Quotes of the Day:
"Understand then all of you, especially the young, that to want to impose an imaginary state of government on others by violence is not only a vulgar superstition, but even a criminal work. Understand that this work, far from assuring the well-being of humanity is only a lie, a more or less unconscious hypocrisy, camouflaging the lowest passions we possess."
- Leo Tolstoy, The Law of Love and the Law of Violence (1908)
“[Ideas of perfect equality] are…extremely pernicious to human society. Render possessions ever so equal, men’s different degrees of art, care and industry will immediately break that equality. Or if you check these virtues, you reduce society to the most extreme indigence; and instead of preventing want and beggary in a few, render it unavoidable to the whole community.”
-David Hume
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
-Frederick Douglass
1. Designed to Prepare for Cyberattacks, a Panel Wraps Up Its Work
2. Putin Is Only Pretending to Be Crazy on Ukraine
3. Richard Marcinko, first commanding officer of SEAL Team Six, dies
4. The Real Crisis of Global Order
5. Doing Less to Do Better: Why the Military Can't Solve Its Overwork Problem (book review)
6. The Promise of Hydrogen: An Alternative Fuel at the Intersection of Climate Policy and Lethality
7. Analyzing Social Media as a Means to Undermine the United States
8. Ukraine on the Edge
9. UK Minister Damian Hinds names Russia, China, Iran, North Korea in 'hostile nations'
10. The Middle East is stuck in the crosshairs of a worsening US-China rivalry
11. Sweden’s top general on watching Russia and responding to an invasion of Ukraine
12. Norway Intelligence alleges Russia of carrying out cyber attacks; Kremlin denies claims
13. Joe Biden in a Multipolar World
14. Dutch have brought 573 people out of Kabul since evacuations ended
15. Taking Down the Caliphate: The story of an ad-hoc SOF task force that helped turn the tide against the Islamic state
16. Ukraine crisis: how Putin feeds off anger over Nato’s eastward expansion
17. Why some of the smartest people can be so very stupid
18. How Many Books Does It Take to Make a Place Feel Like Home?
19. Opinion | The ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ Oregonian, a New York judge and the true meaning of the First Amendment
1. Designed to Prepare for Cyberattacks, a Panel Wraps Up Its Work
Designed to Prepare for Cyberattacks, a Panel Wraps Up Its Work
When the Cyberspace Solarium Commission released its first recommendations in March 2020, after a year of research and writing, its members vowed that the panel would work differently from other blue ribbon Washington exercises. Senator Angus King, independent of Maine and a co-chairman of the commission, said the recommendations would not end up dusty on a shelf, like those drawn up by many other well-meaning panels.
The commission’s name was based on the Eisenhower administration’s Project Solarium, which developed new policies for the Cold War. Influential members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees led the commission, allowing its cybersecurity recommendations to be packaged as legislation included in one of the few policy bills that pass each year: the annual National Defense Authorization Act.
“This is an example of what I think was genius — and I can say that because it wasn’t my idea — instead of just issuing a report with recommendations we handed the congressional committees fully drafted, finished legislation,” Mr. King said.
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Congress originally set the commission’s termination for the end of 2020 but extended its work for an additional year. During that time, Mr. King said, about half of the panel’s recommendations have been implemented, most through legislation but some through executive branch actions.
The commission shuts down with notable successes, like the creation of a national cyber director in the White House and measures to strengthen the powers of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, as well as provisions in this year’s defense bill, including requirements for revised response plans and more exercises and drills for government officials.
Some key initiatives remain unfinished, with details of the legislation to be worked out or arguments over congressional jurisdiction to be untangled.
“We’re cleareyed about the fact that there’s some big things that still need to get done, that did not get done,” said Representative Mike Gallagher, Republican of Wisconsin and the commission’s other co-chairman.
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The commission developed a proposal for a bill that would have identified systemically important infrastructure. Businesses — like Colonial Pipeline, which in May was hit by a ransomware attack — that play a crucial role in the economy would be given special assistance to improve their cybersecurity. In return, however, they would have additional security requirements and share additional information with the government.
More hearings with the House Homeland Security Committee will be necessary before that legislation moves forward, as lawmakers wrestle with details of liability protection and how to oversee security of cloud computing providers and other industries.
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Mr. Gallagher, who over the last two years emerged as a rising star among members of his party focused on legislating, said he wanted additional measures passed that would have required companies and institutions operating critical infrastructure to report intrusions or attacks to the federal government.
“We believe Congress should authorize the Department of Homeland Security to establish requirements for critical infrastructure entities to report cyberincidents to the federal government,” Mr. Gallagher said. “But we were unable to get that across the finish line.”
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The committee also developed proposals for a “joint collaborative environment” on cyberthreats that would increase information sharing between private companies and the government. While government officials say they have taken steps in that direction, private companies say there are still too many barriers to sharing information — and the commission members agree.
Right now, Mr. Gallagher said, the federal government doesn’t have the infrastructure to share data across agencies and with private businesses. The mind-set must also change, he said.
“It’s a question of how do you change the culture of the intelligence community, such that they’re proactively willing to share things with the private sector as opposed to just hoarding information or demanding information,” Mr. Gallagher said.
What to Know About Ransomware Attacks
Why are they becoming more common? Experts say ransomware is attractive to criminals because the attacks take place mostly anonymously online, minimizing the chances of getting caught. The Treasury Department has estimated that Americans have paid $1.6 billion in ransoms since 2011.
Is there any connection to the rise of cryptocurrencies? The criminal industry’s growth has been abetted by cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, which allow hackers to transact with victims anonymously, though experts see virtual currency exchanges as a weak point for ransomware gangs.
Some of the legislative proposals — like the establishment of a national cyber director — were fiercely debated, but the panel largely avoided partisan fighting.
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“I put more time and energy into this project than anything else I’ve done in the Senate. And I didn’t want to waste that time and energy,” said Mr. King, who caucuses with the Democrats.
Mr. Gallagher and Mr. King said they were hopeful their remaining major legislation could move through Congress next year.
While the commission will end, the lawmakers and other members will continue to work with a new nonprofit group, said Mark Montgomery, the executive director of the commission.
The nonprofit will continue to research those initiatives, and members and their staff will push for congressional action, he said. It will also be a resource for researchers and scholars examining policy problems and solutions, hosting the commission’s report and papers on various topics.
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Previous efforts to improve approaches to cybersecurity ran out of steam. But Mr. Montgomery said the nonprofit may be able to maintain momentum, at least for a time, by keeping up the commission’s annual assessment reports.
The nonprofit, Mr. Montgomery said, will also keep a variation of the commission’s name with a new website that will be up and running in the new year.
Julian E. Barnes is a national security reporter based in Washington, covering the intelligence agencies. Before joining The Times in 2018, he wrote about security matters for The Wall Street Journal.
2. Putin Is Only Pretending to Be Crazy on Ukraine
Excerpts:
So does Putin really believe that the country whose territory he has annexed is the real aggressor? Probably not. Does he really believe the U.S. would provide Ukraine with some of its most advanced military technology? Again, probably not.
But Putin clearly benefits from the perception that he is volatile enough to make good on his latest threats. If Biden believed Putin was rational, he would likely call Putin’s bluff. Instead, he is attempting to coax Putin into defusing a crisis that the Russian leader himself has created.
Putin Is Only Pretending to Be Crazy on Ukraine
Russia’s president knows there will be few consequences if he orders an invasion, but that doesn’t mean he will.
December 24, 2021, 2:30 AM EST
Watching Vladimir Putin Thursday at his year-end press conference, one is tempted to ask whether the Russian president has gone mad.
Here is a man leading a country that in the last few months has amassed tens of thousands of soldiers and advanced military equipment on Ukraine’s border, now asserting that it is Ukraine which is planning an invasion of Russia. Putin claimed (without evidence) that the U.S. intends to arm Ukraine with hypersonic missiles. “They just have to understand that we have nowhere left to retreat,” Putin said.
Peter Pomerantsev, the author of the 2014 book “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible,” on the nature of Russian disinformation, told me that Putin sometimes deliberately acts crazy as a way to gain leverage with his adversaries. Launching a new war against Ukraine would indeed be risky for Russia, in part because Ukraine’s own military is better than it was in 2014, when Russia invaded Crimea. Russia would also risk even more devastating sanctions if it moved forward.
Sometimes this tactic is known as “the madman theory.” Former U.S. President Richard Nixon is said to have wanted geopolitical rivals such as the Soviet Union and China to believe he was volatile and unpredictable as a hedge against provocations from adversaries. Is Putin now doing the same thing?
It’s impossible to get inside the Russian leader’s head. But Putin’s brinksmanship has already paid modest dividends. President Joe Biden has offered diplomatic off-ramps to Putin, such as a NATO-Russia summit and high-level bilateral meetings to explore ways to ease tensions and address Russia’s security concerns with NATO and Ukraine.
Biden’s intention here is to prevent a catastrophic war. But his response has also emboldened Putin’s regime. Just consider Russia’s list of demands last week to the U.S. and Europe. Putin’s diplomats are now asking for a treaty commitment to end any further expansion of NATO and to remove advanced weapons from NATO members that border Russia.
Instead of publicly ruling out such concessions, the Biden administration has spoken vaguely about the Russia proposal. A senior administration official on Thursday said some of the Russian proposals “we will never agree to,” while others may be the basis for negotiations. But the official declined to specify which proposals were unacceptable.
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Further bolstering the case that Putin is only pretending to lose touch with reality is that his demands are consistent with what he has been saying for nearly 15 years. In a 2007 speech in Munich, Putin argued that Russia was promised that, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, NATO would not expand to Eastern Europe. This history is debatable. What is not debatable is that large majorities in countries that were once under the sway of the Soviet Union favored joining the NATO alliance. Putin’s proposal ignored the right to self determination of Poles, Latvians and others.
Nonetheless, Putin’s 2007 speech telegraphed his foreign policy. The following year, Russian forces invaded the republic of Georgia and to this day occupy two of its provinces. In 2014, Putin invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea. In 2015, Russia entered the Syrian civil war and saved the dictator’s regime.
So does Putin really believe that the country whose territory he has annexed is the real aggressor? Probably not. Does he really believe the U.S. would provide Ukraine with some of its most advanced military technology? Again, probably not.
But Putin clearly benefits from the perception that he is volatile enough to make good on his latest threats. If Biden believed Putin was rational, he would likely call Putin’s bluff. Instead, he is attempting to coax Putin into defusing a crisis that the Russian leader himself has created.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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3. Richard Marcinko, first commanding officer of SEAL Team Six, dies
Richard Marcinko, first commanding officer of SEAL Team Six, dies
Retired Navy SEAL and the first commanding officer of SEAL Team Six, Richard “Dick” Marcinko, has died, according to a post on the Navy Seal Museum’s Facebook page.
He was 81.
Marcinko led the SEAL team in what has become known as the Navy’s most successful SEAL operation during the Vietnam War: the May 1967 assault on Ilo Ilo Han. Marcinko and his men killed many Viet Cong and destroyed six of their sampans, according to the Navy SEAL Museum. Marcinko deployed a second time with SEAL Team Two during the Vietnam War. His platoon assisted Army Special Forces during the Tet Offensive.
Richard Marcinko, left, with Roman Mashovets, a former Ukranian Navy Special Forces member and the current deputy head of the Office of the President on National Security and Defense, on Nov. 23, 2019. (Roman Mashovets)
He was one of two Navy representatives on a task force to help free American hostages during the Iran hostage crisis in 1979. After the tragedy, the Navy tasked Marcinko with designing and developing a dedicated counterterrorist team.
Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Thomas B. Hayward selected Marcinko as the first commanding officer of the unit. At the time, the Navy had two SEAL teams. According to the Navy SEAL museum, Marcinko named the unit “SEAL Team Six” to make other nations believe there were additional SEAL teams. He also hand-picked members from across existing SEAL teams and Underwater Demolition Teams. Marcinko led SEAL Team Six for three years.
After retiring from the Navy, Marcinko became CEO of SOS Temps Inc., his private security firm, according to his Amazon author profile.
Marcinko was the author of The Real Team; The Rogue Warrior’s Strategy for Success: A Commando’s Principles of Winning; and the four-month New York Times business bestseller Leadership Secrets of the Rogue Warrior: A Commando’s Guide to Success, according to Amazon.
He also created Richard Marcinko Inc., a motivational training and team-building company; and Red Cell International, Inc., which conducts vulnerability assessments of high-value properties and high-risk targets, according to Amazon.
“Rogue Warrior, his #1 New York Times bestselling autobiography, set the stage for his bestselling Rogue Warrior novels, eight of which were coauthored with John Weisman,” according to Amazon.
This is a developing story. Stay with Navy Times for updates.
Howard Altman is an award-winning editor and reporter who was previously the military reporter for the Tampa Bay Times and before that the Tampa Tribune, where he covered USCENTCOM, USSOCOM and SOF writ large among many other topics.
4. The Real Crisis of Global Order
Excerpts:
History is an imperfect guide. Fascism was defeated—at least for a time—on the battlefields of World War II. Had Hitler been less interested in military conquest, fascist states might be a perfectly normal part of the current global landscape. The Soviet Union, for its part, collapsed because of a combination of the inefficiencies of its command economy, nationalist pressures, and policy choices that turned out very poorly.
The United States cannot really contemplate defeating its current authoritarian challengers in a total war, as that would likely produce a catastrophic nuclear exchange. Its most important authoritarian challenger, China, is a totally different kind of polity than the Soviet Union was. China is wealthy and relatively dynamic, and although it has its share of structural problems, it is not abundantly clear that its shortcomings are any worse than those of the United States.
In short, neither of the historical routes to the ideological victory of liberalism seems likely. This means that liberal democracies really do need to assume that they will not retake the catbird seat of the international order anytime soon. And so the question becomes not whether the liberal order will change but on whose terms.
The Real Crisis of Global Order
Illiberalism on the Rise
Foreign Affairs · by Alexander Cooley and Daniel H. Nexon · December 20, 2021
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 sparked a major debate over the nature and fate of the liberal international order, suddenly caught, it seemed, between the Charybdis of illiberal great-power challengers and the Scylla of a hostile U.S. president. Trump may have lost the presidency in 2020, but the liberal order remains under threat. If anything, recent events have underlined the magnitude of the challenges it faces—and, most important, that these challenges are only one manifestation of a much broader crisis endangering liberalism itself.
For decades after World War II, the dominant factions in both the Democratic and the Republican Parties were committed to the project of creating a U.S.-led liberal international order. They saw Washington as central to building a world at least partly organized around market exchanges and private property; the protection of political, civil, and human rights; the normative superiority of representative democracy; and formally equal sovereign states often working through multilateral institutions. Whatever its faults, the order that would emerge in the wake of the Cold War lifted millions out of poverty and led to a record percentage of humanity living under democratic governments. But it also removed firebreaks that made it more difficult for turmoil at one political level to spread to another—by, for instance, jumping from the subnational to the national to the regional and, finally, to the global level.
Key players in the established democracies, especially in Europe and North America, assumed that reducing international barriers would facilitate the spread of liberal movements and values. It did for a time, but the resulting international order now favors a diverse array of illiberal forces, including authoritarian states, such as China, that reject liberal democracy wholesale, as well as reactionary populists and conservative authoritarians who position themselves as protectors of so-called traditional values and national culture as they gradually subvert democratic institutions and the rule of law. In the eyes of many right-wing Americans and their overseas counterparts, Western illiberalism looks perfectly democratic.
Soon after his inauguration, U.S. President Joe Biden began talking about “a battle between the utility of democracies in the twenty-first century and autocracies.” In doing so, he echoed a widespread view that democratic liberalism faces threats from both within and without. Authoritarian powers and illiberal democracies are seeking to undermine key aspects of the liberal international order. And the supposed pillars of that order, most notably the United States, are in danger of succumbing to illiberalism at home.
Whether they want to “build back better” or “make America great again,” every American analyst seems to agree that the United States needs to first sort itself out to effectively compete with authoritarian great powers and advance the cause of democracy on the global stage. But the two major political parties have very different understandings of what this project of renewal entails. This schism is far greater than disputes over economic regulation and public investment. Partisans see the other side as an existential threat to the very survival of the United States as a democratic republic.
The United States is one of the more polarized Western democracies, but its political conflicts and tensions are manifestations of broader, international processes. The U.S. reactionary right, for example, is linked to a variety of global networks that include both opposition political movements and governing regimes. Efforts to shore up liberal democracy in the United States will have cascading and sometimes unpredictable effects on the broader liberal order; at the same time, policymakers cannot set the country’s affairs in order without tackling wider international and transnational challenges.
All of this goes way beyond giving American democracy a fresh coat of paint and remodeling its kitchen. The crisis cannot be addressed by simply recommitting the United States to multilateral institutions, treaties, and alliances. Its roots are structural. The nature of the contemporary liberal international order leaves democracies particularly vulnerable to both internal and external illiberal pressures.
In their current form, liberal institutions cannot stem the rising illiberal tide; governments have struggled to prevent the diffusion of antidemocratic ideologies and tactics, both homegrown and imported. Liberal democracies must adapt to fend off threats on multiple levels. But there is a catch. Any attempt to grapple with this crisis will require policy decisions that are clearly illiberal or necessitate a new version of liberal order.
OPEN FOR INSTABILITY
Critics of the notion of a new cold war between China and the United States highlight fundamental differences between the world of today and that of the early decades of the Cold War. The Soviet Union and the United States formed the centers of discrete geopolitical blocs. By contrast, Beijing and Washington operate in overlapping and interconnected geopolitical spaces. For years, politicians in Washington have debated how many restrictions to place on Chinese investment in the United States. There was no such angst, and no need for it, when it came to the Soviet Union. U.S. companies did not outsource production to Soviet factories; the Soviet Union was never a significant supplier of finished goods to the United States or its key treaty allies.
A wide range of developments—all of which accelerated over the last three decades—have made the world denser with flows of knowledge and commerce, including the expansion of markets, economic deregulation, the easy mobility of capital, satellite communications, and digital media. People are more aware of what is happening in different parts of the world; formal and informal transnational political networks—limited during the Cold War by hard geopolitical borders and fewer, costlier forms of long-distance communication—have grown in both importance and reach.
These unfolding changes jumbled the geopolitical landscape that emerged after the implosion of the Soviet Union. No single, uniform international order replaced the more bifurcated international order of the Cold War; the world, despite the hopes of neoliberal politicians, never became “flat.” Instead, the international order that took shape by the turn of the century was highly variegated. Many of the new democratic regimes that appeared in the 1990s were only tenuously democratic; optimists wrongly dismissed early indications of weak liberal democratic institutions as but bumps on the road to full democratization. Eastward across Eurasia, liberal ordering became increasingly patchwork. Some states, such as China, managed to effectively access the benefits of the liberal economic order without accepting the requirements of political liberalism.
