Quotes of the Day:

"Control. It's all about control. Every dictatorship has one obsession and that's it. So in ancient Rome they gave the people bread and circuses. They kept the populace busy with entertainment. Other dictatorships use other strategies to control ideas and knowledge. How do they do that? Lower education level, limit culture, censor information. They censor any means of individual expression. And it's important to remember this: that this is a pattern that repeats itself throughout history."

– Anthony, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, from the film "Enemy" (2013)

“People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.”

– G.B. Shaw

"It's a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research and study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other."

– Aldous Huxley

Note: I will be traveling overseas this week through Thursday so my messages will come at varied times.

1. The Pentagon wants to use special operators in new ways to train Taiwan and others for a different kind of fight

2. ‘I Cannot Understand Putin’s Hold on Trump’ By H.R. McMaster

3. 'Workhorse of the Air' C-130 Marks 70 Years Since First Flight

4. The Kursk Campaign & Strategic Adaptation by Mick Ryan

5. Perspective: Irregular Warfare in Strategic Competition and Gray Zones, Prosecuting Authoritarian Subversion and Exploitative Use of Corruption and Criminality to Weaken Democracy

6. Putting ‘Asia First’ Could Cost America the World

7. Not Only for Killing: Drones Are Now Detecting Land Mines in Ukraine

8. Gen. McMaster’s blistering account of the Trump White House

9. The Explosion in France: A Wake-Up Call to the Threat of Iran’s Disinformation War

10. China Copies US "Manned-Unmanned" Teaming With Different Twist

11. Everything We Just Learned About The Ghost Shark Uncrewed Submarine

12.  Sabotage Confirmed At Norwegian Air Base

13. Fuel Supplies To Russian Troops, Crimea Strangled By Destruction Of Ship

14. Captain Geary Letter to The SOFX Audience | Brad Geary

15. Reliant on Starlink, Army eager for more SATCOM constellation options

16. Japan scrambles jets after China aircraft 'violates' airspace: Ministry

17. Yahya Sinwar ‘dressed as a woman’ hiding among Gaza's populace

18. Opinion Ukraine’s Kursk offensive isn’t just a raid. It’s upending assumptions. by Max Boot

19. How to Boil a Frog: The Dangers of Downsizing in the U.S. Military

20. The New Bioweapons

21. Biden’s lame-duck period gives him a chance to reshape American security

22. When it comes to military AI, there is no second place by Adm. Gary Roughead

23. America Must Present an Alternative to China’s First BRI Project

24. Russia May Risk the Use of Nerve Agents in Its War With Ukraine

1. The Pentagon wants to use special operators in new ways to train Taiwan and others for a different kind of fight

New ways? Perhaps only to new people.

What is old is new again.

Has the GWOT and its authorities so hamstrung us that we "can only train partners on counterterrorism, counter-narcotics, and border security missions?"  What has Special Forces Detachment Korea been doing in Korea since 1957? What was the Special Forces Taiwan Resident Detachment doing in Taiwan until 1973 (when the 1st Special Forces Group was inactivated)?

Sigh....

Is there a campaign plan? Perhaps if we had a campaign plan to conduct these activities that identified the authorities (and granted the permissions necessary to conduct the activities below) reporters would not need to be writing these articles.

This is not rocket science. In fact, it is basic blocking and tackling for Special Forces operations (or at least it used to be from World War II to the end of the Cold War. My assessment up to 1995 is here: "Special Forces Missions: A Return to the Roots for a VIsion of the Future," https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA299300.pdf)

Here were my lessons in 1995:

Lessons for the Future

The most important lesson is the obvious one. The US military must maintain a permanent special operations force in order to remain prepared for conducting wartime operations. It is too late to create special operations units after the war begins.

A second lesson, which stems from the first, is that the UW potential of the country(s) involved in the conflict cannot be overlooked. Although Clausewitz would say that chance is a significant element of war, a force cannot wait for the UW opportunity to be recognized by sheer luck. Whether a resistance potential exists or not, it should be assessed and plans for exploiting it (if it does exist) should be made during contingency or war planning. SF cannot wait to be employed after the conflict begins. It should be deployed to the area to conduct assessments and assist in the preparation of the campaign plan.

Command and control for special operations cannot be ad hoc. It certainly cannot be effective if it is under staff supervision instead of in the chain of command. Without command emphasis SOF will likely be ineffectively employed.21 The Korean example should always be a reminder as to why the US has a separate SOF component.

When there is no well trained UW organization the resistance organization will not become the force multiplier it should. It is difficult to employ resistance forces in a conventional manner, and unless well-trained and supplied, it is generally counterproductive. While the partisans in Korea enjoyed some success, as it became more conventionally employed the less effective were its results.22

Excerpts from the article below.:

Army Green Berets are ideally suited for such missions. They receive language and cultural training geared to make them warrior-diplomats. They can act alone or in small teams, helping to train and lead large partner forces into combat.

Allowing Green Berets and Marine Raiders, two types of American forces that specialize in training foreign partners, to work with their Taiwanese counterparts in resistance operations could increase Taiwan's chances of defending against a Chinese invasion.

If it decides to forcibly unify with the small but defiant island nation, Beijing will likely strike hard and fast. It will probably want to avoid getting entangled in a long fight like Russia has in Ukraine or giving time to the US and others in the West to react. The Chinese military will use everything at its disposal, including special operations forces and intelligence operatives. But a Taiwanese military trained in resistance operations will be harder to defeat.

"I understand the existing limitations. Resistance and FID skillsets can be used by malicious actors to overthrow legitimate governments and cause all sorts of instability in a region. But, if used as intended, they are a great way to fight a large force," the Green Beret told BI.

The Pentagon wants to use special operators in new ways to train Taiwan and others for a different kind of fight

Business Insider · by Stavros Atlamazoglou

Military & Defense

Stavros Atlamazoglou

2024-08-25T12:25:01Z

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US Army Green Berets prepare to breach and enter a building as part of Close Quarter Battle training. US Army/Staff Sgt. Thomas Mort

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• The Pentagon wants more leeway from Congress to support US-aligned nations like Taiwan.
• Current limitations mean special operators can only train partners on counterterrorism, counter-narcotics, and border security missions.
• Expanded authorities would enhance Taiwan's defense against potential Chinese invasion threats.

The Pentagon has been seeking more leeway from Congress so that it can better use its special operators to support friendly, US-aligned nations, including preparing Taiwan for Chinese aggression.

Today, special operators are limited in the kind of training and equipment that they can provide to partner forces. If a program isn't fighting terrorism or narcotics or doesn't ensure border security, there's not much American commandos can offer. But under the new proposal, US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) would be able to train and equip foreign partners for resistance and extended foreign internal defense (FID) missions focused on combatting potential future threats.

A Pentagon proposal to Congress in April mentioned Taiwan and the Baltic nations in particular, highlighting the need for forces there to be ready to "resist an invasion or occupation by an adversarial power" and protect the nation and its people from "acts of subversion sponsored by a foreign country that pose a significant threat to the existing government," per reporting from Defense News highlighting the challenges posed by China and Russia.

New Authorities for Special Operators

In America's last war, special operations forces were the go-to option for military commanders and policymakers. The fighting against insurgents and terrorists in the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria was ideal for special operations forces. But in a potential future large-scale conflict against China or Russia, special operators are expected to revert to a role of supporting conventional military forces.

Green Berets in Close-Quarter Battle training. US Army

One of the more valuable capabilities of the US special operations community is its ability to train and equip others to fight. The fight can be against an oppressive government or against a rebel group that threatens a legitimate government.

For example, during the opening days of the global war on terrorism, US Army Green Berets and CIA paramilitary officers paired with Afghan Northern Alliance fighters to oust the Taliban and al-Qaida terrorists in just a few weeks. Similarly, in Central and South America, Green Berets have trained local militaries to fend off Communist insurgents.

In the context of Taiwan, which faces tremendous pressure and threats from neighboring China, an expansion of authorities to train Taiwan's conventional and spec ops units in additional, irregular missions will increase their deterrence capabilities and could even make a difference in a potential conflict.

"One of our core mission sets is FID, or Foreign Internal Defense," an Army Special forces operator serving in a National Guard unit told Business Insider.

"We work with and train partner forces. Expanding our authorities beyond the purview of counterterrorism and counter narcotics will untie our hands and help us better prepare our partners, whether that's in Taiwan or Ukraine," added the Green Beret, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to talk to the media.

A Green Beret in combat marksmanship training. US Army

Army Green Berets are ideally suited for such missions. They receive language and cultural training geared to make them warrior-diplomats. They can act alone or in small teams, helping to train and lead large partner forces into combat.

Allowing Green Berets and Marine Raiders, two types of American forces that specialize in training foreign partners, to work with their Taiwanese counterparts in resistance operations could increase Taiwan's chances of defending against a Chinese invasion.

If it decides to forcibly unify with the small but defiant island nation, Beijing will likely strike hard and fast. It will probably want to avoid getting entangled in a long fight like Russia has in Ukraine or giving time to the US and others in the West to react. The Chinese military will use everything at its disposal, including special operations forces and intelligence operatives. But a Taiwanese military trained in resistance operations will be harder to defeat.

"I understand the existing limitations. Resistance and FID skillsets can be used by malicious actors to overthrow legitimate governments and cause all sorts of instability in a region. But, if used as intended, they are a great way to fight a large force," the Green Beret told BI.

China

Business Insider · by Stavros Atlamazoglou

2. ‘I Cannot Understand Putin’s Hold on Trump’ By H.R. McMaster

From another man who was in the room. So much to unpack and consider here. Certainly the description of the relationship with Putin is problematic.

I hate to say it but by tying everything the Mueller investigation really indicates a lack of strategic thinking and understanding.

‘I Cannot Understand Putin’s Hold on Trump’

In an exclusive excerpt from his new memoir, H.R. McMaster details the clashes over Russia that led President Trump to fire him as national security adviser.

https://www.wsj.com/politics/i-cannot-understand-putins-hold-on-trump-8d045461?st=k8tz9cht1uyt82p&reflink

By H.R. McMaster

Aug. 23, 2024 11:00 am ET

From the beginning of my time as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, in February 2017, I found that discussions of Vladimir Putin and Russia were difficult to have with the president. Trump connected all topics involving Russia to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russia’s attack on the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the allegations (which were found to be false) that the Trump campaign, including the president himself, had “colluded” with Russia’s disinformation campaign to sway the election toward Trump.

Since Trump’s election, Democrats and others opposed to Trump kept looking for evidence of collusion or corruption with Russians or for compromising information—such as that in the discredited Steele dossier, a document filled with false allegations about Trump that was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and presented to the FBI as fact. All this had created opportunities for the Kremlin.

Like his predecessors George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Trump was overconfident in his ability to improve relations with the dictator in the Kremlin. Trump, the self-described “expert dealmaker,” believed he could build a personal rapport with Putin. Trump’s tendency to be reflexively contrarian only added to his determination. The fact that most foreign policy experts in Washington advocated a tough approach to the Kremlin seemed only to drive the president to the opposite approach.

President Donald Trump talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin at an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vietnam, November 2017. Photo: mikhail klimentyev/sputnik/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Putin, a ruthless former KGB operator, played to Trump’s ego and insecurities with flattery. Putin had described Trump as “a very outstanding person, talented, without any doubt,” and Trump had revealed his vulnerability to this approach, his affinity for strongmen and his belief that he alone could forge a good relationship with Putin: “It is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country.”

Moreover, Trump’s tendency toward moral equivalence made him relatively unconcerned about some of Putin’s brazen acts of aggression. When Fox News host Bill O’Reilly asked Trump in February 2017 why he respected Putin even though “he’s a killer,” the newly inaugurated president responded, “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think? Our country’s so innocent?”

So, on Putin and Russia, I had been swimming upstream with the president from the beginning. But our relationship reached a breaking point after I attended the Munich Security Conference in February 2018. In the speech I delivered at the conference—which immediately followed a speech by Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov—I emphasized the need to counter the proliferation and use of the most destructive and heinous weapons on earth, defeat jihadist terrorists and reform international institutions that had been subverted and turned against their purpose.

But what made news was the response I gave to a question from a member of the Russian Duma, the lower house of the Federal Assembly, who suggested cooperation between Moscow and Washington in the area of cybersecurity. After joking that I doubted there would be any Russian cyber experts available because they were all engaged in subverting our democracies, I described evidence cited in the Mueller investigation’s indictments of Russians for election interference in 2016 as “incontrovertible.”

Robert Mueller, the special counsel who probed Russian interference in the 2016 election, departs Capitol Hill in June 2017. Photo: Andrew Harnik/Associated Press

Those eager to undermine me told Trump that I had described the preliminary Mueller Report as “incontrovertible,” and they got exactly the reaction they wanted. Trump tweeted: “General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians and that the only Collusion was between Russia and Crooked H, the DNC and the Dems.” To amplify the message, Russian state-controlled Sputnik News reported that “National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster directly contradicted President Trump, saying that there was Russian meddling in the 2016 election.”

Predictably, John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, called me to tell me the president was furious. I offered to call the president and clarify that we were talking about separate questions. First, did Russia meddle in the election? Second, did the Kremlin favor one candidate over another? And third, did the Russian interference have an effect on the election result? The answer to the first question was yes. As to question two, I believed that the Kremlin did not care who won the 2016 American election, as long as a large number of citizens doubted the legitimacy of the result. And there was no way to determine the answer to the third question.

Kelly discouraged me from calling Trump. “Just wait until you see him.”

A Poisoning and a Friendly Note

It was no surprise that Trump was still angry when I returned from the security conference. And his aversion to me would only grow. I think this was because I was the principal voice telling him that Putin was using him and other politicians in both parties in an effort to shake Americans’ confidence in our democratic principles, institutions and processes. Putin was not and would never be Trump’s friend. I felt it was my duty to point this out.

About two weeks later, on March 4, 2018, former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned in Salisbury, England, with a banned military-grade nerve agent that was easily traced to Moscow. Russian spy agencies—the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and the military Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU)—were the perpetrators. The use of a nerve agent had placed hundreds, maybe thousands, of lives at risk. It was with this particularly heinous method that Putin had apparently decided to assassinate Skripal, a former KGB double agent who had been imprisoned for 13 years in Russia but was then released by Moscow in an exchange in July 2010, the biggest spy swap since the Cold War.

British officers in hazmat gear remove the bench where former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter were found poisoned in Salisbury, England., March 2018. Photo: will oliver/EPA/Shutterstock

Just a few days after the poisoning of Skripal and his daughter, a story appeared in the New York Post with the headline “Putin Heaps Praise on Trump, Pans U.S. Politics.” When I walked into the Oval Office that evening, on another matter, the president had a copy of the article and was writing a note to the Russian leader across the page with a fat black Sharpie. He asked me to get the clipping to Putin. I took it with me. When I got home that night, I confided to my wife Katie, “After over a year in this job, I cannot understand Putin’s hold on Trump.”

News was breaking about the poisoning in England, and I was certain that Putin would use Trump’s annotated clipping to embarrass him and provide cover for the attack. The next morning, I stuck to procedures and gave the clipping to the White House Office of the Staff Secretary, which manages any paper coming into and out of the Oval Office. I asked them to take their time clearing it and to come back to me before sending it to Putin via his embassy in Washington. Later, as evidence mounted that the Kremlin and, very likely, Putin himself had ordered the nerve agent attack on Skripal, I told them not to send it.

I told Trump, “Mr. President, do you remember the article and note you told me to send to Putin? I didn’t send it. Putin would almost certainly have used the note to embarrass you, alleviate pressure over the Skripal incident and reinforce the narrative that you are somehow in the Kremlin’s pocket.”

Trump was angry. “You should have done what I told you to do, General.”

“Mr. President, you can be angry at me, but you have to know that I was acting in your interest.”

The Other 10% of the Time

Trump’s anger passed, but each of these confrontations eroded our relationship further. Another was just around the corner. Soon after this incident, Trump wanted to call Putin to congratulate him on being elected to a fourth term as president of Russia. I explained that Putin’s victory had been rigged, thanks to the Kremlin’s control over the media, its quelling of the opposition, the disqualification of popular opposition candidates such as Alexei Navalny, and restrictions on election monitors.

A call was arranged anyway. The day before it, I told Trump I knew he was going to congratulate Putin, but that he should know that “the Kremlin will use the call in three ways: to say that America endorsed his rigged election victory, to deflect growing pressure over the Salisbury nerve agent attack and to perpetuate the narrative that you are somehow compromised.” I then asked Trump the following: “As Russia tries to delegitimize our legitimate elections, why would you help him legitimize his illegitimate election?”

President Trump at a briefing with senior military leaders in the White House in October 2017, including H.R. McMaster, second from left. Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press

But at this stage in our relationship, my advice on Putin and Russia had become pro forma. I knew that Trump would congratulate Putin and go soft on Salisbury. Trump took the early morning call from the residence. Because I had briefed him the day before, I listened in from my office. As expected, he congratulated Putin up front. After the call, Trump asked me, as he had before, to invite Putin to the White House. Wearily, I told him, “Mr. President, I will invite him if you really want me to—but I think we should deal with the Skripal poisoning and the situation in Syria first.”

It soon became apparent that a member of the White House or NSC staff had leaked the preparation materials for the call. In all-capital letters at the top of the first briefing card in the stack we prepared routinely for head-of-state calls were the words “DO NOT CONGRATULATE.” Even though Trump probably never saw the packet, the leak was a perfect opportunity to portray me and the NSC staff as untrustworthy.

Sean Hannity called President Trump to claim that he knew it was one of the staff in my front office who had leaked the prep materials, but that person never had access to them. The White House chief of staff’s office seemed to reinforce the message that the NSC staff was untrustworthy, with many stories highlighting how incensed Kelly was about the leak.

On March 22, 2018, at 4:30 p.m., I received a phone call from the White House. “Good afternoon, Mr. President,” I said after I heard him pick up. “Hello, General,” he said. “I am calling to let you know that I have decided to go with John.” He meant that he was replacing me as national security adviser with Ambassador John Bolton.

Trump thanked me for my service. “You did a great job, General. I agreed with you 90% of the time; the other 10% of the time, not so much.”

I told him I had appreciated the opportunity to serve as his national security adviser. “Hopefully, you saw that I never tried to get you to agree with me. I tried to give you the best analysis and multiple options.”

I knew when I took the job 13 months earlier that this day would come. I had resolved to do the best I could as long as I was effective, and not to fight to keep the job or try to parlay it into a promotion or another position in the administration. I felt disappointed that I would no longer be in a position to help Trump implement long-overdue shifts in foreign policy. But I saw no point in remaining as national security adviser any longer than I was effective for the president and the nation. With Donald Trump, most everybody gets used up, and my time had come.

H.R. McMaster is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general who served as U.S. national security adviser in 2017-18. This essay is adapted from his new book, “At War With Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House,” published Aug. 27 by Harper (which like The Wall Street Journal is a division of News Corp). Copyright ©2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the August 24, 2024, print edition as '‘I Cannot Understand Putin’s Hold on Trump’ President Trump’s Soft Spot For Putin'.

3. 'Workhorse of the Air' C-130 Marks 70 Years Since First Flight

Certainly one of the greatest aircraft in history. Its versatility is simply amazing. It is hard to believe it is 70 years old.

Between the B-52 and the C-130 we can say with certainty that they do not make them like they used to.

'Workhorse of the Air' C-130 Marks 70 Years Since First Flight

airandspaceforces.com · by David Roza · August 23, 2024

Aug. 23, 2024 | By David Roza

An era began 70 years ago on Aug. 23 when Lockheed test pilots Stan Beltz and Roy Wimmer, along with flight engineers Jack Real and Dick Stanton, took the new YC-130 prototype on its maiden voyage from Burbank, Calif., to Edwards Air Force Base about 50 miles east. They took off after just 855 feet of runway, “an astoundingly short distance considering most aircraft of that size required 5,000 feet,” Lockheed Martin later wrote.

It was a sign of things to come: in the seven decades since that flight, the C-130 Hercules has delivered troops, equipment, and live-saving supplies to short, unpaved airstrips in the deserts of the Middle East, the jungles of southeast Asia, the snowy wastes of Antarctica and Greenland, and everywhere in between.

But the Herc’s ability to land and take off in a short distance is just one of the many strengths that makes it one of the longest continually produced aircraft in history, with more than 2,500 airframes operated by 70 countries around the world.

“The vision that Lockheed Corporation had in providing a versatile, durable, capable aircraft has resulted in the greatest airlift workhorse known to the air forces around the world—especially the U.S. air forces,” Dr. Douglas Kennedy, assistant professor of history at the U.S. Air Force Academy and a former Air Force C-130 pilot himself, told Air & Space Forces Magazine.

“The Four Fans of Freedom remains the steadfast tool for all contingencies,” he added.

Archived photo of the YC-130 during its ferry flight from Burbank, California, to Edwards Air Force Base August 23, 1954. (U.S. Air Force photo)While the first flight took place in 1954, the C-130’s story began in 1951, when the Air Force requested a medium cargo airplane that could fill the void in between small and large transports, which had trouble landing on the short runways where troops were fighting during the Korean War.

“It was designed to be used in a tactical situation where there weren’t any nice, clean places to take care of it,” Lockheed engineer Willis Hawkins told the Smithsonian’s Air & Space Magazine in 2004.

The Air Force got what it asked for: a strong durable airframe, a giant tail that stabilizes the aircraft at slow speeds, propellers mounted high to keep the engines clear of dust and dirt, a narrow undercarriage flanked by sturdy tires to operate on and off roads, a tall, fully pressurized cargo compartment set low to the ground to allow for a wide range of cargo, and a built-in auxiliary power unit that lets the aircraft start up “when the nearest ground power cart is 150 miles away,” HistoryNet wrote in 2017.

All this, and the C-130 was surprisingly maneuverable: there was even a four-ship C-130 aerial demonstration team called the Four Horsemen in the late 1950s.

The Hercules proved its worth in the Vietnam War, where it delivered hundreds of paratroopers during Operation Junction City in 1967; landed or air-dropped off much of the supplies for the besieged Marines at Khe Sanh in 1968; and picked up new roles as aerial refueling tankers for rescue helicopters, land-anywhere taxis for special operations troops, and side-firing gunships for close air support.

An HH-3 “Jolly Green Giant” refuels from an HC-130P tanker. The ability to refuel helicopters in flight greatly enhanced search and rescue operations in Southeast Asia by giving helicopters greater range. (U.S. Air Force photo)The Hercules truly lived up to its namesake during the fall of Saigon where, on April 29, 1975, a single C-130 flown by South Vietnamese Air Force pilot carried 452 refugees to Thailand, 32 of them in the cockpit alone.

“The aircraft was overloaded by at least 10,000 pounds and required every foot of runway to become airborne, including hitting the brakes while taxiing in order to close the rear ramp doors,” the U.S. Air Force wrote about the flight.

Do Anything, Anywhere

The C-130’s flexibility is one of its defining features. From 1960 to 1986, Air Force C-130 crews snagged capsules filled with spy satellite film as they dangled from parachutes over the Pacific Ocean. During Desert Shield and Desert Storm, EC-130 Command Solos broadcast radio programs meant to convince Iraqi troops to surrender, while Compass Call variants could disrupt enemy communications, jam radar, and help suppress enemy air defenses. In 1963, a C-130 became the largest, heaviest airplane to ever land and take off from an aircraft carrier.

It seems the Herc can’t stop taking on new jobs: in 2021, a C-130 acted as a drone carrier by snatching an unmanned aircraft out of the air. A year later, an MC-130J Commando II performed the first live-fire of a pallet-dropped cruise missile.

But the C-130’s peacetime portfolio is even more expansive. The Herc has dropped hay to stranded cattle in Colorado. Every summer, Air Force C-130 crews perform some of the most dangerous flying outside of combat when they drop fire retardant to stop wildfires across the western U.S. Meanwhile, the Ohio-based 910th Airlift Wing is equipped with large-area aerial spray units that kill the mosquitoes and filth flies that hatch in the standing flood water left over by large hurricanes.

Since 1965, C-130s have also served as the aircraft of choice for the “Hurricane Hunters” of the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, who fly into storms and atmospheric rivers to collect data for scientists and emergency officials back home.

A U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) worker waits for a flight on a C-130J Hercules assigned to the 75th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron, Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, in Maputo, Mozambique, March 29, 2019. (U.S. Air Force Photo by Tech. Sgt. Chris Hibben)Outside of those technical roles, the Herc has saved thousands of lives just by dropping off food and medical supplies nearly anywhere on Earth, including southern Sudan during the Darfur Conflict, where the aircraft played a pivotal role with the United Nations World Food Program.

“We fly 10 hours a day, first light to last light,” Jaco Klopper, former chief of air operations for the WFP in southern Sudan, told the Smithsonian in 2004. “We refuel the airplane as it’s being reloaded. Turnaround time is about 15 to 20 minutes. If it wasn’t for the C-130s, a large number of people would have died.”

Always Improving

Part of what allows the C-130 to keep taking on new roles is that the aircraft itself is constantly changing. The analog, smooth-nosed YC-130 took off with just three blades on its propellers and engines that were more like blow-dryers compared to those of today’s C-130Js, which also feature six-bladed propellors and a glass cockpit.

“Internally, little remains of the airplane’s 1950s heritage,” the Smithsonian wrote. “But two things never changed: Riding in the cargo hold of a C-130 is still a class below steerage, and, from the first A model to today’s spanking new J, from the first hour of flight to the 20 millionth, the airplane has been fun to fly.”

Kennedy shared that opinion of the aircraft.

“I was always proud to maneuver the beautiful beast around the Americas, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, landing in the Moroccan desert, a former-World War II open field in southern England, and the limestone short runways in southern Colombia, or dropping the most lethal forces known in mankind,” he said. “Cheers to seven decades of service to the workhorse of the air.”

Kennedy’s fellow Herc driver, Gen. Mike Minihan, the outgoing head of Air Mobility Command, called it “the greatest airplane ever built.” Still, Minihan told Air & Space Forces Magazine, it would be nothing without the people who fly, fix, and support it.

“It is blue-collar work. There is nothing majestic or outwardly appealing to it until you’ve been a part of that family,” he explained, holding back tears. “Then it is the most majestic and appealing thing in the world. That airplane has an ability to bring the best out of America and Americans.”

The general said he was heartbroken that his days flying the C-130 are over, but he was ecstatic for an airplane “that’s been made brand new for 70 years and will continue to be made in the foreseeable future.

“I’m happy that we not only get to celebrate that airframe, but more importantly, I’m happy that we get to celebrate the people that fly, fix and support it.”

A C-130 Hercules with the 36th Airlift Squadron takes off at Yokota Air Base, Japan, during a routine sortie Oct. 2, 2015. ((U.S. Air Force photo by Osakabe Yasuo)Air

History

airandspaceforces.com · by David Roza · August 23, 2024

4. The Kursk Campaign & Strategic Adaptation by Mick Ryan

A lot to study, consider, and discuss.

Excerpts:

With this as a prelude, what might be the strategic observations that could be drawn from the Ukrainian Kursk campaign, and the Russian response, over the past three weeks? I believe there are six – but there could be more:

1.    Existential threats drive a different risk calculus.

2.    Narratives of ‘inevitable victory’ are not the same as making it happen.

3.    Humility and respect for the threat posed by the enemy are foundational.

4.    If you don’t build up expectations, it is easier to impress and delight supporters.

5.    Deception is a noble art we need to be better at.

6.    Surprise matters and is an enduring part of war.

...

Conclusion: It’s Never Too Early to Learn

Some of these observations and judgements might be made irrelevant depending on the ultimate outcome of the Ukrainian Kursk campaign. External observers only ever see a very small part of military campaigns. Even less is seen of decision-making at the highest levels of a national wartime government.

But, as I wrote at the start of this article, learning and adaptation can never stop during a war. Developing strategic advantage, because of its transitory nature, must be a constant undertaking. As such, we cannot afford to wait for perfect data upon which we might make judgements about the strategic lessons of Ukraine’s campaign into Kursk. Now is the time to make such observations, even if they evolve and change over the course of the Kursk campaign.

The knowledge such early observations provide might be useful now. In the army we are taught about making decisions with inferior situational awareness. Strategic decision-making is not that different. Therefore, I trust these initial strategic observations that result from Ukraine’s ongoing Kursk campaign are of some use.

The Kursk Campaign & Strategic Adaptation

https://mickryan.substack.com/p/the-kursk-campaign-and-strategic?utm

A special initial assessment on how Ukraine learned the strategic lessons of the failed 2023 counteroffensive and adapted for the 2024 Kursk Campaign

Mick Ryan

Aug 25, 2024

∙ Paid

Source: @DefenceU at Twitter / X

Throughout the brutal war spawned by Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, adaptation has been one of the critical national and battlefield functions of both the Ukrainians and the Russians. This is a process that has pulses and pauses, and which can be distributed unevenly throughout combat units and the bureaucratic institutions of state.

Nonetheless, the capacity to learn and adapt is crucial to generating advantage in wartime. Given the pace of contemporary military operations, when advantage is generated, it can be quite transitory or rapidly overtaken by enemy counter adaption. Therefore, learning and adaptation must be an ongoing endeavour at multiple levels, from squads on the frontline to civilian and military national security planners working for national leaders. One of the most important levels of learning in war is that which takes place at the strategic level.

Strategic adaptation is the process of learning and adaptation that takes place at the strategic or nation level. It occurs in both peace and war, although war does tend to provide better incentives for thinking about better ways of applying all national means to achieve wartime objectives. At heart, strategic adaptation is about engaging in a battle of learning and adaptation with an adversary, applying lessons better or more quickly than they do, and ensuring this knowledge is used to shape the trajectory of war, and ultimately, winning it.

Such adaptation doesn’t just appear from nowhere, nor is it most effective if it is just allowed to occur. National and military transformation activities before a war, and a nation’s inherent innovation culture, provide the foundation for wartime adaptation. As I write in my new book, The War for Ukraine:

One of the most important institutional responsibilities of senior leaders in military and national security institutions is providing the incentives for innovation during peacetime. This allows appropriate organizational constructs and cutting-edge technology to be combined to provide an advantage against adversaries in war. But it does require a cultural predisposition to learning and sharing lessons widely, accepting failure as an opportunity to learn, and a well-honed understanding of risk.

