Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners


Quotes of the Day:

“The Americanization of the war can, from the military point of view, succeed, but the Americanization of the peace, of daily life, can only serve the Viet Cong with terrorist objectives and propagandist arguments against ‘American hegemony in Vietnam.’”
“… the Americans are winning everything—except the war.”
- Moshe Dayan

“Everything we say, everything we do, and everything we fail to say or do will have its impact in other lands.”  
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

“The very massiveness of our intervention actually reduced our leverage. So long as we were willing to use U.S. resources and manpower as a substitute for Vietnamese, their incentive for doing more was compromised.” 
- Komer, Bureaucracy At War.



1. Inside the Afghanistan airlift: Split-second decisions, relentless chaos drove historic military mission
2. U.S. Spent Billions on Afghanistan and Failed to Build a Sustainable Economy
3. Opinion | China’s thuggery in the case of the ‘two Michaels’ shows its contempt for conventional diplomacy
4. U.S. Asked Russia About Offer of Bases to Monitor Afghan Terror Threat
5. Marine officer who blasted leaders over Afghanistan withdrawal now in the brig
6. The Secret War Over Pentagon Aid in Fighting Wildfires
7. What the Allegations Against Chairman Milley Really Mean
8. How ‘wonder material’ graphene became a national security concern
9. Biden’s pivot to Asia is missing something: diplomats
10. Republican lawmakers warn against more military coordination with Russia
11. America is highly vulnerable to a missile attack
12. Biden hit with backlash over removal of Pentagon’s top nuclear policy official
13. Decisive Defeat: Why the U.S. Strategy for Afghanistan Didn’t Work
14. The Taliban didn't change — it adapted to the (dis)information age
15. The price of immigration bureaucracy is risking lives
16. AUKUS: Good Goals, Bad Implementation
17. The Kremlin’s Strange Victory: How Putin Exploits American Dysfunction and Fuels American Decline
18. To Deter China, Relearn The Lost Art of Dissuasion
19. Misinformation Is About to Get So Much Worse
20. Afghanistan probably never stood a chance, reports show
21. China power crunch spreads, shutting factories and dimming growth outlook
22. War Between the U.S. and China is Coming
23. Rapid and Radical Adaptation in Counterinsurgency: Task Force 714 in Iraq
24.  Xi Takes a Page From Mao’s Red Playbook
25. Biden’s Predetermined Withdrawal Leaves Both Afghanistan and Western Coalitions in Tatters
26. Succeeding Xi Jinping



1. Inside the Afghanistan airlift: Split-second decisions, relentless chaos drove historic military mission

Quite a story. Americans doing the best they can (and their best can be amazing) with the hand dealt to them by political leadership.

Excerpts:
Back in Afghanistan, the war’s final moments were witnessed through night-vision devices. Stray dogs roamed the runway, and Taliban militants could be seen waving farewell. Airmen braced for a last minute strike.
The anti-rocket system that safeguarded the airport throughout the operation was switched off as the last troops loaded onto their planes.
“The day of the flight, I enjoyed the sunset more than I normally do,” said Lt. Col. Braden Coleman, director of operations for the 816th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron.
About 60 aircraft were involved in the final departure, including 20 to 25 strike aircraft that flew in a cone over Kabul as the last ground personnel left the airport.
Capt. Kirby Wedan, commander of the lead aircraft of the last five transport planes, said a wave of relief washed over the crews once they arrived in Kuwait.
But, she said, the sense of accomplishment came with a gnawing feeling that more could have been done.
“I know there are a lot of people still there that needed us. And I know that we left a lot of people behind,” Wedan said. “It hurts to know we won’t be able to go back and get them.”
Inside the Afghanistan airlift: Split-second decisions, relentless chaos drove historic military mission
The Washington Post · by Alex Horton and Dan Lamothe Yesterday at 4:42 p.m. EDT · September 27, 2021
As Air Force planners in Illinois choreographed the largest evacuation airlift in U.S. military history, surveillance drones loitering over Hamid Karzai International Airport captured the disarray below, scanning for threats among the mass of civilians desperate to flee. It was Aug. 26, just before 6 p.m. in Kabul. A plume of black flooded the video feed.
Military personnel at the 618th Air Operations Command outside St. Louis quickly concluded that there had been a bombing and that their decisions in the next few minutes would determine the fate of grievously wounded Americans and Afghans thousands of miles away.
A plane in Qatar stuffed with medical personnel and equipment roared to Kabul, about three and a half hours away. Another jet specializing in aeromedical evacuation was dispatched from Germany.
The bombing, which killed at least 170 Afghans and 13 U.S. service members, and the scramble to respond while continuing the evacuation, spotlighted the split-second decisions and chaos that defined the military’s 17-day race to pull off a daunting mission on a single runway at a crumbling airport under constant threat of attack.
Lawmakers determined to assign blame for the messy exit from Afghanistan will convene hearings in the Senate and the House this week to scrutinize the Pentagon’s decision-making and senior military leaders’ counsel to President Biden ahead of Kabul’s fall. Yet while nearly every aspect of the airlift continues to be picked apart and politicized, the rescue of nearly 124,000 people in such a narrow time frame stands as a historic accomplishment — albeit one overshadowed by tragedy.
This account of the operation is based on interviews with more than a dozen military officials and others involved in the evacuation, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. The interviews reveal how troops, diplomats and others on the ground worked to the point of exhaustion and how commanders were forced to improvise as the Biden administration struggled to keep up with the unfolding crisis.
In all, 79,000 civilians, including about 6,000 American citizens, left Afghanistan on U.S. military aircraft between Aug. 14 and Aug. 30, when the last transports carrying heavily armed combat troops faded into the night sky over Kabul. An additional 40,000 escaped on commercial, private or allied planes with U.S. military supervision. But thousands more Afghans were still seeking refuge when the airlift ended, and at least 100 American citizens hoping to be rescued were left behind, U.S. officials said. Others who declined to leave did so when faced with the wrenching choice of fleeing at the expense of leaving behind Afghan family members who were not permitted to come.
The airlift’s centerpiece was the C-17 Globemaster III, a workhorse transport plane that has filled an essential role in ferrying people and equipment in and out of war zones for decades. At one point, half of the Air Force’s entire fleet of 222 C-17s were dedicated to the round-the-clock mission. Some aircrews who refused to take a break requested waivers from their superiors so they could sidestep protocol and continue flying without the prescribed amount of rest otherwise mandated between missions.
“We would have to tell them no,” said Brig. Gen. Dan DeVoe, who leads the 618th Air Operations Center. “Within the realm of what’s physically possible, they were giving it their all.”
Crisis erupts
For years, the Kabul airport, a fortress encircled by concrete blast walls, had weathered occasional attacks on its modest operation — a commercial terminal on the southern side mirrored by a military base on its northern edge, bisected by a single runway.
The facility devolved into pandemonium Aug. 15, after word circulated that President Ashraf Ghani had fled the country, allowing the Taliban a swift victory. The U.S. military quickly ordered thousands of troops back to Kabul to evacuate as many people as possible by the end of the month.
Arriving personnel encountered terrified Afghans who had flooded the airport, paralyzing operations in their bid for escape. Nearly 15,000 people roamed the airfield at one point. On Aug. 16, the plane carrying Air Force Col. Colin McClaskey, who had been dispatched to Kabul to get the facility back online, couldn’t even land. His aircraft orbited for hours. Below, as one C-17 rumbled down the airstrip, hundreds of desperate Afghans chased it, some clinging to its fuselage and landing gear — creating a defining image of the fallen city. When the plane began its ascent, two men fell to their deaths. Later, defense officials said, partial human remains were found in the plane’s wheel well. The incident, including the decision to take off with so many people on the runway, is under Air Force investigation.
The next day, McClaskey, deputy commander for the 821st Contingency Response Group at Travis Air Force Base in California, was able to land and lead a 90-person team onto the airfield.
Nearly everything needed to run the airport effectively — airfield lighting, radars, weather systems — had been damaged or destroyed by crowds as they climbed over sensitive electronics and power supplies. European and American contractors running the airport, McClaskey said, had abandoned their posts as the crowd grew. Random gunfire echoed across the airport.
McClaskey, whose team specializes in setting up crisis flight operations, walked through empty rooms. Cold cups of coffee and sandwiches sat on desks. Someone’s clothes had been left in a washing machine.
“It looked like someone just stepped out for fresh air,” McClaskey said.
The scale of destruction forced McClaskey and his team to improvise. Runway lights were initially off, he said, so his team placed water bottles and flashlights on the tarmac to help create some illumination. While they managed to partially fix the airport’s radar, other equipment needed to organize flights was beyond repair. McClaskey dispatched an Army vehicle with powerful radios onto the runway to ensure military aircraft and charter flights were spaced apart.
Crews — and planes — were asked to handle the unprecedented. On one flight alone, 823 people were crammed into a transport plane that typically carries about a hundred troops and their equipment.
McClaskey consoled Afghan teenagers, close in age to his own children, who struggled to make sense of the upheaval and uncertainty as they embarked on their new lives. The mission was emotionally draining, he said, noting that mental health professionals were waiting to receive the airmen after the mission.
“Our folks saw a lot of things they were not prepared for,” McClaskey said.
Abbey Gate
Army and Marine Corps infantrymen fanned out to clear the runway, restore order inside the airport facility and lock down security across its five main entrances as Afghans massed outside.
While the United States had an agreement with the Taliban to provide security outside the airport, Afghans afraid to filter through those checkpoints searched for an alternate way inside. They found it at Abbey Gate, on the southeast edge of the airfield. The gate straddles a concrete sewage canal with fences on either side, a zone where the Taliban did not operate, according to one Marine who participated in the mission.
With crowds on one side of the canal and U.S. troops on the other, evacuees held up code words they obtained from American contacts working to help them escape, the Marine said. Afghans who received the go-ahead would jump into the canal and grab the hands of troops, who lifted them to safety and searched them by hand.
Others crossed on a footbridge lined with razor wire. It was there, in what would become some of the evacuation’s most visceral scenes, where infant children were hoisted overhead for service members to take.
Marines at Abbey Gate saw children’s bodies adrift in the shallow sewage canal, they said, probably after being trampled during periodic crowd surges. Initially, U.S. personnel were eager to be assigned to Abbey Gate — what they considered the white-hot center of the evacuation.
“We wanted to be there,” the Marine said. “And then we realize that maybe I don’t want to be here, watching these people wade through this s--- river and wave papers, and I have to tell them no.”
Abbey Gate was within earshot of Taliban checkpoints enforcing order on the other side of the perimeter wall. The militants would fire warning shots — sporadic rounds of automatic fire with the occasional orange streak of a tracer round. Other gunfire sounded more deliberate.
“You’d know they were killing people when you’d hear a shot, then a pause, then a shot,” the Marine said.
The attack
As the airlift ramped up, intelligence surfaced warning of an imminent attack on the airport by Islamic State-Khorasan, or ISIS-K, an affiliate of the terrorist group. Troops on the ground understood Abbey Gate would be a prime target.
The Americans knew that unless they stood shoulder to shoulder and managed the crowd on the lip of the canal, they could be overrun; if the troops stood too far back, the crowd might stampede.
That approach came with risk. A fundamental lesson of combat training is to avoid bunching up, which can draw the eyes of an enemy looking for an opportunity to strike several troops at once.
The attack was carried out by a single ISIS-K operative wearing a suicide vest containing an estimated 20 to 25 pounds of explosives. U.S. officials said the bomber slipped into the crowd near where the Americans were conducting hand searches.
After the blast, personnel nearby flooded the area to secure the site and recover the dead and wounded. Marines picked through the carnage to recover equipment and bloody uniforms — and prevent militants from claiming a trophy. One American injured in the blast screamed that he wanted to be the last one carried to safety.
Along the wall above, infantrymen stood in a line, the barrels of their rifles raised.
The Marines braced for another attack. But the night passed without further violence, and complicated feelings set in. There was pride in bringing civilians to safety, but not taking retribution felt like a job left unfinished. It was the next day before some Marines wept.
Plans to end the operation stepped up. Troops were directed to destroy equipment that the United States planned to leave behind — a form of catharsis after the bombing. They took sledgehammers to electronics, smashed windows and stripped armored vehicles to keep the Taliban from using them.
Some troops spray painted obscene messages on the walls taunting the militants. Commanders ordered them to clean up the mess before they left.
“My boys had to go … pick up every last piece of … trash for who? The Taliban?” the Marine said. “It was a slap in the face to us.”
First Lt. Jack Coppola, a spokesman assigned to Marines in the region, said the messages were painted over and trash was collected to ensure debris didn’t impact flights.
In response to the bombing, the United States launched two drone strikes aimed at Islamic State operations, including one in eastern Afghanistan that officials said targeted a planner tied to the attack. Another in Kabul on Aug. 29 struck a car the Pentagon initially said was transporting explosives for a second attack on the airport. Weeks later, officials acknowledged that the driver was an aid worker for a U.S.-based nonprofit and that the strike killed 10 civilians, including seven children.
Beyond Kabul, a different challenge emerged. Thousands of Afghans taxed the capacity of Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar and then other locations as the U.S. military broadened the constellation of bases accepting Afghans into Europe and the United States. U.S. troops in Qatar struggled to keep up with trash and sanitation problems, and eventually asked evacuees to assist with the cleanup, defense officials said.
Brig. Gen. Josh Olson, commander of the 86th Airlift Wing at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, said he and his staff initially planned for 5,000 evacuees. They ended up with a peak of 20,000, he said, leading them to rely on volunteers and German partners to keep people fed, clothed and comfortable.
Olson said about a dozen babies were born among the evacuees who came through bases in Germany. An additional 30 children were born at military installations in the United States, said Navy Capt. Pamela Kunze, a U.S. military spokeswoman.
Last flights out
Back in Afghanistan, the war’s final moments were witnessed through night-vision devices. Stray dogs roamed the runway, and Taliban militants could be seen waving farewell. Airmen braced for a last minute strike.
The anti-rocket system that safeguarded the airport throughout the operation was switched off as the last troops loaded onto their planes.
“The day of the flight, I enjoyed the sunset more than I normally do,” said Lt. Col. Braden Coleman, director of operations for the 816th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron.
About 60 aircraft were involved in the final departure, including 20 to 25 strike aircraft that flew in a cone over Kabul as the last ground personnel left the airport.
Capt. Kirby Wedan, commander of the lead aircraft of the last five transport planes, said a wave of relief washed over the crews once they arrived in Kuwait.
But, she said, the sense of accomplishment came with a gnawing feeling that more could have been done.
“I know there are a lot of people still there that needed us. And I know that we left a lot of people behind,” Wedan said. “It hurts to know we won’t be able to go back and get them.”
The Washington Post · by Alex Horton and Dan Lamothe Yesterday at 4:42 p.m. EDT · September 27, 2021

2. U.S. Spent Billions on Afghanistan and Failed to Build a Sustainable Economy

Excerpts:
Afghanistan is dependent on imports, including for three-fourths of its power. Its trade deficit last year was equal to about a quarter of GDP, much of it financed by foreign aid.
Aid has been curtailed and the Taliban no longer has access to the country’s foreign currency reserves to pay for imports. Loss of that access “will lead to a collapse of the economy and the banking sector,” said Shah Mehrabi, a senior member of Afghanistan’s central bank.
The Biden administration said Friday it would allow U.S. agencies, aid groups and the private sector to send food and medicine to Afghanistan, providing a limited waiver from terrorist sanctions on the Taliban that have restricted trade and finance to the country, in an effort to alleviate an impending humanitarian crisis.
More than a third of government revenues came from taxes on imports; that revenue has collapsed, draining the government of money to pay the salaries of public employees. More than half of them are teachers; if hundreds of thousands don’t get paid, it could be calamitous for children.
Afghanistan’s economy could contract by 4% to 13% this year, and the poverty rate could rise to 97% of the population, according to a report this month by the United Nations Development Programme.
U.S. Spent Billions on Afghanistan and Failed to Build a Sustainable Economy
Country faces economic collapse with the withdrawal of foreign assistance under Taliban rule
WSJ · by Sune Engel Rasmussen and Josh Mitchell

“When aid was there, we were able to pay salaries, buy electricity and we were able to fund our national army,” said Salma Alokozai, who served in the fallen Afghan government’s finance and education ministries, and liaised with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. “The private sector was doing fine. Right now, there is no private sector, and there is no aid money.”
One U.S. Defense Department official put it more bluntly, telling the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar) in a report last month: “When you look at how much we spent and what we got for it, it’s mind-boggling.”
P. Michael McKinley, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2014 to 2016, acknowledged, “On balance, nation-building in Afghanistan was not a success.”
The U.S. alone spent $145 billion over 20 years to rebuild Afghanistan, according to Sigar, a watchdog agency created by Congress. That is on top of $837 billion in U.S. military spending on the country. That exceeds the roughly $137 billion, in today’s dollars, that the U.S. spent on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II, according to Sigar, and the roughly $70 billion spent to rebuild Iraq.

A currency exchange in Kabul that reopened earlier this month after shutting down when the Taliban took power.
Photo: Sandra Calligaro for The Wall Street Journal
Critics say foreign aid built infrastructure—roads, schools, health facilities—but not a self-sustaining private sector. The money “often went into projects that were not sustainable with existing Afghan revenues or other ways they could support it going forward without the U.S.,” said Catherine Lutz, co-founder of Costs of War, a project at Brown University that studies U.S. spending in foreign countries.
Much of the aid flowed through U.S. contractors to meet U.S. priorities, such as counterinsurgency and battling suspected terrorists, rather than to Afghans and Afghan-owned businesses. Afghan officials have for years complained they didn’t have enough influence over what aid money was spent on. The torrent of money also fed corruption that undermined the legitimacy of the Washington-backed government. Public distrust of leaders in Kabul eased the Taliban’s return to power.
“Corruption was the biggest reason the government fell,” said Ms. Alokozai.
The failure to strengthen the Afghan state was most stark in agriculture. Despite $2 billion in U.S. spending, farming output has barely increased over the past two decades. Its share of gross domestic product has fallen to 20% from 70% in 1994, even though two in three Afghans still live in rural areas.
In 2010, the U.S. Department for Agriculture paid the American Soybean Association to introduce soybeans to Afghan farmers. Yet a U.K. government study two years earlier concluded the growth and harvest cycle of the crop and its water needs didn’t suit the Afghan farming system. The ASA didn’t study the feasibility of the project before it was implemented, according to a 2014 letter by Sigar.

A wheat farmer outside Jalalabad, Afghanistan, in May.
Photo: Ghulamullah Habibi/EPA/Shutterstock
An Afghan farmer who took part in the soybean project in Balkh province said there wasn’t enough water to grow the crop, the proper seeds weren’t available locally, and there was no market for any harvested crops. “It was a big failure,” the farmer said. Sigar agreed.
ASA spokeswoman Wendy Brannen disputed that. She said the project had achieved “successes in line with or exceeding its original objectives.” She added, “Our acceptability and sensory analyses showed that Afghans eat and like soy and that it could be a viable source of protein in a very protein deficient country.”
The U.S. sought to introduce alternative crops to opium poppies. But Afghan farmers were reluctant to give up poppies, one of their few cash crops. Others, such as saffron, pine nuts and cotton were far less lucrative, and rutted roads and poor storage infrastructure made exports difficult.
The U.S. Agency for International Development spent $335 million building the Tarakhil diesel power plant to supply Kabul with electricity. But diesel is expensive and dangerous to transport in Afghanistan. By the time the plant opened in 2010, a year behind schedule and tens of millions of dollars above budget, a separate project funded by the Asian Development Bank connected Kabul to far cheaper hydropower from Uzbekistan. By 2015, Tarakhil produced only 1% of its capacity, and 0.35% of Kabul’s power.

The American-built Tarakhil Power Plant, on the outskirts of Kabul, in 2011.
Photo: John Moore/Getty Images
The nation-building efforts did improve the lives of Afghans in important ways. The infant mortality rate has dropped by nearly half, according to the World Bank. Life expectancy rose from 57.2 years in 2003 to 64.8 years in 2019. Before the Taliban takeover, which threatens girls’ access to education, more children were going to school and could read; many more Afghans had gained access to healthcare and education.
Rapid urbanization has changed the face of bigger cities such as Kabul, Mazar-e-Sharif and Herat. Kabul has coffee shops inspired by minimalist Scandinavian design, restaurants open late into the night, and a handful of private internet service providers.

Some data is superficially impressive: Gross domestic product more than quadrupled from 2003 to $19.8 billion in 2020. But much of that was the spinoff effect of the Western military presence. Poverty generally fell much more in conflict areas because Western soldiers brought logistics and development, in part to win local hearts and minds.
All of the GDP increase came by 2012 at the end of the surge of U.S. troops; GDP has since stagnated. Unemployment has risen in recent years to 23.9% in 2017. Huge disparities persist between women and men, and between urban and rural residents. The women’s unemployment rate, at 40%, is more than double that of men. Only one in five women are literate, compared with half of all men. Before the Taliban took power, only one in four girls attended high school, compared with nearly half of all boys, a gap that could grow if the Taliban ban girls’ secondary education, as many fear.
The World Bank estimated 55% of the population to live below the poverty line in 2019, up from 34% since 2008.
Mr. McKinley, the former ambassador, said the country never developed a plan to provide long-term security without foreign forces. “The gains you can measure like extending education or health services are the ones that are most vulnerable” to deteriorating security, he said.

Afghanistan is dependent on imports, including for three-fourths of its power. Its trade deficit last year was equal to about a quarter of GDP, much of it financed by foreign aid.
Aid has been curtailed and the Taliban no longer has access to the country’s foreign currency reserves to pay for imports. Loss of that access “will lead to a collapse of the economy and the banking sector,” said Shah Mehrabi, a senior member of Afghanistan’s central bank.
The Biden administration said Friday it would allow U.S. agencies, aid groups and the private sector to send food and medicine to Afghanistan, providing a limited waiver from terrorist sanctions on the Taliban that have restricted trade and finance to the country, in an effort to alleviate an impending humanitarian crisis.
More than a third of government revenues came from taxes on imports; that revenue has collapsed, draining the government of money to pay the salaries of public employees. More than half of them are teachers; if hundreds of thousands don’t get paid, it could be calamitous for children.
Afghanistan’s economy could contract by 4% to 13% this year, and the poverty rate could rise to 97% of the population, according to a report this month by the United Nations Development Programme.
Write to Sune Engel Rasmussen at sune.rasmussen@wsj.com and Josh Mitchell at joshua.mitchell@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications
The infant mortality rate in Afghanistan has dropped by nearly half since 2003, according to the World Bank. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that the mortality rate had declined to 46% from 82%. (Corrected on Sept. 27)
WSJ · by Sune Engel Rasmussen and Josh Mitchell


3. Opinion | China’s thuggery in the case of the ‘two Michaels’ shows its contempt for conventional diplomacy


Opinion | China’s thuggery in the case of the ‘two Michaels’ shows its contempt for conventional diplomacy
The Washington Post · by Opinion by the Editorial Board Today at 4:15 p.m. EDT · September 27, 2021
There was never much subtlety in China’s arrest in 2018 of a pair of low-profile Canadians, a straight-out act of state-sponsored hostage-taking masquerading as criminal prosecutions. Now, shamelessly, China has dropped any pretense that its actions were anything more than international thuggery, and in so doing also served notice to the rest of the world of its contempt for the norms of conventional diplomacy.
The Canadians were freed from Beijing’s harsh detention Friday, more than 1,000 days after they were arrested on cooked-up charges. Their arrest came nine days after the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, a top executive at Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies, detained by Canada at Washington’s request on charges of lying to evade compliance with U.S. sanctions on Iran. The two Canadians, Michael Spavor, a business consultant, and Michael Kovrig, a former diplomat, were allowed to fly home shortly after the U.S. Justice Department dropped its attempt to extradite and prosecute Ms. Weng. She was permitted to fly back to China at the same time.
China is too big and powerful to be dismissed as a rogue nation, but its thuggery in what Canadians called the case of “the two Michaels” suggests an indifference to established international practices. In retaliating for the legitimate arrest of one of its citizens — an exceptionally well-connected one — by making hostages of two blameless Canadians, Beijing signaled its disdain for justice, an attitude in line with its scorn for human rights (vis-a-vis the Uyghurs, a Muslim minority group) and democracy (in Hong Kong and elsewhere).
In Beijing, officials falsely portrayed Ms. Meng’s arrest as an arbitrary act undertaken by the United States to strike at a powerful Chinese high-tech firm. By that logic, it sought to justify its retribution. In fact, no one was fooled by the false equivalence.
Nor did it escape the world’s attention that while the two Canadians suffered harsh conditions in what amounted to solitary confinement — they were held in cramped cells in separate prisons in a remote area, with meager food rations and little contact with the outside world — Ms. Meng lived in a luxurious home in Vancouver, free to go on shopping sprees and receive massage treatments with no impediments beyond an ankle bracelet to track her movements.
The episode should serve as a warning to Western companies and individuals living and doing business in China: T, that their security and even liberty may be at risk for no good reason and at any time, subject to the whims of a regime that believes itself too mighty to play by the rest of the world’s rules. Hostage-taking has traditionally been the province of terrorist groups and beyond-the-pale regimes such as Iran’s under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, which held dozens of U.S. diplomats as prisoners for 444 days starting in 1979.
Some interpreted the simultaneous release of Ms. Meng and the Canadians as moves undertaken by Washington and Beijing to induce a thaw in their relations. A better analysis might be to recognize China’s behavior as further justification for Western defensive alliances to counter its aggression.
The Washington Post · by Opinion by the Editorial Board Today at 4:15 p.m. EDT · September 27, 2021

4. U.S. Asked Russia About Offer of Bases to Monitor Afghan Terror Threat

Geography counts. Location, location, location. 

Excerpts:
Congress, in legislation passed for the 2017 defense budget and reaffirmed since, prohibits the use of funds to support U.S.-Russian military-to-military cooperation unless Moscow removes the forces it sent into Ukraine in 2014 when it annexed Crimea and abides by a peace agreement. The defense secretary can waive those provisions, but has never done so.
Some members of Congress remain suspicious of Moscow’s motives. “Russia is more concerned with gathering intelligence on the U.S. and our allies than it is sharing information on terrorist threats,” said a letter several senior Republican lawmakers sent Monday to Mr. Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
The letter was signed by Sen. James Risch of Idaho, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee; Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee; and Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee.
The letter asked for a briefing on the Biden administration’s counterterrorism plan, “including efforts to secure third country agreements with Afghanistan’s neighbors for basing, ISR and strike capabilities.”


U.S. Asked Russia About Offer of Bases to Monitor Afghan Terror Threat
Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Mark Milley asked his Russian counterpart about Putin’s comments at the request of the White House
WSJ · by Michael R. Gordon and Gordon Lubold
Gen. Gerasimov was noncommittal during the Helsinki meeting, the U.S. officials said. A Kremlin spokesman declined to comment.
The previously unreported exchange comes as the Biden administration is searching for ways to strengthen its capability to monitor and respond to potential terrorist dangers in Afghanistan now that U.S. forces have left the country.
While the U.S. and Russia share concerns about the threat of terrorism, the idea of working with Russia on counterterrorism is fraught with challenges, particularly politically. Congress enacted legislation several years ago that precludes close cooperation between the U.S. and Russia militaries as long as Russian troops are in Ukraine, unless the secretary of defense issues a special waiver.
Gen. Milley and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin are expected to come under sharp questioning from lawmakers Tuesday over the Pentagon’s planning for the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. At the appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gen Milley is also likely to face questions about the recent discussions with Gen. Gerasimov and phone calls with his Chinese counterpart in the final weeks of the Trump administration.
Last week’s discussion between the top U.S. and Russian military officers had its roots in the June 16 summit meeting in Geneva between Mr. Biden and Mr. Putin. Mr. Putin floated the idea of hosting U.S. military personnel on Russian bases, according to U.S. officials and the Russian newspaper Kommersant.

President Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin held a summit meeting in Geneva in June.
Photo: Mikhail Metzel/Tass/Zuma Press
That prompted the NSC staff to ask Gen. Milley to clarify whether Mr. Putin was simply making a debating point or was hinting at a serious offer, the U.S. officials said.
Col. Dave Butler, a spokesman for Gen. Milley, citing the privacy of the conversation between Gens. Milley and Gerasimov, declined to comment on the meeting, which was part of a series of periodic consultations between the two military leaders.
“We won’t comment on this matter,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
When Mr. Biden announced in April that he was withdrawing all forces from Afghanistan, he said the U.S. would ensure that al Qaeda or Islamic State didn’t regain strength and pose a threat to the U.S. To do so, U.S. officials said they would build an over-the-horizon capability to conduct airstrikes and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, or ISR, from outside Afghanistan.
For now, the U.S. is relying on bases in the Gulf region, including in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. That means drones and other aircraft must fly from several hundred miles away, limiting the amount of time they can linger over potential targets. So U.S. officials have also looked to Central Asia to base drones and other aircraft.
The Biden administration has repeatedly said that it is prepared to cooperate with Russia in areas in which the two sides have common interests while opposing Russian policies that go against U.S. interests.
At their Geneva meeting, Mr. Putin told Mr. Biden that he opposed American efforts to negotiate access for U.S. forces with Central Asian governments and that China would oppose it as well.
Instead Mr. Putin floated the idea that U.S. military units might use Russian military bases in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, Kommersant said. U.S. officials confirmed that Mr. Putin made such comments, but said that it wasn’t clear if he was serious.
While the U.S. military would like access to temporarily position forces in Central Asia, American officials haven't publicly talked about the possibility of deploying U.S. military units on Russian bases.
A Biden administration official said the U.S. isn’t seeking Moscow’s permission to position forces closer to Afghanistan but wanted to better understand Mr. Putin’s position.
“We will pursue our own policies based on our own objectives,” the official said. “The reality is Russia is an element of the equation in the region and so we are engaging with them.”
Congress, in legislation passed for the 2017 defense budget and reaffirmed since, prohibits the use of funds to support U.S.-Russian military-to-military cooperation unless Moscow removes the forces it sent into Ukraine in 2014 when it annexed Crimea and abides by a peace agreement. The defense secretary can waive those provisions, but has never done so.
Some members of Congress remain suspicious of Moscow’s motives. “Russia is more concerned with gathering intelligence on the U.S. and our allies than it is sharing information on terrorist threats,” said a letter several senior Republican lawmakers sent Monday to Mr. Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
The letter was signed by Sen. James Risch of Idaho, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee; Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee; and Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee.
The letter asked for a briefing on the Biden administration’s counterterrorism plan, “including efforts to secure third country agreements with Afghanistan’s neighbors for basing, ISR and strike capabilities.”
—Ann M. Simmons contributed to this article.
Write to Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com and Gordon Lubold at Gordon.Lubold@wsj.com
WSJ · by Michael R. Gordon and Gordon Lubold
5. Marine officer who blasted leaders over Afghanistan withdrawal now in the brig

Marine officer who blasted leaders over Afghanistan withdrawal now in the brig
taskandpurpose.com · by Jeff Schogol · September 27, 2021
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Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller, the Marine officer whose meteoric rise to internet fandom began with a video criticizing military leadership over Afghanistan, is currently in the brig, his father told Task & Purpose.
“All our son did is ask the questions that everybody was asking themselves, but they were too scared to speak out loud,” said Stu Scheller Sr. “He was asking for accountability. In fact, I think he even asked for an apology that we made mistakes, but they couldn’t do that, which is mind-blowing.”
He said that his son is expected to appear before a military hearing on Thursday.
“They had a gag order on him and asked him not to speak,” the senior Scheller said. “He did, and they incarcerated him. They don’t know what to do with him.”
After this story was first published, the Marine Corps issued a statement confirming that Scheller has been sent to the brig.
“Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller Jr. is currently in pre-trial confinement in the Regional Brig for Marine Corps Installations East aboard Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune pending an Article 32 preliminary hearing,” said Capt. Sam Stephenson, a spokesman for Training and Education Command. “The time, date, and location of the proceedings have not been determined. Lt. Col. Scheller will be afforded all due process.”
Scheller first gained notoriety on Aug. 26, when he posted a video on Facebook and Linkedin criticizing the handling of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. In the video, Scheller accused senior military leaders of shirking their responsibilities, and questioned some of the command decisions that were made leading up to, and during, the final moments of America’s longest war.
“People are upset because their senior leaders let them down, and none of them are raising their hands and accepting accountability or saying, ‘We messed this up,’” Scheller said in the video.
To the American leadership.Very Respectfully,US
Posted by Stuart Scheller on Thursday, August 26, 2021
Stu Scheller Sr. described his son as a proud American who loves the Marine Corps and has served proudly for the past 17 years.
“He’s asking for the same accountability that is expected of him and his men,” Scheller Sr. said.
The younger Scheller published his first video on the same day that a suicide bomber attacked Hamid Karzai International Airport’s Abbey gate, killing 11 Marines, one sailor, and one Army special operator. Scheller said in the video that he had a “personal relationship” with one of the fallen service members, but he did not elaborate.
The next day, Scheller posted on Facebook announcing that he had been relieved as battalion commander for Advanced Infantry Training Battalion at School of Infantry East at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.
Since his first video, Scheller has been the subject of both tremendous praise and severe criticism in the military and veteran community. Some saw a battalion commander and an infantry officer who was risking his career to voice frustrations over a long-mismanaged and oft-forgotten war. But others saw an officer who broke with established norms by criticizing his chain of command publicly, and in so doing undermined good order and discipline.
However, Scheller Sr. said the “botched” withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan has likely struck a nerve for anyone who has served in the military over the past 20 years.
“I’ve had Vietnam veterans contacting me applauding him for his courage because they too want to know: Was it all worth it?” the elder Scheller said. “And by demanding accountability and honesty from his senior leaders, that’s all he was asking. And the way the Marine Corps has dealt with it: They have now put him in jail.”
While Lt. Col. Scheller has earned widespread praise on social media, he has also made several statements that have prompted concern about his well-being. On Aug. 29, he made a YouTube video from inside what he described as “an abandoned school bus in Eastern North Carolina,” in which he vowed to resign his commission and proclaimed, “Follow me and we will bring the whole f—king system down.”
Following that video, the Marine Corps announced in a statement that it had taken steps to “ensure the safety and well-being of Lt. Col. Scheller and his family,” but did not provide further information.

More recently, Scheller appeared in a Sept. 16 YouTube video, in which he pledged to file charges against Marine Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr., head of U.S. Central Command, for his mistakes leading up to the chaotic Afghanistan evacuation. He added in a Facebook post that he would charge McKenzie with 13 specifications of “Dereliction of Duty through Culpable Inefficiency” – one specification for each service member killed in the Aug. 26 attack.
On Saturday, Scheller wrote on Facebook that he had been ordered to stop posting on social media “without exception.” He also leveled criticisms against current and former military and civilian leaders as well as Task & Purpose for a Sept. 17 column arguing that he cannot charge McKenzie with dereliction of duty. (That story’s headline has since been updated to clarify that service members can prefer charges but not send other troops to a court-martial.)
Scheller ended his most recent post by indicating that he expected to be sent to pretrial confinement.
“What happens when all you do is speak truth and no one wants to hear it. But they can probably stop listening because… I’m crazy… right?” Scheller wrote. “Col Emmel please have the MPs waiting for me at 0800 on Monday. I’m ready for jail.”
Update: This article has been updated to include a statement from Marine Corps Training and Education Command.
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is the senior Pentagon reporter for Task & Purpose. He has covered the military for 15 years. You can email him at schogol@taskandpurpose.com, direct message @JeffSchogol on Twitter, or reach him on WhatsApp and Signal at 703-909-6488. Contact the author here.
taskandpurpose.com · by Jeff Schogol · September 27, 2021


6. The Secret War Over Pentagon Aid in Fighting Wildfires
Who would've thought?

Excerpts:
Mr. Biden promised to help. “When this meeting is over,” he said, “I’ll be on the phone with the Department of Defense.”
His call wasn’t the first — or the 50th.
The issue of using secret military gear to aid civilian firefighters arose 35 years ago. It grew as the White House, the Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Forest Service and other federal agencies sought to establish a national system that warned of undetected wildfires and menacing flare-ups.
The Pentagon allowed tests and a short-lived prototype. But the arrangements were never permanent. The military, eager to safeguard its prerogatives and orbital fleets, was always glad to shut the pipeline down. As a result, officials like Governor Newsom now have to lobby for emergency access.
But record-setting fires are likely to grow worse and pose grave new dangers that warrant an urgent response, according to proponents of deeper cooperation between officials who combat wildfires and those managing the military spacecraft. The nation can no longer afford endless turf wars and bureaucratic foot-dragging. It’s a matter, they say, of public safety.
The Secret War Over Pentagon Aid in Fighting Wildfires
The New York Times · by William J. Broad · September 27, 2021
The military’s satellites excel at spotting new blazes, but for decades they have been mostly off limits to civilian firefighters.

Firefighters are seen behind the flames of a backfire they set to battle the French Fire near Wofford Heights, Calif., in August.
By
Sept. 27, 2021
In July, as wildfires tore through the American West, President Biden met with the region’s governors to find better ways to battle the flames. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California requested use of military satellites that are designed to warn of missile attacks, calling the orbital fleet “a game changer” for spotting and fighting wildfires.
Mr. Biden promised to help. “When this meeting is over,” he said, “I’ll be on the phone with the Department of Defense.”
His call wasn’t the first — or the 50th.
The issue of using secret military gear to aid civilian firefighters arose 35 years ago. It grew as the White House, the Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Forest Service and other federal agencies sought to establish a national system that warned of undetected wildfires and menacing flare-ups.
The Pentagon allowed tests and a short-lived prototype. But the arrangements were never permanent. The military, eager to safeguard its prerogatives and orbital fleets, was always glad to shut the pipeline down. As a result, officials like Governor Newsom now have to lobby for emergency access.
But record-setting fires are likely to grow worse and pose grave new dangers that warrant an urgent response, according to proponents of deeper cooperation between officials who combat wildfires and those managing the military spacecraft. The nation can no longer afford endless turf wars and bureaucratic foot-dragging. It’s a matter, they say, of public safety.
“Fighting disasters is like fighting wars,” said Darrell G. Herd, a retired senior research scientist at the Defense Intelligence Agency who pioneered early orbital tests of wildfire detection. “You suffer if you don’t have adequate warning.”
The parts of the United States destroyed each year by wildfires have more than doubled over two decades. And California’s fires have recently grown rapidly in size. Deaths and diseases are linked not only to blistering flames but also toxic smoke.
Even so, proponents of using the defense satellites note, the military has no established program that issues firefighting alerts to local, state and federal authorities. They also point out that the Pentagon’s spacecraft, when set against civilian and commercial ones, have repeatedly proven themselves to be superior at spotting blazes.
In an interview, Jeffrey K. Harris, a former director of the National Reconnaissance Office, which runs the country’s fleets of spy satellites, called for expanding civilian use of the attack-warning craft “as quickly as possible.” Scientists see the wildfires intensifying, he noted, “so why don’t we let firefighters take full advantage of the technology?”
California, Mr. Harris added, “is one of the largest economies in the world. And we’re not going to nip these fires in the bud?” The military craft, he stressed, “can save lives.”
A view of a Defense Support Program satellite aboard STS-44 in 1991.Credit...NASA
In 2018, the U.S. Forest Service used the spacecraft as an experiment in California, quickly spotting four flare-ups. “I believe we are just beginning to unlock the possibilities,” Lt. Gen. John F. Thompson, then head of what was called the Air Force Space and Missiles Systems Center, said of the firefighting test. The Forest Service proceeded to ask that the military spinoffs go nationwide.
Satellite-sharing proponents often cite the military’s Global Positioning System as a role model. That fleet of satellites began life in 1978 as a highly classified system for transmitting precise location data to the U.S. armed forces. In the 1980s, civilians gained access. Today, commercial uses include tracking vehicles and sending position data to millions of smartphones.

In an interview, Representative Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat who heads the House Intelligence Committee, said the nation needed to rethink the military’s overall role in protecting American society and decide either to shrink its budgets or expand its domestic responsibilities. The new roles, he added, should include the permanent sharing of the attack-warning satellites with the civilian authorities.
“Part of a strong America is having a strong infrastructure that protects our citizens not just from foreign attack but natural disasters,” Mr. Schiff said. “We need to protect people from the growing intensity of these fires.”
Mr. Schiff cited a personal encounter. In 2009, a California wildfire grew into the largest in the modern history of Los Angeles County, killing two firefighters, destroying scores of homes and turning hundreds of square miles of green vegetation into blackened remains.
“I remember stepping outside my house one night,” Mr. Schiff said. “It looked like lava flowing down the canyons — like a scene out of a surreal horror film.”
The revitalized debate centers on an early generation of attack-warning satellites known as the Defense Support Program, a main participant in the fire experiments. First sent aloft in 1970, the spacecraft orbit 22,300 miles up, over the Equator, in sync with Earth’s rotation. Hanging motionless relative to the ground lets them peer without interruption at the same regions.
An infrared image of the LNU Lightning Complex wildfire burning near Healdsburg, Calif. Infrared sensors on the military satellites are designed to detect the heat signatures of launching missiles, but can also provide early warning of wildfires.Credit...Maxar Technologies, via Reuters
A satellite image of the same area of the LNU Lightning Complex wildfire without infrared technology.Credit...Maxar Technologies, via Reuters
One satellite can see roughly a third of Earth’s surface, and three can scan the entirety of the planet. Their specialty is spotting the fiery plumes of attacking missiles. But their infrared sensors — sensitive to heat’s invisible rays — can see much more. Once, a spacecraft was able to pinpoint where an Air Force C-141 transport jet exploded over the South Atlantic.
The military has lofted 23 of the craft over the decades at an estimated cost of $15 billion. Their current numbers and orbital locations are classified secrets. By Washington standards, their operating costs are relatively low. A military contractor was recently awarded a renewal contract for $223 million over ten years, or $22.3 million a year.
Military craft in geosynchronous orbit have an edge over civilian satellites at lower altitudes that move steadily over Earth’s surface. The spacecraft in lower orbits see particular sites infrequently, often leaving them blind to new fires, sudden flare-ups and shifting flames. The images of NASA’s firefighting program are up to five hours old. In contrast, the military craft scan planet Earth every 10 seconds.
In fire season, striking images from satellite companies and the space fleets of civilian agencies are often made public, but those spacecraft typically detect blazes only after they’re too large to contain.
In the mid-1980s, Dr. Herd, then at the U.S. Geological Survey, learned that the attack-warning satellites could spot wildfires. Interagency talks ensued. After the Cold War, the White House put the nation’s spy agencies and satellites onto the new job of environmental sleuthing, and the C.I.A. funded a number of pioneering fire studies.
In 1993 and 1994, Dr. Herd organized a program of igniting test fires across the United States to see how well the military satellites did. The fuels included brush, trees and grasses. The trials showed that the spacecraft could easily spot blazes even when the flames were relatively small and easily suppressed.
In July 1996, the C.I.A. director boasted in a public speech that his agency had recently helped the U.S. Forest Service battle a series of wildfires raging in Alaska.
A Defense Support Program satellite on its way to the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., in 1991.Credit...NASA
Support grew in the Clinton administration and in Congress for a permanent setup. The National Reconnaissance Office took the lead. Three federal agencies that ran three kinds of satellites — for monitoring land use, adversaries and the weather — helped set up the prototype. It was known as the Hazard Support System.
The warning hub came to life in 1999 but died almost immediately because of lack of funds. In lamenting its demise, Senator Daniel K. Akaka, a Democrat of Hawaii, called it “a small program with a huge return.” Congressional investigators blamed poor interagency management.
Nonetheless, the idea of military aid for firefighters kept gaining support. In 2000, the Aerospace Corporation, which does research for the Pentagon, released a detailed study showing that the spacecraft could easily track grassland fires set intentionally across more than a million square miles of African savanna.
In 2010, an editorial in Space News, an industry publication, called on the military to set up a national system of wildfire alerts.
Experts proceeded to ask if civilian satellites — an increasing number of which have sensors that detect not only visible light but also heat rays — might be as good or even better than the military craft.
In 2012, Medea, the C.I.A.’s environmental arm, compared the two approaches in a global test. The target was Brazil and its gargantuan forests, which farmers often set ablaze to clear land. The military’s attack-warning satellites came out on top. Their geostationary positions gave them continuous views, whereas the civilian satellites in lower orbits came and went over hours and days, often leaving them unable to detect new blazes.
On a temporary basis, California began using the military spacecraft to spot fires in 2018. Last year, Maj. Gen. David S. Baldwin, adjutant general of the California National Guard, told reporters that the state was “becoming pretty good at it.”
The main problem was the limited access. Most recently, use of the military asset was set to expire on Sept. 30, at the end of the federal government’s fiscal year. So, over the summer, the state of California mounted a lobbying campaign.
Flames consume multiple homes as the Caldor fire in California, which started Aug. 14 and is still burning.
In late July, Governor Newsom made his pitch to President Biden. “It’s hard,” Mr. Newsom said of the authorization process. “Every year, we fight to get a one-year extension.” The state’s congressional delegation, led by Mr. Schiff and Senator Dianne Feinstein, sent a follow-up letter to Lloyd J. Austin, the secretary of defense.
When the request was approved, Mr. Schiff put out a statement saying the California delegation “will continue to push to make this program permanent.”
In an interview, Linda Zall, a former C.I.A. official who for decades led the agency’s fire and environmental studies, said it was “a travesty” that civilian officials faced so much resistance to a modest step that promised to substantially enhance public safety.
The civilian authorities could soon get better options. Start-ups in Australia and Germany are planning to loft fire-spotting satellites in order to serve fast-growing international markets. And Planet, a U.S. company that built a fleet of nearly 200 imaging satellites, recently joined with a start-up to assess forest fire risks.
But on the military side, things could worsen. The Department of Defense is now facing budget pressures that could end the Defense Support Program and its firefighting aid. The problem arises principally from a new defensive strategy that the Pentagon is racing to put in place.
Starting in 2011, the Defense Support Program satellites were succeeded by a new generation that cost $1.7 billion per spacecraft. Six were scheduled for launch to geosynchronous orbit. By 2015, however, such giant craft were beginning to be judged as vulnerable to enemy attack. China, in particular, was seen as speeding ahead on a wide range of antisatellite arms.
A firefighter tries to extinguish the flames on a house as the South Fire burned north of Rialto, Calif. on Aug. 25.Credit...Ringo H.W. Chiu/Associated Press
Today, in response, the Pentagon is rushing to build smaller, cheaper, more numerous craft. It sees the vast numbers as greatly reducing the risk of attacks successful enough to knock out vital U.S. capabilities. By 2026, it wants to have in orbit roughly 1,000 satellites, many for attack warning. The issue is considered so urgent that the Pentagon in 2019 set up a new arm, the Space Development Agency, to carry out the sweeping plan.
Experts warn that the shift, and its budget repercussions, may turn the aging spacecraft of the Defense Support Program into prime targets for termination.
One proffered solution is to transfer the satellites from the Pentagon to a civilian agency, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which runs the nation’s weather satellites. Or a civilian agency could simply pick up the military’s operating costs.
Mr. Harris, the former director of the National Reconnaissance Office, offered a more ambitious plan. He said the American military had tailored systems of declassification that, if applied, would let information from all its attack-warning satellites — whether old, new or middle age — be shared quickly with firefighters.
It’s a moment, he said, to expand the military’s support.
The wildfire situation “is going to get worse before it gets better,” Mr. Harris said. As a matter of public safety commensurate with the growing threat, he added, now is the time to “move the bureaucracy, to tell it what’s important. Let’s take advantage of these very capable resources.”
The New York Times · by William J. Broad · September 27, 2021

7. What the Allegations Against Chairman Milley Really Mean

What the Allegations Against Chairman Milley Really Mean
Because Senator Marco Rubio’s allegations of Milley having interfered with the chain of command in a way that could have increased the risk of nuclear war display such elementary ignorance of the basics of the command, control, and conduct of the U.S. military in preparing for, preventing, and executing military attacks, a brief summary of the basics may be in order.
The National Interest · by Graham Allison · September 27, 2021
A senior Senator has called on the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to resign or be fired on the basis of undocumented claims from unnamed sources. Since Chairman Mark Milley is certain to be asked about his meeting on January 8 with senior officers from the National Military Command Center when he testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday—and because Senator Marco Rubio’s allegations of Milley having interfered with the chain of command in a way that could have increased the risk of nuclear war display such elementary ignorance of the basics of the command, control, and conduct of the U.S. military in preparing for, preventing, and executing military attacks—a brief summary of the basics may be in order.
First, as Commander in Chief, the President has the sole authority to order American military officers to conduct lethal strikes, including nuclear strikes. His order goes to the Secretary of Defense and from him to the military commander responsible for their military subordinates and weapons that conduct the attack. As the presidentially-selected, congressionally-confirmed leader of all American military forces, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has responsibility for assuring that the 1.4 million uniformed service members who operate everything from missile silos to nuclear-armed submarines are able and ready at every moment of every day and under all conceivable conditions, including when under attack, to execute presidential commands.
In order to allow the Commander in Chief to have a robust menu of feasible nuclear options to deter adversaries from attack or coercion, and to ensure that his specific order is executed, successive Presidents and Congresses have passed laws directing successive civilian Secretaries of Defense and military Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to build, maintain, and exercise a nuclear system that will under all conditions give the President feasible nuclear options. For seven decades, the system has worked. “Zero error” is a standard that is almost impossible for any complex system consisting of thousands of mechanical systems and tens of thousands of individual human beings, so the fact that there has been not one accidental or unauthorized explosion of a nuclear weapon for the past seven decades is an achievement for which we should pause and give thanks to generations of civilian and military leaders who have built and maintained this system—including successive Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The foundational legislation that establishes the current command structure—the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986—designates the Chairman as the “principal military adviser” to the President and the Secretary of Defense. This responsibility is reflected in the established process of consultation that informs the President when he is considering a possible use of nuclear weapons. In this capacity, the Chairman has primary responsibility for helping the President and the Secretary of Defense assess the menu of military options and the likely consequences of each, including the enemy’s response and thus the options the President will have to consider at that point. This helps prevent what could otherwise be playing chess one move at a time. This role is recognized in the established, presidentially approved process for considering conventional as well as nuclear strikes, in which the Chairman is included at every level of deliberation.

Regular reviews of each of the “combatant commands” that have to stand ready to carry out Presidential orders are an essential part of the Chairman’s job description. The Goldwater-Nichols Act explicitly assigns the Chairman responsibility for “the preparation and review of contingency plans which conform to policy guidance from the President and the Secretary of Defense… preparing joint logistic and mobility plans to support those contingency plans and recommending the assignment of logistic and mobility responsibilities to the armed forces… establishing and maintaining, after consultation with the commanders of the unified and specified combatant commands, a uniform system of evaluating the preparedness of each such command to carry out missions assigned to the command.”
Thus, for example, in January 2020, when President Donald Trump was considering a surgical military strike to kill Iranian Quds Force Commander Qasem Soleimani, one can be sure that Chairman Milley provided his best military advice on potential responses and the options President Trump would have to consider for America’s next move—and that he convened the relevant senior military leaders to “review the process” to ensure that the command and control system was ready and able to execute a presidential order to attack.
Subsequent laws, including annual authorizations and appropriations for the Defense Department, directives from successive Presidents, and directives from successive Secretaries of Defense, have assigned responsibilities for creating, maintaining, exercising, and operating a nuclear weapons system that includes thousands of nuclear warheads and tens of thousands of uniformed individuals who prepare in order to ensure that the United States has at every moment of every day a robust and secure nuclear deterrent and that the President has executable nuclear options if he ever concludes that it is necessary to order a nuclear strike.
In sum: if the allegations made by Senator Rubio about Chairman Milley having convened on January 8 a review of command and control arrangements, including those for nuclear strikes, are correct, Chairman Milley would have been responsibly doing his job. The chorus line Milley is alleged to have sung at the January 8 review is: “do the process.” That is military-speak for reminding everyone in the chain of command and execution between the President and the use of military force that however tumultuous things may seem and whatever their personal feelings and views as citizens may be, they have taken an oath to follow orders in upholding the Constitution and defending the nation as non-political, non-partisan servicemen.
Graham T. Allison is the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is the former director of Harvard’s Belfer Center and the author of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?
Image: Reuters
The National Interest · by Graham Allison · September 27, 2021

8. How ‘wonder material’ graphene became a national security concern


How ‘wonder material’ graphene became a national security concern
UK and China are racing to develop forms of the super-strength technology that has potential aerospace and weaponry uses
The Guardian · by Jasper Jolly · September 27, 2021
A large shed on an unassuming industrial estate beside Swansea’s River Tawe does not at first glance seem vital to the UK’s national security. The facility, run by a small company called Perpetuus , sits beside a mortuary and a parcel depot.
Earlier this month, the company, which makes graphene – a “wonder material” made of a single layer of carbon atoms – grabbed the attention of the government, which said it would investigate a possible takeover involving a Chinese academic, in a highly unusual move that startled industry observers.
The controversy has shone a spotlight on the global race to develop graphene, suggesting that it may be about to make the long-promised leap from the lab to everyday products, and possibly to military uses as well. In particular, it has drawn attention to China’s attempt to corner the nascent industry, and the Communist state’s reach into British universities developing the technology.
Kwasi Kwarteng, the UK business secretary, ordered the Competition and Markets Authority to review the planned takeover of Perpetuus Group by Taurus International or any companies associated with Dr Zhongfu Zhou.
According to Perpetuus’s website, which lists him as “chief nanotechnology scientist”, Zhou has doctorates from China’s University of Science & Technology Beijing and the University of Oxford. Zhou, who could not be reached for comment, then became a researcher at Cardiff University and a professor at Aberystwyth University until December 2020, according to a social media account matching his name.
Perpetuus is a minnow, with 14 employees at its main graphene subsidiary and turnover of £479,000 in the year to March 2020, according to company accounts.
Still, it is not difficult to see why China is interested. Graphene’s properties include high electrical and thermal conductivity and super strength: 200 times that of steel. China has 10 separate research zones in China working on the material, with more than 200 companies working directly on the technology, according to Ron Mertens, the editor of Graphene-Info, an industry publication.
Nine miles away from Perpetuus’s south Wales base, another graphene company is racing to find ways of commercialising the material. John-Mark Seymour, the UK site manager of Haydale Graphene Industries, said he believed that the industry was bouncing back from the disillusionment that followed intense excitement for graphene’s prospects following its discovery in 2004.
“It’s had that hype,” he said. “It has been hurt. Now it’s picking up.”
Technicians at Haydale’s site at Ammanford, a small town on the edge of the Brecon Beacons, fill drums resembling washing machines with graphene, a black form of carbon. These are loaded into reactors in which plasma, an electrically charged gas, helps atoms to bond with the graphene layers, making it usable in plastics.
The process takes an hour per batch, and the factory can only make a few tonnes a year. However, that does go some way, as one gram of graphene can theoretically cover an area of 700m2. Perpetuus, which has a director who was also previously at Haydale, also uses a plasma process. Seymour declined to comment on its rival.
Companies across the industry are grappling with the same problem of producing usable graphene at much lower cost, said Richard Collins, an advanced materials analyst at IDTechEx, a research firm. Graphene can still cost $1,000 (£728) a kilo for the highest-quality powders, he said.
Collins’ forecasts suggest that the industry’s revenues could expand from less than $100m (£73m) in 2020 to $700m (£510m) in 2031, although still well short of some excited predictions of an industry rapidly growing to billions of dollars.
“It could have huge political and strategic implications, but it’s still very early stage,” he said.
China has targeted graphene as a key future industry. Its embassy said in 2015 it wanted the UK and China to pursue the “cooperation of giants” in graphene research after a visit to facilities in Manchester from President Xi Jinping. Huawei, the Chinese telecoms manufacturer that has been blocked from the US and UK’s 5G infrastructure on national security grounds, in 2015 invested in Manchester’s National Graphene Institute.
UK-China knowledge-sharing has continued, and Edinburgh and Manchester universities have announced new collaborations in the past two years. However, political concerns about Chinese theft of UK intellectual property have mounted in recent years. In 2018, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a thinktank, claimed China has sent soldiers to British universities to gain knowledge for its military.
Tom Tugendhat, a Conservative MP who is a prominent China critic, this month said graphene technology should “stay with trusted partners”. The Global Times, a Chinese state tabloid, hit back at the UK’s “flimsy national security justification” for the Perpetuus intervention. “An expected outcome could be that Chinese investors will then have second thoughts when considering business cooperation with the UK,” it warned.
Perpetuus declined to comment, citing legal advice. However, a person with knowledge of the business said Perpetuus was working on technology with potential defence applications, although it may not reach prototype stage for as long as 10 years.
A Perpetuus presentation seen by the Guardian suggests that the company was focusing on biomedical sensors, batteries and “advanced composites”. In the 2015 document it cited “negotiations with several companies” to produce graphene at large scale for battery manufacturers in China. (Perpetuus also holds patents for graphene battery technology.)
The document also made clear the potential military opportunity, with a prominent image of an F15 fighter jet. Meanwhile, “anti-reflective coatings” also referenced could be of interest in stealth aircraft.
Aerospace and weaponry uses have always been an obvious candidate for graphene’s lightness and strength; in August, Haydale disclosed a joint patent with the aircraft maker Airbus for lightning strike protection.
Haydale hopes that a new, larger reactor due next year will allow it to produce hundreds of tonnes of graphene annually, as it seeks to make a profit after years of losses and heavy spending that have led its stock market value to slump to a sixth of its peak, leaving it worth just £32m.
Eventually it aims to produce flexible graphene circuits using newspaper-style presses that will be able to replace the billions of biomedical tests that currently use silver and other expensive metals. Several analysts suggested that sensors could be the launchpad for graphene into everyday use.
“We don’t want to stay in a lab,” said Haydale’s Seymour. “I want this to be a product that you touch 70 times a day.”
Global interest in a Manchester discovery
Graphene was first isolated in 2004 by Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, two University of Manchester academics who used Scotch tape to peel off layers of carbon a single atom thick – making the world’s first “two-dimensional” material. The carbon atoms’ strong hexagonal arrangement leaves electrons free to move easily across the layers, carrying electrical charge or heat very effectively. Geim and Novoselov won the 2010 Nobel prize in physics for their efforts.
Potential uses cited by researchers range from condoms to concrete and electronics to aeroplanes. The UK was early in sensing an opportunity, with government investment in graphene that has launched clusters of companies focused on the material, particularly around Manchester.
Other countries cottoned on. In 2014, the European Union launched a 10-year, billion-euro research project, and it is also looking at defence applications. However, by 2017 China had more graphene companies than any other country, outstripping the US, according to research by Fullerex, a consultancy.
Graphene is now relatively widely available, but quality and cost varies considerably between producers. They generally either grow graphene crystals from the bottom up, or strip away layers of pencil-lead graphite. Yet both methods have disadvantages, and producers are yet to crack the challenge of using graphene at an industrial level.
This article was amended on 28 September 2021 to remove an image of a nanotube that was incorrectly captioned as being of a sheet of graphene.
The Guardian · by Jasper Jolly · September 27, 2021

9. Biden’s pivot to Asia is missing something: diplomats

Key point:

To address these pressing security challenges, the Biden administration will require deft diplomacy and revitalized US alliances in East Asia. Yet this may be an uphill battle, fought in the shadow of the Trump administration’s inconsistent approach to North Korea, trade war with China, insistence on burden-sharing, and repeated failures to adequately consult with allies and partners. The Biden administration has begun to show its commitment to allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region, but those efforts are undercut by the slow pace of diplomatic appointments and the selection of political nominees for critical diplomatic posts.

