Quotes of the Day:
7– “Be reflective if you must be armed. If you carry a weapon in public service, may God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no.”
– Timothy Snyder
"Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
"A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom."
– Bob Dylan
1. Is it Time to Finally Put Someone in Charge of Waging America’s Irregular Wars? by Charles T. Cleveland and Daniel Egel
2. Beijing’s Espionage Campaign Against the West
3. Trump’s CIA Pick Expected to Push for Bare-Knuckle Spycraft Against China
4. Havana Syndrome bombshell as US intelligence report hints at culprit
5. Donald Trump’s Rush for Ukraine Peace Talks Could Be a Giant Mistake. by John Bolton
6. How Assad’s Collapse Paves the Way for a Stronger Israel–Ukraine Partnership
7. China’s Export Boom Means Trump Tariffs Would Hit Beijing Where It Hurts
8. Mainland China ramps up integration push with local Taiwan affairs offices in Fujian
9. 'Things got really crazy.' The shocking untold story of the Chinese spy balloon
10. Taiwan's spy agency says China is working with gangs, shell companies to gain intelligence on Taiwan
11. The U.S. is unprepared for a major war. Can Pete Hegseth fix that? by Max Boot
12. Command and Control and AI, Oh My! – The Case for Petrov’s Law –
13. Machiavelli and our Wars in the Middle East
14.How Lagging Vaccination Could Lead to a Polio Resurgence
15. Japan foreign minister in South Korea for talks before Trump takes office
16. Outgoing US envoy to Japan defends American troops and their standing around the globe
17. Tulsi Gabbard’s Confirmation Conversion on Section 702
18. Military Academies Quashed Army-Navy Game Advertisement Featuring Marine Recommended for Medal of Honor
19. US Army wants spy drones to launch from high-altitude motherships
20. Battlefield Drones and the Accelerating Autonomous Arms Race in Ukraine
21. The Battle for Brilliant Minds: From the Nuclear Age to AI
22. The Ghosts of Bud Dajo: How an American Massacre Shaped the Philippines
23. Rise of the Nonaligned: Who Wins in a Multipolar World?
24. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 12, 2025
25. Iran Update, January 12, 2025
26. Pete Hegseth's Battle Scars Are His Strength
27. Why Senate Republicans Should Reject Pete Hegseth
28. Former NATO Commander Says Trump Annexing Greenland ‘Not a Crazy Idea’
1. Is it Time to Finally Put Someone in Charge of Waging America’s Irregular Wars? by Charles T. Cleveland and Daniel Egel
Conclusion:
The American approach to irregular warfare must turn to that which made it dominant in conventional and nuclear war. Namely, attack the challenge head on with energy, ingenuity, and purpose. If America is to win this war, the one chosen by our enemies on the field of battle we drove them to, it can no longer rely on the scattered actions of orphaned offices and units in departments built primarily for other purposes. So yes, it is time for the United States to professionalize its approach to irregular warfare. America needs a 21st Century version of Britain’s “Ministry of Economic Warfare.”
I will have a similar article coming out later this week on 1945 (https://www.19fortyfive.com/)
Seizing the Initiative in the Gray Zone: The Case for a U.S. Office of Strategic Disruption
Is it Time to Finally Put Someone in Charge of Waging America’s Irregular Wars?
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/01/13/is-it-time-to-finally-put-someone-in-charge-of-waging-americas-irregular-wars/
by Charles T. Cleveland, by Daniel Egel
|
01.13.2025 at 01:44am
Is it Time to Finally Put Someone in Charge of Waging America’s Irregular Wars?
By Charles T. Cleveland and Daniel Egel
The United States is now learning that terrorism – which defined America’s national security posture during the first two decades of the 21st century – was just the leading edge of a broader national security risk facing the nation.
Consolidating America’s approach to irregular warfare in a single high-level agency could help the U.S. address this larger and growing risk, and ultimately win.
The New National Security Challenge
By maintaining deterrence in nuclear and traditional war, the United States has forced adversaries to turn to a version of Kennan’s political warfare and its offensive component –irregular warfare – to achieve their objectives.
Through lawfare, economic means, foreign malign influence, material support to “fifth columns,” and sabotage, these adversaries are demonstrating the willingness, capacity, and capability to combat the United States and stay below the threshold of traditional war. Chinese merchant vessels dragging anchors in the Baltic Sea, Iranian drones in Ukraine, North Korean troops fighting in Europe, and expanding Chinese-Iranian-North Korean-Russian cooperation in the ongoing information war are indications beyond early warning that a global irregular war against America and her allies and friends is well underway.
U.S. Response: Decentralized and Inefficient
While these adversaries have professionalized their ability to leverage this phenomenon in pursuit of strategic objectives, the United States has not. This reflects, in significant part, a simple fact: America’s irregular warfare capabilities are distributed across an increasingly large array of U.S. civilian and military agencies and there is no single organization responsible for deploying this capability on behalf of the nation.
The consequence of this lack of centralized leadership for irregular warfare is that the current U.S. approach is as inefficient as it has been ineffective.
A Proposed Solution: A Cabinet-Level Secretary
One approach for addressing this gap would be for the United States to establish a Cabinet-level secretary equivalent to the World War II-era British Ministry of Economic Warfare.
Lessons from the British Ministry of Economic Warfare
The Ministry of Economic Warfare provided two capabilities during World War II that are of paramount importance in the current competition. The first was to provide the British a coordinated capability to attack “the industrial, financial, and economic structure of the enemy…to cripple and enfeeble his armed forces that they can no longer effectively carry on war.” The potential of such a capability vis-à-vis the current competition with China – perhaps in an updated version of the U.S. Office of Economic War – is clear.
However, equally and perhaps more importantly, this World War II-era ministry also became the home of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). The SOE provided the British government the capability to counter Nazi control and influence across Europe, including “industrial and military sabotage, labour agitation and strikes, continuous propaganda, terrorist acts against traitors and German leaders, boycotts and riots.” The SOE was the forbearer to the U.S. Office of Strategy Services which – at the end of the war – would lay the foundation for both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and U.S. Army Special Forces.
The establishment of the SOE in 1940 under the British Ministry of Economic Warfare reflected two realities of the time. The first was the need for a standing organ of the state, that combined the spy, diplomat and soldier and was purpose-designed to professionally intervene in statecraft for the purpose of manipulating and harnessing indigenous capacities in pursuit of strategic objectives. The second was that this mission was “not something which [could] be handled by the ordinary departmental machinery of either the British Civil Service or the British military machine.”
The Case for a New Cabinet Secretary for Irregular Warfare
What was true in 1940 for the United Kingdom is equally true for the United States in 2025: There is both a need for the capability in which the SOE was imbued and there is not a U.S. Executive Branch agency that is capable of effectively wielding such broad and multidisciplined capability on behalf of the United States.
The President – ideally with congressional support – should take a proven civilian leader and put him or her in charge of creating this new agency. This leader would need to have both professional credibility within the national security community, but also a relationship with the President.
That leader should be paired with the right senior military deputy – one steeped in unconventional warfare. Together they should be empowered to take necessary assets from today’s Special Operations Command (SOCOM), CIA, federal law enforcement agencies, and other civilian cabinet secretaries. Military assets would include the CIA’s paramilitary and influence capabilities and SOCOM’s indigenous focused special warfare capabilities, found mostly in its Army Special Forces and psychological operations units. Civilian assets would include the FBI’s intelligence and overseas networks, Drug Enforcement Administration’s assistance arm that works with foreign paramilitary police, the Department of State’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations and Global Engagement Center, elements of the Department of Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, and elements of the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security, among others.
Benefits: Increased Efficiency and Efficacy
Such an approach would be both more effective and also more efficient. It would allow for purpose-designed and synchronized irregular warfare campaigns while consolidating and eliminating the multitude of redundant capabilities that are artifacts of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the war on terror, on drugs, on crime, and numerous counterinsurgency support campaigns, such as Colombia and the Philippines. And it would let the Department of Defense and CIA focus on their core purposes of nuclear war, traditional war, and intelligence.
Conclusion: Time to Professionalize America’s Approach to Irregular Warfare
The American approach to irregular warfare must turn to that which made it dominant in conventional and nuclear war. Namely, attack the challenge head on with energy, ingenuity, and purpose. If America is to win this war, the one chosen by our enemies on the field of battle we drove them to, it can no longer rely on the scattered actions of orphaned offices and units in departments built primarily for other purposes. So yes, it is time for the United States to professionalize its approach to irregular warfare. America needs a 21st Century version of Britain’s “Ministry of Economic Warfare.”
About The Authors
2. Beijing’s Espionage Campaign Against the West
Beijing’s Espionage Campaign Against the West
The recent Treasury Department breach is the latest example of China’s strategic plan to destabilize the free world.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/beijings-espionage-campaign-against-the-west-treasury-department-breach-latest-example-3c6890fe
By Mike Pompeo
Jan. 12, 2025 4:02 pm ET
American and Chinese flags wave ahead of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Zhangjiakou, China, Feb. 2, 2022. Photo: Kiichiro Sato/Associated Press
When a state-sponsored Chinese hacker breached the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, it allowed the Communist Party to access sensitive information with significant strategic implications. It’s the latest example of Beijing’s espionage campaign against the West, which runs deeper and is far more dangerous than the Soviet efforts of the 20th century.
While leading America’s clandestine operations and diplomacy during the first Trump term, I got a front-row seat to these undercover activities. Judging from publicly available information, these efforts have accelerated over the past four years. The Chinese Communist Party is already deep inside our critical networks and infrastructure—a consequence of a dangerous gap in our national security that imperils Americans and heightens the risk of war.
For too long, the U.S. has underestimated the scale of and risks associated with Beijing’s covert operations. Recent examples illuminate the seriousness of the threat: Chinese-sponsored hackers allegedly compromised American telecommunication networks during the 2024 presidential campaign, targeting the phones of Trump and Harris campaign affiliates. It also recently came to light that a state-sponsored Chinese hacking group dubbed Volt Typhoon embedded malware in critical infrastructure in Guam, which would enable China to disrupt communications between the U.S. and Asia in the event of a conflict over Taiwan. The same group also infiltrated sensitive U.S. military networks in Guam.
Today, Chinese state-sponsored hackers outnumber the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s cyber personnel by at least 50 to 1, according to FBI Director Christopher Wray. These groups regularly target vital American databases, government agencies and critical infrastructure. The Chinese Communist Party has built a vast influence network across the U.S. by bribing and threatening American citizens to advance its malign objectives.
These attacks are part of a strategic effort to destabilize the West and prepare Beijing for war. The Biden administration’s failure to acknowledge this risk and counter it effectively has given China more political power abroad and heightened the risk of a wider conflict. To protect America, the Trump administration must develop counterintelligence capacity and counterespionage efforts at a scale large enough to defend against the Chinese Communist Party’s threat.
U.S. federal and state officials should demand reciprocity in the relationship with China. If U.S. entities are barred from investing in areas China deems a national-security risk, we shouldn’t allow China to invest in areas that could pose a risk to us—such as Chinese entities buying land near our military bases. If U.S. firms must consent to technology transfers and party oversight to do business in China, Chinese firms shouldn’t be able to do business here without more oversight. If our diplomats can’t freely and privately communicate with Chinese citizens, we shouldn’t tolerate Chinese officials doing so with U.S. citizens. If fewer than 1,000 American students study at Chinese universities annually, we shouldn’t grant visas to nearly 300,000 students from China—especially when some of them engage in scientific espionage, intellectual-property theft and other hostile activities.
The Biden administration in 2022 foolishly shut down the China Initiative, an anti-espionage program started in the first Trump term to counter the malign Chinese activities within our borders. Mr. Trump should revive this program on day one of his second presidency.
His administration should also recognize that a fragile Chinese economy, coupled with Xi Jinping’s increasingly draconian policies, will expand the number of disaffected Chinese nationals willing to work with the U.S. to undermine the Communist Party. China is willing to commit massive resources to develop influence networks inside its adversary’s borders, and we must be prepared to do the same.
The idea that America’s relationship with China should be based on mutual understanding and fair competition is naive. It gives the Communist Party all the room it needs to infiltrate our government and society. The U.S. will be secure only if we acknowledge Beijing’s ideological hostility toward America and its desire to supplant us as the pre-eminent world power. We should take the Chinese threat at least as seriously as we took the Soviet threat in the Cold War. It’s time for Washington to engage seriously in a conflict Beijing knows has already begun.
Mr. Pompeo served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, 2017-18, and secretary of state, 2018-21.
3. Trump’s CIA Pick Expected to Push for Bare-Knuckle Spycraft Against China
Spy vs. Spy.
Trump’s CIA Pick Expected to Push for Bare-Knuckle Spycraft Against China
John Ratcliffe, who is set for a Senate confirmation hearing this week, is a national-security repeat from the president-elect’s first term
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/trumps-cia-pick-expected-to-push-for-bare-knuckle-spycraft-against-china-da7da744?mod=hp_lead_pos5
By Joel Schectman
Follow and Dustin Volz
Follow
Jan. 13, 2025 5:00 am ET
John Ratcliffe is scheduled to testify before a Senate panel considering his nomination on Wednesday. Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg News
President-elect Donald Trump’s unorthodox approach to his coming national-security team is set to come under the spotlight in Congress this week, and one constant remains from his first term: America is about to take the gloves off in its shadow bout with Beijing.
Trump’s choice to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, is likely to push for more aggressive spying operations targeting Beijing if confirmed to lead the most storied U.S. spy service, current and former colleagues said. Ratcliffe is to appear before the Senate panel considering his nomination on Wednesday.
The Republican president-elect has snubbed the conventional GOP approach in some of his other top national-security picks. Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host chosen to lead the Pentagon, has criticized U.S. involvement in Ukraine and has said women should be barred from combat. Hegseth has also faced allegations of sexual assault, which he has denied, and is to testify at what is expected to be a tough confirmation hearing on Tuesday.
Trump’s pick to oversee U.S. intelligence agencies, Tulsi Gabbard, has run into some friction in meetings with lawmakers in recent weeks over her past skepticism of U.S. surveillance powers and seeming embrace of Washington’s adversaries. In those meetings, Gabbard—a former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii—has walked back her opposition to a crucial spying program, in an apparent effort to win congressional support.
Ratcliffe, a former congressman who had the job Gabbard is up for during Trump’s first term, has instead focused on the more widely shared view that China is the greatest long-term threat facing the U.S. Trump and his advisers have said China is the top economic and national-security threat and have outlined a range of actions, including potentially steep tariffs, that they want to enact against Beijing.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping reviewed troops in Macau last month. Photo: Li Gang/Xinhua/Zuma Press
Clandestine intelligence operations are among the areas that could be subjected to some of the biggest changes under Trump. Ratcliffe would push for aggressive spy missions against high-level officials in China and for covert operations intended to counter Beijing’s growing influence around the world, a person close to him said. Ratcliffe would also likely pursue such activity to deter recent Chinese cyberattacks, including the compromise of telecommunications networks, the person said. (Beijing has denied involvement in the attacks.)
“John knows he’s got the ultimate top cover: that’s Trump,” the person said. “Trump is down for that kind of thing.”
In the past, the CIA has used these kinds of covert operations, which require presidential authorization, to launch secret propaganda campaigns, cyberattacks and industrial sabotage.
A representative for the Chinese embassy in Washington didn’t respond to a request for comment. Chinese officials have accused Washington of manufacturing claims against Beijing to justify its own aggressive foreign policy.
Many national-security officials, including Ratcliffe, have long said that successive administrations were too naive about the dangers posed by China. Other former intelligence officials and Democratic lawmakers have accused Ratcliffe of politicizing intelligence about China during Trump’s first term to obscure efforts by Russia, which spy agencies have said sought to boost Trump’s electoral prospects.
“Russia was a big geopolitical threat and election threat, but China touched everywhere. John was a big understander of that,” said William Evanina, a former top U.S. counterintelligence official.
In 2019, Trump authorized clandestine confrontation against Beijing, granting the CIA permission to launch a secret propaganda campaign aimed at undercutting Chinese leader Xi Jinping, according to former U.S. officials. That included using social-media bot accounts to promote negative stories about China’s ruling elite, suggesting for example that senior officials were hoarding stolen state funds overseas.
Trump also signed a classified executive order, confirmed publicly by senior officials, that removed interagency bureaucratic restraints on using offensive cyber weapons against a range of foreign foes. The policy was largely kept in place under the Biden administration, but Trump could seek to deploy disruptive cyber actions more frequently, former officials said.
Rep. Mike Waltz, a Florida Republican Trump tapped as his national-security adviser, said the recent Chinese hacking campaigns into critical U.S. infrastructure and intrusions into telecommunications networks showed the need to be more forceful with Beijing.
“We have to stop trying to just play better and better defense,” Waltz said during a recent Fox Business interview. “We need to start going on offense.”
Some former intelligence officials said it would be difficult to engage quickly in more aggressive spy games against Beijing, in part because of the compromise over a decade ago of the CIA’s network of informants in China. The CIA has struggled to rebuild its sources within China since then, former officials said.
During Trump’s first term, Ratcliffe hired more China analysts and pushed to declassify intelligence that could be used to embarrass Beijing on the world stage, a former official said.
That effort sometimes put him into conflict with other senior U.S. officials. Ratcliffe accused the intelligence community of applying different standards when analyzing political interference by Moscow and Beijing, which he said in a 2021 letter to Congress had led “to the false impression that Russia sought to influence the election but China did not.”
Democrats in turn accused Ratcliffe of giving undue weight to the threat posed by China in the 2020 election to distract attention from Russia’s continued support for Trump.
A 2021 report to Congress from an internal intelligence community watchdog found Ratcliffe had ignored protests of analysts who said his assessment didn’t represent their work. But the investigation also determined that the U.S. intelligence community’s China analysts were hesitant to label Beijing’s actions as election interference, out of fear that their work would be used to support Trump’s agenda.
