Quotes of the Day:

"Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies." 

– Robert F. Kennedy

“To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often.” 

– Winston Churchill

“The most difficult thing is the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life and the procedure. The process is its own reward.”

– Amelia Earhart

1. The Pager Attack: Tactical Brilliance or Strategic Dead End?

2. Ex-CIA chief: Pager blasts in Lebanon are ‘terrorism’

3. Dershowitz: Israel’s pager attack was legal under the laws of war

4. Opinion We face unprecedented peril. The Pentagon and Congress must change their ways. By Robert M. Gates

5. New report details stunning Secret Service leadership failures around first Trump assassination attempt

6. Inside the strain challenging the US Secret Service

7. China’s Soft Sell of Autocracy Is Working

8. US targets China’s rare earths dominance with minerals-security finance network

9. Chinese Investment in Ports, Communication Seeks to Project Global Power, Says Panel

10. China’s ‘wolf warrior diplomacy’ targets US partners in the South China Sea

11. FBI raids defense contractor Carahsoft

12. Obama Defense Secretary Issues 'Urgent' Nuclear Warning to Trump And Harris

13. 'Significant Consequences': Army Secretary Warns Congress over Short-Term Funding

14. Debate over Ukraine weapons restrictions divides allies, administration

15. Let's Talk About the U.S. Marines Reopening WW2 Airfields To Prepare For Future Scenarios

16. Russians Do Break: Historical and Cultural Context for a Prospective Ukrainian Victory

17. In Brief: What to Expect out of the United Nations General Assembly

18. The ‘Library Rats’ Who Helped Win World War II

19. 2024 Deepfakes and Election Disinformation Report: Key Findings & Mitigation Strategies

20. Hezbollah says Israel is dropping leaflets in Lebanon with ‘dangerous barcodes’

21. Hearing Wrap Up: House Oversight Committee Warns of CCP’s Infiltration of U.S. Industries and Federal Agencies

22. Former destroyer captain pitches faster, cheaper solution for defending Guam

1. The Pager Attack: Tactical Brilliance or Strategic Dead End?

So today at a conference on the Council of US Korean Security Studies and the 38th INtentional Security conference in Seoul we discussed providing cell phones and other electronic and communications devices to north Korea. We discussed the likelihood that the north Korean Propaganda and Agitation Department would use the counter Hezbollah pager operation as a way to scare the Korean people in the north. They would probably go so far as to stage explosions of devices and deliberately harm Koreans in the north to back up their propaganda and make it seem like South Korea or the ROK/US alliance is conducting operations to harm the Korean people in the north. We all agreed that this should not deter us from working to get information into north Korea. We need to recognize the potential north Korean strategy, understand it, EXPOSE it, and then attack it with a superior political warfare and information strategy.

The Pager Attack: Tactical Brilliance or Strategic Dead End?

Israel’s Strategic Dilemma with Hezbollah

https://www.strategycentral.io/post/the-pager-attack-tactical-brilliance-or-strategic-dead-end?postId=

By Practitioners, For Practitioners

By Monte Erfourth, September 25, 2024

 Introduction

The conflict between Hezbollah and Israel has intensified dramatically over the past year, with Hezbollah persistently launching attacks from Lebanon into northern Israel. In response, Israel has employed various strategies, culminating in a high-profile "pager attack" this month. This brilliantly conceived and executed action involved detonating booby-trapped communication devices used by Hezbollah operatives, marking a significant shift in Israel's approach to Hezbollah. Whether this tactical success fits into a broader, long-term strategy or merely serves as a short-term measure to degrade Hezbollah’s operational capability temporarily. Given Hezbollah's expansive stockpile of missiles and rockets, getting this strategic moment right is of great importance to this close American ally.

Background of the Conflict

Since October 7, 2023, Hezbollah has launched over 8,000 rockets, missiles, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into Israeli territory, targeting both civilians and military bases in the north. This relentless bombardment has forced Israel to evacuate close to 70,000 people from border towns, creating a de facto buffer zone within Israel’s territory. The evacuation has not only had severe social and political consequences but has also represented a significant victory for Hezbollah in terms of psychological and military positioning. The group has managed to inflict sustained damage without triggering a full-scale Israeli invasion.

Israel, for its part, has shown considerable restraint in its military responses, opting to avoid an all-out war with Hezbollah, even as frustration grew among its citizens. The Israeli government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, prioritized focusing its military efforts on Hamas in Gaza, where the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) has been engaged in a prolonged campaign to degrade Hamas’s military capabilities and recover hostages. Israel’s strategy, therefore, has been to manage the Hezbollah threat in a more contained manner to avoid opening a second front while simultaneously dealing with Hamas in Gaza.

The Pager Attack: Tactical Success or Strategic Move?

The turning point in Israel’s approach came last week: the so-called "pager attack," followed by the “Walkie-Talkie attack” and a targeted missile attack. The pager and walkie-talkie attacks, executed through booby-trapped communication devices, were precision strikes aimed at Hezbollah’s operatives and infrastructure. According to reports, the operation not only killed several hundred Hezbollah fighters but also severely disrupted the group’s command-and-control systems. The explosion injured several mid-level and senior Hezbollah leaders, including special forces commander Ibrahim Aqil.

The Israeli’s severally disrupted an enemy, which meant the operation was highly successful in tactical terms. It demonstrated Israel’s intelligence capabilities and its ability to penetrate Hezbollah’s operational networks. By disabling Hezbollah’s communication systems, Israel temporarily crippled the group’s ability to coordinate attacks, thereby improving the security situation in northern Israel, at least in the short term.

However, despite the success of these brilliant communication attacks, analysts and critics have questioned whether they fit into a broader Israeli strategy. As “The Jerusalem Post” notes, while the attack dealt a significant blow to Hezbollah, it may not be enough to prevent future escalations. Hezbollah still possesses a formidable arsenal of around 150,000 rockets, and while its communication networks may have been temporarily compromised, it remains a powerful and well-resourced organization. This raises concerns that Israel’s tactical success could be undermined if Hezbollah eventually recovers and resumes its attacks. It would appear this week's stepped-up missile, aerial bombardment, and drone attacks are attempting to exploit the communications disruption to target senior leaders and indirect fire capabilities in Southern Lebanon. The presumed objective: Disrupt Hezbollah operations and push their weapons threat further north to create a larger buffer zone for northern Israel.

Several key factors have shaped Israel’s approach to Hezbollah. First, the Netanyahu government has been under significant pressure to maintain international support, particularly from the United States. President Joe Biden’s administration has urged Israel to avoid a full-scale assault on Lebanon to prevent a regional war, which has limited Israel’s military options. Second, Israel’s military planners have been wary of Hezbollah’s missile capabilities. While there is little doubt that Israel would prevail in a future war with Hezbollah, the cost in terms of civilian casualties and damage to infrastructure could be catastrophic.

This cautious approach has led to a strategy of containment, where Israel aims to manage Hezbollah’s aggression rather than engage in a full-blown conflict. As “Bloomberg” columnist Marc Champion observes, Israel’s goal appears to be to degrade Hezbollah’s capabilities to the point where the group can no longer launch effective attacks. This includes targeted strikes on Hezbollah’s rocket launchers, command-and-control systems, and personnel.

However, the containment strategy is fraught with challenges. As Champion notes, Hezbollah is not Hamas. While Hamas is a relatively isolated group with limited resources, Hezbollah is deeply embedded in Lebanon’s political and military landscape. The group enjoys strong backing from Iran, with open supply routes and a strategic commitment from Tehran to support its operations. This makes Hezbollah a much more resilient adversary, capable of recovering from tactical setbacks like the pager attack, and even attacks on its rocket and missile systems.

Moreover, the pressure to escalate could grow as Israel seeks to make its northern border safe again. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has outlined Israel’s long-term goal of enabling the return of tens of thousands of Israelis who were displaced from their homes near the Lebanon border. Achieving this goal will require either pushing Hezbollah back or securing a diplomatic deal that guarantees Israel’s security. Without a comprehensive strategy to end the conflict, Israel risks being drawn into a prolonged, destabilizing occupation of southern Lebanon, similar to its experience in Gaza.

Risks of the Current Strategy

While Israel’s current containment strategy has yielded some tactical successes, it is not without risks. The most immediate risk is that Hezbollah could retaliate for the pager attack, leading to a broader escalation. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has already pledged to continue attacking Israel as long as there is no cease-fire in Gaza. This raises the specter of a multi-front war, with Israel simultaneously fighting Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Another risk is the potential for civilian casualties and damage to Lebanon’s infrastructure, which could further isolate Israel diplomatically. As “Newsweek” notes, Hezbollah now faces a choice: either continue its aggression and risk the destruction of Lebanon or stand down and agree to a de-escalation deal. If Hezbollah chooses the former, the conflict could spiral into a full-scale war, with devastating consequences for both Israel and Lebanon.

Finally, there is the question of Israel’s long-term exit strategy. As “The Jerusalem Post” highlights, Israel’s current government has been criticized for its lack of strategic foresight. While the pager attack was a tactical success, it is not clear whether the Netanyahu government has a plan for ending the conflict on favorable terms. Without a clear endgame, Israel risks being caught in a cycle of escalation and retaliation with no clear path to peace.

Conclusion: A Need for a Broader Strategy

Israel’s pager attack on Hezbollah marked a significant escalation in the ongoing conflict between the two sides. While the operation was a tactical success, it has raised questions about Israel’s broader strategy for dealing with Hezbollah. The Netanyahu government’s approach of containment has so far avoided a full-scale war, but it has also left Israel vulnerable to more aggressive future attacks. Moreover, without a clear exit strategy, Israel risks being drawn into a prolonged conflict with no end in sight.

For Israel to achieve lasting security, it must develop a comprehensive strategy beyond tactical victories. This strategy must address not only the immediate threat from Hezbollah but also the broader geopolitical context, including Iran’s role in the region. Indeed, this is not a new problem. Peace is something to hope for, but only the foolish would dare stake Israel's existence on a long-shot deal for peace with organizations that swear allegiance to its destruction. The strategy of total destruction of Iran's proxies may defang it enough to force capitulation, but it seems a hefty price. If war comes, it is unlikely to be limited and highly likely to be total war. If this is the Israeli strategy, it is taking a much longer view than it is given credit for. It is also gambling an entire generations life and financial future on a risky bet that is hardly likely to alter the status quo.

End Notes

1. Champion, Marc. "Israel’s Plans for Hezbollah Are Becoming Clearer." Bloomberg Opinion, September 20, 2024. 

2. Conricus, Jonathan. "It's Last Call for Hezbollah to Opt Out of War. Israel Won't Ask Again." Newsweek, September 22, 2024. 

3. Katz, Yaakov. "Israel’s Government Led by Netanyahu Lacks Strategy in HezbollahAttack." The Jerusalem Post, September 20, 2024. 

2. Ex-CIA chief: Pager blasts in Lebanon are ‘terrorism’

I will leave the legal arguments to the lawyers. I wonder how the former Secretary thinks this will enhance US national security and relations with Israel.  

Ex-CIA chief: Pager blasts in Lebanon are ‘terrorism’

by Ashleigh Fields - 09/23/24 9:38 AM ET

https://thehill.com/policy/international/4893900-leon-panetta-lebanon-explosions-terrorism/?utm

Former CIA director Leon Panetta labeled last week’s deadly pager explosions in Lebanon a form of “terrorism.”

“I don’t think there’s any question that it’s a form of terrorism,” Panetta said on “CBS News Sunday morning.”

“This is going right into the supply chain,” he added. “And when you have terror going into the supply chain, it makes people ask the question: ‘What the hell is next?’”

Last week, pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah exploded in Lebanon, killing dozens of people and injuring thousands. Leaders of the Lebanese militant group, which is backed by Iran, blamed the explosions on Israel’s Mossad intelligence organization.

“This is a tactic that has repercussions. And we really don’t know what those repercussions are going to be,” Panetta told anchor Lee Cohan in remarks highlighted by Mediaite. “The forces of war are largely in control right now.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) condemned Israel over the pager explosions, saying the incident “unequivocally violates international humanitarian law and undermines U.S. efforts to prevent a wider conflict.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last week that the U.S. was not involved with the pager explosions, nor informed of them in advance.

“We’ve been very clear and we remain very clear about the importance of all parties avoiding any steps that could further escalate the conflict that we’re trying to resolve in Gaza,” he said at the time.

Meanwhile, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said last week that the nation’s forces were entering a “new phase” in the 11-month fight against Hezbollah.

Israel late last week also carried out targeted strikes in Beirut that killed top Hezbollah commanders.

Panetta added during the CBS News interview that the Middle East is at risk of developing into the “battlefield of the future,” and warrants international attention now.

“I think it’s going to be very important for the nations of the world to have a serious discussion about whether or not this is an area that everybody has to focus on, because if they don’t try to deal with it now, mark my words, it is the battlefield of the future.”

Updated at 9:54 a.m. EDT

3. Dershowitz: Israel’s pager attack was legal under the laws of war

Here is one legal argument.

Dershowitz: Israel’s pager attack was legal under the laws of war

https://dersh.substack.com/p/dershowitz-israels-pager-attack-was?utm

Alan Dershowitz

Sep 25, 2024

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The international “community” and its academic justifiers have claimed that Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah communications devices are unlawful. They are dead wrong.

The law of war is based on two fundamental principles: first, the distinction between the targeting of combatants and civilians; second, the requirement of proportionality in attacking targets that include both.

Under these principles, Israel’s actions were completely justified.

The law is clear that if a person becomes a combatant, he is a legitimate military target. Becoming a combatant in this case includes joining or assisting Hezbollah, harboring its terrorists or allowing one’s home or building to be used by Israel’s enemies.

The law is also clear that once someone becomes a combatant, he or she can be targeted as long as they retain that status, unless they surrender or openly declare themselves no longer affiliated with the combatant organization. This is especially so with regard to a terrorist group like Hezbollah that comprises both full-time soldiers and part-time terrorists, who may hold other jobs when not participating in military activities all the time.

If a person qualifies as a combatant, he or she may be targeted and killed while asleep, at work or at play. Combatants need not be actively involved in combat at the moment they are killed. Nor do they need to be actively committing terrorism when targeted. It is enough that they maintain the status of combatant.

The individuals who were given beepers, radios and other communication devices by Hezbollah were clearly combatants. Their deaths and injuries were lawful, even if they were shopping or walking when blown up.

But a small number of noncombatants — including children — were also killed or injured. That is where the requirement of proportionality comes in. Israel had to know that it was impossible to blow up so many devices without causing some collateral damage to innocent civilians. That is the case with regard to virtually every military action, especially those conducted in crowded urban areas such as Beirut.

The law of warfare does not prohibit such actions outright, nor should it. But it imposes restrictions based on proportionality. That rule requires that those planning a military or intelligence operation that will inevitably kill or injure some noncombatants must make reasonable efforts, consistent with military goals, to minimize civilian casualties.

They must satisfy the criteria of proportionality, which means that the anticipated civilian casualties must be proportional to the military value of the combatant targets. There is no magic formula for achieving this result. The military action must simply be reasonable under the circumstances.

In other wars, the ratios have been in the range of three or four noncombatant deaths for every combatant death. In Gaza, it has been closer to two noncombatants to one combatant. In the recent beeper and radio attacks, the number of civilian deaths and injuries were considerably lower than those of combatants.

Yet the international community and academics have criticized Israel for violating the laws of war. They are dangerously wrong, and Israel should not be deterred from similar actions based on the biases of those who misuse the law as a weapon against the embattled nation-state of the Jewish people.

4. Opinion We face unprecedented peril. The Pentagon and Congress must change their ways. By Robert M. Gates

Opinion  We face unprecedented peril. The Pentagon and Congress must change their ways.

America cannot make the weapons it needs in the time it needs them. That must change.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/09/24/robert-gates-peril-china-russia-pentagon-congress-defense/?utm_campaign=

In this photo taken from video released by Russian Defense Ministry on Sept. 10, Russian and Chinese warships sail in the Peter the Great Gulf during strategic exercises. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP) (AP)

By Robert M. Gates

September 24, 2024 at 4:44 p.m. EDT

Robert Gates served as defense secretary from 2006 to 2011 for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Despite the boasts of both presidential candidates as well as congressional Republicans and Democrats that they will ensure American military superiority, the Defense Department begins the 14th fiscal year of the past 15 without an appropriated budget. The dire consequences of yet another year beginning with a continuing resolution funding the Pentagon were communicated to Congress by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin this month. This is just the most recent demonstration of the yawning gap between the political rhetoric in Washington about sustaining American military strength and the stark realities on the ground.

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As secretary of defense for both Republican and Democratic presidents, I strongly supported allocating more resources for nonmilitary instruments of power — diplomacy, strategic communications, development assistance, geoeconomic tools and more. But it is a fact of life that these instruments are effective only against the backdrop of American military power so compelling that adversaries are deterred from taking up arms against us or our allies.

The current approach to ensuring such superiority in Congress, the White House and the Defense Department cannot meet the international challenges — and peril — facing America and our allies. The bipartisan Commission on the National Defense Strategy said in its report issued in July: “The threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945 and include the potential for near-term major war. … The nation ... is not prepared today.” After a 30-year holiday from history, we face an aggressive China and Russia (abetted by North Korea and Iran) and the very real prospect of war between nuclear-armed great powers.

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Yet, our Army is shrinking, our Navy is decommissioning warships faster than new ones can be built, our Air Force has stagnated in size, and only a fraction of the force is available for combat on any given day. The defense-industrial base, after decades of neglect, cannot produce major weapons systems in the numbers we need in a timely way nor — as we have seen in Ukraine — can it produce the vast quantity of munitions required for a great-power conflict. Despite these realities, it is largely business as usual in Washington. Dramatic change is needed to convert rhetoric into ensuring and sustaining long-term military superiority.