Strategic adaptation is a deliberate activity that must be led and nurtured by political and military leaders. This doesn’t mean it is simple. In Military Adaptation in War, Williamson Murray describes how “adaptation at the strategic level may represent the easiest to recognise but the most difficult to accomplish.”

The recent Ukrainian decision to launch a major campaign into the Russian oblast of Kursk provides many initial insights. These suggest that Ukraine continues to learn and adapt at the strategic level in this war. There are also many apparent tactical adaptations, based on learning from the failed 2023 counteroffensive. These will be explored in a subsequent article.

In this piece, I will concern myself with observations that might either provide evidence for Ukrainian strategic adaptation in the lead up to the Kursk campaign. It goes without saying that these initial strategic observations might also be useful for military and other national security officials in Western nations.

Strategic Observations: Is It Time to Yet?

One might debate the best time to begin making observations about wartime activities. This is a useful debate to have because during the conduct of military campaigns, it is often difficult to see the full picture of what is occurring from either side. Key decisions and information is deliberately shielded by belligerents, and misinformation is often used to obscure capabilities and intentions.

Additionally, it can be difficult to ascertain whether observations, if they are made, are relevant just for the context of the event being observed or if they might have a broader applicability in other parts of the world.

Notwithstanding these issues, it is never too early to learn from military and national security activities. Early observations almost always contain small nuggets of information that can be applied quickly to improve the learning and adaptation processes of organisations engaged in hostiles.

With this as a prelude, what might be the strategic observations that could be drawn from the Ukrainian Kursk campaign, and the Russian response, over the past three weeks? I believe there are six – but there could be more:

1.    Existential threats drive a different risk calculus.

2.    Narratives of ‘inevitable victory’ are not the same as making it happen.

3.    Humility and respect for the threat posed by the enemy are foundational.

4.    If you don’t build up expectations, it is easier to impress and delight supporters.

5.    Deception is a noble art we need to be better at.

6.    Surprise matters and is an enduring part of war.

Source: @ZelenskyyUA at Twitter / X

Strategic Observations from Kursk

Strategic Observation 1: Existential threats drive a different risk calculus. There has been much analysis about the level of risk that Ukraine is assuming in its defensive campaign in the Donbas to execute its offensive operations in Kursk. This is a reasonable assessment; however, most Western observers lack the full context for Ukrainian thinking about risk calculus. This is because few Western nations have faced existential risks in the post Cold War era and we retain little understanding of how decision-making when facing existential risks is different.

Because of the Cold War, Western nations have enjoyed a relatively peaceful three decades in the post Cold War era. This is wonderful for the prosperity of many nations and the welfare of their people. But it has resulted in national security decision-making drifting into more bureaucratic, risk adverse and lowest common denominator approaches. Because of this, the mindset in most Western countries is different to that of the planners and decision-makers in Ukraine.

The Ukrainian campaign into Kursk is certainly a high-risk endeavour. It consumes resources that might be used elsewhere, particularly in the Donbas. But, with Western strategy drifting aimlessly in its ‘defend Ukraine as long as it takes’ setting, and Russia retaining its strategy to extinguish Ukrainian culture and sovereignty, Ukraine needed to smash the status quo lest it be ensnared in a forever war that consumed its people and territory. Kursk is their attempt to change the status quo. It is risky but also audacious. Too many Western polities either eschew or don’t appreciate such audacity anymore.

This has affected decision-making related to fears of escalation. Ukraine has shown again, through a modicum of strategic risk taking, that Russia’s many, many red lines in this conflict are nearly always a mirage. As Zelensky recently noted, “we are witnessing a significant ideological shift – the naive, illusory concept of so-called red lines regarding Russia, which dominated the assessment of the war by some partners, has crumbled apart these days.”

The West’s support for Ukraine has smashed through multiple Russian red lines in the past 30 months. And while the use of nuclear weapons can never be taken off the table, it is hard to fathom how western leaders have been scared into timid and slow decision-making about artillery, tanks and air defence missiles because of the ‘nuclear risk’ during the war.

But the Ukrainians weren’t bluffed. They know the Russians better than the bureaucrats in Brussels or Washington DC. As Kursk has shown, if you want to bluff an adversary into not ‘escalating’ a conflict, be prepared if the adversary calls your bluff. The Russians, assuming they still had everyone bluffed, have been found out when someone does call their bluff. There is an opportunity now for the U.S. and NATO to exploit this situation with greater support for Ukraine, and not create more imaginary Russian red lines.

Strategic Observation 2: Narratives of ‘inevitable victory’ are the same as making it happen. Since the beginning of the war, Russia has worked hard to assure Western nations that supporting Ukraine and intervening in the war is useless because a Russian victory is inevitable. The story from the Russians goes roughly as follows: “Ukraine isn’t really a country. Why waste western resources on a renegade part of Russia, which the Russian military will inevitable and irrevocably defeat.”

This narrative has worked in some parts of the world. Countries such as South Africa, Iran, India, North Korea, China, and others have either been active supporters of Russia’s war against Ukraine, or they have been quite happy to sit on the fence, benefit from cheap energy and ignore the brutality perpetrated by Russia against Ukraine’s people.

The narrative has even worked in some elements of Western nations. In April, U.S. Congressman Turner, chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, stated that “it was absolutely true that some Republican members of Congress were repeating Russian propaganda about the invasion of Ukraine instigated by Russian President Vladimir Putin.” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene accused Ukraine of having “a Nazi army,” which is the same language used by Putin in his many speeches justifying the large-scale invasion of Ukraine.

But for Russia, getting cut through on its strategic messaging and achieving this ‘inevitable victory’ are two very different things. At the 30-month mark of its 10-day Ukraine campaign begun in 2022, the inevitable victory appears as far away as ever. Victory can’t just be talked up, it needs to be seized in reality as well.

Strategic Observation 3: Humility and respect for the threat posed by the enemy are foundational. The history of warfare is littered with examples of one side being exposed, surprised or defeated because they exercised insufficient humility. Because they underestimated their adversary’s capacity to understand them, attack them or defeat them.

Such is the case with the Russians in Kursk. They have become fixated on their operations in the Donbas. At the same time, the Russians assumed that any future cross border incursions by Ukraine would remain at the same small scale as previous ones. As such, their preparations for Ukrainian conventional operations across the border into Russia were severely lacking.

As far back as Sun Tzu, good advice for military commanders has been to “know your enemy”. The Russians clearly ignored this particular advice in the lead up to the Ukrainian Kursk campaign. Even after 30 months of war, Russia still underestimates the Ukrainians and lacks the institutional imagination to believe the Ukrainians might surprise and hurt them. It will be interesting to see if this changes in the wake of Ukraine’s Kursk campaign.

Source: @DefenceHQ at Twitter / X.

Strategic Observation 4: If you don’t build up expectations, it is easier to impress and delight supporters. As an army combat engineer, I was always taught that in supporting the infantry and armour units, always ‘under promise and over deliver’. Ukraine appears to have assumed this posture with its Kursk campaign.

One of the challenges with the 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive was that everyone in Ukraine, Europe, America and Russia knew it was coming. Everyone (including me) had an opinion about the forthcoming offensives. Ukraine had shown in Kharkiv and Kherson in late 2022 that it was capable of executing successful offensives to liberate its territory occupied by Russia. In 2023, large amounts of western weaponry were pouring into Ukraine to support the formation of new brigades to conduct the counter offensive.

Because of this, expectations for the 2023 counteroffensive were sky high among Ukrainian citizens, as well as western politicians and the media. In some respects, it would have been difficult for Ukraine to fully realise these expectations even if the counteroffensive had been successful.

For the Kursk offensive, Ukraine avoided this expectation build up. By keeping the existence of the offensive a secret, there were no expectations to manage. In achieving their massive surprise in Kursk and quickly securing over 1200 square kilometres of Russian territory (admittedly a very small percentage of Russian territory overall), they effectively ‘under promised and over delivered’. They have surprised and delighted us with the Kursk offensive. Now, the hard work of turning battlefield success into strategic and political success begins.

Strategic Observation 5: Deception is a noble art we need to be better at. The Ukrainians clearly had an intricate and cleverly devised deception plan. This was developed and implemented in the months leading up to the moment when Ukrainian soldiers crossed the border and began their break into the Russian defensive lines in Kursk.

While I have written in detail previously on this topic, it is worth highlighting the strategic elements of the Ukrainian deception plan. They deceived the Russians and their supporters about the very potential for any large-scale offensive operations in 2024. This was a crucial element of the wider deception plan. It will have diverted the Russians from looking for preparations for an offensive, as they did throughout the first half of 2023.

Perhaps more importantly, the Ukrainians were able to deceive their Western supporters about the potential for an offensive in 2024. There has been some commentary on this, with some whining about a lack of Ukrainian warning of the offensive. But given how the 2023 offensive turned out, and my observation above about expectation management, I think we can give the Ukrainians a break for conducting such a deception campaign. At the end of the day, it was a major contributor to the surprise of early August and has probably saved a lot of Ukrainian lives. That matters a lot.

Ultimately, the Ukrainians proved (again) that deception is an integral part of planning, not just at the tactical level, but at the strategic level as well. They also showed that sometimes, success requires a little bit of deception against your partners. This can be uncomfortable, but we probably need to get used to it. If it provides a superior foundation for strategic and operational success, it is more likely to be used by other nations we are partnered with in the future.

Strategic Observation 6: Surprise matters and is an enduring part of war. I have written about surprise in war on many occasions. Most recently, I explored how Ukraine achieved the surprise it did in Kursk in this article on 10 August. I also published this shorter article with The Lowy Institute in the past week. I don’t intend to repeat the content of those articles here.

However, it bears reinforcing that surprise is still an essential part of war and is still achievable. Despite the coverage of a ‘transparent battlefield’ during this war, the reality is a little different. No sensor can see into the minds or hearts of commanders and soldiers on the ground.

As such, surprise still matters and still possible on the modern battlefield – and beyond. It just takes guile, orchestration and good planning, as well as a healthy dose of luck. 

Conclusion: It’s Never Too Early to Learn

Some of these observations and judgements might be made irrelevant depending on the ultimate outcome of the Ukrainian Kursk campaign. External observers only ever see a very small part of military campaigns. Even less is seen of decision-making at the highest levels of a national wartime government.

But, as I wrote at the start of this article, learning and adaptation can never stop during a war. Developing strategic advantage, because of its transitory nature, must be a constant undertaking. As such, we cannot afford to wait for perfect data upon which we might make judgements about the strategic lessons of Ukraine’s campaign into Kursk. Now is the time to make such observations, even if they evolve and change over the course of the Kursk campaign.

The knowledge such early observations provide might be useful now. In the army we are taught about making decisions with inferior situational awareness. Strategic decision-making is not that different. Therefore, I trust these initial strategic observations that result from Ukraine’s ongoing Kursk campaign are of some use.

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5. Perspective: Irregular Warfare in Strategic Competition and Gray Zones, Prosecuting Authoritarian Subversion and Exploitative Use of Corruption and Criminality to Weaken Democracy

Excerpts:

Conclusion

Today the international law enforcement and security communities are under even more pressure, often out-resourced, outmanned, and sometimes, out-gunned. At this point in time, security forces have become largely reactionary instead of proactively working to mitigate the risks and threats posed by organized crime and illicit threat networks.  

Currently, the military, intelligence, international law enforcement and security communities are under enormous pressure to find solutions: 

• Often their efforts are over siloed, and out-resourced.
• Integrating military, economic and criminal analysis, targeting and effects removes 80 percent of the problem,
• But more importantly, cuts off the fuel that the networks use to grow and sustain their efforts.
• This allows political and social reforms to then combat the malign influence and restabilize our partner nations’ governance and civil societies. 

Without more anticipatory and innovative IW frameworks to counter strategic corruption and criminality, we may not meet these challenging threats. 

• To win, we must effectively counter our adversaries and competitors with more innovative resource-sustained IW and anti-crime tools and capabilities including realizing and fully capitalizing new Marshall Fund Initiatives (e.g., G7’s 2022 $600 billion proposal) to Counter Authoritarian-Financed Strategic Corruption and Criminality. We must outfox and react faster to the deviant machinations of adversaries operating in the gray zones. We need a new baseline understanding that integrates global transnational criminal structures into our collection, analysis, targeting and operations to cut the support and logistics of our adversaries and competitors. It’s no longer one or another agency's problem, it’s everyone’s problem and we need a solution before we are on the run. 

Unless we up our game and get ahead with the required political will, resources, and energies needed to push these security boulders up the hill, the battle against many of today’s cross-border threat convergence harms will remain a Sisyphean task. We must keep the flames of democracy burning in the face of rising authoritarianism and strategic corruption.

The. Following ICAIE White Paper (figure 1) provides a viable policy option for these concerns.

Sat, 08/24/2024 - 11:41pm

Perspective: Irregular Warfare in Strategic Competition and Gray Zones, Prosecuting Authoritarian Subversion and Exploitative Use of Corruption and Criminality to Weaken Democracy

https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/perspective-irregular-warfare-strategic-competition-and-gray-zones-prosecuting

David M. Luna

This commentary summarizes the author’s presentation to the United States Department of Defense (DoD) Strategic Multi-Layer Assessment (SMA) Speaker Series at the Pentagon, Washington, DC on 22 August 2024.The author is Executive Director of the International Coalition Against Illicit Economies (ICAIE).

The geo-political challenge of irregular warfare (IW) in gray zones is increasingly more complex. These challenges are related to how our military adversaries such as China, Iran, and Russia are manipulating chaos, instability, and insecurity including, for example through co-option and coercive economics, and by:

• Weaponizing corruption including election interference through illicit financial flows to support pro-authoritarian candidates that advance malign influence operations by exploiting governance gaps to secure friendly policies and win new anti-West friends, while harming US national interests;
• Leveraging criminal networks, state-sponsored armed and violent proxies, diasporic communities, and professional super-fixers (enablers) to achieve military objectives, including to spread democratic backsliding, and to destabilize the national security interests of the United States and those of our democratic allies; and
• Advancing revisionist and revanchist policies to construct their vision for a multi-polar world, exploiting gray zones from small islands in the Asia Pacific region to fragile democracies in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Europe.  

I assert, that we remain unprepared for irregular warfare. China, Iran, and Russia continue to seek to undercut US influence, degrade American relationships with key allies and partners, and exploit the global environment to their advantage including by leveraging, and exploiting—as instruments of competition—strategic corruption, illicit vectors, criminal activities, economic coercion, malign influence operations, terrorism, guerrilla warfare, insurgency, sabotage and subversion through asymmetrical and clandestine efforts.

It is vital that we astutely manage escalation dynamics in global competition scenarios to dictate the costs related to hostile actions by effectively prosecuting the strategic use of corruption and predatory criminality by our adversaries across gray zones to win the peace and to ensure that democracy reigns over authoritarianism.

Critically, the rule of law and the international rules-based system must outlive targeted chaos, subversion, and malign influence operations in some of today’s contested security landscapes and ongoing great power competition (GPC).

We must view such current and horizonal threats through a prism of threat convergence so that we may develop actionable responses to counter illegality corroding the rule of law, and inter-connected illicit threat networks more robustly, and integrate such law enforcement disciplines into DOD’s irregular warfare planning and strategies. 

Through this framework, I firmly believe that we can better help DoD, IC, and inter-agency communities; our Combatant Commanders, and warfighters to understand the threat intelligence overlays of global ecosystems of criminality and corruption, and to equip them with a sharper set of:

• Pragmatic resource-sustainable IW tools and anti-crime capabilities,
• Greater data analytics and data mapping; and
• Leveraged innovation and technological capacities including AI and quantum computing.

These tools will help them to not only develop more dynamic national security military strategies, but to get ahead of the game in planning for future irregular warfare campaigns, using smarter IW capabilities to expand the competitive space to our advantage, and counter illicit operations against poly-threat networks to defeat American adversaries’ own competitive strategies. 

To meet the GPC challenge, it is vital that we seize the initiative while being cleared-eye and see the “shadowverse”—where everything is connected—as a hybrid battlefield that is being primed and executed by our enemies to destabilize American and Allied power from within, our markets and prosperity, the rule of law, and democracy itself.

After sharing a snapshot and insights of some of the emerging hot spots and gray zones of concern around the globe, I hope to illuminate my principal policy thrust of threat convergence in a criminalized multi-polar world being created by China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and other malevolent state and non-state actors: I will pivot to discuss possible tools, capabilities, and capacities that can be brought to the fight, including to foster unified action with allies and partners including a proposal for establishing Special Action Task Forces to counter malign influence and strategic corruption and criminality; and more importantly, ways to develop IW strategies to secure the peace in the current geopolitical environment.

Crime and Corruption as IW Instruments to Weaken Democracies in Gray Zones

A few months back I delivered a keynote address to a meeting hosted by DoD’s Offices for Special Operations/Low-Intensity, Counter Low-Intensity (SO/LIC), and DoD Counternarcotics and Counter Transnational Organized Crime (CTOC) Program which focused more on the specific illicit threat networks. That address was summarized in “Perspective: Getting Ahead of the Game in a new Multi-Polar World across Today's Spectrum of Threats, Converging Ecosystems of Criminality, and Hybrid (Irregular) Warfare” (SWJ−El Centro, 14 May 2024).

This commentary sharpens that earlier threat assessment and focus more on policy actions that need to be integrated into irregular warfare strategies.

Last month, the Office of the Director for National Intelligence (ODNI) released a brief report, “Conflict in the Gray Zone: A Prevailing Geopolitical Dynamic Through 2030,” highlighting how:

• Through 2030, great power competition and international relations generally will increasingly feature an array of hostile “gray zone” activities as China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia seek to challenge the United States and gain advantage over other countries through deliberate campaigns, while also trying to avoid direct war.
• These gray zones are more often than not exploited in places where corruption thrives, and criminals finance chaos, impunity, and insecurity.

In this commentary, I focus on numerous "gray zone" geopolitical attacks in the current fragile global order, in which China, Iran, Russia, and others, are leveraging, and financing:

• Greater strategic corruption and ecosystems of criminality to advance a multi-polar agenda that challenges longstanding rules of the international system with alternative forms of governance;
• Using illicit measures and criminally-oriented proxies to simultaneously promote authoritarianism and weaken democracies, erode institutions, and undermine law and order.

While they may have distinct approaches, they share similar goals by amplifying or reinforcing each other’s active measures intended to prime and soften up political systems, and lead to the collapse and co-option of governments.

China, Russia, and Iran are working to gain control over strategic locations, critical minerals, ports, and infrastructure with an aim of becoming forward operating bases for their military’s expeditionary forces and intelligence agencies (e.g., Islands in the Pacific) and corrode American influence in the country, sub-region, and diplomatic circles.

Global Illicit Environment in a World of Convergence

Let me emphasize that despite many successes of law enforcement, the global ecosystem of criminality and corruption has expanded greatly today compared to even a decade ago, fueled by criminal opportunists and profit driven-illicit entrepreneurial networks and kleptocrats. hese malign actors are working feverishly to exploit a multitude of lucrative illicit economies, which constitutes about 7-15% of the world’s economy—or over $20 trillion a year—going toward criminal networks.

• Equally concerning: global criminality and corruption have also expanded with global trade; and now enable great power competitors and adversaries, such as Russia, China, and Iran, North Korea to underwrite armed conflicts and malign operations against Western democracies and free markets.

Moreover, one of the reasons local conflicts no longer “end” is that they are supported by illicit networks.

• Paramilitary groups supported by criminal opportunists and profit-driven illicit companies exploit conflict and instability to expand criminal economies. In fact, rampant corruption and the violence wrought by organized criminal and terrorist networks help to soften the conditions for insecurity that are exploited by authoritarian states to weaken other fragile governments.

State capture aided by criminality and strategic use of corruption results in democracies sliding into autocracies, and through proxies, helps to start or expand armed conflicts and regional insecurity, and even, to establish disinformation platforms that sow divide within democratic states.

Russia

Russia’s Wagner Group had assisted in a series of coups in Africa, that have brought some juntas to power or enabled further kleptocracies to reign; In exchange, Russian proxies now run gold and diamond mines, high value timber and other natural resources and commodities (e.g., cocoa, coffee, sugar) in those countries, and allow for autocrats to remain in power.

• From the Central African Republic (CAR) to Mali, Niger and Sudan, Wagner’s successors —African Corps—continue to employ active measures to disrupt Africans’ efforts to move their countries from violent conflict to stability, by moving money and weapons around the continent through an intricate web of shell companies, and through criminal networks specializing in illicit trafficking, illegal trading, and sanctions busting.
• What results is chaos, furthering the corruptive influence of extremist insurgencies in many cases, and regime protection of authoritarian (mostly military-led) rulers that face sanctions and condemnations on their human rights abuses.
• Some of the dirty profits derived by Russian mercenaries in Africa have helped Russia bypass global sanctions to fund its war in Ukraine and supported political upheavals and paramilitary mis-adventures in the Middle East, Balkans, and former Soviet republics.
• In Latin America, Russian proxies are selling some of the more advanced surveillance technologies to state and non-state criminal actors across the hemisphere, greatly enhancing their ability to monitor and attack political enemies, law enforcement, journalists, human rights workers and anyone else they perceive as a threat.
• And as many experts have correctly pointed out, Russia remains a criminalized state led by a ruthless and thuggish “Godfather.” The Russian mafia is an extension of the Putin regime in advancing Russia’s national interests overseas and an instrument of its power, operating in the shadows as illicit facilitators and super fixers to other criminal networks and authoritarian governments around the world.
• Russian cyber criminals not only penetrate businesses to steal trade secrets and funds, but to also launch cyberattacks against enemies of the Kremlin, and further extort, exert control, and expropriate wealth through extortion, corporate raid forces, or financial fraud schemes. The Silo-viki may also be asked to engage in kidnappings and assassinations on behalf of their masters in Moscow.

Finally, one last point on Russia: While annexation of Crimea and the recent invasion of Ukraine has significantly affected regional illicit economies,

Russian criminal networks continue to aid Russian intelligence and special forces in smuggling needed weapons and technologies (e.g., missiles, artillery shells, and microchips). This undermines Western sanctions and export bans for highly-sought consumer goods, and helps to launder assets for oligarchs in places like Dubai, London, New York, and other Western capitals.

China

Now let me focus for a few minutes on a bigger threat, China. FBI Director Christopher Wray has underscored in recent years that China remains the “biggest threat” to our national security and homeland.

• This is not only because of its global power ambitions, and active involvement in transnational crimes, but also its political interference operations, as Secretary of State Antony Blinken underscored a few months ago. China’s involvement in expanding illicit economies around the globe has had a triple whammy effect. It; increases tremendous illicit wealth for its ruling CCP elite; hurts U.S. national security, American competitiveness, and innovation; and it enhances China’s global ambitions to become the predominant superpower by 2049 in a multi-polar world, a goal that President Xi Jinping has openly stated.

In fact, ICAIE has in recent years reported on how CCP Inc. has leveraged corruption, illicit markets, and predatory trade and lending practices to become the world’s largest player in almost every major sector of transnational crime including: counterfeits, trafficking in weapons, humans, wildlife, illegally-harvested timber, fish, and natural resources, theft of IP and trade secrets, illicit tobacco, organ harvesting, and other crimes.

Several trillion US dollars in illicit proceeds every year are generated from predicate offenses for money laundering that touch China’s jurisdiction and markets, and are often used to finance China’s authoritarian regime.  

China may very well be the biggest money laundering hub in the world and the CCP Inc. one of most profitable transnational illicit trade syndicates.

• On so many fronts, China poses a serious geopolitical and CTOC threat, given its proclivity to make money on crime and the laundering of dirty monies of drug cartels, kleptocrats, terrorists, sanctioned rogue states and pariahs, and
• Also, through asymmetrical maneuvers, to steal Americans’ personal identifiable information (PII), trade secrets, and intellectual property, as well as finance its foreign malign influence campaigns against the United States.
• China also has helped Russia, Iran, and others evade international sanctions, including on oil exports.

These Chinese threats will require even more attention as numerous illicit industries driven by China (and Chinese triads) continue to expand including across Latin America.

• In Panama, for example, China is leveraging bribery of government officials to win concession rights to control the port of Colón and other critical infrastructure along the Panama Canal.
• Alarmingly, China already owns, controls, or operates important sections of more than 40 major ports across Latin America, in many of which Chinese triads are also quite active.
• As a former SOUTHCOM Commander testified a few years back, China is the No.1 underwriter for the Mexican drug cartels, other criminal networks, and an array of despotic regimes. The Chinese government has been complicit in enabling the tens of billions of dollars in dirty money to be laundered through China.
• Whether it is fentanyl, counterfeits, or money laundering for drug dealers and terrorists, if it harms the United States and the West, China will continue to use all of its national instruments to weaken us, while achieving Xi’s 2049 strategic goals.
• In Venezuela, China has firmly supported the corrupt Maduro regime (even its sham elections and human rights abuses), not only because of its access and investments in the oil sector, but because it is a “strategic partner” to counter American influence in Latin America, as well as being an ally in its pocket at the United Nations, backing its territorial claims to Taiwan and South China Sea, and positioning China’s military options in the event of war in the Pacific.
• If we look at Canada in recent years, it has become a crime convergence zone and forward operational hub for the world’s most notorious crime groups and threat networks including the likes of Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán and the Sinaloa cartel, Chinese drug kingpin Tse Chi Lop, Hezbollah Financier Altaf Khanani, and other bad actors, as well as professional enablers and drivers in the sectors of technology and maritime shipping (e.g., Port of Vancouver), and as a platform for financing global insecurity.
• For example, if you examine the so-called CCP police stations in North America, as certain investigative journalists have done in recent months, you have a nexus of PRC Intelligence Services operators converging with local Chinese triads in cities, often in the Fujian transnational crime networks.
• Such police stations are physically and mentally projecting Beijing’s political power to influence the diaspora community politically. They are connected to underground casinos, human trafficking and money laundering networks, and are connecting with other businesses to clandestinely fund influence and election interference. China uses the triads as well to foment insecurity and illegality in democracies through diasporic communities. In fact, China’s National Intelligence Law of 2017 calls on Chinese individuals, companies, and organizations to act as citizen spies for national security purposes.

Of course, another significant concern is China’s growing network of facilities in Latin America related to its civilian space and satellite programs with defense capabilities. These ground stations have the potential to expand Beijing’s global military surveillance network in the southern hemisphere and in areas close to the United States.

Through economic coercion, China is also buying islands across the Caribbean (e.g., in Antigua and Barbuda), building special economic zones, and likely planning to use these commercial outposts for military purposes. In the US Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) theater, PRC's efforts have destabilized the Solomon Islands, attempted to infiltrate Guam, undermined democracy in the Northern Mariana Islands and other Pacific Rim islands, and are seriously harming US relationships with those communities while isolating Taiwan diplomatically. As democracy weakens and poor governance rises across these Pacific Rim Islands, China pounces and expands its influence through strategic corruption and their multi-polar agenda. Moreover, as China infiltrates government institutions through coercive diplomacy, as reflected in the Security Pact with the Solomon Islands, Chinese law enforcement and military personnel can be called on to assist in "maintaining social order" or "protecting people's lives and property.”

• Since the military took over in Burma/Myanmar, the PLA has worked with the Junta to build fentanyl factories to export precursors to Australia, Canada, New Zealand and anywhere else that they could get access.
• The money helped fund the PRC’s malign influence and truth pollution to corrupt elections by using AI in Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Solomon Islands, Canada, in the U.S. and other countries according to the FBI.
• China has built military bases on several islands in the Spratly Islands, including air force facilities and other military installations to project power and shore up its vast territorial claims over virtually the entire South China Sea. These outpost bases and airfields are located on the three largest artificial islands: Mischief Reef, Subi Reef, and Fiery Cross. China has deployed a variety of weapons on these islands, including anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles, radar, and fighter jets.
• The function of those islands is to expand the offensive capability of the PRC beyond their continental shores, and gain control over disputed territories. In fact, one can argue that China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is intended to finance its economic, trade, and military expansion all around the world through its massive multi-trillion-dollar economic development assistance program. However, as a result of the BRI loans (which some have called ‘debt traps’), ruling kleptocrats in recipient countries have simply lined their pockets and padded their offshore accounts while enabling China to increase its influence and control of critical infrastructure across the developing world including ports, roads, pipelines, electrical power grids, mining, telecommunications, railroads, etc.

The licit trade channels and supply chains that the BRI has constructed have also created illicit pathways exploited by criminals, and the expansion of illicit economies globally. In fact, the BRI global footprint tracks some of the biggest criminalized routes known for corruption, money laundering, and illicit trade. Further threat intelligence and data mapping can show overlays of illicit routes and criminal networks and how China helped to bridge a super highway of illicit economies globally, exporting forced labor practices, and violating human rights of both Chinese and local workers.

And of course, The Chinese triads are always behind these expansionist policies: Through the exploitation and controls of FTZs and ports and through the BRI, Chinese criminal syndicates are also able to expand illicit trade operations and unfair trade and business practices, moving contraband such as fentanyl, precursor chemicals for methamphetamines, counterfeit medicines and other illicit goods, as well as running illegal fishing and timber operations.

Iran

At the same time, Iran continues to threaten U.S. interests as it tries to erode U.S. influence in the Middle East, entrench its influence, and project power in neighboring states and in places such as Latin America.

• Iran’s hybrid approach to warfare—using both conventional and unconventional warfare operations and a network of militant proxies—enables Tehran to use strategic corruption and criminality to maintain strategic depth.
• Iran, through its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), is undertaking subversive active measures through its embassies, terrorist proxies, and criminal networks in Latin America to destabilize democracies and exercise political influence, penetrate illicit exert markets, and increase sway with corrupt ruling elites.
• The Rabbani Network and Iranian Hezbollah Illicit Network are making billions of dollars from illicit trade and financing the information space to shape anti-democracy messages in the region in a manner that advances Iran’s geopolitical goals.  

