Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.”

– Niccolo Machiavelli

"Every strike brings me closer to the next home run."

– Babe Ruth

"Intellectual humility is the acceptance of individual limits of individual knowledge, including your own, and that no person can ever know enough to rule over others in confidence."

– A core principle of classical liberalism

1. The Global Hunt for Putin’s ‘Sleeper Agents’

2. How a Routine Spending Bill Turned Washington Upside Down

3. What the Glorification of Luigi Mangione Reveals About America

4. The Big Five - 21 December edition by Mick Ryan

5. The Father of Chinese Authoritarianism Has a Message for America

6. STRATEGY CENTRAL Proudly Presents The Must-Read Book Recommendations for 2024!

7. The Spanish Civil War and George Orwell: A Powerful Transformation of a Once Naive Man

8. Ukraine Is Using Millions of Hours of Drone Footage to Train AI for Warfare

9. Ukraine: The Inflection Point in the China-Russia Axis

10. Trump, Lenin and the world-revolutionary moment

11. Massive explosion near Russia's Arctic naval base sparks theories

12. Is Trump’s Nobel Prize Waiting in Kyiv?

13. CALL FOR SPECIAL OPERATIONS PAPERS ACADEMIC YEAR 2025

14. The Command Sergeant Major of U.S. Army Special Operations Command Recommends these 5 books for your Christmas Stocking

15. Russia Taps Soviet-Era Stockpiles as Armored-Vehicle Supply Dwindles

16. U.S. Reduces Samsung’s Grant for Texas Chip-Making Project

17. The Combined Action Platoon

18. Opinion: Europe Should Be Afraid if Putin Accepts US-Proposed Peace Plan

19. Happy Holidays From SWJ!!

20. Report: US Special Operations Forces leading the charge against China and Russia in global power competition.

21. The Swedes Tried to Warn Us

22. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations Touts Growing Importance of Irregular Warfare

23. Transforming in Contact: Army Assessing What Success Looks Like

24. Trump wants NATO members to increase defense spending to 5 percent of GDP: FT

25. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, December 20, 2024

26. Iran Update, December 20, 2024

27. Interview with Matt Pottinger

1. The Global Hunt for Putin’s ‘Sleeper Agents’

A fascinating read. Please do not condemn all of VOA because of one anecdote about a freelance journalist.

Sleeper agents exist. Just watch the TV show "The Americans" (as noted below).

The Global Hunt for Putin’s ‘Sleeper Agents’

A quiet suburban mom, a hard-drinking war correspondent and an Arctic researcher were hiding in plain sight, championed by the Kremlin’s No. 1 fan of spy fiction

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/sleeper-agents-putin-global-hunt-a7978f84?mod=hp_lead_pos7

By Drew HinshawFollow and Joe ParkinsonFollow | Illustrations by WSJ

Dec. 20, 2024 9:00 pm ET

MI6 had a secret so sensitive that Slovenia’s spy chief needed to fly to London to hear it in person.

Somewhere in his tiny Alpine nation, a pair of elite Russian spies were hiding under deep cover. But the British intelligence agency couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell him their names. The CIA had heard about them just days earlier.

Josko Kadivnik, director of Slovenia’s intelligence service Sova, meaning Owl, felt his stomach sink. In its three decades of independence, Slovenia had never arrested such a spy. Now, just weeks after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, he was being tasked with a mission that went far beyond Slovenia’s borders to the heart of a New Cold War: His small team of officers needed to capture two Russian sleeper agents.

The stakes of this mission lay in Russia, where jail cells were filling up with political prisoners and a growing list of Americans seized as hostages in a geopolitical game of arresting and trading people like pawns. For every Russian spy the U.S. and its allies could capture, one of the Kremlin’s prisoners could be exchanged into freedom.

Working out of the Central Intelligence Agency’s headquarters, analysts in the mission center known as “Russia House” had been mapping a network of “illegals”: spies who spent years delicately weaving themselves into the fabric of Western society. They included Russian intelligence officers posing as Brazilian researchers in the Arctic and at Johns Hopkins University; and a Spanish news reporter working on Ukraine’s front lines.

The Kremlin called these foot soldiers Vladimir Putin’s “invisible front,” an army of agents living false lives on foreign passports and second languages. Identifying one, American spy catchers would complain, was like finding a needle hiding in a needle stack. Few would prove as well-concealed as Kadivnik’s target.

The story of how the West hunted those sleeper agents has never been told. Wall Street Journal reporters worked on three continents and spoke to more than 30 former and current officials in the countries where they operated: Slovenia, Argentina, Norway, Greece, Poland, Ukraine, the U.K., Canada and the U.S. Hundreds of court documents and personal records revealed painstakingly built false biographies, from a fraudulent Mexican passport to a doctored Greek birth certificate. The spies left behind a trail of confused friends, colleagues, and romantic partners, more than two dozen of whom spoke in detail about the people they thought they knew.

The clandestine transnational pursuit hinged on lucky breaks and leaps of faith. One country after the next would identify a spy only to face the same ethical quandary: Should the illegals be outed, to end their activities, or silently studied to unlock their networks and the riddle of why Putin invests so much in this mysterious tradition? Each day brought the risk that the prey could catch wind and flee. By the time the Greek National Intelligence Service went to investigate a Russian woman living undercover, she had already vanished, cleaning out her knitwear boutique in the shadow of the Acropolis, leaving a longtime boyfriend bereft and confused.

Kadivnik was determined not to let his targets, whoever they were, slip away. Tall with a shaved head, the intelligence chief had spent so long running operations against organized crime bosses that colleagues joked he’d adopted their flair for chunky silver neckchains and salty language. This next operation would have to proceed without a single leak in a country of just 2.1 million where a significant percentage still sympathized with Russia.

The spies he was after were much closer than he realized: a husband and wife living in a quiet suburban lane less than 3 miles from his office. The couple had spent more than a decade molding themselves into an Argentine family of four, all of them conversing in fluent Spanish. Not even their own children knew who they really were.

The Shield and Sword

In 1968, a 15-year-old Vladimir Putin watched the biggest Soviet TV spectacle of the year: “The Shield and Sword.” The four-part miniseries heralded the fictional exploits of a Communist agent whose masterful command of German allowed him to pass as “Johann Weiss,” an SS officer delicately extracting the Third Reich’s deepest secrets.

The U.S.S.R. was stagnating behind the capitalist West, but its films, novels and even postage stamps were celebrating a human weapon Moscow possessed that Washington lacked: sleeper agents. In Soviet mythology, these heroes were the antithesis of James Bond, chameleons who could blend into the enemy’s nest, surviving not on martini-infused bravado and a license to kill, but on patience, wits and a monk-like capacity to sacrifice in service to the motherland.

Decades later, Putin would recall the effect the TV thriller had on him. He studied German in high school, then walked into his local KGB office and volunteered for a life undercover.

The young Putin had become entranced by a tradition whose origins stretched back to the 1917 Revolution, when the new Bolshevik government, unrecognized and encircled by hostile neighbors, couldn’t place spies under diplomatic cover in embassies abroad. Instead, its Communist agents acquired new passports. They honed second languages to operate as sleepers behind enemy lines. The spies had a unique strength (they could operate undetected) offset by a weakness (they had no diplomatic immunity and could thus be arrested for espionage).

Back in the U.S.S.R., their legend burned bright through stories of illegals like Rudolf Abel, who helped steal atomic secrets and was later depicted in Steven Spielberg’s “Bridge of Spies.” In reality, illegals often grew bored and depressed, burdened with long stretches between instructions and the constant stress of withholding a double life from the friends, lovers, spouses and children they accumulated abroad. Some simply walked away from their missions, joining the prosperity of the unsuspecting West, taking their secrets to their graves.

The KGB didn’t offer young Putin a chance to vanish into Europe as an illegal, though he would later claim to have managed several as an officer posted to 1980s Dresden. In his first-ever TV appearance, in 1991, he re-enacted the closing scene from a Soviet spy drama about an illegal in Berlin. That year, the Soviet Union collapsed and shortly after a fledgling democratic government broke the KGB into smaller, weakened agencies, leaving the West to assume the illegals program would expire.

Rudolf Abel arriving at federal court in 1957 for trial on espionage charges. VIDEO: GAUMONT BRITISH NEWSREEL/REUTERS

In truth, the Soviet collapse left a network of sleeper agents stranded abroad, still living undercover, awaiting orders from a vanished empire. By the turn of the millennium, Putin was president, reinvigorating the program he’d idolized as a young man.

Under his watch, dedicated schools trained an army of new recruits in the languages, history and cultural habits of target countries. Young officers were encouraged to marry fellow agents, for cover and to ward off loneliness. Many studied Spanish and Portuguese to deploy to Latin America, where Russia could exploit patchy birth records and corrupt officials to more quickly secure a new identity. They could be activated at Putin’s direction.

In American suburbs, FBI agents were stalking the secret agents, watching from auditorium seats at their children’s school functions, or sneaking into their colonial-style homes in the dead of night to plant bugs and copy the floppy disks they used to communicate. By 2010, the FBI swooped in, announcing the arrest of 10 undercover spies. At least four had children, now left to wrestle with the revelation of their parents’ identity, and the question of where was home.

Another spy, Anna Chapman, had left behind a trail of former lovers and a confused ex-husband, a story condensed under headlines like “Russian spy babe’s hot affair.” Within two weeks of their arrest, all of the spies were swapped on a Vienna runway for four Russians Moscow had imprisoned for collaborating with the West, including Sergei Skripal, a military-intelligence officer who had given MI6 the names of Russian agents.

Putin’s most prized agents were reduced to tabloid fodder and later inspiration for a six-season FX series, “The Americans.” After their return, Putin joined the illegals in front of a live band for a rousing singalong of the theme song from “The Shield and Sword,” entitled “Where Does the Motherland Begin?”

The Obama administration sang a different tune. Eager to maintain its “reset” of relations with Moscow, senior officials played down the discovery of Russian spies living in suburbia as an anachronistic artifact of the Cold War.

It was anything but. Almost as soon as the swap was over, another generation of illegals was heading back into the field, their operations relayed in regular briefings to Russia’s most powerful fan of spy fiction.

The Boot

Pablo González was a spy hiding in plain sight.

When protesters thronged the streets of Kyiv, braving gunfire to oust their pro-Russian government in 2014, the bearded freelance reporter was in the crowd, charming pro-Western activists with his booming baritone and a taste for danger. Early on, the photojournalists he teamed up with noticed he tended to bash out articles after several beers. Closing his laptop, he would talk animatedly about the Kremlin’s military strategy—or the women he’d conquered.

He explained his fluent Russian with shifting stories, at first telling a few friends he had studied it in college before explaining the full picture: He had spent part of his childhood in Russia, where his grandfather had fled after the Spanish Civil War.

Born Pavel Rubtsov in Moscow, he had left Russia with his mother for Spain’s Basque Country when he was 9. There, he took his mother’s maiden name, González. Spanish authorities would later suspect he had been recruited by the GRU, Russia’s military-intelligence agency, on a visit to see his father and stepmother around 2010.

González, who had fathered four children by a Spanish wife and Russian girlfriend, was an attractive potential asset. The bilingual and truly bicultural news reporter could use his freelance writing for Spanish media outlets as cover for operations. The GRU could offer him money and membership in a secret army to help them monitor two of their key targets, Ukraine’s westernizing army and Russia’s exiled opposition.

A protester holds a Ukrainian national flag from a burned building during a 2014 face-off with police in Kyiv. Photo: Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images

Within a year of Ukraine’s 2014 revolution, he had charmed and drunk his way into the company of the lawmakers, press secretaries and customs officials of the new Ukraine, cataloging his victories in text files he left on his laptop, under innocuous headings like “Business Trip to Ukraine.” His handlers would urge him to be more careful, to delete incriminating documents. He, in turn, would bill them for the tiniest expenses, down to the cheap bottles of wine he brought to meetings with Russians living in exile.

Meanwhile, officials at Ukraine’s Defense Ministry took a liking to the daring, garrulous war reporter, and regularly invited him to functions, including a 2016 tour of a base near the Polish border where he witnessed new NATO-structured military exercises and spoke with U.S. and Canadian instructors.

The next year, González on his own initiative tried to befriend Putin’s most feared opponent, opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who had traveled to Barcelona for eye treatment after unknown assailants attacked him with antiseptic green dye. González slipped into the clinic, offered Navalny help translating and navigating Barcelona, then took a selfie with him. He later sent his GRU handlers the address and descriptive details of the hospital, even the Wi-Fi passwords of a cafe where Navalny’s supporters were hanging out. Months later, he joined the protest leader for an evening of drinks with prominent Russian opposition figures, none of them wise to the GRU spy at their table.

Pablo González, left, posed for a photo with Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

González was working for the GRU’s 5th Department, one of two competing directorates Putin had expanded to seed sleeper agents abroad. The GRU encouraged its officers, nicknamed “Boots,” to take risks for quick results. For a Boot, the fluent Spanish-speaker was an unusual asset. Usually, the GRU trained and dispatched illegals so fast that their accents still betrayed a Slavic lilt. They sometimes tried to explain themselves with patchy back stories that fell apart under even light scrutiny.

The Boots’ rivals were the “Slippers” of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, who prided themselves on floating undetected. SVR operatives spent so many years acculturating themselves to the minute details of their supposed homelands—the way its citizens hold their cutlery, stand at a bar or smoke cigarettes—that the best could pass for natives of countries they only arrived in as adults. They were patient. And just as Pablo González began hopping around Ukraine, two of them, more tortoise-like, had arrived in Buenos Aires.

The Slippers

On June 14, 2013, a diminutive woman with mousy brown hair calling herself María Rosa Mayer Muños walked into the Italian hospital in Buenos Aires, with barely an hour left in her pregnancy, to face one of her most difficult endeavors as an undercover spy: birthing a child without betraying her true identity.

Obstetrician Mario Pérez had already logged in his notes that the woman had conspicuously little interaction with staff at the private hospital, one of the best in the Argentine capital. She had waited more than halfway through her term to book her first consultation. Now she walked into the basement delivery room fully dilated, he said. “She made us all run!”

Dr. Pérez had no idea that “Maria” was Anna Dultseva, on a yearslong journey to transform her life into the perfect lie.

Born in the Soviet city of Gorky, she married her husband Artem in 2004, then joined the SVR with him, she later told the spy service’s magazine. She spent three years in immersive training to transform herself into an alter-ego, built on documents seen by the Journal. First, she secured the Greek birth certificate of a dead child, doctored to claim the mother was Mexican. She used that to obtain a Mexican passport. Finally, she moved to Argentina in 2012 to join Artem, who was using the fraudulent papers of Ludwig Gisch, born in Namibia to an Argentine mother.

They lived in a building in the middle-class Buenos Aires neighborhood of Belgrano, attracting little attention among the 146 apartments and rarely attending tenants’ meetings. The concierge saw them come and go at routine times, with Artem usually wearing a tie.

The Belgrano neighborhood of Buenos Aires, where two married Russian spies embellished their fraudulent identities. Photo: Sarah Pabst/Bloomberg News

By 2014 they had both secured Argentine citizenship and Anna was pregnant again. In the delivery room, medical staff had noticed she was calm—barely speaking, save for some quiet words for her husband in fluent Spanish. “This woman has a very high tolerance for pain,” Dr. Pérez said. The couple cooed over their new son, Daniel—a true Argentine citizen by birth, like his older sister, Sophie. No one came to visit them.

Anna and Artem were still building their cover. On Sept. 14, 2015, they married under their assumed names, Maria and Ludwig, a service in an otherwise empty building attended by two witnesses from Colombia, one of whom spoke to the Journal. The family marked birthdays privately, without inviting other children.

Nobody in the tiny circle of parents she interacted with seemed to notice anything odd about Anna’s accent or life story, other than a quiet sense of loneliness. Artem’s Spanish betrayed the lightest touch of something foreign, a trace he chalked up to his childhood in Africa. Forbidden from watching TV, their children ate healthy food and took swimming lessons.

In 2017, the two Slippers got a message from their handler. After more than a decade building their cover it was time to secure new visas and deploy for the next stage of their mission: Slovenia, in the heart of Europe.

Anna Valerevna Dultseva and Artem Viktorovich Dultsev.

First, there was a troubling wrinkle they would have to iron out to avoid detection. In the Argentine civil registry where their wedding record was stored, Anna had listed her mother’s nationality as Austrian, a falsehood Slovenia could easily check with its northern neighbor. In formal, immaculate Spanish, the young mother filed a petition for the Argentine registry to correct her mother’s origin from Austria to Mexico, whose birth records Slovenia would be less likely to consult.

But the change was detected by an officer processing their immigration paperwork in the Slovenian Interior Ministry—who found it unusual enough to note, though not suspicious enough to raise alarm. The visas for the Argentine family were approved and soon the Slippers were buckled into a trans-Atlantic flight, leaving behind only $21 in a Buenos Aires bank account and a credible-enough trail, if anyone ever cared to check.

The Boot, Pablo González, was already in Europe, traveling along Ukraine’s battle lines and spying on a circle of drinking buddies that widened from war correspondents to dissidents. What he didn’t know was that the U.S. and its allies were on his tracks.

The Spy Catchers

Behind the passkey-activated doors that separated them from the rest of the CIA’s Langley headquarters, the officers at Russia House were piecing through a gathering stack of reports chronicling the double life of Pablo González.

For years the storied CIA division, formally known as Mission Center for Europe and Eurasia, had operated from the same warren of cubicles and offices as the agency shifted focus toward the War on Terror. But by 2017, the dozens of Russia analysts, officers and “targeters” scouring communications, official files and business records were tracing the contours of an expanding Russian spy network that included González.

Since 2014, Spain’s Centro Nacional de Inteligencia had been tracking the jet-setting reporter. In time, so were their counterparts at MI6 and in Poland, where he had been interviewing members of a new left-wing party and would begin dating a local freelance journalist.

For the spy catchers, this Boot was a bargain. The more he threw himself into missions, at times of his own volition, the more the Spanish and Americans could map his handlers, contacts, allies and command chain. Western officials studying the bilingual spy admired his natural talent and zest for the dangerous work, even as slips in tradecraft allowed them to track his network. One agency was able to find his documents uploaded onto a cloud service.

The hard-drinking war correspondent embodied an old spycraft dilemma: Once you catch a spy, should you intervene to stop their mission? Or silently follow them, to harvest more secrets? The CIA analysts in Russia House and their Spanish counterparts were inclined to keep watching.

He was becoming romantic with Zhanna Nemtsova, the grieving, exiled daughter of Boris Nemtsov, a Putin critic recently murdered near the walls of the Kremlin. She lent the Spaniard her father’s old laptop and he slipped the device’s email archive onto a thumb drive.

Then, on March 4, 2018, two GRU agents visiting England’s sleepy town of Salisbury smeared the nerve agent Novichok on the door of Skripal, the exiled Russian defector who had given the names of Russian spies to the British. The elderly ex-spy survived, but the would-be assassins’ careless discarding of a chemical weapon in a garbage bin ultimately killed a local mother of three. Her death galvanized a new round of attention on the GRU.

Russian spies attempted to kill Sergei Skripal using a nerve agent in 2018. VIDEO: BBC; SKY NEWS; ITN/GETTY IMAGES

The U.K. pushed allies to expel more than 150 Russian diplomats in Europe and North America, largely intelligence officers working in embassies. Going forward, Russia would need to rely even more on its sleeper spies.

Before, intelligence agencies at times had brushed aside the dangers of Putin’s fixation with illegals. Now, they increased information sharing, scheduling rounds of face-to-face meetings with liaisons in embassies and check-ins over secure channels including the Battlefield Information Collection and Exploitation Systems created by NATO for wartime communication.

New personnel were posted to Russia House, tasked with the painstaking detective work of tracking the illegals’ flows of money, personnel and logistics. Analysts were surprised to see that the GRU was still acquiring passports through the old Cold War tactic of misusing a dead baby’s birth certificate. Soon, the CIA began identifying Boots.

One, Sergey Vladimirovich Cherkasov, who posed as Victor Ferreira, a Brazilian graduate student, was caught by a résumé slipup: The CIA noticed he had worked at a travel agency in Rio de Janeiro that they suspected was run by a GRU officer. By 2018, he was motorcycling each morning through Washington, D.C., studying American foreign policy and international economics at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Though students puzzled over his odd accent, he ingratiated himself with professors unaware that their pupil was a GRU officer born in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.

Another Boot they found was Mikhail Mikushin, undercover as José Assis Giammaria, an eager student at Canada’s Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary. He was also struggling to convince his schoolmates that he truly was Brazilian. After what he claimed was a trip home to renew his visa, Giammaria passed out Rio de Janeiro souvenir bottle opener keychains to every student in his class.

What the Western pursuers didn’t know, and wouldn’t for years, is that two more spies had managed to slip right past them.

Now ensconced in a two-story home in the suburbs of Ljubljana, the quiet capital of Slovenia, the Dultsevs cut a low profile. They spoke to their children only in Spanish, and wouldn’t attempt even a sentence in Slovenian—the Slavic language was too close to Russian, and their native accent might poke through. Neighbors noticed little about the family who never entertained visitors and whose belongings, down to their white Kia Ceed sedan and the bike the husband pedaled downtown daily, all seemed designed to attract as little attention as possible.

The couple said almost nothing about their past except to blame crime in Buenos Aires for their move. Neighbors overheard the Dultsevs’ children playing in the garden, jabbering in Spanish, but the parents hardly ever stayed long outside. Anna was hardly ever photographed, with a rare exception: One Wednesday in late November 2019, she joined a Christmas decorating party in her daughter’s kindergarten classroom, flashing a strained smile over the caption, “A real Christmas spirit was in the air.”

For work, she had set up Art Gallery 5’14, an online company buying and selling mostly modern art. Hardly anyone in Slovenia’s small community of artists would remember anything at all about the unassuming mother of two whose office happened to sit a few steps from a European Union gas and energy regulator. The gallery claimed to work with 90 artists across the world and posted several images to its prolific social-media accounts almost daily. Strikingly, not a single picture showed her face.

The Trap

Pablo González was flying closer to the sun.

Colleagues in the Spanish press corps had been gossiping over his ample supply of top-shelf cameras and expensive drones. He had been freelancing for U.S. government-funded Voice of America while airing Kremlin-sympathetic views on hourlong YouTube videos. He even attended a training hosted by Bellingcat, the open-source investigative outfit that unmasked Russian spies at a clip the analysts at Russia House often envied. His on-off romantic partner Nemtsova, the prominent Putin critic, had started to confide suspicions to other exiles about the well-connected reporter for small Spanish newspapers who took expensive weekslong trips to Ukrainian warzones.

One night, in November 2021, over beers in eastern Poland, he made a grand prediction to a small group of fellow foreign correspondents: Putin was about to invade Ukraine.

His cover unraveled three months later. Taking extended video footage of defensive positions along Ukraine’s eastern front, he spooked anxious soldiers bracing themselves for an impending invasion. Ukraine’s SBU intelligence agency immediately asked him to visit their Kyiv headquarters, where they questioned him for hours, probing his finances, career and where exactly he was born.

The same place as you, González shot back. The Soviet Union.

González was in a belligerent mood that night, downing drinks faster than other war reporters could keep up and laughing about the Ukrainian officers who’d scanned his phone and warned him to depart the country. He stepped out to call the Spanish embassy, which encouraged him to heed the advice. He flew to Istanbul to meet his handlers, then visited Spain for a brief stopover with his wife, before returning to Warsaw, reconnecting with his Polish girlfriend. He told journalists he’d left Ukraine because his Spanish ID was set to expire. All the while he was being tracked by British intelligence.

Just as Putin’s invasion moved ahead, the U.K. sent a tip to one of Poland’s top security officials: Did they know Pablo González was back in town?

One of the largest international arms transfers since World War II was under way at a small airport in Poland, where giant military cargo planes, loaded with equipment bound for Ukraine, were landing hourly. González, they would come to realize, had visited the airport, typing detailed notes on its layout and logistics on his new laptop.

Cars preparing to transport Ukrainian refugees wait a Polish border crossing in 2022. Photo: Dawid Zielinski for WSJ

Polish officers watched as González and his Polish girlfriend returned late on the night of Feb. 27, 2022, to the makeshift housing of a student dormitory near the border. The couple had been squabbling over his relations with other women. Shortly before midnight, a knock came at the door and officers filled the room, frisking them both then pulling González aside. He said nothing as they led him away.

The next morning, the Spanish woke up to learn the spy they’d hoped to keep studying had gone dark—the Poles hadn’t warned them.

In interrogations, González said he was worth a lot to the Kremlin and suggested they trade him for Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent dissident, one of the officials dealing with the case said. Back in Spain, his lawyer and supporters launched a campaign saying he was guilty of nothing except journalism. González, who didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment, never admitted publicly to being a spy.

Neither the Kremlin, nor Russia’s foreign and military intelligence agencies, the SVR and GRU, responded to questions seeking comment.

On the other side of Europe, the CIA was delivering a tip to the officers of the Netherlands’ national security and defense intelligence agencies. The Brazilian Johns Hopkins graduate Victor Ferreira—Cherkasov, the GRU deep-cover officer—would soon be flying in to take an internship at The Hague’s International Criminal Court.

Russia House hoped the Dutch would keep watching him, but Dutch officials debating the stakes felt doing nothing could allow a Russian spy to access the building and email system of a court whose prosecutors had war crimes cases against Russia as far back as 2008.

Tall, with coiffed blond hair, Cherkasov walked through Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport in April to find Dutch authorities waiting to pull him aside then scan his devices. Like González, he’d been sloppy: Hidden on a laptop was his legend, or cover story, that ran just four large-text pages, much of it an elaborate explanation for his peculiar accent and why, unlike most Brazilians, he didn’t eat fish.

The Dutch deported him back to Brazil in the hopes that the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva would be a cooperative partner against Russian espionage. The country would hold him on a fraudulent passport charge. He arrived with a handwritten sign taped to his suitcase by the Dutch, a pun on São Paulo’s international airport code: “To GRU.”

José Assis Giammaria—GRU officer Mikushin—was next. The University of Calgary graduate was now a security studies researcher in Norway’s Arctic city of Tromsø, where police grabbed him on the way to work. Just like that, the West had rolled up three illegals in quick succession.

Yet there was an evidence trail pointing to another pair, who were proving far harder to track. The hunt began shortly after the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, when Josko Kadivnik, the director of Slovenia’s Owl, received his invitation to fly to London.

The Family

Armed with a vague tip from MI6, Kadivnik built his investigative team slowly, inviting only the most trusted underlings into his office, framed by a metallic mosaic of an owl.

Most of the officers wouldn’t be told the full scope of their mission and were frequently rotated over months of slow policework. For the few who knew the truth, Kadivnik checked their pockets for loyalty: Select officers were given a gold coin emblazoned with an owl, a symbol of their tightknit club. If ever he found them without their coin, they would have to treat their colleagues to a round of drinks.

It isn’t clear how, in the needle stack of foreign-born residents, the officers slowly homed in on an Argentine family living at number 35 Primožičeva Street, a quiet suburban lane on the outskirts of the capital. Maria Rosa Mayer Muños had been flying to art fairs in London and Edinburgh, melding into an industry where laundered money and fraud mixed with high society. Was she legitimate? Slovenia’s national security adviser Vojko Volk, an erudite former ambassador to Italy, studied her paintings, noting that they all seemed unimpressive, like new-age art sold cheaply to clueless tourists.

Poring through the family’s bank accounts, investigators puzzled over whether the tuition of her children’s private British-curriculum academy was within their means. Her husband, Ludwig Gisch, had set up an online IT business selling domain names and cloud hosting, but it only had four followers on X, including the account of his wife’s business. He had promptly filed his tax returns, reviewed by the Journal, in 2021 claiming revenues of 40,000 euros alongside his wife’s 23,000.

Neither husband nor wife ever got so much as a parking ticket. Their operations security appeared nearly perfect, except for one error: Deep in their immigration records, Kadivnik could still see where the Interior Ministry had wondered, why had she changed her mother’s nationality from Austrian to Mexican? Now, the odd rectification added to a convincing body of evidence that the Argentines might not be who they said they were.

A scene inside the Ljubljana, Slovenia, office building where two spies ran their cover businesses. Photo: Matjaz Krivic for WSJ

Owl began surveilling the gallerist, at times closely, other times backing off to avoid spooking her. Investigators opened their mail, hacked into their phones and discreetly trailed their car along Ljubljana’s cobblestone streets and past riverside cafes. The agency cross-checked information with Interpol and the CIA, eventually uncovering the real names, Anna and Artem Dultsev. Slowly, the couple’s mission revealed itself.

She was surveilling the director of an EU energy regulatory agency based in Slovenia, as it tried to rapidly wean the continent off Russian gas and help Ukraine avoid blackouts.

On trips across the visa-free Schengen bloc and London—for art exhibitions, ostensibly—Anna would meet sources. When she returned she’d ferry handwritten messages using an unhackable technique from the Cold War, placing them under a designated rock in a forest near the coast.

Owl would never know the full picture of what she was up to—but by Dec. 5, 2022, it was ready to strike.

The arrest would have to unfold without word reaching a single friend or neighbor of the couple, or any Russian sympathizer. Not even the U.S. ambassador was told more than she needed to know, as the local CIA station chief shuttled back and forth to meet the tiny set of Slovenians organizing the raid.

The spy couple lived with their two children in this house on a quiet suburban lane in the outskirts of Ljubljana. Photo: Matjaz Krivic for WSJ

A cold fog was settling on Ljubljana, Christmas markets just opening their shutters, as a string of unmarked vehicles wove toward 35 Primožičeva Street where the Dultsevs were shepherding their children off to school. Kadivnik was watching in real-time on a feed filmed by some of his officers. He would extend the couple one courtesy before arresting them: Neither their daughter Sophie nor son Daniel would be home to watch their parents taken.

At 9:03 he gave the order and special forces burst through the windows so suddenly that Artem, hunched over a laptop, fell backward off his chair. He’d had no time to close the tabs on his screen, or shutter its secure communication to the SVR, which was still running. Screaming echoed through the home, as officers thundered upstairs, shouting “get down!” and bundling Anna onto the floor. She began to cry, claiming an injury, before returning to her feet, standing in silence. The arrest lasted only minutes and the couple left in handcuffs, their breakfast uneaten on the kitchen table.

Neighbors watched through their blinds, late into the night, as detectives searched the home and its yard, leaving with bags of money found in a secret compartment of the refrigerator, documents that included Anna’s forged Greek birth certificate, dozens of USB devices equipped with technology police had never seen before and Artem’s laptop, later sent to Washington for analysis.

Kadivnik delivered word to the CIA that the operation was complete. After nine months of high-strung policework, Slovenia had nabbed the first deep-cover spies in its history.

The Trade

Three months later, in March 2023, Kadivnik slipped into a government building in Belgrade—neutral Serbian territory—to face the Kremlin’s top negotiator for prisoner swaps. The power imbalance was palpable.

Col. Gen. Sergei Beseda was known to some in Russia House as “the Baron” for his tailored suits and a cigar habit hinting at a youth as a KGB officer in Havana. He was wanted in Ukraine for allegedly encouraging former President Viktor Yanukovych to mow down demonstrators before he was toppled.

