Quotes of the Day:

“There will come a time when the rich will own all the media, and it will be impossible for the public to make an informed opinion.” 

- Albert Einstein (about 1949)

“We are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is Day who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

 - Edward Bernays.

“The ordaining of laws, in favor of one part of the nation, to the prejudice and oppression of another, it's certainly the most erroneous and mistaken policy. An equal dispensation of protection, rights, privileges, and advantages, is what every part is entitled to an hour to enjoy” 

- Benjamin Franklin

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 5, 2023

2. An Interview with Mike Kofman: On analysing the Russo-Ukraine War

3. John Bolton: Republicans Must Exorcise the Ghost of Neville Chamberlain When it Comes to Ukraine

4. AUKUS standoff: Australia, UK wait on Congress to approve pact

5. An inside look at Ukraine's cyber war with Russia

6. Criminal enterprise flaunts AI in creepy 'fraud-for-hire' commercial meant for dark web

7. AFSOC Power Projection Wing and Unit Relocations | SOF News

8. The Fall from Grace of Russian SOF: The Danger of Forgetting Lessons Learned

9. Opinion | Three service secretaries to Tuberville: Stop this dangerous hold on senior officers

10. It’s Not About Where U.S. Space Command Goes But Whether It Should Exist At All

11. All to Play for: Ukraine's Counteroffensive and its Prospects for Success in 2023

12. A corporal gave a speech in front of the top Marine — and got promoted

13. 3 Bullets, 2 Wars, 1 Village (Ukraine)

14. Putin is developing a sinister new plan for victory (and the relationship with north Korea)

15. SAM Sites Could Return To Critical Locales Across U.S.

16. This cold war is different

17. Russian Pilot Describes Defection to Ukraine, Urges Others to Follow

18. Russian Official Admits ‘Tactical Retreat’ From Robotyne Amid Kyiv’s Gains

19. The world is running out of ‘inflection points’ in the war against authoritarian rule

20. The Russians Are Getting Better

21. The Last Minarets of Yunnan

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 5, 2023

​Maps/graphics/citations: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-september-5-2023

Key Takeaways:

• Ukrainian forces continue to advance in western Zaporizhia Oblast.
• Russian sources continue to complain that Russian forces lack sufficient counterbattery capabilities and artillery munitions in the face of ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive activities, which the Kremlin and the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) are reportedly attempting to combat.
• Ukrainian counteroffensive operations in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area are likely succeeding in pinning elements of the 7th Guards Mountain Airborne (VDV) Division and preventing them from laterally redeploying to critical areas of the front in western Zaporizhia Oblast.
• Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reiterated boilerplate rhetoric intended to dismiss recent Ukrainian advances and highlight the beginning of a new academic year for Russian military institutions during a meeting with Russian military leadership on September 5.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin drew historical parallels between Soviet participation in the Second World War and the current war in Ukraine to set ideological expectations for a prolonged war effort.
• The Armenian government appears to be seriously questioning its decades-long security relationship with Russia, amid reports of Armenian humanitarian aid to Ukraine and increasing public dissatisfaction with Russia’s security guarantees.
• 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 5.
• Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations in at least two sectors of the front and advanced near Bakhmut, in the western Donetsk-eastern Zaporizhia Oblast border area, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast on September 5.
• Russian sources continue to report on Russian efforts to recruit volunteers amid continued rumors of general mobilization.
• The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) reportedly attempted to assassinate a Russian occupation official in occupied Luhansk Oblast on September 5.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, SEPTEMBER 5, 2023

Sep 5, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 5, 2023

Grace Mappes, Angelica Evans, Nicole Wolkov, Christina Harward, Karolina Hird, and Frederick W. Kagan

September 5, 2023, 5:30pm 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 12:30pm ET on September 5. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the September 6 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Ukrainian forces continue to advance in western Zaporizhia Oblast. Geolocated footage posted on September 5 shows Russian forces striking Ukrainian positions northwest and west of Robotyne, indicating that Ukrainian forces have advanced into an area near the settlement that Russian forces previously claimed to control.[1] Additional geolocated footage posted on September 5 shows that Ukrainian forces have also advanced south of Robotyne and northwest of Verbove (about 10km east of Robotyne).[2] Geolocated evidence of Ukrainian forces northwest of Verbove suggests that Ukrainian forces are advancing along the line of Russian fortifications that runs into the settlement. Ukrainian military sources also confirmed that Ukrainian forces have been successful in the Robotyne—Novoprokopivka directions south of Orikhiv, and further reported that Ukrainian forces are pursuing successful offensive operations south of Bakhmut.[3]

Russian sources continue to complain that Russian forces lack sufficient counterbattery capabilities and artillery munitions in the face of ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive activities, which the Kremlin and the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) are reportedly attempting to combat. Russian milbloggers claimed on September 4 and 5 that Russian counterbattery systems are performing poorly along the front in Ukraine.[4] The milbloggers claimed that Russian forces are relying heavily on Lancet drones and 220mm and 300mm rounds for Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS), of which there are limited stockpiles.[5] One Russian milblogger noted that the Russian MoD‘s plans to form five new artillery brigades in each of Russia’s five military districts are in part meant to improve general counterbattery capabilities.[6] It is unclear if the milblogger is claiming that the MoD plans to form five or 25 brigades total. The milblogger claimed that the Russian MoD would equip the new brigades with 203-mm 2S7 Pion and 2S7M Malka artillery systems from Russian stores.[7] The New York Times reported on September 4 that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok from September 10-13 and will reportedly discuss North Korea’s supply of artillery shells to Russia.[8] Russian sources have continually complained that Russian forces face problems with counterbattery operations.[9]

Ukrainian counteroffensive operations in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area are likely succeeding in pinning elements of the 7th Guards Mountain Airborne (VDV) Division and preventing them from laterally redeploying to critical areas of the front in western Zaporizhia Oblast. A Russian milblogger posted an audio recording on September 5 purportedly from a soldier in the Russian 247th VDV Regiment in which the soldier claims that he has to retrieve bodies of Russian personnel near Staromayorske because the Russian command is not overseeing the retrieval of bodies and claimed that his unit lost 49 killed in action in one day of fighting.[10] The Russian soldier’s claims suggest that elements of the 247th Regiment remain defending in the western Donetsk-eastern Zaporizhia Oblast area, despite claims from a prominent Russian source in late August that some elements are fighting in the Robotyne area.[11] ISW previously observed that elements of 108th VDV Regiment and 56th VDV Regiment — the two other constituent regiments of the 7th VDV Division — have redeployed to the Robotyne area.[12]

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reiterated boilerplate rhetoric intended to dismiss recent Ukrainian advances and highlight the beginning of a new academic year for Russian military institutions during a meeting with Russian military leadership on September 5. Shoigu claimed that the Ukrainian forces had not achieved any of their goals for the counteroffensive.[13] Shoigu noted that the Zaporizhia direction, most likely referring to the Robotyne area, has become the tensest area of the front lines and that Ukrainian forces have committed several brigades from their “strategic reserve” to this area.[14] Shoigu claimed that Russian forces have destroyed a heavily exaggerated amount of Ukrainian personnel and military equipment since the Ukrainian counteroffensive began in June 2023.[15] Shoigu noted that Russian military schools and training programs began a new academic year on September 1.[16] Shoigu also noted that the curriculum of Russian military training programs has been adjusted to prepare students for the conditions they would face fighting in Ukraine.[17]

Russian President Vladimir Putin drew historical parallels between Soviet participation in the Second World War and the current war in Ukraine to set ideological expectations for a prolonged war effort. Putin gave a speech on September 5 that invoked the memory of significant Soviet military victories during the Second World War, including turning points in the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk and recapturing the Caucasus and Donbas.[18] Putin had notably attended a concert in honor of the Battle of Kursk’s 80th anniversary as Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin’s plane crashed on August 23.[19] Putin criticized the international community’s “attitude” to the buildup to the Second World War — very likely criticizing European countries for failing to intervene against Nazi Germany prior to the outbreak of war (and ignoring the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that briefly allied the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany, permitted the Soviet invasion of the Baltic States, and partitioned Poland) — as also creating conditions for the current conflict in Ukraine and drew parallels between reconstruction efforts and veterans assistance measures during and after the Second World War and the current war in Ukraine.[20] Putin also reamplified the Kremlin information operation falsely portraying the Ukrainian government as a “Nazi regime.” These direct parallels between the “special military operation” and the Second World War are likely the closest that Putin or any other senior Russian official has come to acknowledging the war in Ukraine as an actual war. These parallels also message to a domestic Russian audience that the ongoing Russian war effort is really a war effort despite the insistence on the euphemistic “special military operation.”

The Armenian government appears to be seriously questioning its decades-long security relationship with Russia, amid reports of Armenian humanitarian aid to Ukraine and increasing public dissatisfaction with Russia’s security guarantees. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Armenia service Radio Azatutyun reported on September 5th that the Armenian government has reportedly sent unspecified humanitarian aid to Ukraine for the first time since the war in Ukraine began.[21] Radio Azatutyan’s sources claimed that Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s wife Anna Hakobyan will personally deliver the aid to Kyiv and attend the “Third Summit of First Ladies and Gentlemen” that begins on September 6.[22] The Armenian government has not officially confirmed this information. Pashinyan notably stated that Russia cannot meet Armenia’s security needs in an interview with Italian newspaper La Repubblica published on September 4 and called Armenia’s dependence on Russia for security a “strategic mistake.”[23] Pashinyan also reported that Russia could not meet Armenia’s security needs even if it so desired, given the Russian military’s current need for weapons and ammunition likely referring to use in Ukraine.[24] Kremlin newswire TASS notably reported on August 28 that Azerbaijani law enforcement officers detained three Nagorno-Karabakh residents, reportedly escorted by Russian peacekeepers, at a checkpoint in the Lachin corridor, prompting protests outside the Russian embassy in Yerevan.[25] A Kremlin-affiliated Russian milblogger confirmed on September 5 that Major General Kirill Kulakov replaced Colonel General Alexander Lentsov as the commander of the Russian peacekeeping contingent in Nagorno-Karabakh.[26]

Key Takeaways:

• Ukrainian forces continue to advance in western Zaporizhia Oblast.
• Russian sources continue to complain that Russian forces lack sufficient counterbattery capabilities and artillery munitions in the face of ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive activities, which the Kremlin and the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) are reportedly attempting to combat.
• Ukrainian counteroffensive operations in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area are likely succeeding in pinning elements of the 7th Guards Mountain Airborne (VDV) Division and preventing them from laterally redeploying to critical areas of the front in western Zaporizhia Oblast.
• Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reiterated boilerplate rhetoric intended to dismiss recent Ukrainian advances and highlight the beginning of a new academic year for Russian military institutions during a meeting with Russian military leadership on September 5.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin drew historical parallels between Soviet participation in the Second World War and the current war in Ukraine to set ideological expectations for a prolonged war effort.
• The Armenian government appears to be seriously questioning its decades-long security relationship with Russia, amid reports of Armenian humanitarian aid to Ukraine and increasing public dissatisfaction with Russia’s security guarantees.
• 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 5.
• Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations in at least two sectors of the front and advanced near Bakhmut, in the western Donetsk-eastern Zaporizhia Oblast border area, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast on September 5.
• Russian sources continue to report on Russian efforts to recruit volunteers amid continued rumors of general mobilization.
• The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) reportedly attempted to assassinate a Russian occupation official in occupied Luhansk Oblast on September 5.

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 conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove line on September 5 and did not make confirmed advances. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful operations near Novoyehorivka (16km southwest of Svatove) and Bilohorivka (10km south of Kreminna).[27] A Russian news aggregator claimed that Russian forces captured several unspecified Ukrainian positions near Synkivka (7km east of Kupyansk) and Petropavlivka (9km northeast of Kupyansk) and continued to push Ukrainian forces out of positions near Petropavlivka.[28] Russian sources claimed on the evening of September 4 that Russian forces were successful near Novoselivske (15km northwest of Svatove) and continued to advance slowly toward the Oskil River west of Svatove.[29] Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported on September 5 that Ukrainian forces are repelling about eight Russian attacks each day in the Lyman direction and that Russian forces are preparing for more offensive operations in the Lyman and Kupyansk directions.[30]

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Kreminna on September 5. The Russian MoD and other Russian sources claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian attacks near Dibrova (7km southwest of Kreminna), the Serebryanske forest area (10km southwest of Kreminna), and Torske (15km west of Kreminna).[31]

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

Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in the Bakhmut direction on September 5 and have made confirmed advances. Geolocated footage posted on September 5 indicates that Ukrainian forces have made marginal gains south of Andriivka (10km southwest of Bakhmut).[32] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations south of Bakhmut and are consolidating positions in the area.[33] Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Ilya Yevlash noted that Ukrainian forces are advancing in the Klishchiivka area (6km southwest of Bakhmut).[34] One Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces managed to advance in the western part of Klishchiivka and took control of an unspecified sector of the road that runs through the settlement.[35]

Russian forces conducted offensive operations in the Bakhmut direction on September 5 and did not make any confirmed advances. The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Ukrainian troops repelled unsuccessful Russian attacks north of Klishchiivka.[36] Several Russian milbloggers claimed that there are ongoing positional battles near the Berkhivka reservoir (about 2km northwest of Bakhmut) and that Russian forces regained lost positions near Kurdyumivka (12km southwest of Bakhmut).[37] The Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) 4th Motorized Rifle Brigade claimed that elements of the 4th Brigade and Chechen “Akhmat” fighters also recaptured positions near Klishchiivka.[38]

A Russian source claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted limited and unsuccessful attacks on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line on September 5. A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted a platoon-sized attack near Opytne (about 3km southwest of Avdiivka on the northwestern outskirts of Donetsk City) but that Russian forces ultimately repelled the attack.[39]

Russian forces conducted offensive operations southwest of Donetsk City on September 5 and did not make any claimed or confirmed advances. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces continued unsuccessful ground attacks near Marinka (on the southwestern outskirts of Donetsk City).[40] A Russian milblogger noted that Russian forces continue to assault Marinka but that the frontline southwest of Donetsk City has not changed.[41]

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

Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces increased the tempo of offensive operations and marginally advanced in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area on September 5. Russian milbloggers widely claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted small-scale armored assaults against positions of the Russian 37th Motorized Rifle Brigade (36th Combined Arms Army, Eastern Military District), 40th Naval Infantry Brigade (Pacific Fleet), and possibly the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) “Kaskad” Operational Tactical Combat Formation on the Novodonetske-Novomayorske line (11-17km southeast of Velyka Novosilka).[42] Russian “Vostok” Battalion Commander Alexander Khodakovsky claimed that Ukrainian forces captured some unspecified Russian positions in this area, but other Russian milbloggers claimed that heavy fighting is still ongoing on the outskirts of Novodonetske and Novomayorske.[43] Khodakovsky also claimed that heavy Ukrainian artillery fire southeast of Velyka Novosilka is degrading Russian morale and reducing the effectiveness of Russian minefields in the area, as Russian sappers are unable to lay more mines.[44] Another prominent milblogger noted that Russian forces in this area need increased counterbattery capabilities to combat Ukrainian artillery.[45] Russian milbloggers also claimed that fighting is ongoing near Staromayorske and Urozhaine (both about 8km south of Velyka Novosilka).[46] A Russian milblogger claimed that an unspecified Russian naval infantry unit, likely the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade (Black Sea Fleet), and elements of the 29th Combined Arms Army (Eastern Military District) repelled Ukrainian attacks north of Mykilske (27km southwest of Donetsk City).[47]

A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces conducted an unsuccessful counterattack near Pryyutne (16km southwest of Velyka Novosilka) in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area on September 5.[48]

Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast and advanced on September 5. Geolocated footage published on September 5 indicates that Ukrainian forces advanced northwest and south of Robotyne (10km south of Orikhiv) and northwest of Verbove (18km southeast of Orikhiv).[49] Russian sources, including the Russian MoD, claimed that Russian forces repelled small Ukrainian infantry attacks on the Robotyne-Verbove line.[50]

Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces recaptured several positions in Robotyne as of September 5, but ISW has observed no visual confirmation of these claims. Russian milbloggers claimed on September 4 and 5 that unspecified elements of the 76th Guards Air Assault (VDV) Division recaptured several streets in southern Robotyne during counterattacks from the west and east.[51] Another milblogger claimed that Russian forces conducted additional counterattacks northeast of Novoprokopivka and southwest of Verbove, and that positions on the Robotyne-Verbove and Robotyne-Novoprokopivka lines frequently change hands.[52]

A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces maintain limited positions in the east (left) bank of Kherson Oblast near Kherson City but that Russian forces have stabilized the situation near Hola Prystan.[53] The milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces landed two small groups of 20 total personnel near the Antonivsky Bridge and that a 10-person Ukrainian grouping holds a position near Pidstepne (about 12km east of the Antonivsky Bridge).[54] Another milblogger claimed the situation near the Antonivsky Bridge and Dachy is increasingly tense due to nearby Ukrainian positions.[55]

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

Russian sources continue to report on Russian efforts to recruit volunteers amid continued rumors of general mobilization. Russian opposition news outlet Govorit Nemoskva stated on September 4 that Russian regional authorities sharply increased efforts to recruit volunteers for military service in August 2023.[56] Voronezh Oblast authorities reportedly promised 120,000 rubles ($1225) to volunteers from the oblast who sign a contract with the Russian MoD by the end of 2023 and reminded detainees that the Russian government will pardon anyone who serves in the war in Ukraine.[57] Govorit Nemoskva reported that Russian authorities in Perm, Chuvashia, St. Petersburg, and Volgograd began campaigns to coerce migrants to sign military contracts in exchange for Russian citizenship, consistent with ISW’s previous reporting.[58] Regional officials reportedly expressed concern that the Russian government will conduct a wave of “total” mobilization if regional officials do not recruit enough volunteers for military service.[59] Russian sources, including State Duma Defense Committee Head Andrei Kartapolov, repeatedly denounced the circulation of a reportedly fake Russian MoD decree that orders the resumption of mobilization on September 5, indicating that Russian authorities remain concerned about how the Russian population would react to further mobilization.[60]

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

The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) reportedly attempted to assassinate a Russian occupation official in occupied Luhansk Oblast on September 5. Ukrainian news outlet Hromadske cited reported internal SBU sources and stated that the SBU attempted to assassinate former Chairman of the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) Customs Committee Yuri Afanasyevsky with an explosive device.[61] Hromadske reported that Afanasyevsky is a General Major in the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and ”financier” of LNR Head Leonid Pasechnik.[62] Hromadske reported that Afanasyevsky laundered money to finance Russian military units fighting in the war in Ukraine.[63]

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 5.[64] The chairmen of the defense and security committees in the parliaments of all CSTO member states held a Coordination Meeting in Minsk on September 5.[65]

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. An Interview with Mike Kofman: On analysing the Russo-Ukraine War

Excerpts:

I think the main lessons from this go back to what I wrote with Rob Lee in May about the need to think beyond the offensive, and plan for the long war. That is about focusing on priority issues: ammunition, air defense, key enablers, and scaling up training. Training in particular is an area where I think we need to both expand and improve. These topics are not exciting, and stand in contrast to conversations about the next missile system or platforms that might prove a ‘game changer.’ The offensive shows there’s a lot more to building combat effective units than just Western equipment and we need to adjust our efforts accordingly. Much the same will be true when Ukraine begins to receive F-16s. The West needs to also reflect on decision points missed and use that past to inform the future. 

A final comment on the perils of prediction. There is a paradox of expertise. Specialists are not good at making predictions, which makes it ironic that they are regularly asked to make them. In thinking about the future of this conflict, I look to what has already happened in prior phases of this war, and use other wars as reference points. Each has its own context, but they are useful guideposts to what possible futures might look like. A caveat, too often we look to World War I or World War II as references in discourse, but they are by definition outlier events. This is another reason why research in Ukraine proves valuable. Understanding previous battles in this war, what happened and why, helps inform expectations on what the future might hold.

An Interview with Mike Kofman

On analysing the Russo-Ukraine War

https://samf.substack.com/p/an-interview-with-mike-kofman?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=631422&post_id=136550037&isFreemail=false&r=7i07&utm_medium=email

LAWRENCE FREEDMAN

SEP 6, 2023

∙ PAID

From the moment when the build-up of Russian forces around the borders of Ukraine began to attract attention in late 2021, Mike Kofman’s analyses of the threat of war and then the reality of the full-scale invasion have been essential reading. His latest substantial article on the Ukrainian counteroffensive, co-authored with Rob Lee, appeared this week in War on the Rocks. In this interview I ask Mike about the special challenges of analysing an ongoing war as well his forward look.

I’d like to start by discussing the special challenges we’ve both faced in trying to follow a closely fought war as it is underway. You were one of the most prominent voices (correctly) warning of the full-scale Russian invasion. But when it came it did not unfold as you and others anticipated. Why do you think this happened and what lessons can we learn from this experience?

There was a range of views in the analytical community: it was not monolithic. Not everyone expected the same type of campaign. In a January 2022 article I proposed three possible variations. If there was something approaching a consensus, it was in the expectation that Ukraine would probably lose the conventional phase of the war, but that Russia would fail in a large-scale occupation of the country. This naturally seems pessimistic now, but at the time there were sound reasons for this view.

The first, and most important reason for the gap in expectations stemmed from an assumption that the Russian invasion would look like a conventional military campaign. Instead, the invasion plan stemmed largely from the Kremlin’s assumptions, driven by a belief that Russian intelligence had set the conditions for a speedy coup de main. Extensive efforts were made at infiltration, subversion, and sabotage, but Russian intelligence failed to deliver. The Russian military structured the invasion assuming the groundwork had been laid, resistance would be weak and isolated, and that combat operations could be swiftly concluded. 

As one thoughtful Ukrainian colleague put it in a later discussion, they expected someone would ‘open the gates’ for them. Hence little effort was made to isolate the theater, cut ground lines of communication, or engage in other actions that I think analysts anticipated as part of the operation. Russian forces did not conduct a combined arms operation, but essentially drove in, initially trying to conduct ‘thunder runs’ along divergent axes of advance.

This takes us to why analysts rated Ukrainian chances as low. I think there were several reasons for this, but I would highlight that Ukraine did not appear to be preparing a defense against a full-scale invasion. Kyiv had taken steps in secret, but many of the preparations, from mobilization to deployments, were made last minute, and often from the bottom up. For example, had the orders not been given for Ukrainian units to move out on the day before the initial Russian strike, the losses would have been significantly higher than they were. Ukrainian forces were better positioned to defend in the Donbas, rather than against a full-scale invasion. The capital was relatively undefended on the night of February 24^th. A study of the battle of Hostomel suggests that a fair bit of the outcome hinged on those first 24 hours.

Many of those I had the benefit of interviewing in Kyiv also believe that fight for Hostomel was critical to the outcome of that first day’s fighting and much of what followed. Ukrainian volunteers, civilians, and soldiers saved the day through their actions, but the historical evidence suggests that this was a close-run affair. It was difficult to argue, based on what could be observed in the correlation and disposition of forces, that Ukraine stood a great chance of winning. It seemed the Russian plan was to catch Ukraine ‘cold,’ and a fair bit of the evidence suggested this might happen in the days running up to February 24^th. That said, it’s clear the community underestimated the Ukrainian military, and civil society.