There are three institutions responsible for our predicament. First, the White House. Whoever is elected president in November must take the lead in educating the American people about the global dangers we face. The new president must then put forward budgets for the military necessary to deal with those dangers. Barely staying even with inflation or worse is wholly inadequate. Significant additional resources for defense are necessary and urgent. The new president must propose and fight for those resources.

The second institution is the Defense Department itself. While there have been a number of significant initiatives and innovations in recent years (e.g., Space Force, the Defense Innovation Unit, the Replicator drone program and others), as the commission observed, “these examples remain the exception rather than the rule.”

Above all, the department must accelerate and deepen changes to its business practices. It must demonstrate it can wisely and efficiently spend the huge amount of money it already receives. In 2009, the department cut or capped three dozen major programs that were excess to need, had outdated or unrealistic technologies, failed development programs, or faced staggering cost overruns and years of delays. These programs would have cost taxpayers some $330 billion if built to completion. In 2010, we identified $180 billion in cuts of overhead expenses over a period of years. The Pentagon must demonstrate such internal discipline if it is to seek and receive significantly more resources to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow.

At the same time, the department and military services must freshly evaluate legacy systems and strategies for a kind of war we have never fought before — and a combination of adversaries more powerful technologically, industrially and economically than we have ever faced. The department and the services have all embarked on this path with many new initiatives, but urgency and decisive new thinking and strategies are needed.

Congress is the third problem institution. Over the past dozen or so years, the Defense Department has had to deal with sequestration (the Budget Control Act of 2011), year after year of continuing resolutions, dollar-for-dollar linkage of defense and domestic spending, legislative turf fights, and parochial protection of outdated programs — all contributing to the multiple challenges our military now faces. Congressional leaders and committee members in both chambers should work together to end continuing resolutions for defense budgets, reform congressional procedures, enable much expanded multiyear funding of programs (necessary to revive our defense industries), expand reprogramming authorities to permit fast innovation and production, and reduce micromanagement in the name of oversight. Congress is a major obstacle to agility, innovation and modernization.

Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have committed to sustaining American military superiority. The question is whether they will commit, if elected, to fight for the institutional and budgetary changes needed at the White House, in Congress and at the Defense Department necessary to maintain that superiority in the face of unprecedented peril.

5. New report details stunning Secret Service leadership failures around first Trump assassination attempt

Troubling to say the least.

New report details stunning Secret Service leadership failures around first Trump assassination attempt | CNN Politics

CNN · by Holmes Lybrand, Annie Grayer, Zachary Cohen · September 25, 2024

Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump is helped off the stage by US Secret Service agents at a campaign event in Butler, Pa., on Saturday, July 13, 2024.

Gene J. Puskar/AP/File

CNN —

Secret Service agents failed to take charge of decision-making for security at the Butler, Pennsylvania, rally where former President Donald Trump was shot in July, a bipartisan Senate committee revealed in a new report Wednesday, leading to key lapses in preparation and communication that day.

The report, citing interviews with top Secret Service officials and local law enforcement who oversaw the security for the rally, said the failures were “foreseeable, preventable” and found that many of the problems identified by the committee “remain unaddressed” by the Secret Service.

Martin County Sheriff’s Office released body cam video of the apprehension of Ryan Wesley Routh on Sunday on an interstate in Florida.

From Martin County Sheriff's Office/Facebook

Related article Man charged with attempted assassination of Trump at Florida golf course as case is assigned to Judge Aileen Cannon

Some of the problems highlighted include the Secret Service failing to set up visual barriers around the rally that may have blocked shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks’ view of Trump, the lack of a plan on how to secure the building the shooter took aim from and the general chaos of communication around the shooter’s movement leading up to the attempt on the former president’s life.

Key resource requests were also denied, and some were not even made, the report says.

Secret Service advance agents did not request a surveillance team, which could have helped patrol the rally for approximately 15,000 attendees. First lady Jill Biden, meanwhile, had one assigned to her event roughly an hour away for approximately 410 individuals.

“Overall, the lack of an effective chain of command, which came across clearly when we conducted interviews,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat who is leading the subcommittee’s investigation, told reporters Tuesday. “It was almost like an Abbott and Costello farce, with ‘who’s on first?’ finger pointing by all of the different actors.”

Nobody was in charge and there was no decision-making process

In interviews with the committee, the report says the Secret Service team in charge of planning for the Butler “could not answer questions about who – specifically – was responsible” for deciding the inner and outer perimeter of the rally, and who excluded the group of buildings Crooks ultimately climbed up from the Secret Service’s perimeter.

Those involved in security planning could also not agree on who – whether agents from the Pittsburgh field office, the office of protective operations or Trump’s own Secret Service detail – was ultimately responsible for decision-making or how the process even worked.

Secret Service, federal, state and local law enforcement only had two “official” meetings ahead of the July 13 rally and described the interactions prior to the event as “informal,” the report states.

The decisions that fell through the cracks included whether to position rental trucks around the rally to obstruct any line of sight to Trump.

Other issues included how responsibilities that day were not clearly defined or understood in how communication would work that day, both between local law enforcement and the agency as well as in the agency itself.

According to the report, agents interviewed “did not agree about who was responsible for ensuring” the agency’s communication center that day “was functioning as intended.”

Agents also disagreed in interviews over who was responsible for the setup of the operations room, how it was staffed and how the agency would communicate with local officers on the ground.

‘No specific’ agency in charge of securing building shooter fired from

The lack of clarity and subsequent finger-pointing also extended to who was responsible for securing the building Crooks ultimately fired from.

Excerpts of testimony from Secret Service agents and Butler officials outline how there was no clear entity agency to oversee securing the building, which became a huge issue when the rally turned into an emergency.

While Secret Service agents told the committee they believed Butler emergency officials were covering the building, those local officials told lawmakers they had informed the USSS they did not have the ability to do so.

A police officer with the Butler County Emergency Services Unit told lawmakers that two days before Trump’s rally, he told the Secret Service site agent that his team “did not have the manpower to lock down this area.”

That police officer said the site agent “copied” and “they would take care of it.”

But the Secret Service site agent told a different story, saying they thought the Butler County Emergency Services Unit “would have coverage” of the building.

Video shows moment police saw would-be Trump assassin just before shooting began

03:05 - Source: CNN

Because of this breakdown in communication without a clear leader in charge, the Secret Service did not go into the building as part of their advance planning or sweep the building prior to the start of the rally.

The lead advance agent for the Secret Service could not even answer the committee when asked who secured the building.

“There’s no specific. There were several different plans in place, different pieces of the puzzle from the advance that all had their own stake in making sure that that building was not accessible,” the agent said.

Iran threat wasn’t conveyed

Credible intelligence about an Iranian assassination plot targeting Trump prompted US Secret Service officials to take the unprecedented step of deploying a counter sniper unit to help secure the Butler rally, a decision that “potentially saved lives” but ultimately failed to stop the shooter before he managed to fire multiple rounds at Trump, the report says.

Information about that threat was not relayed to senior officials in the Pittsburgh field office or other Secret Service personnel on the ground who subsequently told the committee it was something they “absolutely” should have been made aware of prior to the event so they could request additional resources that may have helped prevent the shooting from taking place.

While the FBI has said there is no evidence linking Iran to the shooter at Trump’s July 13 rally, current and former Secret Service officials have told CNN that knowledge of the credible threat prior to the assassination attempt, on its own, should have automatically led to increased security around the former president – particularly for large, outdoor events like the one in Butler.

But the apparent breakdown in intelligence sharing prior to the Butler rally raises new questions about why certain security assets were not ultimately provided by the Secret Service despite the fact that certain agents, including members of Trump’s protective detail, were aware of a credible threat.

The Secret Service site agent for the Butler rally was among those who only learned about the Iranian threat after the fact, according to an excerpt of their interview contained in the Senate report.

“As a Site Agent or Lead [Advance] Agent assigned, you should have any intelligence or any information pertaining to an active threat to a particular protectee, absolutely, in case that we need to take, you know, take additional measures, or maybe plan for additional assets or additional resources for that particular matter… So it shocked me,” they said.

Handwritten notes taken after the assassination attempt by another Secret Service agent involved in the planning echoed that view and questioned the decision-making by the few who were aware of the threat and believed sending a counter sniper unit, rather than the “entire package” of security assets available, was sufficient.

“Why am I hearing that there were threats to the site on TV… how can the SAIC of our [field office] not know about any threats,” one Secret Service agent wrote after the assassination attempt, according to handwritten notes obtained by the Senate panel.

“Why did they feel that only one part of [Special Operations Divisions] was sufficient to cover it instead of the entire package,” the agent added, referring to the counter sniper unit.

That package includes additional resources that were not provided for Trump’s July 13 rally, including counter surveillance teams, which multiple witnesses told the committee could have helped stop the shooter before he was able to fire multiple rounds at the former president.

The lead USSS advance agent told the committee she was not aware of any discussions to request counter surveillance teams for Trump, stating, “It’s not a typical asset for an advance for a former president that I had worked at that time.”

Meanwhile, the first lady regularly receives counter surveillance teams, including at her event on July 13.

Other security requests denied

Trump’s Secret Service security detail requested Counter Assault Team liaisons ahead of the July 13 rally but were denied. The liaison would provide specialized tactical advice to other Secret Service agents and law enforcement on the ground.

The lead advance agent also told the committee she requested 13 magnetometers from Secret Service, but only received 10.

Even though protective glass was not requested for the rally, or used in general for Trump events, the Secret Service site agent told the committee it “definitely would be beneficial to have protective glass.”

Radio issues and a failure to warn

The breakdown in communication and failure to establish a clear chain of command in the lead up to and during the rally made identifying the shooter and intervening exceedingly difficult.

Perhaps most telling, according to the report, was the sniper team that ultimately shot and killed Crooks failed to pick up local radio alerts about a potential shooter and watched local police approach him with their pistols drawn without initially raising any alarms.

Instead of hearing local radio chatter of warnings that a man was on the roof of nearby buildings, the Secret Service sniper team that ultimately shot and killed Crooks was only made aware that local officers were looking at something at their “three o’clock” two minutes before Crooks opened fire.

Acting Director of the US Secret Service Ronald Rowe and and Deputy Director of the FBI Paul Abbate appear before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on July 30.

Umit Bektas/Reuters

Related article Takeaways from the Senate hearing on the Trump assassination attempt and Secret Service failure

The sniper team leader told the committee that when they saw police running with guns drawn and citizens fleeing the area around the cluster of buildings, they knew something serious was happening.

“When we looked, just plain eyes, no optics or anything, you could see police running towards the building with their hands on their pistols,” the team leader told the committee. “I think one actually had a pistol facing towards the ground, out of a holster. That’s a pretty big deal for us, so immediately we turned and faced our guns towards the threat area. We didn’t know what was happening, but it seemed pretty serious, especially with the locals’ response.”

According to the report, several Secret Service agents had issues with their radios that day and told the committee that those issues were common. One of the members of the counter sniper team said he did not have enough time to pick up a local radio offered that day because he was busy fixing the issues with his own agency-issued radio.

Three minutes before Crooks fired at Trump, warnings went out over local radios that a man, Crooks, was on the roof.

Calls for change

In announcing the report, Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, told reporters that significant changes needed to be made in Secret Service’s leadership, adding that more money wouldn’t fix “human errors.”

“Whoever was in charge of security on the day of Butler, whoever’s in charge of security during the recent assassination tab, those people can’t be in charge,” Paul said. “There’s so many human errors. No amount of money that you give to Secret Service is going to alleviate the human errors, if you leave the same humans in charge who made these terrible, dramatic mistakes with regard to security.”

Blumenthal echoed calls for change in the top brass at the agency, which has already seen the resignation of Kimberly Cheatle, the Secret Service’s director at the time of the July rally, following bipartisan blowback for failing to provide any substantive answers about what happened during a hearing on Capitol Hill.

“There needs to be a house cleaning in procedure, practices and personnel,” he said Tuesday.

“I’m really hoping there’ll be fundamental, far-reaching reform in the way that the Secret Service conducts protective activities, devoting more resources, but most important, more competence in management of the allocation of those resources,” Blumenthal added. “The American people are going to be appalled and astonished by what’s in this report, the accumulation of gross incompetence that puts the president in danger and could result in continuing insecurity.”

CNN · by Holmes Lybrand, Annie Grayer, Zachary Cohen · September 25, 2024

6. Inside the strain challenging the US Secret Service

I hate to sound like I am demeaning the great men and women of the Secret Service but the saying goes, "you get what you pay for." This is unacceptable. Of course Secret Service members do not sign up to take a bullet for their protectee based on compensation, but we should consider that their willingness to do so does deserve proper compensation. And based on this issue I have even greater respect for those Secret Service personnel who continue to do their job in spite of this kind of treatment.

Inside the strain challenging the US Secret Service | CNN Politics

CNN · by Betsy Klein, Jamie Gangel · September 25, 2024

US Secret Service Acting Director Ronald Rowe speaks during a news conference in Washington, DC, on September 20, 2024.

Ben Curtis/Pool/AFP/Getty Images

CNN —

The second assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump in as many months has underscored the strain that’s been placed on the US Secret Service during both a busy campaign season and what its acting director refers to as an “unprecedented and hyper-dynamic threat environment.”

“Everyone is focused on the failures of that day,” one former agent said about the Butler, Pennsylvania, attempt. “And what I would submit is the failures of July 13, as well as most recently in Florida, (are) symptomatic of a deeper-rooted problem within the Secret Service,” said the former agent, who departed in March.

CNN spoke to nearly a dozen current and former agents who describe a workplace mired in inefficient, longstanding procedures and cultural dysfunction.

While the reputation of the US Secret Service is one of precision, vigilance and security, the reality is more complicated – a high-stress, high-intensity workplace beset by management and logistical issues.

That was the case for a group of senior US Secret Service agents assigned to travel to San Francisco to help secure the perimeter of the site of a recent summit for Asia-Pacific leaders and President Joe Biden.

One of those agents, who requested anonymity to speak freely, told CNN that the two-person team in charge of the summit location had a combined four years of field experience, translating on the ground to poor communication and a mishandling of resources. When the agents arrived, there was no pre-event briefing, there was no plan, there were no directions to where the agent was supposed to stand. And there was minimal communication until it was over.

“I was there all week, and I didn’t see one of the site agents come by until I essentially flagged her down and asked her why we were still on post when the last protectee had left hours ago,” the agent, who had been with USSS for nearly two decades, told CNN in an interview. The agent left the agency a few months later.

Another of the senior agents had been on the fence about retirement, but texted his colleagues that the San Francisco experience had prompted him to leave.

The San Francisco episode highlights how the agency is wracked with low morale, burnout, staffing and retention issues, all of which, sources inside and outside the organization told CNN, are exacerbated by poor management at the top and mid-levels.

The sheer volume of the agency’s responsibilities in the weeks since the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt has challenged the agency: enhanced security for Trump, bigger events for Vice President Kamala Harris, the addition of vice presidential nominees Sen. JD Vance and Gov. Tim Walz and their spouses, plus the United Nations General Assembly in New York this week. (The Secret Service is mandated to protect all foreign heads of state while they are on US soil). There have also been major events: the Democratic and Republican National Conventions and a presidential debate.

That’s on top of its regular responsibilities protecting 42 principals – the president and vice president and their families, presidential candidates and their families, and former presidents, among others – full time and part time.

USSS has requested additional funding from Congress aimed at bolstering its resources. Congress is expected to pass an additional $231 million for the agency through a short-term government funding bill this week.

“Following the events of July 13, the U.S. Secret Service enhanced our protective model for protectees. … To sustain this enhanced posture, we need additional resources, for increased travel expenses, overtime, technical security assets, special operations capabilities, and partner support expenses for protection enhancements,” Anthony Guglielmi, USSS chief of communications, told CNN in a statement.

“The men and women of the U.S. Secret Service do an incredibly hard job day in and day out and are operating in a dynamic, heightened threat environment to execute its no-fail mission. The agency will continue to have their backs, including by advocating for the resources needed so our workforce can do their jobs effectively,” Guglielmi said.

Staffing challenges

The agency has long struggled with staff retention and turnover, even as it is now seeking to recruit additional agents to alleviate the workload on its existing workforce.

Speaking to reporters last week, President Joe Biden made clear that the agency “needs more help.”

“The one thing I want to make clear is (the Secret Service) needs more help, and I think the Congress should respond to their needs if they, in fact, need more Service people,” Biden said, adding, “They’re deciding whether they need more personnel or not.”

Acting USSS Director Ronald Rowe indicated last week that his agency was on track to hire more than 400 special agents this year, noting Friday that applications to join USSS are “at an all-time high.”

USSS has approximately 8,100 employees, according to a USSS official, which includes roughly 3,800 special agents, 1,500 uniformed division officers, nearly 275 technical law enforcement personnel, and more than 2,400 administrative, professional and technical employees.

During her testimony to the House Oversight Committee in July, then-Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle told lawmakers that the agency was “striving toward a number of 9,500 employees, approximately, in order to be able to meet future and emerging needs.”

The White House is taking steps toward replacing Cheatle and is currently in the process of making calls and compiling a list of potential candidates, according to a source familiar with the outreach. It was not immediately clear whether a decision would be made before the November presidential election.

A USSS official said the agency is prioritizing retention, while also employing a “proactive and dynamic” recruitment strategy.

But attrition of its existing employees remains a challenge.

According to the Secret Service official, the agency’s attrition rate was 10.26% in fiscal year 2022, 8.78% in 2023, and 8.85% for fiscal year 2024 so far.

One former agent described a lack of significant effort toward retaining employees who are thinking about leaving.

