Quotes of the Day:
"Asymmetric actions have come into widespread use, enabling the nullification of an enemy's advantages in armed conflict."
- Valery Gerasimov, The value of science is in foresight
"No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one. You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself."
- Ernest Hemingway
“We need women at all levels, including the top, to change the dynamic, reshape the conversation, to make sure women’s voices are heard and heeded, not overlooked and ignored.”
- Sheryl Sandberg
1. Opinion | The Pentagon’s ‘deterrence’ strategy ignores hard-earned lessons about the balance of power
2. Milley privately blames State Department for botched Afghanistan evacuation
3. ‘Speed equals safety’: Inside the Pentagon’s controversial decision to leave Bagram early
4. Milley says resigning would be 'incredible act of political defiance,' under Cotton pressure
5. Biden Paints Himself Into a Corner on the Iran Nuclear Deal
6. Army Shifting Training Priorities, Investments for Multi-Domain Ops
7. How Could the U.S. Deter Military Conflict in the Taiwan Strait?
8. Covert Operations Fail More Often than Not, so Why Do Leaders Order Them? (book review)
9. Robert Gates: How civics education became a national security issue
10. #Reviewing The Character Gap
11. Book Launch: “Three Dangerous Men: Russia, China, Iran, and the Rise of Irregular Warfare" with Seth Jones
12. What you should know about ‘Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare’
13. How the U.S. Debt Ceiling Battle Threatens the Global Economy
14. The Timing of Terrorism: The Obsessions with Dates
15. Adapting Intelligence to the New Afghanistan
16. China’s factory activity in shock slowdown as energy crisis hits home
17. America’s Revolving-Door Politics Behind The Fall Of US-Sino Ties – Analysis
18. The west is the author of its own weakness
19. Defense Business Board Relaunches After Pentagon Review
20. Readout of U.S. - PRC Defense Policy Coordination Talks
1. Opinion | The Pentagon’s ‘deterrence’ strategy ignores hard-earned lessons about the balance of power
The first real critique I have seen of integrated deterrence (the headline editor should have included the full name of the concept in the title).
I would offer that the Congressman (and DOD) should include unconventional deterrence into integrated deterrence.
Excerpts:
What we actually need to integrate is more conventional hard power — more ships, more long-range missiles and more long-range bombers in the Indo-Pacific. Giving Chinese forces certainty that we are targeting them is the most important task for restoring our conventional deterrence posture. This is where diplomacy and allies can help. To deploy teams of Marines tasked with targeting Chinese Navy ships from shifting positions throughout the Indo-Pacific, we need base agreements with Japan, Australia, the Philippines and other key allies, along with a plan for better using U.S. territories such as Midway and Wake Island. Congress can also help by breaking the rough three-way funding split between the armed services and growing the Navy — our highest-priority force in the Indo-Pacific — even if it means reducing overall Army end strength, while forcing the Army to defend air bases and logistics sites from threats such as low-elevation cruise missiles.
Opinion | The Pentagon’s ‘deterrence’ strategy ignores hard-earned lessons about the balance of power
Mike Gallagher, a Republican, represents Wisconsin’s 8th Congressional District in the House.
The Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan has called into question the credibility of U.S. commitments and the state of conventional military deterrence. But even before the Afghanistan surrender, the Biden Pentagon was already wrestling with increasingly unfavorable military balances of power, particularly regarding China.
In April, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin outlined a new model he called “integrated deterrence.” The concept, which will likely be the cornerstone of the Biden Pentagon’s forthcoming National Defense Strategy, includes admirable goals. Unfortunately, though, it ignores important lessons from recent administrations about what really works.
First, the defense secretary wants to integrate military and nonmilitary instruments of national power, especially diplomacy, across five domains of competition (air, land, sea, space and cyberspace), for use at the time and manner of our choosing. As Austin explained in a Post op-ed in May, integrated deterrence could “mean employing cyber effects in one location to respond to a maritime security incident hundreds of miles away.”
There is nothing new about this. Under the Trump administration, the Pentagon responded to Iran shooting down an American drone with a cyberstrike. Yet what ultimately reset the escalatory ladder was not a fancy theory of how “effects” in one domain impact another, but rather old-school, kinetic action in the form of a missile strike that killed Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force.
Second, Austin wants to integrate new technologies into conventional deterrence. He believes advances in computing and artificial intelligence are changing the character of warfare itself — “enabling us to find not just one needle in one haystack but 10 needles in 10 haystacks, and share their locations on the spot with other platforms.” The same fantastical thinking fueled the Obama administration’s failed “Third Offset” strategy. Importantly, the then-head of Indo-Pacific Command Adm. Phil Davidson recently warned that China could invade Taiwan in the next six years. If this timeline is correct, betting on tomorrow’s transformative technology makes less sense than fielding reliable technologies that work today. Technology often fails in the Defense Department’s Taiwan war games, and a recent report analyzing the Pentagon’s new battle network strategy also found that it is not ready for prime time.
Third, Austin wants to better integrate the United States’ allies into our deterrent posture. Here Austin deserves credit for persuading Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte to retain the Visiting Forces Agreement that provides access for U.S. forces and forging the AUKUS partnership with Britain and Australia. Yet our allies care less about diplomatic rhetoric than what our military can do, and images of the U.S. military heading for the exits in the face of a technologically backward force do not inspire confidence. The Chinese Communist Party is exploiting the Afghanistan surrender to tell Taiwan that the United States cannot be counted on in a cross-strait crisis. Japanese Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi recently expressed alarm at the growing military imbalance between the United States and China. And as President Barack Obama discovered after abandoning Iraq and embracing the Iran nuclear deal, misunderstanding the basic alliance structure in a lower-priority region can create chaos and thereby undermine any pivot to a higher-priority theater (i.e., the Indo-Pacific).
What we actually need to integrate is more conventional hard power — more ships, more long-range missiles and more long-range bombers in the Indo-Pacific. Giving Chinese forces certainty that we are targeting them is the most important task for restoring our conventional deterrence posture. This is where diplomacy and allies can help. To deploy teams of Marines tasked with targeting Chinese Navy ships from shifting positions throughout the Indo-Pacific, we need base agreements with Japan, Australia, the Philippines and other key allies, along with a plan for better using U.S. territories such as Midway and Wake Island. Congress can also help by breaking the rough three-way funding split between the armed services and growing the Navy — our highest-priority force in the Indo-Pacific — even if it means reducing overall Army end strength, while forcing the Army to defend air bases and logistics sites from threats such as low-elevation cruise missiles.
In every recent administration, the Pentagon has come up with new buzzwords. From the Third Offset, to Trump-era dynamic force employment, to integrated deterrence, most of these concepts serve as smokescreens for disinvesting in defense and making do with a force that is too small to meet global requirements. The jargon provides cover for political leadership that is too weak or too distracted to give the military what it needs to execute its missions or to make hard choices between military services that would free up resources for the main effort: deterring China from invading Taiwan. Platitudes — “Integrated deterrence means all of us giving our all” — cloud our thinking and give false hope that nonmilitary tools, new technologies and allies can substitute for hard power when it comes to denying aggression from our adversaries.
2. Milley privately blames State Department for botched Afghanistan evacuation
Excerpts:
Those private remarks were far more blunt than Milley's public testimony, in which the nation's top general said the issue of whether the order should have been given earlier is an "open question that needs further exploration."
Milley privately blames State Department for botched Afghanistan evacuation
Axios · by Jonathan Swan,Zachary Basu
In a classified briefing with senators on Tuesday, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley directly blamed the State Department for a botched evacuation from Afghanistan, saying officials "waited too long" to order the operation out of Kabul's airport, two sources with direct knowledge of the briefing told Axios.
Why it matters: Those private remarks were far more blunt than Milley's public testimony, in which the nation's top general said the issue of whether the order should have been given earlier is an "open question that needs further exploration."
The big picture: Two days of testimony from Milley, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Frank McKenzie, the head of U.S. Central Command, underscore the finger-pointing and deep divisions between the State Department and the Pentagon.
- Lawmakers are demanding accountability over the Biden administration's chaotic exit from Afghanistan, including the failure to evacuate thousands of at-risk Afghan allies and leaving without evacuating all Americans.
- The State Department delayed evacuations at the order of President Biden after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani warned that evacuating Afghan allies earlier would destroy morale and lead to the collapse of the government.
- Republicans have called on Milley, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan and even President Biden to resign.
Behind the scenes: During a closed session after Tuesday's public testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) directed a general question to Austin about lessons learned from the withdrawal.
- Milley jumped in to say that the evacuation of civilians — which Duckworth had not specifically asked about — needed to happen earlier.
- The top U.S. general acknowledged that there's often disagreement between the State Department and Pentagon in general, but that it was particularly pronounced in this instance.
- A third source, defending Milley, said the general "wasn't blaming anybody per se, but was speaking from a purely military perspective. The quicker we moved out non-combatants, the safer they would be."
- Austin testified publicly that he ordered CENTCOM to begin preparing for a potential NEO weeks after Biden's announcement in April that the U.S. would withdraw from Afghanistan.
- But the State Department did not order the mission until Aug. 14 — one day before Kabul fell to the Taliban. A senior State Department official pointed to the fact that, as Milley himself repeatedly testified, nobody believed that the Afghan security forces would collapse in 11 days.
- It was only because the military had prepositioned forces in the region and run practice exercises, Austin testified, that thousands of troops were able to arrive in Kabul and secure the airport after 48 hours of chaos.
For the record: "Following the president’s decision to withdraw U.S. military forces from Afghanistan, CENTCOM updated contingency planning for a non-combatant evacuation operation, in coordination with the Department of State, including Embassy Kabul," a senior administration official told Axios.
- "Senior leaders from the National Security Council, State, DoD, CENTCOM and the intelligence community discussed the planning during a table-top exercise on August 6."
- "During that exercise, no DoD official, civilian or military, argued for triggering a NEO. If DoD had been pushing for an earlier NEO, we would have expected to have heard those calls during the discussion."
Flashback: Blinken was the first senior Biden official to testify before Congress on Afghanistan. He faced sharp criticism and calls to resign from several Republicans but largely remained calm under pressure.
- "We have to admit it was the State Department and the White House that caused this catastrophe, not the Defense Department," Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), the House Armed Services Committee's top Republican, said after hearing the generals' testimony on Wednesday.
Editor's note: This story has been updated with additional comment from a senior administration official.
Axios' Alayna Treene contributed to this report.
Axios · by Jonathan Swan,Zachary Basu
3. ‘Speed equals safety’: Inside the Pentagon’s controversial decision to leave Bagram early
Excerpts:
The call on Bagram looms especially large. The U.S. handover spooked the American-backed military and government, took away the main U.S. military air base before the pullout was complete and appeared to accelerate the collapse. Some officials say the lack of access to Bagram also made it harder for the U.S. and allies to carry out the evacuation mission in the days after Kabul fell. Reeling from the sudden collapse of the Afghan government and armed forces, the Biden administration made the decision to rapidly redeploy 4,000 troops to secure Hamid Karzai International Airport and assist in the frantic evacuation efforts; 13 were killed on Aug. 27 in a suicide bombing at one the airport’s gates.
This account of the military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan is based on interviews with 17 current and former officials — most of whom requested anonymity in order to speak candidly without fear of retribution. Their accounts shed new light on the Pentagon’s decision to hand over Bagram, and the back and forth between senior military leaders and the White House leading up to the American exit from Afghanistan.
Spokespeople for the National Security Council and the State Department declined to comment on the May drill.
‘Speed equals safety’: Inside the Pentagon’s controversial decision to leave Bagram early
09/28/2021 06:04 AM EDT
Updated: 09/28/2021 07:44 AM EDT
The administration didn't second-guess its decision to rapidly withdraw from Afghanistan. Lawmakers are fuming.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley stressed the need for American troops to get out of the country as quickly as possible to protect against renewed Taliban attacks. | Alex Wong/Getty Images
09/28/2021 06:04 AM EDT
On a rainy day in early May, weeks after President Joe Biden announced the U.S. exit from Afghanistan, senior leaders from across the government gathered in the basement of the Pentagon for a broad interagency drill to rehearse the withdrawal plan.
During the exercise, top Pentagon leaders including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley stressed the need for American troops to get out of the country as quickly as possible to protect against renewed Taliban attacks.
Their plan called for the military to draw down to zero within 60 days of Biden’s official order, or roughly mid- to late-June — far sooner than the Sept. 11 deadline the president originally set. One of the most crucial decisions involved handing over Bagram Air Base to the Afghans as the last step of the withdrawal once U.S. forces were so depleted that they could no longer reasonably secure what had been the hub of the American military effort there for the past 20 years.
“All of them made the same argument,” said one defense official, who was in attendance at the drill on May 8, and whose account includes previously unreported details. “Speed equals safety,” the person said, referring to the message conveyed by the military leaders.
The military brass had done a remarkable 180. For the first four months of 2020, as the White House reviewed the withdrawal timeline inherited from the Trump administration, Austin and Milley, as well as senior military commanders, urged Biden to leave a few thousand troops in Afghanistan indefinitely. Both were overruled. Once that happened, the Pentagon embraced as quick a withdrawal as possible, including from Bagram. And the Pentagon stuck to that approach through the beginning of July, regardless of the conditions on the ground.
The remnants of the U.S. military at Bagram left in the dead of night on July 1 handing off the base to Afghan commanders who complained they weren’t even notified of the departure.
“They just decided they lost the argument, and OK fine let’s get the heck out of dodge,” said one former senior defense official.
At every stage of the withdrawal, the White House went along with the Pentagon’s recommendations, accepting a timetable that ended up going faster than Biden laid out in the spring. When the Taliban started to sweep through northern Afghanistan in the summer, different plans were discussed but never altered. The priority for the Pentagon was to protect U.S. troops and pull them out, even as diplomats and Afghan allies stayed behind.
By early August, when it was clear Kabul would fall sooner than expected, the American military presence was down to fewer than 1,000 troops. It was too late to reverse course.
None of the civilian officials who were at the May 8 meeting at the Pentagon questioned the military’s rapid drawdown plan, according to multiple officials. Those attendees included national security adviser Jake Sullivan and his deputy, Jon Finer; CIA Director William Burns; Samantha Power, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development; Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the ambassador to the United Nations. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was not present, but was represented by his deputy, Brian McKeon. Besides Austin and Milley, other Pentagon officials included Gens. Frank McKenzie and Austin Scott Miller, the commanding generals of U.S. Central Command and U.S. Forces-Afghanistan, respectively, who joined via secure video.
The internal withdrawal debates and plans are at the heart of the congressional inquiry into the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban. The House and Senate armed services committees will question Austin, Milley and McKenzie in a series of hearings this week.
The call on Bagram looms especially large. The U.S. handover spooked the American-backed military and government, took away the main U.S. military air base before the pullout was complete and appeared to accelerate the collapse. Some officials say the lack of access to Bagram also made it harder for the U.S. and allies to carry out the evacuation mission in the days after Kabul fell. Reeling from the sudden collapse of the Afghan government and armed forces, the Biden administration made the decision to rapidly redeploy 4,000 troops to secure Hamid Karzai International Airport and assist in the frantic evacuation efforts; 13 were killed on Aug. 27 in a suicide bombing at one the airport’s gates.
This account of the military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan is based on interviews with 17 current and former officials — most of whom requested anonymity in order to speak candidly without fear of retribution. Their accounts shed new light on the Pentagon’s decision to hand over Bagram, and the back and forth between senior military leaders and the White House leading up to the American exit from Afghanistan.
Spokespeople for the National Security Council and the State Department declined to comment on the May drill.
Summer Spiral
The old Soviet air base at Bagram had been the center of American military operations in Afghanistan since the last Taliban government fell in 2001. Thousands of troops, American and other civilian contractors and Afghans lived and worked at Bagram. The base has two runways, compared to a single one at the civilian airport 35 miles away in Kabul.
The Pentagon pullout plan presented early in Biden’s term called for the base to be handed over to the Afghan military by late June or early July.
Miller, the general in charge of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, recommended handing over Bagram as part of the withdrawal plan he briefed to Austin as far back as March when the Pentagon chief made his first visit to Kabul, according to the first defense official.
The American commander, who had also initially advised senior leaders to keep a few thousand troops on the ground, stressed during the March meeting that American troops would be vulnerable to renewed Taliban attacks if they stayed in the country for an extended withdrawal. Miller was adamant on that point — he had months to think about the best way to pull out, as then-President Donald Trump had ordered the military to get out by May 1.
One senior administration official noted that the date-based withdrawal was inherited from the previous administration, and that the Taliban was clear that they would hold Washington to that agreement.
“General Miller made clear that speed mattered, and that if directed to withdraw, that his preference was to move as quickly as possible,” said the first defense official.
The military’s first priority was getting its troops out of Afghanistan as soon as possible after the initial May 1 deadline, in case of renewed Taliban attack.
The proposal assumed that the Afghans would control the base for at least a few months after the American withdrawal, allowing the U.S. to use the base for an evacuation if needed, the official said.
But as the drawdown neared completion in June and early July, some military officials were concerned that it was moving too quickly. This was one reason brass pushed American contractors to leave the country early, rather than on the administration timeline, said the former senior defense official.
“The one-stars and two-stars.… They are very discouraged because I think it shows some serious flaws in our four-star leadership,” the person said. “To me that was a big mistake by our military: they didn’t have to get them out that fast and they could have kept open some other options.
“The military should’ve pushed back harder and not pulled their people out the minute they didn’t win the argument with Blinken and Biden.”
Second thoughts, briefly
In the weeks leading up to the fall of Kabul, and as the Taliban blitzed across the country, military commanders became increasingly concerned about the morale of the Afghan security forces.
The military briefly paused the drawdown from Bagram in June so the White House could get a better sense of what leaving the base would mean. As a part of the planning process, Sullivan and others from the interagency drilled down on the military’s plan to hand over Bagram in July. The Wall Street Journal first reported the episode, which POLITICO confirmed independently.
Sullivan was worried about the security situation in Afghanistan, and wanted to understand the military’s tactical plan for the drawdown. At the time, a large number of staff remained at the embassy in Kabul.
Ultimately, the president affirmed the Pentagon’s decision to leave Bagram on the original timeline.
Another factor in the planning was that by early July, when Bagram was handed over, the drawdown was already essentially complete. Any changes to the plan would have taken “a reversal of policy,” because the military would have had to bring combat capabilities and troops back into the country, according to a second defense official.
The 2,500 troops in the country when Biden took office had dwindled to fewer than 1,000, split between the international airport and the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.
Officials have since argued that keeping Bagram would have required thousands of additional troops. They did not notify Afghan partners precisely when they were leaving due to concerns that the Taliban could target American forces leaving the base or the Afghans who remained, they said.
Flying in thousands of more troops to secure Bagram, as well as maintaining the necessary operations at the Karzai airport, made “zero sense,” the senior administration official said.
Within hours of the Americans leaving on July 1, looters descended on the base, grabbing gas canisters and some laptops. Afghan officials said the U.S. left behind millions of small items, including bottles of water and ready-made meals known as MREs, as well as thousands of civilian vehicles, hundreds of armored vehicles, and some small weapons and ammunition for the Afghan troops.
Critics say the perceived abandonment played into the hands of the Taliban insurgents and further eroded the morale of the Afghan forces.
“[T]hey lost all the goodwill of 20 years by leaving the way they did, in the night, without telling the Afghan soldiers who were outside patrolling the area,” one Afghan soldier told the Associated Press at the time.
On Aug. 8, McKenzie sent Austin a new assessment about Kabul’s prospects: the city could be isolated within 30 days of the American withdrawal.
Just seven days later, the Taliban captured Bagram and released thousands of prisoners held there, including many with ties to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
The fallout
The Pentagon has defended the decision to give up Bagram, saying the administration’s cap of roughly 700 troops forced the military’s hand. With force levels dwindling due to the scheduled withdrawal, priority was given to securing the embassy over continuing operations at Bagram, Milley said in August.
“If we were to keep both Bagram and the embassy going, that would be a significant number of military forces that would have exceeded what we had,” Milley said. “So we had to collapse one or the other, and a decision was made.”
Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said that Austin is “comfortable with the degree to which senior defense and military leaders contributed to the policy-making process.”
Kirby also defended the decision to turn over Bagram near the end of the withdrawal process, noting that it was “in keeping with the mission the military had been assigned: to reduce our footprint to a level commensurate with protecting our diplomatic presence in Kabul.”
In the end, the Pentagon got the withdrawal senior leaders wanted. But the Taliban ultimately advanced faster than anyone anticipated, forcing the Biden administration to scramble to rush thousands of additional troops to Kabul to pull together a mass evacuation effort.
“I think [the administration] accepted risk to try to accomplish competing policy priorities, and unfortunately that risk was realized when the Taliban swept into Kabul,” said a senior defense official. “The result was a tragedy. It’s been hard for our people to process.”
Andrew Desiderio, Connor O’Brien and Bryan Bender contributed to this report.
4. Milley says resigning would be 'incredible act of political defiance,' under Cotton pressure
Important words from the CJCS that should be discussed. Talk amongst yourselves.
Excerpts:
"I suspect the answer would have been a little different had you asked them 16 days out, not five days out," Cotton said, moving on to press Milley on why he has not resigned after his recommendations were "rejected."
"Senator, as a senior military officer, resigning is a really serious thing – it's a political act – if I'm resigning in protest," Milley said. "My job is to provide advice – my statutory responsibility is to provide legal advice or best military advice to the president, and that's my legal requirement. That's what the law is."
Milley added that the president "doesn't have to agree with the advice," and said he "doesn't have to make those decisions just because we're generals."
"It would be an incredible act of political defiance for a commissioned officer to just resign because my advice is not taken," Milley said. "This country doesn't want generals figuring out what orders we are going to accept and do or not. That's not our job."
He added, on a personal note, that "my dad didn't get a choice to resign at Iwo Jima, and those kids at Abbey Gate don't get a choice to resign."
"I'm not going to turn my back – they can't resign," Milley said. "So I'm not going to resign. There's no way."
"If the orders are illegal, we're in a different place," Milley said. "But if the orders are legal from civilian authority, I intend to carry them out."
Milley says resigning would be 'incredible act of political defiance,' under Cotton pressure
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said he will not resign after President Biden ignored his recommendation to keep a presence of at least 2,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, saying to do so would be an "incredible act of political defiance."
