Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”

– Rudyard Kipling

"The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract."

– Oliver W. Holmes, Jr.

"The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything."

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

1. From Bronze Star to Baffling End: Green Beret Named in Vegas Tesla Explosion Stuns Army

2. Driver of Cybertruck in Las Vegas explosion was a Special Forces soldier, Army confirms

3. America, Afghanistan and the Price of Self-Delusion

4. Experts react: What the New Orleans attack tells us about terrorism in 2025

5. The American Worker Is Becoming More Productive

6. Jimmy Carter vs. Iran: The Untold Story Revealed in the Archives

7. Xi Jinping’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good Year

8. China Adds to Sanctions of U.S. Defense Contractors Over Taiwan Arms Sales

9. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 2, 2025

10. Iran Update, January 2, 2025

11. Chinese Underwater Sea Glider Drone Caught By Fisherman In The Philippines

12. Biden Plans to Block Takeover Bid of U.S. Steel by Japan’s Nippon

13. U.S. Weighs Ban on Chinese Drones, Citing National Security Concerns

14. Inside Israel's Commando Raid On Iran's Underground Missile Factory In Syria

15. Mystery continues to shroud Las Vegas Cybertruck bomber's motives, authorities say

16. The Real Risks of Escalation in Ukraine

17. Veteran suicides often follow complaints of chronic pain, insomnia and physical problems, report finds

18. Are Russian Sanctions Working? Debate Gains New Urgency With Trump.

19. China’s escalating cyber attacks highlight Biden, Trump differences

20. ISIS no longer rules a territory. But its recruits still pose a global threat

21. Opinion: Women like me struggle to see ourselves as veterans. Why?

22. Pay attention: There’s a second civil rights movement

1. From Bronze Star to Baffling End: Green Beret Named in Vegas Tesla Explosion Stuns Army

Yes we are all stunned.

What demons was he fighting?

From Bronze Star to Baffling End: Green Beret Named in Vegas Tesla Explosion Stuns Army

Authorities are looking into whether Matthew Livelsberger, a Bronze Star recipient, was having personal problems before he took his own life

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/from-bronze-star-to-baffling-end-green-beret-named-in-vegas-tesla-explosion-stuns-army-ce6db464?st=fbhpaR&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

By Joshua Chaffin

and Sadie Gurman

Jan. 2, 2025 8:54 pm ET

In July, Matthew Alan Livelsberger was posting to Facebook photos of himself proudly posing with his newborn child. He was in the middle of a highly decorated career in the U.S. military. Six months later, the 37-year-old was dead and named as the man whose Tesla Cybertruck exploded on Wednesday outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas.

After driving up and down Las Vegas Boulevard for an hour, Livelsberger pulled into the Trump hotel and died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound before the explosion, according to authorities, who found the newly purchased handgun he used at his feet, along with a passport, military ID, credit cards and iPhone and smartwatch.

Clark County Sheriff Kevin McMahill said Thursday that the body removed from the Cybertruck was “burnt beyond recognition.”

McMahill said investigators didn’t think there was any additional threat related to the explosion. They were, however, still examining whether Livelsberger had ties to any terrorist networks.

Sheriff Kevin McMahill of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department speaking at a news conference Thursday. Photo: K.M. Cannon/Las vegas review-journal/ap

“I’m comfortable calling it a suicide with the bombing that occurred immediately thereafter,” McMahill said. “I’m not giving it any other labels.”

On Thursday, Army officials were exploring whether Livelsberger was having any personal problems as they scoured his unit, trying to untangle the mystery of how or why a model soldier with a stellar record could potentially be tied to a terrorist event. So far, they remain baffled. He was a decorated master sergeant in the U.S. Special Forces—an Army Green Beret—and a top student who betrayed no signs of distress when talking to members of his unit just a few days ago, according to defense officials.

Livelsberger, who had ties to Colorado Springs, Colo., had been on vacation leave from his base in Germany when the explosion occurred and was due back on Jan. 4. Authorities on Thursday disclosed more about his actions leading to Las Vegas. He rented the Cybertruck in Denver on Dec. 28 and legally bought two handguns on Dec. 30, according to Kenneth Cooper, the assistant special agent in charge of the San Francisco office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Investigators examined the Tesla Cybertruck that was parked outside the Trump hotel in Las Vegas when it exploded. Photo: LAS vegas police department/ap

He soon set off for Nevada. Tracking his movements through Tesla charging stations, authorities said Livelsberger drove the futuristic truck from Colorado Springs to Las Vegas, with stops including Albuquerque on Dec. 31, and Kingman, Ariz., in the early morning hours of Jan. 1. With fuel canisters and large firework mortars in the back, the vehicle arrived in Las Vegas about 7:30 a.m. local time Wednesday. It was parked for roughly 17 seconds before it exploded.

Authorities have said they have no motive yet and are interviewing people across the globe. Crucially, they have yet to find any evidence that Livelsberger crossed paths during his nearly two-decade military career with Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a veteran who used a pickup truck to mow dozens of New Year’s revelers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans in the early hours of Wednesday morning, killing 14 people, in an operation apparently in support of ISIS.

Given the timing and other apparent similarities—both events involved veterans, both involved pickup trucks rented from the same online platform, both were directed at targets laden with symbolism—speculation has arisen that they might be linked. Yet a defense official played down that possibility on Thursday, saying “There is no apparent tie between the two.”

Their military careers followed different arcs: Jabbar was an IT and HR specialist for the Army. Special Forces troops like Livelsberger, by contrast, are part of a smaller, elite force that is usually insulated from other parts of the Army. Even though U.S. officials said the two men appeared to have been at the same large North Carolina base at one point, they found no evidence that they ever crossed paths.

They seemed to be at far different places in their lives. After active duty, and joining the Army Reserve from 2015 to 2020, Jabbar was working as a consultant and trying to start a real-estate business. His second marriage had fallen apart. There were hints of religious radicalization. He posted several Facebook videos in the hours leading up to the attack describing his desire to kill and saying he had joined ISIS.

Soldiers from the 10th Special Forces Group during a deployment to Afghanistan in September 2016. Photo: SGT. connor mendez/us army

On paper, Livelsberger still seemed to be in the midst of an extraordinarily busy military career—one of which he appeared proud. Photos on his social-media accounts show a strapping soldier with a sprawling American flag-themed tattoo wrapped around his arm and a crooked-toothed grin.

Much of Livelsberger’s activity on LinkedIn centered on the military. In one post about three months ago, he responded to a poster looking for a tactical combat casualty-care instructor, ideally with a special operations medic background, to do a 30-day stint in Ukraine. Livelsberger responded that he had a top person looking for such an opportunity, and stated, “sent him your way.”

The poster didn’t reply, but two commenters have responded since the explosion. One person asked: “what happened?” Another wrote, “he’s passed now. No idea.”

In a post from the U.S. Army five years ago about protective gear and how it helped a soldier, Livelsberger questioned the practicality of it. “This stuff briefs well and sounds great on paper, but is completely impractical in the heat of real combat,” he wrote.

Livelsberger also responded to posts about transitioning from the military, asking about certifications one person planned to pursue post-military and the benefit of a management certification program for military veterans and elite athletes.

Livelsberger was born in Bucyrus, Ohio, and more recently associated with addresses in Colorado Springs, Colo., including a home that was searched by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Thursday morning as part of the investigation into the Las Vegas blast.

He enlisted in the military at 18 and served for nearly two decades—both as a reservist and then an active-duty soldier—in a career that took him around the globe.

Valorous awards sit ready to be presented to Green Berets assigned to 2nd Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group, at a ceremony at Fort Carson, Colo., in May 2018. Photo: Staff Sgt. Will Reinier/US Army

Records released by the Army show he had most recently supported U.S. operations in Europe, and had earned several prestigious military citations. Among them was a Bronze Star with valor, although the Army didn’t specify when it was earned or for what. In addition to Europe, the member of the 10th Special Forces Group also served in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Tajikistan, according to two defense officials.

Livelsberger had no disciplinary issues, according to the Army. Fellow soldiers have told authorities he was a strong soldier with no apparent professional issues. Some from his unit had spoken to him a few days ago, according to defense officials.

“This is a weird one,” one remarked.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Livelsberger graduated summa cum laude from Norwich University in Vermont. The university confirmed Thursday that he completed an online degree in strategic studies and defense analysis in 2019, saying “our hearts go out to those impacted.” In high school, Livelsberger earned high grades that frequently landed him on lists of honor roll students published in the local news.

In addition to Livelsberger’s official service record, newspaper accounts also shed some light on his time in Afghanistan. In 2009, when he was 21 and serving in the military, Livelsberger started to collect clothes and toys for children ages 1 to 14 there. He asked people in his hometown of Bucyrus to send volleyballs and soccer balls, stickers and coloring books, according to a news article at the time.

“Soldiers like myself want to do everything we can to affect our sphere of influence, and this definitely is one of them,” he told the Bucyrus Telegraph-Forum.

His mother, Debra, accepted local donations for the project at her home. She had previously sent items to the Middle East when her son was deployed there, she told the newspaper.

“Whatever he calls for, we send,” she said. “When it comes to kids, it’s about whatever he can do for them.”

Livelsberger said the Afghan children were as “adventurous and playful” as American children and that the project was worth doing even though it would only reach a tiny percentage of children in the country.

In early 2010, he was home on leave and thanked residents for their generosity, according to another article. He said he had recently been awarded a Bronze Star for similar efforts.

Nancy Youseff, Tawnell Hobbs and Kris Maher contributed to this article.

Write to Joshua Chaffin at joshua.chaffin@wsj.com and Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com

2. Driver of Cybertruck in Las Vegas explosion was a Special Forces soldier, Army confirms

What demons was he fighting?

Here is the official statement:

“Master Sgt. Matthew Alan Livelsberger enlisted as an 18X and served in the active duty Army from January 2006 to March 2011. Livelsberger then joined the National Guard from March 2011 to July 2012, followed by the Army Reserve from July 2012 to December 2012. He entered the active duty Army in December 2012 and was a U.S. Army Special Operations Soldier (18Z) assigned to 10th Special Forces Group in Stuttgart, Germany.

Additionally, U.S. Army Special Operations Command can confirm Livelsberger was assigned to the command and on approved leave at the time of his death. USASOC is in full cooperation with federal and state law enforcement agencies, but as a matter of policy, will not comment on ongoing investigations.

His awards include the Bronze Star Medal with Valor, Bronze Star Medal x 4, Meritorious Service Medal, Army Commendation Medal with Valor, Army Commendation Medal x 3, Army Achievement Medal x 2, Army Good Conduct Medal x 5, National Defense Service Medal, Afghanistan Campaign Medal with campaign star x 3, Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal, Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, Noncommissioned Officer Professional Development Ribbon x 3, Army Service Ribbon, Overseas Service Ribbon, NATO Medal x 2, Special Forces Tab, Combat Infantryman Badge, Parachutist Badge, and Freefall Badge.”

Army Spokesperson

Driver of Cybertruck in Las Vegas explosion was a Special Forces soldier, Army confirms

Master Sgt. Matthew Livelsberger, an active duty Green Beret for almost 20 years, shot himself just before the truck exploded outside a Trump hotel, police said.

Patty Nieberg

Updated 4 Hours Ago

taskandpurpose.com · by Patty Nieberg

An Army Special Forces soldier shot himself before the Tesla Cybertruck he was driving exploded in front of the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas on New Year’s morning, officials said Thursday.

Master Sgt. Matthew Alan Livelsberger, 37, was in his 19th year as an Army Green Beret, service officials confirmed Thursday, and had earned a Bronze Star with Valor among other combat awards. Livelsberger enlisted in 2006 and rose through the ranks of Special Forces to the position of a team sergeant with 10th Special Forces Group, based at Fort Carson, Colorado, the Army said.

Las Vegas Police Department Sheriff Kevin McMahill said at a press conference that authorities were confident that Livelsberger was the driver of the Cybertruck, but noted that Las Vegas police did “not have confirmation 100%” that the remains inside the truck belonged to Livelsberger because they were “burnt beyond recognition.” McMahill cited a military ID, passport, two semi-automatic handguns, iPhone, smartwatch and credit cards belonging to Livelsberger that were found in the truck.

Police also linked Livelsberger to the truck with pictures and other tracking information from along the route they say Livelsberger drove to Las Vegas after renting the vehicle in Denver, Colorado on Dec. 28. Police traced the truck’s path using electric vehicle charging stations Livelsberger appeared to have used along the way.

“We still have only ever seen him in this vehicle,” McMahill said. “We’re not aware of any other subjects involved in this particular case.”

Officials also identified two tattoos on the remains that were similar to those on Livelsberger’s arm and stomach.

Not a ‘sophisticated’ bomb

Officials found mortar-style fireworks, gasoline cans and civilian-style explosive shooting targets in the back of the truck, an official with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said. Though dangerous, those items did not appear to be well-conceived building blocks of a large-scale bomb.

“The level of sophistication is not what we would expect from an individual with this type of military experience — that most of the materials inside that Tesla were to help fuel a greater explosion,” said Kenneth Cooper, assistant special agent in charge for ATF’s San Francisco division. “But it’s too early to answer any questions as if there was sophisticated connectivity to those components to make it ignite in the way that it did.”

The Las Vegas explosion was the second episodes of deadly and so far unexplained violence on U.S. soil in the early hours of Jan. 1. Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, a former active duty and Reservist soldier, drove a rented pick-up truck through a crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Louisiana just after 3 a.m., killing at least 15.

Just hours later, Las Vegas police received a report that a Tesla Cybertruck was “fully engulfed in flames,” in the valet area in front of the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas located just off the Las Vegas Strip.

But at Thursday’s press conference, McMahill pushed back on misinformation about the explosion — some at least partially endorsed by Elon Musk — and connections between the two incidents. McMahill said both soldiers had spent time at Fort Liberty, North Carolina — which was then Fort Bragg — during their career but that there was no indication the two soldiers ever met, served in the same unit or at the same time at the North Carolina base, which is the Army’s largest by population. McMahill also said that although both served in Afghanistan, there was also no evidence they crossed paths while deployed.

“We’re very well aware of all of the things that are going around on social media, but that’s just the way we’re going to conduct this investigation,” said McMahill. “I’m also confident to tell the Las Vegas community and this great nation that we don’t believe there’s any further threat from this subject, or anybody associated to him here in Las Vegas with that.”

Almost two decades in special operations

Livelsberger’s personal LinkedIn page indicates he qualified as a Special Forces communications sergeant and, later, as an intelligence operations specialist after joining in 2006. He had taken over the leadership position as an operations sergeant — known among Green Berets as a team sergeant — less than two years ago. Team sergeants are the senior enlisted leaders of a 12-man Special Forces team, responsible for the day-to-day business and combat-readiness of the team.

According to the Army, Livelsberger originally enlisted in 2006 as an 18X, the designation for a Special Forces candidate when they enter the Green Beret training pipeline. He served in the active duty Army from January 2006 to March 2011. Livelsberger then joined the National Guard from March 2011 to July 2012. During this time, according to Livelsberger’s LinkedIn profile, he worked as a hyperspectral imaging integrator for General Dynamics where he engineered and deployed with the company’s “Lightguard Minotaur” system.

Livelsberger returned to active duty in December 2012 with an assignment to the Army’s Special Operations Command, or USASOC, which oversees nearly all Special Forces units.

“USASOC is in full cooperation with federal and state law enforcement agencies, but as a matter of policy, will not comment on ongoing investigations,” officials said in a statement.

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taskandpurpose.com · by Patty Nieberg

3. America, Afghanistan and the Price of Self-Delusion

Just spitballing here. One common factor between the two soldiers in New Orleans and Las Vegas was their service in Afghanistan though in two vastly different contexts, one in SF and in human resources and IT. But was it their Afghanistan experiences and more importantly the result of our 2 decades in Afghanistan that damaged their psyches?

Of course there is no excuse for their actions and I am not condoning them whatsoever. But we should think about what moral injuries our soldiers might have from their service or how their service is respected.

On a separate but kind of related note we have these excerpts (especially this first sentence condemning every soldier's service in Afghanistan who tried to help the Afghan military and government to succeed):

The reality was that Taliban fighters with Cold War-era rifles and dirt bikes often outperformed Afghan government forces with state-of-the-art equipment and backing from U.S. air power. The Taliban were religiously motivated to rid the country of foreign invaders and what they perceived as a puppet government installed by Washington. The members of the Afghan military — beset by low morale, chronic logistical problems and pervasive corruption — were often motivated solely by their salaries, though they, of course, also suffered hugely in the fight.

Official statements across successive U.S. presidential administrations were, in my view, often simply untrue. Just six days before the Afghan government collapsed, the Pentagon press secretary declared that Afghanistan had more than 300,000 soldiers and police officers, even though the special inspector general’s office had been warning for years that no one really knew how many soldiers and policemen were available, nor what their operational capabilities were. As early as 2015, I informed Congress that corrupt Afghan officials were listing “ghost” soldiers and police officers on rosters, and pocketing the salaries.

Important information for measuring the success of initiatives was — at times deliberately — hidden from Congress and the American public, including USAID-funded assessments that concluded Afghan ministries were incapable of managing direct U.S. financial assistance. Despite vigorous efforts by the U.S. bureaucracy to stop us, my office made such material public.

Opinion

Guest Essay

America, Afghanistan and the Price of Self-Delusion

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/opinion/afghanistan-audit-reconstruction-us.html#

Jan. 2, 2025, 1:00 a.m. ET

Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times

By John F. Sopko

Mr. Sopko has been the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2012.

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The collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan on Aug. 15, 2021, revealed what little American lives and money had purchased over 20 years there. It also laid bare a gaping disconnect between reality and what senior U.S. officials had been telling Americans for decades: that success was just around the corner.

As the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2012, my staff and I have audited and investigated U.S. programs and spending to rebuild Afghanistan — a mission that, it was hoped, would turn the theocratic, tribal-based “Graveyard of Empires” into a modern liberal democracy.

In hundreds of reports over the last 12 years, we have detailed a long list of systemic problems: The U.S. government struggled to carry out a coherent strategy, fostered overly ambitious expectations, started unsustainable projects and did not understand the country or its people. American agencies measured success not by what they accomplished, but by dollars spent or checklists of completed tasks.

As our own agency winds down and we prepare to release our final report this year, we raise a fundamental and too rarely asked question: Why did so many senior officials tell Congress and the public, year after year, that success was on the horizon when they knew otherwise? For two decades, officials publicly asserted that continuing the mission in Afghanistan was essential to national interests, until, eventually, two presidents — Donald Trump and Joe Biden — concluded it was not.

The incoming Trump administration, Congress and the long-suffering American taxpayer must ask how this happened so that the United States can avoid similar results in Ukraine, Gaza, Syria and other war zones.

We should start with what “success” in Afghanistan was ever supposed to mean. I believe many Americans who worked there over the years wanted to not only achieve important U.S. strategic interests — such as eliminating a haven for terrorists — but also secure a better future for the Afghan people.

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But a perverse incentive drove our system. To win promotions and bigger salaries, military and civilian leaders felt they had to sell their tours of duty, deployments, programs and projects as successes — even when they were not. Leaders tended to report and highlight favorable information while obscuring that which pointed to failure. After all, failures do not lead to an ambassadorship or an elevation to general.

They also aren’t good business for the contractors on which the U.S. mission relied to manage and support programs and projects. For contractors, claiming success, whether real or imaginary, was vital to obtaining future business. So spending became the measure of success. (The same, of course, is true in Washington, where unspent allocations are tantamount to failure, leading to budget cuts.) Accountability for how money was spent was poor. One general told us that he faced a challenge: How to spend the remaining $1 billion from his annual budget in just over a month? Returning the money was not an option. Another official we spoke to said he refused to cancel a multimillion-dollar building project that field commanders did not want, because the funding had to be spent. The building was never used.

As one former U.S. military adviser told my office, the entire system became a self-licking ice cream cone: More money was always being spent to justify previous spending. Old staff departed, new staff arrived with “better” ideas, and new iterations of the same old solutions were repeated, for years. At the same time, many of the problems the U.S. programs faced were simply beyond our control. The sudden collapse of the Afghan government and rise of the Taliban showed that the United States could not buy favorable Afghan perceptions of the country’s corrupt leaders and government, or of America’s intentions.