Lastly, I overestimated the Russian military’s ability to execute a large-scale effort like this. The Russian ability to scale complex operations, especially in the employment of airpower and a missile strike campaign, was unproven, and I think worst-case assumptions were made in this regard. Though the Russian VKS did conduct a strike and suppression campaign early on, their planning was equally based around a speedy victory, and they couldn’t deal with Ukraine’s extensive network of air defenses. In general, the Russian military was missing the organizational capacity and experience to translate theory into practice and the force proved weak in the fundamentals in terms of training, leadership, and initiative. 

There were counter arguments to be made regarding Russian performance, but these arguments are also not without their problems. For example, factors like corruption hold notional appeal, but you will struggle to demonstrate that they are specifically causal of outcomes in war. Azerbaijan was far more corrupt than Armenia when it beat that country decisively in 2020. History shows that will to fight is necessary, but hardly sufficient. Plenty of militaries that have it still end up losing. I think it important we get better at considering soft factors, and intangibles, but these remain difficult to measure and assess.

I also suspect that too much wargaming and analysis post-2014 fixated on a few Russia-NATO scenarios, which created tunnel vision in the community. Military power is heavily context dependent: the contending forces, geography, the political objectives, and attendant military strategy significantly shape how forces will be employed and the potential outcome. This means that not only were the Russian military’s abilities overestimated, but they were overestimated specifically in the context of an invasion of Ukraine. Some of that may have been pessimism bias based on Ukrainian performance 2014-2015, and failure to effectively account for, or interrogate, the improvements made in the Ukrainian military in the interim. Defense analysis tends to be adversary-centric in what it looks at.

I think there is an unfair conflation of what analysts thought and what Western intelligence communities believed. Some didn’t believe the war would happen at all, and had a different interpretation of the evidence. Analysts like myself were not involved in those assessments so I can’t speak to them, but they were likely more pessimistic than those of the broader community. My own reading of the run up to the war is that some of the worst case scenarios were emphasized by officials in order to convey urgency, because many did not believe the war was imminent.  

That said, the assumptions made are always done with limited information on hand about an adversary’s plans and forces. Having perfect knowledge of the inner workings of an adversary military, which classifies everything from their most basic order of battle to the color of toilet paper, isn’t possible. Militaries pad readiness, they certify units in scripted training exercises, they lie to themselves. This rot is often exposed when they embark on a campaign. If you think this only happens in the Russian military, I assure you it does not. Hence, I’m skeptical of critics holding military analysis to the test of being omniscient, knowing about an adversary military all there is, including that which they themselves do not know. What we have to be better at is conveying uncertainty, being frank about what we don’t know, and less deterministic in outlooks.

I am generally less interested in correctly predicting something in war, but rather making sure that we understand what happened, why, and that the prediction was made for the right reasons. Otherwise, one is prone to experience the ‘broken clock’ syndrome in analysis - the appearance of having predicted an outcome correctly, but by chance, and for the wrong reasons. All that said, when does war unfold exactly as one anticipates? Your book ‘The Future of War’ offers insights on the history of such predictions. I can’t say that it is necessarily encouraging for military futurists, or those who seek to predict the course of a future war. 

Predicting that a war will take place is easier than anticipating how it might unfold, even in its early phases. Keeping in mind that wars, especially those conceived as short and decisive, rarely turn out to be so. They unfold in phases, inflection points, involving a host of social, military, and political factors . Were Britain and France wrongly rated against Germany in 1939-1940, or was the German success in the Battle of France in 1940 a low probability outcome? Were those assessments botched, or simply the wrong call, made fairly for the right reasons?  

Following this war has reinforced for me that war is a quintessentially human enterprise, subject to agency, contingency, chance, decisions, and events that cannot be foreseen. This is why our field must remain interdisciplinary at its core. There is far more to military analysis than counting tanks or comparing radar aspect ratios (though knowing how military technology works is important). I suspect this is why many of the people involved in Russia military analysis are not area studies specialists, but researchers with a security or war studies background. 

Another issue concerns the reliability of available information, or at least putting the information we do have in context. Many of us must rely on open sources, social media, and occasional blogs and messages from Ukrainian friends and colleagues. You have dealt with this situation by making regular visits to the front lines in Ukraine. What difference do those visits make to your understanding of how the war is unfolding?

I think it’s important to be aware of the anchoring effect of available information. 100% of drone strike videos shown might be successful, that’s why they are released, but what percentage of actual strikes do they represent? A fair bit of the information being provided is curated, edited, and designed to shape perceptions. Anecdotes are useful, but the way I tend to referee them is with aggregate data, diversity of sources, and looking for input/output problems. If something was true, what would you expect to see to validate it, or invalidate it? You need to have a diversity of sources for claims, and be wary of over consuming desirable information. I try to ask: how do we know what we know? What would we expect to see to falsify the prevailing interpretation?

One way of dealing with this issue is to work as a community of analysts, with different resources, sources of information, and specializations. I see immense benefit working as part of a network, and a research community of interest that includes open source analysts, researchers, hobbyists, and those who have been doing this professionally for years. To do that you have to leave credentialism at the door, be open to newcomers, and assume that everyone has a piece of the puzzle.

The other difference, as you rightly identify, is having the opportunity to conduct field research in Ukraine. I’ve found over time that the information gleaned from field work is immensely valuable in filling in gaps of knowledge, acquiring data on key aspects of the war, being able to reconstruct past battles to gain fidelity on the likely causes behind particular outcomes, and of course it provides invaluable first hand experience. You can see the terrain, observe how Ukrainian soldiers operate, hear directly from them the sort of frank observations you’re just not going to see posted in public forums. 

War is ugly, messy, and you can form incorrect impressions trying to analyze it just based on open sources from thousands of miles away. Context is often missing, and it is difficult to validate or invalidate competing versions of what is taking place. There is no substitute for being there, conducting interviews to gather first-hand accounts, learning about Ukrainian or Russian tactics, how they evolved, etc. I also like traveling with a team of other analysts because they will ask questions I might not think of, or hear something different from the same conversation.

The picture I think we’re able to fill in the most is not just Russian tactics and performance, but more the Ukrainian side of the equation, which is often missing. That means not just taking notes on their successes, and what works, but also learning about the challenges, struggles, and problems Ukrainian forces have to deal with and overcome. Hearing views of what is working, what isn’t, where the fight is going well, and where it is not. Even though most of the details we learn we do not disclose in public, to some, hearing about challenges in the Ukrainian war effort is unwelcome, and always will be. But as Ukrainian military officials themselves remark, war is not a movie. I think engaging with Ukraine’s struggle in a superficial manner is unhelpful, sets unrealistic expectations, and often leads to the wrong conversations about how best to support Ukraine.

Related to both these issues is the question of the responsibility of the independent commentator in a war when so much is at stake and when one’s sympathies are very much with one side. How does one maintain a balanced view, and avoid becoming either an unrealistic cheer-leader or a demoralising doomster? Is it even helpful to think in terms of optimism or pessimism?

Commentator or analyst? I see these as different roles in the public space, and it is a distinction with a difference that bears on your question. Commentators may be more involved in trying to provide broader assessments of where the war is going, speculating on areas where inevitably much is uncertain, and seeking to influence policy choices. Good analysts need to have evidence for their claims, should be empirical in how they approach their work, admit when they’re wrong, or when new evidence disproves prior hypotheses. They should also be honest about what they do not know, or what is outside of their area of knowledge, and avoid intellectual tourism where it is unnecessary. I also see an obligation to inform public discourse. That doesn’t mean you callously disclose everything you know, including that which could unnecessarily hurt the war effort, or perceptions of it. 

I don’t think in terms of optimism or pessimism. I ask whether there is groupthink taking place, or if the community is showing signs of optimism, or pessimism, bias. Here it helps to be less impressionable. Perhaps this is one of the few benefits of getting older. I find myself less swayed by cheerleading, doomsaying, or extraordinary claims. We are not neutral, and like you I’m personally vested in Ukraine’s success, but I think we have a responsibility to be objective, and be mindful of framing. 

That said, I think people grossly overestimate the influence of individual analysts, or commentators, on policy decisions being made. Social media gives folks a distorted sense of where influence lies, and the extent to which particular debates online are representative of the deliberations of decision makers. To be sure, there are great conversations being had, but often what I see is folks talking past each other in a low information environment. 

We agree on the perils of prediction but how then does one talk about the future of the conflict? There seems to be a of 'behind schedule' and 'not going according to plan' talk at the moment yet it has been evident for weeks now that Ukraine has had to adapt tactics and objectives because of problems with the initial push, and that part of the adjustment may be to the demands of a much longer war. Has the issue shifted from one of land liberated to enemy capabilities destroyed or degraded? What are you paying most attention to as likely to give you the best indications of how events may unfold? And what do you think are the most important implications for Western policy-makers of your analysis.

The issue has not shifted if we look at the objectives, what’s changed is the approach. The initial operation did not go according to plan, few do. It’s important to acknowledge that and move on. Ukraine has focused on playing to its strengths and attriting Russian forces, which are concentrated along the first line of defense. That said, we’re quite past the early phases of the offensive, and there’s good fidelity now on what happened and what the original plan was. The war is coming down to the balance of attrition, who has better managed their reserves and ammunition, to sustain a grinding fight.

Both sides have deployed reserves into the fight at this point, and it is unclear what their remaining resources are. Russia has been forced to deploy strategic reserves into the fight, so they appear worried about holding the line. I’m looking at how the next few weeks unfold. The dynamic has changed and Ukrainian forces have been able to pick up some momentum, but the situation remains fluid and difficult to assess. There is a focus on territory being liberated, because it is what we can see, but it is a lagging indicator. If Ukraine does achieve a breakthrough, it is because Russian forces are sufficiently degraded, and they have no more reserves to throw into the fight. 

I think the main lessons from this go back to what I wrote with Rob Lee in May about the need to think beyond the offensive, and plan for the long war. That is about focusing on priority issues: ammunition, air defense, key enablers, and scaling up training. Training in particular is an area where I think we need to both expand and improve. These topics are not exciting, and stand in contrast to conversations about the next missile system or platforms that might prove a ‘game changer.’ The offensive shows there’s a lot more to building combat effective units than just Western equipment and we need to adjust our efforts accordingly. Much the same will be true when Ukraine begins to receive F-16s. The West needs to also reflect on decision points missed and use that past to inform the future. 

A final comment on the perils of prediction. There is a paradox of expertise. Specialists are not good at making predictions, which makes it ironic that they are regularly asked to make them. In thinking about the future of this conflict, I look to what has already happened in prior phases of this war, and use other wars as reference points. Each has its own context, but they are useful guideposts to what possible futures might look like. A caveat, too often we look to World War I or World War II as references in discourse, but they are by definition outlier events. This is another reason why research in Ukraine proves valuable. Understanding previous battles in this war, what happened and why, helps inform expectations on what the future might hold.

3. John Bolton: Republicans Must Exorcise the Ghost of Neville Chamberlain When it Comes to Ukraine

Conclusion:

Haunting all the opponents’ arguments is their tacit assumption that Ukraine is too distant to matter, that it is “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.” Neville Chamberlain’s ghost is not at rest in today’s Republican Party, and this is clearly the time to take him on.

John Bolton: Republicans Must Exorcise the Ghost of Neville Chamberlain When it Comes to Ukraine

John Bolton: Neville Chamberlain’s ghost is not at rest in today’s Republican Party, and this is clearly the time to take him on when it comes to Ukraine.

19fortyfive.com · by John Bolton · September 5, 2023

Labor Day is behind us, Congress is returning to Washington, and the 2024 campaign is well underway. For Republicans who stress philosophy and policy over performance art, no issue is more ominous than the opposition within some party circles to helping Ukraine repulse Russia’s unprovoked aggression. In the months ahead, military and diplomatic developments, combined with congressional votes on Ukraine assistance, could have enormous implications for the party’s future direction.

Core Strategic Realities

Thwarting Russia’s continuing assault on Ukraine is a vital US national security interest. Encouraged by Barack Obama’s pathetic response to Moscow’s 2014 attack, and by Donald Trump’s willful inability to see Ukraine except through his own self-interest, Vladimir Putin is seeking to reverse the Soviet Union’s collapse and forge a new Russian empire. If successful in undoing the USSR’s beneficial and liberating disintegration, the Kremlin would again endanger all surrounding regions and prompt China and others to take advantage elsewhere of perceived US weakness and lack of resolve.

Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first and only freely and fairly elected leader, freely agreed to end the USSR at Belovezha after a 1991 Ukrainian referendum revealed majorities for independence in every region, including Crimea. Moscow’s current attempt to eliminate or severely compromise Kyiv’s sovereignty and territorial integrity manifestly endangers US interests by threatening the cornerstone post-1945 principle that peace and security in Europe are vital to our wellbeing.

That, in two paragraphs, is the core strategic case for Washington assisting Kyiv.

Congressional aid opponents have not seriously or systematically argued to the contrary. They have instead offered bumper-sticker-level rationales, straw men, and non-sequiturs, the very antithesis of strategic thinking.

The most frequently heard complaint is that President Joe Biden worries more about defending Ukraine’s border than America’s Mexican border. While this complaint has political resonance with many Republicans, it is the very paradigm of a non-sequitur, linking two issues that have no logical connection. Assuming (correctly) that Biden’s illegal-immigration policy is erroneous, failure on the Mexico border hardly justifies failure to contest Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. The same applies to the fallacy that resources committed to Ukraine distract us from other global priorities. The real problem is not Ukraine, but wasteful domestic spending that overwhelms both expenditures for Ukraine aid and military spending generally.

Geopolitics by Bumper Sticker

The next most popular is the criticism that Washington should not “write blank checks for Ukraine.” Diligent research does not reveal a single member of Congress or the commentariat who has advocated unlimited “blank-check” support. True, Biden has been unduly deterred by unwarranted fear of Russian escalation. He has dribbled out extensive military assistance in an incoherent, helter-skelter fashion, thereby impairing Ukraine’s ability to act more strategically in expelling the Russians. But the administration’s incompetence does not alter fundamental American interests.

Nor has anyone opposed scrutiny of how the Pentagon and USAID distribute assistance, or of how Ukraine employs it. Corruption in government programs is endemic worldwide, including here at home, but being “shocked” at finding corruption in Ukraine does not excuse strategic malpractice. To the contrary, it is entirely in America’s interest that our assistance is employed effectively to achieve its intended purposes. Concededly, the “no blank checks” criticism fits on a bumper sticker, but it is otherwise utterly irrelevant.

In the straw-man category falls the criticism that China’s status as our pre-eminent adversary this century means we must effectively abandon Washington’s interests elsewhere. Whether in Europe, the Middle East, or beyond, we are told, significant US military commitments divert available resources necessary to defend Taiwan and other allies and interests in the Indo-Pacific.

This is nonsense. In reality, supporting Ukraine strengthens rather than impairs our politico-military ability to defend our interests elsewhere. Indeed, failure to defeat Russia’s aggression only encourages other American adversaries to act belligerently in their regions. The US has failed over multiple post-Cold War presidencies to meet Ronald Reagan’s “peace through strength” standard by devoting adequate resources to defense, intelligence, and foreign-affairs objectives. Nonetheless, promptly correcting that failure hardly requires us to cut Ukraine loose.

Missing from critics’ analysis is the crucial acknowledgement that China is scrutinizing the Ukraine war more closely than many countries in Europe itself. Nor are they merely watching. The new and developing Sino-Russian axis, with Beijing as the command center, is already effectively engaged in the Ukraine war. We ignore this alignment at our peril. China’s significantly increased purchases of Russian oil and gas, the camouflage it provides for Russia’s international financial transactions, and its supply of dual-use equipment and other key resources aiding Russia’s war effort make Moscow and Beijing full partners. Ukraine is not just fighting Russia.

What China Sees

Moreover, Beijing’s strategists are seeking to assess whether Washington has the necessary determination to protect its interests in Europe. If not, China will undoubtedly conclude that the United States does not have the resolve to do so in East Asia and will recalibrate its thinking accordingly, particularly regarding Taiwan and the South China Sea. America’s Indo-Pacific allies have no doubts about what is at stake for them in the Ukraine war, which is why South Korea’s president and the prime ministers of Japan and Australia attended NATO’s recent Vilnius Summit. How can we miss what they see so clearly?

Of course, critics note that several European countries are not pulling their weight, a critique fully shared by Ukraine supporters. Nonetheless, saying rightly that many Europeans should do more does not mean we can wait around until they do. Washington has too long turned a blind eye to European defense inadequacies, but we can hardly subordinate — indeed, endanger — our own national security while Germany and others get their act together. Criticism of European underspending is accurate, but it is not enough in setting the right strategy to counter Russia.

Haunting all the opponents’ arguments is their tacit assumption that Ukraine is too distant to matter, that it is “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.” Neville Chamberlain’s ghost is not at rest in today’s Republican Party, and this is clearly the time to take him on.

About the Author, Ambassador John R. Bolton

Ambassador John R. Bolton served as national security adviser under President Donald J. Trump. He is the author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” You can follow him on Twitter: @AmbJohnBolton.

From the Vault

‘Sir, We Hit a Russian Submarine’: A U.S. Navy Sub Collided with a Nuclear Attack Sub

Did A Russian-Made Missile ‘Strike’ an F-35 Fighter?

19fortyfive.com · by John Bolton · September 5, 2023

4. AUKUS standoff: Australia, UK wait on Congress to approve pact

Why make AUKUS so heavily focused on technology and nuclear submarines? There is so much more potential for AUKUS beyond submarines.

Excerpts:

Courtney — whose district encompasses the Electric Boat shipyard building the Virginia-class submarines — argues the production setbacks were in large part due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and that the massive investments Congress has already made in the industrial base is bringing the program up to speed. He noted the U.S. is on track to meet its annual submarine production requirements by 2028 “with continued support from Congress and improved performance in the industrial base.”

“We put in money and capital expenditures to help these companies, as well as the workforce hiring,” Courtney said. “I am very bullish about the fact that the pace is really picking up.”

Lawmakers allocated nearly $750 million for the submarine-industrial base in FY23. The House’s FY24 defense policy bill, which passed in July, would inject another $735 million into that industrial base.

Despite the legislative complications, Townshend remains optimistic Congress will pass all its necessary AUKUS legislation this year — export control exemptions and submarine transfer authorities included.

Still, there’s little room to dally.

“The timeline for the optimal pathway is extremely tight,” he said. “If the language that allows both sides to move ahead with ship transfer and funds does not proceed this year, then that will inevitably delay the ability of both countries to meet their obligations.”

AUKUS standoff: Australia, UK wait on Congress to approve pact

Defense News · by Bryant Harris · September 5, 2023

This is the first story of a three-part series. The second will be available Sept. 7, and the third on Sept. 8.

WASHINGTON ― A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers traveled to Britain this spring in an effort to get tough on China.

But House China committee Chairman Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., and his delegation quickly found their British counterparts had another matter top of mind: AUKUS, the trilateral nuclear-powered submarine agreement with Britain and Australia.

Officials from those countries made clear to Gallagher and other U.S. lawmakers that Congress must take steps to ensure the deal is a success. Specifically, they want lawmakers to approve a blanket exemption for the U.K. and Australia within Washington’s stringent export control regime. That policy, the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, or ITAR, sets rigorous restrictions on sensitive defense exports. Without ITAR exemptions, they worry the pact won’t succeed.

“The thing we heard most consistently from our allies in Britain is that ITAR is a roadblock for cooperation with them,” Gallagher told reporters. He said a “a free-world approach” to AUKUS is critical.

The AUKUS agreement is intended to draw the three countries’ defense industries closer together by helping Australia develop its own nuclear-powered submarine fleet while sharing top secret technology among the allies. If it works, the program will develop cutting-edge capabilities that will influence the future of warfare.

While visiting Australia in August, Gallagher said “long-overdue ITAR reform” could lead to joint U.S.-Australian munitions production and hypersonic weapons development, “turbocharging AUKUS.”

Critics of existing U.S. export control laws, like Gallagher, argue reform is necessary to increase cooperation among the three countries’ defense-industrial bases, a goal the Biden administration is also eager to pursue. But the push to overhaul ITAR has faced resistance, with the State Department and Democrats arguing the export control policy is crucial to keeping defense industry secrets from falling into the hands of rivals such as China.

As the two-year anniversary of AUKUS approaches, the export control debate and a separate tussle over the health of the submarine-industrial base have raised questions about how and when Congress will pass several authorizations needed to make the program into the transformational initiative leaders promised.

Republicans and the defense industry say if Congress does not pass an ITAR exemption for the U.K. and Australia, it will stymie joint development of disruptive technology such as hypersonic weapons, artificial intelligence and quantum computing. The Pentagon had also hoped Congress would approve the transfer of Virginia-class submarines to Australia this year in order to illustrate the country’s commitment to the pact and to pave the way for Canberra to prepare for its future fleet.

But those efforts have stalled while Senate Republicans push for additional funding for the submarine-industrial base beyond the $647 million the Biden administration requested for fiscal 2024.

“You cannot have an effective transfer of Virginia-class submarines to Australia without systemic change to U.S. export control, tech transfer and information sharing processes as they apply to Australia,” said Ashley Townshend, a senior fellow for Indo-Pacific security at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank.

“Australia has ripped up a deal with France to pursue a submarine agreement with Britain and the United States. It cannot begin to address — either independently or trilaterally — the gamut of industrial base, workforce, defense planning and nuclear stewardship requirements of the SSN project until it has assurances the deal is done,” he told Defense News, using an abbreviation for attack submarines.

‘Layers of red tape’

AUKUS has paved the way for Australia to acquire its own nuclear-powered submarine fleet, but it won’t be ready until the 2040s. In the meantime, all three AUKUS countries are eager to jump-start collaboration on emerging technologies that could prove key to future warfare.

This initiative has revived a two-decade-old export control dispute among the three allies.

“Our allies actually have technology which is as good, if not better, than us,” said Bill Greenwalt, a former U.S. deputy undersecretary of defense for industrial policy who is now a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute think tank. “There are huge disincentives for our allied countries to share that with the United States or work with us in any manner because of the stickiness of U.S. export controls, the extraterritorial application of export controls.”

“Because of that, what we’re seeing is the creation of greater ally technologies that exempt U.S. content or even U.S. participation,” he added.

The Australian Defence Department in July announced a partnership with a startup technology firm specializing in quantum technology, Q-CTRL. The company, which also has offices in the U.S. and Britain, is developing a navigation capability for military platforms — including nuclear submarines — to serve as an alternative to GPS.

The head of Q-CTRL, Michael Biercuk, warned a failure to overhaul ITAR would “isolate the United States” within AUKUS. For example, he noted that ITAR hinders employees at Q-CTRL’s Los Angeles, California, office from collaborating on the technology it’s pioneering in Australia.

“The United States will not be able to partner with Australia and the U.K. in this,” Biercuk said. “If we really want cross-border participation among these very friendly nations in this area of critical technology, we just have to remove this one roadblock. Everybody wants to avoid engaging with the United States because ITAR is very difficult to comply with.”

