Quotes of the Day:
"All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory."
~Viet Thanh Nguyen
"Culture constrains strategy."
Culture beats strategy."
Culture trumps strategy."
Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast"
- This last is often attributed to Peter Drucker but there is no definitive citation.
“So, despite the popular view of Stoicism as a philosophy that would strip us of most emotions, the ancient Stoics argue that the very best of us show rational exuberance and desire, and a cautious wariness, lest we be too easily led astray or deceived. We cherish friends and nurture warm and welcoming attitudes toward them. This is what it is to be righteous. Put bluntly, even sages have emotional skin in the game.”
- Nancy Sherman, Stoic Wisdom: Ancient Lessons for Modern Resilience
1. Attack of the Blob: Why America’s U.S. Foreign Policy Has Been Crippled
2. Global Posture Review Still On Track, Pentagon Spokesman Says
3. Blinken vows Afghanistan evac mission will continue, but lawmakers skeptical
4. Top US spy says Somalia, Yemen, Syria and Iraq represent greater terrorist threat than Afghanistan
5. Army refuses to say whether officer’s resignation letter citing ‘Marxist takeover of the military’ is real
6. Taiwan Is Arming Itself To Beat A Chinese Invasion. Some New Weapons Are Better Than Others.
7. Forward to the Past? Weigh Covert Options in Afghanistan Carefully
8. How Should US Special Operations Forces Train for Great Power War?
9. Afghanistan Has Been 'Gut-Wrenching,' 'Deeply Personal For IC': DNI
10. Opinion | What Game Theory Says About China’s Strategy
11. American Global Leadership Is in Retreat
12. Biden Doctrine abating US tensions with China
13. Facebook Says Its Rules Apply to All. Company Documents Reveal a Secret Elite That’s Exempt.
14. ‘To Rule the Waves’ Review: The Necessity of a Navy (book review)
15. After South China Sea Incidents, US Needs 'Sustained' Pacific Presence, Lawmaker Says
16. Mark 9 SDV: The SEALs' mini-sub that packed full-sized torpedoes
17. Will the AUMF’s 20th Anniversary Prompt Congress to Act?
1. Attack of the Blob: Why America’s U.S. Foreign Policy Has Been Crippled
Still parched and thirsty? Need to drink some more? Who is the blob? WHo are the "elite strategists?"
Excerpt:
Do today’s attacks mean that the blob’s demise is in sight? That’s unlikely. After all, it has survived its decades-long string of blunders with its status pretty much intact. It is bound to be replenished by the same elite universities whose relevant faculty members are overwhelmingly blob-y themselves. There’s no sign that their corporate funders are backing away from the think tanks that keep many of its members employed when they’re out of public office. And its record will surely keep being reported principally by a news media that’s rather blob-y itself. That might leave a foreign policy catastrophe inflicting lasting damage on America as its best hope for replacing the blob even with simply a more genuinely diverse source of experience and expertise.
Attack of the Blob: Why America’s U.S. Foreign Policy Has Been Crippled
Washington’s elite strategists are all drinking from the same poisoned well.
It looks like the foreign-policy “blob” is starting to fight back. The bipartisan globalist national establishment is being blamed both for President Joe Biden’s hellaciously botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, for pushing the transformation of a necessary anti-terrorist operation into a naively grandiose nation-building project.
It’s time, the argument goes, to marginalize—or at least view more skeptically—this hodgepodge of hacks, which includes former diplomats and congressional aides, retired military officers, genuine academics, and think tank types. It has shaped U.S. diplomacy in two critical ways. First, members of the blob have been used as the main personnel pool for staffing presidential administrations and House and Senate offices on a rotating basis, serving as informal advisers to these politicians. Secondly, they have dominated the list of sources used by overwhelmingly sympathetic journalists to report and interpret the news. Thus, they are defining for the public which foreign policy ideas are and aren’t legitimate to discuss.
Members of the blob have been shouting things like, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater!”
“The foreign policy establishment did get it wrong in Iraq, where the U.S. overreached,” Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said. “We got it wrong in Libya, we got it wrong in Vietnam. But over the last seventy-five years, the foreign policy establishment has gotten most things right.”
Washington Post pundit Max Boot similarly has declared that “we can confidently say that, overall, the foreign policy establishment has served America well over the past seventy-six years.”
In other words, look past Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq and Vietnam as well as the failure to anticipate the September 11 terrorist attack. Look past the long-time cluelessness about the emergence of security and economic threats from China, which followed the stubborn, decades-long determination to antagonize China after 1949. Look past the peacekeeping debacle in Somalia, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and the blind loyalty to an Iranian Shah hated by nearly all his subjects. Focus instead on all the—presumably more important—successes.
Paramount among these is the victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. This victory includes the protectorate-alliances, foreign aid, and open trading system that keyed this triumph. Such things were made possible in the process of pacifying and democratizing Germany and Japan, which fostered the recovery of these former enemy dictatorships as well as the rest of Western Europe. As a result, there were decades of record prosperity in these regions.
One obvious rejoinder: today’s blob and its most recent forerunners merit zero credit for those achievements because almost none of its members simply weren’t around or in power then. Meaning maybe America simply needs a more competent blob?
At the same time, there’s inevitably been personnel continuity in the blob’s ranks over time. Moreover, today’s establishment was largely groomed in blob-y institutions, claims to be acting in that original blob-y tradition, and has clearly remained stalwart in its advocacy of tireless international activism, and support for what it calls the liberal global order and its constituent institutions created by the older blob generation. As a result, including those decades-old developments in judgments of today’s blob is eminently defensible.
And in retrospect, what’s particularly revealing but neglected about these achievements is the extent to which they stemmed from circumstances almost ideally suited for foreign policy success, rather than from a blob-er genius. Globalists of the first post–World War II decades unquestionably faced serious domestic political obstacles to breaking with the country's historic aloofness to most non-Western Hemispheric developments.
But they also enjoyed enviable advantages. Especially important was global economic predominance, which blunted much criticism on the home front by permitting subsidization of both the security and well-being of enormous foreign populations without apparent cost to American living standards or national finances.
It’s no coincidence, therefore, that as this advantage eroded, and the core blob tactic of handling problems literally by throwing money at them and refusing to choose between guns and butter became more problematic, the blob’s record worsened. Its actions undercut the intertwined domestic political and economic bases of active and passive public support for its strategies.
In fact, post-Vietnam, it’s difficult to identify any important foreign policy decision that blob-y leaders have gotten right, or even handled reasonably well, with the exception of the first Persian Gulf War. For example, Ronald Reagan’s dramatic military buildup certainly helped spend and innovate the Soviets into collapse but it was opposed by many members of the blob who favored continued containment and the simultaneous pursuit of arms control and detente.
Just as important, this blob’s very profligacy meant that many of its biggest post-Vietnam failures were economic in nature. There are two leading examples. The first is the messy collapse of the early World War II international monetary system and structural inflation and long sluggish growth that followed. The second is the 2007–09 global financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession.
Both crises were brought on fundamentally by global financial imbalances stemming from the stubborn refusal of the blob to support even minimal budget discipline on the foreign policy side. They were also fueled by its failure to require reciprocal market access for traded goods either in the early post–World War II Bretton Woods monetary system or into its patchwork successors. Both revealed the blob’s obliviousness to the intertwined imperatives of maintaining the national economic power needed to responsibly pay for preferred policies and to defining U.S. interests. This obliviousness left it incapable of avoiding needless costs and addiction to debt, inflation, or both.
Do today’s attacks mean that the blob’s demise is in sight? That’s unlikely. After all, it has survived its decades-long string of blunders with its status pretty much intact. It is bound to be replenished by the same elite universities whose relevant faculty members are overwhelmingly blob-y themselves. There’s no sign that their corporate funders are backing away from the think tanks that keep many of its members employed when they’re out of public office. And its record will surely keep being reported principally by a news media that’s rather blob-y itself. That might leave a foreign policy catastrophe inflicting lasting damage on America as its best hope for replacing the blob even with simply a more genuinely diverse source of experience and expertise.
Alan Tonelson is the Founder of RealityChek, a blog on economics and national security, and a columnist for IndustryToday.com.
Image: Reuters
2. Global Posture Review Still On Track, Pentagon Spokesman Says
I really do wonder what significant changes to US force posture will result from the Global Forces Posture Review, particularly in Asia and Korea. Press conference video at the link below.
Global Posture Review Still On Track, Pentagon Spokesman Says
Even with all the churn in the world, DOD's global posture review is still on track and will be finished shortly, Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby said at a news conference today.
The review will determine if the United States military has the correct number of troops in the correct places. "It is very much an effort on track," Kirby said. "They are nearing the completion of their work. And I think, in relatively short order, we'll be able to talk more about the global posture review."
The press secretary did not want to get ahead of the deliberations, but there could be changes in basing of troops, ships and aircraft as a result of the review.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III has called China "a pacing threat" for the United States. He said Russia is also being confrontational. But the threat from international terrorism remains — along with threats from North Korea and Iran — and must be countered.
The U.S. military mission in Afghanistan has ended, but the influence of terror groups that once found refuge in that country continue in other areas. Kirby said the terror threat from al-Qaida has metastasized out of Afghanistan to other places, including Africa. Austin himself said the United States will stay laser-focused on the threat from terrorism, wherever it may raise its head.
Kirby said the United States will maintain its robust counterterrorism partnerships there.
The Taliban once allowed al-Qaida to live, plan, train and operate out of Afghanistan. The Taliban is now back in charge of that nation. "It's too early to tell what the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan is going to mean for terrorism or counterterrorism interests in Africa," he said. "I just don't think we're able to describe that with specificity right now."
But the United States will maintain a watchful eye, he said.
3. Blinken vows Afghanistan evac mission will continue, but lawmakers skeptical
Excerpts:
But along with the political support, Democratic lawmakers still questioned Blinken on what will happen to individuals trapped in Afghanistan now, both those trying to leave and minority groups that may be oppressed by the new Taliban government there.
Blinken promised to use “every tool at our disposal — through our diplomacy, through our economic assistance, humanitarian assistance, programmatic assistance” to address the issue. That includes naming a new senior official at the State Department specific to protecting women and minority rights in Afghanistan.
He also vowed to work with outside groups on the continuing evacuation efforts, saying he is in close contact with more than 75 veterans organizations working with individuals on the ground.
Blinken vows Afghanistan evac mission will continue, but lawmakers skeptical
In his first appearance before Congress since the end of the military’s evacuation mission in Afghanistan — and the first public oversight hearing on Capitol Hill since the full U.S. military withdrawal there — Blinken said that work still continues to get individuals trapped in the Taliban country to safety.
“We are in constant contact with American citizens still in Afghanistan who have told us they wish to leave,” he told members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “We will continue to help Americans – and Afghans to whom we have a special commitment – depart Afghanistan if they choose.
“There is no deadline to this mission.”
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The Pentagon and State need to work more closely with veterans to help rescue American and Afghan allies, the founder of one rescue effort says.
But that pledge (repeated often by Blinken in the two weeks since the evacuation mission ended) was met with skepticism and disdain by Republicans on the panel, several of whom called for the Secretary of State to resign over the “bungled” withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“In the weeks before the fall of Kabul, I was on the phone with very high ranking officials at the State Department and the White House trying to save lives,” said Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas and ranking member of the foreign affairs committee.
“We had Americans that couldn’t get out. We had interpreters that couldn’t get through. They are left behind, and they will be executed (by the Taliban).”
About 124,000 individuals were airlifted out of Afghanistan in the last 18 days of August, ahead of the end of the nearly 20-year American military presence there.
About 100 Americans still in Afghanistan have asked for assistance in escaping the country. Advocates — including veterans groups still in contact with individuals on the ground — say thousands more Afghan allies were left behind and now face retaliation from the Taliban for aiding U.S. troops over the years.
Republicans on the committee labeled that a failure by Blinken and President Joe Biden. McCaul said the incomplete evacuation effort means that “Our standing on the world stage has been greatly diminished, our enemies no longer fear us, and our allies no longer trust us.”
Democrats on the panel criticized their GOP colleagues for grandstanding during the hearing and ignoring decisions by former President Donald Trump in the U.S. departure from Afghanistan. Blinken echoed that blame in his statements.
“We inherited a deadline, we did not inherit a plan,” he said. “The deal that the previous administration struck involved committing to remove all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by May 1 of this year.”
But along with the political support, Democratic lawmakers still questioned Blinken on what will happen to individuals trapped in Afghanistan now, both those trying to leave and minority groups that may be oppressed by the new Taliban government there.
Blinken promised to use “every tool at our disposal — through our diplomacy, through our economic assistance, humanitarian assistance, programmatic assistance” to address the issue. That includes naming a new senior official at the State Department specific to protecting women and minority rights in Afghanistan.
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Lawmakers could approve the money as part of a budget extension plan due at the end of September.
He also vowed to work with outside groups on the continuing evacuation efforts, saying he is in close contact with more than 75 veterans organizations working with individuals on the ground.
In response to another point of GOP criticism, Blinken dismissed concerns about military equipment left behind in the withdrawal and shown under Taliban control in recent weeks.
“Our folks worked very hard to disable or dismantle equipment that we still controlled before we left,” he said. “What we see now is much of the equipment that was left behind, including what was in the hands of the Afghan forces that then fell to the Taliban, much of it ... is inoperable or soon will become inoperable because it has to be maintained.”
Bliken is expected to testify Tuesday on Afghanistan before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Gen. Austin Scott Miller, former commander of U.S. Forces-Afghanistan, will testify in a closed briefing before the Senate Armed Services Committee later in the day.
Leo covers Congress, Veterans Affairs and the White House for Military Times. He has covered Washington, D.C. since 2004, focusing on military personnel and veterans policies. His work has earned numerous honors, including a 2009 Polk award, a 2010 National Headliner Award, the IAVA Leadership in Journalism award and the VFW News Media award.
4. Top US spy says Somalia, Yemen, Syria and Iraq represent greater terrorist threat than Afghanistan
Top US spy says Somalia, Yemen, Syria and Iraq represent greater terrorist threat than Afghanistan
CNN · by Katie Bo Williams, CNN
(CNN)Afghanistan is no longer the US' top concern among international terrorist threats to the American homeland, the nation's top spy said at an intelligence and national security conference in Washington on Monday, even amid ongoing fears from some critics who argue that the country could become a haven for terrorist organizations like ISIS and al Qaeda to regroup following the US withdrawal.
Terror threats emanating from Somalia, Yemen, Syria and Iraq -- in particular ISIS -- pose a greater danger than those that might emerge from Afghanistan, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told the annual Intelligence and National Security Summit.
"In terms of the homeland, the threat right now from terrorist groups, we don't prioritize at the top of the list Afghanistan," she said, speaking by videoconference. "What we look at is Yemen, Somalia, Syria and Iraq for ISIS. That's where we see the greatest threat."
Officials have said publicly that the Islamic State's branch in Afghanistan, ISIS-K, does pose a potential threat to the United States. The group staged a suicide bombing on August 26, in the midst of the American evacuation from Kabul, that killed 13 US service members and dozens of Afghans.
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Haines said that a primary focus for the intelligence community now is monitoring "any possible reconstitution of terrorist organizations" in Afghanistan.