Biden’s pivot to Asia is missing something: diplomats - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
thebulletin.org · by Lorene Yue · September 28, 2021
Biden’s pivot to Asia is missing something: diplomats
By Lauren Sukin | September 28, 2021

President Joe Biden in a photo from 2016. Credit: US Embassy Tel Aviv. CC BY 2.0.
Vice President Kamala Harris recently returned from a trip to Singapore and Vietnam, where she offered Vietnamese officials an increased US Navy presence as a way to put pressure on China’s maritime activities. Speaking in Singapore, Harris accused Beijing of implementing an intimidation strategy in the South China Sea. Harris’ trip reflects the Biden administration’s growing security concerns for the Indo-Pacific, especially against the backdrop of the recent Chinese nuclear build-up, North Korean plutonium production, and expanded North Korean delivery capabilities.
To address these pressing security challenges, the Biden administration will require deft diplomacy and revitalized US alliances in East Asia. Yet this may be an uphill battle, fought in the shadow of the Trump administration’s inconsistent approach to North Korea, trade war with China, insistence on burden-sharing, and repeated failures to adequately consult with allies and partners. The Biden administration has begun to show its commitment to allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region, but those efforts are undercut by the slow pace of diplomatic appointments and the selection of political nominees for critical diplomatic posts.
Eight months into Biden’s presidential tenure, the White House has nominated individuals to just 55 of the 189 available ambassador positions, representing less than 30 percent of the total offices. Of the 134 positions currently without a Biden administration nominee, 97 are vacant, while three belong to Obama-era nominees. The remainder are filled with selections from the Trump administration. US allies have repeatedly expressed frustration with the slow US ambassadorial appointment process, with the average time to confirmation approximately one year. But the Biden administration has been slower to fill diplomatic positions than previous administrations, and notable vacancies in many regions have not gone unnoticed. Currently, the Biden administration has unfilled ambassadorial positions in Japan, Singapore, China, South Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines. No ambassador has yet been proposed for South Korea.
These missing and delayed diplomatic appointments affect the quality of US foreign relations. For example, repeated controversies with US ambassadors in South Korea (including one involving an unfortunate mustache) have exacerbated tensions over US-South Korean military interoperability and undermined cooperation over North Korea. Effective diplomacy requires learning about allies’ threat perceptions and preferred solutions, while collaborating with key stakeholders to explain and promote US policies. Skilled diplomats can improve policy design and ensure effective policy implementation. Vacant positions or inexperienced diplomats, however, can complicate communication and hamper the Biden administration’s commitment to addressing nuclear and conventional security challenges from China and North Korea.
Allies’ aggravation with slow appointments has been compounded by the Biden administration’s continuation of the controversial trend of nominating public and political figures for ambassador positions over career diplomats. Unlike other democracies, many US ambassadorial appointments are allocated to political donors, business leaders, and other individuals who are not career diplomats. The proportion of ambassadors fitting the description is high—approximately 30 percent since the 1950s—and growing. More than half of Biden’s current nominees are not career diplomats, including public figures like pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann, and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti.
While many of these individuals have had impressive careers, they are less qualified for diplomatic offices than their career-diplomat counterparts. Since 1980, nominees who are not career diplomats have been 28 percentage points less likely to speak their receiving state’s principal language if it isn’t English, 67 percentage points less likely to have experience in the region of the receiving state, and 52 percentage points less likely to have foreign policy experience, according to a 2019 Duke Law Journal paper. These challenges can hinder successful diplomacy.
But such nominees do have one advantage over career diplomats seeking ambassadorial posts; the non-diplomat nominees are 68 percentage points more likely to have made campaign contributions to the president that nominated them.
Two Biden nominees in crucial northeast Asia ambassadorships exemplify the differences between political and career appointees and highlight how ambassadorial choices can impact policy. Rahm Emanuel—a former congressman, the first chief of staff for then president Barack Obama, and former Chicago mayor—was recently nominated to the position of ambassador to Japan. Nicholas Burns—an experienced Foreign Service officer with experience in both Republican and Democratic administrations—has been nominated to join the US embassy in China.
Burns has abundant foreign policy experience, including in the nuclear realm. He served on the National Security Council during the Clinton and George H.W. Bush administrations, advising on Soviet and Russian affairs. Burns has been undersecretary of state for political affairs, ambassador to NATO, ambassador to Greece, and State Department spokesperson, among other roles. Burns has gained experience in numerous foreign policy positions at universities and think tanks. He has received the Presidential Distinguished Service Award and the Secretary’s Distinguished Service Award. An important thread in Burns’ extensive resume is his experience negotiating military and nuclear policy. Burns led negotiations over the Iranian nuclear program, the US-India Civil Nuclear Agreement, and a military assistance agreement with Israel. His expertise in this area suggests he could provide important leadership in advancing US-China policy, in light of recent security concerns. If the Biden administration seeks a “NATO-like” nuclear planning infrastructure for the Indo-Pacific or a nuclear arms reduction treaty with China, Burns would be a valuable player.
In contrast, Emanuel has no experience with international security policy, although he brings plenty of political and business experience. ProPublica once described Emanuel as “a particularly high-profile illustration of the revolving door between Washington, DC and Wall Street.” As Chicago’s mayor, Emmanuel was polarizing. His legacy has been marred by controversy over police reform and accusations about his involvement in the police cover-up of the 2014 death of Laquan MacDonald. Progressive opposition to Emanuel is seen to have dashed his hopes of a cabinet position in the Biden administration. Even his supporters have noted Emanuel’s blunt manner and sometimes-difficult temperament.
Despite these challenges, Emanuel’s close ties to the administration have been lauded as an asset for an ambassador. After all, ambassadors often provide a valuable line of communication. Emanual’s strong connections to the Biden administration may be a boon for the Japanese government and the country’s lobbyists. Japan has often had such similarly high-profile ambassadors, including Caroline Kennedy, former Senate majority leader Howard Baker, and former speaker of the House of Representatives Thomas Foley.
Yet even if Emanuel receives a warm welcome in Japan, his lack of foreign policy expertise raises questions about whether he can effectively communicate US policy and Japanese preferences. Aside from a trade delegation visit to Japan during his tenure as Chicago mayor, Emanuel has little experience engaging in diplomacy with Japan or any other foreign nation. Emanuel does not speak Japanese. He has never held a foreign service office. While he may be a shrewd political player domestically, Emanuel’s lack of foreign policy experience could complicate vital efforts to increase collaboration and joint planning on international and nuclear security concerns.
Other diplomatic appointments in the Indo-Pacific region are similarly mixed. Marc Knapper, for example, is the Biden administration’s nomination as ambassador to Vietnam. Since 2018, Knapper has served as the deputy assistant secretary for Korea and Japan. In contrast, the proposed ambassador for Singapore, Jonathon Kaplan, is a philanthropist and the current chairman of Education Superhighway, a nonprofit organization bringing broadband access to US public schools.
Although many diplomatic positions remain unfilled, several early nominations reflect the Biden administration’s serious approach to nuclear security. For example, Biden nominated Julianne Smith as the US ambassador to NATO. Smith previously served as the principal director for European and NATO policy for the secretary of defense and as deputy national security advisor to then vice president Biden. Laura Holgate has been nominated as ambassador to the United Nations in Vienna, a position that involves significant cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Holgate worked on WMD threat reduction on the National Security Council during the Obama administration. Both women would bring valuable expertise on issues of international security to the roles, should they be confirmed.
Overall, the Biden administration’s approach to diplomacy has emphasized the criticality of nuclear policy. The administration’s engagement in the Indo-Pacific region has been matched with some highly qualified appointments for ambassadorial positions central to nuclear policy issues. These selections will be especially important if the Biden administration plans to establish a regional nuclear planning group or pursue an arms reduction agreement with China. However, the slow pace of ambassadorial appointments and the nomination of some political appointees with little relevant foreign policy experience may constitute important obstacles. Without qualified diplomats heading US engagement with vital Indo-Pacific partners and allies, leaders may wonder whether America is really back.

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thebulletin.org · by Lorene Yue · September 28, 2021

10. Republican lawmakers warn against more military coordination with Russia

Republican lawmakers warn against more military coordination with Russia
The Hill · by Ellen Mitchell · September 27, 2021

Top Republicans in the House and Senate on Monday pushed back on the Pentagon’s recent call to increase coordination between the U.S. and Russian militaries, saying they were “deeply troubled” by the news.
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley last week said U.S. and Russian forces should “have an effective means of military-to-military communications in order to clearly understand each other’s positions on very difficult issues” and help “de-escalate any kind of crisis situation.”
Milley’s comments come as the U.S. government is hoping to make inroads with Russia to gain Moscow’s help in fighting extremist groups in Afghanistan.
With the U.S. military completely out of Afghanistan as of Aug. 31, Biden administration officials want to secure basing rights and counterterrorism support in the nations that border the country.
But such interactions could have negative consequences, according to the ranking members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senate Armed Services Committee, House Foreign Affairs Committee and House Armed Services Committee.
“We are deeply troubled to learn from press reports that your administration is in discussions with the Russian Federation to secure access to Russian military installations in Central Asian countries and potentially engage in some form of military cooperation on counterterrorism with the Russians,” Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho), Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
“Inviting Russia into discussions will not further vital U.S. counterterrorism goals, nor is it the path to a ‘stable and predictable’ relationship with Russia the Biden Administration claims it wants,” they added.
Milley on Wednesday met with Russian Gen. Valery Gerasimov for six hours in Helsinki. Afterward, he told reporters traveling with him that should military service chiefs be allowed to speak with their Russian counterparts — something that is currently not legal — U.S. defense officials could potentially avoid conflict wherever there are tensions.
“We need to put in place policies and procedures to make sure that we increase certainty, to reduce uncertainty, increase trust to reduce distrust, increase stability to reduce instability in order to avoid miscalculation and reduce the possibility of great power war,” Milley said. “That’s a fundamental thing that we should try to do, and I am going to try to do it.”
But the Republican lawmakers warn that Moscow "is more concerned with collecting intelligence on the U.S. and our allies" than with helping prevent terrorist threats or conflicts, pointing to Russia’s role in aiding "the brutal Assad regime" in Syria rather than fighting Islamic State extremists.
They also reference Russia’s support to the Taliban, including providing weapons, during the United States’s 20-year conflict in Afghanistan.
Furthermore, they write, any move to coordinate military basing access or operations with Russia “risks violating the legal prohibition on U.S-Russia military cooperation,” a law that Congress imposed in 2016 following Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.
They also demand an “immediate briefing” from the State and Defense departments on Milley’s recent meeting with his Russian counterpart, the Biden administration’s counterterrorism plans in Central Asia and any negotiations or coordination with Russia on such plans.
The Hill · by Ellen Mitchell · September 27, 2021

11. America is highly vulnerable to a missile attack
Missile defense is hard and expensive.

America is highly vulnerable to a missile attack
China, Russia and Iran all now have the projectile means to penetrate America's porous GBI-reliant missile defenses
asiatimes.com · by Stephen Bryen · September 28, 2021
Despite spending billions of dollars, the US still lacks a credible ballistic missile defense to protect its territory from Russia, China or Iran. The US does have some defenses against a possible missile strike from North Korea but even these systems require billions of dollars in new investment for needed improvements.
A good interim solution for the US would be to adopt Israel’s Arrow-3 for homeland security defense, buying time to develop a new and capable ballistic missile defense system.
The US has three land-based missile defense systems and one sea-based system. Of the land-based systems, the Ground Based Midcourse Interceptor (GBI) is potentially the most important to protect US territory from an ICBM launch.

Yet the GBI has performed poorly in tests. So much so, in fact, that the Pentagon decided to drop Boeing, the GBI’s main contractor, and award an “interim” contract to Northrop and Lockheed to build 20 interceptor missiles. The new contracts are valued at US$3.7 billion.
Lockheed is partners with Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrop with Raytheon Missiles and Defense.
Today, GBI launchers and radars are located at Fort Greely, Alaska and Vandenberg Air Force Base near Lompoc in Santa Barbara County, California. The US currently has only 44 interceptor missiles and none that can protect against a possible Chinese, Russian, or even Iranian attack.
The US has some other systems for missile defense, but none are capable against sophisticated ballistic missiles. A sophisticated ballistic missile is one that flies at hypersonic or near hypersonic speed and that can carry multiple warheads and various decoys and other masking devices.
An Israeli Iron Dome defense system, left, a surface-to-air missile system called the MIM-104 Patriot, center, and an anti-ballistic missile system the Arrow 3 at Hatzor Israeli Air Force Base in central Israel on February 25, 2016. Photo: AFP / Gil Cohen-Magen
Russia has had MIRV’d (multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles) on its intercontinental ballistic missiles since about 1973. The US introduced them earlier, in 1968, on the Minuteman III.

China came late to the party, but today it has several long-range missile types with MIRV capability. Other countries including France, the UK and India reportedly have missiles that can carry more than one warhead; whether they are independently targetable isn’t so clear. Iran is working on a long-range rocket with at least two and possibly more warheads. North Korea also says it is working on hypersonic missiles with MIRV capability.
Defeating and destroying a ballistic missile is not easy, and virtually all tested systems have had difficulty even shooting down simulation drones that lacked multiple warheads or deception devices such as decoys.
The GBI is perhaps the worst of all in this regard. In an entirely optimistic assessment, the probability to kill rate for a single launch of an interceptor missile at a single target is put at 56%. To achieve anything like acceptable kills against a relatively unsophisticated ballistic missile threat, it would take four missiles to achieve a 97% kill rate probability.
Given there are only 44 missiles in Alaska and Vandenberg, the chances would be low of stopping a threat of more than 10 attacking missiles.
China has between 50 and 75 ICBMs and is said to be expanding the number as well as hardening the missiles in silos in new locations. North Korea, according to US assessments, has about 12 ICBMs but the number and sophistication are growing.

Right now, North Korea could successfully bypass US defenses on the West Coast and hit US targets. Russia has approximately 310 deployed ICBMs that can carry up to 1,189 warheads.
The US has deployed three other systems outside of the country. These are the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Air Defense) system, the Patriot PAC 3 and the AEGIS sea and land-based system featuring relatively new interceptor missiles, the SM-3 and SM-6, to intercept midcourse and terminal ballistic missiles.
The Aegis Ashore anti-missile system in a file photo. Photo: US Defense Department
Aegis at sea is used by the US and by Japan. The US has a total of 47 ships that carry the ballistic missile defense version of Aegis. The land-based Aegis Ashore is now deployed in Deveselu, Romania, with another site under construction in Redzikowa, Poland.
Japan, which had earlier planned to buy Aegis ashore, changed its mind and decided to rely on Aegis at sea. Recent tests of Aegis SM-6 missiles for terminal defense against submarine-launched ballistic missiles failed.
THAAD is deployed in South Korea and has recently been deployed in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Guam, Israel and Romania. There is also a THAAD unit in Hawaii. Saudi Arabia has also purchased its own THAAD system but it has not yet been delivered.

THAAD has a single-stage solid-fueled interceptor with a downrange of about 200 kilometers and a service ceiling of some 93 miles, allowing it to operate in the exo-atmosphere. Anything below 100 kilometers, or 60 miles, is considered the endo-atmosphere.
Unfortunately, THAAD tests have often failed. The interceptor is not designed to handle sophisticated missile threats and is intended to be used against short- and medium-range missiles. To appease Iran, the Biden administration has ordered the removal of its THAAD and Patriot systems from the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
Patriot PAC-3 – the most sophisticated version of the Patriot – can be used against short-range ballistic missiles and supersonic aircraft. Many countries rely on Patriot as their primary missile defense system, including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, NATO and various countries in the Middle East.
The US does not deploy the Patriot on its home territory. The Patriot has intercepted a number of Houthi (really Iranian) short-range ballistic missiles. In many cases, Patriot has managed to hit incoming missiles but often too late to stop them from impact on or near their targets.
A Patriot PAC-3 anti-missile air defense unit. Photo: AFP / The Yomiuri Shimbun
The Patriot appears to lack the ability to differentiate between a missile body and a missile warhead, and it has trouble dealing with heavier threats.
Given that the only system the US has for homeland defense is GBI, and that GBI is waiting for new missiles, where does this leave the nation? Rather than waiting for a new GBI interceptor, the US should consider taking the existing US-Israeli Arrow 3 interceptor and use it as an interim replacement for the old GBI interceptor missiles.
Arrow 3 was funded significantly by the US, and Israel’s Missile Defense Organization (IMDO) is partnered with the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency (MDA).
About half the Israeli system is built in the US. In July 2019 over a 10-day period, the Arrow 3 was tested at the Pacific Spaceport Complex-Alaska (PSCA) in Kodiak, Alaska.
The Arrow system was integrated with the AN/TPY2 radar, the same one used for GBI. In Alaska, the Arrow 3 system fired three interceptors on three separate occasions against ballistic missile targets, destroying each one.
Arrow 3 does not have the same range as GBI but it still has considerable reach – 2,400 kilometers, or almost 1,500 miles. Unlike GBI, the Arrow 3 is a single-stage interceptor with thrust vector controls and a gimbaled electro-optical seeker.
Like GBI, it is a hit-to-kill system. The main advantage of Arrow-3 is that it is effective and can deal with North Korean threats for now. Arrow-3 is much smaller and more compact than GBI.
The launch of an Israeli Arrow 3 missile at an undisclosed location in southern Tel Aviv. Photo: AFP / Israeli Defense Ministry
A GBI interceptor is 1.28 meters in width, compared to Arrow-3, which is .53 meters and fits in a 21-inch standard launch tube.
The US would gain a lot by using Arrow-3 as an interim GBI solution. It would buy time for the US to build a new and really effective ballistic missile defense system, something that has been lacking for decades. It would also save billions from being wasted on another attempt to salvage a flawed system.
The US MDA is also partnered with Israel on a next step project dubbed Arrow-4. Few details are known about Arrow-4, but it appears it is designed to deal with MIRV’d threats.
asiatimes.com · by Stephen Bryen · September 28, 2021

12.  Biden hit with backlash over removal of Pentagon’s top nuclear policy official


Biden hit with backlash over removal of Pentagon’s top nuclear policy official
Defense News · by Joe Gould · September 27, 2021
WASHINGTON ― Lawmakers on both sides of nuclear weapons issues want answers after the lead Pentagon official overseeing the Nuclear Posture Review was ousted after nine months on the job and her position eliminated.
The Pentagon is saying the departure of Leonor Tomero, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy, was due to a reorganization. However, non-proliferation advocates are questioning whether it was because Tomero was an advocate for nuclear restraint, and worry it could bias the review away from President Joe Biden’s pursuit of arms control.
“Congress needs to understand whether ideology played any role in Ms. Tomero’s dismissal,” Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., a proponent of nuclear arms control and nonproliferation, wrote in a Sept. 24 letter to Biden that included nearly a dozen questions.
“I am also concerned that the sudden departure of a top appointee, charged with presenting you options on the future of the U.S. nuclear weapons enterprise, will result in a draft Nuclear Posture Review that reflects the Cold War era’s overreliance on nuclear weapons, rather than your lifetime of work championing policies that reduce nuclear weapons risks,” the senator added.
Politico broke the news last week that Tomero, who was leading reviews of nuclear weapons and missile defense policy, was leaving and that her responsibilities would be absorbed by the Pentagon’s new assistant secretary for space. Tomero’s former boss, Melissa Dalton, who is performing the duties of assistant secretary of defense for strategy, plans and capabilities, will lead the Nuclear Posture Review in Tomero’s place, Politico reported.
The Nuclear Posture Review, due in early 2022, is expected to chart a definitive course for Biden amid competing pressures.
While on the campaign trail, Biden expressed a desire to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. strategy, and his website says their “sole purpose” is to deter and, if needed, retaliate against a nuclear attack. But there are heated divisions in Congress over the best response to Russian and Chinese nuclear behavior as well as the growing cost of the U.S. nuclear modernization program.
There are two camps within the Biden administration, according to a former defense official. One is focused on arms control, is skeptical of multibillion-dollar nuclear modernization plans and is mainly centered in the State Department. The other is focused on competition with Russia and China, and is deeply concerned that allies under America’s nuclear umbrella would feel abandoned if the country reduced its arsenal.
For more than a decade, Tomero was the House Armed Services Committee’s Democratic professional staff lead for nuclear deterrence, nuclear weapons, nonproliferation, military space and missile defense. There, she worked for now-Chairman Adam Smith, D-Wash., who’s voiced skepticism about the cost of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles and modernizing them ― and called for the U.S. to adopt a “no-first-use” nuclear weapons policy.

Leonor Tomero served as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense. (U.S. Defense Department)
Both sides of the argument have been jockeying amid some apparent contradictions from the Biden administration. While Biden’s first Interim National Security Strategic Guidance stated that “we will endeavor to head off costly arms races and re-establish our credibility as a leader in arms control,” his budget request upset nonproliferation advocates by continuing expansive nuclear weapons sustainment and modernization efforts inherited from the Trump administration.
Tom Collina of the Ploughshares Fund, which advocates for the elimination of nuclear weapons, said removing Tomero — and thus excluding her views that challenged the status quo on nuclear arms — is a disservice to Biden and his pursuit of options for nuclear restraint.
“The reality now is that the person who is going to be drafting the NPR is much more conservative than the person who was going to be doing it,” Collina said. “And what that means is the NPR will not be considering the kind of options President Biden would want to see but that would be threatening to old ways of thinking at the Pentagon.”
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A top lawmaker on nuclear weapons is “convinced, but not fully convinced” on the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, a hot-button program to modernize intercontinental ballistic missiles.
What drove the departure wasn’t immediately clear, even to some hawkish lawmakers, including Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla. Amid the expectation that the NPR will coincide with the release of Biden’s fiscal 2023 budget request, Inhofe wanted to hear more from the Pentagon about the matter and is most concerned about prioritizing nuclear issues and preventing hiccups in the review process.
“I was shocked that she was among the first victims of this reorganization,” House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee Chairman Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., said in a brief hallway interview on Wednesday. “I look forward to finding out what was intended by the reorganization. I just don’t have enough information to know.”
Questioning the president
In his letter to Biden, Markey asked why Tomero, given her expertise, wasn’t offered a new assignment in the Pentagon’s reorganized space policy shop. And he wondered which officials would take over Tomero’s duties.
Markey also wanted to know whether Dalton, Pentagon policy chief Colin Kahl or another official communicated to Tomero the reasons for her dismissal.
Pentagon officials have cast the move as routine.
“It’s natural with any new administration — this one’s not excepted — that we would want to reevaluate the organizational structure and make changes where we think is appropriate to support the secretary’s priorities. And I think, again, without speaking to individuals, we’re certainly doing that,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters last week. “We’re going to continue to consider and include a wide range of viewpoints in the Nuclear Posture Review, including those from administration officials, military leaders, academics and all others.”
But to Markey, Kirby’s answer was fuel for more questions.
“Please identify the individuals and organizations consulting on the Nuclear Posture Review, including paid contractors,” Markey said in his letter to Biden. “How will the [Defense] Department ensure that the advice of individuals who do not support the default military reliance on nuclear weapons?”
About Joe Gould
Joe Gould is the Congress reporter for Defense News.

13. Decisive Defeat: Why the U.S. Strategy for Afghanistan Didn’t Work

A view from Tehran. 


Decisive Defeat: Why the U.S. Strategy for Afghanistan Didn’t Work
The basic models with which the United States has intervened militarily in the Middle East seem to have striking flaws for which there are no simple answers.
The National Interest · by Alireza Ahmadi · September 26, 2021
The Afghan military and security forces collapsed so quickly in the face of the Taliban advance this summer that even the Taliban seem to have been surprised. But as the twenty-year nation-building project comes to a disastrous close, there are a set of implications regarding both the Global War of Terror and America’s interventions in the Middle East that must be considered. There is a growing and increasingly well-established set of facts suggesting that America’s military interventions in the Middle East are inherently unviable and that this has been the case for up to twenty years.
In the early stages of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the United States was expected to leave after total victory was quickly accomplished. Once a decisive victory became unrealistic, mission creep introduced a new notion that could give a nation already questioning these ventures a reason to hold on longer.
In a special address broadcast into the homes of the American public from Fort Bragg shortly after winning a second term, President George W. Bush issued a new doctrine aimed at shoring up domestic support for the international military campaigns being waged under the banner of the War on Terror. Bush stated “[o]ur strategy can be summed up this way: As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down. We have made progress, but we have a lot more work to do. Today, Iraqi security forces are at different levels of readiness.”
This revised goal implied that America could raise forces in the countries it invaded and that these forces would serve U.S. interests in the long term. This would be Washington’s best strategy for both retaining popular support for the wars and achieving long-term political changes that would suit U.S. ambitions. While the specific doctrine was retired not long after it was introduced, the premise loomed large in strategic planning moving forward.