The Iranian collaboration with the Bolivarian Alliance and Bolivarian Joint Criminal Enterprise (BJCE) gives Iran more freedom of movement; and leverage access in the region as it allies with Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and other countries to export their malign influence, intelligence operations, criminal activities, and threat convergence strategies that are often coordinated with China and Russia. Iran uses friendly Latin American countries as strategic staging grounds to foment chaos and insecurity in the region, and to advance it operational platforms and disinformation campaigns against the United States and its democratic allies.

Iran’s primary military engagement with its Bolivarian allies has been through supporting a military doctrine that eradicates any vestige of UUS. military influence in the region and replaces it with an asymmetrical or hybrid warfare.

• The Iran Hezbollah Threat Network (IHTN) provides the means to wage that warfare for Iran and its global allies, and as a fundraising vehicle to finance terrorist attacks internationally.
• Iran established its beachhead in Latin America through Venezuela. Hugo Chávez, the late authoritarian leader, opened crucial doors for IHTN operatives and surrogates in the hemisphere. Chávez often invoked and used similar political rhetoric as Iran to describe the United States (e.g., “Great Satan”).
• The strategic alliance begun with Chávez and then Iranian prime minister Mahmoud Ahmadinejad blossomed into a strategic military, intelligence, and economic alliance. With Venezuela’s support, Iran was able to expand its clandestine operations and malign influence activities across Latin America.
• Iran has leveraged the IHTN as a strategic proxy to collect intelligence in Latin America against the United States, destabilize its regional interests, and engage in fund-raising across diasporic Shi’ia communities in the TBA in South America, and beyond.
• This includes using adaptive adversaries such as terrorists, insurgents, and criminal networks to engage in asymmetrical warfare, and leveraging “sleeper cells” to infiltrate governments and carry out attacks in the TBA, and beyond. IHTN activities are further aided by professional facilitators, corruption, organized crime, political violence and instigated chaos.

In a nutshell: through a confluence of geo-security interests, China, Russia, and Iran continue to strengthen intelligence and military ties to weaken democratic institutions, expand illicit economies, and bolster autocratic governance around the world. 

Threat Convergence: A Threat Multiplier

In many parts of the world, a perfect storm is brewing. As previously mentioned, as kleptocrats, criminals, terrorists, and other bad actors and threat networks work in certain geographic coordinates and points in time across illicit spaces, they are all increasing corruption and criminality, and thus, making it easier for authoritarian states to exploit further such gray zones to advance their national and joint interests.

• Their motto seems to be “the more the merrier” as they work to propel converging forces to destabilize, divide, and conquer markets, democracies, and strategic lands and territories. 

Often authoritarian regimes strictly control outreach and foreign policy. Integrating criminal proxies brings speed, intelligence, revenue, and chaos.

• For example, the PRC runs fentanyl campaigns that fund bribes to political groups, influence operations, and integrate criminal gangs with paramilitary groups to buy political support, economic advantage, and target dissidents in that nation, all while making a profit. Adversaries and competitors are turning the West's economic, political, legal, and social systems against their own people and governments. 

In summary: State-backed strategic corruption and criminality enable authoritarian-led adversaries to: gain a foothold in political institutions; finance local militant groups, criminals or terror cells to ignite instability and throw a coup; to enrich themselves for personal gain; and to fund greater chaos and insecurity through active geo-strategic corruption such as China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and others, are undertaking in many parts of the world.

Again, such active measures and malign influence work to not only weaken Western democracies, but to fulfill their shared ambition of creating a multipolar world order, untethered to the norms of democratic governance and rule of law.

• A world of threat convergence is a confluence of autocrats, organized crime, and criminalized states expanding and exploiting illicit economies globally by orders of magnitude, in ways democratic governments are struggling to understand, map and confront.   

Authoritarian regimes, like South Sudan, survive by stoking instability and conflict within their nation to stay in power and more easily sell natural resources for personal gain. In the past, these regimes would have destabilized and collapsed; but by partnering with criminal groups and threat actor militia proxies, these regimes are able to more cruelly oppress public opposition and remain in power while the region struggles with the refugees and violence spreading into their nations.  

Special Action Task Forces: Prosecuting Authoritarian Subversion and Strategic Corruption and Criminality 

In today’s great power competition world, we must innovate. Akin to the modus operandi of transnational criminal organizations, China, Russia, and other illicit threat networks have perfected the strategic dark art of acting first and faster than countervailing police and security forces when undertaking subversive activities. 

Our response should be anticipatory and dynamic: Action beats reaction. This entails more robust threat horizon measures including: integrating threat intelligence overlays and multi-dimensional capabilities to counter threat convergence in national strategies so that we can better anticipate changing threat environments, and protect US national security interests from TCOs and illicit threat networks. 

We also need to be sharing threat intelligence in a timely manner to mitigate harms.

Unfortunately, across almost all of today’s illicit industries, we are losing the war against both illicit threat networks and state-sponsored criminality and corruption:

• The problem is exacerbated because governments are not making these threats a top national security priority;
• Efforts to combat these adversaries are thwarted by outdated intelligence analysis;
• The lack of understanding of the scale of these challenges;
• Speed, connivance, and use of sophisticated technologies by criminals and malign state actors, and finally;
• Failure to make the requisite adaptations and investments necessary to effectively counter such transnational threats or incentivizing fragile governments on the brink of being captured by China, Russia, and Iran.  

And as clearly articulated earlier, the NSC needs to build and manage whole-of-government and whole-of-society campaigns that respond to adversary and competitor nations' trade, military and criminal actions:

• A unified whole-of-system response is needed. Additionally, these campaigns need Agencies to update intelligence requirements, analysis expectations, and use targeting that includes all aspects of our adversaries and competitors.
• Essentially a PMESII-PT framework is needed to optimally analyze operational hybrid warfare environments, and dark “shadowverse” of criminality and corruption. [PMESII-PT: stands for Political, Military, Economic, Social, Information, Infrastructure, Physical environment, and Time.] 
• Only targeting military threats without removing the economic backing and political and social malign influence allows the threat to rebuild and expand. 

One key enhancement of our ability to combat these threats would be to create an inter-agency or DoD Irregular Warfare Task Force to Counter Malign Influence and Strategic Transnational Illicit and Corrupt vectors (IWTF: C-MISTIC) by China, Iran, Russia, and other authoritarian states, in fragile states and gray zones.

• China, Iran, and Russia are overwhelming the rule-of-law systems in many jurisdictions where bribery and criminality thrive, including by corrupting, softening up, and subverting key governance, political, law enforcement, and security systems that result in state capture, losing committed democracies and allied partners that work with the United States to counter authoritarianism.
• Building on DOJ’s national rapid response strike forces in the United States that examine numerous corruption and fraud cases, the DoD IWTF: C-MISTIC would be invited to deploy to partner nations’ jurisdictions to investigate and prosecute webs of foreign bribery, strategic corruption, and cross-border criminality, and to provide expertise and capacities to conduct complex cases.
• These special action teams could respond to adversary operations by reinforcing the rule of law in US. territories and partner nations and assisting in investigations and prosecutions, for example in Pacific Rim Islands.
• Such a Task Force could be supplemented with specialized Guard and Reservists, who, as civilians, are experienced criminal investigators, attorneys, prosecutors, and federal judges who support the courts. A Task Force could also provide support to Intelligence and Enforcement. It would help analyze data and map illicit networks and dirty money flows that can be used as evidence to warrant further cross-border sharing of information, investigations and prosecutions of bad actors and disruption of malign influence operations.

Conclusion

Today the international law enforcement and security communities are under even more pressure, often out-resourced, outmanned, and sometimes, out-gunned. At this point in time, security forces have become largely reactionary instead of proactively working to mitigate the risks and threats posed by organized crime and illicit threat networks.  

Currently, the military, intelligence, international law enforcement and security communities are under enormous pressure to find solutions: 

• Often their efforts are over siloed, and out-resourced.
• Integrating military, economic and criminal analysis, targeting and effects removes 80 percent of the problem,
• But more importantly, cuts off the fuel that the networks use to grow and sustain their efforts.
• This allows political and social reforms to then combat the malign influence and restabilize our partner nations’ governance and civil societies. 

Without more anticipatory and innovative IW frameworks to counter strategic corruption and criminality, we may not meet these challenging threats. 

• To win, we must effectively counter our adversaries and competitors with more innovative resource-sustained IW and anti-crime tools and capabilities including realizing and fully capitalizing new Marshall Fund Initiatives (e.g., G7’s 2022 $600 billion proposal) to Counter Authoritarian-Financed Strategic Corruption and Criminality. We must outfox and react faster to the deviant machinations of adversaries operating in the gray zones. We need a new baseline understanding that integrates global transnational criminal structures into our collection, analysis, targeting and operations to cut the support and logistics of our adversaries and competitors. It’s no longer one or another agency's problem, it’s everyone’s problem and we need a solution before we are on the run. 

Unless we up our game and get ahead with the required political will, resources, and energies needed to push these security boulders up the hill, the battle against many of today’s cross-border threat convergence harms will remain a Sisyphean task. We must keep the flames of democracy burning in the face of rising authoritarianism and strategic corruption.

The. Following ICAIE White Paper (figure 1) provides a viable policy option for these concerns.

Figure 1. ICAIE Special Action Teams White Paper

For Additional Reading

David M. Luna, “Perspective: Getting Ahead of the Game in a new Multi-Polar World across Today's Spectrum of Threats, Converging Ecosystems of Criminality, and Hybrid (Irregular) Warfare.” Small Wars Journal, 15 May 2024. 

Mahmut Cengiz and Camilo Pardo-Herrera, "Hezbollah’s Global Networks and Latin American Cocaine Trade.” Small Wars Journal, 25 April 3023.

National Intelligence Council, “Conflict in the Gray Zone: A Prevailing Geopolitical Dynamic Through 2023.” Washington, DC: Office of the Director of National Intelligence, NIE 2024-16734-A, Unclassified, June 2024.

Categories: El Centro

About the Author(s)

David M. Luna

David M. Luna is the Founder and Executive Director of the International Coalition Against Illicit Economies (ICAIE). A former US diplomat and national security official, David is a globally-recognized strategic thought leader, advocate for security of humanity, and a leading voice internationally on crime convergence, transnational threats, international affairs, geopolitical risks, changing character of war, illicit trade, threat finance, and global illicit economies (“dark side of globalization”). He is also President and CEO of Luna Global Networks & Convergence Strategies LLC. David held numerous senior positions with the US Department of State, Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL), including directorships for national security, transnational crime and illicit networks, and anti-corruption and good governance; and was an advisor to the Secretary’s Coordinator for the Rule of Law. David also served as an Assistant Counsel to the President, Office of the Counsel to the President, The White House; and other positions with the US Department of Labor and US Senate. David is a Senior Fellow for National Security and co-Director of the Anti-Illicit Trade Institute at the Terrorism, Transnational Crime, and Corruption Center (TraCCC), Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University. David is a graduate (M.S.S.) of the US Army War College, and received his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, J.D. from the Columbus School of Law, the Catholic University of America. He is a member of the network of experts at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime (GITOC). 

6.

As much as I am biased toward the importance of Asia to US national security and national prosperity, I agree with Professor Brands that we cannot have an "Asia FIrst policy" anymore than we can have an" America first policy." (That is if we want to protect the national security and national prosperity of the US.). We are a global nation with global interests (and responsibilities). And more importantly the world is so interconnected that we can no longer divide it up into regions and think that we can act in one region without second and third effects in other regions.

Can we answer the question of what can (or should) replace the rule based international order?

I suggest reading Dean Acheson's book Present at the Creation and study the section on the start of Korean War in 1950.

Excerpts:

The international order the US has constructed since World War II is under assault in multiple regions, at the hands of multiple adversaries who are increasingly working together. Dealing with that situation will require serious, sustained efforts to expand US defense capabilities and to strengthen US alliances on a global basis. It will demand using the urgency created by a crisis that erupts in one region to catalyze action in others, just as Truman used the Korean War to buttress America’s defenses in both Europe and Asia.

That’s a tough task given how long the US has waited to shore up a sagging global order. But the fundamental choice before America isn’t Ukraine versus Taiwan, Europe versus Asia. It is whether to pay the rising cost of international stability or risk becoming a regional power in an age of cascading global turmoil.

Putting ‘Asia First’ Could Cost America the World

If the US abandons Ukraine and ignores the Middle East, why would any Asian allies trust it against China?

August 25, 2024 at 3:00 PM EDT

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/features/2024-08-25/putting-asia-first-could-cost-america-the-world?sref=hhjZtX76

By Hal Brands

Hal Brands is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

As America’s presidential campaign nears its climax, domestic politics and geopolitics are combining to stimulate an important strategic debate. Briefly stated, the question is: Should Washington deprioritize, perhaps even disengage from, regions outside East Asia so it can concentrate on the threat posed by China?

Global events are making that debate more pressing. The US is struggling to manage wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, even as the Chinese military buildup nears an ominous crescendo. Washington is finding it ever harder to contain an axis of autocracies that is pressing on several fronts at once. And if Donald Trump regains the presidency this November, US foreign policy could be steered by people who believe that it is truly time to put Asia First.

This Asia First movement features think-tankers, prominent Republican senators, and — more ambiguously — the former president himself.

They argue that China, not Russia or Iran, is America’s primary rival, and that every dollar, missile or minute spent dealing with secondary problems raises the risk of crushing defeat in the region that matters most. Whether they know it or not, they are echoing an Asia First movement from an earlier great-power struggle.

During the early Cold War, and amid a brutal hot war in Korea, the original Asia Firsters argued that the US had to get out of Europe so it could get real about containing communism in Asia. Then as now, the Asia Firsters blended partisan warfare with serious strategic arguments. And then as now, a hard pivot to Asia would incur huge strategic costs.

Today’s Asia Firsters are right that the US needs greater urgency in grappling with the Chinese challenge. They are wrong if they believe that Washington can disengage from other regions without undercutting its ability to beat Beijing — and weakening its position around the globe.

Failing the China Challenge

If the Asia First movement has traction today, that’s because the US has been trying, and failing, to meet the China challenge for years. As early as 2001, President George W. Bush announced that America was facing an era of strategic rivalry with Beijing. A decade later, President Barack Obama launched his own “pivot” to Asia. Neither initiative turned out as planned.

Bush’s Asia shift was waylaid by 9/11 and the conflicts that followed. Obama’s was an underfunded, desultory effort that was ultimately undone by — this may sound familiar — wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.

Since then, Trump and President Joe Biden have focused the Pentagon on China while bolstering US alliances in Asia. But the US military budget is barely keeping pace with inflation, while China amasses ships, submarines, planes, missiles, nuclear weapons and other deadly tools it could use to seize Taiwan or teach its neighbors a violent lesson. Blue-ribbon panels and even current US officials are stridently warning that America could lose if it has to fight.

Costs of Superpower

China and Russia have been closing the gap on US defense spending

Source: SIPRI

Note: In Constant 2022 USD.

The US has been procrastinating on China for a quarter of a century. Today, with that threat growing and other conflicts grabbing US attention, a cohort of Republicans is calling for a stark strategic shift.

Republican senators such as Josh Hawley, and influential think-tankers such as Kevin Roberts and Elbridge Colby, have called for the US to slash aid to Ukraine and send more weapons to Taiwan. Robert O’Brien, Trump’s former national security adviser, writes that Washington should shift aircraft carriers — currently being used to deter Iran and protect the sea lanes of the Middle East — and the entire Marine Corps to the Pacific.

Some Asia Firsters even imply the US should leave the defense of Europe — and America’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies — to the Europeans. As vice presidential candidate JD Vance has put it, Europe must “stand on its own feet.” Going further, MAGA mouthpiece Tucker Carlson has said that he hopes Putin wins in Ukraine.

Trump himself is harder to pin down, because his views are so idiosyncratic. But his animosity toward NATO, his calls to end the conflict in Ukraine, his condemnation of “endless wars” in the Middle East, and his belligerence toward China make him the political leader on which Asia Firsters pin their hopes.

Politics always suffuses debates on foreign policy, and advocacy of an Asia First strategy is part of a predictable election-year critique of a Democratic administration. No less, it is the leading edge of a bid to wrest control of the GOP from outgoing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a staunch supporter of Ukraine and NATO, and his fellow “globalists.”

If Trump wins in November, Asia Firsters will likely be prominent in his administration. So it’s worth understanding the merits and antecedents of this approach.

Trump, Truman and Taft

This isn’t the first time leading Republicans have raised the Asia First banner. In the early 1950s, as President Harry Truman’s administration was making unprecedented commitments to Europe, it faced objections from conservatives who believed the real fight was on the other side of the world.

Washington did not grasp that “it is Asia which has been selected for the test of Communist power,” General Douglas MacArthur wrote in December 1950, as US forces were being mauled in Korea. He called for America to bomb and blockade Communist China, which had joined the conflict a few weeks earlier, and otherwise take a victory-at-all-costs approach to waging the Cold War there.

Senator Robert Taft and former president Herbert Hoover argued that the US should gradually disengage from Europe while stiffening its defenses in the Pacific. Many Republicans condemned Truman for failing to halt Mao Zedong’s takeover of China in 1949 while investing so heavily in the Marshall Plan, the North Atlantic Treaty and other transatlantic initiatives.

This Asia First movement engaged serious issues, such as how to handle a bloody, stalemated fight in Korea, and whether to focus on America’s most powerful rival, the Soviet Union, or its most aggressive rival, China. It was also an intensely politicized effort by conservative Republicans to end 20 years of Democratic dominance in Washington, and to dethrone an earlier generation of GOP “globalists” led by Senator Arthur Vandenberg (a converted isolationist) and New York governor Thomas Dewey, whom they blamed for the party’s electoral defeat in 1948.

Asia Firsters like Taft sometimes shaded into neo-isolationism, just as Trump sometimes seems hostile to US alliances everywhere. And the earlier Asia First movement — with its claims that Truman was soft on communism — fed McCarthyite paranoia in the 1950s, just as Trump mixes calls to get tough on China with claims that America is infested with “Communists” and “Marxists” today.

The Asia First movement of the 50s ultimately foundered, mainly because escalation in Korea might have caused a third world war, while abandoning Europe would have punched a continent-sized hole in America’s containment strategy. Instead, Truman fought a limited war in Korea, while using the sense of fear and urgency the war created to launch a huge military buildup and strengthen US alliances in Europe and Asia alike.

As Truman understood, the US couldn’t win the Cold War by taking an Asia-centric approach to a global competition. A popular political cartoon of the time had MacArthur fixating on a square globe dominated by Asia. “We’ve been using more of a roundish one,” Defense Secretary George Marshall remarks — a comment that might be directed to today’s Asia Firsters, too.

Global Economy at Risk

In fairness, the Asia Firsters get a lot right. Of America’s rivals, only China has the mix of military power, economic heft and technological innovation needed to contend for global leadership, a fact that President Biden himself has often acknowledged. When it comes to military power in particular, the US and its allies are running out of time to avoid a potentially deadly imbalance in the western Pacific: Some analysts fear the risk of war will rise as the People’s Liberation Army completes its current round of reforms in the late 2020s.

China’s Defense Spending Keeps Going Up

Beijing will boost military expenditure as Xi Jinping presses ahead with modernization

Source: Chinese Ministry of Finance, data compiled by Bloomberg

If war does come, because China attacks Taiwan or tangles with Japan or the Philippines, the effects could be mind-bogglingly bad. A Sino-American clash might crater the global economy; it could spread throughout the western Pacific and even escalate to nuclear war. If the US loses, there would be an epic shift of power in Asia, with reverberations around the world.

Asia Firsters are also right that the US stubbornly refuses to face up to this danger: Defense budgets are stagnant, munitions stockpiles are deficient and the shipbuilding industry is pathetic in light of China’s naval expansion. And they aren’t wrong that the US is overextended globally. The Pentagon is pulling aircraft carriers from the Pacific for use in the Middle East, but it is nonetheless losing a conflict in the Red Sea with the Houthis because it can’t spare the cruise missiles and laser-guided bombs needed to punish them more severely.

US Defense Spending Looks Low by Cold War Standards

What happens to this “peace dividend” in a new age of warfare?

Source: SIPRI Military Expenditure Database

There’s no debating that the US is trying to do too much with too little, and that it must do more, faster to stay ahead of the Chinese threat. Nonetheless, the costs and weaknesses of an Asia First strategy are vastly higher than its proponents admit.

Ditching Ukraine

For one thing, the “ditch Ukraine” attitude of many Asia Firsters is striking. Yes, the US has been generous to Ukraine, to the tune of over $100 billion in bilateral aid. But that support has inflicted catastrophic harm on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military, and thus on China’s closest ally, at the cost of a few percent of the Pentagon’s annual budget and without taking a single American life.

Many of the weapons given to Ukraine, such as tanks and artillery shells, probably won’t be crucial in a China fight. And if the China challenge is as epochal as the Asia Firsters say, the outcome of a war in the Pacific won’t be decided by the disposition of a few hundred missiles sent to Ukraine. It will be decided by whether America and its allies start rearming with the alacrity a dire situation demands.

Asia Firsters are also remarkably blasé about the consequences of US retrenchment. Pulling back from Europe and the Middle East would be difficult even if those areas were peaceful. Today, however, they are rife with conflict. A hyper-militarized Russia is still trying to destroy Ukraine; the Middle East is seeing its worst instability in decades. Friendly countries in both regions would struggle to contain their enemies without US leadership. An America that veers sharply toward Asia won’t leave behind regions blessed by tranquility: It will encourage violent disorder that eventually gets so bad the US is forced to return.

Military Muscle

Russia's defense spending as a percentage of GDP has been surpassing the US’s for a decade

Source: SIPRI

And America would have to return, because regions beyond East Asia still matter quite a lot. Europe represents a sizable chunk of global economic power and the world’s largest concentration of liberal democracies. The Middle East commands the energy resources that still power the global economy, and the critical waterways that connect Europe to Asia. East Asia may be the most important theater of competition, but that doesn’t mean Washington can let the others burn.

Asia Firsters also fail to recognize that what happens outside East Asia will profoundly affect what happens within it. Countries on the front lines of conflict in that region — Taiwan, Japan and South Korea in particular — don’t want the US to cut Ukraine loose. They see that war in Europe as a test of strength between a free world supporting Kyiv and a cast of Eurasian autocracies backing Russia. They know that successful aggression against one vulnerable democracy will leave others more exposed.

Asia Firsters can never quite explain how absorbing a massive setback in one theater will position the democracies for success in another. What’s more, an America that focuses too intently on Asia may struggle to rally the global coalition needed to keep China in check.

If the US leaves Europe alone against Russia, good luck convincing European governments to follow America’s lead in the economic and technological competition with China. If the US can’t or won’t protect the Middle East from Iran and its proxies, it will struggle to keep ambivalent partners such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates onside against Beijing.

A great virtue of America’s security network is that Washington can summon global responses to pressing challenges. The flip side is that regionalizing US foreign policy could, ironically, undercut America’s ability to out-compete Beijing.

Wavering on Taiwan

The deepest problem with Asia First is that it misunderstands US politics. Think-tank analysts may imagine that America will back away from Ukraine, and perhaps even Europe, and then go all-out to prepare for a future war in Asia. It practice, it likely wouldn’t work out that way.

If Asia Firsters convince Americans that one faraway democracy confronting autocratic aggression isn’t worth supporting, will they really succeed in convincing Americans that the next faraway democracy confronting autocratic aggression is? Put differently, a country that has decided it isn’t worth sending money and guns to aid Ukraine may well be a country that declines to send its young men and women to die for Taiwan.

There are already signs that some Asia Firsters aren’t so committed to Taiwan after all. Earlier this year, Tucker Carlson declared that Washington shouldn’t “spend a ton of time worrying about Taiwan” since “it’s far away, and honestly, who cares?” More sober analysts are also suggesting that Taiwan may not be worth a fight. Trump himself has repeatedly cast doubt on whether he would aid Taiwan if it is attacked. Don’t be surprised if the road from Asia First to America First is short indeed.

The Asia Firsters have done a duty in pointing out the severity of the China challenge, and how unready the US remains. But they offer a false solution in saying that America can solve its problems simply by concentrating on China above all else.

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The international order the US has constructed since World War II is under assault in multiple regions, at the hands of multiple adversaries who are increasingly working together. Dealing with that situation will require serious, sustained efforts to expand US defense capabilities and to strengthen US alliances on a global basis. It will demand using the urgency created by a crisis that erupts in one region to catalyze action in others, just as Truman used the Korean War to buttress America’s defenses in both Europe and Asia.

That’s a tough task given how long the US has waited to shore up a sagging global order. But the fundamental choice before America isn’t Ukraine versus Taiwan, Europe versus Asia. It is whether to pay the rising cost of international stability or risk becoming a regional power in an age of cascading global turmoil.

Brands is also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, the co-author of “Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China” and a member of the State Department's Foreign Affairs Policy Board. He is a senior adviser to Macro Advisory Partners.

More From Hal Brands at Bloomberg Opinion:

• Harris Can’t Ignore Foreign Policy Even If Voters Do
• China and Russia Are Breaking the World Into Pieces
• It’s Looking a Lot Like World War II Out There

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Hal Brands is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

7. Not Only for Killing: Drones Are Now Detecting Land Mines in Ukraine

Transforming in contact. War is a tough laboratory.  

This capability may also have tremendous application after the war as mines and UXO will need to be cleared. Think of all the demining operations we have conducted around the world. Will these capabilities be useful in such operations?

Not Only for Killing: Drones Are Now Detecting Land Mines in Ukraine

Ukraine is a beta test for embedding artificial intelligence and other new technologies in drones and robots to find deadly land mines, saving lives and allowing military forces to advance more quickly.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/24/world/europe/ukraine-land-mines-drones.html?searchResultPosition=2

An agricultural drone carrying a magnetic sensor to help survey land for mines last year during a demonstration in the Zhytomyr region of Ukraine.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

By Lara Jakes

Lara Jakes watched mine-detecting demonstrations at Fort Belvoir, Va., and Crawley, England, for this article.

Aug. 24, 2024

Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Ukraine? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

With a stiff gait, a drone dog stomped up and down a makeshift minefield at a U.S. Army testing center in Virginia, shuddering when it neared a plate-size puck meant to simulate an anti-tank explosive. On its back was a stack of cameras, GPS devices, radios and thermal imaging technology that military developers hope will help it detect mines at close range, sparing humans from that dangerous task.

For the most part, the dog appeared to know when to stay away from the mock mine, given the artificial intelligence embedded in its system to identify threats. “Mostly it does, but sometimes it doesn’t,” Kendall V. Johnson, a physicist at the countermine division of the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command, said during a demonstration this summer outside Washington. “That’s something we’re working on currently.”

The drone dog is among a handful of emerging technologies in anti-mine warfare — a field that, until now, experts say had not changed much in the past 50 years. But just as drones, which are generally defined as uncrewed machines, not exclusively aircraft, that are piloted remotely, have proved in Ukraine to be an important offensive weapon in modern fighting, they now may also provide defense, with new and safer ways to detect and clear land mines.

“There’s a bit of poetic justice in this,” said Colin King, a career military and humanitarian weapons specialist who co-founded the England-based firm Fenix Insight to help detect and destroy ordnance. “Drones have been such a force for destruction in this war, and I rather like the symmetry of the potential for drones to offer part of the solution.”

Image

A quadruped drone dog operating during a demining technology demonstration at Fort Belvoir, Va., in a photograph released by the U.S. Army.Credit...Kyle Richardson/U.S. Army

As in so many areas now, artificial intelligence is driving the progress. Fenix, for example, has developed software enabling drones to not only spot and identify types of land mines, but also predict where they might lie. It does that by drawing on open-source intelligence and social media reports from conflicts around the world where military units have laid mines or where rockets have delivered scatterable munitions.

In January, Mr. King paired the software with an uncrewed aircraft from another British company, Ace High Drone Specialists, and tested it with Ukrainian forces in Kherson, where it found multiple Russian-designed TM-62 anti-tank land mines half-buried in grass and dirt.

After more than 10 years of war, Ukraine is one of the most heavily mined countries in the world. Experts estimate that about one-third of its territory needs to be demined — a daunting and deadly mission any time, but especially in wartime. Countless tons of unexploded ordnance, from both Russian and Ukrainian troops, are being added to in daily shelling, some of which includes cluster munitions that can sit unexploded on the ground for years, endangering civilians.

Land mines slowed Ukraine’s attempts last summer to push Russia out of its eastern Donbas region, as well as stunted Russia’s counter-thrust this summer. Russian forces frequently seek to trap the Ukrainians by firing mine-carrying missiles behind the front lines, cutting off supply and retreat routes. That is where a drone empowered with A.I. can quickly help pick out a route by finding the mines to avoid.

“Knowing where the hell things are is a huge problem,” Mr. King said. “Locating them is critical to delineating the danger areas and initiating clearance.”

Image

A Ukrainian soldier, who lost part of his leg in a mine explosion, undergoing rehabilitation in January at a military hospital in the Lviv region.Credit...Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York Times

Already, the Ukrainians have been testing mine-seeking drones equipped with infrared cameras, magnetometers and neural network analysis — a type of A.I. — since last year. Some of those tests have yielded a 70 percent success rate in detecting mines, said Yulia Svyrydenko, Ukraine’s first deputy prime minister.

Ukraine is also developing a system with the American data analytics company Palantir that will use A.I. to study socioeconomic and environmental conditions across the country that Ms. Svyrydenko said would “determine which of the war-affected lands should be demined first.”

In written responses this month to emailed questions, Ms. Svyrydenko said Ukraine was depending both on its emerging domestic industry and on international allies to obtain mine-clearing machines and equipment.

Allies are contributing to a $110 million fund for technical assistance and training for military transport units, emergency services and the country’s National Guard, and at least 92 demining machines are currently clearing land on humanitarian missions across Ukraine.

A coalition of NATO states has also pledged to provide Ukraine with demining equipment, funds to procure it and training for it as part of the alliance’s focus on some of the war’s most pressing needs. And the European Union said this month it would fund a $2.2 million grant to provide 16 Belgian Malinois ordnance-sniffing dogs to new mine-disposal teams, made up of eight Ukrainian women.