Write to Joel Schectman at joel.schectman@wsj.com and Dustin Volz at dustin.volz@wsj.com
4. Havana Syndrome bombshell as US intelligence report hints at culprit
Graphics and photos at the link.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14275835/havana-syndrome-intelligent-report-communications.html
Havana Syndrome bombshell as US intelligence report hints at culprit
By LAURA PARNABY FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
Published: 10:09 EST, 12 January 2025 | Updated: 11:25 EST, 12 January 2025
Daily Mail · by LAURA PARNABY FOR DAILYMAIL.COM · January 12, 2025
A new report has hinted that a 'foreign actor' may be responsible for the 'Havana Syndrome' symptoms which have been plaguing hundreds of US veterans.
Although the majority of the US intelligence community has said it is 'very unlikely' an adversary is linked to the mystery ailment, a new report published on Friday revealed that two out of seven agencies diverged from this consensus for the first time.
Released by the National Intelligence Council on Friday, the document states that the two unnamed groups now believe there is a 50/50 chance foreign actors could have developed radiofrequency technology associated with 'Havana Syndrome'.
Sources told The Atlantic one group which changed its tune was the National Security Agency, adding that their revised evaluation was based on 'intercepted communications' linked to a 'foreign actor'.
It's a major development for people suffering with 'Havana Syndrome', who have felt dismissed and gas-lit by the government for years. Many believe their debilitating symptoms have been caused by concealed energy weapons.
The Intelligence Community (IC) report states that overall, it 'continues to assess that it is "very unlikely" a foreign adversary is responsible for the events reported as possible anomalous health incidents (AHIs)' - the official term for Havana Syndrome.
Five groups within the IC have said they do not believe a foreign actor has 'used a novel weapon or prototype device to harm even a subset of the USG personnel or dependents who reported medical symptoms or sensory phenomena as AHIs'.
But by contrast, one IC group has said there is a 'roughly event chance' a foreign actor has done exactly this. Another group believes such a weapon may have been developed - but they don't think it's linked to the AHIs.
A new report released by the National Intelligence Council has hinted that a 'foreign actor' may be responsible for the 'Havana Syndrome' symptoms which have been plaguing hundreds of US veterans. (Pictured: Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines in March 2023)
The syndrome first surfaced at the US embassy in Havana, (pictured) when government employees suddenly found themselves afflicted with the mysterious malady
Symptoms of Havana Syndrome include loud noise, ear pain, intense head pressure or vibration, dizziness, visual problems, and cognitive difficulties
'Both of these IC components have low confidence in these judgments,' the report update states. 'These shifts are based on reporting they evaluate to indicate that foreign actors are making progress in scientific research and weapons development.'
Havana Syndrome is a disputed medical condition experienced by a cluster of US and Canadian government officials who were based in around a dozen overseas locations, which started among employees in Havana in 2016.
Read More
Only plausible explanation for mysterious Havana Syndrome that has afflicted dozens of US diplomats around the world IS a weapon, CIA report finds
Symptoms include dizziness, cognitive problems, insomnia, and headaches. The most prominent theory is that it is caused by pulsed electromagnetic energy and ultrasound emanating from sonic weapons.
At least 200 cases across the government are now under investigation.
It comes after a CIA whistleblower said Americans should be 'terrified' of alleged government gaslighting of former intelligence employees who believe they have been struck down by the syndrome.
The medically-retired CIA officer spoke with investigative journalist Catherine Herridge about her experience with the debilitating mystery disorder, and how the authorities have treated her since.
Speaking under the pseudonym Alice, the former CIA employee said she spent two decades in government service and began experiencing the syndrome.
Alice said her injuries are so debilitating that she relies on a service dog. She needed several breaks during the interview and wore dark-tinted glasses to shield her eyes from the studio lighting.
A CIA whistleblower (pictured) said that Americans should be 'terrified' of government gaslighting of former intelligence employees who have reported Havana Syndrome symptoms
One of the sonic weapons that could cause Havana syndrome is said to be a smaller version of this 1990s Soviet microwave generator, which is kept at the University of New Mexico
'I was serving in Africa and I experienced an anomalous health incident in my home on a Saturday night,' Alice told Herridge.
'I heard a weird noise. It was a really weird sound that I'll never, never forget it… and after about a second or two, I felt it in my feet, kind of like the reverb from a speaker.'
Alice said she went to the master bedroom to ask her partner whether he could hear the off-putting noise too.
'I said, "Hey, do you hear that weird noise?" And the first sign that something was off, I should have known, was when he said, "what noise?"
Alice went back to where she heard the noise. 'Immediately, as soon as I re-entered the space, I heard the noise again,' she said.
'My ear started hurting. I started having vertigo.
'The room was spinning, my head started pulsing. It hurt so badly and I had a ton of pain in my left ear and my ears started ringing and I thought I was going to pass out.'
Alice said she believes several different, concealed weapons could be behind the strange symptoms experienced by herself and many of her colleagues, adding that she thinks Moscow is to blame.
'I think there are weapons that can be fit in backpacks, ones that can be fit in the trunks of cars, ones that can be planted at a position with line of sight to people from across the street,' she said.
'I believe the Russian GRU (Russian military intelligence) came to my house late at night and took me off the battlefield,' she added.
Asked if her old self died the day she experienced an AHI, Alice responded, 'A little bit. I was paid for my brain. I was paid for my ability to write well and to write for the president.
'I was paid to meet with foreigners and to get information that would help advance US security objectives …and I can't do that anymore the way I used to and it's really, that's one of the hardest parts.'
But Alice said the CIA has been gaslighting her and other AHI survivors in the years since by making them 'question our own injuries'.
'We swore this oath and every day I watch them really continue to deny people's humanity and their injuries,' she told Herridge.
'People that put themselves and their families on the line in horrible, horribly dangerous places and situations to protect this country.'
Speaking about the intelligence agencies, she added: 'If they're politicizing this, what else are they not telling the president?'
'It's a coverup and it's terrifying and it should be terrifying to all Americans.'
There have been several investigations into Havana Syndrome by government and non-government agencies, but none have been able to determine the cause.
They found that foreign adversaries are unlikely to be the cause of AHIs, and considered energy weapons and psychological causes like stress are potential causes.
A March 2024 letter obtained by Herridge from the former head of the DoD Cross-Functional AHI team, Brigadier General Shannon O'Harren, said they believed Havana Syndrome victims.
'We believe your experiences are real and we are unwaveringly committed to continue to provide quality care for you and those who are eligible,' the letter reads.
'The Department of Defense believes us and has actually gone to bat for those of us from across the US government. I would not be getting care if it wasn't for senior DOD leadership,' Alice told Herridge.
But she had sterner words for the CIA. When asked why she was speaking out now, Alice said: 'Because the CIA is betraying and not just betraying but making friends of mine and my life a living hell. I want them to stop hurting my friends.
'I want them to give everyone I care about medical care and Havana Act payments and to take care of us in the long term.
'I want them to stop denying what is happening to us and so there can be opportunities to collect the information that we need so that we can prevent this from happening to more people.'
Daily Mail · by LAURA PARNABY FOR DAILYMAIL.COM · January 12, 2025
5. Donald Trump’s Rush for Ukraine Peace Talks Could Be a Giant Mistake. by John Bolton
Excerpts:
Negotiations are looming primarily because Trump wants the war to go away. Europe is too tired and too incapable of charting a different course. Contemplating these depressing scenarios, therefore, Ukraine and its supporters may have little choice but to acquiesce in talks on unfavorable terms.
For that very reason, Kyiv should be very cautious on what it agrees with Trump.
Donald Trump’s Rush for Ukraine Peace Talks Could Be a Giant Mistake
19fortyfive.com · by John Bolton · January 13, 2025
During the 2024 campaign, candidate Donald Trump said he could resolve the Ukraine war in twenty-four hours by getting together with Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky to thrash things out. At a January 7 press conference, President-elect Trump conceded it could take up to six months.
Call that learning.
Trump fundamentally wants the war to disappear. He has said repeatedly it would never have occurred had he been President, as he has also said about the ongoing Middle East conflict. Of course, these statements are not provable nor disprovable, but they reflect his visceral feeling that the wars are Biden’s problem and should disappear when Biden does.
Neither war will disappear so quickly, but Trump’s comments strongly suggest that he is indifferent to the terms on which they end. That is likely bad news for Ukraine, though it could be good news for Israel in its struggle against Iran’s “ring of fire” strategy.
The Ceasefire Challenge: Good or Bad Idea?
As Inauguration Day nears, little information is publicly available about what Trump will do. And, because he has neither a coherent philosophy nor a strategic approach to foreign affairs, what he says in the morning may not apply in the afternoon.
Accordingly, those concerned for Ukrainian and Western security should focus on what is negotiable with Moscow and what is not. Early decisions on the central components of potential diplomacy can have far-reaching implications that the parties will inevitably try to turn to their benefit. Ukraine, especially, must make several key decisions about how to proceed. Consider the following.
Although a cease-fire linked to commencing negotiations may be inevitable because of pressure from Trump, such a cease-fire is not necessarily in Ukraine’s interest. Talking while fighting was a successful strategy for the Chinese Communist Party in its struggle against the Kuomintang during and after World War II. It could work for Ukraine today under certain conditions. Most important is the continued supply of adequate military assistance, which is questionable with Trump in office.
But a cease-fire can be more perilous for Ukraine than for Russia: the longer negotiations take, the more likely the cease-fire lines become permanent, a new border between Ukraine and Russia far into the future. As negotiations proceed, the absence of hostilities will provide opportunities for Moscow to seek full or at least partial easing of economic sanctions, which many Europeans seem poised to concede.
Moreover, once hostilities stop, they are far harder politically to resume, which is also likely to Ukraine’s disadvantage. Although Russia would probably win an indefinite war of attrition, it also needs time to rebuild its debilitated military and economy. A cease-fire affords that opportunity and thereby buys time for Russia to heal its wounds and prepare for the next attack. Russia waited eight years after its 2014 offensive and can afford to wait again until the West is distracted elsewhere.
Suppose Trump insists on a cease-fire-in-place and contemporaneous negotiations. In that case, Ukraine must be careful to avoid having the talks aim at a permanent solution rather than a temporary accommodation. Russia will see any deal as temporary, no matter what it says publicly. Vladimir Putin obsesses over reincorporating Ukraine into a new Russian empire, and each slice of territory Russia takes back brings that goal closer. Negotiating an “end” to the war plays into the Kremlin’s hands since it provides the false impression to gullible Westerners that there is no risk of future aggression.
Both the cease-fire issue and the duration of any deal raise two other questions: should there be “peacekeepers” along the cease-fire line, and should Ukraine insist on “security guarantees” from the West (NATO or otherwise) against future Russian aggression?
Peacekeeping is operationally complex and rarely successful in any sense other than helping prolong a military stalemate. That is nearly the uniform outcome of UN peacekeeping. Peacekeeping forces (like UNIFIL in Lebanon or UNDOF on the Golan Heights) become part of the landscape in peace or war. The Security Council loses interest in resolving the sources of the underlying conflict. The peacekeepers become irrelevant, as recent developments along the cease-fire line between Israel and Syria demonstrate. In short, peacekeepers are essentially only hollow symbols.
Indeed, the recognition of UN ineffectiveness has likely inspired calls for deploying NATO peacekeepers along the Ukraine-Russia line of control. But does anyone expect Russia to agree meekly? Will Moscow not suggest peacekeepers from Iran or North Korea along with NATO? Moreover, there has been little discussion about what a peacekeeping force’s rules of engagement would be, whether deployed by the UN or NATO. Would these rules be typical of UN operations, where the peacekeepers can only use force only in self-defense? Or would the rules be more robust, allowing force in aid of their mission? Really? In aid of their mission, NATO peacekeepers would be allowed to use force against Russian troops? Or Ukrainian troops? In such circumstances, potential troop-contributing countries would make themselves very scarce.
U.S. Marines fire an M777 Howitzer during Exercise Rolling Thunder 1-22 at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, U.S. October 19, 2021. Picture taken October 19, 2021. U.S. Marine Corps/Lance Cpl. Brian Bolin Jr./Handout
Future security guarantees for Ukraine, which it is insisting upon, are unfortunately likely to be blue smoke and mirrors. Russia has repeatedly said that NATO membership — the only security guarantee that really matters — is a deal-breaker. European Union security guarantees?
Good luck with that. Security guarantees by individual nations? That was the approach of the Budapest agreements on returning Soviet nuclear weapons to Russia; they didn’t work out so well. In short, “security guarantees” are mellifluous words, but evanescent without US and NATO participation, which Trump seems unlikely to endorse.
Time For Ukraine to Be Cautious
Negotiations are looming primarily because Trump wants the war to go away. Europe is too tired and too incapable of charting a different course. Contemplating these depressing scenarios, therefore, Ukraine and its supporters may have little choice but to acquiesce in talks on unfavorable terms.
For that very reason, Kyiv should be very cautious on what it agrees with Trump.
About the Author: Ambassador John R. Bolton
Ambassador John R. Bolton served as national security adviser under President Donald J. Trump. He is the author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” You can follow him on Twitter: @AmbJohnBolton.
19fortyfive.com · by John Bolton · January 13, 2025
6. How Assad’s Collapse Paves the Way for a Stronger Israel–Ukraine Partnership
Excerpt:
There are no longer grounds for postponing this alignment or equivocating about it as both states’ enemies have now suffered serious strategic defeats in the Middle East. Since the strategic destinies of both Israel and Ukraine are bound up with each other, it is now time for both governments to seize the opportunity that lies before them, for more often than not, there are no second chances in world politics.
How Assad’s Collapse Paves the Way for a Stronger Israel–Ukraine Partnership
19fortyfive.com · by Stephen Blank · January 12, 2025
Russia’s aggression against Ukraine continues to have global repercussions. Among them, at least in part, is the fall of the vicious Assad regime. This regime collapse has ramifications that can and should go beyond the Middle East. Specifically, this event opens the way to a full-fledged Israeli alignment with Ukraine, a policy that would benefit both sides.
Syria’s Repercussions
The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s state has eliminated any need for Israel to have a working agreement with Russia regarding Syria. For a long time, and despite some Russian policymakers’ misgivings, Israel and Russia managed a working agreement that Israel would not attack Russian bases in Syria.
At the same time, Moscow looked the other way if Israel struck at Iranian logistical support for Hamas and Hezbollah. This arrangement, based on pure Realpolitik, lasted until Moscow’s over-extension in Ukraine forced it into a much deeper alignment, if not a potential alliance, with Iran. The consequences of that alignment are now visible to everyone.
Russia now depends on regular supplies of Iranian drones and ballistic missiles and has transferred the Su-35 fighter to Iran, is about to sign a significant defense agreement with Tehran, and has transferred weapons to Hamas, Hezbollah, and also ship sighting technology to the Houthis in Yemen. Russia has cast its lot with Iran, sundering the connection to Israel. Moreover, during the war against Ukraine, Putin, on several occasions, has invoked Russia’s traditional Anti-Semitism, another sign that Russian Jewry is again in potential danger and that, if pressed, Putin has no hesitancy in playing the Anti-Semitic card. Obviously, such a regime cannot serve as a partner for Israel.
While Israel had other priorities until now and was hardly going to strike at Russian targets until it dealt with Hamas and Hezbollah, it no longer needs to worry about Russian military action in Syria. Russia will be lucky to retain its bases there but will not have an Iranian ally in Syria.
Syria’s new regime has made clear that it will no longer serve as the logistical lynchpin of Iranian strategy to forge a multi-theater ring of fire around Israel, including Syria. The latter also served as the primary link to both these Iranian-backed terrorist groups.
That strategy now lies in ruins, and Iran’s vulnerability to Israeli and potential US strikes is now plainly visible.
Israel Becomes Unintangled with Russia
At this point, there are no serious geostrategic obstacles to Israel aligning with Ukraine. Indeed, this alignment might benefit both governments.
The benefits to Ukraine are apparent. It acquires a new battle-tested ally with superb and proven intelligence and defense production capability.
Hopefully, this alignment will lead to Israeli supplies to Ukraine. Indeed, there are earlier reports of Israeli shipments of early-warning systems to Ukraine.
At the same time, this alignment further extends the democratic alliance against the well-known Axis of Upheaval: Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s ties with Israel will strengthen its influence in Washington under the Trump Administration.
Outlining the Axis
Beyond these considerations, the benefits to Israel are equally significant. First, we and Israel must grasp, as Ukraine does, that these two wars are, in effect, one war in separate theaters. They are wars against the US, its allies, and the idea of democracy.
And unless both Israel and Ukraine win, i.e., their territorial integrity is restored or maintained, foreign troops are expelled, acts of war cease, and their freedom to conduct their foreign policies as they see fit is recognized, both these theaters of the Axis’ war against the West will be aflame for years to come.
Second, support for Ukraine will improve Israel’s standing in Europe, which has undeservedly but genuinely suffered during the war against Hamas and Hezbollah.
Third, this alignment adds to the pressure on Iran and Russia since mutual intelligence sharing and technology transfer enables Ukraine and Israel to strike Russian and Iranian targets more effectively.
Fourth, this alignment implicitly functions to keep Turkey’s dreams of revived hegemony in the Levant in check. Though Turkey has been a reliable partner to Ukraine and rightly closed the Straits when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it nonetheless harbors dreams of playing the kingpin in the Middle East, and its leader, President Erdogan, is instinctively hostile to Israel and a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood. Thus, this alignment checks Turkish ambitions in the Black Sea and Mediterranean as well as the Russo-Iranian axis in the Middle East.
