Quotes of the Day:

“The deep critical thinker has become the misfit of the world, this is not a coincidence. To maintain order and control you must isolate the intellectual, the sage, the philosopher, the savant before their ideas awaken people.”

- Carl Jung 

“Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.” 

- Charles Spurgeon.

"If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones."

John Steinbeck

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 4, 2023

2. What China is Learning from the Ukraine War – And What it Means for the West

3. Special Operations News Update - September 5, 2023 | SOF News

4. Marines’ top general ‘ruthlessly’ rides out Tuberville’s military hold

5. Resisting Russia: Insights into Ukraine's Civilian-Based Actions During the First Four Months of the War in 2022

6. Italy Seeks to Leave China’s Belt and Road Initiative—Without Angering Beijing

7. Exclusive: China to launch $40 billion state fund to boost chip industry

8. Chinese spy agency suggests that a Biden-Xi meeting hinges on "sincerity"

9. Remind Me Again...What Were We Deterring? Cyber Strategy and Why the United States Needed a Paradigm Shift

10. Is Ukraine really interested in fighting corruption?

11. Opinion | America Is an Empire in Decline. That Doesn’t Mean It Has to Fall.

12. Lack of Will: How the All-Volunteer Force Conditioned the American Public

13. GOLDWATER RIPPLES: How Defense Reform Made the Fighting Force More Diplomatic

14. Sneaky War: How to Win the World Without Fighting

15. Putin Races Against the Clock: The Dangers of a Desperate Russia

16. The Future Convergence of AI, IoT, and Quantum Computing in Information Warfare: A Pandora's Digital Box

17. How to Help Ukraine Win the War of Attrition

18.  The US national innovation base has critical weaknesses. Just look at Starlink.

19. Opinion: Don’t thank my husband for his service if you don’t know why he died

20. Introducing the Harding Project: Renewing Professional Military Writing

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 4, 2023

Maps/graphics/citations: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-september-4-2023

Key Takeaways:

• Ukrainian light infantry has advanced to positions beyond anti-tank ditches and dragon’s teeth anti-tank obstacles that comprise the current Russian defensive layer ahead of the Ukrainian advance in western Zaporizhia Oblast, and Ukrainian forces likely intend to hold those positions. ISW is not prepared to assess that Ukrainian forces have breached this Russian defensive layer in the absence of observed Ukrainian heavy equipment in these areas.
• Russian forces reportedly attempted to expand minefields in southern Ukraine following the start of the Ukrainian counteroffensive in June.
• Limitations on Russian artillery capabilities and Ukrainian advantages in counter-battery fire are forcing the Russians to deviate from their own doctrine, RUSI reported.
• Russian forces conducted a drone strike on Dnipropetrovsk and Odesa oblasts on the night of September 3-4.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated Russia’s unwillingness to rejoin the Black Sea Grain Initiative until all of Russia’s extensive terms are met at a meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
• Head of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine Erik Mose stated on September 4 that the commission has not yet concluded that Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine.
• Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, in the western Donetsk-eastern Zaporizhia Oblast border area, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast and advanced in some areas on September 4.
• Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations and advanced near Bakhmut and in western Zaporizhia Oblast on September 4.
• Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced on September 4 that the Russian military will not be holding “Zapad-2023” joint strategic exercises scheduled for September.
• Russian occupation officials continued the fifth day of early voting for Russian regional elections in occupied territories on September 4.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, SEPTEMBER 4, 2023

Sep 4, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 4, 2023

Nicole Wolkov, Riley Bailey, Christina Harward, Angelica Evans, and Frederick W. Kagan

September 4, 2023, 7:00pm ET 

Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.

Click here to access ISW’s archive of interactive time-lapse maps of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These maps complement the static control-of-terrain map that ISW produces daily by showing a dynamic frontline. ISW will update this time-lapse map archive monthly.

Note: The data cut-off for this product was 1pm ET on September 4. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the September 5 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Ukrainian light infantry has advanced to positions beyond anti-tank ditches and dragon’s teeth anti-tank obstacles that comprise the current Russian defensive layer ahead of the Ukrainian advance in western Zaporizhia Oblast, and Ukrainian forces likely intend to hold those positions. ISW is not prepared to assess that Ukrainian forces have breached this Russian defensive layer in the absence of observed Ukrainian heavy equipment in these areas. Geolocated footage published on September 4 indicates that Ukrainian forces advanced to tree-line positions that are east of the Russian anti-tank ditches and dragon’s teeth obstacles that are a part of a tri-layered defense immediately west of Verbove (18km southeast of Orikhiv).[1] Geolocated footage published on September 4 indicates that Ukrainian light infantry has also advanced further into a series of prepared Russian defensive positions along the road that runs northwest into Verbove.[2] Other geolocated footage published on September 4 indicates that Ukrainian forces have advanced up to Russian defensive positions between Robotyne (10km south of Orikhiv) and Novoprokopivka (13km south of Orikhiv).[3] Ukrainian forces are widening the breach they have already made in one Russian defensive layer and are reportedly maneuvering more equipment and personnel into tactical rear areas of this layer.[4] Ukrainian forces appear to be making gains in the immediate vicinity of the not-yet-breached Russian defensive layer that runs northwest of Verbove to north of Solodka Balka (20km south of Orikhiv) with infantry assaults and heavy artillery fire on Russian positions further into and south of this layer.[5] The deployment of Ukrainian heavy equipment and more substantial forces to these areas than ISW has so far observed would indicate both a breach of this Russian defensive layer and an effort to widen that breach.

Russian forces reportedly attempted to expand minefields in southern Ukraine following the start of the Ukrainian counteroffensive in June. The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) reported that the Russian command determined at the start of the Ukrainian counteroffensive that Ukrainian forces might be able to easily breach the Russian doctrinal minefield depth of 120 meters leading Russian forces to aim to increase the depth of their minefields up to 500 meters.[6] RUSI stated that Russian forces lacked enough mines to mine these larger areas as densely as Russian doctrine dictates, causing Russian forces to deviate from doctrine, including by using improvised explosive devices and a wider and differential distance between mines.[7] RUSI stated that Russian forces tried to compensate for decreased minefield density by increasing the effectiveness of anti-tank mines by placing two on top of each other.[8] Ukrainian operations across several sectors of the front have likely further compounded these constraints on the Russian effort to expand minefields by forcing Russian forces to disperse their mining efforts along wide sectors of the frontline. Ukrainian Tavriisk Group of Forces Spokesperson Oleksandr Shtupun stated on September 3 that minefields near the next series of Russian defensive positions in western Zaporizhia are less dense than the initial defensive layer that Ukrainian forces advanced through.[9] ISW has previously assessed that Ukrainian forces may encounter denser minefields at certain sections of subsequent series of Russian defensive positions, however.[10]

Limitations on Russian artillery capabilities and Ukrainian advantages in counter-battery fire are forcing the Russians to deviate from their own doctrine, RUSI reported. RUSI stated that Russian forces have been attempting to adapt their fire doctrine since before Ukrainian counteroffensive operations began.[11] RUSI noted that Russian forces are attempting to prioritize strike accuracy over volume because they lack enough ammunition to sustain doctrinally designated artillery fire, have difficulties transporting a large volume of ammunition to frontline areas, and are seeing diminishing effectiveness of mass strikes as they lose counterbattery radars and their guns suffer from barrel wear.[12] RUSI stated that Russian forces are attempting to increase the production of Krasnopol laser-guided shells and the use of Lancet drones (loitering munitions) in order to increase accuracy and reduce the number of munitions used in attacks.[13] RUSI also observed that Russian forces have often prepared their fighting positions for remote demolition with improvised explosives instead of striking their own positions with artillery after Russian forces have withdrawn, as Russian doctrine dictates.[14] These adaptations suggest that reduced Russian artillery capabilities may be further weakening the Russian defense in certain sectors as artillery fire is a critical component of the Russian elastic defense. A shift towards more precise fire doctrine may allow Russian forces to strengthen these capabilities, but constraints on Russian training capacity will likely prevent Russian forces from implementing this shift at scale in the near term. Russian sources have continually claimed since the start of the counteroffensive that the Russians lack sufficient counterbattery capabilities on various sectors of the front.[15] Estonian Defense Forces Intelligence Center Commander Colonel Margo Grosberg reported on September 1 that Ukrainian artillery capabilities are “equal or even better” than those of Russian forces and have been able to push Russian artillery units back from the frontline, preventing them from supporting Russian forces.[16]

Russian forces conducted a drone strike on Dnipropetrovsk and Odesa oblasts on the night of September 3-4. The Ukrainian Air Force reported that Russian forces launched 32 Shahed 136/131 drones from Cape Chauda, Crimea, and Primorske-Akhtarsk, Krasnodar Krai on the night of September 4 and that Ukrainian air defenses shot down 23 of the drones.[17] Ukrainian Southern Command Spokesperson Captain First Rank Nataliya Humenyuk stated that Russian drones struck civilian infrastructure in Odesa Oblast, and Russian sources claimed that drones struck port infrastructure in Reni and Izmail, Odesa Oblast.[18] Head of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Council Mykola Lukashuk reported that a drone strike destroyed 1,500 tons of grain in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.[19] Ukrainian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Oleg Nikolenko stated that a Russian drone fell on Romanian territory, which the Romanian Ministry of Defense subsequently denied.[20]

Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated Russia’s unwillingness to rejoin the Black Sea Grain Initiative until all of Russia’s extensive terms are met at a meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Putin reiterated claims that the West ignored its obligations to allow Russia to export grain and fertilizer at a meeting with Erdogan in Sochi, Russia on September 4.[21] Putin claimed that Russia will supply 25,000 to 50,000 tons of grain for free to unspecified African countries in “the coming days.”[22] Putin and Erdogan claimed that Turkey is willing to help process and transport one million tons of grain intended for these countries.[23] Putin and Erdogan also announced Qatar’s interest in providing financial support so that these countries can receive free grain.[24]

Head of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine Erik Mose stated on September 4 that the commission has not yet concluded that Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine. Mose stated that the commission must determine the intent of the perpetrators and identify the “need” to physically or biologically exterminate a certain group to meet the legal qualifications under the Genocide Convention.[25] Mose stated that the commission has found evidence for a large number of war crimes, specifically evidence of torture and strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure that the commission could consider as crimes against humanity.[26] Mose also stated that the commission previously determined that certain statements in Russian mass media could be considered as incitement to commit genocide.[27] Mose noted that the commission’s investigation into genocide in Ukraine will continue.[28] Article II of the 1948 Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention) states that “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measure intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”[29] Article III states that “the following acts shall be punishable: genocide; conspiracy to commit genocide; direct and public incitement to commit genocide; attempt to commit genocide; complicity in genocide.”[30]

Key Takeaways:

• Ukrainian light infantry has advanced to positions beyond anti-tank ditches and dragon’s teeth anti-tank obstacles that comprise the current Russian defensive layer ahead of the Ukrainian advance in western Zaporizhia Oblast, and Ukrainian forces likely intend to hold those positions. ISW is not prepared to assess that Ukrainian forces have breached this Russian defensive layer in the absence of observed Ukrainian heavy equipment in these areas.
• Russian forces reportedly attempted to expand minefields in southern Ukraine following the start of the Ukrainian counteroffensive in June.
• Limitations on Russian artillery capabilities and Ukrainian advantages in counter-battery fire are forcing the Russians to deviate from their own doctrine, RUSI reported.
• Russian forces conducted a drone strike on Dnipropetrovsk and Odesa oblasts on the night of September 3-4.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated Russia’s unwillingness to rejoin the Black Sea Grain Initiative until all of Russia’s extensive terms are met at a meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
• Head of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine Erik Mose stated on September 4 that the commission has not yet concluded that Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine.
• Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, in the western Donetsk-eastern Zaporizhia Oblast border area, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast and advanced in some areas on September 4.
• Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations and advanced near Bakhmut and in western Zaporizhia Oblast on September 4.
• Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced on September 4 that the Russian military will not be holding “Zapad-2023” joint strategic exercises scheduled for September.
• Russian occupation officials continued the fifth day of early voting for Russian regional elections in occupied territories on September 4.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and the Ukrainian population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

• Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis
• Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Activities in Russian-occupied areas

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Luhansk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)

Russian forces continued offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on September 4 but did not make any confirmed advances. The Ukrainian General Staff and Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Novoyehorivka (16km southwest of Svatove) and Bilohorivka (12km south of Kreminna).[31] Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Ilya Yevlash stated that Russian forces have begun to strengthen their positions near Novoyehorivka and have stopped storming Ukrainian positions in the area.[32] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces attacked near Novoyehorivka and east of Petropavlivka (7km east of Kupyansk).[33] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that the tactical situation near Synkivka (9km northeast of Kupyansk) and Petropavlivka was stable, however.[34] A Russian news aggregator claimed that Russian forces took control of an unspecified number of Ukrainian positions and advanced 2km in the Kupyansk direction, although ISW has not observed visual confirmation of this claim.[35] Malyar stated that Ukrainian forces repel several Russian attacks per day in the Kupyansk direction.[36]

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued ground attacks along the Svatove-Kreminna line on September 4 but did not advance. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that elements of the Russian Western Grouping of Forces repelled four Ukrainian assaults north of Tverdokhlibove (17km southwest of Svatove).[37] Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted three unsuccessful assaults on Russian positions near the Serebryanske forest area south of Kreminna.[38]

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations near Bakhmut and advanced on September 4. Geolocated footage published on September 4 indicates that Ukrainian forces advanced east of Orikhovo-Vasylivka (11km northwest of Bakhmut).[39] Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar stated that Ukrainian forces achieved unspecified successes near Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut) and that Ukrainian forces have liberated three square kilometers in the Bakhmut direction in the past week.[40] Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Ilya Yevlash stated that Ukrainian forces continue offensive operations in the Bakhmut direction, particularly near Klishchiivka.[41] The Russian MoD claimed that Ukrainian forces unsuccessfully attacked near Bakhmut.[42] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces attacked near Kurdyumivka (13km southwest of Bakhmut) and in Klishchiivka.[43] Russian sources claimed that there are positional battles near the Berkhivka reservoir northwest of Bakhmut.[44] A Russian milblogger claimed on September 3 that Ukrainian forces advanced near Andriivka (10km southwest of Bakhmut) in the past week.[45]

Russian forces conducted offensive operations near Bakhmut but did not make any confirmed gains on September 4. The Ukrainian General Staff and Malyar reported that Russian forces unsuccessfully attacked north of Klishchiivka and near Kurdyumivka and Ozaryanivka (14km southwest of Bakhmut).[46] A Russian news aggregator claimed that Russian sources regained unspecified lost positions near Kurdyumivka.[47] A Russian milblogger claimed on September 3 that Russian forces achieved unspecified successes near Klishchiivka and pushed Ukrainian forces back from Berkhivka (6km northwest of Bakhmut) in the past week.[48]

The Russian MoD claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line near Sieverne (6km west of Avdiivka) on September 4.[49]

Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line and reportedly advanced on September 4. The Ukrainian General Staff and Malyar stated that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive actions near Sieverne, Avdiivka, Marinka (on the western outskirts of Donetsk City), Krasnohorivka (directly west of Donetsk City), and Novomykhailivka (10km southwest of Donetsk City).[50] Select Russian sources claimed on September 3 and 4 that Russian forces successfully attacked near Novomykhailivka and Krasnohorivka, whereas a Russian milblogger claimed on September 4 that Russian forces unsuccessfully attacked near these settlements and near Sieverne.[51] A Russian news aggregator claimed on September 3 that Russian forces attacked near Krasnohorivka, but did not specify an outcome.[52] A Russian milblogger claimed on September 3 that Russian forces attacked western Marinka and south of Avdiivka in the past week.[53]

Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations in the western Donetsk-eastern Zaporizhia Oblast border area on September 4 but did not advance. A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Pryyutne (15 km southwest of Velyka Novosilka).[54] The milblogger also claimed that Ukrainian forces pushed Russian forces from heights near Rivnopil (10km southwest of Velyka Novosilka) along the Pryyutne-Starmlynivka-Kermenchyk (15km southwest to 15km southeast of Velyka Novosilka) line in the past week.[55]

Russian forces conducted offensive operations in the western Donetsk-eastern Zaporizhia Oblast border area on September 4 but did not make confirmed or claimed gains. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Pryyutne.[56] Footage shot on September 2 and published on September 4 purportedly shows elements of the 218th Tank Regiment (127th Motorized Rifle Division, 5th Combined Arms Army, Eastern Military District) striking Ukrainian positions near Staromayorske (9km south of Velyka Novosilka).[57] Footage published on September 4 purportedly shows elements of the 36th Motorized Rifle Brigade (29th Combined Arms Army, Eastern Military District) operating near Mykilske (just southeast of Vuhledar).[58]

Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast on September 4 and made tactically significant advances. Geolocated footage published on September 4 shows that Ukrainian forces advanced south of Robotyne (9km south of Orikhiv) and west of Verbove (18km southeast of Orikhiv).[59] Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported that Ukrainian forces continue offensive operations in the Melitopol direction (western Zaporizhia Oblast) and achieved unspecified successes in the direction of Novodanylivka (5km south of Orikhiv) and Novoprokopivka (13km south of Orikhiv).[60] Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces advanced in contested areas east of Novoprokopivka in the direction of Ocheretuvate (25km southeast of Orikhiv).[61] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukranian forces continue to advance near Robotyne and Verbove, while the Russian MoD and other Russian sources claimed that these attacks were unsuccessful.[62] Several Russian sources continued to claim that the southern part of Robotyne is contested and that Russian forces maintain defensive positions on the southern outskirts of the settlement.[63] A Russian source claimed that Ukrainian forces attacked near Dorozhnyanka (34km southeast of Orikhiv).[64]

Geolocated footage published on August 26 indicates that Ukrainian forces are operating further south of Kamianske (30km southwest of Orikhiv) than previously observed, suggesting that Russian forces exert less control over the surrounding area.[65]

The Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces “improved their tactical situation” near Robotyne and Verbove on September 4, although ISW has not observed evidence or claims of recent Russian advances in the area.[66] Geolocated footage published on September 4 shows elements of the “Osman” Spetsnaz formation operating near Verbove.[67] Footage published on September 4 purportedly shows elements of the “Pryzrak” (Ghost) Company of the 291st Motorized Rifle Regiment (42nd Motorized Rifle Division, 58th Combined Arms Army, Southern Military District) operating along the Kopani-Nesteryanka line (10-12km southwest of Orikhiv) and elements of the 5th Company of the 429th Motorized Rifle Regiment (19th Motorized Rifle Division, 58th Combined Arms Army, Southern Military District) operating near Zherebyanky (26km southwest of Orikhiv).[68]

The Russian MoD claimed on September 4 that Russian forces destroyed four Ukrainian boats with landing groups moving toward Cape Tarkhankut in occupied Crimea.[69] A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that Russian forces destroyed four Ukrainian boats and that one Ukrainian boat returned to Ukrainian-held territory.[70]

Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced on September 4 that the Russian military will not be holding “Zapad-2023” joint strategic exercises initially scheduled for September.[71] Shoigu notably stated that Russian forces have “exercises” in Ukraine, likely acknowledging that the Russian military lacks the equipment and personnel needed for such exercises due to the war in Ukraine.[72] Ukrainian intelligence previously reported in Winter 2023 that Russia and Belarus were planning to conduct major joint strategic exercises “Zapad-2023“ and ”Union Shield-2023" with Belarusian forces and that Russian forces would deploy to Belarus for these exercises.[73]

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law increasing the age limit for conscription deferments for Russian IT specialists from 27 to 30.[74] This increase in the deferment age corresponds with a recent law that will increase the upper limit of the conscription age range from 27 to 30 for those eligible for conscription starting in the Spring of 2024 conscription cycle.[75] The deferments for IT specialists likely aim to minimize the human capital impacts of the war in Ukraine while also preventing further “brain drain” from Russia.

Russian officials appear to be pursuing joint exercises with North Korea. Shoigu stated on September 4 that Russian officials are discussing the possibility of conducting joint exercises with North Korea.[76] South Korea’s National Intelligence Service Head Kim Kyou-hyun reportedly told the South Korean National Assembly on September 4 that in July Shoigu proposed to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that Russia, China, and North Korea hold a joint naval exercise.[77]

Activities in Russian-occupied areas (Russian objective: Consolidate administrative control of annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian citizens into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)

Russian occupation officials continued early voting for Russian regional elections in occupied territories on September 4.[78] The Ukrainian Resistance Center stated on September 4 that Russian authorities so far are allegedly recording a 38 percent voter turnout in occupied Kherson Oblast, a 39 percent turnout in occupied Donetsk Oblast, and an 18 percent turnout in Zaporizhia and Donetsk oblasts.[79] Ukrainian Luhansk Oblast Head Artem Lysohor published an alleged Russian occupation document on September 4 showing that Russian officials recorded 1.3 million residents being eligible to vote in occupied Luhansk Oblast.[80] Lysohor noted that many of the figures for eligible voters in occupied settlements clearly do not account for widespread depopulation since the start of the full-scale invasion and Russian occupation.[81] Russian occupation officials will likely record inflated participation in the regional elections in an attempt to portray them as legitimate.

Russian occupation officials continue to expand organs aimed at social control in occupied Ukraine. Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Head Denis Pushilin announced on September 4 that the occupied Donetsk Oblast regional channel of the All-Russian State TV and Radio Broadcasting Company began broadcasting.[82] Pushilin added that ultranationalist milblogger Andrei Rudenko will lead the news channel.[83] Kherson Oblast occupation commissioner for children's rights Natalya Tishchenko met with Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova on September 4 to announce the opening of the Kherson Oblast headquarters of the Russian Children’s Rights Commission's humanitarian mission “In the Hands of Children.”[84]

Significant activity in Belarus (Russian efforts to increase its military presence in Belarus and further integrate Belarus into Russian-favorable frameworks and Wagner Group activity in Belarus)

The Russian-dominated Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) continued the “Combat Brotherhood-2023” operational-strategic command staff exercises in Belarus on September 4.[85]

Belarusian Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs and Commander of the Internal Troops Major General Nikolai Karpenkov reportedly thanked a group of Wagner instructors for training Belarusian Spetsnaz forces at a ceremony in Belarus. A Russian source claiming to be affiliated with the Wagner Group claimed on September 3 that Karpenkov addressed a group of Wagner instructors and thanked them for training Belarusian Spetsnaz forces and for displaying “professionalism, dedication, and brotherly attitude.”[86]

ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarusian military activity in Belarus as part of ongoing Kremlin efforts to increase their control over Belarus and other Russian actions in Belarus.

Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.

2. What China is Learning from the Ukraine War – And What it Means for the West

Excerpts:

The war in Ukraine has provided a huge wake-up call to strategists and defence planners. This includes the leadership of the Peoples Republic of China. While the Chinese may have been surprised at the relative incompetence of Russian strategy, and Russian military operations, they will still be observing closely. The political and military lessons from this Russian debacle are likely to have a profound impact on Chinese strategic thinking, and military transformation, in the coming years.

Because, while there may be some who have concluded that China now views a forced “reunification” with Taiwan in the near future as militarily too difficult, this is also a ‘best case’ assessment. Another possibility is that the PLA will absorb the lessons of Ukraine and apply them to the more complex contingency of invading Taiwan in the coming years. As Toshi Yoshihara has written:

Policymakers should treat the lessons that Chinese strategists have learned as early warning signs of the PLA’s future trajectory.

Nearly 600 days since the beginning of the 2022 Russian invasion, we must assume that the Chinese government and their military has studied this war at least as closely as they studied the 1991 Gulf War. It is prudent that we assume they will learn and adapt, even if there are gaps or shortfalls in the institutional capacity for the Chinese to make a full range of transformations based on Ukraine.

Because their learning and adaptation does not have to make them perfect. They just need to be slightly better than their adversaries.

THE TAIWAN CAMPAIGN

What China is Learning from the Ukraine War

And What it Means for the West

https://mickryan.substack.com/p/what-china-is-learning-from-the-ukraine?utm

MICK RYAN

SEP 4, 2023

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(Image: China Military)

The PLA are careful and meticulous students of modern warfare, particularly the U.S. way of war. But despite recent organizational reform efforts, the PLA remains essentially a political entity with a war-fighting mission. It is a party army, not a national army. And its approach to learning and leadership is heavily influenced by its own organization, as well as traditional Chinese culture and education.

Charles Hooper, 21 July 2022.

The war in Ukraine has seen a profusion of reports and documents that explore the purported lessons from the war. While it is much too early to describe our observations as such, these nonetheless play an important role for governments and military institutions to adjust their own strategy and military investments based on the events in Ukraine.

A subset of this large-scale discussion on lessons from the war in Ukraine is those that might be drawn by China for application in its strategic competition with the United States of America. Once again, this is a useful undertaking. We should be able to anticipate what our potential adversaries might learn from the largest war in Europe for over 70 years.

Multiple authors have produced articles and reports on this topic. In April 2022, Thomas Corbett, Ma Xiu and Peter Singer published an excellent piece with DefenseOne. They explored subjects such as joint operations, information warfare and logistics. In July last year, Evan Feigenbaum and Charles Hooper explored Chinese lessons during this event, including battle command, deterrence and the differentiation between political and warfighting functions of the PLA.

In February this year, Evan Feigenbaum and Adam Szubin published an article in Foreign Affairs about Chinese learning from the war. In June this year, the Atlantic Council published a report by John Culver and Sarah Kirchberger offers other useful insights. Finally, in July this year, Gabriel Dominguez examined the potential lessons that China could draw from Ukraine in a good article published by the Japan Times. There are other reports as well that are not listed here.

My first piece on China’s lessons from the war was published back in April 2022. Arriving just 47 days after the start of the Russian invasion, it was a very short, quick look at initial observations from the war. Nearly a year later, in February this year, I undertook another exploration of what China was learning from the war and how it might be using Ukraine to wargame its own future options.

Now after nearly 600 days of war in Ukraine, it is worth reassessing the lessons from this war that might interest China and its leadership. The most important scenario for which these lessons apply would be the conquest of Taiwan.

China and a Taiwan Conquest

The unification of the Republic of China (Taiwan) with the People’s Republic of China has been a feature of many speeches made by President Xi Jinping of China. In his 2022 New Year speech he noted that

The complete reunification of our motherland is an aspiration shared by people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. I sincerely hope that all the sons and daughters of the Chinese nation will join forces to create a brighter future for our nation.

In August 2022, a White Paper issued by The Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council and The State Council Information Office in Beijing noted the following:

Resolving the Taiwan question and realizing China's complete reunification is a shared aspiration of all the sons and daughters of the Chinese nation. It is indispensable for the realization of China's rejuvenation. It is also a historic mission of the Communist Party of China.

The White Paper also contained a series of proposition that underpin Chinese thinking in its approach to thinking about Taiwan:

1. Complete Reunification Is Critical to National Rejuvenation

2. National Development and Progress Set the Direction of Cross-Straits Relations

3. Any Attempt by Separatist Forces to Prevent Reunification Is Bound to Fail

4. External Forces Obstructing China's Complete Reunification Will Surely Be Defeated

The modernisation of China’s military institutions over the past two decades has largely been focussed on the capacity to forcefully seize Taiwan if economic, political and other incentives for reunification prove insufficient.

This modernisation was initiated by the United States success in Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Watching as the technologically sophisticated western forces quickly over ran the world’s (at that time) fourth largest Army, Chinese Communist Party leaders knew the same could happen to the massive but low technology People’s Liberation Army. The 1991 Gulf War shocked the Chinese military into a decade’s long recapitalization of its military, which has included advanced ships, aircraft, ground combat vehicles and satellites. It has also resulted in reforms to strategic and operational command and control, and better joint integration.

Chinese lessons from other conflicts, including the wars spawned by 9/11, have also included a reformation in their operational doctrine and has resulted in concepts such as ‘intelligentization’ and ‘systems destruction warfare.’ As they have with previous Western conflicts, it is highly likely that Chinese analysts will explore the war in Ukraine for its many relevant lessons.

In a February 2023 address to an audience at Georgetown University, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William Burns noted that the Chinese leader was trying to draw lessons by the "very poor performance" of the Russian military and its weapons systems in Ukraine. President Xi, and his Central Military Commission, have been paying close attention to the war in Ukraine. Indeed, the Chinese military have become very fast followers of new technologies and techniques in warfighting since their forensic exploration of the US victory in the 1991 Gulf War.

The past 550 (+) days have therefore provided a significant learning opportunity for President Xi and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). It is important to appreciate the character of the learning that the Chinese Communist Party leadership, and its military arm, might draw from the large-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. By appreciating how the Chinese may learn and where they might adapt, we can also inform our own national security strategies and military modernisation programs in the coming years.

(Image: China Military)

Key Lessons for China from Ukraine

Strategy Matters. As Russia has rediscovered in the past 18 months, getting strategy (and its underpinning assumptions) right is critical to effective military operations. The price of strategic incompetence is military organisations being used for unclear or unachievable political objectives, poorly resourced or out of balance in their capabilities, badly led or a combination of all four. Ultimately, bad strategy is punished on the battlefield, as the Russians have experienced on multiple occasions in this war. And, if there are enough of these battlefield defeats, they can eventually lead to national humiliation, disgrace or defeat.

In the case of Russia, the opportunistic and narrow approach to strategy taken by Putin has led to a string of battlefield defeats, economic sanctions and the humiliation of a nation that thought itself a superpower. It has also led to a reinvigoration of the NATO alliance.

Effective strategic thinking and strategy development must align political objectives with the means available to achieve them. In other words, strategy needs to be resourced appropriately. Whether it is the allocation of personnel to the right areas of government and the military, or provision of sufficient quantities of equipment and munitions, as strategist Bernard Brodie once wrote that “strategy wears a dollar sign.” Resourcing of strategy includes sustaining an industrial base that can expand when the occasion arises. China will have watched and learned.

The Chinese President and his advisors will also have closely observed how the American President, the US national security community and NATO make policy decisions about the war. The Chinese will be keen to understand what Russian policies or actions might have influenced Western decision-making about the war, and what capabilities deterred the West from escalating its support or intervening.

The Chinese will also have observed how outrageously and brutally the Russians can behave without Western forces intervening. This will inform the Chinese decision-making about the level of military aggression towards Taiwan before and during any conflict. However, given recent statements about the re-education of the Taiwanese after any Chinese invasion, we can assume that China will not recoil from the kind of brutality demonstrated by Russia against the Ukrainian people in the past 18 months.

Time. The exploitation of time is another area where the Chinese Communist Party are probably confident that they will have learned lessons from this war. While the degree of Western support for the war may have surprised Putin and Xi, this aid often took time to be decided on by governments. More time was wasted in slow delivery of assistance to Ukraine.

Therefore, Xi and his Central Military Commission will he refining their contingency plans for Taiwan, and ways to distract the United States, Japan, regional partners and Europe, in order to delay their intervention for as long as possible. When geography is considered, time becomes an even more precious resource for China in a Taiwan scenario. Ukraine is close to western Europe and aid can be delivered relatively quickly. On the other hand, Taiwan is distant from the nearest countries that might be able to support it. The PLA will be sure to exploit this.

The longer this war has gone on, the more obvious it has become a war of industrial systems. Both Russia and Ukraine have used extraordinary amounts of ammunition, fuel and military materiel. Consumption rates like these have not been seen in Europe since the Second World War. Post-Cold War drawdowns of military forces, war stocks and defence industry capacity has meant that the holdings of materiel in western military institutions have been significantly reduced. And with the exception of American artillery ammunition production, no country has yet announced an expansion of industrial capacity to replace materiel and ammunition sent to Ukraine. Time to mobilise becomes a critical vulnerability for any nation that might seek to assist Taiwan.

The Chinese, with their massive industrial capacity and ongoing defence build-up, probably believe they have an advantage over the West in this area. Currently, they would be right in this assumption.

Understand your Enemy (and desired future citizens). In his classic text, Sun Tzu describes how fundamental an understanding of one’s enemy is to ultimate victory. His writings are very much ‘enemy-centric’ and throughout them he explores why a knowledge of one’s adversary is critical to manipulating them, defeating their plans, and if necessary, defeating them in battle.

