.

Ukraine’s Security Service later posted a photo on Telegram showing members of the special forces in Kupiansk.

“We move further!” the post read, according to the Ukrinform news agency.

As Ukrainian officials celebrated the turn of events, however cautiously, some prominent pro-Kremlin military bloggers expressed anger and frustration at the rapid developments.

A Russian military blogger, who goes by the name Rusich, has 278,000 followers on Telegram and claimed to be in the city on Friday, wrote that the surrender of Izium was a “small setback” and urged his followers not to “despair.”

With the Russians out of towns and cities they had battered in order to seize, the cost of their monthslong occupation was just starting to come into focus. Ukrainian officials said they had dispatched investigators to newly liberated towns to begin compiling evidence of Russian war crimes.

In his overnight address, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said the military had recaptured more than 30 settlements in the Kharkiv region.

“Actions to check and secure the territory continue,” he said. “We are gradually taking control of new settlements.”

The eastern offensive, which began earlier this week, has cleared Russian forces from more than 2,500 square kilometers of land in the Kharkiv region as of Friday, according to an estimate by the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank.

“There is still a lot that we don’t know about the offensive, but it is clear this was well planned and executed by Ukrainian forces,” said Rob Lee, a military analyst at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “It looks like a very effective combined arms operation with tanks, mechanized infantry, Special Operations forces, air defenses, artillery and other systems.”

Ukrainian and Western officials cautioned that the offensive operations were in their early days, that the situation was fluid and that any gains were far from secure. Some military analysts warned that the Ukrainians’ rapid advance could leave them stretched thin and vulnerable to counterattack.

In addition to the counteroffensive in the northeast, Ukraine has been making a push in the south to recapture territory in the Kherson region.

Mr. Marchenko, the mayor of Izium, said that about 12,000 residents had remained in the city and desperately needed humanitarian supplies.

He said he hoped that residents who had fled could start returning in three or four days but that devastation awaited them.

“There’s no single residential building that wasn’t damaged,” the mayor said.

“Heating is the biggest problem,” he added. “I doubt whether we would be able to restore the heating system before winter.”

Ukraine’s military made significant advances in recent days near the northeastern city of Izium, a key Russian stronghold, according to military analysts and geolocated photos and videos. The breakthrough — possibly some 50 kilometers in just a few days — threatened to encircle Russian forces, which appeared to be caught by surprise.

The progress of the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the east, paired with slower, more limited gains in the south, represents some of the most significant changes to the front lines of the war in months.

The exact positions of Ukrainian forces around Izium could not be independently confirmed. The Russian military released a video with what it said were reinforcements headed to the Kharkiv area, but it has not made detailed statements about the status of the fighting.

But military analysts, satellite detections and photos and videos of Ukrainian forces indicate that they moved rapidly east toward Kupiansk in recent days, possibly getting close to the outskirts of the city.

• Ukraine’s Gains: Ukrainian forces appear to have scored the most significant battlefield gains since April by reclaiming territory in the northeast, in a rapid advance that took Russian troops by surprise.
• Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant: After United Nations inspectors visited the Russian-controlled facility last week amid shelling and fears of a looming nuclear disaster, the organization released a report calling for Russia and Ukraine to halt all military activity around the complex.
• U.S. Aid: During a surprise visit to Kyiv, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken pledged $2.8 billion in military aid for Ukraine and other countries at risk of Russian invasion.
• The Road to Rebuilding: With a major conference on post-war reconstruction scheduled for next month, Ukraine’s allies face complicated questions about the process and the oversight of the funds.

KHERSON REGION, Ukraine — The pontoon bridge had been in place for barely a day. The Ukrainian Army rushed to move troops and equipment across. Then the soldiers watched on a drone video feed as the Russians blew up their bridge, yet again.

“Yes, they hit the bridge,” the drone pilot said matter-of-factly, peering at images beamed in from a safe distance, a mile or so away.

The soldiers shrugged. It was no great loss.

The Ukrainians would soon build another bridge, across the slender, slow-flowing Inhulets River in southern Ukraine, to replace the one destroyed by the Russians. It’s a cycle that repeats itself daily: the Ukrainian Army builds pontoon bridges across the river as it tries to advance in the Kherson region, only to see them blown up.

“We build them, they blow them up,” said Col. Roman Kostenko, the commander of the troops stationed here. “They build them, we blow them up.”

The Ukrainian troops had reason to be confident on this day. Fighting in the pale, late-summer sunshine across hundreds of miles of front line, the Ukrainian Army has broken through Russian positions, recaptured some villages and taken prisoners in its most significant counteroffensive since Russian forces withdrew from northern Ukraine last winter.

While it is early to gauge the full extent of the army’s gains, videos, witness accounts and some Russian reports have all pointed to Ukrainian momentum, including in this spot. It is one of two bulges Ukraine’s forces have created by pushing into Russian lines in the past week; the other is north of the city of Izium in eastern Ukraine.

Building bridges and destroying the enemy’s, however unglamorous, low-tech and old-school as a military art, has nonetheless become a central tool for both sides in Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the south.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused more than $97 billion in damage, and the cost of rebuilding the country has reached an estimated $349 billion, according to a joint assessment issued Friday by the World Bank, the European Commission and Ukraine’s government.

The report estimated that Ukraine had suffered $252 billion in “aggregate losses,” which it said included economic disruptions and other costs of the conflict. Ukraine’s economy contracted sharply, the report said, with its gross domestic product showing a year-over-year decline of 15.1 percent at the end of the first quarter.

The authors of the report said their assessment covered the period from the start of the Russian invasion on Feb. 24 through June 1. “Given the progress of the war since that date,” they wrote, “the extent of damage, losses and needs is clearly larger as of the date of publication.”

Anna Bjerde, the World Bank’s regional vice president for Europe and Central Asia, said in a statement that the invasion continued “to exact a terrible toll, from significant civilian casualties and the displacement of millions of people to the widespread destruction of homes, businesses, social institutions, and economic activity.”

Ukraine’s government, Ms. Bjerde said, “now faces the difficult task of balancing recovery with the country’s immediate needs, including core public services, such as health, education and social protection, which are critical to preventing further deterioration in living conditions and poverty in Ukraine.”

An international conference is scheduled for next month in Berlin to grapple with complicated questions about Ukraine’s reconstruction, including who should pay for what, who should control the process and what kind of external oversight should be required.

The Washington-based German Marshall Fund recommended in a report on Wednesday that the Group of 7 industrialized nations appoint a Ukraine coordinator to oversee reconstruction, ideally an American with global stature; that existing institutions be used for the project to ensure timeliness; and that different multilateral financial institutions be used, to limit the influence of Russian or Chinese board members. The report also says that Ukraine must accept strict oversight of the funds, and must strengthen its legal and judicial systems, to reduce the potential for corruption.

MOSCOW — Russians began voting on Friday in the first nationwide elections since the invasion of Ukraine, as the Kremlin tried to assure the public that it was business as usual despite a climate of wartime censorship and repression.

The vote for local and regional governments across the country includes the first municipal-level elections in Moscow, the capital, since 2017, when the opposition won a sizable minority of seats despite the Kremlin’s dominance of the political system and accusations of fraud. But the ranks of the opposition have since been depleted as anti-government politicians have fled the country and others have been arrested or blocked from running.

Although President Vladimir V. Putin has dominated Russian politics for two decades, he has long relied on elections with a semblance of competition to try to legitimize the rule of his United Russia party. And while those elections were rife with fraud, the vote-counting process in major cities like Moscow retained a modicum of transparency, making them an opportunity for Kremlin critics to express their discontent even if a major opposition victory was virtually impossible.

After the upheaval in Russia’s economy from inflation and international sanctions over the war in Ukraine, the question is whether that logic still holds. Mr. Putin has done everything in his power, critics say, to prevent his opponents from being able to repeat even their modest success of five years ago.

“Finally for the first time, elections are totally senseless,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace based in Moscow. Almost no one is allowed to participate, he added, referring to the opposition.

The elections, which are being held over three days on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, are also a test of the jailed opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny’s ability to influence Russian politics from prison.

Despite the Russian authorities’ crackdown on the opposition, some low-profile critics of the Kremlin and of the Ukraine war remain on the ballot. And while they are unlikely to win, Mr. Navalny’s advisers said they believed the Kremlin would be hard-pressed to paper over a strong showing by some of them that would convey disapproval of the war.

“It is very difficult for Moscow to organize some kind of total falsification system at polling stations,” one exiled adviser to Mr. Navalny, Vladimir Milov, said in a phone interview from Vilnius, Lithuania. “I see great enthusiasm from activists, candidates and many voters, and even in these conditions, they want to do something.”

GENEVA — United Nations human rights monitors said on Friday that Russia was denying them access to detention sites where they have found increasing evidence of torture of Ukrainian prisoners of war that may amount to war crimes.

Prisoners arriving at some detention sites faced a “welcome process” in which they were forced to run the gantlet between two lines of guards who beat them severely as they passed, said Matilda Bogner, the head of the U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine. Some prisoners were targeted for further beatings, Ms. Bogner said.