“And even then, what we have is not enough,” Ms. Svyrydenko said. “No one has faced such a challenge since the Second World War. Neither Ukraine nor its partners were ready for such a challenge. Now, by working together, we are changing global approaches to demining.”

Image

Ukrainian sappers working their way through an agricultural field with a remote-operated demining vehicle last year in the Kherson region. Experts estimate that about one-third of Ukrainian territory needs to be demined.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

Since February 2022, when Russia began its full-scale invasion, Ukraine has surveyed about 13,500 square miles of its territory — roughly the size of the country of Moldova — and has cleared mines from about 1,800 square miles.

One ray of light is that many of the mines in Ukraine are scattered on the ground, instead of buried, “so it is possible to actually see them visually,” said Jennifer Hyman, a spokeswoman for the HALO Trust, a humanitarian organization that is sharing its drone imagery with technical experts at Amazon Web Services to develop software that finds mines.

Finding mines is still an agonizingly slow process, taking an analyst at least two days of poring over pictures and video collected by HALO drones of any of the 288 minefields in Ukraine that the humanitarian group has documented.

But when the new A.I.-enhanced software is ready, “that timeline can be cut down to maybe half an hour,” said Matthew Abercrombie, a HALO research and development officer. “So we can really start to churn through this imagery, produce this evidence and get it back into the hands of people who are making the decisions about where we should clear and where we shouldn’t.”

The HALO Trust also works with the State Department, which has spent nearly $210 million on demining efforts in Ukraine since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and helped separatists seize land in the Donbas region. Over the past two years, efforts to equip Ukraine with everything from thermal detectors to magnetometers to hyperspectral imaging cameras have picked up speed.

Image

A member of a Ukrainian police explosives disposal team preparing to dislodge a Russian mine found in 2022 in a field near the town of Hoholiv. Anti-mine technology is rapidly improving after not changing much for the last 50 years.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times

Some of that work is being done at the U.S. Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command, at Fort Belvoir, Va., on equipment destined for both military and humanitarian missions. Engineers there have developed their own version of the mine-detection software that relies on drone imaging. They are also working on a hand-held scanner that can show soldiers the shape of a buried mine, based on what the mine detector picks up, and then feed it back to a database to create a map of where the explosives are located.

Then there is Mr. Johnson’s drone dog, equipped with night-vision sensors in its “eyes” that earned it the nickname Anthrax because “he’s very scary” in the dark, he said. Several months ago, a group of young Army soldiers test-drove Anthrax through mine-detection scenarios, Mr. Johnson said, and they became “a big fan of this guy — especially when we were climbing more on the wooded side, going around trees” on its four legs.

By contrast, older models of mine detection robots lacked the technology packed into Anthrax — particularly the A.I. software — and were clunky, sporting only a single camera and moving on tracks or wheels that largely confined them to flat surfaces.

The military developers at Fort Belvoir are focused on detecting mines, not necessarily defusing them. But as technology advances, it may not be too long before drones can find and detonate land mines all at once, Mr. Johnson said.

“I could definitely see a future where a drone may find a mine, and then you have somebody who clicks a button that says, ‘Yes, that’s a mine,’ and they click another button to get rid of the mine,” he said. “I can see a lot more automation in this. That’s a conversation that we’re having now to start.”

Image

A sign warning of the danger of mines in a forest outside Izium last year.Credit...Emile Ducke for The New York Times

Lara Jakes, based in Rome, reports on diplomatic and military efforts by the West to support Ukraine in its war with Russia. She has been a journalist for nearly 30 years. More about Lara Jakes

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 25, 2024, Section A, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Unusual Breed of Dog In Virginia Could Save Life and Limb in Ukraine . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

8. Gen. McMaster’s blistering account of the Trump White House

 Peter Bergen provides his review of H.R. McMaster's new book. One of the things we should take away is that McMaster gives credit to Trump on China and Syria which increases the credibility of his book and is a lesson we should all consider when trying to conduct objective analysis. I think McMaster might offer us the least partisan view of Trump's time in office (during the period when McMaster was the NSA). But there are many who will likely take issue with the scathing critiques despite the credit he gives where it is due.

Gen. McMaster’s blistering account of the Trump White House | CNN Politics

CNN · by Peter Bergen · August 25, 2024

Then-national security adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster at the White House in 2017.

Yuri Gripas/Reuters

CNN —

Until now, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster has held his fire about his stint in the Trump White House. McMaster served with distinction in key American conflicts of the past decades: the Gulf War, the Iraq War and the war in Afghanistan, but as McMaster recounts in his new book, “At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House,” in some ways, his most challenging tour as a soldier was his last one: serving as the national security adviser to a notoriously mercurial president.

In his blistering, insightful account of his time in the Trump White House, McMaster describes meetings in the Oval Office as “exercises in competitive sycophancy” during which Trump’s advisers would flatter the president by saying stuff like, “Your instincts are always right” or, “No one has ever been treated so badly by the press.” Meanwhile, Trump would say “outlandish” things like, “Why don’t we just bomb the drugs?” in Mexico or, “Why don’t we take out the whole North Korean Army during one of their parades?”

McMaster’s book, which focuses on Trump’s tenure as commander in chief, comes at a particularly timely moment, just as many Americans start to really consider whether Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris would make a better commander in chief.

In her acceptance speech for her nomination to the presidency at the Democratic National Convention on Thursday, Harris spent some of her speech trying to demonstrate her national security credentials. She talked, for instance, about the war in Gaza, saying that as president she would stand firm on the US alliance with Israel to “ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.” Harris also said that the Palestinians have “their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.” With this speech, Harris was trying to thread a delicate needle between Americans who strongly oppose the war — many of them in her own party — and those who back Israel wholeheartedly.

McMaster provides unique detail on Trump’s approach to foreign policy and — similarly to his successor in the national security adviser role, former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, who wrote scathingly about the former president in a book published in 2020 — his account is likely to do little to reassure US allies about the prospects of a second Trump term.

In addition to being a highly decorated officer, McMaster also has a doctorate in history. His first book, “Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam,” recounted the dismal history of how the top American generals told President Lyndon Johnson only what they thought he wanted to hear about the Vietnam War, rather than giving him their best military advice about how the conflict was going and the full range of policy options that were open to their commander in chief.

‘Tell Trump what he didn’t want to hear’

McMaster wasn’t going to make the same mistake after Trump tapped him to be his national security adviser in February 2017. He writes, “I knew that to fulfill my duty, I would have to tell Trump what he didn’t want to hear.” This helps explain why McMaster lasted just over a year in the job. (Disclosure: I have known McMaster professionally since 2010, when he ran an anti-corruption task force in Afghanistan.)

One subject was particularly neuralgic for Trump: Russia. McMaster astutely observes, “I wished that Trump could separate the issue of Russian election meddling from the legitimacy of his presidency. He could have said, ‘Yes, they attacked the election. But Russia doesn’t care who wins our elections. What they want to do is pit Americans against one another… .’ McMaster writes that the “fragility” of Trump’s ego and “his deep sense of aggrievement” would never allow him to make this kind of distinction.

McMaster felt it was his “duty” to point out to Trump that Russian President Vladimir Putin “was not and would never be Trump’s friend.” McMaster warned Trump that Putin is “the best liar in the world” and would try to “play” Trump to get what he wanted and manipulate him with “ambiguous promises of a ‘better relationship.’”

The final straw that ended McMaster’s tenure in the White House seems to have been when he publicly said on February 17, 2018, at the Munich Security Forum — the annual gathering of top Western foreign policy officials — that the indictment of a group of Russian intelligence officers for their interference in the 2016 US presidential election was “inconvertible” evidence of Russian meddling in that election.

Trump soon tweeted, “General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians….” Once the commander-in-chief started publicly castigating him on Twitter, it was obvious that McMaster would not be long for the White House.

McMaster’s account of the Trump team is not pretty. Steve Bannon, Trump’s “chief strategist” early in the presidency, is portrayed as a “fawning court jester” who played “on Trump’s anxiety and sense of beleaguerment … with stories, mainly about who was out to get him and what he could do to ‘counterpunch.’”

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis were often at odds with Trump, McMaster says. Tillerson, who had previously run Exxon, is portrayed as inaccessible to top officials in Trump’s administration, while Mattis is described as an obstructionist. McMaster writes that Tillerson and Mattis viewed Trump as “dangerous” and seemed to construe their roles as if “Trump was an emergency and that anyone abetting him was an adversary.” Trump himself also contributed to the dysfunction: “He enjoyed and contributed to interpersonal drama in the White House and across the administration.”

Also, McMaster wasn’t on the same page as his boss on some key foreign policy issues. McMaster enumerates those issues as “allies, authoritarians, and Afghanistan.” Trump denigrated American allies whom he saw as “freeloaders”; he embraced authoritarian rulers who McMaster despised; and while Trump largely believed Afghanistan was a lost cause, McMaster thought there was a path forward for the country, and he pushed for a more significant US commitment there, while simultaneously blocking a cockamamie notion by Bannon to turn the conduct of the Afghan war over to American private military contractors.

McMaster credits Trump on Syria and China

McMaster does give Trump his due for some sound foreign policy decisions. Unlike President Barack Obama, who had dithered over his own “red line” when the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against civilians, Trump acted decisively when Assad used chemical weapons in early April 2017, killing dozens of civilians. Trump responded by ordering airstrikes against the Syrian airbase where the chemical weapons strike was launched from.

And on the most important foreign policy issue, China, McMaster concluded that Trump made the right decisions. McMaster oversaw Trump’s 2017 national security strategy document, which took a tougher public stance on China than previous administrations, calling the Chinese out for stealing US intellectual property every year valued at “hundreds of billions of dollars” while noting that China “is building the most capable and well-funded military in the world, after our own.” Briefed by McMaster on the new national security strategy, Trump responded, “This is fantastic,” and asked for similar language in his upcoming speeches.

The assault on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, seems to have marked a decisive break from Trump for McMaster, who, in a previous book published in 2020, “Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World,” had avoided direct criticisms of his former commander in chief.

By contrast, in his new book, McMaster writes that in the aftermath of his 2020 electoral defeat, Trump’s “ego and love of self… drove him to abandon his oath to ‘support and defend the Constitution,’ a president’s highest obligation.” McMaster adds, “The attack on the US Capitol stained our image, and it will take a long-term effort to restore what Donald Trump, his enablers, and those they encouraged took from us that day.”

So, what might this all mean for a second Trump term, if there is one? The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 outlines plans for Trump loyalists to replace numerous career foreign service officers and intelligence officials. Those loyalists would likely tell Trump precisely what he wants to hear rather than give the president their unvarnished assessments of the national security challenges facing the US, which is the proper role of American national security professionals.

Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but the fact that CNN found at least 140 people who worked for Trump are involved in the project speaks for itself. And in a second Trump term, there would likely be no McMasters to tell Trump what he doesn’t want to hear; in fact, that’s kind of the whole point of Project 2025, which would replace as many as 50,000 workers in the federal government with Trump loyalists.

CNN · by Peter Bergen · August 25, 2024

9. The Explosion in France: A Wake-Up Call to the Threat of Iran’s Disinformation War

This is political violence that can be defined as terrorism. But it is really terrorism employed in support of Iran's unconventional warfare campaign that seeks to coerce and disturb the west. As we analyze this action we should consider some terms and definitions and notice how they are all overlapping (or mutually supporting and reinforcing). Is this Iran conducting terroriam, political violence, political warfare, subversion, sabotage, or unconventional warfare? Giap's Dau Tranh? Psychological Warfare? Or all of the above?

Bruce Hoffman defines "terrorism as the deliberate creation and exploitation of fear through violence or the threat of violence in the pursuit of political change. All terrorist acts involve violence or the threat of violence. Terrorism is specifically designed to have far-reaching psychological effects beyond the immediate victim(s) or object of the terrorist attack. It is meant to instill fear within, and thereby intimidate, a wider `target audience' that might include a rival ethnic or religious group, an entire country, a national government or political party, or public opinion in general. Terrorism is designed to create power where there is none or to consolidate power where there is very little. Through the publicity generated by their violence, terrorists seek to obtain the leverage, influence and power they otherwise lack to effect political change on either a local or an international scale. Terrorism is not something separate to be treated outside of irregular warfare. It is an integral part of it."

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

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

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

 https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a233501.pdf

Subversion

• Encompassing a broad scope of tactics and objectives it is defined as “actions designed to undermine the military, economic, psychological, or political strength or morale of a governing authority.”
• Undermine military and security services
• Economic degradation
• Removal of dangerous persons
• Undermine political authority and morale
• Organizational subversion

From the ARIS Project

http://www.soc.mil/ARIS/ARIS.html 

Sabotage

• An act or acts with intent to injure, interfere with, or obstruct national defense of a country by willfully injuring or destroying, or attempting to injure or destroy, any national defense or war material, premises, or utilities, to include both human and national resources
• Selective Sabotage
• Tactical aspects
• General Sabotage
• Tactical Operations
• Sabotage intelligence
• Inspired events, not directed?
• From the ARIS Project

http://www.soc.mil/ARIS/ARIS.html 

""Dau Tranh"

Political dau tranh: three elements

Dan Van- Action among your people: Total mobilization of propaganda, motivational & organizational measures to manipulate internal masses and fighting units. Example: Intensive indoctrination and total mobilization of all civilian and military personnel in North Vietnam.

Binh Van- Action among enemy military: Subversion, proselytizing, and propaganda to encourage desertion, defection and lowered morale among enemy troops. Example: contribution to large number of South Vietnamese Army deserters and draft evaders in early years.

Dich Van- Action among enemy's people: Total propaganda effort to sow discontent, defeatism, dissent and disloyalty among enemy's population. Involves creation and/or manipulation of front groups and sympathizers. Example: work among South Vietnamese and US media, activist and academic circles.

Military dau tranh: the three phases

The strategy of the communist forces generally followed the protracted Revolutionary Warfare model of Mao in China, as diagrammed above. These phases were not static, and elements from one appear in others. Guerrilla warfare for example co-existed alongside conventional operations, and propaganda and terrorism would always be deployed throughout the conflict.

Preparation, organization and propaganda phase

Guerrilla warfare, terrorism phase

General offensive – conventional war phase including big unit and mobile warfare

– Vo Nguyen Giap

Unconventional Warfare (traditional US definition 1997)

A broad spectrum of military and paramilitary operations, normally of long

duration, predominantly conducted by indigenous or surrogate forces who are

organized, trained, equipped, supported, and directed in varying degrees by an

external source. It includes guerrilla warfare and other direct offensive, low

visibility, covert, or clandestine operations, as well as the indirect activities of

subversion, sabotage, intelligence activities, and evasion and escape. (JP 1-2)

https://www.bits.de/NRANEU/others/jp-doctrine/jp-encyclop(97).pdf

Unconventional Warfare (current US definition)

 activities conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, 

disrupt or overthrow a government or occupying power  by operating through 

or with an underground, auxiliary and guerrilla force in a denied area.

(JP 1-02)

Psychological warfare involves the planned use of propaganda and other psychological operations to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of opposition groups.

The Explosion in France: A Wake-Up Call to the Threat of Iran’s Disinformation War

blogs.timesofisrael.com · by Catherine Perez-Shakdam · August 24, 2024

The recent explosion near a synagogue in Toulouse, injuring a police officer, is a grim reminder of the gathering storm facing Jewish communities across Europe. This was not a random act of violence but a symptom of a far deeper and more orchestrated campaign driven by the Islamic Republic of Iran—a regime that has perfected the art of weaponizing misinformation, turning it into a tool for spreading antisemitism and destabilizing Western democracies.

Back in 2022, I warned that Tehran was crafting a strategy aimed at the Jewish diaspora, a tactic designed to isolate Jewish communities, paint them as foreign agents, and ultimately push them out of their own societies. The plan was simple yet diabolical: position Jews as the scapegoat for terror, declare them the cause of instability, and frame their departure as the only path to peace. In this distorted narrative, Jews are cast as both the source of the problem and its solution. The attack in Toulouse should not be viewed in isolation but as the logical consequence of this long-running campaign—a campaign that the West has all too willingly ignored.

Iran’s regime has long masqueraded as a champion of the oppressed while funneling hatred and division into the global bloodstream. Through state-funded propaganda channels, social media bots, and a network of willing dupes in Western academia and activism, Tehran has managed to convince large swathes of the so-called progressive left that to oppose Zionism is to stand on the side of virtue. But make no mistake: this narrative is not about justice for Palestinians or peace in the Middle East. It is about delegitimizing the Jewish state and spreading the oldest hatreds under a new, more fashionable banner.

The tragedy lies in how willingly the Left has embraced this charade. Once the bastion of liberal values, it has become a breeding ground for Islamo-fascist ideologies that have hijacked the Palestinian cause. The legitimate aspiration for Palestinian statehood has been perverted into a banner for endorsing terrorism—a terrorism whose endgame is not just the destruction of Israel, but the dismantling of the very democratic principles that sustain Western civilization.

The real scandal here is that this campaign of hatred has succeeded in corrupting the moral clarity of those who should know better. Pro-Palestinian rallies across Europe have become breeding grounds for slogans that call not for coexistence, but for the obliteration of Israel. When chants of “From the river to the sea” are tolerated as legitimate discourse, what we are witnessing is not the call for peace, but the thinly veiled endorsement of genocide. This is precisely the outcome Tehran seeks: the mainstreaming of extremism, the erosion of moral boundaries, and the transformation of a political issue into a civilizational struggle.

The attack in Toulouse is the natural outcome of this poisoned discourse. The fascistic ideology Tehran propagates does not merely seek to attack Jews; it seeks to delegitimize their very presence in the societies they helped build. By positioning Jews as a threat to national security, the Iranian regime creates the conditions for terror to be justified as a defensive measure. In such a climate, the victims are always to blame, and the perpetrators are simply carrying out what they’ve been told is necessary for the greater good.

What is often overlooked is that this narrative is not just a threat to Jews and Israel—it is a threat to all who cherish democratic values. The regime in Tehran is not merely opposed to the existence of Israel; it is fundamentally hostile to the very notion of freedom, pluralism, and the Judeo-Christian heritage that underpins Western civilization. The forces at work here are not confined to anti-Zionism but extend to a broader assault on the principles that sustain free societies. It is no accident that Islamo-fascism has found a home within the Left—an ideology that claims to be about liberation but has, in fact, become a mechanism for ostracisation and control.

This grotesque perversion of discourse does not end with the Jews, as history has repeatedly shown. When societies allow bigotry to flourish under the guise of social justice, it is not long before other freedoms are eroded. The Left, in its misguided attempt to appear virtuous, has allowed itself to be co-opted by those who would dismantle the very freedoms it claims to defend. What begins with the targeting of Jewish communities quickly spirals into a broader assault on civil liberties, freedom of speech, and the foundations of democratic governance.

The explosion in Toulouse is a warning sign that cannot be ignored. The ruling elite, so often preoccupied with appeasement and moral relativism, must now confront the reality that what is at stake is far more than geopolitical positioning. It is the integrity of the very societies they are supposed to protect. This is not just a matter for Jews; it is a matter for all who value freedom over tyranny, truth over propaganda, and civilization over barbarism.

The fight against Tehran’s disinformation and the fascist ideologies it fuels is not a niche concern—it is a frontline battle for the soul of the West. We must reject the lies, expose the hatreds, and refuse to be complicit in the moral degradation that comes from pretending that terrorism is just another form of resistance. If we fail to act now, we will all be the victims of this lethal complacency. The time to stand against this threat is not tomorrow, but now—before the poison spreads any further.

blogs.timesofisrael.com · by Catherine Perez-Shakdam · August 24, 2024

10. China Copies US "Manned-Unmanned" Teaming With Different Twist

Video at the link.

Can you believe that Kant (Critique of Pure Reason) is introduced as part of the ethical analysis here? :-) 😀

China Copies US "Manned-Unmanned" Teaming With Different Twist - Warrior Maven

warriormaven.com · by Kris Osborn · August 25, 2024

https://warriormaven.com/china/china-copies-us-manned-unmanned-teaming-with-different-twist

By Kris Osborn, President, Warrior

What if a US Navy unmanned surface vessel’s vertical towed array sonar trailing beneath the surface detects and enemy submarine in position to attack US surface warships with torpedoes, and instantly shares critical time-sensitive data with both undersea and aerial drones in position to respond. A forward-positioned undersea drone might either function as an explosive to attack the enemy submarine or transmit targeting data to a US Navy submarine in position to attack from safer stand-off distances. Perhaps an aerial drone or helicopter can use laser scanning and EO/IR targeting to find and destroy the enemy submarine target when it comes close to the surface, by virtue of receiving location data from surface and undersea drones. Of greatest significance, a decision to attack and destroy a manned enemy submarine using the processed and networked intelligence can be made by human decision makers performing command and control from the surface, air or undersea. This kind of scenario, drawing upon both the speed of AI-enabled data processing and human decision-making faculties, is precisely the kind of Concept of Operation now being pursued by US weapons developers both within and across the military services. With US military progress advancing these technologies and concepts at lightning speed, many are likely to wonder what US adversaries such as Russia and China are doing in this area.

“Manned-unmanned teaming” and “human-machine interface” could be described as Pentagon “favorite terms” in the realm of weapons development and concepts of operation aimed at preparing for future warfare. Such an approach is deeply grounded in a clear recognition that any kind of future warfare engagement is best approached using a carefully blended or integrated combination of high-speed, AI-enabled analytics, autonomy and robotics and certain attributes unique to human decision-making. The conceptual or even “philosophical” foundation of this approach maintains that of course specific functions including data organization, analysis, high-speed processing and problem solving can be done exponentially faster and more efficiently than human. At the same time, Pentagon weapons developers operate with the widespread recognition that there are faculties and attributes specific to human consciousness and cognition that mathematically-generated computer algorithms simply cannot replicate.

This US approach continues to generate promising combinations of next-generation technology and human-envisioned concepts of operation in preparation for future armed conflict, yet will US adversaries approach this critical and nuanced blending of manned-unmanned teaming in a similar fashion? Perhaps not, according to a significant new Army intelligence report publishing research findings related to the anticipated combat environment expected to define the coming decade. Among many things the Army’s “The Operational Environment 2024-2034 Large-Scale Combat Operations.” (US Army Training and Doctrine Command, G2), examines robotics, AI, unmanned-systems, sensing, weapons usage and evolving doctrinal and strategic adjustments to new threats. Major rivals such as the People’s Republic of China, the Army report maintains, are pursuing manned-unmanned teaming with comparable intensity. In particular, it appears the PLA is attempting to replicate or copy the fast-evolving US progress connecting manned and unmanned systems across multiple domains simultaneously.

“China is focused on developing teaming software that could be used for unmanned underwater and surface vessels under multiple configurations. It is funding research in manned-unmanned teaming, which could provide significant battlefield gains as neither a human nor machine acting on its own is as effective as both working in tandem,” the report writes.

The text of the report also examines some of the variations, complexities and different approaches informing how countries will integrate AI and unmanned systems into its Concepts of Operation. andOne key finding, according to the report, is that not only will future warfare be driven by AI, unmanned systems and ubiquitous “sensors” creating a “transparent” battlefield, but that major adversaries or rivals such as China appear to be prioritizing “science” of AI, autonomy and computing above the “art” or human components to combat decision making. This emphasis introduces key implications addressed in the report.

“China’s leadership is concerned about corruption within the PLA’s ranks, especially at the lower levels, and to the extent possible wants to remove the individual soldier from the decision-making process in favor of machine-driven guidance. This is in stark contrast to the U.S. Army’s way of war, which relies heavily on warfare as an artform, as the report describes. The U.S. Army sees its Soldiers as its greatest advantage in battle and relies on their intuition, improvisation, and adaptation to lead to victory.” The text of the Army’s Operational Environment 2024-2034, Large Scale Combat Operations states.

Can advanced AI-enabled algorithms incorporate more subjective phenomena fundamental to human decision-making such as emotion, ethics and the mix of variables informing the psychology of human decision-making? This belief of the primacy of human decision-making, Pentagon weapons developers maintain, is particularly critical when it comes to decisions about the use of lethal force. This does not mean or suggest that AI-enabled computing can’t perform time-sensitive warfare tasks with accuracy, precision and speed but rather that an “optimal” approach to warfighting and modern Combined Arms Maneuver requires a key mixture of what’s best with both AI-empowered systems and human cognition. Sure enough, advanced US weapons developers and industry partners are making progress working on advanced algorithms increasing able to make what could be called more “subjective” determinations, such as discerning the difference in meaning between dance “ball” and tennis “ball” by examining a wide range of variables to include context and surrounding words. This being said, many are of the view that even advancing or next-generation AI-information algorithms looking more holistically at a host of variables and indicators in relation to one another in real time, human consciousness simply cannot be “replicated” by computers. This is particularly significant, the Army report indicates, when it comes to decisions about lethal force and the value of human’s weighing and analyzing the “art” of war alongside the “science.”

Philosophical Influence?

It does not seem like a stretch to view the US military’s ethics and beliefs regarding the inherent “subjectivity” or “artistic” elements of human consciousness in relation to Western philosophical renderings of human consciousness, perception and epistemology (theory of knowledge). 18th-Century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, for example, arguably expanded US, European and global thinking about human consciousness through hais intellectual renderings of human thought and perception. In his famous 1781 “Critique of Pure Reason,” Kant makes the case for the inherent “subjectivity” of individual perception by suggesting that human beings do not all perceive and interpret the external world in precisely the same fashion. In several of his works, Kant explained that one elements of the external word are “perceived” or “taken-in” by the human mind, they become part of subjective cognition and are therefore subject to the wide ranges of factors and different variables determining human consciousness and perception.

For this reason, Kant occupies a special and valuable place within the trajectory of Western thought, as he operates as a bridge in a certain way into more modern notions of the human mind. Many philosophers preceding Kant known as the Empiricists(Locke, Hume), maintained that the mind was merely a kind of “mirror” of a certain reflecting the same external reality or set of conditions for everyone. Kant however, and the English Romantics who followed him, alternatively viewed human consciousness as inherently “subjective” and, as Kant puts it, part of “subjective cognition.” Simply put, Kant argued that the same set of external circumstances, which might be thought of as uniform, are not interpreted or understood the same way by “individuals.” Instead of functioning primarily as a mirror reflecting the same external reality, the mind operates more like a “lamp” shedding its own light upon the process of human perception. Sure enough, a famous US Cornell University scholar in the 1950s known as M.H. Abrams wrote the now famous “Mirror and the Lamp” critique on the evolution of epistemological understanding throughout the 1700s and 1800s into today. The human mind and imagination, Abrams maintained, functioned more like a “lamp” than a “mirror,” and that Individuals each perceive and interpret the surrounding set of external conditions differently, a reality we mostly take for granted these days. How do AI-enabled algorithms approximate this…? Can AI-generated systems evaluate the somewhat ineffable or less “quantifiable” variables woven into human imagination, intention, emotion, ethics or intuition?

The Pentagon’s doctrinal approach to AI and its “human-in-the-loop” philosophy could arguably have been influenced by generations of American and European philosophical thinking about consciousness. While we may see computing automation and AI-enabled weapons for purely defensive reasons in the future, humans are arguably best positioned to determine which “human” is the correct one to attack to save lives in war. What if a computer interprets an innocent civilian for an enemy combatant? Will it make an accurate determination in every instance all the time? What if an explosion of an enemy target will generate fragmentation in an urban area, killing civilians? What if an AI-enabled targeting system is spoofed or gets a “false” positive? The Pentagon is aware of these things, which is why US military weapons developers and their industry partners are pursuing what’s called “zero trust,” a term identifying ongoing efforts to make AI more consistently reliable and accurate.

Kris Osborn is the President of Warrior Maven – Center for Military Modernization and Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a Highly Qualified Expert with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army—Acquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

warriormaven.com · by Kris Osborn · August 25, 2024

11. Everything We Just Learned About The Ghost Shark Uncrewed Submarine

Will this alleviate some of our manning challenges?

Everything We Just Learned About The Ghost Shark Uncrewed Submarine

Anduril has laid out big plans for the Ghost Shark, one of which is now in the U.S., especially when it comes to proving out new payloads.

Joseph Trevithick

Posted on Aug 23, 2024 2:48 PM EDT

10 minute read

twz.com · by Joseph Trevithick

Anduril says it has received active interest in integrating more than a dozen new military and commercial payloads onto its Ghost Shark extra-large autonomous undersea vehicle (XL-AUV). Payload testing and otherwise demonstrating the Ghost Shark’s highly modular design are core focuses of new work on the underwater drone that is now set to occur in the United States.

The War Zone learned these and other new details about Ghost Shark in an interview earlier this week with Dr. Shane Arnott, Senior Vice President for Engineering at Anduril and the company’s maritime lead.

The Ghost Shark’s U.S. debut, which Anduril announced this week, came at the biennial U.S. Navy-led Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercise in Hawaii, where the uncrewed undersea vehicle (UUV) was displayed to attendees. RIMPAC 2024 wrapped up on August 1. Development of Ghost Shark began in Australia in 2022 for that country’s navy, which is looking to acquire at least three of the UUVs by 2025. The Ghost Shark now in the United States is an additional example that Anduril built using its own funds.

The first Ghost Shrak for the Royal Australian Navy. Australian Defense Force

Ghost Shark, which also leverages previous work on another large-displacement UUV called the Dive-LD, only first broke cover in April. The Dive-LD, which you can read more about here, was originally designed by Dive Technologies, a company Anduril acquired in 2022. Details about Ghost Shark’s performance specifications, such as maximum range, speed, and endurance, as well as its intended roles and missions, remain limited.

Australian authorities have said in the past that they plan to use Ghost Sharks to conduct “persistent intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance [ISR] and strike” missions, but without any real elaboration. How the Royal Australian Navy, or any other operator, might launch and recover the UUVs during actual operations is also unclear. The example that went to Hawaii around RIMPAC got there in a standard shipping container with the help of a Royal Australian Air Force C-17A Globemaster III transport plane, as seen below, highlighting one option for at least moving it rapidly to a forward location.