Fifth, should this alignment add another element, and in this case, a battle-tested potential supplier of arms and technologies to Ukraine, which clearly needs all the help it can get from foreign suppliers to survive, let alone prevail?
Sixth, To the extent that Iran comes under increasing pressure and even threat, its ability to provide Russia with weapons will probably fall off, possibly to the degree that Ukraine can strike back at Russian forces and targets, including Russia’s defense industry, which is already experiencing difficulties despite its mobilization, will likewise find it hard to transfer weapons systems to Iran.
Therefore, for Israel, a genuine strategic partnership with Ukraine benefits it strategically and equally, if not more importantly, morally. It reaffirms its democratic identity and aligns with partner states against those who threaten both democracy and the existence of both Ukraine and Israel.
Assad and Putin. Image: Creative Commons.
At the same time, it strengthens the US alliance network and resistance to the Axis of Upheaval that supports Russian aggression and Iran’s strategy of terrorism and nuclear proliferation.
The Path Forward
There are no longer grounds for postponing this alignment or equivocating about it as both states’ enemies have now suffered serious strategic defeats in the Middle East. Since the strategic destinies of both Israel and Ukraine are bound up with each other, it is now time for both governments to seize the opportunity that lies before them, for more often than not, there are no second chances in world politics.
About the Author: Dr. Stephen Blank
Dr. Stephen J. Blank is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Eurasia Program. He has published over 900 articles and monographs on Soviet/Russian, U.S., Asian, and European military and foreign policies, testified frequently before Congress on Russia, China, and Central Asia, consulted for the Central Intelligence Agency, major think tanks and foundations, chaired major international conferences in the U.S. and in Florence; Prague; and London, and has been a commentator on foreign affairs in the media in the U.S. and abroad. He has also advised major corporations on investing in Russia and is a consultant for the Gerson Lehrmann Group. He is the author of Russo-Chinese Energy Relations: Politics in Command (London: Global Markets Briefing, 2006), and Natural Allies? Regional Security in Asia and Prospects for Indo-American Strategic Cooperation (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2005). Dr. Blank is also the author of The Sorcerer as Apprentice: Stalin’s Commissariat of Nationalities (Greenwood, 1994); and the co-editor of The Soviet Military and the Future (Greenwood, 1992).
19fortyfive.com · by Stephen Blank · January 12, 2025
7. China’s Export Boom Means Trump Tariffs Would Hit Beijing Where It Hurts
Excerpts:
Beijing is due to announce new fiscal support for the economy in March, when leaders convene for the National People’s Congress, China’s top legislative body. Economists say Beijing will need to increase fiscal spending substantially to maintain economic growth in the teeth of worsening trade headwinds. Many expect growth to slow to between 4% and 4.5% this year.
Even so, Xi shows little sign of abandoning his focus on manufacturing as the engine room of China’s economy, despite worries about overinvestment and tumbling prices. For some economists, the longer-term question is whether the global economy can sustain that vision.
“The rest of the world just cannot absorb all the stuff that China produces,” said Stefan Angrick, senior economist at Moody’s Analytics.
China’s Export Boom Means Trump Tariffs Would Hit Beijing Where It Hurts
Economy is increasingly reliant on foreign demand for goods pouring out of Chinese factories
By Jason Douglas
Follow
Updated Jan. 12, 2025 10:37 pm ET
China’s manufacturing sector has been supercharged by government investment. Photo: str/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
China’s economy is more dependent on exports than it has been for most of the past two decades, leaving it vulnerable to a new broadside on trade from President-elect Donald Trump.
Chinese exports to the rest of the world grew 5.9% last year compared with a year earlier to $3.6 trillion, figures published Monday showed.
Those figures mean trade is on track to account for about a fifth of the 5% or so growth China is expected to report this year.
Aside from 2021, when consumers the world over were gorging on Chinese-made home appliances, fitness equipment and computer gear during Covid-19 lockdowns, that would mark trade’s biggest contribution to Chinese economic growth since 2006, when China’s exports were surging in the aftermath of its accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001.
China’s growing reliance on foreign purchases of manufactured goods to power growth reflects its economy’s struggles with a yearslong real-estate crunch and tepid consumer spending.
In response to those challenges, and to meet longer-term ambitions to transform China into a technological superpower, leader Xi Jinping has been funneling cash into the country’s factories. The result has been ballooning industrial capacity, tumbling prices and an export surge in everything from steel and chemicals to cars and machinery.
China’s exports exceeded its imports in 2024 by $992 billion, a record, reflecting not just buoyant exports but also subdued Chinese demand for the rest of the world’s goods and services.
China’s General Administration of Customs said exports to the U.S. rose 4.9% to $525 billion, despite the tariffs levied on Chinese goods during Trump’s first term and in some cases extended during the Biden administration. Exports to the U.S. jumped 16% year-over-year in December alone, a sign that firms and their U.S. customers might be rushing to bring in stock ahead of anticipated tariff hikes.
Trump on the campaign trail pledged to jack up tariffs on all Chinese imports to 60%, part of a series of aggressive trade moves aimed at reducing the U.S.’s chronic trade deficits and meeting other policy goals, including limiting immigration and tackling the trade in chemicals used to make the drug fentanyl.
Chinese companies are in worse shape to handle rising tariffs than they were half a decade ago, when Trump first hit China with tariffs. Weak spending at home has contributed to two years of falling prices for manufactured goods, crushing corporate profit margins and pushing many firms into the red.
Economists say such a steep rise in tariffs on U.S. imports from China would be a big drag on growth, reducing gross domestic product in the year following their imposition by anywhere between 0.5% and 2.5%, depending on how aggressively China responds.
In the vanguard of Chinese exports are companies such as BYD, whose electric-vehicle sales overseas rose 72% in 2024, the company said this month, to almost 420,000. China in 2023 displaced Japan as the world’s largest car exporter, lifted not just by EVs but also by sales of traditional gasoline-powered vehicles to Russia.
Overall Chinese exports of electric passenger vehicles in 2024 totaled 1.29 million units, a year-on-year increase of 24.3%, the China Passenger Car Association said in a report this month.
As China’s exports have accelerated, so has the backlash from other countries. Major emerging markets have hit some Chinese imports with tariffs to shield domestic industries vulnerable to cut-price competition. Steel has been a particular flashpoint.
For Western economies, anxiety has centered on China’s growing clout in the auto sector and in renewable energy. The European Union in October imposed tariffs of up to 45% on made-in-China EVs, saying manufacturers benefited from unfair subsidies. The Biden administration last year imposed a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs.
You may also like
0:01
Paused
0:02
/
8:17
Tap For Sound
Tariffs are at the center of former President Donald Trump’s economic plan. It would be a dramatic shift in trade policy, but how would they work? WSJ explains what the proposals would look like and how they’d affect consumers. Photo illustration: Madeline Marshall
Beijing’s hope is that it can offset the pain from Trump’s promised tariffs on Chinese goods by selling more to other markets, aided perhaps by a controlled weakening of its currency. Officials have also pledged extra borrowing and other stimulus measures in an effort to firm up growth at home, too.
But the big risk for China is that the looming showdown with Washington morphs into a broader conflict with other nations over trade. Already, the EU, Brazil, India and others are smarting over a flood of cheap Chinese imports as Xi plows money into manufacturing, and might push back harder if China seeks to divert exports away from the U.S. in response to heftier U.S. tariffs.
A wider trade fight would make it much harder for Beijing to lean on exports as an engine of growth, economists say, heaping pressure on officials to fire up lackluster domestic spending—or settle for a much weaker expansion than the 5% or so China is expected to report for 2024.
In the past few months, Beijing has taken bolder steps to boost China’s domestic economy, including easing restrictions on home buying, juicing the stock market and offering consumers discounts for trading in old cars and home appliances for newer models. A debt-swap program is being rushed out to ease the financing burden at cash-strapped and overindebted local governments.
Vehicles waiting to be scrapped in Nanjing in eastern China’s Jiangsu province. Photo: str/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Beijing is due to announce new fiscal support for the economy in March, when leaders convene for the National People’s Congress, China’s top legislative body. Economists say Beijing will need to increase fiscal spending substantially to maintain economic growth in the teeth of worsening trade headwinds. Many expect growth to slow to between 4% and 4.5% this year.
Even so, Xi shows little sign of abandoning his focus on manufacturing as the engine room of China’s economy, despite worries about overinvestment and tumbling prices. For some economists, the longer-term question is whether the global economy can sustain that vision.
“The rest of the world just cannot absorb all the stuff that China produces,” said Stefan Angrick, senior economist at Moody’s Analytics.
Write to Jason Douglas at jason.douglas@wsj.com
Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the January 13, 2025, print edition as 'China Export Boom Raises Vulnerability To Trump Tariffs'.
8. Mainland China ramps up integration push with local Taiwan affairs offices in Fujian
What do we do if the PRC successfully subverts the Taiwan political system and society and a majority of the Taiwanese people vote to reunify with the PRC?
Mainland China ramps up integration push with local Taiwan affairs offices in Fujian
Fujian will also roll out policies to support Taiwanese people who seek education and work in the province, Communist Party official says
Sylvie Zhuangin Beijing
Published: 4:01pm, 13 Jan 2025Updated: 5:49pm, 13 Jan 2025
Several counties in Fujian province have established Taiwan affairs offices, signalling more intense efforts by Beijing to integrate the island with mainland China.
“[We] have established separate Taiwan affairs offices in all counties with significant Taiwan-related responsibilities,” said Zhou Qingsong, director of the organisation office of the Fujian provincial committee of the Communist Party.
While some provinces have their own Taiwan affairs offices, it is unusual to have these offices at the county level.
Writing in the state-run magazine China Institutional Organisation last week, Zhou said the move was part of an institutional reform to strengthen the cross-strait affairs system.
“Going forward, [we] will take institutional reforms into consideration to guide municipalities and counties to effectively improve the development of Taiwan affairs offices and reinforce their respective responsibilities,” he said.
Because of its proximity to Taiwan, Fujian has become a test bed for mainland China’s push for economic, social and political integration with the island.
Beijing sees Taiwan as part of China to be reunited by force, if necessary. The United States, like most countries, does not recognise the self-governed island as an independent state but it is opposed to any attempt to take it by force and is legally bound to arm it for defence.
‘Every bit of strength’: Taiwanese leader William Lai vows to boost island’s defences
In recent years, Beijing has intensified its cross-strait integration efforts through a strategy that includes building economic and industrial ties as well as attempts to win the hearts and minds of Taiwanese people.
Beijing has also ramped up military pressure and staged drills in the Taiwan Strait, especially since William Lai Ching-te, the island’s independence-leaning leader, assumed office in May.
As part of the latest efforts, Fujian will roll out more supportive policies for Taiwanese people who seek to study or work in Fujian, according to the article.
Zhou said vocational schools would recruit Taiwanese teachers, while the province would make it easier for universities to admit Taiwanese students and for public schools to enrol the children of Taiwanese workers in Fujian.
He added that Fujian would create a more benevolent business environment for Taiwanese companies and businessmen.
Beijing declared Fujian a “model zone for integrated development” in September 2023 and unveiled a provincial Taiwan affairs office in January of last year.
In a 21-point plan issued in September 2023, Beijing sought to create shared industrial standards, foster social integration and encourage more Taiwanese to visit Fujian, with a goal of “substantial progress” by 2025.
Since the 1980s, Taiwanese entrepreneurs have flocked to mainland China, drawn by market potential and preferential policies.
In 2009, Fujian’s Pingtan county – the area of mainland China closest to Taiwan – was made a pilot zone for cross-strait integration, with preferential policies in customs, taxes, investment and land use.
The initiative expanded to cover the entire province in 2023 in a bid to foster economic, social and cultural ties between the two sides.
Sylvie Zhuang
FOLLOW
Based in Beijing, Sylvie joined the post in 2023 to report on China. She covers elite politics, diplomacy, international development, and has a interest in exploring how evolving technology is tranforming governance and society. Previously, she graduated from the University of Chicago
9. 'Things got really crazy.' The shocking untold story of the Chinese spy balloon
Long read.
'Things got really crazy.' The shocking untold story of the Chinese spy balloon
nationalpost.com · by Tom Blackwell
Top commanders reveal the extraordinary events from their surprising beginning, months earlier than previously known, to their explosive end
A high altitude balloon floats over Billings, Mont., on Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2023. The U.S. is tracking a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon that has been spotted over U.S. airspace for a couple days, but the Pentagon decided not to shoot it down due to risks of harm for people on the ground, officials said Thursday, Feb. 2, 2023. The Pentagon would not confirm that the balloon in the photo was the surveillance balloon. (Larry Mayer/The Billings Gazette via AP) Photo by Larry Mayer/The Billings Gazette via AP
It was a routine flight, one of several Air Canada runs daily between Vancouver and Winnipeg. But as AC292 passed high over the Rockies one year ago on Jan. 31, the pilots made an unusual sighting.
Another 4,000 feet above their Airbus A-320 floated a large balloon “with something hanging from it.” They reported the observation and flew on to their destination uneventfully.
Then, 24 hours later, a former newspaper photographer left his data-processing job at a health-care centre in the Montana city of Billings, looked upward and was surprised by his own discovery.
“Out of the corner of my eye I saw a bright spot in the sky,” Chase Doak recently recalled. “It looked like a big white orb.”
He raced home, fitted his camera with a 500-millimetre telephoto lens and a teleconverter that doubled the focal length, aimed at the “orb” and quickly realized he was peering at a balloon. With something hanging from it.
What happened next was even more unexpected. Photographs of the balloon by Doak and his friend Larry Mayer soon were buzzing around the world. After four days of silence, their images had prompted U.S. military officials to divulge the shocking truth — what those pilots and photographers had spotted was a Chinese surveillance balloon, a massive dirigible hauling an antenna-sprouting container the size of two or three school buses, and twin arrays of solar panels.
And it was now floating across some of the most militarily sensitive sites in America — nuclear-missile silos that would be among an enemy’s earliest targets should atomic war ever break out.
A U.S. Air Force U-2 pilot looks down at a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon on Feb. 3, 2023, the day before it was shot down off the coast of South Carolina. Photo by Department of Defense via AP, File
The spy balloon’s slow traverse over Alaska, Western Canada and the continental United States, ending when it was shot down off the coast of South Carolina, riveted the world, sparked heated political debate and touched off a diplomatic uproar. The event continues to reverberate, including with a bizarre criminal trial in Billings itself.
It was quickly followed by the appearance of three more unidentified flying objects over Canada and the United States. That led to the first ever shoot-down by American fighter jets in Canadian airspace, after this country’s aging CF-18 fighters were grounded by freezing rain.
“Things were developing pretty fast,” recalls Gen. Wayne Eyre, who played a key part in handling the episode as Canada’s chief of defence staff, before retiring recently. “Things got really crazy for a while.”
Yet, as often happens, the episode that had saturated news coverage for days soon disappeared from the headlines — along with its crucial lessons.
This is the full inside story of the Chinese spy balloon, its troubling implications for the defence of North America, which relies partly on an early-warning system likened to a gap-filled “picket fence,” and the spotlight it shone on a two-nation military agency that is unique in the world.
Based on interviews with the top two commanders of that agency — the North American Aerospace Defence Command (Norad) — and Canada’s most senior general at the time, plus eyewitnesses and experts, this is a look at the extraordinary events from their surprising beginning, months earlier than previously known, to their explosive end.
The implications may be particularly important now as Russia rattles the nuclear sabre, China asserts its military might globally, and rogue nations such as North Korea develop long-range atomic capabilities. And as U.S. president-elect Donald Trump again treats Canada as an adversary as much as an ally.
The balloon opened up eyes. We’re not going to see long-range cruise missiles. We’re not going to see balloons over the horizon.
Gen. Glen VanHerck, retired
The saga includes moments of surrealism — some of America’s most advanced war planes used missiles worth a half-million dollars each to dispatch what were likely tiny hobbyist balloons. And it also delivered a serious message: both countries urgently need to upgrade that picket-fence warning system.
“The balloon opened up eyes,” says Glen VanHerck, the U.S. air force general who commanded Norad throughout the crisis and retired earlier this year. “We’re not going to see long-range cruise missiles. We’re not going to see balloons over the horizon.
“Today, with missiles being fired off submarines, missiles being fired off aircraft, missiles being fired from the land well beyond curvature-of-the-Earth ranges, your time is limited to respond to those types of things.”
Questions about why the Chinese balloon was not taken out sooner, or its presence made public earlier, persist.
VanHerck, a plain-spoken former fighter and bomber pilot from small-town Kentucky, headed efforts to track and eventually destroy all the drifting intruders.
As it turns out, he’d been waiting for the Chinese craft.
The binational organization the general headed, based in Colorado Springs, Colo., is staffed by scores of Canadian Forces members as well as Americans in an arrangement that dates to the early-Cold War days of the 1950s. Its mission is to detect and respond to air and space threats to the continent; no other two countries have a similar partnership. VanHerck also led NORTHCOM, the U.S. military command whose turf stretches from Mexico to the Canadian Arctic.
The words “Chinese spy balloon” became a household term in February 2023, but VanHerck revealed to the National Post that his first intimation of a slow-floating threat came six months earlier.
American intelligence agencies warned him in August 2022 that China had in place a program of high-altitude surveillance craft and was deploying the airships around the globe. American officials later revealed that at least five had traversed the nation in the previous eight years, while another was spotted early in 2023 over Latin America. Though satellites are the major powers’ chief aerial spying tool, the theory is that surveillance balloons, operating at lower altitudes and able to stay aloft longer over targets, can capture higher-resolution images and intercept more communications.
The Norad commander had no illusions about what the August 2022 warning meant.
“I told my team it was just a matter of time before one of these approaches North America,” he says.
VanHerck had his people prepare for such an arrival, focusing especially on whether such an intruder would still be in U.S. jurisdiction, given they float as high as 80,000 feet. The answer his legal advisers came up with? American sovereignty extends all the way to space.