Milley testified Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee, alongside Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and head of U.S. Central Command Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, saying his personal opinion was to maintain troops in Afghanistan.
Milley said that while he would not share his "personal" recommendations he made to the president, his assessment was, "back in the fall of 2020, and remained consistent throughout, that we should keep a steady state of 2,500 and it could bounce up to 3,500, maybe, something like that, in order to move toward a negotiated solution."
Biden and White House officials have said repeatedly that no military leaders advised him to leave a small military presence behind, with the president, himself, telling ABC News in August that "no one" recommended a 2,500 troop presence that he could "recall."
Milley also testified that he was not contacted for his military assessment on whether to maintain a troop presence in Kabul beyond Aug. 31 until Aug. 25 – a time in which he and other military officials came to the "unanimous" conclusion to complete the full withdrawal.
Kabul fell to the Taliban on Aug. 15.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., slammed the Biden administration for waiting "10 days to ask officers" for their assessment.
"I suspect the answer would have been a little different had you asked them 16 days out, not five days out," Cotton said, moving on to press Milley on why he has not resigned after his recommendations were "rejected."
"Senator, as a senior military officer, resigning is a really serious thing – it's a political act – if I'm resigning in protest," Milley said. "My job is to provide advice – my statutory responsibility is to provide legal advice or best military advice to the president, and that's my legal requirement. That's what the law is."
Milley added that the president "doesn't have to agree with the advice," and said he "doesn't have to make those decisions just because we're generals."
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley attends a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the conclusion of military operations in Afghanistan and plans for future counterterrorism operations, Tuesday, Sept. 28, 2021, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, Pool) (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, Pool)
"It would be an incredible act of political defiance for a commissioned officer to just resign because my advice is not taken," Milley said. "This country doesn't want generals figuring out what orders we are going to accept and do or not. That's not our job."
He added, on a personal note, that "my dad didn't get a choice to resign at Iwo Jima, and those kids at Abbey Gate don't get a choice to resign."
"I'm not going to turn my back – they can't resign," Milley said. "So I'm not going to resign. There's no way."
"If the orders are illegal, we're in a different place," Milley said. "But if the orders are legal from civilian authority, I intend to carry them out."
McKenzie also testified Tuesday that he recommended the U.S. "maintain 2,500 troops in Afghanistan."
McKenzie said he made a similar recommendation in the fall of 2020 under the Trump administration, which also had intentions to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan, saying, at the time, he recommended the U.S. maintain at least 4,000 troops.
"I also have a view that the withdrawal of those forces would lead inevitably to the collapse of the Afghan military forces and eventually the Afghan government," McKenzie testified.
Austin was asked whether the president received the personal recommendations from his top military advisers like Milley and McKenzie.
"Their input was received by the president and considered by the president for sure," Austin testified.
The hearing comes nearly a month after the Biden administration, on Aug. 31, withdrew all U.S. military assets from the region after having a presence there for 20 years following the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. An Aug. 26 suicide bombing took the lives of 13 U.S. service members – including 11 Marines, one Navy sailor and one Army soldier. Eighteen other U.S. service members were wounded. The bombing also left more than 150 civilians dead.
As the Biden administration began the withdrawal of military assets, provincial capitals across Afghanistan began to fall to the Taliban. By mid-August, the Taliban attained control of two-thirds of Afghanistan. And by the time the U.S. withdrew all U.S. troops from the country on Aug. 31, Kabul had also fallen to the Taliban. In mid-August, U.S. intelligence assessments projected the capital city could fall to the Taliban within 90 days.
5. Biden Paints Himself Into a Corner on the Iran Nuclear Deal
Excerpts:
Republicans and worried Democrats in Congress need to temper the administration’s unrealistic expectations of a longer and stronger agreement, while holding the White House to deadlines on both a return to the 2015 deal and any improved agreement. That means passing legislation that would trigger punishing sanctions targeting key sectors of Iran’s economy if deadlines aren’t met. Congress also must clarify the parameters of an acceptable new agreement that Republicans and Democrats could envision as a binding treaty. And they should require the administration to explain to oversight committees what a Plan B looks like if negotiations fail.
Mr. Biden has a credibility problem, given the Afghanistan debacle and his rhetoric about ending “forever wars.” Tehran no longer believes he will use military force to curb its nuclear ambitions. Mr. Biden needs to explain clearly what he meant when he told Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett that he is trying “diplomacy first” but would turn to “other options” if talks break down. When Iran misbehaves—and the bar should be set low—he needs to respond quickly with what many Democrats would call “excessive force.” Empty messages from a weakened president about a better deal are no substitute for the credible threat of U.S. power.
Biden Paints Himself Into a Corner on the Iran Nuclear Deal
The White House should use more sticks and fewer carrots to force Tehran to work out a new agreement.
A missile is displayed next to a picture of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran, Iran, Sept. 25.
Photo: abedin taherkenareh/Shutterstock
At the United Nations General Assembly last week in New York, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian sought to dash the Biden administration’s hopes for a follow-on agreement to President Obama’s nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. “We will not have a so-called longer and stronger deal,” Mr. Amir-Abdollahian declared. He added that to resurrect the 2015 nuclear deal, the Biden administration would have to offer more sanctions relief than the Obama administration did.
What is to be done when carrots aren’t working and the administration refuses to use the stick and return to President Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign? President Biden likely will offer even more carrots and pretend that these will slow the development of Iran’s atomic program. This approach—call it “maximum-carrots diplomacy”—is meant primarily to deter covert actions by Israel’s military and intelligence services against Iran, which Jerusalem is committed to expanding, according to my discussions with Israeli officials. Mr. Biden is also wooing Democrats skeptical of the Iran nuclear deal like Sen. Bob Menendez, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan have repeatedly pointed out that there needs to be a “longer and stronger” follow-on agreement, proving that Mr. Menendez’s skepticism is well-founded. Why do they need to improve the deal Mr. Obama struck only six years ago?
As skeptical Democrats foresaw in 2015, the Iran nuclear deal’s problems are intensifying. The nuclear limitations begin expiring in 2024. By 2027, restrictions on the mass deployment of easier-to-hide advanced centrifuges will begin to sunset with remaining restrictions gone by 2029. By 2031 there will be no cap on enrichment-purity levels and stockpiles, including on weapons-grade uranium; enrichment will be permitted at the buried-beneath-a-mountain Fordow plant and other new facilities; a plutonium reprocessing prohibition will be lifted; heavy-water reactors will be allowed; and there will be no cap on heavy-water production.
Mr. Biden has boxed himself in. He has already declared his commitment to pivot out of the Middle East. If former Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif is to be believed, the Biden administration has already offered greater sanctions relief than Mr. Obama did in 2015—and the offer still hasn’t brought Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to the negotiating table. Mr. Biden and his team declined to support the International Atomic Energy Agency’s investigation of Iran’s undeclared nuclear activities by refusing to move for a censure by the agency’s board of governors, which could trigger U.N. sanctions. Tehran refuses to permit weapons inspectors into certain nuclear sites, and the Biden administration, worried that tougher action could undermine negotiations, is afraid to act.
A crippling problem for the White House is that Iranian leaders understand leverage better than Mr. Biden does. They see that he is loath to respond to their belligerence. Tehran has accelerated its uranium-separation program to approach weapons-grade levels, and it has continued to back proxies who attack U.S. troops in Iraq and American allies in the Middle East. Iranian oil is flowing again to China, and the Iranian economy is recovering after severe contractions during the Trump administration.
Republicans and worried Democrats in Congress need to temper the administration’s unrealistic expectations of a longer and stronger agreement, while holding the White House to deadlines on both a return to the 2015 deal and any improved agreement. That means passing legislation that would trigger punishing sanctions targeting key sectors of Iran’s economy if deadlines aren’t met. Congress also must clarify the parameters of an acceptable new agreement that Republicans and Democrats could envision as a binding treaty. And they should require the administration to explain to oversight committees what a Plan B looks like if negotiations fail.
Mr. Biden has a credibility problem, given the Afghanistan debacle and his rhetoric about ending “forever wars.” Tehran no longer believes he will use military force to curb its nuclear ambitions. Mr. Biden needs to explain clearly what he meant when he told Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett that he is trying “diplomacy first” but would turn to “other options” if talks break down. When Iran misbehaves—and the bar should be set low—he needs to respond quickly with what many Democrats would call “excessive force.” Empty messages from a weakened president about a better deal are no substitute for the credible threat of U.S. power.
Mr. Dubowitz is chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
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6. Army Shifting Training Priorities, Investments for Multi-Domain Ops
I just do not see the human domain emphasized very much in multi-domain operations. Certainly not in any of these priorities. Of course cyberspace does have a lot to do with the human domain as a platform for influence but I think we focus more on 1's and 0's and the technological aspects of cyber space rather than the power of influence in the human domain.
Army Shifting Training Priorities, Investments for Multi-Domain Ops
9/30/2021
By
Soldiers test out a prototype for the Reconfigurable Virtual Collective Trainer.
Army photo by Margaret Ziffer
ORLANDO, Fla. — To reach the Army’s goal of building a force that excels at multi-domain operations, officials are making some tough decisions about which capabilities to prioritize for soldier training.
In 2018, the service released its doctrine for a modernized future force, “The U.S. Army in Multi-Domain Operations 2028.” The plans for MDO cited emerging technologies such as hypersonics and machine learning as well as great power competition with China and Russia as catalysts to update the Army’s priorities.
“Should conflict come, [adversaries] will employ multiple layers of stand-off [capabilities] in all domains — land, sea, air, space and cyberspace — to separate U.S. forces and our allies in time, space and function in order to defeat us,” then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley wrote in the document. Milley is now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Shifting the service’s priorities starts with how it trains, officials said. They are working to define the Army’s needs for multi-domain operations and identify the capabilities necessary for future fights as soon as possible.
Ivan Martinez, director of the Army’s Simulation and Technology Training Center, said reorganizing procurement and acquisition has been a major focus.
Starting in 2020, the office began to realign its programs to become MDO centric and to be in alignment with where the Army wants to go, he said in June at the annual Training and Simulation Industry Symposium in Orlando, Florida, which was hosted by the National Training and Simulation Association. NTSA is an affiliate of the National Defense Industrial Association.
Much of the service’s science and technology funding was going toward capabilities that support the Army’s near-term goals and not enough on mid- and far-term objectives, Martinez said. Initially, his team was unsure what multi-domain operations would look like and they took what he called “a pause” to assess the state of play.
“We realized that we needed to have a basic program that was very well synced with the user and our stakeholders,” he said.
Army officials pulled together a group to develop a new science and technology portfolio for soldier training and included input from the training and simulation industry, he noted.
Joseph Sottilare, technology area manager for Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Soldier Center, said the team collaborated to discover 59 capability gaps prioritized by the user community. They then laid out 12 science and technology efforts based on those gaps.
They are a “high priority for the Army focused on MDO-capable objectives for 2028,” he said.
Mid-term goals focus on cyber, live training, simulation architecture and training effectiveness, he said. However, there is enough flexibility to shift them to near-term objectives as the situation evolves.
However, “this strategy really keeps the focus on the long-term, current challenges that aren’t being addressed by industry, aren’t being addressed by anybody else in the government, or we have limited knowledge with what they’ve done,” Sottilare said.
The next step is creating a “competency framework” for multi-domain operations, which will identify ways to measure readiness and provide performance objectives for soldiers, he said.
“That’s something that we have to start now because it takes a very long time to define all the elements,” he said.
Augmented reality and virtual reality simulation tools for medical care is one area of focus, he said. It is often difficult to teach troops how to perform prolonged medical care in austere environments, but the capability will be critical in multi-domain operations, Sottilare added.
“We’re going to have people deployed overseas in … environments where they won’t have access to a medical hospital and have to perform prolonged care,” he said.
Meanwhile, soldiers also need to train for missions such as cyber and information warfare, officials said.
For multi-domain operations, “where it’s even a greater, more dynamic environment for training, it becomes almost impossible for us to train that outside of very specific use cases,” he said.
“We’re looking at how we can enhance our ability to build up these simulation architectures, and then deploy them and sustain them over the next 10 to 15 years,” he added.
Additionally, the Army is looking for opportunities to flesh out its Synthetic Training Environment, which is still in development.
The Synthetic Training Environment, or STE, is a 3D soldier training tool that converges live, virtual and constructive — or LVC — training as well as gaming environments to help troops better prepare for high-end warfare. It’s the service’s latest training advancement for modernizing the force and is one of the service’s top priorities being spearheaded by Army Futures Command.
Earlier this year, officials announced plans to replace training technology known as the Instrumentable-Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System with direct and indirect fire capabilities within the STE in coming years.
One effort — known as the live, virtual, constructive-integrating architecture program, or LVC-IA — is “a cornerstone” of home station training, said Col. Cory Berg, project manager for soldier training.
It will bring “together those different environments, or rotation units, to prepare for a combat training center,” he said. Looking into the future, the Army wants a solution that connects all of the LVC-IA’s capabilities with the Synthetic Training Environment.
“This becomes the highway. This becomes the connective bond between the current capability and what the future capability is,” he said.
The solution needs to be in sync with the next-generation STE until a future capability is ready to replace it, he noted. A draft request for proposals was released in August.
Meanwhile, the Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation is looking to merge two training contracts in order to find efficiencies, Berg said. The programs — the Common Battle Command Simulation Equipment and the Battle Command Training Capability-Equipment Support — both provide hardware and software for simulation training missions.
The program office wants to cut costs by combining the two efforts which are “parallel and complementary,” Berg said. Market research for the move was completed in May, and the office is aiming to award a contract by the first quarter of 2024, he noted.
Brig. Gen. Charles Lombardo, deputy commanding general of the U.S. Combined Arms Center-Training, said virtual environments will give back time to Army commanders by making the training process more efficient.
“It’s really an important reflection point in time in the Army,” he said. “I tell our team, we’re probably in that second training renaissance.”
Efficiency starts with improving training management, he said. The Army Training Information System is the replacement for the Digital Training Management System, which has a negative reputation with some company commanders because of the length of time it takes to populate data, he said.
The Combined Arms Center-Training is working on applications to speed up the process for recording data and enabling information to be recorded where training is taking place. But the Army still needs a data repository that makes information about individual soldiers widely available throughout the enterprise, Lombardo said.
Various training systems — including virtual training technologies — should be able to communicate and share data, he noted.
“If we can get them talking to each other, we’ll unencumber a lot of our commanders because we’ll put our squadron leaders … back in charge of training,” he said.
Meanwhile, more efficient training may become fiscally necessary if the service’s budget continues to decline in coming years. President Joe Biden’s fiscal year 2022 budget proposal would decrease the Army’s topline by $3.6 billion, to include cuts to procurement and research-and-development accounts. The Army requested $367 million for the Synthetic Training Environment’s cross-functional team, according to budget documents.
“As we define how to train the [multi-domain operations] capable force, it’s merging and bringing those joint leaders together, even distributed on multiple locations, to get the most out of our exercises, especially in a time when the downward budget will continue to look like this,” Lombardo said.
Col. William Glaser, the director of the Synthetic Training Environment cross-functional team, said there is an urgency to “double down” on training as adversaries rapidly modernize their forces.
“We no longer possess … [the] tactical and operational overmatch that people enjoyed over the last 30 years,” he said.
The STE must have an open architecture that is scalable and affordable, he noted. Training scenarios must be delivered to the point of need, which could mean solutions that will enable soldiers to access the environment without leaving their combat vehicles, he said.
As the Army continues to determine exactly what multi-domain operations look like, “the one thing that I’m sure of is, in order to present the commander with the problem sets that MDO is going to provide, we’re going to need to use the tools that the STE is going to provide,” Glaser said.
The goal should be for commanders to incorporate the training environment into their procedures and rehearsals for missions, which will not happen overnight. The Army needs industry to make improvements to training environments as soon as possible, he said.
“We need incremental improvements over time, many evolutions over a short time, in order to improve our revolutionary capability over the long term,” he said.
Defining multi-domain objectives could also be a boon for industry, Sottilare said. Those objectives are going to remain relevant into the distant future, so industry won’t have to worry as much about the shelf life of its investments.
“We’re not going to lift and shift again every year,” he said. “This is what we want to support. We want to get this over and stay focused on it.”
Meanwhile, Glaser noted that one silver lining of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is that because of the required social distancing, stakeholders met remotely more frequently than they would have in person before the virus swept across the world. The relationship between teams is grounded in that foundation and will remain “synced” to stay the course on long term objectives, he added.
7. How Could the U.S. Deter Military Conflict in the Taiwan Strait?
Thoughts from -
Daniel Russel:
Where does this leave us? In this set of circumstances there is no playbook of plausible diplomatic moves by the U.S. and Western allies likely to significantly reduce tensions, although there is a cornucopia of potential actions that could raise them. So, while lowering tensions per se may not be our chief priority, keeping them from spiraling out of control probably should be. A good starting point would surely be Obama’s dictum: “don’t do stupid shit.”
Shelley Rigger:
A military crisis in the Taiwan Strait would take a huge toll on everyone involved, but the consequences for Taiwan would be catastrophic. Avoiding war is in Taiwan’s paramount interest.
That should go without saying, but it doesn’t. Too many Americans talk about war in the Taiwan Strait as if it were some kind of potentially necessary evil—a price “we” may have to pay to restrain Beijing’s influence in the region. In fact, war is guaranteed to bring mass death and destruction to the very people we say we aim to help.
Michael Mazarr:
The United States could use economic tools to lessen the risk of war in at least three ways: preserve a stabilizing influence over Taiwan, break Taiwan’s international isolation, and threaten the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with severe costs in the event of aggression.
Chas Freeman:
Military actions by the United States will not lessen the likelihood of military conflict over Taiwan. They will increase it. The more the U.S. postures itself to defend Taiwan, the less Taiwan will do to defend itself. Such actions will appear to validate the People’s Republic of China (PRC) view that American strategy aims to divide and weaken China and to frustrate the aims of both the 1911 and 1949 Chinese nationalist revolutions—which aimed to return China to wealth and power by unifying it, ending foreign spheres of influence on its territory, eliminating warlordism (local armed resistance to central authority), and restoring international respect for Chinese sovereignty and territorial integrity. In this context, foreign efforts at military “deterrence” only provoke the PRC to increase its efforts to intimidate Taiwan and lead to escalating Sino-American confrontation and an arms race.
Unfortunately no mention of "unconventional deterrence."
How Could the U.S. Deter Military Conflict in the Taiwan Strait?
A ChinaFile Conversation
The ChinaFile Conversation is a weekly, real-time discussion of China news, from a group of the world’s leading China experts.
Daniel Russel joined the Asia Society Policy Institute as Diplomat in Residence and Senior Fellow in April 2017. A career member of the Senior Foreign Service at the U.S. Department of State, he most...
Shelley Rigger is the Brown Professor of East Asian Politics at Davidson College. She has a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University and a B.A. in Public and International Affairs from Princeton...
Michael Mazarr is a Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation. He is co-author, among a number of other recent reports, of the RAND study “Understanding Influence in the Strategic...
Chas W. Freeman, Jr. is a visiting scholar at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. He is the former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security...
Last week, China flew 24 warplanes into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone. One of the largest incursions in recent years, the People’s Liberation Army flyover came a day after Taipei applied to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. Beijing, which applied to the trade pact a week earlier, has opposed Taiwan’s bid. In response, Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement branding China an “arch criminal” bent on increasing hostilities across the strait.
In our last Conversation on Taiwan, ChinaFile contributors debated whether the People’s Republic of China could or would wage war on Taiwan. This week, we asked contributors about deterrents—tactics to reduce tension and lessen the possibility of conflict. What might those deterrents look like, and how effective would they be?
We asked each participant to focus on a sole aspect of deterrence—military, economic, or diplomatic. —The Editors
Comments
There are several prerequisites to successful diplomacy. One is being clear about what you are trying to achieve or prevent. Another is understanding your counterpart, particularly in terms of how they tend to make policy decisions, what their priorities are, and what considerations are most likely to influence their judgments. A third is having a functional relationship between key interlocutors. None of these conditions can be credibly ascribed to the current U.S.-China relationship.
If avoiding military conflict with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) over Taiwan were the sole objective of U.S. policy, acceding to Chinese domination of the island would be the most straightforward approach. But obviously there are other powerful policy objectives and considerations shaping Washington’s strategy. These include domestic U.S. politics, America’s global leadership and credibility, the Taiwan Relations Act and the momentum of 40 years of consistent Taiwan policy, opposition to Chinese regional hegemony, and a resolute determination to protect the security and political autonomy of an important democratic partner. Some would add semiconductors to this list. Pursuit of these goals inevitably incurs some risk of military conflict.
Understanding our counterparts requires parsing the significance of PRC military exercises and incursions around Taiwan. How much is theater, how much is warning, and how much is preparation for the real thing? The shrill but rote nature of Chinese hyperbolic talking points on Taiwan comes across as noise, not as reason, which can obscure our grasp of the PRC’s determination to complete what it regards as the final step in unifying China. But perhaps even more important to the Party leadership than taking Taiwan is not losing Taiwan. Thus, what could precipitate military conflict is a conviction in Beijing that the “window of opportunity” for unification is closing and that failure to act now—regardless of consequences—would guarantee Taiwan independence. The aggregation of seemingly modest words and deeds by the U.S. and the Taiwan authorities could be misheard in Beijing as the scrape of a closing window.
Meanwhile, bilateral dialogue began to atrophy after the grand pageantry of Donald Trump’s November 2017 state visit to China, and the handful of attempts made so far by the Biden Administration have not gone well. Not only does this diminish prospects for defusing tension over Taiwan through traditional diplomatic means, but the dearth of communication also increases the risk of miscalculation and mismanagement of an all-too-possible incident around the Taiwan Strait.
Where does this leave us? In this set of circumstances there is no playbook of plausible diplomatic moves by the U.S. and Western allies likely to significantly reduce tensions, although there is a cornucopia of potential actions that could raise them. So, while lowering tensions per se may not be our chief priority, keeping them from spiraling out of control probably should be. A good starting point would surely be Obama’s dictum: “don’t do stupid shit.”
A military crisis in the Taiwan Strait would take a huge toll on everyone involved, but the consequences for Taiwan would be catastrophic. Avoiding war is in Taiwan’s paramount interest.
