Quotes of the Day:
"The fire-breathers are almost always civilians."
- Robert M. Gates
“...people burn books, and that they ban books is, in a way, a good sign. It's a good sign because it means books have power. When people burn books, it's because they're afraid of what's inside them...”
- Marcus Sedgwick, The Monsters We Deserve
“The media controls the mind.”
- Jim Morrison
1. Frustrated with CIA, Trump administration turned to Pentagon for shadow war with Iran
2. US has positioned special ops near Ethiopia for potential US embassy assistance
3. How China Is Trying to Turn the U.S. against Itself
4. Opinion | It’s time to drain the foreign influence swamp — for real
5. Think Tanks and American Interventionism
6. Maj. Ian Fishback, Who Exposed Abuse of Detainees, Dies at 42
7. The Lessons Ian Fishback Taught Us
8. Americans Want to Defend Taiwan. The Pentagon’s Budget Should, Too
9. Palantir CEO says companies working with U.S. adversaries should justify their position
10. A New Chinese National Security Bureaucracy Emerges
11. Xi’s Confidence Game: Beijing’s Actions Show Determination, not Insecurity
12. Who’s afraid of China’s nukes?
13. Peng Shuai: Human Rights Watch accuses IOC of sportswashing in case of Chinese tennis star
14. Why China Can’t Bury Peng Shuai and Its #MeToo Scandal
15. Key Pentagon Posts Remain Vacant Amid Supply-Chain Crisis
16. No Afghan family members of U.S. troops have been eligible to come to the U.S. Here’s why
17. In fight against Islamic State, the Taliban holds major advantage
18. Taiwan revamps military training for reserves amid China pressure
19. Biden administration invites Taiwan to its Summit for Democracy
20. Myanmar Troops Arrest 18 Medics for Treating 'Terrorists' in Church
21. Countering Aggression in the Gray Zone
22. Defeat Mechanisms in Modern Warfare
23. What Went Wrong in Afghanistan?
24. Russia, China Sign Roadmap for Closer Military Cooperation
25. Got the wrong goat: West Point cadets try to nab Navy mascot
26. FDD | How America Lost Its Leverage on Iran
27. America Repeated Vietnam’s Mistakes in Afghanistan
28. Afghan refugees are being recruited to join an Iranian paramilitary
1. Frustrated with CIA, Trump administration turned to Pentagon for shadow war with Iran
Of course there are broader implications for this beyond Iran in terms of covert action, influence, irregular warfare and our dysfunctional national security system when it comes to activities described here.
There is so much to discuss from this: Covert action, irregular warfare, influence operations, subversion and sabotage. As well as aggressive recommendations from CENTCOM and USSOCOM, allegations of stonewalling by the Joint Staff, (and the CJS) claims of lack of CIA capabilities.
Frustrated with CIA, Trump administration turned to Pentagon for shadow war with Iran
Tue, November 23, 2021, 3:51 PM·11 min read
In the final month of his presidency, Donald Trump signed off on key parts of an extensive secret Pentagon campaign to conduct sabotage, propaganda and other psychological and information operations in Iran, according to former senior officials who served in his administration.
The campaign, which was to be led by the military’s Special Operations forces, was designed to undermine the Iranian people’s faith in their government as well as shake the regime’s sense of competence and stability, according to those former officials.
The plan, which eventually grew to a 200-page package of options, involved “things that would cause the Iranians to doubt their control over the country, or doubt their ability to fight a war,” said a former senior defense official.
Then-President Donald Trump at the White House in September 2020. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
While being briefed on elements of the campaign, Trump acknowledged that it would have to be carried out by the incoming Biden administration, according to the former official.
It’s representative of a dilemma that was also faced by President Biden’s predecessors: how hard to prosecute the shadow war against Iran while also seeking to negotiate with Tehran.
The Department of Defense and the CIA declined to comment. The White House referred queries to the Pentagon.
Though the plan did not include targeted killings, the likelihood that Iranians might die during “kinetic” acts of sabotage and other operations — and because Iran itself was not considered a war zone — meant the Pentagon needed to receive approval from the president to move forward, according to former officials.
In fact, said former officials, many prongs of this “irregular warfare” campaign did not formally require presidential permission, and could have been approved by the secretary of defense and other top Pentagon officials.
But some in the Pentagon, especially within the Joint Staff, impeded the execution of these plans for years, according to former officials.
By early 2018, “very explicit direction went out” to the Pentagon on some elements of the campaign, said a former senior administration official. “Explicit direction was given; it was understood. And discretion was exercised liberally not to do it.”
Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, escorts incoming Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III to the Pentagon on Austin's first day in his new role on Jan. 22, 2021. (Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images)
“The Pentagon sat on it, refusing to take any action on it, because it didn’t want to,” said the former official. “And ultimately, at a point of exasperation, felt it had no choice or recourse but to present some of the components of it, as some broad plan to be approved in response to a task, so they wouldn’t look like they were completely resistant or incompetent.”
The last-minute push was the culmination of years of frustration by Trump administration officials over how to wage the shadow conflict with Iran. “The Joint Staff and CIA were obstructing everything,” said the former senior defense official.
The ex-official stressed that the plan, which aimed to weaken the Iranian government, was designed to deter a war, and not precipitate an overt military conflict with Tehran.
“It’s a very detailed escalation ladder,” said the former official. “It’s not like all of a sudden you go from zero to 60.”
Some of these actions would not be executed until the U.S. and Iran were “just at the brink” of war, said the source.
The proposed campaign was intensely scrutinized by Pentagon legal personnel, according to Trump-era officials. One of the “sticking points” within the Department of Defense was “the legality of it, whether this [campaign] constituted acts of war,” said a former senior Pentagon official. “It all came down to the definition of sabotage, and what that means legally.” Pentagon lawyers were also focused on actions that might increase “the likelihood of provoking war,” said the former senior defense official.
The proposal was developed and supported by top uniformed officials within the military’s Special Operations Command and Central Command, as well as senior civilians within the Defense Department overseeing special operations and intelligence matters, according to former officials.
Gen. Frank McKenzie, the head of U.S. Central Command, was an ardent proponent of the Iran-focused actions, according to former officials, who said Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, consistently slow-rolled the proposal.
Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testifies during a House Armed Services Committee hearing in September. (Rod Lamkey-Pool/Getty Images)
The heads of Central Command and Special Operations Command “were furious at the Joint Staff,” said the former senior defense official. “Because they felt that Milley sitting on the package ... was actually tying their hands and putting American forces at risk. Because they weren’t able to build up the capabilities to deter Iran before a conflict.”
“The allegations here simply aren’t true,” said a spokesman for Milley. “Without commenting on any action for security reasons, Gen. Milley’s job as the chairman is to give military advice to our civilian decision makers. He gives advice by articulating the assessed risk and benefits of military action. He did this in the Trump administration, and he does this now.”
The plan, which officials said had been under development for years, involved operations that would take at least six months to get up and running once they were approved by the president. “Trump was briefed that none of these things were going to take place in his time” in office, said the former senior defense official.
President Trump reacted more with “supreme disappointment” that these options were only now being presented to him, said the former senior administration official.
Former officials described an interagency process on Iran that was rife with dysfunction. The CIA and Defense Department “were not providing good options to the decision makers, to the president,” because they thought Trump was “crazy and if they took [an] idea to him he’d say, ‘Do it,’ and so they felt they had to control him,” said former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, who also served in a number of NSC and Pentagon positions in the Trump administration.
Within the Pentagon, some top officials tried to steer the administration away from an overt attack on Iran by pushing for sub rosa, deniable options, which they believed would give the Iranians more room to save face and not precipitate a military response from Tehran.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis speaks at a White House reception in 2018 as then-President Donald Trump looks on. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images)
“[Defense] Secretary [Jim] Mattis’s general order No. 1 to me was, ‘We don’t want a war with Iran,’” said Mick Mulroy, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East. “One of the things that I proposed to take the steam out of the White House … was to do things like irregular-warfare-type stuff.”
The CIA, with its focus on covert action, was a natural ally, according to Mulroy.
The CIA’s Iran chief understood the White House-Pentagon dynamic — and the Pentagon’s desire to avoid overt conflict — and proposed initiating “internal-strife-type things” and propaganda-oriented covert operations against Iran at National Security Council meetings, said a second former senior Pentagon official.
But it’s not clear how many, if any, of the agency’s proposals actually came to fruition.
The CIA’s Iran Mission Center was doing “nothing” on Iran, said the former senior administration official. “And I’m being very, very charitable when I say nothing.”
Frustration with the agency was intense. “We would get briefed on all these wild, elaborate plans for various operations that never occurred,” said Victoria Coates, who served as deputy national security adviser for Middle East and North African Affairs.
Skepticism pervaded the relationship between top Trump national security officials and their CIA briefers. Administration officials pointedly questioned the agency’s assessments that Iran was not imminently capable of developing nuclear weapons, according to former officials.
In the end, Trump national security officials concluded that, though the CIA may have been obstructing their directives on Iran, the agency likely did not possess the capabilities to carry out the types of covert action demanded by administration policymakers.
When it came to covert action against Iran, administration officials asked the CIA, “What can we do tonight? Or what can we do next week? Or even six months from now?” said the former senior Pentagon official. “It was the ‘come to Jesus’ moment, [and] it’s like, 'That’s it, that’s all you’ve got?'” The agency’s capabilities were “completely underwhelming,” said this former official.
Then-CIA Director Gina Haspel on Capitol Hill in 2020. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
The CIA engaged in “this constant litany of why we couldn’t do anything, and then you have the Israelis champing at the bit to do stuff, and wondering why we would talk a good game and then go back and not produce anything,” said Coates.
Eventually, Trump told the Israelis, “'Go forth. Go, do. You be the kinetic arm, and we’ll do the maximum pressure campaign,'” said a second former senior administration official.
Meanwhile, then-CIA Director Gina Haspel was working to convince Milley that the agency should be in charge of the U.S.’s secret operations against Iran, according to the former senior defense official.
Haspel “wooed him into believing that CIA was responsible for this, and let CIA take care of this,” said this former official. “Meanwhile, CIA wasn’t doing anything.”
CIA and other officials strongly dispute this characterization. Long-running CIA programs and authorities — focused on countering Iran’s nuclear program, sowing dissent within the regime and delegitimizing it in the eyes of the Iranian public, and combating Iranian influence abroad, among other things — continued under the Trump administration, according to former agency and national security officials.
On counterproliferation-related activities, “they let us run wild, because they just didn’t want to get involved in the disruption part,” said the former senior agency official. In fact, argue some former CIA officials, during the Trump administration, the agency’s Iran center was so focused on covert action that it hurt the agency’s ability to develop Iranian source networks.
In 2018, the Trump administration also approved a new presidential finding permitting the CIA to conduct much more aggressive covert action in cyberspace. The agency subsequently conducted covert hack-and-dump operations against Iran and Russia and cyberattacks on Iranian infrastructure, former officials told Yahoo News. The secret authorization also freed up the agency to conduct these operations with less White House oversight.
The agency seal in the lobby of CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
But the issues went deeper than neglect, benign or not, by the Trump administration, according to another former CIA official. When it came to the administration’s ideas for covert action against Iran, “either it was overly aggressive — start a war or people die — or unrealistic,” said this former official. “Human life was not so much a concern.”
The agency’s diminished covert action capabilities in Iran may have been tied to its struggles in maintaining sources there, according to former officials. “The stable has been decimated, and there was no incentivization to rebuild it,” said the former senior CIA official.
Indeed, in the summer of 2021, the top CIA official abroad responsible for Iran operations sent a cable to agency headquarters warning that its Iran-related recruiting efforts had all been compromised, according to former CIA officials. The Iran-related cable was previously reported by the New York Times.
In October, the CIA dissolved its Iran Mission Center, folding it back into the agency’s broader Middle East operations division. Some former officials hope the agency will now refocus on more traditional intelligence-gathering activities.
“We need to understand what’s going on there, what’s happening,” said a second former senior CIA official. The lack of sourcing “has reverberated into what amounts to an operational disaster on the Iranian target.”
2. US has positioned special ops near Ethiopia for potential US embassy assistance
US has positioned special ops near Ethiopia for potential US embassy assistance
Updated 10:36 PM ET, Mon November 22, 2021
(CNN)The US military has positioned US special operations forces in Djibouti to be ready to provide assistance to the US Embassy in Ethiopia if the situation worsens, according to one military official and two sources familiar with the movements.
The activation of some Army rangers from the 1/75 Battalion suggests that the United States is growing increasingly concerned about the deteriorating security situation as armed groups allied against the Ethiopian government have advanced south toward the capital of Addis Ababa.
In what a defense official with direct knowledge of the matters described as "prudent planning," three warships in the Middle East have also been put on standby to provide support for evacuations if that becomes necessary, although State Department officials have warned that there are no plans to carry out a large-scale military-led evacuation in Ethiopia.
"There are no plans to fly the US military into Ethiopia to facilitate evacuations or replicate the contingency effort we recently undertook in Afghanistan, which was a unique situation for many reasons," a senior State Department official told reporters Monday, stressing that US citizens should immediately depart using available commercial flights.
"We are always, of course engaged in contingency planning for hypotheticals, but again, with the airports wide open, there's no reason for that at all," they said.
Read More
This official emphasized that US citizens who need assistance in departing Ethiopia via commercial flights should contact the US Embassy, noting that it can provide consular services now "but we cannot predict when and if conditions might change."
In early November, the State Department ordered the departure of non-emergency US government personnel and their family members from the US Embassy in Addis Ababa "due to armed conflict, civil unrest, and possible supply shortages."
The defense official with direct knowledge told CNN Monday that three amphibious warships currently in the Middle East -- the USS Essex, the USS Portland, and the USS Pearl Harbor -- have been on standby and could be used for potential civilian evacuation efforts. The official said that, at this point, the US does not anticipate a widespread evacuation of Americans but concern has grown that even a small number might not be able to get to the airport and fly out commercially.
The US Embassy has issued frequent alerts warning US citizens to leave, and in early November the State Department raised its travel advisory for Ethiopia to Level 4: Do Not Travel and issued stark guidance for those who planned to travel or remain in the country, including drafting a will, leaving DNA samples with a medical provider, and appointing someone as a point of contact in case the individual is taken hostage.
3. How China Is Trying to Turn the U.S. against Itself
Know your enemy. The. Chinese are leading with influence. Can we defend ourselves and compete in this gray zone of strategic competition?
Excerpts:
This is just another example of Beijing’s active-measures toolkit. The CCP is shaping the incentives of U.S. political leaders and private companies, promising them short-term economic or climate-policy inducements in exchange for Beijing’s longer-term cannibalization of American industry, security, and values.
And a decade after the first Governors Forum, the U.S. is still getting suckered.
The Chinese Communist Party seeks a united front of influence across the globe, including in the United States. The U.S. federal government has a responsibility to identify channels of malign influence and block Beijing’s advance on U.S. soil. But doing so will require waking up to the threat and actively coordinating a response with the subnational actors China is targeting across the country.
November 23, 2021 | National Review
How China Is Trying to Turn the U.S. against Itself
Across the country, Beijing has worked to cultivate relationships with state and local governments and private businesses in an effort to advance its agenda.
As Congress advances a set of bills to protect against Beijing’s efforts to subvert American democracy, China is using our system of government to block and tackle. On November 12, Reuters reported that Chinese officials have been pressuring American companies, executives, and trade groups to lobby against the legislation, threatening to reduce their share of the Chinese market if the bills pass. Unfortunately, such attempts to turn the U.S. system of government against itself are not new, or unusual. And they take place at the subnational as well as national levels.
In 2015, Xi Jinping visited the United States for the first time since becoming general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). During the trip, Xi made the requisite appearance at the White House and attended the 70th anniversary of the United Nations in New York. But those stops were not Xi’s priority. Instead, his first stop was in Seattle, where he attended the third China–U.S. Governors Forum.
The CCP has cemented a subversive influence apparatus across the United States. Xi’s visit to Seattle offers a roadmap of that apparatus: its pervasive presence, its targets, its sprawling objectives, and the cross-cutting mechanisms by which it achieves them. During his two days in Seattle, Xi prioritized three main groups: leading U.S. companies and their executives, local organizations dedicated to fostering closer U.S.–China ties, and, especially, state- and local-level government officials.
The CCP’s active-measures toolkit would make the Soviet Union drool. Beijing directs that toolkit at state and local elected officials, as well as the business, media, and nonprofit sectors. The Reuters report offered just the most recent example of the CCP’s subnational strategy, which is accelerating: Beijing has identified the vulnerable nodes through which it might defeat tough federal China legislation, and U.S. state, local, and nongovernmental actors are largely blind to the threat.
This is unsurprising: It’s not their job to guard against such threats. But it’s also dangerous: Beijing is poised to subvert the subnational U.S. system, turning the country inside-out against itself. The federal government needs to step up, recognize the challenge, and do its job. In the meantime, state and local governments will have to start doing the federal government’s job for it.
“There is a saying in American politics,” wrote Jia Zhongzheng of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 2017, “that all politics is local.” He suggested that state and local governments could be particularly open to China’s overtures, tempted by promises of trade and investment even when the federal government raised security concerns. “Chinese entrepreneurs who are willing to invest in state governments are generally treated as guests by state politicians and officials, regardless of their party or ruling philosophy,” explained scholars affiliated with the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization in a 2017 piece.
Events over the past decade certainly suggest that that has been the case, to the detriment of U.S. prosperity and security. In 2011, the U.S. and China held the inaugural China–U.S. Governors Forum. The state-owned China Daily’s coverage of the event focused on a series of deals that provided China the necessary footholds to hollow out the U.S. renewable-energy industry. At the forum, the Wuhu Economic and Technological Development Zone in Anhui Province reached a deal with California-based NuvoSun for a thin-film solar-cells project; Asia Silicon (Qinghai) and New Hampshire-based GT Solar agreed to work together; and the chairman of China’s CHINT Group Corporation, a member of the Zhejiang Province delegation, announced plans to “write a billion-dollar check” as part of a partnership with a Missouri-based firm focused on semiconductor- and solar-related wafer products.
The precise details of those agreements remain unclear. What is clear is that the next year, the U.S. Commerce Department found that both Asia Silicon and the CHINT Group, among other Chinese players, were dumping solar products into the American market. Over the decade since, China has established a monopoly position in the international solar-panel supply chain, which the United States once dominated. China has done so in large part thanks to the acquisition of technology from American players, as well as domestic subsidies and preferential policies.
This example underlines the long-term costs that the U.S. private sector and state and local governments invite when they get into bed with Beijing. It also presents a cruel reminder of the human-rights risks that taint such arrangements: Revelations over the past year have made clear that China’s solar-power industry, bolstered by those deals signed at the 2011 Governors Forum, is associated with forced labor and the genocide of the Uyghur ethnic minority in Xinjiang Province. The solar sector has become ground zero in the fight to protect against such atrocities.
When Xi visited the United States in 2015, skirting diplomatic protocol to meet with subnational actors on the West Coast before visiting D.C., John Kerry was secretary of state. Six years later, as State Department climate envoy, Kerry has reportedly lobbied against the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. Asked how he is balancing his desire for climate-change-related cooperation with China and forced labor in the solar-panel supply chain, Kerry said in a November interview that such human-rights atrocities are simply “not my lane.”
This is just another example of Beijing’s active-measures toolkit. The CCP is shaping the incentives of U.S. political leaders and private companies, promising them short-term economic or climate-policy inducements in exchange for Beijing’s longer-term cannibalization of American industry, security, and values.
And a decade after the first Governors Forum, the U.S. is still getting suckered.
The Chinese Communist Party seeks a united front of influence across the globe, including in the United States. The U.S. federal government has a responsibility to identify channels of malign influence and block Beijing’s advance on U.S. soil. But doing so will require waking up to the threat and actively coordinating a response with the subnational actors China is targeting across the country.
4. Opinion | It’s time to drain the foreign influence swamp — for real
There are few think tanks that do not receive foreign funding.
Excerpts:
The Banks rule is supported by leaders of those Washington think tanks that don’t take foreign funding, such as the American Foreign Policy Council and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
“Policymakers in Congress need to be confident they are receiving advice that isn’t influenced or distorted by foreign or commercial interests,” said AFPC Senior Vice President Ilan Berman. “This bill will help insure the dependability of the insights that Congress receives from the experts it relies upon.”
Opinion | It’s time to drain the foreign influence swamp — for real
In Washington, foreign interests use money to influence policy through a variety of schemes, often hidden. Foreign lobbying must be reported, by law, but that’s only one conduit foreign money can use to enter U.S. politics. Dozens of D.C. think tanks and other policy organizations take money from foreign countries and corporations without ever disclosing the details. The staffers who have received this financing then write policy papers and testify before Congress, posing as objective, disinterested experts.
It’s a win-win for the think tanks, which collect millions, and for the foreign actors, who can successfully spread their influence in D.C. without scrutiny. But our democracy loses, because this system of soft corruption undermines the integrity of our policymaking process. Americans have now woken up to the risks of foreign influence on Facebook, but think-tankers are still allowed to use loopholes to testify to Congress without disclosing which foreign countries are funding them. Why are we letting them get away with it?
As a New Republic investigation released last month illustrated, even though House Democrats strengthened the conflict-of-interest disclosure requirements for witnesses last January, think-tankers and others are abusing huge loopholes to skirt the intent of the new rules. It’s easy for witnesses to claim they are representing themselves rather than their organization (which is the one actually taking cash from a foreign government) — so many witnesses do just that.
Now a group of House Republicans is trying to close that and other loopholes in congressional rules. Republican Study Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) has introduced a “Truth in Testimony Reform Resolution,” which aims to close those loopholes and force congressional witnesses to disclose their foreign paymasters.
“Congress works best when all the cards are face up on the table,” Banks said in a statement. “It’s past time we expose malign foreign influence and we take the masks off those individuals working for other countries who are testifying before Congress. I urge my colleagues to pass this rule as soon as possible.”
The rule has 43 co-sponsors, all Republican. There has been some interest on the Democratic side in joining the effort, but no Democrats are publicly supporting it yet. According to House procedures, this rule could be adopted by a simple-majority vote. The Senate currently does not have any requirement for witnesses to disclose foreign funding sources at all.
The new House rule would force all congressional witnesses to disclose all foreign funding sources over $5,000, regardless of whether the witness claims to be testifying on behalf of themselves or their organization. The rule would also eliminate the loophole that compels think-tankers to disclose their foreign funding only if they define themselves as a “fiduciary of any organization or entity with an interest in the subject matter of the hearing.”
Think-tank fellows are not the only class of witnesses that would be required to disclose their foreign financial ties. Consultants, advisers and all paid associates of foreign governments, foreign political parties and foreign state-owned enterprises and their subsidiaries would now have to disclose. Foreign consulting contracts usually fall outside of legal reporting requirements under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the main regulatory framework for representatives of foreign governments, because they claim not to include lobbying. But under the Banks rule, that distinction would go away if these experts wanted to testify on Capitol Hill.
Under the proposed rule, those witnesses who work on behalf of foreign adversaries such as Russia, China, Iran and North Korea would come in for additional scrutiny. This is meant to give extra attention to the efforts by countries including China to spread foreign influence through organizations such as think tanks. Just for one example, the China-U.S. Exchange Foundation (CUSEF), which was founded and funded by a top member of the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front influence operation, has funded several D.C. think tanks over the years.
The Banks rule is supported by leaders of those Washington think tanks that don’t take foreign funding, such as the American Foreign Policy Council and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
“Policymakers in Congress need to be confident they are receiving advice that isn’t influenced or distorted by foreign or commercial interests,” said AFPC Senior Vice President Ilan Berman. “This bill will help insure the dependability of the insights that Congress receives from the experts it relies upon.”
There’s no good reason to continue letting foreign governments, much less foreign adversaries, covertly influence our legislative process and our public discourse by channeling their money through American think tanks and consulting shops. The House should pass this rule on a bipartisan basis, and the Senate should follow. Both houses of Congress, and both of our main political parties, have an interest in draining this swamp.
5. Think Tanks and American Interventionism
Conclusion:
Interventionism pervades elite national security politics within government as well. The boundaries between the official and unofficial wings of the national security establishment are permeable, and as personnel move between the executive branch and the assembly of private organizations tethered to it, they develop a shared set of norms, beliefs, and interests. Stephen Walt argues that the inclination to intervene militarily in the affairs of other countries represents a “full employment policy” for national security experts, generating demand for the type of labor they provide. Walt explains the perpetuation of “liberal hegemony,” but not its origins. Stephen Wertheim offers an intellectual history of the origins of the doctrine of U.S. supremacy, but focuses his account on the independent agency of outside actors. I argue that closer attention to the partnerships I’ve described helps US foreign policy analysts understand where the establishment’s interventionism comes from, how it has evolved, and why restraint-oriented administrations will find it difficult to reverse.
