Quotes of the Day:
"Do you seriously expect to start a rebellion with picayune stuff like that?" "It's not picayune stuff, because it acts directly on their emotions, below the logic level. You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic. It doesn't have to be a prejudice about an important matter either."
- Robert A. Heinlein - "If This Goes On -"
"There is nothing more soulless than a religion without good works unless it be a patriotism which does not concern itself with the welfare and dignity of the individual."
- SLA Marshall, Men Against Fire
“The happy man is one who is freed from both fear and desire because of the gift of reason.”
- Seneca
1. Pentagon, reacting to Biden order, working on plan for mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations
2. ‘We will do this again,’ Afghanistan IG warns of future drawn-out wars
3. The US and China say they want to avoid military conflict, but no one can agree on how
4. Everything America did wrong in Afghanistan, according to the top US government watchdog
5. Overmatch by other means: integrating Irregular Warfare into Joint Force Wargaming
6. What Are The Best Ways To Shield Taiwan From A Hungry China?
7. FDD | U.S. Leads International Efforts to Attribute China’s Microsoft Hack
8. Austin on a strategic mission in SE Asia
9. Charges preferred against seaman apprentice accused of starting USS Bonhomme Richard fire
10. Biden prepares the ground for Quad-3
11. Duterte restores Philippines as ‘sick man of Asia’
12. China Is Providing an Alternative Regional Framework for South Asia
13. The Forever Wars Aren’t Ending. They’re Just Being Rebranded.
14. Twitter Will Not Steward the Profession
15. Are We Asking the Right Questions?
16. Huawei launches new smartphones without 5G as U.S. sanctions, chip shortage bite
17. The West Embraces State Subsidies, a Policy Throwback, to Counter China
18. Sunisa Lee Is Representing America in the Tokyo Olympics—and a Community America Left Behind
19. First Afghan Interpreters Arrive in Virginia
20. Analysis | The Technology 202: Chinese disinformation "much more subtle, much more insidious" than Moscow's, former cyber chief warns
1. Pentagon, reacting to Biden order, working on plan for mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations
Pentagon, reacting to Biden order, working on plan for mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin will begin consulting military medical professionals, as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to “determine how and when to make recommendations to President Joe Biden” about adding the COVID-19 vaccines to the full list of requirements for military personnel, the Pentagon announced Thursday evening.
The announcement came in the wake of Biden’s call earlier in the day for the Pentagon to look into adding those vaccines to the list of required inoculations for service members. Biden also ordered that all federal workers not vaccinated against COVID-19 will be subject to masking, social distancing and mandatory testing.
“The Department of Defense is moving quickly to meet President Biden’s commitment to defeat COVID-19, and that includes being able to ensure every member of our civilian and military workforce is protected,” Jamal Brown, deputy Pentagon press secretary, said in a statement. “In accordance with the guidance the President issued today, all military and civilian DoD personnel will be asked to attest to their vaccination status. Personnel unable or unwilling to do that will be required to wear a mask, physically distance, comply with a regular testing requirement and be subject to official travel restrictions.”
Biden has stayed largely mum on the topic of mandatory troop vaccinations since he took office in January. The Defense Department has faced endless questions as to why the COVID-19 shot has been voluntary, despite a litany of other required vaccines.
In short, because of the Food and Drug Administration’s emergency use authorization, Pentagon leadership has thought better of forcing it, though Biden’s order could supersede that policy.
As the delta variant sends the country back into mask mandates and indoor gathering restrictions, stronger vaccine rules are now on the table.
“Right now, too many people are dying or watching someone they love die and say if ‘I’d just got the vaccine,’” Biden said Thursday. “This is an American tragedy. People are dying who don’t have to die.”
The voluntary COVID-19 vaccine effort stands in stark contrast to the Pentagon’s mandatory Anthrax Vaccine Immunization Program, which began in 1998. Those who refused often faced harsh penalties.
Biden did not specify whether he would be open to waiting for full FDA approval before enacting a vaccine mandate.
On Wednesday, the DoD reinstated an indoor mask mandate for areas of the country designated “substantial” or “high” for COVID-19 transmission, per Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance.
Whether service members will be required to get vaccinated, they are considered federal workers for the purposes of the new prevention protocol. That would mean weekly testing, in addition to so-called sentinel testing the military put in place in spring 2020, for troops preparing to deploy, redeploy or travel on orders.
About 54 percent of active and reserve troops have received at least one dose of a vaccine, per DoD’s most recently posted numbers.
Each of the services has undertaken their own campaigns to convince members to get vaccinated, to varying affect. While the active-duty Navy reported 77 percent vaccination in late June, the Marine Corps was far behind at 58 percent.
DoD will continue to offer vaccines to personnel and their families around the world, said Brown, the Pentagon spokesman.
“And we will continue to adjust our protocols to the local conditions of the communities we serve in,” he said in the statement.
“COVID-19 remains a significant and evolving threat to our nation’s security,” he said. “The rise of the Delta variant and the speed with which it transmits make these additional protective efforts all the more vital to protecting our force and the nation we defend.
“Vaccines remain the best and most effective way to prevent the spread of COVID, including the Delta variant.”
2. ‘We will do this again,’ Afghanistan IG warns of future drawn-out wars
One of my former bosses was tasked to teach a COIN course in the 1980s at CGSC at Fort Leavenworth and he searched all the Army schools for COIN doctrine and the proverbial "little old lady in tennis shoes" managing the archives would tell him that in 1975 after Vietnam they were told to purge everything related to COIN because we would never do another Vietnam. The only school that supposedly retained COIN doctrine was at Fort Bragg at the JFK Special Warfare Center and School.
Conclusion:
“Don’t believe what you’re told by the generals or the ambassadors or people in the administration saying we’re never going to do this again,” he said. “That’s exactly what we said after Vietnam: we’re never going to do this again. Lo and behold, we did Iraq. And we did Afghanistan. We will do this again.”
‘We will do this again,’ Afghanistan IG warns of future drawn-out wars
The most recent SIGAR quarterly report, released Thursday, tells the same story it’s been telling all along, John Sopko told reporters at Defense Writers Group event.
“You know, you really shouldn’t be surprised if you’ve been reading our reports for at least the nine years ... that I’ve been there,” he said. “We’ve been highlighting problems with our train, advise and assist mission with the Afghan military.”
In the wake of the Biden administration’s May announcement that all troops and contractors would be out by the end of August, public backlash has ranged from disappointment at the war’s “failure” to lamentations that the U.S. is withdrawing before the job has been finished.
The issue, Sopko said, is that “the job” has had many faces since fall 2001. What started as a mission to dismantle the Taliban government that allowed al-Qaida to train in Afghanistan morphed into a nation-building exercise, an effort to beat back numerous insurgent groups and strengthen a central Afghan government and military that would eventually fend for itself.
That effort was more involved than the Marshall Plan, Sopko said, the U.S.-led program to rebuild Europe after World War II.
Whether Afghanistan’s government holds up after the U.S. withdrawal will eventually play out, but when the senior-most American national security officials talk about the reasons for the drawdown, they pin it to one goal: Afghanistan is not currently a place where a terrorist group can plan and train for an attack on the United States. Ergo, mission accomplished.
Sopko quipped that military leadership on the ground “turned the corner” so many times that they’ve been going in circles for years, and it appears the U.S. has settled back into its original goal in Afghanistan.
“Every time we took a look at the assessment tools, our U.S. military would change the goal posts and say, ‘Oh no, no, that’s not the test you want to do,’ to raising serious questions about the sustainability of all this high-tech hardware we gave them,” he said. “And to the real serious problem, that we focused on the more urgent warfighting and not looking at the what I call the ‘long tail,’ the whole issue of logistics.”
The figures include half-a-trillion dollars on interest.
Meghann Myers
April 16
Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters in July that the Afghan National Defense Security Forces have the “capability” to keep the Taliban at bay. But whether they have the know-how and the wherewithal is another issue.
For example, Sopko mentioned that many conventional Afghan National Army units refuse to do basic tasks like route clearance or checkpoint security without the help of the country’s very small special forces contingent, therefore wasting their capacity and burning them out at the same time.
But whenever U.S. leadership in Afghanistan was asked to show progress, he said, they changed the metrics.
“And every time we went in, the U.S. military changed the goal posts, and made it easier to show success. And then finally, when they couldn’t even do that, they classified the assessment tool,” he said. “So, they knew how bad the Afghan military was. And if you had a clearance, you could find out, but the average American, the average taxpayer, the average congressman, the average person working in the embassy wouldn’t know how bad it was.”
The Afghan air force is an example of a success story, Sopko said, because their pilots are competent and they are able to fly their own combat missions. But they rely on contracted maintenance because there has not been a similar effort to train up mechanics.
“Our own Air Force told us, as we have reported time and again, you can’t turn somebody into a UH-60 pilot overnight, or a level one or level two or level three mechanic overnight,” he said. “These take months, and that is one of the serious problems we raised with not only the ANDSF train, advise and assist, but overall with reconstruction.”
A culture of wishful thinking set the ANDSF up for failure.
“We’ve highlighted time and again: we have unrealistic timelines for all of our work, and that is what now is causing the problems you see with the military,” Sopko added.
Whether the national security establishment learns anything from the last 20 years remains to be seen, though Sopko did make a plug for the SIGAR’s soon-to-be released Afghanistan lessons learned report as a resource.
“...what you see in Afghanistan is the is evidence of problems of our own government,” Sopko said. “You know, we have a lousy [human resources] system ... we have a lousy procurement system in place. And, you know, we have ... a lousy way of hiring people. You need the best people for the job, and firing the bad people. And we have a lousy way for planning, and we also have a lousy way of collecting lessons or observations for major actions like we did in Afghanistan.”
Sopko is not, he said, optimistic that the national security establishment will internalize those lessons.
“Don’t believe what you’re told by the generals or the ambassadors or people in the administration saying we’re never going to do this again,” he said. “That’s exactly what we said after Vietnam: we’re never going to do this again. Lo and behold, we did Iraq. And we did Afghanistan. We will do this again.”
3. The US and China say they want to avoid military conflict, but no one can agree on how
We could adopt the Nancy Reagan slogan and 'just say no." Or we could adapt the Mike slogan and say "just don't do it."
The US and China say they want to avoid military conflict, but no one can agree on how
CNN · by Ben Westcott and Nectar Gan, CNN
A version of this story appeared in CNN's Meanwhile in China newsletter, a three-times-a-week update exploring what you need to know about the country's rise and how it impacts the world. Sign up here.
Hong Kong (CNN)Among the recriminations and accusations, there was one point of consensus when American and Chinese diplomats met in the coastal city of Tianjin earlier this week: no one wants to see the world's most important relationship deteriorate into armed conflict.
But there was little consensus on a concrete way to avoid that catastrophe. And that has experts worried.
Washington and Beijing have been trapped in a spiral of anger and suspicion for several years, but the situation has deteriorated rapidly since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, amid finger-pointing over the origins of the virus.
Meetings between the two sides are few and far between — and when they occur, such as in Alaska in March, they are bitter and confrontational. The US is without an ambassador in Beijing. There have been no moves to reopen the recently shuttered United States consulate in Chengdu or the Chinese consulate in Houston. And the appointment of a new Chinese ambassador to Washington, while a positive step, is unlikely to deescalate tensions in the short term.
There's certainly no small amount of antagonism between the two sides at present. Experts point to rising brinksmanship over Taiwan and the expanding standoff in the South China Sea as possible military flashpoints with unpredictable consequences for both sides.
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Speaking in Tianjin, both sides said despite the current state of relations, they wanted to avoid direct confrontation. US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman underscored that while Washington welcomed "stiff competition," it did not seek conflict with Beijing. Meanwhile, China's Foreign Minister Xie Feng told Sherman the Chinese people "cherish peace."
Yet Willy Lam, an adjunct professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said neither side had actually put anything in place to stop conflict from happening. No further talks are planned publicly, and expectations of a possible meeting between US President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the G20 in October weren't raised.
"So there is room for further deterioration but there are no signs of possible improvement, even in areas where they have common interests," said Lam.
At a speech in Singapore on Tuesday night, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said while the US didn't want conflict with China, Beijing was showing an "unwillingness to resolve disputes peacefully and respect the rule of law" in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait and in the western region of Xinjiang.
At the same time, the United Kingdom — a close US ally — has sent a carrier group to the South China Sea, including the Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier, and announced it would permanently deploy two warships to Asian waters.
Experts said the growing militarization of both the South China Sea and air and sea around Taiwan puts the US and China, as well as their allied nations, at risk of an accidental collision in a contested area or exchange of gunfire that spirals out of control.
Both sides have been able to cool tensions in the past, such as in 2001 when a US Navy surveillance plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet, leading to a tense 11-day standoff over the surviving American pilot. Eventually he was released and tensions cooled — but Orville Schell, director of the Asia Society's Center on US China Relations, said both sides might not be as keen to negotiate this time.
"They're headed towards a train wreck here," he said. In particular, Schell described the Taiwan Strait as the "Chernobyl" of international relations, with the repeated military drills and flyovers by Chinese aircraft a disaster waiting to happen.
"This is where the globe is most stressed, China and the US and Taiwan are right there at the epicenter," he said.
Both the US and China have offered potential ways forward to avoid any further deterioration. Before Sherman went to Tianjin, US officials said they wanted to emphasize the need for "guard rails" in the US-China relationship. Washington has mooted the idea of creating an emergency hotline between Washington and Beijing, similar to the "red phone" between the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War intended to allow for direct communication as a way to avoid major conflicts including nuclear war.
But there isn't any public indication at this stage whether Beijing would sign up for such a plan.
Instead, the Chinese government presented a list of demands to the US side during the meetings with Sherman, which included lifting sanctions on Chinese entities, stopping restrictions on student visas and withdrawing its extradition request for Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou.
Schell said any talks between the two sides were better than none — and this one could be the "beginnings of a guard rail." But he said the current and former US military officials he spoke to were "extremely worried" about the risk of conflict if better communication wasn't established.
"There's no mechanism to deal with these — there's no red phone, there's no (leading) groups, there's no protocol, there's nothing," he said.
Japanese gold medalists face Chinese nationalist wrath
Japan's Daiki Hashimoto won the men's all-around gymnastics final at the Tokyo Olympics Wednesday.
Some of the Japanese athletes who defeated Team China at the Tokyo Olympics have been subject to a storm of abuse on their personal social media accounts from Chinese nationalists.
On Wednesday, Japan's Daiki Hashimoto won gold in the men's all-around gymnastics final, edging out China's Xiao Ruoteng by 0.4 points. At just 19 years old, Hashimoto is the world's youngest gymnast to ever claim that medal.
As Japan celebrated his victory, some in China questioned the fairness of the result and accused the judges of favoritism toward host Japan by inflating Hashimoto's score on the vault.
The anger, first set off on Chinese social media, soon spilled over to platforms typically censored by China's Great Firewall and not accessible in China. Chinese trolls circumvented censorship and descended on Hashimoto's Instagram account, inundating his feed with angry comments and tagging him in insulting posts.
Many called him Japan's "national humiliation," others accused him of stealing China's gold medal. Some even tagged him in photos of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Hashimoto later changed his privacy settings on Instagram, banning himself from being tagged, but angry comments have kept pouring under his posts.
Following the controversy, the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) issued a statement Thursday explaining Hashimoto's vault score, including a detailed list of the imperfections.
"The FIG can assess that the 14.7 score obtained by Hashimoto on this apparatus is correct in regards to the Code of Points, and so is the final ranking," the statement concluded.
The nationalist rage against Hashimoto followed attacks on Mima Ito and Jun Mizutani, the Japanese table tennis duo who narrowly defeated the Chinese team to win the first-ever gold medal in mixed doubles Monday.
The attacks are an extreme expression of the rising tide of ultra-nationalism sweeping through Chinese social media in recent years, which has silenced many liberal and moderate voices. Some Chinese netizens have tried to call for an end to the online abuse, but they were also attacked.
China currently leads the overall medal table with 16 golds, followed by Japan — the hosts have claimed 15 golds so far. The United States is third with 14 golds.
Delta arrives in China
Staff members get to work at a temporary Covid-19 testing facility in Nanjing on July 28 as Chinese authorities scramble to prevent the spread of the Delta variant amid an outbreak linked to an airport in the populous eastern city. Infections connected to the airport cluster have since been reported in Guangdong province in the south, Sichuan province in the southwest, Liaoning province in the northeast and the capital Beijing.
It comes as Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian revealed Beijing had provided its own suggested plan to the World Health Organization for a second investigation into the origins of Covid-19, looking into transmission "through an intermediate host or cold chain products." Earlier this month, China rejected the WHO's proposed investigation over its insistence that include the possibility of a lab leak.
Chinese state media is trying to calm investors after massive stock rout
It's been a historically terrible week for Chinese stocks. Now China's trying to placate investors as the country signals a range of sweeping reforms on private enterprise.
"There are some doubts in the market regarding the recent regulatory policies ... in fact, these regulatory policies are not aimed at restricting or suppressing" industry, wrote the state-owned China Economic Daily in a Thursday editorial, joining other voices in the country calling for calm after a massive stock market sell-off.
"If you try to understand it from a big picture perspective, you won't be biased by irrational emotions," the editorial said, adding that in the past, major regulatory efforts "did not affect the vitality of China's economic development" nor dramatically change the relationship between foreign capital and Chinese assets.
That editorial — which appeared in a major newspaper published by the ruling Chinese Communist Party — came a day after the Chinese state-run newspaper Securities Times published a commentary acknowledging the "changes in policy for certain industries." That paper asked investors to "have confidence in the market."
The unprecedented crackdown has wiped $1.2 trillion off the value of overseas-listed Chinese tech stocks since mid-February — one of the worst sell-offs in history, Goldman Sachs analysts said in a research report on Thursday.
On Monday and Tuesday alone, Hong Kong's benchmark Hang Seng Index lost a combined 8%, while the Shanghai Composite Index fell nearly 5%. The drops came after Chinese authorities targeted tech and education companies with a broad set of reforms — including a ban on for-profit after-school tutoring services, and a requirement that online food delivery platforms provide minimum wages to delivery riders.
US-listed Chinese tech stocks have been hammered, too. Tutoring service provider TAL Education has dived more than 70% in the past week, while rivals New Oriental Education and Technology and Gaotu each plunged 65% during that period.
There was one surprising outlier on Thursday in New York: Didi, the ride-hailing company whose botched IPO has made it a poster child of the most recent phase of the crackdown.