That should go without saying, but it doesn’t. Too many Americans talk about war in the Taiwan Strait as if it were some kind of potentially necessary evil—a price “we” may have to pay to restrain Beijing’s influence in the region. In fact, war is guaranteed to bring mass death and destruction to the very people we say we aim to help.
Taiwan is not an airbag designed to absorb the impact of a collision between the United States and a rising People’s Republic of China (PRC). It is a community of 24 million people who treasure their freedom and their lives.
The U.S. and its allies have good reason to help Taiwan avoid being annexed by the PRC. That, too, would be catastrophic for Taiwan. Deterring Beijing requires the U.S. to demonstrate both the capacity and the willingness to fight for Taiwan. Beijing is committed to bringing Taiwan under a Chinese flag; it is the cost and risk of doing so that have prevented it from using force.
There’s a thin line, though, between establishing a credible deterrent and destabilizing the fragile equilibrium in the Strait. Right now, Beijing knows that while it cannot annex Taiwan at an acceptable cost, Taiwan is not going to lunge for formal independence, either. While Beijing’s ultimate goal is elusive, its greatest fear is in check.
When it comes to Taiwan independence, Beijing takes no chances. It parses every word and gesture for evidence that Taipei is looking for an opening to break away; it sees everything through the lens of a toxic and corrosive distrust. Taiwan’s leaders have learned to navigate the narrow space within which they can assert their autonomy, and sometimes even expand their international connections, without giving Beijing excuses to escalate.
The U.S., too, needs to be cautious not to accommodate Beijing or cater to its demands, but to ensure its actions to assist Taiwan are worth the cost. They need to be substantive and high-impact; they shouldn’t give Beijing excuses to squeeze Taiwan without yielding a proportionate benefit. Taiwan can’t afford symbolic gestures. For example, changing the name of Taiwan’s representative office in the U.S. (the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office), as some advocate, requires a stronger justification than “Taiwan deserves it.” Such an action is exactly the sort of thing Beijing uses to support its claim that the U.S. is reneging on its commitments to the PRC. So unless it has concrete benefits that outweigh the dangers of feeding Beijing’s fears, the U.S. shouldn’t do it.
The recommendation that Washington replace its long-standing “strategic ambiguity” approach with “strategic clarity,” promising to defend Taiwan against a PRC attack, is another example. For decades, the U.S. has taken an even-handed approach, one designed to deter Taiwan from provoking China, on the one hand, and to deter the PRC from attacking Taiwan, on the other. If the U.S. switches to “strategic clarity” by dropping the elements that caution Taiwan, Beijing’s war-planning won’t change, but the PRC leadership will have a powerful new excuse to make life even more difficult for Taiwan and its leaders.
If the U.S. wants to signal its dissatisfaction with the PRC’s behavior, it has plenty of options that don’t put Taiwan’s security on the line. There are economic, diplomatic, and even military policies the U.S. could adopt that would send the desired message to Beijing without making Taiwan the centerpiece of the confrontation. As for supporting Taiwan, political and military cooperation are high on the list, but recognizing that Taiwan’s greatest strength is its economy is critical. Promises of military action ring hollow when Washington won’t spend a nickel of political capital to secure a trade pact with Taiwan.
The United States could use economic tools to lessen the risk of war in at least three ways: preserve a stabilizing influence over Taiwan, break Taiwan’s international isolation, and threaten the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with severe costs in the event of aggression.
The United States is one of Taiwan’s top trade partners and has over $17 billion in foreign direct investment (FDI) stock on the island. Washington can use these economic ties to support its long-standing policy of stabilizing cross-strait relations, signaling that risky leanings in the direction of independence would have serious economic consequences.
At the same time, the United States can help draw Taiwan into more multilateral trade and financial institutions and agreements, as part of a campaign to deepen the relationships between Taiwan and the global community. As more countries do business with Taiwan, more foreign investors will travel there, more students will study there, more tourists will visit, and, in turn, the PRC will face a greater backlash if it attacks.
Most importantly, the United States can outline powerful economic consequences for Beijing in the event of Chinese aggression. It makes sense for Washington to assemble as many non-military tools of punishment as possible to provide itself with maximum flexibility in the event of war—and to do so multilaterally, organizing collective threats of economic consequences. These might include:
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Limits on new foreign investment. FDI in China reached $163 billion in 2020 to lead the world in inbound FDI. Recent reports indicate that Western banks and investment firms are looking to bolster their stake even further. The United States could seek to starve Beijing of as much of this capital as possible.
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Targeted embargoes on Chinese exports. The United States and many other leading recipients of Chinese exports could threaten bans on selected categories of exports, including electrical equipment, vehicles, toys, clothes and other textiles, and plastics. This would threaten over $1 trillion in Chinese exports and put at risk tens of millions of jobs.
- A ban on any scientific or technological collaboration with Chinese researchers. Should China engage in military adventurism, the country could lose the right for its researchers and engineers to benefit from international collaboration.
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Limits on visits and tourism. In 2018, China received roughly 63 million foreign tourists, and tourism contributes hundreds of billions to its economy. If China invades Taiwan, Washington could work with other countries to implement a tourism embargo.
- A global campaign to deny China access to high-priority, high-sensitivity investments. Washington could work with allies to build an investment fund able to take more decisive action to prevent China from gaining control of key infrastructure around the world, from ports to local telecommunication networks.
- A national strategy to reduce U.S. vulnerability to Chinese counter-sanctions. China would surely respond to such moves with punitive economic steps of its own. The United States could begin now to take steps to insulate itself from this blowback, knowing there will be limits on the degree to which this is possible.
Taken together, these steps might allow the United States to confront China with the prospect of severe and lasting economic pain. One RAND study concluded that because of lost trade and investment, a major war over Taiwan could slash China’s GDP by 25 to 35 percent. Combined with a wide range of other measures, the prospects of such an economic calamity could help give pause to any temptation to aggression in Beijing.
Military actions by the United States will not lessen the likelihood of military conflict over Taiwan. They will increase it. The more the U.S. postures itself to defend Taiwan, the less Taiwan will do to defend itself. Such actions will appear to validate the People’s Republic of China (PRC) view that American strategy aims to divide and weaken China and to frustrate the aims of both the 1911 and 1949 Chinese nationalist revolutions—which aimed to return China to wealth and power by unifying it, ending foreign spheres of influence on its territory, eliminating warlordism (local armed resistance to central authority), and restoring international respect for Chinese sovereignty and territorial integrity. In this context, foreign efforts at military “deterrence” only provoke the PRC to increase its efforts to intimidate Taiwan and lead to escalating Sino-American confrontation and an arms race.
Defining the Taiwan issue in purely military terms perpetuates and exacerbates it, it doesn’t advance it toward resolution or mitigate the risks it poses. As a practical matter, there can be no military balance between the 24 million-strong Chinese democracy on Taiwan and the 1.4 billion-strong mainland, which must arm itself to deal with potential adversaries on 14 land borders, in Japan, and from the United States Navy. Policy toward Taiwan cannot rest on military deterrence or balance alone.
The question of Taiwan’s relationship with the rest of China is a product of the Chinese Civil War. Ending wars requires the agreement of the parties to them. They do not end because one side decides they should be over. The interposition of U.S. forces between the parties to the Chinese Civil War limited further combat between them but did not end their contention.
Many inhabitants of Taiwan would now clearly prefer not to continue to embrace a Chinese identity. That is their right, providing they are prepared to deal with the consequences rather than impose them on others. As American independence from Britain demonstrated, no people can separate from another without the agreement of those from whom they are separating. Usually self-determination requires a war. Often, as the examples of the Confederate States of America, Kashmiris, Kurds, Palestinians, and Tibetans illustrate, even the most determined attempts to achieve self-determination fail catastrophically.
The overriding U.S. interest has always been to limit or preclude the destabilizing effects of warfare between the Chinese parties. This, rather than fighting the mainland on behalf of Taiwan self-determination, is still the determinative U.S. interest. The United States should seek to incentivize Beijing and Taipei to resolve their differences peacefully through negotiations and to craft their own compromises with each other, not abet military confrontation or lessen the incentives for them to negotiate a mutually acceptable status for Taiwan.
A cross-Strait agreement that preserves Taiwan’s democracy, precludes the People’s Liberation Army’s use of Taiwan for strategic purposes, and removes the risk of a trans-Pacific war over Taiwan’s status is very much in the U.S. interest. Jiang Zemin’s 1995 “eight-point proposal” proposed just this sort of arrangement. In its own interest, the United States should encourage progress toward cross-Strait agreement on Taiwan’s status, not offer open-ended military backing for Taipei’s efforts to change the status quo or achieve recognition as a state separate from the rest of China.
Correction: A previous version of this post incorrectly stated the year of Jian Zemin’s eight-point proposal. He delivered the speech with this proposal in 1995.
8. Covert Operations Fail More Often than Not, so Why Do Leaders Order Them? (book review)
Ah.... what if we do not have access to all the covert actions that have been successful? Perhaps the successful ones remain classified (in order to sustain deniability).
Most importantly there is a lot more to coert action than regime change. But this book is about overt military intervention for regime change versus covert action for regime change. Again there is much more to covert action than regime change.
Covert Operations Fail More Often than Not, so Why Do Leaders Order Them? - Modern War Institute
During the Cold War, the United States undertook an extraordinary number of attempts to overthrow foreign governments. These interventions were mostly conducted in secret, and the majority failed to achieve their aims. One recent tally identified sixty-four covert operations and six overt ones between 1947 and 1989, with less than 40 percent of the covert operations installing a new regime in power. Some of these failures are quite well known. The Bay of Pigs intervention in Cuba, for example, not only failed to remove Fidel Castro from power, but also brought Cuba closer to the Soviet Union and helped precipitate the Cuban Missile Crisis. Even those operations that appeared successful at the time often had negative repercussions in the longer term. This was the case in Iran, where the United States helped oust Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh from power in 1953—but in doing so, also fueled anti-American sentiment and contributed to the 1979 revolution.
Why would the United States continue to pursue a strategy with such a poor track record? The central contention of Michael Poznansky’s fascinating and well-researched new book, In the Shadow of International Law: Secrecy and Regime Change in the Postwar World, is that the explanation lies in international law. In 1945, the principle of nonintervention, which holds that states should not violate the sovereignty of others, came to enjoy the status of international law through incorporation into the charter of the United Nations and subsequent adoption in the charters of the Organization of American States and other regional organizations. Once it did so, overt efforts to oust foreign rulers from power became costlier. States that abrogate their formal commitments undermine their credibility and open themselves up to accusations of hypocrisy.
Drawing upon the rich trove of archival information now available on US regime change efforts in Latin America during the Cold War, the book argues that the United States used covert action to carry out regime change operations when legal exemptions that would permit them to intervene overtly were unavailable. The book compares overt operations in the Dominican Republic and Grenada, where US officials used the presence of American nationals and backing from international organizations such as the Organization of American States (OAS) as legal justifications, with the choice to intervene covertly in Cuba and Chile, where no such legal loopholes could be found.
Through a careful analysis of archival materials and interviews with retired senior government officials, the book documents that US policymakers took seriously the potential for open violations of international law to damage American credibility. Take the deliberations within the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations about efforts to topple Castro’s government between 1960 and 1961. Eisenhower is quoted as complaining, “Except for the existence of the OAS and its abhorrence of intervention, we would have to be thinking already of building up our force at Guantanamo” to remove Castro overtly. The same concerns crop up for Kennedy and his advisors. In a memo from Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Mann to his boss, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Mann outlines the risks of an overt intervention, specifically emphasizing the risks to the United States’ reputation. Mann warned, “At best, our moral posture throughout the hemisphere would be impaired. At worst, the effect on our position of hemispheric leadership would be catastrophic.”
Interestingly, in these cases and others that the book dissects, policymakers did not appear to particularly care whether they could plausibly deny their involvement in covert actions. The Kennedy administration went ahead with the Bay of Pigs invasion even though news reporting brought plans to light in advance. As Richard Bissell, the chief architect of the operation later explained, even if the operation was not plausibly deniable, “up to and through the invasion itself the operation remained to an extraordinary degree technically deniable.”
If the central benefit of covert operations is that they allow states to preserve credibility and avoid accusations of hypocrisy, the downside is that they rarely achieve this result in full. Poznansky spells out a number of reasons why this is likely to be the case. Because the secrecy inherent in covert operations may protect interveners from some of the fallout for botched operations, for instance, they may be willing to undertake action in a riskier set of circumstances. The need to plan in secret also means that operations get less vetting in advance. Finally, covert action requires states to delegate to local actors with their own agendas.
In analyzing the costs and benefits of covert action, Poznansky effectively pushes back against the argument that covert actions are inherently less costly than overt ones. While it may seem obvious that fewer resources are required to covertly back coups or arm rebels than to send in American troops, Poznansky argues that many of the actions the United States takes covertly could be taken overtly as well. Overt action need not mean a full-scale invasion.
Yet this contention is somewhat undercut by the book’s choice of case studies. Both of the overt actions examined in the book were, in fact, large-scale military operations—Operation Power Pack, in the Dominican Republic, involved the deployment of twenty-one thousand troops, while Operation Urgent Fury, in Grenada, involved eight thousand. This method of case selection means it is difficult to rule out the possibility that the decision to use overt action was driven by perceptions that the stakes in these cases were larger.
A fuller accounting of the decision to use overt versus covert action would also consider the potential downsides of overt actions short of invasion. For example, open acknowledgment of US backing could undermine the legitimacy of local actors, and thus the likelihood that their efforts succeed. There is also the risk that more indirect overt action could escalate conflicts in a way that covert actions may not. The book does take care to address as a potential alternative argument the desire to avoid escalation, which has been highlighted in other recent scholarship on covert action. Indeed, Poznanky notes that he selected cases in Latin America in part to reduce the relevance of escalation as a potential explanation for covert action, since the risk of escalation should be lowest in a state’s own sphere of influence. The book finds scant evidence that leaders in the examined cases were concerned about retaliation from rivals leading to escalatory spirals. But another possible consideration, unaddressed in the book, is domestic pressure for escalation. It certainly seems plausible that where operations are conducted in public, leaders may face more pressure from their own constituents not to back down—particularly where the resources expended are large or lives have been lost.
Overall, however, the book’s central argument—that US policymakers took seriously the potential reputational costs of violating international prohibitions on intervention in deciding how to pursue regime change in Latin America—is well supported by the archival evidence Poznansky marshals. The desire to maintain an appearance of legitimate behavior did not prevent American leaders from attempting regime change operations during the Cold War. What it did appear to do was push them to act in secret, even when their preference would have been not to. As Poznansky concludes, “The liberal international order was constraining, but imperfectly so.” His argument has implications for our own troubled era. To the extent that democratic backsliding, rising great power conflict, or other contemporary challenges serve to chip away at the rules-based system the United States helped put in place in the mid-twentieth century, we may expect to see overt attempts at regime change become less costly again—and, as a result, more common.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
9. Robert Gates: How civics education became a national security issue
Here it is:
Public knowledge about how the government works is lagging. Bipartisan compromise seems to be a relic of the past. It’s enough for Gates — the former defense secretary, CIA director and higher education official — to be concerned about the state of civics education in American schools.
For him, it’s a matter of national security.
Robert Gates: How civics education became a national security issue
09/29/2021 05:10 PM EDT
The former defense secretary, CIA director and higher education official spoke to POLITICO following a keynote discussion at the CivXNow Policy Summit.
FILE - In this May 23, 2014 file photo, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates addresses the Boy Scouts of America's annual meeting, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/Mark Zaleski, File) | Mark Zaleski/AP Photo
09/29/2021 05:10 PM EDT
Robert Gates is worried about America’s political paralysis.
Public knowledge about how the government works is lagging. Bipartisan compromise seems to be a relic of the past. It’s enough for Gates — the former defense secretary, CIA director and higher education official — to be concerned about the state of civics education in American schools.
For him, it’s a matter of national security.
Gates spoke to POLITICO following a keynote discussion at the CivXNow Policy Summit, a virtual confab assembled last week by a 170-member coalition intent on advancing federal and state legislation to bolster classroom teaching about self-government.
He believes today’s hyperpolarized political environment has drowned out the role of collaboration within civic institutions. If students learn more about how our system of government is designed to work, he said, perhaps they’ll realize one side doesn’t have all the answers.
The federal government doesn’t control what’s taught in local schools. But it can exert abundant influence on curriculum, and there’s been bipartisan, if halting, efforts in Congress to step up support for learning about this country’s institutions and norms.
This year, Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), Tom Cole (R-Okla.) and Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) joined Sens. Chris Coons (D-Del.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) to introduce the Civics Secures Democracy Act. The bill would authorize Education Secretary Miguel Cardona’s administration to create new grants that states, nonprofits, colleges and civics researchers can use to expand access to civics and history education. Whether it lands on President Joe Biden’s desk is far from certain.
Federal lawmakers and both the Republican and Democratic parties can still play an important role to drive home the issue from the bully pulpit, Gates said. “We didn’t get here overnight, we’re not going to fix it overnight,” he said. “You have to pursue a variety of avenues to try and bring the issue to the forefront again.”
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Everyday Americans might not see the link between national security and the state of civics education in this country. Could you spell out why you feel there's a connection there?
Several of the Founding Fathers were very explicit that an educated and informed citizenry was the only way that the American republic could survive. An informed and educated public doesn't just have to do with domestic affairs, but also America's place in the world. It seems to me that unless people understand how our system of government works — and the role of the Congress, and the role of the president — we can go astray.
Is there a link to draw from the events of Jan. 6, the refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election in certain circles and the divide over Covid-19 precautions to what our kids learn in school about government?
I don't think so, necessarily. Those are awful events and terrible. But my hope is they are one-offs. I'm more concerned with the longer-term implications for our democracy of civics education. One of the things you would learn in civics education is that the Constitution is the product of compromise, and some very significant compromises. You would learn in civics education that our system of government is designed to operate only through compromise. That's what checks and balances are all about. Therefore, if you are willing to vote for people in Congress who have no intention of compromising, you don't understand how the American government is supposed to work — and that the only way to accomplish big things as a country is when members of Congress are willing to cross party lines, or think about the interests of the country as a whole, and make compromises. No one gets his or her way all the time. That fundamental understanding of the criticality of compromise for the American experiment to work, I think, is a critical element of civics education.
Where did we go wrong with civics education at the high school level, in your view?
As educators have looked at the demands of colleges and companies in terms of curriculum and funding, I think that increasingly civics has been moved out of the curriculum in more and more schools over a long period of time to be replaced by other subjects. I think it's due to a lack of understanding among school boards and others of the importance of civics education for the country as a whole. I don't think there's been a conscious sort of program or plot to get rid of civics education. It’s just sort of eroded.
There's been so much emphasis on advancing American technological prowess, and preparing the workforce of the future for STEM fields. Are you concerned that focus has distracted us from classical fundamentals of education?
There has been a general trend away from one of the major purposes of education: to develop good citizens and developing skills that people can bring into the workplace. Those aren't mutually exclusive. I think education has to do both. But if we basically say it's no longer the responsibility of public educators to help develop good citizens, then it's easy to take civics education out of the curriculum and replace it with more practical courses including STEM. You have to have both, as a matter of fact.
Based on all of your experience, and the moment this country is in right now, what’s at stake if we fail?
I often get asked what’s the biggest threat to American national security today. My answer is that threat is found within the 2 square miles that encompass the White House and the Capitol. We've always been polarized as a country. We've always had polarization in our politics. There were things said in the Adams-Jefferson presidential race that would fit right in with some of today's most scurrilous campaigns. But what's relatively new in American history, maybe for the first time since just before the Civil War, is paralysis. Being able to move forward in addressing big problems. If we can't figure out a way to get past that paralysis to tackle some of the big problems facing the country, then we're in very serious trouble. The source of that paralysis, in my opinion, is the unwillingness of people to understand the importance of compromise, and how the Constitution works, and how the Constitution establishes a country and a government that can only work if there is compromise.
10. #Reviewing The Character Gap
Character counts.
Excerpts:
The Character Gap is a three-part volume on character and ethics centered on the questions: to what extent can we be good and how do we achieve this aim?
...
In the preface, Miller contextualizes this book in the larger discussion of the Character Project and his work at Wake Forest University, which helps place the book in its broader context of character development work.[1] The book gives the audience a mixed picture—as reflected on the cover art—of the state of moral character and our society. Miller notes that we are not Hitler, an embodiment of complete vice, but neither are we Gandhi, an embodiment of complete virtue. It is complicated. With its blend of theory, empirical studies, narratives, philosophical argument, and practical strategies, this book is readable and engaging to a wide audience. It is also worth thinking about this book in the context of discussions and debates on ethics, especially considering the focus on character in business, the military, and education.
...
None of the issues highlighted above undermine the value of the book, which is a highly accessible starting point to entering discussions about character and ethics in philosophy and psychology. The Character Gap will be of particular interest to those who are concerned with character and character development as an approach to ethical leadership in education, business, leadership, government and the military.
#Reviewing The Character Gap
If you are looking for an accessible, practical introduction to moral psychology and ethics for undergraduate, Professional Military Education classes, or the general interest reader, look no further. Philosopher and psychology researcher Christian Miller’s The Character Gap distills much of his own scholarly work, as well as the thoughts and writing of others, into a readable, accessible volume with practical examples, citations from important studies, and popular culture references that bring alive questions of moral character and development. This volume asks us not just to consider others’ moral character, but also reflect upon our own, the gaps in it, and how we can improve it.
Overview
The Character Gap is a three-part volume on character and ethics centered on the questions: to what extent can we be good and how do we achieve this aim? Part I addresses what character is and why it matters. Part II addresses empirical studies in moral psychology regarding issues like helping, harming, lying, and cheating, detailing what the evidence shows about how people act. The central thesis of the book, as the title suggests, is that a significant gap exists between how we think of ourselves and our moral characters, and the hard reality of our actual behavior. Part III explores the question of how we can improve ourselves to lessen the gap. This includes some practical strategies, discussions of role models and their role, and even theological discussion of the Divine role.
Miller notes that we are not Hitler, an embodiment of complete vice, but neither are we Gandhi, an embodiment of complete virtue.