U.S. President Joe Biden looks at a quantum computer as he tours the IBM facility in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., on Oct. 6, 2022. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

For years, Canada has been the only U.S. ally to enjoy the special ITAR exemption Britain and Australia now seek.

The U.S. ratcheted up export control laws after China and Iran took advantage of Canada’s ITAR exemption in the 1990s to circumvent Washington’s arms transfer regulations. China used Canada to purchase infrared equipment from a U.S. firm, while Iranian front companies used the country to buy American weapons.

The incidents prompted the U.S. State Department to revoke Canada’s ITAR exemption in 1999, only to restore it in 2001 after the northern neighbor strengthened its laws, harmonizing its export control list with U.S. regulations.

Feeling impeded by the enhanced ITAR regulations, Britain and Australia persuaded the George W. Bush administration to lobby Congress to give both countries the same ITAR exemption as Canada. Bush’s fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill blocked this effort, insisting London and Canberra first bolster their own export control regimes. Neither country did so, and in 2010 the Senate ended up ratifying separate defense cooperation treaties with each country that fell short of the Canada exemption.

Defense firms in AUKUS countries argue these treaties have not significantly reduced the export control barriers that could slow progress on the pact.

Townshend said an export control overhaul is also needed to make the submarine portion of AUKUS work because specific, individual components for the vessels “would all trip up different kinds of export control regulations, tech transfer and information sharing regulations.”

Current export control laws also mean Britain and Australia need specific, individual licenses for most defense transfers, ranging from taking a weapon sold to an allied navy and repurposing it for use by the country’s air force, to sharing military tactics manuals for items like the Tomahawk missile system.

The U.S. Navy attack submarine Annapolis launches a Tomahawk cruise missile off the coast of California in 2018. (MC1 Ronald Gutridge/U.S. Navy)

The U.S. government approves almost all these licenses, though that process can take nearly a year in some cases. Britain estimated in 2017 it spends about $500 million annually on ITAR compliance.

“Export control reform within and between AUKUS nations is key to removing the layers of red tape, unnecessary delays, and compliance costs that currently face our government and our industries,” Claire Bates, a spokeswoman for the British Embassy in Washington, told Defense News.

The Australian Defence Department did not reply to Defense News’ requests for comment.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Mike McCaul, R-Texas, has been receptive to these concerns. Republicans on his panel advanced legislation in July to give both countries a Canada-style ITAR exemption, over Democratic objections.

“There’s too much bureaucracy within the ITAR system,” McCaul told Defense News.

This goes further than the State Department’s June legislative proposal, obtained by Defense News. That proposal asked Congress to give Australia and Britain the ITAR exemptions only if the two countries enhance their own export control regimes so that they “are at least comparable to those administered by the United States.”

Democrats have sided with the State Department, which oversees ITAR, arguing China could take advantage of loosened export control laws.

The top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York, noted in July that “the targeting of Australian defense industry insiders and experts has increased since AUKUS’ announcement” and that “the U.K. faces similar intelligence threats.”

Mike Burgess, the director general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, warned in February of an uptick in online espionage attempts aimed at the country’s defense industry since AUKUS was announced in September 2021.

“Third-party companies have offered Australians hundreds of thousands of dollars and other significant perks to help authoritarian regimes improve their combat skills,” Burgess said.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez, D-N.J., attached a different approach to ITAR reform as an amendment to the FY24 defense policy bill, which passed 86-11 in July.

Menendez’s legislation gives the State Department more discretion as to whether, and how broadly, to implement an exemption for Britain and Australia under ITAR, setting up a possible showdown this year between the House and Senate on AUKUS export control.

For its part, the White House has helped lead the charge for some degree of export control reform.

“This is not a ‘whether to,’ it’s a ‘how to,’ ” Kurt Campbell, the National Security Council coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, said in June. “Sometimes that simple, crystallized fact helps quite a lot in complex bureaucratic situations. So we’re under clear instructions to move in that direction.”

In the meantime, the State Department has established an AUKUS Trade Authorization Mechanism as an interim capability to speed up the transfer of certain technologies.

A State Department fact sheet issued in July noted there are already more than 50 exemptions within ITAR that don’t require a license for close allies. It defended the export control regime as necessary because of “malign actors” seeking to acquire cutting-edge U.S. technology like “an AI algorithm capable of creating drone swarms.”

‘Knitted together’

Despite misgivings about ITAR, U.S. defense companies have shown a keen interest in Australia.

“When you can find ways to collaborate with your closest allies, to knock down barriers to cooperation, technology, development, interoperability, getting these defense-industrial bases kind of knitted together, you’re going to incentivize a whole bunch of interesting things,” Mara Karlin, the U.S. assistant secretary of defense for strategies, plans and capabilities, told a Defense Writers Group roundtable in August.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken in July met with their Australian counterparts in Canberra and announced the U.S. would help Australia make guided-missile rockets for both countries by 2025. Lockheed Martin and RTX, formerly called Raytheon Technologies, will produce the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems in Australia for both countries.

The White House and the Pentagon have also asked Congress to make British and Australian companies eligible for U.S. federal grants under the Defense Production Act — another advantage only enjoyed by Canada — arguing it will help advance AUKUS. U.S. President Joe Biden promised Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese during a May meeting that the U.S. would do this, but Congress has not acted on this legislative request from the Pentagon since then.

Anthony Di Stasio, who oversees Defense Production Act grants at the Pentagon, said adding Canberra would help bolster U.S. supply chains for critical minerals like cobalt — abundant in Australia — and explosive materials like TNT.

Prior to Russia’s invasion, Ukraine was one of the Pentagon’s only three qualified TNT suppliers, with the other two in Poland and Australia. Di Stasio noted the U.S. military is using less TNT every year, so it would be cheaper to use Defense Production Act grants to expand Australian facilities than to build a U.S. plant from scratch.

Oris TinStix of the Dynamite aerobatic team featuring American Skip Stewart and Triple world aerobatics champion Jurgus Kairys fly past pyrotechnics as they perform at a 2017 air show in Avalon, Australia. (Scott Barbour/Getty Images)

Similarly, the proposal would allow U.S. grants to fund cobalt mining activities in Australia. China dominates most of the world’s market for cobalt, needed to make batteries as well as hard-target penetrators for the military.

Di Stasio hopes putting Britain and Australia under his office’s purview will allow them to participate in a pilot program he envisions to create U.S. campuses for businesses to collaborate on different parts of the defense supply chain.

“I want their [intellectual property] protected, but [for] them to be able to combine technology,” Di Stasio told Defense News in June. “If you have someone doing 3D-printed rocket cases and someone else has a new whiz-bang rocket propellant, they can be on the same campus testing it.”

Other countries could benefit as well.

On a trip to New Zealand, Blinken told reporters “the door is open” for the Five Eyes ally to join AUKUS. That intelligence sharing alliance is made up of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K. and the U.S.

Additionally, the U.S. and India have launched their Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology. The White House pledged to work with Congress “to lower barriers to U.S. exports to India” for artificial intelligence and quantum computing when Biden hosted Prime Minister Narendra Modi in June.

The National Security Council’s Campbell said the U.S. is looking for non-AUKUS countries to offer “niche areas” when collaborating with the three allies on disruptive technology.

“We’re not just looking for theoretical applications and partnerships, but practical, real efforts that will enhance defense capabilities,” he said. “We are in conversation with a variety of countries who are interested.”

‘A real commitment’

Congress’ path to authorizing submarine transfers to Australia appeared more straightforward than the export control effort, until it became embroiled in a broader fight over U.S. defense spending levels.

Australia plans to buy at least three and as many as five Virginia-class submarines in the 2030s. But AUKUS proponents had hoped to start authorizing those sales this year to demonstrate allegiance to the pact, particularly as Australia has agreed to invest $3 billion in the U.S. submarine-industrial base.

Australia is waiting on Congress to pass authorizations for the nuclear submarine transfer before work begins on the infrastructure necessary to sustain the vessels.

“This is already a hugely ambitious undertaking for both countries, and for Australia it will require us to move at an extremely fast pace toward building out the domestic nuclear stewardship, infrastructure, submarine production facilities and so forth,” Townshend said.

Republicans and Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee rallied together in July to unanimously advance an authorization to transfer up to two Virginia-class submarines to Australia.

“The transfer language really shows a real commitment by Congress,” Rep. Joe Courtney of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee’s sea power panel, told Defense News. “Australia is prepared to make investments we want to make in terms of building up Virginia production tied to this AUKUS goal post.”

Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn., visits an Electric Boat facility in 2018. (Courtesy of Rep. Joe Courtney)

The Senate was set to attach the same authorization to the defense bill in July, until the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, blocked it. He also held up a separate authorization that would allow the Pentagon to accept Australia’s contributions to the U.S. submarine-industrial base.

However, he didn’t hold up a third authorization allowing the U.S. to begin training Australian private sector personnel in nuclear submarines, which the Senate passed as part of its defense policy bill.

While blocking the other two authorizations, Wicker cited concerns about the industrial base’s current struggle to keep up with submarine production requirements. He wants Congress to add money for the submarine-industrial base as part of a supplemental defense spending package before passing the authorizations.

The senator argues more submarine spending will strengthen AUKUS, given production capacity isn’t keeping pace with the U.S. Navy’s goal of building two Virginia-class attack submarines and one Columbia-class ballistic submarine per year. Right now, the country is producing approximately 1.2 Virginia-class vessels per year.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., in June promised to pass a Pentagon supplemental spending bill to circumvent the $886 billion defense funding top line agreed to as part of the debt ceiling deal. But House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., has expressed opposition to additional defense spending beyond the debt ceiling cap.

Half of the Senate GOP caucus, including McConnell, raised the submarine issue in a letter to Biden led by Wicker and top Republican appropriator Sen. Susan Collins of Maine.

“The administration’s current plan requires the transfer of three U.S. Virginia-class attack submarines to Australia from the existing U.S. submarine fleet without a clear plan for replacing these submarines,” the senators wrote. “This plan, if implemented without change, would unacceptably weaken the U.S. fleet even as China seeks to expand its military power and influence.”

From left, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, U.S. President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak hold a news conference during the AUKUS summit on March 13, 2023, at Naval Base Point Loma in San Diego Calif. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

They added that sending three attack submarines to Australia would require the U.S. to produce 2.3 to 2.5 Virginia-class vessels per year to “avoid further shrinking our fleet’s operational capacity.”

Courtney — whose district encompasses the Electric Boat shipyard building the Virginia-class submarines — argues the production setbacks were in large part due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and that the massive investments Congress has already made in the industrial base is bringing the program up to speed. He noted the U.S. is on track to meet its annual submarine production requirements by 2028 “with continued support from Congress and improved performance in the industrial base.”

“We put in money and capital expenditures to help these companies, as well as the workforce hiring,” Courtney said. “I am very bullish about the fact that the pace is really picking up.”

Lawmakers allocated nearly $750 million for the submarine-industrial base in FY23. The House’s FY24 defense policy bill, which passed in July, would inject another $735 million into that industrial base.

Despite the legislative complications, Townshend remains optimistic Congress will pass all its necessary AUKUS legislation this year — export control exemptions and submarine transfer authorities included.

Still, there’s little room to dally.

“The timeline for the optimal pathway is extremely tight,” he said. “If the language that allows both sides to move ahead with ship transfer and funds does not proceed this year, then that will inevitably delay the ability of both countries to meet their obligations.”

This is the first story of a three-part series. The second will be available Sept. 7, and the third on Sept. 8.

About Bryant Harris

Bryant Harris is the Congress reporter for Defense News. He has covered U.S. foreign policy, national security, international affairs and politics in Washington since 2014. He has also written for Foreign Policy, Al-Monitor, Al Jazeera English and IPS News.

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Defense News · by Bryant Harris · September 5, 2023

5. An inside look at Ukraine's cyber war with Russia

An inside look at Ukraine's cyber war with Russia

wusfnews.wusf.usf.edu · by Jenna McLaughlin Published September 4, 2023 at 4:41 PM EDT · September 4, 2023

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Intelligence and technology have played key roles in the war in Ukraine. The head of the cyber department at the Security Service of Ukraine knows a thing or two about both. NPR cybersecurity correspondent Jenna McLaughlin sat down with him in Kyiv for a rare exclusive interview.

JENNA MCLAUGHLIN, BYLINE: It was a sunny summer day when my producer Katya (ph) and I were ushered into the heavily guarded headquarters of the Ukrainian Security Service. We passed armed guards, sandbags stacked against windows and finally climb a dimly lit staircase into the official press building.

Awesome. And I'm just going to record my phone as a backup in case...

Then we were allowed to turn on our microphones.

ILYA VITYUK: Sure.

MCLAUGHLIN: Awesome. There we go.

This room we're sitting in has a lot of history.

VITYUK: This is a pretty old building. I don't remember when it was constructed, but previously it was the building used by KGB.

MCLAUGHLIN: The KGB, the infamous and brutal former Soviet spy service. Intelligence officers don't typically grant interviews, particularly during a war. But Ilya Vityuk, the head of the cyber department of the Ukrainian Security Service, or the SBU, seemed eager to share, at least in part to prove they're different from the former occupants of this building. Vityuk is tall and musclebound with a cleanly shaved head and a serious demeanor. He immediately dives into the details of a recent Russian operation to hack into Ukrainian military communications systems.

VITYUK: So they planned these operations for a long period of time, and there were some hacker groups that they moved closer to the frontlines. And one of their missions was to capture devices and get the - first of all, the understanding what systems we are using and then to find ways to penetrate the systems.

MCLAUGHLIN: This is one of many examples of the cat-and-mouse game between Russia and Ukraine in cyberspace. These attacks might not all make the headlines, but they're constant. And Russia's always stealing information, even when Vityuk's team catches them. Russian cyberattacks in Ukraine over the years reads like a list of Russia's greatest hits.

VITYUK: So first was BlackEnergy in 2015. This was the first destructive attack on our power grid.

MCLAUGHLIN: Next, a huge hacking campaign against Ukraine's train control systems, which ultimately failed but could have been devastating, followed by an infamous attack in 2017 called NotPetya, a Russian virus aimed at Ukraine that leaked out and cost companies around the world billions of dollars to recover from. Then in February of 2022 came the full-scale invasion.

VITYUK: So since the very beginning, they really thought that there would be a blitzkrieg. So they tried to use all the - how I say - aces in their sleeves during the first days.

MCLAUGHLIN: All the aces in their sleeves - experts around the world expected a Russian cyber tour de force, shutting the entire country down. Moscow did hack military communications, spread disinformation in every direction and launched destructive digital attacks against government agencies all over the country. The concern was so great that people at SBU were physically hauling servers away from downtown Kyiv to protect them, Vityuk recalls.

VITYUK: There was a little bit risk of Kyiv to be surrounded, so we needed to take the most important databases and hardware and to relocate it from Kyiv.

MCLAUGHLIN: Ultimately, Ukraine held strong against the cyber barrage. There was damage, but Vityuk says the impact was limited. He says that's thanks in part to years of suffering and learning from Russia's attacks and help from allies. That includes the U.S. Cyber Command. A team of experts visited Ukraine months before the invasion, helping to study Ukraine's defenses and providing hardware and software that Vityuk says they're still using today.

VITYUK: Cyber Command, they came to us in December, couple of months before the invasion. Together with them, we inspected a couple of our objects of critical infrastructure that we thought will be in focus of their attacks. And it happened just like that.

MCLAUGHLIN: It's now been 18 months of fighting. The focus has rightfully been on dead and wounded, but there's still real concern about how sophisticated cyberattacks paired with things like missiles and drones can inflict real damage. That's especially true with the power grid, an increasing concern as Ukraine prepares for another harsh winter. While some Ukrainians are fighting on the frontlines, others are using their digital skills to volunteer. And that includes career cybercriminals.

VITYUK: So there was literally a line of people standing to security service of Ukraine, calling, text messaging, etc., and asking, how can we help? What should we do? There were a number of even convicted criminals, cybercriminals, that we, as security service, convicted that came. Now it's over, and we are focused on protecting our state. So tell us what to do and where to go.

MCLAUGHLIN: Some Ukrainian cyber experts remain critical of the government. They argue that corruption and past ties to Russian intelligence have prevented agencies like SBU from being fully prepared for this war. Vityuk says he's aware of those allegations, but...

VITYUK: We don't need money.

MCLAUGHLIN: He says he wants international partners to donate technology and services, not money that could be misused.

VITYUK: We want this system to be as transparent as is possible. We want you to understand that we want to be protected, and we act as a shield to the whole democratic world. So we want our shield to be big and strong.

MCLAUGHLIN: In exchange, he says Ukraine has a lot to offer the world when it comes to exposing Russian tools and tricks.

VITYUK: New doctrines will be written and adopted according to what has happened here in Ukraine.

MCLAUGHLIN: Vityuk firmly believes this is the moment his agency was made for, what he was born to do.

VITYUK: It was my dreams since childhood. You know, I liked "James Bond" films and stuff like that. And if you like to take responsibility and to take actions, I do believe that it's a very great profession.

MCLAUGHLIN: Never boring.

VITYUK: No, for sure. Never boring.

MCLAUGHLIN: When the war is over, Vityuk says he looks forward to free and open skies.

VITYUK: I also have had interest in hobbies like skydiving and stuff. But because of these Russian bad people, now the sky is closed, and I cannot jump. So that's - also makes me more angry and adds to my devotion to finish this war as fast as possible.

MCLAUGHLIN: For the first time in almost two hours of talking about war, Vityuk cracks a smile, looking forward to that next jump. Jenna McLaughlin, NPR News, Kyiv. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

wusfnews.wusf.usf.edu · by Jenna McLaughlin Published September 4, 2023 at 4:41 PM EDT · September 4, 2023

6. Criminal enterprise flaunts AI in creepy 'fraud-for-hire' commercial meant for dark web

A brave (and strange) new world.

Vide at the link: https://www.foxnews.com/us/criminal-enterprise-flaunts-ai-creepy-fraud-for-hire-commercial-meant-for-dark-web?utm

Excerpt:

On the dark web, there is a fraud-as-a-service industry run by international cybergangs from all over the world, including Russia, Nigeria and China, among dozens of others.

The one depicted in the video is called Mega Darknet Market, which Talcove said is one of the biggest enterprises in the world.

This video gave the first glimpse into how these organizations sell "mule accounts," which is a bank account set up with a stolen identity, as well as generative AI and "deepfake" tools to other criminals, Talcove said.

Criminal enterprise flaunts AI in creepy 'fraud-for-hire' commercial meant for dark web

Haywood Talcove, CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions' Government Group, told Fox News Digital gangs went from gun running and drug dealing to selling AI tools

 By Chris Eberhart Fox News

Published September 5, 2023 2:00am EDT

foxnews.com · by Chris Eberhart Fox News

Video

Criminals use artificial intelligence in 'fraud-for-hire' commercials

Haywood Talcove, CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions' Government Group, tells Fox News Digital that criminal groups, mostly in other countries, are advertising on social media to market their AI capabilities for fraud and other crimes.

A criminologist recently unearthed a video of a multibillion-dollar, transnational criminal organization that has been stealing from the U.S. government since the pandemic and selling generative artificial intelligence tools to other criminals, an expert says.

The 58-second clip, which was meant for the dark web, opens with a person – who goes by "Sanchez" – covered head to toe in black clothing and speaking behind a black skeleton mask with someone else who appears to be digging a grave behind him.

"Yes, I sell Chase bank accounts. Yes, I am one of the first people to sell fake bank accounts four years ago," the man who calls himself "Sanchez" said. "We started with my partner four years ago. Now we are about 30 people in one office."

As he speaks, the camera shifts from a face-to-face point-of-view with "Sanchez" to one looking up from what appears to be a hole with ominous music in the background.

DISTURBING NEW CRIME TREND SEES KIDS' PRIVATE INFO STOLEN FROM SCHOOLS AND POSTED ON DARK WEB

The man who calls himself "Sanchez" posted this commercial on the dark web, which was uncovered by criminologist David Maimon. (Submitted)

The video was uncovered by David Maimon, a criminologist and professor at Georgia State University, who provided context to the video in a LinkedIn post.

This was an "update to some of his concerned customers who haven’t seen him on the online underground market for few weeks," Maimon said.

WHO IS WATCHING YOU? AI CAN STALK UNSUSPECTING VICTIMS WITH ‘EASE AND PRECISION’: EXPERTS

These groups are behind most of the pandemic fraud that cost the country billions and are now using generative AI to remain hidden while expanding their criminal empire, Haywood Talcove, CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions' Government Group, told Fox News Digital.

"When you think of pandemic fraud, and modern-day cybercriminal fraud targeting the government, you usually think of low-level fraudsters acting alone," Talcove said.

WATCH UNCOVERED "COMMERCIAL"

Video

He used the example of someone submitting a dozen unemployment applications with stolen identities during the pandemic.

"In reality, those who commit government fraud and get caught are the tip of the iceberg," Talcove said. "They’re like the street-level drug dealers who get arrested.

"There’s a whole machine behind them that, at this point, closely resembles the 20th century Italian mob, or modern day drug cartels," he said.

WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)?

On the dark web, there is a fraud-as-a-service industry run by international cybergangs from all over the world, including Russia, Nigeria and China, among dozens of others.

The one depicted in the video is called Mega Darknet Market, which Talcove said is one of the biggest enterprises in the world.

This video gave the first glimpse into how these organizations sell "mule accounts," which is a bank account set up with a stolen identity, as well as generative AI and "deepfake" tools to other criminals, Talcove said.

The man who calls himself "Sanchez" posted this commercial on the dark web, which was uncovered by criminologist David Maimon. (Submitted)

"This video is proof of what I’ve been saying, that there are some very organized institutions empowering low-level fraudsters from all over the world," Talcove said.

These international criminal enterprises rose to prominence during the pandemic and stole hundreds of millions, Talcove said. However, that is a drop in the bucket to the $1 trillion or more that these groups can steal from the U.S. government over the next year using artificial intelligence, he said previously.

AI-ASSISTED FRAUD SCHEMES COULD COST TAXPAYERS $1 TRILLION IN JUST 1 YEAR, EXPERT SAYS

That is just fraud, he said. These international enterprises are arming other criminals across the globe with AI tech and tools to execute sextortion scams, which generally target pre-teens to young adults and have led to suicides.

"This is very important trend that has largely gone unnoticed," Talcove said. "The pandemic prompted a transformation of America's criminals and gangs from gun-running and drug dealing to unemployment fraud, SNAP fraud and PPP fraud.

"Those on the front-lines, doing the dirty work can make millions. The fraud-as-a-service organizations that give the criminals these the tools, data and means to do so are making far more than that."

Haywood Talcove, CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions' Government division, told Fox News Digital AI-assisted fraud could cost U.S. taxpayers $1 trillion over the next 12 years. (Contributed)

AI allows criminals to rob and vanish

Back in the heyday of Al Capone and the Bloods and Crips gangs, criminals avoided law enforcement and government officials at all costs, Talcove said.

Since 2020, that changed. The U.S. government is the "primary target," he said, and AI-powered technology allows them to rob government agencies and vanish.

US MARSHALS SERVICE ATTACKED BY RANSOMWARE TARGETING SENSITIVE LAW ENFORCEMENT INFORMATION

"With Mega Darknet Market and the many other global cybercriminal organizations that are at the top of the pyramid when it comes to stealing from the U.S. government, the police won’t catch them," Talcove said. "They’re too sophisticated and likely not in the country.

