5/20/2021 National Security News and Commentary

Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“A society without the means to detect lies and theft soon squanders its liberty and freedom.”

- Chris Hedges

“It is not to political leaders our people must look, but to

themselves. Leaders are but individuals, and individuals are

imperfect, liable to error and weakness. The strength of the

nation will be the strength of the spirit of the whole people.”

- Michael Collins

Joint Publication 3-05, “Special Operations,”

a resistance movement is:

"An organized effort by some portion of the civil population

of a country to resist the legally established government or

an occupying power and to disrupt civil order and stability."

1. The United States, Joined by Allies and Partners, Attributes Malicious Cyber Activity and Irresponsible State Behavior to the People’s Republic of China

2. Constant but Camouflaged, Flurry of Cyberattacks Offer Glimpse of New Era

3. ‘A big blow’: Washington’s arms controllers brace for loss of their biggest backer

4. Chinese Disinformation Efforts on Social Media

5. 'We lost': Some U.S. veterans say blood spilled in Afghanistan was wasted

6. Biden opens new cyber fight with China

7. ODNI’s Critical Role in Cybersecurity: Facilitating Collaboration, Sharing, and A Combined Response to Foreign Threats

8. How Kissinger’s Secret Trip to China Transformed the Cold War

9. Why Strategic Ambiguity over Taiwan Stabilizes East Asia

10. US lacks credible response to Chinese hacking

11. Nobody is checking on bioweapons violations

12. What Is Happening to Our Apolitical Military?

13. Gen. Mark Milley Reminisces About the Battle of the Beltway

14. Britain to Permanently Deploy Two Warships in Asian Waters

15. China Dismisses U.S. Accusation of Global Hacking Campaign

16. Up to 200 Americans have reported possible "Havana Syndrome" symptoms

17. What Is Happening in Cuba? The Protests Against the Communist Regime

18. Why does America need Delta Force? An operator's perspective

19. Re-Thinking the Strategic Approach to Asymmetrical Warfare

20. The Hedgehogs of Critical Race Theory

1. The United States, Joined by Allies and Partners, Attributes Malicious Cyber Activity and Irresponsible State Behavior to the People’s Republic of China

The United States, Joined by Allies and Partners, Attributes Malicious Cyber Activity and Irresponsible State Behavior to the People’s Republic of China

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/07/19/the-united-states-joined-by-allies-and-partners-attributes-malicious-cyber-activity-and-irresponsible-state-behavior-to-the-peoples-republic-of-china/?utm

JULY 19, 2021

•

STATEMENTS AND RELEASES

The United States has long been concerned about the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) irresponsible and destabilizing behavior in cyberspace. Today, the United States and our allies and partners are exposing further details of the PRC’s pattern of malicious cyber activity and taking further action to counter it, as it poses a major threat to U.S. and allies’ economic and national security.

An unprecedented group of allies and partners – including the European Union, the United Kingdom, and NATO – are joining the United States in exposing and criticizing the PRC’s malicious cyber activities.

The PRC’s pattern of irresponsible behavior in cyberspace is inconsistent with its stated objective of being seen as a responsible leader in the world. Today, countries around the world are making it clear that concerns regarding the PRC’s malicious cyber activities is bringing them together to call out those activities, promote network defense and cybersecurity, and act to disrupt threats to our economies and national security.

Our allies and partners are a tremendous source of strength and a unique American advantage, and our collective approach to cyber threat information sharing, defense, and mitigation helps hold countries like China to account. Working collectively enhances and increases information sharing, including cyber threat intelligence and network defense information, with public and private stakeholders and expand diplomatic engagement to strengthen our collective cyber resilience and security cooperation. Today’s announcement builds on the progress made from the President’s first foreign trip. From the G7 and EU commitments around ransomware to NATO adopting a new cyber defense policy for the first time in seven years, the President is putting forward a common cyber approach with our allies and laying down clear expectations and markers on how responsible nations behave in cyberspace.

Today, in coordination with our allies, the Biden administration is:

Exposing the PRC’s use of criminal contract hackers to conduct unsanctioned cyber operations globally, including for their own personal profit.

The United States is deeply concerned that the PRC has fostered an intelligence enterprise that includes contract hackers who also conduct unsanctioned cyber operations worldwide, including for their own personal profit. As detailed in public charging documents unsealed in October 2018 and July and September 2020, hackers with a history of working for the PRC Ministry of State Security (MSS) have engaged in ransomware attacks, cyber enabled extortion, crypto-jacking, and rank theft from victims around the world, all for financial gain.

In some cases, we are aware that PRC government-affiliated cyber operators have conducted ransomware operations against private companies that have included ransom demands of millions of dollars. The PRC’s unwillingness to address criminal activity by contract hackers harms governments, businesses, and critical infrastructure operators through billions of dollars in lost intellectual property, proprietary information, ransom payments, and mitigation efforts.

[United States Department of Justice] imposing costs and announcing criminal charges against four MSS hackers.

The US Department of Justice is announcing criminal charges against four MSS hackers addressing activities concerning a multiyear campaign targeting foreign governments and entities in key sectors, including maritime, aviation, defense, education, and healthcare in a least a dozen countries. DOJ documents outline how MSS hackers pursued the theft of Ebola virus vaccine research and demonstrate that the PRC’s theft of intellectual property, trade secrets, and confidential business information extends to critical public health information. Much of the MSS activity alleged in the Department of Justice’s charges stands in stark contrast to the PRC’s bilateral and multilateral commitments to refrain from engaging in cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property for commercial advantage.

Attributing with a high degree of confidence that malicious cyber actors affiliated with PRC’s MSS conducted cyber espionage operations utilizing the zero-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server disclosed in early March 2021.

Before Microsoft released its security updates, MSS-affiliated cyber operators exploited these vulnerabilities to compromise tens of thousands of computers and networks worldwide in a massive operation that resulted in significant remediation costs for its mostly private sector victims.

We have raised our concerns about both this incident and the PRC’s broader malicious cyber activity with senior PRC Government officials, making clear that the PRC’s actions threaten security, confidence, and stability in cyberspace.

The Biden Administration’s response to the Microsoft Exchange incident has strengthened the USG’s Cyber Defenses.

In the past few months, we have focused on ensuring the MSS-affiliated malicious cyber actors were expelled from public and private sector networks and the vulnerability was patched and mitigated to prevent the malicious cyber actors from returning or causing additional damage.

As announced in April, the U.S. Government conducted cyber operations and pursued proactive network defense actions to prevent systems compromised through the Exchange Server vulnerabilities from being used for ransomware attacks or other malicious purposes. The United States will continue to take all appropriate steps to protect the American people from cyber threats. Following Microsoft’s original disclosure in early March 2021, the United States Government also identified other vulnerabilities in the Exchange Server software. Rather than withholding them, the United States Government recognized that these vulnerabilities could pose systemic risk and the National Security Agency notified Microsoft to ensure patches were developed and released to the private sector. We will continue to prioritize sharing vulnerability information with the private sector to secure the nation’s networks and infrastructure.
The U.S. Government announced and operated under a new model for cyber incident response by including private companies in the Cyber Unified Coordination Group (UCG) to address the Exchange Server vulnerabilities. The UCG is a whole-of-government coordination element stood up in response to a significant cyber incident. We credit those companies for being willing to collaborate with the United States Government in the face of a significant cyber incident that could have been substantially worse without key partnership of the private sector. We will build on this model to bolster public-private collaboration and information sharing between the United States Government and the private sector on cybersecurity.
Today, the National Security Agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation released a cybersecurity advisory to detail additional PRC state-sponsored cyber techniques used to target U.S. and allied networks, including those used when targeting the Exchange Server vulnerabilities. By exposing these techniques and providing actionable guidance to mitigate them, the U.S. Government continues to empower network defenders around the world to take action against cybersecurity threats. We will continue to provide such advisories to ensure companies and government agencies have actionable information to quickly defend their networks and protect their data.

The Biden Administration is working around the clock to modernize Federal networks and improve the nation’s cybersecurity, including of critical infrastructure.

The Administration has funded five cybersecurity modernization efforts across the Federal government to modernize network defenses to meet the threat. These include state-of-the-art endpoint security, improving logging practices, moving to a secure cloud environment, upgrading security operations centers, and deploying multi-factor authentication and encryption technologies.
The Administration is implementing President Biden’s Executive Order to improve the nation’s cybersecurity and protect Federal government networks. The E.O. contains aggressive but achievable implementation milestones, and to date we have met every milestone on time including:
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) convened a workshop with almost 1000 participants from industry, academia, and government to obtain input on best practices for building secure software.
NIST issued guidelines for the minimum standards that should be used by vendors to test the security of their software. This shows how we are leveraging federal procurement to improve the security of software not only used by the federal government but also used by companies, state and local governments, and individuals.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) published minimum elements for a Software Bill of Materials, as a first step to improve transparency of software used by the American public.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) established a framework to govern how Federal civilian agencies can securely use cloud services.
We continue to work closely with the private sector to address cybersecurity vulnerabilities of critical infrastructure. The Administration announced an Industrial Control System Cybersecurity Initiative in April and launched the Electricity Subsector Action Plan as a pilot. Under this pilot, we have already seen over 145 of 255 priority electricity entities that service over 76 million American customers adopt ICS cybersecurity monitoring technologies to date, and that number keeps growing. The Electricity Subsector pilot will be followed by similar pilots for pipelines, water, and chemical.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) issued Security Directive 1 to require critical pipeline owners and operators to adhere to cybersecurity standards. Under this directive, those owners and operators are required to report confirmed and potential cybersecurity incidents to CISA and to designate a Cybersecurity Coordinator, to be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The directive also requires critical pipeline owners and operators to review their current practices as well as to identify any gaps and related remediation measures to address cyber-related risks and report the results to TSA and CISA within 30 days. In days to come, TSA will issue Security Directive 2 to further support the pipeline industry in enhancing its cybersecurity and that strengthen the public-private partnership so critical to the cybersecurity of our homeland.

By exposing the PRC’s malicious activity, we are continuing the Administration’s efforts to inform and empower system owners and operators to act. We call on private sector companies to follow the Federal government’s lead and take ambitious measures to augment and align cybersecurity investments with the goal of minimizing future incidents.

###

2. Constant but Camouflaged, Flurry of Cyberattacks Offer Glimpse of New Era

It's a brave new world.

Excerpts:

Rather than resembling a new kind of war, hacking is coming to play a role in the 21st century much like espionage did in the 20th, analysts and former officials believe. It is a never-ending cat-and-mouse game played by small states and great powers alike. Adversarial, even hostile, but tolerated within limits. Sometimes punished or prevented, but assumed to be constant.

But there is one important difference, experts say. The tools of espionage are mostly wielded by governments against other governments. The almost democratic nature of hacking — cheaper than setting up an intelligence agency — means that private individuals can get involved too, further muddying the digital waters. And, because it easily scales, almost no target is too small, leaving virtually anyone exposed.

...

The shifting landscape hints at the gap between what policymakers expected of the cyberconflict era and what it actually became. Major attacks like Washington’s against Iran or Russia’s during the 2016 elections happen less frequently than feared.

Rather, the new normal is small but constant hacks. Chinese-sponsored criminals raiding dozens of companies over years. Paranoid officials snooping on a local journalist, rival politician — or even nutrition advocates pushing for a soda tax. And all increasingly conducted through third parties or private software that may be less sophisticated but is easier to spread and easier to deny.

No one such hack is likely to upend the international order. But, cumulatively, they suggest a coming era of omnipresent digital theft, influence peddling and snooping. And it may now be a time in which, as many of the reported Pegasus victims learned this week, almost no one is too pedestrian to be targeted.

Constant but Camouflaged, Flurry of Cyberattacks Offer Glimpse of New Era

The New York Times · by Max Fisher · July 20, 2021

The Interpreter

Once imagined as a new kind of warfare, government-linked hacking has instead become a widespread and perhaps permanent feature of the global order.

A building at an address listed for NSO Group in Herzliya, Israel. A report found that governments used the company’s software to monitor journalists, rights workers and politicians.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times

July 20, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET

The world woke up on Monday to revelations of a sort that have become disconcertingly routine.

Chinese hackers had breached governments and universities in a yearslong campaign to steal scientific research, according to a U.S. Justice Department indictment.

Separately, several governments, including the Biden administration, accused Beijing of hiring criminal hackers to infiltrate the world’s largest companies and governments for profit.

Only hours before, a consortium of news agencies reported that governments worldwide have used spyware sold by an Israeli company to monitor journalists, rights workers, opposition politicians and foreign heads of state.

The rush of allegations represent what cybersecurity and foreign policy experts say is a new normal of continuous, government-linked hacking that may now be a permanent feature of the global order.

Governments have become cannier at exploiting the connectivity of the digital era to advance their interests and weaken their enemies. So have freelance hackers who often sell their services to states, blurring the line between international cyberconflict and everyday crime.

Hacking has become a widely used tool of statecraft, oppression and raw economic gain. It is cheap, powerful, easy to outsource and difficult to trace. Anyone with a computer or smartphone is vulnerable.

And hacking bears a trait common to the most destabilizing weapons in history, from medieval siege devices to nuclear arms: It is far more effective for offensive than defensive use.

Still, after a decade in which military planners worried that cyberconflict might lead to the real thing, the emerging dangers of this new era are somewhat different than once imagined.

Competition Within Bounds

President Obama speaking about Russian hacking during the election in December 2016.Credit...Al Drago/The New York Times

Since the first international cyberattacks in the 1990s, policymakers have worried that one government might go too far in targeting another’s systems, risking an escalation to war.

By 2010, Washington had institutionalized its view of cyberspace as a “war-fighting domain,” alongside land, sea, air and space, to be dominated by a new military outfit called Cyber Command. Hacking was seen as a new kind of warfare to be deterred and, if necessary, won.

But many attacks have been more spycraft than warfare.

China’s operators nabbed commercial and military patents. Russia’s broke into U.S. government emails and, later, released some to achieve a political impact. The Americans monitored foreign officials and slipped viruses into hostile governments’ systems.

Governments began treating foreign hackers more like foreign spies. They would disrupt a plot, indict or sanction the individuals directly responsible and chastise or punish the government behind it.

In 2015, after a series of such episodes, Washington reached an agreement with Beijing to limit hacking. Chinese attacks on American targets dropped immediately, some cybersecurity groups concluded. They spiked again in 2018 amid a rise in tensions under President Donald J. Trump, hinting at a new norm in which digital assaultsrise and fall with diplomatic relations.

Though governments largely abandoned military-style deterrence, they have come to punish especially severe attacks. North Korea suffered countrywide internet outages shortly after President Barack Obama said Washington would retaliate for North Korean hacking. He considered similar options against Russia for its attacks during the 2016 elections.

“Our goal continues to be to send a clear message to Russia or others not to do this to us, because we can do stuff to you,” he said shortly before leaving office. “Some of it, we will do publicly. Some of it we will do in a way that they know, but not everybody will.”

