Quotes of the Day:

Let us not forget on this day.

"You can be sure that the American spirit will prevail over this tragedy."

- Former United States Secretary of State Colin Powell

• “One of the worst days in America’s history saw some of the bravest acts in Americans’ history. We’ll always honor the heroes of 9/11. And here at this hallowed place, we pledge that we will never forget their sacrifice.”

- President George W. Bush at the Pentagon in 2008

 “What separates us from the animals, what separates us from the chaos, is our ability to mourn people we’ve never met.”

- Author David Levithan

1. A Patriot Day Remembrance - Armed Forces Press

2. Military Hall of Honor

3. Unconventional Warfare, 9/11 and the Future of U.S. Military Power (and BG Frank Toney)

4. Lessons From Ukraine for Security Force Assistance

5. Building the New Infantry: It’s All About Culture By Corporal Joshua Sulentic, USMC

6. Is the US getting Asia wrong?

7. Special Operations News - September 11, 2023 | SOF News

8. The Three Roadblocks Keeping Ukraine Mired in War

9. U.S. Military Exercises in Russia’s Backyard Cause Alarm at the Kremlin

10. Theaters of War That Make Up the Fighting in Ukraine

11. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 10, 2023

12. Ukrainians Embrace Cluster Munitions, but Are They Helping?

13 Opinion | Corruption Is an Existential Threat to Ukraine, and Ukrainians Know It

14. Recreating Western Deterrence

15. Jack Carr's take on the 9/11 terror attacks — including 'hope' and the lessons from Afghanistan

16.  In US-led drills, Australian and Indonesian forces deploy battle tanks

17. What a new ruling in a social media case means for cyber agencies

18. 'What happened at the Pentagon?' If we're not careful, 9/11 attacks will fade from memory.

19. It’s Time to Build Combined Forward Operating Base Sierra Madre

20. U.S. Diplomacy After the Russia-Ukraine War

21. EXCLUSIVE: US Navy vet Sarah Bils relaunched pro-Putin propaganda accounts on X and YouTube months after being investigated by DOJ

22. Ambitious Asia-to-Europe Corridor Will Link Up U.S. Partners

23. Australia-Philippines pact takes hard new aim at China

24. 10 Life Lessons from Ted Lasso

1.  A Patriot Day Remembrance - Armed Forces Press

A Patriot Day Remembrance - Armed Forces Press

armedforces.press · by Darin Gaub · September 8, 2023

Public Domain

On September 11, 2001, I was sitting in a class in Fort Carson, Colorado, when one of the other students, another Army Captain like me, came into the room with a look of shock. He said we needed to come into the other room and see what was happening on the news. We huddled around the small television and watched the smoke billowing out of the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon while the newscaster talked about reports of another plane that may have been hijacked.

Eventually, word came down that most of the personnel on the Fort should go home. Being near Cheyenne Mountain and NORAD, people were rightly concerned that the area could also be targeted. Arriving home, I was met by my bride, our two young children, and some neighbors who looked to me for answers I could not provide. We all knew that we were now a nation at war, but with whom?

Like many, the remainder of my career would be defined by conflict. For me, it started two weeks later with a deployment to North Africa, then two deployments to Afghanistan. Next, I was a part of training thirty-two Army Brigades and one Marine Expeditionary Unit to go to Iraq or Afghanistan while serving as a trainer at the Army’s National Training Center. After that, I finished my last two Afghanistan deployments. These combat deployments were bracketed by what seemed a perpetual training cycle. We would come home from a deployment to train for another one only a year later. This also meant the twelve months at home were only 8 months with family, as 3-4 months were spent in the field or deployed to training environments for thirty days at a time. This is what it was like to serve in the Army’s Aviation branch during twenty years of conflict post 9/11.

My final Afghanistan deployment completed nearly thirty trips to and from the region on various missions. I was shot down, blown up, and had many other things happen to me to convince me I would never make it home alive. But I did. My family was blessed in this way because so many paid the ultimate sacrifice and would never see their families again. I finished my twenty-eight-year career with another assignment to Fort Carson, where my final deployment was as the commander of multiple aviation task forces spread across Germany, Eastern Europe, and Turkey. In Turkey, I supported operations in Syria and elsewhere.

To see how much the world changed after 9/11 haunts me still today. The trauma caused by so many years in combat, the wear and tear of a military career, and losing many friends will live with me for the remainder of my life. But 9/11 also caused the passage of The Patriot Act, leading to the gradual erosion or removal of rights once guaranteed in the US Constitution. And a massive expansion of the Federal Government in ways not healthy to liberty. The highest price for our war in Afghanistan was thus paid at home, and liberty was the price.

The hardest part was watching our surrender in Afghanistan. One where we left behind a Taliban stronger than when we invaded, and a humanitarian crisis to follow. That surrender started the brushfires of war and tyranny worldwide as despots took notice and acted.

Many will and should debate the true price of 9/11 and our response in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the multiple other countries where America fought terrorism, and still does today.

I can only ask that Americans never forget the lives of the lost and who served for the love of country. People like Issac Jackson, who was killed in Afghanistan while on a mission on which he was not scheduled to be a part. He was filling in for someone who missed the start time. That is who Issac was, he would never let you down. Also, Kevin Burke, Clay Cullen, Brian Van Dusen, Heathe Craig, and the crews and passengers of Arrowsmith 35 and Colossal 31. These are only a few examples of the thousands of names and callsigns Americans should be familiar with.[i]

Author with Sergeant Issac Jackson in Fort Drum, New York

Author: Sergeant Jackson’s remains arrive in Dover, Delaware

It is Patriot Day. Take time to honor the sacrifices of the lost. If you have young children, teach them of this day and read them the story of a veteran.

Author

• Russia Pulls Armata Tanks From Ukraine
• BREAKING: DOD CONTROLLED COVID ‘VACCINES’ FROM THE START UNDER NATIONAL SECURITY PROGRAM – LIED THE ENTIRE TIME – Were NEVER ‘Safe and Effective’

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armedforces.press · by Darin Gaub · September 8, 2023

2. Military Hall of Honor

I want to remember Colonel "Rick" Rescola. I did not know him. But I morun him and think about his family. His storied life is an inspiration to us all.

https://militaryhallofhonor.com/honoree-record.php?id=2032

First Name: Cyril

Last Name: Rescorla

Birthplace: Hayle, GB

Gender: Male

Branch: Army (1784 - present)

Middle Name: Richard

Date of Birth: 27 May 1939

Date of Death: 11 September 2001

Rank: Colonel

Years Served:Cyril Richard Rescorla

'Rick'

  Engagements:

•  Vietnam War (1960 - 1973)

Biography:Cyril Richard "Rick" Rescorla

Colonel, U.S. Army

Cyril Richard "Rick" Rescorla was killed "in action" by terrorists who flew an airliner into the World Trade Center Two building on 11 September 2001. Before he died, Rick's actions allowed all but 13 of Morgan Stanley's 2,700 WTC employees to survive the terrorist attack.

The Early Years

Cyril Richard "Rick" Rescorla was born on 27 May 1939 in Hayle, a seaport on the north coast of Cornwall, Britain. In 1943, his home town of Hayle served as headquarters for the 175th Infantry Regiment of the U.S. 29th Infantry Division, largely composed of American soldiers from Maryland and Virginia. Young Rescorla idolized the American soldiers, and wanted to become a soldier someday because of them.

He was the only child of a single mom but didn't know it; he thought he had a 'regular' working-class family. He later learned that his "parents" were actually his grandparents and that his "sister" and "brother" were really his mother and uncle. Even after learning the truth, he continued to call his mother "Sis" until the day he died. (He never met his father.)

Rescorla was a sports natural; he set a school record in the shot put and was an avid boxer. When a professional boxing match was scheduled between a British boxer and an American heavyweight contender named Tami Mauriello, his friends backed the Englishman. Rescorla stated, "I'm for Tammy," and after Mauriello won the fight, everyone in Hayle began calling Rescorla "Tammy." According to his friend, Mervyn Sullivan, he was also a talented and highly competitive rugby player. Sullivan has a scar on his forehead where Tammy kicked him 50 years ago while chasing a ball - and Tammy was on his team!

British Military Service

Rescorla enlisted in the British Army in 1957 and because he hated his given name "Cyril," he began using the name "Rick." He trained as a paratrooper with the Parachute Regiment and then served with an intelligence unit in war-torn Cyprus during the Cypriot insurgency. He then served as a paramilitary police inspector in the Northern Rhodesia Police (now the Zambia Police Service).

After returning to civilian life in London, he joined the Metropolitan Police Service and became a detective at Scotland Yard. However, he soon became bored with the job and paperwork and moved to the U.S. where he lived at a YMCA in Brooklyn until he was able to enlist in the Army.

U.S. Military Service

Rick enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1963 and underwent basic training at Fort Dix, NJ. While in basic training he met Dan Hill, who would become his best friend. Rick and Dan were the only two recruits in basic with combat experience; the situation was the same when they attended Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, GA (they also took Airborne training). After graduating from OCS and being commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in April 1965, Rescorla was assigned as a platoon leader in Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile). Like many other units, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment was sent to Vietnam in the fall of 1965; a time when the Vietnam War was beginning to seriously escalate.

Vietnam and the Battle of Ia Drang

In a remote part of the Central Highlands lay the hills of the Ia Drang Valley, an area so named because of the Drang River which runs through the valley northwest of Plei Me ("Ia" means "river" in the local Montagnard language). On 14 November 1965, elements of the 1st and 2nd Battalions, 7th Cavalry Regiment and the 5th Cavalry Regiment began being dropped into the Valley. The first night, American troops were encircled at a landing zone they called X-Ray, and one company was virtually wiped out in a hellish firefight.

The next day, Rescorla's company was ordered to replace it on the perimeter at the foot of the Chu Pong mountain ridge. In a later letter to Moore and Galloway, Rescorla recalled that when he arrived - after a U.S. fighter jet had mistakenly dropped napalm on his men - he found corpses scattered everywhere from the night before, including an American with his hands still clenched around a North Vietnamese soldier's throat. "Are your men up for this? Do you feel they can hold?" asked Myron Diduryk, his commander. "If they break through us, sir, you'll be the first to know," Rescorla replied.

Rescorla risked sniper fire that night to study the terrain from the enemy viewpoint. He ordered his men to dig new foxholes 50 yards back, lay booby traps, reposition their machine guns and artillery. After midnight, he sang a slow Cornish mining tune: "Going Up Cambourne Hill Coming Down." Lund remembers Rescorla stopping by his foxhole to reset his bayonet and critique his fields of fire, joking as if they were preparing to play paintball. "What a command presence," recalls Lund, "We all thought we were going to die that night, and Rescorla gave us our courage back. I figured, if he's walking around singing, the least I can do is stop trembling." He was indeed a very rare Second Lieutenant.

The next morning, Bravo Company beat back four assaults, cutting down about 200 enemy soldiers while sustaining only a few injuries. "A quietness settled over the field," Rescorla wrote later. "We put more rounds into clumps of bodies nearest our holes, making sure. Forty yards away a young North Vietnamese soldier popped up from behind a tree. He started his limping run back the way he had come. I fired two rounds. He crumpled. I chewed the line out for failure to fire quickly."

Although it sounds callous, Rescorla had a vicious job to do. Minutes later, he saved several of his men by dropping a grenade on an enemy machine-gunner. When his company was airlifted back to base, Rescorla still had the gunner's brain matter on his fatigues. "The stench of the dead would stay with me for years after the battle," he wrote. "Below us the pockmarked earth was dotted with enemy dead. A grenadier next to me threw up on my lap. He was, like many, a man who had fought bravely even though he had no stomach for the bloodletting."

The next day, while Bravo Company rested, the rest of 2nd Battalion marched into a vicious ambush near a landing zone called Albany. Bravo was sent back to the rescue. "You know the battalion is in the [expletive]," Rescorla told his men. "We've been selected to jump into that [expletive] and pull them out." Once again, Rescorla sprinted into a ragged perimeter -- after a bone-rattling 10-foot jump from a Huey under fire -- and immediately lifted the spirits of weary soldiers who thought they were done. "My God, it was like Little Big Horn," recalls Pat Payne, a reconnaissance platoon leader. "We were all cowering in the bottom of our foxholes, expecting to get overrun. Rescorla gave us courage to face the coming dawn. He looked me in the eye and said, 'When the sun comes up, we're gonna kick some ass.' "

Rescorla was right, 2nd Battalion fought its way out of Albany. Rescorla left the field with a morale-boosting trophy of war: a battered French Army bugle that the North Vietnamese had once used to signal troops. It became a talisman for his entire division

The Battle of Ia Drang took place during 14-18 November and it was the first major battle between the U.S. Army and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). The area in which the battle took place would become known as the Valley of Death. A total of 305 Americans died in the Battle of Ia Drang, more than in the entire Persian Gulf War. The NVA death toll was 3,561. But the worst news of all was that the leaders on each side decided after the battle that they would be able to outlast the other side in a war of attrition.

The bloody battle was described in the book and movie We Were Soldiers Once… And Young, co-authored by Lieutenant General Hal Moore, U.S. Army (Ret) and war correspondent Joseph Galloway. Rick Rescorla is the gaunt, unshaven soldier pictured on the book's jacket cover carrying his M-16 rifle with bayonet fixed. Lieutenant General Moore described him as "the best platoon leader I ever saw." "What a unique man." Rescorla's men nicknamed him "Hard Core" for his bravery in battle, and revered him for his good humor and compassion towards his men.

Rick is also mentioned in the book Baptism by Larry Gwin, who also fought at Ia Drang. The fourteenth chapter of that book is called Rescorla's Game and describes him as the "Cornish Hawk." Gwin described him as a charming raconteur with a "crazed irreverent twinkle" at play, but also a ruthless killer with a "cold steely glint that could sear through you like the icy stare of death" in the bush.

The survivors of the 7th Cavalry still tell awestruck stories about Rescorla. Like the time he stumbled into a hooch full of enemy soldiers on a reconnaissance patrol in Bon Song. "Oh, pardon me," he said, before firing a few rounds and racing away. "Oh, comma, pardon me," repeats Dennis Deal, who followed Rescorla that day in April 1966. "Like he had walked into a ladies' tea party!"

Another story involves the time a deranged private pulled a .45-caliber pistol on an officer while Rescorla was nearby, sharpening his Bowie knife. "Rick just walked right between them and said: Put. Down. The. Gun." recalls Bill Lund, who served with Rescorla in Vietnam. "And the guy did. Then Rick went back to sharpening his knife. He was flat out the bravest man any of us ever knew."

Larry Froelich, an OCS classmate, remembers "Most of us were in awe of Rick. It came as no surprise when the stories began to trickle back from Vietnam about his exploits in the field."

Rescorla served one tour in Vietnam. He hated the way the Washington politicians were running things; their kill ratios, no-fire zones, and half-baked commitment to victory. He believed they were underestimating the enemy's resolve by mistaking fervent nationalism for Soviet-style communism, and that they were piling up body bags in a losing cause. He liked to say the higher-ups "saw things through the rosy red hue." "When I heard that Rick had quit the war, I felt in my heart that this was the wrong war for us," Froelich recalls. "I never thought he'd walk away from a noble pursuit."

Medals, Awards and Badges

Silver Star Medal

Bronze Star Medal with "Valor" Device

Bronze Star Medal (Merit)

Purple Heart

Meritorious Service Medal

Air Medal

Army Commendation Medal

Army Reserve Components Achievement Medal

National Defense Service Medal

Vietnam Service Medal with 2 Bronze Stars

Armed Forces Reserve Medal with Silver Hour Glass

Vietnam Campaign Medal

Presidential Unit Citation

Vietnam Gallantry Cross Unit Citation Medal

Vietnam Civil Actions Medal

Combat Infantryman Badge

Parachutist Badge

British Parachutist Badge

Post-War Military Service

Rick finished his Army tour back at Fort Benning, and received his U.S. citizenship there.

He later trained officers for the Oklahoma National Guard and took another job training security guards in hand-to-hand combat. But although he remained in the Army Reserve for years, the pure-macho stage of his life was over.

Rick retired from the Army as a Colonel.

Vietnam was always in the background. He told his daughter, Kim, that he wasn't the same man who used to kill 20 people before breakfast. He felt uneasy at reunions, complaining in an e-mail to Shucart about their "strange mixture of sentimentality, camaraderie, hucksterism and revisionist history." He once wrote that men who died in Vietnam were "as valid as any American hero in any war this country has ever fought," and he often visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. But he could not relate to veterans who still greeted him with "Welcome home, brother," and who never got over their bitter homecomings.

Civilian Life

In 1968, Rick began his studies in literature at the University of Oklahoma on the GI Bill. He hung around bookstores and coffee shops. He read up on American Indians and the Wild West and studied creative writing. He earned Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Literature and then began law school. "I'm sure everyone's talking about Rick the Celtic warrior, Rick the hero, but he also had a deep intelligence," says Fred McBee, a fellow student who later became a philosophy professor. "He'd lay Shakespeare on you. He'd quote Proust."

In 1972, Rick became a Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina. However, academia was not his calling. "Can you imagine Rescorla sitting around with a damn pipe in his mouth?" Dan Hill asks. The money wasn't great, either. So Rescorla shifted into corporate security, first at the Bank Administration Institute, then at a Chicago bank.

In 1985, Rick moved to New Jersey to be Director of Security for the Wall Street brokerage firm Dean Witter, which later merged with the investment bank Morgan Stanley. He brought a military regimen to the job, frequently calling his guards at night to make sure they were at their posts, and constantly analyzing new security threats.

World Trade Center Risk Assessment

During the Gulf War, Hill says, Rescorla concluded that the main threat at the World Trade Center was a truck-bomb attack on the pillars of the basement parking garage. "We walked the garage together, and that was obviously the soft spot," says Hill, who had been hired by Rescorla as a consultant. "He warned Port Authority, but they said it was none of his business."

In 1993, a terrorist truck bomb in that very garage created pandemonium. Although legend has it that Rick dropped his pants to get the crowd's attention, that Rescorla story isn't quite true. He only jumped on a desk in the middle of the firm and threatened to drop his pants if his people didn't chill out and listen. In the stunned silence that followed, he launched an orderly evacuation, refusing to leave until the entire tower was empty.

Rescorla and Dan Hill reasoned that the World Trade Center was still a target for terrorists and that the next attack could be a plane crashing into one of the towers. Rick expected a cargo plane, possibly loaded with chemical or biological weapons. He recommended to his superiors at Morgan Stanley that the company leave Manhattan. Office space and labor costs were lower in New Jersey, and the firm's employees and equipment would be safer in a proposed four-story building. However, this recommendation was not followed as the company's lease at the World Trade Center did not terminate until 2006. At Rescorla's insistence, all employees, including senior executives, then practiced emergency evacuations every three months - walking down stairways, two abreast.

11 September 2001

Rescorla was supposed to be on vacation that day. His wife Susan's daughter, Alexandra, was getting married the next week in a 10th Century Tuscan castle, and they had planned to go abroad early. But his deputy, Ihab Dana, wanted to visit Lebanon, so Rescorla delayed his own vacation and covered his shift. "It should've been me in there," Dana says. "Rick was like a father to me."

Rescorla was also scheduled to attend a lunchtime meeting to discuss the lawsuit Morgan Stanley was filing against the Port Authority about the security lapses that led to the 1993 attack.

At 8:15 a.m., Rick called Susan from his corner office on the 44th floor. "He told me he loved me. He said he didn't need the movies -- he had me," she says.

At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 struck World Trade Center Tower 1 (WTC 1). Rescorla, following his evacuation plans, ignored building officials' advice to stay put and began the orderly evacuation of Morgan Stanley's 2,700 employees on twenty floors of WTC 2, and 1,000 employees in WTC 5. Rescorla reminded everyone to "...be proud to be an American ...everyone will be talking about you tomorrow," and sang God Bless America and other military and Cornish songs over his bullhorn to help evacuees stay calm as they left the building, including an adaptation of the song "Men of Harlech:"

Men of Cornwall stop your dreaming;

Can't you see their spearpoints gleaming?

See their warriors' pennants streaming

To this battlefield.

Men of Cornwall stand ye steady;

It cannot be ever said ye

for the battle were not ready;

Stand and never yield!

Rescorla had most of Morgan Stanley's 2,700 employees, as well as people working on other floors of WTC 2, safely out of the buildings by the time United Airlines Flight 175 hit WTC 2 at 9:03 a.m. After leading many of his fellow employees to safety, Rescorla returned to the building to rescue others still inside. When one of his colleagues told him that he too, had to evacuate, Rescorla replied, "As soon as I make sure everyone else is out."

Susan Rescorla watched the United Airlines jet carve through her husband's tower, and she dissolved in tears. After a while, her phone rang. It was Rick. "I don't want you to cry," he said. "I have to evacuate my people now." She kept sobbing. "If something happens to me, I want you to know that you made my life." The phone went dead.

According to Stephan Newhouse, Chairman of Morgan Stanley International, Rescorla was seen as high as the 72nd floor evacuating people, clearing the floors and working his way down. He was last seen heading up the stairs of the tenth floor of the collapsing WTC 2. His remains were not recovered.

As a result of Rescorla's actions, all but 13 of Morgan Stanley's 2,700 WTC employees survived. They are: Richard C. Rescorla, Titus Davidson, Wesley Mercer, Jennifer de Jesus, Joseph DiPilato, Nolbert Salomon, Godwin Forde, Steve R. Strauss, Lindsay C. Herkness III, Thomas F. Swift, Albert Joseph, Jorge Velazquez, and Charles Laurencin.

Personal Life and Health

Rick married Elizabeth, a special-needs teacher, in 1972. She once found his medals hidden in a round tin in their attic. "He always said: 'The war was part of my life. It's not my life,' " she says.

In 1994, Rick was diagnosed with prostate cancer and underwent surgery to remove his prostate. Initially, the prognosis was positive, but by 1998 the cancer had spread to his bone marrow.

After his divorce from Elizabeth, Rescorla met Susan Greer in 1998 in the townhouse complex where he lived. Susan was an assistant to a dean at Fairleigh Dickinson University. When Rescorla's cancer went back into remission, he credited Susan, who had introduced him to a specialist in herbal medicine. They married on 20 February 1999 at Castillo de San Marcos, in St. Augustine, FL, because it reminded him of his childhood home on the coast of Cornwall.

Family

Rick left behind a widow, Susan Rescorla, two children, Kim and Trevor; and three stepchildren. His mother died in 2002.

Rescorla's daughter, Kim, was in law school at Seton Hall University in Newark, NJ, on 9/11. She and her brother, Trevor, were living with their mom, Rescorla's first wife, Betsy, in Morristown, NJ, when the attacks occurred.

They were not surprised that he died in the line of duty. Trevor says, "I knew he would be the last person out, because it was his command. As long as there were people in there, he would try to get them out."

"It was part of who my father was. He stayed to help evacuate the building in 1993 and would not have done anything different that day," Kim says.

This was Rescorla's last e-mail to Kim at law school, dated 10 September:

"Your mission... should you choose to accept it... dream, then scheme... This country will be coming out of its slump about two years from now. It's going to be a time for legal eagles of all kinds to leave their rocky promontories, spread their wings, and do what eagles tend to do..."

Tributes

● A memorial stone was erected in his hometown of Hayle, Cornwall, to commemorate his life.

● The Richard C. Rescorla Memorial Foundation

● A biography of Rescorla, Heart of a Soldier by James B. Stewart (ISBN 0-7432-4459-1), was described by Time Magazine as "the best non-fiction book of 2002." The book is the subject of an opera by Christopher Theofanidis, with libretto by Donna DiNovelli; starring Thomas Hampson as Rescorla, and featuring William Burden. It was premiered by San Francisco Opera on 10 September 2011.

● Rescorla was the subject of a 2005 documentary entitled The Man Who Predicted 9/11. The film was shown on Channel 4 in the UK and the History Channel in the U.S.

● Rescorla was honored with the White Cross of Cornwall/An Grows Wyn a Gernow award from his native Cornwall in 2003 by the Revived Cornish Stannary Parliament.

● Amanda Ripley's 2008 book, The Unthinkable: Who survives When Disaster Strikes-and Why, profiles Rescorla in the "Conclusion" section of the book.

● In 2006, Fort Benning, GA, unveiled a statue of Rick Rescorla.

● On 11 November 2009, Colonel Rescorla was inducted into the Oklahoma Military Hall of Fame.

● There is a Forward Operating Base in Farah Province, Afghanistan named after him, FOB Rescorla.

● Raptor Preserve, a Memorial Site in Morris County, NJ, contains a Memorial Plaque for Richard C. Rescorla. He once told Susan that if she wanted a memorial for him, he'd be okay with a plaque at a nearby bird sanctuary called the Raptors. It'll go on the American eagle cage.

● On 25 March 2009, Rick was awarded the Above & Beyond Citizen Medal - the most prestigious civilian award in America. Every year, on National Medal of Honor Day, three U.S. citizens are awarded the Above & Beyond Citizen Honor. They receive this award from a group of Americans whose actions have defined the word courage: the fewer than 100 living members of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society. Rick's children, Kim and Trevor, accepted this honor at a ceremony held in the shadow of the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington Cemetery.

Origin of Nickname/Handle:When Rescorla enlisted in the British Army in 1957, he began using the name "Rick" because he hated his given name, "Cyril."

Honoree ID: 2032 Created by: MHOH

3. Unconventional Warfare, 9/11 and the Future of U.S. Military Power

I also want to remember the late BG Frank Toney on 9-11 and what he did for the Special Forces Regiment.

Unconventional Warfare, 9/11 and the Future of U.S. Military Power

19fortyfive.com · by David Maxwell · September 10, 2021

As the United States and the military reflect on the end of the war and the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan it may be useful to return to the beginning on the 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001. The entire nation suffered a tremendous blow and from that day forward the U.S. military, the intelligence community, law enforcement, diplomats, development specialists, and contractors have been engaged in bringing to justice the perpetrators, preventing another terrorist attack on the homeland, and trying to alter the geopolitical environment in the face of a global threat of terrorism. Although many may be experiencing a sense of strategic failure there have been many successes over the years. Most importantly, after-action reviews will take place to learn from mistakes. The national security community also must identity what did work and make sure America does not forget the positive lessons even as the negative ones dominate the news.

The nation, the intelligence community and the military were caught off guard on September 11, 2001. While the government learned much from the 9-11 Commission Report and made many changes, America was flatfooted with no plan on how to respond to the attacks. However, there was one force that was part of the initial response that was trained and ready for just such a response. This was due to one person and his vision in two words: unconventional warfare. The man was the commander of the U.S. Army Special Forces Command, the late Brigadier General Frank Toney.

When General Toney took command, he sought to instill two things within the Special Forces Regiment: a total focus on unconventional warfare (UW) and advanced combat skills training with a heavy emphasis on marksmanship. He personally mentored every group and battalion commander and sought to infuse in them the mindset and philosophy of UW as the core foundational mission of Special Forces.

Despite there being no response plan for the September 11th attacks it was the UW focus and the advanced combat skills training that allowed 5th Special Forces Group (SFG) and its horse soldiers to effectively partner with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and exquisite U.S. air power operating in shared battlespace to conduct a punitive expedition in Afghanistan to oust the Taliban and Al Qaeda. One author says the U.S won the war before losing it.

At the same time, through the early years of the war on terrorism, the other Special Forces Groups were just as effective. 3d SFG operated in Africa and Afghanistan. 7th SFG sustained operations in Colombia and throughout the rest Latin America and rotated with 3d SFG in Afghanistan. 10th SFG conducted a highly successful UW mission in Northern Iraq with the Kurds as well and a little known mission in the Republic of Georgia. 1st SFG conducted long-duration operations in Philippines and throughout Asia. All the groups, to include the National Guard 19th and 20th SFGs, rotated Special Forces battalions and companies to Afghanistan and Iraq while continuing their employment in the respective regional theaters.

Although throughout the years the perception developed that special operations forces (SOF) broadly, and Special Forces in particular, emphasized direct action to capture and kill high value targets, the core of the UW mission remained instilled within every Special Forces soldier, along with Psychological Operations and Civil Affairs soldiers. This is an innate desire to work “through, with, and by” indigenous forces as retired Colonel Mark Boyatt first described in the 1990’s. This concept greatly influenced BG Toney and the entire Special Forces Regiment and beyond. By 2010 it was adopted as a fundamental operating concept for U.S Forces in Iraq (page 610).

The UW mission and General Toney were responsible for the success of Special Forces in the beginning of the war on terrorism. No one was certain what threats would emerge in the 21st Century. General Toney understood the best way to prepare for uncertainty was to focus on unconventional warfare. The definitions of UW have evolved over the years and the term itself is controversial, complicated, and often misunderstood. However, rather than focus on the doctrinal definition, UW should be understood as a mindset and philosophy that drives the thinking of Special Forces. At the root of UW it is about working through, with, and by indigenous forces to solve or contribute to solving complex political-military problems. It is also about working through, with, and by indigenous forces to create dilemmas for the nation’s adversaries through developing resistance capabilities among populations. The training, and more importantly the education, required of the UW mission is what gives Special Forces not only the capability to outfight the enemy but to outthink him as well. This is especially true as the U.S. and its friends, partners, and allies face myriad threats from great power competition, gray zone, hybrid warfare and violent extremism. As the former USSOCOM Commander General Schoomaker used to say, “train for certainty, educate for uncertainty.” There is no better way to prepare for the uncertain future than through UW.

In great power competition, the dominant threat or problem the U.S. faces is one of political warfare supported by hybrid military approaches – and these approaches are best described as irregular warfare (IW) in DODD 3000.7 – a “[violent] struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant populations.” It states that IW consists of UW, foreign internal defense (FID), counterterrorism (CT), counterinsurgency (COIN), and stability operations (SO).

The revisionist powers of China and Russia are employing their own forms of political warfare and hybrid approaches such as through the “Little Green Men.” The rogue and revolutionary powers of Iran and North Korea conduct their own unique forms of unconventional and political warfare. Special Operations Command Europe and 10th Special Forces Group, along with NATO allies, have supported development of an innovative approach called the Resistance Operating Concept which employs indigenous forces to counter the malign activities of the likes of the Little Green Men and to make sure an adversary knows that the cost of invasion and occupation will be too expensive in blood and treasure.

