Quotes of the Day:
“It must be remembered that some groups will ignore any constitutional provision in their aim to establish themselves as new dictators. Therefore, a permanent role will exist for the population to apply political defiance and noncooperation against would-be dictators and to preserve democratic structures, rights, and procedures.”
- Gene Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy
“All succeeding political philosophy is a footnote and a commentary on Plato.”
- Michael Curtis, The Great Political Theories, Volume 1
“Given the tendency of nations, particularly great powers, to engage in war unjustifiably and to set in motion the apparatus of the state to suppress dissent, the respect accorded to pacifism serves the purpose of alerting citizens to the wrongs that governments are prone to commit in their name.”
- John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
1. House Passes NDAA, With $24B In Extra Pentagon Funding and Strings Attached
2. Afghan Resistance Mulls Formation of Government in Exile
3. Ten Years after the al-Awlaki Killing: A Reckoning for the United States’ Drones Wars Awaits
4. What to Expect When You’re Expecting a National Defense Strategy
5. Securing an Orderly Departure for Afghan Refugees
6. Japan Names China, Russia And N Korea As Cyberspace Threats Who 'steal Military Info'
7. Biden Aims to Rival China’s Belt and Road in Latin America
8. Former Obama-Biden Advisor Elizabeth M. Allen Sworn-In as Asst Secretary of State for Global Public Affairs
9. Top US general: whisperer to presidents, target of intrigue
10. The Necessity of AUKUS
11. Uncovering the French Origins of COIN
12. Interview with Merkel’s Former Foreign Policy Adviser: “I Have Eliminated the ‘West’ from My Vocabulary”
13. Trapped in Afghanistan
14. The author of 'The Things They Carried' tells us what he carried in Vietnam
15. Ransomware attacks are another tool in the political warfare toolbox
1. House Passes NDAA, With $24B In Extra Pentagon Funding and Strings Attached
House Passes NDAA, With $24B In Extra Pentagon Funding and Strings Attached - Breaking Defense
The NDAA easily passed and now heads to the Senate.
Congress is one step closer to clearing its defense authorization bill. (Photo by Mark Makela/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON: The House of Representatives late Thursday passed its version of the fiscal year 2022 National Defense Authorization Act by a bipartisan 316-113 margin, paving the way for an investigation into the Afghanistan withdrawal, for women to register for the draft and for new ships and missiles.
The bill — which sets defense spending at $740 billion, $24 billion over what was requested by the Biden administration — now heads to the Senate, where changes undoubtedly await.
The NDAA is the annual defense policy bill. While it does not come with money — that comes from the appropriations committees — it serves as both a setter for policy inside the military and a signal of where lawmakers want the Pentagon to go.
“The NDAA represents the legislative process at its best. This year, like every year, we worked for months to identify policies where we agree, and where we don’t, and engaged in thorough, thoughtful debate on all of them,” HASC chairman Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., said in a statement. “In an era where our politics is so dominated by divisiveness, it has never mattered more to show the American people that democracy still works.”
Members debated almost 500 amendments in the week-long leadup to the vote. Among key parts of the NDAA:
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The bill would create a 12-member bipartisan commission to look into what happened in Afghanistan and whether there were intelligence missteps that led to America’s rapid evacuation of the country. It would also require annual reports on the administration’s handling of long-distance counter-terrorism efforts now that there are not forces on the ground.
- It would fund 13 new ships for the Navy, including three new Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, and includes money for 85 F-35 fighters.
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Funding for the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, the next-generation ICBM, was protected against an effort from progressives to defund the program and keep the Minuteman III ICBMs working until 2040. One hundred eighty-eight members voted in favor of the plan, which was not enough to slow the GBSD program.
- The House language includes a 2.7% pay raise for members of the military and sweeping changes to the sexual assault justice system. It also would require women to register for the draft for the first time, something expected to be backed fully in the Senate.
- It also puts in language that would require any Defense Secretary nominee who previously served in uniform to have been retired for a full 10 years, rather than the current requirement of seven years. This comes after back-to-back administration sought a waiver to clear Jim Mattis and Lloyd Austin as the top civilian at the Pentagon, neither of whom had cleared the seven year period at that time.
However, as has become commonplace in recent years, the budget won’t actually start when the fiscal year kicks in on Oct. 1. Democrats are currently organizing a vote on a continuing resolution that would keep the government operating through Dec. 3. It is expected that vote will break down on entirely partisan lines.
Under a CR, the Pentagon cannot launch any new programs that were not already funded in the previous fiscal year.
2. Afghan Resistance Mulls Formation of Government in Exile
We need to be paying attention to and assessing the resistance potential.
Afghan Resistance Mulls Formation of Government in Exile
Fighters, politicians, and generals will try to ape the Taliban’s playbook while the extremists sleepwalk into civil war.
Afghan resistance and anti-Taliban fighters stand guard in Afghanistan’s Panjshir province on Aug. 23. AHMAD SAHEL ARMAN/AFP via Getty Images
The leaders of Afghanistan’s armed resistance against the Taliban have left the country and are regrouping with former senior figures of the toppled Ghani administration with the aim of forming a government in exile.
Politicians including ministers and parliamentary deputies of the deposed government, as well as senior military figures, are in neighboring Tajikistan, seeking financial and military support to bolster a formal opposition to the extremists who took control of Afghanistan on Aug. 15, former officials living abroad said. Ahmad Massoud, son of a famed resistance leader, and former Afghan Vice President Amrullah Saleh, who both led a short-lived resistance in the Panjshir Valley northeast of Kabul, fled across the border in recent weeks after their efforts to hold out against the Taliban were crushed.
A former senior Afghan security official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the resistance comprises three broad categories: supporters of Saleh and Massoud’s National Resistance Front; former officers, including generals of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces, as well as senior officials of the former defense and interior ministries; and former ministers and deputy ministers. Discussions are in the early stages, and the groups are yet to unite ideologically.
The leaders of Afghanistan’s armed resistance against the Taliban have left the country and are regrouping with former senior figures of the toppled Ghani administration with the aim of forming a government in exile.
Politicians including ministers and parliamentary deputies of the deposed government, as well as senior military figures, are in neighboring Tajikistan, seeking financial and military support to bolster a formal opposition to the extremists who took control of Afghanistan on Aug. 15, former officials living abroad said. Ahmad Massoud, son of a famed resistance leader, and former Afghan Vice President Amrullah Saleh, who both led a short-lived resistance in the Panjshir Valley northeast of Kabul, fled across the border in recent weeks after their efforts to hold out against the Taliban were crushed.
A former senior Afghan security official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the resistance comprises three broad categories: supporters of Saleh and Massoud’s National Resistance Front; former officers, including generals of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces, as well as senior officials of the former defense and interior ministries; and former ministers and deputy ministers. Discussions are in the early stages, and the groups are yet to unite ideologically.
They represent Afghanistan’s various ethnic and religious identities—Sunni, Shiite, Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara—sources close to the movement said. Some major players, including warlords and ethnic power brokers, are cooperating from outside Tajikistan, with some expected to relocate there soon. Former President Ashraf Ghani, whose sudden departure on Aug. 15 cleared the way for the Taliban to enter Kabul and declare victory, is not apparently part of the government-in-exile discussions. He is in the United Arab Emirates with a coterie of supporters, including former National Security Advisor Hamdullah Mohib.
The prospect of a government in exile raises concerns that Afghanistan could again be consumed by civil war. The lack of a state or wealthy individual sponsor for armed insurrection, however, makes it unlikely that the opposition, if it does coalesce, could back its aspirations with military might, at least for the foreseeable future. U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham and Rep. Michael Waltz appear to be the only cheerleaders so far for the Massoud-Saleh team, and there is no indication the resistance has found a financial sponsor like former Rep. Charlie Wilson, who famously backed the mujahideen after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
The prospect of a government in exile raises concerns that Afghanistan could again be consumed by civil war.
But if a government in exile really does take shape, there’s still the prospect of a regional proxy battle akin to what happened in Libya, said the former security official. Qatar was the Taliban’s base during its negotiations with former U.S. President Donald Trump, when they secured an open path to take over the whole country. Qatar’s rival, the United Arab Emirates, now shelters Ghani. The two countries are at loggerheads in Libya, among other places.
If the resistance is now trying to regroup in Tajikistan, that’s probably because efforts to mount a last stand in the Panjshir were premature and built on unsteady foundations.
“It [the resistance in Panjshir] was a bad idea. They sacrificed the lives of Panjshiris,” said a source who worked closely with Saleh in government. “The first rule of war is choose a battle you can win.” The province—which held out against the Soviets and the Taliban under the leadership of Massoud’s father a generation ago—fell to the Taliban in early September, after phone and internet communications were cut and the valley surrounded. Since then, the Taliban have been ruthless in crushing opposition, detaining and in some cases killing people associated with the Panjshir, not just the resistance. Saleh’s brother Rohullah Azizi was tortured and executed on Sept. 9.
Advisors to the nascent movement have suggested Saleh and Massoud follow the playbook of the Taliban after their regime was overthrown by U.S. invasion in late 2001: regroup, rearm, seek support, and expand. The Taliban had a sanctuary in Pakistan, where they were sheltered, funded, and armed by the state intelligence service there, before igniting their insurgency three years later.
“This resistance was formed very fast, it didn’t seem to have a solid agenda, there were many fragmentations within the movement, and they seemed to speak the language of the old mujahideen,” which doesn’t resonate with younger followers, said Weeda Mehran, a conflict specialist at the University of Exeter.
“Going away gives them time to regroup, to think, to sort out how to challenge the Taliban, consider what other figures to bring on board, and develop into a broader anti-Taliban movement,” she said.
3. Ten Years after the al-Awlaki Killing: A Reckoning for the United States’ Drones Wars Awaits
Excerpts:
US counterterrorism operations have made weaponized drones a feature of twenty-first-century conflict. As an unintended consequence, militant groups like the Islamic State and Hezbollah have employed commercial and even military-grade drones. Recognizing the danger, the Pentagon released its newest strategy to counter the threat of small drones in early January 2021. And while most militant groups’ drone activity has occurred in overseas conflicts, this doesn’t mean they won’t use drones in their next attack on the United States, leading some observers to worry that the next 9/11 could involve drones.
As is often the case in history, events have a way of coming full circle. In early August, a tourist from Texas lost control of a small drone in New York City, causing it to strike a building. That building was 7 World Trade Center. Twenty years ago, in the same corner of lower Manhattan, the 9/11 attacks made tragically clear that our physical edifices were at risk. The precedents the United States has set in the long wars launched in the wake of those attacks show that our constitutional and ethical ones are as well.
Ten Years after the al-Awlaki Killing: A Reckoning for the United States’ Drones Wars Awaits - Modern War Institute
On September 30, 2011, a hunting party of US drones found its quarry while flying over the desert in Yemen. They fired Hellfire missiles at the vehicle carrying Anwar al-Awlaki, a New Mexico–born, firebrand cleric, whom the Barack Obama administration accused of being an operational leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The killing of al-Awlaki was the result of a multiyear operation involving the CIA, Joint Special Operations Command, and allied foreign intelligence services. That same morning, President Obama heralded the strike as a counterterrorism success. But ten years after al-Awlaki’s death and twenty years after 9/11, the United States must reconsider the precedents and prospects of its drone wars.
Counterterrorism Coup or Constitutional Crisis?
In the years following al-Awlaki’s killing, a chorus of legal scholars and journalists discussed and debated the circumstances surrounding the strike. The case was unprecedented in many respects: The president of the United States had personally overseen a secret executive branch process leveraging the massive capabilities of the US intelligence community and military to extrajudicially kill an American citizen. The use of technologically advanced surveillance and targeting systems in the form of weaponized drones also lent weight to those who believed the killing was an assassination or even an execution.
From the Magna Carta to the US Constitution, citizens have sought ways to protect themselves from the arbitrary exercise of sovereign power. The drone strike on al-Awlaki reversed this historical process with an executive process. From the so-called “Terror Tuesday” or “targeting Tuesday” meetings where President Obama personally approved targets for drone strikes to the drafting of the legal logic justifying the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen, the strike on al-Awlaki was the result of decision making within the executive branch. Completely absent from the proceedings was the judiciary, which acts as a crucial buffer and neutral arbiter between the citizen and the executive.
The Obama administration’s legal test also suffered an internal contradiction by the standard of the administration’s own actions. The Obama administration claimed that capturing al-Awlaki was not feasible, and yet it risked American lives on the ground in Somalia, Libya, Pakistan, and yes, even Yemen in missions to capture or kill terrorists or rescue hostages. In the case of al-Awlaki, the Obama administration risked the Constitution in using unmanned machines to kill an American citizen from the safety of the skies.
Perhaps the foremost principle in applying the Constitution to counterterrorism is that we must not destroy that which we are trying to defend. While there were apparently several procedural layers that led to al-Awlaki’s killing, too much secrecy enshrouded the bureaucratic process of the executive branch playing judge, jury, and executioner. As a result, the targeted killing of al-Awlaki presents a constitutional gray area at the intersection of the executive, secret intelligence, and the rule of law.
It’s Secret . . . Trust Us
The public case for the Obama administration’s private decision to kill al-Awlaki rested on secret intelligence. Other than public professions of al-Awlaki’s support for or involvement in terrorist plots, the Obama administration never charged al-Awlaki with a crime or even presented concrete evidence of his guilt—apart from alluding to having that evidence in the form of secret intelligence.
For his part, al-Awlaki, who otherwise had no problem condemning the United States and vocalizing his support for attacks on Americans, denied that he had authorized the underwear bomb plot. Even AQAP insisted that the US government “did not prove their accusation” or “present evidence” against him. While al-Awlaki’s statements present constitutional questions regarding free speech and incitement to violence, there is a difference between planning and inspiring terrorist attacks.
Ironically, it was a British court case against a would-be terrorist that offered the best public evidence of al-Awlaki’s operational role in terrorist activities. But, in the United States, the Obama administration eschewed the judicial court, and instead opted for the court of public opinion by using secret intelligence to shape a narrative that justified a constitutionally unprecedented decision.
Anwar al-Awlaki undoubtedly wanted Americans to die. And many Americans probably wanted him dead, too. But his targeted killing left American citizens with little more than the proposition that we are supposed to simply trust the president and the executive branch when they use secret intelligence to accuse an American citizen of terrorism and then claim the right to kill that individual without judicial scrutiny. Given the bitter partisan divisions in this country over recent American presidents, should al-Awlaki’s extrajudicial killing comfort or concern the American people?
In a stunning reversal, the Obama administration did not apply its own logic in the case of Mohanad Mahmoud al-Farekh, an American citizen in Pakistan accused of being a major figure in al-Qaeda. Although the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command pushed to add al-Farekh to the kill list, Attorney General Eric Holder voiced his skepticism with the intelligence on al-Farekh, namely his status in al-Qaeda and the threat he posed to the United States—similar claims made against al-Awlaki. Instead, US intelligence assisted Pakistan in capturing al-Farekh and extraditing him to the United States to stand trial in a civilian court.
Ultimately, the Obama administration likely killed al-Awlaki because it was just plain easier at the time rather than trying to charge him with a crime, capture him, and expose secret intelligence in a US court. And that still presents a problem for the United States because drones create the illusion that the United States can continue to conduct counterterrorism on the cheap.
A New Presidential Playbook?
Drones will almost certainly continue to be an appealing tool for counterterrorism operations under the administration of President Joe Biden. This is all the more likely given that Biden served as vice president at the time of the al-Awlaki killing and has long favored a limited footprint approach to counterterrorism operations. The US. withdrawal from Afghanistan will further reinforce the need for drone strikes both as part of “over-the-horizon” operations and because polling has sent a clear signal to the Biden administration that large troop deployments and protracted conflict are undesirable ways to address terrorist threats.
Biden’s approach so far seems to align with policies adopted during Obama’s second term. The drone “playbook” under Obama—the Presidential Policy Guidance—developed after the administration publicly acknowledged having killed four American citizens, required more interagency coordination, communication, and legal deliberation. The Biden administration has echoed similar guidelines for its playbook, the Presidential Policy Memorandum, but the tumultuous withdrawal from Afghanistan and the unresolved legacy of al-Awlaki’s killing leave many questions as to how his drone policy might evolve.
Do Drones Work?
Despite a significant reduction in drone strikes since taking office, the Biden administration made headlines in late August when it launched a retaliatory drone strike in Afghanistan against a suspected Islamic State militant following a suicide bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul that killed thirteen US servicemembers. In the days that followed, it emerged that the United States had mistakenly targeted an innocent man, killing ten civilians, including seven children. Even worse, General Kenneth F. McKenzie, Jr., the commander of US Central Command stressed that this “was not a rushed strike,” adding that the US unit responsible for the drone strike had followed the targeted vehicle for eight hours. This sequence of events suggests that US claims about the intelligence processes and targeting procedures underpinning drone strikes are still insufficiently careful enough to prevent egregious errors.
This recent strike also underscores an ongoing debate surrounding the efficacy and consequences of the use of drones. National security professionals and academics continue to debate whether targeted killings work. For instance, some contend targeted strikes decrease militants’ operational effectiveness and morale while others note that groups become far more indiscriminate in the immediate period after such attacks. Still others say efficacy ultimately depends on who and what is targeted as well as if a strike hits the intended target. In addition, studies have arrived at divergent conclusions about how targeted killings—and specifically those that target an organization’s leadership—impact group durability, with some identifying no distinguishable effect and others showing that leadership decapitation significantly increases the likelihood of organizational demise.
Problematic Precedents and Unintended Consequences
Precedents have lasting effects both in law and in life. While there is a presidential precedent in the case of killing al-Awlaki, there is no judicial precedent. The US District Court for DC punted twice on the al-Awlaki killing: first, before he was dead, and then again after.
In the first case, the court began by noting the uncomfortable irony that the US government needs judicial approval when it targets a US citizen overseas for electronic surveillance, but apparently needs no judicial review to target a citizen for death. During the proceedings, the Obama administration refused to confirm or deny to the court that al-Awlaki was on the “kill list,” meaning US citizens cannot know if they are being targeted by their own government for death until it is too late. Furthermore, the Obama administration refused to disclose information to the plaintiff (al-Awlaki’s father) and even to the court behind closed doors, so secret intelligence undermined the whole process. The court dismissed the case, but acknowledged “the somewhat unsettling nature of its conclusion—that there are circumstances in which the Executive’s unilateral decision to kill a U.S. citizen overseas is ‘constitutionally committed to the political branches’ and judicially unreviewable.”
