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Quotes of the Day:
"Nothing so sharpens the thought process as writing down one’s arguments. Weaknesses overlooked in oral discussion become painfully obvious on the written page.”
– Admiral Hyman G. Rickover
"Those who have long enjoyed such privileges as we enjoy forget in time that men have died to win them."
– Franklin D. Roosevelt
“What we don’t know about North Korea is so vast that it makes the Kremlin of the 1950’s look like an open book. The communist northern tier of the peninsula once known as the Hermit Kingdom has lived up to that name with a vengeance, enveloping its 22 million people in a bell jar of propaganda, thought control and mythology glorifying the Kims, often in public pageants that would dwarf a Cecil B. DeMille production.”
– Arnold Kantor, Former U.S. Undersecretary of State
1. US offers quiet support for Ukraine after Kursk incursion deals Putin a major embarrassment
2. Kursk and the Battle of Wills
3. Incredible tale of Nazi ace who saved American bomber pilot
4. Ukraine’s Incursion Into Russia Flips the Script on Putin
5. A Drunken Evening, a Rented Yacht: The Real Story of the Nord Stream Pipeline Sabotage
6. The Little-Known U.S. Agency Behind the String of Coups Against Mexico’s Druglords
7. The Missteps in Washington and Tehran That Brought Middle East to the Brink
8. Ukraine Shocks Russia in Kursk
9. How the Justice Department Is Changing Its Tactics on Cybercrime
10. Hackers may have stolen EVERY American's Social Security numbers
11. Mine Warfare in the Asia-Pacific: Clear and Present Danger
12. White House advisory group blasts US government, DoD inattention to GPS woes
13. America will be more secure if it does less
14. With the Middle East Simmering, U.S. Seeks to Revive Israel-Hamas Deal
15. Did China just demote its defense ministry?
16. Former SEAL Leader Likely to Face Board of Inquiry in Coming Days over Death of Candidate Kyle Mullen
17. Pentagon didn’t get heads up about Ukraine’s Kursk offensive
18. The Geopolitical Opportunity of Ukraine’s Kursk Offensive
19. America’s Missed Chance in Afghanistan
20. The Indomitable IRGC
21. The World Is Not Ready for the Next Pandemic
22. You Can Thank the US Army for Americans Brushing Their Teeth Daily
1. US offers quiet support for Ukraine after Kursk incursion deals Putin a major embarrassment
Is Kursk the Incheon landing of Putin's War?
Some nice alliteration here:
Speaking in Kyiv earlier this week, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) called Ukraine’s military operations in the Kursk and Belgorod regions “bold, brilliant and beautiful” and urged Kyiv to “keep it up.”
US offers quiet support for Ukraine after Kursk incursion deals Putin a major embarrassment
By Miles J. Herszenhorn and Joe Gould
08/14/2024 06:15 PM EDT
Politico
President Joe Biden told reporters that Ukraine’s advances inside Russian territory have put Moscow in a tough spot, while acknowledging that the U.S. is talking with Kyiv as the incursion continues.
“I imagine Putin is really angry,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal said. “It’s a failure of command, surveillance, fighting and determination.” | Gavriil Grigorov/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP
08/14/2024 06:15 PM EDT
Officials in Washington are offering more public praise for Kyiv’s surprise incursion into Russian territory, as Ukraine has managed to embarrass Russian President Vladimir Putin, scramble the Kremlin’s military strategy and seize large swaths of land along the border.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Ukraine earlier this week, said in an interview Wednesday that the “failure to defend Russia is comparable to the complete breakdown that forced Russia to retreat two and a half years ago.”
“I imagine Putin is really angry,” Blumenthal added. “It’s a failure of command, surveillance, fighting and determination.”
He said Ukraine’s forces “performed extremely ably” in their operations in Russia, crossing mined and heavily armed areas and synchronizing their artillery and ground forces — a hallmark of the U.S. military that he says has been a challenge for Ukraine’s forces to learn.
“It’s not just kind of a stunt, it’s a serious military operation that’s been really brilliantly executed, and very daring and bold in concept,” Blumenthal said. “Strategically it’s meant to divert Russian strength from the East, and whether it does that remains to be seen.”
By Blumenthal’s reckoning, the Biden administration has been wary of escalating the war and might have objected to the attack if it was given the chance. But he believes U.S. military officials are “impressed and a little bit taken aback” by Ukraine’s operation, “because they have done it so well.”
House Foreign Affairs Chair Michael McCaul (R-Texas) offered praise to Ukrainian forces tempered by criticism of the Biden administration for being too cautious in its aid to Ukraine.
“I think it’s a message from the Ukrainians: ‘Look, if you give us what we need to win, we can win,’” he said in an interview.
Rep. Jimmy Panetta — part of a group of U.S. lawmakers who traveled to Kyiv and Odesa last week — voiced support for Ukraine’s cross-border operation as a way to tie up Russian troops, embarrass the Kremlin and capture public support. (Ukrainian officials didn’t mention the operation to lawmakers during this visit, he said.)
“Clearly, it’s a morale booster for Ukraine, for the Ukrainian people, especially based on this tough kind of slog of a summer they were going through,” he said in an interview. “It’s showing that they can put up an offensive, showing the West that they can fight in order to give the West confidence in their ability to support them.”
President Joe Biden told reporters on Tuesday that Ukraine’s advances inside Russian territory have put Moscow in a tough spot, while acknowledging that the U.S. is talking with Kyiv as the incursion continues.
“It’s creating a real dilemma for Putin, and we’ve been in direct contact — constant contact — with the Ukrainians,” Biden said. “That’s all I’m going to say about it while it’s active.”
State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel punted at today’s briefing when asked about reports that U.S. weapons were being used in the incursion against Russian targets. Meanwhile, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated today that the U.S. was not involved with the planning of the attack.
But those new expressions of support come as Ukraine’s offensive continues onward.
Ukraine has already taken control of dozens of villages in Kursk and officials in Kyiv said today that its military has continued to capture more Russian territory — making the Kursk offensive the largest incursion into Russia by a foreign military since World War II, per military analysts. Ukraine hit several Russian air bases with missiles and drones overnight on Wednesday.
The incursion also marks the second straight summer that Putin has been dealt a major military humiliation. Last year, Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Kremlin-backed Wagner Group briefly marched on Moscow to demand the firing of then-Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. Though Prigozhin called off the brief uprising before his Wagner mercenaries got close to Moscow, it was the most serious threat to Putin’s hold on Russia in more than two decades.
In some of Zelenskyy’s earliest comments confirming the Kursk incursion, he compared the offensive to the Kursk submarine disaster in 2000 that killed all 118 members of the Russian Navy on board the vessel.
“We see how Russia really moves in the times of Putin. 24 years ago, there was the Kursk disaster — the symbolic beginning of his rule,” Zelenskyy said on Monday. “And now we can see what the end is for him — and it is also Kursk.”
“Russia brought war to others and now it is coming home,” Zelenskyy added.
Members of the Russian opposition have also used the Kursk incursion to criticize Putin and his leadership — even as they have sought to walk a fine line to avoid any comments that might be interpreted as celebrating the killing of Russian soldiers.
Ivan Zhdanov, a top Navalny aide, shared a graphic video on social media earlier this week that showed dozens dead Russian troops in Kursk.
“The country’s leadership are just incompetent idiots,” he wrote.
Ilya Yashin, a leading member of the Russian opposition who was freed in the prisoner swap earlier this month, called on the mothers of Russian conscripts to convince their sons to leave the Russian army in a post on Telegram.
“Save your children,” Yashin wrote. “Call conscripts, support them psychologically.”
“Get them out of this hell and save their lives,” he added.
The push has also strengthened Kyiv’s hand. Zelenskyy also said on Tuesday in his daily update about the war that hundreds of Russian troops have surrendered to Ukrainian forces, allowing Kyiv to significantly replenish its “exchange fund” for future prisoner swaps.
Some are calling for Washington to deepen its support for Ukraine in the face of Ukraine’s successes, including Zelenskyy.
“Our Ukrainian drones work exactly as they should, but there are some things that can’t be done with drones alone, unfortunately. We need other weapons — missile weapons,” Zelenskyy said on Wednesday. “We continue working with our partners on long-range decisions for Ukraine.”
“The bolder our partners’ decisions are, the less Putin will be able to do,” he added.
Zelenskyy will have at least some support in Washington when Congress reconvenes in September.
Speaking in Kyiv earlier this week, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) called Ukraine’s military operations in the Kursk and Belgorod regions “bold, brilliant and beautiful” and urged Kyiv to “keep it up.”
Graham also called on the U.S. to “give them weapons they need to win a war they can’t lose.”
McCaul also said that Ukrainian victories would help attract more U.S. support for military aid.
“I’ve told Zelenskyy, ‘You need some victories,’” he said. “It’s really important from a psyche standpoint for the American people to see victories because we love backing winners and a winning horse.”
Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul said that “Putin has killed tens of thousands of Russians in a senseless vanity war, expanded NATO including along a giant border with Finland, allowed coup plotters to reach the outskirts of Moscow, and now allowed Russia to be invaded for the first time since 1941.”
“Maybe it’s time for Russians to rethink whether Putin is good for their security,” McFaul added.
Eric Bazail-Eimil contributed to this report.
A version of this story previously appeared in POLITICO’s National Security Daily newsletter. Like this content? Sign up below!
Politico
2. Kursk and the Battle of Wills by Mick Ryan
Military operations are successful when they achieve the political object.
Excerpts:
Military operations, including the Kursk Campaign, are about doing the right thing at the right time…and for the right reasons.
It is important that Ukraine fights by the rules.
...
As I stated at the beginning of the article, this isn’t quite the topic that I expected to be writing about today. But Zelenskyy using the phrase ‘fighting by the rules’ triggered a need for me to cover this very important topic of military ethics, ethical leadership and the centrality of Just War in Ukraine’s military strategy.
I began my article with a quote from Prussian military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz. I shall finish it in the same manner because Clausewitz understood that the moral forces in war are crucial in deciding the outcome. He writes in Chapter V of Book 3 of On War that “the military virtue of an army is one of the most important moral powers in war.”
I think the Ukrainians understand this, and to the greatest extent possible, appear to have practiced being a virtuous military during this war. It is standing them in good stead as their soldiers defend against the Russian advances in Donbas and continue their advance through western Russia.
Kursk and the Battle of Wills
Military operations, including the Kursk Campaign, are about doing the right thing at the right time…and for the right reasons.
https://mickryan.substack.com/p/kursk-and-the-battle-of-wills?utm
Mick Ryan
Aug 15, 2024
∙ Paid
Ukrainian soldiers - the heart and soul of the army. Source: @DefenceU
Morality is not enough; the Profession of Arms requires Ethics. Pauline Shanks Kaurin
Today I had intended to publish a short article about the battle of wills that is ongoing in Kursk and the Donbas. The will of nations and their military institutions matters in wartime. The willingness and capacity to continue fighting demands good leadership, and importantly, the provision of purpose by national leaders. As Clausewitz wrote in Book 1, Chapter 1 of On War: “War is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will.”
On one side, the Ukrainians are continuing to push forward in Kursk while also conducting a difficult defensive campaign in the Donbas. On the Russian side, the Russians are continuing to push on their main effort – the advance towards Pokrovsk – while seeking to redeploy forces from other areas to stem the advance of Ukrainian forces in Kursk.
Both sides are moving forward while at the same time sustaining terrible damage elsewhere. The remainder of this year, and possibly the trajectory of the war, will be determined by who blinks first and decides that focussing on the losses they are sustaining is more important than the gains they are making elsewhere. This is the ultimate expression of Clausewitz’s battle of wills.
I will return to this issue in the coming days. However, something else caught my eye today that, in the reporting about the Kursk operation, has been somewhat overlooked. In his video released in the past 24 hours on Twitter / X, Ukrainian President Zelenskyy used the following words:
It is important that Ukraine fights by the rules.
This is a very important idea in war generally. But it is also crucial for Ukraine. There are strategic, diplomatic and moral reasons for Ukraine to ‘fight by the rules’ and to have its organisations and individuals act ethically. Doing so has a direct impact on Ukraine’s military strategy for the war, and its ongoing operation in Kursk oblast.
Before exploring Ukraine’s rationale for fighting by the rules, what is the intellectual foundation for this thinking?
Many of you will have heard of the term Just War. The concept of Just War has its beginnings in classical Greek and Roman philosophy. Just War theory seeks to resolve several crucial elements of human conflict. The first element is that taking the life of another human is wrong. A second element is that sovereign nations have a right and a duty to defend their citizens, their territory and to defend justice. The third and final element is that protecting innocent human life and defending important values sometimes may at times require the application of force and violence on behalf of a state. These principles are incorporated into international law.
International law, through the auspices of different conventions and treaties, aims to regulate the initiation and application of force, as well as the conduct of war. It also covers the protection of civilians, treatment of prisoners of war and respect for cultural sites and buildings. This is generally referred to as the Law of War and is often used interchangeably with the term’s international humanitarian law and the law of armed conflict.
Two important concepts are part of the Law of War. The first concept is jus ad bellum, which covers conduct by a country when it seeks to use force. In essence, it is focussed on how to make ethical decisions about going to war. The second concept is jus in bello, which are the laws that govern the actual conduct of war and the application of force during conflicts.
The just war tradition draws from a broader scholarship on ethics which is described as natural law theory. The foundational idea for natural law theory is that something is ethical if the intention of the person or organization involved is to pursue a good end in a reasonable way. The focus is on what is intended, what is reasonable, and what is the good end that is sought.
Ukraine and Fighting by the Rules
Since the Russian large-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukraine has fought a defensive war within the bounds of international law. At the same time, it has brought to light where the Russian military and government have transgressed international law.
The Russians, who have often acted in shockingly brutal ways towards civilians, Ukrainian prisoners of war as well as important cultural sites, have not made any significant efforts to comply with international law in the conduct of their special military operation. It is one of the key asymmetries in this war. While many focus on the difference in size between the two countries, this difference in outlook and behaviour is also important.
The discovery of Russian atrocities at Bucha in the first months of this war shocked many people around the world. It was also seen as a statement of Russian intent against Ukraine by Ukrainian citizens, political leaders as well as citizens and political leaders in many foreign countries. President Putin even awarded medals to the unit involved. This provided an explicit endorsement of the actions of the Russian troops at Bucha, and incentivised future similar behaviour by Russian soldiers.
In his book, Overreach, Owen Matthews describes the impact of the 2022 visit to Bucha by President Zelenskyy. Matthews writes how “on the day Zelensky visited Bucha ‘something in him changed,’…For Zelensky personally, as well as his entourage, Western leaders and millions of people around the world, Russia’s invasion had been revealed as an act of savagery against civilians unprecedented in Europe since Bosnia – and before that, the Second World War. From that moment on, there could be no more compromise.
Zelenskyy, clearly shocked at what he had seen in Bucha after the Russian retreat, described how “we see what’s at stake in this war. We see what we are defending. There are standards of the Ukrainian army - moral and professional. And it is not our army that has to adjust now. These are many other armies that should learn from our military. And there are standards of the Ukrainian people. And there are standards of the Russian occupiers. This is good and evil.”
Here, the Ukrainian president differentiates Russian military conduct from that of his army, while also communicating with the Ukrainian people that the war is an existential one. Further differentiation between the Ukrainian and Russian approaches has been provided by reports from Organization for Security and Cooperation and Europe (OSCE) as well as the International Criminal Court over the past two years.
One 2022 OSCE report described how “some of the most serious violations encompass targeted killing of civilians, including journalists, human rights defenders, or local mayors; unlawful detentions, abductions and enforced disappearances of the same categories of persons; large-scale deportations of Ukrainian civilians to Russia; various forms of mistreatment, including torture, inflicted on detained civilians and prisoners of war.” A 2023 report by the OSCE covered an array of Russian war crimes against Ukrainian children. The 2024 report by the OSCE found that “arbitrary deprivation of liberty of Ukrainian civilians started in the unlawfully annexed Crimea in spring 2014, and quickly spread to the areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions controlled by the so-called People’s Republics. Since the outbreak of the full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022, this practice has become pervasive in all the areas that have got under the temporary occupation of the Russian Federation.”
The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Russia’s president Putin as well as senior military and civilian leaders such as General Gerasimov and former defence minister Sergei Shoigu. The office of the Ukrainian Prosecutor General has over 120,000 open war crimes cases against Russian personnel.
In the aggregate, these represent a systemic approach to the brutalization of the Ukrainian people, the destruction of their cities and cultural sites, and a callous disregard for international law and the laws of war by Russia.
Impact of Russian Behaviour
This abysmal Russian record has provided additional impetus for foreign assistance and the imposition of additional sanctions against Russia. The multitude of reports about Russian behaviour since the invasion has also provided evidence for the Ukrainian leadership, and many others in the west, about the mindset of Putin, his insincerity in giving commitments, and his determination to erase the existence of the Ukraine state.
In his book Just and Unjust Wars, Michael Walzer writes that “for as long as men and women have talked about war, they have talked about it in terms of right and wrong”. The war in Ukraine has provided nations in the West with the clearest example since the end of the Second World War of a conflict of good versus evil. The behaviour of the Russian Army, and its Wagner mercenaries during their time in Ukraine, has led to greater national solidarity in Ukraine, and the political justification for many Western leaders to provide ongoing support to Ukraine.
The Russian behaviour has also served to highlight the differences in how Russians and Ukrainians see war, and how they fight. As I highlighted above, the approach to fighting a just war is one of the fundamental asymmetries between the Ukrainian and Russian strategies in this war. Russia uses nearly every means at its disposal, legal and illegal, moral and immoral. Ukraine does not.
What does this mean for the Kursk operation?
Ethical leadership starts at the top. Source: @ZelenskyyUA on Twitter / X.
Fighting a Just War in Kursk
There are some, even in western nations, who believe that in war anything goes. I have personally heard and seen this when discussing the alleged war crimes by Australian special forces in Afghanistan. The reality is, that this is just not true.
Democracies have laws which all of its citizens are expected to abide by. This is especially the case in military institutions. Military personnel are subject an unlimited liability. They must carry out the missions despite personal fear or danger, and this might result in the loss of human life. Unlimited liability also demands the highest standards of behaviour, ethical conduct and self-restraint.
People serving in the military have the lawful capacity to plan and execute operations to kill other humans. It is an important part of soldiering. However, the flip side of this lawful capacity is that it must be exercised responsibly and in a proportionate way. This is not just a principle in international law. It is also the expectation of citizens in democracies. They expect that their military personnel, despite the terrible things they must often do in war, reflect the values of the society they are drawn from and that they represent.
But it is not just about representing the values of a society. Ensuring that military personnel act lawfully and ethically (and these are two different things) is crucial to the projection of strategic legitimacy of a nation at war. When military personnel act professionally, they enhance the legitimacy of their nation and the cause they fight for. While there is no perfect organization in war, and individuals can do bad things, Ukrainian military personnel in general have behaved with enormous restraint and in an ethical way during the Russian invasion of their nation.
The national reputation that Ukraine has built during the war through their projection of legitimacy has helped its operation in Kursk. Because Ukraine is seen to be pursuing a legitimate cause – throwing Russia out of Ukraine – and Russia is not, the incursion into Kursk has not received any significant criticism from its key supporters. This is underpinned by the conduct of Ukrainian soldiers who have entered Kursk. While there is much that is not reported, there are no reports of looting, toilet stealing, rape, arbitrary detention, or the torture and abuse of POWs that has been the case with the Russians throughout the war.
The Ukrainians in Kursk are not fighting to expand the size of the Ukrainian state. They are conducting an operation to coerce the Russians into drawing forces away from the Donbas and to convince Russia that it cannot win this war. Ukrainian officials have also described the operation creating what they describe as a ‘buffer zone’ inside Russia. Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said Wednesday that “the creation of a buffer zone in the Kursk region is a step to protect our border communities from daily enemy attacks.”
Although a buffer zone would be hard to sustain, these are legitimate ends being pursued by military forces fighting in a just war construct. Fighting by the rules, as Zelenskyy describes it, is an important strategic enabler for Ukrainian military operations at home and in Russia.
One final element of ‘fighting by the rules’ should be emphasised. Those who fight for legitimate purposes and who exercise force in an ethical and responsible way are better protected from moral harm or moral injury. Moral injury is the damage done to one’s conscience or moral compass when they perpetrate, witness, or fail to prevent acts that contravene one’s own moral beliefs, values, or ethical codes of conduct is much more likely in those who eschew the Just War traditions. There has been some good scholarship on this topic in recent decades, and I particularly like this piece on the mitigation of moral injury through ethical leadership.
By adopting a Just War approach as part of its military strategy, and by ‘fighting by the rules’, the Ukrainian state is also protecting the souls of the soldiers who are fighting. That matters.
The Kursk Operation Rolls On
As I stated at the beginning of the article, this isn’t quite the topic that I expected to be writing about today. But Zelenskyy using the phrase ‘fighting by the rules’ triggered a need for me to cover this very important topic of military ethics, ethical leadership and the centrality of Just War in Ukraine’s military strategy.
I began my article with a quote from Prussian military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz. I shall finish it in the same manner because Clausewitz understood that the moral forces in war are crucial in deciding the outcome. He writes in Chapter V of Book 3 of On War that “the military virtue of an army is one of the most important moral powers in war.”
I think the Ukrainians understand this, and to the greatest extent possible, appear to have practiced being a virtuous military during this war. It is standing them in good stead as their soldiers defend against the Russian advances in Donbas and continue their advance through western Russia.
3. Incredible tale of Nazi ace who saved American bomber pilot
I offer what is an fascinating historical human interest story not only because a friend has flagged it for me three times in the past couple of days but to reinforce Mick Ryan's essay on the battle of Kursk.
I really want to highlight the quote from the German pilot's commander because it applies to what Mick Ryan wrote about the current battle of Kursk.
Excerpts:
It was 'the most heavily damaged aircraft I ever saw that was still flying,' he recalled years later.
In that moment, he remembered the words of and old commanding officer. 'Honor is everything here,' he had told a young Stigler before his first mission.
'If I ever see or hear of you shooting at a man in a parachute. I will shoot you down myself. You follow the rules of war for you — not for your enemy. You fight by rules to keep your humanity.'
To Stigler, the defenseless plane was a parachute, and he was determined to save the men on board.
Believing they had no chance of surviving all the way back to England, Stigler tried to convince Brown to land at a German airfield by frantically gesturing and mouthing words. But their radio had been shot and they could not understand Stigler's signals.
Brown could clearly see the pilot's face, the whites of his eyes. 'What was the bastard up to? He must be toying with them,' he thought.
Finally Brown and his co-pilot shook their heads. They'd rather die in flames than be taken prisoner by the Nazis.
Then to no avail, Stigler motioned to the enemy crew to change course and head east toward neutral Sweden, a 30-minute flight away. They could crash-land there and spend the rest of the war as internees but alive.
Incredible tale of Nazi ace who saved American bomber pilot
Incredible tale of how Nazi ace risked execution to save an American bomber pilot's life - before their secret encounter took another amazing twist
By Tate Delloye For Dailymail.com
Published: 07:15 EDT, 10 August 2024 | Updated: 12:10 EDT, 10 August 2024
Daily Mail · by Tate Delloye For Dailymail.com · August 10, 2024
The solitary Allied B-17 bomber was an easy target. Down to one working engine and riddled with flak and bullets, the aircraft would struggle to stay in the air over Germany let alone cover the 300 miles back to England.
Cannon fire had blasted away the aircraft's nose cone, causing a 200mph wind to howl through the open fuselage of the plane.