The torture and ill-treatment of prisoners, if proved, “could rise to being war crimes,” she said, speaking by video link from Odesa, Ukraine.

At some Russian detention sites, conditions pose a dire threat to prisoners’ health, Ms. Bogner added, saying that there were reports of inadequate food, water or sanitation. She cited in particular a penal colony at Olenivka, in Russian-controlled territory in eastern Ukraine, where she said there had been reports of prisoners grappling with infectious diseases like tuberculosis and hepatitis A.

Dmitri Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, declined to comment on the U.N. statement, saying he did not have sufficient information on the interactions between the U.N. team and the Russian authorities on the ground, according to a Reuters report.

At least 416 people have been arbitrarily detained or forcibly disappeared in territory controlled by Russian forces since the invasion in February, according to the U.N. monitoring mission, which added that 16 of these people had been found dead and 166 had been released.

Ukrainian forces have also tortured prisoners, usually at the time of their capture, during initial interrogations or in the process of transporting them to camps, Ms. Bogner said, adding that these actions may also amount to war crimes. The Ukrainian authorities had allowed U.N. monitors full access to detention centers across the country, where they visited 160 prisoners of war, she said. But except in one camp that appeared to meet international standards, she said most prisoners were detained in cells, violating rules that say prisoners should not be held in close confinement.

Ms. Bogner also expressed concerns over a sharp deterioration of conditions in Crimea, where she reported tighter restrictions on freedom of expression and rising cases of torture, ill-treatment, enforced disappearances and arbitrary detention.

U.N. monitors had documented the prosecution of more than 80 people in the Russian-held peninsula for “public actions directed at discrediting the armed forces of the Russian Federation,” Ms. Bogner said. The authorities there, she said, had imposed sanctions on teachers who did not endorse the war, arrested and prosecuted human rights activists and intimidated lawyers.

nytimes.com · September 10, 2022

16. Russia confirms big retreat near Kharkiv as Ukraine offensive advances

Russia confirms big retreat near Kharkiv as Ukraine offensive advances​

By Steve Hendrix, Liz Sly and Robyn Dixon 

September 10, 2022 at 11:07 a.m. EDT​

The Washington Post · by Robyn Dixon · September 10, 2022

Russia’s defense ministry on Saturday admitted its forces had retreated from key towns in northeastern Ukraine after a stunning advance by Ukrainian troops.

The Defense Ministry said it had pulled forces out of the village of Balakliya and the strategically crucial city of Izyum in the Kharkiv region, after a decision to “regroup” and transfer them to Donetsk in the south.”

The retreat represents one of the biggest setbacks for Russia since President Vladimir V. Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February.

“In order to achieve the goals of the special military operation, a decision was made to regroup troops in the areas of Balakliya and Izyum in order to build up efforts in the Donetsk direction,” the Russian military statement said.

Although Russian officials sought to spin the developments — saying “a powerful fire was inflicted on the enemy using aviation, missile troops and artillery” as they withdrew — it was clear their troops were retreating to avoid being encircled. Ukrainian officials said the Russians had left behind equipment and ammunition.

Earlier, the commander leading Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region, Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi, said Ukraine had full control of Balakliya and also controlled part of Kupyansk, an important strategic rail hub seen as crucial to Russia’s war effort in the region.

The Washington Post · by Robyn Dixon · September 10, 2022

17. The Hypnotist in the Kremlin

Excerpts:

Putin, like Mann’s hypnotist, has succeeded in inverting the meaning of words. The invasion of Ukraine is a “liberation” of people and the “return” of territory. Universal human values are “neoliberal totalitarianism” imposed on various nations. The descent into the dark ages in politics, economics, and everyday life is “building a more democratic world.” Although Putin claims to be “fighting Nazism and fascism,” it is Putin’s worldview and practical policies that are dangerously close to those ideologies. Nearly all the elements of these systems are present in the Russian state today: ultranationalism; imperialism; the cult of the leader; an increasingly primitive world view; the sacralization of the state and what Putin calls its “thousand-year history,” full of heroism and victories; the glorification of death for the motherland; state interventions in the economy, politics, the legal system, and the private sector; the imposition of “correct” forms of behavior on the public, including calling on people to denounce those who disagree with the regime; phobias of everything foreign; the battle against “national traitors”; and the designation of groups of second-class citizens as “foreign agents.”

If the West continues to isolate them, there is little hope that Russians will reject Putinism.

In such a place, no rational arguments, no punishments in the form of sanctions and travel bans will work: the portion of the population that intends to hold Putin responsible is not large enough. To the contrary, a large majority of Russians blame the deterioration in their relations with other countries and the decline in their quality of life entirely on the United States and its allies. They believe that people who openly speak out against the regime are undermining the country’s greatness and sabotaging the efforts of those working to affirm it. Even investigations into corruption are seen as anti-Russian. Under this logic, the new iron curtain is being built not by Putin but by the West, which seeks to lock Russians inside their own borders through its sanctions and visa bans. Like Putin, many Russians view Ukraine in imperial terms—as within Russia’s sphere of influence—and regard relations with it as Russia’s internal affair.

Six months after the start of his “special operation,” Putin’s project to build a new authoritarian state on partly totalitarian foundations is politically complete. As long as he is in power, it is highly unlikely that Russia will be able to return to the vector of democratic development. Given how precarious independent thought in Russia has become, it is utterly essential to keep Russian youth connected to the West; otherwise, Putinism will indeed outlive Putin. By maintaining open lines of communication to Russian exiles and helping Russians get access to outside information, the United States and its European partners could at least begin to sway more of those Russians who until now have been largely indifferent, rather than ideologically committed. But if the West continues to isolate Russia, there is little hope that the Russian people will throw off the yoke of Putinism. Not only because half the population doesn’t consider it a yoke but also because such reasoning fails to take into account quite how brutal the Putin regime’s treatment of the country’s many dissenters is.

The hypnotist can keep playing to the crowds, or he can disappear. But the ending of Mario and the Magician, in which the hypnotist is simply shot dead, seems little more than a novelist’s fantasy in today’s Russia—just as it was at the time of emerging dictators, when Mann was writing his novella on the shores of the Baltic Sea.

The Hypnotist in the Kremlin

How Putin Has Used Fear and Disinformation to Neutralize the Russian Public

By Andrei Kolesnikov

September 9, 2022

Foreign Affairs · by Andrei Kolesnikov · September 9, 2022

Situated on the Baltic Coast, the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad is closer to Europe than any other part of Russia. It is surrounded by NATO powers, Poland and Lithuania. A former Prussian territory, it also has a long tradition as a center of European culture. Immanuel Kant walked its streets in the eighteenth century; Thomas Mann wrote a novella there in 1929. Until the war in Ukraine began, the region even had a modicum of integration into European life: Kaliningrad did a brisk trade with Lithuania and Poland, and its residents could enter Polish territory by using a special card.

Now, many of the region’s inhabitants lament the end of cross-border commerce, which has reduced standards of living and cut residents off from many European products. Yet few seem to doubt that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “special operation” in Ukraine is righteous or that neighboring Poland and Lithuania are Russia’s enemies. From a sociological view, this contradiction exemplifies a typical Russian attitude, made all the more stark by Kaliningrad’s geographic location. Take the Curonian Spit, a picturesque coastal land formation that extends from Kaliningrad into Lithuania. According to many locals, the part that belongs to Lithuania is better cared for than the Russian part, just as Polish food is far better than that available in Kaliningrad. Yet this observation is sometimes followed up with an offhand remark: “Once we’ve taken back Ukraine, maybe we’ll take the Lithuanian part of the spit, too.”

For average Kaliningrad residents, diet and values are entirely separate. As they see it, those same Lithuanians who have been convenient everyday business partners are also the ideological minions of the United States. In fact, two core beliefs allow Russians to remain convinced that their leadership and army are in the right: the first is that there was a threat to “their own people”—by which they largely mean Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine—and the second is that responsibility for what is happening in Ukraine lies entirely with the West. According to this view, Putin’s war is a purely symbolic affirmation of Russia’s greatness that has nothing to do with everyday life.

That these contradictory attitudes persist a half year into a conflict that has caused a significant but still not so visible decline in living standards makes it even more important to understand the complex nature of Russian public opinion about the Russian government and about the war. Sociological research that I carried out for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace with Denis Volkov, director of the Levada Center, the independent Moscow-based polling organization, offers new insight into how average Russians think about the war. It also provides a clearer picture of how the regime has been able to manage the population since the war began, as well as of some of the underlying tensions that have begun to emerge in Russian society.

In the 23 years since his de facto accession to power, Putin has not only built a regime of great brutality. He has also succeeded in hypnotizing much of the Russian population to an extent that civil society has been driven largely into the catacombs and his rule appears to be unshakable. Of course, many of the tactics the government has employed—media censorship, ruthless crackdowns on dissent, and rituals of obedience such as raising the flag and singing the national anthem in schools on Mondays—are hardly unique to Russia. As the case of Kaliningrad suggests, however, in few other countries has a regime achieved such a complete repression of a society that had managed to become modernized and even Westernized. For those seeking to further isolate Russia from Europe and the United States through travel bans and visa restrictions, it is essential to understand the nature of this regime-induced hypnosis and where its vulnerabilities lie.