A few additional points bear mentioning. First, outside validation for public policy is commonplace in Washington. The fact of collaboration between administrations and think tanks should not surprise close observers of American government. However, many fail to recognize the centrality of top-down collaboration to the evolution of the national security establishment. Second, individuals in think tanks surely act in good faith, working diligently to craft policy ideas they believe will improve national security. But many remain unaware of the presidential origins of the influence their institutions enjoy.
Finally, dissenting voices are not absent from foreign policy debates. Indeed, proponents of restraint are enjoying a kind of renaissance, but they suffer a disadvantage. Cautious presidents rarely build durable organizational support for their policies — it seems unnecessary. Biden doesn’t need to mobilize the public to coerce Congress to permit him to remain withdrawn from Afghanistan. An ambitious, diplomacy-centered foreign policy might generate the demand for the kind of institution-building that interventionist presidents have pursued for decades. Until that happens, the structural advantages of interventionism will likely remain.
Think Tanks and American Interventionism - War on the Rocks
In a polarized environment, where political elites have staked out opposing positions on whether to vaccinate against a plague, we might not expect much agreement on complex matters of military intervention. Yet when President Joe Biden honored his commitment to withdraw military forces from Afghanistan, the bulk of the national security think-tank community responded with vociferous disapproval. As with the proposed invasion of Iraq in 2002, the core disagreement among the foreign policy establishment has centered not on whether to remain in Afghanistan, but why. After failing for 20 years to build a robust Afghan state, persisting in the belief that success remains just around the corner, or that a continued investment in a failed project is worthwhile, suggests a stubborn predisposition to credit the political effectiveness of military force. This tendency demands an explanation.
Understanding Washington’s romance with foreign intervention requires paying close attention to public-relations collaborations between the White House and outside organizations. Presidents enlist think tanks and other groups to provide third-party validation for ambitious policies, with the ultimate goal of mobilizing the public to gain leverage over Congress. Since ambitious foreign policy initiatives tend to involve the use of military power, administrations more often partner with pro-intervention organizations than supporters of restraint. These collaborating groups gain access to political, professional, and informational resources that help them build constituencies, develop networks, and gain influence. Over time, the ecosystem of influence increasingly reflects their interests and worldviews.
Influential Democratic and Republican national security voices have condemned the president’s decision to withdraw. John R. Allen, a former commander of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan and now president of the Brookings Institution, called upon Biden to “reverse his decision.” Richard Fontaine, head of the Center for a New American Security and longtime aide to the late Sen. John McCain, argued that it would undermine America’s competitiveness with China. Kori Schake, the director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, rejected the administration’s claim that the “status quo was unsustainable.” Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, derided the president’s action as a “withdrawal of choice.” Fred Kempe, head of the Atlantic Council, said that it would damage U.S. credibility. Add to that the chorus of warnings that Afghanistan would again become a safe haven for terrorists.
Why Presidents Seek Surrogates
My research, published in Foreign Policy Analysis, shows why presidents enlist surrogates, how think tanks benefit from these partnerships, and why they favor interventionism. When administrations pursue ambitious foreign policies — those that require affirmative congressional consent — they often face public resistance or legislative opposition. They can respond in several ways. They can scale back a policy so it falls within the boundaries of existing discretionary authority. They can attempt to strike a bargain with Congress to forge ahead without public support. Or they can try to mobilize the public in their favor, to exert leverage over legislators to compel them to consent to the administration’s agenda.
This last option brings think tanks and other outside organizations into the picture. Presidents, having worked out what policy they want to pursue, need to secure the funding and authorization to do it. Outside groups help put pressure on members of Congress who oppose the policy or whose caution prevents them from consenting to the administration’s agenda without public backing.
The president’s bully pulpit gives administrations a powerful tool of persuasion, but appeals corroborated by independent surrogates appear more credible than those made by administration officials alone. It is the logic of the advertising testimonial: Endorsements help sell everything from salad dressing to life insurance. Audiences perceive third-party sources as credible when they appear knowledgeable and trustworthy. If presidents can deploy external experts to validate the administration’s agenda, they can overcome the mistrust endemic to partisan politics.
Think tanks represent one type of organization that the White House has enlisted to help make its foreign policy arguments. During World War II, the government helped create the War Advertising Council — a volunteer association of advertising professionals that produced public service announcements on behalf of the war effort — to circumvent statutory prohibitions against government propaganda. Diaspora lobbies such as the Iraqi National Congress and the Cuban American National Foundation partnered with the government to market the continued embargo of the Communist-controlled island and regime change in the Persian Gulf dictatorship.
Vietnam: A Turning Point for Think Tanks
The 2002 debate over whether to invade Iraq offers a perfect illustration of how outside organizations converge to support an interventionist president’s foreign policy. Think tanks lined up behind the president’s proposed invasion. This contemporary example of extra-governmental support for military intervention can trace its roots back to the politics of the Vietnam War. The archival record I have assembled reveals the intentional cultivation of allied organizations by the White House, and a deliberate effort to politicize think-tank influence over foreign policy. The brief narrative that follows shows how President Lyndon B. Johnson decided whether to collaborate with outside organizations, and how Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford initiated the conservative transformation of the think-tank ecosystem with a partnership that Nixon struck with the American Enterprise Institute to keep the Vietnam War going in 1970, which Ford continued.
Johnson Rejects, then Pursues Collaboration
The administration initially declined Conant’s offer. Without public resistance and congressional opposition, it had little need to partner with outside organizations in 1965, and the president’s advisers saw political risks in collaboration. Jack McCloy, one of Johnson’s “wise men” of foreign policy, objected on the grounds that the president had already “done such a good job of pulling public support together” without external organizational support.
Nixon and Ford Forge Ahead
For reasons I can only speculate about, the White House allowed Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and his aide, William Baroody Jr., to take the credit for securing the American Enterprise Institute’s fortune. After the Watergate scandal forced Nixon to resign and sent Colson to prison, the Ford administration established the Office of Public Liaison, and put Baroody in charge of it. One more thing to keep in mind: Baroody Sr. (the elder) was at the time the president of the American Enterprise Institute. The rise of the conservative think-tank movement that would soon follow began within the White House, founded upon their collaborative efforts to keep the Vietnam War going in 1970.
Bottom Up or Top Down?
Most theories about the influence of private organizations offer “bottom-up” explanations. That is, groups outside of formal positions of power persuade officials to pursue policies they otherwise might reject. The protest call “no blood for oil” opposing the Iraq War reflects this concern, but there’s nothing new about the belief that private interests drag governments into war. Lenin argued that commercially motivated imperialist expansion represents the “highest stage of capitalism.” Proponents of neutrality during the interwar years blamed U.S. involvement in World War I on the banking and munitions industries. Dwight Eisenhower warned against the influence of the “military-industrial complex.” Sociologist C. Wright Mills inveighed against “warlords” who push the country into conflict. International relations theorist Jack Snyder argues that commercial cartels spin “myths of empire” that lead countries into over-expansion.
I describe a mostly top-down dynamic. Administrations rarely create outside organizations out of whole cloth. Think tanks bring their own skills, resources, and credibility to the table, in addition to their perceived independence. Still, entering into these partnerships remains a matter of executive discretion, and the conditions that encourage collaboration, indeed the incentives of the U.S. presidency more generally, favor hawkish partners. As James Madison wrote, “War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement.” Foreign policy offers an arena for the president to operate with greater autonomy and gain political advantages over Congress, especially if the administration can get the public on its side. Military interventions tempt ambitious presidents. They also require affirmative congressional consent for military appropriations and the use of force beyond the window of discretion delegated by the War Powers Act. They force Congress to get involved, and make it necessary for presidents to win support, which gives interventionist think tanks their opportunity.
Collaborating groups gain access to resources (money, administration jobs, political intelligence) that allow them to build constituencies and develop influence. Morton Blackwell, a Reagan administration official in the Office of Public Liaison, spelled out this strategy during the 1980 election campaign, in a blueprint for a “New Right Foreign Policy Offensive” that involved identifying allies and “boosting their careers,” training them in “the latest technique of winning,” and “building new organizational vehicles.” Think-tank experts have individual incentives to maintain the alliances they forge with the White House, even when their presidential benefactors leave office. Think tanks serve as “governments in exile,” training centers for new political talent and holding pens for political appointees awaiting their party’s return to power. Over time, this practice has shaped the ecosystem of national security think tanks.
Cautious Presidents Beware
Republican and Democratic-affiliated groups have both gotten in on the action. Carter’s foreign policy critics included the Coalition for a Democratic Majority — mostly Johnson administration alumni who remained in the party rather than join the departing neoconservatives — which paved the way for the Democratic Leadership Council, the hawkish faction that included Joe Lieberman and the Clintons. And Brookings, Nixon’s old bête noire, has evolved with its environment, demonstrating no reluctance to criticize Democratic leaders who show excessive caution in their foreign policy doctrines.
This brings us back to Biden and the opposition to his withdrawal from Afghanistan. Presidents who wish to abstain from or roll back military commitments often get the policy they want, but they have to contend with the legacy of those who built the infrastructure of influence that has made such interventions popular in the first place, on both sides of the partisan divide.
Conclusion
Interventionism pervades elite national security politics within government as well. The boundaries between the official and unofficial wings of the national security establishment are permeable, and as personnel move between the executive branch and the assembly of private organizations tethered to it, they develop a shared set of norms, beliefs, and interests. Stephen Walt argues that the inclination to intervene militarily in the affairs of other countries represents a “full employment policy” for national security experts, generating demand for the type of labor they provide. Walt explains the perpetuation of “liberal hegemony,” but not its origins. Stephen Wertheim offers an intellectual history of the origins of the doctrine of U.S. supremacy, but focuses his account on the independent agency of outside actors. I argue that closer attention to the partnerships I’ve described helps US foreign policy analysts understand where the establishment’s interventionism comes from, how it has evolved, and why restraint-oriented administrations will find it difficult to reverse.
A few additional points bear mentioning. First, outside validation for public policy is commonplace in Washington. The fact of collaboration between administrations and think tanks should not surprise close observers of American government. However, many fail to recognize the centrality of top-down collaboration to the evolution of the national security establishment. Second, individuals in think tanks surely act in good faith, working diligently to craft policy ideas they believe will improve national security. But many remain unaware of the presidential origins of the influence their institutions enjoy.
Finally, dissenting voices are not absent from foreign policy debates. Indeed, proponents of restraint are enjoying a kind of renaissance, but they suffer a disadvantage. Cautious presidents rarely build durable organizational support for their policies — it seems unnecessary. Biden doesn’t need to mobilize the public to coerce Congress to permit him to remain withdrawn from Afghanistan. An ambitious, diplomacy-centered foreign policy might generate the demand for the kind of institution-building that interventionist presidents have pursued for decades. Until that happens, the structural advantages of interventionism will likely remain.
Chad Levinson is an assistant professor of government and international affairs at Virginia Tech’s School of Public and International Affairs. His research has appeared in Foreign Policy Analysis, Presidential Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is working on a book manuscript about the history of collaborations between U.S. presidential administrations and civil society organizations in national security politics. He has not received funding from any of the think tanks mentioned in this article nor from any of their financial backers. The Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation, the Eisenhower Presidential Library, and the Truman Library Institute have provided financial support for this research.
6. Maj. Ian Fishback, Who Exposed Abuse of Detainees, Dies at 42
Few Majors receive NY Times obituaries. He lived a complicated life.
Excerpts:
Mr. Ford, his friend from boyhood, described Major Fishback as a “moral absolutist.”
“If I asked him to help me bury a body, he would turn me in,” Mr. Ford said. “He would have been a great moral compass for this country.”
Major Fishback said several years ago that his original testimony on abuses had been discredited by the Army, in part because doctors said he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Although he was promoted to major from captain, Major Fishback decided to leave the Army and the United States altogether. He moved to Sweden to accept a Fulbright scholarship, worked for a human rights organization, applied for European Union citizenship and sought, he said, to “make sure Europe is able to fend off the United States and Russia.”
“I’m done,” he told Carol Stiffler, the editor of the weekly Newberry News and a former classmate of his sister, in January 2020. “I gave the U.S. a lifetime of service — very admirable service. And if this is the repayment, it is not acceptable.”
At the time, his father called him “a natural-born warrior” who “was simply standing up for the rule of law.”
Major Fishback’s departure was delayed by the pandemic, though, and he returned home from Sweden after his life had begun to fall apart.
He began receiving psychotropic drugs and was involuntarily committed in September, when his behavior became erratic, resulting in an arrest at a football game. His father said that as of last month he was still depressed, but that he was “ditching his demons” and “coming back to reality.”
“We know the community supported Ian through his recent difficult times,” the Fishback family said in its statement. “He faced many challenges, and many of us felt helpless. We tried to get him the help he needed. It appears the system failed him utterly and tragically.”
“We will seek justice for Ian,” the statement concluded, “because justice is what mattered most to him.”
Maj. Ian Fishback, Who Exposed Abuse of Detainees, Dies at 42
His letter to two senators about beatings by U.S. troops in Iraq led to legislation in 2005 prohibiting extreme mistreatment of military prisoners.
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The Army officer Ian Fishback on Capitol Hill in 2005. His reports of the abuse of prisoners in Iraq led to the passage of the Detainee Treatment Act with overwhelming bipartisan support.Credit... Jamie Rose for The New York Times
By
Nov. 23, 2021, 1:35 p.m. ET
Ian Fishback, an Army whistle-blower whose allegations that fellow members of the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq routinely beat and abused prisoners prompted the Senate to approve anti-torture legislation in 2005, died on Nov. 19 in Bangor, Mich. He was 42.
His family, which announced the death in a statement, said the cause had not been determined. In the climax to a distinguished but abbreviated career that the family said had begun to unravel as a result of neurological damage or post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, he died in an adult foster care facility where he had been admitted following court-ordered treatment with anti-psychotic drugs after he became delusional and created public disturbances.
Major Fishback was one of three former members of the division who said soldiers in their battalion had systematically abused prisoners by assaulting them, exposing them to extreme temperatures, stacking them in human pyramids and depriving them of sleep to compel them to reveal intelligence — or, in some cases, simply for the American soldiers’ amusement. He said his complaints were ignored by his superiors for 17 months.
He reported some of the abuses in September 2005 in a letter to top aides of two senior Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee: John W. Warner of Virginia, the chairman, and John McCain of Arizona. The aides said his reports were sufficiently credible to warrant investigation.
Additional allegations from two other members of the division were included in a report released later that month by Human Rights Watch.
“Ian’s greatest quality is not his courage, but his humanity,” Christopher Nicholson, a former Army buddy, wrote on gofundme.com, where by the time of Major Fishback’s death friends had raised more than $18,000 toward a goal of $60,000 to transfer him to the Austin Riggs Center, a private psychiatric treatment facility in Stockbridge, Mass.
“I always marveled at the way he could shoot at and be shot at by terrorists, watching his friends die in battle, then in the very next instant risk himself to demand that the prisoners be treated with decency,” Mr. Nicholson wrote. “I remember I once called him an expert on warfare and he looked mildly offended and responded that he was an expert on justice.”
In his letter to the senators, Major Fishback said that troops were often torn among what they were trained to do, instructions in field manuals, orders from superiors and the exigencies of actual combat.
“I am certain that this confusion contributed to a wide range of abuses including death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure to elements, extreme forced physical exertion, hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivation and degrading treatment,” he wrote. “I and troops under my command witnessed some of these abuses in both Afghanistan and Iraq.”
“Do we sacrifice our ideals in order to preserve security?” he continued. “Will we confront danger and adversity in order to preserve our ideals, or will our courage and commitment to individual rights wither at the prospect of sacrifice?”
He concluded his letter: “I strongly urge you to do justice to your men and women in uniform. Give them clear standards of conduct that reflect the ideals they risk their lives for.”
Later that year, the Senate voted 90 to 9 to approve Senator McCain’s Detainee Treatment Act, which prohibited “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” although subsequent amendments carved out caveats.
Time magazine named Major Fishback one of the 100 most influential people in the world that year.
Ian Fishback was born on Jan. 19, 1979, in Detroit. His parents, John and Sharon Fishback, were both rural letter carriers.
He grew up in Newberry, a village of about 1,500 on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula that bills itself as the state’s “official moose capital.” In 1997 he graduated from Newberry High School, where he excelled in football and wrestling and achieved a 3.953 grade point average (out of 4) and where, his father said, he decided to pursue a military career.
“He was looking for a way to do better in the world,” said Justin Ford, a boyhood friend who organized the funding drive. “He was looking for structure.”
He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point with a Bachelor of Science degree in Middle Eastern studies in 2001. He served in the Army until 2014, including two combat tours with the 82nd Airborne and two with the Fifth Special Forces Group.
“He had all the scars from it,” Brig. Gen. Stephen N. Xenakis, a retired medic who had worked with Major Fishback since 2005 on human rights issues, said in an interview.
“It was not that he was a perfectionist,” General Xenakis added. “I think he wrestled with understanding what are the principles, what am I supposed to do, how am I supposed to organize my conduct and thinking? He was intent on doing what he thought was ethical.”
Major Fishback earned a master’s degree in philosophy and political science at the University of Michigan in 2012, taught at West Point from 2012 to 2015, and was awarded his doctorate from the University of Michigan. In his thesis, dated this year, he explored the questions of when a war is just, when a soldier has a moral justification to disobey orders, and what the scope of his responsibility is both for doing harm and for allowing harm to be done.
His marriage to Clara Hoisington, a fellow West Point graduate, ended in divorce. He is survived by their young daughter; his parents, John Fishback and Sharon Ableson; his stepmother, Sharon Brown; and his sister, Jazcinda Jorgensen.
Mr. Ford, his friend from boyhood, described Major Fishback as a “moral absolutist.”
“If I asked him to help me bury a body, he would turn me in,” Mr. Ford said. “He would have been a great moral compass for this country.”
Major Fishback said several years ago that his original testimony on abuses had been discredited by the Army, in part because doctors said he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Although he was promoted to major from captain, Major Fishback decided to leave the Army and the United States altogether. He moved to Sweden to accept a Fulbright scholarship, worked for a human rights organization, applied for European Union citizenship and sought, he said, to “make sure Europe is able to fend off the United States and Russia.”
“I’m done,” he told Carol Stiffler, the editor of the weekly Newberry News and a former classmate of his sister, in January 2020. “I gave the U.S. a lifetime of service — very admirable service. And if this is the repayment, it is not acceptable.”
At the time, his father called him “a natural-born warrior” who “was simply standing up for the rule of law.”
Major Fishback’s departure was delayed by the pandemic, though, and he returned home from Sweden after his life had begun to fall apart.
He began receiving psychotropic drugs and was involuntarily committed in September, when his behavior became erratic, resulting in an arrest at a football game. His father said that as of last month he was still depressed, but that he was “ditching his demons” and “coming back to reality.”
“We know the community supported Ian through his recent difficult times,” the Fishback family said in its statement. “He faced many challenges, and many of us felt helpless. We tried to get him the help he needed. It appears the system failed him utterly and tragically.”
“We will seek justice for Ian,” the statement concluded, “because justice is what mattered most to him.”
7. The Lessons Ian Fishback Taught Us
A tribute to the Major from one of his former students. I did not know him and was unfamiliar with this story though I recall the controversy of the letter at the time.
His life and actions should be studied in leadership and ethics courses in PME institutions.
Conclusion:
Not that his own self didn’t matter. It is clear, now that he is gone, that it did. And even as cadets we knew that we were seeing only one side of a complicated man. I recall a peripheral but deep sadness to him, and other cadets of his with whom I’ve spoken recall the same. He became less responsive to students’ outreach years ago. Nonetheless his recently expressed pessimism about the American political project and his death come as a jolt.
We of course wish for the chance to go back and say that we were lucky as cadets to study under him. That were it not for him standing at the front of our introductory philosophy class, we would all be worse off, less thoughtful in the execution of our duties. It is impossible to know whether doing so would have mattered. It is impossible to know whether telling him how profoundly good his influence was on his cadets would have made any difference.
What is certain is this. A young Ian Fishback, in his letter to Senator McCain, wrote that officers and soldiers must uphold the ideals of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. He wrote that he “would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is ‘America.’” For the education of the officers commissioned to do violence on its behalf, our constitutional republic could do no better than the lessons Ian Fishback taught.
The Lessons Ian Fishback Taught Us - Modern War Institute
I first met Ian Fishback when I walked into his classroom. It was the start of my second semester at West Point. Like many harried, drowsy plebes, my academic experience had at that point consisted of jogging to classes, then nodding through them. Fishback’s course was a required introduction to philosophy, and he one of several rotating military faculty teaching its many sections. The course catalog suggested it would be another sleepy three credit hours in a schedule of nineteen. But Ian Fishback jolted us awake.
As did the news of his death last Friday. Jolted because he was still young, because I knew not of his decline, and because Ian Fishback was a remarkable teacher. His lessons were that meaningful philosophical inquiry separated an officer from a mere killer, that such inquiry was within the ability of every cadet, and that because cadets were able, they had to ask by what right and with what consequence might they one day kill.
Fishback taught these lessons with the force of a deep thinker who had gone to war and returned a witness to the gravity of our studies. He had little patience for the idea, which sometimes wandered into his classroom, that philosophy was a humanist whimsy superfluous to a soldier’s education. He illustrated as much not with imaginary trolleys and imaginary people on their tracks but with improvised explosive devices, the platoons that awaited us, and the noncombatants between the two.
His belief in the importance of what he taught was evident in the passion with which he taught it. Since his passing I’ve spoken with several of his former students and we unanimously recall that his intensity made for a distinct classroom experience: you were either taking philosophy, or philosophy as taught by Ian Fishback. Some remember his regularly ejecting from class those who did not do the assigned reading. Others recall his unflinching challenges to the simple narratives most young cadets hold dear and reflexively repeat in classroom discussion. We all recall that he cared unendingly about the material and the charge of an officer.
His required philosophy lessons were as often the gateway as they were the limit of a cadet’s study under him. For those interested he devised summer seminars on just war theory, taught courses on humanitarian intervention, and hosted talks on Rwanda, drone warfare, his work with Iraqi special operations forces, the International Committee of the Red Cross, honor killings, and more. He undertook every effort to deliver for cadets a complete ethical education in an already bursting West Point curriculum.
The intensity with which Ian Fishback studied morality in war, though, did not make him inaccessible to his students. He was a hit. He had a gift for inviting cadets to join him in considering the philosophy of the profession of arms. His technique was to pose a single question and then allow discussions to unfold among a growing number of participants, speaking himself only to encourage. These questions were as provocative as they were artful, especially in his distinct drawl: “Private Jeffrey Dahmer reports to your platoon. Is that a problem?”
When his cadets did engage with his instruction, as so many did, he worked hard to convince them their ideas were worthwhile. He taught them how to develop those ideas into theses, then papers, then presentations at conferences—to which he would happily chauffeur them across the northeast in twelve-passenger vans. Once, on two hours’ notice, he pleaded the case to my leadership that he take me on a train to New York City so I could hear Romeo Dallaire speak at the Carnegie Council. An expression of passing interest was all he had needed. After the event in the city, when he dropped me off at my barracks shortly before midnight, he was still prodding me on the relationship between the Libyan intervention and the Thirty Years’ War.
Fishback did not do any of this to convince us of our own brilliance. His relentless exposition of ethical nuance humbled all his cadets. He encouraged us because we had to first believe in our capacity for inquiry in order to inquire. That was his true end. When we did inquire, he ensured it was disciplined and without ego. He was a serious academic, and did not spare his students the rigors of academia.
There was no ego in his classroom, and that started with him. Though many know his name for his letter to Senator John McCain standing up against detainee abuse in 2006, he did not often discuss it and the story barely figured into our view of him. It was a biographical detail rather than his defining quality. To his cadets he was instead a keen, listening, wise officer who had seen much and wanted to know what we thought about the reading.
