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Quotes of the Day:

"All that is really worth the doing is what we do for others."
- Lewis Carroll

“If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."
- Louis Brandeis
[Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357 (1927)]”

"Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves."
- Edmund Burke


1. US warns Russia is sounding 'drumbeats of war' against Ukraine as crisis talks end with no breakthrough
2. 'Be afraid': Ukraine hit by cyberattack, Russia moves more troops
3. Swedes step up military contingency over Russian activity
4. Russia threatens military deployment to Cuba and Venezuela as diplomacy stalls
5. Biden Can No Longer Ignore Growing Iran-China Ties
6. FDD | Iraq election drubbing leaves Iran scrambling to save its militias
7. FDD | After Fox News report, Iran’s America-hating wrestling boss might be banned from US
8. The US Military Needs to Avoid a Linear Approach In a War with China
9. The U.S. Military Is a Helicopter Parent
10. Britain's MI5 spy service warns lawmakers over Chinese agent of influence
11. Podcast: Anytime, Anyplace: Air Force Special Operations Command in Future Irregular Warfare
12. Here’s What DOD’s International Security Nominee Learned from Russia’s 2014 Seizure of Crimea
13. The US is safer from jihadi terrorism 20 years after 9/11
14. Green Beret allowed to retire after sexually assaulting woman in Thailand
15. Woman who quit Air Force commando course questioned ‘highly suspicious’ lower standards
16. Imagining the unimaginable: The U.S., China and war over Taiwan
17. Why didn’t the FBI see the Capitol siege coming?
18. Memo to the president: A counterinsurgency strategy for America




1. US warns Russia is sounding 'drumbeats of war' against Ukraine as crisis talks end with no breakthrough

Excerpts:

Blinken had warned before the talks that no breakthroughs were expected this week "in an atmosphere of escalation with a gun to Ukraine's head."

As Russia and NATO appeared to talk past each other, the language they used illustrated how far apart they remain. Russia had proposed specific treaty language in the weeks ahead of the meetings and called them "negotiations," while Sherman countered that no formal terms were put forward in what she described as "discussions."

Sherman said earlier in the week that she did not know if the Russians had come to the table for the three days of talks in good faith, or as a pretext in an attempt to justify future military action.

"If Russia walks away, however, it will be quite apparent they were never serious about pursuing diplomacy at all," she said. "That is why collectively we are preparing for every eventuality."



US warns Russia is sounding 'drumbeats of war' against Ukraine as crisis talks end with no breakthrough
CNN · by Jeremy Herb, Jennifer Hansler, Alex Marquardt and Kylie Atwood, CNN
(CNN)A senior US official warned Thursday that the "drumbeat of war is sounding loud" following a week's worth of diplomacy between the West and Russia that wrapped up Thursday.
The effort ended without clear breakthroughs over the tens of thousands of Russian troops amassed on the Ukrainian border, leaving prospects for future diplomacy and de-escalation in doubt as Russian officials suggested they could soon turn to military options.
Both US and Russian officials sounded a pessimistic note over the talks following Thursday's meeting in Vienna at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). It was the third session that capped a week of intensive meetings that the United States and its NATO allies hoped could spur Russia to pursue a path of "de-escalation and diplomacy" rather than mobilizing the tens of thousands of Russian troops whose presence has swelled along Ukraine's borders.
But Russian officials reacted with frustration and impatience coming out of the meetings, suggesting they were poised to abandon discussions over the US and NATO's refusal to entertain Moscow's key demands: A guarantee that Ukraine will never be permitted to join NATO and that the alliance roll back its expansion in Eastern Europe. The US and its NATO allies have repeatedly said such proposals from Moscow are non-starters.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov suggested the talks had reached "a dead-end or a difference in approaches" because the US and NATO would not address Moscow's demands about Ukraine never joining NATO, he said, according to Russian state media TASS. Ryabkov said he didn't see a reason for the two sides to continue talks, even though the US has suggested they would continue beyond this week.
Read More
Following Thursday's session, the US Ambassador to the OSCE Michael Carpenter told reporters that the "drumbeat of war is sounding loud and the rhetoric has gotten rather shrill"

"We have to take this very seriously," Carpenter said of the massing of Russian troops along the border with Ukraine. "We have to prepare for the eventuality that there could be an escalation."
Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau, the OSCE chairman, warned after Thursday's meeting that the "risk of war in the OSCE area is now greater than ever before in the last 30 years."
The diplomatic efforts this week -- which included separate sessions between Russia and the US, NATO and the OSCE -- were aimed at pulling back Russia from a potential invasion of Ukraine. But Russia did not commit to pulling back the more than 100,000 troops now along the border, and the Russian military conducted live-fire exercises along the border this week as the talks were ongoing.
'The jury's out on which path Vladimir Putin is going to choose'
US officials made clear heading into the talks they did not know whether Russia was serious about diplomacy or just planned to use the sessions as a pretext for military action.
"The jury's out on which path Vladimir Putin is going to choose," Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Thursday in an interview with MSNBC. "Is he going to choose the path of diplomacy and dialogue to resolve some of these problems or is he going to pursue confrontation and aggression?"
National Security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters at the White House Thursday that the US and its allies remain prepared for any outcome following this week's talks.
"The discussions were frank and direct. They were useful. They gave us and our allies things to consider; they gave Russia things to consider," Sullivan said. "We will now reflect and consult with allies and partners on how to proceed," Sullivan told reporters at the White House.
Sullivan said that the Biden administration planned to share information soon about Russian disinformation operations that could lay the groundwork for a pretext to invade Ukraine. "Our intelligence community has developed information, which has now been downgraded, that Russia is laying the groundwork to have the option of fabricating the pretext for an invasion," Sullivan said.
A senior US official said that in the last several days Russia has "continued to add capacity" near the border. The official said that it wasn't a "substantial" number of troops or equipment, but it's a signal that Kremlin is not de-escalating.
Russia's next move still unclear
It's still unclear what the US plans to do if Russia doesn't de-escalate but also doesn't invade Ukraine. Throughout the week, US officials have said Russia will face consequences like they have never seen if an invasion happens. But the Biden administration is not planning to impose any costs on Russia as a deterrent.
A senior State Department official said there is nothing that would change that approach.
"I don't think there's any desire to impose sanctions or consequences in advance of Russian action on the ground. I don't think that would be a productive way to go," the official told CNN. "I think we maintain leverage if we reserve the right to impose those consequences in the aftermath of an escalation."
The head of the US delegation, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, told reporters after the talks at NATO that the Russians themselves may not know yet what their next move is. Throughout this week's talks, the US has repeatedly argued that diplomacy can't happen unless Russia de-escalates, which Sherman on Monday said the US defined as Russia returning its troops to barracks or telling the US "that exercises are ongoing and what their purpose is."
After Wednesday's meeting at NATO, Sherman said Russia had not committed to any de-escalation.
Top Biden administration officials have made clear that they expect talk to continue in the near future, without providing details for what those talks might look like.
"We would expect to have additional engagement with the Russian Federation in the coming days. We hope that engagement takes place, we hope this diplomatic track continues, but even more importantly, we hope it bears fruit," State Department Spokesperson Ned Price said on Wednesday.
Russia says US demands are 'unacceptable'
Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov responded Thursday that the US demands were "unacceptable."
"I do not think we need to explain how absolutely unacceptable such demands are, and, of course, we will not even discuss them," Lavrov said.
US officials have expressed hope that discussions over areas of mutual interest between Russia and the US -- including nuclear weapons, intermediate range missiles and transparency over military exercises -- could keep the diplomatic conversations going. NATO leaders noted that Wednesday was the first time Russia had agreed to a meeting with the alliance in two years and they sat through the four hour-long meeting, which was longer than had been scheduled.

"I think the reality is that I will say that the Russian delegation sat through nearly four hours of a meeting where 30 nations spoke, and they did, which is not an easy thing to do," she said Wednesday.
But if that gave the impression Russia might have been open to compromise positions, Russia quickly poured cold water on it.
"The US and its NATO allies are not ready to meet Russia halfway on the key issues," Ryabkov said Thursday, according to state news agency TASS. "The main problem is that the United States and its NATO allies, under no guise, for any reason are not ready to meet our key demands."
Blinken had warned before the talks that no breakthroughs were expected this week "in an atmosphere of escalation with a gun to Ukraine's head."
As Russia and NATO appeared to talk past each other, the language they used illustrated how far apart they remain. Russia had proposed specific treaty language in the weeks ahead of the meetings and called them "negotiations," while Sherman countered that no formal terms were put forward in what she described as "discussions."
Sherman said earlier in the week that she did not know if the Russians had come to the table for the three days of talks in good faith, or as a pretext in an attempt to justify future military action.
"If Russia walks away, however, it will be quite apparent they were never serious about pursuing diplomacy at all," she said. "That is why collectively we are preparing for every eventuality."
CNN's Anna Chernova, Zahra Ullah, Mick Krever, Barbara Starr and Sam Fossum contributed to this report.
CNN · by Jeremy Herb, Jennifer Hansler, Alex Marquardt and Kylie Atwood, CNN

2. 'Be afraid': Ukraine hit by cyberattack, Russia moves more troops

"Look at all the troops I have on your border but pay no attention to what I am doing in cyberspace."

And remember: "There is no such thing as a former KGB man." - Vladimir Putin


'Be afraid': Ukraine hit by cyberattack, Russia moves more troops
Reuters · by Pavel Polityuk
A laptop screen displays a warning message in Ukrainian, Russian and Polish, that appeared on the official website of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry after a massive cyberattack, in this illustration taken January 14, 2022. REUTERS/Valentyn Ogirenko/Illustration

  • Summary
  • Kyiv says around 70 government sites hit by cyberattack
  • "Drumbeat of war is sounding loud" says U.S. diplomat
  • Moscow says it could take military action unless demands met
KYIV/MOSCOW, Jan 14 (Reuters) - Ukraine was hit by a massive cyberattack warning its citizens to "be afraid and expect the worst", and Russia, which has massed more than 100,000 troops on its neighbour's frontier, released TV pictures on Friday of more forces deploying in a drill.
The developments unfolded hours after talks wrapped up with no breakthrough between Russia and Western states, which fear Moscow could launch a new attack on a country it invaded in 2014.
"The drumbeat of war is sounding loud," Michael Carpenter, U.S. Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), said at the close of talks on Thursday. read more

Russia denies plans to attack Ukraine but says it could take unspecified military action unless demands are met, including a promise by the NATO alliance never to admit Kyiv.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday Russia hoped security talks with the United States would resume, but this would depend on Washington's response to Moscow's proposals.
"We categorically will not accept the appearance of NATO right on our borders, especially so given the current course of the Ukrainian leadership," he said.
Asked what Moscow meant by threatening this week to take "military-technical action" if talks fail, Lavrov said: "Measures to deploy military hardware, that is obvious. When we take decisions with military hardware we understand what we mean and what we are preparing for."
Russian Defence Ministry footage released by RIA news agency showed armoured vehicles and other military hardware being loaded onto trains in Russia's far east, in what Moscow called an inspection drill to practice deploying over a long distance.
"This is likely cover for the units being moved towards Ukraine," said Rob Lee, a military analyst and a fellow at the U.S.-based Foreign Policy Research Institute.
"EXPECT THE WORST"
The movements indicated Russia has no intention of dialling down tensions over Ukraine, having used its troop build-up to press sweeping demands for "security guarantees" mainly described by the United States as non-starters.
Ukrainian officials were investigating the huge cyberattack, which they said hit around 70 internet sites of government bodies including the ministry of foreign affairs, cabinet of ministers, and security and defence council. Though they avoided directly accusing Moscow, they made clear Russia was suspected.
"Ukrainian! All your personal data was uploaded to the public network. All data on the computer is destroyed, it is impossible to restore it," said a message visible on hacked government websites, written in Ukrainian, Russian and Polish.
"All information about you has become public, be afraid and expect the worst. This is for your past, present and future."
Ukraine's foreign ministry spokesperson told Reuters it was too early to say who could be behind the attack but Russia had been behind similar strikes in the past. Russia did not immediately comment but has previously denied being behind cyber attacks, including against Ukraine.
The Ukrainian government said it had restored most of the affected sites and no personal data had been stolen. A number of other government websites had been suspended to prevent the attack from spreading.
Ukraine's military intelligence also accused Moscow of preparing "provocations" against Russian troops based in a breakaway region of neighbouring Moldova, which could be used as a pretext to invade Ukraine on a new front to the west.
The European Union's top diplomat, Josep Borrell, condemned the attack and said the EU's political and security committee and cyber units would meet to see how to help Kyiv: "I can't blame anybody as I have no proof, but we can imagine."
The message left by the cyberattack was peppered with references that echoed long-running Russian state allegations, rejected by Kyiv, that Ukraine is in the thrall of far-right nationalist groups. It also referred to the sites of killings carried out in Nazi German-occupied Poland by Ukrainian insurgents, a point of contention between Poland and Ukraine.
The United States warned on Thursday that the threat of a Russian military invasion was high. Russia has consistently denied that. Moscow said dialogue was continuing but was hitting a dead end as it tried to persuade the West to bar Ukraine from joining NATO and roll back decades of alliance expansion in Europe. read more
The United States and NATO have rejected those demands but said they are willing to talk about arms control, missile deployments, confidence-building measures and limits on military exercises.

Additional reporting by Matthias Williams in Kyiv, Anton Kolodyazhnyy, Tom Balmforth and Andrew Osborn in Moscow, Sabine Siebold and John Irish in Brest, France; Writing by Mark Trevelyan and Peter Graff; Editing by Alison Williams
Reuters · by Pavel Polityuk


3. Swedes step up military contingency over Russian activity

I think we forget that countries need to take measures tat are not always visible.
Claesson who is the operations manger at the Swedish Armed Forces, said that some of the measures taken by the Swedish military will be visible and others will not be.
Swedes step up military contingency over Russian activity | AP News
AP · January 14, 2022
STOCKHOLM (AP) — A top military chief in Sweden said Friday that there is increased Russian activity in the Baltic Sea which “deviates from the normal picture,” leading the Scandinavian nation’s military to raise its preparedness.
“We have decided to reposition our troops. It does not have to mean an increased threat, but we always want to adapt to the prevailing situation,” Lt. Gen Leif Michael Claesson told The Associated Press.
Sweden, which is not part of NATO, has among other things noticed a number of landing craft from Russia’s northern navy which have been entering the Baltic Sea.
Claesson who is the operations manger at the Swedish Armed Forces, said that some of the measures taken by the Swedish military will be visible and others will not be.
“We will act in different locations in Sweden, in different manners,” he said, adding they would be visible on the strategically important Baltic Sea island of Gotland that sits a little more than 300 kilometers (186 miles) from the Russian Baltic Sea exclave of Kaliningrad.
On Thursday, a guard platoon was seen walking in the harbor of the island’s main town, Visby, as well as in other ports and in the airport.
“We will operate in the air, at sea, below the surface and on the ground in different ways and in different geographical locations,” he said.
Earlier this week, Maj. Gen. Lena Hallin, head of Sweden’s military intelligence agency MUST, said that “we are far from a normal situation for Swedish security today.”
“For some time, developments have been moving in the direction of a serious security policy crisis in Europe, and it has accelerated in recent months,” Hallin said. “It is an illusion that tensions in Europe would be temporary.”
She said Russia’s “main objectives are regime stability and strengthening its position as a major power. Preventing NATO enlargement in the vicinity of Russia is a top priority — and this is being looked at very long-term.”
AP · January 14, 2022