Anduril

“It’s the nature of the beast with subsea [warfare systems],” Anduril’s Arnott said, referring to the historical secrecy surrounding submarines, crewed and uncrewed, and other underwater military capabilities. He did say that “these are very, very long-range assets.”

What we do know is that Ghost Shark was designed to be extremely modular, flexible, and readily reconfigurable. Arnott explained that the overall payload portion of Ghost Shark can be readily configured in different ways using modular hull sections. Each of the sections has integrated data and power buses and can then be filled with whatever might fit inside.

“So the nose and the tail are different pieces, and then the payload in the middle is expandable,” he said. “We make it pretty clean and our idea is to get the maximum mix of effects possible onto this system.”

“If you look at the [payload] sections alone, they are much bigger than a lot of UUVs by themselves, just each section,” he added. “The nice thing… about being in water is the extensibility of how many of those sections you can add. [It] is pretty forgiving in that space in the water domain. So we cannot say how big this thing can grow, but it’s a lot.”

A rendering of a Ghost Shark in Royal Australian Navy service. Australian Defense Force

Arnott further highlighted how Ghost Shark is designed to provide additional flexibility in terms of how payloads, including very large ones, can been oriented inside the modular hull sections.

“We don’t have big masts running down the backbone of our vehicle that a lot of other designs do that then preclude the ability for the payloads to come out in different directions… of the payload module itself,” he said. “So we have… in effect, unlimited flexibility in this design, just the way that we’ve configured the vehicle and the payload bay itself could be almost anything within a size configuration that you can dream up. We haven’t encountered crazy idea yet from a customer that … we can’t fit.”

When Ghost Shark emerged in April, The War Zone pointed out its lack of large, extendable masts found on many other comparable designs, such as the Orca that Boeing is developing for the U.S. Navy. On other UUVs, masts like these are generally used to support sensors, communications, and propulsion systems. Ghost Shark does have a lower-profile swept-back sail on top of its nose section.

An Orca UUV sits on a pier with its top-mounted mast deployed and a payload module installed with a top-opening bay. USN

On the military side, in addition to the capabilities being developed for Australia’s Ghost Sharks, “we’ve had requests for over a dozen new payloads, which we’ve got some level of conceptual design on, and there are active discussions on,” according to Arnott. The company is also exploring commercial applications for the UUVs.

Specific details about any of these payloads remain scant. A suite of sonars and other sensors would be needed to meet the Royal Australian Navy’s persistent ISR requirements. What the “strike” capabilities for the “RAN” might entail remains unclear, but Ghost Shark could well be configured to launch torpedoes or missiles, as well as loitering munitions, or lay mines. Systems capable of launching non-kinetic attacks, such as electronic warfare jammers, are another possibility.

Anduril’s Arnott regularly describes Ghost Shark as a “mothership,” as well, and has alluded to it being capable of serving as a launch platform for other uncrewed systems, including ones designed to operate in highly autonomous networked swarms, in the past. Swarms inherently offer flexibility in how their individual components can be configured and, by extension, in what missions they can be tasked to perform.

An old, but still relevant U.S. Navy graphic showing possible payloads for large underwater drones, including weapons and smaller uncrewed systems. USN An old, but nonetheless interesting U.S. Navy graphic showing possible payloads for underwater drones, including weapons. U.S. Navy

“A big part of why you have an extra large vehicle is as a mothership,” Arnott told The War Zone and other outlets at a media roundtable after Ghost Shark’s public unveiling in April. “So you know, having autonomy controlling autonomy. This is actually a masterclass in use of Lattice.”

Lattice is Anduril’s proprietary artificial intelligence-enabled autonomy software package, which it has been developing in parallel with its still-growing portfolio of uncrewed systems across all domains.

“I think the mind can run wild with what you can do with a very large payload bay. But having having a brain that can be all the way on the edge of smaller things, plus a bigger thing, plus working with crewed assets … this is kind of the vision … of what Lattice is about,” Arnott also said in April, speaking generally, in response to a specific question about whether Ghost Shark might act as a mothership for smaller uncrewed platforms. “I’ll let you connect some dots there.”

In his more recent interview with The War Zone, Arnott also said that interest Anduril has been seeing in Ghost Shark on the commercial side has had to do with employing the UUV as an alternative to tethered remotely operated vehicles and larger vessels on the surface “primarily around … seabed survey [work] and seeing how to interact with things on the seafloor.”

Though Arnott did not explicitly make this link, new and improved ways of surveying the seafloor and manipulating objects on the seabed are things that would also be of clear interest to armed forces, as well as intelligence agencies.

As already noted, proving out new payloads and demonstrating Ghost Shark’s readily reconfigurable architecture are key aspects of the work Anduril now expects to do on the design in the United States. The company also says it wants to showcase its ability to manufacture and otherwise support the platform outside of Australia for future customers, possibly including the U.S. Navy.

So, our intent here is to have this vehicle be able to take U.S. payloads, and for those payloads to be 100% built here in the United States. So, with U.S. steel, U.S. engineers, U.S. guts for these payrolls, and add it to the vehicle,” Arnott said. “The intent is to start to work with the U.S. customer community, of which, you know, there’s a number of parties, including the US Navy, etc, to start to prove that out and show that we can build our mission capability at the edge… [and not] always have to go back to the OEM [original equipment manufacturer] location.”

“We’re very much thinking about manufacturability, so the ability to kind of push these things out at scale,” Arnott added. “We’ve announced two different factories, one in Australia, one in the U.S. Both of those will be set up in order to build… both [Ghost Shark] vehicles and payloads.”

“Scaling has been kind of a central tenant to the program. … some of the mistakes in the past of similar subsea capabilities [is that they] are kind of created with quite exotic designs, and typically, subsea and submarine capabilities are built in small numbers,” Arnott also said at the roundtable back in April. “We’re expecting this to be built in very large numbers. So proving out that supply chain, proving out the production system, has been actually part of this program. … We’ve been very deliberate in the design of the vehicle … no exotic materials [and] approaches that are easily scaled.”

You can read more about Anduril’s planned “hyperscale” factory in the United States, where it expects to produce an array of other products unrelated to Ghost Shark, and its broader vision for manufacturing here. With the U.S. military especially, there is growing interest in not only being able to accelerate the development of new capabilities, but also the ability to quickly start producing them in useful quantities, a broader trend The War Zone has been tracking closely.

An artist’s conception of Anduril’s planned “hyperscale” factory in the United States. Anduril

Having a Ghost Shark in the United States will offer other testing opportunities, including when it comes to work to expand the UUV’s performance envelope and autonomous capabilities. Arnott stressed the continued need to build “trust” in the UUV’s ability to perform tasks autonomously, which is an increasingly common theme in such developments more generally. This, in turn, requires massive amounts of repetitive testing to help refine underlying software algorithms. Uncrewed undersea platforms add additional challenges given that they can more easily find themselves operating alone and out of contact with a human operator than drones in the air or on the ground.

“There’s just a lot of test points for us to hit. So, having the ability to have multiple Ghost Sharks, and particularly in different waters around the world, such that we can burn down those test points and just grow our trust and the customer’s trust by testing and ‘show me, don’t tell me,’ is kind of a really big part of why we’ve done this” and brought the UUV to the United States, Arnott explained.

While much remains to be learned about Ghost Shark and its capabilities, a picture is emerging of a highly adaptable design that could find itself tasked with a wide variety of missions in the future. With what happens beneath the waves emerging as an especially critical area of future warfare, this is also an arena where Anduril may face increasing competition.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

Joseph Trevithick

Deputy Editor

Joseph has been a member of The War Zone team since early 2017. Prior to that, he was an Associate Editor at War Is Boring, and his byline has appeared in other publications, including Small Arms Review, Small Arms Defense Journal, Reuters, We Are the Mighty, and Task & Purpose.

12. Sabotage Confirmed At Norwegian Air Base

Sabotage Confirmed At Norwegian Air Base

A cut cable at the Norwegian airfield was announced amid fears of sabotage at military bases and concerning drone activity in Germany.

Thomas Newdick

Updated on Aug 23, 2024 7:23 PM EDT

10 minute read

twz.com · by Thomas Newdick

Norway has revealed that one of its most strategic air bases has been the target of sabotage. The announcement comes as other European NATO air bases — namely in Germany — report incidents, one of which remains unexplained, as well as troubling drone activity over critical infrastructure. These incidents come amid increasing warnings about nefarious Russian activity on the continent, part of an apparent wave of ‘hybrid warfare’ as the conflict in Ukraine further stokes East-West tensions.

Reports emerged today from The Barents Observer that a critical communications cable associated with Evenes Air Station, in northern Norway, had been severed. The incident occurred in April and was reported to the police, but has only now been announced, as state prosecutors investigate what happened.

The precise function of the cable has not been disclosed, but reports describe it as being “part of the air base’s critical infrastructure,” and that it was cut outside the airfield’s perimeter. The Norwegian Police have confirmed that it was severed in a deliberate action but that, so far, no one has been charged, and no suspects have been identified at this point.

Suspected sabotage against Air Force Base in Northern Norway. It was an intentional and calculated action, the Norwegian Police says about the damage to the cable that belongs to the Evenes Air Station https://t.co/UGdDPG5ED1

— The Barents Observer (@BarentsNews) August 23, 2024

Located north of the Arctic Circle, Evenes Air Station is critical to the defense of Norway and NATO’s Northern Front. It is one of two Royal Norwegian Air Force (RNoAF) bases hosting permanent F-35A stealth fighter units and it is also receiving the service’s fleet of P-8A maritime patrol aircraft.

In addition to its flying squadrons, Evenes is home to other important military units, including ones responsible for air defense (with NASAMS surface-to-air missiles), and elements of the Norwegian Cyber Defense Force and the Norwegian Armed Forces Logistics Organization.

F-35As from 332 Squadron of the Royal Norwegian Air Force (RNoAF). Norwegian Armed Forces Onar Digernes Aase / Forsvaret

Norway has seen other suspicious incidents in the past, notably the cutting of a vital undersea cable connecting Svalbard to mainland Norway in 2022. Before then, in 2018, the Norwegian Intelligence Service (NIS) disclosed three separate instances where Russian aircraft had flown mock attack profiles against a secretive radar station in the northern part of the country. The year before that, the NIS blamed Russian jamming for disruptions in cell phone and GPS service in the region, though it said this was a byproduct of an exercise and not a deliberate attack.

Meanwhile, in Germany this month, authorities were faced with two possible acts of sabotage at different air bases, one of which later proved to be a false alarm.

First, Wahn Barracks, the military section of Cologne Bonn Airport, in the west of the country, was sealed off on August 14 amid concerns about potential sabotage against the local water supply.

The alarm was raised after a guard at the base found a hole in a fence near the base’s water processing plant. Authorities told personnel at the base — 4,300 soldiers and 1,200 civilian employees — not to drink the tap water. A search was made of the base, but no trespassers were found.

A police car stands in front of the entrance to the air force barracks at Wahn after they were cordoned off, on August 14, 2024. Photo by Roberto Pfeil/picture alliance via Getty Images picture alliance

“The water supply was interrupted as the drinking-water system showed unusual values,” the German Armed Forces’ Territorial Command said in a press release.

After an investigation, the German Ministry of Defense stated that there was no evidence that this had taken place, with test results showing that the water was not contaminated.

Wahn Barracks serves the military part of Cologne’s airport, which is home to the German Armed Forces’ Executive Transport Wing, operating VIP aircraft as well as the German Air Force’s refueling tankers and medical evacuation transports.

An Airbus A350 VIP transport of the German Armed Forces’ Executive Transport Wing, or Flugbereitschaft BMVg, based at Cologne Bonn Airport. Bundeswehr/Tobias Koch Tobias Koch

Today, NATO announced that it had lowered the security level at Geilenkirchen Air Base, also in the west of the country, after the facility’s state of alert had been raised overnight. This was in response to what the German Ministry of Defense described as “intelligence information indicating a potential threat.”

“All non-mission essential staff have been sent home as a precautionary measure,” the base said in a statement on the social media platform X. “The safety of our staff is our top priority. Operations continue as planned.”

Roughly, 24 hours later, in another post on X, NATO said: “The security level at NATO air base Geilenkirchen has returned to Bravo. The temporary rise to Charlie was a precautionary measure to minimize potential risk to our organization and personnel. All scheduled operations are proceeding as planned.”

🚨We raised the security level at NATO Airbase Geilenkirchen based on intelligence information indicating potential threat. All non-mission essential staff have been sent home as a precautionary measure. The safety of our staff is our top priority. Operations continue as planned.

— NATO AWACS (@NATOAWACS) August 22, 2024

NATO’s security level Charlie implies that “an incident has occurred, or intelligence has been received indicating that some form of terrorist action against NATO organizations or personnel is highly likely.”

While NATO hasn’t said what exactly the nature of the threat was, it was reportedly sufficient to force the resident NATO E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) fleet to function “with minimal staffing as a precautionary measure while operations continued as planned.”

Geilenkirchen is the main operating base for NATO’s AWACS fleet, a multinational force that plays a hugely important role in the alliance’s air operations, providing airborne early warning, command and control, and battle management capability in Europe and elsewhere.

E-3A AWACS aircraft at Geilenkirchen in February 2022. Photo by Marius Becker/picture alliance via Getty Images picture alliance

The same installation had also seen the security level raised last week, in response to reports of an attempted trespassing incident at the base together with the possible sabotage of the water supply at Wahn Barracks. A full sweep was made of the premises at Geilenkirchen; again, no trespassers were found.

However, there is certainly a precedent for planned attacks directed against military bases in Germany, specifically.

In April, two German-Russian nationals were arrested in Germany on suspicion of plotting sabotage attacks, including on U.S. military facilities in the country. One of those individuals was accused of making plans to carry out bomb and arson attacks on military facilities and had allegedly taken photos and videos of military transports and equipment.

The supposed targets of the pair included the U.S. Army’s Grafenwoehr base in the southern state of Bavaria, where Ukrainian soldiers are trained to use U.S.-supplied M1 Abrams tanks.

A U.S. Army M1A1 Abrams tank, photographed with mine roller fitted, at Grafenwöhr, Bavaria, in July 2023. Photo by Matthias Merz/picture alliance via Getty Images picture alliance

Elsewhere in Germany, there have been reports of recent unexplained drone activity in the north of the country, including over an industrial park in Brunsbüttel, northwest of Hamburg, home to a major floating liquid natural gas (LNG) terminal.

Prosecutors in Germany have said they expect the drone flights are related to “espionage activity for sabotage purposes” and also cite “repeated” drone flights over “critical infrastructure.”

Drone flights over the area have been observed since August 8, with reports that the craft have been hard to track due to their high speeds —reportedly around 60 miles per hour — and their approach from the sea. Critical infrastructure and very high security military bases in the U.S. are experiencing a growing number similarly mysterious intrusions, a troubling reality The War Zone has led reporting on.

The German military is providing radar data to police investigating suspicious drone flights over an industrial park in Brunsbüttel in northern Germany, according to a spokesperson for the country's territorial command.https://t.co/a8R2mVohqz

— DW Politics (@dw_politics) August 23, 2024

At this point, there is nothing to connect the sabotage of a cable at Evenes and the so-far mysterious incident that led to an alert at Geilenkirchen to the Kremlin, let alone the reported drone activity in northern Germany.

However, this all comes as NATO increasingly warns of the risk of an expanding campaign of sabotage, including cyberattacks, across Europe, a new wave of hybrid warfare masterminded by Russia.

In June, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg described what the alliance identified as “a surge of sabotage, cyber-attacks, instrumentalized migration, and other hostile actions by Russia.”

Stoltenberg further pointed to the need for “increased intelligence exchange, enhanced protection of critical infrastructure, including undersea and in cyberspace, and further restrictions on Russian intelligence operatives,” while at the same time stating that Russia’s campaign would not deter NATO from supporting Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, left speaks to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg before the first plenary session at the European Political Community meeting at Blenheim Palace in Woodstock, England, Thursday, July 18, 2024. AP Photo/Kin Cheung, Pool Kin Cheung

“Virtually every ally was seized with this intensification of Russia’s hybrid attacks,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said after a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Prague last month. “We know what they’re up to, and we will respond both individually and collectively as necessary.”

In the last few months, there has been a spike in reported incidents of this kind, suspected to be connected to Russia, if not orchestrated directly by Moscow. As well as Germany and Norway, these incidents have been reported in other NATO countries including the Czech Republic, Poland, and the United Kingdom.

In July, reported intelligence concerns about possible sabotage attacks by Russian-backed actors saw U.S. military bases across Europe placed on a heightened state of alert, “for the first time in a decade,” according to CNN.

For Russia, a campaign of this kind could be attractive for several reasons.

On the one hand, as Moscow becomes increasingly desperate to try and stem support among NATO countries for arming Ukraine — with weapons that are now, albeit to a limited extent, being used on its own territory — it is driven to ever bolder efforts to try and undermine this.

Maxar closeup satellite imagery of the Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, in Moscow. The GRU is widely considered to be the main mastermind behind the hybrid warfare campaign in Europe. Satellite image (c) 2020 Maxar Technologies DigitalGlobe/ScapeWare3d

Hybrid warfare offers a relatively reduced-risk and low-cost solution and, provided it achieves the desired results in terms of disruption and fear, has the potential to undermine support for Ukraine among the wider European populace.

Using proxies, including among the Russian diaspora in Europe, as well as criminal gangs, provides a layer of plausible deniability, making it especially hard to pin any given act of sabotage on Moscow directly.

Again, at this stage, Russia’s role in the suspected sabotage incidents in Germany and Norway remains unconfirmed, but there’s no doubt that NATO is increasingly alert to the prospect of these kinds of attacks, orchestrated by Moscow, becoming much more common in Europe.

Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com

Thomas Newdick

Staff Writer

Thomas is a defense writer and editor with over 20 years of experience covering military aerospace topics and conflicts. He’s written a number of books, edited many more, and has contributed to many of the world’s leading aviation publications. Before joining The War Zone in 2020, he was the editor of AirForces Monthly.

13. Fuel Supplies To Russian Troops, Crimea Strangled By Destruction Of Ship

Photos and graphics at the link: https://www.twz.com/news-features/fuel-supplies-to-russian-troops-crimea-strangled-by-destruction-of-ship?utm

Fuel Supplies To Russian Troops, Crimea Strangled By Destruction Of Ship

The Conro Trader was the last of three vessels that ferry large quantities of fuel across the Kerch Strait.

Howard Altman

Posted on Aug 23, 2024 6:10 PM EDT

16 minute read

twz.com · by Howard Altman

The destruction of the ship full of fuel tank train cars at a port in the Kerch Strait yesterday will hamper Russia’s ability to supply troops and the Crimean peninsula with fuel and lubricants, according to the Ukrainian Navy and the popular Crimean Wind Telegram channel. As we reported yesterday, the Conro Trader, a Russian Roll On Roll Off (RORO) vessel with a reported 30 fuel tank cars aboard, erupted in a ball of flames at the Port of Kavkaz.

The Ukrainian Navy on Friday took credit for that attack, which was suspected to have been carried out by a converted Neptune missile.

“We can confirm the information that this target was destroyed by the [Ukrainian] Navy,” spokesman Captain Dmytro Pletenchuk said Friday, according to Ukrainian Pravda. “This ferry is one of the most important chains of Russian military logistics for supplying the occupation forces, primarily with fuel and lubricants, but it also transported weapons, of course. Therefore, this is a legitimate target. And, accordingly, this should reduce the potential of our enemy’s capabilities in those locations where they are actively engaged in hostilities.”

“The ferry sank, Plentenchuck added. “The work of this part of the port is blocked. They still have one more platform to load wagons onto the ferry. But there are no ferries. This is the problem. No wonder the locals in the occupied Ukrainian Crimea immediately reacted with mass visits to petrol stations.”

Plentenchuk’s explanation of the target’s value lends credence to the claims that Ukraine used one of its prized Neptune missiles to strike the ship.

❗️The Ukrainian Armed Forces have officially confirmed the destruction of a Russian ferry in the port of "Kavkaz" in the Russian Krasnodar Territory

The spokesman for the Ukrainian Navy, Dmitry Pletenchuk, reported that this ferry was one of the most important links in the chain… pic.twitter.com/9CFB7S3BKn

— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) August 23, 2024

Crimean Wind said the attack on the ferry is a sign for residents to stock up on fuel or find alternative energy sources ahead of the coming winter.

The Conro Trader was the last of three vessels ferrying fuel to the peninsula, Crimean Wind noted.

“The ferry Avangard was hit on May 30 and was seriously damaged,” Crimean Wind said. “The ship’s starboard side was practically torn apart. Now Avangard is under repair, when it will return to service is unknown.”

The Ukrainian Armed Forces “damaged the Slavyanin on July 23. The ferry is currently awaiting repairs and is located in the Sea of Azov,” Crimean Wind explained.

The Conro Trader “sank after an attack on August 22 in the port of Kavkaz, paralyzing the work of the Kerch ferry crossing for an indefinite period,” the Telegram channel stated. “Fuel is not being delivered to Crimea via the Kerch Bridge by rail, as the structures are weakened after the explosion on the bridge and the burning freight train. There are also concerns that the train carrying fuel could be hit by a missile. Therefore, our advice, Crimeans, remains the same: stock up on fuel. Or switch to electric transport.”

The Crimean Wind explains the situation with fuel delivery to Crimea after yesterday's strike on the Conro Trader ferry. According to their information, all three existing tankers are no longer operational, while fuel transportation across the bridge has not been carried out… pic.twitter.com/zU9qzuunNZ

— WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated) August 23, 2024

New satellite imagery shows the extent of the damage at the port, including the destroyed Conro Trader and smaller ships there that could have been damaged. Part of the rail line leading to the water was also damaged. In addition, nearby vehicles also appear to be burned.

#Satellite imagery by @planet from August 23, available to Schemes (@cxemu), shows the destroyed ferry and several small vessels nearby that could also have been damaged by the strike on the #Kavkaz port in the Krasnodar Territory of the Russian Federation. pic.twitter.com/A9liA4MYe0

— Kyrylo Ovsianyi (@KOvsianyi) August 23, 2024

In another Ukrainian attack on Russia’s energy infrastructure, a fire at a Russian oil facility in Proletarsk, Rostov Oblast continues to burn for a sixth day after being hit by Ukrainian drones on Aug. 18. There are growing concerns that it could spread to the oil depot’s kerosene tanks. That would make the conflagration even harder to battle.

Russian media claims the facility, about 250 miles from the front lines, was again by a Ukrainian drone on Friday.

The drone struck at 5 a.m. local time, the Russian SHOT news outlet said on Telegram Friday. “There were no casualties,” SHOT said. “Presumably, the Ukrainian Armed Forces are trying to spread the flames to the kerosene tanks, which could significantly increase the area of the fire. At the moment, the fire has not reached the kerosene tanks. There has been no official information about the incident.”

The War Zone cannot independently verify that claim.

🔥 The fire has reached the kerosene tanks in Proletarsk, according to local channels.

❗️They are standing next to each other. If one explodes, then all the others will fly into the air and there will be a powerful explosion that can simply sweep away the entire oil depot. pic.twitter.com/5oBz4FHXNR

— MAKS 24 🇺🇦👀 (@Maks_NAFO_FELLA) August 23, 2024

Meanwhile, the area outside the oil depot has caught fire, with local authorities saying arson is to blame.

“Reeds have caught fire over a decent area,” the Rostov Main Telegram channel said. “The fire has already reached private houses and several of them have burned down. There are 40 firefighters and 12 units of equipment on the scene.”

“A fire in Proletarsk, Rostov Region, where residential buildings, dry grass and reeds are burning, has been assigned a higher level of complexity, the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Emergency Situations reported,” according to TASS.

There are reports that "the whole of Chepayeva Street" in Proletarsk is ablaze. One end of the street is close to the electrified main rail line. This is about 5 km from the burning fuel depot. Authorities say the two fires are not connect, and arson is suspected. pic.twitter.com/cz9ayg4vYW

— Euan MacDonald (@Euan_MacDonald) August 23, 2024

⚡️The fire from the Proletarsk oil depot in the 🇷🇺Rostov region spread to the city, – Russian media.

A whole street with houses is on fire, it is reported that already 6 houses have burned down pic.twitter.com/2CM64KFobS

— 🪖MilitaryNewsUA🇺🇦 (@front_ukrainian) August 23, 2024

A dynamic map of the 18-day-old Kursk invasion posted on Twitter shows how Ukrainian forces have advanced from an initial incursion to a full-fledged invasion now involving nearly 10,000 Ukrainian troops. It shows the fluctuations in the front lines of this fight. with Ukrainian forces spreading their footprint in larger swaths of the Kursk.

However, the map’s designer cautioned that it does not show who controls the territory, just where the fighting has raged.

“Frontline movements should be viewed as an approximation rather than an exact depiction,” said the @TarmoFella Twitter handle. “The numbers hovering over the map represent the approximate soldier numbers. The map does not indicate the level of control over individual zones, but the extent/limit of advances – and is based on reports from soldiers and civilians in the area.”

An advisor to the governor of Kursk Oblast is urging residents of Rysk to evacuate. The town is about 12 miles northwest of the most current known advance of Ukrainian troops in the region. The key E38 highway runs through the middle of it.

“Fellow countrymen, don’t wait until the last minute, like Sudzha, Korenevo Glushkovo. Your life and the lives of your relatives are more valuable than the life of a dog,” Roman Alekhine urged on Telegram. “By delaying the decision to leave, you are putting not only yourself at risk, but also those who will later risk their lives to evacuate you. And they also have families. I think that today it would be better to evacuate from Rylsk, while it is possible and safe to do so.”

So far, more than 133,000 residents of Kursk have evacuated, according to Gov. Alexei Smirnov.

Russia on Friday again claimed that Ukraine tried to attack the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant (KNPP) with a drone and repeated its call for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to investigate, according to Russian media. The plant is located in Kurchatov, about 15 miles from the front lines.

This is the second such accusation in as many days and the IAEA executive director said on Thursday that he will personally visit the site next week.

“A Ukrainian kamikaze drone has been discovered near the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant’s spent nuclear fuel storage facility,” the official Russian TASS news agency said on Telegram, citing a law enforcement source. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told the news outlet that “the Kyiv regime’s attempt to attack the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant with a kamikaze drone is an act of nuclear terrorism.”

TASS posted a photo it claimed shows “a downed Ukrainian drone near the KNPP.” In addition to the drone, TASS posted photos of munitions it claims were found near the plant as well. Both the drone and the munitions are relatively intact. While it is possible that a Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance team could have gotten close enough to the plant to launch such a drone, the motive remains unclear.

A drone claimed to have been found near the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant. (TASS)A munition is said to have been found near the drone. (TASS)Russian officials claim this munition was also found near the drone. (TASS)

The Russian Defense Ministry did not specifically address the claim, but said on Telegram that “over the past night, an attempt by the Kyiv regime to carry out a terrorist attack using an aircraft-type UAV against targets on the territory of the Russian Federation was thwarted.”

In addition, “four Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles were destroyed by air defense systems on duty over the territory of the Belgorod region and three over the territory of the Kursk region.

The IAEA said it will investigate claims made by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday that Ukraine tried to attack KNPP. At a meeting with cabinet officials Thursday to discuss the situation in Kursk, Putin charged Ukraine with trying to strike the plant but did not say how. The IAEA said Putin later told them Ukraine tried to attack with a drone.

IAEA “has been informed by the Russian Federation today that the remains of a drone were found within the territory of the Kursk Nuclear Power Plan,” the nuclear watchdog organization said in a statement.

“The drone fragments were reported to have been located roughly 100 meters from the plant’s spent fuel nuclear storage facility, said IAEA, adding that it was told the drone was suppressed in the early morning of 22 August.”

IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said he will “personally assess the situation at the site during his visit next week.”

“Military activity in the vicinity of a nuclear power plant is a serious risk to nuclear safety and security. My visit to KNPP next week will provide us with timely access to independently assess the situation,” Grossi said.

Meanwhile, KNPP “is operating in normal mode, radiation levels are at natural levels, Rosenergoatom reported,” according to the official Russian RIA Novosti news organization.

A former high-ranking Ukrainian officer with direct knowledge of the operation told us it was unlikely that Kyiv would target the plant.

“I strongly believe that Ukrainians are not attacking KNPP,” the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss operational details. “It is Russian propaganda and manipulation with the strategic aim to undermine and discredit international support for Ukraine.”

However, another source with direct knowledge suggested that Ukraine could be attempting to destroy the plant’s transmission lines or transformers and switching lines.

“Ukraine is trying to make ordinary citizens pay a price for Putin’s war of ambition,” said the second source, also speaking on condition of anonymity. “They have been generally spared thus far, but Ukraine is turning up the thermostat to erode domestic consensus on Putin’s ability to keep them safe and secure from Ukrainian and Western/NATO weapons.

Russian President Putin: Last night the enemy(Ukraine) attempted to strike Nuclear Power Plant in Kursk. pic.twitter.com/1ap40YkmMX

— War Updates 🇵🇸 (@Shezich786) August 22, 2024

In addition to claiming Ukraine tried to attack the KNPP, Putin also addressed the failures that allowed Ukraine to invade Kursk.

“These are problems that lie in the area of responsibility of law enforcement agencies.he said during a cabinet meeting. “This is a separate topic. I hope that, as was reported today, interaction between local and regional authorities, the government, and law enforcement agencies has been established, and this will also play a positive role in achieving the goals that we have here. I will not repeat them, they are absolutely obvious.”

Putin additionally heard from the governors of Belgorod, Bryansk and Kursk oblasts, who have also been under Ukrainian attack, mostly from artillery and drones.

Russian regions under attack by Ukraine are forming civilian volunteer militias called Territorial Defense Regiments (TDRs) to better cope with those attacks.

Belgorod Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov told Putin that so far, there are about 6,000 people in his TDR.

”The situation in the Belgorod region continues to be difficult,” he told Putin, adding that “19 civilians have been injured over the past week.”

“Damage to agricultural enterprises in the Belgorod region from attacks by the Ukrainian Armed Forces is estimated at around 3 billion rubles ($33 million),” he added.

