Quotes of the Day:
“I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable I will tolerate; if I find them too obnoxious I will break them, I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”
-Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a harsh Mistress
“Paradoxically, to alter our culture, we must address everything other than culture. As John Kotter describes in Leading Change, culture is not amenable to direct attack. No amount of blue ribbon panels, chain teaching or “innovative activity reports” will change culture. Behavior drives culture. To change the culture, we must change behavior.”
- Fastabend and Simpson, Adapt or Die, Army Magazine, Feb 2004.
"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."
- William James
1. ‘Greater China’ is a harmful myth
2. A Near Press Blackout in Afghanistan
3. The defining lie at the heart of American foreign policy
4. Senior Green Berets debunk mental health rumors, fight stigma in podcast series
5. The West’s ignorance about China in Africa is a feature not a bug
6. Rubio's chilling warning: China has weaponized US ‘corporate lust for profits'
7. How to Integrate Competition and Irregular Warfare
8. How an International Order Died: Lessons from the Interwar Era
9. ‘The US is ready’: INDOPACOM leader confident in armed forces’ ability to defend Taiwan
10. Potential military vaccine mandate brings distrust, support
11. A small tweak to how the Army trains new soldiers is dramatically reducing sexual assault reports
12. Advancing a Rules-based Maritime Order in the Indo-Pacific
13. The Cold War is over — or is it?
14. China doubles down on baseless 'US origins' Covid conspiracy as Delta outbreak worsens
15. Taliban won’t readily cut ties with anti-China ETIM
16. China vs West in dueling South China Sea exercises
17. Prospects for a people’s war in Myanmar
18. Guam: A Critical Line of Defense—Threats and Means to Deter and Defend
19. Searching for the Next War: What Happens When Contractors Leave Afghanistan?
20. Refreshing American soft power in the Pacific Islands
21. Alliances in Need of Upkeep: Strengthening the U.S.-Philippines and U.S.-Thailand Partnerships
22. Officer Mike Fanone Survived Jan. 6. Then His Trials Began
1. ‘Greater China’ is a harmful myth
Business, political, and influence operations.
An interesting and important perspective from a friend who has provided us with tremendous insights into what is going on inside the PRC.
Fri, Aug 06, 2021 page8
- ‘Greater China’ is a harmful myth
- By James Lee 李牮斯
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We all had a similar experience when we were kids: “Broccoli or spinach?” mom asked.
“Spinach,” I would respond, not knowing that any vegetables aside from the two presented greens were available. Mom’s trick influenced her kids to eat healthy.
Choice of words can influence human thinking and actions, and even shape people’s perceptions of the world.
Taiwanese understand that words matter. Over the past few weeks when “Taiwan” was spoken in place of the oppressive “Chinese Taipei” at the Tokyo Olympics, it symbolized a fundamental geopolitical shift that was heartwarming to freedom-loving people around the world.
There is also a dark side to the art of language, which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has mastered from its long historical roots of “political struggle.”
When a certain event “hurts the feelings of 1.3 billion Chinese people,” as we too often hear, it is just something not going the CCP’s way. The CCP uses rhetorical tricks to rubbish truth and confuse justice seekers in the international arena.
The good news is that with greater awareness and the use of precise language, democratic governments and Western media have started to inoculate themselves from the CCP’s fog of words.
However, while governments have a good grasp of the CCP’s playbook, the private sector lags behind, creating risks to corporations and their shareholders. Specifically, there is a “Greater China” problem in businesses. The BioNTech vaccine episode is a good example.
There were many forces at play that handicapped Taiwan’s efforts to secure the BioNTech vaccine, but one cannot deny the possibility that a purchase agreement could have been inked months earlier, if not for the exclusive distribution rights given to Shanghai Fosun by BioNTech in “Greater China.”
This translates to lost business opportunities and delayed profits for BioNTech, caused by the company’s unassuming subscription to “Greater China.” In reality, the phrase is outdated and creates future risks.
Decades ago, there was justification for using the term “Greater China” in corporate playbooks when the CCP opened the country to global trade. International companies needed the language and market access know-how from neighboring Taiwan and Hong Kong to tackle the new market. It was efficient to wrap these markets into one verbal description, one idea, and ultimately one organizational structure.
However, the low hanging fruit of revenue in China has been picked as the market matures. The defunct “Greater China” framework no longer provides competitive advantage to companies operating in Asia and could even become a liability right under the nose of corporate executives.
The “Greater China” framework has failed to guide companies such as Kodak, the NBA and so on, in the increasingly nationalistic authoritarian China, which includes Hong Kong. These companies were caught wrong-footed, lost revenue and had to put away their moral compass to impose self-censorship. Other companies more in tune with global affairs got a head start by relocating staff and resources to Taiwan to mitigate risks.
To excel in Asia, businesses need to avoid describing markets, formulating strategies, or worse — structuring businesses — around “Greater China” terms. If not for moral reasons, at least for the profit-seeking fiduciary duty to shareholders.
After all, “Greater China” is an oxymoron that no longer serves sound business rationales. It is great for the CCP’s political agenda, but for shareholders of a company, it means mistakenly treating two markets that have fundamentally different ethical guidelines and rules of law as one and the same.
Or should we say “the lack of rules of law” in the case of authoritarian China, which left Wall Street with a bitter taste in the past few weeks, as hundreds of billions of US dollars were wiped off listed Chinese stocks due to unpredictable CCP policies toward the tech sector.
Not only is the term “Greater China” an impediment to companies’ shareholders, it is also an obstacle to Taiwan’s public health policies, and thus Taiwanese’s well-being. The BioNTech incident is not the lone example. Zai Lab was one of the most successful US-listed Chinese companies, which built its fortune by providing “Greater China” access to international drug companies. After securing exclusive rights in “Greater China,” Zai Lab launched cutting edge treatments in mainland China and Hong Kong, but put Taiwan in the back seat with minimal commercial progress.
If pharmaceutical companies had not fallen for the “Greater China” trap, but instead tackled democratic Taiwan directly as a separate market from authoritarian China, additional profits could have been generated, and healthcare in Taiwan could have received a boost.
There is much the Taiwanese government can do. More than 200 listed companies in the US alone have used the term “Greater China” in earnings calls this year. The list includes blue-chip names such as Microsoft and Nike that our government retirement funds likely have exposure to.
Perhaps in the next earnings call, for national security reasons and as concerned shareholders looking after their investments, Taiwanese portfolio managers should suggest that these companies focus their strategies in “Asia ex-China” or “Indo-Pacific” markets.
Give them a choice between the two, but do not mention “Greater China.” It is good for the health of these companies and for Taiwan.
James Lee is a former hedge fund chief investment officer.
2. A Near Press Blackout in Afghanistan
I don't know. I am not sure if I would come to the conclusion based on the way the commander withdrew. I am sure OPSEC was a consideration and the redeployment of the commander and senior staff is a vulnerable time. To ensure security we gave the perception of a hasty and chaotic withdrawal. Yes, the withdrawal is subject to criticism but what if the Taliban starting lobbing mortars on the airfield when the commander and his staff were preparing to take off? How would we be reporting that now?
I think Thomas Gibbons-Neff of the New York Times and of course FDD's Long War Journal continue to provide good reporting. I think a lot of the "A-list" journalists who were there for the final withdrawal are miffed because they did not get the access they might have thought they deserved.
A Near Press Blackout in Afghanistan
The war that Americans forgot is ending in chaos and secrecy.
August 4, 2021
The exit of the last American commander from Afghanistan was marked by a strange and sombre ceremony. Standing outside the military headquarters in Kabul, among flagpoles left bare by nations that had already pulled down their banners and gone home, Austin Scott Miller, the longest-serving general of America’s longest foreign war, spoke to a smattering of Afghan and U.S. officials and a handful of journalists.
He gave no declaration of victory, nor promise of return. The brief, formal event sounded, at times, like a eulogy. “Our job now is just not to forget,” Miller said. “It will be important to know that someone remembers, that someone cares, and that we’re able to talk about it in the future.”
The mission flag was rolled and handed off from Miller to Marine Corps General Kenneth F. McKenzie, Jr., who will oversee the Afghan operation from Tampa. The guests wandered back into the city; the reporters peeled off. Miller’s travel plans were secret, and there had been quiet warnings against capturing images of the general boarding a helicopter. Gordon Lubold, who covers the Pentagon for the Wall Street Journal, circled back to the headquarters later that day for a meeting, so he happened to hear Miller’s Blackhawk churning up into the Afghan skies, followed by a Chinook carrying members of Miller’s staff.
“They choreographed it so the media would all but leave,” Lubold said. “We didn’t even know he was leaving that day.”
As the United States rushes to remove its troops from Afghanistan this summer, the Pentagon has imposed a de-facto press blackout on their departure. The military has ignored requests for embeds, denied pleas for even perfunctory interviews with troops, and generally worked to obstruct the public’s view of the United States pulling up stakes. Journalists submitted letters of appeal and protest, but they had no effect. The Times editor Dean Baquet intervened, pressing the Pentagon to allow journalists access to troops and requesting a meeting with Miller to make his case. But the general ignored Baquet’s overture, according to people involved in the incident. Martha Raddatz, the longtime ABC military reporter with a track record of Pentagon exclusives, got access to the troops; others did not.
In a sense, the obfuscation was predictable. Leaving a country that many expect will now collapse into civil war, the United States has no victory to declare; it can only acknowledge the reality of relinquishment and retreat. “A military that’s withdrawing from battle, whether it’s an organized withdrawal or a retreat, doesn’t want any media nearby,” said the Getty combat photographer John Moore. “The military wants to show itself in a victorious way. When you’re leaving a field of battle, it never looks victorious.”
Moore, who covered Afghanistan before 2001 and has completed dozens of military embeds there, was among the journalists whose requests to document the withdrawal went ignored. When I messaged the Los Angeles Times reporter Nabih Bulos to ask whether he’d got an embed or a chance to interview troops during a recent trip to Afghanistan, he replied tersely. “I tried. Failed,” he wrote. “They weren’t very accommodating.”
The Pentagon press secretary John Kirby acknowledged the discontent. “I’m not insensitive to that criticism,” he said. He explained that commanders were on guard against Taliban attacks and therefore “miserly” with details of troop movements. He added that a shortage of press officers in Afghanistan made it difficult to arrange embeds and interviews.
To pretend that any war is won or lost is to impose an infantile logic on a complex tangle of murder, primal emotion, and money. Some wars end in mutual exhaustion; others simply go into remission or slip out of our attention range. But it is certainly true that a nation may emerge more or less triumphant from the fray and, along that spectrum, the outcome in Afghanistan was ignominious. The conflict will cost taxpayers more than two trillion dollars, including veteran care and interest on war borrowing, according to the Costs of War project at Brown University, which also estimates that more than a hundred and seventy thousand people died in the conflict, counting Afghan forces, Taliban fighters, and contractors. That figure includes twenty-four hundred U.S. troops and forty-seven thousand civilians who died in a project that failed at its most basic goal of defeating the Taliban, who are now surging back to seize control of districts and, according to human-rights groups, carrying out organized revenge killings.
I went to Afghanistan in 2001, as a young reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and I’ve recently been talking with others who fought, documented, and studied the war. I spoke with old friends and journalism colleagues, with academics, with people in the military and retired from it. I asked everyone the same question: How will the war be remembered? And, strikingly, they all said the same thing: they don’t know, because an answer requires a coherent understanding of the war’s overarching purpose, which nobody has possessed for more than a decade. An occupation that began as an act of vengeance against the planners of September 11th and their Taliban protectors evolved into something more abstract and impossibly ambitious, a sort of wholesale rebirth of Afghanistan as a stable and thriving country. It was a project that few U.S. leaders knew how to complete, but nobody had the strength to stop. And so the United States will end the longest foreign war in its history, and few can articulate what it was for. Naturally, there is dysfunction among the propagandists.
“How can you turn the page on a book when you don’t even know what was written?” Catherine Lutz, a co-founder of the Costs of War project, asked. “We still haven’t done an accounting of all the losses and of all the fraud and abuse.”
The most optimistic assessment of the conflict came from Steve Warren, a longtime Pentagon spokesman who got pushed out of his job early in the Trump Administration. He predicted that the U.S. public would recall the war as having been more successful than Vietnam, though hardly a victory. “The goal was to kill Osama bin Laden. We killed that son of a bitch. He’s dead,” Warren said. “So, win.”
But Warren also spoke of his own disillusionment with the war in Afghanistan, a kind of disgusted fatigue that descended upon him so abruptly and absolutely he compared it to Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. It came upon him years ago, when he’d been assigned to work on the issue of veteran suicides. One day, he simply hit a wall. “I just got so sick of it all,” he said. “What are we doing? Stop. Enough. It’s time to go home.”
The post-September 11th wars have been notable for repackaging invasion and occupation as “nation-building,” a charitable undertaking in which the United States would teach a foreign country how to function better. But the Americans could never present a stable or convincing new reality to ordinary Afghans, who watched as security crumbled and new forms of corruption flowed from the slosh of cash and contracts that came with the occupation. Meanwhile, the Taliban, bolstered by Pakistan, mounted an increasingly effective campaign of insurgency, killing U.S.-backed Afghan troops and police officers at a staggering rate. This uneasy combination of violence and quixotic civic engagement led to genuine confusion among those who served, as well as the American public, who sometimes expressed indignation that invaded countries were not more grateful to the United States. “Are we helping people or are we killing people?” as Warren put it.
As time went on, American interest in reports from the Afghan war seemed to dwindle dramatically. “I didn’t sense a great, strong interest in the Afghanistan story,” Kirby pointed out, until the withdrawal announcement led to a “spike” in journalists eager to rush back to Kabul. Within two years of the invasion, the nation’s magazines and newspapers had started referring to Afghanistan as a “forgotten war.” Soon the phrase “war weary” became a staple in writing about Afghanistan.
If it is, indeed, a forgotten war, perhaps it’s because nobody wants to dwell on the inglorious exploits and depraved alliances that have punctuated it. To single out any one of them is to undersell the others, but to list them all you’d need a book. In Afghanistan, the U.S. and its proxies rounded people up and shipped them off to Guantánamo. It was the country that came under more fire than any other through the controversial program of U.S. drone strikes. In Afghanistan, through a tangle of enemy-of-my-enemy pacts and dubious compromises, the United States found itself backing vicious warlords, including the former military commander Abdul Rashid Dostum, who, early in the war, tortured and then packed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners into transport containers. In their dying hours, Dostum’s captives licked the sweat off their neighbors’ skin in a desperate attempt to slake their thirst. Dostum now controls a heavily fortified hilltop base in Kabul and a feared militia in his northern birthplace of Jowzjan Province; he is a close ally of Turkey, whose troops are now expected to defend the Kabul airport from Taliban onslaught.
Perhaps no single site better symbolized the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, from beginning to end, than Bagram Airfield. Built by the Soviet Union and occupied by Soviet troops during an earlier, similarly ill-fated intervention, it was lavishly refurbished and expanded by the U.S. as the war dragged along.
Last month, however, when it came time to leave, the military simply turned off the electricity and spirited the last troops away in the dead of night. Looters from surrounding villages, realizing that the Americans had left, climbed over the walls and laid waste to the abandoned stocks of Gatorade and Pop-Tarts. The following morning, the Afghan commander caught on that his allies had vanished. Hearing rumors that the last U.S. troops had pulled out of Bagram without informing local officials, the Associated Press reporter Kathy Gannon repeatedly called Colonel Sonny Leggett, then a Kabul-based U.S. military spokesman. According to Gannon, Leggett at first declined her calls. (Leggett, who has left Kabul and is in the process of retiring, said he was no longer authorized to comment and referred questions to the U.S. Central Command; a spokesman, Bill Urban, said that he didn’t know what had happened with Gannon’s calls but that he was sure Leggett was committed to “maximum disclosure with minimum delay.”) The military later said that it had discussed the departure from Bagram with higher-ranking Afghan officials, blaming the confusion on a misunderstanding.
A few days later, Gannon, who has covered Afghanistan since 1986, visited Bagram and spoke with an Afghan commander and his soldiers as they took stock of the abandoned airfield. “These soldiers were just sort of wandering around inside this massive compound. It was their first time there,” she said. “A lot of them were a little bit angry and had a bad taste in their mouth about how it had happened, the fact that the electricity had gone out like that. . . . They felt they were veterans of this war and here they were being left with a skeleton of what was there.”
As I listened to Gannon’s story, I realized that I, too, have pawed through the leavings at a base in Afghanistan. I still have the Pashto-English dictionary I lifted from a hastily abandoned Al Qaeda compound in Jalalabad in 2001. The terrorists had taken their wives and children and fled to the mountains, leaving behind a jumble of baby shoes and bomb-mixing chemicals, fake passport stamps, and a French cookbook. Teen-aged Afghan soldiers wandered the rooms with roses from the garden tucked behind their ears, shooting left-behind chickens for food and shoving plastic toys into their pockets. The neighbors grumbled that the vanished families, whom they called “the Arabs,” were rich and haughty; they had resented the foreigners’ power over local officials and feared angering them.
I recall rooting through the papers like a greedy child shredding Christmas wrappings, and having the sense of not finding what I’d somehow expected. I’d go into rooms, portentous rooms that had been occupied by killers, looking for evidence of violent minds but finding, every time, the dull possessions of human beings.
Now it all loops back on itself. Now the Americans are the ones who came in, walled themselves off, and then vanished in the night.
Between these two withdrawals, there was a stretch when the military thought it could salvage the Afghan story. As it prepared for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon had announced a large-scale program to embed hundreds of journalists with the troops advancing toward Baghdad; the strategy of embedding rotations of reporters to embed with military units soon spread to Afghanistan, puncturing some of the secrecy that had characterized the early days of the war.
Embedded journalists would see things from the perspective of the troops, or so the military planners believed. They’d photograph and write about brave young soldiers. And, of course, reporters tagging along on foot patrols or hanging around on bases would have less time to poke around in the bigger questions of the war, about the money and lives spent, the abuses unfolding in places they would not be escorted to visit.
In the latter Bush and early Obama years, embeds were easy to get and wildly popular for all concerned. Fashion and sports writers came to find their combat angles; local TV crews caught free rides to war zones on military planes; press officers called up their favorite photographers and told them to block off their calendars. You won’t want to miss this.
But, eventually, all of that mutual benefit went sour. The embed program never formally or completely ended, but slowly, during the Obama years, interest from journalists and opportunities from the military dwindled away in tandem. Obama was breaking his promise to withdraw all U.S. troops. Afghan poverty and corruption were getting worse, and the Taliban were resurgent. Trust was so eroded that U.S. trainers wouldn’t step onto a firing range to work with Afghan sharpshooters unless the Afghans’ guns were loaded with blanks.
There wasn’t much to showcase, and the U.S. public was amenable to ignoring it. If it’s true that the military kept the war shrouded when it was convenient, it’s also true that very few Americans went looking for it.
“One of the guiding principles is to keep the American people on our side at all costs,” Warren told me. “Controlling the imagery, controlling the message, controlling the sentiment is always geared toward that singular goal—don’t let the American people think we failed. Don’t let them think that, no matter what.”
So maybe it all worked out: they didn’t have to show us, and we didn’t have to look.
New Yorker Favorites
3. The defining lie at the heart of American foreign policy
This is really a critique of Secretary Albright and of course something we can expect from Bacevich. I do recall the report (or perhaps I read it Colin Powell's biography) about. SEcretary Albirght saying what good is it have a military if we do ont use it.
Excerpts:
Call it INS, shorthand for Indispensable Nation Syndrome. Like Covid-19, INS exacts a painful toll of victims. Unlike Covid, we await the vaccine that can prevent its spread. We know that preexisting medical conditions can increase a person's susceptibility to the coronavirus. The preexisting condition that increases someone's vulnerability to INS is the worship of power.
Back in 1998, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright not only identified INS, but also captured its essence. Appearing on national TV, she famously declared, "If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future."
Now, allow me to be blunt: this is simply not true. It's malarkey, hogwash, bunkum, and baloney. Bullshit, in short.
...
So, here's the deal: history didn't end when the Cold War did. At most, it paused briefly to catch its breath. Now, it's resumed and is darting off in directions we've barely begun to identify. The past that we've been conditioned to cherish, that's supposed to make sense of everything, makes sense of more or less nothing at all. As a result, it won't work as either map or compass. Indispensable Nation? Spare me.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not expecting Madeleine Albright to offer an apology, but it would be helpful if she at least issued a retraction. She might think of it as her parting gift to the nation.
The defining lie at the heart of American foreign policy
Andrew Bacevich, TomDispatch August 05, 2021
"The thirty-year interregnum of U.S. global hegemony," writes David Bromwich in the journal Raritan, "has been exposed as a fraud, a decoy, a cheat, [and] a sell." Today, he continues, "the armies of the cheated are struggling to find the word for something that happened and happened wrong."
In fact, the armies of the cheated know exactly what happened, even if they haven't yet settled on precisely the right term to describe the disaster that has befallen this nation.
What happened was this: shortly after the end of the Cold War, virtually the entire American foreign-policy establishment succumbed to a monumentally self-destructive ideological fever.
Call it INS, shorthand for Indispensable Nation Syndrome. Like Covid-19, INS exacts a painful toll of victims. Unlike Covid, we await the vaccine that can prevent its spread. We know that preexisting medical conditions can increase a person's susceptibility to the coronavirus. The preexisting condition that increases someone's vulnerability to INS is the worship of power.
Back in 1998, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright not only identified INS, but also captured its essence. Appearing on national TV, she famously declared, "If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future."
Now, allow me to be blunt: this is simply not true. It's malarkey, hogwash, bunkum, and baloney. Bullshit, in short.
The United States does not see further into the future than Ireland, Indonesia, or any other country, regardless of how ancient or freshly minted it may be. Albright's assertion was then and is now no more worthy of being taken seriously than Donald Trump's claim that the "deep state" engineered the coronavirus pandemic. Also bullshit.
Some of us (but by no means all Americans) have long since concluded that Trump was and remains a congenital liar. To charge Albright with lying, however, somehow rates as bad form, impolite, even rude. She is, after all, a distinguished former official and the recipient of many honors.
Trump's lies have made him persona non grata in polite society. Albright has not suffered a similar fate. And to be fair, Albright herself is not solely or even mainly responsible for the havoc that INS has caused. While the former secretary of state promoted the syndrome in notably expansive language, the substance of her remark was anything but novel. She was merely reiterating what, in Washington, still passes for a self-evident truism: America must lead. No conceivable alternative exists. Leadership implies responsibilities and, by extension, confers prerogatives. Put crudely — more crudely than Albright would have expressed it to a television audience — we make the rules.
More specifically, Albright was alluding to a particular prerogative that a succession of post-Cold War presidents, including Donald Trump and now Joe Biden, have exercised. Our political leaders routinely authorize the elimination, with extreme prejudice, of persons unwilling to acknowledge our indispensability.
Should Irish or Indonesian leaders assert such a prerogative, American officials would roundly condemn them. Indeed, when Russia's president and the crown prince of Saudi Arabia each had the temerity to bump off an opponent, U.S. officials (in the former case) and the American media (in the latter case) professed profound shock. How could such things be permitted to occur in a civilized world? When an American president does such things, however, it's simply part of the job description.
Three Strikes and You're Out!