In the preface, Miller contextualizes this book in the larger discussion of the Character Project and his work at Wake Forest University, which helps place the book in its broader context of character development work.[1] The book gives the audience a mixed picture—as reflected on the cover art—of the state of moral character and our society. Miller notes that we are not Hitler, an embodiment of complete vice, but neither are we Gandhi, an embodiment of complete virtue. It is complicated. With its blend of theory, empirical studies, narratives, philosophical argument, and practical strategies, this book is readable and engaging to a wide audience. It is also worth thinking about this book in the context of discussions and debates on ethics, especially considering the focus on character in business, the military, and education.
Commentary and Questions
I am a huge fan of the book. I have used it in classes, leader development, and faculty development in my ethics work. I especially use it to teach virtue ethics—one of four moral perspectives that I teach. The chapter on virtue ethics and the treatment of Aristotle is straightforward, readable, and clear for non-philosophers whether war college students, flag officers, or faculty members. The empirical studies and examples also lend concrete context and provide a good starting point for discussion and reflection on the reader’s own character and gaps.
It is past time to think about character in respect to collectives, organizations, and communities of practice since they have some marks of personhood.
In the spirit of a fellow ethicist working in this area, there are three critical issues for consideration. First, this book—like most others on morality and character—focuses on the character of individuals to the exclusion of discussion of organizations, except for individuals in these organizations. It is past time to think about character in respect to collectives, organizations, and communities of practice since they have some marks of personhood.[2] The Enron scandal, the dishonesty documented in the Lying to Ourselves report, and other ethical failings and crises simply cannot be addressed by only looking at individual moral character because these events are all embedded in organizations and their cultures. This is not a criticism of only this book; indeed, there are occasional hints of this kind of discussion at times, but it needs much more depth to wrestle with these issues. Miller notes the organizational or cultural contexts in the chapters on helping and harming especially, but the chapters on how to address the gaps in character focus on the individual, their choices, habits, and practice.
A second question is how we ought to think about moral character. Strength of character, character as endurance or toughness, and the idea of character as following one’s moral compass are some popular models that appear in the book. They are also models that I have criticized in my own thinking and writing on these issues mostly on the grounds that they are too simplistic and thus fail to get at the communal nature of character because they only see it as an individual accomplishment or failing.[3]
Our role models expand our moral world in ways that can help us see and address character gaps.
In contrast, I think the idea of character as narrative, with debts to pragmatist philosopher John Dewey and others, is a better approach for many reasons, including that it fits better with the model of character that Miller is trying to get us to take up, especially in Part III of this book. In this view, character is an evolving narrative process, involving the social context and other people that is best understood in terms of narratives--both ours and those of others.[4] Role models are certainly important to this account of character and support Miller’s points about the nature of character as well as his suggestions for addressing gaps in any character narrative. For Miller, role models can help us develop our moral imagination as we see the world through the eyes of our role model, and we can also live alongside and take up the practices and habits of our role models.[5] Our role models expand our moral world in ways that can help us see and address character gaps. However, I think that we also need to address what kinds of gaps to avoid and what kinds of gaps to embrace for authenticity, compassion, and life in a community. A narrative approach can help us with those kinds of judgments.
Finally, there is the problem of moral failure, which much of the character discussion views in terms of ignorance or weakness of will. However, there is a much more complicated story including vice, moral disengagement—the moral analogy to cognitive bias—or a failure in deliberation and judgment, which could involve inexperience or a host of other problems. Some of these issues are made worse by the communal aspect of our moral lives; this is a point that this book does mention on occasion, but needs more treatment because moral failure is not simply about one individual. The empirical studies that Miller uses, in fact, point to various social and cultural influences and pressures, in addition to the cognitive issues listed above, that frame and impact our moral lives. The hints of a broader, more social account of character and its gaps are tantalizing and deserve deeper exploration.
Conclusion
None of the issues highlighted above undermine the value of the book, which is a highly accessible starting point to entering discussions about character and ethics in philosophy and psychology. The Character Gap will be of particular interest to those who are concerned with character and character development as an approach to ethical leadership in education, business, leadership, government and the military.
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Notes:
[1] Miller, Christian B.. The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), xiiii. For more on the Character Project see http://www.thecharacterproject.com/.
[2] See Michael Boylan, Business Ethics. (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 51-81. Depending upon the view, they may have rationality, a decision making process, exhibit intentions, make moral judgments and can articulate reasons to other moral agents, See especially French and Goodpaster in Boylan.
[5] Miller, The Character Gap, 201.
11. Book Launch: “Three Dangerous Men: Russia, China, Iran, and the Rise of Irregular Warfare" with Seth Jones
I just ordered this book but I could not wait until tomorrow to receive it so I read half of it last night on Kindle. Based on reading the first half I strongly recommend this. It is an excellent read.
Book Launch: Three Dangerous Men with Seth Jones
September 20, 2021
Emily Harding: Hello to our two panelists and to all those joining virtually. Both of our panelists today have added substantially to the public record on a critically important topic: gray-zone warfare and the future of great-power competition. The launching pad for our discussion today is Seth Jones’ new book, “Three Dangerous Men: Russia, China, Iran, and the Rise of Irregular Warfare.” We’ll cover some really compelling stories from the book, but also talk about the future of conflict in a broader sense. So, first, let me introduce Seth Jones. He is the senior vice president at CSIS, the Harold Brown Chair, the director of the International Security Program, and the director of the Transnational Threats Project. In his copious free time, he also teaches at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He’s held a wide variety of roles in the national security business, including the representative for the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command to the assistant secretary of defense for Special Operations, which is a long title meaning he was the link between the military and the civilian side of Special Operations. He also served as the advisor to the commanding general of Special Operations forces in Afghanistan. So, he has had many opportunities to view irregular warfare and gray-zone activity up close and personal. We also have David Sanger. His official New York Time bio calls him a senior writer, which seems about the understatement of the century. He has a 38-year reporting on top national security issues. He served on three teams that have won Pulitzers. His latest book – and I’m sorry I don’t have a copy with me here, but I have been reading it – is called “The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age,” which was also made into a very compelling HBO documentary. Both are a thoughtful exploration of the implications of the new tools of warfare in the cyber domain. For me personally, in my previous roles in the intelligence community we often referred to him as, David “how the bleep does he know that” Sanger. (Laughs.) We’re pleased to have him here today as a guest. So, “Three Dangerous Men.” This book is a serious topic, but a fun and approachable book. It uses the stories of three military intelligence leaders to describe how adversaries are using measures short of war to frustrate and undermine the U.S. It talks about Valery Gerasimov, who’s the Russian chief of staff of the armed forces – you know you’ve really made it when you have a doctrine named after you, and he has one: the Gerasimov Doctrine – Qassem Soleimani, the now-deceased head of the IRGC Quds Force; and Zhang Youxia, who’s the vice chairman of the Military Commission in China. So, as we read the stories of these three men and their approaches to modern warfare, it occurs to me proxy forces, mercenaries, propaganda, all as old as warfare itself. So, Seth, talk to us about what’s new here. What’s new about the Gerasimov Doctrine, about China’s whole-of-society approach, and about Iran’s proxy warfare?
Seth G. Jones: Thanks so much, Emily. As you note, there is – the use of irregular, asymmetric, gray-zone tactics and strategies is as old as war itself. You just have to go to books like Sun Tzu to see the importance of deception, the importance of how to win without fighting that comes from those very influential documents. The Chinese have also given us Mao Tse-tung, for example, and his pathbreaking work on guerilla warfare. So, what’s new? This is a – it’s a great question. I think there are a few things. One is the U.S. is shifting now from a focus on counterterrorism to great-power competition. So, we saw that first in the Trump administration’s National Defense Strategy. We saw it with the interim strategic guidance from the Biden administration. But I think the question, though, is as the U.S. focuses on competition with the Russians, the Chinese, and even the Iranians, what forms is that likely to take and how do we think about competition? In the military there’s a lot of focus on, understandably in many ways, large conventional wars, whether it’s with the Chinese in the Taiwan Straits or the South China Sea, with the Russians in the Baltics. How much of that is really going to be the domain of future warfare and how much of it is going to be in the irregular side? So, I think the shifting strategic landscape has changed. There are also a number of new elements and how they’ve been utilized. One – and I defer to David when he talks – but you know, one is certainly the cyber side of this, and the use of social media and digital platforms for information and disinformation campaigns. That’s certainly not something that we saw during the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviets, even though the Soviets – Service A of the KGB was heavily involved in active measures. In addition, we certainly have also seen the increasing use of various types of private military companies, shells, and fronts that have gone on – gone along with that, including the Russians’ use of the Wagner Group and others in Africa, in the Middle East, in Latin America including Venezuela, and overlaying those activities with Russian intelligence – both military intelligences, GRU, as well as the foreign intelligence agency, the SVR. So, there’s a bit of a new dynamic with how private military companies are used for influence and how they’re also used on the economic side. There’s also some newness to – at least new developments on the economic side. I’m going to call it economic coercion. So, the use of the Belt and Road Initiative not just for – by China – not just for economic investments in countries, but also using the leverage from that to pursue issues of interest to the Chinese regarding Taiwan or the Uighurs or Tibet – so issues of strategic importance to the Chinese – and then, you know, how this is done. So there have been new elements in this even though the – just the concept of irregular warfare, Emily, is – as you point out, it’s not new.
Ms. Harding: So, David, with that I will turn to you to talk about that cyber issue that Seth raised. In your book The Perfect Weapon, you wrestle with the analogies between conventional warfare, nuclear warfare, and cyber warfare, and you talk about how these inapt analogies; they don’t – they don’t always work out. So, what’s the closet analogy that you did find? What bad habits in our thinking do we need to break here? And if you could especially focus on the lessons for deterrence theory, I think that’s a ripe topic for conversation here.
David E. Sanger: Sure. Well, first I wanted to say how much I enjoyed reading Seth’s book and how the technique he had used, which I just admired as a writer, of encapsulating these three really fascinating different national approaches through three very difficult kinds of intelligence and military officials, it’s just a great read. And I think, Seth, not only congratulations to you, but I think it’s going to become required reading in irregular-warfare courses in universities maybe even beyond just SAIS. (Laughter.) So, it’s terrific, and to our audience here today I would commend it. So really great question that you’ve raised here because in the early days of cyber there was this tendency for people to say, well, this is like the new nuclear weapon, right? And by the way, we could – why can’t we deter it the same way that we deterred nuclear weapons, where it took us 10 years, but we came up – or 15 – but eventually came up with a mutually assured destruction kind of approach? In fact, it is, as you say, an inapt analogy, just doesn’t apply. All the questions about deterrence in the nuclear arena also arise in the cyber arena and every one of the answers is different. And the reason for that is that cyber is available not just to nation-states and not just to terrorists, but to criminal groups and, worse yet, to teenagers. And you know, outside of the nation-states, those three groups don’t tend to sign arms-control treaties, right? So, the whole concept that we ultimately had, which was that we got the two largest possessors of nuclear weapons – the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and ultimately its successor state in Russia – to diminish the size of their arsenals just will not work in cyber. The second misapprehension we had, I think, was that cyber would be used initially just as a surveillance tool. And if you think about it, it makes sense that we started thinking about this because, you know, the post office was created and we learned how to open people’s mail; and then the telephone system was invented and, you know, not long after Alexander Graham Bell went to all that work, we figured out how to intercept phone conversations. So when people first saw cyber they thought, terrific, you know, we can read each other’s emails, and that falls into sort of traditional intelligence collection. But as Seth points out in his statement and as he does again in the book, the really interesting uses of cyber are not surveillance uses. So, there is the social media side, which is really more understood as more like propaganda than a cyber operation. I mean, Stalin used to put ads in farm newspapers in America in an effort to go try to influence Americans, you know, in the 1930s. He just couldn’t measure his results the way you can if you’re having the Internet Research Agency go at it. But to my mind, the most interesting uses of cyber are closer analogues to what Seth is writing about in “Three Dangerous Men.” You can use cyber to manipulate data. So, you know, it can be as basic as trying to recalibrate the aim of a missile but as pernicious as getting into the Pentagon’s health database and changing the blood type of every soldier and sailor. Imagine the havoc you could wreck. You can try to conduct attacks that previously you could only do through sabotage, putting somebody on the ground, or bombing them from afar. So, when the United States and Israel decided to go after the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant, they considered the sabotage and the bombing effort and decided in the end that if you could use cyber it’s much harder to go trace who’s doing it, but more importantly you may not prompt the kind of military reaction you would get from bombing. And then the third arena in which you can use cyber is as an influence operation. And as Seth points out very well in his chapters on Gerasimov, to the Russians this is all on a spectrum. You know, we think of information operations separately from using cyber as a weapon. They think of it all in a continuum. And interestingly, the Chinese are beginning to as well. So, to the deterrence issues, you know, we just went through a lot of panels on 20 years after 9/11. And you know, the most remarkable thing is we actually managed to improve our defenses so well that we got a fair bit of deterrence by denial, by it’s hard to get a bomb up on a plane or into Times Square or through the – through the tunnels or whatever. It’s not impossible, but we’ve just done a much better job at early detection and defense. And frankly, that’s where we’ve done a crummy job in the cyber arena, where we are just so vulnerable as a society – as you could see with the Colonial Pipeline case, a ransomware case in which the attackers didn’t even plan to cut off the flow of gasoline up and down the East Coast but it happened anyway as the company cut it off – that that’s really where we’ve got to begin to think about a true national effort.
Ms. Harding: Well, so on that happy note – (laughs) – Seth, we’re talking about this continuum and how our adversaries think about war not as war and peace as we tend to, but as war, measures short of war, an entire continuum of possibilities. How are we set up to respond to this? You have – the last chapter of your book you devoted to some recommendations. How is the U.S. set up or not set up to go about combatting this approach to warfare?
Dr. Jones: Good questions. Let me just start off, Emily, with talking about warfare because there are a range of different ways that one can refer to this. It’s been called gray-zone activity or asymmetric. I think the term “warfare,” I use it deliberately for a couple of reasons. One is I think it – this is – this is the use of warfare that’s much closer to Sun Tzu than it is of the Prussian soldier and theorist Clausewitz. If you read Sun Tzu, the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting, so it’s without actually having to resort to violence. And I think in particular when you – when you look at the terminology used by a number of the countries, I looked at here, China uses terms including “three warfares” to describe important components of this. Three warfares are the use of media, propaganda, psychological, and legal warfare for the export of states’ power and influence. So, it is warfare. It is a component of warfare. The Iranians have a term that they use, which is “jang-e narm,” which is “soft war.” Probably not too different from the concept of soft power in the U.S., but again defined in part using ideological information means as warfare. And then even as – the U.S. military historian Charles Bartle’s referred to this as the important point for understanding how the Russians use these instruments, he said, is “while the West consider these non-military measures like information operations, covert action, support to nonstate actors including proxies – while the West consider these non-military measures as avoiding war,” the Russians consider these measures as war, as a component of war. And so that’s why I think the terminology here important, because, I mean, the whole idea here is to be understanding how they view warfare and competition. So these instruments are critical as part of warfare. And in kind of understanding the way the Chinese think about it, I mean, I found it quite – I found a great movie. I wouldn’t – I wouldn’t suggest that people start running to go watch “Wolf Warrior 2.” The general explosion scenes are sort of like 1990s Hollywood. But it is still, I think, the highest-grossing film in Chinese history. This is “Wolf Warrior 2.” And what’s interesting here is the signals that the Chinese are sending. The movie character is not a Chinese infantry officer; it’s a – it’s a former special operations soldier. So, it’s someone who can do both kung fu and he’s part Rambo. In addition, it takes place not in the South China Sea or in the Taiwan Straits or even in Taiwan; it takes place in Africa. And who’s Leng Feng’s enemy? It is Big Daddy. It’s a – it’s kind of an American drawl – it’s actually an American character in the movie. And the message of this – of the second version of “Wolf Warrior” is, at the end, as Leng Feng kills Big Daddy, is basically the United States is the past and China is the future. “You are history,” he says. So, this gets to your question about what do we do about it. And I think, you know, this aspect, Emily, that you talked about at the beginning on warfare as really a continuum, not as dichotomous, gets to the way the Cold War was at least partially conceptualized by some of the more influential individuals like George Kennan in the U.S. That’s the way Kennan conceptualized warfare between the U.S. and the Soviets, as operating – not dichotomous, it starts and its ends, but as a continuous, hourly, certainly daily activity. And I would say particularly with the Chinese, the U.S. is just – I mean, it’s just not prepared, really, at all. It’s not structured this way. It doesn’t have the resources. I mean, what I find most concerning in many ways is even how U.S. competition with the Chinese is conceptualized in the Department of Defense. The OPLANs or operational plans, you know, the scenarios used to plan for future competition, the weapons systems, you know, almost entirely envision conventional fights with the Chinese, whether it’s in the Taiwan – in the Taiwan area, in and around Taiwan, or the South China Sea. In addition, I mean, I find it striking how the U.S. from an information standpoint is nowhere near prepared. We don’t have translations of Chinese material, the entire open-source enterprise. During the Cold War, we had the U.S. Information Agency and as part of that the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, translated huge amounts of Soviet-Warsaw Pact radio programs, television, you know, magazines, newspapers to understand what was going on not just inside of the Soviet Union, but also in its Warsaw Pact allies. And we’ve got – we’ve got nothing along those lines. The Global Engagement Center at the State Department is underfunded, under-resourced, and I mean, in many ways is considered a backwater. So, I think we have to get really serious about this. Beijing has not made the same mistake. The Chinese newspaper with the largest domestic circulation is a compilation of foreign news articles, including English-language reports that are translated into Chinese. That is the largest domestic-circulated newspaper in China. So, I think what it shows is there’s a huge focus on understanding us, from the Beijing side, but not a lot from the U.S. towards the Chinese. There’s also, Emily, a lot that we did in the 1980s in beaming in Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty into the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, which was, frankly, very successful in opening up dialogue in those countries. We see in China, Russia, Iran, all of them are closed societies. They’re not democratic. They don’t have freedom of the press. They don’t have freedom of religion. So, you know, part of the focus, I think, has got to be beginning to open them up, and there are both technical tools that the U.S. can use but also just a constant campaign. And thankfully from a U.S. standpoint, it doesn’t have to be disinformation, but everything from the assassination of defectors – we’ve seen it on the Russian side – to, you know, the international coercion campaigns that have gone along with the Belt and Road Initiative, to the massive doping scandals that both the Chinese and the Russians have been involved in, to the extraordinary pressure the Chinese put on companies including in Hollywood, the NBA – which they put significant pressure on the NBA, including executives, not to criticize the Chinese government or Hong Kong or they will take NBA games off of television in China, which they did and which the NBA leadership paid a big economic price for doing – I think there are a range of tools even from the last decade of the Cold War that the U.S. could do differently.
Ms. Harding: Right.
Mr. Sanger: I’d add – I’d add one more to those, Emily. I agree with everything that’s on Seth’s list, but I think in some ways the most important move the Chinese have made and that the Russians just cannot, and it’s sort of the difference between their approach – and the Iranians cannot – is that they were well on their way, and still are, using Huawei to wire the world, right? So, you know, if you think about the first real pushback by the United States and some its reluctant allies on the Chinese, it was in the effort to block Huawei from building 5G networks. And initially, our allies were quite reluctant. Some still are. And the Chinese have made great inroads in Africa and Latin America and so forth in building these. But why is this important? Because we were looking at this, as Seth suggests, as a commercial project. And frankly, we didn’t have a whole lot to offer. And the Chinese were looking at this as both a commercial opportunity and an opportunity to make sure that the information that flows around the world flows not through the United States, which built all the initial networks, but instead would flow through Beijing or Shanghai. And that has made a huge, huge difference. And only in the past two or three years have you seen the United States begin to push back. Even President Trump viewed this half the time as a trade issue – well, maybe I’ll give away the 5G thing, you know, if I get a better deal on something else – which was a fundamental misreading of what the importance of 5G was to the Chinese plan. And it’s interesting, this week, you know, we’ve spent our time discussing Australian submarines up through the region, which is important and an important way of pushing the Chinese back. But if you made me choose between control of the submarine routes and control of the – of the submarine cables flowing around the world – the two have some relationship – I’d pick the cables any day.
Ms. Harding: Yes, because of this information warfare piece that we’ve been talking about and because if you control the information, you control the world. I have to give –
Mr. Sanger: And you have the ability to turn – not only to listen in, which, you know, the Chinese are good at doing now, but turn it off.
Ms. Harding: Right. Some of those tables get snipped and we’re all in trouble. I have to give a small bit of kudos to my former boss, Chairman Burr, and Chairman Warner for their leadership on the 5G issue. I think that that was a real wakeup moment for the United States government.
Mr. Sanger: Yeah, and they managed to do it together and it was relatively bipartisan. And there’s a huge amount of work – most of it classified so it’s, you know, hard to go dig out – about U.S. efforts to protect those undersea cables, and it’s part of what that Australian submarine deal is about.
Dr. Jones: Well, this is – this is the whole reason that you focus a lot of your activity on irregular activity. It’s not – this is – this is how you take islands in the South China Sea, turn atolls into essentially military bases. You do it with dredgers, not with – by bringing in PLA Navy forces to control the islands. I mean, this is – this is – the whole use of underwater cables for information, 5G, 6G where we’re headed next, I mean, this all off of the overt radar screen. And this is part of the point that I think both David and I and even Emily are making now, is these are less publicly aware activities but they’re extraordinarily important components of competition.
Mr. Sanger: And they are not even – they’re not the side issue as they were once considered to be. They are the central game. And you know, you were asking me for better and worse – you asked me at the beginning, Emily, what’s the – what’s the better analogy. I think the better analogy is the invention of the airplane, right? When Wilbur and Orville Wright first showed aircraft to American military officials in 1909 up at what is now the University of Maryland at College Park out on what is now the soccer field, and they flew their – they flew the Wright Military Flyer around, the initial reaction of the Army was this is a great surveillance device. You know, we’ll fly it out over enemy troops, and we’ll see where their openings are and we’ll send in the cavalry, right? So, they were thinking of it all as surveillance. What’s this like? It’s like the early days of cyber. And it took about five or six years for the Germans to catch on and say, hey, we could drop bombs from this thing, right, or we could – or we could arm these planes. And at that time there was a lot of discussion, including in Britain – I’ve got a great British book published in 1910 called “Aeroplanes in Peace and War.” And the question was, could London ever be bombed? Well, we answered that relatively quickly, OK?