Then, on Jan. 27, 2023, the intelligence community was in touch again. Just as VanHerck had predicted, one of those spy balloons was on its way, about to hit the westernmost reaches of the continent — Alaska’s remote Aleutian Islands.
Retired U.S. Gen. Glen VanHerck, who commanded Norad during the spy balloon ruckus, arrives at the Capitol in February 2023 to brief senators on the situation. He says it was “a failure of the entire system” to not get more warning that the balloon was approaching North American airspace. Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images
By the next day, the balloon would show up on Norad’s radar over St. Matthew Island, a rocky, uninhabited outpost in the Bering Sea, almost as close to Russia as mainland Alaska. In fact, Jan. 28 has typically been cited as the date when the object was first discovered. But U.S. spy agencies were aware of it earlier, perhaps much earlier. Later news reports, quoting unnamed American government sources, suggest it had been tracked all the way from the balloon’s launch in Hainan Island, China.
All of which makes VanHerck wonder why the balloon was just hours away from entering the continent’s jurisdiction before the man in charge of defending the region learned about it.
“To me, that’s a failure of the entire system — to not have the ability to let everybody know this thing’s out there and potentially going to drift into North American airspace,” he says.
“It’s a failure of multiple intelligence, (Department of Defence) agencies,” says VanHerck. “I should not get surprised by something that’s coming into my area of responsibility … Anybody who knows about it should pass that on. It shouldn’t be less than 24 hour’s notice.”
That communication breakdown raises broader concerns of military commanders and academic experts that Norad’s “domain awareness” — its ability to detect threats before they arrive on our doorstep — is seriously limited.
Regardless, just before midnight on Jan. 27, the Canadian Forces’ most senior officer got word that the American Norad commander wanted an urgent video conference.
The next morning, a Saturday, Eyre spoke to VanHerck by secure link and learned for the first time of the uninvited visitor from China. And the fact it might end up in this country.
The episode would dominate the Canadian general’s attention for the next week and more, as he briefed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a half-dozen times and even addressed the entire Liberal cabinet. To Eyre, a 58-year-old from Wadena, Sask., it was a wake-up call, an indication of “unique and emerging threats to our sovereignty,” this time from an increasingly aggressive China.
Gen. Wayne Eyre, who has since retired, was Canada’s chief of defence staff when the Chinese balloon was detected drifting over Canada and the U.S. early in 2023. “Things got really crazy for a while,” he says. Photo by Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press files
VanHerck had already spoken to Eyre’s American counterpart, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the evening of the 27th.
Norad tracks myriad craft entering and leaving its airspace every day, most of them innocuous. But, says VanHerck, “I knew immediately this was going to be a huge deal.”
As the balloon floated 11 miles above the outer reaches of American territory on Jan. 28, Norad’s commander scrambled two F-35 Raptor stealth fighters and two armed F-16s to intercept it.
It was not the fast-moving missile menace the agency is most primed to detect, but it was a Goliath. The balloon itself was 200 feet top to bottom — the height of a 22-storey building — and the payload weighed an estimated 2,000 pounds. The solar panels provided energy to power what was assumed to be surveillance gear inside the container, as well as a small propeller motor with limited ability to steer the craft.
VanHerck says the information he received from the intelligence community made him certain by Jan. 28 it was a Chinese surveillance balloon. Intelligence and inspection by U.S. aircraft also made clear, he says, that it did not pose an offensive threat — it wasn’t about to drop bombs or launch missiles.
If anyone thinks you have radar coverage of the inside of Canada, you’ve got another thing coming.
Gen. Scott Clancy, retired
That was a key point. The Norad commander has authority to unilaterally take down anything judged to be what the military calls a “kinetic” threat — a physical danger to the continent. Absent that peril, it was up to government leaders of the two respective countries to order a shoot-down.
It would be another week before such an order came.
Though VanHerck communicated immediately with his direct superior — Milley — and the office of the U.S. defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, he did not actually talk to Austin until Feb. 1, VanHerck told a U.S. Senate committee last year.
Meanwhile, it seems Canadian Lieut.-Gen. Alain Pelletier, then deputy commander of Norad, was less convinced about the nature of the airship in those initial hours and days after its arrival in North America. He does not recall receiving that August 2022 intelligence about a Chinese program.
“That balloon, unlike commercial aircraft or even military aircraft, didn’t carry any indication of country of origin,” says Pelletier, now retired. “So, we’re trying to figure out where is it coming from … what’s the purpose of that flight and so on and so forth.
“We were not sure until it finally got engaged over the east coast of the U.S., until the recovery activity took place.”
In a sparsely populated region with patchy radar coverage and limited assets at Norad’s disposal, it was impossible even to keep eyes on the balloon 24 hours a day, says Pelletier, a former F-18 pilot from La Pocatière, Que.
The situation made clear a stark reality. While the continental U.S. is mostly covered by radar, much of Canada’s vast expanse is outside radar range, even a dead zone for radio communication.
“If anyone thinks you have radar coverage of the inside of Canada, you’ve got another thing coming,” says Scott Clancy, a retired Canadian air force general and Norad’s former director of operations. “If you’re flying around at 10,000 feet over the Northwest Territories, for the most part nobody can even see that you’re there.”
When Norad jets did shadow the balloon, they had other challenges. To keep airborne in the thin air at that altitude, they had to maintain high speeds, meaning they flew back and forth at 400 miles per hour to get a look at the far-slower balloon, says Pelletier.
Still, the balloon’s passage offered a chance to probe its capabilities and technology, VanHerck says.
On the dirigible went, entering Canadian airspace over the Northwest Territories two days later, on Jan. 30, with Canadian jets keeping tabs on it when they could.
At that point, the Trudeau government had its own decision to make: should it have the airship shot down over Canada’s Far North?
At top, a U.S. fighter jet flies below the 22-storey balloon before it was shot down with a missile on Feb. 4, 2023. The punctured balloon, above, and its antenna-studded payload plunged into the ocean. Photo by Chad Fish via The Associated Press
VanHerck says he told Eyre that if his country wanted to take action against the craft, the Forces chief should consult with Trudeau, U.S. President Joe Biden, and their respective defence ministers. Eyre says the possibility of destroying the balloon was ultimately rejected.
“We briefly discussed the option,” Eyre says, but officials saw the balloon’s arrival as an opportunity to gather information about novel Chinese technology.
“If we had shot it down over Canada, exploiting it would have been very, very difficult, just given the nature of the terrain … My recommendation was to continue to monitor and try to collect as much intelligence as possible.”
The balloon kept on its voyage south, passing into British Columbia, where it was spotted over Cranbrook by that Air Canada crew on Jan. 31. It entered Idaho airspace the same day.
Yet after four days of flying over the continent, and despite a flurry of activity at the highest levels of the two countries’ governments, not a word about its presence had been uttered to the public.
Pelletier said Norad was planning to issue some kind of statement about the balloon but wanted to first gather as much information about it as possible.
“We always try to be transparent with the public, but we don’t want to create panic — the sky is falling,” he says. “Here we have a balloon. We don’t know where it’s from, who it belongs to or what it’s doing.”
Whatever communications plans were in the works, they soon became moot. The Chinese craft arrived on Feb. 1 over Billings, which was about to play an unlikely supporting role in an international news sensation.
Doak was just leaving work at the community’s RiverStone Health when he logged onto a news site and was intrigued to learn that the local airport had been shut down temporarily.
Even Shane Ketterling, the airport’s assistant director of aviation, was taken aback by the sudden closure, something he’d never experienced in 33 years working at Billings Logan International. He called over to the control tower — under separate management from the airport itself — and was told the order had come from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)’s Salt Lake City Centre, without any further explanation.
“The rumours were running rampant,” Ketterling said recently. “There was very little information. The military did not want this going public.”
Meanwhile, Doak walked out to his car and saw the object far above him, wondered if it had anything to do with events at the airport, and decided to take pictures.
Mayer, the Billings Gazette’s photo editor and an amateur pilot, was also getting curious about the airport’s mysterious ground-stoppage, especially after he noticed unusual jet contrails high in the clear-blue sky. Rather than the usual straight lines, he said recently, they were round, suggesting fast-moving planes, probably military jets, flying in circles. The plot thickened when he heard from another pilot that two F-22 stealth fighters had landed at nearby Boseman, Mont.
Then his friend and former colleague Doak called to point out the object in the sky. Mayer took his own photograph and saw as he examined the image that it was a massive balloon. Worried that it might be something dangerous, he sent copies to the state governor and the FAA, then made a series of calls that landed him eventually with a Norad official.
“I sent him the picture. He said, ‘We’re preparing a response,’” Mayer recalls. “So I just put the picture online … My feeling is that if I hadn’t put it online, posted the picture, I don’t think they ever would have told us what it was.”
Republican Senator Tom Cotton, shown speaking on Capitol Hill in July 2020, has been critical of the decision to allow the Chinese balloon to drift across the country in early 2023 before it was shot down. Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
Mayer’s photograph was distributed far and wide by The Associated Press. Doak uploaded his own images to the internet, never asking a penny for them.
“At the point that we learned what it was, I thought, ‘This is a national security issue, this is a global issue,’” he says. “I want that photo to be in front of as many eyes as possible.”
The photographers’ work certainly did have an impact. The Pentagon now had little choice but to disclose the balloon’s presence, stirring up political and diplomatic tempests. Anthony Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, quickly announced that he was cancelling a planned visit to China in protest.
The balloon’s slow passage over Montana brought it close to Malmstrom Air Force Base and its array of silos, which harbour a major chunk of America’s arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
China admitted it owned the balloon, but insisted it was an errant weather station. No one was convinced.
U.S. officials made clear they would not shoot it down over populated areas for fear of the pieces landing on people or buildings below. Critics of the Biden administration demanded to know why it hadn’t been blown out of the sky earlier, particularly as it floated over the Aleutians, where falling debris posed little risk to the public.
“I think it was a bad mistake to let a Chinese spy balloon float all across America and only to leak it to The New York Times once some rancher or amateur photographer in Montana spotted it,” Republican Sen. Tom Cotton would say later. “I suspect if they had not … this would have never become public.”
Pelletier admits that “we would have spent less energy if we had actually engaged it way earlier, up in the north.” But little, if any, of the apparatus would have been recovered from Alaska’s frigid seas or challenging landscape with the limited resources available there, he says.
VanHerck says he didn’t have the authority to act alone, and he still refuses to comment on the choice his superiors made. But he also dismisses the aggressive second-guessing of the decision, noting that an initial assessment from NASA suggested the debris field could be as large as 100 by 100 kilometres, increasing the possibility of inadvertent casualties on the ground. That estimate was later modified to 10 by 10 kilometres, still a wide swath of landscape. And he stresses that a lot of valuable intelligence was gathered — both while the balloon was in the air and after it was brought down — by waiting until it trundled off the U.S. Atlantic coast.
VanHerck also confirms a surprising assessment made public by American authorities months later. Forensic examination of the balloon and its payload by the FBI and others after the shoot-down indicated “for sure” that it never actually gathered any intelligence, let alone transmitted it back to China, he says.
“In the end, the best thing happened for the Canadian and American people,” says VanHerck. ”Number one, they (China) didn’t collect (intelligence), we know that for a fact. Number two, we maximized our collection, and we exposed the PRC (People’s Republic of China) and what they’re doing. And number three, and most important, the Canadian and American people were safe.”
Norad is the neglected command. Nobody understands it, nobody cares about it.
Andrea Charron, University of Manitoba, a leading academic expert on Norad
In fact, it may be the balloon was never meant to invade North American airspace at all. VanHerck says his understanding is that winds blew it off course over the Pacific. U.S. media later quoted American officials suggesting it had been deployed to spy instead on U.S. bases in Guam, before taking a wrong turn.
Andrea Charron, a political scientist at the University of Manitoba and a leading academic expert on Norad and North American defence, agrees with the decision to wait and shoot down the balloon in a place where recovery would be easier. But she questions the assertion that the spy craft never, in fact, spied.
“That they hovered over some pretty important, key areas … makes me wonder.”
She and colleague Nicholas Glesby, a doctoral student at Trent University who has been studying the incident, also lament that Canadian officials said little publicly throughout the whole affair. National Defence issued only three official statements, while Trudeau commented — falsely, it seems — that the three later balloons were linked to China, Glesby says. A spokesman for the prime minister declined to comment to the National Post about Trudeau’s role in the affair.
“What I noticed was very clear communication on the U.S. side but next to nothing on the Canadian side,” says Charron, director of the University of Manitoba’s Centre for Defence and Security Studies. “This is a pretty significant incident, and it just seems that, ‘It happened; oh, well.’”
That was a missed opportunity, she says, given that Norad is already underappreciated, even within the military world. It has been derisively called SNORAD and the overlapping NORTHCOM — a command the U.S. created only after the 9/11 attacks — nicknamed SLEEPYCOM, despite their crucial role, she says. Meanwhile, the incoming U.S. president lives by the motto “America First” and is suspicious of international alliances.
“Norad is the neglected command. Nobody understands it, nobody cares about it. It’s out of sight, out of mind,” she says. “They are raced off their feet but it doesn’t seem to resonate with Congress or Parliament.”
Regardless, three days after photographer Doak spotted it high above Billings, the balloon drifted out over the Atlantic Ocean, where it would meet a deflating end in shallow South Carolina waters.
VanHerck assigned the U.S. air force’s 1st Fighter Wing, based at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, to take it down. The unit decided that peppering the balloon with machine-gun fire might not do the trick. So, on Feb. 4, an F-22 Raptor fired a single AIM-9X Sidewinder missile at the balloon. Evolving versions of the Sidewinder have been the go-to “dogfight” missile on U.S. and allied fighters since the mid-1950s, credited with 270 air-to-air kills in various conflicts. Each one costs about $550,000. The shot fired off that day was a direct hit — if something of an aerial mismatch — that sent the balloon and its cargo plunging to the sea below.
U.S. authorities have been largely silent about what was learned from the debris that Navy units picked up in the following hours and days. But the worrying episode was over, so it seemed.
On Feb. 5, 2023, U.S. Navy sailors recover debris from the Chinese surveillance balloon that was shot down off the coast of Myrtle Beach, S.C. Photo by U.S. Navy via The Associated Press
Indeed, Pelletier hosted a post-Christmas party for his Norad colleagues and spouses on Feb. 10 in Colorado Springs, a welcome release, presumably, from the tension of the previous days. But the revellers were interrupted by another alarming discovery: A new balloon-like object had been spotted heading for the Yukon.
“My wife was kind of, ‘What’s happening?’” recalls Pelletier, who told his spouse, “I can’t tell you right now, we’re busy.”
Eyre had travelled from National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa for meetings in Toronto, accompanied as always by a Forces “signaller” — a service member specializing in secure communication. Before heading to breakfast on Saturday, Feb. 11, the CDS knocked on the signaller’s hotel room door to see if there was any important news.
“I didn’t leave that room until after dinnertime, because of what happened with that Yukon balloon.”
The new object would be one of three spotted in the days after the demise of the Chinese surveillance craft. Norad had recalibrated its radar to pick up slower-moving objects and was getting hits. Their lower altitude made them a potential risk to commercial aviation, so this time no one took any chances.
As one of the objects drifted over Yukon, Norad tasked Royal Canadian Air Force CF-18s based at Cold Lake, Alta., to take it down. Eyre says he “absolutely” wanted Canadian planes to destroy the object over Canadian soil. But their potentially historic mission was not to be. Freezing rain hit the northern Alberta base the morning of Feb. 11, making the runways too slick for takeoffs.
Canadian Lieut.-Gen. Alain Pelletier was deputy commander of Norad during the balloon’s ride over North America. He said it was impossible to keep eyes on it with patchy radar coverage in remote areas and limited assets at Norad’s disposal. Photo by Postmedia
F-22s based in Alaska got the nod instead and one of them fired another Sidewinder at the far-smaller new target. Trudeau had earlier given permission for American planes to open fire over Canada, reflecting the Norad principle that the two countries’ forces are essentially interchangeable in defending the continent.
The CF-18s eventually did scramble and were “minutes away” when the shoot-down occurred, says Andrée-Anne Poulin, a Department of National Defence spokeswoman.
Meanwhile, American jets had earlier destroyed a second balloon over Alaska and dispatched a third above Lake Huron on Feb. 12 near the border between Michigan and Ontario.
The RCMP led a search for debris in the mountainous region where the Yukon floater went down, but called it off a week later, the terrain and weather making finding fragments all but impossible. A spokeswoman for the Mounties says that she cannot comment on whether the search was ever renewed because, almost two years later, “the investigation remains ongoing.”
But it’s unlikely anything with intelligence value would be found. Norad believes the three follow-on objects were not spy craft, but hobbyist or research balloons that lacked transponders broadcasting their identity, though both countries require the devices for any high-flying object weighing more than a couple of kilograms.
In fact, the whimsically named Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, a Chicago-area group that sends its small — i.e. 32-inch — Mylar balloons on treks around the world, revealed that it lost contact with one of them after it drifted over Alaska on Feb. 11. That’s the same day the Yukon balloon was obliterated with a powerful — and very expensive — missile. The balloon club, which has said it fully complies with FAA regulations, did not respond to a request for comment.
Some of the balloons may have been laughably non-threatening, but they all shared a common trait — they were more or less already here before they appeared on Norad’s radar. And nothing about that has changed.
“Today, we would see the balloon again, but we wouldn’t see it until it’s almost right upon North America,” says VanHerck.
In fact, technology has often been a limiting — and evolving — factor for Norad. It was founded in 1957 chiefly to identify Soviet bombers heading to the continent to drop loads of gravity-propelled nuclear or conventional bombs. The emphasis later shifted to the trickier threat of intercontinental ballistic missiles, which soar into space and then hurtle down toward their target. Mostly, it was hoped that the spectre of a cataclysmic response to a first strike from either side — the chilling concept of mutually assured destruction (MAD) — would deter atomic war in the first place.