The experience of President Putin may convince Xi that he needs to invest more in understanding the motivations of the Taiwanese, and their willingness to resist any forceful reunification.

Among Putin’s most significant errors were his assumption that Ukraine was not a real country, that its government would fall once the Russian Army marched on Kyiv, that the Ukrainian military would only provide token resistance to any Russian intervention and that Western nations would not intervene decisively. These assumptions were largely based on his experience with the 2008 Georgia operation, the 2014 invasion of Ukraine and the more recent Russian operations in Syria. However, almost all of Putin’s strategic assumptions were disproved very early after the Russian large-scale invasion began in February last year. From here all of Russia’s strategic and military errors have flowed.

Because of this, the Chinese Communist Party and the PLA may rethink their assumptions about Taiwanese will and their capacity to resist reunification across all its dimensions, not just military. But to do so, the Chinese President will need to hear from a wider range of different opinions. Whether this is possible in a system where Xi has become the centre of a personality cult and relies on a smaller group of trusted advisers to make decisions, is highly questionable.

Russia has demonstrated in the past 18 months what happens when factual information is withheld from a national leader at war. In a December presentation to the Reagan National Defense Forum in California, Avril Haines, the U.S. director of national intelligence, described how President Putin “is becoming more informed of the challenges that the military faces in Russia, but it's still not clear to us that he has a full picture at this stage of just how challenged they are.”

This should not be surprising. As Murray, Knox and Bernstein have described in The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States and War, authoritarian states have long demonstrated the capacity for limiting the flow of information to leaders and self-deception. They write that “throughout the centuries, tyrannies have displayed the notorious tendency to punish the bearers of bad news, consequently, the willingness of their bureaucracies to analyse the world in realistic terms may be less than satisfactory. Whether China can break out of this pattern will be interesting to watch.

A final element of this is understanding your enemy’s allies. The Chinese president, probably like Putin, will have been surprised by the rapid and robust response by large parts of the international community to the Russian invasion. This has resulted in a variety of assistance mechanisms being provided to the Ukrainians from Europe, the United States and beyond. Weapons, humanitarian aid, intelligence and other forms of aid have flowed freely. The NATO alliance has been reinvigorated, and it has attracted additional members. However, the Chinese will probably also take note that the West has been unwilling to commit people to fight on the side of the Ukrainians.

Nuclear Deterrence. A good deterrent, especially a nuclear one, matters. Putin and some of his close advisors have issued veiled threats about the use of nuclear weapons if the west intervenes militarily in the Ukraine conflict. Most of this is posturing and bluff; indeed, it has become a standard Russian tactic. But, it has ensured that no western military forces have crossed into Ukraine. This may encourage the Chinese to further invest in their nuclear deterrent.

The annual report to the US Congress on Chinese military capacity in 2021 found the Chinese had already commenced a build-up of their nuclear forces. The 2022 version of this report expanded on this topic, noting that:

The PRC has continued to accelerate the modernization, diversification and expansion of its nuclear forces. The PRC has stated its ambition to strengthen its ‘strategic deterrent’.

If there was any doubt in the Chinese President’s mind about the cost of expanding of their nuclear force, the effectiveness of the Russian nuclear sabre rattling over Ukraine – which has probably influenced discussions around ‘no fly zones’ and ‘NATO boots on the ground’ has probably removed such doubts.

That said, the accelerated strategic strike campaign being undertaken by Ukraine against Russian targets is yet to result in a Russian escalation. This challenges conventional wisdom among western political and policy elites about the impact of providing certain weapons to Ukraine. It allows a closer examination of the value of conventional deterrent capabilities by countries like Japan and Taiwan.

Integrated Action. A more detailed exploration of this issue will be conducted in a subsequent article. But if there is one military lesson of overwhelming importance, it is that unified military action is not discretionary in modern war. The Russians totally ignored to old military principle of unity of effort by initially attempting to fight four separate wars in the north, the east, the south and in the air. While April has seen a readjustment, it remains to be seen whether this initial miscalculation has compromised any chance of Russian success.

Over the past decade, the PLA has been undergoing a process of transformation that has reduced the traditional influence of the Army. This process has seen the formation of several joint theatre commands. The aim, in President Xi’s words, is to “create a joint force that can fight and win”. At least in theory these have developed joint warfighting concepts that are used in military exercises.

A key aspect of this integrated action is achieving what the U.S. Marine Corps calls Single Battle. This is the ability to combine combat operations, support activities and logistics into an integrated and smoothly orchestrated whole. It is extraordinarily difficult. As we have witnessed during the war in Ukraine, even the most basic competencies in logistics and close combat require investment before a conflict to get right.

However, developing competencies in high level joint warfighting takes time. The US military, the most sophisticated and capable military as this integrated form of warfighting, has been on a multi-decade journey to get where it is. So have other nations that have aimed to increase their joint, integrated warfighting capabilities. And they still have challenges with this approach.

This will be an even more difficult challenge for the PLA given Western warfighting concepts incorporate their own version of Systems Destruction Warfare. They will focus on breaking down joint interaction and operational systems. The Chinese, with none of the American’s operational experience, have a long way to go before in this regard. But the Ukraine experience has probably convinced them that their reforms are worth the effort.

Adaptive Capacity. An important battle in Ukraine right now is the adaptation battle. Both sides and their strategic leaders are learning and adapting, seeking to constantly generate a new source of advantage over the other. This is occurring at the tactical, operational, strategic and political levels.

Part of this adaptation battle has been focused on technology. Autonomous systems have not just proliferated on the battlefield; they have literally exploded in a massive expansion in the kinds of missions they conduct, and the pure quantity now deployed. But, the adoption of these systems would not be as effective without other new technologies that leverage their capabilities, such as meshed civil-military sensor networks and digital command and control.

The adaptation required to build a more effective military however is built on more than just technology. However, none of these new technologies would have had the impact they have without a variety of human interventions. These interventions generally fall into one or more of three types: new ideas, new (and evolved) organisations, and training.

At the same time, adaptation processes need to close the interval between new technologies and new modes of employment. There is almost always a time lag in the process between introduction of new technologies and the introduction of the new doctrines and institutions that best exploit it. In his book, The Diffusion of Military Power, Michael Horowitz proposes what he calls the Adoption Capacity Theory, which “makes clear the distinction between interest in responding to an innovation and the substance of that response.” The Ukrainians, generally, have been very quick to absorb new technologies and then adapt their human processes around them.

Beyond the war in Ukraine, Chinese military institutions will be looking to ensure that there is only a small gap between new technologies and the development of new doctrines and organisations to employ them. As such, if Chinese President Xi and his leadership can build the foundation for their military to be adaptive in peacetime, it would make them a much more formidable military power during any future conflict.

Leadership and Strategic Influence. The Chinese will have also observed the strategic influence operations during the war. The daily speeches by President Zelensky, his battlefield visits and his addresses to major international gatherings have been pivotal in sustaining western military, economic, humanitarian and intelligence assistance. The Chinese President will be contemplating how to prevent a Taiwanese President generating such influence. As I wrote in last year:

Xi, perhaps one of least charismatic personalities in world politics, must live in fear of a Zelensky-like President being elected in the Republic of China (Taiwan). Not only would such a leader be able to unify their own people against a Chinese threat, but they would also be even better at gaining international support before or during a crisis.

Western assistance to Ukraine has made a significant contribution to blunting the Russian invasion and defeating them on the battlefield. The Chinese will be examining ways to forestall any such efforts to solicit foreign military assistance by the Taiwanese government in a future conflict. At the same time, the Chinese in the past couple of years appear to have realised that confrontational diplomatic approaches erodes Chinese influence and this lesson may be a key reason for recent moderation in Chinese diplomatic interactions with other nations.

People. Finally, it has not escaped the attention of observers of this war that the quality of people matters. The generally low quality of its conscript force, notwithstanding the presence of some very good elite forces such as the Airborne troops, has played a major role in Russia’s military woes. This issue will probably have gained the attention of the People’s Liberation Army as well. There is a significant asymmetry between the quality of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers and their leaders. Ukraine’s advantage in this regard has made a difference on the battlefield throughout the war. 

And while quality of personnel was described as requiring a “sense of urgency” by Xi in his 20^th Party Congress speech, development of military leaders who are able (and permitted) to think laterally remains an institutional problem. This issue was explored in the excellent piece by Corbett, Xiu and Singer, where they describe how:

Despite some recent success in recruiting a higher-quality, more-educated voluntary force, the PLA has likewise failed to move away from conscription. It presently requires about 660,000 two-year conscripts, many lacking even partial high-school education, to fill out its ranks. The PLA places heavy emphasis on personnel political education, and Chinese conscripts have been raised from an early age to believe in the necessity of “liberating” Taiwan. Still, the PLA is surely watching with concern as a conscript force with at least some similarities to its own fares so poorly, and will likely redouble their campaign to attract more, and preferably higher-quality, voluntary recruits.

The lesson from Ukraine for the Chinese leader is that he may need to accelerate PLA reforms in order to increase the quality of training and education in the PLA.

(Image: China Military)

China Will Be Learning

The war in Ukraine has provided a huge wake-up call to strategists and defence planners. This includes the leadership of the Peoples Republic of China. While the Chinese may have been surprised at the relative incompetence of Russian strategy, and Russian military operations, they will still be observing closely. The political and military lessons from this Russian debacle are likely to have a profound impact on Chinese strategic thinking, and military transformation, in the coming years.

Because, while there may be some who have concluded that China now views a forced “reunification” with Taiwan in the near future as militarily too difficult, this is also a ‘best case’ assessment. Another possibility is that the PLA will absorb the lessons of Ukraine and apply them to the more complex contingency of invading Taiwan in the coming years. As Toshi Yoshihara has written:

Policymakers should treat the lessons that Chinese strategists have learned as early warning signs of the PLA’s future trajectory.

Nearly 600 days since the beginning of the 2022 Russian invasion, we must assume that the Chinese government and their military has studied this war at least as closely as they studied the 1991 Gulf War. It is prudent that we assume they will learn and adapt, even if there are gaps or shortfalls in the institutional capacity for the Chinese to make a full range of transformations based on Ukraine.

Because their learning and adaptation does not have to make them perfect. They just need to be slightly better than their adversaries.

3. Special Operations News Update - September 5, 2023 | SOF News

Special Operations News Update - September 5, 2023 | SOF News

sof.news · by SOF News · September 5, 2023

Curated news, analysis, and commentary about special operations, national security, and conflicts around the world.

Photo / Image: A U.S. Army Green Beret with 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) during a Joint Combined Exchange Training exercise, June 29, 2023, near Alicante, Spain. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Jacob Dunlap, Special Operations Command Europe)

Do you receive our daily newsletter? If not, you can sign up here and enjoy it five (almost) days a week with your morning coffee (or afternoon tea depending on where in the world you are).

SOF News

SOTG-C, MC-130Js, and JASSMs. U.S. Ninth Air Force (Air Forces Central) service members demonstrated the capability for the MC-130J Commando II to load, unload, forward arm, and arm the aircraft with the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles, or AGM-158 JASSMs (SOF News), as part of Rapid Dragon, at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, Aug. 6, 2023. JASSM is a low observable standoff air-launched cruise missile, intended to keep aircrews out of range of hostile air defense systems without compromising lethality. Rapid Dragon is a precision munitions capability for medium-sized or larger cargo aircraft that allows U.S. forces a flexible rapid response option. “AFCENT Special Operations Task Group prepares JASSM capabilities”, by Jennifer Zima, U.S. Air Force Central, August 26, 2023.

SOCOM Needs New Tech. The vice commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Francis Donovan, outlined the needs of the SOF community during a conference in Austin, Texas. He said we need to leverage the lessons learned during the Global War of Terrorism (GWOT) era; but also look ahead to the change in mission (strategic competition with Russia and China) and how technology can be leveraged by the SOF community. “SOCOM Needs New Tech, Old Approaches, Senior Leader Says”, by Sean Carberry, National Defense Magazine, August 25, 2023.

3rd SFG(A) Soldier Charged with Murder. Army Sgt. Rolondo Boone was arrested on August 28, 2023, and charged with first degree murder in connection with an April 2, 2023, shooting at an off-base hookah bar. Boone is a unit supply specialist for 3rd Special Forces Group at Fort Liberty (formerly FBNC), North Carolina. “Soldier assigned to 3rd Special Forces Group charged with murder”, Task and Purpose, August 30, 2023.

USAF Special Warfare Assessment & Selection. Air Force Special Warfare Guardian Angel and Special Tactics (GA/ST) operators, comprised of pararescuemen, combat controllers, special reconnaissance Airmen, special tactics officers and combat rescue officers must be selected into their career fields before continuing on to career-specific courses and training. “What is Assessment & Selection?”, Special Warfare Training Wing, by Miriam A. Thurber, August 28, 2023.

CSOJTF-L Casualty. A contractor assigned to Combined Special Operations Joint Task Force – Levant died of suspected natural causes in the vicinity of Mosul, Iraq, Aug. 31. The contractor’s identity will be released at the discretion of the pertinent national authorities. (CJSOJTF-L, Sep 3, 2023)

Arrest Made in 2020 Death of SF Soldier on FBNC. A 23-year-old man has been arrested for the December 2020 slayings of a Green Beret and veteran whose bodies were found on Fort Bragg. (Fayetteville Observer, Aug 25, 2023).

26th MEU(SOC) in Norway. Marines and Sailors of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit’s (Special Operations Capable), embarked on the USS Mesa Verde, with attached elements of Italian Marines from the San Marco Brigade, concluded a successful bilateral training exercise with Brigade North Norwegian Soldiers, aimed at enhancing their warfighting lethality and interoperability with our ally and partners above the Arctic Circle, from August 5 – 21, 2023. “26th MEU(SOC) Concludes Bi-Lateral Training in Norway”, by 1st lt. Stephanie Downing, marines.mil.

International SOF

Afghanistan’s CF333. The British were instrumental in the formation, training, funding, and support of the Afghan Special Police Command Force 333 that was based in Logar province, Afghanistan. Since the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban in August 2021 the men of CF333 have been on the run. Some were evacuated out of Afghanistan during the Kabul NEO but most remain in Afghanistan or have fled to neighboring countries. Those remaining in Afghanistan are subject to arrest, torture, and death by the Taliban. The UK governments Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP) has been less than helpful in assisting former members of CF333 with a safe and legal future in the United Kingdom. “Afghanistan: A Final British Betrayal”, by Tim Willasey-Wilsey CMG, Royal United Services Institute, August 30, 2023.

Colombia’s AFEAU. The Agrupación de Fuerzas Especiales Antiterroristas Urbanas (AFEAU or AFEUR), in English “Urban Counter-Terrorism Special Forces Group”, is a Class 1 special operations unit of the Colombian Armed Forces. Its main mission is to conduct counter-terrorism operations, as well as HVT kill or capture and hostage rescue. There are several AFEAU groups, which are divided into the Army’s Alfa, the Navy’s Bravo, and the Air Force’s Charly. This unit is under the direct command of the Comando Conjunto de Operaciones Especiales (CCOES) or Joint Special Operations Command, and the President of the Republic. “The AFEAU: Colombia’s Urban Counter-Terrorism Unit”, by Javier Sutil Toledano, Grey Dynamics, September 1, 2023.

French SOF NCO Dies in Iraq. A French Special Forces sergeant, Nicolas Mazier, died in Iraq on August 28, 2023, during a terrorist attack by ISIS. He was the third French military casualty in August. The incident took place during a reconnaissance mission about 100 miles north of Baghdad. Four other French soldiers were injured. “French Special Operations Soldier Killed by ISIS in Iraq”, SOFREP, September 1, 2023.

Sudan’s SOF Force to Reconstitute. The General Intelligence Service (GIS) issued a call for its former Special Operations Forces members to return to service, signaling the revival of these units notorious for their friction with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). “Sudan reinstates GIS’s Special Operations Forces”, Sudan Tribune, September 1, 2023.

SOF History

WWII OSS Vet Awarded SF Tab. Mr. Ellsworth Johnson, a veteran of the Office of Strategic Services, was awarded the Special Forces Tab and Green Beret by USASOC on September 1, 2023. This honor was given to him at the age of 100! He served as a member of OSS Operational Groups (OG) in both France and China. Johnson is believed to be the last living member of the OSSOG. As a result of his service as a member of the OSSOG, he is qualified to become a member of the Special Forces Regiment.

Honoring Secret Warriors (Vietnam). A recent Medal of Honor recipient, Col. Paris Davis, is advocating for more recognition for the elite members of the U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam, Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG) with a Congressional Medal of Honor. Casualty rates for SOG recon teams exceeded 100% – wounded or killed. “The time is right to honor the Vietnam War’s most secret warriors”, Military Times, August 30, 2023.

Best-Kept Secret of Vietnam War. A former member of Studies and Observations Group (SOG) recently spoke at the American Legion’s 104th National Convention. “Legionnaire and former Green Beret shares story of ‘best-kept secret’ of Vietnam War”, Legion.org, August 30, 2023.

Ukraine Conflict

1st Defensive Belt Breached. Ukrainian generals claim they have breached Russia’s formidable first line of defenses in the south, as the counteroffensive launched earlier this summer may be poised to gather pace. There are, according to observers of the conflict, three Russian defensive belts. “Ukraine War: Counter-offensive troops punch through Russia line, generals claim”, BBC News, August 3, 2023.

Counteroffensive. In early June 2023, Ukraine launched its long-awaited counteroffensive. It wasn’t a quick, decisive deep strike to the coast severing Russia’s lines of communication and disrupting its logistical nodes. Instead, it has developed into a set-piece battle against a heavily entrenched force along three avenues of approach. Artillery fire and drones dominate the battlefield with slow and costly advances by Ukranian infantry tree line by tree line. A comprehensive report on the summer offensive is provided by Michael Kofman and Rob Lee in “Perseverance and Adaptation: Ukraine’s Counteroffensive at Three Months”, War on the Rocks, September 4, 2023.

Former SF General Says 2024 is the Year. Privately, some senior U.S. military officers are disappointed that the Ukrainians have conducted a successful deep strike to the coast. However, one former Green Beret officer with experience in Ukraine says that is based on false assumptions and hopeful thinking. Retired U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Arnold says that next year the Ukrainians will have greater success on the battlefield once their armor and mechanized vehicles arrive in country. “Ukraine may have a better chance to win in 2024, a retired U.S. general says”, The Washington Post, September 4, 2023. (subscription)

Ukrainian Resistance. A resource about resistance concepts and Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion and occupation of Ukrainian territory. Ukrainian Resistance, National Security Info.

U.S. Assistance. The Congressional Research Service has updated its U.S. Security Assistance to Ukraine report on August 25, 2023. This three-page PDF provides an overview of programs since 2014, the provision of defense equipment, and a discussion on future assistance.

Commentary

Counter-SOF Strategy. Alex Crosby (U.S. Navy) argues that in a potential strategic conflict, the U.S. joint force must be prepared to counter adversary special operations forces (SOF) threatening U.S. national interests at home and abroad. The severity of these threats and the differences between conventional and special operations forces call for a joint strategy that better integrates U.S. Special Operations Command expertise with conventional force capabilities. “The Joint Force Needs a Counter-SOF Strategy”, Proceedings, U.S. Naval Institute, September 2023.

Book Review – The American Way of Irregular War: An Analytic Memoir. A book by General Charles Cleveland and Daniel Egel (research and cowriting) is reviewed by Brian Nau, a Special Forces Intelligence Sergeant. The book identifies reasons for U.S. failures in irregular warfare over the past several decades and why the United States was unable to achieve it strategic objectives in nearly every military campaign in which it was involved in since the mid-1970s. Cleveland proposes three different and very significant options for addressing this issue. “Three Proposals to Raise the Profile of Irregular Warfare (Book Review)”, Irregular Warfare Initiative, August 31, 2023.

SOF Needed for National Strategy. Michael Bayer argues that special operations forces will need to rapidly develop and scale new capabilities relevant to today’s strategic competition. He also puts a plug in for the 34th Annual SO/LIC Symposium to be held the later part of October. “Special Operators Essential for National Security”, National Defense Magazine, August 30, 2023.

Thoughts on an American Foreign Legion. Tom Ordeman has put forth a radical concept that is very interesting. Although one could take fault with some of his observations the article is worth reading. He argues that the Marine Corps is the best military service for SFA, FID, and UW (hmmm). He also thinks that we should establish an American Foreign Legion – similar to that of the UK’s Gurkhas or the French Foreign Legion – under the control of the Marines – starting with a Kurdish legion. Read more in “Legio Patri Nostra: A Blueprint for an American Foreign Legion”, Small Wars Journal, September 3, 2023.

Professional Military Journals. Maj. Zachary Griffiths (U.S. Army) argues that the Army has to improve its branch publications to offer enhanced educational opportunities to Army leaders. “Low Crawling toward obscurity: The Army’s Professional Journals”, Military Review, September – October 2023.

PMCs vs SOMCs. The aborted Wagner Group mutiny likely gives leaders around the world a reason to contemplate the risks of relying too heavily on private military companies. “Are State-Owned Military Companies the Future?”, Lawfare Blog, August 21, 2023.

National Security

CRS Report – Crisis in Haiti. This Caribbean nation has experienced decades of strife. This year, 2023, has seen more violence and insecurity. Armed gangs are patrolling the streets and the government is powerless to restore law and order. The international community may soon be deploying a police task force – possibly led by Kenya – to restore order. The Congressional Research Service has published a document entitled Haiti: Recent Developments and U.S. Policy, CRS R47394, August 21, 2023, PDF, 23 pages. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47394

Border Security – Not So Much. The U.S. Border Patrol arrested at least 91,000 migrants who were in family groups that crossed the border in August, exceeding the prior one-month record of 84,486 set in May 2019. Overall, border the Border patrol made more than 177,000 arrests along the Mexico border in August. Border apprehensions have risen more than 30 percent for two consecutive months. “Families crossing U.S. border illegally reached an all-time high in August”, The Washington Post, August 31, 2023.

5th SFG(A) and Nuclear Disablement Team. The 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) and a team from the 20th Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, Explosives (CBRNE) Command took part in an exercise that took them from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to Hollywood, Alabama, where they successfully simulated powering down the Bellefonte Nuclear Power Plant. “Nuclear Disablement Team validates mission at simulated nuclear power plant in Alabama”, DVIDS, August 28, 2023.

Foreign Terrorist Groups. The State Department’s FTO list is administered by the DoS Bureau of Counterterrorism (CT). When assessing entities for possible designation, CT has to follow certain criteria. Read about FTO designation criteria, consequences of designation, the FTO revocation process, entities currently designated as FTOs, and delisted FTOs. Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), Congressional Research Service (FTO), CRS IF10613, updated September 1, 2023, PDF, 3 pages.

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10613

Russian PMCs. Independent Russian news outlets reported that the Russian State Duma was pushing through an amendment to allow Russian regions to form their own private military companies (PMCs). These PMCs are employable during mobilization, military emergencies, or wartime to aid security forces against internal security threats. “Russian Regional Private Military Companies: Key Implications”, by Alex Bertina, Grey Dynamics, August 21, 2023. (subscription)

CRS Report – Chinese Nuclear and Missile Proliferation. China-based companies and individuals continue to export goods relevant to nuclear- and missile-related technologies to other countries. Congressional Research Service, CRS IF 11737, updated August 28, 2023, PDF, 3 pages.

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11737

Marine Deaths in Australia. Three U.S. Marines were killed and twenty injured (some in serious condition) after an Osprey aircraft crashed in Australia during “routine” military exercises. The cause of the crash is unknown, and an investigation is underway. The MV-22B Osprey aircraft was flying in support of Exercise Predators Run – a joint exercise involving troops from the United States, Australia, and other countries. (DVIDS, 27 Aug 2023).

New Cdr of CJTF-OIR. Maj. Gen. Matthew MacFarlane relinquished command and responsibilities to Maj. Gen. Joel “JB” Vowell on August 22, 2023. The mission of the 28-nations organization is to train, advise, and assist the Iraqi Security Forces and the Syrian Democratic Forces. “Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve Changes Command”, Homeland Security Today, August 25, 2023.

Afghanistan

Afghan Update. News about Afghanistan, 2-year anniversary of fall of Afghanistan, relocation, immigration, and resettlement of Afghan refugees, humanitarian crisis, commentary, books, podcasts, events, and more. “Afghanistan Update – August 2023”, Afghan Report, August 31, 2023.

NRF -Resistance to Taliban Rule. The National Resistance Front is proving to be a thorn in the Taliban’s side. A spokesman for the NRF says that “. . . we have been successful in challenging the Taliban in many parts of Afghanistan beyond our base in the remote valleys of the Hindu Kush mountains.” July and August have seen multiple attacks each week. The NRF is lacking international support and the chances of toppling the Taliban regime are remote. “2 years after US withdrawal Afghanistan resistance group yearns for Western help as they take on Taliban”, Fox News, August 29, 2023.

DoS Report on Afghan SIV Program. The Office of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of State has released a report entitled Evaluation of Adjustments to the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa Program From 2018 Through 2022. This 52-page (PDF) document is one in a series of reports by the State Department responding to multiple congressional committee requests for the OIG to review the processing of Afghan special immigrant visas (SIV). The SIV program was established in 2009 to resettle Afghans who had worked on behalf of the United States in Afghanistan and had experienced an ongoing and serious threat as a result. “State Department Report on Afghan SIV Program (August 2023)”, Afghan Report, September 1, 2023.

Afghanistan – Sanctuary for Terrorists. The Biden administration needs to recognize that the threats from al Qaeda, Islamic State, and the TTP emanating from Afghanistan are as dangerous today as they were on September 10, 2021. Without a viable South Asia counterterrorism strategy, the U.S. will have failed to learn the most valuable lesson of all from 9/11 – preempting terrorists with immediate and decisive action before they cause harm to our citizens. “Terrorist Groups are Again Thriving in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan”, by Daniel Hoffman, The Cipher Brief, September 3, 2023.

Help Special Operations Forces (SOF) personnel with spine injuries receive the healthcare options, education, and care they need.

Africa

ISIS in Mali. Islamic State extremists are rapidly gaining territory in Mali. The extremists have grown their presence in the more populated central Mali area since 2015. In August 2020, Mali’s president was overthrown in a coup. The new country leader has developed ties with Russia’s military and Russia’s Wagner Group. A United Nations force, known as MINUSMA, had played a crucial role in security Mail but then were told to leave this year. “UN experts say Islamic State group almost doubled the territory they control in Mali in under a year”, AP News, August 26, 2023.

Departure of MINUSMA. The United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali has a December 31, 2023, deadline to depart Mali. The closure involves the handover of 12 camps to the Mali government (or other parties). Almost 13,000 personnel will need to depart as well as over 4,000 vehicles and 5,500 sea containers. Read a comprehensive report of the MINUSA withdrawal by the United Nations published on August 28, 2023.

Wagner Group in Africa. Despite the failed mutiny a few months back and withdrawal from Russia and Ukraine into Belarus; the private military company is still active – in Africa. The long-term outlook probably has Moscow taken increasing control over the group (behind the scenes) and continuing with its activities in Africa. “PMC Wagner in Africa: Forecast”, by Alexandra Fokina, Grey Dynamics, August 22, 2023.

Another Coup – This Time Gabon. Army officers from all three services have taken power in Gabon (Google Maps) – and in the process annulling the results of an election held on Saturday, August 25, 2023. Many election observers had indicated that the election was fraudulent. The overthrow of President Ali Bongo will end his family’s 53-year hold on power in Gabon. The leader of the new military government will be the head of the presidential guard, Gen Brice Oligui Nguema. This is the eighth coup in former French colonies in Africa in the past three years. “Gabon coup: Army cancels elections and seizes power”, BBC News, August 30, 2023. Nguema was sworn in as interim president by the constitutional court on Monday, September 4, 2023. (France 24, 4 Sep 2023).

Assessment of U.S. SFA in Sahel. Despite significant effort made by the U.S. military to train Sahelian security forces – progress has been limited. Moving these nations towards democracy has been difficult . . . judging by the number of military coups in recent years. The fight against jihadism has been problematic as well. “What Niger’s Coup Says About US Security Assistance in the Sahel”, Stimson Center, August 17, 2023.

Upcoming Events

September 18-23, 2023

5th Special Forces Group Reunion

September 24-28, 2023

Combat Diver Competition

Special Forces Underwater Operations School

October 3, 2023

2023 Virtual MOG Mile

Three Rangers Foundation

October 16-20, 2023

SOAR XLVII

Special Operations Association

Books, Pubs, and Reports

Sentinel. The ‘Newsletter of the Quiet Professionals’ September 2023 issue is now posted online where you can read the articles online or download the PDF (16 pages). Some of the articles include ‘Green Beret Resource List’, ‘SOAR XLVII Registration’, ‘Book Review: Nightmare in Laos’, ‘Book Review: At the Hurricane’s Eye’, ‘Michael D. Echanis Honored by Chuck Norris’, and ‘Burying the Dead with Dishonor Part II’.

CRS Report – Army Security Force Assistance Brigades (SFABs). The Congressional Research Service has published an updated “In Focus” brief on the SFABs. The topics of the three-page PDF include background, establishment, organization, equipment, stationing, mission, role, and regional alignment. Report has been updated on August 21, 2023. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10675

CRS Report – The Army’s Multi-Domain Task Force (MDTF). The Congressional Research Service has published an updated (22 August 2023) “In Focus” brief on the MDTF. The pub explains what the MDTF is, where they are stationed, and possible oversight issues for Congress. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11797

CTC Sentinel. The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point has published their August 2023 issue online. Topics include suppressing international terrorism, ISKP under the Taliban, Islamic State leaders, and the Russian Imperial Movement in the Ukraine Wars: 2014-2023. https://ctc.westpoint.edu/august-2023/

Podcasts, Videos, and Movies

Video – Latvian Special Forces Dog Handling Team. Rejs is a Belgian Malinois currently serving with the Latvian army’s Special Operations Forces. During missions, as a combat assault canine, Rejs helps Latvian commandos by sniffing out explosive traps, chasing down high-value targets and using his incredible speed and agility to get the jump on foes. Rejs requires a lot of kit to do his job, which is carried by his handler, a Latvian Special Forces operator. In this video see the items the dog handling team carries in their backpack – from a dog bowl to a muzzle. “What’s in the kit of a Latvian special forces’ dog handling team?”, NATO YouTube, August 25, 2023.

Video –Special Forces Assessment & Selection News. Watch a video discussing the prospect of SFAS going from 3-weeks to 4-weeks. The Special Warfare Center and School may be adding more land navigation to SFAS. This would improve the selection rate for the land navigation course part of SF training – improving throughput of students and pass rate. The Green Beret Chronicles, August 24, 2023, 6 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78XI_4WqMPI

Video – New Human Performance Training Center opens for 10th Group Personnel. The Human Performance Training Center (HPTC) is a new facility that opened for 10th Group personnel on Fort Carson. The facility boasts a wide variety of services, including a full weight room, turf, cardio section, and physical/occupational therapy. The facility encourages Soldiers to become the best version of themselves in both body and mind. DVIDS, 10th SFG(A), August 25, 2023, 2 mins.

https://www.dvidshub.net/video/891588/new-human-performance-training-center-opens-10th-group-personnel

Video – 26th MEU(SOC): The Nation’s Immediate Response Force, America’s 911 Force. The MEU is currently afloat in the Fifth and Sixth Fleet’s area of responsibility. (DVIDS, September 2, 2023, 3 minutes.)

https://www.dvidshub.net/video/895485/26th-meusoc-nations-immediate-response-force-americas-911-force

And Some Humor? PTSD Barbie. The Barbie movie is a hit. Folks are scrambling to theaters to watch the highly acclaimed film. However, there are some critics who worry about inclusiveness of the Barbie enterprise. “PTSD Barbie excluded from new Barbie Movie”, Duffle Blog, August 2023.