"It will take an all-out commitment from a coalition of law enforcement agencies to catch them: Secret Service, FBI and Interpol."

WATCH FULL INTERVIEW WITH HAYWOOD TALCOVE

Video

What is sextortion?

The FBI describes sextortion as a crime that "involves coercing victims into providing sexually explicit photos or videos of themselves, then threatening to share them publicly or with the victim's family and friends."

"Malicious actors use content manipulation technologies and services to exploit photos and videos – typically captured from an individual's social media account, open internet or requested from the victim – into sexually-themed images that appear true-to-life in likeness to a victim, then circulate them on social media, public forums or pornographic websites," the FBI said in a June 5 PSA.

WATCH EXPERT ALICIA KOZAK EXPLAIN SEXTORTION AND AI IMPACT

Video

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

"Many victims, which have included minors, are unaware their images were copied, manipulated and circulated until it was brought to their attention by someone else," he said.

At least a dozen sextortion-related suicides have been reported across the country, according to the latest FBI numbers from this year.

Many victims are males between the ages of 10 and 17, although there have been victims as young as 7, the FBI said. Girls have also been targeted, but the statistics show a higher number of boys have been victimized.

Chris Eberhart is a crime and US news reporter for Fox News Digital. Email tips to chris.eberhart@fox.com or on Twitter @ChrisEberhart48.

foxnews.com · by Chris Eberhart Fox News

7. AFSOC Power Projection Wing and Unit Relocations | SOF News

AFSOC Power Projection Wing and Unit Relocations | SOF News

sof.news · by SOF News · September 6, 2023

The Air Force Special Operations Command is establishing a ‘power projection wing’ at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona. The nucleus of this organization will be the 492nd Special Operations Wing. The wing will integrate the AFSOC mission capabilities of strike, mobility, ISR, and air/ground integration.

To support this new wing in Arizona, several unit relocations will take place over the next five years involving AFSOC units and organizations. The planned relocations include the following:

• The 492nd SOW at Hurlburt Field, FL, is to relocate to Davis-Monthan AFB. The relocation includes the 492nd SOW’s transition from support wing into a power projection wing.
• The U-28 Draco fleets at Cannon AFB, NM, and Hurlburt Field is to be replaced by the OA-1K Armed Overwatch aircraft. As part of the 492nd SOW’s transition to a power projection wing, one OA-1K Armed Overwatch squadron is to relocate from Hurlburt Field to Davis-Monthan AFB.
• An MC-130J Commando II squadron is to relocate from Cannon AFB to Davis-Monthan AFB to join the 492nd SOW.
• An additional MC-130J squadron is to activate at Davis-Monthan AFB.
• The 21st Special Tactics Squadron is to relocate from Pope Army Airfield, NC, to Davis-Monthan AFB.
• The 22nd Special Tactics Squadron is to relocate from Joint Base Lewis McChord, WA, to Davis-Monthan AFB.
• The 492nd Theater Air Operations Squadron is to activate at Duke Field and transfer to Davis- Monthan AFB.
• The 47th Fighter Squadron (24 A-10s), the 354th Fighter Squadron (26 A-10s), and the 357th Fighter Squadron (28 A-10s) at Davis-Monthan AFB will inactivate and their respective A-10s are to be retired. The 47th FS and 357th FS are to continue A-10 formal training until inactivation.
• The 34th Weapons Squadron and the 88th Test and Evaluation Squadron are to relocate from Nellis AFB, NV, to Davis-Monthan AFB, transferring five HH-60W Jolly Green IIs.

********

The information in this article came from U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF): Background and Considerations for Congress, Congressional Research Service, CRS RS21048, updated August 25, 2023, PDF, 12 pages. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RS/RS21048

Top Photo: An AC-130 Gunship shoots off flares. Photo by AFSOC, January 1, 2020.

sof.news · by SOF News · September 6, 2023

8. The Fall from Grace of Russian SOF: The Danger of Forgetting Lessons Learned

You can request translation of two Russian document from the Irregular Warfare Center at this link: 

Fundamentals of Partisan Warfare: Theory & Practice

Pro-Russian Civil Resistance Handbook

https://irregularwarfarecenter.org/publications/translations/#:~:text=The%20Irregular%20Warfare%20Center%20provides,practitioners%2C%20and%20partners%20upon%20request.

Excerpt:

To understand how Russia views irregular warfare today, one of the first steps should be to analyze the Second Chechen War and the subsequent years of Russian military modernization. After all, for many of the top Russian military brass currently leading the war, such as the current top commander in Ukraine, Valery Gerasimov and his predecessor, Sergey Surovikin, the Chechen conflict was both a formative experience and a brutal lesson on the challenges of irregular war. Many of the modern Russian conceptualizations in IW areas of interest, such as counterinsurgency (COIN), counterterrorism (CT), and special operations forces (SOF), were developed in direct response to the failures of both Russian conventional and special operations forces in combating the insurgent Chechen guerilla forces. Fundamentals of Partisan Warfare is both a sober evaluation of Russian COIN, CT, and SOF capabilities from an operator’s perspective and a vision for its future.

The Fall from Grace of Russian SOF: The Danger of Forgetting Lessons Learned

irregularwarfarecenter.org

September 5, 2023

Andrew Liflyandchick – IWC Analyst

Derek Jones, Col. (Ret.), US Army – IWC Subject Matter Expert

Sandor Fabian, Ph.D. – IWC Chair of Engagements

Download a PDF of this publication by clicking the icon.

As part of its ongoing efforts to help scholars and practitioners understand Russia’s approach to irregular warfare (IW), the Irregular Warfare Center (IWC) translated a 33-page Russian special operations journal article, The Fundamentals of Partisan Warfare: Theory and Practice. The Russian article is now available for request on the IWC website. This Insights article is the first of a two-part series meant to introduce the Russian text and apply the concepts contained within to the current conflict in Ukraine.

For the Russian armed forces, the ongoing war in Ukraine has been a challenge that includes both a conventional war on the frontlines and an unconventional war in occupied territories. As a result, questions on how to correctly employ special operations forces (SOF) have become increasingly relevant for Russian commanders. Yet, this is not the first time that Russia has struggled with the questions of how SOF should be employed. Many of the mistakes being made by Russian military leaders today—such as assuming a quick victory, underestimating the opponent, and incorrectly using special operations forces—are similar to those they made during the Second Chechen War (1999-2009). Around 2008, following many years of failed counterinsurgency efforts in Chechnya, a group of Russian military practitioners and researchers began calling for a change in how Russia approaches special operations. As Russian operations in Ukraine fail, losses continue to mount, and possible insurgencies rise up in Russia itself, these past suggestions might once again become a hot topic of discussion among Russian military leadership looking for new strategies to employ in Ukraine.

As part of its ongoing efforts to help researchers and practitioners understand Russia’s approach to irregular warfare (IW), the Irregular Warfare Center (IWC) has translated a 33-page Russian special operations journal article, The Fundamentals of Partisan Warfare: Theory and Practice. Written in response to the author’s observations of the Second Chechen War, this Russian article analyzes two major problems in Russia’s military approach, which can also be observed in the current war in Ukraine: the incorrect application of special operations forces and an overemphasis on conventional war, while not giving enough focus to certain irregular forms of conflict such as partisan warfare. In this article, the author makes the case for the creation of a radically new military doctrine and force structure—one focused entirely on irregular warfare. The tactics, techniques, and procedures discussed in this monograph also have relevance for Russia today. As its war with Ukraine continues well into its second year, there is evidence that the Russian military has been making centralized efforts to change its approach to the war, which has led to deviation from previous doctrine. If this holds true for special operations, then previous Russian literature on the subject, such as the wave of lessons learned that followed the Chechen Wars, might become the basis for the reevaluation Russian strategy in Ukraine.

The author of The Fundamentals of Partisan Warfare: Theory and Practice is Lieutenant Colonel Oleg Ryazanov, a Spetsnaz veteran with years of experience teaching special operators at Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs University. He has written many other book and articles on the topic of special operations for use in military education and instruction, such as The Art of Sniping in 2004 and, in 2009, a historic examination of the Russian empire’s use of partisans during WWI.

The Russian article is divided into two sections. The first is an in-depth analysis of partisan and counter-partisan tactics and strategies covering a wide variety of fields spanning from raids to psychological warfare to irregular medicine. It draws not only on experiences in Chechnya but also from Russian scholars in the field (e.g., Ilya Starinov and Vladimir Kvachkov), as well as classic resistance literature (e.g., Guevara and Mao). The second section is an examination of how special operations forces (SOF) are viewed and employed in Russia and a comparison to how they are viewed and employed in the United States. This Insights article will focus primarily on the second aspect of the monograph with the first topic, partisan tactics, being covered in a future article.

To understand how Russia views irregular warfare today, one of the first steps should be to analyze the Second Chechen War and the subsequent years of Russian military modernization. After all, for many of the top Russian military brass currently leading the war, such as the current top commander in Ukraine, Valery Gerasimov and his predecessor, Sergey Surovikin, the Chechen conflict was both a formative experience and a brutal lesson on the challenges of irregular war. Many of the modern Russian conceptualizations in IW areas of interest, such as counterinsurgency (COIN), counterterrorism (CT), and special operations forces (SOF), were developed in direct response to the failures of both Russian conventional and special operations forces in combating the insurgent Chechen guerilla forces. Fundamentals of Partisan Warfare is both a sober evaluation of Russian COIN, CT, and SOF capabilities from an operator’s perspective and a vision for its future.

Some of the proposed reforms suggested in this article were later realized by the Russian government. Within the period of 2008 to 2014, there was a major structural reshuffling of Russia’s special operations forces. This also included additional recognition of the importance of SOF at the highest level, including the creation of a professional day in their honor in 2015—demonstrating a sharp change from previous attitudes. A discussion of the high impact that SOF can play in modern military strategy was also a part of the article that would later become the basis for the often misinterpreted and misrepresented “Gerasimov Doctrine.” The term doctrine, in this case, can be greatly misleading; these ideas never reached the standardization or widespread acceptance across the Russian armed forces that a doctrine would have in the U.S. or NATO understanding. This lack of consistency helps explain why even with the adoption of “new-generation warfare” by certain elements of the military, the new possibilities of SOF application were not universally embraced. As a result, the disdain that Ryazanov describes with which the Russian conventional force views special operations was never truly rooted out, despite efforts to change this perception through structural reforms.

At the time of the Second Chechen War, the structure of Russian military SOF differed significantly from those of the United States. These units were not integrated into military theater commands and did not have their own equivalent of the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). Instead, SOF were seen as a part of intelligence operations, with operators being divided between the GRU (military intelligence), FSB (civilian security service), and various other agencies. This disorganized and decentralized nature of Russian military special operations of the time, especially when compared to their Western counterparts, is what inspired Ryazanov to write his article and propose sweeping reforms. It should also be noted that in Russia, the term “Spetsnaz” cannot be used interchangeably with SOF. Spetsnaz is a broader term that refers to elite units in all parts of the Russian government, including police and drug enforcement, and not just the military. The proposed changes to SOF structure did not include the replacement of Spetsnaz, but rather the creation of a separate SOF under the armed forces.

To understand the failures of Russian military special operations policy today, it is first necessary to analyze what issues prompted the formation of a separate Russian Special Operations Command. When the conflict in Chechnya devolved into a drawn-out guerilla campaign, the Russian military at the time found that it possessed neither the training nor the expertise to successfully conduct operations against irregular formations. The national guard (“Rosgvardia”), which serves as Russia’s internal military force component with COIN training, had not yet been created. As a result, responsibility for the “anti-terrorist operation,” a term that would soon be associated with brutality and atrocities which blurred the lines between CT and COIN, was delegated to the FSB in 2001.

However, the FSB also found itself ill-prepared to conduct CT and COIN operations efficiently, and it failed to prevent numerous high-profile terrorist attacks by Chechen insurgents such as the Beslan School Siege in 2004, which resulted in hundreds of civilian casualties. As a result of these dire failings, the Russian government was forced to, yet again, transfer the reins. This time, responsibility for the stabilization of the region went to the forces of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) and local pro-Russian Chechen forces. Yet, it would be many more years of catastrophic failures and losses before the insurgency would finally be suppressed in 2009.

This eye-opening experience made clear that no group in Russia—not the Russian military, the security services, or the government—had the standardized training and unified strategic doctrine needed to effectively fight in partisan and irregular wars. Scholars and practitioners, including one of the most influential Russian military thinkers in the field, Colonel Vladimir Kvachkov, begin calling for a reevaluation of these concepts and doctrines using the lessons learned in Chechnya. It is during this wave of reforms that the author of The Fundamentals of Partisan Warfare calls for a “new philosophy [which] must be used as the basis for creating a Russian military doctrine, in which the top priority should be given to partisan warfare in all its forms.” The first step in this new approach is, Ryazanov argues, the formation of a new military command dedicated to special operations, which would train operators in the art of irregular warfare, partisan and counter-partisan tactics, COIN, and CT.

These new proposals for reform gained traction in the Russian military commands as early as 2008, and the work of moving SOF out from under the shadow of the intelligence services began. However, it would not be until March 2013 that Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov would formally announce the new Russian Special Operations Forces Command (KSSO). This announcement came just three weeks after Gerasimov published his “Gerasimov doctrine,” which, among other considerations, highlighted the important role that SOF would play in what Gerasimov considered a new generation of warfare.

Gerasimov openly admitted that the new command was heavily modeled on Western special force commands, such as U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). Russian scholars and practitioners in the field of special operations had long studied the successes and failures of Western special operations units, especially those of the United States. During his announcement of the formation of the KSSO, Gerasimov stated that it had come as a result of “Having studied the practice of the formation, training, and application of special operations by the leading foreign powers.” Ryazanov also emphasizes the importance of analyzing U.S. SOF doctrine. A significant portion of his article is dedicated to examining what he calls the “U.S. Approach.” In the words of the author, “…our potential adversary takes partisan warfare and other non-traditional methods of warfare quite seriously. When we talk about the inertia of the American military and their unhealthy adherence to traditions, we should instead take a closer look at how and what is being done in the Russian army.”

In the following years, Russian SOF had a string of successes such as foreign internal defense operations in Syria, information warfare in Ukraine, and effective use of new technologies such as drones. This created a perception in the West that the structural reforms had been broadly successful. Russian special forces, operating without official identification as “little green men”, created the pre-conditions for a successful Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014. All of this gave Russia’s SOF a reputation worldwide as a well-trained, modern, and effective force that had a wide-range of capabilities and the potential to rival its counterparts in the United States.

However, despite all these attempted changes in structure and attitude, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has shown the lack of evolution in Russia’s SOF approach. Even with Ryazanov’s warning about the importance of SOF in irregular warfare, Russian military leadership has used SOF as reconnaissance units and light infantry, essentially using them in a primarily conventional capacity. They have also been used on the frontlines as replacements for dwindling reserves of troops. This has meant that the failure of the initial invasion to end the war within days, as originally planned, exposed these units to severe casualties. These losses might take years, if not decades, to recover from, as elite units with high levels of training are not a capability that can be easily replenished with additional mobilizations or conscriptions.

In addition, many direct action operations conducted by Russian SOF, even those that may have attained their tactical goals or worked in the past, may nevertheless fail to result in strategic success due to poor planning and intelligence. Tactical irregular warfare prowess does not make up for poor strategy. There has been surprisingly little open-source information reported about specific Russian SOF operations in comparison to the prominent role they played in 2014, signaling Russia’s increasing preference for conventional tools over unconventional ones.

However, there are well-documented cases of how other Spetsnaz forces have performed, and their track record so far has been mixed at best. For example, within hours of the invasion being announced, Russian airborne forces (VDV) began an operation to capture the strategically important Antonov Airport near Kyiv. The expectation was that this would enable the decapitation of the Ukrainian government in a matter of days. Although the airport was eventually captured, it was only achieved with a significant delay after the initial group was repelled by heavier-than-expected Ukrainian resistance. As a result, the airport was rendered inoperable, and Russia’s plans for a quick end to the war crumbled. This would be just one of the instances where Russian special operations failed to turn the tide of the conflict.

Likewise, the effectiveness of Russian special operations in occupied territories has not lived up to expectations. Despite extensive efforts to root out the Ukrainian resistance and to counter Ukrainian special operations in these areas, Russian forces have failed to stabilize their control. In a mirror of the Chechen War years, the FSB, with the support of local collaborators, has taken the lead in counter-resistance in occupied territories, with the FSB bringing in its own Spetsnaz and CT specialists. These groups have, in turn, adopted tactics straight from Soviet manuals: filtration centers, deportations, brutal raids and massacres, mass collection of citizen data, and informant networks. Although these forms of repression can be effective under certain conditions (e.g., in a scenario where the populace has a low willingness to resist), the Russian occupation strategy has lacked consistency and adaptability. In Ryazanov’s ideal world, the KSSO, the military special operations force with experience in counterinsurgency and counter-partisan operations, should have been the driving force behind this counter-resistance effort. Although KSSO forces have been deployed to assist in a limited capacity in the occupied territories, the fact that this command is significantly smaller than and overshadowed by conventional military and FSB Spetsnaz units, in part due to being fully volunteer-based, has meant that they do not possess the numbers to take a leading role and have a decisive impact.

As for the counter-resistance operations of the FSB and local administrations, the lack of consistency in training and discipline has played a role. These units have demonstrated low adaptability when confronted with situations that do not follow operational manuals, which is a vital skill when dealing with an underground resistance hidden among an uncooperative population. Instead, they have often defaulted to shooting first and asking questions later. Ryazanov describes partisan warfare as “a genuine art that disdains repetition and always surprises the enemy with unique solutions… [which] develops a creative personality in both the common soldier and the commander.” This ability to adapt to situations with creativity and innovation is something that has been sorely lacking among Russian troops. Had a larger emphasis been put on training for irregular tactics, such as those described by Ryazanov in his article, then the results may have been different. That being said, this does not mean that Russia’s SOF capabilities can be completely disregarded. There are indicators that the Russian military has been making attempts to change their approach in various aspects and deviating from previous doctrine. These reevaluations are likely to extend to special operations forces as well and this must be taken into account when planning countermeasures.

In conclusion, the relatively low overall operational impact that Russia’s SOF has had in Ukraine, especially when compared with its previously high reputation worldwide, shows that forgetting lessons learned from past conflicts, even those as distant as the Second Chechen War, can lead to a failure to adapt to the modern operating environment. The roles and limits of special operations are constantly evolving as the number of tools available increases and strategic objectives shift. SOF strategy and doctrine must evolve with them. This does not mean that lessons learned must be discarded, but rather that they should serve as the building blocks for new strategies that avoid past mistakes. The failure of the Russian military to adequately prepare its special operations strategy for its war in Ukraine, likely due to the assumption that past successes would repeat themselves, has led to a fall from grace for Russian SOF. In this context, evaluations of past Russian IW tactics, techniques, and procedures as well as an examination of the challenges they have faced, such as those contained in the Russian article translated by the IWC, can help understand what went wrong for Russian special operations and what solutions they might adopt for future changes in strategies and doctrine. The understanding of these potential changes will be critical in allowing the West and its allies to develop their own effective doctrines and strategies to effectively counter Russian special operations in future conflicts.

irregularwarfarecenter.org

9. Opinion | Three service secretaries to Tuberville: Stop this dangerous hold on senior officers

Does this help or make it worse?  

Opinion | Three service secretaries to Tuberville: Stop this dangerous hold on senior officers

The Washington Post · by Carlos Del Toro · September 5, 2023

Carlos Del Toro is secretary of the Navy. Frank Kendall is secretary of the Air Force. Christine Wormuth is secretary of the Army.

As the civilian leaders of the Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, Space Force and Army, we are proud to work alongside exceptional military leaders who are skilled, motivated and empowered to protect our national security.

These officers and the millions of service members they lead are the foundation of America’s enduring military advantage. Yet this foundation is being actively eroded by the actions of a single U.S. senator, Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), who is blocking the confirmation of our most senior military officers.

The senator asserts that this blanket and unprecedented “hold,” which he has maintained for more than six months, is about opposition to Defense Department policies that ensure service members and their families have access to reproductive health no matter where they are stationed.

After the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, this policy is critical and necessary to meet our obligations to the force. It is also fully within the law, as confirmed by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

Senators have many legislative and oversight tools to show their opposition to a specific policy. They are free to introduce legislation, gather support for that legislation and pass it. But placing a blanket hold on all general and flag officer nominees, who as apolitical officials have traditionally been exempt from the hold process, is unfair to these military leaders and their families.

And it is putting our national security at risk.

Thus far, the hold has prevented the Defense Department from placing almost 300 of our most experienced and battle-tested leaders into critical posts around the world.

Three of our five military branches — the Army, Navy and Marine Corps — have no Senate-confirmed service chief in place. Instead, these jobs — and dozens of others across the force — are being performed by acting officials without the full range of legal authorities necessary to make the decisions that will sustain the United States’ military edge.

Across the services, many generals and admirals are being forced to perform two roles simultaneously. The strain of this double duty places a real and unfair burden on these officers, the organizations they lead and their families.

The blanket hold is also exacting a personal toll on those who least deserve it.

Each of us has seen the stress this hold is inflicting up and down the chain of command, whether in the halls of the Pentagon or at bases and outposts around the world.

We know officers who have incurred significant unforeseen expenses and are facing genuine financial stress because they have had to relocate their families or unexpectedly maintain two residences.

Military spouses who have worked to build careers of their own are unable to look for jobs because they don’t know when or if they will move. Children haven’t known where they will go to school, which is particularly hard given how frequently military children change schools already.

These military leaders are being forced to endure costly separations from their families — a painful experience they have come to know from nearly 20 years of deployments to places such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

All because of the actions of a single senator.

Any claim that holding up the promotions of top officers does not directly damage the military is wrong — plain and simple.

The leaders whose lives and careers are on hold include scores of combat veterans who have led our troops into deadly combat with valor and distinction in the decades since 9/11. These men and women each have decades of experience and are exactly who we want — and need — to be leading our military at such a critical period of time.

The impact of this hold does not stop at these officers or their family members.

With the promotions of our most senior leaders on hold, there is a domino effect upending the lives of our more junior officers, too.

Looking over the horizon, the prolonged uncertainty and political battles over these military nominations will have a corrosive effect on the force.

The generals and admirals who will be leading our forces a decade from now are colonels and captains today. They are watching this spectacle and might conclude that their service at the highest ranks of our military is no longer valued by members of Congress or, by extension, the American public.

Rather than continue making sacrifices to serve our nation, some might leave uniformed service for other opportunities, robbing the Defense Department of talent cultivated over decades that we now need most to maintain our superiority over our rivals and adversaries.

Throughout our careers in national security, we have deeply valued the bipartisan support shown for our service members and their families. But rather than seeking a resolution to this impasse in that spirit, Tuberville has suggested he is going to further escalate this confrontation by launching baseless political attacks against these men and women.

We believe that the vast majority of senators and of Americans across the political spectrum recognize the stakes of this moment and the dangers of politicizing our military leaders. It is time to lift this dangerous hold and confirm our senior military leaders.