Liberal institutions cannot stem the rising illiberal tide.
Many analysts in those years promised that market expansion would produce robust middle classes that would in turn demand political liberalization. They argued that the development of a global civil society—underpinned by human rights, the rule of law, and environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—would help cultivate and mobilize pro-democracy forces, especially in the post-Soviet space. The Internet, widely imagined as an unstoppable force for freedom, would do its part to spread the irresistible appeal of both liberal economic principles and liberal political freedoms.
One could still make a case for optimism even after 2005, the last year that had a net increase in global democracy, according to the pro-democracy advocacy group Freedom House. But in retrospect, it seems hopelessly naive.
In 2001, only a few months before China formally entered the World Trade Organization, the September 11 attacks drove the United States to embark on the global war on terrorism. The Bush administration adopted or expanded a host of illiberal practices, including the torture of “unlawful combatants” through “enhanced interrogation” techniques and via “extraordinary renditions” to third-party governments, and embraced a militarized version of democracy promotion. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the accompanying doctrine of preemption further strained relations between the United States and European allies such as France and Germany. The upheavals of the “color revolutions”—liberal uprisings in post-Soviet countries (in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004)—and the Arab Spring, which flared in 2010, further underscored the threat posed by agents of the liberal order, such as international institutions, Western NGOs, and social media. Authoritarian and illiberal regimes increasingly pursued strategies to inoculate themselves from these transnational liberal threats.
The cumulative result of technological innovations, policy choices made by liberal powers, and evolving authoritarian practices was “asymmetric openness”—the strange reality that the contemporary liberal order works better for authoritarian regimes than it does for liberal democracies. Authoritarian states can curtail the effect on their populations of international civil society, multinational corporations, economic flows, and even the Internet much more effectively than can liberal democracies. Authoritarians can use the freedom of global flows—as afforded by liberal policies, whether economic or political—to advance their own illiberal influence. They do so while variously interdicting, excluding, and controlling cross-national flows of ideas, organizations, information, and money that might threaten their hold on power.
THE AUTHORITARIAN ADVANTAGE
The openness of liberal countries—one of the core principles of such societies—has become a liability. A fundamental problem confronting U.S. policymakers—and one that is especially challenging to those whose assumptions were shaped by governing during the 1990s and early years of this century, when the United States exercised hegemony—is the adeptness with which illiberal states and political movements exploit an open and interconnected global system.
Openness is not producing a more liberal global media and information environment; authoritarians build barriers to Western media in their own countries while using access to Western platforms to advance their own agendas. For example, authoritarian states now enjoy expanded media access to the democratic world. State-run global media outlets, such as China’s CGTN and Russia’s RT, receive billions of dollars in government support and maintain a plethora of foreign bureaus and correspondents, including in Western democracies—even as authoritarian regimes increasingly exclude Western media. China expelled BBC correspondents and banned the British network from broadcasting in the country in 2021 for its coverage of abuses in Xinjiang.
Similarly, authoritarian-sponsored organizations and lobbying groups continue their activities within open societies even as countries such as China and Russia ban Western officials, academics, and think tankers. Contemporary autocrats are image conscious. They use new technologies and social media platforms to shape their global profiles and elevate their standing with both domestic and international audiences. They routinely contract the services of public relations firms in the West, which portray their clients as popular at home, emphasize their geostrategic importance, and whitewash histories of repression and corruption. Autocrats also attempt to influence policymakers in liberal democracies by funding think tanks and sponsoring “study tours” and other junkets. Reputation management firms—retained by illiberal governments and oligarchs from autocracies—carefully scan global media and threaten litigation to dissuade negative coverage and deter investigations.
Protesting against the Hungarian government’s use of Pegasus spyware, Budapest, July 2021
Marton Monus / Reuters
Digital technologies enable new instruments of domestic and transnational repression. They have allowed the security services of both powerful countries (such as China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey) and weaker ones (such as Belarus, Rwanda, and Tajikistan) to intensify campaigns to monitor, intimidate, and silence political opponents in exile and activists in diaspora communities—even those residing in countries normally considered safe havens, such as Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. As a recent investigation into the Israeli technology company NSO Group and its Pegasus spyware highlighted, authoritarian governments engage in extensive digital surveillance of dissidents and journalists from other countries, often with the aid of corporations based in democratic states.
Western technology companies were once self-proclaimed champions of openness. Now, many are capitulating to pressures from their host countries to remove content and tools that could be used to facilitate mobilization against the regime. Just prior to the parliamentary elections in Russia in September 2021, the Kremlin convinced Apple and Google to remove an application developed by supporters of the jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny that was designed to help coordinate the opposition vote. Navalny accused the technology giants of acting as the Kremlin’s “accomplices.”
International institutions are also bending to the will of authoritarians. China under the leadership of President Xi Jinping has aggressively sought to curtail criticism of the country in UN human rights forums. According to the advocacy group Human Rights Watch, Beijing has sought to “neutralize the ability of that system to hold any government accountable for serious human rights violations.” Authoritarian states have banded together in coalitions such as the Like-Minded Group to oppose criticism of the human rights practices of individual countries, privilege state sovereignty, and block the accreditation of NGOs and diminish their role in authorized UN processes, such as the Universal Periodic Review. China now leads four UN agencies and has pushed for its preferred leadership candidates in others, including the World Health Organization. In September, the World Bank Group canceled its influential “Doing Business” annual study after an external investigative report found that its leaders, for political reasons, had applied “undue pressure” on their staff to improve China’s position in the 2018 ranking.
Not only can authoritarian states operate freely in the universalist institutions of the liberal international order, but they are also constructing an ecosystem of alternative ordering institutions from which they exclude or significantly curtail the influence of liberal democracies. By founding new regional economic and security organizations, China and Russia can press home their regional agendas via institutions that openly reject the dissemination of political liberal norms and values, use those institutions to help organize illiberal blocs within more venerable international organizations, and maintain exit options should liberal ordering institutions become less welcoming to authoritarians.
THE ROT WITHIN
The threat to liberal democracies also comes from within. The liberal order is anchored by two large federations: the United States and the European Union. Both are also home to some of the most potent and potentially consequential forces of illiberalism. These assume, broadly speaking, two forms: the illiberal actions that liberal democratic governments themselves take in seeking to counter perceived threats and the antidemocratic forces seen in illiberal political movements, parties, and politicians.
Democratic governments have always grappled with tradeoffs between liberty and security, and liberalism has always faced dilemmas about how far to tolerate illiberal actors. The U.S. government condoned the subnational racial authoritarianism of Jim Crow and racial segregation for the majority of the twentieth century, with horrific consequences. U.S. national security policy after 9/11 contributed to the current crisis of the liberal order by, among other things, promulgating the doctrine of preemptive war and militarizing democracy promotion. The United States’ embrace of speculative capitalism and its overly financed economy made it the epicenter of the 2008 financial crisis. Most recently, the global pandemic has normalized tighter border controls and more restrictive immigration policies and undermined the legitimacy of protections for refugees.
In order to push back against illiberal forces, most notably China, democratic governments have adopted policies that cut against the openness that characterizes the contemporary liberal order. Washington has used coercive instruments to intervene in global markets in an attempt to preserve U.S. access to and superiority in strategically important technologies. Security concerns related to the potential large-scale Chinese surveillance of Western telecommunications traffic, for example, led the Trump administration to place substantial pressure on its allies to reject Chinese 5G technology. Even many U.S. politicians and foreign policy officials who are, unlike Trump, committed to market liberalism generally consider this policy a success.
Liberalism risks undermining itself.
Genuine support for broad-based economic decoupling from China remains limited, but the growing rivalry between Beijing and Washington has produced other, albeit partial, moves away from market liberalism in the name of competitiveness and strategic autonomy. Stuck in the reconciliation process at the time of this writing, the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act is the first significant bipartisan legislation in years to embrace national industrial policy. In this respect, it represents a very limited reversal of the open liberalism, or neoliberalism, of the post–Cold War period.
The neoliberal variant of market liberalism—the push, starting in the 1970s, toward ever-greater deregulation, privatization, and capital mobility—eroded social protections and increased inequality, including by dramatically refashioning the tax code to benefit high-income earners and U.S. corporations. But instead of reversing these policies, many U.S. politicians prefer to place the blame on Chinese trade practices. Maintaining tariffs on Chinese goods appeals to populist sentiments and benefits a limited number of workers in industries that compete against Chinese imports, such as steel. But the harm it inflicts on export industries and consumers is greater. So far, the tariffs do not seem to have produced a new, better trading arrangement with China.
Efforts to grapple with homegrown antidemocratic forces also threaten to undermine liberal norms and values. In the United States, liberals and progressives have called for changes in procedural rules to prevent democratic backsliding. They champion taking an aggressive stance against right-wing militias and paramilitary organizations, stacking the Supreme Court with liberal judges, and abandoning long-standing legislative practices, such as the filibuster. When overtly illiberal regimes take these same measures, observers rightly accuse them of undermining democracy.
The fact remains that liberal democracies do face very real threats from the rise of reactionary populism, conservative authoritarianism, and other antidemocratic movements. In the United States, one of the two major political parties remains beholden to an authoritarian demagogue. Motivated by the “Big Lie” (the objectively false claim that Democrats stole the election from Trump through systematic voter fraud), the Republican Party is purging officials who stood in the way of efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Republican voter-suppression efforts are accelerating. Extreme gerrymandering has already made some states—such as Maryland, North Carolina, and Wisconsin—de facto legislative anocracies, or systems of governance that mix democratic and autocratic features. If these trends continue, procedural changes may prove to be the only way to prevent the unraveling of democracy in the United States.
CULTURE WARS AND POWER POLITICS
More broadly, liberalism risks undermining itself. At the heart of contemporary political liberalism lies the belief that certain rights and values are universal—that they exist regardless of differences among countries, cultures, or historical backgrounds. The human rights treaty system embraces this understanding; signatory states commit to protecting specific rights, such as due process, and to refraining from particular violations of human rights, such as torture.
The expansion of liberal rights in recent decades, however, has fueled a growing backlash. The Obama administration’s effort to promote LGBTQ rights abroad, usually through the State Department, sparked anger among conservatives in countries as different as the Czech Republic and Uganda. The sprawl of contemporary liberal values—from LGBTQ rights to gender equality to the rights of migrants—invites pushback in both democratic and nondemocratic states. It provides illiberal politicians with opportunities to isolate specific liberal values and use them as wedge issues against their opponents.
Moscow, perhaps inadvertently, succeeded in casting itself as a beacon of traditional values through a campaign to demonize LGBTQ rights as a stalking-horse for child sexual abuse. There is nothing particularly novel about this kind of strategy. What is notable is how it has become transnational and, in so doing, has served as a basis for illiberal policies in other countries. Such wedge strategies are also used to undermine support in the international community for reformers by tying them to illiberal values. For example, Amnesty International briefly revoked Navalny’s “prisoner of conscience” status following a Kremlin-backed information campaign that highlighted xenophobic comments he had made in the past about Central Asian migrants.
Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, February 2009
Ria Novosti / Reuters
The point is not that the United States should retreat from making LGBTQ rights part of its foreign policy or that Navalny’s alarming views on Central Asian migrants are of no consequence. It is that in advancing liberal rights, policymakers have to navigate significant tradeoffs, inconsistencies, and contention.
This extends beyond matters of democracy promotion and civil rights. The Biden administration has correctly declared corruption to be a national security risk. But anticorruption measures will inspire blowback that also poses a national security concern. Aggressive measures will threaten politically connected oligarchs in Europe and elsewhere. Corrupt autocrats are likely to see a number of anti-kleptocracy efforts, such as expanding diligence requirements for service providers and prohibiting foreign officials from accepting bribes, as a serious threat to their regimes and will rally their publics against these new forms of “domestic interference.” Important steps for conserving liberalism, even defensive ones, will generate pushback against the liberal order—and not just from overseas. Anticorruption measures threaten a wide range of U.S. politicians, businesspeople, and consultants. In recent years, and especially after the 2016 election, such measures have become another source of partisan polarization.
REACTIONARIES WITHOUT BORDERS
That polarization is not a discrete national phenomenon. U.S. reactionary populism is a specific manifestation of a global trend. The international popularity of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban among right-wing commentators, ethnonationalist leaders, and conservative celebrities (particularly American ones) highlights the transnational character of illiberal networks. Orban—whom the Biden administration noticeably did not invite to the planned Summit for Democracy in December—has emerged as a media darling of the American right: a head of state who denounces the power of the philanthropist George Soros, touts anti-immigration policies, and champions traditional values.
The Conservative Political Action Conference—a major forum of the American right—plans to hold its 2022 annual meeting in Hungary. The Fox News host Tucker Carlson—arguably the single most influential conservative media personality in the United States—spent a week in Hungary in the summer of 2021 to interview Orban, praise his government, and tell his audience that Hungary is a model democracy. Carlson echoed Orban’s vision of a world in deep cultural crisis, with the fate of Western civilization supposedly in the balance; that perceived peril is the glue that unites the transnational right.
The guardrails designed to ward off illiberalism have failed.
Orban consolidated power through tactics that were procedurally legal but, in substance, undercut the rule of law. He stacked the courts with partisans and pressured, captured, or shut down independent media. Orban’s open assault on academic freedom—including banning gender studies and evicting the Central European University from Hungary—finds analogies in current right-wing efforts in Republican-controlled states to ban the teaching of critical race theory and target liberal and left-wing academics.
The guardrails designed to ward off illiberalism have failed. The political scientist R. Daniel Kelemen, for example, points to how the EU, a supposed paragon of liberal democratic norms, did essentially nothing to prevent authorities in Hungary and Poland from incrementally weakening their democracies. The European Parliament institutes regionwide party groupings that effectively shield anti-EU parties, such as Hungary’s Fidesz and Poland’s Law and Justice party, from sanction. The common European labor market allows political opponents and disgruntled citizens to leave by simply relocating to other European countries, weakening the battle against illiberal policies at home.
These dynamics are not, in fact, all that different from those at play in the U.S. federal system: the courts shield antidemocratic practices such as extreme gerrymandering and targeted voter suppression, and some Republican-controlled states have enacted laws designed to let legislatures intervene in local election oversight under the pretense of preventing fraud. Many of those Republican officials who have become alarmed at the party’s sharp authoritarian turn have done little or nothing in response for fear of personal political repercussions or of damaging the party’s electoral prospects.
The elevation of Orban by American right-wing intellectuals and television hosts is a high-profile illustration of how the dense interconnections that form the core of the liberal order can facilitate the rise of antidemocratic movements. Another is the membership of Eduardo Bolsonaro, one of the sons of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, in a nationalist group founded by the U.S. reactionary populist Steve Bannon. Dark money from the United States underwrites illiberal parties and movements abroad. At the same time, kleptocrats launder funds into U.S. bank accounts, real estate, and even politics. This stokes populism in the United States via its corrupting influence. Many oligarchs and kleptocrats see the patrimonial governing style of reactionary populists such as Trump as supportive of their interests and so are happy to support them in any way they can. Russian financing, often funneled through Kremlin-affiliated oligarchs, subsidizes right-wing and culturally conservative organizations in Europe and North America with the aim of undermining the liberal order.
Trump in Warsaw, Poland, July 2017
Kacper Pempel / Reuters
As fissures widen in many ostensibly liberal democracies, a U.S. foreign policy aimed at defending liberal democracy will require the Biden administration—or any future Democratic administration—to take sides in the domestic politics of allied, democratic, and semidemocratic countries. When the Obama administration tried this approach, its efforts were haphazard and ineffectual. The Biden administration has notably refrained, at least publicly, from leveraging Trump-era security commitments to Poland to pressure the ruling Law and Justice party on the country’s democratic backsliding.
The Trump administration, on the other hand, openly endorsed illiberal right-wing governments in Hungary and Poland; it is possible that Trump’s efforts to support Andrzej Duda in the 2020 Polish presidential election helped him eke out a win over the more liberal Rafal Trzaskowski, the mayor of Warsaw. Neither the Trump administration nor the Trump-appointed ambassador to Hungary pressed Orban to reverse his decision in 2018 to evict the Central European University—established with money from George Soros—despite the fact that the university represented the largest single U.S. investment in higher education in post–Cold War Europe.
There is no question that a U.S. president who more openly and substantively aligns with center-right, center-left, and liberal parties overseas will risk further politicizing American foreign relations—most notably with respect to the broad transatlantic agenda that still commands support from influential Republicans. But as is the case with many of the dilemmas created by rising illiberalism, trying to avoid further politicizing this or polarizing that means, in practice, handing a substantial advantage to illiberal forces.
ECHOES OF HISTORY
For many, this peculiar moment in the international order augurs the coming of a new cold war, driven by an intensifying rivalry between Beijing and Washington. But a better, albeit still strained, historical analogy can be found in the “Twenty Years’ Crisis”—the fraught period between World War I and World War II when democracies faced multiple pressures, including the Great Depression, reactionary conservatism, revolutionary socialism, and growing international tensions.
Liberal democracies appeared rudderless, internally divided, and generally incapable of rising to the challenge. They struggled to adapt to globalizing technological forces, including new means of mass communication that illiberal forces could use adroitly to their advantage. International migration stoked nativism. Illiberal policies and ideas were on the global offensive, spreading through old and new democracies alike. The late 1920s and early 1930s saw democratic powers—France, the United Kingdom, and the United States—do little to block the rise of fascism abroad or prevent the slide of fledgling democracies into conservative authoritarianism.
To defend liberal democracy, Washington will need to pick sides in the domestic politics of other countries.
The United States finds itself in a not entirely dissimilar position today. Republicans spent the 2020 presidential campaign calling the Democratic Party “communist” and associating their rivals with authoritarian capitalist China; right-wing media claim that Beijing is implicated in many of their favorite bête noires, including critical race theory. For their part, Democrats tied Republicans, and especially Trump, to the far-right ideology of white nationalism and invoked the specter of extremist militias and other domestic militant groups. U.S. policymakers struggle to pursue a coherent and effective foreign policy in defense of the liberal order for the simple reason that the American public is fundamentally divided.
This historical parallel even provides some limited grounds for optimism. The standard story holds that the vast spending program of the New Deal made liberal democracy attractive again; President Franklin Roosevelt transformed the United States into an “arsenal of democracy.” The United States, together with its allies, defeated Germany, Italy, and Japan on the land and the sea and in the skies. This comprehensive defeat, as well as the ample publicity given to the atrocities committed by the Axis powers, left fascism discredited and stigmatized.
Biden seems to favor this analogy. In his domestic policy, he has attempted his own version of the New Deal through a combination of several significant spending bills, including the American Rescue Plan, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and one other infrastructure bill—which was in limbo at the time of this writing. In his foreign policy, Biden wants to build a coalition of democracies under U.S. leadership to meet the challenge of rising illiberalism and especially to oppose Chinese and Russian efforts to reconstruct the international order along more autocratic lines. The White House hopes that the meeting of leaders in forums such as the Summit for Democracy will bolster this initiative.