ISIS still operates in Syria and Iraq, although the group has been tamped down by the US military presence in both countries. In Yemen, an al Qaeda offshoot based there has attempted attacks on the United States. And in Somalia, the US has regularly conducted counterterrorism strikes against Al-Shabaab, which in early 2020 launched an attack on a US facility in Kenya that killed a US soldier and two US contractors.
But 20 years after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Haines also argued that the threat to the US homeland from international terrorist groups has broadly "diminished over time," crediting "enormous effort" from across the US government to degrade the ability of groups like al Qaeda and ISIS to carry out attacks inside the United States.
CNN has previously reported that it has become infinitely harder for the US intelligence community and military to gather information needed to carry out counterterrorism strikes against ISIS and other targets inside Afghanistan without US troops on the ground.
The Biden administration and military commanders have insisted that they have what the military terms "over the horizon" capabilities -- the ability to conduct surveillance and carry out counterterrorism strikes from afar -- that they need to uncover and prevent terrorist planning in Afghanistan. But former officials, lawmakers and others have raised doubts about the administration's plan, saying they have seen few details to support it.
Haines said Monday that the intelligence community is developing "indicators so that we can understand what are the things that we would be likely to see in the event that there were reconstitution" of terror groups in Afghanistan.
That means ensuring that "we have sufficient collection to monitor against those indicators, so that we can provide a warning to the policy community, to the operators, so that they're able to take action in the event that we do see that," she said.
CNN · by Katie Bo Williams, CNN
5. Army refuses to say whether officer’s resignation letter citing ‘Marxist takeover of the military’ is real
It seems like this letter and the twitter discussion surrounding it could be a part of a disinformation effort.
Army refuses to say whether officer’s resignation letter citing ‘Marxist takeover of the military’ is real
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After a supposed resignation letter from an Army lieutenant colonel criticizing the U.S. military’s vaccine mandates and related “ideologically Marxist takeover of the military” made the rounds on social media and was viewed by tens of thousands of people, the Army has decided to say nothing about it.
“I am incapable of subjecting myself to the unlawful, unethical, immoral, and tyrannical order to sit still and allow a serum to be injected into my flesh against my will and better judgement,” Lt. Col. Paul Hague, a signal officer assigned to the Army Reserve Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, wrote in a resignation letter posted to Twitter by his wife last week. “It is impossible for this so-called ‘vaccine’ to have been studied adequately to determine the long-term effects.”
After eighteen years of active duty service in the US Army, my lieutenant colonel husband has resigned
He’s walking away from all he’s worked for and believed in since he was an ROTC kid at UGA
He’s walking away from his retirement
— Katie Phipps Hague (@AtTheHague) September 9, 2021
Neither Hague nor his wife, Katie Phipps Hague, have responded to repeated requests for comment from Task & Purpose.
The Army has refused to comment on the widely-publicized letter, or even confirm whether it is genuine, citing privacy concerns for the officer. While the Army does not typically go into specific detail regarding personnel issues, the service regularly comments on personnel matters or confirms they are aware of a situation.
In June, the Army Reserve confirmed that they were “investigating” a first lieutenant after he was seen campaigning for political office in uniform and heard saying in an interview that he doesn’t think “this sleepy guy in office” President Joe Biden is actually the president. Last year, the Army confirmed they were “taking immediate action” after a lieutenant posted a Holocaust joke on TikTok. And when a news report revealed an Army officer was allegedly carrying out affairs with multiple women, the Army confirmed it was aware of the allegations and was investigating.
The Army’s approach to providing information has been criticized internally by its own public affairs officers. Three Army public affairs officials told Task & Purpose in June that the service often fails to proactively communicate, hoping instead that what is seen as a bad news story will go away if it’s not acknowledged.
“Ignoring inquiries or questions online, it’s just a bad look and people assume the worst. If people assume the worst and you don’t say anything, that narrative is free to go … Army public affairs seems to delay the process of responding to queries so much that they are always playing from behind,” one field grade public affairs officer said.
Since Hague’s resignation letter was posted on social media by Phipps Hague, there has been no shortage of criticism, including accusations that the memo is fake. But Phipps Hague sought to put those accusations to rest in another statement posted to Twitter on Monday, which has since been deleted, saying her husband “tendered his resignation on the 30th of August,” and it has since been “sent up his chain of command — everyone who needs to see it has seen it and is aware of it.”
“[I]t is important to us that people not think that this story is fabricated,” Phipps Hague tweeted. “It is very real.”
Soldiers stand in formation. (U.S. National Guard/Joseph Siemandel)
It’s unclear where Hague is in the resignation process. A military service record provided by Army Reserve Command says he is still in the Army Reserve.
Hague joined the Army on May 11, 2002, according to his records, and left active duty on Jan. 29, 2008. He joined the Army Reserve months later in July 2008. He deployed to Iraq for 15 months in Sept. 2007 and again for 13 months in Nov. 2014. Among his military awards and decorations are the Army Commendation and Army Achievement Medals, Afghanistan Campaign Medal with three campaign stars, and the Ranger Tab.
Despite being roughly a year from retiring with a full military pension after 20 years of service, Hague said in his resignation letter that he will instead “join those who have served before me in pledging my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor to continue resisting the eternal and ever-mutable forms of oppression and tyranny — both from enemies outside our nation’s borders, and those within.”
Hague said he was resigning “[f]irst, and foremost,” because of the mandatory COVID-19 vaccine. The COVID-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer recently became mandatory for U.S. service members after receiving full approval from the Food and Drug Administration. The vaccine joins over a dozen other mandatory vaccines that troops are required to get upon joining the military.
When asked on Twitter why her husband did not leave the military over other vaccines he was required to have, Phipps Hague tweeted that he “didn’t resign over a vaccine. He said he felt the vaccine was being used as a political tool to divide and segregate Americans.”
He didn’t resign over a vaccine. He said he felt the vaccine was being used as a political tool to divide and segregate Americans. He then went on to list many other reasons for his resignation—none of which have anything to do with vaccines.
— Katie Phipps Hague (@AtTheHague) September 11, 2021
Although Hague’s memo mostly concerns the vaccine, he also mentions the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which he calls “sudden and rash, at best, but pushing traitorous.” He voices concerns that “appropriate screening of personnel could not have taken place … potentially leading to transporting threatening terrorists to friendly nations, including the United States.”
In fact, the screening process for evacuees from Afghanistan is extensive and includes biometric screening and running individuals’ information across multiple government agencies and the National Counterterrorism Center. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby previously said that intelligence and law enforcement personnel were at third-party country sites, where most refugees were taken immediately after leaving Afghanistan, to undergo that vetting process and ensure “that nobody comes into the United States that hasn’t been screened in a robust manner.”
Hague also cited what he says is an “ideologically Marxist takeover of the military and United States government at their upper echelons” as a reason for his resignation. The comment echoes remarks made by Air Force Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier who is being investigated by the Air Force Inspector General after self-publishing a book which claims Marxism is spreading in the military.
The Hague memo was posted to social media days after a Marine lieutenant colonel filmed a video critical of the Afghanistan drawdown and demanded accountability from senior military leadership for the way the withdrawal was handled.
FILE PHOTO: A soldier with the 82nd Airborne Division watches as a CH-47 Chinook helicopter prepares to land in preparation for the extraction of Afghan and U.S. soldiers on Dec. 29, 2019 in Southeastern Afghanistan. (Photo by Master Sgt. Alejandro Licea.)
“I’m not saying we’ve got to be in Afghanistan forever, but I am saying: Did any of you throw your rank on the table and say ‘Hey, it’s a bad idea to evacuate Bagram Airfield, a strategic airbase, before we evacuate everyone?’” Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller said in the video. Scheller was relieved from command, and days later made a second, lengthy video announcing he’d be resigning his commission and planned to “bring the whole fucking system down.”
In a Facebook post on Aug. 30, Phipps Hague said she “just finished reading over” her husband’s resignation memo, and said while her husband began the resignation process before learning about Scheller’s comments, “it is encouraging to see that others are speaking out even at great personal risk.”
“Not everyone … feels compelled to join him,” Phipps Hague said. “But a lot of people are, and I hope that my husband’s resignation will help others speak out if they see what LTC Lohmeier, LTC Sheller, and others see.”
More great stories on Task & Purpose
Haley Britzky is the Army reporter for Task & Purpose, covering the daily happenings in the Army and how they impact soldiers and their families, as well as broader national security issues. Originally from Texas, Haley previously worked at Axios before joining Task & Purpose in January 2019. Contact the author here.
6. Taiwan Is Arming Itself To Beat A Chinese Invasion. Some New Weapons Are Better Than Others.
Taiwan Is Arming Itself To Beat A Chinese Invasion. Some New Weapons Are Better Than Others.
Forbes · by David Axe · September 13, 2021
A Taiwanese air force F-CK-1 fighter with a Wan Chien cruise missile under its wing.
Taiwanese defense ministry
The budget would pay for, among other things, new air-defense missiles for the navy’s six Kang Ding-class frigates plus four MQ-9B armed drones for the air force as well as a host of missiles for that service’s growing fleet of new F-16V fighters.
Most of the proposed expenditures—but not all—align with Taiwan’s increasingly defensive war strategy.
Where once the 24 million-person island democracy boasted more and better ships, planes and tanks than its much more populous enemy, today China with its 1.4 billion people has a quantitative and, increasingly, qualitative military advantage over Taiwan.
So Taipei increasingly is leaning on the natural advantage any defender has against an attacker.
“Unifying” Taiwan with China is the central tenet of the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign policy. But Chinese troops have to go to Taiwan to get what Beijing wants. Taiwanese troops don’t have to move an inch. And they’ve had decades to dig in.
Strategists have a word for this defensive crouch. It’s the “porcupine” approach to warfare.
It’s not for no reason that missiles—plus sensors to guide them and vehicles to launch them—lately have dominated Taipei’s spending plans. In recent years, Taiwanese officials have initiated large-scale purchases of new anti-ship, land-attack and anti-air missiles. The porcupine’s spines. Many hundreds of them.
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The idea is to lob so many missiles at an incoming Chinese invasion force that the munitions overwhelm the invaders’ defenses. The goal is to sink half of the potentially hundreds of large ships carrying Chinese troops toward Taiwan’s ports and beaches.
Not all missiles are created equal, however. And some of the investments the Taiwanese military wants to make in 2022 are more worthwhile than others.
The four U.S.-made MQ-9s make a lot of sense. The 2022 budget proposal hints that Taiwan might buy the armed variant of General Atomics’ propeller-driven Sea Guardian drone, which in essence is a tougher, farther-flying version of the company’s basic Reaper.
But the Taiwanese air force doesn’t need the $600 million Sea Guardian set—the four air vehicles plus ground control stations—for the handful of short-range Hellfire missiles the drones might haul into battle.
It needs the drones to spot targets for the 400 Boeing-made Harpoon anti-ship missiles, and 100 truck-mounted launchers, that the navy is buying for around $2.4 billion, as well as for the Harpoons arming the roughly 200 new and upgraded F-16Vs the air force is acquiring from U.S. plane-maker Lockheed Martin under an $8 billion deal.
The 2022 budget also includes $360 million for additional weapons—potentially hundreds of them—for the F-16V squadrons, including anti-ship Harpoons plus Standoff Land-Attack Missiles-Expanded Response and radar-seeking High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missiles.
The hundreds of American-made missiles comprise just a portion of Taiwan’s growing arsenal of land-attack and anti-ship cruise missiles. The army, navy and air force already are holding onto around 800 missiles in this class—locally made models, mostly.
The truck-launched Harpoons will grow the missile stockpile to 1,200—the bare minimum Taiwanese officials say they need in order to sink half of a Chinese invasion fleet and thwart an attack on the island. Additional missiles decrease the risk for Taiwanese forces and increase it for the Chinese.
Upgrading six frigates for $1.5 billion, while comforting to those ships’ crews, is largely meaningless in this context. The six 1990s-vintage Kang Ding frigates, based on the French La Fayette class, are holdovers from a time when the Taiwanese navy outgunned the Chinese navy and stood a chance of defeating an invasion fleet far offshore.
With the PLA Navy’s explosive growth in recent years, that time has passed. The Chinese fleet operates 170 corvettes, frigates, destroyers and cruisers. The Taiwanese fleet has just 28 such vessels. And the Taiwanese ships are much older than the Chinese ships are.
It’s true that the Kang Ding frigates are in need of a firepower overhaul. At present, their only major air-defense weapon is a naval version of the outdated Chaparral missile with a five-mile range. The 2022 budget proposes to replace the Chaparral with the new locally-made TC-2N missile with a 20-mile range.
But the TC-2N won’t save the Kang Dings in a naval clash with the vastly superior Chinese fleet. The new missile at best would delay the Taiwanese fleet’s defeat.
A possible war over Taiwan could be won or lost at the beachhead, as a Chinese invasion force fights its way through a swarm of air- and surface-launched anti-ship missiles.
New drones help the defenders’ chances by improving the missiles’ targeting. Slightly up-arming six frigates doesn’t help much at all.
Forbes · by David Axe · September 13, 2021
7. Forward to the Past? Weigh Covert Options in Afghanistan Carefully
Give us the broader strategy.
Excerpts:
Covert action is simply one part of a broader strategy. Those officials and policymakers weighing up options should ask: What would the United States want to get out of secret activities? How would the various possible goals of such operations play into the wider U.S. political strategy and into regional geopolitics?
In the unlikely event of a major U.S. covert action program that overthrew the Taliban, a host of new problems would emerge — problems that the United States has already demonstrated, through 20 years of failed efforts, to be beyond its means to adequately address. Even if the United States considers more limited forms of covert action to disrupt the Taliban, it should proceed extremely cautiously. There would be a need for clear goals, alignment with wider policy aims, bipartisan support, bureaucratic control, and exit options. Any action should be based on a comprehensive analysis of associated risks. This is a high bar even for seemingly low-risk operations like dividing and discrediting the Taliban. Such action could dramatically escalate levels of violence in Afghanistan or unwittingly draw the United States back into a country Biden is determined to leave.
Forward to the Past? Weigh Covert Options in Afghanistan Carefully - War on the Rocks
Is “Charlie Wilson’s War” due a sequel? The movie, like the book that inspired it, recounted the flamboyant congressman’s role in escalating America’s war in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Through one of the CIA’s largest covert action programs, the United States supplied huge amounts of arms and money to the mujahedeen, who bravely fought the Soviet army and ultimately drove it out of Afghanistan.
With that country now under the control of another brutal authoritarian regime, some in Washington argue it’s time to dust off the 1980s covert action playbook. Even though most of Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in August, a desperate resistance effort continues in the Panjshir Valley.
Ahmad Massoud, leader of the resistance and son of the famed guerrilla leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, has very publicly requested U.S. support. In a Washington Post opinion article on Aug. 18 and a series of media interviews, he exhorted America to take up its role as the “arsenal of democracy” and provide his newly formed National Resistance Front with weapons and assistance. Plenty in Washington listened sympathetically, determined not to abandon the rebels to the Taliban. Predictably, the calls for action gathered steam, spearheaded by Republican Rep. Mike Waltz, who appears eager to play the role of a modern-day Charlie Wilson. Joined by influential Sen. Lindsey Graham and others, together they called on President Joe Biden to “stand with our friends in the Panjshir Valley” and to recognize them as the “legitimate government representatives” of Afghanistan.