The tail gunner's lifeless body hung from his shattered turret, his blood frozen in icicles over the machine guns and all but one of the crew in the rear were incapacitated by wounds or exposure to the frigid air.
Just when it seemed like things couldn't get any worse for the plane's 21-year-old pilot Charlie Brown, he noticed a Nazi fighter plane readying himself to deal the final, lethal blow to his crippled aircraft.
But what happened next is an extraordinary story of chivalry and mercy from World War II, providing a glimmer of humanitarian light amid the dark tragedy of the conflict.
The German pilot chose to spare his enemy by escorting the damaged plane to the safety of the English Channel.
Then against all odds, a half-century later, the two men became friends and remained close until their deaths less than six months apart.
Charles Brown (left) was an American pilot whose plane and crew were badly injured during a bombing run on Germany. Instead of dealing the final blow, Franz Stigler (right) a Nazi fighter pilot noticed the dead crewman, and blood-soaked interior of the plane through giant holes that had been blown through its fuselage and decided to escort the aircraft back to the safety of the English Channel. He saluted his Allied enemies and peeled off
Over forty years after the incident, the two pilots miraculously reunited and became friends for the remainder of their lives. Above, Charlie Brown (left), Franz Stigler (right)
The American crew of the B-17 - nicknamed 'Ye Olde Pub' - before taking off on a bombing mission of a Nazi aircraft factory in Bremen, Germany. It was Lt. Charles Brown's (bottom row, far left) first combat mission as an aircraft commander with the 379th Bomb Group
It was five days before Christmas in 1943 when Charlie Brown, a 21-year-old B-17 pilot from West Virginia, took off on a cold, overcast winter day in Britain for his first combat mission over Germany.
The operation had practically been a suicide mission from the start as Brown's unit faced heavy fire from 250 anti aircraft guns and shelling from 15 German fighter jets during the daylight bombing run of a Nazi munitions factory in Bremen.
Due to mechanical failures and damage to other aircraft, Brown's plane, 'Ye Olde Pub,' had to move ahead in formation, making it a prime target for enemy counterattacks.
Before Brown had a chance to drop his payload, the plane was attacked by German anti-aircraft guns.
Cannon fire shattered the plane's nose cone, damaging the oxygen and electrical systems and wiping out three of the four engines.
The tail gunner was killed and all but one of the crew in the rear was incapacitated.
Oxygen starved himself, Brown had been knocked out and regained consciousness just in time to level out his plane from a death spiral less than 1,000 feet from the ground.
By then, the German fighters had vanished. They likely observed the crippled plane belching smoke and flames - sputtering along at 135mph, barely above its stalling speed - and marked it as another kill before returning to base.
After inspecting the blood-spattered interior of the plane, the flight engineer reported, 'we're chewed to pieces, the hydraulics are bleeding, the left stabilizer is all but gone and there are holes in the fuselage big enough to climb through.'
Clinging to the last vestiges of hope, Brown realized his only option was to try and make the 300 mile journey back to England.
But he faced an even graver concern when he glanced out his cockpit and noticed his worst nightmare: a gray German Messerschmitt fighter hovering just three feet off their wingtip.
In the cockpit of the German fighter, his guns primed, was Lt Franz Stigler, a Luftwaffe ace with 29 kills under his belt.
With his leather-gloved hand on the trigger, he was just one kill away from achieving the Knight's Cross, Germany's highest award for valor.
Stigler, aged 28 at the time, was a veteran airman who had been flying since the start of the war. He on the ground refueling and reloading his guns when the lone B-17 had lumbered slowly overhead.
Within minutes, Stigler was up in the air to give chase, but as he drew closer, he noticed the rear gunner's lifeless body hanging from his shattered turret. Another gunner was unconscious, his fleece collar soaked in red blood.
He saw the rest of the terrified 10-man crew, battered and wounded, desperately tending to one another's injuries.
As Stigler pulled alongside the plane, he was shocked that he could see clean through the middle, where the fuselage had been bombarded by artillery. The tale and the rudder had also been shot off with giant holes on the wings.
It was 'the most heavily damaged aircraft I ever saw that was still flying,' he recalled years later.
In that moment, he remembered the words of and old commanding officer. 'Honor is everything here,' he had told a young Stigler before his first mission.
'If I ever see or hear of you shooting at a man in a parachute. I will shoot you down myself. You follow the rules of war for you — not for your enemy. You fight by rules to keep your humanity.'
To Stigler, the defenseless plane was a parachute, and he was determined to save the men on board.
Believing they had no chance of surviving all the way back to England, Stigler tried to convince Brown to land at a German airfield by frantically gesturing and mouthing words. But their radio had been shot and they could not understand Stigler's signals.
Brown could clearly see the pilot's face, the whites of his eyes. 'What was the bastard up to? He must be toying with them,' he thought.
Finally Brown and his co-pilot shook their heads. They'd rather die in flames than be taken prisoner by the Nazis.
Then to no avail, Stigler motioned to the enemy crew to change course and head east toward neutral Sweden, a 30-minute flight away. They could crash-land there and spend the rest of the war as internees but alive.
Stigler was frustrated. He was already risking his own life as his decision to not finish off the aircraft was a court-martial offense in Nazi Germany and if revealed, could have led to his execution.
If a civilian spotted Stigler's plane next to a B-17 and reported its tail number, he would be in grave danger.
With his attempts at signaling to Ye Olde Pub unsuccessful, Stigler took formation close to the battered bomber, escorting them for several miles back to the English Channel.
In doing so, Stigler stopped anti-aircraft guns from targeting the Allied plane, but he also feared that if he was spotted flying so close to the enemy without engaging, he could be accused — and doubtless found guilty — of treason.
'Ye Olde Pub' sustained heavy damage during the suicide mission. Cannon fire shattered the plane's nose cone, causing 200mph wind to hurtle through the fuselage, ruining the oxygen and electrical systems, and wiping out three of the four engines. The tail gunner was killed, his blood frozen in icicles over the machine guns and all but one of the crew in the rear incapacitated by wounds or exposure to the frigid air
Nazi pilot, Franz Stigler tried to convince the crippled American plane to land, or divert to neutral territory in Sweden through frantic hand gestures. When Brown refused to listen, Stigler took formation with the plane and escorted it to safety, by doing so he stopped anti-aircraft guns from targeting the bomber, and also risked being accused of treason by the Third Reich
Meanwhile, Lt. Brown remained confused by the situation and instructed his gunners to aim their damaged weapons at the German fighter jet.
In response, Stigler took one final look, mouthed 'Good luck,' saluted the Americans, and peeled away.
'You're in God's hands,' Stigler thought to himself.
Miraculously, the stricken B-17 made it across 250 miles of the North Sea and landed at Seething in Norfolk.
As soon as he landed, Brown told his commanding officer that he and his crew owed their lives to the unknown Luftwaffe pilot. He was ordered to never to speak of the incident for fear that it would humanize the enemy.
For more than 40 years, Brown kept the secret but he never forgot.
Likewise, the memory of that B-17 stayed with Stigler. He always wondered if the crew he had risked himself to save actually survived? He had no way of knowing.
In the years following, Stigler became disillusioned by what his country had turned into under Hitler, and lost any desire for the Knight's Cross.
Though he flew close to 500 combat missions, he simply failed to register his 'victories' and claim what he viewed as a worthless piece of metal.
He emigrated to Canada in 1953 to work as a mechanic in a logging camp.
In time, he bought his own Messerschmitt and would fly in air shows reenactments as the evil Nazi being pursued by vintage American fighters.
Brown continued to serve in the military up until the start of the Vietnam War and eventually settled in Miami, Florida, where he got married and founded an energy and environmental research center.
Then, in 1985, the retired American solider mentioned the story of the mysterious Messerschmitt pilot at a veterans' reunion. 'I still don't know who that German was and why he let us go,' he declared, determined now to find out.
Long and fruitless enquiries over the next five years eventually led him to the newsletter of an association of German fighter pilots.
In January 1990, knowing the odds were against him, Brown took out an ad in a newsletter looking for the one 'who saved my life on Dec. 20, 1943.'
He deliberately omitted one crucial detail: the location where the German pilot had abandoned his B-17.
Brown (right) was ordered by his commanding officer to never to speak of the incident for fear that it would humanize the enemy, but he never forgot. In 1990, against all odds, he took out an ad in a pilots newsletter looking for the one 'who saved my life on Dec. 20, 1943' and the two former enemies were reunited in an emotional gathering
From 1990 until their deaths in 2008, Brown (left) and Stigler (right) were best friends. They went on fishing trips together, flew across the country to visit each other's homes, and took road trips to share their story at schools and veterans' reunions. Their wives, Jackie Brown and Hiya Stigler, also became friends
In 1990, Brown (left) and Stigler (right) met for the second time in a Florida hotel lobby. They spoke about their encounter in a light-hearted manner. 'I was too stupid to surrender, and Franz Stigler was too much of a gentleman to destroy us,' Brown recalled in YouTube footage from the gathering
'I thought there was more chance of winning the lottery than finding him alive,' Brown later said to CNN.
In Vancouver, where he had lived for 37 years, Franz Stigler opened his regular association newsletter, and could not believe his eyes. Suddenly, the missing piece of his life's puzzle was right in front of him.
He responded to Brown with a letter, that read: 'Dear Charles, All these years I wondered what happened to the B-17, did she make it or not?'
Brown was so thrilled that he immediately contacted directory assistance in Vancouver to find a number for Franz Stigler. After dialing the number, Stigler answered.
'My God, it's you!' Brown exclaimed, with tears streaming down his face.
The men arranged a reunion at a hotel lobby in Florida. They spoke about their encounter in a light-hearted manner.
'I was too stupid to surrender, and Franz Stigler was too much of a gentleman to destroy us,' Brown recalled in YouTube footage from the gathering.
When someone asked Stigler what he thought about Brown, Stigler began to fight back tears before he said in heavily accented English: 'I love you, Charlie.'
The war had cost Stigler everything. He lost his brother, his friends and his country - virtually exiled by his own countryman after the conflict. Out of 28,000 pilots who fought in the Wehrmacht, only 1,200 survived.
For Stigler, Charlie Brown was the only good thing that came out of World War II, and was the one thing he could be proud of.
From then on until their deaths, Brown and Stigler became the best of friends.
They went on fishing trips together, flew across the country to visit each other's homes and took road trips to share their story at schools and veterans' reunions. Their wives, Jackie Brown and Hiya Stigler, also became friends.
To express his deep gratitude, Brown organized a reunion for his surviving crew members and their extended families, inviting Stigler as the guest of honor.
A video was played during the event, showing all the faces of the people who now lived – children, grandchildren, relatives – because of Stigler's act of chivalry.
The two men died within six months of each other in 2008, both from heart attacks. Stigler was 92, and Brown was 87.
In 2012, Adam Makos wrote a book detailing their incredible story, titled, 'A Higher Calling.'
Makos told CNN that he first learned of their friendship while rifling through Brown's home library and came across a book on German fighter jets.
Inside was an inscription Stigler had written to Brown: 'In 1940, I lost my only brother as a night fighter. On the 20th of December, 4 days before Christmas, I had the chance to save a B-17 from her destruction, a plane so badly it was wonder that she was still flying.
The pilot, Charlie Brown, is for me, as precious as my brother was.
Thanks Charlie.
Your Brother,
Franz.'
Daily Mail · by Tate Delloye For Dailymail.com · August 10, 2024
4. Ukraine’s Incursion Into Russia Flips the Script on Putin
But will this cause Putin to withdraw forces from Ukraine and will it provide Ukraine leverage at the negotiating table? (will this drive Putin to negotiate? Of course it would mean violating the 1st rule of negotiating - always negotiating from a position of strength).
Ukraine’s Incursion Into Russia Flips the Script on Putin
The reality of 130,000 displaced Russians and a chaotic official response may begin to puncture the official line that Russia is steadily heading toward victory.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/15/world/europe/ukraine-russia-incursion-putin.html
Russians displaced from the border regions waited for aid on Tuesday in Kursk.Credit...Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times
By Anton Troianovski and Alina Lobzina
Anton Troianovski reported from Berlin, and Alina Lobzina from London.
Aug. 15, 2024
Updated 1:37 a.m. ET
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Families fleeing invading Ukrainian troops sought shelter from strangers. Russian parents feared that their children might be sent into battle for the first time.
And in a televised crisis meeting on Monday, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia flipped through a white legal pad, reading aloud from handwritten notes, suggesting that his aides did not have the time to type up a speech for him as they usually do.
Ukraine’s surprise incursion into a sliver of Russia’s Kursk region last week has not shifted the overall course of the war, but it has already struck a blow well beyond the few hundred square miles of Russia that Ukraine now controls: It has thrust a Russian government and society that had largely adapted to war into a new phase of improvisation and uncertainty.
Mr. Putin has said nothing about the incursion since meeting with security and regional officials, a tense gathering in which the president at one point berated the Kursk governor for revealing the depth and breadth of Ukraine’s advance into Russia. Near the border, where, the authorities say, more than 130,000 people have fled or been evacuated, regional officials appeared unprepared for the crisis — prompting grass-roots aid initiatives to jump in.
To opposition-minded politicians, including some of the few remaining inside Russia, Ukraine’s incursion has offered a rare chance to puncture the Kremlin’s narrative that Russia is steadily heading toward victory — even if it was far from certain that Russians would blame Mr. Putin for their ills. One opposition figure, Lev Shlosberg, in the western city of Pskov, compared the state of Russian society to magma gathering beneath a volcano in which it was unclear when or how it would burst to the surface.
“Current events are, of course, intensifying the crisis,” Mr. Shlosberg said in a phone interview. “But we don’t know where and how this energy of dissatisfaction will go.”
In the city of Kursk, about 50 miles from the border where Ukraine invaded, the politician Yekaterina S. Duntsova described meeting people at a shelter who were so disoriented by having to flee that “they hope that this is all some kind of dream.”
Image
Ludmilla Brakhmova, 66, with her son Nikolai, 43, both from Sudzha, Russia, in a shelter in Kursk.Credit...Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times
Ms. Duntsova, in a phone interview, said one woman told her she had been at the shelter in a university dormitory since “the first day of the war.” It turned out she was referring to the start of Ukraine’s incursion last week.
“So what was happening before then?” Ms. Duntsova said she replied. “Before then, we were living our lives.”
Ms. Duntsova, a journalist, tried to run against Mr. Putin in Russia’s presidential elections this year on an antiwar platform, but was barred from the ballot. Now, she is spearheading a volunteer effort to aid displaced Kursk residents while warning that the embarrassment of Ukraine’s incursion cannot be expected to lead to political change in Russia because few people would dare to speak out.
“Silence is salvation,” she said, shortly after an air raid siren wailed in the background. “We live according to Orwell.”
To Russians opposed to the war, helping people who are fleeing the fighting has become one way to feel as if they are taking action without risking arrest. Some posted on the social messaging app Telegram offering their homes to the displaced. In the city of Oryol, about 80 miles north of Kursk, a tailor named Anastasia, 36, said she had helped find housing for two families.
“When you live in a nightmare, it’s really important to see that there are also people around you who are helping,” said Anastasia, who asked that her last name be withheld for her safety. “It helps you not to go crazy.”
Still, there were signs of public jitters stemming from uncertainty over the involvement of young conscripts in the fighting. Since the start of the war, Mr. Putin has pledged that conscripts — Russian men as young as 18 are required to serve in the military for a year — would not be sent into the Ukraine war zone. But battles on Russian territory could be a different matter, and an exiled Russian investigative news outlet, Important Stories, reported on Wednesday that it had identified 22 conscripted soldiers who had gone missing in Kursk.
Image
Ukrainian men carrying a dead Russian soldier in a body bag after finding him in the rubble of a destroyed Russian border post on Monday.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
Conscripts in Kursk who had retreated from the border after Ukraine’s attack were now being “sent to the defense of Kursk again,” said Grigory Sverdlin, the head of an organization that helps Russians seeking to avoid military service. He said his group, Idite Lesom (Get Lost), had received more than 20 appeals for help from conscripts or their relatives.
The use of conscripts is especially sensitive for Mr. Putin because their families could form a potent antiwar force, as they did during the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan in the 1980s and Russia’s war in Chechnya in the 1990s. In Ukraine, by contrast, Russia’s force has mainly been made up of well-paid contract soldiers whose families receive large payments if the men die, as well as prisoners who have been promised freedom if they survive.
Beyond the potential involvement of conscripts, analysts predicted that the effort to drive Ukrainian troops out of Kursk could eventually hinder Russia’s offensive in eastern Ukraine. Ruslan Pukhov, the director of the security research group CAST based in Moscow, said the need to shift some of Russia’s invasion force to Kursk could, in turn, threaten Russia’s strategy of a slow-moving advance across the front line in Ukraine.
“The first days of the Ukrainian operation in the Kursk region should be assessed as very successful, although its ultimate goals remain unclear,” Mr. Pukhov said. “In moral terms, the Russian Federation has taken a powerful blow.”
Russia retains an advantage in the war in terms of personnel and domestic resources, but Ukraine’s incursion underlined Kyiv’s ability to use its nimble forces and Western weaponry to steal some of Russia’s initiative. In the televised meeting on Monday, Mr. Putin blamed the West for “fighting us with the hands of the Ukrainians,” repeating his frequent depiction of the war, which he started with a full-fledged invasion, as a proxy campaign against Russia by the West.
State television has continued to play down the crisis, treating it as a natural disaster or a terrorist attack. Russian forces are “driving the enemy out of our land,” the anchor on the prime-time newscast on Channel One intoned on Tuesday, adding that “the main task now is to help civilian victims.”
Image
Displaced Russians at a shelter in Kursk on Tuesday.Credit...Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times
But on Telegram, popular pro-war bloggers have criticized Russian officials for hiding the scale of the problem. One noted dryly that despite the Russian Defense Ministry’s regular reports claiming hundreds of “destroyed” Ukrainian soldiers, “the enemy reported to be killed is, nevertheless, continuing to capture our territories.”
Amid the mixed messages from war supporters on television and online, analysts predicted that members of the Russian public could respond either by rallying around the flag over the shock of the incursion or by criticizing the state for failing to protect them.
Aleksei Minyailo, an opposition activist based in Moscow who studies Russian public opinion, said that previous Ukrainian attacks on Russia’s border regions had done more to harden pro-war opinions. But this time, he added, the sense of confusion in the wake of the Kursk incursion could cut into the Kremlin’s message that “everything is going well; we are winning.”
“This screw-up very much breaks this propaganda narrative,” said Mr. Minyailo, the co-founder of a research project, Chronicles, which has been polling Russians in recent months.
Mr. Putin has been mum on how he plans to respond, other than declaring in his meeting on Monday that re-establishing control of the Kursk region was a priority. Some in Russia said they expected Mr. Putin to strike back in some unexpected form of his own, further escalating the violence of the war.
“A red line that seemed to be untouchable has been erased,” Mr. Shlosberg, the opposition politician, said, referring to Ukraine’s foray into Russian territory. “Now Putin has a chance, a reason, to think about what line he should cross.”
Anatoly Kurmanaev, Milana Mazaeva and Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.
Anton Troianovski is the Moscow bureau chief for The Times. He writes about Russia, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia. More about Anton Troianovski
5. A Drunken Evening, a Rented Yacht: The Real Story of the Nord Stream Pipeline Sabotage
Is truth stranger than fiction? Would this story be rejected when pitched as fiction to film studios or book publishers?
Separately, does this "case study" have lessons for our SEAL brethren at the tactical level and for operational and covert action planners at the strategic level?
Did Zelensky get plausible deniability for a sufficient amount of time?
Excerpts:
Now, for the first time, the outlines of the real story can be told. The Ukrainian operation cost around $300,000, according to people who participated in it. It involved a small rented yacht with a six-member crew, including trained civilian divers. One was a woman, whose presence helped create the illusion they were a group of friends on a pleasure cruise.
“I always laugh when I read media speculation about some huge operation involving secret services, submarines, drones and satellites,” one officer who was involved in the plot said. “The whole thing was born out of a night of heavy boozing and the iron determination of a handful of people who had the guts to risk their lives for their country.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky initially approved the plan, according to one officer who participated and three people familiar with it. But later, when the CIA learned of it and asked the Ukrainian president to pull the plug, he ordered a halt, those people said.
Zelensky’s commander in chief, Valeriy Zaluzhniy, who was leading the effort, nonetheless forged ahead.
A Drunken Evening, a Rented Yacht: The Real Story of the Nord Stream Pipeline Sabotage
Private businessmen funded the shoestring operation, which was overseen by a top general; President Zelensky approved the plan, then tried unsuccessfully to call it off
By Bojan PancevskiFollow
Aug. 14, 2024 9:00 pm ET
It was the kind of outlandish scheme that might bubble up in a bar around closing time.
In May of 2022, a handful of senior Ukrainian military officers and businessmen had gathered to toast their country’s remarkable success in halting the Russian invasion. Buoyed by alcohol and patriotic fervor, somebody suggested a radical next step: destroying Nord Stream.
After all, the twin natural-gas pipelines that carried Russian gas to Europe were providing billions to the Kremlin war machine. What better way to make Vladimir Putin pay for his aggression?
Just over four months later, in the small hours of Sept. 26, Scandinavian seismologists picked up signals indicating an underwater earthquake or volcanic eruption hundreds of miles away, near the Danish island of Bornholm. They were caused by three powerful explosions and the largest-ever recorded release of natural gas, equivalent to the annual CO2 emissions of Denmark.
One of the most audacious acts of sabotage in modern history, the operation worsened an energy crisis in Europe—an assault on critical infrastructure that could be considered an act of war under international law. Theories swirled about who was responsible. Was it the CIA? Could Putin himself have set the plan in motion?
Now, for the first time, the outlines of the real story can be told. The Ukrainian operation cost around $300,000, according to people who participated in it. It involved a small rented yacht with a six-member crew, including trained civilian divers. One was a woman, whose presence helped create the illusion they were a group of friends on a pleasure cruise.
“I always laugh when I read media speculation about some huge operation involving secret services, submarines, drones and satellites,” one officer who was involved in the plot said. “The whole thing was born out of a night of heavy boozing and the iron determination of a handful of people who had the guts to risk their lives for their country.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky initially approved the plan, according to one officer who participated and three people familiar with it. But later, when the CIA learned of it and asked the Ukrainian president to pull the plug, he ordered a halt, those people said.
Zelensky’s commander in chief, Valeriy Zaluzhniy, who was leading the effort, nonetheless forged ahead.
Valeriy Zaluzhniy, then commander in chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, attended an event marking Statehood Day on July 28, 2023. Photo: Ukrainian Presidential Press Office/Associated Press
The Journal spoke to four senior Ukrainian defense and security officials who either participated in or had direct knowledge of the plot. All of them said the pipelines were a legitimate target in Ukraine’s war of defense against Russia.
Portions of their account were corroborated by a nearly two-year German police investigation into the attack, which has obtained evidence including email, mobile and satellite phones communications, as well as fingerprints and DNA samples from the alleged sabotage team. The Germany inquiry hasn’t directly linked President Zelensky to the clandestine operation.
Gen. Zaluzhniy, now Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, said in a text exchange that he knows nothing of any such operation and that any suggestion to the contrary is a “mere provocation.” Ukraine’s armed forces, he added, weren’t authorized to conduct overseas missions, and he therefore wouldn’t have been involved.
A senior official of the main Ukrainian intelligence service, SBU, denied his government had anything to do with the sabotage, and said that Zelensky in particular “did not approve the implementation of any such actions on the territory of third countries and did not issue relevant orders.”