The Washington Post · by Carlos Del Toro · September 5, 2023

10. It’s Not About Where U.S. Space Command Goes But Whether It Should Exist At All

​My beef with the Space Force is they "stole" the informal acronym long associated with Special Forces – the US Space (USSF) – US Special Forces (USSF)

But seriously, can the genie be put back in the bottle? Even if leadership wanted to undo the Space Force could it be undone?

Excerpt:

Instead of engaging in the political theater of deciding whether Space Command headquarters should stay in Colorado or move to Alabama, the Department of Defense should step back and review whether the command’s core functions could be folded into the U.S. Space Force. Where gaps in statutory authorities are identified, Congress should step in and provide the Space Force with those unique authorities. The commander of Space Operations Command could be specified as the global integrator responsible for delivering space-enabled combat effects to the joint force, and the position elevated in rank. Space Command positions, including the hundreds of civilians who work for the command, could be transferred to the U.S. Space Force, and redundant overhead eliminated. These steps would go a long way to help correct what David Ignatius identified in a recent Washington Post article as an insufficient number of command slots and headquarters staff in the Space Force to effectively compete in Pentagon power struggles.

As Washington returns from summer recess and the defense bills continue to move through both chambers of Congress, the debate should not be about where Space Command headquarters should go but whether it should exist at all as an organization that has outlived its usefulness. Serious defense reform requires leadership and doggedness of implementation.

It’s Not About Where U.S. Space Command Goes But Whether It Should Exist At All - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Mackenzie Eaglen · September 6, 2023

When it comes to real estate, what matters most is “location, location, location.” But the federal government should not be concerned with the Colorado versus Alabama brawl over the potential future headquarters of U.S. Space Command and instead should rethink the organization altogether.

As the location of U.S. Space Command has become front page political news, the debate has effectively devolved into a misguided discussion of infrastructure. Instead of arguing the merits and quality of life in the Rockies or the southeast, Congress and the Department of Defense should be ruthlessly examining redundant or duplicative organizations and streamlining bureaucracy within the department. We believe that the debate Congress should be having is whether the Department of Defense needs U.S. Space Command at all.

That statement may seem at first like heresy, given the growing strategic importance of space in the military competition with China, Russia and others. Space is now widely recognized as a fully operational warfighting domain and one that the United States cannot afford to neglect.

Alongside a fully functional Space Force, however, Space Command serves little added purpose. The Space Force, which accounts for the vast majority of the U.S. military’s space forces, capabilities and command structure, is fully capable of managing the joint space operations of the U.S. military without the redundant bureaucratic overhead of a geographic combatant command. Simultaneously, Space Command is costing the Department of Defense hundreds of millions in increasingly stretched defense dollars that could be spent more effectively elsewhere. These redundancies and high costs should be cause for the Department of Defense to consider merging Space Command into the Space Force. This small but meaningful reform could control a growing bureaucracy and allow the U.S. military to efficiently coordinate its space operations.

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The Resurrection of Space Command and the Establishment of the Space Force

The first iteration of U.S. Space Command was established in 1985 at a time when the military utility of space was rapidly emerging. A functional combatant command was needed to coordinate space activities and operations across the military services because the Air Force, Navy and Army each had space capabilities of their own. Space Command was created to provide joint command and control of all military space operations in support of the geographic combatant commands. But, by 2002, the number of combatant commands had grown too large and the George W. Bush administration decided to reduce the number. After deliberation, it was decided that Space Command was the most dispensable and its responsibilities were rolled under U.S. Strategic Command. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed that merging the commands would “eliminate redundancies in the command structure and streamline the decision-making process.”

Fast forward to 2018 and the debate over whether to create a separate military service for space was well underway. Proponents of creating the Space Force cited the need to consolidate responsibility for space acquisitions, personnel, and operations under one service. The Air Force leadership at the time staunchly opposed the creation of the Space Force, and in its efforts to dissuade Congress from creating it, one of the alternatives offered was reestablishing U.S. Space Command. Opponents of the Space Force argued that the integration of space capabilities would be better achieved under the umbrella of a reinvigorated Space Command. Moreover, recreating this organization would not require congressional approval and would be less disruptive to ongoing operations. The Trump administration ultimately decided to proceed with both: Space Command was reestablished (this time as a geographic combatant command) in August 2019, and the U.S. Space Force was established in December 2019.

A Resurgent Redundancy

Now that the Space Force is nearing its fourth anniversary and has exceeded expectations in many ways, the redundancies between Space Command and the Space Force are becoming more evident. With the transfer of space-related missions, personnel, and organizations from the other services to the Space Force, the centralization of responsibility and authority has largely been achieved in the new military service. The role of the Space Force, as is the case with each of the other military services, is to organize, train and equip forces and employ them as requested in support of the combatant commands. To carry out this responsibility, the Space Force is creating component field commands assigned to each of the geographic commands, the first of which was assigned to U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. These component field commands provide direct support to the combatant commanders to “optimize space effects across all the other service components operating in the area of responsibility, including satellite communications, overhead persistent infrared missile warning, precision navigation and timing, and weather.”

The role of U.S. Space Command is also to provide space support to the other combatant commands. While it is technically labeled as a geographic command (with an assigned area of responsibility that includes the entire known universe except for a tiny sphere around the Earth), in nearly all cases it operates like a functional command in support of the geographic commands. As Kaitlyn Johnson wrote, “Because the space domain is an overarching part of operations in all other domains, a conflict in space will likely be tied to a nation or region already supported by a different geographic command.” In other words, Space Command will always be a supporting command and the other geographic combatant commands will always be the supported commands. And here’s the kicker: The logical evolution of Space Command in its supporting function is to create separate, and entirely redundant, U.S. Space Command functional components at each combatant command.

This begs two questions: What is the role of Space Command if the U.S. Space Force is already supporting the geographic combatant commands directly through its component field commands? And what is the role of Space Command if the forces and capabilities it requires are almost entirely provided by a single service? Moreover, the coordination of global U.S. military space operations is already centralized under the Space Force’s Space Operations Command, and this entity carries out this function for Space Command. The functional combatant commands, such as U.S. Transportation Command, U.S. Cyber Command, and U.S. Special Operations Command, exist because the forces and capabilities they employ come from multiple services — there is a need for a joint command to integrate and coordinate their employment. But there is a reason the U.S. military doesn’t have other domain-centric combatant commands like an air command, naval command, or land command — it would be redundant with the military services that already exist for these domains.

Space Command’s Budget Could Be Better Spent Elsewhere

From its inception, separating Space Command from its position within Strategic Command would come with an additional cost. The creation of a new combatant command carries with it numerous initial startup costs, as staff must be pulled from the services and new facilities must be built to house the command. The Congressional Budget Office initially estimated a one-time start-up cost for establishing a new combatant command as ranging from $520 million to just over $1 billion, alongside an annual cost of up to $120 million and 600 additional personnel.

Space Command has quickly fulfilled this prediction, having already cost the Department of Defense over a billion dollars in its short lifespan. Total spending is already rapidly approaching that of Strategic Command, from which Space Command was broken off in 2019. In Fiscal Year 2016, total spending on the direct operation of Strategic Command (which handled joint space operations) peaked at around $760 million. Now, in FY2024, proposed spending on Strategic Command is $541 million and Space Command is another $401 million, for a combined total of $942 million. That means the Department of Defense is effectively spending hundreds of millions more than it used to for a combatant command that supports a vague and redundant purpose.

Despite its abstract mission, Space Command has also grown to be one of the most expensive combatant commands in its short lifespan. According to Department of Defense budget documents, over the past half-decade, the core operation and mission budget of a functional U.S.-based combatant command averaged around $270 million. In FY2023, Space Command received $327 million and is on track to receive $401 million in FY2024, far and above the average funding level.

While it’s not clear cut which of these costs are associated with the initial revival and standup of Space Command, the command has also already surpassed the Congressional Budget Office’s initial cost estimate in civilian personnel alone. In the Department of Defense’s FY2024 budget request, Space Command is planning to expand to 800 personnel. This level of personnel puts it above other geographic combatant commands with more clearly defined mission sets and operation areas, such as U.S. Northern Command in North America or U.S. Central Command in the Middle East.

Space Command’s redundancy is even starker when looking at the resources being allocated to the Space Force. From being stood up just four years ago, the Force has expanded to 9,000 military personnel (all of which were transfers from the other services) and requested $30 billion in the FY2024 budget request. With such tremendous investment and resources, it is far more logical to allow the Space Force to take the lead on coordinating joint space operations, rather than paying more money for more bureaucracy.

While Space Command’s annual budget of $401 million may be comparatively small change in relation to the $840 billion defense budget, the money could certainly be better spent elsewhere. With the administration’s defense spending locked in from the debt limit negotiations, every dollar counts. Funding being wasted on an unnecessary combatant command could be better invested in hard power assets such as F-35s for the Air Force, critically needed long-range precision munitions or other unfunded priorities.

Real Defense Reform by Rescission, Not Addition

When budgets begin to tighten and the “spigot of defense funding” begins to close, politicians often advocate for defense reform to help save money. These efforts typically mean cutting procurement and cutting or canceling weapons systems. Rarely does reform mean reductions in missions, regulations, laws, or layers of bureaucracy. Take the recent defense bills moving through Congress as an example. House appropriators were quick to slash procurement of key munitions but were far more reluctant to broach more serious changes to the Department of Defense’s layers of bureaucracy. Real reform will take time, but targeted assessments of the necessities of certain organizations and workload would be a refreshing step in the right direction.

Instead of engaging in the political theater of deciding whether Space Command headquarters should stay in Colorado or move to Alabama, the Department of Defense should step back and review whether the command’s core functions could be folded into the U.S. Space Force. Where gaps in statutory authorities are identified, Congress should step in and provide the Space Force with those unique authorities. The commander of Space Operations Command could be specified as the global integrator responsible for delivering space-enabled combat effects to the joint force, and the position elevated in rank. Space Command positions, including the hundreds of civilians who work for the command, could be transferred to the U.S. Space Force, and redundant overhead eliminated. These steps would go a long way to help correct what David Ignatius identified in a recent Washington Post article as an insufficient number of command slots and headquarters staff in the Space Force to effectively compete in Pentagon power struggles.

As Washington returns from summer recess and the defense bills continue to move through both chambers of Congress, the debate should not be about where Space Command headquarters should go but whether it should exist at all as an organization that has outlived its usefulness. Serious defense reform requires leadership and doggedness of implementation.

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Mackenzie Eaglen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. She has previously worked in Congress and at the Defense Department as well as on the staffs of three previous national defense strategy commissions.

Todd Harrison is currently the managing director of Metrea Strategic Insights, where he leads the organization’s efforts to conduct innovative, insightful, and pathfinding research. Previously, he was the director of Defense Budget Analysis and director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Mackenzie Eaglen · September 6, 2023

11. All to Play for: Ukraine's Counteroffensive and its Prospects for Success in 2023

​Excerpts:

The Russo-Ukrainian War is at a critical stage. If no large-scale Ukrainian breakthroughs occur before the rainy season arrives and many roads turn to mud, then both sides will settle down for another period of attritional warfare over the winter. And Western governments may have to shoulder some of the blame for any ineffectual results. The slow pace of commitments of tanks and other high-end equipment may have given the Russians crucial breathing space in preparing their defensive lines. Continued military and financial support for Ukraine is crucial in facing down Russian aggression.

At this stage, all is still to play for. Time will tell.

All to Play for: Ukraine's Counteroffensive and its Prospects for Success in 2023 - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Dale Pankhurst · September 6, 2023

For three months, the much-awaited 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive ground on, painstakingly slow and yielding no headline-grabbing territorial gains or battlefield successes. But a new breach in Russia’s defensive lines near the city of Zaporizhzhia (which Ukrainian forces now seek to build on to effect a major breakthrough) represents the most notable sign of progress since the counteroffensive began in early June. It also offers an opportunity to examine three important questions. Why is it only three months into the counteroffensive that any progress has been made? What will make major success still possible this year? And what are the consequences of failure?

Two Factors Limiting Progress

The inability of Ukraine’s counteroffensive to generate notable progress for so long is a function of a number of factors, but two stand out. The first is limited availability of equipment. Between January and December 2022, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany donated a combined $25 billion to Ukraine in military aid (the vast majority by the United States). Despite these efforts, it quickly became clear this year that Ukraine needed far more military equipment to initiate a comprehensive and effective counteroffensive against Russian forces. Crucially, the Ukrainian forces were in desperate need of armored brigade columns in order to punch through Russian defensive lines stretching from the northeastern Ukraine to the southwest beyond Kherson. Despite a commitment from the US and UK governments to provide missiles and other military equipment, it was only in late January that an agreement was reached to provide modern, advanced main battle tanks—the US M1A2, UK Challenger, and German Leopard 2. With the decision coming when it did, and given the time required to deliver the vehicles and train Ukrainians to operate and maintain them, the full complement of tanks promised was not available to enhance the counteroffensive when it was launched. The Leopard tanks have arrived incrementally, and the total delivered is still below the full number committed, while the first Abrams tanks will not arrive until this month.

The second factor limiting early progress is Russia’s well-prepared defense. Throughout the winter, Russia established heavily armed defensive lines and minefields along a two-thousand-kilometer front that are complex and have so far proven their worth in slowing the Ukrainian advance. These defensive lines contain antitank ditches, minefields, and dragon’s teeth obstacles. Ukrainian armored columns have to navigate through these lines before reaching the first network of zigzag trenches containing Russian troops armed with antitank weapons and heavy machine guns. Beyond these trenches are further minefields and tank obstacles before a final layer of dugouts and bunkers manned by various types of Russian units. The minefields in particular are hazardous for both tank and infantry columns. In some cases, Russian troops are laying mines on top of each other to amplify the explosive yield against Western-supplied Ukrainian tanks when detonated. Further behind these defensive lines are pockets of Russian artillery and rocket units that can concentrate high levels of firepower on a specific location. These layers of Russian defenses have combined to effectively slow the Ukrainian advance. Attempted breakthroughs by armored brigades have resulted in the destruction of some armored columns. The limited ability of the much-anticipated Ukrainian armored columns has placed further emphasis (and stress) upon Ukrainian infantry units who have been tasked with trying to punch through these lines with limited armored protection. Where Ukrainian troops and militias have managed to capture abandoned Russian trenches, they have often encountered complex booby-trap explosive devices throughout the trench networks that have resulted in increased casualty rates among infantry brigades.

Is Major Success in 2023 Possible?

Notwithstanding these setbacks, Ukrainian forces continue to make modest advances in certain areas of Ukraine. They have been successful at damaging Russian supply routes behind the front line with Western-supplied artillery, missile batteries, and explosive-laden drones. Recent attacks on Russian naval and cargo ships have continued to disrupt both military operations and supply routes via the Black Sea. Drone attacks in Moscow and other Russian towns will continue to bring the war to the Russian people (though these attacks may prove counterproductive, with the risk that indiscriminate attacks against disparate populations under authoritarian regimes will allow the Kremlin to claim its own illegal warmongering campaigns are just and noble and that they may encourage limited congealing effects between the Russian regime and its people, something that does not strategically serve the interests of Ukraine or the West). Additionally, the Russians have a major logistics problem. Their defensive positions are roughly two thousand kilometers long, stretching from the Russo-Belarusian border in the north through the Donbas to the Dnipro river in Ukraine’s south. Their defensive lines are also unevenly spread. For example, in the Kherson oblast, the trench networks, minefields, and antitank ditches are ten kilometers deep and highly aggregated. In other areas, the defensive lines are less than a kilometer deep and unevenly variegated. The seventy Russian combat brigades currently occupying Ukraine are nowhere near adequate to man every section of the front line. Although Russia’s defensive systems are impressive, so too was the French Maginot Line in 1940. When faced with such a large defensive force dug deep within an underground complex of concrete bunkers, antitank obstacles, and large artillery batteries, the Nazi forces simply overran the defensive line at its weakest point and proceeded through the rough terrain of the Ardennes (where the French defenses were at their weakest), encircled the stronger defensive positions to the south, and rendered it obsolete. Within weeks, the defensive line the French had relied on as a permanent buffer between France and Hitler’s Germany was rendered useless and Swastika emblems flew over France as Hitler walked the streets victorious.

There is only so much time for the Ukrainian counteroffensive to bear fruit in 2023. Unless the Ukrainians make a significant breakthrough and rout the Russian forces with armored columns in operations akin to the 2022 Kharkiv and Kherson counteroffensives, it is unlikely that any expected territorial objectives will be achieved. More so, there will be disappointment in the West that, even with militarily superior tank columns and missile systems, albeit fewer than Ukraine requested and its international supporters promised, the 2023 counteroffensive made less impact than previous campaigns did without the same equipment in 2022. Additionally, both the United Kingdom and the United States (two of Ukraine’s largest suppliers of military aid) are on the brink of deeply divisive national elections in 2024, during which the strategic value of continuing to supply arms and equipment to Ukraine—and shouldering the cost of doing so—will almost certainly become a central issue. This does not bode well for Ukraine, which will continue to require large amounts of weapons.

Still, the breach near Zaporizhzhia offers some optimism that success can still be achieved. But the weeks to come will illustrate whether Ukraine has the material resources to consolidate at the point of greatest impact and transform this tactical success into an operational achievement that changes the balance on the battlefield, or even a strategic success.

The Counteroffensive’s Far-Reaching Implications

The regime of Vladimir Putin will hope that a continuing war of attrition will eventually sap the will of Western governments to continue depleting their own military resources by arming Kyiv’s forces. The Kremlin’s plan likely hinges on its belief that Ukraine’s international supporters will instead push for negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv. Russia will undoubtedly enter these negotiations with demands for more than Crimea to be formally absorbed into the Russian Federation and crucially, no future NATO or EU membership for Ukraine. And there will be no formal peace while Putin is still in power. The threat of war will continue to dominate Eastern Europe, with implications both regionally, where geopolitical dynamics shaped by an enduring Russian threat suit the Putin regime, and beyond, including in Asia, where China continues saber-rattling vis-à-vis Taiwan. Although the focus is on Ukraine, the global stakes are much bigger than its territorial integrity.

The Russo-Ukrainian War is at a critical stage. If no large-scale Ukrainian breakthroughs occur before the rainy season arrives and many roads turn to mud, then both sides will settle down for another period of attritional warfare over the winter. And Western governments may have to shoulder some of the blame for any ineffectual results. The slow pace of commitments of tanks and other high-end equipment may have given the Russians crucial breathing space in preparing their defensive lines. Continued military and financial support for Ukraine is crucial in facing down Russian aggression.

At this stage, all is still to play for. Time will tell.

Dale Pankhurst is an ESRC-funded PhD candidate at Queen’s University Belfast. His research explores the relationships and interactions between states and nonstate armed groups during conflict and war. He has previously published on a range of topics in both peer-reviewed journals and other sources.

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

Image credit: UK Ministry of Defence

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Dale Pankhurst · September 6, 2023

12. A corporal gave a speech in front of the top Marine — and got promoted

A good story. Leadership on multiple levels.

But the underlying question is why do we have a junior NCO filling a billet that calls for someone four ranks higher? I am sure this is not an isolated incident among all the services. We have all seen this happen many times. What does this say about our personnel management system (putting "faces to spaces" and what does it say about our rank structure? Could (should) we reduce the rank for billets across the services? Will Congress demand we do so?

A corporal gave a speech in front of the top Marine — and got promoted

marinecorpstimes.com · by Irene Loewenson · September 5, 2023

Before July 24, then-Cpl. Peyton Nott had never met a four-star general, or any generals, for that matter.

But that day, Nott received an unexpected Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal from the top general in the Marine Corps and — after the corporal gave an off-the-cuff speech at the award ceremony — a meritorious promotion to boot.

Nott, 24, didn’t come from a military family. Even so, the native of Jefferson City, Tennessee, decided at age 6 he would one day join the military. He never changed his mind, he told Marine Corps Times.

After speaking with recruiters from various branches, he found himself pulled toward what he described as the “family-like” nature of the Marine Corps.

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Now a motor transport Marine, Nott is assigned to Romeo Battery, 1st Battalion, 10th Marine Regiment, at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.

Beginning in February, he had to step into a billet typically reserved for gunnery sergeants, leading a team of eight mechanics and operators, according to a statement from his battalion to Marine Corps Times. The gap between a lance corporal and a gunny is one of four ranks and many years of experience.

All the while, Nott had to transfer his battery’s equipment — “over 80 pieces of rolling stock,” according to his battalion — to another motor pool.

Nott had to learn the ins and outs of a staff noncommissioned officer job: How was he supposed to request to move a vehicle from one place to another? How was he supposed to request more fuel? Were his Marines properly trained? Were they making it to their appointments?

The gunny who replaced him in July had 16 years of experience in the Marine Corps, according to Nott, who has only five.

“I became pretty worn down, but, I mean, you gotta keep pushing forward,” Nott said.

On July 24, Assistant Commandant Gen. Eric Smith was at Nott’s North Carolina base for a scheduled visit to units there, according to spokesman Maj. Joshua Larson. During his visit to Romeo Battery, Smith, who also is the acting Marine commandant, pulled Romeo Battery together into a big circle, Nott recalled.

“My battery commander said, ‘Cpl. Nott, get out here,’ and I’m, ‘Rah, sir,’” Nott said. “So I walked out, and next thing I know, (Smith) is presenting me with the award.”

Nott said Smith then told him to give a few words to the Marines in his battery. So the corporal told them what he has long thought, he recounted to Marine Corps Times.

Nott told them that it didn’t matter what military occupational specialty they were.

“What matters is we’re all here together,” Nott recalled telling his battery. “Because I wouldn’t be able to do my job if it wasn’t for the gun guys doing their part. They wouldn’t be able to do their part if it wasn’t for the communications guys.”

Then he brought up “carpe diem,” frequently translated as “seize the day,” a phrase his father taught him. He also discussed another Latin phrase he learned later on: “memento mori,” or “remember you must die.”

“We’re all going to be six feet down one day,” Nott said. “So it was really about what we leave behind. Because you never really understand the true meaning of life unless you understand that you can plant strong roots without ever sitting under the shade of that tree.”

Look out for each other, Nott told the Marines. Look out for junior Marines. Leave something behind.

Once the speech was over, Smith asked someone, “Hey, can I do this?” Nott recounted.

The corporal wasn’t sure what was going on.

Smith asked the rest of the battery who thought he should promote Nott right here, right now, according to Nott.

“And the entire battery, they all raised their hands and everything, and next thing I know I was getting promoted to sergeant,” Nott said.

According to the Corps’ promotion policies, the commandant or acting commandant has the authority to give meritorious promotions to the enlisted ranks private first class through sergeant, Larson said in an emailed statement to Marine Corps Times.

Smith had been aware of Nott’s “exceptional performance prior to the award ceremony, but Nott’s speech to the Marines about the merits of selfless leadership and his focus on taking care of his Marines to accomplish the mission inspired everyone in attendance, including Gen. Smith,” Larson said.

The promotion took place in the woods without any extra sergeant pins handy, so Smith obtained one from a sergeant in attendance and pinned it to Nott.

“I’m all out of words now,” Nott told his Marines.

Nott said the work that garnered the award and promotion was made possible by his junior Marines; he just oversaw it, according to a Marine news release.