The Irregular War Annex to the National Defense Strategy provides the guidance for preparing for the wide range of threats as well as the activities necessary to counter them including in the context of great power competition. The 1st Special Forces Command’s Vision for 2021 and Beyond provides guidance to Special Forces, Psychological Operations, and Civil Affairs units on organizing and preparing for the future, from employing cross functional teams built from across the SOF disciplines to leading with influence and developing, supporting, and when appropriate countering, indigenous resistance. A close reading of the vision reveals that all concepts are derived from deep knowledge of the UW mission. BG Toney would find this vision completely in synch with his in 2001.

Although most might not recognize Congress as a place for strategic military thought, in the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act it outlined a sound operational concept for employment forces in IW: “Irregular Warfare is conducted in support of predetermined United States policy and military objectives conducted by, with, and through regular forces, irregular forces, groups, and individuals participating in competition between state and non-state actors short of traditional armed conflict.” (Sec. 1202). This succinct statement provides the basis for planning and conducting IW operations from the strategic to the tactical level.

The Chinese threat is the dominant one for the foreseeable future. China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world to dominate regions, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, and displace democratic institutions. It is doing this through its One Belt and One (OBOR) initiative which provides the economic and diplomatic capability to coerce and co-opt nations in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Like Europe, there are ways to develop resistance and resilience against Chinese hegemony built on the foundational mission of UW. Special operations forces, the interagency, and U.S. country teams must consider new approaches to address Chinese malign influence and threats.

As Special Forces, Psychological Operations, and Civil Affairs move forward in the 21st Century and educates for uncertainty they would do well to rely on the “two SOF trinities” to guide them. This is a shorthand summary of the essence of the 1st Special Forces Command’s vision:

• Irregular Warfare
• Unconventional Warfare
• Support to Political Warfare

The second “trinity” is the comparative advantage of SOF:

• Influence
• Governance
• Support to indigenous forces and populations

A foundational focus on these two trinities will continue to prepare special operations forces for the future. A future of irregular and unconventional warfare is not something most in the national security community may want to ponder. However, with no apologies to Leon Trotsky, “America may not be interested in irregular, unconventional, and political warfare; the revisionist and rogue powers are conducting their versions of them around the world.”

Lastly, it should be obvious that Special Forces cannot be successful alone. It cannot always operate unilaterally, and it requires integration, coordination, and synchronization with the boarder military and the interagency. Most importantly, it cannot develop strategic concepts on its own or in a vacuum. The U.S. needs to establish an American political warfare capability to orchestrate all relevant elements of U.S. national power in response to these irregular, unconventional, and political warfare threats, both in war and in peace. The U.S. must be able to effectively counter the political, unconventional, and hybrid warfare being conducted by the revisionist and rogue powers through its own superior form of political warfare.

The crisis of September 11th galvanized America and the U.S. military and intelligence community and entire U.S. government. Despite the uncertainty, the future security environment may still be described by adapting the prescient words of President Kennedy in 1962:

This is another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origin — war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration, instead of aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him. It is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what has been strangely called “wars of liberation,” to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved. It preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts. It requires in those situations where we must counter it, and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved, a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force, and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training.

The aftermath of September 11th demonstrated that those who prepared for unconventional warfare were prepared to meet uncertain challenges. Let us honor General Toney’s legacy with a renewed focus on UW for the future.

David Maxwell, a 1945 Contributing Editor, is a retired US Army Special Forces Colonel who has spent more than 20 years in Asia and specializes in North Korea and East Asia Security Affairs and irregular, unconventional. and political warfare. He had command and staff assignments in Korea, Japan, Germany, the Philippines, and CONUS, and served as a member of the military faculty teaching national security at the National War College. He is the editor of Small Wars Journal and a non-resident senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

19fortyfive.com · by David Maxwell · September 10, 2021

4. Lessons From Ukraine for Security Force Assistance

This is an important contribution to understanding what is happening (and has happened) in Ukraine and the contributions of Security Force Assistance framed in the proper perspective.

MG Mike Repass flagged this for me and sent along his note to the author and gave me permission to share as I believe his comments are an excellent complement to this piece.

First, congratulations for getting this published. It is really well-written in my opinion. Personally, I would like to see a more expansive study but you nailed the three areas in this piece. Well done. 

A couple of points from my perspective. 

-- You cut through the BS on what some people are touting as their efforts leading to UKR success.

-- Concerning the professional NCO corps, you correctly described that story. I entirely agree that their NCO corps was not very big when the war started. 

-- Same with decentralized C2. Some units were up to that task and level of proficiency, but many (most?) were not. 

-- KEY POINT: "Lack of buy-in from the GS." Wow. Spot-on. I hope that lands on the UAF GS and they take this under advisement. My gut tells me that post-war attitudes will harden, however. They did it their way and they beat the snot out of the Russians. What is their motivation to change and do it someone else's way who wasn't there and didn't help with that conflict?

-- Excellent insight on "reform vs modernization" regarding differing expectations. 

Lessons From Ukraine for Security Force Assistance

lawfaremedia.org · by Alexandra Chinchilla

Editor’s Note: Why did security force assistance work in Ukraine but fail in Afghanistan? Alexandra Chinchilla of Texas A&M’s Bush School unpacks this question, examining the factors that led assistance to work—at least somewhat—in Ukraine and explaining the lessons we should learn about when and how to use this tool in the future.

Daniel Byman

***

Just over two years have passed since the fall of Kabul. The speed of the collapse and the chaos of the U.S. withdrawal was shocking, but the eventual outcome was less surprising. In my interviews with U.S. military advisers who served in Afghanistan, no one believed the Afghan government could hold off the Taliban long without U.S. support. Fresh from this failure, American observers were perhaps too pessimistic in February 2022 when Russian troops sat on the Belarusian border with Ukraine, just over a hundred miles north of Kyiv. U.S. intelligence warned that Russian troops might seize Kyiv and install a puppet government in a matter of days, leaving only a rump state in the West.

But that didn’t happen. Ukrainian security forces, along with thousands of civilians, halted the Russian advance outside of Kyiv. After Russia’s failed attempt at regime change, Western aid began pouring into Ukraine on an unprecedented scale. By the time I visited Washington, D.C., in May 2022, the U.S. government was patting itself on the back for training and arming Ukraine since Russia’s initial invasion in 2014. When asked what went right, a senior U.S. official told me and a small group of researchers, “We built a professional NCO [noncommissioned officer] corps.” It’s clear something worked in Ukraine that didn’t work in Afghanistan. But how much, and in what ways, did U.S. security force assistance before Russia’s full-scale invasion enable Ukraine’s defense?

Overall, as I’ve written elsewhere, Ukraine is a successful case of security force assistance. I’ve formed this assessment based on extensive qualitative research, including nearly 100 interviews with U.S. and allied officials and advisers involved in aiding Ukraine, as well as Ukrainian politicians, soldiers, and civil society. What worked, though, and how much it mattered—is complicated.

Following Russia’s initial incursion in 2014, the Western response was swift but limited. The Obama administration chose a training and advising mission, wary of escalating tensions with Russia. NATO allies followed suit. Training and advising had three lines of effort: (a) establishing a combat training center at Yavoriv, (b) building a special forces capability that would be NATO interoperable, and (c) advising Ukraine’s security sector on how to transform from a Soviet legacy system to one resembling a NATO member country.

The combat training center was a success but was too small to train the entire Ukrainian army. Most Ukrainian soldiers trained in their home stations. NATO doctrine did not become the standard for how Ukrainian officers planned operations nor for how the General Staff managed training. The second line of effort—building capable Ukrainian Special Operations Forces (SOF)—was a success. But when Russia invaded, these SOF were thrown into the fight alongside conventional forces and the resulting significant casualties degraded their capability. The third line of effort—the wholesale transformation of Ukraine’s security sector—was a Herculean task that remains unfinished. Institutional transformation on the scale required in Ukraine takes decades, not years. With this in mind, there are three key lessons to draw from the pre-2022 effort to develop Ukraine’s armed forces.

Training Is Easier Than Building

Ukraine shows that training, especially at the tactical level, is much easier than building new institutions or reforming existing ones. Advisers uniformly described the high motivation of the average Ukrainian soldier as well as the speed with which they learned. Transforming defense institutions from Soviet legacy to NATO aligned is a more difficult task by orders of magnitude. Desirable outcomes, like the transparent and competitive procurement of arms and military equipment, require monumental reform—as evidenced by the fact that the overhaul of Ukraine’s defense procurement system is only now underway. Advisers were rarely embedded in the Ministry of Defense or the General Staff, limiting their access and influence. Yet these advising efforts did see some important progress in key functional areas, such as strategic communication, cyber defense, and military medicine. In 2019, Ukraine changed its constitution to commit to becoming a European Union and NATO member. This permanent, strategic realignment was a major achievement given the clear public consensus against NATO membership before 2014. After consideration of Western advice, Ukraine created defense planning concepts as well as a variety of legislation (like the 2018 law making the minister of defense a civilian) to align its military with NATO standards. But some of the other areas frequently touted as successes—a professional NCO corps and decentralized command and control—were not fully realized by 2022.

Had Russia not invaded, the Ukrainian army would have likely been in a position by 2023 to independently run the NATO-built Yavoriv combat training center. In that sense, the mission of the Joint Multinational Training Group-Ukraine (JMTG-U) was nearly completed. At Yavoriv, more than 27,000 Ukrainian individual soldiers, then battalions, and finally entire brigades, practiced soldier skills and trained in NATO ways of fighting. British and Canadian advisers worked at other locations in Ukraine, as well as with the Ukrainian National Guard. It’s clear that these training efforts had a positive effect on the Ukrainian military, or at least on the skills of the individuals and units who trained there, which can be clearly measured by comparing their skills at the beginning and end of training. In a dramatic testament to its value, Russian air strikes destroyed the state-of-the-art simulation center at Yavoriv early in the invasion.

But Western training was limited in scale. Most Ukrainian soldiers did not have the opportunity to receive Western training. Broader efforts to reform the Ukrainian training and professional military education system never gained sufficient traction before 2022. Constrained by their small footprint in Ukraine and lacking sufficient buy-in from the General Staff, NATO allies were left hoping that success at Yavoriv would trickle down throughout the force.

In contrast, Ukrainian SOF became a force thoroughly different from the Soviet-legacy spetsnaz that Ukraine had in 2014. NATO allies were heavily involved in designing the qualification course to produce new operators and establishing a new Special Operations Command. Ukrainian SOF developed into a highly trained force of tactically proficient operators; two units even passed a demanding evaluation process to participate in the NATO Response Force.

But even here, NATO allies were better at training than building. Western SOF trainers excel at creating partner SOF in their image; the Iraqi Golden Division is a prime example. Partner SOF are usually eager to emulate their trainers, down to their Patagonia gear and doctrinal buzzwords, and become part of the “family.” Yet the operational and strategic-level institutions for Ukrainian SOF were less developed and received less training. When Russia invaded, Ukrainian SOF fought as commandos alongside conventional forces, or even as a disciplined backbone inside less experienced conventional units, which led to high attrition rates. On the one hand, this was by necessity to plug gaps in conventional forces. When I interviewed Ukrainian SOF, they said this was an operational necessity—with their country fighting for its survival, what were they supposed to do but fight? On the other hand, more developed institutions could have prevented this. Or NATO allies could have better anticipated this role and built commandos for Ukraine cheaply and at scale instead of with a highly specialized capability.

For future security force assistance efforts, it’s worth asking: Is building required to achieve the desired outcome? If yes, time and significant advising efforts at the working level must be matched with sustained attention at the political level to motivate the partner’s senior decision-makers to build. If U.S. policymakers lack time, political will, or the ability to provide advising capacity, they would be better off aiming for smaller wins that can be achieved through training.

Shared Goals Do Not Imply Shared Ideas About How to Achieve Them

Ukraine’s motivation to defend itself is well known. And Western partners supported Ukraine’s defense. Despite these shared goals, though, both parties often had divergent ideas about how to reach them in the 2014-2022 period I studied. One Ukrainian I interviewed described this tension as the difference between military reform and modernization. NATO wanted reform of the Ukrainian security sector along certain core values: democratic control and oversight, transparency, and interoperability, to name just a few. The Ukrainian Armed Forces, by contrast, wanted to modernize the military with updated equipment and better tactics to keep fighting Russia in the Donbas. Significant tension existed between these methods of immediate increases in combat effectiveness versus transforming the Ukrainian security sector into something wholly new and different.

NATO and its allies weren’t always right. Many Western recommendations, if implemented, would have left Ukraine worse off when Russia invaded. For example, a major NATO priority was the complete reorganization of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), an intelligence agency whose unique combination of law enforcement powers and paramilitaries that can operate on Ukrainian soil has proved critical to finding and neutralizing Russian spy networks. Downsizing the military would have had similar negative effects. Ukrainians involved in reform often felt frustrated with the recommendations of NATO and the plethora of international advisers, which they viewed as contradictory or too vague. Further complicating matters, many Ukrainians felt that reform solely for NATO had little utility because NATO had little intention of granting Ukraine membership prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Security Force Assistance Might Not Always Be the Decisive Factor

Ukraine’s experience over the past 18 months shows that it is unrealistic to expect security force assistance to be the decisive factor in any conflict. In Ukraine, so many factors pulled in the direction of successful resistance. A surge of nationalism spurred civilians to rally against external invaders, prompting many to enlist in the Territorial Defense Forces or to provide essential supplies to the security forces. The security forces continued to resist, even in the face of mounting casualties. Russia’s offensive operations proved vulnerable to asymmetric tactics, which played to Ukraine’s strengths. The international community’s robust and somewhat unexpected support, further galvanized by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s inspirational leadership, was pivotal in sustaining the war effort. And conventional conflicts, unlike counterinsurgencies, can be won with guns and bombs—tools that NATO allies could provide.

Without these factors, U.S. and allied security force assistance would not have succeeded, but it was still a worthy investment. Its cost was modest; in fact, much more could have been spent to help Ukraine before 2022. Without the tools and training in modern war, from Western help and its own modernization efforts, Ukrainian resistance would have been left largely empty handed in the face of Russia’s onslaught.

Alexandra Chinchilla

AlexCecylia

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Alexandra Chinchilla is an assistant professor of international affairs at Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government and Public Service.

lawfaremedia.org · by Alexandra Chinchilla

5. Building the New Infantry: It’s All About Culture By Corporal Joshua Sulentic, USMC

Building the New Infantry: It’s All About Culture By Corporal Joshua Sulentic, USMC

themaneuverist.org · September 10, 2023

A Marine lance corporal and corporal on patrol in Helmand Province, 2014.

Force Design 2030 (FD 2030) demands better infantry Marines. They must be smarter, more mature, and “SOF-like” to conduct expeditionary amphibious base operations (EABO) supporting the joint force. Headquarters Marine Corps has directed the service to “Explore ways to challenge existing models and paradigms to yield a more capable and mature infantry and reconnaissance force.” The Marine Corps has made great strides in improving its training, gear, and technology for infantry Marines. The current culture of the infantry, however, has failed to keep pace. Unless this culture changes, Force Design 2030 could suffer and potentially fail.

Many infantry Marines, especially those at the rank of lance corporal and below, lack maturity and pride in their work. This mentality is best captured by the concept of the “Terminal Lance.” Terminal Lance Marines have low esprit and do their best to avoid work as much as possible. They often rebel against their leaders and the Marine Corps, from minor things like not shaving or getting haircuts within regulations to full-blown malingering and refusing to train. The Terminal Lance mentality exists throughout the infantry and forms a cornerstone of infantry culture. It is highly detrimental to units. But we can and should combat it. Team and squad leaders can implement four practices to help develop the maturity, pride, and proficiency of their Marines, especially new infantry Marines. These practices are attentiveness from leaders, mentorship, proper initiation, and intelligent, well-planned training.

I: Attentiveness from Leaders

Marines must see their leaders. Leaders need to be seen at all levels of command, but the closer they are to the bottom of an organization, the more visible they should be. Junior Marines often complain about not seeing their company or battalion commanders during training and field exercises. Leaders appear uncaring and uninterested in their Marines when they fail to show a vested interest in their small units’ day-to-day activities. Squad and team leaders risk the same thing when they fail to invest in their Marines’ training.

Learning suffers when teachers lack passion for teaching. On the Controversy and Clarity podcast, Damien O'Connell once remarked, “If you don’t have someone who is interested in education or passionate about it, that’s going to trickle down to the students…” If leaders do not care about teaching, Marines will not care about learning. Things happen, of course, and small unit leaders cannot always be present for every exercise. But leaders should show an active interest in their Marines by asking about the day’s events later on. Squad and team leaders should always seek to shape their unit’s training. If leaders miss an event, they should know what their Marines were supposed to learn or practice. Leaders can answer questions, provide additional resources, and test Marines on their knowledge, understanding, and skills. Marines who know their leaders care about them and their training will strive to develop themselves during and after working hours. These efforts will result in better-trained, more prepared, more mature infantrymen.

II. Mentorship

Leaders must build strong, healthy relationships with their Marines. Mentorship is the lifeblood of the infantry. New infantry Marines often face two challenges in their units. First, they are treated poorly and not allowed to integrate into the unit fully. Second, they lack structure, are not held to a high standard, and become complacent. I have seen both cases, and neither outcome is good.

New Marines often become timid and lack confidence when forced to walk on eggshells around overbearing squad or team leaders. Their focus becomes avoiding punishment rather than learning and mastering their job. This breeds resentment and distrust of leaders, leading to apathy and the loss of healthy ambition.

Unfortunately, many junior infantry Marines perpetuate what has been done to them. If they become leaders, they may not know how to train their Marines. One of my seniors once told me, “We got so many briefs about how they [leadership] would crush us if your peer group called one of us out for hazing. So, when you all got here, we were walking on glass and didn’t know how to train you, because everything our seniors did to train us would probably now be considered hazing.” This Marine and his peers had been trained so poorly that they did not know how to effectively train and teach their Marines without fear of being charged with hazing. They had learned how to break down Marines, not build them up.

On the other hand, if new Marines lack structure and standards, they can become complacent, bullheaded, and disrespectful to NCOs and other lower-level leadership. I have witnessed lance corporals with less than a year in the fleet openly disrespect and talk back to corporals and sergeants beginning or well into their second enlistment. Many small unit leaders have similar stories of disrespect from new Marines not held to the standard. Marines want to be led.

We can achieve a happy medium, however, where the relationship between junior and senior Marines is relaxed enough for trust to develop but structured enough to maintain standards and respect both ways. Albert Brumfield, a former infantry corporal from 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines, and now the administrator for the Instagram page Maneuver Up, offers that small unit leaders must “Realize that what you’re seen doing and saying as a squad or team leader is not taken with a grain of salt. It becomes what your boots see as acceptable and common practice long after you’re gone.” New Marines should see their seniors’ actions as something to emulate. And by emulating their seniors, junior Marines can become the more mature infantrymen that FD 2030 requires. As General Lejeune reminds us

The relation between officers and enlisted men should in no sense be that of superior and inferior nor that of master and servant, but rather that of teacher and scholar… …it should partake of the nature of the relation between father and son, to the extent that officers, especially commanders, are responsible for the physical, mental, and moral welfare, as well as the discipline and military training of the men under their command.

This applies to NCOs just as much as it does to commissioned officers. Team and squad leaders should not see themselves as masters of their troops but as educators and caretakers to the Marines in their charge.

III. Initiation

Recruit training initiates civilians into the Marine Corps. Infantry Training Battalion initiates Marines into the infantry. Team and squad leaders must properly initiate new infantry Marines into their units. This builds camaraderie and esprit de corps and creates an immediate relationship of respect between the new Marines and their seniors. There is a reason MCDP-1 Warfighting stresses that “Leaders should develop unit cohesion and esprit and the self-confidence of individuals within the unit.”

Pride is a powerful force and can inspire groups to do great things. But pride must be earned. Former Navy SEAL Jocko Willink states in his book Leadership Strategy and Tactics: Field Manual that, to build pride in a team, leaders must put people through “situations that require unity, strength, and perseverance to get through.” This is where initiation comes in. By putting Marines through a grinder after arriving at their first unit and letting them push through things together, they develop camaraderie and pride. Initiation must end at an appropriate time however. Otherwise, it becomes nonsensical and counterproductive.

Willink also reminds us not to push people so hard that they break. Initiation should build spirit in individuals and teams, not injure, demean, or de-motivate them. If initiation leads to undesirable outcomes, team and squad leaders should pull back the reins so their Marines do not lose motivation and become disgruntled.

Team and squad leaders should take part in some of the initiation activities. By going through hard times with their Marines, leaders get buy-in and prove they will not make their Marines do anything they would not do. I have often seen Marines complain about some of the more strenuous PT sessions they did upon arrival to the fleet, mainly because their seniors stood by and watched. In contrast, I know many Marines who have gone through worse experiences but talk about them with pride because their leaders were with them, slogging through creeks and rain and helping carry mock casualties, ammo cans, and logs.

Another kind of initiation requires new Marines to do menial yet essential tasks. Field days, working parties, and the like are often assigned to the newest Marines. Some leaders use these opportunities to slack off and make the new guys do it “...because that’s what I did as a boot.” This mentality harms units. It tells junior Marines that their seniors are above menial work.

But assigning menial tasks to new Marines holds merit for a different reason. My father, who has been a firefighter for over twenty years, shared that new “Probies,” or first-year firefighters who have completed the fire academy and are in their probationary term, earn their place at their stations by cleaning trucks and dishes, making coffee, answering the phone, and doing many other minor, though necessary, tasks. Carrying out these duties helps new firefighters earn their place and shows they can be trusted to complete tasks without supervision.

In accordance with FD 2030, Marine infantry squads and teams will execute important missions on their own, often far away from their platoons and companies. As such, we should start developing the trust and responsibilities of Marines as soon as they get to their first unit. By proving to their seniors they can be trusted with basic tasks, new Marines will demonstrate they can also be charged with more critical jobs. By contrast, a platoon leader cannot trust a team of junior Marines to operate an observation post overnight when they cannot clean the common areas in their barracks without NCOs breathing down their necks.

Marines are made at the MCRDs and shaped at the SOIs. The performance and attitudes of new infantry Marines directly reflect the leaders who mold them. It is up to team and squad leaders to develop their junior Marines into motivated, intelligent, and physically capable infantrymen, ready and willing to fight the enemy. I was often told the phrase, “Marines don’t jump on grenades for God and country. They do it for their brothers and sisters next to them.” We must develop this camaraderie and trust in our teams and squads as early as possible.

(Credit: Lance Cpl. William Chockey, USMC)

IV. Training

The fourth and final practice involves intelligent, challenging training. Wild “slayer” PT sessions should become rare if not discarded. These result in long-term physical injuries and lower performance. For example, daily “boots and utes” flak runs injure the back, knees, and feet over time. In addition, lifting tires and logs and running with them proves even more detrimental if overdone. While these exercises can make individuals mentally stronger, they wear down the shoulders, neck, back, core, and extremities faster than other equally strenuous but less physically damaging evolutions. Therefore, the above practices should be minimized and replaced with difficult but intelligent physical fitness plans designed to increase endurance, encourage muscle growth, and improve mobility. Infantrymen with extreme joint pain will become ineffective and even liabilities in the long, self-sustaining operations FD 2030 calls for, where most movements will be on foot under load.

But enhanced physical fitness forms only part of the required infantry transformation. We need to get smarter. We must implement well-developed technical and tactical training. Speed reload drills at the armory and buddy rushing are not the be-all-end-all for “backyard” training. Gather the squad and teams to fight decision games; run combat casualty care drills; practice basic MOUT training; and develop, rehearse, and improve team and squad SOPs. These activities bring great benefits and can be done in a barracks room, company lounge, or quad with little to no budget.

Furthermore, small unit leaders should incorporate desirable difficulties into their training. Dr. Bob Bjork, the cognitive psychologist who coined the term, explains that desirable difficulties involve “varying the conditions of learning, rather than keeping them constant and predictable; interleaving instruction on separate topics, rather than grouping instruction by topic (called blocking); spacing rather than massing, study sessions [or training] on a given topic; and using tests, rather than presentations, as study events.”

One simple way small unit leaders can implement desirable difficulties into training is through spaced knowledge checks. We should reward Marines when they answer correctly and demonstrate competence. This motivates them to learn critical information. Furthermore, we should discuss wrong answers and properly remediate them while the questions remain fresh in the Marines’ minds. Remember the saying many Marine infantrymen know but sometimes forget: You will never train too much for a job that can kill you.

Conclusion

Most new infantry Marines join the fleet ready to learn. They have just earned the title “Marine” and want to build upon the knowledge gained from their drill and combat instructors. But these instructors spend only a few months with the Marines. It is the Marines' future team and squad leaders who have the chance to develop them for years. When the time comes, many junior Marines will become leaders. They will take what their seniors taught them and apply it to developing their own Marines. Squad and team leaders can positively or negatively affect the execution of FD 2030 for years to come. Things do not end when small unit leaders PCS, lateral move, or get their DD-214. They should consider this every time they teach a class, push their people through PT, or do anything where their Marines will take away lessons—good or bad—and apply them as leaders one day.

Author Bio: Corporal Joshua Sulentic is a team leader in Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 6th Marines. He is a graduate of the Advanced Infantry Marine Course and currently deployed with the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit to the Persian Gulf. This is his first article for The Maneuverist.

Endnotes

[1] Just what is an appropriate time? It depends. Some individuals may take longer to “get with the program” than others, whether due to stubbornness or other factors.

[2] There are many resources one can look to for well-designed PT plans. The MARSOC Assessment and Selection Fitness Preparation Log has multiple movement-based PT cards to build PT plans. SOFLETE is another great resource for combat fitness workouts.

themaneuverist.org · September 10, 2023

6. Is the US getting Asia wrong?

Excerpts:

Biden has continued on that economic nationalist path, rejecting the idea of market access and tariff reduction trade agreements, resisting calls from Japan and other Asian partners to rejoin TPP. This reinforces Asian concerns about America’s staying power, as the region’s economic party continues with the U.S. outside, face pressed against the glass. 

One possible way to square the circle may be to use the Vietnam meeting and the ASEAN Regional Forum and East Asia Summit, which Vice President Kamala Harris will attend, to build on outrage over China’s coercive maritime behavior in the South China Sea. Beijing’s Coast Guard and maritime militia have been firing water cannons at Filipino resupply ships and Vietnamese fishing boats in their own respective territorial waters. China has also intimated or tried to block offshore oil and gas projects in Malaysia and Indonesia with their respective economic zones. 

All these actions violate the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which China has ratified. Beijing sees its actions as enforcing “sovereignty” based on fictional territorial claims, rejected by the International Court of Justice in 2016. China rejected this international law and outraged many ASEAN states and India (with whom it has disputed claims) recently by publishing a map showing all these disputed territories as part of China. 

Biden laid a foundation for countering Chinese claims at the Camp David summit last month, issuing an unusually strident joint statement denouncing China’s claims and actions in the South China Sea. One way to tie the various regional bodies together would be to work with like-minded states at the East Asia Summit to demand a freeze on new construction in the South China Sea, compliance with the convention on the law of the sea, and call for a code of conduct for the Western Pacific. 

Even if China rejected such ideas, the U.S. and its partners could forge a near-consensus, isolate Beijing and create a basis for further international responses.  

Is the US getting Asia wrong? 

BY ROBERT A. MANNING, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 09/08/23 12:30 PM ET

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4193775-is-the-us-getting-asia-wrong/

At first glance, President Biden’s upcoming state visit to Vietnam this weekend — coming on the heels of a successful trilateral summit last month, where it forged new defense and high-tech cooperation with South Korea and Japan — appears to underscore Biden’s efforts to deepen U.S. ties in the Asia-Pacific.  

Hanoi and Washington are poised to declare a “comprehensive strategic partnership,” another Asian partner seeming to line up to counterbalance China. This is part of a larger pattern. For example, earlier this year, the U.S. cemented deals with the Philippines, a treaty ally, to gain access to four military bases, and with Papua New Guinea, as tensions mount over Taiwan and disputed territorial claims in the South China Sea. 

But things are more complicated than that. Biden’s stop in Vietnam after the G20 Summit in New Delhi may come at a cost to wider U.S. credibility in the region. Why? Biden is skipping two inclusive institutional summits; the ASEAN Regional Forum and the East Asia Summit. Both are hosted by Indonesia, the world’s fourth-largest nation, a democracy, the largest Muslim state and arguably, the most important actor in Southeast Asia. 

Most Asia-Pacific nations want a greater U.S. security and economic role in the region, but fear being forced to choose between the U.S. and China. But a perpetual concern is how reliable America is. As Woody Allen once said, “Ninety percent of life is just showing up.”   

With regard to the Asia-Pacific, the U.S. is fighting geography (the “tyranny of distance”) and economics. Though in absolute terms, the U.S. economic role in Asia is growing, it is shrinking in relative terms because Asian economies grow faster than the U.S. China borders 14 countries and is the largest trading partner and major investor in all U.S.-allied and partner nations in the region. 

The ASEAN Regional Forum and East Asia Summit are inclusive regional institutions that emerged after the Cold War ended in the early 1990s. While they have been largely process-oriented talk shops, they provide a venue for high-level bilateral diplomacy and a ritualistic comfort level of U.S. engagement. 

One reason why Biden’s absence raises hackles in Jakarta and other Asian capitals is that like the elevated ties to Vietnam his visit will cement, and the recent Camp David U.S.-South Korea-Japan trilateral summit, the U.S. is fashioning a network of defense cooperation and new supply chains, eclipsing the forum and the summit.

These include the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (known as the Quad), composed of the U.S., India, Japan and Australia, and AUKUS (U.S.-United Kingdom-Australia), a defense industrial Anglosphere alliance initially created to provide nuclear submarines for Australia.     

Unlike existing Asian regional groupings, this new U.S.-driven network is exclusive, aimed at countering China and functional rather than process-centered. Taken together, these and other U.S. bilateral defense upgrades, like the new base access in the Philippines and Papua New Guinea, are a formidable counterbalance to China. 