Podcasts

SOFCAST. United States Special Operations Command

https://linktr.ee/sofcast

Prep for Impact by Matt Parrish (Green Beret Foundation)

https://open.spotify.com/show/54j9y7oFsvZQonqzgLebZp

The Pinelander. Blacksmith Publishing

https://www.thepinelander.com/

The Indigenous Approach. 1st Special Forces Command

https://open.spotify.com/show/3n3I7g9LSmd143GYCy7pPA

Irregular Warfare Initiative

https://irregularwarfare.org/category/podcasts/

Irregular Warfare Podcast. Modern War Institute at West Point

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/irregular-warfare-podcast/id1514636385

SOF News is not a ‘money making’ enterprise; but we do have administrative, operating, and publishing expenses. Individuals and businesses provide the funds to defray these expenses. Their contributions are deeply appreciated. Learn how you can support SOF News.

sof.news · by SOF News · September 5, 2023

4. Marines’ top general ‘ruthlessly’ rides out Tuberville’s military hold

Marines’ top general ‘ruthlessly’ rides out Tuberville’s military hold

Gen. Eric Smith, restricted by the Republican senator’s promotion blockade, charts a steady, careful path to prepare for America’s next major conflict

By Dan Lamothe

September 4, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Dan Lamothe · September 4, 2023

Gen. Eric M. Smith has a vision for furthering the Marine Corps’ transformation from a force shaped by two decades of counterinsurgency warfare into one that’s optimized for a great-power clash, possibly with China.

He can’t share it with anyone, though.

The United States, Smith said in a recent interview, finds itself in an “interwar period” and must take full advantage of peacetime to regroup and advance new fighting concepts.

But the general, selected by President Biden to become the Marines’ next top officer, is one of more than 300 senior military leaders whose nominations are on hold, caught in an acrimonious months-long dispute between Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) and the administration stemming from the Pentagon’s abortion policy. And so, Smith said, for now he must “ruthlessly adhere” to admonitions from the Senate that he not presume his next assignment is assured.

“People say, ‘What’s your commandant’s planning guidance?’” Smith said, referring to a major document that the Marine Corps leader typically distributes at the outset of his term, to set priorities and expectations for the 200,000 active-duty troops and reservists under his command. The general’s reply: “You’ll have to ask the 39th commandant when that person is confirmed,” he said, “because I cannot work on that document.”

At 58, Smith is battle-tested — in Iraq, in Afghanistan and, equally importantly, in Washington. It appears there is Senate consensus that he possesses the relevant experience and requisite expertise to guide the nation’s crisis-response force through the next four years. At his confirmation hearing in June, lawmakers from both political parties praised his experience — with Tuberville saying a few weeks later that he has “a great deal of admiration” for the general and that there was “little doubt” about his suitability for the post.

Yet for the foreseeable future, Smith — along with the incoming heads of the Army, Navy and, soon, the Air Force — will do his job with the limited authority of an acting administrator — marking the first time in more than a century that the Marines have been without a Senate-confirmed service chief. Smith is barred even from moving into the Home of the Commandants, a historic D.C. residence occupied by the Corps’ top officer since the 1800s.

This portrait of the Marines’ prospective leader is based on interviews with Smith and a dozen current and former Marines. Though colleagues see him as highly qualified, some worry that the longer Tuberville’s gambit continues, the more challenging it will be for Smith to reorient the service and prepare the force for America’s next major conflict.

“It’s only been a couple of months. Can he deal with that? Sure. But how much longer?” said Robert Neller, a retired general who served as the top Marine from 2015 to 2019. “At some point, he has to put his stamp on the organization as commandant.”

‘Waiting is not an option’

Tuberville has said he’ll lift his hold on Biden’s nominations, imposed in February, only after the Pentagon rescinds its policy of reimbursing travel costs for military personnel who cannot obtain an abortion in the state where they are stationed. Administration officials enacted the program after last year’s Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that had protected for nearly 50 years a constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy.

Service members, defense officials say, do not choose where they serve and deserve access to reproductive care. Tuberville’s view is that federal money should not be used to pay for any expense affiliated with abortion. Neither side has budged.

Smith has tread carefully in his public statements about the controversy, telling lawmakers in June that the promotions hold “compromises our ability to be most ready,” thus endangering national security.

He has sought to reassure Marines that the political gridlock will not upend the service, though. During a wide-ranging discussion at the Pentagon, he insisted that plans for modernization will proceed apace.

“There’s no issue,” Smith said, “with that acceleration at all.”

Privately, though, service officials acknowledge that challenges and concerns are beginning to mount. For instance, Tuberville’s hold also has frozen the nominations of Smith’s prospective replacement as assistant commandant, Lt. Gen. Christopher Mahoney, and 16 other senior officers slated for roles either overseeing tens of thousands of troops or setting and directing policy.

One Marine official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal conversations, said that while lower-ranking generals will hold some of those positions on an interim basis, there’s growing apprehension about how effective they can be over the long term, and what the ramifications for unit readiness and troop discipline may be.

Smith addressed the situation in a letter to all Marines on Aug. 1, writing that, while he cannot predict how long the impasse will last, “waiting is not an option.”

Smith wrote that despite the tumult, he intends to press ahead with the controversial force-structure overhaul that began under Gen. David H. Berger, who retired as commandant in July. He offered few specifics, leaving the letter “intentionally broad” so that a confirmed service chief has room to impart guidance.

Smith has played a central role in the effort, which has culled the service’s fleet of battle tanks and much of its artillery while researching new ways to deter Chinese aspirations in the Pacific. The concept calls for sharpening the Marines’ ability to launch long-range missiles from ships or islands and then move quickly to avoid counterattack.

The concept has proved divisive, with some retired generals arguing that it has gutted the service’s ability to conduct other core missions, including intense combat with a powerful adversary — as U.S. leaders are watching unfold now with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Smith has defended the shake-up, saying the Pentagon must, above all, prepare to face down its chief military competitor, China. But he also has left open the possibility that some changes made so far could be reconsidered.

Smith told The Washington Post that, already, officials have revised one proposal calling for the Marines’ standard infantry battalion to shrink from 896 to 735 personnel, an attempt to make the units more nimble. The service now thinks 811 troops is the right size, Smith said, and could revise the figure again.

The prospective commandant also foresees the service scrutinizing lessons from Ukraine, noting that in a “fairly stalemated war,” the range of artillery matters a great deal and that troops who fail to hide their radio communications will come under fire.

Another priority that awaits: There is a dwindling number of warships to move troops at sea. For years, the Marine Corps said it needed 38, but the Navy has shrunk that number over time. The Marines now say they need at least 31, but the Navy has signaled it could cut even more. It’s a significant concern, officials say, citing the scramble in April when the United States moved to evacuate its embassy in Sudan but had no Marines at sea nearby to assist.

Smith, as a three-star general, worked closely on the issue with his Navy counterpart, Vice Adm. James Kilby, whose nomination to become the Navy’s next No. 2 officer also is ensnared in Tuberville’s hold. The two are friends who even go fly-fishing together, but Kilby’s recommendation was to shed three more amphibious ships and apply the financial savings to other missions.

Kilby, in a phone interview, said that while he and Smith have different viewpoints, they want to model civility and collaboration between the services.

“There has never been a time where I said, ‘Am I talking to the real Eric Smith here?’” Kilby said. “The answer is always yes.”

Forging of a 4-star

Smith, a graduate of Texas A&M University, began his 36-year career at the tail end of the Cold War in 1987. His most formative experiences, he said, occurred in Iraq.

In February 2004, he deployed as a staff officer with the 1st Marine Division under the command of then-Maj. Gen. Jim Mattis, who would go on to become a four-star general and, later, serve as President Donald Trump’s defense secretary.

Two months later, on Good Friday, Smith was wounded along with other Marines in an ambush on a vehicle convoy that killed 19-year-old Pfc. Chance Phelps. Smith, shot in the left leg, said that “there was a discussion” about him leaving Iraq to heal, “but I was able to avoid that.” Instead, he stepped into a new role as the No. 2 officer in an infantry regiment that had several thousand Marines spread across Anbar province.

The commander, then-Col. John Toolan, gave Smith oversight of those on the outskirts of Baghdad, with Toolan leading those farther west. “Rather than being an administrator, he really became a combat leader for the other half of the regiment,” said Toolan, who retired in 2016 as a three-star general.

Months later, another tragedy would see Smith briefly take charge of the regiment. On Sept. 14, a 122mm rocket crashed into the office of his new commander, then-Col. Larry Nicholson, at Camp Fallujah, badly wounding Nicholson and killing Smith’s roommate, then-Maj. Kevin Shea. Smith and another officer, then-Lt. Col. David Bellon, had left the office just a few minutes before, Bellon said in an interview.

“It rocked the entire building,” recalled Bellon, now a three-star general in charge of the Marine Reserves. “BA-BOOM!” He and Smith scrambled back to find the room filled with smoke and the furniture pulverized by the hulking rocket’s white-hot engine, Bellon recalled.

Smith left Iraq a few weeks later, after Nicholson’s replacement arrived, and underwent surgery on his wounded leg. But his time home was short-lived. A few months later, in December 2004, he took charge of an infantry unit, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, with plans to take those troops to the city of Ramadi. By early 2005, it had become perhaps the most violent place in all of Iraq.

After their arrival in February 2005, Smith, then 39, decided that he and his security team would respond when groups of Marines within his unit were pinned down and needed help, said retired Sgt. Maj. Charles Blumenberg, who advised Smith during the deployment.

“We were like the quick-react force — and that’s pretty unreal for a commanding officer,” Blumenberg said.

Fatalities and injuries mounted quickly. In all, the battalion lost 16 Marines during the deployment, with 130 more wounded, Smith said. Particularly jarring were the deaths of Capt. James Edge, 31, and Capt. John Maloney, 36, company commanders each overseeing about 200 members of Smith’s 1,000-Marine battalion.

Smith became focused on ensuring his Marines did not retaliate against innocent Iraqi civilians, Blumenberg said.

“The Marines, I think, understood that the fight then was more about who they were as Marines than who the Iraqis may one day become,” Smith said, briefly overcome with emotion while recalling those lost on the deployment. “There were just acts of bravery every day. Every day.”

A decade later, after a combat tour in Afghanistan, Smith became then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s senior military assistant, an opportunity that showed him how the Pentagon’s power centers work together and sometimes compete. He said he appreciated the experience, in part, for helping him to see how to “prevent yourself from digging your heels in on a position — because there are lots of positions.” Carter died unexpectedly late last year.

The only significant known blemish on the general’s record stems from his aggressive attempts to address Marine-on-Marine crimes, including hazing and sexual assault. As a two-star general overseeing thousands of Marines in California, Smith tried to lay down a hard line and pressed to have several troops thrown out of the service. An email he wrote to subordinate commanders complained of “jackassery” among rank-and-file enlisted Marines “who think they are in charge.”

Two military judges found that Smith could not oversee the cases objectively, with one determining it was especially troubling that Smith told fellow officers that Marines involved in hazing had figuratively “flipped the bird” at him and he was angry about it.

Smith, asked about the rulings, declined to comment.

The battles ahead

The Pentagon’s dispute with Tuberville shows no signs of abating, leaving Smith and other affected officers in uncharted territory.

One possibility is that Senate Democrats eventually agree to bring forth the military’s most important nominees to vote on them one-by-one. Tuberville’s hold specifically blocks the Senate from using a process known as unanimous consent to vote on uncontroversial nominees in batches, but lawmakers could vote on nominees individually, a laborious process but one that would at least install new senior leaders.

Smith and other senior leaders have pointed out the potential harm that the senator’s blockade might cause, including, some fear, an exodus of lower-ranking officers who could decide it’s not worth continuing their military service amid the political chaos.

But Smith also has stressed to Marines an imperative: that those in the military must avoid the bitter partisanship gripping much of the country.

“You’re either willing to sacrifice some of your individuality for the privilege of being a Marine,” Smith told The Post, “or you’re not.”

In his office, Smith has two snapshots displayed. One, taken 19 years ago, shows him presenting a posthumous valor award to the 6-year-old son of Maloney, one of the company commanders killed in Ramadi. The second shows Smith with his own two children on a beach in California.

The pictures, Smith said, are there as reminders of what is important. The job of all Marine officers, from the top on down, he said, is to prepare their troops for war by holding them to high standards, even when it is unpopular.

“The dirty little secret to being in command is that if you do it right, it’s not very fun,” he said. “It’s very rewarding. But it’s not very fun.

The Washington Post · by Dan Lamothe · September 4, 2023

5. Resisting Russia: Insights into Ukraine's Civilian-Based Actions During the First Four Months of the War in 2022

Download the 76 page report here:

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RRA2000/RRA2034-1/RAND_RRA2034-1.pdf

Resisting Russia

Insights into Ukraine's Civilian-Based Actions During the First Four Months of the War in 2022

by Marta Kepe, Alyssa Demus

Ukrainian Civilians' Contributions to Resisting Russia

rand.org · by Marta Kepe

The authors examine Ukrainian civilians' contributions to support Ukraine's defense against Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. Civilian-based resistance is integral to Ukraine's territorial defense efforts and has potential value in helping ensure victory by regaining territorial integrity and maintaining political sovereignty. The war in Ukraine also offers insight into potential trends in civilian actions in future wars.

Read Online

Resisting Russia

Insights into Ukraine's Civilian-Based Actions During the First Four Months of the War in 2022

Research Questions

1. What are some of the most relevant civilian-based resistance examples in Ukrainian history?
2. What are the main civilian-based resistance efforts that Ukrainians have engaged in during the first four months of the Russia-Ukraine war (2022–)?
3. What potential future trends with respect to civilian-based activities in defense can be observed based on Ukrainian civilian activities in Ukraine?

The Russia-Ukraine war (2022–) has highlighted the ways in which civilians can support a nation's effort to defend itself against an external occupying power. Although civilian-based resistance began during the first hours of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, most analysis to date has focused on Russian-Ukrainian armed military confrontations. Ukrainian civilian resistance efforts merit attention because of their potential value in helping Ukraine's strategic aims to ensure victory by regaining territorial integrity and maintaining political sovereignty.

The authors of this report offer a broad characterization of Ukrainian approaches to civilian-based resistance during the first four months of the conflict. First, the authors offer a short overview of pertinent historic examples of civilian-based resistance and opposition movements that have paved the way for stronger social mobilization and activism across all segments of Ukrainian society. Second, the authors offer an overview of Ukrainian civilian-based activities through an analytical framework developed by RAND Corporation researchers in 2021 to analyze civilian-based resistance against external occupation. Third, the authors identify indicative future trends in civilian-based resistance against external aggressors.

Key Findings

• Civilian-based activities in Ukraine in February–June 2022 were varied and included numerous actors, from civilian government actors and political leadership to independent enterprises and self-organized volunteer groups.
• Many civilian-based activities were spontaneous and need-based and relied on existing informal networks, while higher-level coordination was more present in civil protection, humanitarian aid, hacker activism, and communication activities.
• The Russia-Ukraine war (2022–) provides a glimpse into what future civilian contributions to wars could look like. Interstate conflict could involve large-scale cyber operations waged by a loose confederation of amateurs and professionals from the occupied country and abroad.
• Civilians might offer meaningful contributions by imposing direct military costs on occupying powers and supporting the defending armed forces or civil society. It is necessary to prepare guidelines for such eventualities to avoid instances in which a sudden surge of civilian volunteers creates chaos, causes friendly fire, or interferes with the strategic objectives of the country.
• The ability to deny an occupier's economic consolidation of the occupied country will increasingly mean protecting not only key economic centers of gravity during the war but also peacetime resilience preparations, including the diversification of energy resources, other product supply chains, and (potentially) export lines.
• Ukraine's history of social and political movements helped build a stronger and more active society, demonstrating the value of understanding civil society movements in different countries.
• In future wars, large companies could increasingly shape the operational aspects of a conflict, as well as its geopolitical and strategic outcomes.

Table of Contents

• Chapter One
• Introduction
• Chapter Two
• Civilian-Based Resistance in Ukraine's History
• Chapter Three
• Civilian-Based Resistance in Ukraine in the First Four Months of the 2022 War
• Chapter Four
• Conclusions

Research conducted by

• RAND National Security Research Division

The research described in this report was prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense and conducted within the International Security and Defense Policy Program of the RAND National Security Research Division (NSRD).

This report is part of the RAND Corporation Research report series. RAND reports present research findings and objective analysis that address the challenges facing the public and private sectors. All RAND reports undergo rigorous peer review to ensure high standards for research quality and objectivity.

This document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law. This representation of RAND intellectual property is provided for noncommercial use only. Unauthorized posting of this publication online is prohibited; linking directly to this product page is encouraged. Permission is required from RAND to reproduce, or reuse in another form, any of its research documents for commercial purposes. For information on reprint and reuse permissions, please visit www.rand.org/pubs/permissions.

The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.

Document Details

• Copyright: RAND Corporation
• Availability: Available
• Print Format: Paperback
• Paperback Pages: 76
• List Price: $16.00
• Paperback Price: $12.80
• Paperback ISBN/EAN: 1-9774-1138-X
• Document Number: RR-A2034-1
• Year: 2023
• Series: Research Reports

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Citation

Format:

• Chicago Manual of Style
• RAND Corporation Style Manual

Kepe, Marta and Alyssa Demus, Resisting Russia: Insights into Ukraine's Civilian-Based Actions During the First Four Months of the War in 2022. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2023. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2034-1.html. Also available in print form.

Kepe, Marta and Alyssa Demus, Resisting Russia: Insights into Ukraine's Civilian-Based Actions During the First Four Months of the War in 2022, RAND Corporation, RR-A2034-1, 2023. As of August 30, 2023: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2034-1.html

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6. Italy Seeks to Leave China’s Belt and Road Initiative—Without Angering Beijing

Will we see more of this? Will other countries leave One Belt One Road?

​(My thesis: China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, and displace democratic institutions.)

Italy Seeks to Leave China’s Belt and Road Initiative—Without Angering Beijing

Rome’s disappointment with infrastructure accord comes as Western skepticism grows about China’s global economic ambitions

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/italy-seeks-to-leave-chinas-belt-and-road-initiativewithout-angering-beijing-a4006e56

By Margherita Stancati

Follow

Sept. 4, 2023 3:10 pm ET

Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said Italy ’didn’t achieve great results with the Belt and Road.’ PHOTO: LAPRESSE / ROBERTO MONALDO/ZUMA PRESS

ROME—Italy is preparing to cancel its controversial membership in China’s Belt and Road infrastructure initiative, engaging in an elaborate diplomatic dance to avoid angering Beijing and triggering retaliation against Italian businesses. 

Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani held talks in Beijing on Sunday and Monday to facilitate as smooth an exit as possible from the initiative while laying the groundwork for alternative economic deals with China. 

“We didn’t achieve great results with the Belt and Road, but that doesn’t matter,” Tajani told reporters in Beijing. “We are determined to move ahead with plans to strengthen our commercial ties.”

The Italian government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has long signaled its discomfort with the Belt and Road memorandum that a previous Rome government signed with Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2019. 

The memorandum marked the first time that a Group of Seven industrialized economy signed on to Xi’s global infrastructure project, and it was seen as a propaganda coup for Xi at a time when Belt and Road was facing criticism within China and in some participating countries. 

Rome’s decision to participate raised eyebrows in Washington and in European Union capitals. Meloni, then in opposition, strongly criticized the decision. The memorandum with China has had few practical consequences and hasn’t led to any major Chinese investments in Italy. Nor has it helped Italian business boost exports to China, an area where Italy lags behind other European economies, such as Germany and France.   

Many Western countries view the initiative as a vehicle for boosting China’s global economic and diplomatic clout. The U.S. and EU are trying to reduce economic dependencies on China in the context of growing geopolitical tensions, heightened by Xi’s close alignment with Russian President Vladimir Putin and the latter’s invasion of Ukraine. 

As the U.S. has stepped up efforts to curb Beijing’s global influence, it has put gentle pressure on Italy to pull out of Belt and Road, including when Meloni visited the White House in July. At the time, Meloni told President Biden she was still assessing her options. 

Italy says it hasn’t yet made a formal decision on whether to cancel its Belt and Road membership. But Rome officials have made little secret of their desire to opt out. The memorandum will automatically renew itself in 2024 unless Italy formally withdraws by late this year. 

Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto recently called the original decision to sign up an “improvised and atrocious” move. The question now, he told newspaper Corriere della Sera, was “how to go back on our steps without harming the relationship.” 

Italy says it wants to boost business ties with China in other ways, including by shifting the focus of cooperation toward a different existing bilateral accord, called the Strategic Partnership agreement. 

“The Strategic Partnership will guide our relationship. It represents an opportunity for our businesses in many sectors, and it will strengthen our exports,” Tajani said after meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, on Monday. “We are betting on economic growth.” 

Meloni has been worried that Beijing could punish Italy for announcing a withdrawal by curbing Italian exports to China, officials in Rome said. 

She is expected to travel to China this fall and wants to resolve the issue by then, the officials said. To secure broad political support for withdrawal, Meloni wants Parliament to vote on it before her trip, these people said. 

However, Italian officials are now becoming more confident that they can navigate their way out of the agreement without a backlash from Beijing.

China has said publicly that it wants Italy to remain a Belt and Road member, but there are also indications that Beijing has accepted Rome’s cancellation as inevitable. A recent article in the Global Times, a Communist Party mouthpiece, said Italy’s departure from the infrastructure initiative “should not be fundamentally detrimental” to bilateral relations.

“We need to use tact, elegance, diplomatic politeness so that we don’t damage the good relationship we have with China,” said a former top Italian official. “We want the same kind of relationship that France or Germany have,” he said, pointing out that Paris and Berlin have more lucrative economic relations with China despite never signing on to Belt and Road. 

Since Italy signed on to the infrastructure project in 2019, its trade deficit with China has further widened. Meanwhile, attitudes in Italy and other parts of Europe have become more critical of China’s ambitions to buy local infrastructure or companies that possess technological know-how. Successive Italian governments have vetoed Chinese investments in strategically sensitive companies. 

Italian officials have carefully avoided making public statements that could embarrass China. The Chinese “want conversations on this topic to happen privately. They are terrified by the prospect that we will make them lose face,” said another Italian official. “These are conversations that have to happen behind closed doors.” 

Write to Margherita Stancati at margherita.stancati@wsj.com

7. Exclusive: China to launch $40 billion state fund to boost chip industry

Exclusive: China to launch $40 billion state fund to boost chip industry

By Julie Zhu, Kevin Huang, Yelin Mo and Roxanne Liu

September 5, 20236:31 AM EDTUpdated 26 min ago

Reuters · by Julie Zhu

HONG KONG/BEIJING, Sept 5 (Reuters) - China is set to launch a new state-backed investment fund that aims to raise about $40 billion for its semiconductor sector, two people familiar with the matter said, as the country ramps up efforts to catch up with the U.S. and other rivals.

It is likely to be the biggest of three funds launched by the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, also known as the Big Fund.

Its target of 300 billion yuan ($41 billion) outdoes similar funds in 2014 and 2019, which according to government reports, raised 138.7 billion yuan and 200 billion yuan respectively.

One main area of investment will be equipment for chip manufacturing, said one of the two people and a third person familiar with the matter.

President Xi Jinping has long stressed the need for China to achieve self-sufficiency in semiconductors. That need has become all the more pressing after Washington imposed a series of export control measures over the last couple of years, citing fears that Beijing could use advanced chips to boost its military capabilities.

In October, the U.S. rolled out a sweeping sanctions package that cut China's access to advanced chipmaking equipment and U.S. allies Japan and the Netherlands have taken similar steps.

The new fund was approved by Chinese authorities in recent months, two of the people said.

China's finance ministry is planning to contribute 60 billion yuan, said one person. Other contributors could not be immediately learned.

All the sources declined to be identified as the discussions were confidential.

The State Council Information Office, which handles media queries on behalf of the government, the finance ministry and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.

The Big Fund also did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

INVESTMENTS TO DATE

The fundraising process will likely take months and it was not immediately clear when the third fund will be launched or if further changes will be made to the plan, said the first two sources.

Backers of the Big Fund's previous two funds include the finance ministry and deep-pocketed state-owned entities such as China Development Bank Capital, China National Tobacco Corporation and China Telecom.

Over the years, the Big Fund has provided financing to China's two biggest chip foundries, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (0981.HK) and Hua Hong Semiconductor (688347.SS), as well as to Yangtze Memory Technologies, a maker of flash memory and a number of smaller companies and funds.

Despite those investments, China's chip industry has struggled to play a leading role in the global supply chain, especially for advanced chips.

INVESTMENT MANAGERS

The Big Fund is considering hiring at least two institutions to invest the new fund's capital, said the three people.

Several senior officials and former officials at SINO-IC Capital, the sole manager for the Big Fund's first two funds, have been under investigation by China's anti-graft authority since 2021.

Even so, SINO-IC Capital is expected to remain one of the managers for the third fund, said two of the people.

SINO-IC Capital did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Chinese officials have also reached out to China Aerospace Investment, the investment arm of state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, to discuss being one of the managers, said two of the people.

China Aerospace Investment did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

($1 = 7.2901 Chinese yuan)

Reporting by Julie Zhu, Kevin Huang, Yelin Mo and Roxanne Liu; Editing by Sumeet Chatterjee and Edwina Gibbs

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Reuters · by Julie Zhu

8. Chinese spy agency suggests that a Biden-Xi meeting hinges on "sincerity"

Does another form of sincere mean to kowtow? Isn't that what the CCP is demanding?

Chinese spy agency suggests that a Biden-Xi meeting hinges on "sincerity"

Reuters · by Liz Lee

BEIJING, Sept 5 (Reuters) - China's top security agency has hinted that any meeting between President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden in San Francisco later this year will depend on the United States "showing sufficient sincerity".

Biden on Sunday expressed disappointment that Xi was not attending an upcoming summit of G20 leaders in India, but added that he was going to "get to see him".

Biden did not elaborate but the next likely opportunity for Biden to hold talks with Xi, as the two countries seek to stabilise troubled relations, is an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in San Francisco in November.

"To truly realise 'from Bali to San Francisco', the United States needs to show enough sincerity", the Ministry of State Security said in a post on Monday on its WeChat social media page.

It was referring to the last meeting between Biden and Xi on the sidelines of a G20 summit on Indonesia's resort island of Bali in November last year. It did not mention the APEC summit in its post.

It is unclear if the ministry, which is China's main intelligence agency, is privy to, or has influence over, Xi's considerations on diplomatic engagements.

This weekend, Premier Li Qiang will lead a delegation to a G20 summit in New Delhi, the Chinese government has announced, all but confirming that Xi would not attend.

The ministry in its post said Biden's administration had adopted a dual-natured strategy towards China, inviting competition with China but also wanting to control the competition.

It said while U.S. officials who visited China recently said there was no intention to curb China's development or "decouple", the U.S. still approved arms sales and provided military financing to Taiwan, and raised issues about Tibet and the South China Sea as well as openly criticising the Chinese economy.

"China will never let its guard down because of a few 'nice words' from the United States ... The various obstacles, containment and suppression by the United States will only make China more courageous and self-reliant," the state security ministry said.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who visited China last week, said the United States did not want to decouple from China but she also said U.S. companies had complained to her that China has become "uninvestible," pointing to fines, raids and other actions that have made it risky to do business in the world's second-largest economy.

China repeated calls for the United States to take more "practical and beneficial actions" to maintain China-U.S. ties after the "uninvestible" comment was reported.

Reporting by Liz Lee; editing by Robert Birsel

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Reuters · by Liz Lee

9. Remind Me Again...What Were We Deterring? Cyber Strategy and Why the United States Needed a Paradigm Shift

Conclusion:

Persistent engagement is a strategic paradigm for cyberspace born out of failure. Deterrence theory proved neither flexible enough nor well adapted to the domain. A new domain called for a new strategy. Rather than prevent cyber-attacks by convincing the attacker the cost is not worth the risk, persistent engagement seeks to prevent cyber-attacks by disabling the attacker’s capacity preemptively. There are fears around the precedents that persistent engagement sets and how those norms may one day be quite damaging. However, these concerns miss the broader nature of the environment and the already emerging norms that called for a response. To be fair, open questions remain. How the role of national sovereignty in cyberspace continues to develop could drastically alter the evolution of persistent engagement. Nonetheless, persistent engagement is a much sounder starting point for American cyber strategy than deterrence.

Remind Me Again...What Were We Deterring? Cyber Strategy and Why the United States Needed a Paradigm Shift

Sam Brown  September 4, 2023

thestrategybridge.org · September 4, 2023

Earlier this year, The Strategy Bridge asked civilian and military students around the world to participate in our seventh annual student writing contest on the subject of strategy.

Now, we are pleased to present an essay selected for Honorable Mention from Sam Brown, a recent graduate from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School.

Since the turn of the century, cyber warfare has developed into a new domain of conflict. Cyber warfare has recently brought new conceptual frameworks to strategic thinking. Persistent engagement, sometimes called active defense or hunt forward, is a new paradigm within the domain. In short, persistent engagement enables American cyber warriors to take a more forward-leaning posture, proactive rather than reactive. This approach has critics, of course. At times, persistent engagement seems to be little more than a thin veneer of justification for aggressive offensive action. Stepping back to a more theoretical level, the question is whether a new paradigm is even necessary. The answer to this question is an unqualified yes.

The primary purpose of this work is to explore why shifting to a new paradigm was so necessary. This will involve a brief historical summary of cyber conflict. Furthermore, an analysis of the deterrence paradigm that came before persistent engagement must be included. Of course, persistent engagement itself must be described. To wrap up, a follow-on question will be discussed. What precedents and norms does persistent engagement set for the international community? How cyberspace is being normed is the main thrust of persistent engagement’s critics. Thus, establishing whether the policy is creating or reacting to its environment is an important distinction.

Cyber Strategy: Origins and Development

Cyberspace originated in the 1970s and 1980s as the American military developed new information technology for communications.[1] Information technology’s interconnected nature enabled a user on one system to affect other systems’ functionality. A malicious actor could potentially cripple an entire communication system. Once information technology became integrated with physical control systems, the ability expanded to remotely causing physical damage. Quick proliferation in the commercial and private worlds meant this vulnerability now threatens everybody. Given information technology’s ubiquity and low cost of entry, the range of potentially malicious actors is quite broad. On the one hand, nation state actors employing national level agencies have a lot to gain from espionage and can apply damaging or destructive cyber actions in a more military-like manner. On another extreme, individuals can wreak havoc for profit or personal ideology. In between, there are plenty of non-state groups active in cyberspace from organized crime to “hacktivist” organizations.

Until recently, the U.S. approach to defending against these threats had been to adapt the deterrence paradigm to cyberspace.[2] Deterrence itself was born out of the advent of nuclear weapons and the early Cold War.[3] Previously, militaries had defended their own civilian population from other, invading militaries. However, between the sheer destructive force of a single nuclear weapon and the advent of long-range strike capability, attackers could entirely bypass an opposing military’s defense to get straight to the civilian population. This necessitated a strategic shift. No longer could the threat of attacks be adequately defended against; rather, they must be deterred from attacking in the first place. The deterrence theory that grew out of this reality placed high value on concepts like credibility and commitment.

When cybersecurity began to arise as a serious issue, the United States was fresh out of the Cold War. Adapting the strategy that had just won the Cold War was natural enough and no paradigmatic alternative was seriously considered. Consequently, American policy makers labored under a number of assumptions. First, establishing American credibility in cyberspace, or the threat of American counterattack, was critical. Additionally, routine statements have been made reiterating the importance of cyberspace to U.S. interests to establish commitment in the domain.[4] In turn, this raised important legal questions. For instance, what constitutes an armed attack in cyberspace? Other problems of deterrence-based thinking, such as escalation risk or the question of how states can adequately signal intentions in an arena with a defining feature of non-attributability, have been embedded in the cyber policy conversation.