4. Russia threatens military deployment to Cuba and Venezuela as diplomacy stalls

Create dilemmas.
Russia threatens military deployment to Cuba and Venezuela as diplomacy stalls
US says ‘drumbeat of war is sounding loud’ as talks with Russia over Ukraine head towards dead end
The Guardian · by Jennifer Rankin · January 13, 2022
Russia has refused to rule out a military deployment to Cuba and Venezuela if talks with the west on European security and Ukraine fail to go its way, while warning the latest discussions with Nato were hitting a dead end.
In an apparent attempt to up the ante with the Biden administration, Sergei Ryabkov, who led Russia’s delegation in a meeting with the US on Monday, told Russian television he could neither confirm nor exclude sending military assets to Cuba and Venezuela if talks fail. Asked about these steps, he said “it all depends on the actions by our US counterparts”.
Meanwhile another senior Russian diplomat threatened unspecified “necessary measures” if Moscow’s security demands were not met.
At the end of a week of diplomacy that appears to have produced no progress, the US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said US had intelligence Russia was preparing to fabricate claims of an imminent Ukrainian attack on Russian forces as a pretext for invasion.
“We saw this playbook in 2014. They are preparing this playbook again,” Sullivan said, and said that the administration would share more of the intelligence in the following 24 hours.
Sullivan said no dates had been set for any further talks but added: “We’re in communication with the Russians and we’ll see what comes next.”
Asked about Ryabkov’s suggestion of Russian deployments in Cuba or Venezuela, he would he would not respond to “bluster”.
Meanwhile the US defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, promised his Ukrainian counterpart, Oleksii Reznikov, continuing US provision of “defensive assistance” to help build the capacity of Ukraine’s armed forces.
Michael Carpenter, the US representative at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), made clear that there had been no progress made in defusing tensions at Thursday’s meeting.
“The drumbeat of war is sounding loud, and the rhetoric has gotten rather shrill,” Carpenter told journalists afterwards.
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said the OSCE talks had consolidated international support for Ukraine in the face of what he called “illegal ultimatums and military pressure from Russia”. He said the country’s western allies shared Ukraine’s position that it should be free to choose which security alliances it joined, including Nato.
“Ukraine will also continue to work actively with partners to implement a comprehensive package to deter Russia from a new wave of war in Europe, which has already begun,” he said, in a comment posted on his ministry’s website.
A volley of bleak statements from Russian senior officials emerged as Poland’s foreign minister, Zbigniew Rau, warned that Europe faced its greatest risk of war in 30 years.
Rau was addressing the 57 nations of the OSCE, an organisation that includes Russia, Ukraine, the United States and European nations. It was the third time this week Russia had discussed security with western countries.
The Polish minister, who has taken over the OSCE chair, told reporters he “cannot say a breakthrough is imminent” in discussions on European security, while pledging to launch a dialogue. “Some of the participating states believe that it’s enough to make a statement and not to participate in debate,” he said, without naming countries.
“It seems that the risk of war in the OSCE area is now greater than ever before in the last 30 years,” Rau had told delegates earlier. “For several weeks we have been faced with the prospect of a major military escalation in eastern Europe.”
Russia has mobilised 100,000 troops and placed military hardware along its border with Ukraine, while issuing a series of security demands that Nato has said are impossible to meet, such as removing troops from eastern members of the alliance and a block on any membership application from Kyiv.
Ryabkov said discussions were hitting a dead end. “I do not see any reason to sit down again in the coming days, to gather again and start these same discussions,” he was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.
“We propose to go step by step through the text, to work on it in order to bring it to a stage where it would be ready to sign. This is impossible today, because on the key elements of these texts, the United States and its allies say categorically ‘no’.”
Carpenter reaffirmed US readiness to continue a dialogue but added “we are not going to renegotiate core principles”, listing the 1975 Helsinki Accords, the UN Charter and the 1990 Paris Charter, which affirmed the right of sovereign states to make their own decisions about their security, free from the threat of force, and guaranteed the inviolability of borders. “Those are sacrosanct. Those are our bedrock,” Carpenter said. He said he did not know if there were plans to put the US position in writing, as the Russians were demanding.
“We’re happy to talk about conflict resolution mechanisms, happy to talk about reciprocal restraint and risk reduction and confidence building, military transparency, all of those things are on the table,” Carpenter said, welcoming a Polish initiative to establish a more regular dialogue among the OSCE’s 57 members to discuss mutual security concerns.
Russian officials focused on the agreements that Moscow drafted in December and demanded a response. The country’s mission to the OSCE threatened Moscow would take “necessary measures” if the west did not respond to Russian demands. “If we don’t hear constructive response to our proposals within reasonable timeframe & aggressive behaviour towards [Russia] continues, we’ll have to take necessary measures to ensure strategic balance and eliminate unacceptable threats to our national security,” Russia’s mission to the OSCE wrote on Twitter, citing its ambassador to the OSCE, Alexander Lukashevich.
The Russian OSCE mission also warned that “a crisis on the continent may arise with unpredictable consequences for European security”.
In Kyiv, Pavlo Klimkin, Kuleba’s predecessor as Ukrainian foreign minister, said this week’s talks with the Kremlin in Geneva, Brussels and Vienna had “eased tensions”. But he said the risk of a military or “other provocation” by Moscow remained extremely high, “especially in late winter or early spring”.
“As the talks continue, the threat of immediate escalation, at least the degree of tension, has decreased. This does not mean that the danger has become much less. It has become less, but it persists,” Klimkin told the news agency Interfax-Ukraine.
Klimkin predicted that Vladimir Putin was more likely to attack Ukraine using “hybrid methods” than stage a full-blown military invasion.
“Blitzkrieg against Ukraine is impossible. They understand that more than a third of our people are ready to hold weapons, and when there is danger for the country, I am sure there will be even more.” He said Putin wanted to turn back the clock and make central and eastern Europe a zone of Russian influence and domination again, as it was in Soviet times.
“This is by definition pure insanity … Russia’s real goal is the destruction of Ukrainian statehood. Our very existence hinders Putin’s model of vertical governance,” Klimkin said.
In Moscow, the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said there could be a complete rupture in US-Russian relations if proposed sanctions targeting the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and other top civilian and military leaders were adopted. Senate Democrats have also proposed targeting leading Russian financial institutions if Moscow sends troops into Ukraine.
The EU is also drawing up possible sanctions, although has declined to reveal details.
Last month Ryabkov compared the current tensions over Ukraine with the 1962 Cuban missile crisis — when the Soviet Union deployed missiles to Cuba and the US imposed a naval blockade of the island. That crisis ended after John F Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev agreed Moscow would withdraw its missiles in exchange for Washington’s pledge not to invade Cuba and the removal of US missiles from Turkey.
The Guardian · by Jennifer Rankin · January 13, 2022

5. Biden Can No Longer Ignore Growing Iran-China Ties

Conclusion:
The Sino-Iranian “comprehensive strategic partnership,” Iranian accession to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the Iranian foreign minister’s trip to China this week demonstrate three things: a growing alignment between Beijing and Tehran, Beijing’s burgeoning clout in the Middle East, and the reality that Washington’s great-power competition with China won’t occur in the Indo-Pacific alone.
Washington may be tired of the Middle East, but Beijing is just getting started.
Biden Can No Longer Ignore Growing Iran-China Ties
Foreign Policy · by Bradley Bowman, Zane Zovak · January 13, 2022
A front-row seat to the Republicans' debate over foreign policy, including their critique of the Biden administration.
Washington may be tired of the Middle East, but Beijing is just getting started.
By Bradley Bowman, the senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Zane Zovak, a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and then-Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif bump elbows during the signing ceremony for a 25-year cooperation agreement in Tehran on March 27, 2021. West Asia News Agency via REUTERS
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian will visit China on Friday to deepen the “comprehensive strategic partnership” the two countries signed last year. Growing Sino-Iranian security cooperation represents a serious threat to core U.S., Israeli, and Gulf Arab security interests. To address them, the Biden administration needs to take several urgent steps now.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin confirmed Tuesday that Amir-Abdollahian will visit China on Friday, reiterating that “China is ready to work with Iran to further deepen the China-Iran comprehensive strategic partnership.”
The 25-year strategic partnership, which Beijing and Tehran signed in March 2021, offers major benefits for two U.S. adversaries united in their opposition to the United States and to the rule of law. By building relations with Iran, China strengthens its foothold in the Middle East, undermines the United States, and further secures access to Iranian oil and other important commodities. For its part, Iran will get billions of dollars in Chinese energy and infrastructure investment, undercutting the effectiveness of U.S. sanctions against the regime.
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian will visit China on Friday to deepen the “comprehensive strategic partnership” the two countries signed last year. Growing Sino-Iranian security cooperation represents a serious threat to core U.S., Israeli, and Gulf Arab security interests. To address them, the Biden administration needs to take several urgent steps now.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin confirmed Tuesday that Amir-Abdollahian will visit China on Friday, reiterating that “China is ready to work with Iran to further deepen the China-Iran comprehensive strategic partnership.”
The 25-year strategic partnership, which Beijing and Tehran signed in March 2021, offers major benefits for two U.S. adversaries united in their opposition to the United States and to the rule of law. By building relations with Iran, China strengthens its foothold in the Middle East, undermines the United States, and further secures access to Iranian oil and other important commodities. For its part, Iran will get billions of dollars in Chinese energy and infrastructure investment, undercutting the effectiveness of U.S. sanctions against the regime.
Much of Beijing and Tehran’s cooperation focuses on economic and diplomatic ties. Indeed, the Chinese- and Russian-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization decided unanimously last September to elevate Iran to full membership.
It would be a mistake, however, to miss the security implications of the Sino-Iranian relationship.
Sino-Iranian military cooperation is not a theoretical or future concern—it is already happening.
For one thing, China’s purchase of Iranian energy and willingness to invest in Iran will have at least two negative security impacts that will get worse with time. First, Chinese investment will provide economic stimulus and revenue for Iran. If past is prologue, Tehran will use a significant portion of that additional revenue to build its missile and drone arsenal, advance its nuclear program, export terrorism, and attack its neighbors.
More broadly, additional Chinese investment will increasingly mitigate the effectiveness of U.S. sanctions against Iran. That will have the effect of intensifying Iranian intransigence in any negotiations regarding its nuclear program. China’s backing also increases the chances that diplomacy will fail and U.S. and/or Israeli military action may be required to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Furthermore, while the final terms of the strategic partnership agreement remain secret, a leaked copy of the agreement, labeled “final version,” called for China and Iran to conduct combined military training, exercises, weapons development, and intelligence sharing. That should make the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates sit up and take note.
Increased Sino-Iranian military cooperation could, over time, significantly improve Iranian military capability. If Iranian forces were to acquire improved anti-access/area-denial capabilities from China, Tehran may come to believe it could deter or defend against an attack designed to halt an Iranian sprint to a nuclear weapons capability. That perception in Tehran could make an Iranian nuclear breakout both more likely and more difficult to stop.
To be clear, Sino-Iranian military cooperation is not a theoretical or future concern—it is already happening. Iran, China, and Russia conducted combined military exercises in the Indian Ocean in December 2019 and in Russia in September 2020. Another combined military exercise involving Iranian and Chinese forces is reportedly scheduled to take place in the Persian Gulf.
Notably, according to a report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, at least one of the ballistic missiles Iran claimed to have used in the 2020 attack on U.S. forces at Ain al-Asad Air Base in Iraq was “very likely to have been developed with Chinese ballistic missile technology.”
It’s no coincidence that the precise details of Sino-Iranian security cooperation remain opaque. Beijing has good reason to downplay the growing cooperation with Tehran. The Chinese Communist Party is eager to build relations with Gulf Arab governments, and helping the Iranian military is unlikely to win Beijing any fans in Riyadh or Abu Dhabi.
This balancing act likely explains why the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain—joined by the Gulf Cooperation Council’s secretary-general—are in China this week as well. Beijing is trying to cultivate relations with both Tehran and Gulf states simultaneously. That makes it necessary for China to frame its growing bilateral security cooperation with Iran in a way that will not agitate leaders on the other side of the Gulf.
That will be a challenge for Beijing, and Washington should seek to make that challenge even more difficult.
To do so, the first step for Washington is to understand that a refusal to provide Gulf Arab partners with the means to defend themselves will only incentivize them to turn to China and Russia for weapons. That would empower the United States’ two main adversaries and reduce U.S. leverage in the Middle East. This dynamic has already played out with respect to Egypt. When Cairo was unable to acquire U.S. aircraft, tanks, and missiles around 2013, it turned to Moscow and Paris for warplanes and Beijing for drones. The same dynamic is starting to play out with Saudi Arabia, and China is eager to take advantage.
Second, Washington should encourage Gulf partners to make clear to China and Russia that providing major weapons systems to Iran would seriously damage their relations with Gulf Cooperation Council countries.
Third, Congress should ensure that the Pentagon and intelligence community provide detailed, annual, written, and unclassified reports on Sino-Iranian military training, exercises, weapons development, and intelligence sharing. Statutory requirements to report on the relationship already exist but could be improved and better enforced. To inform decisions and avoid strategic surprise, Washington should proactively exchange intelligence on Sino-Iranian military cooperation with Israel and Gulf Arab partners.
The Sino-Iranian “comprehensive strategic partnership,” Iranian accession to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the Iranian foreign minister’s trip to China this week demonstrate three things: a growing alignment between Beijing and Tehran, Beijing’s burgeoning clout in the Middle East, and the reality that Washington’s great-power competition with China won’t occur in the Indo-Pacific alone.
Washington may be tired of the Middle East, but Beijing is just getting started.
Ryan Brobst, a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, contributed to this article.
Bradley Bowman is the senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former advisor to members of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees. Twitter: @Brad_L_Bowman
Zane Zovak is a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Foreign Policy · by Bradley Bowman, Zane Zovak · January 13, 2022


6. FDD | Iraq election drubbing leaves Iran scrambling to save its militias
Excerpts:
In the past, whenever Tehran refers to due process as illegitimate, violence, including drone attacks, bombings and assassinations, follows. Whenever the Iran regime loses an election, domestic or in satellite countries, things always boil down to force.
Iraqis might well be advised to remain vigilant. A wounded beast usually becomes more ferocious.
FDD | Iraq election drubbing leaves Iran scrambling to save its militias
Amid the theatrics and walkouts, the meeting illustrated the magnitude of the defeat suffered by the parties loyal to the Iranian regime in the fourth election since the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
fdd.org · by Hussain Abdul-Hussain Research Fellow · January 12, 2022
There was plenty of political drama when Iraq’s parliament held its first session this week since the October election.
Amid the theatrics and walkouts, the meeting illustrated the magnitude of the defeat suffered by the parties loyal to the Iranian regime in the fourth election since the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
The rejection of Tehran’s favored candidates has rendered its bloc in Iraq’s parliament irrelevant in the jostling to form a new government.
But if history is any guide, there should be a concern that whenever Tehran loses out in elections in countries where it wants to hold sway, it resorts to obstruction, then violence.
On Sunday, as stipulated by parliament’s bylaws, the eldest member Mahmood Al-Mashhadani called the meeting to order. On the agenda was the election of a speaker and his two deputies. But Mashhadani had something else in mind.
What transpired highlighted the complexities of Iraq’s political landscape with divides along religious lines, affiliations with foreign powers and a web of alliances.
The pro-Iran bloc, an alliance of six Shia parties operating under the name of the Coordination Framework, instigated that Mashhadani should run for speaker in an effort to split its opponents.
The leader of the bigger Sunni party, Mohamed Al-Halbousi, was running for a second term as speaker and enjoyed the support of all the anti-Iran blocs.
After much jostling, attempts to halt the session, including Mashhadani claiming he needed to be rushed to hospital and a spectacularly misjudged walkout by the pro-Iran bloc, the meeting proceeded and Halbousi was re-elected speaker for a second term.
A Shia from the bloc that follows cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr was elected as his first deputy and a Kurd, from the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), became the second deputy. Iraq, or at least its parliament, could live without Tehran’s members.
The election of Halbousi, a Sunni and his two deputies, a Shia and a Kurd, suggested that a ruling coalition is emerging without the need for the pro-Iran Coordination Framework.
The coalition consists of the Shia Sadrist bloc, the two Sunni blocs of Halbousi and Al-Khanjar and the two Kurdish blocs of the KDP and the Kurdistan Patriotic Union. Sadr has also managed to win over a small bloc of five independents, bringing the total to 164 MPs, only one short of the majority required to name a premier.
Tehran knows that Sadr now has the numbers, as well as the support of the Shia religious leadership in Najaf, to pick a Shia prime minister and form a cabinet without Iran’s proteges. If that happens, it would be the first time since 2003 that the pro-Iran bloc is out of power.
Tehran fears that such a cabinet would insist on disbanding the powerful militias that it funds and arms. This is why the Coordination Framework has been desperate to get into the new coalition, hoping to win veto power from within and try to stop the process of breaking up these armed groups.
The Coordination Framework has met Sadr and tried to convince him to form a “national unity” government. Sadr tentatively agreed and invited the pro-Iran bloc to submit its demands. It requested that former Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki becomes vice-president and his bloc gets eight cabinet portfolios, including two out of the five most important ministries, foreign affairs, defense, interior, finance and oil.
Sadr rejected the demands, aware that Maliki is associated with the old ruling establishment whose popularity has been tanking.
While Tehran seeks to join Sadr’s ruling coalition at any price, it cannot dump Maliki and lose his party’s 33-seats, the biggest bloc of the six-party framework.
This has put Tehran in a bind: drop Maliki and the Framework will suffer further irrelevance, or keep Maliki and stay outside power, thus threatening the future of its militias.
Facing such a conundrum Tehran has instructed its factions to sit out and call the process illegitimate. The pro-Iran parties already tried to reject the election results, but things moved on without them. The Framework’s legislators then attended parliament’s swearing in. But they walked out of parliament, arguing that they did not recognize Halbousi’s election.
In the past, whenever Tehran refers to due process as illegitimate, violence, including drone attacks, bombings and assassinations, follows. Whenever the Iran regime loses an election, domestic or in satellite countries, things always boil down to force.
Iraqis might well be advised to remain vigilant. A wounded beast usually becomes more ferocious.
Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy. Follow him on Twitter @hahussain.
fdd.org · by Hussain Abdul-Hussain Research Fellow · January 12, 2022