Now, allow me to acknowledge the allure of exercising privileges. I once flew on a private jet — very cool, indeed.
Today, however, David Bromwich's armies of the cheated have good reason to feel cheated. Their disappointment is not without justification. The bullshit has lost its mojo. Since the promulgation of the Albright Doctrine, U.S. forces have bombed, invaded, and occupied various countries across the Greater Middle East and Africa with elan. They've killed lots of people, unsettling millions more. And our divided, dysfunctional country is the poorer for it, as the cheated themselves have belatedly discovered.
Blame Donald Trump for that division and dysfunction? Not me. I hold the militant purveyors of INS principally responsible. However contemptible, Trump was little more than an accessory after the fact.
To understand how we got here, recall the narrative that ostensibly validates our indispensability. It consists of sequential binaries, pitting freedom and democracy against all manner of evils. In World War I, we fought militarism; in World War II, we destroyed fascism; during the Cold War, we resisted and "contained" communism. And after 9/11, of course, came the Global War on Terrorism, now approaching its 20th anniversary.
Good versus evil, us against them, over and over again. That recurring theme of American statecraft has endowed INS with its historical context.
Today, in Washington, a foreign-policy establishment afflicted with rigor mortis reflexively reverts to the logic of 1917, 1941, 1947, and 2001, even though those past binaries are about as instructive today as the religious conflicts touched off by the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s.
Confronting evil is no longer the name of the game. Understanding the game's actual nature, however, would require jettisoning a past that purportedly illuminates but actually imprisons Americans in an ongoing disaster.
Today, race dominates the national conversation. And few Americans would deny that we have a race problem. But the United States also has a war problem. And just about no one is keen to talk about that problem.
More specifically, we actually have three problems with war.
Our first is that we have too many of them. Our second is that our wars drag on way too long and cost way too much. Our third is that they lack purpose: when our wars do eventually more or less end, America's declared political objectives all too often remain unmet. U.S. forces don't necessarily suffer defeat. They merely fail. For proof, look no further than the conduct and outcomes of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Two trips to the plate. Two whiffs. How could that have happened? In Washington, the question not only goes unanswered but totally unasked, which, of course, leaves open the possibility of yet another similar failure in the future.
As a long-ago soldier of no particular distinction, I'm mystified at the apparent absence of curiosity regarding the inability of the world's most generously supported military to accomplish its assigned missions. If the January 6th assault on the Capitol deserves a thorough investigation — as surely it does — then how can this nation pass over a succession of failed wars as if they were mere annoyances? Shouldn't our collective commitment to "supporting the troops" include a modicum of curiosity about why they have been so badly misused, even if the resulting inquiry should prove embarrassing to senior civilian and military officials?
Liberal media outlets characterize Trump's claim to have won the 2020 election as the Big Lie, as indeed it is. But it's hardly the only one. Indispensable Nation Syndrome, along with the militarism that it's spawned in this century, should certainly qualify as — at the very least — the Other Big Lie. Curbing Washington's susceptibility to INS requires acknowledging that the proximate challenges facing this country are in no way amenable to even the most creative military solutions. Giving yet more taxpayer dollars to the Pentagon helps sustain the military-industrial complex, but otherwise solves nothing.
Think about it. The defining reality of our moment is the ever-worsening climate chaos that so many of us are now experiencing personally. That threat, after all, has potentially existential implications. Yet in Washington's hierarchy of national security concerns, climate takes a back seat to gearing up for a new round of "great power competition." In effect, a foreign-policy establishment devoid of imagination has tagged Xi Jinping's China to fill the role once assigned to Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany, Adolf Hitler's Germany, Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, and Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
That China and the United States must make common cause in addressing the climate crisis seems to count for little. Nor does the fact that the People's Republic ranks as America's biggest trading partner and holds more than a trillion dollars in U.S. debt. Sustaining the good-vs-evil binary as a basis for policy requires a major enemy. It hardly matters that the most basic assumptions about the continuity between past and present are not only illusory but distinctly counterproductive.
So, here's the deal: history didn't end when the Cold War did. At most, it paused briefly to catch its breath. Now, it's resumed and is darting off in directions we've barely begun to identify. The past that we've been conditioned to cherish, that's supposed to make sense of everything, makes sense of more or less nothing at all. As a result, it won't work as either map or compass. Indispensable Nation? Spare me.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not expecting Madeleine Albright to offer an apology, but it would be helpful if she at least issued a retraction. She might think of it as her parting gift to the nation.
Copyright 2021 Andrew Bacevich
4. Senior Green Berets debunk mental health rumors, fight stigma in podcast series
I have to commend 1st Special Forces Command. They are making good use of podcasts and social media to really inform the force and the public on critical SOF issues.
Senior Green Berets debunk mental health rumors, fight stigma in podcast series
This article discusses suicide and mental health. If you are experiencing suicidal thoughts, contact the National Suicide Lifeline at 800-273-8255 or the Veterans and Military Crisis line by calling 1-800-273-8255 and pressing 1, or by sending a text to 838255.
The Army’s special operations community has borne the brunt of twenty years of war, training and deploying at what a then-senior commander called an “unsustainable” pace. That has led to destructive effects on the mental health of many soldiers, according to two senior special forces NCOs who discussed the topic in a podcast released Wednesday by 1st Special Forces Command.
The podcast featured 1st Sgt. Joshua Thompson, a 19-year special operations veteran assigned to the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, and Master Sgt. Chris Copper, a Green Beret and former Ranger currently serving as the senior enlisted advisor for 1st Special Forces Command’s human performance and wellness initiative.
The two Green Berets have a combined total of 14 combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan between them.
But they weren’t there to talk about their resumes.
They were there to share their personal stories, fight rumors and offer resources for soldiers who might want to seek help.
Master Sgt. Chris Copper from a 2019 Afghanistan deployment. Copper is hosting a series of podcast episodes seeking to reduce the stigma around seeking mental health services in Army special operations. (Courtesy/1st Special Forces Command)
Copper will host a special series of the command’s podcast, The Indigenous Approach, devoted to destigmatizing mental health issues in the Army special operations community.
“We need a way to normalize these feelings and emotions that we have, [and] the ability to share our triumphs and tribulations,” Copper said. “This series of episodes…are meant to be an outlet for sharing these types of stories for those who’ve only known the Army life during the Global War on Terror, and help our fellow soldiers who feel they’re walking this road alone.”
The suicide crisis extends beyond special operations, too. A study released in June estimated that 30,177 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have died by suicide, compared to 7,057 who had died overseas during those conflicts.
There are so many risks for suicide that it's hard to point to the one responsible for the rise in suicides, the report found.
Meghann Myers
June 21
Thompson became a well-known mental health figure in the special operations community after he wrote about his efforts to wear different “masks” for different daily situations in his life.
His team suffered a mass casualty event in Afghanistan that haunted him, so he turned to alcohol.
“I thought it was healthy to go to the [liquor store] once or twice a week and purchase four bottles of whiskey each visit, and make one disappear a day,” he said. “It was like keeping what I had and what I felt to myself.”
It was the suicide death of a close friend that brought Thompson to the point of seeking help.
“His wife stood on stage during the funeral and delivered her message,” he said on the podcast. “I felt as if she was telling my story.”
But rumors about the consequences of reaching out for treatment nearly stopped Thompson in his tracks.
“Everyone knows that if you go to Behavioral Health, you lose your security clearance, right?” he said in his article. “It was also the first question that I asked upon arrival to Behavioral Health.”
Thompson learned that was a myth after he started seeking behavioral health treatment. And when he realized that his story could help show others the way to help, he decided to tell it publicly in spite of his fears it could derail his promotion chances.
“At this point, if this affects my career…screw it,” he said. “If it helps one person, then it was all worth it.”
Copper said the command is working to ensure that leaders at the lowest levels know what mental health resources are readily available for soldiers.
Ultimately, Thompson said, there needs to be a grassroots culture shift: Soldiers struggling with mental health issues should view using behavioral health resources to be routine as physical therapy for injuries — and that starts at the small unit level.
“If you broke your arm, if you broke your leg, what are you going to do? You’re going to go to the doctor; you’re going to get that stuff figured out, you’re going to remain [in the unit]…you may miss a [training] trip, but you’re getting the help that you need,” he said. “And I don’t think that your brain should be any different.”
The episode of The Indigenous Approach podcast titled “The Masks We Wear” released Wednesday and is available through multiple podcast hosting services, including Spotify, 1st Special Forces Command officials said.
5. The West’s ignorance about China in Africa is a feature not a bug
Conclusion:
It’s increasingly not enough to point out the disinformation about Africa-China relations coming out of Washington, Brussels, and Beijing. The real question is what’s the real function of ignorance, and how is it used against the very Africans about whom everyone is so concerned?
Understand Africa's tomorrow... today
We believe that Africa is poorly represented, and badly under-estimated. Beyond the vast opportunity manifest in African markets, we highlight people who make a difference; leaders turning the tide, youth driving change, and an indefatigable business community. That is what we believe will change the continent, and that is what we report on. With hard-hitting investigations, innovative analysis and deep dives into countries and sectors, The Africa Report delivers the insight you need.
The West’s ignorance about China in Africa is a feature not a bug
cold war narrative
By Cobus van Staden
Senior China-Africa researcher, South African Institute of International Affairs
Those of us who concentrate on Africa-China relations have long warned that the current framing of the relationship as a zero-sum arena in a new cold war strips African states of agency.
Cobus is the head of research and analysis at the China Africa Project (www.chinaafricaproject.com), an independent non-partisan media platform dedicated to exploring every facet of China's engagement in Africa where he also co-hosts the weekly China in Africa Podcast and edits the China Africa Project's daily email newsletter.
Posted on Thursday, 5 August 2021 12:51
South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa wants closer ties with China's President Xi Jinping. Tomohiro Ohsumi/Pool via REUTERS
Those of us who concentrate on Africa-China relations have long warned that the current framing of the relationship as a zero-sum arena in a new cold war strips African states of agency.
The problem isn’t only that it flattens the complex compromises African leaders have to make to meet development goals as financing options keep shrinking. It is also that it creates echo chambers in Washington, Beijing, and Brussels that make it impossible to even discuss African realities.
The new cold war narrative
Instead, the new cold war narrative creates a kind of trans-Pacific tunnel vision, where the function of all this Africa talk is actually to allow China and Western powers to better criticise each other. It pushes Africa back into its most familiar role: a silent and silenced symbol ever-ready to play its rhetorical role in any argument. Need innocent victims? We got plenty. Need evil dictators? We have several of those in stock as well!
In the past, we’ve dinged the likes of Antony Blinken and Josep Borrell for trafficking in China-Africa talking points that are oversimplified and decades out of date. We tended to ascribe it to lapses in institutional knowledge. However, I’m increasingly wondering whether this is realistic. Is the problem that these officials simply don’t know the complexity of Africa-China relations despite the think tanks, universities, and highly trained experts that line the streets of wealthy capitals?
Or is it that the new cold war is essentially a space of fiction, and no hard facts can be allowed to pierce its soap bubble walls? In other words, ignorance about Africa-China relations in places like Washington isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. It’s a convenient way to keep the focus on China, while not acknowledging the toxicity of the actual Africa-West relationship, or to reckon with the fact that many African countries’ decision to keep working with China is in part a result of earlier interactions with Western partners.
A recent op-ed in the Boston Herald (seemingly reprinted from the right-wing Washington Times) by Kay C. James, head of the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, provides a great example of this dynamic.
Under the headline “Beware Communist China’s outsized influence in Africa,” she spends a few paragraphs performatively fretting about the “struggling citizens” of the “world’s poorest countries” just trying to get by as China builds “palaces and government buildings for free.”
I feel like a party-pooper in pointing out that in poor countries new government infrastructure is hardly an extravagance, and many of those buildings are actually financed through loans.
Africa Insight
But don’t worry, because she moves right along to brass tacks: the need to keep China from building an Atlantic naval base and for Western countries to regain their death grip on African resources.
On the latter point, her tone reaches full Berlin Conference vibes: “Africa has abundant natural resources that the rest of the world needs and China has considerable influence about the export of these resources […] it may try to cut off the US and the rest of the world.”
No word about what African plans are for those resources, because who cares? Africa has fulfilled its role a few paragraphs earlier (remember how much they’re suffering?) and should now be nice and quiet – the adults are talking.
Bottom line
It’s increasingly not enough to point out the disinformation about Africa-China relations coming out of Washington, Brussels, and Beijing. The real question is what’s the real function of ignorance, and how is it used against the very Africans about whom everyone is so concerned?
Understand Africa's tomorrow... today
We believe that Africa is poorly represented, and badly under-estimated. Beyond the vast opportunity manifest in African markets, we highlight people who make a difference; leaders turning the tide, youth driving change, and an indefatigable business community. That is what we believe will change the continent, and that is what we report on. With hard-hitting investigations, innovative analysis and deep dives into countries and sectors, The Africa Report delivers the insight you need.
By Cobus van Staden
Senior China-Africa researcher, South African Institute of International Affairs
Cobus is the head of research and analysis at the China Africa Project (www.chinaafricaproject.com), an independent non-partisan media platform dedicated to exploring every facet of China's engagement in Africa where he also co-hosts the weekly China in Africa Podcast and edits the China Africa Project's daily email newsletter.
6. Rubio's chilling warning: China has weaponized US ‘corporate lust for profits'
Senator Rubio has a unique critique of the corporate world.
Rubio's chilling warning: China has weaponized US ‘corporate lust for profits'
Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said Wednesday that China has weaponized America's own "corporate lust for profits" against the U.S.
In a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Rubio said, "It is time to wake up" and look at corporate America’s reliance on the Chinese Communist Party.
"U.S. corporations are so desperate to have access to the Chinese market that they’ll lead costly boycotts in an American state that passes a law that they don’t like," Rubio said. "American companies have actually fired Americans who live in America for saying or writing something that China doesn’t like."
Rubio pointed to several instances where American businesses fired employees, removed certain articles of clothing from U.S. shelves, and severed ties to other U.S. businesses due to CCP pressure.
The Florida Republican warned that China’s threat to U.S. interests expands beyond corporate control and amounts to the "biggest illegal wealth transfer from one nation to another in the history of mankind."
"The long arm of China is not some futuristic threat, it’s already here," Rubio said. "China is stealing between $300 and $600 billion a year of American technology and intellectual property."
The senator said that security concerns coming out of China amount to more than cyber and technological-based threats. China's influence affects Hollywood, university research, industrial policies, and startup companies, he warned.
"Today the Chinese Communist Party has more control over what Americans can say, what we can hear, what we can read, what we can watch than any foreign government has ever had in our history," Rubio told lawmakers.
The Florida senator introduced two bills Wednesday that seek to bar U.S. banks from lending to projects controlled by the Chinese government and to otherwise counter CCP influence in the U.S.
The Trump administration took steps to counter threats coming from China and limited how Chinese companies could operate in the U.S. The previous administration renegotiated trade deals and barred telecommunications companies suspected of malign activity -- like Huawei -- from conducting business in the U.S. or with any American companies.
The Biden administration has taken its own measures to counter China. The administration accused the Chinese government of direct involvement in an attack on Microsoft's Exchange email server software last month.
Rubio and other lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee repeatedly emphasized that their concerns solely lie with the CCP and not with the Chinese people or Chinese Americans.
7. How to Integrate Competition and Irregular Warfare
An excellent contribution to the discussion. Few are as well qualified to talk about this from a doctrinal perspective. Robert Burrell was the primary author of the USSOCOM Joint Unconventional Warfare manual (the first and only USSOCOM manual on UW)
My simple description is this:
Great Power Competition is characterized by political warfare. Irregular warfare is the military contribution to political warfare.
Conclusion:
In summary, current joint doctrine constrains our understanding of warfare by offering only two kinds, traditional and irregular, both of which necessarily entail violent action. Broadening our understanding of warfare to include nonviolent activities, including deterrence and irregular competition, provides a more enhanced perspective on conflict as a whole. In particular, the inclusion of irregular competition into theater engagement plans allows the Department of Defense to more effectively address both nonstate opponents and strategic competitors. Such a change in the description of warfare would require revision of Joint Publication 1, which is the cornerstone of all doctrine in the armed forces. An expanded framework would reiterate the necessity of a whole-of-government approach and the importance of nonviolent means of addressing threats. Adopting this change will solve the Department of Defense’s current quest to incorporate strategic competition into doctrine, concepts, and policy—the first step in mounting a successful response to the challenge of great power competition.
How to Integrate Competition and Irregular Warfare
Ever since the 2018 National Defense Strategy, the watchword for the US military has been competition. “Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism,” the NDS declares, “is now the primary concern in U.S. national security.” But in the two years since the document’s publication, how exactly the Department of Defense might best address competition has remained a subject of intense debate. And at the same time as the joint force attempts to incorporate competition into doctrine, it has also begun to readdress irregular warfare, publishing an annex to the defense strategy in 2020 in an attempt to institutionalize irregular warfare as a core competency.
The two priorities of competition and irregular warfare have become conflated with one another. In fact, the Joint Staff has renamed its Office of Irregular Warfare the Office of Irregular Warfare and Competition. These new priorities have led to much introspection on the inability of joint doctrine to address the totality of warfare. One issue derives from the conceptual limitations placed by current doctrine on warfare as a violent struggle. Such a definition fails to address the realities of current interstate competition, which often entails nonviolent means. Take unconventional warfare, for instance. Supporting the armed component of a resistance movement would certainly qualify as violence, but opposition to an oppressive government can come in many forms; assisting a resistance movement that is employing nonviolent protests can prove decisive. The mass movement that brought down the Berlin Wall, for example, accomplished far more than an armed conflict ever could have.
Irregular warfare within states actually occurs along a broad spectrum of conflict, depicted by the graph below. This resistance continuum includes nonviolent protest, illegal forms of protest, and escalating categories of violence ranging from rebellion to insurgency to full-scale belligerency. The United States, as an external actor, can either use foreign internal defense, stabilization, counterinsurgency, or counterterrorism to quell unrest in a partner nation, or it can utilize unconventional warfare to support resistance. Many of these may entail nonviolent measures, which require greater clarity in joint doctrine.
A Doctrinal Void
The Department of Defense has been writing strategy, doctrine, and policy for decades, and so it seems peculiar that nonviolent competition remains unaddressed in the contemporary joint lexicon. During the Cold War, the United States used the term “low intensity conflict” to describe a range of methods for competing with the Soviet Union around the globe. Using influence activities in some cases, offering economic incentives in others, while providing military support elsewhere, the United States countered the Soviet Union without resorting to traditional war. Instead, the Soviet ideology and economic system was defeated by convincing the majority of nations to support a global order built on cooperation, international law, and national sovereignty.
Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the techniques used by the United States to address strategic competitors were neglected. Between 1990 and 2016, a new period of global cooperation emerged. Without a clear strategic competitor, the United States fought irregular wars for two decades against state and nonstate actors who opposed the international order. Today, however, as scholars such as Leo Blanken and Barry Posen have argued, the United States’ liberal hegemony appears to have eroded. China’s and Russia’s opposition to the current world order, and the activities of malign actors such as Iran and North Korea, have contributed to a strategic environment defined increasingly by competition.
The competitive strategies adopted by two nations have the Department of Defense especially concerned. The first is what the Chinese Communist Party introduced as unrestricted warfare. In basic terms, this approach involves a broad array of nonmilitary types of antagonism, including the use of illicit networks, industrial espionage, cyberattacks, propaganda, bribery of public officials, and intimidation—all of which intentionally avoid direct military confrontation with the United States. An example of this approach includes the deployment of a huge Chinese maritime militia composed of hundreds of commercial fishing vessels to drop anchor on disputed islands in the South China Sea. These provocative actions are meant to intimidate the region in order to enforce China’s territorial claims without deploying the People’s Liberation Army Navy.
Russia’s new generation warfare is the second approach to competition that has alarmed the United States. This strategy combines nuclear, conventional, and nonmilitary instruments to produce strategic deterrence, while at the same time offering tools to accomplish strategic goals without international interference. During Russia’s forcible annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, it used subversion, proxy forces, direct military intervention, and coercion to achieve its objectives. With a blend of intimidation, soft power, and irregular activities, Russia accomplished its strategic objectives through actions short of traditional war, leaving the United States and its European allies incapable of a swift and strong response.
Broaden Your Horizon
These novel approaches to warfare by the Chinese Communist Party and Russia (unrestricted and new generation) are only two categories in the ever-growing list of terms to describe modern interstate conflict, which includes gray-zone conflict, hybrid warfare, legal warfare, drug (or crime) warfare, cyberwarfare, economic warfare, trade warfare, religious warfare, proxy warfare, and many others. None of these terms fit nicely into the current joint taxonomy of concepts regarding war. The primary constraint remains that joint doctrine generally addresses military capabilities in terms of violent action (or support for violent action), while many of the evolving approaches to competition use nonviolent means. In the United States, the Department of Defense has played an increasingly influential role in security cooperation, but it is still playing catch up when it comes to the inclusion of nonviolent competition into doctrine.
In a recent article, Eric Robinson brilliantly outlines “the missing, irregular half of great power competition,” suggesting that traditional warfare and irregular warfare definitions may not need significant revision. Instead, Robinson argues that the Department of Defense should incorporate the missing half of related nonviolent conflict by adding both irregular competition and conventional deterrence to the spectrum of nonviolent conflict. Examples of conventional deterrence include establishing alliances, forming coalitions, fostering partnerships, creating trade agreements, and supporting international law. These nonviolent tools, managed primarily by other government agencies, deter overt aggression against the United States from opponents.
Equally important to this new sphere of conventional deterrence, irregular competition addresses interstate conflict short of war (commonly referred to as “left of bang” activities). Irregular competition includes the use of statecraft, military engagements, and economic incentives to either partner with or intimidate middle powers and developing countries. From a Department of Defense perspective, it describes military activities deliberately used to gain influence, from freedom-of-navigation operations in the South China Sea to multilateral training activities in the Baltics. Expanding warfare to include conventional deterrence and irregular competition addresses the totality of competition terminology.
A Prerequisite for Sound Strategy
While challenging, incorporating both competition and irregular warfare into the joint lexicon may not require a massive overhaul of doctrine. The solution requires expanding the scope of unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and stabilization to more systematically address nonviolent aspects. At the moment, these activities are overly constrained by the irregular warfare definition of violent struggle. In fact, irregular activities have always included nonviolent tactics that require greater emphasis in strategy, policy, and doctrine. With this in mind, the model below expands our understanding of warfare in general and demonstrates a more holistic approach to irregular conflict specifically by overlaying the spectrum of violent to nonviolent engagement on Robinson’s model for each of the key irregular warfare activities.
Stabilization inherently encompasses a nonviolent approach to address irregular threats. Unconventional warfare, counterterrorism, and counterinsurgency all arguably use primarily violent means of struggle or irregular warfare, although they also include significant nonviolent actions, while stabilization activities and foreign internal defense generally fall within the realm of nonviolent irregular competition. In the case of unconventional warfare, for instance, a growing number of scholars have argued that fomenting dissent in an opponent’s population could occur prior to establishing a relationship with a dissident or guerrilla group. Cyber activities, for instance, represent a particularly effective and growing nonviolent approach to competition and are applicable to all forms of irregular war.
Unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and stabilization all encompass a spectrum of irregular activities running from nonviolent to violent. By emphasizing violent aspects, the Department of Defense is overlooking some of the most effective means of competition. The recognized goal of irregular conflicts revolves around legitimacy and influence over relevant populations. People are influenced by violence and threats of violence, of course, but equally by factors including money, ideology, religion, and culture. Empowering women through education, for instance, can prove more effective in addressing irregular threats over the long term than killing insurgents. Employment opportunities for young adult males can act as a deterrent to recruitment by armed groups. Only by employing a comprehensive approach that includes nonviolent means can US efforts effectively stabilize a partner or destabilize an opponent.
In summary, current joint doctrine constrains our understanding of warfare by offering only two kinds, traditional and irregular, both of which necessarily entail violent action. Broadening our understanding of warfare to include nonviolent activities, including deterrence and irregular competition, provides a more enhanced perspective on conflict as a whole. In particular, the inclusion of irregular competition into theater engagement plans allows the Department of Defense to more effectively address both nonstate opponents and strategic competitors. Such a change in the description of warfare would require revision of Joint Publication 1, which is the cornerstone of all doctrine in the armed forces. An expanded framework would reiterate the necessity of a whole-of-government approach and the importance of nonviolent means of addressing threats. Adopting this change will solve the Department of Defense’s current quest to incorporate strategic competition into doctrine, concepts, and policy—the first step in mounting a successful response to the challenge of great power competition.
Robert S. Burrell is a retired Marine, award-winning World War II historian, and PhD candidate at Warwick University. He currently teaches irregular warfare at METIS Solutions for Joint Special Operations University. The views stated in this article are his own and do not necessarily represent those of the Department of Defense.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
8. How an International Order Died: Lessons from the Interwar Era
Conclusion:
The collapse of the interwar international order, and the failure of conventional deterrence at its end, resulted in a new war more terrible than any before in human history. What are the key lessons of that disaster? The most obvious is that states opposed to an existing international order may work together despite historical enmity or ideological hostility. Though the Soviet Union and Germany had vastly different visions of their preferred order, they collaborated because their opposition to the status quo was greater than their concerns about each other.
The Western democracies also failed the admittedly tough challenge of defending the existing order, lacking the necessary resolve, unity, and strength. Weak resolve resulted partly from a sense of hypocrisy — British and French leaders themselves undermined the stability of the post-World War I order by violating its precepts of self-determination, collective security, and disarmament. As Lloyd George, who had been British prime minister at the time of the Paris Peace Conference, bemoaned in 1935, Great Britain and France were “in no position morally to enforce those parts of the treaty which they themselves have flagrantly and defiantly broken.” Much of the political spectrum in London agreed.
The unclear resolve of likely adversaries, willing revisionist partners, and revolutionary technological change combined to convince Hitler he could win a new war. There is a risk that similar factors could embolden revisionist leaders today or in the near future. Changes in technology, some argue, represent a new “revolution in military affairs,” which could challenge the existing hierarchy of military power. The rise of autonomous weapons may dent American military predominance, as the expensive capital equipment that constitutes American conventional strength becomes increasingly vulnerable to cheaper autonomous systems. Questions also abound about whether offensive cyber warfare capabilities and anti-satellite technology might have similar effects. Simultaneously, there is growing uncertainty about the willingness and ability of the United States and its partners to defend the order established after World War II. Collectively, these factors may weaken conventional deterrence and suggest opportunities to potential revisionist powers like Russia and China, particularly if they believe that working in concert will deter American intervention.
During the interwar period, British and French leaders ended up encouraging revisionist powers by failing to maintain military forces capable of deterring them. It can be difficult for great powers, particularly democracies, to arm appropriately and quickly when new threats present themselves. French defeat in 1940 marked the end of a 20-year program by German military leaders, which only appeared from Paris to be an existential threat in 1936. Complacency in moments of deteriorating global order and uncertain technological change can mean the collapse of deterrence and, in some cases, disastrous defeat. Embracing imaginative, cutting-edge technology and doctrine in the face of enormous political and financial incentives to maintain legacy systems is one of the greatest challenges to maintaining military predominance. Failing to do so may open a “technological window,” where a revisionist power perceives an opportunity to win a limited war. Perhaps the lessons of the interwar period — rightly understood — may offer some guidance in avoiding such a catastrophe.
How an International Order Died: Lessons from the Interwar Era - War on the Rocks
In the late 1920s, a group of German officers stood side by side at a range, practicing their marksmanship by firing at target dummies dressed in Polish and Czech military uniforms. Standing next to them, and firing at the same targets, were Red Army officers. They were taking a training course together at one of the four joint German-Soviet military bases that were established on Soviet territory beginning in 1925. The German military used the bases to develop and test new technologies of war, train a new generation of military officers, and develop innovative tactics away from the prying eyes of the British and French inspection teams then in Germany. For their communist counterparts, German help meant modernizing and professionalizing the Soviet military.
Such military cooperation was at the heart of nearly 20 years of intermittent collaboration between German and Soviet leaders during the period between World War I and World War II. The partnership was built upon a shared interest in destroying the existing international order, and it would culminate in the return of Europe to war. That moment would arrive before dawn on Sept. 1, 1939, as the German air force unleashed terror bombing against more than 150 towns and cities across the western portion of Poland. Without a declaration of war, 50 divisions of the reborn German army soon crossed the Polish frontier. Sixteen days later, as Poland battled for its life, the Polish ambassador was summoned to the Kremlin in Moscow, where he was informed, “The Soviet government intends to ‘liberate’ the Polish people from the unfortunate war.” A few hours later, 600,000 Red Army soldiers crossed the Polish frontier from the east.
Policymakers and analysts should study the collapse of the interwar order because that era was the most recent period of true multipolarity in the international system. With the return of multipolarity, the interregnum between World War I and World War II is increasingly relevant as a source of historical analogies. In addition, the question of deterring revisionist states — particularly through non-nuclear means — is a major concern of American security and defense policy today. Examining how and why deterrence failed to maintain the status quo in Europe in 1939 — despite the seeming superiority of British, French, and Polish forces — offers useful lessons about the nature of conventional deterrence and the prospects for conflict in the increasingly dynamic contemporary world.
The Post-World War I International Order
Shifts in global order tend to become apparent only at their end. Contemporaries, and many historians, place considerable blame for World War II on the statesmen present at Munich in 1938. In fact, the deterioration of the order established at Versailles had begun almost immediately in 1919, and was largely complete by 1936. By that juncture, Germany, the Soviet Union, and other regional powers had undermined the foundations of the status quo, with the aim of establishing their own versions of regional and global order in its stead.
To understand how German and Soviet leaders destroyed the interwar international order, it is necessary to see what constituted that order. Its most ambitious components were the product of America’s role in final victory in World War I, which provided President Woodrow Wilson with the leverage to demand a new international system. He aimed to replace the power politics he deemed responsible for the outbreak of the war with what would become known as “liberal internationalism.”
The core elements of the new order Wilson demanded included collective security, a decrease in armaments, free trade, recognition of the equality of sovereign states, and the promotion of self-determination. All of these measures were contested in practice among the victors of World War I, particularly after the precipitous American military withdrawal and diplomatic disengagement from Europe. In broad strokes, however, Wilson’s principles shaped the peace settlement: The League of Nations charter, which was a major part of the Treaty of Versailles produced at the Paris Peace Conference, included a mandate to “promote international co-operation and to achieve international peace and security.” While Germany was disarmed as part of the dictated terms of peace, the Allies made clear that they envisioned this as only the first step toward a general disarmament of Europe that would include the victors too. In addition, the principle of self-determination, extended primarily in Eastern Europe, led to the creation of new, sovereign nation-states, most importantly Poland and Czechoslovakia.
German and Soviet Opposition to the Interwar Order
Factions in both Germany and the Soviet state — which had been established as a result of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution — were united in opposing almost all elements of the new order, a fact that became apparent almost immediately. The German military initiated quiet diplomacy with the Bolshevik leadership in Moscow even before the Treaty of Versailles had been finalized. German violations of that treaty, in the form of secret rearmament measures and resistance to reparations, began essentially as soon as it was ratified. In 1922, with the enthusiastic assent of Leon Trotsky — then head of the Red Army — the German military began relocating banned military-industrial production to secret facilities in the Soviet Union. The aim was clear and fundamentally revisionist — in the words of German Gen. Hans von Seeckt, head of the Army Command from 1920 to 1926, “Poland must and will be wiped off the map.”
In 1926, a journalist at the Manchester Guardian revealed some of the details of the German military’s covert rearmament measures in the Soviet Union, of which the civilian government in Berlin was only partially aware. During the public furor that followed in the German parliament, representatives on the right tried to shout down anyone speaking against rearmament. Others gestured toward the American ambassador, who was observing the proceedings from the diplomatic box, and shouted, “Why reveal these things to our enemies?!” The result was a vote of no confidence in the sitting chancellor, but that ushered in a government only further to the political right. It would oversee an expansion of the covert work conducted in Russia. As a result, by the end of 1932 — before Adolf Hitler came to power — then-Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher had already begun to expand the German army to 21 divisions, well beyond the limits set by the Versailles Treaty. And Germany had kept pace technologically with its rivals in critical areas, including tanks, aircraft, military radios, and chemical weapons.
British and French Reluctance to Defend the Order
Defending the international order in the face of this challenge was made much more difficult by doubts among British and French policymakers regarding its value. British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald went so far as to call the Treaty of Versailles “a blot on the peace of the world” in 1933. Tensions between national interests and international commitments confounded British and French leaders. Clear contradictions in the application of self-determination — both within Europe and across European empires — further undermined claims to high principle. And the unwillingness of the French and British publics to support significant military forces in peacetime made punishing minor violations of the Versailles Treaty difficult, even for far-sighted statesmen like Sir Robert Vansittart, the permanent undersecretary at the U.K. Foreign Office.
Limited by these handicaps, the ways in which British and French policymakers did attempt to defend the status quo in Europe were problematic. They were well aware that the order’s biggest problem was that the League of Nations and the Paris Peace Conference treaties did not include or satisfy six of the world’s eight largest economies: the United States, China, Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy, and Japan. To remedy that, leaders in Great Britain and France hoped to draw the United States into engagement with the European financial and security system in a variety of ways, but they met with limited success. They also hoped to incorporate Germany into the order through trade and the gradual amelioration of its reparations payments. The Soviet Union was seen initially as a certain adversary, but that attitude mellowed in London and Paris over time.
As it turned out, these approaches to Germany and the Soviet Union rested on a series of false assumptions and misunderstandings. Both Stanley Baldwin and MacDonald, who were members of the Conservative and Labour parties respectively and served as prime ministers of Great Britain in alternating periods from 1924 to 1937, believed in the logic of engagement. They assumed that reintegrating Germany into the global trade system and incorporating it into institutions like the League of Nations would further liberalize its society and strengthen representative government in the country.
To a degree, that project seemed to be working through the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. But at the same time, while they publicly supported such efforts, the Weimar Republic’s leading politicians simultaneously sought drastic revision of Germany’s place in the international order — including through the redrawing of borders across Central Europe. Even the great Weimar statesman, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Gustav Stresemann favored territorial revision and privately encouraged illegal German rearmament. As a result, between 1922 and 1932, German violations of Versailles continuously grew in scope and scale, while German political leaders still seemed rhetorically committed to partnership with the enforcers of the treaty. Consequently, the British response to secret German rearmament measures was one of confusion. London pushed for French disarmament, which was seen by many in Britain as the legitimate source of German security fears. But this only further emboldened German proponents of rearmament and the revision of the country’s borders by force.
British and French attempts to “liberalize” the Soviet political system through commerce and integration proceeded more cautiously, a consequence of ideological suspicions. But soon after the October Revolution, the Soviet Union resumed foreign trade on a large scale, and in 1934 it was invited to join the League of Nations. Throughout this period, foreign statesmen believed that trade and integration into international institutions would moderate the Soviet regime. Even the Soviet Union’s German military partners — most of whom were hardly sympathetic to liberalism — incorrectly believed that economic engagement would bring about political change in Moscow. In 1922, Seeckt proposed expanding trade with Russia to “undermine the very idea of the Soviet system by making sound alternatives available.” The opposite occurred. Soviet leader Josef Stalin eliminated the relatively market-friendly New Economic Policy in 1928 and embarked on an extraordinarily violent program of collectivization to produce grain for export. The aim was to generate revenue that would pay for machine tools and military equipment.
Attempts to integrate Germany and the Soviet Union into the international trade system failed to change the political aspirations of key decision-makers in those countries and, in the process, helped to strengthen their future capacities for waging war. By the mid-1930s, the increasing strength of revisionist states in Europe and Asia made clear the incompatibility of their interests with the existing order. When Hitler openly announced rearmament in March 1935 — thus challenging the Treaty of Versailles publicly — Italy, France, and Great Britain attempted to use the League of Nations to contain Germany. Known as the Stresa Front, their coalition fell apart within weeks. In an attempt to salvage containment, the French government acquiesced to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, long desired by dictator Benito Mussolini. This blatant violation of the League of Nations charter threw that body into chaos, revealing its impotence. More generally, the entire process made a mockery of the principles of collective security, and the broader ideals that had supposedly been enshrined in the League’s founding document. Unwilling to defend the European order in 1935, the British and French governments “paddled in a puree of words” while doing nothing as Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland and annexed Austria. Negotiations in London in 1935, and at Munich in 1938, aimed to defer conflict as long as possible, but did little to resolve the growing challenge from Germany.
The Final Collapse
By the summer of 1939, there was little left of the old order. Hopes for Europe-wide disarmament were clearly gone and the League of Nations was effectively defunct. But the end of the old order did not inevitably mean the end of peace. At the beginning of August 1939, the French and British militaries were well along in their own rearmament programs, rapidly catching up with Germany. Together, they could mobilize more men than Germany and, considered jointly with their empires, had significantly larger economic capacity for war. Germany lacked the resources to sustain a long war, and was short on oil, iron, coal, and even food. On the face of it, even with the repeated failures to enforce the treaties, rules, and norms established at the Paris Peace Conference, Europe might have remained at peace. The preponderance of military power, at least according to traditional measures, seemed to be in the hands of Great Britain, France, and their partners.
Why then did war break out in 1939? As John Mearsheimer has argued, conventional deterrence often breaks down when policymakers in one state think that changes in the material balance of power offer them the prospect of a quick and decisive victory. Hitler believed exactly that. In November 1937, Hitler told his military leadership that Germany must initiate the next war soon, as Germany had a lead in the development of weapons, and delaying war meant “the danger of their obsolescence.” Hitler’s confidante Albert Speer also recounted how the Nazi leader believed war needed to come sooner rather than later, citing Germany’s “proportional superiority” in weapons technology, which would “constantly diminish” from 1940 onward. In Hitler’s mind, new technologies of war, deployed in innovative ways, offered a key to victory. They made the traditional balance of power, in terms of raw manpower and gross domestic product, irrelevant. It was this perception, along with uncertainty about British and French willingness to defend the existing order after 15 years of permitting German rearmament, that led to the breakdown of conventional deterrence. Hitler believed he could deter British intervention and achieve a rapid victory against Poland in 1939. Germany’s fleeting lead in the arms race, the perceived weaknesses of his rivals, and his partnerships with Italy, Japan, and the Soviet Union all suggested another bloodless victory. But to Hitler’s surprise, Great Britain and France honored their pledges to Poland, and Europe found itself at war once again.
Lessons for Today?
The collapse of the interwar international order, and the failure of conventional deterrence at its end, resulted in a new war more terrible than any before in human history. What are the key lessons of that disaster? The most obvious is that states opposed to an existing international order may work together despite historical enmity or ideological hostility. Though the Soviet Union and Germany had vastly different visions of their preferred order, they collaborated because their opposition to the status quo was greater than their concerns about each other.
The Western democracies also failed the admittedly tough challenge of defending the existing order, lacking the necessary resolve, unity, and strength. Weak resolve resulted partly from a sense of hypocrisy — British and French leaders themselves undermined the stability of the post-World War I order by violating its precepts of self-determination, collective security, and disarmament. As Lloyd George, who had been British prime minister at the time of the Paris Peace Conference, bemoaned in 1935, Great Britain and France were “in no position morally to enforce those parts of the treaty which they themselves have flagrantly and defiantly broken.” Much of the political spectrum in London agreed.
The unclear resolve of likely adversaries, willing revisionist partners, and revolutionary technological change combined to convince Hitler he could win a new war. There is a risk that similar factors could embolden revisionist leaders today or in the near future. Changes in technology, some argue, represent a new “revolution in military affairs,” which could challenge the existing hierarchy of military power. The rise of autonomous weapons may dent American military predominance, as the expensive capital equipment that constitutes American conventional strength becomes increasingly vulnerable to cheaper autonomous systems. Questions also abound about whether offensive cyber warfare capabilities and anti-satellite technology might have similar effects. Simultaneously, there is growing uncertainty about the willingness and ability of the United States and its partners to defend the order established after World War II. Collectively, these factors may weaken conventional deterrence and suggest opportunities to potential revisionist powers like Russia and China, particularly if they believe that working in concert will deter American intervention.
During the interwar period, British and French leaders ended up encouraging revisionist powers by failing to maintain military forces capable of deterring them. It can be difficult for great powers, particularly democracies, to arm appropriately and quickly when new threats present themselves. French defeat in 1940 marked the end of a 20-year program by German military leaders, which only appeared from Paris to be an existential threat in 1936. Complacency in moments of deteriorating global order and uncertain technological change can mean the collapse of deterrence and, in some cases, disastrous defeat. Embracing imaginative, cutting-edge technology and doctrine in the face of enormous political and financial incentives to maintain legacy systems is one of the greatest challenges to maintaining military predominance. Failing to do so may open a “technological window,” where a revisionist power perceives an opportunity to win a limited war. Perhaps the lessons of the interwar period — rightly understood — may offer some guidance in avoiding such a catastrophe.
9. ‘The US is ready’: INDOPACOM leader confident in armed forces’ ability to defend Taiwan
This is necessary to deter an attack.
Excerpt:
“The U.S. is ready for any contingency should it occur,” he said, touting the concept of “integrated deterrence” in such an event.
“That view of integrated deterrence is designed for the entire joint force to be able to operate in a synchronized fashion in all domains — as we integrate cyberspace and space capabilities — as we do it with all forms of U.S. national power,” he said. “And as we synchronize those with our most critical asset — and that is our allies and partners.
“So, when we pull all those together, let me just say that I have a level of confidence that the U.S. military and Department of Defense is in a good place.”
I hope CINCPAC, er... I mean the Commander of INDOPACOM, will be willing to add unconventional deterrence and resilience and resistance among the population to the concept of integrated deterrence.
‘The US is ready’: INDOPACOM leader confident in armed forces’ ability to defend Taiwan
The guided-missile destroyer USS John Finn passes through the Taiwan Strait, March 10, 2021. (Jason Waite/U.S. Navy)
The United States is capable of assisting and defending Taiwan in the event of a military crisis, the commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific said Thursday.
“There is a narrative that we see often in the media that talks about the U.S. and the West in decline,” Adm. John Aquilino, head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, said during a virtual appearance at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado when asked to describe America’s ability to defend Taiwan.
“I think what I’d start with is that that narrative is certainly being pushed by our adversaries,” Aquilino said. “I want to be very clear — we have the world’s greatest military on the planet.
“We are here to continue to operate to ensure peace and prosperity through the region, and we have to be in a position to ensure that status quo remains as it applies to Taiwan.”
Aquilino said Beijing’s heavy-handed actions in Hong Kong since last year have heightened his concern over China’s intentions toward Taiwan, which the Communist Party of China regards as a renegade province that must, at some point, become reunified with the mainland.
Beijing’s heavy-handed actions in Hong Kong have heightened concern over China’s intentions toward Taiwan, Adm. John Aquilino, the head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, said Thursday, Aug. 5, 2021. (Anthony Rivera/U.S. Navy)
Beijing had guaranteed a degree of autonomy for Hong Kong when the British government turned the colony over to China in 1997. But last summer it imposed a new security law that was quickly used to imprison and harass pro-democracy advocates.
The move has left many international observers wondering if Beijing is planning overt military action to reunify Taiwan.
Chinese military aircraft have stepped up incursions into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone over the past year.
The sale “interferes in China's internal affairs and undermines China's sovereignty and security interests,” a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement posted online Thursday.
“China will resolutely take legitimate and necessary counter-measures in light of the development of the situation,” said the statement, which offered no further details.
In light of China’s more aggressive posture toward Taiwan, Hong Kong and the contested South China Sea, questions about how the U.S. would respond to a military crisis in the Taiwan Strait are no longer academic.
During a conference call with reporters Sunday while in Guam, Gen. Charles Flynn, commander of U.S. Army Pacific, was asked whether soldiers could rapidly deploy “in case Taiwan is invaded by China.”
“The Army is always able to rapidly deploy,” Flynn said. “And we have a range of forces out here in the Pacific — from forcible entry forces to motorized forces to sustainment, communications, cyber, electronic warfare, intelligence, security-force assistance — all ranges of capabilities within the Army, that can move at speed and at scale, to conduct operations across the region.”
Aquilino echoed Flynn in his remarks Thursday.
“The U.S. is ready for any contingency should it occur,” he said, touting the concept of “integrated deterrence” in such an event.
“That view of integrated deterrence is designed for the entire joint force to be able to operate in a synchronized fashion in all domains — as we integrate cyberspace and space capabilities — as we do it with all forms of U.S. national power,” he said. “And as we synchronize those with our most critical asset — and that is our allies and partners.
“So, when we pull all those together, let me just say that I have a level of confidence that the U.S. military and Department of Defense is in a good place.”
Wyatt Olson
10. Potential military vaccine mandate brings distrust, support
Leaders at all levels are going to have to work hard on this (from general officer to squad and fire team leader). I believe it is absolutely necessary to have all military personnel vaccinated. It is the only way we can "fight through" COVID. We cannot afford to have another USS Roosevelt pulled from deployment. And we see what happened to the South Korean warship off the Horn of Africa when 267 sailors of the 301 member crew contracted the Delta variant.
But the level of distrust over vaccinations is also going to cause problems for the good order and discipline of the military and trust in the chain of command. Yes the easy answer is to simply demand all military personnel follow lawful orders (and I believe mandatory vaccinations will be a lawful order). But rather than simply say an order is an order the chain of command must work hard to provide the information on why this is necessary and that service to our country necessitates the slight risks from the vaccine. And the health benefits, the responsibility for the protection of fellow service members, and the readiness of the force far outweigh those risks. They are going to have to overcome the vast disinformation network throughout social media that will continue to generate distrust among military personnel.
Potential military vaccine mandate brings distrust, support
SAN DIEGO (AP) — Since President Joe Biden asked the Pentagon last week to look at adding the COVID-19 vaccine to the military’s mandatory shots, former Army lawyer Greg T. Rinckey has fielded a deluge of calls.
His firm, Tully Rinckey, has heard from hundreds of soldiers, Marines and sailors wanting to know their rights and whether they could take any legal action if ordered to get inoculated for the coronavirus.
“A lot of U.S. troops have reached out to us saying, ‘I don’t want a vaccine that’s untested, I’m not sure it’s safe, and I don’t trust the government’s vaccine. What are my rights?’” Rinckey said.