Putin has publicly blamed the U.S. for the attacks. A senior Russian diplomat in Berlin echoed that claim, and said the German investigation findings were “fairy tales worthy of the Brothers Grimm.”
In June, Germany’s federal prosecutor quietly issued the first arrest warrant in the case for a Ukrainian professional diving instructor for his alleged involvement in the sabotage. The German investigation is now focusing on Zaluzhniy and his aides, people familiar with the probe say, although they have no evidence that could be presented in court.
The findings could upend relations between Kyiv and Berlin, which has provided much of the financing and military equipment to Ukraine, second only to the U.S. Some German political leaders may have been willing to overlook evidence pointing to Ukraine for fear of undermining domestic support for the war effort. But German police are politically independent and their investigation took on a life of its own as they pursued one lead after another.
“An attack of this scale is a sufficient reason to trigger the collective defense clause of NATO, but our critical infrastructure was blown up by a country that we support with massive weapons shipments and billions in cash,” said a senior German official familiar with the probe.
Following the May 2022 pact between the businessmen and the military officers, it was agreed that the former would finance and help execute the project, because the army had no funds and was increasingly relying on foreign financing as it pushed back against the onslaught of its gargantuan neighbor. A sitting general with experience in special operations would oversee the mission, which one participant described as a “public-private partnership.” He would report directly to the head of Ukraine’s armed forces, the four-star Gen. Zaluzhniy.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky initially approved the sabotage operation, then tried to shut it down, people familiar with the matter said. Photo: Alexey Furman/Getty Images
Within days, Zelensky approved the plan, according to the four people familiar with the plot. All arrangements were made verbally, leaving no paper trail.
But the next month, the Dutch military intelligence agency MIVD learned of the plot and warned the CIA, according to several people familiar with the Dutch report. U.S. officials then promptly informed Germany, according to U.S. and German officials.
The CIA warned Zelensky’s office to stop the operation, U.S. officials said. The Ukrainian president then ordered Zalyzhniy to halt it, according to Ukrainian officers and officials familiar with the conversation as well as Western intelligence officials. But the general ignored the order, and his team modified the original plan, these people said.
The general tasked with commanding the operation enlisted some of Ukraine’s top special-operations officers with experience in orchestrating high-risk clandestine missions against Russia to help coordinate the attack.
One of them was Roman Chervinsky, a decorated colonel who previously served in Ukraine’s main security and intelligence service, the SBU.
Chervinsky is currently on trial in Ukraine for unrelated charges. In July, he was released on bail after over a year in detention. Reached after his release, he declined to comment on the Nord Stream case, saying he wasn’t authorized to speak about it.
Gas continued to bubble out of the damaged pipelines for days after the attack. Photo: DANISH DEFENCE/AFP/Getty Images
In a subsequent broadcast interview, he said that the sabotage had two positive effects for Ukraine: It helped loosen Russia’s grip on the European countries supporting Kyiv, and it left Moscow with only one main avenue for channeling gas to Europe, pipelines traversing Ukraine. Despite the war, Ukraine collects lucrative transit fees for Russian oil and gas estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Chervinsky and the sabotage team initially studied an older, elaborate plan to blow up the pipeline drafted by Ukrainian intelligence and Western experts after Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, according to people familiar with the plot.
After dismissing that idea due to its cost and complexity, the planners settled on using a small sailing boat and a team of six—a mix of seasoned active duty soldiers and civilians with maritime expertise—to blow up the 700-mile-long pipelines that sat more than 260 feet below the sea’s surface.
In September 2022, the plotters rented a 50-foot leisure yacht called Andromeda in Germany’s Baltic port town of Rostock. The boat was leased with the help of a Polish travel agency that was set up by Ukrainian intelligence as a cover for financial transactions nearly a decade ago, according to Ukrainian officers and people familiar with the German investigation.
One crew member, a military officer on active duty who was fighting in the war, was a seasoned skipper, and four were experienced deep-sea divers, people familiar with the German investigation said. The crew included civilians, one of whom was a woman in her 30s who had trained privately as a diver. She was handpicked for her skills but also to lend more plausibility to the crew’s disguise as friends on holiday, according to one person familiar with the planning.
The Andromeda, a 50-foot Bavaria C50 recreational sailing yacht, stands in dry dock on Ruegen Island on March 17, 2023, near Dranske, Germany. Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
The skipper took a short leave from his unit, which had been fighting on the front in the southeast of Ukraine, and his commander was kept in the dark, according to two Ukrainians familiar with the plot.
Ukraine has a long history of training top civilian and military divers. A naval base on the Crimean Peninsula in the past trained deep-sea divers for the purposes of sabotage and demining. It also kept combat dolphins trained to attack enemy divers and blow up ships, according to two senior Ukrainian officers. The base was taken over by Russia after it occupied Crimea, and some of its staff moved elsewhere in Ukraine.
The Andromeda’s voyage
SWEDEN
Nord Stream 1
Sept. 13
4
Sandhamn,
Sweden
Nord Stream 2
Sept. 11
3
Baltic Sea
Christianso,
Denmark
DENMARK
Copenhagen
Blast
sites
(Sept. 26)
Sept. 8
2
Wiek,
Germany
Sept. 7
1
Sept. 19
5
Sept. 22
Sets sail
from
Rostock,
Germany
6
Kolobrzeg, Poland
Wiek
Hamburg
Sept. 23
7
Returns
to Rostock
POLAND
GERMANY
Berlin
Source: European Space Agency (blast locations)
Armed only with diving equipment, satellite navigation, a portable sonar and open-source maps of the seabed charting the position of the pipelines, the crew set out. The four divers worked in pairs, according to people familiar with the German investigation. Operating in pitch-dark, icy waters, they handled a powerful explosive known as HMX that was wired to timer-controlled detonators. A small amount of the light explosive would be sufficient to rip open the high-pressure pipes.
Spending 20 minutes at that depth requires around three hours of decompression, and the person must then refrain from diving for at least 24 hours or risk serious injury.
Inclement weather forced the crew to make an unplanned stop in the Swedish port of Sandhamn. One diver accidentally dropped an explosive device to the bottom of the sea. The crew briefly discussed whether to abort the operation due to the bad weather but the storm soon subsided, two people familiar with the operation said.
Witnesses on other yachts moored in Sandhamn noted that the Andromeda was the only boat with a small Ukrainian flag hoisted on its mast.
The landfall facility of the Baltic Sea gas pipeline Nord Stream 2 in Lubmin, Germany, before the attack. Photo: Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters
In the wake of the attack, which took out three of the four conduits forming the pipelines, energy prices surged. Germany and other nations scrambled to nationalize energy companies that handled Russian gas but collapsed after the pipelines were destroyed. Even today Germany is paying around $1 million a day alone to lease floating terminals for liquefied natural gas or LNG, which only partly replaced the Russian gas flows channeled by Nord Stream.
Germany, Denmark, Sweden and the U.S., among others, sent out warships, divers, underwater drones and aircraft to investigate the area around the gas leaks.
Zelensky took Zaluzhniy to task, but the general shrugged off his criticism, according to three people familiar with the exchange. Zaluzhniy told Zelensky that the sabotage team, once dispatched, went incommunicado and couldn’t be called off because any contact with them could compromise the operation.
“He was told it’s like a torpedo—once you fire it at the enemy, you can’t pull it back again, it just keeps going until it goes ‘boom,’ ” a senior officer familiar with the conversation said.
Days after the attack, in October 2022, Germany’s foreign secret service received a second tipoff about the Ukrainian plot from the CIA, which again passed on a report by the Dutch military intelligence agency MIVD. It offered a detailed account of the attack, including the type of boat used and the possible route taken by the crew, according to German and Dutch officials.
The Netherlands built deep intelligence-gathering capacity in Ukraine and Russia after Russian-backed paramilitaries downed a Malaysia Airlines flight originating from Amsterdam over eastern Ukraine, two Dutch officials said.
Due to rules governing the sharing of classified intelligence, German police investigating the case weren’t allowed to see the Dutch report that linked Zaluzhniy and the Ukrainian military to the attack, but they were made aware of it by intelligence officials.
German investigators questioned dozens of potential witnesses, scanned the bottom of the sea around the blasts and sifted through masses of data including digital communication, travel records and financial transactions.
An aerial view of the Andromeda. Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
They had one lucky break. In rushing to leave Germany, the sabotage crew neglected to wash the Andromeda, allowing German detectives to find traces of explosives, fingerprints and DNA samples of the crew.
Investigators later identified their mobile phone numbers and their Iridium satellite phone. That data allowed them to reconstruct the entire journey of the boat, which moored in Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Poland. U.S. authorities sought a court order to obtain from Google the emails a Ukrainian businessman used to lease the boat, and handed them over to the Germans. That Ukrainian businessman had contacted a number of boat rental firms in Sweden as well as in Germany, starting from mid-May 2022.
Investigators then analyzed all mobile phone traffic in the areas where the boat was located, trawling through thousands of connections to distill the relevant data.
At one point they were startled to find out that thousands of German mobile phones were active in the tiny Swedish port of Sandhamn, which was nearly empty at the time the boat was sheltering there from a storm.
It later emerged that a vast cruise ship belonging to a tourist operator passed by and the phones of German passengers briefly linked up with the local cellular mast.
They struggled at one point to secure the cooperation of Polish authorities despite the fact that the saboteurs used Poland partly as a logistical base and stopped in the Polish port of Kolobrzeg.
A port official suspicious of the yacht’s crew alerted police. Poland’s border guard checked the identification of the crew, who produced passports from European Union members. They were allowed to continue sailing north, where they laid the rest of the mines, people familiar with the investigation say.
The entire port was covered by extensive video surveillance, they found. However, despite a history of close cooperation between Warsaw and Berlin in police matters, Polish officials initially refused to hand over the CCTV footage of the port. This year, they told their German colleagues that the footage had been routinely destroyed shortly after the Andromeda departed.
The Polish internal security agency ABW told the Journal that no such footage exists.
By November 2022, German investigators believed Ukrainians were behind the explosion.
Earlier this year, Zelensky ousted Zaluzhniy from his military post, saying a shakeup was needed to reboot the war effort. Zaluzhniy, who has been viewed domestically as a potential political rival, was later appointed Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.K., a position that grants him immunity from prosecution.
In June, German officials issued a confidential arrest warrant for a Ukrainian citizen who the Germans believe was one of the crew members. According to people familiar with the investigation, a van driving the Ukrainian sabotage team from Poland into Germany in 2022 was snapped by a German speed camera, and the man, a diving instructor living with his family near Warsaw, was in the photo.
Authorities in Poland didn’t act on the warrant. The instructor is believed to have since returned to Ukraine. Poland’s failure to arrest him is a major blow to the German probe, because he and other suspects have now been tipped off and will avoid travelling outside Ukraine, people familiar with the investigation said. Ukraine doesn’t extradite its own citizens.
Zaluzhniy formally presented his credentials as ambassador to the United Kingdom last month. Photo: Genya Savilov/AFP/Getty Images
Ukrainian officials who participated in or are familiar with the plot believe it would be impossible to put any of the commanding officers on trial, because no evidence exists beyond conversations among top officials who were, at least initially, all in agreement about wanting to blow up the pipelines.
“None of them will testify, lest they incriminate themselves,” one former officer said.
Drew Hinshaw contributed to this article.
Write to Bojan Pancevski at bojan.pancevski@wsj.com
6. The Little-Known U.S. Agency Behind the String of Coups Against Mexico’s Druglords
I have to admit this agency was more than little known to me. It was unknown. I was completely unaware of it.
How does this compete with the FBI and DEA?
And now it is no longer a lesser-known agency and may no longer be able to protect its low profile.
Excerpt:
Created under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, HSI has built a large presence around the world in recent years. With more than 7,000 field agents, it is the second-largest federal law-enforcement agency in the U.S. after the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It has the largest international footprint in U.S. law enforcement with offices in more than 50 countries, and its biggest international outpost in Mexico.
...
Its role in fighting organized crime in Mexico expanded significantly under the Trump and Biden administrations as its focus turned toward the southwestern border. A surge in illegal migration prompted the U.S. government to target criminal groups that run human smuggling rings and traffic drugs such as fentanyl, the highly addictive opioid that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans since it was introduced on U.S. streets more than a decade ago.
...
HSI has quietly helped take down some of the biggest U.S. security targets in Mexico in recent years, U.S. and Mexican officials say. The emergence of HSI as a major player in Mexico comes as the Drug Enforcement Administration, once the leading agency fighting the war on drugs, has been hobbled by leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He has called the DEA agents rogue actors in Mexico who don’t respect the country’s sovereignty.
...
“It’s a lesser-known agency with a bigger punch,” said Oscar Hagelsieb, former deputy director of organized crime at HSI. The agency’s low profile abroad is intentional. “It works when you are in Mexico,” said Hagelsieb, now a private investigator.
The Little-Known U.S. Agency Behind the String of Coups Against Mexico’s Druglords
Homeland Security Investigations played a key role in the capture of elusive kingpin ‘El Mayo’ Zambada and two sons of ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/homeland-security-investigations-cartel-arrests-10e05cdf?mod=hp_lead_pos11
By Steve Fisher, Santiago Pérez
Follow and José de Córdoba
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Aug. 14, 2024 9:00 pm ET
Homeland Security Investigations has built a large presence around the world in recent years. Photo: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement/Reuters
MEXICO CITY—In a spectacular high-wire takedown in late July, U.S. authorities arrested Mexico’s notorious drug lord Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada on the tarmac of a tiny airport near El Paso, Texas, after he had evaded capture for more than four decades.
The operation was hailed as one of the most important captures in the history of the war on drugs. It also shed light on a little-known U.S. law-enforcement agency with an outsize global reach involved in the arrest: Homeland Security Investigations.
Created under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, HSI has built a large presence around the world in recent years. With more than 7,000 field agents, it is the second-largest federal law-enforcement agency in the U.S. after the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It has the largest international footprint in U.S. law enforcement with offices in more than 50 countries, and its biggest international outpost in Mexico.
“HSI has become absolutely mammoth,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a counternarcotics expert at the Brookings Institution. “And with its growth and maturity, its ambitions for global operations have also increased.”
President George W. Bush gave HSI a wide remit at the time of its creation: from sex trafficking to financial crime, terrorism, human smuggling and art theft. Training for some agents includes classes at the Smithsonian Institution to learn how to track art smugglers. Agents have customs authority to inspect computers and search cargo without warrants. They have access to U.S. banking records and Treasury data on international money-laundering schemes and the ability to issue U.S. visas to informants facing danger abroad.
A fentanyl lab in Culiacán, in Mexico’s Sinaloa state.The Sinaloa cartel, a target of HSI, is the top smuggler of fentanyl to the U.S. Photo: Paul Ratje for WSJ
In 2018, the U.S. banned imports of cotton from Turkmenistan after HSI and other agencies found forced labor practices there. Earlier this year, HSI helped Colombian authorities crack down on sex-trafficking rings exploiting underage girls in Colombia, including the arrest of one American citizen. In June, it helped repatriate stolen pre-Hispanic artifacts to Mexico from Seattle.
But it is south of the Rio Grande where HSI has quietly led the charge with Mexican law enforcement to take down high-profile criminals, from major drug traffickers to human smugglers and weapons traffickers.
Its role in fighting organized crime in Mexico expanded significantly under the Trump and Biden administrations as its focus turned toward the southwestern border. A surge in illegal migration prompted the U.S. government to target criminal groups that run human smuggling rings and traffic drugs such as fentanyl, the highly addictive opioid that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans since it was introduced on U.S. streets more than a decade ago.
DEA’s growing isolation in Mexico
HSI has quietly helped take down some of the biggest U.S. security targets in Mexico in recent years, U.S. and Mexican officials say. The emergence of HSI as a major player in Mexico comes as the Drug Enforcement Administration, once the leading agency fighting the war on drugs, has been hobbled by leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He has called the DEA agents rogue actors in Mexico who don’t respect the country’s sovereignty.
The DEA’s greatest reversal of fortunes came after it detained a former Mexican defense minister at the Los Angeles airport on drug trafficking charges in 2020. The surprise arrest infuriated López Obrador and Mexico’s armed forces. In an unprecedented move, the Trump administration released Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos after López Obrador threatened to stop security cooperation with the U.S. Still, he revoked diplomatic immunity for foreign agents and slow-walked visa applications for new DEA agents.
At the same time, HSI officials in Mexico City were deepening their ties with their Mexican security counterparts, Mexican and U.S. government officials say. HSI strengthened its relationships by sharing intelligence on criminals important to Mexican authorities, even when they were of limited interest to the U.S., Mexican officials said.
An HSI agent at a migrant-processing center in Brownsville, Texas; the agency’s remit ranges from financial crime and sex trafficking to terrorism and art theft. Photo: andrew caballero-reynolds/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
“There’s very much the sense that DEA was left in the freezer while HSI is accumulating all kinds of activities,” Felbab-Brown said.
A DEA spokeswoman didn’t return requests for comment.
“The DEA would embrace any opportunity to collaborate with the Mexican government for the greater good of both countries,” said Ray Donovan, the DEA’s former chief of operations.
“Chinese organized crime is rapidly growing in Mexico. Chemicals are flooding the country,” Donovan said. “There are mutual interests where Mexico and the U.S. can openly work together.”
HSI now works with the largest vetted unit of Mexican security officials of any U.S. law enforcement agency in the country, U.S. and Mexican officials say. Members of Mexican units are screened for cartel ties via polygraph and trained in the U.S.
Bilateral security cooperation remains strong, officials from both countries say. There were more extraditions of U.S. security targets from Mexico this past year than almost any other time in the past two decades, many of them HSI targets.
“It’s a lesser-known agency with a bigger punch,” said Oscar Hagelsieb, former deputy director of organized crime at HSI. The agency’s low profile abroad is intentional. “It works when you are in Mexico,” said Hagelsieb, now a private investigator.
Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2023 with former defense minister Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos, who had been detained in the U.S. and later released. Photo: mexico presidency/Reuters
A spokesman for López Obrador declined to comment.
Early signals from Mexico’s President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum suggest that the collaboration with HSI is likely to expand, according to Mexican and U.S. officials. The agency worked with senior members of Sheinbaum’s security team when she was mayor of Mexico City. In 2022, HSI provided intelligence that resulted in the city’s largest cocaine bust, some 1.6 tons of plastic-wrapped bricks stamped with fake Prada and Tesla logos.
‘El Nini,’ ‘El Ratón’ and the man-eating tigers of Sinaloa
In 2023, HSI provided intelligence to Mexican law-enforcement officials that led to the capture of Néstor Isidro “El Nini” Pérez Salas, the top hit man for the sons of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, collectively known as “Los Chapitos.” They inherited their father’s drug-trafficking empire—a faction of the Sinaloa cartel—after he was captured in 2016 and sent to a maximum-security prison in the U.S. three years later.
Federal authorities had already raided three ranches belonging to Pérez Salas in Sinaloa state, confiscating a cache of tank-piercing weapons and three white tigers that he occasionally fed with informants, Mexican and U.S. authorities said.
Mexican law-enforcement agents engaged in covert operations that pressured Pérez Salas into thinking that he was being betrayed by informants in his inner circle. Local news outlets exposed his closest confidants. YouTube videos identified his girlfriends, according to Mexican federal officials who investigated him.
On edge, Pérez Salas ordered his gunmen to stay blocks away. Mexican special forces captured him alone at a safe house. President Biden thanked the Mexican government for the high-profile detention.
In 2019, after Mexican army special forces captured one of El Chapo’s sons in Culiacán, hundreds of gunmen besieged the city. Photo: EPA/Shutterstock
More recently, Biden highlighted the importance of the capture of Zambada—a target with a $15 million price on his head who was on the DEA’s most-wanted list. The DEA filed the indictments against Zambada and Guzmán López, but didn’t take part in their capture, U.S. officials said.
Zambada had never set foot inside a prison and kept a low profile, evading capture numerous times throughout his reign in the Sinaloa cartel. But El Chapo’s second-youngest son, Joaquín Guzmán López, turned to the FBI and HSI offering to self-surrender, according to U.S. officials familiar with the case.
Conversations lasted for months. Along the way, Guzmán López offered to bring in Zambada, the officials said. In a letter released by his lawyer, Zambada said he was betrayed and kidnapped by the son of his longtime associate. Zambada could potentially offer a gold mine of information about cartel operations and government corruption, analysts say.
One of HSI’s biggest drug-trafficking targets in Mexico was Ovidio Guzmán López, another son of El Chapo known as “El Ratón,” or “The Mouse.” Ovidio had become a pioneer in the fentanyl business in Sinaloa, according to Mexican and U.S. officials, and a Sinaloa drug lab operator.
In 2019, Mexican army special forces, using HSI intelligence, captured Ovidio at a house in a swank neighborhood of Culiacán, the Sinaloa state capital and cartel stronghold. But hundreds of gunmen mobilized by his brothers besieged the city, threatened to execute captured soldiers and shot up a housing complex for military families. Within a few hours, López Obrador was forced to release Ovidio to avoid a “blood bath,” the president said.
In 2023, also with HSI intelligence, the Mexican military struck again in an operation that had been planned for months, Mexican officials said. Hundreds of Mexican special forces using Black Hawk helicopters attacked Ovidio’s holiday compound in a town close to Culiacán. About 100 cartel gunmen and 10 Mexican soldiers were killed in the battle, according to people familiar with the operation.
Omar García Harfuch, recently appointed Mexico’s future security minister, built strong relationships with HSI counterparts when he was police chief in Mexico City. Photo: Jorge Nunez/Zuma Press
HSI is also tackling another major concern for both countries: illegal migration. It has provided intelligence that has helped Mexico disrupt smuggling networks, leading to the arrest of several top smugglers working with the Sinaloa cartel in border states, according to Mexican government officials.
In 2023, HSI was involved in the capture of Ofelia “Doña Lupe” Hernández Salas, a migrant smuggler on a U.S. most-wanted list who charged people from as far away as India and Egypt between $10,000 and $70,000 to get across the Southwest border. U.S. prosecutors said that her organization had links to the Sinaloa cartel, which controls smuggling routes along Mexico’s Pacific Coast.
Omar García Harfuch, who was recently appointed by President-elect Sheinbaum as Mexico’s future security minister, built strong relationships with HSI counterparts when he was police chief in Mexico City under Sheinbaum, U.S. and Mexican officials said. He provided intelligence to U.S. law enforcement on high-level targets and received information from the U.S. in return, these people said.
He was the target of an assassination attempt four years ago when more than 40 heavily armed gunmen mounted a predawn ambush as he drove down Mexico City’s elegant Reforma Avenue. From his hospital bed, García Harfuch blamed the violent Jalisco cartel, which is also a top target for U.S. law enforcement.
To increase security cooperation under Sheinbaum, U.S. law enforcement agencies will need to maintain a low profile, said Andrew Selee, director of the Migration Policy Institute.
The U.S. government’s reliance on Mexico to stem migration across the southern border has given Mexico leverage.
“Public security in Mexico will be one of Sheinbaum’s biggest priorities,” Selee said. “And she will expect support from the U.S. in reducing violence in Mexico if she is to crack down on migrant smuggling and the fentanyl trade.”
Write to Santiago Pérez at santiago.perez@wsj.com and José de Córdoba at jose.decordoba@wsj.com
7. The Missteps in Washington and Tehran That Brought Middle East to the Brink
Excerpts:
The stakes for Washington and Tehran are significant: A major Iranian attack that provokes a further Israeli response would set back U.S. hopes for a cease-fire in Gaza and could expose Iran’s vulnerabilities, weakening its position as a regional power.