7. FDD | After Fox News report, Iran’s America-hating wrestling boss might be banned from US

FDD | After Fox News report, Iran’s America-hating wrestling boss might be banned from US
Iran's Alireza Dabir urged “Death to America” in a television interview
fdd.org · by Benjamin Weinthal Research Fellow · January 12, 2022
Iranian regime-controlled media are abuzz with discussions on whether Dabir will be barred from attending the dual meet in Arlington, Texas on February 12. “According to rumors, the US embassy may not issue a visa to the president of the Wrestling Federation,” reported the Iran Labor News Agency.
In response to the Fox News Digital article, the U.S. government news organization Voice of America reported that Dabir’s “anti-American” remarks might produce “the possibility of canceling the Iranian national wrestling team’s trip to the United States.”
State Department spokesperson told Fox News Digital on Tuesday, “The U.S. and Iranian Wrestling teams are scheduled to compete against one another in an event planned for February 12, 2022, called ‘The Bout at the Ballpark.’
“Matters involving visa issuance for any individual members of the Iranian team are subject to Privacy Act concerns and will be adjudicated strictly in accordance with U.S. law,” the spokesperson continued.
“As National Security Advisor [Jake] Sullivan said earlier this week, ‘We are united in our resolve against threats and provocations. We are united in the defense of our people. We will work with our allies and partners to deter and respond to any attacks carried out by Iran. Should Iran attack any of our nationals… it will face severe consequences.’”
The U.S. spokesperson added, “The Bout at the Ballpark is a private, commercial sporting event hosted and operated by the Arlington, Texas-based REV Entertainment to be held at Globe Life Stadium in Arlington, Texas. Any questions related to its conduct or operation should be addressed to those entities.”
Fox News Digital questioned the State Department about Dabir’s claim following the Fox News Digital article that his Green Card had not been valid for seven years.
REV Entertainment did not respond to Fox News Digital media queries by press time.
Fox News Digital sent numerous press queries to Rich Bender, the executive director of USA Wrestling, and to all the sponsors of USA Wrestling, including the U.S. Marines and the multi-national sportswear corporation Nike.
Fars News, a news outlet controlled by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization—reported that Iranian regime foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh lashed out at Fox News for its reporting on Dabir. Khatibzadeh said, “We should not politicize sports,” adding that “the direction of… [Fox News] is clear.”
Sardar Pashaei, an Iranian-American former star wrestler and ex-coach of Iran’s national Greco-Roman team, fired back at Khatibzadeh: ”Isn’t sending a wrestler to the U.S. with the slogan ‘Death to America’ ​​a political act?”
Pashaei told Fox News Digital: “What about not allowing Iranian athletes to compete with Israeli athletes? What about the torture and execution of protesting athletes? People of the world should know that in Iran, if you compete with Israel as an athlete not only will you be banned from competing for the rest of your life but you and your family will be arrested.”
The Islamic Republic of Iran’s Supreme Ali Khamenei made clear his discriminatory policy in September 2021.
“Any Iranian athlete worthy of the name cannot shake hands with a representative of the criminal regime in order to win a medal,” Khamenei told Iran’s medalists from the Tokyo Games. Khamenei, who has repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel and denied the Holocaust, added that “The genocidal, illegal Zionist regime attempts to gain some legitimacy by appearing in international athletic competitions. The world’s arrogant powers and their cohorts [the West] assist and support them in this.”
Lawdan Bazargan, an Iranian-American human rights activist who was imprisoned in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison for dissent, told Fox News Digital, “How can U.S. Wrestling invite the wrestling team of the gender-apartheid Islamic Regime of Iran for a friendly match? They [Iranian women] are banned from participating in international competitions in several sports, including wrestling. Even in the sports that women can participate in, they are forced to wear a compulsory hijab that denies them the right to choose their clothes and makes them less competitive compared to the other teams with the appropriate uniforms.”
Bazargan noted that “Iranian athletes such as Shirin Shirzad and Shiva Amiri had to flee to the West and wrote about their experiences in the #LetUsTalk Campaign, experiences such as discrimination, compulsory hijab, and even assault and sexual harassment.”
She called for a boycott of the dual meet set for Texas.
Pashaei, who won a Greco-Roman wrestling world championship title for Iran, told Fox News Digital that USA Wrestling should pull the plug on the dual meet with Iran’s regime.
He sent a letter from the United for Navid organization to Bender at USA Wrestling, stating: “On behalf of thousands of Iranian athletes we urge you to refrain from inviting Iranian government-sponsored athletes as long as the government tortures and executes athletes, deprives women of participation in competitions, and chants ‘Death to America’ in their media. Refrain from inviting officials and athletes who are government propaganda tools that are anti-women and anti-American.”
The United for Navid campaign seeks justice for the late champion Greco-Roman wrestler Navid Afkari. The Islamic Republic of Iran hanged Afkari in September 2020 for his role in a demonstration against the regime’s corruption.
fdd.org · by Benjamin Weinthal Research Fellow · January 12, 2022


8. The US Military Needs to Avoid a Linear Approach In a War with China

Excerpts:
The Great Wall’s purpose was to limit and channel breakthroughs, not prevent them altogether. Just as with Clausewitz’s defensive cordons, a wall’s efficacy hinges on geography, terrain, and armed might.
Or if the correlation of forces permits, defenders can use defensive fortifications in an offensive way. Roman legionaries used Hadrian’s Wall, which undulated across the northerly narrow neck of Britain, as a backstop for forward operations in Scotland. If successful, forward operations would prevent incursions into Roman Britain from ever occurring. The Roman model was a highly active model of frontier defense where the Chinese took a more passive outlook.
Humility is the proper attitude when devising doctrine, tactics, and hardware for island-chain defense. If the home-team advantage favors the PLA on balance, the defensive philosophy manifest in the Great Wall may be fitting. But even if so, U.S. and allied commanders should work ceaselessly to amplify their own geographic, military, and alliance advantages—making Roman-style forward operations thinkable. Forceful is better.
Let’s play the game in China’s backfield.
The US Military Needs to Avoid a Linear Approach In a War with China
19fortyfive.com · by ByJames Holmes · January 13, 2022
Earlier this month War on the Rocks carried an interview with General David Berger, commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps. The interview was mostly about personnel policy, but toward the end the interlocutors dwelt briefly on strategy and operations in the Western Pacific. Asked about the danger to fixed U.S. bases from Chinese missile salvoes, the commandant seemed to downplay fixed facilities and defenses as a warfighting implement.
Instead, said Berger, it’s imperative to “prevent the linear approach, like their wall against our wall, first island chain against what they have in mainland China—that sort of linear facing off at each other. Okay, that’s definitely not a healthy approach.” In other words, he believes emplacing marine garrisons all along the first island chain in more or less static positions would court defeat at the hands of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) rocketeers, who have at their disposal an imposing array of ballistic missiles boasting various ranges.
And Berger may well be right. Think about it in mathematical terms. A defensive perimeter is a line, and a line is made up of infinitely many points in continuous series. It’s tough to be stronger than a foe at infinitely many points on the map, all the time. An opponent intent on a breakthrough will simply mass forces at some point along the line and puncture it. That’s why military sage Carl von Clausewitz disparages long defensive lines, or cordons. “Lines,” he maintains, “constitute the most ruinous form of cordon-warfare. The obstacle they offer the attacker is worthless without powerful fire to support it. Otherwise it is good for nothing.”
Adds Clausewitz, defensive lines will “have to be very short and thus cover very little of the country, or the army will not be able to defend all points effectively.” To repulse an attempted breakthrough, commanders must be able to supplement ground forces holding the line with firepower delivered at a distance, at any point along the ramparts. How distended a perimeter defenders can hold, then, is a function of geographic distance, terrain, and the reach and volume of precision fire support available to marines, the navy’s fleet, and supporting air forces. It’s worth applying these Clausewitzian metrics to the problem of defending the first island chain from a PLA breakout, and confining the PLA Navy and Air Force to the China seas in the bargain.
A long-dead Prussian can help define the limits of the possible.
Berger continued: “There’s an aspect of ‘home team’ that people have written about in the last month or two that are, I think, helpful here, in terms of analyzing a force on force and who has actually the home-team versus away-team advantage, and what do they really mean?” A couple of U.S. Marine pals and I are the aforementioned people. Last December the Marine Corps Gazette ran our essay exploring how the sports metaphor of the home-team advantage applies to Pacific sea combat. We concluded, to oversimplify, that China enjoys the home-team advantage on a theaterwide scale, but that the United States and its allies have the advantage along the island chain.
If the allies harness that advantage, they may yet accomplish their operational and strategic goals. As opposed to the linear, static approach, General Berger puts the accent on mobility and on defense in depth. Some “stand-in forces,” chiefly unmanned vehicles, will operate west of the island chain, getting in the PLA’s face for scouting purposes. Their handlers will constitute the next layer, and heavier, missile-armed combat forces the next. Marines will move from island to island frequently to evade targeting. Meanwhile submarines, surface warships, aircraft, and sea mines will lurk in and around the straits, plugging them to Chinese military and commercial craft.
To go back to the sports metaphor, think about island-chain defense in football terms. The Georgia Bulldogs won the college national championship Monday night behind a legendary defense. This was not a static defense, even along the line of scrimmage. Even the Bulldogs’ massive linemen were quick and agile. Inventive, highly mobile and deceptive blocking schemes created mismatches along the offensive line, helping defenders contain the Alabama offense and, oftentimes, open gaps through which to break into the backfield in search of a quarterback sack or a tackle for a loss. Alabama, also the possessor of a stout defense, did the same for much of the game.
Meanwhile the defensive secondary operates as a defense in depth in case the offense breaks through the defensive line on the ground or lofts a pass over the line. Defenders operating in space can contain running plays while trying to break up passes or limit receivers’ gains through the air. An impenetrable defensive front is the ideal, just as an impregnable first island chain would be. But this is not reality except against an utterly outmatched adversary. In naval warfare as in football, defense is a hybrid linear/nonlinear enterprise.
Thus has it always been. Think back to military history. Walls are commonplace in history, and yet those who constructed and guarded them seldom regarded these edifices as impenetrable. They too thought in terms of defense in depth. Chinese engineers built the Great Wall to fend off nomads raiding into China from the Central Asian steppes. Yet they assumed there would be breaches. The key was to stage mobile forces to the wall’s rear to quell hostile forces that got through.
The Great Wall’s purpose was to limit and channel breakthroughs, not prevent them altogether. Just as with Clausewitz’s defensive cordons, a wall’s efficacy hinges on geography, terrain, and armed might.
Or if the correlation of forces permits, defenders can use defensive fortifications in an offensive way. Roman legionaries used Hadrian’s Wall, which undulated across the northerly narrow neck of Britain, as a backstop for forward operations in Scotland. If successful, forward operations would prevent incursions into Roman Britain from ever occurring. The Roman model was a highly active model of frontier defense where the Chinese took a more passive outlook.
Humility is the proper attitude when devising doctrine, tactics, and hardware for island-chain defense. If the home-team advantage favors the PLA on balance, the defensive philosophy manifest in the Great Wall may be fitting. But even if so, U.S. and allied commanders should work ceaselessly to amplify their own geographic, military, and alliance advantages—making Roman-style forward operations thinkable. Forceful is better.
Let’s play the game in China’s backfield.
A 1945 Contributing Editor, Dr. James Holmes holds the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and served on the faculty of the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs. A former U.S. Navy surface-warfare officer, he was the last gunnery officer in history to fire a battleship’s big guns in anger, during the first Gulf War in 1991. He earned the Naval War College Foundation Award in 1994, signifying the top graduate in his class. His books include Red Star over the Pacific, an Atlantic Monthly Best Book of 2010 and a fixture on the Navy Professional Reading List. General James Mattis deems him “troublesome.”
19fortyfive.com · by ByJames Holmes · January 13, 2022

9. The U.S. Military Is a Helicopter Parent

I have strong feelings about this based on my experience.

Conclusion:
In Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the United States struggled to build capable security forces that could maintain stability after its departure; it is clear there is a critical flaw in its approach. But that doesn’t mean these problems are unsolvable. The United States succeeded in South Korea and Colombia and even had tactical successes in both Iraq and Afghanistan—though too late and after many mistakes and missed opportunities.
In a world of increasing strategic competition, the costs of failure could be much higher, so it is vital the United States learns from its experiences. Americans must pull back on their strategic culture of helicopter parenting and doing things themselves. If they instead empower U.S. partners from the beginning, the United States can build forces that are able to stand and fight after its departure—to provide not just a decent interval after its departure but a capable regional partner for decades to come.
The U.S. Military Is a Helicopter Parent
Washington needs to trust partner forces to stand on their own feet.
By Jerad I. Harper, an active-duty Army colonel and assistant professor at the U.S. Army War College, and John Nagl, a retired Army officer and a visiting professor at the U.S. Army War College.
Foreign Policy · by Jerad I. Harper, John Nagl · January 13, 2022
An Oct. 3, 2021, Foreign Policy article by Bret Devereaux argued the United States should change the way it builds partnered militaries and create them as “auxiliaries” along the lines of imperial Rome. Devereaux is a capable historian of ancient Rome, but the techniques of around 2,000 years ago no longer work. In fact, the United States has an unfortunate tendency to follow the Roman model when building host nation security forces, albeit unconsciously—with disappointing results.
In its most vital and heavily resourced overseas endeavors, the United States creates partner forces as appendages of its own military and intelligence services rather than as independent and capable structures able to stand on their own. Like the proverbial “helicopter parent”—and indeed, sometimes literally by using helicopters—the United States often sees situations as too important not to do the hard things itself and doesn’t allow its partners the opportunity to learn from failure. That produces partners that find themselves unable to stand on their own when the United States eventually pulls out. Instead, they become dependent on Washington—whether it’s for air support, logistics, communications, or other critical enablers—and incapable of achieving the autonomy they will inevitably need in the long run.
After Afghanistan and Iraq, the mood in the United States is strongly against nation building elsewhere. But this attitude is cyclical and likely to change in the future given the scale of the United States’ global commitments and increasing temperature of its competition with China and Russia. There will be another time when strategic countries need strengthening—whether because they were the source of another damaging terrorist attack or to help them stand as important bulwarks against competitors.
An Oct. 3, 2021, Foreign Policy article by Bret Devereaux argued the United States should change the way it builds partnered militaries and create them as “auxiliaries” along the lines of imperial Rome. Devereaux is a capable historian of ancient Rome, but the techniques of around 2,000 years ago no longer work. In fact, the United States has an unfortunate tendency to follow the Roman model when building host nation security forces, albeit unconsciously—with disappointing results.
In its most vital and heavily resourced overseas endeavors, the United States creates partner forces as appendages of its own military and intelligence services rather than as independent and capable structures able to stand on their own. Like the proverbial “helicopter parent”—and indeed, sometimes literally by using helicopters—the United States often sees situations as too important not to do the hard things itself and doesn’t allow its partners the opportunity to learn from failure. That produces partners that find themselves unable to stand on their own when the United States eventually pulls out. Instead, they become dependent on Washington—whether it’s for air support, logistics, communications, or other critical enablers—and incapable of achieving the autonomy they will inevitably need in the long run.
After Afghanistan and Iraq, the mood in the United States is strongly against nation building elsewhere. But this attitude is cyclical and likely to change in the future given the scale of the United States’ global commitments and increasing temperature of its competition with China and Russia. There will be another time when strategic countries need strengthening—whether because they were the source of another damaging terrorist attack or to help them stand as important bulwarks against competitors.
When (not if) Washington again finds itself developing a partner military in a fragile state, the United States should develop these militaries as stand-alone forces that are not dependent on its exquisite capabilities. Rather than waiting until U.S. forces are about to leave and then wishing their partners luck on their way out the door, U.S. partners must be developed as fully autonomous entities and given the opportunity to fail right from the start so they can correct necessary deficiencies while the United States is still there to dust them off and help them move ahead.
In three major endeavors over the last half century—Afghanistan, Iraq, and South Vietnam—the United States and its first world allies have largely chosen to bear the brunt of major combat operations on their own and only assign battlefield responsibilities to host nation partners very late in those conflicts. Although regular forces have lagged behind, each of these conflicts has seen the development of small numbers of elite, highly effective forces—including Afghan commandos, Iraqi counterterrorism forces, and South Vietnamese Rangers, respectively. These often exist under their own largely independent structure with highly trained troops and specially selected officers. These special forces serve two purposes. For the United States, these are the perfect auxiliaries—excellent appendages to support its own elite forces. For the leaders of fragile partner states, these are also politically palatable as countercoup forces to protect national leaders.
For both of these reasons, these elite units aren’t integrated into the normal military structure; hence, the rest of the force doesn’t really improve from cross-fertilization with these more highly trained personnel. As with the rest of their military structures, these elite forces also tend to be heavily dependent on U.S. support—often even more so since they are used to operating as valuable components closely integrated with the U.S. military. Once U.S. forces are withdrawn, these forces are often tactically superior to the rest of their militaries, which have seen far less operational experience since they were less valuable to the U.S. effort. Unfortunately, rather than being able to continue to contribute their specialized functions, they end up being used as “fire brigades” to fix problems regular units should normally be expected to handle, suffering inordinately heavy (and hard to replace) losses that would otherwise be spread across the force.
Americans are hardwired to want results fast. They know they can do things right with their own highly effective military, so they create the minimum partner force structure necessary to allow the U.S. military to tackle the hard problems. U.S. partners are left to provide static forces to hold ground while more capable U.S. forces conduct the more difficult tasks.
Small unit infantry forces can be trained and fielded easier and much faster than effective logistics and command and control capabilities can, which create the sinews necessary to support and enable truly independent operations. If the United States does the logistics and command and control itself, it doesn’t need to worry about accomplishing these more complicated tasks. And the United States needs partner forces to accompany its own forces and hold ground anyway, so it’s easier to push the development of essential logistics and support functions until later in the conflict.
The United States regularly does better with this in smaller commitments because, under those circumstances, it is unable to do everything for its partners and has to allow them to do things themselves. For example, in Plan Colombia in the early 2000s, the United States provided the necessary equipment (particularly helicopters) and enablers, such as training and intelligence, while the Colombians carried the responsibility for major combat operations. Some argue such “small footprint” commitments are the best way to approach future efforts to build partner capacity. Sometimes, however, standing up a new military requires a much greater commitment of U.S. forces because there are so many things wrong or the threat is so large that small commitments will not be enough. Larger problems require larger footprints.
But even for larger, higher priorities and heavily resourced endeavors, the United States has been capable of doing better. During the Korean War, South Korean forces were given battle space of their own. Although they operated as part of an integrated joint command system, South Korean divisions and later corps had their own responsibilities and fought alongside United Nations forces. Even as their entire organizational structure was massively reformed and reorganized by the United States during the conflict, these forces continued to fight and dramatically improved their capabilities by the 1953 cease-fire. Today, South Korea’s military stands as a shining success of U.S. efforts to build competent partners. That success can be repeated—if attitudes change.
More than a century ago, British officer T.E. Lawrence provided “27 Articles” on how to advise foreign forces—in his case, an Arab force fighting against the declining Ottoman Empire. His 15th article remains a fitting coda to U.S. advisory efforts in Afghanistan: “Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.”
Lawrence’s advice still applies to future operations to assist the building or rebuilding of host nation security forces in failed or failing states. Critical lessons include:
  • Make creating all the supporting components for independent operations an immediate priority. It takes much longer to build intelligence forces, logistics units, and maintenance capabilities than it does to stand up infantry battalions. Start with the hardest tasks first.
  • Give partners their own battle space and important tasks right from the beginning. Have them use their own critical enablers and support themselves. Don’t do things for them. Allow them the opportunity to fail. This provides the political impetus for the United States’ own advisory personnel to help push change. This may be challenging for a domestic audience. There will be political and institutional pressure for immediate success. Additionally, U.S. military culture has a very low tolerance for failure. However, it’s much better to suffer small challenges early on than to face gut-wrenching collapse at the end. U.S. military and political leaders need to be frank about this process from the start and prepare the American population as a whole—and U.S. military in particular—for the hard but necessary requirement of partners growing by doing it themselves.
  • Provide resources to advisory personnel from front-line units all the way to the top. It took the United States more than a decade to create the Security Force Assistance Brigades, standing units dedicated to training and advising foreign security forces, which were critical to the United States’ exit strategies in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The United States never focused enough on building advisors for their national ministries. As it saw in Afghanistan, even good combat units will fail if the Afghan Ministry of Defense in the capital collapses.
  • Create a unified military structure. Put their commanders and staff alongside the United States’. It takes longer to train and develop senior leaders and staff, so give them control of increasingly larger areas as their confidence and capabilities improve.
  • Be prepared for a long commitment, but that doesn’t have to equate to a higher cost of U.S. casualties. In fact, it can have the opposite outcome. The earlier and more energetically the United States develops its partners’ capacities, the more those partners can shoulder the burden of major combat operations.
In Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the United States struggled to build capable security forces that could maintain stability after its departure; it is clear there is a critical flaw in its approach. But that doesn’t mean these problems are unsolvable. The United States succeeded in South Korea and Colombia and even had tactical successes in both Iraq and Afghanistan—though too late and after many mistakes and missed opportunities.
In a world of increasing strategic competition, the costs of failure could be much higher, so it is vital the United States learns from its experiences. Americans must pull back on their strategic culture of helicopter parenting and doing things themselves. If they instead empower U.S. partners from the beginning, the United States can build forces that are able to stand and fight after its departure—to provide not just a decent interval after its departure but a capable regional partner for decades to come.
The opinions and conclusions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not represent the official positions of the U.S. Army War College, U.S. Army, or U.S. Defense Department.
Foreign Policy · by Jerad I. Harper, John Nagl · January 13, 2022