Generally, their rights are limited since vaccines are widely seen as essential for the military to carry out its missions, given that service members often eat, sleep and work in close quarters.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has said he is working expeditiously to make the COVID-19 vaccine mandatory for military personnel and is expected to ask Biden to waive a federal law that requires individuals be given a choice if the vaccine is not fully licensed. Biden has also directed that all federal workers be vaccinated or face frequent testing and travel restrictions.
Unvaccinated service members will be subject to weekly testing, and perhaps mandatory vaccination.
Meghann Myers and Howard Altman
July 29
Lawyers say the waiver will put the military on firmer legal ground so it can avoid the court battles it faced when it mandated the anthrax vaccine for troops in the 1990s when it was not fully approved by the federal Food and Drug administration.
The distrust among some service members is not only a reflection of the broader public’s feelings about the COVID-19 vaccines, which were quickly authorized for emergency use, but stems in part from the anthrax program’s troubles.
Scores of troops refused to take that vaccine. Some left the service. Others were disciplined. Some were court martialed and kicked out of the military with other-than-honorable discharges.
In 2003, a federal judge agreed with service members who filed a lawsuit asserting the military could not administer a vaccine that had not been fully licensed without their consent, and stopped the program.
The Pentagon started it back up in 2004 after the FDA issued an approval, but the judge stopped it again after ruling the FDA had not followed procedures.
Eventually the FDA issued proper approvals for the vaccine, and the program was reinstated on a limited basis for troops in high-risk locations.
Military experts say the legal battles over the anthrax vaccine could be why the Biden administration has been treading cautiously. Until now, the government has relied on encouraging troops rather than mandating the shots. Yet coronavirus cases in the military, like elsewhere, have been rising with the more contagious delta variant.
An unknown fraction of service members who were punished for refusing the anthrax vaccine in the late 1990s and early 2000s have sought to have their records corrected, but only a few have had success.
Todd South
June 4
If the military makes the vaccine mandatory, most service members will have to get the shots unless they can argue to be among the few given an exemption for religious, health or other reasons.
According to the Pentagon, more than 1 million service members are fully vaccinated, and more than 237,000 have gotten at least one shot. There are roughly 2 million active-duty, Guard and Reserve troops.
Many see the COVID-19 vaccine as being necessary to avoid another major outbreak like the one last year that sidelined the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt and resulted in more than 1,000 crewmember cases and one death.
An active-duty Army officer said he would welcome the vaccine among the military’s mandatory shots. The soldier, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said he worries unvaccinated service members may be abusing the honor system and going to work without a mask.
He recently rode in a car with others for work but didn’t feel like he could ask if everyone was vaccinated because it’s become such a political topic. Commanders have struggled to separate vaccinated and unvaccinated recruits during early portions of basic training across the services to prevent infections.
Accommodating unvaccinated troops would burden service members who are vaccinated since it would limit who is selected for deployment, according to active-duty troops and veterans.
“The military travels to vulnerable populations all over the world to be able to best serve the U.S.,” said former Air Force Staff Sgt. Tes Sabine, who works as a radiology technician in an emergency room in New York state. “We have to have healthy people in the military to carry out missions, and if the COVID-19 vaccine achieves that, that’s a very positive thing.”
Dr. Shannon Stacy, who works at a hospital in a Los Angeles suburb, agreed.
“As an emergency medicine physician and former flight surgeon for a Marine heavy helicopter squadron, I can attest that COVID-19 has the potential to take a fully trained unit from mission ready to non-deployable status in a matter of days,” she said.
The biggest challenge will be scheduling the shots around trainings, said Stacy, who left the Navy in 2011 and did pre-deployment, group immunizations.
Arnold Strong, who retired from the Army as a colonel in 2017, said he believes it’s not anything the U.S. military cannot overcome: Troops working in the farthest corners of the Earth have access to medical officers. Given that most people sign up to follow orders, he thinks this time will be no different.
“I think the majority of service members are going to line up and get vaccinated as soon as it is a Department of Defense policy,” he said.
Strong has lost five friends to the virus, three of whom were veterans.
His hope is that the military can set the example for others to follow.
“I would hope if people see the military step up and say, ‘Yes, let’s get shots in arms,’ it will set a standard for the rest of country,” he said. “But I don’t know because I think we face such a strong threat of disinformation being deployed daily.”
Associated Press writer Lolita C. Baldor in Washington contributed to this report.
11. A small tweak to how the Army trains new soldiers is dramatically reducing sexual assault reports
I have to take a slight exception to the headline. We do not want to reduce reports of sexual assault. We want to reduce actual sexual assaults. It has long been a problem that sexual assaults are under-reported. We do not want to suppress reporting. We want to encourage reporting and properly support those making reports as the best way to reduce actual assault. So the question is are reports down or are assaults down?
This is not to take away from what I agree is an important tweak to the training. I think they have done the right thing here.
A small tweak to how the Army trains new soldiers is dramatically reducing sexual assault reports
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A change at one of the Army’s basic training installations has resulted in a huge drop in reports of abusive sexual contact and sexual harassment among recruits in their first weeks of joining the service.
Army recruits are now learning about the service’s Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention (SHARP) program “during the earliest stages of training,” according to a recent Army press release.
New recruits didn’t have sexual assault and harassment prevention training until “roughly two weeks into training” previously, despite the early days of training being “when most cases of inappropriate contact were reported.” Army officials touted a 72% decrease in SHARP reports in 2021 compared to 2020 due to the changes.
Leaders across the Army are looking at ways to prevent the harmful behaviors in our formations. Fort Leonard Wood's SHARP Academy has contributed to a 72% decrease in incidents compared to 2020, and other IET locations are following their lead. https://t.co/UAoMr0TBda
— SMA Michael Grinston (@16thSMA) August 5, 2021
“It’s very important that our newest people know their rights, responsibilities and expectations regarding SHARP as early as possible,” said Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Lillard, the 3rd Chemical Brigade’s sexual assault response coordinator.
Sharon Mulligan, a spokeswoman for U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, said the preliminary results from Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, one of the Army’s four basic training sites, “are very promising and the Army is looking at implementing these changes across the training base.” She added, however, that it’s too soon to have “enough data to measure its success” across Army training units.
Preliminary data from other installations is similar to findings at Fort Leonard Wood, an Army official told Task & Purpose on condition of anonymity.
The training at Fort Leonard Wood includes skits facilitated by a victim advocate over “common examples of sexual harassment and assault,” according to the press release. One scenario includes a soldier attempting “to inappropriately touch another soldier while demonstrating a workout technique.” Another looks at an instance in which two soldiers are overheard rating the looks of other soldiers in their unit. The training also addressed the different kinds of reports victims can make.
“We are trying to demonstrate what we’ve seen, so we can hopefully prevent future incidents from happening,” said Lillard. “We want to set these trainees up for success by showing them that the Army does not tolerate this kind of behavior.”
Drill sergeants in the newly activated 2nd Battalion, 48th Infantry Regiment, welcome their first company of Soldiers to Fort Leonard Wood as part of the End Strength Increase in 2017.
The Army’s SHARP program is undergoing major changes as a result of an independent committee’s review of Fort Hood, Texas, which found major flaws with the SHARP program and senior leaders that many believe are issues across the Army. The committee’s report, commonly referred to as the Fort Hood report, spurred the Army to create its People First Task Force to address the report’s findings.
While the change in how recruits are introduced to the SHARP program in basic training wasn’t one of the 70 recommendations in the Fort Hood report, it’s likely a result of service leaders being forced to confront the way they’ve done things in the past. That introspective approach was displayed at the 18th Airborne Corps earlier this year, when soldiers in the roughly 90,000-strong unit pitched their own ideas for how to improve the SHARP program.
Those ideas included using tools like virtual reality — something the Air Force is also exploring to help teach airmen how to answer questions about the service’s sexual assault programs — and recruiting film schools to help make training more realistic. Staff Sgt. Shameka Dudley, who pitched the idea of using virtual reality to conduct training, said one of the biggest problems with SHARP training is that “there’s a lack of empathy,” but with her training, “you could put someone that has never seen it, never witnessed it and they could be like, ‘I can see how that could affect someone.’”
Fort Leonard Wood’s training didn’t involve virtual reality, but one trainee found the skits and scenario-based training were “a little bit more immersive and helps keep you engaged.”
“Everything was pretty well defined,” Spc. Michael Thompson said. “There was no question about what the expectations are.”
More great stories on Task & Purpose
is the Army reporter for Task & Purpose, covering the daily happenings in the Army and how they impact soldiers and their families, as well as broader national security issues. Originally from Texas, Haley previously worked at Axios before joining Task & Purpose in January 2019. Contact the author here.
12. Advancing a Rules-based Maritime Order in the Indo-Pacific
Issues & Insights Vol. 21, SR 2 — Advancing a Rules-based Maritime Order in the Indo-Pacific - Pacific Forum
Overview
Authors of this volume participated in the Indo-Pacific Maritime Security Expert Working Group’s 2021 workshop that took place, virtually on March 23-24. The working group, composed of esteemed international security scholars and maritime experts from Japan, the United States, and other Indo-Pacific states, was formed to promote effective U.S.-Japan cooperation on maritime security issues in the region through rigorous research on various legal interpretations, national policies, and cooperative frameworks to understand what is driving regional maritime tensions and what can be done to reduce those tensions. The workshop’s goal is to help generate sound, pragmatic and actionable policy solutions for the United States, Japan, and the wider region, and to ensure that the rule of law and the spirit of cooperation prevail in maritime Indo- Pacific.
Table of Contents
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Introduction: Advancing a Rules-based Maritime Order in the Indo-Pacific | Jeffrey Ordaniel, Director, Maritime Programs, Pacific Forum
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Strengthening Maritime Crisis Prevention in Northeast Asia: A Focus on Subnational and Nonstate Actors | Shuxian Luo, Incoming Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Brookings Institution
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The Gaps in Japanese Maritime Security Law and the Senkaku Situation | Yurika Ishii, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Security Studies, National Defense Academy of Japan
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Maritime Security in the East China Sea: Japan’s Perspective | Atsuko Kanehara, Professor, Sophia University; President, Japanese Society of International Law
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Use of Force in International Law and the New China Coast Guard Law | Nguyen Thi Lan Huong, Research Fellow, East Sea Studies Institute, Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam
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Are We Ready for the Quad? Two Contradictory Goals | Kyoko Hatakeyama, Professor of International Relations, Graduate School of International Studies and Regional Development, University of Niigata Prefecture
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Modernizing U.S. Alliances for Maritime Security in the Indo-Pacific | Virginia Bacay Watson, Professor, Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies
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Maritime Governance Capacity Building: A U.S.-Japan Alliance Agenda for Rule of Law in the Indo-Pacific | John Bradford, Senior Fellow, Maritime Security Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University
The Indo-Pacific Maritime Security Expert Working Group’s 2021 workshop and this volume were funded by a grant from the U.S. Embassy Tokyo, and implemented in collaboration with the Yokosuka Council on Asia Pacific Studies (YCAPS).
The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of their respective organizations and affiliations. For questions, please email maritime@pacforum.org.
Photo: The aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76), center left, and the Japanese helicopter destroyer JS Hyuga (DDH 181), center right, sail in formation with other ships from the U.S. Navy and Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) as aircraft from the U.S. Air Force and Japan Air Self-Defense Force fly overhead in formation during Keen Sword 2019 in the Philippine Sea. Keen Sword 2019 is a joint, bilateral field-training exercise involving U.S. military and JMSDF personnel, designed to increase combat readiness and interoperability of the U.S.-Japan alliance. Source: U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Kaila V. Peters/Public domain.
13. The Cold War is over — or is it?
Sometimes I think our weakness is we spend more time trying to name conditions and warfare than we do trying to understand the actual conditions and situation.
As Clausewitz wrote: the "most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish…the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature."
Sometimes I think the American way of war is we have to first come up with a name for it.
I am not criticizing Dr. Ullman as he concludes with some important points though I think deterrence is something that will be enduring simply because of the nature of war and the fear of the absolute war described by Clausewitz can contribute to deterrence (until the primordial trinity gets out of balance (e.g., passion dominates reason - then we are left to chance on the battlefield). I also think alliances will remain a critical part of US national security. But I agree with him that al these concepts should not be taken for granted and should be examined in the context of the current global environment. But I think a deep dive will reveal deterrence and alliances at least will be enduring.
Excerpts:
It is time to reexamine the concepts of containment, deterrence and alliances to determine how and where each is suited for the 21st century and where changes and even substitutions may be required. As massive attacks of disruption (MAD) of both man and nature are becoming far more crucial to national well-being, they must be incorporated into any examination.
Containment, deterrence and alliances have long been the bedrock of Western security, but they are 20th century constructs. What is needed now is to adapt these traditional pillars of security for the 21st century. Failure to act on making this assessment almost certainly cannot help the future safety, security and prosperity of the U.S.
The Cold War is over — or is it?
The Hill · by Harlan Ullman, Opinion Contributor · August 5, 2021
The Cold War has been over for more than three decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Soviet Union’s later collapse. But with the emergence of China and Russia as potential adversaries, the specter of a new cold war cannot be dismissed. This new cold war, if it materializes, would be profoundly different than the first one for several reasons.
First, it will be waged across a broader front in which so-called non-kinetic means will be far more prominent vis-a-vis trade, investment and economic competition, social media, the internet, and other forms of espionage, propaganda, disinformation and misinformation.
Second, unlike the old Soviet Union, China is an economic superpower whose GDP may one day eclipse that of the U.S. Third, both China and Russia have formidable, highly capable militaries, in some cases with technologies equal to America’s.
Currently, U.S. National Security Strategy is based on Cold War assumptions of the 20th century, with the aims being “to contain, deter and, if war comes, defeat” a range of potential adversaries headed by China. During the Cold War, containment, deterrence and alliances were the foundations of American and global security. Containment was directed at keeping the Soviet Union from expanding beyond its borders and invading Europe.
Deterrence ultimately meant reliance on nuclear and thermonuclear weapons that became expressed in the unfortunate shorthand term called MAD, standing for mutually assured destruction. MAD meant that in a thermonuclear war, each side could annihilate the other. Hence, for the first time in history, in war, there could be no winners, only losers.
To contain the Soviet Union, a string of alliances was constructed to surround that huge country in the Atlantic, the Middle East and Asia. NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) was the most formidable. CENTO (Central Treaty Organization) and SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization) would collapse.
Yet, no one has challenged the relevance of containment and deterrence to the 21st century environment when a new MAD involving “massive attacks of disruption” such as a pandemic or extreme weather caused by climate change cannot be deterred and could be more destructive than China or Russia. And related to China and Russia, where can both be contained and deterred and where can they not?
Regarding China, its militarization of islets in its various seas; the building of a strong military; “wolf warrior” highly aggressive diplomacy; its Belt and Road initiative; its use of economic power to intimidate and influence; and its theft of intellectual property and use of internet espionage have neither been contained nor deterred.
Fortunately, China has not historically been a military aggressor; in fact, it’s been far more constrained in using force than the U.S.
Similarly, Russia has not been contained or deterred in its use of “active measures” intervening into the domestic politics of a number of western countries, principally the U.S. It was not contained or deterred from intervening in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine six years later. And Russia continues to embrace aggressive tactics and methods with little restraint.
Last, while NATO is the centerpiece of western security, the U.S. has a number of mutual defense treaties in Asia, principally with Japan, South Korea and the Philippines as well as the more ambiguous Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 (TRA). The U.S. should review these treaties in light of 21st century realities to determine if any changes are required that do not necessitate Senate approval. While some call for making the TRA into a mutual defense treaty binding the U.S. to defend Taiwan if attacked, that would be provocative and unlikely to gain support among the public or in Congress.
It is time to reexamine the concepts of containment, deterrence and alliances to determine how and where each is suited for the 21st century and where changes and even substitutions may be required. As massive attacks of disruption (MAD) of both man and nature are becoming far more crucial to national well-being, they must be incorporated into any examination.
Containment, deterrence and alliances have long been the bedrock of Western security, but they are 20th century constructs. What is needed now is to adapt these traditional pillars of security for the 21st century. Failure to act on making this assessment almost certainly cannot help the future safety, security and prosperity of the U.S.
Harlan Ullman, Ph.D, is United Press International’s Arnaud deBorchgrave Distinguished Columnist. His latest book, due out this year, is “The Fifth Horseman and the New MAD: The Tragic History of How Massive Attacks of Disruption Endangered, Infected, Engulfed and Disunited a 51% Nation and the Rest of the World.”
The Hill · by Harlan Ullman, Opinion Contributor · August 5, 2021
14. China doubles down on baseless 'US origins' Covid conspiracy as Delta outbreak worsens
China doth protest too much. But it will continue to try to push this narrative in the hopes that it will be embraced by cettina political factions in the US. it certainly has widespread acceptance among Chinese social media.
Excerpts:
China's state broadcaster CCTV, meanwhile, aired a 30-minute report this week titled the "dark inside story of Fort Detrick." On Weibo, China's heavily censored version of Twitter, a hashtag related to the report was the top trending topic on Tuesday morning. It has since been viewed 420 million times.
On social media, some government and state media accounts promoted yet another groundless theory from an obscure Italian tabloid, which alleged the US military had spread the coronavirus to Italy through a blood donation program. "Damning evidence! The coronavirus entered Europe from Fort Detrick via a US army blood donation program," read the headline of a widely read story posted by the Communist Youth League, the youth branch of China's ruling Communist Party.
The concerted propaganda push has further fanned nationalist fury against the US. Some Chinese internet users have accused the US of being "shameless," while increasing numbers have taken to referring to Covid as the "US virus" — a dig at the term "China virus" repeatedly used by former US President Donald Trump, who lashed out at Beijing as his administration struggled to contain surging cases and deaths in America.
China doubles down on baseless 'US origins' Covid conspiracy as Delta outbreak worsens
CNN · by Nectar Gan and Steve George, 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.
The wholly unfounded theory, which claims the virus may have been leaked from a US Army lab, has been repeatedly promoted by Chinese officials and state media since March last year.
But over the past week, Beijing has doubled down on the conspiracy, mobilizing its diplomats and vast propaganda apparatus to call for a World Health Organization (WHO) investigation into the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
The campaign comes after Beijing rejected WHO's proposal for a second-phase probe into the origins of Covid-19 last month. The study would include audits of laboratories and markets in Wuhan, the original epicenter of the pandemic. That has drawn the ire of Beijing, with a top Chinese health official accusing WHO of "disregarding common sense and defying science."
WHO released an initial report from its Covid origins study in China in March, concluding the lab leak theory was "extremely unlikely." But a growing number of Western nations and scientists have questioned the thoroughness of the original report, accusing China of "withholding access to complete, original data and samples."
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In late May, US President Joe Biden ordered American intelligence agencies to redouble efforts to look into how the coronavirus originated, including the possibility it emerged from a lab accident.
The intelligence community was required to report back to Biden in 90 days. Since then, no smoking gun has emerged to support the lab leak theory, and many scientists continue to believe the virus is more likely to have jumped naturally from animals to humans. For now, senior intelligence officials say they are genuinely split between the two theories.
Beijing has emphatically rejected the idea the coronavirus could have been leaked from a lab in Wuhan, alleging that Washington is attempting to politicize its origins. And yet at the same time, it is also aggressively pushing a counter-lab leak conspiracy theory without any scientific evidence.
Last month, the state-run Global Times started a campaign calling for people to sign an open letter to WHO demanding an investigation into the Fort Detrick lab. The letter — which only requires a single click online to "sign" — has since gathered 25 million "signatures."
At a news conference last week, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian called for WHO to investigate both the Fort Detrick lab and a laboratory at the University of North Carolina, helmed by leading US coronavirus expert Ralph Baric.
Zhao also suggested American military athletes who attended the World Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019 could have brought the coronavirus into China — reiterating a baseless claim he made on Twitter in March 2020.
China's state broadcaster CCTV, meanwhile, aired a 30-minute report this week titled the "dark inside story of Fort Detrick." On Weibo, China's heavily censored version of Twitter, a hashtag related to the report was the top trending topic on Tuesday morning. It has since been viewed 420 million times.
On social media, some government and state media accounts promoted yet another groundless theory from an obscure Italian tabloid, which alleged the US military had spread the coronavirus to Italy through a blood donation program. "Damning evidence! The coronavirus entered Europe from Fort Detrick via a US army blood donation program," read the headline of a widely read story posted by the Communist Youth League, the youth branch of China's ruling Communist Party.
The concerted propaganda push has further fanned nationalist fury against the US. Some Chinese internet users have accused the US of being "shameless," while increasing numbers have taken to referring to Covid as the "US virus" — a dig at the term "China virus" repeatedly used by former US President Donald Trump, who lashed out at Beijing as his administration struggled to contain surging cases and deaths in America.
CNN finds evidence China is advancing theory that the virus originated in a lab in Maryland (Feb, 2021) 04:12
Beijing's renewed focus on Fort Detrick comes amid the rapid spread of the highly contagious Delta variant across China. Since July 20, the spiraling outbreak — the worst in more than a year — has infected more than 500 people in dozens of cities, placing millions of residents under lockdowns and triggering mass travel restrictions.
The Delta outbreak is posing a major challenge to China's much heralded "zero-tolerence" approach toward infections, and some prominent Chinese public health experts have suggested the country will eventually need to switch to a new strategy and learn to coexist with the coronavirus.
But that is unlikely to be an easy shift. In China, public tolerance toward infections — even if mild — is extremely low, and fear of the virus still runs high. That is partly because China has been so successful in keeping Covid-19 at bay, but also a result of months of unrelenting state media coverage highlighting the devastation of rampaging infections in Western countries.
Since China contained its initial outbreak, Beijing has repeated blamed local flare-ups on the import of coronavirus from abroad, either through air passengers, frozen food or other goods. The source of the latest outbreak, for instance, has been linked to a flight from Russia.
And with the heightened focus on Fort Detrick, the conspiracy theory has just provided another target for those who want to play the blame game.
US-China friendship at the Olympics
Chinese gymnasts Tang Xijing and Guan Chenchen, and US gymnast Simone Biles celebrate after the women's balance beam final at the Tokyo Olympics on August 3.
Between the trade war, military tensions and coronavirus finger-pointing, it's been a rough few years for US-China relations.
But the Tokyo Olympics has allowed athletes from both countries to demonstrate what their governments haven't for years: friendship.
On Tuesday, Chinese gymnasts Guan Chenchen and Tang Xijing won gold and silver respectively in the women's balance beam final, while US gymnastics star Simone Biles claimed bronze. Both Chinese gymnasts are first-time Olympic medalists.
The win was particularly significant for Guan as the 16-year-old identifies Biles as her hero, according to her biography on the Games' website.
After the results were announced, a beaming Biles embraced Guan. Her US teammate and all-around Olympic champion Sunisa Lee, who had loudly cheered on Guan during her routine, also hugged Guan. Afterward, Lee posted on Instagram that she was "so proud" of Guan, and retweeted a video of Guan's dismount from the beam, captioned, "I love her (so much)."
The enthusiastic celebration and the warmth exchanged between the teams — so rarely seen now as US-China relations and public sentiment sour — quickly went viral online.
"We feel the same! This is what it means," tweeted the official Chinese Olympic Committee, along with a heart emoji and a photo showing the celebration between the four athletes.