Now he was seated opposite Kadivnik with a question for Slovenia, a tiny state that won independence from communist Yugoslavia in the 1990s: Why are you doing America’s bidding? Most of all, he was there to deliver a direct message from the Russian president. Putin wanted his spies back.

On the phone with CIA Director Bill Burns, Kadivnik was nervous over what he was supposed to do with two elite Russian agents. Putin’s oldest ally, archhawk Nikolai Patrushev, had called to propose trading them for Slovenians in Russian prisons, but when Slovenia’s national security adviser insisted there were no Slovenians jailed in Russia, Patrushev paused then asked, menacingly: “Are you sure?”

The small country would have to be patient. All through 2023 and into 2024, Moscow and Washington haggled over which prisoners to trade. Poland held off bringing González’s case to a trial that, once it began, would make it harder to swap him.

The Dultsev children remained unaware their parents were charged with being spies, living in foster care, overseen by a female deputy Kadivnik appointed. Anna and Artem were allowed to speak to their children daily. But they begged prison guards to still call them Maria and Ludwig when their children came to visit. Watching the married spies, the Owl chief could tell that she was the more senior officer.

By July, President Biden was facing pressure to step down as his party’s presidential nominee. That month, Kadivnik got a call from the Slovenian prime minister’s office: a deal was coming together. The FSB and the CIA had inked an agreement at a clandestine meeting in Riyadh. The trade would take place on Aug. 1.

The Dultsevs and their children return to Moscow on Aug. 1, part of a prisoner swap that included Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. Photo: Kirill Zykov/TASS/Zuma Press

Russia would free a mix of dissidents, German prisoners, and three Americans: former Marine Paul Whelan and journalists Alsu Kurmasheva and the Journal’s Evan Gershkovich, sentenced to a combined 40 years on national-security charges they and the U.S. government denied. Washington and its allies would release eight Russians, including one held for ammunition smuggling, two convicted cybercriminals, and a hit man serving a life sentence for murdering an enemy of Putin in a Berlin park. The rest were Boots and Slippers.

At a July NATO summit in Washington, Biden’s national security adviser asked the Slovenians how the U.S. could thank the small country for its efforts. Slovenia wanted to build new nuclear plants. Could the U.S. help? Weeks later, Biden welcomed the Slovenians to the White House, where they discussed what Westinghouse Electric could do.

The plane that came to collect the Dultsevs from Ljubljana was a U.S. government jet. Kadivnik and a CIA officer would escort the family all the way to the exchange point in Turkey, and then, once they were rid of the spies, pop open a celebratory bottle of bourbon for their trip home.

Eleven-year-old Sophie spent the journey tapping away on a tablet. Her mother looked at her. At some point, during their flight to Moscow she would have to tell her children the truth: Her name was Anna Dultseva, a citizen of Russia, the country she had quietly served for almost half her life as a deep cover spy.

Kate Vtorygina, Novica Mihajlović, Marcos García Rey, Silvina Frydlewsky, Joel Schectman, Karolina Jeznach and James Marson contributed to this article.

Write to Joe Parkinson at joe.parkinson@wsj.com and Drew Hinshaw at drew.hinshaw@wsj.com

Appeared in the December 21, 2024, print edition as 'The Global Hunt for Putin’s ‘Sleeper Agents’'.

2. How a Routine Spending Bill Turned Washington Upside Down

Checks, balances, and separation of powers. Debate and compromise as Congress represents the interests of their constituents. Do you want to prevent this kind of debacle? Congress must do its job and pass budgets before the start of the fiscal year (October 1st).

It is funny how the headline editor titled this a "routine spending bill." Is that acknowledgement of the "new normal," i.e., Congress cannot pass a budget on time. The second and third order effects of this action (and for a long time non-action) is such that additional inefficiencies and waste is introduced into government spending.

I hope Musk and Ramaswamy can find $2 trillion in savings in the federal budget but the process below only adds to it.

How a Routine Spending Bill Turned Washington Upside Down

Trump hoped for a smooth transition to the White House. Then Republican divisions burst into public view.

By Natalie Andrews

Follow, Alex Leary

Follow, Brian Schwartz

Follow and Lindsay Wise

Updated Dec. 21, 2024 12:51 am ET

WASHINGTON—There was much to celebrate when House Speaker Mike Johnson walked into Mar-a-Lago to meet with President-elect Donald Trump just after the November election. But there was also pressing business, including a deadline to reach a government-spending deal.

Trump told Johnson he was concerned that the spending bill would be loaded up with pet projects to win votes. And he said he wanted to take care of a problem that would confront him in his new term: the debt ceiling. The goal, according to people familiar with the gathering at Trump’s Florida estate, was to provide a glide path as the incoming president prepared for a triumphant return to Washington in 2025.

This week it all unraveled.

Trump narrowly avoided a government shutdown, and for the first time since the election, dozens of GOP lawmakers openly defied him. Johnson is facing a serious threat of losing Trump’s confidence—and the speakership. The near-euphoric mood surrounding Republicans was briefly replaced by finger-pointing and intraparty squabbling one month before Trump takes office.

The chaos might offer clues about what is to come. While Trump will preside over unified Republican control of Washington, his narrow majorities in the House and Senate mean he will have to keep fractious lawmakers together. Social-media missives and primary threats might not be enough to persuade the most stubborn members of the Republican caucus.

“We shouldn’t be in this mess,” said Rep. Steve Womack (R., Ark.). “We’re better than this, and we need to do better than this.”

On Friday night, hours before the government was set to shut down, House lawmakers passed a slimmed-down bill to fund federal agencies for three months, provide disaster relief, and deliver economic aid for farmers. The bill doesn’t address the debt ceiling, and GOP lawmakers said they would vote on the issue next year. The Senate passed the bill early Saturday. The White House said that President Biden would sign it later in the day.

Even though Washington averted a shutdown, lawmakers are still struggling with an unprecedented wild card: the influence of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the Trump sidekicks who are embarking on an ambitious project to slash the size of government.

President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk at a SpaceX launch in Texas two weeks after the U.S. election. Photo: Brandon Bell/Press Pool

It was Musk, not Trump, who led the attacks on the 1,547-page stopgap bill Johnson unveiled Tuesday evening. “This bill should not pass,” the world’s richest person tweeted at 4:15 a.m. ET on Wednesday. Hours later, Trump demanded a streamlined version of the package, coupled with an immediate boost of the federal debt limit.

Democrats including Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) sought to exploit the dynamic, painting “oligarch” Musk as the one pulling the strings. Others referred to Musk as the new president. Several Republican lawmakers called for Musk to be the next House speaker. It couldn’t be determined how much Trump and Musk coordinated in advance of the billionaire Tesla chief executive’s move to go public with his opposition to the legislation, though aides noted that they speak every day and Musk has been a constant presence at Mar-a-Lago.

For now, Trump and Musk’s close relationship remains intact, but some of the president’s allies predict that tumult lies ahead.

Tweets, text chains and tension

There were few signs of discord when Johnson and incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.) attended the Army-Navy game with Trump and Musk on Dec. 14. Attendees in the private box with the lawmakers said Trump and Musk didn’t voice major concerns about the pending spending package.

Four days later, Musk’s early-morning X posts blew everything up.

The speaker and his three other negotiating partners spent the final weeks of the least-productive Congress in modern history hammering out the spending deal, which would have punted the government funding deadline for three months and helped states hit by hurricanes. But it was the dozens of less-prominent line items—from pandemic-response provisions to a pay raise for lawmakers—that drew the ire of Musk, Ramaswamy and conservative lawmakers.

Speaker Mike Johnson, Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance at the recent Army-Navy football game. Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

The bill contained so many giveaways that it was hard for Republicans to pinpoint the one they hated most. Republican lawmakers contacted Musk and Ramaswamy to voice their own concerns about the original bill’s spending proposals, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump’s advisers privately griped that Johnson hadn’t adequately filled them in on the full scope of what would be in the package.

On a group-text chain, Johnson tried to explain the bill to Ramaswamy and Musk on Tuesday and Wednesday. But his messages did little to assuage their concerns. Musk subsequently posted on X roughly 100 times about the bill, riling followers, who called congressional offices.

For hours, lawmakers waited for Trump to say something, wondering if Musk and Ramaswamy’s angry social-media rants reflected the president-elect’s position.

It wasn’t until 4:28 p.m. on Wednesday, more than 12 hours after Musk launched his social-media assault on the package, that they got clarity. Trump signaled his opposition to the bill in a joint statement released by Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance, first posted on Vance’s X feed. But he also went public for the first time with a demand to increase the debt ceiling as part of the spending deal.

Johnson never brought up the debt ceiling during weeks of Capitol Hill negotiations on the spending package, people familiar with the negotiations said. Trump aides said the president-elect’s feelings on the matter and his insistence that it be dealt with shouldn’t have been a surprise.

As the chaos on Capitol Hill was unfolding, the president-elect and Musk were at Mar-a-Lago, dining with the founder of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos, the latest in a line of billionaires trekking to the Florida estate. The next morning, Trump posted on Truth Social that everyone wants to be his friend.

The Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., has served as the hub of the presidential transition. Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Meanwhile, stunned senior Republicans shuttled in and out of Johnson’s office for hours, unable to explain what was happening. By Thursday, they were still looking for a path forward.

“I do not know, I do not know, I really don’t,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R., Okla.), who chairs the appropriations committee, as he left Johnson’s office around 1:15 p.m. that day. “I know the sun came up this morning, it’ll go down tonight, and I’ll betcha it comes up tomorrow morning as well.”

A reporter asked if a debt ceiling was on the table as Cole escaped into a nearby conference room. “I don’t know!” Cole repeated, as the door closed behind him.

About 2½ hours later, Cole emerged from Johnson’s office and told reporters a deal had been reached. As House lawmakers debated a revised agreement that would have punted the government funding deadline by three months and suspended the nation’s borrowing limit for two years, Democrats jeered. The presiding Republican, Rep. Marc Molinaro of New York, broke the gavel when he slammed it down hard to silence them.

By 7 p.m., that deal, too, was dead—with nearly all Democrats and 38 Republicans bucking Trump to vote no.

‘Not just the Democrats’

The demand to raise the debt ceiling was an early test of fealty to Trump. The president-elect asked his party to do something many of them fundamentally oppose. Debt-ceiling increases typically need Democratic votes because Republicans hate that they signal increased government spending to come.

“You never have any ounce of self-respect to go out and campaign, saying you’re going to balance the budget and then you come in here and pass $110 billion unpaid for,” Rep. Chip Roy (R., Texas) told his Republican colleagues who backed the Trump-endorsed bill. “It’s embarrassing, it’s shameful.” In the run-up to the vote, Trump called for a primary challenge against Roy. Roy voted against it anyway.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R., Ky.) wore a debt-clock pin as a government shutdown loomed Friday. Photo: Nathan Howard/Reuters

Throughout the strained negotiations, some of Trump’s allies are starting to turn on Johnson—as the president-elect and his advisers vent their anger at the Republican lawmakers who earlier in the week opposed a revised spending deal Trump endorsed.

Shortly after the Trump-backed spending bill failed Thursday night, Trump’s ally, Steve Bannon, took the stage at a rally of the president’s supporters in Phoenix. He called for ousting Johnson for negotiating “1,500 pages of sellout” with Democrats on the bill.

Donald Trump Jr., one of the president-elect’s sons, was more blunt when he took the stage. “It’s not just the Democrats that are our foes. It’s a vast majority of the Republicans,” he said, referring to House GOP members who voted against the Trump-backed spending measure.

He later added: “For those people who aren’t willing to get in line and do their job, which is to serve their constituents, we have to start primarying the hell out of these people.”

On Friday, as House lawmakers began voting on the latest revised legislation to keep the government open, Musk weighed in. “The Speaker did a good job here, given the circumstances,” he wrote on X. “It went from a bill that weighed pounds to a bill that weighed ounces.”

Lawmakers voted 366-34 to pass the legislation.

After the vote, Johnson said he has been in “constant contact” with Trump. He also said he spoke to Musk and among other things the two discussed the “extraordinary challenges” of the speaker’s job.

Katy Stech Ferek, Aaron Zitner and Vivian Salama contributed to this article.

Write to Natalie Andrews at natalie.andrews@wsj.com, Alex Leary at alex.leary@wsj.com, Brian Schwartz at brian.schwartz@wsj.com and Lindsay Wise at lindsay.wise@wsj.com

3. What the Glorification of Luigi Mangione Reveals About America

I just listened to a fascinating interview with Robert Pape.

Excerpts:

It’s happening across the political spectrum, and violence is becoming more normal today than five or six years ago.

...

We are seeing what I would call a threshold-breaking attack, setting a precedent. And that precedent is already producing an outpouring of public support for the suspect on social media.

,,,

If you look at the rhetoric by President Biden after the first Trump assassination attack or if you look at Vice President Kamala Harris’s statements after the second Trump assassination attempt, you will see there was a steady effort by Democrats and Republicans to condemn political violence in the months before the November election. The more we drive down support for political violence, the less likely it is to occur.

We need a similar national conversation not just to condemn the act itself but also to condemn the support for political violence and to redirect the anger. There’s no doubt: There is anger at our health care system. There’s anger at our corporations. The question is, what is the right way to express that anger? Is it through violence, or is it through politics? I would say we should be directing that political anger away from political violence and redirect it toward politics and voting. The ballot box, not guns, is the right way to settle disputes in America.

Following Pape's editorial below is a NY Times article for teenagers. Our daughter (a 10th grade English teacher) says an article like this could not be used in her school: "Why Do You Think the Killing of a Health Care C.E.O. Has Sparked Such an Intense National Conversation?"

What the Glorification of Luigi Mangione Reveals About America

The shooting of Brian Thompson marks a new era of rage for this country.

Dec. 12, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/12/opinion/luigi-mangione-united-healthcare-ceo-shooting.html?searchResultPosition=1

By Robert A. Pape

Produced by Jillian Weinberger

The political scientist Robert A. Pape has studied political violence for the past 30 years. In this episode of “The Opinions,” he describes what his research illuminates about the homicide of United Healthcare’s chief executive, Brian Thompson. Pape also explains why he is not surprised by the background of Luigi Mangione, who has been charged with the killing.

What the Glorification of Luigi Mangione Reveals About America

The shooting of Brian Thompson marks a new era of rage for this country.

Listen · 9:55 min

Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

Robert Pape: I am Robert Pape. I’m a professor at the University of Chicago. I’ve been studying political violence for 30 years, and I’ve been watching the news about the alleged killer of the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O., Brian Thompson.

What I have seen is lining up quite squarely with what we have found about the growing normalization of political violence in America. Year after year, political violence is becoming more common, and we’re seeing that support for political violence is growing across a range of issues.

Think about the political violence we’ve experienced just in the last few years. In 2022 we saw the attack against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that missed her but almost killed her husband. In 2023 there was an assailant who had weapons in his vehicle, and he was surveilling President Barack Obama’s home in Washington, D.C. This year we saw two assassination attempts against Donald Trump.

Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

It’s happening across the political spectrum, and violence is becoming more normal today than five or six years ago.

Archived clip of news conference: Good afternoon everyone. Earlier this morning in Altoona, Pa., members of the Altoona Police Department arrested Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old male, on firearms charges.

Pape: What we know about the motives of the shooting of Brian Thompson points to a political motive.

Archived clip of news broadcast: Authorities finding three pages of writings, which say, in part, “Frankly, these parasites had it coming.”

Archived clip of news broadcast: Investigators are now confirming that bullet casings found at the scene had words, including “deny” and “delay,” written on them.

Pape: The suspect in this case is clearly wanting to make a broader political point.

We are seeing what I would call a threshold-breaking attack, setting a precedent. And that precedent is already producing an outpouring of public support for the suspect on social media.

Archived clip of TikTok: Thing about this C.E.O. and Luigi situation is that we are witnessing a Robin Hood right before our very eyes. A true Robin Hood.

Archived clip of TikTok: That’s Luigi’s manifesto. I guarantee you, we all know someone — a family member — getting denied, denied, denied. Pay more money if you want to live. And they wonder why we’re not crying.

Archived clip of TikTok: Breaking news: Luigi Mangione, the alleged shooter, is now in danger. Yes, all of the joints in both of his arms are currently in danger, as he received a record number of high-fives entering the jailhouse.

Pape: There is now a hashtag that is trending called #FreeLuigi. What we are seeing is an outpouring of support that is essentially treating this individual as a kind of hero or a Robin Hood.

The background of the alleged attacker virtually personifies the normalization of political violence. We’re used to thinking of violent actors as being on the margins of society. If we looked at the perpetrators that the F.B.I. was prosecuting for political violent attacks from, say, 2000 to 2015, these folks would be members of militia groups; a third of them would be unemployed. That certainly doesn’t fit the background of the alleged C.E.O. killer, who is coming from a privileged, elite high school background.

We’re used to thinking that these perpetrators of political violence are in some way on the margins of society, and that has been a profile that has a lot of empirical basis, but that is changing. The more political violence is spreading in America, the more we’re seeing the wider profile of individuals who are committing political violence. And that wider profile starts to look like America itself.

It is terribly important right now that national political leaders at all levels condemn political violence and the murder of the health care C.E.O. and condemn the outpouring of support for the murder. We have found in our national surveys that 75 to 80 percent of Americans abhor political violence. They want their political leaders to make bipartisan statements condemning political violence. We have an example with Gov. Josh Shapiro from Pennsylvania discussing the arrest of the alleged shooter:

Archived clip of Shapiro: Some attention in this case, especially online, has been deeply disturbing, as some have looked to celebrate instead of condemning this killer. I understand people have real frustration with our health care system, but I have no tolerance, nor should anyone, for one man using an illegal ghost gun to murder someone because he thinks his opinion matters most.

Pape: This is exactly the kind of language that we need from our national political leaders, and it’s something that we also need in the national media.

Many people have been asking why there was no political violence in the immediate aftermath of the November election. Our surveys give us insight into this.

In our June survey, we found that 10 percent of Americans supported political violence to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president. We ran another survey the week after the November election, and we found that support for political violence against Trump fell by 50 percent. That’s the first time we saw a significant drop in over a year and a half. Why did that support for political violence fall?

If you look at the rhetoric by President Biden after the first Trump assassination attack or if you look at Vice President Kamala Harris’s statements after the second Trump assassination attempt, you will see there was a steady effort by Democrats and Republicans to condemn political violence in the months before the November election. The more we drive down support for political violence, the less likely it is to occur.

We need a similar national conversation not just to condemn the act itself but also to condemn the support for political violence and to redirect the anger. There’s no doubt: There is anger at our health care system. There’s anger at our corporations. The question is, what is the right way to express that anger? Is it through violence, or is it through politics? I would say we should be directing that political anger away from political violence and redirect it toward politics and voting. The ballot box, not guns, is the right way to settle disputes in America.

Image

Credit...Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by HOANG DINH NAM/Getty

Why Do You Think the Killing of a Health Care C.E.O. Has Sparked Such an Intense National Conversation?

Have you been following the story? What do you think the news and our reactions to it say about America today?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/16/learning/why-do-you-think-the-killing-of-a-health-care-ceo-has-sparked-such-an-intense-national-conversation.html?searchResultPosition=3

After Brian Thompson was fatally shot on Dec. 4 in Midtown Manhattan, some people expressed support for the gunman online.Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York Times

By Katherine Schulten

Dec. 16, 2024Please keep in mind that this forum is for teenagers only. While there are many places on NYTimes.com for adults to comment, this is the only dedicated spot for the voices of young people.

If you live in the United States, you have almost certainly heard the news about the killing of the UnitedHealthcare chief executive, Brian Thompson, along with the hunt for his killer and the arrest of a suspect.

As The Times writes, this story “has mesmerized a deeply polarized nation that shares a collective frustration over dealings with health insurance companies.”

Have you, too, been mesmerized by this news? If so, why?

In the Dec. 10 article “Reaction to C.E.O. Killing Exposes Frustrations With Health System,” Dionne Searcey and Sarah Kliff report:

On social media, some people have cheered for the gunman and expressed little remorse over the death of Mr. Thompson, 50, a father of two boys from Maple Grove, Minn., with some painting him as the villain in a national health care crisis.

And now that the identity of the suspect, Luigi Mangione, 26, has been revealed and more photos of him have emerged, he is being defended or even applauded in some circles.

That adulation reflects public anger over health care, said Nsikan Akpan, managing editor for Think Global Health, a publication that explores health issues at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The UHC killing and the social media response stem from people feeling helpless over health coverage and income inequality,” he said. The topic is so often ignored by American public officials, he said, that voters have stopped listing it as a top priority.

“A targeted killing won’t solve those problems, and neither will condoning it,” he added.

The article goes on to discuss the rising cost of medical care, and the anger many feel in the face of huge bureaucracies that make seeing a doctor more difficult:

High deductibles and co-payments are causing nearly two of five working-age adults to delay visiting the doctor and filling prescriptions, according to an August study by the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit, bipartisan health care research foundation. Those who do get care can become burdened by medical or dental debt, something almost one-third of working-age adults report experiencing, the study said.

The piece ends by examining how Mr. Mangione has been glorified:

On social media, some posts are openly rooting for Mr. Mangione, an Ivy League graduate who was valedictorian of his private high school class and who comes from an influential real estate family in the Baltimore area.

Commenters swooned over his looks; “Dave Franco” was trending on the social media platform X on Monday night, with users suggesting the actor play Mr. Mangione in a movie about the murder. “Free Luigi” T-shirts were offered for sale. A crypto coin was named after him and initially soared in value. A post that photoshopped Mr. Mangione into a scene in Tulsa, Okla., on the day of the shooting aimed to give him an alibi.

Students, read the entire article and then tell us:

How did you react to this story? How have your friends, classmates and family members talked about it?
Why do you think this news went viral? As the Opinion columnist Zeynep Tufekci noted, there has been an avalanche of response, and the rage and elation people expressed have crossed communities across the political spectrum. Why do you think this story has inspired such strong emotions from so many?
What has been your experience with the American health care system? Have you known friends or family members to delay medical care because of its cost? Do you share the anger many feel?
Why do you think so many have glorified Mr. Mangione, turning him into a kind of folk hero?
The Times critic Vanessa Friedman writes that Mr. Mangione has been cast in the role of the “social bandit” — one man seeming to take a stand against an unfair system. Do you think people are hungry for a hero that is against huge corporations? Have you ever noticed this character of the “social bandit” in popular culture, whether in movies, on TV, in books or in songs? If so, where?
Ms. Friedman also writes about the role of the suspect’s looks. To what extent do you think his popularity is influenced by his appearance? Do you think there has been a “halo effect,” or a tendency for the public to equate attractiveness with innocence, in his case?
In a Times Opinion podcast, the political scientist Robert A. Pape asks, What is the right way to express our anger at the health care system and at big corporations? How would you answer?
Finally, what do you think this news, and our fascination with it, say about America today? What does it reveal about our society and our systems? About inequality and our economy? Politics and power? Social media and popular culture? If you are interested in thinking more about these questions, we recommend a piece from the Opinion section, “Three Columnists Wrestle With the Lionizing of Luigi Mangione.”

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public and may appear in print.

Find more Student Opinion questions here. Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate these prompts into your classroom.

Katherine Schulten has been a Learning Network editor since 2006. Before that, she spent 19 years in New York City public schools as an English teacher, school-newspaper adviser and literacy coach. More about Katherine Schulten

4. The Big Five - 21 December edition by Mick Ryan

Here they are (in addition to other analysis in this piece):

1. Peace Through Strength And That's It

2. Wargaming Nuclear Deterrence

3. China’s Learning from Ukraine

4. Land Operations in the Coming Decade

5. Ukraine’s Combat Medics

The Big Five

The Big Five - 21 December edition

My regular update on conflict and confrontation in Ukraine, the Middle East and the Pacific, accompanied by recommended readings on modern war and future conflict.

https://mickryan.substack.com/p/the-big-five-21-december-edition?utm

Mick Ryan

Dec 21, 2024

Send the gift of Futura Doctrina this holiday season

Send a gift

Toretsk, Ukraine. Source: @DefenceU and the 93rd Brigade

People are dying, and he thinks it’s “interesting”... Dumbass.

President Zelenskyy on Putin, 20 December

The year is almost done, and this will be my final edition of The Big Five for 2024. I will be taking a two week break and resume these updates on 4 January 2025.

This week, I cover Ukraine, including a short strategic assessment of the current status of the war, and the Pacific Theatre. As always, I will finish with my five recommended reads on war and national security issues from the past week.

A quick note on the photo above. It shows the level of devastation that the Russian war against Ukraine has caused. Many Ukrainians are facing a cold, bleak Christmas. As we saw again this week, the Russians care nothing for the lives of the Ukrainian people and continues to target them with advanced weapons. Whether they are manning the frontlines, working in defence factories or supporting a family at home while family members serve in the armed forces, please keep the people of Ukraine in your thoughts and prayers over Christmas.

Ukraine

This week, the Ukrainian president has been on the road again, meeting with European leaders and shoring up support in advance of the inauguration of Donald Trump in January 2025. While this was occuring, the Hungarian leader proposed a new pathway to ‘peace’ to which Zelenskyy responded that “Ukraine does not need intermediaries like Orban. I will not let him in. We must interact with the US directly.”

This week, the Russian president held his annual discussion with journalists to cover a range of issues including the Russian economy and the war in Ukraine. Putin used this opportunity to propose a duel between Russia’s latest weapons and western air defence systems, with Kyiv as a target.

While we have known for sometime what a thoroughly repulsive and morally repugnant individual he is, this is yet another example of his total disregard for Ukraine and its people. Putin also indicated he was willing to meet with President Trump, an offer that will probably be accepted with delight by the incoming administration. You can read the full transcript of Putin’s “Results of the Year” here.

This week saw the first visit to Ukraine of an Australian foreign minister since the beginning of the war. During her visit, Minister Penny Wong announced a contribution to the reconstruction fund for Ukraine as well as the reopening of the Australian embassy in Kyiv (finally).

Killing Kirillov. This week, the Ukrainians killed another Russian general, this time in Moscow. On 17 December, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, the head of the Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection Troops of the Russian Armed Forces, was killed by an exploding e-scooter. That will be a first for a general’s headstone.

Unfortunately, Keith Kellogg, the incoming U.S. administration’s appointed special representative for Ukraine and Russia, criticised the assassination of Russian Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov in Moscow. Kellog was quoted as saying that "when you kill flag officers, general officers, admirals or generals in their hometown, it’s like you kind of extended it [the rules of war]. And I don’t think that’s very smart to do it."

We should be clear here - targeting a senior military officer engaged in active hostilities that kills friendly soldiers is NOT against the laws of war. Generals don't get exemptions. I hope we see criticism of Russian behaviour at some point, rather than victim-blaming Ukraine. Not a great start for the ‘special representative’.

North Koreans in Combat. We had confirmation this week that not only are North Koreans being used in combat in Kursk, but are suffering significant casualties. Pentagon press secretary Major General Pat Ryder this week stated the U.S. believed North Korean soldiers were now "engaged in combat in Kursk alongside Russian forces" and that "they’re taking casualties. Based on the latest understanding that we have as of this afternoon, we’re looking at several hundred casualties suffered casualties, both killed and wounded".

In his evening address of 16 December, the Ukrainian president noted that “the Commander-in-Chief reported on the involvement of North Korean soldiers fighting alongside the Russian army. Preliminary data suggests that the Russians are trying to conceal the losses of the North Koreans. Unfortunately, we are forced to defend against them as well, even though there is not a single reason for North Koreans to die in this war.”

The interesting thing to watch in 2025 is whether this current contingent of 11,000 North Koreans is a one-off deployment, or is just the beginning of a constant flow of North Korean soldiers for the war.

The Frontline. First, the campaign in Kursk. This week, the Ukrainian commander-in-chief has described the Kursk campaign as something that was not discretionary for Ukraine. In an interview with French publication, which was quoted in Ukrainska Pravda, General Syrskyi described how "I had no choice; I had to conduct this operation. I needed to simultaneously disrupt the offensive on Kharkiv, reduce pressure on all fronts and prevent the opening of a new front in Sumy. That’s why I decided to advance where the enemy was vulnerable, with very few troops guarding the border."

Overall, while there has been bitter fighting in the eastern and western areas of the Ukrainian salient in Kursk, there has been minimal territory that has changed hands in the past week. The only advance of note was a Russian gain west of Malaya Loknya, in the north part of the salient.

Kursk: 12 and 20 December 2024. Source: ISW

Further south, in eastern Ukraine, Russia continues to move forward on several axes of advance. Russia has advanced southeast of Kupyansk as part of its continued push along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line. Russia also continues to have its forces advance to, and close up on, the Oskil River. They are clearly wanting to have a presence along multiple parts of the river to generate uncertainty for the Ukrainians about exactly where they intend to conduct river crossing operations. As I wrote recently, deception and surprise are critical elements in these operations.

The Russian also undertook offensive operations northeast of Siversk as well as within Chasiv Yar. They have not made any significant territorial gains in these areas. On the Toretsk axis of advance, the Russians have advanced in the northern and southern sections of Toretsk.

The Russian campaign for Pokrovsk slowly grinds forward with the Russians advancing on the town from the east, south-east and eastern directions. The most dangerous Russian advances are occuring to the south and south-east of the city, as seen in the map below. Should this continue, it may posture the Russians to undertake a ‘single envelopment’ of the city from the south and west.

Status of the Russian advance on Pokrovsk. Source: ISW

The south of Ukraine continues to see a range of Russian operations. The have advanced northwest of Vuhledar as well as in the region of the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border. The Russians have continued their attack along an axis northeast of Robotyne near Mala Tokmachka and north of Robotyne. Russian forces have given up ground however, with Ukrainian forces re-taking ground in western Zaporizhia Oblast.

Finally, in what might be the initial phase of the Russians opening up another significant axis of advance in the south, an attack along the axis of the Antonivsky Bridge was repulsed by the Ukrainians. This Russian attack was most likely a probe, or a reconnaissance in force mission, which will inform the Russians about Ukrainian dispositions, C2, fires, drones and other elements that will permit the planning of subsequent Russian operations.

Of course, it might also be part of deception campaign if the Russians are planning to cross the Dnipro elsewhere. The situation in this part of the front will bear close watching in the coming weeks.

Strategic Trajectory of the War. Finally, a quick assessment of the trajectory of this war.

Russia over the past year has gained, and is exploiting, the strategic momentum. Ever since the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, Russia has sought to implement a new strategy of generating momentum on the ground, and in the minds of western decision makers, regardless of the cost. While this has translated into hundreds of thousands of casualties for the Russians, the Russians have had success in reinforcing their partnerships with China, Iran and North Korea, while also convincing some in the American polity that coercing Ukraine into a ceasefire that disadvantages Ukraine is a good thing.

Western strategic thinking on the war continues to meander and blow in the wind. Neither the U.S. nor NATO has produced an effective strategy for countering the Russian invasion. This is a key challenge Ukraine faces. While Ukraine obviously welcomes statements about support ‘for as long as it takes’ and allocations of financial, military and other forms of aid, the lack of a western strategy means that Ukraine does not really know what the west wants from the war. Does the U.S. or Europe want Ukraine to win? (Neither of the candidates for the US presidency would answer this question before the election). Does it want Russia to lose? (Biden has been clear that his objective is first and foremost to avoid WW3). This lack of a clear strategy is actually a strategy for defeat, as I have written in Foreign Affairs.