As far as can be ascertained from fragmentary news reports, the resistance hangs on by a thread. The Taliban has declared victory in Panjshir after occupying the provincial capital of Bazarak and the international media, largely dependent on journalists embedded with the Taliban, have been quick to accept this line. But it is worth recalling that Soviet forces also occupied parts of the Panjshir multiple times during the 1980s yet could not maintain their presence. Bazarak is only a short way into the long valley and, while symbolic, hardly represents a militarily decisive objective. The resistance claims it continues to occupy “strategic positions” and has vowed to fight on: If it can hold out until the winter snows arrive this could give it time to regroup and resupply. Meanwhile, Massoud called for a national uprising, just as widespread protests rocked Kabul. Although the prospects for the resistance look grim, it might be premature to declare “game, set, match.”
Even if the National Resistance Front loses territorial control over much of Panjshir, active opposition to Afghanistan’s new regime will continue, especially if the Taliban maintain the hardline approach suggested by recent appointments. Calls for U.S. support will also continue. The Taliban are not a united group and have swept to power on the basis of a patchwork of deals with local leaders. The speed of their success has taken them by surprise, and early indicators suggest they will struggle to provide stable or effective governance. The Taliban have already made missteps, could overreach in their relations with China, and there are signs of tension with Pakistan and Iran. American covert action could — in theory — exploit all of these dynamics to divide and discredit the regime.
The Biden administration is not about to ride into the breach to rescue the resistance. But covert action in Afghanistan, especially aimed at something less than regime change, remains a distinct possibility. However, it comes with plenty of hazards and the Biden administration should proceed carefully.
The Lure of Covert Action
Biden has repeatedly stated his commitment to extricate America from so-called forever wars and, as the nature of the Afghan exit underscores, he tends to hold his ground once he has made a decision. Having achieved his central aim of withdrawal from Afghanistan, it would be nonsensical to immediately wade back in — especially given the lack of appetite for doing so among the American public and with midterm elections to be held next year.
Despite this, some form of covert action in Afghanistan is a real possibility for at least three reasons. First, there is clearly pressure from some American politicians to do something about the Taliban’s victory, even if there is little domestic enthusiasm for military intervention. In such circumstances, presidents typically turn toward the hidden hand to bypass domestic constraints. Covert action becomes a silver bullet to solve intractable problems, or an appealing halfway house between doing something and doing nothing.
Second, the record indicates that when considering covert operations the United States often acts because it can, rather than because it should. Whatever the policy reticence or bleak prospects for a successful insurgency, there is a tendency within intelligence and military circles to believe that positive action is possible. America’s spies have a habit of fighting the last war again. The United States has extensive experience in conducting covert actions and unconventional warfare, bolstered in recent years by the formulation of quasi-doctrine related to “light-footprint” and “by, with and through” indirect approaches. America has an array of dedicated units — boasting 20 years of experience overseeing paramilitary operations in theaters such as Somalia, Syria, Iraq and, not least, Afghanistan — capable of rapid deployment for just such missions. Apart from paramilitary action, the United States has even more experience in conducting political and influence operations, designed to divide and discredit targets, dating back to the CIA’s founding.
Third, reinforcing this “can-do” spirit will be the inexorable march of events. The United States will likely still have some contacts in place in Panjshir and perhaps beyond, and initial tentative interactions might generate a momentum of their own. There may even be discrete American activity already taking place on the ground, at least in terms of intelligence collection and liaison. When it comes to covert action, tactics have a habit of driving strategy. And the United States could always encourage private initiatives or facilitate the covert actions of other states, such as France — which has close ties to Massoud and a president who has expressed support for “those who cherish freedom” — or India, which has most to lose from the alliance between the Taliban and Pakistan. The CIA director has already held talks with the Indian national security adviser to discuss developments in Afghanistan.
Covert Options: Perils and Pitfalls
Although a large-scale paramilitary covert action to overthrow the Taliban is unlikely, the U.S. government has other covert options available. These include more limited programs designed to keep alive a spirit of resistance in Afghanistan, communicate determination to allies, or simply impose costs on the Taliban regime. American policymakers may see advantages in signaling resolve to the Taliban or disrupting their activities, and a small toehold within the country might allow the United States to launch counter-terrorism operations against the Islamic State in Afghanistan or al-Qaeda elements there. The composition of the Taliban’s interim regime offers little confidence that they can be relied upon to take counter-terrorism seriously themselves. The caretaker minister of the interior, for example, is none other than Sirajuddin Haqqani, who was featured in an FBI wanted poster with a $10 million bounty on his head.
Other potential options include covert action to identify and exploit divisions or contradictions within the Taliban and its new government, including those between moderates and hardliners, between the formerly exiled political leadership and its military wing, and between the different terrorist factions making up the regime. The U.S. government might also consider efforts designed to exploit frictions between the Taliban and states such as Pakistan, Iran, Russia, or China. Political warfare or influence operations are a much more common form of covert action than grandiose attempts at regime change. All regional powers are concerned about Afghanistan once again serving as a base for cross-border terrorist attacks upon their territory. Iran is watching closely to see how the Taliban behave toward the large Shiite Hazara population, including those who have taken refuge in the Panjshir. China will likely be wary of expanding its geopolitical footprint and influence in the country if there is continuing armed opposition and instability.
Even covert options with limited goals, however, are fraught with hazards. If an operation involves the provision of weapons, they could get into the wrong hands, just as they reportedly did during the recent covert action supporting rebels in Syria. Any relationship between the United States and whatever is left of the resistance movement within Afghanistan would be complicated. Proxies are not puppets and they often manipulate their sponsors: Anyone the U.S. government supports on the ground would pursue their own interests, which may not align with America’s. Working through intermediaries, who will also have their own aims, would exacerbate these problems.
Massoud, or others like him, will probably hype their access to valuable intelligence on al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Afghanistan and request covert support — in the form of money, communications equipment, or training — from the CIA in return for providing information. Any such arrangement, even if starting small as a counter-terrorism operation, could easily drift toward an open-ended U.S. commitment.
Political warfare and influence operations also come with risks. First, they can start small but incrementally grow into paramilitary action, developing a life of their own. The multi-billion-dollar covert action in 1980s Afghanistan began with propaganda. Second, in an interconnected world, political and influence operations are hard to contain and risk reaching unintended audiences, including back home. Even rumors of operations can undermine the legitimacy of those supported or can corrode trust more widely. Third, political and influence operations are very difficult to evaluate. All the while, secrecy creates a ceiling on all types of covert activities, as does the lack of substantial U.S. presence in Afghanistan.
The United States Should Proceed Cautiously
If the U.S. government seriously considers potential covert actions in Afghanistan, it should set clear and realistic goals, including benchmarks for success. Experts stress the importance of keeping open the option of walking away if the mission is no longer serving national interests: That’s an imperative that grows more problematic the more involved the United States becomes, as reputational concerns and vested interests expand. There is always the temptation to escalate and to pursue increasingly grand aims.
In any covert action, policymakers and officials should determine the appropriate allocation of resources and levels of secrecy based on the stated goal. The former is an obvious point (although often forgotten in practice if historical cases of tools driving strategy are anything to go by). The latter is less so, and too often gets overlooked. Determining appropriate levels of secrecy is more nuanced than commonly thought, and exposure — to certain audiences — does not necessarily mean failure. Those crafting a covert action program should ask: From whom is an operation intended to be secret, and to whom is it intended to communicate something? Perhaps the United States might want to signal resolve to the Taliban in order to gain leverage over their policies. Perhaps a covert action might be aimed at Chinese or Pakistani audiences, or even to give succor to policymakers in neighbors of Afghanistan, like Tajikistan, who are fearful of the Taliban’s takeover. Goals, resources, and secrecy are interrelated.
Meanwhile, even the limited — seemingly low-risk — option of disrupting or discrediting the Taliban could still end up inciting another full-blown civil war in Afghanistan. In that event, what comes next? Would U.S. policy then be to covertly intervene on behalf of an emboldened opposition? Or what about the laudable aim of covertly supporting the brave women out on the streets protesting the Taliban? Would such encouragement lead to material support if the Taliban continue to brutally crack down on opposition, or will anti-Taliban protestors get left high and dry? External political intervention, especially if exposed, risks changing the dynamics of genuine protests and undermining both the protestors’ and America’s goals.
Any covert action should be properly integrated into wider interagency decision-making to ensure proper scrutiny, and so that it does not compete with or undercut other U.S. government activity (such as humanitarian efforts or diplomatic initiatives). A covert move to disrupt the Taliban could adversely impact opportunities for U.S. engagement with, or influence on, the new regime. Such engagement might, for instance, be required to push Afghanistan’s new rulers to allow a more inclusive political settlement, to ensure the country is not used as a base by international terrorist groups, or to advocate for the protection of rights (to the limited degree possible). It would be damaging, perhaps dangerous, to engage in covert action against the Taliban without coordinating such efforts with other parts of the U.S. government, leaving them unprepared when the Taliban complains or retaliates.
Covert action is simply one part of a broader strategy. Those officials and policymakers weighing up options should ask: What would the United States want to get out of secret activities? How would the various possible goals of such operations play into the wider U.S. political strategy and into regional geopolitics?
In the unlikely event of a major U.S. covert action program that overthrew the Taliban, a host of new problems would emerge — problems that the United States has already demonstrated, through 20 years of failed efforts, to be beyond its means to adequately address. Even if the United States considers more limited forms of covert action to disrupt the Taliban, it should proceed extremely cautiously. There would be a need for clear goals, alignment with wider policy aims, bipartisan support, bureaucratic control, and exit options. Any action should be based on a comprehensive analysis of associated risks. This is a high bar even for seemingly low-risk operations like dividing and discrediting the Taliban. Such action could dramatically escalate levels of violence in Afghanistan or unwittingly draw the United States back into a country Biden is determined to leave.
8. How Should US Special Operations Forces Train for Great Power War?
The focus is SOF-Conventional Forces (CF) Interoperability, Integration, and Interdependence (I3) or SOF-CF I3 at the Joint Readiness Training Center. However it highlight some important aspects of SOF too often overlooked:
Excerpts:
USASOC highlights the strategic value ARSOF brings to the force in LSCO. According to the U.S. Army Concept for Special Operations 2028-2040, Special Operations contribute to joint force in armed conflict by:
-Sense deep in denied areas. Enable deep area fires.
-Enable the disintegration of critical nodes within enemy A2/AD systems, specifically focusing on the integrated long-range fires complex and the integrated air defense system.
-Maneuver locally recruited, trained, and equipped forces in deep areas.
-Support conventional forces in the close fight.
-Converge cross-domain capabilities in the deep areas through SOF Command and Control.
...
USASOC highlights ARSOF’s capabilities through the SOF core activities and operations in armed conflict. According to USASOC 2035, ARSOF’s four pillars of capability are An Indigenous Approach to operations; Precision Targeting Operations; Developing Understanding and Wielding Influence, and Crisis response.
With an Indigenous Approach to operations, ARSOF leverages persistent partnerships and relationships with partner forces globally. This provides the joint force with a low-cost, high yield option to execute operations and maintain a persistent global sensor. Additionally, ARSOF, by, with, and through their partner forces, gain access and placement to uncertain and potentially hostile environments in which CF cannot easily access. In LSCO, this might look like UW and FID operations with resistance forces or the existing military of a host nation under invasion.
Precision Targeting operations involve direct action (DA) or counter-network activities employed against critical nodes or hard targets to create specific effects. These activities create windows of opportunity for the joint force. In LSCO, this could be penetration of an adversary’s anti-access aerial-denial (A2/AD) system or stimulation and strike on a strategic target.
Developing Understanding and Wielding Influence includes leveraging the SOF network through ongoing partnerships and presence to develop an advanced understanding of the complex environment. This enhances the joint force’s understanding of the operational environment. In LSCO, ARSOF would operate in semi-permissive environments, creating an advanced understanding of the operational environment, expanding options, and understanding areas where CF is not currently operating.
With the fourth pillar, Crisis Response, ARSOF can rapidly respond to crises and provide options to the joint force when threats and unstable situations emerge. By integrating existing capabilities and understanding, ARSOF can address a range of emergencies to support the force. During LSCO, ARSOF offers the ability to gain access to denied or hostile areas for limited amounts of time to support an emerging or immediate objective.
How Should US Special Operations Forces Train for Great Power War?
Bob Dylan highlighted that change is constant, and one needs to get on board or get out of the way. The military is facing a new operational environment, and the times are indeed changing.
The age of Forever Wars is coming to an end, and the era of Great Power Competition is here. Aggressive, assertive, and capable nation-state actors threaten to erode and destabilize U.S. influence globally. Special Operations Forces (SOF) are no exception to the changing environment and constantly adapt and prepare to meet future challenges. Army Special Operations Forces (ARSOF) balance the line between the fight today and tomorrow’s threats. Unit readiness is exceptionally critical as the demand for SOF increases, and the operating environment remains complex. Focus is shifting from training on Counter-Insurgency Operations (COIN) to Large Scale Combat Operations (LSCO) against peer threats. However, ARSOF cannot train for LSCO independently. Instead, ARSOF must train with Conventional Forces (CF) to build Interoperability, Integration, and Interdependence (I3) to prepare for future threats and embrace the changing times. ARSOF needs to focus its limited resources, both time and forces, divesting from training that does not build ARSOF’s required readiness capabilities to invest in opportunities to forge ARSOF to meet, compete and win the fight.
Combat Training Centers (CTC), such as the Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC), in Fort Polk, LA, support unit readiness to preparing units to face the multitude of operations in the future. JRTC remains a bulwark for unit training for Army Brigade Combat Teams (BCT) and their subordinate units preparing for LSCO. ARSOF, due to their unique mission sets, tend to have specialized training sites particular for SOF and often do not train with CF. JRTC provides an excellent training venue for SOF and CF to train together in a realistic environment enhancing SOF-CF I3. However, JRTC is not a SOF training center. The primary training unit for JRTC is a BCT, who conducts a 14-day exercise to engage force on force with an opposing force in a live-action environment.
Conceptually, in LSCO, SOF often operates independently or with partner forces with CF support beyond a CORPS level fire support coordination line (FSCL). SOF prepare and shape the environment in the deep area and at the opportune time hand over the battlespace to conventional forces. Given the size and time constraints of JRTC, ARSOF units are often pushed in the close area with the BCT and struggle to prepare, shape, and hand over the battlespace on the timeline provided by the exercise, degrading I3.
JRTC rotations provide diminishing value to ARSOF readiness and squander excellent opportunities to enhance SOF-CF I3 with these limitations. However, simple re-tooling of the JRTC environment to create applicable training opportunities for ARSOF’s role in LSCO could make JRTC a premiere ARSOF training center for LSCO. This paper examines JRTC’s ability to effectively provide ARSOF training opportunities through USASOC 2035’s four primary stated capabilities that ARSOF provides to the joint force. Further, this paper offers three potential solutions for re-tooling JRTC to enhance both ARSOF unit readiness for LSCO and increase CF-SOF I3.
