Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners


Quotes of the Day:

"The strategist needs to understand his subject, which is not COIN or counterterrorism; it is strategy for his particular challenge in COIN or counterterrorism." 
- Colin S. Gray

“A 1950 definition called doctrine ‘the compilation of principles and theories applicable to a subject, which have been developed through experience or by theory, that represent the best available thought and indicate and guide but do not bind in practice.’”
 
“Doctrine is basically a truth, a fact, or a theory that can be defended by reason.”

“Doctrine cannot replace clear thinking…under the circumstances prevailing.” 
- LTG John Cushman ( 2 LTG (RET) John H. Cushman, “Thoughts for Joint Commanders,” (1993 Copyright John H. Cushman)  

"The history that lies inert in unread books does no work in the world.
If you want a new idea, read an old book.
`Tis the good reader that makes the good book.
A book is like a mirror. If an ass looks in, no prophet can peer out."
- The "maxims” quoted from Clark Becker, Lord Lytton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Georg Lichtenberg quoted in Jay Luuvas.  




1. The Failure in Afghanistan Is Worse Than in Vietnam
2. Reports of military planes landing at Bagram air base in Afghanistan
3. Netflix’s ‘Squid Game’ Is the Dystopian Hit No One Wanted—Until Everyone Did
4. AMMO, Inc. Raises Q2 Guidance To $55 Million; Targets $400 Million In Revenues By 2024 (NASDAQ: POWW, POWWP)
5. The Great Ammo Shortage: Blame the U.S. Government?
6. China's loans leave developing nations with $385 billion in 'hidden debts', reveals study
7. The Information Operations Episode
8. America the Humble: The End of Post-9/11 Militarism
9. New Roles for Civil Affairs Forces in a New World
10. Rodrigo Duterte: Philippine president announces retirement from politics
11. 'Voice behind the violence': English-speaking narrator of ISIS propaganda videos arrested and charged by Justice Department
12.  The idea of the West has always been in motion and in crisis
13.  NY Times: Opinion | Jan. 6 Was Worse Than It Looked
14. H.R.5130 - Consortium To Study Irregular Warfare Act of 2021





1. The Failure in Afghanistan Is Worse Than in Vietnam

The Failure in Afghanistan Is Worse Than in Vietnam
Southeast Asia didn’t fall to communism, and Saigon came closer to winning than reported.
WSJ · by William Lloyd Stearman

U.S. Marines near the demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam, July 19, 1966.
Photo: Horst Faas/AP

Many have compared America’s defeat in Afghanistan to Vietnam. But the comparison is unfair to Vietnam. The U.S. became involved in Vietnam primarily to counter the communist threat to Southeast Asia. In 1955 President Eisenhower placed the communist threat to Vietnam in the broader context of the threat to the entire region. He said a communist victory in Vietnam would lead to other communist takeovers in Southeast Asia, with countries toppled like a row of dominoes.
Southeast Asian leaders reported that our deploying combat troops to Vietnam beginning in May 1965 greatly encouraged their successful resistance to communist threats. The region didn’t fall—a strategic accomplishment.
What few know or appreciate is that South Vietnamese forces came very close to winning the war in 1972. All U.S. combat troops had been withdrawn as a result of Vietnamization. Hanoi was looking forward to a quick victory over South Vietnamese ground forces and launched its Easter Offensive, using divisions equipped with Soviet heavy tanks, long-range artillery, surface-to-air missiles and other modern weapons. They were opposed by South Vietnamese army and marine troops.
Americans provided air support, which more than countered the weaponry of the enemy. Our side actually began winning the war. This was never covered by the media, but much worse, it was largely ignored by the American intelligence community. In September 1972, the South Vietnamese marines retook the provincial capital of Quang Tri. I was working at the White House at the time but didn’t learn this from intelligence reports.
Enemy forces suffered heavy losses. In 1975, after Hanoi had won the war, former commander Gen. Tran Van Tra stated in the Communist Party organ Nhan Dan that his troops, by late 1972, were on the ropes and seemed on the verge of defeat. As former CIA Director William Colby notes in his book “Lost Victory,” by the fall of 1972 “on the ground in South Vietnam the war had been won.”
Faced with the prospect of defeat, Hanoi became interested again in negotiations. Henry Kissinger’s old negotiating partner Le Duc Tho (whom we called “Ducky”) contacted him, offering a concession Mr. Kissinger had long sought: keeping South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu in place.
I have often wondered if I could have convinced Mr. Kissinger that our side was winning, and if he would then have taken a different view of negotiations. I doubt it. President Nixon was eager to end the war and was distracted by the Watergate scandal. Mr. Kissinger had invested time and energy in negotiating the Paris Peace Accords, which had some major flaws. For example, the accords left all enemy forces in South Vietnam after the cease-fire. In any event, Hanoi immediately violated the agreement. Only the U.S. observed it. That’s something to keep in mind when negotiating with the Taliban, who are as unreliable as Hanoi.
Mr. Stearman, who served on the National Security Council staff under four presidents, is author of “An American Adventure: From Early Aviation Through Three Wars to the White House.”
Copyright ©2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
WSJ · by William Lloyd Stearman

2. Reports of military planes landing at Bagram air base in Afghanistan


Reports of military planes landing at Bagram air base in Afghanistan

'Military' planes are spotted landing at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan after it was claimed China is 'considering' sending soldiers to ex US airbase to strengthen ties with Taliban
  • There are unconfirmed reports that Chinese military planes have landed at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan
  • New images from Afghanistan show that power has been restored to the base and multiple sources alleged military planes arrived at the former US stronghold 
  • It comes after Yun Sun, Director of the China Program at Stimson Research Center, said China would be 'eager' to occupy the airfield and seize any equipment left over by the US  
  • The move would be an attempt to strengthen ties with the Taliban and embarrass America

Daily Mail · by Stephen M. Lepore · October 3, 2021
There have been multiple reports of military planes arriving at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, just hours after images emerged showing that power was restored to the base for the first time since US forces evacuated the stronghold in July.
Images circulating on social media appear to show the airbase's floodlights blazing in the distance, amid reports that several military planes have taken off and landed at the base in recent hours.
Several sources suggest that the aircraft are Chinese, given the Taliban are not thought to possess the expertise needed to power the base or maintain and fly several military aircraft.
It comes after Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center think tank, said China would likely be very interested in occupying the airbase following the US pullout.
US forces in Afghanistan abandoned their main base at Bagram airport overnight in July - shutting off the lights and slipping away into the night without telling government forces who were supposed to take it over.

Images circulating on social media appear to show the airbase's floodlights blazing in the distance for the first time since US forces abandoned the base in July

It comes after Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center think tank, said China would likely be very interested in occupying the airbase following the US pullout

It has been confirmed by multiple sources that several military planes have arrived at the airbase after it was powered up for the first time since the US pullout

There are unconfirmed report that the planes arriving at Bagram are Chinese military planes, though this has not been verified by credible sources
The military airfield, located roughly an hour from Kabul, was first established by the Soviets during their own occupation of Afghanistan, after which it was seized by US forces and used as one of their main operating bases for 20 years.
According to U.S. News & World Report, China has been considering sending military personnel and economic development officials to Bagram airbase, and has conducted a 'feasibility study' on the effect of such a plan as part of its 'Belt and Road Initiative'.
A move to occupy Bagram airbase would go towards strengthening relations with the Taliban and further embarrassing America.
The report was denied by a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson.
'What I can tell everyone is that that is a piece of purely false information,' Wang Wenbin told reporters last month.
But Sun Yun was suspicious of the Chinese denial and claimed that Chinese forces would be very interested in occupying the base.
'Given their past experience, the Chinese must be eager to get their hands on whatever the US has left at the base,' said Sun.
Taliban fighters had occupied the airfield following the US pullout, but are not thought to have the equipment or expertise necessary to restore power to the whole base, let alone conduct flight operations in and out of the airfield.
For their part, the Taliban have rejected the notion that Bagram airbase has been occupied by Chinese forces, but made no mention of who may have illuminated the lights at the base or the origin of the planes landing at the airfield.

The Communist country, led by President Xi Jinping, has reportedly conducted a feasibility study on the effect of such a plan as part of its 'Belt and Road Initiative'

According to the Afghanistan Times, the Taliban have rejected the notion that the Chinese military has occupied the base

Other theories indicate that either the Taliban or the NRF could have illuminated the base, but the Taliban are not thought to posses the equipment or expertise to do so

Taliban fighters had occupied the airfield following the US pullout, but are not thought to have the equipment or expertise necessary to restore power to the whole base, let alone conduct flight operations in and out of the airfield



Taliban leaders are looking to strengthen ties with China in the wake of the US' departure
Former American Ambassador to the United Nations and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley seemed to predict something like this in the wake of the United States' departure.
'We need to watch China, because I think you are going to see China make a move for Bagram Air Force Base,' said Haley in an interview with Fox News as she made the case for reconnecting with allies who felt let down by a precipitous withdrawal.
'I think they are also making a move in Afghanistan and trying to use Pakistan to get stronger to go against India.
'So, we have got a lot of issues. The biggest thing he should do is strengthen our allies, strengthen those relationships, modernise our military, and make sure we are prepared for the cyber-crimes and the terrorist crimes that are headed our way.'
While Western nations were evacuating their embassies, the Chinese mission kept operating. Their security guards simply change from Afghan government security forces to Taliban gunmen.

While Western nations were evacuating their embassies, the Chinese mission kept operating
The Taliban has already begun talking up plans for cooperation with Beijing.
A Taliban spokesman told an Italian newspaper that Afghanistan's new rulers will rely primarily on financing from China as it seeks to head off a looming humanitarian crisis and begin reconstruction.
'China is our most important partner and represents a fundamental and extraordinary opportunity for us, because it is ready to invest and rebuild our country,' Zabihullah Mujahid told La Repubblica in an interview.

Since 2002, the base has been one of the major symbols of America's War in Afghanistan
He also praised the New Silk Road – part of the Belt and Road Initiative that China is using to open up trade routes – and said Beijing investment could help reopen copper mines.
A report suggests China's deployment might not be coming for another two years and it would not involve them taking over the base, merely sending personnel at the Taliban's invite.
China likely achieve its latest ambitions for Bagram through help from Pakistan, Sun says, adding, 'I am sure they would like to cut out the middleman,' she added. 'If the Taliban requests Chinese assistance, I think China will be inclined to send human support. Most likely, they will frame it as technical support or logistic support.'

A Taliban spokesman told an Italian newspaper that Afghanistan's new rulers will rely primarily on financing from China as it seeks to head off a looming humanitarian crisis
Daily Mail · by Stephen M. Lepore · October 3, 2021


3. Netflix’s ‘Squid Game’ Is the Dystopian Hit No One Wanted—Until Everyone Did

Excerpts:
Netflix’s Ms. Kim said that the show, though very Korean, has more universal appeal because it poses a simple moral question: “Who are we?”
“We are not horses, we’re all humans,” she said. “That is the question the show really wants to throw at you.”
Brittany Chang, a 22-year-old university student in Singapore, had never watched a Korean drama, but urged by friends—and Netflix’s suggestions—she watched the trailer and wondered why the desperate contestants turned on each other. “Squid Game” reminded her of “The Hunger Games,” another brutal survival tale.
“I watched the entire series in one sitting,” she said.
“Squid Game” is a story of underdogs, relatable for people who struggle, that resonates with younger audiences, much like how the K-pop band BTS became a voice for millennials, said Suk-Young Kim, head of theater and performance studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“Korea is no longer an exotic site where only a certain dedicated fandom culture exists,” said Prof. Kim, who has written a book about South Korea’s music industry. “It’s a major cultural hub with rising prominence in Hollywood and on Billboard charts.”