The trickle-down policy from this strategic framework struggled. Particularly in the 2010s, the United States was on the receiving end of an increasing volume of malicious cyber behavior that it struggled to deal with effectively. The Shamoon virus, presumably Iranian, nearly wrecked the global economy.[5] The North Korean hack of Sony was less economically damaging, but brought home the threat of state actors targeting American corporations.[6] Individual cyber actors extended the threat down to an even smaller level with increasing ransomware attacks against an array of American targets ranging from private individuals to corporations and government entities.[7] Russian use of cyberspace to meddle in American elections was perhaps the most concerning threat.[8] Throughout this period as well, the Chinese government used cyberespionage to exfiltrate vast amounts of American corporate secrets worth an incalculable sum.[9]

Clearly, the American posture in cyberspace was deterring very little. Many called for a more proactive response.[10] Deterrence theory’s shortcomings have become apparent. At the theoretical level, much like the nuclear weapons that necessitated a paradigmatic shift to deterrence, cyberspace’s unique characteristics shift the strategic environment. The non-attributability of cyber weapons and the defiance of physical location inherent in cyberspace are novel features that undercut the assumptions of deterrence. More practically, low consequence attacks in cyberspace put the United States between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, responding aggressively to such attacks under the deterrence paradigm risks escalation. Is the United States willing to risk war over something like the loss of some of Boeing’s proprietary data? On the other hand, doing nothing undercuts American credibility and commitment in cyberspace. Neither option prevented nor recouped mounting losses.

Describing Persistent Engagement

Around 2018, U.S. Cyber Command approved a new approach, persistent engagement, that many see as a paradigmatic shift away from deterrence.[11] Persistent engagement cuts out an attack as a prerequisite to action. Rather, cyber warriors are authorized to actively search out and take down malicious actors in cyberspace. Because these actions are not physically destructive and cyberspace is so dynamic, such engagements must persist to remain effective. Authorizations only extend to going after an adversary’s ability to conduct cyber-attacks on the United States. Presumably, although offensive measures are taken, the actions remain strictly defensive in objective. Hence we have the term active defense. In addition, teams can be preemptively sent forward beyond the walls of U.S. Cyber Command to help potential targets of cyber-attacks hunt down malicious actors on their own systems, or hunt forward. Viewed in traditional military terms, persistent engagement is offensive action for defensive purposes.

Director of the NSA and Commander of the U.S. Cyber Command Paul Nakasone speaks during a hearing on April 15, 2021 in Washington, D.C., where he suggested that deterrence “is a model that does not comport to cyberspace.“ (Al Drago-Pool/Getty)

The strategy has its critics.[12] Some felt that active defensive measures had already been in use. Persistent engagement was an ex post facto policy justification and opened the floodgates to many more cyber operations. Generally, taking preemptive offensive action is a slippery slope. Although a preemptive offensive does have international legal justification, cyberspace’s non-attributional character makes justifiable proof for it tricky. Currently, cyberspace is viewed as an internationally un-normed environment. As such, persistent engagement risks a classic chess fork problem. Either it can be potentially illegal under international law, or it could establish a precedent that justifies offensive actions by an adversary actor. Furthermore, the institutional logic of authorizing the command responsible for cyber operation to take offensive actions it deems necessary to defense is dubious. Persistent engagement certainly has its flaws.

Nonetheless, persistent engagement was a necessary development and is not completely detached from the realities of cyberspace. There are a couple of factors that lend it weight. The first is the shortcomings of its predecessor. With a deterrence paradigm hamstringing decisionmakers, something new had to be tried.[13] Persistent engagement is that something. We can usefully view it as an experiment rather than a permanent solution. More time will provide more data on its efficacy. This new data can be used to evolve persistent engagement theory. Perhaps deterrence theory could even be amended. Potentially, alternative paradigms could be worked out. Regardless, something needed to break out of the deterrence paradigm while providing some current functionality. For all its flaws, persistent engagement has done that.

Furthermore, persistent engagement is closely aligned at a theoretical level with one of cyberspace’s unique characteristics. Cyberspace warps physical geography to near irrelevance.[14] A skilled cyber operator can jump from system to system, regardless of location or system type. Hypothetically, someone on a laptop in Mongolia could jump from a smart refrigerator in Spain to a cell phone in Costa Rica to an oil pump control in Kuwait with relative ease. This blurs the traditional lines of state sovereignty. It also removes meaningful buffers between a malicious actor and their target; there is no military or police force to fight through or bypass, at least not in the same way as conventional domains. All users of cyberspace are potentially always at risk.

Consequently, it would seem that to adequately protect cyberspace, nothing threatening should be tolerated in cyberspace in the first place. Zero reaction time or warning to malicious acts means that the possibility of attack must be closed off before it materializes. This is the driving idea behind persistent engagement.[15] Threats are neutralized as soon as they are discovered. Obviously, persistent engagement operations will never achieve perfect success. The sheer logistical problem of persistently engaging all threats is impossible. But at least persistent engagement is a framework from which to work. As for the sovereignty problem, persistent engagement does not solve it, but neither is it encumbered by it in the way deterrence-based thinking was. After all, it is the domain itself, not merely the operations, that challenge the sovereignty norm.

This all begs the question of persistent engagement’s results. At this point, we have only had five years of persistent engagement, leaving us with limited and murky data points. Results are mixed and should be analyzed with a healthy dose of skepticism. Chinese corporate espionage has tapered off since its height a decade ago, but this began before the shift to persistent engagement and is probably unrelated.[16] Ransomware attacks continue unabated.[17] Any drop-off in the severity of ransomware attacks could be attributed to the American reiteration of critical infrastructure redlines following the Colonial Pipeline attack; a point that would actually suggest successful application of deterrence theory.[18]

Nonetheless, there may be some reason to hope for the efficacy of persistent engagement. After revelations of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential elections, U.S. Cyber Command was tasked with protecting both the 2020 presidential and 2022 midterm elections.[19] Presumably, their attempt to accomplish this relied heavily on active defense measures. No major interference with either election has cropped up. Persistent engagement’s other large success has been the war in Ukraine. Cyber warfare has not played a major role in the kinetic war despite Russia possessing some of the most advanced cyber warfare capability in the world. U.S. Cyber Command attributes this to the success of their hunt forward units deployed in the lead up to the war.[20] Again, this must be taken skeptically. There are alternative explanations. In both cases, it is very difficult to prove a negative. However, these are cases where persistent engagement seems to have enabled successful, high stakes cyber operations.

Persistent Engagement, International Norms, and Implications

On a larger scale, persistent engagement has yet to be problematic in the international arena. No other countries have taken cyber actions under the justification of persistent engagement. The United States’ closest partners, its adversaries, and even non-aligned cyber powers such as India have not protested persistent engagement’s implementation. American partners stand to benefit from a proactive response. The cyber defense of Ukraine is an excellent demonstration of this. The interests of non-aligned actors in cyberspace have yet to emerge. Adversaries’ seeming acquiescence is at first blush more perplexing. Their endeavors in cyberspace stand to suffer direct setbacks from more active American defense. However, China and Russia may view persistent engagement as falling within their own strategic view of cyberspace. American norming of that framework would make tactical setbacks acceptable.

Russia does not distinguish between information and cyber operations; the latter is a subset of the former.[21] The Russian threat perception is that conflict in this domain has been ongoing for some time. Consequently, persistent engagement’s offensive actions are expected in the Russian paradigm. It validates deeply held Russian views. Legal justifications are largely irrelevant. Chinese interests are a bit more nuanced. While they share Russian doctrine, they do not share Russian paranoia.[22] Rather, they are primarily concerned with protecting their own sovereignty.[23] Controlling discontent at home and foreign perceptions abroad are national security issues for Beijing. They have conducted many operations to this end. Given the Chinese perception of what constitutes a national security threat, persistent engagement’s aggressive defense of American interests is not dissimilar. For both countries, persistent engagement is not an American innovation to be decried, but the United States showing up late to the party.

A Ukrainian army soldier checks her phone after a military sweep in the outskirts of Kyiv, in April 2022. (Rodrigo Abd/AP)

This raises an important endogeneity question. Is persistent engagement an agenda setting or reactionary piece of policy? Most criticism is predicated on persistent engagement setting precedents that will come back to haunt American interests. Will this strategic paradigm be used as justification for future cyber-attacks against the United States? Persistent engagement pushes hard where we should tread lightly with this consideration in the background. However, this train of logic would be completely derailed by the existence of other precedents. From the Chinese and Russian perspective, persistent engagement sets no precedents. So, critics have been asking the wrong questions. Rather than worry about legally justifying attacks against themselves, American strategic thinkers should be wondering if persistent engagement cedes too much to Russian or Chinese interests and paradigms.

China’s vision of cyberspace can be compared to land with clearly defined boundaries and jurisdictions. The key word that routinely appears in Chinese thinking is “sovereignty.” Russia adheres to a similar vision. On the other hand, the United States’ vision of cyberspace is more like the world’s oceans, a global common available to all with an internationalized system of regulations and enforcement. It is in this distinction that persistent engagement risks playing into Chinese or Russian designs. But it will not necessarily do so. The same documents that articulate the persistent engagement paradigm also articulate U.S. commitment to a free and open internet. Nonetheless, by playing at the Chinese and Russian level tactically, the United States needs to avoid following them strategically. Persistent engagement must maintain a globalist outlook when defining the American interests it protects.

Conclusions

Persistent engagement is a strategic paradigm for cyberspace born out of failure. Deterrence theory proved neither flexible enough nor well adapted to the domain. A new domain called for a new strategy. Rather than prevent cyber-attacks by convincing the attacker the cost is not worth the risk, persistent engagement seeks to prevent cyber-attacks by disabling the attacker’s capacity preemptively. There are fears around the precedents that persistent engagement sets and how those norms may one day be quite damaging. However, these concerns miss the broader nature of the environment and the already emerging norms that called for a response. To be fair, open questions remain. How the role of national sovereignty in cyberspace continues to develop could drastically alter the evolution of persistent engagement. Nonetheless, persistent engagement is a much sounder starting point for American cyber strategy than deterrence.

Sam Brown currently serves as a Lieutenant in the United States Navy. He recently graduated with a Master of Arts in Security Studies from the Naval Postgraduate School and is stationed in Manama, Bahrain. This essay reflects his own views and not necessarily those of the Department of the Navy, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

The Strategy Bridge is read, respected, and referenced across the worldwide national security community—in conversation, education, and professional and academic discourse.

Thank you for being a part of The Strategy Bridge community. Together, we can #BuildTheBridge.

Header Image: Marine Corps Forces Cyberspace Command, Fort George Meade, Maryland, 2020 (Staff Sgt Jacob Osborne).

Notes:

[1] Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 2-12.

[2] Angus King et al., United States Cyberspace Solarium Commission Report, (Washington, D.C.: The Cyberspace Solarium Commission, 2020).

[3] Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence, (London: Yale University Press, 2008), 22-79.

[4] Leon Panetta, “Defending the Nation from Cyberattack,” Office of the Secretary of Defense, October 11, 2012, http://www.defense.gov/Speeches/Speech.aspx?SpeechID=1728. This speech by the then Secretary of Defense is a good sampler of this approach.

[5] Chris Kubecka and Jack Rhysider, “EP30: Shamoon,” January 22, 2019, in Darknet Diaries, produced by Darknet Diaries, podcast, MP3 audio, 35:11, https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/30/.

[6] Hewlett-Packard, Profiling an Enigma: The Mystery of North Korea’s Cyber Threat Landscape, HP Security Briefing Episode #16, (HP Security Research, 2014), 3.

[7] Tim Maurer, Cyber Mercenaries: The State, Hackers, and Power, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018): 13-14.

[8] Benjamin Jensen, Brandon Valeriano, and Ryan Maness, “Fancy Bears and Digital Trolls: Cyber Strategy with a Russian Twist,” Journal of Strategic Studies 42, no. 2 (2019): 212-234.

[9] Lyu Jinghua, “What Are China’s Cyber Capabilities and Intentions?,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, April 1, 2019, https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/04/01/what-are-china-s-cyber-capabilities-and-intentions.

[10] Lucas Kello, “Cyber Legalism: Why It Fails and What To Do About It,” Journal of Cybersecurity (2021): 1-15. Again, a good example of the sentiment in the field.

[11] U.S. Cyber Command PAO, “CYBER 101 – Defend Forward and Persistent Engagement,” United States Cyber Command, October 25, 2022, https://www.cybercom.mil/Media/News/Article/3198878/cyber-101-defend-forward-and-persistent-engagement/.

[12] Jason Healey, “Triggering the Forever War, in Cyberspace,” The Cipher Brief, April 1, 2018, https://www.thecipherbrief.com/article/tech/triggering-new-forever-war-cyberspace. Yet again, one sampling.

[13] Michael Fischerkeller and Richard Harknett, “Deterrence Is Not a Credible Strategy for Cyberspace,” Foreign Policy Research Institute (2017): 381-393, https://doi: 10.1016,

[14] Jon Lindsay, “Stuxnet and the Limits of Cyber Warfare,” Security Studies 22, no. 3 (2015): 375-376.

[15] Emily Goldman and Michael Warner, “The Military Instrument in Cyber Strategy,” SAIS Review of International Affairs 41, no. 2 (2021): 56-57.

[16] Brandon Valeriano, et. al., Dyadic Cyber Incident Dataset v 2.0, Harvard Dataverse, September 2017, 2022, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/CQOMYV.

[17] Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 2023), 28.

[18] U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Strategy, (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 2018), 11.

[19] Cyber National Mission Force Public Affairs and NSA Public Affairs, “How U.S. Cyber Command, NSA Are Defending the Midterm Elections: One Team, One Fight,” U.S. Cyber Command, August 25, 2022, https://www.cybercom.mil/Media/News/Article/3139691/how-us-cyber-command-nsa-are-defending-midterms-elections-one-team-one-fight/.

[20] Cyber National Mission Force Public Affairs, “Before the Invasion: Hunt Forward in Ukraine,” U.S. Cyber Command, November 28, 2022, https://www.cybercom.mil/Media/News/Article/3229136/before-the-invasion-hunt-forward-operations-in-ukraine/.

[21] Michael Connell and Sarah Vogler, “Russia’s Approach to Cyber Warfare,” N00014-16-D-5003, (Washington, D.C.: Center for Naval Analyses, 2017), 3-6.

[22] Jinghua, “Chinese Cyber Capabilities and Intentions.”

[23] Michael Kolton, “Interpreting China’s Pursuit of Cyber Sovereignty and Its View on Cyber Deterrence,” The Cyber Defense Review 2, no. 1 (2017): 119-154.

thestrategybridge.org · September 4, 2023

10. Is Ukraine really interested in fighting corruption?

​Conclusion:

The eventual resolution of both stories—whether Mr Kolomoisky will face court and whether Ukraine’s defence ministry can be turned around—will go some way in determining how willing the West is to continue to underpin funding for Ukraine. Mr Nikolov said the renewed focus on corruption could only have a positive effect on crooks in government. “The more eyes you have, the less easy it is to trick.” The price of a military egg is a good indicator of the effectiveness of his work. It’s back down to seven hryvnia.

Is Ukraine really interested in fighting corruption?

Volodymyr Zelensky removes his defence minister and goes after an oligarch

The Economist

Sep 4th 2023 | KYIV

Winston Churchill talked about the bulldogs of Soviet power fighting under the rug, with skeletons tossed aside as a clue to who was out of favour. In modern Ukrainian politics the game is less vicious, though often just as opaque. Yuriy Nikolov, an investigative journalist, likens the practice to a scene in “The Prestige”, a thriller from 2006, in which Michael Caine’s John Cutter explains that the secret of magic is about diverting attention from the trick. “The real game is usually elsewhere,” Mr Nikolov says.

In the space of two days over the weekend, Ukraine has seen two big corruption stories make the news. At face value they show the government wresting back the initiative on reform. On September 3rd President Volodymyr Zelensky said he would replace his defence minister, Oleksii Reznikov (pictured), following months of corruption scandals at his department. A day earlier the SBU, Ukraine’s domestic security service, had detained Ihor Kolomoisky, a controversial oligarch once closely associated with the president, on suspicion of fraud and money-laundering. But there are some questions about the timing and nature of both interventions.

Mr Zelensky focused on his defence minister’s role as a brave and trusted comrade over 550 days of war. But in recognising the need for a change, the president was acknowledging that his record has been tarnished. Mr Reznikov was viewed by many, including Western partners, as a charismatic and resourceful negotiator. He was one of the inner core that stayed in Kyiv throughout the invasion despite the huge dangers. To his detractors, however, he will be remembered for two scandals, involving eggs and winter coats.

Mr Nikolov’s journalism exposed both. In February his investigations revealed that Mr Reznikov’s ministry had been paying 17 hryvnia (46 cents) for eggs when the market price was just five. Mr Reznikov somehow survived that scandal, only to be hit by another in August, which showed his ministry had bought military coats from Turkey, also apparently at a huge markup. Invoices in Turkey showed the coats had a value of $29, rather than the $86 paid by Ukraine.

Government insiders say Mr Reznikov does not appear to have had a direct hand in either of the contracts. He did not appoint the officials who signed the deals. But his poor handling of both scandals, including picking fights with journalists about irrelevant details, made his departure inevitable. “The defence minister had become a focus of jokes,” says a source close to Ukrainian law enforcement. “That’s not a good look at a time of war.”

Ukraine’s parliament was expected to confirm Mr Reznikov’s departure and approve his replacement, Rustem Umerov, in a session on September 4th. Mr Umerov, the chair of Ukraine’s State Property Fund, is something of a dark horse. Behind the scenes, he has played important roles as a negotiator on everything from the grain deal that allowed exports from Ukraine’s blockaded Black Sea ports to the greyer world of arms deals. He is a former investment banker and a prominent member of the Crimean Tatar community.

He was not the first choice for the job. Sources say the other men being considered wanted to install their own teams in the Ministry of Defence—a suggestion that was seen as too radical for a ministry with such a huge part of the state budget. Instead Mr Umerov is seen as a compromise candidate: a loyal administrator, but also respected by some anti-corruption activists. “He is simply not interested in money,” says Yaroslav Zheleznyak, an independent-minded MP and a colleague in the opposition Holos party. “I have high hopes for him.”

Mr Zelensky’s team hopes such qualities will allow them to quell public anger. Recent polling suggests six out of ten Ukrainians believe that corruption is the “main thing” standing in the way of military victory against Russia.

The presidential office also appears to have had an eye on the polls when taking on Mr Kolomoisky. Once one of Ukraine’s most powerful men, the oligarch has been a much diminished figure since the nationalisation of his main banking assets following allegations of serious fraud. Mr Kolomoisky had at one point been close to Mr Zelensky, with the oligarch’s 1+1 TV channel promoting first his comedy and then presidential ambitions, but the two have also slowly fallen out. That has allowed the president to make a graphic public demonstration of his battles against corruption.

The role of the SBU, a service controlled by the president, in taking on Mr Kolomoisky has, however, raised eyebrows. The law-enforcement source says the more independent (and Western-backed) National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) had been planning to issue charges against the oligarch later this week. Some interpret the SBU’s move as an attempt to steal the headlines from NABU—or even less charitably, as an attempt to disrupt the case and allow Mr Kolomoisky to avoid court. Cases prosecuted by the SBU are widely seen as more dependent on political whim. Their management of a case often means the end of it. “We will see over the coming days, and whether NABU is able to issue its own charges,” suggests the source.

The eventual resolution of both stories—whether Mr Kolomoisky will face court and whether Ukraine’s defence ministry can be turned around—will go some way in determining how willing the West is to continue to underpin funding for Ukraine. Mr Nikolov said the renewed focus on corruption could only have a positive effect on crooks in government. “The more eyes you have, the less easy it is to trick.” The price of a military egg is a good indicator of the effectiveness of his work. It’s back down to seven hryvnia. ■

The Economist

11. Opinion | America Is an Empire in Decline. That Doesn’t Mean It Has to Fall.

Was Seattle in 1999 an inflection point?

Excerpts:

In the same way, America’s decline is a product of its success. Although developing countries grew more slowly in the postwar period than their Western counterparts, they still grew. By the end of the century, they had started to convert that expanding economic clout into political and diplomatic power. Not only had they begun to acquire the capacity to negotiate better trade and financial agreements, but they also had a crucial bargaining chip in the form of two resources Western businesses now needed: growing markets and abundant supplies of labor.

One of the earliest signs of this more assertive periphery came at the 1999 World Trade Organization conference in Seattle. A group of developing countries joined forces to halt the proceedings, ending the longstanding practice of a handful of Western allies hammering out a draft agreement for presentation to delegates. Since then, developing countries have gradually reduced their dependence on the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, formed lending institutions and begun experimenting with trading arrangements that lessen their dependence on the dollar.

...

If the United States must confront China, whether militarily or — one hopes — just diplomatically, it will inherit big advantages from its imperial legacy. The country still has sources of power that nobody can seriously rival: a currency that faces no serious threat as the world’s medium of exchange, the deep pools of capital managed on Wall Street, the world’s most powerful military, the soft power wielded by its universities and the vast appeal of its culture. And America can still call upon its friends across the globe. All told, it should be able to marshal its abundant resources to remain the world’s leading power.

To do so, though, America will need to give up trying to restore its past glory through a go-it-alone, America First approach. It was the same impulse that pushed the Roman Empire into the military adventurism that brought about its eventual destruction. The world economy has changed, and the United States will never again be able to dominate the planet as it once did. But the possibility of building a new world out of a coalition of the like-minded is a luxury Rome never had. America, whatever it calls itself, should seize the opportunity.

Opinion | America Is an Empire in Decline. That Doesn’t Mean It Has to Fall.

The New York Times · by John Rapley · September 4, 2023

Guest Essay

America Is an Empire in Decline. That Doesn’t Mean It Has to Fall.

Sept. 4, 2023

Credit...Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

By

Mr. Rapley is the author, with Peter Heather, of “Why Empires Fall: Rome, America and the Future of the West.”

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America likes to think of itself in garlanded terms. The shining city on a hill. The indispensable nation. The land of the free. There’s something to each sobriquet, to be sure. But there’s another phrase, not always so flattering, that also applies to the United States: global empire.

Unlike the other notions, which originated in the birth struggles of the Republic, this one dates to the final stages of World War II. At the famous Bretton Woods Conference, the United States developed an international trading and financial system that functioned in practice as an imperial economy, disproportionately steering the fruits of global growth to the citizens of the West.

Alongside, America created NATO to provide a security umbrella for its allies and organizations such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to forge common policies. Over the second half of the century, this system attained a degree of world domination no previous empire had ever known.

In the past two decades, however, it has sunk into decline. At the turn of the millennium, the Western world accounted for four-fifths of global economic output. Today, that share is down to three-fifths and falling. While Western countries struggle to restore their dynamism, developing countries now have the world’s fastest-growing economies. Through institutions like BRICS and OPEC and encouraged by China, they are converting their growing economic heft into political power.

From this view, it can seem that the United States is following the course of all empires: doomed to decline and eventual fall. America, it’s true, will never again enjoy the degree of global economic and political domination it exercised in the decades after the war. But it can, with the right choices, look forward to a future in which it remains the world’s pre-eminent nation.

To call America an empire is admittedly to court controversy or at least confusion. After all, the United States claims dominion over no countries and even prodded its allies to renounce their colonies. But there’s an illuminating precedent for the kind of imperial project the United States forged after the war: the Roman Empire.

By the fourth century, that empire had evolved from a conquest state into one where the Eternal City remained a spiritual center but actual power was shared across the provinces, with two centers of imperial authority: one in the east and another in the west. In return for collecting taxes, provincial landholding elites enjoyed the protection of the legions, their loyalty to the empire cemented by a real share in its benefits and what the historian Peter Heather calls a unifying culture of Latin, towns and togas.

Like modern America, Rome attained a degree of supremacy unprecedented in its day. But the paradox of great imperial systems is that they often sow the seeds of their own downfall. As Rome grew rich and powerful from the economic exploitation of its peripheries, it inadvertently spurred the development of territories beyond its European frontiers. In time, the larger and politically more coherent confederations that emerged acquired the ability to parry — and eventually roll back — imperial domination.

In the same way, America’s decline is a product of its success. Although developing countries grew more slowly in the postwar period than their Western counterparts, they still grew. By the end of the century, they had started to convert that expanding economic clout into political and diplomatic power. Not only had they begun to acquire the capacity to negotiate better trade and financial agreements, but they also had a crucial bargaining chip in the form of two resources Western businesses now needed: growing markets and abundant supplies of labor.

One of the earliest signs of this more assertive periphery came at the 1999 World Trade Organization conference in Seattle. A group of developing countries joined forces to halt the proceedings, ending the longstanding practice of a handful of Western allies hammering out a draft agreement for presentation to delegates. Since then, developing countries have gradually reduced their dependence on the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, formed lending institutions and begun experimenting with trading arrangements that lessen their dependence on the dollar.

Rome, the story goes, was toppled by so-called barbarian invasions. The truth is more complex. Within a single chaotic generation on either side of the year 400, several confederations crossed into the western half of the empire. On Roman soil, these immigrants then formed themselves into still larger alliances — like the Visigoths and Vandals — that were too powerful for the empire to defeat.

Some commentators have been quick to see modern migration into the West as an equally destructive force. But that’s the wrong lesson to take from Roman history. Its economy was primarily agricultural and steady. If one power rose, another had to fall, since you could not simply expand the resource base to support both. When Rome proved unable to defeat the new contenders, it lost a source of taxes from which it could not recover.

Today’s situation is completely different. Thanks to technological change, economic growth is no longer a zero-sum game, possible in one place but not another. Although Western countries no longer dominate manufacturing and services, they still retain an edge in knowledge-intensive industries like artificial intelligence and pharmaceuticals or where they’ve built brand value, such as in luxury goods, sports and entertainment. Economic growth — even if more slowly than in the periphery — can continue in the West.

But it will require workers. Given that Western societies, with declining birthrates and aging populations, aren’t producing enough workers, they will have to come from the global periphery — both those who immigrate to the West and the many more who stay at home to work in businesses serving Western supply chains. Migration may have eroded the Roman Empire’s wealth. Now it’s what stands between the West and absolute economic decline.

Other parallels with Roman history are more direct. The eastern half of the Roman Empire rode out the collapse of the west in the fifth century and was even able to establish a hegemonic position over the new kingdoms in its lost western territories. This situation could have survived indefinitely had the empire not expended vital resources, starting in the late sixth century, in an unnecessary conflict with its bitter Persian rival. Imperial hubris drove it into a series of wars that, after two generations of conflict, left both empires vulnerable to a challenge that would overwhelm them both in just a few decades: a newly united Arab world.

For America, it’s a cautionary tale. In responding to the inevitability of China’s rise, the United States needs to ask itself which threats are existential and which are merely uncomfortable. There are pressing dangers facing both the West and China, such as disease and climate change, that will devastate all humanity unless nations tackle them together. As for China’s growing militarization and belligerence, the United States must consider whether it’s really facing Thucydides’ trap of a rising power or simply a country defending its widening interests.

If the United States must confront China, whether militarily or — one hopes — just diplomatically, it will inherit big advantages from its imperial legacy. The country still has sources of power that nobody can seriously rival: a currency that faces no serious threat as the world’s medium of exchange, the deep pools of capital managed on Wall Street, the world’s most powerful military, the soft power wielded by its universities and the vast appeal of its culture. And America can still call upon its friends across the globe. All told, it should be able to marshal its abundant resources to remain the world’s leading power.

To do so, though, America will need to give up trying to restore its past glory through a go-it-alone, America First approach. It was the same impulse that pushed the Roman Empire into the military adventurism that brought about its eventual destruction. The world economy has changed, and the United States will never again be able to dominate the planet as it once did. But the possibility of building a new world out of a coalition of the like-minded is a luxury Rome never had. America, whatever it calls itself, should seize the opportunity.

John Rapley (@jarapley) is a political economist at the University of Cambridge and the author, with Peter Heather, of “Why Empires Fall: Rome, America and the Future of the West.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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The New York Times · by John Rapley · September 4, 2023

12. Lack of Will: How the All-Volunteer Force Conditioned the American Public

Excerpts:

The Government, the Military, and the People

Since the return to the AVF, American citizens have become increasingly divorced from the business, the sacrifice, and the effects of war-making. However, this unhealthy social dynamic is not their fault, but the product of fifty years of conditioning to rely on the AVF. Indicators of the widening gulf between the military and the people abound and are not trending positively. In addition to 2022’s dismal recruiting results, public trust and confidence in the military have fallen sharply from 70 percent in 2017 to 48 percent in 2022.64 Likewise, fewer Americans are choosing to serve, and since 1973, the percent of the population on active duty has halved, from 1 percent to less than 0.5 percent.65 Effectively neutralizing one-third of Clausewitz’s renowned trinity, the government and the military have been left to fight the Nation’s wars without the people. This model has conditioned the American public to eschew military service for five decades, leaving the United States at a severe disadvantage when it comes time to rally for the next big war. No matter how well trained and equipped they may be, 0.5 percent of the Nation is a woeful representation of national will. While the populace would likely answer the call to arms for an attack on the United States, it is doubtful they will do so for an attack on the Penghu, Senkaku, or Kinmen islands—all potential flash points in the next war. This leaves the AVF in a precarious situation as it prepares for wars it lacks the influence to prevent and may not have the will to win.

Colored by the lessons of Vietnam, both the Abrams and Weinberger Doctrines sought to preserve the vital link between the people and the military by ensuring the former maintained “skin in the game” and the latter was not abused in wars of want. Adhering to these, it was assumed, would confirm the strength of will at home necessary to win abroad. With the George H. W. Bush administration applying both doctrines during Operation Desert Storm, the AVF’s stunning success appeared to validate it as the optimal manning construct. In reality, the AVF was a victim of its own success, and the message received was that the American populace could stay home as its military could win without them. Thereafter, the AVF fit nicely in that brief period of American hegemony that prompted Francis Fukuyama to coin the “end of history.”66 Without a peer threat on the horizon, surely the AVF was up to the task of deposing formerly third-world despots and hunting terrorists. Unfortunately, the George W. Bush administration’s neglect of the Weinberger Doctrine in 2003 left the AVF to prosecute a messy, protracted counterinsurgency under dubious pretense in pursuit of vague objectives. The Pentagon, struggling to meet personnel requirements, relied on the Stop Loss program to involuntarily extend volunteer soldiers, thereby shielding the public from the effects of war. Going a step further, the administration’s general messaging after the events of 9/11 encouraged its citizens to vacation, shop, and dine; gone were tax increases, victory gardens, or any other vestige of sacrifice. Although conceptually admirable, the Abrams Doctrine overestimated the Reserve Component’s ability to affect popular will and it was unable to prevent the fiasco in Iraq. All of this has resulted in a very sick trinity and a Nation ill-prepared to prosecute the protracted, expeditionary campaigns it is likely to face in the future. Adjusting course requires reconditioning the American people to recognize service as an obligatory part of citizenship through the creation of a blended force of conscripts and volunteers sized to meet annual requirements. The Nation’s adversaries all recognize the importance of their populace in waging war, it’s time the United States does the same.

Lack of Will

How the All-Volunteer Force Conditioned the American Public

Maj. Christopher J. Parker, U.S. Army

https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/September-October-2023/Lack-of-Will/

Download the PDF 

Recruits recite the Oath of Enlistment 27 March 2022 in Miami. (Photo by Lara Poirrier, U.S. Army)

Woe to the government, which, relying on half-hearted politics and a shackled military policy, meets a foe who, like the untamed element, knows no law other than his own power!

—Carl von Clausewitz, On War

Fiscal year (FY) 2022 marked the U.S. Army’s worst recruiting year since the inception of the all-volunteer force (AVF) in 1973.1 The Army missed its target of sixty thousand recruits by nearly fifteen thousand, leading to a reduction in end strength of twenty-one thousand over the previous year and prompting Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth to suggest the need for Reservists or National Guard members to fill active-duty billets.2 This was despite the Army spending nearly 38 percent of its FY22 budget—roughly $66 billion—on personnel.3 It also comes only three years after the creation of the Office of the Chief Army Enterprise Marketing, a centralized office charged with coordinating the Army’s national marketing and advertising strategy to support the recruiting requirements of an AVF.4 Since then, the Army has continued to invest heavily in recruiting, retention, and marketing, with an FY24 budget request that includes approximately $390 million for marketing and advertising and $290 million for recruiting, including the largest bonus ever offered to initial recruits—$50,000.5 While the AVF’s high cost is well documented and oft-debated, what is less discussed is what this price tag purchases and what effect it has on the Nation’s ability to wage war.