His selflessness extended to his time. He made himself available always to meet cadets outside the class if it meant another conversation about what a soldier does and whether it is right. When I heard of his death, I dug out some old notebooks from my cadet years. On the top of a page therein I had written two questions to pose during an office hours visit. The first questions asked for the story of that now famous letter to McCain. The second question was whether he thought my course paper had the potential for presentation at an undergraduate conference.
My follow-on notes from the visit show that he answered nothing of the first question, but gave me pages of thoughtful, substantial feedback on the second. His feedback included the direction that I remove the phrase “Hegelian determinism” from my draft’s third paragraph, because I was misusing it and it was not “commonly understood.” That was merciful of him. The story strikes me as emblematic. He wanted his students less concerned with sounding smart than with thinking hard, and would rather talk about ideas than himself.
Not that his own self didn’t matter. It is clear, now that he is gone, that it did. And even as cadets we knew that we were seeing only one side of a complicated man. I recall a peripheral but deep sadness to him, and other cadets of his with whom I’ve spoken recall the same. He became less responsive to students’ outreach years ago. Nonetheless his recently expressed pessimism about the American political project and his death come as a jolt.
We of course wish for the chance to go back and say that we were lucky as cadets to study under him. That were it not for him standing at the front of our introductory philosophy class, we would all be worse off, less thoughtful in the execution of our duties. It is impossible to know whether doing so would have mattered. It is impossible to know whether telling him how profoundly good his influence was on his cadets would have made any difference.
What is certain is this. A young Ian Fishback, in his letter to Senator McCain, wrote that officers and soldiers must uphold the ideals of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. He wrote that he “would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is ‘America.’” For the education of the officers commissioned to do violence on its behalf, our constitutional republic could do no better than the lessons Ian Fishback taught.
Theo Lipsky is an active duty US Army captain currently stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. He holds a BS from the United States Military Academy.
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: Elizabeth Woodruff, US Army (USMA PAO)
8. Americans Want to Defend Taiwan. The Pentagon’s Budget Should, Too
Conclusion:
Lawmakers, pundits, and officials inside and out of the military have warned Americans about the growing threat from China. Now, the public has joined the discourse. They want a U.S. military that will be able to deter and defeat China's People's Liberation Army; the Defense Department needs the budget required to do it.
Americans Want to Defend Taiwan. The Pentagon’s Budget Should, Too
Lawmakers should take advantage and give Americans the defense budget we need to stay ahead of China.
In recent polling, a greater share of the American public than ever supports using the U.S. military to defend Taiwan from China’s aggression. More Americans than ever believe Taiwan should become a treaty ally of the United States. But more than ever, Americans also believe the U.S. military is incapable of matching up to China’s People’s Liberation Army.
This rising tide of public support for Taiwan presents an opportunity for lawmakers to close the gap between the U.S. military budget and arsenal that we have to what is needed to balance and compete with that of China.
Despite the formal pleasantries of the recent video summit between President Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, China, Taiwan, and the United States are near as much of a war footing as they have been in recent memory. Defending Taiwan, however, is not a familiar issue to most Americans or U.S. leaders.
President Biden certainly raised eyebrows in the United States, Taiwan, and on mainland China when he responded during a CNN townhall in October that the United States has a commitment to defend Taiwan. In fact, the Taiwan Relations Act does not commit the United States to come to the aid of Taiwan should China try to reclaim the island forcefully. Although the comment was later walked back by the White House, Biden did voice the current sentiment held by the American public.
According to the 2021 Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey, released in August, most respondents favor making Taiwan a formal treaty ally, support its inclusion in international organizations such as the United Nations, and support its recognition as an independent nation. For the first time since the Council first asked the question in 1982, the majority of respondents, 52 percent, support the use of troops to defend Taiwan from the China. By comparison, public support for the use of U.S. troops to defend a member of NATO is only seven points higher at 59 percent. Since 2014, support for using troops to defend NATO members has risen 25 percent, but support for defending Taiwan has risen 100 percent.
The survey also shows that less than half of Americans, an all-time low number of respondents, feel that the U.S. military is superior to China's People's Liberation Army. While that may not be an accurate assessment of U.S military power, it is an accurate assessment of what Americans believe at the moment. When we analyze the survey results with respect to China and Taiwan in aggregate, they illustrate the public's desire: a military capable of competing with China, especially in support of Taiwan.
Biden’s fiscal year 2022 defense budget included requests for additional F-35 fighters, investments in the B-21 strategic bomber and Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine programs, and advanced capability enablers such as artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, even with a slightly increased value compared to last year, the FY22 budget topline does not support a favorable balance of power for the U.S. military against China's People's Liberation Army. Just this month alone, the Pentagon has reported that China’s People’s Liberation Army/Navy had amassed the largest fleet in the world, cited the acceleration of Chinese nuclear warfare development in its annual report to Congress on military developments involving China, and called a recent test firing of a Chinese hypersonic missile a near-Sputnik moment.
Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro this month called for an annual budget increase of between three and five percent for his service branch to keep pace with China. However, when accounting for inflation, the current rate of growth is stagnant at best.
Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Va., is among those who have sounded the alarm and questioned the Pentagon’s seriousness about the growing China threat. She lamented the Navy's and Air Force's "divest to invest" strategies in which they will decommission older platforms to free up dollars for investment in newer equipment, albeit in fewer quantities. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, she laid out the detrimental effect this strategy will have on Air Force readiness: a "bare minimum" bomber force, a 40 percent decrease in ammunition procurement, and a 22 percent decrease in combat aircraft procurement. And she criticized the Navy’s plans to shelve 15 ships while only procuring two surface ships and two submarines, a drop in carrier-based fighter aircraft acquisition while speeding up aircraft retirements, and a general lack of focus on the Indo-Pacific.
A Fall 2020 simulated wargame exposed more concerns. In it, the Air Force successfully repelled a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. However, its success hinged on a critical assumption: that the Air Force had overcome fiscal and technological challenges to possess the mix of manned aircraft, drones, and networks needed to stop the Chinese military. This mix included systems that do not fit within the Department of Defense's budget. Fortunately, the results of the wargame will inform the Air Force's Fiscal Year 2023 budget request.
Lawmakers, pundits, and officials inside and out of the military have warned Americans about the growing threat from China. Now, the public has joined the discourse. They want a U.S. military that will be able to deter and defeat China's People's Liberation Army; the Defense Department needs the budget required to do it.
The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not reflect those of the U.S. Navy or Department of Defense.
Chet Lee is the 2021-2022 Navy Federal executive fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs' Lester Crown Center. He is a commander in the U.S. Navy.
9. Palantir CEO says companies working with U.S. adversaries should justify their position
Can and should corporations ethically justify their business decisions and actions?
Excerpts:
Apple's CEO Tim Cook recently responded to questions about operating in China. He said companies have a responsibility to do business everywhere they can during an interview with CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin at The New York Times DealBook online summit.
"I think that we have a responsibility as a business to do business in as many places as we can because I think business is this huge catalyst," Cook said. "I believe in what Tom Watson said 'world peace through world trade.' I have always believed that."
Palantir makes software and analytics tools primarily for the U.S. government and large corporations but has seen rising demand for its technology during the pandemic. In the third quarter, Palantir saw government revenue of $218 million.
Karp added that Palantir believes in "full disclosure" and companies should work wherever they can "ethically justify."
Palantir CEO says companies working with U.S. adversaries should justify their position
Technology companies doing business with China or U.S. adversaries need to justify their position, Palantir CEO Alex Karp told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Tuesday.
"If you want to work in China or in any other country that is adversarial … you should disclose it and defend it," he said.
Apple and many chip companies are among the major U.S. tech firms that continue to operate in China. The comments from Karp come as more tech companies pull out of the country amid harsher internet censorship.
Apple's CEO Tim Cook recently responded to questions about operating in China. He said companies have a responsibility to do business everywhere they can during an interview with CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin at The New York Times DealBook online summit.
"I think that we have a responsibility as a business to do business in as many places as we can because I think business is this huge catalyst," Cook said. "I believe in what Tom Watson said 'world peace through world trade.' I have always believed that."
Palantir makes software and analytics tools primarily for the U.S. government and large corporations but has seen rising demand for its technology during the pandemic. In the third quarter, Palantir saw government revenue of $218 million.
Karp added that Palantir believes in "full disclosure" and companies should work wherever they can "ethically justify."
10. A New Chinese National Security Bureaucracy Emerges
Conclusion:
China’s CNSC is not a standalone body like the U.S. National Security Council, but rather the highest echelon in a nationwide system that includes subordinate NSCs down to the county level. This supports an interpretation of the CNSC as an inward-looking body primarily focused on supervising management of domestic security [9]. The creation of an NSC system within the party’s organizational structure reinforces Xi’s dominance of the national security architecture and creates new mechanisms for information sharing and coordination within the party. Yet it is unclear that the NSCs will promote more effective crisis response by local party committees. This is because local leaders lack control of key assets, emergency planning is handled by the state, and incentives for local initiative appear low. For now, the “national security system” is a fruitful avenue for further research and deserves to be more fully analyzed as China’s leaders prepare for next year’s 20th Party Congress.
Early Warning Brief: A New Chinese National Security Bureaucracy Emerges
Introduction
An intriguing aspect of General Secretary Xi Jinping’s political consolidation was the establishment of a Central National Security Commission (CNSC; 中央国家安全委员会, Zhongyang guojia anquan weiyuanhui ) at the end of 2013. The CNSC seemingly empowered Xi, who was put in charge of the new body, and through a permanent staff structure, perhaps set the stage for more effective strategic planning and crisis response [1]. Over the last few years, subordinate National Security Commissions (NSCs) have been installed at all tiers of the party structure down to the county level. The CNSC thus sits atop a new organizational hierarchy that strengthens Xi’s ability to set the agenda and improves the party’s ability to coordinate national security affairs. While the system’s political utility for Xi is clear, its role in improving crisis response at the local level could be constrained by several factors.
Revisiting the CNSC
The CNSC fits into a larger construct known as the “national security system” (国家安全体系, Guojia anquan tixi) that has been developed during the Xi era to protect the party from domestic and foreign threats. The ideational core of the system is the “holistic national security concept” (总体国家安全观, zongti guojia anquan guan) that Xi outlined at the first CNSC meeting in April 2014 (Xinhua, 2014). The concept’s key characteristic is that the party cannot think of security in narrow, traditional terms (China Brief, 2015). Rather, the concept must be defined more broadly to encompass diverse areas such as cybersecurity, biosecurity, energy security, and counterterrorism, many of which involve interactions between domestic security and the outside world—Xi mentioned 11 areas in total. Other changes complemented the implementation of this emerging security system, including reforms to the People’s Armed Police (PAP), new laws on espionage, NGOs, and cybersecurity [2], and a formal “national security strategy” (国家安全战略, Guojia anquan zhanlüe). In November 2021, the Politburo deliberated the second such “strategy,” which will cover 2021-2015; an earlier document was approved in 2015 (Xinhua, 2021).
As the organizational face of the “national security system,” the CNSC was intended to improve high-level coordination of national security work. In the past, excessive bureaucratic stove-piping and limited information sharing constrained strategic planning and crisis response [3]. The CNSC would alleviate those problems by ensuring the involvement of Xi, who could presumably compel the bureaucracy to cooperate. This was accompanied by the establishment of a permanent CNSC staff in the Central Committee General Office, which is led by a top party official (previously Li Zhanshu and now Ding Xuexiang; the current deputy head has been reported as Minister of State Security Chen Wenqing) (The Paper, May 7). The staff also included representatives from civilian ministries and the military. The CNSC would thus be more cohesive than a previous ad-hoc National Security Leading Small Group set up in 2000 under Jiang Zemin [4].
The 19th Party Congress in October 2017 laid the basis for further developments by writing the “holistic national security concept” into the party’s platform and granting Xi another five-year term as party general-secretary (Xinhua, 2017). In April 2018, Xi once again addressed the CNSC, stating that the body had become the “main framework for the national security system” and a “coordination mechanism for national security work” under the party’s leadership (Xinhua, 2018). In a sign of impending changes, Xi also cited new regulations that “clarified the main responsibilities of party committees at all levels to strengthen supervision and inspection… to ensure that the central party’s decisions on national security work have been implemented” (Xinhua, 2018).
A Proliferation of NSCs
Xi’s invocation of “party committees at all levels” raised the question of how lower tiers of the party hierarchy would fit into the “national security system.” Answers came in early 2019 when subordinate NSCs began to appear throughout the party structure—provinces, prefectures, municipalities, city districts, and counties now all have NSCs within their party committees, forming a vertical system culminating in the CNSC (see example below).
Some details on the broader NSC system have come to light. Mirroring the CNSC, the lower level NSCs are chaired by the relevant party committee secretary, with deputy party secretaries (one of whom also serves as state administrative leader, such as governor or mayor) serving as NSC vice chairs. These officials sit on an NSC standing committee (常务委员会, Changwu weiyuanhui) while others are NSC “members” (委员, weiyuan). Like the CNSC, lower level NSCs are managed by “offices” (办公室, bangongshi) led by a director and deputy director. The NSC offices are one of several supporting the party committees, alongside foreign affairs, cyber security, military-civilian fusion, economic reform, and other offices, but NSC offices are unique in that they are located within the party committee general offices (办公厅, bangongting)[5]. This puts NSC offices at the center of the daily management of party affairs and underscoring the sensitivity of their duties [6].
Information from the provincial party committees suggests that the NSCs are meant to serve as “discussion and coordination organs” (议事协调结构, yishi jietao jiegou), replacing existing “national security leading small groups” (国家安全工作领导小组, guojia anquan gongzuo lingdao xiaozu) (information from the Shanxi provincial party committee is available at Shanxi Daily, October 29, 2018; information from the Anhui committee is at Discipline, Inspection and Supervision of Anhui). In order to facilitate discussion, the NSCs hold plenary meetings that are frequently publicized in local media. The first provincial plenaries were convened in March 2019, with city and county-level meetings held several months later. By February 2021, the Hunan provincial NSC had held its fourth plenum, indicating that these meetings occur about one or two times per year (Hunan Government, 2021). The timing indicates that CNSC plenaries take place first (with at least four having taken place since the 19th Party Congress, but only one that has been publicized), followed by provincial plenaries, and then lower-level meetings, each informing the agenda for the next session.
Political themes are a consistent feature of these plenums. Areas of focus include studying Xi’s speeches, such as his comments to recent Politburo study sessions focused on national security and his speeches to CNSC meetings; strengthening the “party’s centralized and unified leadership” over national security work (党对国家安全工作的集中统一领导, Dang dui guojia anquan gongzuo de jizhong tongyi lingdao); and, following the 19th Party Congress Work Report, emphasizing ideas such as the “holistic national security concept” and “political security” as a “fundamental task” for national security work at all levels (Xinhua, December 12, 2020; Jilin Ribao, April 24; Yunnan.cn, April 15). The NSCs thus reinforce Xi’s status at the apex of the system, guarantee that the central party’s priorities and views on the security environment are widely understood, and highlight the message that the party must ensure its own security, including through close supervision of security organs at all levels.
The plenums also allow leaders to discuss practical challenges. The span of issues covered in these meetings reflects the breadth of the “holistic national security concept,” including topics such as epidemic control, supply chain security, financial security (including government debt), industrial safety, network security, energy security, and preparations for major events, such as the Spring Festival or the party centennial. As noted in a Wenzhou City NSC meeting, the intent is to manage challenges so that “small things do not get out of the villages and big things do not get out of the townships” (小事不出村、大事不出镇, xiaoshi bu chu cun, dashi bu chu zhen) (Wenzhou Government, 2021). In some cases, the agenda also reflects local priorities, as with the Yunnan NSC’s discussions of cross-border criminal activity (Yunnan.cn, 2020).
How the lower-tier NSCs enhance coordination is less certain. At a minimum, the plenums provide opportunities for party leaders to listen to reports from national security-related party and state departments (though participant lists are typically not publicized) [7]. In April 2021, municipal NSC offices were also identified as working with other bureaucracies to implement National Security Education Days (国家安全教育日, guojia anquan jiaoyu ri), in one case involving education for party cadres and mass propaganda directed at the public (Government of Jincheng City, Shanxi, 2021). The NSC offices also likely schedule ad-hoc meetings for party leaders on national security issues and manage the flow of information to party leaders and to higher and lower level NSCs.
Complications
Installing new NSCs throughout the party structure helps strengthen central supervision, but does not grant local party officials more power or flexibility to respond to crises. Party committees do not supervise military and paramilitary forces, which often play a critical role in domestic emergency response. Moreover, large-scale crises are sometimes handled at the national level. For instance, the military took the lead in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and the July 2021 Zhengzhou flooding. Indeed, in December 2017, the party rescinded the ability of local officials to mobilize PAP units without securing permission from central authorities (Sina, 2017). Nevertheless, NSCs could still make a modest contribution to more effective crisis management by facilitating discussions between the party, military, and state departments. For instance, in July 2021, the Tibetan Military District commander participated in a Tibetan Autonomous Region NSC meeting which, among other things, touched on border security and social stability (Coqen County Government, 2021).
Crisis response remains primarily a function of the state, not the party or the NSC system. A 2018 State Council reform established a new Ministry of Emergency Management to consolidate various emergency response forces (Xinhua, 2018). China’s emergency response plans (应急预算, Yingji yusuan), many of which were updated in 2020 and 2021, suggest that local emergency management departments play a key role in handling different contingencies, such as fires, earthquakes, industrial accidents, and internal unrest [8]. For instance, Jiangxi province’s 2020 emergency plan for sudden geological disasters references an emergency command organ facilitated by the provincial emergency management office (江西应急厅, Jiangxi yingji ting) but says nothing of the provincial NSC (Jiangxi Government, 2020). Hence, the party may have strengthened its oversight, but the state continues to plan and execute national security work.
Finally, deference to the center could inhibit local initiative. The content of provincial and lower NSC plenaries suggests that party leaders look to Xi and the central party through the CNSC for guidance on what they should be doing and thinking. This engenders familiarity with national priorities throughout the party structure, but is less likely to lead to local officials using the NSCs to develop innovative solutions to vexing problems. It is possible that the NSCs could devolve into another forum focused on demonstrating fealty to Xi with little of practical value accomplished.
Conclusion
China’s CNSC is not a standalone body like the U.S. National Security Council, but rather the highest echelon in a nationwide system that includes subordinate NSCs down to the county level. This supports an interpretation of the CNSC as an inward-looking body primarily focused on supervising management of domestic security [9]. The creation of an NSC system within the party’s organizational structure reinforces Xi’s dominance of the national security architecture and creates new mechanisms for information sharing and coordination within the party. Yet it is unclear that the NSCs will promote more effective crisis response by local party committees. This is because local leaders lack control of key assets, emergency planning is handled by the state, and incentives for local initiative appear low. For now, the “national security system” is a fruitful avenue for further research and deserves to be more fully analyzed as China’s leaders prepare for next year’s 20th Party Congress.
Dr. Joel Wuthnow is a senior research fellow in the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs at the U.S. National Defense University. This piece reflects only the author’s views and not those of the National Defense University, Department of Defense, or U.S. government.
Notes
[1] See Joel Wuthnow, “China’s New ‘Black Box’: Prospects for the Central National Security Commission,” China Quarterly 232 (2017), 886-903; David M. Lampton, “Xi Jinping and the National Security Commission: Policy Coordination and Political Power,” Journal of Contemporary China 24:95 (2015), 759-777; and You Ji, “China’s National Security Commission: Theory, Evolution, and Operations,” Journal of Contemporary China 25:98 (2016), 178-196.
[2] For recent analysis of the “national security system,” see Tai Ming Cheung, “The Chinese National Security State Emerges from the Shadows to Center Stage,” China Leadership Monitor, September 1, 2020, https://www.prcleader.org/cheung; and Sheena Chestnut Greitens, “Domestic Security in China under Xi Jinping,” China Leadership Monitor, March 1, 2019, https://www.prcleader.org/greitens.
[3] Wuthnow, “China’s New ‘Black Box’”; and Andrew S. Erickson and Adam P. Liff, “Installing a Safety on the ‘Loaded Gun’? China’s Institutional Reforms, National Security Commission, and Sino-Japanese Crisis (In)Stability,” Journal of Contemporary China 25:98 (2016), 197-215.
[4] The National Security Leading Small Group had the same membership as an older Foreign Affairs Leading Small Group. This latter group continued to exist following the creation of the CNSC until it was replaced by a Central Foreign Affairs Work Commission in 2018.
[6] It appears that the General Office directors serve concurrently as NSC office director. Ding Xuexing plays this role at the CNSC level.
[8] For background on these plans, see Catherine Welch, “Civilian Authorities and Contingency Planning in China,” in Andrew Scobell et al., eds., The People’s Liberation Army and Contingency Planning in China (Washington, DC: NDU Press, 2015), 85-106.
[9] For an excellent analysis, Sheena Chestnut Greitens, “Prepared Testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee,” June 8, 2021, 1-4.
11. Xi’s Confidence Game: Beijing’s Actions Show Determination, not Insecurity
Excerpts:
Given this reality, there are clear limits to what the United States can do to shape China’s trajectory. Pressure on Beijing to make domestic reforms will yield little. The party elite have concluded that their political system has been largely optimized to face the country’s growing challenges, and the events of the past several years have only confirmed for Xi that a rigorously party-guided economic system is the only path to achieve socialist modernization by 2035.
But the United States does have significant leverage in shaping the strategic environment in the Indo-Pacific. Xi will likely emerge supercharged from next year’s 20th Party Congress, and it is easy to predict that his multiyear pause from major state visits abroad will end with a diplomatic blitz around the region. Washington can blunt the effectiveness of this push by immediately applying to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), the trade agreement that emerged after U.S. President Donald Trump walked away from an earlier iteration. Such a move would require real political guts, but it would also bring immediate and long-lasting strategic benefits.
The United States should also work to expand the Quad—its partnership with Australia, India, and Japan—to include a wider range of security and economic activities. A Quad leaders’ summit timed for just after the 20th Party Congress would deny Xi some of his post-congress glow. AUKUS should fulfill its stated mission by expanding to include additional partners, preferably non–Anglo Saxon nations, Japan being the most important, that represent the future leadership of the Indo-Pacific. Of course, no strategy on China can exist if the U.S. homeland is weak and divided. Any and all efforts to strengthen the fundamental resiliency of the United States are a blow to Xi’s view that China’s political system can bury liberal democracies.
Xi’s sense of urgency and focus, built on a perception of domestic strength and fleeting opportunity, have proven to be his most important assets. For now, the United States still possesses a sizeable aggregate advantage over China in military, diplomatic, and economic strength. But unless U.S. policymakers and analysts develop their own sense of urgency and focus based on an accurate assessment of China’s strengths and capabilities, that lead may not last.
Xi’s Confidence Game
Beijing’s Actions Show Determination, not Insecurity
November 23, 2021
In recent months and weeks, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has displayed a growing sense of urgency. He has launched an unprecedented crackdown on domestic technology giants, stepped up military activities in the Taiwan Strait, and bullied countries that have crossed Beijing’s shifting redlines. Some analysts and experts argue that this behavior marks an increasingly desperate leader trying to stave off the country’s all-but-inevitable decline, perhaps even the coming collapse of Communist Party rule.
Yet if Xi is feeling truly anxious about his grip on power, he’s doing a remarkably effective job of hiding it. Despite far-reaching domestic challenges, the Chinese leader exudes confidence about China’s political system, its position vis-à-vis the United States, and the long-term stability of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Xi has also eradicated all possible opposition within the regime, as evidenced at this month’s Sixth Plenum of the party’s Central Committee, where a bold “history resolution” enshrined his political position alongside Mao Zedong, all but guaranteeing him a third term in power at next year’s 20th Party Congress.
Rather than reflecting insecurity, Xi’s recent impatience is better understood as driven by the view that China has a temporary window to address domestic headwinds and bolster its position and power in the international order. It is not fear of the party’s collapse that motivates him but a determination to see China claim its rightful global position at a time when it increasingly has the economic and military resources to do so. If China is to become a “modern socialist nation” by 2035, Xi believes bold action must be taken now.
This is not to say that the path forward for Xi or the party will be smooth. Far from it. Just as collapse is unlikely in the near term, so too is a seamless path to superpower status. China faces significant legacy and emerging challenges, many of which will be exacerbated by Xi’s tightening grip on power and his overconfidence in his ability to shape the country’s future.
But understanding Xi as determined rather than desperate has enormous implications for the United States’ approach to the bilateral relationship. Beijing’s recent moves suggest genuine self-assurance and yes, in some measure, even self-delusion. Like it or not, though, the United States and its allies should expect to deal with a confident China led by Xi for the foreseeable future.