The “Faberge Egg militaries”
Afghanistan’s army and police forces can be classified as what scholar Jahara Matisek described as “Faberge egg militaries.” Matisek, himself a professor of military and strategic studies at the U.S. Air Force Academy, defines these “Faberge egg militaries” as U.S.-trained militaries that are “expensive, shiny, and easy to break” when confronted by motivated insurgencies. While such militaries usually feature fairly competent special forces groups, their regular troops experience a catastrophic loss of effectiveness and military cohesion if the U.S. military is not fighting alongside them as co-combatants. There are many factors that contribute to this problem, but for Mitsek, looking back at examples from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia, the issue lies in the fact that such militaries were built on the foundation of corrupt and dysfunctional states that the United States was unwilling to invest in outside of military assistance.
But other contributing explanations are worth examining. One issue that certainly begs interrogation is the issue of motivation. One civilian advisor to former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Dunford said the explanation he found compelling came from a Taliban member who said “[t]he Taliban fight for belief, for janat (heaven) and ghazi (killing infidels) . . . The army and police fight for money . . . The Taliban are willing to lose their head to fight . . . How can the army and police compete?” One could argue that the United States is doomed to create incohesive militaries if it focuses on creating non-ideological professional forces motivated only by nationalism in countries that have precarious relationships with the fundamental concept of Westphalian nationhood.
It should also be noted that this lesson was learned once before. The Iraqi Army fell apart in a very similar fashion after the U.S. military departed in 2011. ISIS fighters streamed across the Sunni Triangle and faced little resistance as forces from the Iraqi Army simply melted away. At the time, a consensus emerged in Washington that placed blame for the Iraqi military’s failure on two specific factors: the corrupt Iraqi political class and the impact of Shia sectarianism that emanated from Tehran and Baghdad.
This argument, as articulated even by Matisek, states that the integration of the Shia Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) within the Iraqi military undermined their sense of purpose as the PMF groups are “more concerned with parochial interests and kinship ties” rather than loyalty to the Iraqi state. While the notion that corruption undermines military cohesion and capacity is certainly credible, I would argue that the latter argument is not.
The PMF, once re-established as an independent force, fought ISIS across Iraq—including in Sunni areas—and would have been involved in many other battles deep into al-Anbar Province but for the disapproval of the United States. Along the way, the PMF adapted and began recruiting members from other sects, including Sunnis. Some PMF groups have even fought in Syria. Regardless, the Shia-based explanation certainly helped American experts avoid having to confront questions about the basic viability of U.S.-trained armies in the Middle East.
The Moderate Rebel Model
Another approach to building proxy or allied forces in the region can be generally referred to as the “moderate rebel model.” This scenario includes a variety of specific concepts, but broadly, it is characterized by the United States arming, training, and providing varying levels of direct special forces and aerial support to existing irregular fighting groups. Two of the most prominent cases of the moderate rebel model of security assistance involve Kurdish fighting groups in Syria and Iraq.
Here, too, there is very little evidence that these groups can be trusted to effectively fight on their own. The Peshmerga in Iraq were nearly overrun by ISIS and were only able to avoid a catastrophic defeat in Erbil after they received significant support from both Iran and the United States. They also folded against the reconstituted Iraqi Army after the ill-fated and poorly timed secession initiative led by the Kurdistan Regional Government.
The Syrian Kurds would also likely not fare well in direct battle against the Syria Arab Army and its associated forces without U.S. intervention. However, that hypothesis is unlikely to be tested in the near future. While much of their current policies may be molded by their desire to bank favors with the world’s lone superpower, the Syrian Kurds have long known that an independent Kurdish state composed of their two disconnected and landlocked cantons in Syria, sandwiched between Syria and Turkey, is not realistic. They have generally avoided fighting with the Syrian army so far and have already begun discussing a reconciliation agreement with the Syrian government.
The example of rebel groups fighting the Syrian government may be the only successful use of the moderate rebel model. Before 2015, the Syrian rebels had made major advances throughout Syria and were even threatening Damascus. While their gains were eventually reversed by direct Russian intervention, part of the reason this effort was successful for a time was that the circumstances were different than those in other parts of the region.
The Syrian Arab Army (SAA), with a relatively Western mold and armed with outdated Soviet weapons, was fighting irregulars supported by the United States. This allowed the United States to dust off certain strategies that had been effective in the past. U.S.-supplied Stinger anti-aircraft missiles had been extremely effective—perhaps even the “silver bullet”—for the Afghan Mujahideen in their successful fight against the Soviet invasion. Here as well, the provision of advanced TOW anti-tank missiles to the rebels was so effective against the SAA’s tanks and armored personnel carriers that the rebels dubbed them “lion-killers” (Assad means lion in Arabic).
Another reason was that the United States stepped away from its stated goal of supporting only moderate rebels. More extreme, Taliban-esque elements with violent and decidedly undemocratic ideologies supplied much of the hardened fighters willing to die to advance against their enemies. Notably, this ideological component is typically absent in “Faberge egg militaries.” These groups were usually not themselves the beneficiaries of CIA-provided weapons but instead made alliances with more moderate groups that did receive them. One report from 2015 said that the advance of an anti-Assad coalition primarily made up of Islamist fighters, including those of the Al Qaeda branch Jabhat al-Nusra, was “strikingly swift—thanks in large part to suicide bombers and American anti-tank TOW missiles.” The Tony Blair Foundation, hardly a member of the “Quincy Coalition,” sounded the alarm about the advance made possible by TOW-missiles:
Where short or long-term objectives overlap, groups form coalitions regardless of ideology. . . . This shows that any attempt by international powers to distinguish between acceptable “moderates” and unacceptable “extremists” is flawed. Such overlaps are endless. In one battle in Jisr al-Shughour this year, Jabhat al-Nusra fighters were used as shock troops, with fire support from Western-armed rebels. Meanwhile, a Free Syrian Army group vetted and supplied with arms by the United States is reported as having lied about its collaboration with Jabhat al-Nusra. Western attempts to divide the rebellion into moderates and radicals have frequently encountered problems. Four groups reported to have been vetted and supplied with US anti-tank missiles are ideologically Islamist or Salafi-jihadi.

Ultimately, while this strategy may have been temporarily successful in pushing back Bashar al-Assad’s forces, it was certainly not going to lead to a peaceful Syria without the presence of terrorist groups plotting against the world. So, the basic models with which the United States has intervened militarily in the Middle East seem to have striking flaws for which there are no simple answers. The U.S. military is still capable of significant destruction, but any nation-building efforts or attempts to shape the region’s political dynamics through local proxies seem unviable. This likely has been the case all along.
Ali Ahmadi is a graduate student at the University of Tehran and an analyst focused on economic statecraft and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. His work has been published by The Diplomat, The National Interest, Palladium Magazine, and others.
Image: Reuters
The National Interest · by Alireza Ahmadi · September 26, 2021


14. The Taliban didn't change — it adapted to the (dis)information age
Excerpts:
In the digital world, Taliban spokesmen double down on themes from Haqqani’s op-ed such as women’s rights and global warming. In the real world, the Islamic Emirate just fired all female city workers in Kabul and shuttered its groundbreaking Women’s Affairs Ministry. These are issues known to be popular not among the Taliban but throughout the western world, which is telling of the group’s intended audience.
Over the coming months, the Islamic Emirate will likely offer selective access to journalists and public officials, and publicize that access for maximum effect among its growing base of internet followers. If the Taliban can pull off the equivalent of disinformation jiu-jitsu by portraying its rule as sanctioned by the people, it will not only further discredit U.S. foreign policy in the region but also galvanize a global terrorist network. Worse even, such a ploy could mask any injustices inflicted upon the Afghan people.
The eyes of the world might be on the new regime now, but that won’t last forever. When Afghanistan fades from the headlines, cutting through the Taliban’s digital fog will once again become the charge of investigative journalists and niche intelligence analysts. They will have their hands full.

The Taliban didn't change — it adapted to the (dis)information age
The Hill · by M. P. Ferguson, Opinion Contributor · September 27, 2021

In the wake of Kabul’s fall to the Taliban last month, U.S. officials placed the blame on everything from faulty intelligence to corruption in the Afghan government. Although each of these claims is valid, there were other forces at work leading up to the coup that gave the Taliban control over Afghanistan for the first time in 20 years.
Taliban fighters had been using the internet to connect with local followers since the early 2000s, but their strategy changed once America’s exit became imminent. In February 2020, then-Taliban deputy Sirajuddin Haqqani wrote a New York Times op-ed that sparked a wave of fresh Taliban Twitter accounts. A BBC report revealed that many of those accounts were created explicitly for promoting Haqqani’s article to an international audience.
Haqqani, now Afghanistan’s minister of interior, pledged that any future government would be decided by a “consensus among Afghans” with “equal rights.” To maximize its influence, the article was published during high-visibility peace negotiations between Taliban leaders and President Trump’s administration.
By May 2021, Taliban members who once banned the internet had begun using hashtags, viral promotion techniques and English-language Twitter posts to influence international opinion. “We want to change the [the world’s] perception of the Taliban.” This comment, made by a member of the group’s social media team in early September, embodies the spirit of a sophisticated public relations campaign waged in conjunction with NATO’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. The underlying theme of their message portrayed a moderate Taliban prepared to share power. It was a ploy.
More recent photos of severely beaten Kabul journalists depict a grim future for information exchange under the Taliban’s newly-formed Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. They might be the same despots they were in 1996, but the world around them has changed drastically since they last held political power.
When U.S. special operations teams paired with the Northern Alliance to oust the Taliban in late 2001, only 55 percent of adults in the United States used the internet. Today that number sits at 93 percent. Eighty-six percent of Americans now get their news in rapid flashes from a smart device, such as a phone or tablet. The numbers are no different in Kenya, where 76 percent of the adult population relies on social media to track current events.
During the same period, there has been an explosion of online disinformation from both state and non-state actors seeking to shape mass opinion. This environment and its effects, such as truth decay, are ripe not only for spreading ideas that fuel extremism, but also for distorting an organization’s true nature.
Although there is a wealth of research on the information campaigns of ISIS and al Qaeda, until recently experts viewed the Taliban as an extremist group driven primarily by local interests. As a result, it has largely been excluded from the last two decades of studies covering the transnational information operations of violent extremist organizations. That needs to change.
Ties between the Taliban and al Qaeda are longstanding and held together by maturing digital communities. Last week, David Cohen, the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), alleged that dispersed al Qaeda fighters might already be heading back into Afghanistan.
Yet Islamic Emirate leaders continue to push the narrative of a new and improved Taliban in glossy documentaries, undeterred by videos of the group beheading its enemies or beating women in the streets. Digital information campaigns can minimize the impact of these images because they are cheap and effective.
By some estimates the United States spent $2.3 trillion in Afghanistan as it fought to gain the favor of the local populace. In comparison, the Taliban reaches nearly a million Twitter followers instantaneously with sleek videos depicting them as fun-loving victims of corrupt bureaucrats — and it costs them nothing.
In the digital world, Taliban spokesmen double down on themes from Haqqani’s op-ed such as women’s rights and global warming. In the real world, the Islamic Emirate just fired all female city workers in Kabul and shuttered its groundbreaking Women’s Affairs Ministry. These are issues known to be popular not among the Taliban but throughout the western world, which is telling of the group’s intended audience.
Over the coming months, the Islamic Emirate will likely offer selective access to journalists and public officials, and publicize that access for maximum effect among its growing base of internet followers. If the Taliban can pull off the equivalent of disinformation jiu-jitsu by portraying its rule as sanctioned by the people, it will not only further discredit U.S. foreign policy in the region but also galvanize a global terrorist network. Worse even, such a ploy could mask any injustices inflicted upon the Afghan people.
The eyes of the world might be on the new regime now, but that won’t last forever. When Afghanistan fades from the headlines, cutting through the Taliban’s digital fog will once again become the charge of investigative journalists and niche intelligence analysts. They will have their hands full.
Capt. M. P. Ferguson is an author and U.S. military officer with decades of experience throughout Southwest Asia, Europe and Africa, including in Afghanistan. His research on national security affairs and disinformation has appeared in numerous print and online publications.
*The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect official positions or policies of the U.S. Department of Defense or U.S. government.
The Hill · by M. P. Ferguson, Opinion Contributor · September 27, 2021

15.  The price of immigration bureaucracy is risking lives


The price of immigration bureaucracy is risking lives
dallasnews.com · September 27, 2021
Many Americans, just a month ago transfixed by images of desperate Afghans pushing against the gates of the Kabul airport, have moved on, their eyes flitting to new crises elsewhere.
But here in North Texas, the Taliban keep John up at night.
“John,” an Afghan transplant who asked us to disguise his name as something other than an Afghan name in order to protect his family, worked as an interpreter for the U.S. Army about 10 years ago. He and his wife moved to the United States and built a new life in the past decade — the happy, frenzied life of an American family that revolves around three children.
This summer, disaster snuck up on them during a trip to Kabul to visit relatives. It took an underground network of quick-thinking Americans to evacuate John’s wife and their two youngest children. Now John must rely on the sluggish wheels of the U.S. immigration bureaucracy to rescue the rest of his family, whom he fears the Taliban will target.
Left behind
John told us all his brothers and brothers-in-law have worked for the U.S. military or for American interests in Afghanistan, making them eligible for Special Immigrant Visas, or Priority 2 refugee designation. Yet a backlog in processing those visas has left John with one last tactic to save his family: humanitarian parole, which allows temporary admission to the U.S. for “urgent humanitarian reasons.”
So John is applying on behalf of his brothers, brothers-in-law and their families — more than two dozen people. But the filing fee for each person is $575, and he’s paying attorney fees, too. John, a data engineer, is the sole breadwinner at home. He said he can’t afford the tens of thousands of dollars it’ll cost to cover everyone’s applications.
“I have hardly done two of them so far,” John told us.
The Biden administration has acknowledged that it left behind a majority of Special Immigrant Visa applicants, the Afghans who worked alongside U.S. forces during our 20-year war. The least that the U.S. government can do now is waive filing fees that might expedite our allies’ journey out of a country where their lives are in danger.
For John’s family, the danger isn’t hypothetical. An attempt on John’s life that instead killed a relative was what brought him to the United States, he said. A brother who also worked for the U.S. military has eluded an attack and survived two others since 2016, including an ambush that wounded him and killed several of his colleagues, John told us.
His brothers and brothers-in-law have gone into hiding.
A dangerous escape
John’s despair has only grown since his wife and children’s harrowing escape from Kabul in August.
The couple flew to Afghanistan for the first time in years to introduce their children to grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. John returned to Texas with his oldest son, a fourth-grader, so the boy could start school and John could resume work. Then John watched in horror as the Taliban rolled into Kabul.
A friend of John’s wife knew she was still in Afghanistan and talked with Stephanie Giddens, founder of Vickery Trading Co., a Dallas nonprofit that teaches refugee women how to sew. John’s wife had worked with Giddens and graduated from the program. Giddens frantically reached out to her contacts for help.
One was Anthony Applegate of Frisco, a family friend and a former Army Special Forces commander who served in Afghanistan. His wife got a text from Giddens one Sunday morning while the couple sat in church. He stepped out and called Giddens.
“We fought and shed blood beside each other,” Applegate said about the Afghans who served with American troops. “It is a very personal issue for myself and a lot of other veterans.”
Giddens’ friends pinged their friends, and those people pinged their contacts, eventually reaching people on the ground and others who knew how to help John’s wife and children navigate routes to different airport gates. In Texas, John was receiving automated messages from the U.S. embassy instructing his family to go to the airport at specific times.
Just getting to the edge of the airport every day was an odyssey. John said his wife and a male relative left her family home every day in the middle of the night, baby and toddler in tow. Invisible under a burqa, she flashed her U.S. passport at Taliban checkpoints. But the crowds around the airport were too thick to get near a gate.
It took a full week and a network of more than 15 people who played roles big and small to get John’s wife and children — all three U.S. citizens — out of Kabul and on flights to Bahrain and Washington, D.C., where John reunited with his family.
“We were still working around the clock to try to get the rest of the family out,” Giddens said. “We couldn’t do it.”
Losing hope
Giddens is now coordinating a team of volunteers to help the Afghan families of a dozen associates and graduates of Vickery Trading Co. gather immigration paperwork. She said their relatives worked for the Americans.
But even if the U.S. government acts on their applications, no one seems to know how any of them will actually escape Afghanistan. American immigration officials said Afghans may be asked to report to a U.S. embassy in another country for a screening, yet news reports indicate the Taliban will allow only people with visas or other valid travel documents to exit the country.
“They are stuck there, and I know a bunch of other families that are in similar situations,” John told us. “They are stuck there. There is no hope for them. There are no commercial flights. Borders are closed. We don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel.”
Still, John is scrounging and approaching friends for help with parole application fees.
This can’t be how the U.S. government treats its friends, the people who tied their lives to our cause at great risk to them. The Biden White House and Congress must cut the red tape and waive visa and parole application fees for our Afghan allies. They must secure these families’ safe passage out of Afghanistan. We cannot avert our eyes.
dallasnews.com · September 27, 2021


16.  AUKUS: Good Goals, Bad Implementation
Excerpts:

In formulating AUKUS, the Biden administration should have taken these realities into account and found a way to include France in the agreement. To be sure, there was no easy way to break the submarine news to Paris, but a variety of measures could have been taken to soften the blow and integrate France into the broader defense agreement. That would have been respectful of the centuries-long U.S.-France alliance and would have advanced shared interests in the Indo-Pacific.

At a minimum, Paris should not have been surprised by the announcement. And this blame cannot be put on Australian procrastination; the United States is France’s treaty ally, and Washington should have ensured Paris was appropriately integrated or at least informed. Paris was not altogether unfair in suggesting that such shoddy diplomacy smacked more of the Trump administration than the kind of diplomacy Biden claims to conduct.

Last week, Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron spoke in an effort to heal the diplomatic riff. In response, Paris is sending its ambassador back to Washington. That’s good news. Now begins the real work for the United States and its democratic allies: partnering to strengthen deterrence in the Indo-Pacific, which continues to erode.

AUKUS: Good Goals, Bad Implementation
By BRADLEY BOWMAN and MARK MONTGOMERY
Now begins the real work for the United States and its democratic allies: cooperating to strengthen their eroding deterrence in the Indo-Pacific.
defenseone.com · by Bradley Bowman
Eyeing an increasingly formidable Chinese military, the United States needs all the help it can get in the Indo-Pacific. That was Washington’s primary motivation for a trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, or AUKUS, announced earlier this month.
Unfortunately, the Biden administration’s formulation of the partnership and implementation of the announcement undercut one of the primary goals AUKUS is designed to achieve: an increasingly unified and capable coalition of democracies to oppose regional aggression and bullying from Beijing.
Good Goals
In light of the intensifying military-technology race with Beijing and the eroding military balance of power in the region, AUKUS will look to identify and jump-start trilateral efforts focused on quickly fielding cutting-edge military capabilities. The partnership will “bring together our sailors, our scientists, and our industries to maintain and expand our edge in military capabilities and critical technologies, such as cyber, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, and undersea domains,” President Joe Biden said on Sept. 15.
As a first priority, the three countries will focus on providing the Royal Australian Navy with nuclear-powered attack submarines, or SSNs. Last week’s announcement launches an “18-month consultation period” to determine the best and most expeditious path to helping Australia field SSNs. Biden says that consultation period will be used to answer questions related to workforce, training requirements, production timelines, and nuclear safeguards.
In effect, this component of the AUKUS agreement ends an existing Australia-France deal to build new diesel submarines for the Australian Navy and replaces it with an Australia-U.S.-UK agreement to build nuclear-powered submarines for the Australian Navy.
Doing so requires adding Australia to the existing U.S.-UK nuclear propulsion technology exchange agreement first reached in 1958. This pact was the most consequential element in the UK’s development of nuclear-powered attack and ballistic missile submarines in the 1960s and 1970s and has enabled a highly beneficial undersea warfare relationship between the two navies. Australia and the United States already have a comprehensive submarine technology exchange agreement related to combat systems, known as “front-end” equipment. Australia’s current Collins-class submarines include many of these capabilities.
The AUKUS technology exchange agreement is a unique opportunity for Australia to rapidly join an extremely elite group of navies that operate long-range, high-endurance, quiet, lethal submarines—a group that currently includes the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and France. (Beijing is working [PB1] to produce quieter SSNs.) The technology will provide Australia with the optimal submarine to address the most likely naval threat to their interests: China. That submarine will constitute a significant upgrade from whatever diesel submarine Australia would have eventually received under its deal with France.
In response to the announcement, the Global Times—a Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece—cited an unnamed military expert as suggesting Australia’s acquisition of the submarines could make it a target of a nuclear strike from China. That response is particularly ridiculous; China has nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed submarines and Australia has made it explicitly clear that its new submarines will be nuclear-powered but not armed with nuclear weapons. Indeed, Australia has no nuclear weapons and is one of the world’s most conscientious states when it comes to nuclear nonproliferation. If Beijing is genuinely concerned that Australia will acquire nuclear weapons, the CCP might consider refraining from threatening to strike Australia with such weapons.
In reality, the vitriol of the CCP response is explained by the value of American and allied SSNs in the region. They are the maritime system that poses the greatest challenges to Chinese planning. The United States has invested in and maintained a significant advantage over the Chinese navy in the undersea warfare mission.
The growing challenge for the United States, however, has been capacity. The U.S. Defense Department publicly states it needs at least 66 attack submarines to meet its operational requirements. Due to decisions made over the past 20 years (not producing Virginia-class submarines as fast as other submarines are being retired), the U.S. Navy’s SSN fleet is well below that requirement and expected to dip to 50 submarines by 2026. Because of the limitation in SSN production at U.S. shipyards (especially as they build desperately needed Columbia-class SSBNs over the next 15 years), the Navy cannot seriously alter this “bottoming out” with domestic production.
The declining size of America’s attack submarine fleet is particular problematic given that the People’s Liberation Army Navy fields more than 60 attack submarines. Admittedly, most of those submarines are diesel submarines. But China has at least seven SSNs and is working hard to increase both quality and quantity. To make matters worse, the United States must deploy its SSNs around the world, whereas Beijing focuses almost all of its attack submarine deployments in the Indo-Pacific. That provides Beijing a numeric advantage in attack submarines in locations where U.S.-China conflict is most likely to occur.
Therein lies the benefit for the United States in the SSN component of AUKUS. These additional, highly capable submarines will help mitigate the eroding maritime balance of power between Beijing and countries that support a free, open, and inclusive Indo-Pacific. Once fielded, Australian SSNs will add valuable undersea warfare capacity. That will lighten the burden on American SSNs and help deter Chinese aggression in the region.
However, it will take many years—perhaps “decades,” the U.S. chief of naval operations told Defense One on Thursday—before these submarines are actually in the water. The key to making this agreement relevant anytime in the next 15 years is to identify the proper procurement strategy. While the Virginia class is an excellent SSN, the United States is in no position to shift production efforts to help the Australians get started anytime soon. If the United States could increase SSN production at U.S. shipyards, Washington would likely serve America first.
The United Kingdom, on the other hand, is almost done building its Astute-class SSNs. That UK shipbuilding capacity could serve as a great starting point for Australia on the hull. The specifics of the nuclear reactor and the “front-end” combat systems suite (where Australia may want to maintain a U.S. technology preference to ease the transition for Australian submariners) can be worked out. In any case, the 18-month study will sort this out—hopefully in less than 18 months.
The Aussies will also have to recommit to the service-life extension and modernization of their six Collins-class diesel subs in order to maintain their submarine proficiency as they await the SSNs. As the French diesel sub program had experienced delays, that extension and modernization would have been equally necessary for that plan as well.
Bad Implementation
Speaking of the French, Paris was understandably unhappy with the news that it had lost its multibillion-dollar submarine contract with Australia. The French Foreign Minister called it a “stab in the back.” In an unprecedented step, Paris recalled its ambassador to the United States.
While some may be tempted to roll their eyes at this French reaction, it is clear that the Biden administration botched the formulation and implementation of AUKUS. If the goal was to build an increasingly unified and capable coalition of countries to deter aggression from Beijing and defend a free, open, and inclusive Indo-Pacific, alienating and excluding the French was incredibly short-sighted.
France brings both the desire and ability to help defend these common interests with Washington. From a military perspective, the French are more present and active in the Indo-Pacific than any other European power. There are good reasons for that. France has numerous territories in the region, such as French Polynesia, La Réunion, Mayotte, and New Caledonia. According to an April 1 report by Pierre Marcos for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, these territories in the Indo-Pacific are home to 1.6 million French citizens.
To defend these territories and interests, France maintains a robust defense posture in the region. Paris retains about “8,000 soldiers and dozens of ships are pre-positioned in several bases” in the region, according to Marcos. This year, a French Amphibious Reading Group sailed to the Indo-Pacific, and a French submarine patrolled the South China Sea. Indeed, Paris even sent its aircraft carrier strike group to the region in 2019. That’s exactly the kind of allied capability in the Indo-Pacific that AUKUS is supposed to encourage and facilitate.
In formulating AUKUS, the Biden administration should have taken these realities into account and found a way to include France in the agreement. To be sure, there was no easy way to break the submarine news to Paris, but a variety of measures could have been taken to soften the blow and integrate France into the broader defense agreement. That would have been respectful of the centuries-long U.S.-France alliance and would have advanced shared interests in the Indo-Pacific.
At a minimum, Paris should not have been surprised by the announcement. And this blame cannot be put on Australian procrastination; the United States is France’s treaty ally, and Washington should have ensured Paris was appropriately integrated or at least informed. Paris was not altogether unfair in suggesting that such shoddy diplomacy smacked more of the Trump administration than the kind of diplomacy Biden claims to conduct.
Last week, Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron spoke in an effort to heal the diplomatic riff. In response, Paris is sending its ambassador back to Washington. That’s good news. Now begins the real work for the United States and its democratic allies: partnering to strengthen deterrence in the Indo-Pacific, which continues to erode.
defenseone.com · by Bradley Bowman


17.  The Kremlin’s Strange Victory: How Putin Exploits American Dysfunction and Fuels American Decline

Excerpts:
Making the United States and its society more resilient and less vulnerable to manipulation by tackling inequality, corruption, and polarization will require innovative policies across a huge range of issues. Perhaps the highest priority should be given to investing in people where they reside, particularly through education. Education can lower the barriers to opportunity and accurate information in a way that nothing else can. It can help people recognize the difference between fact and fiction. And it offers all people the chance not only to develop knowledge and learn skills but also to continue to transform themselves and their communities.
One thing U.S. leaders should avoid in seeking to foster domestic unity is attempting to mobilize Americans around the idea of a common enemy, such as China. Doing so risks backfiring by stirring up xenophobic anger toward Americans and immigrants of Asian heritage and thus fueling more divisions at home. Instead of trying to rally Americans against China, Biden should rally them in support of the democratic U.S. allies that Trump spurned and derided. Many of those countries, especially in Europe, find themselves in the same political predicament as the United States, as authoritarian leaders and powers seek to exploit socioeconomic strife and populist proclivities among their citizens. Biden should base a new transatlantic agenda on the mutual fight against populism at home and authoritarianism abroad through economic rebuilding and democratic renewal.
Most important, Biden must do everything in his power to restore trust in government and to promote fairness, equity, and justice. As many Americans learned during Trump’s presidency, no country, no matter how advanced, is immune to flawed leadership, the erosion of political checks and balances, and the degradation of its institutions. Democracy is not self-repairing. It requires constant attention.


The Kremlin’s Strange Victory
How Putin Exploits American Dysfunction and Fuels American Decline
Foreign Affairs · by There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-first Century · September 27, 2021
Donald Trump wanted his July 2018 meeting in Helsinki with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to evoke memories of the momentous encounters that took place in the 1980s between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Those arms control summits had yielded the kind of iconic imagery that Trump loved: strong, serious men meeting in distant places to hash out the great issues of the day. What better way, in Trump’s view, to showcase his prowess at the art of the deal?
That was the kind of show Trump wanted to put on in Helsinki. What emerged instead was an altogether different sort of spectacle.
By the time of the meeting, I had spent just over a year serving in the Trump administration as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council. Like everyone else who worked in the White House, I had, by then, learned a great deal about Trump’s idiosyncrasies. We all knew, for instance, that Trump rarely read the detailed briefing materials his staff prepared for him and that in meetings or calls with other leaders, he could never stick to an agreed-on script or his cabinet members’ recommendations. This had proved to be a major liability during those conversations, since it often seemed to his foreign counterparts as though Trump was hearing about the issues on the agenda for the first time.
When Trump was winging it, he could be persuaded of all kinds of things. If a foreign visitor or caller was one of his favored strongmen, Trump would always give the strongman’s views and version of events the benefit of the doubt over those of his own advisers. During a cabinet meeting with a visiting Hungarian delegation in May 2019, for example, Trump cut off acting U.S. Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, who was trying to make a point about a critical European security issue. In front of everyone, Trump told Shanahan that the autocratic Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, had already explained it all to him when they had met in the Oval Office moments earlier—and that Orban knew the issue better than Shanahan did, anyway. In Trump’s mind, the Hungarian strongman simply had more authority than the American officials who worked for Trump himself. The other leader was his equal, and his staff members were not. For Trump, all pertinent information trickled down from him, not up to him. This tendency of Trump’s was lamentable when it played out behind closed doors, but it was inexcusable (and indeed impossible to explain or justify) when it spilled out into public view—which is precisely what happened during the now legendarily disastrous press conference after Trump’s meeting with Putin in Helsinki.
Before the press conference, Trump was pleased with how things had gone in his one-on-one meeting with Putin. The optics in Finland’s presidential palace were to Trump’s liking. The two men had agreed to get U.S.-Russian arms control negotiations going again and to convene meetings between their countries’ respective national security councils. Trump was keen to show that he and Putin could have a productive, normal relationship, partly to dispel the prevailing notion that there was something perverse about his ties to the Russian president. Trump was eager to brush away allegations that he had conspired with the Kremlin in its interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election or that the Russians had somehow compromised him—matters that at the time of the meeting, Special Counsel Robert Mueller was actively investigating.

