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1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 13, 2023
2. The Top Myths about US Aid to Ukraine
3. Pentagon vows to use cyberspace to project power and frustrate US adversaries
4. The Missing Escalation in Ukraine
5. Army pauses retention cash bonuses amid sky-high re-up rate
6. Zelensky’s commandos are crushing their enemy behind the frontline – just like Britain in WWII
7. Zelenskyy heading to New York to court the rest of the world
8. Former generals urge House to approve Ukraine aid as Republican resistance grows
9. Top Army general in the Pacific warns of China’s military threat
10. US military publishes new joint warfighting doctrine
11. China’s Military Spending Is Much Bigger Than We Thought By James Stavridis
12. The Roots of Bad Strategy
13. US military resumes counterterrorism missions out of Niger bases
14. Japan gets new defense minister
15. China Conducts Major Military Exercises in Western Pacific
16. Opinion | No, it’s not weak for U.S. officials to visit China
17. Beijing says it uncovered US National Security Agency operatives behind cyberattack on Chinese university
18. Taiwan Fires Back after Elon Musk Calls It ‘Integral Part of China’
19. The world of Le Carré is gone — and spycraft is changing fast
20. The draft ended fifty years ago. Can the all-volunteer force survive another fifty?
21. Making Nuclear Sharing Credible Again: What the F-35A Means for NATO
22. Every Taiwan Citizen a Resistance Member: Preparing for a Chinese Occupation
23. Solving for the Missing Element of Maritime Campaigning
1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 13, 2023
Maps/graphics/citations: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-september-13-2023
Key Takeaways:
- Ukrainian forces conducted missile strikes on occupied Sevastopol, Crimea, on September 13, damaging a Russian landing ship, a Kilo class submarine, and port infrastructure.
- Ukrainian forces advanced in western Zaporizhia Oblast and reportedly advanced near Bakhmut amid continued counteroffensive operations on both sectors of the front on September 13.
- Russian forces conducted a series of Shahed-131/136 drone strikes targeting Sumy and Odesa oblasts on the night of September 12 to 13.
- Russian President Vladimir Putin is likely concerned that Russia’s growing relationship with North Korea may endanger Russia’s existing sanctions evasion schemes.
- The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) reportedly temporarily disrupted a Wagner Group force rotation to Syria amid reports of the Russian MoD’s ongoing efforts to subsume Wagner operations in Syria.
- Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, in the western Donetsk-eastern Zaporizhia Oblast border area, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast but did not make any confirmed advances.
- Reports from Western and Russian independent sources indicate that Russia has circumvented some Western sanctions to increase weapons production but still struggles to produce weapons at the pace required by the war in Ukraine.
- The Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) published footage showing GUR and Ukrainian partisans conducting a drone strike on a Russian occupation passportization office in occupied Enerhodar, Zaporizhia Oblast on September 12.
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, SEPTEMBER 13, 2023
Sep 13, 2023 - ISW Press
Download the PDF
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 13, 2023
Riley Bailey, Grace Mappes, Nicole Wolkov, Angelica Evans, and Frederick W. Kagan
September 13, 2023, 6:40pm ET
Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.
Click here to access ISW’s archive of interactive time-lapse maps of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These maps complement the static control-of-terrain map that ISW produces daily by showing a dynamic frontline. ISW will update this time-lapse map archive monthly.
Note: The data cut-off for this product was 1pm ET on September 13. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the September 14 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.
Ukrainian forces conducted missile strikes on occupied Sevastopol, Crimea, on September 13, damaging a Russian landing ship, a Kilo class submarine, and port infrastructure. The Department of Strategic Communications of the Ukrainian Armed Forces stated that Ukrainian forces successfully conducted missile strikes on Russian naval means and port infrastructure in occupied Sevastopol.[1] Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Spokesperson Andriy Yusov stated that the missiles struck the Russian state-owned ship repair facility Sevmorzavod, damaging repair facilities as well as a landing ship and a submarine, both of which he described as unrecoverable.[2] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian air defenses intercepted seven out of 10 Ukrainian cruise missiles targeting the Sevmorzavod ship repair facility but acknowledged that Ukrainian missiles struck two ships under repair.[3] Geolocated footage published on September 13 shows explosions at the dry dock in the Sevastopol port.[4] Satellite imagery published on September 12 shows one Ropucha class landing ship and one Kilo class submarine at the dry dock, and satellite imagery published on September 13 shows that the Ukrainian missile strike likely destroyed the two vessels.[5] Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Captain First Rank Nataliya Humenyuk stated that there were no Russian missile carriers present during the strike but noted that Ukrainian intelligence is still unaware of which submarine was at the dry dock.[6] The apparent destruction of the two vessels will likely render the dry dock inoperable until Russian forces can clear the debris, which may take a significant amount of time. The extent of the damage to Sevmorzavod’s repair facilities beyond the dry dock is unclear, and any damage to one of the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s main repair facilities in occupied Crimea will likely have reverberating impacts in the event of further Ukrainian strikes on Russian naval assets.
Russian officials largely did not address the strike, while select Russian ultranationalists responded with predictable outrage. Crimean occupation officials claimed that the strikes damaged residential buildings and injured several dozen people, although they did not say whether the injured were Russian military personnel.[7] Prominent Kremlin propagandist Vladimir Solovyov expressed deep anger at the strike and called for retaliatory strikes on Western facilities that produced the alleged missiles that Ukraine used in the strike.[8] Solovyov’s call for escalation with the West is boilerplate rhetoric for his domestic audience but is not reflective of any actual Kremlin position on the matter. Russian milbloggers expressed concerns that the Ukrainian strike portends an intensification of Ukraine’s interdiction campaign targeting occupied Crimea.[9] One milblogger argued that Russian forces are unable to strike Ukrainian airfields at scale and that Russian military inaction allowed Ukrainian forces to sufficiently strengthen airfields against Russian strikes.[10]
Ukrainian forces advanced in western Zaporizhia Oblast and reportedly advanced near Bakhmut amid continued counteroffensive operations on both sectors of the front on September 13. Geolocated footage published on September 12 indicates that Ukrainian forces made limited gains south of Robotyne (12km south of Orikhiv) in western Zaporizhia Oblast.[11] The Ukrainian General Staff reported on September 13 that Ukrainian forces achieved unspecified partial successes near Robotyne as well as near Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut), Andriivka (10km southwest of Bakhmut), and Kurdyumivka (13km southwest of Bakhmut) in the Bakhmut direction.[12]
Russian forces conducted a series of Shahed-131/136 drone strikes targeting Sumy and Odesa oblasts on the night of September 12 to 13. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian air defenses destroyed 34 of 45 Shaheds, which mainly targeted port infrastructure in Izmail and Reni, Odesa Oblast.[13] Odesa Oblast Administration Head Oleh Kiper reported that the drone strikes damaged the port and civilian infrastructure in Izmail Raion.[14] The Ukrainian Air Force reported that Russian forces launched the drones from occupied Cape Chauda in Crimea, Primorsko-Akhtarsk in Krasnodar Krai, and Kursk Oblast.[15]
Russian President Vladimir Putin is likely concerned that Russia’s growing relationship with North Korea may endanger Russia’s existing sanctions evasion schemes. Putin met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Amur Oblast on September 14.[16] Putin called the meeting “productive” and reported that he and Kim had a “frank exchange of views on the situation in the region and on bilateral relations.”[17] Putin also stated that Russia continues to comply with restrictions on military-technical cooperation with North Korea but noted that within the “framework of the current rules, there are opportunities.”[18] Putin is likely neutrally portraying his meeting with Kim in order to balance Russia’s interest in acquiring North Korean artillery munitions with concerns about the risk of triggering secondary international sanctions on Russia due to potential trade with North Korea amidst increased international scrutiny of Russian sanctions evasion.
The Russian MoD reportedly temporarily disrupted a Wagner Group force rotation to Syria amid reports of the Russian MoD’s ongoing efforts to subsume Wagner operations in Syria. A prominent Kremlin-affiliated milblogger amplified a claim on September 13 that the Russian MoD blocked Wagner forces from rotating personnel from Africa through the Hmeimim airbase in Latakia, Syria, prompting the Wagner forces to negotiate with the Syrian MoD to rotate through the Tiyas airbase in Homs Governorate instead.[19] The milblogger claimed that the Russian MoD used vehicles on the runway to prevent a Wagner plane from landing at the Tiyas airbase on September 12, and then deployed helicopters threatening to shoot down a Wagner plane. The milblogger claimed that the Wagner leadership in Syria contacted Russian Deputy Defense Minister Colonel General Yunus-Bek Yevkurov who allowed the plane to land.[20] Yevkurov’s reported involvement in this engagement as well as his recent trips to Africa continues to suggest that Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has likely appointed Yevkurov to oversee the MoD‘s effort to subsume the remnants of the Wagner Group.[21]
This reported Russian MoD-Wagner conflict in Syria suggests that elements of the Wagner Group may still have a cohesive leadership and that the MoD has deep concerns about the semi-independence of Wagner’s Syria contingent. Wagner’s ability to negotiate with senior Russian and Syrian MoD officials indicates that Wagner likely retains a cohesive-enough leadership to operate semi-independently of the Russian MoD. The Russian MoD’s decision to deny Wagner’s use of the Hmeimim airbase and disrupt the force rotation indicates that the MoD is likely concerned about Wagner’s insubordination toward the Russian military in Syria, though the precise concerns are unclear. The Wagner contingent in Syria may have better combat capabilities than Wagner contingents in other African states due to some combination of training, provisions, and organization. The MoD may also be concerned that the Syria Wagner contingent is more loyal to Prigozhin than the other Wagner arms. Syria is the only country in which the Wagner Group has a major contingent co-located with a major Russian MoD presence, and the Russian MoD detained Wagner commanders only in Syria and not elsewhere abroad following the June 24 rebellion.[22]
Key Takeaways:
- Ukrainian forces conducted missile strikes on occupied Sevastopol, Crimea, on September 13, damaging a Russian landing ship, a Kilo class submarine, and port infrastructure.
- Ukrainian forces advanced in western Zaporizhia Oblast and reportedly advanced near Bakhmut amid continued counteroffensive operations on both sectors of the front on September 13.
- Russian forces conducted a series of Shahed-131/136 drone strikes targeting Sumy and Odesa oblasts on the night of September 12 to 13.
- Russian President Vladimir Putin is likely concerned that Russia’s growing relationship with North Korea may endanger Russia’s existing sanctions evasion schemes.
- The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) reportedly temporarily disrupted a Wagner Group force rotation to Syria amid reports of the Russian MoD’s ongoing efforts to subsume Wagner operations in Syria.
- Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, in the western Donetsk-eastern Zaporizhia Oblast border area, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast but did not make any confirmed advances.
- Reports from Western and Russian independent sources indicate that Russia has circumvented some Western sanctions to increase weapons production but still struggles to produce weapons at the pace required by the war in Ukraine.
- The Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) published footage showing GUR and Ukrainian partisans conducting a drone strike on a Russian occupation passportization office in occupied Enerhodar, Zaporizhia Oblast on September 12.
We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and the Ukrainian population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
- Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
- Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
- Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
- Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis
- Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
- Activities in Russian-occupied areas
Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine
Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Luhansk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)
Russian forces continued offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line but did not make any confirmed or claimed gains on September 13. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted an unsuccessful attack northwest of Berestove (20km northwest of Svatove).[23] A Russian news aggregator claimed that Russian forces conducted offensive operations near Synkivka (9km northeast of Kupyansk) and Petropavlivka (7km east of Kupyansk) on September 12.[24] A Russian milblogger claimed on September 13 that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations west of Novoselivske (14km northwest of Svatove).[25] Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov posted footage claiming to show Chechen “Akhmat” Spetsnaz forces operating in the Serebryanske forest area (11km south of Kreminna).[26] Another Russian milblogger posted footage on September 12 claiming to show elements of the Russian 21st Motorized Rifle Brigade (2nd Combined Arms Army, Central Military District) striking Ukrainian forces along the Svatove-Kreminna line.[27] The United Kingdom Ministry of Defense (UK MoD) reported on September 13 that elements of the Russian 25th Combined Arms Army (CAA) (reportedly formed under the Eastern Military District) have deployed to the frontline in Luhansk Oblast, supporting ISW’s previous reporting.[28] The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) also reported that Russian forces are regrouping and forming new assault units with personnel from the newly created 25th CAA in the Kupyansk direction.[29] The WSJ reported that the Russian military deployed 50,000 troops to retake Kupyansk but has had little success.[30] Ukrainian Kharkiv Oblast Head Oleh Synehubov reportedly stated that Russian forces have not captured a single new village in the Kupyansk direction since 2022 but have only expanded the contested “gray zone” around a number of settlements.[31]
Ukrainian forces reportedly conducted ground attacks along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on September 13 but did not make any claimed or confirmed gains. A Russian milblogger claimed that fighting continues on the outskirts of Kupyansk – likely referring to the area near Synkivka and Petropavlivka - and that Ukrainian forces are counterattacking from the settlement’s flanks in order to avoid Russian encirclement.[32] ISW has not observed visual evidence of Russian advances close enough to Kupyansk to necessitate Ukrainian concerns about encirclement. Russian sources, including the Russian MoD, claimed on September 12 and 13 that Ukrainian forces conducted unsuccessful attacks near Yampolivka (17km west of Kreminna), Torske (14km west of Kreminna), Dibrova (7km southwest of Kreminna), and the Serebryanske forest area.[33]
Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations around Bakhmut and reportedly advanced on September 13. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in the Bakhmut direction and achieved unspecified partial successes near Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut), Andriivka (10km southwest of Bakhmut), and Kurdyumivka (13km southwest of Bakhmut).[34] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces withdrew from several unspecified positions near Klishchiivka and entrenched themselves at defensive positions behind the railway line east of the settlement.[35] Russian milbloggers claimed that fighting is ongoing in and north of Klishchiivka and that Russian forces maintain positions on the northeastern outskirts of the settlement.[36] Russian milbloggers claimed that most of Klishchiivka is currently a contested “gray zone.”[37]
Russian forces counterattacked in the Bakhmut area on September 13 but did not make any confirmed gains. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive actions near Orikhovo-Vasylivka (11km northwest of Bakhmut) and Bohdanivka (7km northwest of Bakhmut).[38] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces conducted successful counterattacks near Klishchiivka and pushed Ukrainian forces out of the settlement but that heavy Ukrainian artillery fire is preventing Russian forces from reestablishing their positions in central and southern Klishchiivka.[39] ISW has not observed visual confirmation that Ukrainian forces have left positions in Klishchiivka, however. The milblogger also claimed that there are conflicting reports that Russian forces completely recaptured Andriivka, and a Russian news aggregator claimed that the settlement is contested.[40]
The Russian MOD claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian assaults near Pervomaiske (12km southwest of Avdiivka) and Krasnohorivka (22km southwest of Avdiivka) along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City front on September 13.[41]
Russian forces continued limited ground attacks along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City front on September 13 but did not advance. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive actions near Avdiivka, Marinka (27km southwest of Avdiivka), and Novomykhailivka (36km southwest of Avdiivka).[42] A Russian milblogger also claimed that Russian assaults near Avdiivka were unsuccessful.[43]
Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)
Ukrainian forces reportedly conducted offensive operations in the western Donetsk-eastern Zaporizhia Oblast border area on September 13 but did not make any confirmed advances. The Russian MoD and other Russian sources claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian attacks along the Novodonetske-Novomayorske line (13–18km southeast of Velyka Novosilka) and near Pryyutne (16km southwest of Velyka Novosilka).[44]
Russian forces conducted offensive operations in the western Donetsk-eastern Zaporizhia Oblast border area on September 13 but did not advance. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces unsuccessfully attacked south of Novodarivka (13km southwest of Velyka Novosilka).[45] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces hold recently occupied positions near Pryyutne.[46] Footage published on September 12 purportedly shows snipers of the Russian 5th Tank Brigade (36th Combined Arms Army, Eastern Military District) operating in the Velyka Novosilka area.[47]
Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast on September 13 and advanced. Geolocated footage published on September 12 shows that Ukrainian forces made limited gains south of Robotyne (12km south of Orikhiv).[48] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces achieved partial success near Robotyne.[49] The Russian MoD and other Russian sources claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian attacks near Verbove (18km southwest of Orikhiv) and in the area between Robotyne and Verbove.[50] A Russian milblogger claimed that most of Robotyne is contested and that Russian forces maintain positions near the southern outskirts of the settlement.[51] A Russian milblogger claimed on September 12 that Ukrainian forces attacked west of Robotyne in the direction of Kopani (12km southwest of Orikhiv).[52]
Russian forces conducted offensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast on September 13 but did not advance. Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces attacked Ukrainian positions southwest of Robotyne and that fighting is ongoing on the outskirts of Novoprokopivka (18km southeast of Orikhiv) and Verbove.[53] A Russian news aggregator claimed that Russian forces regularly counterattack in the area between Robotyne and Verbove in order to prevent Ukrainian forces from advancing.[54] Footage posted on September 13 purportedly shows elements of the Russian 7th Guards Mountain Airborne (VDV) Division operating near Verbove.[55]
Ukrainian Melitopol Mayor Ivan Fedorov reported on September 13 that Russian forces are strengthening defensive positions in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast. Fedorov stated that Russian forces are setting up new unspecified equipment and dragon’s teeth anti-tank fortifications near Tokmak digging new trenches and strengthening defensive structures near the frontline in Polohivskyi Raion.[56]
A Russian source claimed on September 13 that Ukrainian forces continue operations on islands in the Dnipro River delta in Kherson Oblast. A Russian milblogger claimed that battles for unspecified islands in the Dnipro River are ongoing, and that Ukrainian forces have entrenched themselves on some unspecified islands and maintain positions near the Antonivsky Bridge in the east (left) bank of Kherson Oblast.[57] Footage published on September 13 purportedly shows artillery elements of the 205th Motorized Rifle Brigade (49th Combined Arms Army, Southern Military District) striking Ukrainian forces near Kherson City.[58]
Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)
Reports from Western and Russian independent sources indicate that Russia has circumvented some Western sanctions to increase weapons production but still struggles to produce weapons at the pace required by the war in Ukraine. The New York Times (NYT) cited US, European, and Ukrainian officials as stating that Russia has increased its missile and weapons production beyond its pre-war production levels despite Western sanctions.[59] The officials reportedly stated that Russia’s defense industrial base (DIB) began increasing production at the end of 2022 and can now produce up to 200 tanks per year, double its prewar production of 100 tanks per year.[60] The officials also reportedly stated that Russia has cut costs in artillery ammunition production by sacrificing safety and quality.[61] Russian independent outlet Novaya Gazeta reported however that at least 419 Russian DIB enterprises failed to meet the parameters of the Russian state defense order resulting in over 400 criminal cases since the start of the full-scale invasion, including 79 cases on activity at the Zvezdochka ship repair center, 39 cases at the Instrument Design Bureau (KBP), 34 cases at the “Progress” Rocket-Space Center, 22 cases at the Sevmash facility, and 20 cases at Uralvagonzavod.[62] Novaya Gazeta also reported that the number of vacancies in Russian DIB enterprises has increased by 48 percent since September 2022.[63]
Some Russian authorities are increasingly seeking terms for demobilization and other measures supporting Russian military personnel mobilized during the autumn 2022 partial mobilization. Tatarstan Republic Council Deputy Head Eduard Sharafiev stated on September 13 that he submitted a preliminary proposal to the Russian Federation Council of Legislators to amend the Russian partial mobilization order to establish terms for demobilizing personnel mobilized in autumn 2022.[64] The Council of Legislators has reportedly sent the proposed amendment to the State Duma Defense Committee for consideration.[65] Russian State Duma Deputy Maxim Ivanov stated on September 13 that the current mechanisms for granting leave to mobilized personnel are unclear, unregulated, and strongly dependent on the situation on the front line and the decision of the commander.[66]
Russian authorities imposed new standards for Russian military recruitment and treatment of recruits likely in connection with the upcoming autumn conscription cycle. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu signed a decree on September 13 preventing Russians who are otherwise “partially fit” for military service from serving under mobilization or contracts during periods of martial law, mobilization, and wartime.[67] The decree stipulates that Russians with HIV, Hepatitis B and C, various active tuberculosis variants, malignant cancers, Type 1 diabetes, a history of strokes, vision impairments, and other medical conditions may not serve in these conditions.[68] The Russian MoD published a decree on September 13 dated September 11 that stipulates the payment of pensions to Russian mobilized and contracted personnel who received pensions prior to serving in the Russian military and began serving after the start of the war in Ukraine.[69] The decree stipulates that the MoD will pay these pensioners monthly payments beginning in October 2023 and compensate the pensioners for pensions not received after they entered military service and stopped receiving pensions.[70]
Activities in Russian-occupied areas (Russian objective: Consolidate administrative control of annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian citizens into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)
The Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) published footage showing GUR and Ukrainian partisans conducting a drone strike on a Russian occupation passportization office in occupied Enerhodar, Zaporizhia Oblast on September 12.[71] GUR reported that the drone strike caused a fire at the passportization office and that GUR and the Ukrainian partisans also struck a Russian radio communication posit in Enerhodar.[72]
Russian President Vladimir Putin submitted an amendment to the law on “the Days of Military Glory and Memorable Dates of Russia” on September 12 that will establish September 30 as the “Day of Reunification” for occupied Kherson, Zaporizhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk oblasts.[73] Russian occupation officials will likely use the holiday to amplify programs aimed at consolidating social control over occupied territories in Ukraine.
Significant activity in Belarus (Russian efforts to increase its military presence in Belarus and further integrate Belarus into Russian-favorable frameworks and Wagner Group activity in Belarus)
Nothing significant to report.
ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarusian military activity in Belarus as part of ongoing Kremlin efforts to increase their control over Belarus and other Russian actions in Belarus.
Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.
2. The Top Myths about US Aid to Ukraine
The four:
Myth: Washington is writing Kyiv “blank checks” that Americans cannot afford.
Myth: There is not enough oversight of US aid to Ukraine.
Myth: America is exponentially the largest donor to Ukraine.
Myth: Russia is a distraction. The US must focus on China.
Sep 13, 2023
Hudson Institute
The Top Myths about US Aid to Ukraine
Luke Coffey
View PDF
Since Russia invaded Ukraine for the second time in eight years, Russian troops have ravaged Ukraine’s cities, raped its women, and stolen its children. Russian missiles and Iranian drones strike Ukrainian cities daily, often hitting civilian targets. Russia is the aggressor. Ukraine is the victim.
For Americans who believe in respect for national borders, the primacy of national sovereignty, and the right to self-defense, support for Ukraine is natural. Ukrainians are not asking for, nor do they want, US troops to help them fight Russia. All they ask for are the material resources that give them a fighting chance. Meanwhile, Russia is America’s top geopolitical adversary.
As Congress debates additional support for Ukraine, the anti-Ukraine echo chamber will peddle myths and half-truths, including these four:
Myth: Washington is writing Kyiv “blank checks” that Americans cannot afford.
Reality: Every dollar spent in support of Ukraine is authorized by Congress and used for a specific purpose. There has never been a “blank check” to Ukraine. As of September 2023, the US has provided Ukraine with $101 billion, or about 0.43 percent of America’s GDP. Since February 2022, this averages out to 68 cents per day for each American adult. The vast majority of this money never leaves the US and instead supports American jobs. For this modest amount, the US helps Ukraine dismantle Russia’s military without a single American firing a shot or being shot at. The US can easily afford to support Ukraine, but it cannot afford not to.
Myth: There is not enough oversight of US aid to Ukraine.
Reality: There has likely never been more accountability in place for US foreign assistance than what is available for Ukraine aid. Soon after Russia’s invasion, the US government established the Ukraine Oversight Interagency Working Group. More than 160 officials across 20 federal oversight agencies monitor US aid to Ukraine. To date, Congress has allocated $50 million for the Inspectors General of the Department of Defense, Department of State, and USAID to increase oversight through the working group. Dozens of reports have been completed with dozens more in the works. According to the working group, “Investigations related to the Ukraine response have not yet substantiated significant waste, fraud, or abuse.”
Myth: America is exponentially the largest donor to Ukraine.
Reality: According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy’s Ukraine aid tracker, total European commitments are now more than double those of the US. After totaling all aid (military, economic, humanitarian, and refugee), 20 European countries have given more to Ukraine than the US as a percentage of GDP. Europe can do more, but that is no reason for the US to stop supporting Ukraine.
Myth: Russia is a distraction. The US must focus on China.
Reality: Russia is China’s junior partner. A defeated Russia means a weaker China. Beijing is watching Western support for Kyiv, so a victorious Ukraine would strengthen Taiwan and deter China. It’s no coincidence that Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida visited Ukraine while Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Russia. During this visit, Xi told Vladimir Putin, “Now there are changes that haven’t happened in 100 years. When we are together, we drive these changes.” The choice between security in Europe and security in the Indo-Pacific is a false dichotomy. In terms of US national interests, these two regions are intimately linked. In the words of Kishida, “The security of the Indo-Pacific region cannot be separated from European security.”
3. Pentagon vows to use cyberspace to project power and frustrate US adversaries
Pentagon vows to use cyberspace to project power and frustrate US adversaries | CNN Politics
CNN · by Sean Lyngaas · September 12, 2023
CNN —
The Pentagon pledged to use offensive cyber operations to “frustrate” and “disrupt” foreign powers and criminals that threaten US interests in a new military strategy document released Tuesday that warns of China’s aims to dominate cyberspace.
The Department of Defense’s new cyber strategy – shaped by a close study of Russia’s war in Ukraine – casts the US military’s burgeoning hacking capabilities as important to US power projection, but also acknowledges the risks of escalation in cyberspace.
The department will “remain closely attuned to adversary perceptions and will manage the risk of unintended escalation,” says the unclassified summary of the new strategy, which supersedes the Pentagon’s 2018 cyber strategy. The new document largely reinforces policies already in effect, including a commitment to actively counter US adversaries in cyberspace rather than merely play defense on US networks.
The strategy’s release comes amid consistent public warnings from US officials that China will likely use its formidable cyber capabilities in the event of any military confrontation with the US over Taiwan or other issues.