Shares in the company soared nearly 50% during pre-market trading Thursday after the Wall Street Journal reported the company was considering going private to appease Chinese authorities and compensate investors for losses since its IPO.
Didi later denied the report, saying it was "not true" and the company was "fully cooperating" with authorities in China on a cybersecurity review.
The stock still closed up more than 11%, though it is trading well below its IPO price of $14 per share.
— By Laura He
CNN · by Ben Westcott and Nectar Gan, CNN
4. Everything America did wrong in Afghanistan, according to the top US government watchdog
The subtitle is probably the most important lesson for all of national security and foreign policy: We have to be honest with the American people.
Excerpt:
The following is a partial transcript of John Sopko’s comments at Thursday’s Defense Writers Group event. His remarks have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Everything America did wrong in Afghanistan, according to the top US government watchdog
'We have to be honest with the American people.'
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The Taliban currently have a knife to the throat of the Afghan government in Kabul. While the Afghan military still has a chance to succeed, it will lose if it keeps on its present course, said John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
The precarious situation facing Afghanistan’s government and security forces is the result of two decades of mistakes by American civilian and military officials, Sopko told reporters during a Defense Writers Group event on Thursday.
He also warned that it is vitally important for the United States to learn from its repeated mistakes over the past two decades.
“Don’t believe what you’re told by the generals or the ambassadors or the people in the administration saying ‘We’re never going to do this again,’” Sopko said. “That’s exactly what we said after Vietnam: We’re never going to do this again. And lo and behold, we did Iraq and we did Afghanistan. We will do this again and we really need to think and learn from the 20 years in Afghanistan.”
The following is a partial transcript of John Sopko’s comments at Thursday’s Defense Writers Group event. His remarks have been edited for brevity and clarity.
We have a tendency of building other governments and other militaries in our image and likeness. I think that’s normal.
So, we came into Afghanistan thinking that we would create a strong central government and that’s where our focus would be – and that was a mistake. And if you read some of the lessons learned reports done by USAID [United States Agency for International Development] for the 20 or 30 years before, they said it was a mistake. And if you talked to any experts on Afghanistan, they would have said it was a mistake.
The problem is we didn’t listen to any of them. So that was our first problem.
Then the military goes in and with short tours of duty – and the requirement that these officers of ours have to show success in their short term of duty – you look for short successes. And one of them is not building an infrastructure and building a capability of providing boots, bullets, and food, and pay in the long-term.
So, we emphasized – again, it goes back to these short timelines we set. And, we basically forced our generals, forced our military, forced our ambassadors, forced the USAID to try to show success in short timelines, which they themselves knew were never going to work. And that’s the big problem.
Soldiers from Task Force Stalwart, which is compromised of Soldiers from 1st Battalion, 41st Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, pose for a group photo, March 28, 2018, in a post in the outskirts of Afghanistan. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. 1st Class Jasmine L. Flowers/2nd IBCT UPAR)
So, you focused on – the military in particular – focused on – during the surge, we were bringing troops in, but we knew we were leaving. So, we had to try to turn things around real quickly. So, what was the answer? Well, pour in a lot more money.
And pouring a lot more money just created a lot more waste; it created more corruption, which alienated the Afghan people. So, we basically hurt ourselves by doing this.
I can’t overemphasize too much: These short timelines, which have no basis in reality – except the political reality of the appropriations cycle or whatever’s popular at the moment – is dooming us to failure in countries like Afghanistan.
Now, I don’t know if that answers your questions but that’s one of the problems: By focusing on the immediate security situation and not the long-term sustainability – and not logistics.
Let me just remind you. Napoleon said during the 1800s that an army moves on its stomach. And this is still true. It hasn’t changed since the 1800s. And if you expect the Afghan military to win the hearts and the minds of the Afghan people, you have to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan military.
So, if you don’t pay them; you don’t feed them; you don’t support them; you don’t give benefits to widows and orphans on a regular basis; you don’t have MEDEVAC capabilities – then the average Afghan soldier is saying, ‘What the heck am I dying for?’
And that’s another problem: We didn’t focus on logistics. And every time we had a problem with the Afghan military, we changed the goalposts on how we were rating them.
I mean, you know, we’ve got chapter and verse on that. Four times, I think, we went in and looked at the assessment tools that the U.S. government was using, the military. And every time we went in, the U.S. military changed the goalposts and made it easier to show success.
Afghan National Army soldiers stand in formation waiting to be greeted by Afghan Deputy Defense Minister Dr. Yasin Zia and Resolute Support Commander Gen. Scott Miller at a checkpoint in western Afghanistan on Dec. 31, 2019. (U.S. Army Reserve photo by Spc. Jeffery J. Harris/ Released)
And then, finally, when they couldn’t even do that. They classified the assessment tool. So, they knew how bad the Afghan military was – and if you had a clearance, you could find out – but the average American, the average taxpayer, the average Congressman, the average person working in the embassy wouldn’t know how bad it was. And we were paying for it.
So that is the horrible thing. And again: Changing the goalposts. I remember Gen. [John] Nicholson saying the new standard for success is how much of population, Afghan population, is controlled by the Afghan government. And he set as the goal 80 percent.
And then it looked like we were going down, not going to make the 80 percent by the end of his tour, the goal changed. The new goal was peace. So, you tell me how the train, advise, and assist mission – and whether the soldiers are getting paid, whether they could shoot straight, is linked to the ultimate goal of peace.
I refer to two words that can describe Afghanistan: One is this ‘hubris’ that we can somehow take a country that was desolate in 2001 and turn it into little Norway in that timeframe. And the other is ‘mendacity.’
We exaggerated, over-exaggerated – our generals did, our ambassadors did, all of our officials did – to Congress and the American people about how we’re just turning the corner; we’re about ready to turn the corner. We can give you chapter and verse about how many of our generals talked about just about ready to win.
Well, we turned the corner so much we did 360 degrees – we’re like a top. That is the problem of Afghanistan. And that, unfortunately, is a problem not just with Afghanistan. I think you find it in other countries where we’ve gone in.
We have to be honest. We have to be honest with ourselves And we have to be honest with the American people, who pay for this – not only in money but also in blood and treasure.
So, I’m sorry. It’s a complicated issue. This is why we got what we got right now.
More great stories on Task & Purpose
is the senior Pentagon reporter for Task & Purpose. He has covered the military for 15 years. You can email him at schogol@taskandpurpose.com, direct message @JeffSchogol on Twitter, or reach him on WhatsApp and Signal at 703-909-6488. Contact the author here.
5. Overmatch by other means: integrating Irregular Warfare into Joint Force Wargaming
Irregular wargaming is hard. It is difficult to measure effects and IW is time consuming and often effects cannot be achieved within the timeframe of a wargame. And it is more than the enemy that has a vote: the population, resistance groups, the media, other governments meddling, etc, all have a various type of vote in an irregular warfare conflict. But it is important and necessary that we conduct effective wargames but we must understand the differences with conventional wargames.
But if we are going to conduct irregular warfare war games we need to place them in context beyond only the military instrument of power. Irregular warfare is the military contribution to political warfare and therefore we must take an interagency approach and include political warfare wargaming as well. Who is responsible for that effort?
Now IW is not a SOF exclusive effort. The entire Joint Force must contribute to an IW effort. But this article does (indirectly and unstated) make reference to what I call the two SOF trinities:
1. Irregular warfare (being the overarching military construct)
2.Unconventional warfare (note that it is the fundamentals of UW that inform how to conduct effective IW - note reference to resistance and Blunt-Layer Unconventional Warfare Transition.)
3. Support to Political Warfare (IW is the military contribution to PW but PW must be a national leffort integrating all elements of national power - e.g. Statecraft, or perhaps in this case "irregular statecraft."
The second trinity is the comparative advantage of SOF:
1. Influence
2. Governance
3. Support to indigenous forces and populations.
I like the concussion. We must upgrade our "software" (mindset) for irregular warfare. After all, T.E. Lawrence did give us this nice quote: "Irregular warfare is far more intellectual than a bayonet charge." I think T.E. Lawrence would like the focus on "intellectual overmatch." We can outfight our enemies. We have to be able to outthink them as well.
Conclusion:
Further developing wargaming and its use in professional military education to better account for irregular warfare is a cost-effective way to upgrade the software — the mindsets and cultural preferences — that will allow the United States to thwart adversaries from pursuing indirect approaches that offset America’s conventional advantages. Affording students the opportunity to conduct low-risk experimentation with irregular warfare concepts in the classroom before being asked to formally plan or implement them is worth the time and effort to develop cognitive overmatch against our adversaries.
Overmatch by other means: integrating Irregular Warfare into Joint Force Wargaming
militarytimes.com · by Steve Ferenzi, Christopher J. Hickey, and Christopher Hossfeld · July 29, 2021
“Conventional overmatch encourages adversaries to pursue indirect approaches.”
Despite progress in using games to explore emerging concepts and capabilities, wargames still overwhelmingly focus on the traditional fight. However, tailoring wargaming specifically to hone irregular warfare competencies may mitigate the unintended consequences. One approach with great promise is updating wargaming in a way that drives classroom dialogue and learning to develop the student’s ability to recognize and avoid blinders connected to the application of strictly traditional military power.
Education as the Bedrock of Intellectual Overmatch
Second, military education curriculum does not change overnight. Revisions require long lead times for implementation. However, injecting small irregular warfare aspects into existing experiential learning events such as wargaming does not overburden instructors or require large changes to course content. With minimal time and resource costs, such injects facilitate expanding the conceptual framework for how to employ irregular warfare to both deter adversary coercion and enable decisive operations in war.
An Irregular Upgrade to Wargaming
Bringing wargaming into the classroom in a format usable by the typical seminar and a single instructor is not easy. When primarily focused on the use of military power to achieve national security objectives, a game must account for the very real and different timescales and dynamics across air, land, maritime, cyberspace, and space domains and in the information environment. Scenarios must be close enough to real world problems to maximize student engagement and learning outcomes, while also being suitable for an open source, unclassified international academic environment.
As part of the larger evolution of its curriculum, the U.S. Army War College developed two generations of a wargame that seek to meet these challenges of realism and practicality. The first version is set in a Euro-Atlantic context and the newer version in an Asia-Pacific context. The focus is on providing students multiple opportunities to develop and implement various decisions about military actions and activities against a thinking adversary and understand the consequences of those decisions.
The introduction of operational design exercises — focused not on armed conflict, but on competition campaigning — can set conditions for gaming the interaction of traditional and irregular warfare. This competition campaign is where irregular warfare can contribute to asymmetrically setting the theater to compel adversary behavior changes, contribute to deterrence by denial, and establish conditions for success in armed conflict. The planning for irregular warfare (or lack thereof) would then have positive or negative impacts during the transition to and during armed conflict. Irregular warfare-focused content would consist of the following, represented as effects or payoffs similar to the use of air, space, or cyber capabilities:
Cost-Informed Counterterrorism. Despite shifting focus to strategic competition, the United States must still address the ongoing terrorism threat. While Russia is its primary focus, U.S. European Command continues to balance resources to address violent extremist organizations, particularly from its southern approaches. Students must plan for ongoing counterterrorism activities, even if at minimal levels, and account for intelligence and partnership resources required to prevent an attack in a critical location, such as Paris or Rota, that could disrupt the alliance during game play.
Of equal importance is “consolidating gains” during combat operations. Failure to address “consolidation area” operations places land forces at risk for command and control and sustainment disruption by local insurgents and enemy special purpose forces, as well as threatening post-combat strategic consolidation of gains. Students can mitigate by allocating a land force capacity towards counterinsurgency and stability operations in the consolidation areas instead of on the front lines, presenting a trade-off that cannot be ignored.
Towards an Irregular Complement to Traditional Preferences
The Joint Force must address both the traditional and irregular aspects of strategic competition in wargaming to keep pace with its adversaries. It just requires a bit of innovation and willingness to stray outside the box of cultural preferences. An irregular upgrade to a generic wargame at any professional military education institution can accomplish the following with relatively low cost in time and resources:
First, it expands the conceptual framework for how to deter adversary gray zone coercion and facilitate multi-domain operations by partnering with indigenous resistance forces.
Third, it encourages students to appreciate the long lead-times associated with human-centric preparatory activities for successful irregular warfare outcomes, in contrast to “cold start” attempts like the failed initial training and equipping of Syrian rebels against the Islamic State.
Further developing wargaming and its use in professional military education to better account for irregular warfare is a cost-effective way to upgrade the software — the mindsets and cultural preferences — that will allow the United States to thwart adversaries from pursuing indirect approaches that offset America’s conventional advantages. Affording students the opportunity to conduct low-risk experimentation with irregular warfare concepts in the classroom before being asked to formally plan or implement them is worth the time and effort to develop cognitive overmatch against our adversaries.
Views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Army War College, U.S. Army Special Operations Command, the Department of the Army, the Defense Department, or the U.S. government.
Lt. Col. Steve Ferenzi is a U.S. Army Strategist with recent service in the U.S. Army Special Operations Command G-5. He contributed to the development of the Irregular Warfare Annex to the 2018 National Defense Strategy and holds a Master of International Affairs degree from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
Col. Christopher Hickey is a U.S. Army Strategist serving as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Professor of Military Studies Chair at the U.S. Army War College.
Col. Christopher Hossfeld is a career U.S. Army infantry officer serving as faculty in the Department of Military Strategy, Planning, and Operations at the U.S. Army War College and has helped lead the implementation of wargaming in its course content.
Editor’s note: This is an Op-Ed and as such, the opinions expressed are those of the author. If you would like to respond, or have an editorial of your own you would like to submit, please contact Military Times senior managing editor Howard Altman, haltman@militarytimes.com.
militarytimes.com · by Steve Ferenzi, Christopher J. Hickey, and Christopher Hossfeld · July 29, 2021
6. What Are The Best Ways To Shield Taiwan From A Hungry China?
Or as the SECDEF says, integrated deterrence. We need to get used to this concept and flesh it out as I think this is now the focus of DOD.
Excerpts:
Basically, the three experts agreed that Taiwan needed to beef up its own defense. They agreed that the United States had to exercise caution in how it shaped its deterrence so as not to back China into a corner, leading it to the conclusion it has to act or fail. And they agreed that Taiwan is, ultimately, more important to deterring China than is the US.
“Taiwan needs to establish what sometimes is called an effective ‘porcupine defense,’ a defense that will allow it to defend against an adversary force until support from others would be available,” Frank Kramer, former assistant defense secretary for international security affairs and now an Atlantic Council expert, said in a briefing on how to secure the Taiwan Strait. “Taiwan actually needs to do better than it has done historically; it is improving recently.”
A porcupine defense would allow Taiwan to resist Chinese military coercion with a mix of stockpiled supplies, resilient facilities, sea mines and reliable, shorter-range weapons for a prolonged period without requiring US intervention.
In terms of the proportion of GDP spent on defense, in terms of the professionalization of its reserve forces and in terms of the weapons Taipei bought, “I think it is fair to say that Taiwan is nowhere near to where it needs to be,” said Michael Mazarr, a former National War College, professor and special assistant to the JCS chair now at the RAND Corporation.
Key to bolstering Taiwan’s defenses is securing critical infrastructure such as fuel, water and energy from cyber attacks and other supply chain interference, Kramer said. And that goes for both Taiwan and the United States, he made clear, since Taiwan must hold until US and allied forces can come to its aid in the event of a serious attempt by China to take the island.
Of course, all this is part of deterrence — discouraging China from invading in the first place.
What Are The Best Ways To Shield Taiwan From A Hungry China? - Breaking Defense
The trick will be to avoid "a situation in which China believes that it has no alternative but to act," says RAND's Michael Mazzar.
USS Benfold transits Taiwan Strait on July 28 2021
WASHINGTON: Should America bang out a treaty clearly and unequivocally committing it to the defense of Taiwan? Will Japan, Australia and other allies come to America’s aid should China invade Taiwan? Should the US provide money to help Taiwan buy weapons that the island currently buys from US firms? What is a “porcupine defense,” anyway, and is it the right approach for Taiwan?
Those were among the top issues hammered out Wednesday by a former special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and professor at the National War College, a former top international security official at the Pentagon and an Asia expert at the American Enterprise Institute.
Basically, the three experts agreed that Taiwan needed to beef up its own defense. They agreed that the United States had to exercise caution in how it shaped its deterrence so as not to back China into a corner, leading it to the conclusion it has to act or fail. And they agreed that Taiwan is, ultimately, more important to deterring China than is the US.
“Taiwan needs to establish what sometimes is called an effective ‘porcupine defense,’ a defense that will allow it to defend against an adversary force until support from others would be available,” Frank Kramer, former assistant defense secretary for international security affairs and now an Atlantic Council expert, said in a briefing on how to secure the Taiwan Strait. “Taiwan actually needs to do better than it has done historically; it is improving recently.”
A porcupine defense would allow Taiwan to resist Chinese military coercion with a mix of stockpiled supplies, resilient facilities, sea mines and reliable, shorter-range weapons for a prolonged period without requiring US intervention.
In terms of the proportion of GDP spent on defense, in terms of the professionalization of its reserve forces and in terms of the weapons Taipei bought, “I think it is fair to say that Taiwan is nowhere near to where it needs to be,” said Michael Mazarr, a former National War College, professor and special assistant to the JCS chair now at the RAND Corporation.
Key to bolstering Taiwan’s defenses is securing critical infrastructure such as fuel, water and energy from cyber attacks and other supply chain interference, Kramer said. And that goes for both Taiwan and the United States, he made clear, since Taiwan must hold until US and allied forces can come to its aid in the event of a serious attempt by China to take the island.
Of course, all this is part of deterrence — discouraging China from invading in the first place.
“In the context of Taiwan key critical enhancements to deterrence will also include military, diplomatic, economic, and digital actions,” Mazarr argued. “The key variable in governing deterrence outcomes is aggressor motivation: how motivated is the aggressor; how urgently do they feel like they have to take action?” The single biggest cause of a failure in deterrence is “when a potential aggressor sees an urgent need to act.” That often happens, he said, when the aggressor perceives that it must act or face effective defeat.
The trick will be, the RAND expert said, to avoid “a situation in which China believes that it has no alternative but to act because when it reaches that moment, in my view, it becomes essentially undetectable, no matter how many military systems we bought in the meantime.”
And that calculus grows more complex because of China’s actions, he said. “China has already begun a process of coercion, and as that continues, the next actions they take may not — and I think likely would not — be an all outright invasion of Taiwan. It might include anything from a blockade to increased cyber harassment, to seizure of the islands in between China and Taiwan.