Netflix’s ‘Squid Game’ Is the Dystopian Hit No One Wanted—Until Everyone Did
The South Korean survival drama that for a decade was dismissed as grotesque and unrealistic is on track to become Netflix’s most-watched show
WSJ · by Dasl Yoon and Timothy W. Martin
Now “Squid Game,” which made its debut Sept. 17, is a global phenomenon. TikTok videos of people replicating the children’s games have gone viral, while online retailers are rushing to sell “Squid Game” Halloween costumes. The show has hit No. 1 in more than 90 countries, including the U.S.—a surprise even to Netflix executives.
By every metric, the Korean survival drama is on pace to surpass Netflix’s current record holders—“Bridgerton” and “Lupin”—in the total volume of hours watched and the number of subscribers who have tuned into the show for at least two minutes, said Minyoung Kim, who oversees the company’s creative activities in the Asia-Pacific region except for India.
“It’s still trending up,” Ms. Kim said. “We’ve never seen anything grow as fast and aggressive as ‘Squid Game.’”
Despite its sudden success, “Squid Game” represents a payoff from Netflix’s multiyear bet on South Korean content. The U.S. streaming giant invested about $700 million for Korean films and television shows from 2015 to 2020, the company says. This year alone, Netflix plans to spend half a billion dollars.
That compares with about $400 million earmarked for India content in 2019 and 2020, and the roughly $17 billion Netflix is spending on content world-wide this year.
The popularity of “Squid Game” comes as Netflix faces unprecedented competition, with rival streaming services seeking original hits that can grab eyeballs across continents to distinguish their offerings.
“Squid Game” creator Hwang Dong-hyuk came up with the idea for the show more than a decade ago, while living with his mother and grandmother. He had to stop writing the script at one point: He was forced to sell his $675 laptop for cash.

With a potential language barrier, Netflix emphasized visuals in the costumes and sets of ‘Squid Game.’
Photo: Netflix
Back then, potential investors and actors bristled at the brutal killings and implausibility of individuals competing to the death for money. But two years ago, Netflix thought the class struggles outlined in “Squid Game” spoke to reality.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit the global economy, it exacerbated the disparity between the rich and the poor, said the 50-year-old Mr. Hwang. Even vaccine rollouts vary greatly based on whether a country is wealthy or not, he said.
“The world has changed,” Mr. Hwang said. “All of these points made the story very realistic for people compared to a decade ago.”
Buzz built quickly. The Netflix trailer for “Squid Game” on YouTube has already amassed more than 14 million views—more than double that of “Bridgerton” or “Lupin.”
South Koreans have celebrated the milestone of “Squid Game” becoming the country’s first show to hit Netflix’s top spot in the U.S. and globally. Local media have labeled it the next “Parasite,” the Oscar-winning film. References to the show have even entered South Korea’s presidential election race, with some candidates making parody posters or challenging each other to “Squid Game”-like competitions.
“I was surprised to hear the show did so well outside of Korea and thought maybe the popularity of K-pop made more people interested in Korean content,” said 27-year-old Kwon Se-un, a cafe worker. “The merciless killings were attention grabbing and the range of different characters made it interesting.”
“Squid Game” went through some primping to become a global megahit. With a potential language barrier, Netflix emphasized visuals, outfitting competitors in green tracksuits and building colorful sets resembling children’s playgrounds. Some of the rules for the traditional Korean games were simplified or altered.
Many Americans also enjoy watching foreign shows with English-language dubbing, rather than subtitles—a choice that Netflix’s algorithms can automatically select for users based on their past viewing.
Korean dramas have long had a large fan base across Asia and have been seen in Europe, Latin America and the U.S. through other streaming services such as Viki Inc. and the now-defunct DramaFever Corp. But those rivals didn’t produce much big-budget, original content or boast the streaming reach of Netflix, which began its South Korean efforts in 2016.
Since then, Netflix has introduced about 80 Korean films and series, and U.S. viewing of K-dramas has doubled in the past two years, Netflix said.

‘Squid Game’ has universal appeal, says Netflix’s Minyoung Kim, because it poses a simple moral question: ‘Who are we?’
Photo: Netflix
Previous Korean hits, available on Netflix and elsewhere, typically center on boy-meets-girl love stories or Cinderella-esque tales of the wicked elites—and often weave in both. Some of Netflix’s prior K-drama successes followed that playbook, including “Crash Landing on You,” a 2019 show in which a South Korean heiress lands in North Korea during a paragliding accident.
But more recent shows began to break the mold, winning broader audiences than the K-drama die-hards. For instance, “Sweet Home,” an apocalyptic suspense series released last year, reached No. 3 on Netflix in the U.S.
About 95% of “Squid Game” viewers are outside South Korea. It has been subtitled in 31 languages and dubbed in 13, Netflix said.
Netflix’s Ms. Kim said that the show, though very Korean, has more universal appeal because it poses a simple moral question: “Who are we?”
“We are not horses, we’re all humans,” she said. “That is the question the show really wants to throw at you.”
Brittany Chang, a 22-year-old university student in Singapore, had never watched a Korean drama, but urged by friends—and Netflix’s suggestions—she watched the trailer and wondered why the desperate contestants turned on each other. “Squid Game” reminded her of “The Hunger Games,” another brutal survival tale.
“I watched the entire series in one sitting,” she said.
“Squid Game” is a story of underdogs, relatable for people who struggle, that resonates with younger audiences, much like how the K-pop band BTS became a voice for millennials, said Suk-Young Kim, head of theater and performance studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“Korea is no longer an exotic site where only a certain dedicated fandom culture exists,” said Prof. Kim, who has written a book about South Korea’s music industry. “It’s a major cultural hub with rising prominence in Hollywood and on Billboard charts.”
Write to Dasl Yoon at dasl.yoon@wsj.com and Timothy W. Martin at timothy.martin@wsj.com
WSJ · by Dasl Yoon and Timothy W. Martin


4.  AMMO, Inc. Raises Q2 Guidance To $55 Million; Targets $400 Million In Revenues By 2024 (NASDAQ: POWW, POWWP)

Long article with a lot of data but I thought this was an interesting fact buried within this:

Part of that optimism could come from its military contracts. In September, AMMO announced being awarded a contract from the Irregular Warfare Technical Support Directorate (IWTSD), formerly CTTSO, which is formed and operating under the U.S. Department of Defense, to design and manufacture signature-on-target rounds (SoT) in support of U.S. military operations.
Of course, the size of the contract is sensitive information, and understandably so. But, those that follow similar deals know that dollar amounts can range from hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of dollars. In fact, billion-dollar contracts in ammunition orders are not uncommon. And while AMMO couldn’t provide specific details, it’s a fair assumption that it will be a moneymaker due to the product’s specialized nature.
It’s indeed a dynamic product. According to AMMO, the SoT ammunition is being developed to provide warfighters with the ability to see the impact of rounds fired from their weapon systems on a wider variety of targets, both day and night. The specialized SoT ammunition further allows the machine gunner to see bullet impacts without a visible signature in-flight to expose their firing location.


AMMO, Inc. Raises Q2 Guidance To $55 Million; Targets $400 Million In Revenues By 2024 (NASDAQ: POWW, POWWP)
getnews.info · by admin
AMMO, Inc. (Nasdaq: POWW, POWWP) could be one of the best-kept secrets in the market. Actually, they’re not entirely under the radar since they have a more than $700 million market cap. But, it should be higher, especially after several recent updates shows that POWW is growing at warp-speed.
In fact, several updates in September alone should have generated a firestorm of interest. But, since it didn’t, investors still have an opportunity to catch POWW stock at considerably undervalued prices. This may be an aggressive presumption, but once investors truly understand the story at AMMO, Inc., current prices could become extinct. And deservedly so.
Frankly, AMMO stock is already deserving of a considerably higher market cap. And if AMMO was magically set at a billion-dollar cap, it may not do enough valuation justice. After all, they have the assets, sales, and pipeline to justify that 30% move higher. Better still, recent updates show they have the fuel needed to accelerate well past that ambitious target.
Last week, this leading vertically integrated producer of high-performance ammunition and components announced increasing its prior fiscal second-quarter revenue estimate from $51 million to approximately $55 million for the period ending September 30, 2021. And as the owner and operator of GunBroker.com, the largest online marketplace serving the firearms and shooting sports industries, that estimate may prove to be conservative.
A clue to that scenario comes from the company, which said its transaction activity at its marketplace platform, GunBroker.com, remains more robust, even compared to last year’s record-setting performance. Further, they made sure that investors knew to factor in its implementing several initiatives intending to accelerate the growth, including engaging with manufacturers, distributors, and importers to expand the marketplace offerings.
Growth By Meeting Massive Demand
But that’s not all. Its CEO also noted that the growth in its core ammunition business continues to be driven by strong underlying demand for its unique, high-performance products, coupled with ongoing efforts to increase capacity. Notably, since consolidating all manufacturing operations this past April in its Manitowoc, Wisconsin plant, AMMO said it has doubled its priming and loading capacity and increased its brass manufacturing capacity by approximately 15%. And there are more production enhancements planned for operational deployment in the near term. Still, AMMO said to expect even more in the coming quarters.
Part of that optimism could come from its military contracts. In September, AMMO announced being awarded a contract from the Irregular Warfare Technical Support Directorate (IWTSD), formerly CTTSO, which is formed and operating under the U.S. Department of Defense, to design and manufacture signature-on-target rounds (SoT) in support of U.S. military operations.
Of course, the size of the contract is sensitive information, and understandably so. But, those that follow similar deals know that dollar amounts can range from hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of dollars. In fact, billion-dollar contracts in ammunition orders are not uncommon. And while AMMO couldn’t provide specific details, it’s a fair assumption that it will be a moneymaker due to the product’s specialized nature.
It’s indeed a dynamic product. According to AMMO, the SoT ammunition is being developed to provide warfighters with the ability to see the impact of rounds fired from their weapon systems on a wider variety of targets, both day and night. The specialized SoT ammunition further allows the machine gunner to see bullet impacts without a visible signature in-flight to expose their firing location.
For U.S. troops, the state-of-the-art ammo can be a life-saver. Its advanced capability will increase survivability by reducing firing position identification and ultimately increasing lethality by supporting the shooter to place more rounds on target. Moreover, from a competitive perspective, AMMO remains well-positioned to capitalize on future orders. Remember, this type of ammunition is highly specialized, with only a tiny handful of companies able to produce it. Thus, it’s one big reason why this $6.12 stock could have a tremendous amount of value left on the table.
Optimism Abounds
The company sure thinks so. In its last conference call, AMMO said that while its expected $200 million or more in revenues this year is a great accomplishment, they see business ramping toward the $400 million levels based on existing trends. They can see behind the curtain.
Moreover, with a new Department of State (DOS) policy intending to prohibit the importation of both firearms and ammunition from Russia, the opportunities inherent to its Gunbroker.com asset, with its six million active users, could add substantially to revenues as the integration process continues.
In addition, its massive $238 million order backlog reported at the end of last quarter will also turn into cash, especially through its enhanced manufacturing facility expected to increase capacity by nearly 4X. Not only does it transform a backlog into revenues, but it also leaves plenty of production room to spare.
And, remember, the American gun markets already suffer from demand exceeding the available supply. Store shelves across the country are bare, with both Big Box and small retail struggling for inventory. Sector analysts don’t expect demand to lessen anytime soon either. They see the move by the DOS doing two things- exacerbate the current supply problems and strengthen an already booming market. Sometimes the government itself can be the most successful gun salesman. In the current environment, they may very well be.
Record-Setting Momentum In Place
Moreover, the expected surge in demand to an already booming market is more than good news from a sales perspective. Laws of supply and demand should lead to higher prices, more substantial gross margins, and extended sales visibility for AMMO. Even better, with the DOS order expected to remain effective for at least 12-months, AMMO can see these potential benefits within the next few weeks and should last at least for the next four quarters.
Hence, despite AMMO raising its revenue guidance significantly, changes to the playing field may put another revision in play. Based on the market conditions, expect any modification to be toward the upside. And if details somehow emerge about the size of its military contract, it can be a substantial change.
Investors need to also value the revenue-generating strength and potential from GunBroker.com. Comments made during its earnings call gave every indication that the GunBroker asset will be a substantial revenue driver. They support their optimistic posture by being intimate with the markets on the ground and knowing that its Gunbroker.com asset has far more to contribute once fully integrated. Only about $12 million of high-margin marketplace revenue came through its Gunbroker.com acquisition last quarter. Expectations are for that number to surge in coming quarters.
That makes sense, especially noting despite the massive active user base at Gunbroker.com, ammunition sales accounted for only 3% of its revenues last year. Hence, AMMO inherits an enormous revenue-generating opportunity from that group alone. Even better, with G.Q. Magazine reporting that the average gun owner spends roughly $250 per year on ammo, training, and supplies, tapping into even a small percentage of that six-million-member group could deliver an exponential surge in revenues.
Then, factor in that its new facility can potentially quadruple production to meet demand from its presence in more than 1600 direct-to-consumer locations, it’s almost futile to argue against AMMO’s bullish posture. As if that wasn’t enough to expose the value proposition, the near-unprecedented levels of new gun permits should strengthen an already strong business tailwind into the next few quarters.
And keep in mind, while AMMO may have a small-cap price, it’s no small company. AMMO expects to sell upwards of 750 million rounds of ammunition this year. And that’s not including its newly awarded military contract that could exponentially increase those totals.
Better yet, as AMMO continues to integrate its Gunbroker.com asset, the company is in its best position ever to capitalize on the $32 billion in sales available from its core target markets. Hence, what’s not to like about AMMO, Inc.
They have record sales, the highest ever profits, and a backlog that is near $240 million. For them to be trading at anything less than 52-week highs of $10.31 is, therefore, an opportunity. However, as markets can do, they correct quickly. And once investors digest the growth happening at AMMO, Inc., the gap between current and all-time highs could close. Its next update alone may inspire that rally.
Keep this stock in the crosshairs. Better yet, consider pulling the trigger on what could be a massive near and long-term investment opportunity.
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getnews.info · by admin