The “Collapsing China” Syndrome
Since the death of Mao nearly 50 years ago, the track record of U.S. assessments of China’s capabilities and intentions has been poor. Following the Great Helmsman’s demise in 1976, many American observers expected the CCP regime to collapse. It did not. The June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square crackdown, followed by the demise of the Soviet Union less than two years later, convinced some of the most eminent China specialists that the end was nigh for the CCP. Yet within just a few years, China’s economy was growing at double digits. After the global financial crisis in 2008, many analysts depicted the party as having perfected a new model of governance and economic management, one capable of impressive feats of long-term planning and strategic calculation. Yet these estimates also proved to be overstated, as the recent turmoil surrounding the Chinese technology and real estate sectors have shown.
Now, some have resurrected the view that the party’s days are numbered. According to the new doomsayers, a rapidly aging population combined with growing debt, a retreat from market reforms, and growing international pushback will soon cause China to stall. As Michael Beckley and Hal Brands argued recently in Foreign Affairs, “China is tracing an arc that often ends in tragedy: a dizzying rise followed by the specter of a hard fall.”
But this latest iteration of the “China decline” argument suffers from the same basic shortcoming as previous versions: Beijing’s perceived weaknesses are not weighed against its potential and actual strengths. In the same way that a company cannot be judged by looking at only one side of its balance sheet, so, too, are assessments of China’s vulnerabilities incomplete without factoring in the tools and resources the country can throw at them.
Beijing no longer sees low growth as a threat to stability.
When the well-known list of problems—from debt to demographics—are viewed more closely, they portend a slowing economy, not a collapsing one. For example, China’s efforts to rein in its real estate sector will be complicated and potentially disruptive, as the unraveling of the giant property developer Evergrande has shown. Yet it is already clear that this is not China’s “Lehman Brothers moment.” Although the country’s aggregate debt continues to rise in nominal terms, it is largely denominated in the local currency, and the balance sheets of the major banks remain strong. Debt certainly matters, and China’s economy appears to be increasingly under strain, but a more realistic assessment suggests deceleration, not disintegration.
Similarly, the social and economic effects of China’s aging population are more complicated than they appear. The demographic picture is indeed bleak: some recent predictions suggest that China’s population will peak as soon as 2025, and the Chinese government itself has predicted that the country will lose 35 million workers in the next five years. Aware of the implications, Beijing has belatedly initiated a panoply of reforms, from long-overdue liberalizations to its draconian population control policies to increased investments in technology that it hopes will blunt the impact of a shrinking workforce. Without a doubt, these actions have come far too late, and China’s demographic outlook is unlikely to change anytime soon. Unless Beijing is able to find new sources of productivity to compensate for a graying and shrinking workforce, growth will suffer. But this is largely a long-term dynamic rather than a short-term one.
What is more, Beijing no longer sees low growth as a threat to social and political stability, as was the case for most of the 1990s and the early years of this century. For one thing, at a time when the country had a surge of new workers entering the labor force, it was imperative to maintain rapid growth. With fewer workers, however, the country doesn’t need breakneck growth. This shift was reflected in the official rhetoric of the 19th Party Congress in 2017, which stressed that, henceforth, the quality of growth would matter more than its quantity. As the recent history resolution at the Sixth Plenum put it, GDP growth is no longer “the sole yardstick of success for development.”
Effective Authoritarianism
Perhaps the most effective tool Beijing has in its management of the country is its ability to achieve rapid results via targeted political, ideological, and regulatory campaigns. By ruling by authoritarian fiat, the party can mobilize and channel resources with remarkable speed. Such an approach may disregard the rights and freedoms of Chinese citizens and almost always creates vast amounts of waste. Yet time and again, the CCP has been able to surmount a difficult challenge simply by unleashing the full force of the party-state. During the COVID-19 outbreak, for example, despite initial bungling, Xi ordered a “whole of society” effort that not only kept deaths to a minimum but also helped engineer a rapid economic recovery by the end of 2020, even as the rest of the global economy languished. Campaigns often come at the expense of structural reforms, but their frequent, if temporary, success should not be discounted when assessing the resiliency of the regime.
Even if one remains skeptical of the results of CCP rule, it is clear that Chinese policymaking circles view the country’s unique political system not as a source of weakness but rather with increasing pride when compared with the United States and other democracies. When senior officials declare “the East is rising, the West is declining,” this is both propaganda and their actual assessment. Yes, problems in China’s system abound, and Beijing is worryingly underestimating the resiliency of American democracy. But it is hard to deny that the CCP in 2021 has been stronger, more capable, and in command of more resources than at any other time in its 100-year history.
Many predictions of the CCP’s decline rest on the view that the party faces growing disaffection within China itself. Among the indications of this are the vast amount of resources Beijing expends on internal security, including its repressive policies in Xinjiang and Tibet and the sweeping system of state surveillance that now exists in almost every Chinese city and town. The party’s increasing sensitivity to any perceived slight has also led some to argue that were it not for its monopoly on violence, the party’s hold on power would crumble. Of course, any attempt to assess popular opinion in an authoritarian system is difficult and imperfect even when polling and survey data exist. But the limited evidence that does exist belies such claims.
Power Without Control
After decades of unimpeded economic and military development, Beijing has reached an inflection point. To maintain stability and prosperity in the decade ahead, the party will have to make a significant shift in its growth model and learn to maneuver in an increasingly hostile global order. China will confront difficult, even painful, strategic tradeoffs—between, for example, increased social spending as a result of a demographic graying and its ongoing military modernization—that it has until now been able to avoid.
Obsessed with avoiding the fate of the Soviet Union, Xi likely sees the continuation of his own rule as critical for dealing with these challenges. Unlike his immediate predecessors, who were limited to two terms, Xi is preparing to extend his rule for years to come. At the recent party plenum, Xi’s status within the party was elevated yet again, with the official rewriting of China’s communist history to position him as the country’s modern savior, laying the foundation for a certain third term as party leader after next fall’s 20th Party Congress.
Xi’s accumulation of power is, of course, not without controversy. His totalitarian impulses have led to increased, if low-key, grumbling even within the party. His cultural policies, which include purifying entertainment content and enforcing traditional notions of masculinity, sit uneasily with a population that is increasingly exposed to and connected with the outside world. And his growing intervention in the economy has caused frustration and concern in the Chinese business community, as large companies such as Alibaba and Tencent have come under intense political scrutiny. Xi’s actions to crush political opposition and civil society in Hong Kong have induced significant anxiety in the region, including in Taiwan, where polls demonstrate almost no desire for unification under the “one country, two systems” framework that Xi has proposed.
China will confront tradeoffs that it has avoided until now.
But Xi has built a power structure around him in which any challenge to his authority would be extremely difficult to mount. A lifelong student of elite party politics, Xi knows firsthand that China’s political system is a blood sport that demands constant displays of power and domination. It is thus no surprise that his anticorruption campaign continues to steam along, an omnipresent reminder to all party cadres that the feared investigation squads of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection might well knock on their door if they don’t toe the official line.
But even if his own position remains unchallenged, Xi’s blueprint to transform China into a modern socialist nation by 2035 is far from assured. The domestic response to his policy agenda, the fundamental laws of economics, and the reaction of the global community will arguably shape China’s future as much if not more than Xi’s paper aspirations. Xi may be in power, but he’s not in control. This is a lesson all dictators learn at some point.
Perhaps more important, Xi’s unchecked determination and growing sense of urgency is leading Beijing to adopt actions and policies that are clearly working against China’s long-term interests. Pressure campaigns against Australia and Taiwan are not in fact cowing the local populations but rather instilling resolve. In reaction to Xi’s increasingly aggressive approach to other countries and his crackdown on Hong Kong, the United Kingdom has gone from a “golden era” of bilateral relations with China to a more hardened posture, as evidenced by the recent Australia–United Kingdom–United States (AUKUS) security pact. Similarly, relations with India have entered a new and more hostile period after violent skirmishes along the Chinese-Indian border. Indeed, there seems to be a direct correlation between the amount of authority Xi has over foreign policy and the number of international setbacks China faces.
The New Confidence Game
If the United States wants to forge an effective and enduring approach to its China policy, analysts and policymakers must begin with an accurate, objective assessment of China’s national power. Underestimating the party’s resiliency will lead to unrealistic expectations of how much the United States can shape China’s domestic environment. Overestimating the CCP’s strength distorts priorities and leads to the misallocation of scarce strategic resources. Neither “collapsing China” nor the opposite, “indomitable China,” is a good starting position for developing a strategy. Over the next decade, even with a decelerating growth rate and in the face of rising international skepticism, China will likely continue to be a powerful actor on the global stage.
Given this reality, there are clear limits to what the United States can do to shape China’s trajectory. Pressure on Beijing to make domestic reforms will yield little. The party elite have concluded that their political system has been largely optimized to face the country’s growing challenges, and the events of the past several years have only confirmed for Xi that a rigorously party-guided economic system is the only path to achieve socialist modernization by 2035.
But the United States does have significant leverage in shaping the strategic environment in the Indo-Pacific. Xi will likely emerge supercharged from next year’s 20th Party Congress, and it is easy to predict that his multiyear pause from major state visits abroad will end with a diplomatic blitz around the region. Washington can blunt the effectiveness of this push by immediately applying to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), the trade agreement that emerged after U.S. President Donald Trump walked away from an earlier iteration. Such a move would require real political guts, but it would also bring immediate and long-lasting strategic benefits.
The United States should also work to expand the Quad—its partnership with Australia, India, and Japan—to include a wider range of security and economic activities. A Quad leaders’ summit timed for just after the 20th Party Congress would deny Xi some of his post-congress glow. AUKUS should fulfill its stated mission by expanding to include additional partners, preferably non–Anglo Saxon nations, Japan being the most important, that represent the future leadership of the Indo-Pacific. Of course, no strategy on China can exist if the U.S. homeland is weak and divided. Any and all efforts to strengthen the fundamental resiliency of the United States are a blow to Xi’s view that China’s political system can bury liberal democracies.
Xi’s sense of urgency and focus, built on a perception of domestic strength and fleeting opportunity, have proven to be his most important assets. For now, the United States still possesses a sizeable aggregate advantage over China in military, diplomatic, and economic strength. But unless U.S. policymakers and analysts develop their own sense of urgency and focus based on an accurate assessment of China’s strengths and capabilities, that lead may not last.
12. Who’s afraid of China’s nukes?
"Minimum deterrence requires a higher minimum"
Excerpts:
I’m not a math guy, but even if China sought nuclear superiority it couldn’t credibly reach it anytime soon. Or even anytime not soon. And there’s no corroborating evidence to indicate this is what China’s doing anyway.
An even crazier alt-hypothesis would be that China’s beefing up its nuclear arsenal to take on India. It’s true they’ve got an unresolved territorial dispute in the Himalayas, and it’s true that India’s got nukes too.
But India has only something like 165 nuclear weapons, giving China a healthy margin of nuclear superiority without making any further changes. So that doesn’t make sense, does it?
For now, then, logic dictates that Fravel and Cunningham are probably right – China has looked into the abyss that is American militarism and decided that minimum deterrence requires a higher minimum.
But that doesn’t make any of this stuff a sign of impending attack, and it doesn’t necessarily speak to China’s strategic intentions either. It speaks to the inescapable reality of mutual vulnerability. And that suggests maybe there’s nothing for the United States to gain from plowing money into nukes.
In order to reach this tentative conclusion though, you have to stomach the kind of analysis that American exceptionalism has proven it just can’t abide.
Who’s afraid of China’s nukes?
China has looked into the abyss of American militarism and decided minimum deterrence requires a higher minimum
In 1932, John Chamberlain lamented “the unwillingness of the liberal to continue with analysis once the process of analysis had become uncomfortable.” He was critiquing the way Wilsonian liberals drifted into World War One.
Socialists and reformist progressives had thought seriously about both the causes of the war and the realistic consequences for American democracy if the nation opted in. Liberals, he charged, couldn’t stomach such analysis and instead idealized the upside of succumbing to war fever.
I think about Chamberlain’s quote a lot because America has a habit of making (and making worse) what it fears. Why? Because security experts often have shallow or poorly thought through theories underneath their foreign policy advocacy.
The interest of the national security crowd is in examining symptoms, not deeper causes. They can’t stomach the wider frame on current events. They can’t countenance the policy implications of root-cause analysis. That is, they can’t stand the possibility that America’s choices undesirably affect the behavior of its rivals.
I recently wrote about this problem in the context of US Asia policy for Foreign Affairs, which angered some people who really like missiles and really loathe China. But something I didn’t have space to talk through adequately in that piece was how the defense community is responding to China’s nuclear modernization in unhelpful ways.
If you’re not tracking the issue, China has been rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal after decades of being seemingly complacent with a posture of “minimum deterrence“—that is, just enough nuclear weapons to ensure they can retaliate if attacked (and therefore deter nuclear use by an adversary).
Beyond their minimum deterrence role, China’s nukes have historically served little purpose. China has long sworn by a no-first-use nuclear posture (though naturally most security pundits don’t believe it), avoided putting nuclear weapons on alert and rarely bandied about nuclear threats.
Yet, this year, China tested a hypersonic missile with a fractal orbital bombardment system (FOBS) – a capability that could potentially get past all US and ally missile defenses and early-warning radars.
It’s also come to light that China has built more than 200 silos to house intercontinental ballistic missiles. If they all contained warheads (they currently don’t, as far as we know), then the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) would have upwards of 350 nuclear weapons.
There’s a debate in China now about whether it ought to alter its no-first-use posture toward the United States. And the Pentagon’s latest China Military Power Report estimated that at its current pace, China could double its nuclear arsenal by 2027, and have 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030. In contrast with previous decades, this is a lot of change, and fast.
The problem though isn’t that China’s modernizing its arsenal; it’s the wild-eyed way too many folks are reacting to it. In a sane world, to determine how to respond to something like this, you’d have to have a working theory that explains why the PLA is doing it.
China’s DF-41 nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missiles at a military parade on Tiananmen Square in Beijing on October 1, 2019. Photo: AFP / Greg Baker / Getty Images
But because China’s nuclear expansion is happening in a context of ongoing rivalry, there’s a whole lot of fear-mongering and hyperbole going on. The kind that encourages us to think and act in irresponsible, self-harming ways because we can’t stomach the idea that China’s doing nuclear things we find threatening in direct response to our own nuclear largesse.
Take one embarrassing example that goes by the name of US Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM). They called China’s expansion a “strategic breakout” that’s “explosive” and “breathtaking.”
A couple of months back when the silos were first revealed, USSTRATCOM public affairs tweeted away any ambiguity or analytical humility in favor of confirmation bias: “The public has discovered what we’ve been saying all along about the growing threat the world faces and the veil of secrecy that surrounds it.”
Ok, Tom Clancy. Can you prove anything about Chinese intentions because of this discovery? No. Can you even stitch together a transparent line of reasoning about it? No. You can only inflate. The. THREAT. (Cue ominous music.)
There are sober analysts out there, like M Taylor Fravel and Fiona Cunningham, who are not willing to jump to conclusions and are instead fashioning working hypotheses to serve as most-likely explanations for China’s nuclear shift.
Their best assessment at the moment: “Chinese leaders believe that they now need to threaten the United States with greater nuclear damage to deter a US nuclear first strike: a handful of warheads is no longer enough.”
This makes sense. China’s leadership just watched a madman approve budgets for a trillion-plus dollars of US nuclear modernization. The same madman who made gratuitous threats of “fire and fury” against another nuclear state (North Korea).
And this madman was sitting atop a nuclear arsenal several times the size of China’s capabilities. US nuclear superiority + US brinkmanship posturing + more than a trillion dollars of further US nuclear modernization = oh crap. Faced with that problem set, I’d be rethinking how to achieve minimum deterrence too.
But for the sake of rigor, what are the competing hypotheses that might account for China’s nuclear modernization?
Well, China could be seeking a bolt-from-the-blue first-strike nuclear capability. But China doesn’t benefit from nuking the US first when it already has an assured retaliation capability, and if it really wanted to launch a surprise attack it could do that with its current arsenal. That’s not a smart play, and therefore it’s unlikely to be why China’s modernizing in the way it currently is.
Alternatively, China could be trying to achieve nuclear superiority itself. Seeing as how nuclear superiority has enabled us to threaten others with impunity (though not to any great effect), the PLA might be trying to overtake the United States.
But, wait, what? The upper estimate of China’s nuclear arsenal in 2030 – if it keeps building out at breakneck speed – is 1,000 nukes. The United States has some 3,750 nuclear warheads.
India’s Agni III missile is seen during the Republic Day parade in New Delhi on January 26, 2008. Photo: Agencies
I’m not a math guy, but even if China sought nuclear superiority it couldn’t credibly reach it anytime soon. Or even anytime not soon. And there’s no corroborating evidence to indicate this is what China’s doing anyway.
An even crazier alt-hypothesis would be that China’s beefing up its nuclear arsenal to take on India. It’s true they’ve got an unresolved territorial dispute in the Himalayas, and it’s true that India’s got nukes too.
But India has only something like 165 nuclear weapons, giving China a healthy margin of nuclear superiority without making any further changes. So that doesn’t make sense, does it?
For now, then, logic dictates that Fravel and Cunningham are probably right – China has looked into the abyss that is American militarism and decided that minimum deterrence requires a higher minimum.
But that doesn’t make any of this stuff a sign of impending attack, and it doesn’t necessarily speak to China’s strategic intentions either. It speaks to the inescapable reality of mutual vulnerability. And that suggests maybe there’s nothing for the United States to gain from plowing money into nukes.
In order to reach this tentative conclusion though, you have to stomach the kind of analysis that American exceptionalism has proven it just can’t abide.
Van Jackson is a professor of international relations at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and a think-tanker at various places around the world: a distinguished fellow at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada; an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security; a senior associate fellow at the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Nonproliferation & Disarmament (APLN); and the defense & strategy fellow at the Centre for Strategic Studies in New Zealand. He also hosts the Un-Diplomatic Podcast. This article was first published by the Duck of Minerva.
13. Peng Shuai: Human Rights Watch accuses IOC of sportswashing in case of Chinese tennis star
I wonder when we are going to look hard at the IOC - from questionable selection processes to trying to mitigate or minimize the effect of human rights issues. Is it the organization or is it the people in he organization?
Peng Shuai: Human Rights Watch accuses IOC of sportswashing in case of Chinese tennis star
CNN · by Rob Iddiols and Duarte Mendonca, CNN
(CNN)Human Rights Watch (HRW) has accused the International Olympic Committee (IOC) of sportswashing serious human rights violations in the case of Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai.
During a virtual press conference Tuesday, HRW China Director Sophie Richardson denounced the IOC's role in collaborating with Chinese authorities on Peng Shuai's reappearance.
"In 2008 we were hopeful that they [the IOC] would show some spine and oblige Chinese authorities to live up to some basic promises," said Richardson, referring to when China first staged the Olympic Games.
"I almost think fondly back to those days because, if nothing else, the IOC has shown in the last few days just how desperate it is to keep a Games on the rails no matter the human cost," added Richardson, referring to next year's Beijing Winter Olympics. Beijing is the first city to host both the Summer and Winter Games.
On Sunday, the IOC said in a statement that its president, Thomas Bach, had a 30-minute video call with three-time Olympian Peng Shuai, joined by a Chinese sports official and an IOC official.
Read More
The statement said that, during the call, Peng appeared to be "doing fine" and "relaxed," and said she "would like to have her privacy respected." The IOC did not explain how the video call with Peng had been organized.
Peng Shuai is pictured in action in her women's singles first-round match against Nao Hibino of Japan on day two of the 2020 Australian Open at Melbourne Park.
'Big surprise'
HRW also suggested the IOC should have done more to protect the Chinese Olympian athlete.
"it's a whole different order of magnitude to see Thomas Bach, in a photograph with a woman, Peng Shuai, under intense pressure, we can reasonably assume from other cases, to walk back her claims of sexual assault, rather than figuring doing everything in his and the organization's power to call that out and make sure that she is afforded the support and investigation and prosecution that may well be warranted," Richardson said.
In response, the IOC told CNN that the "Olympic Games are the only event that brings the entire world together in peaceful competition." "They are the most powerful symbol of unity in all our diversity that the world knows," said the IOC statement.
"In our fragile world, the power of sport to bring the whole world together, despite all the existing differences, gives us all hope for a better future.
"Given the diverse participation in the Olympic Games, the IOC must remain neutral on all global political issues.
"At all times, the IOC recognises and upholds human rights as enshrined in both the Fundamental Principles of the Olympic Charter and in its Code of Ethics.
"We are responsible for ensuring the respect of the Olympic Charter with regard to the Olympic Games and take this responsibility very seriously.
"All interested parties have to provide assurances that the principles of the Olympic Charter will be respected in the context of the Games, and both the Japanese and Chinese organisers have done so for the recent Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 and upcoming Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022."
Ability to report in China
Concerns were raised during the HRW press conference regarding the ability to report in China and how that could impact Peng's ongoing situation.
"It is very hard to report on what is happening in China," the Director of Global Initiatives for Human Rights Watch, Minky Worden, said.
"Chinese officials are blocking not just a United Nations backed investigation into human rights violations, but also the journalists the world relies on to reveal new abuses.
"So, it was a big surprise on Sunday to see the International Olympic Committee president and senior officials interview Chinese three time Olympian and former world number one doubles tennis player Peng Shuai by video," Worden added.
Peng, 35, went missing on November 2 after she said on Chinese social media that she had been sexually assaulted and forced into a sexual relationship with Zhang Gaoli, 75, who was China's vice premier from 2013 to 2018.
Sportswashing: What is it and who practice it? 02:32
The allegations were censored in mainland China. CNN's broadcast signal was also censored during Peng reporting.
Earlier on Tuesday, China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the government hoped "malicious speculation" about Peng's well-being and whereabouts would stop, and that her case should not be politicized.
Zhao Lijian, spokesperson for China's foreign ministry, declined to comment on whether the Chinese government will launch an investigation into Peng's sexual assault allegations against former Vice Premier Zhang. He repeated previous comments made to reporters, saying Peng's situation "was not a diplomatic issue."
Peng, a two-time grand slam doubles champion and one of China's top tennis players, publicly accused Zhang of coercing her into sex at his home, according to screenshots of a since-deleted social media post dated November 2.
Her disappearance from public life for more than two weeks following the accusation prompted an outpouring of international concern, with the Women's Tennis Association and the United Nations calling for an investigation into her allegations of sexual assault.
CNN · by Rob Iddiols and Duarte Mendonca, CNN
14. Why China Can’t Bury Peng Shuai and Its #MeToo Scandal
Excerpts:
The subject of Ms. Peng’s sexual assault allegation, Mr. Zhang, was one of the Communist Party’s most powerful officials before he retired. The party sees criticism of a top leader as a direct attack on the whole organization, so it won’t repeat her allegation. As a result, the state media journalists who are trying to argue that Ms. Peng is fine can’t even refer to it directly.
“I don’t believe Ms. Peng has received retaliation and repression speculated by foreign media for the thing people talked about,” Hu Xijin, editor of the Global Times.Credit...Giulia Marchi for The New York Times
For Hu Xijin, the editor of the nationalist Global Times tabloid, the allegation against Mr. Zhang has become “the thing.” “I don’t believe Peng Shuai has received retaliation and repression speculated by foreign media for the thing people talked about,” he wrote on Twitter.
Mr. Zhang can’t even be discussed online in China. Those who do call him “kimchi” because his given name sounds like the name of an ancient Korean dynasty.
If Mr. Hu, China’s spin master, could speak more plainly, and if the Chinese people had the freedom to discuss Ms. Peng and her allegation, official media might understand how to build a narrative. Instead, Mr. Hu alternates between trying to change the conversation and trying to shut it down completely.
“For those who truly care about safety of Peng Shuai, her appearances of these days are enough to relieve them or eliminate most of their worries,” he wrote. “But for those aiming to attack China’s system and boycott the Beijing Winter Olympics, facts, no matter how many, don’t work for them.”
Why China Can’t Bury Peng Shuai and Its #MeToo Scandal
The New New World
Accustomed to forcing messages on audiences at home and abroad, its propaganda machine hasn’t learned how to craft a narrative that stands up to scrutiny.