“They could take some of those actions and kind of flip the deterrence script by taking a partial action and then attempting to deter us from responding or escalating.”
Updating Security Assistance
To increase Taiwan’s chances of creating an effective enough porcupine defense, Michael Mazza, an Asia expert at the American Enterprise Institute, believes the US should consider changing the conditions on the American arms Taiwan buys.
“We think it’s time to rethink the Pentagon security assistance program for Taiwan. Right now, Taiwan pays for every defense article the United States transfers to it. But going forward, we should consider whether we can use the prospect of military aid as a means to encourage Taiwan to invest more in its own defense, in particular in certain capabilities where they may be under invested,” Mazza said. For example, the US could pledge that, if Taiwan were to expand its munition stockpile by some set percentage, then the US would provide more aid.
In the meantime, “China is seeking to undermine faith in Taiwan’s democratic institutions virtually every day. Taiwan is a main target of hostile PRC cyber operations,” Mazza noted. “Taiwan faces daily military intimidation. The United States can and should do more to help Taiwan resist this type of coercion, and deter China from continuing to use these tools so aggressively.”
To help counter those gray zone attacks, the US, its NATO allies, Japan, Australia and other countries must embrace Taiwan’s status as a vibrant and high-tech democracy. Mazarr said, and “increase economic, cultural, political and other kinds of ties.”
The one area where there was significant disagreement among the experts was whether Taiwan’s status as a democracy should obligate the United States to commit to defend the island state.
Kramer’s position was that democracy makes Taiwan worth defending , but was cautious about the level of outright commitment America should make: “We always have to take into account the degree of harm that might be caused by adhering to the principle without evaluating context. But I do think that it’s important, and I think it’s important to discuss with the American people. whether or not supporting democracy in this instance is something the American people want to do.”
Mazarr tried to refute Kramer’s argument. “I also disagree that ‘democracy’ is something that we should be prepared to use military forces to intervene and promote, or fight wars and defend. I think it is a very important value for the United States, and there are a lot of means we can use to promote it,” he said. “I particularly believe that worldwide democracy is not an interlinked sort of organism; that its failure in one place will cause failures in other others.”
7. FDD | U.S. Leads International Efforts to Attribute China’s Microsoft Hack
Excerpt:
U.S. allies have joined the White House in attributing previous international cyberattacks, but this has always occurred on an ad hoc basis. In its statement attributing the Microsoft hack to Beijing, the White House noted that China’s malicious cyber activity “is bringing [countries around the world] together.” The United States must seize this moment of international cooperation to develop intelligence sharing processes and attribution standards with its allies. In so doing, Washington can streamline the investigation process to ensure a more rapid response to future attacks and swifter punishment for violators of international cyber norms.
FDD | U.S. Leads International Efforts to Attribute China’s Microsoft Hack
fdd.org · by Dr. Georgianna Shea CCTI and TCIL Chief Technologist · July 29, 2021
In an unprecedented show of international coordination, the United States, European Union, and NATO last week attributed the recent hack of Microsoft’s Exchange Server and other “malicious cyber activity” to the People’s Republic of China and its Ministry of State Security (MSS). As attribution is a prerequisite for punishing those responsible, this collective action is a leap forward in establishing international norms and standards in cyberspace.
The White House explained that in the Microsoft breach, MSS-affiliated hackers compromised tens of thousands of networks around the world. The European Union noted that the operation was particularly “irresponsible and harmful” because numerous other hackers have continued to exploit the vulnerability first used by Chinese operatives, causing “significant economic loss.” Meanwhile, in its first-ever condemnation of Chinese cyber operations, NATO stated that this kind of malicious cyber activity “undermine[s] security, confidence and stability in cyberspace.”
These statements by the United States and its allies come months after private cybersecurity and technology firms first pointed fingers at the Chinese government. This delay stems partly from the different ways that the U.S. government and private industry attribute cyberattacks. The U.S. government relies on the intelligence community for attribution based on a combination of signals and human intelligence along with assessments of the tradecraft, infrastructure, and malware the hackers employed.
The private sector, on the other hand, generally makes attributions based on forensic analysis of the malware and the network infrastructure the attackers used. This process is vulnerable to false-flag operations. For example, there is nothing stopping an Iranian hacker from leasing space in China and launching attacks on the United States using known Chinese malware and emulating Chinese tradecraft. If the adversary is sophisticated enough to hack into U.S. systems, it may also be sophisticated enough to conceal the source of the attack. While the U.S. intelligence community can also be fooled, its reliance on a broader array of sources makes it less susceptible to surface-level deception.
Private security firms help limit the impact of breaches by quickly providing information that network defenders can use to detect intrusions. The attribution provided by private industry is useful for understanding cybersecurity trends and similar patterns of activity. Only U.S. and allied attribution, however, will lead to punitive actions to hold malicious actors accountable. In this case, Washington and its allies have yet to announce collective steps to punish China, although the Department of Justice announced separate criminal charges against other MSS-affiliated hackers for stealing “information that was of significant economic benefit to China’s companies and commercial sectors.”
U.S. allies have joined the White House in attributing previous international cyberattacks, but this has always occurred on an ad hoc basis. In its statement attributing the Microsoft hack to Beijing, the White House noted that China’s malicious cyber activity “is bringing [countries around the world] together.” The United States must seize this moment of international cooperation to develop intelligence sharing processes and attribution standards with its allies. In so doing, Washington can streamline the investigation process to ensure a more rapid response to future attacks and swifter punishment for violators of international cyber norms.
Dr. Georgianna Shea is the chief technologist of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where she also contributes to FDD’s China Program. For more analysis from Georgianna, CCTI, and the China Program, please subscribe HERE. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD and @FDD_CCTI. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Dr. Georgianna Shea CCTI and TCIL Chief Technologist · July 29, 2021
8. Austin on a strategic mission in SE Asia
Excerpts:
On Tuesday, Austin met Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong as well as Defence Minister Dr Ng Eng Hen, with both sides reaffirming their commitment to deepening defense cooperation, including in the realm of counter-terrorism, artificial intelligence, and cyber-security.
...
Austin’s visit was part of a broader effort to de-escalate trade-related tensions, gently push for democratic reforms, as well as explore avenues to expand maritime security cooperation with Hanoi, if not big-ticket arms sales.
Arguably, the Philippines was the critical part of his regional tour. Earlier this week, the US Defense Secretary made it clear that he considers the Philippines, a treaty ally, as “a very important country to us and we treasure that relationship, their partnership.”
Historically robust security cooperation, however, has been undermined by the Beijing-leaning Filipino president, who until Friday had failed to fully restore the VFA.
Austin on a strategic mission in SE Asia
US defense chief emphasizes competition not conflict with China in a whistle-stop tour through Singapore, Vietnam and the Philippines
“Wheels down in the Philippines,” tweeted US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin shortly after arriving in Manila, the last leg of his much-anticipated trip across Southeast Asia.
During his visit, the Pentagon chief hoped to “discuss avenues to further strengthen” defense cooperation with the Philippines, as the two allies mark the 70th Anniversary of the Philippine-US Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT).
As the first cabinet-level US official to visit the region under the Biden administration, Austin was extended full courtesy and the red-carpet treatment, including meetings with heads of government across the region.
Even Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, notorious for his foul-mouthed anti-Western pronouncements, held cordial conversations with Austin, who hailed their “productive meeting” and shared commitment to “strong ties between our people.”
At the heart of their discussions was a proposed addendum to the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), a crucial defense pact that Duterte had earlier abrogated over US criticism of his government’s human rights record.
On Friday, Philippine Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said Duterte had recalled the VFA’s abrogation after his meeting with Austin. “Last night, after the meeting between Secretary Austin and the President in Malacanang, the president decided to recall or retract the termination of the VFA,” Lorenzana said in a joint press briefing with Austin.
The two allies are currently in the midst of negotiating a multi-billion-dollar defense deal, which includes a squadron of prized F-16 Falcon multi-role fighter jets. The visit to Manila capped the first major attempt by the Biden administration to both reset and revitalize strategic ties with key regional allies and partners.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte (R) holding talks with US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin (L) during a courtesy call at Malacanang Palace in Manila, July 29, 2021. Photo: AFP via Philippines’ Presidential Photographers Division
Austin also provided an overview of the Biden administration’s regional policy, especially vis-à-vis a resurgent China, which has rapidly expanded its naval footprint and economic influence across Southeast Asia in recent years.
The US defense chief’s maiden visit to Southeast Asia began in Singapore, where he was earlier scheduled to present the keynote speech for the annual Shangri-La Dialogue, which was canceled due to an upsurge of Covid-19 cases in the Southeast Asian city-state.
On Tuesday, Austin met Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong as well as Defence Minister Dr Ng Eng Hen, with both sides reaffirming their commitment to deepening defense cooperation, including in the realm of counter-terrorism, artificial intelligence, and cyber-security.
Concomitantly, the Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Gilday was also in Singapore for introductory meetings and the International Maritime Security Conference with naval officials and maritime experts in the city-state.
The same day saw the United Kingdom’s Carrier Strike Group conducting large-scale naval drills with their Singaporean counterparts, underscoring the steady convergence in strategic outlook between the Southeast Asian city-state and Western powers.
Later that day, Austin presented the keynote speech at the 40th International Institute for Strategic Studies Fullerton Lecture, where he laid out the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy.
In a major departure from the former Trump administration’s unilateralist rhetoric and ostensibly anti-China posturing, the Pentagon’s first-ever African-American chief struck a more humble and self-critical note.
Austin criticized the upsurge in racism, especially against Asian-Americans, as “un-American” and “unacceptable.” “I believe that we’re better than that. Far better than that,” said the US defense secretary, before a largely Asian audience of defense experts and pundits.
Nevertheless, he defended the virtues of democracy, since where flaws are not hidden and censored but instead “broadcast[ed] in loud and living color”, thus providing democracies such as America “the built-in ability to self-correct, and to strive towards a more perfect union.”
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin speaks (L) speaks with Singapore’s Minister of Defence Ng Eng Heng during the 40th International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) Fullerton lecture in Singapore on July 27, 2021. Photo: AFP / Roslan Rahman
Austin also made it clear that the Biden administration is intent on competing with rather than recklessly confronting China.
“We compete necessarily because we are two great economic powers [and] we both have impressive military might, but we don‘t seek a conflict with China,” he said, while emphasizing America’s resolve to “deter conflict in every case and every opportunity.”
“I am committed to pursuing a constructive, stable relationship with China, including stronger crisis communications with the People’s Liberation Army,” Austin said during his keynote address, which was titled “The Imperative of Partnership.”
The Pentagon chief, however, was also quick to criticize China’s expansive maritime claims and growing naval assertiveness in the South China Sea as “unhelpful and unfounded.”
He also criticized China’s “aggression” against India amid the recent uptick in border disputes in the Himalayas as well as “destabilizing military activity and other forms of coercion against the people of Taiwan” and “genocide and crimes against humanity against Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang.”
At the heart of Austin’s lecture was the Biden administration’s commitment to an alliance-based approach to regional challenges based on the concept of “integrated deterrence”, whereby multiple allies contribute to joint initiatives against specific traditional and non-traditional security challenges.
The Pentagon has described, “Integrated deterrence [as] a mixture of capabilities alongside allies, partners or other organizations in a variety of domains to deter adversary actions. It can also include whole of government responses.”
Recognizing the need for a holistic engagement with Southeast Asia, Austin also reiterated Washington’s commitment to provide up to 500 million Covid-19 vaccines across the Indo-Pacific, with 40 million of them already delivered in the past two months.
“We don’t believe that any one country should be able to dictate the rules or worse yet, throw them over the transom, and in this regard, I’ll emphasize our commitment to freedom of the seas,” said Austin in an interview before his departure to Vietnam, another major strategic partner in Southeast Asia.
This US Navy photo shows the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan, the amphibious assault ship USS Boxer, and ships from the Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group and the Boxer Amphibious Ready Group under way in formation while conducting security and stability operations in the US 7th Fleet area of operations on October 6, 2019, in the South China Sea. Photo: AFP / Erwin Jacob V Miciano / Navy Office of Information
In Hanoi, Austin met Vietnamese Defense Minister Phan Van Giang to discuss the legacy of the Vietnam War, efforts to remove landmines and toxic materials left by the conflict, and explore new avenues of defense cooperation.
Thanks to shared concerns over China, the two former enemies have rapidly improved strategic ties in the past decade. In 2016, Washington relaxed restrictions on exports of lethal weapons to Vietnam, which has historically relied on Russia for its major defense acquisitions.
Over the succeeding years, the two sides also stepped up their maritime security cooperation, including regularized goodwill visit by US warships to Cam Ranh Bay, famously the site of a former Soviet naval base.
Former US president Donald Trump raised the prospect of advanced US military exports, including missile defense systems, to Vietnam. But the much-anticipated boon in defense cooperation was hampered by US Congress’ concerns over human rights issues as well as accusations of currency manipulation against Hanoi, which enjoys a significant trade surplus with the US.
Austin’s visit was part of a broader effort to de-escalate trade-related tensions, gently push for democratic reforms, as well as explore avenues to expand maritime security cooperation with Hanoi, if not big-ticket arms sales.
Arguably, the Philippines was the critical part of his regional tour. Earlier this week, the US Defense Secretary made it clear that he considers the Philippines, a treaty ally, as “a very important country to us and we treasure that relationship, their partnership.”
Historically robust security cooperation, however, has been undermined by the Beijing-leaning Filipino president, who until Friday had failed to fully restore the VFA.
The VFA, which governs the large-scale entry of US troops to the Philippines, is crucial to the Pentagon’s concept of “integrated deterrence.” For decades, Philippine bases have served as de facto forward deployment platforms against external threats, from the Soviet Union in the past to China in more recent decades.
A US Navy member (left) gives instructions to his Philippine counterpart during drills at a naval base in Sangley Point, Cavite City, west of Manila. Photo: AFP / Ted Aljibe
With Duterte entering his final months in office, he has signaled his willingness to repair frayed ties in exchange for unspecified concessions. In November, the Filipino president is expected to meet Biden on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit, as the two allies seek to navigate short-term tensions in favor of long-term cooperation.
Both sides are exploring a potential addendum to the VFA, which may include expanded US assistance and unspecified concessions, in order to expedite its full restoration in the coming months or, alternatively, under Duterte’s successor next year.
“The VFA will not be changed. There will be just… a side agreement to implement the provisions of the VFA. And once it is signed by the President, then that will be [an] official document that is attached to the VFA,” Lorenzana said ahead of Austin’s visit, underscoring joint efforts to repair and upgrade a century-old alliance.
9. Charges preferred against seaman apprentice accused of starting USS Bonhomme Richard fire
What was the motive of this sailor?
Charges preferred against seaman apprentice accused of starting USS Bonhomme Richard fire
Charges have been preferred against a junior sailor suspected of starting a multi-day fire that destroyed the amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard last summer in San Diego, the Navy announced Thursday.
The sailor is a seaman apprentice and was a crew member on the ship, according to U.S. 3rd Fleet spokesman Cmdr. Sean Robertson. It caught fire on July 12, 2020, and burned for four days before being sent to the scrapheap earlier this year.
The sailor has been charged with aggravated arson and hazarding of a vessel or aircraft under Articles 126 and 110, respectively, of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, according to Robertson.
The date for an Article 32 preliminary hearing has not been set, Robertson said.
Similar to a grand jury proceeding, an Article 32 will involve an officer reviewing all the evidence and then making a recommendation to the convening authority about whether charges should be referred against the accused.
“An impartial officer will make determinations and recommendations by the (Uniform Code of Military Justice) prior to any further trial proceedings — including whether or not there is probably cause to believe an offense has been committed and to offer a recommendation as to the disposition of the case,” Robertson said in an email Thursday.
While no one has been charged in connection with the Bonhomme Richard fire, emails indicate a Navy prosecutor's involvement.
Geoff Ziezulewicz
July 9
Citing Navy legal regulations, Robertson declined to identify the sailor, a standard practice for the service when charges have not yet been referred.
“Evidence collected during the investigation is sufficient to direct a preliminary hearing in accordance with due process under the military justice system,” Robertson said.
He did not immediately clarify whether the accused sailor is being held in confinement.
Robertson also declined to say whether this was the same sailor who the Associated Press reported was being questioned by authorities on suspicion of arson last August.
Recently released emails from the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department, which assisted Navy firefighters in battling the Bonhomme Richard blaze, show that an official from a San Diego-based Navy legal office was involved in discussions of evidence preservation aboard the ship last November.
Go inside charred interior of Navy ship that burned for four days
Images of the badly scorched interior of the U.S. amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard, which burned for four days at a San Diego pier recently, have emerged online. Photos that first surfaced on Twitter show the extent of the damage to the ship. They have since been verified by the Navy.
Mention of a “trial counsel,” or prosecutor, in one email raises questions about whether the sea service was at some point planning to, or actually did, charge someone in connection to the fire, before backing off for reasons that have not been made public.
On Nov. 25, an email from a Navy official who signed the message “XO,” short for executive officer — a unit’s second-in-command — noted that “trial counsel had requested to “preserve some evidence in the Lower V,” a reference to the ship’s aft section.
The Navy has yet to release the findings of several investigations into the inferno, but Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday pledged last summer that those probes will be made public.
Officials told Navy Times this month that they expect the primary command investigation to be completed this summer.
10. Biden prepares the ground for Quad-3
Interesting speculation here. I had not heard anything about this but it is out of my areas of focus.
Excerpt:
The bottom line is, Biden is once again making sure that the great game the Pentagon and the CIA have been working on will continue: Keep Iran, China and Russia at bay in Iraq. It is only a matter of time before Biden announces yet another Quad comprising the US, Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
On July 20, just before hosting Kadhimi, Biden welcomed King Abdullah II of Jordan to the White House, someone with whom he has been “hanging out together for a long time.”
Biden prepares the ground for Quad-3
It is only a matter of time before Biden announces yet another Quad comprising the US, Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia
US President Joe Biden’s foreign policy team seem increasingly unsure of the ground beneath their feet. They can see that the edifice that their 78-year-old chief is erecting stands on shaky ground. But they lack the presence of mind to object.
Biden has the supreme advantage that even if one were to add up the entire experience of his top officials in international diplomacy, he still towers over them. And that includes even veteran diplomat William Burns, whom Biden plucked from retired life to head the Central Intelligence Agency, an organization that even illustrious presidents such as Dwight D Eisenhower and John F Kennedy could not control.