Russia has had a clear objective from the start of the war: to subjugate Ukraine. While its methods may have evolved, it has stuck with its current strategy (mobilise Russia, out wait the west, strangle Ukraine) this for almost the entirety of the war and has learned and adapted its ways to achieve this over the past three years.

Therefore, there remains a vast gulf between Russia (which knows what it wants from the war and is willing to spend the people and resources to get it) and the west (which is not really sure what it wants and is not really willing to suffer any significant financial pain – or any human pain at all – to support Ukraine).

While Ukraine has agency, and is doing all the fighting, unless the west moves from its ‘as long as it takes’ slogan to a strategy that embraces a Russian defeat in Ukraine, it is hard to see a war termination that is favourable for Ukraine. But at the same time, it is easy to see a more confident, encouraged and aggressive Russia making Europe pay for its fickleness and lack of commitment in the past three years.

As we approach the inauguration of Donald Trump and his desire to end the war in Ukraine, is worth reflecting on what happened last time Russia signed an agreement for a ceasefire in Ukraine. As Gabrielius Landsbergis writes in his recent newsletter (the full newsletter is linked below in my recommended readings):

Let’s remember how the West reacted after the first attack on Ukraine in 2014. Minsk Agreements were made that forced Ukraine to negotiate, abandon parts of its territory and legitimize the occupation without any security guarantees or additional measures that would increase readiness in case of future attacks. Putin broke the agreements immediately and continued violations until the full-scale attack in 2022. The OSCE mission that was supposed to monitor the ceasefire was thrown out of Russia, and could only document what was happening on the Ukrainian side. So in effect, as is usually the case – the victims were required to be more accountable than the aggressor.

The victims were required to be more accountable than the aggressor.

Unfortunately, history will repreat itself unless we stop believing Russian narratives and back ourselves to defend ourselves. That means a strategy for Ukraine, working actively for Russia to lose in Ukraine, and for Putin to get such a bloody nose that he won’t contemplate further aggression against his neighbours. Such a loss would also send a statement of resolve to others who are thinking about aggression against their neighbours. And, if a Russian loss means the fall of Putin, we should not be afraid of that.

2025 will be a crucial year, not just for the future of Ukraine, but for the security of Europe. It is not too late for our political leaders to set the right course to invest in a Ukrainian victory.

The Pacific

The Coming of PrSM. In the past week, the U.S. Army completed tests of two new missile systems. One was their long range hypersonic weapon. The other, which is likely to be deployed in much greater quantities, and is also going to be deployed by the Australian Army in the Pacific, is the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM). The PrSM is designed as a longer-range replacement for ATACMs, and will be able to be fired from HIMARS launchers.

A PrSM missile launched from a HIMARS vehicle. Source: Breaking Defense

The initial version of PrSM (Increment 1) will have a range of 500 kilometres. But the U.S. Army intends to develop multiple versions of PrSM. An Increment 2 missile is being developed with a multimode seeker, and will be known as the Land-Based Anti-Ship Missile (LBASM) seeker. The PrSM Increment 3 will add warheads with greater lethality. Beyond that, the U.S. Army already has contractors competing for a PrSM Increment 4 with a range of more than 1,000 kilometers, and an Increment 5 for an autonomous launcher for targets beyond 1,000 kilometers.

Incidently, the Institute for the Study of War reported that Guam police apprehended seven Chinese nationals attempting to enter the island illegally during the missile tests. The Chinese nationals arrived by boat from Saipan.

This week, the United States delivered the initial shipment of M1A2T Abrams tanks to Taiwan. The Taiwanese received 38 out of a total of 108 tanks ordered five years ago. The remainder are due to be delivered over the next year or so, which is a very slow delivery schedule.

There are some in the U.S. national security community who don’t believe Taiwan needs tanks. This is ill-informed. Last time I checked, there is a lot of land in Taiwan, and the best way to traverse land is in vehicles that lay their own road (tracks). Also, recent reports from Ukraine indicate that Ukrainians love their M1 tanks, and they have very good crew protection from drones. And, of course, nothing kills an enemy tank like a friendly tank - and China’s Marine Brigades and its PLA combined arms amphibious brigades have large amounts of armour that they intend to use in the first wave of any amphibious lodgement.

Finally this week, two developments in the south Pacific are worth noting.

First, after a large earthquake in Vanuatu, the Australian military has undertaken a deployment of aid to assist local authorities and citizens in the recovery efforts. At the same time, Australian military aircraft have been conducting evacuation of Australian citizens.

Second, this week Australia signed a security agreement with the Solomon Islands. Australia will spend $190 million on the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force to set up a new police training centre in the capital city of Honiara. While this undoubtedly will assist the people of the Solomons, it is also part of a larger effort to stop China expanding its security presence in the nation.

*****

Since my previous Big Five post, I published my 2024 reading list, which you can review, and download as a single A4 page, at this link. I also provided an update on the changes in store for Futura Doctrina over the coming months.

I also published a piece with the Lowy Institute that examined some of the lessons that Taiwan is learning from the war in Ukraine, and how those insights are changing national defence policy. You can read that article here.

I also had published a study, which was co-authoured with the awesome Clint Hinote, that examines the military operating environment out to 2030. This was part of a series of papers on military reform published by the Washington DC-based Special Competitive Studies Project. You can read our paper, and the full set of studies, at this link.

A quick reminder that paid subscribers now receive a commentary from me on my War Shorts podcast each week that covers the contents of the Big Five as well as a deep dive on a special topic. I am also offering a discount on annual subscriptions from now until 26 December 2024. Whether you are upgrading from a free subscription or continuing an existing paid annunal subscription, you will be able to recieve a 20% discount. You can access the discount here.

Finally, if you are able to, please consider donating to one of the many excellent charities and crowd funders that support the defence of Ukraine.

An important cause I support is raising funds for combat medics in Ukraine like Rebecca (Beka) Maciorowski and her team of medics in the Ukrainian 53rd Brigade. A Christmas fund raiser is ongoing to provide basic medical consumables for the combat medics of this brigade. You can see all the details on how to help at this link and follow Beka at Twitter/X and on Bluesky.

I also help the Australian Federation of Ukrainian Organisations (AFUO) wherever I can. They are a terrific organisation that unites and supports Ukrainians in Australia, whether they have lived here for generations or are new arrivals because of the war. They have several appeals which accept donations to support the people of Ukraine at this link. And you can get a feel for the kind of support they provide from this recent story about another load of medical supplies dispatched by the AFUO.

*****

So, to the recommended readings…

This week, there is a interesting report on wargaming a nuclear confrontation with China as part of a war over Taiwan, as well as a good piece on China’s learning from its observations of the war in Ukraine. There also the most recent U.S. Army assessment of its operational environment over the coming decade, and an excellent piece written by the former Lithuanian foreign minister.

I have also included a documentary in my Big Five for the first time. Regular readers will understand my great admiration for combat medics, and therefore I have included an excellent new documentary produced by the Kyiv Independent about Ukraine’s battlefield medical personnel, and how the save the lives of Ukrainian soldiers every day.

As always, if you only have time to read one article, the first one is my pick of the week.

Happy reading!

1. Peace Through Strength And That's It

My first recommended read this week (hat tip to Ben Tallis) is from Gabrielius Landsbergis, who served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania from December 2020 until November 2024. In this newsletter, he reflects on how we have arrived at this current moment, and what can be done to redress Russian aggression against Ukraine and the rest of Europe. As he notes, “we have to be the ones rejecting Putins' reality, pushing back against it, never allowing complacency to set in.” You can read the full newsletter here.

2. Wargaming Nuclear Deterrence

Recently, a team from the Center for Strategic and International Studies conducted a wargame to explore the nuclear dynamics in a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Key issues included the sources of the greatest pressure for using nuclear weapons, and what would happen if nuclear weapons were used. The authors found that “the greatest pressure for nuclear use came when China teams reached a crisis: their invasion

of Taiwan was in danger of a defeat that might threaten Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule.” You can read the full study here.

3. China’s Learning from Ukraine

China has actively studied foreign war, since the Falkands conflict in the early 1980s, the glean insights on modern war and to understand how western military institutions think and fight. Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, it has done the same and has analysed lessons for its own use, from drones to artillery, from leadership to strategy. In this piece, Peter Singer explores just a few of the lessons the Chinese are drawing from the war in Ukraine. You can read the article at this link.

4. Land Operations in the Coming Decade

The U.S. Army has recently published its updated assessment of the operating environment for the period between now and 2034. These assessments are important becuase they guide procurement of new systems, divestment in obsolete weapons and guide training and education across the institution. The latest report describes 12 key conditions that will have the greatest influence on land operations over the next decade, and these are explored in detail in the report. The report is available at this link.

5. Ukraine’s Combat Medics

I know this isn’t a book, report or article, but it is an important documentary from the team at the Kyiv Independent on Ukrainian combat medics. Called "Can You Hear Me? The Invisible Battles of Ukrainian Military Medics," it is an exploration of Ukrainian military medics in the Ukrainian armed forces from the frontlines to their health retreats in Sweden. You can watch this superb documentary here.

5. The Father of Chinese Authoritarianism Has a Message for America

Excerpts:

Thiel and Xiao are vastly different thinkers, but this only makes their commonalities more striking. In believing that democracy was either premature or past its prime, they turned to the strongman as an antidote. “The problem with Xiao,” Joseph Fewsmith, a professor of Chinese politics at Boston University, told me, “is that he tackles the question of how countries get from autocracy to democracy, but he never explored how not to get stuck. Which is what happened.” When I asked Xiao what a democracy in China might look like, he said that he hadn’t really thought about it. The proponent of a so-called “soft landing” for democracy did not, ultimately, spend much time designing a parachute.

For most of his life, Xiao has claimed that the central danger to Chinese society was not the dictator but his liberal opponents. Whether Xiao was right we will never know. We cannot peer into the universe where Liu and his reformers won, where they are alive and well, rather than silenced or dead. Ours is the world of strongmen, where decisions increasingly turn on the whims of a vanishing few. In China, the risk of Xiao’s theory has come to pass—the strongman changed tack. At his trial for “subversion of state power,” in 2009, Liu Xiaobo prepared a statement of warning to his political opponents. It remains just as relevant today as it was then. “An enemy mentality will poison the spirit of a nation,” Liu wrote. It will “destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity, and hinder a country’s advance toward freedom and democracy.”

The Weekend Essay

The Father of Chinese Authoritarianism Has a Message for America

Xiao Gongqin thought that, in moments of flux, a strongman could build a bridge to democracy. Now he’s not so sure.

By Chang Che

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/the-father-of-chinese-authoritarianism-has-a-message-for-america?utm

December 21, 2024

The New Yorker · by Chang Che · December 21, 2024

The Weekend Essay

Xiao Gongqin thought that, in moments of flux, a strongman could build a bridge to democracy. Now he’s not so sure.

December 21, 2024

A large mural depicting current and former Chinese leaders: clockwise from top, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Hu Jintao, Xi Jinping, and Jiang Zemin.Photograph by Mark Schiefelbein / AP

When Russian and Chinese élites talk about history, they often mean “History”—the grand Hegelian march toward progress. Since the end of the Cold War, the East has lived with the undignified thesis, popularized by Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?,” that democracy had defeated the authoritarian alternatives of the twentieth century. That idea has not aged well. According to a European survey of more than two hundred countries, 2022 was the first time in two decades that closed autocracies outnumbered liberal democracies in the world. Americans have become unreliable underwriters of the international order. Russia’s Vladimir Putin has incited Europe’s largest conflict since the Second World War and China’s Xi Jinping is remaking global institutions in his own image, bereft of democratic values. When Xi visited the Kremlin in March, 2023, a little over a year after Russia invaded Ukraine, he told Putin that the world was changing in ways “we haven’t seen in a hundred years.” “Let’s drive those changes together,” he said. Putin, hands outstretched, nodded. “I agree.”

Donald Trump’s victory this November turned what some dismissed as an electoral fluke, in 2016, into an enduring political reality. “We have won,” Aleksandr Dugin, the Russian ideologue known to some as “Putin’s philosopher,” proclaimed on X. “Globalists have lost their final combat. The future is finally open. I am really happy.” Ren Yi, a blogger and grandson of a former Chinese Communist leader, wrote that Trump’s win, along with his chumminess with Elon Musk, has created something of a “techno-authoritarian-conservative” alliance that resembled the authoritarian cultures of East Asia. “The ‘beacon’ of the free world, the United States, will lead various countries into illiberal democracy,” Ren predicted. “There is no end to history, only the end of the Fukuyama-ists.”

The morning after the U.S. election, I got a message from a seventy-eight-year-old historian in Shanghai named Xiao Gongqin. “I have predicted on several private occasions that Trump would win,” he wrote. Trump, he reasoned, was a necessary corrective against a “woke left” that “had truly gone overboard in recent years.” This level of antipathy toward American progressives is not uncommon among Chinese liberals, who, since 2016, have flocked toward Trump, in part to repudiate a Democratic Party whose emphasis on political correctness—real or imagined—reminds them of China’s past disasters in socialist governance. But Xiao is not a liberal, and his well-known anti-democratic influence on Chinese politics made him an instructive voice on America’s current predicament.

Xiao is the architect of a theory of strongman politics known as “neo-authoritarianism.” In the nineteen-eighties, reformers with varying predilections for democracy and capitalism consolidated power in Communist states. Mikhail Gorbachev restructured the Soviet Union’s planned economy and loosened censorship. In China, Deng Xiaoping ushered in an era known as “reform and opening up,” though the reforms went only so far; he also evinced a limited tolerance for dissent, believing full democracy untenable. In this, he was supported by a group of Chinese thinkers led by Xiao and a prodigious Shanghai academic named Wang Huning. The word “authoritarian” is a rote pejorative in the West, synonymous with tyranny, but in the China of the late twentieth century Xiao and his allies managed to reframe it as a rational, pragmatic, East Asian-specific strategy for modernization. Drawing on a range of sources—Chinese history; Samuel Huntington’s theory of “modernizing authoritarianism”; the Asian “dragons” of Singapore and South Korea, which had grown rapidly under authoritarian rulers—these intellectuals pushed, and supplied the moral ballast, for China to postpone the end of history.

Wang entered government in 1995 and shot through its ranks. He is now one of Xi Jinping’s closest advisers, the preëminent craftsman of Xi’s authoritarian ideology. Xiao, who coined the term “neo-authoritarianism” at a symposium in 1988, continued his advocacy as a professor in Shanghai, until he retired a decade ago. His argument that democracy was a “rootless politics,” alien to Chinese culture, remains part of a dominant strain of the country’s thought. Whether Xiao had influenced the Party’s direction or merely justified it is hard to say. But, in 1988, Deng was briefed on “neo-authoritarianism” by another Chinese leader, who described it as a system where a “political strongman stabilizes the situation and develops the economy.” Deng reportedly responded, “That is exactly what I stand for”; his only qualm was that it could use a rebrand. Later, as China’s economy took off, the world would accept more diplomatic names—“state capitalism” or, more vaguely, “the China model.”

As a writer covering Chinese culture and politics, I’ve watched with a sense of foreboding as America has begun to manifest the same authoritarian compulsions that have long dominated Chinese life. There is a cosmic irony in the way that the twenty-first century has played out: the West, hoping its adversaries would become more like it, has inextricably become more like them. Slowly, ideas that Xiao and his allies had propagated decades ago—the stabilizing force of the strongman and a reverence for cultural traditions—seem to have arrived in the control center of the world’s most powerful liberal democracy.

After Trump’s recent victory, I decided to pay Xiao a visit. I wanted to understand the scholar who had helped salvage the strongman from the dustbin of history, and to know what he made of the figure’s present, and likely future, proliferation. What I found, to my surprise, was a man quietly wrestling with the consequences of his ideas. Xiao has deeply conservative instincts—he counts Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott among his influences—but he was, and is, an incrementalist who dreams of China becoming a “constitutional democracy.” His was a theory of enlightened rule, wherein a dictatorship would vanquish the “radicals,” steward an economic miracle, and then, ideally, relinquish power to the people. He had ready-made examples in places such as Taiwan, whose leader Chiang Ching-Kuo dismantled his own autocracy before his death, in 1988. Xiao has not disavowed authoritarianism, and he even seemed to support America’s New Right. But as the immediate prospects for democracy have all but vanished from China, his politics have shifted from reaction to reflection. Authoritarianism, Xiao told me, “has its own problems.”

When Xi Jinping came to power, in 2012, he used his newfound authority to launch an anti-corruption drive, which Xiao endorsed. Since then, though, Xi has abolished Presidential term limits, decimated civil society, and intensified clampdowns on free expression. As a mainland Chinese scholar, Xiao was careful not to betray his views about the regime. He instead spoke to what he now sees as an unsolvable “dilemma” in his theory. A democrat risks welcoming dangerous ideas into a culture—ideas that, legitimate or not, could hasten a nation’s demise. Xiao turned to authoritarianism partly because he believed that China was careening in that direction. And yet “a neo-authoritarian leader must be wise,” Xiao told me, with a hint of exasperation. “And he may not be.” Once you pin your hopes on a justice-delivering strongman, in other words, he may take the righteous path, or he may not. The only certainty is that he has control.

On an overcast Monday evening, I arrived at a low-rise apartment tower in Shanghai, where Xiao lives with his wife. He is a sprightly man, with salt-and-pepper hair and wispy bangs that he brushes to one side. Every day, for twenty years, he has kept to an intense exercise routine—a hundred and fifty squats and more than three hundred volleys of a squash or tennis ball outside. During that time, he has been hard at work on a hefty three-volume history of China from antiquity to Deng’s “reform and opening up.” (He hopes to complete it by 2030.) Xiao has an obsession with classical music. He often leads guests into a spartan living room, where he shows off an oversized speaker system on which he spent tens of thousands of dollars. (“My entire life savings,” he told me.) On my visit, we listened to the German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter’s rendition of the “Carmen Fantasy,” at a volume suited to the hard of hearing.

In the days after the U.S. election, Xiao wrote an essay on his blog in which he opined about the result’s geopolitical ramifications. He feared that Trump’s isolationist bluster would lead some Chinese to underestimate U.S. commitments to Taiwan, raising the “probability of direct conflict between the U.S. and China.” During our meeting, however, he also expounded on how the countries were similar. China’s neo-authoritarianism in the eighties, he told me, shared a common enemy with today’s Republican Party: the “romanticism” espoused by the “radical liberals.”

Xiao used the term romanticism to describe the belief, inspired by the Enlightenment, that humanity can design ideal societies through reason. He criticized this view for disregarding history and experience—or, to riff on an old adage, for “making the perfect the enemy of the feasible.” Xiao, who was born in 1946 and grew up under Maoism, witnessed the worst excesses of this kind of armchair statecraft. When Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, in 1966, Xiao had recently graduated high school and was working in a factory. He hadn’t been able to enter university, likely for harboring “bourgeois” sympathies—including his passion for Western philosophy—and he allied himself with the Red Guards as a leader of a “rebel worker faction” at his machinery plant. But, as the revolution wore on, he himself was denounced as a “revisionist,” and he spent the next several years consigned to gruelling work at the factory.

Shortly after Mao died, in 1976, the reckoning began. Crowds gathered around a Democracy Wall near Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to post demands for freedom and accountability. Intellectuals called for a “New Enlightenment,” and an iconoclastic 1988 documentary, “River Elegy,” compared Chinese civilization to a muddied Yellow River that was in need of a “good scrubbing.” In the frenzy to repudiate the past, Xiao saw history repeating itself. The Cultural Revolution had cemented his faith in a liberal modernity, but it also, paradoxically, instilled a visceral fear of that modernity’s real-life accelerants. In the spirit of William F. Buckley, Jr., the architect of modern American conservatism, Xiao stood “athwart history yelling Stop.”

The seeds of “neo-authoritarianism” came to Xiao around 1983, when he was researching republican China, the country’s first major attempt at democracy. The experiment followed the overthrow of China’s last imperial dynasty, in 1911, and was seen by many of Xiao’s coevals as a fount of inspiration. But what Xiao found was complete and utter chaos. “The National Assembly couldn’t do anything except mess things up,” Xiao told me. “The parties would just go at each other with total disregard for the nation’s interests.” China, Xiao concluded, lacked the “software system” for democracy: a civil society, a rule of law, a culture of political bargaining and compromise. “I do not mean to say that I am fundamentally opposed to Western democracy,” Xiao told me. “I personally feel very envious of the United States and the West.” But, he went on, moving the system over is implausible because China “lacks so many of the conditions.” What China needed was something like a final emperor, the breaker of the despotic chain who would summon modernity by fiat. Xiao reverse-engineered democracy back to the strongman: “In order to have democracy, there must be civil society,” he told me. A civil society requires economic prosperity; economic prosperity requires political stability; and political stability “requires a strongman.”

In 1988, Xiao introduced his theory at an academic symposium, and “neo-authoritarianism” officially entered the public discourse. The idea was reviled by liberal intellectuals, who accused Xiao of rationalizing the status quo—or, worse, tilting China back toward the system that it had just escaped. But his theory seemed to mirror the temperament of Deng, who, for all his reformist tendencies, was a ruthless apparatchik. Throughout his reign, the man hailed as a pragmatic liberalizer jailed Democracy Wall activists and denounced unwelcome foreign ideas as “spiritual pollution.” In the spring of 1989, students gathered in Tiananmen Square to protest for greater political freedoms. Intellectuals led by the literary critic Liu Xiaobo joined a hunger strike in solidarity. Deng imposed martial law and approved the final order to clear the square.

A protester and soldiers during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Photograph by David Turnley / Getty

Xiao told me that Liu and the demonstrators held “considerable responsibility” for the carnage on June 4th that year. The hunger strikers, it seemed, had contracted the same romantic virus that plagued the turn-of-century reformers, the Red Guards, and Gorbachev. “Neo-authoritarianism’s No. 1 enemy,” Xiao told me, “is the radical liberals.” Only once they were “marginalized,” he continued, could Chinese society stabilize and experiment with political freedoms. (Liu Xiaobo died of untreated liver cancer in 2017, after spending nearly a decade in prison.)

If reformers like Liu had, in Xiao’s view, pushed China beyond its immediate capacities, American progressives were now doing the same to the United States. For Xiao, the Democratic Party, élite universities, and Western corporate boards were the new epicenters of romanticism. Open borders ignored the real difficulties of cultural assimilation—it was, as he put it, like “mixing Type B blood with a Type A body.” Transgender identity was just pseudoscience: “The belief that everyone can decide their gender—it disregards human experience,” Xiao told me. (Xiao did not seem to be familiar with “radicalism” on the American right, from white nationalism to QAnon.) The implication was clear: in 1989, the man who repelled the radicals was Deng Xiaoping. In 2024, it was Donald Trump.

Perhaps one reason why authoritarianism has returned to America is that the country’s fundamental political questions are beginning to resemble those of the East. For most of American history, politics revolved around how to limit government. But, in the Communist world, the question was often about how to rebuild it—and save it from bad actors. The stakes felt higher. There are many probable causes of our eastward drift: the failures of globalization, the betrayals of technological progress, cultural anomie, the provocateurs who profit from the sense that the world is about to burn. Whatever the origin, America’s inner conflict now feels comparable to the pivotal decade when Xiao and his liberal adversaries fought over China’s future.

Following what many Americans considered the most consequential election of a lifetime, Elon Musk has vowed to “delete” a bloated government. Trump promises to eradicate an army of deep-state conspirators, whom he calls “the enemy within.” Democratic norms and the rule of law are mere windshield ornaments on the road to American redemption. In its emphasis on results, this approach is familiar to Chinese authoritarians. “The people didn’t want romanticism, they wanted performance,” Xiao told me when I asked him why he thought Trump had won. The Democrats didn’t perform, he added: they didn’t secure the border, and they didn’t improve the economy.

For all of Xiao’s attention to the psyche of “radical liberals,” I was most struck by his own. In the Liu Xiaobos of the eighties, Xiao had glimpsed a romanticism redolent of the Red Guards. In this light, an advocate for peaceful democratic change, who kept vigil in Tiananmen Square to protect students from oncoming tanks, had been similar to violent revolutionaries. Xiao, of course, had been a revolutionary himself—and who better to recognize a radical than a recovering radical? The current generation of Communist Party leaders is not so different in their perspective. “The Politburo is a Red Guard Politburo,” Geremie Barmé, a prominent Australian sinologist, told me. China, he continued, “lives with a completely unresolved, profound historical trauma . . . and is now led by people who are all the product of trauma. All of this is why it is so repressive.”

One is not born but becomes an authoritarian. Carl Schmitt, the twentieth century’s giant of illiberal thought, drew his theories from his personal experience living in the Weimar Republic. Xiao was inspired by Yan Fu, the reformist intellectual and translator of Adam Smith who, after living through China’s own republican experiment, decided that his people were “not capable of self-government.” And, in the U.S., one finds examples like Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who declared, in a 2009 essay, that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel traced his anti-democratic conversion to earlier defeats: his “trench warfare” against progressive students in college; the post-financial-crisis marginalization of libertarian dogma. Over the years, Thiel’s shift toward the authoritarian right has coincided with the growing acceptance of his ideas in the mainstream. He is now one of the biggest funders of the conservative nationalist movement, a mentor to Vice-President-elect J. D. Vance, and a supporter of “neo-reactionary” figures like Curtis Yarvin, who admires the state-capitalist societies of Singapore and Deng Xiaoping’s China.

Thiel and Xiao are vastly different thinkers, but this only makes their commonalities more striking. In believing that democracy was either premature or past its prime, they turned to the strongman as an antidote. “The problem with Xiao,” Joseph Fewsmith, a professor of Chinese politics at Boston University, told me, “is that he tackles the question of how countries get from autocracy to democracy, but he never explored how not to get stuck. Which is what happened.” When I asked Xiao what a democracy in China might look like, he said that he hadn’t really thought about it. The proponent of a so-called “soft landing” for democracy did not, ultimately, spend much time designing a parachute.

For most of his life, Xiao has claimed that the central danger to Chinese society was not the dictator but his liberal opponents. Whether Xiao was right we will never know. We cannot peer into the universe where Liu and his reformers won, where they are alive and well, rather than silenced or dead. Ours is the world of strongmen, where decisions increasingly turn on the whims of a vanishing few. In China, the risk of Xiao’s theory has come to pass—the strongman changed tack. At his trial for “subversion of state power,” in 2009, Liu Xiaobo prepared a statement of warning to his political opponents. It remains just as relevant today as it was then. “An enemy mentality will poison the spirit of a nation,” Liu wrote. It will “destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity, and hinder a country’s advance toward freedom and democracy.”

The New Yorker · by Chang Che · December 21, 2024

6. STRATEGY CENTRAL Proudly Presents The Must-Read Book Recommendations for 2024!

21 minutes ago6 min read

STRATEGY CENTRAL Proudly Presents

The Must-Read Book Recommendations for 2024!

https://www.strategycentral.io/post/strategy-central-proudly-presents

By the Editorial Board – December 20, 2024

Introduction

In an era marked by rapid political shifts and technological advancements, grasping the complex interplay between diplomacy, information, military strategy, and economics (DIME) is essential. This knowledge is invaluable for anyone seeking to understand the forces that drive national and military strategies. The books from each DIME category offer critical insights into the elements that shape global power dynamics and security, making one or a selection from each a vital source for navigating today’s international landscape.

From the inner workings of autocratic regimes to the evolution of warfare in the digital age, and from the economic undercurrents driving global policy to the tools of disinformation shaping public perception, these books provide a well-rounded view of the challenges and opportunities of our time.

Whether you're a policymaker, military professional, or an informed citizen, reading one book from each category will broaden your understanding of the interconnected forces defining today's world. Take the time to explore these perspectives—you'll gain invaluable knowledge about the factors shaping both national and global strategies.

THE 2024 LIST

DIPLOMATIC

"Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World" by Anne Applebaum

Explores the sophisticated networks of autocracies and authoritarian regimes, highlighting their hostility toward the democratic world and the global challenges they pose.

"To Run the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power" by Sergei Radchenko - An insider's account of the National Security Council's role in shaping U.S. foreign policy, highlighting key decisions and their global impact.

"The Achilles Trap: America’s Middle East Quagmires from Iraq to Afghanistan" by Steve Coll - An analysis of U.S. interventions in the Middle East, exploring the challenges and unintended consequences of American foreign policy in the region.

“New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West “ by David E. Sanger Sanger provides an insightful account of U.S. foreign policy under the Biden administration. It focuses on major events such as Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, escalating U.S.-China tensions, and the conclusion of the Afghanistan war.

“Elements of Deterrence: Strategy, Technology, and Complexity in Global Politics” By Gartzke, Erik; Lindsay, Jon R. Gartzke and Lindsay present theoretical and empirical findings from a decade-long research endeavor on ''cross-domain deterrence'' sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense Minerva Initiative and building on previous research.

“Planning for Protraction: A Historically Informed Approach to Great-power War and Sino-US Competition:” Iskander Rehman’s Adelphi book analyses protracted great-power war throughout history to distill the key determinants of strategic performance. He applies these insights to a possible conflict between China and the United States, which, although it would contain unprecedented elements, would assume a more attritional character than many observers believe.

INFORMATION

"The Weaponization of Everything" by Mark Galeotti

Galeotti examines how modern conflict has evolved beyond traditional warfare, with disinformation and hybrid tactics becoming dominant tools for state and non-state actors.

"The Constitution of Knowledge" by Jonathan Rauch

Rauch discusses the critical role of truth in democratic societies and how misinformation and disinformation threaten the foundations of knowledge.

"The Coming Wave" by Mustafa Suleyman

A thought-provoking exploration of the rapid technological advancements and their role in shaping global power dynamics and influence.

"Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War" by Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff An exploration of the collaboration between the U.S. Department of Defense and Silicon Valley in developing advanced military technologies.

“Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks” By Yuval Noah Harari In this book, Harari looks through the long lens of human history and67 considers how the flow of information has made and unmade our world, and provides an essential background to understanding the threats and promises of today’s AI revolution.

MILITARY

"The Melting Point – High Command and War in the 21st Century" by General Kenneth F. McKenzie Analyzes the complexities of high-level military decision-making and strategy in the modern era. (Our “must read” book for 2024)

"Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine" by David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts A comprehensive analysis of modern warfare's transformation, examining conflicts from the end of World War II to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

"Four Battlegrounds" by Paul Scharre

Explores the competition for military superiority in areas like artificial intelligence, robotics, and cyber warfare.

"The Strategists: Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hitler in World War II" by Phillips Payson O'Brien An examination of the strategic decisions made by key World War II leaders and their impact on the war's outcome.

ECONOMIC

"Underground Empire" by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman

Explores America's hidden power of economic domination through its control over global information networks.

"Chip War" by Chris Miller

Details the importance of semiconductors in global commerce, geopolitics, and everyday life. (Our runner up “must read”)

"Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World" by Oliver Bullough Bullough exposes how the ultra-rich, corrupt officials, and kleptocrats hide their fortunes through offshore banking, shell companies, and legal loopholes, investigating the devastating effects on democracies and economies.

"Offshore: Tax Havens and the Secret World of Global Capital" by James S. Henry Provides an in-depth exploration of the shadowy offshore financial system, its impact on global inequality, and the mechanisms enabling trillions of dollars to remain hidden.