5. The Great Ammo Shortage: Blame the U.S. Government?

The Great Ammo Shortage: Blame the U.S. Government?
19fortyfive.com · by ByPeter Suciu · October 2, 2021
American folk singer and activist Pete Seeger sang “Where have all the flowers gone,” but today someone could rework the lyrics to ponder where have all the bullets gone? The same refrain that was heard throughout the spring and summer will be heard again: ammunition is in short supply and it could be months before levels return to normal.
The same song is being sung across the nation, and the nationwide shortage of ammunition could put a serious squeeze on this fall’s hunting season. Across the country, retailers have had to continue to limit the number of boxes of cartridges that a buyer can purchase at one time—and each of those boxes is costing more.
Popular hunting cartridges including .410, .270, and especially .30-06 are hard to come by, so hunters are advised to stock up early. If you see it on the shelves today, then don’t expect it to be there tomorrow. That is the message retailers nationwide are telling customers.
Blame the Government?
The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has been largely to blame for the ammunition shortage, but rumors have circulated as to what caused the supplies to dip.
Andrew Rose of Professional Loading Service in Stevensville, Montana agreed that the ammunition shortage began due to large purchases of ammunition at the start of the pandemic, but added that government contracts also squeezed out the consumer. According to Rose, who spoke with The Valley Journal this month, American ammunition manufacturers including Winchester, Remington, Federal and Hornady prioritized their resources and production on filling government contracts.
“The government” is responsible has become a popular conspiracy theory in recent months, and the line of thinking is that U.S. government contracts caused the mass ammunition shortages.
However, industry experts say it isn’t actually true. While the government does contract private companies, ammunition for the military and federal agencies are produced at different facilities. According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the larger factor was the increase of first-time buyers last year—while production at many facilities was halted for a while due to the pandemic.
Lawrence Keane, general counsel and senior vice president for government and public affairs at the NSSF, said that hoarding and panic buying were the main factors for the current ammunition shortage. Keane cited the “toilet paper crisis of March 2020” as similar. Consumers rushed out to buy up ammunition throughout last year and suppliers couldn’t keep up with demand.
While retailers have continued to note the shortages, and many shooters bemoaned the lack of ammunition, what was lacking in most nationwide reporting was commentary from those who were well stocked up. Panic buying has been the real issue. Consumers who see empty shelves on a particular visit will snap up everything they see when those shelves are restocked out of fear.
“It kind of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Keane told WUSA9.com earlier this year. “Like the toilet paper last year, they grab as much as they can as fast as they can, because they’re not sure when they’ll be able to get it in the future.”
Keane also sought to debunk the conspiracy theory that the government was behind the shortage.
“Let me just say categorically, that is not true,” Keane explained. “That is fake news . . . if you will.”
Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. He regularly writes about military small arms, and is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com.
19fortyfive.com · by ByPeter Suciu · October 2, 2021



6. China's loans leave developing nations with $385 billion in 'hidden debts', reveals study
Debt trap diplomacy.

China's loans leave developing nations with $385 billion in 'hidden debts', reveals study





Last Updated: 3rd October, 2021 14:23 IST
China's Loans Leave Developing Nations With $385 Billion In 'hidden Debts', Reveals Study
China’s Belt and Road Initiative has caused dozens of countries to accumulate $385 billion in “hidden debts” to Beijing, a new study claimed.
Written By

Image: AP


A new study claimed that China’s Belt and Road Initiative has caused dozens of countries to accumulate $385 billion in “hidden debts” to Beijing. AidData, an international development research lab based at Virginia’s College of William & Mary, revealed that the debt had slipped through the scrutiny of international lenders such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The study said that the “hidden debt” is due to an increasing number of deals struck not directly between governments through central banks but through often opaque arrangements with a range of financing institutions.
Hence “the debt burdens were kept off the public balance sheets,” the study said.
It added, “Chinese debt burdens are substantially larger than research intuitions, credit rating agencies, or intergovernmental organisations with surveillance responsibilities previously understood.”
AirData analysed around 13,427 Chinese development projects worth a combined $843 billion across 165 countries over an 18-year-period to the end of 2017. It revealed that China has provided record amounts of financing to developing countries, supporting both public and private sector projects over the past two decades. The study also said that nearly 70 per cent of Beijing’s overseas lending is now directed to state-owned companies, state-owned banks, special purpose vehicles, joint ventures and private sector institutions in recipient countries rather than sovereign borrowers, which are central government institutions.
China uses confidentiality clauses to debt-trap nations
Meanwhile, the latest study comes after it was previously revealed that China uses a “well thought out strategy” to debt-trap countries with confidentiality clauses. International Forum for Right and Security (IFFRAS) reported that China is shockingly using confidentiality clauses barring borrowers from revealing terms and conditions of the engagement or even the existence of the debt itself. As per the report, the researchers looked at 100 contracts signed during 2000 - 2020 to systemically analyse the legal terms of lending followed by Chinese state-owned entities and government borrowers across 24 developing countries in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Oceania with a commitment amounting to the tune of $36.6 billion.
It found that Chinese credit terms remain highly skewed in favour of Chinese lenders over other creditors. IFFRAS reported that the credit offered contains collateral arrangements, no Paris Club clauses, clauses allowing lenders to influence debtors' domestic and foreign policies, etc. Additionally, it also said that the Chinese stress keeping the credit terms secret from the citizens in both the borrowing and the lending country, who otherwise have a legitimate right to know. The lender is also provided with the discretion to cancel loans or demand full repayment ahead of schedule at will.
(With inputs from ANI)





7. The Information Operations Episode
A podcast from the Modern War Institute's Irregular Warfare podcast. A useful summary below.


Excellent conclusion:

They ended the episode with this warning: “Don’t trust anyone who says they have this space figured out.“
This reminds me of something I once heard about advanced education.
“What did you learn in graduate school?”
“I learned how much I don’t know.”
I am reminded of Socrates:  “I am wiser than this human being. For probably neither of us knows anything noble and good, but he supposes he knows something when he does not know, while I, just as I do not know, do not even suppose that I do. I am likely to be a little bit wiser than he in this very thing: that whatever I do not know, I do not even suppose I know.” (which is usually summarized as "I know that I know nothing" or "I know that I do not know.")

The Information Operations Episode
carryingthegun.com · by DG · September 30, 2021

I’ll be honest.
I didn’t want to like this episode. I was hoping there would be something in there that just turned me off completely or gave me an opportunity to stand on my soapbox and rant.
When information can travel globally at the tap of a finger, irregular warfare professionals must contend with an ever-changing environment. How does strategic messaging tie into operations on the battlefield? How can we build a more information-savvy force? And how can information act as both weapon and warfighting space?
INFORMATION OPERATIONS FOR THE INFORMATION AGE: IO IN IRREGULAR WARFARE, Irregular Warfare Podcast
Too bad.
It was a great episode and it’s clear the guests Dr. Rafi Cohen and Brent Colburn know what they’re talking about.
They didn’t sing the praises of information warfare as a panacea to all of our problems.
Nor did they cast it aside as a silly distraction.
If you’re interested in information warfare, where it’s currently at, and where it might be going, this episode is worth the listen.
You might also want to consider signing up for the CTG newsletter. The next one goes out tomorrow and it is on this very topic.
There were so many great discussion points in this episode, but the below are the ones that stood out to me.
  • We blame DoD for being poor at responding when this is often way outside of their lane. I’ve seen this over and over again. Some adversarial spokesperson says something that gets picked up and amplified. The response (in DoD circles) is often “how are we countering this?” Well, the answer might have to be – “we’re not.” It may be something way outside the lane of DoD. I’ve been in situations where the person asking me this question is the actual person who has the power and authority to “do” the countering – they often don’t realize it.
  • No one (that we care about) is reading that press release or article in the New York Times. Just because it’s hot in the United States does not mean it’s hot somewhere overseas. In fact, it’s probably a non-story.
  • DoD information warfare is inherently tactical. Before anything else, these efforts should be focused on achieving battlefield effects. How many enemy soldiers surrendered? How many civilians moved to safety? There is a role at the operational strategic level, sure. But that is the realm of political warfare.
  • Reinforcing beliefs is easier than changing them. It’s really not even worth the effort.
  • Firehose of falsehoods. I never heard this term before. But it refers to just spouting lies all over the place. This is something that our adversaries do. It’s a tactic, sure. But as the guests say, it ultimately fails. It’s flashy. It’s messy. But it’s not what we do. Truth is our best tactic.
  • Mission Command. Yes! They discussed that our biggest problem is we don’t know what we’re trying to accomplish. Readers of this blog will know that this is Matt Armstrong’s thesis.
  • We need to further professionalize. Yes, agree. Beyond PSYOP. When commander’s look at the IW professional in the room, there is an expectation of expertise. This comes in many domains. We need to keep professionalizing. This is a bigger topic, but this professional really needs to be a lot of things. Language. Culture. Media. Psychology. Political-acumen. It’s that important.
  • The importance of language and culture. “We need to be able to do all of this simultaneously in multiple different languages.” Yes, agreed. You know who does that really well?
  • The age of secrecy is over. I’m so glad that they made this a point. Whatever it is we’re up to is going to become public knoweldge. There is no way we’re going to keep everything a secret. It’s going to become public. Recognize it, plan for it, and move on.
  • “Black hole” words. We’re full of them. Buzzy words that are devoid of meaning – “strategic communications.”
  • It’s not about the tweets. It’s not about the platform.
  • “The railroads are in trouble today not because the need was filled by others (cars, trucks, airplanes, even telephones), but because it was not filled by the railroads themselves. They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business. The reason they defined their industry wrong was because they were railroad-oriented instead of transportation-oriented; they were product oriented instead of customer-oriented.”
  • Authorities need a revamp. The space moves fast. Push the approval authority down lower. How low? Well, how low can you go?
They ended the episode with this warning: “Don’t trust anyone who says they have this space figured out.“
This reminds me of something I once heard about advanced education.
“What did you learn in graduate school?”
“I learned how much I don’t know.”
Enjoy these posts? Follow me on Twitter and sign up for the monthly newsletter.
carryingthegun.com · by DG · September 30, 2021