Passive Conformists

To start with, Russian opinion about the war is far more complicated than a cursory study might suggest. Polling by the Levada Center between February and August has consistently shown strong support—70 percent or higher—for the Ukraine war. Similarly, Putin’s general approval rating has increased since the war began, much as it did after the annexation of Crimea in 2014; Western sanctions and travel restrictions have done nothing to change it. Yet a closer look at these figures suggests a society that is increasingly divided about many issues, including attitudes toward the regime.

When asked why they support the “special operation,” for example, Russians offer diverse reasons. In focus groups, some participants express outright support for a war of aggression or claim that Russia had no choice but to invade Ukraine. Alongside these enthusiastic supporters, however, are a smaller group of passive conformists, who show little interest in the war but find it more comfortable to follow the mainstream point of view.

There are more dissenters today than in 2014, but they are silent.

These differences become even more apparent when Russians are asked to describe their feelings about the war. According to a poll conducted in March, a bare majority of respondents—51 percent—said that the military campaign in Ukraine prompted feelings of “pride in Russia” and that they “definitely” support it. But many others had markedly different takes: 19 percent said they felt “fury and outrage,” “shame,” or “depression and despondence”; 31 percent felt “anxiety, fear, and horror”; and 12 percent felt “shock.” Taken together, this range of negative feelings expressed by nearly half of respondents contrasts with 2014, when Russians were overwhelmingly positive about the Crimea annexation.

Perhaps even more striking are what the polls reveal about the level of dissent. In the face of mass detentions and harsh penalties, very few Russians say they are prepared to attend a protest today—just half the number who said they would in 2014. Yet the number of respondents who say they do not agree with Russia’s actions in Ukraine has actually risen slightly, from 14 percent in March to about 17 percent in August. Notably, this figure is almost double the level of dissent during and after the annexation of Crimea: there are more dissenters in Russia today than in 2014. But they have remained virtually silent.

Putin, along with his officials and propagandists, insists that Russians are united in support of the “special military operation” and that Russian society has been fully consolidated. Those who disagree deserve to be branded as pariahs. But these claims are not true: the consolidation is very shaky, and among the roughly 30 percent who “rather” support the operation, many are shocked and hesitant and appear to be simply trying to adapt to the new situation by following the mainstream. Some have done so out of fear; others because they have no opinion of their own and prefer to borrow Putin’s. This is called status quo bias or anticipatory obedience.

Putin vs. the Truth

The visa restrictions that European governments have proposed are unlikely to turn Russians against the regime. Citing the high support for the war among ordinary Russians, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, as well as a number of European leaders, has called for strict travel restrictions to punish the Russian population. But as the popular response to European pressure campaigns over the last six months has shown, such measures seem likely to instead reinforce support for Putin and the war. And by building new barriers between Russians and the West, these restrictions could make it even easier for the Russian government to shape the narrative it wants about the war.

Rather than further cutting off ordinary Russians from the outside world, Europe and the United States might accomplish much more by doing the opposite: helping Russians have greater access to outside information sources. With the Russian state now wielding almost total control over Russia-based media, it is crucial to preserve alternative sources of information, especially via YouTube, which has not yet been blocked in Russia and which offers viewers access to video content from the team of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny and from former hosts of the independent radio station Echo Moskvy and Dozhd TV, which were shut down after the war began. Other important sources include Telegram chat app channels, as well as independent media sites and streams that are blocked in Russia but can still be accessed by means of a VPN, including, for instance, Novaya Gazeta Europe—founded in Latvia by Novaya Gazeta journalists who fled Russia—The New Times, and Russian investigative outlets such as the Riga-based Vazhnye Istorii and The Insider.

Members of Russia’s Presidential Regiment, at the Kremlin, Moscow, April 2019

Maxim Shemetov / Reuters

Some European governments and influencers have questioned whether Russian journalists, analysts, activists, and academics deserve to live in the West. In doing so, they fail to fully understand how vital it is to enable representatives of banned and exiled Russian media to continue publishing and broadcasting from abroad. In many cases, the information they provide has become the only Russian-language alternative to Russian state propaganda, which is now the sole source of information for many average Russians.

Truth is now one of the main threats to the Putin regime, which has built itself on the indifference and ignorance of ordinary Russians. Moscow’s information front is almost as important as its military front running through Ukraine. By July 2022, Roskomsvoboda, a resource set up to track blocked information online, had recorded more than 5,300 sites and links that had been barred. Meanwhile, Russia’s prosecutor general recently announced that 138,000 websites and URLs have been subject to military censorship. Journalists have been fined and prosecuted for disseminating “fake news” about the army and “discrediting” the armed forces; in early September, the journalist Ivan Safronov was sentenced to 22 years in prison for his reporting on the Russian military and Russian arms deals.

Of course, for those Levada Center poll respondents—about half—who are active and aggressive conformists, accurate information about the war is “fake news.” Most likely, many of them do not perceive foreign reporting as “fake” but rather as a threat because it helps the enemy. They will not be swayed by more such information. Many other Russians, however—those who are passive conformists or largely indifferent—seem far less wedded to the official narrative. Should the power of official media and television be weakened, those in this segment of the population may begin to change their minds about the “special operation” and their own government. But to do so, they must have access to alternative sources of information and analysis. Certainly, many of Russia’s political and business elites are educated enough to understand what is true and what is a lie.

Breaking the Spell

As Kaliningrad’s own cultural history suggests, the techniques that Putin has used to render the Russian population passive and reinforce his rule are not new and are typical for authoritarian regimes. In August 1929, Thomas Mann wrote the novella Mario and the Magician while vacationing in the Prussian coastal resort of Rauschen—today the Russian town of Svetlogorsk. The novella tells the story of the hypnotist Cipolla, who conducts experiments on spectators, including a “gentleman from Rome” who allows himself to be experimented on while deliberately resisting hypnosis. The gentleman is nonetheless hypnotized and dances at the hypnotist’s command. The lesson is clear: explaining the meaning of his novella, Mann wrote that simply rejecting something, without taking action against it, may not be enough to retain the “idea of freedom.” To the contrary, in exercising passive rejection, a victim may allow himself to fall prey to the hypnotist’s spell. The political meaning of Mann’s story—the subjugation of a passive population by a dictator—was too unsubtle for its time. The novella was immediately banned in fascist Italy.

Putin, like Mann’s hypnotist, has succeeded in inverting the meaning of words. The invasion of Ukraine is a “liberation” of people and the “return” of territory. Universal human values are “neoliberal totalitarianism” imposed on various nations. The descent into the dark ages in politics, economics, and everyday life is “building a more democratic world.” Although Putin claims to be “fighting Nazism and fascism,” it is Putin’s worldview and practical policies that are dangerously close to those ideologies. Nearly all the elements of these systems are present in the Russian state today: ultranationalism; imperialism; the cult of the leader; an increasingly primitive world view; the sacralization of the state and what Putin calls its “thousand-year history,” full of heroism and victories; the glorification of death for the motherland; state interventions in the economy, politics, the legal system, and the private sector; the imposition of “correct” forms of behavior on the public, including calling on people to denounce those who disagree with the regime; phobias of everything foreign; the battle against “national traitors”; and the designation of groups of second-class citizens as “foreign agents.”

If the West continues to isolate them, there is little hope that Russians will reject Putinism.

In such a place, no rational arguments, no punishments in the form of sanctions and travel bans will work: the portion of the population that intends to hold Putin responsible is not large enough. To the contrary, a large majority of Russians blame the deterioration in their relations with other countries and the decline in their quality of life entirely on the United States and its allies. They believe that people who openly speak out against the regime are undermining the country’s greatness and sabotaging the efforts of those working to affirm it. Even investigations into corruption are seen as anti-Russian. Under this logic, the new iron curtain is being built not by Putin but by the West, which seeks to lock Russians inside their own borders through its sanctions and visa bans. Like Putin, many Russians view Ukraine in imperial terms—as within Russia’s sphere of influence—and regard relations with it as Russia’s internal affair.

Six months after the start of his “special operation,” Putin’s project to build a new authoritarian state on partly totalitarian foundations is politically complete. As long as he is in power, it is highly unlikely that Russia will be able to return to the vector of democratic development. Given how precarious independent thought in Russia has become, it is utterly essential to keep Russian youth connected to the West; otherwise, Putinism will indeed outlive Putin. By maintaining open lines of communication to Russian exiles and helping Russians get access to outside information, the United States and its European partners could at least begin to sway more of those Russians who until now have been largely indifferent, rather than ideologically committed. But if the West continues to isolate Russia, there is little hope that the Russian people will throw off the yoke of Putinism. Not only because half the population doesn’t consider it a yoke but also because such reasoning fails to take into account quite how brutal the Putin regime’s treatment of the country’s many dissenters is.

The hypnotist can keep playing to the crowds, or he can disappear. But the ending of Mario and the Magician, in which the hypnotist is simply shot dead, seems little more than a novelist’s fantasy in today’s Russia—just as it was at the time of emerging dictators, when Mann was writing his novella on the shores of the Baltic Sea.