EDITORS CHOICE

"The Melting Point – High Command and War in the 21st Century"

by General Kenneth F. McKenzie

General Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr.’s book offers an unparalleled and deeply candid account of the political and military decision-making process during the turbulent years of 2020 and 2021 as the United States grappled with the drawdown and ultimate withdrawal from Afghanistan. As a former Combatant Commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), McKenzie provides readers with a rare inside view, shedding light on the complexities, missteps, and hard truths behind one of the most controversial periods in recent American military history.

McKenzie's writing is both accessible and insightful, revealing his dual talents as a gifted storyteller and a dedicated professional. Above all, he emerges as a consummate strategist, offering a clear and concise definition of the craft: “...the ability to understand what is desired against what can be done to achieve that end, and an appreciation for the costs of pursuing that goal or choosing not to.” This simple yet profound description underpins his analysis of the decisions made by military and political leaders, including the constraints imposed by competing priorities and the high-stakes risks of disengagement.

The book does not shy away from detailing the challenges of executing strategy in a politically charged environment, nor does it attempt to sugarcoat the botched withdrawal that culminated in chaos at the Kabul airport. McKenzie’s reflections are unflinchingly honest, underscoring the human cost of misaligned strategies, tactical missteps, and constrained resources. His ability to balance personal experiences, operational details, and strategic-level insights makes this work a critical resource for anyone seeking to understand the intersection of military operations and national policy.

If you pick up this book with a highlighter, prepare for a visual transformation of its pages. McKenzie’s observations are sharp and memorable, his prose packed with insights that demand attention. His book stands as both a historical record and a cautionary tale, urging readers to grapple with the costs of war and the necessity of clarity in strategic objectives.

The runner up selection for “must read” is “Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology” by Chris Miller. This book explords the geopolitical and economic battle over semiconductors, the essential building blocks of modern technology. Miller chronicles the history and development of the chip industry, from its roots in Silicon Valley to its current status as a critical element of national power and global competition. The book delves into how semiconductors underpin everything from smartphones to advanced military systems, highlighting their strategic importance in a world increasingly shaped by technological supremacy.

With gripping narratives, Miller examines the intense rivalry between nations such as the United States and China, as well as the role of industry leaders, including Intel, TSMC, and others, in shaping the semiconductor landscape. By weaving together technology, history, and international relations, “Chip War” offers readers a vivid understanding of why controlling this industry is central to global power and what the consequences might be for nations that fall behind.

7. The Spanish Civil War and George Orwell: A Powerful Transformation of a Once Naive Man

Coincidentally I just read Orwell's Why I Write on my flight back from Seoul this week. I will be drawing some interesting quotes from it.

The subtitle of the book is instructive:

"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

Another interesting book not listed in the bibliography below is Thomas Ricks' "comparative biography:" Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom.

4 hours ago11 min read

The Spanish Civil War and George Orwell: A Powerful Transformation of a Once Naive Man

Orwell’s experiences in Spain offer enduring lessons about the fragility of truth and the insidious appeal of authoritarianism.

https://www.strategycentral.io/post/the-spanish-civil-war-and-george-orwell-a-powerful-transformation-of-a-once-naive-man

STRATEGY CENTRAL

By and For Practitioners

By Monte Erfourth – December 21, 2024

Pablo Picasso's Guernica was inspired by the 1937 bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, carried out by Nazi Germany to support Francisco Franco's forces. The painting serves as a strong anti-war statement, showcasing the violence and suffering endured by innocent civilians, and it symbolizes the horrors of war and the resilience of humanity.

Introduction

George Orwell’s immersion in the Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939) was a transformative episode that shaped his political philosophy and literary trajectory. The chaotic dynamics of the war, particularly the internecine violence among leftist factions and the Stalinist suppression of dissidents, crystallized Orwell’s understanding of totalitarianism. This crucible of propaganda, betrayal, and violence forged his seminal critique of totalitarian regimes and their instruments of control. Orwell's observations and reflections on these methods—violence, and propaganda—are vital to understanding the enduring relevance of his warnings, particularly as these tools resurface in modern populist and authoritarian movements.

Spain: A Cauldron of Factions and Ideologies

The Spanish Civil War erupted in 1936 when General Francisco Franco led a military coup against the democratically elected Second Republic. The war’s dynamics extended beyond the Republican–Nationalist divide; within the Republican camp, ideologically diverse factions vied for supremacy. These groups included the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) and its Catalan counterpart (PSUC), the Trotskyist-leaning Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), and anarchist collectives aligned with the CNT-FAI. While ostensibly united against Franco’s forces, their strategic and ideological schisms often devolved into violent confrontations.

The Communist Party, heavily influenced by Stalin’s Soviet Union, advocated for centralized control and prioritized winning the war over revolutionary goals. This contrasted with the POUM and anarchists, who believed that victory was inseparable from social revolution. The Soviet-backed PCE labeled these groups as "Trotskyist-fascists," accusing them of sabotaging the war effort. As Orwell observed, this internal conflict turned into a “mini-civil war within a civil war,” culminating in the May Days of 1937 when armed clashes erupted in Barcelona, leaving hundreds dead and leading to the suppression of the POUM and anarchists by Stalinist forces.

Propaganda: The Weaponization of Truth

In Spain, Orwell witnessed the systematic distortion of reality through propaganda. The Stalinist factions weaponized media to delegitimize their leftist rivals, disseminating false narratives that painted the POUM as fascist collaborators. Orwell encountered posters with slogans such as “Tear the Mask,” portraying Trotskyists as traitors conspiring with Franco’s forces. He experienced the spread of disinformation firsthand, noting the gap between the events he observed and the fabricated accounts circulated by communist-aligned newspapers.

The propaganda was insidious in its scope and method. Orwell saw newspapers fabricating entire battles or presenting distorted versions of events to align with Stalinist narratives. Reports exaggerated the successes of Stalinist forces while minimizing or erasing the contributions of the POUM and anarchist factions. Orwell noted the deliberate omission of atrocities committed by Stalinist-aligned forces, which were replaced by tales of heroism or exaggerated enemy crimes. This selective storytelling created a narrative where Stalinist forces were the sole defenders of the Republic, sidelining competing factions as disloyal or counterrevolutionary.

One particularly jarring experience for Orwell was the arrest and subsequent vilification of his comrades in the POUM. Accused of collaborating with Franco’s forces—a baseless claim driven by Stalinist propaganda—the POUM’s leaders were tortured and executed, their reputations destroyed in the press. Orwell witnessed firsthand the psychological toll of such fabrications as former allies turned against each other under the weight of disinformation. This realization profoundly shaped Orwell’s understanding of propaganda as not merely a tool of persuasion but as a weapon that could fracture solidarity and rewrite historical truth.

Orwell’s reflections in Homage to Catalonia and later essays emphasize his disillusionment with the capacity of propaganda to overwrite objective truth. He lamented that in Spain, history was being rewritten to suit political agendas: “I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed.” This manipulation of reality laid the groundwork for Orwell’s later works, particularly 1984, where the omnipresent “Big Brother” regime rewrites history to maintain its grip on power. His exposure to these falsehoods in Spain left Orwell deeply skeptical of any narrative that served entrenched political interests.

Violence as a Tool of Suppression

Violence was not merely a byproduct of ideological discord in Spain but a deliberate instrument for consolidating power. Orwell’s experiences underscore the Stalinists’ ruthlessness in eliminating dissent within the Republican ranks. The POUM leader, Andreu Nin, was arrested, tortured, and murdered by Soviet agents, his fate concealed with blatant falsehoods about his alleged collaboration with Franco. Such accusations served as a pretext to justify purges against perceived “Trotskyist” elements within the anti-fascist coalition. Many others, including Orwell’s commander Georges Kopp, were jailed and subjected to brutal interrogations that sought to extract confessions to fabricated charges of espionage or sabotage. Orwell himself narrowly escaped arrest, saved only by his wife’s quick thinking in destroying incriminating documents before their flight from Spain.

Orwell observed how violence was used to eliminate political enemies and instill fear and obedience. Public trials, denunciations, and executions created a climate where dissent was equated with treason, leaving individuals too terrified to question authority. This systemic violence, Orwell realized, was a tool for ensuring ideological conformity and suppressing alternative revolutionary visions. In his later reflections, particularly in Homage to Catalonia and his 1942 essay “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” Orwell articulated his disillusionment with these methods, recognizing them as betrayals of the egalitarian ideals the Spanish Republic ostensibly fought to uphold.

Orwell’s experiences left him deeply skeptical of all totalitarian systems, regardless of their ideological claims. He saw how the Stalinists exploited the language of unity and revolution to mask their authoritarian agenda. “The struggle for power between the Spanish Republican parties is an unhappy, far-off thing which I have no wish to revive at this date,” he wrote, acknowledging the futility of justifying repression as a means to an end. For Orwell, the coercive violence he witnessed was not simply a tragedy of the Spanish Civil War but a warning about the dangers of any political system that prioritizes control over human freedom.

Orwell’s Evolution: From Naivety to Realism

Before Spain, Orwell’s political views were shaped by a vague socialist idealism. His earlier works, such as “The Road to Wigan Pier,” documented the plight of the working class but lacked a sophisticated critique of political systems. Spain changed this. Orwell’s disillusionment with the leftist infighting and Stalinist tactics deepened his commitment to democratic socialism while fostering a lifelong distrust of authoritarianism.

In his essay “Why I Write,” Orwell attributed his political awakening to the Spanish Civil War: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.” His seminal novels Animal Farm and 1984 distilled the lessons of Spain into universal allegories about the corrupting influence of power and the mechanisms by which totalitarian regimes sustain themselves.

In “Homage to Catalonia,” Orwell chronicled the betrayals and brutal tactics of Stalinist factions during the Spanish Civil War, where ideological purity and loyalty to Moscow were prioritized over the broader struggle against fascism. He saw firsthand how Soviet-backed forces used coercion, propaganda, and violence to suppress dissent among their supposed allies, including anarchists and the POUM, the militia Orwell fought alongside. For Orwell, Stalinism was a perversion of socialism, defined by totalitarian control, systematic repression, and the centralization of power at the expense of individual freedoms.

In contrast, Orwell later articulated his vision of democratic socialism as a system rooted in equality, liberty, and collective well-being without sacrificing personal autonomy. In works such as “The Road to Wigan Pier” and “Animal Farm,” Orwell argued that socialism should empower ordinary people, providing economic justice and social protections while safeguarding political freedoms. He believed democratic socialism was far superior because it combined the ideals of social welfare with a commitment to democracy and accountability, avoiding the authoritarian excesses of Stalinism. For Orwell, true socialism was not about centralized control or ideological rigidity but about addressing systemic inequality through cooperative and voluntary efforts.

Orwell argued that this distinction was critical for humanity because it represented the difference between liberation and oppression. Stalinism, in his view, led to a society where individuals were crushed under the weight of the state, their lives dictated by fear and propaganda. Democratic socialism, by contrast, offered a path to genuine progress—one where economic justice could be achieved without eroding human dignity. For Orwell, the failure to distinguish between these two systems risked allowing the abuses of authoritarianism to masquerade as revolutionary progress, ultimately undermining the very ideals socialism sought to achieve.

Propaganda and Violence Beyond the Twentieth Century

While Orwell’s insights were rooted in the mid-twentieth century, his critiqued methods have evolved and intensified in the modern age. Orwell’s warnings about the manipulation of truth and the normalization of state violence find eerie resonance today. In “1984,” Orwell described a world where propaganda shaped reality through slogans like “War is Peace” and “Ignorance is Strength,” while overt repression and the constant threat of violence crushed dissent. The parallels to today’s political climate are striking, as authoritarian regimes and populist leaders exploit advanced technologies to reshape public perception and consolidate power. The tools of modern propaganda—social media platforms, algorithm-driven echo chambers, and deepfake technology—enable a scale and precision of manipulation unimaginable in Orwell’s time.

Orwell might argue that technology has expanded the reach of propaganda and blurred the line between truth and lies in unprecedented ways. In his essay Politics and the English Language, Orwell warned about how language could be corrupted to distort reality and control thought. Today, disinformation campaigns rely on this principle, using emotionally charged, simplified narratives to polarize societies and suppress critical thinking. Platforms designed to maximize engagement amplifies extremist voices, fostering a climate where populist rhetoric dominates, and dissent is silenced through digital harassment, doxxing, or even coordinated cyberattacks. These modern techniques mimic the coercive force Orwell observed in Stalinist Spain, though often with fewer visible costs, making their effects even harder to counteract.

The role of violence, or its implicit threat, remains equally potent. Orwell understood that fear is a powerful tool for compliance, as illustrated in “Animal Farm,” where violence is employed selectively to maintain control. In the modern era, targeted violence—whether through state-sponsored assassinations, paramilitary crackdowns, or the incitement of mob violence—serves as a warning to dissidents, creating a chilling effect that stifles opposition. The marriage of propaganda with the threat of violence is particularly insidious; populist movements often frame their opponents as existential threats, justifying repression in the name of “stability” or “unity.”

Orwell would likely conclude that these methods are even more influential today due to their global reach and the psychological power of pervasive surveillance and online manipulation. The digital age has created what Orwell might call a "permanent revolution of control," where misinformation and intimidation work in tandem to erode democratic norms. As Orwell observed in his time, the ultimate danger lies in the normalization of these tactics, where society becomes desensitized to manipulating truth and using force. In this modern landscape, Orwell’s call to vigilance against authoritarianism and his defense of objective truth remains profoundly relevant.

Similarly, violence as a means of political control persists in subtler forms. State-sponsored repression targeted assassinations, and the militarization of police forces are common features of contemporary authoritarian regimes. The tactics used by the Stalinists in Spain—vilification of dissent, false accusations, and extrajudicial killings—are echoed in the actions of governments from Russia to Myanmar.

A Call to Resistance: Learning Orwell’s Lessons

Orwell’s experiences in Spain offer enduring lessons about the fragility of truth and the insidious appeal of authoritarianism. In an era marked by political polarization and the erosion of democratic norms, his warnings resonate with renewed urgency. As Orwell wrote in 1984, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” Defending this freedom requires vigilance against the forces that seek to distort reality and silence dissent.

Propaganda feeds on the human desire for certainty and belonging, often offering simplified narratives that confirm preexisting biases and reinforce group loyalties. The first step in resisting propaganda is developing the courage to confront uncomfortable truths, even when they contradict cherished beliefs or affiliations. This requires a commitment to intellectual independence and a willingness to question not just others' assumptions but our own. Orwell’s insight that “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four” reminds us that truth exists independently of ideology or emotional comfort. Recognizing this is the foundation of resistance against manipulation.

A prime example of propaganda’s influence is found in identity politics, where loyalty to a group often supersedes a commitment to objective truth. When allegiance to a shared identity or ideology is prioritized over critical thinking, individuals risk being drawn into a distorted worldview where dissent is punished, and questioning is discouraged. In such environments, subjective narratives become more influential than facts, creating a fertile ground for manipulation. The antidote is critical inquiry: choosing a core belief, seeking diverse and credible sources, challenging it, and rigorously testing its validity. This process refines personal understanding and fosters intellectual resilience against propaganda.

Fortunately, in an era of advanced technology, individuals have unprecedented tools to aid their quest for truth. Artificial intelligence can analyze vast amounts of data from credible sources—including peer-reviewed journals, investigative journalism, and historical records—and synthesize reasonably unbiased insights. By leveraging these tools, individuals can overcome their cognitive biases and explore perspectives outside their ideological bubbles. However, this requires discernment; unreliable sources such as blogs, tweets, and unsourced opinion pieces should be avoided. The key is to rely on well-documented evidence while remaining skeptical of conclusions that align too neatly with preconceived notions.

On a societal level, resisting propaganda demands more than individual effort—it requires fostering a culture of critical inquiry and supporting institutions that uphold the integrity of information. Independent journalism, media literacy programs, and educational initiatives that teach critical thinking are essential in combating the seductive appeal of authoritarian narratives. As Orwell’s experiences in Spain demonstrated, the erosion of truth is a precursor to the erosion of freedom. Societies must invest in safeguarding the truth, not merely as an abstract principle, but as a practical defense against manipulation and authoritarianism. The choice is clear: accept the comforting chains of propaganda or embrace the freedom found in a fact-based understanding of the world.

The rise of populist movements and authoritarian leaders underscores the need to confront propaganda’s seductive power. These movements often exploit economic anxieties and cultural fears, framing themselves as defenders of the “common people” while deploying Orwellian tactics to consolidate power. To counter these trends, societies must invest in media literacy, support independent journalism, and foster a culture of critical inquiry.

Conclusion

The Spanish Civil War was a crucible that transformed George Orwell from a political novice into one of the twentieth century’s most incisive critics of totalitarianism. His experiences with Stalinist repression and propaganda illuminated the dark underbelly of ideological puritanism and the corrosive effects of power. Immortalized in his works, these lessons remain profoundly relevant as new forms of propaganda and authoritarianism emerge in the twenty-first century.

Orwell’s writings challenge us to resist simplistic narratives' allure and defend the principles of truth and justice in an increasingly complex world. As he warned, the cost of complacency is not merely political oppression but the erosion of the shared reality that underpins human freedom. The Spanish Civil War may have been a distant conflict, but its lessons are timeless. To heed them is not merely an act of remembrance but a commitment to the ongoing struggle for liberty and truth.

Bibliography

· Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia. London: Secker & Warburg, 1938.

· Orwell, George. “Looking Back on the Spanish War.” The Orwell Foundation. Accessed December 2024. [https://www.orwellfoundation.com](https://www.orwellfoundation.com).

· Preston, Paul. “George Orwell’s Spanish Civil War Memoir Is a Classic, But Is It Bad History?” The Guardian, May 6, 2017.

· Chislett, William. “How Spain’s Civil War Defined George Orwell Politically.” Elcano Royal Institute, June 26, 2023.

· Orwell, George. Why I Write. London: Penguin Books, 1946.

· Orwell, George. 1984. London: Secker & Warburg, 1949.

· Orwell, George. Animal Farm. London: Secker & Warburg, 1945.

8. Ukraine Is Using Millions of Hours of Drone Footage to Train AI for Warfare

Ukraine Is Using Millions of Hours of Drone Footage to Train AI for Warfare

The country's defense ministry has said it is able to spot 12,000 Russian pieces of equipment a week using AI identification tools.

Gizmodo · by Thomas Maxwell · December 20, 2024

Published December 20, 2024 | Comments (6) |

Ukraine is collecting millions of hours of footage to train AI for battlefield purposes. Anton Petrus/Getty

The ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict marks possibly the first truly AI war, with both sides having come to rely on small drones to conduct reconnaissance, identify targets, and even drop lethal bombs over enemy lines. This new type of warfare allows commanders to survey an area from a safe distance and has highlighted the importance of lightweight aerial weapons that can conduct precise strikes instead of much more expensive fighter jets. One drone that costs $15,000 can take down a F-16 that costs tens of millions.

Reuters has a look at how Ukraine has been collecting vast sums of video footage from drones to improve the effectiveness of its drone battalions.

The story includes an interview with Oleksandr Dmitriev, founder of OCHI, a non-profit Ukrainian system that centralizes and analyzes video from over 15,000 drones on the frontlines. Dmitriev told Reuters that the system has collected more than two million hours of battlefield video since 2022. “This is food for the AI: If you want to teach an AI, you give it 2 million hours (of video), it will become something supernatural,” he said.

The OCHI system was originally built to give the military access to drone footage from all nearby crew on one screen, but the group running it realized that the video could be used for training AI. For an AI system to be effective at identifying what it is seeing, it needs to review a lot of footage; Ukraine probably did not have a lot of battlefield footage before 2022. Now, more than six terabytes of data is being added to the system per day, on average.

Ukraine’s defense ministry has said that another system called Avengers, which centralizes footage from drones, has been able to spot 12,000 Russian pieces of equipment a week using AI identification.

It is not just local Ukrainian companies that are building new AI technology for the battlefield. There is big money to be made in the defense industry, and a slew of Silicon Valley players including Anduril and Palantir, as well as Eric Schmidt’s startup White Stork, have begun offering up drone and AI technology to support Ukraine’s fight.

Of course, the biggest concern of skeptics is that these technologies automate a lot of the fighting and make it somewhat abstract; a military could be apt to allow the drone to strike more indiscriminately or commit war crimes when it is not an actual human on the battlefield doing it. Schmidt has emphasized that the drones offered to Ukraine by his company maintain a “human-in-the-loop,” meaning a person is always making the final decision.

In a recent interview, Anduril’s Palmer Luckey was asked about the use of AI in weapons systems. “There is a shadow campaign being waged in the United Nations by many of our adversaries to trick Western countries that fancy themselves morally aligned into not applying AI for weapons or defense,” he said. “What is the moral victory in being forced to use larger bombs with more collateral damage because we are not allowed to use systems that can penetrate past Russian or Chinese jamming systems and strike precisely.”

Jamming systems are able to scramble GPS and telecommunications used to direct precision-guided weapons, but AI-powered drones can operate unmanned and identify targets without an operator giving an order.

Recent reports have suggested that the U.S. has fallen behind adversaries including Russia and China in its ability to remotely disable enemy weapons using jamming technology. Russia has repeatedly disabled precision-guided weapons the U.S. has given Ukraine using more advanced jamming technology than the U.S. has. The U.S. could respond by investing more in evading GPS jamming so that it does not have to use more indiscriminate, automated drones. Or it could try and jam the Russians back.

Luckey pointedly called out critics who say a robot should never decide who lives and who dies. “And my point to them is, where’s the moral high ground in a landmine that can’t tell the difference between a school bus full of kids and a Russian tank,” he asked. It seems unlikely a school bus would be driving through a battlefield unless it was a booby trap, but whatever.

The war has been a slow grind, with both sides making little advance in recent months. Drones have assisted Ukraine, but are clearly not a panacea with both sides having access to them.

Artificial intelligence Ukraine Warfare

Gizmodo · by Thomas Maxwell · December 20, 2024

9. Ukraine: The Inflection Point in the China-Russia Axis

Excerpts:

Concluding Thoughts

The Sino-Russian partnership represents a significant challenge to Western interests while demonstrating both the potential and limitations of authoritarian cooperation. Their ability to sustain and deepen this relationship despite Western pressure suggests the need for new analytical frameworks and policy approaches. However, inherent tensions within their partnership, particularly regarding their relative power and competing regional interests, create potential vulnerabilities that more sophisticated Western policies might exploit. The long-term success of cooperation between China and Russia will likely depend on their ability to manage these internal contradictions while maintaining sufficient unity against external pressure.

The development of this partnership carries profound implications for the future of global order, suggesting the need for continued research into its evolving dynamics and potential trajectories. Policy responses will require careful calibration to address the challenges this partnership presents while avoiding actions that might inadvertently strengthen it further.

Ukraine: The Inflection Point in the China-Russia Axis

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Chinese companies have been remarkably adept in navigating sanctions on Russia.

China-Russia tech cooperation may have significantly advanced their information warfare capabilities.

Given the West’s limited leverage, nuanced approaches are needed to find fissures in China-Russia ties.

usip.org

Thursday, December 19, 2024

/ READ TIME: 10 minutes

By: Niklas Swanström; Andrew Scobell, Ph.D.

Economics as the Backbone

The Russia-China energy dyad has become the backbone of their economic cooperation, reshaping global energy markets. Russia has emerged as China's primary energy supplier, with daily petroleum shipments reaching record levels. This arrangement has proven mutually beneficial with China securing discounted energy resources while Russia maintains critical export revenues despite Western sanctions. The search to develop new pipeline infrastructure, particularly the Power of Siberia 2 project, indicates a strategic commitment to this energy partnership. However, this relationship is unbalanced and favors China, which is now positioned as Russia's primary long-term energy market on favorable terms and plum pricing.

Additonally, the development of alternative financial mechanisms has advanced dramatically since the conflict began. The shift to yuan-ruble settlements is more than just a technical change in trading arrangements; it signals a concrete step toward creating a parallel financial system less vulnerable to Western sanctions. Chinese banks have simultaneously developed sophisticated methods to continue financing trade while avoiding secondary sanctions, creating a tiered system where smaller institutions handle higher-risk transactions and major state banks maintain plausible deniability. However, this financial integration remains constrained — so far — by China's capital controls and the limited international convertibility of the yuan.

The transformation of bilateral trade extends far beyond energy markets. Chinese companies have systematically replaced Western firms in the Russian market, often acquiring assets at significant discounts and establishing dominant positions in previously competitive sectors. This process has accelerated technology transfer, particularly in sectors with dual-use potential. However, this trade relationship is increasingly asymmetric, with Russia becoming more dependent on Chinese imports while China diversifies its export markets. Chinese companies have shown remarkable adaptability in navigating sanctions regimes, often establishing complex networks of intermediaries to maintain trade flows while minimizing exposure to Western penalties.

Diplomatic Coordination

China's diplomatic strategy regarding Ukraine demonstrates multi-level engagement. While maintaining formal neutrality through its peace plan and public statements, China has consistently provided diplomatic cover for Russia in international forums and de facto support of Russia. This approach allows China to position itself as a potential mediator while effectively supporting Russian interests. The careful choreography of high-level meetings between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin reflects this balance, demonstrating partnership while avoiding actions that might trigger Western response. This diplomatic dance has been particularly effective in the Global South, where many countries share China's skepticism of Western-dominated international institutions.

Both countries have worked to develop alternative international institutions and norms, challenging Western concepts of global governance.

The strategic dimension of Sino-Russian cooperation extends beyond immediate conflict-related issues. Both countries have worked to develop alternative international institutions and norms, challenging Western concepts of global governance. This includes strengthening organizations like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS, while promoting alternative development models through initiatives like the Belt and Road. However, this partnership reveals inherent tensions, as China's global ambitions sometimes conflict with Russia's regional priorities, particularly in Central Asia and the Arctic.

Military and Technical Cooperation

The military dimension of Sino-Russian cooperation in Ukraine reveals careful calibration by both parties. While avoiding direct weapons sales publicly, China has expanded exports of dual-use technologies through sophisticated networks of intermediaries. This includes commercial drones later modified for military use, microelectronics and navigation systems. Chinese companies have developed elaborate re-export schemes via third countries to bypass export controls on sensitive technologies. Satellite navigation cooperation has grown increasingly significant, with China's BeiDou system providing Russia alternatives to GPS. This technical cooperation extends to cyber domains, though both countries maintain plausible deniability about such activities.

Sino-Russian information cooperation represents an unprecedented level of coordination in the global information space. This partnership has evolved beyond simple message alignment into a sophisticated, multi-layered system that fundamentally challenges Western information dominance. The integration of traditional media, digital platforms and influence operations has created a powerful alternative information ecosystem that shapes global narratives and public opinion.

State media entities from both nations have developed intricate content-sharing arrangements that transcend simple republishing. Organizations like RT (formerly Russia Today), Sputnik, China Global Television Network (CGTN) and Xinhua operate in a carefully orchestrated manner, creating complementary narratives that reinforce each other while maintaining distinct national characteristics. Chinese media provides economic and technological context to Russian geopolitical positions, while Russian media amplifies Chinese diplomatic stances with historical and cultural perspectives. This coordination extends to joint media projects, shared correspondent networks and synchronized broadcasting schedules, creating a continuous, mutually reinforcing information environment across multiple languages and platforms.

The partnership has developed sophisticated digital ecosystems that reduce dependence on Western platforms while enhancing information control capabilities. Their alternative social media platforms create spaces where approved narratives can circulate without Western content moderation. Chinese expertise in platform development and content management has significantly enhanced Russian capabilities, particularly in the deployment of advanced algorithms that promote approved content while limiting opposing viewpoints regarding the invasion of Ukraine. The joint development of big data and AI applications for monitoring public opinion enables rapid adjustment of messaging strategies through sophisticated sentiment analysis and predictive modeling.

The technological backbone supporting these operations represents a significant advancement in information warfare capabilities. Their content delivery networks resist Western interference while maintaining high reliability across multiple platforms and languages. Chinese expertise in content filtering and user monitoring has enhanced Russian capabilities in narrative management and audience targeting. The partnership continues to innovate in AI applications for content creation and distribution, developing increasingly sophisticated tools for audience engagement and message optimization.

Counter-Western Strategy and Asymmetric Operations

Their approach to countering Western messaging demonstrates significant sophistication. Rapid response capabilities allow quick neutralization of Western narratives, and especially Ukrainian, through pre-emptive deployment of alternative explanations operations. The narrative over Ukraine and the link to the “aggressive” expansion of NATO as a reason of the war in Ukraine is one example. Offensive operations exploit Western social divisions and media vulnerabilities through coordinated amplification and strategic deployment of competing narratives. This asymmetric approach has proven particularly effective in developing nations where Western media dominance was historically unchallenged.

The partnership's information operations have achieved remarkable success in expanding their global influence. Their reach extends increasingly into developing nations, fostering growing skepticism toward Western narratives while building loyal global audiences. The resilience of their messaging strategy, demonstrated by consistent narrative maintenance despite Western counter-efforts, suggests sophisticated understanding of modern information warfare principles. Their success in creating alternative information ecosystems challenges fundamental assumptions about Western media dominance and information control.

The partnership demonstrates sophisticated understanding of narrative construction and audience psychology. Their primary narratives focus on Western decline, the superiority of alternative governance models, historical grievance and victimization, economic development without political liberalization, cultural sovereignty and in the case of Ukraine the pressure from NATO that forced Russia to defend itself. These narratives are carefully calibrated for different audiences, from domestic populations to diaspora communities and Global South audiences. The messaging strategy shows remarkable adaptability, adjusting tone and content while maintaining consistent underlying themes.

The partnership continues to evolve beyond the war in Ukraine, focusing on technological innovation and strategic adaptation. Advanced AI applications for content creation and distribution, enhanced capabilities for audience targeting, and development of new platforms suggest ongoing commitment to information warfare superiority. Their strategic adaptation includes continuous refinement of narrative frameworks and enhancement of counter-Western capabilities, indicating long-term investment in information operations as a key component of their global strategy.

The sophistication and effectiveness of Sino-Russian information operations suggest the need for fundamental reassessment of Western approaches to information warfare and public diplomacy.

The sophistication and effectiveness of Sino-Russian information operations suggest the need for fundamental reassessment of Western approaches to information warfare and public diplomacy. Their success in creating alternative narrative frameworks and information ecosystems represents a significant challenge to Western information dominance and requires new analytical frameworks and response strategies.

Global Implications

The deepening Sino-Russian cooperation forged by the war in Ukraine represents a fundamental challenge to the post-Cold War international order, and the democratic response against this development. Their partnership demonstrates the viability of different models of international cooperation by non-democratic states outside Western frameworks. This has particular resonance in developing nations seeking alternative models. The emergence of this authoritarian axis has accelerated the transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world, though the ultimate shape of this new order remains uncertain. China-Russia cooperation provides a template for other nations seeking to resist Western pressure, potentially leading to the formation of new international alignments and coalitions, based on anti-Western sentiments and lead by Chinas economic strength.