US officials and tech giant Microsoft in May sounded the alarm on an alleged Chinese hacking campaign that infiltrated critical infrastructure providers in the US territory of Guam and other parts of the US. A senior National Security Agency official told CNN the intrusions were “unacceptable” because the Chinese hackers sought access to networks that might allow them to disrupt critical services in the future.
The Chinese government has denied the allegations and in turn accused the US of conducting hacking operations in China.
The new Pentagon strategy underscored those concerns, alleging that Chinese hacking informs Beijing’s “preparations for war.” In the event of conflict, China’s cyber operatives will “likely seek to disrupt key networks which enable [US] Joint Force power projection in combat,” the new strategy says.
US Cyber Command – the military’s offensive and defensive cyber forces – has grown more capable over the last decade and used its increased capabilities to conduct operations that target cybercriminals who threaten US infrastructure and elections.
But the new strategy acknowledges that offensive cyber operations do little to deter those hacking groups on their own and instead should be paired with “other instruments of national power.” The strategy did not specify what levers should be pulled, but US officials often cite sanctions and arrests as other examples of policy tools used against hackers.
Cyber capabilities “held in reserve or employed in isolation render little deterrent effect on their own,” the strategy says.
Mieke Eoyang, a senior cyber official at the department, told reporters Tuesday that the US “cannot simply defend our way out of [the] problem” of persistent threats in cyberspace.
“There is a recognition that we will, as the department, need to disrupt … malicious cyber activity coming at the United States, and we have been doing so,” said Eoyang, who is deputy assistant secretary of Defense for cyber policy.
CNN · by Sean Lyngaas · September 12, 2023
4. The Missing Escalation in Ukraine
Conclusion:
The lack of escalation in Ukraine serves as a reminder that in limited wars, patience is a virtue. A go-slow approach has allowed NATO countries to provide a level of military support that was unthinkable at the war’s start. The risks of escalation have not been overblown. Instead, gradualism has allowed the West to learn—and, in some ways, stretch—the limits of the war.
The Missing Escalation in Ukraine
In Defense of the West’s Go-Slow Approach
September 14, 2023
Foreign Affairs · by Austin Carson · September 14, 2023
Since the moment Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the specter of escalation has loomed over the war. For Ukrainian citizens and soldiers, the war is a grueling, horrific, daily reality that has already escalated in notable ways; in August, Kyiv ramped up strikes in Russia, and Moscow has resumed its campaign against Ukrainian grain exports through the Black Sea. Seen another way, however, many of the most feared escalation scenarios have not occurred, most notably a large-scale conventional war between NATO and Russia and the use of nuclear weapons.
Eighteen months after the war began, it is time to take stock of its unusual escalation dynamics. Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly hinted that he might go nuclear, raising the prospect that tactical nuclear weapons could be used to destroy military targets, kill Ukrainian civilians, or make a show of force in an uninhabited area. Yet he has not done so. Beyond this most conspicuous missing form of escalation, there are other realms in which various parties have shown restraint—for instance, in the scope of NATO’s surveillance flights or in the details of Russian operations in the Black Sea. Despite ample opportunity to intensify hostilities or to expand the geographic scope of the war, Russia, Ukraine, and Ukraine’s allies have mostly chosen not to do so.
This restraint is often overlooked, and a key reason for it—a gradual approach to the war on all sides—is often misunderstood. Many supporters of Ukraine have criticized the piecemeal delivery of aid and other forms of incrementalism. Indeed, a go-slow approach to expanding military aid to Ukraine has slowed the development of some combat capabilities by Kyiv’s military forces. But the West’s gradual approach has served a vital strategic purpose. It is no accident that the war has avoided certain forms of drastic escalation. The war’s participants, including leaders in Kyiv, have often followed a logic of learning and gradualism, cautiously adopting new weapons and tactics, buying time to assess Russia’s reaction. Even Ukraine has done this in its approach to attacks within Russian territory. Western leaders and Ukraine have allowed what is still, in some important ways, a limited war to emerge organically and through trial and error.
New developments, however, may threaten this dynamic. Russia’s campaign against Ukrainian grain infrastructure and surging Ukrainian attacks within Russia threaten to expand the geographical scope of conflict. The mutiny and subsequent death of Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin suggest that Russia’s domestic political situation is dynamic and could shift in ways that may encourage Putin to escalate. Ukraine’s counteroffensive, meanwhile, has made some progress but no breakthroughs. Should Ukraine achieve rapid territorial gains, the risks of escalation may sharply increase. To keep escalation in check as the war continues to evolve, Western officials and Ukrainian leaders must resist calls to abandon theirgradualist approach. Failure to do so could cause the hard-earned control over escalation to slip away.
THE ROADS NOT TAKEN
Historical comparisons from the past century often inform debates about the risk of escalation. World War I, for instance, started as a local dispute over an assassination, but it quickly ballooned into a pan-European clash that killed 20 million people. The Korean War was initially limited to combat between Pyongyang, Seoul, and Seoul’s foreign partners, but within five months, hundreds of thousands of U.S. and Chinese troops were in direct combat. The United States intended to assist South Vietnam only with military aid and advice, but its involvement evolved into a costly, violent military intervention that lasted a decade.
Conflicts after the end of the Cold War did not feature the same escalation problems. With the end of bipolarity, the West’s adversaries in peripheral countries such as Iraq and Libya did not have great-power backers. These were one-sided affairs. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine therefore harkens back to an earlier period when escalation and restraint were potent issues during war.
The gravest form of escalation in Ukraine would involve nuclear weapons. This scenario has been depicted as plausible because employing nuclear weapons could give Putin a decisive edge under certain battlefield conditions or serve as a stark warning to the West. It could even prompt retaliation by NATO, increasing the possibility of a large-scale exchange of nuclear weapons beyond Ukraine’s borders. Every time an ally has provided Kyiv with new surface-to-surface missile systems, air defense systems, armored and tracked vehicles, or fighter jets, cautious voices in the West have warned that these acts risk prompting escalation—including Russian retaliatory strikes outside Ukraine.
To date, this has not happened. The absence of this form of escalation does not mean that analysts have been wrong to fear it. Quite the contrary: a fear of escalation can motivate military commanders and policymakers to make cautious decisions that help prevent it. Early in the war, Kyiv and many of its supporters called for a no-fly zone, but Western leaders refused to impose one, fearing an air-to-air clash between NATO and Russian aircraft. The no-fly zone proposal has faded from public commentary, making the escalation avoided by rejecting it easy to overlook. But this was an important road not taken.
The lesson is clear: anticipating escalation scenarios helps make them less likely to happen. Yet the fear of escalation is not the only factor that has prevented it in Ukraine. Understanding the other reasons why Russia’s invasion has not drastically escalated is essential to avoid escalation, both in this conflict and in others to come.
The absence of nuclear escalation does not mean that analysts have been wrong to fear it.
Public discussions often underrepresent many of the escalation scenarios that have not come to pass. Conspicuously, Russia has not engaged in observable large-scale cyberattacks on targets beyond Ukraine. Moscow has developed a sophisticated cyber capability and used it to meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Yet civilian infrastructure or government targets in Western Europe and the United States appear to have been largely spared.
Putin has also abstained from using chemical weapons. The Russian military has a considerable stock of chemical munitions, and chemical attacks by President Bashar al-Assad in Syria have set a dangerous precedent. But Putin has not yet used them in Ukraine.
Some forms of restraint demonstrated by the United States and NATO have received minimal fanfare. The United States has limited visits by senior U.S. military officials to Ukraine to “avoid increasing tensions with Moscow,” as an August assessment of the counteroffensive in The New York Times noted. Few outside of Washington notice such moderation. Other forms of restraint related to espionage and covert action are hard to observe. NATO countries routinely conduct surveillance over international waters and their own territories, but, according to The New York Times, they “are careful not to stray into the war zone.” A Washington Post report this August on Russian sabotage operations within Poland contained an overlooked revelation: Russia had not even attempted to sabotage the flow of military supplies into Ukraine until a year into the war.
Even Russia’s resumption of its blockade on Ukrainian grain exports in July—a form of escalation in its own way—features elements of restraint. Although its military strikes have targeted grain-related installations, so far Moscow has not overtly attacked civilian grain shipments. NATO countries’ responses to the blockade have also been measured; for now, they have refrained from providing the armed escorts for grain shipments that Ukraine has requested. As the Kremlin expands the scope of its hostilities, it has shown a tendency to also reject more reckless forms of escalation. The missing escalations in Ukraine are analogous to dogs that do not bark: their silence makes them easy to miss.
REASON FOR RESTRAINT
The puzzle of the missing escalations in Ukraine is, in part, explained by the broader context of this particular war. There are significant incentives for leaders to try to contain the fighting. A direct conventional or nuclear clash between Russia and NATO would clearly be ruinous for both sides, inflicting tremendous economic, political, and military damage. War between major powers in the modern era is incredibly costly. Today’s war in Ukraine and past conflicts during the Cold War share this structural constraint.
The strain on Russia’s military resources almost certainly amplifies the downsides of escalation for Moscow. After its failed bid to swiftly seize Kyiv at the beginning of the war and high rates of equipment loss and casualties, Moscow cannot open new war fronts and achieve anything close to its military objectives in Ukraine. Putin’s decisions over the course of the conflict will need to reflect this reality: if the conflict dramatically widened, he would be playing with a losing hand.
Domestic politics also matter. During the Cold War, restraint toward Communist aggression could be politically fatal. Today’s political environment has changed. Leaders in the democratic West that recklessly invite escalation are probably more likely to lose the next election. It is less clear whether Russia’s domestic political dynamics have blunted or encouraged escalation. Putin must avoid alienating the Russian elites that support him and mobilizing mass dissent. Yet some domestic pressures on Putin incentivize belligerence, namely the “war hawks” outside government who continually demand more expansive military mobilization or even the use of nuclear weapons.
GOING SLOW IS GOOD
Another reason for missing escalation involves incrementalism and learning. At critical moments, political leaders and military commanders in the West have chosen gradualism. Going slowly in war often invites criticism. Ukraine’s supporters have at times complained that the United States and its allies have dithered in providing more effective artillery, air defense, and tanks. What looks like indecisiveness, however, can have significant value on the battlefield.
Examples of U.S. and Western European leaders using a slow, incremental approach are not hard to find. Since the early months of the war, NATO members have cautiously and slowly deliberated about providing shoulder-fired missile systems, armored vehicles, missile defense systems, tanks, longer-distance artillery systems, and F-16 training and aircraft. One benefit of this go-slow approach is that it has given intelligence and military experts time to scrutinize how Russia reacts. For example, Washington did not flip a switch and provide M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine. The idea was debated in public for weeks and internally for longer. Even after approving the M1 Abrams, the United States has slow-rolled their introduction to the battlefield, allowing tanks sent by the British and Germans to go first. Each of these steps can be a painful sacrifice on the battlefield, but they also give analysts time to gauge Putin’s reaction to a potentially explosive U.S. decision.
Kyiv has often been the most vocal critic of the go-slow approach to delivering aid. Yet Ukrainian leaders themselves use gradualism to control escalation when conducting cross-border operations within Russian territory. Since last spring, Ukrainian leaders have incrementally intensified strikes on military supply lines and urban centers within Russia while avoiding taking credit for them. This distancing on Ukraine’s part encourages the Kremlin to respond in a mild, relatively restrained way and avoid the wrath of the public. Ukraine’s Western allies have used distancing as well; for instance, the United States has forbidden its military aid from being used in such operations.
The management of high-risk incidents in Ukraine has been characterized by gradualism, deliberate ambiguity, and political caution. In March 2023, for example, a Russian fighter jet apparently dumped fuel on and collided with a U.S. surveillance drone, sending the drone crashing into the Black Sea. Both sides exchanged blame, with the U.S. military releasing a video to support its account. Yet Washington and Moscow also engaged in deescalatory measures; in public comments, a National Security Council representative suggested that the Russian pilot may have acted on his own accord, and senior U.S. and Russian military officials discussed their views of the incident in a private call.
WARNING SIGNS
Escalation control measures that have worked today may need to evolve to keep working tomorrow. Developments over the summer of 2023 may test the limits that have developed. First, Russia’s renewed attacks against Ukrainian grain exports have expanded the geographic boundaries of the war. In August, a Russian drone attacked a port on the Ukrainian side of the Danube River, which forms the border with Romania, a NATO member. Strikes targeting grain infrastructure increase the risk of accidental or unauthorized attacks on civilian shipping or more deadly incidents between military aircraft.
Second, Ukraine appears to be ramping up the scale and intensity of its attacks inside Russia. In July, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky publicly warned that the war would be “returning to Russia.” This surge may be motivated by a desire to more aggressively degrade Russian logistics during the counteroffensive and to reassure the Ukrainian public that the fight is being taken to Russian territory. Kyiv has also learned from Putin’s mild reaction to earlier cross-border operations. The risk is twofold. A more aggressive campaign within Russia may prompt a harsher reaction. In addition, a widening campaign within Russia may make it easier to expand even farther as more potent Western weaponry becomes available or the war bogs down more.
New developments concerning Putin’s domestic position suggest his decision-making could become more unpredictable. Although some Western commentators and analysts viewed Prigozhin’s rebellion as a positive development, suggesting it indicated a growing appetite for open dissent in Russia, it may have also increased the risk of escalation. Internal dissent could recalibrate Putin’s willingness to accept strategic risk, making him more likely to gamble with escalation as the Hail Mary that would turn the tide of the war and shore up his domestic political support.
Incrementalism can be a painful sacrifice on the battlefield, but it also gives analysts time to gauge Putin’s reactions.
Perhaps Prigozhin’s August death in a plane crash ended the threat to Putin from his inner circle. But if escalation control is largely defined by learning, an increasingly unstable adversary may make some of the lessons the West and Ukraine have learned thus far moot. NATO allies may be less confident about Russia’s reaction to the introduction of F-16 fighter jets into Ukraine’s military operations when the domestic politics in Russia are in flux.
Another wildcard is Ukraine’s counteroffensive. Its sluggish progress is frustrating to Kyiv and its partners, but that pace does inadvertently impose a kind of gradualism. So far, Ukrainian territorial gains have been slow, giving the West time to assess how Putin and the Russian military adapt. Ironically, these limits on escalation could dissolve if Ukraine achieves a decisive battlefield breakthrough. The collapse of the Russian military resistance on one of the conflict’s fronts or the loss of its overland access to Crimea could lead Russian leaders to embrace a new set of escalatory tactics.
Finally, the emergence of a stronger diplomatic process to end the war could reshape the war’s escalation dynamics or even paradoxically encourage escalation. While strengthening diplomatic communication can facilitate better crisis management, peace negotiations can also tempt leaders to escalate. In 1971during the Vietnam War, for example, U.S. President Richard Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, expanded military operations into Laos ahead of talks with North Vietnam to increase their leverage at the negotiating table.
WALKING THE TIGHTROPE
If gradualism has so far controlled escalation, then leaders need to maintain it and adapt it to meet the evolving challenges of the war. Gradualism is most associated with how the West has provided military weaponry. Washington should continue to move slowly as it decides whether to provide new and more potent systems, such as the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS). A cautious incrementalism will also be important when it comes to introducing systems NATO countries have already promised, such as F-16s. Other arenas of the war can also benefit from gradualism. Leaders in the United States and elsewhere should use caution in adopting any new maritime security or surveillance measures in the Black Sea so they can buy time to gauge Russia’s reaction and defuse any incidents. As for Ukraine’s attacks within Russia, Kyiv should go slowly with any expansion in the volume of strikes, targets, or use of new weapons systems.
Countries backing Ukraine also ought to think ahead, designing incremental approaches to Ukraine’s counteroffensive. Should the Ukrainian military achieve a significant breakthrough, Kyiv and its allies should have plans, such as buffer zones for advancing military units, to approach sensitive border areas slowly and cautiously. Western and Ukrainian leaders should also better articulate the strategic value of going slowly, clearly signaling that their gradualism is intentional and motivated by an interest in advancing shared goals while containing the war’s damage. And if negotiations accelerate, leaders in the West and Ukraine should not reach for new escalatory tactics. Any deepening talks with Russia should include proactive and explicit statements about limits that both sides need to respect as the bargaining progresses.
The lack of escalation in Ukraine serves as a reminder that in limited wars, patience is a virtue. A go-slow approach has allowed NATO countries to provide a level of military support that was unthinkable at the war’s start. The risks of escalation have not been overblown. Instead, gradualism has allowed the West to learn—and, in some ways, stretch—the limits of the war.
AUSTIN CARSON is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and the author of Secret Wars: Covert Conflict in International Politics.
Foreign Affairs · by Austin Carson · September 14, 2023
5. Army pauses retention cash bonuses amid sky-high re-up rate
So now will the enlistment rate drop to match the recruiting rate?
Army pauses retention cash bonuses amid sky-high re-up rate
armytimes.com · by Davis Winkie · September 13, 2023
After meeting its retention goals early, the Army paused its reenlistment bonus program Tuesday as the fiscal year comes to a close, according to an internal announcement.
The Army’s annual Selective Retention Bonus program provides cash to some reenlisting soldiers based on the force’s needs, which vary between career fields, ranks and skills, or assignment to certain units.
Some combinations aren’t eligible for bonuses. For example, a CBRN specialist staff sergeant in a conventional airborne role wasn’t eligible for a bonus earlier this year, but one assigned to the 75th Ranger Regiment could receive $90,000 in return for a six-year reenlistment.
But the fiscal 2023 program was shut down at 3:11 p.m. Thursday, according to the internal message. Soldiers who reenlisted before then will receive their bonuses.
Although the bonuses are currently suspended, the Army’s other reenlistment incentives remain in play for those who aren’t eligible or who plan to re-up in the next few weeks. Based on what’s available, soldiers who reenlist without a bonus have “options” that could include special schools, such as Ranger School; retraining into a new career field; stabilization at their current duty station; or a duty station of choice, including overseas assignments.
The bonus pause comes after the Army reached its retention goal for the fifth year in a row, the service’s former top NCO said in June. The strong retention rates have helped the service reduce the sting of an ongoing recruiting crisis, but it is still losing more troops than it is gaining.
The Army is likely to announce its fiscal 2024 bonus program in the weeks ahead, so troops who want to reenlist for a bonus may want to wait. Those who were bonus-eligible and are scheduled to leave the Army between Tuesday and Sept. 30 can extend their contracts by as little as three months, according to service regulations, in order to have their full range of options restored soon.
About Davis Winkie
Davis Winkie is a senior reporter covering the Army. He focuses on investigations, personnel concerns and military justice. Davis, also a Guard veteran, was a finalist in the 2023 Livingston Awards for his work with The Texas Tribune investigating the National Guard's border missions. He studied history at Vanderbilt and UNC-Chapel Hill.
6. Zelensky’s commandos are crushing their enemy behind the frontline – just like Britain in WWII
Zelensky’s commandos are crushing their enemy behind the frontline – just like Britain in WWII
Young, untrained Russian soldiers fear the prospect of daring Ukrainian raids, crossing vast rivers to capture them
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/13/ukraines-commandos-have-learnt-from-britains-wwii-success/#:~:text=The%20war%20in%20Ukraine%20appears,makeshift%20yet%20high%2Dtech%20equipment.
HAMISH DE BRETTON-GORDON
13 September 2023 • 2:33pm
The war in Ukraine appears on the surface like no other, with small flying drones attacking ancient tanks, sea drones attacking bridges and the wide scale utilisation of makeshift yet high-tech equipment. But for all these developments, the art of warfare remains unchanged. The aim is still to use any method to unhinge and dislocate your enemy in order to defeat them. The oldest form of warfare – the clandestine operator behind enemy lines, creating confusion, fear and logistical mayhem – is in full swing in this campaign.
What is most striking is the emergence of what appears to be replication of the Allies’ “Special Operations Executive” (SOE) from the Second World War. And its effect – the death from a thousand cuts of the enemy – is looking as successful in 2023 as it was in the 1940s. Then, as now, incredibly brave men and women conducted operations to gather intelligence, allowing for sabotage attacks where the opposing country least expected it.
Just as the SOE blew up railway lines and heavy water plants supplying the Nazi war machine, the Ukrainians are evidently doing similar in Crimea and behind Russian lines in other parts of the country. Mysterious fires at arms factories, explosions in seaports, fighter jets destroyed: much of this cannot happen without a competent intelligence-gathering operation, coupled with fantastic logistical fighting ability. The effect of Ukrainian drone strikes on the Russian effort has become palpable, with the enemy struggling to anticipate when and where the next one may come.
That is one of the key aims of special operations – to crush morale. No surprise, then, that we hear stories of Russian soldiers drinking away their sorrows, or even defecting. These young, largely untrained conscripts fear the prospect of daring Ukrainian raids, crossing vast rivers to capture them. Ukrainian commandos, with their ever increasing skill and capability, have been exemplary in such efforts.
By contrast, the bravado of the Russian elite – some of whom must now holiday in Crimea, rather than their villas in the Mediterranean – is dulled every time the “iconic” Kursk Bridge is shut after its weekly attack. They may now also live in fear in their homes in Moscow, which have come within the reach of drones.
Such fear, struck into the heart of high Russian society, is what’s most likely to end the “special military operation”. It is only the elite who have a voice in Russia and are listened to by Putin and his politburo. It is they who will most likely conduct regime change in Moscow and end the war in the hope of saving their own skins and fortunes.
The weapons used to conduct war may have changed, but the spies, the saboteurs, and the special forces required to conduct operations deep in enemy territory have stuck to similar tactics. And they carry the same risks, with little hope of survival if caught. In Ukraine, they are utterly crucial to the campaign, sapping the will of the enemy. This must at least be as important as the Western tanks and missiles used to fight in broad daylight.
7. Zelenskyy heading to New York to court the rest of the world
Excerpts:
“The realization is setting in that this will be a long war,” said Alina Polyakova, president of the Center for European Policy Analysis, who follows the war closely.
Zelenskyy has rarely left Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. His refusal to abandon the country in the early days of the full-on attack earned him hero status globally. He was granted special permission to speak to the General Assembly via a pre-recorded video address during last year’s gathering.
But as the war has dragged on and strained the global economy, Zelenskyy appears to have decided that showing up in person can help make Ukraine’s case that it still needs support. In December, he visited Washington and appealed to Congress to keep money and weapons flowing. In May, he swung by the meeting of the Group of Seven in Japan to see the leaders of some of the world’s most economically powerful governments.
The United Nations offers an unusually bright spotlight for any world leader. If a special U.N. Security Council meeting on Ukraine is held next week as some diplomats expect, Zelenskyy may be able to make his case in public at the same table as a Russian representative — a rare face-off.
Zelenskyy heading to New York to court the rest of the world
By NAHAL TOOSI
09/14/2023 05:00 AM EDT
Politico
Ukrainian leaders are trying to shore up support from dozens of countries and hope in-person talks will make a difference.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy hopes to make his case both in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly and in several meetings with fellow leaders. | Pool photo by Brendan Smialowski
09/14/2023 05:00 AM EDT
Call it Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s “special diplomatic operation.”
The Ukrainian president plans to show up in person at the United Nations’ annual gathering of world leaders next week. And he has a mission: Use one-on-one charm to convince an array of hesitant countries to back Kyiv against Russia.
Zelenskyy hopes to make his case both in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly and in a blizzard of meetings with fellow leaders, according to a senior Ukrainian government official familiar with the planning.
But the effort faces serious challenges. Many of the countries that have avoided taking sides hail from Africa, Asia and Latin America — often called the Global South — and they are loath to anger any world power if it could damage their own national interests. Even if they’ve rhetorically condemned the Kremlin’s invasion, many haven’t cut economic or diplomatic ties or enforced Western sanctions on Russia, allowing Moscow to keep up some cash flow.
Still, Ukrainian leaders believe they have to make their case. The Zelenskyy trip is part of a broader surge in Ukrainian diplomacy that has coincided with Kyiv’s military counteroffensive against Russia.
“To secure a comprehensive, long-lasting peace, we need more than Western political support,” said the senior Ukrainian official, who was granted anonymity to describe sensitive, still-tentative plans. “We have to have many countries on board, including from the Global South, because their voices matter.”
Ukrainians also worry about a growing sense of global impatience.
“The realization is setting in that this will be a long war,” said Alina Polyakova, president of the Center for European Policy Analysis, who follows the war closely.
Zelenskyy has rarely left Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. His refusal to abandon the country in the early days of the full-on attack earned him hero status globally. He was granted special permission to speak to the General Assembly via a pre-recorded video address during last year’s gathering.
But as the war has dragged on and strained the global economy, Zelenskyy appears to have decided that showing up in person can help make Ukraine’s case that it still needs support. In December, he visited Washington and appealed to Congress to keep money and weapons flowing. In May, he swung by the meeting of the Group of Seven in Japan to see the leaders of some of the world’s most economically powerful governments.
The United Nations offers an unusually bright spotlight for any world leader. If a special U.N. Security Council meeting on Ukraine is held next week as some diplomats expect, Zelenskyy may be able to make his case in public at the same table as a Russian representative — a rare face-off.
The Ukrainian leader has two tactical goals in New York.
One is to gather support for the 10-point peace proposal his administration has been shopping around the world since last fall.
Kyiv has presented its peace plan at past major events, including an August peace conference for Ukraine in Saudi Arabia that Russia did not attend. Ukraine wants to bring more countries on board ahead of a global peace summit it hopes to hold later this year — even if that means taking a piecemeal approach.
“It’s not necessary that the countries endorse all 10 points of the plan,” the senior Ukrainian official said. “They can choose different points that they feel comfortable about and join efforts to push and implement them.”
Russia, which officially refers to the conflict in Ukraine as a “special military operation” and not a war, has shown no serious interest in peace talks and it has dismissed Kyiv’s demands.
But Ukraine’s leaders believe that it’s important to show the world that while they are the victims of unjust Russian aggression, they are still willing to pursue diplomacy to end the war.
Zelenskyy’s other main focus is to find solutions to the food security crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion, the Ukrainian official said.
That crisis has deepened in recent weeks because Moscow has abandoned the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which allowed Ukrainian agricultural products to leave certain ports, often destined for vulnerable countries in the Middle East and Africa.
Zelenskyy wants to marshal ideas and support for other means of exporting Ukrainian products, the official said. He also hopes to convince Global South countries to pressure the Kremlin to stop its negative moves in the Black Sea, which have helped cause food prices to spike in many places.