ON WHOSE TERMS?
The odds, however, are not in the administration’s favor. The United States remains the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world, but China is challenging the United States’ influence over the international order—and will continue to do so even if its dramatic rise tapers into stagnation. Washington is reaping the costs of two decades of failures in the Middle East and Central Asia. The United States burned through truly staggering sums of money in those failed overseas entanglements, ultimately purchasing the breakdown of U.S. hegemony in the Middle East and the total collapse of its nation-building project in Afghanistan.
But the domestic front should be even more worrisome for the United States. The two parties may muddle through and avoid tanking U.S. liberal democracy—no small achievement considering Republican actions in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. There remains, however, the overwhelming crush of intense political polarization, hyperpartisan scorched-earth tactics, and legislative gridlock. These ills have generated a host of further problems. Both U.S. allies and U.S. rivals are acutely aware that any agreement they make with the United States may not outlive the sitting administration. The U.S. Senate cannot ratify treaties for the foreseeable future, which limits Washington’s ability to attempt significant reforms of the international order, including exercising consistent leadership on matters such as climate change.
After 30 years of worsening political polarization and dysfunction in the country, the U.S. foreign policy establishment has failed to reckon with this reality. Some acknowledge that promoting liberal democracy is now a less relevant priority than preventing democratic backsliding. But such policy debates still do not address the likelihood that the next administration will reverse any new policy, whether the consequences of such a reversal would be better or worse than never enacting a new policy in the first place, or how a new policy might be adjusted to make it harder to undo.
The United States cannot contemplate defeating its current authoritarian challengers in a total war.
Rather than openly confronting this reliability problem, foreign policy analysts float the idea, explicitly or implicitly, that a specific approach—to managing U.S. relations with China, for instance, or to international trade—will be the one that magically provides the basis for a new, bipartisan consensus. But this puts the cart before the horse. If Americans could forge a broadly shared understanding of international threats and an agreement about the purpose of U.S. foreign policy, then there wouldn’t be a serious domestic political crisis to solve in the first place.
A daunting set of problems resides within the structure of the liberal order itself. The current arrangement is too rife with tensions, too internally fragmented, and too asymmetrically vulnerable. In order to survive, the liberal order will have to change.
U.S. officials who sincerely wish to defend the liberal order will need to choose sides, both domestically and in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. In doing so, they will blur the distinction between liberal and illiberal practices. They will need to break domestic norms, such as not modifying the size and jurisdiction of the federal judiciary because of its ideological disposition. They will also need to back away from post–Cold War norms, such as limiting favoritism toward political factions in and among major democratic allies. And they will need to do so with the clear understanding that these actions could backfire and provide rhetorical cover for illiberal and antidemocratic practices at home and abroad.
On the economic front, both Democrats and Republicans seem willing to sacrifice some amount of openness, but with very different ends in mind. Fortunately, most of the steps required to conserve the liberal order—such as clamping down on the flow of foreign kleptocratic money into the United States—would deal significant blows to external illiberal forces, even if they’re conceptualized as domestic policies.
Grappling with domestic illiberal threats remains a thorny exercise. Of course, the defense of liberal democracy has produced terrible excesses in the past, including ugly repression and horrific violence. U.S. officials adopted decidedly illiberal policies during the Red Scare that followed World War I, when the specter of Bolshevism loomed large. In trying to stem the rising right-wing extremist tide today, the United States risks returning to those dark times. But the alternative of inaction—Western liberalism’s failure to beat back fascism in the 1930s—remains a dangerous prospect.
History is an imperfect guide. Fascism was defeated—at least for a time—on the battlefields of World War II. Had Hitler been less interested in military conquest, fascist states might be a perfectly normal part of the current global landscape. The Soviet Union, for its part, collapsed because of a combination of the inefficiencies of its command economy, nationalist pressures, and policy choices that turned out very poorly.
The United States cannot really contemplate defeating its current authoritarian challengers in a total war, as that would likely produce a catastrophic nuclear exchange. Its most important authoritarian challenger, China, is a totally different kind of polity than the Soviet Union was. China is wealthy and relatively dynamic, and although it has its share of structural problems, it is not abundantly clear that its shortcomings are any worse than those of the United States.
In short, neither of the historical routes to the ideological victory of liberalism seems likely. This means that liberal democracies really do need to assume that they will not retake the catbird seat of the international order anytime soon. And so the question becomes not whether the liberal order will change but on whose terms.
Foreign Affairs · by Alexander Cooley and Daniel H. Nexon · December 20, 2021
5. Doing Less to Do Better: Why the Military Can't Solve Its Overwork Problem (book review)
Excerpts:
Deploying the act of subtraction affords a path to move beyond the satisficed product. To be clear, this is not to advocate for “not doing” in the first place. Cutting corners by choosing to forgo equipment inventories in lieu of vehicle maintenance fails to accomplish a directed mission. To arrive at the ideal post-satisficed less disposition requires intentional subtraction. Have commanders considered how much of the stowed equipment the unit needs in the first place? Would selectively removing certain items from a unit’s inventory unburden a future chore? Klotz endorses this sort of effort: “Subtraction is action, and less is the end state.” It requires creative thinking.
Culturally speaking, accountability of leadership usually dictates that unless commanders actively do something, they are failing in their responsibility. Subtract urges resistance against these instincts. Valuing more over less and reflexive action over tactful redesign permits satisficed solutions to overwhelm actual improvements. Choosing the latter is not for the faint of heart. Generating post-satisficed less solutions may not be demonstrable through performance metrics and will run contrary to entrenched attitudes and habits. Of course, leaders and their organizations can develop competence by subtracting. The problem is that it is near impossible to show competence by subtracting. Still, the extra energy necessary to leverage the full power of subtraction is surely rewarding. Salvaging even one LEGO® brick demonstrates as much.
The novel perspectives offered in Subtract make it a worthwhile read for decision-makers everywhere. Through its collection of contemporary psychology, anthropology, and economics, Subtract challenges its audience to defy standard modes of thinking and work to enhance organizations and cultures to reach new potentials. The people of the Army beg for post-satisficed less in the performance of their duties. With the energy of its leaders, creativity of its staffs, and the courage of its commanders, the U.S. Army can arrive there. Maybe then battalions will hit that early Friday release without hiccup.
Doing Less to Do Better: Why the Military Can't Solve Its Overwork Problem - War on the Rocks
It’s Monday morning and the battalion is formed at the motor pool. The battalion commander steps forward and rallies motivation for this week’s training events: a Tuesday airborne jump, a Wednesday squad march-and-shoot competition, and a Thursday live-fire rehearsal. By Friday, pending all training requirements complete, a half-day of equipment maintenance and everyone should be home by 1500. Sounds like a plan.
Then, here it comes — the XO moves front and center. “Today’s focus is vehicle maintenance. Our battalion must be at least at a 75 percent readiness rate and connexes will be organized for Friday inspection before release. Also, the S1 is here. No one leaves today unless we are 100 percent on DD93 and SGLI. Installation will hold a briefing on the new blended retirement system this afternoon in the post theater for all O-5 and below. And don’t forget your flu shots! The clinic will be open first-come, first-serve 9 to 11. On the horizon, next week we begin post-wide clean up.”
What is not mentioned is that it’s the last week of the month. Companies owe equipment and sensitive-item inventories as well as monthly training briefs by the end of the week — never mind that they also have to manifest for airborne operations this afternoon at 1400.
“If we cut just 20 percent of our day-to-day tasks, our whole unit would improve 50 percent!” a fatigued first sergeant mutters under his breath. Here we go. The Army keeps rolling along.
Blind Spots and Behavior
Anyone who has spent time in a military unit has probably witnessed this scenario play out a time or two. In the words of one of my former executive officers, “I feel like I’ve been asked to fight a five-alarm fire with nothing but a garden hose.” The litany of tasks in operational units can be unrelenting. Training initiatives repeatedly evaporate into prescribed schedules. Leaders lose their sense of agency. Ends are met, by hook or by crook. And the definition of unit “success” gradually morphs from some realized goal to mere “not failure.”
The Army is hardly starved of competent and motivated individuals, yet mid-career and junior leaders routinely feel depleted. The obvious way to improve Army unit effectiveness (not to mention to discover that elusive thing called morale) is simply less. Why, then, are these changes so hard to come by? The truth is: Army leaders at all echelons are probably overlooking opportunities to subtract when they make decisions.
But it’s not their fault! When confronted with choices, biological and evolutionary forces have reinforced the human affinity for addition since time immemorial, as Dr. Leidy Klotz points out in his new book, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less. Fundamentally, Subtract is a publication of its time. From Marie Kondo animating us to tidy up and Greg McKeown urging us to pursue only the essential, to Joshua Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus demonstrating better living through minimalism, society is loaded with reminders — perhaps ironically — that “less is more.” No strangers to busy-ness, people of the Army can relate.
Klotz and his research team establish humans’ penchant for addition through a variety of wacky empirical experiments. Test subjects’ attempts to improve riffs of musical notes and miniature-golf-course designs integrated more complexity. Even soup recipes and a Washington, D.C. trip itinerary became bloated with unnecessary components. Klotz concludes that the option to subtract is exiled to blind spots within the human psyche.
Contemporary behavioral research backs this up. Humans, like other animals, demonstrate competence through the completion of tasks. Bowerbirds construct elaborate, though ultimately useless, displays to attract mates. Similarly, individuals hoard objects even when this accumulation provides little actual utility. People even tend to value things more when they take part in creating them. These evolutionary instincts are expressed in the broader context of career pursuits as well. Obsession with performance statistics, resume bullets flooded with quantitative figures, the attainment of professional certifications, collection of social media likes or followers, and even the acquisition of luxury items all attempt to signal something about an individual’s value relative to others. (Cue the promotion paperwork gripe!)
This “more is better” attitude does not always emanate from a conscious intention, however. Sometimes, more is just the end result of other underlying behaviors. Why do people choose to stop doing when it’s “good enough for government work”? Soldiers can thank Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert Simon for furnishing an alibi from this professed character indictment! Combining elements of “satisfying” and “sufficing,” Simon’s ad-libbed notion of satisficing is broadly observed in human nature. To illustrate, Klotz describes a trip to the grocery store. Typically, people purchase “the first jar of pasta sauce that… does not have meat, costs less than five dollars, and [reduces] daily sodium intake within the recommended range.”
Searching for a more perfect or more complete solution to problems (i.e., the ideal jar of sauce) always requires additional effort. The habit of satisficing evolved to guard against wasted energy. Next time someone declares that “all we need here is an 80 percent solution,” or “it’s a rough swag,” or “it will buff,” feel free to blame their primitive impulses. On the downside, this attitude enables quick fixes to pile up. Routine satisficing discourages the pursuit of more elegantly designed solutions to problems.
Constructing Culture
The universal preference to add and its adverse consequences manifest downstream in the organizations and cultures that humans create. Previously, Dr. Leonard Wong showed how Army tasks at the company level cause dissonance within the profession. Deciding whether or not to cut corners is a foregone conclusion. Rather, officers often decide which corners to cut, forcing them to “act in a way that directly contradicts their hard-earned identity.”
On one hand, Wong recommends leaders exercise restraint in the propagation of requirements. On the other, improper management of a group’s “collective time” creates the sensation of time famine which can contribute to these ethical dilemmas. However, the issues that plague Army units can rarely be adequately addressed by mere better leadership. Army commanders, from a four-star at headquarters down to many captains’ companies, are readily aware of the need for less for the sake of organizational performance. Recent efforts to promote a “People First” mentality reflects this. The Army culture itself does not cultivate the ability to accept less as an appropriate course of action. Organizational design plays a central role.
The work of social psychologist Hazel Rose Markus helps explain why. Markus distinguishes two prevailing worldviews: one that defines the self in terms of its relation to others, and another that prizes individual abilities freed from situational constraints. These perspectives, steeped in cultural tradition, correlate to one’s field dependence in the evaluation of one’s environment. Independent types tend to focus on objects and do not always account for surrounding circumstances.
Cultures derived from individualistic values thus prioritize quantities. For the U.S. Army, in spite of statistics-based approaches to operations such as body counts in Vietnam, improvised explosive devices neutralized in Iraq, secured checkpoints and SIGACTs reduced in Afghanistan, none of these conflicts have given way to conclusive victory. Perpetual unit training gates, annual online requirements, and medical and administrative readiness tasks pile on at home and are often misused as proxies for unit fitness. Fixation on the object (read: objective) can cause a failure to grasp a more holistic appreciation for strategy.
How the Army chooses to handle people issues also reflects its underlying culture. Unfortunate scourges of sexual misconduct and behavioral health concerns have been traditionally addressed with stand-down days, which substitute core unit activity with briefings, counseling, and small group discussions. Expressed dissatisfaction with these approaches is widespread. Unproductive attitudes of cynicism fester from under the pile of new, and sometimes gimmicky, requirements. The problem is that more programs, more discussions, more training, and more specialized positions tangled together culminate in a kaleidoscope of additive, but often ineffective, responses to serious issues.
(How Best to) Supervise and Refine
As the primary theme of the book suggests, deliberate subtraction offers a way out from these unfortunate tendencies. If leaders start to apply the tool of subtraction against a wide range of problem sets and adapt their expectations to accept “less” as a viable end state, the Army organization and its people stand to benefit greatly.
An innocent moment building a LEGO® bridge with his toddler son provides the author’s inspiration. Rather than improve an unbalanced span by raising a too-short pillar, Klotz’s son opts instead to remove an unnecessary brick from a too-tall column. This choice offers a solution equal in outcome, through an intriguingly more efficient process.
Though not particularly surprising, some simple math demonstrates this potential. Think of the tradeoff between motor pool maintenance and equipment inventories within one leader’s span of control. Distributing manpower to maximize total effect means both activities will receive, at best, 50 percent of the whole effort. Any further inclusion of tasks — say, drafting training plans — now reduces the output potential of the first two by 17 percent, where each of the three receives 33 percent of the unit’s attention.
Alternatively, choosing to focus solely on vehicle maintenance means that single activity improves by 50 percent, now representing 100 percent of the total effort. The addition of one to a total dilutes, whereas the subtraction of one concentrates. From an operations management perspective, the more dramatic change occurs when choosing less — a convenient reminder that more does not necessarily equal better. Back to that old NCO wisdom: Taking away 20 percent (of the tasks) really can improve the team’s performance!
For that matter, the best way to improve organizational outcomes is by reducing restraining forces, not by increasing driving forces. Neither adding incentives for good behavior (e.g., early release for hard work), nor adding measures to address bad behavior (e.g., corrective physical training), relieves system tension. This is satisficing in action. It results in systems jumbled together, both excessive and wasteful of their resources. Battalion training objectives and company equipment inventories thus compete directly against installation administrative or higher headquarters initiatives in a culture where failure is not an option. Time famines ensue.
Deploying the act of subtraction affords a path to move beyond the satisficed product. To be clear, this is not to advocate for “not doing” in the first place. Cutting corners by choosing to forgo equipment inventories in lieu of vehicle maintenance fails to accomplish a directed mission. To arrive at the ideal post-satisficed less disposition requires intentional subtraction. Have commanders considered how much of the stowed equipment the unit needs in the first place? Would selectively removing certain items from a unit’s inventory unburden a future chore? Klotz endorses this sort of effort: “Subtraction is action, and less is the end state.” It requires creative thinking.
Culturally speaking, accountability of leadership usually dictates that unless commanders actively do something, they are failing in their responsibility. Subtract urges resistance against these instincts. Valuing more over less and reflexive action over tactful redesign permits satisficed solutions to overwhelm actual improvements. Choosing the latter is not for the faint of heart. Generating post-satisficed less solutions may not be demonstrable through performance metrics and will run contrary to entrenched attitudes and habits. Of course, leaders and their organizations can develop competence by subtracting. The problem is that it is near impossible to show competence by subtracting. Still, the extra energy necessary to leverage the full power of subtraction is surely rewarding. Salvaging even one LEGO® brick demonstrates as much.
The novel perspectives offered in Subtract make it a worthwhile read for decision-makers everywhere. Through its collection of contemporary psychology, anthropology, and economics, Subtract challenges its audience to defy standard modes of thinking and work to enhance organizations and cultures to reach new potentials. The people of the Army beg for post-satisficed less in the performance of their duties. With the energy of its leaders, creativity of its staffs, and the courage of its commanders, the U.S. Army can arrive there. Maybe then battalions will hit that early Friday release without hiccup.
Captain (P) J. Alexander Thew is an infantry officer and instructor of economics at West Point’s Department of Social Sciences. He commanded HHC/2-501 PIR of the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division from 2017-2019, and previously served in the 2nd Cavalry Regiment. He earned an MBA at the Yale School of Management in 2021.
6. The Promise of Hydrogen: An Alternative Fuel at the Intersection of Climate Policy and Lethality
Excerpts:
Hydrogen vehicles and platforms also offer significant advantages in performance, which translates to increased lethality on the battlefield. Hydrogen fuel cells already power electric vehicles that are nearly silent, in contrast to the low roar of conventionally powered tactical vehicles or the high-pitched whine of the M1 Abrams’ gas-turbine engine. Hydrogen powered vehicles also have a much smaller thermal signature—making them stealthier on the battlefield. Hydrogen can make vehicles more efficient as well—significantly extending the range and reliability of unmanned aerial systems or, in the case of ground vehicles, giving them large amounts of instantaneous torque through the electric engine.
...
Hydrogen production and logistics also provide an opportunity to engage with our regional allies and partners. Investments in clean hydrogen can support defense but also regional and national climate policies. All of the Five Eyes nations besides the United States—the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia—have a national hydrogen strategy. Japan and South Korea are already global leaders in hydrogen production, with Japan using political, diplomatic, economic, and industrial policies to become a “hydrogen society.” The French Covid economic recovery package included €7 billion for water electrolyzers. They, along with the Germans, Dutch, and European Commission are exploring the feasibility of converting natural gas pipelines to carry 100 percent hydrogen—which, if done at scale, would replace Russian natural gas. The United States can leverage common interest in hydrogen and defense as a type of energy diplomacy in the Pacific and in Europe.
...
Because hydrogen lies at the intersection of responsible climate policy and lethality, shifting to it can improve the capabilities of current and future platforms and weapon systems while reducing the military’s reliance on petroleum-based fuels and greenhouse gas emissions. Building the necessary hydrogen infrastructure to support such a shift offers opportunities to work closely with allies and partners and overlaps with their domestic policy goals. The military has long realized the potential danger of climate change to national security, noting in the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review the need to “employ creative ways to address the impact of climate change.” The shift to using hydrogen as a fuel for unmanned systems and tactical vehicles will improve lethality by reducing signatures and improving performance over legacy engines. Emerging technologies and processes make shifting away from petroleum to alternative fuels a win-win for the Pentagon.