In the second case, the DC District Court glaringly walked back its earlier position and pronounced, “The powers granted to the Executive and Congress to wage war and provide for national security does not give them carte blanche to deprive a U.S. citizen of life without due process and without any judicial review [emphasis added].” Nonetheless, the court still dismissed this case as well. The extrajudicial killing of an American citizen according to the legal logic devised by the executive branch to target al-Awlaki remains an unsettled (and unsettling) question of constitutional law to this day.
Leaving aside questions of US constitutional law, drones are still problematic as a matter of just war theory, the law of armed conflict, and international humanitarian law. The human costs of drone strikes, including the long-term impacts of living under drones and the number of civilian casualties they cause, require further scrutiny. On top of that, the CIA is a civilian agency that comes close to, if not crosses, the line of directly participating in hostilities. In response, Congress and the Obama administration considered shifting responsibility for all US drone strikes to the military at different points in time, but some officials believed the CIA had a better record of hitting its targets and limiting civilian casualties. Still, questions about the precision of US drone strikes and US transparency with regard to civilian casualties remain.
It doesn’t help that the CIA drone program is conducted under Title 50 covert action authority. While US law defines covert action as operations in which “the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged,” the CIA’s drone program is one of the worst-kept secrets in the world of intelligence. The CIA also must pivot away from counterterrorism and paramilitary operations in order to focus on the more pressing work of collecting and analyzing information to support US policymaking in the era of great power competition.
Not only is there an increasing need to address the challenges posed by near-peer competitors, but the United States needs to carefully reconsider the precedents its drone wars have set for countries like Russia and China. While the United States has reproached and punished other states for extrajudicially targeting their citizens abroad both as a matter of law and principle, al-Awlaki’s case undermines US credibility. Moreover, the United States has telegraphed that it is acceptable for states to send unmanned systems over national boundaries to kill those accused of “terrorism,” a pliable term in the international community that exposes a range of people to assassination by states with sophisticated intelligence and military capabilities. For example, Turkey has recently used drone strikes in Syria to attack Kurdish commanders, erstwhile US allies in the campaign against the Islamic State.
US counterterrorism operations have made weaponized drones a feature of twenty-first-century conflict. As an unintended consequence, militant groups like the Islamic State and Hezbollah have employed commercial and even military-grade drones. Recognizing the danger, the Pentagon released its newest strategy to counter the threat of small drones in early January 2021. And while most militant groups’ drone activity has occurred in overseas conflicts, this doesn’t mean they won’t use drones in their next attack on the United States, leading some observers to worry that the next 9/11 could involve drones.
As is often the case in history, events have a way of coming full circle. In early August, a tourist from Texas lost control of a small drone in New York City, causing it to strike a building. That building was 7 World Trade Center. Twenty years ago, in the same corner of lower Manhattan, the 9/11 attacks made tragically clear that our physical edifices were at risk. The precedents the United States has set in the long wars launched in the wake of those attacks show that our constitutional and ethical ones are as well.
Christopher Faulkner (@C_Faulkner_UCF) is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College.
Jeff Rogg (@TheSpyTheState) is an assistant professor in the Department of Intelligence and Security Studies at The Citadel.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense, or that of any organization the authors are affiliated with.
Image credit: Senior Airman Haley Stevens, US Air Force
4. What to Expect When You’re Expecting a National Defense Strategy
No mention of irregular, unconventional, or political warfare. No mention of the DOD concept of "integrated deterrence" which I expect will be a key part of the new NDS. A passing mention of "gray zone aggression." Will the new NDS have a focus on Irregular warfare? Will it continue to have an Irregular Warfare annex?
What to Expect When You’re Expecting a National Defense Strategy - War on the Rocks
In July, Rear Adm. Mike Studeman, director of intelligence for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, warned that “it’s only a matter of time” until China resorts to military force and suggested that U.S. forces are not ready for that “very bad day.” Meanwhile, Russia continues to maneuver its forces aggressively on NATO’s eastern flank, Iran inches toward a nuclear weapons capability, North Korea builds its missile arsenal, and the Taliban has taken control of Afghanistan.
The new National Defense Strategy that the Biden administration is writing should reckon with these challenges and the ramifications of rapidly expanding global threats. It should assess core U.S. strategic objectives and delineate the necessary Department of Defense capabilities, capacities, and forward posture required. This new strategy should be adequately resourced, or it will be destined for irrelevance.
Conservatives and progressives alike share the goal of better securing the United States and its interests. Here are some of our ideas for how the National Defense Strategy should do this.
Prioritizing Core Interests and Objectives
From the outset, the next defense strategy should affirm that the military’s top priorities are defending the homeland while preventing and defeating aggression or attempted military coercion, foremost from China and Russia. The strategy should also assure that the nation can: uphold its security commitments to allies and partners; counter the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; constrain provocations and deter attacks by Iran and North Korea; and prevent terrorists from attacking the homeland and American interests abroad.
Deterring and winning wars should be the cornerstone of the strategy. Whereas previous strategies could rely on a dominant U.S. military to counter all potential adversaries, technological proliferation and modernization will require Defense Department leaders to focus on the most capable opponents — China and Russia. Strategists should align the roles and missions of the U.S. military with these pacing adversaries and resist the temptation to conflate national problems with national security threats. Adding non-core tasks and functions to the military will dilute the urgency, attention, and resources needed to accomplish the Defense Department’s priority missions. Charges related to climate change, pandemic response, refugee relief, border protection, and election security — while important for the nation — are more appropriately led by other federal agencies, which should be funded accordingly.
Honestly Assessing Growing Threats
Ensuring that the Department of Defense is properly resourced, trained, equipped, and postured to defend core U.S. interests requires clarity and honesty about challenges to U.S. national security. The 2018 National Defense Strategy identified five major threats: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and terrorist groups. Since then, each of those threats has only grown more serious.
The Chinese Communist Party has used its large and growing economy to advance the largest military modernization effort in China’s history. The People’s Liberation Army now fields many weapons equal to — and some even superior to — those that the United States possesses.
The strategy should acknowledge that China has the world’s largest standing army, navy, coast guard, maritime militia, and sub-strategic missile force. But China’s advantages are not only quantitative.
As the likely home team in a confrontation with the United States, the People’s Liberation Army has pursued capabilities specifically designed to frustrate the U.S. military’s ability to project power into the Western Pacific. The Defense Department’s own China military power report judges that this strategy has placed the Chinese military qualitatively ahead of the U.S. military in land-based missiles and integrated air defenses, including new technologies such as hypersonic and directed-energy weapons. In other areas like AI and energy storage, Beijing is exploiting its policy of military-civil fusion in innovation to gain an edge on U.S. forces.
The U.S. military is emerging from a decade of delayed modernization and insufficient funding, whereas China grew its defense spending by at least 8 percent a year for the last decade.
Absent urgent American efforts in coordination with allies and partners, Beijing may decide that it can accomplish its political objectives in the Indo-Pacific at an acceptable cost using military force. Indeed, as the Chinese military has grown more capable, Beijing has acted more aggressively in the South China Sea, on the border with India, and in the seas and skies around Taiwan and Japan’s Senkaku Islands.
Meanwhile, Russia has continued to strengthen its military capabilities, seeking to bully and control its neighbors and divide the United States from its allies and partners. Moscow has worked for years to develop the capabilities and doctrines necessary to conduct a successful fait accompli attack in the Baltics before the United States and its NATO allies could respond. Moscow has also prioritized the Arctic, rapidly expanding its military capabilities there and leaving the United States increasingly ill-prepared to defend the northern approaches to its homeland.
To make matters worse, united by their desire to weaken the United States, China and Russia are more aligned than they have been in decades, conducting military exercises together. The intelligence community expressed concern this year about “Russia’s growing strategic cooperation with China.” Accordingly, any assumption that the United States would only confront one great-power adversary at a time is now increasingly questionable.
Nor can the Department of Defense ignore Iran and North Korea. Iran continues to inch toward a nuclear weapons capability, while building its relationships with China and Russia, expanding its arsenal of missiles and drones, cultivating terror proxies around the Middle East, and attacking American friends in the region. North Korea already possesses nuclear weapons and is increasing its stockpile of fissile material, while improving its missile arsenal to strike regional targets and the U.S. homeland as well as proliferating weapons technology, evading sanctions, and engaging in sophisticated cyber attacks against U.S. and allied interests.
As if that were not enough, a Taliban/al-Qaeda terror syndicate now controls an essentially uncontested safe haven in Afghanistan — as it did on September 11, 2001. Thousands of terrorists imprisoned in Afghanistan were released in August, replenishing the ranks of regional and global terrorist groups. Motivated by the belief that they defeated first the Soviet Union and now the United States in Afghanistan, Islamist terrorist organizations will likely enjoy a surge in recruitment and radicalization. America may indeed be tired of the war against Islamist terrorist groups, but terrorist groups are not tired of targeting Americans and their allies.
A new National Defense Strategy worthy of the name should begin by identifying national security goals and objectively assessing and prioritizing the threats to those goals. Any honest assessment should make clear that the threats facing the United States have only increased since 2018 — not decreased.
Narrow Focus on Effective Deterrence
After homeland defense, deterring aggression by China and Russia is arguably the most important strategic objective for the strategy to address. Regional aggression by either would disrupt major drivers of the world’s gross domestic product, invoke U.S. security commitments, and upend global stability. The National Defense Strategy should therefore describe in some detail how the United States intends to deter these regimes. In contrast to the National Security Strategy, which should describe the development and use of all national tools in deterrence, such as statecraft, the National Defense Strategy should narrowly focus on the development and use of U.S. and allied military power to deter and defeat enemy action. The National Defense Strategy is not operational direction for commanders, but it should provide priorities for the National Military Strategy’s guidance on the orchestration and employment of military forces, such as the 2018 National Defense Strategy’s direction to be strategically predictable, but operationally unpredictable.
What matters most in a successful deterrence strategy is shaping the thinking of a potential aggressor. As scholars at Rand suggest, successful deterrence hinges on three fundamental issues: how motivated is the aggressor; was Washington explicit in what actions it would take; and did Washington convince a potential attacker of its willingness and capability to respond? While the first two factors are important, the Department of Defense can directly influence only the third. The National Defense Strategy should therefore focus on convincing China and Russia that the U.S. military possesses the capabilities and ability to employ them in ways that can raise the costs of aggression and increase the uncertainty that aggressors will succeed.
Strengthen Forward Posture Now, Not Later
In support of its efforts to deter Chinese and Russian aggression, the U.S. military should establish a strengthened forward defense posture in vital regions, especially the Indo-Pacific — not simply a plan to do so later this decade. In its 2018 report, the bipartisan National Defense Strategy Commission expressed concern that “China’s missile, air, surface, and undersea capabilities” would grow and potentially make it too costly for the United States to respond to Chinese military aggression in the Taiwan Strait. Since 2018, the Chinese military has only improved the capacity and range of these capabilities.
The capabilities that Beijing has fielded to make the Western Pacific a contested area for U.S. forces create an urgent need to strengthen the reach, agility, and survivability of American and partner blocking forces already forward positioned in and around the first island chain. By raising the costs and increasing the uncertainty of success for Beijing, a more robust posture would be more likely to deter aggression. Ready and capable blocking forces can also provide valuable time for surge forces to arrive from outside the region.
Defeating an attempted fait accompli attack by Beijing will not be easy. Once hostilities commence, U.S. surge forces trying to get to the region can reasonably expect to be inundated with a range of attacks before they arrive and likely even before they depart the United States. Airlift and air-refueling challenges will impair any effort to get assets to the region quickly. That puts a premium on strengthening U.S. and partners’ military capability pre-positioned along the first island chain. The next National Defense Strategy, therefore, should prioritize this effort and support projects and activities such as those promoted by Congress’ Pacific Deterrence Initiative.
Similarly, to deter aggression from Moscow, the United States should strengthen NATO’s forward-positioned combat power in the Baltics and the Black Sea region. Where possible, Washington should push NATO allies to bear as much of the burden as possible, but Washington will need to lead, and the Defense Department will need to provide those forward-deployed capabilities that NATO allies cannot.
Unfortunately, the great-power competition with China and Russia is not relegated to the Indo-Pacific and Eastern Europe, respectively. Great-power competition is truly global, playing out elsewhere in the Middle East, South America, and Africa, as well as in the electromagnetic spectrum, space and cyberspace. Beijing and Moscow have worked overtime to field ground-based and orbital capabilities to attack satellites vital to Department of Defense intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and missile defense. In the cyber domain, the department confronts increasingly capable great-power adversaries not waiting for the next shooting war to assault American networks. The next National Defense Strategy should overtly recognize these realities and catalyze a focused departmental effort to respond.
In the Middle East, learning the hard lessons of the 2011 withdrawal from Iraq and the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, the administration should retain prudent economy-of-force forward deployments in places like Iraq and Syria alongside partners bearing the brunt of the security burden. A failure to do so will only risk preventable security crises, such as a resurgence of the Islamic State’s so-called caliphate, that would likely require the Defense Department to send thousands of American troops back to the Middle East at a higher cost. As a means of deterring aggression from Tehran and its terrorist proxies, the department should seek to create a more unified and militarily capable coalition of Americans, Israelis, and select Arab countries. The Abraham Accords and the shift of Israel to the Central Command portfolio provide an opportunity to advance this effort.
Realism About Allies
Everyone agrees that allies are critical to the success of the strategy. In addition to hard power, allies contribute basing rights, access, local intelligence, and international legitimacy. China and Russia’s security cooperation and robust military modernization programs make allied contributions more necessary than ever before. The National Defense Strategy should prioritize building strong partners through arms sales and transfers, combined exercises, new overseas basing agreements, technology sharing efforts, and international training. In the Indo-Pacific, the strategy should direct special effort toward bolstering relationships with Australia, Japan, India, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, and Taiwan.
The importance of allies should, however, be balanced with realism concerning their military capabilities and how far these can be expected to grow over a certain timeframe. Governments with their own security interests, internal political dynamics, and threat perceptions are constrained in their abilities to contribute the desired capabilities, even when their leaders are willing. For example, despite efforts to persuade NATO countries to meet the agreed-upon two percent of GDP defense contribution, 19 of America’s 29 NATO allies still do not meet that benchmark. The strategy should not fall into the trap of assuming that, even if the United States were to reduce its engagement in key regions, other allies would step in to fill that void.
Finally, the strategy should highlight where and when shared interests are likely to enable allied contributions, which should be a narrower set of situations than previous strategies have assumed. In some cases allies may be best-suited to providing unique capabilities — such as the Japanese minesweeping fleet — that compensate for U.S. shortfalls, versus replicating high-end platforms already present in the U.S. inventory.
Recognition That Both U.S. Conventional and Strategic Deterrence Should Be Restored
For the first time in four decades, the U.S. military is simultaneously modernizing much of its conventional and all its nuclear forces. The costs associated with this vital and belated undertaking have motivated some to suggest that the United States should eliminate one leg of the American nuclear triad to save money. That, however, would produce a more brittle and less effective deterrent. China and Russia are establishing or expanding their nuclear triads because they understand the complementary and essential elements of each leg. With these great powers and revisionist autocracies growing and improving their arsenals of strategic and non-strategic nuclear weapons, American and allied leaders need the confidence provided by a modernized U.S. triad to resist aggression by nuclear-armed opponents.
But the United States cannot rely solely on strategic deterrence. Opponents and allies may not find the threat of nuclear retaliation a credible response to conventional or gray-zone aggression. The fleets of ships, aircraft, and vehicles that the U.S. military depends on to deter conventional attack, worn down by decades at war, are becoming unaffordable to maintain, and their replacements are slow to arrive and fewer in number. Without additional funding, U.S. military capacity will continue to shrink in the near term. Even with additional resources like those authorized by the Senate and House Armed Services Committees this year, the Department of Defense will be hard-pressed to quickly restore the correlation of forces against China in the Indo-Pacific.
To continue deterring conventional aggression, the U.S. military needs new operational concepts that focus on creating uncertainty that China or other adversaries could achieve their objectives on acceptable terms. Leveraging electromagnetic warfare, cyber operations, long-range precision fires, and more distributed manned and unmanned forces, the U.S. military’s emerging joint warfighting concept or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s mosaic warfare concept could enable faster and more effective decision-making by U.S. commanders compared to opponents, reducing Chinese or Russian confidence in their ability to succeed. These concepts should inform weapons-upgrade trade-offs and enable earlier programmatic choices that prioritize adaptability and sustainability rather than exquisite, and often unachievable, performance.
Avoiding Strategic Insolvency
America can afford a strong national defense. There is some concern that the Department of Defense may produce a strategy designed to fit under lower toplines rather than to counter the growing threats of today’s world. Should the new strategy reflect such cart-before-the-horse thinking, it would fail to generate bipartisan support and leave America less safe.
Too often, defense strategies accurately assess threats but fail to adequately explain how the U.S. military will prepare to meet them. The Defense Department should not take this analytical shortcut. Arbitrarily keeping budgets flat for political expediency and then building the best military within that budget is not the proper method to identify funding needs and risks leaving core interests unprotected.
Military compensation, maintenance, and modernization costs have all been growing faster than inflation. Now, inflation is rising. When budgets cannot even keep up with inflation, the military shrinks in size, but expectations for the military do not shrink. That creates a growing mismatch between the missions that the department is expected to accomplish and the missions that it can actually accomplish. The readiness crisis that existed from 2015 to 2017 due to sequester levels of defense funding should serve as a warning about the dangers of undermining the military with fewer resources than are required to achieve assigned missions.
Given the rate of inflation (especially as inflation rates for defense accounts are often higher than that for the wider economy) and the need to deter China for the foreseeable future, a minimum budget growth of three to five percent above inflation remains necessary for at least the next few years, as reaffirmed most recently by Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Hyten. That level of defense funding is also consistent with the recommendations of the bipartisan 2018 National Defense Strategy Commission. Force levels and investments should be threat-led, budget-informed, and strategically effective.
Risk Appropriately Balanced Across Time Horizons
It would be convenient if the serious threats facing the United States manifested only in the future. Then, Washington could invest less in today’s readiness in favor of making a major leap to the next generation of capability. Unfortunately, that is not the situation in which the United States finds itself.