The U.S. in recent days warned Tehran directly as well as through intermediaries that a significant retaliatory attack on Israel could pose a grave risk for Iran’s government and economy.
Neither the U.S. nor Iran aimed to be in this situation, yet they have little choice now but to stumble through it and hope a full-scale conflict isn’t the end result. Washington expects an assault on Israel as soon as this week, although the U.S. is unsure of its shape and scope.
“We truly don’t know if they will do it, when they will do it, and with what force they will do it. We don’t have firm answers for all of that right now,” a senior administration official said. “But we believe an attack of some sort could very well come, potentially soon and without much notice.”
The Missteps in Washington and Tehran That Brought Middle East to the Brink
An Iranian attack on Israel would carry the risk of a wider war
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/us-iran-missteps-middle-east-conflict-455c0be4?mod=hp_lead_pos10
By Alexander Ward
Follow and Nancy A. Youssef
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Updated Aug. 15, 2024 12:02 am ET
President Biden said this week that it is becoming more difficult to complete a cease-fire agreement. Photo: elizabeth frantz/Reuters
WASHINGTON—As the prospect of an Iranian attack on Israel looms, officials in Washington and Tehran are facing a potential escalation with major risks for both sides.
The Biden administration is trying to head off strikes that could exceed Iran’s April launch of 300 missiles and drones at Israel, the biggest test yet of its nearly four-year effort to contain the regime. Tehran, which prefers using proxies against its adversaries, is considering whether to retaliate directly again, even at the risk of a broader war.
The stakes for Washington and Tehran are significant: A major Iranian attack that provokes a further Israeli response would set back U.S. hopes for a cease-fire in Gaza and could expose Iran’s vulnerabilities, weakening its position as a regional power.
The U.S. in recent days warned Tehran directly as well as through intermediaries that a significant retaliatory attack on Israel could pose a grave risk for Iran’s government and economy.
Neither the U.S. nor Iran aimed to be in this situation, yet they have little choice now but to stumble through it and hope a full-scale conflict isn’t the end result. Washington expects an assault on Israel as soon as this week, although the U.S. is unsure of its shape and scope.
“We truly don’t know if they will do it, when they will do it, and with what force they will do it. We don’t have firm answers for all of that right now,” a senior administration official said. “But we believe an attack of some sort could very well come, potentially soon and without much notice.”
An attack in Tehran that killed Hamas’s leader, which Iran blamed on Israel, sparked vows of swift revenge. It came only hours after an Israeli strike that killed a Hezbollah commander in Beirut. Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said it was his country’s “legal right” to retaliate.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office indicated that it is cooperating with White House efforts to de-escalate tensions, agreeing to join U.S.-organized cease-fire talks set for Thursday. But it has also threatened to respond harshly to any attack from Iran. Israel hasn’t ruled out an offensive in southern Lebanon if Hezbollah strikes.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has shown little willingness recently to get a deal done. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Zuma Press
President Biden told reporters on Tuesday that he expected Iran would refrain from strikes if the parties reached a deal. But he acknowledged “it’s getting harder” to complete a cease-fire agreement, an assessment that comes as U.S. officials travel to Qatar for another round of diplomacy.
White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said Wednesday that the U.S. expects “these talks to move forward as planned.”
In a sign of its continued intransigence, Hamas said it wouldn’t attend negotiations this week. Israel will participate, but Netanyahu has shown little willingness to get a deal done in recent months. U.S. officials concede that the door to a grand bargain is closing, prompting the Biden administration to develop a last-ditch “bridging proposal” meant to resolve the differences between Hamas and Israel over a cease-fire agreement.
Without a cease-fire, “it’s hard to see the Iranians, or Hezbollah for that matter, backing off,” said Dalia Dassa Kaye, a Middle East security expert at UCLA’s Burkle Center for International Relations.
U.S. officials and analysts say Tehran has several potential paths, all with pitfalls. Backing down would make the regime look weak. Launching a massive attack, which risks a broader fight, would invite Israeli counterstrikes Iran couldn’t stop. And replaying the April barrage would render the Islamic Republic feckless—and still raise the chances of a wider war.
Some observers suspect Iran might be trying to pry open another door: delaying until after the cease-fire talks, so if there is an agreement Tehran can claim its threats rendered regional peace.
“There is no doubt intense debate within Iran’s leadership about how to respond because none of their options look good,” said Kaye.
Biden entered office hoping to contain Iran by reviving the nuclear deal and building a fresh patchwork of regional allies to thwart its aggressions. Instead, Washington watched as Tehran edged closer to relaunching its nuclear program, backed proxies that killed three U.S. troops in Jordan and disrupted global commerce, and supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Islamic Republic’s biggest shift was moving its shadow war with Israel into the light. After Israel in April killed senior Iranian military officers in Syria, Iran eschewed the usual playbook—deploying proxies to level a counterpunch, giving Tehran a thin veil of deniability.
Iran alternatively opted to launch weapons at its enemy directly from its territory for the first time since the regime came to power in 1979. A combination of Israeli, U.S. and regional defenses stopped the barrage from killing anyone or severely damaging military and civilian targets.
The coffin of slain Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh passes crowds of Iranians during the funeral ceremony in Tehran. Photo: Vahid Salemi/Associated Press
After the July killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh at an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps guesthouse hours after Iran inaugurated its new president, the clock on how Tehran would respond to that attack started ticking.
“They put themselves in the position to have to do something,” said Alex Vatanka, the Middle East Institute’s Iran program director, “and this time they needed to be more impactful without creating another round of retaliations by the Israelis.”
From Biden on down, the administration has repeatedly warned the regime not to escalate the current situation, using diplomatic and military levers to stave off the worst outcomes.
Beyond coordinating with European and Middle Eastern partners, U.S. officials have sent direct and indirect communications to let Iran know that Washington doesn’t want a wider war. “We know they are paying attention to our messages,” the senior administration official said. “We don’t know if it’s changing their minds.”
That is keeping the administration on edge. U.S. military officials have oscillated between fearing a larger Iranian response than its April barrage to Tehran not responding at all. That indecision is based in part on Iran’s military posture, which “definitely doesn’t look like it did before April 13,” a defense official said Thursday.
This month the U.S. sent a squadron of F-22 Raptors to the region. And the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group is moving from the Asia Pacific region to the Middle East, arriving in the coming weeks, U.S. defense officials said. The Lincoln carries F-35 jet fighters and will overlap with the USS Theodore Roosevelt, which is currently operating off the Gulf of Aden.
It is unclear whether any of these moves by the Biden administration will work as intended.
Dana Stroul, who last year left her post as the Pentagon’s top civilian for the Middle East, said Iran is unlikely to cease its aggressive behavior because the regime doesn’t believe its own security is in jeopardy.
“By over messaging the desire to prevent full-scale war, Iran has interpreted this as a U.S. lack of will to take offensive action,” she said.
Dov Lieber contributed to this article.
Write to Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com and Nancy A. Youssef at nancy.youssef@wsj.com
8. Ukraine Shocks Russia in Kursk
Again, is this the Incheon landing to upend Putin's War?
(But I just hope it does not turn into Bonaparte's attempt to march on Moscow. Fall and winter are coming).
Ukraine Shocks Russia in Kursk
Kyiv’s gains show the Kremlin doesn’t control how the war goes.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/ukraine-incursion-russia-kursk-vladimir-putin-volodymyr-zelensky-dc245761?mod=hp_opin_pos_4#cxrecs_s
By The Editorial Board
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Aug. 14, 2024 5:54 pm ET
A Ukrainian military vehicle driving past a destroyed border crossing point with Russia, in the Sumy region, on Wednesday Photo: roman pilipey/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Ukraine is taking the war to Russia this week, and its incursion into the Kursk region is causing new headaches for the Kremlin.
Vladimir Putin was confident that the war would only be fought on foreign soil, and he left Kursk without formidable defensive fortifications. Ukraine is taking advantage of this opening, and its top general, Oleksandr Syrskiy, said Monday that Ukrainian forces now control some 386 square miles of Russian territory.
Russia shares some 600 miles of its southern border with unoccupied Ukraine, which it will now have to think about defending. In response to the Kursk incursion, Russia has reportedly pulled some manpower from Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in southern Ukraine. Moscow may also be pulling men from irregular units in Donetsk or redeploying units intended to relieve or reinforce the southeastern rear, the Institute for the Study of War said Tuesday.
Ukraine isn’t interested in capturing territory to hold in Kursk but needs to protect itself from Russian assaults. Over the past 75 days the Sumy region in Ukraine has endured nearly 2,100 artillery strikes from across the border in Kursk, President Volodymyr Zelensky noted. Russia has based troops there, and Ukraine has worried that Moscow could launch an offensive against Sumy as it has done in nearby Kharkiv. To the extent Ukraine can hold its positions in Kursk, it creates a buffer on Russian soil to shield Sumy.
The incursion has embarrassed Mr. Putin and made the Russian public feel more effects of the war. Russia knows the West fears escalation, and Mr. Putin has called the incursion a “large-scale provocation.” But that contradicts Russia’s domestic reassurances that the situation is under control. Russia has now declared emergencies in the Kursk and Belgorod border regions, and the acting governor of Kursk said some 180,000 Russians have been ordered to evacuate.
Ukraine has also captured Russian soldiers in Kursk, and Mr. Zelensky said this week that this “will speed up the return home of our boys and girls.” Prisoner exchanges are a priority for the Ukrainian public, especially given survivors’ harrowing accounts of abuses suffered in Russian custody. Russia has tortured 95% of Ukrainian prisoners of war, the head of the United Nations human-rights monitoring mission in Ukraine told Dutch media this month.
Mr. Putin said this week that Ukraine’s Kursk incursion may be an effort to “improve its negotiating position in the future.” If so, more power to Kyiv, and Mr. Putin’s calculations may shift if Ukraine can also put Crimea at risk. But as the Institute for the Study of War has noted, Mr. Putin’s assertion undermines “a long-standing Kremlin information operation falsely portraying Ukraine as unwilling to engage in legitimate, good-faith negotiations.”
The U.S. can help Ukraine build on the incursion’s momentum by surging weapons and removing restraints on their use. Current restrictions mean Russia doesn’t have to worry about missile strikes on air bases, weapons-manufacturing facilities and other war infrastructure deep within its territory. The more the reality of the war is brought home to Russia, the sooner a serious negotiation might begin.
WSJ Opinion: Hits and Misses of the Week
WSJ Opinion: Hits and Misses of the Week
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Journal Editorial Report: The week's best and worst from Kim Strassel, Kyle Peterson and Dan Henninger. Photo: Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters
9. How the Justice Department Is Changing Its Tactics on Cybercrime
Excerpts:
WSJ: How has the cyber-threat landscape evolved over the past three years or so, and how have law enforcement’s attempts to tackle those problems also evolved?
OLSEN: What I’ve seen are very concerning trend lines continue in terms of nation-state-sponsored cyber threats. Those trends are increasing sophistication, increasing capability, persistence, and really just a determination and intent to use cyber-enabled means to carry out a range of threats.
We’re most concerned about China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. The range of threats extends from traditional espionage—going after classified information on government systems—to seeking to obtain trade secrets from some of our leading technology companies. It also includes foreign-malign-influence activities, or using cyber-enabled means to influence policies and elections and to really exploit divisions in American society. Probably the most concerning are the threats to our critical infrastructure.
As for our response, there is an increasing focus on being victim-centric. Our goal is to be very much a partner to the private sector, to treat companies that have been attacked or threatened as victims that we want to work with, to limit the damage to them and to work with the broader community to prevent further potential damage. That sort of goal is very much what I see every day when we talk to the FBI leadership, when we get the threat briefing, when we talk about the nature of the threats we’re facing.
And barely a day goes by, maybe a couple of days, where we’re not talking about some sort of cyber activity that’s affecting a major American company or a government department or agency.
How the Justice Department Is Changing Its Tactics on Cybercrime
The assistant attorney general for national security outlines where the biggest threats are coming from—and what kinds of attacks are most worrisome
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/cybercrime-justice-department-tactics-a9db784b?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=1
Aug. 14, 2024 10:00 am ET
The Justice Department’s Matthew Olsen, right, discusses cyber threats with The Wall Street Journal’s Dustin Volz. Photo: Aria Isadora for The Wall Street Journal
Cyber threats from nation-state adversaries against U.S. targets are growing, and it is Matthew Olsen’s job to stay on top of them.
Olsen, who has been the assistant attorney general for national security since 2021, leads the Justice Department’s efforts to fight terrorism, espionage, cybercrime and other threats to U.S. national security.
In an interview with Dustin Volz at The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live: Cybersecurity conference in June, Olsen talked about the threat from China, why cyberattack-disclosure rules are sometimes waived and the challenges posed by ransomware, among other things.
Edited excerpts follow.
Disclosure delays
WSJ: How has the cyber-threat landscape evolved over the past three years or so, and how have law enforcement’s attempts to tackle those problems also evolved?
OLSEN: What I’ve seen are very concerning trend lines continue in terms of nation-state-sponsored cyber threats. Those trends are increasing sophistication, increasing capability, persistence, and really just a determination and intent to use cyber-enabled means to carry out a range of threats.
We’re most concerned about China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. The range of threats extends from traditional espionage—going after classified information on government systems—to seeking to obtain trade secrets from some of our leading technology companies. It also includes foreign-malign-influence activities, or using cyber-enabled means to influence policies and elections and to really exploit divisions in American society. Probably the most concerning are the threats to our critical infrastructure.
As for our response, there is an increasing focus on being victim-centric. Our goal is to be very much a partner to the private sector, to treat companies that have been attacked or threatened as victims that we want to work with, to limit the damage to them and to work with the broader community to prevent further potential damage. That sort of goal is very much what I see every day when we talk to the FBI leadership, when we get the threat briefing, when we talk about the nature of the threats we’re facing.
And barely a day goes by, maybe a couple of days, where we’re not talking about some sort of cyber activity that’s affecting a major American company or a government department or agency.
WSJ: How often are you investigating some sort of cyber national-security case and it turns out it might be China?
OLSEN: Pretty much all the time. There is no country that’s more capable and with more determination and intent than China. And the resources they’re putting into their malicious cyber activity are second to none.
China is one of the countries of greatest concern to U.S. officials as a cyber threat, says the Justice Department’s Matthew Olsen. Photo: edgar su/Reuters
It is a daily occurrence that we’re talking and thinking about the types of activities that China is engaged in, and they run the gamut. But in particular, they are going after our technology, stealing information from companies, as well as traditional espionage.
WSJ: The Chinese hacking network known as Volt Typhoon has been highlighted as a growing concern. Can you talk a little bit more about why that is?
OLSEN: Volt Typhoon is a Chinese government-sponsored threat actor that uses access to home and small-office routers to establish a beachhead, to be present on those routers through a botnet, and to use that presence to conceal its efforts to target critical infrastructure, whether it’s transportation, energy, water or telecommunications systems. It’s a real threat in terms of the capacity to target U.S. critical infrastructure in a very sophisticated way.
related
It has been a bit of a success story from a law-enforcement perspective, however. The FBI has very effectively used a tried-and-true criminal law-enforcement tool, a search-and-seizure warrant, to go in and basically disconnect the infected routers from the command-and-control capacity of Volt Typhoon. It’s an old tool. You go in, you look for evidence of a crime, you seize it.
And again, it highlights how important it is for us to have partnerships with the private sector to be able to take those steps.
WSJ: It sounds like you’re saying, though, that the threat hasn’t gone away, it’s still very real and we might see more activity in this space.
OLSEN: Yeah, there’s no reason to think it’s totally gone away. It’s really that we’re increasing our ability and our capacity to go after it.
WSJ: Late last year, the Securities and Exchange Commission adopted a rule that requires publicly traded companies to disclose cybersecurity breaches no later than four business days after determining the attack will have a material impact on their business. They can delay disclosure, however, if the government determines there could be some national-security-related impacts or considerations. How has that played out in practice?
The SEC recently adopted a new rule on disclosure by companies of cybersecurity breaches. Photo: Tierney L. Cross/Bloomberg News
OLSEN: There have been dozens of disclosures since the SEC adopted the rule in December. But the rule also includes a waiver, or the capacity to delay disclosure if it would impose substantial risks on national security or public safety. There are occasions where simply disclosing an attack might actually reveal a vulnerability that hasn’t been fully remediated, say a zero-day type attack [in which hackers exploit a hardware or software vulnerability before a patch is available].
And we have in fact on a number of occasions delayed disclosure to take the steps necessary to protect national security. It’s a very compressed timeline. So if a company identifies a breach, my strong encouragement would be to work very quickly and closely with the FBI, because once you determine that there’s a material breach, four days isn’t a long time to make the judgment about whether to seek a delay in disclosure.
Ransomware challenge
WSJ: After the Colonial Pipeline attack in 2021 shut down a critical gasoline pipeline to the East Coast for days, ransomware was elevated to a national security threat. It is usually criminal groups that engage in ransomware attacks, but they largely emanate from a certain part of the globe—Russia, Eastern Europe, Russian-speaking places—where they seem to be given a haven. How do we solve this problem?
OLSEN: It’s a very significant challenge. Colonial Pipeline is really the pre-eminent example of a ransomware attack carried out by a Russian-based group. It was a huge wake-up call for both the government and the private sector because of its impact.
The Justice Department’s Matthew Olsen says the ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline was ‘a huge wake-up call.’ Photo: Mark Kauzlarich/Bloomberg News
One of the key challenges you touched on is that these criminal organizations are often given safe haven. Even when Russia is aware that they’re operating with impunity, they’re taking no steps to prevent those groups from being able to effectively operate.
In the Colonial Pipeline case, however, the government was able to recover a majority of the funds that were paid as part of that ransom using the very specific and high-end authority that the U.S. government has that the private sector doesn’t to understand the nature of that threat, to identify the threat actors and ultimately recover some of the funds. So we have had some ability to mitigate ransomware threats by working closely as partners with affected companies.
At the end of the day, though, I do think many of the ransomware attacks we often see could have been prevented with some basic cybersecurity actions.
WSJ: How are you thinking about and gearing up for the election season from your perch?
OLSEN: We’re seeing increasing sophistication and capability and intention, especially from Russia and China, to exploit divisions in our society, to go after our democracy. Our goal is to identify those threat actors and where they’re violating the criminal law, hold them accountable.
Sometimes they’re outside of our reach, at least at the moment. That doesn’t stop us from investigating and charging them and someday maybe arresting them or at least exposing their activities. Through that exposure, we can better inform the public about the nature of the threats and better defend our country.
10. Hackers may have stolen EVERY American's Social Security numbers
I still have my first duffel bag from basic training that has my social security number stenciled in 2 inch characters on the outside.
For decades we wrote our SSN on checks and even had our checks printed with our SSNs on them because they were required for check cashing at the PX and commissary and other businesses.
And for decades the military abandoned a service number and instead used our SSNs for identification.
Ironically what does or did it say on our social security cards? My social security card from 1958 has a statement on it that says this is not to be used for identification. My daughter's, which was issued in 2000. does not have such a statement on it.
Yes hackers may have stolen all the SSNs but for years many of us were giving them away.
Hackers may have stolen EVERY American's Social Security numbers
Hackers may have stolen EVERY American's Social Security numbers in 'five-alarm wake-up call'
By Mitchell Goodbar For Dailymail.Com
Published: 02:17 EDT, 15 August 2024 | Updated: 02:17 EDT, 15 August 2024
Daily Mail · by Mitchell Goodbar For Dailymail.Com · August 15, 2024
A vicious gang of hackers might have stolen every American's Social Security number in a massive theft of personal information from a large data broker, which experts are calling 'a five-alarm wake-up call.'
Following the online heist, which took place four months ago, one of the hackers reportedly released most of the sensitive data on the dark web for free.
Now that this sensitive information - including Social Security numbers - has been disseminated, it is possible it will give rise to rampant identity theft, fraud, and various other crimes.
'If this in fact is pretty much the whole dossier on all of us, it certainly is much more concerning [than previous breaches],' Teresa Murray, a cybersecurity expert, told Yahoo news.
A vicious gang of hackers might have stolen every American's Social Security number in a massive theft of personal information from a large data broker
Now that this sensitive information- including Social Security numbers- has been disseminated, it is possible it will give rise to rampant identity theft, fraud, and various other crimes
'If people weren’t taking precautions in the past, which they should have been doing, this should be a five-alarm wake-up call for them,' Murray continued.
In April, a notorious gang of hackers known as the USDoD took credit for the theft of sensitive personal records of 2.9 billion people from National Public Data, which often provides personal information to employers, staffing agencies, and private investigators.
In a forum for hackers, the USDoD offered to sell the valuable data, which encompassed records of people from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.
According to a post on X.com by a cybersecurity expert, the group claimed that they were selling the 4 TB database for $3.5 million.
In April, a notorious gang of hackers known as the USDoD took credit for the theft of sensitive personal records of 2.9 billion people from National Public Data
The hacker went on to claim that the database contained about 2.7 billion records, which came furnished with a person's full name, date of birth, address, and Social Security number
But last week, a putative member of the hacking gang, going by the name Felice, told the forum that they were offering 'the full NPD database.'
The hacker went on to claim that the database contained about 2.7 billion records, which came furnished with a person's full name, date of birth, and address.
Read More
I'm a professional hacker - here are the signs someone like me is inside your phone
It also contained Social Security numbers, phone numbers, and alternative birth dates and names.
News outlets centered around cybersecurity have since viewed sections of the data Felice made available.
According to experts, the data appeared to be genuine.
According to Yahoo, National Public Data has been informing people who have contacted them regarding the data breach that they 'are investigating these issues.'
The data broker also reportedly stated that they have 'purged the entire database, as a whole, of any and all entries, essentially opting everyone out.'
The hacker went on to claim that the database contained about 2.7 billion records, which came furnished with a person's full name, date of birth, and address
By doing so, National Public Data has deleted 'non-public personal information' about people, although they might have to retain certain documents to 'comply with legal obligations.'
Even though email addresses were noticeably absent from the hackers' database, ill-intentioned people could still do 'all kinds of things,' according to Murray.
With the information they already have in hand, criminals could attempt to hijack someone's bank account.
'For someone who's really suave at it, the possibilities are endless,' Murray added.
Daily Mail · by Mitchell Goodbar For Dailymail.Com · August 15, 2024
11. Mine Warfare in the Asia-Pacific: Clear and Present Danger
Although I am a former soldier, when I was a planner at CFC I recall the commanders being very concerned with the status of our MCM ships because of the importance and threat of mine warfare.
Defense/Security
Mine Warfare in the Asia-Pacific: Clear and Present Danger
Chinese military planners zero in on a cost-effective method of keeping the US at bay
https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/mine-warfare-asia-pacific-clear-present-danger?utm
Aug 15, 2024
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By: Andy Wong Ming Jun
Tahrahra boom deyay!
The Chinese navy learned some important lessons from the 1991 First Gulf War, when two US naval warships operating in the Persian Gulf were damaged by Iraqi mines laid prior to Operation Desert Storm. Military strategists took note of the outsized impact of what was described as a limited and rudimentary mine warfare campaign by the Iraqi Navy in the face of overwhelming numbers, using only the most basic of influence mines, with an eye to applying the same tactics and techniques only with better technology and on a larger scale.