Even the nationalist Chinese tabloid Global Times chipped in, saying in an article Lee's "sincere and joyous reaction touched viewers around the world."
And many on the Chinese social media platform Weibo praised Biles and Lee for their sportsmanship, arguing the kind of camaraderie they shared with Guan and Tang embodies the true spirit of the Olympics.
"No matter where you are from, what race you belong to, what beliefs you have, people in international society should unite together, making human life better," said one Weibo user, according to state media. "I see that hope at the Olympic Games. These athletes give us a good example."
Chinese regulators eye unruly online fans and pop culture shows as their next crackdown targets
The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection — the ruling Chinese Communist Party's disciplinary watchdog — said Thursday that the Cyberspace Administration of China, the internet regulator, has shut down 1,300 fan groups, disabled 4,000 online accounts, and removed more than 150,000 "toxic" remarks in a recent crackdown against "unhealthy" celebrity fan culture.
"The chaos in celebrity fan clubs, exposed by the 'Kris Wu' incident, reflects that bad fan culture has reached a critical moment that must be corrected," the agency said, adding that "fan club" culture is "crazy" and "devil-possessed."
"We must cut off the black hand of the capital — and curb the wild growth of the entertainment industry, " the agency said.
China's National Radio and Television Administration — the country's top media regulator — has added to the scrutiny on celebrity media culture, saying earlier this week that it would spend a month clamping down on celebrity variety shows that it accused of cultivating "star worship."
Wu, one of China's biggest pop stars, was detained earlier this month by Beijing police. Authorities said the 30-year-old artist has been accused of "repeatedly seducing young women into having sex," adding the case is still under investigation.
CNN reached out to Wu's representatives earlier this week, but did not receive a response. He denied the allegations on his personal Weibo account last month, and his company at the time announced it was pursuing legal action against a woman who accused him of assault, calling the accusations "malicious rumors."
His once wildly popular social media accounts — including a Weibo account with more than 51 million followers — have been taken down. Louis Vuitton, Bulgari and other major luxury brands also cut ties with him last month as the allegations surfaced.
The incident triggered a social media firestorm in China. Many on social media voiced support or expressed thanks to a woman who, posting last month under the verified handle "Du Meizhu," alleged she was sexually assaulted by Wu when she was 17.
But many of Wu's fans also came to his defense. The disciplinary agency held up several examples of what it described as extreme action from fans, including calls to fundraise for Wu's legal proceedings or break him out of detention.
Thursday's statement added to growing scrutiny on the media and online fandoms, and it reflects the government's longstanding, aggressive desire to regulate fan groups and the entertainment industry. Beijing has long been wary of the rise of celebrity worship culture and has made clear that celebrities need to be inoffensive in public to stay in their good graces.
Weibo said Monday that it had removed or banned nearly 1,500 accounts regarding "inappropriate remarks" about the Wu incident.
Around Asia
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Across Southeast Asia, countries with low vaccination rates now face their worst coronavirus outbreaks, driven by the Delta variant — as well as new lockdowns, supply shortages and protests from frustrated citizens.
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At least 17 people were killed and more than a dozen injured after lightning struck a wedding party on a boat in Bangladesh.
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Australian Olympians returning home have been criticized for being "loud and disruptive" after drinking too much on the plane — including throwing up in the bathroom and leaving the toilet inoperable all flight.
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Australia will create a $280 million reparations fund for the "Stolen Generations" in three territories — Indigenous children who were forcibly removed from their families during the country's colonial period, which has caused lasting intergenerational trauma.
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The alleged rape and murder of a 9-year-old girl — who belonged to one of India's most oppressed castes — has prompted a judicial inquiry into the incident, after five days of protests in the national capital.
CNN · by Nectar Gan and Steve George, CNN
15. Taliban won’t readily cut ties with anti-China ETIM
Certainly not what China wants to hear. It will be interesting to see how this plays out for both China and the Taliban (and the ETIM).
Taliban won’t readily cut ties with anti-China ETIM
Taliban's political wing promises Beijing it will break with Uighur terror outfit but ground commanders have a different view
PESHAWAR – China and Pakistan are pressuring the Taliban to make a clean break with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and other terror groups, many of which have sanctuaries in the northeastern and southwestern parts of Afghanistan.
That pressure is building as certain of the groups launch new assaults on Chinese interests in neighboring Pakistan, including the US$60 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project that Beijing seeks to extend to Afghanistan for greater Central Asian connectivity.
China sees the ETIM in particular as a “direct threat to its national security”, Foreign Minister Wang Yi told a Taliban delegation at a recent meeting. The militant group bent on destabilizing China’s western Xinjiang region is also a threat to China’s interests in Pakistan.
Beijing’s request to the Taliban came after a joint China-Pakistan investigation showed ETIM and TTP colluded in a July 14 bus bomb attack that killed nine Chinese engineers working on the CPEC-related Dasu hydropower dam project in Pakistan’s upper Kohistan region.
The attack, which used explosive-laden cars to ram into the bus which sent it hurtling down the side of a mountain, also killed two Pakistani security officials and two others.
The ETIM, comprised of ethnic Uighurs and categorized by the UN and others as a terror organization, is committed mostly to destabilizing China’s Xinjiang region, which it has said it aims to turn into an independent state known as “East Turkestan.”
The Taliban is relying on various terror groups to make battlefield gains, seize territory and eventually take power from President Ashraf Ghani’s government in Kabul in the wake of America’s troop withdrawal.
ETIM fighters at an undisclosed location in a file photo. Image: Twitter
While the Taliban’s jet-setting leadership has vowed to cut ties with such outfits, hardline commanders in the field do not clearly share the sentiment.
Pakistan is known to have conveyed a warning to the Afghan Taliban, saying that global recognition of a potential Taliban-led government in Kabul will hinge on their cooperation in expelling foreign terror outfits from the areas under their control.
Afrasiab Khattak, a politician, intellectual, and Pashtun rights activist, told Asia Times that China’s hope that the Taliban will make a clean break from the ETIM is likely wishful thinking.
“Taliban haven’t done it on al-Qaeda, Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), TTP, etc. Why would they do it on ETIM?,” Khattak said.
The ETIM and TTP moved to Afghanistan border areas from Pakistan’s mountainous region of North Waziristan following a Pakistan army operation known as Zarb-e-Azb in 2014. Other foreign and local terrorist outfits were also pushed into Afghanistan territory during the campaign.
The ETIM and TTP’s main leadership now have sanctuaries and enjoy logistical support in the northeastern and southwestern parts of Afghanistan where the Taliban rule.
Farhatullah Babar, a Pakistani leftist politician, former senator and spokesperson for the Pakistan People’s Party, told Asia Times that it was very unlikely that the Taliban would honor their commitments and desist from harboring foreign terror groups.
“China has drawn the line and the Taliban need to expel all terrorist groups who took shelter in the areas controlled by their forces. However, taking a cue from their previous record of breaking promises, they are unlikely to adhere to their commitments and promises,” he said.
Nine Taliban representatives meet with Chinese officials in Tianjin. In the center are Taliban co-founder Mullah Baladar and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Photo: Chinese Foreign Ministry
Babar referred to a July 25 United Nations report that claimed al-Qaeda continues to operate under the Taliban’s protection in 15 Afghan provinces including Kandahar, Helmand and Nimruz. The Taliban had vowed as part of its February 2020 Doha agreement with the US to cut ties with the transnational terror group.
That disconnect between diplomatic rhetoric and on-the-ground reality reflects divisions between the Taliban’s Political Office, led by Abdul Ghani Baradar Abdul Ahmad Turk, and a more hardline group close to Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanekzai.
The former is leading the Taliban’s interactions with China, Pakistan and others, while the latter is in charge of rank-and-file fighters who reportedly do not see the upside of interacting with the international community and showing moderation – including by cutting ties with aligned battle-hardened groups like the ETIM and TTP.
Pakistan is paying a price for the Taliban’s unwillingness to crack down. Soon after the July 14 Dasu bus attack, Beijing postponed a high-level joint committee meeting for the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Pakistan and halted work on the $1 billion Dasu hydropower project.
As Beijing ramped up pressure on Islamabad over the lethal incident, Pakistan sent a high-profile delegation to Beijing to assuage Chinese leaders and assure them that those involved in the attack would be apprehended and punished.
Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi and Director-General Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Lieutenant General Faiz Hameed flew to Beijing last week to share the findings of the joint investigation report. Pakistani authorities had initially claimed the explosion was caused by a mechanical malfunction, claims Beijing quickly contradicted.
Soldiers move from an army helicopter to a military hospital a Chinese national injured in a bomb attack on a bus in Gilgit, Pakistan, July 14, 2021. Photo: AFP
The incident was the latest in a series of militant attacks on Chinese installations and interests linked to the ETIM in Pakistan. The group has demonstrated exceptional staying power in Pakistan amid decapitations of its top leadership.
ETIM founder Hasan Mahsum, an ethnic Uighur from Xinjiang’s Kashgar region, was gunned down by Pakistani troops in 2003 during a raid on a suspected al-Qaeda hideout near the Afghanistan border.
Abdul Haq took over the militant outfit’s leadership and is believed to have orchestrated a 2007 ETIM attack on a Chinese massage parlor in Islamabad that captured three female Chinese technicians who the Islamic outfit claimed were involved in prostitution.
ETIM militants rushed to the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, for sanctuary after raiding the massage parlor. Beijing’s protest led to a Pakistani commando attack on the mosque, resulting in the killing of over 100 including 14 ETIM ethnic Uighur militants and the shrine’s deputy imam Abdul Rashid Ghazi. Haq was killed in a Pakistani assault in 2010.
In 2013, a video that showed children as young as six firing handguns, AK-47 assault rifles and machine guns at a training camp in Pakistan’s North Waziristan region operated by the ETIM went viral on Pakistan social media.
China protested over the video with Pakistani authorities, demanding that all ETIM-related training camps in Pakistan’s remote tribal areas be dismantled immediately. Beijing’s call motivated Pakistan’s military offensive against the militants in 2014, which pushed ETIM militants back into Afghanistan’s border region.
Pakistan Defense Minister Khawaja Asif, during a visit to Beijing in October 2015, triumphantly told his Chinese hosts that Pakistan had eliminated all members of the Uighur militant group from its territory.
ETIM fighters on the march in Afghanistan. Image: Facebook
Chinese state media released a report in August 2014 stating that Memetuhut Memetrozi, a co-founder of ETIM serving a life sentence in China for his involvement in terrorist attacks, had been indoctrinated in a madrassa in Pakistan.
The report, which claimed Memetuhut had met Mahsum in 1997 and launched ETIM later that year, marked a rare public admission of Pakistani ties to anti-China Uighur militancy.
A similar Chinese probe into a 2011 incident in Kashgar which left 20 dead and hundreds injured revealed that ETIM attackers wielding knives and bombs were found to have trained in Pakistan.
16. China vs West in dueling South China Sea exercises
As long as we stick to exercises and not direct confrontation..... (but hope is not a course of action).
China vs West in dueling South China Sea exercises
Large-scale Chinese maneuvers announced as US allies carry out marine drills in the contested maritime area
China will stage a five-day military training exercise in the South China Sea off southeast Hainan province beginning on August 6, large-scale maneuvers that will provocatively coincide with nearby US-led exercises in the contested maritime region.
According to a China Maritime Safety Administration notice released on Wednesday, China will prohibit ships from entering a restricted area between the Paracel Islands and Hainan island province from early on August 6 to the end of August 10.
Meanwhile, the US Indo-Pacific Command said on August 2 it would conduct the LSGE21 with the United Kingdom’s armed forces, Australian Defense Force and Japan Self-Defense Force. It said the US would train with allies and partners to improve interoperability, trust, and shared understanding to better address security challenges impacting all nations.
“We view with concern China’s unlawful claim to the entire South China Sea directly and negatively impacting all of the countries in the region, from their livelihood, whether it be with fishing or access to natural resources,” John Aquilino, commander of the United States Indo-Pacific Command, said during a presentation at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado on August 4.
The US commander added that he was concerned by China’s suppression of Hong Kong and human rights issues in Xinjiang, as well as China’s military actions at the border of India. “Those are the things that lead me to believe that our execution of integrated deterrence has to occur now and with a sense of urgency,” Aquilino said.
Global Times published an editorial warning the UK Carrier Strike Group, led by HMS Queen Elizabeth, not to carry out any “improper acts” when passing through the South China Sea. Photo: AFP / Ben Stansall
On Tuesday, the US Navy said it had started the Large-Scale Exercise (LSE) 2021.
“We have shifted focus from the individual Carrier Strike Group (CSG) to a larger fleet-centric approach, challenging fleet commanders’ abilities to make decisions at a speed and accuracy that outpaces the adversaries,” Christopher Grady, commander of the US Fleet Forces Command, said.
“LSE is more than just training; it is leveraging the integrated fighting power of multiple naval forces to share sensors, weapons, and platforms across all domains in contested environments, globally.”
In the US, a CSG normally consists of one aircraft carrier, one guided-missile cruiser for air defense, two warships for anti-submarine and surface warfare and one to two anti-submarine destroyers. A naval fleet refers to a large formation of warships controlled by one leader.
‘Black hands’
On Wednesday evening, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi said in a speech at the 11th East Asia Summit (EAS) Foreign Ministers’ Meeting that “foreign powers” must stop extending “black hands” in South China Sea issues and show “four respects” respect historic truth, international law, countries in the region and their agreements.
Wang said the historic truth was that China was the first to have discovered, named and explored and exploited the South China Sea Islands and relevant waters while the country had reclaimed sovereignty of the islands from Japan after World War II.
He said according to international law, China had corresponding maritime rights and interests over the Nansha Islands. He added that China and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries had agreed to settle disputes peacefully through consultations and negotiations under the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said China was the first to have discovered the South China Sea Islands Photo: AFP / Anadolu Agency
“Some forces outside the region deployed a lot of advanced carriers and aircrafts to South China Sea and try to lure more external countries to come to the region and show their muscles,” Wang said.
“China and ASEAN countries should have a clear mind against the bad intentions of these foreign forces and say no to behaviors that could hurt the peace, stability and countries’ unity in the region.”
On July 29, Global Times, a communist party mouthpiece, published an editorial to warn the UK’s Carrier Strike Group, led by the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth, not to carry out any “improper acts” when passing through the South China Sea.
Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the Global Times, said the Chinese army would open fire if UK warships entered the 12 nautical miles surrounding Chinese claimed islands and reefs in the region. In the end, the UK did not sail near the contested areas.
On Monday (August 2), the German Navy’s frigate, Bayern, set sail from the port of Wilhelmshaven for a seven-month-long journey across a dozen ports in the Indo-Pacific that will likewise traverse the South China Sea.
“China has no objection to freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. As long as European warships pass through the South China Seas normally in accordance with international law, they will not create a conflict with China,” Hu said in his latest video.
“We strongly hope that the commanders of those warships have the strategic awareness of maintaining their country’s relations with China and will not take willful actions in the South China Sea.
“China is not afraid of provocateurs. Neither Britain nor Germany has the power to fight China in the South China Sea. I believe they are very clear on this,” Hu added.
The chance of a direct military conflict between China and the West is still remote in the short term, military experts say.
Military expert Shi Shan said on his YouTube channel that the PLA would not deploy troops and warships to the restricted area in the South China Sea as it usually took several months to prepare for such kinds of large-scale drills. Shi said the PLA might launch some missiles in the area during the five-day exercises, but only to give a warning to the US, UK, Australia and Japan.
In August 2020, China launched four missiles from Qinghai and Zhejiang at a designated target in the South China Sea. However, two of the missiles reportedly missed the target with one falling down in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.
17. Prospects for a people’s war in Myanmar
I would be curious to read an intelligence assessment of this and then study any military and interagency planning to address potential contingencies in Burma. What if anything are the US and ASEAN and the regional powers going to do about this situation of probably epic proportions which is a humanitarian disaster in the making?
I fear there is a huge and bloody fight in the making: a civil war.
Prospects for a people’s war in Myanmar
Proliferating People's Defense Forces have the spirit but may not have the means to launch an anti-military civil war
BANGKOK – It has taken peaceful protests, bloody massacres, economic collapse and a lethal pandemic but six months after Myanmar’s military seized power from an elected government, one reality has become entirely clear: For all the anguished outrage and diplomatic hand-wringing, the “international community” is not coming to the rescue.
The people of Myanmar are on their own with their military jailers and face a simple choice: roll over or fight back. As a countrywide campaign of bombings, targeted killings and armed clashes launched by local “People’s Defense Forces” or PDFs indicates, many of the country’s youth made that choice some time ago.
More difficult to gauge is where this campaign of grass-roots resistance is headed, what it might realistically achieve and how. Media hyperbole aside, Myanmar is not yet at the point of civil war.
It has, though, descended into a state of violent anarchy marked by a collapse of civil administration and a vacuum of governance that widens by the day. Across much of the country’s heartland, military repression has veered into forays by marauding bands of soldiers killing, looting and occasionally burning entire villages.
PDFs have struggled to fight back, if not in direct confrontations, then with often anonymous and brutal vigilante violence that increasingly sets civilians against civilians and risks spilling into the settling of personal or criminal disputes.
This anarchy may well intensify, but it will not likely last. Over the coming nine months through until the monsoon of 2022 arrives next May, Myanmar will almost certainly begin to shift decisively along one of two broad trajectories.
One could see the military, or Tatmadaw, bring to bear its very real strengths – cohesion, discipline, resources and a capacity for unrestrained violence – in reasserting the control of its newly-minted “caretaker government” over central Myanmar.
Reimposed inevitably at different speeds in different regions, military rule would remain widely hated and occasionally subject to violent challenge.
Over time, however, it would provide the basis for stability and a gradual economic revival supported by Russia, China and other Asian states. On that basis, the Tatmadaw would roll out a planned reconfiguration of the electoral system guaranteeing outcomes in line with its vision of tightly-controlled, or “discipline flourishing”, democracy.
The alternative trajectory would involve a descent into civil war in which today’s fragmented opposition to military dictatorship in the county’s ethnic Bamar heartland achieves a level of organization, leadership and strategic planning needed to sustain resistance and exploit the Tatmadaw’s own vulnerabilities while maintaining the active sympathy of key ethnic minorities.
There is no inevitability about either course: The future of Myanmar remains up for grabs. But both trajectories will hinge on an interplay of factors, most already discernable – what former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously termed “known unknowns.”
There will also undoubtedly be a few “unknown unknowns” – events and personalities still unseen.
A People’s Defense Force group in military training at a camp near Demoso in Myanmar’s eastern Kayah state, July 7, 2021. Photo: AFP
People’s Defense Forces
The most striking “known unknown” turns on the PDFs. The first ill-organized groups began to emerge in early April primarily in the hinterlands of northwestern Sagaing Region and western Chin State, where on April 4 the Chinland Defense Force (CDF) announced its formation.
Late April and early May saw a dramatic proliferation of groups of varying capabilities such that by mid-July around 125 separate groups in both urban areas and rural regions had declared their opposition to the military’s State Administration Council.
Some – but not all – also declared their allegiance to the opposition shadow administration of the opposition National Unity Government (NUG), set up in mid-April.
At ground level, the impact of PDFs has been palpable though hardly decisive. And in recent weeks it has been attenuated by the impact of both the Covid-19 pandemic and monsoon rains. But activity persists and new fighting coalitions have been announced as groups have sought to pool their resources.
Based on clandestine cells, urban PDFs have focused almost entirely on two primary tactics: bombings using mostly still rudimentary improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and targeted assassinations. Their targets have been overwhelmingly “soft”: local ward offices and other government facilities as well as civil administrators, suspected military informants and members of the Tatmadaw’s political proxy, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP).
In the rural hinterlands, PDFs have developed more overtly as embryonic and still poorly armed insurgent bands. In addition to hitting many of the same soft target-sets seen in the cities, they have also repeatedly attempted to repel Tatmadaw incursions into villages with ambushes by local volunteers using hunting rifles and improvised landmines, often claiming to inflict significant casualties on the military.
Rural-based operations have been notably more effective in ethnic minority regions where newly formed PDFs have been able to operate or establish relations with pre-existing ethnic insurgent groups such as the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), the Karenni Army (KA) and others.
Battlefield cooperation that translates into PDF access to modern weapons emerged dramatically in early June in Kayah state on Myanmar’s eastern border, as well as in southern parts of Kachin state and the adjacent Sagaing Region, where PDFs have fought alongside KIA units. In Chin State, the small Chin National Army (CNA) has opened training facilities for PDF members.
A member of the Karenni People Defense Force shows his weapon at a camp hidden in the forested hills of Kayah state near the Thai border, July 2021. Photo: AFP
How far ethnic armies will be willing to supply PDFs with modern weapons and in what quantities nonetheless remains a key question. The late June seizure by the Tatmadaw of a large consignment of KIA-manufactured small-arms and grenade launchers headed for the Mandalay region suggested that one pipeline at least is open for business.
But with arms markets in Thailand and Cambodia largely run dry, purchases from sympathetic ethnic sources would need to be crucially supplemented by capture from every guerrilla’s closest quartermaster – the enemy.
Another critical “known unknown” centers on the opposition NUG. Since its April 16 establishment on a platform of federal democracy, the NUG’s record has been mixed.
With a leadership composed of ethnic majority Bamar parliamentarians from the ousted National League for Democracy (NLD) government and personalities drafted from minority communities, the shadow government has gained some recognition as a putative alternative to a Tatmadaw regime struggling with a crippling deficit of political legitimacy.
It has also succeeded in presenting itself as a point of contact for Western governments unwilling to endorse the military’s power-grab, even if under the current circumstances they remain unwilling to extend formal diplomatic recognition to a body whose leaders are geographically scattered and which controls no territory.
Less clear is whether a shadow administration with an uncertain presence on the ground can assert itself as a central planning body and potential quartermaster for a kaleidoscope of local PDFs that without coordination and strategy risk being crushed piecemeal.
Dominated by an older generation of politicians working under the shadow of detained NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi, the NUG has yet to present any dynamic, let alone charismatic, leadership figures likely to inspire a youth-driven resistance movement.
Nor to date has it been able to command the respect of powerful combatant ethnic armed groups on which it remains largely dependent for sanctuary, training and bases of operations.
Tatmadaw firepower
The military and its vision for the future are mostly “known knowns.” But for all its obvious strengths, the Tatmadaw is a sprawling and often shambolic giant with vulnerabilities that the current crisis has highlighted.
Notwithstanding bullish estimates in media reporting of a standing army 350,000-strong, the Tatmadaw’s effective combat strength is undoubtedly far lower.
Calculations by Western analysts based on the extent of recruitment shortfalls and chronic under-manning in centrally commanded Light Infantry Divisions (LIDs) and regionally based Military Operations Commands (MOCs) suggest that line infantry battalions are unlikely to number more than 120,000 troops.
In recent years, LIDs in particular have been overstretched by constant deployments and often high casualties in the ethnic borderlands of Kachin, Rakhine, Karen and Shan states.
Myanmar soldiers on the march amid an anti-coup protest. Photo: AFP / Getty / Hkun Lat
Today, a vastly extended area of operations imposed by the coup has compounded a perennial problem. In the space of a few weeks, the army has been forced to disperse manpower in support of police at the township-level across much of central Myanmar in addition to ongoing combat and garrison duties in insurgency-prone ethnic states.