But this gets to the different approaches to world order between the U.S. and many Asia-Pacific nations. Where U.S. efforts are designed to shape a regional coalition to oppose and confront China’s assertive, provocative behavior toward Taiwan, the East and South China Seas and South Pacific islands, ASEAN and others in the region are hedging, multi-aligning with and against both the U.S. and China.  

This is in part, the “two Asias,” problem: a U.S.-led “security Asia” of competing nationalisms, Chinese military ascendance and territorial disputes versus “economic Asia.” This is a dynamic, integrating, tech-driven region focused on bolstering market access, trade accord and investment. The business of Asia is business. These two forces are pulling in opposite directions. Hence, Asians impulse to hedge. 

This is about the dual fears of U.S. allies and partners in the region. Fear of abandonment on the one hand, and of entrapment on the other — getting pulled into a conflict with China — which is close and with whom they have to live. 

It has not helped that Asia-Pacific nations have deepened integration aided by major trade expansion via the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which includes China but not the U.S., and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.  

The U.S. is missing in action. Worse, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), now renamed under Japanese leadership, was seen by both the Bush and Obama administrations as a pillar of U.S. economic strategy to counter, which Trump rejected. Now China is trying to join it. 

Biden has continued on that economic nationalist path, rejecting the idea of market access and tariff reduction trade agreements, resisting calls from Japan and other Asian partners to rejoin TPP. This reinforces Asian concerns about America’s staying power, as the region’s economic party continues with the U.S. outside, face pressed against the glass. 

One possible way to square the circle may be to use the Vietnam meeting and the ASEAN Regional Forum and East Asia Summit, which Vice President Kamala Harris will attend, to build on outrage over China’s coercive maritime behavior in the South China Sea. Beijing’s Coast Guard and maritime militia have been firing water cannons at Filipino resupply ships and Vietnamese fishing boats in their own respective territorial waters. China has also intimated or tried to block offshore oil and gas projects in Malaysia and Indonesia with their respective economic zones. 

All these actions violate the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which China has ratified. Beijing sees its actions as enforcing “sovereignty” based on fictional territorial claims, rejected by the International Court of Justice in 2016. China rejected this international law and outraged many ASEAN states and India (with whom it has disputed claims) recently by publishing a map showing all these disputed territories as part of China. 

Biden laid a foundation for countering Chinese claims at the Camp David summit last month, issuing an unusually strident joint statement denouncing China’s claims and actions in the South China Sea. One way to tie the various regional bodies together would be to work with like-minded states at the East Asia Summit to demand a freeze on new construction in the South China Sea, compliance with the convention on the law of the sea, and call for a code of conduct for the Western Pacific. 

Even if China rejected such ideas, the U.S. and its partners could forge a near-consensus, isolate Beijing and create a basis for further international responses.  

Robert A. Manning is a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center. He previously served as senior counselor to the undersecretary of State for global affairs, as a member of the U.S. secretary of state’s policy planning staff and on the National Intelligence Council Strategic Futures Group. Follow him on Twitter @Rmanning4. 

7. Special Operations News - September 11, 2023 | SOF News

Special Operations News - September 11, 2023 | SOF News

sof.news · by SOF News · September 11, 2023

Curated news, analysis, and commentary about special operations, national security, and conflicts around the world.

Photo / Image: An Army Special Forces soldier parachutes during Exercise Super Garuda Shield in Banyuwangi, Indonesia, Aug. 30, 2023. The annual exercise is a joint, multinational event focused on maintaining a free and open Indo-Pacific. Photo by Sgt. 1st Class Austin Berner.

Do you receive our daily newsletter? If not, you can sign up here and enjoy it five (almost) days a week with your morning coffee (or afternoon tea depending on where in the world you are).

9/11 Anniversary. The terrorist attack against the United States on September 11, 2001, thrust the U.S. into a 20-year Global War on Terror (GWOT).

SOF News

New SOJTF-C Cdr. Rear Adm. (lower half) Mark A. Schafer, is assigned as commanding general, Special Operations Joint Task Force-Central, U.S. Central Command, Doha, Qatar. Schafer recently served as commander, Navy Region Korea; commander, U.S. Naval Forces Korea; commander, Naval Component, United Nations Commander, Korea, Pusan, Korea.

SOF and Psychedelic Treatment. A prior study demonstrated that psychedelic-assisted therapy was related to reductions in mental health symptoms and associated consequences among U.S. Special Operations Forces Veterans seeking treatment in Mexico. A new study extends this analysis to explore the prospective associations of baseline predictors on treatment outcomes and whether changes in psychological flexibility mediate the relationship between acute changes in consciousness and clinical outcomes. “Predictors of psychedelic treatment outcomes among special operations veterans”, American Psychological Association, September 2023.

MC-12W Aircrew Honored. An aircraft with the callsign Independence 08 was lost on April 27, 2013, in a crash near Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan, killing four. “MC-12W Liberty aircrew honors fellow Airmen who died in 2013 crash”, DVIDS, September 6, 2023.

NAVSCIATTS SLIC. The Strategic Leaders International Course offered by the Naval Small Craft Instruction and Technical Training School (part of USSOCOM) is a four week in-resident professional development curriculum held at Stennis Space Center, MS. The course is designed for partner nation senior military leaders, diplomats, and senior government officials, introduces the participants to leading-edge methodologies actively used in both the public and private sectors to address the complexities of today’s “gray and green” zone challenges. Read more in “Bridging the Gaps Between Partner Nations”, DVIDS, September 5, 2023.

MoH Recipient – Sgt. 1st Class Chris Celiz. Celiz was selected to join the 75th Ranger Regiment in 2013, and by 2018, he’d deployed several times to both Iraq and Afghanistan. During those deployments, he was always inclusive of others and known to encourage camaraderie. His selflessness was put to the ultimate test on July 12, 2018, when Celiz was leading a special purpose unit that included 1st Battalion Rangers and partner forces in Afghanistan. “Medal of Honor Monday: Army Sgt. 1st Class Christopher A. Celiz”, U.S DoD, September 11, 2023.

SOF Medics and Their Egos. Medicine is an environment where egotistical behavior often reigns supreme; SOF medicine is far from exempt from this phenomenon. “Healthy Humility in Special Operations Forces (SOF) Medicine . . . and Beyond”, by Sam Patrick, LinkedIn Pulse, November 22, 2019.

SEALs Face Charges. An investigation into the death of a SEAL candidate in February 2022 has revealed that medical teams at BUD/S were “poorly organized, poorly integrated and poorly led.” “Three Navy SEAL commanders face charges in Hell Week death”, Task & Purpose, September 8, 2023. Read more about this incident in “The Navy SEALs Hell Week Turns Deadly”, by Seeth Hettena, Rolling Stone, September 7, 2023.

MoH Recipient – Master Sgt. Earl Plumlee. The heroic actions of MSG Plumlee, a member of the 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne), on 28 August 2013 in Afghanistan earned him the award of the Medal of Honor. He was based at Forward Operating Base Ghazni when Afghan insurgents attacked the FOB with a massive explosion against the FOB perimeter wall. Insurgents wearing suicide vests poured through the hole in the wall. Plumlee’s actions that day was key to saving the lives of many. Read more in “Medal of Honor: Master Sgt. Earl D. Plumlee”, Military Review, September – October 2023.

International SOF

Russian SOF – Lessons Not Learned. A recent article about Russian special operations forces provides some interesting perspectives on the historical use of Russian SOF over the past century. “The Fall from Grace of Russian SOF: The Danger of Forgetting Lessons Learned“, Irregular Warfare Center, September 5, 2023.

Estonia SOF. Analysis suggests that Estonia has the most developed total defense and unconventional warfare processes and capabilities of any Baltic state [RAND source]. Much of this is due to the Estonian Special Operation Forces; a highly specialized unit responsible for all manner of special operations. “ESTSOF: Estonian Special Operations Forces”, by Ahmad Hassan, Grey Dynamics, September 4, 2023.

El Sal SF Participate in Fort Devens Shooting Competition. FORT DEVENS, Massachusetts – Team El Salvador won the Remington “Vulcan” Trophy as Team Grand Aggregate Champion in the New Hampshire National Guard Adjutant General (NHNG TAG)’s 2023 Combat Marksmanship Match on Sept. 8, Ft. Devens, Mass. (DVIDS, Sep 10, 2023)

New Rifle for UK SOF. Special operations elements of the British Army and Royal Marines are getting a new rifle – the KS-1. An order for 1,640 Knight’s Stoner 1 (KS-1) rifles, designated the L403A1 in UK service, has been placed, with an option to acquire a further 10,000 falling under a new £90m contract over the next decade. “KS-1: All the gen on the British Army and Royal Marines’ new rifle”, Forces.net, September 7, 2023. See also “New advanced rifle for Ranger Regiment”, army.mod.uk, September 7, 2023.

SOF History

Bin Laden Raid. In May 2011 members of SEAL Team Six infiltrated into Pakistan and killed Osama bin Laden. The al-Qaeda founder was the mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that killed over 3,000 people. “Operations Neptune Spear: 7 Sizzling Secrets About the Bin Laden Mission”, Spyscape, September 9, 2023.

Operation BARRAS. On 10 September 2000, 1 PARA, the RAF, and the SAS conducted Operation BARRAS to free five British soldiers held captive in the war-torn West African country of Sierra Leone. They were held by the West Side Boys. Lynx, Chinook, and Hind helicopters took part in the successful operation. https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/operation-barras

Ukraine Conflict

Guarded Optimism. Many observers of the Ukraine conflict have noticed that the Ukrainians have yet to score a significant breakthrough of the Russian defensive lines that would lead to a severing of the Russian logistical lines of communication. However, some assessments are now moving from pessimistic to a more promising outcome – with a possible penetration of Russia’s third line of defense taking place before the harsh winter weather sets in. A senior official of the Defense Intelligence Agency provides more in an interview. “How the Pentagon assesses Ukraine’s progress”, The Economist, September 6, 2023. (subscription).

Cluster Munitions. Cluster munitions are air-dropped or ground-launched weapons that release a number of smaller submunitions intended to kill enemy personnel or destroy vehicles. Cluster munitions were developed in World War II and are part of many governments’ weapons stockpiles. Cluster munitions have been used frequently in combat, including the early phases of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Cluster munitions have been criticized for causing a significant number of civilian deaths. The Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), which bans the use of cluster munitions, entered into force in 2010; the United States is not a party to this convention. A number of governments, UN agencies, and nongovernmental organizations have accused Russia of using cluster munitions during its 2022 invasion. Cluster Munitions: Backgrounds and Issues for Congress, Congressional Research Service, CRS RS22907, updated September 6, 2023, PDF, 17 pages. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RS/RS22907

SFA and Ukraine. The United States can learn from what has worked in its effort to support the Ukrainian military. Why did security force assistance work in Ukraine but fail in Afghanistan? Alexandra Chinchilla of Texas A&M’s Bush School unpacks this question, examining the factors that led assistance to work—at least somewhat—in Ukraine and explaining the lessons we should learn about when and how to use this tool in the future. “Lessons From Ukraine for Security Force Assistance”, Lawfare Blog, September 10, 2023.

Commentary

SOF and South America. Cole Herring, a Special Forces officer in the US Army with time in the 7th Special Forces Group and Special Operations Command South, writes on countering China in South America. He says that special operations forces are uniquely suited to build partnerships that will help counter the malign influence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in America’s backyard. “SOF Can Help Win the Competition for Influence in South America”, Irregular Warfare Initiative, September 1, 2023.

Paper – Urban Resistance to Occupation. This paper illustrates the feasibility of overt, guerrilla-based activity in urban environments during the final phase of a conflict and offers insight into an understudied Landpower activity that modern at-risk countries should develop and hone. “Urban Resistance to Occupation: An Underestimated Element of Land Warfare”, Parameters, August 2023, by Kevin D. Stringer and Jell J.H. Hooiveld, 19 pages.

National Security

Tanks in the 21st Century. A nine-page essay details the persistent value of armored combined arms teams in the modern era. “The Tank is Dead . . . Long Live the Tank”, Military Review, August 2023, PDF.

11th Airborne Division – With a Mission in the “High North”. During World War II the 11th Airborne Division saw extensive duty in the Pacific theater. It would later deploy to Vietnam as the 11th Air Assault Division. In 2022, the 11th Airborne Division was reactivated. Today, the “Arctic Angels” of the 11th build capability to operate in the Arctic, mountain terrain, and other extreme cold weather (ECW) areas while maintaining readiness for global deployments. “The 11th Airborne Division Reborn”, Military Review, September – October 2023.

Infantry. The Fall 2023 edition of Infantry is online. Lots of articles to include several on jungle warfare. Published on DVIDS by the U.S. Army Infantry School, PDF, 52 pages. https://www.dvidshub.net/publication/issues/67501

DoD Going ‘Woke’. Change 5 to the Manual of Military Decorations and Awards took effect on August 7, 2023. Because of this change citations for prestigious joint awards must now use gender-neutral language. So instead of a fellow getting an award saying ” . . . distinguished himself by superior meritorious service . . .”; it will now say ” . . . distinguished themself by superior meritorious service . . .” Things that make you go “Hmmm”. “New Department of Defense Rule Neuters the Brave Men and Women Who Served in the Armed Forces”, The Daily Signal, September 1, 2023.

Help Special Operations Forces (SOF) personnel with spine injuries receive the healthcare options, education, and care they need.

Afghanistan

Kabul Airlift. A Congressional aide recounts the ups and downs of assisting U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents (LPRs), and Afghan Special Immigrant Visa holders onto Hamid Karzai International Airport during the frantic days of August 2021. He also writes on the despair and disappointment he felt in the aftermath. “The Education of a Soldier”, Special Operations Association of America, August 31, 2023.

Afghan SIVs Lost in Red Tape. Processing rates by the U.S. Department of State of Afghan Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) applicants is very slow. Critics claim this is threatening the lives of more than 152,000 SIV applicants remaining in Afghanistan. “Afghan allies who risked lives to help US lost in red tape”, Fox News, September 3, 2023.

Failure of August 2021. The U.S. military did a phenomenal job in conducting the Kabul Airlift two years ago. Over 120,000 people were airlifted out of Kabul in a two-week period by the U.S. and other nations. Many of these people were foreign nationals. Some were at-risk Afghans who had assisted the U.S., NATO, and other partner nations during the 2001 to 2021 timeframe. However, many of the evacuated Afghans were simply people who swarmed the airport during the initial days of the chaotic non-combatant evacuation operation (NEO) and managed to get on a flight out of the country. Most of the at-risk Afghans who qualify for a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) due to their working relationship with the U.S. military have been left behind in Afghanistan. “Helping the Afghan Allies America Left Behind”, by Luke Coffey, Hudson Institute, September 8, 2023.

Old Salt Coffee is a corporate sponsor of SOF News. The company offers a wide range of coffee flavors to include Green Eyes Coffee, a tribute to those Navy special operations personnel who operate in the night.

Africa

The Coups Keep Coming. There have been several countries in Africa that have had coups in the past few years. This graphic depicts the African countries that have had coups between 2020 and 2023. (Wikimedia.org, Creative Commons, 31 July 2023)

DoD Leaving Niger? Just prior to the coup in Niger the U.S. had about 1,100 troops at two main bases in the country. There now may less than that as the DoD has stated it is ‘repositioning’ troops. The DoD says (DoD News) that some contractors and non-essential personnel have left Niger while others have left the capital region’s Air Base 101 in Niamey for Air Base 201 in the Agadez area of Niger. “US repositioning forces in Niger in ‘precautionary’ move”, The Hill, September 7, 2023. See also “US Drone Flights Limited Since Niger Coup”, Voice of America, September 8, 2023.

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September 18-23, 2023

5th Special Forces Group Reunion

September 24-28, 2023

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Special Forces Underwater Operations School

October 3, 2023

2023 Virtual MOG Mile

Three Rangers Foundation

October 16-20, 2023

SOAR XLVII

Special Operations Association

December 8, 2023

Winter Cruise

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Podcasts, Videos, and Movies

CIA Recruitment Video. The CIA released a new recruiting video targeting employees of the Russian security services and the military. (CIA, YouTube, Sep 8, 2023, 2 mins).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJYy8MMWLDI

Video – Spy Ops Official Trailer – Netflix. In this intense true crime series, intelligence operatives from MI6 to the CIA share insider stories of spy craft, Cold War campaigns, and coups carried out by covert agents. Featuring interviews with real officials, officers, and spies. Netflix, YouTube, August 11, 2023, 2 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N0R50cu-P0

The first episode aired a few days ago – Operation Jawbreaker – about the first Central Intelligence Teams to enter Afghanistan after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in September 2001. Read a recap of the episode by Film Fugitives, September 9, 2023.

Video – Hon. Christopher Maier, ASD SO/LIC. Chris Maier, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict – ASD SO/LIC, is interviewed on the SOFcast Podcast. USSOCOM, YouTube, September 1, 2023, 52 minutes. The interview took place during SOF Week in Tampa, Florida in May 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAmmqC–A_Q

Video – Interview with AC-130 Gunship Crew Member. The Reconnaissance Cast, August 30, 2023, YouTube, 2 hours. The Vietnam War years of the AC-47 and AC-130 Gunship programs – from South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQKNrURBdcU

Video – AFSOC Mission Video 2023. Air Force Special Operations Command is defined by its Air Commandos: highly trained Airmen who are made up by character and adaptability. Airmen who are ready to take on any challenge and find a way for mission success, any place, anytime, anywhere. Air Force Special Operations Command Public Affairs, DVIDS, September 6, 2023. https://www.dvidshub.net/video/896110/afsoc-mission-video-2023

Podcasts

SOFCAST. United States Special Operations Command

https://linktr.ee/sofcast

Prep for Impact by Matt Parrish (Green Beret Foundation)

https://open.spotify.com/show/54j9y7oFsvZQonqzgLebZp

The Pinelander. Blacksmith Publishing

https://www.thepinelander.com/

The Indigenous Approach. 1st Special Forces Command

https://open.spotify.com/show/3n3I7g9LSmd143GYCy7pPA

Irregular Warfare Initiative

https://irregularwarfare.org/category/podcasts/

Irregular Warfare Podcast. Modern War Institute at West Point

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/irregular-warfare-podcast/id1514636385

SOF News is not a ‘money making’ enterprise; but we do have administrative, operating, and publishing expenses. Individuals and businesses provide the funds to defray these expenses. Their contributions are deeply appreciated. Learn how you can support SOF News.

sof.news · by SOF News · September 11, 2023

8. The Three Roadblocks Keeping Ukraine Mired in War

Excerpts:

Ukrainian troops struggling slowly forward in Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk have been blunt about the difficulties throughout this summer, however. 

Dense minefields, a lack of air power and air defenses, shortcomings in new units’ training, and more-competent Russian performance in defense have led to heavy casualties for every mile gained. 

Ukrainian forces have reduced their losses of troops and armored vehicles by adapting their tactics. But their new, cautious approach also gives Russia’s army more time to reset its lines after retreats and makes it harder for Ukraine to build momentum, according to a new study of the counteroffensive by the Royal United Services Institute, a London defense think tank. 

Ukraine has the manpower and the collective determination to continue fighting for a long time, provided the U.S. and its European allies continue their military and economic aid. But defeating a fully mobilized Russia would likely require a far more determined effort by the West to deploy its huge industrial resources and facilitate Ukrainian victory. 

The Three Roadblocks Keeping Ukraine Mired in War

Slow gains on the battlefield, a cautious West and Putin’s record of breaking deals contribute to a deadlock that Kyiv fears plays in Russia’s favor

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/the-three-roadblocks-keeping-ukraine-mired-in-war-a6580c07

By Marcus WalkerFollow | Photographs by Manu Brabo for The Wall Street Journal

Updated Sept. 11, 2023 12:00 am ET

After 18 months of full-scale war with Russia, Ukraine faces a threefold problem. 

Ukraine’s army is inching forward on the battlefield but is short of firepower, including air power, and well-trained manpower to eject Russia’s occupying army from its east and south. 

The West is sticking to its incremental approach to arming Kyiv, and would like it to negotiate a cease-fire eventually. 

But even if Russian President Vladimir Putin were open to a deal, he has a long record of reneging on agreements and renewing his quest to put Ukraine back under Moscow’s sway. 

The current military and political deadlock looks set to continue until one of those three elements changes. 

Ukrainians fear the deadlock plays into Russia’s hands, especially if political fatigue emerges in the West. “The situation is not sustainable,” said Pavlo Klimkin, a former Ukrainian foreign minister. 

Ukraine’s military prospects

Ukrainian troops have breached Russia’s first line of heavy fortifications near Robotyne in the country’s southeast, but they are still 55 miles from the sea, the goal of their summer counteroffensive. 

The four-month-old counteroffensive has so far disappointed Ukrainian and Western hopes for a major breakthrough. But a significant territorial gain is still possible if Russia’s stretched defenses on the southern front reach a breaking point before winter or exhaustion forces a halt to Ukraine’s push. 

The course of the war has defied the predictions of generals, intelligence services and military pundits, from the failure of Russia’s initial attack on Kyiv to Ukraine’s surprise victories in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions last year. 

An image released by Ukraine’s military shows its troops entering Robotyne, a recaptured village in the southeast. PHOTO: ‘SKALA’ OF THE UKRAINIAN ARMED FORCES/VIA REUTERS

“We don’t know how the war will evolve. There could be black swans,” said Klimkin. 

Ukrainian troops struggling slowly forward in Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk have been blunt about the difficulties throughout this summer, however. 

Dense minefields, a lack of air power and air defenses, shortcomings in new units’ training, and more-competent Russian performance in defense have led to heavy casualties for every mile gained. 

Ukrainian forces have reduced their losses of troops and armored vehicles by adapting their tactics. But their new, cautious approach also gives Russia’s army more time to reset its lines after retreats and makes it harder for Ukraine to build momentum, according to a new study of the counteroffensive by the Royal United Services Institute, a London defense think tank. 

Ukraine has the manpower and the collective determination to continue fighting for a long time, provided the U.S. and its European allies continue their military and economic aid. But defeating a fully mobilized Russia would likely require a far more determined effort by the West to deploy its huge industrial resources and facilitate Ukrainian victory. 

Ukrainian soldiers man a trench near Bakhmut, an eastern city consumed by grinding combat for much of the war.

Western caution

So far, key Western countries led by the U.S. and Germany have followed a measured approach that seeks to prevent Russia from defeating Ukraine while limiting the risk of escalation into a direct clash with Moscow. 

President Biden has defined the U.S. goal as helping Ukraine to attain the strongest possible military position for negotiations to end the war, without saying how strong a position that should be. 

The U.S. has given Ukraine potent weapons systems only after months of debate and lobbying by Kyiv and European allies who want an accelerated effort to defeat Russia. 

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has consistently said Putin must not win, while avoiding saying that Ukraine should win.  

The West is showing its interests in Ukraine are limited, said Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin. “As heartbreaking as the situation is, a lot of voters in the West don’t see the war as existential for them. They want money to be spent on other issues too.” 

A Ukrainian woman stands by the grave of a fallen soldier in the western city of Lviv.

Mourners in Lviv gather at the funeral of a Ukrainian combat engineer killed at the eastern front.

The West’s priorities are to weaken the Kremlin’s military and economic ability to pursue expansionist ambitions, keep NATO countries united and avoid World War III. The current deadlock ticks those boxes. 

“Putin’s already lost the war,” Biden said after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, in July. That assessment isn’t shared by Putin, however—nor by Ukraine. 

“So far, Putin thinks time is ticking in his favor,” said Klimkin, the former foreign minister. “We need a coordinated strategy with the West so that Putin thinks time is ticking against his personal position and Russia’s.” 

The chips could fall the other way if Donald Trump returns to the White House and the U.S. cuts aid for Kyiv, said Gabuev. “Then Putin’s original goal of installing a friendly regime in Kyiv, leaving a rump state in western Ukraine, could be back on the table,” he said. 

Negotiating with Putin

In Washington and key European capitals, many officials doubt Ukraine can take back all of its territory by force—short of a massive increase in Western military aid that they consider too risky.

Western leaders are reluctant to pressure Kyiv to talk, since that could split NATO while encouraging Russia to bet that the West will abandon Kyiv. But some would prefer negotiations to the costs of a long war. 

Some Western commentators have long argued that it would be in Ukraine’s own best interests to freeze the conflict and accept a loss of territory, rather than suffer an endless heavy death toll in a war of attrition against a more populous country. 

But surveys have consistently shown that Ukrainians overwhelmingly reject giving up territory to Russia. The revelations of killings of civilians, torture chambers, filtration camps and the deportation of children from occupied areas have hardened the country’s determination to restore full control over their territory despite the heavy casualties. 

Ukrainian police officers secure the site of a Russian strike that killed 16 people last week in a shopping district in the eastern city of Kostyantynivka.

“So far, the majority of Ukrainians are fundamentally against any negotiation. It is an emotional as well as a political position,” said Klimkin. 

What’s more, many believe Ukraine has no choice, because even if Putin were open to a deal, he wouldn’t stick to it. 

“Putin would just treat a cease-fire as a breathing space to strengthen his military forces,” said Andrei Kozyrev, a former Russian foreign minister in the 1990s who has denounced the invasion of Ukraine. “A settlement would open the way to buy weapons from China. In a year or so, Putin would attack again.” 

When Putin became president, Russia had signed several treaties that guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity. In 2003, he personally signed a treaty with Ukraine demarcating the two countries’ land border. 

In 2008, Putin bristled when asked on German TV whether Russia might lay claim to Crimea, saying: “Russia has long recognized the borders of modern-day Ukraine…I think questions about such goals have provocative undertones.” 

But in 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and covertly invaded the eastern Donbas region. Cease-fire deals known as the Minsk agreements were supposed to restore Ukraine’s control over its borders in exchange for autonomy for Russian-backed enclaves, but didn’t stop the fighting. Neither side implemented Minsk. Ukraine felt it had signed a bad deal under duress. The Kremlin sought to use its proxy statelets in Donbas to weaken the Ukrainian state, demanding far-reaching powers. 

“The Minsk agreements produced a staging ground for Russia’s full-scale invasion years later,” said Alina Polyakova, head of the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington. 

Ukrainians also remember the Russian massacre of retreating soldiers at Ilovaisk in 2014 after Putin had offered them safe passage. 

Putin’s deal with his former ally Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner paramilitary group, didn’t last long either. Despite an agreement that ended Wagner’s revolt against Russian authorities in June, Prigozhin and other Wagner leaders were killed when their plane exploded and crashed near Moscow in late August. Few people believed the Kremlin’s denial of involvement. 

“You can negotiate with Putin, but only from a position of strength,” said Klimkin. “We need a far better position on the ground, not just in terms of territory, but in our capabilities and weapons supplies, so that Putin understands Russia has a real possibility of losing.” 

Write to Marcus Walker at Marcus.Walker@wsj.com

Ukrainian forces in towns like Chasiv Yar are still fighting for control of Donbas, years after cease-fire deals in the region failed.

9. U.S. Military Exercises in Russia’s Backyard Cause Alarm at the Kremlin

Time to create some dilemma's for Putin.

U.S. Military Exercises in Russia’s Backyard Cause Alarm at the Kremlin

Armenia, Moscow’s longtime regional partner, is frustrated with Kremlin’s failure to fulfill security guarantees

https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/u-s-military-exercises-in-russias-backyard-cause-alarm-at-the-kremlin-3e96b045

By Thomas Grove

Follow and Vivian Salama

Follow

Sept. 11, 2023 5:13 am ET

Republic Square in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital. PHOTO: ALEXANDER PATRIN/TASS/ZUMA PRESS

As Washington seeks to exploit cracks in Russia’s traditional sphere of influence, U.S. forces began joint military exercises with troops from Armenia, the small South Caucasus country that has been a close Russian ally for nearly 200 years.

In a possible sign of the geopolitical realignment driven by Russia’s invasion in Ukraine, U.S. forces commenced on Monday 10 days of joint exercises with Armenian soldiers. About 175 Armenian soldiers will train with about 85 soldiers from U.S. Army Europe and Africa Command outside the capital of Yerevan.

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Armenia has been an important security partner for Russia and houses one of a small handful of military bases the Kremlin maintains on foreign soil. The country has also remained a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a security alliance of former Soviet countries, which Moscow has developed as an answer to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

But Armenia has increasingly worked to shrug off Russian influence, particularly in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Earlier this year, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan directly denied a Russian announcement that the CSTO would host exercises this year in Armenia. He also refused to send troops for those exercises, which were ultimately held in Belarus earlier this month.

An Armenian soldier stands in front of a Russian-army truck in Armenia. Moscow has pledged security guarantees in the region. PHOTO: CELESTINO ARCE LAVIN/ZUMA PRESS

A senior State Department official acknowledged that the U.S. is looking to bolster its partnerships with countries that had traditionally leaned on Moscow for economic and military cooperation, although that official dismissed the notion that was the reason for the joint exercises with Armenia.

“We’re always looking for an opportunity to deepen our bilateral ties with these countries,” the official said.

Armenia has hosted NATO forces previously for training. U.S. officials said the joint exercises with Armenia had been long in the works and would be focused on peacekeeping operations.

Last week, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov expressed “alarm” over the exercises. 

The exercises come amid growing regional tensions between Armenia and neighboring Azerbaijan as well as Yerevan’s growing frustration with Russia’s failure to enforce a 2020 cease-fire it brokered between the two countries while the Kremlin is mired in the Ukraine war.

While part of Armenia’s turn to the West reflects a generational shift of younger people who see their future tied to Europe and the U.S., it is also driven by Armenia’s frustration with Russia. It says Moscow, distracted by Ukraine, has failed to fulfill security guarantees in Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory that lies inside Azerbaijan but has been disputed, often violently, between Azerbaijan and Armenia for three decades.

The enclave, predominantly Armenian with a population of approximately 120,000, broke away from Azerbaijan in the 1990s.

Armenian lorries carrying humanitarian aid for the Nagorno-Karabakh region are stranded near an Azerbaijani checkpoint. PHOTO: KAREN MINASYAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

After heavy fighting with Armenia in 2020, Azerbaijan has since reasserted control around the territory. At the time, Russia brokered a cease-fire, promising to stop the violence and ensure freedom of movement for both sides through the Lachin Corridor, the main road connecting Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia and a critical route for the delivery of food, fuel and medicine to the enclave.