The North Warning System, when it was designed, it was certainly state of the art. Today, it’s a picket fence that (hard-to-detect) missiles can navigate their way through.
Gen. Glen VanHerck, retired
The Distant Early Warning (DEW) line was the original radar network to detect a possible attack from Russia over the polar region, replaced in 1988 by the North Warning System. Its 50 stations stretch 4,800 kilometres from Alaska to southern Labrador and remain North America’s first line of defence in the Arctic.
But the trip wire that Norad’s radar provides is less than comprehensive and, as the spy balloon showed, the warnings are relatively last-minute. At the same time, the threats from Russia and China mount. Both have nuclear-tipped and conventional cruise missiles that fly close to the ground and at high speeds. They can be fired from land, aircraft, ships and submarines well outside current radar range. Those nations’ newer, hypersonic missiles — soaring at five times the speed of sound or faster — pose an even more alarming challenge.
“The North Warning System, when it was designed, it was certainly state of the art,” says VanHerck. “Today, it’s a picket fence that low radar-cross-section (hard-to-detect) missiles can navigate their way through.”
Those missiles should ideally be spotted as they’re being launched, not when they’re almost here, says Charron. “We need to go after the archers rather than the arrows.”
Then there is the lack of radar and other visibility over large swaths of Canadian territory.
One key answer to the predicament is, governments insist, in the works. Radar functions by blasting out radio waves, which then bounce off objects and return to a receiver, revealing the size and location of the object. But they can only “see” in straight lines, meaning their range is limited by the curvature of the Earth. Canada has promised to install “over-the-horizon” radar (OTHR), the most common of which works by shooting shortwaves off the atmosphere, which bounce down toward Earth as much as thousands of kilometres away, then ricochet back after hitting an object.
Under a $38.6-billion, 20-year Norad modernization plan unveiled by Ottawa in 2022, one OTHR system designed to cover the area from the Canada-U.S. border to the Arctic Circle is to be fully operational by 2031. Another, based in the North and designed to detect threats beyond the northernmost approaches to the continent, is projected to be fully in place by 2033.
The new radar network is to be augmented by another string of sensors across Northern Canada with “classified capabilities.”
National Defence spokeswoman Poulin says the project is on schedule and the government has looked at more than 500 possible sites for the first OTHR system, which she said would have as many as four linked locations. Still, Poulin adds, “should plans evolve, timelines may be updated as required.”
The history of defence procurement in Canada is marked by lengthy political and bureaucratic delays, and Charron says this country stands out among its allies for the volumes of documentation needed to proceed with any kind of military-related spending.
“That (OTHR project) has gone very, very quiet,” she says. “Which makes me concerned.”
Meanwhile, Canada should reconsider another, more controversial way to defend against airborne threats, says Clancy, the retired Air Force general and former top Norad leader. That would be ground-based missile-defence weapons — missiles launched to take out incoming missiles. Such systems could offer an alternative to MAD, deterring enemies by making their attacks less likely to succeed, Clancy argues, while admitting it would be impossible to shield all of Canada that way.
But Canadian politicians have repeatedly rejected being part of any missile-defence program along those lines, which critics worry could touch off a new arms race.
Charron notes that such equipment is enormously costly and wondered if investing the money in health care and education “maybe makes us more resilient than missile-defence systems.”
Experts will undoubtedly keep debating the balloon’s meaning for the defence of North America, and prodding governments to act. Meanwhile, the saga’s fallout has continued in some very different ways, perhaps suggesting the airship was as much a political phenomenon as it was a military one.
The whole thing’s been a wild ride.
Larry Mayer, Billings Gazette’s photo editor
Mayer, the Montana photo editor, says Republican Congress members invited him to attend one of Joe Biden’s state-of-the-nation addresses as a symbol of what the GOP considered a weak response to the intruder. He says he found the experience a bit comical, but received a congressional citation, while his words about the famous photograph are now an official part of the institution’s record.
“The whole thing’s been a wild ride.”
And just two months ago, Doak discussed his experiences in testimony for the defence at a strange criminal trial in Billings. Local resident Richard Rogers had been charged with making telephone threats against Republican Kevin McCarthy, then speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, because he was angry the balloon had been allowed to fly across the county. There were unrelated harassing calls to other federal government offices, too. Rogers was found guilty.
Doak suspects that court appearance and his interview with National Post won’t be the last time he’s quizzed about the balloon. But he says he’s still happy to talk about his own, unique part in history.
“I have committed to the fact that this will probably be what I’m known for for the rest of my life,” he says with a chuckle. “So I figure I better lean into it.”
Read Next
nationalpost.com · by Tom Blackwell
10. Taiwan's spy agency says China is working with gangs, shell companies to gain intelligence on Taiwan
Again, what do we do when China's subversion of Taiwan is successful and the Taiwan people democratically vote to reunify with the PRC?
Excerpt:
China's recruitment of retired military personnel has been facilitated by many having been born in mainland China and backing unification between Taiwan and the mainland. Taiwan's government has enacted time limits on when retired senior officers can visit the mainland and under what circumstances in an attempt to prevent their recruitment.
Taiwan's spy agency says China is working with gangs, shell companies to gain intelligence on Taiwan
13 Jan 2025 05:34PM
(Updated: 13 Jan 2025 05:36PM)
channelnewsasia.com
Read a summary of this article on FAST.
Get bite-sized news via a new
cards interface. Give it a try.
Click here to return to FAST Tap here to return to FAST
FAST
TAIPEI: Taiwan's intelligence bureau says China’s main spy agency is working with criminal gangs, shell companies and other dubious partners to gain intelligence on Taiwan’s defences, resulting in a major rise in those arrested for alleged espionage on the island.
Current and retired Taiwanese military personnel are a special concern, accounting for around half of the 64 alleged spies put on trial last year, it said. That number is up from 16 in 2021 and 10 in 2022.
The arrests are in line with China's stepped-up campaign of military intimidation, economic coercion and “grey area” tactics such as utilising the internet to promote unification and providing all-expense-paid trips to China to low-level government officials.
According to a report released over the weekend by Taiwan’s National Security Bureau, Chinese agents have sought to use the Taiwanese underworld to channel funds to those with information to sell. Gangs, many with origins dating to before the 1949 split between the two sides, are sought out, along with loan sharks, shell companies that can be used to launder funds, religious sects that sometimes engage in illegal activity, and non-profit groups, the report said.
Some payments are made in cryptocurrency, while old-fashioned methods are also used such as sexual seduction to trap unsuspecting targets and pressure them to reveal secrets. That was the case of a one-star general, Lo Hsien-che, who was caught in such a scheme while stationed in Thailand, the bureau said.
Among those arrested last year were 23 people working together in a spy ring, one of whom was sentenced to 20 years in prison, it said.
China's main spy agency, the State Security Ministry, runs programs relying on traditional spy craft and cyberattacks, along with military intelligence, while the party's United Front division runs propaganda campaigns.
China's ruling Communist Party, which refuses most contact with Taiwan's governing pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party, has frequent contacts with the main opposition Nationalist Party. Chinese tactics may have had some effect on local elections, but the DPP appears to be firmly in control and the vast majority of Taiwanese still favour maintaining their de facto independence, backed by strong support from the US
China's recruitment of retired military personnel has been facilitated by many having been born in mainland China and backing unification between Taiwan and the mainland. Taiwan's government has enacted time limits on when retired senior officers can visit the mainland and under what circumstances in an attempt to prevent their recruitment.
Source: AP/ec
11. The U.S. is unprepared for a major war. Can Pete Hegseth fix that? by Max Boot
And irregular ones as well.
Opinion
Max Boot
The U.S. is unprepared for a major war. Can Pete Hegseth fix that?
Trump’s defense secretary pick would face a staggering challenge in readying America for war.
Jan
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/01/13/pete-hegseth-defense-secretary-confirmation-hearing/?utm
Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, arrives on Capitol Hill to meet with senators on Wednesday. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Tuesday’s confirmation hearings for defense secretary are sure to focus on all the troubling allegations of misconduct swirling around intended nominee Pete Hegseth (which he has denied). But let’s not lose sight of the big picture. The essential question that senators must ask is whether Hegseth, a Fox News host and former National Guardsman, has the capacity and experience to prepare the armed forces to fight a major war — and, if so, how he would go about it. Because right now, the U.S. military simply is not ready to defeat an adversary such as China or Russia in a protracted conflict.
Make sense of the latest news and debates with our daily newsletter
Don’t take my word for it: That’s the judgment of the congressionally chartered, bipartisan Commission on the National Defense Strategy, which issued its final report in July. The commission, chaired by former California congresswoman Jane Harman, came to a sobering conclusion that did not get the attention it deserved: “The threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945 and include the potential for near-term major war. … The nation was last prepared for such a fight during the Cold War, which ended 35 years ago. It is not prepared today.”
The commission went on to warn that “China is outpacing the United States and has largely negated the U.S. military advantage in the Western Pacific” and that “the U.S. military lacks both the capabilities and the capacity required to be confident it can deter and prevail in combat.”
Latest editorial cartoons
Next
Opinion
Edith Pritchett
How ‘Dry January’ progresses
Opinion
Jimmy Margulies
Cartoon by Jimmy Margulies
Opinion
Matt Davies
Cartoon by Matt Davies
Opinion
Michael Ramirez
A life of service
Opinion
Edith Pritchett
How your January fitness challenge is going
Opinion
Nick Anderson
Cartoon by Nick Anderson
Opinion
Lisa Benson
Cartoon by Lisa Benson
Opinion
Michael Ramirez
Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s cure
Opinion
Jimmy Margulies
Cartoon by Jimmy Margulies
Opinion
Joe Heller
Cartoon by Joe Heller
Opinion
Tim Campbell
Cartoon by Tim Campbell
Opinion
Mike Smith
Cartoon by Mike Smith
Opinion
Lisa Benson
Cartoon by Lisa Benson
Opinion
Mike Smith
Cartoon by Mike Smith
Opinion
Michael Ramirez
Not adding up
Opinion
Lisa Benson
Cartoon by Lisa Benson
Opinion
Nick Anderson
Cartoon by Nick Anderson
Opinion
Michael Ramirez
Broken resolutions
Opinion
Edith Pritchett
Classifying New Year’s resolutions
Opinion
Ann Telnaes
Bringing in the New Year
The problem isn’t that the U.S. military has gone “woke,” as MAGA partisans such as Hegseth allege. The problem is that America became complacent after the Cold War when it downsized its armed forces and its defense-industrial base. Since then, the United States has prepared a military suitable for fighting insurgents in Afghanistan or Iraq — but utterly inadequate for an extended fight against a major power.
Following Max Boot
Following
The Center for Strategic and International Studies recently staged a China war game and found, as scholar Seth G. Jones wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “The U.S. military spent its entire inventory of Long-Range Anti-Ship Missiles by the end of the first week and ran out of Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range missiles after a month. Taiwan used up its entire inventory of Anti-Ship Cruise Missiles after a week. It would be very difficult to sustain a fight without these weapons.”
The Ukraine war has revealed some of America’s defense-industrial shortfalls and led to belated corrective action. But the process has been agonizingly slow and still has not gone nearly far enough. As retired Army Lt. Gen. David Barno and security scholar Nora Benshael noted in War on the Rocks, before 2022, the United States was producing only 14,000 155-millimeter artillery rounds a year. Once Russia’s all-out invasion began, Ukraine was firing as many as 8,000 rounds a day. The U.S. Army invested billions of dollars to ramp up artillery production to between 70,000 and 80,000 rounds a month. “But that has taken almost three years to achieve — and the stark reality is that artillery expenditures by the U.S. military and its allies in any major war could quickly dwarf that amount,” Barno and Benshael wrote.
Another example of how inadequate America’s armory remains: A U.S. defense official told me last month that the Defense Department has more than 19,000 unmanned aircraft systems in its inventory. That might sound like a lot, but it’s actually a paltry amount. In 2023, Ukraine was reported to be losing 10,000 drones a month, and Ukraine claims to have manufactured 1.5 million first-person-view drones (the simplest and cheapest type) in 2024.
The United States would be hard put to ramp up its own drone production, given that one Chinese company, DJI, claims 70 percent of the global market. Experts estimate that U.S. firms are producing only a few thousand drones a month — and they are generally more expensive and less capable than their Chinese counterparts.
The situation is just as dire when it comes to shipbuilding. As the defense strategy commission noted, “One Chinese shipyard has more capacity than all U.S. shipyards combined.” (China has 20 large shipyards.) U.S. shipyards cannot even utilize all of their capacity because of a critical shortage of skilled workers. According to the Associated Press: “Marinette Marine is under contract to build six guided-missile frigates — the Navy’s newest surface warships — with options to build four more. But it only has enough workers to produce one frigate a year.”
This lack of shipyard capacity also makes it nearly impossible to repair and retrofit ships on time. As a result, fewer than half of the Navy’s 164 surface ships are ready to deploy.
These deficiencies are all the more maddening given how much money taxpayers already devote to defense: $850 billion this year.
But claims that the United States spends more on defense than the next nine countries combined are misleading. Dictatorships often spend more than they reveal, and they don’t have all of the personnel and health-care costs that eat up much of the U.S. military budget. The defense strategy commission estimated that China actually spends as much as $711 billion annually on defense, or more than three times the official figure of $222 billion. While high in absolute terms, U.S. defense spending is just 3 percent of gross domestic product, far below Cold War levels.
President-elect Donald Trump recently demanded that NATO countries raise their defense spending to 5 percent of GDP. If he applies the same standard to the United States — as advocated by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) — it would require boosting defense spending by about $600 billion a year, to more than $1.4 trillion.
That might seem like a crazy amount of money, but it’s still a lot cheaper than failing to win — or deter — a major conflict. Any such spending increase, however, should be combined with reforms of the Pentagon’s dysfunctional bureaucracy to maximize bang for the buck. As the defense strategy commission noted, the defense budget “can be spent more effectively and efficiently.” Although the commission called for “finding savings” and “reforming processes,” it added that “these improvements would not obviate the need to spend … more.”
Now it will be up to senators to decide if Hegseth — who was dogged by accusations of mismanagement and misconduct at the two nonprofits he ran — is the right person to rebuild America’s atrophied defense capabilities. The committee members should grill him not only about his past, but also about his plans to address this massive challenge. His record doesn’t inspire confidence that he can rise to a task that would severely test far more experienced executives.
Share
4
Comments
By Max Boot
Max Boot is a Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in biography, he is the author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller “Reagan: His Life and Legend," which was named one of the 10 best books of 2024 by the New York Times.
12. Command and Control and AI, Oh My! – The Case for Petrov’s Law –
Conclusion:
Make no mistake, artificial intelligence will revolutionize the entire spectrum of conflict from peace to total war. The degree to which it accomplishes this will rely entirely upon the manner in which it is integrated into military decision making. Leaders should embrace AI as a means to inform, but not replace, their own command responsibilities. Petrov’s Law will ensure decision making remains the sole province of human leadership.
Command and Control and AI, Oh My! – The Case for Petrov’s Law –
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/01/13/command-and-control-and-ai-oh-my-the-case-for-petrovs-law/
by Christopher J. Heatherly
|
01.13.2025 at 06:00am
A War Story
September 26th, 1983. The height of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States of America. Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, assigned to the Soviet Air Defense Forces, stands watch at a nuclear attack early warning bunker outside Moscow. His shift began like any other but ended with Petrov literally saving the world from destruction. On that fateful day, Soviet early warning systems mistook reflected sunlight for five inbound American nuclear missiles. Soviet military doctrine required the watch officer to relay launch reports to his superiors, who in turn communicated with the Soviet General Staff. On his own initiative, Stanislav decided not to inform his superiors as he knew the United States would not start a world war with such a strategically insignificant first strike. He kept the information at his level, the moment passed, and the world was saved.
Let us consider for a moment an alternative scenario. The Soviet Union utilizes an artificial intelligence (AI) platform with faster than human reaction and decision speed as part of their early warning system. The AI platform receives the same false report but concludes the information is factual and relays the information to the Soviet General Staff. The Soviet General Staff is too far removed from the early warning system’s daily activities to recognize the error. The USSR responds with the full fury of its nuclear arsenal. American and NATO early warning systems detect a massive Soviet missile launch. Following established war plans, the West responds with a nuclear counterstrike. Human life as we know it ceases to exist.
One might propose a counterargument that existing nuclear weapon protocols prevent an erroneous weapons launch scenario with or without the benefit of AI. The historical record, however, tells a much different and more frightening story. On at least nine known occasions, the world came to the brink of nuclear Armageddon. It stands to reason we will face similar occasions in the future requiring rapid analysis and critical decision making.
Welcome to the Revolution
Throughout history, military professionals studied previous conflicts to prepare to recruit, train and resource their soldiers for the next war. While these changes were frequently incremental, on occasion they led to evolutions in warfare. Past evolutions included the introduction of gunpowder which greatly reduced the defensive value of armor and fixed fortifications, or the somewhat belated shift from battleships to aircraft carriers that modernized naval warfare during World War II. Very rarely, development is so radical that it moves beyond evolution to create a revolution in military affairs (RMA) which irrevocably and immutably changes warfare. Arguably the most impactful past RMA came from the development and later proliferation of nuclear weapons granting humankind instant ability to destroy itself on a global level. Restated, warfare, and its implications, have never been the same since Oppenheimer released the atomic genie from the bottle.