After his whirlwind day, Nott still had a week left in the field, he told Marine Corps Times. Once he returned from the field, he gave his parents a quick call to let them know about the promotion. And then it was back to work.

About Irene Loewenson

Irene Loewenson is a staff reporter for Marine Corps Times. She joined Military Times as an editorial fellow in August 2022. She is a graduate of Williams College, where she was the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper.

13. 3 Bullets, 2 Wars, 1 Village (Ukraine)

The human element of war and its effects.

​TM Gibbons-Neff is one of the best and most legitimate and credible war reports in the business today.

3 Bullets, 2 Wars, 1 Village

By Thomas Gibbons-Neff

Reporting from Kamianka, Ukraine

Sept. 5, 2023

The New York Times · by Thomas Gibbons-Neff · September 6, 2023

Ukraine dispatch

The legacy of World War II lingers in the Ukrainian town of Kamianka, where tractors spit out shell casings, old and new. Now it has been destroyed by a new conflict.

Nadiia Huk in front of what used to be her home in Kamianka, Ukraine. “Everything is broken,” she said.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times

Sept. 5, 2023

The woman pointed at a muddy, half-broken bucket, gesturing to a visitor to look inside. Her home had been destroyed after the Russians invaded in 2022 but she was pointing to detritus from the last war to sweep through this part of eastern Ukraine: shell casings from World War II.

“The tractor plows, and the soil turns over and these are plowed up,” she said, looking down at the recovered cartridges.

By The New York Times

Nadiia Huk, 63, has lived in the village of Kamianka her entire life. Her house, before it was sheared apart by artillery last year, was on the northern edge of the hamlet, next to a tributary of the Siversky Donets River and at the foot of a slight hill topped with a forest of fir trees and pines.

Shell casings from World War II were collected in a bowl in Ms. Huk’s home. Residents see the two wars as part of the same deadly violence.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times

Ms. Huk was born after World War II, but the war’s legacy still lingered. The destruction wrought in the 1940s was the foundation for the village where she came of age — it was in the stories passed down by her family and in the soil, chewed up and spit out by passing tractors.

“At that time, the Germans were staying on our side here, and the Soviets were there,” she said. “And even in that war, they fired shells at each other.” Ms. Huk’s mother had hidden a Soviet soldier in her attic, she said, and her grandmother was wounded by shrapnel and treated by Nazi doctors.

The comparisons between World War II and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine are apt. They serve as a baseline for distant observers as they try to understand the scope and scale of the destruction that began on Feb. 24, 2022. But for Ms. Huk, and the hundred or so residents who have returned to Kamianka since Ukraine reclaimed it, the current war is a continuation of violence, separated by generations, with both eras marked by the artifacts invading armies left behind.

The village holds debris from this war and World War II. Russian ammunition boxes were stacked outside the detritus-strewn entrance to a school in Kamianka.Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

In both wars, Kamianka held the same strategic importance. The small village was west and south of the Siversky Donets River, an important natural barrier, and roughly five miles south of the key city of Izium. If an invading army wanted to seize and hold Izium, Kamianka would have to fall too.

Kamianka “was essentially a German defensive line or Soviet defensive line depending on who was attacking at a given time, and that started in 1941,” said David Glantz, a World War II historian who has written extensively about the Eastern Front.

For the Russians last year, Kamianka would be part of their defensive line around Izium after they took the city in late March. Moscow’s forces tried to advance farther south and west but were eventually stopped. Ukraine recaptured Izium, and Kamianka, in September.

In the recent fighting, as in World War II, Kamianka was nearly destroyed. Even months after its liberation, electricity, water and gas are mostly nonexistent and mines are everywhere. The forest above Ms. Huk’s home is impassible and laden with explosives.

“Everything is broken,” Ms. Huk said.

The main bridge in the nearby city of Izium, Ukraine, was blown up by retreating Russian forces in September.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

But now both wars are part of the wreckage. And once the rust, water and grime were scraped away this time around, two of the shells in Ms. Huk’s bucket were legible.

One was the casing for a 7.92 x 57 millimeter bullet, a round fired from German Mausers, the standard-bolt action rifle issued to the German Army during World War II. The other once belonged to a type of bullet known as a .303 British, sent to the Russian Empire in World War I and then also later to the Soviet Union as part of Britain’s military assistance program that started in 1941.

The spent casing of a .303 British, a type of ammunition sent to the Russian Empire in World War I and then also later to the Soviet Union as part of Britain’s military assistance program that started in 1941.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times

The empty German cartridge had been stamped in 1937, made by Finower Industrie G.m.b.H., in Germany. The other was stamped in 1918, by George Kynoch Ltd., a munitions plant in Birmingham, England.

Both rounds had been fired, with a slight dent in their primers marking where the firing pin of the bolt had slammed home. It is unclear when exactly the two wayward casings ended up in Ms. Huk’s field, but it can be said with some certainty that their earliest arrival would have come during the Second battle of Kharkiv in 1942.

Kamianka has strategic importance despite its small size. Ukraine recaptured the village from Russian forces last fall, but the damage was extensive. Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

In the spring of that year German forces counterattacked around Izium and the city of Kharkiv to the northwest. The Soviet and German forces arrayed against each other, on just a portion of World War II’s sprawling eastern front, involved hundreds of thousands of men more than the Ukrainian and Russian armies fighting today. The roughly two-week battle resulted in roughly 300,000 casualties on both sides and a crushing Soviet defeat.

“If you took a metal detector and ran along the south bank of the Donets River you would end up with everything from German dog tags to pieces of equipment, because most of it was left where it was,” Mr. Glantz said.

But World War II’s relevance is not just buried in the soil of Ukraine, it also serves as an undercurrent of Russia’s present-day invasion.

One oft-cited reason that President Vladimir V, Putin of Russia has given for launching his illegal invasion was to “denazify” Ukraine. He falsely claimed the country was overrun by the same type of adversaries millions of Soviet soldiers had died fighting during World War II, or what Russians call the Great Patriotic War.

In 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, of which Ukraine was a part, after a pact between the Soviets and Germans collapsed when Germany launched a surprise assault. But some Ukrainians fought against the Soviets too, leaving a complicated history of alliances and remembrances that appears often on the current war’s front line in the form of symbols and patches.

Ukrainian soldiers in Izium in September, when they recaptured the city.Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times

About a hundred yards from Ms. Huk’s field, embedded in a dirt road that led to the center of Kamianka, was another collection of shell casings. The empty cartridges were still visible but well on their way to being buried for the next generation. These were probably left last year by the retreating Russians, who had occupied Kamianka for around six months.

One empty cartridge removed from the scattering of expended bullets had been stamped in 1987 at the Novosibirsk Cartridge Plant in Russia. Rifle ammunition assembled at Novosibirsk have appeared in Libya, Syria and Afghanistan over the last 20 years, a nod to the levels of Soviet small arms that proliferated after the Cold War.

But the Russians had left behind far more in Kamianka than just expended ammunition. They murdered many of the villages’ dogs, piling their corpses next to the river near Ms. Huk’s home. They buried artillery shells that the Ukrainian military found and took away. But the most abundant artifact they left behind were the empty dark green ammunition boxes that carried everything from rockets to mortars to artillery shells.

There were so many boxes that Ms. Huk’s son tore several apart and used them to make his mother an outdoor shower next to her home’s shattered remains.

Ms. Huk near an outdoor shower her son built with Russian ammunition boxes.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times

Natalia Yermak and Yurii Shyvala contributed reporting.

Thomas Gibbons-Neff is a Ukraine correspondent and a former Marine infantryman. More about Thomas Gibbons-Neff

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Legacy of World War II Still Lingers in the Soil Of a Strategic Village

The New York Times · by Thomas Gibbons-Neff · September 6, 2023

14. Putin is developing a sinister new plan for victory (and the relationship with north Korea)

​Excerpts:

A more concerning aspect of Russia’s burgeoning relationship is the potential to supply both hard currency and technology for North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme, especially the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles. As with its ability to provide other commodities, Russia has enormous capabilities in this field, including its own nuclear weapons know-how. This could be a game-changer in Pyongyang’s pursuit of an effective nuclear delivery programme. 

Some analysts have suggested that the US exposure of Kim’s planned visit might be enough for him to cancel it. That will make no difference. The deeply embedded links between the two countries are sufficient for this deadly cooperation to continue and develop without a meeting between the two leaders. 

The question that must therefore be asked is: why was there a need to plan for such a meeting in the first place? For Kim, virtually confined to the borders of his own country, it would be an opportunity to posture as a world statesman before his fellow anti-Western regimes. Putin, too, has a need to show his people that he is not isolated. But there may be something else behind it. Putin might well have in mind a bargaining chip to encourage an already wobbling US administration to pressure Kyiv into a ceasefire. 

Putin is developing a sinister new plan for victory

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/05/putin-is-developing-a-sinister-new-plan-for-victory/

Story by Colonel Richard Kemp •

September 5, 2023

The newest Russian tank T-14 Armata fires during a dynamic display of military equipment at the International Military-Technical Forum 'Army-2023' held at the Alabino military training grounds outside Moscow

© Provided by The Telegraph

N

orth Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s planned meeting with Vladimir Putin in Vladivostok, as revealed by US intelligence, gives us a new insight into Russia’s strategy in Ukraine as well as a warning of wider dangers for the world. 

As Kyiv’s offensive wears on into its fourth month, with only limited success and a few Russian counter attacks, it is becoming clear that Moscow’s plan may be to allow Ukraine to exhaust its men, tanks, shells and missiles against the Surovikin Line’s hardest edge. The thinking could be that, once Ukraine’s Western equipped and trained manoeuvre forces have been ground down, Russia will then be able to launch its own major offensive, perhaps as early as January. 

After almost two years of fighting that has been compared more to the First World War than the Second, this plan is reminiscent of the Germans’ Kaiserschlacht, the spring offensive which began in March 1918 and drove the allies back, seizing more territory than had been taken by either side in the preceding four years of war. This was achieved by the Germans bleeding the enemy dry while building massive reserves of men and munitions behind the lines, ready to unleash a devastating assault not unlike what the British aimed for, but failed to achieve, 

during the Battle of the Somme in 1916

.

The problem for Putin is that, as he seeks to grind down Ukrainian forces, he is expending vast quantities of ammunition, especially artillery shells and ballistic missiles, and very large numbers of tanks. While Russia has a greater volume of military industrial production than much of the West, and continues to mobilise tens of thousands of men each quarter on a rolling basis, its core supplies remain inadequate for the level of expenditure required for a major new offensive. 

That is where Pyongyang could come in. North Korea has been sending large quantities of shells, rockets and missiles to Russia for at least a year, with many of the shipments organised by the late Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner group. In July, Putin’s defence minister Sergei Shoigu was in Pyongyang, presumably negotiating further supplies. There he will have found an Aladdin’s Cave of hardware – North Korea maintains immense stocks of heavy weaponry and artillery munitions. Many are old and unreliable, but that won’t matter if Russia resorts to its old tactic for victory: utilising its sheer force of numbers, steamrollering the enemy as the Germans sought to do in 1918. 

The new Moscow-Pyongyang axis is a reversal of roles from the Cold War era, when the Soviet Union and China were the top arms supplier to North Korea from its inception. Supply continued even after the Soviet collapse, only ending with the advent of UN sanctions. Supporting Russia today benefits Kim as a means of hitting back against the US, with the undoubted approval of Beijing.

But North Korea’s backing will not come without a hefty price tag. Crippled by Western sanctions, Pyongyang is in dire need of the oil, food, fertiliser and raw materials that Russia has in abundance. 

A more concerning aspect of Russia’s burgeoning relationship is the potential to supply both hard currency and technology for North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme, especially the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles. As with its ability to provide other commodities, Russia has enormous capabilities in this field, including its own nuclear weapons know-how. This could be a game-changer in Pyongyang’s pursuit of an effective nuclear delivery programme. 

Some analysts have suggested that the US exposure of Kim’s planned visit might be enough for him to cancel it. That will make no difference. The deeply embedded links between the two countries are sufficient for this deadly cooperation to continue and develop without a meeting between the two leaders. 

The question that must therefore be asked is: why was there a need to plan for such a meeting in the first place? For Kim, virtually confined to the borders of his own country, it would be an opportunity to posture as a world statesman before his fellow anti-Western regimes. Putin, too, has a need to show his people that he is not isolated. But there may be something else behind it. Putin might well have in mind a bargaining chip to encourage an already wobbling US administration to pressure Kyiv into a ceasefire. 

Whatever the diplomatic double-dealing, the West should now be helping Ukraine prepare in case their current offensive fails, allowing Putin to unleash his Kaiserschlacht.

The German offensive in 1918 petered out from exhaustion and lack of supplies. We cannot count on a similar fate overcoming Putin’s next move: it is questionable whether Ukraine will have the resources to hold the Russians back, let alone launch their own version of the Hundred Days Offensive which allowed the Allies, with newly arrived American forces, to drive the Germans back into their homeland. 

If this apocalyptic 1918 scenario becomes reality, a monumental effort will be required from the West as well as from Ukraine – greater than has already been delivered. It will be extremely costly for everyone, with the potential consequences too terrifying to contemplate.

Colonel Richard Kemp is a former British Army officer

​15. SAM Sites Could Return To Critical Locales Across U.S.

Wow.

I often drive by a historical marker for a Nike-Hercules site in Northern Virginia. People forget that the Nike-Hercules was a nuclear capable air defense weapon - imagine using nuclear weapons to defeat the Soviet Air Armada trying to attack the US? Imagine detonating a nuclear weapons in the vicinity over Washington DC in an attempt to defend it from air attack?  

Photos at the link: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/cruise-missile-shield-could-see-sam-sites-return-to-critical-locales-across-u-s?mc_cid=3c7d5aaf5c

SAM Sites Could Return To Critical Locales Across U.S.

The Air Force has been tasked with leading the development of a cruise missile defense ‘shield’ to protect critical U.S. infrastructure.

BY

JOSEPH TREVITHICK

|

PUBLISHED SEP 5, 2023 7:47 PM EDT

thedrive.com · by Joseph Trevithick · September 5, 2023

The U.S. military has begun a new formal effort to explore options for how to better defend the homeland against the threat posed by ever-more advanced Russian and Chinese cruise missiles. This might include the return of domestic surface-to-air missile sites at critical locations across the country, though not on a scale that was seen during the Cold War. Directed energy weapons, as well as an expanded sensor and command and control infrastructure, bolstered by artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, have also been discussed in the past as part of an improved cruise missile defense ecosystem.

Inside Defense first reported earlier today that the Air Force had kicked off the "air and cruise missile defense of the homeland analysis of alternatives" back in July. A year before that, the Pentagon had selected the service to lead this effort, which is expected to eventually involve contributions from all of the branches of the U.S. military and the Missile Defense Agency (MDA). This new effort will leverage work done in the course of a number of other U.S. military domestic air defense planning studies over the better part of the past decade.

An unclassified map showing air defense nodes in the contiguous United States, including green circles denoting bases hosting Air Force fighters tasked with homeland defense, circa 2021. DOD

“The AOA [analysis of alternatives] is starting in earnest and [is] going to churn out some program and investment analyses that will then lead into the budgets over the next couple of years,” one of two unnamed senior defense officials said, according to Inside Defense.

"Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks has directed the Air Force, which is spearheading the project, to think about one batch of initial investments that can be achieved in the 2026 five-year spending plan... And then identify a second basket of more advanced capabilities to reach for in the 2030 five-year spending plan," Inside Defense further reported. "The expectation is that the AOA will recommend an amalgamation of existing systems and new capabilities."

Beyond this, specific details about exactly what the Air Force may already be exploring with regard to improving homeland defense capabilities against incoming cruise missiles remain limited.

The War Zone has reached out to the Air Force for further information about the AOA, including whether or not it is completely limited to cruise missile defense. Relevant capabilities to protect against cruise missiles could easily be applicable to other threats, including the increasing dangers posed to domestic critical infrastructure by various tiers of armed or weaponized uncrewed aerial systems. As underscored by the current conflict in Ukraine, the line between traditional cruise missiles and kamikaze drones is already very blurry.

It is no secret that the U.S. military has a long-standing concern about the threats posed by cruise missiles, which are increasingly proliferating, even to non-state groups, to its forces and facilities abroad and at home. Over the past few decades, U.S. government fears have steadily grown about the danger these weapons pose to the homeland more broadly. In addition to the Russian and Chinese armed forces developing and fielding ever more capable designs, including hypersonic types, both of those countries have been expanding their launch platform options, especially newer, more capable missile submarines.

Advanced, ultra-quiet missile submarines, like the Russian Yasen-M class Kazan seen here, have been a particular source of concern for the U.S. military when it comes to the potential for cruise missile strikes on the United States. Russian MoD

"The thing that I really want to emphasize here is that the homeland is not a sanctuary any longer," U.S. Air Force Col. Kristopher Struve, the vice director of operations for the U.S.-Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), said during a virtual roundtable hosted by the Missile Defense Advocacy Association (MDAA) in 2021. "There are opportunities for our adversaries to employ weapons from distances that they could strike critical infrastructure in the United States early in a conflict and create some challenges for us to produce our military power."

These are the realities that have prompted the Pentagon to task the Air Force with exploring a holistic, multi-faceted approach to improving the nation's defenses against cruise missiles. Currently, the vast majority of standing domestic air defense capacity in the United States is provided by a relative handful of fighters sitting on alert at bases near key locales.

The only real permanently deployed ground-based capability within the continental United States are the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS) and AN/TWQ-1 Avengers positioned in and around the greater Washington, D.C. area, also known as the National Capital Region (NCR). There are additional surface-to-air missile units based in the United States that could be deployed in the event of a war or other major crisis, but they are limited in number.

A ground-based launcher associated with the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (NASAMS). Kongsberg Defense

So, an expanded and improved network of surface-to-air missile sites within the borders of the United States is known to be one part of these discussions.

In recent years, the Air Force, in cooperation with the U.S. Army, has publicly been working to expand NASAMS counter-cruise missile capabilities with a particular focus on homeland defense. The Air Force has also been testing more novel ground-based means of kinetically destroying incoming cruise missiles, including a large-caliber gun firing extremely fast-flying projectiles called the Hypervelocity Ground Weapon System (HGWS).

Documents released along with the Pentagon's 2023 Fiscal Year budget proposal showed plans to conduct a test of a prototype HGWS together with NASAMS sometime between the beginning of July and the end of September of this year. However, it is unclear if this has occurred or is still scheduled to take place.

The Army, as well as the U.S. Marine Corps, are both in the process of acquiring new surface-to-air missile systems – Enduring Shield and Iron Dome, respectively – driven in large part by a desire for new counter-cruise missile defenses for forces deployed abroad. These systems could potentially be used to provide additional, if highly localized air defense capacity within the United States.

Beyond ground-based kinetic defense options, the Air Force has demonstrated a capability to shoot down enemy cruise missiles using aircraft armed with laser-guided 70mm Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System II (APKWS II) rockets, as well. Other kinetic and non-kinetic capabilities, including directed energy weapons and electronic warfare systems mounted on various platforms, could be part of the final domestic cruise missile defense equation.

A robust targeting infrastructure, consisting of radars and other sensors, will also be necessary. Detecting and tracking cruise missiles, which generally fly at very low altitudes, and that might be flying at supersonic, supersonic, and now hypersonic speeds, is notoriously difficult.

A key reason beyond the Air Force's refitting of F-15C/D Eagles with AN/APG-63(V)3 active electronically scanned array (AESA) radars in the past was to provide them any improved ability to spot and track cruise missiles. With the F-15C/Ds now in the process of being retired, many of the service's F-16C/D Viper fighters are getting new AESA radars in large part for the same reason. The Air Force's future F-15EXs, an acquisition program that is very much in flux currently, will also have AESA radars.

Creating an elevated sensor platform with good look-down visibility was the key driver behind the Army's abortive Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System (JLENS) radar blimp program. That effort began in 1996 and was canceled some two decades later after numerous cost overruns, delays, and other issues. In a particularly infamous incident in 2015, a prototype JLENS aerostat deployed at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland became untethered and drifted into neighboring Pennsylvania, with its snapped mooring line knocking down power lines along the way. It finally lost sufficient altitude to end up tangled up in a tree.

Furthermore, command and control networks will be required to link everything together. The Army is already in the process of fielding a new centralized air and missile defense networking capability, called the Integrated Battle Command System (IBCS), which you can read more about here. Advanced networks are a key part of the Air Force's larger Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) initiative, as well.

The U.S. government also has a long-standing air defense partnership with Canada through NORAD, which would also be another factor in this future planning.

Overall, “Air and Cruise Missile Defense of the Homeland is very clearly not just a few things – it is a lot of things across a lot of different domains,” the first senior defense official told Inside Defense, according to its report today. “One thing we found [already]... is that there are a lot of capabilities that could be applied to this problem set, they're just not aligned to [the cruise missile defense mission set.]"

“When we determined who needed to be the lead, we had to take into account the whole of the kill chain – not just the defensive part,” a second senior defense official also told that outlet. “That's what really led us to the Air Force as the lead because they do a lot of work and those other domains, which include that early warning and that long-range surveillance, which is critical to the problem."

Last year, the Defense Science Board notably published an unclassified summary of a future U.S. domestic air defense study it had conducted that called for "an adaptable, scalable, and affordable framework... that incorporates emerging technological innovations to ensure all-domain awareness, assured tracking, secure command and control, and affordable engagements." It recommended leveraging of technologies including "artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), multi-statics, directed energy, proliferated LEO [low Earth orbit satellite] constellations, and multimodal seekers, as supported by advances in big data analytics and digital engineering."

Artificial intelligence and machine learning could be very valuable for helping air defenders rapidly prioritize which incoming threats to respond to and do so in the most efficient manner possible, as well as simply aiding them in the initial detection of those targets. It might even alert U.S. forces to the potential for strikes before they are even launched.

"The machine learning and the artificial intelligence can detect changes [and] we can set parameters where it will trip an alert to give you the awareness to go take another sensor such as GEOINT [geospatial intelligence] on-satellite capability to take a closer look at what might be ongoing in a specific location," U.S. Air Force General Glen VanHerck, head of NORAD and U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM), explained to reporters in 2021 following a series of tests called the Global Information Dominance Experiments (GIDE). "What we've seen is the ability to get way further what I call left, left of being reactive to actually being proactive. And I'm talking not minutes and hours, I'm talking days."

The Defense Science Board, a U.S. government-sanctioned civilian scientific and technical committee that advises the Office of the Secretary of Defense, dubbed its notional future integrated air defense network as Strategic Aerospace Guard Environment II (SAGE II). This was a direct reference to the SAGE network that was used to help defend the skies over the United States and Canada during the Cold War.

Bringing up SAGE highlights one of the key hurdles that the Air Force and the rest of the U.S. military will need to address, which is cost. A general consensus has already emerged that trying to establish a modern version of a Cold War-esque domestic air defense network and directly protect all critical military and civilian infrastructure with kinetic defenses would be prohibitively expensive.

“Probably the third rail for homeland cruise missile defense has been the cost,” the first senior defense official said according to today's report from Inside Defense. “Every time you start figuring out what you're going to have to deploy to do this the way we traditionally do air defense, it is an extremely costly proposition. So, our challenge is going to be: How do we do this smartly, right-size this thing where we provide the requirements... while not necessarily looking like you are redeploying Nike batteries.”