The former commander of Indo-Pacific Command has predicted that China could try to take control of Taiwan in the next six years. This spring, Russia moved 100,000 troops near the border with Ukraine in an attempt to intimidate the West. The reality is that the United States could wake up tomorrow and find itself in conflict.
In many cases, this huge amount of Research, Development, Test and Evaluation funding won’t result in the delivery of new capability for more than 10 years. The defense strategy should address this head-on and provide guardrails that dissuade Defense Department leaders from taking unacceptable risks in either the short, mid-, or long terms. The military cannot sacrifice capacity while it waits on the hopes of promising new technologies. This decade, aka the “terrible 20s,” demands the recapitalization of the major fleets and service inventories along with investments seeking to acquire leap-ahead, game-changing capabilities. As a superpower, the United States can and should be able to balance risk without opening dangerous opportunities in any time horizon.
Doing Everything Faster
Even with three to five percent real budget growth, the Department of Defense should continue to advance institutional reforms to improve research, development, and acquisition.
The Government Accountability Office recently assessed that cost and schedule increases for major defense acquisition programs continue to be a problem. In addition to cost increases, “the time required to deliver initial capabilities increased by about 35 percent, resulting in an average delay of more than 2 years.”
The Department of Defense should do better if it is going to deliver essential capabilities quickly to warfighters. Leaders should demand better long-range forecasts, improved warfighting analytic capability, and more conservative cost-estimation to avoid the prominent failures of past programs. They should also employ shortened acquisition and contracting cycles and greater flexibility in program management to field new systems in relevant timeframes.
Indeed, the success or failure of Americans on future battlefields will largely depend on whether the United States can beat China and Russia in the increasingly frenetic military technology race. The Department of Defense should be able to go from concept to fielded capability much more quickly.
This is a daunting challenge. However, the United States enjoys an impressive array of tech-savvy allies — e.g., Japan, Israel, and many NATO members — who can help. Rather than sprinting alone to belatedly address gaps, the Defense Department should seek to establish more systematic and proactive efforts to identify shared, intelligence-informed capability requirements up front. The department can then work with these allies to catalyze combined efforts to develop and field capabilities as quickly and affordably as possible.
For example, it was not until 2019 that the United States acquired from Israel active protection systems for tanks — systems that had been operational in Israel since 2011. Consequently, U.S. soldiers operated for years around the world lacking the cutting-edge protection that Washington could have provided against missiles and rockets.
As part of this effort, the department should better secure the American defense innovation base to ensure that research and development efforts do not inadvertently leak to our adversaries.
Honesty, Urgency, and Humility Are the Watchwords
The 2018 National Defense Strategy properly shifted military strategy to focus on great-power competition but lacked follow-through. The 2022 strategy needs to build on that document and expand the thinking behind the “ways” in the model of strategic ends, ways, and means. More clarity is needed on how the Defense Department will deter and, if necessary, win in conflict with China, Russia, and others. While climate change and COVID-19 represent serious national problems, the authors of the 2022 defense strategy should resist any temptation to siphon resources and attention away from the Department of Defense’s critical strategic tasks.
While the 2018 strategy helped to catalyze an overdue and major shift in defense priorities, other strategies, such as some of the Quadrennial Defense Reviews, merely affirmed the status quo. Too often, defense strategies are simply additive, lowest-common-denominator documents. With threats to U.S. national interests on the rise, the consequences of producing an ineffective National Defense Strategy may be severe and could come quickly. Clear-eyed thinking about national interests, the threats America faces, and how the military can best deter those threats is urgently needed.
Here’s hoping the 2022 National Defense Strategy gets it right.
Thomas Spoehr is a retired Army lieutenant general who serves as the Heritage Foundation’s director for national defense research. While in uniform, he held a number of assignments related to the defense budget, including the Army’s director for Program Analysis and Evaluation; and director, Force Development.
Bradley Bowman (@Brad_L_Bowman) is the senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). He spent nearly nine years working in the U.S. Senate and has also served as a U.S. Army officer, Black Hawk pilot, and assistant professor at West Point.
Bryan Clark is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at Hudson Institute. A career enlisted and officer U.S. Navy submariner, he studies in naval operations, electromagnetic warfare, autonomous systems, military competitions, and wargaming.
Mackenzie Eaglen (@MEaglen) is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she works on defense strategy, defense budgets, and military readiness. She has also served as a staff member on the 2018 National Defense Strategy Commission, worked on Capitol Hill and at the Pentagon.
5. Securing an Orderly Departure for Afghan Refugees
Excerpts:
Using the model of the Orderly Departure Program provides one possible answer to the question of how to help Afghans at risk of persecution. Now the only thing necessary is the political will.
It is easy to forget that the resettlement of Vietnamese and other refugees from the Vietnam War was very unpopular in the United States at the time. In 1975, a Time poll showed that only 36 percent of Americans favored admitting Vietnamese refugees. Governor Jerry Brown vociferously opposed initial efforts to resettle evacuees in California. After the initial influx from the 1975 evacuation, opposition stayed fairly steady: A CBS/New York Times poll from 1979 asking whether the United States should double admission of refugees from Indochina to 14,000 per month found that 62 percent opposed the change.
Although the Ford and Carter administrations and Congress provided bipartisan support for resettlement efforts, many voters felt differently. The first wave of refugees in 1975 had, on average, some education and were more likely to speak English. The later wave of “boat people,” by contrast, were less likely to have language skills or education to assist their resettlement — they competed for entry-level employment with Americans already facing economic problems in the recession that began in 1980. Along the Gulf Coast, extreme tensions over fishing practices erupted into violence, led by the Ku Klux Klan. Many Americans harbored highly emotional resentment of all Vietnamese due to the trauma of the war.
At the same time, American organizations and individuals stepped up to help these newcomers, and the resettled Vietnamese showed impressive qualities of resilience. While we need to avoid the mistake of grouping all Asian-Americans into the category of “model minority,” most Americans today would see Vietnamese refugees as a success story, particularly as the generation of Vietnamese-Americans who came as children or who were born in the United States take their place as members of Congress, award-winning authors, entrepreneurs, and scientists. The United States made the right decision in 1979 to establish the Orderly Departure Program, and can apply the lessons learned from that experience to live up to its responsibilities in Afghanistan today.
Securing an Orderly Departure for Afghan Refugees - War on the Rocks
Drawing comparisons between the wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam has become a cottage industry. But as commentators continue to argue over what we should learn from both tragedies, there is a more positive lesson to be found in how Washington dealt with the humanitarian aftermath of its defeat in Vietnam.
After the fall of Saigon, the United States faced the question of how to help the countless interpreters, soldiers, and bureaucrats who were left behind. Well over 100,000 Vietnamese were evacuated by sea and air during the last few days of April 1975 — similar to the number of Afghans evacuated in August of this year. But the biggest exodus only came later. While a small number of refugees steadily fled Vietnam after 1975, the mass migration of Vietnamese remembered as the “Boat People” did not pick up until mid-1978.
In response to this crisis, the United States instituted a program called Orderly Departure. Though politically unpopular at the time, this effort ultimately facilitated the successful resettlement of some 500,000 Vietnamese refugees in the United States. Looking back at how Orderly Departure worked shows both the possibility and importance of a similar effort today.
Orderly Departure
By mid-1979, there were an estimated 350,000 Indochinese refugee in camps in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, the vast majority from Vietnam. These included people who had worked for U.S. entities or for the South Vietnamese government, and therefore possibly faced re-education camps or other persecution. It also included many who were fleeing economic hardship or general oppression, especially the ethnic Chinese minority, viewed with suspicion by Hanoi as a potential fifth column for China. These refugees faced terrible hardships — death at sea, predation by pirates, and the threat of being “pushed back” if they did reach another country. An unknown number died on their journeys, with estimates ranging from 10 to 50 percent of those who fled.
A key element of the international response to this humanitarian disaster was the Orderly Departure Program. Established by a 1979 memorandum of understanding between the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the government of Vietnam, it was intended to “provide a safe and legal means for people to leave Vietnam rather than clandestinely by boat.” Experts with long memories have already suggested using the Orderly Departure Program as a model for the current challenge, and so it may be useful to examine the program in some detail. Under this program, countries prepared to accept refugees provided lists of those individuals to the government of Vietnam. The government of Vietnam in turn provided lists of citizens eligible to emigrate. Names on one list but not the other were the subject of bilateral negotiations.
The United States accepted applications in three categories: family members of persons in the United States not currently eligible for immigrant visas; former employees of the U.S. government; and other persons closely associated or identified with the U.S. presence in Vietnam, a category that included Amerasian children left behind by U.S. servicemembers and their families.
Even before the United States and Vietnam reestablished formal diplomatic relations in 1995, consular officers from the State Department and representatives from the Immigration and Nationalities Service traveled to Vietnam to interview applicants, with the Orderly Departure Program eventually establishing a permanent office in Ho Chi Minh City. From 1979 until the program closed at the end of 1999, the program processed over 500,000 Vietnamese for admission to the United States as refugees and immigrants. Almost half were resettled to join family members in the United States. The number also included over 4000 former U.S. government employees. In 1989, the United States created a special program under the Orderly Departure Program that helped some 165,000 former re-education camp detainees and their families resettle in the United States. In total, between 1975 and 2000, the United States resettled about 900,000 Vietnamese, including many resettled from the refugee camps in the region.
There were of course many shortcomings in the Orderly Departure Program process, including allegations the would-be emigrants had to pay bribes to obtain their exit documents. Moreover, not all of those who wanted to escape from the hardships of life in Vietnam qualified for inclusion. From the perspective of 2021, however, it is fair to judge the Orderly Departure Program a success. It reduced the flow of “boat people,” saving the lives of many would-be refugees and mitigating the impact on Vietnam’s neighbors, which included U.S. allies and partners. It showed the United States, however belatedly, taking responsibility for “its own” Vietnamese. Other countries also participated, taking over 100,000 refugees, with Canada and Australia the largest participants.
Lessons for Today
What lessons can we learn from this history? Three are particularly important. First, despite decades of war and enmity, the government of Vietnam was willing to cooperate with the international community in this project. This did not require great altruism. Hanoi managed to cultivate a more positive relationship with the international community through its cooperation and rid itself of a difficult minority at the same time. Second, the United States and other countries missed the opportunity to take effective action starting in 1975 to address the legitimate fears of the many thousands of Vietnamese who had opposed the communist takeover. The tidal wave of Vietnamese fleeing as repression and hunger spread had a destabilizing effect throughout the region, as neighboring countries struggled to cope with the endless flow of refugees. The international community should not have waited to act until untold thousands had died at sea, or swamped refugee camps from Thailand to Hong Kong. Third, the international institutions fulfilled their role, with the U.N. high commissioner for refugees providing a serviceable umbrella under which the United States and others could support orderly emigration.
Would the new government in Afghanistan agree to a program similar to the Orderly Departure Program? The obvious answer is we won’t know until we try. The international community has reasonable leverage at this point, given the dependence of Afghanistan on international support. The kinds of Afghans most likely to be helped by an Orderly Departure Program — non-governmental organization workers, former employees of foreign governments, Kabul bureaucrats — are unlikely to be seen as a big loss to the Taliban, already coping with protests from citizens unwilling to give up the rights that they have enjoyed in recent years.
How large would such a program be? Afghanistan has a population of 38 million, compared to 49 million in Vietnam in 1975. The nature of America’s involvement in Afghanistan was far more limited than in Vietnam. Most importantly, if the international community acts quickly to provide a safe and legal pathway out for cases of humanitarian concern — and acts to help prevent a complete collapse of the Afghan economy to mitigate economic migration — it can hopefully avoid the kind of tragic mass exodus that Vietnam experienced. If endangered Afghans know there is ultimately a safety net for them to resettle if necessary, they may be less likely to flee as refugees.
Political Resistance
Using the model of the Orderly Departure Program provides one possible answer to the question of how to help Afghans at risk of persecution. Now the only thing necessary is the political will.
It is easy to forget that the resettlement of Vietnamese and other refugees from the Vietnam War was very unpopular in the United States at the time. In 1975, a Time poll showed that only 36 percent of Americans favored admitting Vietnamese refugees. Governor Jerry Brown vociferously opposed initial efforts to resettle evacuees in California. After the initial influx from the 1975 evacuation, opposition stayed fairly steady: A CBS/New York Times poll from 1979 asking whether the United States should double admission of refugees from Indochina to 14,000 per month found that 62 percent opposed the change.
Although the Ford and Carter administrations and Congress provided bipartisan support for resettlement efforts, many voters felt differently. The first wave of refugees in 1975 had, on average, some education and were more likely to speak English. The later wave of “boat people,” by contrast, were less likely to have language skills or education to assist their resettlement — they competed for entry-level employment with Americans already facing economic problems in the recession that began in 1980. Along the Gulf Coast, extreme tensions over fishing practices erupted into violence, led by the Ku Klux Klan. Many Americans harbored highly emotional resentment of all Vietnamese due to the trauma of the war.
At the same time, American organizations and individuals stepped up to help these newcomers, and the resettled Vietnamese showed impressive qualities of resilience. While we need to avoid the mistake of grouping all Asian-Americans into the category of “model minority,” most Americans today would see Vietnamese refugees as a success story, particularly as the generation of Vietnamese-Americans who came as children or who were born in the United States take their place as members of Congress, award-winning authors, entrepreneurs, and scientists. The United States made the right decision in 1979 to establish the Orderly Departure Program, and can apply the lessons learned from that experience to live up to its responsibilities in Afghanistan today.
Susan Sutton was a member of the Senior Foreign Service. In addition to other postings in Washington, Asia, and Eastern Europe, she served as deputy chief of mission in Vietnam and in Laos, and has worked on refugee issues in both Asia and Europe. The opinions and characterizations in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. government.
6. Japan Names China, Russia And N Korea As Cyberspace Threats Who 'steal Military Info'
Japan names China, Russia and N Korea as cyberspace threats who 'steal military info'
Last Updated: 27th September, 2021 13:20 IST
Japan Names China, Russia And N Korea As Cyberspace Threats Who 'steal Military Info'
“Cyberspace has become an area of international interstate competition that reflects geopolitical tensions, even during normal times,” Tokyo stressed.
Written By
IMAGE: AP
Japan has named China, Russia, and North Korea as the countries that pose a “cyberattack threat” as it suspects their “involvement in hostile cyber activities.” In a draft Cybersecurity Strategy that the country will adopt for the next three years, which also outlines the discussions at the Cybersecurity Strategy Headquarters held in May 2021, Japan stressed that the circumstances and geopolitical tensions in cyberspace contain the "risk of rapidly developing into a graver situation” as it stressed on the importance of country’s digital transformation.
The strategy, to be endorsed by the Japanese Cabinet soon, states that Tokyo will resort to "tough countermeasures using every effective means and capability available," which would include diplomatic responses and criminal prosecutions should these cybersecurity threats flare. It would be the first time that Tokyo has specifically named the countries as it backed the need for stringent measures for strengthening the nation’s defense capability in cyberspace.
“Cyberspace has become an area of international interstate competition that reflects geopolitical tensions, even during normal times,” Tokyo outlined in the upcoming cybersecurity strategy which was framed in July.
“Differences in fundamental values concerning cyberspace and conflicts over international rules, technological foundations, data, and other matters are emerging as well,” it elaborated.
Japan highlighted that the so-called "threat countries" with the spirit of interstate and regional competition might aim to disrupt the country’s critical infrastructure, attempt theft of personal information and intellectual property, and also interfere with democratic processes. “In particular, cyber activities suspected of state involvement include cyberattacks presumed to be conducted by China to steal information from companies related to the military industry and possessing advanced technology, and by Russia to exert influence to achieve military or political aims. North Korea also conducts cyberattacks to achieve political aims or obtain foreign currency,” Tokyo said in its Cybersecurity Strategy.
Tokyo aims for 'free, fair and secure' cyber space
The Japanese government has enforced the Basic Act that will focus on making cyberspace “a free, fair and secure space,” which it said, was important more than ever now when securing cyberspace was at a greater risk. The strategy will implement the existing international laws including the UN Charter applicable in cyberspace for accountability in case of any risks from the perspective of international affairs.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato in a press briefing asked the members of the Cybersecurity Strategic Headquarters to "work with local governments while giving sufficient consideration to gaining the public's trust and steadily implement measures stated in the strategy.” Japan indicated that will seek cooperation in the cyber field with its QUAD partners namely the United States, Australia and India, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific region and counter the Chinese belligerence.
First Published: 27th September, 2021 13:20 IST
7. Biden Aims to Rival China’s Belt and Road in Latin America
Biden Aims to Rival China’s Belt and Road in Latin America
September 27, 2021, 5:00 AM EDT Updated on September 27, 2021, 8:28 AM EDT
- NSC deputy director to scout Colombia, Ecuador, Panama
- White House sees $40 trillion in global infrastructure needs
Taxis and buses wait on a highway in Medellin, Colombia. Photographer: Edinson Arroyo/Bloomberg
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The Biden administration is considering a U.S.-led competitor for China’s Belt and Road international trade and public works program, and a top White House official will scout Latin America next week for possible projects.
Daleep Singh, the U.S. deputy national security adviser for international economics, is traveling to Colombia, Ecuador and Panama to talk with high-level officials, business leaders and civic activists about infrastructure needs, according to U.S. officials who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity.
Colombian President Ivan Duque Marquez, Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso and Panamanian Public Works Minister Rafael Sabonge are among the officials Singh plans to meet.
The White House wants to engage in projects with higher environmental and labor standards than those China is funding, with full transparency for the financial terms, the officials said.
The Belt and Road initiative has transformed from what was once regarded in the U.S. as a series of unconnected infrastructure projects into a centerpiece of Beijing’s foreign policy strategy, aides to President Joe Biden said. China has gained raw materials, trade links and geopolitical leverage from the program, they added.
Biden and other Group of Seven leaders earlier this year discussed a coordinated infrastructure initiative for developing countries to counter China’s program. In the White House, the new project is known as Build Back Better for the World, echoing one of Biden’s key domestic legislative proposals.
Across the developing world, there are more than $40 trillion in infrastructure needs through 2035, administration officials said. U.S. officials plan to first solicit ideas from local leaders before formally selecting several flagship projects early next year, aides said.