A second challenge has been pressure to develop operational intelligence on a threat that only a few weeks ago did not exist, even as PDF elements aggressively target the military’s “eyes and ears” – civil administration officials and suspected security force informants
Thirdly, the army has no airborne (parachute) or air-assault (heliborne) capabilities worth the name and only limited strategic airlift assets, all key to rapid mobility in a counterinsurgency campaign. Basically, its operations depend on vulnerable lines of ground and riverine communication and resupply.
The scale of the first two challenges has been reflected in the Tatmadaw’s scramble to raise and arm new militias. Since May, the main thrust has centered on the so-called Pyu Saw Htee, a plainclothes force tasked with both local security duties such as vehicle searches, as well as undercover surveillance and identification of PDF operatives.
Named after a warrior prince of Burmese history, the Pyu Saw Htee comprises units of 50 to 100 men based on township centers and is drawn from a pool of Tatmadaw veterans and family members, along with USDP loyalists and members of the hardline Buddhist-nationalist MaBaTha movement. Best estimates suggest a still expanding force of at least 10,000 and perhaps as many as 15,000 men loosely supervised by the Tatmadaw.
Predictably, the proliferation of Pyu Saw Htee units to counter PDF activity has led to a sharp rise in targeted killings of its members and their families by PDF elements. Militiamen have retaliated with killings of NLD and suspected PDF members.
Building resistance
Against this chaotic backdrop, building a capacity for sustained resistance aimed at exploiting the Tatmadaw’s weaknesses confronts both the NUG and PDFs with a daunting array of challenges. Whether they are insurmountable, as several analysts who spoke to Asia Times suggested, remains to be seen.
Not least is the need to develop a strategy for protracted guerrilla conflict aimed initially at survival over the coming year, denying the Tatmadaw the consolidation of its coup and eroding the morale of its personnel at field level.
Protracted coup resistance and its inevitable cross-border repercussions would also impact the international environment. A key objective would be undermining the calculus of major neighbors – Thailand, India and China – predicated today on the assumption that, as in the past, the Tatmadaw will soon crush popular dissent and prevail.
Sustained resistance would also provide sympathetic democracies with more solid justification for diplomatic recognition and conceivably financial or even material aid.
Protesters wearing signs in support of the People’s Defence Force during a demonstration against the military coup in Dawei, May 17, 2021. Photo: AFP / Dawei Watch
Implicit in any strategy for protracted struggle, however, is the need to resist the suicidal allure of “urban guerrilla warfare.” Recently, persistent rumors have suggested the coming weeks may bring a coordinated wave of so-called “D-Day” attacks by PDFs countrywide, presumably organized by the NUG and its defense ministry and almost certainly centered on urban areas.
If there is any truth to the rumors, “D-Day” may briefly seize headlines but will likely cost many lives, lose popular support and end only one way. As 20th century revolutionary movements in China, Vietnam, Algeria and other theaters all discovered, even guerrilla forces enjoying wide popular support have no prospect of survival in well-garrisoned urban areas which they cannot hope to capture.
The American and South Vietnamese defeat of the communist Tet Offensive of January 1968 affords perhaps the bloodiest illustration of this truth. The Tet uprising in cities across South Vietnam was a politically dramatic but hugely costly gamble from which the Vietcong never fully recovered as a military force.
As relevant to Myanmar today is the Indian security forces’ systematic elimination of genuinely popular Kashmiri insurgents who between 1990 and 1991 attempted to base themselves in the state capital of Srinagar.
Moving district by district, an army-led campaign rooted them out with a mix of coerced and paid informants, house-to-house searches and overwhelming firepower when cornered rebels chose to stand and fight.
If quixotic urban adventures can be avoided, the return in the coming months of a significant cohort of several thousand fighters from training camps in ethnic minority-controlled borderlands could serve to reinforce PDFs in the hinterland with a crucially needed injection of capabilities.
In addition to basic weapons training, many young returnees will bring with them a range of military-technical skills such as expertise in demolition and sabotage, communications and intelligence. Some will offer leadership potential and a few, the vital ingredient of personal charisma.
Beyond training, however, at least four other elements would be critical to any viable resistance campaign in the rural hinterlands of central Myanmar. The first is effective coordination between emerging fronts, something which in embryonic form appears to have coalesced in recent weeks.
The second requires unremitting harassment and interdiction of lines of road, rail and river communication aimed over time at establishing insurgent-dominated “no-go” areas where Tatmadaw forces can penetrate only in force and at cost. And the third demands an appreciation that the overriding tactical priority in every engagement must be the seizing of munitions from the enemy.
People’s Defense Force fighters taking part in military training at their camp near Demoso in Kayah state, July 6, 2021. Photo: AFP
Finally, the success of resistance in the heartland will hinge critically on advancing relationships with key ethnic armed groups that provide rear areas for the sanctuary, training and logistical aid without which insurgency in central Myanmar would struggle to survive.
Those relations will need to be built on the basis of a new humility on the part of Bamar opposition forces and the NUG, as Myanmar’s ethnic armies now have real choices. One would be to support the resistance either with a view to using Bamar insurgents to tie down and bleed the Tatmadaw; or, more ambitiously, to finally break the military’s stranglehold on national political power.
They also have an alternative course: securing their own regions behind new ceasefires and promises of autonomy that the Tatmadaw will be sure to offer as it turns to strategies of divide-and-rule honed over decades. For the first time since Myanmar’s independence in 1948, the balance of national power appears now to lie largely in the hands of its long-dispossessed ethnic minorities.
18. Guam: A Critical Line of Defense—Threats and Means to Deter and Defend
Guam: where America's day begins. And it is key to the US military supporting any contingency operations throughout the INDOPACIFIC.
Excerpt:
In the event of conflict with Russia, China or North Korea, Guam would very likely be subject to air and missile attack, including in the case of North Korea, the potential use of nuclear weapons. However, it is the conventional long-range precision strike capabilities of Russia and China that pose the most significant and pressing challenge; both are capable of conducting complex, multi-directional air and missile strikes, and have either already deployed or are developing advanced capabilities including low observable and hypersonic systems. In addition, Russia has disclosed that it is developing an electromagnetic pulse warhead for missiles – Alabuga, akin to the U.S. Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP), which would further complicate air and missile defense efforts.[24]
I wonder when we are going to see China really embark on an information and influence campaign among the people of Guam to turn against the US government and for putting them and their island at risk. I hope someone is paying close attention to local Guam politics and how the people of Guam may bec coming under the influence of Chinese psychological and media warfares. We must more effectively compete in the information space with our own American citizens than the Chinese.
Guam: A Critical Line of Defense—Threats and Means to Deter and Defend
James Bosbotinis, Harris S. Fried, David Shank, Guam: A Critical Line of Defense–Threats and Means to Deter and Defend, No. 498, August 4, 2021
Dr. James Bosbotinis is an Associate Member of the Corbett Centre for Maritime Policy Studies, King’s College London, and co-founder of Citadel Analytics.
Harris S. Fried, Esq.
Harris S. Fried, Esq. is an international lawyer and Chairman of Citadel Air Defense Systems LLC.
Colonel David Shank, USA (ret.)
Colonel David Shank, USA (ret.) is the Senior Land Forces Consultant with Advanced Strategic Insight, Inc., and serves on the Citadel Analytics Board of Directors.
Given the shifting global balance of power from the Euro-Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific, highlighted by the rise of China, the island territory of Guam, part of the Marianas in the western Pacific, forms a central component of U.S. strategy in the region.
Hosting multiple military facilities, in particular Andersen Air Force Base and Naval Base Guam, which is home to four Los Angeles-class nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs) and various other units operating in the Indo-Pacific. Andersen Air Force Base provides a key hub for U.S. airpower in the Indo-Pacific, including hosting bomber deployments, and would be critical to any contingency in the region.
Separated by 3,000 km. from the Asian mainland, Guam has not been exposed to the same degree of potential threat compared to more forward U.S. bases such as those in South Korea or Japan (with the exception of nuclear-armed Chinese and Soviet/Russian ballistic missiles). However, the air and missile threat to Guam is growing: North Korea has acquired the capability to target the island, while Russia and China are deploying potent long-range precision strike capabilities, which could be utilized to prosecute complex, multi-directional attacks.
Threat Overview
There are two principal threats to Guam, that posed by long-range ballistic and cruise missiles, and that posed by aircraft. The latter is currently limited but likely to grow significantly over the next decade as new Russian and particularly Chinese air systems enter service. The ballistic and cruise missile threat will similarly evolve over the coming decade as new capabilities, such as hypersonic glide vehicles and hypersonic cruise missiles are deployed.
The growing air and missile threat to Guam has been highlighted by the recently departed Commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (USINDOPACOM), Admiral Philip Davidson, who consistently stressed the requirement for a near-term improvement in air and missile defense capabilities deployed on the island, particularly Aegis Ashore.[1] His successor, Admiral John Aquilino, reiterated the importance of developing the Aegis Guam Defense System in his remarks to the Senate Armed Services Committee considering his nomination for Commander USINDOPACOM.[2] The following is an overview of the principal North Korean, Russian and Chinese developments influencing the air and missile threat to Guam.
North Korea
North Korea has tested two intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) potentially capable of threatening Guam, the BM-25 Musudan and the Hwasong-12, both of which are road-mobile, liquid fueled, and likely capable of delivering a nuclear warhead.[3] In August 2017, North Korea threatened to launch Hwasong-12s toward Guam with projected aimpoints 30-40 km. off the island.[4]
Although the Musudan and Hwasong-12 could also deliver conventional warheads, neither missile could be employed in the precision strike role. North Korea’s development of a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) capability, centered on the Pukguksong-3 and associated Sinpo-class diesel-electric ballistic missile submarine (SSB) could potentially threaten Guam in the mid-to-long-term[5], although at present, the range of the Pukguksong-3, estimated at around 1,900 km., would require an SSB to deploy into the Philippine Sea or Pacific, evading South Korean, Japanese and U.S. anti-submarine forces, a most challenging task.
In January 2021, North Korea unveiled a new SLBM, the Pukguksong-5, which may have a range of 3,000 km., enabling it to target Guam from the Sea of Japan.[6] Moreover, Kim Jong-Un stated in an address on 9 January that Pyongyang was developing a nuclear-powered submarine, as well as hypersonic glide vehicles, and a conventionally-armed intermediate-range cruise missile.[7] Although such threats are unlikely to appear in the near-term, the continued development of advanced weapons systems by Pyongyang highlights the long-term trajectory of the North Korean threat, including a potential long-range precision strike capability.
Russia
At present, Russia can target Guam with nuclear-armed intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (such the SS-19, SS-27 and SS-N-23 respectively) and dual-capable air and ship/submarine-launched cruise missiles, including the AS-23A/B (Kh-101/102) and SS-N-30 (Kalibr).
Air and sea-launched cruise missiles such as the low-observable, extended-range (4,500 km.) Kh-101 and Kalibr (range of 2,000 km.) provide a long-range precision strike capability[8], which will be further enhanced as new missiles enter service, namely the sea-launched Tsirkon hypersonic cruise missile capable of a speed of Mach 9 with a range of 1,000 km.; an air-launched hypersonic cruise missile – the GZUR, with a range of 1,500 km., capable of Mach 6 and sized to fit within the bomb bay of a Tupolev Tu-95MS Bear; and the Kalibr-M, an enlarged derivative of the Kalibr, with a range of 4,500 km., which is due to enter service in the mid-2020s equipping ships and submarines and, following the collapse of the INF Treaty, a ground-launched variant has been reported.[9] Ground-launched Kalibr-Ms would be capable of targeting Guam from the Russian Far East.
A developmental intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the RS-26 Rubezh, a two-stage derivative of the three-stage RS-24 Yars ICBM, may yet be deployed as an IRBM. Given the importance attached to the development of long-range precision strike capabilities in Russia’s wider military modernization efforts, the deployment of a conventionally-armed variant of the RS-26, equipped with a terminally-guided maneuvering re-entry vehicle for prosecuting land and maritime targets, akin to the Chinese DF-26 IRBM, is likely. Similarly, the deployment of a hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV), based on the ICBM-launched Avangard, in the sub-strategic role is potentially likely.
Russia is modernizing its bomber forces and intends to resume production of the Tupolev Tu-160 Blackjack; production of the upgraded Tu-160M2 is due to commence in 2023, with a requirement for at least 50 new aircraft to be acquired.[10] The avionics and other systems under development for the Tu-160M2 will also be utilized in the Tu-22M3M. Following on from the Tu-160M2, Russia intends to start production of its next-generation long-range bomber, the PAK DA – Prospective Aviation Complex for Long Range Aviation – in the late 2020s.[11]
The PAK DA is envisioned to be a subsonic, flying-wing low-observable bomber, with a range in excess of 9,000 miles, and armed with a variety of advanced weapons, including long-range cruise missiles, hypersonic missiles, and potentially, air-to-air weapons. Although Russian bombers are currently capable of prosecuting stand-off missile strikes on Guam, the PAK DA, if successfully developed, would give Russia additional strike options while constituting a significant defensive challenge.
China
China is developing a potent long-range precision strike capability, including ground and air-launched ballistic, and air and sea-launched cruise missiles, which could prosecute targets on Guam. This is centered on the DF-26 4,000 km. range dual-capable IRBM, which features a terminally guided maneuvering re-entry vehicle conferring a precision strike capability against land and maritime targets; the potentially dual-capable CH-AS-X-13 air-launched ballistic missile, which may be equipped with a hypersonic glide vehicle[12]; the air-launched 1,500-2,000 km. range KD-20 (a derivative of the ground-launched CJ-10), which equips the H-6K; a naval variant of the CJ-10 equips the Type 052D Luyang III-class destroyer[13], Type 055 Renhai-class cruiser[14], while the Type 093B and future nuclear-powered attack submarines are likely to be armed with the missile.[15]
An air-launched variant of the CJ-100 high-speed cruise missile may equip the H-6N.[16] China is investing in a broad-based hypersonic technology base for military and other applications[17]; interest in an air-launched hypersonic strike capability has been reported[18], and it is likely that the DF-ZF HGV that equips the DF-17 will be integrated with other missiles such as the DF-26.
Through the course of this decade, China will be capable of conducting complex, multi-directional strikes involving subsonic, supersonic and hypersonic cruise missiles together with precision-guided ballistic missiles and HGVs.
Alongside its missile assets, China is investing in the development of its air capabilities, including a new strategic stealth bomber – the H-20, a regional bomber[19], and carrier airpower, namely the new Type 003 aircraft carrier currently under construction.[20] Although China’s current H-6K bombers are capable of prosecuting stand-off missile strikes against Guam, they are not capable of operating in defended airspace.
In contrast, the H-20, with an expected combat radius of 5,000 km., and designed to be stealthy with an advanced electronic warfare capability to enhance survivability, will likely be capable of operating in the face of an adversary’s air defenses. Similarly, the Type 003 aircraft carrier, to be equipped with catapults and arrestor gear and thus able to operate a wider range of aircraft than the current ski-jump-equipped Liaoning and Shandong, and expected to enter service in the mid-2020s, will mark a significant step up in China’s aircraft carrier capabilities.
The Type 003 carrier will likely embark a fifth-generation fighter aircraft – possibly the J-35[21], the KJ-600 airborne early warning and control aircraft, and unmanned air systems providing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and strike capabilities. Further, a Type 003 carrier would not be operating in isolation, but as part of a strike group with accompanying Renhai and Luyang III surface combatants and one or more submarines.
Moreover, a carrier strike group could operate in conjunction with land-based long-range strike systems, for example, carrier-based aircraft (manned or unmanned) providing ISR support to long-range missile strikes[22], carrier-based fighters providing offensive counter-air support or the direct escort of strategic bomber operations. That is, by the late 2020s, China will likely possess the capability to prosecute joint land and sea-based air and missile strikes against defended targets, such as Guam. The DF-26 can be armed with nuclear warheads, and a small number of nuclear-armed DF-4 IRBMs remain in service, which could target Guam.[23]
Defending Guam
In the event of conflict with Russia, China or North Korea, Guam would very likely be subject to air and missile attack, including in the case of North Korea, the potential use of nuclear weapons. However, it is the conventional long-range precision strike capabilities of Russia and China that pose the most significant and pressing challenge; both are capable of conducting complex, multi-directional air and missile strikes, and have either already deployed or are developing advanced capabilities including low observable and hypersonic systems. In addition, Russia has disclosed that it is developing an electromagnetic pulse warhead for missiles – Alabuga, akin to the U.S. Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP), which would further complicate air and missile defense efforts.[24]
Responding to the evolving air and missile threat requires a multi-faceted approach, encompassing: an emphasis on distributed and cross-domain operations; passive measures including dispersal, hardening and deception; active measures including enhanced early warning, electronic and cyber warfare capabilities (for example, to deny, disrupt and destroy supporting kill chains for precision strike systems), counterforce targeting of threat systems and launch platforms, and the development of enhanced air and missile defense systems, including directed energy weapons.[25]
Based on the strategic importance of Guam and the military capability assigned to the island, it is very clear that a layered air and missile defense is necessary. The current air and missile defense located in proximity to Guam currently is a U.S. Army Terminal High Altitude Air Defense (THAAD) battery and U.S. Navy Aegis destroyer(s), both capable of defending primarily against short range and medium range ballistic missiles.
It is for this reason that a fair argument can be made for the establishment of an Aegis Ashore capability, which would allow the Aegis destroyer(s) to be re-missioned elsewhere, as well as the need for counter-unmanned aerial systems (C-UAS), a cruise missile defense capability such as the National Advanced Surface to Air Missile Systems (NASAMS), and a lower-tier air and missile defense capability such as the Patriot weapon system. These four layers, integrated on a common network architecture, would deliver the air and missile defense necessary to provide for a layered air and missile defense of possibly the most strategic U.S. location in the region. Such an approach would address the limitations of the Aegis Ashore system, as highlighted by Vice Admiral Jon Hill, Director of the Missile Defense Agency, and Admiral Harry Harris, former commander of U.S. Pacific Command, particularly with respect to countering air-breathing threats.[26] Vice Admiral Hill has also suggested that elements of an Aegis Ashore capability on Guam may need to be mobile or underground due to Guam’s “challenging” mountainous terrain.[27]
Given the critical importance of the Indo-Pacific, Guam will remain a core component of U.S. strategy in the region. The development of credible integrated air and missile defenses on Guam is therefore a priority, as Admirals Davidson and Aquilino and others, have emphasized. Perhaps most importantly, the deployment of robust defenses on Guam capable of responding to the spectrum of possible air and missile threats will enhance the credibility of U.S. deterrence and the avoidance of conflict.
Notes:
[12]. See Ankit Panda, “Revealed: China’s Nuclear-Capable Air-Launched Ballistic Missile,” The Diplomat, April 10, 2018, available at https://thediplomat.com/2018/04/revealed-chinas-nuclear-capable-air-launched-ballistic-missile/. Also see Greg Waldron, “Chinese H-6N appears with mysterious ballistic missile,” flightglobal.com, October 18, 2020, available at https://www.flightglobal.com/defence/chinese-h-6n-appears-with-mysterious-ballistic-missile/140671.article.
[26]. John Grady, “MDA Chief: U.S. Needs Hybrid System to Defend Guam From Missile Threats,” USNI News, June 23, 2021, available at https://news.usni.org/2021/06/23/mda-chief-u-s-needs-hybrid-system-to-defend-guam-from-missile-threats; and Harry Harris, “Aegis Ashore Too Limited For Guam: Former INDO-PACOM Head,” Breaking Defense, July 9, 2021, available at https://breakingdefense.com/2021/07/aegis-ashore-too-limited-for-guam-former-indo-pacom/.
[27].Grady, “MDA Chief: U.S. Needs Hybrid System to Defend Guam From Missile Threats,” Ibid.
The National Institute for Public Policy’s Information Series is a periodic publication focusing on contemporary strategic issues affecting U.S. foreign and defense policy. It is a forum for promoting critical thinking on the evolving international security environment and how the dynamic geostrategic landscape affects U.S. national security. Contributors are recognized experts in the field of national security. National Institute for Public Policy would like to thank the Sarah Scaife Foundation for its generous support that makes the Information Series possible.
The views in this Information Series are those of the author and should not be construed as official U.S. Government policy, the official policy of the National Institute for Public Policy or any of its sponsors. For additional information about this publication or other publications by the National Institute Press, contact: Editor, National Institute Press, 9302 Lee Highway, Suite 750 |Fairfax, VA 22031 | (703) 293- 9181 |www.nipp.org. For access to previous issues of the National Institute Press Information Series, please visit http://www.nipp.org/national-institutepress/information-series/.
© National Institute Press, 2021
19. Searching for the Next War: What Happens When Contractors Leave Afghanistan?
Just a guess but the Afghan military probably cannot be sustained with contractor assistance as a minimum.
A lot to parse in this article.
The author is asking where will all these contractors go? Where is the next big opportunity for contractors and private military corporations?
Some interesting anecdotes and views from contractors. And there will be some second and third order effects within poor countries that provide contractors so they can economically support their families back home. What if they cannot find adequate overseas contract work?
Excerpts:
“There are 12 of us Nepalis here, and four of us have applied for jobs with Vectrus [a defense contractor] in Iraq.” Manandhar said he heard the starting salary is $9,000 per year. If he can get one of the jobs, he plans to go. But he concedes, “No one wants to leave their family and go to a war zone. I’d rather be at home having a good time with my family. But I come here because it’s a compulsion.”
As the United States increased its reliance on contractors from one contractor for every 100 soldiers in the first Gulf war to a ratio in Afghanistan where there were often more contractors than soldiers, other countries have followed suit. There are reports of Russia hiring more contractors; many Gulf countries now rely on them to fill the ranks of their militaries and it is more and more common for private companies to build out their own militias. The end of U.S. involvement in the war in Afghanistan is not the end of the conflict, and may actually be an inflection point as many of these contractors move on to less transparent war zones.
Over the past 20 years, conflicts have become more likely to blend commercial and political aims, and more likely to pull in contractors from poor countries like Nepal, while providing them with fewer protections. What will change with the end of U.S. involvement is access for journalists and academics who have studied these practices. This will make the shadowy world that Shrestha works in more difficult to understand and exploitation more likely.
Searching for the Next War: What Happens When Contractors Leave Afghanistan?
As U.S. troops withdraw, many contract employees – most of them from poor countries, including Nepal – are leaving Afghanistan and fanning out around the world.
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Gyanendra Shrestha* spent most of the past 13 years in Afghanistan, helping the United States fight its longest war. A month and a half ago, he was laid off from his job guarding a gate at Bagram Airbase, in preparation for the U.S. troop withdrawal. His employer, the defense contracting company AC First, sent him home to Sindhuli District, in Nepal’s Himalayan foothills. Speaking with The Diplomat by phone, Shrestha says that some of his former colleagues in private security contracting are now finding work in other war zones and he, too, is considering whether to venture abroad again.