Nike here refers to a family of Cold War-era surface-to-air missile systems that were deployed at locations across the United States, as well as to protect American facilities overseas. Nike systems were in use domestically between 1953 and 1979, and the network eventually grew to encompass nearly 300 individual sites.

"Simply put: We cannot defend everything," U.S. Army Lt. Gen. A. C. Roper, Deputy Commander of U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) and the Vice Commander of NORAD's U.S. component, said bluntly at an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think tank last year. "Placing a Patriot or THAAD [Terminal High Altitude Area Defense] battery on every street corner is both infeasible and unaffordable."

In 2021, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) published a report that estimated it could cost between $75 billion and $465 billion over the next 20 years, or $3.75 billion to $23.25 billion annually, to acquire and operate various tiers of new and expanded air defense capabilities to help protect the contiguous United States, as well as various outlying areas. For comparison, the U.S. military is asking for $29.8 billion, in total, across all the services and MDA, for "missile defeat and defense (MDD) capabilities" in the 2024 Fiscal Year.

CBO said its "lowest cost 'architectures'" focused on "airborne or space-based radars, surface-to-air missiles, and fighter aircraft."

A selection of representative sensor systems CBO examined as part of its 2021 homeland air defense study. CBO

Altogether, it is not only reasonable to expect that a nuanced, flexible, and layered approach will emerge, but that this will be a necessity to provide a reasonable level of defense against cruise missiles and other aerial threats across the United States. Beyond more traditional air defense measures, including more deployable assets that can be more readily sent where they are most necessary in any given situation, other steps to try to mitigate or just get additional advance warning about incoming strikes might be taken.

"I think the future of homeland defense is vastly different than what we see today," NORTHCOM and NORAD head VanHerck told members of Congress in March. "It is likely including autonomous platforms, airborne and maritime platforms, unmanned platforms with domain awareness sensors, and effectors that are kinetic and non-kinetic."

"I see the future likely being much less kinetic," he added. "There will be some areas that we should defend kinetically that could bring us to our knees, but also non-kinetic such as deception, denial, and the use of the electromagnetic spectrum."

VanHerck also famously acknowledged what he described as a "domain awareness gap" with regard to defending the airspace over North America as a Chinese spy balloon passed over parts of the United States and Canada earlier this year. That balloon, as well as three other still unidentified objects, were subsequently shot down in U.S. and Canadian airspace. Immediate measures, including changing the sensitivity parameters on domestic air defense radars, were taken, but significant questions remain about the policies and procedures in place at the time.

A picture of the Chinese spy balloon taken from the cockpit of a U.S. Air Force U-2S Dragon Lady spy plane as it passed through American airspace in February 2023. DOD USAF

The NORAD/NORTHCOM chief has been a particular advocate for additional sensor capacity, including new over-the-horizon radars to provide additional early warning against various types of threats. His mention in March of deception and denial also reflects a broader trend, particularly within the Air Force, to find novel ways to help reduce vulnerability to stand-off strikes, especially in the context of a potential future high-end conflict against China.

Cruise missile defense of critical domestic infrastructure, of course, remains a major specific source of concern. Finding the right mixture of capabilities, and ones that can be acquired and fielded at a reasonable cost in the next five to 10 years, to meet this challenge is the key reason the Air Force is conducting its new homeland air defense analysis of alternatives study.

Contact the author: joe@thedrive.com

thedrive.com · by Joseph Trevithick · September 5, 2023

16. This cold war is different

Is the Cold War 2.0? Are we going to "re-adopt" the Cold War to describe the security environment?

Conclusion:

Contrary to how it may appear to many, not least in the US, the new cold war seems to be based not on the old logic of polarisation, but on a new logic of fragmentation. Judging by the growth of the BRICS, there’s no shortage of countries that find that new logic enticing.

This cold war is different | The Strategist

aspistrategist.org.au · by Mark Leonard · September 4, 2023

US President Joe Biden brought the leaders of allies Japan and South Korea to Camp David last month to discuss how to contain China and counter Russia’s influence—for example, in Africa’s Sahel region, which has recently experienced a string of coups d’état. Meanwhile, leaders from the BRICS countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—gathered in Johannesburg to criticise the West’s dominance over the international institutions established after World War II. It was enough to give Cold War historians déjà vu.

The West’s main adversary today is China, not the Soviet Union, and the BRICS is no Warsaw Pact. But with the world entering a period of uncertainty following the demise of the post–Cold War order, the parallels are sufficient to convince many to turn to pre-1989 conceptual models to gain insight into what might come next. This includes the US and China, though each is betting on a different model.

Between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the two main forces defining the international order were ideological conflict, which split the world into two camps, and the quest for independence, which led to the proliferation of states, from 50 in 1945 to more than 150 in 1989–1991. While the two forces interacted, ideological conflict was dominant: struggles for independence often morphed into proxy wars, and countries were forced either to join a bloc or define themselves by their ‘non-alignment’.

The US seems to think a similar dynamic will dominate this time around. Faced with its first peer competitor since the fall of the Soviet Union, Washington has sought to rally its allies behind a strategy of ‘decoupling’ and ‘de-risking’—essentially an economic version of the Cold War policy of containment.

Whereas the US may be expecting Cold War II, shaped primarily by ideological polarisation, China seems to be betting on global fragmentation. Yes, it has tried to offer non-Western countries an alternative to Western-dominated institutions such as the G7 and the International Monetary Fund. But, in China’s view, the quest for sovereignty and independence is fundamentally incompatible with the formation of Cold War–style blocs.

Instead, Beijing expects a multipolar world. While China can’t win a battle against a US-led bloc, President Xi Jinping seems convinced that it can take its place as a great power in a fragmented global order.

Even America’s closest allies aren’t immune from the trend towards fragmentation, despite US leaders’ best efforts. Consider the recent Camp David summit. Though some media were quick to herald a ‘new cold war’, the participants’ interests diverged in several ways.

South Korea’s main focus remains North Korea, and the intelligence-sharing agreements and nuclear consultations announced after the summit were as much about signalling a resolve to push back against North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un’s regime as they were about countering China. Japan, for its part, is eager to avoid strategic escalation over Taiwan—a development that would threaten its economic model, which depends significantly on trade with China (including in semiconductor-related technology). And both South Korea and Japan are unhappy with the zeal with which America is pursuing its de-risking strategy.

As for the situation in the Sahel, it has all the features of a classic Cold War proxy standoff. Since Burkina Faso, Guinea and Mali succumbed to military coups, the US and France have come to rely on Niger’s government as the last bastion of Western support in the region. Under the late Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian mercenary army Wagner Group gained substantial influence over Mali’s governance and practically ran the Central African Republic. The last thing the US and France want is for Wagner to gain another foothold in the region.

But now that Niger’s government, too, has been ousted by the military, American and French responses have diverged sharply, allowing the country’s new rulers to have their cake and eat it. The military junta has requested Wagner’s assistance to stave off the threat of intervention, but appears willing, at least for now, to allow the US to continue operating drone bases in the country.

Perhaps the biggest news, though, was the BRICS’ announcement that six countries—Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—would become full-fledged members by the beginning of next year. Pre-summit editorialising notwithstanding, China is under no illusion that countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE will join it in a bona fide anti-Western bloc; Beijing’s goals are more subtle.

Joining the BRICS increases countries’ freedom of action—for example, by increasing access to alternative sources of financing or, eventually, providing a genuine alternative to the US dollar for trade, investment and reserves. A world in which countries are not dependent on the West, but free to explore other options, serves China’s interests far better than a narrower, more loyal pro-China alliance ever could.

The picture that emerges is of a world in which the superpowers lack sufficient economic, military or ideological clout to force the rest of the world—in particular, the increasingly confident ‘middle powers’—to pick a side. From South Korea to Niger to the new BRICS members, countries can afford to advance their own goals and interests, rather than pledging fealty to the superpowers.

Contrary to how it may appear to many, not least in the US, the new cold war seems to be based not on the old logic of polarisation, but on a new logic of fragmentation. Judging by the growth of the BRICS, there’s no shortage of countries that find that new logic enticing.

Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, is the author of The age of unpeace: how connectivity causes conflict. This article is presented in partnership with Project Syndicate © 2023. Image: Pavel Byrkin/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images.

aspistrategist.org.au · by Mark Leonard · September 4, 2023

17. Russian Pilot Describes Defection to Ukraine, Urges Others to Follow

Russian Pilot Describes Defection to Ukraine, Urges Others to Follow

Capt. Maksim Kuzminov flies to Ukraine in helicopter with help from Kyiv’s military intelligence service

https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/russian-pilot-describes-defection-to-ukraine-urges-others-to-follow-8574d0f7

By Matthew Luxmoore

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Sept. 5, 2023 11:10 am ET

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A Russian pilot who defected to Ukraine last month spoke to reporters on Tuesday and said he had been helped by Ukraine’s HUR military intelligence service. Capt. Maksim Kuzminov said he reached out to the agency late last year after months lamenting the Russian invasion of Ukraine and his part in it. Photo: Kirill Chubotin/Ukrinform/Zuma Press

KYIV, Ukraine—A Russian military pilot who defected to Ukraine last month said he flew his Mi-8 helicopter low over fields with its transponder off to evade detection, capping an operation planned over months with Ukraine’s military intelligence agency.

In his first public appearance at a news conference in Ukraine, Capt. Maksim Kuzminov said Tuesday that he reached out to the agency, best known by the acronym HUR, late last year after months lamenting the Russian invasion of Ukraine and his part in it.

Kuzminov, a 28-year-old from Russia’s Far East, said he had worked as a transport pilot for the Russian military, moving troops and equipment across Russia and, once the war started, also to occupied territory in Ukraine’s south.

He agreed on a plan with HUR to defect by flying the Mi-8 helicopter at his command through a safe corridor into Ukraine. Two other Russian service members were on board when he set off from Kursk in Russia’s south, and neither knew of his plans, he said.

When he neared his destination near Vovchansk in northeastern Ukraine, he said the men began to panic. They jumped out of the helicopter when it landed and sprinted north toward the border. HUR’s director Maj. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov told Ukrainian media that the two men were killed when they attempted to flee.

The successful operation on Aug. 9 was a coup for HUR, the first time a Russian Air Force pilot defected since Moscow launched its war 18 months ago. The agency has compared it to Operation Diamond, a three-year mission by Israel’s Mossad national intelligence agency that ended in August 1966 with the capture of a Soviet-built MiG-21 jet fighter flown by an Iraqi Air Force defector.

Maksim Kuzminov, in black, appeared at a press conference in Ukraine on Tuesday. PHOTO: KIRILL CHUBOTIN/UKRINFORM/ZUMA PRESS

HUR sought to capitalize on the audacity of the daytime operation and counter Russian denials by releasing on Sunday a video detailing the flight and elements of the agency’s cooperation with Kuzminov, who said he was seeking a chance to escape.

“When everything started there were tears, suffering, fear and a question: Why does our country need this war?” Kuzminov said of the first days of the war, speaking beside two HUR officials. “I understood that it was a crime and I simply will not take part in it.”

Moscow hasn’t commented on Kuzminov’s defection. Fighterbomber, a Russian military aviation Telegram channel that is connected with the Russian Air Force, said after the release of the HUR film that the story shouldn’t be trusted.

News of Kuzminov’s defection is a boost to Ukraine just as a counteroffensive in the south is starting to make progress after achieving limited gains in three months of fighting against deeply dug-in Russian forces.

Kuzminov, a pilot in Russia’s 319th separate helicopter regiment of army aviation based in the Primorsk region of Russia’s Far East, said he was living a comfortable life with two apartments and a good salary when the war started.

Toward the end of 2022, he wrote to representatives of HUR in an encrypted chat on Telegram, he said, and began discussing with them a plan to steal a Russian military helicopter and land it in Ukraine, which made him eligible for a $500,000 payout, according to Ukrainian wartime laws.

By the summer, they had agreed on a flight route for Aug. 9, and that afternoon he left an air base in Kursk and flew toward Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, with the two other service members on board.

He flew less than 32 feet above the ground to avoid detection, in radio-silence mode, and said he was targeted by gunfire from an unknown direction as he crossed the border.

Capt. Maksim Kuzminov is the first Russian Air Force pilot to defect to Ukraine since Moscow launched its war 18 months ago. PHOTO: KIRILL CHUBOTIN/UKRINFORM/ZUMA PRESS

HUR officials said troops fanned out around the helicopter and took control of it, finding documents relating to Russian military operations and instructions for airplane parts on board.

Kuzminov said he is considering his options and plans to stay for the foreseeable future in Ukraine, where he said he has been given guarantees of safety and the $500,000 he was promised.

His parents are with him in Ukraine, he said, without giving further details.

HUR has said that any Russian service members who defect will receive similar treatment, including financial compensation for Russian equipment they pass on to the Ukrainians.

In the video released by HUR on Sunday, Kuzminov urged others to follow his example.

“There’s so much you don’t understand, and you haven’t seen how other people live,” he said. “When all this opens up before you, your views will fundamentally change.”

Write to Matthew Luxmoore at matthew.luxmoore@wsj.com

18. Russian Official Admits ‘Tactical Retreat’ From Robotyne Amid Kyiv’s Gains

Russian Official Admits ‘Tactical Retreat’ From Robotyne Amid Kyiv’s Gains

BY ISABEL VAN BRUGEN ON 9/6/23 AT 5:16 AM EDT

newsweek.com · by Isabel van Brugen

Russian forces have abandoned Robotyne, a key village on Ukraine’s southern Zaporizhzhia front, a Kremlin-installed official announced on state TV.

Yevgeny Balitsky, the head of the Moscow-installed administration in the partially occupied Zaporizhzhia region, said during a broadcast of Russian state TV show Solovyov Live that the Russian army pulled out of the area for tactical reasons.

Ukraine’s counteroffensive to reclaim its territory is now in its fourth month, with particularly heavy clashes taking place along the front lines in the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions. Geolocated footage dated September 5 shows Kyiv’s forces have advanced south of Robotyne and along Russian defensive lines in the area.

A Ukrainian military man sets up an FPV drone during training at a drone school on August 4, 2023 in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, Ukraine. Although Zaporizhzhia remains a city free from Russian invaders, it is very close to the front line—only 18 miles separate the city from the combat zone. Elena Tita/Global Images Ukraine/Getty Images

“The Russian army abandoned—tactically abandoned—this settlement because staying on a bare surface when there is no way to completely dig in… doesn’t generally make sense. Therefore the Russian army retreated to the hills,” Russian news outlet RBC quoted Balitsky as saying.

Newsweek has contacted Russia’s Defense Ministry via email for comment.

On August 29, Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar announced that Kyiv’s forces had recaptured Robotyne and were attempting to advance further.

“Robotyne has been liberated,” she said during a national broadcast at the time, Ukrainska Pravda reported.

“In the south, we are carrying out an offensive. This is our main offensive front. In Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts, the enemy is on the defensive,” Maliar added. “Our troops are moving southeast of Robotyne and south of Mala Tokmachka.”

The Institute for the Study of War, a U.S.-based think tank, said on Tuesday that geolocated footage posted on September 5 shows Russian forces striking Ukrainian positions northwest and west of Robotyne, indicating that Ukrainian forces have advanced into an area near the settlement that Russian forces previously claimed to control.

“Additional geolocated footage posted on September 5 shows that Ukrainian forces have also advanced south of Robotyne and northwest of Verbove (about 10km east of Robotyne),” the think tank said. “Geolocated evidence of Ukrainian forces northwest of Verbove suggests that Ukrainian forces are advancing along the line of Russian fortifications that runs into the settlement.”

Open-source intelligence (OSINT) analysts also reported on Tuesday that Kyiv’s forces have expanded a breach in the “Surovikin Line”—Russia’s main defensive line near Robotyne.

GeoConfirmed, an OSINT account on X, formerly Twitter, said Monday that Kyiv’s forces have likely reached the “Surovikin Line” trench system near the village of Verbove, near Robotyne.

The so-called “Surovikin Line” refers to defensive lines in Ukraine constructed under the command of General Sergei Surovikin, the former commander of Russia’s military operations in Ukraine.

Do you have a tip on a world news story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about the Russia-Ukraine war? Let us know via worldnews@newsweek.com.

newsweek.com · by Isabel van Brugen

19. The world is running out of ‘inflection points’ in the war against authoritarian rule

Excerpts:

Biden and NATO take justifiable pride in the quantity of “unprecedented” military aid they have provided Ukraine, which is eons ahead of what they did after Putin’s first invasion of Ukraine — that is, nothing — but far less than what Ukraine needs to eject the Russian invaders from its land. Meanwhile, Russia continues to wreak death, suffering and destruction as it seeks to obliterate Ukrainian civilization and identity in a national genocide.

Along the way, lesser, more localized tests of wills have occurred. In 2012, China seized Scarborough Shoals from the Philippines in violation of a U.S.-negotiated mutual withdrawal agreement. In 2015, Xi promised Obama China would not militarize the artificial islands it had illegally built in the South China Sea. In 2016, a United Nations arbitral tribunal rejected all of China’s expansive territorial claims, but no international enforcement followed.

The cumulative effect of these successive inflection points has been to strengthen the position of the West’s enemies and weaken the capacities and will of many in the West, though the final outcome of Russia’s war in Ukraine hangs in the balance. If U.S. will to defend Taiwan remains as opaque as it is under the policy of strategic ambiguity, and as dilatory as it has been in helping Ukraine, China will continue to press its advantage until strategic miscalculation brings the world to perhaps the final inflection point.

The world is running out of ‘inflection points’ in the war against authoritarian rule

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4187139-the-world-is-running-out-of-inflection-points-in-the-war-against-authoritarian-rule/?utm

BY JOSEPH BOSCO, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 09/05/23 10:00 AM ET

A security guard stands near a sculpture of the Chinese Communist Party flag at the Museum of the Communist Party of China on May 26, 2022, in Beijing. China’s military flew 38 fighter jets and other warplanes near Taiwan, the Taiwanese defense ministry said Friday, April 28, 2023, in the largest such flight display since the large military exercise in which it simulated sealing off the island earlier in the month. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, File)

During his term in office, President Biden has declared almost a dozen times that the United States and the West are “at an inflection point” in facing the existential challenge from the world’s authoritarian powers. He is right; his administration is currently coping with confrontational relationships with Russia and China, as well as the perpetual tensions with Iran and North Korea.

If an inflection point is defined as a trending major event in international relations that has the potential to affect the thinking and actions of malign international actors and influence the direction of world affairs in significant ways, there has been a series of such historic points involving China and/or Russia over the last three decades. Each has set the stage for a successor decisive point. As it happens, Biden personally and/or veteran members of his present administration participated in all but one of those decisive turns of the wheel.

Inflection Point 1: China. In 1995-1996, in what became known as the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis, the most dangerous U.S.-China confrontation over Taiwan to that point, China conducted live-fire exercises near Taiwan and fired missiles toward the island, closing the Strait to international sea and air commercial traffic. The Clinton administration sent two aircraft carriers toward the Taiwan Strait, but when Beijing threatened a “sea of fire” if they entered the Strait, the ships turned away.

Kurt Campbell, then a Defense Department official and now Biden’s China hand, has described the episode as “my own personal sort of Cuban missile crisis.” When Chinese officials asked his boss, Assistant Secretary Joseph Nye, how America would respond if China attacked Taiwan, he replied, “We don’t know […] it would depend on the circumstances.” Only one U.S. carrier battle group has transited the strait in the 27 years since.

Inflection Point 2: Russia. After the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Soviet Empire, which Vladimir Putin later called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” Washington, London and Moscow prevailed upon Ukraine to surrender its nuclear weapons. In the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, the three powers reciprocated by guaranteeing Ukraine’s permanent sovereignty and territorial integrity.

In 2008, the George W. Bush administration pressured NATO to declare that Ukraine and Georgia eventually “will become members of NATO.” Months later, Putin’s Russia invaded Georgia. Neither Washington nor NATO took any significant action to reverse the occupation which persists today.

Inflection Point 3: Russia. In 2012, President Obama promised Putin he could “be more flexible” after his reelection. In 2014, Putin invaded Eastern Ukraine and Crimea. Despite their earlier assurances, Washington, London and NATO did nothing. Putin also dispatched Russian forces to Syria to prop up Bashar Assad in the face of Obama’s red lines about Assad using chemical weapons against his people.

Inflection Point 4: Afghanistan. In their presidential campaigns, both Donald Trump and Biden railed against America’s “forever wars” and promised to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan. In the Doha Agreement of February 2020, the Trump administration reached an agreement with the Taliban, whom Trump had originally intended to invite for negotiations at Camp David.

The U.S pledged to withdraw all its forces from Afghanistan by May 2022, “subject to the Taliban’s fulfillment of its commitments” — no support for terrorist organizations, no attacks on U.S. forces, good-faith talks with the Afghan government on the country’s future. The Taliban violated virtually all their commitments for the duration of Trump’s term and 18 months of Biden’s, but he proceeded with his disastrous pull-out anyway. It was an exponential vindication of former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s scathing judgment that Biden “has been wrong on nearly every foreign policy issue for the last four decades.”

Inflection Point 5: China. After Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s controversial visit to Taiwan in August 2021, Beijing unleashed the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis, eclipsing the 1995-1996 episode in firepower, missile launches and number of ships and planes deployed, imposing a temporary blockade of Taiwan, This time, the chastened Democratic administration, laden with Clinton and Obama veterans, did not bother even to mount a lame effort at defense or deterrence.

Inflection Point 6: Russia and China. In February 2022, Putin visited Xi Jinping for the opening of the Beijing Olympics, where they issued a 5,000-word manifesto that effectively declared a new Cold War against the rules-based international order led by the United States and its allies and partners.

Three weeks later, Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine he had been telegraphing for months, brazenly defying the Biden administration’s threats to impose punishing sanctions, which the China-Russia partnership was well-prepared to undermine. China has progressively increased its purchases of Russian oil and expanded its sanctions-busting measures to keep Russia’s economy afloat, fund the war and provide dual-use systems, weapons parts and other “non-lethal” support that ends up killing Ukrainians.

Biden and NATO take justifiable pride in the quantity of “unprecedented” military aid they have provided Ukraine, which is eons ahead of what they did after Putin’s first invasion of Ukraine — that is, nothing — but far less than what Ukraine needs to eject the Russian invaders from its land. Meanwhile, Russia continues to wreak death, suffering and destruction as it seeks to obliterate Ukrainian civilization and identity in a national genocide.

Along the way, lesser, more localized tests of wills have occurred. In 2012, China seized Scarborough Shoals from the Philippines in violation of a U.S.-negotiated mutual withdrawal agreement. In 2015, Xi promised Obama China would not militarize the artificial islands it had illegally built in the South China Sea. In 2016, a United Nations arbitral tribunal rejected all of China’s expansive territorial claims, but no international enforcement followed.

The cumulative effect of these successive inflection points has been to strengthen the position of the West’s enemies and weaken the capacities and will of many in the West, though the final outcome of Russia’s war in Ukraine hangs in the balance. If U.S. will to defend Taiwan remains as opaque as it is under the policy of strategic ambiguity, and as dilatory as it has been in helping Ukraine, China will continue to press its advantage until strategic miscalculation brings the world to perhaps the final inflection point.

Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He served in the Pentagon when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia and was involved in Department of Defense discussions about the U.S. response. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA

20. The Russians Are Getting Better

Excerpts:

Russia’s learning is not Kyiv’s only obstacle. The slow pace of Ukraine’s counteroffensive also partly reflects the inherent difficulties of conducting large-scale joint offensive military operations against an entrenched enemy, as well as the delays in getting the right weapons and materiel to the forces on the ground. But the adjustments Russia’s military has made are clearly hindering Ukrainian progress, as well.

These challenges and adjustments do not mean that Ukraine’s counteroffensive is failing, and they certainly do not mean that Russia is poised to win. Instead, they mean that Ukraine will need patience from its partners as it tries to wear down its enemy. The West will need to recalibrate its expectations to match reality, which is that this is a war of attrition. In the near term, NATO states must continue transferring weapons and other capabilities to Ukraine. They will need to give Kyiv political and military support for the long term, as well. More than anything, what Ukraine needs right now is time.

The Russians Are Getting Better

What Moscow Has Learned in Ukraine

By Margarita Konaev and Owen J. Daniels

September 6, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Margarita Konaev and Owen J. Daniels · September 6, 2023

Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive has moved more slowly than many of its allies and supporters had hoped. The Ukrainian military has proved remarkably adept at rapidly incorporating new capabilities and technologies into its operations, fighting bravely and for the most part effectively against an enemy with superior numbers, little regard for its own losses, and no regard for the laws of war. Even so, progress has been gradual, and every piece of liberated territory has come at an immense cost. Only after three months of grueling combat has Ukraine started to make more significant progress, penetrating some of Russia’s entrenched defensive lines in the country’s southeast and reclaiming territory in the provinces of Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk.

Some analysts have attributed the counteroffensive’s slow pace to the challenges of successfully executing joint military maneuvers or coordinating artillery, infantry, and airpower. Others have questioned whether the training the United States and NATO have provided—focused on conducting fast offensive operations rather than wearing the Russian military down through attrition—was well suited to the type of enemy and war the Ukrainians are fighting. Still others have argued that Kyiv’s Western allies have been too slow to provide weapons and equipment, which delayed the Ukrainian counteroffensive and allowed Russia to fortify its positions and mine large swaths of contested territory. Finally, the Ukrainian military is not a NATO-style force, and the armed forces’ legacy and doctrine remains, in part, beholden to the Soviet military when it comes to the way it organizes, mobilizes, and sustain itself. Although this is not necessarily a weakness, it does require that Ukraine’s Western allies reconsider what types of weapons, equipment, and training would enable Ukraine to fight the way it fights best.

Still, the challenges facing the Ukrainian military stem from more than its own actions and decisions and those of its Western allies and partners. They also reflect Russia’s changing behavior. For the first six to nine months of the conflict, the Kremlin seemed not to learn from its mistakes. But in the time since, the Russian armed forces have been improving their battlefield tactics—albeit slowly and at great cost in lives and resources. They have learned how to target Ukrainian units and weapons with more efficacy and how to better protect their own command systems. As a result, Russia has been better able to leverage its numerical and firepower advantages, turning what many had hoped would be a swift offensive push into a sluggish, brutal, and tough fight.

PAIN AND GAIN

A year and a half into the war, Russia’s military is bruised and weary. Its leadership, headed by Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and General Valery Gerasimov, either seem to be missing in action or busy keeping bad news about the war from reaching Russian President Vladimir Putin. At least half, perhaps even two-thirds, of the combat-ready tanks Russia had reserved for the war are gone, forcing the Kremlin to dip into its Soviet-era reserves.

Much of Russia’s other military equipment—including armored vehicles, artillery systems, and electronic warfare systems—has been captured, damaged, or destroyed; some systems are so decrepit that they barely function. Many of the most expensive and sophisticated weapons that remain in Russia’s arsenal, including hypersonic and high-precision missiles, are being used to target civilian infrastructure, depleting precious stocks that will be hard to replenish amid sanctions. Russia’s troops, meanwhile, are poorly trained, low on morale, and sometimes forced to fight. Some are fresh out of prison, and some are on drugs. And after the late Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed rebellion in July, many analysts have speculated that the Russian military will face mass military desertions, mutinies, and even a catastrophic collapse.

But as battered and inefficient as it is, Russia’s military is still capable of learning and adapting. This process has been slow, painful, expensive, and cumbersome—but it is happening, and it is showing results. Consider, for instance, how Russia has revitalized its electronic warfare capabilities. For more than a decade, Moscow had been modernizing these systems, which it used to great effect in Syria and in its initial, 2014 invasion of eastern Ukraine. Yet after Russia deployed them against Ukraine’s ground-based air defense systems in the first two days of its February 2022 invasion, these systems and capabilities essentially went missing in action. It is not clear exactly why Russia failed to capitalize on this seeming advantage, but experts pointed to Moscow’s broader failure to plan for the invasion, the Russian military’s poor coordination, and the fact that it would severely disrupt its own communications by using electronic jammers.

Russia’s military is bruised and weary.

But when the war shifted to the Donbas late in the spring of 2022, Russia began ramping up its use of electronic warfare systems. It deployed about ten electronic warfare complexes—collections of systems used to jam an enemy’s communications, disrupt its navigation systems, and knock out its radars—for every 12.4 miles of the frontline. Over time, that ratio has fallen—with approximately one major system now covering approximately every six kilometers of the front, with additional electronic warfare assets deployed as needed to reinforce its units.

These systems still have problems, including relatively limited coverage and an inability to avoid affecting one another. But on the whole, they have proved tremendously valuable, helping Russia degrade Ukraine’s communications, navigation, and intelligence-gathering capabilities; take down Ukrainian aircraft and drones; and cause Ukrainian precision-guided munitions to miss their targets. Russia has also used them to block Ukrainian drones from transmitting targeting information, to augment Russian air defense networks and capabilities, and to intercept and decrypt Ukrainian military communications. And thus far, Ukraine has had only limited success countering these enhanced Russian capabilities.

Just as it resurrected its electronic warfare assets, the Russian military has reconstituted its command-and-control infrastructure and processes, which were devastated by U.S.-supplied High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems and other Ukrainian long-range precision missiles over the summer of 2022. In the process, Russia has made a number of relatively rudimentary but successful overall changes, including pulling its command headquarters out of range of Ukrainian surface-to-air missiles, placing its forward command posts farther below ground and behind heavily defended positions, and fortifying these posts with concrete. Russia has also found ways to ensure that communications between command posts and military units are more efficient and secure, including by laying out field cables and using safer radio communications. But communications at the battalion level and downward are still often unencrypted, and given their limited training, Russian soldiers frequently communicate sensitive information through unsecure channels.

TRIAL BY FIRE

From the start of the war through last summer, the Russian military was organized into so-called battalion tactical groups—essentially, formations of artillery, tanks, and infantry that were grouped to improve readiness and cohesion. In Ukraine, this force structure proved disastrous. Most of the battalion tactical groups were undermanned, especially the infantry units critical to fighting in urban terrain, where some of the war’s early crucial battles took place. They were also generally not well prepared, staffed, or equipped for a prolonged ground offensive or for holding territory.

But in the second half of 2022, as the conflict devolved into a war of attrition, mounting casualties compelled the country’s military leaders to change their approach. They revised their infantry tactics and consolidated their artillery into specialized brigades, consolidating their firepower, and using drones to more effectively coordinate and target their artillery strikes. These adjustments positioned the Russian military to exploit its two primary advantages over Ukraine: personnel and firepower.

The shift in infantry tactics was enabled in part by the arrival of conscripts from inside Russia, from inside the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, and from prisoners drafted by the Wagner paramilitary company. These troops were not well trained or organized, and they have mainly been used as cannon fodder in consecutive waves of assaults on Ukrainian positions. But however brutal and cynical, this approach enabled Russia to better defend its fortified positions and withstand the Ukrainian counteroffensive even as it suffered thousands of casualties. It also forced defending Ukrainian troops to reveal their positions and exhaust their ammunition and personnel. And it allows more specialized Russian units, such as airborne and naval infantry forces, to fight from well-defended positions with improved equipment and weapons. As a result, these better trained and equipped troops have been able to rotate in and out of action, and they have been spared major losses in recent months after bearing heavier costs in the war’s early stages.

Ukraine will need patience from its partners.

Alongside manpower, the ability to saturate targets with heavy artillery fire, whether to strike defensive positions or to blunt offensive maneuvers, has traditionally been one of the Russian military’s greatest strengths. That firepower advantage, however, was largely lost early in the war, when the Russian military was deployed in battalion tactical groups. The country’s artillery strikes were poorly directed, the military was slow to respond, and it was too dispersed and not prepared to maneuver across the multiple throngs of attack. As the war shifted to the Donbas, the static nature of fighting compelled the Russian military leadership to consolidate artillery into brigades. This move helped improve coordination and concentrate firepower in a way that is better aligned Russia’s traditional doctrine.

But the Russian army was still burning through ammunition faster than Russian factories could produce it. These shortages were compounded by successful Ukrainian strikes on Russian ammunition stockpiles across the Donbas in the second part of 2022. Facing ammunition constraints, and still reeling from the loss of many artillery pieces and experienced crews, the Russians have been forced to become more efficient in their use of ammunition, to improve the mobility of weapons to avoid destruction, and to find ways to target Ukrainian troops more effectively.

One adoption has been tightening the link between its reconnaissance systems and the soldiers carrying out attacks, allowing the Russian military to hit Ukrainian troops, command centers, and equipment and ammunition hubs faster and more accurately. Russia is also increasingly using relatively cheap Lancet loitering munitions or explosive drones to thwart Ukrainian advances by destroying expensive military equipment, such as air defense systems. These strikes sometimes deliver propaganda value for Russia, yielding videos that show the destruction of valuable Ukrainian assets that can be broadcast on television or on social media.

OLD DOG, NEW TRICKS

Despite the notable changes and improvements over the past year, there are still many areas in which Russia’s military continues to perform poorly or is failing altogether. The Russian armed forces still cannot horizontally integrate their command and control, nor can they communicate commanders’ decisions and share information across different units in real time. As a result, Russian units deployed in proximity cannot effectively communicate with one another if they belong to different formations. Often, they cannot support one another because they have separate chains of command.

This is not a technical glitch or a bureaucratic barrier. Rather, it is a deep structural problem that is unlikely to be solved without a systemic overhaul of Russia’s military and perhaps even its political system. Military command and control culture boils down to trust, and the militaries of authoritarian regimes such as Russia’s frequently have rigid and fragmented command-and-control structures because the political leadership does not trust the military leadership, and the military brass does not trust the rank and file. Such systems fail to successfully share information, discourage initiative, and prevent battlefield lessons from informing strategy or being incorporated into future military doctrine.

These structural deficiencies are part of the Russian military’s DNA. They help explain why some of the hardest lessons Russia learned in other conflicts—in Chechnya, for instance, about the difficulties of urban warfare, and in Syria about the benefits of flexible and responsive command and control—are being learned anew in Ukraine after staggering losses in personnel and equipment. The Russian military is learning and adapting in its own way, but it remains to be seen whether it is capable of real transformational change.

Russia’s learning is not Kyiv’s only obstacle. The slow pace of Ukraine’s counteroffensive also partly reflects the inherent difficulties of conducting large-scale joint offensive military operations against an entrenched enemy, as well as the delays in getting the right weapons and materiel to the forces on the ground. But the adjustments Russia’s military has made are clearly hindering Ukrainian progress, as well.

These challenges and adjustments do not mean that Ukraine’s counteroffensive is failing, and they certainly do not mean that Russia is poised to win. Instead, they mean that Ukraine will need patience from its partners as it tries to wear down its enemy. The West will need to recalibrate its expectations to match reality, which is that this is a war of attrition. In the near term, NATO states must continue transferring weapons and other capabilities to Ukraine. They will need to give Kyiv political and military support for the long term, as well. More than anything, what Ukraine needs right now is time.

• MARGARITA KONAEV is Deputy Director of Analysis at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
• OWEN J. DANIELS is the Andrew W. Marshall Fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

Foreign Affairs · by Margarita Konaev and Owen J. Daniels · September 6, 2023

21. The Last Minarets of Yunnan

Excerpts:

At a time when China is trying to project itself onto the international stage as a “civilization-state,” its cultural campaigns may hurt its reputation and weaken its influence in the Muslim world. And they may rebound on China locally; Xi’s Sinicization project threatens a cultural decoupling between Chinese and Muslim populations in predominantly Muslim neighboring countries in South Asia and Southeast Asia.

But beyond ramifications for China abroad, the campaign risks impoverishing the richness of Chinese society at home. Xi’s program of forceful Sinicization represents the abandonment of the notion of duo yuan yi ti (pluralistic unity) in the Han-dominated state’s approach to relations with ethnic minorities. Instead, that pluralism is becoming intensely subordinate to the imperative of unity, with the party-state enshrining the Han civilizational heritage. Such Han cultural hegemony will only flatten the complexity of China and diminish the country—and stoke bitterness, dissent, and resistance among those whose culture the state seeks to erase.

The Last Minarets of Yunnan

China’s Hui Muslims in the Cross Hairs of Xi’s New Nationalism

By Haiyun Ma and I-wei Jennifer Chang

September 6, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Haiyun Ma and I-wei Jennifer Chang · September 6, 2023

In late May, thousands of Hui Muslims clashed with local police in the town of Nagu in China’s southwestern Yunnan Province. They were protesting the government’s plan to demolish the dome and minarets of the Najiaying mosque, a structure originally built in the fourteenth century. The mosques of Najiaying and nearby Shadian have stood as relics of the Chinese state’s past tolerance of Islam and Muslims in Yunnan. They are the last two mosques in the province to still boast traditionally Arab features, namely domes and minarets. Recent years have seen the government-backed transformation of several mosques in Yunnan, with their roofs remade to resemble Buddhist pagodas and Confucian temples. These renovations go well beyond architectural style and reveal the uncompromising nationalist tenor of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s rule.

Xi’s hugely repressive clampdown on another Muslim minority, the Uyghurs, has attracted tremendous international attention. But his somewhat more subtle campaigns of Sinicization targeting other minorities have flown largely under the radar. Hui Muslims number around 11 million people and live mostly in the western and central provinces of China. The community has been in China for a long time, tracing its origins to the migration of Muslims out of Central Asia and the Middle East starting in the eighth century. Unlike the Uyghurs, who speak a Turkic language, Hui Muslims speak Mandarin Chinese and its local dialects. But their practice of Islam, with its almost inescapable connections to non-Han cultures, increasingly places them on the wrong side of Xi’s vision of national identity.

The ethnoreligious tolerance that was once possible under the Chinese Communist Party no longer exists under Xi. Beijing is determined to remove the last vestiges of supposedly foreign religious architecture, including prominent so-called Arab-style features. Such evidence of cosmopolitan or foreign attachments clashes with the ideological notion of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” that Xi has constructed in recent years, one that elevates the Han Chinese heritage of the country over all other traditions and histories. The protests in May managed only to temporarily delay the demolition of the dome and minarets. Unfortunately for the Hui and many other minority groups, little seems to stand in the way of Xi and his bid to bulldoze a new China into being.

ISLAM’S CHINESE HOME

Muslims have been in China for over a thousand years. The earliest known diplomatic contact between Arab Muslims and a Chinese state occurred in 651 when ambassadors of the first Muslim caliphate arrived in the court of the Tang emperor. A century later, the eastward expansion of the Abbasid empire and the westward expansion of the Tang collided in 751 in the battle of Talas in what is now Kazakhstan. The Chinese forces suffered a major defeat that enabled the spread of Islam in Central Asia. But through commerce and gradual migration, not military conquest, Muslim communities began to emerge in what is now China. Middle Easterners and newly converted Central Asians made up the majority of the early Muslim settlers who arrived in China’s major cities and coastal entrepôts. They are considered to be the ancestors of the Hui.

Under the Mongol Yuan dynasty, which ruled China between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Muslim populations grew in many parts of the country. Ties to other Mongol-controlled Muslim regions, including the Chagatai khanate in Central Asia and the Ilkhanate in what is now Iran, brought more Muslims into China. Droves of Central Asian Muslims of various professions traveled to China to aid Mongol rule.

Muslims have been in China for over a thousand years.

But the expulsion of the Mongols in the mid-fourteenth century left Muslim communities to face rising xenophobia during the rule of the nativist Ming dynasty. In fact, the Ming dynasty was the first Chinese regime to attempt, as a matter of official policy, to Sinicize Muslim ethnicities. In the dynasty’s early years, Muslims of various origins and languages had to adopt the Chinese language and culture and were forced to marry non-Muslims. Some Muslim scholars and officials, who either went through the Confucian civil service examinations or mastered the Chinese classics, began to study Islam through a Confucian lens to better conform to the strictures of the state. A cultural and religious movement during the late Ming period and the early Qing period produced a rich collection of Chinese Islamic texts—known as han kitab (Chinese books)—that illustrated Islam’s compatibility with the state’s Confucian ideology.

The communist takeover of China in 1949 posed another challenge to the country’s Muslims. The Marxist historical materialism espoused by the Chinese Communist Party and its atheist “critique of heaven” targeted all forms of religiosity and spirituality. The Red Guards’ attacks on Chinese Muslims reached a height during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. Authorities imprisoned many imams and converted many mosques into barns, warehouses, and even pigsties. In 1975, Hui Muslims in Yunnan protested a mosque closure in the town of Shadian. In response, the Chinese army swept into the town and some surrounding villages. By many estimates, the soldiers slaughtered more than 1,600 Hui Muslim men, women, and children.

The state’s posture toward Hui Muslims would soften under the reformist leader Deng Xiaoping, who rose to power in 1978. Deng pursued a more conciliatory approach to Islam by insisting that socialism could accommodate religion and by permitting the restoration of destroyed mosques and the construction of new ones. Such tolerance continued in the following decades during the tenures of subsequent rulers, including Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. The Hui did not have to feel out of place in their own country.

THE NATIVIST TURN

Under Xi, however, things have changed markedly. By contrast to his predecessors, Xi’s avowed ideological understanding of socialism leans heavily on traditional Han Chinese history and culture. Where Mao Zedong, the founder and first ruler of the People’s Republic of China, sought to ground his vision of Chinese socialism in the realities of the country in the early twentieth century, Xi looks further back to the 5,000-year history of zhonghua minzu (the Chinese people), a term invented and made popular by early-twentieth-century Han nationalists.

Xi insists that he is merely following in Mao’s footsteps, offering a “second combination” of Marxist doctrine and Chinese circumstances. But he actually departs considerably from Mao in his emphasis; Mao did not tie Marxism to traditional Han Chinese culture and history, probably owing to the inherent incompatibility between socialism, which seeks the eradication of social classes, and Confucianism, which believes in the preservation of social hierarchies.

Nevertheless, at the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in October 2022, Xi reaffirmed that “to uphold and develop Marxism, we must integrate it with China’s fine traditional culture. Only by taking root in the rich historical and cultural soil of the country and the nation can the truth of Marxism flourish here.” In his view, only traditional Han Chinese civilization could supply the so-called Chinese characteristics of contemporary Marxism. Four months later, the communiqué of the sixth plenary session of the 19th Central Committee of the CCP requested the adaptation of basic Marxist tenets to China’s “fine traditional culture.”

In pursuit of this new model of Chinese identity, Xi has actively promoted the study of Han Chinese history. In 2019, the state set up a school at the University of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing to focus on Chinese history and culture. Three years later, Xi approved the construction of China’s National Archives of Publications and Culture, an act that seeks to echo the Qing empire’s establishment of libraries and collections of texts in the late eighteenth century. This invocation of pre-modern history is part of his broader ideological effort to Sinicize Marxism. Such a nationalist emphasis on the supposedly unique civilization and culture of the country places Xi in the company of many populist leaders today, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Hungary, and former U.S. President Donald Trump.

UNITY, NOT DIVERSITY

Xi’s desire to Sinicize socialism and to yoke China’s modern identity to an ancient Han identity effectively marginalizes ethnoreligious minorities such as Hui Muslims, whose history and culture connect them to the Middle East, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia. From the vantage point of Beijing, foreign and non-Han architectural styles are unwelcome; they do not fit into Xi’s model of contemporary socialism with Han Chinese cultural characteristics. And in the name of that model, the state seeks to sweep away evidence of the foreign in Yunnan and elsewhere.

Few forces seem capable of arresting this cultural purge. The protests against the planned demolitions in Yunnan highlight one of the last bastions of Muslim resistance against religious repression. But it seems unlikely that locals will be able to block the state’s push for Sinicization; after a delay, authorities are removing the dome and minarets of the Najiaying mosque. In addition to deploying a large detachment of security and police forces to the town during the protests in late May, the latest local government order, issued in June, stated that the Sinicization of the Najiaying mosque would take six months to complete. Government officials have been visiting local Hui families to compel their signatures on so-called consent forms that sanction the “reforming” of the mosque.

Xi’s Sinicization campaign will flatten the complexity of Chinese society.

Xi’s program will not end at converting architectural styles. The state will likely convince certified imams of (or indoctrinate them into believing in) the necessity of the Sinicization of Islam, ensuring that these politically reliable imams interpret the religion in ways that reinforce socialist and Han Chinese cultural values. Authorities will curb the religious and cultural practices that many Hui Muslims follow, such as maintaining the habitual practice of the faith, wearing robes, and learning Arabic. This move will likely lead to the further development of indigenous Islam in China, reviving the han kitab tradition of a Chinese version of Islam. By doing so, the Sinicization campaign strives to separate Chinese Islam from the wider Muslim world.

That may constitute a blow to China’s soft power. The forceful Sinicization campaign runs counter to Xi’s March proposal for a “global civilization initiative.” According to Xi, tolerance, coexistence, exchanges, and mutual learning among different civilizations play an irreplaceable role in allowing humanity to advance and flourish. But such warmth for other civilizations is increasingly absent within China’s borders. When visible in Chinese towns and communities, reminders of the Middle Eastern origins of Islam are undesirable.

At a time when China is trying to project itself onto the international stage as a “civilization-state,” its cultural campaigns may hurt its reputation and weaken its influence in the Muslim world. And they may rebound on China locally; Xi’s Sinicization project threatens a cultural decoupling between Chinese and Muslim populations in predominantly Muslim neighboring countries in South Asia and Southeast Asia.

But beyond ramifications for China abroad, the campaign risks impoverishing the richness of Chinese society at home. Xi’s program of forceful Sinicization represents the abandonment of the notion of duo yuan yi ti (pluralistic unity) in the Han-dominated state’s approach to relations with ethnic minorities. Instead, that pluralism is becoming intensely subordinate to the imperative of unity, with the party-state enshrining the Han civilizational heritage. Such Han cultural hegemony will only flatten the complexity of China and diminish the country—and stoke bitterness, dissent, and resistance among those whose culture the state seeks to erase.

• HAIYUN MA is Associate Professor of History at Frostburg State University.
• I-WEI JENNIFER CHANG is China Research Analyst at Exovera.

Foreign Affairs · by Haiyun Ma and I-wei Jennifer Chang · September 6, 2023

22.

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