Ms. Harding: Oh! (Laughs.)
Mr. Sanger: So, by World War II, airplanes moved from being this sort of interesting sideshow to being the central strategic weapon. And the question here is, is cyber and the other irregular techniques that Seth has laid out so well in the world, are – will they in 20 or 30 years be the central game? And my guess is the answer to that is yes, because no one wants to take the U.S. military on frontally nor do they see that as particularly advantageous.
Ms. Harding: Right.
Dr. Jones: David, if I could just jump – if I could just jump in one time – sorry, Emily – just to – just to highlight the point here, I mean, I think there’s this interesting period when the Soviets and the Americans are close to war during the Cuban Missile Crisis where it dawns on both leaders that a nuclear war, if that’s where this goes, now you’re talking about, you know, threatening cities in both the U.S. and in the Soviet Union. The reality of nuclear weapons – and you know, one of the ironies of participating both in classified and unclassified wargames with the Chinese is when you’re fighting in and around the South China Sea and you’re flying F-35s, part of your suppression of enemy air defense almost inexorably includes striking targets along the Chinese mainland because that’s where they’re shooting missiles or that’s where their radar systems are or electronic warfare. That raises the prospect of nuclear war, because when you start conducting strikes in and around someone’s homeland it becomes very difficult to distinguish are these – are these measures that you’re doing so that you’re protecting your aircraft or your forces on the ground in Taiwan or your submarines or your aircraft carriers, or is the next step you’re going to start hitting Beijing and you’re going to attempt to overthrow the government? It becomes very hard to distinguish offense and defense and that balance. So, the issue is, I mean, that looming issue of escalation to nuclear war I think will be very concerning to both leaders in Washington and Beijing. And you could – you could also extend this analogy to Moscow and Washington in the Baltic states, which is why it’s partly what David said, which is that the U.S. is conventionally and from a nuclear perspective continues to be quite strong but also now all these major powers, they have nuclear weapons. So conventional or nuclear war, I mean, you’re talking about huge economic impacts. I mean, one scenario that RAND ran, the Chinese GDP in a war decreased by 25 percent just because of the destruction that was caused by the war. So, what I think this means is the day-to-day activity gets pushed below that threshold.
Ms. Harding: Absolutely. So, on that note, our adversaries very much seem to be playing a long game. They are looking to undermine America in various ways. The Russians in 2016 did a masterful – probably a better job than they expected to do making us question each other, making us question democracy, and really undermining the roots of what makes us function as a society, and that’s a very long-game kind of strategy. As Americans, you know, we tend to be optimistic and go get ’em, but it often means that we tend to think a little bit more short term than our adversaries. How should we be adapting to this long-game perspective? And what do you see as the potential inflection points in this long game?
Mr. Sanger: Do you want to go first, Seth?
Dr. Jones: No, no, no, you go ahead first.
Mr. Sanger: OK. Well, the first is they are playing it for the long haul and that’s not something democracies do really well. Because we change presidents every four or eight years and because in that time period you can have major changes of policy – and you know, that’s just the way democracies operate – we have a much harder time setting 10-, 20-, 30-, 40-year goals. If you want to look at the best example of this – and again, it goes to competition with China – look at the China bill, the infrastructure bill that went through the Senate early this summer, still has not passed the House. So, all of the technologies that we are thinking of putting money into, billions of dollars into in sort of new industrial policy – AI, quantum computing, semiconductor lithography, autonomous vehicles, long battery life issues, encryption, all of that – the list matches up almost perfectly with China’s Made in China 2025 list. The problem is they started their Made in China 2025 list in 2015. And so, they’re in year six. They’ll make it on some; on others, like semiconductors, they are behind. You know, so it’s not going to be a 100 percent success. We shouldn’t say they’re 10 feet high. But here we are, like, just getting our long-term government involvement strategy together in 2021. And it’s entirely conceivable, if you have a change in government come the next presidential election or even the one after that, that that whole effort gets interrupted. So, one thing that’s common to the three societies that Seth writes about in “Three Dangerous Men” – China, Russia, and Iran – is they don’t go through this process. Their downside is they don’t have the kind of entrepreneurial energy that we do. They’ve got greater focus and probably less content. And I think the race of the next few years is going to be which of those turns out to be more important.
Ms. Harding: Seth, do you want to chime in there?
Dr. Jones: Yeah. Just to add to that, so let me – David focused on the Chinese. Let me just start with the Russians. You know, the Russians are starting with a much weaker hand. You know, they’re not the economic power that the Chinese are, and they won’t be. But when you look at the long-term strategy, I mean, it’s important, I think, to look at where the Russians came out of the Cold War, and they lost out in so many different ways. They lost the Warsaw Pact countries, virtually all of whom went to the European Union and NATO. They lost their southern flank. The U.S. deployed forces to Afghanistan, obviously where they had invaded at the end of the 1970s. They lost partners in Libya after the U.S., the French, and the British overthrew Gadhafi. So, they were in pretty tough shape over the next two decades after the end of the Cold War. So, what does the Russian long-term game plan look like for individuals like Gerasimov? You can see it starting to happen in 2013, 2014, 2015. And again, look at the annexation of Crimea. It is done in ways that look a lot like Sun Tzu’s use of the tools of warfare to subdue the enemy without fighting. The Russians didn’t fire a shot, really, in Crimea. They used Spetsnaz and Russian special operations forces, disinformation campaigns, intelligence, individuals, so in that sense – SVR as well as GRU. So, starting to take back territory and influence. Look at supporting Assad. I mean, there was – there was grave concern during the Obama administration that the U.S. would back rebels and, just like they had done in Libya in 2011, overthrow the Assad regime. Well, what did the Russians do in response? They did not do what they did in Afghanistan starting in 1978 and ’79, which is deploying over 100,000 infantry soldiers, armor into Afghanistan. Instead, the maneuver force – so they conducted strikes from maritime vessels – caliber, cruise missiles. They also dropped some bombs from fixed-wing aircraft. But who was the maneuver force for the Russians in Syria? It was Lebanese Hezbollah, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. It was Iranian-trained militias from Iraq, Palestinian territory, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, among other places, I mean in addition to some Syrian forces. It was a very different way of protecting an ally and then using bases in that country for power projection. How do we see the Russians attempting to expand not just their influence, but also their economic activity in Africa? So China has its Belt and Road Initiative. You know, not saying this is going to be a particularly effective strategy, but the Russians have deployed their private military companies and their shells and fronts to Central African Republic, Madagascar, Mozambique, Egypt, Libya, and a whole – Venezuela, Nicaragua. We’ve seen the Russians deploy these kinds of forces – again, not large numbers of Russian infantry but also a heavy focus on Wagner Group with the support of Russian military intelligence, the GRU, and the SVR. So, what we see in the long game is the Russians trying to expand influence in Eastern Europe, in South Asia, in the Middle East, in parts of Africa, and even in Latin America, primarily through irregular means. I would say on balance it’s actually been fairly successful with the weak hand that the Russians have had. And I would wholly support David’s comments. I mean, look at Made in China 2025. It is – it’s a 10-year plan to transform China into a leading manufacturing power by 2049. That’s the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. But look at how they’ve been also doing it. It’s significant stealing of technology to be competitive, both from a defense industry perspective as well as business perspective. What makes the Chinese nervous – and I think this is – this is kind of the last issue I wanted to raise, Emily, is what makes the Chinese nervous about its approach. I think it feels nervous about Hong Kong. You know, it’s an area that it needs to watch very closely. It feels a little nervous – and we’ve seen it in the last couple of weeks with the overthrow of the Afghan government by the Taliban, that the Chinese have basically said both to Mullah Baradar on his trip to China in the summer as well as to senior Pakistan leaders that with the rise of the Taliban: You must take care of the Uighur problem in China. We do not want to see East Turkestan Islamic Movement sanctuaries/base camps operating from Afghanistan. They can conduct attacks inside of China. So there certainly are concerns about some of these internal dynamics that I think makes the Chinese a little worrisome as part of their long-term strategy.
Ms. Harding: Absolutely. So, I want to turn back to the idea of this book as part biography and part lessons for the future of warfare. There are three very different men that you describe in the book, but they do have some similarity. So, I’m curious as to what you – what your takeaways were on the personality characteristics that made them successful at their jobs, how they went about it, what you see as the similarities and differences. And, David, then I’ll turn to you and ask a question sort of from the flipside, which is that, given what we know about these men and the way that these countries go about irregular warfare, what are our options for trying to push back?
Dr. Jones: So, I think there are a couple of things that I was particularly interested and in many ways surprised by Qassim Soleimani, by Zhang, as well as by Valery Gerasimov. All of them actually studied pretty carefully the last several decades of warfare by the United States. I mean, they were – they were – I mean, it was almost like Ph.D. exercises in understanding both the U.S. weaknesses and its strengths. U.S. overthrows the Taliban regime not by sending in large numbers of forces, same thing in Libya, but using small numbers of Special Operations forces, CIA paramilitary on the ground, and some airpower that went with it. Also, a recognition that the – some of the U.S.’s weaknesses – the large deployment of forces on the ground, the 100,000-plus in Iraq and Afghanistan. So, you know, what did the U.S. do well? What did it not do well? There are also some interesting, almost bizarre lessons. You know, reading Gerasimov’s historical overview of the past several decades, he gives a lot of credit where credit really isn’t due to the U.S. for its involvement in the Arab Spring, in overthrowing multiple countries across the Arab world, as well as the color revolutions. So, I mean, my guess is that if you asked a range of individuals at Langley, they would have loved to have been involved in more of those than the U.S. was ever involved in, but you know, the Russians saw U.S. hands in everything from Ukraine to a number of other countries in Eastern Europe and across the Arab Spring. So, I mean, that’s one big theme that cuts across all of those. And I think a second we’ve already highlighted to some degree, which is a recognition that – certainly true in Zhang and Gerasimov, but also Soleimani and his successor Ismail Qaani – how powerful the United States is from a conventional and a nuclear standpoint, and how weak the U.S. has even just looked in Afghanistan at the hands of a pretty well – or pretty poorly-equipped Taliban force that wore the U.S. down, conducted guerilla raids, like, almost directly right from Mao’s guerilla warfare book, almost directly from Sun Tzu. So, the U.S.’s weaknesses are in these areas. So, I mean, just to summarize is how much really students of history all three of them were. I mean, their own interpretations of history, but all three historians of the U.S. experience and trying to pull lessons from that, I mean, I found – I found quite surprising.
Ms. Harding: One of the really frustrating things about trying to conduct diplomacy with the Russians is saying “but that wasn’t us” and them absolutely not believing us that it wasn’t us. And if you say you didn’t do it, then they say that’s exactly what you would say if you did do it, and there’s just no convincing them that our hidden hand is not behind everything. So, David, over to you. What options do we have for these men?
Mr. Sanger: Well, first, in – when you turn the mirror around, we don’t believe they’re not involved in a lot of these operations as well. And so, you know, the most recent great example of this is the ransomware craze, right? So, you know, the other day General Nakasone, the head of the NSA and Cyber Command, said at a conference here in Washington, you know, six months ago if you raised ransomware, I would have described it as a criminal activity, which was his nice way of saying not my problem, right? I got plenty to do in all the areas that Seth just described, hand the ransomware characters over to the Justice Department. They want to go indict them or block their funds, you know, that’s their job, not my job. Now, all of a sudden, we view ransomware as a central national security threat, by President Biden’s own description, if it’s emerging from Russia the Russian government must either be tolerating it at a minimum or encouraging it as a way to undercut us. Which takes us to your question, Emily, who is, what do you do to begin to deter this kind of activity? And the – what it hinges on is, do we come to define national security in a much broader way than we did? That if the Russians are going to determine that our greatest vulnerability isn’t what they can do to us in the South China Sea but the fact that they can get into the electric grid or they can get into Colonial Pipeline or they can execute the kind of attack – Seth makes a brief reference to it at the beginning of his book – that they did in SolarWinds, where they basically got into the update system of a piece of software that was used across corporate America, even at The New York Times, and across the federal government, then they can do far more damage than they could do with a conventional kind of – with a terror attack, much less a conventional attack. And that takes me back to my first point, which is we have to think about the cyber defenses for our own society the way we thought about securing airports and so forth after 9/11, and we’re not at that point yet. And we’re not at that point yet because our adversaries, including these three men, have figured out that if you calibrate the attacks at a low enough level, you’re not going to get a kinetic response and you’re probably not going to get much of a response at all. And that’s what’s happened. And so, we keep talking about raising the price, raising the cost. How many times did you hear that when you were on the Senate Intelligence Committee? Seth, how many times have you heard that, you know, in meetings with Special Forces? But clearly, we have not raised the cost to the point that it’s led to a diminution of activity. The president of the United States just went and spent most of a meeting in Geneva in June with Vladimir Putin and spent it warning him about ransomware, and we had a nice abeyance in the summer while some of their best hackers I guess decided to go to the Black Sea and enjoy the sunshine. But all the evidence is they’re back at this point. And so, the answer to that has got to be some mixture of much higher pain and much higher defenses.
Ms. Harding: That’s absolutely right. And this question of deniability, I mean, this underlies a lot of what’s in the book – both of your books, actually. You know, it’s an adversary conducting activity that is an arm’s length removed or several arms’ lengths removed, and the Russians in particular are really outstanding at this idea where they can say, well, they’re not under our control even though we know that generally speaking the way the Kremlin operates is that people are allowed to do things as long as they are in line with the Kremlin’s interests. We see this with the PMCs. We see this with some of the ransomware groups. They get a little bit out of line, and they get a quick correction, but as long as they’re operating in line with Kremlin interests then they’re allowed to continue, and the Kremlin gets the opportunity of the deniability. That also makes it much harder for American policymakers. One of the things that we saw with the Russia report in 2016 was the Obama administration really struggling because they wanted to know for sure that this was Russian activity before they tried to deploy any of these carrots and sticks that you’re talking about, and this gray-zone activity is just not the kind of place where you get that kind of certainty. And I think that is going to be a huge challenge for American policymakers operating in this realm where you are not going to be sure, but you still have to respond in order to preserve these tools of deterrence. So, Seth, I’ll throw that to you to see if you want to react at all, and then I have a couple more questions before we wrap up.
Dr. Jones: No, I think I would actually agree with what both of you said, so I don’t have – I don’t actually have any more to add to that.
Ms. Harding: Well, then, that’s a win. (Laughs.) We all agree. We’re all set here. We’re done. (Laughs.) Seth, I wanted to ask you a little bit about your original document use in the book. It was really fun to see you pull from some of Gerasimov’s PowerPoint presentations, some of the Chinese documents that you found. Can you talk a little bit about how you went about finding those and what you did to translate them and make them usable?
Dr. Jones: Emily, this is – this is a much bigger issue than I had anticipated. There actually was – you know, there was a fair amount of Russian documents available. I mean, I identified a bunch of what Gerasimov had said. I do speak a little bit of Russian, so that was helpful. What I found particularly discouraging was the – well, were two things. One is during the Cold War and even in graduate school and afterwards I had relied on translated Cold War material from the Foreign Broadcast Information Service. That’s the open-source enterprise that the intelligence community made available publicly. It’s now all closed. So, U.S. government not providing public translations of documents writ large, that was one, you know, discovery that was frustrating. The second is how little publicly available information translated for Mandarin there exists, major documents. None of the science of military strategies. These are momentous Chinese documents. They are not publicly available in English in the U.S. on Web services. So, I actually had to get a lot of information translated. In fact, just the lack of information translated from Mandarin to English, it’s so bad that CSIS, as part of a major effort which I think we’re going to make publicly available in November of this year, 2021, is an open-source China analysis center so that we are translating, you know, substantial amounts of Chinese documents. And you know, the purpose is that it’s not pro- or anti-China; it’s more just to understand what is going on inside of China. I mean, I think eventually it will include key debates going on digital platforms inside of China, as well as journal articles, media, government documents. Even on government documents, what I noticed is – in the translations is when the Chinese – you know, they may actually translate a white paper into English, but what you find pretty quickly is that their translations are designed entirely for their audiences. So, they may have a white paper in Mandarin largely designed for a Chinese-speaking audience. The English version, which is designed for a different audience, actually is different in many ways. The phrases are different. It’s a lot less aggressive in talking about the United States. So that just – that whole process of translating Chinese documents to me was a huge epiphany on how far behind we are on understanding what is going on inside of China. I mean, the easiest way to classify a Chinese document is to keep it in Mandarin because nobody in the U.S. can speak – can speak Mandarin. I mean, I say that a little bit of tongue-in-cheek, but there is definitely some truth to it. So that was – that was actually one of the more interesting findings from the book, is how much we had to translate from Chinese.
Ms. Harding: Right.
Mr. Sanger: The only thing I’d add to that is on the one hand it’s terrible that the U.S. is not putting more of this stuff out, you know, and the good news is there’s a lot of technological solution to this of automated translation. It’s not perfect, but you know, we’ll make up for the high labor cost of doing this. The good news about all of this – and I know sometimes, Emily, this can drive people crazy in the intelligence world – is that there’s a huge amount more open source available for us to go follow our adversaries, right? I get every few weeks satellite photographs of North Korea which we can hand off to, you know, outside experts that give us sub-meter view of the major nuclear facilities and people can come to judgments. You know, a decade ago, you know, that was only available through highly classified systems. So when President Trump was declaring after his meetings with Kim Jong-un that he had had phenomenal success in getting them to stop their nuclear program, we were able to go out and write stories that established that, no, they were building new bases; there was activity in Yongbyon, the main nuclear site; you could see when they turned on and off the reactor because of thermal heat slides and all that kind of stuff. And this is highly frustrating to people in the intelligence community who were accustomed for a while to a monopoly on this data, but it’s a wonderful thing for bringing people into an awareness of the degree to which this is a constant – a constant struggle back and forth. And it at times, I think, is fairly useful even to the U.S. government because something that is classified at their end can still get some public discussion.
Dr. Jones: So, David, just to highlight that point, how did I even for this book get information on Russian private military company Wagner Group activity in Africa? Well, we conducted satellite-imagery analysis – commercial, off-the-shelf satellite-imagery analysis – of found Wagner Group bases in Burango Central African Republic. Could do analysis of ranges there, the airports that they were flying into. You could look at the classrooms, the buildings, the infrastructure. Same thing on the Iranian side, could look at satellite-imagery analysis of IRGC – Islamic Revolutionary Guard Quds Force – training facilities outside of Tehran or along the Lebanese-Syrian border and actually see the ranges on there, see where they’re exploding ordnance. I mean, it’s a wonderful capability. But again, the U.S. is not in – government is not in the position it was or hasn’t made the decision on open source to provide some of that information the way it did during the Cold War. But the private sector has definitely – has definitely kept pace, and I think this is where we had to go for the research on the book. And David’s exactly right.
Mr. Sanger: I’d give one other example, again, that’s been a bit uncomfortable for the U.S. government. You will remember the strike – the drone strike a few weeks ago on the car that was allegedly heading for a second strike on the Baghdad – I’m sorry, on the airport on Kabul, and our –
Dr. Jones: It just feels like Baghdad. It feels like Baghdad.
Mr. Sanger: Inaudible.) Sorry about that. And we published out of our video investigations unit last Friday a reconstruction – a devastating reconstruction of the activity of the main target of that attack, which ended up killing a lot of kids and so forth, that strongly suggests that the activity that from satellites looked to the U.S. like he was gathering explosives was, in fact, him going around gathering fuel for his family and for his activity as an aid worker. And then we went back biographically and discovered he had had 10 to 15 years of work in aid work and certainly did not look like a classic terrorist to all who knew him. And this has caused a real issue inside the Pentagon because it has raised new questions about whether or not, in our last act in Afghanistan, we ended up using a drone to strike the wrong target. And you know, 5 or 10 years ago it would not have been possible for a journalistic enterprise, even one with the reach of The New York Times, to go out and in a matter of days pick a part the U.S. government’s rationale for a drone strike.
Ms. Harding: Well, so, Seth, I will turn to you for the last word on that in just a second, but I do think that it’s important to note that the commercial enterprise is going to be the future of the intelligence community. A little competition now and then is a very good thing, and then in addition there’s just things that only the intelligence community can do and then there are things that the commercial sector is phenomenal at. I mean, companies like HawkEye 360 or SpaceX or a lot of these other firms that are coming up with really brilliant ways to attack some of the same problems, it’s insane for us to not be working together. We could do an entire separate discussion about the ways that the U.S. government needs to reform itself to make that really happen, but it’s something that has to happen. Yeah, David, go ahead.
Mr. Sanger: We should do that. (Laughs.)
Ms. Harding: We should do that. We should do that. So, Seth, in the minute we have left before you and I actually have to head off to test some of these theories in a tabletop exercise, do you want to say anything about the book and about your recommendation on building on America’s core principles and that being one way to push back on this kind of behavior? We talk a lot about the mismatch between America being an open society and some of these countries being highly authoritarian, being able to marshal state resources just by snapping their fingers, whereas, you know, we on the other hand have a kind of bright line between the commercial sector and the government sector and the public and the private. When you think about marshalling our core values as a nation, what does that really say to you?
Dr. Jones: Well, I think at the end of the day the U.S. and Western, open, democratic societies, I mean, are very competitive. And people around the globe, when we’ve gone through waves along these lines, they – our values, our economic systems are attractive. And so, I think that in looking forward the U.S. has to continue to operate based on its core principles – its democratic system; its commitment to freedom of information, freedom of the press, freedom of religion – and that actually is its strength. I mean, you know, one of the things that’s interesting – I looked a little bit at this in the book, but if you look at how countries responded to COVID-19, I mean, what was interesting about the U.S. response was that the private sector led the way in the vaccines and that when it came to the effectiveness of those vaccines they were – you know, they ended up standing the test of time, at least so far, including the exports of them. And this is an area that has probably been understudied, but where the Chinese have definitely struggled, and the Chinese vaccines have definitely struggled. It’s the innovation that comes from an open, effective, competitive economic system that the U.S. has. And I think, you know, this, on the – to shift to the political side, this is also an advantage to the U.S., and it was an advantage during the Cold War. I mean, the Soviet Union in the 1960s and ’70s and even very early ’80s, I mean, it was an imposing force. We saw Marxist-Leninism take hold across the globe in Africa, in Latin America. But at the end of the day, when you start to close off sources of information, when you make it impossible for individuals to choose their own leaders whether they’re good or bad, you know, people get frustrated over time. So, I think, at the end of the day, it’s – I mean, I expect the Chinese over time are going to struggle to keep up with U.S. competitiveness and innovation. Silicon Valley remains a dominant competitive industry. And I think, again, COVID-19 was one good example of that. In addition, I think the Chinese are going to have problems in Hong Kong. They’re going to have problems in Xinjiang. They’re going to have problems in and around Tibet. And I think this is what happens at the end of the day when you try to close off society, when you don’t – when things go poorly, and you have an authoritarian regime. And again, this is – you know, it’s interesting to see how Solidarity emerges in the 1980s as a strong force as the Polish economy starts to collapse over the course – and you know, interesting – and I’m not saying that the U.S. should conduct this kind of activity – but it was also one of the most successful covert action programs of the CIA during the entire Cold War to keep Solidarity alive. This was not providing weapons, bullets to Solidarity. It was printer cartridges. So, I mean, that’s kind of the part of competition that I think, you know, that I’ll be looking at over the next decade or two.