The Promise of Hydrogen: An Alternative Fuel at the Intersection of Climate Policy and Lethality - Modern War Institute
As the world’s single largest institutional user of petroleum the Department of Defense can both further the president’s climate agenda and increase lethality by replacing petroleum-based fuels with hydrogen. Brown University researchers have calculated that the military produced nearly sixty million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2017—more than the entire nations of Sweden or Denmark. Some have argued that the military will have to make sacrifices for the climate change agenda; we don’t believe this. New technologies are making it possible to shift the military away from a near-total dependence on petroleum-based fuels toward greener alternatives without sacrificing lethality. Existing and growing hydrogen production capacity by our allies means that a switch to hydrogen could dramatically change how the military does operational energy. Hydrogen can be generated and used at the tactical edge of the battlefield, whereas petroleum fuels have to be extracted, refined, stored, and transported long distances.
Hydrogen vehicles and platforms also offer significant advantages in performance, which translates to increased lethality on the battlefield. Hydrogen fuel cells already power electric vehicles that are nearly silent, in contrast to the low roar of conventionally powered tactical vehicles or the high-pitched whine of the M1 Abrams’ gas-turbine engine. Hydrogen powered vehicles also have a much smaller thermal signature—making them stealthier on the battlefield. Hydrogen can make vehicles more efficient as well—significantly extending the range and reliability of unmanned aerial systems or, in the case of ground vehicles, giving them large amounts of instantaneous torque through the electric engine.
The True Cost of Addiction
Next generation weapons platforms and concepts of operation often use more energy than their predecessors. As a result, risks to the logistical underpinnings of U.S. power projection, particularly the availability of operational energy, are an enduring challenge.
In other words, the military is going to need more and more fuel, and it’s going to be more and more difficult to get it.
But the true cost of the Pentagon’s reliance on fossil fuels far exceeds those numbers. The 2009 National Defense Authorization Act or NDAA introduced the concept of a “Fully Burdened Cost of Fuel”—in other words, the cost of fuel after factoring in the price of transporting it from the pump to soldiers and Marines on the battlefield. Taking into account the costs of transportation from where the fuel is bought to where it is used can increase the price hundreds of times over the $2–3 dollars per gallon the Defense Logistics Agency pays for the fuel. Pentagon analysis showed that, on average, the cost of operating and protecting ground fuel convoys tripled the fuel’s cost and transporting it by air increased the cost to $43 per gallon. On the most perilous routes in Afghanistan, officials estimated that getting a single gallon of fuel into a vehicle or aircraft cost an average of $400, and in some areas the figure could be as high as $1,000 per gallon.
Dollars are not the only currency that the Pentagon uses to pay for fuel. Servicemembers often pay in blood to transport fuel in combat zones. Fuel convoys have been one of the most frequent targets of ambushes and improvised explosive device attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan. An Army report found that one in every twenty-four fuel convoys in Afghanistan suffered a casualty from insurgent attacks. According to a RAND study, in the first decade of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over half of all US casualties were a result of attacks on US convoys during “land transport missions”—many of them carrying fuel.
The Promise of Hydrogen
Hydrogen is not new to the Department of Defense—its military use dates as far back as the Civil War and it is still in use today. During World War I, the Army Air Service flew 5,800 artillery adjustment and surveillance missions in two-man, hydrogen-filled aerostat balloons. The balloons were so difficult to shoot down and so valuable to operations that the Luftwaffe awarded its pilots one and a half “kills” for every balloon downed. During World War II, hydrogen barrage balloons were used for defense against air attack over the Normandy beaches, above London, and across the United Kingdom, and for attacks against the German power grid. The Department of Defense even produced hydrogen in the field using caustic materials and a wheeled chemical plant, the M1 hydrogen generator. Today, it’s easier. Federal agencies can order a tank of hydrogen from the Defense Logistics Agency’s Aerospace Energy division via a national stock number. The agency supplies multiple grades of hydrogen to federal customers, with compressed hydrogen comprising 4 percent of its Aerospace Energy division’s bulk hazmat shipments.
The Logistics of Hydrogen
Hydrogen production and logistics also provide an opportunity to engage with our regional allies and partners. Investments in clean hydrogen can support defense but also regional and national climate policies. All of the Five Eyes nations besides the United States—the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia—have a national hydrogen strategy. Japan and South Korea are already global leaders in hydrogen production, with Japan using political, diplomatic, economic, and industrial policies to become a “hydrogen society.” The French Covid economic recovery package included €7 billion for water electrolyzers. They, along with the Germans, Dutch, and European Commission are exploring the feasibility of converting natural gas pipelines to carry 100 percent hydrogen—which, if done at scale, would replace Russian natural gas. The United States can leverage common interest in hydrogen and defense as a type of energy diplomacy in the Pacific and in Europe.
The gap in hydrogen deployment for DoD has always been at the tactical level. Transporting hydrogen cylinders is less than ideal because of their bulk and weight. But in 2013 researchers at MIT discovered a new process for creating hydrogen from water—using aluminum activated with small amounts of gallium and indium. This would allow units to generate hydrogen to meet their energy needs at the tactical edge of the battlefield without having to transport hydrogen liquid or gas. The aluminum and activation metals are baked in an oven, which prevents the aluminum from oxidizing. When the activated aluminum is combined with water, it creates heat, hydrogen, and aluminum hydroxide—a benign substance that is often taken to relieve heartburn and indigestion. The activation process can be done in a garage with a home oven (or on a conference table in the Pentagon with a $20 hot plate). One of the authors has repeatedly performed the hydrogen production reaction in his home over Zoom calls in demonstrations to Department of Defense stakeholders.
Instead of a supply chain that runs from oilfield to pipeline to refinery to tanker to port to battlefield, an aluminum-hydrogen supply chain could run from scrap recycler to battlefield. Aluminum is the most common metal in the earth’s crust and available almost everywhere on Earth in the form of post-consumer waste. Petroleum, by contrast, poses significant risks during transport and storage, even if the maritime segment of the Pentagon’s logistics chain weren’t already hobbled by lack of ships, lack of escorts, and poor readiness. This all adds up to a clear conclusion: using aluminum and hydrogen to fuel the military would begin to release it from the tether of petroleum-based fuels.
What’s Standing in the Way?
The “single fuel concept” is the idea that the military runs on a single fuel to simplify logistics. It is codified in US policy as well as in NATO policy. In practice the military runs on four types of petroleum fuel, with a few exceptions: F-24, a kerosene-based jet fuel that is also used in ground vehicles; JP-8, an almost identical fuel to F-24 with a slightly lower freezing point for use in cold weather; JP-5, a jet fuel with a higher flash point for shipboard use; and F-76, a marine diesel fuel for ships. The single fuel concept was intended to reduce the logistical burden of having to supply dozens of different types of petroleum-based liquid fuels to armies where each vehicle used a slightly different fuel. In this regard, it was successful—though not without its critics. Tanks and Humvees run on the same fuel as jets and helicopters, which eliminated the need to supply multiple types of fuel to the battlefield.
But today this single-fuel dogma, while easing the burden on logisticians, has effectively prevented serious experimentation with, let alone the adoption of, alternative fuels. Despite calls for alternative fuels, even from within the military, there are no major planned or projected platforms that will use them. But while the military stands still, the private sector is already shifting away from conventionally powered vehicles. Five of the largest big oil companies are pursuing renewable sources of energy. Major automaker General Motors announced that it will phase out all gas and diesel engines by 2035. Consumers are catching on too—electric cars continue to expand their market share against conventionally powered vehicles. Yet the military has not electrified any of its tactical vehicle fleet. If the single-fuel concept continues to thwart innovation toward nonliquid alternative fuels, it should either be rewritten in a way that encourages adoption of such fuels, or simply abandoned.
Widespread adoption of hydrogen for military use is also held back by longstanding myths about hydrogen’s safety. “What about the Hindenburg?” is a common refrain. But this perception is misinformed. Hydrogen gas is safe to transport and in many respects is a safer vehicle fuel than gasoline. When modern hydrogen tanks are punctured by a bullet they do not explode, but simply vent hydrogen gas vertically. If ignited, the hydrogen escapes upward into the atmosphere, unlike petroleum fuel, which pools aflame on the ground and on the water’s surface. The nearly perfect combat safety record—only one hydrogen-related fatality—among balloon units in World War I, despite their primitive technology and imperfect processes, is a testament to the inherent safety of hydrogen fuel.
The military operates a global purchasing and distribution network for petroleum-based fuel. Such a massive enterprise cannot be replaced in the short term, nor would it make sense to replace all of the military’s equipment with alternative fuels. However, the military’s decisions about the fuels it will use in the future will necessarily be made in the context of the clearly growing policy emphasis on tacking climate threats. At the same time, it will naturally be mindful of the pressing need to increase lethality. A shift toward alternative fuels is in accordance with both of these factors.
Because hydrogen lies at the intersection of responsible climate policy and lethality, shifting to it can improve the capabilities of current and future platforms and weapon systems while reducing the military’s reliance on petroleum-based fuels and greenhouse gas emissions. Building the necessary hydrogen infrastructure to support such a shift offers opportunities to work closely with allies and partners and overlaps with their domestic policy goals. The military has long realized the potential danger of climate change to national security, noting in the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review the need to “employ creative ways to address the impact of climate change.” The shift to using hydrogen as a fuel for unmanned systems and tactical vehicles will improve lethality by reducing signatures and improving performance over legacy engines. Emerging technologies and processes make shifting away from petroleum to alternative fuels a win-win for the Pentagon.
Capt. Walker D. Mills is a Marine infantry officer. He is currently serving as an exchange officer at the Colombian Naval Academy. He is a nonresident master of arts student at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Security and Defense, a nonresident fellow at the Krulak Center for Innovation and Future War at Marine Corps University, and a nonresident WSD-Handa Fellow at Pacific Forum. He holds an MA in international relations and modern war from King’s College London and received a BA from Brown University in history and archaeology.
Erik Limpaecher leads the Energy Systems Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, a Department of Defense federally funded research and development center in Massachusetts. He is a member of the Defense Science Board task force on DoD dependence on critical infrastructure and a nonresident fellow at the Krulak Center for Innovation and Future War at Marine Corps University. He holds a BSE in electrical engineering from Princeton University.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
7. Analyzing Social Media as a Means to Undermine the United States
Excerpts;
As a long-term solution, the Bipartisan Policy Center recommends enacting and teaching media literacy to understand and spot internet radicalization[7]. Social media algorithms are not fool proof. These algorithms require the cyberspace equivalent of “see something, say something” and for users to report any suspicious activity to the platforms. The risks of these companies not acting is also vital as their main goal is to monetize. Acting in this manner does not help companies make more money. This inaction is when the government steps in to ensure that private enterprise is not impeding national security.
Creating a system that works will balance the rights of the individual with the national security of the United States. It will also respect the rights of private enterprise and the pipelines that carry the information to homes, the Internet Service Providers. Until this system can be created, the radicalization of Americans will be a pitfall for the entire National Security apparatus.
Analyzing Social Media as a Means to Undermine the United States
Michael Martinez is a consultant who specializes in data analysis, project management and community engagement. has a M.S. of Intelligence Management from University of Maryland University College. He can be found on Twitter @MichaelMartinez. Divergent Options’ content does not contain information of an official nature nor does the content represent the official position of any government, any organization, or any group.
Title: Analyzing Social Media as a Means to Undermine the United States
Date Originally Written: November 30, 2021.
Date Originally Published: December 27, 2021.
Author and / or Article Point of View: The author believes that social media is not inherently good nor bad, but a tool to enhance discussion. Unless the national security apparatus understands how to best utilize Open Source Intelligence to achieve its stated goals, i.e. engaging the public on social media and public forums, it will lag behind its adversaries in this space.
Summary: Stopping online radicalization of all varieties is complex and includes the individual, the government, social media companies, and Internet Service Providers. Artificial intelligence reviewing information online and flagging potential threats may not be adequate. Only through public-private partnerships can an effective system by created to support anti-radicalization endeavors.
Text: The adage, “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product[1],” cannot be further from the truth in the age of social media. Every user’s click and purchase are recorded by private entities such as Facebook and Twitter. These records can be utilized by other nations to gather information on the United States economy, intellectual property, as well as information on government personnel and agencies. This collation of data can be packaged together and be used to inform operations to prey on U.S. personnel. Examples include extortion through ransomware, an adversary intelligence service probing an employee for specific national information by appealing to their subject matter expertise, and online influence / radicalization.
It is crucial to accept that the United States and its citizens are more heavily reliant on social media than ever before. Social media entities such as Meta (formerly Facebook) have new and yet to be released products for children (i.e., the “Instagram for Kids” product) enabling adversaries to prey upon any age a potential. Terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda utilize cartoons on outlets like YouTube and Instagram to entice vulnerable youth to carry out attacks or help radicalize potential suicide bombers[2].
While Facebook and YouTube are the most common among most age groups, Tik-Tok and Snapchat have undergone a meteoric arise among youth under thirty[3]. Intelligence services and terrorist organizations have vastly improved their online recruiting techniques including video and media as the platforms have become just as sophisticated. Unless federal, state, and local governments strengthen their public-private partnerships to stay ahead of growth in next generation social media platforms this adversary behavior will continue. The national security community has tools at its disposal to help protect Americans from being turned into cybercriminals through coercion, or radicalizing individuals from overseas entities such as the Islamic State to potentially carry out domestic attacks.
To counter such trends within social media radicalization, the National Institutes of Justice (NIJ) worked with the National Academies to identify traits and agendas to facilitate disruption of these efforts. Some of the things identified include functional databases, considering links between terrorism and lesser crimes, and exploring the culture of terrorism, including structure and goals[4]. While a solid federal infrastructure and deterrence mechanism is vital, it is also important for the social media platform themselves to eliminate radical media that may influence at-risk individuals.
According to the NIJ, there are several characteristics that contribute to social media radicalization: being unemployed, a loner, having a criminal history, a history of mental illness, and having prior military experience[5]. These are only potential factors that do not apply to all who are radicalized[6]. However, these factors do provide a base to begin investigation and mitigation strategies.
As a long-term solution, the Bipartisan Policy Center recommends enacting and teaching media literacy to understand and spot internet radicalization[7]. Social media algorithms are not fool proof. These algorithms require the cyberspace equivalent of “see something, say something” and for users to report any suspicious activity to the platforms. The risks of these companies not acting is also vital as their main goal is to monetize. Acting in this manner does not help companies make more money. This inaction is when the government steps in to ensure that private enterprise is not impeding national security.
Creating a system that works will balance the rights of the individual with the national security of the United States. It will also respect the rights of private enterprise and the pipelines that carry the information to homes, the Internet Service Providers. Until this system can be created, the radicalization of Americans will be a pitfall for the entire National Security apparatus.
Endnotes:
[6] Schleffer, G., & Miller, B. (2021). The Political Effects of Social Media Platforms on Different Regime Types. Austin, TX. Retrieved November 29, 2021, from http://dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/13987.
8. Ukraine on the Edge
Ukraine on the Edge
Dec 23, 2021
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s latest saber-rattling against Ukraine presents a fresh threat to regional and European security. Mounting tensions, mutual mistrust, and uncertainty regarding the Kremlin’s precise intentions will further complicate efforts to resolve the crisis peacefully.
In this Big Picture, Columbia University’s Jeffrey D. Sachs argues that a lasting de-escalation of tensions requires all parties to respect the others’ security interests, and urges NATO to take Ukraine’s membership off the table in order not to provoke Russian ire. But former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt shows how dangerous that approach would be, arguing that it is Putin’s own past miscalculations – in particular, annexing Crimea and occupying the Donbas – that have transformed Ukraine from a friendly neighbor into one that regards Russia as dangerous and hostile. And Anders Åslund of the Stockholm Free World Forum worries that, because Putin has few good options for retaining power, Russia may indeed launch a highly risky invasion.
How should the West – and the United States in particular – respond to Russia’s troop buildup? Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations thinks the US is right not only to provide Ukraine with arms and to threaten Russia with severe economic sanctions, but also to offer Putin a diplomatic path to de-escalation. Likewise, Charles A. Kupchan of the CFR and Georgetown University argues that a US-led carrot-and-stick approach offers the best way to avert a Russian invasion.
And Harvard University’s Jeffrey Frankel applauds US President Joe Biden’s refusal to overstate his administration’s commitment to defend Ukraine militarily, pointing out that similar US pledges over the past half-century have generated massive human, financial, and reputational costs.
Featured in this Big Picture
- JEFFREY D. SACHS
- CARL BILDT
- ANDERS ÅSLUND
- RICHARD HAASS
- CHARLES A. KUPCHAN
- JEFFREY FRANKEL
9. UK Minister Damian Hinds names Russia, China, Iran, North Korea in 'hostile nations'
yetWhen you select text while you’rereading, it'll appear here.
UK Minister Damian Hinds names Russia, China, Iran, North Korea in 'hostile nations'
By Apoorva Kaul flip.it2 min
Britain Minister of State for Security and Borders Damian Hinds has accused Russia, China, and Iran of launching disinformation campaigns. He claimed that China, Russia and Iran are among the “hostile nations” and cited the cyber security concerns they pose to the United Kingdom, according to ANI. According to Damian Hinds, the fourth hostile state is North Korea.
Damian Hinds alleged that China, Russia and Iran have “human capability” and “cyber presence” and added that they are capable of deploying them. He further claimed that the three countries have involvement in “multiple ways” that are related to cyber attacks, spying on the ground, soldiers on standby and disinformation campaigns.
"The three countries that I mentioned to you have the physical human capability, they have a big cyber presence, they're able to deploy at scale," Damian Hinds told UK's The Telegraph, as quoted by Sputnik as per ANI.
MI6 chief says Russia, China, Iran pose threat to country
Earlier in November, the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service chief had also made a similar remark. Richard Moore, the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service(MI6) had alleged that China, Russia, Iran and terrorism are the “big four” security issues faced by the country, according to AP. Moore revealed that Beijing is the “single greatest priority” for the UK's intelligence agency as Chinese authorities for their interest support “bold and decisive action”. MI6 Chief alleged that China carries out espionage operations against the UK and its allies and attempts to distort public discourse. He alleged that Iran also poses a threat to the United Kingdom.
MI6 mentioned that the country continues to face threats from Russia. Richard Moore highlighted the need for the UK and its allies to come together in order to "deter Russian activity", as per the AP report. He alleged Russia of interfering in other countries democratic processes and initiating cyber attacks. The claims of the UK's Secret Intelligence Service Chief were denied by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. Russian Foreign Intelligence Service asserted that the statements made by the head of the UK Secret Intelligence Service regarding threats posed by Russia have affected the possibilities of bilateral talks between the two nations.