A New Gray Zone

A power plant in Moscow, Russia. American hackers infiltrated Russia’s power grid as retaliation for the country’s meddling in the U.S. election.Credit...Maxim Shemetov/Reuters

By the end of the decade, many military and intelligence planners had come around to a view articulated by Joshua Rovner, who was scholar-in-residence at the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command until 2019.

In almost all cases, Mr. Rovner wrote in an essay for the site War on the Rocks, hacking had become not a kind of war but “an open-ended competition among rival states” that resembles, and is often an extension of, espionage.

That new understanding “puts the cyberspace competition in perspective,” he added, “but it requires a willingness to live with ambiguity.”

Espionage contests are never won. They carry gains and losses for all sides, and they operate in what military theorists call a “gray zone” that is neither war nor peace.

As governments have learned which operations will draw what sort of response, the world has gradually converged on unwritten rules for cyber-competition.

The scholars Michael P. Fischerkeller and Richard J. Harknett have described the result as “competitive interaction within those boundaries, rather than spiraling escalation to new levels of conflict.”

It is not that governments promise never to cross those bounds. Rather, they understand that doing so will bring certain punishments that may not be worth enduring.

The scholars called these norms “still in a formative phase,” waiting to be proven out by governments testing one another’s tolerance and the consequences of exceeding it. But they have gelled enough that the accepted contours are coming into view.

Mr. Obama’s reference to secret and public retaliations hinted at what has since become standard procedure. Routine hacks may provoke a secret retaliation — for instance taking down government systems responsible for the incident, to punish without risking escalation or a broader diplomatic breakdown.

But governments may answer major hacks with a public counterattack, signaling to the target and other governments that the incident went too far. The United States, for instance, let it be known that its hackers infiltrated Russia’s power grid, a calibrated escalation meant to convince Moscow that election meddling was not worth the trouble.

Russia’s 2016 conduct also led officials to pursue “deterrence by denial” — methods to make similar hacks less likely to succeed. The goal was to raise the cost of such attacks while reducing their benefit.

President Biden, in arraying world governments to condemn Chinese cybertheft this week, is attempting to impose a diplomatic cost to which Beijing may be more sensitive than Moscow. It is a tactic that appeared to work under Mr. Obama. But, with relations souring, Beijing may feel it has less to lose.

A Decentralized Danger

Students during a cyber security class at a school in New York City. Experts say that influence peddling and snooping are going to be the new normal in the coming era of cyber conflict.Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

There is little that can truly prevent governments from choosing to accept the risks that come with initiating a cyberattack. And, because offensive cybertechnology has so consistently outpaced defensive measures, some of those hacks will inevitably succeed.

That dynamic is only accelerating, analysts and officials say, as governments shift more of their hacking to private firms and outright criminals. Moscow was an early innovator, hiring freelance hackers abroad, including a 20-year-old Canadian, to infiltrate American government accounts.

The hacker-for-hire shadow industry has exploded in recent years. Security researchers have identified highly skilled groups targeting governments, legal and financial firms, real estate developers, Middle Eastern energy companies and the World Health Organization.

Most are thought to be hired through dark web platforms that offer anonymity for both parties. Though their labors seem to benefit certain governments or corporations, identifying their employer is often impossible, reducing the risk of retaliation.

Globalization and advances in consumer technology have opened a near-bottomless pool of hackers-for-hire. Many are thought to be young people in economically troubled countries, where legitimate work is scarce, especially during the pandemic. Off-the-shelf hacking software and expanding broadband allows almost anyone to put out a shingle.

Some operate openly. An Indian firm offered to help clients snoop on business rivals and partners. The Pegasus software at the center of this week’s allegations of worldwide hacks on journalists and dissidents is sold by NSO Group, an Israeli company.

The New York Times · by Max Fisher · July 20, 2021

3. ‘A big blow’: Washington’s arms controllers brace for loss of their biggest backer

A significant event. I wonder if this is the tip of the iceberg. Will other philanthropic organizations cease funding national security organizations?

‘A big blow’: Washington’s arms controllers brace for loss of their biggest backer

Politico

The MacArthur Foundation’s decision to stop funding nuclear policy work threatens to silence key voices amid fears of a new arms race.

For more than 40 years, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has been a primary benefactor of a host of non-profit research centers, academic programs and grassroots organizations dedicated to reversing the spread of nuclear weapons. | Mark Wilson/Getty Images

07/19/2021 11:21 AM EDT

For the Washington think tanks and foundations that work to control the spread of nuclear weapons, the Doomsday Clock is inching closer to midnight.

That’s because a leading financial backer of their efforts to reduce nuclear proliferation is ending its support, sending shockwaves through arms control institutions that are already struggling to remain influential.

For more than 40 years, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, one of the largest philanthropic organizations in the United States, has been a primary benefactor of a host of non-profit research centers, academic programs and grassroots organizations dedicated to reversing the spread of nuclear weapons and training a generation of arms control experts.

Since 2015 alone, MacArthur directed 231 grants totaling more than $100 million to “nuclear challenges” — in some cases providing more than half the annual funding for individual institutions or programs.

But its recent conclusion that it wasn't achieving its goals and decision to pull out of the arena could be detrimental without alternative sources of funding, according to multiple veterans of the nuclear policy community.

"It's a big blow for the field," said Joan Rohlfing, president and COO of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a non-profit organization dedicated to stemming the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction that has been one of the largest recipients of MacArthur’s grants. “It is moving in the opposite direction of the needs of the community right now.”

Indeed, while she said the MacArthur grants make up only a small share of NTI’s budget, the move couldn't come at a worse time for the wider community of nuclear policy practitioners.

“The threat of nuclear use is growing,” she said. “This is one of the most dangerous periods in our history since the bomb was created.”

Rohlfing cited a litany of worrying trends: “the complexity of nine nuclear weapons states; the tension between nuclear weapons states; things like cyber vulnerabilities to nuclear systems; rising and continuing threat of nuclear terrorism.”

They “all contribute to an extremely dangerous threat environment,” she added. "Now is the time to be really investing more resources in innovation for problem solving within this space."

Other leaders in reducing global nuclear threats are similarly concerned. “We are at a crossroads right now,” added Emma Belcher, president of the Ploughshares Fund, another leading philanthropy focused on nuclear disarmament. “We really need a strong civil society to produce that independent analysis to inform the public and hold governments accountable.”

MacArthur’s unexpected decision was revealed in June with little explanation, in a report published on its website.

"We know that our decision to exit after 2023 will have a wide-ranging impact on the nuclear field," the foundation told POLITICO in a statement in response to questions. "It was a hard decision, and not one we made lightly."

The foundation says that while its decision was based on a number of factors, it cited an assessment it completed last year that concluded it had no “line of sight” to achieve its latest "big bet" on the nuclear front of halting the production of new bomb material.

The foundation stresses, however, that it is not pulling its funding immediately. It is engaged in a three-year, $30 million "capstone" effort to tackle nuclear challenges before it winds down the support in two years.

That final round of funding is aimed at developing a more diverse pipeline of experts, mitigating the security risks of nuclear power and to "rethink” long held assumptions about how to deter nuclear conflict, according to MacArthur.

But "at the conclusion of the capstone grants in 2023," it told POLITICO, "MacArthur will exit the nuclear field." The funding is expected to be directed to a host of other policy work and issues the foundation supports, from combating climate change to education and public health.

That could be dire news to a host of major beneficiaries of MacArthur funding over the years.

Other major recipients of funding are the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where then-Vice President Joe Biden laid out his nuclear policy vision in 2017, and the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, which has trained a generation of government nuclear experts.

Some organizations depend on the foundation for a major share of their annual budgets.

For example, the Arms Control Association, a Washington think tank with a $1.6 million budget, last fall was awarded a one-year, $400,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

Daryl Kimball, the organization's executive director, said he remains puzzled as to why, if MacArthur determined it could not meet the goals it had set in the nuclear area, it didn’t just change its strategy.

“It would be a mistake to believe that nuclear weapons no longer pose an existential threat to humanity,” Kimball said in an interview. “Investments in civil society efforts to halt and reverse [the] growing global nuclear arms race and get back on the path towards a world without nuclear weapons are as important, if not more important and urgent, than ever.”

Robert Gallucci, a former president of MacArthur and diplomat who helped secure Russian nuclear weapons after the Cold War and negotiated with North Korea over its nuclear program, called the decision "unwise and profoundly regrettable."

He also cited "the continuing threat to national and international security presented by the possession and spread of nuclear weapons."

The organization that has been operating the Doomsday Clock, a measure of the risk of global annihilation, has also been dependent on MacArthur for decades.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which was founded in 1945 by the scientists who invented the atomic bomb to engage the public on the risks of the nuclear age, received a $700,000 grant two years ago, said Rachel Bronson, the president and CEO. It’s annual budget is $2.8 million.

“The percentage that goes into the community from MacArthur is a big deal,” she said. “They’ve gotten us through some very difficult times. It’s really disappointing they are stepping away.”

The clock, which is now at 100 seconds to midnight, she added, is “the closest it's ever been to midnight in the history of the clock.”

Another group that is bracing for fallout is the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, which says it has relied on MacArthur for more than half of its funding.

“MacArthur was providing something like 40 to 55 percent of all the funding worldwide of the non-government funding worldwide on nuclear policy,” said Matthew Bunn, who directs the program.

Without such support, Bunn and others worry about losing voices that have shaped nuclear policy in Washington and beyond for decades.

He has outlined a series of nuclear policy decisions that were influenced by such nongovernmental organizations.

One is the Global Threat Reduction Initiative initiated during the George W. Bush administration and expanded on under former President Barack Obama that removed supplies of highly enriched uranium, the key ingredient for atomic bombs, from vulnerable reactors around the world.

Another was the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia, which was ratified by the U.S. Senate in 2010, and extended for another five years by President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin in January.

“A reasonable case can be made that had the non-government community funded by MacArthur not existed, the treaty might not have been ratified,” Bunn contends. “Had that happened, we would today be in a world with no limits at all on U.S. or Russian nuclear forces, for the first time in half a century.”

Some have even argued that nuclear arms control and disarmament groups played a significant role in ending the Cold War.

More recently, leading beneficiaries of MacArthur funding such as the Arms Control Association and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists have also been on the front lines in the fight to scale back a series of new nuclear weapons.

For example, they have been pressing Congress to cut or cancel the Air Force’s new intercontinental ballistic missile and reverse the decision in 2019 to deploy a new low-yield warhead on submarines.

Many of these programs have also been incubators for generations of nuclear experts, including those who have filled top positions on the National Security Council and at the State, Defense and Energy Departments.

One high-profile example: Bonnie Jenkins, Biden's nominee to be undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, who studied at the Harvard program.

MacArthur’s decision to back out also comes as other leading philanthropies in the nuclear area have either pulled out or curtailed their level of funding in recent years, including the Ford Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, Skoll Foundation and W. Alton Jones Foundation.

"There is no obvious successor," said Rohlfing at NTI. "We're going to need to work hard to develop new relationships with donors and help make the case for why this is important."

The Ploughshares Fund’s Belcher, who also previously oversaw MacArthur’s nuclear challenges portfolio, said the wider community will need to rethink how it raises money.

“The nuclear danger is growing,” she said. “I think looking at traditional foundations might not be the answer. I think this is an area that could be very attractive for people who haven't invested in this before — entrepreneurs in their own right who may have more of a tech background. We could tap into a type of different funding than we’ve seen before.”

“I think for more savvy and dedicated, maybe daring investors, there’s a real opportunity," she added. "The field is ripe for investment."

POLITICO

Politico

4. Chinese Disinformation Efforts on Social Media

Perfect timing for the release of this report. The 207 page report can be downloaded here: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR4300/RR4373z3/RAND_RR4373z3.pdf

Although this appears to be somewhat Air Force centric (it is from RAND Project AIR FORCE) the findings and recommendations apply across the military and beyond.

Chinese Disinformation Efforts on Social Media

by Scott W. Harold, Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga, Jeffrey W. Hornung

rand.org · by Scott W. Harold

Given rising tensions between the United States and China, understanding how the People's Liberation Army thinks about the use of disinformation campaigns on social media has emerged as an important question. The authors of this report identify key Chinese practices and the supporting infrastructure and conditions that such campaigns require to be successful, concluding that China is using Taiwan as a test bed for developing attack vectors.

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Research Questions

How does China think about and engage in disinformation campaigns via social media in advance of or during a conflict?
How might China employ a social media disinformation campaign that targets the United States; the U.S. armed forces; and, specifically, the U.S. Air Force?

The Chinese military's focus on information warfare is expanding to include information operations on social media. Given the possibility of U.S.-China conflict over Taiwan or another regional contingency, understanding how the People's Liberation Army (PLA) thinks about the use of disinformation campaigns on social media has emerged as an important question for U.S. national security policymakers and defense planners. This report describes how the PLA might direct social media disinformation campaigns against the United States and its armed forces, especially the U.S. Air Force. The authors conducted interviews with regional experts during three trips to Asia and reviewed Chinese-language writings and analyses of publicly attributed, or at least reasonably suspected, examples of Chinese disinformation and other malign social media activity on both Chinese and foreign platforms. The authors identify key Chinese practices and the supporting infrastructure and conditions needed to engage in successful social media disinformation campaigns and conclude that China is using Taiwan as a test bed for developing attack vectors. The authors recommend being competitive in shaping and countering messages on social media, working to engage and protect Chinese-American service members (China's most likely targets), and incorporating adversary social media disinformation into future wargames.

Key Findings

China is treating Taiwan as a test bed for developing attack vectors using disinformation on social media.
To date, in the case of Taiwan, China's use of disinformation has achieved mixed and somewhat limited results that are primarily in the political, not operational, domain.
China has not carried out substantial disinformation attacks on other U.S. allies or partners (such as Singapore, the Philippines, or Japan).
Nonetheless, as Chinese disinformation during the COVID-19 crisis has shown, Chinese disinformation campaigns will likely be used to target the United States in the event of a crisis or conflict. As China moves to incorporate social media further into its military operations, it will increasingly engage in some level of shaping operations during what Western observers would consider the preconflict stage.
Should outright kinetic exchanges appear imminent or actually occur, an elevated level of disinformation should be expected, accompanied by messages aimed at such key groups as senior political and military leaders, service members and their families, and base-hosting communities.
Given China's control over the Chinese-language social media platform WeChat and a general belief among China authors that the global ethnic Chinese diaspora is a favorable vector of influence for Beijing to leverage, China will likely seek to communicate directly with Chinese-American military officers and personnel and their families, attempting to turn them against any U.S. policies or operations that China finds objectionable.
Chinese disinformation efforts also will likely seek to introduce information that is difficult for the United States to definitively refute, either because doing so would require revealing classified information or because it is impossible to disprove a negative.