The economic ramifications of the partnership between China and Russia extends far beyond bilateral trade. Their cooperation has accelerated the development of alternative financial systems, challenging dollar dominance and Western control of global financial infrastructure. New payment systems, trade routes and financial instruments are emerging, creating parallel economic structures less vulnerable to Western sanctions. This has particular significance for developing nations seeking to reduce their dependence on Western-dominated financial systems. However, these developments also reveal the limitations of such alternatives, particularly given China's continued deep integration with Western economies.

The security dimension of Sino-Russian cooperation presents both immediate and long-term challenges to Western strategic planning. Their military cooperation, while limited, demonstrates the potential for deeper alignment in response to Western pressure. This has implications for NATO strategy, arms control regimes and regional security arrangements across multiple theaters. The combination of Russian military experience and Chinese technological capabilities creates potential synergies that could significantly impact future military developments. However, their cooperation also reveals inherent limitations, particularly given China's reluctance to risk its broader economic interests for Russian military objectives.

Future Trajectories

The future development of Sino-Russian cooperation will likely be shaped by several key factors. Economic complementarity will continue driving closer integration, though potentially at the cost of increasing Russian dependence on China. Technological cooperation may deepen, particularly in strategic sectors like artificial intelligence and space exploration. That said, potential friction points exist, particularly regarding their respective spheres of influence in Central Asia and the Arctic. The sustainability of their partnership may ultimately depend on their ability to manage these competing interests while maintaining sufficient unity against perceived Western pressure.

The evolution of this partnership necessitates a fundamental reassessment of Western policy approaches. Traditional strategies based on sanctions and diplomatic isolation may become less effective as alternative economic and political structures emerge. This suggests the need for more nuanced approaches that recognize the limitations of Western leverage while identifying potential pressure points within the Sino-Russian relationship. Particular attention should be paid to areas where Chinese and Russian interests diverge, as well as to the concerns of nations caught between these competing power centers.

Concluding Thoughts

The Sino-Russian partnership represents a significant challenge to Western interests while demonstrating both the potential and limitations of authoritarian cooperation. Their ability to sustain and deepen this relationship despite Western pressure suggests the need for new analytical frameworks and policy approaches. However, inherent tensions within their partnership, particularly regarding their relative power and competing regional interests, create potential vulnerabilities that more sophisticated Western policies might exploit. The long-term success of cooperation between China and Russia will likely depend on their ability to manage these internal contradictions while maintaining sufficient unity against external pressure.

The development of this partnership carries profound implications for the future of global order, suggesting the need for continued research into its evolving dynamics and potential trajectories. Policy responses will require careful calibration to address the challenges this partnership presents while avoiding actions that might inadvertently strengthen it further.

Niklas Swanström is the director of the Institute for Security and Development Policy based in Stockholm, Sweden.

PHOTO: Amid the Ukraine war, President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Chinese leader Xi Jinping have led their countries to a more durable strategic alignment in recent years.

The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s).

PUBLICATION TYPE: Analysis

usip.org

10. Trump, Lenin and the world-revolutionary moment

A view from Portugal.

Comment

16 December 2024

Trump, Lenin and the world-revolutionary moment

https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2024/12/trump-lenin-and-the-world-revolutionary-moment

By Bruno Maçães

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

With the second coming of Donald Trump, it may now be prudent to try to understand him. Neither episodic nor properly aberrant, the Trump phenomenon is striking in its clarity. Trump has a theory of American power. When he first put it forward, it was a relatively marginal theory. Now it is seemingly almost uncontested. As the differences between Donald Trump and Joe Biden started to look more contextual than substantive, the former’s victory in November acquired the tinge of inevitability. Like it or not, Trump is what America means today.

Power, in Trump’s mind, must be exercised directly. This marks a drastic change: American power has distinguished itself for its ability to hide behind a complex structure of rules and institutions, a structure many thought only increased its reach. Trade rules, military alliances, political doctrines. The liberal international order, as it was often called, was a tool of power. That has changed. In recent years it has become increasingly difficult for Washington to bring about the outcomes it desires. China’s influence keeps growing. It threatens to dominate the green transition in the way America dominated the electricity revolution. The Taliban returned to Kabul, after the US announced its withdrawal. The Ukraine war appears frozen.

This is where Trump comes in with an obvious response: Americans have to forget about liberal pieties and embrace the open exercise of force, with little concern for legitimacy or normative trappings. Trump won because his adversaries conceded his point. How should we interpret the horror of the war in Gaza if not as the wilful embrace of a form of power that no longer cares much about legitimacy, having replaced it with a sense of civilisational superiority? Biden, after all, has called it outrageous that the International Criminal Court would apply existing international law to Israel. A number of Senators threatened European countries with economic destruction, presumably through sanctions, if they dared to uphold the system of international norms they solemnly committed themselves to.

In this and other examples, Washington opted for its version of might is right. In recent months the State Department has started arguing that Israel is deliberately targeting civilians, but – guess what? – Israel has the right to do that. In this sense, Trump and Gaza are deeply connected events. They signal a momentous change.

As HR McMaster and Gary D Cohn, two Trump advisers, put it in a notable Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2017, Trump embarked on his first term that year carrying a revolutionary new outlook that saw the world not as a “global community” governed by rules and institutions, “but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.” They added: “Rather than deny this elemental nature of international affairs, we embrace it.”

We are in the midst of a revolutionary moment. To understand this, let’s turn from Trump to a distinguished authority on revolutionary moments. Lenin thought a revolutionary situation is triggered by three distinct developments: the rulers become incapable of ruling; the ruled can no longer stand being ruled; and resistance to the rulers is being actively organised. The latter, as seen on the world stage, is what some authors call the new axis of autocracies. Organised efforts to overturn the world order take place when those most under pressure from the hegemonic power sense an opportunity. Two phenomena are at work simultaneously. First, the rulers seem weaker than before. That is certainly the case with American power. It is clear in the case of the Ukraine war, where Washington has refrained from trying to stop Russian energy exports to India or Indonesia, knowing that its own structural power over the world economy has been diminishing over the last two decades. Simultaneously, to the extent that whatever power America still has is now exercised in a direct fashion, expressed through threats and sanctions, that exercise will increasingly be seen as intolerable by their targets. These targets have started to group together in ways that would have looked impossible just some years ago. Russia and Iran have always been geopolitical rivals, and much still separates them, but they have been brought together by our revolutionary moment.

A decline in hegemonic power inevitably creates a sense of threat, to which a natural response is to call for greater ruthlessness in dealing with adversaries. In recent months this is practically all one hears in foreign policy circles in Washington and the main European capitals: we need to be tough, as tough as everyone else. Have we become soft? Do we no longer have any fight left in us? Remarkably, the very traits Westerners have projected upon the rest of the world – a cult of force and lack of concern with legitimate forms and processes – are quickly being re-appropriated by Western democracies themselves. Orientalism is coming home.

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Trump is a master at these games. Already in some of his earliest rallies in 2015 he liked to evoke the example of Singapore to suggest the United States should solve its opioid crisis by introducing the death penalty for drug traffickers. The proposal was invariably met with loud cheers from his supporters. Today he is even more explicit about his theory: America should return to brute power, the instincts that made it great to begin with. Trump was never an isolationist. He wants to act in the world but with the weapons of the arena rather than the habits of that extinct geological epoch, the liberal world order.

Things never work quite the way Trump thinks. When a legitimate power is no longer widely regarded as such, and when it attempts to salvage its position by turning to naked power, its fate is settled. Brute force consumes too many resources and breeds new levels of animosity and hostility. It alienates friends and allies, who tend to feel even more humiliated by the abandonment of the norms and institutions recognising their status. The arena is not where the ruling power wants to be. But Trump has brought America down to the arena. Are you not entertained?

11. Massive explosion near Russia's Arctic naval base sparks theories

Hmmm....

Massive explosion near Russia's Arctic naval base sparks theories

Newsweek · by Maya Mehrara · December 20, 2024

ByNews Reporter

✓ Link copied to clipboard!

What's New

Two massive explosions took place near Russia's Arctic naval base last night and have consequently sparked theories online about what exploded and how as it is unclear, according to the independent Russian news outlet Agentstvo's Telegram post.

Residents of the cities of Murmansk and Safonovo, as well as the town of Severomorsk, in northwestern Russia reported feeling the strength of the explosions. These took place near the main naval base of the Russian Northern Fleet, located in Severomorsk, and two military airfields.

Murmansk

Not warm water port... pic.twitter.com/7v87hk7PX8

— PS01 □ (@PStyle0ne1) December 19, 2024

Newsweek reached out to the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation and the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine for comment via email outside of business hours.

An antisubmarine destroyer arriving at the Severomorsk Naval Base after serving in the Arctic Ocean in 2019. Two explosions near the Russian Arctic naval base took place last night. An antisubmarine destroyer arriving at the Severomorsk Naval Base after serving in the Arctic Ocean in 2019. Two explosions near the Russian Arctic naval base took place last night. Pavel Lvov/Associated Press

Why It Matters

The explosions are significant because, although it is unknown what exploded or where exactly it took place, Russia has key military facilities and assets in the vicinity; the base in Severomorsk is a "hub for Russia's power in the Arctic," according to the news outlet Militarnyi.

If Ukraine struck one of the military facilities and destroyed assets in the explosion, then it could cost Russia both vast amounts of weapons and equipment and money for repairs.

What To Know

The Barents Observer, a Norwegian online news outlet, concluded from the video of the blast that the Severomorsk-1 military airfield was 13 kilometers [8 miles] from the shooting site, which is a base for Russian fighter jets, bombers and a squadron of Ka-27 helicopters. Other notable sites adjacent to the explosions include an open weapons depot 11 kilometers [7 miles] away, and several installations with mobile anti-aircraft missiles and antennas for electronic warfare. Another airfield, Severomorsk-2, that is shut down but currently being restored is also nearby.

Some have also speculated that the explosion of ammunition is what caused the blast to be so large. Military analyst Yan Matveyev spoke to Agentstvo about the explosions and said that the explosions could have occurred either "during the disposal of munitions or in the case of sabotage using mining."

As for what caused the explosion, it is still unknown, although Matveyev did not rule out the use of UAVs. However, he said that the explosion in the video did not match that of what usually takes place when drones are used, "Usually it happens like this: a drone arrives, a fire starts, then the ammunition explodes, but here there was no fire. But if the ammunition was lying on the street, it could have exploded right away."

The town of Severomorsk is 1,900 kilometers [1,180 miles] from the border with Ukraine.

Shortly after the attack on Russia's Arctic naval base took place, Moscow also launched a series of missiles at Ukraine's capital, in which five ballistic missiles and 40 of Russia's UAVs were shot down.

What People Are Saying

Andriy Kovalenko, the head of Ukraine's Center for Countering Disinformation, wrote about the significance of the explosion site on Telegram: "Explosion near the base of the Northern Fleet of the Russian Federation, Murmansk. This base provides the Russian Federation with the ability to control the Arctic sea routes and access to the Arctic Ocean. It supports both surface ships and nuclear submarines.

"Murmansk is home to command centers, ammunition depots, repair docks and fleet control points. Testing, including of the Zircon missiles, also takes place there. The direct distance from Murmansk to Ukraine is approximately 2,000 km [1,243 miles]. The ships of the Northern Fleet are carriers of the Kalibr missiles, which Russia has launched over the territory of Ukraine during the war. The Northern Fleet of the Russian Federation also performs reconnaissance missions and countering NATO forces with an eye on the Arctic."

What Happens Next

Depending on what weapons Ukraine may have used to attack the Arctic naval base, it may escalate the progression of the war, particularly if they are long-range.

Maya Mehrara is a News Reporter at Newsweek based in London, U.K.. Her focus is reporting on international news. She has covered Ukraine, Russia, immigration issues, and the revolution in Iran. Maya joined Newsweek in 2024 from the Londoners and had previously written for MyLondon, the Camden New Journal, BUST Magazine, and Washington Square News. She is a graduate of New York University and obtained her NCTJ at News Associates. Languages: English. You can get in touch with Maya by emailing m.mehrara@newsweek.com.

Maya Mehrara is a News Reporter at Newsweek based in London, U.K.. Her focus is reporting on international news. She ...

Newsweek · by Maya Mehrara · December 20, 2024

12. Is Trump’s Nobel Prize Waiting in Kyiv?

I want him to get the Nobel Peace Prize for supporting the peaceful reunification of Korea. Maybe a twofer.

Conclusion:

It is tempting to view Trump’s efforts as nothing more than a vanity project, but it may also be that they offer the best, or only, hope of silencing the guns, and preventing even worse outcomes.

If that happens, he may well deserve a Nobel Prize.

Is Trump’s Nobel Prize Waiting in Kyiv?

History loves irony, especially in Eastern Europe

Vladislav Davidzon

and

Mark Galeotti

December 19, 2024

Tablet · by Vladislav Davidzon · December 20, 2024

President-elect Donald Trump took the occasion of the restoration of Notre Dame Cathedral to call for a cease-fire in Ukraine. The photographs of the American leader shaking hands with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the French Presidential Palace intimated that he might be ready to forgive conflicts with the wartime president and his publicly recorded resentments with Ukraine, even after Kyiv found itself bizarrely enmeshed in the middle of an American presidential election for a third election cycle in a row. “Zelenskyy and Ukraine would like to make a deal and stop the madness,” Trump thundered on Truth Social.

Ending the war between Russia and Ukraine will constitute a major foreign policy challenge to the incoming administration, the war’s quick resolution having been one of Trump’s core campaign promises. As a result, both Moscow and Kyiv view Trump’s victory as a viable opportunity to conclude the war on their own terms.

A month before his inauguration, Donald Trump is behaving like he is the American president in all but name, while lame duck President Joe Biden seems to have gratefully checked out of running the country after having issued a wide-ranging pardon for the criminal activities of his son Hunter. In doing so, the outgoing president offered a sordid coda to the ignoble saga of “Trump-Biden-Ukraine-gate.” For many Americans, the younger Biden increasingly seemed to epitomize the oligarchic corruption of an arrogant, entrenched and self-serving elite, especially as it turned out that the emails on his laptop were all real, rather than the products of a Russian information operation, as 51 former high U.S. intelligence and security officials had suggested a month before the 2020 election, in an effort to prevent voters from considering the material, and the larger question of Biden family corruption.

In Kyiv, Hunter Biden had accepted a lucrative position on the board of Burisma, an energy company belonging to a former minister in the outcast Yanukovych administration. In the process, Hunter blatantly negated all norms governing conflicts of interests—his father was in fact the Obama administration official directly entrusted with the Ukrainian anticorruption portfolio. Biden later boasted of forcing the Ukrainians to fire the chief prosecutor in charge of investigating Burisma on pains of the country not receiving a badly needed loan. For his part, Trump’s attempts to prod the Zelenskyy administration into opening a criminal investigation into Hunter Biden’s conduct led directly to Trump’s first impeachment trial (further contributing to Trump’s previously formed dislike for the Ukrainians).

At the same time that Joe Biden was pardoning his son, the center of American power was shifting from Washington, D.C., to Mar-a-Lago. The incoming Trump administration has been hastily cobbling together a new cabinet and signaling its foreign policy priorities. The war, which will enter its fourth year a month after Trump’s inauguration, had played a substantial role in the campaign. Trump had campaigned against continuing to send tens of billions of dollars worth of aid to the Ukrainians, a position that dovetails with the “America First” instincts of large segments of his electorate. The bombastic anti-Ukraine campaign rhetoric spoke for itself (as does that of his vice presidential running mate, JD Vance, an earnest ideologue who lacks Trump’s ability to turn on a dime as well as his keen sense of U.S. interests).

Trump’s election has been met with a surprising amount of positivity within Ukrainian political circles, which have grown frustrated with the way in which the Biden administration had been slow-rolling assistance.

Copied link

Preparing the field, Trump told an interviewer in Paris that Ukraine “should probably prepare to receive less aid from the U.S.” Asserting that “there are people being killed in that war at levels nobody has ever seen [since] the Second World War,” he added that the war is “the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen and it should have never been allowed to happen.” Coupled with the speed at which his advisers have begun to discuss their peace plan with European elites, the comments indicate that Trump is serious in his commitment to bringing the war to an end—and that he is likely to have the support of European leaders in doing so. As remarkable as it seems, and as much as it might pain the august members of the Peace Prize committee, it is hard to imagine that the successful negotiation of an armistice between Russia and Ukraine wouldn’t merit an appearance by Donald Trump in Oslo, with Putin and Zelenskyy by his side.

So will it happen? Recent news from the front has been focused on escalation. Intended in part no doubt to make Trump’s life in the White House more difficult, it may wind up having the opposite effect, as both sides now have better reasons to back down than they did a month ago.

Immediately upon the conclusion of the American elections, the outgoing Biden administration reversed its long-term policy against providing permission for Kyiv to target Russian territory using the MGM-140 ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System). This quick reversal by the lame duck president proved that the Biden administration had held off out of fear of providing the Trump campaign with ammunition for use against the Democratic Party standard bearer. Two days later the Biden administration also moved to allow the Ukrainians to receive shipments of American antipersonnel mines, which had also previously been kept from Kyiv.

The Russians quickly escalated by firing the Oreshnik, an experimental intermediate-range ballistic missile, at the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. The first such deployment in history was intended as a powerful signal, threatening further escalation—namely, the use of nuclear weapons on the battlefield. The Kremlin was doubling down on its strategy of deterring Western escalation with nuclear saber-rattling.

Surrogates of the Trump campaign were quick to criticize the outgoing Biden administration for tying the incoming administration to a policy that Trump did not want. Having slow-rolled the Ukrainians for three years, ignoring their pleas out of fear of escalation, the Biden administration was attempting to lock in its preferred policy in its last weeks in power.

A British army officer who has worked alongside U.S. counterparts in supporting Kyiv was scathing about the Biden administration’s timing and motivation: “If it made sense to let the Ukrainians hit targets inside Russia in November, why not do so back in August, when they were begging to be able to hit the airbases from which the Russians were hammering them with glide bombs? There is no military rationale, it’s all politics.” In part, he conceded, it was likely intended to give Kyiv a stronger hand in any future peace negotiations but, he added with evident frustration, “part of the reason the Ukrainians have such a poor hand now is because Biden was so hesitant in the past.” Indeed, the practical consequence of not allowing the Ukrainians to strike at Russian bases and ammunition dumps in those crucial months was that it had allowed the Russians to counterattack in the Kursk region, with 40% of the territory that the Ukrainians had taken in their daring invasion having already been recaptured by Russian and North Korean forces.

Discussion of the Trump-Kyiv relationship has become encrusted with a great amount of misunderstanding, partisanship, wishful thinking, delusion, and often outlandish speculation, largely due to the almost-decade-long information campaign about Trump’s relationship with President Vladimir Putin, which has driven large numbers of American journalists and commentators bonkers. The Ukrainians also played a part, as they had found themselves forced to attempt to ameliorate relations with both American political parties at the risk of making enemies of the other. Unsurprisingly, they have misstepped on more than one occasion.

The Zelenskyy administration had inherited a very bad hand from its predecessors and was certainly not responsible for what had happened before it came to power in 2019. Yet the bad blood between Ukraine and Trump was already a serious factor for the new Ukrainian president to contend with. Trump viewed the machinations of some Ukrainians, in their attempt to gain favor with the Clinton campaign during the 2016 elections, as being an expression of state policy. The Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, D.C., had played a bad hand against the Republican Party standard-bearer rather carelessly, and secret Ukrainian intelligence (SBU) files on Paul Manafort had been leaked to American and British newspapers during the week of the 2016 Republican convention—which had led to his sacking as Trump’s campaign chairman. A Kyiv insider previously speculated to us that Trump’s relationship with Zelenskyy was “likely beyond repair,” though as Zelenskyy has shown in his postelection commentary and in his meetings with Trump, that may not be the case.

Trump has always seen Ukraine as part of the “Russiagate” narrative. While hardly a “Russian asset,” or controllable in any way by anyone apparently, Trump is also deeply skeptical of the international alliances that constrain the freedom for the blunt application—or withdrawal—of American power in global trouble spots. In the process he appears willing to weaken and destabilize the multilateral institutions and security alliances that constrain Russia’s own influence. In that sense, Trump always seemed like a natural partner for Putin, even if the Russiagate narrative was always something between a political slander and a mass hallucination by people who didn’t know much about Eastern Europe and turned out not to be very bright.

Despite Putin’s public statements, such as his smirking claim to support Kamala Harris because of her “infectious laugh,” the Kremlin was almost certainly rooting for Trump’s victory in the 2024 election. That is even more so than during previous election cycles: In 2016, Moscow had incorrectly assumed that he had no chance of winning against an establishment candidate and supported Trump essentially as a spoiler. That assumption essentially reflected the Kremlin’s continuing inability to understand the American system and national character: Assuming that all democracies were as “managed” as Russia’s, Moscow could not believe a disruptive outsider would be “allowed” to win.

This time, however, the Kremlin viewed the American horse race as something closer to a win-win. A Trump victory was the preferred outcome, but a narrow and contested Harris victory would have served their purposes almost as well. A polarized and paralyzed America, engaged in months of recounts, recriminations and intense civil disobedience, would have certainly satisfied the Kremlin.

The Russians understand full well that Trump is a uniquely self-centered and transactional individual who has zero allegiance to them. He is seen with good reason as an unpredictable character, and they are well aware that although he poses a challenge to the Western concert of nations, he is equally capable of doing just as much damage to Russian interests. Indeed, it is noteworthy how far the state-controlled media have gone in trying to play down to the Russian people any overoptimistic expectations as to what a Trump presidency may mean. The tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets ran a commentary headlined “Uncle Trump’s Tales: Promises of ‘Swift Peace in Ukraine’ Are Worth Less Than Nothing,” while Nikolai Patrushev, one of Putin’s most hawkish advisers, even hinted that if Trump challenged the agenda of the U.S. deep state too severely, he faced the risk of assassination.

Patrushev is often something of a nationalist outlier in his circle, but later Putin himself picked up the idea, warning during a summit in Kazakhstan that “he is not safe now” considering the “absolutely uncivilized methods used to battle against Trump, up to and including an assassination attempt.” Of course, Putin in part is playing to Trump’s vanity, presenting him as an embattled champion fighting a ruthless elite, but he is also counseling against overenthusiasm at home.

The fact that Trump’s decisions are unpredictable to himself no less than to America’s elites and international partners makes him a totally unreliable partner for the Kremlin, and in some ways makes him much more dangerous than a conventional opponent. Russia’s armies, spooks, and saboteurs have always factored in some degree of U.S. restraint. So long as the Americans were determined to be the adults in the room, the Russians could play the role of the risk-taking adventurers. No such assumptions of responsible behavior or clear and stable “red lines” will be made under the next Trump administration. That lack of predictability is something that will make the Russians much more cautious in their decision-making, with the aggressive and opportunistic Trump liable to pocket those gains.

Trump’s instincts are also filtered through the policy recommendations of his team, and many of the proposed security and cabinet officials whom Trump has nominated are more hawkish on Ukraine than had been anticipated. Even as some of his team would strongly prefer that the Americans hand over the Ukrainian burden to Europe, most understand the stakes of the conflict—as well as its capacity to disrupt their other foreign and domestic policy priorities. Trump’s penchant for theatrical negotiation means that he is just as likely to pressure the Russians to make concessions as he is willing to do so with the Ukrainians.

The Russians had been horrified in April 2017 by the experience of watching Trump impulsively order a cruise missile strike into Syria when he was angered by dictator Bashar Assad’s brutal chemical attack on civilians. An American president with an impulsive temperament, mercurial and opaque decision-making processes, radical pride, a deeply egoistic sense of self, no appetite for following conventional wisdom, a low threshold for the use of force, and no interest in consulting with allies is the definition of a Russian strategic nightmare. By the end of the first Trump administration, U.S. policy toward Russia was the toughest it had been at any time since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. “Look at what he is doing, and not what he is saying on TV,” conservatives would reply to complaints from Ukraine hands at that time. Admittedly, this was above all because Congress arrogated Russia policy to itself, but many within the Kremlin, mirror-imaging their own autocratic politics, presumed Trump was somehow behind this. Even the more sophisticated America-watchers were disappointed as it became clear that he was not willing to invest any of his own political capital to intervene and moderate Congress’ hawkish actions toward Russia.

Putin’s congratulatory remarks to Trump included boilerplate about negotiations with Ukraine—but not under “Kyiv’s demands.” Putin’s best chance for a quick and positive end to the war, or at least a cease-fire on his terms, is to have the Americans force concessions on Kyiv. It is, of course, unclear whether Trump would be able to impose a cease-fire on Kyiv, let alone a lasting end to the conflict. He can surely threaten to limit or block further military aid, which would be disastrous for Ukraine, but this would have severe potential political repercussions, especially as a cease-fire would almost certainly favor Putin, allowing him a space in which to rearm and reconstitute his forces, but also leaving him with the initiative, able to resume hostilities whenever he thinks is best to his advantage.

The Ukrainians understand this dynamic perfectly well, and will therefore resist any such concessions unless they are accompanied by reliable security guarantees. Such guarantees will be even more crucial for any lasting agreement, which would likely be framed as “land for peace,” with Ukraine accepting some or all of Russia’s territorial conquests—currently accounting for perhaps 19% of all Ukraine—in exchange for an end to the war. Having been badly burned by the lack of response to Moscow’s breach of its commitments under the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, which saw Ukraine surrender its share of the Soviet nuclear arsenal in return for promises that the other signatories would never attack it, Kyiv will need those security guarantees legally codified in treaty form. Ideally in their eyes, this would take the form of full NATO membership—indeed, Zelenskyy explicitly floated the idea that he would waive any hopes of militarily regaining the occupied territories (which in practice means abandoning them, at least for the foreseeable future) in return for quick entry of the rest of Ukraine into the NATO alliance, so that it would be under its Article 5 guarantee of mutual protection.

Getting Washington to lean on Kyiv and impose a cease-fire or peace process will require Putin to try to woo Trump. Putin may well have trouble accepting that in the process he will implicitly be acknowledging that Trump and the United States will be the ultimate guarantors of the negotiation process. All of which carries serious potential risks for Moscow. Trump is easily offended, and if the Russians signal a lack of flexibility in negotiations, or appear to be acting in bad faith or drag their feet, or in any way seem to be the ones denying him a quick and satisfying political triumph, they will deeply anger Trump and thus risk losing an opportunity to end the conflict on terms acceptable to them.

Trump’s personal antipathy toward the Ukrainians, whom he rightly or wrongly views as having been on his opponent’s side for the past three electoral cycles, will no doubt be balanced out by his desire to deliver a big and flashy deal. Trump will also be keen to avoid a debacle like the Biden administration’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. This may help protect the Ukrainians from being totally abandoned to Moscow. Although Trump very much desires to rebalance the burden of the war and force the Europeans to shoulder a greater share—especially by buying more American weapons and ammunition on behalf of Ukraine—he will not want to look weak or a “loser” by capitulating to Putin. Proffering the unsentimental and transactional businessman the understanding that he is forcing European freeloaders to pay their own way—and even better to pay Americans for defending them—would be one way of keeping him on board.

There is also a belief in some quarters in Ukraine that Trump could potentially be their savior, forcing a deal—whether good or bad—before the country bleeds to death through attrition. Trump’s election has therefore been met with a surprising amount of positivity within Ukrainian political circles, which have grown frustrated with the way in which the Biden administration had been slow-rolling assistance, much as it attempted to limit Israel’s offensives in Gaza and Lebanon. As a result, many in Kyiv—including figures within the presidential administration—are entirely ready to give Trump the chance to break the current stalemate.

That said, it is also important to avoid assuming that Trump’s election will necessarily bring dramatic changes to the war front. Negotiating the temporary cease-fire that Putin wants without offering Ukraine security guarantees would not be accepted by Kyiv, even as Moscow will not accept Ukraine’s integration into Western military alliances (with or without NATO membership). Trump’s high profile and theatrical attempts at procuring a deal with North Korea fell through because America fundamentally had no leverage to make the North Koreans dismantle their nuclear program. Likewise, it is entirely possible that, faced with a similarly intransigent situation between Kyiv and Moscow, Trump would shrug and move on to the next thing while directing the Europeans to take matters into their own hands, leaving the Russians without a resolution to the war and the Ukrainians in more dire shape than before.

A former Ukrainian diplomat who used to be close to the administration in Kyiv admitted that “Trump is no more a friend of ours than he is of the Russians, he just wants to prove he is the master dealmaker, get that Nobel Peace Prize, prove he can accomplish what Biden failed to do. But let’s be clear, if something else more appealing comes along, or if it looks too hard, he’ll just drop this.” Neither Moscow nor Kyiv want to be seen as the intransigent party, and both have recently restated their maximalist negotiating positions precisely to indicate that they are willing to see what they can get.

However, while the Russians have enough arms to fight until the end of 2025, the Ukrainians are running critically low on manpower. What they may face is not a sudden collapse of their lines, but a continued, slow and bloody Russian advance. To some, the unpalatable choice seems to be between a bad deal sooner or an even worse one later. As the Russians grind away at Ukraine’s forces and now seem to be winning, many in Kyiv see Trump’s intervention as their only option, even if this may not be Kyiv’s optimal time for negotiations in terms of battlefield dynamics.

After all, what happens if there is no cease-fire, let alone an actual peace deal? Trump is not going to be able to pull Russia away from its revisionist authoritarian alliance with China, Iran, and North Korea, as it needs them too much. Likewise, Ukrainian dreams that a popular uprising, economic collapse, palace coup, army mutiny, or heart attack would rid them of Putin and end the war have not panned out. At the same time, while a growing proportion of Ukrainians supports some kind of negotiations, most still oppose any long-term land-for-peace deal, let alone capitulation to Moscow. If NATO is not willing to let Ukraine join, perhaps a multinational alliance of more combative European states such as Britain, Poland, and the Baltic states could provide some meaningful security guarantees that could permit a genuine peace deal. However, it could just as easily be that the war continues for several more years before concluding with an Iraq-Iran 1980s style stalemate—only with even a higher number of dead Russians and Ukrainians.

It is tempting to view Trump’s efforts as nothing more than a vanity project, but it may also be that they offer the best, or only, hope of silencing the guns, and preventing even worse outcomes.

If that happens, he may well deserve a Nobel Prize.

Tablet · by Vladislav Davidzon · December 20, 2024

13. CALL FOR SPECIAL OPERATIONS PAPERS ACADEMIC YEAR 2025

Read, Think, Write, Repeat.

https://www.jsou.edu/Press/CallForPapers

CALL FOR SPECIAL OPERATIONS PAPERS ACADEMIC YEAR 2025

As the U.S. refines national strategy, resourcing levels, and global focus to address the contemporary threat environment, the role of special operations has never been more vital.

In response, USSOCOM is relooking, and, in some cases, reimagining its role in multiple operations. Recognizing the critical need for advanced discourse and creative idea generation, JSOU is pleased to announce its Academic Year 2025 Call for Special Operations Papers.