Things went wrong as soon as the press conference began. Trump expected public praise for meeting with Putin and tackling the nuclear threat. But the U.S. journalists in attendance were not interested in arms control. They wanted to know about the one-on-one meeting and what Putin might have said or not said regarding 2016 and election interference. Jonathan Lemire of the Associated Press asked Trump whether he believed Putin, who had repeatedly denied that his country had done anything to meddle in the election, or the U.S. intelligence agencies, which had concluded the opposite. Lemire pressed Trump: “Would you now, with the whole world watching, tell President Putin—would you denounce what happened in 2016 and would you warn him to never do it again?”
Trump balked. He really didn’t want to answer. The only way that Trump could view Russia’s broad-based attack on the U.S. democratic system was through the lens of his own ego and image. In my interactions with Trump and his closest staff in the White House, it had become clear to me that endorsing the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence agencies would be tantamount to admitting that Trump had not won the 2016 election. The questions got right to the heart of his insecurities. If Trump said, “Yes, the Russians interfered on my behalf,” then he might as well have said outright, “I am illegitimate.”
So as he often did in such situations, Trump tried to divert attention elsewhere. He went off on a tangent about a convoluted conspiracy theory involving Ukraine and the emails of his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, and then produced a muddled, rambling answer to Lemire’s question, the crux of which was this:
My people came to me. . . . They said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this. I don’t see any reason why it would be. . . . But I have confidence in both parties. . . . I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.
The outcome of the Helsinki press conference was entirely predictable, which was why I and others had counseled against holding it at all. But it was still agonizing to watch. I was sitting in front of the podium as Trump spoke, immediately behind the U.S. national security adviser and the secretary of state. I saw them stiffen slightly, and I contemplated throwing a fit or faking a seizure and hurling myself backward into the row of journalists behind me. I just wanted to end the whole thing. Perhaps contrary to the expectations of many American observers, even Putin was somewhat dismayed. He reveled in the national and personal humiliation that Trump was courting, but he also knew that Trump’s careless remarks would provoke a backlash in the United States and thus further constrain the U.S. president’s already limited room to maneuver on Russia policy. The modest agreements for further high-level meetings were already out the window. As he exited the room, Putin told his press secretary, within earshot of our interpreter, that the press conference had been “bullshit.”
Trump’s critics immediately pounced on his bizarre conduct in Helsinki. It was more evidence that Trump was in league with Putin and that the Kremlin held sway over the American president. The following year, Mueller’s final investigative report determined that during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Trump campaign had in fact been willing to exploit any derogatory information about Clinton that came its way from whatever source, including Russia. In seeking to thwart Clinton’s bid to become the first female American president, the Trump campaign and the Kremlin had been acting in parallel; their goals had aligned. Mueller concluded that although this did not amount to a criminal conspiracy, there was plenty of evidence of an extensive and sophisticated Russian political influence operation against the United States.
Russia and the United States were not so different—and Putin, for one, knew it.
The Mueller report also sketched the contours of a different, arguably more pernicious kind of “Russian connection.” In some crucial ways, Russia and the United States were not so different—and Putin, for one, knew it. In the very early years of the post–Cold War era, many analysts and observers had hoped that Russia would slowly but surely converge in some ways with the United States. They predicted that once the Soviet Union and communism had fallen away, Russia would move toward a form of liberal democracy. By the late 1990s, it was clear that such an outcome was not on the horizon. And in more recent years, quite the opposite has happened: the United States has begun to move closer to Russia, as populism, cronyism, and corruption have sapped the strength of American democracy. This is a development that few would have foreseen 20 years ago, but one that American leaders should be doing everything in their power to halt and reverse.

Indeed, over time, the United States and Russia have become subject to the same economic and social forces. Their populations have proved equally susceptible to political manipulation. Prior to the 2016 U.S. election, Putin recognized that the United States was on a path similar to the one that Russia took in the 1990s, when economic dislocation and political upheaval after the collapse of the Soviet Union had left the Russian state weak and insolvent. In the United States, decades of fast-paced social and demographic changes and the Great Recession of 2008–9 had weakened the country and increased its vulnerability to subversion. Putin realized that despite the lofty rhetoric that flowed from Washington about democratic values and liberal norms, beneath the surface, the United States was beginning to resemble his own country: a place where self-dealing elites had hollowed out vital institutions and where alienated, frustrated people were increasingly open to populist and authoritarian appeals. The fire was already burning; all Putin had to do was pour on some gasoline.
A special relationship
When Trump was elected, Putin and the Kremlin made no attempt to conceal their glee. They had thought that Clinton would become president and that she would focus on criticizing Putin’s style of governance and constraining Russia. They had steeled themselves and prepared for the worst. Instead, they got the best possible outcome from their perspective—a populist, nativistic president with no prior experience in foreign policy and a huge, fragile ego. Putin recognized Trump as a type and grasped his political predilections immediately: Trump, after all, fit a mold that Putin himself had helped forge as the first populist leader to take power in a major country in the twenty-first century. Putin had blazed the trail that Trump would follow during his four years in office.
The essence of populism is creating a direct link with “the people” or with specific groups within a population, then offering them quick fixes for complex problems and bypassing or eliminating intermediaries such as political parties, parliamentary representatives, and established institutions. Referendums, plebiscites, and executive orders are the preferred tools of the populist leader, and Putin has used them all over the past 20 years. When he came to power on December 31, 1999, at the end of a decade of crisis and strife in Russia, Putin promised to fix everything. Unlike his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, Putin did not belong to a formal political party. He was the champion of a looser, personalized movement. After 2000, Putin turned Russian presidential elections into national referendums on himself by making sure his rivals were obscure (or wholly manufactured) opposition candidates. And at every critical juncture during his time in power, Putin has adjusted Russia’s political system to entrench himself in the Kremlin. Finally, in 2020, he formally amended the constitution so that in theory (and health permitting), he can run for reelection and stay in power until 2036.
Putin blazed the trail that Trump would follow during his four years in office.
All of Putin’s machinations greatly impressed Trump. He wanted to “get along” with Russia and with Putin personally. Practically the only thing Trump ever said to me during my time in his administration was to ask, in reference to Putin, “Am I going to like him?” Before I could answer, the other officials in the room got up to leave, and the president’s attention shifted; such was life as a female adviser in the Trump White House.
Trump took at face value rumors that Putin was the richest man in the world and told close associates that he admired Putin for his presumed wealth and for the way he ran Russia as if it were his own private company. As Trump freely admitted, he wanted to do the same thing. He saw the United States as an extension of his other private enterprises: the Trump Organization, but with the world’s largest military at its disposal. This was a troubling perspective for a U.S. president, and indeed, over the course of his time in office, Trump came to more closely resemble Putin in political practice than he resembled any of his American predecessors.
At times, the similarities between Trump and Putin were glaringly obvious: their shared manipulation and exploitation of the domestic media, their appeals to their own versions of their countries’ “golden age,” their compilation of personal lists of “national heroes” to appeal to their voters’ nostalgia and conservatism—and their attendant compilation of personal lists of enemies to do the same for their voters’ darker sides. Putin put statues of Soviet-era figures back on their pedestals and restored Soviet memorials that had been toppled under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Trump tried to prevent the removal of statues of Confederate leaders and the renaming of American military bases honoring Confederate generals. The two men also shared many of the same enemies: cosmopolitan, liberal elites; the American financier, philanthropist, and open society promoter George Soros; and anyone trying to expand voting rights, improve electoral systems, or cast a harsh light on corruption in their countries’ respective executive branches.
Trump also aped Putin’s willingness to abuse his executive power by going after his political adversaries; Trump’s first impeachment was provoked in part by his attempt to coerce the government of Ukraine into smearing one of his most formidable opponents, Joe Biden, ahead of the 2020 presidential election. And Trump imported Putin’s style of personalist rule, bypassing the professional civil servants in the federal government—a nefarious “deep state,” in Trump’s eyes—to rely instead on the counsel and interventions of cronies. Foreign politicians called in chits with celebrities who had personal connections to the president and his family, avoiding their own embassies in the process. Lobbyists complained to whomever they could reach in the West Wing or the Trump family circle. They were quick to set attack dogs on anyone perceived as an obstacle and to rile up pro-Trump trolls on the Internet, because this always seemed to work. Influence peddlers both domestic and foreign courted the president to pursue their own priorities; the policymaking process became, in essence, privatized.
Trump and Putin shake hands in Helsinki, Finland, July 2018
Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

The event that most clearly revealed the convergence of politics in the United States and Russia during Trump’s term was his disorganized but deadly serious attempt to stage a self-coup and halt the peaceful transfer of executive power after he lost the 2020 election to Biden. Russia, after all, has a long history of coups and succession crises, dating back to the tsarist era, including three during the past 30 years. In August 1991, hard-liners opposed to Gorbachev’s reforms staged a brief putsch, declaring a state of emergency and placing Gorbachev under house arrest at his vacation home. The effort fizzled, and the coup was a debacle, but it helped bring down the Soviet Union. Two years later, violence erupted from a bitter dispute between the Russian parliament and Yeltsin over the respective powers of the legislature and the president in competing drafts of a new constitution. Yeltsin moved to dissolve parliament after it refused to confirm his choice for prime minister. His vice president and the Speaker of the parliament, in response, sought to impeach him. In the end, Yeltsin invoked “extraordinary powers” and called out the Russian army to shell the parliament building, thus settling the argument with brute force.
The next coup was a legal one and came in 2020, when Putin wanted to amend Yeltsin’s version of the constitution to beef up his presidential powers—and, more important, to remove the existing term limits so that he could potentially stay on as president until 2036. As a proxy to propose the necessary constitutional amendments, Putin tapped Valentina Tereshkova, a loyal supporter in parliament and, as a cosmonaut and the first woman to travel to outer space, an iconic figure in Russian society. Putin’s means were subtler than Yeltsin’s in 1993, but his methods were no less effective.
It would have been impossible for any close observer of recent Russian history to not recall those episodes on January 6, when a mob whipped up by Trump and his allies—who had spent weeks claiming that the 2020 election had been stolen from him—stormed the U.S. Capitol and tried to stop the formal certification of the election results. The attack on the Capitol was the culmination of four years of conspiracies and lies that Trump and his allies had fed to his supporters on social media platforms, in speeches, and on television. The “Big Lie” that Trump had won the election was built on the backs of the thousands of little lies that Trump uttered nearly every time he spoke and that were then nurtured within the dense ecosystem of Trumpist media outlets. This was yet one more way in which, under Trump, the United States came to resemble Russia, where Putin has long solidified his grip on power by manipulating the Russian media, fueling nationalist grievances, and peddling conspiracy theories.
i alone
Trump put the United States on a path to autocracy, all the while promising to “make America great again.” Likewise, Putin took Russia back toward the authoritarianism of the Soviet Union under the guise of strengthening the state and restoring the country’s global position. This striking convergence casts U.S.-Russian relations and the exigencies of Washington’s approach to Moscow in a new light.
Historically, U.S. policies toward Russia have been premised on the idea that the two countries’ paths and expectations diverged at the end of the Cold War. In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western analysts had initially thought that Russia might embrace some of the international institutional arrangements that Washington and its allies had long championed. That, of course, did not happen. And under Putin, U.S.-Russian relations have become more frazzled and fraught than at any point in the 1990s.
There is something confounding about the ongoing confrontation between the two countries, which seems like an artifact from another era. During the Cold War, the stakes of the conflict were undeniable. The Soviet Union posed an existential threat to the United States and its allies, and vice versa. The two superpowers faced off in an ideological clash between capitalism and communism and a geopolitical tussle over spheres of influence in Europe. Today, Russia maintains the capacity to obliterate the United States, but the Soviet Union and the communist system are gone. And even though foreign policy circles in Washington and Moscow still view U.S.-Russian relations through the lens of great-power competition, the struggle for Europe is over. For the United States, China, not Russia, poses the greatest foreign policy challenge of the twenty-first century, along with the urgent existential threats of climate change and global pandemics.
The ongoing confrontation between the two countries seems like an artifact from another era.
Yet a sense of confrontation and competition persists. Americans point to a pattern of Russian aggression and provocation: Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, its annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its subsequent assaults on Ukraine’s territory and sovereignty, its intervention in Syria in 2015, the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and the frequent ransomware attacks and email hacks attributed to Russian actors. Russians, for their part, point to the expansion of NATO into eastern Europe and the Baltic states, the U.S. bombing of Belgrade during the Kosovo war in 1999, Washington’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003, U.S. support for the “color revolutions” that took place in post-Soviet states such as Georgia and Ukraine in the first decade of this century, and the uprisings in the Middle East during the Arab Spring. In Moscow, all of these serve as proof that Washington is hell-bent on invasion and regime change and also has Russia and Putin in its cross hairs.
In truth, most American policymakers simply wish that Russia would just go away so they can refocus their attention on what really matters. For their Russian counterparts, however, the United States still represents the main opponent. That is because, as a populist leader, Putin sees the United States not just as a geopolitical threat to Russia but also as a personal threat to himself. For Putin, foreign policy and domestic policy have fused. His attempt to retain Russia’s grip on the independent countries that were once part of the Soviet Union and to reassert Moscow’s influence in other global arenas is inseparable from his effort to consolidate and expand his authority at home.

Putin sits at the apex of a personalized and semi-privatized kleptocratic system that straddles the Russian state and its institutions and population. He has embedded loyalists in every important Russian institution, enterprise, and industry. If Putin wants to retain the presidency until 2036—by which time he will be 84 years old and will have become the longest-serving modern Russian ruler—he will have to maintain this level of control or even increase it, since any slippage might be perceived as weakness. To do so, Putin has to deter or defeat any opponents, foreign or domestic, who have the capacity to undermine his regime. His hope is that leaders in the United States will get so bogged down with problems at home that they will cease criticizing his personalization of power and will eschew any efforts to transform Russia similar to those the U.S. government carried out in the 1990s.
Putin observing Russian military exercises in the Nizhny Novgorod region, Russia, September 2021
Sputnik Photo Agency / Reuters
Putin also blurs the line between domestic and foreign policy to distract the Russian population from the distortions and deficiencies of his rule. On the one hand, he stresses how decadent and dissolute the United States has become and how ill suited its leaders are to teach anyone a lesson on how to run a country. On the other hand, he stresses that the United States still poses a military threat and that it aims to bring Russia to its knees. Putin’s constant refrain is that the contest between Russia and the United States is a perpetual Darwinian struggle and that without his leadership, Russia will not survive. Without Putin, there is no Russia. He does not want things to get completely out of hand and lead to war. But he also does not want the standoff to fade away or get resolved. As the sole true champion of his country and his people, he can never be seen to stand down or compromise when it comes to the Americans.
Similarly, Putin must intimidate, marginalize, defuse, or defeat any opposition to his rule. Anyone who might stand in his way must be crushed. In this sense, the jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and Clinton fall into the same category. In Putin’s view, if Clinton had become U.S. president, she would have continued to hound him and hold him to task, just as she did when she served as secretary of state in the Obama administration, by promoting democracy and civil society to root out corruption in Russia.
Of course, Navalny is far more dangerous to Putin than Clinton would have been. Navalny is a Russian, not a foreigner. He is a next-generation alternative to Putin: young, handsome, charismatic, patriotic, and defiant. He poses a threat to Putin not only owing to their differences but also because of a few key similarities: like Putin, Navalny is a populist who heads a movement rather than a party, and he has not been averse to playing on nationalist sentiments to appeal to the same Russian voters who form Putin’s base. Navalny has survived an audacious assassination attempt and has humiliated Putin on numerous occasions. By skillfully using digital media and slick video skills to highlight the excesses of the Russian leader’s kleptocratic system, Navalny has gotten under Putin’s skin. He has forced the Kremlin to pay attention to him. This is why Navalny is in jail and why Putin has moved swiftly to roll up his movement, forestalling any chance that Navalny might compete for the presidency in 2024.
the task at hand
The current U.S.-Russian relationship no longer mirrors the Cold War challenge, even if some geopolitical contours and antagonisms persist. The old U.S. foreign policy approach of balancing deterrence with limited engagement is ill suited to the present task of dealing with Putin’s insecurities. And after Trump’s disastrous performance at Helsinki, it is also clear that the arms control summitry that took the edge off the acute phase of the Cold War and nuclear confrontation can provide little guidance for how to anchor the future relationship. The primary problem for the Biden administration in dealing with Russia is rooted in the domestic politics of the United States and Russia rather than their foreign policies. The two countries have been heading in the same political direction for some of the same reasons over the last several years. They have similar political susceptibilities. The United States will never change Putin and his threat perceptions, because they are deeply personal. Americans will have to change themselves to blunt the effects of Russian political interference campaigns for the foreseeable future. Achieving that goal will require Biden and his team to integrate their approach to Russia with their efforts to shore up American democracy, tackle inequality and racism, and lead the country out of a period of intense division.
The polarization of American society has become a national security threat, acting as a barrier to the collective action necessary for combating catastrophes and thwarting external dangers. Partisan spectacles during the global covid-19 pandemic have undermined the country’s international standing as a model of liberal democracy and eroded its authority on public health. The United States’ inability to get its act together has hindered the projection of American soft power, or what Biden has called “the power of our example.” During my time in the Trump administration, I watched as every peril was politicized and turned into fodder for personal gain and partisan games. Successive national security advisers, cabinet members, and their professional staffs were unable to mount coherent responses or defenses to security issues in the face of personalized, chaotic, and opportunistic conduct at the top.
In this regard, Putin actually offers an instructive contrast. Trump railed against a mythological American deep state, whereas Putin—who spent decades as an intelligence operative before ascending to office—is a product of Russia’s very real deep state. Unlike Trump, who saw the U.S. state apparatus as his enemy and wanted to rule the country as an outsider, Putin rules Russia as a state insider. Also unlike Trump, Putin rarely dives into Russia’s social, class, racial, or religious divisions to gain political traction. Instead, although he targets individuals and social groups that enjoy little popular support, Putin tends to promote a single, synthetic Russian culture and identity to overcome the domestic conflicts of the past that destabilized and helped bring down both the Russian empire and the Soviet Union. That Putin seeks one Russia while Trump wanted many Americas during his time in office is more than just a difference in political styles: it is a critical data point. It highlights the fact that a successful U.S. policy approach to Russia will rest in part on denying Putin and Russian operatives the possibility to exploit divisions in American society.
The Biden administration must integrate its approach to Russia with its efforts to shore up American democracy.
The United States’ vulnerability to the Kremlin’s subversion has been amplified by social media. American-made technology has magnified the impact of once fringe ideas and subversive actors around the world and become a tool in the hands of hostile states and criminal groups. Extremists can network and reach audiences as never before on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, which are designed to attract people’s attention and divide them into affinity groups. Putin has weaponized this technology against the United States, taking advantage of the ways that social media undermines social cohesion and erodes Americans’ sense of a shared purpose. Policymakers should step up their cooperation with the private sector in order to cast light on and deter Russian intelligence operations and other efforts to exploit social media platforms. They also need to figure out ways to educate the American public about the perils of posting personal and political information online.

Making the United States and its society more resilient and less vulnerable to manipulation by tackling inequality, corruption, and polarization will require innovative policies across a huge range of issues. Perhaps the highest priority should be given to investing in people where they reside, particularly through education. Education can lower the barriers to opportunity and accurate information in a way that nothing else can. It can help people recognize the difference between fact and fiction. And it offers all people the chance not only to develop knowledge and learn skills but also to continue to transform themselves and their communities.
One thing U.S. leaders should avoid in seeking to foster domestic unity is attempting to mobilize Americans around the idea of a common enemy, such as China. Doing so risks backfiring by stirring up xenophobic anger toward Americans and immigrants of Asian heritage and thus fueling more divisions at home. Instead of trying to rally Americans against China, Biden should rally them in support of the democratic U.S. allies that Trump spurned and derided. Many of those countries, especially in Europe, find themselves in the same political predicament as the United States, as authoritarian leaders and powers seek to exploit socioeconomic strife and populist proclivities among their citizens. Biden should base a new transatlantic agenda on the mutual fight against populism at home and authoritarianism abroad through economic rebuilding and democratic renewal.
Most important, Biden must do everything in his power to restore trust in government and to promote fairness, equity, and justice. As many Americans learned during Trump’s presidency, no country, no matter how advanced, is immune to flawed leadership, the erosion of political checks and balances, and the degradation of its institutions. Democracy is not self-repairing. It requires constant attention.

Foreign Affairs · by There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-first Century · September 27, 2021


18. To Deter China, Relearn The Lost Art of Dissuasion
Persistent engagement contributes to integrated deterrence (which must include unconventional deterrence).

Excerpts:

Even if the U.S. military cannot stop Beijing from moving on Taiwan, it could use persistent engagement to make invasion an undesirable option. For example, the Pentagon could increase Chinese leaders’ uncertainty through a concerted campaign of revealing new U.S. capabilities, contesting Chinese use of the electromagnetic spectrum, and changing U.S. military posture in and outside the Western Pacific in ways that would raise the costs of aggression. Allies and the interagency could complement military actions by suggesting economic repercussions against China’s global interests or Belt and Road Initiative investments.


To Deter China, Relearn The Lost Art of Dissuasion
Threats of denial or punishment will not deter a peer adversary fighting at home.
By BRYAN CLARK and DAN PATT
defenseone.com · by Bryan Clark
In its upcoming defense strategy, the Biden administration will attempt to balance challenges from an increasingly capable Chinese military against fiscal constraints imposed by other domestic spending and rising fears of inflation. Congressional authorizers are correct that defense budgets can be higher, but short of continuous wartime mobilization, the U.S. military may soon be unable to prevent Beijing from overpowering neighbors like Taiwan. Chinese leaders are also unlikely to believe the United States would launch nuclear weapons in response to conventional attacks against overseas U.S. territory or allies. The Pentagon’s strategy will therefore need a more sophisticated approach to deterring war than simply threatening denial or punishment.
Strategists have long argued that the United States could dissuade potential adversaries through a combination of raising the costs of aggression, increasing opponents’ uncertainty about their plans, and reducing the potential benefits by making targets less attractive or threatening economic, political, or military repercussions. During the 1950s, this orchestration of efforts was often reframed as deterrence, with the emphasis on nuclear retaliation increasing when NATO forces fell behind their Warsaw Pact counterparts.
Unfortunately, the multi-dimensional nature of deterrence was forgotten during three decades of post-Cold War U.S. military dominance. Pentagon leaders came to believe opponents could be convinced their aggression was certain to fail or they would suffer catastrophic consequences if successful. This belief underpins today’s U.S. defense strategy and programs and requires the U.S. military to pour its resources into attempting to win a conflict against China over Taiwan that may never end better than a draw and is unlikely to be the most stressing or most common form Chinese or Russian aggression could take.
Authoritarians in Beijing and Moscow increasingly rely on “gray zone” tactics that combine proxy and paramilitary operations with political warfare, industrial espionage, and economic actions to, say, annex Crimea or build islands in the South China Sea. By avoiding thresholds that would justify a military response, revisionist powers undermine U.S. assurance of allies. And if a tripwire is inadvertently breached, Chinese or Russian forces may have already gained an upper hand in their own backyards of the Taiwan Strait or Baltic states, respectively.
Comprehensive Chinese and Russian campaigns caught the Pentagon flat-footed by because its doctrine conceptualizes conflict as a steady progression from peacetime competition through crisis, deterrence, and conflict. But today’s warfare scrambles these phases and incorporates a growing array of new tools. The U.S. military should rediscover the art of dissuasion.
The cyber community has already embraced the end of deterrence as we knew it. In 2017, Gen. Paul Nakasone, who leads U.S. Cyber Command, concluded that most cyber operations ignore the Pentagon’s phasing construct and are unlikely to be deterred by threats of denial or punishment. So he introduced the framework of persistent engagement, under which cyber forces are expected to grapple with adversaries every day to understand their tools and tactics. Lessons from these exchanges, in turn, guide future operational and technical innovation.
More importantly for dissuasion, persistent engagement allows U.S. operators to better inform adversaries about U.S. capabilities, intentions, and responses. And by sensing when competition is turning from competition to crisis or conflict, U.S. cyber forces can better withstand the initial blows of an attack and adapt in response.
The rising importance of information technologies may result in all confrontations looking more like today’s action in cyberspace. Ubiquitous space and airborne sensors will provide nearly continuous observation of friendly and adversary forces, spurring new efforts at counter-detection and deception. Once identified, opposing units can be engaged by electromagnetic and cyber attacks, influence operations, or criminal activity regardless of whether a war is underway. An approach like persistent engagement may be needed to counter these efforts by showing enemies the associated costs, uncertain results, and consequences.
Even if the U.S. military cannot stop Beijing from moving on Taiwan, it could use persistent engagement to make invasion an undesirable option. For example, the Pentagon could increase Chinese leaders’ uncertainty through a concerted campaign of revealing new U.S. capabilities, contesting Chinese use of the electromagnetic spectrum, and changing U.S. military posture in and outside the Western Pacific in ways that would raise the costs of aggression. Allies and the interagency could complement military actions by suggesting economic repercussions against China’s global interests or Belt and Road Initiative investments.
Some of these tactics are surely under consideration by the U.S. government. However, the U.S. military’s reliance on deterrence by denial or punishment relegates capabilities beyond those that counter or conduct attacks to supporting roles. A more comprehensive approach will be needed as China’s leaders grow more confident in their ability to achieve military objectives.
As attrition becomes a less useful tool for deterrence and the gray zone emerges as a preferred venue for Chinese and Russian aggression, military operations and national security activities are becoming more important as communication than as ways to damage or destroy the enemy. Success will require understanding how foreign leaders make decisions and discerning how communication occurs between them and their U.S. counterparts, especially the inadvertent or faint signals that make up most of the information passed between people or governments.
Just as Cold War strategists successfully employed a multi-disciplinary portfolio of actions to dissuade Soviet aggression, authors of the new U.S. defense strategy should rethink the catechism of “deter, and if necessary, defeat” aggression and reframe U.S. goals to focus on preventing war through dissuasion.
Bryan Clark is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and Director of the Hudson Center for Defense Concepts and Technology.
Dan Patt is an Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Center for Defense Concepts and Technology.
defenseone.com · by Bryan Clark




19. Misinformation Is About to Get So Much Worse

The human will continue to dominate at least in our lifetime.

Excerpt:

Schmidt: I could speculate that in a few hundred years there will probably be no places where computer intelligence is not as good as humans. But certainly for the rest of all of our lifetimes, there will be things that are uniquely human that involve the synthesis of ideas out of left field, things which are just true ideas, true new discovery, true innovation. If you look at the pattern of AI, it’s not replacing the brilliant lawyers, columnists, writers, teachers, researchers; it’s replacing menial jobs. So what happened with AI was it started working on vision. And an awful lot of people just look and monitor things, which is pretty mind-numbing. And now computers are better at vision than humans, which allows humans to be freed up to do higher-order things. So for the foreseeable period, and certainly for our lifetimes, there will be a place for humans. Hopefully that place for humans is using what we do best, which is our creativity, our sense of morals, our sense of spirit. Those are going to be very difficult for the current tasks and current focus of how AI evolves, at least in this generation of invention.
Misinformation Is About to Get So Much Worse
A conversation with Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO and chair of the 2021 National Security Commission on AI.
By Saahil Desai
defenseone.com · by The Atlantic
For years now, artificial intelligence has been hailed as both a savior and a destroyer. The technology really can make our lives easier, letting us summon our phones with a “Hey, Siri” and (more importantly) assisting doctors on the operating table. But as any science-fiction reader knows, AI is not an unmitigated good: It can be prone to the same racial biases as humans are, and, as is the case with self-driving cars, it can be forced to make murky split-second decisions that determine who lives and who dies. Like it or not, AI is only going to become an even more omnipresent force: We’re in a “watershed moment” for the technology, says Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO.
Schmidt is a longtime fixture in a tech industry that seems to constantly be in a state of upheaval. He was the first software manager at Sun Microsystems, in the 1980s, and the CEO of the former software giant Novell in the ’90s. He joined Google as CEO in 2001, then was the company’s executive chairman from 2011 until 2017. Since leaving Google, Schmidt has made AI his focus: In 2018, he wrote in The Atlantic about the need to prepare for the AI boom, along with his co-authors Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, and the MIT dean Daniel Huttenlocher. The trio have followed up that story with The Age of AI, a book about how AI will transform how we experience the world, coming out in November.
During The Atlantic Festival today, Schmidt spoke with Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic’s executive editor, about the future of AI and how to prepare for it. Their conversation below has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Adrienne LaFrance: For decades, we’ve been waiting for artificial intelligence to catch up with our imagination. And now the technology really is advancing incredibly rapidly. How different do you think life will be a year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now as a result?
Eric Schmidt: Well, we think it’s going to be quite different. And the reason we think it’s quite different is that this is the beginning of a new epoch of human civilization. Frankly, when the Renaissance happened, we developed collectively 500 years ago the notion of reason, the notion that things did not just descend from God, that independent actors could criticize each other. Under that same argument, the arrival of a different intelligence that’s not human life, but similar to humans, is such a watershed moment.
LaFrance: So you’re invoking the Scientific Revolution, the Age of Enlightenment. We’ve all just lived through a triple revolution with the internet, smartphones, and the social web—will the AI revolution be bigger than all three of those?
Schmidt: I do think it will be bigger, and the authors collectively disagree on how positive or negative, but we articulate these points in the book. If you look back 20 years ago, people were talking about social networks. No one had any idea that social networks would become so important and would shape the political discourse of elections, how people are treated. It would give a voice to people who are underrepresented but also people we don’t necessarily want to hear from. And we didn’t, at the time, understand the implications of putting everyone on the same network. We need to think now of what happens when artificial intelligence is co-resident with us in the world. It lives with us; it watches us; it helps us, maybe interferes with us occasionally. We don’t really know.
I’ll give you a good example: If you imagine a child born today, you give the child a baby toy or a bear, and that bear is AI-enabled. And every year the child gets a better toy. Every year the bear gets smarter, and in a decade, the child and the bear who are best friends are watching television and the bear says, ’“I don’t really like this television show.” And the kid says, ’“Yeah, I agree with you.” What do we think when humans and these AI systems become best friends? Do we lose our communications and our warmth among humans, or does it get stronger? We don’t know.
LaFrance: You’re posing it as a question: What do we think of this? I can tell you, I find it mildly creepy, the bear-best-friend example. Would you want your children or your grandchildren to be raised with an AI best friend? Does that concern you, or is it exciting to you?
Schmidt: I think a lot depends on how it actually works. If that AI best friend is also the best teacher in the world, the best mentor in the world, the warmest possible version of what a child needs, then I’m all for it. But let’s imagine that this bear has a hidden bug in it; it was inserted from an evil person, where the bear is slightly racist, which is a value that I do not want my child to be exposed to. That’s not okay. Or let’s reverse the scenario and imagine that I am in fact a racist, which I’m not, and I want my bear to be racist. And I want to program the racist bear. We haven’t figured out what the rules are. Because these are systems that will be interacting with humans every day; they will have an outsize impact on their experience of daily life.
The information space, the social world that we all live in now, is so governed by the online media and, frankly, many of the attributes of clickbait and all those other kinds of things. It’s really disturbing. Now, as you know, Dr. Kissinger wrote in 2018 an article which was entitled “How the Enlightenment Ends,” and we followed up with an article in The Atlantic called “The Metamorphosis.” We’ve been working on these ideas for a while to frame them in a context not about the technology, which hopefully we will describe accurately, but rather on how society will react to this, and it’s coming fast. Dr. Kissinger says his concern is us technologists are building the stuff without a historical record and without an understanding of the deep issues in humanity that we are touching in our technology.
LaFrance: You chaired the 2021 National Security Commission on AI, and one of the recommendations that came out of it was to recommend to President Biden to reject a ban on autonomous weapons systems. That recommendation runs against an argument that many of your peers have made. They fear a world in which AI weapons would make battle decisions that we can’t understand or explain. Talk a little bit about your position.
Schmidt: When I speak about AI, most of my friends think I’m talking about a robot that has gone amok and a woman scientist slays the robot. But we’re not talking about that. What we’re talking about are information systems and knowledge systems that are with us every day. And today it’s fair to say that those systems are imprecise. They’re dynamic in that they change all the time. They’re emergent in that when you combine them, you can get unexpected behaviors, some good, some bad. And they’re capable of learning. Well, it’s the combination of those four points that makes these AI systems both problematic but also very powerful. So if you then apply it to a life-critical decision—and I can think of no more life critical decision than the launch of a very, very deadly weapon—how would we know that the computer was making the right decision? We can’t prove it. If it makes mistakes, it’s a mistake that’s intolerable.
People who think that this is an easy problem, let me give you another example. You’re on a ship and there’s a missile coming in that you can’t see. And the AI system is telling you about this and says, ’“You will be dead if you don’t press this button within 20 seconds.” Now the rule in the military is the human needs to be in control. And there is no question the human has to press the button. What are the odds of that human not pressing the button? Pretty low. The notion of the compression of time in the context of these life critical decisions, especially military defense, is really important. If you go back to the original RAND study, it’s about automatic defense. And if you go back to the movie with Peter Sellers where they threaten to launch a nuclear weapon and the doomsday machine automatically launches one in return, which is retaliatory—that’s a good proxy for what we’re talking about. I’ll give you another example: We’re collectively, as an industry, working on general intelligence, and the general intelligence will emerge in the next 10 or 20 years. And depending on how you define it, those systems will be enormously powerful, and those systems will be enormously dangerous in the wrong hands. So they’re going to have to be treated in a way similar to nuclear weapons but with a new doctrine, because we don’t understand proliferation and we don’t understand how to do containment with these new weapons systems.
LaFrance: I want to go back to that in a minute, the question of what happens to our theories of deterrence with these new kinds of weapons. But first the geopolitical context: What is the U.S. position in all of this, relative to what we imagine China might do or Russia might do? Talk about the extent to which your position that we should reject a ban on autonomous weapons is about making sure that the United States is strong relative to other superpowers.
Schmidt: The core argument that we’re making is that there will be a small number of countries that will master this technology. And it’s important that there be discussions about how to limit them. It’s important that those discussions be bilateral; the number of countries that will be able to field at this level will be in the handful. So a reasonable expectation will be that these kinds of systems, when they eventually emerge, will be under the control of large national governments such as the United States and China, and maybe a few others. We feel quite strongly that the discussions about where the limits and lines should be should start now. We don’t want a situation where there has to be an explosion before there’s a treaty. If you go back to 1945, with the use of nuclear weapons in World War II, which ended it, there was no treaty at the time banning or limiting their use. We spent the next 15 years developing the concepts of containment, mutually assured destruction, balance of power, and so forth. We’re going to need to rediscover those in this new age of dangerous weapons.
LaFrance: With nuclear weapons, so far, thankfully deterrence has worked. But when you look at AI weapons, you have the possibility for targeted drone killings carried out with extreme precision and accuracy, and not necessarily by nations but by terrorists. The nature of these attacks could be very hard to trace. This breaks our entire sense of how war and deterrence might work. So you say we need a doctrine or framework, but where do we start?
Schmidt: Well, many people believe that the best way to solve this problem is to create the equivalent of a Los Alamos Center, where the United States invests its many great people and money to build and advance in this area. The question is: How long, how much of an advantage would that give us? In 1945 we did this, and we had an advantage of about four years before the Soviet Union was able to do something similar. We estimated in my AI commission that the gap between the United States and China was far shorter already. And the reason the gap is there is because software and the knowledge about sovereign algorithms proliferate very quickly. So with nuclear, we’ve had the capability to limit the actual proliferation of the actual fissionable material, even though the underlying knowledge of how to build such a weapon has been broadly known for at least 50 years pretty much everywhere. We don’t have the equivalent of uranium-235 to restrict it in software; we have to find other ways to avoid the proliferation of the tools you just described in the hands of every evil player.
LaFrance: You’ve talked before about how AI is here, we can’t uninvent it, so we have to figure out how to live with it. When you think about the arc of technological history, is there a technology that you wish we could uninvent, one where humans would be better off if it never existed?
Schmidt: Certainly nuclear weapons and biological weapons would be where we would start. If you just use death from conflict, famine, things like that, I would find a way to reverse whatever technology enabled them. I think that the impact of AI, in the way you’re describing, will be much broader felt and much harder to identify. I’ll give you a good example. With AI systems, they’re particularly good at finding patterns and finding exceptions. And they’re particularly good at looking at you and your life pattern and coming up with things that are useful for you. So, for example, if you know your search history, we can suggest your next search. If we know your ad history, we can suggest the next ad. Those are, in my view, benign uses of technology within a control space. But now let’s imagine that we build an AI system that looks at human behaviors and figures out my weaknesses. So let’s say, for example, that I’m subject to the first person: Whatever you say, I believe first. This is called anchoring bias. And let’s imagine that the computer system can determine how to anchor me on a falsehood. So the current problem of misinformation will be child’s play compared to many people trying to manipulate the impression I have of the world around me using this technology. This is a problem to be solved. We’re all online. All of these systems will be learning what we care about, but we could then be manipulated. That will have as big an impact as the discussions that we’re having, for example, in conflict.
LaFrance: I’m glad you brought up misinformation. When you were Google CEO, in 2006 Google acquired YouTube. It was a very, very different internet then, and now YouTube is among one of the places—among many other platforms, including Google as well, for that matter—where we see the threat of extremism and misinformation. What do you wish you knew then that you know now?
Schmidt: I can tell you, in the 2000s, our view, and I think I speak for the company during that time, was the American view that the solution to bad information is more information. And so we took a position that was quite aggressively against removing content, even if it was harmful. And we viewed that as both the right thing technologically, but also the right thing culturally. We were criticized heavily in other countries for this. To me, the most interesting thing about COVID online has been that platforms like Twitter and Facebook, which have resisted any form of takedown, have worked aggressively, or they have claimed to be working aggressively, to take down COVID misinformation. COVID is an example of something where falsehoods are on the other side of the line. I can tell you today I’m not involved with it—I left Google—but YouTube has a team which makes these decisions every day and tries to figure out where the line is. You get to decide where you think that line is. Many people I know believe that the lying in misinformation that goes on on social media is on the other side of the line, it should be prohibited, but I don’t know how to prohibit it in a systematic way. And I furthermore believe that the people who are spreading misinformation will get access to these tools that will make it even easier for them to spread information. The industry has got to figure out a way to stop the spread of misinformation. One of them, by the way, just to digress technically, is that the information is not watermarked in such a way that we know its origin. It will be relatively easy for the industry as a whole to start by saying, “Where did this information actually come from? Where did this picture or this text or video or whatever—where did it enter all of our systems, and then who modified it?” That alone would help us at least understand the source of the manipulation.
LaFrance: Do you think it’s possible that these platforms are just too big and humans shouldn’t be connected at this scale? I think Facebook has 2.9 billion users. Is it possible that this is just not how humanity is meant to be organized?
Schmidt: It’s pretty clear that there are things that humans are not very good at, and one is a cascade of information. So we’re not very good with rapid change and lots of information—it just causes our brains to go crazy, with maybe a few notable exceptions. For normal people it’s like, Oh my God, I just can’t take it anymore. And it leads to rises of cortisol stress, perhaps mental illness, God knows. So we have a problem that the information that is coming at you is so profound. In our book, what we talk about is that this coexistence with this information resource—it’s driven by features that are not human—is a change in the information space that is profound. We worry a lot in the book about how you regulate it. We’re not in favor of censorship; we’re not trying to filter people’s opinions. So what are the appropriate restrictions of the misuse of this new technology?
Now, you haven’t asked me all the great benefits of all of this. Let me give you an example of why we should fight for AI. The people I talked to in science, which is where I spend most of my time now, would love to have an AI that would just read everything, because the explosion in knowledge in science is overwhelming their brilliant brains. You can imagine that the AI system, which sees everything and can summarize, can be used to move biology forward, drug discovery forward, and so forth at enormous rates. In the introduction to our book, we use three index points. The first is AlphaGo, which beat the Korean and Chinese competitors and invented moves that had never been seen in 2,500 years. I know because I was physically present when this happened. We talked about a drug called Halicin, where the computer took 100 million compounds, figured out how they work, and figured out how to assemble a new broad-class antibiotic, which had never been conceived of, which is in trials now. And we also talk about technology called GPT-3, which is a representative of what are called universal models, where they read everything and then you try to figure out what they understand and what they can do. The results are miraculous. We’re just at the beginning of this ramp that I’m describing. And now is the time to say, “Let’s figure out how we want to handle these things.” So, for example, is it okay—I use my facetious example of the bear. Is it okay to have a racist bear? Maybe people will think that’s okay. I don’t think it’s okay, but that’s an appropriate debate to have.
LaFrance: You’ve written before that the “intelligence” in artificial intelligence is needlessly anthropomorphic, and that we need to reframe the way we think about what knowledge is. What is your view of what human intelligence then becomes, if machines can do all the things we can do, and better. Is there any form of intelligence that remains uniquely human, and should we worry if there isn’t? What realm remains ours?
Schmidt: I could speculate that in a few hundred years there will probably be no places where computer intelligence is not as good as humans. But certainly for the rest of all of our lifetimes, there will be things that are uniquely human that involve the synthesis of ideas out of left field, things which are just true ideas, true new discovery, true innovation. If you look at the pattern of AI, it’s not replacing the brilliant lawyers, columnists, writers, teachers, researchers; it’s replacing menial jobs. So what happened with AI was it started working on vision. And an awful lot of people just look and monitor things, which is pretty mind-numbing. And now computers are better at vision than humans, which allows humans to be freed up to do higher-order things. So for the foreseeable period, and certainly for our lifetimes, there will be a place for humans. Hopefully that place for humans is using what we do best, which is our creativity, our sense of morals, our sense of spirit. Those are going to be very difficult for the current tasks and current focus of how AI evolves, at least in this generation of invention.
The Age Of A.IHenry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher, Little, Brown and Company
This story was originally published by The Atlantic. Sign up for their newsletter.
defenseone.com · by The Atlantic


20. Afghanistan probably never stood a chance, reports show

Excerpts:

“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, a former military counterinsurgency adviser said in a 2016 interview, the Post reported. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”
Five years later, after a Taliban offensive captured the city of Kunduz, the SIGAR was no more confident that Afghanistan’s security forces could handle security on their own.
“... much of what SIGAR tracks is quantitative and does not address intangible factors such as leadership and the will to fight,” according to the Oct. 30, 2015 report. “The [Afghan National Defense and Security Forces] has more tools at their disposal than their enemies, but that fact by itself does not guarantee success.”
That update included a list of concerns, including:
  • In 2012, the success metric changed from “independent,” to “independent with advisors,” thus making more units “successful,” but with a lower bar.
  • Two audits in 2015 that found there was no way to confirm that security forces personnel and payroll counts were accurate
  • And that military leaders told SIGAR that their success metrics were not meant to be applied to every unit in the security forces, raising “questions about the U.S. ability to determine ANDSF effectiveness at an operational level.”
In that July 2021 interview with reporters, Sopko warned that the U.S. “will do this again,” having not learned enough from its missteps in Vietnam and unlikely to learn much from Afghanistan either.
Afghanistan probably never stood a chance, reports show
militarytimes.com · by Meghann Myers · September 28, 2021
On July 29, the Pentagon’s independent inspector general for Afghanistan told a group of reporters that with 20 years in and trillions dollars spent, Afghan security forces were not confident enough to do basic route clearance or checkpoint management.
Two weeks later, the Taliban had taken nearly all of Afghanistan and was preparing to launch its campaign into Kabul, the capital. Video would show Afghan forces laying down their weapons as the insurgents rolled into city after city, shocking many, but certainly not everyone.
“You know, you really shouldn’t be surprised if you’ve been reading our reports for at least the nine years ... that I’ve been there,” John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, said in late July. “We’ve been highlighting problems with our train, advise and assist mission with the Afghan military.”
After the Taliban took Kabul on Aug. 15, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff stood in the Pentagon briefing room and said that no one saw the country unraveling in that way.
“... the timeframe of a rapid collapse, that was widely estimated and ranged from weeks to months and even years following our departure,” Army Gen. Mark Milley said. “There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days.”
Milley, along with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, will be forced to revisit that assessment this week, as the two take questions from both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees.
While they may not have seen it taking a week and a half, there is a long trail of public reporting that Afghanistan was making little, if any, progress as a self-sustaining, democratic nation, despite public assurances that the U.S. was winning the War on Terror and that Afghanistan was a key front.
“The administration firmly believes that we’re about to turn the corner, and that we just need to give our policy a chance to work,” now-President Joe Biden, then a senator not yet selected as a running mate from Barack Obama, said during a Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing in January 2008. “I am curious as to what that policy is, because, quite frankly, I tell you, I’m somewhat ― I’m ― it’s not clear to me.”
In the Navy, they call it gundecking ― when your people or equipment aren’t up to snuff but you have to keep things moving, so you write up reports as if everything is going swimmingly.
The strategy was on the verge of success again several years later, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told the National Press Club in 2012.
“That has been in my book, the significant turning point.” Panetta said. “For the first time, we saw the transition working, the Afghan army able to do its job, and violence going down.”
But dozens of SIGAR reports detail the underwhelming prowess of the Afghan National Army and National Police, despite the growing competence of its pilots and special operations forces. The most recent came out July 30, the first to be released after President Joe Biden’s April announcement of a full withdrawal.
With that in mind, the SIGAR focused on how the Afghan forces would handle their own logistics, especially fuel. It didn’t look great.
“Fuel remains a major area for theft and corruption in Afghanistan,” according to the report.
Rank-and-file troops weren’t properly trained on fuel handling and quality testing, the report continued, and there was no oversight in place to require the defense or interior ministries to accurately report how much fuel they used ― necessary to make sure security forces received the fuel that they needed, rather than getting extra that could be stolen or sold.
The corruption of Afghan government and military officials was well-documented by the SIGAR, as was the slow progress in building and maintaining a force that could fight off the Taliban, though the Pentagon did not adopt any of the reports’ findings into its own messaging.
“It really depends on the kind of political and military leadership that the Afghans can muster, to turn this around,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters Aug. 11. “They have the capability, have the capacity, and now it’s really time to use those things.”
To that end, the U.S. was prepared to continue helping the Afghan National Security Forces from afar, both by footing their payroll and procurement bills, but also through logistics and maintenance.
What went wrong
Backlash throughout the drawdown pointed to the chasm between years of rosy public assessments and the situation that played out in mid-August, but to call the whole thing a charade doesn’t quite describe the situation.
You might think “one of two things is true. They’re either stupid, or they’re dishonest. They’re either too stupid to understand what’s happening, or they’re dishonest in their reporting,” retired Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who commanded the NATO mission in Afghanistan from between 2009 and 2010, told Military Times in a Sept. 7 interview. “I didn’t see either of those. What I saw was people given tasks. They are trying to get those tasks done.”
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Retired Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal's latest book is out Oct. 5.
The nature of military action is to break down a mission into pieces and work through them one by one, with oversight to ensure that each objective feeds into the larger mission. That’s tough when the mission changes.
“I think that the goalpost shifting is typical in any war, any conflict,” he said. “The reality is, nations enter a war with certain goals in mind. And often, very quickly into the war, their goals shift, because those original goals may not be achievable.”
And, often, in the course of executing a military mission, non-military issues come up, but commanders don’t always have the knowledge or wherewithal to follow up with them.
“The reality is, you’ve got somebody focused on a narrow task,” he said. “And the bigger reality are the weaknesses, that either aren’t in their lane, or they don’t feel like they are the right person to report that.”
So military leaders give the civilians above them the best advice they have, McChrystal said. But the chain of command being what it is, they have no choice but to carry out what the administration prescribes. And then, they have to consider the messaging, and that showing any dissent in public could not only jeopardize their jobs, but could inform how much faith their troops have in the mission.
“If you go to that leader and say, ‘Can you take that hill?’ and the leader goes, ‘You know, 50/50, I don’t know,’ the troops behind that leader are going, ‘Hey, what’s going on here? You’re asking me to assault the hill, and you’re saying you don’t think we can do it,’ " he said.
Lying doesn’t really describe it, he said, though that’s the conclusion many people draw.
“The leader who is going to succeed at something hard, has to believe, has to lean forward, has to enthusiastically bring his people along,” he said. “So the idea that that that is dishonesty is not what I saw. I didn’t see everything, but but in my sense, there were people trying to get it done, who believed that it was possible. And whether they were right or wrong ... you’re going to have to judge it over time.”
The fall
The final days of the Afghan government might have been foreshadowed by the release of the so-called “Afghanistan Papers,” a Washington Post exposé, based on previously unreleased “Lessons Learned” interviews conducted by the SIGAR, that dropped Dec. 9.
Documents obtained after a lengthy lawsuit showed that despite cheery assessments in briefings and congressional hearings, the generals leading the effort there had a grim impression of their progress.
“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a former “Afghan war czar” told interviewers in 2015, according to the Post. “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”
McChrystal echoed that sentiment.
“Well, I think that we learned it as we went along,” he said. “But the reality was, al-Qaida and other threats were significant. But they weren’t huge. And they were pretty limited in size and their ability to hurt us. And yet, our weakness came from being disconnected.”
The Pentagon regularly touted the ANSF’s 300,000-plus troops, though multiple reports over the years explained that much of that was attributed to “ghost soldiers.” Essentially, they completed training and were possibly assigned to a unit before taking off, though their names were still on the rolls.
The U.S. was, of course, still footing the bill to pay and equip them, money that has not been accounted for.
“And it really is going to come down to their leadership, they have, as you rightly said, they have the advantage in numbers, in operational structure, in air forces, and in modern weaponry, and it’s really about having the will and the leadership to use those advantages to their own benefit,” Kirby said in August.
But leadership had long been the Afghans’ biggest issue.
“Poor leadership at the civil level, from the top of the government down, that began almost immediately after the new Afghan government took over from the Taliban, did as much to weaken the efforts to create effective Afghan National Defense and Security Forces as any military mistakes,” Anthony Cordesman, strategy chair at the Center for Strategic and International studies, wrote in a report published Aug. 17, two days after the Taliban took Kabul.
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“The strike was a tragic mistake,” Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, told a Pentagon news conference.
“In many ways, the politics, corruption, and incompetence of both the civil and military side of the Afghan government was at least as serious of an enemy to that government as the Taliban,” he wrote.
The report reflects much of what the SIGAR found throughout its tenure: that Afghanistan was still effectively run by warlords, and government officials would prioritize efforts based on their economic interests.
Though the Biden administration, at the end, declared victory in Afghanistan because al-Qaida had been and remained degraded, that messaging did not account for the the years in between when a democratically-elected government, advances in women’s right and subduing the Taliban all took their turns as the “goal” in Afghanistan.
“...the goals did migrate over time,” Kirby said.
In 2010, the goal was to building an Afghan National Army and National Police that could maintain security in the country.
“Earlier this year, SIGAR issued an audit that analyzed the Capabilities Milestone system, which had been used since 2005 to measure the capabilities—the outcome objectives—of the ANSF,” according to the quarterly report published Oct. 30 that year. “SIGAR found that the system could not provide a reliable or consistent assessment of the capabilities of the ANSF and made 13 recommendations to improve it.”
That’s likely because when one set of metrics didn’t find success, the metrics changed.
“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, a former military counterinsurgency adviser said in a 2016 interview, the Post reported. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”
Five years later, after a Taliban offensive captured the city of Kunduz, the SIGAR was no more confident that Afghanistan’s security forces could handle security on their own.
“... much of what SIGAR tracks is quantitative and does not address intangible factors such as leadership and the will to fight,” according to the Oct. 30, 2015 report. “The [Afghan National Defense and Security Forces] has more tools at their disposal than their enemies, but that fact by itself does not guarantee success.”
That update included a list of concerns, including:
  • In 2012, the success metric changed from “independent,” to “independent with advisors,” thus making more units “successful,” but with a lower bar.
  • Two audits in 2015 that found there was no way to confirm that security forces personnel and payroll counts were accurate
  • And that military leaders told SIGAR that their success metrics were not meant to be applied to every unit in the security forces, raising “questions about the U.S. ability to determine ANDSF effectiveness at an operational level.”
In that July 2021 interview with reporters, Sopko warned that the U.S. “will do this again,” having not learned enough from its missteps in Vietnam and unlikely to learn much from Afghanistan either.
“Don’t believe what you’re told by the generals or the ambassadors or people in the administration saying we’re never going to do this again,” he said. “That’s exactly what we said after Vietnam: we’re never going to do this again. Lo and behold, we did Iraq. And we did Afghanistan. We will do this again.”
Asked the same question, McChrystal didn’t rule it out, though current Pentagon leadership has pledged a lengthy project to explore what went wrong and how to prevent it happening again.
“It’s up to us. I’m quite sure we won’t do anything like this in the very near term,” he said, as the U.S. managed to take a break after Vietnam.
But it’s going to require leaders to throw out the old playbook.
“We certainly haven’t fixed it yet,” McChrystal said. “And so the answer is, well, to just look in the mirror and decide whether we want to do that.”
About Meghann Myers
Meghann Myers is the Pentagon bureau chief at Military Times. She covers operations, policy, personnel, leadership and other issues affecting service members. Follow on Twitter @Meghann_MT


21. China power crunch spreads, shutting factories and dimming growth outlook

Energy security = economic growth = domestic stability = CPP remaining in power.


China power crunch spreads, shutting factories and dimming growth outlook
Reuters · by Shivani Singh
1/3
Workers of grid operator China Southern Power Grid inspect power cables connecting transmission towers in Dongguan, Guangdong province, China May 29, 2018. Picture taken May 29, 2018. REUTERS/Stringer
BEIJING, Sept 27 (Reuters) - Widening power shortages in China have halted production at numerous factories including many supplying Apple and Tesla, while some shops in the northeast operated by candlelight and malls shut early as the economic toll of the squeeze mounted.
China is in the grip of a power crunch as a shortage of coal supplies, toughening emissions standards and strong demand from manufacturers and industry have pushed coal prices to record highs and triggered widespread curbs on usage. Read the explainer
Rationing has been implemented during peak hours in many parts of northeastern China since last week, and residents of cities including Changchun said cuts were occurring sooner and lasting for longer, state media reported.
On Monday, State Grid Corp pledged to ensure basic power supply and avoid electricity cuts.
The power crunch has hurt production in industries across several regions of China and is dragging on the country's economic growth outlook, analysts said.
The impact on homes and non-industrial users comes as night-time temperatures slip to near-freezing in China's northernmost cities. The National Energy Administration (NEA) has told coal and natural gas firms to ensure sufficient energy supplies to keep homes warm during winter.
Liaoning province said power generation had declined significantly since July, and the supply gap widened to a "severe level" last week. It expanded power cuts from industrial firms to residential areas last week.
The city of Huludao told residents not to use high energy-consuming electronics like water heaters and microwave ovens during peak periods, and a resident of Harbin city in Heilongjiang province told Reuters that many shopping malls were closing earlier than usual at 4 p.m. (0800 GMT).
Given the current power situation "the orderly use of electricity in Heilongjiang will continue for a period of time," CCTV quoted the provincial economic planner as saying.
The power squeeze is unnerving Chinese stock markets at a time when the world's second-largest economy is already showing signs of slowing.
China's economy is grappling with curbs on the property and tech sectors and concerns around the future of cash-strapped real estate giant China Evergrande (3333.HK).
PRODUCTION FALLOUT
Tight coal supplies, due in part to a pickup in industrial activity as the economy recovered from the pandemic, and toughening emission standards have driven the power shortages across China.
China has vowed to cut energy intensity - the amount of energy consumed per unit of economic growth - by around 3% in 2021 to meet its climate goals. Provincial authorities have also stepped up the enforcement of emissions curbs in recent months after only 10 of 30 mainland regions managed to achieve their energy goals in the first half of the year.
China's focus on energy intensity and decarbonization is unlikely to abate, analysts said, ahead of COP26 climate talks - as the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference is known - which will be held in November in Glasgow and where world leaders will lay out their climate agendas.
The power pinch has been affecting manufacturers in key industrial hubs on the eastern and southern coasts for weeks. Several key suppliers of Apple (AAPL.O) and Tesla (TSLA.O) halted production at some plants.
loading
At least 15 Chinese companies have said in exchange filings that production had been disrupted by power curbs, while more than 30 Taiwan-listed firms with China operations had stopped work to comply with the power limits.
The steel, aluminium and cement industries have also been hard hit by the output curbs, with about 7% of aluminium production capacity suspended and 29% of national cement production affected, Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a Monday note. Paper and glass could be the next industries to face supply disruptions, they said.
Producers of chemicals, dyes, furniture and soymeal have also been affected.
China's seasonal output of key industrial products
GDP CUTS
The fallout of the power shortage has prompted some analysts to downgrade their 2021 growth outlook.
Nomura cut its third and fourth-quarter China GDP growth forecasts to 4.7% and 3.0%, respectively, from 5.1% and 4.4% previously, and its full-year forecast to 7.7% from 8.2%.
"The power-supply shock in the world's second-biggest economy and biggest manufacturer will ripple through and impact global markets," analysts at Nomura said in a Sept. 24 note, warning that global supplies of textiles, toys and machine parts could be affected.
Morgan Stanley analysts said production cuts, if prolonged, could knock 1 percentage point off China's GDP growth in the fourth quarter.
China thermal coal prices
Last week, major coal producers in China met to try and resolve shortages and curb price increases.
China, the world's biggest energy consumer and source of climate-warming greenhouse gas, has said it aims to bring carbon emissions to a peak by 2030 and to net zero by 2060.
Reporting by Shivani Singh, Min Zhang in Beijing, Additional reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru, Ben Blanchard in Taipei, Yiming Shen in Shanghai and Beijing newsroom; Editing by Ana Nicolaci da Costa, Tony Munroe and Susan Fenton
Reuters · by Shivani Singh


22. War Between the U.S. and China is Coming

Excerpt:
The absolute worst course of action, however, is to choose to fight China – on their terms, in their backyard, where they have regional military superiority – over Taiwan. There is no way we could guarantee a lasting victory and end up in a more secure place than we are today – and would be risking an outright military defeat, or even a devastating nuclear strike on our homeland. If we base our decisions on a cold and rational calculation of military reality, we will avoid war; if we base it on hubris, pride, and emotion, we will almost certainly choose poorly and suffer the predictable consequences.
God help us if we choose the latter.