Recommendations

The Air Force should incorporate adversary social media disinformation into wargaming.
The Air Force should engage communities around U.S. bases and overseas military installations to build trust.
The Air Force should raise awareness of PLA malign activity online.
The joint force and/or the U.S. government should train the joint force and the broader Department of Defense workforce to recognize and resist foreign (and in this case, specifically Chinese) disinformation campaigns.
The joint force and/or the U.S. government should explore the advantages and opportunities of using human versus technological solutions to identify and possibly counter or defeat disinformation efforts.
The joint force and/or the U.S. government should establish a trusted presence in all important social media platforms used across the Indo-Pacific as a way to compete in the information domain.
The joint force and/or the U.S. government should establish a presence on Chinese-language social media platforms so as not to cede these valuable communications territories to the PRC government uncontested.
The joint force and/or the U.S. government should engage Chinese-American and Taiwanese-American military personnel and provide them with resources to identify and defeat Chinese disinformation operations that they might be exposed to.
The joint force and/or the U.S. government should engage with allies and/or partners to share information and best practices for identifying and countering Chinese disinformation on social media.
The joint force and/or the U.S. government should assess where best to allocate scarce resources—countering Chinese disinformation operations or responding to other forms of Chinese influence and interference operations.

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Yet U.S. officials had long realized that the strategic geometry of the Cold War would be altered momentously if China could be pulled away from the Soviet Union. And they doubted that the two Communist giants could coexist forever. During the 1950s, the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration had used unorthodox measures to hasten that split — putting extreme economic and military pressure on Beijing in hopes that Mao would then make excessive demands for support from Moscow.

By the late 1960s, that relationship had fractured, due more to ideological and geopolitical strains than U.S. policy. China and the USSR were on the brink of war. Mao, totally isolated after the madness of the Cultural Revolution, decided that he must use the “far barbarians” (the Americans) to keep the “near barbarians” (the Soviets) at bay.

The result, as I recount in my new book, “The Twilight Struggle,” was a subtle diplomatic dance that led to Kissinger’s trip to Beijing, followed by Nixon’s visit the next year, followed by the rise of a tacit alliance that transformed the Cold War. The Soviet Union now had to contain two powerful rivals that were working to counter it; it had to worry about a two-front war against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and China.

The new partnership also facilitated the economic reforms that would move China toward capitalist prosperity after Mao’s death, thereby driving an ideological dagger into the heart of Moscow’s stagnating socialist model.

Beijing, for its part, broke its international isolation, gaining access to global institutions and the world economy. It started to receive valuable intelligence, technology and military goods from the U.S., as well as aid, trade and investment from close American allies such as Japan. In many ways, the opening forged by Kissinger created the global conditions for China’s rise.

Fifty years later, this may seem like a terrible mistake — that the U.S. created a geopolitical monster while naively assuming that monster would mellow. Yet Kissinger and Nixon were initially quite realistic.

The Chinese, Kissinger wrote, were “tough ideologues who totally disagree with us on where the world is going.” The administration understood that re-establishing ties required some nasty moral compromises — such as abandoning Taiwan, one of America’s most loyal allies, and toasting Mao. The ethical price of reconciliation was high, but not higher than the moral and strategic benefits that came from outmaneuvering Moscow and winning the Cold War.

The real trouble came later. The Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 and collapse of the Soviet Union two years later should have promoted a fundamental re-evaluation of U.S. policy and an end to the marriage of geopolitical convenience that had been sealed in 1971.

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Instead, the heady atmosphere of the unipolar era led the U.S. to triple down on engagement with China, in hopes that the forces of globalization and liberalization would eventually transform a brutal, tenacious regime that had no interest in being transformed. And the inertia of that policy, plus the fact that the U.S. got hooked on trade with China, caused it to persist for at least a decade after its flaws were clear.

Right now, there is no hope for a near-term improvement in U.S.-China relations. The search for a major diplomatic breakthrough could actually be dangerous if it distracts Washington from urgent measures to shore up its defenses in the military, technological and economic realms of the competition. But the Kissinger-Nixon opening to China is, if nothing else, a reminder that the bitterest enemies do occasionally reconcile — even if it takes many years and a lot of turmoil for that to happen.

As my Bloomberg bio states, I am the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University, a fact that hasn’t stopped me from being plenty critical of Kissinger before.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:

Hal Brands at Hal.Brands@jhu.edu

To contact the editor responsible for this story:

Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net

9. Why Strategic Ambiguity over Taiwan Stabilizes East Asia

Excerpts:

By revising the policy of strategic ambiguity in favor of a formal defense commitment, the United States would be altering the “all or nothing” deterrent facing China. It would also force U.S. allies to take a less self-interested approach when addressing Chinese assertiveness. Especially given Japan’s vulnerability over long-standing territorial disputes with China, a Manichaean choice between the Washington and Beijing would leave Tokyo with less room for diplomacy, its preferred tool. For Japan, embarking on a “zero-sum” security competition with China is a losing proposition given the bilateral disparities in economic and military strength. Thus, while strategic ambiguity is a policy designed for Taiwan, it also accommodates a treaty ally’s justifiable wariness about initiating military showdowns with China if they can be avoided.

Taiwan is, The Economist noted in May, “the most dangerous place on earth”. While opponents of strategic ambiguity find fault in its subtleties, it isn’t simply bureaucratic inertia that led American presidents over the last four decades to maintain it. By placing the onus on China to upend the status quo, the United States is minimizing the risks and costs while stabilizing, as best it can, an incredibly tense arrangement in East Asia.

Why Strategic Ambiguity over Taiwan Stabilizes East Asia

19fortyfive.com · by ByMatthew Mai · July 19, 2021

Japan, America’s closest ally in Asia, has been raising the alarm over Taiwan in recent days. Last week, a new white paper from the Defense Ministry called for “stabilizing the situation surrounding Taiwan” given that the geopolitical climate has “a sense of crisis more than ever before”. This echoes comments made by the Japanese Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso last week who noted that a “major incident” over Taiwan would be viewed as a direct threat to his country’s security. These headlines are a reminder about why the U.S. policy of strategic ambiguity—which has helped avoid a crisis—remains valuable today.

For its part, the Biden administration has been forthcoming in acknowledging that it is not looking to upset the status quo in the Taiwan Strait. Indo-Pacific Coordinator Kurt Campbell recently reiterated that the United States does “not support Taiwan independence.” And in a telling clarification, Japan’s deputy prime minister backtracked his previous comments into the official position.

It is apparent that both the Biden administration and the Japanese government seem to understand that maintaining the long-standing policy of strategic ambiguity is critical to keeping the peace in East Asia.

Yet, as China has grown stronger and more assertive, there has been a corresponding increase in calls for the United States to abandon this posture. Advocates for abandoning strategic ambiguity argue that the United States must set a clear “red line” that deters Chinese aggression toward Taiwan. If Beijing knows for certain what lines cannot be crossed, then it makes it less likely that it will attempt an invasion through a fait accompli, or as security researcher Michael Kofman succinctly puts it, “winning without fighting because you expect the other side not to show up.”

However, these policy revisionists underappreciate the prudence of strategic ambiguity.

Strategic ambiguity acts as a stabilizing force in U.S.-China relations. For all of Beijing’s bluster, the Chinese leadership is rational enough to understand that the risks and costs of changing the status quo will fall disproportionately on them. Unless the United States acts first and attempts to formally incorporate Taiwan into its regional security framework, the ball is in China’s court.

China is strongly motivated by historical and political concerns to reassert its control over Taiwan. But without complete certainty about the nature of the United States’ defense commitment, the urgency behind reunification is largely dependent on how much Beijing is willing to risk to regain what it regards as a breakaway province.

Taiwan may be small, but it is by no means an easy or “soft” target. If reunification is the ultimate objective—and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) maintains that it is—then Beijing better be willing to pay a high price. Taiwan’s reliance on an “asymmetric defense” strategy through the use of sea mines, anti-ship missiles, and high-tech guerrilla warfare will cost the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in blood and treasure. Moreover, the limited number of beaches available for an amphibious assault are hardly desirable landing points for an invasion as they are rugged and overshadowed by cliffs. A poor cross-strait weather climate only increases the friction for an invader. Once onshore, hundreds of mountainous peaks and sprawling urban jungles defended by two million nationalistic Taiwanese await the untested PLA.

China knows that a quick and easy takeover of Taiwan is unlikely making preemption an undesirable option. Furthermore, a protracted and costly war would weaken the internal legitimacy of the CCP, not to mention give outside powers the opportunity to tacitly intervene by providing material assistance to Taipei to keep the conflict going.

Matthew Mai was a Marcellus Policy Fellow with the John Quincy Adams Society in the fall of 2020.

19fortyfive.com · by ByMatthew Mai · July 19, 2021

10. US lacks credible response to Chinese hacking

Excerpts:

Anyone who reads the full listing and goes over the “Defensive Tactics and Techniques” will immediately recognize that implementing any of them would take a cyber army of sophisticated experts and, in any event, might not work at all.

There is also an Appendix B in the report called “MITRE ATT&CK Framework,” otherwise known as the MITRE Adversarial Tactics, Techniques and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK®) framework. The framework is “an open framework and knowledge base of adversary tactics and techniques based on real-world observations.”

Over the years the Pentagon has tried to put into operation comprehensive security measures for its computing assets, but has largely failed to consistently apply measures or even figure out how to authenticate how well security steps have been implemented.

One of the underlying problems is shifting personnel and support contractors. But there also are funding limitations, lack of skilled personnel, indifference and demands to keep networks running even if they are vulnerable because they are needed for urgent military requirements.

One of the reasons the DOD saw the JEDI contract as of critical importance is it would have consolidated many of the diverse networks into one cloud environment. Unfortunately, no one seems to have considered the vulnerability of a single cloud for surviving a national security disaster, and that was before the extent of Chinese hacks of Microsoft Exchange servers was known.

The US government needs to reconsider its entire approach to network security, but despite an exponential rise in cybercrime and cyber disruptions, the prospect for this happening remains low.

US lacks credible response to Chinese hacking

US government needs to overhaul its entire approach to network security but there is reason to doubt that will happen

asiatimes.com · by Stephen Bryen · July 20, 2021

A new report by the US National Security Agency (NSA), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reveals just how difficult, if not impossible it is, to fix cyber vulnerabilities caused by Chinese-supported intrusions.

It does not offer an alternative to current-day computing networks and is indifferent to Cloud-based networks as being any more secure than wired networks.

The bottom line is that the critical infrastructure, which includes key industries, business, government and military systems, remains hostage to Chinese hacking and represents a major national security danger to the US and its allies, far surpassing the Russian ransomware attacks that also have hit some infrastructure targets.

The report is titled “Chinese State-Sponsored Cyber Operations: Observed TTPs.”

A key finding of the report is the massive intrusion of Microsoft Exchange servers, which Microsoft advertises as “efficient and secure.” The report makes clear this is not the case.

The Microsoft Exchange server supports Microsoft 365, which includes the Microsoft product line including Office, Skype for Business, PowerPoint, Planner, some Mobile Apps and Outlook email. It is cloud-based.

On July 6, the US Defense Department canceled a US$10 billion master cloud contract with Microsoft under a program called JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure). While all public reporting has pointed to a dispute between the government and Amazon, a competitor for the JEDI contract, by July the DOD would have been well aware of Chinese hacking and Microsoft’s vulnerabilities, as the NSA is run by the Defense Department.

TTPs are jargon for “tactics, techniques and procedures” and refers to the different ways China and hackers China hires to carry out attacks on “US and allied political, economic, military, educational and critical infrastructure (CI) personnel and organizations to steal sensitive data, critical and emerging key technologies, intellectual property and personally identifiable information (PII).

“Some target sectors include managed service providers, semiconductor companies, the Defense Industrial Base (DIB), universities and medical institutions. These cyber operations support China’s long-term economic and military development objectives.”

The Microsoft Exchange servers were a target. Photo: AFP / Sebastian Kahnert / dpa

China’s ability to respond

The report goes through a long list of ways Chinese-led hackers penetrate US and allied networks, including even tracking what the US and allied cybersecurity community is doing to protect networks in order to circumvent and blunt security efforts.

One of the top techniques is China’s ability to rapidly respond to any report of a new vulnerability. When such a vulnerability is revealed, often first in technical literature and well before patches or other remedial steps can be taken to fix any hole in a networked or stand-alone system, Chinese hackers undertake a mass effort to use knowledge of the unpatched and unrepaired vulnerabilities to go after top targets.

Much of this involves the theft of intellectual property, which includes national security-related new technology or products, commercial and business proprietary information and increasingly medical research data, such as information on new drugs, treatments and vaccines.

Some of the Communist Party elite have ownership of Chinese Pharma companies, largely through their children and grandchildren.

There is no official estimate on how much has actually been stolen from the United States. The author believes that a large part of the US research and development (R&D) budget has been compromised by China.

One feature of research grants from organizations such as the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is that most of the funds go to work that isn’t classified and where encryption and file protection is more the exception than the rule.

Anytime US universities or independent researchers carry out sensitive work, most of the time they do so on the margins of the public domain, making cyber protection very difficult if not impossible.

China, according to the report, is also using a variety of attack modes, including the use of ransomware. Chinese-supported hackers use virtual private networks (VPNs) almost in the same way as using “burner” phones to hide their hack operations.

A VPN gateway. Photo: AFP / Maxim Tumanov / Sputnik

No easy fix

A VPN is an encrypted network that hides the actual user and shields the user from discovery. By regularly changing VPNs, the Chinese hackers make it difficult for security agencies to go after the hack sources.

The most important part of the report, however, is found in Appendix A: “Chinese State-Sponsored Cyber Actors’ Observed Procedures.” It goes into significant detail on at least 41 “procedures” used by Chinese hackers and offers suggestions on how to try and protect against such hacks.

Anyone who reads the full listing and goes over the “Defensive Tactics and Techniques” will immediately recognize that implementing any of them would take a cyber army of sophisticated experts and, in any event, might not work at all.

There is also an Appendix B in the report called “MITRE ATT&CK Framework,” otherwise known as the MITRE Adversarial Tactics, Techniques and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK®) framework. The framework is “an open framework and knowledge base of adversary tactics and techniques based on real-world observations.”

Over the years the Pentagon has tried to put into operation comprehensive security measures for its computing assets, but has largely failed to consistently apply measures or even figure out how to authenticate how well security steps have been implemented.

One of the underlying problems is shifting personnel and support contractors. But there also are funding limitations, lack of skilled personnel, indifference and demands to keep networks running even if they are vulnerable because they are needed for urgent military requirements.

One of the reasons the DOD saw the JEDI contract as of critical importance is it would have consolidated many of the diverse networks into one cloud environment. Unfortunately, no one seems to have considered the vulnerability of a single cloud for surviving a national security disaster, and that was before the extent of Chinese hacks of Microsoft Exchange servers was known.

The US government needs to reconsider its entire approach to network security, but despite an exponential rise in cybercrime and cyber disruptions, the prospect for this happening remains low.

asiatimes.com · by Stephen Bryen · July 20, 2021

11. Nobody is checking on bioweapons violations

Is COVID 19 a warning to the world?

Excerpt:

Bill Clinton and his administration tried various ways to regulate and inspect, but had little success.