Artificial intelligence is the next revolution in military affairs. AI will positively or negatively affect every facet of military operations at the tactical, operational and strategic levels of war. AI will transform warfare more than the changes wrought by gunpower, aviation, mass production and nuclear weapons combined. While AI is too nascent a concept to fully catalogue its potential use by either state or non-state actors, we may confidently predict some applications. AI will play a major role in data analysis, software and application development, logistics and targeting at all levels of warfare. More specifically at the strategic and operational levels, AI will serve as a primary tool in psychological operations, disinformation strategies and public affairs messaging. At the “muddy boots” tactical level of battle, AI will assist with crew served weapons or obstacle emplacement, fires planning, route selection and other fundamental soldier tasks.
As AI approaches human critical thinking ability, there will be an inevitable temptation to include it in decision making to augment or outright replace the “man in the loop” control mechanisms used since Cain slew Abel. True, AI offers tempting advantages in decision speed, data aggregation and even reducing the moral burdens of leadership. Military leaders must be cognizant of the many dangers inherent in introducing AI into decision making before surrendering command or control functions. Ultimately, decision authority to employ lethal force must remain in human minds and human hands.
Integrating AI Within Military Operations
The United States military spent the early 21st century conducting counterinsurgency (COIN) operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere under the umbrella Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). With the general cessation of those campaigns, the American military once again returned to its core mission of fighting large-scale ground combat operations (LSGCO). It stands to reason the United States, its allies, and competitors will perform the same time-tested analysis on the effectiveness of American military capabilities in COIN and LSGCO. These studies will share a common goal of retaining the decisive edge against peer or near-peer competitors. Within the US construct, analysis is performed via examination of doctrine, organization, training, material, leadership and education, personnel and facilities (DOTMLPF). These studies will include examination of AI to best assess its applicability across the entire spectrum of conflict – to assume otherwise is foolish. If history teaches anything, it routinely proves the failure to adapt is the fast road to societal extinction. The question remaining to be answered is twofold: Where can AI contribute to mission success, and to what degree may AI assist military leaders?
To best answer that question, it is worth reviewing the dual concepts of command and control. The science of control is best defined as the processes and equipment used to exercise the art of command. The art of command is the process by which commanders lead their team. Discussions on command and control constitute a formative part of the military science curriculum used as the Washington State University Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) Department Chair. During these lessons, cadets were assigned two tasks:
- Complete a series of simple math problems.
- Draw the Mona Lisa.
The first task, mathematics, is readily understood as the discipline is governed by proven logic, principles, and rules. The science of control functions via similar rule driven processes, checklists, and standard operating procedures (SOP). Control means, such as doctrinal operations orders or tactical radio employment, are easily taught and just as easily retained. AI understands control via operating software and will outperform humans given its superior ability to process information faster and from a greater number of data sources. For example, an AI platform assisting with the intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, reconnaissance (ISTAR) cycle will more efficiently search databases across the larger intelligence enterprise to cross reference reports, update collection plans, provide early warning indications or alert units when specific condition criteria are met on the battlefield. In a game like chess, where the rules are clearly defined and enforced, AI has the definite advantage.
Warfare, however, is not a logical undertaking. War is inherently chaotic, dirty, and frequently illogical. Combat is further complicated by the uncertainty and dynamic operational environment found in every military operation, something Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s termed as the “fog and friction of war.” It takes years of training, education, and experience to master the leadership skills necessary for proper military decision making. No current AI system, regardless of its nuanced complexity, matches the uniquely human ability to command – particularly when there are significant information gaps. Small wonder that drawing the Mona Lisa posed the greater challenge to the cadets.
Employed correctly, AI will complete or augment control functions while simultaneously affording military leaders greater time to think or focus on critical command tasks.
A Proposal
What guidelines may we look towards to best incorporate artificial intelligence into military operations to bring its advantages to bear against our competitors? Science fiction may point the way. In 1942, author Isaac Asimov established the now famous “Three Laws of Robotics” in a short story titled Runaround. In their original version, the Three Laws dictate:
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Doctrine requires a new law, superseding Asimov’s previous work, based upon Stanislav Petrov’s moment in history to account for the future use of AI in military decision making. This proposal incorporates the possible benefits of AI in warfare while avoiding potential negative consequences associated with its use.
Petrov’s Law – The final decision to preserve or take life must be safeguarded by the uniquely human ability to rationalize, empathize, and understand the consequences of action or inaction.
To be clear, this paper does not argue military leaders should eschew AI altogether. AI will play an important, if not potentially decisive, role in future operations across the land, sea, air, space, information, and cyber domains. AI offers its greatest value as a control tool, providing leaders with a range of analytically informed options to augment human derived conclusions for a given problem set. The inverse, placing command functions directly into “AI hands”, absolves commanders of the consequences of deciding, thereby creating a temptation for leaders to avoid that critical responsibility inherent in their role. Bluntly, soldiers should struggle with the decision to take life.
Even as a control tool, AI integration comes with a final concern when considering potential consequences when leaders make decisions against the advice of their AI systems. For example, an AI tool assigns probability values to several likely outcomes in a tactical scenario. The supported leader considers all options and, after applying their experience, training and education, selects an outcome the AI system deems has less chance of occurring. Will their political or military superiors back that choice? One hopes so as failure to support those leaders will inevitably result in a situation where AI derived percentages have the final word, and humans are merely rubberstamping a decision.
Conclusion
Make no mistake, artificial intelligence will revolutionize the entire spectrum of conflict from peace to total war. The degree to which it accomplishes this will rely entirely upon the manner in which it is integrated into military decision making. Leaders should embrace AI as a means to inform, but not replace, their own command responsibilities. Petrov’s Law will ensure decision making remains the sole province of human leadership.
Tags: AI, AI integration, Artificial Intelligence, Human-in-the-loop, Military Decision Making Process, Military Doctrine
About The Author
- Christopher J. Heatherly
- Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) Christopher J. Heatherly enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1994 and earned his commission via Officer Candidate School in 1997. He held a variety of assignments in special operations, Special Forces, armored, and cavalry units. His operational experience includes deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq, South Korea, Kuwait, Mali, and Nigeria. He holds master’s degrees from the University of Oklahoma and the School of Advanced Military Studies. He retired from the military in 2023.
13. Machiavelli and our Wars in the Middle East
Perhaps our wars in CENTCOM.
Afghanistan is in Central Asia versus the Middle East.
(Not meant to be snarky)
Excertps:
“For in truth there is no sure method of holding such cities by destruction. Anyone who becomes master of a city accustomed to freedom and does not destroy it may expect to be destroyed by it; for such a city may always justify rebellion in the name of liberty and its ancient institutions. These are not forgotten either through passage of time or through benefits received. Despite any actions or provisions one may take, if the inhabitants are not divided and dispersed, they will not forget the name and those institutions, and will quickly have recourse to them at every chance.”
The rapid victories against the Taliban and Saddam’s regimes were warning signs that ruling Afghanistan and Iraq would not be easy. The fact that the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and remnants of Saddam’s regime found sanctuary in Pakistan, Iran, and Syria, respectively, ensured the memories of their past institutions would live on and serve as a call to arms. This fact meant that labeling the Taliban insurgents was inaccurate since the Taliban and its supporters have continued to view it as the legitimate Afghan government, even in exile.
The counter-insurgency victories against the Taliban and insurgent forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and today in Syria may prove fleeting as time marches on. The United States never lost a tactical battle in Vietnam but proved strategically irrelevant in defeating the communist because we failed to understand the war’s political nature. The North Vietnamese were prepared to pay any cost to win unification after suffering foreign interference by China, France, and the United States. Likewise, the Taliban proved they were willing to pay a high price in their efforts to reclaim their right to rule Afghanistan. The wars in Iraq and Syria remain unresolved and may eventually fracture those two nation-states as the various groups and tribes seek a new political reality.
As the junior leaders during Vietnam War and Cold War assumed senior leadership political and military positions misapplied the lessons learned from their experience, the September 11th generation must do better and learn from both. Future leaders must ask themselves the hard questions and challenge their assumptions about whether a proposed conflict and post-conflict scenario would abide by Machiavelli’s dictum on what it takes to conquer another state. Finally, a careful reading of history, like former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis said, would ensure “nothing new under the sun.” This fact would ensure future leaders ask the right questions when considering Machiavelli’s advice and understand why our experience in Afghanistan and Iraq went wrong.
Machiavelli and our Wars in the Middle East
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/01/13/machiavelli-and-our-wars-in-the-middle-east/
by Chad Pillai
|
01.13.2025 at 06:00am
Editors Note: This article originally ran on 21 July, 2021. It is re-run with consent from the author.
The upcoming twentieth anniversary of the September 11th attacks and the recent passing of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld require thoughtful attention as the nation completes its final troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, ending the longest war in U.S. history. The war in Afghanistan and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Syria have shaped my generation’s cultural image, similar to the Vietnam War’s generation. In both instances, the U.S. entered the wars believing its martial superiority ensured victory and ended each war wondering what went wrong.
The political, strategic, and emotional rationale for the war in Afghanistan was logically tied to the heinous attacks on September 11th. The world watched as Al Qaeda hijacked commercial airliners and flew them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and one that crashed in Pennsylvania when the passengers revolted. Shortly after the attack, President George W. Bush spoke with first responders at ground zero in New York. He announced, “the world will hear all of us soon!” Within weeks, the CIA and U.S. Special Operations spearheaded our response in Afghanistan that led to the U.S. overthrowing the Taliban government and the displacement of the Al Qaeda terrorist network. The rapid victories represented by the famous “Horse Soldiers” of the 5th Special Forces Group highlighted the nation’s martial superiority. They gave strategic leaders like former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld the confidence needed to expand the global war on terrorism to Iraq.
Assured of rapid victory and that senior policy makers believing U.S. forces would be greeted as liberators, the United States, and its allies launched a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein and his regime. Like the victory in Afghanistan, the initial success took less than a month. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. and its allies employed fewer forces than they did to expel Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait in 1991. Sadly, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, rapid tactical victory did not yield long-term strategic peace or stability. Twenty years after 2001, the U.S. is departing Afghanistan with a resurgent Taliban and a fragile Iraq that continues to battle Al Qaeda’s offshoot – the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) – and is caught in a low-level regional conflict between Iran and its Arab neighbors.
Policymakers and academics such as Carter Malkasian have and will continue to ask what went wrong. There are plenty of reasons for the perceived failure including not sending enough forces into Afghanistan early to prevent the Taliban’s and Al Qaeda’s senior leaders from escaping and finding sanctuary in Pakistan, diverting troops from Afghanistan to Iraq, and colossal errors like disbanding the Iraqi Army. Each error compounded on the other; however, the primary mistake was hubris.
To avoid hubris, senior political and military leaders should have read closely Niccolò Machiavelli book The Prince on what a ruler should expect when conquering foreign land. In chapters four and five, Machiavelli lays out the fundamental principles a ruler needed to understand before embarking on conquest by highlighting the differences between the Kingdom of France and the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire. To briefly paraphrase Machiavelli’s advice in chapter four, he wrote that states that are hard to conquer are easy to rule while states that are easy to conquer are hard to rule.
In chapter five, Machiavelli providers further advice on what to expect when conquering another with the following words:
When a state accustomed to live in freedom under its own laws is acquired, there are three ways of keeping it: the first is to destroy it, the second is to go to live there in person; the third is to let it continue to live under its own laws, taking tribute from it, and setting up a government composed of a few men who will keep it friendly to you. Such a government, being the creature of the prince, will be aware that it cannot survive without his friendship and support, and it will do everything to maintain his authority. A city which is used to freedom is more easily controlled by means of its own citizens than by any other, provided one chooses not to destroy it.
The American experiences with Germany and Japan after World War II and South Korea after the Korean War shaped our perception of what could be achieved by the nation’s military presence and commitment to long-term peace and stability. The U.S. and its allies fought four bloody and expensive years against Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan, leading to their unconditional surrender. The Japanese were prepared for national suicide and destruction but submitted when they heard the Emperor speak for the first time announcing the war’s end. After the war, the U.S. maintained a large military footprint in Germany and Japan and helped them democratize and become long-term allies. Despite being challenging to conquer, the Germans and Japanese proved easy to rule.
During the Korean War, the U.S. and its allies fought the first major “hot war” of the “Cold War” when it helped South Korea maintain its sovereignty. Since the 1953 armistice, the U.S. has maintained a sizeable military footprint and helped South Korea democratize between 1953-1997 and become a long-term ally. The U.S. did not conquer South Korea, but its assurance of long-term defense against its North Korean enemy helped make its transition a stable democracy easier, which allowed the Republic of Korea to contribute to U.S. military operations during the Vietnam War and in Iraq.
In Germany, Japan, and South Korea, the U.S. applied Machiavelli advice by destroying the state, living there (long-term military presence), and setting up governments friendly to the United States that made post-war stability possible. The political and military decisions made regarding Afghanistan and Iraq were the opposite of those made concerning Germany, Japan, and South Korea. In Afghanistan and Iraq, senior political and military leaders had no intention of staying and quickly installed Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan and Ahmed Chalabi in Iraq to govern. While Hamid Karzai had some legitimate claims to his role as a leader in Afghan society as the son and grandson of the chief of the Popalzai Pashtuns who served in the former King of Afghanistan’s government, Ahmed Chalabi was a corrupt banker with no ties to the ruling elite in Iraq. The desire to run for the exits before Afghanistan and Iraq were fully stabilized set the conditions for the insurgencies that bogged down the U.S. military for the past twenty years.
For twenty years, the U.S. fought a counter-insurgency in both Afghanistan and Iraq that still fell short of completely destroying the insurgents, their means of resupply (narcotrafficking and the funds provided to the Taliban as an example), and eliminating those agents that provided sanctuary (Pakistan, Syria, and Iran). Employing the means to destroy the insurgents or those who provided haven was politically untenable and therefore should have heeded Machiavelli’s advice in chapter five when he said:
“For in truth there is no sure method of holding such cities by destruction. Anyone who becomes master of a city accustomed to freedom and does not destroy it may expect to be destroyed by it; for such a city may always justify rebellion in the name of liberty and its ancient institutions. These are not forgotten either through passage of time or through benefits received. Despite any actions or provisions one may take, if the inhabitants are not divided and dispersed, they will not forget the name and those institutions, and will quickly have recourse to them at every chance.”
The rapid victories against the Taliban and Saddam’s regimes were warning signs that ruling Afghanistan and Iraq would not be easy. The fact that the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and remnants of Saddam’s regime found sanctuary in Pakistan, Iran, and Syria, respectively, ensured the memories of their past institutions would live on and serve as a call to arms. This fact meant that labeling the Taliban insurgents was inaccurate since the Taliban and its supporters have continued to view it as the legitimate Afghan government, even in exile.
The counter-insurgency victories against the Taliban and insurgent forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and today in Syria may prove fleeting as time marches on. The United States never lost a tactical battle in Vietnam but proved strategically irrelevant in defeating the communist because we failed to understand the war’s political nature. The North Vietnamese were prepared to pay any cost to win unification after suffering foreign interference by China, France, and the United States. Likewise, the Taliban proved they were willing to pay a high price in their efforts to reclaim their right to rule Afghanistan. The wars in Iraq and Syria remain unresolved and may eventually fracture those two nation-states as the various groups and tribes seek a new political reality.
As the junior leaders during Vietnam War and Cold War assumed senior leadership political and military positions misapplied the lessons learned from their experience, the September 11th generation must do better and learn from both. Future leaders must ask themselves the hard questions and challenge their assumptions about whether a proposed conflict and post-conflict scenario would abide by Machiavelli’s dictum on what it takes to conquer another state. Finally, a careful reading of history, like former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis said, would ensure “nothing new under the sun.” This fact would ensure future leaders ask the right questions when considering Machiavelli’s advice and understand why our experience in Afghanistan and Iraq went wrong.
Tags: global war on terrorism, GWOT
About The Author
- Chad Pillai
- Colonel Chad M. Pillai is a senior Army Strategist who has served a variety of strategic planning positions in Europe and the Middle East to include Commander’s Action Groups at USCENTCOM and ISAF. He has a Masters in International Public Policy from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), served as Visiting Defense Fellow at Queens University’s Centre for International Defence Policy (CIDP), editor at Emergent Defense Magazine, and a member of the Military Writers Guild.
14. How Lagging Vaccination Could Lead to a Polio Resurgence
I do not get it. But I am a vaccine believer and all my vaccinations are up to date. (and we still get COVID and SSV shots as well as a flu shot). I had a mild case of COVID in 2023 and did not even go to the doctor – just treated it like a cold but isloated more than I would with a normal cold to protect my family. My wife has never had COVID and our daughter who is a high school English teacher has never had COVID despite being in contact with so many students every day.
We made sure our daughter received all required and recommended vaccinations on time while growing up.
We believe in preventative medicine and vaccinations are a key part of that in our world view.
How Lagging Vaccination Could Lead to a Polio Resurgence
In its original form, the virus survives in just two countries. But a type linked to an oral vaccine used in other nations has already turned up in the West.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/13/health/polio-vaccine-outbreaks.html
Carol Paulk of Dallas contracted polio in 1943, when she was just 3. Her right leg never recovered, and for the rest of her life she has walked with a pronounced limp and dealt with pain.Credit...Emil Lippe for The New York Times
By Apoorva Mandavilli
Jan. 13, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET
Most American parents hardly give thought to polio beyond the instant their child is immunized against the disease. But there was a time in this country when polio paralyzed 20,000 people in a year, killing many of them.
Vaccines turned the tide against the virus. Over the past decade, there has been only one case in the United States, related to international travel.
That could change very quickly if polio vaccination rates dropped or the vaccine were to become less accessible.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic who may become the secretary of health and human services, has said the idea that vaccination has nearly eradicated polio is “a mythology.”
And while Mr. Kennedy has said he’s not planning to take vaccines away from Americans, he has long contended that they are not as safe and effective as claimed.