REQUIREMENTS

Submissions must be informed by topics included in the 2024 Special Operations Research Topics (SORT) booklet that focus on the USSOCOM commander’s three lines of effort:

PEOPLE: How can SOF improve the execution of its service-like responsibilities (e.g., Program, Planning, Budget, and Execution [PPBE]); Cost Assessment Program Evaluation (CAPE); and Doctrine, Organization, Training, Materiel, Leadership, Personnel, Facilities, Policy [DOTMLPF-P])?
WIN: How can the SOF enterprise leverage asymmetric options and new forms of irregular warfare to fill critical gaps in Joint Force capabilities and to “Prevent, Prepare, Prevail, and Preserve” against near-peer competitors (i.e., Russia/PRC)?
TRANSFORM: How can SOF leverage emergent technology and/or advanced concepts that enable SOF operations, such as the SOF-Space-Cyber-Strategic Command Nexus, to “Prevent, Prepare , Prevail, and Preserve” in conflict against a near-peer competitor (e.g., Russia/PRC)?
As a starting point for research, review the SORT for a list of refined, salient topics grouped by the above themes or see Appendix A of the Academic Year 2025 JSOU Call for Special Operations Papers Memorandum.

NOTE: All submissions must be unclassified. Paper length should be between 1,500 and 3,000 words.

CATEGORIES AND DEADLINES

To ensure divergent and convergent perspectives and meet varied submission timelines, JSOU is sponsoring three writing categories for the AY25 Call for Special Operations Papers:

Category 1: Joint Special Operations Forces Senior Enlisted Academy (JSOFSEA) personnel, with focus on the Career Education Program. Quarterly submission deadlines/winners as set by JSOFSEA commandant.
Category 2: Professional military education (PME) students and military practitioners. Submission deadline 28 February 2025.
Category 3: Academic faculty and civilian scholars. Submission deadline 28 February 2025.
One paper from each category will be selected as the winner.
Please review the JSOU Press Manuscript Submission Format Guidance for paper preparation and submission guidelines.
FOR MORE INFORMATION OR TO SUBMIT A PAPER FOR CONSIDERATION, EMAIL CALLFORPAPERS@JSOU.EDU

14. The Command Sergeant Major of U.S. Army Special Operations Command Recommends these 5 books for your Christmas Stocking

The Command Sergeant Major of U.S. Army Special Operations Command Recommends these 5 books for your Christmas Stocking - From the Green Notebook

fromthegreennotebook.com · by Joe Byerly · December 21, 2024

By Command Sergeant Major JoAnn Naumann

I am busy. But every day, I make time to read.

For me, my dedicated time is early morning before anything else competes for my attention. I also read on flights and on lazy weekends. Most nights, you can catch me curled up with some good fiction before drifting off to sleep. Reading is my entertainment and professional and personal development. I select books that address a situation in my life or work – I read a couple of books about running this year. I read about current events and history. I take recommendations from friends, coworkers, and connections on social media. All told, that added up to about 50 books this year.

Each year, a few books stand out. If you are looking for something to read in 2025, here are my top five:

1. Hope Is Not a Method by Gordon R. Sullivan and Michael V. Harper. This book, written in 1996, was recommended by Jimmie Spencer, the second Command Sergeant Major of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, who held the position in the early 1990s. He led through a period of change following the end of the Cold War and the overwhelming success of Desert Storm. Jimmie has also been a great mentor to me, so when he recommended a book, it immediately rose to the top of my list.

Despite technological advancements and evolving adversaries, this book feels like it could have been written today. General Gordon Sullivan, former Chief of Staff of the Army, recounts how he successfully led the transformation of an Army facing new missions and the dawn of the information age.

He navigated personnel and budget cuts while ensuring the Army maintained readiness and met current demands—all while preparing for future conflicts. Along the way, he encountered a bureaucracy resistant to change, a challenge still familiar to military leaders today.

With the Army now facing a similar crossroads, the lessons General Sullivan shares are particularly relevant. This book is a must-read for anyone serving in the military.

2. What You Do Is Who You Are by Ben Horowitz. This book was NOT what I expected. With a subtitle like “How to Create Your Business Culture,” stories about Toussaint L’Ouverture and Genghis Khan weren’t exactly what came to mind. Yet, Ben Horowitz uses these unexpected historical examples to illustrate what he sees as successful cultures—or at least cultures that were successful in specific ways he connects to modern business lessons.

I didn’t agree with all of the examples or what they represented, but it’s a reminder that we shouldn’t limit our learning to only the ideas we agree with. This book earned a place on my list because it challenged my thinking. It forced me to consider that even if I disagree with the outcomes, there might still be value in the methods used to achieve them.

At the same time, each of these cultures had flaws—flaws that ultimately led to their downfall. And perhaps that’s the most important lesson I walked away with from this book: any culture, no matter how successful, must be adaptable to survive.

3. Life in Five Senses by Gretchen Rubin. I’ve been a fan of Gretchen Rubin since her first book, The Happiness Project. I still use her two-minute rule: that any task that can be completed in two minutes or less should be done immediately. In this latest work, Rubin once again dives into self-experimentation to uncover insights, this time about the five senses. The book is a journey into the joys of the physical world, a world we often overlook in the rush of our busy lives.

When was the last time you truly paused to notice the shades of color around you or savor the taste of your favorite food? Inspired by Rubin, I tried a few of her suggested experiments: listening to Gustav Mahler, collecting small blue items, and really savoring a bite of dark chocolate.

But the book came to life for me during a trip to Iceland this summer. Experiencing a new place, I became much more aware of my senses; paying attention to the sights, sounds, and textures around me. It was a simple yet powerful way to slow down and appreciate the richness of the world.

4. The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter. This is my number one read of 2024! Michael Easter writes about one of my personal life rules: Get comfortable being uncomfortable. Through his own story, Easter explores the benefits of taking on challenges—physical, mental, emotional, and even dietary.

In 2009, he embarked on a life-changing trip to the wilderness of Alaska, and throughout the book, he backs his narrative with compelling data: hardship makes us happier, healthier, and more resilient.

The beauty of Easter’s message is that not everyone needs to take on a month-long adventure in the wild. Instead, he introduces the concept of a misogi—a challenge that pushes your own limits. The rules are simple: Make it really hard. And don’t die.

I’m still deciding on my 2025 misogi, but this book has me inspired to embrace the uncomfortable in a whole new way.

5. The Terminal List series. By Jack Carr. For fiction to make my list, it has to do two things: entertain me and make me think. The Terminal List series checked both boxes so well that I read all seven books this year. (Yes, I’m recommending books written by a Navy SEAL.)

While the stories are fiction, Jack Carr uses his deep knowledge of the military and government to give these hyperbolic plots a surprisingly realistic feel. He also weaves in current political themes and adversaries, which kept me reflecting on real-world events.

James Reece, the main character, takes on enemies ranging from Islamic terrorists and Iranians to Russians and the Chinese. I don’t think these scenarios are likely to play out exactly as written, but I couldn’t help pondering the possibilities.

If you love action-packed thrillers that also make you think, this series is a must-read.

This holiday season, I encourage everyone to take a well-deserved break and set aside a little time each day for reading. Over the years, reading has profoundly shaped my personal and professional growth, and I hope it can do the same for you.

Wishing you all a joyful holiday season and the very best as we head into 2025!

CSM JoAnn Naumann, a New Jersey native and graduate of the College of William and Mary, enlisted in the Army in 1996 as a 35P, Voice Language Analyst. She has completed 14 deployments and held senior leadership roles across JSOC, Special Operations Command-Korea, and USASOC. A decorated leader, she is the Command Senior Enlisted Leader of USASOC.

fromthegreennotebook.com · by Joe Byerly · December 21, 2024

15. Russia Taps Soviet-Era Stockpiles as Armored-Vehicle Supply Dwindles

Russia Taps Soviet-Era Stockpiles as Armored-Vehicle Supply Dwindles

Moscow has lost an estimated 11,000 armored combat vehicles in the Ukraine war

https://www.wsj.com/world/russia-taps-soviet-era-stockpiles-as-armored-vehicle-supply-dwindles-6f8f8df2?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1

By Matthew Luxmoore

Updated Dec. 21, 2024 12:05 am ET

A destroyed Russian armored military vehicle in Kyiv. Analysts say Russia has around 2,600 tanks left in reserve. Photo: Roman Pilipey/Getty Images

KYIV—When the director of Russia’s largest film studio met President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin last month, he made sure to highlight how he had supported the war effort—by handing over dozens of tanks and armored vehicles dating back to the 1950s.

The company, Mosfilm, had used armored vehicles from the Soviet era as props for decades. Now, with the Ukraine war chewing through stockpiles, Mosfilm is turning them over. “I was told they were needed, so I reached out to the Defense Ministry,” Karen Shakhnazarov, Mosfilm’s director general, told Putin.

The donation of around 50 vehicles was a drop in the bucket for Russia’s military—but an indication of how deep the deficit of armor has become for one of the world’s most powerful armies. Two-and-a-half years of intense warfare along a 600-mile front has taken its toll, while sanctions have cut off access to Western parts.

Russia has lost more than 11,000 armored combat vehicles in the war, including some 3,600 tanks, according to the estimates of Western officials and analysts—equivalent to almost 15 years of Russian tank production at prewar levels. Analysts say Russia has around 2,600 tanks left in reserve.

New tank deliveries to the front are largely older models plucked from storage, which depletes stockpiles and degrades the overall quality of Russia’s force. The vehicles have “to be sent for refurbishment, then for maintenance and finally, prepared for combat duty,” said a senior Ukrainian intelligence official. “All of this takes time.”

Russia has shown an ability throughout the war to adapt to fierce resistance from Ukraine and pressure from Western sanctions, and it is doing so again now to preserve its supplies of armored vehicles. It has shifted its fighting tactics, stepped up efforts to refurbish old equipment and increased military spending. Most analysts estimate, at the current rate of production, Russia has enough tanks to last another two years.

Moscow’s existing stocks are a legacy of the late Soviet period, when it ramped up defense production in anticipation of a potential war with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. By 1991, the crumbling U.S.S.R. had tens of thousands of tanks in reserve, and as many armored vehicles as the rest of the world put together.

In subsequent years, many of them stood idle in fields, exposed to the elements. Thousands were shipped off for export. A small number were melted down for the production of other hardware. A large portion of what is available today dates from the 1960s and 1970s and requires weeks of work to become operative.

The vehicles handed over by Mosfilm, a titan of Soviet and Russian film production, were given to the studio by the Soviet Defense Ministry in the 1960s. The company is now returning what it had effectively borrowed, including six armored personnel carriers and 36 tanks dating back to the period just after World War II.

“Losses can’t be replenished very quickly,” said Ruslan Pukhov, head of the Moscow-based defense think tank Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies. “Since you constantly need more, you prioritize quantity over quality.”

In the first months of its invasion in 2022, Russia expected a swift thrust toward Kyiv. It deployed large parts of its arsenal to Ukraine, including some of its most modern equipment.

Kyiv’s forces had remarkable success picking off Russian armored vehicles using drones and antitank missiles in spectacular displays of firepower that went viral online. By the end of the year, ordinary Ukrainians could stroll among captured Russian tanks at open-air displays that popped up in several cities.

The parts Russia traditionally sourced from the West, such as precision components and tank optics, had become inaccessible. By the spring of 2023, footage of decades-old Russian tanks being transported on train cars toward Ukraine was prompting Russian television pundits to quip that Moscow could soon start removing from the commemorative plinths the T-34 tanks that had seen service in World War II.

If Kyiv kept getting allied military aid, Western and Ukrainian officials suggested, Russia would run out of the means to keep prosecuting its invasion. “They have nothing left,” Ukraine’s military-intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov said in August 2023. “They’ve exhausted their reserves.”

Budanov underestimated the sheer size of Russia’s Soviet-legacy stocks—as well as its ability to adapt.

To skirt sanctions, Russia soon began sourcing components such as Western microchips and telecommunications equipment via third countries. It deepened ties with North Korea, which has sent millions of artillery shells and other military hardware, and more than 10,000 troops to shore up Russia’s defenses. And it pumped money into its arms industry.

Russian President Vladimir Putin with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang in June. Photo: gavriil grigorov/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Russia’s military industrial complex scaled up, reorienting the country’s economy around the exigencies of war. Military spending has hit a post-Soviet high, and is planned to rise to more than $120 billion next year, making up over 30% of total spending. Almost half a million new jobs have been created by the defense industry.

Uralvagonzavod, Russia’s largest tank factory, has launched a recruitment drive to find crane operators, welders and electricians. Some workers are doing 12-hour shifts. State TV has shown footage of Orthodox priests in cassocks throwing holy water on T-90M tanks—Russia’s newest model—being ferried west.

Michael Gjerstad, who tracks the Russian military at the International Institute of Strategic Studies, estimates that Russia is now producing new and refurbished tanks at the same rate it is losing them on the battlefield—more than 100 a month.

“Yes, there’s a shortage, but it’s not as clear as most people think,” he said. “Russia’s reconstitution has actually been way better than I would have imagined.”

Russia has also changed battlefield tactics to stem vehicle losses. When it launched a large-scale assault on the city of Avdiivka in October 2023, dozens of its tanks and armored troop carriers quickly fell prey to mines, artillery and drones.

Ukrainian soldiers near Avdiivka in Ukraine in February, 2023. Photo: LIBKOS/Associated Press

The Russians adapted, Ukrainian and Western intelligence officials say: sending waves of infantry forward in small groups, and often keeping tanks concealed in tree lines to fire on the enemy from a distance. They began paying a far greater price in lives than armor.

As Russia now assaults the town of Pokrovsk, west of Avdiivka, Ukrainian drone operator Oleksandr Solonko says Russian vehicles are camouflaged and hidden away. “They drive out to the position, fire on us, and retreat,” Solonko said.

The new strategy of giving priority to infantry assaults has significantly raised the human cost, with Western officials estimating Russian casualties in Ukraine at almost 1,000 a day on average this fall, compared with fewer than 300 throughout most of 2022. It has also made it far harder for Russia to attempt encirclements or major operational breakthroughs in much of Ukraine’s east.

But it has helped Russia preserve its dwindling stock of armored vehicles, while grinding forward inch-by-inch in Ukraine’s east.

“Russia can’t keep up this intensity of offensive operations for ever, but it is adapting in order to extend that timeline,” said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment who regularly visits Ukrainian front-line units. “The Ukrainians don’t have time to wait for the Russians to run out of equipment.”

People stand next to a destroyed Russian armored military vehicle displayed in Kyiv in August, 2023. Photo: roman pilipey/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

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

Appeared in the December 21, 2024, print edition as 'Russia Taps Soviet-Era Stockpiles'.

16. U.S. Reduces Samsung’s Grant for Texas Chip-Making Project

And Intel's too.

20 hours ago

U.S. Reduces Samsung’s Grant for Texas Chip-Making Project

Asa Fitch

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp500-nasdaq-live-12-20-2024/card/u-s-reduces-samsung-s-grant-for-texas-chip-making-project-VEshJNLLQB6E1p4ZqyOr?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=1

South Korea’s Samsung Electronics on Friday finalized a U.S. grant of up to about $4.75 billion to help fund its chip-making expansion in Texas, significantly less than the $6.4 billion that the company and the government initially announced.

The funds come from the 2022 Chips Act, which sought to reinvigorate U.S. chip-making. In April, the Commerce Department said Samsung would invest $45 billion to build factories in Taylor, Texas. The Commerce Department said Friday its grant would support an investment of over $37 billion in the state.

“Ultimately, we changed this award to align with market conditions and the scope of the investment the company is making,” a Commerce Department spokesman said. “Samsung feels that this award represents a strong commitment to their Texas and U.S. efforts and is a sustainable long-term plan for them.”

Samsung’s chip-making arm has struggled in its quest to make some of the most advanced chips in the world in recent quarters, analysts say. The electronics giant also faltered in its bid to profit from the artificial-intelligence boom, apologizing for its performance in an October letter from the head of its semiconductor business.

The department also changed its award for U.S. chip giant Intel, which is building new factories in Ohio, Arizona and Oregon. Last month it allocated up to $7.87 billion for Intel, down from an $8.5 billion preliminary agreement. Officials cited additional funding of up to $3 billion Intel received to make chips for military applications as the reason for that reduction.

With the Samsung grant, all of the largest U.S. projects expected to get support from the Chips Act have received their funding. In addition to Samsung and Intel, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. got up to $6.6 billion for large new chip-making facilities in Arizona, and memory-chip giant Micron got up to $6.1 billion for facilities in Idaho and New York.

The Biden administration has been racing to finalize the awards before Trump takes the presidency. Trump has raised doubt about his support for the Chips Act, calling it “so bad” in an interview on the campaign trail.

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.

KR:005930 (S. Korea: KRX)

₩53000.00 KRW-100.00-0.19%

Intel Corp.

INTC (U.S.: Nasdaq)

$19.52 USD0.462.41%

17. The Combined Action Platoon

I love Bing West and his thoughtful and thought provoking writing and I am happy that he wrote this. I just hope someone will write about the Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) project initiated by the CIA and then executed by 5th Special Forces Group that was on a much wider scale well before the excellent CAP program. I do not mean to take anything away from this article or the CAP program but when we talk about CAP we should mention CIDG.

This is the key point for the Marine Corps but one that we should all heed - there will be civilians and local forces and we will need to be able to fight and operate "through, with, and by them:"

Regardless of where Marines next fight, there will be civilians and local forces. Marines don’t have the manpower to support a stand-alone advisory regiment. We will always seek the support of the local forces. The CAP proved that our infantry squads can adapt on any battlefield, due to the Marine ethos and training.

The Combined Action Platoon

By: Mr. Bing West

Posted on December 17,2024

Article Date 16/12/2024

https://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/the-combined-action-platoon/

Unique in the history of war

Commemoration address for the Combined Action Platoon memorial at Marine Corps Museum

We who fought in the villages six decades ago have gathered here to dedicate this memorial to our fallen brothers. We thank LtGen Ron Christmas and MajGen Jim Lukeman for honoring their sacrifice.

Historians remark upon the sheer audacity of the Combined Action Platoon (CAP). In the midst of a war with millions of combatants, twelve-man squads led by sergeants lived and died in villages amongst thousands of Vietnamese. Their mission: drive out the enemy, protect the villagers and train the farmers to defend themselves.1 In theory, those tiny squads, vastly outnumbered and isolated, should have been wiped out. In fact, they succeeded. Of the 209 villages protected by CAPs, not one reverted to enemy control.2 The CAP stands unique in America’s wars, never duplicated before or since.

From 1966 through 1970, across hundreds of hamlets every mosquito-filled night, patrols of about five Marines and five farmers sneaked through the bush, with no night vision or on-call fires. To survive, they relied on stealth, laying down grazing fire, pitching grenades, and pulling back when incoming fire was too intense. Firefights were sudden and short, green and red tracers zipping past like dancing Christmas lights. Afterward, no one ventured into the kill zones. Only the next day might they hear from the villagers about enemy bodies carried off. No CAP ever relaxed. The peril of each night focused every Marine.

During the day, CAP grunts ambled through the hamlets, eating duck eggs and bananas and peanuts, laughing and bartering with the villagers, respected but not feared. The ‘nghia quans’ (the farmers called PFs, or Popular Forces) patrolled and lived side by side with the Marines. Spending month after month inside the same few kilometers, the Marines and villagers came to know one another as human beings, with individual quirks. Six of the CAP Marines in this 1966 photo were killed in the besieged village of Binh Nghia.

The village chief wrote a letter to the parents of Sergeant White, the CAP leader. Here is a direct quote:

To Sgt. J.D. White Family … My name is trao, second village chief working with Sgt. White and Sq. Our people thank him very much, because he is very good man. Every day he is few to sleep he works too much … My people are poor and when they see a marine they very happy. When V.C. come to people, people come to talk to Sgt. Whte so Sgt. White can talk to P.F. and marine to fight V.C. Maybe die … I’ll say a Happy New Year to you. Jod bless you all …. Your friend always, Ho Yan Trao.3

The cost was high. Of the 450,000 Marines who served in Vietnam, three percent were fatalities,4 rising to six percent among the combat battalions. In the CAPs, the fatality rate was above ten percent. The reason was that on average a CAP conducted a thousand patrols in a year. There was no embedded chain of command to ensure these patrols went out, no gunny, no first sergeant, no company commander. Instead, there was peer pressure. There were no nights off. In every CAP, sooner or later death called.

Over five years, 540 CAP Marines were killed, while accounting for 4,900 enemy killed by rifle fire and grenades, with almost no employment of supporting arms.5 You don’t call in fire on the village where you live. Inflicting casualties on the enemy was only a means; the end objective was providing security and training the nghia quans (PFs). The CAPs weren’t interlinked; they were scattered across several thousand kilometers. Each CAP staked out five to seven square kilometers of paddies, shrubs and hooches, then fought to protect it.

The ultimate test of the program came when the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) launched the 1968 TET offensive. In the Marine area in northern I Corps, tens of thousands of NVA left the mountains to assault the cities. To get there, they had to pass through the hamlets guarded by CAP patrols. The CAPs absorbed fully 47% of all the enemy attacks.6 Forewarned through the network of villagers, for eleven straight days the CAPs held firm in daily combat. The NVA found no way through.

At its peak, CAP platoons (squads really) extended across 800 widely scattered hamlets, protecting 500,000 villagers.7 This was accomplished by 2,200 CAP Marines, three percent of the Marine total force. Given that CAP was a force multiplier, why wasn’t it expanded into a countrywide strategy?

The CAP focus upon population protection collided with the directive from the high command in Saigon to search for and destroy the NVA forces in the mountains. To quote from the official Marine history of 1968, “The problem was a lack of a warfighting (overall) strategy. There was no yardstick for measuring the amount of resources dedicated to Mission X vs Mission Y. The CAP was seen as a drain of manpower. In fact, it saved Marine lives.”8

The high command in Saigon opposed the CAP program. Yet no top-level meeting with the subordinate Marine command was ever convened to resolve the conflicting strategies. The top commander in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, criticized Marine tactics. His command disparaged the CAPs as “too manpower intensive and too slow in pacifying.”9 The command also consulted the British, whose top counterinsurgency expert, Sir Robert Thompson, concluded the opposite. He said CAP was “the best idea I have seen in Vietnam.”10

After our troops left in 1972, Congress slashed aid to the South and forbade all air strikes. In 1975, South Vietnam fell to North Vietnam. Artillery and armor provided by China and the Soviet Union plus massed infantry caused the defeat, not some fantasy about a Marxist revolt in the villages. Quite the opposite. When the North Vietnamese troops poured in, they changed the names of CAP villages, symbolizing their frustration with the farmers who had staunchly resisted. A history of the CAP program in the Military Review magazine concluded, “The Battle for Hue City and the siege at Khe Sanh dominate the literature about the Marines in Vietnam. CAP, however, was the Corps’ greatest innovation during the war.”11

Is the CAP concept useful in the future? My book describing the lives and deaths in a typical CAP, entitled The Village, was deleted from the Commandant’s Reading List because CAP seemed irrelevant. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the tribal and Muslim insular cultures did make it impossible for Marine squads to live inside isolated villages. Unlike in Vietnam, as outsiders (and unbelievers) Americans were not accepted, let alone warned of danger. On the other hand, CAP is relevant for the new antiship mission. Although Marines no longer read about the CAP, the small units training to deploy on remote Filipino islands will need its tactics.

Regardless of where Marines next fight, there will be civilians and local forces. Marines don’t have the manpower to support a stand-alone advisory regiment. We will always seek the support of the local forces. The CAP proved that our infantry squads can adapt on any battlefield, due to the Marine ethos and training.

>Mr. West, an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, served in CAP Lima-One in Chulai in 1966. He has written a dozen books about Marines in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. His forthcoming book is entitled: Who Will Fight for Us the Next Time?

Notes

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_Action_Program

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_Action_Program

3. https://www.amazon.com/Village-Francis-J-West/dp/0299102343/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.p-mZNDimiy50ukbcHJePqf34WcdHeY7QGVcWelymYhzsODh_dEwCC7vZOsDJOpK7wUlcKoIykKApCmsweqabshyjB1zc40ZFr6VQ_r-nrAJKhD_Jx-K7MrIOvC40_P4PwQSOUHmJnWhFBbRW64yovnGhQT2YJhe41eixBDWTobY.kMlkWTIY2hPyuRhqs2FJgFYqsYZl7bEnd8yUvSMy1Aw&qid=1723471958&sr=8-1

4. https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2015/april/marines-vietnam-commitment; and https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/wars-conflicts-and-operations/vietnam-war0/human-cost.html

5. https://www.nmvetsmemorial.org/combined-action-program-monument.html

6. Weltsch, Michael D (1991). “The Future Role of the Combined Action Program” (PDF). U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. Archived from the original (PDF) on 8 February 2012. That PDF was retrieved 12 December 2007.

7. https://www.usni.org/sites/default/files/inline-files/Kopets,%20Keith%20F.pdf

8. Ibid. p. 629

9. https://www.marines.mil/Portals/1/Publications/US Marines In Vietnam The Defining Year 1968 PCN 19000313800_1.pdf pages 619-625

10. https://smallwarsjournal.com/documents/kopets.htm

11. Military Review, July-August 2002 Found as a footnote in https://www.usni.org/sites/default/files/inline-files/Kopets,%20Keith%20F.pdf

18. Opinion: Europe Should Be Afraid if Putin Accepts US-Proposed Peace Plan

Trusted security guarantees are key to any agreement.

Excerpts:

If Russia accepts a US-proposed peace plan, bearing in mind that the US lacks strategic leverage, Europe and the US are in trouble. It means Trump has given Putin what Russia demands, and he will be in a much better position to renew his assault on Ukraine in the future. Equally important, the West will once again have demonstrated its feebleness.

A Russian objection will demonstrate its aggressive intent. Ukrainian NATO membership would effectively curtail its Great Power ambitions. Not only would the Alliance guarantee Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty but Ukraine would also greatly strengthen NATO militarily.

“I insist that no leader in the world has the right to negotiate with Putin on behalf of Ukraine. We have never delegated this mandate to anyone:” President Zelensky said on Dec. 17.

At the end of the day, the US needs to sell a peace plan to both Putin and Zelensky. Ukraine will not accept a plan that will lead to its future defeat. Threatening to bring the defeat forward by stopping aid for defense will hardly convince Ukraine to give in.

Crucially, the US must also convince its allies that this is in their interest. Europe is, however, all too aware of the dramatic consequences a Ukrainian defeat entails for the continent.

A peace agreement without security guarantees will further undermine our collective security.

Opinion: Europe Should Be Afraid if Putin Accepts US-Proposed Peace Plan

President Vladimir Putin has entered into over 200 negotiations which he has used as merely as a pretext to overcome and defeat his opponents – why would a Ukraine peace deal be any different?

By Hans Petter Midttun

December 21, 2024, 4:47 pm

https://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/44234

kyivpost.com · by Hans Petter Midttun · December 21, 2024

The experience gained from the more than 200 negotiations Russia has signed up to amply demonstrates the futility of engaging the Kremlin in peace talks. Russia sees negotiations merely as another weapon to use against its opponents.

That absence of good faith has been repeatedly shown during nearly 11 years of the war in Ukraine and was reaffirmed on 14 June, when Putin reiterated his terms for “negotiation.” His demands are tantamount to a call for a Ukrainian capitulation as a crucial step to achieving strategic parity with the US and China.

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To negotiate or not?

France and Germany failed to negotiate peace between 2014 and 2022 because of a lack of leverage. Russia was willing to use all means to secure its victory in Ukraine. In contrast, the West held back from using most of its tools. Unfortunately, President-elect Donald Trump seems determined to make the very same mistake.

Lacking political bravery and strategic clarity, describing a confrontation between Russia and the West as a so-called “Russia-Ukraine War” only, the US is not in the position to force Russia to accept a peace deal that does not serve its interests. To change Russia’s strategic appraisal, the US must find the courage and introduce tools it has repeatedly shown itself unwilling to use.

Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.

Why Russia would turn down a US peace plan

Putin will not let himself be dictated by the US. Russia sees itself as equal to the US and China and will consequently, not accept being dictated to. Being willing to use all means and accept higher risks and costs than the US, the latter will be negotiating from a position of weakness. Giving in to US demands would undermine the regime, its coalition of autocracies and Russia’s global standing.

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A tribute to Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s remarkable woman politician of Ukrainian origin.

Giving up on Ukraine means giving up its imperial ambitions. As Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former US National Security Advisor, said: “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.” While Russia’s aspirations go far beyond Ukraine, the latter is crucial to its imperial ambitions. It is either victorious and a future Great Power or defeated and forever a pariah state. This is in a sense, an existential war for Russia, albeit of its own making.

The US lacks leverage. President Joe Biden has fallen victim to Russian reflexive control tactics, fearing a hypothetical World War III. He is unwilling to use US military power to end the war or even send US forces to enforce a (temporary) peace agreement.

President-elect Donald Trump strongly objects to permitting Ukrainian strikes inside Russia with US-produced weapons. He has signaled that he would “probably” reduce aid to Ukraine. Trump opposes Ukrainian NATO membership.

His ability to ramp up defense support to Ukraine as a response to Russian unwillingness to bend to his will is limited. The administration is already voicing concern over stockpiles as Biden surges military aid for Ukraine. The Pentagon says it has reached the limit of weapons it can send to Ukraine monthly without compromising the US’s own combat capability. Neither the US nor the European defense industry are in a position to meet the urgent needs for weapons and ammunition.

Trump has already shown his cards, and he is left without leverage. Russia perceives the US as divided and indifferent to European security.

Russia must defeat Ukraine today to be able to challenge NATO tomorrow.

The window of opportunity

The decision to start a full-scale war was made after 15 years of testing NATO’s political will and military capability. It was made at a unique strategic window of opportunity. The US was busy tearing itself apart; the transatlantic link was in tatters after the first Trump presidency.

NATO was historically weak after three decades of underfunding, downsizing, reorganization and streamlining. It lacked leadership. The Alliance had grossly failed to rebuild its military power after the war started in 2014, signaling the weakness we have since witnessed. Additionally, the EU suffered from internal discord, including the aftermath of Brexit.

While (irresponsibly) late, the Alliance has, however, started the process of rearming and will be ready to face off against a resurgent and aggressive Russia in 5-10 years time. Russia must defeat Ukraine today to be able to challenge NATO tomorrow.

According to Bruno Kahl, Head of the German Federal Intelligence Service, “Russia is preparing for war with the West.” He believes Russia will be capable of “attacking the West” by the end of the decade. Others warn about an increasing risk of a military conflict between NATO and Russia as soon as in two – five years, stressing that “the continent has entered a “pre-war era“ for the first time since World War II.”

Strategic initiative. Conditions on the ground are not conducive to a deal as Russia retains the strategic initiative. President Putin believes he is winning. Russia is making progress on the battlefield in Ukraine, the EU, and the US. Trump is pushing for negotiations to appease the Kremlin. While the EU has just recently started discussing sanctions over Russia’s hybrid war in Europe, NATO has yet to acknowledge that it is exposed to Russian aggression which neither is fully prepared to counter. A coalition of CRINK (China, Russia, Iran and North Korea) autocracies emboldened by Western inaction and indecisiveness, is emerging.

Russia risks losing the initiative if it accepts a (temporary) peace agreement. The fall of the Assad regime makes it even more imperative to demonstrate its “greatness.”

From a Russian perspective, a (temporary) peace will make sense if the agreement strengthens its strategic advantage.

Why Russia would accept a US peace plan

Strategic pause. Russia has suffered more than 750,000 casualties and is struggling to recruit enough volunteers to sustain its military efforts. Being unable to replace its losses of equipment with newly produced weapons, it is slowly running out of tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery. The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) believes that Russia can sustain its assault on Ukraine only for about two or three years. Other experts believe Russia will reach a “critical point of depletion” in 2025 already.