10. Britain's MI5 spy service warns lawmakers over Chinese agent of influence

China doth protest too much.

Excerpts:
Patel said it was "deeply concerning" that an individual working on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party had targeted lawmakers.
Lee is the founder of a law firm, which has offices in London and Birmingham, according to a government official. A woman who answered the phone at the Birmingham office said: "We are not taking any calls now". A request for comment left at the London office went unanswered.
The law firm lists on its website one of its roles as legal adviser to the Chinese embassy in Britain.
The Chinese embassy in London said in a statement that China does not interfere in the internal affairs of other countries.
"We have no need and never seek to 'buy influence' in any foreign parliament," it said. "We firmly oppose the trick of smearing and intimidation against the Chinese community in the UK."

Britain's MI5 spy service warns lawmakers over Chinese agent of influence
Reuters · by Andrew Macaskill

LONDON, Jan 13 (Reuters) - Britain's domestic spy service MI5 has warned lawmakers that the Chinese Communist Party has been employing a woman to exert improper influence over members of parliament.
MI5 sent out an alert and picture of the woman named Christine Lee on Thursday alleging she was "involved in political interference activities" in the United Kingdom on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party.
Speaker Lindsay Hoyle, who circulated MI5's alert to lawmakers, said MI5 had found that Lee "has facilitated financial donations to serving and aspiring parliamentarians on behalf of foreign nationals based in Hong Kong and China".
Hoyle said Lee had been involved with the now disbanded all-party parliamentary group, Chinese in Britain.
Britain’s interior minister Priti Patel told reporters that Lee’s behaviour was currently below the criminal threshold to prosecute her, but she said that by putting the alert out the government was able to warn lawmakers about Lee's attempts to improperly influence them.
Patel said it was "deeply concerning" that an individual working on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party had targeted lawmakers.
Lee is the founder of a law firm, which has offices in London and Birmingham, according to a government official. A woman who answered the phone at the Birmingham office said: "We are not taking any calls now". A request for comment left at the London office went unanswered.
The law firm lists on its website one of its roles as legal adviser to the Chinese embassy in Britain.
The Chinese embassy in London said in a statement that China does not interfere in the internal affairs of other countries.
"We have no need and never seek to 'buy influence' in any foreign parliament," it said. "We firmly oppose the trick of smearing and intimidation against the Chinese community in the UK."
POLITICAL DONATIONS
1/4
The Elizabeth Tower, more commonly known as Big Ben, is seen with hands fixed at twelve o'clock, whilst Britain's domestic spy service MI5 has told the House of Commons speaker that the Chinese Communist Party has been employing a woman to exert improper influence over lawmakers, at the Houses of Parliament in London, Britain, January 13, 2022. REUTERS/Toby Melville
Barry Gardiner, a lawmaker for the opposition Labour Party, said he had received hundreds of thousands of pounds in donations from Lee and said he has been liaising with intelligence services "for a number of years" about her.
"They have always known, and been made fully aware by me, of her engagement with my office and the donations she made to fund researchers in my office in the past," Gardiner said.
Gardiner employed Lee's son as a diary manager but he resigned on Thursday.
Iain Duncan Smith, a former leader of Britain's governing Conservative Party who has been sanctioned by China for highlighting alleged human right abuses in Xinjiang, called for an urgent update from the government on the issue.
He questioned why the woman had not been deported and called for a tightening of the accreditation process for people gaining access to parliament, which he said was too lenient.
Lee is listed under the Christine Lee & Co law firm as a British national in financial filings with Companies House, Britain's corporate registry.
Former defence minister Tobias Ellwood told parliament of her alleged activity: "This is the sort of grey-zone interference we now anticipate and expect from China."
Britain's relations with China have deteriorated in recent years over issues including Hong Kong and Xinjiang.
Last year MI5 urged British citizens to treat the threat of spying from Russia, China and Iran with as much vigilance as terrorism. read more
British spies say China and Russia have each sought to steal commercially sensitive data and intellectual property as well as to interfere in domestic politics and sow misinformation.
The Chinese ambassador to Britain was banned from attending an event in the British parliament last year because Beijing imposed sanctions on lawmakers who highlighted alleged human right abuses in Xinjiang.
China placed the sanctions on nine British politicians in March last year for spreading what it said were "lies and disinformation" over the treatment of Uyghur Muslims in the country's far west.

Reporting by Andrew MacAskill; Editing by Hugh Lawson and Christopher Cushing
Reuters · by Andrew Macaskill


11. Podcast: Anytime, Anyplace: Air Force Special Operations Command in Future Irregular Warfare


Anytime, Anyplace: Air Force Special Operations Command in Future Irregular Warfare - Modern War Institute
Laura Jones and Shawna Sinnott | 01.14.22
mwi.usma.edu · by Laura Jones · January 14, 2022
Irregular warfare is executed across all domains and when operations require air support, Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) stands ready to provide specialized skill sets to IW practitioners. As irregular warfare faces an uncertain future, so does AFSOC and its air commandos. The command stands at an inflection point in which it must prepare to compete against great powers while continuing the fight against violent extremist organizations. How must AFSOC change in order to meet divergent demands for specialized airpower?
Episode 44 explores AFSOC’s current efforts to build the organization that will be needed to meet future threats. Our guests begin by explaining AFSOC’s role within the irregular warfare space. They continue by discussing how AFSOC can manage to adapt to new adversaries and threats in a flat resourcing environment. They then discuss how AFSOC can leverage its human talent to incorporate new technologies and find innovative solutions to future problems. They conclude by examining the possibilities of different metrics of success within IW and how great power challenges may need to define success along multiple time horizons.
Lt. Gen. James C. “Jim” Slife is the commander of Air Force Special Operations Command, the Air Force component of US Special Operations Command. AFSOC provides Air Force special operations forces for worldwide deployment and assignment to unified combatant commanders. The command has approximately 20,800 active duty, reserve, Air National Guard, and civilian professionals.
Lt. Gen. Slife was born outside of Detroit and grew up in Hot Springs, Arkansas. He was commissioned through the ROTC program at Auburn University and has spent the majority of his career in special operations aviation assignments, deploying extensively.
Dr. Richard Newton is an adjunct professor at the Joint Special Operations University. His areas of expertise include irregular warfare, airpower, and the integration of special operations and conventional forces at the theater level. He has developed and delivered special operations–focused curriculum for the US Army Command & Staff College, US Naval War College, US Army School of Advanced Military Studies, Joint Forces Staff College, Joint Advanced Warfighting School, and NATO Special Operations School.
Dr. Newton graduated from the US Air Force Academy in 1977 with a BS in military history. After graduation he earned his pilot wings and went on to serve twenty-two years as a combat rescue and special operations helicopter pilot, combat aviation advisor, strategic planner, and educator.
The hosts for this episode are Laura Jones and Shawna Sinnott. Please contact them with any questions about this episode or the Irregular Warfare Podcast.
The Irregular Warfare Podcast is a product of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, a collaboration between the Modern War Institute at West Point and Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project—dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. IWI generates written and audio content, coordinates events for the IW community, and hosts critical thinkers in the field of irregular warfare as fellows. Make sure to follow IWI and subscribe to the IWI newsletter so you don’t miss any content!
Image credit: Staff Sgt. Jonathan Snyder, US Air Force
mwi.usma.edu · by Laura Jones · January 14, 2022


12. Here’s What DOD’s International Security Nominee Learned from Russia’s 2014 Seizure of Crimea


Excerpts:
Although she served on the NSC during the crisis, Wallander criticized the Obama administration’s response as “too slow and too incremental.” Asked by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., if it was a mistake not to give Ukraine Javelin anti-tank missiles more quickly after Russia annexed Crimea, Wallander said it was.
“One of the lessons I learned is that it would have been appropriate and necessary to provide Ukraine with what it needed to defend its territory, including the weapons you suggest,” said Wallander, who also served as the deputy assistant defense secretary for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia from 2009 to 2012.
There has been much debate about whether to give offensive weapons to Ukraine. While the capabilities would allow Ukraine to better protect itself, Russian President Vladimir Putin has called it a “red line” that could spark military retaliation from Moscow.
Here’s What DOD’s International Security Nominee Learned from Russia’s 2014 Seizure of Crimea
Send weapons faster, and prepare to boost U.S. forces in the region, Celeste Wallander told lawmakers
defenseone.com · by Jacqueline Feldscher
The Biden administration must learn lessons from the slow U.S. response to Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea: it must be prepared to send weapons to Kiev faster and, potentially, to boost NATO troop presence in the region if Russia attacks, the nominee to lead the Pentagon’s international security office told Congress on Thursday.
Celeste Wallander, who served as the National Security Council’s Russia director in 2014, said any further incursion by Moscow into Ukraine should prompt the Pentagon to reevaluate its presence in the region and its contributions to NATO, including potentially expanding the alliance’s Enhanced Forward Presence brigades in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.
“In principle, I would support an increased American at least rotational presence in that region,” Wallander told Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., who asked about sending more EFP brigades further south in Eastern Europe.
The Enhanced Forward Presence brigades were established in 2016 in response to Russia’s seizure of the Crimean peninsula. Each country’s brigade includes troops from multiple NATO nations. American troops lead the brigade in Poland.
A senior administration official told reporters in December that the government is working with allies on a plan to respond to a potential Russian invasion, which could include boosting the number of troops in countries on NATO’s eastern flank.
Although she served on the NSC during the crisis, Wallander criticized the Obama administration’s response as “too slow and too incremental.” Asked by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., if it was a mistake not to give Ukraine Javelin anti-tank missiles more quickly after Russia annexed Crimea, Wallander said it was.
“One of the lessons I learned is that it would have been appropriate and necessary to provide Ukraine with what it needed to defend its territory, including the weapons you suggest,” said Wallander, who also served as the deputy assistant defense secretary for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia from 2009 to 2012.
There has been much debate about whether to give offensive weapons to Ukraine. While the capabilities would allow Ukraine to better protect itself, Russian President Vladimir Putin has called it a “red line” that could spark military retaliation from Moscow.
Wallander said she would “not rule them out,” but added that she would not make any firm commitments until she had been confirmed and fully briefed on the classified assessment of Russia’s capabilities and Ukraine’s requirements.
She also said she’s looking for European allies to do more to protect the continent and go beyond the promise made in 2014 to spend at least 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense by 2024. But she said she’s not prepared to recommend that the United States cut its military presence in Europe to encourage allies to spend more themselves to fill that gap and free up American dollars to counter China.
“As we face a heightened threat from Russia, this would not be the moment to put a reduction in American commitment to NATO on the table, but what I would favor, if confirmed, is looking at how the United States can provide some of its advantages in enablers, in weapons systems, in security cooperation with allies to ensure that we are properly resourcing the requirements in the Indo-Pacific…and yet sustaining defensive deterrence against Russia,” she said.
defenseone.com · by Jacqueline Feldscher