As recently as 2023, he said batches of an early version of the polio vaccine, contaminated with a virus, caused cancers “that killed many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did.” The contamination was real, but research never bore out a link to cancer.
Aaron Siri, a lawyer and adviser to Mr. Kennedy, has represented a client seeking to challenge the approval or distribution of some polio vaccines on the grounds that they might be unsafe.
Those efforts appear unlikely to succeed. And there is widespread support for vaccination among prominent Republicans, including President-elect Donald J. Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell, who had polio as a child.
But the secretary of health and human services has the authority to discourage vaccination in less direct ways. He or she could withdraw federal funds for childhood vaccination programs, hasten the end of school mandates in states already disinclined toward vaccines or fuel doubts about the shots, exacerbating a decline in immunization rates.
If polio vaccination rates were to fall, scientists say, the virus could slip into pockets of the country where significant numbers of people are unvaccinated, wreaking havoc once more. The virus may be nearly eradicated in its original form, but resurgence remains a constant threat.
Image
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who may become the top health official in the nation, could take several steps to discourage vaccination in the United States.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
Any decision the Trump administration makes regarding the polio vaccine is likely to ripple across the globe, said Dr. David Heymann, an infectious disease physician at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and former leader of polio eradication at the World Health Organization.
“If the U.S. takes away the license, then many other countries will do the same thing,” he said. To have polio resurge when it is so close to eradication “would be very, very, very, very sad.”
Before 1955, when the vaccine was introduced, polio disabled more than 15,000 Americans each year and hundreds of thousands more worldwide. In 1952 alone, it killed 3,000 Americans after paralysis left them unable to breathe.
Many of those who survived still live with the consequences.
“People really underestimate how horrific polio was,” said Dr. Karen Kowalske, a physician and polio specialist at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.
Many who recovered now suffer “post-polio syndrome”: Some of the original symptoms, including muscle weakness and respiratory problems, return.
Dr. Kowalske tends to about 100 post-polio patients who need braces, wheelchairs or other devices to cope with progressive weakness. Some are older adults who became infected before the vaccine was available; others are middle-aged immigrants from countries where polio remained a problem for much longer than in the United States.
To some survivors, the idea of polio’s return is unfathomable.
Carol Paulk contracted the disease in 1943, when she was just 3. Her right leg never recovered, and for the rest of her life she has walked with a pronounced limp and has been in near-constant pain.
Ms. Paulk is among the luckier ones. Until recently, she did not suffer the breathing, swallowing or digestive problems that often torment polio survivors.
Image
Ms. Paulk, right, on her fourth birthday at St. Giles Hospital in Brooklyn in 1944.Credit...via Carol Paulk
She has had a “a wonderful, wonderful life” with a husband and three daughters, a law degree and extensive travel abroad.
But always, everywhere, she is calculating how far away the next seat is, how long her energy will hold out and whether a given activity is worth debilitating pain the next day.
She didn’t participate in the 1963 March on Washington or play sports, as she desperately wanted to, or go hiking, skiing and bicycling with her husband.
If there were a public hearing about the polio vaccine now, “I would go, and I would take off my brace, and I would let them see my leg and ask them, is that what they want for their children?” she said.
Polio disables many fewer children now. Vaccination has scrubbed the virus from most of the planet, slashing the number of cases by more than 99.9 percent and preventing an estimated 20 million cases of paralysis.
Still, the virus has turned out to be a stubborn enemy, and eradication has been set back over and over again.
In 2024, 20 countries reported polio cases, and the virus was detected in wastewater in five European countries, decades after its official elimination from the region, and in Australia.
“Any reduction in coverage rates increases the risk of polio anywhere,” said Oliver Rosenbauer, a spokesman for the World Health Organization’s polio eradication program.
Image
Ms. Paulk is constantly calculating how far away the next seat is, how long her energy will hold out and whether a given activity is worth debilitating pain the next day.Credit...Emil Lippe for The New York Times
Image
Polio patients in New York in 1954. Before the vaccine’s introduction in 1955, polio disabled more than 15,000 Americans each year and hundreds of thousands more worldwide.Credit...Everett Collection Historical, via Alamy
There are three types of polioviruses, and eradication requires that all three disappear. For years, the goal has been tantalizingly close.
Type 2 was declared vanquished in 2015, and Type 3 in 2019. Type 1 now circulates only in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 2021, the two countries together had just five cases; in 2024, they had 93.
But those figures tell only part of the story. In a surprising twist, an oral vaccine used in some parts of the world has kept poliovirus circulating long after it should have died out.
In most low- and middle-income countries, health officials still rely on an oral vaccine given as two drops on the tongue. It is inexpensive and easy to administer, and it prevents transmission of the virus.
But it contains weakened virus, which vaccinated children can shed into the environment through their feces. When there are enough unvaccinated children to infect, the pathogen slowly spreads, regaining its virulence and eventually causing paralysis.
The problem is this: Since 2016, the oral vaccine used for routine immunization has not protected against Type 2 virus. Global health authorities made a deliberate decision to reformulate the vaccine on the grounds that naturally occurring Type 2 virus had disappeared.
That turned out to be premature. More Type 2 virus had been shed by orally vaccinated children in some parts of the world than officials had anticipated. When some nonimmunized children, or those given the newer oral vaccine, encountered this “vaccine-derived” Type 2 virus, they became infected and paralyzed.
Vaccine-derived poliovirus now paralyzes more children than naturally occurring virus does. For example, Nigeria eliminated all so-called wild-type polio in 2020. But in 2024, the country saw 93 cases of Type 2 vaccine-derived virus, more than one-third the global total.
None of this is a problem for Americans — as long as they are vaccinated.
The inactivated polio vaccine (I.P.V.) used for routine immunization of American children protects against all three types of polio. These formulations contain dead virus, and so cannot cause disease or revert to a dangerous form.
Image
A polio vaccination campaign in Peshawar, Pakistan, in September.Credit...Insiya Syed for The New York Times
Image
Polio vaccines at a pop-up vaccination clinic for polio at the Rockland County Department of Health in Pomona, N.Y., during an outbreak in 2022.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
But like some other vaccines for infectious diseases, they do not fully prevent infection or transmission of the virus. This aspect is among the criticisms of Mr. Siri, Mr. Kennedy’s adviser.
Still, it is less important than the vaccines’ near-perfect power to prevent paralysis, experts said.
“Yeah, yeah, it’s true, I.P.V. doesn’t prevent transmission,” said Dr. William Petri, an infectious diseases physician and past president of the W.H.O.’s polio research committee. “But, boy, that’s the best thing since sliced bread at preventing paralysis.”
It does mean, however, that people vaccinated with I.P.V. can keep the virus circulating, even when they themselves are protected against illness and paralysis.
So here’s a realistic scenario that worries researchers: Someone who was vaccinated with the oral polio vaccine in another country might bring the virus into the United States and then shed it, in its weakened form. This has already happened in other countries.
So long as most of the population remains vaccinated, this is not likely to set off an epidemic. But if the virus makes its way into communities with low vaccination rates, it may spread, and then revert to a virulent form that can cause paralysis.
That is what happened in New York in 2022, when polio struck a 20-year-old unvaccinated member of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Rockland County.
The vaccination rate in that county was just over 60 percent, compared with the national average of 93 percent.
The virus that paralyzed the young man had been circulating for months, and it was later detected in the sewage of multiple New York counties with vaccination rates hovering around 60 percent, prompting the state to declare an emergency.
Genetically related polioviruses were detected in wastewater samples in Britain, Israel and Canada, suggesting widespread transmission. The authorities later found two distinct vaccine-derived Type 2 polioviruses in New York wastewater, suggesting two separate importations.
If polio were to re-emerge in the United States, it is unlikely to be as horrific as it was in the pre-vaccine decades. Many older adults still remember that as children they were not permitted to swim in rivers or pools, or anywhere the virus might lurk.
“The reason we weren’t allowed to play in rivers in the ’50s is because raw sewage was dumped into the rivers,” Dr. Heymann said.
That is no longer the case, so there “wouldn’t be massive transmission immediately in the U.S.,” he added.
But even if just a few children were to become paralyzed, “it would be awful.”
Apoorva Mandavilli reports on science and global health, with a focus on infectious diseases, pandemics and the public health agencies that try to manage them. More about Apoorva Mandavilli
15. Japan foreign minister in South Korea for talks before Trump takes office
Keep talking.
Japan foreign minister in South Korea for talks before Trump takes office
13 Jan 2025 06:34PM
(Updated: 13 Jan 2025 06:36PM)
channelnewsasia.com
SEOUL: Japan's foreign minister held talks in South Korea with top officials on Monday (Jan 13) as the Asian neighbours seek to strengthen ties before the inauguration of US President-elect Donald Trump.
Takeshi Iwaya met counterpart Cho Tae-yul for discussions in the capital Seoul, the South Korean foreign ministry said, with the two later holding a news conference.
It is the first such meeting by Tokyo's top diplomat in Asia's fourth-biggest economy for more than six years.
Cho said the ministers had "expressed strong concerns over North Korea's nuclear and missile development", in particular Pyongyang's growing military ties with Moscow, including troop deployments.
The talks also focused on trilateral cooperation with mutual ally the United States – before Trump, who has previously questioned the US's Asian security alliances, takes office on Jan 20.
The three nations have bolstered security cooperation in recent years, including sharing information on North Korean missile launches.
The latest such test was last week when Pyongyang said it had fired a new hypersonic missile, the same day US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was visiting Seoul.
Cho said he and Iwaya had agreed on "the necessity of continued close coordination among Korea, Japan, and the United States to counter the North Korean nuclear threat".
Tokyo and Seoul's bilateral ties would also continue to be developed "under any circumstances", with diplomacy to "remain consistent and unwavered", he added.
Iwaya is scheduled to meet acting president Choi Sang-mok on Tuesday, the Japanese government said.
South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Tae-yul (left) talks with Japanese Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya (right) during their meeting at the Foreign Ministry in Seoul on Jan 13, 2025. (Photo: AFP/Pool/Jung Yeon-je)
POLITICAL CRISIS
The Seoul-Tokyo meeting comes as South Korean officials try to reassure allies of the country's stability.
A political crisis has roiled the vibrant East Asian democracy for weeks following suspended President Yoon Suk Yeol's failed martial law bid and impeachment.
Yoon is currently facing a Constitutional Court case which will determine whether his impeachement is upheld, plus a separate probe on insurrection charges, with investigators seeking to detain him after he refused summons for questioning.
Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba said last month Tokyo was monitoring the situation in South Korea with "exceptional and serious concerns".
If Yoon is removed from office, South Korea has to hold presidential elections within 60 days.
Both the US and Tokyo have adopted "a measured approach ... regarding what is ultimately the domestic legal process of an important ally," said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul.
"Nonetheless, both the US secretary of state and Japanese foreign minister have visited Seoul to support South Korean foreign policy in a time of need, promoting continuity of the trilateral cooperation that deters adventurism by North Korea, China, and Russia," he added.
US-Japanese relations have also recently been strained by President Joe Biden's decision to block Nippon Steel's takeover of US Steel.
Citing national security concerns, Biden blocked the US$14.9 billion sale this month and Ishiba reportedly told the US president that "strong" concerns have been raised over the decision.
Iwaya will head to the Philippines on Tuesday as Tokyo seeks to strengthen its strategic partnership with the Southeast Asian nation, to counter China's growing military might and influence in the region.
Japan has been building the newest and largest ships of the Philippine Coast Guard, a key element of Manila's efforts to assert its sovereignty in the South China Sea which Beijing claims almost in its entirety.
channelnewsasia.com
16. Outgoing US envoy to Japan defends American troops and their standing around the globe
Outgoing US envoy to Japan defends American troops and their standing around the globe
Stars and Stripes · by Seth Robson · January 10, 2025
Outgoing U.S. ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel speaks to reporters at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo, Jan. 10, 2025. (Akifumi Ishikawa/Stars and Stripes)
TOKYO — U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel in his outgoing remarks Friday defended U.S. forces abroad as “the thin blue line” and hinted at his further involvement in public life when he returns to the United States.
Emanuel was questioned at his final press conference by a reporter for Swiss TV about the “illusion” of U.S. alliances with Japan and NATO. The ambassador pushed back, pointing a finger for emphasis.
“In the last century, when Europe was fighting Europe, the United States was called upon, and young men, principally, lost their lives defending both not only the ideas of freedom and liberty but against violence and aggression,” Emanuel said.
“And number two, many people go to sleep at night around the world knowing that the United States is there, that it is on the front line,” he said. America’s “word and deed count.”
The U.S. is “the thin blue line” standing up to Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, “an axis of autocrats,” he added.
Emanuel took questions for about an hour at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan as he prepares to step down from the post he’s held since March 2022. George Glass, an investment banker and former ambassador to Portugal, is President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to succeed him.
The often-outspoken Emanuel, previously an Illinois congressman, President Barack Obama’s chief of staff and mayor of Chicago, said he likely will continue in public service.
“I’m not planning on leaving the field of public discourse and public debate,” he said. “First of all, it would not come naturally to an Emanuel to be silent.”
In an Dec. 17 op-ed piece in the Washington Post, he wrote that the Democratic Party was “blind to the rising sea of disillusionment” that Trump, a Republican, rode to electoral victory.
Days earlier, Emanuel told the ABC-TV affiliate in Chicago that he’s not interested in leading his party, contrary to reports he was a possible candidate for that and other offices.
Emanuel said his goal in Tokyo had been to reimagine, reinvigorate and reenergize the U.S.-Japan alliance to meet future challenges and opportunities.
“Time will evaluate whether we have done that adequately,” he told reporters Friday. “You run a race, and you hand off the baton. I can say with some confidence that the U.S.-Japan alliance is better prepared than it was before.”
Military cooperation between the U.S., Japan and South Korea did not exist three years ago, Emanuel said. But when North Korea launched a missile recently, in real time, the three nations shared intelligence about it.
But South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s attempt in December to impose martial law, which lead to his impeachment, came as a surprise, Emanuel said. He predicted the three nations will continue their agreement.
“The real question is, will the trilateral thrive?” he said.
Meanwhile, Japan will join the U.S. and the Philippines in their annual Balikatan exercise this spring for the first time as a full partner, Emanuel added.
“Part of the entire strategy of China is to isolate a country in this region and use their full force and power to isolate that country and limit and restrict their sovereignty and independence,” he said. “When America’s allies are confident in the strength, power and commitment of the United States, the multitude of our numbers, the strength in numbers becomes apparent and then the isolated party is China.”
Emanuel said he would return to Japan in March to watch the Chicago Cubs play the Los Angeles Dodgers and two Japanese teams at the Tokyo Dome.
Stars and Stripes · by Seth Robson · January 10, 2025
17. Tulsi Gabbard’s Confirmation Conversion on Section 702
I cannot imagine her receiving enough support to be confirmed. She might be the real test for the president-elect and his domination of Congress.
Tulsi Gabbard’s Confirmation Conversion on Section 702
She flips on the crucial intelligence-collection tool to win Senate GOP support. Is she believable?
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/tulsi-gabbards-confirmation-conversion-on-section-702-intel-gathering-6d90ef53?mod=latest_headlines
By The Editorial Board
Follow
Jan. 12, 2025 4:30 pm ET
Tulsi Gabbard Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Does Tulsi Gabbard suddenly believe in gathering intelligence against America’s enemies? That’s presumably what she wants the U.S. Senate to believe with her come-lately conversion to support Section 702 data gathering.
The 702 provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act lets the U.S. spy without a court warrant on the electronic communications of non-Americans located outside the country. Ms. Gabbard voted against 702 when she was in Congress, though everyone serious about national security understands the tool’s vital importance.
Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford told our Kimberley Strassel on her podcast last week that Ms. Gabbard’s views on 702 is crucial to whether defense-minded Republicans would support her nomination by President-elect Trump to be director of national intelligence (DNI). “If she comes out and says, ‘No, I want to oppose all 702 authority’—that literally shuts down all of our national defense gathering,” Mr. Lankford said.
He added that “she’s going to get a fair hearing to be able to put those things out there and to say, ‘This is what I believe about these issues.’” Voila, Ms. Gabbard suddenly saw the intelligence light.
The question is whether Senators should believe her. Ms. Gabbard’s explanation is hardly persuasive. She now says Congress has added enough protections for civil liberties that she is comfortable supporting 702. But her previous criticisms were largely specious and demonstrated her lack of understanding about the threats against the U.S. and the few defensive tools the country has against terrorists and malign states. Data collection to detect patterns that can prevent attacks is essential.
Mr. Trump deserves some, but not total, deference on his nominees. He promised Ms. Gabbard a cabinet position in return for her endorsement during the campaign, and his nomination fulfills that pledge. But that doesn’t mean the Senate must accept that political transaction, especially on national security.
The DNI operates largely in secret, coordinating intelligence from the 18 U.S. spy agencies and presenting the best estimate of threats for the President and his policy advisers. Ms. Gabbard’s statements across her career have demonstrated a knee-jerk instinct to underestimate threats. She was an apologist for Syria’s Bashar al-Assad on chemical weapons and she blamed Vladimir Putin’s aggression on NATO expansion. A confirmation conversion doesn’t erase that dangerous record.
You may also like
0:35
Paused
0:02
/
5:23
Tap For Sound
Review and Outlook: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan address the company’s decision to abandon its censorship regime, by walking back most of the platform’s speech controls. Photo: Leigh Vogel - Pool via CNP/Zuma Press/David Zalubowski/AP
Appeared in the January 13, 2025, print edition as 'Gabbard’s Confirmation Conversion'.
18. Military Academies Quashed Army-Navy Game Advertisement Featuring Marine Recommended for Medal of Honor
Another great American. I hope he is properly recognized.