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Chinese state media and its journalists produced one piece of evidence after another to prove that Peng Shuai is safe and free. The world still doesn’t believe it. Credit...Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters
By
Nov. 23, 2021
The Chinese government has become extremely effective in controlling what the country’s 1.4 billion people think and talk about.
But influencing the rest of the world is a different matter, as Peng Shuai has aptly demonstrated.
Chinese state media and its journalists have offered one piece of evidence after another to prove the star Chinese tennis player was safe and sound despite her public accusation of sexual assault against a powerful former vice premier.
One Beijing-controlled outlet claimed it had obtained an email she wrote in which she denied the accusations. Another offered up a video of Ms. Peng at a dinner, in which she and her companions rather conspicuously discussed the date to prove that it was recorded this past weekend.
The international outcry grew only louder. Instead of persuading the world, China’s ham-handed response has become a textbook example of its inability to communicate with an audience that it can’t control through censorship and coercion.
The ruling Communist Party communicates through one-way, top-down messaging. It seems to have a hard time understanding that persuasive narratives must be backed by facts and verified by credible, independent sources.
In its official comments, China’s foreign ministry has mostly dodged questions about Ms. Peng, claiming first to be unaware of the matter, then that the topic fell outside its purview. On Tuesday, Zhao Lijian, a spokesman, leaned on a familiar tactic: questioning the motives behind the coverage of Ms. Peng’s allegations. “I hope certain people will stop malicious hype, not to mention to politicize it,” he told reporters.
China has grown more sophisticated in recent years at using the power of the internet to advance a more positive, less critical narrative — an effort that appears to work from time to time. But at its heart, China’s propaganda machine still believes the best way to make problems disappear is to shout down the other side. It can also threaten to close off access to its vast market and booming economy to silence companies and governments that don’t buy its line.
“Messages like these are meant as a demonstration of power: ‘We are telling you that she is fine, and who are you to say otherwise?’” Mareike Ohlberg, a fellow at the German Marshall Fund, a research institute, wrote on Twitter. “It’s not meant to convince people but to intimidate and demonstrate the power of the state.”
Xi Jinping, right, China’s top leader, has tightened limits on relatively independent media outlets and critical online voices.
China has a history of less-than-believable testimonials. A jailed prominent lawyer denounced her son on state television for fleeing the country. A Hong Kong bookstore manager who was detained for selling books about the private lives of Chinese leaders said after his release that he had to make a dozen recorded confessions before his captors were satisfied.
This time, the world of women’s tennis isn’t playing along and has suggested it will stop holding events in China until it is sure Ms. Peng is truly free of government control. The biggest names in tennis — Serena Williams, Naomi Osaka and Novak Djokovic, among many others — don’t seem to be afraid to lose access to a potential market of 1.4 billion tennis fans, either. The pushback is problematic because the Winter Olympics in Beijing are just weeks away from opening.
The country’s huge army of propagandists has failed the expectations of its top leader, Xi Jinping, that it take control of the global narrative about China. But it shouldn’t take all the blame: The failure is ingrained in the controlling nature of China’s authoritarian system.
“It can make Peng Shuai play any role, including putting up a show of being free,” Pin Ho, a New York-based media businessman, wrote on Twitter. For Chinese officials in charge of crisis management, he continued, such control is routine. “But for the free world,” he said, “this is even more frightening than forced confessions.”
One of the biggest giveaways that Ms. Peng isn’t free to speak her mind is that her name remains censored on the Chinese internet.
“As long as coverages about her inside and outside China are different, she’s not speaking freely,” said Rose Luqiu, an assistant professor of journalism at the Hong Kong Baptist University.
Ms. Peng appeared in a live video call with the president of the International Olympic Committee and other officials within the organization. But women’s tennis officials still have their doubts.
Despite the outpouring of concern about Ms. Peng’s well-being on Twitter and other online platforms that are blocked in China, the Chinese public has little knowledge of the discussions.
Late Friday, as the momentum of the hashtag #whereispengshuai was building on Twitter, I couldn’t find any discussion of the question on Chinese social media. Still, Ms. Peng had clearly caught the attention of politically observant Chinese. I messaged a friend in Beijing who was usually on top of hot topics and asked generally, in coded words, if she had heard about a huge campaign to find someone. “PS?” the friend guessed, using Ms. Peng’s initials.
It’s hard to estimate how many Chinese people learned about Ms. Peng’s allegation, which she detailed in a post on Chinese social media this month. Her post — which named Zhang Gaoli, a former top Communist Party leader, as her assailant — was deleted within minutes. One Weibo social media user asked in a comment whether saving a screenshot of Ms. Peng’s post was incriminating. Another Weibo user, in a comment, described being too scared to share the post.
They have good reasons to be afraid. Beijing has made it easier to detain or charge people for what they say online. Many people get their social media accounts deleted for simply sharing content that the censors deemed inappropriate, including #MeToo-related content.
Ms. Peng accused Zhang Gaoli, a former vice premier and top Communist Party leader, of sexual assault in a social media post.Credit...How Hwee Young/European Pressphoto Agency
China has been bitter about its poor image in the Western mainstream news media and has talked for years about taking control of the narrative. Mr. Xi said he hoped the country would have the capacity to shape a global narrative that’s compatible with its rising status in the world. “Tell the China story well,” he instructed. “Create a credible, lovable and respectable image of China.”
Official media has raised the suggestion that Covid-19 emerged from a lab in the United States and spread the unproven allegation on Facebook and Twitter. China released thousands of videos on YouTube and other Western platforms in which Uyghurs said they were “very free” and “very happy” while the Communist Party was carrying out repressive policies against them and other Muslim ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region.
In reality, China is less respected, and its narratives less credible, since Mr. Xi took power nine years ago. He cracked down on relatively independent media outlets and eliminated critical online voices within the country. He unleashed diplomats and nationalistic youths who would roar back any hint of criticism or belittlement.
“There are three things that are inevitable in life: life, death and humiliating China,” a reader commented on a recent column of mine.
Despite China’s relatively fast economic growth and relatively competent response to the pandemic, the country’s deteriorating human rights record and its uncompromising international stance are not helping its image. The negative views of China in the vast majority of the world’s advanced economies reached a historic high last year, according to the Pew Research Center.
China can’t respond to the questions about Ms. Peng effectively because it can’t even address the problem directly.
The subject of Ms. Peng’s sexual assault allegation, Mr. Zhang, was one of the Communist Party’s most powerful officials before he retired. The party sees criticism of a top leader as a direct attack on the whole organization, so it won’t repeat her allegation. As a result, the state media journalists who are trying to argue that Ms. Peng is fine can’t even refer to it directly.
“I don’t believe Ms. Peng has received retaliation and repression speculated by foreign media for the thing people talked about,” Hu Xijin, editor of the Global Times.Credit...Giulia Marchi for The New York Times
For Hu Xijin, the editor of the nationalist Global Times tabloid, the allegation against Mr. Zhang has become “the thing.” “I don’t believe Peng Shuai has received retaliation and repression speculated by foreign media for the thing people talked about,” he wrote on Twitter.
Mr. Zhang can’t even be discussed online in China. Those who do call him “kimchi” because his given name sounds like the name of an ancient Korean dynasty.
If Mr. Hu, China’s spin master, could speak more plainly, and if the Chinese people had the freedom to discuss Ms. Peng and her allegation, official media might understand how to build a narrative. Instead, Mr. Hu alternates between trying to change the conversation and trying to shut it down completely.
“For those who truly care about safety of Peng Shuai, her appearances of these days are enough to relieve them or eliminate most of their worries,” he wrote. “But for those aiming to attack China’s system and boycott the Beijing Winter Olympics, facts, no matter how many, don’t work for them.”
15. Key Pentagon Posts Remain Vacant Amid Supply-Chain Crisis
I wonder what is going on in the Biden administration and why there are not even nominations for some of these positions (and others).
Key Pentagon Posts Remain Vacant Amid Supply-Chain Crisis
The Biden administration has not even nominated a defense undersecretary of acquisition and sustainment.
In March 2020, as the coronavirus spread and millions of employees around the country were told to work from home, the Pentagon’s acquisition and sustainment office mobilized to figure out how they could safely keep open companies critical to national security.
Every day, top officials would hold a conference call with the heads of three major trade organizations that represent the bulk of defense firms to figure out supply-chain chokepoints and how to exempt workers from local stay-at-home mandates.
But the office has been leaderless since Jan. 19, when Ellen Lord, the Trump administration’s defense undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment, stepped down. And those government-industry conference calls have stopped.
“Without someone in the office, there isn't the guidance, and perhaps the follow-up and the accountability that you might have, if a political [appointee] was there,” Lord said in a recent interview. “That's not an indictment, at all, of the civilian workforce; they're great. However, just by the virtue of the governance and the organizational structure, there is only so much they can drive.”
And Lord’s former post is one of more than a dozen senior weapons-buying positions that remain filled with acting officials 10 months into the Biden administration.
“There are serious limits as to what an acting person can do and can't do, no matter who it is, and no matter what administration,” said David Berteau, the CEO of the Professional Services Council who served in an acting political role three times throughout his career. “For anybody who would say that everything's moving OK, that is simply not true. There are things that don't get done until the Senate confirmed person is in place.”
Most of the vacant positions have been temporarily filled by career civil servants, but in some cases these acting officials cannot sign off on certain decisions, meaning they are kicked up the organization chart to Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks.
“There are a lot of priorities in the DepSecDef's office and it worries me that one human being, regardless of how great a staff they have in their front office, can only focus on so many things,” Lord said. “The defense industrial base has a big challenge to do business, just given steady state, and I believe they really need someone in the A&S office, who understands what's going on inside of government, as well as how industry works.”
While companies have in large part figured out how to keep factories open and the workers inside safe, the pandemic is still having a dramatic impact on the elaborate, and in some cases multinational, supply chain that defense companies rely on to build the military’s weapons. Access to raw materials is slowly increasing, but rising inflation is driving up prices. And those daily, turned weekly, calls that Lord and her staff would hold with company reps have stopped.
“We got into a daily rhythm of trading information,” Lord said. “We tried to put out the latest in terms of policy and guidance and then, more importantly, listening to where the pain points were.”
The undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment oversees hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons projects across all branches of the military. Several of the office’s authorities have in recent years been delegated to the military branches, but it still oversees joint weapons projects, including the F-35 fighter.
The person in that position is “the primary conduit between industry and the department,” said Hawk Carlisle, CEO of the National Defense Industrial Association.
In addition, the official sets Pentagon policies around weapons-buying and mergers and acquisition. Knowing these policies allows companies to make internal investments and position themselves to act quicker.
"Industry can't predict, they can't do long-lead [work] ahead of time, they can't establish the workforce and the pace," Carlisle said.
Companies now face a Jan. 18 federal deadline to get their workers vaccinated against COVID-19. They are looking to the Pentagon for guidance about how to deal with workers who refuse the shot.
“Industry’s frustration level has been growing and based on my discussions…the frustration level is very high.” Arnold Punaro, chairman of the National Defense Industrial Association, said of the acting officials.
In recent years, Congress has allowed the Pentagon to delegate acquisition responsibilities to the military services, but those top positions also remain vacant. Heidi Shyu, the undersecretary for research and engineering, is the only confirmed undersecretary who routinely works with the defense industry. The Biden administration has nominated weapons buyers for the Army and Air Force, but the Senate has not yet approved them.
“The bottom line is not having confirmed people in these key acquisition jobs either because the Senate is sitting on its duff and not confirming...nominees [or] the administration not having nominees for many of the other ones, this is a huge problem,” Punaro said.
16. No Afghan family members of U.S. troops have been eligible to come to the U.S. Here’s why
Excerpts:
The denials don’t mean all is lost for these family members. There are options through the State Department, including asylum status through the the U.S. Refugee Admissions Programs for Afghans who were employed by the U.S. government or U.S-based media organizations.
“We continue to receive and process submissions for Afghans who may be eligible for referral to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Programs through a P1 or P2 referral,” the spokespersons said. “We will continue to support Afghans in as many ways as we can by providing humanitarian assistance in partnership with the international community.”
The challenge is that the process can take between a year to 18 months to complete, and applicants have to leave Afghanistan to start the process.
“We recognize that it is currently extremely difficult for Afghans to obtain a passport or a visa to a third country or find a way to enter a third country, and like many refugees, may face significant challenges fleeing to safety,” the spokesperson said, adding, “We continue to call for safe passage for all those who wish to leave Afghanistan, and we have been very public about advocacy to other countries to respect the principle of non-refoulement and to allow entry for Afghans seeking protection. There are a number of countries that have been very generous in supporting relocated Afghans, with which we have been coordinating.”
Those countries include neighboring Pakistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Iran.
As of Nov. 17, roughly 45,000 of the 80,000 Afghans evacuated from Kabul during August are still being housed at military installations as they finish screenings and wait for longer-term housing assignments.
No Afghan family members of U.S. troops have been eligible to come to the U.S. Here’s why
The requests came through an inbox set up in early November. Over the course of the 20-year war in Afghanistan, many Afghan-born immigrants joined the U.S. military or became DoD civilians and contractors, while members of their family have remained in the country.
“Thus far of the ones that have been studied and reviewed, they are not eligible for parole status,” Kirby said.
State is working with DoD, the Homeland Security Department, as well as advocacy groups and non-profits to identify people who want to leave the country and help coordinate their arrival in the United States, according to a State spokesman.
But details aren’t available on what kind of special consideration, if any, these family members might have in the evacuation and immigration process, or who the program is designed to benefit.
“We are not going to detail the specifics of our coordination and operations at this time,” a State spokesman told Military Times on Friday, when asked whether that coordination involved physical extraction from Afghanistan or assistance for those who are able to escape on their own.
In general, spouses and children of U.S. citizens are eligible to come to the U.S. under these circumstances, though State would not say whether that means physical transportation, priority in processing or any other benefit.
They do get priority for State-coordinated flights out of the country, according to someone familiar with the process, along with American citizens and legal permanent residents, as well as those who are in the Special Immigrant Visa pipeline.
In order to make that happen, they need to have proper documentation, including passports.
Neither DoD nor State were able to say what precisely is preventing family members from receiving temporary legal status, or whether the barriers to it are temporary, provided they can get their paperwork in order.
A DHS spokesman did not return a request for information about what would qualify these Afghan family members for parole, a temporary legal status that allows immigrants to stay in the U.S. while their cases are adjudicated.
The burden of proof is on the applicant to prove “whether or not the circumstances are pressing,” which includes, ”the effect of the circumstances on the individual’s welfare and wellbeing; and the degree of suffering that may result if parole is not authorized.”
So these family members would have to prove that they are in imminent, overwhelming danger by staying in Afghanistan, presumably above and beyond any danger the entire population of Afghanistan faces under Taliban rule.
RELATED
I am inundated daily with calls for help from dozens of other families desperate for rescue, writes the author of this commentary.
By Lark S. Escobar
The denials don’t mean all is lost for these family members. There are options through the State Department, including asylum status through the the U.S. Refugee Admissions Programs for Afghans who were employed by the U.S. government or U.S-based media organizations.
“We continue to receive and process submissions for Afghans who may be eligible for referral to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Programs through a P1 or P2 referral,” the spokespersons said. “We will continue to support Afghans in as many ways as we can by providing humanitarian assistance in partnership with the international community.”
The challenge is that the process can take between a year to 18 months to complete, and applicants have to leave Afghanistan to start the process.
“We recognize that it is currently extremely difficult for Afghans to obtain a passport or a visa to a third country or find a way to enter a third country, and like many refugees, may face significant challenges fleeing to safety,” the spokesperson said, adding, “We continue to call for safe passage for all those who wish to leave Afghanistan, and we have been very public about advocacy to other countries to respect the principle of non-refoulement and to allow entry for Afghans seeking protection. There are a number of countries that have been very generous in supporting relocated Afghans, with which we have been coordinating.”
Those countries include neighboring Pakistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Iran.
As of Nov. 17, roughly 45,000 of the 80,000 Afghans evacuated from Kabul during August are still being housed at military installations as they finish screenings and wait for longer-term housing assignments.
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
17. In fight against Islamic State, the Taliban holds major advantage
Interesting analysis.
Excerpt:
Will To Win
Advantage: Even.
The will to fight and ultimately win is perhaps the most important factor in this fight. Both groups have displayed a commitment to fight for the long haul. The Taliban displayed a remarkable will to win in its 20-year war against the U.S., Coalition, and Afghan government. The Taliban was written off in 2002 after suffering a string of battlefield defeats, and again in 2012 after the “surge.” Yet the Taliban persisted. After its victory over the summer, the Taliban again displayed its will to win by taking over the vaunted bastion of resistance in Panjshir in less than two weeks. Yet this is one area where ISKP can match the Taliban. ISKP has persisted for nearly a decade in Afghanistan despite long odds. ISKP has no allies or state sponsors, and has suffered a string of defeats at the hands of the Taliban. It is outnumbered, has inferior weapons and resources, and its recruiting pool is limited, at least at the moment. ISKP has persevered, which makes it a dangerous enemy.
In fight against Islamic State, the Taliban holds major advantage | FDD's Long War Journal
After defeating the Islamic Government of Afghanistan and taking control of the country on Aug. 15, the Taliban is beginning to ramp up its fight against the Islamic State’s Khorasan Province.
The Islamic State’s Khorasan Province or ISKP, which is often referred to as ISIS-K, has increased attacks against the Taliban over the past two months. ISKP has orchestrated a handful of high-profile suicide attacks on soft targets such as mosques and hospitals, and conducted smaller but more numerous IED and small arms attacks against Taliban military forces. In response, the Taliban has sent more than 1,000 fighters to battle the group in Nangarhar province, the hub of ISKP operations, according to The Washington Post.
Much of the reporting from Afghanistan has boosted the threat of ISKP while ignoring the Taliban’s very real advantages in the fight. The Taliban has the advantage in all of the key areas, save one. The Taliban has state sponsors, terrorist allies, regional support, a marked superiority in weapons and numbers, and controls all of Afghanistan. ISKP can only match the Taliban in one area, and this their will to fight and persevere.
To be clear, ISKP is a decided underdog when matched up against the Taliban. Either way, the United States and the West community should not be rooting for a Taliban victory over ISKP. The Taliban continues to support international terror groups that seek to overthrow friendly governments and attack the West. The Taliban’s relationship with Al Qaeda endures, and has strengthened after 20 years of war and victory in Afghanistan.
Here is the tale of the tape as a battle ensues between the Taliban and the Islamic State’s Khorasan Province:
State Sponsors
Advantage: Taliban.
Pakistan and Iran have both invested deeply in the Taliban project, providing the group with safe haven, weapons, financial support and training. Pakistan is certainly continuing its support of the Taliban. Iran’s support was initially focused on driving the U.S. and NATO from Afghanistan, and it is unclear if Iran’s support will wane or continue. Iran will likely continue a level of support to maintain a degree of influence. However, ISKP rejects state sponsorship, and Iran and Pakistan are both its enemies. State sponsorship is a key driver for a successful insurgency, and ISKP has no state sponsors.
Terrorist Allies
Advantage: Taliban.
In addition to the state sponsors of Pakistan and Iran, the Taliban has the support of all of the powerful regional terror groups, including but not limited to: Al Qaeda, The Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Muhammad, Harakat-ul-Mujahideen, Ansarullah, Turkistan Islamic Party, Islamic Jihad Union, Jamaat Imam al Bukhari, and a host of other South and Central Asian terror organizations. The Taliban can pool thousands if not tens of thousands of fighters if needed in its fight against ISKP, just as it did in its victory against the former Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. ISKP, on the other hand, remains on an island with no regional terror allies as it insists its allies swear allegiance to its emir.
Neighbors
Advantage: Taliban.
With the exception of Tajikistan, which opposes the Taliban regime, all of the Afghanistan’s neighbors, including China, as well as Russia, which isn’t a neighboring country but wields significant influence in the ‘Stans, are pushing for international recognition and humanitarian support of the Taliban regime. However, the regional view that these nations can work with the Taliban to suppress the jihadist threats emanating from Afghanistan is deeply flawed. For instance, the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan is an ally of the Afghan Taliban, as is Turkistan Islamic Party, which seeks to wage jihad in China. ISKP is a direct threat to all of Afghanistan’s neighbors, which seek to use the Taliban to suppress and defeat it.
Numbers
Advantage: Taliban.
The low end estimate of the Taliban forces, as noted by The Washington Post, is 70,000, while the Islamic State is estimated to have several thousand fighters in its ranks. The exact number of fighters for each group is impossible to know. FDD’s Long War Journal has estimated in the past that the Taliban has well over 100,000 fighters under its command, and given the sophistication and scope of its summer offensive to take control of the country, we stand by this estimate. The Taliban can flood the zone in key battlefields where the fight intensifies, as it is beginning to do in Nangarhar, while the Islamic State has limited resources. It remains to be seen if a brutal crackdown on the Islamic State increases its recruiting potential, or if it grinds it down.
Weapons
Advantage: Taliban.
The Taliban obtained a massive cache of weapons as it overran Afghan forces and seized control of Afghanistan over the summer. These weapons include small and heavy arms, armored vehicles, including tanks, armored personnel carriers, and HUMVEEs, artillery pieces, helicopters and aircraft. The Taliban has been adept at adapting these weapons systems to the battlefield. The Islamic State only possesses small arms, and its main tool to attack the Taliban has been IEDs and suicide bombs.
Terrain
Advantage: Taliban.
The Taliban is fully in control of all of Afghanistan 34 provinces while the Islamic State does not control any ground. The Taliban can muster the resources of all of Afghanistan’s provinces; troops, weapons, ammunition, fuel, food, and other supplies. The Taliban can operate hospitals, recruiting and training centers, and base troops. It can tax the local population and border crossings. ISKP must operate clandestinely and is extremely limited in how it can support its forces.
Will To Win
Advantage: Even.
The will to fight and ultimately win is perhaps the most important factor in this fight. Both groups have displayed a commitment to fight for the long haul. The Taliban displayed a remarkable will to win in its 20-year war against the U.S., Coalition, and Afghan government. The Taliban was written off in 2002 after suffering a string of battlefield defeats, and again in 2012 after the “surge.” Yet the Taliban persisted. After its victory over the summer, the Taliban again displayed its will to win by taking over the vaunted bastion of resistance in Panjshir in less than two weeks. Yet this is one area where ISKP can match the Taliban. ISKP has persisted for nearly a decade in Afghanistan despite long odds. ISKP has no allies or state sponsors, and has suffered a string of defeats at the hands of the Taliban. It is outnumbered, has inferior weapons and resources, and its recruiting pool is limited, at least at the moment. ISKP has persevered, which makes it a dangerous enemy.
Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD's Long War Journal.
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18. Taiwan revamps military training for reserves amid China pressure
Excerpts:
Whether the US, Taiwan’s most important ally, would come to its defence is deliberately unclear under its continuing policy of “strategic ambiguity” that walks the line between defending Taiwan while not angering China. Under the terms of the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, the US has pledged to “make available to Taiwan such defence articles and defence services in such quantity as may be necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain sufficient self-defence capabilities.”
Its guarantees, however, stop short of promising military support.
Since taking office, Biden has made several statements suggesting that he would support the diplomatically isolated democracy in the case of attack, but White House officials have quickly tempered his comments afterwards.
The more potential allies Taiwan can secure, the more it will offset China’s ability to attack Taiwan, ANU’s Sung told Al Jazeera.
At that time it would also need both “the objective capability and subjective political will” to carry out an operation, he said. Beyond the US, a potential list of allies could include Japan, South Korea, Australia, and even some European countries who have all expressed concern about the future of the Taiwan Strait.
“We’re seeing estimates that put the year at 2027 more or less in terms of China having sufficient conventional superiority for a successful offensive, and if you talk to more military crowd, and they will tell you, maybe it’s closer to 2035,” Sung said. “But that’s the straight line projection number. If you take into account other kinds of hawks of war or the possibility of additional friends and allies (of Taiwan) coming to participate in this situation, then we’re probably pushing the timeline back further into the future.”
Taiwan revamps military training for reserves amid China pressure
Taiwan is facing questions about whether its military reserves are capable of actual fighting in the event of a Chinese invasion.
Taipei, Taiwan – Preparing for potential military action from China is a prospect that has hung over Taiwan since its government fled to the island at the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. There were three close encounters between the 1950s and 1990s, and now there may be reason to worry once again as China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) completes an ambitious military modernisation campaign.
In a recently released white paper, Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense said the PLA had developed the ability to blockade Taiwan’s major airports and harbours, while the Pentagon said they would have the capacity to “compel Taiwan’s leadership to the negotiation table” as early as 2027.