10. The Middle East is stuck in the crosshairs of a worsening US-China rivalry
The competition with China is global. We cannot geographically limit ourselves to the INDOPACFIC.
The Middle East is stuck in the crosshairs of a worsening US-China rivalry
CNN · by Analysis by Tamara Qiblawi
(CNN)In a year that has brought profound change to to much of the world, the conflict-ravaged Middle East appeared to be finally turning a page. A diplomatic spree that sought to patch up long rifts bore fruit. Iraq transformed from the region's epicenter of violence to one of progress, for example, brokering rare talks between old rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Emerging from the crushing blows of the pandemic and four years of global turbulence during the presidency of Donald Trump, many of the Middle East's nations have shown signs that this level of conflict simply cannot go on.
But as the year grinds to an end, and as a whirlwind of diplomacy picks up speed, another geopolitical fault-line has appeared -- the Middle East has become a political and economic battleground for the US and China, despite its continuous attempts to keep out of this powerhouse rivalry.
In comments that show just how anxious this is making the Middle East's leaders, a high-level Emirati official earlier this month expressed a sense of hopelessness over the showdown between the US and China.
"What we are worried about is this fine line between acute competition, and a new Cold War," Anwar Gargash, diplomatic adviser to the UAE leadership, said in remarks to the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington last week.
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"Because I think we, as a small state, will be affected negatively by this, but will not have the ability in any way to affect this competition, even positively really."
Gargash confirmed reports that the UAE -- a key regional US ally -- had shuttered a Chinese facility over US allegations that the site was being used as a military base. He made clear that Abu Dhabi was merely paying lip service to US intelligence -- the UAE didn't actually agree with Washington's characterization of the site. Abu Dhabi simply did not want to upset a strategic ally.
CNN has reached out to China's foreign ministry for comment.
Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman poses for camera with the Chinese Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Li Huaxin during a visit to Great Wall of China in Beijing, China February 21, 2019.
But the US won't always win the battle for influence in the country. Days after Gargash's remarks, Abu Dhabi apparently decided to stop humoring America. It was suspending a multi-billion dollar purchase of US-made F-35 aircraft, the first deal of its kind with an Arab country. The US had made the sale conditional on the UAE dropping China's Huawei Technologies Co. from its telecommunications network. Washington claimed the technology posed a security risk for its weapons systems, especially for an aircraft the US dubs its "crown jewel."
Abu Dhabi disagrees. An Emirati official said a "cost/benefit analysis" was behind their decision to stick with Huawei at the expense of the F-35s. And while US officials have tried to downplay the significance of the event and insists that the sale has not been killed, Abu Dhabi had set a new tone Abu Dhabi does not intend to always bow to US demands over China, and it is dismissing Washington's notions about Chinese trade deals disguised as covert military activity.
It's an event could set the stage, not just for the Gulf powerhouse, but for an entire region where China's rapidly growing trade relationships transcend old geopolitical rivalries, and where the US' long-running hegemony could be coming to an end.
'A theater of competition'
The Middle East has been rocked by geopolitical tensions arguably since Western colonial powers carved the resource-rich region into spheres of influence over a century ago.
But the region had rarely seen violence on the scale of the 2010s, when simultaneous wars in four different countries -- Syria, Yemen, Libya and Iraq -- as well as long-running violence in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, turned vast swathes of the Arab world into a bloodbath.
It was a period that coincided with a momentous political shift -- the US was deprioritizing the Middle East as it became laser-focused on China. The subsequent chaos was unprecedented and appeared to anticipate a major power vacuum in Washington's wake.
The flurry of regional diplomacy that came after -- rushed and sometimes haphazard -- also appeared to be hinged on a perceived US departure from the region. Throughout it all, China, once ideologically reviled by powerhouses like Saudi Arabia, was working in the Middle East's shadows.
Beijing forged wide-ranging economic partnerships with the likes of Riyadh and Tehran. It deepened its foothold in economies that were already strong trading partners, such as the UAE, where it is on its way to becoming the fulcrum of its telecommunication networks.
Used to being targeted with accusations of human rights violations, Beijing promised to stay quiet on those in the Middle East, and to keep out of its conflicts. It has made the Middle East a key part of its Belt and Road Initiative, a massive infrastructural project that connects East Asia to Europe (Egypt's Suez Canal is the project's only maritime connection). And most of all, it presented an opportunity to hedge the region's bets in the event of an American exit.
"You've got this scenario where this preponderant extra-regional power looks like it's leaving and then you have China, a top trading partner," said Jonathan Fulton, senior non-resident fellow at The Atlantic Council. "The region looks like a theater of competition. This looks like the way it's going to play out."
Abu Dhabi's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping after witnessed a signing ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on July 22, 2019.
Analysts argue that if Washington forces the region to choose between the US and China, the answer will be a no-brainer -- the US' friends in the region are loath to draw the ire of the superpower, especially while its military presence in the Middle East remains expansive. But ultimately, the region may have no choice but to take the Chinese carrot even if it means subjecting itself to the American stick.
The region's gravitation towards China, argues Fulton, is "the law of nature. That's how it's going probably going to be for the next century."
US needs 'real cash on the table'
The main weakness in the US' proposition regarding China in the Middle East is that Washington offers no alternatives to Beijing's lucrative deals.
The US can try to coerce the UAE, for example, to withdraw from its Huawei deal, but it is unwilling to give them a competitive second option. At the start of Lebanon's financial tailspin in 2020, the US pressured Beirut to resist turning to Beijing for investments in Lebanon's decaying infrastructure, with US Ambassador Dorothy Shea issuing televised warnings about the dangers of Chinese "debt traps." The government of former Prime Minster Hassan Diab bowed to pressure, while the US largely spurned his government, which it believed to be backed by Hezbollah, and Western cooperation with the flailing economy has been little to none.
"US pressure has intensified in recent years, and especially since the start of the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013," said Tin Hinane El Kadi, an associate fellow at the think tank Chatham House. "However, in international politics, you can only pressure countries when you have substantive power and the means to really offer another deal."
He added: "If the US really wants to pressure countries and win this so-called new cold war, it would have to move away from discursive play, and really start to put real projects, and some real cash on the table,"
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi being welcomed by Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G20 summit in Hangzhou, China, 4 September 2016.
Nor can the US claim the moral high-ground on human rights issues or on the espionage it accuses Chinese companies such as Huawei of conducting. Recent scandals around Facebook, for example, weakens that position, argued Fulton.
"We've been watching what Facebook does ... and after (whistleblower Edward) Snowden ... it's hard for them to say you can trust us because we're reliable," said Fulton. "If we do it for liberal reasons and they do it for authoritarian reasons, it's not really a case to make here."
In the absence of a Western competitive alternative to Chinese cooperation, the writing appears to be on the wall. China's roots in the region will only become deeper and are only set to rapidly expand. Countries that have been embroiled in largely wasteful conflicts will choose options that serve their economic interests. And as Abu Dhabi's anxieties about being caught in the middle of rising tensions between larger powers has illustrated, the appetite for conflict is quickly dissipating.
"Even though the US right now, with very little leverage, is forcing countries to choose between the US and China, the fact that countries have more options, more loans that they can take from a variety of choices is a good thing," Kadi said.
"Having more alternatives in the global scene can only be a good thing for the region and its stability."
CNN · by Analysis by Tamara Qiblawi
11. Sweden’s top general on watching Russia and responding to an invasion of Ukraine
Where you stand depends on where you sit. We should pay attention to the views, perspectives, and assessments of our friends, partners, and allies.
Sweden’s top general on watching Russia and responding to an invasion of Ukraine
WASHINGTON ― The supreme commander of the Swedish Armed Forces, Gen. Micael Bydén, recently met in person with the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chief’s of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, to discuss the threat posed by Russia’s military buildup on Ukraine’s border.
In a Dec. 15 interview with Defense News, Bydén said this visit, and future ones, to Washington are part of Sweden’s efforts to deepen international defense cooperation. He also visited Marine Corps Base Camp LeJeune in North Carolina, weeks after American and Swedish marine units practiced seizing maritime terrain on the Stockholm Archipelago.
Sweden borders the Baltic Sea — a body of water also adjoining Russia. The northern European nation is not a NATO member but cooperates closely with the alliance. Like others in Europe, Sweden bolstered its defense budget after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine 2014, and the government is continuing to deepen pan-Nordic defense cooperation.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
What was your message to Gen. Milley, and what progress did you make during the meeting?
In our region, there is no secret that Russia is the challenging [factor] and has been over the years. There was a clear indication of its activities in 2014, and operations in Crimea continue. It’s still a war going on in southeastern Ukraine, and what is happening now around Ukraine is of course in focus. So that was an obvious thing we talked about.
We deal with sharing information on a regular basis, on the intel side, and it’s important to understand what is happening. So when it comes to unit numbers and capabilities, we share the same view, and the discussion and the big question would be: What would be [Russia’s] next step? When would the next step be? Why? [Essentially an] assessment of what is happening.
We have different perspectives, which is good. It’s not only Ukraine right now — we see things in a greater perspective. It starts in the Arctic, which we share with our neighboring countries, not least of which is Finland and Norway. So we talked about that [as well as the] Baltic Sea, Ukraine, the Black Sea, all the way down to the Middle East and Africa. It’s a variety of challenging developments right now around the globe, and these are interlinked one way or another.
What’s your assessment of Russia’s forces and intent? How close are we to seeing a military confrontation?
The military confrontation has been there since 2014. You should never underestimate a country that has now built up their capabilities over time. Listen to their rhetoric, listen to their communication. It’s obvious that they do have ambitions. They also protect their long-term interests. If we’re close now to some kind of a major operation, I wouldn’t go into that discussion. But this is really the question right now, and that’s why it’s so important to talk to our partners.
If there’s been a military confrontation all along, what’s the most troubling thing you see that’s different?
We never took our eyes and ears off of Russia — not even when times were different and we [had more optimistic views]. We do have a good understanding about what capabilities they have. But the question will always be: What would the next step be, and why? They have proved [they will] use their military capabilities to reach their aims and goals.
One should not be surprised if they act, but what would the act would be? It’s really hard to to be very clear and 100% sure. This is the tricky question.
How would Sweden react if Russia invades Ukraine?
At a politically high level in Sweden, the support to Ukraine has been there over time. What is happening in Ukraine will definitely have an impact on security in Europe. So it’s bilateral; the support is very clear. What we have done has been under the umbrella of unifier, so it’s multilateral, under the umbrella of the Canadians. That would be training, it would be advising, that support down to the practice level. We would continue on; we would probably add more in that direction. There’s clear support from the Swedish side to Ukraine, whatever happens.
What’s your level of confidence in the West responding, specifically the U.S. and NATO?
When I spoke with Gen. Milley yesterday [Dec. 14], I also expressed my appreciation for the very clear support they have given us ― meaning sharing information, sharing their views ― because it has been very transparent and open.
Sweden recently received the Patriot air defense system. What capability does that provide? What is the timeline beyond the initial handover?
We took delivery from our procurement agency a few weeks ago, so now it’s under the ownership of the Armed Forces. We’ll go from [initial operational capability] to [full operational capability] in line with our plans. Our procurement of the Black Hawk helicopter was another one that met requirements when it came to time, economics and capability requirements. We will continue to work very closely with the U.S. Army in this case.
[The Patriot is] very promising, and it will add tremendously to our capability when it comes to air defense. We had another system before, but it’s from the 1960s, so this opens up a new way of working.
What’s driving the planned 40% increase in Sweden’s defense spending? Is it linked to Russia’s recent activities?
A general answer would be “regional security,” and that would be very much focused on Russia and what Russia has done over time: in 2018, Georgia; and in 2014, the illegal annexation of Crimea and starting a war in southeastern Ukraine. It’s a mix of a World War I and a more modern warfare with high-end capabilities. On a political level, I have the mandate and the budget. The political administration has done its part. Now it’s up to me to deliver, and I welcome it. After years of decline, now we build.
It’s a combination of investments in manpower and modernization. What will that look like?
Five new Army regiments, one air wing. We inaugurated three regiments during the fall.
What we call the “wartime organization” would be about 55,000 people. By 2025, we will be at 80,000; and by 2030, more or less 100,000. Most of that would be conscripts after the reintroduction of the conscript system in 2018. It’s gender-neutral, it’s very positive. We have 100,000 young women and men every year, and right now we take about 5% of them — 5,500 this year, which will go up to 8,000 in 2024.
New capabilities would also come. What we need to develop would be under headlines like “cyber,” so we started the cyber training for soldiers, but it also needs to be complemented with new technology. We will hopefully sign an agreement with the U.S. during the spring when it comes to space. Other areas include electronic warfare and artificial intelligence. We don’t have contracts for everything, but we do have plans, and now it’s high time we go from plans to acquisition.
What’s coming in the near term?
We had plans to acquire GlobalEye [airborne early warning and control aircraft] after 2025, but we will now do it earlier because it will add significantly to our capabilities. With the Saab 340 [aircraft], it’s hard to sustain and it’s a bit slow, but a new platform and new sensor will definitely be a gamechanger for us. Both fighters and submarines are on contract and will be delivered in this five-year period to 2025. Submarines [are coming] in the next five years.
What are the implications of Finland’s decision to buy the F-35 fighter after Sweden pushed the Gripen?
Finland is our closest partner. The relationship we now have, we haven’t done anything like this in modern times. We have plans to fight together beyond peacetime, pending political decisions. I hoped for another outcome, but I fully respect the Finnish decision, and the process has been very thorough. Me and my counterpart have agreed that this will not have an impact on our cooperation because it’s too important right now that we just continue as we have. A fighter system like the F-35 will of course add to our common capability.
How has Sweden deepened security cooperation agreements?
With Finland, its obvious, and we started a few years ago. What it comes down to is trust between individuals at all levels, and we are there. Regionally, we have a trilateral agreement with Finland, Norway and Sweden based on our common responsibility in the Arctic. We have a new trilateral agreement with Norway, Denmark and Sweden, which protects the major harbors in the western part of our country. Otherwise, we work very closely with with all the countries around the Baltic Sea.
With the U.K. and France, we took a few steps, including in Mali together with special forces.
I couldn’t be more clear: The U.S. is one of the most important bilateral cooperation [setups] we have. We also have very important trilateral ties with Finland and the U.S.
We’re part of the U.K.-led Joint Expeditionary Force. From a political level, there is no limit here — from statements of intent to memoranda of understanding.
How long has the intelligence sharing relationship with the U.S. existed? Is it deepening, given the current situation with Russia?
I was an attache [in the United States] 20 years ago, from 1999 to 2002. The relations and cooperation then was built upon research and development, acquisition, and procurement ― on the defense industry side. Intel has always been there to levels I can’t talk about, and I probably don’t know everything about it. But it’s been very important because we are where we are, we see things and it’s easier for us to follow developments here.
The cooperation today is very much operationally driven, so now it’s exercises, it’s training, it’s operating together. Exercises today are very close to operations. You can decide the time and place where to run an exercise, which will definitely have an impact on an operational level or operational outcome. It’s been a very interesting path from 20 years to now, and it’s very promising. We’re looking at new [approaches in] certain areas: joint fires, combining new technologies, making sure that we can communicate securely. It could be a lot of things.
Offer some insights about Russia’s approach to warfare, both in Crimea and this recent massing of troops.
It’s modern capabilities and modern technology like electronic warfare and unmanned platforms. I went to the trenches to see the bad guys over there.
They are experts in what they call “nonlinear warfare” ― which others would call “hybrid warfare.” It could be military, diplomatic or economic. They know exactly how far they can go before [passing a threshold that would lead to traditional conflict]. It could also be information operations, influence operations, cyberattacks continuously happening; the challenge here would be attribution. They are ready to use their military assets, and they take the opportunity while it’s there. As long as it’s in line with their interests ― to be a major power again, to protect their territory ― they are able and capable and ready.
Is the West ready if it comes to that?
We are more ready today than we were just a few years ago. We are more aware [and focused]. If we are ready to go to action if things happens, [time will tell].
Back to my visit here: Having a very good dialogue with with one of my most important counterparts is not only a good start — it’s a good place to work from.
Joe Gould is the Congress and industry reporter at Defense News, covering defense budget and policy matters on Capitol Hill as well as industry news.
12. Norway Intelligence alleges Russia of carrying out cyber attacks; Kremlin denies claims
No surprise.
Norway Intelligence alleges Russia of carrying out cyber attacks; Kremlin denies claims
Last Updated: 27th December, 2021 13:02 IST
The Norwegian intelligence service chief has alleged Russia of carrying out cyber attacks and added that it is interested in Norwegian foreign policy.
Written By
Image: Pixabay/Representative
The Chief of Norway's Intelligence Service, Nile Andreas Stensones, has alleged that Russia poses the 'greatest threat' in cyber attacks to the country. Speaking to NRK, intelligence chief Nile Andreas Stensones has claimed that Russia is interested in the Norwegian foreign policy. He also alleged that they have an interest in security policy and knowledge of security.
In 2020, the authorities had claimed that Moscow was responsible for a major data breach. In the latest development, the intelligence chief revealed that the authorities have identified the people behind the attacks, however, the cyber attacks have not stopped.
Furthermore, Stensones mentioned that they have not witnessed any change in the pattern or intensity of the attack. Stensones alleged that Beijing is also active in the digital world, however, Russia has more interest in Norway.
As per NRK, there have been two digital attacks on the Storting in a year and the last one was carried out in March 2021. Moreover, Stensones claimed that Norwegian companies in the maritime industry and underwater technology have been exposed to espionage. He added that digital attacks are being carried out against companies that have inaccessible technology. He mentioned that they are making efforts in order to stop the digital attacks against the country.
Russia rejects Norway's claims
Meanwhile, Timur Chekanov, the Embassy Secretary at the Russian Embassy in Norway, in an email to NRK, has rejected the claims of Norway's intelligence chief Nile Andreas Stensones. Chekanov claimed that the allegations made by Stensones lack “concrete facts”.
He further called upon the Norwegian agencies to stop making “unfounded” public statements. Chekanov added that the Norwegian authorities must use official channels to have information exchange with Russia.
Norway alleges Russia of cyber attack on Storting Parliament
Last year in August, hackers targeted the Storting Parliament and breached the emails of parliamentary representatives and employees. Then Foreign Minister Ine Eriksen Soreide at that time accused Russia of carrying out the cyber attack. Norway’s Foreign Minister claimed that Russia intruded into the Norwegian Parliament's email system in August.
The cyberattack was immediately stopped and the security service investigated the matter, according to AP. Reportedly, the parliament had later mentioned that the security number, bank information and contact data “may have been lost”.
Inputs from AP
Image: Pixabay/Representative
13. Joe Biden in a Multipolar World
Excerpts:
Instead of isolating itself by alienating Russia and China, the US should engage with them as equals – most immediately to clarify sensitive issues relating to buffer lands and borders. The US should understand well why Russia is so concerned about Ukraine joining NATO, and why China will not accept any declaration of independence by Taiwan or its militarization by foreign powers. The US was not going to tolerate Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, was it?