They rattled off a list of examples of possible projects, including solar power plants in India, water treatment facilities in El Salvador, pharmaceutical research and manufacturing in South Africa that could produce Covid-19 therapies or vaccines, digital technology projects that might result in an alternative to 5G wireless networks, digital links for Kenyan farmers and vendors, or investments in women-owned businesses in Brazil.
Officials traveling with Singh will include David Marchick, the chief operating officer at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation.
(Adds details of meetings in third paragraph. An earlier version corrected U.S. trip participants in the final paragraph)
8. Former Obama-Biden Advisor Elizabeth M. Allen Sworn-In as Asst Secretary of State for Global Public Affairs
The snarky conclusion which not subtly asks the question of when are we going to get serious about information and influence activities?
So now we’re wondering if folks have given any thought about filling in the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs post or is that a case of nah?
Former Obama-Biden Advisor Elizabeth M. Allen Sworn-In as Asst Secretary of State for Global Public Affairs
Elizabeth M. Allen is sworn in as Assistant Secretary of State for Global Public Affairs, at the U.S. Department of State, on September 13, 2021. [State Department Photo by Freddie Everett/ Public Domain]
Elizabeth M. Allen, Appointee for Assistant Secretary of State for Global Public Affairs, Department of State
Liz Allen is a partner at strategic communications and public affairs firm Finsbury Glover Hering (FGH), where she specializes in message and campaign strategy, crisis management, and leadership communications. Prior to FGH, Allen served in the Obama-Biden Administration for eight years, most recently as White House Deputy Communications Director and Deputy Assistant to President Barack Obama. She also served as White House Director of Message Planning and Deputy Director of Communications to then-Vice President Joe Biden. In 2020, Allen took a leave of absence from FGH to serve as Vice President Kamala Harris’s Communications Director on the Biden-Harris presidential campaign. Allen previously served at the U.S. Department of State as Director of Strategic Communications and Public Affairs for the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, focusing on U.S. public diplomacy efforts, and in positions in the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement and Office of Global Women’s Issues. A native of Buffalo, New York, she graduated Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in Political Science from the State University of New York (SUNY) College at Geneseo, where she returned to give the commencement address in 2016.
As we have written previously, this position does not require Senate confirmation. Here’s a quick summary of the position according to history.state.gov:
The Department of State created the position of Assistant Secretary of State for Public and Cultural Relations during a general reorganization in Dec 1944, after Congress authorized an increase in the number of Assistant Secretaries in the Department from four to six (Dec 8, 1944; P.L. 78-472; 58 Stat. 798). The reorganization was the first to designate substantive designations for specific Assistant Secretary positions. The Department changed the title to Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs in 1946. Initially, incumbents supervised the forerunners of the U.S. Information Agency and the Voice of America. P.L. 112-116, the Presidential Appointment Efficiency and Streamlining Act of 2011 (signed into law August 10, 2012), removed the requirement for Senate confirmation of Assistant Secretaries of State for Public Affairs.
So now we’re wondering if folks have given any thought about filling in the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs post or is that a case of nah?
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9. Top US general: whisperer to presidents, target of intrigue
Top US general: whisperer to presidents, target of intrigue
AP · by ROBERT BURNS and LOLITA C. BALDOR · September 27, 2021
WASHINGTON (AP) — Gen. Mark Milley has been the target of more political intrigue and debate in two years as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff than any of his recent predecessors were in four. One after another, political firestorms have ignited around him — unusual for an officer who by law is a whisperer to presidents and by custom is careful to stay above the political fray.
From racial injustice and domestic extremism to nuclear weapons and the fitness of Donald Trump as commander in chief, Milley has become entangled in politically charged issues, regularly thrusting him into the news headlines.
Milley is expected to face tough questioning on those and other issues when he testifies with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at a Senate hearing Tuesday and a House panel Wednesday. The hearings originally were meant to focus on the Afghanistan withdrawal and the chaotic evacuation from Kabul airport last month.
But since then, Milley has come under fire from Republicans for his portrayal in a new book as having taken unusual — some say illegal — steps to guard against Trump potentially starting a war with China or Iran or ordering an unprovoked nuclear attack in the final months of his presidency. Milley was reported to have agreed with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s assertion in a January phone call that Trump was “crazy.”
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Even during Milley’s swing through Europe last week, headlines dogged him and reporters quizzed him. Mostly he batted questions away or buried them in detailed historical precedent.
Burly and square-jawed, with a bushy slash of eyebrows over often mischievous eyes, Milley is quick with a quip and frequently a curse. His oversize personality, born of Irish roots in Boston, belies a sharp intellect and a penchant for digging deep into military history. The Princeton-educated Milley often meets simple questions with a deep dive into history that can reach as far back as the Greeks, cover long stretches of both world wars, and expound upon the context and concepts of war.
“I think it’s best that I reserve my comments on the record until I do that in front of the lawmakers who have the lawful responsibility to oversee the U.S. military,” Milley said. “I’ll go into any level of detail Congress wants to go into.”
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While some in Congress have charged that he overstepped his authority, President Joe Biden has stood by him.
Loren Thompson, a longtime observer of the U.S. defense establishment as chief operating officer of the nonprofit Lexington Institute, says Milley is a victim of Washington’s extreme partisanship and perhaps of his own efforts to shape his public image.
“His views and descriptions of his behavior behind closed doors, pop up too frequently in tell-all books like the Woodward and Costa book,” Thompson said. “So perhaps Milley has taken a more active approach to trying to shape his image, and that has not served him well.”
Not all of Milley’s controversies have been related to Trump. At a House hearing in June, Milley passionately defended the military’s openness to allowing young officers to study ideas they might not agree with, such as “critical race theory,” and he said he wanted to understand “white rage” and the motivations of those who participated in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Joint Chiefs chairmen traditionally keep a low public profile. Of the 19 who preceded Milley, none was fired, nor does it appear he will be. Among recent chairmen, only Marine Gen. Peter Pace served fewer than four years when the George W. Bush administration did not tap him for another two-year term, citing the divisiveness of his association with the Iraq war.
Created in 1949, the job of chairman is to advise the president and the defense secretary. By law, the chairman commands no troops. The role has grown in public prominence during the two decades of U.S. warfighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Milley commanded troops during tours in both wars. Those battles, where he lost many soldiers, helped chart his path as he rose from an armor officer in 1980 to Army chief of staff 35 years later.
His move into the chairman’s office on Sept. 30, 2019, came with an unusual twist.
Nearly a year before he was sworn in and just days before James Mattis resigned as defense secretary, Trump announced that Milley was his choice to succeed Gen. Joseph Dunford as chairman. The timing was unusually early in Dunford’s tenure, and it may have had as much to do with Trump’s antagonism toward Mattis as his belief that Milley was right for the job.
That’s how Trump described it when he lashed out at Milley this summer following reports that Milley had feared last year that Trump might use the military in a coup. Trump said he picked him as chairman to spite Mattis, who he believed didn’t like Milley. In fact, Mattis had recommended the Air Force’s top general for the job, not Milley.
Milley’s gregarious nature might have initially appealed to Trump, but he soon soured on him. In June 2020, Milley privately opposed Trump’s talk of invoking the Insurrection Act to put active-duty troops in the streets of Washington to counter protests sparked by the killing by Minneapolis police of a Black man, George Floyd.
Milley also expressed public regret at being part of a Trump entourage that strolled across Lafayette Square on June 1, 2020, to be positioned near a church where Trump held up a Bible for photographers. Critics hit Milley for appearing to be a political pawn. Days later, Milley said he had made a big mistake. Through the months that followed, he seemed at risk of being sacked by Trump.
In the book “I Alone Can Fix It,” Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker reported that on the day President Joe Biden was sworn in, Milley expressed relief to former first lady Michelle Obama.
“No one has a bigger smile today than I do,” Milley said.
AP · by ROBERT BURNS and LOLITA C. BALDOR · September 27, 2021
10. The Necessity of AUKUS
Excerpts:
The truth is that China has long since initiated hostilities against any country that criticizes it – both covertly, through infiltration, espionage, and commercial theft, and more openly through its “wolf warrior” diplomacy. The only effective response is for those with common agendas based on international rules and norms – whether strong, middle-ranking, or weak powers – to stand together and aggregate their influence through alliances.
That is what Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom have recently done with their AUKUS defense agreement, under which Australia will acquire at least eight nuclear-powered submarines. Australia has been disgracefully treated by China ever since it pressed for a full and open inquiry into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. That call came after Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi hoodwinked the Australians in January 2020 about the Wuhan health emergency – just when China was buying large quantities of medical equipment from Australia and other countries.
The Necessity of AUKUS | by Chris Patten - Project Syndicate
The diplomacy surrounding the recent agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States left much to be desired, and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson should now lead efforts to mollify the French. But this should not be the last agreement between like-minded powers to counter Chinese aggression.
LONDON – The basic text making the case for an international-relations rulebook was provided by the ancient Greek historian Thucydides in his account of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century BCE. During that struggle, the inhabitants of Melos, the only significant island in the Aegean Sea not controlled by Athens, insisted on retaining their neutrality despite intense Athenian pressure. Eventually, the Athenians lost patience and wiped the Melians out, killing all the men and enslaving the women and children. The Athenian justification was simple: “Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
It has become increasingly apparent that this is also China’s view of the world today. Now a global economic power with a large navy, China seeks to tempt others with the prospect of selling more goods in its huge market or borrowing money for infrastructure projects. It may, for the sake of form, pretend to abide by the international agreements it has signed. But China’s leaders, in fine Leninist form, simply do whatever they deem to be in the Communist Party’s interest.
This is evident in China’s behavior in the sea lanes to its south; in its relations with neighbors such as Vietnam, India, and the Philippines; in the fight against epidemic disease; in its crackdowns in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Tibet; and in its international trade and economic policy. In each case, China does what it wants and what it thinks it can get away with. And it regards any attempt by others to stand up to the bullies in Beijing as tantamount to launching a new Cold War.
The truth is that China has long since initiated hostilities against any country that criticizes it – both covertly, through infiltration, espionage, and commercial theft, and more openly through its “wolf warrior” diplomacy. The only effective response is for those with common agendas based on international rules and norms – whether strong, middle-ranking, or weak powers – to stand together and aggregate their influence through alliances.
That is what Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom have recently done with their AUKUS defense agreement, under which Australia will acquire at least eight nuclear-powered submarines. Australia has been disgracefully treated by China ever since it pressed for a full and open inquiry into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. That call came after Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi hoodwinked the Australians in January 2020 about the Wuhan health emergency – just when China was buying large quantities of medical equipment from Australia and other countries.
Australia’s geographic location and heavy reliance on exports to China potentially make it particularly vulnerable to Chinese bullying. It makes good sense for these three liberal democracies and old friends to work together to help Australia stand up to this.
Unfortunately, the negotiation of the AUKUS deal was badly mishandled, leaving France understandably angry at what looked like an underhanded breach of a previously negotiated deal for it to provide Australia with 12 conventional submarines. It is difficult to understand how this was allowed to happen. After all, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken (a fluent French speaker) probably knows more about France and French politics than any recent occupant of his office. It is surprising that he did not help to steer a more sensible diplomatic course with President Emmanuel Macron’s government.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson also should have seen the dangers. But Johnson is so desperate to show that post-Brexit Britain still counts for something in the world that he ignored the country’s abiding long-term interest in good and trustworthy relations with France, our nearest large neighbor.
France is the European country whose view of international security and defense most closely matches Britain’s, not least in relation to China. Sooner or later, Britain will need French understanding and support far more than it needs an online photo opportunity with US President Joe Biden. Who could blame the French for suggesting, when Britain next asks for their help, that the British call Washington instead? Johnson should therefore now take the lead in trying to broaden the agreement with Australia and the US to include France and perhaps Canada as well.
But what will China do now? The country’s next big part in international negotiations will come with the attempt to secure a strong global agreement on climate change at the forthcoming United Nations COP26 summit in Glasgow. China, the world’s largest carbon-dioxide emitter, gets some credit from environmental groups for its climate pledges. Yet, on close inspection, China’s commitments look hollow and inflated.
Three things are clear. First, China will not do anything for years to curb its CO2 emissions if it means disrupting economic growth and job creation. Second, Chinese firms will continue to buy stakes in Western companies (in Scotland, for example) that have created green technologies for renewable energy sources such as wind farms. But who else really benefits from China’s efforts to dominate this sector? Third, China – which faces large environmental challenges of its own, especially regarding water supply in its northern provinces – will leverage its agreement to climate goals, however inadequate, to compel others to toe the line on other issues. To get China to behave better on the environment, we will be told we must shut up about human rights violations and territorial aggression.
“The strong do what they can” is China’s guiding principle these days. As many other countries as possible must stand together to prevent it from undermining liberal democratic values in China’s neighborhood and around the world. The diplomacy surrounding the AUKUS deal may have left much to be desired, but this should not be the last agreement between like-minded powers to counter Chinese aggression.
11. Uncovering the French Origins of COIN
Long read. What people call COIN was really about Pacification. (same was true for the US in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th Century).
Excerpts:
To ignore the French origins of COIN is to fail to recognize that as a military tactic, the practices of counterinsurgency were initially rooted in an ongoing system of imperial control and governance, and thus necessarily were designed for decades-long continuous application. The French military officers (and administrators) Bugeaud, Gallieni, and Lyautey were all three reacting to a population and a geographic space in which they intended to stay. Galula, the man so influential to the crafting of the United States’ FM 3-24 over a century later, was also part of an operation that fought to remain in Algeria. That attitude and purpose stands in sharp contrast to repeated claims by contemporary U.S. Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump, that the United States does not engage in nation-building and has no intentions of staying in Iraq, Afghanistan, or elsewhere any longer than strictly necessary.[54]
COIN was originally designed to be a necessary component of a broader occupation strategy, and it was designed with the longue durée in mind.[55] Although the wars in Malaya and Algeria (amongst others) in the 1950s are still used as tactical and strategic models within the Pentagon and U.S. Service Academies, not to mention among national security practitioners, the United Kingdom and France were at the time both fighting to stay in those locations over the long term, or at the very least, to control a slow-paced if eventual departure. These fundamental aspects are explicitly forgotten or ignored today. Rather, what seems to be most often remembered about COIN is COIN as a military tactic vaguely related to ‘strategy,’ not as an actual practice of colonization. Doctrines of warfare, as much as of foreign policy, of course adapt over the years, to meet the challenges of new circumstances and in the face of new technologies and geopolitical realities. But such historical evolutions do not absolve us from understanding and clearly grasping the origins of those doctrines we continue to invoke in contemporary situations. Rehabilitating an awareness of COIN’s past origins forces those of us who think about foreign interventions to face uncomfortable facts—that the supposedly benevolent modern tools we would use to uphold liberty and human rights in the Global South were once used to sustain colonial empires; and if we blindly allow ourselves to be lulled by a softened rhetoric of pacification, as by myths of empire, they may do so yet again.[56]
Uncovering the French Origins of COIN
In 2006, the U.S. army released a new field manual, The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual: U.S. Army Field Manual no. 3-24: Marine Corps Warfighting Publication no. 3-33.5 (FM 3-24) on counterinsurgency operations (COIN), which was hailed at the time as a significant shift in thinking about how to approach fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.[1] Although counterinsurgency was not new to the U.S. Military, the armed forces had largely ignored the doctrine since Vietnam because it was not the type of war it preferred to fight. Yet as Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, one of the authors of the COIN manual, quipped, “Unfortunately, the enemy has a vote.”[2] Since then, and until very recently, COIN has dominated the strategic landscape of warfare at the Pentagon.[3]‘Winning hearts and minds’—a shorthand colloquialism for the crux of counterinsurgency doctrine—rests on the supposition that placating, bribing, coercing, or swaying a general population against militants, cuts off necessary support to the rebels, making it substantially more difficult for them to feed, shelter, and arm themselves. Moreover, winning local trust and support helps build up a robust informant network to aid in ongoing efforts to dismantle the insurgency. In the United States, the provenance of contemporary counterinsurgency is typically located in the mid-twentieth century and the independence movements of (now former) colonies. Nagl himself notes that he and his co-authors relied heavily in their thinking on Lieutenant Colonel David Galula, who wrote about his experiences in Algeria in the 1964 classic Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice.[4] However, counterinsurgency as a discrete military (and political) practice dates even further back—to the nineteenth century and to the height of European imperialism.
Certainly, ‘unconventional’ wars, broadly defined as rebellions against authority where those taking part are not recognized as lawful combatants, are as old as time. However, it was not until the turn of the nineteenth century that countering insurgencies gained sufficient traction in popular and military lexicons to merit a separate doctrine. Historians generally trace COIN’s doctrinal origins to the Peninsular War (1807-1814; a sideshow of the Napoleonic Wars), when ‘irregular’ rebels made enough of a disruption to garner their own name. Faced with conquest by Napoleon’s vastly superior military, the peasants of Spain, and later Portugal, took up arms in 1808 against the French. This organic wave of popular revolt became known as ‘guerrilla’—the diminutive form of guerra—meant to signify the asymmetric nature of the contest between a formal, professional army and a ragtag band of rebels. The word ‘guerrilla’ first appeared in English a year later to refer to the fighters, as well as to their specific type of warfare.[5]
The notion of a conflict being defined by an imbalance in putative strength took on further significance and formality as Europe continued its colonial expansion through Africa and Southeast Asia. By the end of the nineteenth century, a number of military veterans had written about their experiences overseas, culminating in the first manual explicitly devoted to irregular warfare, published in 1896. The author, British Major General Sir Charles Callwell, a veteran of the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-1880) and the Boer Wars (1880-1881; 1899-1902), categorized such engagements as ‘small wars’, which occurred, in his definition, “whenever a regular army finds itself engaged upon hostilities against irregular forces, or forces which in their armament, their organization, and their discipline are palpably inferior to it, the conditions of the campaign become distinct from the conditions of modern regular war.”[6] Callwell’s book was well received: It quickly became a British Army textbook, was translated into French, and later served as the model for the first U.S. Small Wars Manual published in 1935.