8. America the Humble: The End of Post-9/11 Militarism

Excerpts:
Evidence of this emerging American aversion to the 9/11 wars could be found as early as 2005, as one of us (Mueller) noted then. Now, the United States seems to have fully embraced an “Iraq syndrome” or an “Iraq/Afghanistan syndrome,” and it has moved back to a considerable degree of humility. As something of an indicator, military spending as a percentage of GDP, which rose considerably in the decade after 9/11, is back to the levels of 2000. The American public might still support a mostly airborne campaign against international terrorism, but there is little appetite for invasion and occupation.
Something like humility can perhaps be seen today even in the reaction to the rise of China, which many see as the primary danger out there. Even alarmists push for little more than rearranging the U.S. military (or selling submarines to allies) in a (potentially quixotic) effort to somehow “balance” against China’s (primarily economic) rise. Other proposals have even less bite. For example, they advocate working with allies, improving American officials’ understanding of China, calling out China’s repressive policies, countering Beijing’s efforts to potentially control communication networks, and cooperating on common interests, such as climate change. But you do not hear calls for major military operations to counter China.
After the extended aberration caused by the overreaction to 9/11, American military humility appears to be back. And as the country limps from its 9/11-induced failure in Afghanistan, it even seems possible that official rhetoric will mellow, as suggested by Biden’s recent UN speech. Self-infatuated proclamations about American superpowerdom, exceptionalism, and indispensable nationhood, seen by many to be arrogant, may subside, at least for now.


America the Humble
The End of Post-9/11 Militarism
September 30, 2021
Foreign Affairs · by John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart · October 2, 2021
At the United Nations last week, President Joe Biden contended that the United States now stands at “an inflection point in history” during which “relentless war” is being replaced by “relentless diplomacy.” He also pointed out that “many of our greatest concerns cannot be solved or even addressed through the force of arms.” This could mark a notable departure from the last 20 years, when military ventures largely defined U.S. foreign policy.
Impelled by an overwhelming desire to hunt down those responsible for the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the United States launched military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, where it toppled regimes that had little or nothing to do with 9/11. Initially successful at that task and eventually accompanied by rhetoric about spreading democracy and stability in the Middle East, the wars soon devolved into extended counterinsurgency (or counteroccupation) operations that have resulted in the deaths of more than 100 times as many people as perished on 9/11.
But it hasn’t always been this way. The militarization of the post-9/11 period has been a glaring, extended, and highly consequential aberration. During the quarter century before that, the United States pursued a foreign policy that was far more humble militarily, and it seems ready to resume that tradition after its exhausting and costly 9/11-induced military ventures, which have so thoroughly failed to deliver satisfactory results at an acceptable cost. And the country may now have a president fully committed to carrying out such a policy.
Humble Pie
In the wake of its withdrawal from the Vietnam War in 1973, the United States fell into something that has been dubbed the “Vietnam syndrome.” Although it still pursued the Cold War with the Soviet Union, it substantially avoided the active use of U.S. military force to do so. In the late 1970s, in fact, the United States essentially let its policy of containing the Soviet Union lapse and watched as the Soviets welcomed 10 new countries into their camp: Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Grenada, Laos, Mozambique, Nicaragua, South Yemen, and Vietnam. All of those countries soon became dependent on Moscow economically, politically, and sometimes militarily—particularly Afghanistan, where the Soviets found it necessary to intervene with force in order to keep their allies in power. As it turned out, the Soviets eventually came to realize that they might have been better off being contained.
American military force was applied rather sparingly during the entire last quarter of the twentieth century. The most assertive Cold War actions by the United States during that period were the military invasion of the small Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983 and the operation to support anti-Soviet rebels in Afghanistan. The United States also bombed Libya for a day in 1986 in retaliation for the Libyan government’s sponsorship of terrorist activities; invaded Panama in 1989 to depose an offending regime; and led an international coalition in 1991 to reverse Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. In all cases, the opponents were scarcely formidable. Although the Iraqi army may have looked impressive on paper, it lacked strategy, tactics, defenses, leadership, and morale, and it responded to confrontation with the U.S. military mostly by fleeing or by surrendering.

Other military ventures Washington pursued between the Vietnam War and 9/11 were even more limited and were carried out mostly for humanitarian purposes. American troops were sent to Lebanon in 1983 to help police a cease-fire there, but they were abruptly pulled out when 241 of them were killed in their barracks by a terrorist bomb. In 1992, American soldiers helped stabilize Somalia, which was in the midst of a civil war and an attendant famine. But Washington withdrew its forces after 18 soldiers were killed in a chaotic firefight. Stung by this experience, the Clinton administration did not act to stop the genocide in nearby Rwanda in 1994.
The militarization of the post-9/11 period has been a glaring, extended, and highly consequential aberration.
There were great concerns about civil war in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, but along with much handwringing, the U.S. military role involved little more than supplying aid and advice and, toward the end of the conflict, conducting limited bombing missions against Serbian targets in Bosnia. Only after the fighting was over did Washington send in troops to perform policing operations. A few years later, the United States led a NATO bombing campaign against Serbia to stop violence against Kosovo Albanians, but no American forces ever got close to fighting on the ground. Overall, this does not suggest a country looking for a fight, questing after monsters to destroy, or seeking to act like a hegemon.
It is true, however, that American rhetoric during this period did not match its military humility. President Ronald Reagan insisted that world peace was at stake in the civil war in Lebanon, and President George H. W. Bush opined that his war in the Gulf would “chart the future of the world for the next 100 years.” In addition, Bush (and later President Bill Clinton) declared that a coup in Haiti was an extraordinary threat to the security and economy of the United States. There have also been proclamations about how the United States is “the one indispensable nation,” suggesting that others are, well, dispensable.
Despite all the hyperbolic and self-important rhetoric, the fact remains that between the end of the Vietnam War and the turn of the century, the United States averaged only about 20 combat deaths per year including the toll from the attack in Lebanon (or about half that annual average if those deaths are excluded). Over the same period, the total number of military personnel dropped by 720,000, and military spending declined from 5.6 percent of U.S. GDP to 3.1 percent.
In the presidential election campaign of 2000, no one seems to have opposed George W. Bush’s explicit support for a “humble” foreign policy. Indeed, his Democratic opponent, Vice President Al Gore, deemed the idea to be “an important one.” To a considerable degree, both candidates were in tune with the times.
The Aberration
Any commitment to humility disappeared when al Qaeda attacked the United States on September 11, 2001. After the attacks, Bush abruptly abandoned humility to proclaim that the country’s “responsibility to history” was now to “rid the world of evil.” With this extravagant goal in mind, the United States launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and began to hunt down terrorist suspects across the globe. The U.S. reaction to the 9/11 attacks accounts for the overwhelming amount of American military action over the last 50 years. Without 9/11, the comparative military humility of the last quarter of the twentieth century would likely have continued.

Neither of the two post-9/11 wars was necessary. Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq with its ramshackle army was fully containable and deterrable, and it was unlikely that the insecure Taliban regime in Afghanistan, where al Qaeda had carried out training, needed to be overthrown. The relationship between the Taliban and al Qaeda was often very uncomfortable, and the regime might have been susceptible to international pressure—especially from Saudi Arabia, which had been trying to extradite terror chief Osama bin Laden for years.
The United States seems ready to resume a humble military approach after its exhausting and costly 9/11-induced military ventures.
The 9/11 attack did not prove to be a harbinger—no terrorist attack before or after, in a war zone or out of one, has inflicted even one-tenth as much total destruction. And al Qaeda central, while inspiring some wannabes abroad and creating many videos, has done almost nothing of consequence in 20 years. Even under siege, it is difficult to see why it could not have infiltrated a few operatives into the United States legally or illegally or carried out local attacks like the shooting rampage in Mumbai in 2008.
That was not how it looked at first, of course, and some degree of alarm was justified for a while. That alarm, however, should in time have been reassessed; with little exception, it was not. The same holds for the establishment of a massive apparatus to deal with terrorism within the United States that has cost well over $2 trillion. For this to be justified, it would have had to deter, disrupt, or protect against about three 9/11 attacks every four years.
In conducting the Iraq war, U.S. leaders seemed to have believed that other actors would not react. But Iran had a huge incentive to make the American occupation of neighboring Iraq as miserable as possible, and terrorists from around the world were attracted to the fray, something warned about before the U.S. invasions. In Afghanistan, the notion was that American soldiers “could walk into the world’s most conservative villages, make friends, hunt their enemies, and build a better society,” as Graeme Smith wrote in his book, The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan. Instead, attacks by the foreigners regularly rallied tribal members to the Taliban’s cause.
Course Correction
As it became clear just how costly and counterproductive the main conflicts of the “war on terror” had become, Washington began to shift back to a humbler military approach. In a major statement in January 2012, the Defense Department stressed that “U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct largescale, prolonged stability operations.” This suggests that the military and its leaders had concluded that they simply didn’t know how to successfully execute such missions, and, in that sense, it expressed a degree of humility. Presumably with this in mind, at least in part, policymakers worked to reconfigure the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq to reduce the death rate of U.S. military forces. In Afghanistan, the rate was over 400 per year in 2010–11, but it declined to under 25 per year later. The death rate in Iraq was over 800 per year between 2004 and 2007, but it declined to under 70 per year in 2010–11 and to less than 25 per year thereafter. (All of these rates, however, are much lower than those suffered earlier in the wars in Korea and Vietnam.) In 2014, Washington sent troops back to Iraq to fight the Islamic State, or ISIS, but in the years that followed, the United States mostly provided air support while local fighters bore the brunt of combat deaths; about 20 U.S. service members were killed in the conflict.
Both the Obama and Trump administrations moved to reduce U.S. commitments to the “forever wars,” echoing a shift in American public opinion. Indicative of the public’s wariness about military ventures abroad was its response to bipartisan support in Congress in 2013 for the punitive bombing of Syria after the ruling regime of Bashar al-Assad was deemed to have carried out a poison gas attack on civilians. Out of concern that the action would lead to further involvement in the conflict, the public was strongly opposed to using force—as members of Congress of both parties found when they went home to their districts.
There is little appetite for invasion and occupation among the American public.
Evidence of this emerging American aversion to the 9/11 wars could be found as early as 2005, as one of us (Mueller) noted then. Now, the United States seems to have fully embraced an “Iraq syndrome” or an “Iraq/Afghanistan syndrome,” and it has moved back to a considerable degree of humility. As something of an indicator, military spending as a percentage of GDP, which rose considerably in the decade after 9/11, is back to the levels of 2000. The American public might still support a mostly airborne campaign against international terrorism, but there is little appetite for invasion and occupation.

Something like humility can perhaps be seen today even in the reaction to the rise of China, which many see as the primary danger out there. Even alarmists push for little more than rearranging the U.S. military (or selling submarines to allies) in a (potentially quixotic) effort to somehow “balance” against China’s (primarily economic) rise. Other proposals have even less bite. For example, they advocate working with allies, improving American officials’ understanding of China, calling out China’s repressive policies, countering Beijing’s efforts to potentially control communication networks, and cooperating on common interests, such as climate change. But you do not hear calls for major military operations to counter China.
After the extended aberration caused by the overreaction to 9/11, American military humility appears to be back. And as the country limps from its 9/11-induced failure in Afghanistan, it even seems possible that official rhetoric will mellow, as suggested by Biden’s recent UN speech. Self-infatuated proclamations about American superpowerdom, exceptionalism, and indispensable nationhood, seen by many to be arrogant, may subside, at least for now.