Bryansk Gov. Aleksandr Bogomaz said that the TDR in his region is being led by an Airborne Forces major general. A reported Ukrainian attempt to fight into Bryansk was thwarted, he added.

“The situation at the site of the clash with the Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance group has been stabilized,” he said.

Beyond the loss of territory, Russia is preparing to allocate about $30 million to deal with the border situation in Kursk, Belgorod and Bryansk Oblasts. About a third of that is earmarked to directly assist residents. Putin also supported a measure to give residents leaving Kursk a $1,600 payment.

JUSTIN IN ⚡

Ukrainian troops having some fun in Russian administration building in Kursk region, drinking vodka with a photo of Putin on the desk. #RussiaUkraineWar #Ukraine

#Russiapic.twitter.com/cJqDS3NadJ

— Hira Afridi (@HiraAfridi_) August 23, 2024

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Ukraine Friday as part of an ongoing diplomatic effort by Kyiv “to engage non-Western nations in potential settlement talks in the war with Russia,” reported.

Modi’s trip is “the highest-profile wartime visit of a leader of a nation with a neutral stance on the conflict,” the publication reported.

Ukrainian officials have said that they do not see a mediating role for India, but they portrayed Mr. Modi’s visit as a welcome show of support for their country during the war. The visit is the first by an Indian leader since Ukraine gained independence in 1991, according to The Times.

Modi also visited a memorial to Ukrainian children killed during this war.

Today in Kyiv, Prime Minister @NarendraModi and I honored the memory of the children whose lives were taken by Russian aggression.

Children in every country deserve to live in safety. We must make this possible. pic.twitter.com/gKdjqcL5iz

— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) August 23, 2024

⚡ Indian PM Modi arrived in Kyiv for the first time in the history of Ukraine-India bilateral relations.

📹: Ukrzaliznytsia / Instagram pic.twitter.com/N1lBzOy06P

— UNITED24 Media (@United24media) August 23, 2024

While the Pentagon supports Ukraine’s use of some U.S.-donated weapons in Kursk, U.S.-produced Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) short-range ballistic missiles are still prohibited from being fired into Russia, a Pentagon spokesperson told us.

“In May, we gave Ukraine permission to use U.S.-provided munitions with the exception of ATACMS, to defend themselves against Russian troops north of the border and that is what Ukraine has said they are doing, the spokesperson told us. “Ukraine may only use long-range missiles provided by the United States inside its own territory. That continues to be our policy, which has not changed in the wake of Ukraine’s military operations in Kursk.”

On Thursday, Pentagon Deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh said Ukraine can use U.S. weapons in Kursk.

“Our policy does allow for Ukraine to conduct counterfires to defend itself from Russian attacks coming over that border region,” Pentagon Deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters on Thursday. “And that border region does include Kursk. It does include Sumy, and so they are defending themselves from Russian attacks within that region.”

Singh did not specify what weapons and was not asked if the U.S. still prohibits the use of ATACMS.

The Pentagon is still trying to assess the nature of the Kursk invasion, how far Ukraine will try to go and how long it may stay.

“So when it comes to Kursk, we have an understanding from what President Zelensky laid out that they want to create a buffer zone,” Singh said. “We are still working with Ukraine on how that fits into their strategic objectives on the battlefield itself. When we feel confident that we have a better understanding of how that all knits together.”

Ukraine has used some of its best troops and equipment in Kursk. Singh said the Pentagon is unsure how that will affect Kyiv’s defense of its east, which is facing tremendous pressure from advancing Russian troops.

“It remains to be seen how Kursk impacts the east,” she said. “That’s something we’re still trying to get a better understanding from the Ukrainians on the long-term goals in that area, and also understanding how that fits into their strategic operations.”

Pentagon confirms that Ukraine has been given authorization to use US weapons in Russia's Kursk region. pic.twitter.com/QSGP1tQgWa

— KyivPost (@KyivPost) August 23, 2024

During a visit to Sumy Oblast with his top general on Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said his forces captured one more town in its invasion. He also said Ukraine will bolster the defense of two key towns in Donetsk Oblast.

Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi “reported on the operational situation in all areas of active operations, and in particular on the most difficult areas of the front,” Zelensky stated on Telegram. “He informed about the steps taken to strengthen the defense in the Toretsk and Pokrovsky directions. In certain areas of the Kursk region under the control of Ukraine, there is one more settlement, and we have replenishment of the exchange fund.”

Zelensky did name the new town that was captured.

The invasion has reduced the number of attacks Russia has launched on Sumy Oblast, the head of the Sumy Military Administration told Zelensky.

“There is a decrease in shelling with barrel weapons and a decrease in civilian casualties,” said Volodymyr Artiukh.

Sumy abuts Kursk and serves as a staging area for the invasion.

“Special attention was given to the coordination between the military, police, and the State Emergency Service in the border area, particularly in organizing humanitarian convoys to designated areas of the Kursk region,” Zelensky added.

I visited the border area of the Sumy region and held a meeting with Commander-in-Chief Syrskyi and the Head of the Sumy Regional Military Administration.

The Commander-in-Chief reported on the operational situation across all active combat zones, with a particular focus on the… pic.twitter.com/GvaCEAUBBj

— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) August 22, 2024

Russia claims it recaptured the town of Nechaev in Kursk, the Russian Vorposte Telegram channel claimed, using a photo of Russian troops holding up the tricolor flag there as proof. About 11 miles northeast of Sudzha, the town is on the eastern edge of Ukraine’s advance.

Russian forces claim the "liberation" of the village of Nechaev in the Kursk region of the Ukrainian military.

Meanwhile behind them the ENTIRE settlement of Nechaev is burning to the ground. pic.twitter.com/E95tGWd0HA

— Thomas van Linge (@ThomasVLinge) August 22, 2024

A prominent Russian milblogger shared his ire over the lack of shelters that were constructed near the KNPP and elsewhere in Kursk before the invasion.

“The Kursk region authorities have announced the start of installing reinforced concrete shelters in Kursk and Zheleznogorsk,” the Kotenok Telegram channel said. “They are also planning to provide them to Kurchatov. That is, the city of nuclear scientists, where the nuclear power plant is located, has not yet been provided. How is that possible?”

That, Kotenok said sarcastically, “is the most obvious evidence of the sanity and effectiveness of not only the regional ‘elites,’ but also the entire vertical of power of the Russian Federation.”

Military correspondent Kotenok complains about the delay in the construction of defensive structures in Kursk and Kurchatov. He is shocked by the inefficiency of local managers, and the thoroughly corrupt system in which everything has to be done at the last moment. pic.twitter.com/JyTtyozPxI

— WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated) August 22, 2024

The Russian Air Force has dropped nearly 30 guided munitions on targets in Kursk, according to the Ukrainian Armed Forces General Staff.

“Russian troops are actively applying aviation in Kursk,” it said on Facebook. “At present, 17 aviation strikes are known, with the use of 27 controlled aviation bombs, on the settlements of the Russian Federation.”

Russian planes continue to bomb…. checks notes… RUSSIA. In Russia's Kursk region yesterday, Ukrainian military report 17 airstrikes on settlements using 27 guided aircraft bombs. Russian people finding out what its military does everyday in #Ukraine. https://t.co/zZKe0VRPkP

— Glasnost Gone (@GlasnostGone) August 22, 2024

Ukraine’s 95th Brigade compiled a video of drone operations against Russian forces in Kursk.

“I flay them on their land and they die and stink here and fertilize their lands, not ours,” said one soldier.

The 95th Brigade has just released this powerful video showcasing their operations in Kursk, I added English captions.

We’re currently working on repairing three of their vehicles, which are in the shop right now. You can directly support this unit by contributing to the… pic.twitter.com/ssyvhDeLOm

— Tonya Levchuk 🇺🇦🇺🇸 (@TonyaLevchuk) August 22, 2024

Russia has issued arrest warrants for three more journalists who filed reports in Kursk.

The FSB “has initiated and investigated criminal cases…against the American journalist Nick Peyton Walsh and Ukrainian correspondents Borovik Olesi Nikolaevna and Butsko Diana Vladimirovna, who illegally crossed the State border of the Russian Federation and conducted videotapes in the area of the Russian Federation. Sudzha of the Kursk region,” the FSB said in a statement.

The FSB previously opened a criminal case against Italian journalists Simoni Trini and Stephanie Traini and Stephanie Battistini “for illegally crossing the State Border of the Russian Federation on the territory of the Kursk region,” according to FSB.

The journalists face up to five years in prison.

“In the near future, they will be put on the international wanted list,” the FSB stated.

Paton Walsh, CNN’s chief international security correspondent, reported from the now-Ukrainian held town of Sudzha last week.

CNN did not respond to a request for comment.

Russia is charging CNN's @npwcnn, @dianabutsko, and Olesya Borovik with illegally crossing the border while reporting on Ukraine's incursion into Kursk region. The FSB says it will put an international warrant out for their arrest. https://t.co/IMvhCP8hG5 pic.twitter.com/CfOqgfehNe

— max seddon (@maxseddon) August 22, 2024

Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence Directorate (GUR) hacked into several Russian television broadcasts, inserting video from the Kursk invasion and forcing those stations to temporarily go off the air.

Several Russian TV stations were forced to temporarily close down broadcasting today as Ukraine's Military Intelligence (HUR) cyber forces injected a dose of reality into their regular stream of propaganda. pic.twitter.com/3K5PKCQqkO

— KyivPost (@KyivPost) August 22, 2024

So many residents of the Russian town of Irkutsk have been killed in the war that there is now a crowd-funded effort to buy body bags, according to a local Telegram channel.

“Money for bags to evacuate corpses from the front line is being collected in the Irkutsk region,” said People of Baikal, citing a closed chat of the wives of three mobilized troops.

The chat owner wrote that she was “appealing for help, not for judgment.” according to People of Baikal. “She explained that the money for bags was being asked for by the military, who were ‘lifting bodies.’”

“We need a large number of pathological bags for evacuations! It will take a long time to wait for them to be provided. When leaving for evacuation, they may take the norm, but in reality it will turn out that there are more than the norm,” she wrote in the chat.

1/ So many Russian soldiers have been killed in the Irkutsk region that the local authorities have run out of money to transport them back to their relatives. Local people are now having to crowd-fund for body bags and the transportation of corpses. ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/Uzfjwsenog

— ChrisO_wiki (@ChrisO_wiki) August 22, 2024

Meanwhile, in Ukraine, the fighting remains fierce in the east as Russian troops continue to approach the key cities of Pokrovsk and Toretsk. The video below shows Russian first-person view (FPV) drone attacks on a Ukrainian high-ground position near Toretsk.

Sparta using their FPV bomber to take apart Ukrainian positions on a slag heap hill.

Wonder if this is the hill by Toretsk or a different one.

I am sure the map autists will find it quick. pic.twitter.com/4AYQVwnOYe

— Fennec_Radar (@RadarFennec) August 21, 2024

That’s it for now.

Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com

Howard Altman

Senior Staff Writer

Howard is a Senior Staff Writer for The War Zone, and a former Senior Managing Editor for Military Times. Prior to this, he covered military affairs for the Tampa Bay Times as a Senior Writer. Howard’s work has appeared in various publications including Yahoo News, RealClearDefense, and Air Force Times.

14. Captain Geary Letter to The SOFX Audience | Brad Geary

Captain Geary Letter to The SOFX Audience | Brad Geary

sofx.com · by Editor Staff · August 25, 2024

Last week, we received a letter to the editor from Captain Brad Geary, regarding the article I wrote the week prior concerning a recent Shawn Ryan Show podcast Appearance. The first article is available here: https://www.sofx.com/active-duty-navy-seal-captain-alleges-investigation-steering-and-mishandling-on-shawn-ryan-show-sam-havelock-the-sofx-report/ -Sam Havelock, Founder, SOFX.

Captain Geary Letter to The SOFX Audience | Brad Geary

Thank you for your recent article within The SOFX Report. My lawyer, and former Marine Judge Advocate, Jason Wareham has reviewed this letter. We ask you and the readership of The SOFX Report to consider additional observations about the circumstances I talked about on the Shawn Ryan Show. All the observations included in this letter have been publicly disseminated by government officials, including a United States Congressman. These are our opinions based on the facts as we know them.

After Hell Week concluded, Kyle Mullen was examined by not less than three separate Naval Medical Physicians. His vital signs were stable. Kyle did not have an elevated temperature and his Oxygen saturation at the conclusion of Hell Week was 98%. Kyle was conversational and did not complain of anything other than knee pain, which is a common ailment SEAL candidates report after the arduous week of Hell Week training. Kyle Mullen walked out of the candidate medical examination area on his own. One of the examining physicians conducted a final check of all candidates before departing and saw Kyle relaxing comfortably on his bed, reclining, and listening to music. He was of sound mind and coherent in multiple conversations.

Several hours after routine post-hell week medical checks were complete, Kyle’s physiological situation began to decompensate and show signs of stress. All candidates remained under routine post hell week surveillance. The US Navy watch stander responsible for monitoring the students offered to call 9-11 multiple times. Kyle refused each time. Contrary to the widely reported claim that Kyle Mullen was denied medical care, the reverse is true and a matter of the official record and investigation outputs: Kyle Mullen refused medical treatment, multiple times. Eventually, ignoring Kyle’s refusal, 9-11 was called. Paramedics arrived and began treating Kyle in earnest. Kyle was transported to a civilian emergency room where despite the best attempts of all medical professionals including Civilian Emergency Medicine Physicians, he was unable to stabilize and tragically passed away.

The Bureau of Naval Medicine (BUMED) is the foremost authority on Navy & Marine Corps medicine, medical practice and standards of care. BUMED conducted an independent review of the case and concluded all three Naval physicians met the standard of medical care expected of them as professionals. There was no medical malpractice. Beyond the Naval medical physicians, all Emergency Medical Technicians and Paramedics involved in this case performed as expected and maintain their full licenses and accreditations.

As SOFX covered in the article, Kyle’s heart was found to be significantly larger than it should have been, but it’s important to note it had been internally restructured as well. The use of Performance Enhancing Drugs (PED) has been clinically associated with heart malformation and PED abuse. After Kyle’s death, our Senior Medical Officer examined Kyle’s initial physical examination to enter the Navy. Kyle Mullen’s military medical record specifically identified gynecomastia as a pre-existing condition. Gynecomastia is a well-known side effect of long-term steroid use. Finally, with regards to additional unprescribed and controlled substances beyond the PEDs found among Kyle’s belongings, one of which was Sildenafil, the generic version of Viagra. The Food & Drug Administration label for Sildenafil/Viagra does not recommend taking it for patients with heart issues, as it can cause sudden cardiac arrest.

Beyond misinformation previously reported by other media outlets, a team of prosecuting attorneys, the Regional Legal Services Office (RLSO) reviewed the thousands of pages of investigations and determined there was no evidence of a crime by me or my Instructor Cadre, and there was no evidence to suggest we ever stepped outside the limits of curriculum execution.

Despite these legal and medical findings, we continue to be punished by US Navy processes.

Doctors and leaders cannot read minds, nor should they be expected to. There are several reasons why a candidate who just completed Hell Week would conceal their true level of suffering and difficulty, most notably the fear of being held back from starting Phase 2 of BUD/S. Add to that the possibility of being dropped from training entirely if Naval Medical Professionals reconsidered Kyle’s fitness for duty given known heart abnormalities, the incentive becomes stronger. Now finally add in the fact that one is currently in possession of unprescribed controlled dangerous substances, which is a one-way ticket to a career-ending other than honorable discharge from the Navy… What Hell Week Graduate / SEAL candidate in their right mind would invite closer medical scrutiny and a battery of blood and cardiovascular diagnostic testing that will come with it? Common sense should prevail here and that is what I am asking for on the part of the Navy and the public. The facts of the situation speak for themselves.

When someone does not disclose their full clinical picture, especially while conducting high-risk training, they can and should be held personally responsible. Beyond all the politics and conjecture, the fact remains: Kyle Mullen downplayed his symptoms and was in personal possession of substances that directly and negatively impacted his ability to survive the world’s most grueling military course of instruction. No naval leader, medical professional nor SEAL Instructor can protect people from themselves when they make poor decisions like that.

In closing, the facts and evidence were available within hours. Since then, the process has been pure punishment for a frontier of military professionals who have both dedicated and risked their entire lives in the service of a Nation. We don’t deserve this persecution. We didn’t dedicate a life to fighting this nation’s enemies to sit back and not fight for the truth. As the previous Commanding Officer of Naval Special Warfare Basic Training Command, I am the one who needs to stand up for the truth regarding the Kyle Mullen tragedy and the people I led, rather than allow the reputation of our deeply dedicated training cadre, Naval medical professional staff, and my reputation as committed professionals to be impaired.

The truth is evident for anyone with common sense enough to process the nuances. Thank you for affording me the opportunity to provide observations on your original article.

All the best,

Brad Geary, Captain (SEAL), USN

sofx.com · by Editor Staff · August 25, 2024

15. Reliant on Starlink, Army eager for more SATCOM constellation options

Reliant on Starlink, Army eager for more SATCOM constellation options

c4isrnet.com · by Courtney Albon · August 21, 2024

The Army is leaning heavily on SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network for advanced command and control, but service officials say they want to keep their options open as new commercial megaconstellations materialize.

Mark Kitz, the Army’s program executive officer for tactical command, control and communications, said Wednesday that the importance of proliferated low Earth orbit satellite networks was on display at the service’s most recent Project Convergence Capstone event, where the Army experiments with multi-domain connectivity concepts.

“I don’t think you could take 10 steps without tripping over a Starshield terminal,” Kitz said at AFCEA’s TechNet conference in Augusta, Georgia. “I would say the Army is very committed to pLEO and Starshield.”

Starshield is SpaceX’s military business unit, which provides access to the company’s Starlink constellation, a fleet of more than 6,000 satellites in LEO, about 1,200 miles above Earth’s surface. The growing network of spacecraft provides internet service for private consumers as well as militaries around the world.

The company has expanded its military space footprint in recent years, providing launch services through its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets and receiving its first military satellite production contract in 2021 from the Space Development Agency.

The Ukrainian military has relied heavily on Starlink in its war with Russia, and last year the U.S. Space Force awarded the company a contract for the satellite service. Starshield is also building a classified constellation of hundreds of spy satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office, Reuters reported earlier this year.

While Starlink is the dominant player providing space-based communications services, several other companies have plans to join them. Amazon is designing a 3,000-satellite network called Project Kuiper, with its first operational spacecraft slated to launch late this year. U.K.-based OneWeb and Luxembourg’s Intelsat are also developing large SATCOM constellations with slightly different market focuses than SpaceX.

Speaking with Kitz at TechNet, Director of the Army’s Network Cross-Functional Team Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis said that as these constellations come online, the Army wants to ensure its units have access to multiple connectivity options.

“What we’re really looking for is that diversification of transport, and that is one of the tools we’re looking to give commanders,” Ellis said.

One way the Army is looking to give commanders access to more satellite services is through its Next-Generation Tactical Terminal. The program is designing a capability to leverage constellations based in multiple orbits and frequency bands through a single terminal by building an agnostic radio frequency receiver.

“We want to get out of bringing a new antenna every time we want to change providers,” Kitz said. “If a unit deploys and they want to leverage a Ka-band Kuiper, they have that RF front end. If they want to be leveraging Starshield, we swap modems and we go.”

About Courtney Albon

Courtney Albon is C4ISRNET’s space and emerging technology reporter. She has covered the U.S. military since 2012, with a focus on the Air Force and Space Force. She has reported on some of the Defense Department’s most significant acquisition, budget and policy challenges.

16. Japan scrambles jets after China aircraft 'violates' airspace: Ministry

Japan scrambles jets after China aircraft 'violates' airspace: Ministry

26 Aug 2024 06:05PM

(Updated: 26 Aug 2024 06:16PM)

channelnewsasia.com

Japan scrambles jets after China aircraft 'violates' airspace: Ministry

An F-2 fighter jet takes part in a live fire exercise conducted by the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force (JGSDF) at East Fuji Maneuver Area in Gotemba on on May 28, 2022. (File photo: AFP/Pool/Tomohiro Ohsumi)

26 Aug 2024 06:05PM (Updated: 26 Aug 2024 06:16PM)

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TOKYO: Japan scrambled fighter jets after a Chinese military aircraft "violated" Japanese airspace, the defence ministry said on Monday (Aug 26).

A Chinese aircraft was "confirmed to have violated the territorial airspace off the Danjo Islands in Nagasaki Prefecture", the ministry said in a statement, adding it had launched "fighter jets on an emergency basis".

The "Y-9 intelligence-gathering" aircraft entered Japanese airspace at 11.29am for around two minutes, the ministry added.

Local media including public broadcaster NHK said the incident marked the first incursion by the Chinese military's aircraft into Japan's airspace.

Japanese and Chinese vessels have previously been involved in tense incidents in disputed areas, in particular the Senkaku islands in the East China Sea, known by Beijing as the Diaoyus.

The remote chain of islands has fuelled diplomatic tensions and been the scene of confrontations between Japanese coastguard vessels and Chinese fishing boats.

Beijing has grown more assertive about its claim to the islands in recent years, with Tokyo reporting the presence of Chinese coast guard vessels, a naval ship and even a nuclear-powered submarine.

Source: AFP/rl

17. Yahya Sinwar ‘dressed as a woman’ hiding among Gaza's populace

I suppose the religious practice of covering women provides an opportunity for disguise of and deception by bad actors.

Yahya Sinwar ‘dressed as a woman’ hiding among Gaza's populace - Daily Express

Sinwar has reportedly been moving between hiding places in Gaza, fleeing from the IDF, and possibly hiding as a woman.

By JERUSALEM POST STAFFAUGUST 26, 2024 08:32Updated: AUGUST 26, 2024 08:38

Jerusalem Post

Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s most senior leader, has “dressed as a woman” while hiding among Gaza’s populace during his time outside of the terror group’s tunnel network in the Gaza Strip, the UK’s Daily Express reported on Sunday, citing Israeli intelligence sources.

The New York Times on Sunday, citing American and Israeli officials, reported that Sinwar may have left tunnels in which he had been hiding on a number of occasions over the last year.

Sinwar has reportedly been moving from place to place in the Gaza Strip to stay ahead of Israeli efforts to hunt him down.

Sinwar now Hamas's most senior leader

Since his appointment to the head of Hamas’s political bureau after the killing of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in late July, Sinwar has been the Islamist organization’s undisputed leader.

Additionally, the IDF targeted the head of Hamas’s military wing, Mohammad Deif, in July before later confirming the elimination of the terror leader.

Yahya Sinwar highlighted in a video published by the IDF on February 13, 2024 (credit: IDF SPOKESPERSON'S UNIT)The strike that killed Deif also eliminated Khan Yunis Brigade commander Rafa’a Salameh.

In August, speaking to the Israeli news outlet Maariv, one Israeli security source estimated that Sinwar was running out of places to hide as the Israeli offensive in the Strip cut away at Hamas’s leadership and continued to advance in Gaza.

Sinwar is believed to be relying on human couriers to receive information and send instructions, the New York Times noted.

“Sinwar is said to no longer trust electronic communications, fearing that the Israeli army will discover his location and kill him,” the Emirati Al-Ain reported earlier this month.

Further, the Arabic-language Asharq al-Awsat reported that Sinwar is insisting that his life be spared as part of ceasefire deal negotiations.

Jerusalem Post

18. Opinion Ukraine’s Kursk offensive isn’t just a raid. It’s upending assumptions. by Max Boot

Western restrictions. Fear of escalation.

Excerpts:

Because of those Western restrictions, Ukraine has been forced to rely on its own drones for strikes deep into Russian territory. In recent days, Ukrainian drones have targeted the Russian capital, a giant oil-storage facility in southern Russia and Russian air bases. The Moscow attack is purely symbolic, but deep strikes against Russian air bases and energy infrastructure demonstrably degrade Russian war-making capacity — the former by limiting the number of sorties that Russian bombers can fly, the latter by reducing the revenue the Russian energy sector can generate for the Kremlin.

These deep strikes would be more effective if the Ukrainians were able to employ U.S.-made ATACMS rockets. Biden should grant the Ukrainians the authority they seek, or else risk the possibility that Russia will simply continue to use its greater manpower and manufacturing base to slowly grind down Ukrainian defenses. Ukraine has scrambled assumptions with its push into Kursk. It’s time for fresh thinking at the White House too — and for the administration to finally deliver the strategy for victory in Ukraine that Congress mandated as part of its last aid package in April.

Opinion  Ukraine’s Kursk offensive isn’t just a raid. It’s upending assumptions.

Russia, stunned by the incursion, has been slow to respond, while Ukraine gains battlefield maneuverability.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/08/26/russia-ukraine-kursk-incursion/?utm_campaign=

A Ukrainian serviceman patrols in the town of Sudzha, in the Kursk region of Russia, on Aug. 16. (Yan Dobronosov/Reuters)

By Max Boot

August 26, 2024 at 6:15 a.m. EDT

When Ukrainian forces launched their surprise offensive into Russia’s Kursk region on Aug. 6, the widespread expectation was that this was merely a fast in-and-out operation, akin to the cavalry raids undertaken by both Confederate and Union forces behind enemy lines during the Civil War. More than two weeks later, it is now clear that Ukraine is attempting something much more ambitious: As Ukrainian leaders have explained, their forces are bent on occupying Russian territory indefinitely to create “a buffer zone” against Russian attacks and a bargaining chip for use in any future negotiations.

As new details have emerged about the operation, it has become apparent that Ukrainian forces skillfully gained the element of surprise — in part by not telling their Western allies what they were up to, and in part by blinding Russian sensors with electronic warfare devices. Battle-hardened Ukrainian troops then found it relatively easy to advance, at least at first, against ill-trained, ill-equipped, ill-motivated Russian conscripts. Some 10,000 Ukrainian troops are reportedly now in Kursk.

The Kremlin has been slowly moving more experienced troops to Kursk — many of them coming from less active parts of the front in southern Ukraine — and so the pace of the Ukrainian advance has slowed. But there is still no indication that the Russians have assembled a force large enough to retake their territory. U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal that the Russians would need at least 20,000 troops for the task; the New York Times, citing U.S. officials, suggested the actual figure might be 50,000 troops. Even the lower number would risk dangerously depleting front-line units in Ukraine’s Donetsk province.

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Aug. 19 that Ukrainian troops control 480 square miles of Russian territory — roughly the same amount of Ukrainian territory that Russian forces seized between January and July of this year. The Ukrainians have also captured several hundred Russian prisoners, who can be traded back in exchange for Ukrainian POWs. The exchanges, in fact, began on Saturday when Ukraine sent back to Russia 115 servicemen captured in Kursk in exchange for 115 Ukrainians held in Russia. And more Russian troops might be forced to surrender soon.

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The Ukrainians have used explosive drones and U.S.-made HIMARS rocket systems to damage or destroy the bridges over the Seym River that would enable Russian troops in the Kursk salient to escape. The Russians tried to erect pontoon bridges, but those did not last long under withering Ukrainian fire. Some 3,000 Russian troops are now in danger of being trapped by advancing Ukrainian troops.

The success of the Kursk offensive has offered a welcome boost to Ukrainian morale after nearly two years in which the front lines have barely budged, even as casualties have piled up on both sides.

Meanwhile, an analysis of Russian social media posts suggests that public attitudes toward Vladimir Putin have turned more negative as a result of the Ukrainian advance — the first invasion of Russian territory since World War II. Russian officials are predictably having a meltdown, with a Putin-aligned oligarch warning that Washington is risking a “global conflict,” and the FSB, the Russian security service, filing criminal charges against Western reporters who have entered the Kursk area with Ukrainian forces.

But like all military operations, this one is a gamble, and the Kursk offensive comes at a cost. While Ukrainian troops are advancing into Russia, they are falling back in their own territory. Russian troops are now within artillery range of Pokrovsk, an important Donetsk city that is a major transportation hub supplying Ukrainian troops throughout the eastern region. A Ukrainian commander in eastern Ukraine told the Financial Times that his troops are being forced to ration artillery shells for the first time since U.S. aid to Ukraine began flowing again in the spring because munitions have been diverted to Kursk.

Critics of the Kursk attack — including some Ukrainians — argue that Ukrainian troops would be better employed trying to hold back the Russian onslaught in Donetsk. Frederick W. Kagan, a senior fellow and director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute, told me he rejects those criticisms.

“It would definitely not have been the best use of Ukraine’s reserves simply to commit them to the defense of Pokrovsk,” Kagan wrote in an email. “The Russians have fully embraced positional warfare and are satisfied with making slow, gradual gains at exorbitant costs in manpower and equipment because they think that the Ukrainians will never be able to retake any territory they’ve seized. The Ukrainians cannot succeed by embracing positional warfare. They have to find ways to restore maneuver to the battlefield.”

Kagan argues that the Kursk attack could force Putin to either accept the occupation of his territory indefinitely or to move even more substantial resources from other sectors to Kursk. It could even lead Putin to devote scarce resources to fortifying more of the Russia-Ukraine border to prevent future incursions. Whichever course Putin chooses, Ukraine could benefit.

“I think that the path to success for Ukraine lies in continuing to innovate, to do the unexpected, and to seek ways of generating asymmetric effects, and Kursk is one such effort,” Kagan noted. “We should watch it, support it, and await the outcome before rushing to draw conclusions about it.”

Whatever happens in Kursk, the success the Ukrainians have so far enjoyed reveals that Russian red lines are not as menacing as President Joe Biden seems to imagine in setting sharp limitations on the use of U.S. weaponry against Russian territory. Far from going nuclear, Putin is trying to minimize the Ukrainian incursion by pretending it’s business as usual for the Kremlin. “It shows the final hollowness of all the nuclear threats that have been used for years to limit aid to Ukraine,” Phillips P. Obrien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews, wrote last week on Substack.

Because of those Western restrictions, Ukraine has been forced to rely on its own drones for strikes deep into Russian territory. In recent days, Ukrainian drones have targeted the Russian capital, a giant oil-storage facility in southern Russia and Russian air bases. The Moscow attack is purely symbolic, but deep strikes against Russian air bases and energy infrastructure demonstrably degrade Russian war-making capacity — the former by limiting the number of sorties that Russian bombers can fly, the latter by reducing the revenue the Russian energy sector can generate for the Kremlin.