Callwell’s ‘small war’ describes asymmetrical warfare, with much of the definition falling on a comparison of military force and capability. It does not, in and of itself, offer any details on the political element of conflict. In that respect, and borrowing from the terms of biological taxonomy, it equates to a sort of genus of warfare of which there are different species. Callwell himself wrote about three different war species: wars for territorial conquest; wars to avenge a wrong or remove a dangerous enemy; and wars of pacification. This last category specifically addresses internal campaigns—insurrections and lawlessness in conquered lands. But even here, the manual eschews statecraft for military maneuvers. The population-centric model of ‘winning hearts and minds’ (as we know it today) evolved not from the British, but from French colonial interventions beginning in the mid-1800s.
In this essay, I trace the history of COIN doctrine across Francophone Africa and Southeast Asia to better understand how it is used or misused today. Perhaps because many counterinsurgency tactics have evolved and been adapted away from those used in the nineteenth century, analysis of contemporary COIN often ignores the doctrine’s colonial origins. Doing so, however, fails to consider how the foundational assumptions of the doctrine may well still limit its successful application in the twenty-first century. This essay, accordingly, sets out to unearth the possible repercussions of adopting the heart of a doctrine without a firm understanding of its initial purpose, seeking to understand whether that purpose is compatible with today’s geostrategic objectives.
The Birth of COIN
As Sir Charles Callwell notes, colonial expansion in the nineteenth century first required military conquest, often accomplished by overwhelming brute force, and subsequent pacification campaigns against native resistance. That resistance, although often weaker and less organized, benefited from intimate knowledge of the terrain; shared ethnic, cultural, religious, or social ties with the rest of the population; and a more vested interest in the stakes involved. Given the David and Goliath dynamic, many resistance groups relied on tactics outside the then-European norms of Continental warfare. Instead of armies facing off against other armies, those resisting colonization mostly engaged in hit-and-run-style engagements, emerging and then blending back into their surroundings,[7] very much like the guerrillas in Spain, except these ‘insurgents’ were ethnically and racially perceived to be inferior, thus barbaric. As France encountered such insurgencies again and again, military leaders learned that these small wars required a more specialized response than anything they were taught at l’école spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr. Countering insurgencies required a very different skillset. It required not just agile physical force but political skill at selling colonial rule. The mindset and rhetoric of la mission civilisatrice therefore aimed to legitimize colonial control and to demonize and belittle those resisting it (in order also to convince the metropole of the worthiness of the cause).
Interestingly, metropolitan France in the mid-nineteenth century was fairly ambivalent about colonization, for both moral and practical reasons, not to mention because of ongoing political unrest at home.[8] However, given the growing competition with other European powers, the imagined economic benefits, and a sense of lost national honor and prestige as a result of Napoleon’s defeat, France joined in the land-grab across Africa and Asia. Unlike its peers who saw new colonies as places for resettlement, successive French governments viewed colonization primarily as a military affair meant to secure resources, or better yet, to get the indigenous population to work the land and provide the resources for them.[9] Three figures stand out during this period as pivotal to the development of counterinsurgency warfare as we know it today: Maréchal (Marshal of France) Bugeaud, Maréchal Gallieni, and Maréchal Lyautey.
Thomas Robert Bugeaud and the Bureaux Arabes
Thomas Robert Bugeaud began his military career fighting the guerrillas in Spain during the Peninsular War. Over the subsequent years, as he vacillated between service and self-imposed retirement, he earned a reputation as a pugnacious, irascible, and unfriendly man, with strong political opinions and an obdurate sense of self-righteousness.[10]King Louis-Phillippe I first sent him to Algeria in 1836 to relieve a French garrison besieged at Tafna by Abd el-Kader, the Del or Emir of Algiers. Abd el-Kader’s father, a prominent religious leader, had declared jihad against the foreign invaders in 1831, and his son had taken up the reins after managing to unite the tribes of the region behind him (no small feat). Kader’s army proved difficult to suppress. By the time Bugeaud was posted to Algeria, political opinion in France had soured on the war as a long drawn-out affair, of no immediate value to the nation.[11] Bugeaud quickly crushed Abd el-Kader’s army at Tafna, which lead to a peace treaty in 1837. However, the treaty collapsed two years later in 1839, and Kader, having learned his lesson at Tafna not to engage in conventional confrontations, returned to systematic raids and ambushes against the French.
Bugeaud returned to Algeria in 1840 as governor-general and soon adopted the razzia method of attack common to his opponents. These “flying columns” were designed to be small, agile, lightly armed, and mobile—they could attack quickly and retreat quickly. Multiple columns could work in tandem to swarm the enemy. With this, Bugeaud was able to push his adversary back. Although more adroit than his predecessors’ use of conventional tactics, the razzias were no less deadly. Indeed, they were designed precisely to terrorize both the enemy and the civilian populations, and often incited public condemnation back in France for their viciousness. Callwell praises Bugeaud as one of the first to perceive “that he had to deal not with a hostile army but a hostile population… and that to bring them to reason he must reach them through their crops, their flocks, and their property.”[12] While maneuverability and surprise were imperative, razzias had three other benefits compared to traditional Continental-style warfare. First, raids enabled the army to feed themselves along the way; this did away with the reliance on supply lines. Second, along with taking food, soldiers were allowed to loot the villages, ultimately meaning that the war paid for itself and was not solely reliant on Parisian budgetary approval.[13]Third, the lack of restraint in terms of violence—the massacres, rape, forced relocation, internment, and destruction of property—had the anticipated effect of cowing civilians into submission, ostensibly pacifying the countryside and denying Abd el-Kader his support base.[14]
Bugeaud was not sentimental or naïve; he was quite aware of the tradeoffs involved in such a strategy. Ruthless control over the indigenous masses bred contempt and racial animosity. He said repeatedly that force or the threat of force was ultimately the only guarantee for France to maintain control of Algeria.[15] Nonetheless, he also acknowledged that military success was unsustainable without some sort of social buy-in.[16] Consequently, even as Bugeaud adopted the fighting tactics of irregular warfare, his true contribution to contemporary COIN was what one might today refer to as a form of ‘nation-building’.[17]
To gain compliance from the conquered tribes, Bugeaud established a “pyramid of authority” predicated on his strong belief in “the necessity of governing Arabs by Arabs.”[18] Pacified territories were subdivided and placed under the control of French officers. Within these military districts, he reestablished the bureaux arabes, which were designed to oversee day-to-day affairs and offer a bridge between the French and native populations (then numbering about two million people).
Spread throughout the country, a typical bureau included a mix of French and indigenous soldiers and civil functionaries (such as judge, doctor, secretary), and was led by an Arab Affairs official.[19] Bugeaud’s aim was to force the two cultures to work together, ultimately to encourage greater commercial development between the colony and her metropole.[20] Moreover, he organized these bureaux to reflect local tribal structure, arguing that any French administration of Algeria had to incorporate existing hierarchies, traditions, and customs. Arab affairs officials were tasked with intelligence gathering to maintain control and domination, yet they always performed under the guise of impartiality to maintain and foster an image of the French as benevolent protectors. To do so, Bugeaud argued, the officer “should not hesitate by any means to put himself often among the populations: visit the markets, the tribes, and listen to the locals’ complaints.”[21] Petraeus and his coauthors advocated for the same practices in the Army’s 2006 counterinsurgency manual, as did David Kilcullen in his “Twenty-eight Articles,” succinctly summing up the dictum: “know your turf.”[22]
The success of Bugeaud’s bureaus was mixed. They worked in the short term insofar as they quelled organized resistance, which they managed through a combination of diplomacy, persuasion, civil works projects, bribes, punishments, and violence. Of violence, bureaux officers employed small teams of local thugs known as goums to ‘enforce’ French control through razzias. The fruits of the raids incentivized some tribes to switch allegiance to France—a divide-and-rule tactic meant to destroy the Muslim solidarity that Abd el-Kader had worked so hard to create in the 1830s. In reality, however, bureaux were often poorly staffed, thinly spread, and with only a weak grasp of local laws and customs. Moreover, the growing settler population viewed these bureaus as anti-European and therefore a threat to French civilian rule.[23]
Whether or not the bureaux ultimately succeeded in their hoped-for strategic ends, Bugeaud was one of the first colonial strategists to recognize that pacification was not just about overpowering the enemy. As governor-general, later Marshal of France, Bugeaud actively and aggressively campaigned for more funding and greater military control of the colony, asserting that “war in Africa and continental war have no similarities;” that successful occupation required as many as 60,000 men to remain after the initial conquest “for an indeterminant time,” and that that time “could be long.”[24] He stressed that those men were not simply soldiers but were construction workers, administrators, cultural experts, and other required related blue- and white-collared professionals,[25] in yet another similarity with today’s ‘COIN-dinistas’, who argue that “counterinsurgency is armed social work.”[26]
By and large, Paris ignored Bugeaud. After Napoleon, the metropole’s popular understanding of war had solidified around professional armies with enemy positions, fortifications, classic supply lines, lines of communication, and decisive battles.[27] But according to Bugeaud, the nomadic nature of the Arabs made most of these conventional tactics obsolete in the field. Still, though France’s primary military occupation from 1815 to 1870 centered on small wars outside of the metropole, the few continental wars France did fight and win seemed to demonstrate to the public that colonial warfare was no different in professionalization than conventional wars, obviating any need to distinguish the two.
This changed dramatically after the defeat of the French army by the Prussians at Sedan on September 2, 1870, and the capture of Emperor Napoleon III. While the Franco-Prussian War continued until 1871,the failure at Sedan released a torrent of public condemnation against policymakers and military leaders for their failure to uphold the honor of France. This recrimination rested on the assumption that the focus of the last several decades on irregular warfare overseas had corrupted and withered the French army’s ability to defend the country against ‘real’ threats on the continent.
As a result, the mood soured on colonial aggrandizement even more after 1870; it was untenable politically, morally, and militarily.[28] Money funneled to the colonies now had to be diverted back to the homeland in an effort to adapt France’s military posture to the immediate threat of Germany. Conscription under the Third Republic aimed to create a mass conventional army, sustained by a shared love of country and the willingness to protect its territory against hostile neighbors. Continental warfare and colonial warfare did indeed become distinct categories of conflict, though not in the sense that Bugeaud wanted. Small wars were of secondary interest and subsequently relegated to mercenaries and the marines, who were often considered to be the worst soldiers coming out of the military academies.[29] Paradoxically, despite this shift in posture, the growing competition between the European powers translated into a renewed race for overseas possessions. France, having suffered a huge blow to its ego in 1870, took up competition voraciously, though the stain against small wars remained. From this point forward “imperial soldiers dealt in a devalued professional currency.”[30]
The Cercles Militaires of Joseph-Simon Gallieni
Joseph-Simon Gallieni joined the Troupes de Marine (Marine Troops, a then-subdivision of the French Army) in 1870 as this shift was taking place. After the Franco-Prussian war, he served in several African and Caribbean colonies before landing in Tonkin (northern Vietnam) in 1892. At the end of 1893, the governor-general of French Indochina gave Gallieni command of the northern region bordering China. The area was plagued by bands of ‘pirates’—mostly Chinese, though Vietnamese mercenaries as well—who preyed on the local inhabitants (indigenous tribesmen known collectively as les montagnards, or mountain men), and who effectively stopped regional commerce and colonial railway construction.[31] Once installed, Gallieni, like Bugeaud, broke up his troops into small, independent units dispersed across the region. He then employed what became known as the tâche d’huile (oil spot) tactic, where pacification spread from an initial location outward, and which required a combination of physical force and political skill. The purpose of these expanding circles was not to eradicate piracy altogether. Gallieni was aware that he did not have the manpower, resources, or situational intelligence to do so. Instead, he sought to separate the bandits from the villagers as much as possible and to make the lives of the pirates hazardous and uncertain enough to disincentivize their financial backers.[32] This then would instill confidence in the villagers that the French could protect them as they went about their day-to-day lives.[33]
In practice, these efforts had three characteristics. First, the military would provide some social service like a well for water or a market to attract locals. Intelligence officers would then mingle with the crowd and gain a sense of the human terrain. This led to the second step, which was to employ “flying columns” against networks of Vietnamese and Chinese thugs, who often hid in the mountains. As in the twentieth century, terrain and spies limited the usefulness of force. Still, the bandits were largely separated from the montagnards, and this division was deepened by offering the villagers money for any Chinese or Vietnamese rebel’s head that they took.[34] The third aspect of Gallieni’s strategy was political. Known as la politique des races, this strategy was one of divide and conquer, whereby the French removed any preexisting ethnic social caste divisions and made separate treaties with each group to force them all to work together under French rule. Gallieni negotiated with the regional Chinese warlord to police the Chinese border (after demonstrating his ability to use force), and he then arranged for the montagnards to run the opium trade in the North, thereby forcing the Vietnamese and Chinese pirates to create a sustainable economic relationship with the locals.[35]
Gallieni was sent to Madagascar in September 1896 to put down an intensifying peasant rebellion (known as the Menalamba Rebellion) against foreigners, Christianity, and the long-term political corruption of the Merina kingdom. Deploying his tâche d’huile method, Gallieni immediately reorganized the entire political landscape of the colony into territoire militaire; exiling the queen, Ranavalona III, and establishing a network of governance that spread out from the capital into the periphery. Reminiscent of Bugeaud’s bureaux arabes, these cercles militaries coincided (roughly) with pre-existing Malagasy districts and were divided into smaller secteurs in an effort to consolidate military control under the auspices of ‘nation-building’.[36] At each constituency level, complete military and civil control (and discretion) rested in the hands of a French officer, who was then held accountable by the head officer of the larger division, up to Gallieni himself.[37]
As in Tonkin, the onset of this reorganization was accompanied by an ongoing show of force to push back the insurgents as well as convince the other inhabitants of France’s ability to ‘protect’ them.[38] Gallieni again employed la politique des races by abolishing slavery and eliminating the ethnic caste system that had elevated the Merina tribe above all other tribes. He himself wrote that successful counterinsurgency depended on a combination of political action and military might. Pacification and possession of a colony required “intimate contact” with the indigenous population, he argued, in order “to seek to know their patterns of behavior and mental state, to strive to satisfy their needs,” so to draw them to the new colonial institution and to persuade them of its merit.[39] As Gallieni’s circles pushed farther inland, he was able to control increasingly more of the population through social institutions like schools and hospitals, as well as by maintaining the Merina kingdom’s policy of corvée (forced) labor in lieu of taxes.[40]
Gallieni’s military circles were very similar to Bugeaud’s Arab bureaus. Both men believed that the military was the only viable form of authority in a territory that was not yet fully tamed, where rebels only seemed to value the universal currency of brute force.[41] At the same time, both Gallieni and Bugeaud also believed in adopting native political and administrative practices within French military oversight as a means of making clear “the blurring of civilian and combat spaces.”[42] In fact, the men’s efforts to reorganize administratively their respective native landscapes—a proto-nation-building—were key to their maintaining control of vastly larger indigenous populations.
One reason for this success is that the “technologies of rule”[43] prescribed by Bugeaud’s bureaux arabes and Gallieni’s cercles militaires required quantifying and categorizing occupied populations—in other words, making them visible to French rule. At the time, European philosophers, scientists, and politicians were increasingly interested in how to render public bodies visible as a means of social control, whether through censuses, taxation, or even architecture and city planning. Borrowing from one such intellectual named Jeremy Bentham, the French theorist Michel Foucault would later develop the idea of ‘panopticism’ as a means of biopower and governmentality.[44] At its core, the state “disciplines and normalizes bodies through the exercise of a visual power that seemingly has no limits.”[45] Foucault referred to this panopticism as “a state of conscious and permanent visibility.”[46] The surveillance societies fostered in both Bugeaud’s Algeria and Gallieni’s Madagascar were built and operated not only with physical power but also as an “architecture of power through visual means.”[47]
“Bugeaud at his Best”: Louis-Hubert-Gonzalve (Hubert) Lyautey
Hubert Lyautey served under Gallieni in both Tonkin and Madagascar; he brought Gallieni’s playbook to Morocco, first in 1903 to Oran (an Algerian border city), and later in 1907 to Morocco proper—against orders and under the pretext that a prominent French doctor had been killed in Marrakesh. He returned to Morocco in 1912 to put down a rebellion in Fez, and, after the Convention of Fez established the country as a French protectorate, he was made Resident-General, a role he occupied until 1925. Lyautey wholeheartedly espoused Gallieni’s methods and believed that conquest would only succeed if force were sustained by political and social efforts to win ‘hearts and minds.’[48] He firmly bought into the rhetoric of la mission civilisatrice as justification for any use of (excessive) force in putting down insurgents.[49]Indeed, he often described his methods as “Bugeaud at his best.”[50] Using a combination of the razzia fighting style and la politque des races, Lyautey was able to crush existing and nascent rebellions and to deftly maneuver across the treacherous political terrain of the Moroccan sultanate, various tribal and rebel leaders, competing European claims to the territory, and the political machinations of his superiors in Paris. Lyautey, also, was an outspoken advocate for recognizing the merits and advantages of small wars and small war warriors, publishing a number of small monographs and pamphlets beginning in 1900.
All three officers recognized that a foreign ruler could never completely win the loyalty of the people he ruled over by force. As a result, all three officers believed that military control over conquered lands and peoples was the only way to “destroy any seed of rebellion that might arise.”[51] In this capacity, colonial soldiers were tasked with far more than tactical maneuvers. As the First World War approached, Lyautey in particular passionately distinguished the colonial soldier from conventional troops. After all, “destruction is easy, reconstruction is much harder.”[52] All three officers believed that successful counterinsurgency centered on the civilian population. While Bugeaud let loose on unpacified villages the razzias with their indiscriminate violence, Gallieni and Lyautey took a more measured approach, reserving the brunt of the violence mostly for the insurgents. They instead tried to cultivate goodwill among the people—or at least persuade them of France’s benevolence (often through the rhetoric of la mission civilisatrice).[53] All three employed native troops and cultivated collaboration with indigenous civil society.
Still, their relationships with the local populations highlight the main challenge of COIN, then certainly, but particularly as it applies to today’s practices. That challenge is to at once kill the ‘bad’ guys and protect the ‘good’ guys, even as the bad and good guys by and large come from the same place, eat the same food, and pray to the same God. How then to distinguish between civilian and insurgent? The narrative that has evolved since Bugeaud’s time reflects this challenge, but in increasingly liberal terms. Bugeaud did not really care about the fundamental welfare of the local Algerians, so long as they were compliant to French military power and French rule. To him, COIN was first and foremost a tactical affair. Gallieni and Lyautey both recognized that convincing the locals that they did indeed care about their welfare (whether true or not) was necessary to successful military operations. That is to say, Gallieni and Lyautey in particular recognized as fundamental this truth about counterinsurgency: the tactical elements of counterinsurgency must fit into a nation’s broader strategy of long-term occupation and rule.