Since taking office in 2016, President Tsai Ing-wen has focused on improving the armed forces’ capabilities and gone on an extensive weapons buying campaign from the United States as her government’s relationship with Beijing has darkened. In August, the administration of US President Joe Biden approved its first sale of $750m in weapons to Taiwan, after predecessor Donald Trump approved $5.1bn in sales in 2020.
The Taiwanese defence ministry is now asking for an extra $9bn over the next five years to improve Taiwan’s defences. The money would be in addition to its existing, and growing budget.
As Taiwan’s horizon darkens, it needs to reckon with another big question of whether the general public will be ready.
Most male citizens are required to complete national service which should, in theory, prepare them to supplement the professional military, now capped at about 188,000, according to budget data, and rising to 215,000 if civilian contractors and trainees are factored into the equation.
Limits have been placed on the military for budgetary reasons and political ones – most democracies do not maintain large standing armies – and so the reserves would play a vital support role repositioning bombed runways, repairing vehicles and simply digging ditches. In the event of an attack, about one million or so of these reservists, those who have completed their national service in the past eight years, could be called up in the first round of mobilisation.
‘Trainees are more of a burden’
Despite their important role, however, Taiwan faces questions about whether its reserves are capable of actual fighting and if an adequate system is in place to oversee them if they were mobilised in a wartime scenario.
After completing national service, which was cut down to four months from one year about a decade ago, most reservists are required to return for about a week of recall training on two separate occasions to brush up on their skills. In practice, however, results have been mixed.
“The new four-month compulsory service does not provide sufficient time for training in various specialisations while also providing them with sufficient experience in joint exercises,” said Kitsch Liao Yen-fan, a cyber-warfare and military affairs consultant for Doublethink Lab in Taiwan. “This means the new four-month trainees are more of a burden to units they are assigned to than actual combat power that can be relied upon.”
Wen Lii, director of the office of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party for the Matsu Islands, a group of islands governed by Taiwan that lie off the coast of southeastern China. told Al Jazeera that he spent his national service learning how to drive and repair an armoured vehicle.
While he found the experience worthwhile, he also said there was room for improvement.
“I played a supporting role – my role was similar to that of a mechanic and teaching assistant – but that has to do with the purpose of our specific unit as well as the intended role for conscripts in the first place,” he told Al Jazeera.
He said reservists could benefit from a “more defined role” detailing how they would assist regular soldiers during war time by focusing on logistics, first aid and similar support – a point that has also been made by analysts.
Taiwan’s defence strategy has long focused on “asymmetric defence” or that it would “resist the enemy on the opposite shore, attack it at sea, destroy it in the littoral area, and annihilate it on the beachhead,” according to the defence ministry. In practice, this means that while outnumbered by the PLA, Taiwan aims to make itself an unattractive enough target for attack by being able to carry out a prolonged resistance.
For this reason, the defence ministry has established the All-Out Defense Mobilization Agency to oversee the reserves from January.
A pilot project will also start the same month to overhaul recall training, testing out a more intensive 14-day regimen on 15,000 recalled reservists. Recently some recalls have also spoken of a changing tone in how the military treats them, suggesting that their potential value is also recognised.
Cy Chen, who works in customer service, told Al Jazeera his first experience with recall training three years ago felt like “summer camp” for boy scouts, but during his second recent recall he noticed a major shift in tone as his group reviewed how to use guns and practise marksmanship.
“As one of our leaders mentioned there, ‘we learned how to shoot and how to hide but never learn how to dodge or how to do combat.’ I think this process is to make sure that when the country needs you, and you won’t be afraid to use a gun and further, this process also remind us how to (value) peace,” he said.
‘Lot more work to be done’
Improving practical skills and training are just one part of the equation, however, if Taiwan really wants to have a capable defence force. For one thing, Taiwan’s military is somewhat lopsided as it has nearly 90,000 non-commissioned military officers (NCOs) – enlisted soldiers who began at entry-level and rose through the ranks – but just 44,127 soldiers and 36,232 commissioned officers who entered the military at a higher rank, according to government budget data.
Wen-Ti Sung, a lecturer at Australian National University’s Taiwan Studies Programme, said Taiwan only has about 40 percent of the officers and 60 percent of the NCOs required to oversee, train and coordinate recalled reservists as part of Taiwan’s greater “plug and play” or “ready to go” defence strategy anchored in a relatively small military and wider base of civilians.
The military in Taiwan, however, has long been unpopular career choice due to low pay, benefits and social status as well as negative associations with Taiwan’s martial law regime, when the military played a vital role in suppressing human rights. “There’s a lot more work to be done in terms of making defence a major career of the kind that attracts higher calibre talent in Taiwan,” Sung said.
Taiwan’s ‘frogmen’ Marines perform covert landing drills just a few kilometers from mainland China on the outlying island of Kinmen, Taiwan [File: Wally Santana/ AP]
A new defence white paper made public earlier this month proposes better housing, childcare and more career development courses, but it is unclear whether it will be enough to entice people to sign up.
Currently, a lieutenant makes just 51,915 New Taiwan Dollars ($1,867) a month while a colonel – one of the most senior field positions in most militaries – makes 78,390 NTD ($2,816), not much more than the average monthly salary of 54,320 NTD once bonuses are factored in. Pensions were also cut in 2018 as the government was unable to balance the books with a shrinking population and structural changes in Taiwan’s economy.
“How do you make them [professional recruits] believe joining the military is not a lifelong commitment, they could have a second life outside the military? That’s what happened with the US military, most people when they leave service have a second life,” said Doublethink’s Liao, describing how Taiwan is now undergoing a “race” against time.
“It’s not about buying all the big weapons, getting all the missiles you can, it’s about changing attitudes and culture and the entire society catching up to be ready, and to form a deterrence in time.”
On the other end of the spectrum, there is a continuing discussion by legislators and military experts in Taiwan and the US on whether to train a civilian militia or simply have volunteers ready to provide food and shelter at Taiwan’s many temples.
Civilian defence
For now, small workshops have been organised by groups outside the government by groups like the Taiwan Military and Police Tactics Research and Development Association (TTRDA), which trains civilians in skills like tactical shooting practice, to Forward Alliance, which teaches skills like first-aid for major disasters.
“We believe that a resilient society and a prepared society would play a big factor in whether the Beijing authority ultimately decides to use force. That means behind that 180,000 to 200,000 strong military, we have a system of reserves and civilians who are trained and equipped to mobilise in case of emergencies. The idea is the civilian population would complement the strength of our regular force,” said Enoch Wu, the founder of Forward Alliance who once served in Taiwan’s special forces.
The alliance teaches people how to protect themselves, how to treat those who are wounded, how to work together as a team, and how to secure their immediate surroundings.
“These things are the building blocks to emergency response whether we are dealing with an earthquake or in a worse case scenario a military conflict to have a civilian population that is trained to back up our emergency responders,” Wu added.
But Taiwan must now also contend with the increasing use of “grey zone” psychological warfare and other confrontational tactics that could allow China to “seize Taiwan without a fight”. These range from cyber-warfare and misinformation, to ramming Taiwanese coastguard vessels, patrols of the Taiwan Strait, and sending PLA flights into Taiwan’s Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ), a swath of land and sea monitored by the military.
Between September 16 last year and July 31, Chinese aircraft made 554 sorties into Taiwan’s ADIZ, according to the defence ministry. They continued with regular flights in September and ramped up activity around October 1, China’s National Day, sending nearly 150 flights into the ADIZ over four days.
These patrols have “multiple objectives, including testing Taiwan’s responses, training PRC pilots, sending warning signals to Taiwan’s government, and stoking nationalism at home,” according to Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia programme at the German Marshall Fund of the US. Glaser described China’s growing capabilities as “worrisome” although she did not think any military action was imminent.
For now, Taiwan’s military has said it will keep monitoring the situation and also use caution to avoid further escalation.
Whether the US, Taiwan’s most important ally, would come to its defence is deliberately unclear under its continuing policy of “strategic ambiguity” that walks the line between defending Taiwan while not angering China. Under the terms of the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, the US has pledged to “make available to Taiwan such defence articles and defence services in such quantity as may be necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain sufficient self-defence capabilities.”
Its guarantees, however, stop short of promising military support.
Since taking office, Biden has made several statements suggesting that he would support the diplomatically isolated democracy in the case of attack, but White House officials have quickly tempered his comments afterwards.
The more potential allies Taiwan can secure, the more it will offset China’s ability to attack Taiwan, ANU’s Sung told Al Jazeera.
At that time it would also need both “the objective capability and subjective political will” to carry out an operation, he said. Beyond the US, a potential list of allies could include Japan, South Korea, Australia, and even some European countries who have all expressed concern about the future of the Taiwan Strait.
“We’re seeing estimates that put the year at 2027 more or less in terms of China having sufficient conventional superiority for a successful offensive, and if you talk to more military crowd, and they will tell you, maybe it’s closer to 2035,” Sung said. “But that’s the straight line projection number. If you take into account other kinds of hawks of war or the possibility of additional friends and allies (of Taiwan) coming to participate in this situation, then we’re probably pushing the timeline back further into the future.”
19. Biden administration invites Taiwan to its Summit for Democracy
Biden administration invites Taiwan to its Summit for Democracy
A man cycles past a Taiwan flag in Taipei, Taiwan, November 16, 2021. REUTERS/Ann Wang/File Photo
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WASHINGTON, Nov 23 (Reuters) - The Biden administration has invited Taiwan to its "Summit for Democracy" next month, according to a list of participants published on Tuesday, a move likely to infuriate China, which views the democratically governed island as its territory.
The first-of-its-kind gathering is a test of President Joe Biden's assertion, announced in his first foreign policy address in office in February, that he would return the United States to global leadership to face down authoritarian forces led by China and Russia.
There are 110 participants on the State Department's invitation list for the virtual event on Dec. 9 and 10, which aims to help stop democratic backsliding and the erosion of rights and freedoms worldwide. read more The list does not include China or Russia.
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The invite for Taiwan comes as China has stepped up pressure on countries to downgrade or sever relations with the island, which is considered by Beijing to have no right to the trappings of a state. read more
Self-ruling Taiwan says Beijing has no right to speak for it.
Sharp differences over Taiwan persisted during a virtual meeting earlier this month between Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
While Biden reiterated long-standing U.S. support for the "One China" policy under which it officially recognizes Beijing rather than Taipei, he also said he "strongly opposes unilateral efforts to change the status quo or undermine peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait," the White House said.
Xi said that those in Taiwan who seek independence, and their supporters in the United States, were "playing with fire," according to state news agency Xinhua.
Rights groups question if Biden's Summit for Democracy can push those world leaders who are invited, some accused of harboring authoritarian tendencies, to take meaningful action.
The State Department list shows the event will bring together mature democracies such as France and Sweden but also countries such as the Philippines, India and Poland, where activists say democracy is under threat.
In Asia, some U.S. allies such as Japan and South Korea were invited, while others like Thailand and Vietnam were not. Other notable absentees were U.S. allies Egypt and NATO member Turkey. Representation from the Middle East will be slim, with Israel and Iraq the only two countries invited.
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Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk; Editing by Peter Cooney
20. Myanmar Troops Arrest 18 Medics for Treating 'Terrorists' in Church
Myanmar Troops Arrest 18 Medics for Treating 'Terrorists' in Church
By U.S. News & World Report2 min
FILE PHOTO: Nurses take part in a protest against the military coup and to demand the release of elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi, in Yangon, Myanmar, February 8, 2021. REUTERS/Stringer/File PhotoReuters
(Reuters) - Myanmar's military has arrested 18 medics for providing treatment to patients who were members of "terrorist organisations", a state-run newspaper said Wednesday, referring to outlawed anti-junta groups.
Troops made the arrests during a raid on Monday on a church in Loikaw in eastern Kayah state, where they discovered 48 patients who were receiving treatment, seven suffering from COVID-19.
"It was learned that unofficial medical treatment was being provided to the injured persons and patients from the terrorist organisations," said the Global New Light of Myanmar, the junta's mouthpiece.
The report did not name the organisations. It said the 18 medics arrested would be dealt with according to the law.
Myanmar's healthcare system has been close to collapse since the army overthrew an elected government in a Feb. 1 coup.
Many medical workers joined a civil disobedience movement and have refused to work in military-run hospitals in protest at the junta's rule.
Many healthcare facilities and workers have been targeted by security forces https://reut.rs/3HKNiiV, according to human rights groups.
The military has appealed to doctors to return to work.
Some of the four doctors, four nurses and 10 nursing aides arrested at the church had previously been charged with incitement over their refusal to work, the report said.
Close to 1,300 civilians have been killed and more than 10,000 arrested since the coup, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), which has been tracking post-coup events in Myanmar.
The military has dismissed the AAPP's data, which has been cited by the United Nations, and accuses it of bias. A junta spokesman last week said 200 soldiers have been killed during the conflict.
(Reporting by Reuters Staff; Editing by Martin Petty)
Copyright 2021 Thomson Reuters.
Recommended Articles
21. Countering Aggression in the Gray Zone
Excerpts:
As with deterrence by punishment, deterrence by denial should be demonstrated and thereby communicated to countries already engaged in gray zone aggression and countries flirting with the prospect. Military exercises do not just serve the purpose of soldiers perfecting their skills but the equally important message of signaling those skills to potential attackers. Specially designed exercises can also be used to signal to would-be adversaries that their efforts to subvert our interests through gray zone aggression will yield insufficient gains to justify the costs. To date, although government agencies have practiced for contingencies related to gray zone aggression, there have been no specific gray zone defense exercises. The closest existing exercise is Sweden’s Total Defense 2020 exercise, which focuses on traditional threats but does include all parts of the government as well as businesses and volunteers. During the Cold War, Sweden regularly held total defense exercises; this exercise is the first such since 1987. Given the nature of gray zone aggression, such exercises should involve the armed forces, the government, industry, and civil society volunteers, and be of a purely defensive nature.
The author has proposed a concept for gray zone exercises involving the armed forces, industry, and other relevant government agencies. The government would identify private companies that would benefit from gray zone preparation; that is, most companies engaged in critical national infrastructure in the wider sense. Businesses would also be able to apply to participate. Upon conclusion of the exercises, participating businesses would be awarded ISO-style certification, which they could keep current through renewed participation in gray zone exercises. In January 2021, the Czech Republic premiered the concept with a pilot exercise.
In the six years since Russia’s annexation of Crimea—the event generally considered the West’s wakeup call concerning Russia’s ability to use gray zone aggression—the focus has been on Western vulnerabilities in the face of their adversaries. There is no doubt that the open borders and free societies characteristic of liberal democracies that allow citizens and foreigners alike to pursue their lives unimpeded by government present countless opportunities for gray zone aggression by unscrupulous adversaries. By thinking innovatively, however, Western countries can improve both their deterrence by resilience and deterrence by punishment to at least discourage if not prevent gray zone aggression. By creatively using their advantages, Western countries in cooperation with their allies can mitigate their vulnerabilities. Indeed, innovative thinking is a deterrent in itself, one that keeps the attacker uncertain about the resilience and punishment that might ensue, and thus changes the cost-benefit calculus.
NEWS | Nov. 18, 2021
Countering Aggression in the Gray Zone
By Elisabeth Braw PRISM Vol. 9, No. 3
In recent years, much has been written and said about conflict in the so-called “gray zone,” often described as conflict below the threshold of combat. Gray zone aggression is an attractive option for Western rivals because it exploits the openness of Western societies. The fact that Western countries are characterized by small governments with limited powers to dictate the activities of their populations and businesses makes these countries even more attractive targets for nonkinetic aggression, ranging from hostile business activities, to cyber attacks, to kidnappings, assassinations, and even occupation by unofficial militias aligned with foreign powers. Resourceful adversaries use such actions to force wedges into the fault lines of open societies. With innovative thinking, however, liberal democracies can develop effective gray zone deterrence while staying within the norms of behavior they have set for themselves.
The Case of Sergey Skripal
On March 4, 2018, former Russian intelligence officer Sergey Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found in “an extremely serious condition” on a park bench in the English cathedral town of Salisbury. The UK government’s first task was to determine precisely what had happened to the Skripals and who was responsible. On March 12, then-Prime Minister Theresa May informed the UK Parliament of the findings of the government’s investigation: “It is now clear that Mr. Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia. . . . The Government has concluded that it is highly likely that Russia was responsible for the act against Sergei and Yulia Skripal.” She continued ominously, “Mr Speaker, there are therefore only two plausible explanations for what happened in Salisbury on the 4th of March. Either this was a direct act by the Russian state against our country, or the Russian government lost control of this potentially catastrophically damaging nerve agent and allowed it to get into the hands of others.”
Although the attack was primarily a Russian assassination attempt against the traitor Skripal, it was also a chemical weapon-aided attack on the United Kingdom; when state-sponsored assassinations occur—when they are not deterred—they can dangerously weaken the stability of the countries in which they are carried out. While true with respect to assassinations, this also holds for other forms of gray zone aggression. With such below-the-threshold aggression, the targeted country faces an awkward predicament: how to respond forcefully without violating the ethical standards liberal democracies have set for themselves, and more importantly, how to communicate deterrence to prevent such attacks?
Deterring Gray Zone Aggression
The primary reason gray zone aggression is an attractive option for countries seeking to increase their power at Western expense is that the West’s traditional deterrence policy—based on conventional military strength and ultimately backed by nuclear weapons—has been successful in deterring traditional military aggression. Deterrence always poses a basic challenge: its effectiveness is virtually impossible to measure or prove. An absence of aggression is not a confirmation that deterrence has been successful; it may simply mean the adversary was never planning to attack in the first place. Nevertheless, nation-states have long known that they need to signal to potential attackers and the wider world that military attacks will not be tolerated and will not be successful. Some countries have projected more forceful deterrence through the course of the Westphalian world order, some less so, but all know that signaling weakness is in no country’s interest.
In addition, as Hathaway and Shapiro and others such as the Uppsala Conflict Data Program have shown, armed conflict has lost significant lure among industrialized nations. In this context, Russia’s intervention in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine is an aberration. Geopolitical competition has, however, not vanished. The decline of inter-state war makes gray zone aggression a convenient tool and alternative strategy for advancing standing and weakening opponents in the competitive global arena. Gray zone aggression bedevils the targeted country not just because it primarily targets civil society but because it is hard to identify, to attribute to a specific sovereign perpetrator, or both. Cyber attacks are notoriously difficult to trace to a sponsoring government, partly because no digital trail may link the perpetrators to their sponsors. Alternative forms of land acquisition as practiced by China through the gradual construction of islands in disputed South China Sea waters defy any obvious retaliatory response as no individual Chinese step seems sufficiently significant to warrant retaliation or even explicit deterrence signaling. Hostile business acquisitions by foreign entities may seem like cutthroat business as usual until a country has lost a significant number of key firms to a rival country. Crucially, because it is so difficult to establish suitable defense and response, establishing credible deterrence is a vexing challenge. What punishment or denial to signal when the nature of a prospective or even an executed attack is not even clear?
The UK government’s response to the attempted assassination of the Skripals was innovative. The government quickly assembled a coalition of allies, all of which expelled Russian intelligence officers working under diplomatic cover. The United States not only expelled 60 Russians working under diplomatic cover but also ordered Russia to close its consulate in San Francisco. A total of 28 countries expelled 153 Russian intelligence officers. This was not without cost to UK allies—Russia retaliated by expelling 189 individuals working in Russia on diplomatic passports. The UK government also launched a communications offensive, which in combination with the muckraking efforts of investigative journalists, resulted in the two Russian perpetrators quickly being identified along with Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency and shamed for their incompetence.
In October 2020, soon after retiring from government service, Mark Sedwill—the UK government’s national security advisor at the time of the Skripal attack—revealed that the government had struck back in other ways as well. “We also took a series of other discreet measures,” Sedwill told the British newspaper The Times. Sedwill declined to identify the discrete measures, explaining only that “we will use different techniques. We need to play to our strengths and focus our attention on their vulnerabilities. We are not going to conduct illegal operations, but there are things we can do. There are some vulnerabilities that we can exploit too.” Those vulnerabilities, he said, include “tackling some of the illicit money flows out of Russia, and covert measures as well.”
“Play to our strengths and focus our attention on their vulnerabilities” is a promising approach to deterrence in the gray zone. In the case of the Skripal attack, the UK actions were retaliatory, coming as they did after the attack. Successful deterrence would have signaled that such punishment would be metered out on any country attempting gray zone aggression on UK soil. UK deterrence signaling in the gray zone prior to the attack was, in fact, indisputably insufficient. The country had suffered a litany of previous gray zone aggressions including cyber attacks and even the previous successful assassination of Russian former spy Alexander Litvinenko, which also featured a toxin.
Indeed, as demonstrated by the Skripal attack, continuing cyber attacks by the governments of China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and their proxies; coercive Chinese diplomacy; and subversive business practices, gray zone aggression persists because it is not deterred—perpetrators have been confident they can get away with impunity. Their confidence is based on the vexing difficulty of designing effective gray zone deterrence. Unlike deterring the armed forces of rival states, where countries seek to match or counter each other’s military capabilities, the diversity and unpredictability of gray zone aggression leaves the defender one step behind. Indeed, part of the beauty of gray zone aggression is its surprise element, not only in timing but also in its methods.
The challenge presented by the diversity of methods is not only in trying to predict them but also the fact that liberal democracies are often not able to retaliate using the same methods. It would, for example, not behoove a Western country to signal that a chemical weapon-powered assassination attempt on its soil will be avenged with a corresponding assassination attempt on the adversary’s soil, or that concerted use of intellectual property theft will be avenged in kind. Because the West’s rivals know the ethical standards Western governments set for themselves, and that any deviation from these standards might be severely criticized by opposition parties, civil society watchdogs, and voters, deterrence that does not adhere to such standards would not be credible.
Like traditional deterrence, deterrence signaling in the gray zone must be credible. Signaling kinetic punishment for an act of gray zone aggression would be disproportionate and escalatory and thus not credible. To date, the only kinetic response to gray zone aggression has been Israel’s 2019 bombing of a Hamas building in Gaza in response to a cyber attack. As a result, NATO’s long-serving deterrence tools, including the U.S. nuclear umbrella, are of minimal use for deterrence in the gray zone. Somewhat surprisingly, the UK government states in its Integrated Review—published in March 2021—that the UK will, in practice, seek to deter new technological threats with its nuclear arsenal. “The UK will not use, or threaten to use, nuclear weapons against any non-nuclear weapon state party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons 1968 (NPT). This assurance does not apply to any state in material breach of those non-proliferation obligations. However, we reserve the right to review this assurance if the future threat of weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical and biological capabilities, or emerging technologies that could have a comparable impact, makes it necessary.” Adversaries may take this to understand that the UK will avenge devastating cyber attacks with nuclear strikes. The question is whether the adversaries will regard the threat as credible.
Nevertheless, the UK government’s cumulative response to the Skripal attack holds important lessons. It has almost become an article of faith that liberal democracies are powerless to deter gray zone aggression because the attacks target their vulnerable civil societies, and because they cannot avenge most attacks in kind, and thus lack punishment tools with which to deter such aggressive behavior. Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. elections is a good case in point. The Russian disinformation campaign left many Americans convinced that their government could not protect itself against election meddling by hostile states. A September 2020 poll by the University of Chicago found that 69 percent of Americans believed Russia tried to influence the 2016 vote, while only 29 percent believed Russia did not. Fully 74 percent were concerned that foreign governments would try to tamper with voting systems or election results, and 74 percent were also concerned that foreign governments would try to influence what Americans think of their political candidates.
During the 2020 U.S. election campaign, there was considerable concern that Russia would replicate its interference efforts of the 2016 election campaign. In the end, Russia’s interference in the 2020 election was markedly below the level of 2016. This suggests that targeted countries are, in fact, capable of deterring gray zone aggression through resilience, punishment, or both. In the case of the 2020 U.S. elections, successful deterrence can credibly be attributed to DOD’s Defend Forward offensive strategy, CISA’s defense of the election infrastructure, and Americans now being on their guard against disinformation. Similarly, while the UK’s open borders and freedom of movement make it easy to attempt a government-sponsored assassination, the UK government’s swift and innovative response to the Skripal attack imposed a significant cost to Russia, and thus is likely to deter similar aggression in the near future.