“You’re just a breathing body to them,” he said, pointing to a lack of incentives aimed at keeping employees who have been with the agency between five and 15 years who are contemplating roles elsewhere with similar pay, less travel and more balance.

US Secret Service ranks 413 out of 459 government agencies and subcomponents on the list of Best Places to Work in the Federal Government, the result of an annual survey conducted by the nonpartisan, nonprofit Partnership for Public Service and the Boston Consulting Group.

“We have had a lot of people leave rather than retire,” one current agent, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about some of the problems their colleagues are facing, told CNN.

One key factor contributing to frustration in the USSS workforce is that a significant number of more senior agents are being forced to work overtime without pay, sources told CNN. Once an agent hits a “pay cap” on overtime beyond their base salary, they are still required to work – but without pay.

The USSS official said that the agency was unable to provide the exact number of employees affected by this policy. The caps are defined by US code. Congress passed a bill in 2016, reauthorized this year, that lifts the pay cap up to $221,145.

Rowe, the acting director, nodded to this issue in remarks last week: “The men and women of the Secret Service right now, we are redlining them, and they are rising to this moment, and they are meeting the challenges right now.”

The staffing squeeze is exacerbated by the current environment.

Jonathan Wackrow, a former USSS agent and CNN contributor, said the agency’s security posture for all of its protectees “should be enhanced across the board” after the assassination attempt on Trump earlier this month in Florida. “But the reality is, there’s nothing else to give,” he said.

USSS should also be “very concerned” about the possibility of “potential retaliation strikes” against its other protectees in the aftermath of the Trump assassination attempts, Wackrow added, noting that the threat of a copycat acts of violence is “really high.”

Stresses of the job

In recent years, agents have been subjected to high-stress roles for longer periods.

Agents have previously been required to serve in “phase two” roles – typically protection duties – for approximately three years, but now, that expectation is up to six years, the agent said.

“You’re always on alert, on high alert. Imagine that stress throughout your body,” the current agent said, pointing to the high levels of burnout their colleagues are experiencing.

“If you are complacent in any way, you miss things like what happened in Florida,” they added, referring to the second assassination attempt thwarted by an agent at Trump’s golf club.

The agency, a spokesperson said, offers short-term counseling by mental health professionals and a confidential peer support program.

The hyper-polarized political environment over the last decade has also placed strain on an agency that has long prized its neutrality and deep relationships with leaders of both parties it works to protect. There have been questions internally and raised by Biden allies to The Washington Post during the presidential transition regarding some USSS agents’ strong personal political loyalty to Trump, which, sources told CNN, has led to problems with assignments.

CNN has previously reported that the relationship between the Bidens and the agency was “combustible” in the administration’s early days, exacerbated by biting incidents with two of the first family’s pets and challenging schedules. A USSS spokesman disputed any reports of tension between Secret Service and the Bidens.

“We never used to be political in a partisan way,” said one veteran agent.

“The most important thing was for the protectee to trust us, but it wasn’t about politics,” they added, noting that the polarization has contributed to a loss of pride and professionalism internally.

Significant attrition has caused an experience gap, which, according to Wackrow, was among the root causes of the Butler assassination attempt. A bipartisan Senate panel is set to release an interim report Wednesday reflecting stunning lapses in preparation and communication at Trump’s Butler rally.

Multiple sources suggested morale is at an all-time low.

“Protection is an art as much as it is a science and if you don’t understand the art and nuance of building out a site and coming up with site logistics and planning, it can be detrimental from a security standpoint – but also from a morale and staffing standpoint,” said Wackrow.

CNN’s Whitney Wild contributed to this report.

CNN · by Betsy Klein, Jamie Gangel · September 25, 2024

7. China’s Soft Sell of Autocracy Is Working

We must understand the nature, objectives, and strategy of the Chinese leadership. This is my personal understanding that I have shared many times: China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions directly and/or indirectly through proxies, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, while displacing democratic institutions. It takes a long term approach, employing unrestricted warfare and its three warfare to set conditions and achieve objectives.

Excerpts:

There is much, however, that Washington can do on this score. The United States should direct funding toward State Department public diplomacy programs that evenhandedly portray the U.S. political system in all its glory and dysfunction—and, crucially, highlight the country’s dynamic economy. The CCP’s messaging strategy owes much of its success to highlighting pocketbook issues, especially the ability of the Chinese system to promote growth. China’s recent economic woes may very well undercut the ability to sell this message to a broad audience. The United States should take this as a lesson worth following and point to the considerable successes of the U.S. economy in producing innovation and prosperity.

The United States should also work to emphasize the advantages of democratic political systems, such as a free press. Washington should not lean exclusively on government organs for its messaging purposes; who wants to dine on state media when there are more exciting options on the menu? Instead, the United States could subsidize independent U.S. press operations abroad, including supporting U.S. newspapers’ foreign bureaus, cable news outlets, and Internet media operations. Foreign audiences are eager to consume American television, print, and Internet journalism that is free and honest—and that includes both critical and positive coverage of the United States.

In the long run, this is a competition the United States can win. Curiosity about the Chinese system does not mean that states actually can or will emulate it; China’s particular blend of a strong ruling party and elements of a capitalist market economy would be difficult to replicate elsewhere. Moreover, given China’s economic slowdown and the personalization of the CCP around Xi, Beijing’s economic appeals may soon start to lose their luster. The best advertisement for the U.S. system remains the United States itself—and the capacity of the country to live up to its democratic ideals.

China’s Soft Sell of Autocracy Is Working

And America’s Efforts to Promote Democracy Are Failing

By Daniel Mattingly

September 25, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Daniel Mattingly · September 25, 2024

For decades, the United States has promoted democracy around the globe. But amid mounting U.S.-Chinese competition, a question has arisen: is Beijing attempting to export its authoritarian political system in a similar way? No, says Chinese leader Xi Jinping. “We do not seek to ‘export’ a China model,” he told an assembly of world leaders in 2017, “nor do we want other countries to ‘copy’ our way of doing things.” It would be a mistake, however, to think that Beijing is not seeking to shape global opinion in favor of China’s political system. The Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to promote autocracy are simply not as explicit as the United States’ hard-sell efforts to export democracy; instead, the CCP is soft-selling autocracy.

To that end, the party has invested heavily in public diplomacy and influence operations intended to make the global public more accepting of its nondemocratic political system. It has developed a far-reaching program of trainings, conferences, and workshops that teach CCP-style management of the press, Internet, military, and civil society to foreign political leaders. And despite a perception among some Western policymakers and academics that these efforts are tone deaf, China’s external influence operations are more sophisticated, effective, and likely to succeed over the long run than many in the West believe. They are aimed primarily at people in the developing world, where many see the so-called China model as effective at delivering what matters most to them: a path out of grinding poverty and into the global middle class.

In the face of Beijing’s increasingly resonant foreign propaganda, Washington has failed to rise to the challenge. It has yet to adopt a coherent message about the merits of the U.S. political system. In contrast to China’s messaging, which is tightly focused on winning over audiences in the developing world, U.S. messaging is scattershot and less persuasive. To compete, the United States needs to sell a positive vision for itself around the world. And it needs to refine this message for people in the developing world, which is likely to be the main arena of this competition. Should Washington fail to adapt its pro-democracy strategy to today’s evolving political and economic realities, it will cede ground to Beijing—and could well fuel international support for China’s autocratic model.

DEMOCRACY BY ANOTHER NAME?

To sell its political system abroad, the CCP frames it as responsive, meritocratic, and remarkably effective at shepherding economic growth—without calling attention to its authoritarian aspects. CCP messaging claims that China’s political system is receptive to citizens and their everyday demands for government services and infrastructure. Propaganda videos feature inspiring drone shots of engineering marvels such as China’s high-speed rail network, its impressive bridges, and its gleaming airports.

The party also claims that the ruling party is staffed with highly competent politicians who undergo a rigorous selection process. Here, CCP messaging typically argues that the current civil service exam, which is in fact highly selective, is a legacy of the competitive imperial exam for selecting mandarins who served China’s emperors.

The most important element in the CCP’s soft-sell strategy is touting China’s extraordinary economic growth—what amounts to a prosperity gospel for the autocratic world. The CCP’s foreign propaganda points toward China’s inspiring success in lifting hundreds of millions of people from dollar-a-day poverty into the global middle class, which is an undeniable fact. Of course, rather than giving credit for this success to the Chinese people, the CCP likes to claim that the ruling party is mostly responsible.

China promotes its illiberal, authoritarian system while dressing it up as a populist democracy.

Official messaging is generally upbeat and avoids a hard sell, even if the harsh and combative messages of a small subset of Chinese diplomats occasionally grab headlines. Xi and other party leaders have often stressed the need to “tell China’s story well” and spread “positive energy” about the country both at home and abroad. The underlying idea seems to be that hope and inspiration sell better than doom and gloom. Some of China’s foreign messaging is devoted to criticizing Western democracies and painting U.S. democracy as especially chaotic. For the most part, however, it promotes China’s own story.

Notably, these messages don’t just elide the authoritarian aspects of China’s political system, they also claim that it is in fact democratic. The CCP’s official stance is that China is a “whole process democracy” in which the ruling party, while unelected, represents the interests of all people, in contrast to parties in democracies that supposedly represent just factions of society. This messaging builds support for China’s illiberal, authoritarian system while dressing it up as a populist democracy.

The CCP pushes this message through an array of channels. The party has established a global television news network, CGTN, its answer to CNN or the BBC. It has funded an expansion of the global wire service Xinhua, which is making inroads abroad by placing its content into foreign newspapers. The party also increasingly uses covert influence operations on social media by promoting influencers who cheerily sell the merits of the Chinese system.

CHINA’S FRESH FACE

For decades, U.S. analysts have expressed skepticism as to whether the soft sell actually increases global acceptance of the Chinese political system. Their assumption has long been that the Chinese system is too authoritarian and too specific to the Chinese context to win over admirers overseas. China’s messaging, to many Americans’ ears, often falls flat. Some messaging is explicitly anti-American; moreover, the more positive stories of China’s growing prosperity can be seen as a threat to the United States’ global status—and given the United States’ greater wealth, there is little reason for it to emulate China’s system.

It is now clear, however, that CCP messaging is in fact effective at changing hearts and minds and building support for China’s autocratic system—but mostly outside of wealthy democracies. In a study published in the American Journal of Political Science in 2024, I worked with an international team of researchers to survey people across 19 countries in six continents and to analyze data on thousands of propaganda videos produced by CGTN. We found that viewers’ positions on China moved dramatically after watching representative clips produced by CGTN. Although only 16 percent of people preferred the Chinese political model to the U.S. political model initially, after watching CGTN content, 54 percent stated the reverse. People also saw the Chinese system as more responsive, better at delivering growth, and, remarkably, more democratic in character.

CCP messaging is particularly resonant in the developing countries we studied, such as Colombia, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, and South Africa. It is not a coincidence that these are areas where China has invested heavily in expanding its media footprint. CGTN, for instance, opened a bureau in Nairobi in 2012, and the party’s English-language newspaper, China Daily, has established content-sharing agreements with dozens of media outlets in Latin America.

The United States is the incumbent to China’s lesser-known challenger.

A saving grace for the United States is that relatively few people consume China’s foreign-facing media, which means that however effective and slick its programming, its reach is not yet all that broad. For example, only seven percent of South Africans and six percent of Kenyans report regularly watching CGTN. The confined reach of China’s official media makes it, thus far, a limited tool.

The United States cannot take it for granted, however, that the CCP’s official media messaging will continue to have a narrow audience. The viewership of CGTN and other channels is growing, if modestly. In Nigeria, for example, viewership increased from six percent of the population in 2018 to 11 percent in 2020. The CCP also relies on an array of other strategies to make inroads. It has, for instance, expanded the footprint of Xinhua, so that stories with pro-CCP messages, implicit or explicit, are more likely to appear in newspapers around the globe, sometimes without attribution to Xinhua itself.

Moreover, China’s propaganda campaign is helped greatly by the fact that whereas the United States is old news, with a reputation born of decades of international activity, China is seen as a relatively new player. With many having relatively little knowledge about China and its system, the CCP is seizing the opportunity to define itself from scratch overseas. The United States, in other words, is the incumbent to China’s lesser-known challenger—and the United States, universally known and weighed down by its history of meddling and intervention, may find it very difficult to change minds. China, on the other hand, is a fresh-faced newcomer by comparison and can introduce itself as the better, unburdened alternative to Washington’s tired goods.

THE NUTS AND BOLTS OF AUTOCRACY

China uses traditional media and social media to sway the broader global public, but the CCP also has a complementary strategy for advancing its system among elites: workshops and summits to sell the benefits of Chinese-style governance. The Chinese government runs extensive programs instructing politicians across the globe about the mechanics of the CCP’s system of government. By the mid-2010s, according to a 2024 Atlantic Council report, the party was running an average of 1,400 training programs per year in developing countries on issues such as national governance, ethnic policies, and new media. But the effectiveness of these programs at changing minds or patterns of governance remains unclear.

The CCP also runs special training schools in Africa for politicians from regimes dominated by single parties. In 2022, the party established the Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Leadership School in Tanzania in partnership with parties in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe, many of which have experienced decades of dominant-party rule. The school focuses on the lessons of CCP-style party governance and discipline for parties in Africa. In addition to these workshops for civilian elites, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army trains foreign soldiers at military academies in China and abroad on maintaining control of the armed forces.

AMERICAN DEMOCRACY CAN’T SELL ITSELF

The United States cannot afford to stand idly by as China accelerates its efforts to sell its political system to the global public. So far, U.S. messaging has been far less coherent and effective than China’s influence campaign. This discrepancy became clear in my study; when survey respondents drawn from a global sample viewed both U.S. and Chinese messaging, on balance they moved toward China.

U.S. policymakers must acknowledge that selling political models is an important arena of political competition—one that the United States stands to lose. Official U.S. messaging to foreign audiences in the developing world is haphazard and gauzy, expounding on the idea of the United States, U.S. civil liberties, and the American way of life. There has not been a serious attempt to sell the merits of the U.S. system; Chinese messaging, on the other hand, is laser-focused on building global support for its system through consistent and targeted strategies. And amid the potential domestic political chaos ahead of November’s presidential election, the idea of American democracy does not simply speak for itself anymore.

The idea of American democracy does not simply speak for itself anymore.

There is much, however, that Washington can do on this score. The United States should direct funding toward State Department public diplomacy programs that evenhandedly portray the U.S. political system in all its glory and dysfunction—and, crucially, highlight the country’s dynamic economy. The CCP’s messaging strategy owes much of its success to highlighting pocketbook issues, especially the ability of the Chinese system to promote growth. China’s recent economic woes may very well undercut the ability to sell this message to a broad audience. The United States should take this as a lesson worth following and point to the considerable successes of the U.S. economy in producing innovation and prosperity.

The United States should also work to emphasize the advantages of democratic political systems, such as a free press. Washington should not lean exclusively on government organs for its messaging purposes; who wants to dine on state media when there are more exciting options on the menu? Instead, the United States could subsidize independent U.S. press operations abroad, including supporting U.S. newspapers’ foreign bureaus, cable news outlets, and Internet media operations. Foreign audiences are eager to consume American television, print, and Internet journalism that is free and honest—and that includes both critical and positive coverage of the United States.

In the long run, this is a competition the United States can win. Curiosity about the Chinese system does not mean that states actually can or will emulate it; China’s particular blend of a strong ruling party and elements of a capitalist market economy would be difficult to replicate elsewhere. Moreover, given China’s economic slowdown and the personalization of the CCP around Xi, Beijing’s economic appeals may soon start to lose their luster. The best advertisement for the U.S. system remains the United States itself—and the capacity of the country to live up to its democratic ideals.

• DANIEL MATTINGLY is Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University.

Foreign Affairs · by Daniel Mattingly · September 25, 2024

8. US targets China’s rare earths dominance with minerals-security finance network

As an aside the UN's Tumen River Area Development Program assessed that some of the largest untapped natural resources to include rare earth minerals are in the tri border area of northeast north Korea. Would a free and unified Korea help to alleviate China's dominance in their area?

US targets China’s rare earths dominance with minerals-security finance network

Move brings together banking and mining institutions from top minerals producer Australia as well as chip exporters Japan and South Korea

Reading Time:

3 minutes

Kawala Xiein Washington

Published: 5:40am, 24 Sep 2024

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3279674/us-targets-chinas-rare-earths-dominance-minerals-security-finance-network

The United States announced the establishment of a minerals-security finance network with its allies on Monday, the latest step in its bid to halt China’s global dominance of critical minerals.

The joint finance network will be used to “strengthen cooperation and promote information exchange and co-financing” among participating institutions from Indo-Pacific and European nations, according to the US State Department. It will also “advance diverse, secure and sustainable supply chains for critical minerals”.

The network was the latest initiative out of the Minerals Security Partnership (MSP), a framework the US set up with 13 countries and the European Commission in 2022. It aims to diversify the countries’ supply chains for critical minerals amid an intensifying US-China tech rivalry. The US also rolled out a chip ban against China in 2022.

Its unveiling came as leaders of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, pledged during a weekend summit in Delaware to “focus near-term efforts” on boosting mineral production across their countries.

China produces nearly two-thirds of the world’s rare earth metals and has imposed export controls on minerals such as graphite and gallium that are critical for making semiconductors and electric vehicles.

Employees work on an electric-vehicle production line at a factory belonging to Chinese auto company Leapmotor in Jinhua, Zhejiang province, last week. China’s dominance of the EV market has sparked concern in the US. Photo: AFP

Beijing’s actions came in response to Washington’s ramped-up chip restrictions as the two economic giants increasingly face off over technology.

Those taking part in the MSP include banking and mining institutions from Australia, another top producer of critical minerals, as well as from Japan and South Korea, which together have undertaken talks with the US to curb their chip exports to China.