Thus, in the past decades, the PLA Navy has taken pains to develop and stockpile naval mines of increasing sophistication, with some 50,000 of various capabilities stockpiled as far back as 2009. This has doubled in quantity to 100,000. Recognized in strategic circles as one of China’s “Assassin’s Mace” military technologies, the tools required for building and deploying hi-tech mines with smart sensory capabilities, autonomous self-propulsion, and increased firepower constitute an important asset for the Chinese military to skew the naval balance of power in the Pacific in its favor against a qualitatively superior foe such as the US.
The fact hasn’t gone unnoticed that naval mines are the cheapest and most passively deployed weapon in any navy’s arsenal, and yet oftentimes one of the deadliest in terms of sheer firepower and psychological impact on any theater of combat. Their power in modern naval warfare is demonstrated by a sobering statistic: of 18 warships lost or seriously damaged since WWII due to hostile action, 14 were struck by sea mines. The mines are the most effective method of denying precious maritime space and corralling a potential naval adversary into restricted waters where they cannot maneuver freely without fear of damage, as well as tying down considerable time and assets to painstakingly sweep and sanitize an operational area before deployment can happen.
Efforts have also been placed in developing mine deployment systems, using not just surface naval mine-laying assets but also aircraft-deployed parachute systems and rocket-launched mines. China has also particularly earmarked its conventional submarine fleet for offensive mine warfare due to its ability to operate stealthily at long ranges far from the Chinese coastline into the South China Sea and Western Pacific waters surrounding Taiwan.
With China’s focus on deploying increasingly sophisticated naval mines not just from military vessels but also merchant and fishing ships, the PLA Navy is now capable of implementing and escalating its own “blockade” strategy around Taiwan and within the First Island Chain at will. Such a strategy has been demonstrated with increasing intensity and frequency through exercises such as its annual “Joint Sword” exercises since 2023, aimed at cutting all sea lines of communications and trade and leaving only Chinese-controlled “cordon sanitaire” sea lanes accessible for use by its own commercial and naval vessels.
China is currently the largest operator of minesweepers and naval mines in the Indo-Pacific. As of 2021 it has 36 minesweepers (seven of them built from the 2000s onwards) in operation and much of its 500-strong active fleet being capable of laying naval mines. In comparison, regional navies including that of the US have outdated and numerically inferior minesweeping vessel flotillas.
The Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force has 26 minesweepers, of which only three have been built since 2014. The South Koreans have 11 active ones, of which only three were newly built in the 2000s. Most shockingly, the US Navy has only four Avenger-class minesweepers forward-deployed under the Seventh Fleet out of Sasebo, Japan. For perspective, this is half of the US’s total specialist minesweeping fleet deployed globally, and the same amount as the much smaller Singapore Navy possesses in its own fleet.
The Avenger minesweepers are more than three decades old, of late 1980s vintage. As of 2022, the US Navy plans to retire all remaining Avenger-class minesweepers starting from 2025. The intention of replacing them with minesweeping mission package modules mounted onto its Independence-class Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) as well as helicopter-towed demining sleds has run into multiple cost and capability shortfall issues, and future advanced minesweeping platforms be it surface or underwater in nature are not expected to mature and enter service until the 2030s.
China has a numerical and qualitative superiority in all areas of naval mine warfare for the Indo-Pacific theater, be it offensive/defensive mine deployments, or minesweeping capabilities to keep its own waters clear of enemy mines. The larger fortunes of naval warfare in the Indo-Pacific thus may very well be decided not by large capital fleet units or advanced, long-ranged weaponry across vast expanses of ocean, but by the outsized impact and influence of intelligently deployed static and even mobile naval mines in the face of inadequate minesweeping capabilities. Mine warfare in the Indo-Pacific theatre is therefore not a theoretical possibility but a clear and present danger.
12. White House advisory group blasts US government, DoD inattention to GPS woes
One of our Achilles' heels? Can we reduce dependency on GPS for military operations?
It is a good thing my map, compass, and protractor are day/night all weather capable and do not rely on batteries or any external power (except brain power). Of course that is a snarky comment. The serious question is can we develop non-GPS reliant technology and weapons systems to reduce our vulnerabilities?
Now what will we as citizens do when Waze and Google and Apple maps no longer receive GPS signals. How will we navigate?
White House advisory group blasts US government, DoD inattention to GPS woes - Breaking Defense
The President’s National Space-based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Advisory Board recommends that the Biden administration create a new “locus of authority and accountability for PNT decision-making beyond DoD GPS program management.”
breakingdefense.com · by Theresa Hitchens · August 14, 2024
GPS III satellite, (Lockheed Martin image)
WASHINGTON — The independent White House advisory group on GPS is taking the US government to task for failing to adequately address increased risks of interference with the Pentagon owned satellites, and for lack of progress in finding alternative positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) systems — suggesting that control of GPS functions should lie outside the Defense Department.
“America’s continued over-reliance on GPS for PNT makes critical infrastructure and applications vulnerable to a variety of well documented accidental, natural, and malicious threats,” Thaad Allen, chair of the President’s National Space-based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Advisory Board, wrote in a recent memo to the Defense and Transportation Department deputy secretaries.
“Simply put, the Board believes that the 20-year-old framework for GPS governance and the current policy statements establish neither the priority that the system deserves nor sufficiently clear accountability for its performance,” he added.
The memo, which was made public on Aug. 9 but transmitted on July 19, was designed to report on the outcome of the board’s 30th session held on April 24-25 in Colorado Springs, Colo.
The GPS satellites are owned and operated by DoD. But because the network has become a de-facto public good serving government agencies and commercial entities both in the US and abroad, their use is governed by an interagency executive committee, or EXCOM, led by Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks and Deputy Transportation Secretary Polly Trottenberg. Other member organizations are the Departments of State, Treasury, Agriculture, Interior, Commerce, Energy and Homeland Security, as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Director of National Intelligence and NASA.
Allen’s letter makes clear that the 29 advisory board members, comprising experts from industry, academia and international organizations, are unhappy with the EXCOM’s remit and performance. The EXCOM in essence is itself advisory, as it has no budgetary authority over DoD decision-making about GPS or its funding of upgrades and/or alternatives.
“While GPS is a Dept. of Defense (DoD) program, the well-intentioned framework of an EXCOM to manage the interrelation of military and civil users is ineffective and non-responsive to existing and emerging risks regarding not only GPS, but the larger spectrum of U.S. PNT capabilities. Space Policy Directive 7 (SPD-7), U.S. Space-based PNT Policy, must be revisited and the term ‘space-based’ should be removed from its title,” Allen wrote.
The board is urging the Biden administration to “revisit SPD-7 to establish a clear strategy, bolstered by a revised governance framework with clear roles and responsibilities extending to the creation of programs of record with resourcing plans to execute agency assigned responsibilities.” This includes creating a “locus of authority and accountability for PNT decision-making beyond DoD GPS program management.”
The Board further is fretting that other PNT systems such as the European Union’s Galileo and China’s BeiDou are outstripping GPS’s performance, including with regard to jam resistance. That could in part be remedied, the letter asserts, by DoD activating a new signal for non-military users called L-5.
Thus, the board is recommending that DoD activate the “long-awaited” L-5 signal as soon as possible.
Another potential solution would be for the Biden administration to lift International Traffic in Arms Regulation on advanced antennas, the board suggested.
Finally, the advisory board recommended that the PNT EXCOM “assign a lead agency and single individual with clear responsibility and authority for the end-to-end prompt detection, characterization, and removal of significant sources of interference” to GPS and other PNT systems within the United States.
13. America will be more secure if it does less
Doing less?
Unfortunately the mantra has always been do more with less.
But let's be realistic. Wars in Taiwan and Korea, while both within a single theater (INDOPACOM), may as well be considered multi-theater. While they are in relative geographic proximity (as opposed to the Middle East or Ukraine), we are still going to have challenges with dual apportioned forces.
America will be more secure if it does less - Breaking Defense
In this op-ed, Jennifer Kavanagh argues the Commission on the National Defense Strategy needs to prioritize the threats in Asia, as opposed to the “multi-theater force construct” it recommended this year.
breakingdefense.com · by Jennifer Kavanagh · August 14, 2024
Chairman Jack Reed, D-R.I., center, greets former Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., chair of the Commission on the National Defense Strategy, and vice chair Eric S. Edelman, before the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the “findings and recommendations of the Commission on the National Defense Strategy,” in Dirksen Building on Tuesday, July 30, 2024. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
In its final report, released at the end of last month, the Commission on the National Defense Strategy (NDS) had a chance to tackle the Pentagon’s most stubborn but pressing challenge: the failure to prioritize. It squandered this opportunity, however, by recommending a “multi-theater force construct” that requires a larger military, more spending and an increased forward presence in Asia, Europe and the Middle East while still defending the homeland. In other words, the Commission’s more-of-everything prescription punted on arguably the most crucial question it was supposed to tackle.
Even as the defense budget pushes towards $1 trillion, the status quo approach leaves the United States overstretched — involved in unnecessary wars where its interests are limited, and falling behind in Asia, where the stakes are highest. The Commission’s answer to this perennial overcommitment is to double down, with the American public footing the bill through tax increases and entitlement cuts. As attention shifts to what the US defense strategy might look like under a new president, policymakers should not repeat the Commission’s mistake, and instead must lean into the hard but necessary prioritization choices required to align ambitions and resources.
We are currently witnessing the consequences of the US failure to set and stick to national security priorities and its efforts to retain global military primacy. Although the Biden administration defined China as the “pacing threat” and Asia as the most important theater for US interests, it has found itself sucked deeper into the Middle East and Europe, where Washington has large numbers of forces and extensive security commitments, at the expense of its investments in the Indo-Pacific. In Asia, meanwhile, China is taking advantage of a distracted United States, continuing to expand its naval fleet and missile stockpiles, while ramping up gray zone activities in the South China Sea.
The Commission’s multi-theater approach worsens these problems. Even with bigger budgets, trying to meet the demands of homeland defense and global military leadership in three theaters will spread US munitions, military forces, and advanced systems thin for the foreseeable future, leaving the United States underprepared for missions abroad, vulnerable at home, and at risk of defeat in Asia, where it matters most. Efforts to assert US military dominance could fail in other ways as well, including triggering new arms races or alienating countries that are less willing to yield to US preeminence now that they have other options.
The Commission explicitly rejects making the type of prioritization decisions that would be required to make US strategy solvent, arguing that “the United States must engage globally … to maintain stability and preserve influence worldwide” and that its presence is simply too important everywhere to pull back from any one theater. Instead, it insists that more resources — money and personnel to fill spots in the larger armed forces — will be required and looks to the American public to provide both. Even if the defense budget continues to rise, it won’t realistically cover the cost of Commission’s proposals, leaving the recommended strategy as insolvent as it is imprudent.
The Commission report does deserve points for candor. It admits that with the national debt itself a security risk, large increases in defense spending — the Commission suggests the military budget should grow by hundreds of billions of dollars in coming years — would need to be accompanied by unspecified “additional taxes and reforms to entitlement spending.” But let’s be real: The unpopularity of tax increases and cuts to Medicare and Social Security mean Congress will likely thumb its nose at these ideas, leaving only a few, small pots of money to be redirected towards defense — nothing close to what the Commission feels the Pentagon needs.
The Commission is also unlikely to win the public support it says is needed to underwrite its vision. The Commission calls on policymakers to “make the case publicly why these challenges matter and why the United States remains the indispensable nation to maintain peace, stability, and a flourishing economy.”
But Americans aren’t likely to fall for this narrative again. Decades of massive overseas military commitments and failed military adventures in the Middle East have not brought peace and prosperity to that region, nor have they left Americans better off. Instead, as the Commission argues, the risk of major power war is more likely than any other time this century. It is unsurprising, then, that US voters are increasingly ambivalent or opposed to the United States playing a large role abroad, resistant to paying for defense budget increases, and uninterested in military service — propensity to serve sat at just 9 percent among eligible young people in 2023.
The authors of the next NDS should abandon the quest for global military preeminence once and for all and ruthlessly prioritize, placing the focus on US investments and posture in Asia and at home — committing to finally executing the promised “Asia pivot.” This will mean downsizing ground forces and reducing forward presence in Europe and the Middle East rather than increasing it; ending legacy and underperforming acquisition programs; choosing lower cost strategies rather than depending on expensive, exquisite systems; and accepting a reduced, though still important, global role for the United States that reflects its geographic and latent power advantages.
These cuts will be painful, but ultimately, the United States will be more secure if it does less.
Jennifer Kavanagh is a senior fellow and the Director of Military Analysis at Defense Priorities, a think tank in Washington D.C. She is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.
breakingdefense.com · by Jennifer Kavanagh · August 14, 2024
14. With the Middle East Simmering, U.S. Seeks to Revive Israel-Hamas Deal
With the Middle East Simmering, U.S. Seeks to Revive Israel-Hamas Deal
Ceasefire-for-hostages negotiations resume in the shadow of a looming regional war.
thedispatch.com · by Charlotte Lawson · August 15, 2024
TEL AVIV, Israel—As Israelis awaited an imminent attack by Iran, Hezbollah, or both this week, the U.S. dispatched senior officials to a Middle East on the brink of a wider war. On Thursday, they will meet with Arab state representatives and Israeli negotiators in Qatar for the latest and perhaps final push to broker a ceasefire-for-hostages deal with Hamas.
Speaking here Wednesday, diplomats from the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States made the urgent case for an agreement the Biden administration hopes will defuse tensions across the region as Iran and its proxies vow to retaliate for the assassinations of terror chiefs in Tehran and Beirut last month. U.S. Middle East envoy Brett McGurk arrived in Egypt on Tuesday and CIA director Bill Burns will reportedly attend ceasefire talks Thursday. Secretary of State Antony Blinken delayed a planned trip to the region amid the looming threat of escalation.
President Joe Biden said Tuesday that while efforts to reach a ceasefire were “getting harder,” he was “not giving up.” Asked by a reporter if he thought Iran would hold off on a retaliatory strike against Israel if a deal with Hamas is reached, the president responded, “That’s my expectation.”
But by relying on negotiations over Gaza to manage the threat posed by Iran, the U.S. may have cornered Israel into making a binary choice: Reach a deal, even if it’s on unfavorable terms, or risk a multifront war. Unnamed senior Iranian officials told Reuters Tuesday that Tehran and its allies would launch a direct strike against Israel should talks fail. Meanwhile, new Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar could view the prospect of Iran’s intervention as a reason to harden his own demands or ditch the negotiating table altogether. Hamas refused to send a delegation to Qatar on Thursday, though Arab state officials will communicate Israel’s conditions to the terror group for ending more than 10 months of hostilities in Gaza.
“It’s in the interest of Sinwar that there be a war between Israel, Iran, and Hezbollah,” Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States, told The Dispatch. “Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, and the Iranians have said that if Sinwar reaches a ceasefire, they’ll cease fire as well. So that essentially becomes an incentive for Sinwar not to reach a ceasefire, because what will a war with Israel and Iran and Hezbollah do? It will draw all of Israel’s military attention to the north, exhaust Israel, and isolate Israel further.”
And significant daylight between the two warring parties remains. Hamas, which continues to obfuscate about the number and identity of living hostages it still holds, has demanded a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in phase one of the agreement. But Israel appears determined to retain control over the strategically important Philadelphi Corridor, an 8-mile stretch of land between Egypt and Gaza through which Hamas smuggles arms and cash into the Strip. Israel also wants to vet the people returning to northern Gaza, to prevent Hamas from reconstituting there.
Relatives and supporters of Israelis held hostage by militants in Gaza since the October 7 attacks hold placards as they demonstrate calling for their release in Tel Aviv on August 10, 2024. (Photo by OREN ZIV/AFP via Getty Images)
Other sticking points, like whether Jerusalem can exercise veto power over the Palestinian prisoners Hamas requests to free as part of a deal, also threaten to disrupt progress toward even a temporary truce. The group’s wish list includes people serving life sentences for murdering Israeli civilians, reportedly including Marwan Barghouti, a popular Palestinian nationalist and the planner of multiple lethal bombings during the Second Intifada. This issue became even more politically fraught on Tuesday, when a Hamas terrorist who was released as part of November’s temporary ceasefire and hostage deal shot and killed a 23-year-old Israeli in the West Bank.
Zooming out, a permanent ceasefire looks even further off, despite pressure from the U.S. and its European allies. “There’s the big picture in which the two sides are fundamentally at odds. Israel insists that it is not going to stop until it achieves its war aims, which include toppling Hamas as a military and governing organization. That’s victory for Israel, and they’ve said it at every stage,” said Lazar Berman, a Jerusalem-based analyst and diplomatic correspondent at the Times of Israel. “Hamas—and it’s been consistent as well—wants the exact opposite. They want to win, and winning for them is surviving.”
As it pushes for a diplomatic resolution, the U.S. has also moved additional military assets to the Middle East to help Israel defend itself in the event of escalation by Iran or Hezbollah. On Monday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered the deployment of a missile-guided submarine and expedited the transit of the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier to the region.
But a strong defense posture alone may not be enough to deter a broader war, as Hezbollah proved in October by joining Hamas in attacking Israel despite U.S. warnings and deployments. In northern Israel, near-daily rocket, drone, and missile attacks have killed scores of soldiers and civilians and forced some 100,000 people from their homes for more than 10 months. And with Israel’s counterstrikes against Hezbollah commanders, including the killing of senior military chief Fuad Shukr in Beirut last month, the simmering conflict risks boiling over into an all-out war.
Though Hezbollah will likely hold its fire in the event of a Gaza ceasefire deal being reached, it would continue to pose an unbearable threat to northern communities and beyond. The group possesses a trained fighting force and an arsenal in Lebanon of more than 200,000 rockets and missiles capable of striking deep into Israeli territory.
“In order to get the close to 100,000 residents of Israel’s north from 43 different communities home, there is going to have to be a major change in the way Hezbollah operates,” Enia Krivine, senior director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Israel program, told The Dispatch. Where diplomacy has failed to push the terrorist group back over the last 18 years, she added, military force might be needed. “The question is: Is that time now, or is that time six months from now, or nine months from now? It’s not a matter of ‘if,’ it’s a matter of ‘when.’”
thedispatch.com · by Charlotte Lawson · August 15, 2024
15. Did China just demote its defense ministry?
Did China just demote its defense ministry?
Adm. Dong Jun has been left off key decision-making bodies. That could complicate the U.S.-China military relationship.
By Shanshan Mei and Dennis J. Blasko
August 14, 2024 02:31 PM ET
defenseone.com · by Shanshan Mei
Among the most significant personnel changes of the Chinese Communist Party’s recent Third Plenum meeting are two that didn’t happen: Adm. Dong Jun, the country’s defense minister, was neither added to the Central Military Commission nor appointed a State Councilor. This is an apparent demotion for the defense ministry, and could complicate the military-to-military relationship between China and the United States.
Traditionally, the head of the Ministry of National Defense of the People’s Republic of China has been a member of the Party and state CMCs. That gave the incumbent direct access to Xi Jinping, who—along with being president of the People’s Republic of China and the Party’s General Secretary—is CMC chairman. The defense minister typically has also been a State Councilor, granting him status equal to the other national-level ministers and giving him direct access to the Chinese premier, the second-ranking Party leader and the PRC’s head of government.
Admiral Dong remains at the head of the defense ministry, which primarily is responsible for managing the Chinese armed forces’ relations with other entities: externally with foreign militaries and the press, and internally with the other national-level ministries and agencies and with local governments for conscription and recruiting. The defense minister is not in the direct chain of command for combat operations, nor is he a member of the Party’s highest decision-making bodies, the Politburo and its Standing Committee. Like his 13 predecessors, Dong is an active-duty three-star general officer, the PLA’s highest rank; unlike them, he is an admiral—a former commander of the PLA Navy, the first naval officer appointed to his job.
He received that job in December, shortly after the Biden-Xi summit and roughly two months after Gen. Li Shangfu was unexpectedly removed from office. Since then he has met with numerous foreign counterparts and attended high-profile events such as the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, where he engaged with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III.
Leaving Dong off the powerful CMC puts a question mark on the admiral’s access to Xi and his influence within the Chinese political system. Further, Xi has removed Dong’s two immediate predecessors: Li and Gen. Wei Fenghe. That makes Dong’s status appear to be an intentional effort to downgrade the defense minister’s role in the Party-state bureaucracy.
Dong may now be required to report first to a CMC vice chairman—Zhang Youxia or He Weidong—or perhaps even one of three other CMC members. Indeed, if Dong lacks direct access to Xi, the U.S. Defense Secretary may prefer to speak directly to a CMC vice chairman whose responsibilities within the Chinese system are better aligned to that of the Pentagon’s most senior civilian leader, as was the case several years ago.
It gets more complicated. Dong’s move from PLAN commander to defense minister was a lateral transfer in grade: he retains status equivalent to its five Theater Commanders and four service chiefs. But the U.S. Defense Department continues to emphasize engagement between the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and the PLA’s Southern and Eastern Theater Commands, a step below the Minister-Secretary level. If China’s defense minister is not in the chain of command or on the CMC, what role does he have in these dialogues between operational commanders?
In the State Council, Dong is outranked by Wang Xiaohong, a State Councilor and minister of Public Security. This suggests a limited role for Dong as an advocate for military affairs within the State Council and during national policy-setting.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has gained clout within the Chinese bureaucracy since last year’s replacement of its leader Qin Gang by Wang Yi, a Politburo member.
The “Dong Jun surprise” might be signaling that military diplomacy—particularly its military-to-military contacts with the United States—remains low on Beijing’s priority list. Instead, China’s engagement agenda with the world is led by the Foreign Ministry’s Global Security Initiative. Launched in April 2022 by Xi Jinping, the initiative aims to promote a vision of “an alternative to the U.S.-led international order.”
Moreover, China’s military is reducing its transparency; for example, it has been over five years since it released its last defense white paper. Meanwhile, military exercises and “patrols” with Russia and other foreign militaries continue unabated, including with old and new partners in Africa. And Beijing has not abandoned attempts to improve bilateral relations with U.S. allies, such as Japan and France, perhaps aiming to create daylight between alliance members.
Historically whenever the U.S.-PRC relations were tense, the military-to-military component was often the first to suffer. For now, China’s senior leaders appear to be in no rush to elevate Admiral Dong, nor to engage in substantive military-to-military dialogue with the United States. If anything, Beijing is downplaying both. China may perceive the military component as leverage to achieve political agreement on Chinese proposals for what it considers the fundamental basis for the bilateral relationship. The U.S. side does not need to adopt Beijing’s framing of the bilateral relationship. But at a minimum, both sides should agree that “to jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.” And as the Chinese and American saying goes, where there is a will, there is a way.
Shanshan Mei is a political scientist at RAND. She previously served as the special assistant to the 22nd chief of staff of the Air Force for China and Indo-Pacific issues.
Dennis J. Blasko is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel with 23 years of service as a military intelligence officer and foreign area officer specializing in China. From 1992 to 1996, he was an Army attaché in Beijing and Hong Kong. He has written numerous articles and chapters on the Chinese military, along with the book The Chinese Army Today: Tradition and Transformation for the 21st Century.
The views in this article are those of the authors alone and not those of any institution they are or have been affiliated with.
defenseone.com · by Shanshan Mei
16. Former SEAL Leader Likely to Face Board of Inquiry in Coming Days over Death of Candidate Kyle Mullen
Former SEAL Leader Likely to Face Board of Inquiry in Coming Days over Death of Candidate Kyle Mullen
military.com · by Konstantin Toropin · August 14, 2024
Nearly a year after Navy officials said they were planning on taking disciplinary actions against three officers for their roles in the death of Navy SEAL candidate Kyle Mullen, the lawyer for one officer says that their case is finally heading toward something resembling a trial.