In January 1998, seeking to break the deadlock, the Clinton administration proposed reduced verification requirements. Nations could limit their declarations to facilities “especially suitable” for bioweapons uses, such as vaccine production facilities.

Random or routine inspections of these facilities would instead be “voluntary” visits or limited challenge inspections – but only if approved by the executive council of a to-be-created international agency monitoring the bioweapons treaty.

But even this failed to achieve consensus among the international negotiators.

Finally, in July 2001, the George W Bush administration rejected the Clinton proposal – ironically, on the grounds that it was not strong enough to detect cheating. With that, the negotiations collapsed.

Since then, nations have made no serious effort to establish a verification system for the Biological Weapons Convention.

Even with the amazing advances scientists have made in genetic engineering since the 1970s, there are few signs that countries are interested in taking up the problem again.

This is especially true in today’s climate of accusations against China, and China’s refusal to fully cooperate to determine the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Nobody is checking on bioweapons violations

The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention is now widely circumvented and ignored – to the world's peril

asiatimes.com · by Gary Samore · July 20, 2021

Scientists are making dramatic progress with techniques for “gene splicing” – modifying the genetic makeup of organisms.

This work includes bioengineering pathogens for medical research, techniques that also can be used to create deadly biological weapons.

It’s an overlap that’s helped fuel speculation that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus was bioengineered at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology and that it subsequently “escaped” through a lab accident to produce the Covid-19 pandemic.

The world already has a legal foundation to prevent gene splicing for warfare: the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. Unfortunately, nations have been unable to agree on how to strengthen the treaty. Some countries have also pursued bioweapons research and stockpiling in violation of it.

As a member of President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council from 1996 to 2001, I had a firsthand view of the failure to strengthen the convention. From 2009 to 2013, as President Barack Obama’s White House coordinator for weapons of mass destruction, I led a team that grappled with the challenges of regulating potentially dangerous biological research in the absence of strong international rules and regulations.

The history of the Biological Weapons Convention reveals the limits of international attempts to control research and development of biological agents.

Questions have swirled around ‘gain of function’ viral research conducted at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. Photo: AFP

1960s-1970s: Negotiations to outlaw biowarfare

The United Kingdom first proposed a global biological weapons ban in 1968.

Reasoning that bioweapons had no useful military or strategic purpose given the awesome power of nuclear weapons, the UK had ended its offensive bioweapons program in 1956. But the risk remained that other countries might consider developing bioweapons as a poor man’s atomic bomb.

In the original British proposal, countries would have to identify facilities and activities with potential bioweapons applications. They would also need to accept on-site inspections by an international agency to verify these facilities were being used for peaceful purposes.

These negotiations gained steam in 1969 when the Nixon administration ended America’s offensive biological weapons program and supported the British proposal. In 1971, the Soviet Union announced its support – but only with the verification provisions stripped out. Since it was essential to get the USSR on board, the US and UK agreed to drop those requirements.

In 1972 the treaty was finalized. After gaining the required signatures, it took effect in 1975.

Under the convention, 183 nations have agreed not to “develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain” biological materials that could be used as weapons. They also agreed not to stockpile or develop any “means of delivery” for using them. The treaty allows “prophylactic, protective or other peaceful” research and development – including medical research.

However, the treaty lacks any mechanism to verify that countries are complying with these obligations.

1990s: Revelations of violations

This absence of verification was exposed as the convention’s fundamental flaw two decades later, when it turned out the Soviets had a great deal to hide.

In 1992, Russian President Boris Yeltsin revealed the Soviet Union’s massive biological weapons program. Some of the program’s reported experiments involved making viruses and bacteria more lethal and resistant to treatment.

The Soviets also weaponized and mass-produced a number of dangerous naturally occurring viruses, including the anthrax and smallpox viruses, as well as the plague-causing Yersinia pestis bacterium.

Yeltsin in 1992 ordered the program’s end and the destruction of all its materials. But doubts remain whether this was fully carried out.

Another treaty violation came to light after the US defeat of Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War. United Nations inspectors discovered an Iraqi bioweapons stockpile, including 1,560 gallons, or 6,000 liters, of anthrax spores and 3,120 gallons (12,000 liters) of botulinum toxin.

Both had been loaded into aerial bombs, rockets and missile warheads, although Iraq never used these weapons.

In the mid-1990s, during South Africa’s transition to majority rule, evidence emerged of the former apartheid regime’s chemical and biological weapons program. As revealed by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the program focused on assassination.

Techniques included infecting cigarettes and chocolates with anthrax spores, sugar with salmonella and chocolates with botulinum toxin.

In response to these revelations, as well as suspicions that North Korea, Iran, Libya and Syria were also violating the treaty, the US began urging other nations to close the verification gap.

But despite 24 meetings over seven years, a specially formed group of international negotiators failed to reach an agreement on how to do it. The problems were both practical and political.

Hazard suits at the high-security National Biosafety Laboratory in Wuhan. Photo: Wuhan Virology Institute

Monitoring biological agents

Several factors make verification of the bioweapons treaty difficult.

First, the types of facilities that research and produce biological agents, such as vaccines, antibiotics, vitamins, biological pesticides and certain foods, can also produce biological weapons. Some pathogens with legitimate medical and industrial uses can also be used for bioweapons.

Further, large quantities of certain biological weapons can be produced quickly, by few personnel and in relatively small facilities. Hence, biological weapons programs are more difficult for international inspectors to detect than nuclear or chemical programs, which typically require large facilities, numerous personnel and years of operation.

So an effective bioweapons verification process would require nations to identify a large number of civilian facilities. Inspectors would need to monitor them regularly.

The monitoring would need to be intrusive, allowing inspectors to demand “challenge inspections,” meaning access on short notice to both known and suspected facilities.

Finally, developing bioweapons defenses – as permitted under the treaty – typically requires working with dangerous pathogens and toxins, and even delivery systems. So distinguishing legitimate biodefense programs from illegal bioweapons activities often comes down to intent – and intent is hard to verify.

Because of these inherent difficulties, verification faced stiff opposition.

Political opposition

As the White House official responsible for coordinating the US negotiating position, I often heard concerns and objections from important government agencies.

The Pentagon expressed fears that inspections of biodefense installations would compromise national security or lead to false accusations of treaty violations. The Commerce Department opposed intrusive international inspections on behalf of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries.

Such inspections might compromise trade secrets, officials contended, or interfere with medical research or industrial production.

Germany and Japan, which also have large pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, raised similar objections. China, Pakistan, Russia and others opposed nearly all on-site inspections.

Since the rules under which the negotiation group operated required consensus, any single country could block agreement.

Bill Clinton and his administration tried various ways to regulate and inspect, but had little success. Photo: AFP / Sean Rayford / Getty Images

But even this failed to achieve consensus among the international negotiators.

Since then, nations have made no serious effort to establish a verification system for the Biological Weapons Convention.

Even with the amazing advances scientists have made in genetic engineering since the 1970s, there are few signs that countries are interested in taking up the problem again.

This is especially true in today’s climate of accusations against China, and China’s refusal to fully cooperate to determine the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Gary Samore is Professor of the Practice of Politics and Crown Family Director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies, Brandeis University.

This story originally appeared on The Conversation website and is republished with permission. To see the original, please click here.

asiatimes.com · by Gary Samore · July 20, 2021

12. What Is Happening to Our Apolitical Military?

From one of our foremost authorities on civil-military relations.

Powerful critique of the CJCS' testimony and statements.

Conclusion:

That Milley chose to engage at all—he interjected to respond to a question directed at Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin—was itself a mistake. The great criminal defense attorney Clarence Darrow advised his clients that “no man was ever convicted based on testimony he did not give.” Milley ought to have taken that advice when testifying. Instead, he voluntarily exposed the military to further enmeshment in political disputes of the moment, ones fraught with febrile tempers and high stakes.

What Is Happening to Our Apolitical Military?

Remarks by America’s most senior military officer mark the latest step in the continued erosion of relations between the armed forces and their civilian leaders.

defenseone.com · by Kori Schake

The nation’s senior military adviser, General Mark Milley, is once again in the news, for reportedly having described President Donald Trump’s postelection rhetoric as “a Reichstag moment” and privately reassuring friends and members of Congress that the president and his supporters “may try, but they’re not going to f---ing succeed” in preventing the peaceful transition of power.

As CNN reports, “Milley spoke to friends, lawmakers and colleagues about the threat of a coup,” and although journalists have largely recounted either private conversations or actions that Milley was planning—that is, giving him credit for things he might have done but hadn’t—the comments cast him in a flattering light, a soldier stalwart in defense of democracy.

And although some of the sources, and the subject himself, may be attempting to remake an image tarnished by Milley’s decision to march with Trump across Lafayette Square in combat fatigues during nationwide protests, the American military nevertheless did an admirable job navigating the interregnum between election and inauguration. The proper role for our armed forces in domestic political upheaval is none, and that appears to be what the American people got this election. Milley deserves credit for that, as he does for the other restraints he placed on presidential impulse during his tenure. He ought to be graded like an Olympic diver, with a degree of difficulty factored into his score.

Where he deserves greater criticism is his congressional testimony from a few weeks ago. Then, Milley voiced support for military reading lists, including books about the hot-button political issue of critical race theory. “I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin,” Milley said. “That doesn’t make me a communist.” It was a good line, witty and wise. And if he’d left off there, he’d have scored a victory. But he went on to connect racism to the attack on the Capitol: “I want to understand white rage … What is it that made thousands of people assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America?”

And that turned his testimony into a political judgment, the latest step in the continued erosion of America’s relations with its military, which has been pulled further and further into the political arena. Milley may have been attempting to protect the military by wrapping himself in the flag and virtuously defending the Constitution, but the effect of his words has been to join the broader political fight about racial issues.

George Packer: It’s not too late to avert a historic shame

The modern era of civil-military relations dates from 1973, when the U.S. ceased conscripting its armed forces. The “all-volunteer force” relies on public admiration, competitive pay and benefits, the prospect of adventure, opportunities for job training and advancement, patriotism, and the allure of citizenship to recruit the 0.5 percent of America’s population required to staff our military. It has made the military far and away the most trusted and popular institution in American society—and one politicians love to champion, associate themselves with, and use as a political bludgeon.

Because obedience is compulsory in the military, changes aspired for in our society at large can be enforced in its ranks, as was the case with racial integration. Politics is ostensibly anathema in the force. Leaders proudly proclaim themselves to be apolitical, and some even decline to vote so as not to prejudice themselves against prospective commanders in chief. The deeply ingrained subordination of our military to elected civilians means that the president and Congress determine the extent to which our military gets to be different from the rest of society.

Yet over the years, political, social, and judicial impulses have been frequently attenuated by deference to perceived needs by the military for recruitment, retention, and unit cohesion. This was the case with the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy allowing gay, lesbian, and bisexual people to serve, and the exclusion of women from combat units. The military is also often thrust into the political disputes of the day, as much as its leaders prefer to avoid it: Think Senator Ted Cruz castigating the Army for becoming “a woke, emasculated military,” or Senator Tom Cotton and Representative Dan Crenshaw seeking “whistleblowers” from the military who object to “woke ideology.”

The apolitical norm was first challenged in 1988, when former Commandant of the Marine Corps Paul X. Kelley chaired Veterans for Bush, in support of George H. W. Bush’s presidential campaign, and it has accelerated to the point where campaigns now recruit hundreds of senior-veteran endorsements and routinely use military imagery to imply military support. (Many veterans claim to speak for the force and are treated as a proxy for military opinion, but it would be a mistake to believe that those in uniform think in lockstep with one another: Unofficial surveys suggest that the officer corps is slightly more conservative than American society at large, while the rank and file are slightly more liberal.) Military leaders decry this practice of veteran endorsements, believing it pulls the military into politics that are detrimental to the good of the force. Which is true. Americans have begun to see our military the way we see the Supreme Court: apolitical when it supports our policy preferences, shamefully partisan when it does not.

Trump exacerbated the corrosion of civil-military norms. He appointed no more high-ranking veterans than had President Barack Obama, yet he termed them “my generals,” and their accepting appointments suggested their support for his policies. He signed the Muslim travel ban at the Pentagon, gave campaign speeches to troops, commuted sentences issued by military tribunals, and often claimed that the military had voted overwhelmingly for him.

Kori Schake: Biden brings more class warfare to foreign policy

Milley is himself an imperfect defender of the civil-military distinction. During last year’s Black Lives Matter protests, he marched through a public square forcibly cleared of protesters while in uniform alongside Trump. Milley damaged our military’s relationship with the American people that day, as he later admirably acknowledged. Navigating the high-cresting shoals of this political moment cannot be easy or pleasant, especially for a military officer who is inexpert in politics, as our officers are by design. The military as an institution grooms them to eschew politics, and distrusts them if they become political.

The political scientist Risa Brooks argues that the military should not even attempt to be “apolitical,” because that leaves it blind to the political impact of its actions. The armed forces ought to be “politically aware,” she writes, “so that they can distinguish negative and partisan behaviors.” Milley’s testimony, however, provides a useful example of the practical difficulty of applying her standard. Milley clearly thought that he was distinguishing between negative and partisan behaviors, but his choice of how to address that leaves the military open to legitimate criticism of partisan behavior.

In his testimony, Milley crossed far over into political territory, inviting challenges to whether it actually is the military’s business to expend educational and training resources on those issues. Cotton is not wrong that military effort might be better spent focused on professional responsibility.

One could certainly make the argument that racism is an issue of professional military responsibility. We have a military that recruits from and seeks to reflect all of American society, and needs to bind its members together in common purpose, so expunging racism is important in recruiting and unit cohesion. Milley touched lightly on those issues, but only in the midst of an extended disquisition on the history of institutional racism in American society. That is, he spoke glancingly of military equities while engaged in a political topic.

That Milley chose to engage at all—he interjected to respond to a question directed at Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin—was itself a mistake. The great criminal defense attorney Clarence Darrow advised his clients that “no man was ever convicted based on testimony he did not give.” Milley ought to have taken that advice when testifying. Instead, he voluntarily exposed the military to further enmeshment in political disputes of the moment, ones fraught with febrile tempers and high stakes.

This story was originally published by The Atlantic. Sign up for their newsletter.

defenseone.com · by Kori Schake

13. Gen. Mark Milley Reminisces About the Battle of the Beltway

Another criticism of the CJCS.

I’ve argued many times on these pages that Mr. Trump’s behavior after the election was reprehensible, and no doubt it alarmed many of those who worked for him. But the larger point here is the propriety of a serving general speaking out explicitly so soon after the events.

Whatever Mr. Trump’s failings, to characterize many of his supporters as “brownshirts,” as Gen. Milley has been quoted, can only intensify the sense among millions of Americans that the institutions of their government regard their grievances as treasonous—and that Gen. Milley’s Army has enlisted on a political side. One of the accounts has him at Joe Biden’s inauguration telling Michelle Obama, “No one has a bigger smile today than I do.”

Speak softly and carry a big stick, a famous soldier turned politician once said. It’s an axiom that applies to domestic politics as much as to global matters. It would be better for everyone if the nation’s leading military officers respected it.