It will be a tough sell.
Two U.N. General Assembly resolutions condemning the Kremlin’s invasion have gained votes from more than 140 countries. But fewer countries are willing to go beyond rhetoric to punish Russia.
Many of the countries Zelenskyy intends to appeal to in both bilateral and group settings at the United Nations have economic and security ties to Russia, not to mention China, which has sided with Moscow in the war.
Some also see an America and Europe in decline.
“Among African actors, at least in that part of the Global South, there is an understanding that there’s something shifting about international affairs, and it is not in their interest to align themselves behind any one party,” said W. Gyude Moore, a former senior Liberian official now with the Center for Global Development.
It’s possible that a special U.N. Security Council session about Ukraine will be held during this year’s gathering and that Zelenskyy will attend, said a Western diplomat familiar with the General Assembly planning who was granted anonymity because discussions are still ongoing.
(The Ukrainian official declined to comment on that possibility or give details about the number of meetings Zelenskyy hopes to have or the size of his entourage.)
The theatrics of such a Security Council meeting could prove riveting, especially if a Russian representative, likely to be Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, shows up. The diplomats at such meetings generally project calm, but the tension can be thick and the words sharp.
U.S. officials wouldn’t say whether President Joe Biden would attend such a special Security Council meeting on Ukraine.
Lavrov, a veteran diplomat, will likely hold his own meetings with Global South leaders, though his schedule appeared relatively light during last year’s gathering.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin often skips the General Assembly and isn’t traveling outside his country much these days because the International Criminal Court has issued a warrant for his arrest related to the war.
An official with the Russian mission to the United Nations declined to comment for this story.
Several other major world leaders have indicated they won’t be in New York this year for a variety of reasons. They include France’s Emmanuel Macron, Britain’s Rishi Sunak and India’s Narendra Modi.
It’s not a concern, the senior Ukrainian government official said.
Zelenskyy already is in regular touch with some of these leaders. He wants to use his platform in New York to meet with others with whom he’s less acquainted, the official said.
“We don’t have much opportunity to talk to the president of, for instance, Botswana,” the official said.
Last year, Zelenskyy used both his video address to the Assembly and a side virtual appearance to urge countries to stop being neutral. In the side address, he said: “You cannot vacillate between good and evil, light and dark.”
The message didn’t appear to make much difference in the calculations of countries such as India, South Africa and Brazil, which continue to say they want peace but aren’t willing to endanger their ties to Moscow.
“Nothing changes simply because we’re in New York,” said Moore, the former Liberian official. Even if Zelenskyy finds more sympathetic ears, “I don’t know if he’s going to get a different result than the one he’s gotten for the last two years.”
POLITICO
Politico
8. Former generals urge House to approve Ukraine aid as Republican resistance grows
I have not found the letter so perhaps it has not been made public.
Excerpts;
In July, 70 House Republicans voted for failed amendments to an annual defense policy bill that would strip all aid to Ukraine. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, joined other conservative groups Tuesday in calling on congressional leaders to reject continued support for Ukraine.
“Greenlighting the administration’s recent request for an additional $24 billion to fund the war does not serve the interests of the American people,” the groups wrote in a letter to Democrat and Republican leaders in the House and Senate.
Congress has signed off on $113 billion in military, economic, humanitarian, and other aid for Ukraine since last year. The latest request includes $13 billion in military assistance, including weapon shipments to the Ukrainian military and the replenishment of Pentagon weapon stocks.
Breedlove and Hodges said the money has been well spent so far.
“Having spent a fraction of the annual U.S. military budget in security assistance, Ukraine managed to cut Putin’s combat capacity in half,” they wrote. “That is a significant and historic return on investment when it comes to our own national security and interests, and the investment in protections against the threats posed by Putin and Russia against NATO members.”
The U.S. is the largest contributor to the Ukraine war effort, but it ranks 12th, behind the tiny countries of the Baltics and others, when accounting for the size of its aid relative to the size of its economy, according to the Council on Foreign Relations think tank.
Former generals urge House to approve Ukraine aid as Republican resistance grows
Stars and Stripes · by Svetlana Shkolnikova · September 13, 2023
At left, Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, then-NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe and commander of U.S. European Command, talks at a news conference July 31, 2014, in Gaziantep, Turkey. At right, Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, then-commander of U.S. Army Europe, observes soldiers conducting training, Nov. 5, 2016, at the International Peacekeeping and Security Center in Yavoriv, Ukraine. (Nicole Sikorski/U.S. Air Force (left), Elizabeth Tarr/U.S. Army)
WASHINGTON — Two former generals are calling on Republican leaders in the House to put politics aside and quickly approve additional aid for Ukraine as the country’s forces press their counteroffensive against entrenched Russian troops.
Retired Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, a former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, and retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the former commanding general for U.S. Army forces in Europe, made the appeal in a letter this week to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., who is attempting to build legislative consensus with a narrow Republican majority.
McCarthy is facing increasing pressure from hard-right Republicans to cut off Ukraine assistance and has indicated he will not include the White House’s recent request for $24 billion in additional aid in a spending bill that needs to pass by the end of the month to avoid a government shutdown.
“Now is not the time to allow partisan politics to get in the way of supporting an ally that is fighting for freedom, as well as their own existence,” wrote Breedlove and Hodges. “Ukrainians need our help. They need both military and non-lethal aid, and they needed it yesterday.”
The retired generals said Ukraine is at a critical juncture in the war and has the momentum to take back occupied territory despite a slower-than-expected counteroffensive. They defended the arming of Ukraine as vital to American strategic interests.
“Our economic prosperity at home is linked to Europe, and European prosperity depends on stability and security on the Continent,” Breedlove and Hodges wrote. “American prosperity also depends on the respect of sovereign borders, the freedom of navigation on the high seas and the credibility of international agreements. Russia has challenged each one of these pillars of American power.”
Their arguments are shared by most Republicans in the Democrat-led Senate, where Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is regularly making speeches on the floor pushing back against Republican skeptics. McConnell said the Pentagon and other government agencies will brief Republican senators on oversight efforts for Ukraine aid, a frequent topic of conservative criticism.
Still, opposition to funneling more weapons and money to the war-torn country is growing from Republicans who contend the U.S. needs to focus on domestic priorities over foreign wars.
In July, 70 House Republicans voted for failed amendments to an annual defense policy bill that would strip all aid to Ukraine. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, joined other conservative groups Tuesday in calling on congressional leaders to reject continued support for Ukraine.
“Greenlighting the administration’s recent request for an additional $24 billion to fund the war does not serve the interests of the American people,” the groups wrote in a letter to Democrat and Republican leaders in the House and Senate.
Congress has signed off on $113 billion in military, economic, humanitarian, and other aid for Ukraine since last year. The latest request includes $13 billion in military assistance, including weapon shipments to the Ukrainian military and the replenishment of Pentagon weapon stocks.
Breedlove and Hodges said the money has been well spent so far.
“Having spent a fraction of the annual U.S. military budget in security assistance, Ukraine managed to cut Putin’s combat capacity in half,” they wrote. “That is a significant and historic return on investment when it comes to our own national security and interests, and the investment in protections against the threats posed by Putin and Russia against NATO members.”
The U.S. is the largest contributor to the Ukraine war effort, but it ranks 12th, behind the tiny countries of the Baltics and others, when accounting for the size of its aid relative to the size of its economy, according to the Council on Foreign Relations think tank.
The next package of U.S. aid to Ukraine is caught up in a spending battle on Capitol Hill that is pitting the House against the Senate as lawmakers race to negotiate a stopgap spending bill before the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. A government shutdown would go into effect Oct. 1 if an agreement is not reached.
Senate leaders are unlikely to approve legislation that does not include more assistance to Ukraine while McCarthy is reluctant to support measures that are unpopular with the hard-right House Republicans who helped propel him to his leadership post earlier this year.
House Republicans on Wednesday were forced to delay consideration of the Pentagon’s 2024 budget due to the widening discord among their ranks.
Stars and Stripes · by Svetlana Shkolnikova · September 13, 2023
9. Top Army general in the Pacific warns of China’s military threat
Excerpts:
Flynn laid out a brief, pointing to specific map areas and highlighting Chinese government and military efforts that include building dams in Vietnam, forming islands in the South China Sea, engaging in predatory lending “debt traps” with smaller nations in the Pacific to seize terrain, ports and other features in lieu of payments, and a series of defenses and alliances with North Korea, Russia and Pakistan.
...
“By 2033 I believe that something is going to have to be decided by President Xi (Jinping),” Flynn said. “He’s 70 years old. And generally, by the time he’s 80 he’s going to have to make a decision about what to do with the modernization, with the reorganization, and with the military instrument that he’s built and is building. He’s stated it publicly, he’s basically told his commanders to be ready by 2027.”
Flynn then highlighted how the Army has ceded much of its history and capabilities in the Pacific region but is regaining that through a series of efforts, some of which he’d previously shared with Army Times.
...
Though often considered more of an air and maritime command, Flynn has pushed back against that view for years now.
“…This (anti-access, area denial) arsenal is primarily designed to defeat maritime and airpower,” Flynn said. “Notice, however, it is not designed to find, fix and finish distributed, mobile, lethal and nonlethal fixed and semi-fixed land power armies.”
But Flynn isn’t going full Army green. The big green machine will still need some help.
“When I say land power, I mean the Marine Corps and the Special Operations Forces and I mean these large armies that represent the region,” Flynn said.
By having these multiple options to thwart Chinese military expansion, Flynn said the United States and its allies have “created a targeting dilemma for the [People’s Republic of China].”
Top Army general in the Pacific warns of China’s military threat
armytimes.com · by Todd South · September 13, 2023
The top officer for Army forces in the Pacific region challenged soldiers with a “call to action” to look at the challenges in that area and to think hard about where they’ll be in the next five to 10 years and what they’re doing today to prepare.
In a virtual address to attendees at the annual Maneuver Warfighter Conference at Fort Moore, Georgia, on Tuesday, U.S. Army Pacific commander Gen. Charles Flynn said that Chinese political and military leaders are likely to make serious choices on how to use their growing military power at some point in the next decade.
“First of all, this century is going to be defined by what actually happens in the Indo-Pacific and Asia. It is the most consequential region at the most consequential time, and it has the most consequential adversary that has both the capability and the will, and it demonstrates it every single day to conduct operations to counter the United States… and what a free and open Indo Pacific represents to the world,” Flynn said.
The four-star wants soldiers to take a tough look at their own preparedness.
“Think about where you’re going to be in the next five to 10 years…and what that means to you, to the Army and to the country,” he said.
Flynn is not alone in his concerns.
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said Monday at the Air Force Association Annual Air, Space and Cyber Conference that “intelligence couldn’t be clearer. Whatever its actual intentions may be I could not say, but China is preparing for a war and specifically for a war with the United States,” CNN Pentagon reporter Haley Britzky reported.
Flynn laid out a brief, pointing to specific map areas and highlighting Chinese government and military efforts that include building dams in Vietnam, forming islands in the South China Sea, engaging in predatory lending “debt traps” with smaller nations in the Pacific to seize terrain, ports and other features in lieu of payments, and a series of defenses and alliances with North Korea, Russia and Pakistan.
The New York Times reported recently that the leaders of North Korea and Russia are in talks for North Korea to provide additional munitions to Russia so that it may continue its war in Ukraine.
“By 2033 I believe that something is going to have to be decided by President Xi (Jinping),” Flynn said. “He’s 70 years old. And generally, by the time he’s 80 he’s going to have to make a decision about what to do with the modernization, with the reorganization, and with the military instrument that he’s built and is building. He’s stated it publicly, he’s basically told his commanders to be ready by 2027.”
Flynn then highlighted how the Army has ceded much of its history and capabilities in the Pacific region but is regaining that through a series of efforts, some of which he’d previously shared with Army Times.
Those include Operation Pacific Pathways, an annual, 40-exercise program that flows soldiers from various Pacific-focused and United States-based units into the region to work alongside partner and allied militaries.
U.S. Army Pacific commander Gen. Charles Flynn receives a brief on the training objectives of exercise Talisman Sabre 23 at Lavarack Barracks in Townsville, Queensland, Australia, July 28, 2023. (Sgt. 1st Class John Healy/Army)
Other work includes the expansion of the Joint Pacific Multinational Training Center, which offers combat training capabilities both on-site in Hawaii and Alaska and through an exportable model that can be set up and conducted in host nations.
Though often considered more of an air and maritime command, Flynn has pushed back against that view for years now.
“…This (anti-access, area denial) arsenal is primarily designed to defeat maritime and airpower,” Flynn said. “Notice, however, it is not designed to find, fix and finish distributed, mobile, lethal and nonlethal fixed and semi-fixed land power armies.”
But Flynn isn’t going full Army green. The big green machine will still need some help.
“When I say land power, I mean the Marine Corps and the Special Operations Forces and I mean these large armies that represent the region,” Flynn said.
By having these multiple options to thwart Chinese military expansion, Flynn said the United States and its allies have “created a targeting dilemma for the [People’s Republic of China].”
Lastly, the line of effort that Flynn told the audience concerns him most currently as it could present gaps should conflict break out – joint interior lines.
Essentially the series of defenses that ring China with an array of formations, capabilities, weapons and more that stretch from the northern reaches of the Pacific through Japan and southward into the Philippines and hooks around through Malaysia and into Thailand and neighboring countries.
But, Flynn noted, these “interior lines” are growing through increases in partner military force capability.
Thailand recently ordered an entire brigade combat team’s worth of equipment, enough to field 144 Strykers, Flynn said.
Japan has increased its military spending each year for the past decade, with a 26% increase this past year alone and U.S. and Indian military exercises have also grown in scale and complexity in recent years.
“We need to understand the place, the adversary, the adversary’s capabilities and we can’t get there fast enough ladies and gentlemen,” Flynn said. “We have to understand what’s at stake out here.”
About Todd South
Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.
10. US military publishes new joint warfighting doctrine
Just as a reminder this is not available to the general public even though it is unclassified. The Joint Electronic Library only allows doctrine to be downloaded by CAC card holders.
That said, I have seen a copy. :-) Here is an excerpt from the EXSUM about the two forms of warfare. Below the article are the complete descriptions of conventional and irregular warfare.
The US military recognizes two general forms of warfare— conventional and irregular—which may escalate to include the employment of nuclear weapons. Joint force commanders (JFCs) choose to conduct warfare, not in terms of an either/or choice but in various combinations that suit the strategic and operational objectives and that are tailored to a specific OE.
The three levels of warfare link tactical actions to the achievement of strategic objectives. There are no finite limits or specific boundaries between these levels, but they help JFCs plan and synchronize campaigns and operations, allocate resources, and assign tasks. The strategic, operational, or tactical purpose of employment depends on the nature of the mission.
The strategic level of warfare integrates national policy decisions into the development and promulgation of national, defense, and military strategies.
The operational level of warfare is generally the realm of CCDRs and their subordinate components. The focus of this level is the application of operational art. CCDRs link strategy and tactics through campaigns (e.g., global campaign plans and combatant command (CCMD) campaign plans); link the operational and strategic objectives for each type of plan; and work to constantly pursue and support national, multinational, or global strategic objectives as defined by the President and Secretary of Defense (SecDef).
The tactical level of warfare is where the conduct of battles and engagements seeks to achieve military objectives assigned to JFCs and subordinate units.
US military publishes new joint warfighting doctrine
defensescoop.com · by Jon Harper · September 13, 2023
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The Joint Chiefs of Staff have published their highly anticipated new doctrine for implementing the U.S. military’s joint warfighting concept.
The document — called JP 1 Volume 1, Joint Warfighting — appears to have been quietly published on Aug. 27, although it isn’t publicly available.
“We realized Joint Warfighting Concept 3.0 as Joint Publication 1 Volume 1 … This is important because it’s gone from concept to doctrine, and it marks a distinctive paradigm change. It emphasizes our proactive stance in a persistent competitive environment where military advantages aren’t set in stone. We must think expansively beyond conventional operational domains. And it is crucial for us, all of us, to understand that this isn’t a one-time endeavor. Our required joint capabilities are ever-evolving, echoing the fluidity of modern warfare, and they must be informed by the JWC’s tenets,” Adm. Christopher Grady, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday at AFA’s Air, Space and Cyber conference.
“And to truly bring this doctrine online, I need this community’s help. The most consequential thinking decisions and investments we’re making for our future national defense are underway right now. We need to hear the voices of airmen and guardians in the Joint Force forums, exercises and war games. We need your expertise, your skills, your perspectives. We need you to accelerate change within the Joint Force. We must adapt to meet the demands of the future fight and we cannot get this wrong,” he added.
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The new publication provides foundational doctrine on the strategic direction of the Joint Force, and the functions of the Department of Defense and its major components, according to the JCS.
DefenseScoop reached out to the Joint Staff to try to obtain a copy but is still waiting to hear back.
Joint doctrine “presents fundamental principles that guide the employment of U.S. military forces in coordinated and integrated action toward a common objective. It promotes a common perspective from which to plan, train, and conduct military operations. It represents what is taught, believed, and advocated as to what is right (i.e., what works best). It provides distilled insights and wisdom gained from employing the military instrument of national power in operations to achieve national objectives,” per the JCS.
Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had previously indicated that the new publication would likely come out in July.
“Doctrine is important because it will help clarify and inform all the various levels of the organization on how you plan to fight. And then there’ll be subordinate doctrines that come out of each of the services that support the joint doctrine, etc. So Joint Pub[lication] 1 will come out … and that’ll start us on a journey. It’ll probably take two years or so for all the other documents to catch up so that we clearly establish the doctrine on how to fight,” Milley said June 30 during remarks at the National Press Club.
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At the AFA conference, Grady noted that Joint Warfighting Concept 3.0 focuses on information advantage, command and control, joint fires, the ability to win in contested logistics, and expanded maneuver.
To win “key battles for advantage,” U.S. military forces must “sense and make sense” of their operating environments by fusing information from sensors across multiple domains — including space, air and land — and make that information rapidly available for decision-makers. The employment of combinations of crewed and uncrewed systems will be a key component of future operations, he added.
The U.S. military is good at force employment, Grady said. However, he sees room for improvement regarding force design.
“Where I think we can do better as a Joint Force is the future force design aspect. And we have to hold ourselves accountable to the direction that we’ve been given” by the secretary of defense, the National Defense Strategy and Joint Warfighting Concept 3.0, he said, noting that the DOD needs to solve some of its key challenges in upcoming budget cycles.
“One of my major lines of effort as the vice chairman is pushing for more accountability in this process so that we can better realize the future force design imperative, bolstering deterrence, amplifying our global network of allies and partners, driving down risk and fast-tracking the development … [of] innovative capabilities and operational concepts,” he said.
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A J-7 cross-functional team within the Joint Staff, led by Maj. Gen. Patrick Gaydon, has already been established to explore options for creating a new “Joint Futures” organization, the shape of which is still being fleshed out.
“That organization will help drive these [doctrinal] concepts, but also the technologies and describing the operational environment that we’re moving into, and so on,” Milley said at the National Press Club.
defensescoop.com · by Jon Harper · September 13, 2023
a. Forms of Warfare. The US military recognizes two general forms of warfare— conventional and irregular—which may escalate to include the employment of nuclear weapons. JFCs choose to conduct warfare not in terms of an either/or choice but in various combinations that suit the strategic and operational objectives and that are tailored to a specific OE. In some cases, adversary actions force the JFC to select specific ways and means. Warfare does not always fit neatly into one of these subjective categories but incorporates all aspects of conventional warfare and irregular warfare (IW) when in tandem or parallel. Military activity (or inactivity) may be communicative if observed and perceived by actors as affecting them. A nation-state’s purpose for waging war is to impose its will on an enemy and avoid imposition of the enemy’s will. Winning a war requires creative, dynamic, and synergistic combinations of all US capabilities. Achieving strategic objectives often depends on the population indigenous to the OA accepting the imposed, arbitrated, or negotiated result.
(1) Conventional Warfare. This form of warfare is a violent struggle between nation-states or coalitions, and alliances of nation-states, fought with conventional forces.
(a) In conventional warfare, nation-states fight each other to protect or advance their strategic interests. Campaigning as a part of conventional warfare normally focuses on an enemy’s armed forces, their capabilities, and seizing key terrain to influence their government. In conventional warfare, enemies engage in combat against each other and employ a variety of similar functions and capabilities throughout the OE. In today’s OE, enemies are challenging traditional views of warfare that blur warfare lines in their rhetoric and their doctrine, including operations that may integrate IW, conventional warfare, and nuclear operations.
(b) Nuclear war is an existential threat, and strategic nuclear deterrence requires a no-fail approach. Strategic deterrence is foundational to the success of all other missions and is the joint force’s priority mission for which it maintains the highest state of readiness. Therefore, the United States manages the risk of an escalation to nuclear war. This type of deterrence requires close coordination across all CCMDs to control escalation.
Additionally, the joint force supports counterproliferation of nuclear weapons and nuclear materials of concern.
For more information on nuclear operations, see JP 3-72, Joint Nuclear Operations.
(a) Military victory typically results from defeating an enemy’s will, destroying or defeating an enemy’s warfighting capability, destroying the enemy’s war- sustaining capacity (e.g., defense industrial base), removing a hostile regime, or the seizure and holding of territory. Both conventional warfare and IW may consist of a tailored mix of capabilities, including cyberspace and space capabilities.
(b) Conventional warfare may also encompass state-like entities that adopt conventional military capabilities and methods to achieve military victory.
(c) The near-term outcomes of conventional warfare are often obvious, with the conflict ending in military victory for one side and military defeat for the other or resulting in stalemate. When considering forcible action, policymakers and senior military leaders must consider the operational continuity of effort, like preparedness for initiating offensive operations, consolidation, and the return to competition. These actions can ultimately determine whether military victory translates into enduring strategic objectives.
(2) IW. IW is a form of warfare where states and non-state actors campaign to assure or coerce states or other groups through indirect, non-attributable, or asymmetric activities, either as the primary approach or in concert with conventional warfare. The term “irregular” highlights the character of this form of warfare, which seeks to create dilemmas and increase risk and costs to adversaries to achieve a position of advantage. IW may employ the threat or use of organized armed violence for purposes other than physical domination over an adversary. States and non-state actors may conduct IW when they cannot achieve their strategic objectives by nonmilitary activities or conventional warfare.
(a) States and Non-State Actors. IW occurs between nations, states, or other groups. Other groups include organizations with no state involvement but that have capacity to threaten or use violence. States or other groups conduct IW to impose their will, with complementary methods contributing to the military defeat of an adversary.
(b) Campaign. JFCs plan, conduct, and assess IW within military campaigns as part of a broader, long-term USG effort across relevant instruments of national power to protect and advance US national interests.
1. Integrating military and nonmilitary means is essential to plan and conduct IW, as the military alone is often insufficient to achieve desired strategic objectives. The joint force plans and conducts IW in collaboration with relevant instruments of national power and with allies and partners.
2. The intent of IW is to erode an adversary’s legitimacy and influence over a population and to exhaust its political will—not necessarily to defeat its armed forces—while supporting the legitimacy, influence, and will of friendly political authorities engaged in the struggle against the adversary.
3. JFCs may conduct IW proactively to deny access or create dilemmas for an opponent’s government, economy, or civil society.
4. In armed conflict, JFCs can conduct activities to support IW as an inherent aspect of joint operations.
5. JFCs may conduct IW proactively to undermine an emerging threat and prevent them from becoming an enemy.
(c) Assure or Coerce. IW can assure or coerce within the paradigm of strategic uses of military force. JFCs can assure allies and partners by demonstrating US commitment to their strategic interests. JFCs can employ IW in attempting to coerce opponents, such as deterring their future behavior and compelling them to modify their current behavior. IW operations and activities may have the following effects:
1. Affecting the legitimacy and influence of the principal actors and their partners and opponents.
2. Deterring, delaying, disrupting, or degrading opponents.
3. Countering the coercive and subversive activities of opponents.
4. Diverting, coercing, attriting, or exhausting opponents.
(d) IW Variables. IW employs either indirect, non-attributable, or asymmetric military activities to achieve strategic objectives. Not all IW is indirect, non- attributable, and asymmetric, but IW includes one of these essential characteristics.
1. Indirect activities target an adversary or support an ally or partner through one or more intermediaries (e.g., allies, partners, proxies, surrogates).
2. Non-attributable activities target an opponent or support an ally or partner in ways that conceal the source of the activities or their sponsorship.
3. Asymmetric activities target an opponent or support an ally or partner when a gross disparity in relative comprehensive power causes the weaker party to resort to irregular methodologies (e.g., disinformation, terrorism, insurgency, resistance to occupation) to erode or exhaust their opponent’s power, influence, and will. However, a stronger party may target opponents asymmetrically when the risks and cost associated with a direct, symmetric approach are unacceptable.
(e) Joint Force Conduct of IW. IW is a joint force activity not limited to special operations forces activity. Most joint capabilities can be employed in an irregular context. All IW operations and activities require conventional force lead, facilitation, or participation.
11. China’s Military Spending Is Much Bigger Than We Thought By James Stavridis
Excerpts:
None of this should surprise us. The US continues to use the global playbook written more than a century ago by the great naval strategist Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan. He thought of overseas bases as “coaling stations,” since the ships of his day ran on the stuff. But the idea is sound in the modern context. By expanding its string of bases from the Korean Peninsula to the Japanese home islands to the Arabian Gulf to the Baltic and Mediterranean Seas, the US can exercise global naval control. China is in no position to do likewise, and doesn’t seem to want to.
We should avoid overreacting to what seems to be this more accurate data of China’s military push. But the first step is for the Pentagon to talk about it, and not just in Washington’s halls of power. It should be providing unclassified briefings and reports to the public — one will be out in October, an annual Defense Department review of Chinese capabilities.
Next, the US needs to at least maintain its own defense spending in line with inflation, and encourage allies, from Tokyo to Berlin, to continue to raise their levels of spending on systems that are interoperable with America’s. The US and allies need to step up exercises and training together on land, sea, air, space and cyber. We need to shift toward more modern, faster, lighter and cheaper platforms and sensors, a la the new Replicator drone idea from DoD.