Yet over two decades — and even as Afghan provinces fell like dominoes in the summer of 2021 — I do not recall any senior official telling Congress or the American people that failure was a real possibility.

Our final report will detail what many experts and senior government officials now say to us, with hindsight: that these entrenched, fundamental challenges doomed any real possibility of long-term success. Some argued that decisions made as early as 2002 — such as partnering with warlords and refusing to include the Taliban in discussions about Afghanistan’s future — set a course for inevitable failure. Others blamed poor interagency coordination, rampant Afghan corruption, ignorance of local culture and the distance between U.S. goals and Afghanistan’s realities.

There were key moments when American officials could have come clean. Before the United States began, in 2014, to transfer responsibility for security to the Afghans, a succession of U.S. generals and officials made optimistic claims that Afghan forces would be effective in fighting the Taliban, that corruption and human rights abuses were contained and that Afghan elections were democratic and fair — assessments that did not align with my agency’s reporting to Congress or basic reality. In 2013, one senior official even suggested that Afghanistan might prove to be the most successful reconstruction effort over the last quarter-century.

The fall of Kunduz in 2015 — which represented the first time since 2001 that the Taliban regained control of a major city — should have punctured the delusion that Afghan forces could hold their own. But building those forces had been the cornerstone of the U.S. reconstruction effort, whose success would pave the way for eventual U.S. withdrawal. The rosy narrative had to be maintained.

The reality was that Taliban fighters with Cold War-era rifles and dirt bikes often outperformed Afghan government forces with state-of-the-art equipment and backing from U.S. air power. The Taliban were religiously motivated to rid the country of foreign invaders and what they perceived as a puppet government installed by Washington. The members of the Afghan military — beset by low morale, chronic logistical problems and pervasive corruption — were often motivated solely by their salaries, though they, of course, also suffered hugely in the fight.

Official statements across successive U.S. presidential administrations were, in my view, often simply untrue. Just six days before the Afghan government collapsed, the Pentagon press secretary declared that Afghanistan had more than 300,000 soldiers and police officers, even though the special inspector general’s office had been warning for years that no one really knew how many soldiers and policemen were available, nor what their operational capabilities were. As early as 2015, I informed Congress that corrupt Afghan officials were listing “ghost” soldiers and police officers on rosters, and pocketing the salaries.

Important information for measuring the success of initiatives was — at times deliberately — hidden from Congress and the American public, including USAID-funded assessments that concluded Afghan ministries were incapable of managing direct U.S. financial assistance. Despite vigorous efforts by the U.S. bureaucracy to stop us, my office made such material public.

Special interests are a big part of the problem. President Dwight Eisenhower once warned of the growing influence of a “military-industrial complex.” Today, there are multiple complexes: development and humanitarian assistance, anti-corruption and transparency, protection for women and marginalized people, and many others. These are all good and noble causes, to be sure. But when it came to Afghanistan, organizations under these umbrellas, whether because of altruism or more selfish motivations, contributed to the overly optimistic assessments of the situation to keep the funds flowing. Self-serving delusion was America’s most formidable foe.

That delusion continues today. According to data provided to my office by the Treasury Department, since 2021 the United States has funneled $3.3 billion to Afghanistan through public international organizations, mainly United Nations offices, for humanitarian purposes. Some of this money helps the Afghan people, and some goes to the Taliban. In response to a congressional request, my office reported this year that between the American withdrawal in August 2021 and this past May, U.S.-funded partners paid at least $10.9 million in taxes and fees to Taliban authorities. In July, we reported that two out of five State Department bureaus were unable to show that their contractors working in Afghanistan in 2022 had been vetted sufficiently to ensure their work was not benefiting terrorist organizations.

Today, most aid to Afghanistan and other war-torn countries flows through United Nations offices that my agency has identified as having weak oversight. If we are to continue providing taxpayer dollars to these organizations, it must be made conditional on U.S. oversight agencies having full access to their projects and records to make sure funding reaches the people it is intended to help.

In Afghanistan, the office of the special inspector general was often the only government agency reliably reporting on the situation on the ground, and we faced stiff opposition from officials in the Departments of Defense and State, USAID and the organizations that supported their programs. We were able to do our work only because Congress granted us the freedom to operate independently. Inspectors general for the military, State Department and USAID, however, do not enjoy such autonomy. If we are going to fix a broken system that puts bureaucrats and special interests ahead of taxpayers, the first step is to make all federal inspectors general as fully independent as my office has been.

Ultimately, however, if we do not address the incentives in our government that impede truth-telling, we will keep pursuing projects both at home and overseas that do not work, rewarding those who rationalize failure while reporting success, and burning untold billions of dollars. American taxpayers deserve better.

Experts react: What the New Orleans attack tells us about terrorism in 2025

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/experts-react/experts-react-what-the-new-orleans-attack-tells-us-about-terrorism-in-2025/

By Atlantic Council experts

It was a somber start to 2025. In the early hours of New Year’s Day, a man drove a pickup truck through throngs of pedestrians on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, leaving fourteen dead and injuring at least thirty others. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said Thursday that the driver, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, acted alone and was inspired by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). What does the attack reveal about ISIS and the state of global terrorism as 2025 begins? What policy implications are there for the incoming Trump administration? Our counterterrorism experts are on the case.

Click to jump to an expert analysis:

Marc Polymeropoulos: A lone wolf is far more dangerous than a terrorist cell

Danielle Cosgrove: The attack shows the evolving threat of ISIS’s Digital Caliphate

Morgan Tadych: The attack indicates a troubling pattern of online radicalization

Doug Livermore: ISIS is diminished in the Middle East, but is persisting elsewhere

Mike Nelson: The US must remain vigilant against the appeal of ‘leaderless jihad’

A lone wolf is far more dangerous than a terrorist cell

As the investigation unfolds in New Orleans, I get a sense that some in the media and law enforcement are a bit relieved that this may “just” be the work of a lone wolf attacker. It may be counterintuitive, but I’d argue that a lone wolf is far more worrisome and dangerous for US counterterrorism officials, as it is so much harder for both law enforcement and the intelligence community to penetrate the operation itself. This is exacerbated further if the attacker self-radicalized, receiving inspiration and guidance virtually from ISIS propaganda, for example.

Officials in the counterterrorism world actually prefer to investigate terrorist cells, as this provides significant opportunities to uncover and recruit the cell members, and also potentially intercept communications between cell members and the terrorist mothership. The more individuals involved in a terrorist plot, the larger chance that one makes a mistake. While of course it would be a relief to know that there are not ISIS adherents running around New Orleans posing a direct public safety threat, we should not rest easy, as this modus operandi of a lone wolf conducting a vehicle attack poses immense challenges to the traditional detect/disrupt/deter counterterrorism model that has worked so effectively in the past.

—Marc Polymeropoulos is a nonresident senior fellow in the Forward Defense practice of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and a member of the Council’s Counterterrorism Project. He worked for twenty-six years at the CIA in a variety of field and headquarters operational assignments focusing on counterterrorism, the Middle East, and South Asia.

The attack shows the evolving threat of ISIS’s Digital Caliphate

Following their formal defeat by coalition forces in 2019, the Islamic State leveraged its technological expertise to establish a Virtual Caliphate—a digital refuge where disaffected individuals seeking community and purpose converge around the vision of a state governed by sharia law under a caliph. The Virtual Caliphate has expanded rapidly, driven by shifting refugee populations, unresolved border disputes, decentralized planning needs, the use of generative AI as a knowledge hub, and the role of protests.

The Digital Caliphate signifies a new chapter in ISIS’s technological evolution, building on the Virtual Caliphate by advancing from the dissemination of ideas to the orchestration of action and violence through digital and technological means. In essence, the Digital Caliphate bridges the proliferation of ideas with the execution of actions through digital tools.

The New Year’s attack in New Orleans highlights the evolving threat of the Digital Caliphate. The attacker’s actions reflect its hallmarks, including likely radicalization via unregulated platforms. The shift from physical territories to digital domains has made it harder to detect and disrupt lone actors operating independently but aligned with extremist ideologies.

This attack serves as a stark reminder that extremism has fully adapted to the digital age. The United States’ counter-strategies must evolve at scale and speed. Policymakers must act decisively to disrupt the Digital Caliphate’s ability to weaponize commercial technology and protect communities from future attacks.

—Danielle Cosgrove is a member of the Atlantic Council’s Counterterrorism Project as well as a technology executive and distinguished lecturer at Stanford University who previously led high-impact conflict zone operations and strategic stability initiatives.

The attack indicates a troubling pattern of online radicalization

The terror attack on our homeland on New Year’s Day shares several horrifying characteristics with other recent terror arrests made in the United States and Canada. In all three cases, men disaffected with their lives started to interact online with ISIS-linked influencers and sites. While the specifics of Jabbar’s online interactions are not yet clear, the presence of an ISIS flag in his rental truck in addition to early reports of videos that he posted promoting extremist content indicate that he was radicalized online. Prior to the last few years, Jabbar appeared to lead a relatively normal life; as his personal life fell apart, he became further radicalized.

In particular, Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K, the Central Asia/Afghanistan-based branch of ISIS) has demonstrated a particular social media savvy to expand its Digital Caliphate. In several foiled attack plots in 2024, IS-K leveraged online contact with men seeking an Islamic community to radicalize and encourage them to commit attacks against symbolic Western targets. The New Orleans attack follows a similar pattern, with a recently radicalized US citizen terrorizing a symbolic soft target that is in opposition to IS-K’s perception of morality. The United States must monitor online spaces to attempt to detect and deter radicalization before it happens—in cases such as this, it is critical to stay “left of boom.”

—Morgan Tadych is an open-source intelligence (OSINT) professional, Army veteran, and member of the Atlantic Council’s Counterterrorism Project. She spent much of her military career researching strategic Russia/Eurasia issues and deployed to conduct counterterrorism missions.

ISIS is diminished in the Middle East, but is persisting elsewhere

ISIS’s territorial caliphate in the heart of the Middle East has largely crumbled and the group’s continued influence now relies on various “provinces” across the globe, from the Sahel to Afghanistan. These affiliates continue to pose notable challenges, surviving in regions marked by instability, weak governance, and other active insurgencies.

Throughout 2022, I served as the deputy commander of the NATO Special Operations Advisory Group in Iraq, a role in which I worked closely with the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service and Federal Intelligence and Investigations Agency to root out the few legitimate ISIS fighters hiding out in caves in the mountainous north. Despite the group’s increasingly diminished capacity in Iraq and Syria, it continues to exploit the fragmented security environments there and elsewhere to persist despite international pressure. In the Sahel, ISIS affiliates compete with other larger terrorist groups for influence, while IS-K, operating in Afghanistan, remains a small but persistent threat to regional security—as was seen in the Moscow attack of March 2024.

Iran has strategically used ISIS as a bogeyman to justify its malign activities in the region, particularly its influence in Iraq and, until recently, Syria. By portraying itself as a bulwark against the return of ISIS, Iran aims to maintain its presence and control over strategic territories, consolidating its influence among local militias and proxy groups. This dangerous narrative obscures Iran’s broader regional ambitions and its role in exacerbating the very conditions that foster extremism. This ongoing dynamic allows Iran to continue using proxies to smuggle weapons and launch attacks against Israel and threaten other interests from within Iraqi territory.

Even though ISIS is a diminishing shell of its former self, it still bears continued attention given both the exploitation of its existence by strategic competitors and potential for resurgence.

—Doug Livermore is a member of the Atlantic Council’s Counterterrorism Group, national vice president for the Special Operations Association of America, senior vice president for solution engineering at the CenCore Group, and the deputy commander for Special Operations Detachment—Joint Special Operations Command in the North Carolina Army National Guard.

The US must remain vigilant against the appeal of ‘leaderless jihad’

The New Orleans attack represents the latest in a series of attacks and threats that have plagued the United States and its allies for decades. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, there was speculation that this was an act of a larger cell or potentially a complex attack with improvised explosive devices placed as a second wave. Perhaps this was part of a multicity simultaneous attack connected to the bizarre events in Las Vegas. However, while details are still emerging, it appears that this was a tragic but unsophisticated attack by a solo actor who had recently become more radicalized by digital messaging and content against a soft target. In many ways, it was reminiscent of attacks like those in San Bernardino in 2015 and Orlando in 2016, in that the perpetrators were individually radicalized and inspired by Islamist jihadism as opposed to being directed by larger organizations or conducting attacks that required specialized training. Jabbar’s status as a veteran is reminiscent of the attacks of Sergeant Hasan Akbar and Major Nidal Hasan, in that those who had volunteered to serve the United States became influenced to attack it.

These kinds of attacks are the manifestation of al-Qaeda strategist Abu Musab al-Suri’s concept of “leaderless jihad,” that mujahideen distributed throughout the world would take it upon themselves to conduct attacks against enemies near and far. They are potentially the hardest to anticipate in that there are no cells to infiltrate, no specialty items or explosives to trigger attention, and, given that Jabbar was a native-born US citizen, no immigration screening to have blocked the threat at the border.

The attack should not be taken as an indication of re-emerging ISIS strength, rather as what appears to be the radicalization of an imbalanced malcontent. The danger, however, is that there are many more who are susceptible to this kind of extremism. As such, the United States must remain vigilant against all forms of radical Islamism—both the armed formations and the online influence operations.

—Mike Nelson is a retired Army special forces officer and a member of the Atlantic Council’s Counterterrorism Project.

5. The American Worker Is Becoming More Productive

Finally a little positive news but with a double edge.

The American Worker Is Becoming More Productive

U.S. workers are getting more done. That’s great for the economy—though not always great for workers.

https://www.wsj.com/economy/jobs/worker-productivity-america-growing-36f4c90c?mod=hp_lead_pos7

By Justin LahartFollow

and Lauren WeberFollow

| Photographs by Cody O’Loughlin for WSJ

Jan. 2, 2025 9:00 pm ET

America is getting better at getting things done.

Take Vic Viktorov, a gym owner who increased revenue at his Boston business in 2024 by 30% without adding a single salesperson to the two already on staff. Instead, he has been using an artificial-intelligence model loaded with company documents, sales materials and other information. Now, he can complete in just minutes work that used to take hours, such as writing marketing plans, email drafts and social-media posts.

“It allows us to be lean, nimble and fast,” said Viktorov.

Productivity in the U.S., as measured by how much the average worker gets done in an hour, has been on the rise. That matters because the faster that productivity grows, the faster the economy can grow as well. The success of the U.S. economy, and why it has grown so much compared with other countries over the past century and more, has hinged on its productivity.

Productivity—the total output of the economy divided by hours worked—rose 2% in the third quarter compared with a year earlier, according to the Labor Department. That marked the fifth quarter in a row with an increase of 2% or better. In the five years before the pandemic, there were only two such quarters.

The gains in part reflect massive changes in the U.S. economy since the onset of Covid-19. Companies learned new ways of doing things and adopted new technologies, while an upheaval in the labor market moved workers into more productive jobs.

Another big change in the American labor force—a massive influx of immigration—might also have played a role. Immigrants are often slotted into manual-intensive jobs, which could allow other workers to move up to more highly skilled jobs.

After a sudden heart attack at age 40, Viktorov left management consulting and opened his own gym.

Businesses learned new ways to operate: QR codes instead of paper menus at restaurants, for example, or a videoconference instead of a time-consuming trip out of town. There has also been a big and continuing jump in the number of new businesses getting started.

And workers, for their part, moved themselves into better-paying and higher-skilled jobs. When restaurants, hotels and retailers reopened after briefly shutting down, they struggled to find workers and were more inclined to offer bonuses or promotions. That made it easy for, say, a cashier at a poorly run store to get work at a well-run one—where he might earn more money, have more responsibilities and get more done.

Of course, increased productivity isn’t always good news for workers: One way that companies get more productive is by laying off employees. New technologies such as AI can create new jobs and make workers more efficient—or take their jobs.

The recent dockworkers strike was fueled in part by port employers’ desire to expand the use of automated machinery on docks. President-elect Donald Trump threw his support behind the dockworkers, saying in December that automation threatened jobs.

And it isn’t clear that the move up in productivity growth will last. The figures are both volatile and subject to revision. The wave of job switching after the pandemic hit has run its course. And so far, productivity isn’t experiencing anything like the boom in the 1990s, when the wide-scale adoption of the personal computer and the advent of the internet reshaped the economy.

But at the least, it looks better now than before the pandemic, when economists worried the U.S. was stuck in a low-productivity funk.

With labor scarce in recent years, Novae, a Markle, Ind.-based maker of trailers for pickup trucks, built a state-of-the-art factory that opened six months ago. It cost $35 million, about seven times more than typical plants in the industry, and output is already 35% higher per worker, according to Chief Executive Manish Bhandari. He expects even better results over time, partly because the new factory helps the company retain its skilled workers.

A Novae factory that opened in 2024 incorporates automation and other productivity-enhancing innovations. Photo: Novae LLC

At the plant, Novae automated some processes and incorporated improvements suggested by workers. One employee designed a bin that hangs 3 inches away from assemblers’ hands and holds a fastener used in the trailer’s frame.

The company also worked with Streamliners, an operations consulting firm, on an older factory near Minneapolis, with a goal of increasing productivity by 70%. Lacking additional room to expand, the team designed a whole new layout for the existing space.

“There is no silver bullet here,” Bhandari said. “It’s hundreds of small decisions.”

‘They don’t have anything to lose’

The stakes are high. Economic growth fundamentally relies on how many people are working and how much they can produce while they are on the clock.

But America’s scope for expanding its labor force is limited: The population is increasing slowly, the baby-boom generation is retiring, and Trump has promised to heavily restrict immigration and deport millions of immigrant workers who are already in the U.S. Stronger productivity would help bolster the economy and support an aging population.

Productivity also helps keep inflation in check: A more efficient business can be more profitable and pay its workers more without raising prices.

In November, there were a seasonally adjusted 157,678 “high-propensity” new-business applications, those with a high likelihood of turning into businesses with payroll, according to the Census Bureau—nearly 50% above the monthly levels that prevailed before the pandemic.

That is a positive sign for productivity, for two reasons, according to University of Maryland economist John Haltiwanger.

First, when there are new opportunities for innovation, as with cars a hundred years ago or computers in the 1980s and 1990s, new businesses proliferate. Second, new businesses are quicker to adopt new technologies. That can allow them to hire fewer workers to get things done.

“They’re more likely to do radical things,” Haltiwanger said. “They don’t have anything to lose, so to speak.”

Hybrid-work arrangements might have also helped productivity for white-collar workers by creating a balance between the quiet of home and face-to-face interactions of the office. Hybrid work also appears to improve employee retention, said Stanford University economist Nick Bloom, meaning businesses don’t lose time training new workers.

No emails, no problems

Viktorov, the gym owner, had a sudden heart attack at the age of 40, after working in management consulting for two decades. That fueled his decision in 2022 to open a gym focused on athletic-style training.

He employs two salespeople and eight coaches but manages the rest—marketing, human resources, information technology, facilities and other functions—on his own.

Viktorov uses generative AI, which can create content from large pools of data, for more than marketing tasks. It also helps with complex projects such as figuring out financing options or drafting an employee handbook, he said.

Vic Viktorov with clients at his gym, a franchise of D1 Training.

“If I can save an hour, two hours a day by speeding up these tasks, it makes me much more efficient,” said Viktorov, whose gym is a Boston-area franchise of Tennessee-based D1 Training.

It takes time, though, for a successful technology to be used widely enough and effectively enough for it to show up. So while ChatGPT and other GenAI tools are garnering lots of attention, and some businesses are using them, they are probably too new to move the needle on productivity across the economy yet, said Harvard University economist David Deming.

“They haven’t been around long enough, and there hasn’t been enough embedding of them in organizations in ways that change practices,” he said.

But older types of AI technologies could already be making businesses more efficient, Deming said. For example, some AI that can help companies manage inventory predates the pandemic.

Viktorov calls himself an early adopter when it comes to technology.