ANDREI KOLESNIKOV is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Foreign Affairs · by Andrei Kolesnikov · September 9, 2022

18. U.S. Military Aid to Ukraine Grows to Historic Proportions — Along With Risks

Excerpts:

A spokesperson for the State Department wrote in an email to The Intercept that the U.S. is the largest provider of security assistance to Ukraine and has “quickly provided an historic levels [sic] of weapons and equipment that Ukraine’s forces have been using effectively to defend their democracy against Russia’s unprovoked war.”

“Diplomacy is the only way to end this conflict, but Russia has shown no signs that it is willing to seriously engage in negotiations,” the spokesperson added. “We remain committed to supporting a diplomatic settlement and we are currently focused on strengthening Ukraine’s hand as much as possible on the battlefield so that when the time comes, Ukraine has as much leverage as possible at the negotiating table.”

The Defense Department and the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which works to further U.S. defense and foreign policy goals by building foreign partners’ capacity, did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

...

Ultimately, critics warn, flooding Ukraine with weapons faster than officials can monitor them presents risks whose full impact won’t be known for years. And while most agree there is a moral imperative to support Ukrainian defense against Russia’s aggression, they note that sending military assistance alone, and boosting military spending across the board, only sets the stage for more conflict.

“If the U.S. is going to send weapons to Ukraine, it has to be in the service of ending the conflict as quickly as possible to prevent further bloodshed.”

“If the U.S. is going to send weapons to Ukraine, it has to be in the service of ending the conflict as quickly as possible to prevent further bloodshed. … There has to be ruthless pursuit of diplomatic engagement, and the Biden administration hasn’t signaled that it’s interested in diplomacy,” said Semler, who also noted that while Ukraine aid is a fraction of the U.S. defense budget, the endless trickle of military assistance risks drumming up support for a broader increase for military spending that is already at historic levels.

“They say, ‘Ukraine needs help, that’s money for us,’ and then, ‘The overall budget needs increasing, because look at Putin, Poland is next, Finland is next, the U.S. has to be prepared,” he added, referring to defense officials. “There’s a moral case for sending weapons [to Ukraine], but as a practical matter, in terms of actually ending the conflict, I just don’t see the effort going in.”

U.S. Military Aid to Ukraine Grows to Historic Proportions — Along With Risks

Ukraine is on track to become the largest recipient of U.S military assistance in the last century. But questions surround the policy.

Alice Speri

September 10 2022, 7:00 a.m.

The Intercept · by Alice Speri · September 10, 2022

Since Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February, the U.S. government has pumped more money and weapons into supporting the Ukrainian military than it sent in 2020 to Afghanistan, Israel, and Egypt combined — surpassing in a matter of months three of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid in history.

Keeping track of the numbers is challenging. Since the war started, U.S. officials have announced a flurry of initiatives aimed at supporting Ukrainian defense efforts while keeping short of a more direct involvement in the conflict. On Thursday, on a surprise visit to Kyiv, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced a new $675 million package of U.S. military equipment as well as a $2.2 billion “long-term” investment to bolster the security of Ukraine and 17 of its neighbor countries. Weeks earlier, President Joe Biden unveiled a $3 billion aid package, the largest yet, symbolically choosing Ukraine’s Independence Day for the announcement. The administration noted on that occasion that the total military assistance committed to Ukraine this year had reached $12.9 billion, more than $15.5 billion since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea. And this month, Biden also asked Congress to authorize an additional $13.7 billion for Ukraine, including money for equipment and intelligence.

Because the assistance is drawn from a variety of sources — and because it’s not always easy to distinguish between aid that’s been authorized, pledged, or delivered — some analysts estimate the true figure of the U.S. commitment to Ukraine is much higher: up to $40 billion in security assistance, or $110 million a day over the last year. What is clear is that the volume and speed of the assistance headed to Ukraine is unprecedented, and that legislators and observers are struggling to keep up.

“There is a range of funding sources, including Presidential Drawdown Authority, Foreign Military Financing, and the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative,” Ari Tolany, U.S. program manager at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, told The Intercept. “It’s been tricky to trace what materiel is coming from where.”

I’m in

Analysts estimate that Ukraine, already the largest recipient of U.S. security assistance in Europe since 2014, is well on track to become the largest recipient of U.S. security assistance of the century altogether. From World War II Britain to South Vietnam, to the more recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. government has long conducted foreign policy by supporting, and in some cases building up from scratch, the military capabilities of its allies — often with mixed results. Before the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan last year — two decades after they were ousted from power — the U.S. government spent some $73 billion in military aid to Afghanistan, in addition to billions more it spent on the country’s reconstruction and the $837 billion it spent going to war there. Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II: $146 billion in military assistance and missile defense funding.

There is little precedent for the breakneck pace and scale of U.S. spending on Ukraine. “It’s more than the peak it paid to Afghanistan by a long shot and many times more than aid to Israel,” William Hartung, director of the arms and security program at the Center for International Policy, told The Intercept. “And it’s somewhat unique that they’ve been arming a country where there are two nation states at war.”

The most recent U.S. military assistance announcements also marked a significant shift in the scope of the U.S. commitment to Ukraine. Earlier packages ­mostly involved the Defense Department drawing from preexisting stock to quickly equip Ukrainian forces in the face of urgent need — to the tune of $8.6 billion worth of equipment over the last year. The $675 million drawdown announced by Blinken this week marked the 20th time the administration invoked this authority to support Ukrainian defense. The $3 billion package announced by Biden last month, however, involves new contracts with defense manufacturers to produce equipment that will be delivered to Ukraine over months and years, in order to, according to officials, “build the enduring strength of their forces to ensure the continued freedom and independence of the Ukrainian people.”

In other words, as Under Secretary of Defense for Public Policy Colin Kahl put it, this aid is not intended to support Ukraine in “today’s fight” but “for years to come.”

“It’s not like the U.S. is expressing much confidence in its diplomatic skills to end the conflict, rather than just trying to outlast Putin.”

The relentless stream of funding announcements, in the absence of any public discussion of what the U.S. is doing to seek an end to the conflict, has signaled to critics a recognition that there is no end in sight to the war, and that the U.S. is committed to supporting Ukrainian defense efforts for the long haul rather than pursue a negotiated end to it.

“The U.S. is really preparing for a long war. … It’s actually preparing for endless war in Ukraine,” said Stephen Semler, co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute, a grassroots-funded U.S. foreign policy think tank that has been tracking the assistance. “They’re saying, ‘We’re only doing this long-term approach because Putin is the one insisting on doing so.’ And that could be right — but at the same time, it’s not like the U.S. is expressing much confidence in its diplomatic skills to end the conflict, rather than just trying to outlast Putin.”

A spokesperson for the State Department wrote in an email to The Intercept that the U.S. is the largest provider of security assistance to Ukraine and has “quickly provided an historic levels [sic] of weapons and equipment that Ukraine’s forces have been using effectively to defend their democracy against Russia’s unprovoked war.”

“Diplomacy is the only way to end this conflict, but Russia has shown no signs that it is willing to seriously engage in negotiations,” the spokesperson added. “We remain committed to supporting a diplomatic settlement and we are currently focused on strengthening Ukraine’s hand as much as possible on the battlefield so that when the time comes, Ukraine has as much leverage as possible at the negotiating table.”

The Defense Department and the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which works to further U.S. defense and foreign policy goals by building foreign partners’ capacity, did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

Bubble in Washington

The quick succession of aid announcements and Biden’s request for Congress to authorize an additional $13.7 billion for Ukraine this month have begun to raise questions among legislators. But so far, most of those who have expressed concern about the scale and pace of the aid have focused on calling for enough oversight mechanisms to make sure the weapons are accounted for and don’t end up in the wrong hands, rather than questioning whether the administration should send the aid in the first place, or so much of it so quickly. “At least in the U.S., there’s been very little public criticism of security assistance on the whole,” said Tolany, of Center for Civilians in Conflict.

That’s in part because of the gravity of Russian actions in Ukraine, including widespread evidence of war crimes; the lack of a coherent vision for alternatives to military support for Ukraine, including from European allies; and the Biden administration’s determination to keep U.S. support for Ukraine a material one rather than one involving direct engagement, such as a no-fly zone or American troops on the ground, particularly after a disastrous exit from Afghanistan last year. Questioning U.S. security assistance for Ukraine is seen by many as a controversial stance.

“There’s kind of a bubble in Washington; the conventional wisdom is, give Ukraine almost anything it needs to fight back against Russia,” said Hartung, of Center for International Policy. He noted that a “line” drawn early on by the Biden administration to avoid Russian escalation and potential nuclear threats — like the exclusion of long-range missiles that can reach into Russia — seemed to be slowly moving. “There seems to be an upper limit, but it seems to be getting higher, what they’re willing to send.”

Ultimately, however, much of the debate in the U.S. lacks a long-term vision, Hartung believes.

“There’s not a lot of support in official circles for trying to push for some kind of negotiated settlement to the war,” he said. The U.S. position, he added, has been “defending Ukraine.” But there’s little clarity about how the assistance is shaping the conflict. “It just a one-liner almost. And not much analysis of, well, does that work? What are the consequences on the ground? Is it going to prolong the war? That stuff is not in the mainstream discussion, and I think there needs to be more debate about that.”