Studying the AVF in this context helps determine whether this method of manning an Army—inducement by bounty—is suitable for delivering a combat-credible force to backstop the National Defense Strategy. Both the National Defense Strategy and National Military Strategy make clear, should integrated deterrence fail, the U.S. military must be able to fight and win against a peer adversary.6 In other words, the Army must be able to prevail in large-scale combat. As FY22 demonstrates, if the relatively lucrative incentives tied to volunteerism are unable to meet defense requirements during peace, will they suffice in war? And not just any war, but a high-intensity, protracted fight with a technologically capable and potentially larger foe. If not, what does this indicate about the relationship between the military and society, and what does it mean for the Nation’s ability to prosecute large wars?

The answers to these questions reveal that despite its investment in personnel, fifty years of the AVF has conditioned much of the American public to eschew military service while simultaneously enabling wars of want that have, in turn, only reinforced public skepticism about military service. In essence, the all-volunteer manning construct purchased a small but professional force in exchange for public acquiescence to its use abroad. Over time this began to sever society’s relationship with its military, and it had a significant impact on determining when and to what extent the Nation can wage war. By abandoning mandatory service, the AVF dismantled the executive branch’s ability to directly tap the Nation’s populace—a critical resource, or means, for war—under the assumption that a combination of incentives and national will, or ethos, would draw enough recruits to fill the ranks when needed. However, by conditioning the American public into believing that its military did not need it, and that wars are often fought under dubious pretense in pursuit of peripheral interests, the AVF stifled the very will needed to tap back into the means it required. This effectively eliminated the American populace from the decision calculus around when to go to war and its contribution to war prosecution.

As history, strategic theory, and contemporary events all show, big wars are a test of total means and strength of will.7 The AVF’s principal shortcoming, its tendency to separate the populace from the military, makes it a largely unsuitable and historically unproven vehicle for massing the strength of will necessary to prosecute large wars. While it may prove tenable for manning an Army tasked with conducting protracted limited contingency operations such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq or for the ever-elusive short and decisive war, its propensity to sideline the populace means it lacks the depth necessary for large-scale, expeditionary combat against a peer.8 The policymakers charged with developing the AVF recognized this shortcoming, and two early safeguards built in and around it were designed to maintain the connective tissue between society and its military to prevent the national apathy that could result from its misuse abroad: the Abrams and Weinberger Doctrines. As such, these doctrines provide a framework for assessing how the AVF’s employment can affect the public’s perception of it and the public’s relationship with it. Both doctrines recognized the centrality of popular will, or what Carl von Clausewitz termed “primordial violence, hatred, and enmity,” in determining the scope and character of conflict, and each recognized the risk that an AVF might become divorced from it.9 Because of this, they sought to keep warfighting a “national” affair by ensuring buy-in at home and preventing the AVF from being wantonly dispatched abroad. Using these doctrines to examine how the AVF was employed during both Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom makes it possible to understand how these very different wars conditioned the public to avoid military service.

Creighton Abrams and the All-Volunteer Cold War Army

Born out of popular discontent with the Vietnam War, Congress approved a bill that ended the draft and transitioned the military to an AVF in September 1971.10 This decision was not without debate, and only after invoking cloture was a slight majority able to stymie an attempted filibuster and pass the contested legislation.11 Nor was it unanimously approved by President Richard Nixon’s inner circle. Gen. Lewis Hershey, the advisor to the president on manpower mobilization, pled with him to veto the initiative, stating, “The presumption that the national security can be maintained by armed forces provided by added pay incentives is based on hopes that have not been sustained by the history of the United States … The message gives encouragement to those who desire to be relieved from obligations of military service.”12 Despite these objections, Nixon signed the bill, and Public Law 92-129 went into effect on 28 September 1971.13 After an extension clause enabled transition, the program that yielded an uninterrupted supply of personnel for the Cold War military since 1948 officially ended on 1 July 1973.

While significant, the transition to an AVF at the close of the Vietnam War was more of the norm than an exception. Throughout most of its history, America has relied on a volunteer force to man its peacetime military, swelling the ranks through conscription for war and downsizing shortly thereafter.14 However, much like today, the United States did not emerge from Vietnam as the sole superpower in a peaceful world. Instead, the threat posed by the Soviet Union dominated force development and design. Internalizing lessons from Vietnam, those charged with developing an AVF that could counter a peer threat recognized the importance of national will in harnessing the support required for a big fight while also acknowledging its perceived ability to keep the Nation out of unnecessary entanglements. Under the doctrine that bears his name, Gen. Creighton Abrams, then chief of staff of the Army, devised one such mechanism to maintain the vital relationship between America and its Army.

At its core, the Abrams Doctrine sought to keep society vested in its Army by filling the void left by the draft with the Reserve and National Guard.15 It placed critical supporting units and enablers—engineers, transportation, maintenance, supply, and others—in the Reserve so that combat units could not deploy en masse without them. This inextricably linked the Reserve and Active Components in a mutually dependent relationship; a relationship then Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, and later James Schlesinger, would further refine into the Total Force Concept.16 Abrams meant the doctrine to correct President Lyndon Johnson’s contentious decision to fight the Vietnam War without mobilizing the National Guard or Reserve. Johnson refused to call up the Reserve Component in a desperate attempt to keep the affair in Southeast Asia from interfering with his Great Society efforts at home.17 Abrams wanted to correct this by making it increasingly difficult for future presidents to commit forces abroad without tapping into citizen-soldiers at home. “They’re not taking us to war again without calling up the Reserves,” he declared.18 The intended effect was twofold.

Gen. Creighton Williams Abrams Jr. (right), commander of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, attaches a campaign streamer to a unit flag during a 3 January 1970 ceremony in Vietnam. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Army)

First, Abrams aimed to use the mobilization time required for Reserve deployments to give the National Command Authority (NCA) the space necessary to assess the character of the conflict they were about to undertake and to garner the popular support required to successfully prosecute it.19 In this regard, it became a de facto check on the president’s ability to deploy the volunteer force prematurely without prudent assessment or adequate national will. Second, it endeavored to maintain the representative quality of a conscript force by tying the AVF to the populace through National Guard and Reserve units woven throughout towns and cities across the country.20 Gen. John Vessey, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recalled Abrams’s aversion to building an insular volunteer force: “Let’s not build an Army off here in the corner someplace. The armed forces are an expression of the nation. If you take them out of the national context, you are likely to screw them up.”21 This latter intention, making the AVF representative of the American people, made the Abrams Doctrine an important component of the AVF. By reaching out and touching a vast cross-section of the Nation anytime the Army marched off to war, the doctrine sought to ensure the American public maintained literal skin in the game. Local economies, families, and every congressional district would have a very real interest in the goings-on of the American military abroad. In this capacity, the doctrine recognized the relationship between strength of will and national sacrifice, using willingness for the latter to measure the former. On the one hand, public support would indicate the strength of will necessary to prevail in a large fight or, on the other, public outcry would prevent the Nation from entering conflicts it lacked the will to win. While the doctrine ultimately failed, it tried to bridge the ever-widening gap between America and its volunteer military, ensuring the public understood that war meant sacrifice and that their willingness to do so would directly influence when and where the Nation went to war.

Col. Bruce Fister (right), commander of the 435th Tactical Air Wing, bids farewell to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger after his visit on 28 March 1986 to Rhein-Main Air Base, West Germany. (Photo courtesy of the National Archives)

By 1989, on the eve of its first real test, roughly 89 percent of the Army’s maintenance companies, 90 percent of its supply companies, and 67 percent of its combat engineer and transportation units were in the Reserve Component.22 In the largest mobilization since the Korean War, over sixty-two thousand National Guard members and over thirty-five thousand Reservists were called to active duty to help eject Iraq’s military from Kuwait.23 The Abrams Doctrine and the Total Force Concept had effectively transitioned the Reserve Component from a strategic to an operational reserve, delivering on Abrams’s promise to ensure the Nation never again went to war without them. However, between its inception in 1974 and Operation Desert Storm in 1991, another doctrine emerged that sought to inject prudence into national decision-making to preserve public trust and prevent misuse of the AVF. Although both doctrines would appear to pass this first test in Iraq with flying colors, their stunning success had unintended consequences for subsequent decisions about when to use force abroad and the public’s perception of their role in it.

The Weinberger Doctrine and the First Gulf War

When he entered office as secretary of defense in 1981, Caspar Weinberger faced recruiting and retention challenges similar to those staring down the Army today and he worried the AVF was not ready for a showdown with the Soviet Union.24 Initial enlistments and reenlistments were down as was the quality of recruits, with only 60 percent of applicants possessing a high school diploma.25 A strong advocate of President Ronald Reagan’s initiative to significantly increase defense spending, Weinberger channeled substantial funds toward improving compensation and benefits to maintain the relative size of the AVF while improving its quality.26 Between 1981 and 1987 defense spending increased by roughly a third, from $686.6 billion to $959.1 billion (in 2022 dollars), while the number of active duty service members only increased by 91,657.27 This investment in the quality of personnel was accompanied by significant investment in modernization with several new weapons, such as the F-117 Stealth Fighter, the M1 Abrams Tank, and the Patriot Missile Defense System, making their debut. Such investments in modernization and professionalization would rightly give most decision-makers pause about when and where to commit such an expensive force abroad. Weinberger was no different, and with the lessons of Vietnam still fresh, he searched for a framework to help the NCA navigate the minefield of smoldering, potential Cold War conflicts.

A year after a car bomb killed 266 Marines in Beirut, Weinberger outlined his six tests for the commitment of U.S. forces in a 28 November 1984 speech to the National Press Club. Laying out the tenets of the Weinberger Doctrine, he attempted to curb the wanton use of force by arguing the following criteria should be met before sending the AVF to war:

First, the United States should not commit forces to combat overseas unless the particular engagement is deemed vital to our national interest or that of our allies.

Second, if we decide it is necessary to put combat troops into a given situation, we should do so wholeheartedly, and with the clear intention of winning. If we are unwilling to commit the forces or resources necessary to achieve our objectives, we should not commit them at all.

Third, if we do decide to commit forces to combat overseas, we should have clearly defined political and military objectives.

Fourth, the relationship between our objectives and the forces we have committed—their size, composition, and disposition—must be continually reassessed and adjusted if necessary.

Fifth, before the U.S. commits combat forces abroad there must be some reasonable assurance we will have the support of the American people and their elected representatives in Congress.

Sixth, finally, the commitment of U.S. forces to combat should be the last resort.28

Although not official policy, the doctrine sheds light on the perspective of the senior appointed official leading the Department of Defense for over six years, and it had a substantial impact on defense policy and those charged with crafting it for nearly a decade after its introduction.29

Weinberger’s first, second, and fifth tests are paramount to understanding the risks inherent in an AVF, the importance of national will, and the fragile ties between the two. The first test implicitly acknowledges the ease with which the NCA could commit its volunteer force to wars of want without evoking a backlash at home. This was a continual challenge for Weinberger, who frequently found himself battling the National Security Council’s desire for “ever more wild adventures for our troops. The NSC staff’s eagerness to get into a fight somewhere—anywhere—coupled with their apparent lack of concern for the safety of our troops [was appalling].”30 As such, the test meant to prevent an “imperial president” from involving the Nation in conflicts over anything but vital interests, for, if it did, Weinberger reasoned this would degrade willingness to serve to levels similar to those observed during the Vietnam War.31 As historian Andrew Bacevich noted, “Vietnam demolished the notion of military obligation and brought the tradition of the citizen-soldier to the verge of extinction. And it persuaded many that war itself—especially as waged by obtuse American generals doing the bidding of mendacious civilian officials—had become an exercise in futility.”32 Further involvement in conflicts over peripheral or unclear national interests would only erode what little service ethos the populace had left.

Young men registering for military conscription on 5 June 1917 in New York City. (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Weinberger’s second and fifth tests both relate to the importance of national will. The second test, “no half-measures,” pays homage to Clausewitz’s maxim that war is a test of the total means and strength of will. Here, Weinberger emphasizes that if the Nation decides to commit troops to combat, it should be prepared to mobilize all available resources, including the populace and the economy, if necessary. In other words, where the troops go, the Nation follows. In this regard, its similarities with the Abrams Doctrine become more evident. Combat at large should not be considered an economy-of-force operation, as victory often depends on the government’s ability to muster the necessary resources and the population’s willingness to support this mobilization through the sacrifices accompanying it. Anything less risks ceding the strategic advantage to an enemy with greater will from the outset.

Weinberger’s fifth test directly recognizes the importance of national will and popular support in decisions concerning combat abroad. Like the Abrams Doctrine, which sought to indirectly leverage popular buy-in by drawing on National Guard and Reserve units across congressional districts, the Weinberger Doctrine makes an explicit plea to assess this support from the start and gauge changes to it throughout the fight. Joining battle without this support is akin to neutralizing or ignoring the component of Clausewitz’s renowned trinity he considered most revolutionary in his day: the people.33 While an initial assessment of popular support is critical to deciding whether to start or join a conflict, it also rests on the Nation’s leaders to sustain this support throughout the war. In World War II this support was tangible, as leaders urged Americans to support the war in a variety of ways, including by buying bonds, planting a victory garden, carpooling, and contributing to scrap metal drives. In more recent conflicts, such as Operation Desert Storm, civilian sacrifice evolved to symbolism as Americans displayed yellow ribbons and other patriotic regalia in a show of moral support for the troops. Later, after the 11 September 2001 attacks, this imperative was inverted, and Americans were encouraged to behave as though there was no war at all. However, before exploring that unique development, it is important to assess how the Weinberger Doctrine fared during the Persian Gulf War.

While an initial assessment of popular support is critical to deciding whether to start or join a conflict, it also rests on the Nation’s leaders to sustain this support throughout the war.

Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990 provided the first opportunity to see the Abrams and Weinberger Doctrines in action. With the Soviet Union mired in internal disputes and teetering toward dissolution, the George H. W. Bush administration could shift its focus from Europe to the Middle East, where maintaining stability and access to oil were considered vital national interests. Passing the first of Weinberger’s tests, Operation Desert Storm made clear this would be no half-measure as an impressive coalition of over forty nations and nearly five hundred thousand U.S. troops assembled in the region.34 To Weinberger’s fifth test, roughly 57 percent of the American public supported using the military to remove Saddam’s army from Kuwait, with 70 percent having full confidence in victory.35 Although not without debate, Congress too got on board, narrowly passing Public Law 102-1 authorizing the use of force to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation under the auspices of United Nations Resolution 678.36 Guided by four relatively clear, albeit limited, objectives outlined in National Security Directive 54, Responding to Iraqi Aggression in the Gulf, it can reasonably be assessed to have passed Weinberger’s third test.37 Having garnered broad international and domestic support, U.S. forces joined over three hundred thousand members of the multinational coalition and initiated offensive operations on 17 January 1991.38 Meeting nearly all of Weinberger’s prerequisites, it was time to see whether the AVF would deliver in combat.

On the surface, Operation Desert Storm was a stunning success and complete validation of the AVF. Not only did it justify the investments in personnel and weaponry of the 1980s, but it also demonstrated the AVF’s qualitative edge and esprit de corps, routing the Iraqi army in one hundred hours of ground combat. More impressive than its speed was the relative efficiency of this high-tech war, with only 147 U.S. service members killed in action to an estimated twenty-five thousand Iraqis.39 The message was clear: a well-equipped, volunteer force could deliver on national security objectives when those objectives were appropriately scoped and overwhelming force was applied. The American public appreciated this as well, with approval for the use of force against Iraq rising to 80 percent once the coalition offensive was underway, and an additional 90 percent believing U.S. forces were “doing a good job.”40 After the war, American confidence in the military as an institution soared to an impressive 89 percent.41 A collective celebration ensued as the military, its civilian leaders, and the public enjoyed a National Victory Day parade on 8 June 1991 and a traditional ticker tape parade through New York City two days later.42

While an undeniable sense of pride washed over the Nation that summer, it is hard to help but consider the nuanced differences between what each group was celebrating. The military had finally kicked the “Vietnam syndrome” and restored its reputation. The Bush administration had worked hard to align the diplomatic, political, and military instruments of national power to achieve its objectives while avoiding the overreach that often accompanies initial success in war.43 The public, asked only to symbolically support the troops, cheered its volunteer force for demonstrating American military prowess and delivering justice where due. All three groups likely breathed a collective sigh of relief in the confirmation that an AVF, under the right circumstances, could win. Like the cause for celebration, the effect of this realization varied between the groups. For the military, it vindicated the significant force development initiatives and structural reforms that went into the post-Vietnam military. For the political leadership, it increased confidence in the military instrument of power and lowered inhibitions for its use abroad. Finally, for the public, it reinforced the notion that service as choice is an effective model, and reduced the likelihood they would ever be pressed into it. If, as Bacevich argues, the Vietnam War “demolished the notion of military obligation,” then the Persian Gulf War put the first nail in its coffin by demonstrating to the American public that the Nation could fight and win its wars without them.44 In many regards, Operation Desert Storm was the perfect storm, and the AVF emerged from it superficially unscathed because it was employed in accordance with the strict criteria established by the Weinberger Doctrine. However, just over a decade later the AVF would again face Saddam’s army, this time without passing Weinberger’s tests, and this time the result would be much different.

At the Mall: Operation Iraqi Freedom

In 2003, the Nation would once again forgo conscription in favor of calling on the AVF to do its bidding. But aside from sharing this unique feature, the Iraq War of 2003 differed in almost every conceivable way from the Iraq War of 1991. Although it met some of Weinberger’s tests, it failed others, and it directly turned one on its head. This, coupled with the failure of the Abrams Doctrine and the administration’s ability to shield the populace from the war through programs like Stop Loss, undermined society’s trust in the military and had a disastrous effect on how it viewed military service. The resultant conditioning only reinforced the professionalization of America’s warrior class and increased the public’s general aversion to service.

When examining the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the George W. Bush administration clearly saw little value in the Weinberger Doctrine, refusing to be constrained by tests designed to impede the rush to war. Unlike 1991, Iraq had not grievously violated an international norm prior to the U.S. invasion; instead, the administration justified the campaign as a preemptive act to thwart Saddam Hussein from acquiring weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Although based on faulty intelligence, this appeared to be in the Nation’s vital interest, and in the year prior to the invasion, a vast majority of the American public, a staggering 73 percent, supported using force to remove Saddam from power.45 While support fell once events in Iraq began to unravel, at the outset, both Congress and the American people were behind the endeavor. Having initially passed Weinberger’s first and fifth tests, the Bush administration was unable to garner United Nations support and the campaign ultimately failed the doctrine’s sixth test as war with Iraq in 2003 was by no means a last resort. It also failed the third test as the initial reason for removing Saddam—his pursuit of WMD—quickly gave way to much more amorphous objectives regarding the promotion of democracy once WMD were nowhere to be found.46 This shift in pretense seriously damaged public trust; a public that recognized the vital importance of protecting the Nation from attack by WMD but did not place equal import on Iraq’s form of governance. The populace felt betrayed and their sentiment showed as much: by 2007, 67 percent said the war was not going well; and a year later, 54 percent believed the U.S. made the wrong decision to use military force in Iraq, a 38 percent increase in disapproval from 2002.47 Much of this displeasure likely stemmed from being sold a war the administration claimed would require few resources and little effort, a complete dismissal of Weinberger’s second test—“no half measures”—and one that deserves a closer look.

Instead of responsibly mobilizing the Nation for war, the Bush administration made clear that Iraq would be a limited war and senior officials promised it would cost little in the way of blood or treasure. This led to constant back-and-forth negotiations on troop levels between the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), led by Donald Rumsfeld, and the operational planners at U.S. Central Command, who had the support of the service chiefs. In his initial guidance, Rumsfeld advocated a “running-start plan” that called for a paltry commitment of eighteen thousand troops with follow-on forces only deploying when necessary.48 Recognizing the infeasibility of this course of action, U.S. Central Command planners eventually convinced Rumsfeld to accept a different plan and a larger, but still modest, contingent of 222,500 troops—roughly a third of the number used in Operation Desert Storm.49 This did not sit well with Gen. Eric Shinseki, then chief of staff of the Army, who remarked that the OSD had “constipated the hell out of the process” and greatly stressed the Reserve Component by introducing an unnecessary degree of uncertainty into mobilizations.50 Weeks later, on 25 February 2003, when testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) about the number of troops required to stabilize Iraq, Shinseki was clear that many more would be needed, remarking that “several hundred thousand soldiers are probably … required.”51 For this suggestion, he was publicly lambasted by Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz who called Shinseki’s estimate “wildly off the mark” and “outlandish.”52 Although Shinseki’s retirement that summer had been approved well before his comments to the SASC, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz’s rebuke had a chilling effect across the Department of Defense, and it became clear the administration’s intent was to keep this war as minimally invasive as possible.53 Having stifled most of the dissent regarding troop commitments, the OSD next moved to convince the Nation the war would be fought on the cheap as well.

Approximately a month after Shinseki’s testimony before the SASC, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz testified before the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee regarding the cost of reconstruction in Iraq. In their testimony, both leaders made clear to the American public that it would not bear the cost of reconstruction, not through taxes and certainly not through an outmoded construct like war bonds. Wolfowitz stated, “We’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.”54 Rumsfeld took it a step further with his remarks stating, “I don’t believe the United States has the responsibility for reconstruction … and the funds can come from those various sources I mentioned: frozen assets, oil revenues and a variety of other things …”55 According to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, this new, self-funding war would not require America’s “full-measure,” and they would do all in their power to prevent it from imposing on the public.

The citizenry largely obliged and instead of sacrificing through increased taxes, carpooling, or the like, the Nation went about its business uninterrupted. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the public was told to go to Disney World, and what was once a collective, national burden was placed entirely on the shoulders of the AVF.56 Ironically, in a war heavily influenced by America’s interest in oil, instead of taking measures to reduce this dependency, 2003 and 2004 witnessed the only consecutive, two-year decrease in average fuel efficiency for light trucks since 2000.57 It seemed as though patriotism had been reduced to buying a large, gas-guzzling truck and placing an American flag sticker on the bumper. While able to shield the public from the financial burden of war by shifting the cost to later generations, soldiers cannot be purchased on credit, and as the short, cheap war ground into a protracted insurgency, the administration relied on the Total Force Concept to deliver them.

The newly confirmed Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (right) emphasizes a point as he talks to reporters in the Pentagon on 1 March 2001. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (left) introduced Wolfowitz to reporters during a Pentagon news briefing. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Department of Defense)

The NCA did not shy away from using the Reserve Component to meet the needs of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with over 143,000 National Guard and Reserve troops mobilized by June 2003, it appeared as though Abrams succeeded in ensuring the Nation never again went to war without the Reserves.58 However, if Abrams and the architects of the Total Force Concept intended it to function as a check on the president’s ability to use force abroad, it certainly failed in this regard. As public disapproval with the war grew so too did the number of Reserve Component troops serving in it, with over 250,000 National Guard members serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom, and upward of 183,000 Reservists having deployed to either Iraq or Afghanistan by 2009.59 Although tough, the disruptions caused by National Guard and Reserve mobilizations were not enough to trigger a serious reconsideration of the war; however, the administration’s reliance on a seldom used Cold War personnel policy to make ends meet certainly caught the public’s attention.

When asked what single, Iraq-related issue [the lieutenant colonel] would raise with President George W. Bush if given the chance, the officer responded, ‘We’re at war, America’s at the mall.’

As the Total Force buckled but did not break, the Bush administration kept with their intent to avoid placing any war-related burden on the populace and, instead, leveraged the Stop Loss program to meet the increasing personnel requirements of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Created by the Department of Defense Authorization Act of 1984, Stop Loss enables the president to suspend retirements and separations during periods of national emergency or a presidential call-up of the Reserve Component.60 Under this program, service members assigned to a unit slated for deployment, whose separation is scheduled to occur either during the deployment or within ninety days thereof, are involuntarily extended through the deployment until ninety days after return. Although not its first use, 2001 to 2009 witnessed the greatest application of Stop Loss since 1984, with over 185,000 service members involuntarily extended for deployments to either Iraq or Afghanistan.61 This, in effect, became a “backdoor draft,” where the only citizens compelled to serve were those who had volunteered in the first place. The program wholly shifted the Nation’s wartime burden to the AVF and the public took notice. The program was so prevalent that even Paramount Pictures got into the action with its 2008 film Stop-Loss, chronicling the hardships of Staff Sgt. Brandon King, played by Ryan Phillippe, as he faced an involuntary deployment to Iraq.62 Although fictional, the film reinforced several popular themes that characterized the Iraq war in the public psyche: the objectives were dubious, the deployments were arbitrary and numerous, and the Army was callous and unsympathetic. Outside of movie theaters, the extent to which the administration used the Stop Loss program to confine the hardships of war to the AVF further conditioned the public to believe they had no obligation to serve and were unlikely to be called upon to do so. Not only did this degrade public trust, as it presented the military as not keeping its bargain with service members, but it also widened the chasm between society and the military, a military increasingly exhausted by the frequency of deployments and the administration’s unwillingness to spread the burden. In a candid 2006 interview, a lieutenant colonel deployed to Baghdad summarized both the overwhelming frustration with, and the inherent shortcoming of, the AVF. When asked what single, Iraq-related issue he would raise with President George W. Bush if given the chance, the officer responded, “We’re at war, America’s at the mall.”63

The Government, the Military, and the People

Since the return to the AVF, American citizens have become increasingly divorced from the business, the sacrifice, and the effects of war-making. However, this unhealthy social dynamic is not their fault, but the product of fifty years of conditioning to rely on the AVF. Indicators of the widening gulf between the military and the people abound and are not trending positively. In addition to 2022’s dismal recruiting results, public trust and confidence in the military have fallen sharply from 70 percent in 2017 to 48 percent in 2022.64 Likewise, fewer Americans are choosing to serve, and since 1973, the percent of the population on active duty has halved, from 1 percent to less than 0.5 percent.65 Effectively neutralizing one-third of Clausewitz’s renowned trinity, the government and the military have been left to fight the Nation’s wars without the people. This model has conditioned the American public to eschew military service for five decades, leaving the United States at a severe disadvantage when it comes time to rally for the next big war. No matter how well trained and equipped they may be, 0.5 percent of the Nation is a woeful representation of national will. While the populace would likely answer the call to arms for an attack on the United States, it is doubtful they will do so for an attack on the Penghu, Senkaku, or Kinmen islands—all potential flash points in the next war. This leaves the AVF in a precarious situation as it prepares for wars it lacks the influence to prevent and may not have the will to win.

Colored by the lessons of Vietnam, both the Abrams and Weinberger Doctrines sought to preserve the vital link between the people and the military by ensuring the former maintained “skin in the game” and the latter was not abused in wars of want. Adhering to these, it was assumed, would confirm the strength of will at home necessary to win abroad. With the George H. W. Bush administration applying both doctrines during Operation Desert Storm, the AVF’s stunning success appeared to validate it as the optimal manning construct. In reality, the AVF was a victim of its own success, and the message received was that the American populace could stay home as its military could win without them. Thereafter, the AVF fit nicely in that brief period of American hegemony that prompted Francis Fukuyama to coin the “end of history.”66 Without a peer threat on the horizon, surely the AVF was up to the task of deposing formerly third-world despots and hunting terrorists. Unfortunately, the George W. Bush administration’s neglect of the Weinberger Doctrine in 2003 left the AVF to prosecute a messy, protracted counterinsurgency under dubious pretense in pursuit of vague objectives. The Pentagon, struggling to meet personnel requirements, relied on the Stop Loss program to involuntarily extend volunteer soldiers, thereby shielding the public from the effects of war. Going a step further, the administration’s general messaging after the events of 9/11 encouraged its citizens to vacation, shop, and dine; gone were tax increases, victory gardens, or any other vestige of sacrifice. Although conceptually admirable, the Abrams Doctrine overestimated the Reserve Component’s ability to affect popular will and it was unable to prevent the fiasco in Iraq. All of this has resulted in a very sick trinity and a Nation ill-prepared to prosecute the protracted, expeditionary campaigns it is likely to face in the future. Adjusting course requires reconditioning the American people to recognize service as an obligatory part of citizenship through the creation of a blended force of conscripts and volunteers sized to meet annual requirements. The Nation’s adversaries all recognize the importance of their populace in waging war, it’s time the United States does the same.

The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not reflect the views of the Joint Staff, U.S. Army, or Department of Defense.

Notes

• Epigraph. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 219.