But Azerbaijan has since imposed a de-facto blockade on that corridor. Last month, the United Nations urged Azerbaijan to lift the blockade to “alleviate the suffering of thousands of people in Nagorno-Karabakh and allow for the unimpeded flow of humanitarian assistance to the civilian population.”

Azerbaijan says it is preventing the import of weapons into the territory from Armenia, a claim Armenia has denied.

Over the past week, Azerbaijan has built up troops around the enclave and on the border of Armenia, a move that Pashinyan said had aggravated the regional political and military situation.

Previously, Moscow also failed to come to Armenia’s aid in 2021 through the CSTO when the country accused Azerbaijan of advancing inside Armenian territory.

“Armenia is overly dependent on Russia and that is our biggest strategic vulnerability and our biggest mistake, something we have to change with the West and other partners,” said Areg Kochinyan, president of the Yerevan-based Research Center on Security Policy.

“It’s not just that Armenians are no longer seeing Russia as a partner, it’s that they’re starting to call it a traitor,” he added. 

So far, Armenia has been careful not to provoke Russia, which invaded Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine last year over the countries’ attempts to break out of its orbit. Nonetheless, Moscow has increasingly criticized pro-Western Armenian rhetoric and its expressions of frustration as “bordering on rudeness.” Russia’s Foreign Ministry also said last week that it summoned the Armenian ambassador to the ministry to protest increasingly anti-Russian rhetoric among Armenian officials.

As tensions rise between Russia and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, the U.S. has played an increasingly active role in the region, condemning the humanitarian crisis inside Nagorno-Karabakh and calling for Azerbaijan to reopen the Lachin Corridor.

Washington played a role in negotiating a cease-fire when hostilities flared up last year. Secretary of State Antony Blinken also held meetings with Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev this year.

The current military exercises in Armenia have raised concern in Azerbaijan that the U.S. can’t be an honest broker in its conflict with Yerevan, despite repeated efforts by Blinken, as well as European and U.N. officials, to hold talks with both sides to ease tensions.

A senior State Department official described the exercises as part of an “ongoing partnership” with Armenia and dismissed claims that they signaled any type of bias, adding that “transparency is the way to go on so many of these issues.”

Write to Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com and Vivian Salama at vivian.salama@wsj.com

10. Theaters of War That Make Up the Fighting in Ukraine

Excerpts:

Forest Fighting in the Northeast

Bakhmut and the Donbas

Vuhledar: Where Two Fronts Converge

The Southern Counteroffensive

At Kherson, the Battle for the River Delta

Theaters of War That Make Up the Fighting in Ukraine

By Marc Santora

Marc Santora reported from northeastern forests, the Bakhmut area, the southern front and the Odesa region over the summer.

• Sept. 11, 2023

The New York Times · by Marc Santora · September 11, 2023

Ukrainian soldiers from the 14th Mechanized Brigade fire a volley of 122 mm rockets from their “Grad” launcher at a frontline Russian position near Kupiansk, Ukraine last week.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times

A “striking fist” in the North, and river crossings in the South. Along a jagged 1,000-mile front, the fighting is multifaceted — and relentless.

Ukrainian soldiers from the 14th Mechanized Brigade fire a volley of 122 mm rockets from their “Grad” launcher at a frontline Russian position near Kupiansk, Ukraine last week.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times

Along the southern reaches of the Dnipro River, Ukrainian forces are staging amphibious assaults on Russian positions across the river from around the city of Kherson, forcing Russia to deploy already-stretched units to prevent Ukraine from gaining a foothold on the eastern bank.

Nearly 1,000 miles to the north, it’s the Russians who are on the offensive and forming what the Ukrainian military called a “striking fist,” with tens of thousands of soldiers amassed near the towns of Kupiansk and Kreminna. That has prompted Ukraine to dispatch some of its most seasoned airborne assault units to retake positions lost earlier this summer.

Along a front line that cuts a jagged path roughly the same distance as New York to Miami, the fighting rarely relents.

And with Ukrainian forces pressing ahead along multiple lines of attack — Kyiv’s most ambitious and high-stakes offensive campaign in nearly a year — what happens in one sector invariably affects the others.

“A person who simply reads the news does not see it, does not feel it,” Hanna Maliar, a deputy Ukrainian defense minister, said this week. It can seem that everything is taking a long time, “but believe me, it doesn’t seem that way to people who are fighting,” she said.

“In fact, this is a very dynamic, active process,’’ she said.

To better understand how the fight is playing out along the breadth of the front, it is useful to look at some of the major theaters where Russia and Ukraine have concentrated their troops. Moving geographically from the northeast to the south, this is a snapshot of the fighting as summer draws to a close.

Forest Fighting in the Northeast

After Ukraine drove Russian forces from nearly all of the Kharkiv region last fall, its offensive was finally halted in the pine forests that dominate the landscape in the region.

This sector stretches some 60 miles through towns like Kupiansk and Kreminna, and has been the scene of seesaw battles for months. One army moves a mile or two forward, only to be driven back again.

That’s a common sequence in this war; what’s different in the Northeast, the Ukrainians acknowledge, is that it is one of the very few places where Moscow’s forces are engaged in sustained offensive operations, and making small, tactical gains.

So far the Russians have failed to break the Ukrainian lines, according to military analysts and soldiers interviewed over the summer. Still, there is no indication that Russian pressure will ease. Ukraine warned last week that Moscow had withdrawn ground forces from Belarus to join offensive operations in the area.

Members of a Ukrainian assault unit take cover while moving toward a frontline position on the “Zero Line” in eastern Ukraine, in July.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

A member of a Ukrainian assault unit takes cover from drones and shelling at a position at the “Zero Line” 300 yards from Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, in July.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

Oleh Matviychuk, a 49-year-old battalion commander, said the Russians have two main goals: driving the Ukrainian across Oskil River, a natural defensive barrier that has played a key role in fighting, and forcing Ukraine to deploy troops here so they cannot be used elsewhere.

Given the region’s proximity to the Russian border, the Russians do not face the same logistical challenges here that they do elsewhere.

The area has long been a staging ground for Russia’s campaign in the east and the Kremlin has amassed some 100,000 troops and more than 500 battle tanks in the area, according to Ukrainian officials. But it is not clear whether they will be dedicated to this sector or deployed elsewhere.

Bakhmut and the Donbas

Russia claimed “victory” over the smoldering rubble of Bakhmut in May after a yearlong campaign that featured some of the bloodiest fighting of the war. The city was razed, but the battle never stopped.

Almost immediately, Ukrainian forces were fighting to drive the Russians from areas to the north and south of Bakhmut. The gains can appear small — a few hundred meters in a given clash — but the Ukrainians have continued to advance, slowly but steadily.

Ukrainian troops of the 80th Air Assault Brigade prepare for an evening assault against Russian forces near Bakhmut, eastern Ukraine, last month.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

Troops from the 80th Air Assault Brigade fire a “Grad” multiple rocket launcher at Russian targets in the direction of Bakhmut, last month.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

On a recent visit to Ukrainian positions around the city, soldiers said they know they are not the focus of the counteroffensive, with much of the best weaponry and personnel being deployed in the south. But they aid the war effort by forcing the Russians to devote resources to the defense of Bakhmut.

Ms. Maliar said on Monday that Ukraine had reclaimed about 49 square kilometers around the city.

The fighting has been brutal, with attacks and counterattacks by both sides. For months Ukraine has gradually progressed south of the city, in and around the village of Klischivka. And it has launched a series of coordinated attacks this week, according to military officials and combat footage geolocated by military analysts.

At the same time, battles rarely cease around the villages of Avdiivka and Marinka to the south of Bakhmut, with Ukraine now hoping to exploit any gaps in the defense that emerge as Russian forces are increasingly stretched.

Vuhledar: Where Two Fronts Converge

While Bakhmut has drawn more attention for the ferocity of the battles there, the coal mining town of Vuhledar has been the site of fierce, destructive fighting. It is where the Eastern and Southern fronts converge, only a few miles from vital Russian logistical lines that supply Russian troops in southern Ukraine, making it a critical corner of the war.

The Russians have been shelling Vuhledar for months. Drone footage shot over blasted-out ruins by The New York Times highlights the intensity of the fighting.

Vuhledar, Ukraine, in June.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

In Vuhledar in June.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

Ukrainian soldiers in this area say their primary mission is to hold onto key positions and, if the opportunity presents itself, take advantage of stretched Russian forces to gain better positions to strike a vital Russian logistical hub 17 miles to the southeast, in Volnovakha.

The Southern Counteroffensive

After a faltering start marked by heavy losses, Ukraine has regrouped and adjusted its tactics. Its forces have broken through what they consider to be the first line of Russian defenses along two lines of attack heading south.

One of those thrusts has retaken the village of Robotyne; though tiny, it represented the most important advance of the counteroffensive to date. Ukraine had pushed through Russia’s first major layer of defenses and set up a base for launching further advances to the south.

Now Ukrainian forces are widening the breach and putting increasing pressure on a secondary line of Russian defenses around the village of Verbove, to the southeast.

A member of the Ares battalion from the 129th territorial defense brigade gazes out a kindergarten window in the Donetsk region, last month.Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times

A member of the 128th Mountain Assault Brigade moves to a position on the frontline in Zaporizhzhia, last month.Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times

Oleksandr Shtupun, a spokesman for Ukraine’s military forces there, said the next series of Russian defensive positions in the area were somewhat less dense than the initial layer, giving Ukraine “the opportunity to maneuver equipment and troops.”

He said Russia was employing airborne assault units for defensive purposes, which is not their traditional use. “That’s because the Russians see them as elite forces,” he said, “so if they are throwing their so-called elite in defensive battles, then something is going wrong for them.”

The second route southward for Ukrainian forces is farther east, along a winding rural road that cuts a path through the Mokri Yori River valley.

The road leads to the occupied port city Mariupol, but it is unclear what the Ukrainian goal is. Some analysts have said it could be the city of Berdiansk, south and west of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov. Indeed, if Ukraine is able to advance, it could turn its forces that way, or even make a hard turn west to try to join the other thrust and encircle Russian forces.

Ukrainian marines conduct training exercises in the region of Vuhledar, last month.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

Ukrainian marines during training exercises near Vuhledar last month.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

When Ukrainian forces reclaimed the tiny village of Urozhaine in mid-August, they broke through what they consider the first Russian defense line in this direction. The next major village on the map is Staromlynivka and the Ukrainians have been pounding Russian positions there with artillery for more than a week.

Ukrainian soldiers say that if they can break through defenses on the road ahead and drive Russians from the village, the minefields will become less dense and they will then have more options for where to strike next.

The marines fighting in the valley say they need to advance another 20 kilometers — and hold that land — to begin putting Russian supply lines along the coast in daily peril.

At Kherson, the Battle for the River Delta

After Ukraine drove Russian forces out of the western Kherson region in the fall, the Dnipro became the new front line.

The fighting was then largely defined by cross-river shelling and skirmishes on the islands that dot the sprawling estuary south of Kherson. Even if Ukraine does not plan to mount a large-scale amphibious assault, it is forcing Russia to expend resources and devote soldiers to defend the area.

The Antonivsky bridge across the Dnipro River, destroyed by retreating Russian forces, in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, in November.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

Oksana Pavlenko, 55, stands in front of the remains of her destroyed home, which was on the front lines in Posad Pokrovske village, in the Kherson region, last month.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

The fighting here remains murky and its significance hard to assess, given the limited information made public by either side. There is no indication Ukraine is poised to break through entrenched Russian positions between Kherson and the Crimean peninsula.

The British military intelligence agency said that the Ukrainians have managed to hold a small bridgehead across the river since early June.

The most significant fighting in recent weeks has taken place around the village of Kozachi Laheri, northeast of Kherson, where Western military analysts say Ukraine staged a successful raid before pulling back again.

Marc Santora has been reporting from Ukraine since the beginning of the war with Russia. He was previously based in London as an international news editor focused on breaking news events and earlier the bureau chief for East and Central Europe, based in Warsaw. He has also reported extensively from Iraq and Africa. More about Marc Santora

The New York Times · by Marc Santora · September 11, 2023

11. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 10, 2023

Maps/graphics/citations:  https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-september-10-2023

Key Takeaways:

• Ukrainian forces continued to advance south of Robotyne in western Zaporizhia Oblast and reportedly advanced near Bakhmut on September 10.
• Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Head Kyrylo Budanov stated on September 10 that Ukrainian forces will continue counteroffensive operations into late 2023. Cold and wet weather will affect but not halt active combat, as it has done in the first 18 months of the war.
• Russian military personnel continue to detail persistent problems hindering Russian operations along the frontline in Ukraine.
• Russian forces conducted a series of Shahed-131/-136 drone strikes targeting Kyiv Oblast on the night of September 9 to 10.
• Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast and reportedly regained some lost positions in some areas.
• Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Spokesperson Major General Vadym Skibitskyi stated on September 10 that the Russian military has concentrated over 420,000 military personnel in occupied Ukraine, not including Rosgvardia (Russian national guard) and other military units and structures.
• Russian occupation officials held the final day of voting for Russian regional elections in occupied territories on September 10, continuing efforts to coerce residents to vote and portray the elections as legitimate.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, SEPTEMBER 10, 2023

Sep 10, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 10, 2023

Riley Bailey, Angelica Evans, Nicole Wolkov, Karolina Hird, and Mason Clark

September 10, 2023, 4:05pm ET 

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

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

Note: The data cut-off for this product was 12:00pm ET on September 10. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the September 11 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Ukrainian forces continued to advance south of Robotyne in western Zaporizhia Oblast and reportedly advanced near Bakhmut on September 10. Geolocated footage posted on September 10 shows that Ukrainian forces have advanced east of Novoprokopivka (18km southeast of Orikhiv).[1] Ukrainian Tavriisk Group of Forces Spokesperson Oleksandr Shtupun noted that Ukrainian forces continue to advance near Robotyne (12km south of Orikhiv) and have liberated 1.5 square kilometers of territory in this direction.[2] The Ukrainian General Staff and Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Ilya Yevlash reported that Ukrainian forces achieved unspecified success near Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut) in Donetsk Oblast.[3]

Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Head Kyrylo Budanov stated on September 10 that Ukrainian forces will continue counteroffensive operations into late 2023.[4] Cold and wet weather will affect but not halt active combat, as it has done in the first 18 months of the war. Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley stated on September 10 that Ukrainian forces probably have 30 to 45 days of “fighting weather” left.[5] Seasonal heavy rains and heavy mud in late autumn will slow ground movements for both sides, and low temperatures impose a variety of logistics challenges. The start of such seasonal weather is variable, however.[6] While weather considerations will affect Ukrainian counteroffensive operations, they will not impose a definite end to them. A hard freeze occurs throughout Ukraine in the winter that makes the ground more conducive to mechanized maneuver warfare, and Ukrainian officials expressed routine interest in exploiting these weather conditions in winter 2022–2023.[7]

Russian military personnel continue to detail persistent problems hindering Russian operations along the frontline in Ukraine. The “Rusich” Sabotage and Reconnaissance Group, a far-right Russian irregular paramilitary unit, published a list of various issues on September 8 that it claims are persistent along the frontline. Rusich claimed that Russian counterbattery range and accuracy are inferior to Ukrainian capabilities and claimed that Russian forces lack laser-guided Krasnopol shells and UAVs to guide them.[8] The Rusich Group also claimed that the Russian Tornado-S multiple launch rocket system (MLRS) is less resistant to electronic warfare (EW) than Ukraine’s US-provided HIMARS systems.[9] The Rusich Group also noted that many Russian personnel buy their own communication technology, making it difficult for different units using different models of technology to communicate with each other.[10] The Rusich Group claimed that Russian forces do not evacuate wounded or dead personnel from frontline areas, and that this lack of evacuations has prompted some Russian personnel to refuse to complete combat tasks.[11] The Rusich Group may be experiencing these problems at a higher intensity and frequency than Russian forces writ large because it is a small and irregular formation, but ISW has routinely observed other Russian units expressing similar issues with counterbattery capabilities, communications, and evacuations.[12]

Russian forces conducted a series of Shahed-131/-136 drone strikes targeting Kyiv Oblast on the night of September 9 to 10. Ukrainian military sources reported on September 10 that Ukrainian forces downed 26 of 33 drones that Russian forces launched from the direction of Kursk Oblast.[13] Ukrainian Air Force Spokesperson Colonel Yuriy Ihnat stated that Russian forces dispersed the Shahed drones in the air and attacked targets from different directions in order to complicate Ukrainian air defense operations.[14] Kyiv Oblast Administration Head Ruslan Kravchenko stated that Russian strikes damaged an infrastructure facility, a school, residential buildings, and a rehabilitation center in Kyiv Oblast.[15] Russian milbloggers claimed that NASA FIRMS/VIIRS data suggests that Russian forces struck a Ukrainian military arsenal in Rokytnyanskyi Raion, Kyiv Oblast.[16]

Army General Sergei Surovikin, the previously dismissed Wagner-affiliated former commander of Russia’s Aerospace Forces (VKS), has reportedly become the head of the Coordination Committee on Air Defense Issues under the Council of Defense Ministers of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Several low-profile and local Russian outlets reported on September 10 that the CIS Council of Defense Ministers unanimously voted on Surovikin’s appointment to head of the air defense committee, and noted that Surovikin will now be responsible for overseeing the function of the joint air defense system of CIS member states.[17] More mainstream and Kremlin-affiliated newswires notably did not report on Surovikin’s new appointment and have not mentioned Surovikin at all since Russian President Vladimir Putin dismissed him as VKS commander on August 23.[18] ISW previously assessed that Surovikin’s move to a leadership position with the CIS is consistent with previous patterns of the Russian military leadership shifting disgraced and ineffective commanders to peripheral positions far removed from Ukraine without discharging them from the Russian military entirely.[19]

Russia held the final day of voting for regional elections on September 10 amid reports of electoral falsifications and intimidation. Affiliates of imprisoned ultranationalist Igor Girkin claimed that Russian officials falsified all electoral results in Nakhodka, Primorsky Krai, and attacked an independent candidate in Saratov, Saratov Oblast.[20] Girkin’s affiliates noted that Russian officials coerced people to vote to improve voter turnout but that average turnout will likely be at 35 percent.[21] The Radio Free Europe/Free Liberty (RFE/RL) branch Sever Realii reported that Russian authorities detained three Yabloko Party candidates in Veliky Novgorod, Novgorod Oblast.[22] Russian sources also reported that Kremlin newswire RIA Novosti published the results of the regional elections in the Republic of Sakha before the closure of the polls there.[23] RFE/RL branch Idel Realii reported that Russian authorities issued a military summons to a Communist Party candidate in the Republic of Bashkortostan when he visited a polling station.[24]

Russian sources claimed that the Russian peacekeeping contingent in Nagorno-Karabakh has not conducted personnel rotations due to increasing tension between Armenia and Azerbaijan.[25] The Russian sources also claimed that the Russian peacekeeping contingent is on “full alert” because of the potential escalation between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces.[26] Russian sources will likely increasingly discuss the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh if hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan intensify, which may impact their coverage of the war in Ukraine.

Key Takeaways:

• Ukrainian forces continued to advance south of Robotyne in western Zaporizhia Oblast and reportedly advanced near Bakhmut on September 10.
• Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Head Kyrylo Budanov stated on September 10 that Ukrainian forces will continue counteroffensive operations into late 2023. Cold and wet weather will affect but not halt active combat, as it has done in the first 18 months of the war.
• Russian military personnel continue to detail persistent problems hindering Russian operations along the frontline in Ukraine.
• Russian forces conducted a series of Shahed-131/-136 drone strikes targeting Kyiv Oblast on the night of September 9 to 10.
• Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast and reportedly regained some lost positions in some areas.
• Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Spokesperson Major General Vadym Skibitskyi stated on September 10 that the Russian military has concentrated over 420,000 military personnel in occupied Ukraine, not including Rosgvardia (Russian national guard) and other military units and structures.
• Russian occupation officials held the final day of voting for Russian regional elections in occupied territories on September 10, continuing efforts to coerce residents to vote and portray the elections as legitimate.

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

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

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

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

Russian forces reportedly continued offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line but did not make any confirmed advances on September 10. Russian sources claimed on September 9 that Russian forces conducted offensive operations near Synkivka (9km northeast of Kupyansk), Petropavlivka (7km east of Kupyansk), and in the direction of Kyslivka (20km southeast of Kupyansk).[27]A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces conducted offensive operations near Novoyehorivka (16km southwest of Svatove) and in the direction of Serebryanka (14km southwest of Kreminna).[28] Russian sources claimed that Russian and Ukrainian forces skirmished near Novoselivske (15km northwest of Svatove), Karmazynivka (13km southwest of Svatove), and in the forests west of Kreminna.[29] Geolocated footage published on September 6 indicates that Russian forces advanced south of Kreminna sometime in August.[30]

Ukrainian forces reportedly conducted ground attacks along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line but did not make any confirmed advances on September 10. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian attacks near Kuzemivka (13km northwest of Svatove) and Dibrova (7km southwest of Kreminna).[31] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces attacked near Synkivka.[32] Geolocated footage published on September 6 indicates that Ukrainian forces advanced south of Kreminna sometime in August.[33]

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

Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations near Bakhmut on September 10 and reportedly advanced. The Ukrainian General Staff and Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Ilya Yevlash stated that Ukrainian forces achieved unspecified success near Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut).[34] The Ukrainian 2nd Mechanized Battalion of the 3rd Assault Brigade stated on September 9 that it had pushed Russian forces out of an unspecified area in the Bakhmut direction.[35] A Russian milblogger claimed on September 9 that fighting was ongoing near Andriivka (9km southwest of Bakhmut) and Kurdyumivka (13km southwest of Bakhmut).[36]

Russian forces conducted offensive operations near Bakhmut on September 10 but did not make confirmed or claimed advances. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Berestove (25km northeast of Bakhmut), Orikhovo-Vasylivka (11km northwest of Bakhmut), Bohdanivka (5km northwest of Bakhmut), Klishchiivka, and Kurdyumivka.[37] Russian sources claimed on September 9 that Russian forces attacked near Dubovo-Vasylivka (6km northwest of Bakhmut) and improved their positions near the Berkhivka Reservoir (about 2km north of Bakhmut).[38] A Russian milblogger published footage on September 10 purportedly showing elements of the 57th Motorized Rifle Brigade (5th Combined Arms Army, Eastern Military District) operating near Kurdyumivka.[39] The milblogger also claimed that elements of the 83rd Guards Air Assault (VDV) Brigade and 11th VDV Brigade are operating in the Bakhmut direction.[40] Footage published on September 10 purportedly shows artillery units of the 106th VDV Division operating near Bakhmut.[41]

Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line on September 10 but did not make any confirmed or claimed advances. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks near Keramik (14km northwest of Avdiivka), Avdiivka, and Marinka (on the southwestern outskirts of Donetsk City).[42] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces unsuccessfully attacked near Krasnohorivka (22km southwest of Avdiivka).[43]

Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line on September 10 and reportedly advanced. Avdiivka City Military Administration Head Vitaliy Barabash stated that Ukrainian forces gained a foothold in Opytne on September 8 (3km southwest of Avdiivka) and that fighting is ongoing in the settlement.[44] A Russian milblogger claimed that the situation in Opytne is not easy, and that fighting is ongoing in urban areas.[45] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian attacks near Vodyane (7km southwest of Avdiivka) and Krasnohorivka.[46]

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

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area on September 10 but did not advance. Russian milbloggers largely reported that Ukrainian forces continued ground attacks along the Novodonetske—Novomayorske line (13–18km southeast of Velyka Novosilka).[47] One milblogger reported that Russian forces repelled three Ukrainian armored attacks along this line overnight.[48] Russian sources additionally claimed that positional battles are continuing near Urozhaine and Staromayorske, both about 10km south of Velyka Novosilka.[49]

Russian sources claimed that Russian forces conducted limited counterattacks in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area on September 10 and reportedly regained some lost positions. Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces are expanding their zone of control near Pryyutne, about 16km southwest of Velyka Novosilka, following successful counterattacks in the area on September 9.[50] A Russian milblogger additionally claimed that Russian forces counterattacked near Novomayorske and regained unspecified positions.[51]

Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast and advanced on September 10. Geolocated footage posted on September 10 shows that Ukrainian forces have made gains east of Novoprokopivka (18km southeast of Orikhiv).[52] Ukrainian Tavriisk Group of Forces Spokesperson Oleksandr Shtupun noted that Ukrainian forces continue to advance near Robotyne (12km south of Orikhiv) and have liberated 1.5 square kilometers of territory in this direction.[53] Russian milbloggers additionally reported that Ukrainian forces continued attacking along the Robotyne–Verbove line, particularly near Novoprokopivka.[54] One Russian milblogger noted that Ukrainian forces also attacked Kopani (12km southwest of Orikhiv) from the east.[55] The sector of the front west of Robotyne has notably been quieter in recent weeks, and reports of Ukrainian activity in this area may represent renewed attempts to attack southwest of Orikhiv.

Russian sources continued limited counterattacks in western Zaporizhia Oblast on September 10 and reportedly regained some lost positions. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces unsuccessfully attacked near Robotyne.[56] Some Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces counterattacked northwest of Verbove and regained some previously lost positions.[57]

Russian sources claimed that Russian forces thwarted a Ukrainian special operations group in the Black Sea on the night of September 9 to 10. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian naval aviation discovered and destroyed three Ukrainian boats carrying a total of 36 special operations servicemen northeast of Snake Island, Odesa Oblast that were traveling in the direction of occupied Crimea.[58] A milblogger claimed that Ukrainian intelligence agents initially launched six boats towards Cape Tarkhankut and that a Russian Su-24M naval aviation bomber dropped four cluster bombs and sunk three of the boats, forcing the remaining three to retreat.[59]

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces attempted to attack occupied Crimea with drones on the night of September 9 to 10. The Russian MoD claimed that Russian air defense downed eight Ukrainian drones over the Black Sea near the Crimean coast overnight on September 9 to 10.[60] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces were attempting to target military assets on Cape Tarkhankut and noted that units of the 31st Air Defense Division shot down eight of the drones.[61]

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

Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Spokesperson Major General Vadym Skibitskyi stated on September 10 that the Russian military has concentrated over 420,000 military personnel in occupied Ukraine, not including Rosgvardia (Russian national guard) and other military units and structures; thus this number does not fully reflect Russia’s total forces involved in the war in Ukraine.[62] Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov stated that there are currently one million active Ukrainian Defense Forces personnel, with 800,000 serving in the ranks of the Armed Forces, though this number similarly does not mean 800,000 Ukrainian personnel are actively engaged in fighting.[63]

Russian defense enterprise Uralvagonzavod General Director Alexander Potapov stated on September 10 that the Sverdlovsk Oblast–based machine building company is planning on producing T-80VM tanks.[64] Potapov stated that Uralvagonzavod is actively interacting with the Russian Ministry of Industry and Trade to establish new capacities at the plant to produce the latest modification of the T-80 main battle tank.[65] Russian opposition outlet Novaya Gazeta reported in November 2022 that Uralvagonzavod could produce 200 to 250 new T-90 and T-72 tanks a year and could repair up to 600 damaged tanks a year in partnership with Omsktransmash in Omsk Oblast.[66]

The United Kingdom Ministry of Defense (UK MoD) reported on September 10 that Pskov Oblast Governor Mikhail Vedernikov has organized volunteer security patrols to interdict possible further drones strikes against the Kresty airfield, where Ukrainian forces reportedly damaged four Russian IL-76 aircraft on August 29.[67] The UK MoD added that the volunteer patrols will consist of 50 people divided among multiple municipalities.[68]

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

Russian occupation officials held the final day of voting for Russian regional elections in occupied territories on September 10, continuing efforts to coerce residents to vote and portray the elections as legitimate.[69] Ukrainian officials reported that Russian occupation officials continue to go door-to-door to force people to vote and that occupation police officers watch people at polling stations to see which candidates they vote for.[70] Ukrainian Kherson Oblast Deputy Chairman Yurii Sobolevskyi stated that Russian occupation officials are trying to reach a pre-determined turnout figure of 75 to 80 percent.[71] Zaporizhia Oblast occupation deputy Vladimir Rogov claimed that voter turnout was already at 53 percent in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast.[72] The Kherson Oblast occupation administration amplified a post on September 10 claiming that the ruling United Russia Party already has roughly 73 percent of the vote in occupied Kherson Oblast, 84 percent in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast, 75 percent in occupied Luhansk Oblast, and 79 percent in occupied Donetsk Oblast.[73] Russian occupation officials and sources also continued to promote the work of “international election observers” to claim that there have been no electoral violations.[74] Russian occupation officials will likely publish inflated turnout statistics to portray the elections as legitimate, and these figures will likely ignore the demographic ramifications of forced depopulation of many areas of occupied Ukraine.[75]

Russian officials accused Ukrainian forces of disrupting regional elections on September 10, likely to set informational conditions to explain possible reports of low voter turnout. Russian Central Election Commission (CEC) Head Nikolai Bulaev accused Ukrainian forces of destroying a polling station in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast with a drone strike and conducting missile strikes near occupied Henichesk, Kherson Oblast on September 10 to disrupt regional elections.[76] Kherson Oblast occupation commission chairperson Marina Zakharova stated that Russian occupation officials closed polling stations early in occupied Nova Kakhovka and Kakhovka due to Ukrainian shelling.[77]

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

Nothing significant to report.

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

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

11. Ukrainians Embrace Cluster Munitions, but Are They Helping?

Ukrainians Embrace Cluster Munitions, but Are They Helping?

By Lara Jakes and Eric Schmitt

Reporting from Rome and Washington

Sept. 7, 2023

The New York Times · by Eric Schmitt · September 7, 2023

The weapons, banned by most countries over human rights concerns, are “not a magic wand,” but some Ukrainian troops say they are making a difference in fighting Russian forces.

A Ukrainian soldier firing a 155 mm howitzer, the type of weapon used to launch cluster munitions, in the Donetsk region in March.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

The images of Russian troops retreating from a village in Ukraine under fire leave little doubt of the impact of cluster munitions. Soldiers running from a constellation of at least a dozen explosions around them. An armored vehicle speeding down a road before being hit in a cascade of simultaneous eruptions salting the surrounding ground.