Ukrainian gunmen prepares powder charges for U.S.-made M777 howitzers prior to loading their gun on the front line in the Kharkiv region on Aug. 1, 2022.

Photo: Sergey Bobok/AFP via Getty Images

Tracking the Weapons

In the absence of more scrutiny of the Biden administration’s end goals in Ukraine, much of the debate in recent months has focused on ensuring that the U.S. can keep track of the security assistance it sends there. Earlier this summer, the Defense Department’s Office of the Inspector General raised concerns about the “transparency and traceability” of funds devoted to Ukraine after Congress rushed to allocate multiple rounds of additional assistance in response to the invasion. The office has been filled on an acting basis for many months — in itself a reason for concern.

The inspector general’s warning came after legislators last spring authorized the U.S. government to devote more than $40 billion to responding to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine through support — ranging from defense equipment to refugee assistance — involving more than half a dozen U.S. agencies. The most recent $3 billion package is part of more than $6 billion approved under that bill for the Defense Department’s special Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which supplements conventional avenues through which the U.S. is also boosting Ukrainian military capabilities and those of other “countries impacted by the situation in Ukraine.”

In recent months, legislators have sought to impose some oversight on that massive influx of assistance, including through half a dozen proposed amendments to the defense budget that would introduce measures like congressional reporting requirements, regular briefings to defense and foreign affairs committees, reassurances that weapons would not be provided to extremist groups, and efforts to prevent the illicit distribution of weapons. A number of Republicans have also called for the establishment of a special inspector general tasked with monitoring assistance to Ukraine, and earlier this year, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., single-handedly held up passage of the $40 billion aid package over a similar demand. So far, however, efforts to more robustly monitor the aid have taken second place to getting the aid to Ukraine urgently — a priority that critics note is no longer justified as the latest aid packages signal a much longer-term effort, with plenty of time for better tracking.

In fact, the challenge of tracking where military assistance ends up, and how it is used, is hardly a new one for the U.S. But the sheer scale and speed of the assistance being sent to Ukraine has observers concerned that existing monitoring mechanisms, already riddled with problems, won’t be able to keep up. In recent conflicts, the U.S. lost track of tens of thousands of rifles and pistols it bought for Iraqi security forces, and tens of thousands more pieces of equipment were lost in Afghanistan, frequently ending up in the hands of the Taliban, who loved to display them. Elsewhere, foreign forces who were trained and equipped by the U.S. for “counterterrorism” purposes regularly used their increased capabilities to fight in conflicts unrelated to U.S. security goals, sometimes committing widespread human rights abuses in the process.

U.S. officials’ efforts to track the weapons distributed through security assistance programs across the world have often focused on developing countries — with major recipients like Israel facing little scrutiny even when U.S.-provided equipment was connected to serious violations, including against U.S. citizens. But even in those countries where end-use monitoring is in place, the offices tasked with the job are chronically understaffed. That has raised the alarm about the number of weapons flooding Ukraine in recent months, particularly as Ukraine has historically been a hub in the illicit arms trade, with weapons smuggled through Ukraine ending up in conflicts from Afghanistan to West Africa.

The State Department spokesperson wrote to The Intercept that the administration takes the risk of diversion and illicit proliferation “very seriously.”

“We are actively engaging with the Government of Ukraine to ensure accountability of assistance, even amidst the challenging conflict environment in which it is operating. Despite Russia’s steady drumbeat of false allegations, we see Ukraine’s frontline units effectively utilizing security assistance at large scale every day on the battlefield as they defend their country against Russia’s aggression,” the spokesperson wrote, citing the Ukrainian authorities’ recent announcement of a new commission to strengthen monitoring of donated military equipment. “We will not approve transfers if we assess that a recipient will be unable to adequately secure U.S. origin materiel consistent with the provisions of the underlying agreements supporting the sale or transfer of such equipment.”

Ultimately, critics warn, flooding Ukraine with weapons faster than officials can monitor them presents risks whose full impact won’t be known for years. And while most agree there is a moral imperative to support Ukrainian defense against Russia’s aggression, they note that sending military assistance alone, and boosting military spending across the board, only sets the stage for more conflict.

“If the U.S. is going to send weapons to Ukraine, it has to be in the service of ending the conflict as quickly as possible to prevent further bloodshed.”

“If the U.S. is going to send weapons to Ukraine, it has to be in the service of ending the conflict as quickly as possible to prevent further bloodshed. … There has to be ruthless pursuit of diplomatic engagement, and the Biden administration hasn’t signaled that it’s interested in diplomacy,” said Semler, who also noted that while Ukraine aid is a fraction of the U.S. defense budget, the endless trickle of military assistance risks drumming up support for a broader increase for military spending that is already at historic levels.

“They say, ‘Ukraine needs help, that’s money for us,’ and then, ‘The overall budget needs increasing, because look at Putin, Poland is next, Finland is next, the U.S. has to be prepared,” he added, referring to defense officials. “There’s a moral case for sending weapons [to Ukraine], but as a practical matter, in terms of actually ending the conflict, I just don’t see the effort going in.”

The Intercept · by Alice Speri · September 10, 2022

19. Who will win the ammunition war in Ukraine? Russia is buying shells from North Korea; the U.S. is burning through its stockpile of weapons.

Key point. What does this portend for the future?

Excerpts:

Beyond this war, the artillery duel in Ukraine could also change some assumptions about the future of warfare and just how much ammunition will be needed to fight those wars. Even as U.S. defense budgets overall have steadily increased in recent years, artillery stockpiles have been rapidly decreasing. Another recent RUSI analysis found that current U.S. annual artillery production would at best only last for 10 days to two weeks of combat in Ukraine. In a recent war game, British forces ran out of artillery in eight days of fighting.

Johnson told Grid, “We’ve taken our experience of the last 30 years as the future. We think war is going to be quick, fast, decisive and low-casualty. What this war is showing is that this may be partially true, but when you show up with a million artillery rounds and start pounding something, your presence is noted.”

Who will win the ammunition war in Ukraine? Russia is buying shells from North Korea; the U.S. is burning through its stockpile of weapons.

In a war of attrition, victory could come down to supplies.

Joshua Keating

Global Security Reporter

September 9, 2022

grid.news · by Joshua Keating

Coverage of the war in Ukraine has focused heavily on new high-tech weapons systems that promise to change the balance of power; TB2 drones, Javelin anti-tank missiles, and High Mobility Advanced Rocket System (HIMARS) rocket launchers have all gotten their turn in the spotlight. But as the war stretches on into an open-ended battle of attrition, victory may be less a matter of metaphorical silver bullets than supplies of the actual bullets — and shells, rockets and missiles — that both sides are firing at each other at shocking rates.

For months, the assumption has been that Russia’s larger defense industrial base and huge stockpiles of weapons and ammunition would give it an advantage in a prolonged firefight. But a recent U.S. intelligence report, suggesting Russia is now buying ammunition from North Korea, has raised doubts about just how robust those supplies may be.

Beyond the sheer volume of shells Russia is expending in the war, there is now Ukraine’s strategy of targeting Russian ammunition depots, particularly with its recently acquired long-range HIMARS rockets. The strategy appears to be working: In the first month of the HIMARS operation, Ukraine claimed to have destroyed 50 of these depots.

Ukraine has its own concerns when it comes to supplies of ammunition. Former Deputy Defense Minister Alina Frolova recently told Grid that while recent deliveries of high-tech weapons systems from the West had helped the Ukrainians close the gap in terms of battlefield capabilities, “the biggest concern for now is still ammunition. It’s quite heavily used. The delivery and production of ammunition is the principal point for now.” Ammunition has been a big part of the assistance packages the Ukrainians have received from the U.S. and other allies, but those supplies may not be inexhaustible either.

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With no end in sight in the overall conflict, what will it take to win the ammunition war?

Russia’s stockpiles of weapons: smaller and dumber

“Ammunition” can refer to a number of things, big and small, ranging from bullets for small arms to the “hypersonic” Kinzhal missiles Russia has reportedly used several times in Ukraine. The Russians are reportedly facing acute shortages of more advanced forms of ammunition such as cruise and ballistic missiles and other precision-guided weapons, in large part because of their continued reliance on Western technology imports such as computer chips. Western sanctions have specifically targeted the technologies Russia’s defense industry needs to produce these weapons, and those sanctions seem to be working. Ukraine’s prime minister recently told Politico that Russia is down to just four dozen of its hypersonic missiles.

As a U.S. defense official told reporters in late July, “They have expended a lot of their smarter munitions. … Their capabilities are getting dumber.”

But some experts caution against reading too much into this dumbing down of Russia’s capabilities. “My concern is that we’re mirror-imaging. They’re not fighting the way we do,” David E. Johnson, a former U.S. Army artillery officer who is now a principal researcher at the RAND Corporation, told Grid. “They’re running out of the things we would use. Therefore [we assume] they’re running out of everything that’s useful. After all, the Russia military has used unguided munitions with brutal effectiveness in the virtual destruction of several Ukrainian cities.”