Liberal Democracies Fight Back
What can we learn from these recent possible examples of success? How can liberal, democratic states persuasively signal that gray zone attacks will be resisted and avenged? Western governments need to rethink deterrence. Or rather, they need to remember how successful deterrence works. The sum of deterrence by denial and by punishment aims to, in the words of Dr. Strangelove, instill in the enemy the fear to attack. It is primarily about changing an adversary’s cost-benefit calculation through psychology, not specific tools. Indeed, because gray zone deterrence may require a different toolbox than that used by the adversary, the psychological factor is even more important than is the case with deterrence of traditional armed attacks. As demonstrated by the UK government’s response to the Skripal incident, the West has options that are both legal and ethical. And because gray zone aggression targets civil society, societal resilience presents an enormous potential, not only as defense but also as a deterrent.
First, governments should signal that while they may not be able to prevent every attack, widespread and well-organized societal resilience means a gray zone attack will have limited impact. Such deterrence by denial was a pillar of Sweden’s deterrence posture during the Cold War. While Sweden had large armed forces, with a mobilized strength of some one million, military power alone was plainly insufficient to deter the Soviet Union. Instead, deterrence relied heavily on the civil defense arm, which involved no fewer than 2.2 million Swedes, who in case of an attack would maintain vital societal functions and support the armed forces, thus denying an attacker a swift victory and changing the attacker’s cost-benefit calculation. Deterrence by denial—as exemplified by the societal resilience just described—is by definition reactive. As such, it is an insufficient deterrent in and of itself. It is, however, a vital twin to deterrence by punishment as it demonstrates that even successful attacks will have relatively limited effect and will present to a prospective aggressor an unattractive cost-benefit calculation.
Second, specific retaliatory measures in the context of deterrence by punishment need not be identified in deterrence messaging. In what the author calls the “horse’s-head-in-the-bed strategy,” a targeted country only needs to communicate to the country sponsoring gray zone aggression that it will retaliate and impose an unacceptable cost. Deterrence by punishment should signal both to known gray zone actors such as Russia and China as well as to other countries that gray zone aggression will be avenged, and that the aggrieved state will choose the time, manner, and target to maximize effect.
Third, governments must establish who should be deterred. This is a critical departure from centuries of deterrence, where the only recipient of deterrence messaging was a rival government. Today, in the many cases where no government declares itself the perpetrator or sponsor of gray zone activities, addressing deterrence to a presumed sponsoring government is ineffective. As a result, Western governments should build targeted deterrence messaging directed at governments, government-linked companies, and individuals, respectively.
There should, in other words, be no ambiguity regarding the intention to respond to gray zone aggression and that this response will range from societal resilience to punishment of the attacker. There should, however, be ambiguity as to how the attacker will be punished, when it will be punished, and indeed which individuals or individual companies will be punished. This ambiguity is perhaps the most useful tool that Western countries can use in deterrence of gray zone aggression. It is highly beneficial for three reasons:
- It does not lock the targeted country into responding with the same means as those used by the aggressor. This is important as the means used by the aggressor may fall outside liberal democracies’ ethical norms.
- It does not lock the targeted country into immediately responding to an attack. This is particularly beneficial as the perpetrator of a gray zone attack—whether a state or non-statal entity—can often not be immediately identified.
- It leaves the targeted country the liberty to choose whether, when, and how to retaliate. This uncertainty itself—not knowing whether the targeted country will avenge the attack, and if it does, with which allies, and in which manner—in fact increases deterrence.
This leads to the question of which kinds of punishments liberal democracies can signal to the various targets of their deterrence. Sedwill’s observation that “we need to play to our strengths and focus our attention on their vulnerabilities. We are not going to conduct illegal operations, but there are things we can do. There are some vulnerabilities that we can exploit too,” is crucial. During the 2020 U.S. election campaign, presidential candidate Joe Biden referred to these vulnerabilities when he explained how he would seek to counter election interference: “I will direct the U.S. Intelligence Community to report publicly and in a timely manner on any efforts by foreign governments that have interfered, or attempted to interfere, with U.S. elections. I will direct my administration to leverage all appropriate instruments of national power and make full use of my executive authority to impose substantial and lasting costs on state perpetrators,” he wrote, adding that the punishment could include “financial-sector sanctions, asset freezes, cyber responses, and the exposure of corruption.”
While sanctions are a much-used but not particularly effective punishment, the exposure of corruption suggests an agile approach badly needed in gray zone deterrence, and not just with regard to election meddling. Russian opposition activist Alexey Navalny’s early 2021 exposé of a magnificent palace, apparently built by President Vladimir Putin through dubious means, appeared to rattle Putin more than any other allegations against him. Let us not forget the resignation of Iceland’s Prime Minister Sigmundur Davio Gunnlaugsson in 2016 following the release of the Panama Papers which implicated him in corrupt activities. Such exposure is clearly viewed as very threatening to corrupt leaders.
Another Russian vulnerability, shared by China and Iran, is systematic discrimination against minorities. At the time of writing, China appears to have decided that sending Uighurs to “reeducation camps” and thereby earning the opprobrium of the West is preferable to allowing the spread of Uighur separatism. Separatism is, in other words, a key concern for Beijing. Although the plight of persecuted minorities should emphatically not be leveraged in Great Power politics, Western governments could, for example, signal the possibility of intrusive examination and reporting of China’s domestic conflicts and tensions. While interference in the internal affairs of other countries is decidedly a contravention of Westphalian norms and can violate international law, doing so on behalf of minorities subject to discrimination and internal to a country against their popular will is less self-evident.
Western countries also have assets their adversaries lack, and which they can employ in deterrence. The most important of these is the desirability of their countries as destinations for visits, investment, education, or even residence. People from every country in the world want to visit or even live in the West. In countries with autocratic regimes, such as Russia and China, people with money, connections, high positions, or a combination thereof visit the West for private purposes. In many cases, their families visit Western countries with great frequency; indeed, children of such officials and businessmen often attend schools and universities in the West and stay on to work after graduation. Even after the United States and the EU imposed sanctions on, among others, Deputy Duma Speaker Sergei Zheleznyak after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, his daughter Anastasia continued working as a production assistant at the BBC’s prestigious Ellstree Studios. Anastasia is a graduate of Queen Mary University in London and the American School in Switzerland (TASIS), a boarding school for the moneyed global elite. North Korean ruler Kim Jong-Un also attended a Swiss boarding school. Many children of top Chinese officials attend top U.S. universities, including the daughter of current Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who graduated from Harvard University in 2014. Typically, the children use assumed names.
Officials and well-connected businessmen from countries hostile to the West often own property in the very countries they denigrate and sabotage. The UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee noted in its Russia report—released in July 2020—that the UK has welcomed Russian money, with few questions asked about its provenance. In so doing, the Committee said that the UK “offered ideal mechanisms by which illicit finance could be recycled through what has been referred to as the London ‘laundromat’. . . . Russian influence in the UK is ‘the new normal’.” It is, however, not known to the wider public which officials from hostile countries own which properties or bank accounts in countries such as the UK. With the permission of the Western schools, universities, and employers of family members, as well as banks and property developers, Western governments can signal to perpetrators that they will reveal such facts to both their own domestic publics as well as the local community. The author refers to such public dissemination of uncomfortable facts as second-strike communications. Signaling of punishment featuring such revelations could be coupled with entry bans not just for the targeted officials but for their family members as well.
To be sure, this would require cooperation from civil society entities not ordinarily involved in national security. It would also entail reaching those regimes’ citizens. Chinese state authorities spare no effort to prevent such access by banning Western social media platforms such as Twitter. Nevertheless, many ingenious Chinese citizens do manage to access proscribed content. While Russians—often with justification—distrust Western criticism of their government, exposés of officials’ families living large in the West on taxpayer money could cause a stir. Neither Western banks nor universities would delight in cooperating with their home governments in exposing some of their well-paying customers. The issue of Chinese and Russian influence in the West is, however, gaining so much attention in the public debate that both educational institutions and commercial firms may be convinced to do so, if only to cleanse their brands.
In response to, say, a new case of systematic intellectual property theft by companies linked to the Chinese government, one possible response might be to draw attention to the U.S. university enrollment of certain Chinese officials’ children. Better yet, it should signal that such revelations may be part of the punishment. This should not be a general accusation—if nobody is named, nobody will be shamed—but signaling that specific individuals, officials, and their families will be singled out.
Traditionally, Western governments have not highlighted foreign leaders’ private associations with their countries, as it seemed irrelevant to Great Power politics and was at any rate considered contrary to diplomatic protocol. With hostile governments hiding behind gray zone acts to weaken the West it is, however, imperative that Western governments be more innovative and daring, while yet adhering to their ethical standards. Indeed, if Western governments demonstrate an ability to think creatively about retaliation, they will constantly keep the attackers in uncertainty and fear, thereby reducing the country’s appetite for aggression. As Thomas Schelling reminded policymakers, surprise is a key element of deterrence.
There is precedent in communicating with rivals’ publics. During the Cold War, governments on both sides established radio stations serving the populations of their rival states. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, initially funded by the CIA, was part of that effort. Of course, if Western governments increase their already existing efforts to communicate with rivals’ citizens, they cannot criticize rival governments for communicating with theirs.
Retaliation could, as Biden suggested, also include publicly sharing information about corruption. In addition, it should clearly include Defending Forward and its sister policy, criminal indictments against individual perpetrators. The Trump administration continued its predecessor’s nascent practice of not just naming and shaming countries to which it had attributed cyber attacks, but of indicting individual perpetrators as well. On September 16, 2020, the Department of Justice charged five Chinese nationals with cyber attacks on more than 100 companies in the United States and elsewhere; one month later it charged six officers in Russia’s military intelligence agency with cyber attacks against Ukraine, Georgia, the 2017 French election campaign, and the 2018 Winter Olympics. The officers were also charged with having perpetrated the devastating NotPetya attack in 2017, which was directed against Ukraine but brought down a range of international companies as well. In July 2020, the EU issued its first-ever sanctions over a cyber attack, imposing a travel ban and other penalties on six Russian and Chinese nationals involved in NotPetya and several other attacks.
Criminal prosecutions constitute an even stronger deterrent but are only possible if the defendant is present; and a targeted foreign official is highly unlikely to present him- or herself for prosecution abroad. Because indictments, however, effectively bar the accused from entering the country (for reasons other than presenting him- or herself to law enforcement authorities), and subject them to possible extradition to the United States if apprehended in third countries, they block an attacker from benefits available to the general public. The attacker thus has to weigh participating in gray zone aggression on behalf of a government against being able to travel freely abroad or visit the United States.
These examples illustrate some of the possibilities of targeted deterrence. The author refers to the this as personalized deterrence. Its basic operating assumption is that many officials and other perpetrators and sponsors of gray zone aggression are likely to be more loyal to themselves than to their regimes, and that the prospect that they will personally suffer retaliation by the United States can substantially change their cost-benefit calculation. The objective—following Schelling’s surprise element dictum—is to keep representatives of the hostile country guessing as to which punishment will be meted out, whom it will target, and when—and whether—it will take place.
As with deterrence by punishment, deterrence by denial should be demonstrated and thereby communicated to countries already engaged in gray zone aggression and countries flirting with the prospect. Military exercises do not just serve the purpose of soldiers perfecting their skills but the equally important message of signaling those skills to potential attackers. Specially designed exercises can also be used to signal to would-be adversaries that their efforts to subvert our interests through gray zone aggression will yield insufficient gains to justify the costs. To date, although government agencies have practiced for contingencies related to gray zone aggression, there have been no specific gray zone defense exercises. The closest existing exercise is Sweden’s Total Defense 2020 exercise, which focuses on traditional threats but does include all parts of the government as well as businesses and volunteers. During the Cold War, Sweden regularly held total defense exercises; this exercise is the first such since 1987. Given the nature of gray zone aggression, such exercises should involve the armed forces, the government, industry, and civil society volunteers, and be of a purely defensive nature.
The author has proposed a concept for gray zone exercises involving the armed forces, industry, and other relevant government agencies. The government would identify private companies that would benefit from gray zone preparation; that is, most companies engaged in critical national infrastructure in the wider sense. Businesses would also be able to apply to participate. Upon conclusion of the exercises, participating businesses would be awarded ISO-style certification, which they could keep current through renewed participation in gray zone exercises. In January 2021, the Czech Republic premiered the concept with a pilot exercise.
In the six years since Russia’s annexation of Crimea—the event generally considered the West’s wakeup call concerning Russia’s ability to use gray zone aggression—the focus has been on Western vulnerabilities in the face of their adversaries. There is no doubt that the open borders and free societies characteristic of liberal democracies that allow citizens and foreigners alike to pursue their lives unimpeded by government present countless opportunities for gray zone aggression by unscrupulous adversaries. By thinking innovatively, however, Western countries can improve both their deterrence by resilience and deterrence by punishment to at least discourage if not prevent gray zone aggression. By creatively using their advantages, Western countries in cooperation with their allies can mitigate their vulnerabilities. Indeed, innovative thinking is a deterrent in itself, one that keeps the attacker uncertain about the resilience and punishment that might ensue, and thus changes the cost-benefit calculus. PRISM
Notes
1 “Russian spy poisoning: What we know so far,“ BBC, October 8, 2018, available at <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43315636>.
2 Prime Minister Theresa May, “Oral statement to Parliament: PM Commons statement on Salisbury incident,“ March 12, 2018, available at <https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-commons-statement-on-salisbury-incident-12-march-2018>.
3 Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro, The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018). For figures since 1946, see, Uppsala Conflict Data Program, “Armed Conflicts by Region and Year, 1946–2019,” available at <https://ucdp.uu.se/downloads/charts/>.
4 Julian Borger, “US orders Russia to close consulate and annexes in diplomatic reprisal,” The Guardian, August 31, 2017, available at <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/31/us-russia-san-francisco-consulate-close>.
5 Alia Chughtai and Mariya Petkova, “Skripal case diplomatic expulsions in numbers,” Al Jazeera, April 3, 2018, available at <https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/4/3/skripal-case-diplomatic-expulsions-in-numbers>.
6 Elisabeth Braw, “Second Strike Communications,” Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) Newsbrief 39, no. 4 (May 17, 2019), available at <https://rusi.org/publication/rusi-newsbrief/second-strike-communications>.
7 Tom Newton Dunn and Mark Sedwill, “We always hit back hard. Russia paid a high price for Salisbury poisonings,” The Times, October 24, 2020, available at <https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/mark-sedwill-we-always-hit-back-hard-russia-paid-a-high-price-for-salisbury-poisonings-5v3n3hngk>.
8 Zak Doffman, “Israel Responds To Cyber Attack With Air Strike On Cyber Attackers In World First,” Forbes, May 6, 2019, available at <https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/05/06/israeli-military-strikes-and-destroys-hamas-cyber-hq-in-world-first/?sh=3209e8caafb5>.
9 Global Britain in a Competitive Age: The Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy, presented to Parliament by the Prime Minister by Command of Her Majesty, March 2021, 77, available at <https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/969402/The_Integrated_Review_of_Security__Defence__Development_and_Foreign_Policy.pdf>.
10 Americans Split on Relationship with Russia, University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, September 11–14, 2020, available at <https://apnorc.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/topline_release1.pdf>.
11 Elisabeth Braw, “This Time, the Meddling Is Coming From Inside the House,” Foreign Policy, November 5, 2020, available at <https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/11/05/election-hacking-domestic-trump-biden-vote/>.
12 Försvarshögskolan, Förutsättningar för krisberedskap och totalförsvar i Sverige (2019), 19, available at <https://www.fhs.se/download/18.165b2e611685dbe45333940a/1549227413452/F%C3%B6ruts%C3%A4ttningar%20f%C3%B6r%20krisberedskap%20och%20totalf%C3%B6rsvar%20i%20Sverige%202019.pdf>.
15 Elisabeth Braw, Educating Their Children Abroad Is the Russian Elite‘s Guilty Secret, Newsweek, July 30, 2020, available at <https://www.newsweek.com/2014/08/08/educating-their-children-abroad-russian-elites-guilty-secret-261909.html>; see also “Tuition and fees,” The American School in Switzerland, available at <https://www.tasis.ch/page.cfm?p=736>.
16 Andrew Higgins and Maureen Fan, “Chinese communist leaders denounce U.S. values but send children to U.S. colleges,” Washington Post, May 19, 2012, available at <https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinese-communist-leaders-denounce-us-values-but-send-children-to-us-colleges/2012/05/18/gIQAiEidZU_story.html>.
17 Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament, Russia Report, presented to Parliament Pursuant to Section 3 of the Justice and Security Act of 2013, July 21, 2020, available at <https://docs.google.com/a/independent.gov.uk/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=aW5kZXBlbmRlbnQuZ292LnVrfGlzY3xneDo1Y2RhMGEyN2Y3NjM0OWFl>.
18 Braw, “Second Strike Communications,” May 17, 2019.
19 T. C. Schelling, The Reciprocal Fear of Surprise Attack (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, April 16, 1958), available at <https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2007/P1342.pdf>.
20 “History,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, available at <https://pressroom.rferl.org/history>.
21 Department of Justice, “Seven International Cyber Defendants, Including ‘Apt41‘ Actors, Charged In Connection With Computer Intrusion Campaigns Against More Than 100 Victims Globally,” press release, September 16, 2020, available at <https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/seven-international-cyber-defendants-including-apt41-actors-charged-connection-computer>.
22 Department of Justice, “Six Russian GRU Officers Charged in Connection with Worldwide Deployment of Destructive Malware and Other Disruptive Actions in Cyberspace,” press release, October 19, 2020, available at <https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/six-russian-gru-officers-charged-connection-worldwide-deployment-destructive-malware-and>.
23 Lorne Cook, “First ever EU cyber sanctions hit Russian, Chinese, NKoreans,” AP, July 30, 2020, available at <https://apnews.com/article/malware-technology-foreign-policy-international-news-military-intelligence-978f1494313a545e6e7e568e5f9782bf>.
24 Elisabeth Braw and Gary Brown, “Personalised Deterrence of Cyber Aggression,” The RUSI Journal 165, no. 2 (March 18, 2020), 48–54.
25 Försvarsmakten/MSB, Totalförsvarsövning 2020. Tillsammans försvarar vi Sverige, <https://www.forsvarsmakten.se/contentassets/dd56a6422b8e496ab552c5f4186da291/tfo_faktablad_se-faststalld.pdf>; see also, Gerhard Wheeler, “Northern Composure: Initial Observations from Sweden’s Total Defence 2020 Exercise,” RUSI, September 3, 2020, available at <https://rusi.org/commentary/northern-composure-initial-observations-swedens-total-defence-2020-exercise>.
26 Elisabeth Braw, “The Case for Joint Military–Industry Greyzone Exercises,” RUSI Briefing Papers, September 28, 2020,” available at <https://rusieurope.eu/publication/briefing-papers/joint-military-industry-greyzone-exercises>.
27 Helen Warrell, “Czech Republic turns to war-games to build cyber defences,” Financial Times, February 17, 2021. <https://www.ft.com/content/8c018644-3866-4f69-9105-d3c0e68ca491>.
22. Defeat Mechanisms in Modern Warfare
Abstract
This article explores the current debate about service and Joint operating concepts, starting with the Army’s multi-domain operations concept. It argues for adaptations to an old operational design technique—defeat mechanisms; updates to Joint and service planning doctrine; and discipline regarding emerging concepts. Rather than debate over attrition versus maneuver, combinations of a suite of defeat mechanisms should be applied to gain victory in the future,
First Page
49
Last Page
66
Recommended Citation
Frank Hoffman, "Defeat Mechanisms in Modern Warfare," Parameters 51, no. 4 (2021): 49-66, https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol51/iss4/6
23. What Went Wrong in Afghanistan?
Just as a reminder: we must understand the indigenous way of war.
4. Assessment - must conduct continuous assessment to gain understanding - tactical, operational, and strategic. Assessments are key to developing strategy and campaign plans and anticipating potential conflict. Assessments allow you to challenge assumptions and determine if a rebalance of ways and means with the acceptable, durable, political arrangement is required. Understand the indigenous way of war and adapt to it. Do not force the US way of war upon indigenous forces if it is counter to their history, customs, traditions, and abilities.
https://maxoki161.blogspot.com/2018/07/eight-points-of-special-warfare.html
Abstract
Critics of the Afghan war have claimed it was always unwinnable. This article argues the war was unwinnable the way it was fought and posits an alternative based on the Afghan way of war and the US approach to counterinsurgency in El Salvador during the final decade of the Cold War. Respecting the political and military dictates of strategy could have made America’s longest foreign war unnecessary and is a warning for the wars we will fight in the future.
First Page
7
Last Page
22
Recommended Citation
Todd Greentree, "What Went Wrong in Afghanistan?," Parameters 51, no. 4 (2021): 7-22, https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol51/iss4/3
24. Russia, China Sign Roadmap for Closer Military Cooperation
Excerpts:
On Friday, two Russian Tu-95MS strategic bombers and two Chinese H-6K strategic bombers flew a joint patrol over the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea, prompting South Korea to scramble fighter jets.
The bomber patrol followed joint naval maneuvers by Russian and Chinese warships and aircraft in the Sea of Japan last month.
In August, Shoigu visited China to attend joint war games, which marked the first time that Russian troops had taken part in drills on Chinese territory.
They were the latest in a series of war games in recent years, intended to underline increasingly close military relations between Moscow and Beijing.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, have developed strong personal ties to bolster a “strategic partnership” between the former Communist rivals as they both faced tensions with the West.
Russia has sought to expand ties with China as its relations with the U.S. and its allies sank to post-Cold War lows over Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula, accusations of Russian hacking attacks, interference in elections and other disputes.
Even though Russia and China in the past rejected the possibility of forging a military alliance, Putin said last year that such a prospect can’t be ruled out. He also has noted that Russia has been sharing highly sensitive military technologies with China that helped significantly bolster its defense capability.
Russia, China Sign Roadmap for Closer Military Cooperation
military.com · by 23 Nov 2021 Associated Press | By Vladimir Isachenkov · November 23, 2021
MOSCOW — Russia's defense chief on Tuesday signed a roadmap for closer military ties with China, pointing to increasingly frequent U.S. strategic bomber flights near both countries' borders.
During a video call, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and his Chinese counterpart Wei Fenghe “expressed a shared interest in stepping up strategic military exercises and joint patrols by Russia and China,” according to the Russian Defense Ministry.
“China and Russia have been strategic partners for many years,” Shoigu said. “Today, in conditions of increasing geopolitical turbulence and growing conflict potential in various parts of the world, the development of our interaction is especially relevant.”
Shoigu pointed to increasingly intensive flights by the U.S. strategic bombers near Russian borders, saying that there were 30 such missions over the past month alone.
“This month, during the U.S. Global Thunder strategic force exercise, 10 strategic bombers practiced the scenario of using nuclear weapons against Russia practically simultaneously from the western and eastern directions,” Shoigu said, adding that they came as close as 20 kilometers (12 miles) to the Russian border.
He also noted a rise in the number of U.S. bomber flights over the Sea of Okhotsk where they practiced reaching the points for launching cruise missiles, saying that it poses a threat to both Russia and China.
“In such an environment, the Russian-Chinese coordination becomes a stabilizing factor in global affairs,” Shoigu said.
Wei praised Russia for successfully countering what he described as U.S. pressure and military threats.
Shoigu and Wei hailed a series of maneuvers that involved Russian and Chinese warplanes and naval ships, and signed a plan for military cooperation for 2021-2025.
On Friday, two Russian Tu-95MS strategic bombers and two Chinese H-6K strategic bombers flew a joint patrol over the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea, prompting South Korea to scramble fighter jets.
The bomber patrol followed joint naval maneuvers by Russian and Chinese warships and aircraft in the Sea of Japan last month.
In August, Shoigu visited China to attend joint war games, which marked the first time that Russian troops had taken part in drills on Chinese territory.
They were the latest in a series of war games in recent years, intended to underline increasingly close military relations between Moscow and Beijing.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, have developed strong personal ties to bolster a “strategic partnership” between the former Communist rivals as they both faced tensions with the West.
Russia has sought to expand ties with China as its relations with the U.S. and its allies sank to post-Cold War lows over Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula, accusations of Russian hacking attacks, interference in elections and other disputes.