“Partners emphasised that the scope and scale of meeting the rapidly increasing global demand for critical minerals to achieve the clean-energy transition is beyond the purview of any single institution,” the US State Department said in a statement.

“Creation of the MSP finance network reflects a desire to strengthen information sharing, coordination and collaboration among the network participants,” it added.

Addressing the MSP finance meeting in New York on Monday, Jose Fernandez, the State Department’s undersecretary for economic growth, energy and the environment, described the energy transition as “at risk”.

“Many of the supply chains for critical minerals are concentrated in one or two countries and also lack resilience,” said Fernandez.

“Addressing this challenge requires close coordination between partners and allies, countries with public finance, tools, minerals producing countries and the private sector.”

US President Joe Biden arrives at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on Monday to attend the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly. Photo: AP

The MSP partnership was announced on the sidelines of the ongoing United Nations General Assembly in New York, where US President Joe Biden and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi are due to speak this week.

Sino-American competition over critical minerals has increasingly extended to other resource-rich regions in the world, including Africa, a traditional mineral supplier for China that has received large amounts of Chinese funding over the years.

In August, the US International Development Finance Corporation voiced interest in funding the Kabanga Nickel Project in Tanzania, a move widely perceived as trying to stem China’s and Indonesia’s dominance of nickel.

American efforts have entailed further investment in Canada. Toronto-based mining company Electra Battery Materials received US$20 million from the US Defence Department in August to support the construction and commissioning of North America’s first cobalt sulphate refinery. Cobalt is a key component for EV batteries.

And as China and the European Union stay locked in a dispute over EV tariffs, the bloc has sought to bolster the resilience of its local supply chains.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), described by the US as a “like-minded” MSP partner, has funded a lithium-tin deposit in the Czech town of Cinovec. It is the largest hard-rock lithium deposit in Europe and one of the world’s largest undeveloped tin resources.

Ola Electric’s new 4680 lithium-ion battery cells are displayed in a showcase ahead of the company’s IPO launch in Mumbai, India, in July. Lithium-ion batteries are the most popular rechargeable batteries used today. Photo: Reuters

The EBRD also provided a US$50 million loan to finance decarbonisation and electrification of mining operations in Turkey, which discovered the world’s second-largest rare earth element reserve, according to the US State Department.

Turkey is reportedly looking for Chinese investments to build infrastructure around the reserve in its northwestern city of Eskisehir.

Ankara is expected in October to dispatch Alparslan Bayraktar, the country’s energy and natural resources minister, to Beijing to discuss a deal, according to news website Middle East Eye, citing sources familiar with the situation.

A US State Department spokesperson last week told the Middle East Eye that Turkey had joined the MSP and a formal announcement would come in the following weeks.

Turkey, which in July secured an EV manufacturing plant by Chinese EV manufacturing giant BYD, filed an application earlier this month to join Brics, an emerging economies bloc comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

The bloc is increasingly regarded as a rival to the Group of Seven major advanced economies consisting of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the US. The EU is also represented within the G7.

Kawala Xie

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Kawala joined the Post in 2022 and has worked in both news and tech after graduating from Columbia Journalism School. Previously based in the US and Australia, she has worked for multiple international news outlets including Al Jazeera, SBS Australia and Shenzhen Television. She specialises in Asia affairs, breaking news reporting and video production.

9. Chinese Investment in Ports, Communication Seeks to Project Global Power, Says Panel

Chinese Investment in Ports, Communication Seeks to Project Global Power, Says Panel - USNI News

news.usni.org · by John Grady · September 24, 2024

Chinese sailors at the People’s Liberation Army Navy base in Djibouti in 2019. Xinhua Photo

While the United States is unrivaled in projecting military power from 500-plus overseas bases, China’s investments in ports and communication technology globally show Beijing’s footprint approach as a possible means to a similar end, a panel said last week.

Geoffery Gresh, head of international security studies at the National Defense University, and other panelists at the Brookings Institution event agreed, “competition is not always symmetric” and “not all regions are the same.”

He asked rhetorically how do you project power in the 21st century, “it’s through the internet.” He suggested China’s actions now have historic parallels with the activities of the British and Dutch East India Companies in setting up trading ports in India and what is now Indonesia.

Great Britain and the Netherlands eventually expanded those trading outposts to colonial control.

China is not alone in seeing the value of this approach, Gresh added. Russia’s knowledge that soon 600 undersea fiber-optic cables will be moving data that is the internet’s backbone has them focusing on increasing its submersible capabilities.

Like Beijing’s port projects from Asia to Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and South America, Moscow has poured money into dual-use projects – such as sea-floor mapping to support its interests in the Baltic, Black Sea and parts of the Mediterranean.

Gresh added these cables have proven “difficult to patrol.” In the past year, critical cables have been suspiciously cut in the Baltic, Red Sea and off the African coast.

Isaac Kardon, who moderated the Brookings Institution discussion and is co-editor of Great Power Competition and Overseas Basing, said, “bases [like the United States maintains] are big fat targets for precision munitions and not so precision munitions.”

The question Washington, Beijing and Moscow should be asking themselves is “what is the purpose of the base – power projection or intelligence-gathering,” Dawn Murphy, who teaches national security strategy at the National War College, said. She added with the exception of Djibouti and Cambodia, China’s military does not have a “large military footprint overseas.”

Russia does maintain bases similar to the United States’ military presence, but they are largely concentrated in former Soviet republics. It also maintains a naval presence in Syria on the Mediterranean and in sub-Saharan Africa.

Instead of the leasing arrangements Washington employs, Beijing uses “a robust set of tools” such as development funds, the Belt and Road Initiative and investments from Chinese companies into infrastructure projects to gain access economically and politically. It also can gather useful military intelligence from this kind of presence.

“China envisions itself as a leader of the Global South” and uses different means to achieve that goal, she added.

Djibouti, where China maintains a base near the U.S. facility, is an exception. In part, Murphy said, that base was built to show Beijing’s interest in being a responsible power in combating smuggling, piracy and now protecting tankers carrying Middle Eastern oil.

The major exceptions to the small-footprint approach are occurring closer to China’s land borders and its territorial claims, especially in the South China Sea, Andrew Yeo, the book’s co-editor and senior fellow at Brookings, said.

He cited Beijing’s creating artificial islands on sea rock and coral formations, building runways and piers to support military operations in the first island chain (notably threatening Taiwan and the Philippines) and extending its reach to Pacific island nations.

“We do have to think differently [regarding] Southeast Asia and westward to the Indian Ocean,” he added, and what that means in terms of rapid deployment and sustainment if a crisis turns to conflict.

Looking at the current U.S. overseas basing model, Yeo said, “crisis leads to continuity” of military presence as in Japan, especially Okinawa, following World War II and Korea after the armistice in 1953 halted the war on the peninsula.

But even in those two nations, the United States and its allies have altered their basing structure, consolidating facilities and moving others to disperse forces in case of attack.

Over the next decade, U.S. strategy for the first island chain and the Korean peninsula needs clarity on whether its military presence should be “closer to where the fight is or pulling back because of vulnerability to Chinese missiles, North Korean missiles,” Yeo said.

Gresh said 20 years ago Secretary Donald Rumsfeld suggested the United States should adopt a “lily pad” basing strategy in the Pacific, but the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq put that idea on the shelf. China’s spreading military presence regionally poses “a significant challenge” that should be causing a re-thinking of strategy.

Looking at Europe and the Chinese, Gresh noted Beijing has significant investments in 10 percent of the continent’s ports. The Chinese shipping company Cosco is the majority stockholder in Piraeus, Greece’s largest port. Gresh said it has become the main maritime entry point for Chinese merchant vessels.

He added its cruise ship facilities can fit a naval vessel.

China could say, “we’re going to bring our ship in for replenishment” and allow its crew shore leave. The U.S. Navy already makes port calls at Piraeus for similar reasons, most recently in late December.

For the first time, Europeans are pulling back from more Chinese investments, saying “we need to take a harder look” at the implication of who owns its ports.

Related

news.usni.org · by John Grady · September 24, 2024

10. China’s ‘wolf warrior diplomacy’ targets US partners in the South China Sea

No "soft sell" on authoritarianism here.

China’s ‘wolf warrior diplomacy’ targets US partners in the South China Sea

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4891071-philippines-sabina-shoal-china/amp/

by Gordon G. Chang, opinion contributor 09/23/24 11:30 AM ET

Philippine military chief Gen. Romeo Brawner Jr.,gestures during a press conference with U.S. Indo-Pacific Command Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo, not shown, on the Mutual Defense Board-Security Engagement Board held at the Philippine Military Academy in Baguio, northern Philippines on Thursday, Aug. 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)

China and the Philippines are sending vessels to Sabina Shoal to secure their competing territorial claims to the feature. Manila withdrew the Teresa Magbanua, a coast guard vessel that had left that strategic spot in the South China Sea, on Sept. 14.

China will undoubtedly block the Philippine attempt to reoccupy the shoal. The probability of an incident — and war — is high.

The U.S., a party to a 1951 mutual defense treaty with Manila, is bound to be involved in any conflict. 

The 318-foot Teresa Magbanua had been anchored at Sabina for more than 150 days to, among other things, protect the Philippines’ territorial claims. 

Both China (which calls it Xianbin Jiao Lagoon) and the Philippines claim Sabina as sovereign territory. Manila’s formal name for the contested feature is Escoda Shoal. 

Beijing claims as “blue national soil” all the shoals, reefs, islands, islets and other features, as well as all the waters inside its infamous “cow’s tongue,” defined by 10 dashes on official maps, which encloses about 85 percent of the South China Sea.  

A Hague tribunal, adjudicating between the Philippines and China under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, invalidated Beijing’s expansive sovereignty claims to Philippine features in that body of water in 2016. China, with virtually no legal support, has consistently maintained that the decision “is illegal, null and void.”

China’s forces have continually committed provocations in Philippine waters — especially since the middle of June — at Sabina, Second Thomas Shoal, and other features close to islands universally recognized as part of the Philippines. Journalists featured on a Sept. 16 episode of 60 Minutes reported the Chinese rammed a Philippine craft in the South China Sea while they were on board. 

Sabina is about 76 nautical miles from Palawan, a main Philippine island, and therefore within the Exclusive Economic Zone of the Philippines. Sabina, by contrast, is 648 nautical miles from China’s Hainan Island. An Exclusive Economic Zone is a band of water between 12 to 200 nautical miles from the shoreline where the coastal state has certain economic and other rights against others. 

The Teresa Magbanuawas monitoring suspected Chinese reclamation activities. China had seized from the Philippines nearby Mischief, Subi and Fiery Cross Reefs and turned them into sprawling military bases. Beijing is threatening to do the same thing to Scarborough Shoal, which it grabbed in 2012.

There is a crisis in the making, as China has already been using, in the words of CBS’s Jacqueline Williams, “tactics just short of war.”

“This time, they may use extreme force to prevent the Philippine ship from getting close to Sabina Shoal,” says James Fanell of the Geneva Center for Security Policy and co-author of “Embracing Communist China: America’s Greatest Strategic Failure.” “The risk of China trying to sink the ship is real.”

“Neither side can afford to back down,” David Day of the Global Risk Mitigation Foundation, a Honolulu-based non-profit focused on Southeast Asia, told me.  

The Chinese know they must prevent the return of a Philippine vessel to Sabina because, should it anchor there, its presence will undercut what Day correctly calls “their bogus sovereignty claims.”

The Philippines will not back down either. Manila cannot afford to let China take away another island, reef, shoal or rock, because the Philippines is nothing more than a collection of rocks, shoals, reefs and islands.

Fanell, a former U.S. Navy captain who served as director of Intelligence and Information Operations at the U.S. Pacific Fleet, believes the U.S. Navy must begin escorting Philippine craft when they begin the journey back to Sabina. 

“America must enforce its words about a ‘free and open Indo-Pacific,’” he said. “If we do not, that phrase will become more hollow than it is today.”  

China, in fact, sees America’s words as “hollow” as Beijing has been ignoring a series of pronouncements from Washington.  

The Biden State Department, for instance, has issued a dozen written warnings — the last one on Aug. 31 — that the U.S. was willing to use force against China to discharge its obligations pursuant to Article IV of the mutual defense pact. President Biden has orally issued similar warnings, for instance on Oct. 25 of last year and April 11.  

Despite these warnings, China has increased the tempo of provocative acts and its belligerence. At the moment, Beijing wants the world to see how aggressive Chinese forces are. China’s officials had to know there was a 60 Minutes crew on board the Philippine Coast Guard vessel they rammed.

In recent years, Xi Jinping has sponsored what has become known as “Wolf Warrior diplomacy,” and now he is going to even greater lengths to show off the ugly side of Chinese nationalism. 

Chinese leaders are now looking for a fight. Xi has obviously decided to risk war with an American treaty ally, which means he is prepared to wage war against America.

Soon, there will be a confrontation in the South China Sea. 

Says Day, “The real clash is just beginning.” 

Gordon G. Chang is the author of “The Coming Collapse of China” and the upcoming “Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy America.” Follow him on X @GordonGChang. 

Categories: International, Opinion

Tags: 60 Minutes, Beijing, Philippines, Sabina Shoal, united states

11. FBI raids defense contractor Carahsoft

FBI raids defense contractor Carahsoft

Company president says the agents were there "as part of an investigation into a company with which Carahsoft has done business in the past."

defenseone.com · by David DiMolfetta

The FBI seal on bureau headquarters in Washington, D.C. The bureau confirmed it had raided the offices of government technology provider Carahsoft on Sept. 24, 2024. krblokhin/Getty Images

Company president says the agents were there "as part of an investigation into a company with which Carahsoft has done business in the past."

September 24, 2024 01:26 PM ET

• Industry
• Pentagon
• Homeland

By David DiMolfetta

Updated: 7:30 p.m. ET.

The FBI has raided the headquarters of Carahsoft Technology Corp., a provider of IT, software, and cybersecurity services to the Pentagon and others, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The raid was conducted in Reston, Virginia, sometime Tuesday morning, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified due to the matter’s sensitivity.

“We can confirm that the FBI conducted court-authorized law enforcement activity on Sunset Hills Road this morning. We decline to comment further,” an FBI spokesperson said in a statement.

Carahsoft is a privately held provider of IT services and software to the Pentagon and other public-sector clients. It has secured billions of dollars in contracts with agencies like the Social Security Administration, Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Treasury, according to GovTribe, a federal market intelligence platform owned by Nextgov/FCW parent company GovExec.

In an email sent Tuesday to Carahsoft employees, Carahsoft President Craig Abod said the agents were there "as part of an investigation into a company with which Carahsoft has done business in the past" and that the company is fully cooperating and "operating business as usual." A copy of the letter was obtained by Nextgov/FCW.

A Carahsoft spokesperson noted that no one was arrested or detained and reaffirmed the company's cooperation with the Department of Justice investigation into a company with which they have done business.

Several notes and images of what appeared to be the raid were posted in a Reddit channel purportedly used by company employees. Nextgov/FCW could not immediately verify the contents of the images, though one appeared to show a group of FBI agents dressed in uniform walking through the office. Another image obtained separately by Nextgov/FCW showed a trio of FBI agents dressed in uniform walking into a building entrance.

Editor's note: This story has been updated.

[Editor's note: Carahsoft is an advertising client of Defense One.]

This story is breaking and may be updated.

12. Obama Defense Secretary Issues 'Urgent' Nuclear Warning to Trump And Harris

What was the headline editor thinking? Dr. Gates was also Bush's SECDEF (as noted in the article) Why did the headline editor emphasize Obama and not include Bush in the headline?.

Obama Defense Secretary Issues 'Urgent' Nuclear Warning to Trump And Harris

Newsweek · by Hugh Cameron · September 25, 2024

ByLive News Reporter

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Robert Gates, the former Defense Secretary, has warned that America's armed forces are ill-equipped for the "very real prospect of war between nuclear-armed great powers."

Gates, who served under both Barack Obama and George W. Bush, has called on Donald Trump and Kamala Harris to face up to the "unprecedented peril" posed by China and Russia, aided by North Korea and Iran.

"The current approach to ensuring such superiority in Congress, the White House and the Defense Department cannot meet the international challenges — and peril — facing America and our allies," Gates wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post.

Gates argued that current levels of funding for the U.S. military are insufficient.

"Our Army is shrinking, our Navy is decommissioning warships faster than new ones can be built, our Air Force has stagnated in size, and only a fraction of the force is available for combat on any given day," he wrote.

He cited a February report by the Department of Defense, which said that, in the 14 fiscal years since 2011, the branch "has had only one, on-time, full appropriation." Pentagon Press Secretary Pat Ryder said that this underfunding, alongside the delayed signing of full-year budgets "undermines our military readiness and jeopardizes critical modernization efforts."

US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris arrives to board Air Force Two at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on September 13, 2024. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates is skeptical that either candidate... US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris arrives to board Air Force Two at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on September 13, 2024. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates is skeptical that either candidate will commit to providing the funding necessary for the U.S. military. Jacquelyn Martin/AFP via Getty Images

Despite their otherwise extensive policy differences, both candidates have assured voters that the military will remain well-financed during their administrations.

Though neither have provided specific budgetary proposals, Harris has vowed to ensure that the military "remains the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world," while Trump has made "rebuilding America's depleted military" a key slogan in his campaign.

However, Gates said that these "boasts," do little beyond demonstrating the "yawning gap between the political rhetoric in Washington about sustaining American military strength and the stark realities on the ground."

Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates listens as President Barack Obama speaks to the press after a meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House June 22, 2010 in Washington DC. Gates, who also... Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates listens as President Barack Obama speaks to the press after a meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House June 22, 2010 in Washington DC. Gates, who also served as Defense Secretary during the Bush administration, believes both candidates must enact "dramatic change" to ensure America's "long-term military superiority." Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images

Whoever is elected president in November must be ready to inaugurate the "dramatic change" needed to ensure America's "long-term military superiority," Gates continued, and be prepared to put forward budgets that correspond to the level of threat facing the U.S.

"As secretary of defense for both Republican and Democratic presidents, I strongly supported allocating more resources for nonmilitary instruments of power — diplomacy, strategic communications, development assistance, geoeconomic tools and more," Gates said. "But it is a fact of life that these instruments are effective only against the backdrop of American military power so compelling that adversaries are deterred from taking up arms against us or our allies."

In March, the Biden-Harris administration submitted a $849.8 billion defense budget for fiscal year 2025, representing a 4.1 percent increase form 2023's enacted budget, though this faces threats from the six-month spending bill recently unveiled by House Speaker Mike Johnson.

However, even were this budget enacted, Gates believes this would still be insufficient for the embattled U.S. military.

"Barely staying even with inflation or worse is wholly inadequate," he wrote. "Significant additional resources for defense are necessary and urgent. The new president must propose and fight for those resources."

Hugh Cameron

Hugh Cameron is Newsweek Live News Reporter based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on international politics, conflict, and crime. Hugh joined Newsweek in 2024, having worked at Alliance News Ltd where he specialised in covering global and regional business developments, economic news, and market trends. He graduated from the University of Warwick with a bachelor's degree in politics in 2022, and from the University of Cambridge with a master's degree in international relations in 2023. Languages: English.

You can get in touch with Hugh by emailing h.cameron@newsweek.com

Hugh Cameron is Newsweek Live News Reporter based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on international politics, conflict, and ...

To read how Newsweek uses AI as a newsroom tool, Click here.

Newsweek · by Hugh Cameron · September 25, 2024

13. 'Significant Consequences': Army Secretary Warns Congress over Short-Term Funding

The second and third order effects of our dysfunctional Congress.

'Significant Consequences': Army Secretary Warns Congress over Short-Term Funding

military.com · by Steve Beynon · September 24, 2024

Army Secretary Christine Wormuth warned key lawmakers that the plan for yet another short-term funding cycle for the federal government could have a significant impact on the service, ranging from delays in construction projects to weapons acquisition.

In a letter to House and Senate Appropriations committee leaders Wednesday, Wormuth emphasized that a planned three-month continuing resolution set to fund the Army starting Oct. 1 will have "significant consequences on the Army's mission to maintain national security," as well as soldiers' quality of life.

Congressional leaders announced a plan Sunday to vote on a short-term spending agreement this week to fund the government through Dec. 20. The move avoids a shutdown during election season, instead punting funding questions to a lame-duck legislature and White House.

Under the continuing resolution, the Army must work within this year's budget, hindering its ability to advance projects or contracts.

Construction on at least half a dozen projects, including a new $10 million machine gun range for Fort Wainwright, Alaska, and a new $44 million rail yard to transport armored vehicles and other equipment, would see delays, potentially lasting months. Other delays could affect projects at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington.

For 2025, the service requested a near doubling of its budget for barracks, going from $1.5 billion this year to $2.35 billion next fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1. However, it's unclear whether the stopgap spending bill will delay any of the barracks projects planned at Fort Johnson, Louisiana; Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri; and Army Garrison Rheinland-Pfalz in Germany, among others.

The investment in barracks is one of the most dramatic changes to the service's spending and comes after media reports showed dilapidated living conditions for junior enlisted soldiers, something that raised lawmakers' ire to such a degree that a new House panel was stood up to investigate the matter.

Other delays include fielding the new weapons set to replace the M4 carbine and M249 Squad Automatic Weapon to two brigade combat teams. The XM7 rifle and XM250 machine gun made their debut in March at 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, though the service has been mum on whether those weapons have been successful in the field.

Both use 6.8mm ammo, which is much heavier than the current 5.56mm round widely employed in the Army but has the potential to be more effective against body armor. The XM7 is nearly one-third heavier than the currently mass-issued M4.

A planned $403 million purchase of Patriot missile hardware would also be delayed, as well as various software upgrades to missile defense systems. Those systems have been especially critical in the Middle East, where troops are under threat of drone strikes, mostly from Iran-backed militias. The service may also see a significant delay in procuring warheads and other key components for rockets.

Wormuth's warning comes after Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin expressed his own irritation with Congress over continuing resolutions earlier this month.

"We have already lost valuable time, having operated under 48 CRs for a total of almost five years since 2011. We cannot buy back this time, but we can stop digging the hole," Austin wrote in a letter to House and Senate Appropriations committee leaders from both parties.

military.com · by Steve Beynon · September 24, 2024

14. Debate over Ukraine weapons restrictions divides allies, administration

Again, the second and third order effects of a nationals security policy with a "prime directive" of "prevent escalation."

Debate over Ukraine weapons restrictions divides allies, administration

The discussion over weapons restrictions is ongoing in Washington, splitting the Biden administration and Capitol Hill and confounding America’s partners in Europe.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/24/ukraine-weapons-limits-biden-permission-atacms/?utm

From left, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and British Foreign Secretary David Lammy attend a meeting in Kyiv on Sept. 11. (Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images)

By Isabelle Khurshudyan, Siobhán O'Grady, Michael Birnbaum and Ellen Francis

September 24, 2024 at 3:00 a.m. EDT

KYIV — The United States’ lingering refusal to relax restrictions on Ukraine’s use of Western missiles for deeper strikes on Russian territory has exacerbated a growing divide between the allies — with Kyiv angry over yet another setback in slowing Russia’s assault across the country while its biggest backer considers the possibility of Moscow’s backlash.

The latest ask by Kyiv — to receive permission to use the U.S.-supplied Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, and other longer-range munitions to reach targets such as strategic airfields deeper inside Russia — will be made by President Volodymyr Zelensky personally during his meeting with President Joe Biden in Washington this week.

But in an example of the widening disconnect between the two sides more than two years into Russia’s invasion, the Ukrainians had expected Biden to have already granted permission by now, according to two officials who, like others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

The discussion is ongoing in Washington, splitting the Biden administration and Capitol Hill, and it has confounded America’s partners in Europe, several of whom have publicly said they’re in favor of granting the permission for more cross-border strikes using their missiles. For this article, Washington Post reporters interviewed more than a dozen officials in Ukraine, NATO member countries, and both the Biden administration and Congress to gauge the temperature of the fierce debate over the management of Ukraine’s war.

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So far, U.S. officials insist there is no indication that the White House will change its position on this. But the Ukrainians have heard that before. They point to a U.S. pattern of repeatedly denying their weapons requests — on modern tanks, fighter jets and longer-range missiles — before eventually giving the green light each time. And with the lengthy debates playing out in public, the Russians have always had time to prepare long before the new weapons reach the battlefield.

U.S. officials, for their part, express frustration about what they perceive as Ukraine’s lack of understanding of their occasionally cautious approach even as they provide Kyiv with significantly more security assistance than anyone else. Russian President Vladimir Putin has framed his attack on Ukraine as part of a war against the West — the United States in particular — and Washington has often cited managing escalation with Moscow as a reason for not approving some of Ukraine’s armament requests immediately.

It is a point of view strongly held by the campaign for Republican candidate Donald Trump as well, with his son co-writing an opinion piece in the Hill warning against nuclear conflagration if such permissions are given.

That rationale is mocked in Ukraine, where the daily Russian bombardment has killed thousands and Russian troops occupy more than 20 percent of the country. More frustrating for Ukrainians is seeing Russia receive a steady supply of critical weapons from Iran and North Korea.

“As it turns out, Russia has more decisive allies than we do,” said Roman Kostenko, the secretary of the defense and intelligence committee in Ukraine’s parliament. “It’s shameful for the West.”

In Zelensky’s meeting with Biden this week, the Ukrainian delegation’s priority is to pitch its secretive “victory plan” as an opportunity for Biden to leave office with a legacy of having helped Ukraine win the war against Russia. An important aspect of that plan is the ability to hit the Russians on their own territory. Russian glide bombs, converted munitions with guidance systems that are launched from aircraft, have been devastating Ukrainian front lines.

With Kyiv’s limited air defense capabilities unable to prevent the glide bomb attacks, Ukrainian officials want to hit the planes launching these weapons while they are still on the airfields in Russia. But those runways are out of range of the Western weaponry they currently are permitted to use for cross-border strikes.

“We think the permission should be granted yesterday, not today or tomorrow,” one Ukrainian official said. “Otherwise, the phrase ‘We want to see Ukraine as strong as possible for any scenario’ looks like total BS.”

Army Sgt. Ian Ketterling prepares a crane for loading an Army Tactical Missile System onto a High Mobility Artillery Rocket System in Queensland, Australia, in July 2023. (Sgt. 1st Class Andrew Dickson/U.S. Army/AP)

The Ukrainians also want more agency to pick their own targets, including energy infrastructure, such as oil depots, officials said. Those kinds of strikes can hurt Russia’s economy, limiting its ability to fund the war effort, explained a senior Ukrainian military official. It’s fair play, the official added, as Moscow has been pummeling Ukraine’s power grid for the past two years, causing rolling blackouts throughout the country.

But Kyiv has long been dependent on receiving target coordinates for strikes with its precision Western weaponry from U.S. military personnel on a base elsewhere in Europe. Without those, missiles are likely to miss their marks, the military official said, and the United States has sometimes declined to provide coordinates for some of Kyiv’s desired targets.

“The weapons are often used on what we would consider less important targets,” the official said.

U.S. officials argue that Ukraine has such a limited stockpile of ATACMS and similar munitions that opening up Russian territory to strikes would make only a limited impact on the battlefield and could lead to the missiles running out in a matter of weeks, or even days.

White House and Defense Department officials say that they have not heard a convincing argument from Ukrainian leaders that the possible targets within missile range in Russia would make a significant difference in Ukraine’s path to victory. They say that using the missiles against targets in Crimea, as Ukraine has done so far, is a more worthwhile strategy that has already forced the Kremlin to pull forces back from the peninsula.

One U.S. official maintained that this request is different from past ones because it is not worth the risk of a Russian escalation. Because the stockpile of missiles is limited and Russia has already pulled 90 percent of the jets launching glide bombs out of ATACMS range, a changed U.S. policy would not reshape the course of the fighting.

But European military officials and diplomats emphatically disagreed that allowing the longer-range strikes into Russia would only have limited impact and condemned the policy of refusing to lift the restrictions on Western weapons.

“On the technical and strategic level, it doesn’t make sense. It’s actually stupid,” one Western military official said, adding that NATO’s own military doctrine calls for deep strikes behind enemy lines.

While the United States’ green-lighting of deeper missile strikes into Russia would not be enough on its own for Ukraine to win the war, the official said, it would help disrupt Russian logistics, target command centers and weapon depots. In addition, the longer the wait for permission, the less effective the long-range strike capability will eventually be.

Ukrainian and European officials said they’ve already recorded the Russians using the airfields closest to Ukraine’s border less. Military aircraft now use these landing strips for just a quick stop to refuel or maintenance.

“There’s no doubt that if there is a decision on this now, to allow these weapons to be used, some of the advantage has already been squandered through this timorousness,” said Keir Giles, an analyst at the London-based Chatham House think tank.

One Ukrainian official suggested that the new American argument about the lack of effectiveness of cross-border strikes probably emerged “because the previous excuse is not working anymore.”

A European diplomat in Kyiv said they believe Ukraine launched its recent incursion into Russia’s Kursk region in part to make a statement to the West that Putin’s red lines can be crossed without fear of major retaliation, such as the use of nuclear weapons.

But Russia still can escalate elsewhere in ways that make the Biden administration’s life more difficult on the world stage, U.S. officials said, by arming the Houthi militia group in Yemen that has been threatening maritime traffic in the Red Sea, for example, or handing nuclear know-how to Iran, or increasing its campaign of sabotage attacks in Europe.

Those considerations aren’t enough to dissuade the Biden administration from taking any confrontational steps against Russia — Ukraine has been using U.S. weaponry on Russian soil in its attack on the Kursk region in ways that stretch the previous rules of engagement for U.S. military aid — but in the specific case of ATACMS, the benefits of allowing strikes on Russian soil are not compelling enough to outweigh the drawbacks, the officials said.

Still, there are splits within the administration: Even after Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin made clear his firm opposition to loosening the rules around ATACMS strikes, Secretary of State Antony Blinken indicated this month in a visit to Kyiv that he was open to the Ukrainian arguments and would ultimately bring them back to Biden for a broader discussion in Washington.

That discussion is ongoing, officials said, with those inside the National Security Council trying to manage the differences between the Defense Department and the State Department.

U.S. officials say that they would have preferred that Ukraine pursue its requests in private rather than mount the public campaign that it has waged. But the Ukrainians counter that this public pressure campaign was born out of desperation after the private approach was rejected. The downside, of course, is that it telegraphs their plans to Russia.

One Western diplomat said that it is normal for such decisions to take time and that even if the debate is public, it doesn’t necessarily give Russia a military advantage, “but it gives them an in into who is the weakest link in the chain. It gives them leverage in terms of messaging and playing into our fears.”

Some European countries have joined Ukraine’s call for the United States to lift its restrictions, and diplomats said they wouldn’t rule out a U.S. policy shift in a war that has seen the goal posts repeatedly move. Britain and France are also providing longer-range missiles to Ukraine, and both have been vocal in supporting Ukraine using their munitions on Russian territory.

Britain’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, however, appeared to be lowering expectations that Ukraine’s allies would make a quick decision over whether to allow Ukraine to fire their long-range missiles deep into Russia. He told the BBC a week ago that the matter would be discussed with Ukraine by its allies at the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York.

“These decisions come with a risk that is not small,” said a European official. “But in general, on the question of whether it’s an escalatory risk or is Putin bluffing, you never really know. The decisions are not made in fear of that.”

While Ukrainian officials are quick to express their gratitude for any foreign military assistance, they also point out that they’re paying the highest price. And any delays on weapons use cost the lives of their soldiers, they say.

“It’s time to choose,” said Mykola Bielieskov, an analyst linked to Ukraine’s presidential office. “Now you can’t sit on two chairs simultaneously. You need to take one chair. The balancing act is a byproduct of crisis management instead of good strategy.”

Birnbaum reported from Washington and Francis from Brussels. David L. Stern and Serhii Korolchuk in Kyiv; William Booth in London; Robyn Dixon in Riga, Latvia; and Missy Ryan, Abigail Hauslohner and Karen DeYoung in Washington contributed to this report.

15. Let's Talk About the U.S. Marines Reopening WW2 Airfields To Prepare For Future Scenarios

Let's Talk About the U.S. Marines Reopening WW2 Airfields To Prepare For Future Scenarios

The Aviationist · by Stefano D'Urso · September 24, 2024

Aerial drone photograph of the newly resurfaced Camp Davis South outlying landing field (OLF), taken on Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, Aug. 23, 2024. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl Daniela Chicas Torres)

After the first one in the Pacific few months ago, the USMC renovated and reopened another WW2 airfield in North Carolina which will serve as a multipurpose outlying landing field.

The U.S. Marine Corps has announced the reopening in August 2024 of a World War 2-era airfield in North Carolina, the former Army Air Corps airfield at Camp Davis. Thanks to a recent $28 million, 18-month overhaul, the resurfaced Davis South runway will now serve as a multipurpose outlying landing field (OLF) about 25 miles from Camp Lejeune.

According to the service, the new Davis South OLF can support every airframe in the Marine Corps’ arsenal, as well as other services’ aircraft up to the C-17 cargo aircraft. The OLF, which has minimal infrastructure, will be used primarily as a training platform, without units or aircraft based there.

The 4,525 foot airstrip includes a 3,600 foot asphalt runway and concrete turnarounds at each end to accommodate vertical take-offs and landings, with the total area of the airfield measuring 275 acres. The Marines said the entire runway was resurfaced with three layers of rock, gravel, and asphalt, while the concrete landing pads and apron were specially designed to handle high-intensity heat generated during hovering, landing, and turning maneuvers.

“The completion of Davis South represents a significant milestone for Camp Lejeune as one of this nation’s preeminent power projection platforms along the East Coast,” said Colonel Ralph J. Rizzo, Jr, commander, Marine Corps Installations East – Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune. “Aviation and ground units across the region will be able to use this runway to exercise the full spectrum of training capabilities in preparation for missions around the globe, to include simulating austere airfield conditions in conjunction with Expeditionary Advanced Basing Operations.”

Camp Davis was originally created in WW2 as an anti-aircraft artillery training center of the Army, until its use was discontinued in 1946. In 1992, the installation was included in the Navy’s purchase of the Greater Sandy Run Training Area and used by Marine Corps rotary wing units from Marine Corps Air Station New River.

A U.S. Marine Corps KC-130J Super Hercules aircraft with 1st Marine Air Wing, lands on a newly designated airstrip on the island of Peleliu, Republic of Palau, June 22, 2024. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Hannah Hollerud)

Peleliu airstrip

Two months before the Davis South OLF’s reopening, the Marines also recertified in June 2024 the historic Peleliu airstrip in Republic of Palau, in the middle of the Pacific. The service said the Marine Corps Engineer Detachment Palau (MCED-P) 24.1, comprised of engineers from the 7th Engineer Support Battalion, 1st Marine Logistics Group, was assigned the critical task of rehabilitating the WWII-era Japanese airfield, enhancing U.S. military strategic capabilities in the Indo-Pacific region.

On June 22, a KC-130J Super Hercules aircraft with 1st Marine Air Wing landed on the newly designated airstrip, marking the first landing of a military fixed-wing aircraft since it was recertified. The runway was named in honor of Eugene Sledge, a private first class with the 1st Marine Division during the Battle of Peleliu.