Higher Guidance
The United States addresses rising and existing challenges to the nation in strategic documents. The 2021 Interim National Security Strategic Guidance states, “We face a world of rising nationalism, receding democracy, growing rivalry with China, Russia, and other authoritarian states” The 2017 National Security Strategy (NSS) notes that “China and Russia want to shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests.” The 2018 National Defense Strategy observes that “Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security.” All the documents highlight a shift in national focus. The change from counterterrorism and counter-insurgency to great power competition and potential LSCO is without a doubt challenging for the military. For SOF, the threat of terrorism and insurgencies does not go away; instead, roles and tasks are expanding in an ever-complex environment.
Following national guidance, the Army is also shifting its focus. The Army capstone doctrinal publication FM 3-0 states, “The Army and joint force must adapt and prepare for large-scale combat operations in highly contested, lethal environments.” Other emerging concepts such as the Army’s Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) highlight great power challenges and the need to leverage and integrate all capabilities across domains to achieve objectives in large-scale combat operations. USASOC nests within the Army’s MDO concept in the United States Army Concept for Special Operations 2028-2040, which complements the necessity for I3 between Army SOF and CF in the future operating environment. “ARSOF require the ability to coordinate, synchronize, integrate, or deconflict ARSOF and CF activities in time, space, and purpose.” Working together to achieve a common objective against a capable adversary becomes challenging as units strive to take on and adjust to new roles.
SOF-CF I3
During the Counter-insurgency conflicts, Special Operators have often taken the lead supported by conventional forces. During LSCO, conventional forces most likely will take primacy requiring SOF to conduct missions supporting a broader joint force. SOF and CF have distinct sets of responsibilities, capabilities, training, and relevant tradeoffs. SOF-CF I3 continues to be a friction point and an answer key for effective LSCO operations.
The concepts of I3 are crucial in the command and control (C2) of SOF and CF on the battlefield. TRADOC pamphlet 525-3-0 defines SOF-CF interdependence as “The deliberate and mutual reliance by one force on another’s inherent capabilities designed to provide complementary and reinforcing effects. Integration and interoperability are subsets of interdependence.” Interdependent SOF and CF forces mutually support one another with capabilities and specializations.
Historically, SOF and CF tend to focus on different levels of war. Due to their unique mission set and capabilities, SOF commanders focus on affecting objectives at the strategic and operational levels. In contrast, CF commanders focus on achieving their objectives in the tactical battlespace. Both groups have the same strategic objectives as part of a larger joint force. However, at times they are mutually supporting strategically but tactically divergent. In many cases, divergence can cause friction between SOF-CF, such as resource allocation and prioritization of objectives. JRTC’s size provides a limited tactical space, an area where ARSOF shapes but primarily does not operate.
JRTC
The Combat Training Center Programs are Army programs established to provide realistic joint service and combined arms training in accordance with Army doctrine. The CTCs offer training units opportunities to increase collective proficiency on the most realistic battlefield available during peacetime. The four components of the CTC Program are: (1) the National Training Center, (2) the Combat Maneuver Training Center, (3) the Joint Readiness Training Center, and (4) the Battle Command Training Program.
JRTC focuses on improving unit readiness by providing highly realistic, stressful, joint, and combined arms training across the full spectrum of conflict. As a CTC, the JRTC trains a multi-component force: About one-third of the Army’s Brigade Combat Teams, Army National Guard and Reserve units, and their associated rotational unit enablers undergo the most realistic and relevant training the Army offers. JRTC trains rotational units to perform their core Mission Essential Tasks in a Decisive Action Training Environment (DATE). The primary customer for JRTC is a BCT, and the DATE is not designed for ARSOF units.
ARSOF’s Role in LSCO
SOF has a distinct role in LSCO. SOF reinforces the Army’s fighting approach to seize, retain and exploit the initiative. Special Operations core activities, including Direct Action (DA), Special Reconnaissance (SR), Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction (CWMD), Counterterrorism (CT), Unconventional Warfare (UW), Foreign Internal Defense (FID), Security Force Assistance (SFA), Hostage Rescue and Recovery (HRR), Counterinsurgency (COIN), Foreign Humanitarian Assistance (FHA), Military Information Support Operations (MISO) and Civil Affairs Operations (CAO). Those roles are not unique to LSCO but are executed across the range of military operations, including LSCO.
USASOC highlights the strategic value ARSOF brings to the force in LSCO. According to the U.S. Army Concept for Special Operations 2028-2040, Special Operations contribute to joint force in armed conflict by:
-Sense deep in denied areas. Enable deep area fires.
-Enable the disintegration of critical nodes within enemy A2/AD systems, specifically focusing on the integrated long-range fires complex and the integrated air defense system.
-Maneuver locally recruited, trained, and equipped forces in deep areas.
-Support conventional forces in the close fight.
-Converge cross-domain capabilities in the deep areas through SOF Command and Control.
There is a significant disproportion between a typical ARSOF Company Mission Essential Task List (METL) and the conventional counterpart in LSCO, which creates a challenge to integrate the two forces effectively.
USASOC’s Four Pillars
USASOC highlights ARSOF’s capabilities through the SOF core activities and operations in armed conflict. According to USASOC 2035, ARSOF’s four pillars of capability are An Indigenous Approach to operations; Precision Targeting Operations; Developing Understanding and Wielding Influence, and Crisis response.
With an Indigenous Approach to operations, ARSOF leverages persistent partnerships and relationships with partner forces globally. This provides the joint force with a low-cost, high yield option to execute operations and maintain a persistent global sensor. Additionally, ARSOF, by, with, and through their partner forces, gain access and placement to uncertain and potentially hostile environments in which CF cannot easily access. In LSCO, this might look like UW and FID operations with resistance forces or the existing military of a host nation under invasion.
Precision Targeting operations involve direct action (DA) or counter-network activities employed against critical nodes or hard targets to create specific effects. These activities create windows of opportunity for the joint force. In LSCO, this could be penetration of an adversary’s anti-access aerial-denial (A2/AD) system or stimulation and strike on a strategic target.
Developing Understanding and Wielding Influence includes leveraging the SOF network through ongoing partnerships and presence to develop an advanced understanding of the complex environment. This enhances the joint force’s understanding of the operational environment. In LSCO, ARSOF would operate in semi-permissive environments, creating an advanced understanding of the operational environment, expanding options, and understanding areas where CF is not currently operating.
With the fourth pillar, Crisis Response, ARSOF can rapidly respond to crises and provide options to the joint force when threats and unstable situations emerge. By integrating existing capabilities and understanding, ARSOF can address a range of emergencies to support the force. During LSCO, ARSOF offers the ability to gain access to denied or hostile areas for limited amounts of time to support an emerging or immediate objective.
Solutions
In a short training exercise, it is challenging to recreate persistent partnerships and networks. The volunteers and role players utilized as partner forces in SOF training have limited knowledge of the scenario and limited SOF experience. This simulates a raw, untrained unit, as opposed to a realistic SOF partner. This shortfall detracts from ARSOF ability to focus on it’s role in an LSCO training event. Further, JRTC lacks a deep environment for ARSOF to prepare, shape, and hand over the battlespace. This constraint reduces an advantage to a CF unit conducting LSCO training. Finally, SOF require specific infrastructure, both physical, virtual, and cognitive, to train its LSCO tasks.
A potential solution to enhance the Indigenous approach at JRTC would be to create a permanent partner force at JRTC. Permanent SOF role-players with military training and a deep understanding of the terrain and environment provides ARSOF immediate combat capability and value in the exercise. A suitable partner force would require a company size element that can resemble a near-peer military or resistance force. The unit maintains an enhanced knowledge of the operating environment, fully equipped and augmented with senior prior service SOF providing depth and realism as an effective training aid. Role players need to be re-tooled to mimic a resistance or military force with organic capabilities and realistic C2. This partner force needs to be funded and trained for a SOF scenario, capable, competent, and ready to engage in LSCO immediately. This enables the ARSOF training unit to mass combat power against objectives with the BCT immediately.
In LSCO, ARSOF operations often occur in the deep maneuver area, affecting actions that will have second and third-order effects on the close fight. These areas are well beyond the organic fire capabilities of a BCT. However, the deep maneuver area remains pertinent to a CF CDR as actions in the deep area shape the tactical battlespace. JRTC does not have a deep maneuver area, limiting ARSOF operations to the small area where the BCT operates, creating friction as both units compete for the same targets, rather than synchronizing efforts in both the close and deep areas for layered effects. If ARSOF trains LSCO at JRTC, a deep maneuver area tied to the close area is required. Developing a deep maneuver area linked with the close area allows SOF to conduct its roles in LSCO to support and create an advantage for the CF. Creating a deep maneuver area supports ARSOF readiness, enhances the overall training environment for a BCT, and offers immense training opportunities for other domains.
Complex and hard target sets need to be created for ARSOF forces to conduct Precision Targeting Operations. Spray-painted PVC pipes do not cut it. Realistic targets with complex and integrated operating systems or fortified critical nodes are needed for ARSOF to train to conduct operations. These “hard targets” present realistic adversary systems. The hard targets should connect and support the existing adversary infrastructure in the training scenario and provide critical capabilities to the enemy that provide the BCT with an advantage if taken out of the fight. Creating strategic and operational targets tied to the tactical level would assist in target delineation and create synergy between SOF-CF enhancing I3. This also allows each force to focus efforts on their respective targets and achieve unity of effort. Replication of strategic targets with strategic defenses creates high-value targets that become a realistic SOF target. For example, protected assets with layered security from multiple domains such as communication networks, cyber, and physical defenses in near-peer terms.
At present, the rotational timelines for the training units remain the same, meaning the start and end time for the exercise occurs roughly simultaneously for both SOF and CF. This allows limited time for ARSOF to conduct their roles in shaping the environment and targeting critical adversary nodes to create a window of opportunity for a BCT to conduct a JFE in the training area “box.” A solution to this problem to offset the rotational timelines. This would enable SOF to infiltrate the area first to shape the environment, partner with indigenous forces, target adversary key systems, and build an operational picture that supports the BCT’s planning. Offsetting provides ARSOF with opportunities to send specialized units to validate on hard target mission sets. Additionally, offsetting demonstrates a more realistic role of ARSOF in LSCO that enhances SOF-CF I3 as they mutually support each other and conduct battlefield handover.
The highest risk of SOF-CF operations remains in battlefield handover. Proper battlefield handover provides CAF the most advantage to close with and destroy the enemy. Rotational offsetting at JRTC provides the opportunity to train on battlefield handover, enhancing SOF-CF I3. Rotational offsetting entails JRTC adjusting its rotational schedules to allow for time for SOF to conduct training. This would increase a strain on the OPFOR, sustainment, support, and exercise control to support a longer rotation.
Depiction of Chinese missiles attacking the U.S. Navy. Image: Chinese Internet.
Given the operational limitations of JRTC, ARSOF would benefit the most by focusing on a specific task that is strategically critical to the BCT in the tactical fight. For example, penetrating and disintegrating an adversary’s A2AD bubble provides a window of opportunity for a BCT to conduct a JFE. This mission demonstrates and trains ARSOF’s ability to leverage their relationships with the indigenous population, understanding and wield influence, and conducting precision targeting in a denied environment against a near-peer threat incorporating multi-domain capabilities. This focused mission would enhance SOF-CF I3 and demonstrate ARSOF’s role in LSCO to conventional force commanders and staff.
Conclusion
Times are changing, and national guidance has driven the Army and USASOC to focus on LSCO. JRTC is a venue in which SOF-CF can train on LSCO together, but JRTC has limitations for SOF. Three potential near-term solutions to enhance JRTC for SOF-CF I3 and readiness are: Create a permanent partner force; build and integrate strategic and operational targets; and offset rotational start times. A long-term solution includes the creation of a deep area for SOF operations.
At JRTC, SOF offers very little to a BCT in the close fight, and SOF’s incessant craving to show relevance could be damaging CF’s understanding and utilization of SOF’s role in LSCO. Without a deep area, SOF is forced to focus on “selling” their relevance to a BCT instead of exercising their mission sets. SOF and CF have distinct roles which can complement each other in affecting both the tactical, operational, and even the strategic levels of war to ultimately attain mission accomplishment. In training and war, without a doubt, there will be friction between the two groups as limited resources, competing objectives, and varying levels of risk and mission accomplishment create diverging paths. The struggle is to make training as close to realistic to LSCO as possible.
A Kazakh Air Force CAIG Wing Loong during a Defender of the Fatherland Day parade on Independence Square in Nur-Sultan.
SOF-CF should not adapt to JRTC; JRTC should strive to provide a realistic training environment to enhance readiness. Re-tooling JRTC to meet both SOF and CF requirements could have immense impacts on overall force readiness. SOF-CF have to adapt and develop substantial I3 to face the challenges of the future. With minimal investment, JRTC provides opportunities for both SOF-CF to train, enhance and validate their roles in LSCO. Change is challenging, but the benefits of minor adjustments at our Combat Training Centers such as JRTC could genuinely benefit our nation’s ability to fight and win.
Major Justin Woodward is a Special Forces officer, veteran of small wars, and a student of Unconventional Warfare. He has served in the Army in various roles for 13 years.
The above work reflects the authors’ opinion and does not represent the official policy or position of the Special Forces Regiment, the Department of Defense, or the United States Army.
9. Afghanistan Has Been 'Gut-Wrenching,' 'Deeply Personal For IC': DNI
Afghanistan Has Been 'Gut-Wrenching,' 'Deeply Personal For IC': DNI - Breaking Defense
"There's no question that as you pull out... our intelligence collection is diminished," Haines said. "In Afghanistan, we will want to monitor any reconstitution of terrorist groups."
WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 29: Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines testifies on Capitol Hill, April 29, 2021. (Photo by Graeme Jennings – Pool/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON: The events that played out in Afghanistan in recent months have been “gut-wrenching” and “deeply personal” for the Intelligence Community, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told an audience of government and industry officials today.
The comments come amid widespread public debate over the Biden administration’s decisions about the US withdrawal from Afghanistan — and how some of those decisions were made. The episode has spurred questions about whether the chaos and bloodshed surrounding the withdrawal resulted in a failure of intelligence or operational planning or both.
Speaking to the press on Aug. 19, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said he had seen no intelligence that predicted what unfolded. “There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this [Afghan] army or this government in 11 days,” Milley said.
Haines did not specifically address questions about intelligence gathering leading up to or during the withdrawal. But she did hit on another thorny issue: The trouble the US is expected to have in gathering intelligence now that so many US officials, including intelligence officers, have pulled out and the Kabul embassy has been shuttered.
“There’s no question that as you pull out… our intelligence collection is diminished,” Haines said during opening remarks at the 2021 Intelligence & National Security Summit organized by the Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association (AFCEA) and the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA). “In Afghanistan, we will want to monitor any reconstitution of terrorist groups.”
But Haines said the IC currently views places like Yemen, Syria, and Iraq with greater concern than Afghanistan, while adding that, globally, “the terrorist threat has diminished over time.”
She also said there are still potential threats from those “inspired by the ideology, including in the homeland” and referred to domestic terrorist threats as a “potpourri of instigators.”
“[Domestic terrorism] is a growing and concerning threat, and one we’re focused on. We play an important role, but it does have its limitations,” she said, referring to laws that restrict the IC’s ability to operate within the US.