Ms. Harding: Great. And with that, we are a little bit over so we’re going to end. I want to give a shout-out, though, to our colleague Bonny Lin. You say that’s an understudied question about Chinese medical diplomacy. She and her colleagues are looking at this question and I think are going to have something out in the next few months, so we’re all excited to see that. I want to thank David Sanger for joining us today and I want to thank Seth, too, for his book, “Three Dangerous Men.” Highly recommend. Like I said, it’s a very serious topic but also highly approachable and I really enjoyed reading it. So, thank you, gentlemen, and I hope to talk to you again soon.
Mr. Sanger: Thank you.
Dr. Jones: Thank you.
(END)
12. What you should know about ‘Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare’
From one of the leading authorities on cyber warfare.
Excerpts:
Q: You reference early successful operations in Afghanistan. Turning to similar areas, how could we properly use cyberwarfare in our non-peer operations in Libya, Somalia, Mali, etc.
A: I think we need to rekindle the spirit of those 11 Green Beret A-Teams that went to Afghanistan in the fall of 2001. Things like the tactical webpage and other tactical systems. They won a campaign in a very short amount of time. The campaign against ISIS under President Donald Trump was very much organized in small teams. Kurds were a tremendously reliable indigenous force to achieve in a very quick time. Again, it’s an example of how the many and the small, less permissive in some places, probably not sending teams in Libya or Yemen but we do have them operating in and around Somalia. Even in an era of great power competition, there are little brushfires going on. Just like in the Cold War and we’re going to see that again. But it’s going to be “little green men,” not the tanks into the Fulda Gap.
Therefore, militaries are reluctant to discard older ways, with generally successful track records, for uncertain new methods. It is worth keeping the past in mind as we ponder the cyber future.
— -Dr. John Arquilla, "Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare"
Q: Any closing thoughts to share with readers on cyberwarfare and its future?
A: I am very optimistic and here’s why: I think the early experiences of an officer are formative. The three-four stars today had their formative experiences in Desert Storm. The officers starting to put on stars now, will all have had their formative experience in the post-9/11 period campaigns. All will have these experiences and understanding and willingness to use new tools in new ways. I saw it until I retired recently in my classrooms. Officers usually attend NPS at about 10-12 years into their careers. I saw it coming in 2008-09.
And artificial intelligence will transform much of what we’re doing. I think GI Joe and “AI Jane” are going to get together in the coming years and AI will have as profound an effect in military affairs in the 21st Century as the aircraft did in the 20th Century. That is something that has tremendous potential for military and human affairs. China and Russia moving full speed ahead. An AI arms race, I think, is underway and will have transformational effects. I want to make sure that the U.S. military is in the forefront of development and what they will mean organizationally.
What you should know about ‘Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare’
Cyberwarfare has evolved as not only a buzzword in defense circles but one that underpins much of what modern warfighting, with or without bombs, bullets and bandages, has become.
Dr. John Arquilla and his colleagues at the Rand Corporation and the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School were peering into the interconnected planet, and especially its future battlespace in the early 1990s. Despite creating new uniformed and civilian jobs in defense, as well as establishing U.S. Cyber Command, Arquilla sees cyber thinking among political and military leaders as potentially fractured or sometimes missing the point.
Arquilla served as an advisor to former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, assisted with information strategy for former Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre during the Kosovo War and consulted for Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf during Operation Desert Storm.
The NPS professor emeritus wrote the recently published book, “Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare,” which provides breadth and depth in a slim volume of roughly 200 pages.
Military Times spoke with Arquilla about the book and some of what he’s trying to share with everyone from the grunt to the general officer and civilian leaders on how the United States needs to shift its thinking and operations.
The following Q&A interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What are your thoughts on Cyber Command, how it was formed, how it’s being staffed, used, etc.?
A: In the past, putting cyber behind the green door slowed the process of getting these ideas out across the services. It ramped up so quickly. I have a concern at the high number of private contractors. I think that’s a problem. The military should put more into getting uniformed personnel into those billets.
I understand that is breaking down now. And in the beginning, there was too sharp a division between offensive and defensive operations. Everything you can learn about good defense can get from doing offense, vice versa.
Q: What should every entry-level service member to service chief understand about cyberwarfare at their level?
A: Every E-1 should know that they are sensors, not just shooters. Every sensitive site exploitation can create an opportunity for information. Also, everyone is an emitter. Your smartphone’s probably got 20 [different] apps on it to say where you are. Information Mission Control is absolutely necessary. Realize that everybody is in the information age. Military organizations are sensor organizations, not just shooting organizations. The business of sensing is complemented by realizing that every individual on some level is an emitter of information.
Mid-career military members don’t need to be computer geeks but need to understand themselves as information managers. Make sense of all this information. What’s relevant to the situation that I am facing?
At higher levels, G1+ must make sure to connect those sensor and information links with issues of advanced organization and doctrine. And create the next AirLand Battle.
Dr. John Arquilla, author of the recently published "Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare." (Polity Books)
Q: There are a lot of references to Distributed Maritime Operations, Multi-Domain Operations, and other new warfare concepts. How does “Bitskrieg” fit in with or contradict these approaches?
A: On MDO, it’s important as a step towards Bitskrieg. But if you’re truly operating like China in warfare or Russian Gerasimov doctrine, then you need to tease out the implications for military doctrine and organizations for themselves. The “how you fight” optimal doctrine is not going to be mass on mass, not even maneuvers like Blitzkrieg. It’s the distribution of forces and fires capabilities. We called that “swarming.” My belief, to this day, the gathering swarm the coming swarm is really where we need to be moving. I do see distributed lethality, DMO, all building blocks to the battle.
To optimize the emerging new doctrine, you have to have the right organizational form. A century ago, planners brought the tank, plane, radio communications and other technologies together. And they realized it was important to concentrate tanks in their own organizational unit such as the Germans did with the Panzer division. Germans got it right first, others followed. What’s the right organizational form? The biggest challenge and most important is organizational. Instead of a military of a few large things like aircraft carriers, bomber fleets or Marine Expeditionary Units, we should build a military of many small things. That allows us to operate in a distributed way, be more elusive, more accurate as shooters. Feed the whole notion of the military as a sensory organization.
Among all the services I think the Marines are the farthest ahead in catching a glimpse. They’re the closest to Bitskrieg if you ask me. Decoupling range and accuracy from weapons. Working across great distances and extremely high levels of accuracy. The many and the small operating highly effectively. Especially in littoral operations. Hopefully what the Marines are doing will be a laboratory for the other services.
That night, over 100 troop-laden Taliban trucks were destroyed. This was Bitskrieg in action: the skillful blending of fast-moving information and firepower in swift, lethal fashion. The Taliban truck convoy was destined to be on that road for hours, vulnerable for more than enough time for an aware enemy to strike at it.
— -Dr. John Arquilla, "Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare"
Q: Is the United States doomed to sluggishly trudge along with our cyberwarfare concepts as China and Russia’s militaries move ahead until there’s a reckoning?
A: We are way out of balance here. Our defenses are exceptionally weak, [but] to some extent moving ahead. I’m proud to say the NPS is one of the principal early advocates for data mobility and cloud storage. Keep your data moving and encrypted and it’s better. Strong encryption and data mobility has to happen and it has to happen right away. Every time you hear a story, whether it’s the colonial pipeline, title companies, office of personnel management got hacked, [the] emphasis [needs to be] on defense. I know everyone loves offense, but we’ve got to balance. Russia, China, North Korea and Iran have balanced.
And as far as kinetic warfare, now bombs and bullets will be directed by bits and bytes, just as the French and British took tanks and planes and parceled them out across the forces. Today we’re grafting the new technologies. Whether it’s carrier ops or land battle or any other area of military activity. We’re a little bit behind the Russians and a lot behind the Chinese. It’s less about an arms race and more about an organizational race. We have to redesign and redefine ourselves.
Q: You reference early successful operations in Afghanistan. Turning to similar areas, how could we properly use cyberwarfare in our non-peer operations in Libya, Somalia, Mali, etc.
A: I think we need to rekindle the spirit of those 11 Green Beret A-Teams that went to Afghanistan in the fall of 2001. Things like the tactical webpage and other tactical systems. They won a campaign in a very short amount of time. The campaign against ISIS under President Donald Trump was very much organized in small teams. Kurds were a tremendously reliable indigenous force to achieve in a very quick time. Again, it’s an example of how the many and the small, less permissive in some places, probably not sending teams in Libya or Yemen but we do have them operating in and around Somalia. Even in an era of great power competition, there are little brushfires going on. Just like in the Cold War and we’re going to see that again. But it’s going to be “little green men,” not the tanks into the Fulda Gap.
Therefore, militaries are reluctant to discard older ways, with generally successful track records, for uncertain new methods. It is worth keeping the past in mind as we ponder the cyber future.
— -Dr. John Arquilla, "Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare"
Q: Any closing thoughts to share with readers on cyberwarfare and its future?
A: I am very optimistic and here’s why: I think the early experiences of an officer are formative. The three-four stars today had their formative experiences in Desert Storm. The officers starting to put on stars now, will all have had their formative experience in the post-9/11 period campaigns. All will have these experiences and understanding and willingness to use new tools in new ways. I saw it until I retired recently in my classrooms. Officers usually attend NPS at about 10-12 years into their careers. I saw it coming in 2008-09.
And artificial intelligence will transform much of what we’re doing. I think GI Joe and “AI Jane” are going to get together in the coming years and AI will have as profound an effect in military affairs in the 21st Century as the aircraft did in the 20th Century. That is something that has tremendous potential for military and human affairs. China and Russia moving full speed ahead. An AI arms race, I think, is underway and will have transformational effects. I want to make sure that the U.S. military is in the forefront of development and what they will mean organizationally.
Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.
13. How the U.S. Debt Ceiling Battle Threatens the Global Economy
We must protect our economic instrument of national power. Congress is playing a very dangerous game that will harm US national security in perhaps an irreparable way.
Ponder this and prove it wrong. What if this leads to a challenge to the dollar as the world's reserve currency. I do not think most Americans realize what that would do to our economy as well as being able to maintain (e.g., pay for) national security.
A U.S. default, no matter how quickly it is fixed, would lead to “complete chaos,” prompting investors to sell off an asset class that was considered risk free, Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute of International Economics, told Foreign Policy. “It’s a bomb—you basically blow up the global financial system.”
The damage to U.S. credibility in global markets would be irreversible, Kirkegaard said. “If they miss a payment that trust is gone. 250 years down the drain. And you don’t get that back just by promising, ‘Oh, I promise I won’t do it again.’ That’s not good enough for investors around the world.”
The long-term effects of a default could also disrupt U.S. foreign policy tools, with a world less trusting in the U.S. dollar making U.S. financial sanctions that much less effective.
How the U.S. Debt Ceiling Battle Threatens the Global Economy
Foreign Policy’s flagship daily newsletter with what’s coming up around the world today. Delivered weekdays.
Why a political fight could ‘blow up the global financial system.’
By Colm Quinn, the newsletter writer at Foreign Policy.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (2ndR) (D-CA) and US President Joe Biden (3rd R) talk during the Congressional baseball game at Nationals Park in Washington, DC on September 29, 2021. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
Here is today’s Foreign Policy brief: U.S. Congress to avert shutdown—but avoids debt ceiling issue, climate ministers meet in Milan ahead of COP26, and Kim Jong Un offers to reopen hotline with South Korea.
Have tips or feedback? Hit reply to this email to let me know your thoughts.
Here is today’s Foreign Policy brief: U.S. Congress to avert shutdown—but avoids debt ceiling issue, climate ministers meet in Milan ahead of COP26, and Kim Jong Un offers to reopen hotline with South Korea.
Have tips or feedback? Hit reply to this email to let me know your thoughts.
U.S. Debt Ceiling Battle Threatens the Global Economy
The U.S. Congress is likely to prevent a government shutdown today by passing a short-term funding bill, but another major fiscal issue remains unresolved, threatening the health of the global economy in the process.
The debt ceiling—a limit on U.S. government borrowing to service debt that has historically been raised routinely by Congress since it was established in 1917—is back again as a political football, as Senate Republicans seek to pressure Democrats to solve the crisis through reconciliation rather than join a bipartisan effort to raise the ceiling and avert a U.S. debt default.
No one knows exactly when the United States will reach its borrowing limit, but the time is fast approaching. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned that the cliff could be reached as soon as Oct. 18. The Bipartisan Policy Center says it could hit between mid-October and Nov. 4.
Yellen brought her message to Congress on Tuesday, saying that raising the ceiling was “necessary to avert a catastrophic event for our economy.”
A U.S. default, no matter how quickly it is fixed, would lead to “complete chaos,” prompting investors to sell off an asset class that was considered risk free, Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute of International Economics, told Foreign Policy. “It’s a bomb—you basically blow up the global financial system.”
The damage to U.S. credibility in global markets would be irreversible, Kirkegaard said. “If they miss a payment that trust is gone. 250 years down the drain. And you don’t get that back just by promising, ‘Oh, I promise I won’t do it again.’ That’s not good enough for investors around the world.”
The long-term effects of a default could also disrupt U.S. foreign policy tools, with a world less trusting in the U.S. dollar making U.S. financial sanctions that much less effective.
The problem is nakedly political, Mark Super, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and an expert on congressional procedure, told Foreign Policy. Republicans are happy to threaten default to extract concessions on other priorities, while Democrats are afraid to simply get rid of the limit in case their opponents attack them as fiscally irresponsible in mid-term elections next year.
“The irony is that raising the debt limit does not increase the deficit. The way you increase the deficit is either by cutting taxes or increasing spending. And both parties have done plenty of that,” Super said.
“I think a number of politicians are hoping to confuse voters by making a lot of noise about the debt limit, which doesn’t matter, to distract from their votes on budget-busting bills, like the 2017 tax cut, that do matter.”
Jamie Dimon, the head of banking giant JPMorgan Chase, told Reuters he had grown tired of the political wrangling and wished the two parties would remove the ceiling once and for all. “Every single time this comes up, it gets fixed, but we should never even get this close.”
14. The Timing of Terrorism: The Obsessions with Dates
History matters. We neglect it at our peril.
Excerpts:
BUT THE PATTERN IS REAL…
Whatever its variants, this pattern in publicizing dates is clear. Nearly two dozen further groups—most secular and western—went by names that included dates. There was the Revolutionary Organization May 1, which lasted until about 1992. The 15 May Organization did airline bombings ; it focused on the founding date of Israel; to terrorists this was a tragedy of 1948 which must be gripped in the mind. There were the Popular Forces of April 25 in the era of Portuguese decolonization. A plague in Spain, adjacent, was the First October Anti-Fascist Resistance Group, formed after the death of Franco.
SO, CAN WE PLAN BETTER?
If terrorists and insurgents have their dates to be commemorated, authorities, too, may plan, and be ready. Islamic groups have key days which can be identified in advance, such as Hezbollah’s “Martyr’s Day.” Any area plagued by terrorists (a) named for a given day, or (b) with a record of acting on a given day, would reasonably have intelligence specialists or analysts attending to such times of special meaning. After the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, it became commonplace for authorities and terrorism specialists to be alert in advance of April 19 as they surveyed the anti-federal and right-wing scenes. The very next day on the calendar is the one that most troubles Germanic countries, which have predictable ugly experiences with observers of Adolf Hitler’s birthday on or about April 20th. Austrians living in his 1889 birthplace in Braunau are weary of the political pilgrims each year. Authorities have now sealed off the building where Hitler was born and may tear it down.
The Timing of Terrorism: The Obsessions with Dates
By Christopher C. Harmon
This month is the black anniversary of September 11, 2001. It has many meanings for us, but was that date in particular selected by Al Qaeda? A few suggest there is a link to the last day of battle in 1683 at the gates of Vienna, a titanic Moslem-Christian struggle for western Europe. Americans might also wonder whether 9/ll—numbers that cry “emergency” to this country—were a clever choice by the terrorists as psychological warfare.
Terrorism is very much about symbols and events—usually political, historical, cultural. Virtually every group has a date, or certain dates, which are sacrosanct. Among the most common: the birth or death date of some hero or martyr; the opening day of an insurrection; the formal founding date of a movement or political party; etc. Some terrorist groups name themselves after an awful date, a tragedy.
But, apparently, the nineteen men sent to their deaths by Khalid Sheik Mohammed were not thinking of a particular date for their attack. We have the meditative letter given to them called “The Last Night” and it was silent on that. Timing seems to have been based on operational needs. It may or may not have been coordinated with the team that murdered celebrated commander Ahmad Shah Masood in Afghanistan two days before airplanes hit American targets. But no Al Qaeda sources confirm special interest in Sept. 11, 1683--and in fact the Battles of Vienna finished the next day, the 12th.
Instead Al Qaeda’s action gave the day its significance. Having made the strike, then they did attach importance to it on anniversaries. Ten years on, in Sept. 2011, their magazine Inspire devoted an issue to recalling “The Greatest Special Operation of All Time.” Later the journal often had “terror timelines” with dates of various Al Qaeda strikes. Such considerations now make each new Sept. 11th a terribly attractive date to the Al Qaeda central group still run by Osama Bin Laden’s former deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri.
Politics & Motivation
First, the reasons to be alert to dates start with how they help us understand a terror group’s political essence and motivation. Second, certain groups may act on or about that day of the calendar. Linking dates with actions or attacks proves terror organizations remember, and it proves their potency: the action says to authorities ‘even when it’s predictable you cannot stop it.’ So the Puerto Rican group Los Macheteros timed an attack—the worst ever against American air forces in the continental U.S.—to mark the birth date of a Puerto Rican independence advocate, Eugenio Maria de Hostos (b. Jan 11, 1839). The attackers in 1981 were one day late but fully successful against Muniz Air National Guard Base, San Juan, P. R. To them, American war planes fit as a symbol of U.S. occupation.
Celebrating Birth Days
Mao Zedong, theorist of guerrilla war and victor in China’s civil war, was born December 26, 1893. That 19th century fact drove more than a few events in the 20th century. The Communist Party of the Philippines-Maoist took care to make its founding date Dec. 26 – in 1968, the 75th anniversary of the Great Helmsman’s birth. Jose Maria Sison was re-founding a staid and small Communist Party, traditionally pro-Soviet; he wanted his cadre fired by “Mao Tse Tung Thought.” His Filipino followers are still fighting democracy a half-century later.
Sison was not the only acolyte to be dazzled by Mao. In distant Peru, in 1980, the morning of Dec. 26 presented to citizens of Lima the spectacle of dogs hung dead from lamp posts, each wearing a placard: “Deng Xiaoping.” The point of this menace was to shame that current Chinese General Secretary for abandoning Maoist economics and deemphasizing class struggle and endless internal revolution. The right day--for such a salute and a shaming--was the 26th of December, 87 years after Mao‘s day of birth. In Lima, this agit-prop against “running dogs” in China and Peru helped open an incredible campaign of insurgent violence around Peru. It was led by Abimael Guzman: professor, purist in Maoism, and visitor to China. When he was finally captured twelve years later his converts in Shining Path had vast “liberated zones” in rural places, in line with Maoist strategy.
In the U.S., a “Revolutionary Communist Party, U.S” founded in 1968 by Bob Avakian affirmed membership in the broader, neo-Maoist “Revolutionary Internationalist Movement.” Shining Path of Peru was also a member; RIM was stretching across national lines; it had chapters from Sri Lanka to Turkey and inspired a vigorous magazine, A World To Win. RIM also did a manifesto in 1993, releasing the text on Dec. 26 because it was Mao’s birthday. Their document argued that Mao was so original and vital that “Today, without Maoism there can be no Marxism-Leninism.”i
Another important date has been May 19, birth day of Ho Chi Minh. That nom de guerre means “he who enlightens.” Ho was a dedicated Communist, working for the Soviets’ Comintern initially and later championing Maoist strategies of warfare to win back South Vietnam. In the American scene, radicals were transfixed by Ho and elevated his name in poster art and chants. Remnants of the Weather Underground Organization linked up with black power militants in 1978 to create a new “May 19 Communist Organization.” That date signaled support for “Uncle Ho.” Perhaps their best-known leader was Assata Shakur/Joanne Chesimard. She was quoted in the Weather Underground manifesto Prairie Fire of when she was still with the “Black Liberation Army.” Shakur was jailed for shooting of New Jersey state troopers. Sprung by revolutionary comrades, she found asylum in Cuba.
May 19th was also the date of the first attack by The Black Liberation Army. For black power advocates May 19 was not just Ho’s birthday but that of the 1925 birth of Malcolm Little, later Malcolm X. A fiery deputy of Louis Farrakhan in the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X’s speeches helped make famous his phrase “by any means necessary,” an open door to all types of political violence beyond “self-defense.” But Malcolm X then made the Haj to Mecca and came back an orthodox Muslim. No less activist or articulate, he quit militancy and Farrakhan’s organization; apparently that rebellion cost him his life. Six years passed and in 1971 BLA made their first attack, selecting the birthday of Malcolm X, May 19. It was a deliberate hit on police officers. BLA would operate for a decade and kill more police than any other terrorist group in American history.ii
Modern eco-terrorists, who say they do not kill but specialize in sabotage, also pay attention to birthdays. Earth First! News, one of those how-to and hortatory magazines, notes birthdays of some terrorists totally outside of the eco milieu—apparently from commitment by journal editors to the idea of revolution. At other times there is a clear link to Earth First policy, as when they remind readers that May 22 is the birthday of anarchist and eco terrorist Ted Kaczynski. Such notices from allies help morale—a ray of recognition breaking into the isolation cell of the Unabomber. Public salute to so violent a man also raises the standard for readers of Earth First! News: The message is to the gentle liberal: ‘reading this on line in your apartment with a cup of tea is not really advancing our movement. We require action and violence to save Wild Nature.’