13. The US is safer from jihadi terrorism 20 years after 9/11

Excerpts:
The clear policy choice given the government’s assessment of the international jihadi threat is to continue strengthening homeland resilience and continue other non-kinetic anti-terrorism efforts. Building resilience and hardening defenses has declined in public importance over the past 20 years. The United States, partners, and international organizations also have other powerful tools. These tools include the efforts that have already degraded al-Qaida’s strength. They include global financial constraints on the movement of money by states, individuals, and international organizations, and intelligence sharing with partners, including the nastier ones who also have reason to fear malign non-state actors.
Finally, governments may find it useful to make clear to the public that it is impossible to prevent all non-state political violence. Reducing fear, panic, and the bad political choices that follow is a priority. The British government was successful in retaining a stiff upper lip approach during the Irish Republican Army campaign that ended with the Good Friday agreement of 1998. A public that recognizes the impossibility of perfect safely is more likely to respond to any type of attack with the necessary fortitude.
The US is safer from jihadi terrorism 20 years after 9/11
militarytimes.com · by Jacqueline L. Hazelton · January 14, 2022
The international jihadi terrorist threat to the United States is down since the al-Qaida attacks of 20 years ago. Not through war or other uses of organized violence, but through cooperation, use of legal and financial tools, and strengthening homeland defense and resilience.
When it comes to international or foreign groups that want to target the United States, their capabilities — as well as their will — matter in assessing the threat. Fortunately for the United States, their capabilities are quite limited. Al-Qaida’s ability to mount another attack on U.S. soil has been seriously diminished over the past 20 years. Intelligence sharing, increases in homeland security, international tracing and blocking of financial flows, and cracking down on communications have all contributed to breaking down al-Qaida’s communications and planning abilities, reducing its funding, and diminishing its organizational and command authority. It has also lost a series of seconds-in-command, not to mention Osama bin Laden. These weaknesses lessen the threat that it poses to the United States. Also contributing to the United States’ relative position of strength is the astounding luck that facilitated the 9/11 attacks. The fact that it took a number of lucky breaks for the attacks to succeed suggests that another spectacular is less rather than more likely.
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A June report from the U.N. Security Council said the group’s senior leadership remains present inside Afghanistan, along with hundreds of armed operatives.
As the Taliban work to extend their rule over all of Afghanistan, their relationship with jihadi groups remains primarily competitive rather than collaborative. The Taliban themselves are reactionary nationalists eager to impose their version of conservative Pashtun social mores on Afghanistan. Some factions retain ties to al-Qaida while others remember the disaster that al-Qaida’s 9/11 attacks brought on them and on Afghanistan. The Taliban are also likely to continue trying to destroy or drive out the Islamic State of Khorasan, an al-Qaida inspired group with aspirations to form a new caliphate. IS-K, meanwhile, has been focused on targets within Afghanistan rather than trying to strike U.S. interests. The group is small, perhaps no more than 2,000 scattered members in eastern Afghanistan with relatively little military capability, command and control, and unity of effort. Fending off the Taliban is likely to keep IS-K busy for the foreseeable future.
Assessing the international jihadi terrorism danger to the United States means recognizing that the majority of Muslim and Islamic terrorist and insurgent groups are focused on their own government and people, not the United States. Examples include the Taliban and thus far IS-K. Fawaz Gerges famously identified this as a focus on the near enemy. Many in the West were surprised to learn after 9/11 that al-Qaida focused on the far enemy, primarily the United States. Al-Qaida was determined to weaken the United States to force it to withdraw support for corrupt, repressive near enemies such as the Egyptian and Saudi governments. Bin Laden wanted to drive the United States out of the Middle East so he and his group could topple the corrupt dictators in the region and create a more just and godly system.
The immediate threat is of jihadi groups fighting their own governments in their own lands and in adjacent areas. That danger is to those governments and people rather than to the United States. There is little the United States can do in these cases. U.S. and partner efforts in Somalia, Yemen, Mali, Nigeria, Niger, and elsewhere have not reduced the political violence or weakened the terrorist and insurgent groups active there. U.S. support for repressive, corrupt governments has enabled greater repression and corruption. Political violence has spread rather than receded. Civilian costs continue rising.
In the United States and Western Europe, rather than more attacks akin to 9/11, we see so-called lone wolf or mad dog attacks by individuals or small groups. These killings are tragic, but they they do not pose an existential threat to any state. These attacks are likely to continue. Whether we judge the fundamental cause of these attacks ideological or psychological, or both, it is very difficult to stop an individual or small group determined to kill a lot of people quickly. This is the case with school shooters, movie theater shooters, casino shooters, and others such as the two anti-government terrorists who bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 and the anti-abortion, anti-government terrorist who bombed the Olympics in Atlanta in 1996.
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The figures include half-a-trillion dollars on interest.
There are naturally U.S. military concerns that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan could allow al-Qaida and the Islamic State of Khorasan room to attack the United States. As far as al-Qaida goes, the will may be there but the capability is not. Al-Qaida lost most members and its ability to directly threaten U.S. territory after 2001. CENTCOM commander Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie said last month that al-Qaida is trying to rebuild within Afghanistan. McKenzie said al-Qaida retains “an aspirational desire” to attack the United States. It remains unclear whether all elements within the Taliban are willing to cut ties to al-Qaida
There are good political reasons for the administration to warn of the potential of attacks launched from Afghan soil. The U.S. government must keep its eye on low probability, high cost events, and low probability, high political cost events as well. The reduction in information coming out of Afghanistan with the U.S. and partner withdrawal has been a concern for some time. Colin Kahl, undersecretary of defense for policy, warned in October that IS-K has the intention to strike the United States and might be able to do so within six months. Al-Qaida, he said, could reconstitute its abilities within a year. And yet, Kahl also said that intelligence officials say the risk to the American homeland “is at its lowest point since Sept. 11, 2001.”
So, what to do? The single most important step that the United States can take to protect the homeland is to increase domestic resilience and defense. Harden nuclear power sites, natural gas plants, railroads carrying huge tanks of corrosive chemicals. Along with these steps — sometimes resisted by the industries involved because of their cost — the United States should restore the strength of its first responders. Medics, hospitals, police, firefighters, environmental crisis response departments — all have been hollowed out by budget cuts. These organizations and people are critical from the moment an attacker strikes whether they are local, at the county level, or the state level. They respond to planned attacks as well as executed attacks. Without them, the human, environmental, and business costs of an attack within the United States is likely to be far higher.
The clear policy choice given the government’s assessment of the international jihadi threat is to continue strengthening homeland resilience and continue other non-kinetic anti-terrorism efforts. Building resilience and hardening defenses has declined in public importance over the past 20 years. The United States, partners, and international organizations also have other powerful tools. These tools include the efforts that have already degraded al-Qaida’s strength. They include global financial constraints on the movement of money by states, individuals, and international organizations, and intelligence sharing with partners, including the nastier ones who also have reason to fear malign non-state actors.
Finally, governments may find it useful to make clear to the public that it is impossible to prevent all non-state political violence. Reducing fear, panic, and the bad political choices that follow is a priority. The British government was successful in retaining a stiff upper lip approach during the Irish Republican Army campaign that ended with the Good Friday agreement of 1998. A public that recognizes the impossibility of perfect safely is more likely to respond to any type of attack with the necessary fortitude.
Jacqueline L. Hazelton is an associate professor at the U.S. Naval War College. Her recent book is “Bullets Not Ballots: Success in Counterinsurgency Warfare,” from Cornell University Press. These views are hers alone, not that of any organization.
Have an opinion?
This article is an Op-Ed and as such, the opinions expressed are those of the authors. If you would like to respond, or have an editorial of your own you would like to submit, please email Military Times Managing Editor Howard Altman.
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14. Green Beret allowed to retire after sexually assaulting woman in Thailand
No words for this.
Green Beret allowed to retire after sexually assaulting woman in Thailand
'I should be safe working with them.'
taskandpurpose.com · by Jeff Schogol · January 13, 2022
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The Army will allow a Special Forces soldier to retire with a written reprimand over allegations he sexually assaulted a translator in Thailand more than a year ago, Task & Purpose has learned.
The Thai translator, who asked not to be named to protect her career, said that Sgt. 1st Class Kurt Williamson of 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne) inappropriately touched her on multiple occasions during military exercises in August 2020. Shortly afterward, she contacted a Naval Criminal Investigative Service special agent at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok to file a sexual assault complaint against Williamson.
“While I love my job and many of the people I have worked with over the years, these conditions are hostile in nature,” the translator wrote in her complaint, which was obtained by Task & Purpose. “They spell danger for both ongoing and future involvement with the US military, the US Army & 1st SFG(A) [1st Special Forces Group (Airborne)] because of individuals such as SFC Williamson. Ultimately, I wish that other female interpreters will not have to suffer similar indignities, dehumanization, nor face the same situations that I have had to endure in the future.”
Attempts to reach Williamson for comment through his command were unsuccessful, but Maj. Dan Lessard, a spokesperson for 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne), confirmed that Williamson had been disciplined over the incident. “We take all allegations of sexual assault seriously, and we took appropriate administrative action following those specific allegations in August of 2020,” Lessard said. “The service member in question remains on active duty.”
U.S. Special Forces and their Thai counterparts conduct a Stress Shoot Training in Bangkok, Thailand, July 26, 2017.(U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Kwadwo Frimpong.)
Williamson’s command decided against separation or further punishment since the translator did not press charges against him, Task & Purpose has learned. Another factor driving his command’s decision was that Williamson was so close to his retirement date that Army Human Resources Command would have had to approve any decision to kick him out of the service.
The translator said she decided not to ask that Williamson face charges because she did not want to hire an attorney, which would have cost her a lot of money. The translator also said that her only evidence against Williamson came from witness statements, and she was concerned that the case would have fallen apart if any of those witnesses had recanted.
“I’m just a terp sir,” she told Task & Purpose. “If I charged him, God knows how long it’s gonna take for this to be over.”
Task & Purpose obtained an email from Capt. Rebecca Baker, the judge advocate for 1st Special Forces Group, who told the translator the military could not retain an attorney for her because she is not an American service member and the case was not going to trial.
The United States has designated Thailand a major non-NATO ally and Green Berets routinely deploy there to train Thai special operations forces on close-quarters battle drills, crisis response planning, marksmanship, combat casualty care, and other combat skills. All Special Forces go through language and cultural training so they are mindful of the local customs when they train indigenous forces. But the translator said Williamson was anything but professional when he touched her inappropriately.
Balance Torch 20-2
Special operators from the Royal Thai Army Special Warfare Command and 1st Special Forces Group – Airborne recently conducted comprehensive partnership training. Sharing cultures and practices is important for when we operate together anywhere worldwide. #FriendsPartners #FreeandOpenIndoPacific Partnership in Action U.S. Indo-Pacific CommandUnited States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM)U.S. Army Special Operations Command, 1st Special Forces Command – Airborne
Posted by Special Operations Command Pacific on Friday, February 14, 2020
Baker sent the translator another email over the summer saying that Williamson had received a general officer memorandum of reprimand for touching her inappropriately that would be included in his permanent military records.
“This means any promotion or awards board will see the reprimand and be able to utilize it to determine his future in the military,” Baker wrote. “It is very likely that SFC Williamson will face being separated from the Army in the near future.”
Yet the translator was not surprised when Task & Purpose told her that Williamson would not be separated since he is a well-respected instructor, she said.
“I wish they could have done more; actually, just educate people – the soldiers, the personnel – to act more professionally,” she said. “That’s what we expected. I should be safe working with them. I shouldn’t have to worry about this stuff at all.”
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is the senior Pentagon reporter for Task & Purpose. He has covered the military for 15 years. You can email him at schogol@taskandpurpose.com, direct message @JeffSchogol on Twitter, or reach him on WhatsApp and Signal at 703-909-6488. Contact the author here.

taskandpurpose.com · by Jeff Schogol · January 13, 2022


15. Woman who quit Air Force commando course questioned ‘highly suspicious’ lower standards

This could have long term effects and will long be used to undermine arguments that standards have not been lowered.


Woman who quit Air Force commando course questioned ‘highly suspicious’ lower standards
airforcetimes.com · by Rachel Cohen · January 13, 2022
A female captain who may become the Air Force’s first woman to complete its elite special tactics training raised concerns about the program’s shifting standards as early as April 2021, Air Force Times has learned.
Multiple documents obtained by Air Force Times — including performance forms, score charts and a report the woman authored shortly after dropping out of a land navigation event — illustrate how she was allowed to return to training after she quit, and how physical training metrics were lowered just as she arrived at a challenging schoolhouse last spring.
“I believe the change in standards invalidated me with a majority of my team,” she wrote in an April 2021 memo to an unnamed master sergeant about her experience at the school. “One [instructor] cadre member had a conversation with a student and said that the cadre ‘rioted’ when they found out the PT test was changing back to lesser standards.
“Perhaps all of this timing was coincidental, but looks highly suspicious with my arrival on campus,” she added. Air Force Times is withholding her name for privacy reasons.
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The claims are incorrect or missing important context, said Lt. Gen. Jim Slife, the head of Air Force Special Operations Command. But he has called for the service's inspector general to investigate.
The airman’s account and other paperwork contradict public statements that Lt. Gen. Jim Slife, the head of Air Force Special Operations Command, issued during the first week of January to refute claims that his organization is unfairly pushing an unqualified female airman through special tactics training.
An anonymous letter circulated online alleged that AFSOC tweaked the training benchmarks to her benefit and allowed the woman to return after she tried to quit the program three times.
In statements to the press and a Jan. 7 letter to airmen, Slife said the anonymous letter was inaccurate and took the situation out of context.
“We do make changes in how we train airmen in order to improve the effectiveness of our training, but we do not lower our standards. … Period,” he wrote.
Air Force Times on Monday asked AFSOC to comment on the new information. The command referred a list of detailed questions and screenshots of documents to Air Education and Training Command, which manages the special warfare pipeline.
AETC spokeswoman Marilyn Holliday said Wednesday the service would not answer the query.

Air Force Special Tactics operators, assigned to the 24th Special Operations Wing, help establish a forward area refueling point during Emerald Warrior 21.1 at Hurlburt Field, Fla., Feb. 20, 2021. (Senior Airman Edward Coddington/Air Force)
‘They believed the standards had been bent’
Special tactics is the Air Force’s name for a collection of commando jobs, including combat controllers, pararescue and special reconnaissance airmen, who are all led by special tactics officers. It’s a small cohort within the far larger AFSOC world, comprising roughly 1,000 operators, and it is the Air Force’s most decorated community since the Vietnam War.
The female captain is one of only a few women who have attempted to earn a commando’s beret since the Air Force opened the prestigious career fields to female airmen in 2016. None have succeeded.
In January 2020, the female captain passed the physical fitness test needed to graduate from the special warfare assessment and selection course, according to a score sheet obtained by Air Force Times. But when she left for Combat Control School in North Carolina — the most challenging part of a yearslong program that entails air traffic control, parachute and dive training — she learned the physical standards had been lowered.
Had she been held to the previous criteria, she would have failed, according to her score sheet and memo. The change was so recent that her scores were still marked as a failure on electronic records when she took the test in late March 2021, since the grading database wasn’t updated with the new rubric, according to the paperwork and a source familiar with it.
“[Teammates] knew the [standard] was at one point 300 pounds for the deadlift. During the test, we were not told any standards, and I lifted 250 pounds,” the woman wrote in April. “Since I passed, they believed the standards had been bent for me.”
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More than five years after the Jan. 1, 2016, deadline to let women into all-male special warfare fields, they are still a rarity in parts of Air Force Special Operations Command.
The woman chalked it up to poor communication. Any edits to PT requirements should be “widely disseminated and provided with time to train,” she wrote.
“If a person can meet the standard of a job,” she said, “they should be allowed to do the job.”
All of the woman’s face-to-face interactions with instructors and staff were professional, she also wrote. But she believes rumors spread before she arrived in North Carolina.
Multiple students told her instructors were “preparing their warships” and did not want her to graduate. One told her that a trainer openly discussed his disdain of the soon-to-arrive female candidate in front of an entire team of students.
“Had I chosen to continue, I would be responsible for leading these men,” the woman wrote. “Any bias that is created and supported by people in positions of authority (the cadre) would make it difficult for me to lead them.”
The female captain’s April memo does not mention any pressure from instructors to leave, or “self-eliminate.”
Deviating from the norm
The author of the anonymous letter said the female airman has tried to quit training three times — twice in water confidence sessions and once during land navigation. Self-elimination has long meant that an airman’s attempt to join special tactics is over, yet documents show a different standard applied to the female captain.

Army Gen. Richard D. Clarke, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, and Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Gregory Smith, SOCOM command chief, both center-right, tour the Special Warfare Training Wing's water confidence drill Oct. 16, 2020, at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, Texas. (Johnny Saldivar/Air Force)
Four airmen who quit during Combat Control School at different points throughout 2019 were ordered to be reclassified into other jobs, according to administrative forms provided by a source to show how the situation is normally handled. Two airmen quit during rucksack-toting marches, one dropped out during psychological training to withstand stress, and another pulled out during land navigation.
None of the four were recommended for reinstatement. In contrast, the female candidate’s form recommended that she be considered to reenter the course after taking herself out of the land navigation event.
While the other airmen’s forms suggested they transfer elsewhere, citing Air Force policy, the woman’s paperwork advised supervisors to readmit her and “proceed [in accordance with Special Warfare Training Wing and 24th Special Operations Wing] determination.”
One instructor, a member of the team that was vetting students and who spoke on condition of anonymity, previously confirmed to Air Force Times that the female candidate also tried to quit in the pool during special tactics officer selection in 2018.
She was allowed to continue despite the instructors’ objections, the trainer said.
“When a self-elimination occurs, the student is typically returned to their previous duty assignment and either reclassified by the Air Force or given the option to separate from the military,” the anonymous letter reads. “She was presented [with] very different circumstances.”