These deep strikes would be more effective if the Ukrainians were able to employ U.S.-made ATACMS rockets. Biden should grant the Ukrainians the authority they seek, or else risk the possibility that Russia will simply continue to use its greater manpower and manufacturing base to slowly grind down Ukrainian defenses. Ukraine has scrambled assumptions with its push into Kursk. It’s time for fresh thinking at the White House too — and for the administration to finally deliver the strategy for victory in Ukraine that Congress mandated as part of its last aid package in April.

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Opinion by Max Boot

Max Boot is a Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in biography, he is the author of the forthcoming “Reagan: His Life and Legend.” Twitter

19. How to Boil a Frog: The Dangers of Downsizing in the U.S. Military

Excerpt:

Conclusion

Where the U.S. military is today did not happen overnight, as evinced by the frog analogy, and will not remedy itself overnight, as even boiling water takes time to cool. There are steps that military leaders can take to address the current challenges, and questioning the standards applied to those looking to serve and those still serving should be reviewed to determine their effectiveness and if they are still applicable to the military requirements. If the current system is derived from World War II, and the focus of many of the policies is on physical performance, perhaps it’s time to consider standards that reflect a military that leverages advanced technology and concepts.

How to Boil a Frog: The Dangers of Downsizing in the U.S. Military - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Ryan Pallas · August 26, 2024

There’s a story about the dangers of slow, incremental change. The story says if you throw a frog in hot, boiling water, he’ll jump right out. The way to boil a frog is to start with room-temperature water, and then slowly increase the temperature one degree at a time. Unable to sense the incremental change, the frog doesn’t jump out of the water. The all-volunteer force, like the frog, didn’t meet its current challenges through rapid change — it happened slowly, one degree at a time. For many senior leaders, the change is unrecognized since it happened over decades, spanning their own careers. Unfortunately, for the frog and the U.S. military, it’s an unpleasant end to the story if the water is left to boil. The U.S. military, in pursuit of providing a qualitatively superior force within the constraints of a given budget since 1945, has incrementally increased the demand for qualitative standards that are now mathematically impossible to achieve for military recruiters.

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Incremental Change

There are two dominant incremental changes that occurred since the advent of the all-volunteer force in 1973. First, the U.S. military end strength has decreased since World War II. Second, because of this continual decline in end strength, senior military leaders have focused on increasing qualitative standards. While initially beneficial and commonsense, the focus on quality produces long-term challenges in the ability to find candidates able to meet recruiting and retention standards. For recruiting, this manifests in the increase in educational levels and physical prerequisites over time. This trend is also reflected within retention standards that tend to focus on increased physical fitness performance. The argument I am presenting seems counterintuitive, with many readers asking, “Isn’t this a good thing?” In a way, it is a good thing. Senior leaders focus on standards to provide civilian leaders and lawmakers the highest quality force for a given budget. Senior military leaders can then communicate an increase in quality within the constraints of decreasing quantity. However, there are long-term problems when this approach is repeated.

First, the increase in the ability to meet standards reflects the U.S. military’s approach to personnel relying upon “youth and vigor” determined more by “physical ability” than “intelligence and technical expertise.” Second, and foremost among the negative effects of such an approach, when repeated over time, these successive increases in standards for new recruits become impossible to achieve. This results from a lack of historical context considering how those standards came to be and how often they increased, and a lack of consideration for how the achievement of those standards will be satisfied in the future. The result is an all-volunteer force with standards, specifically recruiting, that are out of step with the society from which it recruits.

As a result of archival research, I noticed a trend that plays out in the following sequence. The sequence begins with the National Defense Authorization Act. This law provides each military service an authorized end strength. Since 1945, the end strengths for the military services have decreased, requiring the services to downsize. While downsizing, military services focus on the ability for new recruits and retained servicemembers to meet quality standards, which makes sense. The result is an increase in recruiting requirements while seeking to retain the highest performers for that given fiscal year or service chief tenure. The focus on quality results in the services increasing requirements for service. At that moment in time, the increase in performance seems like a win for the services.

However, such changes do not occur in isolation. While the military services have downsized since 1945, external conditions also changed. In this case, family models and societal demographics have shifted, along with a decrease in the proportion of American youth who are both qualified for and have a propensity toward military service. Such shifts occurred over the same time period the military downsized and increased qualitative standards, creating a challenging recruiting environment for the military services.

With performance standards increasing, and societal preference and qualifications decreasing, the result is that the increase in standards and requirements over time have created an increasingly challenging environment for military recruiters. Senior military leaders face the undesirable task of admitting they cannot achieve the standards set by their predecessors with many factors outside of their control. The services also face the reality that by increasing performance requirements, they are competing to acquire and retain some of the brightest minds in the country who have options outside of military service. By increasing standards, the services have unintentionally narrowed the pool of available candidates from which they can recruit.

The result is that senior leaders maintain previously established standards despite evidence that attaining recruiting goals with the existing requirements costs vast resources in terms of time, money, and personnel to satisfy. Even when services seek to revisit previous requirements — a recent example being the U.S. Navy — the services face an outcry of “lowering the standard” across social media platforms, painting an inaccurate picture. The outcries neither consider how the services arrived at the current requirements nor accept that the U.S. military, like any business, must both appeal to future employees and also have entrance standards that allow them to enter military service.

Impossible Standards to Satisfy

In a 2016 interview with Brad Carson, then serving as acting undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, he identified that 16 million contacts (people contacted about military service) were needed to generate 60,000 contracts (people signed up to enter military service) for the U.S. Army. Carson provides a grim scenario given today’s recruiting environment. Previous arguments at War on the Rocks illustrate the ratio has likely worsened with a civilian population that has a lower propensity for military service, is less eligible, and is less likely to recommend military service. But using Carson’s 2016 ratio of contacts to enlistments welcomes the warranted criticism that those numbers and statistics are out of date, given they’re almost a decade old.

Using fiscal year 2023 accession requirements by service (rounding down), the Department of Defense has to recruit approximately 90,000 individuals annually. Examining the age demographics for 18- to 24-year-olds in the United States reveals approximately 31 million Americans from which the military has historically recruited. Of that demographic, approximately 23 percent, or 7 million, qualify for military service. If 7 million men and women are qualified for military service, using the most recent Joint Advertising, Market Research, and Studies data and assuming a best case scenario that 11 percent have a propensity for military service, the optimistic estimate provides approximately 770,000 men and women from which the services can recruit. If one in 30 applicants are “clean as a whistle,” the Department of Defense is left with slightly less than 26,000 individuals that can be contracted without a waiver for military service, with an annual requirement three times that. In reality, the number the Department of Defense is left with is likely lower given not everyone with a propensity for military service is likely qualified, and not everyone qualified will have a propensity for military service. If one were to use a larger percentage, specifically the 31 percent who responded “probably not” to military service, that still produces a shortfall, only providing 72,000 individuals, or two-thirds of the annual requirement. If the 1996 Department of Defense recruiter survey is any indication of how challenging the present moment is, one can only assume the quality of life for recruiters has continued to degrade since 1996, especially when considering current recruiting challenges.

Recommendations

There are three approaches the Department of Defense can take to address the current problems. Regardless of how the department proceeds, it should apply the following two assumptions: Available personnel, like budgetary resources, will only decline, and competition with the civilian sector will only intensify.

The first option, and the most realistic, is to allow the services to independently navigate the current issues by relying upon waivers along with adjusting performance standards and requirements where they see fit. This begs the question: If everything requires a waiver, is it really a standard? The benefit here is each individual service can tailor its approach to its own needs. The drawback is the lack of uniformity when trying to implement large-scale organizational change across the Department of Defense. Also, services are likely to generate “band-aid” solutions to navigate the present moment without solving the long-term issues that will continue to plague the U.S. military if left unaddressed.

The second option, which is not as likely as the first but still feasible, is to have the Department of Defense lead a revision of the current entrance and performance requirements across the services. The department can serve as the focal point, allowing the service chiefs and secretaries to provide how the current standards and requirements were established and, more importantly, how the current requirements directly relate to the occupations and requirements set for each service. While this is a more comprehensive option that can pool greater resources and look to provide long-term solutions, it requires the time, effort, and focus of senior leaders while marginalizing one of the myriad requirements within the Pentagon from a senior leader’s calendar.

Lastly, the long-shot option, is to establish a new Gates Commission. Some may balk at this suggestion, but there is good reason to consider this given the current recruiting environment.

First, the Gates Commission focused on the economic considerations for military employment and maintaining the volunteer force. Fifty years later, much has changed — available age demographics, incentives, generational preferences — all while maintaining an industrial-era personnel model. If anything, the pension system is one aspect of the U.S. military personnel system that was updated, leaving the remainder of the legacy system in place that is “fundamentally the same one put into place after World War II.” By only updating the pension system, the military personnel system lost the “delayed ‘carrot’ that induces personnel to invest in military-specific job skills, to accept onerous or hazardous assignments, and generally exert work effort early in their careers.”

The current system can only limp along so long before ultimately succumbing to the slowly rising temperature of the water, as does the frog. A commission, more so than the other options, offers the most holistic and timely reform, given the current challenges facing recruiting coupled with global events across multiple theaters requiring military forces. While not directly related to recruiting, a commission can also review the global force requirements the military services are levied against to prevent overstretching a declining force too thin. This prevents the U.S. military from becoming “a hollow shell, over-deployed,” a warning provided by Secretary of State George Marshall in 1948 and echoed by Senator John McCain in the 1990s. While recruiting may be the topic of this article, it is important to remember how a shortage in recruiting will impact retention —specifically, how fewer men and women will be required to meet constant or growing domestic and global requirements.

Resistance

Suggesting a review and revision of current requirements and standards will likely be met by opposition from leaders across the Department of Defense and veterans. The most likely rebuttal is that the U.S. military will not lower its standards. This response illustrates a failure to appreciate historic context. Reactions such as this result as a failure to understand the starting point for a given standard and the current requirement. Faulty conclusions are drawn, promoting the narrative that the U.S. military is lowering standards — echoing the old saw of “That’s not how it was in my day.” While it may result in a decrease or lowering of a standard, it is important to see just how far those requirements have increased over decades, not just over the course of the career of the individual offering the criticism.

Second, some may argue to maintain the status quo with the argument that warfare is still inherently physical. While one cannot deny the physical requirements of combat, that argument fails to identify the number of occupations directly related to combat in proportion to supporting occupations. Also, that argument must consider the growing role of technical occupations within the U.S. military that require less physical ability and more cognitive capability. While certain occupations within the military will remain physically intensive, specifically combat arms, the argument that warfare is inherently physical ignores the outsized growth of technology, specifically since the 1990s, in both national and military strategies. The argument also fails to acknowledge that performance standards can, and should, vary by occupation. Currently, the system makes “no distinction between an infantry soldier, whose youth can be an extremely desirable asset, and a computer network troubleshooter, whose skills generally continue to grow with experience.” This article is not arguing that physically intensive occupations can’t have additional requirements, only what the baseline requirement for military service should be.

Conclusion

Where the U.S. military is today did not happen overnight, as evinced by the frog analogy, and will not remedy itself overnight, as even boiling water takes time to cool. There are steps that military leaders can take to address the current challenges, and questioning the standards applied to those looking to serve and those still serving should be reviewed to determine their effectiveness and if they are still applicable to the military requirements. If the current system is derived from World War II, and the focus of many of the policies is on physical performance, perhaps it’s time to consider standards that reflect a military that leverages advanced technology and concepts.

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Ryan Pallas is an active-duty Marine Corps officer who has completed tours at Miramar, CA; Yuma, AZ; Kaneohe Bay, HI; and Quantico, VA. He currently serves as a Commandant of the Marine Corps strategist fellow in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University in Arlington, VA, where he is studying the all-volunteer force.

The views are those of the author and do not reflect those of the Marine Corps, Department of Defense, or any other government agency.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Ryan Pallas · August 26, 2024

20. The New Bioweapons

Excerpts:

It will not be easy to reduce the risks that come from these new technologies, and some governance measures risk slowing down legitimate research. Policymakers must be thoughtful as they contemplate restrictions. But smart oversight is essential. The reality is that for all their upsides, AI and bioengineering carry immense perils, and societies and governments must honestly assess the present and future benefits of these developments against their potential dangers.

Officials, however, should not despair. The world, after all, has avoided existential catastrophe before. The Cold War may not provide a template for how to address today’s challenges, but its history is still proof that society can contain dangerous inventions. Then, as now, the world faced an innovation, developed by human ingenuity, that imperiled civilization. Then, as now, states could not eliminate the new technology. But governments succeeded in preventing the worst, thanks to the development of concepts and systems that kept the risk to a minimum. “For progress, there is no cure,” wrote John von Neumann, a mathematician and physicist who helped guide U.S. nuclear policy. “Any attempt to find automatically safe channels for the present explosive variety of progress must lead to frustration. The only safety possible is relative, and it lies in an intelligent exercise of day-to-day judgment.”

A defining challenge for the twenty-first century will be whether the world can survive the emergence of these newer technologies, which promise to so transform civilization. As with nuclear energy, they are products of human research. As with nuclear energy, there is no way to wind them back. But society can prevent the worst by wisely exercising day-to-day judgment. “To ask in advance for a complete recipe would be unreasonable,” von Neumann said. “We can specify only the human qualities required: patience, flexibility, intelligence.”

The New Bioweapons

How Synthetic Biology Could Destabilize the World

By Roger Brent, T. Greg McKelvey, Jr., and Jason Matheny

September/October 2024

Published on August 20, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Roger Brent, T. Greg McKelvey, Jr., and Jason Matheny · August 20, 2024

In cybersecurity, a penetration test is a simulated attack on a computer system’s defenses that uses the tools and techniques an adversary would employ. Such tests are used by all kinds of governments and companies. Banks, for example, regularly hire computer experts to break into their systems and transfer money to unauthorized accounts, often by phishing for login credentials from employees. After the testers succeed, they present their findings to the institutions and make recommendations about how to improve security.

At the end of the last decade and the beginning of this one, human society itself was subject to a kind of penetration test: COVID-19. The virus, an unthinking adversary, probed the world’s ability to defend against new pathogens. And by the end of the test, it was clear that humanity had failed. COVID-19 went everywhere, from remote Antarctic research stations to isolated Amazonian tribes. It raged through nursing homes and aircraft carriers. As it spread, it leveled the vulnerable and the powerful—frontline workers and heads of state alike. The draconian lockdowns imposed by autocracies and the miraculous vaccines developed by democracies slowed, but did not halt, the virus’s spread. By the end of 2022, three of every four Americans had been infected at least once. In the six weeks after China ended its “zero COVID” restrictions in December, over one billion of the country’s people were infected. The primary reason for the pandemic’s relatively modest death toll was not that society had controlled the disease. It was the fact that viral infection proved to be only modestly lethal. In the end, COVID-19 mostly burned itself out.

Humanity’s failure against COVID-19 is sobering, because the world is facing a growing number of biological threats. Some of them, such as avian flu, come from nature. But plenty come from scientific advances. Over the past 60 years, researchers have developed sophisticated understandings of both molecular and human biology, allowing for the development of remarkably deadly and effective pathogens. They have figured out how to create viruses that can evade immunity. They have learned how to evolve existing viruses to spread more easily through the air, and how to engineer viruses to make them more deadly. It remains unclear whether COVID-19 arose from such activities or entered the human population via interaction with wildlife. Either way, it is clear that biological technology, now boosted by artificial intelligence, has made it simpler than ever to produce diseases.

Should a human-made or human-improved pathogen escape or be released from a lab, the consequences could be catastrophic. Some synthetic pathogens might be capable of killing many more people and causing much more economic devastation than the novel coronavirus did. In a worst-case scenario, the worldwide death toll might exceed that of the Black Death, which killed one of every three people in Europe.

Averting such a disaster must be a priority for world leaders. It is a problem that is at least as complex as other grand challenges of the early Anthropocene, including mitigating and managing the threat of nuclear weapons and the planetary consequences of climate change. To handle this danger, states will need to start hardening their societies to protect against human-made pathogens. They will, for example, have to develop warning systems that can detect engineered diseases. They must learn how to surge the production of personal protective equipment and how to make it far more effective. They will need to cut the amount of time required to develop and distribute vaccines and antiviral drugs to days, instead of months. They will need to govern the technologies used to create and manipulate viruses. And they must do all this as fast as they can.

RISKY BUSINESS

For more than a century, most people have seen biology as a force for progress. By the early twenty-first century, vaccines had helped humanity eradicate smallpox and rinderpest, and nearly eradicate polio. Success has been piecemeal; many infectious diseases have no cure, and so the outright eradication of pathogens remains an exception, not the rule. But the advances have been undeniable. The qualified nature of humanity’s accomplishments is perhaps best exemplified by the HIV pandemic. For decades, HIV killed almost everyone it struck. It continues to infect millions of people each year. But thanks to scientific innovation, the world now has cocktails of drugs that block viral replication, which have turned the disease from a death sentence into a manageable medical condition. This sort of medical progress depends on distinct and loosely coordinated enterprises—each responding to different incentives—that deliver care, manage public health, and carry out scientific and medical research.

But progress can be a double-edged sword. If scientists’ growing understanding of microbiology has facilitated great advances in human health, it has also enabled attempts to undermine it. During World War I, the Allies studied the use of bacterial weapons, and German military intelligence operatives used such pathogens to attack animals the Allies used for transport. They sickened horses and mules in France and Romania. In Norway, they attempted to infect reindeer used by the Sami to deliver weapons to Russian forces. German officers even managed to infect corrals and stables in the United States that were full of animals headed to Europe.

By the time World War II began, these initiatives had matured into weapons designed to kill humans. In Japanese-occupied Manchuria, the Japanese military officer Shiro Ishii had his forces preside over the dystopian Unit 731, in which they tested biological weapons on humans. They infected and killed thousands of prisoners with anthrax, typhoid, paratyphoid, glanders, dysentery, and the bubonic plague. During the final days of the war, Ishii proposed a full-on biological-warfare operation—titled Cherry Blossoms at Night—in which Japanese seaplanes would disperse bubonic-plague-infected fleas over major American West Coast cities. But the plan was vetoed by the chief of the army general staff. “If bacteriological warfare is conducted,” the chief noted, “it will grow from the dimension of war between Japan and America to an endless battle of humanity against bacteria.”

It is wrong to assume states and terrorists lack the will or the means to build biological weapons.

Such thinking did not stop other countries from researching and developing biological weapons. In the 1960s, the U.S. Department of Defense launched Project 112, which experimented with how to mass distribute offensive pathogens. To do so, the army dispersed spores in the tunnels of the New York City subway and bacteria in aerosols from boats in San Francisco Bay. It sprayed chemicals from army planes over thousands of square miles, from the Rockies to the Atlantic and from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. As U.S. officials saw it, these weapons were a kind of insurance policy against a Soviet nuclear attack: if Moscow hit the United States and neutralized Washington’s own nuclear arsenal, the United States could still devastate the Soviet Union by counterattacking with deadly pathogens. By the middle of the decade, the department committed to developing lethal and incapacitating biological weapons. As the 1960s drew to a close, government scientists were producing sizable quantities of deadly bacteria and toxins that were devised, in the words of the microbiologist Riley Housewright, to “confound diagnosis and frustrate treatment.”

These developments, however, terrified civilian researchers, who pushed back against Washington’s plans. They found a receptive audience in the White House. In 1969, U.S. President Richard Nixon decided to halt his country’s biological weapons program. He also called for an international treaty banning such initiatives. Outside experts bolstered his message. Shortly after Nixon’s announcement, Joshua Lederberg—a Nobel Prize–winning biologist—testified before Congress in support of a global ban. Biological weapons, he said, could become just as deadly as nuclear ones. But they would be easier to construct. Nuclear weaponry “has been monopolized by the great powers long enough to sustain a de facto balance of deterrence and build a security system based on nonproliferation,” Lederberg said. “Germ power will work just the other way.”

But Washington’s main adversary was not persuaded. In 1971, as the world haggled over a treaty, the Soviet Union released a weaponized strain of Variola major—the smallpox virus—on an island in the Aral Sea. It resulted in a smallpox outbreak in present-day Kazakhstan. The outbreak was contained through heroic efforts by Soviet public health officials, but those efforts succeeded only because of the affected region’s sparse population and because most Soviet citizens had been vaccinated and possessed some immunity.

Later that year, the Soviet Union and the United States agreed to a treaty banning biological weapons, called the Biological Weapons Convention. The UN General Assembly universally commended the agreement, and in 1972, it opened for signing in London, Moscow, and Washington. But the Soviets ultimately defied the agreement. In 1979, 68 people died in the city of Sverdlovsk—present-day Yekate­rinburg—after spores from a clandestine anthrax project were released. Moscow did not have any other clear-cut accidents, but the Soviets maintained a biological weapons program until their country fell apart—a program that, according to defectors, employed 60,000 people at its height. In 1991, U.S. and British representatives visited some of the program’s facilities, where they saw rows of vessels and bioreactors capable of producing thousands of liters of high-titer smallpox. Those vessels could then pump the virus through refrigerated pipes and into bomblets, which could, in turn, be loaded onto missiles.

A smallpox production facility, Pokrov, Russia, 1993

U.S. government

The Biological Weapons Convention had another problem: it did not constrain private groups and individuals from pursuing such weapons. In 1984, the Rajneesh religious movement, based in Oregon, contaminated salad bars with salmonella. (Its goal was to incapacitate opposition voters so that Rajneesh candidates could win a Wasco County election.) No one died, but hundreds of people became ill. In 1995, the apocalyptic Aum Shinrikyo group injured thousands of people in Tokyo with the chemical nerve agent sarin; it had previously attempted, without success, to make anthrax weapons. In 2001, anthrax attacks in the United States targeting journalists and two U.S. Senate offices—which the FBI believes were carried out by a lone American scientist—killed five people.

The relatively small scale of these incidents could be taken as evidence that terrorists and states might currently be too constrained, perhaps by technical difficulties or existing laws, to inflict mass biological damage. But this perspective is too optimistic. Instead, they show that current international agreements and public health measures cannot prevent such attacks. These incidents also demonstrate that it is wrong to assume states and terrorists lack the will or the means to build biological weapons. Some individuals and groups do face barriers—say, an inability to access the right labs or facilities. But thanks to relentless technological advances, those barriers are falling apart.

FOR BETTER AND FOR WORSE

In 2012, a group of scientists led by Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna published an article in Science, a premier academic journal. The article described an engineering system, called CRISPR-Cas9, which uses human-made chimeric RNA to edit genetic material. The invention added to an already formidable toolbox of molecular biological engineering, including what scientists call “classical recombinant DNA” (invented in the 1970s), the polymerase chain reaction (better known as PCR, and invented in the 1980s), and synthetic DNA (which also came into use in the 1980s). Together, these inventions have created an explosion of human ingenuity that powers scientific discovery and advances in medicine. In December 2023, for example, the FDA approved a complex CRISPR-based gene therapy as a cure for sickle cell anemia, a devastating illness that afflicts millions of people.

But owing to politics, economics, and the complex institutions through which biological progress reaches humans, it can take years before the newest technology’s upsides touch those in need. The CRISPR treatment for sickle cell anemia, for instance, is technically and medically complex, costly ($2.2 million per person), and time-intensive. It has therefore reached a very small share of patients. And while the world struggles to spread the benefits of these sophisticated new technologies, scientists continue to demonstrate that they can also easily cause damage. In 2018, one individual on a three-person team used recombinant DNA, PCR, and synthetic DNA to re-create horsepox, a close relative of smallpox. Another group used these tools, plus CRISPR, to engineer a different virus related to smallpox. Such research could easily be used to produce lethal toxins.

The risks are growing in part thanks to a second technological revolution: the rise of artificial intelligence. Large language models, such as those from ChatGPT and Claude, grow far more sophisticated and powerful with each new iteration. Today, the most recent versions are used every day by thousands of lab workers to accelerate their work, in part by providing a wealth of useful guidance on technical questions. In 2020, AI researchers created a system, AlphaFold, which effectively solved a Holy Grail problem in biology: predicting the three-dimensional structure of a protein from the sequence of its amino acids.

Generating pathogens is cheaper than defending against them.

But for would-be bioterrorists, these systems could ease the path to mayhem. The largest AI models appear to have been trained on the entirety of the life sciences’ published knowledge. Most of this knowledge was, of course, already available on the Internet, but no human could consume, process, and synthesize all of it. Present AI systems can also design new proteins (which enable the design of dangerous pathogens) and execute laboratory operations. Some computer scientists are even working to make automated systems that can carry out laboratory tasks. If these efforts succeed, a malevolent actor could create a deadly new pathogen by simply hijacking such automated facilities.

And it will be very difficult for authorities to stop them. Hackers have proven capable of breaking into exceedingly complex security systems, and the materials needed to generate new pathogens include reagents and equipment that are widely available. Regulators could try to target the dozens of suppliers who fill orders for key components. But there are ways around these suppliers, and closing them off could slow valuable biomedical research and development.

If bad actors do eventually produce and release a viral pathogen, it could infect vast swaths of the human population in far less time than it would take officials to detect and identify the threat and start fighting back. Generating pathogens, after all, is cheaper than defending against them. The capital costs of the facilities and materials needed to make a new disease are low, but responding to an epidemic of one involves a complex and staggeringly expensive set of components: expansive testing and detection networks, vast quantities of personal protective equipment, socially disruptive lockdowns, and an apparatus that can develop, manufacture, and distribute treatments and vaccines.

The thought of spending billions of dollars trying to stop another pandemic should be enough to deter states from weaponizing biology. Some governments, however, continue to pursue dangerous initiatives. In April 2024, the U.S. State Department assessed that North Korea and Russia have offensive biological weapons programs and that China and Iran are pursuing biological activities that could be weaponized. All are parties to the Biological Weapons Convention.

DETERRENCE BY DEFENSE

During the Cold War, the world’s nuclear powers avoided catastrophe in large part thanks to the concept of mutually assured destruction. Politicians recognized that a single nuclear attack might trigger a planet-ending retaliation—or, as U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev famously declared in 1985, “a nuclear war cannot be won, and must never be fought.” Nuclear states produced elaborate doctrines to govern their technology and deter weapons use. Governments struck a variety of international nonproliferation agreements that kept the number of countries with nuclear weapons to a minimum. And the Soviet Union and the United States created numerous systems—including treaties, command-and-control protocols, and hotlines—to diminish the chance that a misunderstanding would lead to a cataclysmic war.

But when it comes to biological weapons, the Cold War deterrence formula will not work. Mutually assured destruction relies on fear, something that was widespread in the nuclear era and is not as prevalent toward biological warfare. The current threat is dependent on a continuation of breakneck technological progress and on inventions without precedent, which makes it hard for people to fully grasp the risks. Unlike the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no biological attacks have been world-historical events that attract enduring attention.

Mutually assured destruction also depends on a state’s ability to identify the attacker. With nuclear weapons, doing so is easy enough. But states could release biological weapons and evade detection—and, therefore, retaliation. A government could secretly release a dangerous virus and blame it on any number of other states, or even on nonstate actors.

And nonstate actors really could release deadly pathogens, a fact that makes mutually assured destruction an even less useful check. No government wants to risk the annihilation of its country, but plenty of terrorists care little about survival, and they now have access to the materials, equipment, knowledge, and technical capability needed to make biological weapons. In 1969, Lederberg warned that the consequences of unchecked biological proliferation would be akin to making “hydrogen bombs available at the supermarket.” The world of 2024 is full of supermarkets, well stocked with bomb-making materials.

At a chicken farm where bird flu was found, Mitoyo, Japan, November 2020

Kyodo / Reuters

Because Cold War–style deterrence is hard to pull off, the present situation demands a different philosophy. Here, the path to deterrence is not in the capacity to retaliate. Instead, it is in a defense so strong that it makes biological attacks not worth conducting.

There is a historical template for how societies can make biological weapons unsuccessful: the end of major urban fires. For most of recorded history, the cities of the world were periodically consumed by massive conflagrations that razed their cores. But in the nineteenth century, the frequency of these fires decreased dramatically. This diminution was, in part, the product of developing better response systems, such as professional firefighting forces and fire hydrants. But mostly, the reduction was driven by mundane steps, including the introduction of less combustible building materials, the imposition of engineering standards and building codes, and requirements for liability insurance—which discouraged risky behavior. When states created sharper definitions of negligence, making it easier to launch civil suits for accidental fires, people became even more cautious.

Today’s authorities can take a page from this playbook. Governments built fire departments and hydrants to respond to urban fires. Now, they need to construct systems that can rapidly develop vaccines, antiviral drugs, and other medical interventions. Yet just as with urban fires, governments need to understand that rapid responses won’t be enough. The world could, and must, develop the ability to vaccinate its eight billion people within 100 days of an outbreak—faster than it took the United States to fully vaccinate 100 million people against COVID-19. Yet this would still not suffice for a pathogen that spread at the pace of the coronavirus’s Omicron variant.

In addition, policymakers must take steps akin to instituting better building codes—in other words, steps that make it harder for pathogens to spread. They can start by creating bigger stockpiles of personal protective equipment. Masks, gloves, and respirators are key to stopping virus transmission, and so officials should sign preparatory contracts for such wares. States should also subsidize their industrial bases so that they can surge production if needed. They should instruct manufacturers to redesign personal protective equipment to make it cheaper, more effective, and more comfortable. Governments can further augment this resilience by ensuring that people who work in essential services have especially prompt access to protective equipment. States should help furnish these sectors’ buildings with microbicidal far-UV-light purification systems and particulate filters. Combined, these measures would substantially reduce the risk that outbreaks grow into societally destabilizing events.

STEP BY STEP

There is a final way to reduce the risk of biological disasters, one that goes beyond plotting responses and defenses. It is for officials to better govern new technologies. And ultimately, it may be the only way to actually prevent a mass biological attack.

There are many tools that governments can use to regulate advances. Officials could, say, deny funding to or even outright ban particular experiments. They could require that people and facilities obtain licenses before carrying out certain kinds of work. They could be more thorough in overseeing future lab automation.