All three French military officers were deemed victorious in their pacification efforts. Success in counterinsurgency warfare, however, very much depends on what timeline one goes by, as much as by whether one judges COIN as an operational affair simply or as part of a more holistic colonizing strategy. After all, conquest in Vietnam and Algeria ultimately ended in military defeat for the French, even if those defeats were not immediate and only manifested a century or a half-century later. Importantly, these defeats suggest that the broader French goal of winning sustained popular support—or at least complacency—for French rule never completely materialized on the ground, despite the ‘civilizing’ elements of the ‘nation-building’ they had engaged in.
Contemporary COIN: The Postmodern Manifest Destiny?
Rehabilitating the colonial legacy of pacifying foreign populations highlights several crucial but most-often overlooked characteristics of past and present counterinsurgencies. Specifically, what rises to the fore in reexamining COIN’s development and application in nineteenth and early twentieth century French colonial adventuring is the unmistakable fact that COIN was created as a long-term occupying doctrine, not as a doctrine applicable for short-term nation-building escapades and quick exits. Moreover, despite Gallieni’s and Lyautey’s tempered views on acceptable levels of civilian casualties, all three progenitors of modern COIN theory strenuously argued for a military occupation sustained by the threat—if not use—of force to maintain local complacency. Even if the contemporary rhetoric of winning over local populations through a public relations-friendly slogan of ‘hearts and minds’ is far less bellicose than colonial-era articulations, the supposition remains from Bugeaud’s time, that the only reliable way of preventing popular backlash is ultimately through the public’s fear of punishment.
Today’s COIN is in some ways the postmodern Manifest Destiny. Territorial aggrandizement is no longer recognized as the motivating or driving force. Rather, in employing COIN, modern mostly western, liberal states seek to spread their political, economic, and cultural influence as a means of reconstituting others in their image. Ostensibly, the motives (at least over the last twenty years) have been both to prevent terrorism and to stabilize a geopolitical region. Yet, if military practitioners and political theorists have (re)learned anything from the last two decades of the Global War on Terror, it is that opposing insurgencies is distinctly not the United States’ strong suit. And yet, despite America’s poor record, counterinsurgency as a military doctrine seems to retain its place in contemporary history as a valuable tool in the irregular warfare toolbox. This remains true, even while acknowledging the U.S. Department of Defense’s recent pivot back to conventional warfare and ‘Great Power Competition’ due to the threats posed by China and Russia, and as announced in the 2015 and 2017 National Security Strategies.
To ignore the French origins of COIN is to fail to recognize that as a military tactic, the practices of counterinsurgency were initially rooted in an ongoing system of imperial control and governance, and thus necessarily were designed for decades-long continuous application. The French military officers (and administrators) Bugeaud, Gallieni, and Lyautey were all three reacting to a population and a geographic space in which they intended to stay. Galula, the man so influential to the crafting of the United States’ FM 3-24 over a century later, was also part of an operation that fought to remain in Algeria. That attitude and purpose stands in sharp contrast to repeated claims by contemporary U.S. Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump, that the United States does not engage in nation-building and has no intentions of staying in Iraq, Afghanistan, or elsewhere any longer than strictly necessary.[54]
COIN was originally designed to be a necessary component of a broader occupation strategy, and it was designed with the longue durée in mind.[55] Although the wars in Malaya and Algeria (amongst others) in the 1950s are still used as tactical and strategic models within the Pentagon and U.S. Service Academies, not to mention among national security practitioners, the United Kingdom and France were at the time both fighting to stay in those locations over the long term, or at the very least, to control a slow-paced if eventual departure. These fundamental aspects are explicitly forgotten or ignored today. Rather, what seems to be most often remembered about COIN is COIN as a military tactic vaguely related to ‘strategy,’ not as an actual practice of colonization. Doctrines of warfare, as much as of foreign policy, of course adapt over the years, to meet the challenges of new circumstances and in the face of new technologies and geopolitical realities. But such historical evolutions do not absolve us from understanding and clearly grasping the origins of those doctrines we continue to invoke in contemporary situations. Rehabilitating an awareness of COIN’s past origins forces those of us who think about foreign interventions to face uncomfortable facts—that the supposedly benevolent modern tools we would use to uphold liberty and human rights in the Global South were once used to sustain colonial empires; and if we blindly allow ourselves to be lulled by a softened rhetoric of pacification, as by myths of empire, they may do so yet again.[56]
M.L. deRaismes Combes is an adjunct at American University and at George Washington University. She is a former postdoctoral fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin (2019-2020).
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
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Decker, Karl von. La Petite Guerre, ou Traité des Opérations Secondaires de la Guerre, trans. M. Ravichio de Peretsdorf. Société de Librairie Belge, 1838.
Deschamps, Hubert. “Madagascar and France, 1870-1905.” In The Cambridge History of Africa. Edited by Roland Oliver and G.N. Sanderson, 521-538. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
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———-. Neuf ans à Madagascar. Paris: Librarie Hachette, 1908.
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———-. Le Maréchal Bugeaud, d’après sa correspondance intime et des documents inédites, 1784-1849, volume II. Paris, 1884.
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Sullivan, Anthony T. Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, France and Algeria 1784-1849. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1983.
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[1] United States, John A. Nagl, David H. Petraeus, and James F. Amos, The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual: U.S. Army Field Manual no. 3-24: Marine Corps Warfighting Publication no. 3-33.5 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). For its reception, see Richard Shultz Jr. and Andrea Dew, “Counterinsurgency, By the Book,” The New York Times (7 August 2006), A15; Sarah Sewall, “He Wrote the Book. Can he follow it?” The Washington Post (25 February 2007); and Oliver Belcher, “The Best-Laid Schemes: Postcolonialism, Military Social Science, and the Making of U.S. Counterinsurgency Doctrine, 1947-2009,” Antipode 44, no. 1 (2012): 258.
[2] Interview on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, August 23, 2007.
[3] Gventer et al. note that the COIN discourse has been appropriated and used as a “political commodity” to more broadly justify Western—and U.S. in particular—interventions abroad as morally appropriate and necessary. See: Celeste W. Gventer, David M. Jones, and MLR Smith, “Deconstructing counter-insurgency: COIN discourse and the devaluation of strategy,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 28, no. 3 (2015): 348-371.
[4] FM 3-24, xix.
[5] The Duke of Wellington first used the term ‘guerrilla’ to refer to the combatants in a dispatch sent on 8 August 1809. See https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/guerrilla (accessed 19 September 2021). The Peninsular War also influenced Carl von Clausewitz’s thinking on small wars, particularly on the benefits of civilian militias. See: Carl von Clausewitz, “Strategy: Defensive” Principles of War, trans. Hans W. Gatzke (The Military Service Publishing Company, 1942), III.2.3. https://www.clausewitz.com/mobile/principlesofwar.htm (accessed 18 September 2021).
[6] C. E. Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice, third edition (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1996 [1906]), 21.
[7] Mao describes insurgents as fish swimming in water (On Violence, Chapter 6).
[8] Charles-André Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie Contemporaine: La Conquête et les débuts de la colonisation (1827-1871) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964).
[9] Thomas Rid, “The Nineteenth Century Origins of Counterinsurgency Doctrine,” 33, no. 5 (2010): 728; Joseph-Simon Gallieni, Lettres de Madagascar (St. Gilles les Bains: Salines Éditions, 2020 [1928]). The big exception is Algeria, which by its independence in 1962, included over one million pied noirs.
[10] Douglas Porch, Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Rid, “Nineteenth Century Origins;” Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie.
[11] Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie; Porch, Counterinsurgency.
[12] Callwell, Small Wars, 128-129.
[13] This also attracted local clans and tribes to join with the French to reap the benefits of plunder.
[14] In one such incident in June 1845, Bugeaud’s men under Colonel Pelissier suffocated over 100 Muslims—men, women, and children—by trapping them in a cave and setting fire to the exit. The incident, known as les enfumades, made it into the French Press back in Paris and shocked the public, further eroding support for the ‘endless’ war. See Henri d’Ideville, Le Maréchal Bugeaud, d’après sa correspondance intime et des documents inédites, 1784-1849, volume II (Paris, 1884), 165-6 for a first-hand account.
[15] Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie, 223; Ideville, Le Maréchal Bugeaud, vol. II, 144-145.
[16] Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie, 187.
[17] Bugeaud was adamant that any form of governance must remain under the control of the military. He excoriated the civilian authorities in Algeria as incompetent and dangerous. See: Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie, 210-216. It should also be noted that ‘state-building’ (creating governing institutions that consolidate authority)—which is what Bugeaud was actually doing—is semantically often confused with or consolidated into ‘nation-building’ (creating institutions that foster a sense of national identity)—which is what the United States was accused of doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. In this essay, I have used the term ‘nation-building’ with scare quotes to highlight the family resemblance to contemporary COIN discourses.
[18] Anthony T. Sullivan, Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, France and Algeria 1784-1849 (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1983), 102. See also: Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie, 224.
[19] See Albert Ringel, Les Bureaux Arabes de Bugeaud et les Cercles Militaires de Gallieni (Paris: Université de Paris, 1903), 25-61.
[20] Sullivan, Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, 102.
[21] Henri d’Ideville, (1882) Le Maréchal Bugeaud, d’après sa correspondance intime et des documents inédites, 1784-1849, volume III (Paris, 1882), 137-138.
[22] David Kilcullen, “Twenty-Eight Articles,” Military Review (May-June 2006): 2.
[23] Rid, “Nineteenth Century Origins,” 740-742; Stephen H. Roberts, The History of French Colonial Policy, 1870-1925 (London: Routledge, 1929), 96; Rigel, Les Bureaux Arabes, 83-87.
[24] Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie, 171, 174. This complaint has stayed the test of time and was a common refrain in Vietnam and justification for both surges in Iraq and Afghanistan.
[25] Ideville, Le Maréchal Bugeaud, vol. II.
[26] Kilcullen, “Twenty-Eight Articles,” 8.
[27] Bugeaud gave testimony before the Chamber of Deputies on 15 January 1840 critiquing his peers for judging his actions in Algeria based on this traditional view of warfare. See: Le Moniteur universel, 16 Janvier 1840. https://www.retronews.fr/journal/gazette-nationale-ou-le-moniteur-universel/16-jan-1840/149/1551329/4 (accessed 17 September 2021); See also: Rid, “Nineteenth Century Origins,” 733-734. The German military strategist Karl von Decker also drew this distinction in his books on “small wars,” arguing that asymmetrical wars (“guerre de partisans”) were fundamentally different from secondary operations in “normal” wars, which is what he referred to as la petite guerre). See: La Petite Guerre, ou Traité des Opérations Secondaires de la Guerre, M. Ravichio de Peretsdorf, trans. (Société de Librairie Belge, 1838), 15-17.
[28] This was a fair assessment, given the rapidity with which Prussia overwhelmed France. Porch, Counterinsurgency, 41-45; Douglas Porch, The March to the Marne: The French Army 1871-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Roberts, French Colonial Policy.
[29] Porch, March to the Marne, 152-153.
[30] Porch, Counterinsurgency, 47.
[31] Louis de Grandmaison, L’Expansion Française au Tonkin en Territoire Militaire (Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie, 1898), 87.
[32] Grandmaison, L’Expansion Française, 90.
[33] Grandmaison, L’Expansion Française, 87-90.
[34] A practice that the French had encouraged among the goum in Algeria as well, yet one that also ‘confirmed’ the natives’ barbarity to the French public. See: Porch, Counterinsurgency, 31.
[35] Joseph-Simon Gallieni, Trois colonnes au Tonkin, 1894-1895 (Paris: Librairie Militaire R. Chapelot & Cie, 1899).
[36] Rigel, Les Bureaux Arabes, 107-115.
[37] Hubert Lyautey, Du rôle colonial de l’armée (Paris: Armand Colin & Cie, 1900), 6. For a thorough analysis of the Madagascar campaign and each pacification circle, see: Joseph-Simon Gallieni, La Pacification de Madagascar: Opérations d’Octobre 1896 à Mars 1899 (Paris: Librairie Militaire R. Chapelot & Cie, 1900).
[38] In one letter to the Secretary General, Gallieni specifies: “Avec les indigènes de nos colonies, … il faut toujours, sinon être, du moins paraître les plus forts” (With the indigenous populations, we must at least always appear to be the strongest, even if we aren’t). See: Gallieni, Trois colonnes, 48. See also: Rigel, Les Bureaux Arabes, 111.
[39] Joseph-Simon Gallieni, Neuf Ans à Madagascar (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1908), 47; Gallieni, Trois colonnes, 157-160.
[40] Arnaud-Dominique Houte, Le Triomphe de la République (1871-1914) (Paris: Seuil, 2014), 149.
[41] Rigel, Les Bureaux Arabes, 122.
[42] Oliver Belcher, “The Best-Laid Schemes: Postcolonialism, Military Social Science, and the Making of U.S. Counterinsurgency Doctrine, 1947-2009.” Antipode 44, no. 1 (2012): 260; Rigel, Les Bureaux Arabes, 111-113. Rigel argues that Bugeaud was less successful than Gallieni at population pacification because Bugeaud created a redundant (in Rigel’s opinion) tier of ‘indigenous administrators’ that hampered simple French military oversight (114-123).
[43] Belcher, “Best-Laid Schemes,” 260.
[44] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison (London: Penguin, 1991).
[45] Nicholas Gane, “The Governmentalities of Neoliberalism: Panopticism, Post-Panopticism, and Beyond,” The Sociological Review 60 (2012): 614.
[46] Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 201.
[47] Gane, “Governmentalities,” 615.
[48] Lyautey, Du rôle colonial, 17.
[49] Even so, Lyautey had a firm respect for Islam and local customs, and he often ‘went native’ in appearance when governing Oran. See: Hervé de Charette, Lyautey (Paris: J. C. Lattès, 1997), 176; J. Lecrecq, Ma Première Bibliothèque: Conquérants d’Empire (Paris: Éditions Bias, 1947), 106-109.
[50] Hubert Lyautey, Lettres du Tonkin et de Madagascar: 1894-1899 (Paris: Armand Colin & Cie, 1921), 112-113. See also: Rid, “Nineteenth Century Origins,” 752.
[51] Gallieni, Trois colonnes, 160.
[52] Ibid.
[53] Bugeaud did this as well, but only to an extent.
[54] For an excellent analysis of presidential aversion to nation-building during the war on terror (and before), see: Dominic Tierney, “Avoiding Nation-Building: From Nixon to Trump,” Parameters 48, n. 1 (2018): 25-36.
[55] I am currently working on another project that examines how the United States has adapted COIN to contemporary warfare, and whether those adaptations successfully take into account and compensate for the longue durée of colonial occupation.
[56] I should point out that I am not equating all efforts to promote liberty and human rights with ‘myths of empire’. Rather, I am cautioning that best intentions have the power to paper over the realities and interpretations of others.
12. Interview with Merkel’s Former Foreign Policy Adviser: “I Have Eliminated the ‘West’ from My Vocabulary”
A lot to ponder in this interview, from Afghanistan to the UN to China to America and the "west."
Excerpts:
Heusgen: The lesson is that we need to set clearer conditions. We cannot have a transitional president who refuses to move forward with the transition to civilian rule. We need to be clear: Either you implement good governance reforms, or we will end our support. If the government doesn’t look after the welfare of its people, the terrorists will continue to gain ground. Foreign troops can’t do anything to change that.
DER SPIEGEL: But you also then have to carry through with it.
Heusgen: Yes, then you have to get out.
"When the Chinese wake up in the morning, the first things they are thinking about is not how they can strengthen the international legal order."
DER SPIEGEL: Was Afghanistan a defeat for the West?
Heusgen: I have actually eliminated the term "the West" from my vocabulary.
DER SPIEGEL: Why?
Heusgen: From my point of view, it is no longer about a dispute between the West and the East today, but between states that adhere to a rules-based international order, to the United Nations Charter, to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and those that do not. These principles are not Western, but universal. The West has become a negative fighting word that the Russians and Chinese use against us, along the lines of: The West is yesterday’s news.
Interview with Merkel’s Former Foreign Policy Adviser: “I Have Eliminated the ‘West’ from My Vocabulary”
Spiegel · by Christoph Schult, Christiane Hoffmann, DER SPIEGEL
About Christoph Heusgen
Foto:
Luiz Rampelotto / dpa
Christoph Heusgen, 66, served as foreign policy adviser to German Chancellor Angela Merkel from 2005 to 2017. After studying economics in St. Gallen and at the Sorbonne, he joined the foreign service in 1980. From 1999 to 2006, he headed the staff of EU High Representative for Foreign Policy Javier Solana in Brussels. After leaving the Chancellery, he represented Germany as its permanent representative to the United Nations in New York until summer 2021. Heusgen comes from the city of Neuss, Germany, and is a member of the center-right Christian Democratic Union party.
DER SPIEGEL: Mr. Heusgen, you served as a foreign policy adviser to Angela Merkel from the time she took office in 2005 until 2017. Merkel is considered a major proponent of realpolitik, especially when it comes to foreign policy. What explanation can you offer regarding the degree to which Berlin was taken by surprise by the reality on the ground in Afghanistan?
Heusgen: It wasn’t just in German foreign policy circles – everyone was surprised by the dynamics that developed in Afghanistan.
DER SPIEGEL: Shouldn’t we have been able to predict that the Taliban was going to seize power in the country again?
Heusgen: Hindsight is always 20/20. As a matter of principle, it was right for us to be engaged in Afghanistan, both militarily and in terms of development policy. But we made the mistake of not forcing good governance on Afghan leaders. We should have attached much stricter conditions to our aid. Having seen how Afghan politicians thought first and foremost about themselves and their clans, it is not surprising in retrospect that this government had no standing with the population or with the security forces. When things got serious, everyone ran for the hills. This could have been foreseen with a little common sense.
DER SPIEGEL: Do you think the West could have succeeded in Afghanistan if things had been done differently?
Heusgen: Personally, I think we should have stayed longer in Afghanistan, just as the Americans did for decades in Japan, South Korea and Germany. The key difference was the that the governments there helped in building democracy and institutions, and they also had the backing of the people.