Gen. Mark Milley Reminisces About the Battle of the Beltway

The most curious claim is the one that he somehow restrained Trump from starting a war with Iran.

WSJ · by Gerard Baker

But his repeatedly demonstrated valor shouldn’t inoculate him from accountability for his words. By all accounts Gen. Milley is a thoughtful man and that should equip him to understand that he has made a grave mistake that risks great harm to his own reputation and to the trust Americans place in the integrity of their military.

This isn’t a complaint about his apparent genuflection to the postmodern cultural orthodoxy of inherent white sinfulness (though the report published last week and reported in these pages about the U.S. Navy’s readiness—or lack thereof—puts some flesh on the bones of the criticism that the politically sensitive modern American military hasn’t got its priorities in order).

The more immediate damage Gen. Milley risks stems from his decision to spend much of the past six months apparently scripting his own John Frankenheimer remake for the benefit of eager journalists and his approving masters in the White House. In the past week we’ve had breathless accounts from a proliferation of books by reporters about Donald Trump’s final hours in office that cast the general as the hero-soldier of “Six Days in January,” a real-life movie in which he saves the nation from—I think I have this right—World War III, a coup d’état and the desecration of the Constitution.

Gen. Milley is a keen student of history, and in these florid accounts we are invited to see a man who identifies with Benjamin Franklin and his fellow revolutionaries in ”all hanging together” against President Trump, and who lets us know that if only he’d been around in 1933, the Reichstag Fire wouldn’t have led to the Nazis’ seizure of power.

The most curious claim is the one that he somehow restrained Mr. Trump from starting a war with Iran. According to an article by Susan Glasser —based on reporting she and her husband, Peter Baker, did for a forthcoming book on the last days of Mr. Trump’s presidency—the general believed that the president’s interest in striking at Iran late last year was a way of helping him stay in office after he lost the election. “You’re going to have a f—ing war,” Gen. Milley says, living up to George Patton’s observation that “an army without profanity couldn’t fight its way out of a piss-soaked paper bag.”

There’s quite a lot of rhetorical smoke on this battlefield, but as I read the account, it seems that this is what happened: The president convened a series of meetings to discuss military and other options for Iran after its repeated provocations against U.S. interests in the Middle East. At the last of these, on Jan. 3, it was agreed that it was too late to do anything. There was no military strike on Iran.

That’s it. (Except that, a month after taking office, President Biden authorized strikes against Iranian targets in the region.)

The more serious allegation from Gen. Milley is the familiar one that Mr. Trump was orchestrating a coup to keep himself in office. “They may try to stage a coup but they’re not going to f—ing succeed,” he tells his subordinates, again channeling Old Blood and Guts.

WSJ · by Gerard Baker

14. Britain to Permanently Deploy Two Warships in Asian Waters

Britain to Permanently Deploy Two Warships in Asian Waters

By U.S. News & World Report2 min

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Britain's Defence Secretary Ben Wallace is welcomed by Japan's Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga at the start of their meeting at the prime minister's official residence in Tokyo, Japan, July 20, 2021. Franck Robichon/Pool via REUTERS 

TOKYO (Reuters) - Britain said on Tuesday it would permanently deploy two warships in Asia after its Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier arrives in Japan in September, traversing waters at the centre of tension between China, the United States and its ally Japan.

Plans for the high-profile visit by the carrier leading a Royal Navy flotilla come as London deepens security ties with Tokyo, which has expressed growing alarm in recent months over China's territorial ambitions in the region, including Taiwan.

"Following on from the strike group's inaugural deployment, the United Kingdom will permanently assign two ships in the region from later this year," Britain's Defence Minister Ben Wallace said in a joint announcement in Tokyo with his Japanese counterpart Nobuo Kishi.

After their arrival in Japan, Kishi said, the Queen Elizabeth and its escort ships would split up for separate port calls to key U.S. and Japanese naval bases along the Japanese archipelago.

The British carrier, which is carrying F-35 stealth jets, will dock at Yokosuka, the home of Japan's fleet command and the U.S. Navy Seventh Fleet's carrier, the USS Ronald Reagan.

(Reporting by Tim Kelly; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)

Tags: South Korea, North Korea, Asia, United Kingdom, Europe, Japan

15. China Dismisses U.S. Accusation of Global Hacking Campaign

Admit nothing, deny everything, make counter accusations.

You havn’t highlighted anything yet

When you seect text while you’re reading, it'llappear here.

China Dismisses U.S. Accusation of Global Hacking Campaign

By U.S. News & World Report1 min

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FILE PHOTO: Chinese and U.S. flags flutter outside the building of an American company in Beijing, China January 21, 2021. REUTERS/Tingshu Wang/File Photo

BEIJING (Reuters) - China said on Tuesday that accusations made by the United States and its allies that the Chinese government has conducted a global cyber hacking campaign were unwarranted.

Foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said the accusations were politically motivated smears and the United States had not provided enough evidence.

The United States and its allies accused China on Monday of a global cyberespionage campaign, mustering an unusually broad coalition of countries to publicly call out Beijing for hacking.

(Reporting by Gabriel Crossley; Editing by Andrew Heavens)

Tags: United States, international trade

16. Up to 200 Americans have reported possible "Havana Syndrome" symptoms

Excerpts:

In a bid to centralize and improve care for U.S. workers who are injured, the U.S. government is working to ensure that they have access to military medical "centers for excellence," where Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., has introduced legislation to get victims access to specialized medical care, including Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The government is considering selecting a prominent academic institution as a center for acute and chronic care for patients, three people with knowledge of the deliberations said. If selected, it would be the third academic institution the government has turned to for help after having sent its workers to the University of Miami and then the University of Pennsylvania.

Concerned that the incidents, still unsolved more than four years after they came to light, may continue well into the future, government agencies have refocused efforts on "mitigation" — finding ways to lower the risk to staffers — as well as detection to identify when an attack might be taking place.

Working off the leading theory that pulsed microwaves affected people's brains, the State Department's Diplomatic Security Service has helped develop and deploy small physical detection devices in Cuba and a handful of other posts, three people with knowledge of the devices said. They declined to describe them because many of the details remain classified.

Up to 200 Americans have reported possible "Havana Syndrome" symptoms

Almost half of those reporting symptoms are linked to the CIA, say officials, with possible cases in Berlin and Vienna and on every continent but Antarctica.

NBC News · by Ken Dilanian, Josh Lederman and Courtney Kube · July 20, 2021

WASHINGTON — As many as 200 Americans have come forward to describe possible symptoms of directed energy attacks, part of a wave of fresh reports that includes newly identified incidents around the world, Western officials say.

A U.S. official with knowledge of new potential cases of so-called Havana Syndrome said a steady drumbeat of cables has been coming in from overseas posts reporting new incidents — often multiple times each week.

A recent and previously unreported incident in Berlin cut short at least one diplomat's term in Germany, U.S. officials and others briefed about the matter said.

Another person who was briefed this month about recent incidents said, "It is global — but there seems to be an awful lot going on in Europe."

Officials with direct knowledge said there are now possible cases on every continent except Antarctica. In the past year, officials said, more than one American in the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan has experienced symptoms, including a baby.

Almost half of the possible cases involve CIA officers or their relatives, two officials said, while about 60 involve Defense Department employees or relatives, and around 50 were linked to the State Department.

A number of FBI agents and personnel — both current and former — have come forward after having experienced symptoms while overseas, especially in Europe and Central Asia, sources said. Several FBI employees reported to officials that they were hit in Vienna, including some possible cases dating back more than a decade.

In a statement, an FBI spokesperson said: "In keeping with DOJ policy, the FBI can neither confirm nor deny the existence of specific investigations. However, we will direct you to recent statements made by Director Wray in testimony before Congress where he underscored the protection, health, and well-being of U.S. government personnel is the highest priority; we view all U.S. government personnel who have these symptoms as potential victims and will treat them as such; and we care deeply about our colleagues in the federal government."

The U.S. Embassy in Vienna.U.S. Embassy in Austria

A Defense Department spokesman said: "The Department is heavily engaged on this issue as a part of the [National Security Council]-led interagency process across the federal government to address anomalous health incidents, and is fully committed to determining both the causes and source. The safety, health and welfare of our personnel remains a top priority for the Department."

Biden administration officials said government employees were encouraged to come forward if they had experienced symptoms and cautioned that not all people who had done so should be considered Havana Syndrome cases.

A senior administration official said: "In certain cases, these incidents have upended the lives of U.S. personnel who have devoted their careers to serving our country. Our government recognizes how important it is to make sure they get the care they deserve and that we get to the bottom of this as quickly as possible."

In Vienna, officials say, at least one American was sent home because of the severity of the symptoms. The New Yorker was the first to report as many as two dozen cases in Vienna.

"When it comes to Vienna, in coordination with our interagency partners, we are vigorously investigating reports of possible unexplained health incidents among the U.S. Embassy community there, and we're also doing that wherever these incidents are reported," State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters Monday.

The U.S. Embassy in Havana on March 2.Alexandre Meneghini / Reuters file

U.S. officials have said they do not know what explains the mysterious neurological symptoms first experienced by U.S. diplomats in Cuba, and in public they avoid using the word "attack" in favor of "anomalous health incidents."

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine said in a report last year that some of the observed brain injuries were consistent with the effects of directed microwave energy, which the report said Russia has long studied.

NBC News reported in 2018 that U.S. intelligence officials considered Russia a leading suspect in what some of them assess to have been deliberate attacks on diplomats and CIA officers overseas. But there was not — and is not now — conclusive intelligence pointing in that direction, multiple officials who have been briefed about the matter said.

U.S. officials have said privately that they suspect that Russia may be using a microwave energy device either to secretly gather digital data or to intentionally injure U.S. officials in a campaign of harassment, which Russia denies.

A team of medical and scientific experts who studied the symptoms of as many as 40 State Department and other government employees concluded that nothing like them had previously been documented in medical literature, according to the National Academies of Sciences report. Many reported hearing a loud sound and feeling pressure in their heads, and then they experienced dizziness, unsteady gait and visual disturbances. Many suffered long-standing debilitating effects.

Former CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos, who believes he was hit during a trip to Moscow in 2017, said what has happened is "a mass casualty event."

CIA Director William Burns has ordered a significant intelligence-gathering effort to determine the cause of the incidents, and he has pledged that employees who report them will be taken seriously and given treatment.

"Director Burns is personally engaged with personnel affected by anomalous health incidents and is highly committed to their care and to determining the cause of these incidents," a CIA spokesperson said.

An intelligence official said, "The intelligence community has convened a panel of experts from across the U.S. government and private sector to work collectively to increase understanding of the possible mechanisms that are causing these anomalous health incidents."

The State Department also has a panel of medical and scientific experts examining the cases, and like the CIA panel, its members have access to relevant classified information.

But some U.S. government workers who have reported worrisome incidents in Western Europe to their superiors in the State Department have been met with skepticism and disbelief, three people with knowledge of the situation said. In one case this year that has been widely discussed among U.S. diplomats, a worker reported a potential incident in Europe but was brushed off, told that they were serving in a low-risk region where it is unlikely that U.S. operatives would be targeted.

Some cases that appeared at first to be part of the cohort of Havana Syndrome incidents were ruled out later. A group of U.S. troops in Syria reported symptoms after a Russian helicopter was seen hovering overhead, for example, but it was determined that the troops had come down with food poisoning.

U.S. intelligence agencies have launched a significant effort to find new information. They are combing through data seeking clues, including records of cellphone calls and geolocation data around the times and places of reported events, officials say. As NBC News and other news organizations have reported, the CIA used geolocation data to determine that Russian intelligence officers were near the scenes of some of the incidents, but the finding is not considered conclusive, given that U.S. officials are often under surveillance.

In a bid to centralize and improve care for U.S. workers who are injured, the U.S. government is working to ensure that they have access to military medical "centers for excellence," where Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., has introduced legislation to get victims access to specialized medical care, including Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The government is considering selecting a prominent academic institution as a center for acute and chronic care for patients, three people with knowledge of the deliberations said. If selected, it would be the third academic institution the government has turned to for help after having sent its workers to the University of Miami and then the University of Pennsylvania.

Concerned that the incidents, still unsolved more than four years after they came to light, may continue well into the future, government agencies have refocused efforts on "mitigation" — finding ways to lower the risk to staffers — as well as detection to identify when an attack might be taking place.

Working off the leading theory that pulsed microwaves affected people's brains, the State Department's Diplomatic Security Service has helped develop and deploy small physical detection devices in Cuba and a handful of other posts, three people with knowledge of the devices said. They declined to describe them because many of the details remain classified.

NBC News · by Ken Dilanian, Josh Lederman and Courtney Kube · July 20, 2021

17. What Is Happening in Cuba? The Protests Against the Communist Regime

As we look at the resistance in Cuba (and Myanmar, and other places (potentially north Korea?) ) I offer some academic resources from the ARIS Project at USASOC. (See all publications here: https://www.soc.mil/ARIS/books/arisbooks.html)

Science of Resistance: https://www.soc.mil/ARIS/books/pdf/science-resistance.pdf

Resistance Manual: https://www.soc.mil/ARIS/books/pdf/resistance-manual.pdf

Understanding States of Resistance: https://www.soc.mil/ARIS/books/pdf/understanding-states-resistance.pdf

Resistance and the Cyber Domain: https://www.soc.mil/ARIS/books/pdf/resistance-cyber.pdf

What Is Happening in Cuba? The Protests Against the Communist Regime

Island’s economic crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic lead to deteriorating living conditions, electricity outages and acute shortages of food and medicine

WSJ · by Anthony Harrup and Santiago Pérez

President Miguel Díaz-Canel quickly deployed security forces across the country. His government disrupted communications, with the state-run phone and network monopoly, Etecsa, halting internet service.

In Havana, state forces were sent out July 11, including so-called rapid-reaction brigades and Communist Party militants armed with heavy sticks. Some protesters were attacked, and more than 100 were arrested, according to activists. In subsequent days, hundreds of Cubans lined up outside police stations to look for missing relatives whose whereabouts were unknown.

A street in Havana, where state forces were deployed.

Photo: yamil lage/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Cuba’s Interior Ministry said one person had died when a group of protesters attacked a police station in a town near Havana. It said a number of people had been injured in the incident, including police officials.

In an effort to quell tensions, and lessen the acute shortages of food, medicine and other essential products that have angered Cubans, Prime Minister Manuel Marrero announced last week that such goods brought to the island by visitors would no longer be subject to customs duties.

What triggered the wave of protests?

The Cuban economy contracted more than 11% last year amid the pandemic, which led tourism to dry up and brought about a drop in remittances from Cubans living abroad—both vital sources of income for families.

Cubans stand for hours in line to buy basic goods such as chicken or bread, or even to take a bus. The island has been increasingly hit by hourslong electricity outages, and, in recent weeks, coronavirus infections have surged, according to authorities, putting a strain on the country’s health system.