The U.S. war effort in Afghanistan has relied heavily on so-called Third Country Nationals (TCNs) like Shrestha — workers from poor countries in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and beyond — who work for contracting companies that serve the military, Department of State, and USAID. Often invisible in media presentations of the war, TCNs perform work ranging from guarding convoys to cooking meals on bases, and from building installations to defusing mines. Many do work nearly identical to that of U.S. soldiers. Now, as U.S. troops withdraw, many TCNs are leaving Afghanistan — and fanning out around the world.
“Some of the guys from my company are trying to get jobs with contractors in Iraq now,” says Shrestha. Other TCNs are looking for work with the militaries of Gulf countries reliant on contracted private security, or in oil refineries in West Africa, or in casinos in China, or with shadowy firms in Syria.
Recent reports suggest that private security contractors from Latin America were unwittingly recruited to assist in the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse. Listening to Shrestha discuss the various recruiting firms that these contractors are now working with, it is easy to see how contractors, many of whom have been thoroughly trained with U.S. tax dollars, could end up inadvertently participating in such activities.
In Afghanistan, TCNs often risked their lives for far less pay than their American counterparts at contracting companies, and are often exploited by their employers. Post-Afghanistan, as these vulnerable workers are pulled into even less transparent conflicts, it has become more likely that they will be injured, killed, or exploited.
***
A Nepali Army veteran, Shrestha first embarked for Afghanistan in May 2008 at the age of 37 because his paltry military pension was insufficient to support his family. He says he paid an underground labor agent 250,000 Nepali rupees (nearly $5,000 in today’s dollars) to arrange a job, traveling first to Delhi and then to Kabul on an Afghan tourist visa. But upon arrival, Shrestha learned that the job had not, in fact, been arranged. He spent the next nine months waiting in a boarding house and living illegally without a visa, gradually using up his own meager funds, before getting a job on Bagram Airbase.
Shrestha in many ways was lucky. We interviewed other TCN contractors who paid bribes to secure contracts or visas that never materialized. Some thought they were going to comfortable jobs in Gulf countries, only to wind up on bases in Afghanistan or Iraq, deeply in debt and unable to leave. An entire network of human labor firms in countries like Jordan and India has been feeding migrant workers from poor countries into the United States’ conflicts. In some cases these firms are little more than traffickers, and several workers have been kidnapped and held in Afghanistan until their families and friends paid ransom.
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When Shrestha first arrived on Bagram — a huge military installation that was built by the Russians in the 1970s — he worked for a Turkish subcontractor of Northrup Grumman, the U.S. defense company. Shrestha earned $600 per month as an escort for Afghan laborers on the base. For the first year, he says he lived inside a tent, as there was insufficient housing available for TCNs like him on the base. The Taliban fired small rockets onto the base on a near-daily basis, which worried him, but the pay was better than what he could have earned in Nepal. “Of course, we have to take risks to earn money,” he says.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of TCNs to the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. Although the Defense Department is notoriously bad at keeping records on its contractors, official data indicate that just after the height of the Obama administration’s troop surge, in 2012, there were 86,100 U.S. soldiers and 36,826 TCN contractors working for the DoD in Afghanistan. Today, there are 6,399 TCNs working for the United States in Afghanistan, compared to just a few hundred troops. Additional TCNs work for the Department of State and USAID.
TCNs earn far less than their U.S. counterparts, even while taking greater risks. Bases like Bagram are typically surrounded by three layers of security: the outermost layer is composed of Afghan security forces, the next layer is handled by TCN contractors, and the innermost (and thus safest layer) is composed of U.S. contractors and soldiers.
A U.S. military veteran who later worked for a contracting firm in charge of security for the U.S. embassy in Kabul in the mid-2010s, who asked not to be named, says he earned more than four times his Nepali colleagues and received more benefits and leave time – an inequality that left him feeling uneasy. He said that Nepali guards were assigned the dangerous task of completing initial vehicle checks before Americans came out to complete additional checks, and that Americans sometimes referred to the Nepalis as “our flak jackets” and “bait” for suicide bombers. What is more, he said the Nepalis’ guard sheds were inferior to the blast-resistant structure he spent most of his working day inside.
“They were shit, bro,” says the American of the guard sheds. “They were held together with metal bands, and they weren’t even, like, arc-welded, they were spot-welded, sometimes. There was zero way those things would hold up in a blast — which they didn’t.” He noted that several of his Nepali colleagues sitting in those structures were severely injured during an enemy attack.
TCNs are not protected by laws against discrimination or workplace safety that are commonplace in the United States. One of the few protections they do have is the Defense Base Act, a U.S. law that requires contracting and subcontracting companies to buy workers’ compensation insurance for all employees, covering injuries, disabilities, and deaths. If a worker is killed or injured while working on a U.S. government contract, they are entitled to certain rights and compensation. Few TCN workers know this, however, and if they are denied these resources, their only recourse is appealing directly to the U.S. Department of Labor – something almost impossible for a Nepali based in Afghanistan to do.
“[Contracting companies] think that they can get away with not compensating injured or killed workers and save yet another amount of money that goes into their profits,” says Matt Handley, an American lawyer who has represented many Nepali and other TCN workers to win compensation.
Ultimately, we don’t know exactly how many TCN contractors have been killed or injured during the United States’ wars. For such data, the U.S. government relies on a database kept by the Department of Labor, but contractors and contracting companies have a significant incentive not to report incidents.
***
Many TCNs like Shrestha are already looking for the next war. Speaking by phone from a hotel in Dubai, Kamal Manandhar* explains that he recently left Bagram, where he worked for Fluor Corporation, and is now hoping to go to Iraq.
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“There are 12 of us Nepalis here, and four of us have applied for jobs with Vectrus [a defense contractor] in Iraq.” Manandhar said he heard the starting salary is $9,000 per year. If he can get one of the jobs, he plans to go. But he concedes, “No one wants to leave their family and go to a war zone. I’d rather be at home having a good time with my family. But I come here because it’s a compulsion.”
As the United States increased its reliance on contractors from one contractor for every 100 soldiers in the first Gulf war to a ratio in Afghanistan where there were often more contractors than soldiers, other countries have followed suit. There are reports of Russia hiring more contractors; many Gulf countries now rely on them to fill the ranks of their militaries and it is more and more common for private companies to build out their own militias. The end of U.S. involvement in the war in Afghanistan is not the end of the conflict, and may actually be an inflection point as many of these contractors move on to less transparent war zones.
Over the past 20 years, conflicts have become more likely to blend commercial and political aims, and more likely to pull in contractors from poor countries like Nepal, while providing them with fewer protections. What will change with the end of U.S. involvement is access for journalists and academics who have studied these practices. This will make the shadowy world that Shrestha works in more difficult to understand and exploitation more likely.
*Names of contractors were changed upon their request.
20. Refreshing American soft power in the Pacific Islands
It is important that we recognize the strategic importance of these islands and their people. We have better stories and we need to tell them
Refreshing American soft power in the Pacific Islands
Tales of past wars no longer resonate. The US has better
stories to tell, not least of its own stumbles with democracy.
Some years back, Kurt Campbell, then US State Department Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs and now a senior Biden administration official, sought to make the case for America’s enduring affinity with the Pacific.
“Our [American] identity as a ‘Pacific power’ was, in many ways, forged on the beaches of the Pacific during World War Two,” Campbell remarked. “We often forget about the significant battles, such as Guadalcanal, that in many ways proved to be the most consequential, if not fundamental, to the remarkable growth and stability that the Asia-Pacific enjoys today.”
Evoking wartime imageries from the Pacific theatre of the Second World War in this fashion was illustrative of an appeal to “soft power”. And the United States has more history to draw upon. Through the Australia, New Zealand and United States Security Treaty in 1951, the United States extended its sphere of influence into the southern Pacific Ocean. In the 1980s, the United States negotiated separate Compacts of Free Association treaties with former territories it administered under United Nations mandate. These Compacts guarantee unrestricted and unilateral American military access.
There are of course blemishes associated with the American presence in the Pacific. For instance, the effects of nuclear testing conducted from 1946 to 1958 in the Marshall Islands. But for the foreseeable future, the United States will continue to rest on its historic footprint in the Pacific as the basis for its identity as a “Pacific power”.
Such a narrative is untenable. America’s historic claims are outdated in winning hearts and minds in the region. The United States needs an inclusive narrative which must seek to co-opt a post-Second World War generation of Pacific Islanders into the American worldview of the future.
Evening colours aboard the USS Cleveland off Lae, Papua New Guinea, during the 2011 Pacific Partnership, a five-month humanitarian assistance initiative across the Pacific and Timor Leste (US Navy/Flickr)
The United States can enlist useful allies in the Pacific through appropriately crafted public diplomacy strategies. The edited work, China Alternative: Changing Regional Order in the Pacific, published earlier this year, highlighted among other things, the importance of soft power diplomacy in the evolving “Great Power competition”. Detailed analyses of this sort raise critical questions about the relevance of the United States (and by extension, Western powers) in the Pacific.
The United States can tailor a specific public diplomacy strategy for its Pacific Island audience.
In diplomatic terms, the United States possesses considerable soft power resources. Joseph Nye defined soft power as a country’s ability to effectively persuade and shape another country’s preferences. Much like elsewhere, the United States has underutilised its “Pacific advantage”, squandering the attractiveness associated with its presence in the world. To date, the misconception is that China presents a serious challenge to American dominance in the Pacific. This is hardly the case.
What China has done is capitalise on the power vacuum in the Pacific, with a disinterested United States failing to engage meaningfully in the region. In any case, China has not gained much traction in the soft power stakes, relying simply on its economic muscle and extravagant diplomatic gestures to woo its Pacific Island audiences.
The United States, through President Joe Biden’s executive orders, has re-joined the Paris Climate accord. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken also reiterated America’s commitment to upholding the rules-based international order. These overtures from the Biden administration have moral undertones, a way of reassuring a global audience of America’s continued engagements with the world.
In the Pacific, more can be achieved in American public diplomacy initiatives. The United States can tailor a specific public diplomacy strategy for its Pacific Island audience. One practical area in America’s diplomatic focus should be educational exchange programs, beyond its present mediocre levels. Education exchange programs are a cost-effective medium, targeting potentially influential generations of Pacific Islanders. In the practice of diplomacy, “people-to-people exchanges are highly successful and produce a tremendous return on investment”, most notably in the values and collaborative networks that are created. American educational systems provide pragmatic learning. Participants in educational exchange programs upon returning to their home countries will eventually occupy politically influential positions.
The United States can take a lesson from the Chinese experience. China has been able to make inroads into a diverse range of countries because its activities are grounded on the pragmatism of the South-South cooperation narrative. More importantly, China successfully employs an elitist approach. It recognises the importance of engaging with senior government officials and political elites, particularly in developing countries. In the Pacific, China understands the regional pecking order and exploits it with finesse. Knowing Fiji’s role as a regional hub and a natural leader in the Pacific, China is developing an intricate relationship with the island nation.
Welcoming China’s Xi Jinping to Port Moresby during the 2018 APEC summit (Photo: Shane McLeod)
The United States has superior advantages. Its laborious experiment with democracy is a useful asset. This experience will resonate with Pacific Islanders, if creatively reinforced through public diplomacy. Additionally, Pacific Islanders are mostly trained in and able to use English, an added advantage for the United States. On the other hand, China acknowledges the language barriers and has established the Confucius Institute in the Pacific to teach the Chinese language.
America’s educational exchange programs in the Pacific can range from democratic governance, social justice, climate change, civic participation and human rights to technological innovation and sustainable development. Pacific Islanders value relationships that are sustained, and built on trust and mutual respect. Through people-to-people interactions, the United States will invest in a generation of Pacific Islanders who will not only become key stakeholders in their own countries but, more importantly, build rapport with American institutions and citizens.
American officials must undertake a serious assessment of their engagements with the Pacific and consider cost-effective and mutually productive methods in their public diplomacy. It is the best way of ensuring the relevance of the United States in the region.
21. Alliances in Need of Upkeep: Strengthening the U.S.-Philippines and U.S.-Thailand Partnerships
I would consider re-establishing the Special Forces resident detachments we had when the Special Action Forces Asia (SAFASIA) was on Okinawa from the late 1950s through 1974. (built around the 1st Special Forces Group.) We had Special Forces Detachment Korea (and still do to this day), the Taiwan Resident Detachment, and the 46th Special Forces Company in Thailand.
I would revitalize this concept and station (not deploy) cross functional teams from the 1st Special Forces Group (SF, CA, and PSYOP) in key allies and partners in the region. And I would reactivate SAFSASIA in Okinawa.
Alliances in Need of Upkeep: Strengthening the U.S.-Philippines and U.S.-Thailand Partnerships
August 5, 2021
In contrast to its alliances in Northeast Asia, the United States’ two alliances in Southeast Asia are fundamentally adrift, posing significant challenges and risks to U.S. defense strategy and interests. U.S. alliances with the Philippines and Thailand have both been weakened substantially in recent years by the changing strategic environment, shifting internal politics, and China’s growing influence and aggressive outreach. But these two Southeast Asian alliances remain important for the United States, both for the benefits of bilateral cooperation in peacetime and the role they play in U.S. defense planning above or just below the threshold of conflict.
The strategic drift in these two alliances demands focused dialogue between U.S. experts and practitioners on one side and Philippine and Thai counterparts on the other to shore up the strategic foundations of the alliances, identify ways to strengthen the mutual benefits of cooperation, and examine the implications of the emergence of great power competition with China. Furthermore, defense policymakers and warfighters need to better understand Philippine and Thai strategic assessments and threat perceptions to inform assumptions about the role the alliances would play in the event of conflict with China. This report examines these critical issues and presents potential paths forward for strengthening the current and future state of the alliances.
This report is made possible with support from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
22. Officer Mike Fanone Survived Jan. 6. Then His Trials Began
What a tragic story. A Trump supporter who did his duty to his nation. This should move anyone regardless of which side of the political spectrum one resides.
Officer Mike Fanone Survived Jan. 6. Then His Trials Began
TIME · by molly.ball@time.com
It wasn’t a cop bar; that was the point. They weren’t there to meet other cops. They were there to meet girls. The three police officers took seats at the wine bar in D.C.’s trendy Navy Yard neighborhood—exposed concrete walls, leather banquettes, $13 tuna tartare—and despite its being a wine bar, despite the Wednesday night half-price-wine special, they ordered beers.
May 12, 2021, was a balmy night, and dozens of newly vaccinated young urbanites mingled out on the patio. At 10 p.m., the cops asked the bartender to put CNN on the TV.
“A true American hero, officer Michael Fanone,” intoned the host, Don Lemon. “This is difficult to watch. But it is the truth of what happened that day. The truth—not the lies that you’ve been hearing.” The screen filled with Fanone’s body-camera footage from the Jan. 6 insurrection, airing publicly for the first time. “Officer Fanone is outside on the Capitol steps on the lower west terrace,” Lemon said. “This is approximately 3:15 on that day.”
Mike Fanone—wiry, bearded, his arms and neck covered in tattoos—nursed a Modelo at the bar and took it all in again. It had been four months since the day Fanone nearly died defending the Capitol—the day a self-described redneck cop who voted for Donald Trump was beaten unconscious by a mob waving Thin Blue Line flags and chanting “U.S.A.” The day Fanone, a narcotics officer with the D.C. metropolitan police department (MPD) who’d planned to spend his evening shift buying heroin undercover, voluntarily rushed to defend the seat of American democracy and wound up in hand-to-hand combat with a horde hellbent on unstealing the election. The day Fanone was dragged down the Capitol’s marble stairs, beaten with pipes and poles, tear-gassed and stun-gunned. The day he pleaded for his life as they threatened to shoot him with his own gun, telling the rioters he had kids, until they relented and spared him.
On the TV at the bar, Fanone’s hand strained to push them away. The crush parted, and the full scene came into view: the grand terrace, the teeming crowd. Bodies upon bodies as far as the eye could see. Red hats and camo, Trump flags and American flags, all pressing forward, trying to break the cops’ tenuous hold on the central door into the building. There is a thin blue line between order and chaos, and at that moment, Mike Fanone was it.
Photograph by Christopher Lee for TIME
The footage showed Fanone getting pulled out into the scrum. A man’s voice: “I got one!” Then Fanone began to scream the high-pitched, undignified screams of a man being tased in the back of the neck.
The bar fell silent as the body-cam footage played. And suddenly, for the first time since that day, Fanone was sobbing uncontrollably, shoulders heaving as his buddies put their arms around him.
Fanone—40, nearly broke, living with his mother, seeing ghosts, unable to return to duty in the only job he’d ever loved, possibly forever—had seen the footage a hundred times. But this was the first time he’d viewed it with other people, watched them witness what he lived through, see it through his eyes, feel his aggression, his valor, his abject terror. He sat there crying for a good 20 minutes. At some point he looked up and realized he was surrounded: everyone in the bar had come inside from the patio and gathered around him, watching the footage on the screen.
The months since Jan. 6 had not been easy for Fanone. Still recuperating from life-threatening injuries and posttraumatic stress disorder, he’d found himself increasingly isolated. Republicans didn’t want him to exist, and Democrats weren’t in the mood for hero cops. Even many of his colleagues didn’t see why he couldn’t just get over it. That very day, a GOP Congressman had testified that what had happened was more like a “tourist visit” than an “insurrection.” But no one could see this footage, Fanone thought, and deny what really happened that day. History would be forced to record it.
This is the story of what happened after Jan. 6. This is Mike Fanone’s story, recounted over weeks of searching conversations and corroborated by witnesses, public records and videotape. It is a story about what we agree to remember and what we choose to forget, about how history is not lived but manufactured after the fact. In the aftermath of a national tragedy, we are supposed to come together and say “never forget,” to agree on the heroes and the villains, on who was at fault and how their culpability must be avenged. But what happens if we can’t agree? What if we’re too busy arguing to face what really happened?
“There’s people on both sides of the political aisle that are like, ‘Listen, Jan. 6 happened, it was bad, we need to move on as a country,’” Fanone tells me one recent afternoon on the well-kept back patio of his mother’s house, between long swigs from a beer can. It’s in a quiet exurban Virginia neighborhood, ranch houses alternating with McMansions, American flags flying over big green yards. “What an arrogant f-cking thing for someone to say that wasn’t there that day,” he says. “What needs to happen is there needs to be a reckoning.”
What makes a hero? Is it bravery, charging into danger to protect others? Is it sacrifice, the damage sustained in the process? Or is it the man who refuses to let us forget?
After Fanone regained consciousness that day, he and his partner, Jimmy Albright, stumbled away from the Capitol to their patrol car, weaving like drunks from the chemical agents they’d inhaled. At one point Albright fell to his knees and vomited uncontrollably. They kept walking, arms around each other’s shoulders.
When they were almost there, Fanone said to Albright, “Dude, my neck hurts so bad.” He pulled down the collar of his black uniform, and Albright gasped:
the back of his neck was covered in pink, splotchy burns.
“Dude, what happened?” Albright asked.
“Dude, they were tasing me,” Fanone said.
Albright took a picture with his phone to show Fanone what his own neck looked like.
Fanone drifted in and out of consciousness as Albright drove to the emergency room. The security guard at the entrance told them they couldn’t go in without masks on. Albright pushed the guard aside, dragging his partner by the shoulders. At the intake counter, as a staffer was asking for his insurance information, Fanone collapsed on the floor.
The ER was jammed with a motley array of injured cops and rioters and COVID-19 patients. On the stretcher next to Fanone’s lay a rioter whose cheeks had been pierced by a rubber bullet at close range: it had gone in one side of his face and out the other. The doctors asked Fanone if he’d ever had heart problems, because his body was flooded with troponin, a chemical indicating cardiac distress. He’d had a heart attack, they told him.
From his hospital bed, he watched the news. On CNN, someone was questioning whether the police had used sufficient force to repel the rioters, asking why they hadn’t arrested more people on the scene. Outraged, Fanone looked up CNN, called the number that came up on his phone and told the woman who answered that Mike Fanone with the metropolitan police department needed to talk right away to that jerk on the air who was insulting the good name of every police officer.
“Sir,” she said, “this is the front desk.”
He burned to set the record straight, and he soon got his chance. A photo went viral in the days after the riot: Fanone in his helmet and tactical vest, face distorted in a furious battle grimace, the lone cop in a sea of rioters, Thin Blue Line flag waving ironically over his head. His ex-wife, the mother of his three youngest daughters, proudly posted his name on social media, and suddenly everyone seemed to have his number.
Fanone, in uniform and helmet, was nearly killed on Jan. 6 by a pro-Trump mob waving Thin-Blue-Line flags.
Shannon Stapleton—REUTERS
The following week, at his urging, the department set up a round of interviews with the Washington Post and major TV networks. Fanone, one of several officers authorized to speak to the press, was the star of every segment. “They were overthrowing the Capitol, the seat of democracy, and I f-cking went,” he said, neck tattoos peeking from his collar. He was pugnacious, funny, charismatic, unfiltered. The battle, he quipped, felt like the movie 300, “except without the six-pack abs, which none of us have.”
Perhaps most indelibly, Fanone offered his take on the rioters who’d heeded his pleas for mercy. “A lot of people have asked me my thoughts on the individuals in the crowd that helped me,” he drawled. “I think the conclusion I’ve come to is, like, thank you”—here he paused and squinted—“but f-ck you for being there.”
The response was overwhelming. Thousands of letters, tens of thousands of emails, poured into the MPD. Men wanted to thank him. Children said they looked up to him. Women swooned. (Fanone turned down a request to pose nude in Playgirl.) Liberals posted worshipful memes. Joan Baez, the singer and activist, made an oil painting of his face and captioned it: “Thank you, but f-ck you for being there.” At a gas station at 5 a.m., an elderly Black woman walked up and said, “Are you Michael Fanone? Can I hug you?” and burst into tears as he held her in his arms.
People were hungry for heroes, hungry for a sliver of humanity in the ugliness and violence. Here was the brave cop who rushed into danger and put his life on the line for his country. He was embarrassed by the attention, but it also seemed right on some level, like America agreed that what happened at the Capitol was an attack on all of us, like we were coming together to denounce the bad guys and lift up the good.
But the story was only beginning.
The House of Representatives initiated impeachment proceedings against Trump for inciting the riot, and the Democratic lawmakers managing the impeachment reached out to Fanone for help putting together their case. He met House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and shocked her with his foul language. On Jan. 13, 10 Republicans joined the Democrats in voting to impeach Trump for a second time. Fanone called each of their offices to thank them.
The 10 Republicans invited him to meet at the Capitol Hill Club. They hailed his heroism—and told him they feared they’d just ended their political careers. Death threats were pouring in from their pro-Trump constituents. Right-wing activists were lining up to unseat them in primaries. It didn’t make sense to Fanone that there were only 10 of them. Hadn’t all the members of Congress been there that day? Hadn’t they fled the chamber in terror as he and his colleagues held off the mob? The Republicans told him that plenty of their colleagues privately agreed Trump was to blame, Fanone says. But they didn’t want to commit political suicide.
At the same time, Fanone had questions about the investigation into the assault he suffered. MPD detective Yari Babich had been assigned to the case, but Fanone learned Babich had posted a bunch of nasty comments on social media about Fanone’s media tour—calling him an egomaniac, a celebrity wannabe, unprofessional, a buffoon. Fanone complained to the department but says he was told Babich was entitled to his opinion. (In response to a detailed list of written questions, the MPD declined to comment on this or other aspects of this story. TIME was unable to immediately reach Babich for comment.) He kept complaining, and eventually Babich was taken off the case, according to law-enforcement officials familiar with the matter. But cops gossip like hens, and Fanone knew that if one guy was talking this way he probably wasn’t the only one. Fanone had thought that in telling his story he was speaking for all of them, helping them get the recognition they deserved. What if other cops didn’t see it that way?