American hegemony is over. But a stable global balance of power is achievable. It is Biden’s move.
Joe Biden in a Multipolar World | by Andrew Sheng & Xiao Geng - Project Syndicate
,
Upon taking office, US President Joe Biden had an opportunity to engineer a reset in international relations, engaging constructively with China and Russia to figure out how to manage the new multipolar world. His administration has done the opposite, apparently believing that America is still the global hegemon.
HONG KONG – Next year will mark 50 years since US President Richard Nixon traveled to China to meet with Communist Party of China Chairman Mao Zedong and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai – a major step toward restoring relations after decades of estrangement and hostility. A half-century later, the progress they launched has been all but lost, and US President Joe Biden is partly to blame.
The ideological differences between the United States and China in 1972 could not have been starker. But both sides recognized the vast benefits of a détente. By isolating the Soviet Union, they hastened the end of the Cold War. And by enabling China to shift its focus to peaceful economic development, they bolstered global prosperity for decades to follow.
Thanks to a large labor force and abundant land, China became a manufacturing powerhouse, enabling international firms to slash their production costs and deliver more affordable goods to consumers. Over time, Chinese incomes grew, and low-cost production began to move elsewhere. But China’s economic progress – in particular, growing demand from its massive domestic market – has continued to benefit the rest of the world.
In fact, as Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan have pointed out, the world owes the Great Moderation – the period of decreased macroeconomic volatility that lasted from the 1980s until 2007 – largely to China’s integration into the global economy. The US reaped rich rewards from China’s rise during this period.
But the US also made several strategic mistakes. The end of the Cold War gave the country an unprecedented opportunity to update the world order for an era defined by new challenges and rivalries. But, as Richard Haass has lamented, it squandered that opportunity, instead dedicating itself – and $8 trillion – to a War on Terror that was flawed in design and a failure in practice.
Meanwhile, the US failed to adapt to a changing global economy. When millions of Americans lost manufacturing jobs, they blamed trade, especially with China, even though technology played a far bigger role. Declining middle-class incomes and rising inequality exacerbated discontent.
The 2008 financial crisis sent these frustrations into overdrive. Beyond highlighting the government’s utter failure to keep the financial sector in check, the crisis showed that America’s position atop the global economic pecking order was no longer unassailable. Whereas the US triggered the crisis and suffered through a recession, China’s growth never dipped below 6%, and the country’s massive 2009 stimulus package helped fuel the global recovery by driving up commodity prices.
Donald Trump won the White House in 2016 by sensing – and then stoking – voters’ growing fears and frustrations, and by portraying the loss of American primacy as an existential threat for which China was to blame. But far from “making America great again,” Trump eroded the country’s global standing further by abandoning commitments, alienating allies, and failing to devise anything close to a coherent strategy for tackling shared challenges. His counterproductive trade war with China is a case in point.
Yet Trump was hardly alone in viewing China as a major threat that must be contained. That much has become clear under the Biden administration, which, despite reversing many of Trump’s other policies, has maintained a hard line on China, and is even attempting to create a coalition of democracies to contain it.
After Trump’s tumultuous four years in office, Biden had an opportunity to engineer a reset, engaging constructively with China, as well as with Russia, to figure out how to manage a multipolar world. Instead of seizing it, he has created the sense that countries may need to pick a side in the US-China rivalry.
Given America’s battered global reputation, Biden may well find that this approach does not produce an entirely favorable outcome. Even European powers have struck a softer tone toward China – with which they maintain crucial economic ties – and have expressed a desire to avoid an overly militarized strategy.
Whether the US likes it or not, a multipolar order is in many ways already here. As recent studies by Harvard’s Belfer Center show, China is rapidly catching up with the US in terms of technology and military capabilities, though the US still leads in finance, research and development, education, and access to global talent.
Moreover, unlike during the Cold War, the leading global powers – especially the US and China – are economic peers. As a 1988 RAND study showed, the Soviet Union’s GDP peaked at 60% of US GDP in 1977. While the Soviet Union was spending 15-17% of GDP on defense – three times the share in the US – its per capita income amounted to just half of America’s.
By contrast, China and Russia together account for about 77% of US GDP in current dollar terms and 137% by purchasing power parity. Furthermore, the US is weighed down by debt, which has swelled to $29.2 trillion. At 122% of GDP, America’s debt-to-GDP ratio now exceeds its World War II peak of 119% of GDP.
The nineteenth-century German statesman Otto von Bismarck observed that in a world order dominated by five states, it is always desirable to be part of a group of three. As former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has pointed out, this implies that in a three-country order, one should want to be in the group of two.
Instead of isolating itself by alienating Russia and China, the US should engage with them as equals – most immediately to clarify sensitive issues relating to buffer lands and borders. The US should understand well why Russia is so concerned about Ukraine joining NATO, and why China will not accept any declaration of independence by Taiwan or its militarization by foreign powers. The US was not going to tolerate Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, was it?
American hegemony is over. But a stable global balance of power is achievable. It is Biden’s move.
14. Dutch have brought 573 people out of Kabul since evacuations ended
Dutch have brought 573 people out of Kabul since evacuations ended: AD - DutchNews.nl
Destroyed tanks, abandoned in a field in Afghanistan. Photo: Depositphotos.com
The figures from the foreign affairs ministry show 352 people were brought out via Qatar and 221 via Islamabad in Pakistan. The total, which includes family members, involves 228 people with a Dutch passport or residency permit.
The Netherlands evacuated some 2,500 people from Kabul as the city fell to the Taliban, but there was much criticism of the chaos and hundreds of people were left behind. Foreign minister Sigrid Kaag resigned after MPs passed a motion of censure against her.
Human Rights Watch reported at the beginning of December that people who did work for the peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan were being targeted and executed by the Taliban. At least one person who worked for the Netherlands is thought to have been killed.
Research for television current affairs show Nieuwsuur in September showed seven in 10 Dutch people say that the Netherlands should accept refugees from Afghanistan in principle, but 17% are completely opposed.
15. Taking Down the Caliphate: The story of an ad-hoc SOF task force that helped turn the tide against the Islamic state
Sun, 12/26/2021 - 6:16pm
Taking Down the Caliphate:
The story of an ad-hoc SOF task force that helped turn the tide against the Islamic state – and why the lessons of this campaign are more important than ever
by Andrew Milburn
Rutbah, Iraq - 2016
“The battle showed how the campaign against the Islamic State [...] is supposed to work:
This month, a US drone attack on a nearby highway killed Shaker Wahib, the terrorists ‘military emir’ in Anbar, shaking morale. The day before the battle the United States dropped two huge bombs on minefields and berms surrounding the town.”
“Then came the attack from a combined force of Iraqi Army troops and hundreds of recently recruited tribal fighters who had been trained by US Special Operations Forces. When they moved in, only thirty Islamic State fighters stayed to fight.”
David Ignatius, “The U.S.’s Show of Power Against the Islamic State,” Washington Post, (March 2016)
ISIS meets Gypsy Caravan
In the summer of 2014, the Islamic State surged across the Syrian border into Northern Iraq, seizing Mosul almost without a fight. Beyond the city to its east, however, lay territory claimed by the Kurds; and here the Islamic State’s headlong advance foundered against a breakwater of Peshmerga defenses that surrounded Mosul on three sides. For the next eighteen months, Peshmerga and Islamic State fighters manned opposing trench lines only a few hundred meters apart in a scene reminiscent of the First World War.
Although halted in the North, the Islamic State continued to advance in Anbar province until it was just 30 miles from Baghdad, engulfing in its line of march places whose names evoked poignant memories for a generation of Marines: Al Qaim, Haditha, Fallujah, Karma, Ramadi—a heartbreaking litany of wasted effort.
In September, President Obama authorized the U.S. military to conduct air strikes in support of Iraqi and Kurdish security forces, and to deploy to Iraq a special operations task force. There was a strong undercurrent of urgency about the mission—everyone involved knew that it was entirely possible that the Islamic State could take Baghdad with one determined push. Incredibly, given the glacial machinations of the global force management process, a special operations task force appeared in Baghdad scarcely two weeks after the President’s announcement. It was an ad hoc affair, the hasty amalgamation of units already in theater: an Army Special Forces headquarters and a SEAL task group. Despite being, in the words of a British liaison officer, “somewhat of a gypsy caravan,” the task force was effective in halting the Islamic State’s inexorable advance.
The Islamic State had no shortage of skilled rocketeers and were able to dial in on our OPs with impressive speed. Picture taken moments before first impact.
Crisis and Opportunity
In December 2014, U.S. Special Operations Command put together a plan to replace this task force with another that would comprise a combined staff drawn from Naval Special War- fare Command and MARSOC. At the time, I commanded the Marine Raider Regiment and would soon switch roles to lead the first MARSOC rotation of this task force scheduled to deploy a year hence. It would be the first time that MARSOC had raised an 0-6 level special operations task force, and from the outset, all involved felt the pressure to succeed.
MARSOC is a small organization: comprising less than three percent of the United States Special Operations Command’s total manpower; it is a fifth the size of the Naval Special Warfare Command and less than a twelfth that of the U.S. Army’s Special Operations Command. Whereas there are five Army Special Forces Groups each with an 0-6 as both commander and deputy, there is only one Marine Raider Regiment headed by a single colonel. Because of this, our challenge was to figure out how to man a CJSOTF without closing shop at Camp Lejeune. The only way we could do this was to form the head- quarters from personnel drawn from across the SOF community and conventional forces. My primary staff were all individual augments with very little experience in their functional areas, and none had deployed before as part of a task force headquarters. Additionally, we were to include in the headquarters personnel from five different countries, which would pose endless challenges when it came to simply sharing information.
The six months that we had available for pre-deployment training shrank to five when we accounted for leave and public holidays—not a lot of time in which to train so disparate a group for a mission so complex.
Framing the Problem
This work-up would not resemble the preparation for previous deployments to Iraq or Afghanistan in which much was already known about the area of operations. The situation in Iraq was constantly changing as the Islamic State probed for weaknesses in the Peshmerga and Iraqi defenses while the various forces arrayed against it—Kurds, Iraqi Security Forces, Sunni Tribesmen, and Shia militia—jockeyed for position against each other as much as against the enemy.
It was July of 2015 when I assembled the CJSOTF staff together for the first time on the campus of the Joint Special Operations University in Tampa. There we underwent a two-week special operations planning course, which enabled us to develop our initial campaign plan.
This venue was our opportunity to frame the problem, a collective effort at sense making that gave us some shared understanding of an immensely com- plex situation.
Together, we examined the mysteries of doctrine, and despite the large number of unknowns, were able to give life to concepts such as mission analysis, implied tasks, assumptions, center of gravity and critical vulnerability. With the help of intelligence analysts, we were able to model a thinking enemy—put- ting ourselves in the position of the Islamic State as we discussed and then war gamed our approach.
The plan that resulted gave a frame of reference, a known point from which to shift as more information became available. I emphasized that we would have to re-assess this plan upon arrival in country—and thereafter as a continuous process.
Assessment involves much more than making PowerPoint charts that show easily measurable data with no necessary correlation to success (estimates of enemy casualties and equipment destroyed are a great example of this). A good unit incorporates assessment into their execution of operations. That assessment involves constantly asking the question “are we doing the right things. Is the energy that we are directing into the environment having the desired effect.” It is a continuous process—more art than science—and the commander has to be personally involved.
Peshmerga pray in the assembly area the night before the attack.
An Impossible Span of Control
The Task Force deployed on New Year’s Day 2016 and was tasked with degrading, dismantling, and defeating ISIS—a mission that had a pleasing alliterative ring to it. This would be a countrywide campaign designed to undermine the enemy’s leadership and morale while systematically killing his foot soldiers and wresting back key terrain. Our ultimate goal was Mosul.
As CJSOTF commander, I commanded eight task forces, but only one of these—a Special Operations Task Force (SOTF), composed of SEALs—was large enough to conduct independent operations. The problem was that this SOTF had too many units spread over too wide an area to be able to manage them all effectively. Its geo- graphical span of control ranged from Anbar Province in Western Iraq to the Kurdish sector in the north. These were two distinct fights; the Iraqi and the Kurdish commanders fought the war against ISIS separately, as though they belonged to different countries, which in a real sense they did.
Our partnerships were all important, but at the same time, they were so diverse that we were compelled to make a separate line of operation for each one: the Peshmerga, the Iraqi SOF, and the Sunni Tribes. Each required different types of assistance and engagement— presenting a single commander with more than he would be able to handle effectively.
Realizing that I would need a second task force, I put in a request for a MAR- SOC task force to lead the campaign in the north—a request that stirred up no small amount of angst among cynics in the special operations enterprise who saw this as being a parochial bid on my part to get more Marines into the fight.
It would be five months before a MARSOC SOTF deployed to Erbil. In the meantime, I deputized an Army Special Forces lieutenant colonel on my CJSOTF staff and placed a MARSOC company headquarters below him. I then took roughly half the current SOTF’s strength—all those teams who were partnered with the Peshmerga—and placed them under this new headquarters. This arrangement was not initially popular with the various force providers involved, and I had to spend some time by SVTC getting buy-in from all stakeholders. After our CJSOTF left Iraq, MARSOC formalized this task organization by dedicating all three Raider battalions to the Iraq SOTF rotation.
Leading Up
The CJSOTF was the only U.S. unit in Iraq that had the permissions and freedom of movement that enabled it to partner those forces that were involved in direct combat with ISIS: the Peshmerga, Iraqi SOF, and Sunni Tribes. Conventional units were much more restricted in what they could do and lacked cohesive relationships with the Iraqi Army and Peshmerga. Further- more, they were not permitted to have a direct relationship to the Sunni Tribes whose cooperation would be critical plan to win back Anbar Province—the Iraqi Government’s first geographic priority in the fight against ISIS.
Typically, when a subordinate unit is best positioned to have an impact on the enemy, it makes sense for higher headquarters to make this unit the main effort. In terms of command relation- ships, this unit becomes the supported unit with all other units being designated as supporting.
But as CJSOTF commander, I was supporting the Combined Joint Force Land Component (CJFLC), which comprised a conventional army division headquarters, heavy with generals and determined to make a name for itself in the counter-ISIS fight. The division had twice as many personnel on its headquarters staff alone as we had in the entire CJSOTF. It was only half in jest that I would modify a famous Churchillian quote to apply to this top- heavy arrangement: “Never in the field of human conflict have so few been led by so many.”
Ultimately, the relationship worked but not without considerable friction— something that I might have been able to mitigate had I devoted as much effort to leading up, as I did to leading down.
Leading Down
In contrast, I could not have been happier with performance of the eight task forces that worked for me, from the larger Canadian and Australian contributions to the smaller detachments from Holland, Norway, Belgium, France, Sweden, Italy, and Spain—each brought distinctive capabilities and were eager to contribute. I never once ran into a situation where a subordinate commander pulled the red card on me, indicating a conflict between my orders and his national chain of command. At times, I was not beyond using their national authorities to circumvent the burden- some restrictions placed on U.S. units.
In one such case, the CJSOTF was forbidden to support a particular Iraqi SOF unit, the Emergency Response Division, because of that unit’s alleged Shia affiliations. During the battle to re-take Fallujah, this prohibition was problematic because the ERD was the Iraqi Army’s main effort for much of the battle. Fortunately, the Italian SOF task force was encouraged by their national chain of command to partner with the ERD. So—using Italian fire support teams—the CJSOTF was able to deliver fires in a manner that avoided the perception of direct support but enabled the ERD to make headway into the city.
Partners
Everything that we did in Iraq would have to be by, with, and through our partners—which made them our operational center of gravity.
We had three main partners who bore the brunt of the fighting against the Islamic State. First, there was the Counter Terrorism Brigade which spearheaded every Iraqi Army operation in the role of elite infantry, sustaining heavy casualties as a result. Then there was the Peshmerga who had stopped the Islamic State’s advance in the North and, for the previous two years, held them to a limit of advance that extended several hundred kilometers across northern Iraq. Our third partner force comprised some 10,000 Sunni tribesmen whom we were tasked with recruiting and training in Anbar province with the uneasy assistance of the Iraqi government.
Without Iraqi SOF, there could be no drive north from Baghdad up the Tigris valley. Without the Peshmerga, there would be nothing in the meantime to stop the Islamic State from sweeping southwards from Mosul. And without the support of the tribes in Anbar there could be little hope of dislodging the Islamic State from that key province.
At the same time, all of us in the CJSOTF had to be aware of political sensitivities that attended each one of these relationships and become adept in navigating them.
The Peshmerga and the Iraqi government were openly hostile to one an- other. The Peshmerga, who had long sought their own independent state in the north and had since the First Gulf war, settled instead on the Iraqi government’s agreement to a semi-autonomous region. Following the fall of Mosul, the collapse of the Iraqi Army, and the Peshmerga’s successful bid to halt the Islamic State’s advance in the North, the Peshmerga believed that they had won their right to a homeland. The Iraqi government of course was not about to cede the most fertile and oil rich portion of the country to the Kurds. So even while the fight against ISIS was taking place, this enmity bubbled beneath the surface, on occasion erupting into open hostility such as when the Iraqis would refuse to support Peshmerga offensives against ISIS. On one occasion that I witnessed, the Iraqi air force bombed Kurdish positions claiming afterwards that it had been an error.
As for the Sunni Tribes, there was a great deal of mutual distrust between them and the predominantly Shia Iraq government—who were always uneasy about the U.S. SOF effort to arm and train the tribesmen.
In short, this was the kind of environment that even the most imaginative exercise scripters would have struggled to produce—and yet probably a good representation of the reality that U.S. forces can expect to face.
A Marine Raider provides covering fire for a Peshmerga attack.
Modeling A Thinking Enemy
The Islamic State had steadily gained territory over the course of the previous year, and now, with over a third of the country under its control, was only 30 miles from Baghdad. As we arrived, Iraqi Special Operations Forces were leading an attack to reclaim Ramadi in a block-by-block slugging match that dragged on for almost three months. Even with Ramadi back in government hands, ISIS still held the vast majority of Anbar Province and had the benefit of fighting closer to the Iraqi capital than to its own.
The Islamic State’s operational center of gravity was its army—its order of battle which consisted of actual units of fighters with a fairly sophisticated command and control (C2) and logistic support structure. It was this army that enabled ISIS to capture and hold territory to establish itself as a Caliphate—the essence of its identity and the means by which it was able to attract a steady flow of recruits. If we could destroy this army, killing the Islamic State’s foot soldiers at a rate faster than they could be replenished by the flow of recruits coming across the border from Syria, we would win.