Raj Karanam took over Architectural Surfaces, which distributes stone and other materials for homes, five months ago. In that short time, he has reduced product shortages 95%, largely by using advanced analytics and AI to manage inventory.

That leads to as much as $2.5 million in added revenue a month from sales the company would previously have lost because materials were out of stock.

In the past, he said, a showroom in Denver might need a slab of quartzite that is in stock in Austin, Texas. Dozens of emails would go back and forth to approve and initiate a transfer. Now, he said, all of that happens automatically. “Emails don’t even get triggered so you eliminate that waste, and we’re getting inventory to the right location as quickly as possible.”

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

What do you think explains the success of the U.S. economy? Join the conversation below.

Write to Justin Lahart at Justin.Lahart@wsj.com and Lauren Weber at Lauren.Weber@wsj.com

6. Jimmy Carter vs. Iran: The Untold Story Revealed in the Archives

An interesting historical perspective.

Jimmy Carter vs. Iran: The Untold Story Revealed in the Archives

The late president was often criticized as too passive in engaging a new U.S. enemy. But evidence from the time shows his attempted interventions were forceful—just misguided.

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/jimmy-carter-vs-iran-the-untold-story-revealed-in-the-archives-052d4c5d?mod=latest_headlines

Supporters cheer Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s return to Tehran after the fall of the shah’s regime, February 1979. Photo: Michel SETBOUN/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

By Ray Takeyh

Jan. 2, 2025 9:00 pm ET

The popular impression for the four decades since his presidency is that Jimmy Carter, who died this week, is responsible for somehow “losing” Iran. His passivity, it has often been argued, helped build the militant Islamist state that has stalked the Middle East since Iran’s revolution in 1979.

But if that is seen as his most meaningful legacy, the archives of the time tell a different story. No American tried harder to thwart the revolution than Carter. And when that failed, he plotted to subvert the Islamic regime.

The mid-1970s, when Carter took office, was a time of U.S. retrenchment. The twin shocks of Watergate and Vietnam had caused many Americans to lose confidence in their politicians and institutions. The Arab-Israeli War of 1973 was followed by an oil embargo and dramatic spike in petroleum prices; those in turn pushed a new term, stagflation, into our lexicon, meaning simultaneously high inflation and unemployment.

An exhausted America had to step back and rely on proxies and allies to patrol the critical regions of the world. In the Middle East that meant Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran. He was a rare leader in the region who sided with America in the Cold War, embraced Israel and refused to join Arabs in their oil embargoes. He was willing to spend billions on American arms to protect the Persian Gulf. Retrenchment from the Middle East was not costly for Washington so long as the shah stood sentry.

President Jimmy Carter toasts Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi at Niavaran Palace in Tehran on Dec. 31, 1977. Photo: Associated Press

Carter recognized this, and on one of his first trips abroad as president, in December 1977, he journeyed to Tehran. In a much-remembered toast, he celebrated Iran as an “island of stability” because of the shah’s leadership. But over the next year, the Iranian revolution unfolded faster than U.S. policymakers could adjust their long-held assumptions about the shah.

It was not unreasonable for them to presume that a cagey ruler who had been in power for 37 years, commanding a formidable military, could handle a few convulsions like student protests among his citizenry. But they also underestimated a religious revival— fueled partly by anger at corruption and repression in a ruling elite enabled by Western allies. Meanwhile, it was not known in Washington, D.C., that the shah suffered from cancer, which exacerbated his tendency to fade in times of crisis.

Carter himself was preoccupied in 1978 with other priorities: arms control with the Soviet Union, normalization of relations with China and Arab-Israeli peacemaking culminating in the Camp David accords in September. It was not until then that he turned to Iran and found his own administration divided, with State Department doves opposing the National Security Council hawks who wanted the strongest intervention to support the shah.

Carter was made of tougher stuff than his liberal aides and usually sided with his more hawkish deputies. For a president who often blended idealism with pragmatism, preserving the shah’s regime was not a difficult call.

It is rare for an American president to tell a sovereign leader to repress his rebellious subjects. But in November 1978, Carter instructed his ambassador, William Sullivan, to inform the shah, “We have confidence in the shah’s judgment…. We also recognize the need for decisive action and leadership to restore order and his own authority,” according to then-National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski’s memoir.

It was the shah who rejected this option and wondered “why the president thought a military government could be successful,” according to a cable Sullivan sent after their meeting; he also noted that “the situation was vastly different from 1953,” when the CIA had helped the shah’s military overthrow a nationalist government.

Khomeini speaks to journalists at Roissy airport near Paris on Jan. 31, 1979 before flying from exile back to Iran. Photo: Michel Binh/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

U.S. Ambassador William Sullivan (center), is escorted from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran by armed guerrillas brandishing bayonets who overran the embassy, Feb. 14, 1979. Photo: Bettmann Archive

By January 1979, Iran was coming undone. The streets were filled with demonstrators and the economy was crippled by strikes. The shah essentially gave up and left the country, leaving behind a caretaker prime minister to deal with the vengeful revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Carter did not mourn Pahlavi’s departure, telling his aides on Feb. 5 that “even to save his own ass, the shah had not been willing to order massive bloodshed,” in a recording preserved in the Carter Presidential Library. He now began to contemplate the so-called Option C—C standing for coup. He dispatched General Robert Huyser to Tehran to ready the Iranian military to take over.

Neither Carter nor Huyser seemed to recognize that the Iranian generals were as hesitant as the monarch they had served and had no stomach for a crackdown. At a time when Huyser was trying to prod them into action, they were busy making their own exile plans.

On Feb. 11, both the monarchy and American hopes crumbled. The revolutionaries were taking over government buildings, arms depots and radio stations across the country. The shah’s generals were fleeing and their conscripts defecting. This did not deter Carter and his advisers, who dusted off Option C. They even considered sending Huyser back to Tehran, but the Iranian military declared its neutrality and succumbed to history’s verdict.

After the revolution, there was some optimism that America could come to terms with the provisional government, which featured moderate and nationalist voices. But on Nov. 4, 1979, ostensibly to protest the shah’s admission to America for medical treatment, militant students seized the U.S. Embassy and held American diplomats hostage for 444 days. There was always more to the hostage crisis than its stated rationale. The embassy seizure was Khomeini’s revenge against America and an expression of his personal animus toward Carter for enabling the shah’s repression.

The American response came with the failed rescue mission called Operation Eagle Claw. The complex logistical mission was aborted when helicopters crashed in the desert. The lasting image of that operation that was beamed across the world was one of burned-out helicopters and bodies of eight dead American servicemen being inspected by grinning mullahs. Carter was seen as a weak, indecisive leader who could not punish a second-rate power for humiliating America.

Above: Remains of one burned-out U.S. helicopter and one abandoned one from the abortive rescue mission on April 24, 1980, to free American hostages. Below: President Carter prepares to make a national television address from the White House on April 25 on the failed rescue mission. Photo: Associated Press (2)

Though the rescue mission was a failure, behind the scenes, Carter was hardly a passive player. In December 1979, two months into the hostage crisis, he issued a Presidential Finding ordering the CIA to “conduct propaganda and political and economic action operations to encourage the establishment of a responsible and democratic regime in Iran” and “make contact with Iranian opposition leaders and interested governments to encourage interactions that could lead to a broad, pro-Western front capable of forming an alternative government.”

Given his penchant to inject idealism into unsavory measures, Carter hoped to displace the theocracy with a democratic government. As far as it can be determined from the available archival records, Carter is the only president to formally commit the U.S. to regime change in Iran.

To discharge this task, a committee was established in the White House headed by Deputy National Security Adviser David Aaron. The committee gave itself the morbid title of the “Black Chamber,” and went about enlisting exiles and trying to contact dissidents in Iran. The precise operational details remain classified, and the committee seems to have been disbanded once President Ronald Reagan’s team took over in 1981.

Jimmy Carter did not lose Iran, but he misunderstood it. He seemed to believe that one of the great populist revolutions of the 20th century could be stopped by foreigners. He failed to appreciate that his royalist allies were broken men eager to abandon their inheritance. His coup scheme seems fantastic in retrospect given the timidity of the shah’s generals in the face of a determined popular rebellion. And he assumed that a regime born out of a revolution that enjoyed popular legitimacy—at least at the start—could be displaced by a committee operating out of the White House.

In this sense, Jimmy Carter was quintessentially American, a president who thought he could determine outcomes in a faraway country that he knew little about.

Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of a forthcoming book on Jimmy Carter and Iran.

7. Xi Jinping’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good Year

Excerpts:

Domestically, Xi’s task is how to redefine success. If political stability and ideological discipline now take primacy over economic growth, Xi will have to reframe hardship as proof positive of China’s resilience and moral superiority over the West. If national rejuvenation now takes decades longer than planned, Xi will likely cast the delays as necessary steps in achieving the “Chinese Dream.” Whether the Chinese people will embrace this new narrative—or tire of a perpetually deferred future—remains an open question.

On the global stage, Xi’s reliance on instability poses its own perils. Rather than treading water, Xi may escalate tensions elsewhere—perhaps in the South China Sea, testing U.S. resolve through confrontation with the Philippines. Yet as much as a chaos-driven strategy intends to distract adversaries and sidestep direct confrontation, it invites miscalculation. More specifically, Xi risks exposing Beijing to the vulnerabilities that have undermined other authoritarian regimes—from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s disastrous gamble of invading Ukraine to Hamas’s ill-fated Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that invited overwhelming retaliation.

Of course, the irony of Xi’s leadership is that a seemingly transformational figure obsessed with progress cannot embrace change. Under his rule, China has become a power both disruptive and constrained, where every effort to tighten control risks tarnishing Beijing’s global standing and undermining the credibility of its great-power ascent. But muddling through isn’t leading, and for someone whose legitimacy hinges on delivering national prestige, mere survival risks falling dangerously short of his own lofty ambitions. Ultimately, whether 2025 becomes a turning point or simply another terrible, horrible, no good year will depend on Xi’s ability to overcome the greatest challenge of all: himself.

Xi Jinping’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good Year

The irony of his leadership is that a seemingly transformational figure cannot embrace change.

By Craig Singleton, a senior China fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Foreign Policy · by Craig Singleton

China

January 2, 2025, 12:05 PM

2024 was disastrous for Chinese President Xi Jinping. For all of his rhetoric about “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” his regime faced staggering setbacks. Military purges intended to root out corruption instead revealed systemic turmoil that continues to undermine readiness. Economic growth cratered as unemployment, bankruptcies, and capital outflows soared. Meanwhile, key partners in Moscow and Damascus stumbled or fell, undermining Beijing’s geostrategic ambitions. Together, these and other crises have revealed a China that looks increasingly fragile, not formidable.

If 2024 shattered illusions of China’s unyielding ascent, 2025 promises to lay bare the vulnerabilities that Xi can no longer conceal.

Facing mounting problems at home and soon an emboldened U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington, Xi is nevertheless not banking on dramatic shifts or bold reforms. Instead, he is pursuing a policy of perseverance: muddling through economic stagnation, avoiding outright confrontation with Washington, doubling down on ideological discipline, and fomenting chaos abroad to distract adversaries and buy time to stabilize his precarious position.

Yet Xi’s approach carries significant risk. While his willingness to endure hardship may fortify his grip on power today, it threatens to unravel his aspirations for China’s national revival tomorrow.

Contrary to Xi’s carefully constructed image of competence, China’s domestic dilemmas remain profound. A shrinking population, a weakening currency, and dwindling foreign investment have exposed cracks in Xi’s economic stewardship. They also undermine the Communist Party’s bargain with the Chinese people: prosperity in exchange for compliance. China’s crisis of confidence risks spiraling into a vicious cycle as weak growth deters investment, shrinks spending, deepens deflation, and raises unemployment—all of which drag growth even lower. Xi’s reliance on meager supply-side stimulus has delivered fleeting sugar highs, with modest spending upticks and short-lived credit expansions. But ballooning debt, bad real estate bets, and a stock market that has been flat for a decade leave Xi with few levers to reignite growth.

Worse still, Xi’s campaign to root out perceived weaknesses within the party, military, and private sector has compounded his conundrum. Purges of senior officials such as People’s Liberation Army Navy Adm. Miao Hua—a key enforcer of Xi’s ideological conformity accused of “serious violations of discipline”—as well as former Defense Minister Li Shangfu underscore rot within the ranks. The reported detention of more than 80 business executives in 2024 alone has stifled innovation and fueled fears of arbitrary state intervention. While these actions may consolidate loyalty and enforce control, they also deepen distrust and erode the competence that Xi needs to navigate mounting pressures.

These widening woes have only steeled Xi’s resolve. He routinely invokes Western “encirclement” and “containment,” blaming the United States for thwarting China’s rise. But he uses this narrative to justify ever-expanding repression at home, including constructing more than 200 party-run, extrajudicial detention facilities to enforce discipline and root out dissent. In Xi’s view, China’s domestic struggles ultimately stem from weak ideological discipline and insufficient loyalty to his vision. Put differently, in Xi’s mind, China isn’t broken; it’s disobedient. His solution? A stronger dose of the same medicine: tighter party control, intensified repression, and an unrelenting drive to cement his legacy as the architect of China’s historical destiny.

Amid internal challenges, Xi is turning to chaos abroad to reshape the international order in China’s favor. By offering diplomatic cover and economic support for Russia’s war in Ukraine and tacit backing for Middle Eastern disruptors such as Iran, Xi is fueling crises that distract, divide, and drain Western resources. For Xi, chaos is not merely a tactic; it’s a form of strategic currency, undermining Western cohesion while bolstering his narrative of Chinese resilience and strength. His calculation is stark: If China’s ascent is faltering, the international architecture sustaining its rivals must falter, too. Seen in this light, disorder abroad is Xi’s lifeline—a calculated gambit to obscure his inability to deliver progress at home or globally.

Yet 2025 will test Xi like never before. Intensifying scrutiny from Washington—including new semiconductor investigations, advanced technology export controls, and expanded tariffs—is set to collide with rising domestic unrest, including labor strikes and online dissent. At the same time, an emerging anti-authoritarian alignment—marked by enhanced trans-Atlantic coordination on China and the new U.S.-Japan-South Korea trilateral framework—will intensify the strain. These converging forces will challenge Xi in ways he can neither control nor predict, exposing the fragility of his centralized power and testing the limits of his carefully constructed narrative of inevitability.

Xi’s biggest X factor will be Trump, whose return promises unpredictability. In his first term, Trump waited 15 months to impose tariffs on Chinese goods. This time, tariffs are expected to hit immediately and intensely, targeting the very lifeblood of China’s faltering economy: exports. These tariffs won’t just come faster; they’ll cut deeper, with proposed rates reaching as high as 60 percent on critical sectors such as technology, consumer goods, and industrial equipment. Unlike sanctions, which Xi has worked to mitigate and take years to fully materialize, tariffs take effect overnight, leaving Beijing with little time to react and forcing Chinese manufacturers to absorb crushing losses.

Trump’s tariff threats translate into tremendous peril for Xi. China’s reliance on the United States—its largest trading partner—sustains millions of manufacturing jobs, but a rapid tariff escalation could devastate small and medium enterprises, triggering factory closures and layoffs. Vulnerable sectors such as electronics and textiles could face severe disruption, and even the electric vehicle industry—one of China’s few bright spots—is grappling with domestic oversaturation and budding Western trade barriers. Meanwhile, bipartisan support in Washington for outbound investment screening threatens to choke off critical U.S. capital flows, stalling Beijing’s technological ambitions and broader economic goals.

All told, these measures could deliver a knockout blow to China’s economy, which is almost certainly growing below Beijing’s official target of 5 percent. Tellingly, the party has threatened to fire economists if they warn of economic freefall or express “inappropriate” views—a hallmark authoritarian move to suppress inconvenient truths. Xi has made boosting domestic consumption his top priority for 2025, but this rests on shaky ground, too. If Xi trusts anything even less than markets, it’s the Chinese masses, who have shown no appetite to spend their way out of his economic quagmire. Investors share this skepticism: China’s 10-year bond yield has plunged to record lows, signaling doubts about the country’s trajectory.

Meanwhile, Xi’s reliance on global chaos to sustain his position reveals a glaring paradox: The instability he is fueling in order to distract the West could backfire if and when those crises stabilize. In 2025, the winding down of major conflicts—whether through Trump’s promised dealmaking over Ukraine or Israeli action against Iran’s last remaining proxies—could put the global spotlight back on China. For Xi, this is a nightmare scenario. The West’s fragmented focus has helped mask his vulnerabilities, but resolving these crises could empower the West to confront him head-on.

Xi’s choice is stark: hunker down by embracing a survival strategy or risk further instability by overreaching. Both paths will test his capacity for long-term endurance. Confronted by Trump’s aggressive posturing, Xi is unlikely to pursue outright economic warfare, at least initially, because he recognizes that an escalation would hurt China more than its adversaries. Instead, Xi may adopt calibrated, symbolic responses—like the recently announced rare-earth restrictions—to project strength while preserving room for negotiations. Xi may also leverage retaliatory tariffs or regulatory crackdowns on U.S. firms operating in China to signal defiance without provoking a full-scale confrontation.

Domestically, Xi’s task is how to redefine success. If political stability and ideological discipline now take primacy over economic growth, Xi will have to reframe hardship as proof positive of China’s resilience and moral superiority over the West. If national rejuvenation now takes decades longer than planned, Xi will likely cast the delays as necessary steps in achieving the “Chinese Dream.” Whether the Chinese people will embrace this new narrative—or tire of a perpetually deferred future—remains an open question.

On the global stage, Xi’s reliance on instability poses its own perils. Rather than treading water, Xi may escalate tensions elsewhere—perhaps in the South China Sea, testing U.S. resolve through confrontation with the Philippines. Yet as much as a chaos-driven strategy intends to distract adversaries and sidestep direct confrontation, it invites miscalculation. More specifically, Xi risks exposing Beijing to the vulnerabilities that have undermined other authoritarian regimes—from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s disastrous gamble of invading Ukraine to Hamas’s ill-fated Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that invited overwhelming retaliation.

Of course, the irony of Xi’s leadership is that a seemingly transformational figure obsessed with progress cannot embrace change. Under his rule, China has become a power both disruptive and constrained, where every effort to tighten control risks tarnishing Beijing’s global standing and undermining the credibility of its great-power ascent. But muddling through isn’t leading, and for someone whose legitimacy hinges on delivering national prestige, mere survival risks falling dangerously short of his own lofty ambitions. Ultimately, whether 2025 becomes a turning point or simply another terrible, horrible, no good year will depend on Xi’s ability to overcome the greatest challenge of all: himself.

Foreign Policy · by Craig Singleton

8. China Adds to Sanctions of U.S. Defense Contractors Over Taiwan Arms Sales

China Adds to Sanctions of U.S. Defense Contractors Over Taiwan Arms Sales

Beijing starts year with fresh warning to Trump of economic statecraft at its disposal

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-adds-to-sanctions-of-u-s-defense-contractors-over-taiwan-arms-sales-547d8cde?mod=latest_headlines

By James T. Areddy

Jan. 2, 2025 3:26 pm ET

Chinese leader Xi Jinping issued a warning to the U.S. over Taiwan in a recent address. Photo: Wang Ye/XINHUA/Zuma Press

China started the year with a broadside against U.S. defense contractors, responding to recently ramped-up Taiwan arms sales by the Biden administration and laying down a fresh warning to President-elect Donald Trump of tools Beijing can use to protect national interests.

Beijing’s Ministry of Commerce on Thursday blacklisted 10 companies as “unreliable entities” barred from doing business in China and said it would block an additional 28 from buying unspecified components that could have dual civilian and military uses.

Most of the defense contractors named have previously been sanctioned by China and have little trade with the country, unlike some of the hundreds of Chinese entities with U.S. operations targeted in punishments by Washington, such as Huawei Technologies.

While the immediate impact is likely minimal, the measures are important as symbolic reminders of the kind of measures China could level more broadly against American corporations in any future conflict.

The ministry cited safeguarding national security in Thursday’s action and Xinhua News Agency said the targeted companies have engaged in military technology cooperation and arms sales with Taiwan in recent years, despite China’s strong opposition.