War Between the U.S. and China is Coming
19fortyfive.com · by ByDaniel Davis · September 27, 2021
War is coming.
Or it will be, without a major and sustained change in how Washington forms policies in the Indo-Pacific region. China, the United States, Taiwan, Japan, Australia, and even the UK are engaged in a dangerous, escalating game. Each is contributing to an ever-escalating cycle of threatening moves and countermoves that could lead, not to a Cold War, but a conflict of white-hot intensity – with potentially catastrophic consequences for America.
The primary catalyst for this growing danger is the struggle between the United States and China. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. has been the= the world’s sole superpower. Facing a world that adds China as a major power (along with a strengthening Russia), is something few in Washington are willing to passively accept.
Except for a few notable exceptions over the past few decades, China has not been much of a factor in great power competition. In fact, China was virtually taken off the global stage at the end of World War II because of the severe damage they had suffered at the hands of Japan during the war and the destructive 20-year civil war they inflicted on themselves.
The U.S. and China fought each other in a sharp but brief period during the Korean War—but once the armistice was signed in 1953, things between the two populous countries moved to the back burner, especially given the ascendancy of the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union.
After the initial Soviet nuclear test in 1949, Moscow and Washington began an arms race that included massive land armies and exploding numbers of nuclear weapons. The world quickly divided into two camps around the Americans and Soviets. China was then a backwards, undeveloped country that was more concerned with trying to feed its people – amidst Chinese leader Mao’s slaughter of millions of his own people – than playing any role in the international stage. The Cold War balance of power was roughly stabilized until the 1990s when everything changed.
In 1991 the U.S. led a massive coalition of armies and air forces to the Middle East to fight Iraq in Desert Storm, crushing what at the time was the fifth largest army in the world. Barely a year later the USSR imploded and collapsed, exiting the world stage. That left the United States as the winner of the Cold War and in the position of undisputed global supremacy in both economic and military terms. China was then only just beginning to emerge into global markets. Now 30 years later, things have changed.
Following Desert Storm, China made a concerted effort to study the American way of war to build a force that could someday defeat the U.S. military. Over the past 20 years, China has been increasing its defense spending an eye-popping average of 10% per year.
According to the Department of Defense’s most recent annual report to Congress on Chinese military capabilities, China has militarily reached near parity with the U.S. in the region, and “(i)ndeed, as this report shows, China is already ahead of the United States in certain areas.” By 2049, the DoD report goes on to say, China intends on producing a “world class” military. As is crucial to note in this period of rising danger, however, military capacity does not equal intent.
For example, during the Cold War the USSR had upwards of 50,000 tanks in Europe, tens of thousands of fighter and bomber aircraft, a massive navy, and thousands more nuclear weapons than the U.S. (by 1986 the USSR had mindboggling 45,000 nuclear warheads) – yet were successfully deterred without having to ever fire a shot. There is every reason to believe that China can likewise be perpetually deterred from launching an unprovoked attack against America.
The continued advancement of China’s conventional military power makes it entirely reasonable for Washington to maintain its high caliber global military power and even to strengthen our readiness capacity. But we must be very careful to guard against the mindset that war with China is inevitable, because as humans are often wont to do, such fears can often lead to self-fulfilling prophesies. Already we are dangerously close to such a place – and the potential for catastrophic war keeps rising apace.
As China’s military continues its rapid multi-decade modernization drive, it has concurrently become bolder, and more confident in itself. Chinese authorities are likewise becoming more comfortable threatening to retake Taiwan by force, recently warning anyone who gets in their way will “have their heads bashed bloody against a Great Wall of steel.” This increasing assertiveness from China is being matched in the West.
The Pentagon has added new military bases in the region, requested $27 billion from Congress to expand military capacity in the Indo-Pacific region, and has warned that China will seize Taiwan in the near future; many leading figures in the U.S. openly advocate for giving direct security guarantees to Taiwan. Australian military leaders privately believe a war with China over Taiwan is a “high likelihood.” Japanese leaders openly say they would consider a Chinese invasion of Taiwan to be an existential threat and would join any U.S. war against China.
China regards the recent deal between Washington, London, and Canberra to build nuclear submarines in Australia as a direct military challenge to Beijing. The continued military enhancement of ‘The Quad’ is likewise focused on a potential military clash between Western powers and China – while China continues to build militarized islands in the South China Sea, cracks down on freedoms in Hong Kong, and dramatically increases combat air sorties near Taiwan.
Each move by one party spawns an increase in rhetoric by the opposing side, often accompanied by a corresponding counteraction of their own – which in turn prompts the first party to angrily react and take yet another escalatory action. And the cycle continues.
This is how major wars start.
America, Taiwan, Australia, Japan, the UK, and even China all have some valid security concerns in their disputes with each other. But all are presently locked in a series of ever-escalating moves and rhetoric that serve to incrementally chip away at the psychological barrier to engaging in open war.
The more the U.S. and its allies treat China as an enemy and talk about how they can and should defend Taiwan, the easier it is for our military leaders to consider “the military option.” The more China verbally blasts Taiwanese leaders, sends fighter jets near Taipei, and makes emotional arguments to its own people, the lower the barrier becomes for them to choose a lethal solution to “the Taiwan question.”
We all need to be crystal clear on one thing: a large-scale conventional war that pits the United States and its allies on one side against China on the other will be catastrophic for all, beyond what anyone can presently imagine.
Both the United States and China have modern missile forces with enormous range and explosive power, surface and sub-surface warships that can attack targets thousands of miles away, and air power that delivers death from great distances. There would be no “winning” such a war; one side will eventually emerge less damaged than the other – or it could go nuclear, and both could be devastated. Millions could perish as a result.
U.S. leaders need to sober up and consider the profound – and potentially unrecoverable – damage we could suffer from such a war. The cold, hard truth for the United States and our allies is there is nothing at stake between China and Taiwan that is worth the potential loss of hundreds of thousands of U.S. casualties in a conventional war with China – or the loss of millions if it goes nuclear.
Even if China took Taiwan by force, their military would likely suffer egregious losses in the process, and would be greatly weakened in the region for a decade or more – while the U.S. and our allies would remain at full military strength. We would have more than ample time to increase our Pacific forces to defend against even the prospect that China might one day have greater territorial designs.
But it bears repeating: even in the bad case that China militarily conquers Taiwan, the United States military would still be at full strength while China would be seriously degraded. At that time we would have an even greater level of security from Chinese attack than we do now.
It is therefore of the most profound importance that Washington do everything in its power to ensure our Armed Forces remain at peak readiness levels, but privately rule out a military response to a Chinese attack on Taiwan. There are other diplomatic and economic tools we can use to impose punishing consequences on China if they do take Taiwan by force, further elevating our advantage over them.
Soldiers of Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 94th Field Artillery Regiment, fire a rocket from a M142 high mobility rocket system during a decisive action training environment exercise on Oct. 4, 2016.
The absolute worst course of action, however, is to choose to fight China – on their terms, in their backyard, where they have regional military superiority – over Taiwan. There is no way we could guarantee a lasting victory and end up in a more secure place than we are today – and would be risking an outright military defeat, or even a devastating nuclear strike on our homeland. If we base our decisions on a cold and rational calculation of military reality, we will avoid war; if we base it on hubris, pride, and emotion, we will almost certainly choose poorly and suffer the predictable consequences.
God help us if we choose the latter.
Now a 1945 Contributing Editor, Daniel L. Davis is a Senior Fellow for Defense Priorities and a former Lt. Col. in the U.S. Army who deployed into combat zones four times. He is the author of “The Eleventh Hour in 2020 America.” Follow him @DanielLDavis1
19fortyfive.com · by ByDaniel Davis · September 27, 2021


23. Rapid and Radical Adaptation in Counterinsurgency: Task Force 714 in Iraq

Excerpts:


Lessons Learned

Amid the many lessons that should be taken from the experience of Task Force 714 in Iraq, three in particular stand out. First, in irregular warfare, organizational change is often required. 
...
Second, change need not be hard. 
...
Third, irregular warfare missions should be assigned to units who own the mission from start to finish. 
...
Success in irregular warfare—as demonstrated in El Salvador, Colombia, the Philippines, and by the task force in Iraq—is enhanced when a unit is assigned a mission and owns it until complete. Rotating missions between commands every year or sooner is not a recipe for success. This should not come as a surprise given the fact that organizational change results from learning, and effective learning—especially in the types of complex environments in which irregular warfare occurs—may take years.


Rapid and Radical Adaptation in Counterinsurgency: Task Force 714 in Iraq - Modern War Institute
mwi.usma.edu · by Liam Collins · September 28, 2021
In May 2003, President George W. Bush declared victory in Iraq after a month of major combat operations. Yet, instead of an end, this milestone marked only the beginning of a protracted campaign as the United States transitioned from major combat operations to counterinsurgency—even if the US military was slow to recognize this shift. The nascent insurgency included a number of other disparate groups with al-Qaeda in Iraq being the most disruptive.
A special operations task force, Task Force 714, had the responsibility for a broad geographical expanse throughout the US Central Command’s area of responsibility, which included Iraq. Like most coalition units deployed to combat the unexpected insurgency in Iraq, the task force found itself relatively unprepared for the opponent it faced. Yet, led by its commander, Major General Stanley McChrystal, the task force underwent a remarkable transformation that allowed it to decimate al-Qaeda in Iraq and provide the Iraqi government the time and space it needed to secure itself.
The account of Task Force 714’s innovations in Iraq from 2003 to 2005 provides valuable lessons for future conflicts. History has shown that conflicts rarely play out as anticipated, and this is especially true for irregular warfare. Military organizations must adapt—often rapidly and radically—if they are to succeed.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and al-Qaeda in Iraq
When McChrystal assumed command of Task Force 714 in October 2003, he had a highly talented group of operators working for him, but the organization was far from effective. Despite the growing threat posed by al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the task force lacked the intelligence capability necessary to degrade Zarqawi’s network.
Zarqawi believed that if he could isolate the United States from its allies, deter Iraqi cooperation, target rebuilding efforts, and ultimately start a civil war, the US military would leave Iraq. To accomplish this strategy, he embraced a suicide bombing campaign that killed thousands of innocent Iraqis in addition to US and coalition forces. His bombings against the United Nations mission in Iraq in August and September of 2003 prompted UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to pull all but a skeletal staff from Iraq, effectively ending its presence there. Zarqawi’s campaign of bombs and terror targeting police stations, Iraqi politicians, and recruitment centers discouraged Iraqis from cooperating with the US-led coalition. Similarly, his high-profile attacks against contractors and humanitarian workers—including the beheading of Nicholas Berg—discouraged aid workers from supporting the reconstruction effort.
Defeating al-Qaeda in Iraq became the task force’s top priority and Zarqawi became its number one target. Nonetheless, despite the threat that he posed to the coalition effort, the task force conducted a mere ten operations against the Zarqawi network during the month of April 2004. To defeat Zarqawi and his network, the task force would have to undergo a major organizational, cultural, doctrinal, and technological transformation, the results of which were dramatic. Two years later, the task force was conducting as many operations on any given night as it had in an entire month only two years earlier. In 2007, the task force killed Zarqawi, and by 2010, it had destroyed much of al-Qaeda in Iraq’s leadership. Essential to this success was the task force’s ability to rapidly adopt sweeping organizational and cultural changes.
Organizational Changes
The first major organizational change was the creation of an effective targeting cycle. The task force was extremely efficient at conducting find, fix, and finish (kill/capture) operations, but after capturing terrorists and insurgents, the task force rarely exploited the intelligence that it had acquired. Lacking the means to exploit it, captured electronic media often sat piled in storage rooms. Likewise, interrogations provided little value without an effective supporting intelligence architecture. As a result, operational teams would often sit idle for days at a time waiting on actionable intelligence required to launch an operation.
In the summer of 2004, Colonel Bennet Sacolick, the commander of McChrystal’s subordinate task force in Iraq, presented McChrystal with a PowerPoint slide that read, “FIND-FIX-FINISH-EXPLOIT-ANALYZE,” or F3EA. This acronym formally captured the targeting cycle that Sacolick’s deputy, Colonel Austin “Scott” Miller, had outlined earlier that year. F3EA represented more than just a targeting cycle; ultimately it resulted in a cultural change, with the main effort shifting from the finish phase to the exploit and analyze phases.
Given the decentralized nature of the enemy network, McChrystal concluded that there was “no single person or place” that the United States could strike that would cause al-Qaeda to collapse. A rigid hierarchical task force would be too slow to defeat this networked threat; thus, his subordinate leaders at every level needed to know the broader enemy situation, understand how they contributed to the task force effort, and feel empowered to act without seeking guidance. Over the next two years, McChrystal transformed the task force from a set of disparate nodes into a well synchronized network united by a common strategy.
His first step was to flatten the organization and create a culture where “everyone knows everything . . . all the time.” To accomplish this, McChrystal required all of his forward-deployed teams to participate in daily operations and intelligence briefings, providing them the communications equipment packages to make it possible. He added an online portal that contained the task force’s operations and intelligence information to ensure everyone knew his current priorities. Finally, he flattened email protocols across the organization so that information could get to the right people quickly.
His second step was to expand the task force’s liaison network. McChrystal sent liaison officers to as many units and commands as he could and would soon expand the liaisons to relevant agencies in Washington. These partner organizations all played a valuable role in defeating al-Qaeda in Iraq, but there was no formal mechanism to pull them all together. The liaison officers facilitated, and at times forced, the participation of the organizations they were assigned to in the fight against al-Qaeda. Soon, the various commands and agencies started to attend the daily operations and intelligence video teleconferences. By 2007, the daily meeting was a worldwide forum of thousands of people associated with the mission, with up to seventy-two distinct locations participating daily.
At the recommendation of his deputy, Rear Admiral Bill McRaven, McChrystal formed two Joint Interagency Task Forces (JIATFs). JIATF-East, located in Afghanistan, focused on senior al-Qaeda leadership. JIATF-West, located in Iraq, focused on the foreign fighter network. The JIATF transformed the task force, as McChrystal describes it, “from a collection of niche strike forces into . . . a unified effort.” Having the various intelligence assets all housed under a single roof helped drive down the time required to “connect the dots.”
A fourth step was improving the task force’s interrogation capability. McChrystal built a professional screening facility that provided a clean, sterile environment with the appropriate oversight. He also grew the skeletal staff from roughly one dozen to more than one hundred, with interrogators, analysts, and linguists working in two- to three-person teams. Operators often assisted the interrogation teams to expedite the process.
Another important component was increasing the task force’s intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capability. In 2003, the task force had access to a single Predator and a helicopter augmented with a camera. Over time, the ISR fleet grew to dozens of assets, which included six commercial single-engine planes that US Special Operations Command had purchased, gutted, and installed sensor packages onboard. The task force also developed a signals-intelligence capability that served as an accelerant for the F3EA cycle.
Finally, the task force expanded its media exploitation capability. When McChrystal took command, he found a room filled with captured media that had yet to be exploited. His staff recognized the value it could offer but lacked the ability to exploit the material. He created the Joint Exploitation Team to triage media exploitation and purchased commercial satellite bandwidth to send the data to the National Media Exploitation Center in Washington for exploitation. Soon, “exploitation VTCs” were created so that intelligence specialists in Washington could weigh in on captured material only hours after capture.
A Cultural Change
While these organizational changes were necessary to build an effective network to combat the enemy’s network, they alone were not enough. The bigger change was cultural, and it occurred once the operators embraced and mastered the new targeting cycle and understood the main effort needed to shift from the finish phase to the exploit and analyze phases.
The operators soon became involved in every phase of the targeting cycle. They started watching ISR feeds, directing drones, reading interrogation and other intelligence reports, and mapping the enemy networks on dry-erase boards. As a result of their study, the operators became more effective on target because they could ask more pointed questions during their tactical questioning.
The operators also assisted the interrogation teams when they transferred detainees to the tactical interrogation facility. During their debriefs, they provided the interrogation teams with detailed sketches showing where detainees had been captured and where documents and media had been recovered. This information was necessary to identify the most significant members captured on target and to determine what equipment belonged to whom. It served to jump-start the interrogations. While operators were debriefed by the interrogation team, other members of the task force and its extended network immediately set out to exploit captured documents and media so that they could be analyzed quickly.
As the culture changed and the analytical and technical capabilities expanded, the targeting cycle accelerated. Soon operational teams could immediately exploit captured personnel and material on target and move to subsequent targets during the same period of darkness. The task force became so effective that many al-Qaeda fighters started to sleep with suicide vests to prevent capture.
By the end of 2005, McChrystal had fully transformed the task force. He had flattened the organization and created an environment where situational awareness was centralized but decision making was decentralized. With (1) the expanded ISR; (2) interrogation, document and media exploitation, and intelligence capabilities; and (3) cultural change of the operators, the F3EA cycle had accelerated from a process that took days and weeks into what became hours and minutes.
Assessment
The massive transformation of Task Force 714 almost certainly contributed to the coalition’s successful withdrawal and transition of power to the Iraqis in 2010. The task force’s pace of operations, which peaked at more than three hundred operations a month, severely degraded the operational capability of al-Qaeda in Iraq. From 2005 to 2007, the task force sent more than two thousand Iraqis to trial. Between January and March of 2010, the task force and its Iraqi counterparts had killed or captured much of al-Qaeda in Iraq’s top leadership. By early 2010, al-Qaeda was a shell of its former self—what had once been a broad terrorist network was now an underground group with a handful of cells.
Killing Zarqawi and degrading his terrorist network was a factor that helped reduce coalition fatalities. Coalition fatalities averaged more than nine hundred annually from 2004 to 2007, but decreased to 322 in 2008, 150 in 2009 and less than one hundred in 2010. General David Petraeus, who served as the Multi-National Force – Iraq commander during the “surge” in 2007-2008, attributes the task force as a significant factor in achieving stability in Iraq.
While the Islamic State was able to seize sizable portions of Iraq in 2014 and 2015, this does not undercut the significant contribution that the task force made to reducing violence and improving stability in Iraq. It is outside the scope of this article to address the rise of the Islamic State, but is safe to say that its rise was due to a number of factors.
Lessons Learned
Amid the many lessons that should be taken from the experience of Task Force 714 in Iraq, three in particular stand out. First, in irregular warfare, organizational change is often required. Few irregular warfare operations are similar; thus, a cookie-cutter approach is rarely effective. Special operations forces are trained, manned, and equipped for a range of operations, but they are rarely employed as organic assets as a conventional brigade would be. To be effective on the ground, organizations, their commanders, and their people must be flexible enough to adapt to achieve their mission. The recently published Routledge Handbook of U.S. Counterterrorism and Irregular Warfare Operations demonstrates that flexibility, creative thinking, and organization innovation also contributed to irregular warfare success in El Salvador, Colombia, and the Philippines, and for the “horse soldiers” in Afghanistan.
Second, change need not be hard. The military is sometimes accused of being a rigid organization that is resistant to change. But as this article demonstrates, this is not necessarily always the case. Actions speak louder than words: change is rarely achieved by trying to argue a new way is better; rather, it is best achieved by demonstrating it. Operators expedited the transfer of detainees to the tactical interrogation facility only after the interrogation teams started to provide decent intelligence. Interagency partners contributed to the JIATFs and participated in the daily operations and intelligence briefings because they saw value in them. As McChrystal’s chief of staff was fond of saying, “You are either a martyr or a zealot.” He was communicating to everyone in the command that you had to embrace change. If not, you were a martyr and would soon be looking for work elsewhere. There was no middle ground when it came to accepting change.
Third, irregular warfare missions should be assigned to units who own the mission from start to finish. The traditional deployment cycle of units in Afghanistan and Iraq may have impeded change. Conventional units were focused on what they could achieve during their one-year deployments, and as such they had a relatively short time horizon. Thus, they were unlikely to seek changes that would take more than one year to implement. By contrast, many members of McChrystal’s task force had shorter deployments (often three to six months), but when they returned home from each deployment, they knew they would be returning to Iraq three to six months later. This deployment cycle created a mindset within the command that the deployments would not end until the war was over. This created a longer time horizon that encouraged the command not only to seek changes that were quick to implement, but also to invest in changes that would take more time.
Success in irregular warfare—as demonstrated in El Salvador, Colombia, the Philippines, and by the task force in Iraq—is enhanced when a unit is assigned a mission and owns it until complete. Rotating missions between commands every year or sooner is not a recipe for success. This should not come as a surprise given the fact that organizational change results from learning, and effective learning—especially in the types of complex environments in which irregular warfare occurs—may take years.
For a more detailed discussion of the changes that the task force underwent, read the chapter, “Dismantling al-Qaida in Iraq,” from the Routledge Handbook of U.S. Counterterrorism and Irregular Warfare Operations here.
Retired Colonel Liam Collins is a fellow with New America and a permanent member with the Council on Foreign Relations. He was the founding director of the Modern War Institute at West Point and former director of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. He holds a PhD from Princeton University and is coeditor of the Routledge Handbook of U.S. Counterterrorism and Irregular Warfare Operations.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Sgt. Duke Tran, US Army
mwi.usma.edu · by Liam Collins · September 28, 2021
24. Xi Takes a Page From Mao’s Red Playbook
Excerpts:
Like Mao’s consolidation of power, in the coming year Xi will also further intertwine foreign and domestic crises, even at the risk of potentially serious flair ups with Washington over Taiwan. The first true test will come this month, when the U.S is expected to allow the Taiwanese government to change the name of its representative office in Washington to include the word “Taiwan.” Just how Xi intends to navigate a wholesale restructuring of China’s economy and increasing tensions over Taiwan remains unclear — even to him, it seems.
What is clear, however, is that to get wherever they are going, which presumably does not include a war, Xi and President Biden are going to need to build some personal in-roads. It is a challenge made all the more difficult for Biden given Xi’s refusal to travel outside of China for more than 600 days and counting. For now, the best Washington can do it buckle up, and hope that Xi’s sequel is a whole lot better than Mao’s original.
Xi Takes a Page From Mao’s Red Playbook
The Daily Beast · September 27, 2021
opinion
Feng Li/Getty
In the 1985 blockbuster Back to the Future, California teen Marty McFly journeyed back in time to save his present. The film’s universal themes are known around the world, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping appears to have internalized them as he approaches the most fraught moment of his political career. What Xi lacks in a time-traveling DeLorean, however, he more than makes up for with the theory of “continuous revolution,” as first championed by Mao Zedong.
Xi’s re-election campaign, which could see him anointed leader for life, unofficially began more than two years ago when he eliminated term-limits from China’s constitution. But it was not until this July’s Chinese Communist Party centennial celebration, and a fiery speech mere steps from Mao’s tomb in Tiananmen Square, that Xi truly kicked his campaign into high gear.
China watchers have long mused about the many similarities between Mao and Xi. Both came of age during a time of great socio-economic upheaval, and both led China through periods of intense international pressure. The difference, though, between Mao’s past and Xi’s present is that China itself has changed. The country and its people are more connected to the outside world than at any point in Mao’s era, and the party itself is more accountable to Chinese public opinion. Which raises the question: If the geopolitical game has changed, does Mao’s playbook still apply?
Mao’s revolutionary zeal and deep affinity for asymmetric warfare were borne out of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Front and center in China’s victory was Mao’s concept of a “united front,” which entailed unifying all of Chinese society, nationalists and communists alike, to defeat the country’s then-main adversary, Japan. After consolidating power and expelling the nationalists, Mao recycled the term “united front” throughout his reign, first when partnering with the Soviet Union against imperialist forces and later against the Soviet Union itself after the 1960 Sino-Soviet split. Central to Mao’s foreign policy, beyond his role as China’s sole decision-maker, was his strong emphasis on security and sovereignty, as well as his attempted elevation of China’s international prestige.
But like any good revolutionary seeking job security, Mao realized early in his tenure that the key to sustaining his political longevity was not simply eliminating rivals. Rather, it was about mobilizing the masses, namely through the adoption of a revolutionary foreign policy centered around crisis creation. In casting the People’s Republic of China’s birth as the first step in a long revolutionary march—one linked to an ill-defined destination —Mao successfully managed to enhance his own authority and legitimacy.
Fast-forward to the last two months in China, which were marked by a policy blitzkrieg geared toward deepening the party’s ideological dominion over the country. In a series of crackdowns aimed at reining in private business and redirecting entrepreneurial energies in service of the party’s priorities, Xi, tapping into memories of Mao’s cultural revolution, reminded Chinese entrepreneurs that they are dispensable tools of the party.
In a move reminiscent of the 1960s and early 1970s, China’s education curricula will now be centered around permeating party ideology deeper into the minds of the masses. This time, it will be Xi Thought reinforced in children’s textbooks and blasted from loudspeakers in the countryside. Not even video games are safe, with the government now restricting daily play to one hour. The net effect of these moves is that entrepreneurs will be more willing to comply with the party’s demands and intellectuals more inclined to stay silent.
Xi has announced these and other policies under the banner of his latest rallying slogan, “common prosperity,” which aims to improve standards of living and to address the widening rich-poor gap, both of which threaten Xi and the party’s long-term legitimacy. Even less clear is how these draconian, Maoist measures fit into Xi’s even grander ambition of bringing about China’s “great rejuvenation,” a term which Xi and his acolytes have never defined. But as Mao also dreamt, it ensures that China’s revolution can continue indefinitely, and all in the name of Xi’s political survival.
Which explains the events leading up to President Biden’s most recent phone call with Xi, one ripped directly from Mao’s script. The White House sought to frame the call as an opportunity to conduct a “broad, strategic discussion” following months of unproductive, lower-level engagements. Of course, the inability of lower-level Chinese and American officials to make any meaningful headway was largely by Xi’s design, one that places him, not his lieutenants, at the center of China’s relationship with its external rival, the United States.
The call also occurred only days after the end of the annual conclave of party heavyweights in Beidaihe, one geared toward discussing policy and high-level appointments. This year, however, there are reports that Xi may have not even bothered to attend, a sign that he has so thoroughly consolidated power that he makes personnel and policy decisions on his own without any input from party bigwigs. Somewhere, Mao must be smiling.
Xi’s emphasis on leader-to-leader exchanges is thus a personification of his Maoist tendencies, and one certain to persist until his re-election in 2022. What’s more, Xi appears unlikely to outsource control over any major bilateral decisions that could impact, positively or negatively, his own political standing. This includes meaningful progress on climate change negotiations, which Xi has smartly dangled before a White House eager to deliver on its domestic priorities. Whereas China’s historic pragmatism and reliance on exports may have previously constrained Xi’s revisionist behavior, he—like Mao—increasingly sees China’s fate as less dependent on outside influence. It is a political calculus that sits at the center of China’s 14th Five Year Plan, one focused on building up China’s domestic economy.
Like Mao’s consolidation of power, in the coming year Xi will also further intertwine foreign and domestic crises, even at the risk of potentially serious flair ups with Washington over Taiwan. The first true test will come this month, when the U.S is expected to allow the Taiwanese government to change the name of its representative office in Washington to include the word “Taiwan.” Just how Xi intends to navigate a wholesale restructuring of China’s economy and increasing tensions over Taiwan remains unclear — even to him, it seems.
What is clear, however, is that to get wherever they are going, which presumably does not include a war, Xi and President Biden are going to need to build some personal in-roads. It is a challenge made all the more difficult for Biden given Xi’s refusal to travel outside of China for more than 600 days and counting. For now, the best Washington can do it buckle up, and hope that Xi’s sequel is a whole lot better than Mao’s original.
The Daily Beast · September 27, 2021

25. Biden’s Predetermined Withdrawal Leaves Both Afghanistan and Western Coalitions in Tatters

Conclusion:

President Biden’s Foreign Affairs article was titled “Why America Must Lead Again.” If Biden’s idea of American leadership is stranding our citizens and allies in a far-off land, free to be butchered by a decades-old enemy hungry for revenge, in a region beset by a widening array of genuine national security emergencies, a massive reassessment of America’s reliability will likely be the result. The famed British Foreign Office mandarin and opponent of his country’s pre-war appeasement policy towards Germany, Sir Robert Vansittart, could have been referring to 2019 when he observed of the 1930s that: “Left or Right, everybody was for the quiet life.”[20] President Biden may offer lofty assurances, such as he did at the United Nations General Assembly on 21 September 2021, that “as we close this era of endless war we are opening an era of endless diplomacy.”[21] But more likely the observation supposedly made by Leon Trotsky will prove correct in the context of a forthcoming re-emergence of a renewed terrorism threat. “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”

Biden’s Predetermined Withdrawal Leaves Both Afghanistan and Western Coalitions in Tatters | Small Wars Journal