After suffering relatively few Covid-19 cases in 2020, and only 146 deaths, the island saw a pickup this year, with the curve steepening in April and more so in June. The government has reported close to 2,000 deaths so far.

Thousands of Cubans marched in Havana on July 11.

Photo: yamil lage/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

What has been the communist government’s response?

President Díaz-Canel said the protests were being led by a minority of “counter-revolutionaries, sold out to the U.S. government,” taking advantage of the difficult situation in Cuba and the pandemic.

He urged supporters of the regime to take back the streets from the demonstrators, which led to attacks on protesters. Soon after the unrest began, authorities cut off most communications with the outside world and deployed security forces across the country.

Among those arrested were visual artist Luis Manuel Otero, a highly visible figure among Cuban dissidents, poet Amaury Pacheco and José Daniel Ferrer, the leader of Cuba’s most important opposition group.

On Saturday, the government bused in thousands of people to Havana’s seaside promenade for a mass rally in support of the regime. Similar demonstrations—in which people waved tiny Cuban flags—were held at a dozen cities around the island. Communist Party members, state workers and students are required to attend government mass events.

A rally was held July 17 in Havana in support of the Cuban government.

Photo: Eliana Aponte/Associated Press

What are the implications for the Cuban regime?

Since taking power in a 1959 revolution, Cuba’s communist regime has weathered a number of economic and political crises, while remaining defiant against calls for change in the face of the U.S. economic embargo. The unraveling of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought about a so-called special period, one of the worst economic contractions in Cuba’s history. The loss of Soviet economic backing led to severe food and fuel shortages that crippled economic activity.

In more recent times, the island has seen diminished support from once oil-rich Venezuela, which provides cheap oil to the island in exchange for doctors, teachers and other advisers. Venezuela faces its own economic crisis under socialist leader Nicolás Maduro and is also subject to U.S. sanctions.

An easing of U.S. sanctions against Cuba under the Obama administration, which had promised to bring more tourists and dollars to the island, was reversed by the Trump administration, leading in turn to a hardening of the communist government’s position.

A police vehicle patrolling through Old Havana.

Photo: Eliana Aponte/Associated Press

How is this different from previous protests?

The demonstrations are unprecedented in Cuba. For the past six decades, Cuba has been a country where protests have been virtually nonexistent. All protests were quickly suffocated. Protesters this time appear willing to stand up against the government.

A longtime Communist Party apparatchik, Mr. Díaz-Canel is seen by many Cubans as lacking the charisma and revolutionary legitimacy of his predecessors— Fidel Castro, the emblematic leader of the 1959 revolution who died in 2016, and his brother Raúl Castro, who succeeded Fidel as president but retired in 2018.

Earlier this year, Mr. Díaz-Canel also assumed the top job in Cuba’s ruling Communist Party.

Social media has been an essential factor in organizing the wave of protests. Relatively new to the island, it has empowered a young generation of Cuban activists who use it to spread their ideas and organize protests. As demonstrators sought to broadcast the current protests live with their cellphones, authorities cut internet service on several occasions. Kentik, a U.S.-based network monitoring company, reported countrywide internet outages July 11.

Mobile and fixed-line phone service were also selectively cut off, crippling communications and blocking the internet signal from activists’ cellphones, they said.

What has been the U.S. response?

President Biden is voicing support for the protesters, calling it a “clarion call for freedom and relief.”

The Cuban government has responded to past crises by allowing mass emigration to the U.S., but U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said Cubans attempting to reach the U.S. by boat won’t be allowed in.

Mr. Díaz-Canel blames electricity outages, as well as shortages of food and medicines, on the U.S. embargo and the restrictions reimposed by the Trump administration that cut off Cuban access to hard currency. He is calling on the Biden administration to remove the sanctions.

In Florida, home to many Cuban-Americans, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis urged Mr. Biden to help provide internet to Cubans on the island. But such effort would require equipment on the ground to get the signal. The government strictly controls imports of such equipment.

“We’re considering whether we have the technological ability to reinstate that access,” Mr. Biden said. He said his administration is considering allowing for more remittances to Cuba and sending Covid-19 vaccines, but needs assurances that the Cuban government wouldn’t take advantage of the assistance.

What did Black Lives Matter say about the protests?

Last week, Black Lives Matter called on the U.S. government to end the U.S. embargo on grounds that it is “cruel and inhumane.”

“The people of Cuba are being punished by the U.S. government because the country has maintained its commitment to sovereignty and self-determination,” it said in a statement.

The U.S.-based organization also noted that Cuba “has historically demonstrated solidarity with oppressed peoples of African descent.” But it made no reference about the dozens of Black civil-rights activists and demonstrators who were detained soon after the unrest started, among them Messrs. Otero and Pacheco. About one-third of Cuba’s population is of African descent.

The group’s statement sparked controversy in the U.S., where politicians such as Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio lashed out at the organization.

Write to Anthony Harrup at anthony.harrup@wsj.com and Santiago Pérez at santiago.perez@wsj.com

WSJ · by Anthony Harrup and Santiago Pérez

18. Why does America need Delta Force? An operator's perspective

Why does America need Delta Force? An operator's perspective

sandboxx.us · by George Hand · July 19, 2021

Editor’s Note: The following piece on the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, also known as Delta Force, was penned by legendary Delta operator, Master Sergeant George E. Hand IV (retired).

The Delta Force, like so many other organizations, is the answer to a problem. If you can consider that our country’s civic police force is the answer to a very general problem — the domestic physical safety of the population — then you could view the Delta Force as an answer to some very specific and complex problems.

Domestic protection in our country comes in the form of our police departments, our National Guard forces, Department of Homeland Security, the Coast Guard, and others. Our Armed Forces — Army, Navy, Air Force, etc. — protect our nation and its interests abroad, a feat that can only be accomplished by relatively powerful nations like our own.

There came a time when our country realized we did not boast an adequate capability to cope with one of the developing scourges of international terrorism of the time; that is, an aviation hijack situation. To clarify, there are basically two ways to respond to a hijacked airliner — wait it out and negotiate with the terrorist(s) hoping you can win the semblance of a decent outcome, or you can seize the initiative and carry the fight to the terrorist. Being Americans, we prefer the latter of the choices.

Imagine a large jet airliner with hundreds of people on board. Next time you are traveling by air look around and try to imagine the complexity of breaking into and storming aboard and airliner filled with people and blaze through the aircraft trying to only shoot the terrorist(s) — somehow.

Men of Delta’s A Squadron in Panama during Operations Acid Gambit, including Dr. Dale Comstock on the left.)

To accomplish the arguably monumental task we need a breed of person with hard-to-find balance of specific traits. Perhaps those traits should include a person who is in good physical form. Not some guy who follows a yoga workout on YouTube, or the guy who goes to the gym to discuss working out for an hour then hits the showers. Not the guy who joined a weekend jogging club or owns several bicycle riding costumes but never actually rides a lot.

Maybe we need huge guys who can bench press Volkswagens. Sounds legit, aw… but big guys typically can’t run fast and long and can’t climb to well or fit though holes that are almost too small for them. Ok then perhaps we want those guys that run olympic marathons and can actually compete with the Kenyans. Sounds good, but those guys don’t boast much upper body strength or look like they can carry other than tiny nylon shorts, a tank top T-shirt, and $2,000.00 running shoes that weight as much as a handful of raisins.

Men of Delta’s C-Squadron in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993 during Operations Gothic Serpent)

So far we have have an Arnold Schwarzenegger who can out-run Kung Bushmen in the Kalahari desert. We’re almost done… what else do we need. We need someone who will routinely perform actions that he believes he might die performing. And if we give that person a pistol and a photo of a person who he is to find and kill in a public setting, he can’t pause at the moment of pulling that trigger and think: “Aw man, he doesn’t look like such a bad guy up close.”

So our guy has to be able to kill without hesitation, but can’t be free-lancing with that skill on weekends away from the job. Our candidate has to be a highly moral person with extraordinary self-discipline who will FOLLOW ORDERS. Following orders isn’t cool; nobody wants to do it because everyone is too cool.

As for self discipline and following orders, I think I demonstrated those concepts accidentally when I was five years old. My mother decided she was going to teach me the dangers of fire from a technique she read in “Readers Digest.” She handed me a book of matches and told me to light one and hold it.

With her smug face she waited for the flame to burn close enough to my fingers that I would certainly drop it and learn my valuable lesson. To her horror I held the match until the flame burned all the way down and snuffed itself out on my severely blistered fingers. I cried out but stayed firm. My terrified mother:

(both palms on her forehead) “Why didn’t you drop that match???”

(geo) “Because you told me to hold it.”

(Delta men in Bosnia and Herzegovina [former Yugoslavia] in 1996)

The debate here is whether or not I was too stupid to drop the match or was I so disciplined as to follow instructions. I can assure you that while I was indeed pretty stupid at five years old, I understood as well as the Frankenstein monster that FIRE BURN…FIRE HOT!! So we have our man now: speed, endurance, strength, morals, discipline, bravery. My God… we have a Boy Scout! —just kidding.

So to find these men the Delta Force puts the candidates through a month of intense physical stress in the mountains of West Virginia. Most of them don’t make it. Then they are subject to rigorous psychological evaluations. Finally the candidates go through five months of amazing specialized training that is specific to the missions of the Delta Force. If a candidate makes it to one of the assault squadrons he maintains a probational status for six months while operating with his assault team.

During those six months he says very little and generally offers opinions and ideas only when solicited by the seasoned operators on his assault team. Men in Delta engage with a myriad of special operations skills. Close Quarters Combat is a skill that Delta specialize in to the highest degree in the U.S. Armed Forces. Responding to a terrorist hijacking of an airliner is an operation absolutely exclusive to the Delta Force in America. We practiced the scenario several times a year in very realistic environments.

Delta Force in Iraq in 2005 attacking the sons of Saddam Hussein)

The airliners we used were in-service aircraft typically between flights. Delta purchased the flights to include the flight crew. Passengers were role players gathered and recruited by our operations and logistic crews. They were high school students, families of first responders — policemen, firemen, and the like. So we had a real airliner with all the typical passengers you would see on any flight. Then Delta men specially selected to perform the role of the terrorist work out their scenario play and assimilate in with the passengers.

The assault could begin in another state with the assault force being flown in to the airport where the “hijacked” aircraft was located. In one scenario we descended from the passenger compartment down into the luggage hold. We threw ropes outside and slid down the ropes as our aircraft taxied behind the hijacked aircraft. Scattered behind the target we assembled and began our clandestine approach to the target. Our men aboard the target were watching for us, and if we were to do something sloppy or wrong we would be compromised.

(Delta Forces George Andrew Fernandez, KIA in Iraq in 2005)

The Delta Force was implemented to solve a problem. Today they solve problems still, any problem on Earth that arises that is too complicated or daring for any other facet of our armed forces. Delta is phenomenally resourced and generously funded. It is because I understood what it means to be richly funded that I recognize the monumental value of our United States Marines, a force that is asked to perform incredible tasks with an absolute insult of a budget.

I often think of the Delta Force as the one unit that National Command Authority holds with no pretense toward capability and expectations, therefore resourcing it thusly and removing all semblance of bullshit. There is almost no Army there, yet many of the best men who have ever traversed the Army have been there.

By Almighty God and with honor,

Geo sends

sandboxx.us · by George Hand · July 19, 2021

19. Re-Thinking the Strategic Approach to Asymmetrical Warfare

Excerpts:

Why Strategists Stumble Asymmetrically

What might explain this limited mindset that leads to these consequences? There has been much written about the difficulty grooming and selecting strategic planners within the military. One critic notes those who rise to the top of the strategic decision-making pyramid are poorly qualified for the task[xxix] due to a personnel system that bases promotions on tactical competence over the first quarter century of an officer’s career.[xxx] Unfortunately, tactical skill does equate or translate to great strategic skill and are often incongruous mindsets.[xxxi] It makes sense why a reactionary tactical approach manifests at the strategic level[xxxii] as it has served that leader well in the past.

Even more than this, structural critiques are a fundamental human reason. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman could explain the strategic creativity deficit due to “Loss Aversion.” Within greater prospect theory, “Loss Aversion” postulates that the pain of losing psychologically motivates people’s behavior as twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining.[xxxiii] When people do take risks, it is more likely to avoid a loss than to make a gain people are more willing to take risks (i.e., losses loom larger than gains).[xxxiv] In the case of asymmetric thinking, one can better avoid a loss by spending money to mitigate a problem. A plan to put an opponent in an asymmetric relationship just carries more risks, because innovation requires change and risk. Someone looking at their career progression might elect for something more rational with a stronger reward guarantee.

These impediments do not necessarily prevent a successful asymmetric strategy; however, flag officers and strategists must identify and account for them in order to ensure they don’t subvert necessary and proper strategy. After this, a radical rethinking and restructuring can occur to tackle asymmetric threats. If not, we see from the past conflicts advantages gained by the enemy and punishment to the domestic populace.

Re-Thinking the Strategic Approach to Asymmetrical Warfare - Military Strategy Magazine

Daniel Riggs - Fort Bragg, NC

militarystrategymagazine.com

Asymmetrical Warfare: “Warfare that is between opposing forces which differ greatly in military power and that typically involves the use of unconventional weapons and tactics (such as those associated with guerrilla warfare and terrorist attacks.” Merriam Webster Dictionary

Asymmetrical Warfare: “Unconventional strategies and tactics adopted by a force when the military capabilities of belligerent powers are not simply unequal but are so significantly different that they cannot make the same sorts of attacks on each other.” Encyclopedia Britannica

The Present Asymmetric Orientation

In October 2020, the US Army announced it was going to disband the Asymmetric Warfare Group[i]. Founded in 2003, AWG was formed to counter the improvised explosive device (IED) threat that emerged early in the Iraq War.[ii] AWG was composed of military experts who could use their extensive experience to formulate solutions to problems that were upending deployed units. Until 2012, AWG focused on the atypical means (notably IEDs) in which various insurgencies were preventing US success in both Iraq and Afghanistan.[iii] After 2012, the focus shifted to planning for potential environments soldiers might find themselves in. A recent example of this was AWG training 82nd Airborne paratroopers in subterranean warfare.[iv]

AWG members were innovative at a tactical level, but the group incorrectly defined and oriented its governing term: asymmetry. While they successfully provided symptomatic solutions to threats, they did not posture units or themselves to solve the systemic issues driving the symptoms. If AWG had been a pest control company, it was providing impressive insights on killing termites. However, it had no long-term solution for pests that were affecting the whole property.

The blame should not lie solely with AWG. The past and current strategic orientation to “asymmetry” favors expensive and immediate tactical while ignoring systemic tensions that allow for the asymmetric threat. The strategic orientation put AWG on a Sisyphean Hill without prospect for success. They deserved better direction from higher.