“Today is a historic moment as we land a Marine Corps aircraft on the ‘Sledge’ runway,” remarked Maj. Christopher Romero, MCED-P 24.1 commanding officer. “This remarkable achievement demonstrates the strategic importance of our mission and our dedication to regional stability and security.”

The airfield is in a strategic location, approximately 1,400 miles from Okinawa, Japan, where the bulk of USMC forces in the Pacific are based, and within 1,000 miles from the Philippines, a major partner nation of the United States in the area.

U.S. expanding their reach in the Indo-Pacific

With the heightened tensions in the Indo-Pacific region, especially with China, the United States are working to strengthen their forces in the area and deter a possible Chinese aggression. The U.S. Department of Defense published early in July 2024 a “modernization plan” aimed at strengthening forces in Japan.

Japan is a major hub where the bulk of the U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific are located. -However, Japan is still too far from some major hotspots like Taiwan. That’s why the U.S. are working to extend their reach in the region with the creation of new bases hosted by partner nations and the reopening of older ones.

The Pacific theater of World War II saw some of the most intense air operations in history, where the vast distances and numerous islands made air power crucial for both sides. As a result, a network of airfields was established across the Pacific, many of which have been abandoned since the end of the war as they were no longer needed, both because of newer technology which allowed longer operational ranges and because the focus shifted to the European theater with the Cold War.

However, the recent developments in the geopolitical landscape are leading to a resurgence of these WWII-era airfields, with the goal of both extending the reach of U.S. forces with the creation of forward arming and refueling points (FARP) and dispersing assets to improve the survivability in the event of a Chinese missile attacks. Considered the Chinese expansion in the area, the refurbished bases also enhance the U.S. ability to respond to potential conflicts.

The use of these bases would fall under the Dynamic Force Employment (DFE) concept. By the way, the U.S. Air Force already tested the concept in Palau, with a detachment of A-10Cs operating out of a tent village at Roman Tmetuchl International Airport, well before Peleliu’s airstrip was ready.

A U.S. Air Force A-10C Thunderbolt II taxis down the runway at the Palau International Airport, Republic of Palau Nov. 1, 2022. (U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Courtney Sebastianelli)

Dynamic Force Employment

The Dynamic Force Employment (DFE) is the new strategy that combines strategic unpredictability with operational adaptability, first introduced by the 2018 National Defense Strategy. The key concept is to be operationally unpredictable in order to disrupt an adversary’s ability to respond and target allied forces.

An application of this strategy are the Bomber Task Force missions, during which the Air Force also describes DFE as the “ability to reach out from home station, fly anywhere in the world and execute those missions, rapidly regenerate from a forward operating base and continue operations.”

The term Dynamic Force Employment is usually adopted by the U.S. military as a whole, while the U.S. Air Force often refers to Agile Combat Employment (ACE) for its operations. However, the two are not necessarily distinct from each other.

In fact, during a DFE exercise which saw Hawaii’s F-22s deploy to MCAS Iwakuni, Japan, the service mentioned that “DFE operations fall under the scope of Agile Combat Employment capabilities which allows Pacific Air Forces to continuously exercise ways to improve passive and active defense capabilities to ensure a competitive advantage and to protect assets and personnel in the future.”

Specifically, the Agile Combat Employment has been defined by the Air Force in its doctrine as “a proactive and reactive operational scheme of maneuver executed within threat timelines to increase resiliency and survivability while generating combat power.” The service also added that agile here means being “able to outpace adversary action through movement and maneuver to achieve commander’s intent.”

ACE essentially involves operating from austere airfields, large roads and highways with little supporting and technical infrastructure, dispersing assets out from the larger air bases that are likely to come under a sudden volume of Russian or Chinese tactical ballistic and cruise missiles. The strategy, while complicating adversary planning, also allows to hold adversary targets at risk from multiple locations.

DFE is thus not necessarily separate from ACE, although we saw a preponderance of the U.S. of the term ACE during Air Force-only exercises or from austere locations, while DFE is seen used during joint operations or from more prepared military facilities at forward locations. In both cases there is the element of the quick movement of forces, and the ability to operate soon after reaching the deployed location.

About Stefano D'Urso

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Stefano D'Urso is a freelance journalist and contributor to TheAviationist based in Lecce, Italy. A graduate in Industral Engineering he's also studying to achieve a Master Degree in Aerospace Engineering. Electronic Warfare, Loitering Munitions and OSINT techniques applied to the world of military operations and current conflicts are among his areas of expertise.

The Aviationist · by Stefano D'Urso · September 24, 2024

16. Russians Do Break: Historical and Cultural Context for a Prospective Ukrainian Victory

We must understand the nature (culture and history), objectives, and strategies of our adversaries. That is job one for the national security practitioner.

Russians Do Break: Historical and Cultural Context for a Prospective Ukrainian Victory - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Ben Connable · September 25, 2024

For major wars like the one being fought between Russia and Ukraine, the military, the people, and the state interact with one another to constitute a collective national will to fight. In most wars, one side loses its will to fight and is forced into an unfavorable negotiating position; it accepts a defeat short of annihilation.

Russia can be broken in Ukraine and thereby forced to accept this kind of negotiated defeat. I argue here that the approach Ukraine and its Western allies are taking — the combined attrition of Russia’s military and the compression of its economy — has a good chance of succeeding if it can be sustained.

To understand how Russia can be brought to its knees, we first need to understand the historical and cultural influences that strengthen Russian will to fight. These admittedly discouraging factors go a long way toward explaining why Russia has not yet quit more than two years into this extraordinarily costly war.

But all people have limits. Despite benefitting from the longstanding historical and cultural strengths I describe in this article, Russia quit in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and it quit in Chechnya in the 1990s. History informs forecasting. In the case of the Ukraine War, a realignment of historical factors suggests there are good prospects for Ukrainian and Western victory.

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Skewed Western Perceptions of Russians as Superhumans

When I proposed a study of Russian will to fight to a U.S. general officer in 2015, he told me that “Russians never quit.” While his assumption about the Russians was provably wrong, it also was understandable. At least from a modern Western perspective, seemingly mindless sacrifices made by Russian soldiers throughout modern history — particularly in World War II and in Ukraine since 2022 — can appear prima facie to be almost superhuman.

Since the full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, an endless barrage of videos has shown us waves of Russian troops launching themselves into Ukrainian defensive lines only to be blasted apart by artillery and drones, shredded by cannon and machinegun fire, and then routinely abandoned on the field by their commanders. Even after these repeated catastrophes, new waves of soldiers have trundled over flat ground in suicidal linear columns, all in broad daylight, to meet similar ends. In a ghastly series of Kiplingesque motifs, wounded Russian soldiers have “rolled to their rifles” and killed themselves (or blown themselves up with grenades, or even slit their own throats) seemingly without a moment’s hesitation.

On the home front, Russian President Vladimir Putin appears implacable as ever. Since 2022, hundreds of thousands of Russian men have volunteered or dutifully reported for service in waves, feeding what now looks even to the Russian public to be a meatgrinder offensive in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine. Two years into a war that has buckled their economy, killed or wounded perhaps over 300,000 servicemen, and produced many notable battlefield defeats, civilian willingness to back Putin’s war appears at least on the surface to be unwavering. Keeping in mind the poor conditions for survey work in Russia, Levada Center polling showed 77% support for the war in the beginning of 2024.

Many Western analysts could not image modern 21st century Western soldiers recklessly throwing their lives away or military leaders so cruelly ordering them forth with such seeming carelessness. Nor could they imagine today’s Western citizens rallying with such little sustained public opposition behind such a seemingly purposeless and unremittingly bloody war.

Given the assumption that Russians have an inexhaustible willingness to fight, public discussions of the Ukraine War have focused on other questions: Will the Russians run out of Soviet-era war stocks? Will their economy collapse? Will Ukraine’s Kursk incursion succeed or backfire? How many casualties can the Russians sustain? Will they overthrow Putin? This all has devolved into a flailing roller-coaster ride of excited prospects and dashed hopes, and then inevitably to exhausted patience. A more nuanced conversation about the cultural and historical factors influencing Russia’s will to fight can offer grounds for more optimism — before Western popular support for Ukraine fades even further, and before Western leaders lose their own will to fight.

The Historico-Cultural Context

To better understand the will to fight of any nation as a Clausewitzian trinity consisting of the army, the people, and the state, it helps to appreciate its history and culture. This approach requires some humility. History and culture can help us understand influences on behavior but they can easily be overstated; nothing accurately predicts complex human behavior in war. This historico-cultural context is a necessary starting point to help identify the point at which the Russians are more or less likely to quit.

A great deal of scholarship about Russian history and culture focuses on several key factors that shape the country’s approach to conflict: trauma, nationalism, spirituality, and fatalism. All four of these factors are closely interwoven and effectively inseparable: Trauma feeds fatalism, fatalism and spirituality feed nationalism, nationalism reinforces fatalism, and so on.

All these compelling factors emerge repeatedly in modern Russian propaganda, literature, video, and, perhaps most importantly, in the fleeting but often forthright insights we receive from Russian civilians and soldiers. They culminate in what may best be described by the late scholar Evgeny Yasin as a “tragic passivity” that has thus far rendered many Russians vulnerable to Putin’s finely tuned and omnipresent manipulations.

Trauma

Perceptions of trauma are visible as a deep current in Russians’ shared history. They also are anchored in a singular modern event: the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. Many Russians believe theirs is a nation of eternal and passive sufferers. And, of course, there are grounds for this belief. Despite the state’s increasingly vast access to resources from the 19th through the 21st centuries, average citizens of Russia and the Soviet Union lived in a general state of poverty and powerlessness.

Patrimonial state control ensured that average Russians outside of the Moscow bubble mechanics, teachers, farmers, bricklayers, store owners, oilfield workers, etc. — too often existed at the whim of a fickle and purposefully brutal state. To some extent, these conditions continue to exist in Russia in 2024. Rural and small town Russians, and many less-well-off urban Russians, are long accustomed to being manipulated and abused (really, traumatized) by state officials at all levels. Their general expectations for an equitable and hopeful life are, to be fair, broadly tempered.

Perhaps more directly relevant to understanding Russian will to fight in Ukraine is the trauma resulting from the collapse of the Soviet Union and its impact on Russian society and the economy, and on Russian leaders. Experts on modern Russian culture are clear about the impact of the immediate post-Soviet period: As we ask ourselves if economic sanctions will squeeze the Russians to the point of surrender, we must put ourselves in the shoes of Russians who suffered through the trauma of the 1990s, and also in the shoes of the children who have acquired that perception from their parents.

The collapse of the Soviet system proved disastrous for Russia. In the decade following the transition to an effectively capitalist free-market economy, production plummeted, inflation skyrocketed, the Russian currency tanked, and the standard of living for average Russians fell markedly. Mortality from alcoholism may have increased sevenfold just from 1991 to 1994, and aside from the pirate-oligarch nouveau riche, life expectancy dropped. Russians’ sense of national purpose and hope for the future declined. Russian culture atomized, necessitating a national rebirth.

Putin, who was himself deeply traumatized by the Soviet Union’s collapse, crafted that rebirth. Buoyed by conveniently high extractives revenues, Putin revitalized Russia’s economy. Employing what he once referred to as “cultural therapy,” he recentralized Russian society around nationalism and messianic spirituality (see below) and gave both ethnic and non-ethnic Russians living within the state’s borders a renewed sense of collective purpose. He continues to frame Western sanctions and support for Ukraine as a conspiracy intended to relegate Russia to the misery of the 1990s.

In interview after interview, many Russians — but certainly not all — share their belief that Putin saved them from their post-Soviet trauma. More importantly, they view their current prospects in the mid-2020s in relative contrast to the traumatic 1990s, and also to the ugly decline of the late 1980s. Therefore: As bad as it can get now or in the near future, at least it will be relatively better than it was.

Defensive Nationalism

Modern Russian nationalism, like that of many other countries, builds from both a narrative of existential threat and a messianic perception that the Russian people are spiritually anointed universal exemplars and, therefore, justified in expanding their power. Defensive nationalism helps us understand the willingness to make extraordinary sacrifices in any war, while spirituality and messianism — discussed further in the next section — help us understand how Putin and many Russians justify and are therefore motivated to win the Ukraine War.

Russians’ cultural memory of collective trauma is closely linked to their sense of perpetual external threat. Here too, history provides ready examples. For nearly a millennium, the state now known as Russia has been under either direct siege or the perceived threat of siege. It suffered repeated assaults dating at least from the 13th century Mongol invasion that destroyed Moscow, and its history includes at least six other invasions that directly threatened the city that became the Soviet, then Russian, capital.

No historical threat is more relevant to the contemporary Russian will to fight than the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in World War II. Reminders of the Great Patriotic War are omnipresent in daily Russian cultural life, reinforced in formal education, popular entertainment, ceremonies, and the ubiquitous statues and tributes to veterans and casualties. Most Russians are acutely aware of the roles their grandparents and great-grandparents played in the war. Putin continues to build new monuments to anchor today’s Russians in their mid-20th century past.

While Putin does not deserve all the credit for centralizing the Great Patriotic War in Russian consciousness — Russian pride and remembrance are longstanding and broadly lived — he certainly has leveraged this cultural memory to both shape and sustain the collective rationale for the Ukraine War. Putin has repeatedly worked to build a rhetorical bridge linking historical traumatic threats to the manufactured threat ostensibly posed by Ukraine.

Themes of unquestioning sacrifice are central to this anchored collective remembrance of the Great Patriotic War. Probably over 25 million Russian soldiers and civilians died in World War II. Russians have long perceived this sacrifice as an absolute necessity. Westerners might view Russians’ fond remembrance of such an enormous loss as perverse, but for many Russians the losses themselves are an almost unquestioned point of pride.

Modern Russian nationalism emphasizes the perceived collective need to fend of perpetual existential threats. Successfully fending off these threats has required sacrifice. Russian victory typically emerged only following extensive trauma; say, after a costly Mongol, Polish, or German invasion. Cultural memory of the Great Patriotic War organizes and frontloads this powerful narrative of nationalist sacrifice. So when the invasion of Ukraine is likened to a “Little Patriotic War,” or in any way compared to World War II, then collective, defensive, nationalist sacrifice is firmly established as an expectation for victory.

Orthodox Spirituality and Messianism

Russian spirituality influences will to fight in the Ukraine War through common interpretations of Russian Orthodox doctrine, the Russian Orthodox Church’s direct support of Putin’s war narrative, and its historical messianism. Russians certainly do not follow church doctrine in lockstep — many believers are ambivalent about its least flexible precepts — but orthodoxy plays an influential role in Russian life and its modern moral discourse.

This influence reinforces Russian patrimonialism. Individual will, or choice, is viewed by some church leaders and parishioners as sinful. In 2000, Archpriest Vladislav Sveshnikov wrote: “The principle of ‘I will’ is one of the dominant principles of sinful existence.” So at least from this perspective, Russia’s broader patrimonial culture — in the case of the church a literal patriarchy — and obedience to power are continuously reinforced.

Spiritual obedience and the subjugation of individuality transfer directly to the state, which historically has subsumed the Orthodox Church and applied spirituality to achieve its own ends. Therefore, when the church declared Russia’s violent and illegal attempt to annex Ukrainian territory a “holy war,” indelibly linking church to state, many Russians may have been receptive.

Putin had previously enlisted the church in building a rationale for invasion well before 2022. Church leaders also declared Putin’s 2015 intervention in Syria a holy war. Building from a longstanding link between Russia’s church and its armed forces, Putin ensured that the Russian military closely integrated Orthodox Church chaplains, rituals, iconography, and spiritual idealism into military life.

In his ongoing sermons, Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kiril — who is allegedly a former KGB officer or asset — routinely frames soldiers’ sacrifices in Ukraine as glorious patriotic duty. Kiril extends his exhortations to the entire Russian population, describing their continuing will to support the war as “spiritual mobilization.”

At the national-collective level, broader spirituality anchored in the church feeds into ethno-nationalist messianism. This complex factor can be briefly summed up as a collective belief that Russia is a great power ordained with spiritual purpose to lead at least the Eurasian landmass. While a sense of messianism may be unevenly shared across the Russian populace, it helps Putin activate the other facets of spirituality and nationalism to reinforce the Russian will to fight.

Fatalism

All of these key factors (and others not listed here) contribute to a sense of fatalism. Many Russians — influenced by cultural memories of trauma and threat, conditioned by church and state through patrimony and fear to be obediently sacrificial, and motivated by genuine spirituality and nationalism — are, at least for now, prepared to accept whatever fate may hold in Ukraine and in the broader struggle against the West. They practice this fatalism through abdication and sacrifice.

Abdication is constantly evident in the blind acceptance of state control. In many of the more than 1,000 street interviews compiled by Daniil Orain in Moscow, other cities, and various rural areas since 2022, many Russians make plain that they willingly and purposefully submit to whatever policy on any subject the state might enact. Those in Orain’s videos who still openly disagree with the war — there are surprisingly many despite the looming threat of arrest — do so with the verbal equivalent of a shrug.

Sacrifice is constantly evident on the battlefield in Ukraine, where soldiers fatalistically submit to horrific treatment by their own leaders and fellow soldiers, hopeless combat missions seemingly designed to kill them, and unending deployments that may now require frontline service until either victory or death. While they routinely complain, and while some flee or surrender, at least through late 2024, hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers were still demonstrating the daily will to fight, act, or persevere.

So When, and Under What Circumstances, Might the Russians Quit?

These worrisome descriptions mitigate toward a continuing Russian will to fight over time. However, history points to useful examples that help us understand when abdication and sacrifice might be tipped over into defeat. As I wrote up front, Russians do break. They have broken on the battlefield, including in Ukraine in late 2024. They broke on the home front during the Afghanistan and first Chechen wars. And Putin is breakable. While he is deeply fixated on Ukraine, he is also a creature of consummate self-interest. Self-interest is a potential weakness.