Biden’s Predetermined Withdrawal Leaves Both Afghanistan and Western Coalitions in Tatters
Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware
If September 2021 feels like September 1938 it is because the United States, to paraphrase Winston Churchill,[1] had a choice between continued war or dishonor in Afghanistan. President Biden, like Neville Chamberlain 83 years earlier, chose dishonor and like Great Britain in 1939 will likely have war.
Of course, war in the first quarter of the 21st century looks nothing like it did near the mid-point of the 20thcentury. The mighty armies, navies, and air forces of established states nowadays rarely clash on the battlefield in the epic contests of arms, men, and materiel of the past. Instead, they are bled to death by a thousand cuts inflicted by shadowy amalgamations of terrorists and insurgents in protracted combat where guile and resolve counts more than firepower and kinetics.
This is not the American way of war.[2] And, so, after twenty years of effort and exertion, the U.S. departed Afghanistan as it did from Vietnam nearly fifty years earlier. Just as the U.S. swore in 1975 never to become mired in another counterinsurgency,[3] similar pledges echo through the West Wing, the E-Ring, and Congress today regarding both counterinsurgency as well as counterterrorism. Much as the U.S. could not escape these unconventional modes of warfare that predominated throughout the latter decades of the 20th century, we will not escape their predominance in the present one. And, even more challenging, the U.S. will increasingly discover that its rival states will themselves accelerate their continued utilization of the tactics of terrorism, insurgency, and subversion against the U.S. as a proven game-winning strategy—in Afghanistan and beyond.
The Past as Prologue—And Its Diasatrous Consequences
In a wide-ranging article in the March/April 2020 issue of leading international relations magazine Foreign Affairs, then-candidate Joe Biden declared, “It is past time to end the forever wars, which have cost the United States untold blood and treasure.”[4] Although his article praised smaller-scale counterterrorism missions, called-for in Afghanistan by many national security experts,[5] it took less than eight months for Biden to withdraw the American presence entirely. Just as President George W. Bush and his Vice President Dick Cheney were determined to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein from the time they took office,[6] Biden’s decision to leave Afghanistan was also pre-ordained. A decade earlier, Biden had opposed the Obama surge and argued for “counterterrorism plus,” a smaller, elite presence, based on strong intelligence and working closely behind Afghan allies—that he now found too extensive.[7] Arguments that the Trump administration dealt Biden a bad hand may ring true, but they fail to tell the full story: withdrawal is what Biden always intended.[8] But in leaving Afghanistan the way he did, Biden made a grave political blunder: ignoring the dire security assessments of his top military commanders and intelligence chiefs in favor of an already determined political imperative.
The near-term result is a cacophony of jihadist militants jockeying to fill the vacuum left by the U.S.; some in power, others seeking their own strategic gains from the Taliban’s military victory. The Taliban and the Haqqani Network along with their longstanding al-Qaeda allies are most immediately positioned to gain: the former will govern in its image, while likely restoring the latter’s pre-9/11 safe haven. Each will almost certainly to be challenged by upstart groups like the Islamic State Khorasan Province, which portrays itself as more violent and more ideologically pure than the Taliban, and therefore better placed to advance the jihadist endgame.[9] And in the coming months and years, we may learn of new splinters emerging to advance the jihadist worldview both locally and, as the rapid rise of the Islamic State threat showed, potentially globally. “Competition among these jihadist groups is a critical feature of politics in the region,” Asfandyar Mir writes in the New York Times. “It means more attacks, more instability and, crucially, an even more complicated challenge for the United States and U.S. allies, if they hope to prevent Afghanistan from once again becoming a haven for armed groups.”[10]
Despite its assurances of new-found moderation, the Taliban revealed its true ideological loyalties with its appointment of Sirajuddin Haqqani—an al-Qaeda intimate and a U.S.-designated terrorist—as its minister of interior. Described by leading national security scholar Seth Jones as “a wily and dangerous enemy with American blood on his hands,”[11] Haqqani’s appointment is indicative of the Taliban’s intentions to place militant jihadist ideology at the forefront of its governance platform. Further evidence is provided by the sweeping prison releases that attended the Taliban’s reconquest of Afghanistan and thereby bolster the array of terrorist groups blossoming there.[12] In this respect, the Taliban’s opponents benefitted as well. Abdul Rehman, the ISIS-K suicide bomber who killed 13 American service personnel and nearly 200 Afghan civilians at Kabul’s airport on 26 August 2021, for instance, had been freed from the U.S. military prison at Bagram Airport eleven days earlier.[13]
Even the prospect of a Taliban-ISIS-K modus vivendi should not be completely discounted. The Taliban’s lightning success, reminiscent in some ways of the Islamic State’s blitzkrieg advance across Iraq in 2013 in the wake of U.S. withdrawal, may encourage Islamic State elements to tactically moderate. Where ISIS’s caliphate in Syria and Iraq failed, the Taliban’s long-game guerrilla strategy in Afghanistan has provided a new victory against the West. In this respect, too, the ISIS-K bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport in August provided the Taliban with a dual strategic boon—it both forced the U.S. to hurry its exit, and still allowed the Taliban to paint themselves as the relative moderates compared with the excesses of the Islamic State. The perceived palatability of hitherto extremist terrorist movements like both al-Qaeda and the Taliban is the subject of an especially incisive analyst by terrorism scholar Lorenzo Vidino in Foreign Policy.[14]
In the near-term, then, the U.S. has suffered a devastating reversal in its counterterrorism mission. According to former acting CIA director Michael Morrell, “The reconstruction of al-Qaeda’s homeland attack capability will happen quickly, in less than a year, if the U.S. does not collect the intelligence and take the military action to prevent it.”[15] Collecting that intelligence, meanwhile, will become much more challenging without human capacity on the ground.
But, perhaps equally concerningly, the withdrawal has also inflicted strategic wounds, most conspicuously to the U.S.’s relationship with its allies. One of the undisputed, towering accomplishments of the war on terror were the close bonds forged between the U.S. and its closest friends throughout the world. The seamless integration of counterterrorism intelligence by the Five Eyes community (the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) and similarly close coordination with the European Union along with countries in Africa, the Middle East, and South and South East Asia—with America indisputably in the lead—has been damaged. It is likely neither permanent nor severe. But the U.S.’s unilateral decision to withdraw has undeniably infuriated many of these countries,[16] who had accepted that, while the war in Afghanistan was still far from any kind of decisive conclusion, there were long-term advantages in the relative stability achieved there over the past two decades. Nations who had willingly followed the U.S. into this war feel aggrieved and ignored—and, even worse, that Trump’s “America First” approach has been perpetuated rather than reversed despite Biden’s repeated promises.
The long-term damage done to global counterterrorism cooperation will perhaps also set back global security—not least because U.S. collaboration with our allies transcends this issue and includes great power competition and such critical dimensions as cyber and nuclear defense. One British Conservative Party Member of Parliament provided a particularly stark warning about the future of the sacred U.S.-U.K. relationship: “The lesson for the U.K. is that interdependence must not become overreliance. We are better partners to others if we have options and can help shape decisions.”[17] Those projecting that U.S. diplomacy will ultimately win the day and resurrect those international bonds should take warning from the administration’s bizarre decision to blindside France over the signing of the new AUKUS nuclear deal with Australia and the United Kingdom.
For all the attention focused on Afghanistan, there are few indications where the Biden administration will focus next in the global counterterrorism fight. In his 31 August speech addressing the withdrawal, President Biden declared that “We will maintain the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan, and other countries, we just don’t need to fight a ground war to do it.”[18] Indeed, when he met with Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi at the White House in July, Biden told him that U.S. troops would depart that country by the end of the year.[19] This inevitably raises the prospect of whether the Afghan model will now be applied in addition to Iraq to other counterterrorism hotspots as well. Will the U.S. now seek withdrawal from Syria, despite the enduring presence of restless Islamic State cells, and our promises to our Kurdish allies? And what of the French mission in Sahel, one of the world’s growing hotspots of Salafi-jihadist terrorism? Will Paris see long-term counterterrorism wars as a national interest, given the U.S.’s willingness to turn away?
And yet, the most volatile possible side effect of U.S. withdrawal concerns relations between Pakistan and India, two nuclear states. Pakistan has long deployed proxy jihadist forces to commit major attacks within its southeastern neighbor’s borders. Given that there are now more terrorist entities than ever before in the AfPak region, and that terrorists typically thrive in chaos, we should not be surprised should groups like al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) seek to further undermine the security of that entire region. And unlike in the past, the U.S. has now lost a large degree of its credibility as a moderator, given its very public desire to turn away from the region.
President Biden’s Foreign Affairs article was titled “Why America Must Lead Again.” If Biden’s idea of American leadership is stranding our citizens and allies in a far-off land, free to be butchered by a decades-old enemy hungry for revenge, in a region beset by a widening array of genuine national security emergencies, a massive reassessment of America’s reliability will likely be the result. The famed British Foreign Office mandarin and opponent of his country’s pre-war appeasement policy towards Germany, Sir Robert Vansittart, could have been referring to 2019 when he observed of the 1930s that: “Left or Right, everybody was for the quiet life.”[20] President Biden may offer lofty assurances, such as he did at the United Nations General Assembly on 21 September 2021, that “as we close this era of endless war we are opening an era of endless diplomacy.”[21] But more likely the observation supposedly made by Leon Trotsky will prove correct in the context of a forthcoming re-emergence of a renewed terrorism threat. “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
Endnotes
[1] On Neville Chamberlin’s appeasement of Hitler in Munich, Churchill said, “You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war.” In “Winston Churchill Quotes.”Military History Matters. 20 November 2010, https://www.military-history.org/feature/winston-churchill-quotes.htm.
[2] See Seth G. Jones, Three Dangerous Men: Russia, China, Iran and the Rise of Irregular Warfare. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2021.
[3] Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., The Army and Vietnam. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1988.
[4] Joseph R. Biden, Jr., “Why America Must Lead Again: Rescuing U.S. Foreign Policy After Trump.” Foreign Affairs. March/April 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-01-23/why-america-must-lead-again.
[5] “Is Washington Right to Leave Afghanistan? Foreign Affairs Asks the Experts.” Foreign Affairs. 22 June 2021, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ask-the-experts/2021-06-22/washington-right-leave-afghanistan.
[6] Robert Draper, To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq. New York: Penguin Books, 2021.
[7] Bob Woodward, Obama’s Wars. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2011.
[8] Scott Dworkin, “Stop Blaming Biden for Afghanistan. He's Cleaning Up Trump's Mess | Opinion.” Newsweek. 23 August 2021, https://www.newsweek.com/stop-blaming-biden-afghanistan-hes-cleaning-trumps-mess-opinion-1622049.
[9] Asfandyar Mir, “Biden Didn’t See the ISIS-K Threat in Afghanistan Until Too Late.” New York Times. 31 August 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/31/opinion/biden-isis-k.html.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Seth G. Jones, “Meet the New Taliban, Same as the Old.” Wall Street Journal. 7 September 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/al-qaeda-taliban-haqqani-sirajuddin-network-terrorist-jihadist-islamist-afghanistan-11631047441.

[12] Sophia Ankel, “Video shows thousands of prisoners, reportedly including Islamic State and al Qaeda fighters, freed from Kabul jail by the Taliban.” Insider. 15 August 2021, https://www.businessinsider.com/watch-afghan-prisoners-isis-al-qaeda-fighters-freed-by-taliban-2021-8.
[13] Praveen Swami, “Kabul Airport suicide attacker was freed by Taliban after four years in CIA custody for New Delhi terror plot.” Firstpost. 19 September 2021, https://www.firstpost.com/india/quads-shift-in-mindset-from-national-indigenisation-to-strategic-cooperation-signals-gain-for-india-10003771.html.
[14] Lorenzo Vidino, “The Myth of Moderate Jihadis.” Foreign Policy. 22 September 2021, https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/22/the-myth-of-moderate-jihadists/.
[15] Paul Cruickshank, Don Rassler, and Kristina Hummel, “Twenty Years After 9/11: Reflections from Michael Morell, Former Acting Director of the CIA.” CTC Sentinel. Vol. 14, No. 7. September 2021, https://ctc.usma.edu/twenty-years-after-9-11-reflections-from-michael-morell-former-acting-director-of-the-cia/.
[16] Liz Sly, “Afghanistan’s collapse leaves allies questioning U.S. resolve on other fronts.” Washington Post. 15 August 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/afghanistan-chaos-blame-us/2021/08/14/0d4e5ab2-fd3e-11eb-911c-524bc8b68f17_story.html.
[17] Mark Landler, “Biden Rattles U.K. With His Afghanistan Policy.” New York Times. 18 August 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/18/world/europe/britain-afghanistan-johnson-biden.html.
[18] “President Biden delivers remarks on ending the war in Afghanistan — 8/31/2021.” YouTube. 31 August 2021, https://youtu.be/abVP2BZtHd0.
[19] Michael Collins and Maureen Groppe, “US to end combat mission in Iraq by end of year, Biden announces in meeting with Iraqi prime minister.” USA Today. 27 July 2021, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/07/26/biden-meet-iraqi-prime-minister-amid-troop-redeployment-talks/8075835002/.
[20] Cited in William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill Alone, 1932–1940 – Volume 2. New York: Bantam Books,1989, p. 83.
[21]. Anne Gearan, “At U.N., Biden calls for unity in addressing pandemic and climate change.” Washington Post. 21 September 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-at-un-calls-for-unity-in-addressing-the-pandemic-and-climate-change/2021/09/21/6c8c2368-1ac3-11ec-bcb8-0cb135811007_story.html.
Bruce Hoffman
Bruce Hoffman is Shelby Cullom and Kathryn W. Davis senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has been studying terrorism and insurgency for four decades. He is a tenured professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, where he is the director of the Center for Jewish Civilization. Hoffman is the author of Inside Terrorism (3rd edition, 2017) and the award winning book, Anonymous Soldiers (2015).

Jacob Ware
Jacob Ware is the research associate for counterterrorism at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also an adjunct professor in Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service. Jacob holds an MA in Security Studies from Georgetown, and an MA (Hons) in International Relations and Modern History from the University of St. Andrews.



26. Succeeding Xi Jinping

Excerpts:
There are no examples of blatant military coups in Leninist regimes such as China and the Soviet Union, but analysts disagree on why that has been the case. Some argue that tight control of the military and security bureaucracy by these leaders accounts for this rarity. In my view, the insecurity stemming from leaders’ limited ability to control the military motivates them to adopt a policy that stresses effective civilian governance. Effective governance helps to prevent major political and social crises that may incentivize the military’s intervention in domestic politics, which they may find difficult to control and manage. Meanwhile, they promote what Samuel Huntington calls “objective control” by confining the military to perfecting its functional and technical expertise and fulfilling its external missions.
Some also suggest that Xi’s sudden death or incapacitation may trigger a succession crisis similar to the one following Mao’s death in 1976. But the limits on Xi’s power concentration, including his inability to monopolize the appointment of Politburo Standing Committee members and his limited ability to control the military and civilian bureaucracy, show that Xi is not comparable to Mao in terms of revolutionary and military credentials, political capital and influence, charisma, or entrenched personal networks in the party and the army. Xi’s sudden death or incapacitation would be a big deal, but it should not be exaggerated. The successor to Xi should be produced based on the pecking order of the incumbent Politburo Standing Committee members, and the candidate should nominally be approved by the party Central Committee through voting. The process may involve leadership politics but it would not be as tumultuous and militarized as in 1976.
Xi will likely govern effectively on issues related to economic development and political and social stability, and designate a successor in due course. The People’s Liberation Army will likely play a minimal role in the succession. Xi is one of the most powerful Chinese leaders in decades, and his ability to centralize power is remarkable. However, warnings that China faces a looming succession crisis are overstated.
Succeeding Xi Jinping - War on the Rocks
warontherocks.com · by Nan Li · September 28, 2021
Does Xi Jinping’s China face a looming succession crisis? Some analysts argue that it does because Xi’s elimination of the term limit on his leadership position and the concentration of power therein would precipitate such a crisis. Others are more skeptical, pointing out that the political significance of Xi’s moves is exaggerated.
The ultimate benchmark of any succession crisis is whether the military gets involved. Consequently, examining the possible role of the People’s Liberation Army in China’s leadership succession may help us to understand whether a crisis is looming.
Since the Communist Party came to power in 1949, two critical instances stand out in China when the military became heavily involved in domestic politics, including in leadership successions. The People’s Liberation Army played a crucial role in the Cultural Revolution (1966 to 1976) under Mao Zedong. It also massively intervened to quell the popular rebellion in 1989 under Deng Xiaoping.
Certain institutional conditions incentivized the involvement of the military in domestic politics in those instances. The first was the “symbiotic” relations between the Communist Party and the army. Top leaders such as Mao and Deng possessed extensive and entrenched personal networks or factions within the People’s Liberation Army, and they counted on them for support in political crises. The second condition was the civilian governance failures that caused severe political divisions among the ruling civilian elite. The ensuing political crises drove the top leaders to mobilize the military to intervene.
China is not now facing a succession crisis because the military is unlikely to intervene in deciding who replaces Xi whenever he leaves office. More effective civilian governance in China since Deng has disincentivized the military from intervening in elite politics. Moreover, senior party leaders no longer enjoy the deep personal networks within the People’s Liberation Army that would allow them to use the army for their own domestic political purposes. Xi’s successor will likely come from the ranks of the Politburo Standing Committee members, and will be approved by the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee through voting. Simply put, it will be a big deal when Xi leaves office, but it won’t be a crisis.
From Symbiosis to Institutionalization
China does not currently face a succession crisis because the country’s top leaders do not possess their own extensive and entrenched personal networks or factions within the People’s Liberation Army, a result of the change of Chinese civil-military relations from “symbiosis” to institutionalization. For symbiotic political-military factions to solidify, top leaders must spend a substantial part of their careers in the military so that personal networks can form and grow. Unlike Mao and Deng, who founded the People’s Liberation Army and spent a major part of their careers therein, post-Deng top leaders such as Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao never served in the army, while Xi served for only three years, from 1979 to 1982. Similarly, unlike the eras of Mao and Deng when China was run by “dual-role” elites or revolutionary veterans who were experienced in both civilian governance and military operations, post-Deng China is managed by technocrats who specialize either in civilian governance or in the military profession, with minimal circulation of elites across civil-military institutional boundaries. Military officers do not have experience of working in civilian institutions, and few civilian officials have had military service experience.
This post-Deng development toward civil-military bifurcation has clearly fostered an environment that prevents the formation of symbiotic political-military factions. It may explain why the informal networks that post-Deng leaders have assembled to support themselves, such as Jiang’s Shanghai network, Hu Jintao’s Communist Youth League network, and Xi’s Zhejiang network, are made up of civilian officials.
Top leaders in the post-Deng era have been highly insecure about their lack of personal networks within the People’s Liberation Army. It is accepted as conventional wisdom that they attempt to buy off the military with higher ranks and more money to cultivate such networks, which can then be used in power struggles against their political opponents. However, this conventional wisdom is flawed for two reasons.
First, all leaders after Deng have regularly promoted senior officers in the People’s Liberation Army and have increased the defense budget to fulfill their responsibility as chair of the Central Military Commission. However, candidates for promotion are mostly recommended by military professionals in the commission, not picked by top leaders. Top leaders would interview the most senior candidates, but their knowledge of these officers is limited since they have not worked together before. Moreover, evidence to show that military officers are mobilized for intra-leadership power struggles is sketchy in the post-Deng era, but military modernization has nonetheless accelerated during this period. Officer promotion and budget increases can thus be explained better by functional and professional reasons than by personal and factional ones.
Second, top leaders are careful not to depend on the military for political support and survival. Such dependence would suggest a failure of civilian governance and incompetence on the part of these leaders to resolve major political and social crises. This kind of vulnerability could be exploited by the military for political advantage. Furthermore, any expansion of the military’s political role also makes it difficult to reestablish effective civilian control of the military. In the end, a new threat may emerge against these leaders: a military that is itself politically ambitious. In this regard, leaders have inevitably learned the lessons from the Lin Biao incident under Mao and the Yang brothers incident under Deng.
Chinese leaders in the post-Deng era thus have adopted a two-pronged policy toward the military. First, rather than employing the military to engage in power struggles, they confine the People’s Liberation Army to perfecting its functional and technical expertise and fulfilling its external missions. And second, they adopt a policy that stresses effective civilian governance to prevent and preempt the major political and social upheavals that may incentivize the intervention of the military in politics.
Xi and Civilian Governance
China also does not face a succession crisis because civilian governance in the post-Deng era has become more effective, which has disincentivized the military from intervening in elite politics. Post-Deng top leaders have all endorsed Deng’s basic line (基本路线) of “upholding economic development as the central task of the party,” which was codified in the Party Constitution in 1992. Civilian governance that promotes economic development along with political and social stability has thus become the main priority of the post-Deng top leaders. Effective civilian governance is critical to the party’s survival and legitimacy to rule. Equally importantly, it prevents major political and social crises that may trigger the military’s intervention in domestic politics, which these leaders may find difficult to control and manage. Xi thus is no exception from his post-Deng predecessors in promoting effective civilian governance.
Besides fighting official corruption — which he believes would “doom the party and state” (亡党亡国) — Xi has attempted to restructure the economy for high-quality growth, promote poverty reduction to narrow down the wealth gap, and endorse measures to reduce environmental pollution. He has also tightened control to achieve political and social stability, including promoting ideological and political education, strengthening media and internet control and censorship, and intensifying social surveillance by leveraging new technologies.
Recently, Xi has strengthened regulations on technology monopolies such as Alibaba, and has imposed restrictions on online video gaming and private tutoring. The motivations driving these policies are complex and multifaceted, including helping small and medium-sized companies and narrowing down the wealth gap, rechanneling investment capital to the “real economy” (实体经济) such as manufacturing or “hard” technologies, lowering the cost of raising kids to encourage parents to have more children, and more effective social control. These policies are generally in line with the enhancement of civilian governance by promoting economic development along with political and social stability.
Xi stands out from his post-Deng predecessors, however, in that he has also centralized power in meaningful ways. He abolished the two-term limit for the state president position, which was first codified in the 1982 State Constitution. He has also strengthened the authority of the Chinese Communist Party general secretary at the expense of collective leadership and intra-party democracy. The “succession crisis” argument particularly highlights the political uncertainty brought up by Xi’s “unrivaled power within the CCP … as untouchable as Stalin or Mao” as the primary source of a “looming crisis.”
Xi’s elimination of the term limit increases the probability of failed civilian governance. Unlimited tenure may incentivize the emergence of an unaccountable and arbitrary dictator who will not tolerate any “checks and balances,” not even in the minimal terms of intra-leadership debates and criticisms intended to correct policy mistakes and avert policy failures. A case in point is Mao, who ruled China from 1949 to 1976 and was generally regarded as a dictator. His disastrous policies of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution are clear examples of the abject failure of civilian governance.
The political implications of removing the term limit and centralizing power, however, may be overstated. The position of state president is largely ceremonial. By comparison, the top positions that carry real power are the party general secretary and the Central Military Commission chair. The norm of a limit of two five-year terms for holding these two positions simultaneously has been informal and never institutionalized — following this norm is thus an exception. Deng, for instance, served as the commission chair from 1982 to 1989, while Hu Yaobang served as the party general secretary from 1982 to 1987 and Zhao Ziyang from 1987 to 1989. Similarly, Jiang served as the party general secretary for two and a half terms, from 1989 to 2002, and commission chair for the length of three terms, from 1989 to 2004. In comparison, Hu Jintao is an exception by serving as the party general secretary for exactly the two five-year terms, from 2002 to 2012, but he served as the commission chair for only about one and a half terms, from 2004 to 2012.
Also, Xi’s presumed unlimited tenure does not have to cause the failure of civilian governance. There are major examples where top leaders served for unlimited tenure but delivered impressive governance success. Lee Kuan Yew, serving as Singapore’s prime minister from 1965 to 1990, transformed Singapore from a colonial backwater trading post to an economic powerhouse. In this instance, unlimited tenure becomes an asset because it extends the office of a competent top leader and ensures the continuity of sound policies. Leonid Brezhnev, often seen as not as competent as Lee but not as incompetent as Mao, served as the top leader of the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982. With a mediocre governance record, Brezhnev was largely responsible for presiding over a country and an economy that remained stagnant.
Moreover, Xi’s concentration of power is not absolute. Such a concentration is specifically driven by Xi’s attempt to manage the downsides of collective leadership, such as rampant corruption sustained by powerful oligarchies within the party leadership. More than half of the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee of the 19th Party Congress cannot be counted as Xi’s protégés. Li Keqiang and Wang Yang are identified with Hu Jintao’s Communist Youth League network and Han Zheng and Wang Huning with Jiang’s Shanghai network. Age and term limits have also been enforced in appointing senior civilian officials and military officers to critically important positions. Xi has seemingly created a system like the Soviet Union where the Leninist party-state, including party-army relations, is quite institutionalized, but substantial discretion is allowed for the top leadership succession.
The limits of Xi’s power are also reflected in personnel appointments and the counter-corruption drive. Zhang Yang and Fang Fenghui were appointed to direct the People’s Liberation Army General Political Department and head the People’s Liberation Army General Staff respectively in 2012 when Xi became the top leader, but both were investigated for corruption by the end of 2017. The fact that corrupt officers held the most important positions of the PLA for five years under Xi shows that Xi did not have a network of officers who he could trust when he became the top leader. An alleged member of Xi’s Zhejiang network was also investigated for corruption. Both examples show the limit of Xi’s control over the military and civilian bureaucracy.
Finally, Xi — unlike Mao — has not behaved like an impulsive and irrational leader. Xi’s policies are consistent with Deng’s “basic line” of upholding economic development as the central task of the party, which was reiterated in the report of the 19th Party Congress. Xi even borrowed the term of “common prosperity” from Deng. Xi promotes common prosperity in order to gradually transform China into an “olive-shaped” society to prevent a class revolution. His evolving policy to contain COVID-19 also reflects quick learning and adaptation. After bungling the response for about three weeks in January 2020, Xi followed the assessment of public health professionals and shifted to a more effective containment policy. This policy has resulted in a relatively successful curb of the virus’ spread in China. Similarly, there were extensive consultations and discussions about major party and state documents before they were issued, including the 19th Party Congress Report and the 14th Five-Year Plan. Drafting of the latter reportedly involved input from over 70,000 functional and technical experts.
A Likely Scenario of Succession
For the remainder of his time in office, Xi might actually deliver good civilian governance on issues related to economic development and political and social stability (notwithstanding his policies toward Uighurs). In this scenario, Xi may extend his tenure for a third term and remain as the top leader until the 21st Party Congress in 2027. By then, he would have completed the complex processes of the party, government, military, economic, and social reforms that he has initiated. Moreover, Xi’s governance would have presumably achieved moderate (albeit better-quality) economic growth, a low level of official corruption, successful poverty reduction, a much larger middle-income population, a better environment, and overall political and social stability. Also, Xi would have effectively managed Sino-American relations by de-escalating the trade dispute and preventing bilateral security competition from escalating into a military conflict.
In such a scenario, civilian governance success would lower the probability of the army’s involvement in elite politics. By the 20th Party Congress in 2022, taking into consideration the party constitution’s clause against lifelong tenure for top leaders, Xi would have designated a successor. This successor may become a Central Military Commission vice-chair in 2024 to gain experience in managing military affairs, and then succeed Xi at the 21st Party Congress in 2027. As the heir-apparent may lack sufficient military credentials and personal networks in the military to take full charge of it, Xi may possibly remain as the commission chair for some extra time beyond 2027. Xi’s extended tenure in this position would allow time for the successor to gain governing experience.
Another scenario sets a context in which a limited policy failure, such as a severe economic recession caused by mismanagement, may trigger an intra-leadership debate. The dissenting voices within the ruling civilian elite may attribute such a policy failure to Xi’s centralization of authority. Xi’s alleged mistakes may include eliminating the term limit, abandoning the principles of collective leadership and intra-party democracy, and creating a personality cult around himself, all of which could have discouraged and prevented debates and criticisms intended to correct policy mistakes. Xi’s behavior, according to these voices, would have constituted a serious violation of the norms established by Deng in order to avoid another governance failure like the Cultural Revolution.
Xi’s anti-corruption drive may also face criticisms for its worst excesses, including the lack of due process, unchecked power of the supervision agencies, and dereliction of duty (不作为) of officials for fear of making mistakes. In this scenario, the possible outcome of the power struggle may be similar to what had happened to former top leader Hua Guofeng from 1978 to 1980. Hua was criticized for making “serious mistakes,” but the People’s Liberation Army played a minimal role in the struggle. As Hua’s mistakes were regarded as “contradictions among the people,” the issue was resolved through an intra-leadership debate rather than via the barrel of a gun. The fact that Hua served as the Central Military Commission chair and Wang Dongxing, a close ally of Hua, commanded the central guard unit did not gain any advantage for Hua against his opponents.
Rather than a zero-sum game where “winner takes all,” the outcome of this power struggle resembles a variable-sum game where “there are gains for losers.” Although Hua lost the top leader position, he continued his leadership role as a party vice-chair and a member of the Politburo Standing Committee for more than a year, and as a party Central Committee member until his death in 2002. This scenario is less likely since an opposing coalition consisting of powerful personalities like Deng, Hu Yaobang, and Chen Yun does not exist among the ruling civilian elite in today’s China.
There are no examples of blatant military coups in Leninist regimes such as China and the Soviet Union, but analysts disagree on why that has been the case. Some argue that tight control of the military and security bureaucracy by these leaders accounts for this rarity. In my view, the insecurity stemming from leaders’ limited ability to control the military motivates them to adopt a policy that stresses effective civilian governance. Effective governance helps to prevent major political and social crises that may incentivize the military’s intervention in domestic politics, which they may find difficult to control and manage. Meanwhile, they promote what Samuel Huntington calls “objective control” by confining the military to perfecting its functional and technical expertise and fulfilling its external missions.
Some also suggest that Xi’s sudden death or incapacitation may trigger a succession crisis similar to the one following Mao’s death in 1976. But the limits on Xi’s power concentration, including his inability to monopolize the appointment of Politburo Standing Committee members and his limited ability to control the military and civilian bureaucracy, show that Xi is not comparable to Mao in terms of revolutionary and military credentials, political capital and influence, charisma, or entrenched personal networks in the party and the army. Xi’s sudden death or incapacitation would be a big deal, but it should not be exaggerated. The successor to Xi should be produced based on the pecking order of the incumbent Politburo Standing Committee members, and the candidate should nominally be approved by the party Central Committee through voting. The process may involve leadership politics but it would not be as tumultuous and militarized as in 1976.
Xi will likely govern effectively on issues related to economic development and political and social stability, and designate a successor in due course. The People’s Liberation Army will likely play a minimal role in the succession. Xi is one of the most powerful Chinese leaders in decades, and his ability to centralize power is remarkable. However, warnings that China faces a looming succession crisis are overstated.
Nan Li is visiting senior research fellow at the East Asian Institute of National University of Singapore.
warontherocks.com · by Nan Li · September 28, 2021







V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Personal Email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
Web Site: www.fdd.org
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Subscribe to FDD’s new 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: david.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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