The August drone footage of the Russian withdrawal from the southeastern village of Urozhaine, verified by The New York Times, highlights the power of the weapons. But their usage also points to a grim trade-off in the 18-month conflict. By embracing cluster munitions to keep this summer’s counteroffensive moving forward, Ukraine and the United States have opened themselves to human rights concerns about their long-term threat to civilians who inadvertently trigger unexploded bombs.

Now, two months after the United States shipped an initial tranche of the munitions to Ukraine to ensure its troops did not run out of ammunition, three American officials said the Biden administration is planning to send more, and soon.

One official said the weapons were key to helping Ukraine maintain the momentum its troops just recently gained on the southern front against Russian forces. All three of the officials spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.

President Biden’s decision this summer to send the munitions to Ukraine, after pleas by President Volodymyr Zelensky, drew widespread condemnation, and even some close American allies were critical.

Both Russia and Ukraine used the bomblets during the 18-month war well before the American shipment arrived in mid-July, but with a crucial distinction. Russia has used them against a country it had invaded, where its forces have not hesitated to wreak indiscriminate destruction, while Ukraine has used them on its own soil, weighing the costs to its own people.

Cluster munitions have been banned by more than 100 countries because of their devastating effects, sometimes years later, on children and other civilians who mistakenly disturb and detonate unexploded rounds.

President Biden said the cluster munitions sent to Ukraine were intended as a stopgap for forces in danger of running out of ammunition.Credit...Desiree Rios for The New York Times

Some Ukrainian troops said U.S.-supplied cluster munitions have been a powerful addition to a slew of weapons the West has sent for the counteroffensive, and a necessary substitute for their dwindling stocks of 155-millimeter artillery shells.

“They are super efficient,” said one Ukrainian marine, who participated in the successful fight for Urozhaine and who identified himself only as Serhiy. “When our guys see how we use them against the enemy, their spirits soar.”

But other Ukrainian soldiers are more measured, saying cluster munitions are used mostly in situations where enemy infantry are exposed, and that they are largely ineffective against the dug-in Russian positions — line after line of trenches and bunkers — that are the major obstacle to the counteroffensive.

Western officials and experts agree that cluster munitions — multiple bomblets packed in shells that disperse over a wide area before impact — are most effective against forces and vehicle convoys that are spread out over open terrain. Because the bomblets leave the shells in a scattershot way, it is hard to direct them at precise targets.

So far, American officials said, they have been used to strike concentrations of Russian troops, artillery systems, air defenses, ammunition depots, radar stations and vehicles.

“What we have seen from Ukrainian reporting is that they are having good effect with this capability,” Laura K. Cooper, a U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia policy, said in a recent interview.

Ukraine’s counteroffensive has been slowed by extensive dug-in Russian positions like this abandoned one near Petrivka, last year.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

U.S. officials will not say how many cluster munitions were included in the first shipment, out of the hundreds of thousands that the Pentagon has available.

The American-supplied cluster munitions are fired from 155-millimeter howitzers, with a range of about 15 miles. Some military experts are now pushing for cluster munitions that can be launched from rocket systems and hit targets dozens of miles away.

With NATO states’ stockpiles of other ammunition to donate running alarmingly low, and with weapons manufacturers in the United States and Europe unable to keep up, experts said cluster munitions may be one of the only available means to refill Ukraine’s supply.

Ukraine’s voracious demand for ammunition is expected to rise as some units increasingly rely on heavy artillery to lay the ground for infantry advances instead of NATO-style combined arms warfare that Ukrainian units have struggled to master.

U.S. officials have estimated that Ukrainian forces were recently firing as many as 8,000 artillery rounds each day — including hundreds of cluster munitions.

Taken together, that could lead to cluster munitions becoming what George Barros at the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, predicted could be a “permanent fixture within the Ukrainian arsenal.”

That is especially worrisome to those who object to any cluster munitions being given to Ukraine, no matter who uses them, or how.

“What we’ve seen is that Ukraine is keen to show that there is military utility to cluster munitions,” said Mary Wareham, advocacy director of the arms division at Human Rights Watch. “But at the end of the day these weapons are prohibited because of the harm inflicted on civilians both when they’re used and decades after.”

Volunteers with the Syrian Civil Defense, or White Helmets, posted mine warning signs around a suspected cluster bomblet in Termanin, Syria, last month.Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times

But without them, Ukraine’s leaders counter, they cannot match Russian firepower.

“I want to look at this from a perspective of fairness,” Mr. Zelensky said in July at the annual NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania. “Russia’s constantly using cluster munitions on our territory, and they’re fighting only on our land. They’re killing our people.”

The strategic problem is that in the counteroffensive, Ukraine is fighting dug-in defenders, where cluster munitions “have their limits,” said Can Kasapoğlu, director of defense research at the independent Centre for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies in Istanbul. They may succeed when used with other kinds of artillery, but alone, “they’re not a magic wand,” Mr. Kasapoğlu said.

Gian Luca Capovin and Alexander Stronell, analysts with the British security intelligence firm Janes said in August that Ukraine’s use of cluster munitions in the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions, at least so far, “did not deliver any decisive effect.”

As a condition of receiving cluster munitions from the United States, Mr. Zelensky and senior Ukrainian defense officials pledged to avoid firing them into areas where civilians could be hit.

Senior Russian officials, commanders and military bloggers on the front lines have for months accused Ukraine of firing cluster munitions not only at Russian troops, but also at areas populated by civilians.

The United States has dismissed such claims as disinformation. There has been evidence earlier in the war, however, that Ukraine appeared to sometimes use cluster munitions in populated areas.

Collected fragments of Russian rockets, many of them cluster rounds, that hit the city of Kharkiv, in December.Credit...Libkos/Associated Press

For now, Ukrainian forces say the arrival of American cluster munitions had not only raised morale, but also helped to pick apart Russian defensive positions in the south, keep pressure on Russian troops in the east and hold back Russian assaults in the northeast.

And some experts point to some specific battles where they argue the cluster munitions have helped. One of those places is the small city of Kupiansk in Kharkiv Province, where Ukraine has used them in defense more than offense.

Ukraine has struggled for months to maintain control of Kupiansk in the face of a Russian advance. Losing it now would be a major blow, said Mr. Kasapoğlu, who is also a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington and has been monitoring ground reports from Kupiansk on social media and other public sources.

Within two weeks of Mr. Biden’s decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine, they reached Kupiansk. By early August, the weapons were targeting Russian forces and armored vehicles trying to seize territory, Mr. Kasapoğlu said.

The fighting in Kupiansk remains fierce. But so far, at least, Ukraine is holding the line, and Mr. Kasapoğlu said that “cluster munitions have indeed played a major role.”

Lara Jakes reported from Rome, and Eric Schmitt from Washington. Thomas Gibbons-Neff contributed reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine, and Marc Santora from southern Ukraine.

Lara Jakes is a foreign correspondent focused on the war in Ukraine. She has been a diplomatic and military correspondent in Washington and a war correspondent in Iraq, and has reported and edited from more than 60 countries over the last 25 years. More about Lara Jakes

Eric Schmitt is a senior writer who has traveled the world covering terrorism and national security. He was also the Pentagon correspondent. A member of the Times staff since 1983, he has shared four Pulitzer Prizes. More about Eric Schmitt

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Ukraine Insists Cluster Arsenal Keeps it in Fight

622

The New York Times · by Eric Schmitt · September 7, 2023

13. Opinion | Corruption Is an Existential Threat to Ukraine, and Ukrainians Know It

Excerpts:

It would have been better to spend far less money in Afghanistan but in a way that empowered local leaders. Instead, we spent more than a trillion dollars on a war that ended disastrously. Does it matter that we had a special inspector general perfectly documenting the disaster?

Ukraine is a different place, of course. U.S. boots aren’t on the ground there — yet. Pallets of cash aren’t being delivered to military leaders and politicians, as far as we can tell. Corruption scandals seem to involve Ukrainian funds, not U.S. money. But the lessons of Afghanistan are not lost on Ukrainians. Last year an article in Foreign Affairs by Tymofii Brik, the rector of the Kyiv School of Economics, and Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili of the University of Pittsburgh argued that donor countries should work with local Ukrainian government entities to rebuild the country instead of using “vast armies” of foreign contractors and nongovernmental organizations.

Such methods “undermine local governance institutions, not just by sweeping up the best talent from them but by giving foreigners a greater say in what happens in communities than the people who live there,” they wrote. When the war in Ukraine finally ends, the money to rebuild the country will most likely dwarf anything we’ve seen in our lifetime. That’s when the real feeding frenzy will begin. Ukrainian institutions and watchdogs had better be ready.

Opinion | Corruption Is an Existential Threat to Ukraine, and Ukrainians Know It

By Farah Stockman

Ms. Stockman is a member of the editorial board who has reported from Afghanistan.

The New York Times · by Farah Stockman · September 10, 2023

Farah Stockman

Corruption Is an Existential Threat to Ukraine, and Ukrainians Know It

Sept. 10, 2023, 6:00 a.m. ET

The Motherland Monument in Kyiv, Ukraine.Credit...Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times

Ms. Stockman is a member of the editorial board who has reported from Afghanistan.

President Biden talks of the world being divided into autocracies and democracies. But a more important division exists: between kleptocracies, where leaders treat their nations like personal piggy banks, and places where corruption is the exception rather than the rule.

Since 2014, Ukrainians have been fighting to drag their country into that second category. The Maidan revolution, which sent a pro-Russian president packing, wasn’t just about freeing Ukraine from Russian influence. It was also about breaking the stranglehold of oligarchs who — as in so many former Soviet republics — controlled everything from television stations to the politicians on ballots. The fight against corruption amounts to a second front in Ukraine’s war against Russia.

Ukraine is making progress, no small feat in the middle of a hot war. But it is still ranked the second most corrupt country in Europe, after Russia, according to Transparency International. Since the February 2022 Russian invasion, a host of characters — from arms dealers to suppliers of soldiers’ meals — has stood to reap big profits, creating vested interests in prolonging the conflict.

Corruption has been the elephant in the room since the invasion — an unpopular subject in Washington, since it risks undermining the American support that Ukraine desperately needs.

But guess who hasn’t shied away from calling out corruption in Ukraine? Ukrainians. No one knows better what an existential threat corruption can be, sapping the public trust and the legitimacy of the state. Ukrainians consider corruption the country’s second-most-serious problem, behind only the Russian invasion, according to a poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology this year. They know that they must root out money laundering and the influence of oligarchs as a condition of joining the European Union. Since the war started, the percentage of Ukrainians who say they are willing to stand up for their rights when they interact with bureaucrats doubled — from 26 percent in 2021 to 52 percent this year. That raises hopes that Ukrainians are starting to resist corruption with the same can-do spirit that repelled the Russian invasion.

Yuriy Nikolov, a founder of the online news platform Nashi Groshi (Our Money), broke stories about the Ukrainian Defense Ministry paying huge markups for supplies — 46 cents for eggs that should have cost five cents, $86 for winter coats that were worth just $29. A week ago, President Volodymyr Zelensky dismissed his defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, who, although not personally implicated, had been tarnished by the scandal.

Another Ukrainian platform, Bihus, exposes expensive cars and luxury vacations purchased by politicians since the invasion. It took aim at Bohdan Torokhtiy, a lawmaker whose wife, Alina Levchenko, documented high-end stays at resorts and villas across Europe and the Middle East on Instagram in the early days of the Russian invasion while other Ukrainians were fending off the attack. It also reported that she had been hired as an adviser to an executive at Antonov, a state-owned aircraft company, despite having no experience in the industry. She didn’t reply to my request for comment on social media. Her Instagram account has since become private.

Ukrainian lawmakers are pushing back against the scrutiny. For more than a year, Ukrainian watchdog groups and the international agencies that fund them have been encouraging the government to reinstate wealth declarations by politicians, a requirement that was suspended in the early days of the invasion. Last week, lawmakers in Kyiv passed a bill that would reinstate the obligation to declare but keep the information closed to the public for a year or longer. In less than 24 hours, more than 83,000 people signed a petition asking Mr. Zelensky to veto the bill. “Many Ukrainians are unhappy with this decision of the Parliament,” Andrii Borovyk, the executive director of Transparency International Ukraine, told me. “Attention is very big.”

Vitalii Shabunin, the chairman of the board of the nonprofit Anti-Corruption Action Center in Kyiv, wrote a scathing column about the decision in Ukrainian Pravda, an online newspaper based in Kyiv. Access to declarations has helped expose “top corrupt people,” he wrote. Now lawmakers “want to keep the ‘war fortunes’ of officials a secret and absolve themselves of crime.”

Mr. Zelensky has been on a mission to convince Ukrainians and donor countries that he has things under control. In May the chief of Ukraine’s Supreme Court was arrested on bribery charges. In June another judge, who hid $150,000 worth of bribes in pickle jars and fled the country to Moldova, received a 10-year sentence after a bizarre incident in which he was forcibly returned to Ukraine. This month, Ihor Kolomoisky, an oligarch who once served as a governor, was arrested in Ukraine nearly two years after the U.S. Department of Justice accused him of embezzling billions of dollars from a private Ukrainian bank that he owned and laundering the money by buying real estate in Cleveland and other American cities.

His arrest will boost the Ukrainian public’s confidence that the war on corruption can be won. But anti-corruption watchdogs in Ukraine aren’t thrilled with how he was taken into custody. The security services grabbed Mr. Kolomoisky before the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, which is seen as more independent, got the chance. The bureau had been preparing to prosecute him on far more serious charges.

The Ukrainian people should be applauded — and supported — for battling corruption. In one sign of support, the White House recently met with a delegation of anti-corruption groups.

But there’s a danger that these arrests will weaken American enthusiasm for the war. Some Republicans are pushing for the appointment of a special inspector general for Ukraine, like the office that was created for Afghanistan. Before we spend a fortune on a new inspector general, we should make sure that we’re staffing the inspector generals that already exist. (The State Department’s inspector general post, for instance, has been vacant for three years.) We should also boost our support for Ukrainian investigators who can demand accountability from their government in perpetuity rather than create an American agency that will disappear over time.

That’s perhaps the biggest lesson of Afghanistan. We didn’t fail in Afghanistan because we couldn’t stop corruption. We failed because we didn’t foster Afghan institutions that could withstand a U.S. withdrawal. Americans were so worried about stamping out corruption that they micromanaged everything, creating a shadow government — staffed by temporary, highly paid consultants that answered to Washington. They wrote beautiful reports but weren’t accountable to the people who mattered most: Afghans. The special inspector general of Afghanistan reconstruction acknowledged as much in a report released this year: “In order to control for corruption,” it read, Americans took control of more and more processes, “which in turn led to a lack of Afghan mission and logistics ownership.”

It would have been better to spend far less money in Afghanistan but in a way that empowered local leaders. Instead, we spent more than a trillion dollars on a war that ended disastrously. Does it matter that we had a special inspector general perfectly documenting the disaster?

Ukraine is a different place, of course. U.S. boots aren’t on the ground there — yet. Pallets of cash aren’t being delivered to military leaders and politicians, as far as we can tell. Corruption scandals seem to involve Ukrainian funds, not U.S. money. But the lessons of Afghanistan are not lost on Ukrainians. Last year an article in Foreign Affairs by Tymofii Brik, the rector of the Kyiv School of Economics, and Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili of the University of Pittsburgh argued that donor countries should work with local Ukrainian government entities to rebuild the country instead of using “vast armies” of foreign contractors and nongovernmental organizations.

Such methods “undermine local governance institutions, not just by sweeping up the best talent from them but by giving foreigners a greater say in what happens in communities than the people who live there,” they wrote. When the war in Ukraine finally ends, the money to rebuild the country will most likely dwarf anything we’ve seen in our lifetime. That’s when the real feeding frenzy will begin. Ukrainian institutions and watchdogs had better be ready.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Farah Stockman joined the Times editorial board in 2020. For four years, she was a reporter for The Times, covering politics, social movements and race. She previously worked at The Boston Globe, where she won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2016. @fstockman

The New York Times · by Farah Stockman · September 10, 2023

14. Recreating Western Deterrence

Excerpts:

Before the war in Ukraine is over, the West should ensure that the Ukrainians are able to acquire the weapons needed to utterly destroy the ships and shipyards of the Black Sea fleet. Given the restraint that the US and NATO have exercised so far, providing the relevant munitions and intelligence for the Ukrainians to destroy the Black Sea fleet could be done in a way that generates surprise and chagrin among the Russian command staff and political leadership. It is a pity that these weapons and capabilities were not provided at the beginning of the war when the surprise could have been more severe. Russia will not be able to rebuild the Black Sea fleet capability for decades if both the ships and the port facilities are destroyed, and destroying their offensive naval capabilities in the Black Sea and Mediterranean will be a major strategic victory, turning the Black Sea into a NATO lake for a generation. The destruction of this national asset will likely generate significant embarrassment and dismay for the Putin regime.

Furthermore, and in parallel with this effort, the West should enable the Ukrainians to destroy Russian port assets - especially but not exclusively on the Black Sea. Russia’s most significant export continues to be oil and oil derivatives. Given that the Russians have announced unrestricted warfare against shipping in and out of Ukraine, there is no reason for the Ukrainians not to respond in kind. Attacking the Russians’ most significant source of revenue is one of the most efficient and asymmetric ways for the Ukrainians to undermine the Russian ability to wage war. Much of the oil exported by Russia has historically left from the Black Sea ports, which are certainly within Ukrainian reach with only modest and deniable Western support.

Demonstrating the ability to generate painful and punitive surprises for Russia will go a long way toward preventing a war in the Taiwan Straits. It’s time for the United States and NATO to stop telegraphing their punches.

Recreating Western Deterrence

By Michael Hochberg

September 11, 2023

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/09/11/recreating_western_deterrence_978583.html?mc_cid=f7a47e4c7d

The art of deterrence seems to have been lost here in the liberal-democratic West.

Certainly, the West failed egregiously in deterring Russian aggression against Ukraine – first in 2013 in Crimea, and then on February 24, 2022, after Valdimir Putin amassed troops on Ukraine’s borders. Economic blandishments and sanctions, it has become clear, are weak reeds when it comes to deterring autocratic governments from kinetic actions. In fact, economic sanctions can delay timely and coordinated Western actions aimed at deterrence, since international businesses and individuals benefiting from engagement will tend to lobby against anything that will disrupt their activities.

Deterrence is, in no small part, about fear. In an authoritarian regime, deterrence occurs in the mind of the autocrat. And the leaders of authoritarian states fear different things than the leaders of Western liberal states. Western leaders of commercial republics fear things like a declining economy, supply chain disruptions or inflated prices on ever scarcer goods–especially with the approach of elections. But such economic deterrents to action do not hold sway to the same extent over the imagination of authoritarian adversaries. Only in commercial republics, where leaders are answerable to citizenry, is the logic of economic hardship likely to lead to a loss of authority and status.

Western powers would do well to focus on the things that the leaders of authoritarian regimes actually fear. Most of all, autocrats fear the creation of popular discontent and the destabilization of their regimes. It follows that the most effective strategy for deterring autocrats is to look beyond the threat of economic sanctions to threats of defeat, embarrassment, and popular discontent. A nuanced understanding of the thought processes and strategic culture of the adversary regime is absolutely essential to the construction of an effective strategy of deterrence.

Fear may be rational, based on a cold appraisal of the factual balance of forces, available manpower, technological superiority, war materiel, and will to fight. But more powerful, in many cases, is the fear of the unknown. Questions like the following are of the essence: What surprises do our enemies have in store? What will they do that we cannot predict? What if we are unprepared or unable to counter? Perhaps they will do something that we regard as utterly irrational. The ideal scenario, from the perspective of deterrence, is that our autocratic adversaries’ leaders should feel confusion and panic at the prospect of war with the allies of the United States.

Deterrence Does Not Mean Nuclear

One fear that the United States and our allies might legitimately have is the use of nuclear weapons by the adversaries of the United States. Iran’s nuclear program is such a threat; the North Korean dictator threatens to use his nuclear arsenal to attack America; Russia’s Putin threatens to use tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield in Ukraine. There is no clear, public doctrine on the United States’ response to a nuclear strike, and it is unclear whether the United States would in fact be prepared to engage in nuclear escalation over any attack on an ally. Deterrence only emerges to the extent that adversaries anticipate, expect, or fear a response to certain contemplated actions.

In any event, nuclear weapons are only one of the tools that humans have developed for the destruction of cities. Witness Hama in 1982, Tokyo in 1944, Dresden in 1945, Grozny in 1999, and Carthage in 146 BC, among countless others. Each of these were acts of destruction that served as cautionary tales for those who might anticipate the same fate. Conventional weapons are both necessary and sufficient for strategic deterrence, especially in a world where leaders of great powers have a strong preference to avoid nuclear escalation.

What, one might ask, are the circumstances under which the United States would engage in a nuclear first strike against China or Russia, or their armed forces? It’s hard to imagine any such circumstance: Even if China were to cross the Taiwan Straits and begin systematically rounding up and killing the citizens of Taiwan, does anyone seriously believe that the United States would launch a nuclear first strike on China, or even on a Chinese fleet in the Taiwan Straits, to stop it? The leaders of Taiwan certainly should not act on the assumption that the United States would do so.

For any circumstance where the first use of an American nuclear weapon might be considered, there will, for the near term, always be a conventional alternative. And given realistic fears of nuclear escalation by the leaders of the United States, the conventional alternative will, for the foreseeable future, be the chosen solution for the United States.

Dependence and Deterrence

As Halford Mackinder once argued, states that contribute to the balance of power remain effectively sovereign. Such states have many more options than those which rely on others for their security. States that depend on allied nations are thus limited in their ability to execute effective deterrence. For small states on the periphery of expansionist autocratic regimes, the rapid development and deployment of their own credible deterrents, whether nuclear or conventional, should be considered a priority.

For Taiwan, this means several key things:

• Developing the ability to keep the PLA from establishing air superiority over Taiwan, even over the course of a long campaign.
• Developing the capability to stop an invasion fleet before it reaches Taiwan’s shores.
• Deploying deep-strike capability that will allow significant and disabling reprisals against key infrastructure and prestige targets in China, including port facilities, military bases, and government facilities.
• Developing the capability to engage in grey-zone information warfare and to support insurgency within China in order to destabilize and discredit the regime.
• Ideally, developing enough defensive capability to allow Taiwan to keep their ports open to shipments of key goods from allies, even in the face of a hostile China; the prospect of a long and embarrassing war may constitute a deterrent in and of itself.

By contrast with Ukraine, which shares a long border with Russia and where Russian forces have demonstrated an ability to dig in and hold ground once taken, Taiwan has enormous advantages. Most notably, any invasion fleet needs to cross the Taiwan straits; stopping them from coming ashore by sinking the fleet will be radically less expensive and more effective than any form of fight on the beaches or on land.

In addition, small states can pursue the strategy that Taiwan and Korea have already deployed to great effect: Wield economic specialization to create technical capabilities that are available in only one place, necessitating their defense by the United States on the grounds of an irreplaceable geo-economic choke point in a vital commercial supply chain. In effect, they contribute to what might be called technological power, which underlies much of military and economic power in the modern era. Unfortunately, this strategy also has an anti-deterrent effect, since the result is that any invasion of Taiwan will create dramatic harm to Western economies, creating a comparative increase in Chinese power. Ironically, creating a situation where Taiwan is essential to the United States’s economy makes Taiwan all the more attractive as a target for China.

Secrets, Surprises, and Punishments

In Ukraine, it may be that the greatest source of failure to deter conflict was inadequate signaling of the extent to which the United States was prepared to support Ukraine’s war effort. This in turn led to an intelligence failure on the part of the Russian leadership. While the West had been quietly supporting Ukrainian military training and providing limited armaments, these efforts were deliberately downplayed in order to avoid upsetting Russian leadership, which was perceived by some as a partner rather than an adversary regime. It seems, in retrospect, that what the West had provided the Ukrainians, coupled with the Ukrainian will to fight in the face of bald aggression, was far more effective than anyone expected, in Moscow or in Washington, D.C.

It would have been far cheaper and more effective for initial Western aid to Ukraine to have been more public and more expansive; a key component of deterrence is ensuring that the enemy understands that the cost of adverse action will be high. Making it crystal clear and obvious that Ukraine, even in the absence of strong and immediate Western support, would be a hard nut to crack, would have been key to effective deterrence. In this, the West failed utterly. Far more weapons, far more public training, and far more logistical and C4ISR support after the first Russian invasion of 2013 was needed to make it clear to Russia that Ukraine would not be an easy target.

But this alone would likely not have been sufficient. Giving Ukraine the ability to grind down an attacking force, while incredibly valuable, creates a circumstance where the only thing at risk in an attack are the Russian forces used in the attack. In such a scenario, the attacking party gets to control the pace and place of aggression, and the scope of consequence in any downside scenario.

Deterrence also requires that the enemy fear punishment. While Russia uses precision-guided weapons to deliberately attack civilian targets in Ukraine, the Ukrainians have been largely unable to respond (until recently) with attacks even on military targets within Russian occupied Ukraine, let alone in Russia proper. While there have been isolated conventional and grey-zone attacks on a few targets in Russia – such as arms depots and staging areas, as well as isolated attacks on Moscow and on naval targets in port – and, allegedly, on the Nord Stream pipelines, these have been the exception rather than the rule. Had Ukraine been equipped with the capability to engage in conventional, sustained, deep strikes into Russia, Putin and his advisors might have appreciated the dramatically enhanced downsides of launching this war. Relying on threatened and after-the-fact economic sanctions and seizures of the yachts of Russian oligarchs is insufficient; our front-line allies need to have the capability, outside of any US veto or control, to strike the cities and critical infrastructure of aggressor states.

The lesson for Taiwan is obvious.

Nor should the element of surprise be slighted in reestablishing deterrence. The United States has, in this war, telegraphed every punch. Every new weapon system acquisition by the Ukrainians has been extensively and sometimes publicly debated, often for months, eliminating the opportunity for the Ukrainians to achieve any level of strategic or tactical surprise by their use. The United States’ leadership would be well-served to identify key capabilities (including but not limited to weapons systems) that can be provided to the Ukrainians, and provide them en masse, without warning, so that they can be used to achieve surprise.

This would seem at odds with the suggestion that effective deterrence requires instilling fear through public actions that are known to an adversary. And it’s true that hidden capabilities and surprises cannot, by their nature, contribute to deterrence directly from the perspective of a balance-of-forces analysis. But a demonstrated capability and willingness to create surprises for adversaries is absolutely essential to deterrence. It creates uncertainty in the minds of enemy commanders and requires them to prepare for scenarios beyond what their direct intelligence would suggest. The performance of the Ukrainian military in the early stages of the war was one such surprise and was a major victory for Western arms. The balance of forces required for a successful invasion of Taiwan undoubtedly changed dramatically, in the minds of PLA command staff, in the wake of the surprising performance of the Ukrainians.

Jerry Pournelle, in his book The Strategy of Technology, argued that ‘surprise is an event that takes place in the mind of an enemy commander.’ The United States has acted, since the invasion of Ukraine, to avoid creating surprise in the minds of the commanders of the Russian forces. But surprise, properly wielded, is one of the most powerful tools of warfare, and one that the United States and the West have sacrificed in the interest of avoiding escalation in Ukraine. For instance, NATO countries have decided to furnish F-16’s to Ukraine, but only after a long training period for their pilots. There are many retired, US military trained fighter pilots and crews here in the United States. It would not take much to allow and incentivize these folks to serve as PMC’s in the Ukrainian armed forces, and to furnish the Ukrainians with the cash to employ them; clear permission that doing so will not violate their obligations to the United States is probably all that would be required, along with providing competitive compensation at market rates. A couple hundred fully armed, fully supported F-16’s showing up all at once, a month from now, staffed by trained contractors, would likely make a huge difference to the Ukrainians. This would certainly be more impactful than a handful showing up a year from now when the Russians have had time to prepare for their arrival. 

Showing a capacity to generate these kinds of surprises will have a dramatic force multiplier effect with regard to deterrence in Taiwan and elsewhere.

The West now has a golden opportunity to re-establish deterrence by engaging in punishment by proxy, and to reestablish the threat value of the element of surprise. There are a variety of Russian economic and strategic assets (factories, mines, power plants, rail depots, pipelines, gas infrastructure, port facilities, museums, landmarks, etc.) that the Ukrainians can attack, through direct kinetic means, grey-zone warfare, support of insurgents, or special operations. Enabling them to do so should be a US and Western priority. In particular, facilities like ports and pipelines, which generate hard currency and enable exports to China and elsewhere, should be high-priority targets. 

One critical asset - perhaps the most important one - is the Black Sea fleet, which is a standing threat to the stability of the Black Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean. Certainly, nobody would debate the status of the Black Sea fleet as a legitimate target. The ships of this fleet have been documented engaging in harassment of Romanian ships and oil exploration efforts, and they are the reason that Russia has been able to exercise significant leverage over Ukrainian grain exports. Since the sinking of the Moskva, the Russian fleet has stayed largely out of range of shore-based Ukrainian defenses. With the accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO, the Baltic has become a NATO lake; achieving the same effect in the Black Sea would radically curtail Russian force-projection capabilities in the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond. 

Before the war in Ukraine is over, the West should ensure that the Ukrainians are able to acquire the weapons needed to utterly destroy the ships and shipyards of the Black Sea fleet. Given the restraint that the US and NATO have exercised so far, providing the relevant munitions and intelligence for the Ukrainians to destroy the Black Sea fleet could be done in a way that generates surprise and chagrin among the Russian command staff and political leadership. It is a pity that these weapons and capabilities were not provided at the beginning of the war when the surprise could have been more severe. Russia will not be able to rebuild the Black Sea fleet capability for decades if both the ships and the port facilities are destroyed, and destroying their offensive naval capabilities in the Black Sea and Mediterranean will be a major strategic victory, turning the Black Sea into a NATO lake for a generation. The destruction of this national asset will likely generate significant embarrassment and dismay for the Putin regime.