Burns admitted tactfully to National Public Radio (NPR) in his first interview as the CIA boss last week that his priority task will be to rein in the agency: “I hope very much that I’ll be a better director of CIA because my experience as a policymaker, as a diplomat, should help me better connect intelligence work to what matters most to policymakers. At least that’s what I’ll try very hard to do …
“As a diplomat over those three and a half decades, I helped shape policy. And my job, our job, at CIA is to support and inform policymakers so they make the best possible choices; it’s not to become policymakers.
“And so what that means, I think, is that our obligation is to deliver, in an unvarnished way without any political or policy agenda, the best and most well-grounded intelligence that we can collect to help the president and all of my colleagues in this government make smart choices.
“I’ve known and worked with and admired the president for a quarter-century, and he made very clear to me when he asked me to take on this job that that’s what he expects, even when the intelligence we provide is not convenient; and I know that feeling, as a policymaker before …”
Burns accounts for not less than 90% of the entire Biden team’s experience in the diplomatic arena – which includes Antony Blinken, secretary of state, Lloyd Austin III, defense secretary, Jake Sullivan, national security adviser, and Avril Haines, director of national intelligence.
CIA Director William Burns is expected to play a key role in Joe Biden’s foreign policy. Photo: AFP / Saul Loeb
Foreign policy failures
Unsurprisingly, Burns’ remarks are confusing. To comprehend their hopelessness, read that fine book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner, who wrote on American intelligence for The New York Times for two decades and was a Pulitzer Prize winner.
Weiner uncovered why nearly every CIA director left the agency in worse shape than when he found it, and why its covert actions led to profound failures in the United States’ foreign policies.
Biden is indeed a very experienced leader who spent more than 36 years in the dog-eat-dog racetracks of American politics – the Senate. Thereafter, for the next eight years, he served as Barack Obama’s indispensable vice president, where he played the improbable role of consensus-maker on the Hill and sorting out the United States’ recalcitrant allies and partners abroad, including Turkey and Russia.
Biden handled turfs where Obama temperamentally lacked the skill to operate or a sense of engrossment – such as Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. If Obama was completely at ease with Angela Merkel, Biden delighted in pow-vowing with Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan or Iraq’s Nouri al-Maliki or Saudi Arabia’s Prince Mohammed bin Nayef.
By the way, Biden has his own game plan on Saudi Arabia, which he once called a “pariah state.” Madawi al-Rasheed, visiting professor at the Middle East Institute of the London School of Economics, wrote recently: “So far, Biden has a better record on pushing the [present] crown prince to temper his adventurist foreign policies. It is easier for Biden to force him to seek reconciliation with Qatar, offer a peace treaty to Yemen’s Houthis, flirt with Iran via Iraq, and endear himself to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“But when it comes to political reforms, a muted US is neither willing nor able to see the merits of promoting a process that will eventually lead the kingdom on a path to democracy. At the moment, US national interests are allied with those of an authoritarian crown prince, so why rock the boat.”
That’s Biden for you: His foreign policy team is like babes in the woods.
Blinken couldn’t have anticipated that his boss would call Russian President Vladimir Putin a “killer” and then in just three weeks veer around to propose a meeting. Blinken therefore increasingly sticks to safe ground – occasionally badmouth China, or, when there’s nothing else to do, reaffirm America’s trans-Atlantic nuptial vows.
He prefers to handle India and Kuwait, which don’t terribly interest Biden.
Antony Blinken appears to have been left out of the loop on Afghanistan. Photo: AFP / Alex Edelman
Plan B for Afghanistan
Take Afghanistan. Blinken thought that the Doha process was the real thing. But in reality, that wasn’t Biden’s track. Only Austin and Burns knew. Actually, Biden even had a Plan B in reserve, which is unfolding now, aimed at transforming that hybrid war into an algorithm war.
It necessitates recasting the Taliban in the mold of the “enemy,” and thereafter from the safety of the skies rain missiles on them, testing new weapons systems, frustrating China’s Belt and Road, keep Russia on tenterhooks and Iran in a high state of alert.
Of course, Biden first made sure that no body bags would return home to embarrass him. His Plan B was drawn up by the so-called “Deep State” and it takes care of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s exit, which is always a possibility.
Therefore, a Quadrilateral Diplomatic Platform (Quad-2) has been put in place. But Biden is yet to have a word with Pakistani leader Imran Khan, America’s newest Quad partner on the horizon.
The Afghan pantomime is now repeating in Iraq, Biden’s old haunt. On Monday, Biden announced that the US combat mission in Iraq would end by December 31. Biden is ending another “forever war.”
The announcement followed a White House meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi. For the benefit of the uninitiated, Kadhami’s real mission, when the US manipulated his ascendance in Baghdad, was that he’d push back Iran’s shadows and retrieve Iraq from the Tehran-led “Shia Crescent” – to borrow an explosive expression credited to the late Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.
To be sure, the termination of Iraq’s “forever war” is a mere illusion. Biden added the caveat that US cooperation with the Iraqi government against “terrorism” would continue in a new stage that is now being discussed.
US President Joe Biden meets with Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi (L) in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, July 26, 2021. Photo: AFP / Saul Loeb
Desperate for US help
Kadhimi is in exactly the same predicament as Afghanistan’s Ghani – he too is America’s creation; lacks a political base; is under pressure to announce a firm schedule for transition in Baghdad; and is under pressure from Shiite militias and Tehran. Kadhimi, like Ghani, is also desperate for US help.
Biden is repeating his black magic. His predecessor Donald Trump’s impetuous decision to murder Iranian General Qasem Soleimani haunts the Pentagon and CIA. Biden hopes to exorcise Soleimani’s ghost with his Iraq troop withdrawal decision, whose optics will also reboot his sagging political ratings at home.
The bottom line is, Biden is once again making sure that the great game the Pentagon and the CIA have been working on will continue: Keep Iran, China and Russia at bay in Iraq. It is only a matter of time before Biden announces yet another Quad comprising the US, Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
M K Bhadrakumar is a former Indian diplomat.
11. Duterte restores Philippines as ‘sick man of Asia’
It amazes me how popular he has remained.
For all the chaos since 2016, Duterte remains extremely popular – as high as 90% in certain polls. It’s grand, then, that Duterte claims he has ample time left in his term to loosen restrictions on foreign companies and investment, push ahead with tax reforms and complete big infrastructure projects.
“This is by no means my swan song,” he said Monday. “I shall never cease to implore Congress to pass vital and critical legislation as well as to push the entire government to ensure nothing less than the full recovery and revitalization of our country.”
Yet just as real estate is all about location, location, location, bursts of reformist energy tend to be about timing, timing, timing. It sure would’ve been nice to hear these words from Duterte, say, five years ago. Coming now, it smacks of hollow electioneering.
Duterte restores Philippines as ‘sick man of Asia’
Filipino leader's appeal to foreign investors comes five years too late with no end in sight to nation's corruption and pandemic woes
Five years into his chaotic tenure, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is suddenly remembering why he was elected back in 2016.
On Monday, his sixth and final State of the Nation Address channeled his predecessor Benigno Aquino’s reformist energy more than Duterte’s spin doctors would admit. His full-throated appeal to foreign investors to give the Philippine economy a look was ripped right from the “we’re-open-for-business” Aquino era.
Aquino, who died in June at 61, won the presidency in 2010 on pledges to restore trust in government and repair a long-neglected economy.
He hit the ground running, strengthening the national balance sheet, curbing graft, increasing accountability and transparency, going after tax cheats and taking on the Catholic Church’s meddling in politics to tame overpopulation.
In just six years, Aquino transformed the “sick man of Asia” into an investment-grade growth star. Sure, Aquino left much undone. He didn’t create enough good-paying jobs. But then, reversing decades of neglect dating back to the days of dictator Ferdinand Marcos isn’t a six-year job.
Enter Duterte, who was elected to turbocharge Aquino’s Big Bang reforms. Duterte rose to national folk hero status after two decades of running the southern city of Davao.
On his watch, the city developed a reputation for efficient governance with faster growth rates and better infrastructure than the national average. The hope was that Duterte would do the same nationally, taking Aquino’s inherited economy to new heights.
Yet Duterte largely rested on Aquino’s economic laurels. When Duterte arrived in the presidential palace on June 30, 2016, the Philippines was already enjoying its fastest growth since the 1970s. It helped that the global economy was enjoying a rare, synchronized growth spurt, one that even saw Japan eking out moderate growth.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte speaks during the annual state of the nation address at the House of Representatives in Manila on July 26, 2021. Photo: AFP / Pool / Lisa Marie David
Duterte, to borrow a baseball metaphor, started his presidency on third base – but thought he’d hit a triple. Rather than bring the Philippine economy home, so to speak, he benched Manila’s reform program and pivoted to a war of choice against the drug trade.
When he should have dispatched economic technocrats to curb graft, reduce bureaucracy and ensure infrastructure projects are being done sustainably, Duterte instead deployed legions of trigger-happy gunmen, landing Manila in the global headlines for all the wrong reasons.
Just last month, a prosecutor at the International Criminal Court urged the Hague tribunal to investigate Duterte’s drug war for crimes against humanity. And yet, when Duterte made his plea to foreign investors on Monday, he couldn’t help but tout his drug war as a great success.
To be sure, Duterte played his greatest hits in his speech while addressing lawmakers. He touted this administration’s work to accelerate infrastructure projects. He argued that Covid-19 – “unforeseen events,” as he put it — got in the way of him being able to fulfill the “dreams and visions of a better life for all Filipinos.”
In many ways, though, the Covid-19 crisis exposed the numerous pre-existing economic conditions that Duterte failed to address in the first three-and-a-half years of his presidency.
Now, says World Bank economist Kevin Chua, “growth prospects are subject to significant downside risks. A resurgence of infection due to the entry of new virus variants is the most significant risk, which may yet overwhelm the healthcare system. Scaling up testing, tracing, isolation, and treatment measures, along with the rollout of the vaccination program are key to the public health response.”
Tight global production supply and vaccine nationalism risk delaying the arrival of vaccines. As such, Chua says, “failure to effectively contain the virus or implement the mass vaccination program may extend mobility restrictions, which could lead to further job and income losses, disrupt businesses, and delay economic recovery.”
“There are also external risks including the risk of a slower-than-expected global recovery, disruptions in international logistics and global value chains, and trade protectionism,” he says.
Even so, Duterte’s urging of lawmakers to ease restrictions on international retailers and professionals and to allow foreigners greater ownership in certain public utilities has a better-late-than-never feel. All things that might’ve been nice to hear five years ago. But the real problem, and one that Duterte glossed over in his two hours and 45-minute speech-a-thon is the backsliding that’s made the Philippines a less trusted investment destination.
Filipinos wait in line at a community pantry as they receive goods from a Catholic church in Antipolo City, Philippines on April 22, 2021. Photo: AFP via NirPhoto / Ryan Eduard Benaid
The problem can be summed up with one number: 115, which is Manila’s current corruption ranking on Transparency International’s league tables. This 20-point erosion from the end of the Aquino era puts the Philippines behind Mongolia and Panama. It also puts Manila 13 rungs behind Indonesia, 11 behind Thailand and Vietnam. Duterte’s economy now trails India by 29 rungs; China by 37.
All these nations are vying for, or working to retain, the same multinational companies the Philippines hopes might open factories within its borders. Duterte may have made it easier to do business in the Philippines, but by prioritizing speed over transparency – and basic checks and balances – his tenure has been great mostly for the rent-seeking class and less so for foreign investors.
The “build, build, build” program, a Dutertenomics centerpiece, is a case in point. A common Aquino era gripe was that his focus on open bidding, checks and balances on construction companies and environmental studies slowed projects to a crawl. The same with Aquino’s emphasis on public-private partnerships to finance projects.
Duterte replaced these initiatives with an old-school emphasis on publicly financed projects completed quickly for maximum economic impact. What the Philippines is getting is a short-term sugar high and longer-term headaches like rising graft and public debt.
Yet missing from Duterte’s comments this week was a plan to contain the pandemic. Or to address the fallout from Duterte’s decision to prioritize China’s Sinovac vaccine, which is proving less effective than most others.
Earlier this month, Fitch Ratings fired a shot across Manila’s bow, hinting at a downgrade if the nation doesn’t get serious about the pandemic and the government’s debt to gross domestic product ratios.
“There are downside risks to medium-term growth prospects as a result of potential scarring effects, and possible challenges associated with unwinding the exceptional policy response to the health crisis and restoring sound public finances as the pandemic recedes,” says Fitch analyst Sagarika Chandra.
Economist Nicholas Mapa at ING Research adds that “with businesses concerned about a potential return to stringent lockdowns,” the “ongoing pickup in the Delta variant” is the last thing Duterte’s government needs.
A man wears a face mask as a preventive measure against the spread of the coronavirius in Manila, March 2020. Photo: AFP/Maria Tan
Mixed messaging from the Duterte administration on pandemic mitigation measures and misinformation on social media has allowed anti-vaccination propaganda to run wild. “It’s a polluted media landscape,” says Melissa Fleming, the United Nations’ under-secretary-general for global communications. “This infodemic has shifted now, and the focus is misinformation on vaccines. It’s about instilling fear in people.”
And that, in turn, could instill additional fear among the foreign investors Duterte has finally gotten around to courting. So might the growing odds Duterte will try to extend his tenure beyond the six-year limit in mid-2022. Speculation is rife that his daughter, Sara Duterte, might run for president next year and that dad might angle for the vice presidency.
“They keep on threatening me with lawsuits and everything,” Duterte said on July 17, referring to his political enemies. “But the law says if you’re president, vice president, you have immunity. So I’ll just run as vice president.”
How foreign investors might respond to a Duterte-Duterte ticket is anyone’s guess. It’s hard to see how another family dynasty serves average Filipinos still suffering fallout from the Marcos, or multinational companies potentially eyeing the Philippines. Though Marcos was ousted by a people-power revolt in 1986, the kleptocratic system he created has proven hard do dismantle.
Amid the political jockeying, it’s hard to see Duterte multitasking sufficiently to regain reformist momentum. More likely, it will be more about short-term tinkering to keep growth in the 5.1% range that economist Emilio Neri at Bank of the Philippine Islands expects this year, down from his earlier 6.3% forecast.
Yet economist Ruben Carlo Asuncion at Union Bank of the Philippines speaks for many in expressing disappointment that Duterte’s team isn’t talking more about boosting GDP. At this point, he says, “next year’s budget is extremely important for further economic recovery.”
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and his daughter Sara Duterte may run on a family ticket at 2022 elections. Image: Twitter
For all the chaos since 2016, Duterte remains extremely popular – as high as 90% in certain polls. It’s grand, then, that Duterte claims he has ample time left in his term to loosen restrictions on foreign companies and investment, push ahead with tax reforms and complete big infrastructure projects.
“This is by no means my swan song,” he said Monday. “I shall never cease to implore Congress to pass vital and critical legislation as well as to push the entire government to ensure nothing less than the full recovery and revitalization of our country.”
Yet just as real estate is all about location, location, location, bursts of reformist energy tend to be about timing, timing, timing. It sure would’ve been nice to hear these words from Duterte, say, five years ago. Coming now, it smacks of hollow electioneering.
12. China Is Providing an Alternative Regional Framework for South Asia
We are developing quite the list of acronyms (SAARC and BIMSTEC).
Excerpts:
As the SAARC process is in limbo, India’s neighbors have become open to other avenues for regional interactions and cooperation. This has created a fertile ground for the seeds of Chinese collaboration and influence in the South Asian region.
Other than SAARC, the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) is another regional organization which since its inception in 1997 aspires to provide a platform for sectoral development cooperation for its member countries (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Thailand). Even though it was created as an “alternative” to the failing SAARC, BIMSTEC too has not made any significant mark in promoting regionalism in South Asia.
There is a probability that the China-led “minus-India” initiative would undermine the existing regional process in South Asia. At a time when the SAARC and BIMSTEC processes are suffering an uncertain future, these regional organizations might see China’s new platforms as direct competition to their regional integration agenda.
Such a scenario could intensify geopolitical and economic competition between India’s traditional power and China’s new, accelerating power in the region. Greater Sino-Pakistan interaction via regional cooperation would make it diplomatically challenging for India to maintain its influence in the region. It also could embolden Pakistan’s confidence and voice over regional economic and political issues, which could be a strategic blow to India’s effort to isolate Pakistan diplomatically.
The project also carries a symbolic meaning. It seems China wanted to kill two birds with a single stone. First, it is a message to India about its position against China’s membership to SAARC and also an exhibition of China’s power to form a parallel organization in India’s immediate neighborhood. Through this initiation, China successfully showcased that South Asia is no longer India’s sphere of influence.
Second, it is a demonstrative message from China to the Western powers that it still enjoys confidence from many South Asian countries and is capable of consolidating its position by creating new regional grouping with like-minded countries. The launch of this China-led initiative is an answer to the critics of its BRI project, illustrating that China still has an amiable allure when it comes to cooperation on economic development. Through this initiative, China is also looking to counter the West’s attempt to isolate it at the global level in post-pandemic times.
This changing geopolitical scenario should push India forward to revive the process under existing regional organizations likes SAARC and BIMSTEC to protect its interests and the overall prosperity of the region. Western powers, especially G-7 countries, should also expedite the mechanisms to provide economic assistance as declared at the recently concluded G-7 summit.
China Is Providing an Alternative Regional Framework for South Asia
China has set up its own alternative to SAARC and BIMSTEC – one that does not include India.
By Bipin Ghimire and Apoorva Pathak
July 30, 202
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China has managed to chaperone its South Asian neighbors by launching the China-South Asia Emergency Supplies Reserve and Poverty Alleviation and Cooperative Development Center, the results of a virtual meeting convened by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and attended by the foreign ministers of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka (excluding India, Bhutan, and the Maldives) on April 27. The assistant foreign minister of China and the ambassadors of the above-mentioned South Asian countries got together in Chengdu on July 9 to set up these platforms, which aim to work for COVID-19 vaccination and poverty alleviation in South Asian states.
The emergency reserve aims to devise a common strategy for combating the COVID-19 pandemic through vaccine development and distribution. It also aims to create an emergency reserve to combat contingencies caused by climate change. The Poverty Alleviation and Cooperative Development Center aims to pool strength and integrate resources to assist South Asian countries’ economic development, livelihood improvement, and poverty reduction. Such issues require long-term partnership, indicating that China intends to engage with South Asia for the long haul.