Ukraine has the initiative in cyberspace, space, and the maritime domain. Russia has become increasingly dependent upon China, North Korea and Iran for ammunition, personnel, machine tools, microelectronics and dual-purpose technology. Its potential loss of bases in Syria might have major implications for its ability to project power in the Mediterranean Sea, threaten NATO’s southern flank, and operate in Africa. Its economy is facing a meltdown.

Russia would benefit from a temporary pause, depending on what concessions the West is willing to make.

There should be no illusions that a just peace can be bought by showing weakness. Peace is a reward only for the strong.

Western concessions meet Russian demands. From a Russian perspective, a (temporary) peace will make sense if the agreement strengthens its strategic advantage. Russia has already signaled what these are: No Ukrainian NATO membership; the freezing of the front line along the administrative borders of the Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions as defined in the Russian constitution (and consequently, the territorial waters and exclusive economic zone around Crimea and all of the Sea of Azov); “demilitarize” Ukraine; the “removal” of President Zelensky from office; and not least, the lifting of Western sanctions. This is (with some exceptions) more or less according to the plan proposed by Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy for the Russo-Ukrainian war.

Additionally, Russia will likely insist the US reverses the policy allowing Ukraine to use Western-provided long-range weapons to strike into Russia and institute a demilitarized zone to force Ukraine to move its defensive positions further west.

All of this will not only strengthen Russia’s likelihood of success in its next attack on Ukraine but will also help to divide NATO. Poland, the UK, France, the Netherlands, and the Nordic and Baltic countries will likely recognize the folly of such a plan.

Ukraine will remain vulnerable to future attacks. A peace plan acceptable to Russia will leave Ukraine as a gray zone country (non-NATO member) and without any security guarantees worth the paper they are written upon. Equally important, once the sense of urgency is gone, Western support for Ukraine will probably decrease. Ukraine might find itself unable to fund and equip the huge standing army its future security depends upon – knowing that it has less territory to trade to absorb the next assault at a time and place of Russia’s choosing.

The next assault will destroy what’s left of US credibility. Russia is after all waging war to achieve strategic parity with the US and China. The so-called “Russia-Ukraine war” was always a confrontation between Russia and the West. Western democracies are Russia’s enemy. It is reflected in its strategic documents; its stated aim and objectives; its threat perception; its public statements and rhetoric; its ultimatums, its nuclear threats and not least, its aggressive actions.

Collapsing a US-imposed peace plan, guaranteeing the security of Ukraine, would undermine US credibility and global standing. It is in Russia’s interest to make sure that the peace is temporary and to embarrass the US by demonstrating Russian military “might.”

Good faith or not: The test

President Zelensky has said, “There should be no illusions that a just peace can be bought by showing weakness. Peace is a reward only for the strong.

Having experienced the costs of the US and European weakness first-hand, Ukraine should know. Hence its “peace through strength” approach. Ukraine’s experience, however, is shared by all European countries that remember occupation and the horrendous costs of oppression.

Only the ignorant or the extreme cynics seek negotiations with Russia from a position of weakness.

The peace through strength approach must be introduced in a peace agreement to test Russia’s willingness to negotiate in good faith. If Russia truly wants peace, it will not object to:

Ukrainian NATO membership. Membership in a defensive alliance that has never attacked either the USSR or Russia will constrain Ukraine.
NATO forces being deployed as peacekeepers along the front line. This will stop Ukraine from trying to liberate the occupied territories.
NATO forces being deployed across Ukraine. This will ensure strategic transparency as well as the quickest possible introduction of NATO standards across the Ukrainian Security and Defense sector to ensure Ukrainian compliance.

These measures might help convince Ukraine to make compromises without putting its future existence at peril. It would also help establish hope for a future peaceful return of the occupied territories by diplomatic means (e.g. gradual lifting of sanctions).

“I insist that no leader in the world has the right to negotiate with Putin on behalf of Ukraine. We have never delegated this mandate to anyone:” President Zelensky.

Will Russia accept or not?

Negotiations cannot solve the war’s cause: Russia’s ‘Great Power’ ambitions. This can only be denied through military power.

Putin will reject any peace negotiations plan proposed by Trump that does not account for Russia’s so-called “security concerns.” Russia has repeatedly claimed that it is ready to resume “negotiations” if Ukraine understands the “realities on the ground“ and accepts Putin’s preconditions.

Ukraine is not the enemy but a prerequisite for Russia’s Great Power aspirations. From a Russian perception, it is a fundamental war that it cannot afford to lose. It will not give up its attempt to subjugate Ukraine. If Russia accepts a peace plan, it will be because the peace plan lays the foundation for its future victory.

If Russia accepts a US-proposed peace plan, bearing in mind that the US lacks strategic leverage, Europe and the US are in trouble. It means Trump has given Putin what Russia demands, and he will be in a much better position to renew his assault on Ukraine in the future. Equally important, the West will once again have demonstrated its feebleness.

A Russian objection will demonstrate its aggressive intent. Ukrainian NATO membership would effectively curtail its Great Power ambitions. Not only would the Alliance guarantee Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty but Ukraine would also greatly strengthen NATO militarily.

“I insist that no leader in the world has the right to negotiate with Putin on behalf of Ukraine. We have never delegated this mandate to anyone:” President Zelensky said on Dec. 17.

At the end of the day, the US needs to sell a peace plan to both Putin and Zelensky. Ukraine will not accept a plan that will lead to its future defeat. Threatening to bring the defeat forward by stopping aid for defense will hardly convince Ukraine to give in.

Crucially, the US must also convince its allies that this is in their interest. Europe is, however, all too aware of the dramatic consequences a Ukrainian defeat entails for the continent.

A peace agreement without security guarantees will further undermine our collective security.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.

kyivpost.com · by Hans Petter Midttun · December 21, 2024

19. Happy Holidays From SWJ!!

(I will continue to post my daily National Security and Korean News and Commentary there through holidays as always).

Happy Holidays From SWJ!!

by SWJ Staff

12.21.2024 at 06:00am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2024/12/21/happy-holidays-from-swj/

Dear Small Wars Journal Community,

As the year draws to a close, we want to take a moment to thank you for your incredible support and engagement since the relaunch of our website on Veterans Day 2024. This relaunch marked an exciting new chapter for Small Wars Journal, and over the past month, the overwhelmingly positive feedback from our readers has reinforced the importance of our shared mission: advancing the discourse at the speed of relevance. Your encouragement, thoughtful comments, and continued readership inspire us to strive for even greater heights in the coming year.

As we prepare to celebrate the holiday season, we will be taking a short publishing break from December 21, 2024, to January 6, 2025. During this time, our team will step back to recharge, reflect on the past year, and prepare for the exciting initiatives we have planned for 2025. We won’t be publishing new articles during this period, but we will still be actively accepting submissions. If you’ve been considering sharing your insights, research, or perspectives, this is the perfect time to submit your work.

Looking back on this year, we’re proud of the robust discussions sparked by recent featured articles and the dynamic contributions from authors and readers alike. Highlights such as “Taiwan Resilience and Resistance Operating Concept” by Jeremiah “Lumpy” Lumbaca (Our #1 article for most reads), “Proxy is Not a Pejorative” by Amos Fox, and “Prosecuting Putin’s Proxies: How Prosecutions are Reshaping the Fight against Russian Irregular Forces” by Candace Rondeaux are just a few examples of the high-caliber content our community produces and supports. As we move forward, we are committed to maintaining this standard of excellence and continuing to provide a platform for the critical conversations that shape the future of irregular warfare and beyond.

This holiday season, we also encourage you to stay connected with us. Follow us on social media for updates, thought-provoking content, and reminders about our initiatives, including exclusive benefits for paid members like ad-free viewing and early access to select articles. If you’re not already subscribed, consider joining our membership program to support our mission and gain access to these perks.

As we pause for the holidays, we want to extend our deepest gratitude to you, our readers, for making Small Wars Journal the vibrant and impactful community it is today. Your engagement fuels our passion for this work, and we look forward to building on this momentum in the new year.

On behalf of the entire Small Wars Journal team, we wish you and your loved ones a joyful and peaceful holiday season. We’ll be back in January, ready to continue this journey with you.

Sincerely,

Dr. Jan Gleiman

Editor-in-Chief – Small Wars Journal

Professor of Practice – Future Security Initiative – Arizona State Univesity

P.S. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook to stay in the loop! Become a member and sign up for email alerts.

About The Author

SWJ Staff
SWJ Staff searches the internet daily for articles and posts that we think are of great interests to our readers.
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20. Report: US Special Operations Forces leading the charge against China and Russia in global power competition.

Report: US Special Operations Forces leading the charge against China and Russia in global power competition.

https://www.armyrecognition.com/focus-analysis-conflicts/army/armies-in-the-world/report-us-special-operations-forces-leading-the-charge-against-china-and-russia-in-global-power-competition

21 Dec, 2024 - 16:07 Armies in the world

U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOFs) have long been recognized for their vital role in counterterrorism operations, but their evolving significance in addressing challenges posed by great power competition with China and Russia is increasingly evident. According to a report by the U.S. Department of Defense on December 19, 2024, Chris Maier, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, emphasized this expanded role during a recent event at the Center for a New American Security, highlighting the critical contributions of SOFs in this broader strategic context.

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U.S. Special Forces Soldiers conduct vehicle movement during a Panzer Kaserne, Germany training event. (Picture source: U.S. DoD)

Maier underscored how U.S. SOFs (Special Operations Forces) operate within a whole-of-government framework, enabling them to play a pivotal role in fostering alliances, strengthening partnerships, and providing early warnings of emerging threats. He noted the global reach of special operations, saying, “Our special operations enterprise is in many different places. This gives special operators a chance to reassure allies and partners and also a chance to give a heads-up when they see things going amiss.” The agility and innovative culture of SOFs make them uniquely suited for the complex dynamics of great power competition, where nonconventional and hybrid threats abound.

The evolution of SOFs' mission reflects broader changes in U.S. defense strategy. While they were once predominantly focused on counterterrorism, their role in irregular warfare has gained prominence. Maier noted that in the 2018 National Defense Strategy, irregular warfare was relegated to an annex, but the 2022 iteration fully integrated it into the core strategy. This change highlights the recognition of asymmetric operations as a key component of modern defense. "Asymmetric and nonconventional operations are now side by side with conventional aspects of the strategy," Maier said, pointing to the growing alignment between SOF capabilities and broader military objectives. He acknowledged the complex terminology used to describe unconventional warfare—terms such as irregular, hybrid, gray zone, and asymmetric—all of which signify the nuanced challenges of differentiating these operations from traditional warfare.

A significant aspect of U.S. SOF operations in the current era is their role in countering China's multifaceted strategies. Maier identified China as the primary pacing challenge, citing its use of both conventional and unconventional tools. The Belt and Road Initiative, a cornerstone of China’s diplomatic and security strategy, exemplifies its hybrid approach. Similarly, China's actions in the South and West China Seas, including the deployment of maritime militias, are indicative of its irregular warfare tactics. These militias, though not conventional military forces, exert significant coercive influence. Maier emphasized the importance of partnerships with regional allies, particularly the Philippines, in countering these tactics. "At the end of the day, a lot of this type of activity is dissuaded with the ability to put it in the open," he said, underscoring the importance of transparency and exposure in disrupting coercive operations.

Taiwan remains a critical flashpoint in U.S.-China relations, and Maier stressed the importance of deterrence in maintaining stability in the region. The U.S. commitment to the Taiwan Relations Act and other agreements aims to prevent any unilateral changes to the status quo through force. “We’re carefully calibrating what we’re doing to establish deterrence and dissuade a military operation into Taiwan,” Maier said. The South China Sea is another area of tension, with China's excessive territorial claims and assertive actions posing challenges to regional stability.

While China dominates much of the strategic discourse, Russia's activities also remain a significant concern. U.S. SOFs contribute to NATO's resilience efforts in Europe, countering Russian hybrid tactics, disinformation campaigns, and proxy operations. These efforts are integral to bolstering allied defenses and maintaining stability in Eastern Europe.

Special operations forces within the United States military are organized across several branches, each with distinct missions and capabilities. The U.S. Army Special Forces, commonly known as the Green Berets, specialize in unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, and counterinsurgency. They are highly skilled in working with partner forces to build capacity and conduct operations in contested environments. The Navy SEALs, part of the Naval Special Warfare Command, are experts in maritime operations, counterterrorism, and direct action missions, often operating in hostile and politically sensitive regions. The Air Force’s Special Tactics units provide critical support in combat search and rescue, precision airstrikes, and battlefield control. The Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC), also known as Raiders, focuses on direct action, special reconnaissance, and building relationships with foreign militaries. The U.S. Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment is a highly trained light infantry unit specializing in direct action and airfield seizure, while the Delta Force and SEAL Team Six, both Tier 1 units, conduct high-risk counterterrorism and hostage rescue missions.

The adaptability of these forces ensures they remain at the forefront of addressing emerging threats, including those posed by great power competitors. Maier noted the ongoing evolution of the U.S. defense strategy, with integrated deterrence as its cornerstone. This approach spans all domains—land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace—and leverages both conventional and unconventional capabilities to address the full spectrum of challenges. "This is about deterrence,” Maier said, adding that the strategy increasingly emphasizes competition and crisis management as integral to warfighting.

With their unique blend of agility, innovation, and expertise, U.S. Special operations forces have transitioned from being solely the vanguard of counterterrorism to a central element in the U.S. approach to maintaining global stability and countering aggression from major powers like China and Russia. Their role in modern warfare is indispensable as the global security environment continues to evolve.

21. The Swedes Tried to Warn Us

A sober analysis.

Excerpts:

Acemoglu and Robinson see the rising tide against liberal democracy in America as a reaction to our political failure to deal with festering economic problems. In their view, our institutions have become less inclusive, and our economic growth now benefits a smaller fraction of the population. Some of the best economic research over the last few decades confirms this. Wage growth for most has stagnated. Social mobility has plummeted. Our labor market has been split into two: the college-educated thrive, and those without a degree watch their opportunities shrivel. Automation and trade with China destroyed millions of jobs that once gave them good wages and dignity.

These conditions have been building. When asked years ago to explain anti-democratic act-outs like the January 6th, Acemoglu said: “I don’t think January 6th was a singular day of failure. What surprises me is why it took until January 6th.”

The Swedes Tried to Warn Us | Washington Monthly

The economists who won the Nobel Prize see political institutions as key to economic vitality and fear political extremism when inequality rises. Sound familiar?

by John Austin

December 18, 2024

The Washington Monthly · by John Austin · December 18, 2024

Sweden’s leaders were sending us a message.

The members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences who confer the Nobel Prize in Economics often use the award to focus global attention on something they think neglected. Earlier this autumn, the Committee awarded Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson the Nobel Prize in Economics for their work, underscoring that countries and democracies with severe economic inequities undermine citizen confidence. When the economies of democratic nations stop working for the public, they often turn to leaders willing to overthrow the institutions that undergird the system.

In their seminal work, Why Nations Fail, Acemoglu and Robinson demonstrate that well-functioning political institutions that deliver shared economic growth were the prime determinants of national economic prosperity. Such “inclusive institutions” include “representative legislatures, good public schools, open markets, and strong patent systems—inclusive institutions (that function to) educate their populations. Invest in infrastructure. Fight poverty and disease. Encourage innovation,“ notes NPR’s Greg Rosalsky of Planet Money.

A decade ago, when they wrote Why Nations Fail, the authors celebrated America—despite our misdeeds—as a success: “a place with free and fair elections and world-renowned universities; a haven for immigrants, new ideas and new business models; and a country responsive to social movements for greater equality. Lucky for America—and its economy—its inclusive institutions have had a helluva run.”

But the message sent by voters on Election Day is that our institutions aren’t working. When citizens feel the “system” isn’t working, they welcome someone who will throw over it.

These economists (and the Swedes trying to get our attention with their Nobel Prize award) saw this coming.

NPR’s Rosalky reported they told him as much months ago:

Acemoglu and Robinson see the rising tide against liberal democracy in America as a reaction to our political failure to deal with festering economic problems. In their view, our institutions have become less inclusive, and our economic growth now benefits a smaller fraction of the population. Some of the best economic research over the last few decades confirms this. Wage growth for most has stagnated. Social mobility has plummeted. Our labor market has been split into two: the college-educated thrive, and those without a degree watch their opportunities shrivel. Automation and trade with China destroyed millions of jobs that once gave them good wages and dignity.

These conditions have been building. When asked years ago to explain anti-democratic act-outs like the January 6th, Acemoglu said: “I don’t think January 6th was a singular day of failure. What surprises me is why it took until January 6th.”

Similar conditions and working-class voter frustrations are boiling over in democracies worldwide. As I wrote earlier this year—2024 is the so-called “Year of the Elections,” with democracy on the ballot in over 70 countries–we have seen a variety of outcomes. However, the results have one thing in common: they are essentially a response to untreated economic inequalities—fundamental gaps in opportunity within countries that are often still growing. Economic unease and anger at a system that doesn’t deliver cause voters to push back against those in power—even being willing to support anti-democratic extremists. The support for right-wing ethnonationalist leaders and their policies is robust in regions within democracies that once boasted a solid middle class and vibrant communities but now see relative decay and decline—like much of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

Trump’s victory points to this working-class backlash as anxious voters sent a message that cuts across ethnic and racial lines. Even before Election Day, Jack Herrera noted for Politico:

Trump made gains with Latinos for the same reason he performed so well with white voters in factory towns across Pennsylvania in 2016: economic anxiety. The real estate billionaire can galvanize working-class resentment in a way few other politicians can. Almost 80 percent of Latinos are working class, and many of them are proving amenable to Trump’s core populist messages: that they’ve been cut in line by undocumented immigrants and that Democrats are out-of-touch elites who send jobs overseas

The irony (and tragedy) of the election is that the Biden-Harris administration was doing the things that, over time, might change the dynamics. Anxious working-class voters blamed Biden-Harris for high inflation, which is political Kryptonite for incumbents. (Higher prices were not caused by the Biden-Harris policies but by the pandemic, which led to a worldwide price surge.)

The Biden-Harris administration’s policies have been part of a remarkable convergence of work across our democracies to close yawning economic inequities within countries—including through their largest in U.S. history investments in heartland region infrastructure, science, and innovation, education (the very ingredients the Nobel winners say are essential for shared prosperity and faith in democracy!).

Trump may try to walk it all back. Let’s hope not.

His victory underscores that bringing opportunities to people and places that aren’t lacking them remains urgent work. Populations whipsawed by change will continue to support populists and nationalists who offer protection from disorienting dynamics.

We may have finally heard what the Swedes were trying to tell us.

The Washington Monthly · by John Austin · December 18, 2024

22. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations Touts Growing Importance of Irregular Warfare

Secretary Maier's CNAS interview is getting a bit of press.

Note that the author Mr. McCArdle, references an older definition of irregular warfare and not the current Joint Staff or Army definitions (or my favorite the congressional description).

Here are the current definitions and description:

Joint Definition of IW JP –1 Warfighting(August 2023)

IW is a form of warfare where states and non-state actors campaign to assure or coerce states or other groups through indirect, non-attributable, or asymmetric activities, either as the primary approach or in concert with conventional warfare.

Army Definition of IW – FM 3-0 Operations (October 2022)

Irregular warfare is the overt, clandestine, and covert employment of military and non-military capabilities across multiple domains by state and non-state actors through methods other than military domination of an adversary, either as the primary approach or in concert with conventional warfare.

Congress in the 2017 NDAA: Irregular Warfare is conducted “in support of predetermined United States policy and military objectives conducted by, with, and through regular forces, irregular forces, groups, and individuals participating in competition between state and non-state actors short of traditional armed conflict.”

Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations Touts Growing Importance of Irregular Warfare

sofrep.com · by Guy D. McCardle · December 20, 2024

1 day ago

Defining Irregular Warfare

Irregular warfare (IW) is a type of conflict defined as “a violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant populations.” It is a unique form of warfare that does not rely on traditional military confrontations but instead employs indirect and asymmetric methods. Rather than engaging in head-on battles, IW focuses on exploiting weaknesses in an adversary’s systems through tactics such as subversion, propaganda, and unconventional operations.

The primary goal of irregular warfare is to erode an adversary’s power, influence, and will to fight. This type of conflict is inherently long-term, testing the patience, endurance, and strategic resolve of nations and their allies. Unlike conventional wars, which often have clear timelines and objectives, IW stretches over years or even decades, requiring a sustained effort from all parties involved.

Irregular warfare covers a wide range of activities. These include insurgency, counterinsurgency, unconventional warfare, terrorism, counterterrorism, foreign internal defense, and stabilization operations. Together, these operations form a complex and dynamic strategy designed to shape the battlefield and achieve political or military objectives without direct confrontation.

One of the most critical aspects of IW is its population-centric nature. Success often depends on gaining legitimacy and influence over relevant populations. This makes civilians a central focus of the conflict, as they are not only affected by the war but also play a significant role in its outcome. Building trust, winning hearts and minds, and influencing public opinion are vital components of IW strategies.

Irregular warfare is also characterized by its coercive nature, where actors seek to either build legitimacy for their cause or erode the legitimacy of their adversaries. This involves leveraging propaganda, psychological operations, and societal pressures to shift public perception and political power. The approach is multifaceted, blending military, economic, political, and social efforts to create a comprehensive attack on societies and their institutions.

Unlike conventional warfare, which aims to defeat an adversary’s armed forces in battle, or nuclear warfare, which focuses on large-scale destruction and deterrence, IW provides militarily weaker actors with a means to challenge stronger states. By employing subversion, deception, and societal mobilization, these actors can effectively undermine more powerful adversaries without relying on traditional military superiority.

In today’s global landscape, irregular warfare plays a critical role in shaping defense strategies. Adversaries increasingly use methods like cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, and proxy conflicts to disrupt and destabilize their targets. Understanding and countering these tactics require a comprehensive approach that combines military operations with diplomatic, economic, and informational tools. As the lines between war and peace blur, IW remains a vital element in addressing the complex challenges of modern conflict.

Defining Irregular Warfare

Irregular warfare (IW) is a type of conflict defined as “a violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant populations.” It is a unique form of warfare that does not rely on traditional military confrontations but instead employs indirect and asymmetric methods. Rather than engaging in head-on battles, IW focuses on exploiting weaknesses in an adversary’s systems through tactics such as subversion, propaganda, and unconventional operations.

Institutionalizing Irregular Warfare as a Core Competency

Institutionalizing irregular warfare (IW) as a core competency has become a significant focus for the U.S. Department of Defense in recent years. The aim is to ensure that the entire Joint Force—not just Special Operations Forces—is prepared to tackle the challenges of IW across all levels of competition and conflict. This approach involves breaking the reactive “boom and bust” cycle that has historically characterized IW capabilities. Instead of ramping up resources only during times of crisis, the goal is to maintain a consistent baseline of expertise and readiness.

The Department of Defense is adopting a whole-of-force approach to institutionalize IW. This means integrating IW capabilities into both conventional and special operations forces to ensure they are equipped to respond to modern threats. A key part of this effort involves education and training. The Department emphasizes providing continuous access to IW-related training, doctrine, and educational resources for military officers, enlisted personnel, and civilians alike. Additionally, the strategy focuses on resource sustainability by developing cost-effective and efficient ways to achieve strategic success in IW. By adopting a proactive stance, the Department aims to control the pace of adversarial competition rather than merely reacting to it.

However, there are challenges in fully institutionalizing IW. For instance, the 2022 National Defense Strategy only references IW twice, suggesting that its integration into broader defense policies may still be inconsistent. Organizationally, concerns have been raised about the establishment of the Irregular Warfare Center within the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, as it could fragment the development of IW expertise. On the positive side, Congress has authorized the creation of an Irregular Warfare Functional Center (IWFC) to enhance understanding and knowledge of IW across the Department of Defense.

Looking ahead, there are recommendations to strengthen the institutionalization of IW. Consolidating IW knowledge development under U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) could centralize expertise and improve efficiency. Ensuring high-level accountability for the IWFC is also essential, potentially involving senior leaders who are directly responsible for IW operations overseas. Furthermore, continuing to invest in human capital is critical, as skilled and adaptable personnel remain the greatest competitive advantage in irregular warfare.

By making IW a core competency, the Department of Defense aims to build a more agile, cost-effective, and sustainable approach to addressing irregular threats. This proactive strategy will help the U.S. compete effectively against adversaries and maintain its edge in an increasingly complex global security environment.

Special Operations Forces in the Gray Zone

Maier noted that special operations forces (SOF) are uniquely positioned to operate in the “gray zone” between peace and conventional warfare, engaging in activities that deter adversaries and shape the strategic environment without escalating to full-scale conflict. He stated,

“Special operations forces have been crucial in U.S. counterterrorism efforts, but they also have a place in what is also known as great power competition.”

Collaboration and Partnerships: A Strategic Imperative

The U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) places a strong emphasis on collaborations and partnerships with allied nations to enhance global security and improve interoperability. These partnerships are essential for tackling complex international challenges and strengthening collective capabilities. Through the International Operations Office, USSOCOM works closely with partner nations and industry to develop and deploy specialized capabilities tailored for Special Operations Forces (SOF). This includes activities like exchanging information and equipment, conducting technical experiments, collaborating on capability development, and evaluating operational interoperability.

USSOCOM also facilitates Foreign Military Sales, coordinating agreements between governments to transfer defense articles and services to allies. Subject Matter Expert Exchanges (SMEEs) are another vital aspect, bringing together SOF units from different countries to share knowledge, tactics, and build trust. Events like SOF Week provide further opportunities for the global SOF community to discuss challenges, share innovations, and collaborate on new initiatives.

Recent collaborative efforts highlight the success of these partnerships. For instance, during Tropical Dagger 2024 in Jamaica, U.S. and Canadian forces joined Caribbean SOF units to train on troop leadership and operational planning. Additionally, a multinational capabilities demonstration during SOF Week involved commandos from 10 countries showcasing their ability to work together in scenario-based exercises. USSOCOM leadership continues to emphasize the value of the global SOF network, which provides unique insights into global events and accelerates the development of advanced capabilities.

These partnerships bring numerous benefits. Regular joint exercises and exchanges enhance interoperability, allowing allied SOF units to operate seamlessly together. Collaborative efforts also promote the sharing of best practices and innovative solutions to common challenges. Building personal relationships during these events fosters trust and mutual understanding between forces, while collective problem-solving enables SOF units to tackle global security issues more effectively. By prioritizing international partnerships, USSOCOM is strengthening a global SOF network that is more resilient and adaptable to diverse security challenges worldwide.

Countering Irregular Tactics in Great Power Competition

In the context of great power competition, Maier highlighted that adversaries are increasingly employing irregular methods, such as cyber operations, disinformation campaigns, and proxy forces, to challenge U.S. interests. He asserted that the U.S. must be prepared to counter these tactics with a comprehensive irregular warfare approach that integrates military and non-military tools.

Organizational Changes to Enhance Irregular Warfare

Organizational changes aimed at enhancing irregular warfare (IW) have become a critical focus for military institutions as they adapt to evolving threats and operating environments. One of the primary goals is to institutionalize IW as a core competency across the Department of Defense (DoD), ensuring that both conventional and Special Operations Forces (SOF) are equipped to address these challenges.

A whole-of-force approach has also emerged, emphasizing the involvement of the entire force, not just SOF, in IW-related activities. This includes continuous access to specialized training, doctrine, and education for military personnel and civilians alike.

Adapting to new threats has also become a priority. With a shift in focus from counterterrorism to addressing challenges posed by near-peer adversaries like China and Russia, the DoD is working to take a proactive stance. This involves controlling the tempo of adversarial competition through prevention and early intervention rather than reacting to crises. Additionally, a whole-of-government approach is being promoted, encouraging collaboration between military and non-military agencies to tackle the multifaceted nature of modern threats.

Technological advancements are another key area of focus. Efforts are being made to modernize military procurement systems and attract the talent needed to handle future conflicts. At the same time, cultural shifts within the military aim to dismantle rigid organizational structures and mindsets that may hinder adaptation to IW challenges. International partnerships also play a crucial role in this strategy, with USSOCOM emphasizing collaborations with allied nations to enhance global security and improve interoperability in IW contexts.

Despite these efforts, significant challenges remain. For instance, as noted above, the 2022 National Defense Strategy only mentions irregular warfare twice, suggesting that the concept has not yet been fully integrated into overarching defense strategies. Additionally, concerns have been raised about the potential fragmentation of IW expertise across different organizational structures, which could dilute its effectiveness.

To address these issues, several recommendations have been proposed. These include consolidating IW knowledge development within U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), ensuring high-level accountability for IW initiatives, and prioritizing investments in human capital as the primary competitive advantage in IW. By embracing these changes, military institutions aim to create a more agile and resilient force capable of addressing the complex challenges posed by irregular threats in today’s dynamic security environment.

A Strategic Recalibration for Modern Threats

Maier’s remarks underscore a strategic recalibration within the DoD, recognizing that the evolving security landscape requires a versatile and adaptive approach. By embedding irregular warfare capabilities across the force, the U.S. aims to effectively navigate the complexities of modern conflicts and maintain a competitive edge against both state and non-state adversaries.

Summing Up: Sustained Investment in Irregular Warfare

In conclusion, the integration of irregular warfare into the National Defense Strategy reflects a nuanced understanding of contemporary threats and the necessity for a multifaceted response. As Maier aptly stated, “We must not—and will not—repeat the ‘boom and bust’ cycle that has left the United States underprepared for irregular warfare in both Great Power Competition and conflict.” This commitment signals a sustained investment in the capabilities required to address the full spectrum of challenges in today’s dynamic security environment.

As someone who’s seen what happens when the truth is distorted, I know how unfair it feels when those who’ve sacrificed the most lose their voice. At SOFREP, our veteran journalists, who once fought for freedom, now fight to bring you unfiltered, real-world intel. But without your support, we risk losing this vital source of truth. By subscribing, you’re not just leveling the playing field—you’re standing with those who’ve already given so much, ensuring they continue to serve by delivering stories that matter. Every subscription means we can hire more veterans and keep their hard-earned knowledge in the fight. Don’t let their voices be silenced. Please consider subscribing now.

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Brandon Webb former Navy SEAL, Bestselling Author and Editor-in-Chief

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Transforming in Contact: Army Assessing What Success Looks Like

https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2024/12/20/transforming-in-contact-army-assessing-what-success-looks-like

12/20/2024

By Sean Carberry

Army photo

For the 12 people in the D.C. metro area who weren’t sardined into the Walter E. Washington Convention Center for the Association of the United States Army’s annual extravaganza in October, the theme this year was “Transforming for a Complex World.” Central to many of the panels was discussion of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George’s “transforming in contact” initiative.

For iteration 1.0 of transforming in contact, the Army tapped three brigades to experiment with new technology such as communications systems, small drones, loitering munitions and new Infantry Squad Vehicles. The units are also experimenting with new formations, evolving from infantry brigade combat teams to either light or mobile brigade combat teams.

The overriding goal of it all is “increased lethality for our formations,” Maj. Gen. Joe Ryan, assistant deputy chief of staff, G-3/5/7, said at the conference.