But of course, we need to do all we can to avoid unintended confrontations. Big doors can swing on small hinges, and in an era of an expanding global Chinese military, we need bilateral communications and protocols to defuse incidents; these are sorely lacking at the moment.
China has plenty of internal problems right now, from restive youth to challenging demographics to a sputtering economy — but we must not underestimate the arc of their military ambition.
China’s Military Spending Is Much Bigger Than We Thought
Revised figures based on US intelligence give an estimate of $700 billion a year instead of the official figure of $300 billion.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-09-13/china-spends-700-billion-on-its-military-approaching-us-900-billion?mc_cid=80c26d6446&sref=hhjZtX76
By James Stavridis
September 13, 2023 at 5:00 PM EDT
A spotlight is beginning to shine on China’s increasing defense spending. Senator Dan Sullivan, an Alaska Republican, recently issued a statement indicating his belief — based on assessments by US intelligence agencies and the highly regarded Swedish defense think tank SIPRI — that China spends about $700 billion annually. What makes this remarkable is that China reports less than $300 billion in its overall defense budget.
If these revised numbers are true, how should it change our reading of China’s intentions? And how should the US respond?
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We should start with the US defense budget, which is accurately reported as nearly $900 billion. This includes the Defense Department appropriation of roughly $830 billion, the portion of the Energy Department budget allocated to the nuclear weapons program, and some other agencies related to national security. It amounts to just over 3% of gross domestic product, which feels about right given the global nature of US engagement and commitments.
America’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies spend a collective $300 billion, and Japan, South Korea and Australia have strong defense budgets as well. So even if China is spending $700 billion, the democratic world allocates perhaps twice that, and forms a far tighter and more powerful global network than Beijing’s.
But in assessing China, it is important to understand several key facts about its spending. First, it is increasing fairly rapidly and, if the $700 billion is accurate, amounts to about 4% of GDP. That trajectory alone is concerning.
Second, China doesn’t field an all-volunteer force — which means its personnel costs are far, far lower per person. You don’t have to pay conscripts much: Beijing pays a recruit $108 a month, compared to $1,900 per month paid to US recruits (which goes up rapidly).
This gives China the luxury of spending more on weapons, sensors and advanced technology. It is a classic example of purchasing power: Things cost less in different countries and currencies, so trying to measure them against each other by simply equating dollars to Chinese currency isn’t accurate.
Additionally, the People’s Liberation Army relies on multiple civilian reserve forces, notably at sea. When I was a commodore operating in the Western Pacific with a squadron of US destroyers under my command, we often operated in the South China Sea on “freedom of navigation” missions. So often, the ships sent out to harass and challenge us were not official People’s Liberation Army-Navy ships, but part of the Chinese coast guard (which operates full-scale corvettes and frigates) and the even blurrier People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia.
The latter, composed of everything from tugboats to coastal freighters to fishing boats, can interdict small craft and create difficulties for large US warships when they come close to China’s coast, although the US Navy is always careful to observe sea law and remain in international waters.
One also has to consider how China intends to use its armed forces. Unlike the US, which has a global remit and dozens of large bases all around the world, China has historically been a coastal force. This has significant advantages in logistics: Instead of needing a vast fleet of oilers for refueling and rearming ships around the world, as the Pentagon does, Chinese craft can simply pop in and out of their coastal ports. The same advantages accrue to aviation operations as well.
But lately that is changing a bit. China now has a base on the coast of the Red Sea, near the US base in Djibouti, which can provide logistics, intelligence and surveillance throughout the approaches to the Persian Gulf. At Cambodia’s Ream Naval Base, China is apparently building its first naval facility in the Indo-Pacific. Look for more bases around the world, likely leveraging the facilities of allies such as Russia, Iran, Venezuela and Cuba.
None of this should surprise us. The US continues to use the global playbook written more than a century ago by the great naval strategist Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan. He thought of overseas bases as “coaling stations,” since the ships of his day ran on the stuff. But the idea is sound in the modern context. By expanding its string of bases from the Korean Peninsula to the Japanese home islands to the Arabian Gulf to the Baltic and Mediterranean Seas, the US can exercise global naval control. China is in no position to do likewise, and doesn’t seem to want to.
We should avoid overreacting to what seems to be this more accurate data of China’s military push. But the first step is for the Pentagon to talk about it, and not just in Washington’s halls of power. It should be providing unclassified briefings and reports to the public — one will be out in October, an annual Defense Department review of Chinese capabilities.
Next, the US needs to at least maintain its own defense spending in line with inflation, and encourage allies, from Tokyo to Berlin, to continue to raise their levels of spending on systems that are interoperable with America’s. The US and allies need to step up exercises and training together on land, sea, air, space and cyber. We need to shift toward more modern, faster, lighter and cheaper platforms and sensors, a la the new Replicator drone idea from DoD.
But of course, we need to do all we can to avoid unintended confrontations. Big doors can swing on small hinges, and in an era of an expanding global Chinese military, we need bilateral communications and protocols to defuse incidents; these are sorely lacking at the moment.
China has plenty of internal problems right now, from restive youth to challenging demographics to a sputtering economy — but we must not underestimate the arc of their military ambition.
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To contact the author of this story:
James Stavridis at [email protected]
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Tobin Harshaw at [email protected]
James Stavridis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A retired U.S. Navy admiral, former supreme allied commander of NATO, and dean emeritus of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, he is vice chairman of global affairs at the Carlyle Group. He is on the boards of American Water Works, Fortinet, PreVeil, NFP, Ankura Consulting Group, Titan Holdings, Michael Baker and Neuberger Berman, and has advised Shield Capital, a firm that invests in the cybersecurity sector.
12. The Roots of Bad Strategy
Excerpts:
Conclusion: the real roots of rotten strategy?
Not nearly enough attention, this study maintains, is devoted to discovering the causes of defective strategy. Dissecting how poor judgement, disproportionate responses, and a lack of prudential reasoning arises might enable better choices to be made in the future.
A totalising liberal idealism promoted in an age of non-total threats is therefore one level of explanation that accounts for the poor strategic outcomes witnessed in recent times. When populations do not perceive themselves to be in mortal danger or at war with opposing ideas or nations, they are unlikely to accept the trade-offs and long-term commitments demanded of them by others who inhabit a neo-total war mindset. The outstanding question is why policymaking has become substantially detached from popular consent, and continues to perpetuate a total war way of thinking?
There are many possible layers of explanation here regarding the social forces pushing Western societies towards a post-democratic age,[xlviii] where new elites seek to exclude the popular voice,[xlix] but one notable result has been to confine strategic matters within a technique of specialist advocacy that is often dismissive of popular sentiments, because they are seen as unsophisticated and out of step with expansive liberal cosmopolitan norms.[l] It is this technocratic coterie who credentialise themselves as experts in grand strategy and appoint themselves as arbiters of what they consider effective policy making.
We arrive, then, at something of a paradox. It is as if good strategy – if the past three decades is anything to go by – exists in inverse proportion to the number of students and centres of learning dedicated to studying strategy. Seemingly, the greater the highbrow effort devoted to expostulating about grand strategy the worse the outcomes.
In the final analysis we are left to wrestle with the most ironic of questions, which is are we part of the problem? Are we who traffic in the currency of strategic learning, responsible for promoting an almost gnostic idea that strategy is a form of secret knowledge, available only to a few select initiates and certainly beyond the reach of the common person to apprehend,[li] whose views should, naturally, be excluded from any consideration?
Are we, who pretend to the knowledge of what constitutes good strategy, the real harbingers of bad strategy?
M.L.R. Smith - Australian War College
https://www.militarystrategymagazine.com/article/the-roots-of-bad-strategy/?mc_cid=80c26d6446
To cite this article:
Smith, M.L.R., “The Roots of Bad Strategy,” Military Strategy Magazine, Volume 9, Issue 1, summer 2023, pages 10-18.
M.L.R. Smith is Academic Principal of the Australian War College, Canberra. Formerly he was Head of the Department of War Studies, King’s College, University of London.
Over the previous three decades of teaching strategic theory, I have inquired of many a tutorial group as to what should be considered ‘good strategy’. From the outset the students proceed to tick off numerous markers of good strategy: the ability to achieve goals; attaining values and outcomes that are meaningful; maximising interests; accomplishing aims as efficiently as possible; evaluating the costs and benefits of different courses of action; balancing risk and reward; gaining an appreciation of the adversary; assessing one’s own strengths and limitations; arriving at an outcome better than where one began; knowing when to stop.
There is no obvious way of distilling these level-headed observations except to infer that the essence of good strategy is premised upon the principle of proportionality. This begs the question: what is proportionality? Proportionality, my students deduce, connotes weighing up the balance of advantages relative to disadvantages; gauging the value of one’s goals and the price one might be willing to pay to achieve them; the willingness to modify, change or abandon certain aims or behaviours if one is not getting what one wants through a chosen course of action.
Acting with prudence might also be another way of describing the principle of proportionality. A prudential attitude is not a recipe for inaction. Neither does it mean that one cannot take risks. It does suggest, however, that those risks are calculated, are not undertaken rashly but are sufficiently thought through. They are also premised on the preparedness to ask searching questions about why and with what intent one is embarking on a course of action, and crucially, is it likely to be worth it?
Framing the argument
The point is that if 20-year-old undergraduates can comprehend the precepts of effective strategy, why cannot higher decision makers and policy analysts, who seem – at least in the context of contemporary Western practice – to exhibit poor judgment time and again? Yes, it may be tiresome to rehearse the litany of recent failures in military intervention, but do we not fail as strategic analysts if we don’t at least ask the question why?
This article, then, seeks to discern whether we – and by ‘we’ I mean those of us who operate in the intellectual space where policy and strategy intersect, be it in academia, think-tanks, government, and armed forces – can initiate a serious debate as to how and why systematic errors of judgement have arisen. Can we, in other words, get to the roots of what constitutes bad strategy?
Although I usually try to avoid discursive forms of writing, I would like to narrate the argument here partly through my own engagement with this question over the past three decades, to show how I have arrived at my observations about where the roots of bad strategy may be said to originate. On that score, I hope the reader will be patient, and bear with me as I endeavour to establish the premises of my argument.
By bad strategy, I mean the formation and execution of policies that manifestly do not obtain their original goals. In building an argument about the roots of bad strategy, I am conscious that I will be skating over questions that cannot be dealt with adequately in the space of a short article: such as whether meaningful distinctions between policy and strategy can be made, or whether political failures can be distinguished from strategic failures, or for that matter, just who are the strategists?
With respect to these questions, while there is no ‘guild’ of strategists as such,[i] I have intimated that there does exist an interface between policy makers, armed forces practitioners, along with analysts and commentators in policy think-tanks and the scholarly world, who do aspire to have – and in some cases have had and continue to have – an influence over how national policy and strategy are moulded, as will be shown. The ultimate point that this article thus attempts to convey is that those who may be said to comprise the strategic fraternity, howsoever defined, should not evade their responsibility for the formation of bad strategy.
Good judgement… a commodity in short supply?
Approaching matters prudentially – asking the questions about what one is seeking to achieve at proportional cost – is no guarantee of future success but it is one of the tenets that underpins the notion of ‘good judgement’: a mixture of sound reasoning and appreciation of context, along with an intuitive grasp of what constitutes a sensibly pragmatic response to the circumstances in which one finds oneself. This, again, may be the most approximate way that one can capture this most elusive of attributes.
The practice of good judgement – good strategy – is a classic case of easier said than done. Deciding on a preferable course of action must often be made in conditions of uncertainty, sometimes in the presence of a wilful adversary who is seeking to assert its interests against your own.[ii] All manner of circumstances mitigates against the exercise of good judgement – time constraints, pressure to act, lack of resources, lack of knowledge: all those elements that the Prussian soldier-scholar of war, Carl von Clausewitz, argued comprise ‘fog and friction’ that made the simplest of things in strategy difficult.[iii]
All of this may be true, and obvious. But why, my students wonder, has the evidence of good judgement – the willingness to act with due consideration to potential costs and consequences – been so notably lacking in contemporary Western politics? They have a point. It is a question that I have increasingly pondered. Those of us who write about what constitutes ‘good strategy’, and who have sought to teach its principles to generations of undergraduates, post-graduates and working professionals in public service do not have much to be proud of judging by the lack of success our efforts seem to have produced.
The roll call of failure
A register of Western strategic failure in the current era is hard to ignore. A pattern of sustained error has been demonstrated particularly, though not exclusively, in the realms of foreign policy. The low point was the humiliating end of the twenty-year military commitment in Afghanistan, concluding in the chaotic withdrawal of Western forces in the summer of 2021.[iv] Afghanistan was merely the culmination of a series of setbacks and miscalculations, which includes the by now familiar roll call of Iraq, Libya, and Syria – amongst others – where Western interventions manifestly failed to fulfil their original policy aims at proportionate cost.[v]
These calamities succeeded only in eroding Western power and prestige, collapsing functioning – if imperfect – systems of governance, causing widespread regional instability, while inflicting enormous human suffering. The proximate reason for these tragedies is often laid at the door of a reckless advocacy of regime change and military intervention after 2001. Rhetorically this advocacy intended to pre-empt threats to Western security after 9/11 by striking at bases that supposedly incubated jihadist conspiracies. By almost any metric, the consequences were not better than the conditions that preceded them.[vi]
More controversially still, the impetus behind these misadventures derived from an ideologically driven belief that externally induced regime change would enable countries to re-make themselves along more liberal democratic lines.[vii] Through such a process, the thinking went, societies and regions would bring themselves into alignment with a liberal international order that would be congenial to Western, and specifically U.S., interests. In the words of one its leading exponents, Charles Krauthammer, the U.S. should ‘lead a unipolar world, unashamedly laying down the rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them’.[viii]
Discounting geopolitics?
That these grand strategic programmes did not play out as their architects hoped, underlines a broader critique of Western foreign and military policy, which maintains that for the better part of two-decades geopolitical realities have been neglected in favour of ethicist based abstractions that wish to fashion the world on the basis of what ‘ought’ to be, rather than what ‘is’.[ix] Ideas like the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ doctrine that, in theory, legitimises military intervention in the internal affairs of states in times of extreme crisis, or the belief that admitting China into the World Trade Organization in 2002 would moderate the People’s Republic’s hegemonic ambitions and inculcate it into the norms of good regional citizenship, are taken as symbols of this misplaced idealism.[x]
As far back as the 2010s critical appraisals emerged from seasoned foreign policy watchers lamenting a decline in the rigour of Western strategic formulation. Such commentary opined that Western nations were ‘distracted [and] weak’, susceptible to being outmanoeuvred on the world stage by the likes of Russia and China, who pursued their national interests unencumbered by notions that geopolitics was somehow ‘old-fashioned and unappealing’.[xi] Writing in 2014, Charles Powell, former foreign policy adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, complained that a ‘false doctrine of soft power’ and ‘creeping legalism’ made it increasingly ‘hard to galvanise democratic societies to meet new threats’.[xii]
The systematic malfunctions in foreign and military policy speaks to a paradox. It is in those countries that constitute the generic West, most notably the Anglophone countries of the United States and the United Kingdom, where a reflective practice of strategic thought is explicitly cultivated, be it in institutes and think tanks, university departments and courses, books, and academic journals. Much of this intellectual endeavour is directed towards identifying national security priorities, evaluating the ‘lessons’ of history, and the pre-conditions for policy implementation.[xiii] In other words, the precepts of good strategic practice. Yet, it is from within this socio-intellectual milieu, and the broader national polities whence they originate, that has yielded so many examples of recent strategic failure.
Strategic humility
All this can become personally embarrassing. For several years I have given lectures to Oman’s National Defence College on the principles of strategic thought. In the past two years, I have felt the need to acknowledge that perhaps my value in standing before these mid/senior level military officers is as a representative of a general construct that has in recent decades been responsible for the production of so much flawed strategy. Images of decimated cityscapes across the Middle East or the anarchic sight of U.S. military transport aircraft departing from Kabul surrounded by crowds of civilians, are sufficient to make the point. I wonder why they would want to listen to me, or indeed any other know-it-all flown in from one of the prestige centres of strategic learning in the West to preach at them about the theories of ‘good strategy’?
An acknowledgement of Western strategic deficiency does, though, strike a chord with my Omani audience. They see the results of Western foreign policy mistakes all around them, but – I sense – are receptive to someone prepared to concede that there are systemic defects, and that Western based ‘experts’ do not have all the answers. Humility, I have come to understand, is perhaps the one unimpeachable component of ‘good strategy’.
Nevertheless, the self-recognition that I do not occupy a position of Olympian detachment on the matters of good strategic practice, usually provides a stimulus for excellent discussions about why Western strategic policy has proved so deficient. Such discussions provide the gateway into a subject that is, to my mind, not nearly discussed enough in the circles that debate strategy: namely, that while much time is dedicated to detailing the rules of ‘good strategy’, little time is dedicated to identifying the roots of bad strategy.
The problem is proportionality not actionability
Works like Richard Rumelt’s, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, have sought to describe the contours of bad strategy. Good strategy, according to Rumelt, is the concentration of resources and focus towards resolving the ‘crux’ of specific problems.[xiv] Bad strategies, on the other hand, are nebulous aspirational statements that define no actionable objectives.[xv] Though Rumelt’s observations contain much relevance for non-state organisations, be they businesses or bureaucracies, they have less specificity for policy and strategy at the national level where the theoretical signifiers of bad strategy are less evident. After all, the failures of contemporary Western strategy are rarely because they were devoid of actionable goals. The problem is not that they have lacked action. It is that they have lacked proportion.
The question is why do Western nations seem to have a problem with taking actions at proportional cost? Historical reflection suggests that prudential calculations of how to advance national goals were in previous eras put at far more of a premium. A case in point was the way Britain managed the growth of its empire. That a small maritime nation for nearly 150 years succeeded in controlling a third of the world’s land surface, often with fewer administrators than a large city council, indicates a high level of strategic management, which balanced resources with perceived needs in multiple theatres.[xvi] When the era of decolonisation dawned, moreover, the calculation became one of withdrawing from empire at minimum cost and on the best possible terms with new post-imperial governments.[xvii]
All this is not to argue that policy makers in the past were not susceptible to miscalculations and that foreign and strategic policies have since the end of the Cold War been everywhere wrong or futile. The Coalition effort to eject Iraq from Kuwait in 1990/91 was a model demonstration of how to wage a contained conflict for specific goals. While the utility of Western strategy in the Balkans in the mid/late 1990s – in Bosnia and Kosovo – can be debated, the cumulative impact of NATO-led military actions was to steer these conflicts towards a conclusion. British intervention to deal with the civil war in Sierra Leone in 2000 is generally rated a success.[xviii]
The rise of anti-strategy: a case of serial repeat-offending
Even so, it is hard to deny that much has gone awry, certainly in Anglo-American strategic planning, both in concept and execution since 2001. To reiterate, the problem is the inability to relate to problems proportionately, with a propensity to get drawn into wars of extended duration, or else attempting ill-thought through acts of regime change.[xix] Lest anyone think that this is an exaggeration, or that it is somehow a bit unfair to blame policy failures on ‘strategists’ who are entirely innocent of the foolish decisions of politicians, let us reflect upon the advocacy of those in the academic and policy analysis sphere who, regardless of whether they would choose to describe themselves as strategists, nevertheless have clearly aspired to have an influence upon U.S. strategy.
In a ‘Letter to President Clinton on Iraq’ of 26 January 1998, various luminaries representing the Project for a New American Century including Francis Fukuyama, Paula Dobriansky, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, William Schneider, amongst others – every one of them highly credentialled members of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, armed with Ivy League degrees, ensconced in prestigious Washington think-tanks, or sinecures at renowned universities – urged the President to ‘enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim above all at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power’. They continued: ‘The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing’. The signatories went onto state that they were ‘fully aware of the dangers and difficulties’ but if the President acted decisively, he would be ‘acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country’.[xx]
The explicit rejection of the principles of prudence and proportionality in this advocacy were laid out even more glaringly in a January 2002 paper for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, by Robert Kagan and William Kristol, which lambasted those ‘who argued for limiting American involvement overseas, for avoiding the use of ground troops, for using force in a limited way and only as a last resort, for steering clear of nation-building, for exit strategies and burden-sharing – those who prided themselves on their prudence and realism’. ‘If we fail to address the grave threat we know exist’, the authors intoned, ‘what will we tell the families of future victims? That they were “prudent”?’[xxi]
One trusts that these quotations above speak for themselves and require no elaboration in terms of their strategic nescience.[xxii] They illustrate how an almost anti-strategy way of thinking is embedded in sections – and influential sections at that – of the Western foreign policy establishment.[xxiii] There are many levels of explanation that might account for this particular pathology of Western strategic failure,[xxiv] but for the purposes of igniting a debate, let me posit the following hypothesis: the roots of bad strategy over the past two decades resides in the continuing influence of a total war mentality.
The distorting influence of total war
Total war – the idea that all national efforts should be galvanised towards titanic struggles for survival – resonates in the Western consciousness as the path to victory in both world wars:[xxv] the prevailing side being the one most able to comprehensively mobilise society towards collective goals, bear the costs, and wear down the other side to exhaustion.[xxvi] The total war mindset was one that transferred easily into the Cold War era, with the ideological clash between the Soviet and U.S.-led alliance blocs: a clash that was to yield a clear victor with the collapse of the USSR in 1990/91. However, it is the enduring sense that totalising solutions should be applied to problems which this study contends is responsible for much strategic failure.
Notions of total war frame a Manichean view of victory and defeat, which undermines prudential reasoning in favour of expansive objectives, which are often conceived in terms of a stark morality of good versus evil. The persistence of moral dichotomies into the post-Cold War era informed the U.S. Administration’s ‘war on terror’ and ‘Axis of evil’ rhetoric after 9/11, which legitimised the targeting of states of concern for possible military intervention.[xxvii] More generally, the prolongation of a total war mentality can be observed in how a warlike idiom permeated public and policy discourse after 1945 in relation to non-warlike phenomena, be it the ‘war on drugs’, the ‘war on poverty’, the ‘war on cancer’, and the ‘war on alcoholism’.[xxviii]
Recently this tendency was evidenced by the ‘war on covid’. The British Medical Journal noted how speech around Covid-19 was flooded with biomilitary metaphors about patients being ‘struck with illness’, and where physicians ‘were the warriors deployed to the front lines’.[xxix] The rhetoric of winning the fight against the pandemic was widely applied in the media and government.[xxx] The totalising implications of this outlook were manifest in the practical responses to the Covid-19 era that saw governments assume vast powers to direct national efforts towards ‘beating the virus’ – closing schools and businesses, restricting human contact, enforcing social-distancing, mandating masks and vaccines, and making it difficult, if not quasi-illegal, for anyone to question the efficacy of these measures.[xxxi]
The influence of total war thinking during this era was not latent, but clearly articulated. Writing in late 2020, one U.S. analyst, for example, stated that ‘Clausewitz would almost certainly endorse a national COVID-19 strategy and war effort in which the government executes its powers to compel the entire nation state into a uniform response and ensure that all resources are concentrated in the pursuit of fighting the same kind of war as everyone else’.[xxxii] Such sentiments are not dissimilar from those offered by the progenitors of total war thinking, like Erich Ludendorff’s, overtly anti-Clausewitzian, 1935 tract Der Totale Krieg.[xxxiii]
Leaving aside the question as to whether it is plausible to speak of divining Clausewitz’s response to Covid-19 from beyond the grave, let alone whether applying militarised language to non-violent medical or social challenges represents a coherent understanding of war, the rhetoric of total war places the notion of proportionality and prudence at a discount. It is a lens through which socio-political problems, no matter how limited or potentially containable, determines that they must be met with an overwhelming response.
The totalising mind
And this goes to the root of what often constitutes bad strategy. A totalising mind is usually an ideologically fixated one. While a fixated mind can articulate a focal point for action, it is one that is often inflexible, and unwilling to concede that it might be wrong. The price to be paid for proving its error, moreover, is inordinately high. It is a mindset that takes over fifty thousand combat deaths and $141 billion to affirm that trying to prevent a corrupt state like South Vietnam from falling to the communists in the North was not worth the effort.[xxxiv]
It is an outlook that must witness years of insurgency against occupying forces and the infliction of a devastating sectarian civil war on a country, the de facto control of which was later handed over to Iran, to show that invading Iraq was futile, especially when no weapons of mass destruction could be found and when the people made it clear they were none too enamoured with being ‘liberated’.[xxxv] It is a mentality that can only be convinced of the follies of nation-building in a country like Afghanistan after the vast wastage of human and material resources expended over a twenty-year period.[xxxvi]
For that matter, it is also a state of mind that is prepared to tolerate enormous expenditure – trillions of dollars – along with numerous other social harms, imposed with the intention of halting the spread of a virus, all to achieve an outcome which studies suggest may only have reduced mortality rates by 0.2 percent.[xxxvii] Contrary to the strategic clairvoyants who invoked Clausewitz’s name to ‘endorse a unified, nationally directed response to COVID-19, because it more effectively concentrates force and promotes shared understanding of the objectives of the war’,[xxxviii] one authoritative study by Johns Hopkins University concluded that lockdowns ‘are ill-founded and should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument’.[xxxix]
All of which is to say that these examples illustrate that lack of proportion, excessive and inordinately costly responses, seem baked into Western policy formation, often because they are cast in terms of an essential ‘investment’ in national security.[xl] Poor strategic choices are not simply the product of a few unfortunate miscalculations. This is a record of serial repeat offending. The question, which rarely seems to get asked, is why? What is the cause of this enduring strategic recidivism? The provisional answer this argument has advanced is that it is the preponderant influence of total war thinking. But can one get any further beyond this observation?
Totalisation and the people
Totalising responses may be cogent in times of supreme emergency where national survival is placed in jeopardy. When the stakes are this high, as they were for many states in World War II, much of the populace is likely to see – or be persuaded of – the necessity for large-scale sacrifices. They are likely also to accept the need for unrestricted objectives such as the policy of unconditional surrender, which demanded the invasion, occupation and – in the case of Germany – dismemberment of adversaries as the requirement for victory.
People, in other words, discern the response as proportionate to the threat being confronted. It is, though, the tendency towards applying the prism of total war to threats and situations that cannot be said to endanger the physical survival of nations that represents the most pernicious aspect of strategic thinking, or what passes for strategic thinking, in the post-total war era. How to explain this curious feature of current day Western strategic responses?