Air Force special tactics and combat rescue officer candidates perform push-ups in the water during an assessment and selection process at Hurlburt Field, Fla., March 25, 2021. (Tech. Sgt. Sandra Welch/Air Force)
Another chance, and an investigation
A year after leaving Combat Control School, the woman is expected to return to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for another try in April. Senior leaders at Hurlburt Field, Florida, allegedly counseled her to stick with the program after she quit in 2021, according to the anonymous letter.
She’ll head back to Bragg in the shadow of an Air Force inspector general investigation into the allegations.
Air Force spokesperson Rose Riley confirmed Tuesday that Secretary Frank Kendall on Jan. 8 directed the service’s IG to begin the inquiry, the day after Slife issued a memo asking for that review. It’s unclear how long the probe could take.
Qualified female officers will undoubtedly join special tactics eventually, the anonymous author said, but how AFSOC has handled this case is cause for concern.
“Setting up a quitter for success, regardless of gender, sets a dangerous [precedent] for all SOF members,” they wrote. Special treatment “degrades the image of women in [special tactics], as they will be doubted by all members for years to come.”
Rachel Cohen joined Air Force Times as senior reporter in March 2021. Her work has appeared in Air Force Magazine, Inside Defense, Inside Health Policy, the Frederick News-Post (Md.), the Washington Post, and others.
Kyle Rempfer is an editor and reporter who has covered combat operations, criminal cases, foreign military assistance and training accidents. Before entering journalism, Kyle served in U.S. Air Force Special Tactics and deployed in 2014 to Paktika Province, Afghanistan, and Baghdad, Iraq. Follow on Twitter @Kyle_Rempfer


16. Imagining the unimaginable: The U.S., China and war over Taiwan

Conclusion:

Endgame
In the end, these scenarios are influenced — in Beijing and Washington both — by politics and long-standing principles. For China, it’s that article of faith about Taiwan, and “One China,” which has recently been married to a position of geopolitical and military strength. For the U.S., it’s the defense of an ally and an increasingly vigilant stand against China and its regional ambitions. Neither side wants war. Neither side has shown any interest in standing down. The war-gamers are still in business.
Imagining the unimaginable: The U.S., China and war over Taiwan
One way to avoid conflict may be to understand just how destructive it would be.
grid.news · by Joshua Keating
A war over Taiwan would likely involve the largest and most complex amphibious invasion ever mounted. Were the conflict to drag on, it might well evolve into a building-to-building, mountaintop-to-mountaintop ground war in one of the most densely populated and economically advanced countries on Earth. And that’s just in Taiwan itself.
Hear more from Joshua Keating about this story:
It’s an open question whether the U.S. would come to its longtime ally Taiwan’s aid; if the United States got involved, we would see a scenario the world has managed to avoid over the 75 years since the introduction of the atomic bomb: direct exchange of fire between two nuclear-armed superpowers.
“Disabuse yourself of the notion that war with China is going to be like anything we’ve experienced in our lifetimes,” said David Ochmanek, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Obama administration who is now a senior researcher at the RAND Corporation.
China’s desire to retake Taiwan goes back decades
While still far from inevitable, this nightmare scenario has never seemed more likely. Beijing has sought control of Taiwan, which it considers a wayward province, ever since 1949, when fleeing Chinese nationalist forces set up a government on the island.
China has unsuccessfully attempted military force against Taiwan before, in the 1950s and 1990s. For much of that period, Taiwan itself had a superior military to the People’s Republic, and U.S. naval dominance in the region was unquestioned.
But in recent years, the balance of power has shifted dramatically, thanks to China’s economic rise and one of the largest and fastest military buildups in history. Until a few years ago, most experts believed China had little chance of successfully taking Taiwan in the face of U.S. opposition. Now, as Ochmanek has put it, the U.S. regularly “gets its ass handed to it” in Pentagon war games simulating a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
Lately, Chinese leaders have shown signs that they are running out of patience. Chinese President Xi Jinping has said on more than one occasion that the Taiwan issue should not be “passed on from generation to generation.” More recently, he emphasized: “The historical task of the complete reunification of the motherland must be fulfilled and will definitely be fulfilled.” Xi would undoubtedly prefer to accomplish this without war, but that seems increasingly unlikely.
Public sentiment in Taiwan is turning ever more against Beijing — around two-thirds of the country’s population now identify as “Taiwanese” rather than “Chinese,” according to one recent poll — and in 2016, Tsai Ing-wen, who ran on a platform of defending the nation’s sovereignty, was elected president. And recent crackdowns in Hong Kong have undermined Chinese assurances that Taiwan would be allowed to maintain some degree of autonomy under a “one country, two systems” model.
“If you’re sitting in Beijing, it’s pretty clear that anything short of direct military force is not going to be adequate,” Elbridge Colby, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Trump administration, told Grid. “In fact, the trajectory is moving exactly in the opposite direction.”
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Examples of that trajectory are in plain sight. In recent months, China has shown signs it is preparing for the use of force. Starting in October, planes from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force made a record number of incursions into the area surrounding Taiwanese airspace. The PLA air force has expanded air bases at Longtian, Huian and Zhangzhou, directly across the strait from Taiwan. Taiwan’s government agencies currently face around 5 million cyberattacks per day, around half of them believed to originate in China. China has not been subtle in its rhetoric or its tactics: Satellite images have shown a scale replica of Taiwan’s presidential office building constructed in Inner Mongolia for PLA soldiers to practice raids.
None of these developments suggests that Xi has made the decision to take Taiwan by force. But Xi has described reunification with Taiwan as a core component of a larger political project called the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” (think, “make China great again”) due to be completed by the People’s Republic’s 100th anniversary in 2049. Time and again, he has publicly tied his own political fortunes to the goal.
The view from Washington
The hard line from Beijing is met regularly by a hard line in Washington. As part of a larger shift toward “great power competition” with China, both the Trump and Biden administrations have elevated Taiwan as an issue.
Technically speaking, the U.S. does not recognize Taiwan as an independent nation. The island is part of China under a long-held formulation known as the “One China” policy, but the U.S. is also bound by law to provide aid for Taiwan’s defense. The U.S. — under Republican and Democratic administrations alike — has long been deliberately coy about what it would do if China invaded, under a policy known as “strategic ambiguity.”
President Joe Biden has, on more than one occasion, been less ambiguous, saying the U.S. has a “commitment” to come to Taiwan’s aid were the island to be attacked. The Biden team invited a delegation from Taiwan to its Summit For Democracy in December, enraging Beijing. Support for Taiwan has lately been a rare example of bipartisan agreement on Capitol Hill, and delegations from both parties have traveled to Taipei in recent months. In the military realm, it was reported in October that U.S. special operations troops and Green Berets had been in Taiwan for over a year, secretly training its forces to resist potential Chinese aggression.
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The outgoing U.S. Indo-Pacific commander, Adm. Phil Davidson, suggested in congressional testimony in March 2021 that China is likely to move on Taiwan “in the next six years.” Some experts feel that as U.S. support ratchets up, and because of steps Taiwan and the U.S. are taking to fortify the island’s defenses, China may want to move sooner than that. Whatever the timetable, analysts agree that the risk of miscalculation leading to conflict is great.
Prelude to attack
Analysts and former officials told Grid they envision a range of scenarios for how the first few days of a conflict over Taiwan might play out. War-gaming is always fraught with hypothetical and shifting scenarios, but several common threads emerge.
One thing the Chinese military would probably not have on its side is the element of surprise. Defense analyst Ian Easton, whose 2017 book, “The Chinese Invasion Threat,” imagines what war might look like based on leaked Chinese military documents, suggests that somewhere between 1 to 2 million combat troops would have to cross the strait if Taiwan’s defenses were at full strength. (If China already had Taiwan on the back foot by instigating a coup or assassinating its president, a smaller force might be feasible.) The 1944 Normandy invasion, by contrast, involved a landing force of some 132,000 troops.
A Chinese landing on Taiwan would “be the most complex operation in modern military history,” said Michael Beckley, a professor at Tufts University and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies U.S.-China competition.
China’s navy — the dramatic recent buildup notwithstanding — doesn’t have enough amphibious assault ships to transport even a fraction of that number of troops, so it’s anticipated that civilian ships, including passenger ferries and even fishing boats, would be pressed into service. The logistics alone would be staggering. Food, fuel and medicine would be stockpiled. Some of these preparations could be camouflaged as military drills, but most such movements would be obvious to the outside world, days or weeks in advance.
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Before any land invasion, China would attempt to achieve dominance in the air, sea and “electromagnetic” realms. Barrages of rockets, missiles and armed drones would target the island’s air defenses — including air base runways and radar installations — in an attempt to ground the Taiwanese air force. Air and sea offensives would be launched against Taiwan’s navy, and China would almost certainly attempt to impose a naval blockade of the island. Military and political targets on Taiwan would be bombed in the early days of an offensive — likely including major government buildings in Taipei — as would the country’s power grid and fuel supplies. Perhaps most important, bombers would be used to degrade Taiwan’s coastal defenses before an invasion. According to an open-source 2015 estimate, there are roughly 40 air bases from which Chinese fighters could strike Taiwan without refueling. Even with a substantial number held back for reinforcements, as many as 800 aircraft could be dedicated to a Taiwan campaign.
Less visible — but potentially almost as damaging — Taiwan’s civilian and military infrastructure would be the target of massive cyberattacks. Taiwanese analysts have also warned that undersea cables linking Taiwan to the global internet could be cut by the PLA in the lead-up to an attack.
For China, the goal in these early days would be to sow as much chaos as possible to either soften Taiwan for invasion or, better yet from Beijing’s point of view, convince its leaders and people that it’s not worth fighting at all.
What will the U.S. do?
No question preoccupies leaders in Taipei, Beijing and Washington more than this: How will the U.S. respond?
Taiwanese military estimates suggest its forces might hold out on their own against China from two weeks to about a month. Even that may be optimistic. If the U.S. enters the fray, it becomes a much fairer fight. And it raises the most critical strategic questions for Beijing.
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If Chinese leaders are certain that the U.S. commitment to defend Taiwan is ironclad, their best move will be to strike first. A 2017 war game conducted by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) found that a preemptive Chinese missile strike could “crater every runway … at every major U.S. air base in Japan, and destroy more than 200 aircraft on the ground.” The RAND Corporation has estimated that just 36 missiles could shut Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan, to fighter traffic for four days. In 2015, the PLA unveiled an intermediate range ballistic missile that was quickly nicknamed the “Guam killer” for its potential ability to reach Andersen Air Force Base on that island. The RAND study found that if 50 of these missiles struck their targets, it could keep the base closed to large aircraft for eight days.
Of course, one act of aggression under these circumstances would almost certainly beget another — and the Chinese know this. Attacking U.S. forces, particularly forces on U.S. territory in Guam, would all but guarantee an American military response.
On the other hand, if the Chinese believe the Americans are bluffing, and that the U.S. has no real interest in a Pacific war, the better move would be to attack the island without provoking the Americans. If no Americans have been harmed, will a U.S. president really launch a war against a rival superpower, risking American lives and billions of dollars in a fight the U.S. might well lose? Polling shows Americans evenly divided — though the numbers have risen lately — as to whether they would support using U.S. troops to defend Taiwan.
But if the U.S. president does decide that defending a democratic ally and halting China’s military expansion is worth the fight, China will have lost a crucial opportunity to strike an early blow and will face a much tougher fight once the Americans show up. (Worth noting: Unlike the U.S. military, the PLA has virtually no combat experience. China has not fought a major war since an ill-fated invasion of Vietnam in 1979.)
Assuming U.S. forces are not badly damaged in an initial onslaught, the Americans have a range of options for striking China in the early days of a Taiwan invasion. It might be days before they reach the area — depending on advance intelligence and positioning — but U.S. submarines, surface ships, aircraft and cruise missiles would likely sink a significant number of China’s amphibious craft during the crossing of the strait. As of 2017, RAND estimates showed that U.S. submarines alone could destroy almost 40 percent of the Chinese amphibious fleet during a weeklong conflict, though China’s defenses in this area have improved significantly since then. If they were able to penetrate Chinese airspace, U.S. aircraft could attack those 40 Chinese air bases within range of Taiwan, though this would represent a significant escalation. Beyond conventional warfare, the U.S. and China could also carry out attacks on each other’s satellites and cyberattacks in the early days of a conflict.
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A U.S. intervention hardly guarantees victory, however. The “blue” teams representing the U.S. have repeatedly lost to Chinese “red” teams in classified Air Force war games held since 2018. This is partly by design — the games are designed to highlight vulnerabilities — but they also highlight real strategic dilemmas. China will enter the conflict with a major geographic advantage: Taiwan lies only a few hundred miles from the full strength of the PLA; it’s more than 1,500 nautical miles from Guam, the closest U.S. territory.
In addition to its geographic advantages, China in 2010 became the first country in the world to announce it had operational anti-ship ballistic missiles, capable of precision strikes on U.S. ships at a range of more than 900 miles. These missiles are part of a suite of systems designed to prevent U.S. forces from entering or maneuvering within an area of combat — a concept known in military jargon as anti-access area-denial or A2/AD.
Recent U.S. defense planning has been focused on penetrating these defenses, but according to a recent Defense News report, the most promising Pentagon scenario for repelling an invasion of Taiwan relies on air defense technology that doesn’t exist yet.
The crossing
The most dangerous part of any invasion from the Chinese perspective would be the actual crossing of the 100-mile strait. “I certainly wouldn’t want to be in one of those Chinese transport crafts, puttering across the Taiwan Strait for eight hours,” Tufts University’s Beckley told Grid. While the Chinese would pound Taiwan’s coastal defenses during the initial air assault, they would be unlikely to eliminate them. Several analysts noted that the vaunted U.S. Air Force had a difficult time eliminating Iraqi and Serbian mobile missile batteries during the Gulf and Kosovo wars; Taiwan’s military is far more advanced.
During this period, the China-Taiwan air war would continue to be intense. “There’s no real way to not be vulnerable during the actual amphibious invasion,” Cristina Garafola, who researches the Chinese military at RAND, told Grid. “You’re basically sitting ducks for anti-ship cruise missiles or Taiwanese aircraft. So I think the [PLA air force] and the PLA navy’s aviation branch would have a key role in making sure those ships made it across to Taiwan with as few casualties and as little damage as possible.”
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When China’s ships actually land on Taiwan’s beaches, they’re likely to be met with mines, nets and traps along the shoreline. In one of the more vivid sections of his book, Easton cites PLA military documents that describe Taiwanese plans to create “sea walls of fire” by pumping oil into the shallows and lighting it aflame. (These reports are unconfirmed.)
China’s best bet for moving troops and supplies onto the island will be to seize a port. That means the Taiwanese may have to take the drastic step of destroying their own ports to prevent a landing.
“[The Chinese] have to have that combo of sufficient combat power ashore plus air superiority,” said Chris Dougherty, a senior fellow at CNAS, who has designed numerous Taiwan war simulations. “In almost all of our war-games, there’s a big scramble to see if Taiwan can destroy their ports and their airports fast enough.”
There’s precedent for such operations — the retreating Germans left the port of Cherbourg in ruins to deny the allies a base of operations after D-Day — but the scale and implications of the task should not be downplayed: Taiwan’s largest port, Kaohsiung, is among the 15 largest in the world, handling a larger annual volume of shipping than the Port of Los Angeles.
The land war
Most experts agree that a short, sharp war offers China’s best bet for victory. “If you read Chinese military writings, they talk about essentially the equivalent of ‘shock and awe,’” Beckley said. “I think the Chinese have a reasonable expectation that if they just hit Taiwan and the U.S. hard enough in the face, that they will be paper tigers and stand down.” If China can cripple Taiwan’s resistance quickly, the thinking goes, the international community will be hard pressed to do much about it. Defense scholars refer to this is as a fait accompli strategy, best demonstrated in recent years by Russia’s rapid and almost uncontested annexation of Crimea in 2014.
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As Eric Heginbotham, a researcher on Asian security issues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, notes, the longer a conflict drags on, the tougher it becomes from Beijing’s perspective: “Once you start lethal action, then Taiwan begins to mobilize its reserves. And as long as that ground campaign is going on, your fleet has to be anchored off the coast where it is vulnerable. Any chance for success really does count on a quick, relatively quick occupation.”
Taiwan has a standing army of around 190,000, but hundreds of thousands more troops could be pressed into service from its reserves. That’s still not many compared with the largest military on the planet, but the Taiwanese would have the advantage of fighting on their turf, in mountainous terrain that could be a nightmare for occupiers.
Polls suggest the island’s population is overwhelmingly willing to take up arms, but that could change quickly if defenses were being overwhelmed or if U.S. support looked iffy. “On our side, the will is there. But it’s that’s not enough. You need it to be trained and prepared ahead of the contingencies,” said Enoch Wu, a former Taiwanese special forces soldier turned politician who has founded an organization advocating greater preparedness for war among average citizens.
Meanwhile, a drawn-out conflict would give Taiwan’s allies — the U.S. but also potentially Japan or Australia — more time to organize support and chip away at China’s air superiority. “Over time, we will have superior aircraft, superior pilots,” Ochmanek said. “I say to people, you can’t win this war in a week, but you can lose it in a week.”
So what happens if — in war-game parlance — the “blue” team stands up, Taiwan mobilizes its reserves, and the U.S. and other allies provide air and naval support? In all likelihood, China still would land a large number of troops on the island, but after that many of the scenarios and planning documents grow vague. It’s been decades since the world has seen mechanized ground combat in urban areas between two heavily industrialized powers, said MIT’s Heginbotham: “Honestly, I think it looks a lot like it always has or has for the last 100 years — which is bloody and slow.”
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CNAS’s Dougherty said that war games that get to the ground war stage often settle into a “kind of stalemate” in which the Chinese have control of the air but the Taiwanese are dug in with armor and artillery. “The Chinese can make some headway when they have extra air superiority, when we don’t have fighters up. But then, every 12 to 18 hours, we get a big sortie of bombers, and they get pushed back again. And it kind of goes back and forth like this over the course of days and days and days.”
No refuge for civilians
Less discussed in the war games and white papers is the potential impact on Taiwan’s civilian population. Beyond the fighting itself, the damage could prove catastrophic. Taiwan imports much of its food, fuel and medicine, and an extended blockade could have devastating humanitarian consequences.
In his book, Easton notes that civilian casualties are hardly mentioned in the PLA documents he studied. He told Grid that on a recent trip to Taiwan, he couldn’t help but think about which of the places he was visiting would be targeted in the event of war: “When you do this kind of research, it changes the way you look at the world. The whole country is going to be a war zone.”
With a population of 23.5 million in an area a bit bigger than Maryland, Taiwan is one of the densest countries on Earth and is particularly so along its west coast, where Taiwan’s main military installations are located and where the fighting is likely to be most intense.
“Our military bases are in our cities,” Wu told Grid. “Our communications networks, our infrastructure, our power plants, those are all strategic targets. All those nodes are in urban environments. We all recognize that if conflict breaks out, there are no safe zones.”
The nuclear question
To some of the experts, these grim scenarios are actually good news, in that China is unlikely to embark on a mission that has a good chance of turning into a gruesome stalemate. The problem, given the importance of reunification as a goal for the Chinese state, is the difficulty of getting Beijing to back down.
“How many times does Xi Jinping have to say that the destiny of China is to reunite Taiwan with the mainland before people are convinced that he really means it?” Ochmanek asked. “Once they commit to this course of action, they have a lot riding on it.”
Meanwhile, looming over any discussion of escalation is the fact that both the U.S. and China have nuclear arsenals. (China’s is much smaller but catching up.) In his new book, “The Strategy of Denial,” which argues the U.S. needs to be doing more to deter a Chinese “fait accompli” attack on Taiwan, Colby, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense, argues that any war between the U.S. and China would likely be limited in critical ways, because the incentives to avoid massive nuclear exchange are too great for both sides. He argues this isn’t necessarily a good thing; you might be more likely to start a war if you believe you can keep it under control.
Beckley is skeptical that war would remain limited. He worries about a scenario in which “both sides assume the other side would never go nuclear. And so, it’s OK to just hit them as hard as you want with conventional forces, because there’s a fire break between that the nuclear realm.”
Colby accepts that the risk of nuclear escalation is real but said it shouldn’t deter the U.S. from defending Taiwan. “If we are completely convinced that a limited war is impossible, and the Chinese believe that it is possible, then they will checkmate us every time,” he said. “At some point, we have to be willing to fight a war under the nuclear shadow. My view is the best way to avoid testing that proposition, which I absolutely don’t want to do, is to be visibly prepared for it.”
For some U.S. analysts and policymakers, the risks to Taiwan (and in a nuclear scenario, the risks to everywhere else) are an argument for bolstering support for the island, making an invasion seem as unappealing a prospect as possible to Beijing. For others, the risks involved in defending Taiwan are simply too great, and the U.S. should cut the island loose from its strategic priorities. Either way, it’s best for all involved if these scenarios remain theoretical.
Endgame
In the end, these scenarios are influenced — in Beijing and Washington both — by politics and long-standing principles. For China, it’s that article of faith about Taiwan, and “One China,” which has recently been married to a position of geopolitical and military strength. For the U.S., it’s the defense of an ally and an increasingly vigilant stand against China and its regional ambitions. Neither side wants war. Neither side has shown any interest in standing down. The war-gamers are still in business.
This article has been updated.
grid.news · by Joshua Keating