First, look to the battlefield. Well over 5 million Red Army soldiers surrendered to the Germans in World War II. Probably thousands more surrendered to irregular Chechen fighters in the mid-1990s. Data on total Russian prisoners of war in Ukraine is not reliable, but at least thousands of Russians have lost the will to fight and surrendered. Some broke even during the 2022 invasion. Entire units collapsed and fled in Kharkiv later that year. Probably over 600 Russians surrendered in Kursk just in the first weeks of the 2024 incursion. Russian soldiers can and do break.

On the home front, Russian civilians hit breaking points during both the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. As the Soviet war in Afghanistan ground on beyond its second year, it appeared that a combination of casualties (perhaps only one-tenth of those suffered thus far in Ukraine), increasing economic decline, and a general loss of belief in the war’s purpose took their toll. Recruiting and conscription numbers fell, and eventually Soviet leaders came to view the war as a “bleeding wound.” They withdrew in defeat. Catastrophe in Chechnya in 1994 also was fed by, and in turn led to, wavering Russian will to fight. These were entirely rational reactions to bad policies, bad treatment of soldiers, and bad economic conditions.

Putin has a breaking point, or at least a point at which he will settle on terms he finds unfavorable. While he presently retains dominant control over the state and enjoys at least an imposed version of popular support, Putin is aging and may be weakening. His surprisingly passive and initially incoherent response to Yevgeny Prigozhin’s revolt in 2023 caused a reexamination of his carefully constructed aura of invulnerability. Putin’s equally lethargic response to Ukraine’s 2024 Kursk incursion and his increasingly fantastical claims about Russia’s economy reinforce perceptions that he may be hurting.

So where does this all lead? While history is not necessarily predictive, at least the cases of Afghanistan and Chechnya (in 1994) suggest that Russia’s biggest vulnerability may lie at the intersection between battlefield casualties and economic strain.

Russian leaders appear to be aware of this worrisome problem in Ukraine. Generals are doing their best to hide casualties and keep wounded and distraught soldiers from returning home where, like the Afghansky of the 1980s, they might undermine popular support. They are desperately trying to use mercenaries, convicts, foreign troops, and unempowered mobilized troops to soak up casualties in order to keep their contract army intact. But Russia may be running out of cannon fodder. Military personnel costs are skyrocketing. Meanwhile, Putin is doing his best to maintain a veneer of economic normality. But his economy is almost certainly suffering under Western sanctions and market isolation.

Therefore, despite all the historico-cultural factors mitigating toward Russian endurance in this war, practical realities seem likely to intrude. Russia’s efforts to caulk over its vulnerabilities may be successful in the short run, perhaps through the beginning of 2025. But there is good reason to expect that the combined Ukrainian and Western strategy focused on pressuring Russia through battlefield losses and economic compression will succeed.

War is, of course, a two-sided contest of opposing wills, and there is always the uncomfortable possibility of the West losing its will first. Understanding why Russia is still fighting, and when its will might break, can help articulate a compelling theory of victory for Ukraine and, in doing so, help sustain the West’s own commitment.

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Ben Connable, PhD is an independent research leader, adjunct professor of security studies at Georgetown University, and author of the forthcoming book, Ground Combat: Puncturing the Myths of Modern War.

Image: German Federal Archives via Wikimedia Commons

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Ben Connable · September 25, 2024

17. In Brief: What to Expect out of the United Nations General Assembly

In Brief: What to Expect out of the United Nations General Assembly - War on the Rocks

Mark Kersten, Anjali Dayal, Richard Gowan, and Hugh Dugan

https://warontherocks.com/2024/09/in-brief-what-to-expect-out-of-the-united-nations-general-assembly/

September 25, 2024

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A lot happens every day. Alliances shift, leaders change, and conflicts erupt. With In Brief, we’ll help you make sense of it all. Each week, experts will dig deep on a single issue happening in the world to help you better understand it. 

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This week, as wars continue to rage in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, and beyond, world leaders are convening in New York for the 79th annual United Nations General Assembly. We asked four experts to tell us what they expect to come out of the summit, what issues they expect to take center stage, and if they think the meeting will yield any substantial solutions to the world’s many ongoing conflicts and disasters. Read more below.

Mark Kersten

Assistant Professor, The University of the Fraser Valley &

Senior Consultant, Wayamo Foundation

The saber-rattling and palpable fears over escalating violence in the Middle East are set to dominate the 79th U.N. General Assembly. The situation in Gaza and the West Bank will be front and center on the agenda. The ongoing violence there is a fulcrum for the international community. Indeed, what purpose does multilateral diplomacy serve if it cannot abate a war that no major power has an interest in deepening and worsening? Can states set aside their differences to address atrocities committed in Israel, Palestine, and the wider region? Will Israel’s novel — and terrifying — corruption of supply chains to place booby traps into pagers and walkie-talkies bring a renewed sense of drive to end this war, or will the violence and war crimes continue to spill outwards as capitals bicker and finger-point? If leaders do make progress, the benefits are clear: They can turn to resolving intractable violence in Ukraine and Sudan and to the pressing question of climate change. Or might some make the connection between the two? The climate and human cost of the world’s wars is growing. The planet and the people in the crosshairs of internecine conflicts can ill afford continued inaction. Many will look to the U.N. General Assembly to offer a roadmap to better. If they are ignored, calls for reform of the U.N. will only grow louder.

Anjali Dayal

Associate Professor of International Politics

Fordham University

This year’s U.N. General Assembly follows the Summit of the Future, a multilateral conference and set of agreements years in the making and convened to reimagine a United Nations more fit to respond to 21st-century challenges and to the disasters future generations might face. It also unfolds in the context of wars in Gaza and Ukraine that highlight the moribund midcentury Security Council mechanisms that allow great powers to gridlock globally popular collective action in the face of humanitarian catastrophes. On Sunday, the summit’s headline Pact of the Future passed with resounding support — 143 to 7 — from member states, despite last-minute efforts by Russia to derail the process. Although the document falls short on many fronts, its passage is a remarkable diplomatic achievement, given widespread cynicism about the institution and member states’ radically different visions for the future. It reaffirms both member states’ key commitments to core U.N. principles of multilateralism and sovereign non-intervention and support for newer, more fragile principles, like the protection of civilians in conflict. Critically, it makes U.N. Security Council reform a key collective goal — a move that the Biden administration has explicitly endorsed in a set of speeches over the last two weeks that propose permanent seats for African states, and a move that would fundamentally change the dynamics of the body that sets international law on the use of force. Accordingly, while much of the attention at this year’s U.N. General Assembly will understandably go toward wars the U.N. cannot stop, leaders will address its chamber with the understanding that they want the U.N. to endure.

Richard Gowan

U.N. Director

International Crisis Group

The wars in the Middle East, Ukraine, and Sudan will loom large at the U.N. General Assembly this week. Other challenges, like climate change, will also feature. But the main focus will be matters of war and peace. Virtually all leaders will call for a ceasefire in Gaza, although the escalation between Israel and Hizballah could overshadow events at the United Nations.

Ukrainian diplomats fret that Gaza has shifted attention away from their struggle against Russia. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is visiting New York, but his recent proposals for deep strikes against Russian targets may sit badly with non-Western leaders, who would prefer to see early peace talks.

The United States is leading a push to focus attention on the war in Sudan, which has displaced some 10 million people. The United States and other powers are running a series of side-meetings on the war, in the hope of persuading the Sudanese factions to de-escalate and work toward a ceasefire.

The fact that the United Nations has failed to resolve these conflicts to date has led many of the world organization’s members to worry about its decline. At a Summit of the Future on United Nations reform this weekend, governments signed off on a call to accelerate talks on reforming the Security Council to make it more effective. That could still take years.

Hugh Dugan

Former Special Assistant to the President & Senior Director for International Organization Affairs, National Security Council

World leaders have convened at the United Nations again, this time to include a Summit of the Future. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called this summit to expand international cooperation given ”imminent world collapse” from political strife, uneven development, and environmental degradation. But he has asserted that that the chessboard is to blame for bad chess – with no mention of his players. He does not offer to work harder or smarter. Rather, his pitch is for even more U.N. bureaucracy.

Let’s better have held a “Summit of the Present,” to prepare a report card on the Secretary-General and his staff asking, “Where have you been over your nine-year watch over your admitted world collapse? What has the $3.4 billion annual budget funded by taxpayers been buying?” Wearied of Guterres, some are urging an early retirement a la Joe Biden.

Instead of delivering on U.N. membership’s taskings, Guterres’ and his staff claim to “know better” while accomplishing much less. Where are their plans for resolving Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan crises? Why was migration missing from the Summit? Where is the staff accountability for its role in spreading deadly cholera in Haiti?

Guterres speaking about the future has distracted us. But in the present he has been an absentee administrator enabling inefficacy and even corruption in the organization. It would seem that this U.N. Secretary-General has little future left to build a legacy of his own.

***

That’s all for this week’s In Brief. For more information on what’s happening, head to our site or download the War on the Rocks app.

18. The ‘Library Rats’ Who Helped Win World War II

And we need today's Library Rats to help us successfully prosecute irregular, unconventional. and political warfare.

There are still lessons to be learned from the OSS.

The ‘Library Rats’ Who Helped Win World War II

In her lively “Book and Dagger,” the historian Elyse Graham rescues a cast of scholar-spies from obscurity.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/24/books/review/book-and-dagger-elyse-graham.html

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The American coordinator of information William J. Donovan, seen here in 1942, pillaged the humanities and social science faculties of American universities to staff his newly formed Office of Strategic Services.Credit...Keystone/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images

By Ben Macintyre

Ben Macintyre’s latest book is “The Siege: A Six-Day Hostage Crisis and the Daring Special Forces Operation That Shocked the World.”

Sept. 24, 2024, 

5:01 a.m. ET

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BOOK AND DAGGER: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II, by Elyse Graham

The world of spying is traditionally divided into two categories: human intelligence and signals intelligence, known as humint and sigint.

The first is composed of secrets (variously defined) obtained from individuals and organizations with or without their knowledge. Sigint is the technical gathering of information through intercepted messages: letters, telegrams, telephone calls and, latterly, emails, texts and the swirling blizzard of electronic communication.

Image

But these two pillars are themselves founded on and feed into the far less glamorous work of intelligence analysis: sifting through huge amounts of data to establish a clearer picture of an enemy (or ally), his plans and dispositions. Some of this material is obtained clandestinely, but much of it is combed from open sources, painstakingly studied, marshaled into concision and then passed on to spies, soldiers and politicians.

This is the least exciting part of espionage, not so much cloak-and-dagger as filing cabinet and index card, a network of hidden spies burrowing in the background: The work is time-consuming, complex, frequently thankless and vital to the efficient functioning of a modern intelligence system.

Elyse Graham, a historian and professor at Stony Brook University, has set out to rescue some of the worker bees of intelligence from obscurity by exploring their contribution to victory in World War II. She passionately argues that many of these fact-gatherers and analysts were not professional spies, but American academics, scholars, liberal arts professors, historians, librarians, anthropologists, artists, bookworms and art experts. Hers is a plea for a better understanding of the role played in espionage by the book, the imagined story, the artist, the writer, the humanities and the “library rats” who study them.

This was not solely a war of soldiers and scientists. “This was also the historian’s war, the book collector’s war, the artist’s war,” she writes. “It was the professor’s war.”

In June 1942, the Office of Strategic Services was founded by William “Wild Bill” Donovan — a lawyer, World War I veteran and keen bibliophile — to coordinate intelligence behind enemy lines. He immediately went hunting for recruits in the humanities and social science faculties of American universities to work in the Research and Analysis branch, people with the academic training (and patience) to gather facts as widely as possible, understand, refine and then assemble them into usable form.

The O.S.S. was the first spy agency with the resources and energy to analyze intelligence on an industrial scale: The work of Research and Analysis — mining nuggets of valuable information from a mass of factual rubble — would form the intellectual foundations of the future C.I.A.

The former secretary of state Henry Stimson once loftily pronounced that “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” As the author writes, “Gentlemen may not read other people’s letters, but scholars do. They’re good at it.”

Graham tells the story through three principal characters: Adele Kibre, an archivist with a Ph.D. in Latin from University of Chicago; Joseph Curtiss, a professor of English at Yale; and the Yale history professor Sherman Kent, a rambunctious, foulmouthed figure who favored red suspenders and could “throw a knife better than a Sicilian.”

While Curtiss gathered published material in neutral Istanbul under cover of collecting books for the Yale library, Kibre was dispatched to neutral Sweden (another espionage hotbed) to collect and photograph printed materials, including much about the Third Reich: propaganda, scientific and technical journals, an illegal pamphlet on how to desert from the German Army, privately printed books, atlases, directories, maps, telephone books, works on aeronautics, banking, synthetic petroleum, shipbuilding, statistics.

As chief of the Research and Analysis branch’s Europe-Africa division back in Washington, Kent was responsible for turning the mass of information into answers to specific questions: the optimal number of pellets in an aircraft shell, the percentage of synthetic rubber in German car tires, the precise length of the sidings on Moroccan railroads. This panning for precision was about as far from James Bond’s world as can be imagined, requiring an “almost superhuman resistance to boredom.”

Graham tells all this in jaunty if scattershot style, gleefully sliding into accounts of spycraft where the protagonists simply fabricated stories to bamboozle the enemy, such as the celebrated “Operation Mincemeat,” in which a dead body was invested with a fake identity and bogus papers to fool the Germans over the Sicily landings.

Sometimes, she fills in the blanks with speculative episodes, meetings and passages of dialogue. There is no need for fiction when the facts of wartime espionage are already barely credible.

“The war may have been fought in the battlefields, but it was won in the libraries,” she writes. This was the real genius of Allied intelligence: the employment of a vast range of gifted amateurs, “corkscrew thinkers” in Churchill’s words, many of whom emerged from the libraries to fight a war of paper, books and scholarship and — when it was all over — quietly shuffled back into the groves of academe.

BOOK AND DAGGER: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II | By Elyse Graham | Ecco | 400 pp. | $30

19. 2024 Deepfakes and Election Disinformation Report: Key Findings & Mitigation Strategies

Download th 22 page report here: https://go.recordedfuture.com/hubfs/reports/ta-2024-0924.pdf

Excerpts:

Countering the Deepfake Threat

• Speed and Accuracy: When deepfakes go viral, it’s essential to act quickly. Public figures should release authentic content to debunk false claims swiftly.
• Familiarity Campaigns: Encourage public figures to increase their visibility, allowing people to become familiar with their true likenesses.
• Copyright Leverage: Deepfakes that use copyrighted materials can be taken down via DMCA requests, providing a possible legal avenue to counter AI-generated disinformation.
• Advanced AI Detection: Governments and media outlets need to invest in AI-powered detection tools to identify and take down deepfakes before they cause significant harm.
• Collaboration with Fact-Checkers: Collaboration between social media platforms and fact-checking organizations will be essential in curbing the spread of deepfakes and false narratives.

Deepfakes will likely play a significant role in the 2024 US elections and global political processes, impacting outcomes by damaging reputations and eroding trust in elections. Regulations struggle to keep up with the evolving technology, especially in foreign interference and election manipulation. Research suggests that deepfakes, beyond a certain quality, don't necessarily need to be highly sophisticated to cause harm. Therefore, focusing on response and mitigation strategies is more effective, including exposing audiences to the real likeness of impersonated individuals and fact-checking narratives swiftly.

2024 Deepfakes and Election Disinformation Report: Key Findings & Mitigation Strategies

recordedfuture.com · by RecordedFuture

The rise of deepfakes poses significant threats to elections, public figures, and the media. Recent Insikt Group research highlights 82 deepfakes targeting public figures in 38 countries between July 2023 and July 2024. Deepfakes aimed at financial gain, election manipulation, character assassination, and spreading non-consensual pornography are on the rise. To counter these risks, organizations must act swiftly, increase awareness, and implement advanced AI detection tools.

2024 Deepfakes and Political Disinformation: Emerging Threats & Mitigation Strategies

The proliferation of AI-generated deepfakes is reshaping the political and disinformation landscape. Between July 2023 and July 2024, deepfakes impersonating public figures surfaced in 38 countries, raising concerns about election interference, character defamation, and more. Here’s a detailed breakdown of these emerging threats and strategies to mitigate them.

Key Trends in Deepfake Use

82 deepfakes were identified in 38 countries, with 30 nations holding elections during the dataset timeframe or having elections planned for 2024. Political figures, heads of state, candidates, and journalists were targeted, amplifying the potential to disrupt democratic processes.

Primary Objectives

Scams (26.8%): Deepfakes are frequently used to promote financial scams, leveraging heightened attention during elections. Prominent figures like Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President-Elect Claudia Sheinbaum were impersonated in fraudulent schemes.

False Statements (25.6%): Deepfakes often fabricate public figures’ statements to mislead voters. For instance, fake audios emerged of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer criticizing his own party, and Taiwan’s Ko Wen-Je making false accusations.

Electioneering (15.8%): Political parties increasingly use deepfakes to influence voter behavior. Turkey’s President Erdoğan used a deepfake to link an opposition leader to terrorist groups, while Argentina saw deepfakes in the Milei vs. Massa election battle.

Character Assassination (10.9%): Figures like Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. have been depicted engaging in unethical behavior, eroding public trust.

Non-consensual Pornography (10.9%): Women in politics are disproportionately targeted with deepfake pornography, creating reputational damage and deterring political participation.