1. “Why Has America’s Army Recruitment Plummeted?,” Economist (website), 29 November 2022, accessed 27 June 2023, https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2022/11/29/why-has-americas-army-recruitment-plummeted.
2. Ibid.; “Army Fiscal Year 2023 Budget Overview,” Army Financial Management and Comptroller, 28 March 2022, accessed 27 June 2023, https://www.asafm.army.mil/Budget-Materials/; “Army Fiscal Year 2024 Budget Overview,” Army Financial Management and Comptroller, accessed 27 June 2023, https://www.asafm.army.mil/Budget-Materials/.
3. “Army Fiscal Year 2023 Budget Overview.”
4. Army Directive 2019-25, Establishment of the Office of the Chief Army Enterprise Marketing (Washington, DC: Headquarters, Department of the Army, 1 August 2019), accessed 27 June 2023, https://armypubs.army.mil/ProductMaps/PubForm/Details.aspx?PUB_ID=1007542.
5. “Army Fiscal Year 2024 Budget Overview”; Jonathan Franklin, “The Army Is Increasing Its Largest Signing Bonus to $50,000 for Some New Recruits,” National Public Radio, 12 January 2022, accessed 27 June 2023, https://www.npr.org/2022/01/12/1072628577/army-increases-bonus-new-recruits.
6. Office of the Secretary of Defense, National Defense Strategy (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense, 2022), accessed 28 June 2023, https://media.defense.gov/2022/Oct/27/2003103845/-1/-1/1/2022-NATIONAL-DEFENSE-STRATEGY-NPR-MDR.PDF; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Military Strategy (Washington, DC: Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2022), accessed 28 June 2023, https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/NMS%202022%20_%20Signed.pdf.
7. Clausewitz, On War, 77.
8. John Nagl et al., “U.S. Army War College Integrated Lessons Learned from the Russo-Ukraine War” (panel presentation, United States Army War College Strategic Landpower Symposium, Carlisle Barracks, PA, 9–11 May 2023), accessed 27 June 2023, https://csl.armywarcollege.edu/landpower/default.aspx.
9. Clausewitz, On War, 89.
10. David E. Rosenbaum, “Senate Approves Draft Bill, 55-30; President to Sign,” New York Times (website), 22 September 1971, accessed 27 June 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/1971/09/22/archives/senate-approves-draft-bill-5530-president-to-sign-action-in.html.
11. Ibid.
12. Bernard Rostker, I Want You! The Evolution of the All-Volunteer Force (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2006), 92, accessed 27 June 2023, https://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG265.html.
13. Military Selective Service Act of 1967, amendments, Pub. L. No. 92-129, 85 Stat. 348 (1971).
14. Rostker, I Want You!, 25; David R. Segal, Recruiting for Uncle Sam: Citizenship and Military Manpower Policy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989), 31.
15. Lewis Sorley, Thunderbolt: General Creighton Abrams and the Army of His Times (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 363–64.
16. James Jay Carafano, “Total Force Policy and the Abrams Doctrine: Unfulfilled Promise, Uncertain Future,” Foreign Policy Research Institute, 1 February 2005, accessed 27 June 2023, https://www.fpri.org/article/2005/02/total-force-policy-and-the-abrams-doctrine-unfulfilled-promise-uncertain-future/.
17. Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War, 2nd updated ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 39.
18. Sorley, Thunderbolt, 361–62, 364.
19. Harry G. Summers, “The Army after Vietnam,” in Against All Enemies: Interpretations of American Military History from Colonial Times to the Present, ed. Kenneth J. Hagan and William R. Roberts (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 363; Andrew J. Bacevich, Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (New York: Picador, 2014), 106.
20. Sorley, Thunderbolt, 364.
21. Ibid.
22. Martin Binkin, Who Will Fight the Next War? The Changing Face of the American Military (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1993), 109–10.
23. “Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm,” Office of Army Reserve History, accessed 27 June 2023, https://www.usar.army.mil/OurHistory/DesertShield-DesertStorm/; “25th Anniversary: Operation Desert Storm,” National Guard Bureau, accessed 27 June 2023, https://www.nationalguard.mil/Features/2016/Desert-Storm/.
24. “Caspar W. Weinberger,” Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense, accessed 27 June 2023, https://history.defense.gov/Multimedia/Biographies/Article-View/Article/571286/caspar-w-weinberger/.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. “What Is the State of the Military and How Are Us Veterans Faring?,” USA Facts, accessed 27 June 2023, https://usafacts.org/state-of-the-union/defense/.
28. “Excerpts from Address of Weinberger,” New York Times (website), 29 November 1984, accessed 27 June 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/1984/11/29/world/excerpts-from-address-of-weinberger.html; Michael I. Handel, Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought, 3rd rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2001), 310–11.
29. Bacevich, New American Militarism, 51–52.
30. Caspar W. Weinberger, Fighting for Peace: Seven Critical Years in the Pentagon (New York: Warner Books, 1990), 159.
31. Handel, Masters of War, 308–9.
32. Bacevich, New American Militarism, 99.
33. Handel, Masters of War, 318.
34. Shannon Collins, “Desert Storm: A Look Back,” U.S. Department of Defense, 11 January 2019, accessed 27 June 2023, https://www.defense.gov/News/Feature-Stories/story/article/1728715/desert-storm-a-look-back/.
35. William Thomas Allison, The Gulf War, 1990–91 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 89.
36. Ibid., 92–94; Authorization for Use of United States Armed Forces, Pub. L. No. 102-1, 105 Stat. 3 (1991); UN Security Council, Resolution 678, S/RES/678 (29 November 1990).
37. National Security Directive 54, Responding to Iraqi Aggression in the Gulf (Washington, DC: The White House, 15 January 1991), accessed 27 June 2023, https://bush41library.tamu.edu/files/nsd/nsd54.pdf.
38. Allison, The Gulf War, 102.
39. Ibid., 144.
40. Ibid., 153.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., 154.
43. Ibid., 94.
44. Bacevich, New American Militarism, 99.
45. Dexter Filkins, “Colin Powell’s Fateful Moment,” New Yorker (website), 18 October 2021, accessed 27 June 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/colin-powells-fateful-moment; Pew Research Center, Americans Favor Force in Iraq, Somalia, and Sudan (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 22 January 2002), accessed 27 June 2023, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2002/01/22/americans-favor-force-in-iraq-somalia-sudan-and/.
46. Richard Haass, A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), 123, 153–54.
47. Pew Research Center, Americans Favor Force in Iraq, Somalia, and Sudan; “Public Attitudes Toward the War in Iraq: 2003–2008,” Pew Research Center, 19 March 2008, accessed 27 June 2023, https://www.pewresearch.org/2008/03/19/public-attitudes-toward-the-war-in-iraq-20032008/.
48. David E. Johnson et al., The U.S. Army and the Battle for Baghdad: Lessons Learned – And Still to Be Learned (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2019), 23-27, accessed 27 June 2023, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3076.html.
49. Ibid., 27.
50. Ibid., 27–28.
51. Ibid., 33.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. 149 Cong. Rec. S13753 (2003), accessed 27 June 2023, https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/volume-149/issue-157/senate-section/article/S13751-7?r=1097.
55. 149 Cong. Rec. S13754 (2003), accessed 27 June 2023, https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/volume-149/issue-157/senate-section/article/S13751-7?r=1097.
56. George W. Bush, “At O’Hare, President Says ‘Get on Board’” (remarks to airline employees, Chicago, IL, 27 September 2001), accessed 27 June 2023, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010927-1.html.
57. “Average Fuel Efficiency of U.S. Light Duty Vehicles,” Bureau of Transportation Statistics, accessed 27 June 2023, https://www.bts.gov/content/average-fuel-efficiency-us-light-duty-vehicles.
58. Sorley, Thunderbolt, 361–62, 364; Gregory Fontenot, E. J. Degen, and David Tohn, On Point: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2004), 176.
59. John Orrell, “The National Guard’s Contribution: 300,000-Plus Iraq Deployments,” National Guard Bureau, 4 January 2012, accessed 27 June 2023, https://www.nationalguard.mil/News/Article/576180/the-national-guards-contribution-300000-plus-iraq-deployments/; Kathryn Roe Coker, Biannual Army Reserve Historical Summary: 2008/2009, ed. Deborah Foster-King et al. (Fort Bragg, NC: Office of Army Reserve History, 2013), xlvii, accessed 27 June 2023, https://www.usar.army.mil/Portals/98/Documents/historycorner/USARC%202008_2009%20History%20for%20Web.pdf.
60. Charles A. Henning, U.S. Military Stop Loss Program: Key Questions and Answers, Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report No. R40121 (Washington, DC: CRS, 10 July 2009), accessed 27 June 2023, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA503196.
61. Ibid.
62. Stop-Loss, directed by Kimberly Peirce (Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures, 2008), last updated 12 December 2012, accessed 27 June 2023, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0489281/.
63. Greg Kandra, “We’re at War; America’s at the Mall,” CBS News, 8 September 2006, accessed 27 June 2023, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/were-at-war-americas-at-the-mall/.
64. Stew Magnuson, “Annual Poll Shows Low Confidence in Military,” National Defense (website), 18 January 2023, accessed 27 June 2023, https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2023/1/18/annual-poll-shows-low-confidence-in-military.
65. “Demographics of the U.S. Military,” Council on Foreign Relations, last updated 13 July 2020, accessed 27 June 2023, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/demographics-us-military.
66. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), xi.

Maj. Christopher Parker is a U.S. Army strategist serving as strategic planner on the Joint Staff, J-7. He holds a BA from Kansas State University and an MA in history from Georgia Southern University and has served combat tours in Iraq.

13. GOLDWATER RIPPLES: How Defense Reform Made the Fighting Force More Diplomatic

An interesting read. Worthy of reflection and discussion. The Combatant Commanders as proconsuls as Dana Priest pointed out in her 2004 book, The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military

Excerpts:

The architects of Goldwater-Nichols were not trying to make the military an implement for global liberalization when they crafted the legislation. They hoped the military would lead the development of America’s Cold War strategy and that the chairman would be better postured to present military options to civilian officials in a “timely and crisp” manner. But these very reforms designed to make the military more strategically adroit also served as an invitation for the chairman and combatant commanders to play a persistent leadership role in diplomatic affairs. The chairman and the European Command commander began offering defense diplomatic means to policymakers for two reasons. First, Goldwater-Nichols placed them both in a position where they needed to offer policy solutions for nonmilitary problems. And second, there was an urgent demand for such initiatives from the countries in question and their American ambassadors. Powell and Crowe offered up the military element of national power to solve national problems in nonmilitary domains. In so doing, they set the U.S. foreign policy apparatus on a course whereby it has become an accepted feature of the policy landscape that the military can do diplomacy in addition to warfighting.

This system has had its drawbacks. As Gen. David Berger pointed out, the U.S. foreign policy agenda appears to be set in large measure by the regional combatant commands. He worries that the United States should be more concerned with managing “global threats” and “global problems,” while the combatant commands draw too much attention to their specific regions. With the combatant commanders wielding great influence, they may prevent the U.S. foreign policy apparatus from approaching issues transregionally.

Nonetheless, the United States would be wise to tread lightly in de-emphasizing the size and remits of the geographic combatant commands. Committing to a more trans-regional or functional combatant command orientation invites the risk of ceding the hard-won soft power influence vested in existing commands to countries like China, which have added defense diplomacy to their own repertoire. Any rethink of the current configuration should reckon with the fact that other countries want ready diplomatic engagement with the U.S. military. Since the 1980s, meeting this demand has been central to American foreign policy.

GOLDWATER RIPPLES: How Defense Reform Made the Fighting Force More Diplomatic - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by George Greanias · September 5, 2023

In recent years, critics have lamented the “militarization” of American foreign policy, specifically the government’s tendency to favor military solutions for thorny foreign policy issues. All too often, however, this critique focuses narrowly on counter-terrorism and the exigencies of the “Global War on Terror” while ignoring the other equally significant ways the U.S. military has become more enmeshed in the daily conduct of diplomacy. These include a more politically and diplomatically engaged chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, more influential combatant commanders, and strong demand for a more diplomatically useful military from Congress, foreign states, and the American ambassadorial corps.

To understand the accumulation of individual practices and changes that have undergirded America’s contemporary approach to global engagement, it might be more useful to consider the recent history of U.S. “defense diplomacy.” Described as the “velvet gauntlet,” defense diplomacy refers to the use of a broad array of tools, from international military education and training to exchange programs, exercises, and U.S. military sales. Defense diplomacy is popular with partners and allies and has been adapted by U.S. adversaries as an influence-building tool of their own. Defense diplomacy, in short, is a habit of American statecraft. But this habit was not a product of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Rather, its contemporary origins lie, unexpectedly, in the defense reforms of the 1980s.

Three early events were critical in institutionalizing defense diplomacy’s place in American statecraft. First was the reconfiguration of roles and responsibilities of the American national security apparatus caused by the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986. Second was the defense diplomacy that emerged in the late 1980s between Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. William Crowe and his Soviet counterpart, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev. Finally, there was the chairman’s initiative to press the cause of liberalization in the former Eastern Bloc following the dissolution of the Soviet empire.

American foreign policy analysts and practitioners should understand this history. Contemporary debate on the appropriate relationship between the uses of diplomatic and military power should also reckon with the diplomatic repertoires of the American military and the diplomatic expectations of it from partners, allies, and the rest of the American government.

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Goldwater-Nichols and the Reconfiguration of the Chairman’s Office

In 1982, the sitting chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen. David Jones, asked Congress to step in and mandate major reform of the joint system. Jones argued that the chairman was too weak, that the services were too involved in operations, and that the unified commanders did not have unified command authority. His comments and attendant article were explosive. Legislators from both political parties jumped on the reform bandwagon. They reached a clear and (eventually) overwhelming consensus that broad-gauge defense reorganization was necessary to fix the perceived flaws in the military’s institutional structure.

The reformers’ intention matters. Congress hoped to make the nation’s warfighters better at warfighting. Diplomacy and soft power were not their concerns. Instead, they wanted to build a more interoperable and lethal force, one more capable of deterring Soviet adventurism and defeating terrorists. They wanted the military to play a more prominent role in influencing and implementing national strategy. Congressional leaders on the armed services committees thought that if they increased the authority, prestige, and autonomy of the chairman and the regional commanders in chiefs (now called combatant commanders) while simultaneously decreasing the operational influence of the services, that official military advice on matters of national strategy would become both “timely and crisp.”

To do this, Goldwater-Nichols and its related reforms elevated the chairman above the service chiefs, making him the “principal military adviser” to the president. Simultaneously, Congress increased the size of his staff, vastly improved the quality of joint staff officers, provided him a four-star deputy, and gave him his own pot of money to spend on combatant commander initiatives. To empower the combatant commanders, the law made explicit that these unified commands had full, undiluted operational control over their assigned forces and that they also had a direct line of communication to the chairman and the secretary of defense. Together with the elevated chairman, the newly empowered regional commanders were expected to develop and implement American strategy. Goldwater-Nichols created a new requirement for the president to regularly produce a National Security Strategy, and combatant commanders were asked, along with the chairman, to testify before Congress annually on this document. Though their stated intent was to solicit advice from these professionals in the realm of strategy, the hearings often required these military leaders to participate in the construction of foreign policy outside the narrow military domain. These hearings quickly departed from strictly delimited conversations on the security dynamics in their region and veered into topics that seemed the purview of diplomats and politicians.

Though these 1986 reforms are well known, their more obscure second-order effects enjoy less notoriety but played a crucial role in the development of defense diplomacy. First, the arrival of the vice, along with improvements in telecommunications, enabled the chairman to travel more. With the vice minding the store, the chairman was free to stay away from Washington for longer periods of time, knowing that his four-star deputy enjoyed deep continuity on joint issues and would be able to effectively represent joint positions to the White House and interagency community. Additionally, the newly minted vice position enabled a subtle yet significant shift in focus for the assistant chairman. Pre-reform, the three-star assistant chairman of the joint chiefs of staff was the chairman’s primary liaison to the rest of the executive branch and the White House. Post-reform, the newly minted four-star vice could handle many of these duties, especially regular participation in the National Security Council at the deputy level. This new four-star vice thereby freed the three-star assistant chairman to focus almost exclusively on his most important interagency partner: the secretary of state. The assistant chairman became, as Colin Powell recalled, the chairman’s “eyes and ears to that person the chairman had responsibility for providing military advice to but had to be delicate in doing it, and that was the secretary of state.” The assistant began traveling everywhere with the secretary of state post–Goldwater-Nichols, a tradition that has endured. This provided the chairman a window and conduit into the diplomatic realm as well as a prompt to remain engaged with global diplomatic issues even when security concerns were peripheral.

The combined effect of these two developments was a new joint chiefs of staff environment in which the chairman traveled more and longer, the vice could continually keep up with the National Security Council deputies committee demands, and the assistant chairman kept the chairman closely connected to the secretary of state personally.

Okies, Russkies, and Defense Diplomacy’s Contemporary Rise

Shortly after these reforms took hold in 1987, the United States confronted dramatic changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The new Goldwater-Nichols-empowered chairman was incentivized to play a role in not just security policy, but indeed all foreign and military policy. Congress wanted a more strategically assertive chairman, the White House solicited more (and more frequent) military input at both the chairman and vice levels, and the regional commanders had a more effective and direct hotline to Washington. Moreover, the chairman was enabled to play a nimbler role in this vein than he otherwise would have been owing to the first- and second-order effects of the vice chairman’s arrival. Now the principal military adviser charged with timely and crisp advice, the chairman was drawn further into international political developments even when the military aspect was subdued.

It is common to associate the post-reform military with chairmen Colin Powell and John Shalikashvili. In truth, the earliest glimmers of this new diplomatically alive force began under Powell’s predecessor, Navy Adm. (and Cheers star) William Crowe. Chairman Crowe began his first term in 1985 under the ancien joint system. After Goldwater-Nichols passed, the more subtle effects of the legislation were evident in Crowe’s unique initiatives, especially in the way he responded to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s charm offensive. Crowe took it upon himself as chairman to establish a direct dialogue with his Soviet counterpart, Akhromeyev. Crowe conceived of a series of reciprocal defense diplomacy exchanges between the U.S. and Soviet militaries. The secretary of defense was “not enthusiastic” about the idea, and the Department of State was, at best, lukewarm. Crowe remembered that senior career diplomats at State did not want some unsophisticated “Okie” meddling in the delicate and rarified art of international diplomacy.

Given these headwinds, Crowe took the sensible course of not seeking formal approval at all and instead simply notifying the White House of his plans. After hosting the Soviet marshal at the Pentagon in late 1987, Crowe planned a large-scale visit for a Soviet military delegation for the following summer. In July 1988, Crowe provided the Soviet delegation with a nationwide tour de jointness. Though the more well-publicized of these events were muscle-flexing displays like a naval airpower demonstration from the deck of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, the “nonmilitary” elements of the visit were perhaps more important. Crowe took Marshal Akhromeyev to a series of cultural events including a rodeo, a visit to a Native American reservation, and a Chamber of Commerce dinner in San Antonio where members of the American business community feted the short-statured Russian general and thanked him for his commitment to peace. Akhromeyev reciprocated the following year when Crowe and the American military vice service chiefs visited the Soviet Union and spent an extended period behind the Iron Curtain. Just as Akhromeyev was congratulated by American citizens for reducing tensions, Crowe was embraced by a weeping babushka in Stalingrad who was overcome with relief that there would not be a war.

The Crowe-Akhromeyev exchanges continued into the years to come. Crowe established an interagency working group for military-to-military contacts so that the rest of the U.S. foreign policy establishment could help the chairman manage future exchanges. The warm personal relationship these two men developed through the visits proved useful during the tumultuous years that followed. Akhromeyev confided to Crowe that perestroika was unsettling the country and that Russia’s youth seemed to have turned on his generation. He told Crowe that his own daughter wanted him to “shut up and get out of the way” and let Gorbachev’s reforms go through. Crowe reported back to the White House and secretary of defense that the Soviet Union was extraordinarily fragile. These exchanges provided the two influential leaders, and their entourages, keen insights into the military capabilities and intentions of their adversaries as well as unique diplomatic intelligence and contacts.

Goldwater-Nichols was decisive in enabling Crowe to launch this initiative as well as to breathe institutional energy into it. Having a capable vice chairman made it possible for Crowe to leave Washington for so long and to carry out the series of exchanges. Further, his leveled-up joint staff provided the institutional heft required to plan, coordinate, and manage such visits, especially when the rest of the U.S. national security apparatus was apprehensive about the initiative.

Crowe’s diplomatic push was popular with Congress as well. Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1989, the senior senators from both parties went out of their way to congratulate Crowe on his program. Later that year, when General Powell was testifying at his confirmation hearing before the same body, he recognized these exchanges as a signal accomplishment of Crowe’s tenure and one that should be replicated and sustained.

A View to the ’90s

Once the Cold War era came to its sudden close, the U.S. military tiptoed further into the diplomatic realm. Despite sweeping budget cuts, Powell ensured that the military increased its diplomatic role through a large-scale but little-noticed European defense reform initiative known as the Joint Contact Team Program. At its core, this was a liberalization and democratization program designed to prevent communist backsliding within Central and Eastern European militaries. Powell hoped to inculcate foreign military — and civilian — officials with a Western, Huntingtonian conception of civil-military relations. This was a high-demand program from the partner states and the U.S. ambassadorial corps, but it was less attractive to America’s diplomatic leadership in Washington.

This somewhat paradoxical appeal — a diplomatic initiative with a lukewarm commitment from diplomats — is a prime example of defense diplomacy’s awkward position in American strategic culture. The national-level diplomatic community was focused on marquee matters of high policy such as nonproliferation, European security, Somalian turmoil, Yugoslavia’s crackup, and especially Soviet/Russian stability. In this context, they worried about the wisdom of decentralizing diplomacy and inviting other non–State Department actors into the space. Meanwhile, two Goldwater-Nichols institutions — the “new” chairman and combatant commanders — embarked on a new diplomatic odyssey of their own to liberalize former communist militaries.

An easy way to appreciate how Goldwater-Nichols made the development of defense diplomacy possible is to consider the demand and supply dynamics for military engagement at the end of the Cold War. First, the demand. The “Visegrad” states of Central Europe — Poland, Hungary, and the former Czechoslovakia — entered the 1990s electrified by both fear and hope. To manage their uncertainty, these states were desperate for any and all contact with the West. While the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was not ready to integrate them, U.S. European Command and the chairman were. The Joint Contact Team Program was ready with liaison teams, training programs, and institution-building initiatives to make their militaries more culturally Western. Conceived of as an urgent, near-emergency measure by the chairman and the European Command commander, this military-to-military contact program was portrayed as a necessary first step to insure against a “third reverse wave” in democratization and as a good-faith down payment on future NATO membership.

American ambassadors strove mightily to support them but lacked capability. Embassies in the former Eastern Bloc were relatively small and weak, given these countries’ former status as enemies. In Hungary, Ambassador Mark “Robie” Palmer asked the U.S. military to develop ties with the Hungarian military. In Poland, Ambassador Thomas Simons pressured European Command to build what would become the Marshall Center as a diplomatic engagement platform for West and East. In Czechoslovakia, U.S. ambassador and former child star Shirley Temple presided over what remains a large-scale annual pro-American rally whereby the U.S. military’s World War II liberation of Czechoslovakia is celebrated. These and other ambassadors enthusiastically solicited support from European Command to bring as much American military attention to these young democracies as possible.

The suppliers of defense diplomacy during this era were eager to meet this demand. Powell was alarmed — as were most others — by the August 1991 coup attempt in Moscow that hastened the Soviet empire’s collapse. He directed his staff to create a program of military contacts for the “newly independent states” along with a concept paper he could take to the interagency community. His staff turned the product around quickly, and two weeks after the Soviet Union dissolved, the interagency working group on military contacts (the successor to Crowe’s interagency working group) approved Powell’s concept. Powell believed that “all contact was good,” and his policy guidelines reflected this. In practice, the Joint Contact Team Program consisted of a series of combatant command–run engagements on a wide variety of “noncombat” subjects dealing with anything and everything that was not maneuver warfare. American contact teams helped partners write their constitutions, develop a noncommissioned officer corps, build their chaplaincies, manage civilian airspace, liaise with their legislatures, conduct public affairs and more.

Powell initially funded the program with the “initiative fund.” This was a Goldwater-Nichols–inspired tool developed by Congress to further empower both the chairman and the combatant commands. Using this funding stream, relying on his own strategic intuition, and leveraging the forums built by his predecessor (for example, the interagency working group), Powell and European Command launched the Joint Contact Team Program officially in 1992. As Powell described America’s strategy to manage the post–Cold War era, he specifically called out his defense diplomacy initiative. He told reporters:

We are doing democracy activities. … Our forces in Europe that are providing forward presence are spending more and more of their time traveling into the nations of the former Warsaw Pact to teach them, to learn from them, to exchange experiences and to help them understand the role of the armed forces in a democratic system.

The Legacy of Goldwater-Nichols

Since Chairman Powell and European Command launched the Joint Contact Team Program, defense diplomacy has only become more deeply institutionalized. Indeed, the program itself was the direct progenitor of the National Guard’s robust State Partnership Program, which pairs up the troops from individual states with the militaries of partner countries abroad. These programs frequently serve as bridges beyond the military realm, providing platforms for deeper, subnational engagement for businesses and academia as well. Moreover, the NATO Partnership for Peace program followed the Joint Contact Team Program, and the two initiatives shared a common origin, a common logic, and a common hope on behalf of their participants: alliance membership.

The architects of Goldwater-Nichols were not trying to make the military an implement for global liberalization when they crafted the legislation. They hoped the military would lead the development of America’s Cold War strategy and that the chairman would be better postured to present military options to civilian officials in a “timely and crisp” manner. But these very reforms designed to make the military more strategically adroit also served as an invitation for the chairman and combatant commanders to play a persistent leadership role in diplomatic affairs. The chairman and the European Command commander began offering defense diplomatic means to policymakers for two reasons. First, Goldwater-Nichols placed them both in a position where they needed to offer policy solutions for nonmilitary problems. And second, there was an urgent demand for such initiatives from the countries in question and their American ambassadors. Powell and Crowe offered up the military element of national power to solve national problems in nonmilitary domains. In so doing, they set the U.S. foreign policy apparatus on a course whereby it has become an accepted feature of the policy landscape that the military can do diplomacy in addition to warfighting.

This system has had its drawbacks. As Gen. David Berger pointed out, the U.S. foreign policy agenda appears to be set in large measure by the regional combatant commands. He worries that the United States should be more concerned with managing “global threats” and “global problems,” while the combatant commands draw too much attention to their specific regions. With the combatant commanders wielding great influence, they may prevent the U.S. foreign policy apparatus from approaching issues transregionally.

Nonetheless, the United States would be wise to tread lightly in de-emphasizing the size and remits of the geographic combatant commands. Committing to a more trans-regional or functional combatant command orientation invites the risk of ceding the hard-won soft power influence vested in existing commands to countries like China, which have added defense diplomacy to their own repertoire. Any rethink of the current configuration should reckon with the fact that other countries want ready diplomatic engagement with the U.S. military. Since the 1980s, meeting this demand has been central to American foreign policy.

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George Greanias, Ph.D., is a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel currently serving as a professor of strategic intelligence at National Intelligence University. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the positions of any U.S. Government entity.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by George Greanias · September 5, 2023

14. Sneaky War: How to Win the World Without Fighting

"Democratic sneaky war exists." See George Kennan and Pual Smith on Political Warfare (below). We need to embrace it.

Excerpts:

The West, and especially the US, must change how we think about contemporary warfare. We may already be at war with China and Russia and do not know it; this could be by their design. You cannot win if do not even know you are at war, and that’s the strategic logic of sneaky war.The West, and especially the US, must change how we think about contemporary warfare. We may already be at war with China and Russia and do not know it; this could be by their design. You cannot win if do not even know you are at war, and that’s the strategic logic of sneaky war.

...

If you want to know what kind of war Washington thinks we will face, look at what we’re buying. The top weapon systems acquisitions are all designed for conventional war: fighter jets, submarines, aircraft carriers, armored battle vehicles, and so forth. Washington’s military industrial complex insists these weapons can also win unconventional wars, and hence are not a total waste of money. However, they did not win in Iraq or Afghanistan, which were unconventional fights like Vietnam.

It’s all expensive, obsolete war junk, with astounding opportunity costs. The US fights in the past, while our adversaries fight in the present. They use Washington’s low strategic IQ against us, like a martial arts master using their opponent’s weight against them. It is why sneaky war succeeds.

What to do? Not everyone is sleepwalking. Outgoing Marine Commandant Gen. David Berger introduced Force Design 2030, an ambitious plan to update the way Marines fight in the 21st century. Agree or not, innovative thinking is sorely needed among the strategic literati, and Berger deserves credit. Unsurprisingly, traditionalists attacked it like a pillbox on Iwo Jima.

But there’s only one solution — the US needs to get sneaky, as it was during the Cold War. Democratic sneaky war exists, and does not look like the autocratic version. While democracies’ open societies make them vulnerable to sneaky war, they are resilient. Autocracies can easily fight sneaky, but they are brittle. Democratic sneaky war targets this weakness, and a plethora of stratagems can be deployed today. Yes, the approach is controversial. Some may decry sneaky war as dishonorable. But is it somehow better to lose honorably than win dishonorably? Never.

Sneaky War: How to Win the World Without Fighting - Irregular Warfare Initiative

irregularwarfare.org · by Sean McFate · September 5, 2023

China. Russia. Iran. Everywhere you look, there’s talk of war. Some call it the “Thucydides Trap,” while others worry bellicose hotheads will drag us into World War III. People are nervous. Concern over China’s growing belligerence is the one issue that still unites Democrats and Republicans, as hearings over TikTok show. Congress overwhelmingly passed a $858 billion defense budget, the largest in history. It’s one of two major bills last year that received substantial bipartisan support. The other was the CHIPS and Science Act, aimed squarely at China.

But will all that money and concern actually protect us? Everything depends on what we think future wars will look like. Putin got it badly wrong in 2022 and is still paying for it. He assumed Russia could swallow Ukraine in a few days, as did Western pundits. The only thing Russia accomplished was uniting the world against it. We can chuckle at Putin, but are we much better? The last time the US won a big war was 1945 — nearly 80 years ago — despite maintaining the best military in the world. Houston, we have a problem.

The West, and especially the US, must change how we think about contemporary warfare. We may already be at war with China and Russia and do not know it; this could be by their design. You cannot win if do not even know you are at war, and that’s the strategic logic of sneaky war.

Get your sneak on

War is getting sneakier because we live in a hyper-information era, in which information has become more important than firepower. Who cares about the sword if you can manipulate the mind that wields it? Certainly, political warfare is not new, but what’s changed is its power. In the pre-information age, political warfare was ancillary and kinetic power was everything. Now the reverse is true. Back in WWII, you won by blitzkrieging into another country from the outside in with a huge military. That no longer works — remember 2003’s infamous “Mission Accomplished!” moment. Today you win by covertly rupturing a society from the inside out, using the dark arts of sneaky war. Modern communication technology makes that possible. Ubiquitous information has transformed global politics, daily life, and warfare, just as the industrial age did two centuries ago. It has made war sneakier, moving us from the Clausewitzian paradigm of schwerpunkt brute force to a Sun Tzuian one of subterfuge. There are many ways it succeeds; here are three.

First, you can win by waging war but disguising it as peace to your adversaries. How can you mount a defense if you do not even know you are under attack? You cannot, and that’s why China, Russia, and others favor non-military instruments that Americans do not associate with war. Consequently, the US does not react, yet these “non-war” strategies achieve traditional war objectives all the same. Cyberattacks are a favorite, but the arsenal is huge. Russia likes to weaponize refugees, manipulate energy supply, and use mercenaries like the Wagner Group to wage wars in secret. China wages “lawfare” to undermine the US’s rules-based order and has captured Hollywood to make everyone a Manchurian Candidate. (When was the last time you saw a Chinese villain? Answer: Never). Beijing wields the One Belt, One Road initiative like a mob boss to extort countries out of prize possessions. In 2015, Sri Lanka could not pay its debts and surrendered Hambantota, its prize port. That’s like the US forking over Los Angeles port to China. However, American traditionalists do not see the threat here. For them, war only occurs when bullets fly. They may be patriots, but sneaky war exploits their ignorance.

Second, sneaky war is epistemological. In philosophy, epistemology is concerned with truth, and it can be easily weaponized in a hyper-information age. Why invade a country if you can trick them into orchestrating their own downfall? What once was achieved on physical battlefields is now accomplished by diverting attention, casting doubts and mutual suspicions, and sowing disharmony — then letting society eat itself alive.

Here’s how sneaky epistemological warfare works: 1) Find an existing schism in an adversary’s society, such as America’s Red-versus-Blue culture war. 2) Covertly fuel it with inflammatory disinformation, whipping up both sides. 3) Get the popcorn and watch your adversary crumble from within. Stoke civil war, if possible. In 2022, a NBC poll shows 80% of Republicans and Democrats believe the political opposition poses a threat that, if not stopped, will destroy America. More than 40% of Americans think civil war likely within a decade, according to an Economist and YouGov poll. We should expect these numbers to climb as we approach the 2024 presidential election. Partisanship is not new in democracy. But today, unlike in the 1860s, foreign powers exert their own covert influence to widen existing social rifts.

TikTok is another example of epistemological warfare at work. It is the most downloaded app on the planet, with one billion users, 150 million of them in the US — over one-third of Americans. Its parent company, ByteDance, is Chinese and answers to the Communist Party by law. Consequently, the app collects user data like a spy balloon in your phone, and its algorithms amplify divisive messaging and promote criminality, according to the FBI. Few realize there are two TikToks. The Chinese domestic version feeds teens educational videos and patriotic clips, and limits app use to 40 minutes per day. The export version shows anything, and has kids hooked for hours. A recent study found children in the US and UK are three times more likely to choose “social media celebrity” over “astronaut” as a future career aspiration, while the opposite is true in China. Governments around the world have banned TikTok. The US is considering the same, but faces potential First Amendment challenges.

Third, plausible deniability beats firepower in sneaky war. In a hyper-information age, militaries can no longer kill their way out of problems, because smartphones turn everyone everywhere into witnesses, journalists, videographers, and publishers. You can’t hide in the age of media. Massacres and international law violations attract international rubbernecking and unwanted exposure for perpetrators. To avoid accountability, the Putins of the world keep a buffer of plausible deniability between them and their henchmen. If things go badly, they simply disavow everything. Warriors are masked, and black ops are the only type that matter.

To understand the effectiveness of plausible deniability, compare Russia’s two invasions of Ukraine. In 2014, Russia took Crimea not by blitzkrieg but through sneakiness: spetsnaz special forces, “little green men,” Wagner Group mercenaries, and astroturfed separatist militia puppeteered by Moscow. They staged a ghost occupation rather than a traditional military one. Meanwhile, the Internet Research Agency (AKA the “Troll Factory”) spewed disinformation and manufactured the fog of war. While the West is still scratching its head about what’s going on in eastern Ukraine, Crimea was a fait accompli.