Even though Russia and China in the past rejected the possibility of forging a military alliance, Putin said last year that such a prospect can’t be ruled out. He also has noted that Russia has been sharing highly sensitive military technologies with China that helped significantly bolster its defense capability.
military.com · by 23 Nov 2021 Associated Press | By Vladimir Isachenkov · November 23, 2021
25. Got the wrong goat: West Point cadets try to nab Navy mascot
Let the memes begin. I already saw comments on social media that says this is why SEAL Team 6 received the mission to capture/kill bin Laden.
General Marshall is rolling in his grave:
"I want an officer for a secret and dangerous mission. I want a West Point Football player!"
Got the wrong goat: West Point cadets try to nab Navy mascot
WEST POINT, N.Y. (AP) — West Point cadets attempting to nab the U.S. Naval Academy’s mascot ahead of the annual Army-Navy football game ended up grabbing a different goat, according to a report.
U.S. Military Academy cadets traveled this weekend to a farm near Annapolis, Maryland, that is home to Navy mascot Bill, who belongs to a long line of goat mascots with the same name. Cadets gave chase to the spooked goats. And instead of grabbing Bill No. 37, they came away Bill No. 34, a one-horned, 14-year-old retiree, according to The New York Times.
West Point officials would not confirm details of the incident Tuesday, but said the animal was returned safely and that they were investigating those responsible.
“The U.S. Military Academy and the U.S. Naval Academy are disappointed by the trust that was broken recently between our brothers and sisters in arms. These actions do not reflect either academy’s core values of dignity and respect,” read a prepared statement attributed to superintendents Lt. Gen. Darryl A. Williams and Vice Adm. Sean Buck.
Nabbing mascots is a decades-long service academy tradition, typically viewed by the perpetrators as a prank. But it has been officially off-limits since the early 1990s.
In 2018, Army officials at West Point apologized after a falcon belonging to the Air Force Academy was injured during a prank.
The Army-Navy game is on Dec. 11.
26. FDD | How America Lost Its Leverage on Iran
Excerpts:
This month marks the tenth anniversary of one of the most impressive foreign-policy accomplishments in the history of the Senate. Facing the ever-growing threat from Iran’s nuclear program, alongside the regime’s continued sponsorship of terrorism and accelerated ballistic-missile development, two U.S. senators—the Republican Mark Kirk and the Democrat Robert Menendez—introduced an amendment to the annual defense bill that would impose sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran. The sanctions would attack the economic lifeblood of the Islamic Republic—its oil export revenue—and cut the country off from the international financial system.
...
But Israel shouldn’t have to do the world’s dirty work. A nuclear-threshold terror-sponsoring regime with long-range missiles presents a grave threat to American national security. And while more creative and bolder than the American military at times, the IDF is no match for the power of the United States.
Mark Kirk was defeated for re-election in 2016. But Menendez is still there, and now the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. We need another Menendez-Kirk moment a decade after the last. Who will stand up and take on the mantle?
FDD | How America Lost Its Leverage on Iran
Ten years ago, two senators, one Republican and one Democrat, joined together to force America to sanction Iran. In the years since, the leverage they built has dissipated. Why?
fdd.org · by Richard Goldberg Senior Advisor · November 23, 2021
Next week, President Joe Biden will send his envoys back to Vienna for yet another round of indirect talks with Iran. This will be Iran’s first multilateral engagement over its nuclear program since President Ebrahim Raisi took office in August. But while the cast has changed, the Iranian script remains the same as it was when negotiations began during Barack Obama’s first term: buy time to stabilize an economy freed of the burdens imposed by U.S. sanctions enforcement, obscure its clandestine nuclear activities from international inspectors, and secure future pathways to nuclear weapons.
Without an unexpected change in direction, it should come as no surprise if, in the months ahead, we learn of an Israeli airstrike on Iran’s nuclear facilities—or that Iran has tested a nuclear weapon. But for those in Congress who still hold out hope that Iran’s nuclear program can be dismantled through coercive diplomacy, the window for taking action is closing fast. A showdown in Congress about whether to preserve any economic leverage over Tehran may soon emerge from Biden’s diplomatic foray in Vienna. The results may leave America with only two options: military action or a nuclear-armed Iran.
This month marks the tenth anniversary of one of the most impressive foreign-policy accomplishments in the history of the Senate. Facing the ever-growing threat from Iran’s nuclear program, alongside the regime’s continued sponsorship of terrorism and accelerated ballistic-missile development, two U.S. senators—the Republican Mark Kirk and the Democrat Robert Menendez—introduced an amendment to the annual defense bill that would impose sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran. The sanctions would attack the economic lifeblood of the Islamic Republic—its oil export revenue—and cut the country off from the international financial system.
At the time, the price of oil hovered above $100 a barrel. The Obama administration fiercely opposed the amendment, fearing it could cause gas prices to spike in an election year and alienate U.S. allies that purchase Iranian crude. But Kirk and Menendez secured a unanimous vote in favor of the amendment.
Years later, President Obama would credit these sanctions with bringing Iran to the table to negotiate what would become the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). President Trump would then restore these sanctions and add new ones, in what his administration termed a “maximum-pressure” campaign, but it was the Menendez-Kirk amendment that forced other countries to cease importing oil from the Islamic Republic, dramatically reducing the regime’s accessible foreign-exchange reserves.
Rather than use the current sanctions to force Iran into a “longer and stronger” version of the JCPOA—in the words of Secretary of State Antony Blinken—the Biden administration has during these last nine months rolled back the Trump-era economic pressure. Although some of the White House’s defenders have pointed out that the sanctions are still formally on the books, that is hardly relevant, since the Treasury Department simply hasn’t been enforcing them.
A key tool of economic pressure is what are called secondary sanctions: if an entity from a third country, such as China, buys Iranian oil, the U.S. can use these sanctions to cut off Chinese state-owned enterprises from the American financial system. But if China understands that a president will not enforce U.S. sanctions, then it will violate them. And, indeed, that’s exactly what we’ve seen this entire year as Chinese imports of Iranian oil have increased dramatically with barely a peep from Washington.
Market psychology, too, plays a role. When the market perceives that sanctions are being enforced and more are the on the way, a regime like Iran enters a downward economic spiral from which it cannot escape. When the market perceives no more sanctions are coming and that sanctions may not even be enforced, the spiral is replaced with a flywheel—and the economy stabilizes. Biden, moreover, has also provided billions of dollars to Iran in direct sanctions relief, dramatically expanding its ability to use previously inaccessible foreign-exchange reserves to repay foreign debts and to import any goods that could conceivably be defined as “humanitarian” or “COVID-related.”
In short, there is no maximum economic pressure in place today. There hasn’t been since January. The failure to coax concessions out of Iran isn’t a result of an overreliance on sanctions, but of their underutilization.
Ten years on, America needs another Menendez-Kirk moment.
A return to the JCPOA, which the Biden administration professes to be its primary objective, would not prevent an Iranian bomb. The nuclear pact guaranteed Tehran pathways to advanced centrifuges, stockpiles of weapons-grade uranium, and nuclear-capable missiles within a few short years. It did not put Iran’s nuclear program “in a box,” as Biden’s advisers suggest, but rather on a slow and steady glide-path to the threshold of nuclear weapons. Iran essentially agreed not to race to a bomb—but to get paid instead to walk calmly toward it over a decade.
During the last year, however, Tehran has raced forward, rapidly expanding its nuclear activities while enjoying Biden’s sanctions relief at the same time. The regime heads to the Vienna talks with a key objective: maintain its nuclear advances and receive sanctions relief at the same time.
That’s essentially what President Biden’s proposed “Plan B” would deliver. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has already signaled that the goal is no longer to return to the JCPOA, and certainly not to achieve a “longer and stronger” deal, but simply to come to some agreement with Iran. Whatever the details, such a deal is apt to involve further easing of the Menendez-Kirk sanctions on Tehran’s central bank in exchange for Iran modestly curtailing its now vastly expanded nuclear program. In short, Iran gets more money to retain a more threating nuclear program. The arrangement might be characterized as interim, temporary, or a bridge to a longer, stronger deal. But once Iran gets more cash and banks its nuclear progress, the odds that it will become a nuclear power before the end of this decade increase significantly.
The administration’s claims that the JCPOA or some other kind of limited nuclear deal would “put a lid” on Iran’s advance to the bomb are deceptions. A lid atop a container with no sides doesn’t contain. Absent a credible threat of military force, and without unrelenting political and economic pressure, the clerical regime will carry the international community on its back, slowly but surely, all the way to the finish line: a test of a nuclear weapon.
To its critics on the left, maximum pressure was a recipe for war, perhaps even intentionally so. Sanctions would eventually meet with a violent response from Tehran, which would in turn provoke a military response from Washington. According to some of these critics, Trump’s talk of using maximum economic pressure to set up a negotiation with Iran over an agreement that was tougher, more comprehensive, and more enduring than the 2015 accord was just a ruse; the administration knew the mullahs would never accede to its conditions, and merely sought a pretext for military intervention.
On the right, some hawks saw the maximum-pressure campaign in the exact opposite light. Economic and political pressure alone, they argued, could never deter the Islamic Republic. Deterrence requires Tehran to believe that the United States is truly on the verge of using overwhelming military force to put the regime in jeopardy. And that belief can only result from a demonstration of Washington’s willingness use force, starting with a rollback of the Iranian military presence throughout the region. In this view, maximum pressure was the politically expedient way for Trump to satisfy his isolationist base while talking a tough game. These critics also worried that Trump’s vision of leveraging maximum economic pressure for a “better nuclear deal” would ultimately lead the president to legitimize and empower an evil and dangerous regime.
Both camps were wrong—at least in that they misunderstood the intention of the framers of maximum pressure. Economic warfare was conceived of as part of a strategy involving political and military power as well as covert action to turn the screws on Iran, based loosely on the approach Ronald Reagan used to defeat the Soviet Union. In practice, the economic element of the maximum-pressure campaign became its defining feature, but the entire strategy could only work if the United States were willing to use force as a last resort: to defend U.S. interests if ever attacked and to destroy nuclear and missile sites if red lines were crossed.
The Iranian response to this approach tested American resolve on two fronts. Starting in June 2019, weeks after Trump’s sanctions sent Iranian oil exports plummeting toward zero, Iran opened a two-pronged counter-pressure campaign: terrorist attacks against U.S. forces and allies, and incremental expansion of its nuclear program.
Trump did not respond militarily that June when Iran shot down an American drone. Nor did he defend Saudi Arabia three months later when its oil infrastructure was attacked. Nor did any retaliation come in the wake of Iranian mine and drone attacks on maritime shipping that same year. This passivity led to a fatal miscalculation in Tehran: that Trump was a Twitter tiger, that Iran would pay no price for continued violence, and that such violence could ultimately erode public opinion back in the United States, forcing Trump to pull back on the maximum-pressure campaign. Trump closed the door on that illusion when he ordered the killing of Qassem Suleimani.
After firing off a salvo of ballistic missiles that left no Americans dead, the Islamic Republic stood down. World War III did not start. The mullahs had executed a face-saving counterattack for propaganda purposes but were unwilling to risk further escalation. And while Iran kept producing more low-enriched uranium than the JCPOA allowed, it refrained from producing highly enriched uranium until it was clear that Trump, by then on his way out of office, was handcuffed from taking military action.
The conclusion from these years is clear: the regime may be made up of religious ideologues irrationally obsessed with the United States and Israel, but the mullahs at their core still fear anything that might threaten their survival. They know they can’t win a conventional war against the United States. And they act accordingly.
Today, it’s hard to imagine that Iran’s supreme leader believes President Biden is willing to use military means to prevent Tehran from crossing the nuclear threshold. Biden’s failure to respond forcefully to an Iran-directed attack on a U.S. base in western Iraq that left an American contractor dead was a reversal of Trump-era doctrine of defending American forces and interests. Even this past month, Biden declined to retaliate after an Iran-directed drone strike against U.S. forces in Syria. Combined with continued sanctions relief, the lack of a credible military threat invites miscalculation and adventurism by the mullahs—both on the nuclear and terrorism fronts.
In August 2013, 77 senators sent a letter to then-President Barack Obama urging him to “reinforce the credibility of our option to use military force” against Iran to deny the regime nuclear weapons. They demanded “a convincing threat of the use of force that Iran will believe,” and concluded that the U.S. “must be prepared to act, and Iran must see that we are prepared.”
The first signature on the letter: Robert Menendez, the current Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But also on the list: now-Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, Chris Murphy, Jack Reed, Kirsten Gillibrand, Richard Blumenthal, and many others.
Legislators should deliver the same message to President Biden along with a clear defense of the Menendez-Kirk sanctions architecture.
The Central Bank of Iran, the National Iranian Oil Company, and the National Iranian Tanker Company are all currently subject to U.S. terrorism sanctions for their financing of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. It makes little sense to lift sanctions on these entities and allow them to funnel money into terrorist groups in exchange for mild concessions that neither end Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism nor permanently dismantle its nuclear weapons-related infrastructure.
Ideally, Congress should pass a law to prevent President Biden from lifting any terror-related sanctions until Iran has ceased all sponsorship of terrorism—and to establish rigorous oversight and accountability for enforcement. This would keep the Menendez-Kirk amendment fully intact and maintain significant economic leverage for the United States to negotiate something better than Biden’s Plan B.
Even if that’s not possible due to a lack of bipartisan support, members of Congress—and those running for president in 2024—can send a clear message to importers, banks, investors, insurers, and shippers: there is no evidence these institutions have changed their terror-supporting ways; U.S. sanctions will soon return with a vengeance; and investigations will be launched into anyone who did business with Iran’s Terror Inc. while Joe Biden was president.
Noting the loss of American leverage, the lack of an American military threat, and the potential for more Iranian escalation in the weeks ahead, Israel has launched a rather public effort to signal that it is developing its own military option against Iran. Its military is budgeting for preparations for a strike on the Islamic Republic, and sources tell the media the IDF will begin rehearsing various scenarios next year.
The moves feel a bit hokey coming from a military that built up its mystique by operating with a “show don’t tell” philosophy. Indeed, these pronouncements have a distinctly political flavor—especially in the context of the razor-thin majority of the fragile governing coalition and the desire to project strength vis-à-vis Tehran while Benjamin Netanyahu (who billed himself as Mr. Iran) leads the opposition. And President Biden might not mind a little Israeli saber rattling, believing it helpful to empower the negotiation of his disastrous Plan B nuclear arrangement.
No one truly knows the Israeli red line for military action, although there’s little doubt that it’s approaching much faster than America’s. The Israelis believe the U.S. military has the luxury of waiting longer because of its capabilities for penetrating deep underground mountain-covered facilities. The “zone of immunity” for nuclear-weapons capability, therefore, comes much sooner for Israel than it does for the United States.
The conventional wisdom posits that Israel has long maintained the military capability to degrade Iran’s nuclear program but not to destroy it. That may or may not be true. As evidenced by its Hollywood-style covert actions in recent years, the Mossad has deeply penetrated the inner sanctum of the Islamic Republic, gaining an unknown treasure trove of intelligence along the way. Through a combination of bombs, electronic warfare, cyberattacks, and sabotage, the Israeli Air Force, Mossad, and Unit 8200 (Israel’s National Security Agency) might well be able to do considerable damage to Iranian nuclear infrastructure. Whether it can destroy it, rather than just set it back, remains an open question—as does whether it can reach Iran’s under-the-mountain enrichment facility near the holy city of Qom.
The Abraham Accords raise the possibility that Israel would no longer have to worry about the air-to-air refueling challenges that a sustained aerial bombing campaign would present, since Israeli jets could land on Arab desert airfields for quick refueling. Jerusalem, in recent days, expressed interest in buying America’s latest bunker-buster, a 5,000-pound bomb that can be launched from an F-15 fighter. The Biden administration should approve that request—and Congress should support it.
But Israel shouldn’t have to do the world’s dirty work. A nuclear-threshold terror-sponsoring regime with long-range missiles presents a grave threat to American national security. And while more creative and bolder than the American military at times, the IDF is no match for the power of the United States.
Mark Kirk was defeated for re-election in 2016. But Menendez is still there, and now the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. We need another Menendez-Kirk moment a decade after the last. Who will stand up and take on the mantle?
Richard Goldberg is a Mosaic columnist and senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He has served on Capitol Hill, on the U.S. National Security Council, as the chief of staff for Illinois’s governor, and as a Navy Reserve Intelligence Officer. Follow Richard on Twitter @rich_goldberg. FDD is a Washington, D.C.-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Richard Goldberg Senior Advisor · November 23, 2021
27. America Repeated Vietnam’s Mistakes in Afghanistan
America Repeated Vietnam’s Mistakes in Afghanistan
Lessons from both conflicts should become part of the military’s education requirements.
WSJ · by Arnold L. Punaro
U.S. Marines at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan in August.
Photo: Lance Cpl. Nicholas Guevara/Associated Press
Defense Department leaders have assured Congress and the American people that the military would study the war in Afghanistan to learn lessons from America’s 20-year involvement and painful exit. This will be an important exercise, but not a new one.
Many lessons from Afghanistan mirror ones from Vietnam. This time, we owe it to our fighting sons and daughters not merely to identify the lessons of failure but also to integrate them into our military so they aren’t repeated.
From the start, the U.S. engagements in Vietnam and Afghanistan suffered from a lack of clarity and coherent strategy. Despite the death of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, the U.S. remained in Afghanistan, and leaders continued to misunderstand the differences between counterterrorism and counterinsurgency strategies. We should have known better. In Vietnam we similarly lacked knowledge of the broader social, political and economic dynamics underpinning the situation and broader region.
We also “Americanized” the war in Afghanistan despite the failure of the same strategy in the Vietnam War. We defaulted to teaching our allies to fight like U.S. soldiers, with U.S. weapons and technologies and American-style training. We failed to teach our partners in either case self-sustaining logistics and maintenance skills, thereby setting them up for failure.
In Afghanistan we witnessed a stream of inaccurate accounts and unreliable analyses of the situation on the ground, much as we had in Vietnam. In both cases, the failure to address reality laid the groundwork for failed nations and botched evacuations.
The similarities go on. There were diplomatic blunders: The North Vietnamese paid only lip service to the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, and the Taliban repeatedly failed to uphold their end of the conditions-based withdrawal agreement. There were foreign-aid problems: The influx of cash to both countries yielded little benefit but fueled rampant corruption and created dependency on external help. There were bureaucratic snafus: Poor coordination and communication, as well as an unclear division of labor among U.S. federal agencies, foreign governments and international organizations hampered mission effectiveness. (These issues also contributed to the failure to prevent 9/11.)
Are we doomed to repeat history? Service members who served during both conflicts, as I did, were pained to see our efforts in Afghanistan fail to take into account Vietnam’s lessons, even though many of our early leaders in Afghanistan cut their teeth in Vietnam.
There is still one critical failure of the Vietnam War that we could avoid repeating: the failure to act decisively on lessons learned. Three strategies could help ensure that things are different in the future.
First, the military should reform its education requirements to include a thorough examination of the lessons of both Vietnam and Afghanistan. It should be included in boot camp, officer candidate school and the senior service schools. The lessons must be absorbed by all, not limited to an analyst’s bookshelf.
Second, understanding and applying the lessons of Vietnam and Afghanistan should become part of the nomination process for three- and four-star generals. The Senate Armed Services Committee makes nominees certify all manner of commitments. They also should testify that they understand the lessons and won’t repeat the same mistakes.
Third, Congress must step up its oversight capacity. It should implement congressionally mandated strategy reviews as a safeguard against becoming bogged down in similar situations.
We need to make better, more informed decisions. Let’s study these painful lessons and prevent them from happening again.
Mr. Punaro is a retired U.S. Marine major general and a former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He served in Vietnam, was director of Marine reserve affairs, 2001-03, and is author of “The Ever-Shrinking Fighting Force.”
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WSJ · by Arnold L. Punaro
28. Afghan refugees are being recruited to join an Iranian paramilitary
Excerpts:
Further study of the issue is particularly important since it is unclear what tools can be used to stop state-sponsored refugee recruitment. Additional sanctions are unlikely to persuade Iranian stakeholders — Washington already has enacted broad sanctions on Tehran and designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. An improved humanitarian response, inside and outside of Afghanistan, could make recruitment incentives less enticing. There also could be information campaigns to warn refugees of the risks of recruitment.
While refugee recruitment may seem a less immediate concern than other humanitarian challenges, it could be an important and under-appreciated component of threats to displaced peoples. The possibility of having refugees flee conflicts in their home countries, only to be recruited by another state to fight in a different war, could be counterproductive. Greater attention to these risks may become increasingly important as refugee flows from Afghanistan continue.
Afghan refugees are being recruited to join an Iranian paramilitary
The Hill · by Erik E. Mueller and Andrew Radin, opinion contributors · November 23, 2021
As hundreds of thousands of Afghans flee their homeland following the Taliban’s victory, the United States and international community face an under-appreciated challenge: Some of these refugees could be recruited into state militaries and paramilitaries. As Western policymakers consider how to deal with Afghan evacuees, including former members of the Afghan security forces, they might consider how to prevent adversaries such as Iran from recruiting Afghan refugees for dangerous and destabilizing operations.
Recently, Iran has recruited thousands of Afghans into its Liwa Fatemiyoun, which it has used as “cannon fodder” in the war in Syria. But the recruitment of refugees into paramilitaries is not a new phenomenon, and its recurrence may point to its attractiveness to governments.
During the Cold War, the United States recruited Cuban refugees for the Bay of Pigs operation and the British recruited heavily from exile communities during World War II. Research shows that states tend to recruit “legionnaires” — foreign-born individuals — into their military forces when they face recruitment challenges and external threats. An increasing supply of refugees may make recruitment even more attractive, especially if potential recruits have few other options. The United Nations estimates that up to a half-million Afghans may flee into neighboring countries and join over 2.6 million existing Afghan refugees.
Recruitment into paramilitaries — forces that are not formally a part of the state’s military — comes with added benefits and risks to states. Paramilitaries will not face the same need for accountability as regular units, nor will they likely be provided with the same long-term benefits provided to regular military veterans. The availability of refugee-staffed paramilitary groups also could make covert action more attractive, since the citizens of the sponsoring state do not bear the costs of an operation. While paramilitary groups may face recruitment challenges given the costs and risks, refugees may be easier targets.
One proposal — the British Army recruiting Afghan commandos in a capacity like that of the Gurkhas — offers an example of a positive approach. The United States also reportedly evacuated partners who were aligned with the former regime and these individuals could be recruited by the U.S. military as well. Well-trained, experienced Afghan military personnel who long have collaborated with coalition militaries could contribute a great deal, assuming they are properly vetted, receive necessary benefits and have a real choice about their recruitment options.
The recruitment of former Afghans outside of Western militaries should give policymakers pause. Turkey could enlist Afghan arrivals into proxies emulating its recruitment of displaced Syrians into forces that have deployed to fight in Syria, the Libyan civil war and in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War. One also can imagine a future hypothetical mission mirroring the Bay of Pigs approach in which Afghan evacuees are recruited to return to Afghanistan. Such a mission might draw on former members of special units outside the mainline Afghan forces. For example, the New York Times reported that a unit from the National Defense Service, Afghanistan’s intelligence service, was reportedly present at Kabul’s airport and was evacuated. Returning such forces to Afghanistan could seem like an easy option in the future but could pose unanticipated risks to both the forces returning and stability in the region.
Undoubtedly the greater threat to national security comes from the recruitment of Afghans by Iran. Since at least 2012, Iran has recruited Afghan adults and children into the Liwa Fatemiyoun, which supports Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Syria’s civil war. Of its estimated 50,000 Afghan fighters, approximately 5,000 were killed and another 4,000 injured during the war. In 2017, Iran declared victory over Islamic State and ceased recruitment for the Liwa Fatemiyoun, but it could change course and expand operations in Syria or beyond.
Further study of the issue is particularly important since it is unclear what tools can be used to stop state-sponsored refugee recruitment. Additional sanctions are unlikely to persuade Iranian stakeholders — Washington already has enacted broad sanctions on Tehran and designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. An improved humanitarian response, inside and outside of Afghanistan, could make recruitment incentives less enticing. There also could be information campaigns to warn refugees of the risks of recruitment.
While refugee recruitment may seem a less immediate concern than other humanitarian challenges, it could be an important and under-appreciated component of threats to displaced peoples. The possibility of having refugees flee conflicts in their home countries, only to be recruited by another state to fight in a different war, could be counterproductive. Greater attention to these risks may become increasingly important as refugee flows from Afghanistan continue.
The Hill · by Erik E. Mueller and Andrew Radin, opinion contributors · November 23, 2021
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