17. Why didn’t the FBI see the Capitol siege coming?

Excerpts:
In a public address the day before the anniversary of the siege, Garland delivered a speech vowing to hold accountable the many people involved in the day’s events and planning “at any level.” Noticeably absent from the 3,316-word speech was a recognition that any responsibility for the day’s events could lie with the bureau, or that the lens of accountability could be appropriately turned inward on his department.
Asked what the bureau had learned from the insurrection, the spokesperson replied: “The FBI has increased our focus on swift information sharing with all our state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement partners throughout the United States. We also have improved automated systems established to assist investigators and analysts in all our field offices throughout the investigative process.”
Why didn’t the FBI see the Capitol siege coming?
A year later, the bureau still won’t come clean on why it ignored piles of evidence and outside warnings about political violence before the attack on January 6, 2021.
grid.news · by Jason Paladino
In the lead-up to the Capitol siege, the FBI received at least a dozen warnings about the possibility of violence that day (see timeline below.) When the day came and the Capitol barricades fell, it became evident the FBI largely ignored them all.
Hear more from Jason Paladino about this story:
The warnings came from all sides: regional law enforcement, social media platforms, Congress (specifically the House and Senate intelligence committees), a top defense official, extremist watchdogs, right-wing experts, journalists and even three different components within the FBI itself.
Grid reviewed every public statement FBI officials made about the bureau’s intelligence leading up to the siege to understand how the FBI explained its posture on Jan. 6. We read hundreds of pages of FBI briefings and press statements, FBI officials’ testimony before Congress and public comments in news reports.
We found that the FBI has given at least five different explanations for why it failed to heed these warnings and take steps to foil the Capitol attack or help other agencies prepare a sufficient response. Some of them support arguments the FBI should get more money and legal authorities. But given what we now know, none of them holds up.
“They’re following the same blueprint as 9/11,” said Mike German, a former undercover FBI agent and author of “Disrupt, Discredit and Divide: How the New FBI Damages Democracy.” He is a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. “First they say, ‘We had no intelligence,’ then say, ‘Our authorities prevented us from getting the intelligence,’ which is not true.”
German echoed the comments of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) from a June 2001 Judiciary Committee hearing: Nearly every time the bureau fails, Grassley marveled, it “ends up with a bigger budget, more jurisdiction, and the director walks out of this room with a nice pat on the back.”
“This is what the FBI is good at,” German said. “Taking its failures and turning them into opportunities for more resources.”
The institutional lack of introspection, while unsurprising, is deeply worrisome, German and others agree. The threat of political violence — particularly from the right, and targeting democratic institutions and political leaders — is higher than at any point in modern history. Many key indicators point in one direction: Extremist violence is reportedly surging, and threats against election officials and members of Congress are increasing. The threat of lethality from domestic violent extremist groups “is higher than it ever was,” Attorney General Merrick Garland told Congress last May.
If the FBI remains blinkered to the most serious and likely threats, Jan. 6 might not be its last major failure. American democracy has largely survived the violence of Jan. 6, and the Department of Justice has undertaken a historic effort to investigate, indict and prosecute hundreds of participants — who might never have stormed the Capitol in the first place if the FBI had heeded clear warnings and taken proper steps to prevent the attack. The Department of Justice did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
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A credible explanation for the FBI’s failures around Jan. 6 may yet come from other quarters. Multiple accountability probes into the events of Jan. 6 are scrutinizing the bureau’s woefully insufficient response. The Department of Justice Inspector General has an active probe that reportedly examines the FBI’s troubling inaction; the House Jan. 6 Committee has an entire “blue team” of investigators trying to answer the questions around the security and intelligence failures that preceded the Capitol breach.
A bureau spokesperson, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told Grid that “while the FBI had information that was concerning about the potential for violence in connection with the January 6th events, the FBI was not aware of actionable intelligence that indicated that hundreds of people were planning to violently breach the U.S. Capitol.”
Here are the bureau’s five public explanations for failing to take seriously the intel on Jan. 6, and an assessment of the veracity of its claims.
1. Nothing we saw suggested violence was possible on Jan. 6.
Just hours before the attack, FBI National Security Division personnel assured the acting deputy attorney general that there were “no credible threats,” according to an email obtained by BuzzFeed News. Shortly after the siege, the FBI echoed the internal communication, repeating that it had worked with other law enforcement and intelligence agencies to detect potential threats, and no one saw the Capitol siege coming. “There was no indication there was nothing other than First Amendment protected activity,” Steven D’Antuono, FBI assistant director in charge of the Washington Field Office, said on a call with reporters on Jan. 8. “We worked diligently with our partners on this.”
Less than a week later, the FBI appeared to contradict itself. “We developed some intelligence that a number of individuals were planning to travel to the D.C. area with intentions to cause violence,” D’Antuono told reporters on Jan. 12. An FBI official told NBC News that agents traveled around to people’s homes to dissuade them from attending the protest. To date, no outlet has confirmed the details of any visit.
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In March, another senior FBI official repeated the canard that the bureau had seen no indication of possible violence. In testimony before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Jill Sanborn, assistant director of the FBI’s counterterrorism division, told lawmakers, “None of us had any intelligence suggesting that individuals were going to storm and breach the Capitol.”
As we now know, this is not true. Many within the FBI had intelligence suggesting violence related to Congress’ election certification. In addition to the many warnings from outside and within the FBI (see timeline below), the bureau should have been privy to alerts on travel to Washington by any one of the dozens of watchlisted individuals who reportedly came to the District for the day of the siege.
“Why didn’t that trigger anything?” asked German.
2. We didn’t have sufficient visibility into the violent groups involved.
At a Senate Judiciary hearing in March, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) expressed surprise at the detailed planning the violent right-wing Proud Boys extremist group employed when preparing for its Jan. 6 assault on Capitol Hill. She asked FBI Director Christopher Wray if he ever wished the FBI had kept closer tabs on the Proud Boys in advance of Jan. 6.
The Proud Boys had left a trail of violent altercations across the country before Jan. 6, including in Washington, D.C., and were central actors at some of the worst flashpoints of violence at the Capitol that day. The group’s members were among some of the first to breach the Capitol windows. At least 27 Proud Boy members or associates have been arrested in connection with the attack, with at least 17 indicted on a charge of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, according to NPR’s database of charged individuals.
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“There must be moments where you think, ‘If we would have known. If we could have infiltrated this group, or found out what they were doing,’” Klobuchar said. “Do you have those moments?”
“Absolutely,” Wray responded. “I will tell you, senator, and this is something I feel passionately about: Any time there’s an attack, our standard at the FBI is, we aim to bat a thousand.”
We now know that the FBI was in regular contact with the Proud Boys in the days and months leading up to Jan. 6 — to gather intelligence on left-wing activists. According to Reuters, the FBI cultivated Proud Boys not to inform on their own activities, but to act as intelligence sources about antifa, a loosely organized group of anti-fascist street protesters.
Proud Boys leader Joseph Biggs faces six criminal charges in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol siege. He is accused of directing some of the first acts of violence that precipitated the siege, accusations he denies. Two days before the attack, Biggs told a Reuters reporter that he had been talking with the FBI for months and was willing to tell his bureau contact about his plans for the day, if they asked.
At least four members of the group had communicated with the FBI prior to the attack, Reuters reported. One member of the group was even texting his FBI handler a real time account of the attack, according to the New York Times.
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Another member of the group has pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the riot and is cooperating with the government.
The FBI spokesperson told Grid in a written statement: “The FBI has no comment on the news reports you mentioned. The FBI does not comment on sources and methods.”
The Proud Boys weren’t the only violent far-right group that appeared to plan ahead for violence. The government has identified at least 21 riot defendants as members of or associates of the Oath Keepers, an anti-government militia group founded in 2009 and incorporated in Nevada. The group claims to have 30,000 members, and recruits from active and former military and law enforcement. According to federal prosecutors, Oath Keepers arrived at the Capitol in armor and helmets, with firearms and radios, and “forcibly storm[ed] past exterior barricades, Capitol Police and other law enforcement officers and enter[ed] the Capitol in executing the Jan. 6 operation.”
Prior to the Capitol violence, members of the militia provided security for Trump ally Roger Stone, as first reported by the New York Times. The group’s founder, Elmer Stewart Rhodes, has been subpoenaed by the House committee investigating Jan. 6. Rhodes told the New York Times that the alleged Oath Keepers charged in the Capitol breach had “gone off mission,” and that they entered only to render aid to others. On Thursday the Department of Justice charged Rhodes and 10 others with seditious conspiracy, some of the first sedition charges made in the investigation. Prosecutors accused the group of stashing firearms on the outskirts of D.C., to be used “in support of their plot to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power.”
Although many Americans first heard of the Oath Keepers in relation to Jan. 6, the organization is well known to the FBI. The bureau has kept tabs on it since at least 2013. The FBI has identified the Oath Keepers as “domestic terrorism sovereign citizen extremists” in internal documents released under the Freedom of Information Act to reporter Emma North-Best in 2018, and observed that “various individuals associated with the Oath Keepers have engaged in well-publicized criminal acts which appear linked to violence and terrorism.”
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3. The Constitution tied our hands.
Even though journalistswatchdog groups and even social media platforms themselves were able to spot the clearly emerging threat, and the FBI itself was reportedly in contact with members of key participant groups of the day’s events, FBI leaders have repeatedly told Congress that the Constitution ties their hands — a claim that baffles legal experts.
When grilled on the issue by lawmakers last March, the FBI’s Sanborn said the bureau couldn’t monitor social media in the absence of “a lead or a tip” from a citizen or outside agency. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) expressed his disappointment with the answer, citing the FBI’s lackluster response to earlier questions after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that turned deadly.
But according to the Justice Department’s own domestic investigation guidelines, agents are allowed to “conduct proactive Internet searches of ‘publicly available information’ to process observations or other information for authorized purposes.”
In June, Wray seemed to repeat the red herring, telling lawmakers repeatedly that department regulations forbid agents from monitoring social media without “proper predication.” Wray told Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) the bureau did not have “proper predication and authorized purpose” in advance of Jan. 6 to dig into the social media posts.
“That’s completely false,” the Brennan Center’s German said of Wray’s claims. “Their rules are public, you can read them. It’s ridiculous that stuff even gets reported, or that policymakers don’t immediately debunk it.”
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4. It’s hard to distinguish “intentional” posts, which presage actual violence, from the “aspirational” or mere bluster.
At the same June hearing, Wray described the difficulty the FBI had determining whether threatening online posts were “aspirational versus the intentional.”
“There is all kinds of just unspeakably horrific rhetoric out there across the spectrum, and trying to figure out which individuals are just using hateful horrible language with no intent to act versus which ones actually have an intention to commit violence,” Wray told the committee, “especially in a country where we have the First Amendment and there are all kinds of policies that the Justice Department has had in place for years and years and years that govern our safe space or our ability to operate in social media is a real challenge.”
That’s just wrong, experts say. Andrew Weissmann, former top lawyer for the FBI, called Wray’s explanations “stingy” and “deeply unsatisfying” in a joint op-ed. Weissman and his co-author, law professor Ryan Goodman, pointed out that the FBI “routinely takes actions to prepare for highly sensitive events such as the Jan. 6 certification of the Electoral College results.”
“Indeed,” wrote Weissman and Goodman, ”although Wray did not mention this to lawmakers, the FBI’s role in preparing for such events allows the bureau, in accordance with the attorney general’s guidelines, to engage in ‘proactively surfing the Internet to find publicly accessible websites and services’ through which the ‘promotion of terrorist crimes is openly taking place.’”
“What is clear,” the two concluded, “is that the FBI knew enough to take further action, but failed to do so.”
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In fact, two recent cases suggest the FBI does believe it can distinguish between the two and bring charges against speech it finds intentional.
One example is the case of Daniel Baker, a self-described leftist from Florida. Baker wrote on Facebook shortly after Jan. 6, calling for armed civilians to help defend the Florida Capitol building against potentially threatening far-right groups. He was recently sentenced to 44 months in federal prison for the posts, more than most Capitol rioters will face, including those who made specific threats against members of Congress and traveled with weaponry to D.C.
“There is a long history in this country of police, prosecutors, and courts targeting anarchists for trumped up charges and excessive sentences. This legacy goes back to Haymarket and continues to today, with Dan’s case being the most recent example,” Brad Thomson, a civil rights attorney at People’s Law Office told the Intercept.
“The FBI’s approach of de-emphasizing investigations of white supremacist and right-wing militia violence while targeting resources at social justice movements and calling that extremism has existed for some time,” Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) National Security Project, told Desmog earlier this year.
Another example involved Missouri activist Mike Avery. After Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in May 2020, Avery posted calls to action on Facebook. Avery encouraged people to gather outside of the Ferguson, Missouri, police department to protest.
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Soon after, FBI agents showed up at Avery’s home and arrested him. They charged Avery under the Anti-Riot Act, a 1968 law that is rarely invoked. According to the affidavit, Avery’s Facebook posts were spotted by FBI agents online who were attempting to “identify potential flashpoints for violence” by “monitor[ing] social media for imminent acts of violence.” The FBI cited a post where Avery encourages people in the St. Louis area to gather for a “RED ACTION” and specifically encouraged “shooters” to turn out, which the FBI believed was encouraging people to assault police officers. Avery’s attorneys argued that “shooters” is a slang term for men, and that “red action” is a commonly used term in activist circles to describe protests that may involve pepper spray, rubber bullets and other crowd control measures.
According to reporting by NBC News, Avery was one of four people charged on incitement to riot charges based on social media posts. His charges were dropped several weeks later, after Avery was held without bail. To date, no Capitol insurrection defendant has been charged with inciting a riot.
This case, though dismissed, showed the willingness of the FBI to proactively arrest and detain individuals it saw as planning violence on social media.
The FBI issued joint intelligence bulletins to law enforcement agencies in 2020 based on social media activity before demonstrations over the killing of George Floyd, protests in Portland and Black Lives Matter protests in Washington.
The FBI issued no such bulletin prior to Jan. 6, according to a Senate report on the insurrection published in June. It was not until Jan. 13, a week after the attack, that the FBI issued a joint intelligence briefing warning of possible continued violence. “Since the 6 January event, violent online rhetoric regarding the 20 January Presidential Inauguration has increased,” the FBI document says, citing “open source reporting.”
5. Our tools failed us.
The FBI claims it needs better tools to sort through social media data. “The volume — as you said, the volume of this stuff is just massive, and the ability to have the right tools to get through it and sift through it in a way that is, again, separating the wheat from the chaff is key,” Wray told lawmakers in June.
Last October, unnamed sources with apparent deep knowledge of the bureau gave potentially more detail to Wray’s claim. The sources told the Washington Post that an “end-of-the-year changeover” from one social media monitoring service, Dataminr, to another, ZeroFox, left the bureau blind to obvious threat indicators online.
The FBI has never made this claim publicly and for attribution. German dismisses it out of hand, along with the bureau’s other excuses, which profess a lack of intelligence or awareness of extremist threats before the Capitol siege.
“It just doesn’t fly,” German said of the FBI’s complaints. For starters, German noted, news media were reporting threats of violence in advance of Jan. 6: “Even if FBI leaders are somehow unable to see the threat information reported up from below, they can certainly read the front page of the local paper.”
On Jan. 5, 2021, the Washington Post ran a story headlined, “Pro-Trump forums erupt with violent threats ahead of Wednesday’s rally against the 2020 election.” The article noted that the forum members discussed “potential bloodshed and advice on sneaking guns into D.C.”
What’s more, ZeroFox apparently has a history of aggressive social media exploitation to identify potentially violent threats, one that suggests the FBI’s criticism of the service’s thoroughness may be misplaced. Unfortunately, ZeroFox’s apparent zeal appeared as misdirected as the FBI’s could be — instead of focusing exclusively on actual violent threats, the company appears to have aggressively probed and reported nonviolent, progressive protest organizers.
In April 2015, amid protests and rioting in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, ZeroFox sent Baltimore city officials an unsolicited report that labeled prominent Black activists with large Twitter followings as “threat actors,” according to Mother Jones and the Baltimore Business Journal. Under a section of the report titled “THREAT ACTORS: #MOSTWANTED,” the report listed movement organizers DeRay McKesson, Johnetta Elzie and others as physical threats subject to “continuous monitoring.”
The report, which was subsequently released to media through a public records request, categorized both McKesson and Elzie as “Severity: HIGH” and “Threat Type: PHYSICAL.” ZeroFox said in its report they were among 187 “influencers” and 62 “actors” the company was monitoring ahead of the protests.
More than a year after ZeroFox’s report, FBI agents visited McKesson’s home and the home of some of Elzie’s relatives to ask questions, the two told Grid. It could not be determined if the alleged visits were prompted by ZeroFox’s reporting.
“This is just so insane to me. Who would look at [my] photo and think, ‘Oh, she is a threat’?” Johnetta Elzie told Grid. “I never incite violence. If anything I documented the violence of the police,” said Elzie. “I care more about people’s safety than the police did at the time.”
When the FBI agents came calling, Elzie said her aged relatives “trolled” the agents hard. “They’ve lived through Malcom [X], Martin [Luther King, Jr.]. They know about the FBI,” Elzie said. “They asked, ‘Why did you kill MLK?’ and it made the agents uncomfortable.” The FBI spied on King and in 1964 attempted to convince the civil rights legend to kill himself.
According to emails obtained by the Baltimore Sun, ZeroFox CEO James C. Foster sent the report to contacts in Baltimore city government on April 27, 2015, saying he had “immediate intelligence” to pass along.
“Our system also supported the NYC PD during their riots and protests,” Foster wrote. “The alerts and data are alarming and we briefed our classified partners at Fort Meade this morning.” Foster and ZeroFox did not respond to requests for comment.
In a public address the day before the anniversary of the siege, Garland delivered a speech vowing to hold accountable the many people involved in the day’s events and planning “at any level.” Noticeably absent from the 3,316-word speech was a recognition that any responsibility for the day’s events could lie with the bureau, or that the lens of accountability could be appropriately turned inward on his department.
Asked what the bureau had learned from the insurrection, the spokesperson replied: “The FBI has increased our focus on swift information sharing with all our state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement partners throughout the United States. We also have improved automated systems established to assist investigators and analysts in all our field offices throughout the investigative process.”
Steve Reilly contributed to this report.
‘None of us had any intelligence’: A timeline of the FBI’s ignored warnings about Jan. 6
FBI officials said they saw no indications of potential violence prior to last January’s Capitol siege. We counted over a dozen.
grid.news · by Jason Paladino