DER SPIEGEL 38/2021
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 38/2021 (September 18th, 2021) of DER SPIEGEL.
DER SPIEGEL: What bothered you more: the negotiations with the Taliban under former U.S. President Donald Trump or the unconditional withdrawal under Joe Biden?
Heusgen: Excuse me, but the Trump administration was an amateurish, diplomatic mess. It was a grave mistake to forge an agreement with the Taliban and sideline an Afghan government that had been receiving support for years. Biden’s decision was logical and consistent. He knows how incredibly expensive the deployment is and how unpopular it is in the U.S. But I still wish he would have decided differently.
DER SPIEGEL: What does the defeat in Afghanistan mean for current and future deployments? How, for example, can we prevent a similar situation from arising in Mali, where the German armed forces are also deployed?
Heusgen: The lesson is that we need to set clearer conditions. We cannot have a transitional president who refuses to move forward with the transition to civilian rule. We need to be clear: Either you implement good governance reforms, or we will end our support. If the government doesn’t look after the welfare of its people, the terrorists will continue to gain ground. Foreign troops can’t do anything to change that.
DER SPIEGEL: But you also then have to carry through with it.
Heusgen: Yes, then you have to get out.
"When the Chinese wake up in the morning, the first things they are thinking about is not how they can strengthen the international legal order."
DER SPIEGEL: Was Afghanistan a defeat for the West?
Heusgen: I have actually eliminated the term "the West" from my vocabulary.
DER SPIEGEL: Why?
Heusgen: From my point of view, it is no longer about a dispute between the West and the East today, but between states that adhere to a rules-based international order, to the United Nations Charter, to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and those that do not. These principles are not Western, but universal. The West has become a negative fighting word that the Russians and Chinese use against us, along the lines of: The West is yesterday’s news.
DER SPIEGEL: What’s your assessment of foreign policy in the Merkel era?
Heusgen: Over the past four years in New York (where Heusgen was Germany’s ambassador to the United Nations), I have seen that Germany has an excellent reputation, thanks in part to its chancellor. When I then return to Germany, I can only shake my head at my nagging compatriots, who complain about so many things here. People are always envious of us in New York, as an example of a country that works well and of a chancellor with foresight who, for 16 years, has ensured reliability, stability and balanced crisis management – in the euro and financial crises, the Ukraine crisis and the refugee crisis. When it comes to the refugee crisis, especially, perceptions in Germany and abroad diverge widely. My American colleague Susan Rice told me at the time that the refugee policy had permanently changed her view of Germany. Opening the border to Syrian refugees in 2015 was a great thing for our country’s reputation.
DER SPIEGEL: Crisis management is indeed considered to be Merkel’s legacy. But shouldn't the aim of successful foreign policy be to avoid crises, to pursue forward-looking policies? The refugee crisis, in particular, could have been avoided if the migrants in Syria’s neighboring countries had been dealt with at an early stage.
Heusgen: It is true that more could have been done. We have learned from that. Today, Germany is the second-largest financial contributor to the United Nations. We provide massive support to the World Food Program and UNICEF.
DER SPIEGEL: Could we not have predicted the Ukraine crisis? It was becoming clear, after all, that Russia was not going to accept the country’s orientation toward the West. Did Germany fail to prevent Ukraine from getting pushed into this conflict?
Heusgen: No, the chancellor had that in mind. We did not want to promote that conflict. That is why, against strong opposition from the United States, she prevented Ukraine from being granted the prospect of joining NATO; nor did the Association Agreement with the European Union open up any prospect of membership. She always kept in mind what was tolerable for Russia. But then, overnight, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych said: No, I'm not going to do this thing with the EU.
Chancellor Merkel, adviser Heusgen: "Germany has to do more."
Foto: Markus Schreiber / AP
DER SPIEGEL: Because Russia had placed massive pressure on him.
Heusgen: But we could not have known that Russia was planning an invasion. U.S. Senator John McCain, however, felt it could have been foreseen. From the moment when President Obama stood by and watched as Assad cross his red line in Syria in 2013 and deployed poison gas against the civilian population. McCain felt Putin saw this as a sign of weakness and believed that the Americans would not intervene in Ukraine either. But we still couldn’t tell the Ukrainians: Sorry, because of your geographical position, there can be no Association Agreement.
DER SPIEGEL: In your opinion, is Germany having a particularly hard time coming up with a forward-looking, strategic foreign policy?
Heusgen: I believe that Germany is still in the process of taking the step from being a divided nation to a reunified country that also parlays its economic strength into political strength. We have to get away from always looking first at what others want and think. Leadership is expected from Germany. This, of course, includes crisis prevention. We do that, too – in the Balkans or in Libya, for example. When it came to military intervention in Libya in 2011, Germany had the foresight to recognize that there was no upside, and it abstained at the UN Security Council.
DER SPIEGEL: The decision was not considered far-sighted, but rather typical of the Germans' reticence when it comes to military missions.
Heusgen: In retrospect, the decision has given us great credibility in Libya and in the region; it provides the foundation for our mediation in the country. I see this as part of a forward-looking policy to try to keep the EU’s backyard stable. This also includes our engagement in Africa, which has been a central focus of the chancellor in recent years.
DER SPIEGEL: Is Germany properly positioned for a leadership role in foreign policy?
Heusgen: No one else seems interested. The U.S. is pulling back, and you can see it everywhere. China has developed in a very nationalistic manner. When the Chinese wake up in the morning, the first thing they are thinking about is not how to strengthen the international legal order. So, Germany has to do more.
"If the chancellor then makes a decision, you have to accept it."
DER SPIEGEL: The election platforms of the center-left Christian Democrats and the business-friendly Free Democrats call for Germany to establish a National Security council along the lines of the one in the U.S. The Greens have similar ambitions. Is this a good idea?
Heusgen: A National Security Council would be good for a unified foreign policy. So that, for example, the Chancellery and the Foreign Ministry aren’t working at cross purposes. But that is difficult in a country that has coalition governments. The Chancellery, where central decisions are made, must coordinate closely with the ministries in order to implement them.
DER SPIEGEL: Are there issues where you say today: I should have been more persistent, even with the chancellor. It is said that you have always had a more critical stance about, for example, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline under the Baltic Sea.
Heusgen: Let me answer that on principle. My role in the Chancellery was that of foreign policy adviser. However, decisions very often also have economic or domestic policy dimensions that the chancellor must take into account. If the chancellor then makes a decision, you have to accept it. She’s the politician, I am the civil servant. If you can’t deal with that, then you should find another job or go into politics yourself.
DER SPIEGEL: You were known for making some striking statements during your time on the UN Security Council. Did it feel good to drop the diplomatic restraint at times?
Heusgen: Those are two completely different roles. As adviser to the chancellor, it isn’t your job to be in the public eye, but when you sit on the Security Council, you speak for Germany. In a situation in which Russia, China and Trump’s America had trampled on the international order, I saw it as my duty to stand up for international law from morning until night – especially in light of Germany’s history. I have indeed often taken a very clear stand on this, and many other countries have thanked me for it. Even my Russian counterpart says that things are no longer as interesting without me there.
"The Trump administration was an amateurish, diplomatic mess."
Foto: CHRISTIAN HARTMANN / AFP
DER SPIEGEL: You once asked China and Russia how their presidents could still look in the mirror after they cut off 500,000 children in Syria from humanitarian aid. Was that statement coordinated with Berlin?
Heusgen: I think about formulations like that while I am jogging. If something is crying out to the heavens, you need to consider how to express it in a way that it will be heard. On important issues, you have to seek polarization.
DER SPIEGEL: The chancellor has been accused of being too naive in her dealings with China.
Heusgen: The chancellor had China's growing strength on her radar from the very beginning. She knew early on that the country would be a world power. That’s why she has traveled to China every year since 2006 and started government consultations. This intensive attention paid to China was far-sighted and correct.
DER SPIEGEL: Many thought she was too optimistic about the potential for change created by trade.
Heusgen: I don't agree. I also think the EU's investment agreement with China, which Merkel pushed forward, is right. We must meet China at eye level. The chancellor has never been naive. She has raised human rights concerns with Chinese leaders, she has been critical of the situation of the Uighurs and Tibetans, and she has helped get dissidents out of the country. She has constantly addressed the difficult points, but in a way that kept the discussion going. Of course, we shouldn’t have any illusions. China has become a totalitarian state under Xi Jinping. This will not change in the foreseeable future. We have to remain in dialogue with China and also do business with the country, but in doing so, we must clearly defend our principles and prevent the world from being run according to Chinese rules in the future.
Heusgen on the eyebrow-raising statements he made as Germany's ambassador to the UN: "I think about formulations like that while I am jogging."
Foto: Andreas Chudowski
DER SPIEGEL: The Chinese UN ambassador said goodbye to you by saying that he was glad to be rid of you. What was your experience with the Chinese at the UN?
Heusgen: My experience in New York was that you can work with the Chinese if you do it from a position of strength. It is very important that we do not turn a blind eye, because that won’t get us anywhere. The Chinese will interpret it as weakness. I was given such a "warm” farewell by the Chinese UN ambassador because I was a source of discomfort and clearly addressed the shortcomings: the military threats in the South China Sea, the suppression of democracy in Hong Kong and the treatment of the Uighurs. And we must act together with other countries. We should not breathe a sigh of relief when Beijing goes after other countries like Canada or Australia. We have to stand together – that impresses the Chinese.
DER SPIEGEL: Can you give an example of where that has worked?
Heusgen: I experienced that last year, when the annual declaration of the Human Rights Committee of the United Nations was discussed, in which the situation of the Uighurs in Xinyang was condemned. In previous years, Britain and the U.S. were in charge, but last year we Germans took over. Instead of 23, 39 countries joined the declaration. That was an earthquake from the perspective of the Chinese. According to reports, a department head in Beijing had to resign as a result.
DER SPIEGEL: Is that also the way to confront Putin?
Heusgen: In contrast to Russia, China actually does care about its reputation abroad. The Russians don’t care if a resolution is passed against them in the General Assembly by a vote of 120 to five. The Chinese do care – they don't want to lose, and they will try to prevent losing by all means. They blackmail countries. When it comes to an issue that China cares deeply about, you sometimes see African ambassadors reading from Chinese talking points. It’s pretty brutal.
DER SPIEGEL: On the one hand, you are pleading for toughness, but on the other, you are sticking firmly to dialogue. Can that work in the long run?
Heusgen: Name an alternative.
DER SPIEGEL: The U.S. no longer sees China as a partner and competitor, but exclusively as a systemic rival.
Heusgen: The Americans call this "decoupling," but the policy doesn’t work. America’s trade with China may stagnate, but it will not decrease significantly. The economies are far too intertwined for that, and the economic losses would be too high. Furthermore, the Americans are not decoupling entirely. They still want to cooperate with China on climate policy.
DER SPIEGEL: Before Merkel brought you into the Chancellery, you served as chief of staff to Javier Solana, the EU’s first high representative for common foreign and security policy. Are you disappointed by how little has happened in EU foreign policy over the past 20 years?
Heusgen: Those were the golden days of European foreign policy. Solana had previously served as NATO secretary general and could speak on equal footing with EU heads of state and government. No such heavyweight has been appointed to the post of high representative since. Most countries are not prepared to hand more competencies over to Brussels. A first step would be if a former head of state or government were finally appointed to this office.
DER SPIEGEL: What about Angela Merkel?
Heusgen: I don't think she will seek a task like that after the end of her term as chancellor.
DER SPIEGEL: You are a member of the Christian Democratic Union. What distinguishes a Christian Democratic foreign policy from that of the business-friendly Free Democrats, the environmentalist Greens or the center-left Social Democrats?
Heusgen: As a Catholic and a Christian Democrat, the focus for me is on people. Human rights have always very much driven my foreign policy thinking and actions. There is definitely overlap with other parties.
DER SPIEGEL: Is it your hope that Armin Laschet will become chancellor?
Heusgen: Yes.
DER SPIEGEL: What's next for you personally? Is it true that you are likely to succeed Wolfgang Ischinger as chair of the Munich Security Conference?
Heusgen: As chairman of the circle of benefactors of the Munich Security Conference, I will now play an even greater role there and work together with my long-time colleague Wolfgang Ischinger. Apart from that, I have taken on a teaching position at my old university in Sankt Gallen, and I am very pleased about that.
DER SPIEGEL: Mr. Heusgen, we thank you for this interview.
Spiegel · by Christoph Schult, Christiane Hoffmann, DER SPIEGEL
13. Trapped in Afghanistan
Imagine the fear and stress he and his family and others like them must be feeling now. For those interested in support efforts to evacuate Afghans here is a web site to check out: https://www.shonabashona.net/
Excerpts:
At the moment, there’s nothing he can do but wait. Trying to escape the country is still too dangerous, especially with a large family. Shah has enough money saved to live in Kabul for another five months, he told me. “His application is being processed,” Zaretsky said. But, in the meantime, she noted, the U.S. could help people like Shah evacuate to third countries. “It’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, for Shah to get out on his own.”
According to the Times, sixty-four thousand Afghans have arrived in the U.S. as of September 14th, the majority of whom are currently living on military bases as the government makes plans to resettle them in the States. Another eighteen thousand Afghans are on American military bases abroad. Advocates and private citizens are still working to organize outbound flights for stranded Afghans. Senior Administration officials told me that the U.S. government is also continuing to process S.I.V. applications. When I asked how the Americans are planning to get applicants out of Afghanistan, now that the Taliban are in control, one of the officials told me, “T.B.D.”
When Shah and his family used to live in the south, they weren’t in hiding but their movements were severely circumscribed. His children would come home from school and share reports of classmates whose parents took them all around town, to parks and gardens. “These people are different from us,” he told the kids. “I will take you far away from here, far away from the garden, to a better place.” When he said this, he wasn’t thinking about the U.S. but of Kabul or of foreign cities, like Dubai. “We’ll go on a vacation,” he would say. Shah has finally fulfilled his promise to his children: they are in the nation’s capital. But the other day his oldest daughter had become depressed and refused to eat. She and her siblings miss school, and they beg him each day to go outside. “They’re in a worse situation,” Shah told me, “much worse than it had been back home. I say, ‘This is just temporary.’ This is what I’ve been telling them for years and years. I’ve made a lot of promises to my kids.”
Trapped in Afghanistan
A translator for American forces applied four times for a special immigrant visa to come to the U.S.—he’s still waiting.
When Shah began working as a translator for U.S. forces at an Afghan airbase, in 2007, his parents warned that he was putting the family at risk. “In our culture, most kids listen to what their parents say,” he told me. “And they kept telling me to quit. They’d say, ‘You can have a piece of bread to eat and live a peaceful life. You don’t need chicken and rice.’ ” It had taken Shah two years to learn to speak English well enough to land a job with the Americans. His family was large and poor, and, although he was just nineteen, they depended on his earnings. He’d previously made a modest salary working as a part-time bookkeeper. A few years after he began working as a translator, Shah got married, and, in 2012, he and his wife had their first child. The whole family moved into a two-story house in a gated community. “I was proudly working,” he said. “I had something in my mind.”
The threats had begun almost as soon as he took the position, anonymous callers telling him, “I know where you’re living. I know where you’re going every morning. I know what your job is.” Shah, who asked me to withhold certain identifying details, including his full name, tried to take precautions, changing his routes and scanning the streets before going outside. One night, as he was returning home from work, his father called his cell phone and ordered him to turn back. Shah could hear his mother sobbing in the background. The Taliban were making new incursions into their old strongholds in the southern parts of the country, and some of the group’s fighters had shot a man whom they had apparently mistaken for Shah in front of the family’s house. Afterward, the threats intensified: in addition to the phone calls, menacing notes were left on the front door. By then, it no longer made much difference whether or not Shah quit. He knew people who were assassinated even after they’d resigned their positions with the Americans.
In 2013, Shah applied for a special immigrant visa, or S.I.V. Created by the United States Congress in 2006, the program was designed to help Iraqi and Afghan nationals who faced persecution as a result of working with the U.S. Recipients were relocated to the U.S. and put on a path to eventual citizenship. Applying was notoriously difficult. There were fourteen steps that Shah’s application had to clear, including an extensive review by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. He needed to obtain proof of employment from human-resources departments, as well as separate letters of recommendation written by direct supervisors who were U.S. citizens. Between 2013 and 2016, Shah applied three times for an S.I.V., but each time some bureaucratic problem stood in his way. In one instance, he had a proof of employment from a former supervisor but could not get an attestation from human resources because the contractor had closed its offices in Afghanistan. “He could confirm everything,” Shah told me of his former supervisor. “But they were not accepting the letter.”
Shah is thirty-three now and has five children. He’s held a number of jobs with American contractors, at airbases and in intelligence training. Most recently, he worked from his home office, overseeing cargo deliveries for a U.S. company. In May, as the Taliban advanced on Helmand Province, he started a fourth S.I.V. application, this time with the help of the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), an advocacy group based in New York. “Wherever the Taliban took, they were stable there—they were not going backward,” Shah said. “I realized this is something outside the government’s control.”
After filing his application, Shah decided to fly to Kabul, ahead of his family; at the time, the capital was expected to withstand the Taliban’s advances. Before he left, he dismantled his office, threw out any furniture that might suggest he once associated with foreigners, and burned two large garbage bags filled with work documents. On the day of his flight, the airport was mobbed. People were lined up at the ticket counters, pleading with agents to sell them seats on any plane headed for the capital. Prices had surged, and Shah could overhear people offering to pay even more to get their families in the air.
In Kabul, Shah moved between hotel rooms, ordering in food and leaving only to inspect rental properties where he could house the rest of his family. While he was there, the Taliban seized twelve provincial capitals in the span of a single week. Shah’s family had plane tickets for Kabul, but the flights were all delayed, then cancelled. At the time, the White House anticipated that Kabul would come under heavy attack within the month, but Shah faced a more immediate problem. His family couldn’t fly to the capital, and the Taliban now controlled most of the roadways.
One morning in the middle of August, when Shah woke up at four to pray, he noticed his cell phone flashing. His father had been calling. Armed men had shown up at the family’s house around midnight. They claimed to have information about someone inside with ties to the U.S., and threatened to shoot down the door to search the property. Shah’s father, who is in his early seventies and has a heart condition, refused to let them in. He called out to neighbors for help. The noise woke the children, and Shah’s wife and mother were wailing from the stress. “You could have come during the day,” Shah’s father shouted at one point. “How Muslim can you be, to come at this time of night?” Eventually, a crowd of neighbors gathered outside, and the men left.