Even though strategically significant to South Asia, these initiatives went almost unnoticed by the mainstream media and think tanks of the region.
China’s Interest in South Asia
China’s interest in the South Asian region is not new. South Asia is of vital strategic importance for China for many reasons, especially in current times.
First, geographically, South Asia lies between East Asia and the oil-rich Middle East. Also, China’s trade and economy is dependent primarily on the Malacca Strait and sea lanes of communication passing through the Indian Ocean; ergo, China must increase its presence in the Indian Ocean region, which hitherto has been dominated by India.
Second, many South Asian countries (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka) have become party to China’s Belt and Road Initiatives (BRI) with an expectation that it would provide an impetus to their developing economic environments. China wants to continuously woo and engage with these countries to maintain its newly generated strategic space. This is even more pertinent as the BRI is under academic and media scrutiny in these countries. Thus, when India suspended its COVID-19 vaccine exports, including to its neighbors, citing its domestic needs, China used the opportunity to project itself as a benevolent neighbor and provided lifesaving vaccines to these countries. This bolstered a conducive regional environment for cooperation between South Asian countries and China. Strategically, this has enabled China to accelerate its soft power and political influence, projecting itself as a responsible great power and countering Indian’s political and economic preponderance in the region.
Third, since the violent border skirmish in the Galwan Valley and the diplomatic row over India’s targeting of Chinese business interests in India, China-India political relations have further degenerated in 2021. Realizing the urgency of the situation, India went ahead to form a stronger alliance with the U.S.-led Quad (Australia, India, Japan, and the U.S.), which C. Raja Mohan argues is important for India’s strategic autonomy. India’s support to the U.S.-led Indo-Pacific Strategy and its regular military exercise with the U.S. Navy indicates that India is tilting toward the United States, which it believes would help to check Chinese assertive military power.
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As India opts for external balancing and thus moves its attention away from its immediate neighborhood, China wants to seize this opportunity to strengthen its relations with South Asian countries and counter India’s dominant position in the region by creating an alternative regional bloc. The Observer Research Foundation, a prominent New Delhi-based think tank, even dubbed such increasing Chinese engagement as a sign of a “Quad with Chinese characteristics.”
Possible Implications of China-South Asia Ties
The new partnerships that have been formed between some South Asian countries and China could possibly compete with the already existing regional cooperation mechanisms in South Asia.
China became an observer state in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) in 2005, and since then, it has been pushing to be a full member of the regional organization. China has also contributed $300,000 to the SAARC Development Fund. However, India’s long and continuous objection to Chinese membership in the South Asian regional forum has prevented China from becoming a full member. While India is obstructing China’s membership in SAARC on the one hand, New Delhi itself is reluctant to lead the SAARC process forward on the other, resulting in SAARC falling victim to what Ernst Haas described as “turbulent non-growth.”
The SAARC summit, which was supposed to happen in every two years, has not been held since 2014, primarily because of India’s opposition to convening the summit in Pakistan. India has been accusing Pakistan of cross-border terrorism and spared no effort to diplomatically isolate the latter, accusing Islamabad of posing a serious obstacle to regional peace and stability. The SAARC process has been in a frozen state from continuous hindrances, mostly because of the antagonistic bilateral relations between India and Pakistan.
As the SAARC process is in limbo, India’s neighbors have become open to other avenues for regional interactions and cooperation. This has created a fertile ground for the seeds of Chinese collaboration and influence in the South Asian region.
Other than SAARC, the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) is another regional organization which since its inception in 1997 aspires to provide a platform for sectoral development cooperation for its member countries (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Thailand). Even though it was created as an “alternative” to the failing SAARC, BIMSTEC too has not made any significant mark in promoting regionalism in South Asia.
There is a probability that the China-led “minus-India” initiative would undermine the existing regional process in South Asia. At a time when the SAARC and BIMSTEC processes are suffering an uncertain future, these regional organizations might see China’s new platforms as direct competition to their regional integration agenda.
Such a scenario could intensify geopolitical and economic competition between India’s traditional power and China’s new, accelerating power in the region. Greater Sino-Pakistan interaction via regional cooperation would make it diplomatically challenging for India to maintain its influence in the region. It also could embolden Pakistan’s confidence and voice over regional economic and political issues, which could be a strategic blow to India’s effort to isolate Pakistan diplomatically.
The project also carries a symbolic meaning. It seems China wanted to kill two birds with a single stone. First, it is a message to India about its position against China’s membership to SAARC and also an exhibition of China’s power to form a parallel organization in India’s immediate neighborhood. Through this initiation, China successfully showcased that South Asia is no longer India’s sphere of influence.
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Second, it is a demonstrative message from China to the Western powers that it still enjoys confidence from many South Asian countries and is capable of consolidating its position by creating new regional grouping with like-minded countries. The launch of this China-led initiative is an answer to the critics of its BRI project, illustrating that China still has an amiable allure when it comes to cooperation on economic development. Through this initiative, China is also looking to counter the West’s attempt to isolate it at the global level in post-pandemic times.
This changing geopolitical scenario should push India forward to revive the process under existing regional organizations likes SAARC and BIMSTEC to protect its interests and the overall prosperity of the region. Western powers, especially G-7 countries, should also expedite the mechanisms to provide economic assistance as declared at the recently concluded G-7 summit.
13. The Forever Wars Aren’t Ending. They’re Just Being Rebranded.
Some may not be able to make it past the opening paragraph of this piece. "Long live US imperialism" (note my very sarcastic tongue in cheek attempt)
So here is the conclusion:
According to The Washington Post, President Biden is trying “to end the post-9/11 era.” From Afghanistan to Iraq to Guantánamo, where a prisoner was recently released after years of confinement and no criminal charges, Biden claims to be turning the page, reorienting toward security threats emanating from China and Russia.
This new eagerness to wave sabers in the general direction of Beijing would be concerning on its own. But it also highlights how ending America’s decades-long imperial drift will take far more than rearranging some military deployments. It will require a complete reimagining of how to engage with a world that has been cynically reduced to a global battlefield populated with endless threats. It requires admitting that we live in a country mostly safe from external enemies, with only a marginal risk of terrorism. For 20 years, our political and military leaders and foreign policy establishment have claimed otherwise. Judging by Biden’s latest decisions—as well as the hysterically overwrought reactions of old neocon hands like George W. Bush and Lindsey Graham, who would be content to occupy Afghanistan for another generation—our elites are still not ready to admit the obvious: We lost these wars, and the only way to expiate our failure is to go home.
The Forever Wars Aren’t Ending. They’re Just Being Rebranded.
The president is pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan. But many will be headed to other war zones where America’s military grinds on.
After 18 years of illegal warfare, corruption, and untold numbers of innocent people killed or made into refugees, the U.S. combat mission in Iraq will be declared finished—for the third time. Sort of. This week, President Joe Biden said that the United States is “not going to be, by the end of the year, in a combat mission” in Iraq. The 2,500 U.S. soldiers officially staged there—almost certainly an undercount, as military leaders tend to fudge deployment numbers and reorganize troops under intelligence authorities or noncombat roles so as to disguise the scale of our overseas footprint—will be moving on.
But they won’t necessarily be going home, or even leaving the region. The change in status, while pleasing to anti-war advocates and to Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al Kadhimi, who met with Biden this week, is mostly a distinction without a difference. The U.S. will be moving into an “advise-and-assist role,” as it’s euphemistically described, providing many of the same services it does now. According to ABC News, “the change in mission is more of a semantic one, and the number of U.S. troops in Iraq will not dramatically differ as they shift their emphasis to training and assisting.” U.S. soldiers will be doing “the exact same things they’re already doing, just fewer doing it,” said Wesley Morgan, author of a book about America’s war in Afghanistan.
The forever wars don’t seem to end, they just molt into their next iteration, as assets are shuffled around, missions rebranded, and local allies reassured that we are there to “advise and assist” for as long as is needed. Relying heavily on special forces, intelligence resources, contractors, and unmatched air power, the U.S. continues to be involved in conflicts in Syria, Somalia, Libya, Niger, and other undeclared war zones. In Africa alone, the U.S. has at least 29 military bases and participates in operations against Islamic State sympathizers and other jihadist groups in a number of countries, particularly in West Africa. Earlier this year, making good on a campaign promise, Biden claimed that the U.S. would stop providing “offensive assistance” to the vicious war prosecuted by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—with British and American help—in Yemen. We still don’t know if anything has changed, and the U.S. continues to help enforce a devastating blockade of a key port in a country where millions face hunger.
Prolonging a process that was begun under Donald Trump, the U.S. hasn’t so much folded its cards in these conflicts as it has reshuffled the deck. Biden has positioned himself as a reluctant peacemaker—so reluctant that he sometimes brushes off questions about Afghanistan because they aren’t “happy.” But in practice, he appears to be a pliant imperial overseer. In moving to reestablish the relationships and treaties Trump trashed, while rebranding U.S. involvement in various conflicts, Biden’s foreign policy looks much like a return to the muscular liberalism of the Obama era, which gave us the Islamic State and humanitarian disasters in Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere. Any reports that the forever wars are ending miss what is really happening in U.S. foreign policy.
Consider America’s pullout from Afghanistan, which has featured quietly dramatic scenes of fleets of vehicles abandoned at Bagram Airbase and reports of the Taliban capturing district after district. Even in that conflict, there’s little sense that the U.S. is about to abandon its foundering efforts to create a functional democracy in a country wracked by generations of war and outside meddling. Rather than fully exit the region, the U.S. reportedly has been considering repositioning its military assets to surrounding Central Asian countries, including possibly leasing Russian military bases in places like Tajikistan. U.S. forces have also continued launching airstrikes against the Taliban to try to aid the teetering Afghan government and to provide cover for foreign forces set to leave the country. (The Taliban, for its part, promised “consequences” for the U.S. violating its agreement to pull out of Afghanistan fully by August 31.) The U.S. has similarly promised, in the words of Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr., to provide “intelligence sharing and advising and assisting through security consultations at the strategic level” to the Afghan government—for as long as that government lasts in the face of growing Taliban assaults.
American military operations seem to be continuing in Syria and Somalia, as well. Trump expressed interest in ending U.S. involvement in Somalia, but according to some reports, U.S. forces were mostly relocated to Kenya and other regional bases, essentially “commuting to work,” as described by Air Force Magazine. Following a six-month respite, the Biden administration resumed airstrikes in Somalia, leading several Democratic senators to demand an explanation. “I have received no information suggesting that these strikes are necessary to protect any U.S. personnel and would need to understand, if this is so, why they are occurring,” said Senator Tim Kaine. The same could be said about much of the last 20 years of America’s wars of choice.
In Syria, the U.S. has carved out a small “buffer zone” in the east of the country, where Green Berets train and assist Syrian Democratic Forces in their battle against remnants of the Islamic State, and other U.S. assets provide air support. Although their presence is probably illegal, and occurred without any congressional debate, the mission will go on. “I don’t anticipate any changes right now to the mission or the footprint in Syria,” an anonymous official told Politico on Tuesday. More detailed information about the U.S. mission in Syria, including photos, videos, and other friendly propaganda, can be found on Twitter, where a U.S. spokesman provides regular updates with the hashtag #defeatdaesh (Daesh being a derogatory Arabic term for the Islamic State). The U.S.-led coalition “is committed to supporting the #SDF to combat terrorism & ensure a long-term stability in NE Syria,” said spokesman Col. Wayne Marotto this week.
In both Iraq and Syria, U.S. officials say, American soldiers no longer participate in raids or kick down doors. They merely do everything else a long-term counterinsurgency campaign requires. This shift to more hazily described assistance roles is supposed to reflect a maturation and evolution of a global war on terror. But they’re also a way of keeping U.S. forces engaged in the region without visibly occupying it. This strategy also allows the U.S. to amp up involvement any time an Iranian-sponsored militia manages to lob some missiles a U.S. base in Iraq or Syria. As Marotto, the coalition spokesman, recently said, “The U.S./Coalition has the inherent right to self-defense. Force protection remains the highest priority of the @Coalition.”
It’s a measure of how distorted our forever-war logic has become. Why keep U.S. soldiers parked at regional bases without any combat role, just so they can be targets for militia drone strikes that may then demand an escalating response? These soldiers and contractors wouldn’t require force protection if they were returned home.
According to The Washington Post, President Biden is trying “to end the post-9/11 era.” From Afghanistan to Iraq to Guantánamo, where a prisoner was recently released after years of confinement and no criminal charges, Biden claims to be turning the page, reorienting toward security threats emanating from China and Russia.
This new eagerness to wave sabers in the general direction of Beijing would be concerning on its own. But it also highlights how ending America’s decades-long imperial drift will take far more than rearranging some military deployments. It will require a complete reimagining of how to engage with a world that has been cynically reduced to a global battlefield populated with endless threats. It requires admitting that we live in a country mostly safe from external enemies, with only a marginal risk of terrorism. For 20 years, our political and military leaders and foreign policy establishment have claimed otherwise. Judging by Biden’s latest decisions—as well as the hysterically overwrought reactions of old neocon hands like George W. Bush and Lindsey Graham, who would be content to occupy Afghanistan for another generation—our elites are still not ready to admit the obvious: We lost these wars, and the only way to expiate our failure is to go home.
14. Twitter Will Not Steward the Profession
Perhaps instagram will? What about TikTok? (again please note my sarcasm)
The author does outline a real paradox here (almost like to save the village we must burn it). He makes an argument to abandon the emphasis on Twitter. But this is like everything in the cyber domain - too often we focus on the technology, the 1's and 0's, or the platform. But this is really about operations in the human domain and influencing behavior (and thinking).
To turn away from Twitter’s egalitarian, unfettered dialogue seems regressive. But, to protect a liberal system, the American military must be vexingly illiberal. This paradox is neither new nor has its necessity expired. The Army’s ethic will not, in every instance, mirror society’s. It is what Samuel Huntington meant when he melodramatically cast West Point, a stand-in for the military ethic, as “a bit of Sparta in the midst of Babylon.”
Without listening to ideas from across its ranks, the Army cannot hope to reform successfully before the next war. Those budding ideas will not mature into action if servicemembers dump them into a fatally distracting algorithmic feed, 280 characters at a time. Servicemembers should instead write for publication.
The Army has the infrastructure to usher in a writing culture, rather than a tweeting one. The Army University Press under the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center constitutes an outstanding platform. Writing competitions and prizes, the expansion of existing professional journals, conferences for the presentation of ideas, and grants for research all promise to deliver better-developed insights than Twitter. This is because long-form writing threatens intra-military and civil-military norms less than social media platforms do. When military writing does make the news, cross-contaminating the Army’s and society’s dialogues, it does so by exception. Tweets do so by design. Publishing can erode military values if done without an eye for recommendation or dignity, but because it occurs apart from addictive feedback mechanisms that reward dissent, it does so less often.
Advocates of social media will remind you that Twitter will never “go away.” That is exactly right. That’s why Army leadership should stop pitching Twitter — something that needs no selling and corrodes discourse — as a forum for professional dialogue. Writing, on the other hand, and the critical thought it engenders, needs every sales pitch it can get. The Army might start by telling its leaders that the next time they want to tweet a thought, they ought to write it out in long form instead.
Twitter Will Not Steward the Profession - War on the Rocks
The Army is busy determining how it can graduate from the industrial age to the information age. But it is worth asking whether, in every instance, the Army should make that shift. In particular, senior officers across the service have migrated the professional dialogue about the Army and how to reform it onto Twitter. The resultant online conversation is funny. It is fast. It is thrillingly flat, in the military’s otherwise martial and hierarchical world. It is also a mistake.
Moving the Army’s dialogue onto Twitter invites a fickle, transient, and undiscerning online gallery to partake in shaping the Army’s culture. It conditions servicemembers to attend more to that online gallery than to institutional feedback, leading to a fractured military ethos and alienated servicemembers.
This migration is also a mistake because Twitter invites the service into the American political scrum. The Army cannot afford to accept this invitation, but owing to the platform’s design, servicemembers often cannot resist doing so. The result is an Army that appears available for political capture, at a time when it is one of the nation’s last institutions to have evaded that fate and crucially so.
The Army cannot and should not retreat from Twitter and other social media platforms wholesale. They have uses that the Army cannot neglect, including family outreach, recruiting, and strategic messaging. But intra-Army professional dialogue is not one of them. If a service wants to discuss reform, leaders should foster a culture of long-form writing — not tweeting. Whereas Twitter’s design stunts ideas, reducing them to punchlines stripped of context, long-form writing develops those ideas into the substantive arguments that drive meaningful change. Whereas Twitter orients servicemembers toward virality and seeking approval, long-form writing orients them inward, toward the institution they hope to reform.
The Rise of #MilTwitter
The Army has endorsed social media with good reason. Most recruiters now have an Instagram page to reach potential enlistees and units run Facebook groups to engage soldiers and their families. But of late, Army leaders have urged servicemembers to join social media, and particularly Twitter, to partake in an informal dialogue about the military as part of a program of self-development.
Supporters of this move address their exhortations to all ranks. Some have called for leaders “from top to bottom” to “embrace and advocate” for Twitter’s use. Peter W. Singer, who specializes in social media’s impact on national security, advised leaders, “If you want to communicate, social media is the place you now have to be. Its whole appeal and value is that it is a space for both one-on-one interaction and mass broadcast.”
Many have accepted these invitations to “get on the bus and enjoy the ride.” Use of the #MilTwitter hashtag has ballooned as a result. The dialogue is informal and it occurs publicly between personal and official accounts in clipped conversations, replete with “hot takes” of various issues. The informality is not an accident but an alleged strength: Engaged in a “war for talent,” the Army fears appearing to be an analog dinosaur.
Twitter Erodes Intra-Military Norms
The Army is not the first institution to discover social media’s limits in pursuit of reform. In The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, Martin Gurri repurposed Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky’s terms “border” and “center” to describe two types of organizations. “Center organizations” operate using an industrial-era model and are hierarchical, while “border organizations” are flat, networked, and moralizing. As Gurri argues, social media has become the border’s preferred weapon, because it affords all users a voice irrespective of rank. Border movements, such as the 2011 Spanish indignados and Tahrir Square protests in Egypt, undermine regimes by ending the near-monopoly on narratives those regimes once enjoyed.
While border organizations can negate the center, they struggle to fill its place. Social media platforms are good for criticizing, but are ill suited for building institutions. As Gurri explains, even though the indignados delegitimized the sitting Spanish government, the center-right Popular Party succeeded it. Although Tahrir Square protestors toppled President Hosni Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood and then the Egyptian military replaced him.