Beijing’s claim to Taiwan is its pre-eminent source of friction with the U.S., and under leader Xi Jinping, China regularly flexes military muscle with jet fighters and warships that demonstrate how it might conduct an invasion or impose a trade embargo of the island. In a New Year’s address, Xi issued a warning to the U.S. over Taiwan: “No one can ever sever the bond of kinship between us, and no one can ever stop China’s reunification, a trend of the times,” he said.

Despite Beijing’s admonishments, every U.S. administration has sold weapons to Taiwan, most recently Abrams tanks from General Dynamics ordered during Trump’s first term and recently delivered by the Biden administration. Under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, the U.S. is committed to providing Taiwan with defensive weaponry and is obligated to treat threats to the democratically run island as a matter of “grave concern.”

During the Biden years through November, the U.S. has reduced a backlog of weapons sold to Taiwan but not delivered, according to a blog post last month by Eric Gomez, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Cato Institute. Gomez pointed out that the Biden administration has put more emphasis on asymmetric systems and maintenance services to Taiwan, which don’t necessarily cost as much as traditional weaponry.

“While the first Trump administration sold Taiwan more weapons, the Biden administration sold Taiwan a better mix of weapons for Taiwan’s self-defense needs,” Gomez wrote.

The 10 companies labeled Thursday as unreliable by China are units of defense contractors General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and RTX’s Raytheon, all of which have been sanctioned previously by Beijing. Some of those groups’ units are among those now blocked from dual-use item purchases, along with Boeing’s Defense, Space & Security unit, which likewise has previously been targeted by Beijing. The companies declined to comment or didn’t respond to questions.

A unit of General Dynamics was among the 10 companies labeled Thursday as unreliable by China. Photo: Nathan Howard/Reuters

The companies now cut off from dual-use components include some new names, including Texas-based sensor technology maker Intelligent Epitaxy Technology, which said it is studying the announcement.

The measures build on Chinese sanctions in recent months against a number of American drone industry players. One of the companies, California-based Skydio, said the measure was aimed at its elimination in order to “deepen the world’s dependence on Chinese drone suppliers.” Beijing has also blocked specialty minerals germanium and gallium from export to the U.S., which appeared related to U.S. efforts to limit Chinese access to high-end semiconductors. And it has lashed out at critics of its human-rights record, banning some prominent American politicians from China, including Trump’s designee for secretary of state, Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.).

After more than a decade of telling American companies they were at risk for participating in Taiwan sales, China in 2020 first sanctioned American defense contractors Lockheed, Raytheon and Boeing. Also during Trump’s first administration, China in 2019 said it would compile an unreliable-entity list after the U.S. blacklisted Huawei, then in 2023 added Lockheed and Raytheon following Biden administration sanctions on a clutch of Chinese enterprises blamed for building a spy balloon that traversed the U.S.

As the world’s largest trading nation by value, its No. 2 economy and a consistently large absorber of foreign direct investment, China, like the U.S., has a vast ability to conduct economic statecraft. Its actions against American defense contractors, like special investigations into the safety of U.S. agricultural products like wheat and beef, plus thickets of regulation and its claims of final approval over multinational corporate mergers, provide tastes of how Beijing can try to match the U.S. in levering economic heft to pressure a foreign adversary.

More could be in store once Trump returns to the White House, as the president-elect has vowed significant new pressure on Beijing, including with tariffs.

Before his November election, Trump suggested he would like to see a more transactional relationship with Taiwan—raising the question of whether he would step up arms sales to the island—and separately vowed retaliation against China if it were to threaten Taiwan. Trump told The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board in October that Xi wouldn’t dare to move against Taiwan because, he said, Xi sees Trump as “crazy,” but that if he did, “I would say: if you go into Taiwan, I’m sorry to do this, I’m going to tax you at 150% to 200%.”

In addition to unleashing its full military power, Beijing would be expected to use a variety of economic strategies in a showdown over Taiwan.

“China has been using a wider range of economic statecraft tools in recent years, particularly in response to Taiwan-specific policy moves by other countries, and these new sanctions on defense contractors seem to be consistent with that same pattern,” said Logan Wright, a partner at Rhodium Group in Washington.

A 2023 study by Rhodium Group and the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center concluded that Beijing has been more systematic in preparing such defenses than Russia was to counter Western sanctions it faced as a result of invading Ukraine.

The study concluded that the major democratic nations that make up the Group of Seven depend on more than $477 billion in Chinese goods that could be restricted from export by Beijing. At least $460 billion in G-7 direct investment assets would be at risk, it said, though Beijing would also need to consider how such measures could undermine domestic employment and other economic factors.

Write to James T. Areddy at James.Areddy@wsj.com

Appeared in the January 3, 2025, print edition as 'Beijing Blacklists More U.S. Companies'.

9. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 2, 2025

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 2, 2025

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-january-2-2025

Ukraine's decision to not renew its contract to transport Russian gas through Ukrainian territory will likely significantly impact Russian gas revenues despite Kremlin posturing to the contrary. Russian and Ukrainian authorities confirmed that Russian gas ceased flowing through Ukrainian territory as of the morning of January 1, and Russian officials and media largely projected confidence that the cessation of gas supplies through Ukraine will harm Europe but not Russia. The loss of gas revenue will likely negatively affect Russian state energy operator Gazprom, which has been struggling with decreasing gas revenue from Europe since 2022. Bloomberg estimated on January 2 that Gazprom will likely lose $6 billion in gas revenues per year due to the cessation of gas transports through Ukraine. The BBC Russian Service noted on January 1 that Gazprom's main source of income in 2021 came from Russia's 45 percent share of the European gas market at the time but that Russia now has only one remaining route to export gas to Europe — the TurkStream pipeline bypassing Ukraine through the Black Sea to Turkey — and that Russian gas currently only accounts for five percent of the European market. The BBC noted that Slovakia and Austria — the final destinations of the blocked Russian gas through Ukraine — have both fully met their energy needs through alternative sources. The Kremlin's efforts to project confidence about the cessation of gas transit through Ukraine mirrors its efforts to coerce Europe into authorizing Russian gas transit to Europe through the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in Winter 2021–2022, and the Kremlin's renewed posturing in Winter 2024–2025 likely aim to extract economic or diplomatic concessions from Europe, undermine unity within the European Union (EU), and drive a wedge between the US and EU.

Gazprom is likely attempting to exploit the cessation of gas transits through Ukraine to create an artificial energy crisis to destabilize Moldova. Gazprom shut off gas supplies to Transnistria via Ukraine on January 1, claiming that Moldova failed to pay a debt worth $709 million. An audit by British and Norwegian audit firms, however, found in 2022 that Moldova owed Gazprom only $8.6 million. Moldova recently held talks with Gazprom about transporting gas to Transnistria via the TurkStream pipeline that runs from Russia to Turkey, but Gazprom refused and did not make the arrangements to do so by the deadline on December 16. Free Gazprom gas has long powered Transnistria's Cuciurgan power station, which exported a significant amount of electricity to Moldova and used the profits from these sales to support Transnistria's budget. The Cuciurgan power station switched to coal reserves on January 1, which reportedly can last about 50 days. Transnistrian gas company Tiraspoltransgaz stopped gas supplies to most consumers in Transnistria and shut off most of the hot water and heat on January 1. Moldova increased its electricity imports from Romania to make up for lost supplies from Transnistria. Moldovan gas company Moldovagaz and Moldovan state electricity company Energocom offered on January 1 to provide Tiraspoltransgaz technical and commercial assistance to obtain gas from European markets after successful tests on December 31, 2024 to supply Moldova with gas through Bulgaria, Romania, and Ukraine.

Key Takeaways:

Ukraine's decision to not renew its contract to transport Russian gas through Ukrainian territory will likely significantly impact Russian gas revenues despite Kremlin posturing to the contrary.

Gazprom is likely attempting to exploit the cessation of gas transits through Ukraine to create an artificial energy crisis to destabilize Moldova.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signaled that Ukraine will increase drone and missile strikes against Russia in 2025 as part of efforts to bring Russia to accept Ukraine's demands for a "just peace" in future negotiations.

Russia intends to issue Russian licenses for the operation of all six of Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant's (ZNPP) reactors by 2028 as part of Moscow's long-term efforts to legitimize its illegal occupation of the plant and exploit Ukraine's energy supplies.

Ukrainian forces conducted a missile strike in Kursk Oblast, reportedly against a Russian military command post.

Ukraine’s Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) specified new details about the December 31 Ukrainian naval drone strike against Russian Mi-8 helicopters in the Black Sea as Ukrainian strikes continue to degrade Russian operations in occupied Crimea.

Russian forces recently advanced near Siversk, Toretsk, Pokrovsk, Kurakhove, and Vuhledar and in western Zaporizhia Oblast.

The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) continues to inadequately supply Russian military personnel with basic equipment and ammunition, forcing soldiers to provide their own materiel.

10. Iran Update, January 2, 2025

Iran Update, January 2, 2025

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-january-2-2025

A Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) delegation met with Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) leader Ahmed al Shara in Damascus on December 30. There were no specific, public reports of meaningful or tangible progress toward an agreement between Shara and the SDF, despite an unspecified official’s statement to AFP that the meeting was “positive.” This is the first reported meeting between the HTS-led interim government and the SDF since the former assumed power over Damascus, though Shara acknowledged that the government was negotiating with the SDF in an al Arabiya interview on December 29. Syrian Democratic Council (SDC) official Bassem Ishak told Asharq al Awsat on January 2 that the parties only discussed “military issues” at the meeting, suggesting that the two parties discussed HTS’s demands that the SDF subordinate itself to the HTS-organized military. This military is—at present—dominated by HTS-affiliated commanders. It does not appear that HTS and the SDF came to an agreement on or even discussed the political requirements of integrating the Kurdish-controlled autonomous zone into HTS territory and governance. The unspecified official told AFP that this was a “preliminary meeting” that would set the stage for future HTS-SDF dialogue. It remains unclear how high of a priority negotiating with the SDF is to Shara, however, as HTS continues to formalize and deepen its relations with Turkey.

The SDF is almost certainly both unable and unwilling to subordinate itself to the HTS-organized Defense Ministry at this time, given the organizational tasks implicit in that effort. The Kurdish-led SDF is still actively engaging the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) and continues to face an existential threat from a potential Turkish offensive in Syria. Reorganizing SDF formations under the HTS-organized Defense Ministry, regardless of whether or not the SDF formations are reflagged or reorganized, would probably require the SDF to break contact with the SNA. The SDF would presumably need to receive certain assurances that the SNA would not continue to attempt to destroy the SDF, especially given that the various SNA formations would make a large portion of the future Syrian army.

The SDF has reportedly widened its salient on the western bank of the Euphrates River around the Tishreen Dam southwards since December 31. The SDF claimed to engage the SNA in Khirbet Zamala, al Atshana, and several other villages between five and ten kilometers south of Tishreen Dam on January 2. Anti-SDF media also reported clashes in the area. Geolocated footage posted on January 1 showed the SDF conducting a drone strike on an SNA vehicle in mountainous terrain in Khirbet Zamala, south of Tishreen Dam. The SDF said it destroyed six armored SNA vehicles in engagements in the area. The SDF may seek to link its forces around Tishreen Dam with the forces moving northwards from Highway Route 4. A link-up between these two advances would presumably strengthen SDF supply lines around the dam, which currently flow across the dam itself and could be more easily disrupted.

The SDF and SNA forces continued fighting west of Tishreen Dam and Qara Qozak bridge since December 31. Geolocated footage posted on January 2 showed the SDF conducting drone strikes targeting SNA vehicles and an M113 armored vehicle along a highway west of Tishreen Dam. The SDF also claimed that it shot down a Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drone near Qara Qozak bridge on January 1. Anti-SDF media reported that the SNA sent reinforcements to the frontlines near the Tishreen Dam on January 2.

Unspecified fighters have detonated improvised explosive devices (IED) in two separate attacks in SNA-controlled territory since December 31. An unspecified fighter detonated a possible car bomb in central Tal Rifaat, north of Aleppo, on December 31. Six people were injured. The low casualty count in a popular market makes it more likely that the culprit used a relatively rudimentary car bomb and not a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (VBIED). This is the third car bomb or VBIED attack in SNA-controlled territory since December 24. An unspecified suspect also detonated a motorcycle in the nearby town of Deir Jamal on January 1. There were no injuries. The SDF condemned the recent IED attacks in Tal Rifaat, Deir Jamal, and Manbij in a statement on January 2.

Additional Key Takeaways:

Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)-Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) negotiations: An SDF delegation met with HTS leader Ahmed al Shara in Damascus on December 30. A Syrian Democratic Council official said the meeting only included “military issues.” The SDF is almost certainly both unable and unwilling to subordinate itself to the HTS-organized Defense Ministry at this time, given the organizational tasks implicit in that effort. The SDF continues to face an existential threat from Turkish-backed forces.

Fighting in Northern Syria: The SDF has reportedly widened its salient on the western bank of the Euphrates River around the Tishreen Dam southwards since December 31. The SDF may seek to link its forces around Tishreen Dam with the forces moving northwards from Highway Route 4. A link-up between these two advances would presumably strengthen SDF supply lines around the dam, which currently flow across the dam itself and could be more easily disrupted.

HTS Operations Against Former Regime Members: The Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS)-led Military Operations Department continued to conduct raids to detain former Regime members that refused to settle with the interim government and disarm on January 1 and 2. Interim government forces also engaged “remnants of an Iranian-backed militia” in Albu Kamal, Deir ez Zor Province, on January 1.

Negotiations with Minorities in Syria: The HTS-led interim Syrian government appears to be taking initial steps to secure cooperation with minority religious communities ahead of the Syrian National Dialogue Conference.

HTS-backed Officials Visit to Saudi Arabia: Interim Syrian Foreign Minister Assad al Shaibani, Defense Minister Marhaf Abu Qasra, and Head of General Intelligence Anas Khattab traveled to Saudi Arabia on January 2 and met with senior Saudi officials.

Iranian-Syrian Relations: Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s senior advisor, Ali Larijani, justified Iran’s actions in Syria, reaffirmed support of the Axis of Resistance, and linked future Iran-Syria relations to the conduct of new Syrian leaders.

11. Chinese Underwater Sea Glider Drone Caught By Fisherman In The Philippines

Chinese Underwater Sea Glider Drone Caught By Fisherman In The Philippines

Similar underwater drones matching a Chinese type able to travel for weeks over long distances were found in the past around the South China Sea.

Joseph Trevithick

Posted 17 Hours Ago

twz.com · by Joseph Trevithick

Authorities in the Philippines are examining what appears to be a Chinese ocean glider-type uncrewed underwater vehicle (UUV) that a fisherman ‘caught’ earlier this week. At least three similar, if not identical undersea drones were found in various locations around Indonesia between 2019 and 2020. The design looks to be one ostensibly intended for maritime research use, but that could also have military applications.

A fisherman recovered the UUV approximately six miles (nine kilometers) off the coast of the San Pascual municipality in Masbate, an island province in the Philippines that lies in the central section of the archipelago nation, on December 30, 2024. The drone, which is said to be around six and a half feet (two meters) long, was turned over first to the Philippine National Police (PNP) and then to the Philippine Navy.

A view of the glider-type UUV in PNP custody. PNP Bicol

A map showing the general location of the San Pascual municipality in Masbate province in the Philippines. Google Maps

The predominantly yellow-painted UUV has a torpedo-esque main body with a single fin and stinger-like protrusion at the rear end. There are also two larger wing-like fins, which are black, attached to the body. Pictures the PNP has released show “HY-119” and “HY-L0119” markings on the rear of the drone.

The HY-L0119 marking is visible in this picture of the glider-type UUV. PNP Bicol

“Based on our open-source research in the internet… HY-119 refers to a Chinese underwater navigation and communication system,” PNP Bicol regional director Brigadier General Andre Dizon told AFP. “It has an antenna and an eye that can be used for viewing. Based on our research, this can be used for monitoring and reconnaissance.”

Pictures, seen below, do show an aperture or port on top of the nose end of the UUV, as well as what may be rows of smaller ones behind it. There is no obvious propulsion system, which we will come back to momentarily.

Another view of the glider-type UUV. PNP Bicol

PNP Bicol

The UUV recovered near San Pascual looks virtually identical, at least externally, to ones that fishermen in Indonesia recovered on at least three separate occasions between 2019 and 2020. The drones found around the Philippines and Indonesia also have very strong similarities to the Chinese Sea Wing ocean glider-type UUV, which the state-run Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) developed more than a decade ago. Underwater drones of this type use an internal system to alter their buoyancy, repeatedly diving and then surfacing to move forward in the water, aided by the fins along the body and at the tail. Past Chinese state media reports have claimed that Sea Wing can operate for up to 30 days and dive down to a depth of nearly four miles.

Noted that this is at least the second time Sea Wing UUV found in Indonesia

In March 2019, a fisherman made similar findings on Tenggel Island/Village, Riau Islands

Laduni & TribunNews https://t.co/3lvZzhdXwI pic.twitter.com/ASxAdWPs6B

— JATOSINT (@Jatosint) December 29, 2020

Yep, there are the two incidents in the article. @Peatland_Boy just highlighted a third, also a Sea Wing glider

— H I Sutton (@CovertShores) December 29, 2020

Officially, CAS has used Sea Wings for various underwater research purposes, including measuring the strength and direction of currents and water temperature, oxygen levels, and salinity using acoustic and other sensors. As TWZ has noted in the past, these are common tasks for glide-type drones, which are also in service with the U.S. Navy and other military and civilian organizations globally.

Sea Wing unmanned undersea vehicles arrayed in front of a Chinese Academy of Sciences research ship. Chinese Academy of Sciences

Glider-type UUVs, in general, are also known to be employed for hydrographic survey work and to otherwise support the creation of underwater maps. Having highly accurate charts detailing the contours of the seabed has obvious military utility, especially for submarine operations.

Underwater gliders can be used to support other kinds of military activities, as well. For instance, the U.S. Navy has said in the past that it uses these kinds of UUVs to help “service” fixed underwater sonar sensor “fields.” However, UUVs of this type do offer far more limited capabilities overall than more advanced underwater drones that have been and continue to be developed and fielded, including by China, in recent years.

It is also worth noting that the line between civilian research capabilities and military ones is often muddled in general in China. The country’s state-run civilian scientific and engineering organizations like CAS and its subdivisions have close ties directly to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

It does remain unknown what the UUV recovered near San Pascual was doing at the time, as well as whether it was operational or had stopped functioning and drifted there from somewhere else. At the same time, as was the case with the ones that fishermen ‘caught’ around Indonesia years ago, its appearance, especially in waters well within the bounds of the Philippines archipelago, has real potential national security implications. The PNP itself has made this clear. All of this is only further underscored by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy’s (PLAN) own brief seizure of a U.S. Navy glider-type underwater drone in the hotly contested South China Sea back in December 2016.

A stock picture of a US Navy glider-type UUV. USN

“The recovery of the HY-119 system has significant implications, as it provides insights into advanced underwater technology and naval capabilities,” the statement from the PNP’s Bicol office adds. “Authorities are closely examining the device as to its origin and to assess its potential impact on national security and maritime operations.”

The Philippines could well reach out to allies and partners, especially the United States, to further assist with its ongoing investigation. The U.S. military and the U.S. Intelligence Community have particularly robust so-called Foreign Materiel Exploitation (FME) enterprises that specialize in gleaning a wide variety of information on capabilities and other aspects of captured or otherwise acquired non-American systems. You can learn more about the U.S. government’s FME ecosystem in this past TWZ feature.

The recovery of the UUV near San Pascual also comes at a time of particularly heightened geopolitical friction between China and the Philippines, primarily over Beijing’s widely rejected claims to virtually all of the South China Sea. Last year saw especially aggressive actions on the part of the Chinese Coast Guard and Maritime Militia ships over Scarborough Shoal, which an international tribunal affirmed as belonging to the Philippines in 2016. Chinese authorities continue to ignore that ruling.

In the meantime, authorities in the Philippines have stressed that if anyone finds any more underwater drones or other similar objects that they should not touch them and immediately contact the PNP.