The “in contact” element isn’t in contact with an enemy, it’s contact with time and money — specifically 18 to 24 months, correlating with the execution and budgeting years of the five-year Program Objective Memorandum cycle, he said.

At the time of the conference, the 2nd Brigade Mobile Combat Team of the 101st Airborne Division had completed its transformation rotation at Fort Johnson, Louisiana. The 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division was conducting its rotation in Hawaii and 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division was preparing for its rotation in Germany.

“We think from an environmental perspective, that gives us about the breadth that we’ll need to really say for sure where it is we’re going to go, and then we are going to try to move really, really fast to codify those requirements … so that we can deliver into a broader set of formations,” Ryan said.

“I don’t know how broad we’re going to go. The appetite is going to be up to Army senior leaders, and it’s going to be dependent on available structures too,” he continued. “But the equipment is one thing, the people and the formations are another.” The 1.0 formations are prototypes, and nothing “in terms of formations is captured in official Army structure, but we’re letting them task orient to see what works.”

That leads to questions the Army is wrestling with and for which the service doesn’t yet have all the answers: How will the transformation be assessed and evaluated for success? How will the Army avoid creating a panoply of bespoke units, each with its own drones, networks and vehicles? Will the Army rein in kit options to achieve some level of economies of scale with industry? What budget or other authorities will be needed to institutionalize the transformation?

Adding to the complexity, Army Special Operations Command and the 2nd Cavalry Regiment in Germany have also been experimenting with new communications and network technologies outside of the formal transforming in contact initiative.

“We’re bringing in all these efforts — these separate, disparate efforts — that have arguably advanced our innovative culture and spirit and some testing along some lines — but it’s been very disparate and very uncontrolled — and so transform in contact helps us get a little bit of institutional control,” he said. “We don’t want to stifle it; we want to understand it so we can get [the] best product.

“Otherwise, it’s just innovation for innovation’s sake,” he continued.

In addition to innovation, transforming in contact has involved a certain amount of improvisation to work within the existing 2024 and the pending 2025 budgets, Ryan said.

The Army reprogrammed $15 million in fiscal year 2024 from the canceled Shadow drone program to allow each of the three brigades to purchase $5 million in commercial drones and accessories off the Defense Innovation Unit’s Blue List of preapproved systems, he explained.

“Every single other piece of kit we gave them was in the pipeline somewhere, and it was either a signature modernization effort or it was another effort that our acquisition partners had in the offing that we simply reallocated or redirected to get the mass and the density in these formations that we wanted to really give them a good test,” he said.

Alex Miller, chief technology officer for the Army chief of staff, said the service hasn’t figured out the economic model for institutionalizing transforming in contact yet.

“We just haven’t. … We’re getting great advice from industry — in a not self-aggrandizing way,” he said in an interview. “We’re getting great advice from our acquisition teammates, who have been doing the acquisition core things in terms of production and scale for the Army. They have a wealth of knowledge in terms of, ‘Hey, here’s how you get economies of scale.’ And we’re trying to say, ‘Hey, how do we bend it to sort of find the right inflection point between economies of scale and adaptability to mission?’

“There is a world that we are now moving into where different brigades have different solutions, because the goal is not the box, right? To fall into a ‘Moneyball’ analogy, we want to ‘buy runs,’” Miller said.

“Moneyball” is the book and movie about how the general manager of the Oakland A’s adopted a data-driven approach to building a baseball team on a small budget and found value in players overlooked by the subjective scouting approaches used by other teams.

“I do not care how we get the runs, as long as it is affordable, legal, ethical, moral,” Miller said.

The 2nd Cavalry Regiment “architecture is probably going to be good for them, because they also know that when we go into other countries, there’s different rules for what we can turn on and when we can turn on. … That’s different for Hawaii. That’s different for a multi-domain task force going into the Philippines,” he continued.

“We will have a heterogeneous architecture, but the goal is buy runs — like make sure that we can actually share data between commanders, commanders can talk, we can execute fires and maneuver,” he said.

To “buy runs,” the Army is driving on two lines: “Agile funding as a mechanism … and then flexibility within our portfolios, such that the changes, the institutional changes that the chief is driving for, are really institutional, and they don’t leave with him,” Miller said.

“Agile funding is not about creating slush funds,” Miller said, noting that Congress will kill anything that resembles such. “It is not about creating pots of money to do anything with. It is very focused up front on three categories: counter-UAS, UAS and electromagnetic warfare, and the thought process is within each of those activities, there are discrete actions we can take.”

For example, counter-UAS requires sensing, deciding and acting, he said. “What we don’t want to do anymore is have 10 or 11 different budget lines within the ‘sense’ that give no flexibility to choose the right sensor or to get rid of the wrong sensor, because more often than not, we’re stuck because of funding lines with the wrong kit.”

George has met with the Defense Department comptroller, secretary of the Army and deputy secretary of defense to discuss changes to financial management regulations needed in fiscal year 2025, Miller said.

“It might sound parochial because this is one service saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got to change,’” he said. However, the Army has an ally in the Defense Innovation Unit “because they also need flexibility if they’re going to field the systems that we’re partnered with at the scale they want to achieve.”

Ultimately, the goal of agile funding boils down to, “can we shoot, move and communicate within our own budget, rather than being stuck with the same thing for five, 10, 15 years?” he said.

Will that mean transforming in contact systems turn into programs of record?

“There’s some healthy debate here,” Miller said. “Normally as a heretic to the system, I would say no programs of record, but I also recognize that’s where your funding is, that’s consolidation of funding,” he said.

“What it will probably look and feel like if we know that we’re successful is you’ll have lots of systems of record … things that everyone can use,” he continued. There will be some common hardware and software that will be centrally managed at a program executive office or by the chief information officer, who is a big player in this regard, he added.

“The other things might just be sort of program of record in name and function, but inside of there is a range of actors,” he said. That is what Other Transaction Authorities are really good at bringing about. That’s what the Middle Tier of Acquisition is good at doing, he added.

One solution to providing manageable flexibility is through “commodity buys,” he said. The idea is like the Defense Innovation Unit’s Blue List for small drones where DIU conducts evaluations to approve commercial products that units can purchase without going through additional paperwork. The Army could seek to apply that approach to other items like phones and network devices, Miller said.

That kind of enterprise or commodity purchasing “will hopefully tamp down the 1,000 points of light or 1,000 flowers blooming, because otherwise you will end up with 1,000 highly optimized solutions for 1,000 different units,” he said.

A central element of the effort is reforming or in some cases reversing the requirements process. The service is trying to find the sweet spot of slimming down requirements so the process is quicker, and the result is no longer an overly prescriptive requirement that takes years to meet and is obsolete when fielded.

But eliminating existing requirements is just as important and will be a measure of success, Miller said.

“What things have we stopped doing, whether it’s programs or lines?” he asked. “And then, in terms of the economics of it all, what hard choices did we have to make where we might not have wanted to?”

Miller said the decision to cancel the Shadow — which had an operational readiness rate less than 50 percent — should not have required the chief and secretary of the Army to intervene and should have been decided at levels far below.

“Everybody tells the chief his superpower is requirements,” Miller added. “His actual superpower is ability to decertify requirements, because that tells the Army what they don’t need to do anymore.”

While iteration 1.0 of transforming in contact focused on communications, small UAS and loitering munitions, 2.0 will have two divisions, two armored brigade combat teams, two Stryker brigade combat teams and several additional units in the Guard and Reserves experiment with new formations and technology including mobile power generation and storage and robotics capabilities.

While the Mission Command Center of Excellence is the oversight organization for capturing and processing the lessons from transforming in contact, what the metrics for success will be is an open question.

“We will know we are successful if soldiers have regained trust and confidence in the [program managers] they have to talk to,” Miller said, noting that the existing structure and distribution of program executive offices and program managers does not always align with soldier needs, and soldiers often don’t interact with program managers.

The Army will know that it has made good progress when soldiers say, “Oh yeah, they’re helping me. … They’re listening to my feedback. I see my feedback implemented in these changes,” he said.

Moving from 300-page to single-digit page requirements documents will be another sign of success, Miller said.

“A year from now, we should be able to look in the mirror and go, ‘Hey, the changes that we have made stuck … and here is the metric by which we assess that they’ve stuck,’” he said. “Whether it’s … changes to the budget because that’s the number one indicator, but two, changes to process inside this building and changes to how … our units and our soldiers fight and use the capability.” ND

24. Trump wants NATO members to increase defense spending to 5 percent of GDP: FT

(LEAD) Trump wants NATO members to increase defense spending to 5 percent of GDP: FT | Yonhap News Agency

en.yna.co.kr · by Song Sang-ho · December 21, 2024

(ATTN: ADDS more info in 3rd para)

By Song Sang-ho

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 (Yonhap) -- Incoming U.S. President Donald Trump's team has told European officials that he will demand North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member states raise their defense spending to 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), the Financial Times reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.

Trump's closest foreign policy aides shared his intentions in discussions with senior European officials this month, the newspaper said, amid expectations that he could call on South Korea and other allies to increase their defense spending and take greater responsibilities for their security.

Currently, NATO has a guideline calling for its member states to commit 2 percent of their GDP to defense spending. The guideline was agreed upon by leaders of the NATO members in 2014.

Seoul and other U.S. allies have been bracing for the possibility that when he returns to office next month, Trump could reorient America's foreign policy based on his America First credo that is expected to see Washington curtail costly overseas military involvement and call for allies to do more to address shared challenges.

Some observers have said that Trump could call for renegotiation of a new defense cost-sharing deal with South Korea, called the Special Measures Agreement (SMA).

In October, Seoul and Washington struck the 12th SMA to determine Seoul's share of the cost for the stationing of the 28,500-strong U.S. Forces Korea (USFK). Under the deal that will last through 2030, Seoul is to pay 1.52 trillion won (US$1.04 billion) in 2026, up from 1.4 trillion won in 2025.

After the conclusion of SMA negotiations, Trump said in a campaign speech that South Korea would be paying $10 billion a year for the stationing of USFK if he was in the White House. He also described the Asian ally as a "money machine."

President-elect Donald Trump speaks during the House GOP conference in Washington on Nov. 13, 2024 in this file photo released by the Associated Press. (Pool photo) (Yonhap)

sshluck@yna.co.kr

(END)

en.yna.co.kr · by Song Sang-ho · December 21, 2024

25. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, December 20, 2024

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, December 20, 2024

https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-december-20-2024

Russian ballistic missile strikes damaged several embassies in central Kyiv on the morning of December 20. The Ukrainian Air Force reported that Russian forces launched five Iskander-M/North Korean KN-23 ballistic missiles at Kyiv City on the morning of December 20 and that Ukrainian forces downed all five, but that missile debris damaged infrastructure in Kyiv City and caused civilian casualties. Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) Spokesperson Heorhiy Tykhyi stated that the Russian missile strike damaged multiple embassies in a single building, including the embassies of Albania, Argentina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Palestine, and Portugal. Kyiv City officials reported that debris from Russian missiles damaged warehouses and infrastructure in Kyiv City. The Ukrainian Air Force reported that Russian forces also launched an Iskander-M ballistic missile, a Kh-59/69 cruise missile, and 65 Shahed and other drones at Ukraine overnight on December 19 to 20, of which Ukrainian air defenses downed 40 drones and electronic warfare (EW) interference caused 20 drones to become lost. The Ukrainian Air Force reported that the overnight drone and missile strikes damaged civilian infrastructure in Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Sumy oblasts.

Ukrainian forces reportedly conducted their first attack solely using unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) and first-person view (FPV) drones, highlighting Ukraine's ongoing efforts to leverage technological innovation into ground operations. The spokesperson of a Ukrainian brigade operating in the Kharkiv direction reported on December 20 that Ukrainian forces conducted their first ground attack exclusively using robotic systems instead of infantry on an unspecified date near Lyptsi (north of Kharkiv City) and successfully destroyed unspecified Russian positions during the attack. The spokesperson stated that Ukrainian forces conducted the attack with dozens of UGVs equipped with machine guns and also used the UGVs to lay and clear mines in unspecified positions in the area. Ukrainian officials have repeatedly highlighted Ukraine's efforts to utilize technological innovations and asymmetric strike capabilities to offset Ukraine's manpower limitations in contrast with Russia's willingness to accept unsustainable casualty rates for marginal territorial gains.

Ukraine also continues to innovate aerial drone production. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian officials completed tests of a drone attached to fiber optic cables that will be more resistant to electronic warfare (EW) interference. Russian forces have recently fielded such drones in Kursk Oblast and Ukraine. A Ukrainian drone company reported that it recently assembled a prototype of the first FPV drone made exclusively from components manufactured in Ukraine.

Key Takeaways:

Russian ballistic missile strikes damaged several embassies in central Kyiv on the morning of December 20.
Ukrainian forces reportedly conducted their first attack solely using unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) and first-person view (FPV) drones, highlighting Ukraine's ongoing efforts to leverage technological innovation into ground operations.

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced his intention to orient Russia's political and ideological priorities for 2025 around Russian veterans.

The Kremlin continues to scapegoat Kursk Oblast civil servants for its failure in responding to Ukraine's Kursk Oblast incursion.

Russian forces recently advanced in Kursk Oblast, near Kupyansk, within Toretsk, and in the Vuhledar direction.

Russian opposition outlet Mediazona reported on December 20 that it has confirmed that at least 20,364 Russian soldiers have been killed in action (KIA) in Ukraine since January 1, 2024.

26. Iran Update, December 20, 2024

Iran Update, December 20, 2024

https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-december-20-2024

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan expressed readiness to help Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) form a new political system in Syria. Erdogan said that Turkey could offer expertise and guidance to this end. Erdogan also emphasized the need to draft a new Syrian constitution. Erdogan added that Turkish Foreign Affairs Minister Hakan Fidan will travel to Damascus soon to discuss the formation of a new Syrian state. These comments come amid indications from HTS that it wants to establish a centralized and unitary Syrian state without autonomous or federal regions for minorities, such as Druze and Kurds.

Erdogan’s comments also come amid renewed Turkish aggression toward the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in recent days. Turkish officials have defined one of their objectives in Syria as “eliminat[ing]” the SDF. Turkey and the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) have built up their military presence immediately outside SDF-held territory and indicated that they may attack to seize territory. An SNA military commander said on December 20 that his forces were fighting against “separatist parties,” referring to the SDF. SDF Commander Mazloum Abdi said on December 10 that he wanted to “enter into a political process for the future of” Syria, but it is unclear what role he would play if Turkey adopts a major role in the formation of a new Syrian state.

Key Takeaways:

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan expressed readiness to help HTS form a new political system in Syria. These comments come amid renewed Turkish aggression toward the US-backed SDF and fighting with the Turkish-backed SNA.

US CENTCOM Commander Michael Kurilla stated that ISIS plans to exploit political instability in Syria in order to break 8,000 of its fighters out of detention facilities, which would help ISIS reconstitute rapidly.

Senior Iranian officials are trying to justify domestically the years-long Iranian support for the Bashar al Assad regime while downplaying the fact that the fall of Assad marks a strategic defeat for Tehran.

27. Interview with Matt Pottinger

CSDS Interview| Interview

Interview with Matt Pottinger

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2024/12/20/interview-with-matt-pottinger/

by Octavian Manea

12.20.2024 at 07:42pm

CSDS-SWJ STRATEGY DEBRIEFS • 8/2024

Interview with Matt Pottinger (Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Hoover Institution), by Octavian Manea

This interview is part of a collaborative initiative with the Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy.

A significant challenge confronting the United States (US) and its allies is the increasing strategic alignment between China and Russia. Indeed, the ability of the US and its allies to uphold strength and security across the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific regions is largely contingent upon their capacity to counter China’s advancements in Asia and to prevent the emergence of a durable and solid axis among China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. In this comprehensive interview with Matt Pottinger we look at what can be done to restore deterrence in the Taiwan Strait, how to unpack the shared objectives of the newly formed “axis of chaos”, how best to understand the personal rapport between President Putin and President Xi Jinping that fuels this collaboration and what lessons might inform Beijing’s approach in the first island chain.

Octavian Manea: When talking about Taiwan, a traditional image is that of a porcupine, but in your latest book you speak about “a boiling moat.” Let us unpack this a little, what is the strategic symbolism of a boiling moat?

Matt Pottinger: The porcupine analogy is a useful one, but as my co-authors and I really looked as best as we could at Beijing’s strategy (as far as we can know it) and Beijing’s capabilities, and when we looked at Taiwan’s advantages and the advantages of Taiwan’s friends – not least the US, but also Japan and Australia, and to some extent Europe – it became clear to us that the great geographic blessing that Taiwan enjoys is the Taiwan Strait. What would Ukrainian people have given to have 100 miles separating them from the armored brigades and infantry of Vladimir Putin? There is a reason why Taiwan has very rarely been part of China as a political unity over the centuries and millennia – it enjoys some geographic distance. During the research for the book, a Chinese friend pointed me to the Han dynasty statesman Kuai Tong, who had this phrase about how cities with metal ramparts and boiling moats are best left alone. We need a boiling moat strategy. Therefore, we should focus on that body of water and the other waters that surround Taiwan like a moat and make them impassable, full stop. The Chinese military’s center of gravity in a Taiwan war would be its naval forces and the Taiwan Strait would be its graveyard.

Octavian Manea: So building on these symbolic lines is something that we should keep in mind in order to deter China?

Matt Pottinger: Beijing can try and is trying to subvert Taiwan through the so-called three warfares – information warfare, legal warfare and psychological warfare. But it becomes much harder to defend against those forms of grey zone warfare if Taiwan is not confident that it can repel a military invasion or a blockade. Therefore, we focus in the book heavily on the military dimensions of this competition, on the cornerstone prerequisite for Taiwan governing itself on its own terms. And this means military capability in Taiwan, and also robust capabilities with Taiwan’s friends in order to persuade Xi Jinping that to attempt a blockade or war would be a bad gamble.

Octavian Manea: At the core of today’s predicament and the global strategic interactions is the rise of the China-Russia revisionist core. How should the strategic relationship between China and Russia be decoded? Is it something contingent on the personalities of the two leaders?

Matt Pottinger: It is more than temporary. This is not the Stalin-Hitler pact that melted away in a shocking instant for Joseph Stalin. This is not Ribbentrop-Molotov. This is something more profound than that. At the same time, we also need to recognize that this is driven by the men themselves more than by the systems and more than by the enduring national interests of either nation. That is to say that if not for Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, I very much doubt that we would be seeing an entente and “no limits” pact like we have seen not only in writing, but in action over recent years, particularly since February of 2022. We should not be dismissive of this pact just because there are many reasons why both China’s and Russia’s national interests are not compatible with this pact over the long term. We should not be dismissive of it just because the two regimes have different ideologies that they operate under. It is going to be very hard to break this entente so long as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are in charge of their respective systems.

In the meantime, we should be planting the seeds for a future when Russia comes to its senses, stops killing its neighbors and realizes that it is surrendering its autonomy to a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship to the East. This would be unthinkable to earlier generations of Russians. We should be planting the seeds for that future and be willing to eventually bring Russia back into a trajectory where it can be secure and sovereign without the need to wage war against its neighbors and without the need to surrender its autonomy to Beijing.

Octavian Manea: There is a big discussion today about the imperatives of strategic prioritization. How should the strategic sequencing be approached – at a time when Russia and China are increasingly a strategic combo that forces us to face the dilemma of strategic simultaneity problem, a multiple-front predicament?

Matt Pottinger: My view is that prioritizing some things and deprioritizing other things is the essence of strategy. But we should not be lured into a false dilemma. I think that the false dilemma is one that says that geographically we cannot afford to even help Europe fend off Russia. We should not indulge this false dilemma that says we should accept in essence a military defeat in Europe in order to place greater emphasis on deterrence in the Western Pacific. In fact, we can deter in both places.

Now, if you were to tell me that we cannot fight our own war in both theatres simultaneously, I would say you have got a point and that we have allowed our ability to fight simultaneous wars to atrophy. It used to be a mainstay during the Cold War that we would have the ability to fight on two fronts. But what we are talking about now is not fighting a two-front war. We are talking about supporting Europeans in fighting their war and also enhancing deterrence in the Western Pacific. No one is asking us to commit American troops to fight Putin’s forces.

Of course, Europeans need to do more for themselves. Europe definitely does need to spend more and I think that we should make that very clear and there should probably be some consequences for the failure of some of the laggard countries such as Germany to meet their obligations to the other NATO allies.

But let us just take stock for a second. Europeans are fighting with their lives right now. It is Ukrainians who are fighting and also some brave Russians who have joined Ukraine’s side in this war, not to mention some brave individual volunteers from around the globe. So let us not deprive them of the respect that they deserve and the honor that those sacrifices deserve. We can actually do better in the long run and even in the short run by supporting the Ukrainians in their fight with war material. The alternative which might be a collapse of Ukraine would be more expensive for the US in terms of political capital, in terms of economic outlays and in terms probably of military deployments to Europe because Romania shares a border with Ukraine, and so does, of course, Poland and other NATO member countries. We would be looking at a much less advantageous post-war posture and it would be one that I believe would actually be more expensive than what I believe are relatively modest outlays to support Ukraine in beating back an aggressor.

Octavian Manea: And this in a way could be an emboldening message, an incentive for the other revisionist actors to test American power in other theatres? I mean, if Ukraine is lost, it could be tempting to try in other parts of the globe, especially in the Taiwan Strait.

Matt Pottinger: Absolutely. Even as Russia has lost reportedly a half a million men to death and injury, they are still present in Africa, in Cuba, they are in Venezuela helping the dictator there steal an election as we speak. So, why do we think that Russia would be satisfied with Ukraine as opposed to doing what it can, working with the other Axis members to which it is increasingly closely bound? That includes, of course, Beijing, which is the decisive enabler of Russia’s war machine, but also North Korea, which is sending ballistic missiles, artillery ammunition and troops. And then Iran, which is providing the kamikaze drones. In addition, we see all kind of insidious activities in Latin America, in the Caribbean where the US has not seen this kind of activity in our front yard since the Soviet Union provoked the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I do not think people are using enough imagination to think about what the world looks like and what it looks like for America’s own security the day after Ukraine falls. Therefore, real prioritization would mean to prioritize deterrence along all of these axes. That is a much cheaper proposition than taking our chances with a major Russian axis victory in Ukraine.

Octavian Manea: What are the potential lessons that China is learning from Russia’s war in Ukraine?

Matt Pottinger: Let us go back in time to September of 2022, roughly six months or so into the full invasion of Ukraine. Things were not going well for Russia and Xi Jinping got together with Vladimir Putin in Uzbekistan for one of the roughly four dozen face-to-face meetings they have had since Xi Jinping was elevated to General Secretary of the Communist Party. Back then, the press mistakenly interpreted Xi Jinping’s body language and one of the statements that Putin made for Chinese displeasure with the invasion of Ukraine. It should have been clear at the time that what Xi Jinping was concerned about was Vladimir Putin’s poor prosecution of the war in Ukraine: not the fact that he was fighting it, but how he was fighting it. In Xi Jinping’s eyes it was very important for Putin to win this conquest.

It was only about six months after that, in March of 2023, that Xi Jinping paid a visit to Putin at the Kremlin and made that extraordinary statement as he was bidding him farewell that “there are changes occurring that happen only once in a century on the world stage and we are the ones driving that change”. He was basically admitting that those two men together are the architects of destabilization around the world. The Chinese material support for the Russian war machine began to skyrocket that same month and it has not really abated. We have seen the unprecedented NATO statement this summer declaring Xi Jinping the decisive enabler of Russia’s war.

So one lesson is that wars are very deliberate, but their consequences are highly unpredictable. Xi Jinping should not bet on a short sharp war succeeding and therefore he is going to need to prepare, and I believe that there is ample evidence that he is preparing for the possibility of what he would call protracted warfare.

A second lesson would be in the realm of information warfare. We can see the contempt that Chinese have for the Russian information and cyber warfare plans, starting with the early phases of their full-scale invasion. If it does invade Taiwan, Beijing is going to try to not make that mistake. It is going to do everything it can to try to cut undersea cables – which it has already demonstrated – and to fry satellites, which is why it is important for Taiwan, together with commercial and other government partners to be capable of replacing satellite constellations quickly.

Another lesson that Xi Jinping has probably drawn, which is a negative lesson from our perspective, is that nuclear blackmail is very effective. We need not let it be so effective. But every time Vladimir Putin rattles his nuclear saber, you can hear people jumping under their desks at the State Department. Beijing is going to view as useful or at least potentially useful the threat of nuclear holocaust. I do not think it is a credible threat from Xi Jinping, but he is going to be tempted to make it, having seen how scared too many European and American diplomats are whenever Vladimir Putin rattles that saber.

Octavian Manea: There is also another facet of Mao that I suspect could be useful in decoding today’s Chinese strategic behavior – “Mao, the insurgent”. To what extent has China become an “insurgent power” or an enabler of disorder, enabler of disruption, targeting key pillars of international order? Their fingerprints are literally everywhere: enabling Russia, slowly physically controlling the South China Sea through salami slicing tactics, supporting Hamas and Iran. Should we see these operations through this lens of spreading and enabling chaos globally?

Matt Pottinger: Beijing is the center of the new axis which I like to call the “axis of chaos”, borrowing Xi Jinping’s own use of the term “chaos”. I am thinking of one speech he gave in January 2021 where he talked about how the key feature in the world today can be summed up in one word, “chaos”, and he goes on later in the speech to talk about how global trends are in China’s favor. So this is a guy who hates instability at home, but instigates chaos abroad and that is why you are seeing him reaching into Latin America to support Venezuela and reportedly to try to build military bases in Cuba. And this is coming from a regime that claims that Americans have a Cold War mentality.

It is why they are hosting delegations from Hamas, which has its support from Iran, and Iran certainly treats Hamas as if it were a proxy. Beijing is ramming its huge armada of Coast Guard vessels into the much smaller boats commanded by the government of the Philippines as a way to try to intimidate people across South Southeast Asia and in order to try to demonstrate that the US is feckless. The US should be supporting directly at the invitation of the Philippines those resupply missions to small islands right off of the coast of the Philippines that Beijing is trying to capture coercively.

In many respects, Beijing now plays the role that the Soviet Union played during the Cold War – it is an agent for instability everywhere except within its own borders.

Octavian Manea: You are a former Marine. But the campaigns you served in were of a different character than the character of a potential campaign in the first island chain. Today, the Marines are leading the way in terms of transformation. How do you see the reinvention of part of the US Marine Corps as a first island chain-centric sea denial force? We have seen also a lot of push back against this direction. On the other side, an argument could be made that the trends that we see in the Ukraine war for the Black Sea validate the logic behind the Marine’s Stand in Forces and Maritime Littoral Regiments.

Matt Pottinger: I think our former commandant, Dave Berger, was brave in really making dramatic steps to try to acquire new capabilities that would allow Marines to fight China. And I think that the sorts of capabilities that we have seen demonstrated on the battlefield in Ukraine supports his arguments for the types of capabilities we need to incorporate.

Now, the main criticism that General Berger received has been for giving up certain capabilities that have been really important to the force structure of the Marine Corps for decades. He had to make those sacrifices because the Congress would not raise his budget. In fact, for three years in a row we have seen the US military budget decline – it is now just hovering slightly above 3% of GDP, which is less than half of what we were spending typically over the course of the Cold War. Even in peaceful decades like the 1980s, we were spending something like 6.8% of GDP. So I think that the answer here should be to give the Marine Corps and our military generally a greater budget so that it can maintain its traditional force structure and weave in these new capabilities, but without sacrificing its ability to serve as America’s so-called 9-1-1 force. Marines have to respond to the emergency phone call, have to be capable of being the first ones into a fight and to be able to sustain themselves without outside support for 30 to 45 days and then to be able to be resupplied to sustain a fight.

In conclusion, I understand the arguments on both sides. I think that that we should actually make the pie bigger so that we are not cutting out critical pieces of that pie. But we also should not be sacrificing the integration of new capabilities, given what we are learning from the battlefield in Ukraine which are essential.

Octavian Manea: In your book you make a very important point about parity. There is this classic image in international relations – of neutralized power when the power is balanced between two rivals. But such an understanding can be very misleading. Why is parity a danger zone? Something to be avoided at all costs?

Matt Pottinger: There is this very nice phrase that we use as a matter of habit, which is called balance of power. It leaves a misimpression in our minds because a balance of power gives us this image of a scale perfectly and evenly balanced, therefore it achieves its equilibrium point because of the equal weighted on both sides. But historians who have really studied the causes of war closely – I am thinking here in part of the great Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey – concluded that the more evenly matched two rivals are, the more likely they are to fight in a war. In fact, the times when you have a sustained peace are when there is a clear imbalance of power favoring one side over the other. I think that a lot of people in Washington D.C. do not understand that.

The key point is, while it might please our senses to see a scale that is evenly balanced on an equilibrium point, in the relations between nations, particularly the relations between rivals, that is an omen for war. A balance of power incentivizes war, it does not stabilize the situation. Conflict often erupts when nations disagree about their relative power and this is something they are more likely to do when they are closely matched. War in some ways becomes an act of measurement, to try to settle the matter of who actually does have superior might. War in itself becomes that act of accounting that settles the question of who is dominant. So what we should want is preponderance of power. The reason that we have had peace in the Western Pacific for all these decades since World War II has been because the US has had the preponderance of power in that region.

Now what we need to do is to recognize that many of the advantages that we held have eroded, but also recognize that many of the advantages that China has gained are actually predicated on platforms that are quite vulnerable, particularly in an amphibious assault required to control Taiwan. In this sense, there are things that we can acquire to offset Beijing’s military might that are a lot less expensive than the capabilities Beijing has invested so heavily in.

Let us remember that the Ukrainians sank something like a quarter of Russia’s Black Sea fleet using asymmetric capabilities such as remote-controlled jet skis packed with explosives, that are way cheaper than the warships that now sit at the bottom of the Black Sea. So this is the sort of thing that we need to be acquiring.

But as we acquire those capabilities and put them in place, and I love Admiral Paparo’s phrase evoking a “hellscape” in the Taiwan Strait, we must also not allow to atrophy the existing platforms that we have that are also quite fearsome. This includes not only our attack subs, but also increasingly our longer-range missiles than what we allowed ourselves to build until President Trump wisely left the INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) Treaty. And also our long-range bombers, our B-1B bombers, our B-52s, B-2 bombers, that can carry a load of anti-ship missiles that could be fired from a standoff distance.

Disclaimer: This interview is part of a collaborative initiative with the Small Wars Journal. The views expressed in this interview are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy (CSDS) or the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB).

Tags: global security

About The Author

Octavian Manea
Octavian Manea is a PhD Researcher at the Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy (CSDS) that he joined in October 2021. He is interested in the changing character of conflict and the implications of such alterations for the US-led alliance system. Octavian is also broadly interested in strategic studies, transatlantic relations and security issues. He worked for many years as a journalist, and is currently a contributor at the Romanian weekly 22 and the Small Wars Journal. In addition, Octavian was the managing editor of the Eastern Focus Quarterly in Bucharest and was affiliated with the Romania Energy Center (ROEC). Octavian was a Fulbright Scholar at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, where he received an MA in International Relations and a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Security Studies. He also holds a BA and an MA in political science and international relations from the University of Bucharest.
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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

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

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