Haines acknowledged that, overall, the IC has begun shifting budgets and priorities from a 20-year focus on counterterrorism to near-peer competitors China and Russia, as well as a handful of rogue states like Iran and North Korea. She said there is “consensus across the community” that China is the biggest threat to the US going forward.
The required changes within the IC are gradual, Haines admitted.
“Government is a big ship, and you’re just trying to shift the trajectory. It’s slow, but it’s happening,” she said. She said the IC’s changing focus is “almost like a paradigm shift,” adding “There are things we learned from counterterrorism that we can apply” to competition with countries like China and Russia.
Haines also touched on the IC’s work to address disinformation, which she characterized as “critically important.” Just last week, US cybersecurity outfit Mandiant Threat Intelligence detailed a Chinese influence campaign that sought to spark protests in the US, which researchers noted is “potentially indicative of an emerging intent to motivate real-world activity outside of China’s territories.”
The IC is now in the process of standing up a congressionally mandated center to thwart disinformation, Haines said, but added that the IC “must prioritize.” Intelligence agencies “can’t go after all disinformation everywhere. We have to figure out what to go after in a way that is consistent with our values and our democratic system,” she added.
In the wide-ranging talk, Haines also noted her focus as DNI includes people — what she called “the bones” of the IC — new and emerging tech, developing internal IC expertise in new trends, partnerships, and resilience “in conflict and competition, which includes cyber and supply chain.”
There was a lighter moment during the discussion when moderator Letitia Long, chair of the INSA Board, had technical problems with her tablet and joked that someone must be jamming her device.
“I promise it’s not us,” Haines quipped.
10. Opinion | What Game Theory Says About China’s Strategy
Salami slicing and red lines.
Excerpts:
Salami-slicing may have originated as a metaphor in Hungary, but in the decades since, it has entered the vocabulary of politicians, military tacticians and editorial writers far from the banks of the Danube.
China, for instance. In August, The Global Times, a newspaper published under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Party, wrote, “The Biden administration has been gradually advancing ties with the island of Taiwan by using salami-slicing tactics.” China itself has been accused of salami-slicing tactics with its encroachments in the waters around Taiwan, in the South China Sea and on its border with India in the Himalayas. (The Chinese term for salami-slicing is “can shi,” meaning nibbling like a silkworm.)
Economics, specifically the discipline known as game theory, has a lot to say about salami slicing. The strategy is to move against a foe in small increments, always staying below the threshold that will provoke a response.
...
That brings us back to Hungary’s Rakosi, the original salami slicer. Rakosi, a Stalinist, thought he could extinguish the opposition one bit at a time. But he misjudged. Just four months after he was interviewed, he was forced to resign and leave for the Soviet Union. And just three months after that, Hungary erupted in a short-lived uprising against the Stalinist domination that Rakosi had led. Sometimes the salami refuses to be sliced.
Opinion | What Game Theory Says About China’s Strategy
peter Coy
What Game Theory Says About China’s Strategy
Sept. 13, 2021
Credit...Illustration by Arsh Raziuddin, The New York Times
By
Opinion Writer
On March 19, 1956, The New York Times carried an interview with Matyas Rakosi, who was described as “Hungary’s ebullient Communist boss.” Rakosi said that his enemies had accused him of using “salami tactics,” that is, cutting away all opposition slice by slice. He didn’t deny it: “That is the job of any good political party — including the Communists,” Rakosi said.
Salami-slicing may have originated as a metaphor in Hungary, but in the decades since, it has entered the vocabulary of politicians, military tacticians and editorial writers far from the banks of the Danube.
China, for instance. In August, The Global Times, a newspaper published under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Party, wrote, “The Biden administration has been gradually advancing ties with the island of Taiwan by using salami-slicing tactics.” China itself has been accused of salami-slicing tactics with its encroachments in the waters around Taiwan, in the South China Sea and on its border with India in the Himalayas. (The Chinese term for salami-slicing is “can shi,” meaning nibbling like a silkworm.)
Economics, specifically the discipline known as game theory, has a lot to say about salami slicing. The strategy is to move against a foe in small increments, always staying below the threshold that will provoke a response.
Thomas Schelling, the game theorist who received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2005, memorably described the strategy in his 1966 book, “Arms and Influence”:
“Salami tactics,” we can be sure, were invented by a child; whoever first expounded the adult version had already understood the principle when he was small. Tell a child not to go in the water and he’ll sit on the bank and submerge his bare feet; he is not yet “in” the water. Acquiesce, and he’ll stand up; no more of him is in the water than before. Think it over and he’ll start wading, not going any deeper; take a moment to decide whether this is different and he’ll go a little deeper, arguing that since he goes back and forth it all averages out. Pretty soon we are calling out to him not to swim out of sight, wondering whatever happened to all our discipline.
One countermove against salami slicing is to draw a red line: this far and no further. Announcing one’s red line is not just a communication; the announcement itself enhances the obligation by making it harder to back away from, Schelling writes in “Arms and Influence.”
To be effective against salami slicers, though, the commitment must be more than cheap talk. Otherwise the salami slicer will not be deterred. President Bashar al-Assad of Syria successfully called President Barack Obama’s bluff after Obama vowed in 2012 that any use of chemical weapons by Assad would cross a red line. Assad remains in power today.
Getting a reputation for being a little crazy, and occasionally overreacting, is another way to deter a salami slicer. As Schelling puts it, “If one cannot buy clearly identifiable and fully reliable tripwires, an occasional booby trap placed at random may serve somewhat the same purpose in the long run.”
That brings us back to Hungary’s Rakosi, the original salami slicer. Rakosi, a Stalinist, thought he could extinguish the opposition one bit at a time. But he misjudged. Just four months after he was interviewed, he was forced to resign and leave for the Soviet Union. And just three months after that, Hungary erupted in a short-lived uprising against the Stalinist domination that Rakosi had led. Sometimes the salami refuses to be sliced.
Number of the Week
5.9 percent
The change in China’s industrial output in August from a year earlier, according to an estimate by Action Economics of Boulder, Colo. That would be down from a yearly change of 6.4 percent in July and 8.3 percent in June. China’s production has been restrained by “flooding, higher raw material costs and anti-pollution curbs,” according to FocusEconomics of Barcelona, Spain. China’s National Bureau of Statistics will report the official number tomorrow.
Quote of the Day
“Money makes the world go around.”
— Fred Ebb, lyric from “Money, Money” from “Cabaret” (1966).
11. American Global Leadership Is in Retreat
Excerpts:
Meanwhile, the Biden administration occupies an unenviable spot. Its goals on issues like climate change, human rights and denuclearization would have been difficult, if not impossible, to achieve even at the height of U.S. geopolitical dominance a quarter-century ago. Today, the determined and focused hostility to American world leadership emanating from Beijing, Moscow and Tehran limits Washington’s ability to orchestrate a global diplomatic consensus around those ambitious goals.
Under the circumstances, the old consensus in support of a global liberal order seems fated to fade even as geopolitical challenges such as a rising China and global problems like climate change grow. Whether restrainers or global nationalists can produce sustainable, realistic national strategies that work remains to be seen. Inadequate globalist responses to the complex challenges facing America will likely give one or both schools an opportunity to try.
Barring a dramatic, new attack on the scale of 9/11, radical violence from fanatical Islamists, however, appears unlikely to play a large role in the next era of U.S. foreign policy debates. Even as it steels itself for the struggles ahead, America should recognize that as a victory, which is something to be grateful for in a dark and dangerous time.
American Global Leadership Is in Retreat
If the U.S.-led liberal international order is crumbling, what comes next?
WSJ · by Walter Russell Mead
By
Walter Russell Mead
Sept. 13, 2021 6:35 pm ET
The White House in Washington, Nov. 4, 2019.
Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg News
The 20th anniversary of 9/11 finds American foreign policy in a peculiar place. The U.S. hasn’t stabilized the Middle East, permanently remade Afghan society or ended jihad. But no terrorist has managed to inflict another attack on the scale of Sept. 11 on the American homeland. As a result, the War on Terror has receded to the margins of U.S. politics as fears that the liberal world order is crumbling rise to the fore.
The central pillar of Washington’s post-Cold War grand strategy was a quest to build a liberal international order by promoting free trade and secular democratic governance under the aegis of American power around the world. The U.S. foreign policy establishment still believes not only that this strategy offers the best way to secure American interests, but that it represents humanity’s best hope to survive. In the era of nuclear weapons, the age-old cycle of great powers going to war with one another threatens the entire human race and must end, while global problems like climate change can only be addressed through the establishment of effective global institutions.
These are powerful ideas, but as a practical matter, globalists have so far failed to master the challenges of the 21st century. Progress on international trade liberalization stalled as the World Trade Organization’s last comprehensive round of global trade talks ground to a halt during the Obama years. Since then, protectionism has been on the rise. Liberal democracy is also losing ground. Surveys by democracy monitors like Freedom House show a steady decline in political freedom around the world. Meanwhile, China, Russia and Iran are challenging American power with growing success. The problems facing the liberal world order are more acute and urgent than they were in 2001; the order’s resources to address them have diminished.
U.S. policy failures overseas have reduced American confidence in the globalist vision. The Trump movement replaced traditional Republican internationalism with a more populist agenda and the growing progressive wing within the Democratic Party has pushed for more fundamental changes in American foreign policy. While President Biden’s rhetoric often echoes the ideas of the old American globalism, his administration doesn’t seem to have much appetite for the muscular humanitarianism and liberal trade policy that, for example, marked the Clinton presidency.
More failures seem likely. The fall of Hong Kong, the consolidation of Russian power in Belarus, the Afghan collapse, and gains by Iranian clients across the Middle East signal to both U.S. allies and adversaries that Washington has lost control of geopolitical events. The liberal order’s record in managing global challenges ranging from Covid-19 to migration to climate change also remains uninspiring.
Two alternative visions of American grand strategy are gaining prominence in U.S. politics as globalism fades. Restrainers, who include both progressives and conservatives, want to reduce America’s footprint abroad. As the U.S. withdraws from its global commitments, restrainers believe a natural balance of power will emerge, with American allies from Europe to Asia taking responsibility for their own defense. On the other hand, global nationalists—mostly more hawkish Republicans and independents—have little regard for global multilateral institutions, free trade and visionary human rights goals, but believe that U.S. security requires an active American presence in key theaters around the world.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration occupies an unenviable spot. Its goals on issues like climate change, human rights and denuclearization would have been difficult, if not impossible, to achieve even at the height of U.S. geopolitical dominance a quarter-century ago. Today, the determined and focused hostility to American world leadership emanating from Beijing, Moscow and Tehran limits Washington’s ability to orchestrate a global diplomatic consensus around those ambitious goals.
Under the circumstances, the old consensus in support of a global liberal order seems fated to fade even as geopolitical challenges such as a rising China and global problems like climate change grow. Whether restrainers or global nationalists can produce sustainable, realistic national strategies that work remains to be seen. Inadequate globalist responses to the complex challenges facing America will likely give one or both schools an opportunity to try.
Barring a dramatic, new attack on the scale of 9/11, radical violence from fanatical Islamists, however, appears unlikely to play a large role in the next era of U.S. foreign policy debates. Even as it steels itself for the struggles ahead, America should recognize that as a victory, which is something to be grateful for in a dark and dangerous time.
Appeared in the September 14, 2021, print edition.
WSJ · by Walter Russell Mead
12. Biden Doctrine abating US tensions with China
A view from India.
Excerpts:
The Chinese readout says Biden reaffirmed the US adherence to the “one-China policy” and sought “more candid exchanges and constructive discussions with China to identify key and priority areas where cooperation is possible, avoid miscommunication, miscalculation and unintended conflict, and get US-China relations back on track.”
Biden also said the US “looks forward to more discussions and cooperation with China to reach more common positions” on important issues and spotlighted that “the future of the bulk of the world will depend on how the United States and China get on with each other.”
And the two leaders agreed to “maintain frequent contact by multiple means and instruct officials at the working level to intensify the work, conduct extensive dialogue and create conditions for the further development of China-US relations.”
Did they exchange notes for an early meeting in person? That’s entirely conceivable now. Biden appears to be discarding the illusions of suppressing China. There is realization that China’s help and cooperation are vital for addressing key global issues ranging from climate change and Afghanistan to North Korea and Iran.
Interestingly, all the recent high-level exchanges between the two countries have been initiated by the US side. Post-Afghanistan, through the past three weeks alone, Secretary of State Antony Blinken twice called Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Biden’s climate envoy John Kerry since communicated with Wang as well as Politburo member Yang Jiechi while visiting China.
All this underscores a sense of urgency in Washington to open a pathway toward Beijing. The US administration is grappling with complex foreign-policy challenges and facing huge pressure domestically with crises on multiple fronts.
However, there is a contradiction here: the seething rivalry with rising China and the obsession with weakening the “strategic rival” on one side and the acute need for China’s help and cooperation on the other side. Reconciling this contradiction has become the litmus test of the Biden Doctrine.
Biden Doctrine abating US tensions with China
A 90-minute phone conversation between the presidents of the United States and China surely makes world news, but Joe Biden’s call to his Xi Jinping on Friday draws special attention on its timing, backdrop and substance.
It comes “post-Afghanistan,” on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and amid high expectations of a “Biden Doctrine” struggling to be born in US foreign policy. All three are defining moments amid the backdrop of sure signs of a slow, steady decline of the United States accelerating of late.
An excellent essay in Foreign Affairs magazine defines the Biden Doctrine as follows: A “coherent version of pragmatic realism – a mode of thought that prizes the advancement of tangible US interests, expects other states to follow their own interests, and changes course to get what the United States needs in a competitive world … [marking] a welcome change from decades of over-assertive US foreign policy that has squandered lives and resources in pursuit of unachievable goals.”
Of course, the above definition is only partly correct. Wasn’t Biden an ardent advocate of NATO expansion, the turning point in the post-Cold War era big-power politics? George Kennan forewarned at that time with great prescience:
“Why, with all the hopeful possibilities engendered by the end of the Cold War, should East-West relations become centered on the question of who would be allied with whom and, by implication, against whom in some fanciful, totally unforeseeable and most improbable future military conflict?
“Bluntly stated … expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.… ”
Biden no doubt represented the American establishment and was full of the “unipolar moment” like the US strategic community and political elite. He supported the US-led military intervention in Yugoslavia and voted to authorize the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the initial heady phase of the invasion of Iraq, he even saw the US putting that country “on the path to a pluralistic and democratic society.”
US Marines assist evacuees at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 29. Biden voted to authorize the war in Afghanistan. Photo: AFP / EyePress News
Yet to be fair, once it became clear that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were going horribly wrong, Biden opposed any “surge” strategy and urged quick exit. Call it a pragmatic realistic streak or the premonition of a consummate politician, herein lies the best hope for the Biden Doctrine, which he enunciated on August 31 in a landmark speech on the end of the war in Afghanistan.
It is a bit early to conclude that the Afghanistan withdrawal presages a recast of the US military footprint globally – although domestic reform is the compelling reality today for Biden, which demands rollback of the imperial overreach.