Capt. Bradley Geary, the then-leader of the command that runs the Navy SEAL BUD/s training program, is now facing a board of inquiry in the coming days, his lawyer confirmed to Military.com on Wednesday.
Geary was initially told last fall that the Navy planned to take him, as well as his boss and the command's top doctor, to admiral's mast -- a nonjudicial form of punishment -- over their roles in Mullen's death. However, Geary's lawyer, Jason Wareham, told Military.com that they refused the proceeding, arguing that he wouldn't receive a fair hearing.
Since masts like the ones Geary was set to face are nonjudicial punishments -- they don't involve many due-process protections or a jury -- service members have the right to refuse them.
In a letter shared with Military.com, Wareham told Rear Adm. Keith Davids, the commander of Naval Special Warfare, in December that they refused the mast because they had a "strong reason to believe a guilty verdict has been predetermined." Wareham also argued that the command retaliated against Geary by assigning him extra work to limit his preparation time for the proceeding and restricting what evidence he could review.
Typically, if a service member refuses a mast, it forces the commanders to either drop the charges or refer them to a court-martial, a formal legal proceeding that not only raises the standard of evidence but also affords a defendant more latitude in defending themselves.
According to Wareham, Geary is instead headed for something in between -- a board of inquiry.
"I call them quasi-criminal proceedings," Wareham said, noting that, while they are not a court, they are still governed by federal rules and "they carry such significant consequences ... more consequences than you may find in some criminal courts, as far as financial impacts and long-reaching collateral consequences."
"In that strict administrative process, they have the ability to retire us as other than honorable and demote us in our retirement, which ... those have lifelong consequences associated with them," Geary told Military.com in an interview Wednesday.
"It's a very, very strange way for them to use this administrative system that they will continue to tell you is not punitive, but it really is in practice," he added.
Military.com reached out to Naval Special Warfare Command but did not immediately receive a reply.
The Navy is charging that Geary failed in following orders and doing his duty when he "negligently failed to provide appropriate medical support during high-risk training evolutions and ensure medical personnel were properly trained and equipped," and this negligence resulted "in death and grievous bodily harm," according to Wareham, who was unable to provide the formal notice because it was designated "Controlled Unclassified Information."
The Navy also argues that Geary failed "to demonstrate acceptable qualities of leadership," given the findings of one of two investigations into Mullen's death.
Mullen, 24, died of acute pneumonia shortly after completing the first, brutal portion of SEAL training known as "Hell Week" on Feb. 4, 2022. His death would give rise to two investigations.
The first investigation was conducted by Naval Special Warfare Command itself and revealed major problems at the legendary training program. It determined that Mullen died of pneumonia but that his condition was aggravated by an enlarged heart.
However, a second investigation, this time conducted by a Navy command that was completely separate from the SEAL community, revealed even more troubling issues with the culture at the schoolhouse.
Investigators said they found that the staff at the training facility was overzealous and ran largely unchecked, while students were so determined to pass that they would either lie to doctors or turn to doping.
That second investigation also focused on Geary and his leadership since he had been made aware of problems with the program that were leading to more recruits than usual being dropped from the course.
According to investigators, at the time, Geary largely chalked it up to the fact that "the current generation had less mental toughness" and made deliberate decisions to reduce the role of the school's civilian instructors -- veteran SEALs put in place to be a check on the less experienced and sometimes overzealous active-duty instructors.
Geary fought back against the characterizations shortly after the report was made public in May.
In the wake of the report, Geary went public with his version of events and criticism of the investigation, giving interviews to "Good Morning America", Fox News and The New York Post, among others.
He specifically argued that the quote about the next generation being weak was incorrect. Geary told The Post that "those were not my words. I never said that."
Asked Wednesday whether he still stands by his critiques of the investigation, Geary said that he feels "even stronger toward those positions."
military.com · by Konstantin Toropin · August 14, 2024
17. Pentagon didn’t get heads up about Ukraine’s Kursk offensive
This is hard to believe but perhaps it is a narrative that works for some.
If accurate, what does this say about our diplomats and foreign area officers and SOF personnel, and other military personnel all of whom should have relationships with Ukrainian counterparts? What does it say about the relationships between our senior leaders up to and including the presidents?
Then again, as I said, this narrative must work for some.
And the fact that we are still trying to discern Kyiv's long term objective indicates that we may not have good liaison relationships but may also be a function of our apparently wavering support over the past two+ years.
Lastly, Ukraine likely believed US military experts might have tried to talk them out of the oepration and would have recommended tot he US Presidnet not to provides support to the Ukrainians.
Pentagon didn’t get heads up about Ukraine’s Kursk offensive
U.S. officials still trying to discern Kyiv’s long-term objectives for the attack.
defenseone.com · by Audrey Decker
Ukrainian servicemen operate a tank on a road near the border with Russia, in the Sumy region of Ukraine, on August 14, 2024. ROMAN PILIPEY / AFP via Getty Images
U.S. officials still trying to discern Kyiv’s long-term objectives for the attack.
|
August 15, 2024 03:23 AM ET
By Audrey Decker
Staff Writer
August 15, 2024 03:23 AM ET
Ukraine did not inform the U.S. military about its surprise cross-border incursion into the Kursk region of southern Russia, a senior defense official said, and has not told the U.S. about its long-term plan following the move.
“We didn't get any advanced notification,” the official said Wednesday. “What the Ukrainians were able to do was operational security, and that is something that I think we should be giving credit for. It definitely surprised the Russians.”
Since entering Russian territory on Aug. 6, Ukrainian forces claim to have captured 390 square miles of land, which would make it the largest attack on Russia since World War II. The surprise attack has raised questions about the value of the offensive and how long Ukraine can hold the land it takes.
“I know they were concerned about being able to protect that area and not have the Russians incur, and so from that perspective, they've been effective in what they've been able to do,” the official said.
But the U.S. is uncertain about Ukraine’s overall objectives after the incursion, and the official said the Pentagon is “asking the Ukrainians what their real intent is, kind of long term, and how it plays into future negotiations.”
Asked about the possibility of counter-escalation, the official said Russia has “done some things to reinforce, in particular, their citizens in that area, but no major movements to speak of.”
Ukrainian forces on Wednesday advanced even further into Russia and now claim to have captured 100 servicemen and destroyed a Russian Su-34 jet. That type of jet has been used to drop glide bombs on Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials say the new land would help protect its borders from Russian attacks, creating a buffer zone.
18. The Geopolitical Opportunity of Ukraine’s Kursk Offensive
Conclusion:
Strategy is not fixed but situational. Americans and their allies need to wake up to realities and looming choices. Unless the United States starts to seriously prepare for war, it may find itself actually having to fight one—or worse, several at the same time.
The Geopolitical Opportunity of Ukraine’s Kursk Offensive
The incursion shows Washington the way to a smarter pivot to Asia.
By A. Wess Mitchell, a principal at The Marathon Initiative and a former assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia.
Foreign Policy · by A. Wess Mitchell
August 15, 2024, 4:40 AM
Understanding the conflict two years on.
More on this topic
Ukrainian offensives onto Russian soil, such as the one currently underway in the Kursk region, present an opportunity to end the war more quickly as part of a wider strategy of sequencing the United States’ geopolitical challenges. Such a sequencing strategy, as I wrote in Foreign Policy on the second day of Russia’s invasion, is the best option for avoiding wars against China, Iran, and Russia simultaneously and on multiple fronts. By giving the Ukrainians the tools they need to consolidate and perhaps build on their recent gains, Washington has a chance to help Kyiv compel Moscow to the negotiating table, buy time for the West to rearm, and allow the United States to shift attention to the Indo-Pacific. But doing that will require U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration to remove restrictions on Ukraine’s use of U.S. weapons and define a clear and attainable end state for the conflict. While this is risky, it is preferable to the alternative of drip-feeding aid to Ukraine until China or Iran confronts the United States with a two-front war.
To see the opportunity the Kursk offensive creates, one has to understand how the offensive differs from other Ukrainian incursions into Russia since 2022. First, it is on a much bigger scale, involving elements of at least five brigades, including some of Ukraine’s best, Western-trained units, as well as tanks, artillery, drones, and fighter aircraft.
Second, the incursion has gone much deeper than past ones. Although the details have not been confirmed, the Ukrainians appear to control more than 70 villages on the Russian side of the border, rail lines, a key gas transit hub, and a total of more than 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles). Third, rather than leaving after a successful raid, the Ukrainians appear to be bringing in additional forces and equipment—and digging in.
A lot could still go wrong. For one, the offensive could draw Ukrainian manpower away from other fronts where Russian forces are attacking. Although Moscow has been slow to rush new forces to Kursk, the Russians still have larger reserves to draw from.
Nevertheless, the incursion revealed surprising Russian weaknesses. Russia’s borders were barely defended. The Ukrainians achieved strategic surprise, brought the war home to their adversary, and gave Ukraine a much-needed morale boost. Now Putin faces the dilemma of downplaying the attack as a nuisance and making do with conscripts (a politically unpopular move), domestic security forces, and a few redeployed frontline troops—or trying to evict the Ukrainians and fortify the rest of the border with a much larger redeployment. So far he has chosen the former option, which means he may contain but is unlikely to eject the Ukrainian bridgehead.
In spite of their numerical inferiority, the Ukrainians have a good a chance of holding their ground. So far, the war has revealed unexpected advantages of defense over offense in positional warfare. With the fall rainy season around the corner, it’s possible that the Ukrainians will be able to form a durable salient that defies easy dislodgement. Going forward, the Russians won’t be able to avoid having more troops on hand to keep an eye on the country’s long, porous borders.
These developments matter strategically because they call into question what has been for some time now the obvious Russian theory of victory, which hinges on the idea that protracting the war works to Russia’s advantage as the larger and presumably stronger party in the conflict. Even if the Kursk operation ultimately fails, it allows us to picture a Ukrainian strategy that could reverse the current apparent stalemate to Ukraine’s relative advantage. As the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote in the 19th century, “The seizure of a lightly held or undefended province is an advantage in itself; and should this advantage be enough to make the enemy fear for the final outcome it can be considered a short cut on the road to peace.” If Kyiv can take and hold Russian border regions, even on a small scale, then Moscow will have to reckon with the possibility that it is vulnerable to a more consequential kind of pain on its home territory than what it has so far endured due to Western sanctions.
All of this has implications for wider U.S. strategy. I have long argued that the United States’ optimal approach to Russia’s war in Ukraine is to use it as an opportunity to inflict a proxy defeat on Russia on a faster timeline than China is prepared to move against Taiwan. The last two national defense strategies made it clear that the United States is not prepared to fight wars against more than one major opponent at the same time. By using resources in a focused and disciplined way against Russia’s ongoing aggression, the United States has a chance to weaken the Russian threat to Europe—and on that basis, freeing up bandwidth to strengthen deterrence in the Indo-Pacific.
The problem is that the United States has not used its time as well as its opponents. Since the start of the Ukraine war, the U.S. defense budget has remained relatively static, while Russia’s has tripled. China has used this time to insulate its banking industry against sanctions, reorient energy supplies to routes that the United States cannot as easily disrupt, build up assault forces near Taiwan, and accelerate efforts to achieve nuclear parity with the United States. Iran has used this time to increase its defense budget, pump military equipment to its proxies across the Middle East, and shrink its nuclear breakout time to just about zero.
While its adversaries have been arming round-the-clock, the United States has struggled to get its defense industrial base to a state that is even capable of supporting Ukraine. By the Pentagon’s estimates, the United States is on track to producing 80,000155 155-millimeter howitzer shells per month. That sounds impressive until one considers that Ukraine needs at least 75,000 a month just to sustain its defensive positions—and that in the mid-1990s, the United States was producing more than 800,000 artillery rounds a month. Russia—whose economy is the same size as the Netherlands’—is currently producing three times as much ammunition as the United States and Europe combined. According to a recent estimate, it will take five years at current production levels to replenish the inventories of Patriot missile interceptors, Javelin anti-tank systems, and Stinger air-defense systems that the United States has provided to Ukraine.
The situation is even worse in Europe. Despite much high-flying rhetoric, most NATO states have made only half-hearted efforts to prepare for war—the prerequisite for deterring one. Despite declaring a turnaround in its willingness to rearm, Germany has allowed shortfalls in its defense budget for the past two years. It recently halved Ukraine aid and funded the 2025 defense budget with a small increase that will barely make up for inflation, rather than what the German Defense Ministry requested. Promises by Western European allies at the 2022 and 2023 NATO summits to deploy division-sized units to NATO’s eastern flank and subsequent pledges to improve air defenses there have not been met. A recent report found that Europe lacks the “preparedness, industrial capacity and supply chains, magazine depth, logistics, mass, resources, and especially the ‘will to fight’” to wage a protracted conflict.
In short, Washington and its allies have not used the time since the shock of Russia’s invasion wisely, but their adversaries have. For well over two years, it has been manifestly evident what scale of effort would be required in a protracted conflict with a major, industrialized opponent. And yet neither the United States nor its allies have mounted anything close to what would be required to prepare for such an eventuality.
It is against this backdrop that Ukrainian incursions into Russia—like the one in Kursk—take on strategic significance. If the Ukrainians can hold their ground and credibly demonstrate their ability to put even small areas of Russia at risk, then they may, with time, be able to compel Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table on terms that are much more favorable to Kyiv. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has stated explicitly that this is the aim of the operation. Putin acknowledged as much when he said that “the enemy seeks to improve its negotiating positions in the future.”
It’s worth underscoring the unique role that territory has played in the final stages of Eastern European wars. In the past, Russia has been prevented from achieving lopsided terms after a war only when its opponent held Russian territory. At the end of the Polish-Soviet War in 1921, for example, Soviet Russia ended its westward march only after Polish armies occupied portions of Soviet territory. By contrast, the Finnish-Soviet Winter War ended with the cession of large tracts of Finnish territory because the Finns were unable to occupy Soviet territory, despite winning most of the military engagements in the war.
In other words, soil is the single most important leverage that Ukraine can amass, more valuable than sanctions relief or other economic incentives to Russia. The West’s aim should therefore be to help Zelenksy hold Russian soil as a way of bringing the war to an end as quickly as possible and on the best possible terms to Ukraine.
That will require the Biden administration to do two things it has so far been unwilling to do. First, it should provide Ukraine with the weapons it needs to sustain a battlefield advantage and remove the restrictions on how Kyiv uses those weapons. This is not without risk, since Russia could respond by escalating the conflict in ways that directly threaten NATO or the United States. But these risks have to be considered against the risks of the alternatives: attempting to prioritize Asia before Europe is stable, for example, or trying something more dramatic and dangerous, such as a preemptive strike against Iran. Perhaps the worst would be to continue on the current, incremental path, which could confront Washington with a Chinese move against Taiwan at a moment when U.S. military stocks have been depleted—a scenario that would have its own arguably greater escalatory potential.
Second, Washington needs to define clear and attainable political objectives for the war. The aim should be a sovereign Ukraine in its borders prior to February 2022, in charge of its own foreign policy, economically viable, and militarily strong. That’s not just valuable intrinsically; it also has the potential to act as a breakwater against future Russian aggression in Europe, thereby assisting the U.S. goal of focusing more on Asia.
Defining U.S. objectives along these lines means jettisoning the Biden administration’s vague and vacillating approach to the war. Biden has repeatedly suggested that the end goal is regime change in Russia. In addition to not being obviously achievable, framing U.S. objectives in this way makes it difficult for the United States to support Ukraine when it reaches a point on the battlefield where negotiations become desirable. Diplomacy is not surrender or sweet reasonableness in the face of aggression; rather, as Clausewitz wrote, it is the crucial medium by which states find a “shorter route to the goal than the destruction of the opposing armies.”
On both points—more military aid without restrictions and clarity on the end goal—Washington and its allies should be animated by a sense of urgency. The clock is working against the United States: A sequencing strategy is riskier today than it was in 2022 for the simple reason that time has not been used wisely. But the risks of sequencing are still lower than the risks of the alternatives. Sequencing deserves another, potentially last shot.
That’s why a two-pronged approach—both helping the Ukrainians and moving faster to enable the defense-industrial base to support the U.S. military in a war with more than one great-power rival—is crucial. It’s also crucial that Washington push European allies to do much more than they are currently doing to prepare for war. Otherwise, all that is gained is a short reprieve that doesn’t really allow the United States to strengthen its posture in Asia in hopes of deterring war.
Strategy is not fixed but situational. Americans and their allies need to wake up to realities and looming choices. Unless the United States starts to seriously prepare for war, it may find itself actually having to fight one—or worse, several at the same time.
Foreign Policy · by A. Wess Mitchell
19. America’s Missed Chance in Afghanistan
Wasn't "total victory" achieved in December 2001 in Kabul when the Taliban were routed and in May 2011 when bin Laden was killed in Pakistan? (snarky question I know)
Is anything ever "zero zum?
Excerpts:
Washington’s failure in Afghanistan reflects a deep-seated American pathology: the belief that victory in war is a zero-sum game, in which the United States must score an unambiguous win and its opponent must lose everything. By demanding the total military and political defeat of the Taliban—and pursuing the group long after it posed a threat to U.S. national security—the United States directly undercut its own efforts to help establish a stable and secure Afghanistan. Two years later, the Bush administration would repeat this mistake in Iraq, when it quickly disbanded the Iraqi army and pursued a policy of “de-Baathification” that plunged the country into chaos and, eventually, civil war. In both cases, by offering its enemies no way to surrender, the United States gave them few options other than to fight.
The Bush administration was not alone in this miscalculation. In 2009, President Barack Obama, who had promised a new strategy for the country’s forgotten war, surged 50,000 more troops to Afghanistan, still refusing to offer a political olive branch to the Taliban. Even in the face of a newly confident insurgency steadily making military and political inroads, Washington refused to negotiate with people it cast as terrorists. It would not countenance a political role for the Taliban. The United States, officials believed, would fully prevail in Afghanistan. By the time it finally reversed course under President Donald Trump and began direct talks with the Taliban, the situation bore remarkable similarities to the failed U.S. war in Vietnam. American diplomats were simply negotiating the country’s eventual defeat.
THE ROAD LESS TAKEN
Blustery suggestions that the United States will not negotiate with terrorists, will confront and defeat evil, and will teach adversaries a lesson sound good for public consumption. But the reality of fighting wars—and ending them—is often far messier. Insisting that adversaries must be soundly defeated or must give up the grievances that drove them to take up arms in the first place is neither realistic nor effective. To be sure, there will always be groups that are truly irreconcilable and with whom negotiation or political compromise is impossible. But such examples are the exception, not the rule.
So while it might have been impossible to negotiate with rigid ideologues like bin Laden, the Taliban leadership that negotiated and ultimately surrendered to Karzai in December 2001 was quite evidently more reasonable—and more willing to accept defeat. The same is true of today’s seemingly intractable conflicts. Take the war in Gaza: Hamas might never reconcile itself to a Jewish state, but for 30 years, the Palestinian Authority has done so, and like its Israeli counterparts, it has interests and political objectives that can potentially be satisfied at the negotiating table. The same can be said of illiberal regimes like Vladimir Putin’s in Russia or Xi Jinping’s in China. Moscow will almost certainly not be defeated in Ukraine, and Beijing will not give up its political aspirations in East Asia, but they are probably willing to entertain compromises on their ambitions that leave the world a more stable place, even if it appears that they’ve been given what they want.
And while no democrat would take pleasure in seeing Taliban leaders escape accountability, seeing Russia prosper from its illegitimate invasion of Ukraine, or seeing China expand its influence, the alternatives—letting a vindictive Taliban ride an insurgency back into power, fighting an endless war to a bloody stalemate in Ukraine, and inflaming tensions with China to a point of no return—are far more dire for anyone interested in human rights. Washington must think about the price for peace, with an eye toward stopping fighting once conflict begins. The first step should be to take seriously the lessons of 2001 and 2021: countries that prize total military victory over unsatisfying but necessary political compromises are destined to know nothing but more war.
America’s Missed Chance in Afghanistan
How Washington’s Early Insistence on Total Victory Set the Stage for Defeat
August 15, 2024
Foreign Affairs · by Michael A. Cohen, Christopher A. Preble, and Monica Duffy Toft · August 15, 2024
For many Americans, the dominant image of the United States’ 20-year war in Afghanistan came at the very end: terrified Afghans storming the Kabul airport, clinging to departing planes, some falling to their deaths, desperately trying to flee the country as Taliban insurgents closed in on the capital. Three years ago this month, the longest and most expensive war in U.S. history, a conflict that resulted in 2,459 dead American soldiers and 20,000 more wounded, had ended in spectacular failure.
Although accusations of American incompetence in Afghanistan now focus on those last days in August 2021, the real error was made long before, at the moment of the United States’ greatest victory there: the fall of the Taliban in December 2001. Flush with success, hungry for vengeance, and confident of the Taliban’s complete defeat, the United States sought neither reconciliation nor compromise with Afghanistan’s former leaders. Instead, it sought to make an example of them. In doing so, the George W. Bush administration planted the seeds for the Taliban insurgency that would emerge and eventually wipe away two decades of sacrifice in Afghanistan.
Understanding what happened in Afghanistan in 2001—and how the United States snatched defeat from the jaws of victory—helps explain why the war lasted so long and ended so badly. But it also offers a broader lesson about war, one that applies universally: total military victory is an illusory, dangerous goal. To be sure, there will always be groups that are truly irreconcilable and with whom negotiation or political compromise is impossible. But such examples are the exception, not the rule. More often than not, victory in war is achieved at the negotiating table, not on the battlefield—and demonstrating empathy toward a political adversary pays more dividends than recalcitrance.
AN EARLY WIN
Many forget it now, but the initial U.S. victory in Afghanistan was quick and overwhelming. The United States went to war on October 7, 2001, less than a month after al Qaeda terrorists murdered nearly 3,000 people on September 11. By December, the Northern Alliance, an anti-Taliban militia, had chased al Qaeda from its safe haven and routed the Taliban government, with the essential support of U.S. airpower and a few hundred U.S. special operators.
In the face of this show of force, Taliban militants simply faded away. Many returned to their villages and made peace with the country’s new political reality—and not only the rank-and-file fighters. Apart from the group’s leader, Mullah Omar, who wanted to continue the fight, the Taliban leadership held no illusions about the scope of their defeat. “We all knew time was up,” a military commander later told the journalist Anand Gopal. “Fate laughs at even the best schemes.”
In early December 2001, a conference of Afghan and international officials meeting in Bonn, Germany, created a temporary government helmed by Hamid Karzai, an ethnic Pashtun from a well-regarded and politically influential family who at the time was in southern Afghanistan seeking to organize a rebellion against Taliban rule. That same day, a Taliban delegation led by Defense Minister Mullah Obaidullah and Tayeb Agha, a close aide to Mullah Omar, traveled to meet Karzai and work out a surrender agreement. Karzai quickly announced the deal to reporters. The Taliban had agreed to surrender the remaining provinces under their nominal control. “The Taliban would lay down their weapons and go to their homes with honor and dignity,” said Karzai. In extending an olive branch to the country’s now former leaders, Karzai explained, “The Afghan Taliban are our brothers, and there is no cause for them to worry.” He added, “Let there be no revenge and no vendetta.” Karzai even suggested that former Taliban officials could play a role in a future Afghan government.
Karzai promised that “foreign terrorists” would be expelled or tried. He declared a “general amnesty” for ordinary Taliban fighters and demanded that Mullah Omar “distance himself completely from terrorism.” But Karzai also said that the interim government would decide the best course of action for dealing with the group’s former leaders. He insisted that he had not consulted with the United States on the question of whether Mullah Omar would face justice. “This is an Afghan question,” he declared. Karzai’s uncle and confidant Azizullah Karzai echoed his views, telling NPR that tribal elders would decide what to do with the Taliban. But, Karzai added, “until then, they should not be harmed.”