Foreign Affairs · by John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart · October 2, 2021

9. New Roles for Civil Affairs Forces in a New World

Excerpts:
Civil affairs forces sustained and utilized in more novel roles in cooperation and competition would still be available for their traditional roles at or near the end of armed conflict: to conduct stability operations and rebuild civil institutions following the cessation of major hostilities. There is potential for these forces to leverage prior investments in cooperation and competition to improve outcomes following armed conflict. The information they would have gathered and relationships they would have built would likely prove valuable to rebuilding efforts and possibly add to the integrity of civil institutions as U.S. forces withdraw.
In sum, civil affairs forces present great potential for helping the United States to compete effectively this new strategic era, across the competition continuum. Realizing this potential requires considered and creative attention to the conceptual employment of civil affairs forces, followed by concrete steps to leverage this unique capability across a range of activities and challenges.
New Roles for Civil Affairs Forces in a New World
cna.org · by CNA

By Emily Mushen
October 1, 2021

The armed forces of the United States have engaged with civilian leadership, institutions and populations throughout our nation’s history. Today, we know these activities as civil military operations, typically conducted by civil affairs forces. They are traditionally employed following the conclusion of major combat operations, in the period of transition toward stabilization. We saw this most recently in Afghanistan, where civil affairs forces worked extensively with local institutions and personnel to help restore order to civil society, rebuild, and grow lasting relationships with civil actors. Today, however, the military is contending with a shift in policy priorities to focus on strategic competitors like China and Russia. President Biden recently signaled this continuing change, saying that the United States is “ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.”
What, then, can we expect from civil affairs, given the typical use of these forces has been on “remaking” efforts like those in Afghanistan? Rather than portending an end to the need for civil affairs forces, strategic competition should prompt us to think about new and creative uses for this unique skillset.
Today’s civil affairs forces belong to the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps, numbering about 15,000 personnel, along with a contingent of over 1,200 soldiers under U.S. Special Operations Command. Together, these civil affairs forces support relationships with allies and partners through theater security cooperation, disaster response and other, largely peaceful efforts not tied to armed operations.
Although these capabilities have seemingly wide application, current guidance does not yet reflect a full exploration of where and how to employ civil affairs forces in strategic competition with a near-peer like China or Russia. For example, in the 2018 Joint Concept for Integrated Campaigning , the Joint Chiefs of Staff accept that the United States is not well suited for operating outside of a war-peace duality, and propose a continuous campaign approach for operating within a competition continuum. While there are clearly opportunities for civil affairs units to contribute within that continuum — between cooperation and armed conflict — the document does not explicitly mention civil affairs. We see similar omissions in service-level concepts, such as the Army’s Multi-Domain Operations and the Marine Corps Force Design 2030 .
Civil affairs forces have potential uses in strategic competition that remain unexplored. The DOD should consider how civil affairs forces might be relevant within each of the three main elements of the continuum as laid out in Joint Doctrine Note 1-19 : cooperation, competition below the level of armed conflict, and armed conflict.


Cooperation
Civil affairs forces have an enduring and natural role in cooperation. The joint doctrine note points out that cooperative activities involve U.S. and partner-nation forces working toward shared policy objectives and may include “security cooperation activities, multinational training and exercises, information sharing, personnel exchange programs and other peaceful military engagement activities.” These constitute the bulk of U.S. military day-to-day operations outside of conflict zones.
An example of civil affairs in cooperative efforts might involve engaging partner nation local governments, civil aviation authorities and port authorities in support of military training exercises. These events often require coordination with civilian government personnel to ensure that the activities of the forces involved comport with local laws and regulations and are not disruptive to the local economy. Civil affairs forces serve as a natural bridge among the interested parties.
Competition below the level of armed conflict
Competition below the level of armed conflict is effectively the same as “strategic competition.” It is a protracted effort to counter a nation in competition with the United States. Joint Doctrine Note 1-19 references a wide range of activities that could fall under competition below the level of armed conflict, such as “diplomatic and economic activities; political subversion; intelligence and counterintelligence activities; operations in cyberspace; and the information environment, military engagement activities, and other nonviolent activities to achieve mutually incompatible objectives, while seeking to avoid armed conflict.”
The role of civil affairs in competition below the level of armed conflict could include support to proxy forces, foreign assistance to grow civil institutions in partner nations, or civil reconnaissance operations. For civil reconnaissance, civil affairs forces could conduct operations to map civil institutions, gathering and tracking information on these key players and monitoring for changes over time. They are also well-positioned to liaise with them where necessary to gain additional insights to help U.S. forces achieve their objectives.
Another consideration to explore is the application of civil affairs capabilities in irregular warfare, which can be a part of competition below armed conflict. The crucial factor in considering civil affairs in irregular warfare is the opportunity and battle for influence. Indeed, the Civil Affairs Association refers to influence as a civil affairs force’s “greatest talent and weapon” in a list of maxims on civil affairs employment. This influence opportunity would allow civil affairs to contribute to and align with U.S. strategic goals in advancing regional stability and achieving competition objectives.
Armed conflict
Civil affairs forces sustained and utilized in more novel roles in cooperation and competition would still be available for their traditional roles at or near the end of armed conflict: to conduct stability operations and rebuild civil institutions following the cessation of major hostilities. There is potential for these forces to leverage prior investments in cooperation and competition to improve outcomes following armed conflict. The information they would have gathered and relationships they would have built would likely prove valuable to rebuilding efforts and possibly add to the integrity of civil institutions as U.S. forces withdraw.
In sum, civil affairs forces present great potential for helping the United States to compete effectively this new strategic era, across the competition continuum. Realizing this potential requires considered and creative attention to the conceptual employment of civil affairs forces, followed by concrete steps to leverage this unique capability across a range of activities and challenges.
Emily Mushen is a research scientist at CNA with 15 years of experience in analysis of irregular warfare, influence operations, and counterinsurgency. She has conducted several studies on civil affairs activities, force structure, and impact for the US Marine Corps.
cna.org · by CNA


10. Rodrigo Duterte: Philippine president announces retirement from politics

I wonder if he will walk this back if there is a public demand for him to run as vice president. Is this just an attempt to stir up support?

Rodrigo Duterte: Philippine president announces retirement from politics
BBC · by Menu
Published
1 day ago
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Image source, EPA
Image caption, President Duterte had previously said he would stand as vice-president in next year's election
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte says he is retiring from politics and will not stand in elections next year.
The 76-year-old leader said last month that he would run for the vice-presidency in 2022. The country's constitution only permits presidents to serve a single six-year term.
But he now says he will withdraw, as "the overwhelming sentiment of the Filipinos is that I am not qualified".
The move comes amid speculation that his daughter could run for president.
Mr Duterte, a controversial "strongman" figure, came to power in 2016 promising to reduce crime and fix the country's drug crisis.
But critics say that during his five years in power, Mr Duterte has encouraged police to carry out thousands of extrajudicial killings of suspects in what he has called his "war on drugs".
Media caption, There's alarm over a spate of drug-related killings in a suburb of Manila taking place during Covid-19
Mr Duterte's daughter Sara Duterte-Carpio, who is currently mayor of the southern city of Davao, has given mixed messages about running for high office.
Last month Ms Duterte-Carpio said that she would not join the race because she and her father had agreed that only one of them would stand in the election next May.
However, she has led every opinion poll conducted this year.
Mr Duterte announced his surprise retirement at the venue in Manila where he was expected to register his candidacy.
He said that standing for the vice-presidency "would be a violation of the constitution to circumvent the law, the spirit of the constitution".
His spokesman Harry Roque, however, did not entirely rule out a political role for Mr Duterte in the future.
Mr Roque told the BBC that the announcement "means that he is not interested in the vice-presidency anymore - as to whether or not he will completely retire from politics, I would have to clarify this point with him".


President Duterte's announcement should be taken with a pinch of salt.
He has form in saying similar things, only to make U-turns weeks later. In September 2015, in the build-up to the presidential elections, the then-mayor of Davao said he planned to "retire from public life for good".
But in a last-minute move in November that year, Mr Duterte was chosen as the PDP-Laban party's candidate. He went on to win the presidency in May 2016.
Commentators say Saturday's announcement is in keeping with the "2015 playbook", with some speculating Mr Duterte could be a "super sub" for his ally Senator Christopher "Bong" Go, who has filed his candidacy for vice-president.
The drama plays well with voters, many of whom spend evenings glued to their TVs watching the twists and turns of the saga.
Mr Duterte is a shrewd operator who will know the announcement will place his family's name at the heart of his country's "tsismis", the Filipino word for gossip.

When Mr Duterte first announced his intention to run, there was widespread speculation that he would seek a politically weak running mate in order to rule from the number-two role.
He had also publicly mused that, as vice-president, he would be immune from prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for presiding over the brutal "war on drugs" that has killed thousands in the country.
However, it was unclear whether he would have retained legal immunity.
Image source, Reuters
Image caption, Mr Duterte's withdrawal paves the way for his daughter, Sara Duterte-Carpio, to run for the presidency
According to the human-rights organisation Amnesty International, more than 7,000 people were killed by police or unknown armed attackers in the first six months of Mr Duterte's presidency.
In June, the ICC prosecutor applied to open a full investigation into drug war killings in the Philippines, saying crimes against humanity could have been committed.
If Ms Duterte-Carpio were to be elected president, correspondents say she would be likely to protect her father from criminal charges in the Philippines and from ICC prosecutors.

BBC · by Menu

11. 'Voice behind the violence': English-speaking narrator of ISIS propaganda videos arrested and charged by Justice Department


'Voice behind the violence': English-speaking narrator of ISIS propaganda videos arrested and charged by Justice Department
CNN · by Katelyn Polantz, CNN Reporter, Crime and Justice
(CNN)An English-speaking narrator of ISIS recruitment videos is in custody in the US and charged with conspiring to help the terrorist organization, the Justice Department announced Saturday.
Mohammed Khalifa, a 38-year-old Saudi-born Canadian citizen, was captured by Syrian Democratic Forces in January 2019 following a firefight in which he was throwing grenades. Khalifa was recently transferred to the FBI, a DOJ statement said.
The acting US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Raj Parekh, called Khalifa the "voice behind the violence."
"Through his alleged leading role in translating, narrating, and advancing ISIS's online propaganda, Khalifa promoted the terrorist group, furthered its worldwide recruitment efforts, and expanded the reach of videos that glorified the horrific murders and indiscriminate cruelty of ISIS," Parekh said in the statement.