In contrast to the past strategic alignment, strategists must reorient asymmetric thinking to complement and enhance any tactical measures especially in asymmetric environments. Beyond Project Objective Memorandum (POM) cycles[v], contracting, and spending, strategists need to contextualize asymmetric threats radically different than in the past. Alternatively they can continue the current strategy which rewards the enemy, punishes the US populace, and fails to address these ill-structured problems. The following will examine the legacy understanding of asymmetric warfare, the consequences of legacy asymmetric thinking, why this thinking might persist, and considerations for reforming asymmetric thinking at the strategic level.

Modern Roots of the Term

“Asymmetric warfare” emerged as the axiom to explain the environment of the early Iraq conflict. It seemed apropos as the small Iraqi “David” was using their relative size against the US “Goliath” to move, act, and evolve quicker. An internet search of “Asymmetric warfare” appears to corroborate this assumption. Most definitions describe an asymmetric conflict as between weaker opponents frustrating stronger opponents via irregular means. It is a conflict where a jet-ski can frustrate a battleship. The US Iraq experience reflected this appeared to mimic this dictionary definition of a big person being frustrated by the smaller one. In hindsight, strategists should have avoided this definition as it predisposed them to think like a bug exterminator, not as a systemic threat to the bugs. Strategists failed to think asymmetrically like their opponents did. They should have been attempting to dictate the foundational terms of conflict regardless of the opponent’s size, not just trying to spend it away. To redirect thinking on asymmetry, strategists ought to move away from the unsatisfactory “David and Goliath” metaphor.

The starting point is finding a suitable definition to derive subsequent actions and orientations. The Rand Corporation, though far from perfect, provides a suitable starting point: “asymmetric warfare is a conflict between nations or groups that have disparate military capabilities and strategies.”[vi] While not as complete as it should be, this definition provides an opportunity to broadly think about the issue. The latter half of the definition requires keen consideration when it describes “disparate military capabilities and strategies.” The terms “disparate” and “strategies” require special notice and investigation, because they can be the starting terms that guide impactful asymmetric strategy.

Unfortunately, the asymmetric focus defaults to “disparate capabilities”, not “disparate strategies.” This is consequential. Instinctively, it appears that to defeat an adversary’s innovation, extensive resources are required to develop the capabilities to match or overcome it. In the case of IEDs, the US countered insurgent IED emplacement through a myriad of expensive counter IED methods. Rationally, this is Newton’s third law of physics at work. The insurgent’s action necessitated the US countering with an equal reaction. However, the reaction was not equal. It was profoundly in favor of the adversary. They were the ones dictating the conflict and inflicting both seen and unseen consequences on the US.

This was fine for the previous years as it was harmless: none of the US’s adversaries in these conflicts constituted a true existential threat. US Strategists and Planners should care about the future of this term and not relegate it as a tragic designation artifact of the early 2000’s. These failures can be informative. Understanding asymmetry ought to re-emerge to understand and engage in future Great Power Conflict (GPC), not just a Middle Eastern based counter-insurgency. Asymmetric strategic thinking should force planners to think of inverting an adversary’s resources and strengths. Merely trying to out-resource, the adversary’s novel approaches are deleterious and unsustainable.

Rewarding the Enemy: Asymmetry’s First Sin

The Iraq and Afghanistan insurgencies understood a conventional fight would be impossible with the US. What the insurgents needed was to invert the operational environment (OE) to their strengths and then “min-max”[vii] those strengths and metrics for victory. They effectively discovered this equation, defined the variables for victory, and put the US on its back foot. Cheap media and cheaper homemade explosives halted the world’s then sole superpower. Both insurgencies successfully:

Bled the US’ treasure[viii]
Elongated the timeline for any possible victory
Frustrated the patience of a once supportive US domestic populace

The US was in a deficit in these three metrics/variables during these conflicts.

While the US was able to stack bodies of insurgents via direct action, the insurgencies could easily suffer through KIAs if they continued to invert the power paradigm in the conflict. While every killed or captured High Value Individual satisfied a McNamara like vision of victory, it failed to generate US success. GEN Stanley McChrystal best illustrated this in his explanation of “Insurgent Math:”[ix]

Following a military operation, two are killed. How many insurgents are left? Traditional mathematics would say that eight would be left, but there may only be two, because six of the living eight may have said, ‘This business of insurgency is becoming dangerous, so I am going to do something else.’

There are more likely to be as many as 20, because each one you killed has a brother, father, son, and friends, who do not necessarily think that they were killed because they were doing something wrong. It does not matter – you killed them. Suddenly, then, there may be 20, making the calculus of military operations very different.

The USG was aware of this inversion, but failed to divine the variables that would similarly frustrate the insurgency. Strategists instead turned to finance over finesse and foresight.

The development of the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicle (MRAP) exemplified this reactive turn to the printing presses. Championed by Senator Lindsey Graham[x] and then Senator Joseph Biden[xi], the MRAP was one of the notable solutions to the IED problem. Instead of being in a “soft-skinned” Humvee, soldiers would now ride in seemingly impervious vehicles. While the MRAP undoubtedly saved lives, consider the trade-offs. The more secure MRAP was less mobile and slower than the Humvee. Chasing down a four-door sedan was a problem.

The reaction of insurgents was more inexpensive homemade explosives. Regardless of the protections an armored vehicle offered the insurgents could respond by increasing their spending fractionally, and they did so. The better and bigger IEDs nullified the better and bigger vehicles.[xii] Regardless of the protections offered by Oshkosh, no one is surviving 500-600lbs of explosives beneath your feet.[xiii]

Even more damaging was the cost to the US. The purported MRAP cost as of 2012 was $45 billion dollars.[xiv] The average IED costs around $30.[xv] This divergence is stark. The enemy pays a minuscule sum and consequently exerts disproportionate resource costs upon its opponent. Did the $45 billion dollars spent on the MRAP eliminate the IED threat[xvi] or merely address the symptoms of a problem?

The MRAP is just one example of resource diversion. In fact, IEDs affected the entirety of the Department of Defense’s (DOD) Joint Capabilities Integration Development System (JCIDS). JCIDS is the solution space that considers solutions involving a simulation of doctrine, organization, training, material, leadership and education, personnel, and facilities (DOTMLPF) required to accomplish a mission.[xvii] The table below will show how the IED affected the JCIED’s DOTMLPF process:[xviii]

Figure 1: From Author

These small tactical insurgent actions rearranged operational and strategic priorities thus creating an asymmetric relationship. It is not that the insurgent was a smaller opponent with novel means battling a bigger opponent. They imposed disproportionate costs, defined the battlefield, and the metrics for victory. Even if the US is the wealthiest country on earth, there is no such thing as limitless resources. Spending will eventually exceed thresholds and capacities and sink the state. This reactive, money dump failed the US and will continue to do so in future conflicts.

That which is seen and unseen: Domestic Consequences of Asymmetric Thinking

In his seminal text The Law, Frederic Bastiat[xix] encourages economists to look beyond the superficial effect of a law or policy and broaden their perspective to consider secondary and tertiary consequences. His challenge to readers is to divine “seen and unseen” effects from a given choice or policy.[xx] Just like economic concerns, foreign policy problems are not hermetically sealed and solely relegated to the specific geographically defined battlespace. This separation is purely cognitive and incorrect.

Strategists need to acquaint themselves with Bastiat’s lessons[xxi] as much as they do Clausewitz. They have a moral obligation to consider the unseen effects of current reactive measures towards asymmetric threats, and the effect on those it intends to safeguard, the domestic populace. The aforementioned MRAPs not only decreased soldier speed and lethality, but it increased costs, served as a bigger, more notable target, and negatively affected the domestic populace. In terms of the latter, the historic spending[xxii] has led to resource deprivations and inflation directly affecting much of the US population.

Regarding the resource deprivation, consider expert personnel shortages (i.e., scientific, and technical experts) needed to fill the organizations charged to deal with the asymmetric threats. DoD has had to go to the private sector for these solutions. Even before the Global War on Terror (GWOT), approximately one-third to two-thirds of all technical researchers in the United States have been working for the military.[xxiii] The consequence is a reduced supply of comparable talent to serve civilian industry and civilian activities[xxiv] According to one study, the DoD luring science and engineering graduates with high salaries has reduced the quantity and quality of R&D undertaken in civilian-created laboratories[xxv] The US domestic populace (and the world population) might be missing out on technological and medical breakthroughs as civilian institutions do not have the personnel to move projects out of a nascent stage or towards completion.

Inflation is another destabilizing effect of the current asymmetric “capabilities” posture against the populace. When DoD needs funding that is in excess of tax revenues, they need to recall where money comes from. Strategists need to remember increased printing of dollars via the US Federal Reserve (aka the Fed) is not just an ink and paper cost. The Fed’s printing of excess dollars (i.e. dollars that are not reflecting and representative of new capital creation) leads to a chase of too few goods, which requires more dollars to purchase the product. This disproportionately affects lower and middle income families who bear an increase in prices of goods (especially food and energy), that is easier to offset for the rich.[xxvi] These demographics remain stagnant while the upper classes in society continue to rise. This trend, which has been increasing for some time[xxvii] and exacerbated by financial commitments to these conflicts, is not desirable for an aspirational stable society and past research indicates it leads to unstable societies.[xxviii] Any spurious claim of being safer from this spending needs to juxtapose it against a volatile society with a widening distribution of wealth.

Why Strategists Stumble Asymmetrically

What might explain this limited mindset that leads to these consequences? There has been much written about the difficulty grooming and selecting strategic planners within the military. One critic notes those who rise to the top of the strategic decision-making pyramid are poorly qualified for the task[xxix] due to a personnel system that bases promotions on tactical competence over the first quarter century of an officer’s career.[xxx] Unfortunately, tactical skill does equate or translate to great strategic skill and are often incongruous mindsets.[xxxi] It makes sense why a reactionary tactical approach manifests at the strategic level[xxxii] as it has served that leader well in the past.

Even more than this, structural critiques are a fundamental human reason. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman could explain the strategic creativity deficit due to “Loss Aversion.” Within greater prospect theory, “Loss Aversion” postulates that the pain of losing psychologically motivates people’s behavior as twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining.[xxxiii] When people do take risks, it is more likely to avoid a loss than to make a gain people are more willing to take risks (i.e., losses loom larger than gains).[xxxiv] In the case of asymmetric thinking, one can better avoid a loss by spending money to mitigate a problem. A plan to put an opponent in an asymmetric relationship just carries more risks, because innovation requires change and risk. Someone looking at their career progression might elect for something more rational with a stronger reward guarantee.

These impediments do not necessarily prevent a successful asymmetric strategy; however, flag officers and strategists must identify and account for them in order to ensure they don’t subvert necessary and proper strategy. After this, a radical rethinking and restructuring can occur to tackle asymmetric threats. If not, we see from the past conflicts advantages gained by the enemy and punishment to the domestic populace.

Orientating Asymmetric Thinking towards GPC

The following will not be an ambitious conception of re-building of strategy. Instead it will advocate for the incorporation of certain principles to better assist strategists conceive of asymmetric opportunities with GPCs or any other adversary.

Tensions

Center of Gravity (COG) analysis informs current problem framing in joint doctrine with its constituent vulnerabilities, requirements, and capabilities.[xxxv] While appropriate for force on force, COG should not influence asymmetric planning. As an analytical tool, COG inevitably frames an adversary in a “blue on red” context, which will push planners back to a symmetrical understanding of conflict and options in it.

COG’s narrow conception of the environment fails to deal with the complexity that is an inherent aspect of an asymmetric environment. Instead of a channelized conception of weaknesses, looking at systemic tensions provides strategists a perspective which generates options to deal with an adversary. While abstract, systemic tensions provide a means to appreciate and understand the most significant and influential phenomena within a given environment that would contribute to an end state.[xxxvi]

Dr. Ben Zweibelson documented this in his role as a planning lead for the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan/Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan (NTM-A/CSTC-A). To better assist commanders and planners better understand the complexity of Afghanistan through radical recalibration in 2011, Zweibelson and his team followed a four step process consisting of (1) de-taciticalization,[xxxvii] (2) contextualization,[xxxviii] (3) problematization,[xxxix] and (4) improvisation.[xl] The eventual deliverables were a series of operational level frames for planners that emancipated them for merely conceiving of conflict solely within operational level variables (aka PMESII-PT).

The problematization step especially provides one of the better ideas for thinking asymmetrically. In this step, and seen in Zweibelsons work,[xli] strategists juxtapose oppositional tensions against each other on quad charts to spur future planning, redirect on-going operations, and/or re-frame a post conflict future to gain insights not previously divined.[xlii]

In the case of China in a GPC conflict, consider the initial hypotheses of possible competing tensions within China that could yield asymmetric insights:

As one can see across the four examples, the tension charts kick start thinking not of course of action development. Over a longer period and with more participants, these initial quads would see the tensions re-arranged, introducing an addition of changing descriptive words and metaphoric images in the effort to divine asymmetries. The result would be a break from the paradigm of a classic great power struggle defined solely by capabilities, instead of a singular focus on a COG to generate options.

Value

Just as strategists should look to Bastiat for guidance, they should also look to economists such as Carl Menger, William Jevons, and Leon Walras. Within a few years of one another, these three economists posited value derived from utility, not from labor.[xliii] In overturning this Marxist proposition and simultaneously answering the “diamond-water paradox”[xliv] that had bedeviled Adam Smith, Menger et al argued that value is completely subjective.[xlv] The ability to satisfy human wants, accessibility (is it scarce or in abundance) and utility in its least important uses dictates a product’s value.[xlvi] Value is thus reflective of the continuous and relative judegments men make to maintain the requirements for their lives and well-being.”[xlvii] Value formation is a specific iterative process, not something that is a priori or determined by the “world of the forms.”

This value description is not tangential but critical for thinking asymmetrically. Current Joint Doctrine asks planners to understand value in terms of a static, quantifiable, and utilitarian sense (see Jeremy Bentham’s work on his conception of utility) that will yield a definable output.[xlviii] This understanding of value fails to understand the dynamic nature of value. It accepts an objective and utilitarian sense of value. The consequence of this is it sees value as fixed and requires a positivist means to validate it.

If strategists have this objective and utilitarian sense of value, they end up with a lens that defaults all conflict to a linear conflict, not asymmetric where more amorphous and unmeasurable concepts in the cognitive realm are of importance. The targeting of what is valuable to the adversary becomes the biased reflection of the Professional Military Education taught to strategists, not what is of value at that time and space to the adversary. It is easy to see how this misperception is consequential as it undoubtedly leads to resource misallocation and faulty objectives.

In the case of Vietnam, the misconception of value and tensions were on full display and assisted in defeat. Robert McNamara’s penchant for objective measurement failed to discern the operational level variables requisite for success. In the aggregate, these measurements of progress, established at the highest levels, failed to tell the story of what was happening in the ground[xlix] and resulted in outputs understood in absolute terms[l] without the clarity of nuance.

As noted in Douglas Kinnard’s The War Managers, what precisely did “37% of camps neutralized” mean.[li] How was that effective for US forces and deleterious for North Vietnam? GEN William Westmoreland remarked that the US failed to understand the motivations and perspective of the enemy.[lii] In a way, planners assumed what was of value to the enemy and ignored tensions in both North and South Vietnam that they needed to address or target. Instead, strategists conceived of the conflict consisted as two “symmetrical forces who valued the same things.”