But once we were in country, we realized that the pursuing the enemy’s operational center of gravity would entail a lengthy war of attrition. We could kill Baghdadi’s foot soldiers all day, and it would make no difference as long as he continued to draw recruits from across the Muslim diaspora. At the rate that the Iraqi security forces were clawing back territory, it would take two more bloody years to reach Mosul.
While the Iraqi security forces were focused on the fight in Anbar, we needed to make ISIS feel pressure closer to home. We would continue to support our partners as they fought toe-to-toe with the enemy, but to have strategic effect (which should always be the objective of special operations forces), we needed to focus our efforts on the enemy’s strategic center of gravity.
Mosul was the physical and spiritual epicenter of the Islamic State. It was the location from which Al Bakr Baghdadi had declared the birth of the Caliphate in June 2014. Since then, it had been the beacon that had drawn recruits from across the Muslim diaspora to serve un- der the black flag. Mosul was the source of the Islamic State’s moral strength, and in war—as Napoleon famously said—the moral is to the physical as ten is to one. Mosul was where we were going to use that principle to even the score.
The population of Mosul—some one million inhabitants—vastly out- numbered the Islamic State fighters in the city. In order to hold on to Mosul, the Islamic State would have to secure their continued compliance. To do this, they would have to make good on their explicit mandate to represent a proto- state by providing the governance and services that the inhabitants of any city require. Failing this, they would have to resort to draconian measures to maintain order, which would likely incur resentment, especially if this dissatisfaction was fueled by a coherent U.S. information campaign. At the same time, we had to offer the predominantly Sunni inhabitants of Mosul a credible and acceptable alternative. We would only win their confidence by showing them that ISIS would not simply be replaced by an occupying Shia army.
Our partnership with the Iraqi Special Operations Forces meant that we still had to focus on defeating Islamic State fighters in the field. ISIS had no shortage of savvy tactical commanders—men who were able to execute impressive C2 without all the tools available to western armies. They were adept at planning and executing offensive operations and were particularly good at rapidly bringing together cohesive counterattacks. They typically used vehicle borne IEDs converging on point of penetration or, in the case of counter- attack, against our lead elements. Time and again, ISIS units fought with great determination often to the last man—as long as they had this kind of direction.
Morale is an interesting thing. In the case of the ISIS rank and file, there was no straight-line correlation between morale and expectation of survival. Again and again, we saw Islamic State units fight with a happy heart though all hands faced almost certain death, but there was a connection between morale and leadership: the presence of a commander, whose proficiency and charisma lent meaning to their sacrifice, was all important. Remove that—take away the calm voice on the radio—and even foreign fighters, typically more fanatical than their home-grown comrades, were likely to evaporate in the face of determined attack.
Armed with this knowledge, we made a point of removing from play as many tactical leaders as we could immediately prior to an operation—a move that clearly undermined the enemy’s will to fight in the battles to re-capture Fallujah and Rutbah.
Emerald Bounty
Joint doctrine directs you to find the enemy’s critical vulnerability, the chink in his armor that will tip him off-balance and bring him down. In practice, it is not so clear cut; if the enemy does have a critical vulnerability, it is seldom apparent. So, you look for a range of vulnerabilities and work on them all simultaneously, ready to exploit success.
All of this was easy to say but much harder to make a reality. Fortunately, I had the right team: a brainy cabal of junior officers: Marines, Green Berets, SEALs, Australians, and Brits who put together in short order an ingenious but simple plan. In its essence, it involved loosening the Islamic State’s grip on Mosul simultaneously from inside and out, in a manner designed to elicit an atavistic reaction from its leadership, and while offering to Mosul’s long- suffering inhabitants the message that help was on its way.
We called this Operation EMERALD BOUNTY. The origin of this name was like the clue to a crossword puzzle. Emerald City was our term for Mosul, and Bounty was a play on the word’s actual meaning as a prize and its connection with the term mutiny—as in Mutiny on the Bounty. Inciting mutiny—or more accurately, revolt—would be one method by which we proposed to win Mosul back.
That is what our campaign was designed to do. I did not think for a moment that any one of our initiatives under EMERALD BOUNTY would be the silver bullet to bring the Islamic State to its knees, but in their aggregate, I was confident that they would have an effect—enabling the Iraqis to take Mosul earlier and at less cost than would otherwise be the case.
UW by FaceTime
Looking for vulnerabilities inside Mosul would mean working with disaffected members of the local population, of which there were many. The Islamic State’s failure to deliver on the basic obligations of civil government while imposing their medieval version of the rule of law had alienated the city’s population. The question was whether they had been cowed into submission or were angry enough to take action.
Inciting segments of the population in Mosul to revolt without having direct contact with them would be a challenge. The initial contact relationship building and recruitment (if that is the right term) would all have to be conducted by means of the internet. It takes extraordinarily talented people to persuade others, whom they have never met, to rebel against an occupying force at the risk of their lives. Furthermore. it takes a good understanding of group psychology: that it is best to start with small acts of defiance, graffiti, or minor vandalism for instance, even if their contribution to your objectives may appear insignificant. Once someone takes that initial step, it becomes easier to persuade them to do more. In this we were enabled by ISIS, who punished all acts of defiance in the same draconian manner—bringing to mind the old English proverb “You might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb.”
Our inside approach also included using advanced targeting methods to identify and take out the Islamic State’s mid-level managers. Killing the top people of an organization like ISIS or Al Qaeda, while satisfying, achieves little in the long run and can even make things worse than before. On the other hand, if we could take out of play the people whose expertise Daesh depended on, the men who really ran the organization and commanded its units in the field, then—so we reasoned—we had a better chance of causing real damage.
The Enemy of my Enemy
To exert pressure from outside the city, we needed to find a group of Sunnis to conduct raids into Mosul’s outskirts. The majority of Mosul’s population were more fearful of a vengeful Shia liberation than they were of ISIS. We needed to show them that their fellow Sunnis were taking action, however symbolic, to challenge the Islamic State’s grip on the city. ISIS had only been partially effective in eliminating use of the internet in Mosul, and we knew that such news would travel fast.
We were not looking for a relief force—just a group of fighters who could strike and then withdraw. We found just such a group had already been formed by the former governor of Mosul, a man named Atheel Najaifi, and we reached out to him to see if we could enlist his help in our scheme. However, as we began negotiations, our intelligence team discovered that Najaifi was affiliated with a Sunni extremist group, the Nachabandi, who had ties with the Islamic State. We circumvented this problem by persuading Najaifi to turn over his group of Sunni tribesmen for us to train, advise, and assist—and so EMERALD BOUNTY was born.
A Peshmerga officer points out targets to a Raider JTAC.
The Kill Chain as King
The term “kill chain” is a military concept used to describe the process of an attack. It consists of initial target identification, a “fixing” phase which involves determining a target’s location and other relevant details while preparing to strike, the final decision and order to attack, and—finally—the destruction of the target. The term is used for any method of attack whether launched by drones, manned aircraft, artillery, or a ground force. It is also used to describe operations in the information or cyber environment. The more efficient the kill chain becomes, the less advantageous it renders traditional forms of maneuver involving ground-mobile units.
The campaign against the Islamic State was an introduction for us to the primacy of the kill chain in modern war. Given our mandate to avoid where possible direct contact with the enemy and our reliance on precision fires, the use of sensors—primarily airborne drones—became all important. For the CJSOTF—sensing meant not just visual observation but also the use of signals intelligence to locate and validate targets. In turn the Islamic State also used drones to initiate kill chains—a tactic that it employed with increasing sophistication.
The requirement to employ responsive sensors as part of a functioning kill chain is even more acute now for Marine ground combat units preparing to take on Chinese forces in Indo-PACOM. Even the humble Puma, equipped only with electro-optical cameras, has—in the hands of a skilled operator—become worth its weight in gold.
Conclusion
By the time the MARSOC led CJSOTF turned over to its successor in July 2016, the area of Iraq under control of the Islamic State had shrunk to less than half its size at the beginning of our deployment and the Iraqi Security Forces had started to push towards the outskirts of Mosul. It was, of course, a combined effort, heavily dependent on all the resources that the Coalition was able to bring to bear.
The campaign against ISIS brought to war fighting a new dimension: the ubiquitous employment of drones by both sides, for instance, and the use of the internet as a medium for psychological operations, intelligence collection, and for recruiting surrogate forces from among the population in enemy territory.
The ability to employ proxy forces and to raise and train armed resistance groups against adversary states or proto states are areas of expertise likely to increase rather than diminish in value in this era of Great Power Competition.
It is true that the unique capabilities of SOF enabled the CJSOTF to make a contribution out of proportion to its size, but the advantages that we had in terms of training, and equipment are easily accessible now by conventional Marine ground combat units. The ability to employ multiple sensors and to link them rapidly to precision fires is not a skill that should be the exclusive use of special operations forces. The integration of effects in the electro-magnetic spectrum simply involves a wider view of the concept of combined arms that is already central to the way we fight.
If we are to operate below the threshold of detectable electronic emissions, we really need to take seriously concepts such as commander’s intent, implicit communication and – of course – that much discussed and universally neglected principle: mission command
As prosaic though it may sound, the fundamentals that enable us to adapt to the changing nature of war are already rooted in our doctrine. If only we could adhere to it.
About the Author(s)
Andrew Milburn retired from the Marine Corps as a colonel in 2019 after a 31 year career. His last position in uniform was Deputy Commander of Special Operations Central (SOCCENT), and prior to that commanding officer of the Marine Raider Regiment and Combined Special Operations Task Force – Iraq.
Since retiring, he has written a critically acclaimed memoir: When the Tempest Gathers and has had articles published in The Atlantic , USA Today, JFQ, and War on the Rocks, in addition to the Military Times . He is on the Adjunct Faculty of the Joint Special Operations University and teaches classes on leadership, planning, ethics, command and control, mission command, risk, special operations and irregular warfare at US military schools. He is a co-host of the Modern War Institute’s Irregular War Podcast, and Irregular War Initiative.
16. Ukraine crisis: how Putin feeds off anger over Nato’s eastward expansion
Ukraine crisis: how Putin feeds off anger over Nato’s eastward expansion
It is more than 13 years since Nato’s Bucharest summit, the meeting that agreed that the western alliance wanted the former Soviet states of Ukraine and Georgia to become members. But in many respects the legacy of that April 2008 meeting – the last attended by Vladimir Putin – hangs over the Ukraine crisis today.
Putin, however, addressed the assembled leaders at the start of the meeting, describing such a move as a “direct threat” to Russian security. “I remember him clearly saying to Angela Merkel and Bush: ‘For me Ukraine is not a real country’,” said Jamie Shea, who spent 38 years inside Nato.
Putin’s language helped produce a partial retreat – and a problematic compromise.
“There was furious haggling with Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy [the then French president] and the result was that Ukraine would be offered membership in the future, but there would be no membership action plan, no firm date to join Nato,” Shea said.
As a result the issue was allowed to linger, with Nato and its members not fully committed to Ukraine. “I was actually present,” said Jens Stoltenberg, Nato’s secretary general, at a press appearance with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, last week. “We stand by that decision.”
During this winter’s crisis Russia has massed an estimated 100,000 troops to the north, east and south of Ukraine, prompting fears among Nato allies of an invasion and a conflict “on a scale not seen since world war two”, according to Britain’s new head of the armed forces, Adm Sir Tony Radakin. But in the past week the attention-seeking Kremlin has pivoted to a series of diplomatic demands.
Russia presented a draft security treaty to the US before making it public. Its provisions say the US should prevent Ukraine and Georgia and other former Soviet states from joining Nato. It also insists the US should not establish military bases or even engage in “bilateral military cooperation” with Ukraine or any other non-Nato, former Soviet state – an attempt to carve out a clearly defined Russian sphere of influence.
A Russian soldier takes part in drills in the Rostov region near its border with Ukraine. Photograph: AP
Such an idea is clearly controversial, particularly in eastern Europe, where memories of communist domination linger. “Russia’s proposed two draft treaties on 17 December outline the establishment of a two-tier Europe – one with the right to defend itself from Russian encroachment while the other must accept Russian supremacy as a new geopolitical reality,” wrote Orysia Lutsevych, an analyst with the Chatham House thinktank, in a recent paper.
Other experts argue that Nato has become overconfident. Joshua Shifrinson, an associate professor of international relations at Boston University, said the US and the west “in the grand sweep of post-cold war relationships have become less sensitive to Russian concerns”, losing sight of the idea that the Kremlin too has vital interests.
He added: “Russia does not want other political groupings present near their homeland. That’s not a hard thing to understand. Imagine if China were to form an alliance with Canada. Powerful states don’t want other powers forming alliances near their borders.”
Shifrinson, a historian, said that at the end of the cold war, US and German strategists had given “very clear signals” that Nato would not expand farther eastward if Germany were allowed to reunite. But this sphere of influence commitment was quickly dropped in the 1990s and early part of the 2000s as Russia struggled as an independent country and a string of eastern bloc countries joined Nato and the EU.
Critics of this thinking argue that if anything, Nato’s recent support for Ukraine has been too slight. “It’s a lack of resolute action in the past that has taught Russia that it [can] upmarket and descale a crisis whenever they want it,” said William Alberque, an American former Nato official and now the director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies thinktank. “Russia has all the momentum in the current crisis,” he added, as the US and Nato have agreed to hold talks with Kremlin diplomats in the new year.
Ukrainian soldiers launch a US-supplied Javelin missile during military exercises in the Donetsk region. Photograph: AP
A hundred or so US military trainers are based in the west of the country, a long way from the frontline. Washington has provided $2.5bn in military aid, including Javelin anti-tank missiles, since Russia’s seizure of Crimea, part of a gradual strategy to modernise Kyiv’s forces and officially a precursor to Ukraine being given a path to Nato membership.
Nato repeatedly stresses it represents no military threat to Russia. Earlier this month, for example, the UK defence secretary, Ben Wallace, said it was “highly unlikely” that western troops would be sent to defend Ukraine if attacked.
But Shifrinson said that even if the west believed it was treading mildly, it had to better understand how its actions were perceived. “Moscow understands that Ukraine is not being armed to the teeth or anchored in the west tomorrow, but at the same time it is asking where Ukraine will go in the future.”
17. Why some of the smartest people can be so very stupid
A very thought provoking piece (unless I am dumb or stupid!)
Excerpts:
Stupidity is a very specific cognitive failing. Crudely put, it occurs when you don’t have the right conceptual tools for the job. The result is an inability to make sense of what is happening and a resulting tendency to force phenomena into crude, distorting pigeonholes.
...
So stupidity is tough to fix. This is exacerbated by the way it dovetails with other vices: stubbornness stops me from revisiting my concepts even as they fail me. But once we understand stupidity’s nature, things are a little brighter than they might seem. To view political opponents as primarily cynical transforms them into Machiavellian monsters, leaving no space for anything but a zero-sum battle for domination. To view political opponents as primarily dumb is to suggest an irreparable flaw – one that, in our deeply hierarchical society, we often project on to those without the ‘right’ educational credentials. Both moves also offer a certain false reassurance: with a bit of reflection, we can be fairly sure that we are not cynical and, with the right credentials, we can prove that we are not dumb. But we might well, nevertheless, be caught in the net of stupidity. If history is anything to go by, a few hundred years from now, our descendants will find at least one part of contemporary morality almost unintelligible – ‘How could decent people ever have believed that?’ If they are not to condemn us as evil, they might well have to conclude that we were stupid.
Why some of the smartest people can be so very stupid | Psyche Ideas
Sacha Golobis a reader in philosophy at King’s College London and co-director of the Centre for Philosophy and Visual Arts (CPVA). He has published extensively on modern French and German philosophy and the philosophy of art. His current research explores moral progress and decline.
A few years before he died in exile from Nazism, the Austrian novelist Robert Musil delivered a lecture in Vienna, ‘On Stupidity’ (1937). At its heart was the idea that stupidity was not mere ‘dumbness’, not a brute lack of processing power. Dumbness, for Musil, was ‘straightforward’, indeed almost ‘honourable’. Stupidity was something very different and much more dangerous: dangerous precisely because some of the smartest people, the least dumb, were often the most stupid.
Musil’s lecture bequeaths us an important set of questions. What exactly is stupidity? How does it relate to morality: can you be morally good and stupid, for example? How does it relate to vice: is stupidity a kind of prejudice, perhaps? And why is it so domain-specific: why are people often stupid in one area and insightful in another? Musil’s own answer, which centred around pretentiousness, is too focused on the dilettantism of interwar Vienna to serve us now. But his questions, and his intuition about stupidity’s danger, are as relevant as ever.
Stupidity is a very specific cognitive failing. Crudely put, it occurs when you don’t have the right conceptual tools for the job. The result is an inability to make sense of what is happening and a resulting tendency to force phenomena into crude, distorting pigeonholes.
This is easiest to introduce with a tragic case. British high command during the First World War frequently understood trench warfare using concepts and strategies from the cavalry battles of their youth. As one of Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s subordinates later remarked, they thought of the trenches as ‘mobile operations at the halt’: ie, as fluid battle lines with the simple caveat that nothing in fact budged for years. Unsurprisingly, this did not serve them well in formulating a strategy: they were hampered, beyond the shortage of material resources, by a kind of ‘conceptual obsolescence’, a failure to update their cognitive tools to fit the task in hand.
In at least some cases, intelligence actively abets stupidity by allowing pernicious rationalisation
Stupidity will often arise in cases like this, when an outdated conceptual framework is forced into service, mangling the user’s grip on some new phenomenon. It is important to distinguish this from mere error. We make mistakes for all kinds of reasons. Stupidity is rather one specific and stubborn cause of error. Historically, philosophers have worried a great deal about the irrationality of not taking the available means to my goals: Tom wants to get fit, yet his running shoes are quietly gathering dust. The stock solution to Tom’s quandary is simple willpower. Stupidity is very different from this. It is rather a lack of the necessary means, a lack of the necessary intellectual equipment. Combatting it will typically require not brute willpower but the construction of a new way of seeing our self and our world.
Such stupidity is perfectly compatible with intelligence: Haig was by any standard a smart man. Indeed, in at least some cases, intelligence actively abets stupidity by allowing pernicious rationalisation: when Harry Houdini, the great illusionist, took Arthur Conan Doyle, the inventor of Sherlock Holmes, through the tricks underlying the seances in which Conan Doyle devoutly believed, the author’s reaction was to concoct a ludicrously elaborate counter-explanation as to why it was precisely the true mediums who would appear to be frauds.
While I have introduced it via ‘conceptual obsolescence’, stupidity is also compatible with a kind of misguided innovation. Consider a country that excitedly imports new conceptual tools not from a past time but from a very different place. Global debates over social justice, for example, are now dominated by a set of ideas and terms taken from the United States, a nation marked by an incredibly specific historical and cultural trajectory. Simply transferring that framework to other countries, such as those in which class is less starkly racialised (for example, states reliant on exploiting white migrant labour from eastern Europe), or in which it is racialised in much more complex ways (for example, states such as South Africa) is conceptually and socially risky.