Contact the author: joe@thedrive.com

Joseph Trevithick

12. Biden Plans to Block Takeover Bid of U.S. Steel by Japan’s Nippon

Biden Plans to Block Takeover Bid of U.S. Steel by Japan’s Nippon

The president’s announcement of the fate of the iconic Pennsylvania-based company, which became a contentious political issue in an election year, is expected as soon as Friday.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/03/us/politics/us-steel-nippon-biden.html

U.S. Steel, the iconic American company whose metal has been used to build some of the nation’s most famous bridges and buildings, is based in the swing state of Pennsylvania.Credit...Kyodo, via Associated Press

By Alan Rappeport

Reporting from Washington

Jan. 3, 2025, 12:26 a.m. ET

President Biden has decided to block the $14 billion takeover of U.S. Steel by Nippon Steel of Japan in an announcement expected as soon as Friday based on grounds that the sale poses a threat to national security, according to people familiar with the matter.

The decision would be an extraordinary use of executive power, particularly for a president who is just weeks from leaving office. It is also a departure from America’s long-established culture of open investment, one that could have wide-ranging implications for the U.S. economy.

Mr. Biden’s move to stop the transaction could cause foreign investors to rethink the wisdom of acquiring American firms in sensitive industries that are based in politically important states. It could also roil relations with Japan, a close ally of the United States and one of America’s largest sources of foreign investment.

The president’s decision to block the deal came after a federal committee reviewing the transaction opted to not make a formal recommendation about whether the takeover should be allowed to proceed, according to letters sent to the companies and the White House last month.

The Committee of Foreign Investment in the United States, which is made up of agencies including the departments of Treasury and Justice, expressed reservations about the deal to the companies in a letter last month. CFIUS (pronounced SIFF-ee-yuhs) voiced concerns that the transaction could pose a national security threat to the United States by potentially leading to a decline in American steel production. The officials suggested that Nippon’s other global business considerations could in the future outweigh its pledges to invest in U.S. Steel.

The lack of a formal recommendation cleared the way for Mr. Biden, barring an unexpected change of heart, to end a transaction that became ensnared in election-year politics.

But that decision could face challenges in court. Nippon had indicated that it was prepared to take legal action if the deal was blocked.

Nippon sent a letter to CFIUS last month that accused the White House of “impermissible influence” in the process. Nippon said the concerns raised by CFIUS were “littered with factual inaccuracies and omissions, misleading and incomplete statements, conjecture and hypotheticals that have no basis in fact and are plainly illogical.”

Image

Nippon Steel had indicated that it was prepared to take legal action if the deal was blocked.Credit...Richard A. Brooks/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

U.S. Steel has also continued to push for the deal. After CFIUS failed to make a formal recommendation, the company issued a statement saying that the deal “is the best way, by far, to ensure that U.S. Steel, including its employees, communities and customers, will thrive well into the future.”

CBS News reported earlier that a decision could come as early as Friday.

The politics of Mr. Biden’s decision were clear: U.S. Steel is based in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania, and its powerful union vehemently opposed the proposed takeover, in part over concerns that Nippon would not honor its commitments to invest in plants and preserve the pensions of workers. The public debate over the acquisition emerged as a key issue ahead of the 2024 presidential election, and Mr. Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and President-elect Donald J. Trump all publicly said that U.S. Steel should remain American-owned.

Before the election, the Biden administration granted the companies an additional three months to try to address concerns about the deal. By December, however, it was clear that the deal was most likely doomed when CFIUS told Nippon that federal agencies were divided over whether it should proceed, and after Mr. Trump declared that he would block it upon taking office.

“As President, I will block this deal from happening,” Mr. Trump said on social media. “Buyer Beware!!!”

Despite his opposition to the steel deal, Mr. Trump last month welcomed a $100 billion investment in the United States pledged by SoftBank, a Japanese technology company, that will focus on technology and artificial intelligence over the next four years.

The bid by Nippon faced political opposition from the moment it was announced in December 2023. Democratic senators including Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, along with Senator JD Vance, the Ohio Republican who is now the vice president-elect, urged Mr. Biden to review the proposed sale to guard against lost steel production and jobs. Both Mr. Brown and Mr. Casey lost their seats to Republican challengers in November.

Shortly before last Christmas, the Biden administration appeared to bend to the concerns being voiced by lawmakers, with Lael Brainard, the director of the National Economic Council, issuing a statement saying that the transaction “appears to deserve serious scrutiny in terms of its potential impact on national security and supply chain reliability.”

While U.S. Steel shareholders approved the deal in April, the likelihood that it would happen dimmed as the presidential election grew closer.

U.S. Steel, which was founded in 1901, has for years faced financial struggles amid the changing dynamics of global metal markets and rapidly evolving technology, which the company was often slow to adopt. The company, whose metal has been used to build some of the nation’s most famous bridges and buildings — such as the Willis Tower in Chicago and the United Nations building in New York — employed 340,000 workers at its peak in the 1940s but now has around 20,000 workers overall, with about 4,000 in Pennsylvania.

A post-pandemic boost to the steel market, which stemmed from a combination of shortages and demand spurred by federal infrastructure investments, had been showing signs of cooling amid worries of a global economic slowdown. In 2023, a U.S. Steel rival, the Ohio-based Cleveland-Cliffs, made an unsolicited offer to buy its competitor. That set off a bidding war that Nippon won.

Image

Workers leaving their shift at the U.S. Steel plant in Youngstown, Ohio, in the early 1900s.Credit...Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone, via Getty Images

As the fourth-largest steel maker in the world, Nippon saw an opportunity to grow even larger and gain access to the American market with the purchase of U.S. Steel. With large federal investments in infrastructure and climate technology in the works, the United States has been viewed as a growth market where steel demand will rise over the coming years.

But the United Steelworkers union quickly came out against the agreement. The union claimed to have been blindsided by the company’s management and argued that Nippon was unlikely to honor the union’s contracts and protect worker pensions. Nippon has said that it will honor existing contract commitments.

Early last year, Mr. Trump said U.S. Steel needed to remain in American hands. Mr. Trump, who enacted sweeping tariffs on foreign steel imports from allies like Mexico, Canada and Europe during his first term, said that preventing a Japanese company from buying U.S. Steel was a matter of preserving America’s industrial heritage.

Mr. Biden, under political pressure, echoed that sentiment in April, insisting that U.S. Steel remain American-owned and -operated. Over Labor Day weekend, Ms. Harris, who had replaced Mr. Biden as the Democratic nominee, repeated that message.

Not everyone, however, opposed the deal. Many U.S. Steel workers came out in support of it, arguing that the company desperately needed the investment. Last month, three members of the Congressional Black Caucus sent a letter to the White House making the case that the transaction was important for the future of American manufacturing.

And Mike Pompeo, who served as Mr. Trump’s secretary of state in his first term and who has been advising Nippon, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the deal would allow the United States to challenge China’s global steel dominance.

The fate of the company remains uncertain, and efforts to preserve its American roots could end up harming workers in Pennsylvania in the long run.

Nippon had pledged to keep the company’s headquarters in Pittsburgh and invest in upgrading mills in the state. U.S. Steel executives have warned that without Nippon, it might have to lay off workers, relocate the headquarters and invest in mills that it has been building in the South. The company received several additional takeover offers, and it remains possible that one could be revived.

Alan Rappeport is an economic policy reporter, based in Washington. He covers the Treasury Department and writes about taxes, trade and fiscal matters. More about Alan Rappeport

13. U.S. Weighs Ban on Chinese Drones, Citing National Security Concerns

U.S. Weighs Ban on Chinese Drones, Citing National Security Concerns

The Commerce Department requested that private companies comment on the implications of the rule by March. The final decision will fall to the Trump administration.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/us/politics/drone-ban-china-security.html

Lawmakers have repeatedly raised concerns about national security risks from drones, including ones from DJI, a leading drone maker based in China.Credit...Alex Goodlett for The New York Times

By Ana Swanson

Ana Swanson covers international trade and is based in Washington.

Jan. 2, 2025

阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版

The Biden administration said on Thursday that it was considering a new rule that could restrict or ban Chinese drones in the United States out of national security concerns.

In a notice, the Commerce Department said the involvement of foreign adversaries — notably China and Russia — in the design, development, manufacture and supply of drones could pose “undue or unacceptable risk to U.S. national security.”

The notice requested private companies to comment on the scope and implications of the rule by March 4. The decision of what restrictions to impose, if any, on Chinese and Russian drones will fall to the Trump administration.

China and Russia have shown a willingness to compromise U.S. infrastructure and security through cyberespionage, the Commerce Department said, adding that the governments could leverage their laws and political situations to “co-opt private entities for national interests.”

Beyond the use of drones by hobbyists, the devices are employed in a variety of U.S. industries. They help farmers monitor crops and spray for pests, inspect pipelines for the chemical industry, survey bridges and construction sites, and aid firefighters and other emergency responders.

But drones have evolved over the past decade to include sophisticated cameras, receivers and artificial intelligence abilities, fueling concerns that they could be turned into a useful tool for an adversarial government.

Companies based in China account for at least 75 percent of the U.S. drone market, a dominance that “provides ample exploitation opportunities,” the Commerce Department said. It added that Russia accounted for a relatively small portion of global drone sales but had announced its intention to invest heavily in developing the domestic market.

Commerce Secretary Gina M. Raimondo said in a statement that the proposed rule would be “an essential step in protecting the United States from vulnerabilities posed by foreign entities.”

She added that securing the unmanned aircraft systems technology supply chain was “critical to safeguarding our national security.”

In its notice, the Commerce Department said that drones could be used to damage physical infrastructure in a collision, deliver an explosive payload or gather information about critical infrastructure, including building layouts.

In addition, with critical infrastructure in the United States increasingly reliant on drones, any efforts to remotely incapacitate them would create a risk to national security. The department added that in the past, drone companies based in China had pushed updates to their devices to create no-fly restrictions that disabled them in conflict zones defined by the companies.

The notice said that the Commerce Department was also considering whether any measures could mitigate the risks and allow the sale of Chinese drones to continue, such as certain design requirements or cybersecurity software.

The proposed rule is part of a broader effort by the Biden administration to examine and eliminate vulnerabilities in high-tech products and communications infrastructure that collect huge amounts of data about Americans.

In September, the administration moved to ban Chinese-developed software from internet-connected cars in the United States. The initiative was aimed at preventing Chinese intelligence agencies from monitoring the movements of Americans or using the vehicles’ electronics as a pathway into the U.S. electric grid or other infrastructure.

On Thursday, China added 28 U.S. companies to an export control list to “safeguard national security and interests.”

Lawmakers have repeatedly raised concerns about national security risks from drones, including ones from DJI, a leading drone maker based in China. A defense bill that President Biden signed last month contained a provision ordering the government to determine whether drones from DJI or Autel Robotics, another Chinese company, posed a threat.

The restrictions come amid growing concerns about U.S. vulnerabilities to cyberattacks. The Treasury Department announced on Monday that it had been hacked by a Chinese intelligence agency.

In recent months, a series of revelations have shown how a sophisticated Chinese intelligence group, called Salt Typhoon, penetrated deep into at least nine U.S. telecommunications firms, targeting phone lines used by President-elect Donald J. Trump and others.

Ana Swanson covers trade and international economics for The Times and is based in Washington. She has been a journalist for more than a decade. More about Ana Swanson

A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 3, 2025, Section A, Page 14 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Weighs Restrictions on Chinese Drones, Citing Concerns for National Security. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

See more on: Commerce Department, U.S. Politics, Gina M Raimondo

14. Inside Israel's Commando Raid On Iran's Underground Missile Factory In Syria

Inside Israel's Commando Raid On Iran's Underground Missile Factory In Syria

New details and footage are coming to light from one of Israel's most high-risk and complex commando operations ever.

Thomas Newdick

Posted 9 Hours Ago

106

twz.com · by Thomas Newdick

The Israeli Ministry of Defense has released details — and imagery — of a dramatic commando raid into Syria, which targeted an underground missile production facility, back in September. The raid, codenamed Operation Many Ways, was deemed an outstanding success, with the facility destroyed and none of the 120 Israeli special forces troops involved being injured. Until now, however, very few details of how the raid took place had emerged.

The raid was carried out on September 8 by members of the Israeli Air Force (IAF), specifically its elite Shaldag unit and Unit 669. Shaldag is a clandestine outfit that specializes in long-range penetration operations, including commando-style raids. Unit 669 is tasked primarily with combat search and rescue (CSAR), a key requirement of missions carried out in or close to hostile territory.

The target of Operation Many Ways was, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) say, an Iranian-run missile manufacturing site, codenamed Deep Layer by the Israeli military, part of the Scientific Studies and Research Center (SSRC) network.

A satellite image of the Deep Layer facility. IDF

What the Israeli Ministry of Defense described as “precision-guided missiles” and long-range rockets were planned to be made here and then supplied to Hezbollah in Lebanon as well as to the Assad regime in Syria. In terms of Iranian support for Hezbollah, Deep Layer was Iran’s “flagship project,” according to the IDF.

The IDF says the target was surveilled with “extensive intelligence gathering and monitoring” and a plan for its destruction reportedly started to take shape “months” ahead of the operation.

Fascinating, apparently the Masyaf site was an underground facility for producing and casting solid propellant rocket motors. First such site I have seen, apart from some more primitive Hamas ones. https://t.co/nQEtI75UQf pic.twitter.com/X62kY5rmMs

— Fabian Hinz (@fab_hinz) January 2, 2025

Fitting its name, Deep Layer was located deep underground, buried within a mountain in the Masyaf area of Syria, west of Hama. Reportedly situated between 230 and 430 feet below the ground, the facility was considered more or less impregnable by IAF airstrikes. But destroying it using a commando raid was also a huge challenge since its location was more than 124 miles north of the Israeli border, and around 28 miles from Syria’s western coastline.

IAF personnel oversee the raid from a command center in Israel. IDF

As to the layout of the facility, the IDF says it was horseshoe-shaped, with an entrance in the side of the mountain where raw materials went in, and an exit nearby from where the completed missiles emerged. There was also a third entrance used for logistics and to reach offices inside the facility. Along the horseshoe were at least 16 rooms where missile and rocket motor assembly took place.

A rendering of the underground tunnel network. IDF

At the time of the raid, the facility was not yet working at full capacity, construction work having begun here in late 2017. However, according to the IDF, at least two missiles had been successfully manufactured as part of testing, and rocket engines were already being mass-produced. Ultimately, it was expected that the facility would be able to produce between 100 and 300 missiles of various kinds annually.

A satellite image of the facility, with details of the buildings overlaid using computer-generated imagery, in a graphic released by the IDF. IDF

The soldiers involved in the operation, 100 members of Shaldag and another 20 members of Unit 669, were transported into and out of Syria aboard four CH-53D helicopters, locally named Yasur. Official pictures that have now been released, like the one below, show that military working dogs were also part of the force. Reconnaissance and fire support were provided by undisclosed Israeli fighter jets, as well as vessels of the Israeli Navy.

IAF personnel disembark from a CH-53 after the raid. IDF

According to the Israeli media, the CH-53s were escorted by a pair of AH-64 attack helicopters, while other air assets included 21 fighters, 14 reconnaissance aircraft, and five drones, among others. Meanwhile, 30 more aircraft were on standby in Israel to respond if the operation began to go wrong.

“The six helicopters flew over the Mediterranean Sea far off the coast of Lebanon, before crossing into Syria above its own coastline,” The Times of Israel reports. “The choppers flew unusually low in order to evade Syrian radars and air defense systems.”

IAF personnel discuss the raid after returning to Israel. IDF

The Syrian air defense systems around the facility were, the IDF determined, the second-most densely concentrated in Syria, surpassed only by Damascus, although at least some had already been knocked out by IAF airstrikes and had not been repaired or replaced.

Reportedly, it took the helicopters only 18 minutes to reach the facility after they had crossed the Syrian coastline, and none were detected. Concurrent with their arrival, IAF fighters and drones along with missile-armed Israeli Navy vessels hit targets both related to the facility and elsewhere in Syria. The strikes on other targets were intended to serve as a deception, to mask the objective of the commando raid, were it to be detected.

Although the helicopters were apparently not detected by local air defenses, Israeli reports indicate that “dozens” of Syrian soldiers began to head to the facility, suggesting that they must have been alerted to the operation, although perhaps only after the commandos had landed. To hamper any Syrian response, strikes also targeted roads in and out of the facility.

The first of the CH-53s put troops down very close to the entrance to the facility and once all four had dropped off the troops the helicopters moved to landing zones nearby and waited for the mission to be completed. The Unit 669 members remained on the aircraft, waiting for the call to action if any of the commandos were injured.

The view out of the rear ramp of one of the CH-53s involved in the raid. IDF

The operation is said to have involved the first team of commandos securing the area while a second team advanced toward the entrance, killing two guards. Meanwhile, another team took up a position on a nearby hill, from where they operated a small drone. This drone was reportedly equipped not only for surveillance, but was also armed, so it could “eliminate anyone approaching the facility.”

Within an hour, the first team of commandos had broken through one of the entrances, which were protected by heavy doors. Further internal doors were opened using nearby forklifts. Indeed, at least some of the commandos underwent forklift driver training, for just this eventuality.

This mission was forklift-certified https://t.co/waDyGOty51 https://t.co/cyKXle2JX2 pic.twitter.com/CiuAA56fbt

— ELINT News (@ELINTNews) January 2, 2025

As well as forklifts on site, the commandos used a quad bike they had brought with them to move explosives around the tunnels. In all, 50 commandoes were involved in planting explosive devices, while the other 50 waited outside to provide surveillance and offer covering fire. Meanwhile, IAF fighters continued to hit targets, dropping 49 munitions in total during the raid, although not all were around the facility.

IAF commandos in one of the tunnels at the facility during. the raid. IDF

After around 660 pounds of explosives had been rigged up, a remote detonator was planted at the site entrance, and the 100 commandos moved to the original landing site, where the same helicopters picked them up. As they boarded, the explosives were triggered.

In all, the IDF assesses that its soldiers killed 30 guards and Syrian soldiers during the operation, while Syrian media reported 14 dead and 43 wounded.

According to the IDF, the operation was completed with the commandos involved having spent a little over 2.5 hours on the ground in Syria.

Members of the IAF leadership discuss the outcome of the raid with some of the commandos involved. IDF

“During the operation, the forces reached critical machinery for manufacturing precision missiles, including a planetary mixer, numerous weapons, and intelligence documents, which were transferred for investigation,” the IDF disclosed. “The soldiers destroyed the compound and safely returned to Israeli territory.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commented on the operation in Syria: “I salute our heroic fighters for the daring and successful operation deep in Syria. This was one of the most important preventive operations that we have taken against the efforts of the Iranian axis to arm itself in order to attack us; it attests to our boldness and determination to take action everywhere to defend ourselves.”

IAF commandoes after their return to Israel from the Syria raid last September. IDF

Israel destroyed a secretive missile production facility in northwest Syria in September 2024, in an attack that included inserting special operations forces by helicopter to retrieve equipment and documents. IDF IDF

Operation Many Ways took place when Syria was still ruled by Bashar al-Assad and before Israel launched its campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

After the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, it seems that Israel has decided that it can publicize details of the commando raid. This will also serve as a warning of potential further operations directed against Iran and its proxies in the region. The fact that the operation demonstrated Israeli willingness and capacity to launch such raids against deeply buried and highly defended bunkers sent a signal to Iran, which is a key takeaway we highlighted when the first mention of the special operations raid emerged. While executing a similar operation against an underground target in Iran would be far more complex and risky, this has always been a real possibility and Israel has proven itself more than capable of operating within Iran’s borders.