Publicity for Dates of Uprisings
As the Murrah federal building was reduced to rubble in Oklahoma City in 1995, a smart highway trooper arrested Timothy McVeigh as he drove towards Kansas. When the perpetrator presented his driver’s license, the birthdate (in a false year) showed as April 19—though McVeigh had been born five days later. Why?
April 19 had become a venerable day for the far right. Legends had been building up around it. On that day in 1776, patriots fought at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts. The far right of the late 20th c. perceived as patriots a violent group called the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, raided in their compound in Arkansas by federal authorities--on April 19, 1985. And that same day and month in 1993 brought unskilled governmental overreach at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco Texas, where ensuing fire suffocated or burned to death many inside, including children. This was appalling, and it was judged by some to be the crushing of a modest separatist community. Some also linked the date April 19, 1995 to a scheduled execution in Arkansas of the killer of a black state trooper. An event honoring state prisoner and white supremacist, Richard Wayne Snell was to be in Confederate memorial park that day, with the expected crowd to include veterans and Christian Identity adherents. Timothy McVeigh was both. And he had earlier made a pilgrimage to Waco McVeigh believed the Waco “take-down” had been planned by federal authorities based in the Murrah building. So his personal history made it appropriate to choose April 19 to drive his truck bomb into Oklahoma City, killing 168 people in a flash. He hoped to start an anti-federal war and a race war.iii
Insurrectionists of “FALN” were the best-armed and bloodiest of the Puerto Rican separatist organizations. This “Armed Forces of Puerto Rican National Liberation” did dozens of bombings in the eastern U.S. and Chicago. Their first communique came in late October 1974 with attacks in New York City and it read: “These actions have been taken in commemoration of the October 30, 1950 uprising in Puerto Rico against Yanki colonial domination.”
October 1950 had seen Puerto Rican separatists stalking President Harry Truman near the White House. Bumbling by the two assassins, and response by the Secret Service who fought a three-minute gun battle on November first, saved the man from Missouri. Puerto Ricans also shot up the House of Representatives, choosing March 1st, 1954. They had two reasons: the start of an Inter-American Conference in Venezuela; and the date in 1917 when Puerto Ricans were given U.S. citizenship—something this armed minority now rejected. The pistol-carriers injured five people on the floor of Congress; for this they would be named with honors, on the month after 20 years, by the FALN’s October 1974 communique, which demanded their freedom. Ever-committed to symbolism, FALN also staged bombings on an anniversary of that March 1, 1954 attack by other Puerto Ricans on the U.S. House.
The Irish Republican Army annually memorializes an uprising. Its early 20th c. insurrection, initially suppressed, led into civil war that by 1922 did yield an independent 26-county southern republic, Eire. After centuries of British rule, this Easter Uprising of Irish nationalists in Dublin came in 1916. That this happened amidst World War One was no accident: rebels were counting on (a) British preoccupation elsewhere, and (b) German aid. The New York weekly The Irish People explained how Roger Casement worked with German diplomats including Arthur Zimmermann to arrange for a formal aid agreement. When the Irish received that promise it led into planning for an Easter Uprising on April 23, 1916. An Irish Brigade was to be to be formed in Germany and shipped over—although this effort failed. A German arms shipment sailed from Lubeck—but it was scuttled off the Kerry coast when the British Navy caught on.iv These frustrations carried on into Easter when Dubliners did rise…yet saw their leaders arrested.
For such Irish, Easter is politically-saturated. Of course, generally, Easter is always a major religious and cultural celebration for millions of Irish more attentive to the Holy Day and the church than to politics or war. Exemplary of the drive for unification of Ireland by military means is that New York paper The Irish People. In its run of three decades, starting in in 1972, the organ publicized each anniversary of the rising of 1916. Few historical occasions if any rated as much “ink” in the 16-page weekly. Second in its level of interest to Irish militants is an insurrection attempted in 1798 by Wolf Tone. That unusual Irish Protestant became gripped by the dual cause of Irish independence from Britain and his island’s unification. Recognizing an opportunity during conflict between royalist Britain and revolutionary France, Tone persuaded French authorities to invade Ireland to challenge British forces on home grounds. Although their effort disintegrated, there has been a gathering each summer at Tone’s gravesite in Bodenstown, County Kildare, Republic of Ireland. At such memorials, steady adherents are reinforced; young fans are created in conversation with veterans; old prospects of threatening British security in its Irish occupation of the north are “rebooted.”
Marking Founding Dates
The Soviet Union’s founding by Bolsheviks came with the “October Revolution,” dated on our calendars as November 7, 1917. That day was then recalled and elevated by groups all over the world. The first communist party of the Philippines took care to name its founding date as Nov. 7 (1930) due to Comintern influences and the USSR’s political impact. Although the Filipinos’ revitalized communist party of a later generation is explicitly named “Maoist,” they paid respects to the Soviets as their centenary approached (Fall, 2017). Jose Maria Sison, active in foreign exile, published a glowing account of Vladimir Lenin’s achievement in state-founding. The spread offered colored pages on the web site of the International League of People’s Struggle ( www.ilps.info ) which Sison founded as an outreach tool of his Maoists.
A hemisphere away, one modern terror group identifies its own founding with unwelcome landings of U.S. troops in the homeland. Puerto Rico saw U.S. troops arrive on July 26, 1898, as the U.S. wrapped up other Caribbean-area fighting of the Spanish-American War. Puerto Ricans would stage independence drives in future decades—sometimes pacific, sometimes violent, always by minorities. Los Macheteros, the machete wielders, took their name from the agricultural tool fundamental to life on the Puerto Rican farms and estates. Three men, including the Cuba-connected Filiberto Ojeda Rios, formed Los Macheteros on July 26 of 1976.
They sometimes attacked on historic dates. A $7.2 million robbery of the Wells Fargo armored car company, Sept. 12, 1983, marked the anniversary of the birth in 1891 of Pedro Albizu Campos, a nationalist and independence activist. Much of the cash was smuggled to Cuba by an “insider” employee of Wells Fargo, who has lived on the island ever since. Another operation aimed to take down the television tower at Maravilla. Los Macheteros chose July 25/26 for links to both the initial U.S. invasion and the later adoption of the 1952 constitution which made the island a U.S. commonwealth.v
September 11 was not a well-known date in the U.S. until 2001. But a terror group of significance had been founded on that Fall day. Born on the far right, Omega 7 was part of a lengthy pattern of anti-Castro Cuban terrorism in the U.S. and occasionally in Cuba. Miami was the operating base but 1976 saw Omega 7 shift some resources to New York, where official Cuban connections were evident, e.g. a consulate, and the delegation at the United Nations. They murdered Cuban relief executive Eulalio Jose Negrin for his proponancy of normalization of Cuban relations. The same weapon used in the Negrin attack killed Felix Garcia Rodriquez, a diplomat with the Cuban mission to the U.N., on Sept. 11, 1980, the sixth anniversary of the founding of Omega 7. Never before had a diplomat at the U.N. been murdered in the U.S.vi
Memorializing Tragedy
One strength of terrorism’s psychological warriors is how they “flip” defeats into mythical victories. If well-handled by propagandists, and if media are helpful or neutral, the worst of times may be portrayed as the best of times, heroism and progress. Chinese communism’s “Long March” was occasioned by defeat and weakness, and the human losses during the march itself were staggering. But from it emerged Mao as the recognized leader and prospects brightened. Decades later, one’s very credibility as a Chinese Communist was measured by whether he had (or had not) marched with Mao. Deng Xiaoping had; that mattered more than his un-Maoist ideas about economics when the time came for Deng’s elevation to General Secretary of the party.
The death of the Argentinian-turned-Cuban-guerrilla Ernesto “Che” Guevara in Bolivia in 1967 was seen as tragedy and even today is commemorated by the left and the militant left. There are iconographic photos, new runs of tee-shirts for the college market, retrospective articles, and conferences. For U.S. student radicals, this loss was deep and extreme. Among those pivoting from campus agitation to overt violence and a bombing campaign, and ready to elevate Che as icon and as guide to guerrilla war, were the Weather Underground. In memoirs, in the chapter called “Bring the War Home!,” their leader Mark Rudd describes planning for a “National Action” in Chicago:
We chose October 8 because that was the anniversary of Che Guevara’s murder in Bolivia, two years before. Cuba had proclaimed October 8 “El Dia del Guerrillero Heroico,” the Day of the Heroic Guerrilla. Che was my personal revolutionary saint, as he was for every Weatherman: we wanted his pain and glory for our own.”
In truth October 8 was the day Bolivian special forces captured Che; he was not shot until the next day. Weathermen followed Cuba’s example and opened their agit prop event on the 8th, the two-year anniversary. That night they met in a Chicago park. Bernardine Dohrn proclaimed: “This is the second anniversary of the death of Che Guevara.” A giant portrait of him carried the word “AVENGE.” As Rudd wrote later, “Fallen martyrs are always good for motivation.” Militants then rampaged down one of the city’s priciest shopping avenues; police and youth were injured in large numbers, while the radicals did vast property damage. Rudd’s team fulfilled their earlier pledge to set themselves apart from the “liberals” they abhorred and prove that white college kids would fight like Black Panthers or Young Lords, recounts Rudd’s memoir Underground.
“Black September” was a Palestine Liberation Organization sub-unit named for a month. It was the second most infamous in Palestinian terror’s books, comparable only to Abu Nidal’s “Black June” gang. What was the source of the name Black September? The PLO umbrella organization had a founding date of 1964 and was developing well in political and military ways, garnering notice and foreign allies. The Kingdom of Jordan—the actual ‘Palestinian state’—indulged the political newcomers and permitted them training camps. But the violent international activities of the PLO came under disapproval in Amman; Jordan was concerned about its sovereignty, law and order. In Sept. 1970, King Hussein I moved decisively, defeating Arafat’s guerrilla armies and driving them out.
That dark event Palestinian militants chose to hold in memory as “Black September.” They punished Jordan with assassinations and also carried out the first televised terror siege, at the Munich Olympics of 1972. Opportunism and Olympics schedules accounted for the date that operation began: Sept. 5. This time it was Israel that faced a black September. The terror group celebrated the Munich date on its anniversary the next year: Sept. 5, 1973 by storming an embassy in Paris and demanding release of Munich mastermind Mohammed Oudeh from jail. Years later, that man, a.k.a. Abu Daoud, still looked back with pride on how their play at the Olympics ‘put Palestine on the map” for T.V. audiences around the world.
European terrorist news of a generation ago often mentioned this date: Nov. 17. “Revolutionary Organization November 17” were Greek Marxist-Leninists. They published communiques and struck every year, often with the same .45 caliber pistol. Greeks, other Europeans and Americans made their target list. Nov. 17th took its name from the suppression by a military junta of the student occupation of Athens Polytechnic university in 1973. The Greek Colonels’ regime held back only for several days before sending tanks through school gates. Three dozen died, on university grounds or in the aftermath. Greeks recoiled; a political march the next spring brought a half-million into the streets; the junta gave up power. But in 1975 the new terror group opened its campaign, which lasted a quarter-century.
ANALYTICAL CHALLENGES
While making the strong case for the importance of dates to terrorists, it is important to hold certain reservations.
First, most terrorist attacks are timed for operational and other reasons—not anniversaries. Many of the above groups, who named themselves for particular dates, are not known for killing on those dates. The Tamil Tigers of LTTE in Sri Lanka had an anniversary kept with fidelity—Heroes Day, November 27. It was not for war-making, however, but speech-making; leader V. Prabhakaran always addressed cadres that day.
Second, the analyst must beware the distractions of coincidences. Appearances seem to link the 1980s U.S. group, May 19 Communist Organization, with men and women of a similar time and ideology in Colombia: M-19, the narco-terrorists. But no: In Spanish the “M” abbreviation is for the word “Movement”—as in 19th of April Movement. That day in 1970 was one of an electoral defeat, to which some responded by forming the Colombian Leninist group M-19.vii Later they morphed into a political party.
A third question is whether there are geographic or cultural limits on how insurgents and terrorists make ‘political play’ with months and days. The Islamic world has its own calendar and makes mere administrative use of our Gregorian calendar with its recurring months and days. And the “audience” may differ too: Muslims may register a given terror attack with deep seriousness but apart from any date.viii Certainly there is no fix on dates in the massive book of 2004/2005, The Call to Global Islamic Resistance. Its terror proponent Abu Musab al Suri recommends psychological or political levers, such as “playing up” the Crusades to throw Westerners onto the defensive. But al Suri makes no identification of such events and arguments with dates. His faithful Al Qaeda students on the past editorial team of Inspire did show interest in dates—but Inspire was an English-language magazine aimed at a Western audience.
Asian and African groups have their own range and variety but do not name themselves by days, months, or years. The most violent in Africa now, Boko Haram (Nigeria) and two called Al Shabab (Somalia; Mozambique) deploy names that emphasize other themes: the offensiveness of western education, in the first case, and youth in the other two cases.
BUT THE PATTERN IS REAL…
Whatever its variants, this pattern in publicizing dates is clear. Nearly two dozen further groups—most secular and western—went by names that included dates. There was the Revolutionary Organization May 1, which lasted until about 1992. The 15 May Organization did airline bombings ; it focused on the founding date of Israel; to terrorists this was a tragedy of 1948 which must be gripped in the mind. There were the Popular Forces of April 25 in the era of Portuguese decolonization. A plague in Spain, adjacent, was the First October Anti-Fascist Resistance Group, formed after the death of Franco.
SO, CAN WE PLAN BETTER?
If terrorists and insurgents have their dates to be commemorated, authorities, too, may plan, and be ready. Islamic groups have key days which can be identified in advance, such as Hezbollah’s “Martyr’s Day.” Any area plagued by terrorists (a) named for a given day, or (b) with a record of acting on a given day, would reasonably have intelligence specialists or analysts attending to such times of special meaning. After the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, it became commonplace for authorities and terrorism specialists to be alert in advance of April 19 as they surveyed the anti-federal and right-wing scenes. The very next day on the calendar is the one that most troubles Germanic countries, which have predictable ugly experiences with observers of Adolf Hitler’s birthday on or about April 20th. Austrians living in his 1889 birthplace in Braunau are weary of the political pilgrims each year. Authorities have now sealed off the building where Hitler was born and may tear it down.
In this vein, for the American scene, anniversaries that prompt considerations of prudence. The two April dates of 19 and 20 are both of value to the extreme right, and there is also good cause for alertness on the hours preceding and following those.
For many countries, May First is a day of heightened danger. For over a century it has been a marker for a good thing—the day of the working man. Weather Undergrounder Mark Rudd sniffs that it is honored world-wide, “except in the United States.” In 1886, as labor demonstrations stretched across the U.S., their legitimacy was stained red: shooting and a bomb ripped through police ranks in Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 4. For that crime, anarchists were hung.ix What has followed underscores our theme.
The square inevitably courted future demonstrators, and in early October 1969, in the self-declared “Days of Rage” in Chicago, terrorists dynamited a large statue of a policeman that a guild had erected there to commemorate the May 1886 disaster. The city repaired the statue and reconstructed the monument in Haymarket Square. But they underestimated the stubborn, anniversary-tracking Weathermen, who returned precisely one year later (1970) and blew it up again!
Of course, when a date is exceedingly well-known, it pressures the group and also law enforcement and intelligence to “perform” on the day. The former’s efforts might be cancelled out by alertness by the latter. Dr. James Anderson of the Institute of World Politics suggests another angle on that: if a date is known to be a cause of action for terrorists, and thus to authorities, this could well prompt perpetrators to strike just before, or just after, the anniversary in question, to keep the element of surprise.
Perhaps this is what once happened with Hitler’s birthday and American devotees. Before the Oklahoma City catastrophe put a black square around April 19, on that date in 1987 a police vehicle was bombed in Missoula, Montana. The Aryan Nations telephone call claiming responsibility ended with “Heil Hitler.” The group may well have been “leaning into” their favorite holiday, the 20th of April, Hitler’s birthday.
Fortunately, in recent years these two anniversaries have been quiet. But here are many others, and many other groups, to consider.
About the Author
Christopher C. Harmon is the author of A Citizen’s Guide to Terrorism & Counterterrorism (Routledge, 2021). He wrote on the tactic of “Double Bombings” for our Winter 2005 issue. Dr. Harmon is a Distinguished Fellow of the Krulak Center for Innovation and Future Warfare, Marine Corps University, Quantico VA.
References
The manifesto was published in issue 20 of A World To Win in 1995. Fraternal Order of Police data in Dennis A. Pluchinsky, Anti-American Terrorism, vol. 1 (Hackensack, N.J.: World Scientific Publ., 2020), 99-100.
McVeigh was among those obsessed with violence and the racial war novel The Turner Diaries; Christopher C. Harmon, Terrorism Today, 2nd edn. (Routledge, 2008), 18-19.
The Irish People, Dec 3, 1994, “German Aid for Rising,” and the essay on the newspaper in Christopher C. Harmon & Randall G. Bowdish, The Terrorist Argument (Wash. D.C.: Brookings Inst. Press, 2018).
Ronald Fernandez, Los Macheteros (N.Y.: Prentice Hall, 1987), 112.
As Pluchinsky, in Anti-American Terrorism, writes that the challenge of protecting U. N. delegates led to differences between the N.Y. metropolitan police and Congress—which New York asked to pay relevant security costs. On Omega 7 see Louis R. Mizell, Jr. who tracked them for the U.S. Bureau of Diplomatic Security: Target U.S.A. (N.Y.: John Wiley & Sons, 1998).
U.S. Dept. of Defense, Terrorist Group Profiles (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1988). 88-92. Anniversaries may be unconnected even where the two groups are linked. Los Macheteros marked the 26th of July for Puerto Rican reasons--without connection to that day in Cuba. Cubans look to July 26th of a different year—1953--and a different event--assault on the Batista government’s Moncada Barracks. For that, Raul and Fidel Castro were jailed and then exiled. Then they reorganized as the new “26 July Movement.”
The above lines reflect advice from Dr. Douglas Streusand, an expert on Islamic thought.
Chicago city web sites, and Joseph T. McCann, Terrorism on American Soil (Boulder, CO: Sentient Pubs., 2006), 18-23.
15. Adapting Intelligence to the New Afghanistan
Excerpts:
The U.S. intelligence mission in Afghanistan needs to adapt to new realities. Political and military leaders should recognize the terrorist threat, acknowledge the likelihood it will grow under Taliban rule, and rethink America’s collection posture accordingly. These efforts should include a heavy dose of diplomacy and economic incentives throughout the region to pave the way for positioning intelligence resources. Americans should remember that Afghanistan is where terrorists planned their attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the USS Cole in Yemen, and New York and Washington on Sept. 11. Preventing future attacks requires good intelligence. And good intelligence requires re-posturing.
Adapting Intelligence to the New Afghanistan - War on the Rocks
Amid the broader debate over the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, policymakers should remain focused on one crucial fact: terrorist groups in Afghanistan now have greater freedom to operate. To monitor this threat, Washington should re-posture its intelligence assets in the region. Otherwise, its ability to mitigate the terrorist threat through over-the-horizon strikes or other means will be substantially degraded.
To effectively re-posture, the United States and its allies should use diplomacy and economic incentives to gain basing rights in the region that will enable intelligence collection. Defense and intelligence community leaders should then allocate resources to address the emerging risk. This may be difficult as emphasis shifts to great-power competition, but with a Taliban government in Kabul, it is now vital. Both the threat in Afghanistan and the U.S. level of access have changed — the intelligence strategy should change, too.
The Risk
Today, the CIA counts 14 terrorist groups operating in Afghanistan. In June, the United Nations Sanctions Monitoring Team assessed that much of the al-Qaeda leadership resides in Afghanistan and is aligned with the Taliban. Finally, the Aug. 26 attack that killed 13 Americans is evidence that the Islamic State is still viable. America’s Aug. 29 strike on civilians in Kabul who were misidentified as members of the Islamic State also demonstrated the difficulty the United States will have keeping international terrorists at bay without a presence in the country.
Even if the Taliban leadership honors its pledge to disassociate with terrorist groups, it is unlikely they could enforce this decision. Many Taliban never stopped partnering with al-Qaeda and have family ties to its members. The Taliban will run a decentralized government — they are capable of little else — and the population in many parts of the country will welcome these terrorist groups. Influential Taliban, notably the Haqqani family, have a well-documented relationship with al-Qaeda. This includes records of al-Qaeda and Haqqani cooperation on attacks on NATO troops in Afghanistan recovered in the Bin Laden files. The Haqqanis were prominent during the negotiations with the United States and now hold top leadership positions in the Taliban government. As a consequence, al-Qaeda’s presence will grow in many parts of Afghanistan under Taliban rule even if some senior Taliban leaders seek to avoid that outcome.
As the chief of staff of the intelligence directorate for Operation Resolute Support from summer 2019 to summer 2020, I managed much of the drawdown of the military intelligence enterprise in Afghanistan and watched the national agency footprint — the CIA, NSA, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency — shrink to nearly nothing there. The decreased situational awareness quickly became apparent. For example, the intelligence team stopped producing its annual district assessment in late 2019 because we no longer knew who was in control in Afghan districts where intelligence collection had formerly been pervasive. The coalition had pulled back from many bases and the U.S. Joint Staff had moved essential collection platforms out of the region. We knew al-Qaeda was present and observed Afghan commandos conduct raids on its leaders, but struggled to quantify the depth of its influence.
Presence Matters
Despite this, some commentators are optimistic that Washington can still maintain awareness of terrorist threats without a presence in Afghanistan. However, absent a significant change in strategy, this optimism may prove dangerous.
For example, some have asked why the United States cannot simply continue to collect human intelligence through its source network built over the last 20 years.