After two weeks, the adrenaline that carried him through Jan. 6 and the immediate aftermath started to wear off. His phone stopped ringing. He wanted to go back on TV and respond to the lies Trump and his acolytes were telling, but the department’s public-information officer told him the mayor’s office was not authorizing any more interviews.
Fanone testified on July 27 before the House select committee investigating the siege of the Capitol.
Christopher Lee for TIME
Fanone’s head hurt constantly. Everything seemed to be rushing at him all the time; he needed to be somewhere quiet. The doctors told him he had PTSD. He’d be going about his day, and suddenly the idea that he would be better off dead would appear in his mind. He didn’t know how to shake it. Then it would just as suddenly be gone, until it came back again.
Anger alternated with self-doubt. He kept watching the video footage, but instead of feeling proud, he started picking it apart. The famous photo—what if what people saw on his face was not bravery but fear? How had he let himself get pulled into the crowd, away from the group? Was it his fault? What more could he have done?
In February, Fanone and a couple of other officers were invited to the Super Bowl. The police chief persuaded him to go on behalf of the department, telling him it would prove that the nation could still rally around law enforcement. The officers were told there would be a ceremony at halftime, Fanone says—a solemn procession of honor and reverence, the sort of thing we do to create heroes in America. But at the last minute, the officers were told to leave their uniforms at home. While the game featured elaborate tributes to health care workers and to racial justice, the cops got only a brief callout from the announcers as they were shown in their box midway through the third quarter. (The NFL denied the officers were promised an on-field ceremony.)
He was a good cop—one of the best. Fanone was born in the District and raised in Alexandria, Va., his father a lawyer, his mother a social worker. They divorced when he was 8. His dad was a partner at a big firm, but Fanone hated the stuffy status-grubbing of fancy-pants D.C. He spent his free time with his mother’s working-class family in rural Maryland, boating, fishing, crabbing, hunting and watching John Wayne movies. “Michael was a cowboy from the time he was 3 years old,” says his mother Terry Fanone.
Attempts to smuggle the self-styled backwoods boy into the professional class were unsuccessful. He spent a year at Georgetown Prep, the private school whose alumni include two U.S. Supreme Court Justices, but was asked not to return. When his parents sent him to boarding school in Maine instead, he saved his pocket money and bought a bus ticket back home. After his parents kicked him out, he got a job working construction and eventually completed his high-school diploma at Ballou, a nearly all-Black public school in southeast D.C.
Fanone joined the Capitol Police shortly after 9/11, but he knew by the time he finished at the academy that he didn’t want to spend his career there. Fanone and his buddy Ramey Kyle would drive down to the projects on their lunch break and chase drug dealers, to management’s chagrin. “We were 21-, 22-year-old adrenaline junkies—we wanted to run and gun,” Fanone recalls. After a couple of years, he and Kyle both moved to the MPD.
Fanone loved the job—the thrill of it, the intensity, the brotherhood of officers. He recalls the rush of pulling up to the projects and watching people scatter. Gradually he honed his skills, working with informants, establishing probable cause, liaising with federal agencies on wiretap cases and big busts. He studied local defense attorneys and relished sparring with them on the witness stand. “He went from being this wild and crazy, reckless guy—that was his image at the beginning—to thinking things out and planning ahead and being meticulous,” says Jeff Leslie, who was Fanone’s partner for more than a decade. “Mike is the best narcotics officer I’ve ever worked with, including FBI and DEA.”
At some point in his 30s, Fanone realized there was more to life than the job. His mentor, someone he thought of as a living legend, retired, and there were no parades—the department just carried on without him. Fanone stopped volunteering for overtime and re-established contact with the teenage daughter he barely knew. He got married, had three more daughters, got divorced.
He wasn’t interested in politics—it should be, he thought, like the Olympics, something to gawk at every four years and then put away. But for a white cop who spent his time policing Black neighborhoods, politics became harder and harder to ignore. He hated the way liberal politicians and the media always made police the bad guys. After the 2014 death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., people seemed to assume every cop was like Darren Wilson, the white officer who shot Brown. Of course there were bad cops, but they weren’t all like that. The city council kept making new rules about what they could and couldn’t do. He did his best to follow the blitz of reform-minded dictates from above: community outreach, sensitivity training, de-escalation. He took to heart the ideas about better rather than more arrests, he says, only to be penalized for not arresting enough people. Tired of anti-police sentiment and feeling a bit of kinship with the bombastic, abrasive politician, Fanone voted for Trump in 2016.
“If I didn’t speak out against Trump, would people think I was just another evil white cop?”
But with Trump in office, policing in America only became more fraught. Jeff Leslie spent the summer of 2020 working 12-hour days at the George Floyd protests in D.C., standing stoically on the sidelines as white kids from the suburbs spat in his face and called him a racist. The very first day, a brick went through his cruiser window and a Molotov cocktail nearly lit it on fire. “I said to some of these white guys in antifa gear, ‘Look, you’re more educated than me, and I do believe you care about Black people,’” Leslie recalls. “‘Let me take you down to the hood and show you how you can really invest in some young Black lives.’” The law-abiding citizens of those neighborhoods weren’t calling to abolish the police, Leslie says; they told him they wanted more police to clean up their community. None of the protesters ever took him up on his offer.
Leslie was there on Jan. 6. He was in the battle with Fanone and got hit with hammers. But he’s suspicious of Fanone’s new liberal friends. “I love the guy, and I’m concerned that all those people are using and manipulating him,” Leslie says. “He’s always wanted us to be respected and appreciated for what we do, and it’s never going to happen. We’re never going to get a parade. No one cares. Now all these people want to use him against Trump. But these are still the same people calling us white supremists and saying we should be defunded.”
Fanone shares that worry: “If I didn’t speak out against Trump, would people think I was just another evil white cop?” What he hoped to make people understand was that he wasn’t some exceptional “good cop”—he was every cop. The worst kind of cop: the arrogant adrenaline junkie. And the best kind of cop: meticulous, humane, committed. Maybe the liberals who supported him would see they ought to support the others too—the hundreds who answered the call at the Capitol; the thousands who rush into danger every day for the sake of their ungrateful asses.
Because Fanone was just like every other cop. Unless, after Jan. 6, he wasn’t.
Andrew Clyde, a first-term Republican representing Georgia’s Ninth district, witnessed more of the Jan. 6 chaos than many of his colleagues. Around the time Fanone was getting tased on the Capitol terrace, as most members of Congress were being whisked to safety, Clyde, a 57-year-old former Navy aviator and gun-shop owner, bravely helped barricade the door to the House chamber as rioters massed outside.
Yet Clyde soon became a case study in the GOP’s determination to forget. On May 12—the day Fanone broke down at the bar—Clyde insisted in a House hearing that the footage from Jan. 6 resembled a “normal tourist visit” more than the coup attempt liberals portrayed.
Something broke open inside Mike Fanone when he heard Clyde’s comments. His courage, his fists, his neck, had kept these guys from being strung up, and now they wanted to pretend it never happened? How could they deny it when it was all right there on video? Fanone couldn’t let these cowards keep twisting the facts. The department’s press officer had stopped answering his calls. He didn’t care. He’d gone rogue.
House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, center, and his colleagues have tried to distort the truth about Jan. 6.
Christopher Lee for TIME
But the Republicans weren’t the only ones who wanted to put Jan. 6 behind them. A new President had taken over, promising to heal the nation’s wounds, and the public had turned its attention to the future: the pandemic ebbing, Congress passing laws. Fanone wrote a letter to every politician he could think of, demanding to know why the officers who fought that day hadn’t been recognized. The White House acknowledged the letter but never got back to him; the mayor’s office did not respond. (A spokesman said the White House was still in the process of responding to Fanone’s three-month-old letter. The mayor’s office noted that the officers were subsequently honored at an employee-appreciation ceremony.)
Fanone’s new political friends told him not to take it personally. That President Biden was trying to “lower the temperature” in the country. That D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser couldn’t be seen as too pro-police in the current political climate. He wasn’t being slighted, they told him; he was just politically inconvenient.
In Congress, official honors for police who defended the Capitol were caught up in legislative squabbling. The Senate voted in February to award the Congressional Gold Medal to Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman, who’d led a mob away from the Senate chamber as Senators evacuated. But the House wanted to give medals to all the officers who were there. Months of back-and-forth ensued.
Democrats and Republicans feuded over how to investigate Jan. 6. Bipartisan negotiations to establish an independent, 9/11-style commission looked promising until the House and Senate GOP leaders, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, torpedoed the talks. In the days after the riot, McCarthy had said Trump bore responsibility for it and McConnell had passionately denounced him. Now they had an upcoming election to worry about.
On June 15, the House finally passed legislation awarding gold medals to the Capitol Police and MPD for their valor on Jan. 6. Twenty-one Republicans voted against it, including Clyde. Fanone decided to pay each of them a visit. He and Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn, a 6-ft. 7-in. Black man who’d spent Jan. 6 herding rioters on an interior staircase as they hurled racial slurs, went to each of the 21 lawmakers’ offices, politely requesting to schedule appointments. But the only one they met that day was Clyde.
Fanone spotted him getting into an elevator, and he and Dunn followed Clyde in. “How are you doing, Congressman?” Fanone said as the doors closed, putting out his hand.
Clyde shrank away. “You’re not going to shake my hand?” Fanone said.
“I don’t know who you are,” Clyde said.
“I apologize,” Fanone said, and launched, for the umpteenth time, into his practiced spiel. “My name is Michael Fanone. I’m a D.C. metropolitan police officer who fought on Jan. 6 to defend the Capitol, and as a result I was significantly injured. I sustained a heart attack and a traumatic brain injury after being tased numerous times at the base of my skull, as well as being severely beaten.”
Clyde turned away and started fumbling with his phone. The elevator doors opened, and he bolted. (Clyde later issued a statement acknowledging the elevator encounter but said he did “not recall [Fanone’s] offering to shake hands.”)
Fanone called his new friend Eric Swalwell, a Democratic Representative from California, and told him what had just happened.
“What do you want me to do?” Swalwell asked.
“Tweet it, motherf-cker!” said Fanone, who eschews social media.
Swalwell and another friend, Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger, both tweeted about the incident. Fanone went on television and called Clyde a “coward.” The story was all over the news. He had fought back against the lies with the force of his truth, and for a moment, he believed he had won.
But the rot was setting in—the fatigue, the forgetting, the whitewashing. Trump claimed Jan. 6 was not a riot but a “lovefest,” that the rioters’ interactions with police that day were more like “hugging and kissing.” Newsmax did a segment portraying Fanone as a mentally ill anti-Trumper; one of the network’s anchors called him a “crybaby” and an “unhinged gangbanger.” QAnon zealots in private forums whispered that he was a paid actor, not a cop at all. Republican Congressman Paul Gosar called the police shooting of Ashli Babbitt—a rioter who was attempting to force her way into the Speaker’s Lobby off the House floor—an “execution.” Polls showed that more and more Republicans saw the attack on the Capitol as a display of patriotism.
In meetings with GOP members of Congress, Fanone asked how they could claim to “back the blue” while selling him out. They brought up Black Lives Matter and how they’d had the cops’ backs. “You guys don’t seem to have a problem when we’re kicking the sh-t out of Black people,” Fanone recalls saying. “But when we’re kicking the sh-t out of white people, uh-oh, that’s an issue.” He found himself explaining why attempting to overthrow a CVS was slightly different than attempting to overthrow the government. Why the peaceful transfer of power was a bigger deal than a few anarchists in Portland, Ore.
Conservative pundits quibbled with the riot’s body count, pointing out that Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who died the day after he helped fight off the rioters, had technically passed away of “natural causes” after a series of strokes. Fanone had gone to the Capitol to see Sicknick’s body lie in honor, buying his only suit for the occasion. He’d gotten to know Sicknick’s mother and girlfriend. (All of them, incidentally, were Trump voters.) Is that what they’d be saying if I didn’t make it? Fanone wondered. That he’d died of a heart attack? That it wasn’t Trump’s fault, just “natural causes”?
Fox News hosts invented other explanations for the violence: antifa provocateurs, FBI infiltrators. Tucker Carlson called Dunn “an angry left-wing political activist” who could not “pretend to speak for the country’s law-enforcement community.” Fanone wanted to go on Fox News to argue but, he says, a booker told him there was a networkwide ban on his appearing. (A Fox News spokesperson denied this.)
Much as he hated to admit it, Fanone was starting to suspect Carlson had a point. Maybe officers like him and Dunn, who wanted Trump held accountable, were the exception. Watching the body-cam footage again, he noticed how many cops were standing around, kibitzing with the rioters. He thought of his MPD colleagues: out of more than 3,000 on duty, about 850 had responded to the Capitol. What about all the others?
"The vast majority of police officers—would they have been on the other side of those battle lines?”
Where was his backup? Where was the police union, which rushed to the defense of any officer criticized by left-wing politicians? The Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which endorsed Trump in 2016 and 2020, had issued a lukewarm statement on Jan. 6 urging “everyone involved to reject the use of violence and to obey the orders of law enforcement officers to ensure that these events are brought to a swift and peaceable end.” Numerous active-duty FOP members have since been charged in connection with the riot. In at least one case, the union is trying to keep an accused rioter from being fired by his department.
There was an FOP meeting on July 14, and Fanone and Dunn decided to attend. Fanone arrived with specific demands. He wanted a public condemnation of the 21 Republican lawmakers who’d voted against the gold medals. He wanted Clyde and Gosar condemned specifically, and he wanted the officer who shot Babbitt defended as forcefully as the FOP had defended officers who shot Black citizens in the past. Fanone addressed the FOP’s national president, Patrick Yoes, an ardent Trump supporter. “You are doing a disservice to your membership by not speaking the truth of that day,” Fanone said. “You have an opportunity to educate Americans—not just police officers but Americans—about what actually happened, and you’re not doing it.”
Yoes bristled. He told Fanone the only thing he could offer was access to the FOP’s free wellness program. (In an interview, Yoes said the FOP hopes to work with Fanone and his local union to resolve his complaints. “I see his struggles, I see he is dealing with a lot, and he may have some misconceptions about it,” Yoes says, “but I assure you we have been there for him and will continue to be.”)
At the end of the meeting, the D.C. lodge voted to endorse Yoes for another term as union president.
Healed from his physical injuries but still on mental-health leave, Fanone now spends most days alone. He goes to the gym, takes care of his daughters part time, fields media calls. He probably can’t go back to undercover work, and he wonders if he’d be safe going back on the job at all. Colleagues he’s known for decades don’t talk to him anymore. Guys who never called to check in when he was in the hospital send him taunting memes about his liberal-darling status.
“I had convinced myself, Mike, you’re vocalizing the opinions of thousands and thousands of police officers. But I’m starting to think I’m vocalizing the beliefs of just one,” Fanone says one day over lunch, as his three young daughters dig into their chicken tenders. “While there are still some officers that are very supportive of me, I can count them on one hand. The vast majority of police officers—would they have been on the other side of those battle lines?”
His mission to defend his colleagues’ actions had morphed into something bigger and more daunting. What he had to do, he concluded, was not just to speak up on behalf of law enforcement. He needed to shake his fellow Americans out of their Trump-induced delusions, debunk the lies that had poisoned his friends’ minds. He needed to root out the hatred that led to Trump in the first place.
Fanone at his mother’s home in Alexandria, Va., on July 28.
Christopher Lee for TIME
“The greatest trick in history was Donald Trump convincing redneck Americans that he somehow speaks for them,” says Fanone, who includes himself in that category. “He will destroy this country simply for the sake of his ego, just because he can’t accept that he lost an election.”
In late July, Fanone was one of four officers who testified at the first hearing of the House committee investigating Jan. 6, a proceeding that just two Republicans took part in. “The indifference shown to my colleagues is disgraceful,” he cried, pounding the table. A Fox News anchor joked that he should get an Oscar for acting. His voice mail filled with threats and mockery. “I wish they would have killed all you scumbags,” one caller said. Others threatened to rape and kill his mother and daughters. Trump reportedly called Fanone and the other officers “pussies.” Two days after the hearing, another cop Fanone knew who’d been there on Jan. 6 died by suicide—the fourth to take his own life since the riot.
For most Americans, Jan. 6 keeps getting further away. For Fanone, it’s still the only thing—the day his life stopped. And yet, as awful as it was, he’s grateful for it. “That’s, like, difficult to come to terms with. What if I had not gone through that?” he says. “I’d be the same dumbass that I was on Jan. 5. Not evil in my motivations. But ignorant to the truth.”
And so he keeps telling his story—the story of what really happened that day.
On the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, Mike Fanone woke up early, as usual, and went to the gym. He’d been living with his mom since a breakup left him with an apartment he couldn’t afford, working a second job at a security consultancy, saving for a down payment on a house for him and the girls—Piper, 9; Mei-Mei, 7; and Hensley, 5. Terry went to her prayer group, and when she came back she told her son she’d had a funny feeling and said an extra prayer for him.
Fanone’s shift was scheduled to start at 2:30 p.m. His plan for the day involved a heroin buy at the James Creek public housing project in southwest D.C. The buyer would be a longtime informant whom Fanone considered a friend, a 68-year-old Black transgender woman named Leslie. (Leslie, who suffered from cancer, AIDS and various addictions, has since died, which Fanone learned because he was listed as her emergency contact.) But shortly after noon, seeing what was happening in the news, he called off the buy and drove to the station instead.
Things were getting hairy. He had just hit the 14th St. Bridge when he heard the commander on the scene say on the radio that the department had run out of chemical munitions such as tear gas and pepper spray—not just what it had on hand at the Capitol but the whole department’s supply. In all his years on the job, that had never happened. A call went out requesting aid from surrounding jurisdictions.
At the station he met Albright, who was changing into his uniform. “What do you want to do?” Albright said.
“We’re going to go,” Fanone said. “Get us a vehicle.” He went to his locker and took out the uniform he’d never worn before, still in its plastic wrapping. He grabbed a tactical vest, a radio, a body camera, a helmet and a gas mask.
In the parking lot, a sergeant was tossing car keys to anyone volunteering to go to the Capitol. They parked a couple of blocks away. Fanone couldn’t figure out how to attach the gas mask to his vest, so they both left their masks in the car. It was eerily quiet as they approached the building on foot, passing abandoned police cars and barricades. Albright pointed out a trail of blood on the ground.
They went in the south entrance and made their way to the columned chamber known as the Crypt, lined with historic statues and a replica of the Magna Carta. A couple of dozen trespassers were milling about. As the partners tried to figure out where to go, a 10-33 call—officer in distress—came over the radio from the west front of the Capitol. They went.
"What if I had not gone through that? I’d be the same dumbass that I was on Jan. 5. Not evil in my motivations. But ignorant to the truth.”
Some rioters had gone around and trickled in through other windows and doors, but it was this entrance, facing the White House, where most of the mob was trying to force its way in. Fanone and Albright came upon a narrow, stone-walled tunnel choked with clouds of gas. A commander in a gray coat was hunched over, retching, trying to wipe the tear gas from his face. Fanone saw that it was his friend Ramey Kyle. A dull roar was getting louder as they approached. “Hold the line!” Kyle shouted over the din.
Fanone and Albright went into the tunnel. The floor was slick with vomit. About 30 officers were pressed against a pair of brass-bordered double doorjambs, four or five abreast, several rows deep. The ones in front strained to push the crowd far enough from the doors to yank them closed, trying to lock their plexiglass riot shields together. But the rioters had managed to tear some of the shields away and were beating the cops with them.
From the back, Fanone and Albright could see the officers were ragged: injured, bleeding, blinded, fatigued. Some had been there for hours. They could also see that if the line broke, they would be trampled in the narrow tunnel, and the rioters would overrun the building. This was the last line of defense.
“Let’s get some fresh guys up front!” Fanone yelled. “Who needs a break?” Some officers pointed at colleagues they thought needed relief, but nobody volunteered to come off the line.
What makes a hero? Is it bravery? Is it sacrifice? Or is it the man who refuses to let us forget?
“C’mon, MPD, dig in!” Fanone yelled, bracing his hands against the other officers’ backs. “Push! Push ’em the f-ck out!”
He and Albright got to the front. It was only then that they looked out on the sea of people for the first time and saw what they were up against. The rioters were coordinating efforts, yelling “Heave! Ho!” and lunging in rhythm.
An officer yelled, “Knife!” and Albright turned to his left, away from Fanone, to grab the weapon. When he turned back Fanone was gone.
He was out in the crowd, surrounded by rioters. They dragged him face first down the stairs and punched and kicked and beat him. They ripped off his badge and took his radio. One kept lunging for his weapon. Someone was yelling: “Kill him with his own gun!” Fanone felt an excruciating pain at the base of his skull—the taser—and cried out, but he couldn’t hear himself scream. The rioters seemed intent on torturing him. He thought about pulling his gun. He would be justified in defending himself, but then what? He thought of his daughters. He didn’t want to die. “I’ve got kids!” he cried.
A couple of rioters surrounded him, fighting off others. “Bring him up, bring him up,” one said. “Don’t hurt him,” said another. “Which way do you want to go?”
“I want to go back inside,” he whimpered, and that’s the last thing he remembers. The rioters lofted his limp, unconscious body to the doorway—the battle line. Albright grabbed him and pulled him back through the phalanx.
One of the officers carrying Fanone back into the hallway shouted, “I need a medic! Need an EMT, now!” Albright followed, crazed with fear. “I got it. It’s my partner!” he yelled. “Mike, stay in there, buddy. Mike, it’s Jimmy. I’m here.”
What does Mike Fanone deserve? A parade? A key to the city? A White House ceremony? He’s not asking for any of that. He’s not asking to be called a hero—he just wants us to remember what his sacrifice was for. Fanone believes we can’t keep trying to outrun this thing; we’ve got to turn around and face it, defeat it once and for all. That if all we do is turn away and hope it fades, it will just keep getting stronger until it comes back to kill us all.
Fanone has gotten none of those traditional heroes’ honors. None of the officers have. But perhaps that’s normal. Perhaps we always fail our heroes: the veterans who sleep in the street, the whistle-blowers languishing in penury. Perhaps all the medals and ceremonies are our constant, insufficient attempt to atone. But we can never be grateful enough. For our comfort, for our safety, for our freedom.
They laid him down on a luggage cart—there were no more stretchers, no more ambulances. “Take his f-cking vest off, man. He’s having trouble breathing,” Albright said frantically. He took Fanone’s gun so that he wouldn’t come to and instinctively reach for it, thinking he was still out in the crowd.
“C’mon, Mike,” Albright pleaded. “C’mon, buddy, we’re going duck hunting soon.”
“Fanone, Fanone,” another officer said. “You all right, brother?”
The world swam blurrily back into view.
“Did we take that door back?” Fanone asked.
They took back the door. They defended the Capitol. That is the story Mike Fanone won’t let us forget.
—With reporting by Vera Bergengruen, Mariah Espada, Nik Popli and Simmone Shah
TIME · by molly.ball@time.com
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.