Furthermore, and in parallel with this effort, the West should enable the Ukrainians to destroy Russian port assets - especially but not exclusively on the Black Sea. Russia’s most significant export continues to be oil and oil derivatives. Given that the Russians have announced unrestricted warfare against shipping in and out of Ukraine, there is no reason for the Ukrainians not to respond in kind. Attacking the Russians’ most significant source of revenue is one of the most efficient and asymmetric ways for the Ukrainians to undermine the Russian ability to wage war. Much of the oil exported by Russia has historically left from the Black Sea ports, which are certainly within Ukrainian reach with only modest and deniable Western support.

Demonstrating the ability to generate painful and punitive surprises for Russia will go a long way toward preventing a war in the Taiwan Straits. It’s time for the United States and NATO to stop telegraphing their punches.

Michael Hochberg earned his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Caltech and is currently the President at Luminous Computing, a company building supercomputers for machine learning. He founded four companies, representing an exit value over a billion dollars in aggregate, spent some time as a tenured professor, and started the world’s first silicon photonics foundry service. He co-authored a widely used textbook on silicon photonics, and has published work in Science, Nature, National Review, The Hill, American Spectator, RealClearDefense, Fast Company, etc.

15. Jack Carr's take on the 9/11 terror attacks — including 'hope' and the lessons from Afghanistan

Jack Carr's take on the 9/11 terror attacks — including 'hope' and the lessons from Afghanistan

foxnews.com · by Jack Carr Fox News

Video

Biden to break with 9/11 tradition, won't visit memorial sites

‘Outnumbered’ panel discusses President Biden planning to skip the traditional visit to 9/11 memorial sites.

Twenty-two years have passed since the attack that changed the course of history and not a day has gone by that I have not thought about 9/11.

In remembering that Tuesday in September, it is hard not to reflect on all that followed.

Two years removed from the disastrous withdrawal of U.S. forces, I think of the flag officers who — year after year, for close to two decades — went before Congress, the American people and their troops, to say time and time again that we were "making progress" and that we needed just a little more time, additional resources or increased funding to capitalize on our hard-earned gains and those of the Afghan people.

JACK CARR, BESTSELLING AUTHOR AND FORMER SEAL, ANNOUNCES NONFICTION SERIES, ‘TARGETED’

These are the same leaders who had 20 years to prepare for an eventual withdrawal. We saw their best efforts play out in real time in August 2021.

Have any been held accountable? The answer is a resounding no.

Writes bestselling novelist and former Navy SEAL Jack Carr in a powerful remembrance of 9/11 and what came before it and afterward, "I wonder if we will ever learn the lessons of the past and apply them to the future in the form of wisdom." (Jack Carr/Getty Images)

I encourage all Americans to read Craig Whitlock’s "The Afghanistan Papers" to find out what those same officers were saying in what they believed were to be classified interviews unearthed through two Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.

Politicians and military commanders deceived the public and their own troops throughout America’s longest war — a war the nature of which they did not understand.

Too many elected representatives were blinded by the dazzling array of administrative awards that adorned the left chests of clean and pressed dress uniforms worn by generals and admirals with impressive resumes and taxpayer-funded postgraduate degrees who largely succeeded in organizations where advancement was predicated on checking boxes and impressing the officer a rung above in the chain of command.

"The policymakers, planners and strategic decision-makers will write their histories as did McNamara and Westmoreland."

Too many of those same military commanders failed upward and now sit on boards of defense industry companies whose weapon systems they approved for purchase while still in uniform. They are now profiting from a new war in Ukraine while enjoying the benefits of a full four-star military pension.

The policymakers, planners and strategic decision-makers will write their histories as did McNamara and Westmoreland. From time to time, they will shuffle before the cameras to promote a new war without disclosing they might benefit financially from the commitment of U.S. or NATO forces attached to lucrative defense contracts.

Jack Carr led special operations teams as a team leader, platoon commander, troop commander and task unit commander. Over his 20 years in naval special warfare, he transitioned from an enlisted SEAL sniper, to a junior officer leading assault and sniper teams in Iraq and Afghanistan, to a platoon commander practicing counterinsurgency in the southern Philippines, to commanding a Special Operations Task Unit in the most Iranian-influenced section of southern Iraq throughout the tumultuous drawdown of U.S. Forces. He is the No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of, most recently, "Only the Dead: A Thriller." (Jack Carr)

Today, as every day, I think of those who were left to deal with the strategic blunders of their fathers — the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who returned home dealing with the physical and emotional trauma of the battlefield, those who never came back, those who have taken their lives since.

I think of the blood, sweat and tears of a generation still staining the Afghan soil.

I think of the special operators and CIA officers in the mountains of Tora Bora in December 2001 in what Carl von Clausewitz would have identified as the "culminating point of victory." And I think of how those far from the battlefield "snatched defeat from the jaws of victory."

"I think of the intellectual inertia of those we trust to make our strategic decisions."

I think of the Taliban’s march toward Kabul in the months leading up to our withdrawal and of the U.S. military abandoning Bagram in the dark of night in early July 2021 — a grim foreshadowing of what was to come.

HEROES OF KABUL: GOLD STAR FAMILIES BLAME BIDEN ADMINISTRATION FOR DEATHS AS THEY CONTINUE TO GRIEVE

I remember elected and appointed officials in Washington, D.C., going on vacation as Kabul fell.

I think of history books unopened.

Four "Heroes of Kabul" who were killed in the August 2021 suicide bomber attack on the Kabul airport amid the Afghanistan evacuation. Courtesy of Daegan Page, Rylee McCollum, Nicole Gee and Kareem Nikoui families. (Courtesy of each family)

I can’t help but think of imperial hubris.

I think of lessons not heeded.

On Dec. 24, 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

THESE ARE THE US SERVICE MEMBERS KILLED IN THE KABUL AIRPORT ATTACK

After nine years of war, on Feb. 15, 1989, the last Soviet soldier departed the Graveyard of Empires.

The following day The New York Times wrote, "The war … scarred a generation of young people and undermined the cherished image of an invincible Soviet Army … The Soviet Government now faces a period of reckoning with the roots and consequences of the war."

Just shy of three years later, on Dec. 25, 1991, the red Soviet flag with gold hammer and sickle flew over the Kremlin for the last time.

Lessons …

I think of the intellectual inertia of those we trust to make our strategic decisions.

I think of bodies falling from planes, and of our brave troops forced into tactically disadvantageous positions by those in temperature-controlled offices in The Beltway.

I think of 13 dead Americans coming home in caskets as an elected official and lifetime bureaucrat checked his watch on the tarmac at Dover Air Force Base.

At Dover Air Force Base in Dover, Delaware, on Aug. 29, 2021, President Joe Biden looks down alongside first lady Jill Biden as they attend the dignified transfer of the remains of a fallen service member — one of the 13 members of the US military killed in Afghanistan a week earlier. President Biden prepared Sunday at a U.S. military base to receive the remains of the 13 American service members killed in an attack in Kabul, a solemn ritual that comes amid fierce criticism of his handling of the Afghanistan crisis. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

Those 13 dead service members had been doing their duty half a world away amid the chaos of Abbey Gate.

I think of those wounded in that attack, their lives forever altered. The dead and wounded, and their families, trusted the flag officers in starched uniforms, officers not strong enough to stand up and protect their troops from senseless decisions made far from Hamid Karzai International Airport.

I think of U.S. citizens left behind and the fate of our Afghan partners, partners who fought with us and trusted us. Trust.

JACK CARR'S TAKE ON TERRORISM IN THE SKIES ON JUNE 14, 1985: CREW WAS ‘NOTHING SHORT OF HEROIC’

I think of the beheadings and executions of those we worked with and the torture and murder of their wives and children.

I think of veterans mobilizing and using private funding and assets to extract those who had believed in us.

I think of politicians and media outlets anxious to focus on other stories.

I think of veterans mobilizing and using private funding and assets to extract those who had believed in us.

I think of those who will never be held accountable.

I wonder if we will ever learn the lessons of the past and apply them to the future in the form of wisdom.

But — I also reflect on the flags raised in the wake of 9/11.

I remember the firefighters, police officers, paramedics and first responders who ran into burning buildings that fateful day 22 years ago this morning.

I recall the hundreds of thousands of Americans who lined up to give blood.

American flags are shown at the 9/11 memorial. "Today, I remember those who stood up in the aftermath of the attack to answer the call," writes Jack Carr in this special remembrance of Sept. 11, 2001. (Gary Hershorn/Getty Images)

I am reminded of the Red Cross personnel who manned shelters and served meals to rescue and recovery workers alongside volunteers combing through the rubble at Ground Zero.

And I am touched at the memory of families who gathered in communities across the nation in candlelight vigils.

Today, I remember those who stood up in the aftermath of the attack to answer the call.

"There is hope in the lessons of the past and in the lessons of the U.S. experience in Afghanistan. But, as it was passed to me in the SEAL Teams, hope is not a course of action."

They raised their right hands and swore an oath to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic."

Those memories give me hope, hope that as Americans it is still possible to band together and move forward stronger and wiser.

I have hope because there are those who believe in holding the line despite the actions of those in suits or tailored uniforms in the nation’s capitol.

"Our future depends on dusting off the history books, heeding their lessons and then applying those lessons going forward as wisdom," writes Jack Carr in this special post for Fox News Digital on Sept. 11, 2023. "We owe those who sacrificed their lives on 9/11 and in the Afghan dirt nothing less." (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

At this very moment, there are troops deployed abroad at the tactical level, special operators and intelligence officers tasked with keeping America safe, dedicated to preventing another 9/11.

And there are firefighters, paramedics and police officers responding to calls right now, protecting and serving their fellow citizens, ready to run into collapsing buildings as others run out.

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There is hope in the lessons of the past and in the lessons of the U.S. experience in Afghanistan.

But, as it was passed to me in the SEAL Teams, hope is not a course of action.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

Our future depends on dusting off the history books, heeding their lessons and then applying those lessons going forward as wisdom.

We owe those who sacrificed their lives on 9/11 and in the Afghan dirt nothing less.

Jack Carr is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of "The Devil’s Hand" and host of the "Danger Close Podcast." His latest book is "Only the Dead" (Atria/Emily Bestler Books, May 16, 2023). He is a former Navy SEAL task unit commander and sniper with deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq. Visit him at officialjackcarr.com and follow along on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook at @JackCarrUSA.

foxnews.com · by Jack Carr Fox News

16. In US-led drills, Australian and Indonesian forces deploy battle tanks

​Tanks also have to live with Mark Twain's saying about death being exaggerated.

In US-led drills, Australian and Indonesian forces deploy battle tanks

militarytimes.com · by Fadlan Syam, The Associated Press · September 10, 2023

BANYUWANGI, Indonesia — Thousands of soldiers from the United States, Indonesia, Australia and other allied forces demonstrated their armor capabilities on Sunday in combat drills on the Indonesian island of Java at a time of increased Chinese aggression in the region.

President Joe Biden’s administration has been strengthening an arc of military alliances in the Indo-Pacific to reassure allies alarmed by Beijing’s increasingly provocative actions in the disputed South China Sea, which has become a battleground for U.S-Chinese rivalries.

During the drills, Australian forces deployed five M1A1 Abrams battle tanks and the Indonesian military, deployed two Leopard-2 tanks for the two-week combat exercises in Banyuwangi, a coastal district in East Java province which began Sept. 1. It will include live-fire drills.

A U.S. Marine and and Singaporean soldiers take their positions during an amphibious landing operation at the Super Garuda Shield multi-national military exercise in Situbondo, East Java, Indonesia, Sunday, Sept. 10, 2023. (Trisnadi/AP)

It was the first time Australia deployed battle tanks outside its territory since the Vietnam war.

The Garuda Shield drills have been held annually between American and Indonesian soldiers since 2009. Last year’s participants —Australia, Japan and Singapore — joined again Sunday and the list expanded to include the United Kingdom and France bringing the total number of troops taking part in the drills to 5,000.

China sees the expanded drills as a threat, accusing the U.S. of building an Indo-Pacific alliance similar to NATO to limit China’s growing military and diplomatic influence in the region.

Maj. Gen. Marcus Evans, commanding general of the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Division, told The Associated Press in an interview Saturday that the introduction of armor capability in the large-scale drills would give the allied forces and defense partners a chance to test their weaponry in combat training as they finetune their military readiness.

Garuda Shield is being held in several places, including in waters around Natuna at the southern portion of the South China Sea.

Indonesia and China enjoy generally positive ties, but Jakarta has expressed concern about what it sees as Chinese encroachment on its exclusive economic zone in the South China Sea. The edge of the exclusive economic zone overlaps with Beijing’s unilaterally declared “nine-dash line” demarking its claims there.

Increased activities by Chinese coast guard vessels and fishing boats in the area have unnerved Jakarta, prompting Indonesia’s navy to conduct a large drill in July 2020 in waters around Natuna.

Evans refused to comment on China’s long-standing opposition to U.S.-led military drills in Asia.

Asked whether there are plans by the U.S. military to carry out joint naval patrols with allies like Japan and the Philippines in or near contested waters, Evans said that “it is important that we maintain a continuous engagement with our regional partners and allies from a military perspective, because, that, again, enhances our overall readiness.”

“I think it continues to show a sign of our commitment to regional partners and allies,” said Evans, who is also Senior Commander of U.S. Army Hawaii.

Combat exercises between U.S. forces and their regional allies and defense partners “remains critically important, as it has been since we began this operation in 2006,” he said in response to a question on the urgency of conducting such exercises now.

U.S. allies recognize the strategic importance and the opportunity to participate in the multinational exercises, which aim to enhance military professionalism aside from bolstering combat readiness and sharpening the ability of allied forces to operate together, Evans said.

“Australia, along with all of our regional partners and allies, continues to contribute to really three things that we focus on during operation pathways, in this case, Garuda Shield,” Evans said, “Those three things are partnerships, the refinement of our overall military readiness and interoperability.”

Meanwhile, Rear Adm. Julius Widjojono, the spokesperson for the Indonesian military, said the field training exercises aim to boost combat preparedness and hone the battle instincts of soldiers from participant nations, including overcoming enemy assaults while carrying out patrols.

Brunei, Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, South Korea, and East Timor sent observers to the combined joint multilateral exercise.

Karmini reported from Jakarta, Indonesia. Associated Press writer Jim Gomez in Manila, the Philippines, contributed to this report.

17. What a new ruling in a social media case means for cyber agencies

What a new ruling in a social media case means for cyber agencies

The Washington Post · by Tim Starks

Welcome to The Cybersecurity 202! This is my current favorite internet video. I’ve watched it a double-digit number of times, and I still laugh out loud every single time.

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Below: A coalition urges the intelligence community to support surveillance reforms, and a foreign student in Norway faces espionage allegations. First:

Court ruling frees CISA, but leaves FBI with restrictions on countering misinformation and disinformation

An appeals court ruling on whether federal agencies violated the First Amendment in their battle against misinformation and disinformation offers a mixed outcome for agencies with major cybersecurity responsibilities.

On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit partially overturned a district court injunction limiting communication with social media platforms for some agencies, such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, but not others, namely the FBI. And it rolled back some of the injunction’s restrictions for all of the agencies that were the subject of the lawsuit.

Chris Krebs, the first CISA director who initiated some of the agency’s efforts to counter misinformation and disinformation during the 2020 election and its aftermath, said in a story by my colleagues Cat Zakrzewski and Joseph Menn that he found the ruling “reassuring.”

“As it relates to CISA, this ruling eviscerated the district court decision,” Krebs said.

The difference for the judges, all three appointed by Republicans, was whether the conduct of the agencies (which extend to others beyond cybersecurity-oriented ones) fell under “attempts to coerce” or “attempts to convince.”

What the ruling does

The FBI, White House, surgeon general’s office and Centers for Disease Control — as well as some named officials — remain subject to some of the restrictions of the injunction. All of the others are free of those limits.

Previously, a federal judge’s injunction had prohibited contacts between a longer list of defendants and social media companies for 10 specific purposes. The appeals court revoked all of those prohibitions except one, which it altered. 

The original injunction had barred “threatening, pressuring, or coercing social-media companies in any manner to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce posted content of postings containing protected free speech.” But the appeals court wrote that “those terms could also capture otherwise legal speech. So, the injunction’s language must be further tailored to exclusively target illegal conduct and provide the officials with additional guidance or instruction on what behavior is prohibited.”

The modification now prohibits efforts to “coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech.”

Biggest beneficiaries

Among agencies with major cyber responsibilities, the court reversed the district court’s decision for both CISA and its parent department, Homeland Security — the latter without commentary. That reversal includes some named officials from the injunction, such as CISA Director Jen Easterly.

The judges wrote that CISA flagged content, including “switchboarding” operations where the agency acted as an intermediary for other groups to forward flagged content. And those actions “apparently” led to removal or demotion on social media platforms.

But, the judges said, for CISA and some other defendants, the evidence of coercion wasn’t ample enough.

“Although CISA flagged content for social-media platforms as part of its switchboarding operations, based on this record, its conduct falls on the ‘attempts to convince,’ not ‘attempts to coerce,’ side of the line,” the ruling states. Its further reasoning:

• “There is not sufficient evidence that CISA made threats of adverse consequences — explicit or implicit — to the platforms for refusing to act on the content it flagged,” it continued. “Nor is there any indication CISA had power over the platforms in any capacity, or that their requests were threatening in tone or manner.”
• “Similarly, on this record, their requests — although certainly amounting to a non-trivial level of involvement — do not equate to meaningful control,” the ruling reads. “There is no plain evidence that content was actually moderated per CISA’s requests or that any such moderation was done subject to non-independent standards.”

Still affected

The FBI and some of its officials are still subject to the modified injunction, however. 

“Similar to the White House, Surgeon General, and CDC officials, the FBI regularly met with the platforms, shared ‘strategic information,’ frequently alerted the social media companies to misinformation spreading on their platforms, and monitored their content moderation policies. But, the FBI went beyond that — they urged the platforms to take down content,” it wrote. “In short, when the platforms acted, they did so in response to the FBI’s inherent authority and based on internal policies influenced by FBI officials.”

The court’s reasoning for the FBI is that while there’s no indication of overt threats for not complying with takedown requests, it cited a past legal ruling that a law enforcement officer’s request could be inherently coercive.

More reaction (or the lack thereof)

The FBI declined to comment for Cat and Joseph’s story. CISA declined to comment.

In a statement, a White House spokesperson said the Justice Department was “reviewing” the decision and its options.

• “This Administration has promoted responsible actions to protect public health, safety, and security when confronted by challenges like a deadly pandemic and foreign attacks on our elections,” the White House official said. “Our consistent view remains that social media platforms have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects their platforms are having on the American people, but make independent choices about the information they present.”

The Justice Department didn’t respond to requests for comment, and it’s not clear whether it plans to appeal the ruling.

Evelyn Douek, assistant professor at Stanford Law, said in Cat and Joseph’s story that the case was a “strong candidate for the Supreme Court to weigh in, given the law isn’t clear, the issues are so important, and courts have come to different conclusions.”

Also in their story, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey hailed the decision as a win.

“The first brick was laid in the wall of separation between tech and state on July 4,” he said in a statement. “Today’s ruling is yet another brick.”

The keys

Coalition urges intelligence community to consider surveillance power reforms

A coalition of civil liberties groups met with Avril Haines, the director or national intelligence,and other intelligence officials last week, urging them to support reforms to contentious U.S. surveillance powers that are set to expire at the end of the year. 

• Representatives from Demand Progress, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Project on Government Oversight, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Democracy and Technology were among those that attended the meeting.

The spying authority — Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — allows the FBI and National Security Agency to gather electronic data without a traditional warrant based on probable cause when the target is a foreigner overseas and it’s for foreign intelligence purposes. But those intercepted exchanges sometimes include conversations with Americans, raising skeptics’ fears that American communications are warrantlessly swept up in the process.

• Civil rights groups have also cited legal complaints that allege the intelligence community has misused the spying power in domestic incidents.
• Intelligence and national security representatives argue the tool is vital to U.S. operations and that information sourced from Section 702 makes up a large chunk of President Biden’s daily briefings.

In a letter, the groups had urged Haines’s agency and other federal intelligence entities to advocate for reforming legal components of the tool as Congress considers whether to reauthorize it before Dec. 31. Those requests include requiring the United States to obtain a warrant before searching contents of Americans’ communications collected by intelligence authorities and increasing government obligations to notify when information collected from the tool is used against a person accused of committing a crime.

• A White House advisory board in July recommended new restrictions be placed on 702, but argued against a long-demanded critique that authorities must seek a warrant before probing certain electronic communications. Meanwhile, key members of Congress say they will not support reauthorization unless significant changes are put in place.

After the meeting, the groups said they “appreciate DNI Haines taking time to hear our serious concerns with warrantless FISA 702 surveillance, but remain deeply distressed that the intelligence community will not commit to any of the meaningful reforms that are critical to protect Americans’ privacy.” They added that there “simply isn’t a path to reauthorization built on half-measures, window dressing, and codification of internal procedures that have repeatedly failed to protect Americans’ civil rights and civil liberties.”

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed the meeting and said in a statement to The Cybersecurity 202 that it “appreciated the opportunity to listen to the meaningful perspectives of representatives from non-governmental organizations and looks forward to continued engagement with interested parties on key civil liberties and privacy topics related to national security.”

Foreign student in Norway arrested for alleged espionage, eavesdropping

A 25-year-old foreign student in Norway was arrested late last week on suspicion of espionage and eavesdropping through various devices, the Associated Press reports. 

• “Norway’s domestic security agency, known by its acronym PST, told Norwegian media that the man, who was arrested on Friday, was charged in court on Sunday with espionage and intelligence operations against the Nordic country,” according to the report.
• The man pleaded not guilty, and authorities have not disclosed his nationality, the report adds. He is a student but is “not enrolled at any educational institution in Norway,” according to the AP, which adds he has been living in the country for only a short amount of time. PST is also investigating several of the man’s electronic devices.
• “Citing the arrest order, [Norwegian public broadcaster] NRK said the suspect had allegedly been caught conducting illegal signal surveillance in a rental car near the Norwegian prime minister’s office and the defense ministry,” the AP reported.

“We don’t quite know what we’re facing. We are in a critical, initial and vulnerable phase of the investigation,” PST lawyer Thomas Blom told NRK. “[The suspect] is charged with using technical installations for illegal signal intelligence,” Blom added.

Officials have suggested he was not operating alone. He is being held in custody for four weeks and is not permitted to receive mail or visits. 

PST in previous assessments has “singled out” North Korea, Russia and China as nations that pose a significant intelligence threat to Norway, according to the outlet. 

White House rejects congressional request for post-cyberattack economic plan

The Biden administration found that a plan sought by Congress for preventing economic catastrophe caused by a major cyberattack or other disasters could be duplicative and cause confusion, the Messenger’s Eric Geller reports.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency report said “lawmakers’ requirements for a ‘continuity of the economy’ (COTE) plan ‘are addressed through existing authorities, policies, plans, and frameworks,’ and if the government created a new plan focused just on economic resilience, it might ‘create confusion and duplicate existing response and recovery mechanisms,’” Geller writes.

• The report could upset lawmakers who have begged the executive branch to craft a national economic strategy in the event of a crippling cyberattack.

Congress had previously given the administration a two-year window to develop the plan, which was inspired by a 2020 report from the first iteration of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission. The fiscal 2021 national defense bill baked that continuity plan into its directives, granting CISA $200,000 to put the crisis blueprint together.

• “The Biden Administration did not create this problem, but after 30 months in office they own it, and in this report they have missed a great opportunity to address the economic resilience and recovery challenge,” Mark Montgomery, senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and former executive of CSC, told the outlet.
• The White House “has no plan for how to work with the private sector” on economic resilience planning, Montgomery added. 

The Messenger adds that the CISA report “also looks at each of the specific elements of the COTE plan that Congress wanted and recommends steps that agencies should take to incorporate those elements into existing work. These include developing plans for the ‘methods and timing’ of the restoration of specific industrial equipment after an incident, as well as identifying backup sources of critical raw materials should a crisis disrupt U.S. supply chains.”

Chat room

Cybersecurity consultant John Breth asked the cyber community for unpopular opinions about their industry. Google security executive Heather Adkins:

The cybersecurity industry shouldn’t exist. We built the internet wrong, and we can solve most of our cybersecurity problems at their root by rearchitecting technology platforms to be safe-by-default instead of buying security products. https://t.co/VxBI5bAVd0

— Heather Adkins - Ꜻ - Spes consilium non est (@argvee) September 9, 2023

CrowdStrike R&D consultant Jack Halon:

The term “Red Team” is overrated and just becoming another buzzword because:

1) Clients can’t differentiate between a red team vs a normal pentest anymore

2) Everyone and their mom calls themselves a “red teamer” even though they lack the skills to be considered one  https://t.co/BPvIhxuVOu

— Jack Halon (@jack_halon) September 9, 2023

Privacy lawyer Whitney Merrill:

Being in infosec or security does not make you qualified or an expert in privacy https://t.co/a2vFtbj5Ur

— Whitney Merrill (@wbm312) September 9, 2023

Government scan

State Department looks to satellite communications for emergencies in embassies around the world (FedScoop)

Hill happenings

Amid shutdown anxiety, federal agencies are running up against an IT security deadline (Nextgov/FCW)

Securing the ballot

Pretrial-palooza underway for Trump (Perry Stein and Devlin Barrett)

Industry report

Elon Musk’s X Corp sues California to undo content moderation law (Reuters)

National security watch

Blinken says Musk’s Starlink should keep giving Ukraine full use (Bloomberg News)

Global cyberspace

Influx of Russian fraudsters gives Turkish cyber crime hub new lease of life (Financial Times)

Who pulled off a $41M online casino heist? North Korea, FBI says. (Motherboard)

Polish Senate says use of government spyware is illegal in the country (TechCrunch)

How Saudis quietly built influence at Spain’s Telefonica (Reuters)

G-20 broadens debate on AI risks and mulls global oversight (Bloomberg News)

Cyber insecurity

Associated Press warns that AP Stylebook data breach led to phishing attack (Bleeping Computer)

U.S. org worker infected with new Pegasus vector; Apple releases security patch (Haaretz)

Massive DDoS attack on U.S. financial company thwarted by cyber firm (The Record)

Encryption wars

VPNs, Verizon, and Instagram Reels: how students are getting around the TikTok ban (The Verge)

The network

Privacy patch

Chrome has new privacy settings. Here’s what to change now (Heather Kelly)

Your Gmail and Instagram are training AI. There’s little you can do about it. (Geoffrey A. Fowler)

Meta Platforms must face medical privacy class action (Reuters)

Carmakers can collect — and sell — too much data about you, watchdog says (Andrew Jeong)

Daybook

• The House Homeland Security Committee holds a field hearing on emerging national security threats in New York City tomorrow at 9:15 a.m.
• Our Early 202 colleague Leigh Ann Caldwell interviews Senate AI Caucus leaders Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) for a Washington Post Live event on congressional AI regulation efforts tomorrow at noon.
• The Center for Strategic and International Studies convenes a discussion on cybersecurity preparedness exercises tomorrow at 1 p.m.
• The Hudson Institute holds a discussion on quantum computing and U.S.-Japan relations tomorrow at 3 p.m.

Secure log off

Orange cat trying to catch snow pic.twitter.com/YZzyvrS6fn

— No Context Cats (@nocontextscats) September 10, 2023

Thanks for reading. See you tomorrow.

The Washington Post · by Tim Starks

18. 'What happened at the Pentagon?' If we're not careful, 9/11 attacks will fade from memory.

'What happened at the Pentagon?' If we're not careful, 9/11 attacks will fade from memory.

As the headquarters of the U.S. Defense Department, the Pentagon is a symbol of national security. Terrorists bombed a hole in that symbol in 2001.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2023/09/11/september-11-attacks-honor-victims-teach-history-schools/70604305007/?utm_campaign=dfn-ebb&utm_medium=email&utm_source=sailthru&SToverlay=2002c2d9-c344-4bbb-8610-e5794efcfa7d

Jacqueline JulesOpinion contributor

0:17

1:50

“The Pentagon is broken,” he said. “I saw the hole from my daddy’s car.”

The child was a preschooler in one of my library classes. He approached me after story time. I recall his little hands cupping my ear as if he were sharing a secret.

Like everyone in the Washington, D.C., area, this young child had a story to tell after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. One of my friends in Arlington, Virginia, was surprised by a vase falling from a bookshelf when the impact of the Pentagon crash jolted nearby houses. Others were frightened by the smoke and the sirens. Another family I knew was spared tragedy because the mother arrived late to work at the Pentagon that particular Tuesday morning. Many people were panicked by the lack of cell service as they tried to get through to loved ones and co-workers.

The Pentagon was broken. A gaping hole could be seen from the road. But it was repaired within a year. And in 2008, a beautiful memorial was erected on the grounds of the complex. The Sunday my husband and I visited, we got lost in one of the massive parking lots. A helpful security guard directed us.

When we finally arrived, we spent a thoughtful hour in silence walking among 184 cantilevered benches made of stainless steel with inlaid granite. On each bench, a name is inscribed. The ages of victims range from a 3-year-old aboard American Airlines Flight 77 with her family, to a 71-year-old Navy veteran also on the hijacked flight.

In addition to the beauty of the 9/11 Pentagon Memorial, I must note that my husband and I were practically alone – so different from other memorials in the area generally packed with tourists. At the time, I appreciated the quiet, but in retrospect I wonder whether the absence of visitors that day reflects a larger truth about the collective memory of Sept. 11. 

'Many people are surprised to hear that the Pentagon was ever a target'

The Pentagon sits across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., in Arlington, Virginia. In a recent conversation with a group of Northern Virginia friends, I asked whether they had visited the 9/11 Pentagon Memorial. They responded that they didn’t even know a memorial existed there.

News coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks focused primarily on the carnage in New York City. Anniversary coverage does, too. Who doesn’t immediately recognize an image of the Twin Towers collapsing? Could the same be said for an uncaptioned picture of the damage done to the Pentagon?

Do Americans even remember that a jetliner also crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001?

A synopsis on the Arlington Public Library website for "9/11 Inside the Pentagon," a PBS documentary about the attack, notes that “many people are surprised to hear that the Pentagon was ever a target, let alone the loss of life that occurred there.”

Are kids learning enough about civics?If we want to make history, we must understand it first.