Khalifa allegedly had worked with the terrorist organization for about six years after traveling to Syria in 2013 to become a foreign fighter and worked in its English Media Section, narrating and translating for propaganda. In all, Khalifa translated and narrated about 15 ISIS videos, including two widely seen violent videos titled "Flames of War," the Justice Department said. He admitted to the FBI in March 2019 that he was the narrator of the 2014 and 2017 "Flames of War" videos, according to the criminal complaint that was unsealed Saturday.
Khalifa also allegedly narrated a series of videos that encourages "potential recruits to join ISIS and conduct terrorist attacks against non-Muslims," the complaint says.
"While many Americans are aware of the brutal and violent crimes committed by many ISIS actors, ISIS' efforts to radicalize individuals to travel to Syria and commit violence on its behalf were equally horrendous," Steven D'Antuono, a top official in the FBI's Washington field office, said.
Jason Kung, a spokesperson for Global Affairs Canada, said in a statement the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is aware the US has Khalifa in custody "and that he will be facing charges."
The statement continued: "Since this matter is before the United States Courts, the RCMP is unable to discuss the matter. Global Affairs Canada is in contact with local authorities to gather additional information. Due to privacy considerations, no further information can be disclosed."
Khalifa spoke about his decision to leave Canada to fight in Syria in a 2019 interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Company.
"I figured that if they knew that I was going to go and fight in Syria they'd try to stop me," Khalifa said in the interview, according to the criminal complaint against him. "I had a normal life back in Canada. I was doing very well for myself and I decided to give it up knowing where I was coming, knowing what I was sacrificing in the process."
He had told his family he was going to Egypt, but later acknowledged he wanted to "join the mujahideen fighting against Bashar and the Syrian army," federal authorities said, citing an email Khalifa sent in 2013.
This story has been updated with additional information.
CNN's Veronica Stracqualursi, Elizabeth Joseph and Artemis Moshtaghian contributed to this report.
CNN · by Katelyn Polantz, CNN Reporter, Crime and Justice


12. The idea of the West has always been in motion and in crisis

Conclusion:

Like the modern civilisation Gandhi had criticised, the West’s effort to achieve global hegemony in the war on terror has been overtaken by the universalisation of its procedures, which have legitimised authoritarian states all over the world. From Turkey and Russia to India and China, the war on terror is no longer a Western project but has been deployed to join market-friendly economics with political repression. And so, the last project to reconfigure the West has also escaped its reach. Concomitantly, we have seen a tearing apart of the West’s institutional forms, whether in Donald Trump’s departure from alliances and agreements, or with Brexit and the reimposition of border controls in parts of the EU. These fraying bonds, however, have been complemented by a veritable rediscovery of the West as a civilisational entity, as if by way of compensation. Or are we indeed seeing a return of the West as a spiritual, rather than political or economic, phenomenon?
The idea of the West has always been in motion and in crisis | Aeon Essays
While the West belonged to a European geography, its name meant something. Now it is a vague invocation, laden with fear
Faisal Devjiis professor of Indian history and fellow of St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford, where he is also the director of the Asian Studies Centre. His latest book is Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (2013).

Edited by Sam Haselby

3,000 words
When asked what he thought of Western civilisation, Gandhi apparently responded that he thought it would be a good idea. While this celebrated statement is taken to be an ironic dismissal, Gandhi had in fact given the matter of Western civilisation much thought. In his manifesto of 1909 called Hind Swaraj or ‘Indian Home Rule’, the future Mahatma had described imperial Britain’s desire to spread Western civilisation not as hypocritical so much as suicidal. For he thought that this civilisation was threatened by the very effort to replicate it using the means of industrial capitalism, in much the same way as European commodities were mass-produced for colonial markets. ‘It is a civilisation only in name. Under it the nations of Europe are becoming degraded and ruined day by day,’ he said. ‘Civilisation seeks to increase bodily comforts, and it fails miserably even in doing so.’
What Gandhi called the modern civilisation of industrial capitalism sought to multiply the manufacture, desire for and consumption of its commodities the world over:
They wish to convert the whole world into a vast market for their goods. That they cannot do so is true, but the blame will not be theirs. They will leave no stone unturned to reach the goal.
The purely mechanical expansion of this process, Gandhi argued, would destroy Western civilisation in the very effort to spread it. Why? Because capitalism belonged to no particular people or history, and could be owned by anyone. Modern civilisation, in other words, was a kind of parasite that would grow strong and spread via its European host. Europe would enable it to globalise and attack other parts of the world. Its driving logic was not European domination: that was just a means to an end.
Other Asian and African thinkers upheld the distinction between Europe’s particularity and the universal history of modernity. They claimed modern industrial capitalism as a human inheritance for which the West was merely a midwife. This allowed them to adopt it without any sense of civilisational risk or inferiority, and in Gandhi’s day such men often pointed to Japan as an example of the fit between an Asian culture and modern civilisation understood in a technical way. After Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, modernisation theory, now delinked from European civilisation, continued to promote capitalist development. More recently, the ferociously anti-Western Ayman al-Zawahiri, who led al-Qaeda after Osama bin Laden, made the same point in 2008 when justifying his use of modern technology.
The Mahatma, however, considered the apparent universality of modern civilisation to be its most dangerous form. He wrote that ‘there is no end to the victims destroyed in the fire of civilisation. Its deadly effect is that people come under its scorching flames believing it to be all good.’ Gandhi saw Japan as being in thrall to the very forces of violence he thought were undermining Western civilisation, claiming that it might as well be the British flag flying over Tokyo. His compatriot and contemporary, the philosopher and poet Muhammad Iqbal, sought to rescue the European ideals both men often associated with Christianity from the destructive grip of capitalism. For Iqbal, these included Christendom itself as an arena for the universal ethics of Jesus.
Gandhi suggested that colonised countries should not achieve their freedom copying or adopting the technological prowess and institutions of the West. Instead, they should repudiate the path of the United States and Japan in favour of the true idealism of a nonviolent struggle. If they did so, the freedom of the colonised world might even redeem the West by returning it, through the force of Asian and African example, to a better way of life. Therefore, rather than following the European or American example, as in modernisation theory, the nonviolent struggles of colonised peoples should inspire the West to recall its own lost ideals. In other words, the Mahatma was not arguing for the superiority of Asian as opposed to European civilisation, but thought that the former could liberate the latter into its own truth. Indeed, apart from the Japanese who imitated Europe’s modernity, the West has never faced any foe identifying itself as belonging to the East.
The problem with modern civilisation and its vision of universality was that it inevitably escaped the West’s own grasp, as the expansion of Japan’s economy and empire demonstrated in Gandhi’s own day. Europe’s imperial powers understood the risk posed by the universality of their claims, since they routinely denied their colonial subjects had achieved modernity by arguing that they were not yet ready for self-government by reason of their poverty and illiteracy as much as customs and mutual antipathies. This was the argument the British used to deny India self-government even within the empire from the end of the First World War until the close of the Second, when the decision was taken out of their hands. The colony, for Europe, thus became a school of civilisation to which non-Europeans must be enrolled in perpetuity.
Anti-imperialists recognised the hypocrisy of this reasoning but often sought independence only so as to complete the destruction of native society. Jawaharlal Nehru, for instance, who went on to become India’s first prime minister after independence, argued that Britain was incapable of modernising India because it was too reliant upon the support of Indian aristocrats and other conservatives who had no interest in it. Only a democratic government, he claimed, would have both the determination and legitimacy to extend education, reduce poverty, abolish noxious customs and bring internecine conflicts to an end. In this way, he and other newly independent leaders proved Gandhi’s point about how anyone in the world could, in principle, fulfil modern civilisation’s universal promise.
If European imperialism represented the first effort to spread Western civilisation abroad, preceded though it sometimes was by Christian missionary activity, it also signalled the first crisis of the West as an idea. Imperialism made the West into a mobile figure for the first time, by expanding its geography well beyond Europe to include settler colonies in the Americas and Australasia.
The ‘ship of state’ was not merely a machine but mobile and replicable
Describing the way in which the British Empire became de-territorialised in its expansion, the German jurist Carl Schmitt quoted the Victorian prime minister Benjamin Disraeli’s recommendation in one of his novels that the Queen move to India should Britain be threatened. For, in doing so, she would only follow the precedent of the Portuguese crown, which moved to Brazil during the Napoleonic Wars. Schmitt saw such mobility as being made possible by the industrial technology that Gandhi had recognised as lying at the basis of modern civilisation.
In his book Land and Sea (1942), Schmitt reflected on the way in which the ship, as the most important technology of Britain’s maritime empire, represented modern civilisation in miniature. The ship, he pointed out, subordinated all its crew’s relations and activities to technical or instrumental ones. It could tolerate no principle but pure functionality, with all other ideals reduced to lower forms. The imperialist expansion of the West, therefore, entailed the diminution of its own historical and spiritual ideals in as suicidal a way. Like Gandhi, Schmitt had understood that the aptly named ‘ship of state’ was not merely a machine in which individuals were reduced to cogs, but that it was mobile and replicable, and so could never be the inalienable property of any one people or history. In this sense, the strength of national identity in such states represented nothing more than a desperate attempt to possess the country as a distinctive piece of collective property. But, like all capitalist property, its alienation was always possible in an economy defined by the universality of exchange.
As long as the West belonged to a European geography, its name possessed some meaning. But with its globalisation in empire, terms such as the ‘East’ and the ‘West’ had to be reinvented. Schmitt saw the implications of the West’s globalisation in his book The Nomos of the Earth (1950). European empires brought settler colonies in different parts of the world into the fold of the West, but it was the US that made the West into a properly political category. Empires like Britain’s, which were scattered across the world, had no geographical integrity, and so could not be politically divided into Eastern and Western domains.
Instead, with the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, an American president split the globe in half to place one hemisphere under his country’s undisputed sway. Called the Western Hemisphere, this domain had the Americas at its centre and excluded Europe along with its Asian and African empires as part of the Eastern Hemisphere. For the first time, Europe was displaced from the West and separated from its former American colonies, in whose affairs it was no longer permitted to interfere.
First enunciated in President James Monroe’s 7th annual message to Congress on 2 December 1823, the doctrine distinguished a despotic and monarchical Europe forever engaged in internecine and colonial wars. The new home of freedom was in the Americas. Monroe claimed that ‘the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonisation by any European powers.’ He described Europe in much the same way as its imperial powers did their Asian and African colonies, albeit with the promise not to interfere in their internal affairs. The US also took on an imperial role in South and Central America.
The rise of the US led directly to the West’s crisis, to its doubling and displacement both as a geographical location and a political or civilisational category. This crisis has since been integral to the idea of the West. It is always in crisis and flux, and often in motion.
The end of the Second World War and the decolonisation in Asia and Africa required changing the meaning and location of the West again. It now included both ends of the Northern Atlantic Ocean, to exclude the Soviet Union and its Asian allies as part of the East in a new, Cold War division of the globe into rival hemispheres. And so the West was now NATO-claimed sovereignty, while the East was the Warsaw Pact.
Politics would reappear in battles defined by culture and civilisation that were not controlled by states
Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History and the Last Man (1992) signalled the latest crisis of the West with the end of the Cold War. The West had emerged victorious against communism. The grand conflict, and therefore the ideological as well as the civilisational narratives of historical rivalry, had come to an end. Henceforth, all politics would become a kind of internal mopping-up operation within a liberal world order no longer divided into East and West and so made safe for capitalism. Politics was to be subordinated to economics, and the global triumph of neoliberalism represented this vision of the world made safe for the market and its mechanisms. Eastern Europe’s colour revolutions notably made no calls for equality. It was as if Gandhi’s vision of the parasite taking over its host had been fulfilled.
There was something paradoxically Soviet about Fukuyama’s argument, which seemed to mimic Vladimir Lenin’s idea about the victory of communism leading to the replacement of politics by what, citing Friedrich Engels, he called the administration of things. This notion was part of Lenin’s theory about history ending with the withering away of the state as an instrument of capital to be replaced by popular self-governance. However, Fukuyama’s move from political history to neoliberal governance simply foregrounded the problem posed by the newly internal, rather than traditionally external, enemies of a new world order no longer divided into East and West.
In his bestseller The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Samuel Huntington argued against Fukuyama that this enmity, and so politics or history, was unlikely to vanish into the problems of governance. Rather, politics would reappear in battles defined by culture and civilisation that were not controlled by states. In this new iteration, the West, newly reattached to its religious roots in Judaism and Christianity, was engaged in a civilisational struggle with forces such as Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism. Here, states and even geographies would play a lesser role.
With the terrorist attacks on the US of 11 September 2001, Huntington’s focus on non-state actors and religion took on urgent meaning. The French historian Michel Foucault had written extensively about the devolution of power from the sovereign and top-down politics to everyday institutional procedures of discipline and regulation that normalise children, students, soldiers, prisoners or patients into good citizens. He showed how, in this genealogy, the enemies of society were not foreign countries but internal foes such as sexual deviants, criminals and, of course, religious fanatics and terrorists.
In our own day, it is terrorism and Islam that play the role of such an enemy, one that is threatening because, like the race or class enemy of old, it is both internal and external to Western societies. Attempts are made to deny the interconnections between the West and its new enemy by externalising the latter through wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, restrictions on immigration, the surveillance of mosques and the criminalisation of practices such as veiling or ritual slaughter. Yet Islam is internal to Western societies not through immigration or conversion but because the varied trajectories of non-state militancy disallow us from defining it geographically as belonging to the non-West. The terrorist’s familiarity with jihad in Syria can coexist with his ignorance of that country and its language, while being quite at home in Europe. There is no foreign power to which he can betray the West in which he belongs. Having been smashed with the closing of the Cold War, it is no longer possible to put the Humpty Dumpty of bipolar conflict between East and West back together again.
If Islam has appeared as a new kind of civilisational foe in the 21st century, that is also because it can no longer play the role of a geopolitical rival. Dispersed among groups and individuals all over the world, it takes as its target not countries, but a global arena defined by flows of finance, commodities and migration. This post-Cold War world can be understood as a marketplace that has turned politics into a set of competing efforts by states and other actors to regulate or deregulate it. The goods subjected to such competition range from natural resources such as oil and fish, manufactures such as weaponry and nuclear technology, and individual rights such as that to life, privacy, free speech and the liberty of movement.
Like their enemies if also against them, Muslim militants want to regulate some of these goods and deregulate others for a global marketplace. But rather than defining their activities in the economic terminology of self-interest, they seem willing to sacrifice both their bodies and societies in death and destruction to achieve their ends. Islamic terrorism poses no existential threat to any state; rather, what makes it important is its promise of civil strife as an internal threat. Even the ‘Islamic state’ founded by ISIS in Iraq did not serve to define its war geographically since militants continued to attack targets in different and disconnected parts of the world. Its militancy crucially includes the apparently nihilistic repudiation of self-interest as the economic rationality that governs human behaviour.
From Turkey and Russia to India and China, the war on terror is no longer a Western project
The sacrificial form taken by Islamic militancy has led not just to attempts at opposing it but also to surprising imitations of its ethic. Among these is the return of the West as a civilisational category now set explicitly against Islam. But rather than representing the universalisation and technical rationality of modern civilisation that Gandhi had criticised, the West, as Huntington had argued, has returned in a specifically cultural and even theological incarnation. Pioneered in the war on terror, this can now be seen in the populist or ultranationalist repudiation of a universal, ‘rules-based global order’ with its freedoms of movement and standardisation. Growing in strength all over Europe and the US, this view constitutes nothing less than a refusal of the West itself in its neoliberal incarnation as a free market for goods and labour.
Brexit illustrated this form of sacrifice or repudiation. Its votaries are willing to accept economic and other losses to regain what they see as their sovereignty from the European Union as if imitating the struggles of their own former colonies. While not explicitly rejecting the principle of self-interest, they have stepped away from a vision of the post-Cold War world as a neoliberal marketplace of goods and ideas in which it can flourish. This sudden if disavowed identification with colonial subjects from Britain’s own past has been repeated all over Western Europe, where Right-wing parties and governments claim to be fighting for their sovereignty and culture against the EU as much as the colonising potential of immigration, Islam and other forms of globalisation. Does this strange historical reversal represent a perverse fulfilment of Gandhi’s prediction that the civilisation of modern capitalism would be decoupled from the West?
Like the modern civilisation Gandhi had criticised, the West’s effort to achieve global hegemony in the war on terror has been overtaken by the universalisation of its procedures, which have legitimised authoritarian states all over the world. From Turkey and Russia to India and China, the war on terror is no longer a Western project but has been deployed to join market-friendly economics with political repression. And so, the last project to reconfigure the West has also escaped its reach. Concomitantly, we have seen a tearing apart of the West’s institutional forms, whether in Donald Trump’s departure from alliances and agreements, or with Brexit and the reimposition of border controls in parts of the EU. These fraying bonds, however, have been complemented by a veritable rediscovery of the West as a civilisational entity, as if by way of compensation. Or are we indeed seeing a return of the West as a spiritual, rather than political or economic, phenomenon?