As for the less sophisticated types of ammunition, a July report from Britain’s Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) said Russia was firing 20,000 152-milimeter artillery shells per day, the vast majority of them unguided. Among the many mysteries of this war has been just how long the Russians can keep this up. Undersecretary of Defense Colin Kahl said in a press briefing earlier this month, “My sense is they have a lot of kind of dumb artillery rounds and other munitions like that. I don’t think we have any assessment to suggest they’re reaching some inflection point where they’re about to run out of that.” The RUSI report noted that when it came to existing stockpiles of artillery ammunition, “by some estimates, several years’ worth still remains” and that Russia’s defense industry still had the capability to build more.

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This is what made this week’s New York Times report that Russia is buying “millions of artillery shells and rockets” from North Korea so notable. The shells in question aren’t the kind of precision systems that Russia is having a hard time producing because of sanctions. They’re the “dumb” Soviet-era weapons that Russia supposedly had in abundance. There have also been reports in recent months of Russia drawing on Belarus’ ammunition stockpile and bringing shipments of weapons home from its ongoing military mission in Syria.

All of which would suggest that Russian ammo supplies are feeling the strain of a longer-than-expected conflict.

Why can’t Russia just build more?

Experts are divided as to what this all means. Some analysts suggest that Russia is scouring the globe for ammunition because it’s unable to mobilize its industrial base to build its own. “The only reason the Kremlin should have to buy artillery shells or rockets from North Korea or anyone is because [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has been unwilling or unable to mobilize the Russian economy for war at even the most basic level,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick Kagan told the New York Times.

Matthew Cancian, a military operations analyst and contractor at the U.S. Naval War College, said it’s too soon to reach that conclusion. The North Korea purchase may be a means of shoring up short-term supplies while Russia settles in for a longer struggle. “The Russians need these shells now, and it takes years to set up production lines,” Cancian told Grid. He pointed to a quote from then-British Prime Minister Winston Churchill about Britain’s industrial difficulties during World War II: “Here is the history of munitions production: first year, very little; second year, not much, but something; third year, almost all you want; fourth year, more than you need.”

In this line of thinking, a big buy of North Korean ammunition might be a way to shore up supplies until more domestic shells can be produced.

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Jack Watling, co-author of the July RUSI report, acknowledged on Twitter this week that his report had overestimated Russia’s current ammunition stockpiles and ability to sustain its current rate of fire in the short-term, but that “for unguided ammunition … production is likely able to step up to ensure long-term supply.”

The Russian government has shown signs that it’s trying to do just that. In July, the parliament passed legislation allowing companies supplying the military to compel employees to work nights, weekends and holidays. Shortly thereafter, Putin appointed Denis Manturov, reportedly a close confidant of the president, as a new deputy prime minister in charge of the defense industry.

But Pavel Luzin, a Russian defense analyst who is currently a visiting scholar at Tufts University, told Grid he’s skeptical Russian industry has the capability to vastly increase production given a number of factors — including a shortage of skilled workers, deteriorating equipment, reliance on foreign-supplied parts and an overly centralized organization structure.

“How can Russia increase productivity? To me, it seems just impossible to do,” he said. Based on his own calculations of current defense spending and rate of fire in Ukraine, Luzin projects that Russian forces will have to reduce their rate of artillery use in order to conserve ammunition by the end of 2022, if not sooner.

Ukraine’s pipeline problem

In a now-famous (though possibly apocryphal) moment on the eve of the invasion, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy responded to a U.S. offer of evacuation by saying, “I need ammunition, not a ride.”

Ukraine has been dealing with ammunition shortages throughout the war, which have hurt the country’s ability to respond to the Russian barrage, particularly during the fierce artillery fighting in the Donbas in early summer. According to the RUSI report, Ukraine was firing only 6,000 artillery rounds per day to Russia’s 20,000.

Ukraine’s aging Soviet-era ammunition stockpiles were not in great shape at the beginning of the war, depleted by years of fighting Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas as well as a series of fires and explosions in 2017 that destroyed some 32,000 tons of artillery shells. As such it has been heavily dependent on Western aid to keep its cannons firing.

Complicating the effort to get Zelenskyy his ammo is the fact that most of Ukraine’s artillery systems at the beginning of the war fired 152-millimeter Soviet-standard shells, whereas NATO militaries use 155-millimeter shells. Unfortunately for Ukraine, most of the world’s Soviet standard ammunition was in the hands of Russia and its allies. This led to a mad dash in the early months of the war to scour the world for remaining stockpiles of Soviet-standard ammunition as well as to provide the Ukrainians with NATO-standard systems.

Some of the U.S. aid to Ukraine comes in the form of money it can use to purchase its own weapons. Other military aid is weaponry and equipment drawn down from U.S. stockpiles. As of Aug. 24, the U.S. has provided Ukraine with 806,000 rounds of 155-millimeter ammunition, but even America’s vast stockpiles are not unlimited. At 6,000 rounds a day, this would last Ukraine for just about four and a half months, but more ammo is on the way in subsequent aid packages.

Last month, the Wall Street Journal quoted a U.S. defense official saying that because of the drawdown to supply Ukraine, current U.S. ammunition stockpiles are now “uncomfortably low” and “not at the level we would like to go into combat.” The same may soon be true of the guided rockets fired by the HIMARS. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged in July that while this system has been extraordinarily effective in Ukraine, “the issue will become ammunition and the consumption rates.”

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No farewell to arms

The contest over ammunition supplies is, to a large extent, already driving Ukraine’s strategy including its ongoing practice of targeting Russian ammunition depots and, as the Washington Post recently reported, its use of decoy rocket launchers to lure the Russians into wasting valuable long-range cruise missiles. Worries about whether Western supplies can continue indefinitely may be one factor behind Ukraine’s decision to launch an offensive in the south last month. Ukraine needs to press its advantage as much as it can while it still has the firepower.

As for the Russians, Luzin said we will soon see the end of Russia’s reliance on its overwhelming artillery advantage to gobble up Ukrainian cities and territory. “[Russia] may be trying to reduce the intensity of the conflict into, not a full-scale war, but an irregular war. That way, they could continue the campaign for the next several years,” he said.

Beyond this war, the artillery duel in Ukraine could also change some assumptions about the future of warfare and just how much ammunition will be needed to fight those wars. Even as U.S. defense budgets overall have steadily increased in recent years, artillery stockpiles have been rapidly decreasing. Another recent RUSI analysis found that current U.S. annual artillery production would at best only last for 10 days to two weeks of combat in Ukraine. In a recent war game, British forces ran out of artillery in eight days of fighting.

Johnson told Grid, “We’ve taken our experience of the last 30 years as the future. We think war is going to be quick, fast, decisive and low-casualty. What this war is showing is that this may be partially true, but when you show up with a million artillery rounds and start pounding something, your presence is noted.”

Thanks to Alicia Benjamin for copy editing this article.

grid.news · by Joshua Keating

​20. ​​Why the U.S. Is Being Ominously Compared to Hungary and Turkey

​For objective reflection.

Graphic/chart at the link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/09/us/politics/united-states-democracy.html

​​Why the U.S. Is Being Ominously Compared to Hungary and Turkey

A conversation with Max Fisher, who covers the decline of democracy around the world.​​

• Give this article

Donald Trump, like other leaders around the world who have attacked democratic institutions, has appealed to supporters by promising to defeat internal threats to the country.Credit...Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

By Blake Hounshell and Max Fisher

Sept. 9, 2022

Friday’s newsletter is a discussion with Max Fisher, an international reporter and columnist for The New York Times who covers conflict, diplomacy and the sweeping sociopolitical changes taking place all over the globe.

Max often delves deep into the world of ideas and where they intersect with the real world, from the rise of new social movements to the subject of today’s chat: the decline of democracy in the United States and abroad.

Here’s our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity:

You recently wrote about how democracy is under threat all over the world. What did you find most worrying?

That democracy is declining more or less everywhere now. Not necessarily in every country but in every region, in rich and poor countries, old and new democracies. And the decline is incremental but steady, which means that the scale of the change isn’t necessarily obvious until you start looking at the data.

We tend to think of democratic decline as something that happens in big dramatic moments — a coup, a government collapsing, tanks in the streets. But that’s not typically how it happens anymore.

What happens is more like what has occurred in Venezuela, say, or Turkey or Hungary. Elected leaders rise within a democracy promising to defeat some threat within, and in the process end up slowly tearing that democracy down.

Each step feels dangerous but maybe not outright authoritarian — the judiciary gets politicized a little, some previously independent institution gets co-opted, election rules get changed, news outlets come under tighter government control.

No individual step feels as drastic as an outright coup. And because these leaders both promote and benefit from social polarization, these little power grabs might even be seen by supporters as saving democracy.

But over many years, the system tilts more and more toward autocracy.

That doesn’t always end up leading to full-on dictatorship. But that pull toward elected strongmen rulers is something we see happening in dozens of countries. By the sheer numbers, according to a democracy monitoring group called V-Dem, more democracies are in decline today than at any other point in the last century.

What did you find most surprising?

There’s one chart I think about a lot that was put together by the political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart. They tracked every election in Europe, at every level, going back decades. And they looked at how populist candidates did, on average in those elections, over time.