In 2022, Russia attempted to blitzkrieg Ukraine in open “traditional” warfare. The unprovoked attack and Ukraine’s spirited defense galvanized the world’s hearts and minds against Russia. Ukrainian flags became ubiquitous, and memes of sympathy flooded the internet: think of the beatification of the Javelin anti-tank missile and images of soldiers on Snake Island flipping the bird to a Russian warship. Zelenskyy refused a US offer to evacuate, saying “I need ammunition, not a ride.” And he got it: F-16s, Patriot Missiles, M1 tanks, cluster munitions, and billions of dollars. NATO resurrected itself over Ukraine, adding two more countries. Putin’s mercenaries marched on Moscow. The last people who attempted it were Hitler and Napoleon. Russia floundered, and the war reached a stalemate.

Sneaky victory is, well, sneaky. Democracies are especially vulnerable to sneaky war because they are open societies, and defensive measures like censorship lead to authoritarianism. It’s win-win for the enemies of democracy. Sneaky war causes the US to corrode from within, so it eventually becomes a first-world country without first-world power, like Italy. China can win by 2049, their self-imposed deadline, and avoid major battle, contrary to Washington’s assumptions. The US did it in the Cold War, and China can do it too. Why does Washington forget this?

Warfare has moved on, but we have not

The US suffers from low strategic IQ, and many defense leaders have acute Ludendorff Syndrome: assuming firepower alone can solve international problems. When you ask Americans “What is war?” they usually describe something called conventional or traditional warfare: a style of combat where states battle other states for destiny using industrial strength militaries like gladiators. Think of World War II and theorists like Clausewitz. It’s a military-centric vision of war, and superior firepower wins the day. There’s just one problem with traditional warfare: No one fights this way anymore. It’s an antiquated form of armed conflict, like battleships in 1940. Until Russia’s failed invasion, the last big traditional wars were in the 1980s. American wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were untraditional. The US lost to vastly inferior forces with low-tech weaponry — the antithesis of traditional warfare theory. Social science data confirms the trendlines: Only 6% of wars since WWII are traditional (see chart). Nothing is less conventional today than a “conventional war.” Yet America remains hypnotized by the concept, something sneaky war exploits.

To show how deeply rooted the conventional war fixation goes, take the Russian war in Ukraine. Most observers believe it’s conventional simply because they see tanks and artillery and associate them with the Battle of the Bulge. Astonishingly, they overlook the conflict’s larger unconventional features: Ukraine’s guerrilla warfare campaign, the Wagner Group mercenary army, Russia’s deliberate bombing of civilians to inflict terror like al-Qaida, and the wily disinformation campaigns waged by both sides. Other than a traditional state-on-state conflict, little about the war is “conventional.”

Then there’s the heart-stopping sticker shock. Budgets are moral documents because they do not lie. Weapon systems built for conventional wars are both obsolete and heinously expensive, yet the US is investing heavily in them. The F-35 fighter jet program, for example, will cost taxpayers $1.7 trillion over its lifespan. That’s about the size of Russia’s 2021 GDP, spent on a single-seat airplane. If the F-35 were a country, it would rank 11th in the world in terms of GDP.

The Navy, too, is buying conventional weapons better suited to a type of war that no longer exists. A Ford-class aircraft carrier costs $13.3 billion per ship, and that’s before you add sailors and aircraft. Imagine it as Spain’s defense budget wrapped up in a hunk of steel. Carriers are worthless today. If a shooting war starts in the Straits of Taiwan, sailors — 5,000 per carrier — know they will be smack-dab in the middle of China’s crosshairs. And they are correct, according to multiple Pentagon wargame simulations. Still, the US bought five of the new aircraft carriers.

If you want to know what kind of war Washington thinks we will face, look at what we’re buying. The top weapon systems acquisitions are all designed for conventional war: fighter jets, submarines, aircraft carriers, armored battle vehicles, and so forth. Washington’s military industrial complex insists these weapons can also win unconventional wars, and hence are not a total waste of money. However, they did not win in Iraq or Afghanistan, which were unconventional fights like Vietnam.

It’s all expensive, obsolete war junk, with astounding opportunity costs. The US fights in the past, while our adversaries fight in the present. They use Washington’s low strategic IQ against us, like a martial arts master using their opponent’s weight against them. It is why sneaky war succeeds.

What to do? Not everyone is sleepwalking. Outgoing Marine Commandant Gen. David Berger introduced Force Design 2030, an ambitious plan to update the way Marines fight in the 21st century. Agree or not, innovative thinking is sorely needed among the strategic literati, and Berger deserves credit. Unsurprisingly, traditionalists attacked it like a pillbox on Iwo Jima.

But there’s only one solution — the US needs to get sneaky, as it was during the Cold War. Democratic sneaky war exists, and does not look like the autocratic version. While democracies’ open societies make them vulnerable to sneaky war, they are resilient. Autocracies can easily fight sneaky, but they are brittle. Democratic sneaky war targets this weakness, and a plethora of stratagems can be deployed today. Yes, the approach is controversial. Some may decry sneaky war as dishonorable. But is it somehow better to lose honorably than win dishonorably? Never.

Sean McFate is a professor in the College of International Security Affairs at National Defense University and author of The New Rules of War: How America Can Win — Against Russia, China, and Other Threats.

Main image: Real-time cyber attacks, including information on the attack’s origin, type and target, as well as, the attacker’s IP address, geographic location and ports being utilized, are displayed on the Norse attack map on the 275th Cyberspace Squadron’s operations floor, known as the Hunter’s Den. (U.S. Air Force photo by J.M. Eddins Jr.)

George F. Kennan defined political warfare as “the logical application of Clausewitz’s doctrine in time of peace.” While stopping short of the direct kinetic confrontation between two countries’ armed forces, “political warfare is the employment of all the means at a nation's command… to achieve its national objectives.” A country embracing Political Warfare conducts “both overt and covert” operations in the absence of declared war or overt force-on-force hostilities. Efforts “range from such overt actions as political alliances, economic measures…, and ‘white’ propaganda to such covert operations as clandestine support of ‘friendly’ foreign elements, ‘black’ psychological warfare and even encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states.” See George Kennan, "Policy Planning Memorandum." May 4, 1948.

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/history/johnson/65ciafounding3.htm

Political warfare is the use of political means to compel an opponent to do one's will, based on hostile intent. The term political describes the calculated interaction between a government and a target audience to include another state's government, military, and/or general population. Governments use a variety of techniques to coerce certain actions, thereby gaining relative advantage over an opponent. The techniques include propaganda and psychological operations (PSYOP), which service national and military objectives respectively. Propaganda has many aspects and a hostile and coercive political purpose. Psychological operations are for strategic and tactical military objectives and may be intended for hostile military and civilian populations. Smith, Paul A., On Political War (Washington: National Defense University Press, 1989)

 https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a233501.pdf"Democratic sneaky war exists." See George Kennan and Pual Smith on Political Warfare (below). We need to embrace it.

15. Putin Races Against the Clock: The Dangers of a Desperate Russia

​Conclusion:

All three of these measures would bolster Ukrainians’ sense of capability and their sense that their plight is understood. To be able to exact military costs inside Russia, just as Russia has done since the start of the war in Ukraine, would provide a partial leveling of the playing field. It would remind Ukrainians that as Putin tries to break them, they have the ability to resist in new ways that hurt Putin and his military. The announcement that a real Ukraine reconstruction fund—which ultimately needs to be hundreds of billions of dollars—is beginning with Russian reserves as seed funding would indicate that Ukraine’s partners are planning for a hopeful future for the beleaguered country and its people. And crucially, such commitment to the defense of Ukraine will speed the clock that Putin now finds himself racing against.

Putin Races Against the Clock

The Dangers of a Desperate Russia

By Daniel Baer

September 5, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Daniel Baer · September 5, 2023

Russian President Vladimir Putin never expected to find himself 18 months into a major war in Ukraine. In past entanglements, including the one he inherited in Transnistria (the breakaway region in Moldova) and the one he created in 2008 in Georgia, for instance, he was content to let conflicts simmer. But the conflagration in Ukraine is too big and too important: he can neither accept a slow burn nor effectuate the kind of frozen conflict now in place in several parts of the post-Soviet world. Putin’s strategy in the coming months is unlikely to be more of the same—the status quo is neither attractive nor sustainable for him. As he looks to the coming winter, he is thinking of ways to end the war on his terms.

He cannot do so simply by sending more troops and weapons to the frontlines—his reserves of both are limited. Instead, he will look anew for opportunities to inflict pain on Ukraine away from the frontlines. And because his approach is likely to become more brutal and sadistic, Ukraine and its international partners must be ready. Those supporting Ukraine and international law can find ways to enlarge the playing field and put more pressure on Putin.

THE BATTLEFIELD OF THE SOUL

One of the striking things about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is his apparently intuitive understanding that winning a war is not just a matter of having enough weapons and soldiers and managing supply lines, nor is it only about military strategy and tactics. Zelensky reminds many in the West of Winston Churchill because, just as the British prime minister did during World War II, he understands that war requires the stewardship of the national soul. A wartime leader, especially in an existential war, must be both general and prelate.

This at once secular and spiritual preservation of the nation requires boosting what is commonly understood as morale but also appealing to the deeper elements of common identity and sense of purpose in the face of horror and adversity—the kind of individual and collective belief that, in a quasi-religious fashion, encourages people to take a leap of faith: to believe in the possibility of alleviating their present condition and in their power to do something about it, even if they cannot see a plausible path to a better future.

Zelensky’s careful, courageous efforts to marshal his compatriots’ hearts, bodies, and minds in the face of ruthless aggression have been on display since the outset of the war, from his defiant declaration to concerned American officials who wanted to evacuate him from Kyiv—“I don’t need a ride, I need ammo”—to his deliberate management of the expectations about and the execution of the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive. He knew that after a year and a half of war’s human and material depletions, Ukrainians themselves, like their international partners, are now less able to absorb disappointment.

Zelensky and Putin both understand that in military terms the war is, for the moment, at a stalemate. It will grind on for as long as both sides can do even a modest job of replenishing bodies and weapons on the frontlines. For Zelensky, this poses a tactical challenge: he needs to ensure that Ukraine can continue to get the weapons it needs, even as Western partners, particularly the United States, face a mix of material hurdles (with the replenishment of depleted stocks becoming harder) and political distractions (the looming U.S. presidential election cycle). But for Putin, the stalemate poses an unexpected strategic challenge.

THE BETRAYAL OF TIME

In Putin’s nearly quarter century of rule, time has been his most constant accomplice. Putin has used his increasing authoritarianism, especially after returning to the presidency in 2012, to buy time: time to defang his internal critics, to shape the Russian mind with propaganda, to wait out the attention span of the West in the wake of past outrages, and to lure elites in Russia and its near abroad into a web of corruption.

At the beginning of the war, it seemed that, as usual, time was on Putin’s side. Even for those few who did not think that Russia would quickly rout Ukrainian forces, most would have still predicted that in the face of a military standoff, Putin would settle in for the long haul. He would wear down the Ukrainians on the battlefield for as long as it took, counting on the West to lose its resolve and on Ukraine to lose strength and hope.

Eighteen months later, it is less clear that time is on Putin’s side. The G-7, NATO, and the European Union have not lost resolve. China’s domestic economic challenges have given Beiijing, Moscow’s only significant ally and source of support, reason for impatience. Outwardly, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping has not broken with Putin, but Putin knows that he is the junior partner in that relationship, and junior partners do not typically get to make demands of their seniors. For all the declarations that Putin will tighten his grip more than ever after the June rebellion of the Wagner private military company, the bizarre spectacle and its aftermath exposed cracks where none were thought to exist. Even if they can be repaired, they cannot be unseen. As my colleague Tatiana Stanovaya has described in Foreign Affairs, the war is coming home to Russia, Putin is increasingly isolated in his own system, unmoored from the points of stability that anchor a sustained play for time. And he is getting older: time ultimately betrays us all.

CRUEL INTENTIONS

The obvious conclusion to draw from the analysts who emphasize that the war has reached a kind of stalemate is that policymakers in the West should continue morosely moving from one military assistance package to the next, endlessly inventorying guns and ammunition, and decide (with what gets called realism but is really resignation) to back Ukraine in a years-long war of attrition.

But Putin may be increasingly eager to conclude the war on his terms; time is no longer the partner he once imagined it to be. Credible assessments of Putin’s thinking and mental state are notoriously elusive, but those who have studied him for decades report that, if anything, he has become more committed to the ersatz messianic mission that he laid out in a surreal speech on the eve of the war. Whether or not settling in to play for time appeals to his strategic intuitions, there is little reason to believe that it appeals to his present psyche. He may see the prospect of the reelection of Donald Trump as a potential opening for the U.S. abandonment of Ukraine and a negotiated end to the conflict on the Kremlin’s terms, but that outcome has at best a 50-50 chance, and is still over a year away. To hope for Trump’s victory is one thing; to bet on it, quite another. And even if Putin hopes to ride out the conflict until the U.S. presidential election, he will still want to improve his position in advance of any expected negotiations.

Unfortunately, that means the coming months may be especially grim: if Putin wants to drive the war to a conclusion or prepare for negotiations, he will not simply accept the indefinite continuation of attritional trench warfare. Notwithstanding his military’s equipment and weapons supply issues, he will be ready to do more, many more, of the most horrible things he has already done. He will ramp up the war crimes, including sexual violence and abductions, explicitly ordering some atrocities and tacitly condoning other such incidents. He will broaden attacks on civilian infrastructure, including hospitals and schools. He will accelerate the war’s genocidal ends, attempting to inflict even more carnage and devastation on civilian populations. In escalating criminal attacks on civilians, he will hope to undermine the ability of Ukrainians to work together, to function, and to see themselves as a nation.

This coming winter’s principal battlefield will not be in the trenches across the Donbas. Putin will try to break the Ukrainian soul.

TICK-TOCK

In response, the United States and Ukraine’s international partners should be prepared to bolster the Ukrainian spirit and wind the clock that is tick-tocking in Putin’s head. They of course must continue to deliver military assistance, but they also need, consistent with international law, to weaken Russia and remind Putin and the Ukrainian people that the opponents of the Kremlin’s violent aggression retain agency; they can still do things.

The West can widen its approach in the coming months in several ways. Western countries should provide expertise and intelligence to Ukrainians that they can use to take out Russian installations inside Russia that are critical to the resupply of the frontlines and to Russian air attacks. Drone attacks or acts of sabotage that target military bases and equipment factories could become more common, further weakening the Russian war effort and making the war more palpable to the Russian people.

The U.S. and key partners should also send a clear message to Putin that if he attacks critical infrastructure such as gas, water, and electricity systems this winter, as he has in the past, they will not only deliver ATACMS short-range ballistic missiles but also remove some of the limitations placed on the weapons systems already provided to Ukraine—restrictions that currently prevent Ukraine from using such arms to attack targets in Russia. Despite the terrible state of the U.S.-Russian relationship, U.S. officials have stressed to their Russian counterparts how Washington has successfully limited the scope of the conflict and avoided escalation, notably by restricting the use of certain weapons now in Ukrainian hands. The United States has earned credibility with Putin by being able to exercise such control. U.S. officials should make it clear that if Putin continues to attack civilians and the infrastructure they depend on, the United States will incrementally remove restrictions, including those that currently prevent Ukraine from taking proportional, discriminate action on Russian soil in response to Russian attacks on Ukrainian soil.

Away from the battlefield, the United States and other partners should begin formally taking Russia’s international reserves, which many countries seized after Putin launched the invasion, and transfer them to a fund to support Ukraine. About $300 billion of Russian sovereign reserves have been frozen since the beginning of the war. Concerns about setting a dangerous international legal precedent—as well as the potential knock-on effects for central banks and the international financial system—have so far prevented the United States and its partners from enacting such transfers. But it is time to overcome the legal objections, with as much care as possible to narrow the precedent established, and to begin creating a Ukraine reconstruction fund with Russian assets. To start, Western officials should transfer $20 billion a month. Putin will believe that for as long as the reserves have not been formally seized, they remain on the negotiating table at the war’s end. The transfer of $20 billion a month for as long as his illegal, misguided war continues will remind him of the passage of time and become a further testament to the war’s mounting costs.

All three of these measures would bolster Ukrainians’ sense of capability and their sense that their plight is understood. To be able to exact military costs inside Russia, just as Russia has done since the start of the war in Ukraine, would provide a partial leveling of the playing field. It would remind Ukrainians that as Putin tries to break them, they have the ability to resist in new ways that hurt Putin and his military. The announcement that a real Ukraine reconstruction fund—which ultimately needs to be hundreds of billions of dollars—is beginning with Russian reserves as seed funding would indicate that Ukraine’s partners are planning for a hopeful future for the beleaguered country and its people. And crucially, such commitment to the defense of Ukraine will speed the clock that Putin now finds himself racing against.

• DANIEL BAER is Senior Vice President of Policy Research and Director of the Europe Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and was U.S. Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe from 2013 to 2017. He is the author of the forthcoming book The Four Tests: What It Will Take to Keep America Strong and Good.

Foreign Affairs · by Daniel Baer · September 5, 2023

16. The Future Convergence of AI, IoT, and Quantum Computing in Information Warfare: A Pandora's Digital Box

Conclusion:

The convergence of high-speed broadband, the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud and edge computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and quantum computing represents a seismic shift in the landscape of information warfare. The integration of these technologies allows for the creation of highly sophisticated, adaptive, and targeted operations. These operations can exploit vulnerabilities at both the individual and societal levels, manipulating perceptions, sowing discord, and even altering the course of elections or conflicts. The capabilities are not merely additive; they are multiplicative, creating a new paradigm of warfare that is greater than the sum of its individual components.

However, this new frontier also presents unprecedented ethical and security challenges. The same technologies that can be used to safeguard democracy, enhance governance, and improve quality of life can also be weaponized to undermine institutions, violate privacy, and infringe upon human rights. The ethical implications are profound, raising questions about surveillance, consent, and the very nature of free will in a world where perceptions can be manipulated at scale. Furthermore, the security challenges are equally daunting. Traditional defense mechanisms, whether they are cybersecurity protocols or international laws, are ill-equipped to handle the complexities of this new form of warfare. This necessitates a rethinking of how we approach defense and security in the digital age. Policymakers, technologists, and military strategists must collaborate to develop new frameworks, guidelines, and countermeasures that can effectively mitigate the risks posed by the convergence of these technologies.

Moreover, the rapid pace of technological advancement means that the window for developing effective countermeasures is narrowing. The next decade will be critical in shaping the rules, norms, and institutions that govern the use of these technologies in the context of information warfare. Failure to act could result in a "wild west" scenario, where rogue states, non-state actors, and even criminal organizations could exploit these technologies with impunity. The stakes are high, and the urgency is palpable.

In conclusion, the convergence of these advanced technologies has opened a new chapter in the annals of information warfare, one that offers both unprecedented opportunities and risks. Understanding this landscape is the first step; the next is to navigate it responsibly and ethically. This will require concerted effort from all stakeholders, from governments and international organizations to academia and civil society. Only through collective action can we hope to harness the potential of these technologies while safeguarding against their nefarious use. The future of information warfare is being written now, and it is incumbent upon us to ensure that it is a future we can all live with.

The Influence Compendium

Exploring leadership, cognition, persuasion, and technology, offering insights into modern influence.

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The Future Convergence of AI, IoT, and Quantum Computing in Information Warfare: A Pandora's Digital Box

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/future-convergence-ai-iot-quantum-computing-information-brad-carr%3FtrackingId=bKPsX3%252FV7hfaUiSw7G%252FtKA%253D%253D/?trackingId=bKPsX3%2FV7hfaUiSw7G%2FtKA%3D%3D

Brad Carr

Owner at Carr Media Productions, LLC | Executive Management Consultant / Coach | SOCOM MISO/PSYOP Proponent Analyst / Strategic Planner | Futurist | Retired Army Colonel | Disabled Veteran

September 5, 2023

Open Immersive Reader

Introduction

The 21st century has been marked by rapid technological advancements that have fundamentally altered the landscape of human interaction, governance, and warfare. Looking forward, the synergy of greater high-speed broadband access and bandwidth, the continued expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT), further evolution of cloud and edge computing, advacements in artificial intelligence (AI), and evolution of quantum computing at scale stands out as a transformative force with far-reaching implications. While these technologies individually offer a plethora of opportunities for innovation and progress, their convergence creates a new frontier that is greater than the sum of its parts. This frontier is particularly evident in the realm of information warfare, where the stakes are not just technological but also ethical, political, and existential.

Information warfare is not a new concept; it has existed in various forms throughout history. However, the digital age has exponentially increased its scale, scope, and complexity. Traditional forms of information warfare have been supercharged by these emerging technologies, leading to new methodologies that are more targeted, more efficient, and more difficult to counter. The integration and synergy of these technologies allows for the creation of multi-faceted campaigns that can adapt in real-time, target individuals on a psychological level, and even manipulate the very fabric of reality through techniques like deepfakes.

This level of integration and efficiency is currently difficult, but someone will eventually make it reality. The convergence of these technologies will allow for information warfare campaigns that are not only more effective but also more adaptive, more targeted, and more difficult to defend against. This represents a paradigm shift in the way we understand and prepare for conflicts in the digital age, making it imperative for policymakers, technologists, and military strategists to understand and plan for this emerging landscape.

The Synergistic Landscape: A 15-Year Projection and Its Impact on Information Warfare

High-Speed Broadband Access

In the next 15 years, we can expect nearly ubiquitous high-speed broadband access, facilitated by technologies like 5G and satellite systems such as Starlink. This will not only increase the speed of data transmission but also significantly reduce latency. In the context of information warfare, this means that real-time data analytics and decision-making will become the norm rather than the exception. Operations that currently take minutes or hours to coordinate could be executed in seconds, allowing for a level of agility and responsiveness that is currently unattainable.

Internet of Things (IoT)

The IoT landscape is expected to explode in complexity and scale, with estimates suggesting that there could be over 75 billion connected devices by 2035. These devices will not just be smartphones and computers; they will include everything from household appliances and vehicles to industrial machines and public infrastructure. In information warfare, this means an unprecedented level of data collection. Every connected device becomes a potential source of information, providing real-time insights into human behavior, environmental conditions, and even strategic assets. More nefariously, beyond just sensors or data collectors, these devices could also be “weaponized” against the user.

Cloud and Edge Computing

The evolution of cloud computing, coupled with the rise of edge computing, will revolutionize data storage and processing capabilities. Edge computing will allow for data to be processed closer to the source, reducing latency and enabling real-time analytics. This will be particularly impactful in information warfare for operations that require immediate action based on complex data sets, such as drone strikes or cyber-attacks.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI is expected to undergo significant advancements, particularly in the fields of machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision. These advancements will enable more sophisticated data analysis, content generation, and automated decision-making. In the realm of information warfare, AI could be used to analyze vast datasets to identify vulnerabilities, generate influence-oriented materials, or even make strategic decisions without human intervention.

Quantum Computing

Although still in its infancy, quantum computing holds the promise of computational speeds that are orders of magnitude faster than current capabilities. By 2035, we could see the development of quantum algorithms capable of breaking existing encryption methods, thereby revolutionizing the field of cryptanalysis. In information warfare, this could mean the ability to decrypt secure communications or penetrate/exploit previously impenetrable security systems.

The Disruptive Synergy

While each of these technologies offers transformative capabilities on its own, their real power lies in their convergence. The synergy of high-speed broadband, IoT, cloud and edge computing, AI, and quantum computing will create a landscape that is ripe for disruptive innovation in information warfare. Imagine a scenario where an AI algorithm, running on an edge computing platform, analyzes real-time data from millions of IoT devices to identify a potential vulnerability in a target country. This information is then securely transmitted over a quantum-encrypted network to a command center, where a decision is made to exploit this vulnerability. A highly targeted influence operation is crafted and disseminated within seconds, thanks to high-speed broadband access. The entire operation is so fast and seamless that the target has no time to respond or counteract.

Integrated Influence Operations Through AI and Deep Learning

The amalgamation of real-time psychological profiling, automated influence operations, AI-driven text, audio, and video generation, and deepfake-based products represents a paradigm shift in the realm of information warfare. This integrated approach leverages the full spectrum of advanced technologies, including AI algorithms, IoT data collection, cloud and edge computing, and even quantum-secured communications, to create a seamless and highly effective influence operation framework.

Imagine an AI algorithm that continuously scrapes data from a myriad of sources, including social media activity, online purchase history, geolocation data from IoT devices, and even biometric data like facial expressions and heart rates. This algorithm, operating in real-time and powered by edge computing capabilities, creates intricate psychological profiles of individuals or groups. These profiles are not static; they evolve in real-time as new data is ingested, ensuring that the influence strategies remain highly targeted and effective.

Once these profiles are established, the next layer of AI algorithms kicks in. These are specialized in natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and deep learning. They craft personalized messages, narratives, or even entire propaganda campaigns tailored to the psychological profiles. These could range from simple text messages and social media posts to complex multimedia content, including AI-generated deepfake videos that are virtually indistinguishable from reality.

The dissemination of these tailored influence materials is also automated. AI-powered bots, operating on social media platforms, identify key influencers and nodes within the target network. They engage in conversations, share content, and even adapt their behavior based on the real-time effectiveness of the influence operation. All of this happens at a speed and scale that would be impossible to achieve through human operators.

But the sophistication doesn't end here. The entire operation is secured using quantum encryption algorithms, making it nearly impossible for external entities to intercept the communications or compromise the operation. Moreover, the operation's effectiveness is continuously monitored through a feedback loop, where the outcomes are analyzed in real-time, and the strategies are dynamically adjusted.

This integrated approach to psychological and influence operations represents the pinnacle of technological convergence in the realm of information warfare. It allows for a level of personalization, security, and adaptability that was previously unthinkable. However, it also poses significant ethical and security challenges, as the same technologies can be employed for nefarious purposes by rogue states, terrorist organizations, or even criminal syndicates.

Conclusion: Navigating the New Frontier of Information Warfare

The convergence of high-speed broadband, the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud and edge computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and quantum computing represents a seismic shift in the landscape of information warfare. The integration of these technologies allows for the creation of highly sophisticated, adaptive, and targeted operations. These operations can exploit vulnerabilities at both the individual and societal levels, manipulating perceptions, sowing discord, and even altering the course of elections or conflicts. The capabilities are not merely additive; they are multiplicative, creating a new paradigm of warfare that is greater than the sum of its individual components.

However, this new frontier also presents unprecedented ethical and security challenges. The same technologies that can be used to safeguard democracy, enhance governance, and improve quality of life can also be weaponized to undermine institutions, violate privacy, and infringe upon human rights. The ethical implications are profound, raising questions about surveillance, consent, and the very nature of free will in a world where perceptions can be manipulated at scale. Furthermore, the security challenges are equally daunting. Traditional defense mechanisms, whether they are cybersecurity protocols or international laws, are ill-equipped to handle the complexities of this new form of warfare. This necessitates a rethinking of how we approach defense and security in the digital age. Policymakers, technologists, and military strategists must collaborate to develop new frameworks, guidelines, and countermeasures that can effectively mitigate the risks posed by the convergence of these technologies.

Moreover, the rapid pace of technological advancement means that the window for developing effective countermeasures is narrowing. The next decade will be critical in shaping the rules, norms, and institutions that govern the use of these technologies in the context of information warfare. Failure to act could result in a "wild west" scenario, where rogue states, non-state actors, and even criminal organizations could exploit these technologies with impunity. The stakes are high, and the urgency is palpable.

In conclusion, the convergence of these advanced technologies has opened a new chapter in the annals of information warfare, one that offers both unprecedented opportunities and risks. Understanding this landscape is the first step; the next is to navigate it responsibly and ethically. This will require concerted effort from all stakeholders, from governments and international organizations to academia and civil society. Only through collective action can we hope to harness the potential of these technologies while safeguarding against their nefarious use. The future of information warfare is being written now, and it is incumbent upon us to ensure that it is a future we can all live with.

References

1. ResearchGate: Technology-based information warfare - Developing world perspective. Available at: ResearchGate
2. Air University: The Impact of New Technologies in the Military Arena. Available at: Air University
3. DTIC: Information Warfare. Available at: DTIC
4. TS2 Space: The Impact of AI on Military Psychological Operations. Available at: TS2 Space
5. DTIC: Cross-Domain Synergy: Warfare in the 21st Century. Available at: DTIC
6. Strategic Analysis: Impact of Technology on Conduct of Warfare. Available at: Columbia
7. Strategic Information Warfare: A New Face of War - RAND Corporation. Available at: RAND
8. Information Technologies and the Future of Land Warfare | RAND. Available at: RAND
9. Information Warfare: Good News and Bad News. Available at: FAS
10. Information Warfare - Intelligence Resource Program. Available at: FAS
11. Weaponization of the Future: Digital Warfare & Disinformation. Available at: CB Insights
12. Impact of Technology on War - Raksha Anirveda. Available at: Raksha Anirveda
13. Deepfake Technology in the Age of Information Warfare. Available at: West Point
14. The digital battlefield has become more sophisticated & widespread. Available at: CB Insights

#InformationWarfare #AI #IoT #QuantumComputing #EthicalImplications #NationalSecurity #EmergingTechnologies #DigitalTransformation #Innovation

Published by

Brad Carr

Owner at Carr Media Productions, LLC | Executive Management Consultant / Coach | SOCOM MISO/PSYOP Proponent Analyst / Strategic Planner | Futurist | Retired Army Colonel | Disabled Veteran

Published • 1h

We stand on the precipice of a new frontier in information warfare—a frontier that could redefine conflict, destabilize nations, and even alter the fabric of perceived reality. The convergence and synergy of high-speed broadband, the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud and edge computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and quantum computing have immense implications, especially in the wrong hands. What if the integration of these technologies could lead to operations so fast and seamless that targets would have no time to respond? Imagine a world where AI algorithms can manipulate your perceptions, sow discord, and even influence election outcomes—all in real time. The ethical and security implications are staggering. We're talking about a paradigm shift that could make traditional defense mechanisms obsolete. We're entering an era where rogue states, non-state actors, and even criminal organizations could exploit these technologies with impunity. The clock is ticking. The next decade will be critical in shaping the rules, norms, and institutions that govern this new form of warfare. The stakes are high, and the urgency is palpable. #InformationWarfare #AI #IoT #QuantumComputing #EthicalImplications #NationalSecurity #EmergingTechnologies #DigitalTransformation #Innovation

17. How to Help Ukraine Win the War of Attrition

How to Help Ukraine Win the War of Attrition

Roll up the Wagner Group in Africa and make Russia pay for aggression in Syria, Moldova and elsewhere.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-help-ukraine-win-the-war-of-attrition-putin-russia-biden-wagner-125f031e

By Walter Russell Mead

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Sept. 4, 2023 4:43 pm ET

Russian mercenaries in northern Mali. PHOTO: /ASSOCIATED PRESS

Eighteen months into Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, two things seem clear. First, the war matters. After 15 years of failed Western responses to Russian aggression against Georgia and Ukraine, another failure to contain and deter Russia would have catastrophic consequences around the world.

Second, current American strategy is not working well. Ukrainians are fighting bravely. We can and should hope for Ukrainian breakthroughs that transform the military situation and break Russian morale, but hope is not a plan.

Absent decisive military victories for Ukraine, the conflict is developing into a war of attrition, and given current American strategy that kind of war favors Russia. Moscow has more people, more resources and more territory than Ukraine. Worse, Ukrainian forces can make progress only by attacking prepared Russian defenses. If you are in a war of attrition but you have to keep hurling your forces at well-entrenched, well-defended enemy positions, you will burn through your reserves faster than your opponent.

Ukraine has another vulnerability. It depends on Western aid, and Western public opinion is fickle. The need to produce dramatic results to keep Western support from flagging may have forced Ukraine into launching the counteroffensive before its forces were ready.

Meanwhile, like LBJ agonizing over target selection in North Vietnam, President Biden frets over every weapons shipment to Ukraine, worried that sending too many arms of the wrong kind will trigger Russian escalation and risk a nuclear holocaust. He dribbles out enough support to keep Ukraine in the field but stops short of providing the kind of assistance that Kyiv really needs.