18. Memo to the president: A counterinsurgency strategy for America
This will provoke a response.

I have long argued that the only counterinsurgency the US should fight is an insurgency against the US. We can only advise and assist other countries as they try to defend themselves against lawless, subversion, insurgency, andterroris. Each country is responsible for its own defense and when it comes to counterinsurgency the only counterinsurgent must be from that country to defend itself against insurgency. I used to make this argument somewhat flippantly to empssize that we should not be conducting counterinsurgency or doing it for someone lese.

But are we at risk of an insurgency?

Conclusion:

A final plea
Mr. President, the advice I am providing sets for you an uneasy task. What I advocate may well run counter to your short-term political interests and those of many in your party, whose support you need to realize your agenda. But I do believe that what is at stake is nothing less than the future cohesion and security of the nation, and the preservation of our democratic system. Ironically, the very democratic norms that we are trying to preserve preclude my help in safeguarding them. I cannot counsel you to act here as I would have counseled in Anbar Province. But that doesn’t mean we should not act at all. Given the stakes, you must try.

Memo to the president: A counterinsurgency strategy for America
The threat of violent insurgency in the U.S. is real; the CIA’s former head of counterterrorism has some ideas for dealing with it.
grid.news · by Robert Grenier
Robert Grenier served as a career intelligence officer and former head of counterterrorism at the CIA. He was the agency’s station chief in Pakistan at the time of the 9-11 attacks and later led counterinsurgency strategy efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today he believes the gravest threats to the U.S. lie within its borders – and that what is needed, effectively, is a counterinsurgency for the nation. He shares his views with Grid in the form of a memo to the president.
An unsolicited memo to the president
MEMORANDUM
From: Director, National Counterterrorism Center
To: The President of the United States
Mr. President:
I begin by stating the obvious: This memo is way out of line. While the issues I raise here are directly relevant to my domestic counterterrorism responsibilities, the advice I propose is largely political and thus well outside my purview: Indeed, it lies uniquely within yours, as both a government and a political figure.
In the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6, 2021, I was struck with stunning clarity that the social and political conditions that underlay past insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan were now at work here at home. While relatively few of our fellow citizens have been or would ever be moved to actual political violence, we have seen that a number sufficient to generate long-term endemic violence were, and are, very much at work.
I don’t need to remind you that your senior intelligence and law enforcement officials share the consensus that by far the greatest terrorism threat in the United States today is domestic and not foreign-generated. The latent threat of Islamic extremism pales in comparison with that posed by white-supremacist and other right-wing extremists.
That alone is a startling fact. But it is not what most concerns me, and not why I write to you now.
The nature of the threat
The threat of domestic terrorism is eminently manageable with the laws and law-enforcement capabilities at our disposal at the federal, state, local and tribal levels. I and my colleagues have the means to thwart those who actively plot and perpetrate criminal acts.
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What worries me more is our ability to deal with the political environment in which violent extremism can grow and spread. In short, Mr. President, what should concern you is not domestic terrorism, but insurgency.
Those who pose the greatest threat in our country present themselves, plausibly, as the defenders and champions of a great many of their fellow citizens whose political and cultural grievances they share and loudly amplify. The most serious of these grievances in fact serves to legitimize the violence of the few in purported defense of the many. They also help generate broad tacit political support for their aims, if not their means, in the process encouraging others to join their ranks.
We see this already in the efforts of many otherwise mainstream Republicans to politically exploit the same social grievances seized upon by the extremists, either out of fear or opportunism, and even to excuse or defend those responsible for the Jan. 6 insurrection in service of the same political ends. Many Republican leaders have, in effect, joined the insurgency, potentially fanning the flames that could consume us all.
The classic counterinsurgency methods we employ abroad are unavailing here. Were we talking about a foreign land in which U.S. troops were deployed and critical national security interests engaged, I would be advocating for a presidential finding to authorize pervasive surveillance of private communications, designed to drive military raids against both insurgent cells and malign social influencers, even if peaceful; I would seek to employ the methods of social media manipulation and disinformation employed so effectively by the Russians, while suppressing alternative voices; I would advocate clandestine assistance to supportive politicians and social movements.
Here at home, any such methods would be anathema — not to mention illegal and unconstitutional — and would serve to realize the worst fears of the paranoiacs who believe there is in fact a “deep state” at work against them.
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And yet Mr. President, a counterinsurgency mindset is exactly what is demanded. There is a great and compelling need to delegitimize the violent extremists in the eyes of those whom they purport to champion, in part by addressing the grievances on which the extremists feed. This critical work will fall to you and others in the political class.
You will need to reach out to people who hold conservative beliefs but who do not wish to subvert democracy or overthrow the government. You must be willing to elevate their social and cultural stature. You must acknowledge and address the underlying concerns fueling the insurgency, even if that means abandoning hope for a total victory in the so-called culture wars. You will need to convince fellow Democrats of the wisdom and merit of these approaches: put simply, that it’s worth the trade to fully marginalize Tucker Carlson and other charlatans, and preserve a stable democracy.
Iraq as a model
So what can be done? The best analogy I can offer is the work we did nearly two decades ago in Iraq’s Anbar Province.
In Iraq, we had no chance against the insurgency until traditional tribal leaders in the Sunni-dominated areas of the country decided they needed to break with the Islamic extremists destroying their country purportedly in its defense, to retake control of their destiny and to martial the populations over which they wielded influence. When they did so, it was in their own time and for their own reasons. Only then did they solicit our help.
It’s important to be clear about whom we mean in this very different context. The metaphorical “Sunnis,” with whom I and my colleagues so closely identified in Iraq, can be described in the U.S. as a large, religiously conservative segment of the population, disproportionately (though not entirely) rural, economically bypassed and culturally marginalized, which believes with some reason that it is being eclipsed by a largely urban coalition of immigrants, minorities, educated knowledge-economy workers and “politically correct” secular elites. These latter, they believe, try to abridge their religious freedoms; disparage and “cancel” their most cherished moral, cultural, social and historical beliefs; are bent on imposing “socialism”; and are ultimately prepared to seize their guns.
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But Donald Trump and Trumpism’s populist takeover of the Republican Party and the conservative movement was not foreordained and need not be permanent. Yes, some in the conservative political class — the Paul Gosars, the Matt Gaetzs, and in the associated popular and social media worlds the Tucker Carlsons and Alex Joneses — may be irredeemable, but just as with traditional tribal leaders temporarily eclipsed by religious extremists, there are many in the various factions of the traditional conservative movement who are not happy with the current state of affairs and who abhor the long-term corrosion of our civic norms and democratic institutions.
You must reach out to these conservatives, broadly and quietly, using credible emissaries from within and outside the Democratic Party, to offer encouragement and support. Some, such as Bill Kristol, provide an organizational infrastructure for doing so. Some politicians, including Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney and Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, Michigan Rep. Peter Meijer and Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, along with many thought leaders such as Kristol, Bret Stephens, Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, Ross Douthat and David Brooks have shown the character and courage to stand up publicly against the Trumpists, their lies and their manipulations.
Far more numerous among Republican politicians, however, are what we might term the “Vichyite collaborators.” Whether they are currently motivated by fear, opportunism or some combination of the two, they hold the key to effective opposition to Trumpism and thus must be the prime target of the “counter-insurgency” effort.
As attested by conservatives such as Max Boot, with whom many are willing to speak honestly in private, they understand the dangers posed by Trump and his acolytes but dare not oppose them out of fear of political rejection on the one hand and the lure of partisan advantage on the other. Indeed, the political motivation to swallow both pride and self-respect in the service of craven ambition will grow only stronger, as the prospect of Republican political advancement in 2022 and 2024 grows ever larger.
Most important, you and your surrogates must understand that this is not a matter of them joining you, but of you joining them — for patriotic reasons and with full assurances that you are not seeking political advantage.
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Address the “Big Lie”
It would be hard to overstate the importance of the stolen-election myth in contributing to our nation’s current pathologies. A year ago, I naively thought of this as a great misunderstanding that could be addressed by naming a commission comprised of figures unassailably trusted by different elements of the political spectrum, tasked with rendering findings that would be accepted by all. Such is the state of distrust in the country, however, and such is the extent to which figures on the right are playing to popular Republican fears of election fraud, that any easy, definitive resolution of the problem is impossible.
But it cannot be ignored. Lost in the denunciations of the Jan. 6 rioters is the fact that given what they fervently believed, the revolutionary traditions of our nation tell us they were justified in what they did. This is tacitly understood and often openly asserted on the right; it is blindly unacknowledged on the left. You must change that.
Your messaging should acknowledge how horrific the prospect of election fraud would be — if it were true. That gives you and others the space to address whether it is indeed true rather than merely asserting the opposite. All the evidence is on the side of you and your de facto Republican allies.
More broadly, when faith in the integrity of elections is lost, any means of peaceful, legitimate redress of grievances is lost with it, and violence becomes justified. That is what makes the political opportunism of many on the right so self-destructively dangerous and why traditional conservatives, with your support, must address the issue — as many are, and in increasingly compelling terms.
But as you do so, it must be with humility, however hard that may be. Earnest magnanimity will help generate the credibility necessary to strongly oppose the pernicious efforts of Republican lawmakers in some states to wrest control of elections from nonpartisan local officials and place ultimate adjudication in the hands of highly partisan state lawmakers.
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Such efforts are underway in at least six states, most of them swing electoral states. These efforts would go further than anything else to debase our democratic institutions and must be resisted at all cost. Kristol is making precisely these distinctions, advocating for reform of the Electoral Count Act and in favor of the Freedom to Vote Act. He and those with him deserve your loud and constant support.
Local election officials and workers are just that — local. The faceless bureaucrats supposedly stealing elections are in fact our neighbors, upholding a long and consistent record of independent election integrity. That history — almost universally accepted until recently — places the burden of proof on those who wish to claim rampant fraud and is the natural counter to those who sophomorically press their fraud claims by stating that “you can’t prove there wasn’t.”
The experience of Maricopa County in Arizona is instructive. At Republican behest, a thorough study of the 2020 election results was conducted by a company called Cyber Ninjas, wholly unqualified for the job and populated largely by Republican partisans ignorant of election law and procedure. The result nonetheless was to widen your margin of victory. Of course, that didn’t stop them from also engaging in all manner of speculation about what might have gone wrong, all of which was thoroughly unsubstantiated and thus easily rebutted by election officials, many of whom were themselves Republican. But again, in a spirit of patient humility, such reviews should be touted by your fellow counterinsurgents as a means of allowing people to satisfy themselves on the matter. However messy, the results provide a recurring platform for election officials and secretaries of state to rebut conspiracies and misconceptions.
Meanwhile, to give those who are genuinely concerned about the potential for election fraud their due, and to underscore what should be the commitment of all to election integrity, the counter-insurgents should engage selectively on those aspects of recently introduced state voting bills that are transparently intended to reduce the turnout of the “wrong sort” of voters, while tolerating those which could indeed make it harder to engage in fraud — however unlikely or ahistorical those concerns may be. As one of your staff members is alleged to have said, in the end you have to out-organize your opponents, regardless of the election rules.
Root causes
Much is made of the urban-rural political divide in this country, which would be hard to overstate and which cuts across most aspects of life, from economics to religion to social values. It has been true for many years that “Trump’s America” has largely been left out of the benefits of globalism and the knowledge economy.
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In fact, you have done much of what’s possible in addressing this: There is a reason why the infrastructure bill, critically including rural broadband, was (somewhat) bipartisan, and conversely there is a reason why Trump attacks it, preferring to see its adherents’ continued suffering than to see you get the credit.
You and the counterinsurgents need to further reinforce the explicit link between retraining and green jobs, and the larger effort to address inequality and economic resentment — even if, for you, it means deflecting some political credit away from your Democratic allies.
Nonetheless, you and those you’re assisting in the effort to heal the civic and democratic soul of America must not view this as primarily an economic challenge. At its core, the motivation behind our incipient insurgency is cultural.
The culture wars
Right-wing concerns over uncomfortable social changes (e.g., trans rights) and rapidly changing demographics (exacerbated by immigration) have become almost inextricably tied to perceived liberal denigration of passionate conservative moral beliefs (e.g., concerning abortion), the evolution of our national narrative to take greater account of historical shortcomings (Confederate monuments and place names, the claimed teaching of “critical race theory”) and concern over government suppression of individual rights (vaccine and mask mandates, restrictive gun laws).
It has come to the point where all these issues are seen by many self-identified conservatives not on their individual merits, but as part of a concerted liberal conspiracy against their way of life. Concern with one immediately raises concerns with all the others. The effect of this conflation has been to make the country practically ungovernable, and to further stoke the sort of seething social discontent which frequently justifies and gives rise to violence.
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The fact that someone of the profile of Mr. Trump has made himself the champion of social conservatives is one of the abiding ironies of our time. And while you may have a greater affinity for conservative sentiments than those in the left wing of your own party, there is little you personally can do to address the cultural chasm. The task of saving conservatism from the lies, conspiracies and democratic norm-busting depredations of the Trumpists can be undertaken only within the conservative movement itself, by those who are your natural allies in this regard and to whom you should be reaching out quietly now.
You can help them, however, by pushing back on the more extreme and unpopular aspects of the social agenda being pressed by the left wing of your own party.
Rein in social media
Finally, it is critical that you and those with you in the counter-insurgency effort get behind common-sense regulation of social media. As recent revelations by industry insiders have made clear, these are not neutral forums for the exchange of ideas but instead places to aggregate, reinforce and promote extremist views for very clear commercial reasons. They are doing great social harm. The means to combat their most pernicious effects are at hand and indeed have been demonstrated, for example, in the U.K.
A final plea
Mr. President, the advice I am providing sets for you an uneasy task. What I advocate may well run counter to your short-term political interests and those of many in your party, whose support you need to realize your agenda. But I do believe that what is at stake is nothing less than the future cohesion and security of the nation, and the preservation of our democratic system. Ironically, the very democratic norms that we are trying to preserve preclude my help in safeguarding them. I cannot counsel you to act here as I would have counseled in Anbar Province. But that doesn’t mean we should not act at all. Given the stakes, you must try.
grid.news · by Robert Grenier






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

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

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

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