One way to approach an answer is to appreciate that the total wars of the twentieth century were manifestations of wars of the people: they involved the mobilisation of entire populations against one another.[xli] To sustain this level of commitment over time required wide popular support. A shared fate and the desire to defend a particular national way of life were prerequisites for total war to exist as a coherent idea. It is the popular consensus for action that enables total wars to be prosecuted.
The question is, then, what happens in the absence of totalising causes? In 1998, after the end of the last total struggle – the Cold War – the philosopher Anthony Giddens proclaimed that the nations of the West were ‘without enemies’ and the prospects for large-scale inter-state war unlikely.[xlii] Rather than heralding a period of laissez faire peace, where individual states could be left to their own devices, those like Giddens envisaged a new grand strategic project where ‘it was no longer utopian to connect issues of national and global governance’.[xliii] A ‘liberal imperialist posture’ aiming to impose a democratic ‘rules’ based global order was to replace the era of superpower struggle.[xliv]
Unlimited aims in an age of non-total threats
The total war predisposition is one that is underpinned by a comprehensive ideological agenda. In the aftermath of the Cold War, the continuation of a total war mentality revealed itself in the perpetuation of an all-encompassing liberal teleology: an idealistic cause to create a ‘New World Order’. This appealed to many Western political elites at the ‘end of history’.[xlv] A single, overarching strategic narrative thus displaced more sceptical and prudential appreciations of the national interest, in favour of military interventions based on the espousal of cosmopolitan normative values.
The strategic problem here is that totalising ideologies cannot maintain coherence without the ‘total’ support of the population. The sacrifices demanded to uphold a liberal international order, be it interventions to displace ‘rogue’ regimes in the Middle East or to maintain Western support of Ukraine against Russia, are – in the absence of direct threats to national survival – unlikely to garner the full support of the populace, who proceed to question the wisdom of throwing human and material resources at problems that do not yield clear and realisable objectives. Totalising liberal aspirations that aim to ‘defend democracy’ or ensure ‘social justice’ begin to outrun the willingness of people to support imprecise, open-ended goals. Sections of the populace come to question the proportionality of the response and the domestic consensus for the strategy breaks down.
We have seen this pattern play out time and again in Western policy. The issue is already presaging a faultline in U.S. politics over the Russia-Ukraine war, with Republicans likely to contest the next presidential election in 2024 on the cost of aiding Ukraine and whether U.S. national interests are being served. By contrast President Joe Biden’s foreign policy team invoke a Wilsonian/Manichean worldview where democracy is pitched against autocracy, and freedom vs. tyranny.[xlvi] The latter line is promoted by many governments, political parties, and mainstream media outlets in the West often with little reflection. In this manner, grand strategy – a potentially useful term to describe the effort to unify national focus and resources – is stretched and manipulated in pursuit of totalistic progressive abstractions like human rights, global justice, and increasingly climate change and environmental sustainability, in a way that leaves students of prudential diplomacy and statecraft bemused, and a great deal of the public alienated.[xlvii]
Conclusion: the real roots of rotten strategy?
Not nearly enough attention, this study maintains, is devoted to discovering the causes of defective strategy. Dissecting how poor judgement, disproportionate responses, and a lack of prudential reasoning arises might enable better choices to be made in the future.
A totalising liberal idealism promoted in an age of non-total threats is therefore one level of explanation that accounts for the poor strategic outcomes witnessed in recent times. When populations do not perceive themselves to be in mortal danger or at war with opposing ideas or nations, they are unlikely to accept the trade-offs and long-term commitments demanded of them by others who inhabit a neo-total war mindset. The outstanding question is why policymaking has become substantially detached from popular consent, and continues to perpetuate a total war way of thinking?
There are many possible layers of explanation here regarding the social forces pushing Western societies towards a post-democratic age,[xlviii] where new elites seek to exclude the popular voice,[xlix] but one notable result has been to confine strategic matters within a technique of specialist advocacy that is often dismissive of popular sentiments, because they are seen as unsophisticated and out of step with expansive liberal cosmopolitan norms.[l] It is this technocratic coterie who credentialise themselves as experts in grand strategy and appoint themselves as arbiters of what they consider effective policy making.
We arrive, then, at something of a paradox. It is as if good strategy – if the past three decades is anything to go by – exists in inverse proportion to the number of students and centres of learning dedicated to studying strategy. Seemingly, the greater the highbrow effort devoted to expostulating about grand strategy the worse the outcomes.
In the final analysis we are left to wrestle with the most ironic of questions, which is are we part of the problem? Are we who traffic in the currency of strategic learning, responsible for promoting an almost gnostic idea that strategy is a form of secret knowledge, available only to a few select initiates and certainly beyond the reach of the common person to apprehend,[li] whose views should, naturally, be excluded from any consideration?
Are we, who pretend to the knowledge of what constitutes good strategy, the real harbingers of bad strategy?
References
[i] M.L.R. Smith, ‘On efficacy: A beginners guide to strategic theory’, Military Strategy Magazine, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 10-17.
[ii] See Lawrence Freedman, ‘The master strategist is still a myth’, War on the Rocks, 14 October 2014, https://warontherocks.com/2014/10/the-master-strategist-is-still-a-myth/.
[iii] Carl von Clausewitz, On War (trans. and ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 119-121.
[iv] Graeme Herd, ‘The causes and the consequences of strategic failure in Afghanistan?’ George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, 21 August 2021, https://www.marshallcenter.org/en/publications/security-insights/causes-and-consequences-strategic-failure-afghanistan-0.
[v] Michael Clarke, ‘Afghanistan and the UK’s illusion of strategy’, RUSI Commentary, 16 August 2021, https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/afghanistan-and-uks-illusion-strategy.
[vi] See Anthony H. Cordesman, America’s Failed Strategy in the Middle East: Losing Iraq and the Gulf (Washington: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2020), pp. 1-14.
[vii] Benjamin Denison, ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same: The failure of regime change’, Policy Analysis, No. 883, Cato Institute, Washington, DC, January 6, 2020; Sam Meyerson, ‘How to fail at regime change’, Harvard Political Review, 22 January 2020, https://harvardpolitics.com/regime-change-failure/.
[viii] Charles Krauthammer, ‘The unipolar moment’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 70, No. 1 (1990–91), p. 33.
[ix] David Martin Jones and M.L.R. Smith, ‘History restarted: The return of the Machiavellian moment’, War on the Rocks, 23 September 2015, https://warontherocks.com/2015/09/history-restarted-the-return-of-the-machiavellian-moment/.
[x] Mina Al-Oraibi, ‘“Responsibility to Protect” is just one more casualty of the Syrian war’, Foreign Policy, 14 June 2021, https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/14/syria-war-un-security-council-responsibility-to-protect-r2p-humanitarian-intervention-assad-russia-human-rights-civilians/; Faisal Islam, ‘How the west invited China to eat its lunch’, BBC News, 10 December 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59610019.
[xi] Edward Lucas, ‘Ukraine protests: we’re letting Putin win’, Daily Telegraph, 20 February 2014.
[xii] Charles Powell, ‘The West will pay for losing its backbone in Iraq and Ukraine’, Daily Telegraph, 19 June 2014.
[xiii] See Linda Robinson, Paul. D Miller, John Gordon IV, Jeffrey Decker, Michael Schwille and Raphael S. Cohen, Lessons From 13 Years of War Point to a Better U.S. Strategy (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation 2014).
[xiv] Richard P. Rumelt, The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists (London: Profile, 2022).
[xv] Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters (London: Profile. 2011).
[xvi] See Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (Boston: Little Brown, 1997).
[xvii] See John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System, 1830-1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
[xviii] Andrew Dorman, Blair’s Successful War: British Military Intervention in Sierra Leone (London: Routledge, 2009).
[xix] A. Trevor Thrall and Eric Goepner, ‘Step back: Lessons for US foreign policy of the failed war on terror’, Policy Analysis, Cato Institute, No. 814, 26 June 2017, https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/step-back-lessons-us-foreign-policy-failed-war-terror.
[xx] Eliott Abrams, et al, ‘Letter to President Clinton on Iraq’, 26 January 1998, Project for a New American Century. See ‘1998 Letter on Iraq’, New York Times, 3 December 2001, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/03/world/1998-letter-on-iraq.html.
[xxi] Robert Kagan and William Kristol, ‘What to do about Iraq?’ Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 21 January 2002 (reprinted from The Weekly Standard, 21 January 2002).
[xxii] These quotations also demonstrate that strategic failures cannot be ascribed simply to the idea that U.S. interventions lose the run of themselves, beginning with limited strategic intent and then involuntarily ending up in crusades to transform the target society into a version of America. The evidence cited here shows that the elements of a messianic mission to re-cast societies and regions are prior assumptions ingrained in these advocacies.
[xxiii] See James Wirtz, ‘Fooling all the people some of the time’, Review of John M. Schuessler, Deceit on the Road to War: Presidents, Politics and American Democracy, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol. 31, No. 4 (2018), pp. 843-847.
[xxiv] Here we might note, among other things, the influence of commercial interests in fuelling foreign military adventures, but also in particular, the lack of penalties for analytical failure. Analysts have not suffered any injury to their careers for predictive ineptitude or reckless advocacy in recent years and in many cases, they continue to prosper in their sinecures or advance further through the corridors of power. The correlation is therefore obvious, if no sanction attaches to lack of aptitude, then repeated incompetence is the logical outcome.
[xxv] See Peter Calvocorressi and Guy Wint, Total War: The Story of World War II (New York: Pantheon, 1972).
[xxvi] William Philpott, ‘Total war’, in Matthew Hughes and William Philpott (eds.), Palgrave Advances in Modern Military History (London: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2006), pp. 131-152.
[xxvii] David Frum, ‘The enduring lessons from the “Axis of Evil” speech’, The Atlantic, 29 January 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/axis-of-evil-speech-frum-bush/621397/.
[xxviii] ‘War on drugs: Unites States history’, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/war-on-drugs; ‘War on poverty: United States history, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/War-on-Poverty; ‘The “war on cancer “isn’t yet won’, Nature, 19 January 2022, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00109-3; ‘Pharmacists declare war on alcoholism month’, National Today, 13 June 2023, https://nationaltoday.com/pharmacists-declare-war-on-alcoholism-month/.
[xxix] Katherine A.A. Clark, S. Elissa Altin, ‘Calling time on the use of war metaphors in covid-19’, BMJ, No. 377, 13 May 2022, https://www.bmj.com/content/377/bmj.o1214.
[xxx] Poonam Khetrapal Singh, ‘Together, forward in the fight against COVID-19’, World Health Organisation, 10 May 2020, https://www.who.int/southeastasia/news/opinion-editorials/detail/together-forward-in-the-fight-against-covid-19; Sam Baker and Andrew Whetherspoon, ‘America is finally winning its fight against the coronavirus’, Axios, 13 May 2021, https://www.axios.com/2021/05/13/coronavirus-cases-deaths-good-news-pandemic.
[xxxi] Kevin Rawlinson, ‘This enemy can be deadly: Boris Johnson invokes war time language’, The Guardian, 18 March 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/17/enemy-deadly-boris-johnson-invokes-wartime-language-coronavirus.
[xxxii] Jordan Beauregard, ‘Covid-19 and Clausewtiz (Masters of War Part 2)’, Wavell Room, 15 October 2020, https://wavellroom.com/2020/10/15/covid-19-and-clausewitz-masters-of-war-part-2/.
[xxxiii] Erich Ludendorff, Der Totale Krieg (Munich: Ludendorffs Verlag, 1935).
[xxxiv] ‘US spent $141-billion in Vietnam in 14 years’, New York Times, 1 May 1975.
[xxxv] Ron Suskind, ‘Faith, certainty and the presidency of George W. Bush’, New York Times Magazine, 17 October 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-and-the-presidency-of-george-w-bush.html.
[xxxvi] Kori Schake, Jim Mattis, Jim Ellis, and Joe Felter, ‘Defence in depth: Why U.S. security depends on alliances—now more than ever’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 99, No. 6 (November/December 2020), https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-11-23/defense-depth.
[xxxvii] James Herby, Lars Jonung and Steve H. Hanke, ‘A literature review and meta-analysis of the effects of lockdowns on covid-19 mortality’, Studies in Applied Economics (Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health and the Study of Business Enterprise), No. 200, January 2022.
[xxxviii] Beauregard, ‘Covid-19 and Clausewitz (Masters of War Part 2)’.
[xxxix] Herby, Jonung and Hanke, ‘A literature review and meta-analysis of the effects of lockdowns on covid-19 mortality’, p. 43.
[xl] Schake, Mattis, Ellis, and Felter, ‘Defence in depth’.
[xli] Kate Clements, Paul Cornish, Vikki Hawkins, Margaret Macmillan, Total War: A People’s History (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2021).
[xlii] Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), p. 140.
[xliii] Ibid., p. 140.
[xliv] John J. Mearsheimer, ‘Imperial by design’, National Interest, No. 111 (January-February 2011), p. 19.
[xlv] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
[xlvi] Walter Russell Mead, ‘The cost of Biden’s “democracy” fixation’, Wall Street Journal, 3 April 2023, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cost-of-bidens-democracy-fixation-autocracy-summit-freedom-house-ideology-foreign-policy-middle-east-86638fc5.
[xlvii] Charlotte Hume, ‘Grand strategy in an age of climate change: A theory of emergent grand strategy’, The Strategy Bridge, 29 September 2019; https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2019/9/29/grand-strategy-in-the-age-of-climate-change-a-theory-of-emergent-grand-strategy; Laura Leddy, ‘A grand strategy for the climate’, American Security Project, 20 October 2019; https://www.americansecurityproject.org/a-grand-strategy-for-the-climate/; Elizabeth G. Boulton, ‘Plan E: A grand strategy for the twenty-first era of entangled security and hyperthreats’, Journal of Military Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1 (2022), pp. 92-128.
[xlviii] Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy (London: Verso, 2013).
[xlix] Matthew Goodwin, Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics (London: Penguin, 2023).
[l] Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy (New York: Basic Books, 1996).
[li] See for example, William Kristol, ‘Surge’s success going unnoticed’, CBS News, 19 March 2007, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/surges-success-going-unnoticed/.
13. US military resumes counterterrorism missions out of Niger bases
US military resumes counterterrorism missions out of Niger bases
airforcetimes.com · by Tara Copp · September 13, 2023
Editor’s note: This story was updated at 9:45 p.m. EST with a statement from the Pentagon press secretary.
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The U.S. military has resumed counterterrorism missions in Niger, flying drones and other aircraft out of air bases in the country more than a month after a coup temporarily halted all those activities there, the head of U.S. Air Forces for Europe and Africa said Wednesday.
Since the July coup, the 1,100 U.S. forces deployed in the country have been confined inside their military bases. Last week the Pentagon said some military personnel and assets had been moved from the air base near Niamey, which is the capital of Niger, to another in Agadez. Niamey is about 920 kilometers away from Agadez.
In response to a question from the Associated Press on how the U.S. was able to continue its counterterrorism missions without those flights, Gen. James Hecker, the top Air Force commander for Europe and Africa, said in recent weeks some of those intelligence and surveillance missions have been able to resume due to U.S. negotiations with the junta.
“For a while we weren’t doing any missions on the bases, they pretty much closed down the airfields,” Hecker said. “Through the diplomatic process, we are now doing, I wouldn’t say 100% of the missions that we were doing before, but we’re doing a large amount of missions that we’re doing before.”
In a statement, Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder confirmed that the U.S. was flying missions again but said they were confined to protecting U.S. forces.
Hecker, who spoke to reporters at the annual Air and Space Forces Association convention at National Harbor, Maryland, said the U.S. is flying both manned and unmanned missions and that those flights resumed “within the last couple of weeks.”
The significant distance between the two bases also means that the while flights are going out, some missions are “not getting as much data, because you’re not overhead for as long” because of the amount of fuel it takes to get out and back, he said.
The U.S. has made Niger its main regional outpost for wide-ranging patrols by armed drones and other counterterror operations against Islamic extremist movements that over the years have seized territory, massacred civilians and battled foreign armies. The bases are a critical part of America’s overall counterterrorism efforts in West Africa.
The U.S. has also invested years and hundreds of millions of dollars in training Nigerian forces.
In 2018, fighters loyal to the Islamic State group ambushed and killed four American service members, four Nigeriens and an interpreter.
West Africa recorded over 1,800 extremist attacks in the first six months of this year, which killed nearly 4,600 people, according to ECOWAS, the Economic Community of West African States.
The Islamic extremist group Boko Haram operates in neighboring Nigeria and Chad. Along Niger’s borders with Mali and Burkina Faso, the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara and al-Qaida affiliate Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin pose greater threats.
14. Japan gets new defense minister
Japan gets new defense minister
Defense News · by Mari Yamaguchi, The Associated Press · September 13, 2023
TOKYO — Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida shuffled his Cabinet and key party posts on Wednesday to strengthen his position before a key party leadership vote next year, bringing in a new defense minister and the country’s first female foreign minister since 2002.
Kishida appointed five women to the 19-member Cabinet, part of his attempt to buoy sagging support ratings for his previous male-dominated Cabinet, which had two women. The five females match the number in two earlier Japanese Cabinets — in 2001 and 2014.
One of the five, former Justice Minister Yoko Kamikawa, who approved the hangings in 2018 of a cult leader and six aides for a deadly 1995 subway nerve gas attack, was appointed foreign minister, replacing Yoshimasa Hayashi.
Minoru Kihara, who has been serving on the governing Liberal Democratic Party’s national security committee, was selected as defense minister, replacing Yasukazu Hamada.
Kishida said the new Cabinet reflects his determination to adapt to recent rapid economic, security and technological changes — and turn those into national strengths.
“There is a huge flow of change in front of us,” Kishida said at a news conference after the Cabinet’s swearing-in ceremony. “We cannot stand still just watching all these changes.”
Kishida said three pillars of his policy goals are an end to deflation, stronger diplomacy and security, and measures to address Japan’s rapidly aging and declining population.
It is the second Cabinet shuffle since Kishida took office in October 2021, when he promised a fairer distribution of economic growth, measures to tackle Japan’s declining population and a stronger national defense. Russia’s war against Ukraine, rising energy prices and Japan’s soaring defense costs have created challenges in his tenure, keeping his support ratings at low levels.
Kishida’s three-year term as the conservative LDP’s president expires in September 2024, when he is expected to seek a second term. His faction in the party is the fourth largest, so he must stay on good terms with the others to maintain his position.
He distributed Cabinet posts to reflect that balance of power, with nearly half of the positions going to the two largest factions associated with assassinated former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and former leader Taro Aso.
Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Yasutoshi Nishimura, Finance Minister Shunichi Suzuki, Digital Reform Minister Taro Kono, and Economic Security Minister Sanae Takaichi were among six ministers who stayed.
The LDP supports traditional family values and gender roles, and the low number of female politicians in leadership positions is often criticized by women’s rights groups as democracy without women.
U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel welcomed the new Cabinet. “These appointments will bring a level of freshness, a level of energy and purposefulness in that endeavor that started two years ago” as Japan and the United States continue to elevate their security ties, Emanuel said in a telephone interview.
Opposition leaders expressed disappointment in the new Cabinet. “We recognize the increase of female ministers to five, but otherwise, [the new Cabinet[ conveys no sense of what it actually wants to achieve,” said Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan executive Katsuya Okada.
Kishida told reporters Wednesday that he plans to compile a new economic package by the end of October to deal with rising gasoline and food prices.
Two people who lost posts in the shakeup had been touched by recent scandals.
Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Minister Tetsuro Nomura was reprimanded by Kishida and apologized after calling treated radioactive wastewater being released from the Fukushima nuclear power plant “contaminated,” a term China uses to characterize the water as unsafe. And magazine reports have alleged that Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Seiji Kihara influenced a police investigation of his wife over her ex-husband’s suspicious death.
Kishida last shuffled his Cabinet a year ago after Abe’s assassination revealed ties between senior governing party members and the Unification Church, a South Korea-based conservative religious group.
15. China Conducts Major Military Exercises in Western Pacific
The axis of authoritarians appears to be trying to create multiple dilemmas for the like minded democracies.
China Conducts Major Military Exercises in Western Pacific
By David Pierson and Amy Chang Chien
Sept. 14, 2023, 3:12 a.m. ET
The New York Times · by Amy Chang Chien · September 14, 2023
The drills, which appear to simulate a blockade of Taiwan, are believed to be in response to recent military drills between the United States and allies.
\Sept. 14, 2023, 3:12 a.m. ET
The News
China launched large-scale military drills in the Western Pacific this week, deploying an aircraft carrier and dozens of naval ships and warplanes in a major show of force aimed at pushing back at U.S. pressure.
In this photo released by Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense, a Taiwanese warship, right, is seen monitoring the Shandong, a Chinese aircraft carrier, left, near Taiwan’s waters earlier this month.Credit...Taiwan Defense Ministry, via Associated Press
The joint exercises come after the United States conducted a series of military drills across the region in recent weeks with allies like Japan, Australia and the Philippines. On Saturday, the American and Canadian navies sailed ships through the Taiwan Strait.
What We Know
China’s Shandong aircraft carrier was one of at least 20 Chinese naval vessels spotted navigating waters around Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines starting on Tuesday, according to the Japanese and Taiwanese governments.
Other vessels identified by Japanese officials included missile destroyers, frigates and supply ships.
China also sent at least 68 warplanes near Taiwanese airspace on Thursday, up from 35 on Wednesday, Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense said. Some of those aircraft joined the naval exercises. Planes were spotted taking off and landing on the Shandong, according to Japan’s Ministry of Defense.
China has not announced any exercises involving the Shandong, its first domestically built aircraft carrier, one of two carriers China has in service.
What the Analysts Say
The drills appeared to be focusing on some of the People’s Liberation Army’s deficiencies: the ability to keep up operations far from its shores and coordinate between different forces on the water and in the air.
“It looks to me like they were practicing sustained air operations toward the West Pacific in conjunction with their carrier exercises, something we haven’t seen at this scale before,” said Ben Lewis, an independent defense analyst based in Washington, who tracks Chinese military activity around Taiwan.
Mr. Lewis said China’s military was likely practicing enforcing a blockade around Taiwan, the self-governed island that Beijing claims and has threatened to take by force. A blockade would complicate the United States’ ability to come to Taiwan’s aid if it were to be invaded by China.
“China wants to use this exercise to showcase that it has the ability to fly over the first island chain,” said Lin Ying-yu, an assistant professor at Tamkang University in Taipei, referring to the string of major archipelagos — Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines — nearest to China’s coast.
“By sending out big numbers of its jets and vessels, it wants to let the other players in the region know that it possesses the ability to launch joint attacks by sea and air forces,” he added.
Background
China has deployed more planes and ships to challenge American dominance in the region. At the same time, it has grown more frustrated with the United States’ efforts to strengthen security alliances with Asian allies.
Last month, the United States signed a trilateral agreement with Japan and South Korea aimed at deterring Chinese aggression in places like Taiwan. Beijing has accused Washington of launching another Cold War by trying to contain China’s rightful rise.
The Chinese army is “unambiguous about safeguarding the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country,” Song Zhongping, a commentator in Beijing who is a former Chinese military officer, said about the signal China is sending with this week’s military drills.
Other analysts said China’s growing aggressiveness over Taiwan was backfiring by making more countries take notice. Some like the Philippines have even offered to bolster security cooperation with the United States by offering more access to its military bases.
“The strengthening in China’s maritime combat power will further cause tensions near Taiwan,” said Su Tzu-yun from Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taipei. “But, at the same time, China also has to face more enemies in the region.”
Chris Buckley, Olivia Wang and Hikari Hida contributed reporting.
David Pierson covers Chinese foreign policy and China’s economic and cultural engagement with the world. More about David Pierson
Amy Chang Chien covers news in mainland China and Taiwan. She is based in Taipei. More about Amy Chang Chien
The New York Times · by Amy Chang Chien · September 14, 2023
16. Opinion | No, it’s not weak for U.S. officials to visit China
From the editorial board of the Washington Post.
Excerpts:
The criticisms are not only wrong but also dangerous. The notion that high-level U.S. officials should not be engaging with China through visits — and the critics have also targeted Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen among other Biden administration officials — implies that isolating China is better than communicating.
...
We’ve argued before about the necessity of enhancing dialogue and keeping channels of communication open, as a way to help de-escalate tensions and avoid the potential danger of a misunderstanding turning into an unintended military mishap. The United States learned that lesson over and over again during the Cold War, in which American officials wisely chose to negotiate with the Soviet Union, a country with which economic and other ties were far less substantial. These planned congressional visits are a good step at resuming the type of dialogues that used to be commonplace.
The naysayers might consider hopping on a plane, instead.
Opinion | No, it’s not weak for U.S. officials to visit China
The Washington Post · by Editorial Board · September 13, 2023
Official visits to China, including congressional delegations, used to be fairly routine and mostly noncontroversial. Then came the covid-19 pandemic and, now, Republican criticism of the resumption of face-to-face contact.
There’s little substitute for lawmakers getting on-the-ground experience from traveling to the world’s largest economy, one of the United States’ most important trading partners and, increasingly, a geopolitical adversary. High-level visits are a chance to hear from Chinese leaders firsthand, as well as to promote U.S. business interests and raise concerns about human rights directly to Beijing.
Unfortunately, most official visits to China were halted for the past three years, when China closed itself off during the covid pandemic. Also during that period, congressional visits to Taiwan — which China considers a renegade province — reached a decade-long high. Those included a trip by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), to which Beijing responded by cutting off contacts and launching military exercises around Taiwan.
Now comes news that two congressional delegations plan to travel to China this fall. One will be led by Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), and the other will be a House trip led by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), a member of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. These trips are welcome and a long-overdue way to resume normal communications between Washington and Beijing.
Yet Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) called the Senate trip, which he was invited to join, “ill-advised,” because, he said, “you need to be dealing from a position of strength.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) said he was concerned about the United States looking as though it were kowtowing to China.
The criticisms are not only wrong but also dangerous. The notion that high-level U.S. officials should not be engaging with China through visits — and the critics have also targeted Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen among other Biden administration officials — implies that isolating China is better than communicating.