Shah continued to make arrangements for his family. He found a house that belonged to a man who was taking his own family to Turkey. They met in Shah’s hotel room to sign a rental agreement and exchange the cash. Later that week, Shah visited a government office to get identification documents for his two youngest children, which they would need in order to leave the country. As he stood near the end of a line that snaked around the block, a man emerged from the lobby, yelling that the Taliban had entered the capital. The crowd buckled and eddied—some people ran, others pushed harder to get inside the building. A Toyota Corolla stopped in the middle of the street, and the driver and his passengers darted out, leaving the car abandoned with its doors open. Groups of pedestrians encircled women who weren’t wearing head coverings, to keep them out of public view. “I’m lost,” Shah recalled thinking as he rushed back to his hotel. “I’m in the middle of nowhere now.”
On the evening of August 25th, Shah received a call from IRAP. Lawyers at the organization were trying to book his family on a charter flight leaving Kabul the next night. Around five the following morning, Shah’s father set out with Shah’s wife and children. It was half a day’s drive on roads filled with Taliban checkpoints. While the family was in transit, a lawyer from IRAP called with another tip: there were reports of an impending attack at the airport. An evacuation was still possible, but it would have to be delayed. Shah still felt hopeful when his family arrived at the hotel that afternoon. His wife and children hurried upstairs to his room. His father stayed in the car, telling him, “There’ll be a time when we’re together again.” He was turning around to drive back home. They had agreed ahead of time that this was the safest course of action. “Now the situation in our province is the same as in Kabul,” Shah told me. “The only difference is that we know no one in Kabul.”
That evening, Shah, his wife, and their five children crammed together inside the small hotel room, waiting for an update about when they could leave. At around 6 p.m., there was a series of explosions at the Kabul airport. Two suicide bombers attacked the crowds, killing at least ninety Afghans and thirteen U.S. service members. Shah’s wife asked him what the plan was. “I cannot think anymore,” he said. “The borders were being locked. The only option was the airport.”
Over the past fifteen years, more than seventy-five thousand Afghans have come to the U.S. as a result of the S.I.V. program, which was designed to protect not just applicants but also their families. Thousands of others, however, never made it through the process. “The way the legislation originally was passed made it very difficult for people to qualify,” Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire, told me. She noted that “both Democratic and Republican administrations” failed to address the program’s systemic problems. The situation, she added, has “also been complicated by the unwillingness of a few people in the Senate to agree to increase the cap to allow the program to move faster.” Jeff Sessions and Chuck Grassley were staunchly opposed to bringing more immigrants to the U.S.; Mike Lee, in 2016, blocked a key measure to expand the S.I.V. program in order to force the chamber’s consideration of an unrelated amendment; and, most recently, Rand Paul said, “I think those who speak English and are our friends should stay and fight.” The cumulative effect of a small minority of obstructionists has been years of underfunding and neglect.
Unsurprisingly, the S.I.V. program has also been beset by logistical holdups. Despite the fact that the government was required to close cases within nine months, average processing times could be nearly three years. In 2019, after a group of Afghan and Iraqi S.I.V. applicants sued the U.S. government over the delays, a federal judge ordered the Trump Administration to submit a plan for resolving such issues. Congress, she said in her ruling, did not intend to give the U.S. government “an unbounded, open-ended timeframe in which to adjudicate SIV applications.” In June of 2020, she approved a plan establishing timelines and performance reports for the government’s handling of each stage of the S.I.V. application.
By then, the Trump Administration had already halted visa interviews at Embassies and consular offices worldwide, owing to the pandemic. They wouldn’t be restarted until February, 2021, a full year after Trump cut a deal with the Taliban to begin withdrawing American forces from the country. In Trump’s final eighteen months as President, as Shaheen told me, the S.I.V. program “pretty much stalled out.” When Biden took office, roughly seventeen thousand applicants remained in Afghanistan, along with approximately fifty-three thousand family members.
“We inherited a deadline,” Antony Blinken, Biden’s Secretary of State, said later. “We did not inherit a plan.” In the early spring of 2021, the State Department sent additional staff to Kabul and more than quadrupled the personnel in the U.S. to expedite the processing of S.I.V. applications. Within a few months, according to a senior Administration official, “we saved a ton of time on screening and vetting,” reducing the average processing time for each application by more than a year. Advocates representing S.I.V. applicants were unimpressed. “Many applications saw limited or no movement,” Alexandra Zaretsky, an attorney at IRAP, told me. Her understanding was that some of the additional government staff, in the U.S., wouldn’t be trained until September. “Time was our biggest enemy,” the Administration official told me.
In April, Biden had vowed to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by the twentieth anniversary of September 11th. Veterans groups and other advocates—including IRAP—urged the Administration to immediately launch massive evacuation efforts. Officials countered that it was impractical to bring large numbers of Afghans with pending applications to U.S. territory, and that a premature exodus could undermine the standing of Afghanistan’s then beleaguered President, Ashraf Ghani. In July, the Biden Administration announced a plan called Operation Allies Refuge to evacuate American allies whose applications had stalled in the federal bureaucracy. According to the Administration official, the idea was to fly out applicants on civilian aircraft and “build a conveyor belt through Fort Lee,” a military base in Virginia, where the new arrivals could finish the visa process. A flight was going out every three days at the end of July; by early August, a plane of evacuees was leaving the Afghan capital every day. “We were getting ready to transition to two flights a day when the Taliban entered Kabul,” another senior official said. Ultimately, out of some seventy thousand Afghans who were waiting on S.I.V. applications, around two thousand of them reached the U.S. through this effort.
By then, there were reports that thousands of other Afghans were eligible for S.I.V. status but didn’t have a pending application. (Many of them had applied before and been rejected, but had yet to restart the process.) Officials were attempting to enact years’ worth of necessary reforms and recalibrations within a period of weeks—in the middle of a humanitarian crisis. To make matters worse, from mid-June to early July, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul temporarily halted S.I.V. interviews, owing to an outbreak of COVID-19. Nevertheless, in the second half of August, following the Taliban’s capture of Kabul, the Biden Administration evacuated more than a hundred and twenty thousand people, most of them Afghans. Thousands more made it out thanks to the coördinated work of private citizens—including veterans, journalists, and advocates—who raised money for private planes that left Afghanistan for third countries in the final weeks before the Americans departed. Many people involved in these efforts pleaded with White House officials to delay the military withdrawal so that the evacuations could continue. “I was not going to extend this forever war,” Biden said, on August 31st, shortly after the final U.S. forces had left the country, “and I was not extending a forever exit.”
The fate of Afghans with pending S.I.V. applications didn’t figure into the President’s remarks. But a day later a State Department official told NBC News, “I don’t have an estimate for you on the numbers of SIVs and family members who are still there, but I would say it’s the majority of them, just based on anecdotal information about the populations we were able to support.” The Administration has since estimated that nearly two thousand applicants have made it to the U.S. since the fall of Kabul. Advocates at IRAP estimated that at least ten thousand S.I.V. applicants may have been left behind. Zaretsky told me that each applicant has, on average, about four family members who also need to be evacuated. “The S.I.V. process was designed because there was no other clear path for Afghans who helped the U.S. government to reach the United States,” she said. “The U.S. government has a legal and moral duty to protect these individuals and their families.”
Shah is still in Afghanistan, and is now in hiding with his wife and children. The house that he’d initially rented fell through after the Taliban overtook Kabul. But, through a family friend, he and his wife found an apartment that seemed secure. It has three rooms and is fully furnished. They keep the blinds drawn. Each afternoon, Shah puts on a shawl and sits on the front stoop while his children run around with their new neighbors for forty-five minutes. The key, he told me, is to cover his face without looking as if he is trying to hide. It helps that so many people have already fled the country and rented their apartments and houses to other families. The turnover afforded some protection. Since most of the residents in his apartment complex are also newcomers, Shah and his family can blend in.
Shah and his wife spend most of their waking hours worrying about their children—monitoring their movements, keeping them occupied, pleading with them to stay quiet. For the better part of each day, Shah sets them in front of videos on YouTube. His wife stays quiet in the morning so that the children can sleep in. One evening, while Shah and his wife were cooking dinner, they heard a thud, followed by sobs. The kids were jumping on a bed, and one of them fell and banged his head. Shah initially panicked that the boy might be hurt; when it was clear that he was fine, Shah became anxious that the crying would attract attention. He and his wife ordered everyone to bed. The next day, he decided to take his family outside the complex for the first time, a trip to the supermarket, with a stop on the way for ice cream. “We spent one hour outside, and everyone was happy,” Shah told me afterward. When they got back to the apartment, his children asked, “Daddy, are we going to go again tomorrow?”
Later that night, he sent me a series of tweets posted by other Afghans. “An SIV holder was beaten and tortured by the Taliban,” one journalist reported. A former government official announced that the “Taliban have started mass house to house and door to door search operations” across Kabul, “looking for ‘foreigner collaborators.’ ” We’d spoken for several hours by this point, but it was the first time he told me outright that he was scared.
At the moment, there’s nothing he can do but wait. Trying to escape the country is still too dangerous, especially with a large family. Shah has enough money saved to live in Kabul for another five months, he told me. “His application is being processed,” Zaretsky said. But, in the meantime, she noted, the U.S. could help people like Shah evacuate to third countries. “It’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, for Shah to get out on his own.”
According to the Times, sixty-four thousand Afghans have arrived in the U.S. as of September 14th, the majority of whom are currently living on military bases as the government makes plans to resettle them in the States. Another eighteen thousand Afghans are on American military bases abroad. Advocates and private citizens are still working to organize outbound flights for stranded Afghans. Senior Administration officials told me that the U.S. government is also continuing to process S.I.V. applications. When I asked how the Americans are planning to get applicants out of Afghanistan, now that the Taliban are in control, one of the officials told me, “T.B.D.”
When Shah and his family used to live in the south, they weren’t in hiding but their movements were severely circumscribed. His children would come home from school and share reports of classmates whose parents took them all around town, to parks and gardens. “These people are different from us,” he told the kids. “I will take you far away from here, far away from the garden, to a better place.” When he said this, he wasn’t thinking about the U.S. but of Kabul or of foreign cities, like Dubai. “We’ll go on a vacation,” he would say. Shah has finally fulfilled his promise to his children: they are in the nation’s capital. But the other day his oldest daughter had become depressed and refused to eat. She and her siblings miss school, and they beg him each day to go outside. “They’re in a worse situation,” Shah told me, “much worse than it had been back home. I say, ‘This is just temporary.’ This is what I’ve been telling them for years and years. I’ve made a lot of promises to my kids.”
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14. The author of 'The Things They Carried' tells us what he carried in Vietnam
The author of 'The Things They Carried' tells us what he carried in Vietnam
An M16, letters to a girl, fear, pride, love. He's left some burdens behind in exchange for others.
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Editor’s note: This article was originally published on Feb. 18, 2021.
Tim O’Brien is many things. A Vietnam veteran. A Purple Heart recipient. The so-called “poet laureate of war.” One of the greatest American writers of his generation. He is all those things and many more. He’s a loving father and husband. A devoted teacher, not just to his sons, but to his students at writing seminars, some of whom are military veterans looking to share their stories of war, and in so doing, make sense of their own experiences. He’s a fierce and unrelenting critic of unjust wars; a crusader against apathy and willful ignorance; and a preacher for peace who wields his rage and eloquence like a weapon against those who call for blood but are never there on the ground when it is spilled.
Though he has written many novels over the years, O’Brien is perhaps best known for The Things They Carried, a collection of fictional stories which drew heavily from his own experiences in Vietnam as a young 20-something infantryman who was drafted into the war in 1968. The novel’s unique framework — revealing the hidden depths of individual soldiers through their burdens, both literal and figurative — has captured the attention and imagination of millions of readers, many of them veterans, and even inspired a recurring series on Task & Purpose.
We recently spoke with the acclaimed author about a documentary by Aaron Matthews that chronicled O’Brien’s struggle to finish one last book, and in the process revealed the many ways that art, family, duty, and trauma intersect in our daily lives. During that interview, we took the opportunity to ask O’Brien what he carried in Vietnam, and what he carries with him now.
The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and style.
Task & Purpose: What did you carry in Vietnam?
Tim O’Brien: I carried all the standard military stuff: grenades, ammo, an M16, sometimes an M60. Letters from mom, dad. Letters from a girl back home.
More than the physical, I carried incredible terror with every single step I took. Is the land going to blow me up? I think of that all the time, even when I walk out of the house. To this day, I watch the pavement, the grass. It’s just been built into me.
Indeed, O’Brien specified many of the dangers he faced in Vietnam, ticking them off one by one: Land mines, booby-trapped artillery rounds, bouncing betties, toe poppers. “85 percent of our casualties came from land mines, which you couldn’t shoot back at,” he said. “So it felt as if the whole country was just killing us. The ground, the trails, the paddy dikes.”
I carried a sense of responsibility for the deaths of other people, and it wakes me up at night. And I carried a love for my fellow soldiers; the guys who went through what I went through; who didn’t shoot themselves in the foot, as everyone was tempted to do but very few did. You just kept humping forward, every day. There’s something grand about that, knowing that just walking can kill you, but every day you set out, and keep your legs moving. There’s a pride in it. As much as I hated the war, as much as I disagreed with it, I kept humping and so did the guys around me and that’s the thing I carry inside me to this day.
What do you carry now?
I carry the love of my children and my wife.
I carry the increasing burden of my own mortality: I’m 74 years old, and in the next 5, 10, 15 years I’ll be dead. I carry a kind of urgency inside of me: Get this done, get that done.
Part of this is a kind of wrapping up of a life: One more book, maybe? One more trip to the Bahamas, maybe? One more quiet dinner with my family, maybe? There’s an endless maybeness to the world now that didn’t used to be there. It does come upon all of us, I’m not special in that way. It’s a lot like being back in Vietnam when I was 22; Maybe I’ll have the next 5 minutes? Maybe I won’t. Now it’s back again as an old man. Maybe there’ll be a tomorrow? Maybe there won’t be a tomorrow?
So, I’m carrying that now.
What do you carry for personal significance? For example, how about the hats you always seem to wear?
On our plane ride home from Vietnam, as we came in to Seattle, it was night and I went into the back of the plane and the lavatory and I took off my uniform and I put on blue jeans, a sweater, and a baseball cap, and I’ve been wearing a ball cap ever since then as a kind of reminder to myself that I’m a human being. I’m not a guy who belongs in a uniform. I hated it. I hated saluting my inferiors.
After saying “inferiors,” O’Brien paused to ask if I had been an officer — I told him I had not.
Some officers deserved it, a lot of them didn’t. I hated having to say “yes sir” to stupidity, to ignorance. I hated it. [But] the baseball cap — I have one on right now — it’s a reminder of that day I got off that airplane in Seattle and rejoined the civilian world.
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is the Deputy Editor of Task & Purpose and a Marine veteran. He oversees daily editorial operations, edits articles, and supports reporters so they can continue to write the impactful stories that matter to our audience. In terms of writing, James provides a mix of pop culture commentary and in-depth analysis of issues facing the military and veterans community. Contact the author here.
15. Ransomware attacks are another tool in the political warfare toolbox
Ransomware attacks are another tool in the political warfare toolbox
The Hill · by Kiril Avramov, opinion contributor · September 26, 2021
It’s easy to imagine yourself as a ransomware victim. You open your laptop one morning and see a note explaining that your files are now encrypted. Only the attackers hold the key. They are willing to let you back into your system if you pass them some bitcoin.
Perhaps what’s harder to imagine is how these attacks shape and are shaped by our businesses, governments and personal lives. But it is crucial more policymakers appreciate these dynamics because ransomware is not only a criminal enterprise. Just like disinformation, private military contractors and state-directed corporate espionage, ransomware is a powerful weapon in political warfare.
A wave of recent ransomware attacks has attracted the attention of many leaders by targeting what the U.S. government has deemed "critical infrastructure." The scale, volume and disruptiveness of recent ransomware attacks have led to an effort by the Biden administration to reclassify ransomware as a national security threat.
The ongoing surge of ransomware targeting Western networks has been attributed to Russian groups operating ransomware-as-a-service enterprises. In Russia, ransomware actors are seldom pursued or prosecuted. They operate with relative ease in a context where public and private spheres overlap. External observers are left wondering where the state ends and private, or rather illicit, the enterprise begins.
Strategic inaction on the Kremlin’s part is an inducement to experiment with malicious software aimed at Western targets. There are documented instances of individuals and groups being co-opted by Russian security and intelligence services. The state provides them legal protection and occasional targeting guidance in exchange for information and corrupt material gains.
In this way, ransomware has entered the Gray Zone. This is a realm where plausible deniability is achieved because of the cooptation and weaponization of private proxies. When these private entities act, the outcomes align suspiciously well with the Kremlin’s objectives. The result is a proliferation of confusion and chaos, erosion of social trust and diminishing the economic potential of Russia’s competitors.
Despite the patterns of interactions between the Russian security services and cybergangs, the exact details of this arrangement remain opaque. The global trend of amalgamation between private actors and state initiatives complicates efforts to discern purely criminal activities from state-sponsored political warfare. These difficulties introduce dangers of misattribution or miscalculation that could lead to other confrontations and further strain the already difficult relations between the U.S. and Russia.
When you consider the explosion of new ransomware business models and the favorable conditions Russia creates for attackers, it is reasonable to anticipate the market for ransomware capabilities will continue to get better. And increasing demand for malicious code may incentivize cybergangs to develop artificial intelligence features that could further erode the Russian state’s ability to place limits on attackers. These trends spell an uncertain future for norms against ransomware attacks.
In terms of Gray Zone confrontation, we need to diffuse capable operators armed with highly sophisticated software. Ransomware risks becoming just another “conventional” weapon in conflicts classified as “below the threshold of war.”
To make informed decisions, lawmakers need to continue to solicit an intelligence community assessment on the nature of Russian state involvement in the ransomware industry. And, although it may seem counterintuitive, policymakers should attempt to secure limited Russian cooperation on developing norms against AI-enabled ransomware attacks.
The Hill · by Kiril Avramov, opinion contributor · September 26, 2021
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