13. NY Times: Opinion | Jan. 6 Was Worse Than It Looked



Opinion | Jan. 6 Was Worse Than It Looked
The New York Times · by The Editorial Board · October 2, 2021
The Editorial Board
Jan. 6 Was Worse Than It Looked
Oct. 2, 2021, 11:00 a.m. ET

Credit...Mark Peterson for The New York Times
By
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.
However horrifying the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol appeared in the moment, we know now that it was far worse.
The country was hours away from a full-blown constitutional crisis — not primarily because of the violence and mayhem inflicted by hundreds of President Donald Trump’s supporters but because of the actions of Mr. Trump himself.
In the days before the mob descended on the Capitol, a corollary attack — this one bloodless and legalistic — was playing out down the street in the White House, where Mr. Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and a lawyer named John Eastman huddled in the Oval Office, scheming to subvert the will of the American people by using legal sleight-of-hand.
Mr. Eastman’s unusual visit was reported at the time, but a new book by the Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa provides the details of his proposed six-point plan. It involved Mr. Pence rejecting dozens of already certified electoral votes representing tens of millions of legally cast ballots, thus allowing Congress to install Mr. Trump in a second term.
Mr. Pence ultimately refused to sign on, earning him the rage of Mr. Trump and chants of “Hang Mike Pence!” by the rioters, who erected a makeshift gallows on the National Mall.
The fact that the scheme to overturn the election was highly unlikely to succeed is cold comfort. Mr. Trump remains the most popular Republican in the country; barring a serious health issue, the odds are good that he will be the party’s nominee for president in 2024. He also remains as incapable of accepting defeat as he has ever been, which means the country faces a renewed risk of electoral subversion by Mr. Trump and his supporters — only next time they will have learned from their mistakes.
That leaves all Americans who care about preserving this Republic with a clear task: Reform the federal election law at the heart of Mr. Eastman’s twisted ploy, and make it as hard as possible for anyone to pull a stunt like that again.
The Electoral Count Act, which passed more than 130 years ago, was Congress’s response to another dramatic presidential dispute — the election of 1876, in which the Republican Rutherford Hayes won the White House despite losing the popular vote to his Democratic opponent, Samuel Tilden.
After Election Day, Tilden led in the popular vote and in the Electoral College. But the vote in three Southern states — South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana — was marred by accusations of fraud and intimidation by both parties. Various officials in each state certified competing slates of electors, one for Hayes and one for Tilden. The Constitution said nothing about what to do in such a situation, so Congress established a 15-member commission to decide which electors to accept as valid.
The commission consisted of 10 members of Congress, evenly divided between the parties, and five Supreme Court justices, two appointed by Democrats and three by Republicans. Hayes, the Republican candidate, won all the disputed electors (including one from Oregon) by an 8-to-7 vote — giving him victory in the Electoral College by a single vote.
Democrats were furious and began to filibuster the counting process, but they eventually accepted Hayes’s presidency in exchange for the withdrawal of the last remaining federal troops from the South, ending Reconstruction and beginning the era of Jim Crow, which would last until the middle of the 20th century.
It was obvious that Congress needed clearer guidelines for deciding disputed electoral votes. In 1887, the Electoral Count Act became law, setting out procedures for the counting and certifying of electoral votes in the states and in Congress.
But the law contains numerous ambiguities and poorly drafted provisions. For instance, it permits a state legislature to appoint electors on its own, regardless of how the state’s own citizens voted, if the state “failed to make a choice” on Election Day. What does that mean? The law doesn’t say. It also allows any objection to a state’s electoral votes to be filed as long as one senator and one member of the House put their names to it, triggering hours of debate — which is how senators like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley were able to gum up the works on Jan. 6.
A small minority of legal scholars have argued that key parts of the Electoral Count Act are unconstitutional, which was the basis of Mr. Eastman’s claim that Mr. Pence could simply disregard the law and summarily reject electors of certain key battleground states.
Nothing in the Constitution or federal law gives the vice president this authority. The job of the vice president is to open the envelopes and read out the results, nothing more. Any reform to the Electoral Count Act should start there, by making it explicit that the vice president’s role on Jan. 6 is purely ministerial and doesn’t include the power to rule on disputes over electors.
The law should also be amended to allow states more time to arrive at a final count, so that any legal disputes can be resolved before the electors cast their ballots.
The “failed” election provision should be restricted to natural disasters or terrorist attacks — and even then, it should be available only if there is no realistic way of conducting the election. Remember that the 2012 election was held just days after Hurricane Sandy lashed the East Coast, and yet all states were able to conduct their elections in full. (This is another good argument for universal mail-in voting, which doesn’t put voters at the mercy of the weather.) The key point is that a close election, even a disputed one, is not a failed election.
Finally, any objection to a state’s electoral votes should have to clear a high bar. Rather than just one member of each chamber of Congress, it should require the assent of one-quarter or more of each body. The grounds for an objection should be strictly limited to cases involving clear evidence of fraud or widespread voting irregularities.
The threats to a free and fair presidential election don’t come from Congress alone. Since Jan. 6, Republican-led state legislatures have been clambering over one another to pass new laws making it easier to reject their own voters’ will, and removing or neutralizing those officials who could stand in the way of a naked power grab — like Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, did when he resisted Mr. Trump’s personal plea to “find” just enough extra votes to flip the outcome there.
How to ensure that frivolous objections are rejected while legitimate ones get a hearing? One approach would be to establish a panel of federal judges in each state to hear any challenges to the validity or accuracy of that state’s election results. If the judges determine that the results are invalid, they would lay out their findings in writing and prevent the state from certifying its results.
There is plenty more to be done to protect American elections from being stolen through subversion, like mandating the use of paper ballots that can be checked against reported results. Ideally, fixes like these would be adopted promptly by bipartisan majorities in Congress, to convey to all Americans that both parties are committed to a fair, transparent and smooth vote-counting process. But for that to happen, the Republican Party would need to do an about-face. Right now, some Republican leaders in Congress and the states have shown less interest in preventing election sabotage than in protecting and, in some cases, even venerating the saboteurs.
Democrats should push through these reforms now, and eliminate the filibuster if that’s the only way to do so. If they hesitate, they should recall that a majority of the Republican caucus in the House — 139 members — along with eight senators, continued to object to the certification of electoral votes even after the mob stormed the Capitol.
Time and distance from those events could have led to reflection and contrition on the part of those involved, but that’s not so. Remember how, in the frantic days before Jan. 6, Mr. Trump insisted over and over that Georgia’s election was rife with “large-scale voter fraud”? Remember how he called on Mr. Raffensperger to “start the process of decertifying the election” and “announce the true winner”? Only those words aren’t from last year. They appear in a letter Mr. Trump sent to Mr. Raffensperger two weeks ago.
Mr. Trump may never stop trying to undermine American democracy. Those who value that democracy should never stop using every measure at their disposal to protect it.
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The New York Times · by The Editorial Board · October 2, 2021
14. The U.S. Military Needs to Learn How to Train Auxiliary Armies

Painting with a broad brush? 

Or we could just say don't do occupations.

Or learn how to really conduct operations "though, with,and by" and not just pay lip service to that (or maybe "through, with, and by " cannot be applied on an industrial sized scale).