Mr. Schumer, for one, has consistently advocated a firmer line against China’s currency manipulation and what he has called the country’s unfair trade practices. He was instrumental in pushing legislation boosting investment in the American semiconductor industry to reduce reliance on China. Even a China “hawk” recognizes the importance of talking to Beijing.
We’ve argued before about the necessity of enhancing dialogue and keeping channels of communication open, as a way to help de-escalate tensions and avoid the potential danger of a misunderstanding turning into an unintended military mishap. The United States learned that lesson over and over again during the Cold War, in which American officials wisely chose to negotiate with the Soviet Union, a country with which economic and other ties were far less substantial. These planned congressional visits are a good step at resuming the type of dialogues that used to be commonplace.
The naysayers might consider hopping on a plane, instead.
The Washington Post · by Editorial Board · September 13, 2023
17. Beijing says it uncovered US National Security Agency operatives behind cyberattack on Chinese university
Excerpts:
Cyberspace is increasingly becoming a keenly contested area between China and the US. The US state department recently accused Chinese hackers of breaching senior US diplomats’ email accounts.
China, on the other hand, has been stepping up its efforts to target spies – especially from the US and its allies – and updated its anti-espionage legislation this year to include cyberattacks as punishable spying activities, with a jail term ranging from 10 years to life.
Beijing says it uncovered US National Security Agency operatives behind cyberattack on Chinese university
William Zheng
+ FOLLOWPublished: 1:05pm, 14 Sep, 2023
China says it has identified US National Security Agency operatives while investigating a recent cyberattack on Northwestern Polytechnical University, as its top spying and anti-espionage agency vowed on Thursday to root out all “digital spies”.
The revelation came just three days after Beijing revealed more details about John Shing-wan Leung, a Hong Kong permanent resident and US citizen the Chinese Ministry of State Security said posed as a philanthropist while snooping for information. He was jailed for life for espionage in May, two years after his arrest in China.
John Shing-wan Leung, 78, was arrested in China in April 2021. Photo: Alliances for China’s Peaceful Reunification, USA
State-run CCTV said on Thursday that China’s National Computer Virus Emergency Response Centre, with help from Chinese antivirus company 360 Total Security, had discovered the identity of the National Security Agency (NSA) operative or operatives – the broadcaster did not specify how many or name them – after it extracted “multiple samples” of a spyware called “Second Date”.
It said the spyware was used in the cyberattack on Northwestern Polytechnical University in Shaanxi province.
Quoting senior engineer at the National Computer Virus Emergency Response Centre Du Zhenhua, it said software was a potent cyberespionage tool that enabled attackers to take control of target network devices and the data traffic flowing through them, and use them as a “forward base” for the next stage of attacks. It could run on various operating systems and was compatible with multiple architectures.
Du was quoted as saying the spyware was usually used in conjunction with various network device vulnerability attack tools from the NSA’s Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO). The TAO, now renamed Computer Network Operations, is a cyberwarfare intelligence-gathering unit.
The report said that after global tracing, the Chinese team found “thousands of network devices” across the country were still infected by the spyware and its derivatives. It said they also found springboard servers remotely controlled by the NSA in Germany, Japan, South Korea, India and Taiwan.
On Thursday, the state security ministry said China had become “a major victim of high-level persistent threats online”, and vowed to strengthen the tracking, monitoring and prevention of cyberespionage, “effectively safeguarding” China’s network security, in a commentary published on its official WeChat account.
“[We] will have ‘digital spies’ reveal their true colours and have nowhere to hide!” the commentary said.
Without naming a specific country or agency, it said “dozens of intelligence agencies from different countries and regions” had carried out cyberattacks in China via specific agencies and “cover companies”. Besides directly carrying out cyberattacks, foreign spies also lured Chinese companies via outsourcing arrangements, paying for data and system loopholes, it said.
The commentary said these cyberattack targets extended beyond government agencies, with foreign spies and intelligence agencies aiming for “our critical information infrastructure and major infrastructure network systems and … our universities, scientific research institutions, large enterprises, hi-tech companies and other institutions as well as corporate executives, experts and scholars”.
Cyberspace is increasingly becoming a keenly contested area between China and the US. The US state department recently accused Chinese hackers of breaching senior US diplomats’ email accounts.
China, on the other hand, has been stepping up its efforts to target spies – especially from the US and its allies – and updated its anti-espionage legislation this year to include cyberattacks as punishable spying activities, with a jail term ranging from 10 years to life.
CONVERSATIONS (1)
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William Zheng
William Zheng is a veteran journalist who has served and led major Hong Kong and Singaporean media organisations in his 20-year career, covering greater China. He is now a senior correspondent on the China desk at the Post.
18. Taiwan Fires Back after Elon Musk Calls It ‘Integral Part of China’
Taiwan Fires Back after Elon Musk Calls It ‘Integral Part of China’
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/taiwan-fires-back-after-elon-musk-calls-it-integral-part-of-china/
By JIMMY QUINN
September 13, 2023 1:18 PM
The Taiwanese government fired back at Elon Musk after he called the island country “an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China” on a recent podcast.
“Hope @elonmusk can also ask the #CCP to open @X to its people. Perhaps he thinks banning it is a good policy, like turning off @Starlink to thwart #Ukraine’s counterstrike against #Russia,” Taiwanese foreign minister Joseph Wu said today on X, which Musk owns.
“Listen up, #Taiwan is not part of the #PRC & certainly not for sale!”
Musk recently went on the All-In podcast, a show hosted by venture-capital executives, when he made the comments echoing the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda line.
Musk said that because he has met with “senior leadership at many levels in China,” he has “a pretty good understanding” of the country for an outsider.
“The fundamental thing here is really Taiwan. China has really since for half a century or so — longer at this point — their policy has been to reunite Taiwan with China. From their standpoint, maybe it is analogous to, like, Hawaii or something like that, like an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China — mostly because the U.S. Pacific Fleet has stopped any sort of reunification-effort force.”
The idea that Taiwan was once part of China, and that an attempt to annex it would be a reunification effort, features heavily in CCP propaganda about the island’s future. The Chinese regime has never ruled over Taiwan.
In his tweet today, Wu also referred to recent reports that Musk had limited the Ukrainian military’s access to Starlink as Kyiv planned an attack on Russian forces that, Musk believed, would lead to a catastrophic escalation of the war. Musk’s work to provide Starlink to Ukraine has significantly bolstered Kyiv’s ability to continue its fight against Russia.
The Taiwanese foreign minister’s post today marks the first time that Taiwan has voiced concern about Musk’s noteworthy ties to and praise of the CCP. Previously, Taiwanese officials have dodged questions about whether Taipei would seek access to Starlink in anticipation of a potential Chinese attack.
Taiwanese digital-affairs minister Audrey Tang demurred last year when a National Review reporter asked about Starlink’s potential role in the construction of a satellite network through which Taiwan could maintain contact with the world during a crisis.
Musk has previously praised Beijing, where, as he noted during the podcast episode, Tesla has a significant footprint — including a showroom in the Xinjiang region, where Beijing is carrying out genocide against the Uyghurs.
On the 100th anniversary of the CCP’s founding, Musk praised China, raving in a tweet about “the economic prosperity that China has achieved.”
In 2021, Musk took China’s then–ambassador to the U.S. Qin Gang on a drive in a Tesla vehicle and later participated in an event that Qin hosted. This year, after the Chinese official was appointed foreign minister, Musk met him in Beijing. The Chinese-government summary of the meeting said that Musk had said “the interests of the United States and China are interlinked, like conjoined twins inseparable from each other.”
JIMMY QUINN is the national security correspondent for National Review. @james_t_quinn
19. The world of Le Carré is gone — and spycraft is changing fast
ANALYSIS
The world of Le Carré is gone — and spycraft is changing fast
Richard Spencer, China Correspondent
Monday September 11 2023, 9.20pm BST, The Times
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/90c7ab72-50c1-11ee-abb5-ce4135341f1b?shareToken=cfb34907d9adaddfc86ac5d63481e6b2&utm_source=pocket_saves
The case of Xu Yanjun, who was jailed in America, shows the changing face of espionage
China has spent decades trying to “catch up” with the West, using all means within its power.
Some of those are legitimate, such as its huge economic growth. At the other end of the scale, Beijing, Washington and London have deployed old-fashioned spies against each other for decades.
But in recent years western nations have also begun to take measures against a range of “grey” tactics from industrial espionage to the “monitoring” of public discussion of issues such as Tibet or human rights.
Chinese-run groups have been targeting companies, including Google, since 2002
ALAMY
A year ago, Ken McCallum, the MI5 director-general, and Chris Wray, the FBI director, gave an unprecedented joint address to businessmen and academics, saying they needed to join forces with the authorities to prevent China undermining the West’s security and democracy.
Microsoft gave a specific example in May that a state-sponsored Chinese hacking group had compromised critical US infrastructure. Cyberespionage groups run by the People’s Liberation Army are suspected of targeting civilian companies, including Google, as far back as 2002. Google and other firms supplying software to companies and government departments provide a “back door” into their computer systems.
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There is wider concern about China gaining access to political “influencers”, using Chinese students or even unwitting dupes to prevent discussion of sensitive issues on campuses — to harass dissidents and control and direct opinion in other ways.
In Britain the National Security Act, which became law in July, introduced a foreign influence registration scheme — based on laws passed by the Australian government in 2018 to combat the growing influence of China. Lobbyists working there on behalf of foreign states are required to register with the government within 14 days of undertaking their activities or face prison sentences of up to five years.
The US is ahead of Britain in several ways. It has gone so far as to ban federal employees from downloading TikTok, the Chinese-owned app, on government-issued electronic devices. And 28 of the 50 US states have also banned officials from using TikTok at all.
The buying of agricultural land in the US by Chinese companies has stoked fears that it may be being used by the Chinese government to spy on US military installations. Last week, China was accused of sending nationals posing as tourists to test security at military installations by trying to enter them “by mistake”.
A row broke out earlier this year when a Chinese spy balloon was tracked flying at high altitude over North America. The Biden administration shot it a few days later after it had drifted over the sea by North and South Carolina.
Beijing is developing “increasingly sophisticated” espionage activities
GETTY IMAGES
Officials briefed that it had carried sophisticated eavesdropping equipment. The government in Beijing insisted it was a weather balloon that had blown off course. The US has its own fleet of spy satellites and planes, making that incident unprecedented only for the means, not the principle.
A more striking case was that of an expert in advanced engineering working for the American giant GE, who was asked to lecture at a Chinese university in 2017. It was only later the FBI told him he had unwittingly allowed himself to become a Chinese spy.
The man who invited him was not a university representative but a senior agent of the Chinese state security ministry by the name of Xu Yanjun, who pestered him for information about his work. Xu had been tasked with recruiting insiders at the cutting edge of American industrial — and by extension — military aviation research.
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In a remarkable double agent operation, the FBI “turned” the engineer, using him to feed information to the Chinese and, eventually, lure Xu to Belgium for a meeting where he was arrested and extradited.
After his trial, Xu was revealed to have also targeted French aviation experts and recruited a Chinese student who had enrolled in the US army reserve. Xu’s sentencing to 20 years in prison was a rare case of a spymaster, not just a spy, being jailed.
The case is evidence that the modern world of intelligence gathering is far removed from the Cold War, Kim Philby and John Le Carré.
Information and influence in the international competition for political, economic and military power now circulates freely. The key is to determine which activities are legitimate, and which are not.
Chinese-born migrants vote in host countries’ elections. Academics in China, Britain and the US publish research in the same journals, their companies buy stakes in each other — including in high tech. Everyone tries to influence each others’ policies.
But governments, political parties and institutions such as universities have been slow to catch up to the idea they need to set new rules. There is understandable concern among ethnic Chinese in the US, many of whom are descended from families who fled the communist regime, that they are becoming subject to a witch-hunt.
But with British universities still boasting of the tens of thousands of Chinese students they recruit every year, some with military and political backgrounds, the UK may not yet have reached that stage.
20. The draft ended fifty years ago. Can the all-volunteer force survive another fifty?
Excerpts:
The AVF can be considered a success, resulting in an exceptionally high-quality force in both peace and wartime. It is important to note that the actual forces committed in Desert Shield/Desert Storm and Iraq and Afghanistan were around 697,000 and 1.9 million, respectively. The number of personnel actually engaged in those conflicts was small compared with those in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. In fact, during the peak of the Cold War, draft registration was reinstated because the leadership at the time believed the AVF was strictly a peacetime force.
The AVF is so ingrained in today’s society that the alternative—the draft—is not even considered a viable option. So, while we agree that the AVF is here to stay, it would be unwise for our nation to not also recognize its unsustainable cost growth trends.
Since the attack on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent greatly expanded deployment of the armed forces, “pay per active-duty service member has grown over 80 percent (in current-year dollars, or about 50 percent in constant dollars) … military pay has increased 40 percent more than civilian pay since 2000, and enlisted service members are now paid close to 90 percent that of civilians with comparable education and experience.”Ibid.
Accordingly, experts including former Secretaries of Defense Robert Gates, Leon Panetta, and Charles Hagel and former senior military leaders including General Ron Fogleman and Admiral Gary Roughead have also agreed that the “all-in” costs of the AVF are not sustainable.Ibid., 8 And although the Gates Commission did not recommend a large expansion of benefits, the fact is that such benefits have been expanded over time and must be considered as part of the all-in costs of the AVF.
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The 2019 RFPB study highlighted that while personnel costs are rising across the board, the greatest increase has been in the active component (AC). “In terms of per capita costs to the US government [between fiscal years 2013 and 2018], AC costs have increased over four times as much as the reserve component (RC)—roughly $57,000 versus $14,000. While the costs for both RC and AC troops are increasing, the AC costs are increasing faster, and the RCs still maintain their significant cost advantage of being more than 71 percent cheaper than their AC counterpart.”Punaro, The Ever-Shrinking Fighting Force, 47. Any solution to the sustainability problem must acknowledge and take advantage of the fact that the RC is a bargain for taxpayers.
There has been a real reluctance to debate these trends publicly, so there first needs to be a recognition of just how much the AVF’s all-in costs are. From there, the nation’s leaders in the Pentagon and Congress need to determine if they will put their hands on the helm or just leave it on autopilot. One thing is clear, however: As so many senior military leaders have stated, the current path is unsustainable. If the all-volunteer force is to survive for another half century, we must find solutions that work and are affordable—the nation’s future security depends on it.
The draft ended fifty years ago. Can the all-volunteer force survive another fifty?
By James L. Jones, Jr. and Arnold Punaro
atlanticcouncil.org · by jmezey · September 11, 2023
Civil Society Defense Policy National Security United States and Canada
Issue Brief
September 11, 2023
As two individuals who volunteered for the United State Marine Corps during the peak years of the Vietnam War draft and ended our military careers when the all-volunteer force (AVF) had been in effect for close to thirty-five years, we have experienced, witnessed, and influenced policies during both the draft and volunteer forces. In fact, most of those who served in Vietnam with us in our infantry platoons were draftees and performed their missions with courage and professionalism. In our post-uniformed careers, we have served in government, worked in industry, and built think tank assessments of the AVF. While we would strongly oppose reinstating the draft, we do not believe the AVF, at its fiftieth anniversary, can succeed on its current path.
Since the nation’s founding 247 years ago, military conscription has been used for only thirty-five of those years, specifically during times of major conflict: the Revolutionary War, Civil War, World Wars I and II, Korea, and Vietnam. At times, conscription was so controversial—regarding its necessity and application—that it sparked large instances of civil disobedience, such as during the American Civil War. The draft riots in New York City in July 1863 left hundreds, some say perhaps a thousand, dead. There was similar opposition in the South to the conscription legislation passed by the Confederate Congress.
However, at other times, when the need for conscription was widely accepted, and its application viewed as universal and fair, the practice was largely unquestioned. But for numerous reasons involving demographics and social challenges, constitutional questions, moral and ethical issues, and changing public perceptions of fairness and the burdens of service, conscription versus alternatives has shown that it can quickly become a divisive public and political issue. Those factors converged in the late 1960s resulting in a decision by President Richard M. Nixon to abandon the draft and transition the American military to an all-volunteer force.
By most measures, the adoption of an AVF for the American armed forces has been a success. It created what many believe to be the most capable, professional, and equitable military force in the history of the world. But will this model prove to be sufficient and affordable in the years ahead? Will it be workable in the period of growing strategic competition between the United States and emerging powers with competing global ambitions? Is it viable given changing attitudes regarding public service and the attitudes and values of service-aged citizens? Is the target age population for new recruits (ages eighteen to twenty-four) sufficiently qualified physically, mentally, and medically, among other considerations? And, of equal importance, is it affordable in a period of increasing national debt and a growing federal budget where defense already accounts for half of discretionary spending? Are the annual fully burdened costs and subsequent life-cycle costs sustainable?
These are difficult questions as the answer to several is “no.” The time for avoiding these mounting problems is long past. In its current form, the AVF is on an unsustainable path forward—both from a cost and recruitment standpoint—and our nation’s political leaders must recognize this. An understanding of the history of the AVF as well as the present factors that are stressing the system will help inform the critical decisions ahead. It is paramount to make these difficult decisions that are necessary to preserve the AVF, especially as the world grows ever more dangerous and unstable with the rising threat of China.
Brief history of the all-volunteer force
Conscription was used multiple times during the early part of the twentieth century, and the draft and its selective service process became rather normal for the American public and was generally seen as a rite of passage for young men. Perhaps that was best illustrated in March 1958 when entertainment superstar Elvis Presley reported to his reception station in Memphis, Tennessee, to begin a two-year stint in the US Army. However, this was not the case by April 28, 1967, when heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali refused to be inducted stating a religious exception and declaring, “I ain’t got no quarrel with those Vietcong.”Some controversy remains over what Muhammad Ali actually said and when. See Bob Orkand, “I Ain’t Got No Quarrel with Them Viet Cong,” New York Times, June 27, 2017https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/27/opinion/muhammad-ali-vietnam-war.html.
What had changed? Obviously, as the Ali statement demonstrated, it was the increasing US involvement in Vietnam, which saw draft calls increase from 82,000 in 1962 to nearly 230,000 by 1967. But there was an associated problem, one that would always bedevil the draft process: “Who shall serve when not all need to serve?”A paraphrase of this statement served, as we shall show, as the subtitle of the 1967 report of the presidential commission convened by President Lyndon B. Johnson, commonly called the “Burke Commission.” The formal title was, “In Pursuit of Equity: Who Serves When Not All Serve.”
As the nation’s involvement in the Vietnam War deepened, the perception that the draft was fair began to change, as those with higher education, more favorable financial conditions, and better local connections avoided the draft while those of lesser means became more likely to be drafted. Approval for the war overall dropped from a high of 61 percent at the beginning to 40 percent in early 1968—and approval of the draft saw a similar decline.See Gallup poll results regarding public opinion on the Vietnam conflict via Wikimedia Commons:https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Vietnam_War_and_Public_Opinion.png. In this timeframe, military personnel killed in action increased from 1,928 in 1965 (the year US ground troops arrived in Vietnam) to a high of 16,899 just three years later.“Vietnam War U.S. Military Fatal Casualty Statistics,” National Archives, n.d., https://www.archives.gov/research/military/vietnam-war/casualty-statistics, accessed July 2023
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial honors the sacrifices and dedication of the US service members who served during the Vietnam War. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Christian Ayers)
Recognizing the deep unpopularity of the draft supported by his predecessor, Republican nominee for president Richard Nixon stated that he supported moving to a volunteer armed force during a televised campaign speech on October 16, 1968. After his election, Nixon appointed a presidential commission to address the issue, one that would be led by former Eisenhower Defense Secretary Thomas Gates.
In some ways, the Gates Commission is misunderstood. Many believe it studied the idea of an AVF and decided it was feasible. In actuality, Nixon had already made the decision to institute it. The job of the Gates Commission was to validate, operationalize, and sell the AVF concept. In his instructions to the commission, Nixon stated:
I have directed the Commission to develop a comprehensive plan for eliminating conscription and moving toward an all-volunteer armed force. The Commission will study a broad range of possibilities for increasing the supply of volunteers for service, including increased pay, benefits, recruitment incentives and other practicable measures to make military careers more attractive to young men.
See the “Nixon Papers,” National Archives and Records Administration, 1969, Vol. 1, 258.
Regarding the cost of an AVF, the Gates Commission acknowledged that the budgetary costs would be higher. Still, the final report endorsed commissioner and economist Milton Friedman’s calculus that the overall costs would actually be lower than those of a mixed force of volunteers and conscripts. As the Gates Commission stated very early in its report:
[The] output of the civilian economy is reduced because more men serve in the military than would be required for an all-volunteer force of the same strength. This cost does not show up in the budget. Neither does the loss in output resulting from the disruption in the lives of young men who do not serve. Neither do the costs borne by those men who do not serve, but who rearrange their lives in response to the possibility of being drafted. Taking these hidden and neglected costs into account, the actual cost to the nation of an all-volunteer force will be lower than the cost of the present force.
See Thomas Gates et al., The Report of the President’s Commission on an All-Volunteer Armed Force, President’s Commission on an All-Volunteer Armed Force, February 1970, 9.
In essence, this was a macroeconomics argument, one that focused on overall economic productivity and labor allocations while largely avoiding a comprehensive discussion of the federal budgetary expenses that would result from increased pay and improved benefits over time. As argued by one evaluation decades after the introduction of the AVF:
While Friedman and others included direct compensation in their calculations and analysis, they either did not anticipate or did not address indirect costs resulting from efforts to maintain an effective force in the face of changing demographics. These include increases in retirement costs for a recruited force more likely to make the military a career, the housing, family program and health care costs for a force more likely to be older and married, the direct cost of recruiting infrastructure and advertising, and the costs associated with increased usage of benefits like the Army College Fund and the GI Bill.
Louis G. Yuengert, “America’s All-Volunteer Force: A Success?, The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters 45, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 58.
Some members of the Gates Commission offered caveats regarding their all-volunteer proposal and how to make it sustainable. Gates himself had several, including reforming the military’s “up-or-out” promotion system; eliminating the military’s retirement system that benefits only those who stay twenty years and then incentivizes them to leave right away; and changing pay and compensation from one based on tenure to one based on skills and performance.See Arnold Punaro, written testimony submitted to the United States Senate Committee on Armed Service, May 3, 2017, 7.
Over the subsequent years, however, none of the three concerns voiced by Gates has been implemented fully. Significant pay increases were established rather quickly when the draft ended, and over time additional benefits to those serving have been added mainly regarding health care expansion, childcare, family housing, and greater educational opportunities. The AVF became more professional, and the military retirement community grew—currently almost double the active-duty force in total numbers (2.4 million retirees compared with 1.3 million active-duty personnel).
The challenges of the all-volunteer force today
The AVF can be considered a success, resulting in an exceptionally high-quality force in both peace and wartime. It is important to note that the actual forces committed in Desert Shield/Desert Storm and Iraq and Afghanistan were around 697,000 and 1.9 million, respectively. The number of personnel actually engaged in those conflicts was small compared with those in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. In fact, during the peak of the Cold War, draft registration was reinstated because the leadership at the time believed the AVF was strictly a peacetime force.
The AVF is so ingrained in today’s society that the alternative—the draft—is not even considered a viable option. So, while we agree that the AVF is here to stay, it would be unwise for our nation to not also recognize its unsustainable cost growth trends.
Since the attack on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent greatly expanded deployment of the armed forces, “pay per active-duty service member has grown over 80 percent (in current-year dollars, or about 50 percent in constant dollars) … military pay has increased 40 percent more than civilian pay since 2000, and enlisted service members are now paid close to 90 percent that of civilians with comparable education and experience.”Ibid.
Accordingly, experts including former Secretaries of Defense Robert Gates, Leon Panetta, and Charles Hagel and former senior military leaders including General Ron Fogleman and Admiral Gary Roughead have also agreed that the “all-in” costs of the AVF are not sustainable.Ibid., 8 And although the Gates Commission did not recommend a large expansion of benefits, the fact is that such benefits have been expanded over time and must be considered as part of the all-in costs of the AVF.
In the last twenty years, the average fully burdened cost for a mid-career individual on active duty—which includes support structures for the service members and their families, such as the cost to recruit them and provide skills training, the military health program, a taxpayer-subsidized grocery chain, military dependents’ schools, a childcare system, and more—has gone from $80,000 per year to $160,000 at the end of the George W. Bush administration, to current estimates of close to $400,000 today. These rapidly rising costs provide some explanation as to why the active-duty force size has contracted by about 2 percent since 2001—the cost of adding more members is simply too high. Additionally, the $400,000 fully burdened cost can be misleading, as the Department of Defense (DOD) uses a composite rate strictly for budgeting purposes.
Further, the life-cycle costs of the retiree force, with pay increased each year with a cost-of-living adjustment and mostly free health care under TRICARE for Life, are prohibitively expensive under the current active-duty and retirement program: “Today’s system currently pays a service member seventy years for those who retire after only twenty years of active service. For example, if someone joins the military at age eighteen, they can retire with full retirement benefits at age thirty-eight. Given that the average life expectancy is now in the mid-eighties, the department is currently responsible for approximately fifty years of additional retirement costs.”Arnold Punaro, The Ever-Shrinking Fighting Force (McLean, VA: Punaro Press, 2021), 494. The DOD health care budget is over $54 billion per year, and retirees and their dependents account for more than 50 percent of the personnel served and 65 percent of the costs.
Further, the department does not know or track active-duty personnel’s fully burdened and life-cycle costs. While some might argue that it is too difficult to track these figures, others suspect that DOD does not want to know the true costs because of the sticker shock. But it is imperative to reach an agreement on the definitions and metrics of the fully burdened and life-cycle costs of the AVF. These figures must take into account all of the costs such as those for health care, education, and retirement.
The Reserve Forces Policy Board (RFPB) did a yearlong study, deliberating in open sessions and coordinating in the department and with outside experts like the Government Accountability Office and Congressional Budget Office, and made a lengthy report to the secretary of defense with six major recommendations, which were mostly supported by the DOD leadership.Reserve Forces Policy Board, Requiring the Use of Fully Burdened and Life Cycle Personnel Costs for All Components in Total Force Analysis and for Budgetary Purposes: Update Report to the Secretary of Defense, September 10, 2019. Figures 1 and 2 outline what the RFPB found:
Figure 1.