In Islamabad, Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan, also announced the surrender and said the Taliban had received assurances that Mullah Omar would be allowed to “live with dignity” while remaining in Afghanistan. “Karzai and the tribal leaders have promised him protection,” Zaeef told reporters.
DRIVING A HARD BARGAIN
None of those things came to pass. Instead, the Taliban leadership remained fully isolated from the new Afghan political system, regrouped, and eventually won back control of Afghanistan. The reason was simple: U.S. officials had no interest in accepting a Taliban surrender—and did everything in their power to scuttle any reconciliation.
There is little public documentary record of the U.S. position regarding the Taliban’s role in post-2001 Afghanistan. National Security Council documents from that period remain classified, and many of those who worked closely with U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or who were on the ground with Karzai at the time have declined repeated requests for interviews or comment, including ours. As a result, the role of the United States in the failure of the agreement remains a matter of intense debate. But the Bush administration’s internal deliberations are immaterial; its public statements at the time make clear that the surrender and eventual reintegration of Taliban officials were not only off the table but had barely been discussed.
Both Gopal and the journalist Bette Dam claim that Karzai told them he received a phone call from Rumsfeld demanding that he rescind the surrender offer. In his book The Good War, the journalist Jack Fairweather reported that one of the U.S. special operators with Karzai at the time, David Fox, was “directed” to tell Karzai that “such an arrangement with the Taliban was not in American interests.” And Zalmay Khalilzad, who served as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2004 to 2005, did not find out about the aborted deal until more than a decade later.
When Khalilzad confronted Karzai about the agreement in 2013 or 2014, Karzai confirmed its broad outlines. Khalilzad was shocked that the subject had never come up in his years of near-daily contact with the then president. “We discussed almost everything and anything,” Khalilzad told Karzai, “and this you forget to mention to me?” Karzai told Khalilzad that he had asked the Taliban delegation to turn over their weapons and their vehicles and to read the letter that they had presented to him on local radio in order to confirm the agreement. When Khalilzad asked Karzai if the Taliban had done as he requested, he said they had.
Karzai’s story, however, didn’t make clear why the proposed deal had not gone through. “What happened?” Khalilzad asked. Karzai had no answer.
Whether American officials directly nixed the deal is still a tantalizing open question, but the U.S. position was hardly a mystery. Bush administration officials publicly and privately denounced overtures to the Taliban, and it is almost certain that they pressured Karzai to rescind his surrender offer.
The United States sought neither reconciliation nor compromise with Afghanistan’s former leaders.
No administration official played a larger role in shaping this hardline approach than Rumsfeld—and his attitude toward reconciliation grew more intractable as the odds of a Taliban surrender began to increase. On November 19, 2001, when asked at a Pentagon press conference about reports that Mullah Omar was trying to negotiate a surrender, Rumsfeld explained that the United States was “not in a position of determining or controlling” events in Afghanistan. A week later, he called the prospect of allowing the Taliban to participate in a new government “ill advised” but stopped short of condemning a deal, declaring at a November 26 Pentagon briefing, “That’s for the people of Afghanistan to decide.”
By November 30, however, Rumsfeld’s tone had hardened. He declared that the United States would “vigorously oppose any idea of providing [Mullah Omar] amnesty or safe passage of any type.” Then, at a December 6 press conference, Rumsfeld went a step further. Citing the emerging reports of a surrender agreement that would allow Mullah Omar to remain in Afghanistan, Rumsfeld made clear that such a deal would be “inconsistent with [U.S.] interests” and thus unacceptable. In reinforcing the point, Rumsfeld issued a veiled threat to the country’s new leaders: “We obviously have a lot of things we have been doing to assist the opposition forces … and to the extent our goals are frustrated and opposed, obviously, we would prefer to work with other people who would not oppose our goals.”
At the White House, Press Secretary Ari Fleischer branded Mullah Omar “a combatant against the United States and other nations,” relaying Bush’s message that those who harbored terrorists, including Mullah Omar, must be brought to justice. According to a December 6, 2001, report from NPR, U.S. officials had been in direct touch with Karzai and were aware of the negotiations with the Taliban leadership. The report stated that the United States had “made very clear throughout these discussions that it would not support any deal” that allowed Mullah Omar to escape justice. Other Afghans claim to have heard similar warnings. The Northern Alliance’s envoy in Washington, Haron Amin, told the Associated Press that it had “been made very clear” that any plan allowing for the release of Mullah Omar would cost Karzai U.S. support.
Karzai was under pressure not just from the United States but also from members of the Northern Alliance; Deputy Security Minister Abdullah Jan Tawhidi complained that he was “taking the side of the enemy of the people of Afghanistan.” So Karzai quickly changed course. In a December 8 interview with Reuters, he called for Mullah Omar and top Taliban leaders to be held accountable. “If he is found, he must face trial,” Karzai said. He went on: “Of course, I want to arrest him. He is a fugitive from justice.”
Even after the surrender agreement had fallen apart, U.S. officials continued to insist that the Taliban be given no quarter. Rumsfeld traveled to Kabul in mid-December and told reporters, “There still are al Qaeda and Taliban people in the country, in the mountains, hiding in the cities, in the caves and across the borders. There are a lot of fanatical people. And we need to finish the job.” He claimed to have delivered the same message to the new Afghan leadership “to make sure we’re all on the same wavelength as to what’s left to be done.” The message from administration officials was clear: the war against the Taliban would continue, and any talk of political reconciliation was a nonstarter.
Karzai and his cabinet praying at the inauguration of the interim government in Kabul, December 2001
Peter Andrews / Reuters
It would be understandable to think that the United States had reasons to doubt the sincerity of the Taliban’s offer to surrender. The Taliban had, after all, given shelter to al Qaeda. It had refused repeated U.S. demands before 9/11 to hand over the terrorist group’s leaders and shut down its training camps, and it was notorious for its mistreatment of women and religious and ethnic minorities. Moreover, there was legitimate reason to want to hold Mullah Omar accountable for his actions.
By December 2001, however, there was little love lost between the Taliban and al Qaeda, whose risky assault on the United States had precipitated the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the Taliban’s overthrow. For years before 9/11, many of those closest to Mullah Omar saw Osama bin Laden and his foreign fighters as causing far more trouble than they were worth. Their fears were confirmed after 9/11. Bin Laden allegedly did not inform Mullah Omar in advance about the attacks, just as he had kept him in the dark about strikes on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
The two groups had always had fundamentally different agendas: al Qaeda sought global jihad, whereas the Taliban’s focus was almost exclusively on Afghanistan. And the gap between the two groups became even more pronounced after December 2001 as more and more Taliban came to resent the foreign interlopers for inviting the war that drove them from power. U.S. officials, however, never grasped these complexities and often saw the Islamist Taliban as an irreconcilable foe, basically indistinguishable from the Salafi-jihadis of al Qaeda.
But whatever doubts Washington harbored about the Taliban’s desire to surrender (while remaining a political force) should have been allayed by the way its leaders behaved after December 2001. During that period, many of the group’s top officials repeatedly tried to give themselves up. In January 2002, Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, who had served as the foreign minister in the Taliban regime, was convinced by Afghan interlocutors to surrender to CIA officers. But once in custody, his offers to lay down arms and respect the new government’s authority were rejected by the Bush administration, and he was instead sent to a detention facility at Bagram Air Base, where he remained until late 2003.
In the weeks and months that followed, virtually all top Taliban ministers—as well as the whip-wielding religious police, who had enforced harsh religious edicts—either surrendered to local tribal leaders or defected to the Karzai government. Other Taliban officials declared their intention to participate in future Afghan elections, and Karzai consistently sought reconciliation, only to be repeatedly rebuffed by American officials. More important, the Taliban leaders made no concerted effort to take up arms against the Americans or the fledgling Karzai government.
REPEAT OFFENDERS
Counterfactuals, particularly ones concerning war and peace, are always fraught. But looking back at the missed opportunities for peace in late 2001 and early 2002, it is evident that flexibility from U.S. officials regarding the Taliban’s future in Afghanistan could have prevented an insurgency from later emerging. By December 2001, the Taliban were a vanquished political movement with little interest in waging war against the Karzai government. But U.S. leaders understood little about Afghanistan’s complex politics and cared even less. Afghanistan was to them an abstraction, a venue for fighting global terrorism and a place to demonstrate American power to others. As Douglas Feith, U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy at the time, later explained, one of the key U.S. strategic goals in Afghanistan was to “remove the Taliban government as a way of communicating to state sponsors of terrorism that there are very heavy penalties to be paid for being associated with groups that attack the United States.” Putting aside the question of whether others would get the message, the U.S. position ignored the reality that the immediate effect of the war in Afghanistan would be felt by the Afghan people—and that they would determine the conflict’s final act.
In any war, an agreement that allows for the eventual reintegration of former fighters into society is an essential step in moving from a state of conflict to a state of peace. An official Taliban surrender would have been a powerful catalyst: ending the group’s claim that it was the true government of Afghanistan, ensuring that former Taliban fighters had nothing to fear from the Karzai government or the U.S. military, and, above all, giving former Taliban figures and their supporters a political outlet and a voice in Afghanistan’s future.
Leaving the Taliban outside the country’s emerging political tent encouraged the group to become a repository for grievances and frustrations that would build up in the initial postwar years. As Afghanistan’s post-9/11 experiment in self-governance faltered, the Taliban reaped the political rewards. Even worse, by actively targeting the remnants of the Taliban and treating them as little more than a proxy for al Qaeda, Washington created enemies where none had existed, inadvertently helping spawn an insurgency that, if not for U.S. actions, might never have emerged.
Washington’s failure in Afghanistan reflects a deep-seated American pathology: the belief that victory in war is a zero-sum game, in which the United States must score an unambiguous win and its opponent must lose everything. By demanding the total military and political defeat of the Taliban—and pursuing the group long after it posed a threat to U.S. national security—the United States directly undercut its own efforts to help establish a stable and secure Afghanistan. Two years later, the Bush administration would repeat this mistake in Iraq, when it quickly disbanded the Iraqi army and pursued a policy of “de-Baathification” that plunged the country into chaos and, eventually, civil war. In both cases, by offering its enemies no way to surrender, the United States gave them few options other than to fight.
The Bush administration was not alone in this miscalculation. In 2009, President Barack Obama, who had promised a new strategy for the country’s forgotten war, surged 50,000 more troops to Afghanistan, still refusing to offer a political olive branch to the Taliban. Even in the face of a newly confident insurgency steadily making military and political inroads, Washington refused to negotiate with people it cast as terrorists. It would not countenance a political role for the Taliban. The United States, officials believed, would fully prevail in Afghanistan. By the time it finally reversed course under President Donald Trump and began direct talks with the Taliban, the situation bore remarkable similarities to the failed U.S. war in Vietnam. American diplomats were simply negotiating the country’s eventual defeat.
THE ROAD LESS TAKEN
Blustery suggestions that the United States will not negotiate with terrorists, will confront and defeat evil, and will teach adversaries a lesson sound good for public consumption. But the reality of fighting wars—and ending them—is often far messier. Insisting that adversaries must be soundly defeated or must give up the grievances that drove them to take up arms in the first place is neither realistic nor effective. To be sure, there will always be groups that are truly irreconcilable and with whom negotiation or political compromise is impossible. But such examples are the exception, not the rule.
So while it might have been impossible to negotiate with rigid ideologues like bin Laden, the Taliban leadership that negotiated and ultimately surrendered to Karzai in December 2001 was quite evidently more reasonable—and more willing to accept defeat. The same is true of today’s seemingly intractable conflicts. Take the war in Gaza: Hamas might never reconcile itself to a Jewish state, but for 30 years, the Palestinian Authority has done so, and like its Israeli counterparts, it has interests and political objectives that can potentially be satisfied at the negotiating table. The same can be said of illiberal regimes like Vladimir Putin’s in Russia or Xi Jinping’s in China. Moscow will almost certainly not be defeated in Ukraine, and Beijing will not give up its political aspirations in East Asia, but they are probably willing to entertain compromises on their ambitions that leave the world a more stable place, even if it appears that they’ve been given what they want.
And while no democrat would take pleasure in seeing Taliban leaders escape accountability, seeing Russia prosper from its illegitimate invasion of Ukraine, or seeing China expand its influence, the alternatives—letting a vindictive Taliban ride an insurgency back into power, fighting an endless war to a bloody stalemate in Ukraine, and inflaming tensions with China to a point of no return—are far more dire for anyone interested in human rights. Washington must think about the price for peace, with an eye toward stopping fighting once conflict begins. The first step should be to take seriously the lessons of 2001 and 2021: countries that prize total military victory over unsatisfying but necessary political compromises are destined to know nothing but more war.
- MICHAEL A. COHEN is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic Studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
- CHRISTOPHER PREBLE is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic Studies at the Fletcher School and Senior Fellow and Director of the Stimson Center’s Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy Program.
- MONICA DUFFY TOFT is Academic Dean and Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School and Director of its Center for Strategic Studies.
- They are the Principal Investigators the Afghanistan Assumptions Project at the Fletcher School. This essay draws from the project’s working papers.
Foreign Affairs · by Michael A. Cohen, Christopher A. Preble, and Monica Duffy Toft · August 15, 2024
20. The Indomitable IRGC
Is the Iranian regime really on its last legs? I am genuinely asking that question as I do not know. Is it wishful thinking that a regime favorable to US interests will replace it?
Excerpts:
The Iranian regime may be on its last legs, and a regime much more favorable to U.S. interests may replace it. If so, the United States should welcome such a regime while conscious that U.S. fingerprints on regime change are more likely to delegitimize Iran’s new rulers than help them—especially given the long resonance of U.S. efforts at regime change in Iran in 1953.
Instead, a better policy would combine pressure with co-optation and engagement, with the aim of shaping internal Iranian choices and outcomes. Iran’s power brokers must not only know that their malign behavior will elicit a punishing U.S. response; they must also know that the United States will notice and respond if they cease such malign behavior. For example, if Tehran reduced its support for its proxies or distanced itself from Russia, Washington could respond by reducing its enforcement of sanctions.
It is possible to imagine an IRGC that, like Egypt’s military, becomes beholden to the status quo rather than regional upheaval. Outsiders often assume that because Iran’s rulers are hostile, they must be irrational, but the record suggests otherwise. A clear-eyed assessment of what the IRGC’s leaders genuinely fear and what they are willing to live with can illuminate pathways to a reduction in tensions. Pezeshkian may help facilitate better relations, or he may prove irrelevant. Either way, the United States’ approach should seek accountability and consistency and allow for the possibility of the pragmatic accommodation that it has pursued with Egypt. Such an approach is more likely to serve U.S. interests over the long term. The alternative path of pressure will only strengthen the IRGC’s grip on the country and push the IRGC to double down on confrontation.
The Indomitable IRGC
How the Revolutionary Guards Prevent Iran’s President From Charting a New Course
August 15, 2024
Foreign Affairs · by Jon B. Alterman and Sanam Vakil · August 15, 2024
The lot of Iranian presidents is not a happy one. They enter office as heroes, promising big changes to improve the lives of their fellow citizens. Almost without exception, they leave as broken men.
Iran’s problems frequently prove more intractable than its new leaders anticipate. But a bigger obstacle Iranian presidents face is that they have responsibility without authority. With large swaths of the government and economy under the control of Iran’s clerical elite and thus beyond politicians’ reach, presidents are able to affect the tone more than the substance of Iranian life. Iran’s is a hybrid system, divided between elected and unelected leaders, and the latter almost always have the upper hand.
Masoud Pezeshkian’s July 5 victory in Iran’s snap presidential election nevertheless revived hope inside and outside the country that things might be different this time. Pezeshkian ran as a reformist, promising greater government transparency, economic growth, and personal autonomy. Early indications suggest that he is seeking a pragmatic path, building public enthusiasm for his agenda while showing unalloyed loyalty to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Pezeshkian’s bet seems to be that he will be able to wrest some concessions from the clerical establishment that will enhance Iranians’ daily lives.
Pezeshkian may help Iranians win greater social freedom, and he might be able to get the country some relief from crushing Western sanctions. But such achievements would not herald a more moderate direction for Iran. Increasingly, Iran’s aggressive posture and isolation from the West is driven not just by the clerical establishment, which is a waning force, but rather by the security establishment, principally the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has amassed tremendous influence over the country’s government and economy. This should worry those who hope for a more conciliatory approach from Tehran: an Iran in which the IRGC wields greater power will be a more insular Iran—and a more insular Iran will be a more dangerous Iran.
More than any other faction in Iran, the IRGC profits from isolation. The heavily sanctioned Iranian economy spins off billions of dollars in smuggling revenues that the group dominates. That money, in turn, supports conservative patronage networks and funds the Iranian proxies across the Middle East that form the so-called axis of resistance. In effect, the IRGC runs a complex Ponzi scheme that perpetuates the authority and influence of a select few at the expense of ordinary Iranians. That fact, more than any resistance the clerical elite put up to Pezeshkian, will pose the most significant obstacle to any effort he makes toward reform and moderation.
BORN OF REVOLUTION
After the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, the country’s first supreme leader, established the IRGC to safeguard the young Islamic Republic. The idea was to create a rigorously loyal entity separate from the conventional armed forces for at least two reasons. One was to serve as a counterweight to an army that might be reactionary or have its own ambitions for power. The other was to protect the new system from internal and external security threats more broadly. The IRGC’s ideological connectivity and fealty to the Islamic Republic has helped it grow and given it influence and privileged status within the state. During the Iran-Iraq War, which stretched from 1980 to 1988, the IRGC was instrumental in quickly mobilizing to defend against Saddam Hussein’s invasion. Its members were involved in both frontline combat and guerrilla warfare. Meanwhile, the Basij militia, a largely volunteer force eventually incorporated into the IRGC, was used to repress dissent and maintain public order.
After the war ended, the IRGC played a major role in the reconstruction of Iran’s infrastructure, extending beyond military rebuilding to include significant economic ventures. In 1989, the IRGC established Khatam al-Anbiya Construction Headquarters, which became one of Iran’s largest contractors. The organization has undertaken dam construction, road building, and energy sector development, significantly increasing the IRGC’s economic footprint. In the years since, the group has expanded into telecommunications and banking. This economic diversification provided the IRGC with significant untaxed financial resources independent of state control. After the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was signed in 2015, the IRGC, fearing a loss of market share, intervened to slow down deals with international companies. Consequently, the IRGC’s role has expanded far beyond its initial mandate, and its size has increased significantly, from an estimated 10,000 members in late 1979 to somewhere between 150,000 and 190,000 today.
Designed to constrain if not alter Iranian behavior, sanctions and economic isolation have become the de facto tools of U.S. policy toward Iran. Rather than provoking a change in Tehran’s behavior, however, sanctions have produced the opposite effect. The IRGC, already a dominant actor, has become more present in the economy to keep the system afloat, at the expense of ordinary people and the private sector. The IRGC has captured licit and illicit trade, embedding corruption and Mafia-style criminality through a network of shell companies used to circumvent sanctions. In the absence of international investment and limits on oil sales, the IRGC has taken to funneling its money through oil exports, albeit at discounted prices, and the group relies on its financial network in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria for access to these markets and, with it, liquidity.
A STATE WITHIN A STATE
Since 1979, the Iranian regime has sought to project both its Islamic and revolutionary bona fides. In scenes that have often seemed made for television, robed clerics regularly exhort huge crowds to oppose the United States, the Western-led global order it represents, and “the Zionist entity” it supports. Meanwhile, Iran and its allies and proxies—the Assad regime in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Palestinian territories, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, and various Shiite militias in Iraq—engage in destabilizing acts of brinkmanship, provocation, and terrorism.
But for most Iranians, this politics of resistance is little more than resistance theater. They long ago lost patience with the clerical leadership and lost interest in revolutionary Islamism. The issues that concern ordinary Iranians the most are the stagnant economy (which has produced a brain drain of capable young people) and enforced social repression (whose harshest measures are reserved for women). Those are the grievances that have led Iranians to take to the streets in massive demonstrations in recent years.
As Iran’s clerical establishment has lost stature, the IRGC has picked up the slack, increasingly operating as a state within a state. Although it is at least notionally aligned with the clerics and beholden to Khamenei for as long as he survives, the IRGC has its own sources of wealth and power and few sources of external accountability. The group has cultivated political influence throughout most if not all Iranian institutions. Its constitutionally defined mandate to protect national security has enabled it, with the support of the supreme leader, to establish a repressive apparatus at home while also advancing a resistance-oriented foreign policy abroad.
The true center of gravity in Iran is a quietly ascendant IRGC.
The IRGC’s political influence has grown alongside its economic expansion. Many former IRGC members hold positions within the government (including the cabinet and the parliament) and serve as provincial governors. The group’s senior commanders sit on the Supreme National Security Council, the body tasked with formulating nuclear, foreign, and defense policy. Many key figures in the IRGC play crucial roles in the office of the supreme leader. The IRGC also oversees several major security institutions and even influences the revolutionary courts, which hear cases related to national security. Since the outbreak of student demonstrations in 1999 and in every demonstration over the past 20 years, including nationwide protests of 2009, 2017, 2019, and 2022, the IRGC has played a prominent role in cracking down on domestic dissent. The group is also spearheading Iran’s burgeoning security and defense relationship with Moscow, and its foreign arm, known as the Quds Force, provides direct financial and material support to members of the axis of resistance.
And yet the IRGC is not monolithic. Despite high degrees of loyalty, discipline, and paranoia, like any large institution, it has experienced internal tensions. Disagreements and generational gaps have emerged over involvement in regional conflicts, relations with the West, and the handling of protests, with younger pragmatists appearing less ideological and more open to engagement and social liberalization than older veterans. The IRGC is also not composed of only conservatives; some members have supported reformist politicians, including in the recent presidential election. Allegations of corruption, financial misconduct, and involvement in domestic repression have also tarnished the IRGC’s public image and could affect its long-term role.
Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the IRGC will act as a guarantor of stability whenever Khamenei passes from the scene. The organization will surely influence the succession process, supporting an outcome that will protect its own interests and safeguard its role as the architect and chief administrator of the axis of resistance. This continued entrenchment will come at the expense of already declining clerical influence.
A MILITARY THAT WON’T MODERATE
For a sense of what Iran might look like in a post-Khamenei period in which the IRGC is ascendant, one might imagine that Egypt offers a hint. Soldiers have led Egypt and dominated its government since a group of officers overthrew the monarchy in 1952. In the decades since, nominal civilian rule has provided a thin façade over the country’s real powers: the military establishment and the security services. The country has had a single civilian president: Mohamed Morsi, an Islamist who was elected in early 2012, after the Arab Spring revolts, and whom the military and security services helped dislodge in July 2013.
The man who has ruled the country ever since, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, is a former general who has been embedded in military institutions since he was 16 and reserves his deepest trust for the military establishment. More than half of the governors of Egyptian provinces are retired generals, and Sisi has recruited general officers to head a large number of governmental and quasi-governmental economic initiatives. The military also has a direct hand in the economy through institutions such as the Ministry of Military Production, the Egyptian Armed Forces Engineering Authority, and the Arab Organization for Industrialization (which is principally a weapons manufacturer).