Image

Credit...Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart

(Political scientists typically use the word “populist” to describe politicians who champion cultural backlash and oppose establishment institutions. Here’s a definition from the book “How Democracies Die,” by two academics named Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt: “anti-establishment politicians — figures who, claiming to represent the voice of ‘the people,’ wage war on what they depict as a corrupt and conspiratorial elite.”)

What Norris and Inglehart found was that, in Europe, populists have been receiving a steadily larger share of the vote, on average, basically every year since 1960. That year is important because it’s roughly when Western countries, as the colonial era ended, collectively began to embrace what we now think of as full, liberal, multiracial democracy. And that is also the moment, it turns out from this research, when populist politics began steadily rising in a backlash to that new liberal-democratic order.

That discovery is really important for understanding the threat to democracy. It shows that, for all the ways that we might think of the threat as top-down, it’s also, and maybe chiefly, bottom-up.

And though we might tie the rise of populist hard-liner politics to specific events like the global financial crisis of 2007-8 or the refugee crisis of the mid-2010s, this is in fact something much larger.

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It’s a deeper backlash against the demands of modern liberal democracy — and this is something I’ve written about a lot over the past few years — both among voters who feel that they’re being asked to soften their racial and religious identities and among leaders who are being asked to compromise their political self-interest for the sake of democratic norms.

What patterns have you found abroad that you now see in the United States?

The United States fits pretty cleanly into what is now a well-established global pattern of democratic backsliding.

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First, society polarizes, often over a backlash to social change, to demographic change, to strengthening political power by racial, ethnic or religious minorities, and generally amid rising social distrust.

This leads to a bottom-up desire for populist outsiders who will promise to confront the supposed threat within, which means suppressing the other side of that social or partisan or racial divide, asserting a vision of democracy that grants special status for “my” side, and smashing the democratic institutions or norms that prevent that side from asserting what is perceived to be its rightful dominance.

You also tend to see political parties and other establishment gatekeepers, who are in theory meant to keep authoritarians from rising in politics, either weaken or become co-opted. Once populist hard-liners gain enough power to begin eroding democratic checks, such as an independent judiciary or the rule of law, it’s usually a steady slide toward democratic erosion.

This trend has really picked up speed, globally, only in the last 20 years or so. So it’s hard to say exactly how common it is for countries that begin on this path to end up like Hungary or Turkey. But very few democracies have begun to slide and then reversed course.

You have a new book called “The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World.” In your reporting and research for the book, what sorts of effects on democracy did you find social media is having? I’m old enough to remember when techno-evangelists like Clay Shirky were predicting that social media would unleash a wave of democratization in the developing world. Obviously, that hasn’t happened. Or has it?

I had that same arc of initially seeing social media as a democratizing force.

So did a lot of Arab Spring activists from the early 2010s, like Wael Ghonim, the Egyptian revolutionary and Google engineer. But, within a few years, Ghonim had come to conclude, he has said in a TED Talk, that “the same tool that united us to topple dictators eventually tore us apart” by “amplifying the spread of misinformation, rumors, echo chambers and hate speech.”

A neutral social media really could be a democratizing force, in theory. But the major platforms are far from neutral. They are deliberately designed to manipulate you, and to manipulate your experience on the platform in ways that will change how you think and how you behave. These platforms do this not just by what they show you, but also by eliciting certain emotions and behaviors from you.

All this digital manipulation, at the scale of maybe hundreds of hours per year, changes you. And not just online, but in your offline life, too. It changes your emotional makeup, the way that you approach politics, your sense of your own identity — even the way that you process right and wrong.

For an individual user — and we now have hard, empirical, scientific evidence for this — the effect can be to make you angrier, more extreme and intolerant, more distrustful, more prone to divide the world between us and them, and more disposed toward hostility and even violence against people outside your social in-group.

This might change you just by a matter of degree. But when you multiply this effect out by billions of users, and often among a majority of the population, the effect can change society as a whole, too, and especially its politics, in ways that can be detrimental to democracy.

What do you think most people miss about the link between social media and threats to democracy?

One thing that social platforms have done — and it’s hard to blame this entirely on Silicon Valley — is to displace the traditional activism that is an important part of bringing about democracy or of preventing an existing democracy from backsliding.

That activism used to happen through organizing among real-world networks, like student groups during the civil rights movement in the United States, or mothers’ groups in 1970s Argentina resisting that country’s dictatorship. Now, social media allows a protest group, even a leaderless one, to skip that process and, by going viral online, to activate thousands or even millions of people overnight.

That is really effective at driving huge numbers of people onto the street, but not at much else.

With the advent of social media, the number of mass protest events in the world shot way up. A million people marching on a capital city became a more common occurrence. But the success rate of those movements fell from about 70 percent to only 30 percent.

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The Yellow Vests movement in France quickly gained momentum in 2018 before fizzling out.Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

The Yellow Vests, the French protest movement that began in 2018, exemplifies this. It was this stunning, spontaneous, nationwide uprising for political change. And it had been organized almost entirely through Facebook and other platforms. But it was also internally incoherent. For all its force, it quickly fizzled out, having caused a lot of traffic problems but having changed very little.

Partly that was because of what had been lost in the displacement of traditional organizing. But partly it was also because of the distorting effects of those platforms. Those systems, just as they do for users globally, had pulled the Yellow Vests supporters who were gathering on those platforms toward extremes: demands to bar all refugees from the country, to default on the national debt, to replace elected legislatures with fuzzily defined citizens’ councils.

It’s not the only reason the Yellow Vests mostly receded, but it is, I think, a metaphor for those platforms’ effects on our societies and democracies broadly.

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What to read about democracy

• Luke Broadwater and Michael Schmidt have an update on the long-shot push, led by some members of Congress and nonprofit groups, to bar Donald Trump from running for president in 2024 by invoking the 14th Amendment to establish him as an “insurrectionist.”
• Writing in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik asks a provocative question: Can’t we come up with something better than liberal democracy?
• The editorial board of The New York Times is reaching out to readers to ask: What concerns and confounds you about the state of American democracy? Read about the project here.

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Thank you for reading On Politics. — Blake

Read past editions of the newsletter here.

If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.

Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.

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Blake Hounshell is the editor of the On Politics newsletter. He previously was managing editor for Washington and politics at Politico. @blakehounshell

Max Fisher is a New York-based international reporter and columnist. He has reported from five continents on conflict, diplomacy, social change and other topics. He writes The Interpreter, a column exploring the ideas and context behind major world events. @Max_Fisher • Facebook

​21. Air Force Special Ops Testing Amphibious MC-130

​I thought this project had been rejected.

Air Force Special Ops Testing Amphibious MC-130 - FLYING Magazine

AFSOC will begin integrating amphibious modifications on MC-130J aircraft next year, according to a service official.

By Kimberly Johnson

September 8, 2022

flyingmag.com · by Kimberly Johnson · September 8, 2022

Can a Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) MC-130J Commando II cargo plane land on water? Wave testing of modifications that turn the Air Force Special Operations Command’s (AFSOC) clandestine cargo airplanes into amphibious aircraft capable of water takeoffs and landings is currently underway, according to a top command official.

From an engineering standpoint, a C-130 airframe probably isn’t the first aircraft one would start with when designing an amphibious airplane, admitted AFSOC Commander Lt. Gen. James Slife while speaking at an Air & Space Forces Association event Wednesday.

“But the C-130 is the ingredient that we have in the cupboard,” Slife said. “We’ve got a pretty compelling digital design that’s going to allow us to turn any large body of water into a landing zone where we can insert and extract special operation forces and equipment and other things that might cause dilemmas for our adversaries.”

AFSOC will begin integrating the modifications, known as MC-130J Commando II Amphibious Capability (MAC), onto aircraft in 2023, Slife said.

“It will be a field-installable modification kit,” Slife added. “It won’t be every airplane, it won’t be all the time. It will be a capability that’s available to the fleet.”

AFSOC relies on the MC-130J to insert and extract commandos, as well as for resupply missions and refueling its helicopters and tilt-rotor aircraft.

The plans, however, will not include amphibious modifications for gunships because of issues involving weight and center of gravity, Slife said.

• READ MORE: U.S. Air Force To Test Single-Pilot C-130 Flight Crews

Like a growing number of programs, MAC is the result of a digital design process. Northrop Grumman (NYSE: NOC), for example, turned to digital development to expedite development of the B-21 Raider stealth bomber.

“We’ve got a 100 percent digital design,” he said. “We started out with a number of digital designs. We ran through a series of testing to figure out, do we want to do a catamaran, a pontoon, a hull aplique on the bottom of the aircraft. We went through all the iterations of that. We settled on a design that provides the best tradeoff of drag, weight, sea state performance.”

• READ MORE: Report: Air Force Set To Roll Out B-21 Stealth Bomber This Year

While Slife did not elaborate on what the design included, he did say the modifications would not turn the MC-130 into a straight floatplane.

“It will have the ability to land both on land or water,” he said.

So far, the amphibious modification capability has performed as the digital design predicted, he added.

AFSOC is on track to have a fleet of 57 MC-130Js by 2025.