The answer is that without a presence in Afghanistan, running a reliable human intelligence network is difficult. Face-to-face conversations now require sending U.S. agents covertly into Afghanistan or having sources transit to a neighboring country. Human interaction still matters when building trust, especially when someone is risking their life to provide information on terrorists. Agents can run sub-source networks using trusted Afghans in the country, but it is simply not as effective. Further, many of the Afghans with whom the United States has relationships have left or are hiding from the Taliban.
Furthermore, every sub-source put between the agent and the source increases the chance of error and bias. Think of the childhood game Telephone. You whisper a message down a line of people to see how it changes in the process. In intelligence too, a longer source chain will have the same distorting effect, only magnified because the participants will be financially motivated to satisfy their pay agent’s desires. Finally, the degradation of the other intelligence disciplines makes it challenging to validate source reporting. For example, previously the United States could use imagery or signal intercepts from aircraft to confirm that a source was telling the truth or had traveled to a location. It is much harder to do that now.
And what about the U.S. airborne intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) fleet? My question is: Where will the United States launch and recover these aircraft from? Iran? China? Maybe they can be launched from Pakistan in limited volume, but the Pakistanis are not likely to permit a large U.S. footprint for their own political reasons. Looking to the north, the Central Asian states of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan asked the United States to leave bases in their countries in 2005 and 2014 under pressure from Russia. News outlets reported in July that Russian President Vladimir Putin hinted to U.S. President Joseph Biden that he might allow intelligence assets back into the Central Asian states in exchange for information-sharing. But a heavy load of diplomacy is necessary before this could become a reality.
What is more, weather and geography pose challenges when flying out of the Central Asian states. Unpredictable weather inhibits the takeoff and landing of unmanned aerial vehicles. Terrorist groups operate primarily in the southern, Pashtun-dominated parts of Afghanistan. Crossing the Hindu Kush mountain range in central Afghanistan requires gas and decreases station time. Finally, the entire U.S. short-range intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance fleet is no longer available to collect on terrorist targets. Most of these predominately army aircraft have limited range. If launched from neighboring states, they could hardly reach targets in Afghanistan before turning back for fuel. Further, this small fleet is in great demand in other theaters as the United States shifts its global focus. Space-based assets, if dedicated, could help close the gap but they lack many of the capabilities aircraft once provided. As a result, I estimate that the United States now has one-quarter of the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capability to hunt terrorists in Afghanistan that it had just over a year ago.
Recommendations
I am not advocating returning to Afghanistan to rebuild the former intelligence collection capability. Instead, I recommend adapting America’s global posture to the new reality in the region. U.S. political and military leaders must first acknowledge the risk, then dedicate resources to mitigating that risk. This means repositioning existing assets and using diplomacy to develop new ones.
The U.S. intelligence community and Joint Staff have shifted intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance platforms away from the U.S. Central Command — including Afghanistan — in great numbers over the last two years to support competition with China and Russia. It is time to readdress the global allocation of these assets in response to the new threat. This could require returning some of the long-range collection platforms to Central Command. As the Biden administration builds its new National Defense Strategy, it must consider changes to the situation in Afghanistan.
The Biden administration’s emphasis on diplomacy makes sense. In time, having diplomatic representation in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan would improve situational awareness. In the meantime, American diplomats should induce Afghanistan’s neighbors to allow U.S. bases for intelligence collection. Washington’s diplomatic and economic leverage with Pakistan should increase now that it no longer relies on Pakistani ground routes to support U.S. troops. Though not ideal, the United States will need new airbases in Central Asia, which means working with Russia. India, a long-time U.S. ally in the region, could influence Russia and the Central Asian States to help with basing rights. The United States should continue to work closely with India and its European allies that bring collection capability and share concerns about terrorists and drugs emanating from Afghanistan. The Taliban may welcome the Europeans back in the country before they allow the United States. The U.S. relationship with its European allies in Afghanistan held strong for 20 years but suffered during the difficult withdrawal from Kabul. It deserves diplomatic rehabilitation. The State Department should work with European countries to apply diplomatic and economic pressure to the states surrounding Afghanistan in order to secure basing rights.
The U.S. intelligence mission in Afghanistan needs to adapt to new realities. Political and military leaders should recognize the terrorist threat, acknowledge the likelihood it will grow under Taliban rule, and rethink America’s collection posture accordingly. These efforts should include a heavy dose of diplomacy and economic incentives throughout the region to pave the way for positioning intelligence resources. Americans should remember that Afghanistan is where terrorists planned their attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the USS Cole in Yemen, and New York and Washington on Sept. 11. Preventing future attacks requires good intelligence. And good intelligence requires re-posturing.
Col. Thomas Spahr is an assistant professor in the department of military strategy, planning and operations at the U.S. Army War College. He deployed to Afghanistan four times in 2001, 2004, 2011, and 2019. He has a Ph.D. in history from the Ohio State University.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.
16. China’s factory activity in shock slowdown as energy crisis hits home
China’s factory activity in shock slowdown as energy crisis hits home
Output, orders and employment all fell in September, according to official data, as Beijing turns to Russia to ease its electricity shortages
China’s factory activity has shrunk unexpectedly amid curbs on electricity use and rising prices for commodities and parts, raising more concerns about the state of the world’s second biggest economy.
A closely watched survey released on Thursday showed that China’s factory activity contracted in September for the first time since the pandemic took a grip in February 2020.
The figures showed that output fell thanks to a marked slowdown in high-energy consuming industries, such as plants that process metals and oil products. Sub-indices also highlighted a fall in new orders, employment and new export orders.
Analysts had expected the manufacturing purchasing manager’s index (PMI) to remain steady at 50.1 in September, but the official result showed the index at 49.6. The 50-point mark separates growth from contraction.
China’s economy rapidly recovered from a pandemic-induced slump last year. Although the non-manufacturing PMI provided a welcome bright spot for September, momentum has broadly weakened in recent months, with its sprawling manufacturing sector hit by rising costs, production bottlenecks and electricity rationing.
Good morning: China manufacturing PMI contracts below 50 to 49.6 & the details are terrible:
Output, new orders, employment, new export orders all down!
— Trinh (@Trinhnomics) September 30, 2021
Another sign of the energy crisis came late on Wednesday when the Russian state energy company Inter RAO said China had asked it to increase electricity supplies to offset shortages at home.
Inter RAO was considering a significant increase in electricity supply, a spokesman said, providing no further details. Russia can supply up to 7bn kilowatt-hours of power to China every year but the exports fell last year by 7.2%.
The sudden contraction in factory activity will further weigh on an economy already facing serious problems in its bloated property sector, chiefly in the form of the struggling behemoth Evergrande.
The Shenzhen-based company owes $305bn to homebuyers, contractors and investors, and the possibility of it defaulting on deals to finish homes and pay out on investment products brought a rash of public protests and saw its shares plunge. Although it calmed some market nerves last week by repaying some local debt, it missed a repayment on interest on dollar-denominated bonds, and missed a repayment deadline on another bond coupon on Wednesday night.
The property sector accounts for up to 25% of GDP according to some estimates, but the country’s huge tech sector is also facing a sustained assault from the government in Beijing as it tries to push back against billionaires in its pursuit of “common prosperity”.
Leading forecasters such as Goldman Sachs and Nomura have downgraded their expectations for GDP growth.
Economies throughout the world are grappling with production issues due to supply chain disruptions. UK car production fell 27% in August because of a shortage of semiconductors, and data on Thursday showed Japan’s industrial output falling for a second straight month in August.
17. America’s Revolving-Door Politics Behind The Fall Of US-Sino Ties – Analysis
Wow! This is quite a statement:
Neither the White House nor the Pentagon seems to be effectively in charge anymore. Defense contractors are.
America’s Revolving-Door Politics Behind The Fall Of US-Sino Ties – Analysis
The US-Sino ties plunged in the Trump era, but the downfall has intensified in the Biden era. Without policy shifts, the tensions, fueled by defense contractors, translate to arms races and elevated nuclear risks in Asia.
In just nine months, Biden’s net ratings have plunged by a stunning 20 percent, which leaves him behind all U.S. postwar presidents except for Trump, many of whose policies his White House has embraced. Today, Biden’s performance divides the nation, just as Trump’s did before him.
True, Biden pledged to end America’s longest war in Afghanistan. That does not spell end to the “forever wars.” It only means shifts of resource allocations to new regions. Last June, Bernie Sanders warned that such policies could “start another Cold War” against China.
The global challenges America faces – climate change, pandemics, nuclear proliferation, massive economic inequality, corruption and authoritarianism – are shared challenges. They cannot be overcome unilaterally, Sanders warned. It is “distressing and dangerous that a fast-growing consensus is emerging in Washington that views the U.S.-Chinese relationship as a zero-sum economic and military struggle.”
But if such policies are misguided, who benefits from the Cold War against China?
Revolving-door politics behind militarized foreign policy
In 2019, Biden’s Asia Tsar Kurt Campbell and national security advisor Jake Sullivan touted a new China doctrine of stiff “competition without catastrophe.” As in the ‘50s, the effective objective is to militarize containment policy and minimize U.S. costs by diversifying risks to allies and proxy conflicts into Asia.
The new Cold War promoters like to refer to George Kennan, the architect of U.S. containment against Russia in 1947. Here’s the irony: Kennan himself began to push for dialogue with Moscow already a year later, when he denounced Truman administration’s “distorted” and “militarized” version of containment – which, he stressed to CNN in 1996, “led to 40 years of unnecessary, fearfully expensive and disoriented process of the Cold War.”
So why the disastrous doctrine? The short answer: It pays off to its promoters.
President Biden’s greatest mistake has been his willingness to let a handful of policy experts, each of whom has deep economic ties with defense contractors, to take over the US foreign policy. The credibility of each – Campbell, Sullivan, foreign affairs secretary Antony Blinken, and defense secretary Lloyd Austin – is undermined by conflicts of interests, as US government watchdogs and investigative journalists have recently reported.
The consequent US-Sino tensions were not inevitable. They are manufactured outcomes of the privatization of US foreign policy vis-a-vis campaign finance and revolving-door politics between the White House, the Pentagon and its contractors – as evidenced by the plunge of the bilateral ties.
Collapse of bilateral ties
In the Trump era, the bilateral relations plunged to a historical low. Instead of the hoped-for reset, Biden embraced Trump’s far-right anti-China policies.
High-Level Dialogues. Presidents Trump and Xi met five times in 2017-19, but the dialogue effectively collapsed. In the Biden era, bilateral ties are limited to a phone call in which Biden aimed to set “guardrails and parameters” so that “stiff competition does not veer into conflict.” But in China, unilateral directives amid an unwarranted Cold War sound like a bully’s monologue.
Trade. In bilateral trade, Biden embraced Trump’s protectionism and tariff wars. Both have hit hard American consumers. Similarly, US businesses are frustrated with Biden’s decision to retain Trump’s confrontational China policies. They know that Cold Wars are preludes to Hot Wars. In 1930, President Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which worsened the effects of the Great Depression, serving as a prelude to still another world war (Figure 1).
Figure 1 The Trump-Biden Tariffs toward Hot War Sources: Chad P. Bown and Douglas A. Irwin 2018.
Investment. In 2016, prior to the Trump era, US foreign investment in China was $15 billion, while Chinese investment in the US soared to more than $50 billion. Today, each figure is closer to $8 billion or so (Figure 2).
Figure 2 FDI transactions between the US and China, 2000-2020 ($ bn) Source: Rhodium Group; Difference Group
Military-to-Military Relations. If a bilateral catastrophe is to be avoided, high-level military ties play a critical role. Yet, in the Trump era, US-China military engagements fell from 30 in 2016 by more than two-thirds by 2019, while plunging in 2020. What’s left focuses narrowly on risk reduction.
Climate change. In the Obama era, climate change was the one area of bilateral ties that showed the promise of cooperation. In the Trump-Biden era, that promise is fading, as Biden’s climate diplomat John Kerry discovered recently in Beijing. When Kerry urged China to move its peak emissions target, foreign minister Wang Yi noted that when Washington’s grand strategy has targeted China as a “threat and adversary,” it puts all bilateral cooperation at risk.
The current tensions are the net effect of a decade of missed opportunities.
Opposite stances to manage Sino-US ties
In 2013, when Chinese president Xi Jinping met with president Obama at Sunnylands, he promoted the idea of a “new type of great-power relations.” When the Pax Britannica was superseded by the Pax Americana, the lingering transition resulted in two world wars. As the size of the Chinese economy is projected to exceed that of the United States by the late 2020s, Xi saw a historical opportunity to avoid misguided conflicts and to focus on economic development that would benefit both major powers.
However, the Obama administration stayed away from the idea, nixed it and replaced it with the shift to “renewed great power competition.” The new doctrine was first affirmed in the Obama administration’s National Military Strategy (Jun 2015). And it was placed at the center of the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (Dec 2017) and National Defense Strategy (Jan 2018).
Stressing inclusion, dialogue and multilateralism in the global economy, China advocated “new type of great power relations,” which Washington rejected. Emphasizing the quest for full spectrum military supremacy, US promoted increasing force deployments and large-scale, high-end warfare capabilities against Beijing.
The contrast between the two stances could not be greater.
Sleepwalking into catastrophe
Since 1945, the only successful economic modernization worldwide has occurred in Asia, with focus on economic development. But after a decade of US pivot to the region, arms races and nuclear threats risk undermining the Asian Century.
According to the new trilateral security pact (AUKUS) between the US, the UK and Australia, Washington and London will “help” Canberra to develop and deploy nuclear-powered submarines. The $66 billion deal effectively killed Australia’s $90 billion conventional sub deal with France. Stunningly, US and Australian officials had been in secret talks for months over the plan that was hatched more than a year ago by the far-right Trump administration. Yet, it was both embraced and accelerated by the Biden White House.
The pact will dramatically escalate regional nuclear proliferation, which is strongly opposed by China and casts a dark shadow over the Southeast Asian Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone Treaty (1995).
First tremors were felt months ago, twice. During the U.S. 2016 election and the subsequent Capitol riot, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley had reason to be concerned about President Trump’s possible use of war to distract attention from domestic turmoil. According to The Peril, the new book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, Milley took secret action to limit Trump and called Chinese General Li Zuochen to “convey reassurance in order to maintain strategic stability.”
Demonstrating great restraint, Milley did whatever he could to neutralize the risks. But what about the next time?
Neither the White House nor the Pentagon seems to be effectively in charge anymore. Defense contractors are.
A version of the commentary was originally published by China-US Focus on Sep. 29, 2021.
18. The west is the author of its own weakness
Excerpts:
What Trump understood, as did populists elsewhere, is that the voters’ respect for established politics is rooted in a bargain. Public faith in democracy — in the rule of law and the institutions of the state — rests on a perception that the system at least nods towards fairness. There have been reforms to that end since the crash, but little to suggest they are enough.
There was nothing wrong with the ambition of the post cold war optimists. It remains hard to see how the world can work without liberal democracy and a rules-based international system. What the optimists missed then, and the China watchers overlook now, is the hollowing out of trust in democracy at home. Of course, China is a potential threat. A second presidential term for Trump would be a much more dangerous one.
It may be that history will conclude that the excessive optimism of the 1990s is being mirrored today by too much pessimism. That’s a judgment I intend to leave to others. For a political commentator, 25 years in the same slot is long enough. So this is my last column. I will continue to write from time to time as an FT contributing editor, but otherwise intend to go in search of a better understanding of, well, history.
The west is the author of its own weakness
Call it the age of optimism. Twenty five years ago, when this column first appeared, the world belonged to liberalism. Soviet communism had collapsed, the US claimed a unipolar moment, and China had joined the market economy. European integration had banished the demons of nationalism. The UK would soon be dubbed “Cool Britannia”.
You did not have to think the wheels of history had stopped turning to judge that the 21st century would be fashioned in the image of advancing democracy and a liberal economic order.
Today’s policymakers grapple with a world shaped by an expected collision between the US and China, by a contest between democracy and authoritarianism and by the clash between globalisation and nationalism. Britain is again the sick man of Europe. If this sounds insufficiently bleak, you can add the existential threat of man-made global warming.
The easy explanation is that the west fell prey during the 1990s to hopeless naivete. Victory in the cold war went to its head. Living standards were on the up. It was still possible, pre-Facebook, to imagine the internet as a global community for good. In any event, it is the human instinct to project the present into the future. Doesn’t history travel in straight lines?
Europe was no innocent in this respect. The continent’s liberal internationalists made common cause with US neoconservatives in promoting a great democratising mission. America had guns but the EU had its own “normative” power. Large swaths of the world were set to become, well, European.
The great unwinding since has seen the US-led post-cold war order give way to the return of great power rivalry, populists of far right and far left raising the standard of nationalism against European integration, and a mercantilist scramble for national economic sovereignty. In an era of authoritarian “strongmen”, headed by China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, democracy is in a defensive crouch.
And now western policymakers risk another big mistake by identifying China as the most pressing challenge to the ancien regime. The US and its allies, we are told, must concentrate their energies on gathering their resources to see off the threat. What we need is more submarines in the South China Sea.
Given Beijing’s belligerence, the argument is beguiling. It is also displacement activity, an excuse not to admit what has really happened since the 1990s. Yes, China has grown at a much faster pace than almost anyone imagined. But the explanation for the weakening of western democracies lies largely in the west.
America’s wars of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq are part of the story. They were intended as a salutary demonstration of US power. Instead these vastly costly and unpopular conflicts served to delineate the limits of the Pax Americana. The sole superpower promised to remake the Middle East. Instead, as we saw last month in the fall of Kabul, Washington has been forced to cut and run. The rest of the world notices these things.
The failure in the Middle East, however, pales into insignificance against the damage inflicted by the 2008 global financial crash. Historians will record the crash as a momentous geopolitical as much as an economic event — the moment western democracies suffered a potentially lethal blow.
The failure of laissez-faire economics was visible before the collapse of Lehman brothers. The incomes of the not-so-well off had long been stagnating under the pressure of technological advance and open markets. It was obvious too that the rewards of globalisation were being reaped by the rich and super-rich. The crash, though, crystallised what had become, in effect, an elaborate shakedown.
Those looking for an explanation for Donald Trump’s presidential victory, for the UK Brexit vote, or for populist insurgencies across Europe need reach no further. The excesses of the financial services industry and the decision of governments to heap the costs of the crisis on to the working and lower middle classes have struck at the very heart of democratic legitimacy.
What Trump understood, as did populists elsewhere, is that the voters’ respect for established politics is rooted in a bargain. Public faith in democracy — in the rule of law and the institutions of the state — rests on a perception that the system at least nods towards fairness. There have been reforms to that end since the crash, but little to suggest they are enough.
There was nothing wrong with the ambition of the post cold war optimists. It remains hard to see how the world can work without liberal democracy and a rules-based international system. What the optimists missed then, and the China watchers overlook now, is the hollowing out of trust in democracy at home. Of course, China is a potential threat. A second presidential term for Trump would be a much more dangerous one.
It may be that history will conclude that the excessive optimism of the 1990s is being mirrored today by too much pessimism. That’s a judgment I intend to leave to others. For a political commentator, 25 years in the same slot is long enough. So this is my last column. I will continue to write from time to time as an FT contributing editor, but otherwise intend to go in search of a better understanding of, well, history.
19. Defense Business Board Relaunches After Pentagon Review
Excerpt:
The board members other than James have not been sworn in yet, as they complete paperwork and other administrative tasks. Notable members include former United CEO Oscar Munoz; former Northrop Grumman executive Linnie Haynesworth; Intel Chief Strategy Officer Saf Yeboah-Amankwah; and retired Gens. Joseph Votel and Larry Spencer.
Defense Business Board Relaunches After Pentagon Review
Former Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James named chair of the diverse advisory board.
The Biden administration has reassembled one of the Pentagon’s most influential advisory boards with a diverse group of business leaders, seven months after it was disbanded.
Earlier this month, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks swore in the Defense Business Board’s chair Deborah Lee James, the former U.S. Air Force secretary and SAIC executive. Other members include three retired four-star generals. James is the first woman to lead the panel.
“It's a new way to serve and be involved,” James said in an interview last week. James said she was not speaking on behalf of the Defense Department or the Business Board.
The Defense Business Board is re-launching with 17 new members. It’s the most diverse group assembled in the board’s 20-year history: Seven women and nine people of color have been named to the panel.
In February, Biden administration suspended all of the Pentagon’s advisory boards in the wake of a number of 11th-hour appointments by the Trump administration. The Defense Business Board is the first to be reconstituted.
The board members other than James have not been sworn in yet, as they complete paperwork and other administrative tasks. Notable members include former United CEO Oscar Munoz; former Northrop Grumman executive Linnie Haynesworth; Intel Chief Strategy Officer Saf Yeboah-Amankwah; and retired Gens. Joseph Votel and Larry Spencer.
Shortly after arriving at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin suspended all of the Pentagon’s advisory boards following an 11th-hour move to appoint Trump-loyalists to many of them. The Defense Business Board is the first to relaunch after a months-long review.
The Defense Business Board report provides independent advice on business management issues to the defense secretary, deputy defense secretary, and other senior defense officials.
“I believe we will have a significant impact on their thinking,” James said.
While it’s yet to get its official taskings, the new board is expected to focus its efforts on three areas: business transformation, business processes, and talent and human capital issues, James said. In addition, the board is also expected to conduct an assessment of the Pentagon’s Mentor-Protégé Program, which partners small businesses with large companies.
The board is shooting to have its first meeting by November, James said.
20. Readout of U.S. - PRC Defense Policy Coordination Talks
Readout of U.S. - PRC Defense Policy Coordination Talks
Immediate Release
Sept. 29, 2021
Department of Defense Spokesperson Lt. Col. Martin Meiners provided the following readout:
Dr. Michael Chase, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for China, conducted a secure video conference with Major General Huang Xueping, Deputy Director of the People's Republic of China's (PRC) People's Liberation Army Office for International Military Cooperation to co-host virtually the 16th U.S.-PRC Defense Policy Coordination Talks, September 28 and 29, 2021.
The meeting is an important component of the Biden-Harris Administration’s ongoing effort to responsibly manage the competition between the U.S. and the PRC by maintaining open lines of communication with the PRC.
During the talks, the two sides held a frank, in-depth, and open discussion on a range of issues affecting the U.S.-PRC defense relationship. Both sides reaffirmed consensus to keep communication channels open. The U.S. side also made clear our commitment to uphold shared principles with our allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region.
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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.