Source: Reproduced from Reserve Forces Policy Board, Requiring the Use of Fully Burdened and Life Cycle Personnel Costs for All Components in Total Force Analysis and for Budgetary Purposes: Update Report to the Secretary of Defense, September 10, 2019.
Figure 2.
Source: Reproduced from Reserve Forces Policy Board, Requiring the Use of Fully Burdened and Life Cycle Personnel Costs for All Components in Total Force Analysis and for Budgetary Purposes: Update Report to the Secretary of Defense, September 10, 2019.
In its 2014 interim report, the Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission showed that the total cost for pay, benefits, health care, and retirement was close to $410 billion a year.Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission, Report of the Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission: Interim Report, June 2014. Additionally, the commission highlighted the presence of a $1 trillion unfunded liability over the next ten years in the military retirement fund, which is not included in any budget. Military retirees, a growing population of over 2.4 million people, are living longer, have expanding health care costs, and under the current system have inflation-indexed retirement income.
As these figures demonstrate, we continue to spend large amounts to pay for the force of yesterday at the expense of the force of tomorrow. Veterans’ care doubled in the last twenty years, from 2.4 percent of the federal budget in fiscal year 2001 to 4.9 percent in fiscal year 2020, even though the veteran population decreased by 6.8 million in that period—meaning the United States is spending more for every veteran.Linda J. Blimes, “The Long-Term Costs of United States Care for Veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars,” Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, August 18, 2021.https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2021/Costs%20of%20War_Bilmes_Long-Term%20Costs%20of%20Care%20for%20Vets_Aug%202021.pdf.
The government will also have to contend with caring for the veterans of the post-9/11 conflicts. Brown University’s Costs of War project has estimated that between 2001 and 2050, those costs will amount to somewhere between $2.2 and $2.5 trillion:
This includes the amount already paid in disability and related benefits and medical care, as well as the projected future cost of lifetime disability benefits and health care for those who have served in the military during these wars … Yet the majority of the costs associated with caring for post-9/11 veterans has not yet been paid and will continue to accrue long into the future. As in earlier U.S. wars, the costs of care and benefits for post-9/11 veterans will not reach their peak until decades after the conflict, as veterans’ needs increase with age.
Linda J. Blimes, “The Long-Term Costs of United States Care for Veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars,” Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, August 18, 2021
These staggering costs are not being factored into budget, troop, or strategy decisions. When looking at this comparison from 1998 to 2014, growth in military pay, quality of life, retired pay, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and DOD health care far exceeded both the Gross Domestic Product Price Index and the Employment Cost Index. This is why the consensus among experts is that the costs are unsustainable.
And the sustainability problems of the AVF are only exacerbated by the other areas of inefficiencies in the Pentagon. Despite defense spending levels that, in constant dollars, are higher than the peak of the Ronald Reagan buildup, the United States’ defense capabilities can now be characterized as an “ever-shrinking fighting force.” Today, the US military has one million fewer active-duty personnel and 35-40 percent fewer major combat units, such as the army brigade combat teams, navy battle force ships, and air force combat aircrafts, than the United States had at the time of the Reagan buildup. Since 9/11, the number of active-duty military personnel has decreased by over 100,000 people while the civilian government workforce has increased by 136,000 people. Cutting warfighters while adding bureaucrats does not strike fear into our adversaries. No matter where you look, this shrinking trend has continued consistently through many administrations, both Democratic and Republican, and persists today.
Capt. Pete Riebe, commanding officer of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72), waves alongside sailors as the San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock USS Anchorage (LPD 23) sails through San Diego Bay upon return to home port following a seven-month deployment. (US Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Madison Cassidy)
A main driver of this negative trend is DOD’s broken acquisition system. In total, the current federal procurement data show that DOD spends $400 billion a year on goods, services, supplies, and equipment, yet the acquisition system is plagued by bureaucratic inefficiencies, yearslong lag times, and significant cost overruns. Ballooning personnel and overhead costs are another factor. Defense-wide spending has grown from 5 percent of the budget to 20 percent of the budget today; DOD’s support functions represent over 40 percent of its total workforce; the defense agencies have gone from one in 1952 to twenty-eight defense agencies today with 170,000 people spending in excess of $120 billion; and DOD maintains one of the largest property books in the world, worth over $880 billion—over 562,000 facilities on more than 4,800 sites in all fifty states, seven US territories, and forty other countries. We know there is a pressing need for reform in all these areas to reverse the unsustainable trends, but we are not moving fast enough in that direction today.
Despite the multiple studies and noted experts raising the alarm bells about the sustainability of the AVF since its inception, these warnings have been ignored in administration after administration. The inability to tackle these difficult problems over the years is a sad indictment of our political leadership over the last half century.
The current recruiting crisis
Despite expanded pay and benefits, the armed services face significant recruiting challenges today. In fiscal year 2022, the army missed its recruiting goal by some fifteen thousand soldiers. This roughly equates to the strength of one army combat division. The other services have also struggled to meet recruiting numbers, but to a lesser degree. Why is this the case?
As explained by noted defense experts David Barno and Nora Bensahel, the current recruiting challenge is driven by several factors. An obvious issue is an economy with an unemployment rate that hovers at historically low levels. Another is a shrinking demographic of those of service age (commonly called the “cohort”). In addition, the rigors of current military recruitment eligibility standards mean that fewer in the cohort are eligible for military service, a number that has recently dropped from 29 percent to 23 percent of those in the pool. Among those in the military cohort, the number inclined to consider military service (called “positively propensed”) has declined significantly in recent years from over 20 percent to less than 10 percent.David Barno and Nora Bensahel, “Addressing the U.S. Military Recruiting Crisis,” War on the Rocks, March 10, 2023. Additionally, a recent Gallup survey shows that only 60 percent of Americans have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the US military—the lowest figure in twenty-five years.Mohamed Younis, “Confidence in U.S. Military Lowest in over Two Decades,” Gallup, July 31, 2023, https://news.gallup.com/poll/509189/confidence-military-lowest-two-decades.aspx.
According to a recent survey of people aged sixteen to twenty-eight conducted by the army, one of the top reasons that young people did not want to volunteer was because they did not want to put their lives on hold. The top three other main concerns were fear of death, worries about post-traumatic stress disorder, and leaving friends and family. However, a perception that the military is becoming too politically correct, or “woke,” accounted for only about 5 percent of respondents’ concerns about joining the military—a far cry from what has been suggested by many of the critics of the recruiting crisis. Quite the contrary: Almost three times as many respondents (13 percent) were concerned about racial or gender discrimination in the army.Lolita C. Baldor, “Army Sees Safety, Not ‘Wokeness,’ as Top Recruiting Obstacle,” AP, February 12, 2023, https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan-politics-military-and-defense-race-ethnicity-6548adcb0fee590f3427771d1e1eeea7.
Vandenberg Air Force Base members serve breakfast during the 2019 Santa Barbara County Veteran Stand Down event Oct. 19, 2019. (US Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Hanah Abercrombie)
Additionally, as the military has become smaller and more professional, it has become a much smaller presence in American society. Since the end of the Cold War and the closure and consolidation of military bases and facilities, the military is simply less present in US communities. Moreover, in some ways the military has become a “family business” with over half of enlistees having a close family member with military service.See Yuengert, “America’s All-Volunteer Force,” 61.
However, servicemembers and veterans are increasingly less likely to recommend military service to their families—a troubling trend in an already difficult recruiting environment. In 2019, almost 75 percent of respondents said they would recommend military service to someone considering it. In 2021, that figure fell to 63 percent. The top reasons that respondents would not recommend military life were the views that the military is not family friendly, that it does not pay enough to keep up with skyrocketing inflation, and that military leadership is letting them down.“Fewer Veterans Are Recommending Military Service,” Veterans of Foreign Wars, November 30, 2022, https://www.vfw.org/media-and-events/latest-releases/archives/2022/11/fewer-veterans-are-recommending-military-service.
No simple solutions
The challenges outlined above are significant, with no easy solutions to any of them. But no longer can the nation ignore these mounting problems. We cannot simply wish away the iceberg straight ahead; we must course correct now before an imminent collision.
Several studies have been conducted by respected organizations regarding the quandary. The Bipartisan Policy Center conducted the most comprehensive one in March 2017, which made some thirty-nine recommendations. The majority of the recommendations—such as military spouse employment, expanded day care services, health care modernization, active duty to reserve force transitions, changes to military pay scales, and more flexible military assignment procedures—are intended to make military life more appealing to contemporary American youth, and hopefully attract more recruits.
Other Bipartisan Policy Center recommendations would modernize several aspects of traditional military personnel management such as eliminating the up-or-out promotion system, making promotions much more merit based, allowing for flexible career service (such as a two-year leave of absence from the military for professional or personal reasons), and better aligning military specialties with civilian certifications in similar vocations.See Bipartisan Policy Center, Building a F.A.S.T. Force: A Flexible Personnel System for a Modern Military, March 2017. Many of these recommendations are reiterations of the original Gates Commission recommendations.
Barno and Bensahel offered their own suggestions: increasing the number of recruiters, raising the maximum age for new recruits from thirty-nine to forty-one, allowing for longer delayed entry after enlisting, expanding the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program in high schools, recruiting more women, and dropping some disqualifying personal issues. Such steps, they argue, would expand the recruiting cohort without compromising standards.Barno and Bensahel, “Addressing the U.S. Military Recruiting Crisis.”
As the various survey results demonstrate, a lack of trust in military leadership is also hindering recruiting. There have been a number of examples over recent years to justify this view, from the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan to the “Fat Leonard” corruption scandal in the navy, from the horrid state of military housing to congressional, civilian, and military leaders—both retired and, in some cases, on active duty—taking actions that counter the apolitical nature of the military. Senior leaders need to take a hard look in the mirror and better acknowledge how their actions affect the force and take responsibility for their failures and mistakes.
However, all these solutions must also come with the recognition that the fully burdened and life-cycle costs of the AVF, in its current form, are unsustainable. To begin with, Congress and DOD must agree on a definition and metric to track the all-in cost of the AVF, which they do not currently do. Ignoring or overlooking these data means continuing on an unsustainable path.
The 2019 RFPB report gives examples of DOD elements committing to upgrading their calculations to meet the “fully burdened” standard and then, even after several years, failing to meet that commitment. In particular, the report highlights the need for the director of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) to take the lead on this, something he pledged to do in early 2013; in the decade since, CAPE has addressed only four of the six recommendations and only in part.
If the next decade follows the same trend, the department will eventually find itself in a funding crisis of its own making thanks to a refusal to track the all-in costs for its active-duty personnel, which include items such as real estate, facilities, utilities, infrastructure, training, and other support costs. In other words, the problem is avoidable, but it requires immediate attention.
The 2019 RFPB study highlighted that while personnel costs are rising across the board, the greatest increase has been in the active component (AC). “In terms of per capita costs to the US government [between fiscal years 2013 and 2018], AC costs have increased over four times as much as the reserve component (RC)—roughly $57,000 versus $14,000. While the costs for both RC and AC troops are increasing, the AC costs are increasing faster, and the RCs still maintain their significant cost advantage of being more than 71 percent cheaper than their AC counterpart.”Punaro, The Ever-Shrinking Fighting Force, 47. Any solution to the sustainability problem must acknowledge and take advantage of the fact that the RC is a bargain for taxpayers.
There has been a real reluctance to debate these trends publicly, so there first needs to be a recognition of just how much the AVF’s all-in costs are. From there, the nation’s leaders in the Pentagon and Congress need to determine if they will put their hands on the helm or just leave it on autopilot. One thing is clear, however: As so many senior military leaders have stated, the current path is unsustainable. If the all-volunteer force is to survive for another half century, we must find solutions that work and are affordable—the nation’s future security depends on it.
About the authors
General James L. Jones (USMC, retired) is the executive chairman emeritus of the Atlantic Council, former commandant of the US Marine Corps, former Supreme Allied Commander Europe, and former national security advisor to President Barack Obama. He is the founder and president of Jones Group International.
Major General Arnold Punaro (USMC, retired) is a nonresident senior fellow in the Atlantic Council’s Forward Defense program and a member of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security’s advisory board. Punaro served as the staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the commanding general of the 4th Marine Division, and as a defense industry executive. He is the CEO of The Punaro Group, LLC.
Forward Defense, housed within the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, generates ideas and connects stakeholders in the defense ecosystem to promote an enduring military advantage for the United States, its allies, and partners. Our work identifies the defense strategies, capabilities, and resources the United States needs to deter and, if necessary, prevail in future conflict.
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Image: US soldiers assigned to the 4th Infantry Division render salutes to honor the memory of fallen soldiers during the playing of the national anthem at Kit Carson Park Colorado. (US Army photo by Spc. Nathan Thome)
atlanticcouncil.org · by jmezey · September 11, 2023
21. Making Nuclear Sharing Credible Again: What the F-35A Means for NATO
This could create new friction with South Korea.
Making Nuclear Sharing Credible Again: What the F-35A Means for NATO - War on the Rocks
warontherocks.com · by Frank Kuhn · September 14, 2023
Critics and supporters of NATO’s nuclear deterrence posture, which relies partly on forward-deployed U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe, hardly agree on anything. But when it comes to nuclear sharing, their assessments are remarkably similar. Both groups claim, either explicitly or implicitly, that American B-61 gravity bombs and the nuclear sharing arrangement as a whole are militarily obsolete and lack credibility. However, participants in the ongoing debate about the future of NATO’s nuclear deterrence posture have failed to realize that the technological and political nature of nuclear sharing is changing.
The F-35A Lightning II, which is set to replace current legacy fighters in almost all NATO states that take part in nuclear sharing, is a significantly more capable aircraft than the legacy fighters it is replacing. Together with the modernized B61-12 nuclear bomb, it will reconstitute NATO’s regional deterrence capabilities and help to deter further Russian aggression. Furthermore, the procurement of the F-35A by a large number of NATO members — and by Germany in particular — will alleviate doubts about the political credibility of the nuclear sharing commitment.
Because the F-35A will become the foremost fighter jet in Europe and users cannot make any modifications to the airplane, it also offers new opportunities for alliance members in Eastern Europe to send jets and pilots to Western Europe and train for the nuclear sharing mission. As pilots from Eastern Europe, due to their heightened threat perception, may well be more willing to employ nuclear weapons in a potential conflict with Russia, such direct participation would reassure Eastern European allies that the nuclear commitment is politically credible.
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If NATO actively pursues this kind of cooperation, the times when nuclear sharing was a defunct relic of the Cold War will soon be over — besides bolstering deterrence, the arrangement would further promote the unity and cohesion of the trans-Atlantic alliance.
The Credibility Issues of Nuclear Sharing
Under NATO’s nuclear sharing arrangement, the United States deploys tactical nuclear weapons in Europe to convince its friends and foes that the commitment to defend Europe is credible. This is because tactical nuclear weapons create an escalatory chain that links the security of the United States with the security of its European allies, a mechanism that is known as coupling. Moreover, forward-deployed tactical nuclear weapons bolster deterrence since their presence near the front lines increases the likelihood of nuclear escalation in a conventional conflict.
Three decades after the Cold War, the United States has withdrawn almost all of its tactical nuclear weapons from Europe. Only a small number of B-61 gravity bombs, designed to be employed against enemy targets using so-called dual-capable aircraft operated by European NATO members, remain on a handful of allied air bases across the continent. According to recent estimates, about 100 bombs are deployed in Italy, Germany, Turkey, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
This stockpile is no longer regarded as credible.
One issue is military-technical. As a popular argument goes, using fourth-generation fighters such as the F-16 or the aging Tornado to penetrate modern Russian air defenses and deliver unguided bombs on Russian territory would represent “seven consecutive miracles.” Not only would the aircraft need to survive an enemy first strike and receive authority from the U.S. president to arm the nuclear bombs, but they would also have to take off successfully, meet up with a tanker aircraft to refill their fuel tanks mid-air, make it to the target without being engaged by enemy air defenses or fighters, find and identify the target, and release the weapon as designed.
The war in Ukraine has further emphasized the problems that any fourth-generation dual-capable aircraft would face in the modern battlespace. By employing modern air defense systems, Russia and Ukraine have mutually denied themselves air superiority, making it nearly impossible for either side to fly close air support missions without sacrificing their own jets. Russian forces have thus resorted to firing ballistic missiles and cruise missiles for strategic air attacks — often from within Russia’s own airspace, far away from Ukrainian surface-to-air missile batteries.
Another issue is political. Especially after the ratification of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in October 2020, a growing number of NATO states debated openly whether to join the treaty and end their participation in NATO’s nuclear sharing arrangement. Germany in particular was on the fence about the future of nuclear sharing, with senior politicians arguing for a withdrawal of the remaining U.S. nuclear warheads. This has sparked questions about the willingness of Western European states to share the risks associated with nuclear deterrence. It has also led to apprehensions in Eastern Europe, where experts and politicians feared that a German exit could deal a major blow to the alliance’s nuclear cohesion and ultimately decrease the credibility of NATO’s security guarantees on the eastern flank. After all, the political dimension of nuclear sharing, which consists of information sharing, consultations, as well as common planning and execution, is often considered even more important than military-technical factors.
NATO has also failed to adapt the nuclear sharing scheme to the different threat perceptions within the alliance, which further undermines the political credibility of the arrangement. Even though the most pressing threat to NATO is in the East, almost every host nation is located in the West. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that Poland has repeatedly requested to host U.S. nuclear weapons.
The Changing Technological Nature of Nuclear Sharing
NATO’s nuclear sharing arrangement may not be credible today, but it likely will be in the near future. With the F-35A scheduled to replace the remaining fourth-generation dual-capable aircraft within the alliance and the B61-12 set to arrive in European storage facilities this year, the strategic outlook today is vastly different than a couple of decades ago.
Even though the F-35A has yet to perform a number of crucial tests to go into full-rate production, is plagued by availability issues due to a lack of spare parts and functional engines, and still has over 800 open deficiencies, it is already a very capable fighter. Thanks to its stealth capabilities, electronic warfare suite, and advanced sensors, which provide the pilots with situational awareness unmatched by any fourth-generation platform, the F-35A will give nuclear sharing participants unprecedented ability to penetrate highly defended Russian airspace.
The advances of stealth capabilities should be obvious to anyone who closely watched the performance of the F-117 Nighthawk during the first night of Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Whereas fourth-generation fighters were employed in large strike packages to ensure adequate protection, the F-117s slipped through Iraqi air defenses and struck their targets unimpeded, without any additional support.
To be sure, stealth alone is no longer sufficient to ensure penetration against advanced integrated air defense systems. Mission planners need to use intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets to identify holes in enemy air defense coverage and to work out where and when to jam or suppress enemy radars in order to map out flight paths that minimize the risk of radar detection. The F-35A, however, can do a fair bit of this highly complex work on its own. Using its advanced sensor suite, the aircraft is able to quickly geolocate and classify enemy radars, as well as display them to the pilot. These capabilities, which are currently being used on NATO’s eastern flank to gather valuable intelligence, greatly enhance the F-35A’s ability to operate safely in contested airspace, and it’s no coincidence that the F-35A has been highly successful on the international market.
The modernized B61-12, which will be fully integrated into the F-35A Block 4 variant, offers additional operational credibility for the nuclear sharing mission. The traditional B61 can be delivered in four different ways: in free-fall or retarded airburst, as a free-fall surface burst, or in a “laydown” mode where the bomb is released from a low-flying aircraft and slowed down by a parachute (to prevent disintegration) before it detonates by timer. In all of these cases, the bomb behaves as any unguided general-purpose bomb — it is not as accurate as modern precision-guided munitions, and the pilots need to get very close to their targets. The B61-12, however, is outfitted with a new tail kit comprising an inertial guidance system and a GPS receiver, allowing F-35A pilots to deliver their nuclear bombs with much greater accuracy. Reportedly, the bomb comes with a circular error probable of five meters or less as long as GPS data is available — and with a circular error probable of 30 meters if not. This means that half of the nuclear warheads would explode within five or 30 meters of their actual targets, respectively. This is a substantial improvement over the 100-meter accuracy of the older B61 models. The B61-12’s modest standoff range also improves aircraft survivability because it leaves more time for safe aircraft escape after weapon delivery.
Taken together, the F-35A and the B61-12 will result in a significant boost in operational credibility for NATO’s nuclear sharing mission. Of course, this does not mean that it would be easy, nor that success would be guaranteed. Air campaigns are a hugely complex business, and critics of nuclear sharing have rightfully pointed to a number of operational challenges, not least of which is the requirement to refuel NATO’s dual-capable aircraft in contested airspace. But since Russian air defense capabilities are not as effective as publicly suggested and do not create impenetrable bubbles for NATO operations, there is a reasonable chance of success.
Fixing the Politics of Nuclear Sharing
Besides ameliorating the military-technical issues of nuclear sharing, the F-35A can also help to fix the political credibility issues.
The F-35A sends a strong political signal that Western European governments will continue to participate in the nuclear sharing arrangement and are still willing to deliver U.S. nuclear weapons on enemy soil. This is because the jet is tailored for the nuclear delivery mission, unlike any other fighter on the Western market. At the present moment, the F-15E Strike Eagle is the only other modern fighter jet certified for the B61-12, and the Strike Eagle would arguably face major difficulties in penetrating enemy air defenses. Moreover, as both Switzerland and Finland have noted in their procurement decisions, the F-35A promises not only high security of supply, but also the highest development potential of all fighter jets available on the market, ensuring that it will remain relevant in the battlespace until at least 2060. The F-35A therefore signals a long-term political commitment to the nuclear sharing mission — much more so than models such as the F/A-18F Super Hornet, which Germany considered purchasing as a stopgap measure even though its production line is on life support.
The German procurement of the F-35A also matters politically since it solidifies the nuclear character of the alliance and makes efforts to end German participation in NATO’s nuclear sharing arrangement exceedingly unlikely. As long as Germany was still undecided about the successor model for its old Tornado fighter-bombers, lawmakers were presented with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to exit the unpopular arrangement. Due to the dismal readiness state of the German Tornado jets, a decision for or against a specific aircraft model, or no decision at all, might have effectively precluded further participation in the nuclear sharing scheme. In addition, a German de facto exit might have motivated other countries to follow suit. Now that the deal is signed and sealed, this opportunity has passed. In a last-ditch effort, critics tried to argue that the F-35A would be a waste of money. But with the military-technological base in place, nuclear sharing critics will have a hard time ending the arrangement because doing so would require an active decision, rather than simple inaction.
Perhaps most importantly, the F-35A offers new ways of cooperation between NATO members that did not previously exist. Once the jet is in service in Poland, the Czech Republic, Finland, and Romania, NATO allies on the eastern flank could deploy airframes and pilots to Western Europe and train jointly to employ U.S. nuclear weapons. Such a program, which is not currently possible because all states operate different aircraft types, would significantly increase the political credibility of NATO’s nuclear sharing arrangement. Due to their diverging threat perceptions, the Polish government and Polish pilots, for example, might well be more willing to employ nuclear weapons than, say, the German government and German pilots.
Usually, even operating the same aircraft type does not guarantee full interoperability, because there are differences between national versions, as the Anglo-German air policing mission in the Baltics exemplifies. That said, for the F-35A, most states will not be allowed to modify the physical or data systems of the airplane. NATO members could thus actively explore such a cooperation, perhaps with Germany being in the lead. As a side effect, deploying additional airframes to Germany would also ease pressure on Germany’s tiny F-35A fleet.
Russia would be unlikely to appreciate such an arrangement, but it is still far less provocative than deploying U.S. nuclear warheads in Eastern Europe. Moreover, as Russia has already announced its intent to station nuclear weapons in Belarus, the benefits of deeper cooperation on nuclear sharing within NATO would likely outweigh any detrimental effects on European security resulting from hypothetical Russian countermeasures.
Making the F-35A the Central Pillar of Regional Deterrence
More than three decades after the Cold War, it is widely accepted that NATO’s nuclear sharing arrangement lacks military-technical and political credibility.
In a quest to resurrect this “magic ingredient” of deterrence, various experts have suggested that the United States should level the playing field and field its own ground-based missiles in Eastern Europe. It is said that such a deployment could address Russia’s overmatch of conventional and nuclear missile systems and close a gap on the escalation ladder after the demise of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which banned surface-to-surface missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. NATO emphasized in 2021 that it has no intention to deploy nuclear-tipped missile systems in Europe, but Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has lent new urgency to the debate about conventional and even nuclear missiles.
The F-35A Lightning II is likely to resolve the long-standing credibility issues of NATO’s nuclear component once it enters into service with European NATO allies. If NATO seeks to maintain a nuclear posture that relies partly on forward-based nuclear weapons, the alliance should thus continue making the F-35A the central pillar of its deterrence strategy. The F-35A is suitable for a wide set of missions, such as offensive and defense counter-air, cruise missile defense, suppression or destruction of enemy air defenses, reconnaissance, electronic attack, close air support, as well as battlefield interdiction, thus offering considerably more flexibility than ground-based missiles that can only be employed against fixed targets. It also carries a significant political value that goes beyond military capabilities.
Rather than fielding an entire new set of weapon systems in Europe, NATO would be wise to take full advantage of the F-35A’s capabilities and invest in additional weapons and expertise to suppress and defeat Russian air defenses. European F-35A operators could also evaluate whether they can adapt strategies similar to the U.S. Air Force’s Agile Combat Employment concept. “Hot refueling” their fighter jets on the ground, for example, might be a solution to extend the range of operations in contested environments. Finally, NATO members should consider detailing F-35A airframes and pilots from Eastern Europe to air bases in Western Europe to train for the nuclear mission. All of these measures would further increase the credibility of nuclear sharing arrangement and, ultimately, strengthen deterrence.
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Frank D. Kuhn works as project coordinator for the Cluster for Natural and Technical Science Arms Control Research at Peace Research Institute Frankfurt. His research interests include nuclear deterrence, arms control and nonproliferation, as well as military technology and strategy. The views expressed in this article represent those of the author alone.
Commentary
warontherocks.com · by Frank Kuhn · September 14, 2023
22. Every Taiwan Citizen a Resistance Member: Preparing for a Chinese Occupation
From Dr. Lumpy Lumbaca a long time 1st SFG member and an Asia hand.