Excerpts:
What the historical precedents speak to is a need to choose: Either trim down American objectives in what are, effectively, occupied countries to those that could be achieved merely by organizing the existing military and political structures, or settle down to the task of building a new military organization from the ground up in a manner that fundamentally severs it from the civil society from which it came.
If the latter is deemed morally and politically unacceptable, smacking of empire, then that policy decision must come with its corollary that American objectives must be limited to what can be done within organic social structures, limitations that will generally preclude any substantial reorganization of those same structures—at least ones coerced by American power.
In either case, the U.S. military must begin to learn how to accomplish this task in contexts where its own military structures are not organic to the local communities, because it is almost certain that this is a mission that is not going away. “No more nation building” (and “no more army building” with it) are calls that have always had swift expiration dates. After Vietnam, the U.S. Army chose to abandon counterinsurgency doctrine rather than absorb the lessons of defeat only to find itself embroiled in one supposedly low-intensity military operation after the next. Former U.S. President George W. Bush famously campaigned against nation building in 2000 and started his first nation-building effort in 2001, while his successor Barack Obama campaigned against foreign military intervention, particularly in Iraq, in 2008 before intervening in Iraq and Syria in 2014. This latest determination to avoid nation building, counterinsurgency, and the auxiliary training that goes with is not likely to last either. The United States will need to raise auxiliaries again; it might as well start learning how.
The U.S. Military Needs to Learn How to Train Auxiliary Armies
The Afghan army’s collapse shows American forces are using the wrong approach.
Foreign Policy · by Bret Devereaux · October 3, 2021
America’s war in Afghanistan is now over, but the war over the war has only just begun. The sudden collapse of the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police looms large in these new debates among policy wonks, politicians, and journalists. Images of captured U.S. equipment in the hands of the triumphant Taliban brought bitter reminders of Islamic State soldiers celebrating in American armored vehicles after Iraqi security forces suddenly collapsed in 2014. How could these security forces, which the United States had spent so much time and resources training and equipping, collapse so quickly?
As for why the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police failed, the frequent answer in much of the reporting has been consistent: “corruption.” The same explanation was offered for the collapse of Iraqi security forces in 2014. Corrupt leaders at all levels diverted funds; recorded so-called ghost soldiers on the rolls to enrich their friends, relatives, and associates; and sold weapons to all comers—even the enemy. Consequently, ammunition ran short, vehicles failed for lack of maintenance, and units were often understrength, underpaid, and deeply demoralized. Collapse and defeat, often against substantially more poorly equipped but more cohesive and highly motivated foes, predictably followed. There is a temptation to attribute these failures to the particular place and people, to say that this is merely an Afghan or Iraqi problem. But this isn’t a new phenomenon; many of the same criticisms were made of the poor performance of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam before its collapse.
Yet the Taliban, in their long war in Afghanistan, somehow managed to survive and thrive despite the supposedly endemic corruption there. That’s because in many cases the behavior that Western observers are quick to term “corruption” is local social institutions, such as the bonds of family, patronage, and tribe, reasserting themselves against a backdrop of imposed foreign institutions. For the Taliban, these loyalties were a natural part of life; they didn’t process them as corruption and instead worked through them, rather than around them. Even before they came to occupy most of the country, the Taliban chose to work through the existing structures of power and local leaders in Afghanistan’s villages, co-opting, bribing, or intimidating those leaders as necessary.
America’s war in Afghanistan is now over, but the war over the war has only just begun. The sudden collapse of the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police looms large in these new debates among policy wonks, politicians, and journalists. Images of captured U.S. equipment in the hands of the triumphant Taliban brought bitter reminders of Islamic State soldiers celebrating in American armored vehicles after Iraqi security forces suddenly collapsed in 2014. How could these security forces, which the United States had spent so much time and resources training and equipping, collapse so quickly?
As for why the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police failed, the frequent answer in much of the reporting has been consistent: “corruption.” The same explanation was offered for the collapse of Iraqi security forces in 2014. Corrupt leaders at all levels diverted funds; recorded so-called ghost soldiers on the rolls to enrich their friends, relatives, and associates; and sold weapons to all comers—even the enemy. Consequently, ammunition ran short, vehicles failed for lack of maintenance, and units were often understrength, underpaid, and deeply demoralized. Collapse and defeat, often against substantially more poorly equipped but more cohesive and highly motivated foes, predictably followed. There is a temptation to attribute these failures to the particular place and people, to say that this is merely an Afghan or Iraqi problem. But this isn’t a new phenomenon; many of the same criticisms were made of the poor performance of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam before its collapse.
Yet the Taliban, in their long war in Afghanistan, somehow managed to survive and thrive despite the supposedly endemic corruption there. That’s because in many cases the behavior that Western observers are quick to term “corruption” is local social institutions, such as the bonds of family, patronage, and tribe, reasserting themselves against a backdrop of imposed foreign institutions. For the Taliban, these loyalties were a natural part of life; they didn’t process them as corruption and instead worked through them, rather than around them. Even before they came to occupy most of the country, the Taliban chose to work through the existing structures of power and local leaders in Afghanistan’s villages, co-opting, bribing, or intimidating those leaders as necessary.
In the meantime, the United States attempted to work through a national government whose structure was ill suited to Afghanistan and commanded little legitimacy. Money disappeared into Swiss bank accounts through such catastrophic national schemes as the Kabul Bank, or it simply washed back into Washington. As Richard Boucher, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, commented in a “Lessons Learned” interview (recorded in the recent “The Afghanistan Papers” project), he preferred contracts going to Afghans who “would probably take 20 percent for personal use or for their extended families and friends” than for the money to be spent on American consultants. “I want it to disappear in Afghanistan, rather than in the Beltway,” he said.
The problem of how to effectively mobilize a local population is not a new one; empires have sought ways to effectively utilize local manpower to achieve military objectives for centuries. Historians generally term such soldiers “auxiliaries,” and most historical empires have deployed such troops in at least some quantity.
The United States rarely conceptualizes its own policy in such flatly imperial terms, but self-directed conceptual dishonesty does little to enable effective strategic thinking, regardless of its political uses. The goal of several of the largest U.S. military inventions since World War II, particularly in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, have been exactly this: to stand up an auxiliary force willing to and capable of achieving American military objectives (be that supporting civilian administration, hunting terrorists, or fighting communists) either without substantial American military support or with only an economy of it.
That self-deception has made it difficult for the United States to make use of past successful historical exemplars, which have typically followed one of two patterns: Either auxiliaries are recruited entirely within the structures organic to their own society or those structures are completely replaced by radically deracinating those same soldiers, removing them from their own culture and essentially making the army their society. The Romans, whose exceptional success came in large part due to their adroit use of auxiliaries of both kinds, provide useful examples of both.
For instance, early in the expansion of the Roman Republic, the Romans were faced with the problem of effectively utilizing the manpower of subjugated, often freshly conquered communities within Italy. Their solution was to rely on the facade of an alliance system to obscure the actual coercive system of recruiting auxiliaries through their own organic social structures. Most of the various non-Roman Italians fought in ways fairly similar to the Romans and were thus readily compatible with the Roman military system.
Nevertheless, the Romans left the particulars of things like who would be drafted and how they would be paid to the local communities; Rome merely specified the number of men required. The junior officers for these formations, likewise, were local community leaders, selected by the communities they came from (and then subordinate to senior Roman officers). The Italians thus fought under their own local leaders, for their own communities, with their own sense of local pride. By aligning their recruitment system with the preexisting institutions of these Italian communities, the Romans got the manpower they needed at a minimum of cost and could still capitalize on the social systems that made these Italians tough fighters.
The Romans could also use similar systems to integrate very different kinds of troops into their armies. Client kingdoms often thus supplied troops to assist in Rome’s wars, fighting in their unique local style and under their own junior leaders. Numidian cavalry became a fixture of Roman armies; famously, the Numidian prince Jugurtha led one such detachment in Rome’s wars in Spain as part of an army led by the Roman Scipio Aemilianus. Likewise, the Roman victory over the Seleucids at Magnesia was chiefly due to an allied contingent of Pergamene troops under the command of their king, Eumenes II.
The main benefit of this system, that troops organized this way fought with the same style and level of effectiveness as they would have if fighting independently, could be a drawback. Sometimes a local fighting style was a poor match for Roman needs, whereas at other times the soldiers were simply less effective than Roman-trained troops. There were also local leaders who couldn’t be trusted with military forces of their own due to either fears of rebellion or just prioritizing their own goals over Roman ones. The Romans responded to this problem in the imperial period with the auxilia, noncitizen troops recruited from the various peoples of Rome’s empire into the regular, standing Roman army.
Here the Romans followed the deracination strategy. The auxilia were paid professionals in standing units that, particularly after the revolt of some Batavian auxiliary units in A.D. 69, were almost never deployed in their home country. Instead, they were moved across the empire. Some auxilia were recruited specifically for Rome to gain access to unique local fighting styles, particularly missile troops and cavalry (two essential forms of fighting that the Romans had never been very good at), though many auxiliary cohorts were trained as heavy infantry. Over time, the auxilia themselves mostly seem to have learned Latin, taken Roman names, and come to identify as much as members of the Roman army as members of a cultural homeland—which was, in any event, hundreds of miles away—while at the same time their local fighting styles and equipment diffused into the broader Roman army. Most auxilia, on retirement, seem to have settled near their forts; few, it seems, bothered to return home. The result was an extremely effective, professional force that Rome could rely on to fight with all of the discipline of the legions.
Of course, these are not the only examples. The British used both retaining organic social structures and deracination strategies, for instance, in India to considerable effect. Over and over again, however, the American approach has been to try to split the difference between these two contradictory methods: impose a Western-style military organization that does nothing to incorporate local power structures and loyalties while at the same time refusing to actually deracinate the soldiers in question. In this, the United States military has appeared starkly unwilling to learn from the lessons of either its own past or the pasts of other countries, partly due to a forever unrequited desire to shift back to conventional warfare with peer competitors and partly because, as the United States does not perceive of itself as an empire, it is incapable of learning the lessons of empires past.
What the historical precedents speak to is a need to choose: Either trim down American objectives in what are, effectively, occupied countries to those that could be achieved merely by organizing the existing military and political structures, or settle down to the task of building a new military organization from the ground up in a manner that fundamentally severs it from the civil society from which it came.
If the latter is deemed morally and politically unacceptable, smacking of empire, then that policy decision must come with its corollary that American objectives must be limited to what can be done within organic social structures, limitations that will generally preclude any substantial reorganization of those same structures—at least ones coerced by American power.
In either case, the U.S. military must begin to learn how to accomplish this task in contexts where its own military structures are not organic to the local communities, because it is almost certain that this is a mission that is not going away. “No more nation building” (and “no more army building” with it) are calls that have always had swift expiration dates. After Vietnam, the U.S. Army chose to abandon counterinsurgency doctrine rather than absorb the lessons of defeat only to find itself embroiled in one supposedly low-intensity military operation after the next. Former U.S. President George W. Bush famously campaigned against nation building in 2000 and started his first nation-building effort in 2001, while his successor Barack Obama campaigned against foreign military intervention, particularly in Iraq, in 2008 before intervening in Iraq and Syria in 2014. This latest determination to avoid nation building, counterinsurgency, and the auxiliary training that goes with is not likely to last either. The United States will need to raise auxiliaries again; it might as well start learning how.
Foreign Policy · by Bret Devereaux · October 3, 2021
14. H.R.5130 - Consortium To Study Irregular Warfare Act of 2021
We need to have the intellectual foundation for Irregular Warfare.

T.E. Lawrence: “Irregular war was far more intellectual than a bayonet charge, far more exhausting than service in the comfortable imitative obedience of an ordered army."

Summary: H.R.5130 — 117th Congress (2021-2022)
There is one summary for H.R.5130. Bill summaries are authored by CRS.
Shown Here:
Introduced in House (08/31/2021)
Consortium To Study Irregular Warfare Act of 2021
This bill requires the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering within the Department of Defense to establish a research consortium of institutions of higher education to study irregular warfare and the responses to irregular threats.
The office must coordinate activities related to the research consortium with the U.S. Special Operations Command.







V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Personal Email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
Web Site: www.fdd.org
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Subscribe to FDD’s new podcastForeign Podicy
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Personal Email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
Web Site: www.fdd.org
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Subscribe to FDD’s new podcastForeign Podicy
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."
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