In Egypt, military control initially prompted a foreign-policy reorientation, with President Gamal Abdel Nasser embracing anticolonialism and nonalignment in the Cold War and supporting revolutionary movements in places like Yemen and Algeria. Eventually, however, the entrenchment of the Egyptian military acted as a stabilizing force in foreign policy. In the 1970s, under President Anwar al-Sadat, a former officer, Egypt became a status quo power in the Middle East, partly because the military leadership’s economic interests became deeply tied to Western investment. Sadat signed a peace treaty with Israel and searched constantly for other ways to draw hundreds of billions of dollars of aid and investment into Egypt. All the while, the military maintained its privileged place in the economy and profited handsomely. Sadat’s successors, first Hosni Mubarak (a former general) and then Sisi, have sustained that policy.
But as things stand today, the IRGC’s entrenchment in Iran would play out in a far different manner. Whereas having a praetorian elite has over time moderated Egypt’s international posture, in Iran it will have the opposite effect. Egypt was never under strict sanctions, and the Egyptian military’s business model never relied on Egypt’s isolation from the global economy. By contrast, the IRGC profits from sanctions-busting revenues, and much of the investment it receives comes from China, which has an interest in sustaining Iran’s estrangement from the West. In addition, Iran’s network of regional proxies provides the country with strategic depth, and a strategic reorientation away from China and other anti-Western powers such as Russia and North Korea would leave Iran isolated and exposed.
PRAGMATISM OVER PRESSURE
Western audiences have too often paid attention to the wrong factors in Iranian politics. They focus their ire on Iran’s cadres of dour, bearded clerics and get their hopes up for reform-minded presidents. The true center of gravity in Iran, however, is less visible: a quietly ascendant IRGC. Pezeshkian can score some small internal victories against conservative opponents, but it would be a mistake to confuse any battle he wins against clerical control of society for a fundamental power struggle or a shift in Iran’s international posture. The real power increasingly lies with the IRGC, and its interests and business model militate against accommodation with the outside world. And so Western powers hoping to encourage a deeper shift shouldn’t put their faith in Pezeshkian alone; instead, they need to find ways of shaping the interests of the IRGC.
One path is to double down on a one-way escalation of international sanctions and terrorist designations, with the hope of precipitating regime collapse. This is often the path of least resistance in Washington, in part because so much of what Iran does is indefensible. But it is important to note two things. First, U.S.-led sanctions have rarely brought down a regime, however odious—whether Fidel Castro’s Cuba or Muammar al-Qaddafi’s Libya or Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. Regimes adjust to them over time and, like the IRGC, learn to use the confrontation to serve their own political and economic needs. At least in the near term, greater sanctions will continue to secure the IRGC rather than weaken it. Second, a path of unalloyed confrontation pushes the IRGC to respond with precisely the sorts of behavior that the United States finds most objectionable, strangling the domestic economy at the expense of the Iranian people and bolstering its axis of resistance to show it is unbowed in the face of U.S. pressure.
The Iranian regime may be on its last legs, and a regime much more favorable to U.S. interests may replace it. If so, the United States should welcome such a regime while conscious that U.S. fingerprints on regime change are more likely to delegitimize Iran’s new rulers than help them—especially given the long resonance of U.S. efforts at regime change in Iran in 1953.
Instead, a better policy would combine pressure with co-optation and engagement, with the aim of shaping internal Iranian choices and outcomes. Iran’s power brokers must not only know that their malign behavior will elicit a punishing U.S. response; they must also know that the United States will notice and respond if they cease such malign behavior. For example, if Tehran reduced its support for its proxies or distanced itself from Russia, Washington could respond by reducing its enforcement of sanctions.
It is possible to imagine an IRGC that, like Egypt’s military, becomes beholden to the status quo rather than regional upheaval. Outsiders often assume that because Iran’s rulers are hostile, they must be irrational, but the record suggests otherwise. A clear-eyed assessment of what the IRGC’s leaders genuinely fear and what they are willing to live with can illuminate pathways to a reduction in tensions. Pezeshkian may help facilitate better relations, or he may prove irrelevant. Either way, the United States’ approach should seek accountability and consistency and allow for the possibility of the pragmatic accommodation that it has pursued with Egypt. Such an approach is more likely to serve U.S. interests over the long term. The alternative path of pressure will only strengthen the IRGC’s grip on the country and push the IRGC to double down on confrontation.
- JON B. ALTERMAN is Senior Vice President and Director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
- SANAM VAKIL is Director of Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa Programme.
Foreign Affairs · by Jon B. Alterman and Sanam Vakil · August 15, 2024
21. The World Is Not Ready for the Next Pandemic
Conclusion:
Of course, it is still possible that such a pandemic may never arise—or that it doesn’t occur for many years. But hope is not a strategy. The United States and the rest of the high- and middle-income world need to start devoting the necessary resources to developing better vaccines, treatments, and other countermeasures immediately. Humanity will not get ahead of a pandemic-causing virus without such commitment.
The World Is Not Ready for the Next Pandemic
Governments Need to Invest Far More in New and Better Vaccines
August 15, 2024
Foreign Affairs · by The Big One: How to Prepare for World-Altering Pandemics to Come · August 15, 2024
Less than five years after the outbreak of COVID-19, the world remains vulnerable to another pandemic. Over the past five months, a mutated strain of the H5N1influenza virus detected in dairy cattle poses a potential risk for a pandemic-causing virus. Yet governments and international organizations have done far too little to prepare for such a scenario, despite the lessons they should have learned from the global battle with COVID-19.
After the COVID-19 crisis revealed the shortcomings of the global public health response system, many assumed that governments and international organizations would strive to fix the most obvious problems. Given the catastrophic human and economic costs of the pandemic, countries had a strong incentive to start spending heavily on developing new generations of more protective influenza and coronavirus vaccines, as well as to greatly expand global manufacturing and distribution networks. But this has not happened. At current funding levels, it likely will take a decade or longer to develop more effective and longer-lasting vaccines. Although there are groups at work on new treatments and other antiviral initiatives, on the whole, global society does not appear to be much more prepared for a future coronavirus or influenza pandemic than it was five years ago.
The resurgence of H5N1 influenza in humans and animals has highlighted these failures. Although the virus was identified in the 1990s, over the last 20 years it has continued to mutate, reinventing itself over and over again. Today, it is infecting millions of birds, but it has also become more capable of spilling over into at least 40 species of mammals. It still cannot easily transmit between humans, but infections in dairy cattle, which have influenza receptors for both avian and human influenza viruses in their udders, demonstrate the risk for a new pandemic.
It is impossible to know when a new pandemic will arise, or which specific pathogen will be its cause. H5N1 is just one of the viruses that could mutate into something that will start a pandemic. But eventually, one will happen. It is therefore time to move away from vague recommendations and best practices to a far larger-scale program aimed at producing new and better vaccines, antiviral drugs and other countermeasures, and building the infrastructure at the scale needed to protect entire populations. Although such efforts will be costly, failing to take these steps could be catastrophic.
THE AVIAN THREAT
Although it has never caused a human pandemic, the H5N1 virus has been on the public health radar for decades. It was first identified in late 1996, when a new influenza virus began circulating in avian species in Asia, initially known as high pathogenic avian H5N1. Influenza strains are classified by the characteristics of two proteins, hemagglutinin and neuraminidase, on the virion particle’s surface. The pathogen gained international attention for causing a 1997 outbreak in Hong Kong, killing six of the 18 people infected. To control the spread, Hong Kong was forced to cull millions of poultry from its markets and from the supplying farms.
In December 2003, H5N1 reemerged. For the next three years, wild birds spread the virus to domestic waterfowl and chickens in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. It also infected a limited number of mammals, including tigers in Thai zoos, and eventually made its way to 148 humans in five Asian countries. Seventy-nine of those cases—53 percent—proved fatal. As the virus spread, public health officials grew concerned that the world was on the brink of a devastating pandemic. In 2005, at the height of that scare, one of us (Osterholm) wrote a Foreign Affairs article explaining how governments should prepare for such a scenario. The essay noted that the World Health Organization’s (WHO) and various countries’ pandemic response plans were vague and did not offer a realistic blueprint for how to get a population through a potential one-to-three-year pandemic. The article recommended an initiative to provide vaccines for the entire world, with a well-defined schedule to ensure that it would be carried out in a timely way.
Fortunately, H5N1 did not cause a pandemic in 2005. But in late 2019, a different virus did. COVID-19 was a novel coronavirus—so called because of the protein spikes on the virion surface that give it a corona-like appearance—that began infecting thousands of people in Wuhan, China. Soon, it spread across China, then the continent, and then the world. In its first year, COVID-19 infected hundreds of millions of people and killed at least three million.
THE HUMAN MIXING BOWL
Influenza pandemics are not a new phenomenon. From 2009 to 2010, an H1N1 virus—popularly known as swine flu—rapidly spread around the planet, killing an estimated 575,000 people. In United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated that 60.8 million people were infected, 273,300 hospitalized, and 12,469 died. This level of morbidity and mortality was tragic, but for a flu pandemic, relatively mild. After all, the 1918 flu pandemic, also H1N1, killed between 50 million and 100 million people worldwide, or at least 2.7 percent of the world’s population.
It might be tempting to conclude that the 2009 pandemic was less deadly than its 1918 counterpart because of 90 years of intervening medical progress, including improved vaccines. Unfortunately, that conclusion is incorrect. The 2009 virus was simply less virulent than the one that spread in 1918. Moreover, the most vulnerable group—people over 65—already had H1N1 antibodies thanks to previous infections with related viruses. As COVID-19 showed, the world is no better prepared for pandemics today than it was a century ago and, in some ways, worse off. Today, there are three times as many people as in 1918. Hundreds of millions live close to poultry and pigs. Air travel can transport infected carriers anywhere in the world within hours. (There are more than a billion international border crossings annually.) And global supply chains have created far greater international interdependence. Humanity, in other words, has become an extraordinarily efficient biological mixing bowl as well as a highly productive viral mutation factory.
That does not mean an H5N1 pandemic is about to unfold. Both the WHO and the CDC assess the current risk of H5N1 in humans to be low. So far, there is no compelling evidence that the current virus is becoming better at attaching to the receptor sites for influenza in the human respiratory tract, the critical bar H5N1 must clear before it can cause a pandemic. To date, the primary outcome of humans becoming infected with H5N1 in the United States—whether by association with infected poultry flocks or working with infected dairy cows—is conjunctivitis. This is unsurprising since humans have receptor sites in the eye for bird viruses.
But nature can change fast. Viruses are constantly mutating and reassorting. Influenza reassortment can occur when a human, pig, or cow becomes infected simultaneously with two different viruses, presenting the opportunity for the pathogens to swap critical genetic segments and create new strains. Although the vast majority of these alterations either have little significance or make the new form less robust and adaptable, occasionally a mutation or reassortment will make a virus more transmissible, dangerous, or both. H5N1 could experience such a transformation at any point, turning the current consensus on its head. And H5N1 is just one of the influenza strains the epidemiology community is closely monitoring.
Officials should make no mistake: there will be more influenza and coronavirus pandemics, and any one of them could prove far more catastrophic than the COVID-19 pandemic. Whenever it occurs, it will almost certainly be a virus, primarily transmitted from person to person via the airborne route, a “virus with wings,” meaning the viral particles can be suspended in the air for long periods and distances. When such an outbreak transpires, rapid global transmission will happen before anyone realizes the world is in the earliest days of a years-long pandemic. Governments cannot wait to prepare until a virus is already spreading around the world. As the last five years have shown, even a moderately deadly disease can have enormous health, economic, social, and political consequences.
IN SEARCH OF A SILVER BULLET
It is time for all nations to wake up to the danger and prepare for a new pandemic. At the top of the list should be a game-changing improvement in the medical countermeasures that governments put in place to fight influenza viruses and coronaviruses. Specifically, this means vaccines, drug treatments, and diagnostic tests. Improving the design and systems for manufacturing personal protective equipment quickly and in sufficient numbers will also be essential. Governments must begin investing heavily in vaccine research and development, including studies aimed at creating universal influenza and coronavirus vaccines: ones that provide protection against multiple strains of either virus, offer durable protection for extended periods, and can be manufactured quickly and distributed globally.
To be fully effective, improved vaccines must be safe and provide multiyear protection against most possible influenza strains. They must significantly reduce the likelihood of serious illness, hospitalization, and death, as well as prevent infection and transmission. Ideally, they should be produced and routinely administered to the general population before a pandemic virus emerges, and be readily available in low- and middle-income countries. Researchers are still a long way from creating such a vaccine, though current developments in the lab suggest it is possible. But at the current level of support for research and development, it could take a decade or more to achieve these game-changing vaccines. With significantly greater government support, this timeline almost certainly could be shortened.
The price tag for such measures will be high, and not all of the investment will pay dividends. But a new pandemic could prove far more deadly or costly than a new war, and governments rarely shy away from spending whatever is deemed necessary on new and better weapons. Biological security is just as important as military security, and the United States needs to accept the idea that it would be going to war against a microbial enemy potentially far more dangerous than any conceivable human foe.
THE WEAPONS WE HAVE
Until these universal or near-universal vaccines are created, policymakers will need to work with currently available influenza and COVID-19 vaccines. These shots are good, but hardly great. For example, they limited illness and deaths caused by the 2009‒10 H1N1 influenza and the COVID-19 pandemics, but the protection they provide against infection varies widely. Even now, the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines against symptomatic illness, disease severity, and hospitalization is largely determined by the viral variant then circulating and whether the infected person is immunocompromised. Similarly, the effectiveness of influenza vaccines against illness requiring medical care ranges from less than 20 percent to as high as 60 percent for any given flu season.
COVID-19 and flu vaccines also lack durability. In one recent study, the CDC found that COVID-19 inoculations provided approximately 54 percent protection against the need for medical care at an average of 52 days after vaccination. According to a different study, the vaccine loses almost all of its protective powers after a year. Current flu vaccine protection is even shorter, beginning to wane after only a month or two.
To keep up, health authorities generally recommend booster vaccines every year for influenza and even more often for COVID-19, with the antigenic component changing to match the most recent circulating strain. But when a reassorted or mutated virus with pandemic potential emerges, it is likely to be significantly different, causing vaccines to miss their targets. That, in part, was why H1N1 was able to spark a pandemic in 2009. The United States has tried to get out ahead of H5N1 by stockpiling 4.8 million vaccine doses, which were recently tested and found to be potentially effective against H5N1 by the Food and Drug Administration. But if a new H5N1 variant were to cause a pandemic, the changes to the virus’s makeup could render the present vaccines largely or entirely ineffective.
COVID-19 and flu vaccines lack durability.
Even if the vaccine in the current stockpile does prove effective, there are not enough doses to control an emerging H5N1 pandemic. The United States is home to 333 million people, each of whom would need two shots to be fully immunized, meaning the 4.8 million doses on hand would cover only about seven percent of the population. The government would, of course, try to scale up production quickly, but doing so would be tricky. During the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, the first lot of vaccine was released on October 1, almost six months after the pandemic was declared. Only 11.2 million doses were available before peak incidence.
Other countries are no better equipped. In a 2019 report, the WHO and three academic centers estimated annual worldwide seasonal influenza vaccine production capacity to be 1.48 billion doses, with potential production capacity to be 4.15 billion doses. That means a maximum of two billion people—25 percent of global population—could be vaccinated in the first year of a pandemic.
The WHO’s estimates rely on some optimistic assumptions. In the event of a pandemic, for example, the research assumes that there would be an adequate supply of egg-laying chickens, since fertilized chicken eggs are the vessels in which most influenza vaccines are grown. But since the natural reservoir for all influenza strains is avian, the virus could kill off or otherwise compromise large numbers of chickens. Even if it didn’t, an H5N1 pandemic might erupt when manufacturers are in the middle of their normal, seasonal vaccine production, making it hard for them to rapidly switch. And a pandemic influenza vaccine strain may not grow as well in eggs and cells as do seasonal virus vaccines.
The 2019 WHO study also identified several potential bottlenecks. Manufacturers may not have sufficient facilities to put their vaccine into vials or syringes, and there may not be a sufficient and timely supply of those vials and syringes, or of reagents- the chemicals to produce the vaccines. Shipping and administration of shots will be a significant challenge in many low- and middle-income countries. Manufacturers could lack the workforce protection needed to ensure continuous production. And producers may be short on adjuvants, compounds that enhance immune responses. Without them, twice as much antigen would be needed per dose.
THE MILITARY MODEL
Public health experts and government health officials are aware of the threat of another pandemic and have launched a variety of initiatives to mitigate it. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations—focused on developing vaccines and treatments for infectious diseases—has outlined a plan for delivering “pandemic-beating vaccines” within 100 days of a WHO declaration. CEPI has laid out five areas of innovation needed to make this a reality: creating a library of prototype vaccines for pathogens across multiple virus families, having clinical trials networks at the ready, speeding up identification of immune response markers, building global vaccine manufacturing capacity, and strengthening disease surveillance and global early-warning systems. These innovations, if realized, would greatly improve the world’s pandemic readiness. But with current funding levels, the project’s 100-day target is hugely ambitious and unlikely to be realized over the next decade for either influenzas or coronaviruses. And as public health experts and governments rightly focus on shortening the time from the beginning of the pandemic until the first vaccine doses are available, just as important is how long it takes until everyone is vaccinated.
Nonetheless, some important steps forward have been made since the 2019 report. Improvements in mRNA technology, first used to make the most successful COVID-19 vaccines, could help speed up influenza vaccine production. Three Phase 3 trials are underway to evaluate the effectiveness of mRNA influenza vaccines. But no such vaccines are yet ready, and it is unclear when they will be.
In response to all these shortcomings, beginning in 2019, the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, which one of the current authors (Osterholm) directs, has led an effort to coordinate research and development of new seasonal and universal influenza vaccines. Using a team of 147 multidisciplinary experts, CIDRAP launched the Influenza Vaccines Research and Development Roadmap to advance the scientific and policy knowledge needed to produce better vaccines and track progress. So far, the initiative has identified more than 420 projects that address at least one of these strategic goals, totaling over $1.4 billion, with U.S. government agencies funding approximately 85 percent of these research studies. This is a start toward more effective vaccines, but only a start. Recently the Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) provided $176 million to Moderna to develop an mRNA-based pandemic influenza vaccine aimed at multiple strains of the virus. This effort should improve the speed with which a vaccine can be made available in an emerging influenza pandemic, but it is not expected to improve on the effectiveness of the current generation of mRNA vaccines.
Hope is not a strategy.
BARDA has recently launched an initiative to develop better coronavirus vaccines and antiviral drugs, called Project NextGen. While it is to be hoped that this effort leads to better and quicker results, the $5 billion government investment—a tiny fraction of what the United States devotes to weapon systems procurement—is only a minimal down payment on the research and development needed to accomplish this important goal. There is nothing currently in the legislative pipeline to suggest that Project NextGen will continue receiving vital government support.
Given these shortfalls, it will likely be a long time before scientists develop game-changing vaccines. In the interim, governments will have to dramatically increase the capacity to produce at pandemic scale the vaccines the world already has. This will mean high-income nations subsidizing their own pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity and helping middle- and low-income countries establish facilities and train workers to staff them.
At first glance, the costs may seem prohibitively high. But consider the stakes. If H5N1, or any other airborne virus that begins to spread in the human population, sparks a pandemic with a fatality rate even three to five percent higher than COVID, the world will be going to war against a terrifying microbial enemy. It would be far more deadly than any pandemic in living memory or any military conflict since World War II. Viewed from that perspective, adopting a military model of planning, procurement, and development is not just rational but essential. Yes, some of the pandemic preparedness projects the government funds may not pan out. Others may never go into use. But governments, and the people that vote them into power, have long accepted that aircraft carriers, fighter jets, and other weapon systems come with enormous price tags and take many years to finance, design, build, test, and commission. And they also accept that some of these arms may sit in storage until they are obsolete. Nations invest anyway, because in war, such weapons become indispensable. It is urgent that governments begin to think the same way about pandemic preparedness.
Of course, it is still possible that such a pandemic may never arise—or that it doesn’t occur for many years. But hope is not a strategy. The United States and the rest of the high- and middle-income world need to start devoting the necessary resources to developing better vaccines, treatments, and other countermeasures immediately. Humanity will not get ahead of a pandemic-causing virus without such commitment.
Foreign Affairs · by The Big One: How to Prepare for World-Altering Pandemics to Come · August 15, 2024
22. You Can Thank the US Army for Americans Brushing Their Teeth Daily
Another military contribution to society.
You Can Thank the US Army for Americans Brushing Their Teeth Daily
military.com · by Blake Stilwell · August 14, 2024
Dentists recommend brushing your teeth twice a day for at least two minutes each time, preferably with a soft bristle toothbrush. Although what we should brush with and how many times a day to do it might have changed over the years, the prevailing wisdom in the United States since the turn of the 20th century is that teeth should be cleaned somehow.
Dental health professionals have long known that oral problems lead to diseases elsewhere in the body, and even tried to enlist the help of government and industry to keep Americans from missing work due to toothaches. But like so many of us today, we just didn't listen to the dentist. Oral care was not a new concept to people, and toothbrush use was widespread in much of the world -- and had been since at least the 1800s. But getting Americans to use them was a whole other matter.
It was only after World War II that returning U.S. troops, who were forced to brush their teeth as part of the U.S. Army's strict hygiene and readiness standards, brought their new habit home with them. It wasn't long before regular brushing became the norm and halitosis something to be feared.
Always arrive for your dental appointments 15 minutes early, even if it is in Europe.
Anyone who's served knows the importance of hygiene and sanitation in the field. Failure to clean yourself, your clothes and your mouth regularly quickly leads to one's designation as "that guy." You will soon find yourself isolated and alone, getting a visit from the first sergeant, behavioral health, or even a midnight blanket party. Simply put: You will stink, everyone will think there's something wrong with you, and ultimately they will take steps to fix you.
That's what happens now, but the America of the early 1940s was a very different place and World War II brought together soldiers from all different parts of a large country, many of which had very little in common. The Army brought together both wealthy and poor troops at a time when much of America was out of work -- and oral hygiene products were not cheap. Before the outbreak of World War II, the cheapest toothbrush and toothpaste cost around 62 cents, a little over $11 today, at a time when the average annual income was $1,368 and the unemployment rate was above 18%.
To keep working mouths healthy, big corporations would contract dentists to clean their employees' teeth for them, ensuring skilled laborers didn't miss a day of work. When those men joined the military to fight the Axis, the needs didn't change, but the methods sure did. The Army's field hygiene kit included a plastic toothbrush with nylon bristles while War Department Field Manual 21-10, Section 206, outlined the need to keep teeth clean and just how to do it. It even matched current American Dental Association guidelines:
"It is highly important to clean the teeth thoroughly twice a day, but especially just before going to bed. Brush the inside and outside surfaces away from the gums and toward the biting
surfaces. A small amount of table salt or soda on the toothbrush will do an excellent cleaning job in the absence of toothpaste or powder. It is important to remove food particles between the teeth promptly, taking care not to injure the gums. If dental floss is available, use this to keep spaces between teeth free of food thereby helping to prevent cavities from forming."
"The majority of you fellas refuse to look after your teeth!"
Those who didn't brush their teeth would eventually be found out, as the same field manual warrants a monthly inspection of all enlisted men. Most enlisted men seemed to think it was a check for venereal disease (the manual even says so), but it was really a search for any signs of disease, including their teeth and mouth.
Whether it was the repeated lessons, expediency in the field or those old Army training films working the way they were supposed to, something stuck with the troops. The idea that regular brushing was an essential part of everyday health became the norm, and the habit was soon passed onto future generations.
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military.com · by Blake Stilwell · August 14, 2024
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
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