'What happened at the Pentagon?'

In 2008, I was a librarian at a public elementary school in Northern Virginia. After viewing a snippet of the televised dedication ceremony at the 9/11 Pentagon Memorial, a group of my students expressed sincere surprise. “What happened at the Pentagon?” they asked me.

If students in Virginia don’t know, what about students in Idaho or New Mexico?

We're still living with 9/11.Just like we're learning to live with COVID-19.

I will acknowledge that the Washington area did not experience the same death toll as New York City, where 2,753 lost their lives that Sept. 11. The Pentagon building still exists, unlike the demolished Twin Towers. But 9/11 was not just an attack on New York.

As the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense, the Pentagon is a symbol of American security. That symbol was shattered in 2001.

Monday marks the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This year and in subsequent anniversaries, we should be cognizant of the 184 lives lost in Virginia and the 40 who died when terrorists crashed another jet in Pennsylvania. We should ask that this history be a part of the curriculum in all American schools.

Now, only a fraction of the 50 states require students to be educated on the events of Sept. 11, 2001. When a subject is not required, it is not given precious instructional time, particularly in schools that struggle with standardized test scores.

If we are not careful to teach the next generation, the 9/11 terrorist attacks will fade into a brief news story given coverage only on milestone anniversaries. Those who died 22 years ago deserve to be more than a footnote in American history.

Jacqueline Jules is a poet and author of more than 50 titles. In 2001, she was living in Arlington, Virginia, and working as a librarian. Her collection of narrative poems, "Smoke at the Pentagon: Poems to Remember," recalls the Northern Virginia experience of 9/11. Visit her online at www.jacquelinejules.com

19. It’s Time to Build Combined Forward Operating Base Sierra Madre

Conclusion:

There is no denying that this would be a provocative move, and it would not be without significant risk, but as U.S.-Philippine alliance bonds are revived under the Marcos presidency it would be a strong indication of U.S. willingness to shoulder risk in the relationship. Proponents of the alliance in both states have cheered the new era for the bilateral relationship, encouraged by announcements like the opening of four new sites within the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement arrangement. But influential voices within the Philippines, including ex-president Rodrigo Duterte, contend that allowing U.S. operations on the archipelago would make the Philippines a target in a U.S.-Chinese conflict, creating an imbalance in Manila’s risk assessment for limited domestic utility. Co-locating American and Philippine troops at the forefront of the Philippines’ most significant security concern would be a tangible symbol of American commitment in a space in which Manila has long sought clarification of Washington’s policy and interpretation of the Mutual Defense Treaty’s application.

It’s Time to Build Combined Forward Operating Base Sierra Madre - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Blake Herzinger · September 11, 2023

Recent Chinese Coast Guard operations in the South China Sea targeted a Philippine vessel attempting to resupply a remote outpost that has the potential to become the next flashpoint in the region. The Chinese government followed its provocative act with a disinformation campaign designed to coerce the Philippines to recognize Chinese claims of extended territorial sovereignty in the South China Sea.

China claims that the Philippines had previously agreed to remove the Sierra Madre — a false claim the current government has vociferously denied. The Chinese Communist Party’s real intent is to strengthen China’s territorial claims within the Nine Dash Line — the vague, unilateral Chinese addition to maritime charts that purports to extend territorial sovereignty over almost the entirety of the East and South China Seas.

The Sierra Madre was an improvised, temporary solution to a vicious problem. It was intentionally run aground in 1999 to physically demarcate what is already widely accepted — Philippine maritime sovereignty over islands and atolls that many nations claim. As the ship rusts and rots, its physical disintegration is creating significant risk for regional security, its steadily eroding hull an unsettlingly apt metaphor for the tenuous status quo in the South China Sea.

Become a Member

China may feel emboldened to interfere with the ship to stake its own claim to the territory, which raises the prospect of U.S.-Chinese conflict over the outpost. The United States and the Philippines should act before being forced to react to deteriorating conditions aboard the ship. Failure to do so would not only create conditions for loss of Philippine sovereignty, a reenactment of China’s seizure of the Philippines’ Scarborough Shoal in 2012, but could also potentially create a crisis within the bilateral U.S.-Philippine alliance.

The Philippines should remove the Sierra Madre and replace it with a permanent structure manned by combined rotational forces from both the Philippines and the U.S. Marine Corps. Such a forward operating base would be a powerful signal of commitment to the alliance for both nations as well as providing significant improvements in situational awareness for both the United States and the Philippines. By raising the potential costs of interference, a combined outpost might deter future efforts from Beijing aimed at interdicting resupply of Philippine bases in the South China Sea.

A more muscular approach could elicit Chinese escalation, given the Chinese military’s considerable force presence in the area and its pattern of coercion against other South China Sea claimants. But the coercive tactics long employed against littoral states in the region would be less effective against the U.S. Navy, which could dispel the image of Chinese forces enjoying unchallenged dominance in the region while resolving an untenable security situation at Second Thomas Shoal.

The Rapidly Eroding Hull and Status Quo

China’s Coast Guard vessel fired water cannons at Philippine vessels on Aug. 12 2023. This act is not the first of its kind. China’s Coast Guard interdicted Philippine resupply efforts with water cannons and attempts at ramming at Second Thomas Shoal in 2021. It also shadowed and harassed Philippine ships in 2022, 2018, 2014, and 2013. Earlier this year Beijing’s bad behavior made headlines for employing a dazzling laser against a Philippine Coast Guard ship near the shoal.

Manila’s diplomatic response to this most recent encounter was robust and, possibly more importantly, it was backed by unequivocal statements of support from friendly capitols around the world — including from European Union, United States, Australia and Japan. This kind of clear, collective messaging of commitment to international law is important and has been slow to materialize. However, decades of Chinese government misbehavior in the region have underlined the fact that words alone will not inhibit the Chinese Communist Party’s revisionist campaign in the maritime domain.

The BRP Sierra Madre LST-57 was commissioned by the United States during World War II as USS Harnett County. It was donated to the Philippines in 1976 and then intentionally run aground on Second Thomas Shoal (called Ayungin Shoal by the Philippines) in 1999. The Philippines did so following China’s seizure of Mischief Reef (called Panganiban Reef by the Philippines) in 1995. The dispute has been a serious point of contention with China ever since. The vessel is deteriorating and it is only through constant reinforcement and repair that it is maintained in a state even resembling minimum standards for inhabitability. The Second Thomas/Ayungin Shoal is located about 174 nautical miles from Puerto Princesa. The distance allows for China to keep dozens of maritime units in the vicinity while the Philippine Navy and Coast Guard struggle to visit the grounded vessel on a periodic basis.

China’s state and irregular forces have delayed food deliveries for extended periods in the past, forcing the ship’s complement of marines to catch fish to survive. This quasi-blockade is particularly dangerous, given that the ship remains a flagged vessel of the Philippine Navy and as such falls within the publicly recognized protection of the U.S.-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty.

It would admittedly be far easier to develop a combined U.S.-Philippine presence on one of the Philippines’ other occupied features in the South China Sea, such as Thitu Island where there is an airfield in place as well as a more robust presence. Second Thomas Shoal is the only South China Sea feature occupied by the Philippines that is legally designated as a low-tide elevation, rather than a rock, under the 2016 arbitral award delivered by the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea’s Permanent Court of Arbitration. Therefore, it is the only feature occupied by Philippine forces that does not generate a 12-mile territorial sea. Given the location of the shoal within the Philippines’ recognized exclusive economic zone and the findings of the 2016 award, the Philippines is well within its rights under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea to maintain a security presence there.

But the issue is that Second Thomas Shoal’s status quo will not endure forever. The ship is rusting and the danger is that China will claim the reef it now sits on once the ship is removed. There is also the possibility that Chinese forces might act unilaterally to remove the hulk from the reef, perhaps under the pretense of protecting the environment. And if the United States and the Philippines wait until the already-dire conditions aboard the ship worsen, or until China decides to act, the alliance’s options for reaction will be far more limited than if Washington and Manila move forward now.

Second Thomas Shoal is, arguably, the Philippines’ most vulnerable outpost. As a result, it has clearly become a priority for China’s pressure campaign in the region. Loss of control there would be akin to allowing a second Scarborough Shoal debacle, which saw Manila lose control of an important feature within its exclusive economic zone (as is Second Thomas Shoal). And, like in the Scarborough Shoal incident, lack of effective U.S. intervention would have long-lasting negative effects on the alliance.

Following the incident on Aug. 12, Beijing’s diplomats have initiated a disinformation campaign claiming that Manila previously committed to removing the rusting vessel from the shoal, which lies within Beijing’s invalidated Nine Dash Line claim extending across the Spratly Islands. The Philippine government has denied the Chinese government’s claims, but as the Sierra Madre slowly crumbles, the risk of Chinese action grows.

Short-Term Escalation for Long-Term Stability

The replacement of the Sierra Madre with a more permanent, improved structure might be challenged by China under the terms of the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea. However, any opposition would be performative, rather than formal arbitration, and could be readily dismissed by the Philippine government. First, the Sierra Madre was grounded on the shoal three years before the declaration was signed. Second, the shoal itself was declared a low tide elevation by arbitral tribunal in 2016. The shoal is also located within the Philippines’ 200-nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zone. This means that an observation post would not include any attempt to change the status of a feature, thereby claiming unjustified maritime jurisdiction and sovereignty, which was the case with China’s own island-building campaign. Finally, the sweeping scale of China’s own reclamation and militarism has put it well beyond any reasonable possibility of claiming the moral high ground in the region — the victims of Beijing’s bullying campaign are more than justified in taking necessary measures to ensure their sovereignty and protect their uniformed personnel.

The best structure to replace the Sierra Madre would be a repurposed oil platform, oil rig, or accommodation platform. Development of a combined facility would require a ready-made structure able to quickly replace the Sierra Madre immediately following its removal. Or, alternatively, the new facility could be emplaced as an upgraded living structure for the marines living aboard it, with the Sierra Madre to be disassembled after the new outpost is installed. The depth of the water and the area’s biodiversity would likely necessitate a removal approach similar to the U.S. effort to remove its own grounded minesweeper from Tubbataha Reef in 2013. The removal required contracted support and salvage vessels to cut the stranded vessel into pieces, which were craned aboard and disposed of elsewhere to minimize damage and pollution.

An Expeditionary Advanced Base with Commercial Characteristics

The United States should not follow China’s reclamation strategy because of the damage caused to the environment. From 2013 to 2018, using a fleet of dredging vessels, Beijing ripped apart coral reefs and poured concrete to build its network of artificial island outposts in the South China Sea, a time-intensive approach with extraordinarily destructive impacts on the maritime environment. Using repurposed equipment from the oil and gas industry offers a speedier solution to the issue at hand. It also lessens the environmental damage, all while presenting Beijing with a fait accompli. This approach turns turning the tables on the Chinese Communist Party, which has successfully changed the status quo on its own terms many times before.

There is significant risk that Beijing might physically challenge the emplacement of a platform with elements from its navy, coast guard, or maritime militia. However, the Chinese government’s past bullying tactics have been less effective when U.S. forces are present. For example, during the West Capella standoff in 2020, Chinese naval forces shadowed a Malaysian-contacted drill ship. In response, the United States brought together forward-deployed and homeland-based air and naval units, ranging from strategic bombers to littoral combat ships and submarines, to form a month-long show of force. The intent was to counter Chinese intimidation tactics, which eventually subsided following the U.S. show of force. Beijing has become comfortable bullying its neighbors and has successfully trained others, including the United States, into accepting responsibility for risk. A significant show of U.S. naval and air power during the emplacement of the facility would force Beijing to shoulder risk and be a step toward reversing years of unimpeded aggression.

Maritime industry equipment provides additional advantages on the Second Thomas Shoal. Specifically, the equipment is designed to withstand deleterious effects of prolonged exposure to the elements and to operate in the maritime domain, particularly relevant in this case. These platforms can also be equipped with a helicopter landing area, which would offer another method for transferring personnel, stores, and equipment on a shorter timeline and without crossing paths with the surface vessels of the China Coast Guard. The increased space and dedicated flight operations space would also enable the use of smaller unmanned aerial systems such as Blackjack, Puma, and ScanEagle drones, which are operated by the U.S. Marine Corps and Philippines Armed Forces respectively. And this ability to support the use of small drones would enable more effective unmanned resupply operations, a concept the United States military has been experimenting with within its submarine force since at least 2020.

It is also common for these industrial platforms to be equipped with cranes, which would enable more effective seaborne resupply and recovery of small boats. Of course, even with vertical replenishment made possible this arrangement would not completely eliminate China’s ability to interfere with resupply operations. It is, however, unlikely that Chinese naval vessels would feel as emboldened opposing operations backed by the U.S. Navy, and supporting U.S. troops. Recent events reinforce this logic — the Philippine mission on Aug. 22 that followed the unsuccessful resupply operation was conducted under the watchful eye of a U.S. P-8A Poseidon and was successful in reaching the Sierra Madre with supplies. As rigs are often located in austere locations and are situated far from shore, they also offer safe, comfortable eating and sleeping quarters, reliable communications and power generation, safe storage for consumables, and the ability to distill potable water and treat sewage — all capabilities that would drastically increase the quality of life of those troops based aboard the outpost and add resilience to the combined posture.

There would be a need to upgrade the chosen platform to provide a degree of self-defense capacity and reinforcement, given that its original purpose would not include the need for military standards. However, these platforms are designed to meet rigorous safety standards given the nature of their original mission. Built sufficiently robust to withstand potential explosions, fires, and heavy weather with redundant systems, hardened communications and surveillance systems like closed-circuit television monitoring inside and out, and capable fire suppression systems, a repurposed industry platform would already drastically surpass the safety and self-defense capabilities of the Sierra Madre.

With commercial off-the-shelf radars and small tactical drones, already in use with U.S. Marine Corps units, a combined operating base on Second Thomas Shoal could extend real-time maritime domain awareness for the Philippines in an area where their armed forces have traditionally struggled to maintain an effective common operating picture. Further upgrades could see the addition of more sophisticated electronic intelligence and signals intelligence sensors that would upgrade the intelligence value of the platform for both the United States and the Philippines. And this kind of flexible light footprint operation is exactly what the U.S. Marine Corps is reorganizing itself to conduct within its Concept for Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations, offering the service an opportunity to prove its concept’s viability by executing dynamic deployments to and from the base by air and sea.

There is no denying that this would be a provocative move, and it would not be without significant risk, but as U.S.-Philippine alliance bonds are revived under the Marcos presidency it would be a strong indication of U.S. willingness to shoulder risk in the relationship. Proponents of the alliance in both states have cheered the new era for the bilateral relationship, encouraged by announcements like the opening of four new sites within the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement arrangement. But influential voices within the Philippines, including ex-president Rodrigo Duterte, contend that allowing U.S. operations on the archipelago would make the Philippines a target in a U.S.-Chinese conflict, creating an imbalance in Manila’s risk assessment for limited domestic utility. Co-locating American and Philippine troops at the forefront of the Philippines’ most significant security concern would be a tangible symbol of American commitment in a space in which Manila has long sought clarification of Washington’s policy and interpretation of the Mutual Defense Treaty’s application.

Become a Member

Blake Herzinger is a research fellow in the Foreign Policy and Defence program at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.

Image: Philippine Navy

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Blake Herzinger · September 11, 2023

20. U.S. Diplomacy After the Russia-Ukraine War

Excerpts:

With this in mind, policymakers should focus on policies that can build long-term relationships and secure payoffs for the United States. Whatever resources or expertise China may be offering rising powers, there remain plenty of capabilities that only the United States can provide for the growing list of nations that are beginning to fear Chinese influence. Rather than rely on the threat of sanctions, trade blockages, or defunding, the United States can persuade other countries to take actions in pursuit of mutual benefits. These should not be tied to short-term payoffs like favorable votes on U.N. resolutions — rather, they should be seen as long-term investments. By starting to build goodwill and influence now on technical matters, such as fisheries or intelligence sharing, the United States can increase the chances of eventual payoffs on large-scale issues of international peace and security. 

Finally, the United States should embrace variable geometry in its coalition building efforts. In practice, this would involve working within existing institutions and forming ad hoc coalitions to corral states with a shared interest without necessarily requiring agreement on other core issues. By reinvigorating the diplomatic toolkit, engaging effectively in multilateral spaces, developing and deploying “positive currency,” and exercising variable geometry, the United States can compete and succeed in a world of rising middle powers.

U.S. Diplomacy After the Russia-Ukraine War​

KELLY M. MCFARLAND, CHESTER A. CROCKER, AND RYAN CONNER

warontherocks.com · by Kelly M. McFarland

U.S. Diplomacy After the Russia-Ukraine War - War on the Rocks

National security.

For insiders. By insiders.

September 11, 2023

Commentary

Since its inception over 20 years ago, the BRICS — a grouping formed by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — has been discussed more for its future potential than for any tangible geopolitical victories. The August 2023 BRICS summit seeks to change that. After much jostling over candidates, criteria, and balance, the members agreed to the potential inclusion of Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. In the short term, this move has been perceived as a challenge to the United States and the West more broadly. Yet the long-term impact remains uncertain. The group’s increased diversity brings a degree of geopolitical confusion that does not quite live up to the pro-China or pro-Russia dreams of Beijing and Moscow.

Still, the new assertiveness from the BRICS, coming on the heels of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, demonstrates the changing global landscape in which the United States is now competing. This new strategic environment is defined by a global diffusion of power, where the agency and importance of middle powers have risen in tandem. Crucially, many of these middle powers are hesitant to fall in lockstep behind Washington’s international agenda. In order to remain a global leader, the United States should build new alliances and partnerships that are tailored to this reality. Washington can do so by strengthening multilateral institutions and better preparing its diplomats to work within them. 

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Understanding Today’s International Landscape

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine called for a reevaluation of what we thought we knew about the current state of international affairs. In our recent report from Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy we broke down the emerging dynamics into three broad categories. First are those that were previously known but have now been cast in sharper focus. These include the rise of a new non-aligned movement, the limits of Western sanctions, economic regionalization, and an increase in cross-border challenges such as food insecurity. Second are the trends that revealed Russia’s aggression and the world’s reaction. These include the collective investment in security organizations such as NATO and Russia’s slipping grasp on its traditional area of influence. And the final set of trends is best described as black swan events, or those that are hard to predict or understand but will present significant strategic challenges. 

Common to all these issues is a global diffusion of power. Middle powers are asserting greater agency relative to major powers, such as the United States, China, and Russia. For Washington, this does not make middle powers adversaries to work against, but rather vital partners in addressing geopolitical challenges. These powers speak with louder voices —

though not necessarily in unison — and it is incumbent upon the United States to engage with what they are saying.

The Hedging Middle

Middle powers may be defined as regional hegemons or those with access to significant geopolitical resources, such as India, Turkey, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, or Japan. However, it can also include regional blocs that pull and consolidate resources, access, and therefore power. These groupings include formal organizations such as ASEAN and the African Union, ad hoc groupings such as those in the Gulf, hopes of a unified South American bloc, and, of course, the BRICS. 

We understand that while the term “middle powers” is broadly applicable for this analysis, it is an imperfect way to describe a diverse array of independent and autonomous nations. While the term is often associated with countries criticizing U.S. policy, this is a misleading framework. The rise of middle powers is better understood as countries pursuing a strategy of hedging against major powers, where the dominant consideration is their own self-interest. 

One of the strategic surprises to emerge from Russia’s invasion was the unity of the U.S.-led Western coalition in providing support to Ukraine. Yet, at the same time, many countries have remained neutral. Some have called these fence-sitters a “new nonaligned movement.” Indeed, these powers and regional groupings have bucked U.S. or Russian attempts to win over their exclusive support, instead forging their own paths. 

India represents a clear example of hedging. In one policy area, such as security cooperation, it is closely aligned with the West: India and the United States have strengthened their bilateral military relationship through the Quad in order to counter Chinese influence in Asia. However, India has refused to align with the U.S. position on Russia’s war in Ukraine, given New Delhi’s historically close ties with Moscow. India has become a leader among the non-aligned powers, making it an important partner for the United States. Yet Washington cannot take this relationship for granted: Even in the event of a military confrontation with China, it is not clear whether the United States would receive full support from India.

Regional organizations, such as the African Union, further demonstrate how middle powers have adopted a strategy of hedging. In recent years, the organization has strengthened its own capacity for international peace and security operations. It has mediated peace deals among parties to armed conflicts in Africa, conducted peacekeeping missions, and advocated for a cohesive Africa agenda on issues such as climate change and food insecurity. 

African countries have become stronger independent players in the international system and, as a result, few have aligned with the West on the war in Ukraine. Although a plurality of African Union member states voted in favor of U.N. resolutions condemning Russia, many were unwilling to take additional punitive measures against Moscow. Some of them do not want to disrupt their existing relationships with Russia, which provide them in large part with loans, arms sales, and military contractors. In addition, a South-African-led delegation, promoted by French businessman and consultant Jean-Yves Ollivier’s Brazzaville Foundation, went to Kyiv and Moscow in early June 2023 to discuss an end to the war in Ukraine, with access to grain exports likely at the top of the agenda. For the United States, these trends mean that even as the Biden administration deepens its engagement on the African continent, it should understand these countries’ own respective interests and work with them accordingly.

As these examples show, middle powers are not a homogenous grouping of necessarily like-minded states. These nations and blocs use different tools and levers of power to exercise their own agency. Some use their unique economic positions and others their regional political power to achieve diverse objectives including economic gain, domestic politics, or staying out of great-power conflicts that they do not see as their own. Regardless of their tools or intentions, the ability and willingness of middle powers to speak with a louder voice will shape the strategic landscape for the United States in the coming decades. This diffusion of power is an opportunity for the United States to engage with empowered partners on issues of shared interest — adding both legitimacy and capability to broader coalitions. 

U.S. Diplomacy for a New World

The linchpin of any successful diplomatic strategy moving forward will be a special emphasis on multilateral diplomacy, where the United States can use its convening power to build and lead coalitions around mutual interests. As power diffuses throughout the system, such coalitions will be necessary to align efforts and marshal resources. Rather than seeking explicit commitments to stand by the United States in its rivalry with China or any other actor, Washington should prioritize flexible frameworks that do not compromise other countries’ concerns and provide these hedging nations with a positive currency. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has called this “variable geometry.” It allows for convergence on issues requiring a concert of powers without requiring adherence to or support for all U.S. priorities. As it already does in forums such as the G7, the United States can organize informal arrangements with other countries on issues like climate change, finance, or nonproliferation, either within established institutions, such as the U.N. Security Council, or outside them.  

Assembling a plurality of powers will require the difficult work of coalition building with the emerging middle powers and their divergent interests. To be sure, bilateral diplomacy remains important, but it complements multilateralism rather than precluding it. The United States can draw on its relationships with different countries to build coalitions in multilateral settings. Washington need not confine these efforts to formal mechanisms within international or regional organizations. Instead, the United States should be open to engagement in new avenues driven by regional actors, ad hoc groupings, and non-traditional actors. 

As recent events have shown, Russia and China will both face serious constraints in the coming years. Bullying of regional neighbors cannot compensate for shady economic practices and a dismal demographic outlook. Russia, for its part, may have little to offer developing countries and hedging nations beyond the export of thugs like the Wagner Group as Western sanctions further sap economic and technological strength. The fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin is now attempting to source weapons from North Korea hints that this may be happening sooner, rather than later. Likewise, numerous recent reports of China’s current economic malaise do not bode well for Xi Jinping’s expansionist plans, nor does the Belt and Road Initiative’s increasingly shoddy track record.

Next Steps

How can Washington better embrace multilateral diplomacy? First, the State Department should focus more on training multilateral diplomats. U.S. diplomats at all levels should be familiar with multilateral, consensus-driven negotiations and understand their nuanced dynamics. The Bureau of International Organization Affairs already sponsors U.S. citizens for U.N. positions through the Junior Professional Officer program. The U.S. foreign service can build on these current initiatives by incorporating postings to multilateral institutions as one of the core pillars of diplomatic training and career development, thereby incentivizing this type of work. 

Second, the United States should continue to support U.N. Security Council reform. The U.N. system remains an important institution to work within on any number of international threats, from climate change to food insecurity. However, the Security Council better reflects the immediate post-World War II order than the world that emerged following decolonization and the end of the Cold War. Reform would help secure greater buy-in from the middle powers and, in turn, increase the chances of multilateral cooperation in line with U.S. interests. President Joe Biden has already expressed support for adding permanent and non-permanent seats to the council. Working group members noted that the administration ought to support India for permanent membership, given its strategic importance and its leadership among the middle powers. 

The United States should also seek to provide hedging nations with positive aid on areas of shared concern in the near term, with an eye toward long-term mutual benefits. This includes delivering “positive currency” to hedging nations that may not be aligning with the United States on other geopolitical issues. In regions such as South America and Southeast Asia, for example, multiple countries’ fishing industries are being crippled by illegal fishing and could benefit from partnerships with the U.S. Coast Guard. Likewise, American policymakers should make better use of intelligence sharing as a tool of long-term diplomacy. Whether on fishing, corruption, or trafficking, Washington can use more robust intelligence sharing to build relationships and long-term goodwill.

With this in mind, policymakers should focus on policies that can build long-term relationships and secure payoffs for the United States. Whatever resources or expertise China may be offering rising powers, there remain plenty of capabilities that only the United States can provide for the growing list of nations that are beginning to fear Chinese influence. Rather than rely on the threat of sanctions, trade blockages, or defunding, the United States can persuade other countries to take actions in pursuit of mutual benefits. These should not be tied to short-term payoffs like favorable votes on U.N. resolutions — rather, they should be seen as long-term investments. By starting to build goodwill and influence now on technical matters, such as fisheries or intelligence sharing, the United States can increase the chances of eventual payoffs on large-scale issues of international peace and security. 

Finally, the United States should embrace variable geometry in its coalition building efforts. In practice, this would involve working within existing institutions and forming ad hoc coalitions to corral states with a shared interest without necessarily requiring agreement on other core issues. By reinvigorating the diplomatic toolkit, engaging effectively in multilateral spaces, developing and deploying “positive currency,” and exercising variable geometry, the United States can compete and succeed in a world of rising middle powers.

Become a Member

Kelly M. McFarland is a U.S. diplomatic historian and the director of programs and research at Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. He also hosts the institute’s Diplomatic Immunity podcast. Prior to Georgetown, he served in the U.S. Department of State as an intelligence analyst. Follow him on X @mcfarlandkellym

Chester A. Crocker is professor emeritus of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and distinguished fellow at its Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. A former assistant secretary of state for African affairs, he subsequently served as chairman and board member at the U.S. Institute of Peace for 20 years.

Ryan Conner is a research and communications associate at Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. He recently completed an MA in European Studies in the School of Foreign Service.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Commentary

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/54.0.2840.71 Safari/537.36

warontherocks.com · by Kelly M. McFarland

21. EXCLUSIVE: US Navy vet Sarah Bils relaunched pro-Putin propaganda accounts on X and YouTube months after being investigated by DOJ

A social media Tokyo Rose in our midsts?

• Lord Haw-Haw – propagandist who broadcast from Nazi Germany during World War II
• Mildred Gillars – propagandist who broadcast from Nazi Germany during World War II
• Rita Zucca – propagandist who broadcast from Fascist Italy during World War II
• Seoul City Sue – propagandist who broadcast from North Korea during the Korean War
• Pyongyang Sally – propagandist who broadcast from North Korea during the Korean War
• Hanoi Hannah – propagandist who broadcast from North Vietnam during the Vietnam War

EXCLUSIVE: US Navy vet Sarah Bils relaunched pro-Putin propaganda accounts on X and YouTube months after being investigated by DOJ

• Sarah Bils relaunched her pro-Putin project in July under the name 'DD Geopolitics' in which she and her fellow hosts repeatedly rail against the US
• She has already garnered more than 200,000 followers across X, YouTube, and messaging platform, Telegram, which draws in a wide range of guests 
• It comes after the former Navy technician saw her social media axed by tech giants such as X and YouTube shortly after she was unmasked in April

By JAMES FRANEY FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

PUBLISHED: 14:56 EDT, 10 September 2023 | UPDATED: 16:33 EDT, 10 September 2023

Daily Mail · by James Franey For Dailymail.Com · September 10, 2023

A US Navy veteran-turned-pro-Russian propagandist is back online despite a DOJ probe into her posting of leaked Pentagon intelligence files on Ukraine, DailyMail.com has learned.

Divorcee Sarah Bils, a 38-year-old New Jersey native, was unmasked in April after falsely posing as a Russian Jew from the occupied Ukrainian city of Luhansk on her 'Donbas Devushka' podcast.

Sarah Bils, a New Jersey native and US Navy vet, relaunched her pro-Putin social media project in July where she and her fellow hosts repeatedly rail against the US

The former Navy technician, who enlisted in 2009, saw her social media channels axed by tech giants such as Twitter and YouTube shortly after she had been exposed by disinformation experts.

A Navy spokesman failed to answer queries regarding the reasons for her departure, but divorce papers filed in the state of Washington show that prior to her discharge she had been suffering from an array of health problems.

But DailyMail.com can also reveal that Bils relaunched her pro-Putin project in July under the name 'DD Geopolitics' in which she and her fellow hosts repeatedly rail against the country she once served.

It comes after a ten-month investigation into her online activities by volunteers from the pro-Kyiv open-source intelligence group, 'The UnIntelligence Agency.'

She has already garnered more than 200,000 followers across X - formerly known as Twitter - YouTube, and the social media messaging platform, Telegram, which draws in a wide range of guests.

Bils left the military last year but after being demoted. No reasons were given in the official records for her demotion

They include Moscow's envoy to the UN and Alexander Dugin, a far-right political philosopher, described as the Russian president's 'brain' on foreign policy.

'Donbass Devuskha hasn't pulled a disappearing act, she's just had a fabulous makeover,' Bils wrote earlier this summer.

'Rest assured the same bunch of weirdos is still running the show behind the scenes.'

And in a bizarre rant on September 4, she lashed out at the United States, blaming successive administrations for its 'constant meddling' and provoking the current full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

She repeated the oft-debunked claim that the U.S. government and its allies 'manufactured' two revolutions in the war-torn country.