More recently, Prime Minister Netanyahu has spoken of a changing order in the region, with two of Iran’s key proxies there, Hamas and Hezbollah, deeply degraded and the Assad regime eliminated, stating:

“After Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Assad regime in Syria, the Houthis are almost the last remaining arm of Iran’s axis of evil. The Houthis are learning, and will learn the hard way, that those who strike Israel will pay a very heavy price for it.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (second from right) visits the peak of Hermon Mount (Jabal al-Sheikh) on the Syrian side of the border after the fall of the Baath regime in Syria on December 17, 2024. Photo by Ma’yan Toaf / Israel GPO / Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images Anadolu

While disclosing details of Operation Many Ways, the IDF said it will “continue to act strategically and professionally with various methods and tactics to remove threats directed at the citizens of Israel.” This clearly includes special operations raids against very hardened underground facilities well beyond Israel’s borders.

Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com

twz.com · by Thomas Newdick

15. Mystery continues to shroud Las Vegas Cybertruck bomber's motives, authorities say

Excerpts:

People who served with Livelsberger described him as a kind person who went above and beyond. One described him as an "idealist" and a real hero in his continued service to the country, including 5 tours in Afghanistan; Livelsberger, he said, had a "remarkable" military career.

"The American people still don't understand that quality of quantifying that service — someone could say they went to Afghanistan, but what did they really do?" this servicemember said. In Livelsberger's case, he said, "on a Special Forces team at the far fringes of U.S. support, operating with a lot of trust, very little direction, and make it happen, constantly in harm's way."

The U.S. Army Special Forces, known as the Green Berets, are a small but elite special operations force inside the U.S. military. Officially founded in 1952, their roots trace to the World War II missions carried out by the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA. Small teams of Green Berets, known as Operational Detachment Alphas, are trained to carry out specialized missions from counterinsurgency and unconventional warfare to combat raids and special reconnaissance missions. "De Oppresso Liber," is their Latin motto: "To Free the Oppressed."

The close-knit Green Beret community has been left reeling in the aftermath of the Cybertruck explosion. Numerous former Green Berets spoke to CBS News to express their dismay over Livelsberger's actions.

Many spoke of his accolades as a soldier and how he was a "stand-up guy." Others, shocked by the news, didn't believe him to be involved — that perhaps someone had stolen Livelsberger's identity, they conjectured. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department on Thursday confirmed that Livelsberger was positively identified as the driver of the Tesla Cybertruck. His death was ruled a suicide by the Clark County Office of the Coroner. Authorities said he shot himself in the head prior to the vehicle explosion at the Trump International Hotel and that they recovered a handgun at his feet.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Livelsberger previously served in Tajikistan and received the Department of State Meritorious Honor Award there for services at the Embassy. Now, the seemingly sterling résumé left only questions.

Mystery continues to shroud Las Vegas Cybertruck bomber's motives, authorities say

CBS News · by James LaPorta

Decorated Army Special Forces Master Sgt. Matthew Livelsberger had an 8-month-old daughter at home and a new assignment involving drones that friends said excited him. He wrote glowing Yelp reviews praising the tattoo parlor in his Colorado Springs hometown and touting the benefits of float spas. And when his father last spoke with him on Christmas Day, he told CBS News, all seemed normal.

He "loved the Army and loved America," Roger Livelsberger said.

Matthew Livelsberger, 37, was on holiday leave from his station in Germany and his father had figured he would be returning to Germany. He said nothing with his son seemed amiss.

Days later, though, Matthew Livelsberger would rent a Tesla Cybertruck, purchase two firearms, take a meandering 1,000-mile drive from Denver to Las Vegas, and place himself at the center of one of two concussive New Year's Day attacks. What led him there remains, at least for now, a frustrating mystery to those who knew him, and to those investigating the attack.

"Obviously, we're always concerned in these sorts of events to ascertain what the motive is," said Spencer Evans, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's Las Vegas Division. "We understand that's at the forefront of everyone's thoughts, and so looking into exactly what the motivation is remains our number one priority."

Figuring out what drove Livelsberger to explode a ragtag cache of fireworks and fuel tanks in front of the Trump Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip is not only a priority for law enforcement. It is also a question that has left his family and friends with heavy hearts and a yearning for answers.

This image from video provided by the Las Vegas Police Department shows the aftermath of the Cybertruck explosion outside the Trump hotel in Las Vegas on Jan. 1, 2025. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department

Livelsberger's history offers few immediate clues.

A football star in high school in Bucyrus, Ohio, he enlisted with the Army after high school through a program called 18xray that allows applicants to train to be in the Special Forces without prior military experience.

He served multiple tours in Afghanistan and even started a charitable drive to bring toys to children there.

In 2010, he helped resettle a former Afghan interpreter he had served with in Afghanistan. CBS News spoke with the interpreter who said that Livelsberger was very kind to him and his family, and would often come to their house for meals, although not for many years.

Livelsberger was divorced from his first wife, remarried and had an 8-month-old child with his second wife. She continued to live in Colorado Springs and he traveled back and forth from Germany.

Police released this file photo of Matthew Alan Livelsberger, identified as the driver of the Cybertruck that exploded outside the Trump hotel in Las Vegas on Jan. 1, 2025. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department

People who served with Livelsberger described him as a kind person who went above and beyond. One described him as an "idealist" and a real hero in his continued service to the country, including 5 tours in Afghanistan; Livelsberger, he said, had a "remarkable" military career.

"The American people still don't understand that quality of quantifying that service — someone could say they went to Afghanistan, but what did they really do?" this servicemember said. In Livelsberger's case, he said, "on a Special Forces team at the far fringes of U.S. support, operating with a lot of trust, very little direction, and make it happen, constantly in harm's way."

The U.S. Army Special Forces, known as the Green Berets, are a small but elite special operations force inside the U.S. military. Officially founded in 1952, their roots trace to the World War II missions carried out by the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA. Small teams of Green Berets, known as Operational Detachment Alphas, are trained to carry out specialized missions from counterinsurgency and unconventional warfare to combat raids and special reconnaissance missions. "De Oppresso Liber," is their Latin motto: "To Free the Oppressed."

The close-knit Green Beret community has been left reeling in the aftermath of the Cybertruck explosion. Numerous former Green Berets spoke to CBS News to express their dismay over Livelsberger's actions.

Many spoke of his accolades as a soldier and how he was a "stand-up guy." Others, shocked by the news, didn't believe him to be involved — that perhaps someone had stolen Livelsberger's identity, they conjectured. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department on Thursday confirmed that Livelsberger was positively identified as the driver of the Tesla Cybertruck. His death was ruled a suicide by the Clark County Office of the Coroner. Authorities said he shot himself in the head prior to the vehicle explosion at the Trump International Hotel and that they recovered a handgun at his feet.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Livelsberger previously served in Tajikistan and received the Department of State Meritorious Honor Award there for services at the Embassy. Now, the seemingly sterling résumé left only questions.

Those answers may yet come, law enforcement officials said Thursday, with aid from those who knew Livelsberger best.

"We have to focus on what we know and what we don't know," the FBI's Evans said at a press conference Thursday. "We know we have a bombing and it's a bombing that certainly has factors that raise concerns. It's not lost on us that it's in front of the Trump building, that it's a Tesla vehicle, but we don't have information at this point that definitively tells us or suggests it was because of this particular ideology, or any of the reasoning behind it. That's the purpose of the investigation that we're conducting is to get to the bottom of exactly what happened, why and how."

In:
Las Vegas

James LaPorta is a verification producer with CBS News Confirmed. He is a former U.S. Marine infantryman and veteran of the Afghanistan war.

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CBS News · by James LaPorta

16. The Real Risks of Escalation in Ukraine

Excerpts:

But there is another way to measure success that is rarely discussed: namely, whether Biden’s team effectively defeated Putin’s attempts to redefine thresholds for escalation that would have set a dangerous precedent for the future. This conflict is not only about Ukraine or the rules-based international order. It is also about how the United States and the West more broadly should think about escalation thresholds in a new era of great-power rivalry that often bears little resemblance to the Cold War. From the beginning, Putin tried to enforce redlines that aimed to deter status-quo parties—the United States and NATO allies—from assisting Ukraine. Slowly, carefully, and with circumspection, Biden succeeded in eroding and undermining those redlines. Salami tactics did not offer the ringing victories that many hoped for, but they did provide important pushback.

These dynamics around navigating escalation thresholds also have implications for the competition between the United States and China. The risk of escalation during any conflict over Taiwan would depend on a variety of factors, including Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s prewar expectations about victory and whether a loss in Taiwan would threaten the survival of the Chinese Communist Party’s rule. Obtaining credible intelligence about each of these factors would be essential for figuring out how far and how fast the United States would be able to go in aiding Taiwan. The greater the gap between how Xi believed the war would unfold and how it unfolded—or the greater the risk it posed to his ability to hang on to power—the more powerful the argument in favor of salami-style tactics.

Additionally, the use of Cold War-era analogies—or even analogies from the war in Ukraine—might go out the window if the United States decided to deploy troops to defend Taiwan. There is no historical case of two nuclear-armed great powers engaged in direct combat, something policymakers and analysts worried about during the Cold War but which never came to pass. In such a scenario, reading and responding to the escalation thresholds that would govern how the conflict played out will require a great deal of communication, learning, and potentially salami slicing.

The Real Risks of Escalation in Ukraine

Foreign Affairs · by More by Michael Poznansky · January 3, 2025

Critics of Washington’s Gradualism Are Misreading Putin’s Redlines

Michael Poznansky and William C. Wohlforth

January 3, 2025

After a Russian missile strike in central Kyiv, December 2024 Thomas Peter / Reuters

Michael Poznansky is an Associate Professor at the U.S. Naval War College. The views expressed here are his own.

William C. Wohlforth is Daniel Webster Professor of Government at Dartmouth College.

More by William C. Wohlforth

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As U.S. President Joe Biden’s national security team prepares to depart, one of its chief foreign policy strategies is facing withering assault. A growing chorus of critics argues that Ukraine’s current dire situation is partly the result of Biden’s timid approach to helping Kyiv defend itself against Russia’s invasion. Excessively worried about triggering World War III, the administration shied away from swift and major weapons transfers that might have altered the war’s course at key junctures. Setting aside debates about weapons stockpiles, logistics, training, and the battlefield effect of different weapons systems, the core claim is that Biden’s team needlessly allowed itself to be deterred from bolder action by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threats.

These critics are wrong. Their conclusion that the Biden administration overestimated the risk of escalation underestimates just how hard it is to navigate redlines in a crisis and assess an enemy’s risk calculus. Whether intentionally or not, the administration’s approach resembled salami slicing, a common strategy whereby an actor seeks to undermine an adversary’s redlines in such small increments that any substantial retaliation is rendered unreasonable. International relations scholars typically view this tactic as one employed by revisionist powers, such as China, when it pushes against maritime boundaries in the South China Sea, or Russia, when in 2014 it sent heavily armed commandos without identifying insignia—so-called “little green men”—to seize Crimea from Ukraine. But in this case, Washington deployed the strategy to counter a highly motivated revisionist adversary. And it worked.

The irony is that Washington’s salami-slicing strategy has now become a victim of its own success. The absence of major escalations in Ukraine has led critics to argue that the Biden administration should have been bolder and abandoned the very gradualism that likely helped prevent escalation in the first place. Learning the right lessons from this case is essential for navigating future crises with revisionist powers.

TOEING THE LINE

A core theme running through many critiques of Biden’s Ukraine policy is that senior officials have been too credulous of Russia’s stated redlines. Since the start of the war, Putin has issued numerous warnings aimed at deterring Western intervention. They ranged from generic threats related to the provision of weapons to Ukraine to more specific threats about how Moscow would respond if Western countries supplied long-range missiles. At times, Putin made veiled threats to use nuclear weapons if his redlines were crossed.

Although Biden’s critics believe these threats were bluffs, they are rarely explicit about what Putin’s actual redlines might be, if there are any. Instead, they simply suggest that because the United States has routinely crossed the lines Putin established without sparking major escalation, going much further faster would have been justified. As Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, and Ben Hodges, who served as commanding general of U.S. Army Europe, wrote in a May 2024 op-ed for CNN: “In almost every one of these cases, Russia threatened escalation, an attack on NATO or the use of nuclear weapons. Each time, the bluff was called, and Ukraine was able to better defend its territory. . . . Imagine if we had provided Ukraine with all of the . . . weapons [Ukraine requested] from the start? . . . The war might have ended.”

The problem is that redlines and escalation thresholds are not inscribed on stone tablets. They are socially constructed moving targets that emerge endogenously during conflicts. Something that represents a redline at a particular moment may not function as one in perpetuity.

History offers numerous examples of redlines’ fluidity. Operation Cyclone, the covert program the United States ran from 1979 to 1992 to aid the mujahideen fighting the Soviet-backed Afghan government, is one. Early in President Ronald Reagan’s administration, U.S. officials were reluctant to give the rebels Stinger missiles capable of shooting down Soviet helicopters. By the middle of the 1980s, the Reagan administration had relaxed this restriction as escalation calculations changed. Other apparent redlines, including a prohibition on supporting direct raids into the Soviet Union, remained in place.

Washington’s strategy in Ukraine has now become a victim of its own success.

In the case of Ukraine, actions that might have been viewed early in the war as crossing a genuine redline, such as openly supplying weapons that could reach into Russian territory, likely became less taboo over time as the context evolved. It is worth remembering that Biden eased restrictions on Ukraine’s ability to fire ATACMS, long-range precision missiles, directly into Russia only after Ukraine was already operating on Russian soil and after the discovery that North Korean troops were being deployed to the front in significant numbers.

In the rare cases when critics explicitly address Russia’s redlines, they define them exceedingly narrowly. The basic idea is that open and direct NATO participation in the conflict is the only thing that is truly off limits for Putin. As Dan Altman wrote in Foreign Affairs in July 2022, “NATO should pursue a strategy of going as far as possible in Ukraine without plainly crossing Russia’s redlines—meaning refusing to openly attack Russian forces or send combat units into the country. The United States prevailed in the gravest crises of the Cold War by using this approach.”

If the war between Russia and Ukraine closely resembled Cold War–era cases, as some critics imply, they might indeed offer ready-made blueprints with respect to Putin’s real redlines. But these analogies and precedents are imperfect and conflicting. Altman is right, for example, that the Soviets generally tolerated U.S. assistance to the mujahideen. The problem with using that example to argue that the West has been too cautious in Ukraine is that U.S. support in Afghanistan in the 1980s was designed to be plausibly deniable. The military aid the United States has offered to Ukraine, by contrast, is a highly visible affair.

Moreover, in cases such as Afghanistan’s, the recipients of Washington’s support were insurgents. The same was true of numerous “rollback” operations the United States undertook early in the Cold War with the goal of undermining Soviet influence in Eastern Europe. By contrast, in Ukraine, the United States is openly backing a sovereign government against unprovoked aggression. International law is clearly on its side. This would seem to give Washington latitude to provide Kyiv with whatever it asks for. Yet there is little precedent from the Cold War of one superpower supplying a smaller state under attack with the physical means to strike the sovereign territory of a nuclear-armed aggressor with which it shares a large contiguous border. Toward the end of Biden’s time in office, this is exactly what has been under consideration. Moreover, the stakes in Ukraine for Moscow appear far higher than in Cold War conflicts such as Korea and Vietnam, faraway proxy fights to which the Kremlin devoted far fewer resources. Thus, Cold War history offered only an ambiguous guide to discerning where Putin’s true redlines were.

SURVIVAL TACTICS

Along with overrating how reliably the West can divine Putin’s redlines, critics downplay another significant factor that differentiates the current conflict from Cold War precedents and changes Moscow’s calculus around escalation: the risks to the regime’s survival. Surprising military setbacks, especially early in the war, had raised real questions about Putin’s grip on power.

As Ukraine’s stunning counteroffensives in Kharkiv and Kherson in the fall of 2022 got underway, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky continued to call on Washington to provide Kyiv with longer-range missiles. According to reporting by Bob Woodward in his October 2024 book War, however, during that period, Washington received “highly sensitive, credible” intelligence based on “conversations inside the Kremlin” that Putin “was seriously considering using a tactical nuclear weapon.” If Russia’s 30,000 troops in Kherson faced encirclement, U.S. intelligence—its credibility riding high after its accurate forecast of the initial 2022 invasion—put the odds at 50 percent that Putin would use nonstrategic nuclear weapons to avoid the loss of troops. Analysts outside the government identified additional plausible and dangerous scenarios for nuclear escalation, including the launch of a “demonstration shot” over the Black Sea. Florida Senator Marco Rubio raised the prospect that Putin could order a strike on transit hubs for supplies from the West.

The administration, clearly viewing the threat of escalation as credible, went into overdrive to deter Russia. It issued private messages to Putin and his national security team, scrambled to get leaders around the world to issue public warnings against the use of nuclear weapons, and developed potential responses to their deployment. The administration’s reluctance to go all in—out of a fear that Russia may escalate in response to catastrophic battlefield losses—is just what has frustrated critics. It appears to consign Ukraine to an attrition war in which it faces insurmountable odds. How can Ukraine win if its hands are tied, especially when it has the invading Russians on the ropes? After all, the defeat of an invading force is not necessarily an existential threat to the invader itself. Isn’t Russia invading a neighbor and deterring the United States from aiding its victim merely a recipe for future nuclear-fueled revisionism?

Slowly, Biden succeeded in eroding and undermining Putin’s redlines.

The problem is that escalation becomes credible when the stakes are existential, and threats can be “existential” for a personalist dictator like Putin even if not for the country he runs. When a leader’s grip on power is under threat and escalating a war promises to save his position, a thoroughly rational dictator may choose to gamble for his own resurrection—say, by lobbing a low-yield nuclear missile at a target in Ukraine. Even if the risks outweigh the benefits for the Russian people, the bet might pan out for Putin himself. This dynamic is especially relevant for despots who do not intend to exit the scene peacefully when their tenure is up. International relations scholars Giacomo Chiozza and Hein Goemans have found that the threat of exile, imprisonment, or death can cause leaders to take risks they might otherwise not.

Many observers saw the threat in these terms. In October 2022, the retired general and former CIA director David Petraeus described Putin as “desperate.” Rubio warned that Putin’s desperation might lead him to use nuclear weapons: “Certainly, the risk is probably higher today than it was a month ago.” Similar concerns persisted long after the Ukrainian counteroffensive ended. In War, Woodward quotes Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines as stating in the spring of 2024 that “between the United States and Russia, we have over 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons. . . . You do not want a country that has got that kind of a stockpile of nuclear weapons to feel as if it’s slipping.”

Risky gambles for self-preservation become even more plausible if leaders receive warped information about the scale of the threats they face. In March 2022, the White House said it had credible intelligence that Putin was getting hyped threat assessments from his advisers about the West’s intentions. And it does not require privileged access to see that information has not flowed smoothly through Moscow’s corridors of power. After all, the invasion itself was premised on profoundly flawed assessments of the situation in Ukraine.

Those in Washington managing the delicate dance around escalation had to reckon with the possibility that any signals they sent would suffer heavy distortion en route to the Kremlin’s decider in chief. To be sure, fears of escalation related to regime survival have ebbed as Russia’s position stabilized. Still, navigating Putin’s many redlines has remained a challenge throughout the war.

CUTTING EDGE

In Arms and Influence, the economist and Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling describes “salami tactics” as a process of gradually shifting the status quo. “One can begin his intrusion on a scale too small to provoke a reaction,” Schelling writes, “and increase it by imperceptible degrees, never quite presenting a sudden, dramatic challenge that would invoke the committed response.” The concept is usually applied to aggressors trying to make small gains while avoiding direct conflict. In practice, the strategy has much broader applicability, including for defenders of a status quo seeking to manage escalation.

The concept of salami tactics essentially captures the Biden administration’s strategy. And it was a reasonable response, given the risks inherent in a situation in which Putin plausibly could have seen the stakes of major battlefield losses in Ukraine as existential and in which there was a lack of ready-made analogies to identify clear redlines. Gradualism in the provision of military aid enabled Russia to slowly adjust to a new status quo in which Ukraine received increasingly capable fighting platforms and munitions. Deliberately pushing boundaries in such a way that no single decision by Washington warranted dramatic escalation by Russia (for example, tactical nuclear weapons use) allowed weapons and aid to accumulate.