But officials should also shape the ecosystem that supports biological research and development. They should, for example, require that firms selling nucleic acids, strains, reagents, and other life-sciences equipment used to make biological agents adopt “know your customer” rules, which require that companies confirm their customers’ identities and the nature of their activities. They also ensure that goods are shipped only to known, legitimate sites. (Many governments have long forced financial institutions to follow know-your-customer rules, in order to prevent money from flowing into criminal networks.) In addition, policymakers should be able to better regulate conduct. Governments should devise new ways to detect prohibited biological activity so that law enforcement and intelligence agencies can head off attacks before they take place.

For all their upsides, AI and bioengineering carry immense perils.

Finally, starting today, states will need to craft their biodefense policies with AI in mind. Currently, before releasing large language models, companies invent and install various safeguards, such as “redlines” that users cannot cross. ChatGPT-4 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, for example, refuse to answer direct questions on how to evolve a virus to kill farm animals. But if users ask for technical guidance on how to engage in such directed evolution without using the word “kill,” these models will give good guidance. AI models therefore need additional safeguards against handing out dangerous information, and governments should help create them.

It will not be easy to reduce the risks that come from these new technologies, and some governance measures risk slowing down legitimate research. Policymakers must be thoughtful as they contemplate restrictions. But smart oversight is essential. The reality is that for all their upsides, AI and bioengineering carry immense perils, and societies and governments must honestly assess the present and future benefits of these developments against their potential dangers.

Officials, however, should not despair. The world, after all, has avoided existential catastrophe before. The Cold War may not provide a template for how to address today’s challenges, but its history is still proof that society can contain dangerous inventions. Then, as now, the world faced an innovation, developed by human ingenuity, that imperiled civilization. Then, as now, states could not eliminate the new technology. But governments succeeded in preventing the worst, thanks to the development of concepts and systems that kept the risk to a minimum. “For progress, there is no cure,” wrote John von Neumann, a mathematician and physicist who helped guide U.S. nuclear policy. “Any attempt to find automatically safe channels for the present explosive variety of progress must lead to frustration. The only safety possible is relative, and it lies in an intelligent exercise of day-to-day judgment.”

A defining challenge for the twenty-first century will be whether the world can survive the emergence of these newer technologies, which promise to so transform civilization. As with nuclear energy, they are products of human research. As with nuclear energy, there is no way to wind them back. But society can prevent the worst by wisely exercising day-to-day judgment. “To ask in advance for a complete recipe would be unreasonable,” von Neumann said. “We can specify only the human qualities required: patience, flexibility, intelligence.”

• ROGER BRENT is Professor of Basic Sciences at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center.
• T. GREG MCKELVEY, JR., is a senior physician policy researcher and an adviser to the Meselson Center and the Technology and Security Policy Center at the RAND Corporation.
• JASON MATHENY is President and CEO of the RAND Corporation.

Foreign Affairs · by Roger Brent, T. Greg McKelvey, Jr., and Jason Matheny · August 20, 2024

21. Biden’s lame-duck period gives him a chance to reshape American security

"Four bold moves." Some congressional assistance is required.

Excerpts:

First, the president needs to take care of our junior enlisted service members and assist our military in the battle for recruiting talent to man the force.

...

Second, the Pentagon needs to be funded for fiscal 2025, through its annual appropriation.

...

Third, the lame duck period after the election might be the only time to proverbially “put the band back together” one more time to pass another $100B emergency war supplemental to support both Ukraine and Israel.

...

Lastly, and maybe most importantly, is the debt ceiling. 

Biden’s lame-duck period gives him a chance to reshape American security - Breaking Defense

Before President Joe Biden exits, AEI's John Ferrari argues in this op ed that there are four bold moves he should make for his legacy and for the future of America's defense.

breakingdefense.com · by John Ferrari · August 23, 2024

President Biden salutes 171st Air Refueling Wing Mission Support Group Commander Col. Frank Shoaf, left, and Maj. Chris Bowser, Installation Deployment Officer, right, at the 171st Air Refueling Wing, April 17, 2024. (U.S. Air National Guard Photo by Senior Master Sgt. Shawn Monk)

As President Joe Biden prepares to step off the world’s stage, he has a unique opportunity to do four things that will benefit his legacy while at the same time sending a message to America’s adversaries that our best days are still in front of us.

With the passion of the election at full throttle, these tasks need to be accomplished in the lame duck period between election day and the winter break. However, much of the groundwork can and needs to be done beforehand.

First, the president needs to take care of our junior enlisted service members and assist our military in the battle for recruiting talent to man the force. Over the past four years, the military has struggled to recruit, dramatically impacting readiness. Additionally, the impact of inflation has disproportionately impacted those junior enlisted, the lowest paid members of the armed forces. .

To do this, Biden should publicly support, and advocate with Congress for, the House Armed Services Committee proposal to raise junior enlisted pay by about 19 percent. Currently, his administration “strongly opposes” this, almost surely due to the price tag and concerns from at OMB or the Pentagon. The President can and should overrule those who work for him, and support the pay raise in order to treat our military members correctly.

Second, the Pentagon needs to be funded for fiscal 2025, through its annual appropriation. The president made a deal with House Republicans last year in the Fiscal Responsibility Act to limit defense spending in FY25 to a 1 percent increase. This is below the current inflation rate and with ongoing wars, sends exactly the wrong message to our adversaries.

It’s time for Biden to publicly support and advocate for Congress to pass the FY25 defense appropriation at the funding levels proposed by the Senate Armed Services Committee, which is about $38B, or 4.4 percent above what the president requested. It is likely that his political staff will advise him to hold out for a similar increase for domestic programs, especially in an election year that is shaping up to be all about domestic issues. But the benefit of being an outgoing president is not being beholden to politics, and Biden would send a strong signal to our adversaries by advocating for more defense regardless of domestic spending.

Third, the lame duck period after the election might be the only time to proverbially “put the band back together” one more time to pass another $100B emergency war supplemental to support both Ukraine and Israel. This six-to-eight week lame duck period will have the same key congressional leaders that passed the last war supplemental several months ago; More importantly, reloading our depleting munitions stockpile will send a clear message to Russia and Iran that the US in this for the long term, and perhaps get them to back down sooner.

Lastly, and maybe most importantly, is the debt ceiling. This debate will come back to life in January, though, with extraordinary measures, the crisis will not become serious for several months. As his last grand gesture to the American public and the international community at-large, Biden should seek to postpone this debate by another year, giving the next president and Congress time to hammer out a compromise. This may be the most difficult task of the four, but sometimes bundling controversial issues together makes it an easier task.

Again, it’s an election year, and domestic issues are naturally at the forefront. But the president is first and foremost the Commander-in-Chief and the leader of the free world. This week, Biden passed the torch within his political party and is preparing to step off the world’s stage. However, until January 2025, he remains the only person in the world that can bend the arc of global security. These four steps, while politically fraught, will send a clear and compelling message and leave a lasting legacy.

Retired US Army Maj. Gen. John G. Ferrari is a senior nonresident fellow at AEI. Ferrari previously served as a director of program analysis and evaluation for the service.

breakingdefense.com · by John Ferrari · August 23, 2024

22. When it comes to military AI, there is no second place  by Adm. Gary Roughead

When it comes to military AI, there is no second place

militarytimes.com · by Adm. Gary Roughead, U.S. Navy (Retired) · August 24, 2024

When future military capabilities are discussed these days, artificial intelligence and how it will change the nature of warfare is at the top of the list.

But within the Pentagon and the services, AI ambition does not match current budgetary realities.

And while more money is rarely the answer to every Defense Department shortcoming, militaries are what they buy.

As a former Chief of Naval Operations and former member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who continues to participate in non-governmental dialogues in Asia, to include with China, I’ve followed China’s impressive military growth.

Chinese ships, aircraft, and technology are not as good as ours, but they are buying more and rapidly getting better. The dialogue agendas and discussions have also evolved, to include transformational technologies with AI top of mind. Unquestionably, as we move deeper into the AI modernization war, Beijing is buying in that space and doubling down.

Years ago, the Air Force and Navy began creating a new sixth-generation, AI-powered fighter jet to outpace the one China is developing.

That project subsequently split into two separate approaches — the F/A-XX for the Navy and the Next Generation Air Dominance System (NGAD) for the Air Force. Although one is launched from the land and one from the sea, they possess the same objective: to remain globally dominant in the air and to help the United States be the first nation to realize true AI-powered air warfare. The only way to do that is to create these two new AI warfighting systems.

But the Fiscal Responsibility Act that Congress passed last year has hamstrung the U.S. military budget. The Navy and the Air Force are now stuck. In March, the Navy delayed a full $1 billion of funding for its F/A-XX system. The Air Force forewarned that it, too, might soon need to make “tough decisions” about NGAD, including potentially ending the entire program.

That must not happen. China is already closing in on the United States’ militarily. Its new fighter system will be ready by 2035. If the U.S. does not advance fully, our air dominance will become jeopardized.

The AI race is on and shaping the future of warfare. The global military AI market is nearly $9 billion today and is expected to approach $25 billion by 2032. China and the malign countries in its circle want China to become the AI dominant player. Delaying or pausing America’s AI warfighting modernization initiatives like the F/A-XX and NGAD make that goal attainable.

Bold statements of commitment ring hollow when we re-phase or delay our transformational programs. Our deferred outcomes and lack of real urgency are pleasing to Beijing, which has set 2035 as the year China will complete its military modernization effort. The Pentagon, particularly the Air Force and Navy, must set their budgets to deliver these critical systems faster. Congress, in providing for the common defense, must enable these critical programs with funding needed to win the military AI race, because in warfare, there is no second place.

In many respects, China is already ahead. Beijing’s civil-military fusion approach is alive and well. The infrastructure, techniques, and processes that have made China the global manufacturing center of gravity also nurtures along rapid military delivery and improvement.

This is seen in the maritime domain. Between 2015 and 2020, China’s navy, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), eclipsed the size of America’s Navy, and the gap continues to widen.

The Office of Naval Intelligence has assessed that China’s shipbuilding capacity far exceeds that of the United States because of its significantly larger military and commercial shipbuilding industry. According to the Pentagon’s China power report, the PLAN grew by 30 ships last year, while the U.S. added just two. That trend will likely continue as we’ve reduced our submarine buys in 2025 and delays plague our other shipbuilding programs.

The U.S. Air Force isn’t faring much better. Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee in march, Navy Adm. John Aquilino, then the head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, assessed that “the world’s largest Navy [is] soon to be the world’s largest Air Force” and “the magnitude, scope, and scale of this security challenge cannot be understated.”

He’s right. China is producing 100 J-20 fighter aircraft annually, while the United States is turning out roughly 135 F-35s, with only 60 to 70 destined for our Air Force. As in shipbuilding, that’s a recipe for second place.

Beyond numbers, this is also about jobs, skills, and the myriad of companies that contribute to these extraordinary machines and the technology behind them. If we do not sustain American industry, we will lose it.

Gary Roughead is a former United States Navy officer who served as the 29th Chief of Naval Operations from 2007 to 2011. He previously served as Commander of the United States Fleet Forces Command from May 17 to September 29, 2007.

23. America Must Present an Alternative to China’s First BRI Project

Here is an excerpt from a paper I am presenting next month in Seoul.

The U.S., the ROK, and Japan face a number of common threats and the Spirit of Camp David and the Camp David Principles have helped drive trilateral cooperation to address them in an unprecedented manner. It is apparent that Korea and Japan have prioritized national security and national prosperity while pledging to manage the historical issues, at least at the moment, that have long hindered effective relations.

Yet these threats loom large for the three nations, both individually and collectively. These range from strategic competition with China, to multiple territorial disputes, to potential conflict in the South China Sea. One of the major obstacles to stable relations in the region is China’s malign activities from “wolf warrior diplomacy”[i] and “debt trap diplomacy”[ii] emanating from its One Belt One Road initiative[iii] (or as China now calls it the Belt and Road Initiative),[iv] to its three warfares[v] (psychological, legal, and media warfare) in support of Unrestricted Warfare.[vi] It is apparent that China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions directly and/or indirectly through proxies, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, while displacing democratic institutions. And the “axis of dictators”[vii] or the “Dark Quad”[viii] (China, Russia, Iran, and north Korea) are conducting political warfare to challenge the rules-based international order that like-minded democracies around the world seek to defend.

While the dilemmas posed by unrestricted and political warfare demand attention and a serious and superior political warfare response, there are three major dangers that are the most perilous threats both individually and collectively. These are a South China Sea conflict that includes an attack on the Philippines, an invasion of Taiwan, and war on the Korean peninsula.

Each of these threats alone is a serious danger to each nation. They become increasingly complex and even more dangerous if they occur sequentially. And the worst case is if they occur simultaneously and are coordinated among the actors, China and north Korea. 

The initiation of improved intelligence sharing, trilateral missile defense cooperation, and combined mutli-domain exercises provide the basic capabilities to deal with the complex threats. Most importantly sustained trilateral contingency and defense planning is the foundation to providing for mutual defense across the spectrum of conflict. It is imperative that the processes establish by the Camp David Summit are sustained and built upon.

America Must Present an Alternative to China’s First BRI Project

By Farrell Gregory

August 26, 2024

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/08/26/america_must_present_an_alternative_to_chinas_first_bri_project_1053986.html?mc_cid=d3ba7b8e4b&mc_eid=70bf478f36

The great power competition for tomorrow’s critical mineral supplies will play out in African ports and mines. Despite falling behind China in foreign investment, America has the opportunity to catch up and secure access to the resources that power next-generation military and commercial technologies. But to compete, we must understand China’s role as an alternative lender and developmental partner. Out of all African countries, Tanzania best exemplifies the potential of Chinese engagement as well as the danger that America and its allies could be shut out of an essential supply chain for critical minerals.

China and Tanzania have long enjoyed a close relationship since establishing relations in 1964. In 1970, the two countries began work on the TAZARA rail line. Funded largely by grants from the PRC, the expansive project stretched for over 1,000 miles to connect landlocked Zambia to coastal Tanzania.

The TAZARA railway also became an early test for Beijing’s now-familiar BRI formula. Using Chinese materials, overseen by Chinese firms, and in total employing over 50,000 Chinese workers, the railway offered an opportunity for the PRC to expand its construction industry and diplomatic footprint abroad. Upon its completion in 1975, the rail stood both as an example of successful cooperation between China and other developing countries and as a cornerstone of the burgeoning Sino-Tanzanian relationship. It also created a potential route for natural resource extraction. By linking northern Zambia with Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s largest city and main port, the TAZARA line could serve to transport copper, cobalt, and other critical minerals from the African interior. Today, the railway is in a state of disrepair, as Tanzania has long sought aid to modernize the line from China. But recently the PRC committed to spending up to $1 billion to modernize the rail line – an investment which could transform TAZARA into the lynchpin of Beijing’s African mineral supply chain.

Port investment is an equally important part of China’s growing critical mineral portfolio. Already, copper from Zambia, cobalt from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and rare minerals from the northern part of South Africa go through the port of Dar es Salaam to China. At once, this dynamic presents a challenge and opportunity for China. Given the vast quantity of resources flowing through Dar es Salaam, in addition to trade with other countries, the port is crowded and inefficient. But this need for modernization presented a chance for China to improve its raw material supply chain and solidify its presence in Tanzania.

In 2013 the opportunity presented itself. The Tanzanian government and China Merchant Holdings announced a $10 billion deal to redesign and modernize Bagamoyo port, which sits just north of Dar es Salaam. Close enough to the capital for trade to be easily directed and its security guaranteed by a ninety nine year lease to Chinese investors, the Bagamoyo port project would allow the PRC to alleviate its resource congestion issues and gain a foothold on the African continent.

But one year after the project began construction in 2015, then-President John Magufuli brought the enterprise to a halt after expressing concern that the deal limited Tanzania’s right to develop additional ports as well as China’s latitude to use the land as it saw fit under the terms of the ninety nine year lease. For the remainder of his term until his death in office in 2021, the project remained mired in stalled negotiations. His successor, Samia Suluhu Hassan, announced in 2021 that Tanzania and the Bagamoyo port project’s PRC-backed investors would reinitiate negotiations, which appear likely to succeed.

These two projects have the potential to solidify Chinese control of the supply chain for critical minerals extracted from central Africa – a pressing issue where America is falling behind. Already, Chinese companies own 80% of the cobalt output in the DRC, the source of an overwhelming majority of the world’s supply. Similarly, Chinese companies refine 90% of cobalt in the battery market. Already, China’s dominant position has enabled it to take the lead in 37 of 44 critical technologies. The competition for critical minerals will determine access to the materials that power commercial and military innovation. If America continues allowing China unchallenged control of the critical mineral supply chain, we cede our strategic technological edge.

The first step to challenging Chinese mineral dominance is to offer an alternative to Chinese investment in railway infrastructure. In September 2023, America and several partners initiated the Lobito Corridor project as part of G-7’s Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment. With $250 million in American financing to be provided by the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation and additional investment from EU countries, the Lobito Corridor would offer an alternative to the TAZARA line.

In two parts, the project would connect the southern DRC and northern Zambia to the Angolan port of Lobito. First, the investment will improve an existing 1,300km line that connects the DRC and Angola. Then, additional financing will create a new line that leads into Zambia.

The Lobito Corridor project is a meaningful first step towards offering an alternative to Chinese investment, but policymakers should be clear about the goals of future projects in Africa. America and its partners should aim to be an alternative investment option, not try to supplant China as the lone source of developmental financing. African countries should be able to freely choose between competing offers, rather than being trapped in a zero-sum game of alignment.

This also applies to America’s critical mineral grand strategy. It is not feasible to remove China entirely from the critical mineral supply chain, nor would it be desirable. Instead, the U.S. ought to learn from our decades of lacking infrastructure investment in Africa and present ourselves as a ready, willing, and reliable partner for development.

To do this, investment in projects like the Lobito Corridor will be necessary. Future investments in mining, transportation, and refinement should present compelling and competitive alternatives to the PRC. In particular, the executive branch, working together with Congress, should allocate additional resources and direct development finance institutions to specifically pursue critical mineral mining opportunities in Africa. To prepare for the possibility of being cut off from strategic materials, Congress should revitalize the National Defense Stockpile by appropriating additional funds, investing in recycling technology, and encouraging coordination with private mining and refinement companies.

Minerals mined today will power tomorrow’s advanced technology: robotics, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and more. No matter what America does, Chinese investments like TAZARA and Bagamoyo will be major parts of that supply chain for decades to come. But the U.S. doesn’t have to accept second place in the frontier technology race. By taking positive action, America and its allies can offer meaningful alternatives to secure critical minerals whose extraction benefits African states, legitimate purchasers, and American national security.

Farrell Gregory is a junior at Dickinson College studying Chinese and International Studies. He is a research assistant at the Yorktown Institute.

24. Russia May Risk the Use of Nerve Agents in Its War With Ukraine

Russia May Risk the Use of Nerve Agents in Its War With Ukraine

By Julian Spencer-Churchill

August 26, 2024

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/08/26/russia_may_risk_the_use_of_nerve_agents_in_its_war_with_ukraine_1053988.html?mc_cid=d3ba7b8e4b&mc_eid=70bf478f36

Frustration in the Kremlin over repeated Russian military failures in their prosecution of the war against Ukraine, is leading a desperate Moscow to explore ever more brutal strategies to undermine their adversary’s will to resist. Russian atrocities against Ukrainian non-combatants and prisoners of war, and mass deportations, are primarily the result of dehumanizing state propaganda, and the lack of moral restraint in the Russian soldiery and supervising officers. However, the artillery and missile bombardment of Ukrainian non-combatants, is a deliberate strategy by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s administration, like the threat of using nuclear weapons, to break the stalemate of the war, which is having a severe reputational impact on the Russian military’s ability to deter threats and assert its influence along its long border.

Moscow may be tempted to escalate its use of chemical weapons (CW) as part of its incremental exploration of winning tactics. In a significant escalation, Russia has been accused of using chloropicrin, a choking agent, against Ukrainian forces, with up to fifty soldiers treated. The accusations, first originating from the Tavria operational-strategic group commander in southeastern Ukraine, Ukrainian sources cite over 1,891 incidents of chemical weapons use as of May 3, 2024, with a sharp increase since December 2023. Although concrete evidence remains scarce due to the active conflict zones and information management policies, the use of chloropicrin, a chemical banned under the Chemical Weapons Convention for riot control, indicates a severe breach. The delivery systems used by Russia are under scrutiny, with allegations ranging from modified K-51 hand grenades to MLRS-launched rockets, highlighting a concerning advancement in chemical warfare tactics. Despite the lack of confirmed casualties specifically from chloropicrin, its use, often accompanied by reports of chlorine smells, raises alarms about Russia's potential violation of international norms and agreements. It is also aligned with Soviet use of these agents as Riot control agents in Georgia in 1991.

While some authors doubt whether chemical weapons have ever demonstrated effectiveness, when compared with well-targeted artillery or airstrikes, their area effects would provide a force multiplier to the current Russian tactic of indiscriminate bombardment. A surprise chemical attack against unprepared Ukrainian infantry in the defense, even on a small scale, would temporarily break the front, creating the conditions for an offensive breakthrough by Russian mechanized forces. Against Ukrainian logistics positions in depth, including airfields, command complexes, train depots, ports, and hospitals, especially in conjunction with explosive, incendiary white phosphorous and cluster munitions, would lead to extended evacuations of whole areas, and consequent disruption of supplies and Ukraine’s ability to maintain a continuous front. A sustained, broad-fronted and in-depth use of mixed (nerve and corrosive) agents, could lead to a catastrophic collapse of broad sectors of the Ukrainian front, perhaps even reversing the territorial gains around Khakiv and in Donetsk.

By the end of the First World War, chemical shells constituted a quarter of fired artillery rounds, inflicting eighteen percent of casualties, of which only another fifteen percent were fatal:killed 0.75 and injured 10.5 soldiers. In addition, the resulting chronic cardiovascular injury resulted in susceptibility to the post-war influenza epidemic, and shortened life expectancy among survivors. Contemporary attacks that mixed chemical shelling against a position of prepared, well-trained troops, would produce casualty rates of 10-30 percent, and as high as 80 percent against untrained troops. Non-persisting chemical agents can breach forward defences as they act very quickly, are difficult to detect, are highly lethal and can dissipate within minutes. As a result, advancing troops would not even need protective equipment and would require little preparation to take advantage of its use. Persisting agents, on the other hand, can last for hours or even days and can protect flanks, enable area denial, and reduce mobility. The combination of persistent and non-persistent agents can be used in a layered approach to offer the highest chance of achieving tactical objectives.

However, the prevailing evidence from the Italian use of first generation gas in its 1935 invasion and later counter-insurgency in Ethiopia, is that it had its greatest effect on non-combatants, such as at Jijiga, and during the rout of Abyssinian forces, such as at Ganale Doria. Italian tactical air power, machine guns, tanks, and Italy’s overwhelming numbers were far more decisive. Conservative backbencher, Winston Churchill, in a 1934 speech, identified incendiary bombs as far more lethal and dangerous to London, than German gas, though he was unaware of the effects of the new nerve agents.  

Sporadic use of chemical weapons by Iraq was decisive in blunting attacks by unprepared Iranian infantry during the Iran-Iraq War. Even though well-trained soldiers with chemical protection equipment can reduce their daily losses during chemical attacks to 2 percent per day, their combat performance suffers significantly. Even partial exposure to nerve gasses can induce double-vision, trembling and other neurological disorders. It is instructive to the war in Ukraine, that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein decided to use chemical weapons against the Kurdish villages in the North as part of the 1987 Anfal campaign, following a recommendation from military intelligence, in order to raise morale and secure control. According to the Saddam Hussein FBI Counterterrorism Files, Saddam ordered the attack, without consulting others and fully aware of the international consequences, in a moment of desperation and in response to the Iranian capture of the Al Faw peninsula. The deeper Iranian forces penetrated into Iraq, the greater the incentive to escalate to chemical weapons use.

A sizable delivery of NATO countermeasures, including protective clothing, gas masks and canisters, field decontamination stations for personnel and vehicles (as gasses can penetrate into the paint of vehicles), and medical supplies like Atropine, would significantly reduce Ukrainian battlefield losses. However, stockpiles from the Cold War and the 1991 Gulf War, have long been depleted, and the West will need to make a major industrial effort to produce the protective gear at scale. The degrading effects of corrosive chemicals, which are typically deployed in conjunction with nerve agents, requires protective clothing to be replaced every few days.

Severe overheating, muffled communications, and the poor visibility typical of chemical protection suits will cause soldiers to lose over 50 percent of their operational efficiency, compromising the demands of detailed work like aircraft piloting and maintenance, and stealthy movement required of the infantry. Worse still, exposure anxiety has the same symptoms as actual exposure, which can lead to the erroneous administration of antidotes like Atropine, which can have their own severe side-effects.  

Even worse, a sustained Russian chemical attack against Ukraine cities would yield an order of magnitude greater losses than current missile and drone strikes, producing huge refugee flows, and would have a calamitous effect on morale, almost certainly leading to concessionary ceasefire negotiations by Kyiv. There are no surviving records that explain why Germany did not use chemical weapons against civilian targets during the First World War, but it is assumed by most scholars that mutual deterrence enforced restraint.

Non-use in the European theatre of the Second World War was established by an explicit Anglo-German declaration at its outbreak in 1939, but sustained by the reciprocal deterrence of British biological agents (principally weaponized Anthrax) and German nerve gasses. Despite China’s weakness, implicit U.S. threats restrained Japan’s war in China, resulting in only a few lethal applications of blister agents as in 1944 at Hengyang. There were occasional casualty-producing accidents, such as the German bombing of a U.S. ship carrying 100 tons of HD mustard gas in 2,000 M47A1 mustard gas bombs in Bari harbor in Southern Italy, in December 1943.

Although Russia confirmed the destruction of the last of the USSR’s Cold War 40,000 ton arsenal of chemical agents in 2017, large-scale accumulation of agents as a biproduct of chemical manufacturing is easy. Though obsolete as a CW agent, chlorine is widely available. In more recent memory, it saw reported use in Iraq, Chechnya, Bosnia, and Sri Lanka, and, out of their abundance, cannot be listed as a controlled agents. Hydrogen cyanide is highly toxic and used extensively in mining. Thiodiglycol, the precursor to mustard gas, is used as a solvent in textiles and dyes. In 1988, Iraq was producing 70 tons of mustard and 6 tons of nerve agents, monthly. On December 3, 1984, the Union Carbide cotton pesticide plant at Bhopal, India, released 42 tons of the deadly gas methyl isocyanate that killed 2,500 people and injured 200,000 (50,000 continue to suffer chronic injuries). With contemporary computing power, generative AI models can design new chemically stable and increasingly deadly molecules. Novichok, a nerve agent developed by Russia, is not listed as a scheduled substance out of the concern that disclosing its molecular structure would allow for other actors to replicate and proliferate it.

Simply seeking to establish norms and relying on states’ moral reservations not to use chemical weapons is not a reliable means of deterrence, since conditions and discourse can change. Furthermore, some have argued that Washington’s policy of promoting norms of restraint is cynically the result of a strategic calculus that has concluded that the U.S. comparative advantage is with nuclear weapons. The most significant multilateral effort to ban the stockpiling, production, and use of chemical weapons, is the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). Its attendant verification agency is the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), whose most severe challenge is that while there is a list of proscribed agents, most chemicals are dual-use and have no precise regulations method for limiting their manufacture, and most chemicals have substitutes.

Despite being dependent on voluntary compliance, the CWC contributes to deterrence against a Russian chemical weapons attack on Ukraine through certified verification, enabling a coordinated response, and delegitimation. First, in an instance of the use of chemical agents in Ukraine, the OPCW will provide a prompt confirmation of the evidence, as it did in Syria in 2015, despite non-cooperation from the Damascus government. Second, this validation of the incident then enables the coordination of an international response, in the form of targeted sanctions, as in the case of Syria. Although the CWC does not have any independent role in enforcement, it has, for example, anticipated Russian chemical weapons use by condemning Moscow’s false claims of Ukrainian use. In t6he event of a chemical attack, states allied with Moscow and engaging in the commerce of chemical manufactures, such as Iran, North Korea, and China, may be subject to further trade penalties. Third, Putin’s popularity is contingent on him delivering a balance of security and prosperity, as well as satisfying the Russian people’s self-identification of Russia as engaging in legitimate and moral behavior. The OPCW, as a super-national organisation, while it may be toothless, benefits from being a multilateral organ of 193 countries, and therefore operates with the credibility of international norms, and not simply representing the interests of Ukraine’s allies. As well, Russia lacks a veto power in the OPCW’s dispute-settlement process.

The OPCW measures identified above, in conjunction with an increase in the provision of conventional military supplies to Ukraine, are the optimal response to a battlefield use of nuclear weapons by Russia. Enabling a retaliatory chemical weapons response by Ukraine, even if limited, would be entirely counter-productive: it would erode the support of Ukraine’s allies, and alienate neutral states beyond the point of recovery. Russian chemical tactics could be used to justify equipping Ukraine with long-range systems aimed at safely striking at military targets in Russia’s interior. This is because Russia would likely use nuclear weapons to signal geographic redlines, such as over possession of Sevastopol in the Crimea, whereas chemical weapons are more typically used by leaders who want to preserve the political freedom to back down. However, in the event that the Kremlin uses chemical weapons as an instrument to depopulate Ukrainian cities, the scale of which would constitute genocide, then the only remaining solution is the entry of NATO ground troops into Ukraine.  

Dr. Julian Spencer-Churchill is associate professor of international relations at Concordia University, and author of Militarization and War (2007) and of Strategic Nuclear Sharing (2014). He has published extensively on Pakistan security issues and arms control and completed research contracts at the Office of Treaty Verification at the Office of the Secretary of the Navy, and the then Ballistic Missile Defense Office (BMDO). He has also conducted fieldwork in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and Egypt, and is a consultant. He is a former Operations Officer, 3 Field Engineer Regiment, from the latter end of the Cold War to shortly after 9/11.

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