This may feel rational and even statesmanlike to the president, but it is a hard sell in American politics. If Russia is so evil and threatening that we must help Ukraine, why aren’t we doing enough to help Ukraine win? If Americans conclude that Mr. Biden’s Ukraine strategy will produce what political scientist Max Abrahms calls a forever war with a side order of nation building, support for Mr. Biden’s war policy is likely to collapse well before Russia throws in the towel.

The answer is not to walk away from Ukraine, but to fight Mr. Putin in smarter and politically more sustainable ways. Mr. Putin must pay, and be seen to pay, for his attack on Ukraine, and to do that the U.S. needs a whole-of-government campaign against Russian interests and assets around the world.

Fortunately, we operate in a target-rich environment, and there are lots of ways that Team Biden can bring the cost of war home to the Kremlin.

One option is to roll up the Wagner Group and its successors in Africa. Standing passively by as Mr. Putin’s proxies established a new colonial empire across the Sahel was an act of strategic incompetence. The Wagner Group is lawless and ruthless but it is not 10 feet tall. Bringing real peace and stability to the Sahel is a complex and long-term project, but dismantling Mr. Putin’s tin-pot African empire is well within the capabilities of the U.S. and its allies in Europe and the Gulf.

We could work with Turkey and neighboring states to make Mr. Putin’s presence in Syria ruinously expensive while bringing him diminishing returns. Forcing Mr. Putin to devote more resources to Syria while reducing its usefulness to him weakens him in Ukraine and at home.

The U.S. can apply pressure in other places, such as Russia’s illegal enclave in Moldova. Belarus is a de facto co-belligerent participating in Russia’s war. Our goal should be to force Mr. Putin to devote scarce resources to keeping his satellite afloat.

The U.S. can also target Mr. Putin’s Latin American allies. The Biden administration needs to move past the leftist shibboleths of the 20th century and develop a concerted approach toward pushing Russia out of the Western hemisphere.

Mr. Putin’s networks of cronies, allies and agents extend well beyond Russia. These people need to learn that collaboration with rogue states is a poor career choice. President Biden should instruct the intelligence community to work with the Treasury Department and prosecutors around the world to expose the shady deals, tax evasion, bribery and other bad behavior that holds Mr. Putin’s global network in place. Some prominent careers may collapse in disgrace. That would be a good thing. Working with allies, the full power of American intelligence should be devoted to the detection and systematic deconstruction of Mr. Putin’s international assets.

Despite the disappointing performance of our sanctions so far, the Russian economy remains an important vulnerability for the Kremlin. As analyst Edward Luttwak points out, we can accelerate the degradation of Russia’s economy by focusing on critical components that Russia badly needs but can’t easily make or source. The Russian gas industry, for instance, depends on a range of cold-weather equipment that is made in the West.

There are other things we can do. We can help Ukraine develop a powerful arms industry and defense establishment that pose a permanent obstacle to Russian ambitions in the region. We can go pedal-to-the-metal on energy production of all kinds to cut global prices and Mr. Putin’s revenues without alienating countries like India. We can advance a multinational effort to ensure that the world’s uranium market won’t depend on Russia. We can develop military technologies and weapons systems that Russia cannot hope to match, just as Ronald Reagan did with his missile defense program in the 1980s.

If this is a war of attrition, the U.S. and its partners are well-placed to win. We just need to make up our minds and roll up our sleeves.

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Appeared in the September 5, 2023, print edition as 'How to Help Ukraine Win the War of Attrition'.

18. The US national innovation base has critical weaknesses. Just look at Starlink.

​Excerpts:

The invasion of Ukraine, the consolidation of power by Xi Jinping, and the no joke return of great power competition mean we must say the quiet part out loud: Ignorance of the depth of exposure to Chinese supply chains amounts to strategic malpractice. The US military cannot deter its pacing threat in Beijing if it cannot muster an independent and resilient industrial base. And the United States certainly cannot rely for its national defense strategy on a foundation controlled by Beijing.

Real American dynamism – and real competitive advantage – stem from credible and sustainable power. That means coming to grips with the costs of resolving the danger of supply chain dependencies tied to China – including those that start with Starlink.

The US national innovation base has critical weaknesses. Just look at Starlink.

By Emily de La Bruyere and Nathan Picarsic

September 1, 2023

forcedistancetimes.com · by Emily Labruyere · September 1, 2023

Defense intellectuals and proponents of defense innovation have been busy for over a decade selling dreams about Third, Fourth, perhaps Fifth Offsets; about the promise of bringing “dynamism” back to the US industrial base, in part through emergent, commercial startups that comprise the national innovation base.

The problem: Right now, those at the forefront of the defense innovation base risk giving America’s adversaries an angle in. They risk being co-opted by a great power adversary (read: China) adept at exploiting vulnerabilities in the US innovation ecosystem. Even the most promising and well intentioned efforts risk building on a foundation controlled by the adversary – and forfeiting any deterrent or warfighting advantage we may think we’re gaining vis-à-vis China by moving faster and with a more agile and innovative industrial base.

The darlings of the US innovation base who are saving the day in Ukraine make this case clearly – and alarmingly. Take Elon Musk: This summer, the US Department of Defense announced that it had signed a contract with SpaceX’s Starlink to procure its satellite services for Ukraine. Per the Pentagon, “we continue to work with a range of global partners to ensure Ukraine has the resilient satellite and communication capabilities they need.”

Right now, those at the forefront of the defense innovation base risk giving America’s adversaries an angle in.

But Elon Musk’s dependence on China risks meaning that Starlink is not as resilient as American war planning may assume or require.

The same day as the Pentagon’s announcement, Elon Musk wrapped up a two-day visit to China. During his 48 hours there, he visited Tesla’s Shanghai factory, the automaker’s biggest production hub; met with China’s foreign, commerce, and industry ministers in Beijing; dined with the chairman of Chinese battery supplier CATL; and visited with Chinese Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang (the first known meeting between Ding and a foreign CEO).

Throughout, Musk praised China, close US-China relations, and commercial interdependence. The US and Chinese economies “conjoined twins,” he said, declaring his opposition to their decoupling.

A contest on the battlefield and factory floor

The United States is locked in a great power competition: Washington and its allies are defending the international order from China and its axis of aligned spoilers, from Russia to Iran. This competition is playing out in the industrial domain – both because today’s military battlefield increasingly depends on commercial assets (like Starlink) and because Beijing attacks through supply chains and markets (like Tesla’s). This competitive reality is why China elevated “military-civil fusion” to national strategy in 2015; it’s why the US military’s innovation apparatus has embraced dual-use, commercial technology.

Beijing has leveraged a deliberate, non-market strategy to ensure that US industry – up to and including its emergent, high-tech champions – depends on China.

This is a contest for which the United States needs a robust industrial and innovation base, able to withstand China’s attack on the battlefield and the factory floor.

The problem: Beijing has hollowed out the US industrial base and is well on its way to doing the same to the innovation base. Beijing has leveraged a deliberate, non-market strategy to ensure that US industry – up to and including its emergent, high-tech champions – depends on China. This vulnerability afflicts the legacy industrial base. It also afflicts new entrants aiming to disrupt incumbents and face down challenges of a new military era.

As long as US defense and industrial champions depend on China, their actions are controlled by China. Moreover, their incentives are tied to and shaped by the Chinese Communist Party. Elon Musk wants his businesses to be party to China’s economic rise. He also wants to support US national security. At some point, those aims end up mutually exclusive.

Ignore Starlink’s China dependencies at America’s peril

The battlefield in Ukraine may reveal those tensions in real time. The Pentagon is paying Musk’s SpaceX for satellite services intended to defend against Russia’s incursions into Ukraine. Those incursions have been greenlit and bankrolled by Beijing. Musk’s broader business empire – as he was busy reminding everyone on his jaunt through China earlier this year – depends on China for production and revenue. Starlink’s supply chain has dependencies on Chinese suppliers, as Chinese industry observers are keen to point out any time the prospect of Starlink deployment to Taiwan is raised. Thosedependencies range from printed circuit board suppliers to RF module inputs.

These supply chain dependencies may seem tactical. But they carry strategic effect. And reflect the coercive intent behind Beijing’s military-civil fusion strategy. What happens if China decides it doesn’t want Ukraine to be defended by Starlink satellites? Or, down the road, what happens if the Pentagon – dependent on systems that in turn depend on China – has to confront Beijing?

This is a contest for which the United States needs a robust industrial and innovation base, able to withstand China’s attack on the battlefield and the factory floor.

The invasion of Ukraine, the consolidation of power by Xi Jinping, and the no joke return of great power competition mean we must say the quiet part out loud: Ignorance of the depth of exposure to Chinese supply chains amounts to strategic malpractice. The US military cannot deter its pacing threat in Beijing if it cannot muster an independent and resilient industrial base. And the United States certainly cannot rely for its national defense strategy on a foundation controlled by Beijing.

Real American dynamism – and real competitive advantage – stem from credible and sustainable power. That means coming to grips with the costs of resolving the danger of supply chain dependencies tied to China – including those that start with Starlink.

Emily de La Bruyère and Nathan Picarsic are Senior Fellows at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and co-founders of Horizon Advisory.

forcedistancetimes.com · by Emily Labruyere · September 1, 2023

19. Opinion: Don’t thank my husband for his service if you don’t know why he died

A powerful and heartfelt message from a Gold Star wife.

Conclusion:

If we for one second think it was for nothing, then we need to look ourselves square in the face as a country and ask ourselves why we sent our finest treasures to fight, bleed and die in a war that we as a country think wasn’t worth it

How dare any Americans avoid considering these consequences, living peacefully here in anytown USA while military families receive unexpected knocks at the door. We are an all-volunteer force; the least Americans can do is pay attention to where we are fighting and wonder why.

We as an American people, as a country, must do better. We must have true accountability, which means dissecting what went wrong. That demands nationwide reflection, especially from those who chose not to serve. It means having Congress conduct an after-action review of the withdrawal that is apolitical, one that peels back the 20-year onion layer by layer and demands that senior military and State Department leaders admit what actually went wrong and how we do better.

It means looking at how we treated an entire country and her people, with civilian casualties, families destroyed, a nation gutted and slaughtered. Only when we do this can we honor our fallen who gave their lives in Afghanistan.

Don’t thank my husband for his service if you don’t know why he died.

Opinion: Don’t thank my husband for his service if you don’t know why he died

https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/30/opinions/opinion-anniversary-afghanistan-withdrawal-kabul-airport-horton

Opinion by Jane Horton

Updated 2:13 PM EDT, Wed August 30, 2023

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US withdrawal from Afghanistan

00:53 - Source: CNN

Editor’s Note: Jane Horton is a senior policy advisor in the US Congress. She has held many senior roles in the Department of Defense and across the federal government and she is a proud member of Georgetown University’s US-Afghan Women’s Council. The views expressed here are her own. View more opinion on CNN.

CNN — 

Ever since September 9, 2011, my heart has slowly tortured me by replaying the summer from hell, when the Oklahoma National Guard lost soldier after soldier in combat. It’s been nearly 12 years since I received the excruciating knock at the door notifying me that my husband Chris had died from a gunshot wound to the head in Afghanistan. Time after time, it all comes flooding back.

I miss him. Deeply. Yet losing him wasn’t what broke me. It was the fall two years ago of the country where he gave his life.

This is my first time since America’s disgusting, chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan on August 30, 2021, that I’ve put my emotions on paper, splattering them like a toddler spitting out sour milk. My heart has been bursting at the seams with pain, loss and anger.

A military transport plane departs overhead as Afghans hoping to leave the country wait outside the Kabul airport on Aug. 23, 2021.

Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

For 20 years, we as a military community tried to stay strong despite what we received back from war. Many soldiers came home to spouses who’d left them, landlords who’d evicted them, business partners who despised them for “taking time off,” children who were angry with them for missing another birthday. “Why didn’t you call me, dad?” “Where have you been?” “Why is this war more important than me?” The truth is — duty was.

Worst of all, many at the top didn’t seem to know what the mission was. Did the Joes on the ground, like my husband, even know why they were fighting? Yes, they did; they’d say they were fighting for their fellow comrades to their left and to their right. But did they have any idea why we were there, why their friend was blown up next to them in their Humvee last week so now they were crashing an Afghan wedding to try to find the people who did it?

On August 3, 2011, Chris made his last Facebook post, about losing his dear friend Staff Sgt. Kirk Owen the day prior. “With grief comes an icy viciousness and the pain brings with it a profound determination to not only make it home but to ensure that bad men do not,” he said.

Spc. Chris Horton, a sniper with 1st Battalion, 297th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, Oklahoma Army National Guard, stands with his weapon in Paktia, Afghanistan, in 2011.

Sgt. 1st Class Whitney Hughes/National Guard Bureau

A few days before he was killed that September, Chris wrote me something so painful I shoved it deep inside my heart. “Jane, I watched a helicopter crash and it reminded me of a quote by Field Marshal Rommel ‘Don’t go to war if you gain nothing from winning.’”

“Is that how you feel?” I asked him.

“A little bit,” he replied.

Five years after Chris was killed, I went to Afghanistan to see the country for myself and to try to answer my own questions as to why we were there. The American people sure didn’t seem to know or care what our policies were, nor the toll they took on the people of Afghanistan, who were losing enormous numbers of civilians. There had to be a why and reason somewhere. What I discovered were the people of Afghanistan and all the incredible progress that was being made in their country.

I ended up taking six trips to Afghanistan in different official capacities as I traveled with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretary of defense and other senior leaders involved with the war. A few years later, I worked for the Afghan government as a senior advisor to the ambassador of Afghanistan to the United States and hosted hundreds of fellow Gold Star families at the US Embassy in Washington to share Afghanistan with them.

Jane Horton on her first trip to Kabul in 2016.

Courtesy Jane Horton

I had developed a passion for the people, the food, the dancing, the beauty. I bought Afghan silver and lapis to give to the daughters of fallen heroes so they could have something from the land where their fathers’ blood remains in the soil. These families became my strength. How humbling it was to be in their homes, hear their stories, visit their loved ones’ graves. The years came and went, and more and more families joined our ranks as Gold Stars.

I would tell them how a million girls had entered school in one year alone, and how there was a higher percentage of women in parliament than we had in the US Congress. Their fallen heroes’ contributions toward the eradication of the Taliban were changing the way Afghans lived, and that made our losses worth it. It gave us something to hold on to. Something good from the bad.

I met the women in parliament — and even met the Afghan girl’s robotic team. One Gold Star wife who often came to the Embassy and brought her children wrote the ambassador a note that said, “Afghanistan used to be a cold scary place to me, and now it’s like a warm memory.” The people of Afghanistan, the culture, it gave me pieces of my heart back. It helped me heal.

In this March 2016 photo, US Central Command Commander Gen. Lloyd Austin and Gold Star Wife Jane Horton talk at Headquarters Resolute Support Mission in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Myles Cullen/Department of Defense

In 2017, I was escorted to Afghanistan’s Presidential Palace. To my knowledge, I was the only Gold Star widow to ever make such a trip, and it made US officials nervous, to say the least, to see me travel “outside the wire” of the gates of Resolute Support Headquarters in Kabul. But I trusted the Afghans; I knew they would keep me safe.

I had little idea what I was doing or what the cultural norms were once I left that base, but I wore five layers of clothing so that I was covered enough on my way to town that no one would know I was an American. Two Afghan sisters I worked with also gave me their favorite scarf to wear over my head. “No red lipstick though,” Maryam told me. She knew I wore red lipstick almost every day.

After going through what seemed to be 18 layers of security, I entered the palace. As I finally peeked through the gates, there were platoons of Afghan soldiers dressed in ceremonial uniforms drilling, carrying their flag. I tried so hard not to let any tears slip down my face as I was led to meet with the president.

Ashraf Ghani warmly greeted me in what was one of the heaviest and most important moments of my entire life. He thanked me on behalf of Afghanistan for the service and sacrifices of all Americans and their families, of all the fallen and the wounded. The weight of that sacrifice in that moment, and what I represented, was so massive that I almost melted through my chair into the ground.

Jane Horton, senior adviser to the acting secretary of defense, gives a speech in Kabul in December 2020.

When the US withdrew from Afghanistan years later, the presidential palace quickly overrun by the Taliban, all I could think was, “How could my husband die, and his death didn’t break me, yet the fall of the country he died in did? How could this be worse than the knock at the door?”

But this time, everything I loved and everything I had invested in was broken alongside me in pieces on the floor. The country I cherished, the people I treasured. The girls in the school in Paktya – the village Chris died in – who made me pillowcases and gifts, the children at the Kabul orphanage I had just carried, there was no more hope for them. I wanted to hold those babies and never let them go.

How could America let it get to this? We are better than this. How cruel to empower Afghan women and little girls for years, ensure they knew they could be anything they wanted in life, and after they became it, leave them to be hunted and killed for following their dreams? This precious land went up in flames after the American people barely noticed 20 years of war. Our war.

During the withdrawal, I woke up to constant messages from troops on the ground. The mental anguish of being there and not being able to stop the collapse was pure torture for them — many of whom had been working with the Afghan people in their villages for years. They told me women where being trampled, babies were dying from dehydration and people were getting shot. The US had to partner with the Taliban to get flights off the ground.

In this handout provided by the US Air Force, an air crew assigned to the 816th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron assists evacuees aboard a C-17 Globemaster III aircraft in support of the Afghanistan evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport on August 21, 2021 in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Taylor Crul/US Air Force/Getty Images/Handout

An attack was just waiting to happen. And then it did.

On August 26, 2021, 13 American service members died while working flight evacuations at the Kabul airport. It was one of the worst days of my life. The truth is, it should have been one of the worst days of all our lives, because it was one of the worst days in American history.

The heart that I had spent so many years rebuilding through my love of the Afghan people, through the progress that our countries had made, through my love of the military – a military that had been so stretched and wounded throughout 20 years of war – was ripped apart.

The withdrawal took me back to a place that I never thought I would or could be again. It was a place that might have even been darker than the day Chris died. I threw up again and again.

In every interview that I’ve done since losing Chris, I’ve been asked in one form or another if my husband died for nothing. How dare they ask me that? How dare they continually ask families of the fallen these questions? When I sent my husband to war, he was no longer mine. He was ours. He was America’s. We as a nation needed to ask ourselves these questions.

Spc. Chris Horton and Jane Horton pose for a photo on their wedding day in 2009 in Cleveland, Ohio.

Courtesy Jane Horton

If we for one second think it was for nothing, then we need to look ourselves square in the face as a country and ask ourselves why we sent our finest treasures to fight, bleed and die in a war that we as a country think wasn’t worth it

How dare any Americans avoid considering these consequences, living peacefully here in anytown USA while military families receive unexpected knocks at the door. We are an all-volunteer force; the least Americans can do is pay attention to where we are fighting and wonder why.

We as an American people, as a country, must do better. We must have true accountability, which means dissecting what went wrong. That demands nationwide reflection, especially from those who chose not to serve. It means having Congress conduct an after-action review of the withdrawal that is apolitical, one that peels back the 20-year onion layer by layer and demands that senior military and State Department leaders admit what actually went wrong and how we do better.

It means looking at how we treated an entire country and her people, with civilian casualties, families destroyed, a nation gutted and slaughtered. Only when we do this can we honor our fallen who gave their lives in Afghanistan.

Don’t thank my husband for his service if you don’t know why he died.

20. Introducing the Harding Project: Renewing Professional Military Writing

This looks like an excellent initiative. I commend them.

Introducing the Harding Project: Renewing Professional Military Writing - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Zachary Griffiths, Theo Lipsky · September 5, 2023

In 1934, the US Army was racing to transform quickly enough to win the next war. Knowing successful modernization would require the full ingenuity of the service, Major General Edward Croft, the chief of infantry, sought to revive the flagging Infantry Journal. He hoped doing so might solicit from the Army’s wide base of talent—with all of the experiences, interests, and professional education within it—the ideas needed to modernize well. To pull off the revival, he named Major Edwin “Forrest” Harding as editor.

Croft picked his man well. Harding had a literary mind. When they served together in China a decade before, a young George Marshall had nicknamed Harding the “poet laureate” of the 15th Infantry Regiment. Harding’s literary talents paid off as Infantry Journal editor. In four short years he more than doubled the journal’s circulation, and kicked off a revolution in Army writing.

And the United States is lucky he did.

Under Harding, the Infantry Journal fostered critical debates over changing tactics and technology before America joined World War II. Soldiers hashed out the best use of the rapidly developing tank and means of combining arms.

Today, once again, the Army again finds itself in an interwar period, seeking to modernize before the next war. And today, once again, it needs the input of the entire Army to succeed in doing so. To that end, the Army’s journals again require renewal.

While Military Review—the professional journal of the US Army—has modernized into a web-first, mobile-friendly platform supported by social media, other professional bulletins have missed this transition. Branch magazines, in particular, should be the venue for discussion of branch issues and should be associated with the branches’ centers of excellence. But they now publish less content, less often, and more erratically than ever before. These publications are also distant from the forces they serve, employing no uniformed editors and having only weak connections with authors.

The Harding Project is a grassroots effort to organize those interested in renewing professional publications, inform that community, and solicit their ideas. We are proud to partner with the Modern War Institute on this effort. MWI has led the modern professional publication renewal today as Harding did with the Infantry Journal in the 1930s.

Over the next year, the Harding Project will advocate for four specific actions to renew the US Army’s journals: (1) updating policy to encourage modernization, (2) educating the force on the professional publication landscape, (3) improving archive accessibility, and (4) empowering volunteer editors.

The Five Functions of Professional Writing

Two interwar cases—one leading up to World War II, when Harding revitalized the Infantry Journal, and the second following the Vietnam War—highlight the five important purposes of the Army’s professional journals. First, leaders can inform the force. After Vietnam, the Army found itself transitioning from a low-intensity conflict to a period in which it sought to enhance its readiness for a major war with a peer adversary. Gen. Donald Starry published an article in Military Review, “Extending the Battlefield,” that reflected his observations from the Yom Kippur War and foreshadowed the publication of a new Army operating concept, AirLand Battle. With the Army now in a similar position—preparing for large-scale combat operations after nearly two decades of counterinsurgency and stability operations, and looking for lessons in conflicts like the ongoing war in Ukraine—professional journals offer the same opportunity today.

Second, articles can help connect communities of interest. The Infantry Journal certainly did this, publishing articles in the interwar years like “Tank Divisions” and “Infantry Caterpillar Club” that connected American military thinkers with one another and fostered shared understanding of emerging ideas. It even tied in the work of foreign officers, exposing US Army readers to ideas taking shape outside the country—Heinz Guderian’s article, “Armored Forces,” was published in a 1937 issue.

Third, journals can serve as an outlet for ideas that may not find support from their originators’ local chains of command. The Infantry Journal’s use of pen names provided an outlet for individuals like “Captain Tenderhide,” who complained about woolen Army shirts, or “Private Heelclicker,” who skewered officers that failed to return salutes. But more broadly, the journal provided a venue for ideas to be shared outside of the rigidly hierarchical silos characteristic of military organizations.

Fourth, archived professional journals serve as a repository of earlier thinking that can be repurposed for contemporary challenges. This is an invaluable resource for a force in transition—like the US Army in the wake of the Vietnam War and today’s Army after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And finally, the act of writing and editing builds written communication skills so necessary for leadership. Unfortunately, today’s professional writing landscape needs renewal before these five functions can be fully realized.

The Need for Renewal

The Army’s professional military publications need renewal. From 1982 to 2020, four branch magazines published fewer issues and fewer pages, more erratically, each year. The Army’s professional outlets also publish in outdated formats. While outlets like Military Review have modernized, professional publications largely publish as downloadable PDFs that are incompatible with today’s web-first and mobile world. These downloadable PDFs also make the Army’s archives relatively inaccessible. Those searching for historical documents must rely on topic guides or scrub complete back issues to find information of interest. The decline in content and inaccessibility may be related to the distance between the field and the press. Over the same time period, military editorial staff declined to zero officers working at branch magazines, with just one at Military Review.

This distance between editors and the troops in the field may also contribute to weak engagement on social media, in scholarly work, and with authors. As a social media example, MWI’s more than seventy thousand Twitter followers are nearly ten times the total of Army University Press. On the scholarly side, a forthcoming Harding Project research brief demonstrates that military authors cited professional military writing only 254 times in a sample of 9,014 citations. The lack of social media and scholarly engagement suggest the Army’s publications are not currently reaching their audiences.

Furthermore, the authors contributing to these publications overwhelmingly fail to reflect the diversity of the Army. When the body of officers engaging in professional writing in these outlets is more white and more male than both the Army and the country, the discussions taking place in their pages can hardly be described as representative of the force. These missing perspectives, combined with weak engagement with the field may send eyeballs elsewhere, to non-branch-specific outlets, like MWI, or even to those published entirely outside the military, like War on the Rocks.

The Harding Project Platform

With a modest investment, the Army’s professional journals can be renewed for the modern information environment. The Harding Project advocates for four steps toward renewal.

1. Perfect the policy.

The first step in renewing the Army’s professional publications is to update the Army’s publication policy to support the transition to web-first, mobile-friendly platforms with robust social media support. Outlets like the Modern War Institute embody this approach.

Currently, Army Pamphlet 25-40 and associated policy documents implicitly assume that the “publishing program” they govern takes the printed form, specifying the “cover paper stock,” prohibiting “full-page reversals” and “full-page screening,” and requiring the inclusion of certain information on the cover. While the policy does include a mechanism to request exceptions to professional bulletin standards, the requests must flow from the editorial team, through commanders of the Army command, to the director of the Army Publishing Directorate. No professional bulletin appears to have requested exceptions to policy.

Better publication policy would explicitly encourage modernization to a web-first, mobile-friendly format. Rather than publishing as thirty-eight-megabyte PDF complete issues, professional bulletins could publish articles with relevant content on a rolling basis. When supported by social media, these articles could directly reach their branches’ soldiers and officers on their phones or work desktop computers.

To further encourage change, the Secretary of the Army Awards for Publications Improvement could focus for the next two years on professional bulletin modernization. This awards program recognizes “military and civilian personnel who have made superior contributions in publications.” The awards program has categories for both editors who produce superior publications and for individuals who “develop, manage, or support a program or effort that improves the activity’s publishing system, process, or program.” By tying criteria for these awards to modernizing professional publications, the Army could further encourage renewal.

Changing the policy as described would mean the end of picking up printed copies of branch magazines laying around the company area, but those days are largely over already. Few or no branch magazines are published in hard copy today—they just retain the format from the days when they were. By modernizing to web-first, mobile-friendly platforms, the Army’s professional bulletins will again reach their audiences.

2. Educate the force.

Evidence suggests that as things stand the profession does not read what it writes. Low engagement on the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS), low citation rates by Army students, and weak social media presence indicates that many soldiers are probably not even aware of the Army’s fifteen professional bulletins and many other publications. On DVIDS (where many branch magazines are published), Infantry, Armor, Engineer, and Field Artillery in 2022 and 2023 averaged only six downloads and 1,287 hits per issue. Likewise, a forthcoming study of 90 Command and General Staff College (CGSC) monographs and 120 issues of Military Review found that less than 3 percent of citations were of professional bulletins or military student monographs. Finally, no professional journal has its own social media and journals are rarely mentioned on associated branch center of excellence accounts.

The value of a publishing culture compounds but only if soldiers read and build on what each other write. To this end, the Army could adopt several policies. One would be the publication of an annual anthology of each year’s best articles, and the incorporation of that anthology in professional military education (PME) curricula. Another such policy would be mandating the citation of just one professional article per written assignment. Another would be to award noncommissioned officers promotion points for publishing in a professional journal.

None of these suggested policies is a silver bullet and not every soldier in the Army will write, but it is clearly in the Army’s interest for all of them to know that these resources exist, and to program into institutional development exposure to the Army’s publishing ecosystem.

3. Improve the archives.

The Army could gain more from its professional publications. Any student of Socrates or veteran of a good seminar knows that ideas best develop in dialogue with others. But because most Army publications have no indexed archives, every article currently run in an Army publication is more like a shout in a void than a contribution to a conversation.

To more rapidly find solutions to the Army’s tough challenges, the Army should transition archives from the issue-level to the article-level and improve metadata to ease the use of research tools like Zotero.

Today, the Army largely archives professional journals by complete, scanned issue in single PDF files. Unfortunately, issue-level archives challenge students and researchers interested in specific topics rather than what was published at a specific time. In recognition of this challenge, the Army maintains guides to accessing our information. As examples, Infantry maintains a 216-page subject-author index and the Army Heritage Center Foundation hosts dozens of research bibliographies. Issue-level archives make it difficult for action officers or students to access the Army’s rich history of intellectual engagement with important subjects.

Consider recruiting. Recruiting is a continuous process for the Army and a rich subject of professional writing, yet accessing previous writings on the subject is difficult. Notably, Infantry’s index includes only four articles relating to recruiting, while the Army Heritage Center Foundation’s website does not include a bibliography focused on recruiting issues.

Because the Army archives at the issue level, searching is also difficult. A search of Military Review at the Ike Skelton Combined Arms Research Library for “recruiting” returns 218 complete issues. Searchers must then download each of the multi-megabyte PDF files, scour the hundred or more pages of each to find the material on recruiting, decide whether the material is suitable for their research, and then record key information including the bibliographic information for future citation. This is a laborious process.

Transitioning to article-level indexing with improved metadata would allow for rapid screening of each search result. Academia and other professions have already transitioned from archives of paper issues to digital archives of articles, so this transition should not be overly burdensome. One option for hosting articles could be with the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC). While this might require some negotiation, DTIC’s holdings are already indexed by search tools like Google Scholar and include document metadata.

4. Empower volunteer editors.

Volunteer editorial teams could increase the capacity of civilian editorial teams at professional journals, develop a capable cohort of military writers, and better connect professional journals with the force. Extrapolation from a recent survey suggests there could be more than 360 potential volunteer editors for Army journals, many times the number of professional staff. This is important, as military authors have limited connection with overwhelmingly civilian editorial staff.

Professional journals could adopt an editorial format similar to that used by law reviews, with military volunteers augmenting a permanent civilian staff. At the branch level, each center of excellence could recruit and train junior editors from lieutenants in their basic courses with the aptitude and inclination, who could perform basic functions like social media support, screening articles, and copy editing. Centers of excellence could then either promote junior editors into senior editors or recruit new senior editors from those so inclined at career courses. Volunteer editors would thus constantly refresh as new editors are recruited and other volunteers drop off as other commitments require their attention elsewhere. This constant cycle of volunteer editors is a feature that ensures that the professional journals modernize their formats as media continues to evolve, builds a cohort of talented writers, and fosters a continued connection with the issues in the field.

The Approach

Together, the four elements of the Harding Project platform will renew the Army’s professional publications. New policy will modernize outlets. The citation requirement will educate the force on the Army’s publications and create a demand signal for more accessible archives. Then, improved archives will unlock our history for both students and professional military authors who want to build on the work of previous authors. Finally, empowering volunteers will improve outlet capacity to edit, publish, and publicize articles while also building a cohort of talented communicators and connecting journals with the field.

The Harding Project, and the greater reinvestment in professional military writing, will not succeed unless the full complement of Army talent buys in. We invite those passionate about renewing military writing to follow the Harding Project here at MWI, where regular feature pieces will be published, and to subscribe to the Harding Project Substack newsletter. If you’d like to submit an article or post for consideration, please email submissions@hardingproject.com.

The US Army finds itself in an interwar moment of great consequence, but not for the first time. In similar periods in the past, Army leaders such as Major Edwin Harding seized the moment to renew military professional writing. That reinvestment ensured that there was a professional venue for essential debates about doctrine and technology needed to ready for the next war. It is time for the US Army to make such a reinvestment, and the Harding Project represents the beginning of it.

Zachary Griffiths is a major in the United States Army.

Theo Lipsky is a captain in the United States Army.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Zachary Griffiths, Theo Lipsky · September 5, 2023

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com