Certainly, the touchstone will be the United States’ excessively militarized and zero-sum approach in Asia. Biden’s call for extreme competition with China ratchets up tensions. If this extended to an explicit guarantee to defend Taiwan, Washington’s already extensive regional commitments would cross the red line.
Biden’s approach has been to intensify geopolitical rivalry with China while also welcoming cooperation on common challenges, preserving room for diplomacy. However, Beijing has lately taken a tough line ruling out selective engagement – that is, unless the US jettisons its hostile attitude toward China to suppress it willfully, cooperation is not possible.
It is from such a perspective that Biden’s call to Xi on Friday needs to be understood. The threefold salience of the White House readout is, first, that a “broad, strategic discussion” has taken place resulting in a mutual agreement to engage “openly and straightforwardly” on areas where their interests converge as well as where “our interests, values and perspectives diverge.”
Second, Biden underscored the US commitment to “peace, stability, and prosperity” in the Indo-Pacific region and to ensure that “competition does not veer into conflict.”
Third, this was a politely worded White House readout devoid of one-upmanship or aggressive hectoring. The contrast with the curtly worded White House readout of the first conversation on February 20 between Biden and Xi couldn’t be sharper.
In February, Biden harped on “preserving a free and open Indo-Pacific” and highlighted his “fundamental concerns about Beijing’s coercive and unfair economic practices, crackdown in Hong Kong, human-rights abuses in Xinjiang, and increasingly assertive actions in the region, including toward Taiwan.”
Biden was hanging tough and his interest in bilateral engagement narrowed down to “pursuing [with China] practical, results-oriented engagements when it advances the interests of the American people and those of our allies.” Period. On Friday, on the contrary, Biden virtually came around to conceding Beijing’s insistence on a holistic approach to the relationship. It suggests a major rethink.
A watchtower on a high-security facility near what is believed to be a re-education camp where mostly Muslim ethnic minorities are detained in Xinjiang region. Biden spoke out about alleged Xinjiang abuses in February. Photo: AFP / Greg Baker
To be sure, the expansive Chinese readout is conspicuous for its note of satisfaction over the “candid, in-depth and extensive strategic communication and exchanges.” Although the relationship has “run into serious difficulty” only due to US policy, Xi has gone the extra league: “Getting the relationship right is not an option, but something we must do and must do well.…
“The two countries should look ahead and press forward, demonstrate strategic courage and political resolve, and bring China-US relations back to the right track of stable development as soon as possible.”
But then, Xi also gently flagged that “engagement and dialogue to advance coordination and cooperation” need to be “on the basis of respecting each other’s core concerns and properly managing differences.” Overall, Xi’s remarks moderate the tough “all-or-nothing” optics of senior Chinese officials ruling out cooperation unless US policymakers mend their ways.
The Chinese readout says Biden reaffirmed the US adherence to the “one-China policy” and sought “more candid exchanges and constructive discussions with China to identify key and priority areas where cooperation is possible, avoid miscommunication, miscalculation and unintended conflict, and get US-China relations back on track.”
Biden also said the US “looks forward to more discussions and cooperation with China to reach more common positions” on important issues and spotlighted that “the future of the bulk of the world will depend on how the United States and China get on with each other.”
And the two leaders agreed to “maintain frequent contact by multiple means and instruct officials at the working level to intensify the work, conduct extensive dialogue and create conditions for the further development of China-US relations.”
Did they exchange notes for an early meeting in person? That’s entirely conceivable now. Biden appears to be discarding the illusions of suppressing China. There is realization that China’s help and cooperation are vital for addressing key global issues ranging from climate change and Afghanistan to North Korea and Iran.
Interestingly, all the recent high-level exchanges between the two countries have been initiated by the US side. Post-Afghanistan, through the past three weeks alone, Secretary of State Antony Blinken twice called Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Biden’s climate envoy John Kerry since communicated with Wang as well as Politburo member Yang Jiechi while visiting China.
All this underscores a sense of urgency in Washington to open a pathway toward Beijing. The US administration is grappling with complex foreign-policy challenges and facing huge pressure domestically with crises on multiple fronts.
However, there is a contradiction here: the seething rivalry with rising China and the obsession with weakening the “strategic rival” on one side and the acute need for China’s help and cooperation on the other side. Reconciling this contradiction has become the litmus test of the Biden Doctrine.
M K Bhadrakumar is a former Indian diplomat.
13. Facebook Says Its Rules Apply to All. Company Documents Reveal a Secret Elite That’s Exempt.
I guess Facebook is not your friend (unless you are one of the "elite").
Will this be an inflection point in the life of Facebook or perhaps a tipping point for Congress that will push them over the edge to force them to take action. I see all the advertisements from Facebook touting the 25th anniversary of internet regulations and calling for them to be updated. Facebook may need to be careful what it asks for.
Facebook Says Its Rules Apply to All. Company Documents Reveal a Secret Elite That’s Exempt.
A program known as XCheck has given millions of celebrities, politicians and other high-profile users special treatment, a privilege many abuse
The program, known as “cross check” or “XCheck,” was initially intended as a quality-control measure for actions taken against high-profile accounts, including celebrities, politicians and journalists. Today, it shields millions of VIP users from the company’s normal enforcement process, the documents show. Some users are “whitelisted”—rendered immune from enforcement actions—while others are allowed to post rule-violating material pending Facebook employee reviews that often never come.
At times, the documents show, XCheck has protected public figures whose posts contain harassment or incitement to violence, violations that would typically lead to sanctions for regular users. In 2019, it allowed international soccer star Neymar to show nude photos of a woman, who had accused him of rape, to tens of millions of his fans before the content was removed by Facebook. Whitelisted accounts shared inflammatory claims that Facebook’s fact checkers deemed false, including that vaccines are deadly, that Hillary Clinton had covered up “pedophile rings,” and that then-President Donald Trump had called all refugees seeking asylum “animals,” according to the documents.
A 2019 internal review of Facebook’s whitelisting practices, marked attorney-client privileged, found favoritism to those users to be both widespread and “not publicly defensible.”
“We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly,” said the confidential review. It called the company’s actions “a breach of trust” and added: “Unlike the rest of our community, these people can violate our standards without any consequences.”
Despite attempts to rein it in, XCheck grew to include at least 5.8 million users in 2020, documents show. In its struggle to accurately moderate a torrent of content and avoid negative attention, Facebook created invisible elite tiers within the social network.
In describing the system, Facebook has misled the public and its own Oversight Board, a body that Facebook created to ensure the accountability of the company’s enforcement systems.
In June, Facebook told the Oversight Board in writing that its system for high-profile users was used in “a small number of decisions.”
In a written statement, Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said criticism of XCheck was fair, but added that the system “was designed for an important reason: to create an additional step so we can accurately enforce policies on content that could require more understanding.”
At Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.
Photo: Ian Bates for The Wall Street Journal
He said Facebook has been accurate in its communications to the board and that the company is continuing to work to phase out the practice of whitelisting. “A lot of this internal material is outdated information stitched together to create a narrative that glosses over the most important point: Facebook itself identified the issues with cross check and has been working to address them,” he said.
Internal documents
The documents that describe XCheck are part of an extensive array of internal Facebook communications reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. They show that Facebook knows, in acute detail, that its platforms are riddled with flaws that cause harm, often in ways only the company fully understands.
Moreover, the documents show, Facebook often lacks the will or the ability to address them.
This is the first in a series of articles based on those documents and on interviews with dozens of current and former employees.
At least some of the documents have been turned over to the Securities and Exchange Commission and to Congress by a person seeking federal whistleblower protection, according to people familiar with the matter.
Facebook’s stated ambition has long been to connect people. As it expanded over the past 17 years, from Harvard undergraduates to billions of global users, it struggled with the messy reality of bringing together disparate voices with different motivations—from people wishing each other happy birthday to Mexican drug cartels conducting business on the platform. Those problems increasingly consume the company.
Time and again, the documents show, in the U.S. and overseas, Facebook’s own researchers have identified the platform’s ill effects, in areas including teen mental health, political discourse and human trafficking. Time and again, despite Congressional hearings, its own pledges and numerous media exposés, the company didn’t fix them.
Sometimes the company held back for fear of hurting its business. In other cases, Facebook made changes that backfired. Even Mr. Zuckerberg’s pet initiatives have been thwarted by his own systems and algorithms.
The documents include research reports, online employee discussions and drafts of presentations to senior management, including Mr. Zuckerberg. They aren’t the result of idle grumbling, but rather the formal work of teams whose job was to examine the social network and figure out how it could improve.
They offer perhaps the clearest picture thus far of how broadly Facebook’s problems are known inside the company, up to the CEO himself. And when Facebook speaks publicly about many of these issues, to lawmakers, regulators and, in the case of XCheck, its own Oversight Board, it often provides misleading or partial answers, masking how much it knows.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, right, at a House Financial Services Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in 2019.
Photo: Andrew Harnik/Associated Press
One area in which the company hasn’t struggled is profitability. In the past five years, during which it has been under intense scrutiny and roiled by internal debate, Facebook has generated profit of more than $100 billion. The company is currently valued at more than $1 trillion.
Rough justice
For ordinary users, Facebook dispenses a kind of rough justice in assessing whether posts meet the company’s rules against bullying, sexual content, hate speech and incitement to violence. Sometimes the company’s automated systems summarily delete or bury content suspected of rule violations without a human review. At other times, material flagged by those systems or by users is assessed by content moderators employed by outside companies.
Mr. Zuckerberg estimated in 2018 that Facebook gets 10% of its content removal decisions wrong, and, depending on the enforcement action taken, users might never be told what rule they violated or be given a chance to appeal.
Users designated for XCheck review, however, are treated more deferentially. Facebook designed the system to minimize what its employees have described in the documents as “PR fires”—negative media attention that comes from botched enforcement actions taken against VIPs.
If Facebook’s systems conclude that one of those accounts might have broken its rules, they don’t remove the content—at least not right away, the documents indicate. They route the complaint into a separate system, staffed by better-trained, full-time employees, for additional layers of review.
Most Facebook employees were able to add users into the XCheck system, the documents say, and a 2019 audit found that at least 45 teams around the company were involved in whitelisting. Users aren’t generally told that they have been tagged for special treatment. An internal guide to XCheck eligibility cites qualifications including being “newsworthy,” “influential or popular” or “PR risky.”
Neymar, the Brazilian soccer star whose full name is Neymar da Silva Santos Jr., easily qualified. With more than 150 million followers, Neymar’s account on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, is one of the most popular in the world.
After a woman accused Neymar of rape in 2019, he posted Facebook and Instagram videos defending himself—and showing viewers his WhatsApp correspondence with his accuser, which included her name and nude photos of her. He accused the woman of extorting him.
Brazilian soccer star Neymar, left, in Rio de Janeiro in 2019.
Photo: Leo Correa/Associated Press
Facebook’s standard procedure for handling the posting of “nonconsensual intimate imagery” is simple: Delete it. But Neymar was protected by XCheck.
For more than a day, the system blocked Facebook’s moderators from removing the video. An internal review of the incident found that 56 million Facebook and Instagram users saw what Facebook described in a separate document as “revenge porn,” exposing the woman to what an employee referred to in the review as abuse from other users.
“This included the video being reposted more than 6,000 times, bullying and harassment about her character,” the review found.
Facebook’s operational guidelines stipulate that not only should unauthorized nude photos be deleted, but that people who post them should have their accounts deleted.
“After escalating the case to leadership,” the review said, “we decided to leave Neymar’s accounts active, a departure from our usual ‘one strike’ profile disable policy.”
Neymar denied the rape allegation, and no charges were filed against him. The woman was charged by Brazilian authorities with slander, extortion and fraud. The first two charges were dropped, and she was acquitted of the third. A spokesperson for Neymar said the athlete adheres to Facebook’s rules and declined to comment further.
The lists of those enrolled in XCheck were “scattered throughout the company, without clear governance or ownership,” according to a “Get Well Plan” from last year. “This results in not applying XCheck to those who pose real risks and on the flip-side, applying XCheck to those that do not deserve it (such as abusive accounts, persistent violators). These have created PR fires.”
In practice, Facebook appeared more concerned with avoiding gaffes than mitigating high-profile abuse. One Facebook review in 2019 of major XCheck errors showed that of 18 incidents investigated, 16 involved instances where the company erred in actions taken against prominent users.
Four of the 18 touched on inadvertent enforcement actions against content from Mr. Trump and his son, Donald Trump Jr. Other flubbed enforcement actions were taken against the accounts of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, fashion model Sunnaya Nash, and Mr. Zuckerberg himself, whose live-streamed employee Q&A had been suppressed after an algorithm classified it as containing misinformation.
Pulling content
Historically, Facebook contacted some VIP users who violated platform policies and provided a “self-remediation window” of 24 hours to delete violating content on their own before Facebook took it down and applied penalties.
Mr. Stone, the company spokesman, said Facebook has phased out that perk, which was still in place during the 2020 elections. He declined to say when it ended.
At times, pulling content from a VIP’s account requires approval from senior executives on the communications and public-policy teams, or even from Mr. Zuckerberg or Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, according to people familiar with the matter.
In June 2020, a Trump post came up during a discussion about XCheck’s hidden rules that took place on the company’s internal communications platform, called Facebook Workplace. The previous month, Mr. Trump said in a post: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
A Facebook manager noted that an automated system, designed by the company to detect whether a post violates its rules, had scored Mr. Trump’s post 90 out of 100, indicating a high likelihood it violated the platform’s rules.
For a normal user post, such a score would result in the content being removed as soon as a single person reported it to Facebook. Instead, as Mr. Zuckerberg publicly acknowledged last year, he personally made the call to leave the post up. “Making a manual decision like this seems less defensible than algorithmic scoring and actioning,” the manager wrote.
Mr. Trump’s account was covered by XCheck before his two-year suspension from Facebook in June. So too are those belonging to members of his family, Congress and the European Union parliament, along with mayors, civic activists and dissidents.
Those included in the XCheck program, according to Facebook documents, include, in top row: Neymar, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Jr. and Mark Zuckerberg, and in bottom row, Elizabeth Warren, Dan Scavino, Candace Owens and Doug the Pug.
Photo: ZUMA Press, Getty Images (4), Reuters (2), Associated Press
While the program included most government officials, it didn’t include all candidates for public office, at times effectively granting incumbents in elections an advantage over challengers. The discrepancy was most prevalent in state and local races, the documents show, and employees worried Facebook could be subject to accusations of favoritism.
Mr. Stone acknowledged the concern but said the company had worked to address it. “We made multiple efforts to ensure that both in federal and nonfederal races, challengers as well as incumbents were included in the program,” he said.
The program covers pretty much anyone regularly in the media or who has a substantial online following, including film stars, cable talk-show hosts, academics and online personalities with large followings. On Instagram, XCheck covers accounts for popular animal influencers including “Doug the Pug.”
In practice, most of the content flagged by the XCheck system faced no subsequent review, the documents show.
Even when the company does review the material, enforcement delays like the one on Neymar’s posts mean content that should have been prohibited can spread to large audiences. Last year, XCheck allowed posts that violated its rules to be viewed at least 16.4 billion times, before later being removed, according to a summary of the program in late December.