Excerpts:
The specific objectives of Taiwan’s resistance will depend on the changing circumstances of the occupation. After the initial invasion, for example, PLA forces may not be well organized. In this instance, the resistance—alongside Taiwan and coalition military powers—might focus on defeating China’s forces outright. Alternatively, if the timeline of occupation is extended and Chinese forces can successfully build up their formations, the resistance movement might need to focus on harassing and disrupting while trying to maintain the morale of the people of Taiwan. Ultimately, the success of a Taiwan resistance movement will depend on a several factors, including the timeline of occupation, the size and strength of the occupying force, the level of support from the people, and the diplomatic, informational, military, and economic response from the international community. Even a small resistance movement can make it more difficult for China to achieve its goals in Taiwan. Resistance alone, however, is rarely—if ever—enough to win a war. It is for this reason that Taiwan’s resistance must always remain aligned with the legitimate government’s strategic objectives.
Resistance needs to be homegrown and organic to the place it occurs and the people who conduct it. It must be a product of the hearts and minds of the local population. Foreign supporters cannot want a free and independent Taiwan more than the people of Taiwan do. Assuming the citizens of Taiwan genuinely want to resist, and with approval and guidance from the government of Taiwan, America and other international partners can support efforts to organize and train the people starting now. While a great deal of effort is rightly placed on the Taiwan war apparatus, the role of the civilian populace must be fully acknowledged and addressed. Civilians will represent a critical node in any strategic plan to protect Taiwan if occupation occurs. Organizing a resistance after hostilities have erupted is extremely challenging and dangerous for those involved. Instead, organize today and resist tomorrow.
Every Taiwan Citizen a Resistance Member: Preparing for a Chinese Occupation - Modern War Institute
mwi.westpoint.edu · by Lumpy Lumbaca · September 14, 2023
Deterrence has failed. The People’s Liberation Army has invaded and occupied Taiwan. Just like Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine, some questioned whether Xi Jinping would go through with it. Many experts incorrectly predicted that an invasion would be too costly for China’s already shrinking economy given the inevitable global backlash. But autocrats have their own logic and reasons that are often not understood by others. Rational actor theory is just theory, and Westerners have never fully unlocked China’s long-term, grand strategy playbook. The Chinese occupation force is on every street corner, in every government office, at all sea ports, in the telecommunications centers, and literally sleeping in the homes of the people of Taiwan. The crackdowns in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong are nothing compared to Xi’s ruthlessness unleashed in his attempt to bring the island under his control. Deterrence has failed. Taiwan has fallen.
This is a scenario the world may see on the news tomorrow, or in a year. Luckily, Taiwan and its supporters have today to prepare for the invasion and—if defense fails—the occupation. Much has been written about what the Taiwan or American or Japanese or any other conventional fighting forces around the globe should do before, during, or after the invasion, and there are likely well-established military plans in place for a war against China over Taiwan. Moreover, America’s arming and training of the Taiwan military increases significantly each year, as it should. But those initiatives are almost entirely focused on the island nation’s military. There is another element at play, one that offers Taiwan important advantages if it is properly incorporated into defense planning: Taiwan’s people, the civilians who will be forced to choose between compliance with or resistance against China’s occupation—the Taiwan students, truck drivers, tech entrepreneurs, private business owners, accountants, civil servants, CEOs, mayors, and the like. Today is the opportunity to prepare the civil population for their contribution to a resistance tomorrow—a resistance that will be necessary for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to ultimately realize that subjugation, oppression, and faux unification following invasion are all impossible in the face of a trained and organized populace.
There are many lessons to be learned from Putin’s war in Ukraine. One of them is when there is a threat of invasion and occupation—as is the case in Taiwan—it’s best to prepare civilians to resist before the first shot is fired. In Ukraine, this was largely not done before Russia’s invasion of Crimea and the Donbas region in 2014. But Ukraine’s response to the aggression involved a large-scale mobilization of civil society. Volunteers traveled east to fight. Nongovernmental organizations emerged to procure equipment and send it to the front lines—from night-vision devices to body armor to vehicles. Specialty organizations like the Ukraine Crisis Media Center emerged organically to promote Ukraine’s cause and rapidly respond to Russian propaganda. So when Russian forces launched their full-scale invasion in 2022, the groundwork for resistance was in place. There are admittedly countless differences between the situations in Ukraine and Taiwan. Nevertheless, it seems rather clear that now is a better time to train, organize, resource, and empower any willing citizens in Taiwan to resist potential occupation by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) should deterrence fail.
Former US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper recently described his impressions following a visit to Taiwan. “I’ve come to view the growing willingness of all Taiwanese to fight for their country—a whole of society approach—as the key to deterring a Chinese invasion,” he wrote. “This evolution was shocked into being by Russia’s unprovoked invasion of its neighbor and sustained by the courage and success of the Ukrainian people. Let’s also hope that Xi is learning the painful lesson the Ukrainians are teaching Vladimir Putin—that a smaller nation with the will to win can beat back a larger foe, inspiring global support in the process.” A few notes about Esper’s comments are needed here. First, the fact that someone as senior as a former secretary made such comments about civilian resistance gives the observation greater credibility. And while Esper was speaking mainly about the convictions of the Taiwan people as a deterrent to prevent invasion altogether, it seems reasonable to infer that if a civilian population in Taiwan demonstrates its willingness to resist as a deterrent, that same population would be receptive to preparing said resistance beforehand. Second, Esper’s comments were likely aimed more at American lawmakers than anyone in Taiwan. The point was to tell the US Congress to keep supporting Taiwan with necessary resources. From a US perspective, the subject of Taiwan’s defense is highly political. But that is also true in Taiwan. With elections on the island set for January 2024, political will and even the idea of approaching the population with a conversation about resistance are both sensitive matters.
The Components of Resistance
Just like anywhere else, there will be nuances to Taiwan’s resistance. What worked in a resistance action in Ukraine may not work in Taiwan. Resistance is local and may differ from one place—and its unique set of cultural, religious, ethnic, socioeconomic and other factors—to another. The heroic actions of World War II’s partisan resistance fighters may only be partially effective today. Furthermore, it can be expected that some portion of Taiwan’s civilian population will in fact support China’s occupation, just as some in Ukraine support Russia’s ongoing war in the country. Moreover, emerging technology should be accounted for in all aspects of a resistance as it has fundamentally changed how people communicate, organize, think, and act. Along these lines, both China’s and Taiwan’s advanced abilities to use technology must be accounted for.
Still, despite the nuances that distinguish one resistance from another, all resistance movements are made up of several key components, and the United States Army Special Operation Command offers a useful framework for understanding these components in its Unconventional Warfare Pocket Guide. One component of a Taiwan resistance will be the underground. This is a “cellular organization within the resistance that has the ability to conduct operations in areas that are inaccessible to [the guerrilla component].” One such inaccessible area will be Taipei, the capital city that can reasonably be anticipated to quickly fall into the grip of PLA forces and CCP representatives. It is there that underground functions may include support for intelligence gathering, developing counterintelligence networks, fabricating special materials like false identifications or 3D-printed weapons, projecting subversive radio messages, developing print media (which will be important if the People’s Republic of China controls online communications), engineering social media and webpage content (possibly on the dark web), forming logistics networks, conducting sabotage operations, manning clandestine medical facilities, and moving funds from international supporters.
A second component of the resistance is known as the auxiliary. This term “refers to the portion of the population that provides active clandestine support to the guerrilla force or the underground.” Members of the auxiliary are part-time volunteers who have value because of their normal positions in their communities. Some functions of the auxiliary may include logistics procurement and distribution, labor for special materials, early warning for underground facilities and guerrilla bases, recruitment of intelligence collectors, communications or message delivery, media distribution, and safehouse management.
A third component of the resistance movement is the armed element, sometimes referred to as insurgents or guerrillas (although terminology is always up for debate and rarely agreed upon). The armed element is comprised primarily of local citizens “organized along military lines.” Their mission is “to conduct military and paramilitary operations in enemy-held, hostile, or denied areas.” It is possible that foreign supporters may join the armed element, as happened in Ukraine—although the physical geography of Taiwan and its lack of land borders makes this less likely, at least in any large scale.
A fourth component, the public component, refers to the overt political manifestation of the resistance. This component will be primarily responsible for negotiations with CCP representatives on behalf of the resistance. Every case of resistance is unique, and the degree to which public representatives exist in occupied Taiwan will depend greatly on the fluid situation on the ground. If the CCP decides to suppress the public component of the resistance, which is almost inevitable given China’s track record for brutally suppressing dissenters, the public component of the resistance may have to dissolve and go underground. Note that the public component is not synonymous with the parallel government or the government-in-exile.
A fifth component is the parallel government, sometimes referred to as the shadow government. This is the body that, behind the scenes, “replaces the governance functions of the existing regime”—in Taiwan’s case, the CCP’s occupation representatives. The parallel government legislates and provides oversight for things like security, health services, and taxation when possible. These functions may sound impossible at first, but some resistance movements last months, years, or decades. Members of Taiwan’s parallel government “may originate from any other component of the resistance.”
Finally, a Taiwan resistance movement would require a sixth component, the government-in-exile. Displaced from the island, or perhaps already overseas when the invasion occurs, the government-in-exile is the true government of Taiwan. It will be “recognized as a legitimate sovereign authority” of Taiwan by some but not all. It is almost guaranteed that many nations with good relations or high levels of economic dependence on China will not recognize the government-in-exile. This component of the resistance will need to reside in an allied or friendly country, such as the United States.
Toward an Effective Resistance in Taiwan
The people of Taiwan should be informed today that not everyone in a resistance movement needs to pull a trigger or detonate a bomb. Every civilian can play an important role in defeating the occupation. An initial step toward mapping out each of the six components of the resistance will involve population outreach programs to assess what and how each citizen may contribute to the movement. The willing banker, enabled by the information technology expert, for example, may want to assist in the movement of funds through clandestine channels outside of the CCP’s digital reach. The satellite frequency manager can facilitate secure communications. The mailperson can reconnoiter routes, identify potential PLA targets, and report intelligence during her normal mail delivery routine. The construction contractor can place bombs or sabotage infrastructure. Local mayors can help organize and compartmentalize community leadership councils. The TV announcer can assist with underground propaganda production. The ambulance driver may be the one to deliver dead-drop messages and communicate between Taiwan’s remaining military units and the civilian resistance. These are just a few examples of how the average citizen can support the resistance. At the strategic level, current and former senior government, nongovernmental, military, and private industry representatives will likely compose the parallel government, government-in-exile, and resistance leadership.
But it would reflect an antiquated understanding of resistance—one that doesn’t account for the unique conditions present in Taiwan—to stop there in thinking about how people may support resistance in Taiwan. An insurgency on the island would be like no other resistance movement the world has ever seen. While basic resistance principles would still apply, dusting off old US military field manuals on resistance will prove woefully inadequate in accounting for the modern complexities of Taiwan’s people and infrastructure. This is not Europe or the Pacific in World War II, nor even Ukraine in 2022 or the Islamic State at the peak of its short-lived caliphate. Why? Because the citizens of Taiwan today are different than in any of those other places. The island nation is one of the world’s most technologically advanced, with a highly educated population. Taiwan’s companies are at the forefront of advanced technologies, ranging from semiconductors to artificial intelligence. Plans to organize civilians into a resistance movement must account for exactly what and who is on the island today in this regard.
Resistance conducted for resistance’s sake may generate small victories but in the long run will likely contribute to a protracted conflict or outright failure. The overarching strategic objectives of the parallel government, government-in-exile, resistance leadership, and international coalition of supporters must be developed with painstaking detail and communicated to the lowest levels of the resistance movement. In the case of Taiwan, four principal strategic objectives stand out. First, a Taiwan resistance must support or enable the defeat of the Chinese occupation force, something that will likely be achieved in concert with coalition diplomatic, informational, military, and economic efforts. Defeat of the enemy should be the goal of any resistance movement, no matter how difficult the task. Second, the resistance must maintain the morale of the people. It is essential to remind the citizens of Taiwan that they are not alone and that there is hope for the future, free of oppression. This objective is essential for maintaining the will to resist, even in the face of overwhelming odds. Third, the resistance must inspire other countries to support Taiwan. Ukraine is an excellent example of how important this objective is. While many expected Ukraine to fall to Russia in days or weeks, the world has seen instead a committed and effective defense, enabled especially in the war’s initial months by the population’s spirited resistance. This has encouraged many nations around the world to support the war effort against Putin. Support does not always have to be military. A successful resistance movement may convince other countries to support Taiwan diplomatically, economically, or through other means, thus making it difficult for China to achieve its goals. Finally, the fourth objective of the resistance, short of defeating the PLA and more operational in nature, would be to harass and disrupt PLA and CCP operations on and around the island. The resistance movement has the potential to make the situation too costly for China to maintain its occupation, potentially forcing it to withdraw.
The specific objectives of Taiwan’s resistance will depend on the changing circumstances of the occupation. After the initial invasion, for example, PLA forces may not be well organized. In this instance, the resistance—alongside Taiwan and coalition military powers—might focus on defeating China’s forces outright. Alternatively, if the timeline of occupation is extended and Chinese forces can successfully build up their formations, the resistance movement might need to focus on harassing and disrupting while trying to maintain the morale of the people of Taiwan. Ultimately, the success of a Taiwan resistance movement will depend on a several factors, including the timeline of occupation, the size and strength of the occupying force, the level of support from the people, and the diplomatic, informational, military, and economic response from the international community. Even a small resistance movement can make it more difficult for China to achieve its goals in Taiwan. Resistance alone, however, is rarely—if ever—enough to win a war. It is for this reason that Taiwan’s resistance must always remain aligned with the legitimate government’s strategic objectives.
Resistance needs to be homegrown and organic to the place it occurs and the people who conduct it. It must be a product of the hearts and minds of the local population. Foreign supporters cannot want a free and independent Taiwan more than the people of Taiwan do. Assuming the citizens of Taiwan genuinely want to resist, and with approval and guidance from the government of Taiwan, America and other international partners can support efforts to organize and train the people starting now. While a great deal of effort is rightly placed on the Taiwan war apparatus, the role of the civilian populace must be fully acknowledged and addressed. Civilians will represent a critical node in any strategic plan to protect Taiwan if occupation occurs. Organizing a resistance after hostilities have erupted is extremely challenging and dangerous for those involved. Instead, organize today and resist tomorrow.
Jeremiah “Lumpy” Lumbaca, PhD is a retired US Army Green Beret and current professor of irregular warfare, counterterrorism, and special operations at the Department of Defense’s Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies. He can be found on X/Twitter @LumpyAsia.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Simon Liu, Office of the President of Taiwan
mwi.westpoint.edu · by Lumpy Lumbaca · September 14, 2023
23. Solving for the Missing Element of Maritime Campaigning
Excerpts:
But a disconcerting gap is forming within the Joint Force for campaigning in the maritime domain: one that misses its human element, an area where special operations forces (SOF) have gained hard-earned expertise. A human element to maritime campaigning—including working through traditional and irregular maritime partners—has not been a primary focus of naval special operators who typically focus on unilateral direct action raids and more common “Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure” (VBSS) activities at sea and in the littorals.
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A full refocus on the maritime domain must integrate the unavoidable human element of conflict and lessons learned over the last 20 years of counterterrorism operations. Today’s maritime challenges reflect the growing dependence of human populations on the seas for everyday life. As such, campaigning approaches must keep human motivations in mind throughout the course of maritime operational design. Doing so may require converging elements of existing SOF training pipelines or blending training exercises for greater joint effect. Nevertheless, these irregular (or non-traditional) approaches to maritime campaigning could be invaluable for preventing conflict while maintaining strategic positions of advantage in daily competition, preparing flexible options for escalation management, and setting conditions to prevail if a naval conflict emerges.
Solving for the Missing Element of Maritime Campaigning - Irregular Warfare Initiative
irregularwarfare.org · by Kevin Bilms · September 14, 2023
After 20 years of land-centric counterterrorism, special operations service components are beginning to “return to the sea” for strategic competition. This pivot by Naval Special Warfare Command (NSW) and Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC) is sensible, as both elements consider the needs of the larger fleet and the realities of warfighting in the largely maritime Indo-Pacific region.
But a disconcerting gap is forming within the Joint Force for campaigning in the maritime domain: one that misses its human element, an area where special operations forces (SOF) have gained hard-earned expertise. A human element to maritime campaigning—including working through traditional and irregular maritime partners—has not been a primary focus of naval special operators who typically focus on unilateral direct action raids and more common “Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure” (VBSS) activities at sea and in the littorals.
This emerging gap resembles an easily avoidable mistake in baseball: when a shallow pop-fly falls between three players who assume the other will make the catch. Baseball’s “Bermuda Triangle” parallels continue in maritime campaigning, where NSW maintains specialized maritime capabilities, but not a human-centric focus. Meanwhile, MARSOC and the U.S. Coast Guard are somewhat proficient in both, but they suffer from limited resourcing and competing responsibilities. Finally, although Army Special Forces are experts in human aspects of military operations, Army SOF’s maritime capabilities have faced neglect despite a rich history of maritime operations dating to World War II.
However, the importance of global waterways on regional populations and international trade underscores the urgency for forces and capabilities trained to engage in this space to fill this gap. As with the baseball metaphor, the Coast Guard and SOF components are close to the problem—but neither is currently positioned to make the decisive play in human contests or struggles of legitimacy by applying cultural understanding, local relationships, historical knowledge, language skills, and other population-centric competencies among seafaring populations.
Demand for these sorts of forces has been high across multiple combatant commands, but the Navy disbanded one force element that might have addressed the challenge, the Navy’s maritime civil affairs teams, in 2014, right as maritime gray-zone coercion was ramping up. Before discussing the use of fiscal authorities to support irregular warfare and maritime campaigning, there is a need to ensure the U.S. fields a force that is organized, trained, and equipped with the basics to foster the resilience of maritime partners facing gray-zone threats to their territorial waters and sovereign interests.
An Unconventional Look at Maritime Training
Look to the Project Maritime Deep Dives for a compelling reason to address the human element in maritime campaigning. From illegal fishing, piracy, smuggling, use and misuse of the commons, and even bullying behaviors that threaten human security at sea, the need is clear for a population-centric campaigning mindset. This approach differs from the platform-centric “material school” approach that traditionally dominates naval discourse and emphasizes a technological mindset and engineering-based thinking in the face of naval challenges. Today’s increasing maritime complexity calls for scrutinizing maritime challenges through a human lens, one that emphasizes partner-focused problem solving and the local population. Before enlisting the world’s fishermen to take personal risks and report or track illicit activity, there must be consideration on how to build rapport, understand the local population and their motivations, identify incentives to cooperate, and only then begin to work together towards common interests.
One Special Forces course quickly comes to mind to bridge this gap: Robin Sage, the culmination exercise for Army Special Forces. Earning the coveted Green Beret hinges on gaining the support of an indigenous movement to repel an occupying power in the fictitious People’s Republic of Pineland. Unfortunately, Robin Sage lacks a maritime, littoral, or even amphibious element, nor does the Special Forces Qualification Course that precedes it.
To gain the maritime expertise, there may be opportunity for a marriage of convenience with a Navy school: the Naval Small Craft Instruction and Technical Training School (NAVSCIATTS), where NSW and conventional Navy servicemembers provide world-class security cooperation training in an array of tactically- and operationally-focused riverine and littoral topics. Combining the human-centric training of Robin Sage with the technological, engineering, and seamanship skills from NAVSCIATTS would be a win-win for U.S. and partner forces to have the technical skill to navigate the maritime environment as well as the human skill to navigate seafaring populations, understand their specialized needs, and design operations that seize the initiative in maritime campaigning.
A combined Robin Sage-NAVSCIATTS (RS-N for convenience) program would allow for integrating social movement approaches to build resilience against subversion and coercion, bolster maritime internal defense, and disrupt outside challenges by, with, and through the population, while also addressing unique maritime considerations and core competencies. The maritime space is ripe for this sort of analysis. As Doowan Lee observed, understanding broad socioeconomic processes, political opportunities, organizational strength, and strategic framing is a prerequisite for taking action and maintaining popular support. Ensuring SOF maritime-focused personnel have a baseline understanding of these dynamics would be invaluable to shape conditions in the contact layer where day-to-day campaigning is likely to have greatest impact, and there are sustained and repeated occurrences of maritime coercion of local populations.
Unlike Robin Sage’s focus on organizing guerrilla forces to expel an invading force, an RS-N course should prioritize building rapport with the resistance auxiliary. This distinction accounts for the goal of campaigning in the human element of the maritime domain: not to impose one’s will on an occupying force, but instead maintain presence and respond to the needs of vulnerable seafaring groups. In doctrinal unconventional warfare parlance, the auxiliary provides logistics, procurement, communications, early warning, distribution, and safe house capabilities. Applied to the maritime domain, these are the mariners and port officials best positioned to engage local populations and sustain day-to-day campaigning. These personnel could consist of either uniformed (military or non-military) or volunteer seafaring personnel and give legitimacy to the activities of a host nation and partner maritime groups. Jumping straight to the ‘maritime guerrillas’ and gray-zone maritime tactics without sufficiently building deep relationships with the auxiliaries would leave a partner-centric maritime campaign floundering shortly after it started, having failed to establish legitimacy among the local population.
In this vein, a former Navy civil affairs force called the Maritime Civil Affairs and Security Training Command (MCASTCOM)—which was disbanded almost a decade ago—is also worth revisiting. As populations move towards the littorals, the expertise of civil affairs practitioners is essential in understanding potential vulnerabilities, relevant area studies, and how both may impact maritime operations. Unfortunately, civil affairs expertise across the Joint Force resides within the Army’s SOF formations, and demand for civil affairs expertise has outpaced supply for more than a decade. To be sure, the Maritime Civil Affairs Teams (MCATs) who performed these exact functions would be a critical linkage between the sea services and relevant populations if they were still in operation today. These small teams proved effective in improving self-reporting of suspicious activity and could epitomize an “ounce of prevention, pound of cure” approach to more cost-effective maritime operations to support partners whose water and sovereignty face routine malign incursions.
Human Benefits in the Maritime Domain
Several benefits emerge from a human-centric approach to maritime issues, regardless of who conducts the campaign or how they are trained. First, this focus articulates a “more positive” economic and political approach of partner engagement that builds trust and credibility by tackling shared objectives. Direct engagement to support the motivations of local populations and address their grievances is more likely to beget long-term political influence and cooperation on more sensitive topics over time.
Second, addressing the human drivers of maritime challenges is more likely to solve the underlying causes of instability or aggression on the water. Take the Cod Wars, for example. Iceland’s highly motivated population was determined to protect access to its fishing waters, and the Icelandic Coast Guard’s innovative use of non-lethal tools helped deny access to foreign trawlers that were depleting Iceland’s fisheries. Taken together, these elements of Iceland’s approach ultimately allowed Iceland to prevail over the UK’s Royal Navy and its inability to adjust to the terms of their competition. Human behaviors have a greater role in conflicts’ outcomes than technology alone. Assuredly, that logic also extends beyond land-based struggles.
Third, going straight to the human element is cost-effective. Claude Berube’s analysis of the maritime non-state actor the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society illuminates this fact: even when their budgets ballooned following release of Whale Wars, Sea Shepherd had an impact on fisheries enforcement and countering Illegal, Unregulated, and Unreported (IUU) fishing that exceeds a $12 million annual budget. The gross tonnage of its fleet and ability to provide just a few patrol vessels provides significant return on investment for modest resources. While presence is indeed important for maritime security, Sea Shepherd’s effectiveness shows that presence is not the preordained solution to maritime challenges on its own. Instead, direct engagement against unwanted human behaviors on the seas distinguishes its success and is instructive for future campaigns in the maritime domain.
Fourth, SOF maritime activities can inject irregular-focused aspects of deterrence—whether “integrated” or otherwise—to complement and buttress other deterrence logics. Human-based maritime activities enhance deterrence by denial and resilience to prevent adversary access to, and leverage over, vulnerable populations. Similarly, strategic sabotage can also deter or dissuade by holding at risk an adversary’s critical maritime infrastructure, energy delivery, and naval assets.
Finally, working with local populations is an important prerequisite to developing non-standard logistics or auxiliary support in conflict. Such “heroic acts of great men” were made possible in World War II by the Shetland Bus, a loosely affiliated network of Norwegian fishing vessels who clandestinely transported saboteurs and equipment from the United Kingdom into Nazi-occupied Norway. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) recognized this requirement and created a specific Maritime Unit to infiltrate agents and supply resistance groups by sea, conduct maritime sabotage, and develop specialized maritime surface and subsurface equipment.
As David Howarth wrote in his account of the Shetland Bus, escape or resistance was preferred to capture. But these determined Norwegian sailors, supported by a total of five British commissioned and non-commissioned officers, provided uniquely flexible ways of conducting close reconnaissance, sustainment, and support to the resistance. As Christopher Booth noted, a modern Shetland Bus could easily replicate its predecessor’s low-signature approach, but preparations would likely need to take place well before time of need—and might be more successful after building trust well ahead of time.
We’re Not in Pineland Anymore
A full refocus on the maritime domain must integrate the unavoidable human element of conflict and lessons learned over the last 20 years of counterterrorism operations. Today’s maritime challenges reflect the growing dependence of human populations on the seas for everyday life. As such, campaigning approaches must keep human motivations in mind throughout the course of maritime operational design. Doing so may require converging elements of existing SOF training pipelines or blending training exercises for greater joint effect. Nevertheless, these irregular (or non-traditional) approaches to maritime campaigning could be invaluable for preventing conflict while maintaining strategic positions of advantage in daily competition, preparing flexible options for escalation management, and setting conditions to prevail if a naval conflict emerges.
Kevin Bilms is a career civil servant, a non-resident fellow of the Joint Special Operations University (JSOU), and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. This article adopts from the author’s research focus on Maritime Foreign Internal Defense at JSOU and reflects the author’s views alone. These views expressed do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, U.S. Special Operations Command, or the Department of Defense.
Main image: Divers assigned to Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit 2 and the Armada de Chile exchange salvage diving tactics. MDSU-2 is participating in Navy Diver Southern Partnership Station, a multinational partnership engagement designed to increase interoperability and partner nation capability through diving operations. (Gregory Juday/U.S. Navy)
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: [email protected]
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