Psychology also lent credence to a salami-slicing approach. Decades of research show that people are far more willing to run risks to avoid losses than to make comparable gains. The greater the speed and magnitude of loss, the higher a person’s acceptance of risk; several recent studies have found that individuals show a greater appetite for risk when they suffer large losses quickly. Putin’s threats to attack NATO may well be “dubious” from the standpoint of a rational leader, as Hal Brands argued in a Bloomberg column in May 2024, because such an attack “would change [the] war fundamentally.” But leaders facing the prospect of high losses, especially when setbacks are already mounting rapidly, sometimes do irrational-seeming things.

Salami tactics were strategically wise, given the pervasive uncertainty about where Putin’s genuine redlines were—a degree of uncertainty that defenders of Biden’s policy argue warranted such a trial and error approach. But such tactics would also have been useful in instances when the Biden administration believed that it was getting close to a real redline, such as the decisions to allow Ukraine to strike targets in Russia with HIMARS rocket systems near Kharkiv in May, followed by the loosening of restrictions on ATACMS in November. The very act of subtly altering the status quo creates ambiguity about whether the United States has indeed stepped over a redline and, over time, can even shift the status quo well beyond what Putin would have tolerated had the same aid been provided all at once.

To be sure, Putin has escalated in important ways over the course of the conflict. In November, he fired an intermediate-range nuclear-capable ballistic missile at Dnipro. The deployment of at least 10,000 North Korean troops to help Russia, in some cases fighting Ukrainian troops directly, was another escalation. The core question for evaluating Biden’s approach is not whether some escalation has occurred. It has. Instead, the real question is whether it could have been much worse. There are many reasons to suspect it might have been.

MEASURING SUCCESS

One major lesson to draw from the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy is that measuring success is more complicated than meets the eye. If the most important metric is providing Ukraine with the means to recapture all of its sovereign territory, Biden’s policy was a partial failure. Although Western aid has enabled Ukraine to put up significant resistance, the results remain indecisive. If the measure of success is whether the United States’ policy avoided starting another world war, however, the Biden administration’s approach fared better, although even here it is hard to know whether that same outcome could have been reached with more a rapid provision of aid.

But there is another way to measure success that is rarely discussed: namely, whether Biden’s team effectively defeated Putin’s attempts to redefine thresholds for escalation that would have set a dangerous precedent for the future. This conflict is not only about Ukraine or the rules-based international order. It is also about how the United States and the West more broadly should think about escalation thresholds in a new era of great-power rivalry that often bears little resemblance to the Cold War. From the beginning, Putin tried to enforce redlines that aimed to deter status-quo parties—the United States and NATO allies—from assisting Ukraine. Slowly, carefully, and with circumspection, Biden succeeded in eroding and undermining those redlines. Salami tactics did not offer the ringing victories that many hoped for, but they did provide important pushback.

These dynamics around navigating escalation thresholds also have implications for the competition between the United States and China. The risk of escalation during any conflict over Taiwan would depend on a variety of factors, including Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s prewar expectations about victory and whether a loss in Taiwan would threaten the survival of the Chinese Communist Party’s rule. Obtaining credible intelligence about each of these factors would be essential for figuring out how far and how fast the United States would be able to go in aiding Taiwan. The greater the gap between how Xi believed the war would unfold and how it unfolded—or the greater the risk it posed to his ability to hang on to power—the more powerful the argument in favor of salami-style tactics.

Additionally, the use of Cold War-era analogies—or even analogies from the war in Ukraine—might go out the window if the United States decided to deploy troops to defend Taiwan. There is no historical case of two nuclear-armed great powers engaged in direct combat, something policymakers and analysts worried about during the Cold War but which never came to pass. In such a scenario, reading and responding to the escalation thresholds that would govern how the conflict played out will require a great deal of communication, learning, and potentially salami slicing.

Michael Poznansky is an Associate Professor at the U.S. Naval War College. The views expressed here are his own.

William C. Wohlforth is Daniel Webster Professor of Government at Dartmouth College.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Michael Poznansky · January 3, 2025

17. Veteran suicides often follow complaints of chronic pain, insomnia and physical problems, report finds

Veteran suicides often follow complaints of chronic pain, insomnia and physical problems, report finds

Stars and Stripes · by Linda F. Hersey · January 2, 2025

Chronic pain, sleep disorders and increasing health challenges were identified as risk factors that veterans most frequently reported to doctors at the Department of Veterans Affairs prior to their deaths by suicide from 2020-2022, according to a new VA report. (Joshua Seybert/U.S. Air Force)

WASHINGTON — Chronic pain, sleep disorders and increasing health challenges were identified as risk factors that veterans most frequently reported to doctors at the Department of Veterans Affairs prior to their deaths by suicide from 2020-2022, according to a new VA report.

The analysis conducted by the VA’s Behavioral Health Autopsy Program identified leading suicide risk factors in the health records of 2,654 veterans who had taken their own lives in those two years. The veterans were enrolled in VA care.

Four of the five most frequently documented problems were about physical well-being, according to the 2024 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report. Information was gathered on clinical diagnoses, health conditions, personal life circumstances and psychosocial factors. Findings showed nearly 55% of 2,654 veterans who took their own lives had reported pain problems in the year before they died.

“The pain I have is constant — there is pain in my hand, my neck [and] my head,” said Esteban Blis, a 55-year-old retired Army staff sergeant who served from 1993 to 2011 with deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

He said he sustained a traumatic brain injury and other physical injuries when the military aircraft that he was flying in made a hard landing in Afghanistan in 2010.

“The chronic pain causes a lot of complications for me today like insomnia and high blood pressure,” said Blis, who was hospitalized with a traumatic brain injury and honorably discharged a year later.

But Blis, who now lives in Panama, said he thinks the VA does not adequately address chronic pain in veterans because it is so common.

“They just hand you painkillers,” he said.

The prevalence of pain was the most frequently documented complaint among the veterans who committed suicide between 2020-2022.

More than half reported persistent sleep problems that affected their well-being. More than 40% had an increase in physical health problems in the year prior to their deaths. One-third experienced a recent decline in physical activity, according to the report.

About 1/3 of the veterans also disclosed they were having relationship problems, which was the fifth most frequently documented risk factor by veterans, according to the report.

The VA conducts an analysis of veteran suicide rates each year. Veteran suicides rose to 6,407 for calendar year 2022, up by three from the previous year, according to the VA’s most recent report. Veteran suicide was about 1.5 times higher than the general population. Though veterans compose 7.6% of the general population, nearly 14% of adult suicides are among veterans, the National Institutes of Health said in an April 2022 report.

The autopsy program identified a total of two dozen risk factors for veterans.

Sources for health information included VA health records, coroner and medical examiner reports, death certificate records, reports from law enforcement agencies, media and news outlets and information shared by family members.

The findings provide a “unique resource for understanding the characteristics and context” of veteran suicides for the two years studied, according to the report.

Suicide ranked as the 12th highest cause of death among veterans for each of the three years studied by the autopsy program.

The VA launched a 988+1 crisis line in 2022 to provide immediate help to at-risk veterans. Nearly one million veterans contacted the crisis line during its first year of operation, which included phone calls, texts and chats. The VA also provides free emergency care at VA and non-VA health facilities for veterans at imminent risk of suicide, according to the agency.

Firearm deaths contributed to most veteran suicides from 2021 to 2022, according to the VA’s annual report on veteran suicides. Guns were also used more often by veterans to kill themselves than people in the general population. The report found 27% of the veterans had “unsecure firearms in the home” prior to their death.

Other relevant factors identified in health records of veterans who had committed suicide between 2020 and 2022 were problems with self-control and acting impulsive, financial losses, feelings of alienation, and evidence the veteran made plans to commit suicide.

Blis, who is 100% disabled, said the VA continues to prescribe him painkillers and other medication to address the chronic pain, insomnia and irritability that he experiences. He serves as an advocate for veterans in Panama.

“Helping others is what keeps me going,” said Blis, who formed the You Served, We Care Foundation, a nonprofit that connects veterans living overseas with resources for their health care. “The VA needs to care more for the veterans who served this country. There needs to be a greater focus on rehabilitating veterans with chronic pain and not just give us pills. They just make us addicted. The problems get worse.”

Stars and Stripes · by Linda F. Hersey · January 2, 2025

18. Are Russian Sanctions Working? Debate Gains New Urgency With Trump.

Are Russian Sanctions Working? Debate Gains New Urgency With Trump.

The president-elect has said he will use sanctions sparingly while vowing to end the war in Ukraine, renewing questions over their efficacy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/business/economy/russia-sanctions-ukraine.html?utm_campaign=dfn-ebb&utm

Nearly three years of international sanctions have put a squeeze on Russian consumers. Credit...Natalia Kolesnikova/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Patricia Cohen

Patricia Cohen, based in London, has been covering the sanctions on Russia since the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Jan. 2, 2025

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Thousands of far-reaching sanctions have been imposed by dozens of countries on Russian banks, businesses and people since Moscow ordered tanks to roll across the border into Ukraine in the winter of 2022.

Now, more than 1,000 days later, as President-elect Donald J. Trump prepares to take office, questions about the sanctions’ effectiveness — and future — are expected to come under renewed scrutiny.

Mr. Trump has stated, “I want to use sanctions as little as possible.” And he has made clear that there will be a shift in American policy toward Ukraine, having promised to end the war in a single day.

Experts believe that sanctions and continued military aid are almost certain to be bargaining chips in any negotiations.

So how valuable are the sanction chips that Mr. Trump will hold?

The answer is hotly debated.

Predictions in the early months of the war that economic restrictions would soon undermine President Vladimir V. Putin’s regime or reduce the ruble to “rubble” did not pan out. Mr. Putin remains entrenched in the Kremlin, and his forces are inflicting punishing damage on Ukraine and gaining on the battlefield.

Yet the idea that economic sanctions could bring a quick end to the war was always more a product of hope than a realistic assessment, said Sergei Guriev, a Russian economist who fled the country in 2013 and is now the dean of the London Business School.

A better measure of success, Mr. Guriev said, is to ask whether sanctions hampered Moscow’s ability to wage war effectively. And the answer to that, he and several other analysts argue, is yes.

After the invasion, the United States, Europe and their allies reacted with a speed and scale that surprised even the participants. They drastically restricted Moscow’s access to the global financial system and the U.S. dollar, crimping Russia’s ability to sell oil, its most valuable export.

Image

Humanitarian aid in eastern Ukraine in November. By reducing Russian resources, sanctions “saved lives in Ukraine,” said Sergei Guriev, the dean of the London Business School.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

Western banks froze more than $300 billion in Russian assets. Governments prohibited the purchase and sale of a wide range of services and goods, including some advanced technology weapons.

Europe, which had previously gotten 40 percent of its imported gas from Russia, moved to wean itself off its dependence. Russia could start selling even less energy to Europe after Ukraine on Wednesday refused to renew an agreement that allowed for the transit of Russian gas via a pipeline that runs through its territory.

“Imagine a world where sanctions were not introduced,” Mr. Guriev said. A world where Russia’s foreign commerce was not severely limited and it had access to all of its frozen foreign reserves.

“It’s very clear that sanctions did cause problems for Putin, did reduce the amount of resources in his pocket and, therefore, saved lives in Ukraine,” he said. Without them, he added, Russia might have even won the war by now.

Russia’s economy has felt the squeeze. Spiraling inflation has prompted the country’s central bank to raise benchmark interest rates to 21 percent. Despite enormous expenditures by the government to finance the war, overall economic growth is slowing. Many products and parts are either unavailable, more expensive or replaced by substandard substitutes.

When Mr. Trump sits down to negotiate with Mr. Putin, sanctions will be “an extraordinarily valuable chip,” said Elina Ribakova, vice president for foreign policy at the Kyiv School of Economics and a nonresident scholar at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington think tank.

There is widespread agreement that the most effective sanctions have been those involving the global financial system, an arena where the United States can exert unique power.

The U.S. dollar is the closest thing the world has to a universal currency. And only American banks can handle transactions in dollars. The result is that many of the world’s financial assets — including any dollar accounts owned by foreign countries, enterprises and individuals — are under America’s digital thumb.

Washington not only cut off most of Russia’s access to this system but also threatened to cut off any banks around the world that run afoul of its rules. That is a risk that even many institutions in China, which has aligned itself with Russia, do not want to take.

Image

A shop in a small town near Moscow. With help from China, Russia has found ways to blunt the impact of sanctions.Credit...Natalia Kolesnikova/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Russia’s banishment from SWIFT, the messaging system that enables international payments, has also significantly increased the cost, complexity and time of every international exchange, whether for the purchase of pharmaceuticals and electrical machinery or the sale of oil and fertilizer.

“It really removes the capacity for any effective payment system,” said Andrew Shoyer, a partner at the law firm Sidley Austin who advises companies on compliance with sanctions.

Yet if sanctions have achieved more than some might have imagined, they have had less impact than many people had hoped.

Over time, Russia, with enormous help from China, found several ways to blunt their impact by expanding trade with other countries, exploiting loopholes and evading the law.

China and India, for example, refilled Moscow’s money chest by snapping up a lot of Russian oil. China has also provided Russia access to weapons parts, semiconductors and other essential materials needed for the war.

A lot of Western goods that can be used for both civilian and military purposes have made their way to Russia through countries that don’t participate in sanctions, like Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.

Those who downplay the value of sanctions as a bargaining chip also argue that Western nations did not go far enough or respond fast enough to changing conditions to tighten the squeeze on Russia.

Worries about reducing energy supplies when the price of oil was soaring and inflation was spiraling led the United States and Europe to weaken restrictions on the export of Russian fuel.

Image

A funeral for a Ukrainian soldier outside Kyiv in November. Sanctions are seen as a likely bargaining chip for ending Russia’s war with Ukraine. Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

The decision to replace more comprehensive European sanctions on Russian oil transactions with a price cap meant that Russia was able to continue to earn enormous revenues from energy exports. That money has helped finance its war against Ukraine.

Over time, Russia developed further ways to circumvent the sanctions, like developing its own shadow fleet of vessels to transport oil after restrictions were put on Russia’s use of Western oil tankers and oil spill insurance.

And the European Union is still buying nearly 50 percent of the liquefied natural gas that Russia exports.

Jeffrey Schott, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, said Moscow was able to sell too much gas and oil at too high a price. “Sanctions have been applied with one arm tied behind your back,” he said.

Piecemeal sanctions and the often listless enforcement of them have also made the economic noose around Russia’s neck looser than it could have been, Mr. Schott and other critics say.

Yet even the most valuable bargaining chips that may derive from sanctions may not be enough to persuade Mr. Putin to agree to a settlement that is also acceptable to Ukraine and its neighboring European allies.

Some political and military analysts argue that the fall of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, Russia’s ally, may cause Mr. Putin to take an even tougher stance in Ukraine.

In the end, the only valuation of sanctions as a bargaining chip that really counts is Mr. Putin’s.

Patricia Cohen writes about global economics and is based in London. More about Patricia Cohen

19. China’s escalating cyber attacks highlight Biden, Trump differences

China’s escalating cyber attacks highlight Biden, Trump differences

The incoming administration aims to reduce government’s role in cybersecurity—but also to increase offensive actions.

By Patrick Tucker

Science & Technology Editor

January 2, 2025 08:23 PM ET

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

The differing responses of current and incoming administration officials to the unprecedented intensity of Chinese cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure illustrate how the Biden team’s focus on regulation and intelligence-sharing may change under a successor more focused on retribution.

Either way, “It looks as if things are going to get much worse before they get any better,” David Sedney, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia, said Thursday.

News broke Monday of a Beijing-sponsored breach of the U.S. Treasury Department, which Sedney told Alhurra was likely intended to learn about U.S. sanctions on Chinese exporters. In September, the Biden administration added restrictions on Chinese goods, while Donald Trump has floated the idea of tariffs of up to 60 percent.

Sedney said that the Chinese “want to be prepared for what, first, the Biden administration in its closing days does, and then what the Trump administration does, starting on Jan. 20.”

He said that suggests the attacks are likely to grow in scope and sophistication.

Meanwhile, U.S. officials continue to uncover and assess attacks by the Salt Typhoon group, which has breached nine U.S. telecommunications providers via systems used to cooperate with U.S. government surveillance requests, This has given the Chinese government “broad and full” access to Americans’ data and the ”capability to geolocate millions of individuals, to record phone calls at will,” Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber Anne Neuberger told reporters on Dec. 27.

Still, Neuberger said, Salt Typhoon’s work seems to be aimed mainly at spying on a limited set of specific government officials.

“We believe a large number of individuals were affected by geolocation and metadata of phones; a smaller number around actual collection of phone calls and texts. And I think the scale we’re talking about is far larger on the geolocation; probably less than 100 on the actual individuals,” she said.

But outgoing FBI Director Christopher Wray told an FBI town hall on Dec. 11 that the telecommunications hack was the “most significant cyber espionage campaign in history.”

The Biden administration has said the attacks show why industry should be subject to more mandatory cybersecurity protocols.

"We know that voluntary cybersecurity practices are inadequate to protect against China, Russia, and Iran hacking of our critical infrastructure," Neuberger said, effectively endorsing an FCC proposal requiring telecommunications companies to better secure their networks.

The administration has also urged increased collaboration between government and private industry to improve monitoring and resilience, while promoting encrypted communications to ward off eavesdropping. These steps are part of a broader push to address vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure exposed by state-sponsored attacks.

In contrast, the Trump team’s approach to cybersecurity—as outlined by Kash Patel, Trump’s prospective nominee for FBI director; and Rep. Mike Waltz, R-Fla., Trump’s pick for national security advisor—combines aggressive countermeasures and proposals to cut back federal cybersecurity capabilities. Patel has argued that the FBI, which has long led the U.S. government’s counterintelligence efforts on domestic territory, should focus on law enforcement.

"We need to decentralize the FBI, close its D.C. headquarters, and get back to basics," Patel said in a September interview with the “Shawn Ryan Show.”

Waltz has championed the use of offensive cyber operations against adversaries. He has also suggested taking economic measures to punish nation-state actors for cyber intrusions. But since Trump is already talking about higher tariffs, the effect of other sanctions might be muted.

Other incoming Trump team members have suggested reducing cybersecurity regulations on business and shrinking or eliminating government institutions that respond to cyber threats. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 suggests shrinking the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in favor of private sector-led solutions.

Such cutbacks could undermine the FBI’s and CISA’s ability to attribute attacks like those of Salt Typhoon—and therefore make it more difficult to unleash the kind of offensive measures that Waltz suggests.

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

20. ISIS no longer rules a territory. But its recruits still pose a global threat

ISIS no longer rules a territory. But its recruits still pose a global threat | CNN

CNN · January 2, 2025

A mural bearing the ISIS logo on the outskirts of Mosul, Iraq on March 1, 2017.

Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images

CNN —

It’s many years since ISIS, also known as Islamic State, held sway over much of Syria and northern Iraq a time when it spawned affiliates throughout Africa and Asia and organized a series of deadly terror attacks in European cities.

But as a terror group it remains active in more than a dozen countries – and has inspired and supported individuals and cells in Europe and Russia in recent years.

ISIS is far from moribund, even if it is now a loosely linked network rather than a self-declared caliphate controlling sizeable cities.

The most high-profile attack claimed by ISIS in 2024 was the devastating assault on a Moscow shopping mall in March, which left at least 150 dead and more than 500 injured.

It thrust ISIS back into the spotlight, as have events in Syria. US officials are concerned that instability following the collapse of the Assad regime may allow ISIS to expand from its remote desert strongholds, nearly six years after the “caliphate” fell, and also regain a foothold in Iraq.

There is also the perennial concern among Western security services that individuals inspired by ISIS will launch low-tech attacks – such as stabbings, shootings and driving vehicles into crowds. Such plans are notoriously difficult to detect.

A fire truck and a police vehicle near an attack during New Year's celebrations, in New Orleans, January 1, 2025.

Octavio Jones/Reuters

Vehicle attacks in the name of ISIS in the last few years – including in Nice, Barcelona, Berlin and New York – have killed more than 100 people.

After Wednesday’s attack in New Orleans, FBI assistant special agent in charge, Alethea Duncan, said an ISIS flag was located on the trailer hitch of the suspect’s vehicle. FBI investigators are now searching for anyone who may have worked with the suspect – Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a 42-year-old Texas man and Army veteran – to plan or execute the assault, Duncan said.