Facebook recognized years ago that the enforcement exemptions granted by its XCheck system were unacceptable, with protections sometimes granted to what it called abusive accounts and persistent violators of the rules, the documents show. Nevertheless, the program expanded over time, with tens of thousands of accounts added just last year.
In addition, Facebook has asked fact-checking partners to retroactively change their findings on posts from high-profile accounts, waived standard punishments for propagating what it classifies as misinformation and even altered planned changes to its algorithms to avoid political fallout.
“Facebook currently has no firewall to insulate content-related decisions from external pressures,” a September 2020 memo by a Facebook senior research scientist states, describing daily interventions in its rule-making and enforcement process by both Facebook’s public-policy team and senior executives.
A December memo from another Facebook data scientist was blunter: “Facebook routinely makes exceptions for powerful actors.”
Flubbed calls
Mr. Zuckerberg has consistently framed his position on how to moderate controversial content as one of principled neutrality. “We do not want to become the arbiters of truth,” he told Congress in a hearing last year.
Facebook’s special enforcement system for VIP users arose from the fact that its human and automated content-enforcement systems regularly flub calls.
Part of the problem is resources. While Facebook has trumpeted its spending on an army of content moderators, it still isn’t capable of fully processing the torrent of user-generated content on its platforms. Even assuming adequate staffing and a higher accuracy rate, making millions of moderation decisions a day would still involve numerous high-profile calls with the potential for bad PR.
Facebook wanted a system for “reducing false positives and human workload,” according to one internal document. The XCheck system was set up to do that.
To minimize conflict with average users, the company has long kept its notifications of content removals opaque. Users often describe on Facebook, Instagram or rival platforms what they say are removal errors, often accompanied by a screenshot of the notice they receive.
Facebook pays close attention. One internal presentation about the issue last year was titled “Users Retaliating Against Facebook Actions.”
“Literally all I said was happy birthday,” one user posted in response to a botched takedown, according to the presentation.
“Apparently Facebook doesn’t allow complaining about paint colors now?” another user complained after Facebook flagged as hate speech the declaration that “white paint colors are the worst.”
“Users like to screenshot us at our most ridiculous,” the presentation said, noting they often are outraged even when Facebook correctly applies its rules.
If getting panned by everyday users is unpleasant, inadvertently upsetting prominent ones is potentially embarrassing.
Last year, Facebook’s algorithms misinterpreted a years-old post from Hosam El Sokkari, an independent journalist who once headed the BBC’s Arabic News service, according to a September 2020 “incident review” by the company.
In the post, he condemned Osama bin Laden, but Facebook’s algorithms misinterpreted the post as supporting the terrorist, which would have violated the platform’s rules. Human reviewers erroneously concurred with the automated decision and denied Mr. El Sokkari’s appeal.
As a result, Mr. El Sokkari’s account was blocked from broadcasting a live video shortly before a scheduled public appearance. In response, he denounced Facebook on Twitter and the company’s own platform in posts that received hundreds of thousands of views.
Facebook swiftly reversed itself, but shortly afterward mistakenly took down more of Mr. El Sokkari’s posts criticizing conservative Muslim figures.
Mr. El Sokkari responded: “Facebook Arabic support team has obviously been infiltrated by extremists,” he tweeted, an assertion that prompted more scrambling inside Facebook.
After seeking input from 41 employees, Facebook said in a report about the incident that XCheck remained too often “reactive and demand-driven.” The report concluded that XCheck should be expanded further to include prominent independent journalists such as Mr. El Sokkari, to avoid future public-relations black eyes.
As XCheck mushroomed to encompass what the documents said are millions of users world-wide, reviewing all the questionable content became a fresh mountain of work.
Whitelist status
In response to what the documents describe as chronic underinvestment in moderation efforts, many teams around Facebook chose not to enforce the rules with high-profile accounts at all—the practice referred to as whitelisting. In some instances, whitelist status was granted with little record of who had granted it and why, according to the 2019 audit.
“This problem is pervasive, touching almost every area of the company,” the 2019 review states, citing the audit. It concluded that whitelists “pose numerous legal, compliance, and legitimacy risks for the company and harm to our community.”
Facebook is trying to eliminate the practice of whitelisting, the documents show. Its headquarters in Menlo Park.
Photo: Ian Bates for The Wall Street Journal
A plan to fix the program, described in a document the following year, said that blanket exemptions and posts that were never subsequently reviewed had become the core of the program, meaning most content from XCheck users wasn’t subject to enforcement. “We currently review less than 10% of XChecked content,” the document stated.
Mr. Stone said the company improved that ratio during 2020, though he declined to provide data.
The leeway given to prominent political accounts on misinformation, which the company in 2019 acknowledged in a limited form, baffled some employees responsible for protecting the platforms. High-profile accounts posed greater risks than regular ones, researchers noted, yet were the least policed.
“We are knowingly exposing users to misinformation that we have the processes and resources to mitigate,” said a 2019 memo by Facebook researchers, called “The Political Whitelist Contradicts Facebook’s Core Stated Principles.” Technology website The Information previously reported on the document.
In one instance, political whitelist users were sharing articles from alternative-medicine websites claiming that a Berkeley, Calif., doctor had revealed that chemotherapy doesn’t work 97% of the time. Fact-checking organizations have debunked the claims, noting that the science is misrepresented and that the doctor cited in the article died in 1978.
In an internal comment in response to the memo, Samidh Chakrabarti, an executive who headed Facebook’s Civic Team, which focuses on political and social discourse on the platform, voiced his discomfort with the exemptions.
“One of the fundamental reasons I joined FB Is that I believe in its potential to be a profoundly democratizing force that enables everyone to have an equal civic voice,” he wrote. “So having different rules on speech for different people is very troubling to me.”
Other employees said the practice was at odds with Facebook’s values.
“FB’s decision-making on content policy is influenced by political considerations,” wrote an economist in the company’s data-science division.
“Separate content policy from public policy,” recommended Kaushik Iyer, then lead engineer for Facebook’s civic integrity team, in a June 2020 memo.
That same month, employees debated on Workplace, the internal platform, about the merits of going public with the XCheck program.
As the transparency proposal drew dozens of “like” and “love” emojis from colleagues, the Civic Team’s Mr. Chakrabarti looped in the product manager overseeing the XCheck program to offer a response.
The fairness concerns were real and XCheck had been mismanaged, the product manager wrote, but “we have to balance that with business risk.“ Since the company was already trying to address the program’s failings, the best approach was “internal transparency,” he said.
On May 5, Facebook’s Oversight Board upheld the suspension of Mr. Trump, whom it accused of creating a risk of violence in connection with the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol in Washington. It also criticized the company’s enforcement practices, recommending that Facebook more clearly articulate its rules for prominent individuals and develop penalties for violators.
In May, Facebook’s Oversight Board upheld the suspension of former President Donald Trump.
Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News
As one of 19 recommendations, the board asked Facebook to “report on the relative error rates and thematic consistency of determinations made through the cross check process compared with ordinary enforcement procedures.”
A month later, Facebook said it was implementing 15 of the 19 recommendations. The one about disclosing cross check data was one of the four it said it wouldn’t adopt.
“It’s not feasible to track this information,” Facebook wrote in its responses. “We have explained this product in our newsroom,” it added, linking to a 2018 blog post that declared “we remove content from Facebook, no matter who posts it, when it breaks our standards.” Facebook’s 2019 internal review had previously cited that same blog post as misleading.
The XCheck documents show that Facebook misled the Oversight Board, said Kate Klonick, a law professor at St. John’s University. The board was funded with an initial $130 million commitment from Facebook in 2019, and Ms. Klonick was given special access by the company to study the group’s formation and its processes.
“Why would they spend so much time and money setting up the Oversight Board, then lie to it?” she said of Facebook after reviewing XCheck documentation at the Journal’s request. “This is going to completely undercut it.”
In a written statement, a spokesman for the board said it “has expressed on multiple occasions its concern about the lack of transparency in Facebook’s content moderation processes, especially relating to the company’s inconsistent management of high-profile accounts.”
Facebook is trying to eliminate the practice of whitelisting, the documents show and the company spokesman confirmed. The company set a goal of eliminating total immunity for “high severity” violations of FB rules in the first half of 2021. A March update reported that the company was struggling to rein in additions to XCheck.
“VIP lists continue to grow,” a product manager on Facebook’s Mistakes Prevention Team wrote. She announced a plan to “stop the bleeding” by blocking Facebook employees’ ability to enroll new users in XCheck.
One potential solution remains off the table: holding high-profile users to the same standards as everyone else.
“We do not have systems built out to do that extra diligence for all integrity actions that can occur for a VIP,” her memo said. To avoid making mistakes that might anger influential users, she noted, Facebook would instruct reviewers to take a gentle approach.
“We will index to assuming good intent in our review flows and lean into ‘innocent until proven guilty,’ ” she wrote.
The plan, the manager wrote, was “generally” supported by company leadership.
—Design by Andrew Levinson. A color filter has been used on some photos.
14. ‘To Rule the Waves’ Review: The Necessity of a Navy (book review)
Excerpts:
Mr. Jones has managed to write an important book about foreign policy without delivering an impenetrable tome. He handles his reporting deftly, keeping the reader engaged as he roams from a Cold War-era submarine base beneath a Norwegian mountain, recently reactivated in anticipation of conflicts in the Arctic, to the bridge of a missile-equipped command vessel in the Pacific. And he deftly diagrams the connections between economic policy and national security. As he asserts: “Globalization has been very good for the US economy, but quite bad for the US polity.” But the stark choice he offers—“Either we pull away from globalization, at fantastic cost, or we remake it”—may be too pessimistic.
With little public attention, manufacturers have been pulling away from globalization for more than a decade now. Relative to the world’s output, foreign direct investment peaked in 2007, and exports of manufactured goods did the same a year later, due largely to businesses’ decisions about managing risks and costs. Increasingly globalization has to do with things that don’t move in container ships, such as software, research services and entertainment. These sorts of products have international supply chains, too, but bigger navies won’t do much to protect them.
‘To Rule the Waves’ Review: The Necessity of a Navy
The imperative of protecting trade lanes on the high seas is fueling maritime competition, especially between the U.S. and China.
In “To Rule the Waves,” Bruce D. Jones attempts to adapt Mahan’s thinking to the 21st century. In prose much livelier than his predecessor’s, Mr. Jones places the oceans at the center of modern globalization. They took on such importance, he writes, amid “relative comity between the world’s most populous nations,” a time of “deepening economic integration, and a sense of shared stakes and even a shared fate in the evolution of the natural world.” But Mr. Jones warns that in the years ahead, the oceans will lie at the heart of a much more contentious relationship among the great powers.
The book starts with a look at the explosive growth of maritime trade in merchandise and oil since the late 20th century. It was trade, the author emphasizes, that propelled China’s rapid rise to challenge the United States both economically and militarily. In particular, container shipping has enabled manufacturers and retailers to forge complex supply chains, through which inputs from many countries are transported across the seas to be combined into finished goods. Those chains often have links in China, anchoring it at the center of international commerce.
From the security perspective, Mr. Jones points out, supply chains that span the oceans have created a conundrum for the U.S. Keeping them secure requires military force, and if America wants to maintain its naval primacy, then it must do the job. That effectively means, as Mr. Jones puts it, that “the US Navy is securing a flow of trade in goods and energy that profits China and Russia.”
The imperative of protecting trade lanes, Mr. Jones says, is fueling maritime competition, especially between the U.S. and China. Superficially, much of this competition is not between militaries. The container terminals that China-based entities control in Belgium, Djibouti, South Korea and other places are profit-making ventures, as is state-owned China Cosco Shipping Corp., which owns nearly 1,400 commercial vessels.
Viewed through Chinese eyes, though, this maritime infrastructure also offers protection from hostile foreigners who could disrupt China’s access to raw materials, fuels and components headed to its assembly plants. “If the United States and its allies could actually succeed in stopping shipping from reaching Chinese shores, it could cripple the Chinese economy,” Mr. Jones writes. China’s strategic policy, including its effort to turn the East and South China seas into Chinese lakes, is intended to keep that from happening.
Mr. Jones, a foreign-policy scholar at the Brookings Institution, is among the burgeoning community of China hawks in Washington. “We are already deeply mired in an arms race with China,” he insists. But as he observes, the naval arms race is not merely a contest between two countries. The expanding Indian navy has gained access to bases throughout the Indian Ocean. Japan is bolstering its naval forces. Russia “has been using its navy in ways that are very helpful to China” and likely has the ability to tap or sever undersea cables. Several other countries have submarines on patrol in the western Pacific. Hostilities could make things very messy very fast, and the ensuing interruption of supply chains and communications links could cripple the economies of countries seeking to steer clear of the conflict.
Climate change is adding to these tensions. Though the phenomenon is global, the near-term effects vary by geography. Mr. Jones highlights two of particular relevance to China’s projection of power. One is a drop in fish stocks in the South China Sea, which may explain why China has moved aggressively against Philippine boats fishing in waters that both countries claim. The other is the potentially disastrous impact of changing rainfall patterns on Myanmar, threatening the country’s viability and increasing its dependence on China, which wants to import and export through Myanmar to reduce its vulnerability to the closure of sea lanes east and south.
Mr. Jones has managed to write an important book about foreign policy without delivering an impenetrable tome. He handles his reporting deftly, keeping the reader engaged as he roams from a Cold War-era submarine base beneath a Norwegian mountain, recently reactivated in anticipation of conflicts in the Arctic, to the bridge of a missile-equipped command vessel in the Pacific. And he deftly diagrams the connections between economic policy and national security. As he asserts: “Globalization has been very good for the US economy, but quite bad for the US polity.” But the stark choice he offers—“Either we pull away from globalization, at fantastic cost, or we remake it”—may be too pessimistic.
With little public attention, manufacturers have been pulling away from globalization for more than a decade now. Relative to the world’s output, foreign direct investment peaked in 2007, and exports of manufactured goods did the same a year later, due largely to businesses’ decisions about managing risks and costs. Increasingly globalization has to do with things that don’t move in container ships, such as software, research services and entertainment. These sorts of products have international supply chains, too, but bigger navies won’t do much to protect them.
Mr. Levinson’s most recent book is “Outside the Box: How Globalization Changed From Moving Stuff to Spreading Ideas.”
15. After South China Sea Incidents, US Needs 'Sustained' Pacific Presence, Lawmaker Says
Can we play a long game?
Excerpts:
In the meantime, the Navy continues to experiment with and tout its premiere concept of operation known as distributed maritime operations. Historically, one of the Navy’s concerns when attempting to combat China’s territorial claims is a need to respond without escalating the situation, a delicate task proven difficult when Navy destroyers heavily outgun the smaller Chinese patrol boats attempting to expel them.
“Distributed maritime operations is geared to combat, but the fleet it requires does provide more options and greater number of ships to cover more areas which is important in these grey zone operations at sea,” said Sadler. “That said, commanding officers need more non-lethal options and training for interactions with Chinese maritime militia and coast guard.”
As an example of a non-lethal option, Sadler suggested forms of electromagnetic capabilities that when directed at an opposing vessel could disorient or disable personnel, but not cause any permanent damage.