Emerging Deepfake Tactics

Several new tactics have emerged, demonstrating how sophisticated deepfake operations have become:

• Fake Whistleblowers: Using AI to create deepfakes of third-parties posing as whistleblowers, influence actors seek to manipulate public opinion by fabricating scandals.
• Audio Deepfakes: A growing trend is the use of fake audio clips to create false statements, like President Biden allegedly urging voters to skip primaries.
• Spoofing Media Assets: Influence actors increasingly use legitimate news branding, such as logos or overlays from France24 and BBC, to give their deepfakes credibility.
• Foreign Leader Impersonation: Videos like those featuring China’s Xi Jinping or the US's Donald Trump have been repurposed to influence domestic elections in Taiwan and South Africa, respectively.
• Family Member Impersonation: Deepfakes are even targeting family members of political figures, adding another layer of disinformation and manipulation.

The Impact of Deepfakes on Elections

Deepfakes have become a tool in political warfare. In Slovakia, for example, a deepfake audio emerged just before elections, spreading disinformation about electoral fraud, while Turkey saw a candidate withdraw from its presidential race after the release of an alleged deepfake sex tape. The disinformation potential of deepfakes, especially in volatile political climates, is vast. The risk of discrediting political candidates and spreading false narratives makes the need for advanced countermeasures more urgent.

Countering the Deepfake Threat

• Speed and Accuracy: When deepfakes go viral, it’s essential to act quickly. Public figures should release authentic content to debunk false claims swiftly.
• Familiarity Campaigns: Encourage public figures to increase their visibility, allowing people to become familiar with their true likenesses.
• Copyright Leverage: Deepfakes that use copyrighted materials can be taken down via DMCA requests, providing a possible legal avenue to counter AI-generated disinformation.
• Advanced AI Detection: Governments and media outlets need to invest in AI-powered detection tools to identify and take down deepfakes before they cause significant harm.
• Collaboration with Fact-Checkers: Collaboration between social media platforms and fact-checking organizations will be essential in curbing the spread of deepfakes and false narratives.

Deepfakes will likely play a significant role in the 2024 US elections and global political processes, impacting outcomes by damaging reputations and eroding trust in elections. Regulations struggle to keep up with the evolving technology, especially in foreign interference and election manipulation. Research suggests that deepfakes, beyond a certain quality, don't necessarily need to be highly sophisticated to cause harm. Therefore, focusing on response and mitigation strategies is more effective, including exposing audiences to the real likeness of impersonated individuals and fact-checking narratives swiftly.

To read the entire analysis, click here to download the report as a PDF.

recordedfuture.com · by RecordedFuture

20. Hezbollah says Israel is dropping leaflets in Lebanon with ‘dangerous barcodes’

Who thinks leaflets are an anachronism?

Hezbollah says Israel is dropping leaflets in Lebanon with ‘dangerous barcodes’

https://san.com/cc/hezbollah-says-israel-is-dropping-leaflets-in-lebanon-with-dangerous-barcodes/

Yesterday

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By Lauren Taylor (Reporter), Alex Delia (Producer), Jake Maslo (Video Editor)

Hezbollah has accused Israel of employing new analog methods of cyber warfare after communication devices were banned by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps earlier this week. The accusations come as leaflets reportedly dropped by Israel have appeared in the eastern Bekaa Valley, according to Hezbollah’s media office on Tuesday, Sept. 24.

Images of the leaflets were shared on social media, including on X, formerly known as Twitter. The leaflets contain a warning addressed to residents of the Bekaa Valley, stating that Hezbollah activity has forced the Israel Defense Forces to move against military positions in the area.

The message reads: 

“Urgent warning to the residents of Bekaa. Hezbollah activity forces the IDF to move against military positions in the village, and the IDF does not want to harm you. If you are in a building where Hezbollah weapons are located, you must leave the village within 2 hours and move 1,000 meters away or to the nearest central school. Do not return until you receive a new message. Anyone near Hezbollah facilities or weapons is putting their life and the lives of their family at risk.”

The leaflet, which is allegedly signed by the IDF, includes a QR code in the lower right corner, instructing residents to scan it to view a block map of their area. Hezbollah, however, claims the QR code is a “dangerous barcode” that will extract all information from any device used to scan it.

The development follows an ongoing series of unconventional warfare tactics used against Hezbollah, including a deadly strike in September that targeted communication devices such as pagers and walkie-talkies. Israel has not yet officially commented on the incident or its involvement.

Related Stories

• Israel kills Hezbollah commander during deadliest attack in Beirut in years
• Netanyahu: Israel may shift focus to Hezbollah in Lebanon
• More blasts rock Lebanon, a day after mass pager attack wounds thousands

21. Hearing Wrap Up: House Oversight Committee Warns of CCP’s Infiltration of U.S. Industries and Federal Agencies

Multiple videos at the link.

Unresticted Warfare.

Published: Sep 24, 2024

Hearing Wrap Up: House Oversight Committee Warns of CCP’s Infiltration of U.S. Industries and Federal Agencies

https://oversight.house.gov/release/hearing-wrap-up-house-oversight-committee-warns-of-ccps-infiltration-of-u-s-industries-and-federal-agencies/

Federal agencies must develop comprehensive plan to counter CCP

WASHINGTON—The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability held a hearing today titled, “Defending America from the Chinese Communist Party’s Political Warfare, Part III.” During the hearing, experts detailed how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has successfully waged an influence and infiltration campaign targeting critical U.S. industries, while the federal government has failed to develop a comprehensive strategy to protect the American people and combat the CCP’s dangerous tactics. Members emphasized that the Oversight Committee has gathered evidence showing the CCP’s targeting and infiltration of key federal agencies. The Committee remains committed to ensuring the federal government takes every necessary action to protect Americans from the CCP’s political and economic warfare.

Key Takeaways:

The House Oversight Committee’s investigation has found the Biden-Harris Administration has no government-wide strategy to combat CCP warfare. The House Oversight Committee conducted oversight of 25 sectors of the federal government, consulted with experts from government, military, and private sector, and held briefings with 23 federal agencies.

Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.): “The CCP’s ultimate goal is to weaken and destroy its ‘main enemy,’ which the Party has identified as America. The Committee has conducted oversight of 25 sectors of the federal government to understand if a ‘whole-of-government’ approach to the CCP threat is sufficient or even in existence. Consulting with experts from the U.S. government, military, and private sector—and holding briefings with 23 federal agencies—the Committee has found that the CCP is waging a “war without weapons” against America. And the Biden-Harris Administration has no government-wide strategy to combat CCP warfare.”    

Experts testified about the serious threat posed by the CCP and provided comprehensive recommendations the federal government can adopt to counter CCP political warfare and protect Americans from China’s ongoing influence operation.

The Hon. Joseph Cella, Former United States Ambassador and Co-Founder and Director of the citizen-led Michigan China Economic Security and Review Group: “My testimony today focuses on failures on the federal government to both understand the depth and breadth of this threat and to effectively counter it. I witnessed firsthand the CCP’s impactful use of political and economic warfare across the Indo- Pacific. Through this, China has effectively bypassed our historic defensive barriers… In order for our common defense in this Cold War with China, I am offering initial recommendations for federal agencies to consider.

• Read Amb. Cella’s testimony and recommendations to combat CCP political warfare here.

Dr. Bradley Thayer, Founding Member on the Committee on Present Danger China: “The CCP has waged political warfare against the United States government since it seized power in China in 1949 and has done so very successfully. The result has had a devastating impact on the national security of the United States of America. The CCP effectively misled our Executive Branch to ignore the People’s Republic of China as a rising existential threat. The U.S. Government and the American people are not prepared intellectually, ideologically, organizationally, nor militarily. I will provide eight recommendations that the House Oversight and Accountability Committee can employ to assist the federal government.

• Read Dr. Thayer’s testimony and recommendations to combat CCP political warfare here.

Mr. Robert Atkinson, President of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation: “I commend the Committee for your important efforts to better understand what U.S. government agencies are doing to understand and respond to the techno-economic challenge China presents. For agencies to respond effectively, policymakers need to understand the nature of the threat accurately and fully. Agencies and departments will need to be pressured to prioritize winning the techno-economic war with China, just as containing and ultimately winning against the Soviets was a top priority for many federal agencies in the first Cold War.”

• Read Mr. Atkinson’s testimony and recommendations to combat CCP political warfare here.

The House Oversight Committee will continue to expose CCP political warfare and work to ensure the federal government formulates a plan to combat CCP threats to protect all Americans.

Chairman James Comer: “America’s adversary is the Chinese Communist Party—not the Chinese people, who are victims themselves of the regime. In the face of the cold war the CCP is waging, federal agencies should fulfill their responsibilities to the American people. Federal officials should use their platforms and authorities to equip America to strengthen their communities and create the new technologies that will secure a strong future for the nation. A government-wide strategy is decades overdue. The American people deserve better from their government—and I hope that federal officials will listen to the constructive recommendations today.”

Member Highlights:

Chairman Comer asked witnesses if federal agencies are even aware of the legitimate threat the CCP poses and what solutions federal agencies can adopt to secure Americans from CCP political warfare.

Chairman Comer: “Is the average government agency aware of the threat the CCP poses? Does anyone have confidence that they are aware? We aren’t even talking about if they have a plan right now to combat CCP infiltration.”

Dr. Thayer:“Not sufficiently.”

Mr. Atkinson: “Overall I do not believe they are.”

Amb. Cella: “Woefully not commensurate with the current threat.”

Chairman Comer: “If you could convince federal agencies to do one thing to protect Americans from CCP political warfare what would it be?”

Dr. Thayer:“Work with Congress to formulate a strategy.”

Mr. Atkinson: “Each agency needs to develop an internal plan and strategy to counter the CCP.”

Amb. Cella: “Agencies need to develop a top to bottom assessment and plug gaping holes that exist.”

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) discussed the deliberate methods employed by the CCP to infiltrate U.S. economic institutions and financial systems.

Rep. Foxx: “We see repeated instances that the United States fails to comprehend the threat posed by the CCP and allows China to exploit our institutions. How is it that the federal government has failed to counter CCP political warfare? People are smart enough to understand the China threat. This Committee and others have uncovered the CCP’s hyper aggressive political warfare, including efforts to weaken America through economic warfare. Based on your experience Ambassador, what is China’s goal here?   

Amb. Cella: “I will share my experience here while serving in Michigan and refer to my testimony. I witnessed malign influence through a subnational incursion and influence operation by a PRC-based and CCP-tied lithium-ion battery manufacturer, Gotion, in rural Green Charter Township, Michigan. Roughly 70 miles from Gotion’s proposed lithium-ion facility is the secure U.S. military installation, Camp Grayling, which is the hub of the National All-Domain Warfighting Center, which trains our troops and those of our allies, including Taiwan, in strategic and tactical battle operations. U.S. national security and intelligence agencies convened a group of bi-partisan state and local elected officials and business executives across the country to warn them of China’s political warfare. Despite these warnings, all supporting the Gotion project brazenly defied them.”

Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) stated that while our State Department is focused on social re-engineering and lecturing the world, the CCP is gaining influence through financial investments in foreign roads and bridges.   

Rep. Cloud: “The CCP is engaged in trade warfare, biological warfare, biochemical warfare. China is even taking advantage of what is happening at the border and causing us to use resources. We need to recognize the moment, and I haven’t felt that our own State Department has recognized this… When we talk to China we hear about roads and bridges and when we talk to our State Department, we get a lecture. It is social re-engineering.    

Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) pressed for information on China targeting and purchasing U.S. farmland.

Rep. Grothman: “We have a lot of farmland in Wisconsin. We know China is seeking to acquire farmland. How big of a threat is this?”

Dr. Thayer: “This is a very serious threat. We need the food and agricultural products that are produced on that land. Often times the land is not used or used for nefarious purposes. By taking that farmland, if you think like the CCP, is that you are taking those assets from the United States. They are also sending a message that they are getting more powerful.”

Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) broke down the CCP’s efforts to infiltrate U.S. academic institutions and how critical academic studies funded by taxpayers have fallen into the hands of the CCP.

Rep. Higgins: “The CCP has a presence within our university structure across the country. Our university culture is designed to include a freedom of expression. I support that. But it still carries a risk to the public when it relates to the CCP. Are you familiar with a report that identified over 8,000 publications that covered emerging AI, nuclear and high energy physics, and emerging modern weaponry of the 21st century that were funded by DOD through our universities? More than 2,000 of these DOD funded papers had authors who were directly affiliated with China’s defense research. What dangers does this present to the entire world? We are willingly funding the advancement of CCP weapons through our own university systems.”   

Mr. Atkinson: “It is outrageous. Any public or private university that receives Chinese money should also be ineligible to receive federal funding. These is no way we should allow CCP companies to fund our research.”

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) highlighted federal departments and agencies are currently vulnerable to CCP influence and need a plan to counter CCP political warfare.

Rep. Sessions: “What are we doing to counter the CCP threat? Do we just let this continue to go on? I think this is an issue we can find common ground on. We have a problem, and the federal government needs to get itself together to protect the American people.”

Amb. Cella: “We need to operate with eyes wide open. There has been complacency. We need to be informed about this threat. The fact we don’t have our footing or plan is outrageous.”

Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.) emphasized that Michigan lawmakers recently green-lit $800 million in taxpayer dollars for the construction of a CCP-tied battery plant project near an important U.S. intelligence operation and military training facility.

Rep. McClain: “The CCP is clearly not our friend. Lawmakers from my state in Michigan have approved nearly $800 million in taxpayer dollars to incentivize the construction of the Gotion plant. Gotion Inc. is a subsidiary company of Gotion high tech which is a state-owned company of the CCP. Lawmakers are using taxpayer dollars to pay the CCP to implant thousands of Chinese workers and billions worth of Chinese technology strategically close to an intelligence program and military facility. Coincidence? I think not. Anyone looking can see this is a troubling pattern.”  

Rep. Nick Langworthy (R-N.Y.) noted that the Trump Administration implemented strong and effective resistance to the CCP, but the Biden-Harris Administration shifted away from these strategies.

Rep. Langworthy: “How did the Biden-Harris Administration shift away from President Trump’s strategy of strong and effective resistance to the CCP threat?”

Dr. Thayer: “The Biden-Harris Administration moved away in terms of political signaling to allies that engagement was returning. As a result, the CCP recognized that they could increase hyper aggressive activities. Messaging is essential. Trump signaled China was a threat… the Biden-Harris Administration has regrettably and sadly backed away from it. We have seen under this Administration a return of hyper aggression by China.”  

Read More:

Comer: Federal Government Lacks Cohesive Strategy to Combat the CCP’s Political Warfare and Influence Operation

Hearing Wrap Up: Federal Agencies Have Succumbed to CCP Influence and the Oversight Committee is Demanding Answers

Hearing Wrap Up: The Federal Government Must Effectively Combat the CCP’s Influence and Infiltration Campaign

22. Former destroyer captain pitches faster, cheaper solution for defending Guam

Former destroyer captain pitches faster, cheaper solution for defending Guam

Stars and Stripes · by Seth Robson · September 24, 2024

Soldiers stand near a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, launcher on Guam, Nov. 30, 2023. (Seth Robson/Stars and Stripes)

The Pentagon should rethink its plans for missile defense on Guam and consider less expensive technology with a lighter footprint, according to a former Navy destroyer captain.

Retired naval officer J.D. Gainey called for a pause on plans for Guam’s Enhanced Integrated Air and Missile Defense System during an online forum Friday.

Gainey, who specializes in Indo-Pacific security, commanded the USS Hopper, an Aegis-equipped destroyer, and was part of a 2018 effort to plan to defend Guam from air and missile attacks, according to the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, the group that sponsored the forum.

After retiring from the Navy, Gainey joined the board of the Virginia-based nonprofit that lobbies for missile defense, deployment and development, according to its website.

The threat to Guam includes ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missiles, Gainey said during the forum, noting that China has demonstrated the ability to target forces at a range of 2,000 miles.

The Missile Defense Agency’s plan to defend Guam calls for up to 20 new military sites across the island, to be operational by 2027.

“The MDA and the Army need to strategically locate and integrate various system components, including a command and control center, radars, sensors, missile launchers, missile interceptors, and support facilities, at multiple sites around Guam,” the agency states on its website.

However, Gainey said the cost of the dispersed missile defense system will be astronomical.

“We need to take a pause,” he said, before adding that the requirement to defend the island remains the same, along with the need to be ready by 2027.

The U.S. military projects air and sea power from Guam, its westernmost Pacific territory.

The cost of planned military construction on the island will likely increase beyond a projected $60 billion, alliance chairman Riki Ellison said during the forum.

Meanwhile, Chinese President Xi Jinping has said he wants his military ready to invade Taiwan by 2027, Ellison said.

“There has to be capabilities to defend against the best threats that China is deploying,” he said.

The Navy would probably assign four Aegis destroyers to defend Guam in a crisis if the island’s land-based missile defense system isn’t ready, Ellison said.

Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers are equipped with the Aegis Combat System, which uses high-tech radars and computers to track enemy missiles so they can be shot down with interceptor missiles.

The distributed missile defense system planned for Guam involves truck-mounted, mobile launchers.

That plan requires numerous safe areas where missile booster rockets may fall, up to 1,000 service members and support services such as schools and a commissary, said Mark Montgomery, a retired Navy rear admiral and an alliance board member.

A better option against a hypersonic missile threat would be a pair of vertical launch systems, of the type installed on Aegis destroyers, defend Andersen Air Force Base and Naval Base Guam, Montgomery said during the forum.

That plan could be ready in 2 ½ years and would free up Aegis destroyers to defend aircraft carriers or attack the enemy with Tomahawk missiles in a contingency, Montgomery said.

The Navy should man the system, but the Army could support it with its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, and Patriot missile launchers on Guam if they are available, he said,

Stars and Stripes · by Seth Robson · September 24, 2024

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com