The military is a quintessential center organization. To illustrate how it suffers on Twitter — a border area — I consider some hypothetical examples. I refrain from referring to actual Twitter conversations whenever possible because doing so would unnecessarily personalize this analysis when the issue is systemic.
Imagine a young officer has a run-in with his or her commander and feels wronged. Twitter beckons as a way for that officer to recount the event in pursuit of validation. An online audience, equipped only with the tweeted account of the incident, affirms the officer’s sense of injustice with 40 likes, retweets, and replies. To that young officer, this is exoneration. How could the chain of command be right, if 40 people, many of whom are self-identified leaders of equal or greater rank to that commander, say otherwise? The feedback triggers a loop: The officer is less likely to listen to the now-delegitimized commander and, because affirmation feels good, is all the more likely to take future disagreements to “Twitter court.”
It may be that the young officer is right and the commander is wrong. But the reality of the incident has zero bearing on social media’s judgment. That’s by design. Twitter’s purpose is to retain users’ attention and sell it. It does so by systemically affirming their ire, not by telling them hard truths. It is an escape hatch from the lonely reflection that makes a leader.
As this process iterates, Twitter nudges servicemembers to value the wrong audience. Servicemembers oblige not because they are particularly weak, but because they are human. Twitter quickly and regularly delivers feedback via an interface designed exquisitely to exploit psychological vulnerability. The lumbering Army feedback systems, delivering affirmation months if not years after performance, cannot compete. Affirmation soon becomes the purpose of online exchange rather than its byproduct. The unit’s mission, which will never produce an attention-grabbing notification, becomes an afterthought. Like Catch-22’s Col. Cathcart, concerned more with getting into the Saturday Evening Post than winning the war, leaders risk one day spending more time tracking the performance of tweets than crafting the message they hope to send. We become the tool, and Twitter wields us.
In performing for their online audience, servicemembers grant it a role in policing the Army even though that audience lacks the wisdom to do so. It relishes public betrayal for its drama and will amplify a servicemember’s diss of the Army more than it will some innocuous observation. Anger goes viral more reliably than banal acquiescence, and punishing norm-violators delivers a better dopamine hit than withholding judgment until all the facts emerge.
Granting an online audience a role in policing the Army’s ethos is also a mistake because that audience has little stake in the outcome. If the audience errs by preemptively judging a situation or spreading a falsehood, it suffers none. It can log off at any time, washing its hands of its own acidic discourse. But a servicemember cannot log out of the Army and should accordingly attend to the institution. The institution is at stake and will still be there tomorrow.
Twitter’s advocates may claim that to orient toward Twitter is to attend to one’s formation, to “be where your soldiers are.” But there is little evidence that lower-ranking soldiers have joined #MilTwitter en masse. Anecdote and demographic data suggest they’re more likely following unit-specific, meme-dispensing “morale” pages on Instagram. Research suggests Twitter is “a highly insular echo chamber of elites speaking to elites” and #MilTwitter is no different.
Proponents of moving the Army’s professional dialogue to Twitter also laud its ability to solve problems by circumventing a creaking hierarchy and allowing servicemembers of all ranks to speak directly to power. Over time, however, this circumvention is a bug, not a feature. Massive bureaucracies like the Army depend on impersonal processes, which in the aggregate are slow and frustrating, but are also the best possible option. These processes depend on predictable and well-known regulations, rather than on leaders’ varying personalities and Twitter’s unauditable algorithms. Twitter tunnels under those processes until the institution falters.
Twitter, as a tool of the “border,” erodes the Army, a “center” organization. Border movements cannot rebuild what they weaken. Twitter can fracture an old narrative, but it cannot sustain a new one. Even if users could justify every tweeted grievance and the Army did deserve to be burned down, Twitter could not muster an Army to replace it. The platform’s mode of dissent is the mob, not the position paper, and mobs do not march well.
A Threat to Civil-Military Relations
The Army’s use of Twitter for professional dialogue also threatens civil-military relations because Twitter is a major forum for political debate. When both conversations occur in the same charged room, the risk that they will mix rises. In a republic, the military cannot afford even the appearance of political loyalty. Political militaries end republics, and so the concern is existential.
Servicemembers enjoy a right to private expression within limits, but #MilTwitter encourages servicemembers to build public profiles that derive their authority from service. Servicemembers may include “opinions my own” in their bio in pursuit of legal absolution — I know I did — but the public, looking to consume the military’s authenticity, will make no distinction. That much of #MilTwitter is semi-anonymous also means nothing: Society cares that the opinions come from the uniform, not the name sewn on it.
The risks generated by merging the military’s professional dialogue with society’s political debate were evident in two recent spats on Twitter. #MilTwitter partook in both of them. One followed Tucker Carlson’s comments that maternity uniforms are a stand-in for the allegedly fatal feminization of the military. A second followed Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s promise to tweet complaints from servicemembers about “woke ideology.”
In early March, Carlson declared uniforms that fit pregnant servicemembers “a mockery of the U.S. military and its core mission, which is winning wars.” The Department of Defense condemned the comments, as did individual services. Servicemembers rebuked Carlson on Twitter, many of them ahead of the release of any official statements. Many also demanded that other Army leaders denunciate Carlson by tweet, claiming that to be silent about the issue on Twitter was to endorse Carlson’s comments and leave women in uniform without support.
Three months later, Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL and lieutenant commander, tweeted a solicitation for whistleblowers to report “woke ideology” in the military so that he might “publish egregious complaints on social media.” It is hard to imagine a more direct invitation for servicemembers to perform, via Twitter, in political theater with their uniform as costume.
Carlson’s comments and the threat of “woke ideology” are not the same. Carlson’s misogynistic statements were wrong. The secretary of defense has compellingly rebutted the charges of ideological compromise levelled at the department. But my purpose here is not to adjudicate these questions. It is to point out how both episodes illustrate the way Twitter wears down barriers between the Army’s inner dialogue and that of the broader country. In both cases, Twitter’s incentive structure, which rewards participation with attention, beckoned servicemembers into the fray. This cycle, if left unchecked, will render the military just another formerly apolitical institution newly up for grabs.
Tweeting servicemembers will insist that the circumstances were exempt from norms separating the military from politics. In the Carlson case, those who condemned him argue that his misogyny, and the fact that it was aimed squarely at military women, required a response. Those answering Crenshaw’s call will likely claim that they have an obligation to do so because “woke ideology” poses an existential threat to the military.
Both views are wrong. The military is categorically apolitical, even when political figures say vile things with which servicemembers disagree. Following Carlson’s comments, many chose to simply affirm the indelible service of women in uniform. This is less dangerous because it appears, and therefore is, less political. But on Twitter, to explicitly invoke Carlson’s name, a trending topic, is to increase one’s audience and to feel a part of the conversation, and so many did.
Some argue that this conflation of the Army’s inner dialogue and that of broader society is a benefit of #MilTwitter. Senior leaders have argued that the military’s informal use of social media increases “transparency and auditability,” which are “core responsibilities of military organisations in our democratic systems.” Those are indeed core responsibilities of the U.S. military, but they are also responsibilities that are too serious to delegate to self-selecting servicemembers on Twitter. The mechanisms for the military’s auditability in America’s democratic system bear names like the House Armed Services Committee, not a captain’s Twitter handle. In the same article, the authors acknowledged some risk in social media’s use but parried that all military operations carry some risk. The Army mitigates risk through training and certification and has entire military occupational specialties devoted to public affairs. No evidence has surfaced to suggest that certification is too strenuous. The Army should empower public affairs officers on social media. It should not inadvertently replace them.
Writing Will Steward the Profession
To turn away from Twitter’s egalitarian, unfettered dialogue seems regressive. But, to protect a liberal system, the American military must be vexingly illiberal. This paradox is neither new nor has its necessity expired. The Army’s ethic will not, in every instance, mirror society’s. It is what Samuel Huntington meant when he melodramatically cast West Point, a stand-in for the military ethic, as “a bit of Sparta in the midst of Babylon.”
Without listening to ideas from across its ranks, the Army cannot hope to reform successfully before the next war. Those budding ideas will not mature into action if servicemembers dump them into a fatally distracting algorithmic feed, 280 characters at a time. Servicemembers should instead write for publication.
The Army has the infrastructure to usher in a writing culture, rather than a tweeting one. The Army University Press under the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center constitutes an outstanding platform. Writing competitions and prizes, the expansion of existing professional journals, conferences for the presentation of ideas, and grants for research all promise to deliver better-developed insights than Twitter. This is because long-form writing threatens intra-military and civil-military norms less than social media platforms do. When military writing does make the news, cross-contaminating the Army’s and society’s dialogues, it does so by exception. Tweets do so by design. Publishing can erode military values if done without an eye for recommendation or dignity, but because it occurs apart from addictive feedback mechanisms that reward dissent, it does so less often.
Advocates of social media will remind you that Twitter will never “go away.” That is exactly right. That’s why Army leadership should stop pitching Twitter — something that needs no selling and corrodes discourse — as a forum for professional dialogue. Writing, on the other hand, and the critical thought it engenders, needs every sales pitch it can get. The Army might start by telling its leaders that the next time they want to tweet a thought, they ought to write it out in long form instead.
Theo Lipsky is an active-duty U.S. Army captain. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the U.S. Military Academy. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect those of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.
15. Are We Asking the Right Questions?
That in itself is the profound question.
If we do not ask the right question how can we appreciate the context, understand the problem, and develop a feasible, suitable, and acceptable approach to protecting, sustaining, and advancing our interests and values?
Excerpt:
Reading this compelling issue, I was struck not only by how often we get things wrong, but how our judgments change over time. In their penetrating article, Dan Reiter and Paul Poast argue that the difference between deterrence success and failure in Korea between 1949 and 1950 turned upon a visible, meaningful U.S. military presence. When America reduced its forces to a mere token presence on the peninsula, deterrence weakened and North Korea invaded. For May, the surprise was not so much the failure of deterrence as the decision to fight at all. “It was the policy of the United States in June 1950 to avoid using American military forces in Korea.” Relying on overly simplistic comparisons to world politics in the 1930s, Harry Truman and his advisers “discarded previous calculations because of a presumed historical maxim” in order to expend “life and large sums of money and some risk of precipitating general war” to defend territory that had, only months earlier, appeared to lie outside of America’s declared area of interest. Historical judgment changes with time. In 2021, the mistake the United States made was to have relied on tripwire forces to deter an adversary, whereas in 1973, in the shadow of Vietnam, the mistake was to have even considered fighting at all.
...
What if we are wrong? While they rarely say so out loud, the best scholars, analysts, and decision-makers always wonder. Perhaps, however, we are asking the wrong question. History demonstrates time and again that, despite great effort, we will be wrong as often as not. The past demonstrates that world politics is so complex, historical processes so interdependent, that we should always expect the unexpected. Marc Bloch reminds us that “history is neither watchmaking not cabinet construction” but “an endeavor towards better understanding and, consequently, a thing in movement.” The real question — and the true benefit of engaging with the past — is how we will respond when we are wrong. History provides no easy answers, obvious lessons, or clear blueprints on how to act. It does, however, provide something more important — intellectual flexibility and the capacity to be surprised, an ability to recognize when things are changing, the confidence to challenge and interrogate our own beliefs, and an ability to update our own assumptions and reactions and self-correct. Given the fast-moving, complex, and uncertain nature of our changing world, these are qualities we most certainly could benefit from.
Are We Asking the Right Questions? - War on the Rocks
Editor’s Note: This is the introductory essay for Volume 4, Issue 3 of the Texas National Security Review, our sister publication. Be sure to read the entire issue.
I recently re-read historian Ernest May’s slim classic, “Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy. Published in 1973, the year the United States left Vietnam in defeat and disgrace, the book possesses a dark, gloomy feel. “Lessons,” is in quotes, emphasizing May’s belief that, while statesmen naturally mine the past for answers, more often than not they do so poorly. Makers of “foreign policy are often influenced by beliefs about what history teaches or portends” but “ordinarily use history badly.” Their primary sin is to fight the last war and draw linear analogies in a simplistic manner, usually based on the more recent events. With the sting of the Vietnam fiasco all too fresh, perhaps it is not surprising that May largely saw America’s Cold War policies as erratic, shaped by bureaucratic in-fighting and often faulty logic. Even Franklin Roosevelt, the president who successfully guided the nation through a global depression and world war, was not immune from misunderstanding history. He is charged with an obsession with avoiding the mistakes Woodrow Wilson made after the previous world war, leading Roosevelt to overemphasize the danger of a German and Japanese resurgence while underestimating the risk of postwar Soviet belligerence.
Reading this compelling issue, I was struck not only by how often we get things wrong, but how our judgments change over time. In their penetrating article, Dan Reiter and Paul Poast argue that the difference between deterrence success and failure in Korea between 1949 and 1950 turned upon a visible, meaningful U.S. military presence. When America reduced its forces to a mere token presence on the peninsula, deterrence weakened and North Korea invaded. For May, the surprise was not so much the failure of deterrence as the decision to fight at all. “It was the policy of the United States in June 1950 to avoid using American military forces in Korea.” Relying on overly simplistic comparisons to world politics in the 1930s, Harry Truman and his advisers “discarded previous calculations because of a presumed historical maxim” in order to expend “life and large sums of money and some risk of precipitating general war” to defend territory that had, only months earlier, appeared to lie outside of America’s declared area of interest. Historical judgment changes with time. In 2021, the mistake the United States made was to have relied on tripwire forces to deter an adversary, whereas in 1973, in the shadow of Vietnam, the mistake was to have even considered fighting at all.
Other articles in this issue highlight how hard it is to get things right: Russia’s surprising aggression in the Donbas, according to Brendan Chrzanowski, appears irrational when assessed through our standard materialist or ideological theories and lenses. When the Cold War ended, few would have expected the erosion of civil-military norms warned of by Polina Beliakova. Paul Scharre pushes back against the widespread use of an arms race frame to understand the future of artificial intelligence, which highlights the troubling implications of articles by Herbert Lin and Guy Schleffer/Benjamin Miller about the dangers presented by cyber technology and social media. A decade and a half ago, the consensus was that digital technologies and platforms that connected citizens from around the globe and made all the world’s knowledge available to anyone, immediately and for free, would be a revolutionary force benefiting the world. Today, these technologies threaten not only America’s military stability, but the very fabric of democracy.
Scholars and analysts appear to fare no better than decision-makers when it comes to getting things right. As the recent Texas National Security Review roundtable on Brendan Green’s important new book, The Revolution that Failed, reveals, the best national and international security analysts and scholars misunderstood the nature and consequences of the strategic nuclear competition between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War. Academics from the security studies community believed that the Strategic Arms Limitation and Antiballistic Missile Treaties captured the natural and inescapable state of mutual vulnerability, enshrining a nuclear revolution that they hoped would end arms races, prevent war, and dampen geopolitical competition. Green joins an emerging group of scholars who demonstrate how misguided this analysis was. American and Soviet decision-makers continued to compete ruthlessly to achieve nuclear advantage, going to great lengths and taking some risk to escape mutual vulnerability. Strategic arms control limited the number of weapons, but not their quality. The superpowers engaged in an intense counterforce arms race to make their weapons more accurate, stealthier, mobile, and fast, with important consequences for the course — and the end — of the Cold War.
Using History More Wisely
Can we be sure that we are any better now at using the past to make sense of contemporary and future challenges? Today’s conventional wisdom, for example, proclaims a return to the kinds of great-power rivalry and geopolitical competition that dominated world politics in earlier eras. Perhaps this is right. But should we have much confidence in this assessment, when less than a generation ago, many believed that great-power politics was a thing of the past and that increased interdependence would make China, if not a partner, than at least not an adversary to the United States? The track record of predicting future national security challenges — both inside and outside of government — is not stellar. Few scholars were thinking about terrorism or counterterrorism in 2000, an issue that would dominate American national security policy in the years following the 9/11 attacks on the United States. Nor was there a lot of debate in the policy or academic world in 1985 about what the United States should do in a post-Cold War world without the Soviet Union, because few imagined such a world was possible.
Can we do better? I am not sure how we can improve our ability to forecast. As Yogi Berra purportedly said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Even May came up short in that category — his 1973 statement that “I would predict with highest confidence that there will not in the coming decade be another round of the Cold War” was, to put it mildly, off the mark. When I honestly interrogate my own views over the past 30 years, I can think of plenty of forecasts I got wrong. While we all have plenty of reasons to crow about our successes, there is little professional incentive, either in government, think tanks, or the academy, to demonstrate humility or highlight our errors.
We can, however, use history more wisely. “Lessons” of the Past provides an excellent way to rigorously interrogate historical analogies, an exercise May’s famous class and book with political scientist Richard Neustadt — Thinking in Time — took even further. There are other terrific scholars and programs working to think about how to better apply history to the present and future. I would only add a few suggestions.
First, it is important to remember that history is more than a simple grab bag of examples and analogies you can ransack to fit your current question. The past is vast enough, if used indiscriminately, to provide whatever evidence you are looking for. The truth is that most people exploit history to validate their long-held theories and assumptions about how the world works. If you worry about the dangers that may emerge by not challenging a rising authoritarian state, a visit to the 1930s will provide ammunition for your argument. If, on the other hand, you want to decry America’s overreach and meddling in the world, the Vietnam War is the place to take your time machine. One of the best ways to use history is not only to identify how the present is similar to the past, but also how it is different. Likening the current and future U.S.-Chinese relationship to the rise of Bismarck’s Germany or the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union may risk obscuring more than it reveals.
How can we best determine how our present and future are different from the past? In his 1964 book An Introduction to Contemporary History, Geoffrey Barraclough reminded his readers that there were still people alive while he was writing who had met Bismarck, yet the worlds of the Iron Chancellor and that of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson could not be more different or incomparable. The same is true today. There are still people alive who interacted with Konrad Adenauer, who was born during Bismarck’s chancellorship. Why does this matter? There will be many elements of international relations that may appear, on the surface, much like the past. We would be wise to follow Barraclough’s suggestions that we go beyond obvious political similarities to “clarify the basic structural changes” that mark our current and future world. These tectonic changes are harder to see but are arguably more consequential: “they fix the skeleton or framework within which the political action takes place.” Similar to Barraclough’s time, we are in the midst of profound demographic, economic, socio-cultural, and technological changes that are upending our very notions of identity, power, purpose, and governance in the world. In terms of American national security policy, how will these powerful if murky forces shape who America is, if and how it fights, and for what purposes? Some of the answers will look similar to the past, while many others profoundly different.