The DOJ opened an investigation into Bils earlier this year when she distributed stolen, classified documents about U.S. arms deliveries to Ukraine. The highly confidential papers were allegedly first leaked, by Jack Teixeira (pictured) a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman

Bils began her pro-Moscow propaganda empire in 2014, the time of the first Russian invasion, that spouts Kremlin talking points on Ukraine.

She started her rise to prominence from her home in Oak Harbor, Washington as one of the most hawkish pro-Russian voices in the English language just eight months before she was demoted and discharged from serving.

The Navy veteran, who earned several awards and medals before leaving in November last year, also believes the West staged 'a coup' to oust its last pro-Moscow leader, Viktor Yanukovych, in 2014.

Officials from the Department of Justice opened an investigation into Bils earlier this year when she distributed stolen, classified documents about U.S. arms deliveries to Ukraine.

One of the documents outlined how Ukraine's stockpile of missiles was running out and required urgent supplies from Kyiv's Western allies.

They were then picked up by several pro-Russian channels on social media, sparking concern among U.S. allies over how the papers were able to end up online so easily.

The leak also included details of how the U.S. snoops on both its friends and foes, sparking a diplomatic storm amid concern it would undermine Ukraine's fight against Russia.

The highly confidential papers were allegedly first leaked on Discord, a chat platform used by video gamers, by Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman, where they languished for months.

Bils began her pro-Moscow propaganda empire in 2014 hat spouts Kremlin talking points on the war in Ukraine

One of the leaked documents outlined how Ukraine's stockpile of missiles was running out and required urgent supplies from Kyiv's Western allies

He is currently on trial and pleaded not guilty in June to six counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information.

Bils, an ex-Navy technician who had security clearance, denied that she was involved in helping Teixeira.

'I didn't post the Pentagon leaks,' she said when contacted by DailyMail.com for comment. 'Do not write about me. Leave me and my family alone.'

The mother-of-one claimed she had 'turned over' ownership of the operation that she described as being not-for-profit.

But she has repeatedly produced posts since the relaunch that faithfully parroted the Kremlin line, with followers encouraged to donate to the Russian army and the Wagner militia.

They have been praised by pro-Kremlin military bloggers in Russia, such as the highly influential Wagner-linked Rybar Telegram channel.

Online sleuths were originally able to unmask Bils thanks to yet another unusual side hustle that she had.

Aside from serving in the Navy, she also ran a business selling tropical fish and imported food from Poland.

Bils had appeared in a popular podcast about fish tanks in June 2020 that proved to be her undoing.

Volunteers from open-source intelligence groups were able to match up her voice and home interiors to her now-deleted postings as Donbas Devushka.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Justice declined to comment.

Pekka Kallioniemi, a researcher into Russian disinformation at the University of Tampere in Finland, questioned how Bils was able to restart her pro-Kremlin operations so soon after the opening of that DOJ probe.

'I find it surprising that the FBI appears to be turning a blind eye to the online activities of people who are clearly working on behalf of America's enemies,' he said.

Daily Mail · by James Franey For Dailymail.Com · September 10, 2023

22. Ambitious Asia-to-Europe Corridor Will Link Up U.S. Partners

Ambitious Asia-to-Europe Corridor Will Link Up U.S. Partners

fdd.org · by Elizabeth Robbins · September 10, 2023

Latest Developments

World leaders announced plans on September 9 for a rail and shipping corridor running from India through the Arabian Peninsula to Israel. The “India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor” initiative, unveiled at the New Delhi-hosted G20 summit, was promoted by the Biden administration as a means of facilitating trade and the delivery of energy resources, as well as improving digital connectivity.

While years from implementation, the project envisages an overland counterpart to Gulf and Suez Canal shipping, with a rail network to move goods from Asia through the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan to Israel, whose Mediterranean ports will then serve to transport them on to Europe. Israel welcomed the announcement, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying the country would be a “central junction” in the plan and would harness all resources to make it happen.

Expert Analysis

“President Biden is wise to partner up with Prime Minister Modi in parlaying the wave of Indian economic growth for the benefit of Middle East countries aligned with U.S. interests. At a time of rising Iranian-orchestrated sabotage against Gulf shipping, growing Chinese regional influence, and occasional but costly mishaps in the Suez Canal, this plan shows that world powers are thinking of alternatives.” — Mark Dubowitz, FDD CEO

“Move over ‘one belt one road.’ This important initiative takes a page out of the Chinese playbook, yet also reinforces the important progress Middle East states have taken toward normalization. Israel will be an important junction for this sprawling project with regional Arab states. But no less important is the participation of India, a country that will prove to be indispensable in America’s great power competition with China.” — Jonathan Schanzer, FDD Senior Vice President for Research

“A three-way deal between the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Israel would be consequential for the region and for American security. It would be an important counter to Chinese and Iranian influence in the Middle East. But it should not come at the price of green-lighting nuclear proliferation in the Middle East as a previous Obama administration deal did with the Iran nuclear deal of 2015.” — Richard Goldberg, Senior Advisor

fdd.org · by Elizabeth Robbins · September 10, 2023

23. Australia-Philippines pact takes hard new aim at China

Excerpts:

To date, bilateral relations remain lopsided. Philippine-Australia bilateral trade ($6.2 billion in 2021) is relatively small compared to Canberra’s trade with similarly sized nations in Southeast Asia such as Vietnam ($18 billion) and Thailand ($25 billion).

Albanese hopes to boost trade and investment ties with Southeast Asian nations under the newly-launched Southeast Asia Economic Strategy to 2040, though it’s not clear how much the policy will emphasize the Philippines.

Australia’s charm offensive toward the Philippines has also come under criticism for potentially overlooking Manila’s troubling human rights and corruption record during the Duterte administration.

“The Australian government should recognize that it would be a mistake to deepen defense and security ties with the Philippines while ignoring human rights concerns,” said Australia director for Human Rights Watch (HRW) Daniela Gavshon ahead of the Albanese-Marcos meeting.

“A security partner that routinely violates basic human rights will ultimately provide little safety and security for anyone,” Gavshon said.

Australia-Philippines pact takes hard new aim at China

Newly-signed strategic partnership will pave the way for enhanced military ties and more joint patrols in contested South China Sea

asiatimes.com · by Richard Javad Heydarian

When Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese signed a new strategic partnership with the Philippines on Friday (September 8) in Manila, the ceremony marked the culmination of a year-long charm offensive to win over Ferdinand Marcos Jr’s Western-friendly administration.

Albanese described the new partnership as “historic” and a “watershed moment” that will “contribute to an open, stable and prosperous Indo-Pacific region.” Marcos Jr said the new bilateral deal was “very gratifying” and “terribly important” amid growing geopolitical uncertainty in the region. 

The pact underscores the growing convergence between the two US allies on the need to enhance maritime security cooperation in the face of China’s expanding footprint and rising assertiveness in adjacent waters including the South China Sea.

Bilateral defense relations have become increasingly robust in recent years through the two sides’ Status of Visiting Forces Agreement (SOVFA), which was first signed in 2007 likewise with an eye on China and facilitates joint exercises and training and allows for temporary use of bases and facilities.

Last month, Australia conducted joint patrols as well as major bilateral military drills with the Philippines shortly after Chinese vessels used water cannons against Philippine resupply vessels near the contested Second Thomas Shoal.

At the strategic partnership’s signing ceremony, Albanese promised to upgrade bilateral relations “to an even higher level” with a focus on enhancing people-to-people exchanges as well as trade and investment ties.

Australia’s trade with Manila is relatively small compared to other Southeast Asian nations such as Vietnam, Thailand and Singapore.

Despite their deep historical ties, with Australian troops playing a crucial role in the liberation of the Philippines from Imperial Japan during World War II, bilateral relations were relatively limited throughout the Cold War period.

By and large, the Philippines served as America’s forward deployment base for military operations across East Asia, including in the Korean Peninsula and during the Vietnam War.

Meanwhile, the so-called “White Australia Policy” largely hampered meaningful interaction with the Philippines, which experienced massive emigration to the US but not Australia in the second half of the 20th century.

Philippine-Australia relations, however, got a boost following the departure of US bases from Subic and Clark in the early 1990s. In particular, growing threats from a rising China that culminated in its coercive seizure of the Mischief Reef in the South China Sea, driving Manila to seek new defense partnerships.

China has militarized Mischief Reef since seizing it from the Philippines. Photo: Asia Times files / EyePress / Digital Globe

The upshot was the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on Cooperative Defense Activities and the Joint Defense Cooperation Committee (JDCC) with Canberra, both of which provided frameworks for closer defense cooperation.

The two sides then negotiated SOFVA to institutionalize military cooperation. After its initial hesitation, the Philippine Senate ratified the defense pact following Beijing’s occupation of the Scarborough Shoal in mid-2012 after a months-long naval standoff Manila ultimately lost.

Though China was a major driver for SOVFA, the defense pact proved crucial for the delivery of emergency assistance during recent Philippine natural disasters, including the Haiyan superstorm disaster in 2013.

Soon thereafter Australia also began to join large-scale Philippine-US military drills, most notably the annual Balikatan exercises.

It didn’t take long before Australia began providing defense aid, including notably the transfer of three former Royal Australian Navy (RAN) Balikpapan-class heavy landing craft (LCH) to the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) in the mid-2010s.

Eager to enhance Australia’s strategic ties with Southeast Asia, then-Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull visited Manila on multiple occasions and hosted the inaugural Australia-ASEAN Summit. In 2015, he signed the Joint Declaration on Australia-Philippine Comprehensive Partnership (DCP), which laid down the foundation for an even more comprehensive partnership. 

Bilateral ties entered a new phase when Australia offered special forces training and deployed surveillance aircraft to assist the AFP during 2017 the Marawi crisis in the southern Philippines, which saw militant groups aligned with Islamic State lay siege to the city.

The episode left a deep impression on the Philippine political elite, most notably President Rodrigo Duterte, who publicly thanked Australia for “showing solidarity” during the crisis on his home island of Mindanao.

Although he boycotted Western capitals throughout his six-year term in office, Duterte personally boarded the HMAS Adelaide during the Royal Australian Navy’s goodwill visit to Manila in 2017.

Duterte’s successor, however, has wasted no time in winning back traditional allies amid escalating tensions with Beijing over their South China Sea disputes. In that direction, Marcos Jr decided earlier this year to expand the country’s Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) with the US.

The expanded agreement will allow US forces access to five new Philippine bases, including a facility that is geographically close to Taiwan. Shortly after, top Australian officials were in Manila to enhance their defense partnership with Manila as part of a broader network of likeminded actors in the region. 

The Philippines also became the only Southeast Asian nation to openly back the Australia-UK-US (AUKUS) nuclear-powered submarine deal, which drew criticism from both Beijing-friendly and non-aligned nations in the region such as Malaysia and Indonesia.

Last month, Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles visited Manila for the second time to observe the Philippine-Australia Amphibious and Land Operations of the Indo-Pacific Endeavor 2023 (ALON) exercises near the South China Sea. This coincided with Australia, Philippine and Japan trilateral patrols in the sea, with Canberra dangling more joint patrols in the near future.

Against this backdrop, the newly signed strategic partnership aims to seal the deal of expanded relations between the two fellow US allies.

“Australia is working with our partners including the Philippines to shape a region where sovereignty is upheld,” Albanese said during a press conference, emphasizing Canberra’s commitment to managing South China Sea disputes in accordance with international law.

“Australia supports the 2016 South China Sea arbitral award. That is final and binding. And it is important that it be upheld going forward,” he added, referring to the Philippine-initiated legal proceedings, which culminated in an arbitral ruling at The Hague against China’s expansive claims over the South China Sea.

Philippine and Australian troops are poised to train more together under their new strategic partnership. Image: Twitter

During his visit, Albanese also spoke of developing an even more comprehensive relationship “based on close cooperation and enriched by the 400,000 Australians with Filipino heritage.”

In particular, Albanese promised to enhance people-to-people relations by doubling Australia Awards Scholarships to the Philippines, re-establishing the Philippines Institute at the Australian National University, establishing a new reciprocal Work and Holiday visa for Australians and Filipinos and providing up to $64.5 million in additional aid for the peace process in Mindanao.

To date, bilateral relations remain lopsided. Philippine-Australia bilateral trade ($6.2 billion in 2021) is relatively small compared to Canberra’s trade with similarly sized nations in Southeast Asia such as Vietnam ($18 billion) and Thailand ($25 billion).

Albanese hopes to boost trade and investment ties with Southeast Asian nations under the newly-launched Southeast Asia Economic Strategy to 2040, though it’s not clear how much the policy will emphasize the Philippines.

Australia’s charm offensive toward the Philippines has also come under criticism for potentially overlooking Manila’s troubling human rights and corruption record during the Duterte administration.

“The Australian government should recognize that it would be a mistake to deepen defense and security ties with the Philippines while ignoring human rights concerns,” said Australia director for Human Rights Watch (HRW) Daniela Gavshon ahead of the Albanese-Marcos meeting.

“A security partner that routinely violates basic human rights will ultimately provide little safety and security for anyone,” Gavshon said.

Follow Richard Javad Heydarian on X at @Richeydarian

asiatimes.com · by Richard Javad Heydarian

24. Why It’s Good for Europe to Argue With America

Excerpts:

In fact, increased European autonomy is exactly what the United States has long demanded. Successive U.S. presidents of both parties, including Biden, have urged Europe to boost military spending and assume more responsibility for its own security so that Washington can train more attention elsewhere. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, European countries boosted their defense expenditures, and European financial commitments to Kyiv are now twice as large as U.S. commitments. This uptick in spending has lessened Washington’s burden, and American leaders must recognize that Europe’s increased capabilities are naturally going to give the continent a degree of autonomy. If Americans do not want European dependence, they will have to accept European independence, and that means understanding that Europe will sometimes follow its own path.

For Washington, these resulting disputes will sometimes be uncomfortable. The United States will have to get used to sporadic pro-China comments from European leaders, chummy EU trips to Beijing, and squabbles over trade policy. But at the end of the day, Washington should not panic. According to surveys by the Pew Research Center in 2022 and 2023, European views of the United States are favorable and trending upward while European views of China are unfavorable and trending downward. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine consolidated NATO and spurred a sense of organizational mission. And ultimately, Europe usually ends up broadly aligning itself with Washington’s policies toward Beijing. In 2022, for instance, the European Commission unveiled a ban on products made by forced labor—a move clearly targeted at Beijing’s decision to put millions of Uyghurs into labor camps, and one that matched a similar U.S. ban. In 2021, Taiwan opened a representative office in the Lithuanian capital, prompting China to cut trade to Lithuania. The United States responded by giving Lithuania a $600 million export credit, and the EU enacted anti-coercion measures to help its members withstand Chinese pressure.

The U.S.-EU relationship can survive the occasional quarrel. The disagreements are, in fact, positive: they restrain Washington’s most dangerous impulses, deter China from fully siding with Russia, and indicate that Europe is a more capable power and partner for Washington. Divisions serve, in other words, as a useful guardrail on U.S. and Chinese behavior. As U.S. President Barack Obama put it in 2016, “Multilateralism regulates hubris.”

Why It’s Good for Europe to Argue With America

Transatlantic Disagreements Make the World Safer

By Dominic Tierney

September 11, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Dominic Tierney · September 11, 2023

In April 2023, French President Emmanuel Macron visited Beijing, where he spent six hours meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping and discussing Europe, Russia, and Taiwan. Then, on the flight home, Macron declared that Europe should strive for “strategic autonomy” from the United States. The continent, he said, should not “take our cue from the U.S. agenda” and should not be “caught up in crises that are not ours.” Macron even argued that European countries should reduce their dependence on the U.S. dollar so as not to become mere “vassals” of Washington.

Macron’s comments were music to Beijing’s ears, but they provoked a furious backlash in the United States. Mike Gallagher, the Republican who chairs the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, deemed the comments “embarrassing” and “disgraceful.” Ian Bremmer, the founder of the Eurasia Group, wrote that Macron’s remarks to reporters reflected “arrogance and poor judgment.” In a video, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, suggested that the United States should respond by cutting aid to Europe. The continent “has depended heavily on the United States for over 70 years,” he said. “If they’re going to break off on their own and follow Macron’s lead, that’s going to save us a lot of money.”

This anger toward Macron might seem reasonable. The United States is locked in an increasingly intense competition with China, and it fears that Europe, its biggest ally, will be an unreliable partner. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has also pushed for a cozy relationship with China, a key business partner for Berlin. “Of all the countries in the world, Germany—which had such a painful experience of division during the Cold War—has no interest in seeing new blocs emerge in the world,” he wrote in an op-ed for Politico in November 2022. Officials in Paris and Berlin appear to speak for ordinary Europeans. According to a poll by the European Council of Foreign Relations, a majority of the continent’s residents would prefer to remain neutral in a hypothetical U.S. war with China over Taiwan.

Transatlantic divisions are certainly real. But American policymakers need not worry too much. In fact, they might learn to appreciate these differences. Anyone who wants global security certainly should. A diversity of perspectives acts as a check on bad American ideas, blocking U.S. policies that would have dangerous consequences for both the United States and the world. European independence moderates China’s behavior as well, especially when it comes to Russia and Ukraine. And at least within the West, no one should fear the continent’s autonomy. Instead, it’s an inevitable byproduct of something the United States has long demanded: greater European defense spending.

Transatlantic differences, of course, are not always a plus. Europe has its own history of biases and blunders and could impede wise global initiatives. Its opposition to U.S. policies can certainly inconvenience American policymakers. But on the whole, lively debate between the United States and Europe, even sharp disagreement, tends to produce better outcomes and creates a world that is more secure and prosperous.

SEPARATION OF POWERS

For decades, allied opinion has served as a useful barometer of the wisdom of U.S. policies. Many of Washington’s allies opposed the wars in Iraq and Vietnam, for example, and both turned out to be disasters. By contrast, in 1991, American partners backed the Gulf War, which the United States-led coalition won a rapid victory. Allies also joined the United States in providing large quantities of support to Ukraine, which has helped counter Russia’s aggression.

Sometimes, as Iraq and Vietnam show, allied warnings fail to prevent the United States from careening over a cliff. But other times, allies can make a difference. Consider, for example, the Korean War—the last time the United States directly fought China. In the fall of 1950, U.S. and allied troops seemed on the verge of victory as they closed in on the Yalu River, which sits on the Chinese-North Korean border. But Beijing entered the war in October and triggered one of the gravest battlefield defeats in U.S. history as Communist forces pushed allied troops down to the midpoint of the Korean Peninsula. In response, the United States considered risky escalatory actions. The administration of U.S. President Harry Truman backed the “hot pursuit” of Chinese aircraft across the Yalu into China, which would have extended the conflict onto Chinese territory. The U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted to institute a naval blockade of China and empower Chinese Nationalist forces in Taiwan to invade the mainland. And General Douglas MacArthur, the head of United Nations forces in Korea, pushed to use nuclear weapons. MacArthur even proposed laying a belt of radioactive cobalt across the neck of the Korean Peninsula, which he claimed would win the war in ten days.

If Americans do not want European dependence, they will have to accept European independence.

Thankfully, U.S. allies restrained Washington. In 1951, the United Kingdom described the United States’ escalatory proposals as risking “annihilation without representation.” In the same year, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin told the Indian government that “the United States is still a young country” prone “to take unreflecting plunges,” and that London “had made it our business to try to restrain them.” The French and Dutch governments coordinated with London to press for U.S. caution. The Nation described “a rebellion of free Europe against the kind of leadership America was giving to the West on the Korean issue." The warnings got through. In his memoirs, Truman wrote that “without exception,” Washington’s allies “indicated strong opposition” to hot pursuit, and he dropped the idea. In June 1953, the State Department considered the use of atomic weapons in Korea but concluded in a report that the United States “would be faced with choosing directly between Allied and neutral support and the pursuit of the proposed course of action.” Less than two months later, the war ended with an armistice.

Today, Europe appears to again be tempering Washington’s excesses with China. As U.S. president, Donald Trump embraced the idea of “decoupling” the United States from China, or systematically severing economic relations. When he first took office, U.S. President Joe Biden largely continued his predecessor’s trade policies, flirting with what one analyst called “an aggressive, full-spectrum face-off with Beijing.” Such a combative stance would be dangerous, slowing global economic growth while bringing the world’s two most powerful countries into an even more tense relationship. As a result, Europe balked. Instead, the continent pushed for the idea of “de-risking,” or cutting only a handful of Chinese industries from Western supply chains instead of decoupling. Eventually, the Biden administration also embraced de-risking, aligning the U.S. and European positions.

European checks on U.S.-Chinese tensions could prove especially useful if a crisis erupts over Taiwan. Biden has signaled that the United States would send American forces to defend the island if it were attacked by China, creating a war between the world’s two leading powers. Yet European states, along with U.S. allies in the Pacific, might be able to prevent or control such a conflict. Europe would certainly have an interest in stopping or limiting a war over Taiwan. The EU is China’s biggest export market, and Beijing could be willing to restrain itself in response to the bloc’s demands.

HEALTHY DISTANCE

Transatlantic disagreements over China are not just healthy because they restrain Washington; they are also healthy because they restrain Beijing. China is desperate to drive a wedge between Europe and the United States to prevent a united Western front from opposing its global plans, and so it can access European technology and markets. As a result, Beijing is trying hard to woo the Europeans. Such a split, of course, is the United States’ greatest fear—and the reason it reacts so strongly to any hint of dissent from the EU. But unless Europe actually leaves its fold, Washington and the world may benefit from Beijing’s efforts. The desire to win European hearts and minds has, for example, encouraged China to deter Russia from using nuclear weapons in Ukraine. A senior adviser to the Chinese government told the Financial Times in July that stopping Putin from using such weapons was a central part of Beijing’s campaign to repair ties with the continent.

China knows that the Europeans see Russia as a critical threat, so Beijing has generally avoided aligning itself too closely with Moscow’s war. Xi has asserted that Beijing and Moscow have a “no limits” partnership, but Fu Cong, China’s ambassador to the European Union, told The New York Times in April that “‘no-limit’ is nothing but rhetoric.” Fu also declared that China did not recognize Moscow’s annexation of Ukrainian territory. And in a June interview with Al Jazeera, Fu said that Beijing might even back Ukraine’s goal of retaking all its territory, including Crimea. “I don’t see why not,” he told reporters. “We respect the territorial integrity of all countries.” Fu packaged these remarks with calls for Europe to move away from the United States. As he told the Times, Europe should develop “strategic autonomy” from Washington.

Fu’s comments may also be “just rhetoric” that obscures China’s diplomatic support for Russia’s invasion. But European opinion is a powerful motive for Beijing’s restraint. Absent the allure of European friendship, Beijing would have little to lose by supplying Moscow with weapons or forging a formal geopolitical alliance with its northern neighbor. In other words, if Europe moved in lockstep with the United States, China might move in lockstep with Russia.

The U.S.-EU relationship can survive the occasional quarrel.

In fact, increased European autonomy is exactly what the United States has long demanded. Successive U.S. presidents of both parties, including Biden, have urged Europe to boost military spending and assume more responsibility for its own security so that Washington can train more attention elsewhere. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, European countries boosted their defense expenditures, and European financial commitments to Kyiv are now twice as large as U.S. commitments. This uptick in spending has lessened Washington’s burden, and American leaders must recognize that Europe’s increased capabilities are naturally going to give the continent a degree of autonomy. If Americans do not want European dependence, they will have to accept European independence, and that means understanding that Europe will sometimes follow its own path.

For Washington, these resulting disputes will sometimes be uncomfortable. The United States will have to get used to sporadic pro-China comments from European leaders, chummy EU trips to Beijing, and squabbles over trade policy. But at the end of the day, Washington should not panic. According to surveys by the Pew Research Center in 2022 and 2023, European views of the United States are favorable and trending upward while European views of China are unfavorable and trending downward. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine consolidated NATO and spurred a sense of organizational mission. And ultimately, Europe usually ends up broadly aligning itself with Washington’s policies toward Beijing. In 2022, for instance, the European Commission unveiled a ban on products made by forced labor—a move clearly targeted at Beijing’s decision to put millions of Uyghurs into labor camps, and one that matched a similar U.S. ban. In 2021, Taiwan opened a representative office in the Lithuanian capital, prompting China to cut trade to Lithuania. The United States responded by giving Lithuania a $600 million export credit, and the EU enacted anti-coercion measures to help its members withstand Chinese pressure.

The U.S.-EU relationship can survive the occasional quarrel. The disagreements are, in fact, positive: they restrain Washington’s most dangerous impulses, deter China from fully siding with Russia, and indicate that Europe is a more capable power and partner for Washington. Divisions serve, in other words, as a useful guardrail on U.S. and Chinese behavior. As U.S. President Barack Obama put it in 2016, “Multilateralism regulates hubris.”

• DOMINIC TIERNEY is Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College, a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and the author of The Right Way to Lose a War: America in an Age of Unwinnable Conflicts.

Foreign Affairs · by Dominic Tierney · September 11, 2023

24. 10 Life Lessons from Ted Lasso

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/10-life-lessons-from-ted-lasso-john-fenzel%3FtrackingId=fmuzGZk84zh4ZfN%252FCxqtVQ%253D%253D/?trackingId=fmuzGZk84zh4ZfN%2FCxqtVQ%3D%3D

And on a lighter (but eeducational) note from John Fenzel.

10 Life Lessons from Ted Lasso

John Fenzel

Keynote Speaker : Leading by Example : Overcoming Adversity : Teamwork : Storyteller : Green Beret

128 articles Following

September 9, 2023

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Okay...I know I'm slow catching up to everyone on this, but we just completed a 3-week binge on the series Ted Lasso--the Apple TV+ series about an American football coach charged with turning around an English Premier League soccer team. Chances are, you’ve seen it by now; but if you haven’t, you really should. About midway through the first season, I realized I should be taking notes from Ted Lasso, the mustachioed messiah of positivity and the embodiment of the dad joke. I found myself asking, "What can we learn from this guy who’s coaching a game he knows nothing about?"

Lesson 1: The Biscuit Paradox

Bring biscuits (cookies for us Yanks) to your boss and they might think you're sucking up. But keep doing it with genuine enthusiasm, and suddenly it's not sycophantic; it's endearing. It's about the long game, folks. "Football is life!" Dani Rojas exclaims, and Ted enthusiastically agrees--reminding us that life is sweeter when you're not just handing out biscuits, but also kindness and sincerity.

Lesson 2: Be a Goldfish

Ted tells us the happiest animal is a goldfish because it has a 10-second memory. "You know what the happiest animal on Earth is? It's a goldfish. You know why? Got a 10-second memory," he quips. Forget life's little mistakes as quickly as a goldfish but remember the good times like an elephant. The selective memory approach: be a goldfish for the bad, an elephant for the good.

Lesson 3: Lead with Empathy

"Win or lose, we do it together," Ted says. He doesn't just manage a team; he manages people. Know the difference between a boss and a leader? "A team is not just the sum of its parts, but the product of their interaction." A boss says "Go!" A leader says "Let's go!" Be the guy who runs into the field first, even if you're running in the wrong direction. At least you're moving, and that's half the battle.

Lesson 4: Darts and Vulnerability

"Sometimes to succeed, you've got to fail," Ted says. His dart game teaches us to be aware of our strengths and weaknesses and to own them. You've got to let people see your wobbly bits. Life's not about aiming where you think you should; it's about aiming where you know you can hit.

Lesson 5: The Power of Laughter

"It’s hard to be angry when you’re laughing," Ted says while dancing like nobody's watching, but everyone is actually watching, and nobody cares. Humor is the ultimate diffuser of tension. Angry? Stressed? Just laugh it off, and throw in a dad joke for good measure. Even if nobody laughs, you will, and sometimes you're the most important audience.

Lesson 6: The Power of "I Don't Know"

"Two buttons I never like hitting: that's panic and snooze," Ted admits. It's okay to admit when you're clueless. Ted walks into English football with zero experience and isn't afraid to say, "I don't know." This isn't weakness; it's an invitation for others to step up and teach you something. Nobody knows everything, but everyone knows something. 

Lesson 7: Be a Mentor, Not a Savior

"Success is not about the wins and losses. It's about helping these young fellas be the best versions of themselves, on and off the field," Ted believes. He doesn't try to "save" his team; he tries to make them better people. Invest in others without expecting a quick return on investment. Sometimes the best way to help someone is just to listen and give 'em a safe space to be themselves. 

Lesson 8: "Be Curious, Not Judgmental"

"Be curious, not judgmental," Ted advises. Instead of quickly judging a situation or a person, be curious about it. Ted treats even his most hostile encounters as opportunities to learn. This flips the script and often turns adversaries into allies.

Lesson 9: Celebrate the Small Wins

"I believe in believe," Ted passionately declares. He takes joy in every little victory, be it a surprising goal or just a well-executed play. In life, don't wait for monumental successes to crack a smile. The small wins stack up and sometimes they're the most satisfying.

 Lesson 10: "Believe" is More Than a Sign

"Life is about the people we meet and the relationships we form with them," Ted observes. His "Believe" sign isn't just decor; it's a mantra. Sometimes the difference between failure and success is just believing you can. Self-belief is a powerful tool in your life toolkit. It won't build the house for you, but it'll give you the confidence to start laying bricks.

Life, like soccer, is a game of two halves. And just like Ted Lasso, you can choose how you play it. From Coach Lasso, we’re all challenged to remember: it's not about the wins or losses, but the friends and lessons we pick up along the way.

So next time you find yourself stuck between a rock and a relegation, channel your inner Ted Lasso. With a mustache or without, life's just better with biscuits, laughter, and a positive attitude toward life.

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John Fenzel

Keynote Speaker : Leading by Example : Overcoming Adversity : Teamwork : Storyteller : Green Beret

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128 articles

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I may be late to the party in tuning into Apple TV+'s Ted Lasso, but I couldn't be happier that I finally did. As I binged this charming series, I couldn't help but jot down some nuggets of wisdom. Ted Lasso's insights are often infused with wit and humor, making them stick in your mind long after you've turned off the TV. Whether you're in search of inspiration, laughter, or a combination of both, Ted has something valuable to offer. Here are 10 key lessons I've learned from Ted Lasso... #tedlasso #lessons #inspiration #humor #wisdom #wit #lifelessons

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com