Stupidity has two features that make it particularly dangerous when compared with other vices. First, unlike character flaws, stupidity is primarily a property of groups or traditions, not individuals: after all, we get most of our concepts, our mental tools, from the society we are raised in. Suppose the problem with Haig had been laziness: there was no shortage of energetic generals to replace him. But if Haig worked himself to the bone within the intellectual prison of the 19th-century military tradition, then solving the difficulty becomes harder: you will need to introduce a new conceptual framework and establish a sense of identity and military pride for it. Once stupidity has taken hold of a group or society, it is thus particularly hard to eradicate – inventing, distributing and normalising new concepts is tough work.
Dumbness alone is rarely the driving threat: at the head of almost every dumb movement, you will find the stupid in charge
Second, stupidity begets more stupidity due to a profound ambiguity in its nature. If stupidity is a matter of the wrong tools for the job, whether an action is stupid will depend on what the job is; just as a hammer is perfect for some tasks and wrong for others. Take politics, where stupidity is particularly catching: a stupid slogan chimes with a stupid voter, it mirrors the way they see the world. The result is that stupidity can, ironically, be extremely effective in the right environment: a kind of incapacity is in effect being selected for. It is vital to separate this point from familiar and condescending claims about how dumb or uneducated the ‘other side’ are: stupidity is compatible with high educational achievement, and it is more the property of a political culture than of the individuals in it, needing to be tackled at that level.
Musil’s indulgent, almost patrician, attitude to ‘honourable’ dumbness was certainly dangerously complacent: consider its role in the anti-vax phenomenon. But dumbness alone is rarely the driving threat: at the head of almost every dumb movement, you will find the stupid in charge.
We can now explain why stupidity is so domain-specific, why someone can be so smart in one area, and such an idiot in another: the relevant concepts are often domain-specific. Furthermore, we can see that there will be many cases that aren’t fully fledged stupidity but that mimic its effects. Imagine someone who had been blind to all evidence that they were being cheated on finally asking themselves ‘How could you be so stupid?’ Here the problem is not pure stupidity: the concept of a cheat is common enough. What we have here is rather someone ‘acting as if they were stupid’. It’s not just that they failed to apply the concept of betrayal, but that they literally didn’t think of it: it was effectively ‘offline’, due to emotional and other pressures. In this kind of case, agents possess the necessary intellectual tools but unwittingly lock them away. This marks an important contrast with dumbness – we can make ourselves stupid, but we don’t make ourselves dumb.
So stupidity is tough to fix. This is exacerbated by the way it dovetails with other vices: stubbornness stops me from revisiting my concepts even as they fail me. But once we understand stupidity’s nature, things are a little brighter than they might seem. To view political opponents as primarily cynical transforms them into Machiavellian monsters, leaving no space for anything but a zero-sum battle for domination. To view political opponents as primarily dumb is to suggest an irreparable flaw – one that, in our deeply hierarchical society, we often project on to those without the ‘right’ educational credentials. Both moves also offer a certain false reassurance: with a bit of reflection, we can be fairly sure that we are not cynical and, with the right credentials, we can prove that we are not dumb. But we might well, nevertheless, be caught in the net of stupidity. If history is anything to go by, a few hundred years from now, our descendants will find at least one part of contemporary morality almost unintelligible – ‘How could decent people ever have believed that?’ If they are not to condemn us as evil, they might well have to conclude that we were stupid.
18. How Many Books Does It Take to Make a Place Feel Like Home?
We all need more books! Now every time I buy a book I can tell my wife we are making our home feel more like a home!
How Many Books Does It Take to Make a Place Feel Like Home?
There’s a reason that some people won’t let go of their physical books — and a new term for it: ‘book-wrapt.’
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Matthew Millman for The New York Times
By
Dec. 24, 2021
At the turn of the millennium, Reid Byers, a computer systems architect, set out to build a private library at his home in Princeton, N.J. Finding few books on library architecture that were not centuries old and in a dead or mildewed language, he took the advice of a neighbor across the street, the novelist Toni Morrison.
Ms. Morrison “once famously said if there is a book you want to read and it doesn’t exist, then you must write it,” recalled Mr. Byers, 74, in a video chat from his current home, in Portland, Maine.
The opus arrives at an ambivalent time for book owners. As the pandemic’s social and economic disruptions have nudged people into new homes, some are questioning whether it is worth dragging along their collections. Given the inflated costs of real estate and the capacity of e-readers to hold thousands of titles, maybe that precious floor and wall space could be put to other uses?
Alice Waters, the chef and food activist, estimated that two-thirds of the 1,800 or so books in her Berkeley, Calif., home have something to do with food. “I have my own strange organization,” she said, “but I pretty much know where everything is.”Credit...Matthew Millman for The New York Times
Lisa Jacobs, the founder and chief executive of Imagine It Done, a home organization service in New York City, said that out of hundreds of projects in the past few years, she can recall only three requests to organize books. In one of those examples, the arranged books were treated as a backdrop — to be admired, but not read. “The clientele that has collected books through the years are not as numerous for us,” she said.
And yet there are clear benefits in a pandemic to having a private sanctuary programmed for escapism.
“The tactile connection to books and the need for places of refuge in the home, both for work and for personal well-being, have made libraries a renewed focus in residential design,” said Andrew Cogar, the president of Historical Concepts, an architecture firm with offices in Atlanta and New York.
Morgan Munsey, who sells real estate for Compass in Brooklyn and Manhattan, has seen well-groomed libraries in brownstones help spark bidding wars. “Even when I stage a house, I put books in them,” he said.
In “The Private Library,” Mr. Byers goes to the heart of why physical books continue to beguile us. Individually, they are frequently useful or delightful, but it is when books are displayed en masse that they really work wonders. Covering the walls of a room, piled up to the ceiling and exuding the breath of generations, they nourish the senses, slay boredom and relieve distress.
The quintessential family library at Lamport Hall, in Northamptonshire, England, dates from the early 1730s (the furniture and fixtures were updated in the early 19th century).Credit...Reid Byers, Courtesy of the Lamport Hall Preservation Trust
“Entering our library should feel like easing into a hot tub, strolling into a magic store, emerging into the orchestra pit, or entering a chamber of curiosities, the club, the circus, our cabin on an outbound yacht, the house of an old friend,” he writes. “It is a setting forth, and it is a coming back to center.”
Mr. Byers coined a term — “book-wrapt” — to describe the exhilarating comfort of a well-stocked library. The fusty spelling is no affectation, but an efficient packing of meaning into a tight space (which, when you think of it, also describes many libraries). To be surrounded by books is to be held rapt in an enchanted circle and to experience the rapture of being transported to other worlds.
So how many books does it take to feel book-wrapt? Mr. Byers cited a common belief that 1,000 is the minimum in any self-respecting home library. Then he quickly divided that number in half. Five hundred books ensure that a room “will begin to feel like a library,” he said. And even that number is negotiable. The library he kept at the end of his bunk on an aircraft carrier in Vietnam, he said, was “very highly valued, though it probably didn’t have 30 books in it.”
“What’s five times 40?” Alice Waters, the chef and food activist, recently asked. (The question was rhetorical.) “Two hundred, 400, 600, 800,” she calculated, apparently scanning the bookcases around her and adding up their contents (she was speaking on the phone). “And then probably another 800,” she said, referring to other rooms in her Berkeley, Calif., bungalow.
Yes, Ms. Waters, 77, who opened a new restaurant in Los Angeles called Lulu last month, is officially book-wrapt. She owns hundreds of cookbooks organized by cuisine, as well as volumes on farming, nutrition, education, environmental calamity, victory gardens, chef memoirs, French gastronomic terminology, art, architecture, design and fiction. The author of more than a dozen of her own books, she recently published “We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto,” written with Bob Carrau and Cristina Mueller.
Taking inventory in the room where she works (she added three of the custom bookcases last year), Ms. Waters verbally enacted the capricious browsing habits of a book lover on the loose, for whom all authors are alive, even when they are not. Her references skipped from the journalist Michael Pollan to the graphic and product designer Tibor Kalman to the environmentalist poet and novelist Wendell Berry to Patti Smith. (Ms. Waters bought 25 copies of the rock star’s memoir, “Just Kids,” to give away as Christmas gifts.)
She uses a library ladder — her shelves rise that high. “But I’m not a reader; I’m a film person,” she said. “I like to be able to pull out a book and read a passage and be inspired.”
Reader or not, Ms. Waters’s sparrow-like style of dipping and hopping is one of the great joys of library ownership, in Mr. Byers’s view. “The ability to browse among your books generates something completely new,” he said. “I like to think of it as a guaranteed cure for boredom.”
Alexandre Assouline, whose parents founded the publishing company Assouline, recently designed a wall of books and objects for his Manhattan apartment.Credit...Stefano Ukmar for The New York Times
Alexandre Assouline’s loft in the NoLIta neighborhood in Manhattan is not technically book-wrapt, yet Mr. Byers would almost surely cut him slack. Chief of operations, brand and strategy at Assouline, the publishing company founded by his parents, Prosper and Martine Assouline, he recently designed a library of 400 books that fills a wall of the unit, clear to the 15-foot ceiling.
“Every day when I wake up, this is the first thing I see,” Mr. Assouline, 29, said of his collection, which is dominated by glamorous coffee-table books — the company’s specialty — and is visible from most spots in the one-bedroom apartment. Because he leases the unit, he had to erect the solid walnut shelves without drilling into the wall; they are supported by posts compressed between the floor and ceiling.
Mr. Assouline designs private libraries for other people, too, and said he treats each as a mirror of the owner’s personality, giving weight to both books and objects. Gazing into Mr. Assouline’s own reflected depths, one finds whimsical Italian porcelain monkeys and rare antique brass lions, a miniature statue group of the Three Graces and an ailing juniper bonsai tree that raised a sigh from him when its condition was pointed out. (He acknowledged that it really should not be indoors.)
“I want it to be alive,” he said of his display, meaning not just organic but changeable. “To me, a library is never done.”
It is easy to fall into a semantic swamp figuring out exactly where a jumble of books ends and a library begins, but we have clear ideas of what a room designated as a library should look like. You can thank the English country house for that, Mr. Byers said.
Having begun 4,000 years ago, as “strange little rooms in modest Mesopotamian houses” storing cuneiform tablets, libraries reached their Western European apotheosis by the 18th and 19th centuries as grand paneled spaces with fireplaces, ornate ceilings, built-in shelves, hard and soft chairs (for serious and relaxed reading), plush carpets, game tables, maybe a grand piano and secret doors (through which servants discreetly entered to tend fires).
“Libraries always refer to earlier libraries,” Mr. Byers said. Influencers include the 45-foot-long Italian Renaissance room with a barrel vault built in the mid-15th century by Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, and, to a lesser extent, the bookcase-lined refuge of the British diarist Samuel Pepys, who died in 1703. Asked to describe what the library of the future might look like, Mr. Byers flashed a photo of a room at Highclere Castle in England, the setting of the television series “Downton Abbey.”
Indeed, private libraries hew so closely to convention that it is often hard to say at a glance when any particular one was completed — even roughly. (In this way, libraries are the opposite of kitchens, which a practiced eye can date to within half a decade.)
Gil Schafer III, a New York City architect, designed a small library in his own vacation home in Maine, using oak plywood on the walls for less formality.Credit...Simon Upton
“It is often a woody room, or a room that has a deeper color sometimes, if painted,” said Gil Schafer III, a New York architect, of the libraries he routinely incorporates into residential projects. (However, when Mr. Schafer added a small library to his own retreat in Maine several years ago, he covered the walls in sheets of oak plywood rather than traditional paneling, to create an effect that was “beautiful but not fancy.”)
Even a postmodern sensation like the inventor and entrepreneur Jay S. Walker’s library, built in 2002 in Ridgefield, Conn. — which is dedicated to the history of human imagination and laid out like an M.C. Escher labyrinth, with books stacked 26 shelves high — makes clear references to antecedents, Mr. Byers points out in his book. “The recessed and paneled wall frames might have come from Kedleston,” an English country estate in Derbyshire, designed in 1759 by Robert Adam. And “the barrel vault over the library distinctly recalls Stourhead,” an 18th-century Palladian house in the English county of Wiltshire, he noted.
Which is not to say that if you build a library, it will be used as one. Roger Seifter, a partner at Robert A.M. Stern Architects, in New York City, typically designs houses that contain a main-floor room with bookshelves, which he described as “a more intimate type of living room.” The space is labeled a library on the plans, but might morph into a den, study, media room or — especially now — home office. (Definitions quickly get murky, but architects seem to agree that libraries are rooms buffered as much as possible from noise and traffic, and thus are naturally suited as work spaces.)
Conversely, rooms intended for non-bookish purposes are finding new lives as libraries. Mr. Schafer was not a maverick when he chose to put a sofa, bookcases and a television at one end of a dining room in one of his projects. “Dining rooms can be deadly rooms where there’s a table and chairs and no other use,” he said.
The private 50,000-volume book room of the inventor and entrepreneur Jay S. Walker was built in 2002 with surreal inspirations, but it, too, is a recognizable throwback to the English country house library.Credit...Reid Byers
“Any large room looks wrong without the appropriate number of people in it,” Mr. Byers writes. “An unused living room looks empty. An empty ballroom is absolutely creepy; it looks as if it is waiting desperately for something to happen. A library, on the other hand, is delightful when full but still especially attractive when empty.”
And masses of books, he said, represent “delights that we hold in possibility” — the joy of being able to lift a hand and tap unexplored worlds. (Because who among us has read every single book in our libraries?) “I like to be in a room where I’ve read half the books, and I’d like there to be enough books that I cannot possibly read them in my remaining years,” he said.
Still, one can dream of completion, as Mr. Byers, who was ordained as a Presbyterian minister, apparently did when he inscribed this verse inside volumes from his own collection:
This book belongs to the
Rev. Reid Byers,
Who still hopes to read it
Before he expires.
19. Opinion | The ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ Oregonian, a New York judge and the true meaning of the First Amendment
Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from criticism of your speech.
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
― S.G. Tallentyre
"Some people's idea of free speech is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage.'
- Sir Winston Churchill
Opinion | The ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ Oregonian, a New York judge and the true meaning of the First Amendment
The Washington Post · by Ruth MarcusDeputy editorial page editor |AddFollowYesterday at 6:29 p.m. EST · December 26, 2021
This is the time of year for talk about the true meaning of Christmas. This year, it seems, we need to talk a bit about the true meaning of the First Amendment as well.
Two otherwise unconnected Christmas week episodes bring freedom of speech to the forefront. First, an Oregon man, Jared Schmeck, who insulted President Biden on a Christmas call with the president and then complained that he was being attacked for exercising “my God-given right to express my frustrations in a joking manner.”
Next, a New York state judge, Charles D. Wood, who not only kept in place his blatantly unlawful prior restraint against the New York Times for publishing documents obtained from Project Veritas but also ordered the newspaper to turn over physical copies and destroy any electronic versions of the material.
Let me exercise my Constitution-given right to express my frustrations to suggest that neither individual understands the first thing about the First Amendment.
Schmeck had every legal right, as he says, to be rude to the president while he and the first lady were answering calls to NORAD’s Santa tracking center. Schmeck ended the call with “Merry Christmas and ‘Let’s Go Brandon’” — then insisted he meant “no disrespect” by the obviously disrespectful phrase, whose meaning no longer requires elucidation.
Here we get to the meaning of the First Amendment. It means that here, unlike in authoritarian countries, Schmeck not only has the right to say what he wants about the president, he also can say it directly to him, without fear of being jailed, being fined or being punished by the government in any way.
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His freedom of speech is near absolute — just like that of the person who burns an American flag or wears a jacket emblazoned with “F--- the Draft” into a courthouse. No one can punish him — not in America. (At least not yet; see, for example, Donald Trump’s threat to “open up our libel laws.”)
But it is also fair game for others to criticize Schmeck for what he said. “I am being attacked for utilizing my freedom of speech,” Schmeck complained, utilizing his freedom of speech. Wrong. He is being attacked for being out of line, and while incivility is constitutionally protected, it is not immune from public criticism. “The remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence,” Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in a famous dissent.
Enforced silence brings us to the even more dangerous — and even more ignorant — event of the past week: Wood’s order against the Times. The law here could not be clearer: Nothing is more repugnant to the First Amendment than telling a news organization what it can and can’t publish.
The Supreme Court underscored that principle in the 1971 Pentagon Papers case, New York Times Co. v. United States, in which the government sought to prevent the Times and The Post from printing classified documents. “These disclosures may have a serious impact,” Justice Hugo Black wrote in rejecting that effort. “But that is no basis for sanctioning a previous restraint on the press.”
Now comes Justice Wood, who, it is safe to say, is no Justice Black. His ruling came in a libel suit filed against the Times by Project Veritas, the conservative group that runs sting operations to expose alleged liberal bias in various institutions, including the mainstream news media.
The Justice Department is separately investigating the possible theft of a diary belonging to President Biden’s daughter, Ashley Biden; the diary ended up in the possession of Project Veritas, which didn’t publish the material and offered to return it. The Times, in the course of reporting on that probe, published quotes from memos prepared by a Project Veritas lawyer.
Although the memos were prepared years before the libel suit was filed and were not obtained in conjunction with the case, Wood last month ordered the Times not to publish any additional material from them. In the latest order, which the paper has said it will appeal, he reaffirmed that ruling and further instructed that the Times surrender the disputed material.
The opinion is jaw-dropping in its constitutional illiteracy. Project Veritas has aggressively inserted itself into the political debate; its operations are a legitimate topic for news coverage, yet Wood found that the Times’s reporting on the group’s legal strategy is not a matter of “public concern.” He also determined that Project Veritas had adequately shown that the memos were “obtained by irregular means” — what those of us in the news business generally call reporting.
“[S]ome things are not fodder for public consideration and consumption,” Wood wrote. “A client seeking advice from its counsel simply cannot be a subject of general interest and of value and concern to the public. It is not the public’s business to be privy to the legal advice that this plaintiff or any other client receives from its counsel.”
And: “As important as the First Amendment’s protection against prior restraint is, on the present facts, the erosion of the attorney-client privilege is a far more imminent concern.”
No, a thousand times no. The essence of the Supreme Court’s teachings on the dangers of prior restraint is that it is not up to judges to determine in advance what is newsworthy. If the Times obtained internal memos, it is as entitled to publish them as it was to publish the classified material in the Pentagon Papers.
Schmeck at least has the defense of not having attended law school. Let us hope that a higher court will soon educate Wood in the meaning of the document he is sworn to uphold.
The Washington Post · by Ruth MarcusDeputy editorial page editor |AddFollowYesterday at 6:29 p.m. EST · December 26, 2021
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