Another way we can deploy history more effectively is to think about perspective. Sometimes perspective is chronological: Any assessment of the Korean War, China’s ascension into the World Trade Organization, or the effectiveness of America’s response to 9/11 will ultimately depend on when you make the evaluation. What will our choices today look like in 2040? There is rarely a correct, a priori answer. It all depends on what happens between now and then. My friend Janice Stein always says that when crafting policies, decision-makers should start with what they most want not to happen and work backwards from there. While that seems easy enough, the policy choices for the top two catastrophes decision-makers seek to avoid — a global war between China and the United States and a deepening climate cataclysm — may pull in different directions.
Historical perspective is also shaped by place. A few months ago, I gave a lecture for an applied history course in Stockholm, focusing on America’s nuclear policies and the contours of the emerging geopolitical challenges of an aggressive, authoritarian China. An extraordinarily impressive student, who worked in international finance, asked me a searching question that I didn’t have a great answer for. In the ensuing email exchanges, I saw how my views might have appeared less objective and derived more from the outlook of my own time, place, and view of history. For a smart, globally minded citizen of Sweden, it wasn’t obvious that history revealed that the United States possessed a particular claim to wisdom and virtue when navigating world politics or our nuclear weapons future. Nor was the return to Cold War-style, great-power geopolitics wise given that the planet’s terrifying climate disruptions are manifest all around us. She also sent me a link to a fascinating TedTalk — “Don’t ask where I’m from, ask where I’m a local” — delivered by the writer Taiye Selasi, a founder of Afropolitanism, on the complex questions of identity. It presented viewpoints I had not fully considered and reinforced the obvious but important lesson that our own thinking improves when we expose ourselves to voices and ideas we don’t typically encounter.
What if we are wrong? While they rarely say so out loud, the best scholars, analysts, and decision-makers always wonder. Perhaps, however, we are asking the wrong question. History demonstrates time and again that, despite great effort, we will be wrong as often as not. The past demonstrates that world politics is so complex, historical processes so interdependent, that we should always expect the unexpected. Marc Bloch reminds us that “history is neither watchmaking not cabinet construction” but “an endeavor towards better understanding and, consequently, a thing in movement.” The real question — and the true benefit of engaging with the past — is how we will respond when we are wrong. History provides no easy answers, obvious lessons, or clear blueprints on how to act. It does, however, provide something more important — intellectual flexibility and the capacity to be surprised, an ability to recognize when things are changing, the confidence to challenge and interrogate our own beliefs, and an ability to update our own assumptions and reactions and self-correct. Given the fast-moving, complex, and uncertain nature of our changing world, these are qualities we most certainly could benefit from.
Francis J. Gavin is the chair of the editorial board of the Texas National Security Review. He is the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and the inaugural director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at SAIS-Johns Hopkins University. His writings include Gold, Dollars, and Power: The Politics of International Monetary Relations, 1958-1971 (University of North Carolina Press, 2004) and Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America’s Atomic Age (Cornell University Press, 2012) and Covid-19 and World Order (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020) co-edited with Hal Brands. His latest book is Nuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy (Brookings Institution Press, 2020).
16. Huawei launches new smartphones without 5G as U.S. sanctions, chip shortage bite
Sanctions work.
Huawei launches new smartphones without 5G as U.S. sanctions, chip shortage bite
CNBC · by Ryan Browne · July 29, 2021
KEY POINTS
- Huawei on Thursday launched its new P50 and P50 Pro smartphones without support for super-fast 5G internet.
- It's a sign of the toll that U.S. sanctions and a global chip shortage are taking on the Chinese tech firm.
- 5G phones are "beyond our reach" due to U.S. trade restrictions, Huawei's Richard Yu said.
Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei's consumer business group, unveils the Chinese tech giant's new P50 smartphone lineup.
Huawei
Huawei on Thursday unveiled its new P50 smartphone line, which lacks support for super-fast 5G internet, as the Chinese tech giant grapples with both U.S. sanctions and a global chip shortage.
The company is launching two models: the P50 and a more expensive P50 Pro. Huawei's P series is mainly known for its cutting-edge camera tech, and the P50 lineup builds on that with two huge circular camera units.
On the P50, the main camera module has three lenses: a 50-megapixel large sensor, a 40MP monochrome lens and a 13MP super-wide angle lens. The second one uses a 64MP telephoto lens capable of 3.5 times optical zoom. Huawei says this lets users zoom in 200 times.
However, neither model supports 5G mobile networks, instead coming with a 4G chipset from Qualcomm. It's a sign of how trade curbs imposed by the administration of former U.S. President Donald Trump continue to impact the firm.
Last year, Washington introduced restrictions which meant foreign manufacturers using U.S. technology would need to get a license to sell semiconductors to Huawei. Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei's consumer business group, had warned Huawei could run out of its own high-end Kirin chips, which are manufactured by Taiwanese firm TSMC.
"Our products still maintain the ultimate performance," Yu said Thursday. "Only a very small drop in speed will be experienced, almost negligible."
"Huawei is a global leader in 5G technology and in communication technology," he added. "Because of the four rounds of U.S. restrictions over the past two years or so, 5G phones are beyond our reach and we have to go with 4G."
The Huawei P50 starts at a price of 4,488 Chinese yuan ($695) while the P50 Pro starts at 5,988 yuan ($927).
Both P50 phones come with Huawei's new operating system, HarmonyOS, which the company introduced in response to Google's decision to stop licensing its Android software to the firm due to U.S. trade restrictions.
Yu said Thursday that more than 40 million Huawei users have upgraded their phones to HarmonyOS 2, a new version of its software. Starting from next year, Huawei customers will be able to upgrade any model to HarmonyOS, he added.
CNBC · by Ryan Browne · July 29, 2021
17. The West Embraces State Subsidies, a Policy Throwback, to Counter China
Wow. This is quite a statement from the former Virginia governor. Do we believe this? Should we accept this?
Advocates say the U.S. has employed industrial policy in some form ever since its first Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, used tariffs to nurture manufacturing. Critics call it “picking winners” in ways better left to capital markets, and point to money wasted on past efforts such as supersonic airliners and fast breeder nuclear reactors.
Support now is broadening, straddling the Trump and Biden administrations, driven by pandemic-driven disruptions to supply chains and the rise of China. American officials once assumed that as China’s government matured, the state’s role in the economy would shrink. Now they say the U.S. has to embrace government intervention or watch China dominate vital industries.
“I’ve been impressed with the Chinese model,” said Mark Warner, a former venture capitalist and Virginia governor who as a Democratic senator sponsored the semiconductor legislation. The Chinese state ensures that Chinese, not foreign, companies become the dominant players in its domestic market, effectively guaranteeing them a big share of the world’s market, he said.
“It’s hard to see how a company in America or any normal, traditional market-based economy can compete against that kind of juggernaut and win,” Mr. Warner said.
The biggest hurdle with industrial policy is governments’ inability to predict technological trends, and the West’s new industrial-policy push might prove wasteful and ineffective, which some analysts say is already true of China’s.
The West Embraces State Subsidies, a Policy Throwback, to Counter China
An approach long criticized as inefficient, is being adopted by the U.S. to fund sectors such as semiconductors
Other regions have done the same. The European Union has committed to nearly doubling its share of global semiconductor manufacturing capacity, to 20%. South Korea approved up to $65 billion in support for semiconductors, and Japan promised to match other countries’ semiconductor aid while planning to turn Japan into an Asian data center hub.
Chip-manufacturing subsidies are the most prominent of a range of interventions Western governments are rushing out to promote industries they deem strategic, from electric-car batteries to pharmaceuticals. Such interventions have increased sharply in both the U.S. and Europe in the past decade, according to Global Trade Alert, a trade-monitoring group.
Collectively, this represents an embrace of “industrial policy,” the idea that governments should direct resources to industries critical to the national interest rather than leaving things to the market.
Advocates say the U.S. has employed industrial policy in some form ever since its first Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, used tariffs to nurture manufacturing. Critics call it “picking winners” in ways better left to capital markets, and point to money wasted on past efforts such as supersonic airliners and fast breeder nuclear reactors.
Support now is broadening, straddling the Trump and Biden administrations, driven by pandemic-driven disruptions to supply chains and the rise of China. American officials once assumed that as China’s government matured, the state’s role in the economy would shrink. Now they say the U.S. has to embrace government intervention or watch China dominate vital industries.
“I’ve been impressed with the Chinese model,” said Mark Warner, a former venture capitalist and Virginia governor who as a Democratic senator sponsored the semiconductor legislation. The Chinese state ensures that Chinese, not foreign, companies become the dominant players in its domestic market, effectively guaranteeing them a big share of the world’s market, he said.
“It’s hard to see how a company in America or any normal, traditional market-based economy can compete against that kind of juggernaut and win,” Mr. Warner said.
The biggest hurdle with industrial policy is governments’ inability to predict technological trends, and the West’s new industrial-policy push might prove wasteful and ineffective, which some analysts say is already true of China’s.
Dutch chipmaker NXP Semiconductors NV operates a chip plant in Chandler, Ariz. Encouraging domestic manufacturing is a Biden administration priority, much as it was for the Trump White House.
Photo: nxp semiconductors/Reuters
“It would be a huge mistake for the U.S. to try and match Chinese government spending,” said Scott Kennedy of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank. “So much of it is thrown down bottomless pits, leading to over-investment, lower profits, slower innovation and more debt.”
Industrial policy was once commonplace among market-based democracies. Western European governments held controlling stakes in numerous companies. Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry, or MITI, influenced almost every major industry decision.
They pulled back over recent decades. European governments privatized state-owned enterprises, while the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, imposed strict limits on state aid. MITI’s influence shrank in the 1990s in the face of deregulation and the collapse of Japan’s bubble economy. The creation of the World Trade Organization in 1994 made it harder for governments to protect “national champion” companies.
China, though, never retreated. Even after it introduced market reforms in 1979 and accelerated them after 1992, the state continued to guide economic development through ownership of enterprises and control over credit, government purchases, tax preferences, land and foreign investment. Since 2006 the ruling Communist Party has put priority on catching up to the West technologically.
Previously called “Made in China 2025,” this endeavor was renamed “dual circulation” last year. In a speech, President Xi Jinping said the goal was to eliminate China’s dependence on other countries while increasing their dependence on China. It could then threaten to cut off foreign customers to deter aggression, he said.
China is responding in part to the Trump administration’s barring U.S. companies from supplying critical technologies to Chinese companies such as telecom manufacturer Huawei Technologies. The prospect of China’s doing the same—made more urgent by many countries’ restrictions on exports of medical supplies during the pandemic—has led some skeptics to swallow their reservations about industrial policy.
Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican who co-sponsored the semiconductor legislation with Mr. Warner, said, “What we’re doing is industrial policy unlike anything people with my free-market, conservative background would ordinarily be comfortable with. Our driving impetus is what China is doing and [the security of] the supply chain.”
Current industrial-support efforts are narrower than in the past. Japanese officials say government intervention should be the exception, focusing on “chokepoint” sectors critical to others. A June document from its Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, the successor to MITI, described semiconductors as the “brain of industry,” as essential as energy and food, and as meriting an exception. It called for securing “Japan’s strategic indispensability and autonomy in the midst of confrontation between U.S. and China over technological sovereignty.”
In 2014, the EU said exceptions could be made for “important projects of common European interest” that have widely shared benefits and don’t distort competition. One is the European Battery Alliance, a public-private consortium with more than 600 members that is developing batteries for electric vehicles and power grids.
Commission Vice President Maroš Šefčovič said he pitched the plan as an “ Airbus for batteries,” comparing it to Europe’s successful launch of a competitor to Boeing. “In today’s electric vehicle, the battery and the software represent more than half the value of the car,” he said. “You cannot retain your competitive position as proud producers of the best cars in the world if you simply do not master and manufacture the most significant part of the electric vehicle.”
In U.S. there has long been broad support for government funding of basic research and development. One result is that the U.S. still leads in inventing and designing new technology, even though the manufacture of the resulting products moved abroad, mostly to East Asia.
The U.S. led in the development of photovoltaic solar technology, but China dominates the manufacture of their panels. U.S. companies account for half of world semiconductor-design revenue, but U.S. factories make just 12% of semiconductors.
Advocates of industrial policy in Congress and the White House are no longer satisfied simply promoting innovation; they want the resulting products to be made in the U.S. They have multiple goals: to secure U.S. supply, create jobs and ensure that the resulting intellectual property stays in the U.S. rather than being transferred to Chinese competitors via outsourcing.
Last month, the White House proposed a breadth of tools to boost domestic production in four sectors deemed vital to the supply chain: semiconductors, batteries, specialized minerals and pharmaceutical ingredients.
China has cornered the market in neodymium, a component of electric-vehicle batteries.
Photo: Doug Kanter/Bloomberg
It proposed using several existing federal loan, tax-credit and R&D programs to support electric-vehicle battery manufacturing. To reduce dependence on foreign supplies of neodymium magnets, important components of motors and other devices, it suggested imposing tariffs under the same 1962 national-security law that former President Donald Trump used to impose tariffs on imported steel and aluminum.
The administration also announced plans for a public-private consortium to revive domestic production of 50 to 100 critical drugs, as well as plans for a domestic lithium-battery supply chain.
The return of industrial policy complicates life for businesses. The U.S.-China trade war had already led to tariffs and export controls. Now, industry officials say, decisions previously based on cost and proximity to customers, suppliers and the head office must also take into account political pressure to localize production.
Last year the Trump administration helped persuade Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. , the world’s largest chip foundry—that is, a company that makes chips designed by others—to build a fab in Arizona.
“We conveyed to TSMC the importance of securing the semiconductor supply chain, and that the U.S. government as well as their U.S. customers wanted them manufacturing here,” said Keith Krach, who led the negotiations as a State Department undersecretary at the time. “They knew it would strengthen Taiwan-U.S. relations and that it was strategic not just to our national security but also to Taiwan’s.”
TSMC, a giant Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer, is in line to receive U.S. subsidies for building a plant in Arizona, if Congress passes a related bill.
Photo: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd
TSMC said the Arizona fab is “of critical, strategic importance to a vibrant and competitive U.S. semiconductor ecosystem.”
The arrangement also needed to make economic sense, Mr. Krach said, so obtaining congressional authorization for incentives to TSMC was a key reason the Trump administration pushed for the legislation providing aid to the chip industry. The House has yet to take up the Senate-passed bill.
Separately, when Intel was seeking to sell a memory chip fab in Dalian, China, last year, Mr. Krach said, he and other U.S. officials told the company the U.S. would block a sale to a Chinese company. Intel sold the plant to South Korea’s SK Hynix, a major memory-chip manufacturer.
“While a Chinese buyer likely would have paid more, Intel acted as a responsible corporate citizen,” Mr. Krach said. Intel and SK Hynix both declined to comment.
Multinational companies already locate facilities around the world to be closer to customers, avoid trade barriers and curry local favor. SK Innovation, which like SK Hynix is a unit of South Korean conglomerate SK Holdings, makes batteries for electric vehicles in Hungary, China and South Korea, all to serve manufacturers in those regions. In 2019 it broke ground on a plant in Georgia to supply batteries to Ford Motor Co. and Volkswagen AG .
South Korean rival LG Chem accused SK of making batteries with trade secrets stolen from LG. In February the U.S. International Trade Commission, an independent, quasi-judicial body, ruled in LG’s favor, barring SK from importing components necessary to start production in the U.S. state.
In a presentation to U.S. officials, SK Innovation said the Biden administration should intervene or its priorities would be compromised, including securing supply chains for critical technologies. It said China was the leader in lithium-ion batteries and was targeting 80% global market share in electric-vehicle batteries and motors.
“Chinese EV battery manufacturers are well positioned to fill the void…if SK’s Georgia facility is shuttered,” said the presentation, which The Wall Street Journal reviewed. White House officials helped broker a settlement between the companies in April, allowing the Georgia plant to open on schedule.
Explaining SK Innovation’s decision to put battery production in Georgia, a spokesman said, “Encouraging local production of electric vehicles has become a priority for nations around the world, including the U.S.” He cited Mr. Biden’s decision to replace the federal fleet with electric vehicles, of which more than half the parts must be U.S.-made.
“Chinese EV battery manufacturers are well positioned to fill the void…if SK’s Georgia facility is shuttered.” Above, the company’s Georgia operation under construction.
Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg News
The Georgia plant alone won’t establish an independent battery supply chain; that also requires access to lithium, cobalt and other essential minerals, plus the recycling of spent batteries. China refines 60% of the world’s lithium and 72% of its cobalt, according to last month’s White House supply chain report.
Efforts by the U.S. and its allies to build up industries that can challenge China face several obstacles to success. One is that China’s commitment to industrial policy is deeper and older.
Its support for favored industries is pervasive and opaque, and difficult to challenge as a violation of international trade rules. By restricting the export of raw aluminum, China ensures that aluminum manufacturers have a cheap supply of raw material, said Chad Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a pro-free trade think tank.
Western governments are reluctant to take ownership of industrial companies, but doing that is central to China’s industrial policy. Not only are many of its largest companies state-owned, but Chinese governments at all levels have established 1,741 industrial guidance funds—in effect, state-sponsored private equity—with plans to deploy $1.6 trillion, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, a research center.
While often uncoordinated and duplicative, these holdings give Chinese authorities enormous sway over company decisions and blur the line between state and private ownership. State investors also tolerate losses for far longer than Western shareholders.
Government support from 2014 to 2018 was equal to as much as 30% or more of annual revenue for two of China’s two major semiconductor companies, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC) and Tsinghua Unigroup, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an association of mostly advanced economies. Other countries subsidize semiconductor fabs through cheap land and tax breaks, but only China provides so much aid in the form of this cheap equity, the OECD said.
Whether China’s spending is effective remains controversial. Chinese chip companies remain well behind leading Western competitors. Mr. Kennedy of the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated China has injected between $49 billion and $72 billion into state-owned aircraft maker Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (Comac) in a so-far-unsuccessful effort to make it a competitor to Airbus and Boeing.
Even if other countries spent as much as China, they would likely struggle to achieve truly independent supply chains because China dominates so many of the links. When semiconductor chips are fabricated in the U.S. they still must undergo assembly, packaging and testing, a low-margin business where China is the biggest player.
Often, politics rather than commercial potential determines who gets help. Federal regulations require oil refiners to blend corn-based ethanol with gasoline to benefit farmers even though experts question its environmental benefits. Mr. Biden wants federal support directed to economically depressed communities and colleges that cater to minorities, whereas high-tech companies gravitate toward elite universities and places where similar work is already being done.