The C-130, built at Lockheed Martin’s factory in Marietta, Georgia, holds the record for the longest continuous production run of any military aircraft, according to the manufacturer. The Hercules first flew in 1954.

flyingmag.com · by Kimberly Johnson · September 8, 2022

22. Rules of Civility in a Sometimes-Uncivilized World — SMERCONISH

A public service article for reflection.

I do like Smerconish.

Rules of Civility in a Sometimes-Uncivilized World — SMERCONISH

smerconish.com · September 10, 2022

Divisive politicians. Shouting TV pundits. Mean-spirited social media trolls. Are you concerned about the decline in civility?  

You’re not alone. Nine out of ten Americans believe the erosion of civility is a serious problem, according to Arthur C. Brooks, a Harvard professor and author of Love Your Enemies.

Who is to blame? According to an annual civility study, seventy-five percent of Americans blame politicians, 69% fault the Internet/social media, and 59% say it’s the news media. As a former Congressman, the most common question I’m asked is: "Aren't you glad you're not in Washington during these crazy times?”

Yes, Washington does feel very different than it did during my tenure. But even if we fear America being ripped apart by divisive leaders and talking heads who tell us that ideological opponents are worthless, it’s not too late to turn things around. We just need to follow these simple rules.

Rule #1: Don’t be (or hire) an asshole.

You can tell a lot about a person by how they treat people with less power. If a person is rude to the waiter, they are probably a jerk.

Robert Sutton, a Stanford professor, wrote an essay based upon his personal experiences at Stanford which talked about the “no asshole rule.” Sutton said company leaders should screen out toxic staff because they worsen morale and productivity. The mildly profane essay, published by the Harvard Business Review, provoked over 1,000 emails and led to his book called The No Asshole Rule. After it was released, HBR published Sutton’s follow-up article, “Why I Wrote The No Asshole Rule.” (The term “asshole” captures the “emotional wallop” better than “jerk,” wrote Sutton.)

Sutton is right. Company leaders shouldn’t excuse bad behavior merely because the employee has good technical skills or generates revenue.

Rule #2: Listen with an open mind to those with differing views.

When I was first elected to Congress, I had the privilege of attending Harvard’s bipartisan congressional orientation program. I absolutely loved it. The speakers encouraged open-mindedness and civility, a message I took with me to D.C. I worried greatly about that civility during the contentious election season of 2020. And so, in November of 2020, I wrote an article entitled “What I Learned at the Harvard IOP’s Congressional Orientation,” which was published by the Harvard Crimson, encouraging new members of Congress from both parties to attend the Harvard event.

Why did they need encouragement? Because the orientation had been criticized by both parties in the past. In 1994, all Republicans boycotted it, claiming that Harvard was “too left-leaning.” In 2018, some Democrats attending the orientation complained there were CEO speakers but not enough labor union speakers. These complaints all missed the mark. They underestimated the value of a representative keeping an open mind to all sides.

Would it kill a Republican to hear what a left-leaning Harvard professor has to say about improving access to higher education for poorer students? Would it be so bad for a Democrat to listen to what a right-leaning CEO has to say about how to create more jobs in the private sector? Not only is the answer to both questions “no,” but this open-mindedness is a critical component to any political career.

Rule #3: Be courteous to your opponent. They may be your ally in the future.

Anne Wexler, a former presidential advisor, gave sage advice at the Harvard orientation: “Always remember that in Washington, there are no permanent friends and no permanent enemies,” Wexler said. “Civility is the watchword.”

As someone who served eight years in Congress, I saw she was correct.

For example, in May 2008, I was invited to the Oval Office by President George W. Bush to attend a signing ceremony for a higher education bill that had been co-sponsored by me in the House and co-sponsored by Senator Ted Kennedy in the Senate.

After Kennedy and I arrived, Bush invited us into the Oval Office. Pointing to the Resolute desk, Bush said, “This is the same desk Ted’s brother used when he was president.” Pointing under the desk, Bush continued, “And this is the same spot where that iconic photograph of little John Jr. was taken as he crawled under the desk. We are now going to reenact that famous scene by having Ted crawl under the desk.” They both erupted in laughter.

Aside from being courteous to each other, Bush and Kennedy were practical politicians who found common ground on some issues, such as education reform and immigration. It goes to show: Your opponent doesn’t have to be your enemy.

Rule #4: Remember the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Brooks: Respect matters most.

In “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” a girl entered the home of three bears, and then ate their porridge, broke a chair, and fell asleep in their bed. The moral is respecting others and their property.

Coincidentally, three big advocates for respectful behavior have the same last name: Brooks.

Brooks #1: Country singer Garth Brooks gave a talk in March 2020 in which he promoted the idea of civility. “If you want to surround yourself with people that only think like you do, we are in deep trouble,” he said. “When we were kids, if there was a list of ten things and you didn't agree on seven of them, you're still my buddy. You're a dipsh*t, but you're still my buddy.” People who lack civility will have “Friends in No Places.”

Brooks #2: Arthur C. Brooks, Ph.D., is a professor at Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School. He teaches a popular course on “Leadership and Happiness” and also wrote Love Your Enemies to turn around what he calls the “culture of contempt.” His prescriptions are wise, albeit unconventional. “To bring America together, we shouldn’t try to agree more,” Brooks argues in the book. “There is no need for mushy moderation because disagreement is the secret to excellence.” The solution? What matters most is how we choose to act. In other words, the path forward is choosing to treat each other with love and respect despite our differences.

Brooks #3: Alison Wood Brooks, Ph.D., is also a professor at Harvard Business School, where she teaches a course called “How to Talk Gooder in Business and Life.” Her course and research emphasize respect for opposing views, levity, asking questions, and varying topics as the keys to good (and civil) conversation. I recently heard her impressive lecture while attending my wife’s HBS reunion in June.

Rule #5: It’s never too late for civility to heal a fractured relationship.

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson started out as friends. Then were enemies. Then they were friends again. In 1776, Adams and Jefferson became good friends while serving on the committee to draft the Declaration of Independence. Adams graciously insisted that Jefferson write it because, as he told Jefferson, “you can write ten times better than I can.”

Fast forward to 1800. President Adams was running for re-election against Jefferson. Things got ugly quick. Jefferson's camp called Adams “a hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, not the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” In return, Adams' team called Jefferson "a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow.” Jefferson won. Adams was bitter and skipped the inauguration ceremony. They didn’t speak for 12 years.

After a dozen years apart, they began writing letters to each other. They became friends again, remaining pen pals for the rest of their lives. They both passed away on the same day: July 4, 1826—the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

The lesson from our Founding Fathers is that it’s never too late. A renewed spirit of civility and friendship can heal even a fractured relationship.

And so, America, as we enter this election season, in the spirit of Adams and Jefferson, I propose a new kind of Declaration of Independence as we declare our independence from hate:

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

That divisive politicians, shouting talking heads, and Twitter trolls shall no longer tear us apart.

That love and respect are more powerful than hate and contempt.

That we listen with an open mind and act respectfully despite disagreement.

That we admit to one another we’re no good without each other.

That we find a way to come together and take the best and make it better.

smerconish.com · September 10, 2022

23.  Jamie Lynn Spears Competing In Celebrity Special Forces Training Reality Show

​Sheesh... Give me a break. Everyone wants to be Special Forces or exploit peoples' interest in Special Forces.

Britney Spears' little sister will be joined on the show by Mel B, Hannah Brown, Montell Jordan, Kenya Moore, Dr. Drew, Anthony Scaramucci, Tyler Florence, Beverley Mitchell and Kate Gosselin.

A bunch of former and current athletes are competing as well, including Danny Amendola, Dwight Howard, Gus Kenworthy, Carli Lloyd, Nastia Liukin and Mike Piazza.

Jamie Lynn Spears Competing In Celebrity Special Forces Training Reality Show

tmz.com

Jamie Lynn Spears Competing In New Reality TV Show ... Special Forces Training!!!

• 3.4K
• 
  

9/7/2022 10:06 AM PT

Jamie Lynn Spears is being put to the test, on not just by her sister, Britney ... she's one of 16 celebrities tapped for a new reality show where contestants go through challenges straight out of special forces training.

The former 'Zoey 101' star is competing in a new show on FOX, "Special Forces: The Ultimate Test," in what figures to be quite the celebrity experiment.

Jamie Lynn and her 15 famous counterparts will try to survive demanding special forces training exercises out in the desert ... with ex-special forces operatives running the camp, where toilets are literally just holes in the ground and beds consist of only a sheet over a metal bar.

FOX

The reality show challenges will simulate the special forces selection process, and the only way for the celeb contestants to leave is by giving up, getting injured, or being kicked out by staff sergeants ... there are no votes and no eliminations, it's all about survival.

Britney Spears' little sister will be joined on the show by Mel B, Hannah Brown, Montell Jordan, Kenya Moore, Dr. Drew, Anthony Scaramucci, Tyler Florence, Beverley Mitchell and Kate Gosselin.

WHO KILLED MJ?

A bunch of former and current athletes are competing as well, including Danny Amendola, Dwight Howard, Gus Kenworthy, Carli Lloyd, Nastia Liukin and Mike Piazza.

The show debuts in January on FOX.

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De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

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Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com