“We do not believe that Jabbar was solely responsible,” she told a news conference Wednesday. “We are aggressively running down every lead, including those of his known associates.”

US President Joe Biden said late Wednesday that he had been told by the FBI that the driver had posted videos on social media “mere hours” before the attack “indicating that he was inspired” by ISIS. The suspect was killed in a firefight with police officers.

Police investigators stand at the site of yesterday's deadly stabbings that left three dead and eight injured in Solingen, Germany.

Sascha Schuermann/Getty Images

The ‘lone wolf’ threat

ISIS and al Qaeda have repeatedly called on sympathizers to carry out “do-it-yourself” attacks. The Boston marathon bombers in 2013 used a “recipe” from an online al Qaeda publication to build their devices.

Events in the Middle East have pushed already radicalized individuals to violence, according to Rita Katz, executive director of SITE Intelligence, a non-governmental organization that monitors terror groups,.

She notes that since Israel’s assault on Gaza began in October 2023, there has been a resurgence of “lone wolf” plots in the name of ISIS: a mass stabbing at a festival in Solingen, Germany; an alleged plot against Taylor Swift concerts in Vienna; and the stabbing of an Orthodox Jewish man in Zurich. In that instance, a 15-year-old boy, a Swiss national of Tunisian descent, declared his allegiance to ISIS in a video, saying he was “responding to the call of the Islamic State to its soldiers to target the Jews and Christians and their criminal allies.”

ISIS sought to exploit the situation in Gaza within days of the October 7 attacks by Hamas.

In January last year, ISIS spokesman Abu Hudhayfah al-Ansari called on Muslims to “hunt your prey — the Jews, Christians, and their allies — in the streets and alleyways of America, Europe, and the world,” in a speech cited by SITE Intelligence.

And as in years before, ISIS urged followers to “direct your actions at the easy targets before the difficult, the civilian targets before the military, and the religious targets such as synagogues and churches before anything else.”

Ten years ago, the then-head of Australian intelligence, David Irvine, said that his “recurring nightmare… has been the so-called lone wolf, often radicalized over the internet and who has managed to avoid coming across our radar.”

In that respect, little has changed.

Global image

Katz said at the time of the Moscow attack in March that “ISIS’ global support rests in no small part on its image as a capable organization, and this devastating massacre in Russia will only feed into that image.”

Investigators are still probing how the suspect in New Orleans became radicalized but there is still plenty of pro-ISIS content to be found online.

The Islamic State’s most potent branch - IS Khorasan (ISIS-K) – has global ambitions and a sophisticated online presence in multiple languages, including English.

The fact that Tajik nationals were charged after the Moscow attack indicated ISIS-K was responsible. US officials also said there was evidence ISIS-K carried out the attack.

Based in Afghanistan, ISIS-K has grown in strength since the US withdrawal from the country in 2021 and also tapped into radicalized populations in central Asia. The commander of US Central Command, Gen. Erik Kurilla, assessed early in 2024 that ISIS-K “retains the capability and the will to attack US and Western interests abroad in as little as six months with little to no warning.”

ISIS-K’s most infamous attack was the suicide bombing at Kabul airport in 2021 that killed nearly 200 people, including 13 US soldiers guarding the airport. But it has since expanded its orbit.

Amira Jadoon, who has written a book about the group, said that over the last three years ISIS-K “has grown more ambitious and aggressive in its efforts to gain notoriety and relevance across South and Central Asia.”

Emergency services vehicles outside Crocus City Hall concert hall following the shooting incident in Krasnogorsk, outside Moscow, on March 22, 2024.

AFP via Getty Images

ISIS-K has also attempted to target western Europe and the United States, as well as Russia. In July 2023, seven men were arrested in Germany suspected of planning high-profile attacks and being in contact with ISIS-K planners. All the suspects were from central Asia.

In March last year, two Afghan citizens were detained in Germany, accused of plotting to attack Sweden’s parliament in retaliation for a spate of Koran burnings in the country.

Edmund Fitton-Brown, former coordinator of UN sanctions and threat assessment regarding ISIS and al Qaeda, told CNN last year that ISIS-K “has plugged into the central Asian diaspora, primarily in Russia and Turkey and to some extent in Germany.”

Fitton-Brown said ISIS also benefited from “ambient rage” among radicalized individuals at the scale of deaths in Gaza, and the release of some former jihadis from European jails after serving their sentences.

Such individuals see ISIS-K as “an inspirational and growing force… This could lead to attempts by individuals to travel to conflict zones to join its ranks or carry out attacks in their home countries on behalf of the group,” Jadoon told CNN.

Syrian vacuum

The US is concerned that should a security vacuum emerge in Syria, ISIS will regroup and expand there. On the day Bashar al-Assad fled the country, US Central Command hit more than 75 ISIS targets in Syria. Kurilla said there “should be no doubt - we will not allow ISIS to reconstitute and take advantage of the current situation in Syria.”

Analysts with the non-profit Soufan Center calculated that ISIS attacks in Syria tripled in 2024 compared to the previous year, hovering around 700. “They have also improved in sophistication, increased in lethality, and become more dispersed geographically,” they said.

One risk is that as beleaguered Kurdish forces fend off Turkish-backed militia in northern Syria, they will no longer secure the compounds where thousands of ISIS operatives are held.

Kurilla recently warned ISIS planned to “break out of detention the more than 8,000 ISIS operatives currently being held in facilities in Syria.”

Were ISIS fighters able to escape and begin terror attacks in neighboring Turkey or even travel to western Europe, the image of the group among like-minded lone wolves would only be enhanced.

CNN · January 2, 2025

21. Opinion: Women like me struggle to see ourselves as veterans. Why?

It pains me to read these OpEds. But we need to read them and try to understand the experiences of our fellow soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines.

Opinion: Women like me struggle to see ourselves as veterans. Why?

Los Angeles Times · by Bailey Williams Jan. 2, 2025 3 AM PT · January 2, 2025

It took me 10 years after leaving the military to call myself a veteran.

It was an act of reclamation. My enlistment was defined by sexual harassment. More than a decade later, the thinking that caged me then still circulates: Women service members are worth less.

As a Marine, I hemorrhaged my own power. I stayed silent at rape jokes and language that made my skin burn. I worked out until I was a sliver of myself. I ate dinners of three multivitamin gummies and a lemon popped into my water bottle. To be more like the guys, I policed other girls, doubting and distrusting them.

Donald Trump’s choice for Defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, seems to be riding out the waves of criticism generated in November when he said that women should not serve in combat roles because they are not as “capable” as men. He pivoted. He recently informed Fox News viewers of his newfound revelation that women in the military are “some of our greatest warriors.”

His initial statements, and his refusal to take responsibility for them, brought back what I heard every day as a Marine: The puerile sexualized teasing, the hard edge behind it and the language that normalized a culture that denigrated and distrusted women. Also familiar: the quick disavowment — “I didn’t mean it” — when called out on it.

When I first saw that the cover of my memoir incorporated red poppies, a flower traditionally associated with sacrifice and death on the battlefield, my blood flooded hot. I felt the ghost of an old shame, the feeling that my experience did not deserve the association.

I did what I normally do when I get these flashes of shame. I closed my computer, called my dog and ran into the snowy mountains above my cabin in Alaska until my head cleared.

I remembered the incredible women with whom I served. Mighty, determined, doing the exact same work as men under the constant stress of quotidian sexism. They deserve recognition as veterans, and I was among them.

As I ran, I felt the familiar dull ache in my right hip, an injury I sustained during my enlistment. Hegseth has disparaged service members who “take advantage” of the government by seeking medical care, an opinion recently repeated by the Economist. Hegseth has also said advocacy groups encourage veterans toward an artificial dependency on government benefits.

This rhetoric is not new. I heard it when I served — that to seek care for any reason less than a Purple Heart was not only weakness but selfishness. As if to claim basic healthcare is to elbow past war heroes. Overtraining fractured a bone in my hip, but the same rhetoric Hegseth perpetuates moved me to truly believe that the moral thing to do was shut up and deal with it.

Have you been shot? I used to scold myself. Have you deployed? Then what are you limping for? Get it together.

Pushing through physical pain felt like the only recourse. I knew what was said about women who sought medical care. Weak and faking it and couldn’t hack it lined the path to treatment.

My hip did heal. Imperfectly, and only after a decade of yoga and backpacking. I was lucky.

To Hegseth I am surely no veteran. I fought no wars. To him, my — incompetent! distracting! — enlistment must be meaningless. The physical pain and the lingering distrust of men, the years it’s taken to be able to breathe in crowds, the restlessness that kept me sleepless for a decade — worth nothing.

Honoring only those whose enlistments take them to the farthest reaches: what a clever, cinematic way to dismiss the experiences of most male and female service members, the majority of whom never see combat.

“We’ve all served with women, and they’re great,” Hegseth said in November, though whether he’ll stand by the statement remains to be seen. “It’s just our institutions don’t have to incentivize that in places where … over human history men are more capable.”

What Hegseth is implying is this: Women shouldn’t be leaders in the military.

Barring women from combat hinders their leadership potential. It’s more than a calculus of promotion. It’s the internal conversation women and men in the military have about whose opinion deserves to matter, whose service deserves respect and whose bodies deserve fair treatment.

About who is even a “veteran” at all.

Comments from people in power, as Hegseth may soon be, normalize, exacerbate and preserve a culture that makes it OK to dismiss and even harm women. If Hegseth bounces back from his sexist commentary, it will be sad proof of the incredible leniency that allows men in power to walk away from damage they’ve caused.

I started calling myself a veteran again for the sake of other young women I served with. The ones in my company who used to greet each other on Monday mornings with, “Make it through the weekend?”

Meaning, did we make it through without rape. Without abuse. Without having to barricade ourselves in a barracks head, texting a guy we trusted, could he please do something about the guy we did not, who would not leave us alone.

We had to laugh. Didn’t want to create drama.

We had to detach. Didn’t want to be those girls — the ones who complained.

The language we use to speak of women seeps through the ranks. Right now, some female private who with all her heart wants to serve her country is being reminded that her enlistment isn’t as important as that of the man next to her. Supposed leaders, who should care about her training, career and retention — to say nothing of her well-being — believe she is critically incompetent.

She is not. Get out of her way.

I said yes to the red poppies. Not for me — for her.

Bailey Williams is the author of “Hollow: A Memoir of my Body in the Marines.”

Pay attention: There’s a second civil rights movement

The first civil rights movement sought to end discrimination. The second means the fight isn’t over.

Yesterday at 6:00 a.m. EST

11 min

1221

Washington Post staff illustration; photos by Justin Tallis and Brendan Smialowski AFP/Getty, Ed Reinke/AP)

By Juan Williams

Juan Williams is a journalist and political analyst for Fox News. This column was adapted from the forthcoming “New Prize for These Eyes: The Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement,” to be released on Jan. 14.

As an author and journalist, I have been telling the story of the civil rights movement my entire career. I’m 70 years old, so that is a long time.

Today, in the 21st century, I see a great fight for racial justice in action — a second civil rights movement, if you will.

This second wave builds on the achievements of the first but is not an extension of it. The first civil rights movement was about getting Black people out of the back of the bus. It was about breaking down segregation in all aspects of American life.

The second civil rights movement began when we realized that racial inequality did not disappear in 1964 — nor in 2008, with the election of America’s first Black president. Barack Obama’s victory fulfilled the highest aspiration of the first movement: a rise in Black political power. His election gave hope that the longest, ugliest chapter in America’s history — blatant, state-sanctioned racial violence and discrimination — was ending.

Participants in the 1963 March on Washington. (AFP/Getty Images) (- and AFP/AFP/Getty Images)

Yet, more than 15 years after his inauguration — and the historic ascensions to power of Black members of Congress, Black Cabinet secretaries, and a Black vice president that have taken place since — a post-racial America has continued to elude us.

This is the mantle of the second movement.

The newest generation of civil rights activists battle a behemoth of lingering racial inequalities left unresolved by the first movement, and they diverge from their forebears in three significant ways.

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First, these activists have focused their resistance on a familiar, but secondary enemy of the first movement: the extrajudicial killing of Black people, or lynching. The stirrings of a new crusade against violence toward Black people took shape with creation of BLM, or Black Lives Matter. BLM emerged in 2013, after an aggressive neighborhood-watch volunteer, George Zimmerman, who killed a Black teenager, Trayvon Martin, was found not guilty. It appeared his life did not matter to the man who pulled the trigger, or to the jury. Martin’s tragic death led to an increased awareness of the second movement.

Protesters and New York City Council members attend a news conference at City Hall on March 28, 2012, after the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, on Feb. 26. (Allison Joyce/Getty Images)

Next, the current movement is larger and more diverse. As we know, Martin was not the first, nor the last, Black person to be slain. Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor — Black Lives Matter demanded justice for all these lives, and soon, the movement became primarily recognized as a fight against police brutality. When George Floyd was murdered by a Minnesota police officer in 2020, the protests in his honor dwarfed the demonstrations of the 1960s: “If we added up all those protests during that period,” says professor Deva Woodly of the New School, “we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people, but not millions.” Even the most famous demonstration of the first civil rights movement, the 1963 March on Washington featuring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, attracted fewer than 250,000 protesters.

A mix of all races protested the police killing of Floyd. In fact, most of the people marching were White — close to half. Hispanics were the second-largest racial group in the protest. Blacks showed out in large numbers, but they were the third-largest racial group in this very diverse movement.

Finally — and what is arguably the most significant difference from the first civil rights movement — the current movement exists, in part, within the realm of the internet. This makes organizing both lightning-fast and difficult to manage. Across social media, millions of users have taken to the internet to share personal experiences with racial discrimination, coordinate marches and spread awareness of police violence under the hashtag “#BlackLivesMatter.”

These young Black people found social media to be an open road. They could hear from one another without waiting for editors and producers to deem their stories worthy of attention. This was different from the 1965 protests for voting rights in Selma, where footage of violence by the Alabama state police against the marchers could not be seen until the film made it back to newsrooms in New York, and only if the networks decided to broadcast it. Social media, on the other hand, provided an immediate connection for people of all races to share details that never made the press.

A demonstrator marches with a Black Lives Matter flag in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, on April 16, 2021, on the sixth night of protests over the shooting death of Daunte Wright, 20, by a police officer. (Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images)

But this instantaneous, unfiltered mode of organizing and information exchange made BLM, and its parent second civil rights movement, a cause without a clear shepherd. Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi — the three radical Black organizers who founded BLM — made it clear from the movement’s outset that they were not interested in re-creating the patriarchal hierarchy of the first civil rights movement. With millions of online followers from around the world — all interconnected, but many of them unknown to each other — the sprawl of the movement was far from the concentrated, meticulously planned civil rights organizing of the past.

And, of course, no movement is without opposition. The challenge of organizing the new movement was compounded by the rise of a right-wing backlash — backlash fueled by White grievance — and led to the emergence of a new conservative champion, Donald Trump.

Barack Obama, then a candidate for the Senate from Illinois, speaks at the Democratic National Convention in Boston on July 27, 2004. (Timothy A. Clary/AFP)

Trump advanced his racist rhetoric using the same tools as the Second movement: social media. He used Twitter in much the same way that social justice activists had, but to provoke public outrage, champion the police and oppose calls for racial justice.

Activists of the second civil rights movement were understandably disappointed by Trump’s election. For eight years, Obama served as the hopeful harbinger of a post-racial America. He declared in his breakout speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that “There is not a Black America and a White America and a Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.” The new generation wanted to believe him. Trump’s victory in 2016 made it all too clear that had not come to pass.

Trump’s first term was marked by episode after episode of racial antagonism, from the infamous “Muslim ban” enacted in the first month of his presidency, to the white supremacists in Charlottesville with whom he sympathizes, to the murder of Floyd at the hands of a police officer in May 2020, which led to the height of the movement’s mobility.

“New Prize for These Eyes: The Rise of America's Second Civil Rights Movement,” by Juan Williams (Simon & Schuster)

However, the passionate embrace of the second civil rights movement in that moment turned out to be fleeting. Even after Trump was defeated in 2020, he remained the most popular Republican in the country. His 2024 presidential campaign again relied on racial division, complete with conspiracy theories about immigrants eating pets and taking “Black jobs.” The campaign, with its brassy display of machismo and fierce rejection of progressive social mores, aimed to stir turnout among the youngest members of his most loyal base, non-college-educated White men.

But to the surprise of many liberals, it also drew a large share of votes from non-college-educated Latino and Black men. Polls and news reports consistently uncovered wells of frustration among young men of color. Despite talk of a post-racial America, young men of color failed to see evidence of a better life for themselves. And it did not help that Trump’s opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, is a woman. Trump played into sexist stereotypes by calling her “dumb” and labeling her as weak. The media compounded her floundering campaign, with many media figures claiming that Harris failed to clearly state her policies or separate herself from the unpopular President Joe Biden.

Harris notably failed to tap into the power of the second civil rights movement. Unlike Obama’s, her campaign was not the face of change. She had none of Obama’s cool, his progressive yet unifying appeal. Her shtick was as a stabilizing figure for the status quo, not a disrupter.

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris speaks at a rally in Savannah, Georgia, on Aug. 29. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

Harris never defined herself as a leader pushing into the future, an avatar of fresh thought. Her anti-Trump crusade didn’t cut it. Unlike in 2016, Trump decisively won the election, clinching both the electoral college and the popular vote.

So, what is the second civil rights movement to do? It is up against a foe that detests everything the movement stands for: racial equality, equity, diversity.

The only option is to reflect and evolve. Indeed, it’s time for a third movement to come to term.

As with the second movement, the third movement can thrive only so long as it adopts the strongest parts of what came before. It can be hard to see the second civil rights movement’s achievements through the blizzard of constant backlash and the rising public profile of white supremacists. That understandably leads to frustration among young people looking for immediate change. But they are wrong to think of this backlash as evidence of failure or the diminishing value of their movement. It is simply another phase in a long-term fight, a struggle across time for equal rights.

The second civil rights movement has made tremendous progress. The 118th Congress, which took office in January 2023, was the most diverse ever elected — more than 100 members were non-White — and it included a 25-year-old from Generation Z as its youngest member. The two houses of Congress had 153 women (28 percent), representative of the profound shifts happening elsewhere in American society. Almost half the U.S. workforce is female, and nearly 60 percent of U.S. college students are women. Gender equality is another engine for social justice.

The soldiers of the second movement must not feel discouraged by 2024’s losses. Wayne Frederick, former president of Howard University, believes that the issues of race and American democracy behave like a pendulum. “It corrects based on what has happened before. The reality is that you don’t have an Obama if you did not have a George W. Bush,” Frederick said, referring to the economic troubles at the end of Bush’s tenure as well as the unpopular, lingering war in Afghanistan. “He gives rise to an Obama and Obama gives rise to a Trump. Whether or not we like that or not, it’s a reality.”

President-elect Donald Trump emerges to speak at an election night party at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Nov. 6. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

The second movement is its own epoch of civil rights history. Obama’s rise and the incredible social media engine fueled by BLM were monumental achievements. Now the movement for racial justice is ready for another period of growth. After Trump’s victory, that new energy will likely be born of activists embracing the imperative to counterattack by winning at the ballot box.

This will be a departure from the past, from civil rights activists who kept their distance from politics to show their distaste for incremental gains through compromise. But the lack of political enthusiasm on the left is what led to Harris’s defeat. Today’s activists need to break ground by creating new alliances, both within and outside of government, in the most racially diverse population in our nation’s history. Eighty percent of Trump’s support came from White voters — therefore, working with Democrats to get these voters to see their interest in racial justice will be a necessary first step.

On the flip side, Democrats need to make themselves known as the party dedicated to solving real-world problems. Trump derides good, functioning government — one that protects the rights of all people — as a tool of the elites. To ring in the next era of civil rights activism, Democrats must learn from activists how to bring their party’s platform closer to the people — and activists must be willing to help. In the face of Trump, the great divider, racial justice can only be achieved with a united push.

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."

Access NSS HERE

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