In the 1980s the U.S. imposed restrictions on imports from Japan of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips to protect U.S. market share, but DRAM chips became a commodity business whipsawed by booms and busts. Production has almost entirely left the U.S.
Mr. Warner knows the lesson well. As governor of Virginia, he, like two predecessors, directed state aid to a memory-chip plant just outside Richmond operated by a spinoff of Germany’s Infineon Technologies AG . In 2009, amid a global glut driving down memory-chip prices, the spinoff entered bankruptcy protection and closed the facility, laying off more than 1,000 employees.
Mr. Warner said U.S. semiconductor subsidies must be allocated through a clear, rigorous process without political interference. But “the truth is you could have a panel that makes exactly the right decisions, technology could leapfrog and, five years later, the valid choices made in 2021 could look pretty stupid,” he said.
Mr. Warner said the U.S. has little choice because semiconductor fabs are going to be built and without federal intervention they’ll go to China. “I was a venture capitalist before I was a politician,” Mr. Warner said. “This is the kind of bet America has to make.”
18. Sunisa Lee Is Representing America in the Tokyo Olympics—and a Community America Left Behind
Yes, a great story about a great American and on one hand she represents all that is great with America. Despite the hardships they continue to endure and with the resilience they demonstrate the Homng community is an illustration of the value of Americans who emigrate from other countries. But we do have to examine our past policy decisions and learn from them.
Excerpts:
Lee is from St. Paul, Minn., where many Hmong families like her own resettled in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. After the ethnic group, which lives across Laos, China and Vietnam, was recruited by the CIA to fight in a covert military operation in Laos, now known as the Secret War, the Hmong population was subsequently abandoned when American troops withdrew from Vietnam. Initially denied asylum in the U.S. (unlike the Vietnamese and Cambodians), many Hmong families fled to safety in Thailand. In the late 70s, Hmong refugees eventually began relocating to the U.S. with communities concentrated in Minnesota, California and Wisconsin.
Four decades after the Hmong escaped persecution, the Twin Cities has become the largest urban center of Hmong life. Still, without targeted government services, nearly 60% of Hmong Americans are low-income, and more than a quarter live in poverty. As the first generation of Hmong-Americans born in the U.S. has come of age—the oldest is currently 45—many wear the mantle of being first. Lee is by far the highest-profile athlete—and arguably, thanks to the spotlight of Olympic gymnastics, the biggest star yet.
Sunisa Lee Is Representing America in the Tokyo Olympics—and a Community America Left Behind
In March 2019, a day before her 16th birthday and just over a year before the Olympic Trials were supposed to begin, Sunisa “Suni” Lee appeared on 3 Hmong TV, one of the most popular Hmong-language news shows in the Twin Cities.
Cushioned between her parents, John Lee and Yee Thoj, wearing her Team USA jacket, the newscaster asked, “Do you feel you have high potential to go to the Olympics?”
“Um, I think. I’m not really sure,” Lee says. Her father interrupts, “The important thing is that she has as much potential as anyone on the team.”
Now, two years later, Suni Lee is a singular talent in the world of gymnastics—poised to carry both the hopes of the United States and a community that has not always felt a part of it.
Lee is the youngest of six gymnasts representing the U.S. in Tokyo and the first Hmong-American to compete for Team USA. She has advanced to the finals in the all-around, beam and uneven bars events, where she will contend for medals on July 29, Aug. 1 and Aug. 3. On bars, Lee is favored to win an individual medal with a routine so packed with skills, viewers shouldn’t blink. Her routine earlier in Tokyo earned her a score of 15.4, the highest anyone has received so far, and stepped up to lead Team USA to silver with an unexpected floor routine when teammate Simone Biles pulled out of competition.
USA's Sunisa Lee reacts after competing in the uneven bars event of the artistic gymnastics women's team final during the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at the Ariake Gymnastics Centre in Tokyo on July 27, 2021.
Loic Venance—AFP/Getty Images
A legacy of resilience
Lee is from St. Paul, Minn., where many Hmong families like her own resettled in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. After the ethnic group, which lives across Laos, China and Vietnam, was recruited by the CIA to fight in a covert military operation in Laos, now known as the Secret War, the Hmong population was subsequently abandoned when American troops withdrew from Vietnam. Initially denied asylum in the U.S. (unlike the Vietnamese and Cambodians), many Hmong families fled to safety in Thailand. In the late 70s, Hmong refugees eventually began relocating to the U.S. with communities concentrated in Minnesota, California and Wisconsin.
Four decades after the Hmong escaped persecution, the Twin Cities has become the largest urban center of Hmong life. Still, without targeted government services, nearly 60% of Hmong Americans are low-income, and more than a quarter live in poverty. As the first generation of Hmong-Americans born in the U.S. has come of age—the oldest is currently 45—many wear the mantle of being first. Lee is by far the highest-profile athlete—and arguably, thanks to the spotlight of Olympic gymnastics, the biggest star yet.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when Suni Lee became a household name within the diaspora. Perhaps it was in 2019 when she finished second at US Nationals right behind Biles, or maybe it was later that year when she won her first of three world championship medals. No matter, one thing is clear: her name is a unifying force in her community.
Phillipe Thao first met Sunisa Lee at the Twin Cities’ Hmong New Year in 2019.
Courtesy Photo
“When people of different generations who don’t necessarily pay attention to pop culture or sports start talking about it, it’s a big deal,” says Phillipe Thao, who first met Lee at the Twin Cities’ Hmong New Year in 2019. “I remember seeing a long line of people and wondering what it was for. Everyone was waiting to get a photo with Suni and donate money to her family.”
“Everybody knows Suni,” says Koua Yang, the Athletic Director at Como High School in St. Paul, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1980 during one of the first waves of Hmong refugees arriving stateside. “We get to celebrate as a community, as an ethnic group, one of ours, a shining star at the highest level.”
The cost of success
It’s exceptional to see this kind of investment in young women in particular, says Yang. “I’ve coached Hmong women for many years and I’ve had to beg their parents to let them play. For an athlete like Suni and her family to break out of that is incredible because it takes so much support.”
This feels especially true for people like Patsy Thayieng, a recent college graduate and a former gymnast. “You have to understand, this is a highly inaccessible sport, especially for communities like ours because it’s so expensive and time consuming,” she says.
Gymnastics has relatively high financial barriers compared to other sports. A parent can’t buy uneven bars or a vault for their backyard the way they can a soccer ball (though John Lee did build his daughter a makeshift balance beam when she was younger.) As an athlete becomes competitive, costs rise for travel, uniforms, and club memberships, often totaling thousands of dollars a year. For first generation refugees and their children, it’s often out of reach.
“That’s half the reason I get so emotional. I cry watching how beautiful her routines are. I cry understanding how much time and money her family must have put in to get her to the Olympics.”
With her community behind her
As for many immigrants, Western ideals of individualism often collide with the values at the heart of the Hmong experience: family and community—the urge to turn towards each other during times of catastrophe and celebration. These values are what make Lee’s story so instantly familiar. Televised flashes of her family during competitions are reminiscent of scenes from any Hmong household: restless younger siblings watching YouTube videos on their phones, fists full of food, a parent capturing a glorious moment on camera. And now that she’s in Tokyo, every cheer from back home rings even louder.
Of course, there are limitations to visibility, and the outsized success of an individual can feel incremental, but the ripple effects of having a Hmong Olympian are already starting to surface. Gaomong Xiong, Thayieng’s sister, is a junior in high school and on her school’s gymnastics team.
“Seeing Simone Biles and Sunisa spearhead Team USA is amazing. There was no representation anywhere until Sunisa Lee. It’s different because she’s Hmong, like me. She’s from St. Paul, like me. And so, I think this gives us and future generations a sense of hope.”
Suddenly, dreams of an Olympic stage—impossible a generation ago—no longer feel insurmountable. And those even younger than Xiong can sit comfortably in their optimism. Mor Chia Her’s daughter, Emma Nguyen, 7, has been in gymnastics since she was three years old.
Emma Nguyen, who has practiced gymnastics since she was 3 years old, poses with Sunisa Lee.
Courtesy Photo
“We started following Sunisa’s journey two years ago,” Her says. “Suni has been a great inspiration. My daughter is Hmong and Vietnamese. She’s excited to one day represent both ethnicities in the future Olympics.”
The years leading to Tokyo were marked by radical changes in Lee’s life: her father’s injury, which paralyzed him from the chest down the day before she left for US Nationals, the pandemic and a delayed Olympic games, a broken ankle. Through it all, she has not only persevered but soared, displaying the resilience that the Hmong people have been forced to demonstrate throughout their history.
“I know she’s doing it for her family and for us but I hope she’s doing it for herself too,” says Phillipe Thao.
“Our ancestors who never made it across the Mekong River, our parents and grandparents who struggled to make end’s meet—I hope she doesn’t think of those legacies as pressure but as the bridge to the Olympic stage, because the Hmong community is going to rally around her no matter what.”
19. First Afghan Interpreters Arrive in Virginia
First Afghan Interpreters Arrive in Virginia
More than 200 Afghans are expected to spend a week at Fort Lee before being resettled.
The first planeload of Afghan interpreters who helped American troops in combat has arrived in the United States.
More than 200 Afghans, including family members of people who worked with U.S. forces, were on the first flight out of Afghanistan to Virginia, said Russ Travers, the deputy homeland security advisor on the National Security Council. But more than 2,000 other interpreters and dependents have completed most or all of the security screening and are still awaiting their trip to the United States.
“This flight represents a fulfillment of the U.S. commitment to honor these Afghan’s brave service in helping to support our mission in Afghanistan, in turn helping to keep our country safe,” said Travers, who added that flights from Afghanistan to the United States will continue to relocate translators and their families “over the course of a few weeks.”
The translators are eligible to come to the United States under the Special Immigrant Visa program, which allows Afghans who helped the U.S. military and consequently face threats from the Taliban to safely leave the country. Since 2008, more than 70,000 Afghans have come to America under the program, Travers said.
This first group of refugees is expected to spend about a week at Fort Lee, an Army base near Richmond, Va., where they will receive a medical checkup before being relocated across the country, said Tracey Jacobson, director of the State Department’s Afghanistan Task Force. Jacobson said she hopes to shorten that wait on the base for future flights.
There is also a larger group of Afghans who have started the process to get a special immigrant visa, but have not completed the required security checks to come to the United States. The State Department told Defense One that about 18,000 applicants are seeking visas. Each person on average brings three people--a spouse and two children, according to advocates.
U.S. officials will start moving this group of people “in the coming weeks” from Afghanistan to somewhere outside the United States, where they can be safe from the Taliban while they undergo security vetting and complete paperwork. The Wall Street Journal reported that negotiations are ongoing to use American bases in Kuwait and Qatar to temporarily house these Afghans, but nothing has been finalized.
The White House has asked lawmakers for $1 billion in emergency funding for the evacuation and resettlement effort, CNN reported.
Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have supported the administration’s plan to make sure the Afghans who helped American troops are safe. The House last week passed a bill to streamline visa processing and boost the number of visas available by 8,000. The chamber also recently passed the Honoring Our Promises Through Expedition for Afghan SIVs Act of 2021, which would waive the requirement for interpreters and their families to get a medical exam in Afghanistan before receiving a visa.
The Senate on Wednesday passed a similar bill that would increase the number of visas and postpone the medical exam. The Afghan Allies Protection Act would also make someone eligible after just one year of employment instead of two, ensure Afghans who provided military logistics support could also participate in the program, and provide visas for spouses and children of Afghan translators who were killed.
Members of Congress are trying to help other Afghans as well beyond those who served alongside the U.S. military. On Wednesday, the leaders of the Democratic Women’s Caucus introduced a bill that would prioritize refugee applications for others facing violence from the Taliban, including women’s rights activists, journalists and human rights advocates.
“Their valiant fight for their country and ideals is to be commended, but their circumstances are expected to become even more dire as the Taliban’s territorial offensives rage across the country,” caucus co-chair Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., said in a statement.
Asked whether the White House is considering also helping this group of threatened Afghans, Travers said they would not be covered by the limited Special Immigrant Visa program, but that there are ways the United States can help.
“U.S. Embassy Kabul can make referrals to the U.S. Refugee Admission Program for any Afghans who are well known to the embassy and have both imminent and compelling protection concerns,” he said. “This would, by definition, include women’s leaders, activities, human rights defenders, civil servants, [and] journalists.”
20. Analysis | The Technology 202: Chinese disinformation "much more subtle, much more insidious" than Moscow's, former cyber chief warns
A word of warning to us.
We need to heed these wise words from Nadia Schadlow and HR McMaster from the 2017 National Security Strategy and apply them against China (and Russia, Iran, and north Korea). This has to be a major line of effort in defending American from the revision, rogue, and revolutionary power's malign influence. It is on us as citizens. Yes the 2d Amendment may be necessary for defense of liberty but we need a strong citizen defense against the malign influence. This is an ideological war that engages all Americans .
"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."
Analysis | The Technology 202: Chinese disinformation "much more subtle, much more insidious" than Moscow's, former cyber chief warns
Countering baseless claims online has become a global challenge, former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) director Chris Krebs told my colleague Ellen Nakashima at a Washington Post Live event on Thursday.
“Every government out there — U.S., European, elsewhere — has to be thinking about disinformation as a strategic threat,” Krebs said, calling disinformation one of two key priorities he would flag for his successor, Jen Easterly.
Krebs is no stranger to rebutting baseless online claims.
Former president Donald Trump fired Krebs in November after he refuted Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen. (In January, Krebs and former Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos founded the Krebs Stamos Group.)
In his conversation with Ellen, Krebs doubled down on the importance of combating misinformation, even at a local level. He praised officials in Maricopa County, Ariz., who have denied claims that the election was stolen.
“But ultimately some folks, unfortunately, are too far gone,” Krebs said. “I think there’s an alternate-reality bubble that’s set up around this,” he added, noting that he has seen the “alternate realities that have evolved” firsthand when he dives into Twitter and sees what some people are saying.
Baseless claims about issues like coronavirus vaccines can have real-world consequences, and major social media platforms are key players.
The problem has plagued social media platforms despite a year of fighting it, my colleagues Gerrit De Vynck and Rachel Lerman reported last week.
President Biden has blamed social media companies like Facebook for allowing baseless claims about coronavirus vaccines to fester through a small group of accounts, and he initially called out the company for “killing people” but later clarified his comments.
Facebook said it has made significant progress in fighting coronavirus misinformation by promoting trusted information and removing more than 18 million “instances of covid-19 misinformation.”
Disinformation efforts are getting increased attention after Biden suggested Russia is trying to interfere in the 2022 midterm elections.
“Look what Russia is doing already about the 2022 elections and misinformation,” Biden said in a speech delivered to the U.S. intelligence community this week. “It’s a pure violation of our sovereignty.”
It’s not clear whether Biden was briefed on a specific threat to the election, and a senior administration official declined to clarify the comments.
But Krebs warned that Chinese disinformation efforts can be much more insidious and subtle than those emanating from Moscow.
“They work it at a local level,” Krebs said. “Where Russia tends to be more of the arsonist, they’re much more subtle in terms of laying their groundwork.” Krebs also cited FBI statistics that the bureau opens a new investigation into China every 10 hours and called Chinese efforts a “remarkable campaign.”
Under Krebs’s leadership, CISA pushed back against foreign influence campaigns on social media and used creative tactics to educate Americans on what to trust online.
One of those initiatives came in the form of an infographic warning Americans to be cautious about how foreign adversaries like Russia could exploit Americans’ divisions, in an example scenario: pizza toppings and the “war on pineapple.”
Krebs also touted CISA’s “Rumor Control” initiative, which debunked false claims about the 2020 election and suggested it could be scaled with subject matter expertise.
“I think CISA has an opportunity, just like disinformation-as-a-service is emerging … [through] Rumor Control-as-a-service, pre-bunking, debunking disinformation as it hits us on those infrastructure-related and national security-related topics,” Krebs said. “I think there’s plenty of opportunity there.”
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Advocacy groups said the FTC should crack down on surveillance technology sold by Amazon and other companies.
The 48 groups warned that the technology threatens people of color and the data collected by companies like Amazon entrenches the company’s monopoly power, Motherboard’s Edward Ongweso Jr. reports. The groups went on to urge the Federal Trade Commission to “use its rulemaking authority to ban corporate use of facial surveillance technology, ban continuous surveillance in places of public accommodation, and stop industry-wide data abuse.”
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment from Motherboard.
FTC Chair Lina Khan is a longtime critic of the company. The e-commerce giant wants Khan to recuse herself from matters concerning the company, claiming she is not able to work on them with “an open mind.”
(Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
TikTok is giving users quick, intimate looks at the Olympics, threatening NBC.
The video-sharing platform has surged in popularity, and its videos seem to be getting more views than NBC’s official Olympics coverage, Tatum Hunter reports. Olympic stars have also turned to the platform to share goofy and behind-the-scenes videos.
TikTok users have also shared Olympics clips before they’ve been aired on NBC. TikTok spokeswoman Megan Cook said the company takes copyright infringement “very seriously” and is “continuing to work closely with the [International Olympic Committee] and NBC to identify and take down content that violates their usage guidelines.”
Chinese ride-share giant Didi is thinking about delisting from the New York Stock Exchange to appease Chinese regulators.
The company is considering a move to go private in the wake of scrutiny by Beijing over data security practices, the Wall Street Journal’s Jing Yang reports. The company began thinking about delisting in mid-July as a regulatory crackdown worsened, according to people familiar with the matter.
Didi did not respond to a request for comment, though it later said on the microblogging platform Weibo that “rumors of Didi’s privatization are false” and that it is cooperating with an investigation by Chinese regulators. Chinese app stores were ordered to take down Didi apps in early July.
Rant and rave
Amazon reported strong earnings but missed expectations. NPR’s Alina Selyukh:
CEO Andy Jassy’s absence was noted. The Hollywood Reporter’s Alex Weprin:
The New York Times’s Erin Griffith:
Workforce report
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Tech:NYC executive director Julie Samuels has stepped down. She plans to be involved in the search for her successor and said she will retain a seat on the organization’s board.
Daybook
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NetChoice hosts an event on the implications of U.S. lawmakers and regulators adopting a European antitrust approach on Aug. 3 at noon.
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The Wikimedia Foundation hosts an event on content moderation on Aug. 5 at 8 p.m.
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V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