A dynamic understanding of value is required to think asymmetrically. Failing to understand what is of value, not just monetarily and not necessarily measurable, to key adversary decision makers and influencers makers, likely means a return to a fixed and unhelpful conception of power in a GPC relationship. To defeat a peer adversary with equal resources, requires the means to deplete their ability to earn or sustain value.

Future Asymmetric Warfare Group

Asymmetry’s current orientation and subsequent responses have been ineffective and damaging to the larger US society. Strategists owe the US citizenry better. The future of Asymmetry must be radical and proactive, not a reactive spending spree. If DoD is dealing with a traditional GPC opponent, the US is not going to be able to outspend it. Future asymmetric planners need to exact disproportionate costs[liii] on the enemy by better identifying systemic tensions and what is of value to the adversary decision makers within their time and space. Future research ought to articulate a methodology that provides a framework to help strategists think more radically. The motto of AWG was Think. Adapt. Anticipate. The new motto should be the following: Clarify. Design. Subvert.

References

[i] South, Todd, “The Army is shutting down its highly praised Asymmetric Warfare Group.” Army Times. October 02, 2020.

https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2020/10/02/the-army-is-shutting-down-its-much-lauded-asymmetric-warfare-group/

[ii] Ibid

[iii] South, Todd. “The subterranean battlefield: Warfare is going underground, into dark, tight spaces.” Military Times. February 26, 2019.

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-army/2019/02/26/the-subterranean-battlefield-warfare-is-going-underground-into-dark-tight-spaces/

[iv] ibid

[v] Each DOD component (Military Department and Defense Agency) submits a combined Program Objective Memorandum (POM)/Budget Estimate Submission (BES) to the Office of the Secretary of Defense which covers the 5-year Future Years Defense Program (FYDP) and presents the Component's proposal for a balanced allocation of available resources within specified constraints to satisfy the Defense Planning Guidance (DPG).” From “Defense Primer: Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution(PPBE)” by the Congressional Research Service. Accessed at https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/IF10429.pdf

[vi] RAND Corporation. Asymmetric Warfare.

https://www.rand.org/topics/asymmetric-warfare.html

[vii] Minimize the possible loss for a worst case (maximum loss) scenario to maximize the minimum gain (Encyclopedia of Mathematics) from Encyclopedia of Mathematics. “Minimax Principle.”

https://encyclopediaofmath.org/index.php?title=Minimax_principle

[viii] Macias, Amanda. “America has spent $6.4 trillion on wars in the Middle East and Asia since 2001, a new study says.” CNBC Online. November 20, 2020.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/20/us-spent-6point4-trillion-on-middle-east-wars-since-2001-study.html

[ix] McChrystal, Stanley. “Gen. McChrystal's Speech on Afghanistan.” October 1, 2009. International Institute for Strategic Studies. London, United Kingdom

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/10/01/gen_mcchrystals_address_on_afghanistan_98537.html

[x] Office of Senator Lindsey Graham. Oct 11, 2007. “Graham Visits SPAWAR, Discusses MRAP Vehicles.” Wes Hickman and Kevin Bishop. Press Release.

https://www.lgraham.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=90BF50C2-802A-23AD-41A3-62431CBCE1A2

[xi] Ackerman, Spencer. “Pentagon Salutes Itself for Armored Truck It Didn't Want in the First Place.” Wired.com. October 01, 2012. https://www.wired.com/2012/10/mrap/

[xii] Riggs, Daniel (personal communication, April 11, 2021) in which the author’s personal friend detailed the tactical view of improvements over 5 combat deployments as an Infantryman to solve asymmetrical problem.

[xiii] ibid

[xiv] Tadjdeh, Yasmin. “The MRAP: Was It Worth the Price?” National Defense Magazine. 01 October 2012. https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2012/10/1/2012october-the-mrap-was-it-worth-the-price

[xv] Martin. Rachel. “The IED: The $30-Bombs That Cost the U.S. Billions.” NPR. December 17, 2011.

https://www.npr.org/2011/12/18/143902421/in-iraq-fighting-an-improvised-war#:~:text=The%20IED%3A%20The%20%2430-Bombs%20That%20Cost%20The%20U.S.,end%20of%20the%20war%2C%20but%20one%20lasting%20

[xvi] Shell, Jason. “How the IED Won: Dispelling the Myth of Tactical Success and Innovation.” War on the Rocks. May 01, 2017.

https://warontherocks.com/2017/05/how-the-ied-won-dispelling-the-myth-of-tactical-success-and-innovation/

[xvii] Department of Defense. Joint Publication 1-02: Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. 8 November 2010 (As Amended Through 15 February 2016)

https://fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/jp1_02.pdf

[xviii] The bold word is the individual DOTMLPF term and the italicized section defines the doctrinal term

[xix] Basiat, Frederic. “That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen.” 1850.

http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html

[xx] ibid

[xxi] Bastiat’s “Parable of The Broken Window” from “That which is Seen and That Which is Unseen” at http://bastiat.org/fr/cqovecqonvp.html should be the first stop for strategists

[xxii] Zeballos-Roig, Joseph, “Cost of War.” Business Insider. November 22, 2019.

https://www.businessinsider.com/us-spending-war-on-terror-stands-at-6-trillion-report-2019-11?r=US&IR=T

[xxiii] Melman, Seymour. Our Depleted Society. New York: Dell, 1965:7.

[xxiv] Ibid, 15.

[xxv] Nelson, Richard N. “The Impact of Arms Reduction on Research and Development.” American Review 53 (May 1963): 445.

[xxvi] Lowrey, Annie. “The Inflation Gap.” The Atlantic. November 5, 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/income-inequality-getting-worse/601414/

[xxvii] Johnston, Matthew. “A History of Income Inequality in the United States.” Investopedia. June 25, 2019. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/110215/brief-history-income-inequality-united-states.asp

[xxviii] See recent work by the Council on Foreign Relations (“The U.S. Inequality Debate” by Anshu Siripurapu, July 15, 2020) for instance.

[xxix] Scales, Robert H. “Ike’s Lament: In Search of a Revolution in Military Education.” War on the Rocks. August 16, 2017. https://warontherocks.com/2017/08/ikes-lament-in-search-of-a-revolution-in-military-education/

[xxx] Joyner, James. “Does the US Military Really Need More Strategists.” War on the Rocks. November 8, 2018. https://warontherocks.com/2018/11/does-the-u-s-military-really-need-more-strategists/

[xxxi] Scales, Robert H. Are You a Strategic Genius?: Not Likely, Given Army's System for Selecting, Educating Leaders.” Association of the United States Army. October 13, 2016. https://www.ausa.org/articles/army-system-selecting-educating-leaders

[xxxii] Innovation itself is also ironically asymmetric. The radical change might serve little payoff. If it is successful, there might be reward. There also might be reprisal if it affects someone’s bureaucratic fiefdom. More likely, the change has little chance of success. For upward looking officer there is too much to lose. One should deviate from a career map and the required evaluations if they want higher commands.

[xxxiii] Kahneman, Daniel., Amos Tversky. “Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk.” Econometrica, 47, 263-291. (1979)

[xxxiv] Pfatteicher, Stefan and Simon Schindler. “The frame of the game: Loss-framing increases dishonest behavior.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 69; September 2016.

[xxxv] Department of Defense, Chapter 4, Page 23, Joint Publications 5-0 Joint Planning, June 16, 2017.

[xxxvi] Zweibelson, Ben. “Does Design Help or Hurt Military Planning: How NTM-A Designed a Plausible Afghan Security Force in an Uncertain Future, Part I.” Small Wars Journal. July 09, 2012. https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/does-design-help-or-hurt-military-planning-how-ntm-a-designed-a-plausible-afghan-security-f

[xxxvii] De-tactilization: agree to see events as a generalist from an abstract level to avoid viewing problems from a reductionist and often tactical worldview; “Does Design Help or Hurt Military Planning: How NTM-A Designed a Plausible Afghan Security Force in an Uncertain Future, Part I.”

[xxxviii] Contextualization: description of the larger environment; “Does Design Help or Hurt Military Planning: How NTM-A Designed a Plausible Afghan Security Force in an Uncertain Future, Part I.”

[xxxix] Problematization: framing the problem to develop options; “Does Design Help or Hurt Military Planning: How NTM-A Designed a Plausible Afghan Security Force in an Uncertain Future, Part I.”

[xl] Improvisation: shaping of an operational approach while continuously cycling back into all earlier phases to seek novel operational approaches; “Does Design Help or Hurt Military Planning: How NTM-A Designed a Plausible Afghan Security Force in an Uncertain Future, Part I.”

[xli] ibid

[xlii] Simplicity of these is also its strength. According to Douglas Kinnard’s The War Managers one of the biggest issues for tactical level commanders was a difficulty in translating operational guidance down to their level. Instead of further detail, simplicity may be the better COA.

[xliii] Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopedia (Invalid Date). Austrian school of economics. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Austrian-school-of-economics

[xliv] The Paradox states that , even though life cannot exist without water and can easily exist without diamonds, diamonds are, pound for pound, vastly more valuable than water.

[xlv] Austrian school of economics. Encyclopedia Britannica.

[xlvi] Austrian school of economics. Encyclopedia Britannica.

[xlvii] Menger, Carl. Principle of Economics. Auburn, AL: Ludwig Von Mises Institute, 1871: 78. Retrieved from https://cdn.mises.org/principles_of_economics.pdf

[xlviii] Department of Defense, Chapter 6, Page 9, Joint Publications 5-0 Joint Planning, June 16, 2017.

[xlix] Kinnard, Douglas. The War Managers. Lebanon, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1977: 72.

[l] Ibid, 69

[li] Ibid, 72

[lii] Ibid, 63.

[liii] This does not need to be just financial. Insights on effectiveness can be qualitative and beyond measure.

militarystrategymagazine.com

20. The Hedgehogs of Critical Race Theory

A good essay. But the hedgehogs on both sides of the political spectrum must be challenged. And it is amazing how similar are the hedgehogs despite being on opposite extreme ends of the political spectrum.

In this conclusion you can substitute all the hedgehog issues that the other side of the political spectrum believes in as the One Big Thing. Everyone should evaluate their positions and ask themselves if they believe in One Big Thing and consider how that affects the American political environment (and divide).

When Niebuhr wrote that line, in a 1937 book called “The Kingdom of God in America,” he was arguing against the Marxist hedgehogs’ economic interpretation of the Constitution—their claim that the Founders were nothing more than capitalists protecting their own interests. Niebuhr meant that it is an error to assume that one’s own particular fixation (whether it be money or race or class or religion or environment or animal rights or transgenderism or whatever) is the One Big Thing. The hedgehog’s most profound character defects are moral vanity and self-righteousness—his fatal, paradoxical intolerance.

The Hedgehogs of Critical Race Theory

They start with important truths—slavery was wicked—and get carried away into monomania.

WSJ · by Lance Morrow

The world’s hedgehog population tends to expand in times of stress and change. Lately it has exploded in the U.S. Hedgehogs are thick on the ground, all of them advancing One Big Thing or another—each peering through the lens of a particular obsession. At the moment, the biggest One Big Thing is race—the key, it seems, to all of America, to the innermost meanings of the country and its history.

It isn’t really true. Race is one of many big things in America. It is hardly the most important. Americans need to desanctify the subject of race—to mute its claims, which have grown absolutist and, as it were, theological in their thoroughness, their dogmatism.

Critical race theory has spread across the U.S. like—forgive the expression—a virus, coming to infect primary schools and high schools and universities, foundations, art museums, big corporations, the military, local, state and federal government bureaucracies. It’s everywhere in the West Wing. President Biden, who spent almost 40 years following the ways of an amiable political fox in the Senate—exchanging pleasantries and now and then doing legislative business with Confederate mossbacks like Strom Thurmond and James Eastland —has, in his old age, signed on with the monomaniacs of the left.

The hedgehog’s trajectory may begin on the side of undeniable and important truth—for example, the truth that slavery was a great wickedness in America (as it was elsewhere in the world), and that race prejudice has been a chronic American dilemma and a moral blight that has damaged and scarred the lives of millions of black American citizens over generations.

All true—a truth to be acknowledged and addressed. But hedgehogs, who deal in absolutes, are liable to get carried away. Their truth changes shape as it coalesces into a political movement and gets a taste of power and begins to impose itself programmatically. Its ambitions swell, it grows messianic, it embraces civic idiocies (defund the police!) and beholds the astounding impunity with which it may run amok in the streets and burn police cars and shopping malls, as it did last summer, and the ease with which it may take over city councils and mayors’ offices and turn so many of the country’s normal arrangements upside down.

It was said in the era of Joe McCarthy that he and his followers saw a communist under every bed. The single-minded ideology of critical race theory sees racism in every white face—a racism systemic, pervasive, inescapable, damning. All white people are racists. The doctrine devolves to the crudest form of what might be called racial Calvinism: Americans are predestined—saved or damned, depending on the color of their skin. This doctrine merely reverses the theory of white supremacy, which damned black people—and consigned them to oppressive segregation—because of the color of their skin.

So critical race theory, protesting the old injustice, embraces its lie. This is not progress but revenge. The motive is not justice but payback, lex talionis—an understandable, if Balkan, impulse. Beware a hedgehog claiming the immunities of an innocent victim. Beware when victimhood is his One Big Thing.

The victim wants revenge, and who is more justified in committing any crime or injustice than a blameless victim acting in historic retaliation? Virtue, feeling vengeful and tasting power, grows manic—dogmatic, dangerous. Critical race theory ends by fostering the evil it professes to combat—racism and the hatred that comes with it. “Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return,” W.H. Auden wrote. The 20th century taught the lesson over and over again, but it seems to be wasted on the 21st.

The theologian H. Richard Niebuhr (younger brother of Reinhold) explained the fallacy thus: “There is no greater barrier to understanding than the assumption that the standpoint which we happen to occupy is a universal one.” It is an error embedded in human nature.

When Niebuhr wrote that line, in a 1937 book called “The Kingdom of God in America,” he was arguing against the Marxist hedgehogs’ economic interpretation of the Constitution—their claim that the Founders were nothing more than capitalists protecting their own interests. Niebuhr meant that it is an error to assume that one’s own particular fixation (whether it be money or race or class or religion or environment or animal rights or transgenderism or whatever) is the One Big Thing. The hedgehog’s most profound character defects are moral vanity and self-righteousness—his fatal, paradoxical intolerance.

Mr. Morrow is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His latest book is “God and Mammon: Chronicles of American Money.”

WSJ · by Lance Morrow

V/R

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow

Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Phone: 202-573-8647

Personal Email: d avid.maxwell161@gmail.com

Web Site: www.fdd.org

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Subscribe to FDD’s new podcast, Foreign 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: d avid.maxwell161@gmail.com

Web Site: www.fdd.org

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Subscribe to FDD’s new podcast, Foreign Podicy

FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

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