Another option for dealing with China’s claims – and the ensuing harassment the Pentagon calls “grey zone activity” – is a form of deterrence recently promoted by Marine Commandant Gen. David Berger, “deterrence by detection.” In that strategy the US would highlight every microaggression China takes both publicly, but, perhaps more importantly, in explicit detail privately to allies and partners.
Tim Walton, a fellow at the Hudson Institute, said the US should pursue Berger’s idea but suggested detection alone will not be enough to break the status quo.
“US and allied forces require the technical ability and political will to credibly target and defeat opposing operational systems at appropriate scales, rates, and levels of risk and escalation in order to deny the PRC the aims of its aggression,” he said.
After South China Sea Incidents, US Needs 'Sustained' Pacific Presence, Lawmaker Says - Breaking Defense
Rep. Elaine Luria and analysts say the US Navy must a play the long game when it comes to confronting China's territorial claims in the South China Sea.
The destroyer Benfold (DDG-65) transits the Taiwan Strait on July 28 2021. (File)
WASHINGTON: A recent contentious run-in between the US Navy and the Chinese military in the South China Sea was just the latest in a string of incidents that highlight a fundamental question for US operations in the contested waterways: How long can the status quo be maintained, and to what end?
The answer, according to a US lawmaker and analysts who spoke to Breaking Defense, is for the Navy look beyond the status quo altogether to the long game by increasing its presence in the South China Sea and standing ready to counter militia forces if the Chinese government becomes more overtly aggressive towards US and allied ships, creatively, if need be.
“It is a very serious issue that we need to approach aggressively in the sense that we have to react back and show that we [the US or its allies] are not going to … accept China or any other country making unbased maritime claims,” Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Va., a member of the House Armed Services Committee, told Breaking Defense in an interview today.
The US needs to maintain a “sustained and deliberate and presence in the Pacific,” said Luria, who was a Navy officer prior to being elected to the House of Representatives.
“The US goes in sporadically [and] comes out … but it’s transiting from point A to point B and it’s not a persistent presence,” she said.
Brent Sadler, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, agreed.
“The end game of freedom of navigation operations and forward presence is a state of acceptance of US presence where international law and customary naval precedent allows — so it isn’t a goal that is achieved but rather a condition,” Sadler said. “We will need to keep up a steady presence and [freedom of navigation operation] routine in East Asia for the long haul.”
In the latest incident, the Navy’s Benfold (DDG-65) was transiting near the Spratly Islands in waters the Navy says no country is entitled to claim as its territory under international law. Following the transit, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army claimed it had expelled the US warship and admonished Washington for threatening China’s “national sovereignty and security.” The US Navy followed up with its own statement, disputing the notion its ship was expelled and emphasized that China’s territorial claims are baseless.
“The PLA(N)’s statement is the latest in a long string of [People’s Republic of China] actions to misrepresent lawful U.S. maritime operations and assert its excessive and illegitimate maritime claims at the expense of its Southeast Asian neighbors in the South China Sea,” according to a Sept. 8 statement from US 7th Fleet.
Now, there is reason to believe these public disputes may pick up in pace and intensity: The Chinese government recently reportedly passed legislation, effective Sept. 1, that requires maritime vessels transiting its territorial seas to report aspects of their passage, such as the last and next time they will make a port of call.
In the meantime, the Navy continues to experiment with and tout its premiere concept of operation known as distributed maritime operations. Historically, one of the Navy’s concerns when attempting to combat China’s territorial claims is a need to respond without escalating the situation, a delicate task proven difficult when Navy destroyers heavily outgun the smaller Chinese patrol boats attempting to expel them.
“Distributed maritime operations is geared to combat, but the fleet it requires does provide more options and greater number of ships to cover more areas which is important in these grey zone operations at sea,” said Sadler. “That said, commanding officers need more non-lethal options and training for interactions with Chinese maritime militia and coast guard.”
As an example of a non-lethal option, Sadler suggested forms of electromagnetic capabilities that when directed at an opposing vessel could disorient or disable personnel, but not cause any permanent damage.
Another option for dealing with China’s claims – and the ensuing harassment the Pentagon calls “grey zone activity” – is a form of deterrence recently promoted by Marine Commandant Gen. David Berger, “deterrence by detection.” In that strategy the US would highlight every microaggression China takes both publicly, but, perhaps more importantly, in explicit detail privately to allies and partners.
Tim Walton, a fellow at the Hudson Institute, said the US should pursue Berger’s idea but suggested detection alone will not be enough to break the status quo.
“US and allied forces require the technical ability and political will to credibly target and defeat opposing operational systems at appropriate scales, rates, and levels of risk and escalation in order to deny the PRC the aims of its aggression,” he said.
16. Mark 9 SDV: The SEALs' mini-sub that packed full-sized torpedoes
Mark 9 SDV: The SEALs' mini-sub that packed full-sized torpedoes
sandboxx.us · by Stavros Atlamazoglou · September 13, 2021
Most people have heard of the Navy SEALs, the maritime component of the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM). They were the ones who conducted the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaida, in 2011, in addition to conducting several other high- and low-profile raids and hostage rescues in the past 20 years. But not many people have heard about the SEAL Delivery Vehicle (SDV) Teams; a small community of SEALs within the already small community that is Naval Special Warfare.
The Navy SEAL Delivery Vehicle Teams primarily specialize in underwater insertion and extraction of special operations forces, underwater direct action, and underwater special reconnaissance.
Navy SEALs during an underwater insertion. The Mark 9 SDV could carry two operators but several munitions, including torpedoes (NSW).
The concept of the frogman, a commando specializing in underwater special operations, really came into life during the Second World War. First, the Italians and then the British developed and deployed frogmen to great effect, sinking or damaging several enemy vessels throughout the conflict.
Established in the 1980s, the SDV Teams have used several underwater vehicles for their operations. The vast majority of SDVs were transporters, designed to carry SEAL operators and munitions closer to a target without alerting the enemy. Several iterations of the Mark 8 SDV, which is still in service, made up the SDV Teams’ fleet for decades. Now, Naval Special Warfare Command is upgrading its fleet of mini-submarines with the introduction of the Mark 11 Shallow Water Combat Submersible (SWCS) and the Dry Combat Submersible (DCS).
But there was an additional, far deadlier SDV that served for years. Its mission came straight out of a Tom Clancy novel.
MARK 9: A Unique SDV
Navy SEALs securing a Standoff Weapon System on a Mark 9 SDV before a mission (Wikimedia.org).
Unlike its brethren, the Mark 9 SDV was primarily designed for offensive operations.
The mini-submarine was designed primarily for hydrographic reconnaissance, anti-submarine, and anti-ship operations. Its ability to cruise clandestinely made it an ideal platform for special operations inside enemy harbors or anchorages.
Operated by two fully geared SDV SEALs (usually one officer and one enlisted troop), the Mark 9 could carry a number of underwater munitions that could sink enemy vessels. The two operators, a pilot and navigator, were located at the front of the Mark 9. They would lie prone side-by-side on the front of the vehicle.
Right behind them was a large cargo area that could hold several different munitions, including limpet mines, satchel demolition charges, and, more importantly, the Standoff Weapon System. Designed specifically for the Mark 9 SDV, the Standoff Weapon Systems was a modified Mark 37 submarine torpedo that could be used against enemy vessels from a distance, as opposed to the limpet munitions which had to be physically attached to a target. However, the Standoff Weapon System required the Mark 9 SDV to be within sight of the target.
The Mark 37 torpedo has a maximum range of 13 miles and carries a 330 pound HBX-3 high explosive warhead. (WikiMedia Commons)
The Mark 9 SDV was propelled by two electric motors that used rechargeable batteries, allowing for stealth and endurance. It also sported a navigation system (the Doppler Inertial Navigation System), sonars (on the sides and front) that could detect obstacles, and a special navigational device that was used to find the mother submarine and dock in its dry dock shelter successfully and safely.
The Mark 9 (Mk 9), Mod 0 SEAL Delivery Vehicle is one of the few mini-submarines developed for offensive operations against surface vessels and submarines. Its low-profile make that resembles a Sole fish also made it harder to detect and a bit more agile. The Mark 9 SDV could easily sneak into an enemy harbor, strike against an enemy ship, and slither away into the cold darkness of the ocean. Its characteristics and ability to cruise clandestinely made it an ideal platform for attacks inside enemy harbors or anchorages and strategic reconnaissance in littoral or shallow waters.
The now-decommissioned Mark 9 SDV; for years it was the most lethal SEAL Delivery Vehicle in Naval Special Warfare’s arsenal (Navy SEAL Museum).
Like the Mark 8 and Mark 11, its less-deadly counterparts, the Mark 9 SDV was flooded, meaning that the two SEAL operators were exposed to the water and had to either use the machine’s air supply or activate their Drager breathing apparatuses, which emit no bubbles, once closer to the target.
The SDV could be deployed from the sea, underwater from a submarine, or from the surface, land, or even by air via a helicopter.
By the late 1980s, however, the Mark 9 was decommissioned because the Mark 8 could perform all of its missions, except deploying the Standoff Weapon System, and the Naval Special Warfare Command sought to save money and manpower.
SDVs: An Invaluable Capability Few Nations Possess
Members of SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team Two (SDVT-2) prepare to launch one of the team’s SEAL Delivery Vehicles (SDV) from the back of the Los Angeles-class attack submarine USS Philadelphia (SSN 690) on a training exercise. (U.S. Navy photo by Chief Photographer’s Mate Andrew McKaskle)
The SDV capability is a unique arrow in the U.S. military’s quiver. Through its inherent stealth, the capability enables clandestine and covert missions that would otherwise be off-limits. Both the military and the intelligence community can find the SDV capability useful.
In the era of Great Power Competition with near-peer states like China and Russia, the SDV capability becomes ever more useful. Both Beijing and Moscow have been using innovative ways to counter conventional U.S. military capabilities
For example, China has been fortifying the illegal man-made islands in the South China Sea with Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) weapon systems as a way to prevent the U.S. Navy from deploying in the area in force. What that means is that if there is a conflict in the area, U.S. aircraft carriers won’t be able to reach the islands to deploy their aircraft, thereby rendering one of the U.S. military’s most potent weapons impotent.
An example of China’s Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) defenses (Office of Naval Intelligence).
The situation is becoming similar in the Russian area of operations. After invading and annexing Crimea, Moscow has been fortifying the peninsula with Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) systems to prevent its retaking by Ukraine with the support of the West in a potential full-blown conflict. U.S. warships won’t be able to get near the area to be as effective as they could be.
That’s where the SDV capability comes in. Special operations units carried by SDVs close to the self-made Chinese islands in the South China Sea or the Crimea can target and destroy the emplaced defensive systems, allowing larger conventional forces to leverage their capabilities in full.
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sandboxx.us · by Stavros Atlamazoglou · September 13, 2021
17. Will the AUMF’s 20th Anniversary Prompt Congress to Act?
A good question. I doubt it.
Will the AUMF’s 20th Anniversary Prompt Congress to Act?
The passage of two decades since the Sept. 11 terror attacks might be a “wake-up call” for lawmakers.
The wars launched in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks 20 years ago are both over, but the legal authorizations for them are still in effect.
There is growing bipartisan support among lawmakers for Congress to assert its responsibility to authorize military action and take back some power from the executive branch. Though lawmakers seem poised to act on the 2002 authorization for military operations in Iraq, some experts say the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan after 20 years could prompt Congress to seriously debate repealing and replacing the 2001 authorization for conflict in Afghanistan as well.
“This is the farthest that Congress has gotten in 20 years towards repealing or revising either of the two AUMFs,” said John Bellinger, a legal advisor to the George W. Bush administration’s National Security Council who helped draft the two Authorizations for the Use of Military Force.
Just one week after Sept. 11, Congress approved an authorization in 2001 allowing the president to target “those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, and aided” the terrorist attacks, or any countries that harbored those doing the planning. This 2001 AUMF is what authorized the war in Afghanistan, and it is the legal basis for many American counterterrorism operations 20 years later.
Lawmakers passed a second AUMF in October 2002 that authorized the start of military operations in Iraq.
Most previous discussion on Capitol Hill has focused on repeal of the 2001 authorization, after President Barack Obama used it as the legal basis to launch military action against the Islamic State in 2014, Bellinger said. More recently, Congress has turned its attention to the 2002 authorization, after President Donald Trump relied on it for the strike on Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in 2020.
“That troubled both Republicans and Democrats, because President Trump was essentially saying...Congress authorized me to kill this Iranian leader when he was in Iraq by voting on the 2002 AUMF 17 years ago,” Bellinger said. “Many members of Congress said, ‘We did not do that. You can do that if you want under your constitutional authority, but that’s not what we voted for in 2002.’”
After years of failing to act on eliminating or narrowing the scope of the authorizations, Congress is starting to clean up outdated documents, though nothing has yet become law. The House in June voted 268-161 to approve a bill from Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., which would immediately repeal the 2002 authorization for the Iraq War, which formally ended in 2011.
The vote suggests that support for repealing the authorization is growing. Forty-nine House Republicans voted for Lee’s bill in June, while just 11 supported an identical bill last year after Soleimani’s killing.
The Biden administration also supports this effort. The White House released a statement in June supporting Lee’s proposal, saying that there are no ongoing military missions that rely on the 2002 authorization and that its repeal would have “minimal impact” on current operations.
The Senate is making similar moves. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee in August approved a bill from Sens. Tim Kaine, D-Va., and Todd Young, R-Ind., that would repeal the 2002 authorization as well as the one from 1991, which was the legal basis for the Gulf War. The bill will now go to the full Senate, where Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has been supportive.
Even without an active authorization, the president would have a lot of constitutional power to use the military without Congress’ blessing to counter a threat to America’s national security.
Past repeal efforts have failed because Congress is divided on whether to exercise its power to declare war and take hard votes that could be politically damaging in the future, or to leave that responsibility to the president, said Bellinger. But the twentieth anniversary of the 2001 authorization could provide a “wake up call” for Congress to take action, said Oona Hathaway, a professor of international law at Yale Law School.
“Members realize that they have ceded their constitutional role in making decisions about whether and when the country should be at war, and they realize that their constituents expect them to do their jobs and take some hard votes,” she said. “And the rise of ISIS-K, which has claimed responsibility for the attacks at the Kabul airport that killed American soldiers and Afghan civilians, is hard to shoehorn into existing authorities.”
The 2001 authorization would have to be replaced with something to allow for counterterrorism operations to continue if it is repealed, and there’s significant disagreement about how broad or limited to make that document.
One thing that could force a conversation about a new authorization for counterterrorism is what happens in Afghanistan now that it’s fallen to the Taliban, Bellinger said. If Al Qaeda finds safe haven in the country again, the 2001 authorization already clearly allows for military strikes against that group. But if a new group not mentioned in the 2001 document and with no ties to 9/11 takes hold in the country, that could force lawmakers to act, he said.
While the specifics of a potential replacement to the 2001 authorization are not yet clear, experts predict it could have some key characteristics that are markedly different from the original language.
“It seems likely that a replacement AUMF will include a reauthorization requirement—meaning it won’t sit on the books for 20 years without a vote by Congress. It will also include great specificity about who the enemy is, and it will allow Congress to add or remove groups based on information provided by the executive [branch],” Hathaway said. “But for that to happen, members of Congress have to be willing to live up to their constitutional responsibilities.”
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