Counterintuitively, perhaps the academies are showing greater support by rejecting the ads because this could generate more notoriety for the cause than simply allowing the ads to be aired. Allowing themselves to be criticized for the rejection will bring greater attention to the cause. (the media equivalent of jumping on the hand grenade).
Excerpts:
Capers, now 87 years old and "one of the most decorated Marines in Force Reconnaissance history," according to the Marine Corps, earned the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars with a "V" device for valor, and three Purple Hearts, among a bevy of other awards. He was also the first Black Marine to command a force reconnaissance company and to receive a battlefield commission, according to the service.
In 1967, on the last day of his nine-man patrol near Phu Loc, Vietnam, and after thwarting an attack from a numerically superior enemy, then-2nd Lt. Capers was severely wounded, at one point needing morphine to cope with his "extreme loss of blood," his Silver Star citation said. He continued the fight, leading his team to a helicopter extraction site and refusing to board until his Marines could take off first.
"While struggling to maintain consciousness and still under attack, Maj. Capers demanded continuous situation and status reports from his Marines and ensured the entire team was evacuated before himself," according to the citation. "Barely able to stand, Maj. Capers finally boarded the helicopter and was evacuated."
Military Academies Quashed Army-Navy Game Advertisement Featuring Marine Recommended for Medal of Honor
military.com · by Drew F. Lawrence · January 10, 2025
The U.S. Naval Academy and West Point rejected an advertisement intended for the Army-Navy game last month that featured a Marine whom supporters believe should receive the Medal of Honor, a tribute that could have raised significant awareness of his heroic actions, his advocates said.
The ad, which lauded the life and bravery of retired Marine Maj. James Capers Jr., was sponsored by a group that has backed service members convicted or sentenced for war crimes, among other cases it believes were wrongfully tried or determined.
The academies declined to comment on the refusal to Military.com, but the move drew the attention of 23 Republican lawmakers who signed a letter addressed to the superintendents of the military academies, stating that they were "deeply troubled" by the decision to dismiss it.
"Major Capers, a distinguished Marine veteran and Medal of Honor nominee, embodies the values of courage, dedication and sacrifice that our service academies strive to instill in their cadets and midshipmen," the Dec. 10 letter from lawmakers said. "Recognizing him in the commemorative program for such a historic event would have been a fitting tribute to his legacy and contributions."
The academies responded to the lawmakers with a joint letter the next day praising the "merits" in the advertisement. But they cited "strict page constraints and its departure from standard program materials" as factors in the rejection, according to the document.
When asked, the academies declined to comment on how the ad was a digression from its usual promotions, but acknowledged the authenticity of the letter.
The Army-Navy game on Dec. 14 marked the 125th anniversary of the blockbuster event, occurring three days after the response from the superintendents -- enough time, critics contend, to include a tribute to Capers or invite him to be recognized.
Despite the lawmakers asking for other ways to "recognize this American hero at the game," the response letter from the academies said they would not offer an alternative to "properly honor" Capers and that all of the event's processions were finalized.
"Instead, we maintained the military-themed submissions from long-standing corporate sponsors and service organization partners," said the letter, which was signed by the superintendents of the academies, Lt. Gen. Steven Gilland and Vice Adm. Yvette Davids.
Capers, now 87 years old and "one of the most decorated Marines in Force Reconnaissance history," according to the Marine Corps, earned the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars with a "V" device for valor, and three Purple Hearts, among a bevy of other awards. He was also the first Black Marine to command a force reconnaissance company and to receive a battlefield commission, according to the service.
In 1967, on the last day of his nine-man patrol near Phu Loc, Vietnam, and after thwarting an attack from a numerically superior enemy, then-2nd Lt. Capers was severely wounded, at one point needing morphine to cope with his "extreme loss of blood," his Silver Star citation said. He continued the fight, leading his team to a helicopter extraction site and refusing to board until his Marines could take off first.
"While struggling to maintain consciousness and still under attack, Maj. Capers demanded continuous situation and status reports from his Marines and ensured the entire team was evacuated before himself," according to the citation. "Barely able to stand, Maj. Capers finally boarded the helicopter and was evacuated."
Retired Marine Lt. Col. David "Bull" Gurfein is the CEO of United American Patriots, or UAP, the nonprofit sponsor of the advertisement that supports and funds legal defense for service members it says were unfairly accused of war crimes.
He acknowledged that Capers is different compared to the organization's other beneficiaries, which include former Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, a soldier who pleaded guilty to killing 16 Afghan civilians in 2012 to avoid the death penalty, resulting in life in prison without parole. Despite filing a petition for pardon and Gurfein's push to rectify what he said was a loaded trial, Bales remains incarcerated at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
Neither the letter from Congress nor the academies mentioned UAP or the other cases. Gurfein said that the organization was willing to modify the ad, including -- if asked -- removing the UAP logo and QR code leading to the group's website if it meant that the promotion could still feature Capers, but "nobody once came back and said, 'Remove the link.'"
The academies declined to say whether the association with UAP in the ad was a factor in their decision to exclude it. But if it was, Gurfein said that he would have "respect[ed] them at least taking that position and being bold enough" to do so.
He criticized their "lack of action" and "their hiding" in the dismissal of the ad and subsequent response as "setting a horrible example."
Gurfein said that he had hoped the inclusion of the advertisement would not only bring public attention to Capers' accomplishments, but also catch the eyes of President-elect Donald Trump; Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, who is a Marine veteran; and Elon Musk, who all attended the game last month.
He said that UAP submitted an advertisement featuring Capers nearly three weeks before the game and that it was accepted by the publisher. The original ad, however, was later deemed "inappropriate" and "too controversial" by the academies, according to Gurfein, so the organization removed allusions to Capers having not yet received the Medal of Honor.
The original ad included the line: "For some unknown reason, Capers still has not received the Medal of Honor" and "Capers is 87 years old. He deserves to be recognized while he is still alive," according to a draft ad provided by Gurfein. Both ads included a QR link to UAP's website, specifically to a biography about Capers. UAP raised $10,000 for the ad, Gurfein said.
The academies also did not comment on the advertisements they ultimately chose to run, which included spots for Disabled American Veterans; Sandia National Laboratories, a research and development lab; Veterans Moving Forward Inc., a service dog nonprofit; and Williams Companies, a clean energy organization, according to pictures of the ads provided by Gurfein.
According to UAP, Capers was nominated for the Medal of Honor in 2008, but the military "downgraded" the award to the Silver Star, which he did not receive until 2010, decades after the 1967 combat took place.
Rep. Ralph Norman, a Republican from Capers' home state of South Carolina, recommended Capers for the military's highest honor last year. He was the primary signatory of the letter to the academies and was addressed in the return letter from the superintendents.
"Rep. Norman is disappointed that the advertisement was not accepted for the Army-Navy game, but he plans to continue to pursue all possible avenues to ensure Maj. Capers receives the recognition that he absolutely deserves," a spokesperson for the congressman, Annie Butler, told Military.com in an emailed statement Friday.
The advertisement highlighted Capers' valorous combat actions and said that he overcame poverty during the "Jim Crow" era in South Carolina, breaking barriers as a Black Marine. It also referenced his promotion in "one of the Marine Corps' most successful recruiting campaigns: 'Ask a Marine,'" which starred Capers and helped solidify him as a service icon.
Gurfein said that he met Capers a few years ago and wanted the organization to take on the case because he was "just amazed that he had not been recognized" for his heroism and was struck by what he recounted as the Marine declining to blame systemic racism for not receiving the Medal of Honor.
"He looks at himself as an individual, and that's what made him so interesting, is that he wasn't playing identity politics," Gurfein said. "This is where I really align with his ethics, his integrity and, obviously, his heroism."
military.com · by Drew F. Lawrence · January 10, 2025
19. US Army wants spy drones to launch from high-altitude motherships
US Army wants spy drones to launch from high-altitude motherships
Defense News · by Jen Judson · January 10, 2025
The Army is scouring industry for unmanned aircraft systems to launch from medium- or high-altitude platforms that would perform tasks like intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, according to a request for information posted to the federal business opportunities portal Sam.gov.
The Special Electronic Mission Aircraft Product Directorate, part of the Army’s Fixed-Wing aircraft Project Office, plans to demonstrate operational capability in the fiscal 2026 timeframe, the notice states.
The “Launched Effects” systems, or LE, would be integrated onto “the hardpoints” of an executive jet category aircraft, such as a Bombardier G6500, which would operate above 41,000 feet mean sea level and would reach true airspeed of above 400 knots for more than seven hours. This means the LE and its sensors would need to survive in an air temperature 65 degrees below zero for lengthy durations.
Launched Effects is the service’s term of art for an envisioned unmanned segment among its aerial platforms, capable of delivering a wide range of capabilities such as targeting, reconnaissance, surveillance, network extension or kinetic strike. Launched Effects can be deployed from both air and ground vehicles.
The LEs would be carried on the aircraft from wing pylons and should be able to deploy from the aircraft when flying in configuration, according to the RFI.
The overall launched effect effort represents a new direction in the Army’s aviation portfolio, which prioritizes drones and the more loosely defined category of LE platforms as the tip of the spear in enemy contact.
The Army is leaning hard into developing and deploying launched effects on the battlefield and is working to speed up its plan to procure a variety of LEs capable of flying at different ranges and speeds. The service canceled its manned Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft a year ago and has used some of that freed-up funding to pursue launched effects more at a quicker clip.
In 2020, the service selected 10 companies to provide mature medium-range launched effects technologies. From those, the Army then chose five companies earlier this year to come together to build a prototype, with each company bringing a different element to the system.
Anduril Industries is providing the air vehicle. Anduril purchased Area-I, the original developer of the vehicle — the Altius 700 — in 2021. The Altius 700 has been in use by the Army to evaluate launched effects for over five years.
Collins Aerospace, a Raytheon Technologies company, is the mission system provider, and Aurora Flight Sciences is the system integrator. Technology Service Corp. and Northrop Grumman Information Systems are providing modular payloads.
The medium-range LE will also be developed in conjunction with Program Executive Office Missiles and Space to fill its requirement for a helicopter-fired Long-Range Precision Munition.
The Army is also working on a short-range LE and a long-range version with plans to begin prototyping for the short-range version early in fiscal 2025 that will continue through fiscal 2029. The service plans to put out a request for proposals for the long-range system in the third quarter of fiscal 2026, a year ahead of its original schedule.
Additionally, the service has expressed interest in experimenting with launched effects for even higher altitude platforms like balloons or long-endurance, fixed-wing, solar-powered platforms capable of operating in the stratosphere.
About Jen Judson
Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.
20. Battlefield Drones and the Accelerating Autonomous Arms Race in Ukraine
Excerpt:
Ukraine’s Western supporters are closely monitoring how such technologies are developed and fielded in combat. Retired Army General Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has predicted that within the next ten to fifteen years, up to one-third of the US military could consist of robotic systems, an assessment likely informed by observations of technologies fielded in the Ukraine war. To be sure, certain systems in use by both Ukrainian and Russian forces can function more effectively than others on a battlefield teeming with countermeasures, but the sum total of different autonomous, robotic, and unmanned technologies used in the past three years demonstrates the potential for rapid, large-scale fielding. Both Ukraine and Russia are continuously accelerating their development of different types of battlefield drones and robotic systems, driven by the need for precision, mass employment to overwhelm the adversary, resilience against countermeasures, and reducing risks to human lives. These advancements are impacting the battlefield at the tactical and operational levels and are shaping how future warfare may be conducted.
Battlefield Drones and the Accelerating Autonomous Arms Race in Ukraine - Modern War Institute
mwi.westpoint.edu · by Samuel Bendett · January 10, 2025
Share on LinkedIn
Send email
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the war there has been impacted by attritable, cheap drones and rapidly growing roster of unmanned and robotic systems. Collectively, these technologies are redefining how military forces can wage modern warfare. With both sides in this war rushing to secure a technological advantage, the Ukrainian battlefield is transforming into a clash between conventional forces backed by a growing number of autonomous and remote-controlled systems. Both Ukraine and Russia have steadily poured more and more resources into developing this technology in a bid to stay a step ahead of the adversary.
Ukraine’s battlefield experience reflects a shift toward unmanned systems that augment or attempt to replace human operators in the most dangerous missions, and against an enemy willing to send more and more manpower into large-scale frontal assaults. After so many autonomous and robotic systems were fielded over the past three years by Kyiv’s forces, Ukrainian officials started to describe their country as a “war lab for the future”—highlighting for allies and partners that, because these technologies will have a significant impact on warfare going forward, the ongoing combat in Ukraine offers the best environment for continuous testing, evaluation, and refinement of such systems. Many companies across Europe and the United States have tested their drones and other systems in Ukraine. At this point in the conflict, these companies are striving to gain “battle-tested in Ukraine” credentials for their products.
For example, US defense tech company Anduril recently started selling its new autonomous drones after successful tests carried out in Ukraine in October 2024. Ukrainian and Western drone manufacturers have started partnering more closely both on drones and on certain types of AI development. The US military is seeking to speed up the deployment of cheap autonomous systems through its Replicator program, and is also working closely with the private sector to test systems and technologies in Ukraine that can then be potentially used in future conflicts.
Recently, US Army Chief of Staff General Randy George noted that the Ukraine war “has demonstrated the value of small, attritable drones on the battlefield.” This combat application of relatively inexpensive platforms has provided the Pentagon with an opportunity to see how integrating cutting-edge software with scalable drone technology can proceed across the US Department of Defense, drawing lessons from the Russia-Ukraine war as it prepares for potential future conflicts, including with China.
In December 2024, for the first time, Ukrainian forces successfully carried out an attack on Russian positions using only ground and first-person view drones, further evolving how Ukraine is leveraging unmanned technology on the battlefield. According to Sergeant Volodymyr Dehtiarov of the Khartiia Brigade involved in this attack, dozens of robotic and unmanned systems, including machine-gun-equipped ground drones and kamikaze first-person view aerial drones, were deployed near Lyptsi, north of Kharkiv. While these were remote-controlled systems that still required a large human complement to operate them, this is the first step in the process of Ukraine gradually working to deploy more combat robots and eventually bring more autonomous systems to the battlefield. Ukraine also previously used a ground robot in an assault on a Russian trench in Kursk Oblast, in September 2024, with numerous other examples of such systems being rapidly built and fielded for combat. In many ways, Ukraine has no choice but to maximize its use of technology, as the manpower disparity between Ukraine and Russia is still significant along the eight-hundred-mile front line of the war.
While technological developments have proceeded at a very rapid pace in this war, it also became clear that systematizing the combined research, development, testing, evaluation, and use of different systems by different units across the entire force was crucial. Therefore, in February 2024, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed a decree to establish the national Unmanned Systems Forces, with Colonel Vadym Sukharevskyi appointed as commander in June 2024. In December 2024, the Russian military followed up by announcing that it was establishing an unmanned systems branch to better integrate its forces’ use of autonomous and robotic technologies, and to make sure that lessons and tactics from combat in Ukraine can be absorbed and codified by different military branches.
Both countries also claim multiple AI developments for their respective militaries, in drones as well as in other battlefield systems and tactical applications. Three years into its war against Russian aggression, Ukraine has led the way in conceptualizing large-scale development and application of different unmanned systems and AI technologies across domains and different mission sets. In 2025, Ukraine is expected to field AI-enabled drone swarms and massive numbers of ground vehicles to counter Russian forces. As one Ukrainian official put it: “We count people, and we want our people to be as far from the front line as we can.”
Ukraine’s private sector has stepped up to accelerate the development of autonomous and robotic technologies for enhanced targeting capabilities, with companies like TAF Drones leading the way, aided by the Brave1 organization, a coordination platform established by Ukraine’s government playing an important role in helping the private sector. Ukraine’s plan is to ensure AI-powered combat drones can ensure the nation’s advantage over the Russian force on the battlefield. The Russian military claims the same for its military AI research and application in this war.
For example, Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov stated in October 2024 that AI-powered drones are playing a pivotal role on the battlefield in Ukraine, though he did not elaborate further. To better understand how different types of robotic and autonomous systems are used in Ukraine combat, the Russian Ministry of Defense launched the Rubicon Center in August 2024 to help systematize lessons from Ukraine, including the development and application of AI. This initiative is likely to be the epicenter for Russia’s formation of its planned unmanned systems branch. Russian president Vladimir Putin also announced that Russia is increasing military drone production to approximately 1.4 million in 2024, aiming to stay abreast of Ukraine’s own rapid and large-scale drone manufacturing.
Both Ukrainian and Russian forces prioritize minimizing drone operator involvement to protect trained assets in a complex combat environment. Ukraine’s survival-driven focus often outweighs ethical concerns tied to lethal autonomous weapon systems. Meanwhile, despite recent announcements of AI-enabled combat drones already used against Ukraine, Russia’s military AI likely mainly supports data analysis and rapid decision-making. For example, In November 2024, the Russia-allied Donetsk People’s Republic claimed that its “Donbass Dome” airspace defense and electronic warfare system evaluates different types of information from multitudes of sources to evaluate incoming threats, allegedly done with the help of artificial intelligence algorithms. The evaluated data is transmitted to the military and law enforcement for follow-on actions.
Considering the Russian military’s attempt at making sense of the Ukrainian battlefield, such data analysis efforts are likely taking place across different systems, though public information on their overall effectiveness is relatively scarce. Similar efforts exist across the Russian defense sector, with a subsidiary of national industrial giant Rostec claiming in 2024 the development of a neural network for optical drone detectors, which allegedly allows for increasing their detection range by 40 percent.
On the other side of the war, Ukrainian officials are on record noting the need for tens of thousands of uncrewed robotic ground vehicles in 2025 for combat and logistics missions. These officials also noted that Ukrainian forces have been using dozens of domestically made AI-augmented systems to enable aerial drones to reach targets on the battlefield without being piloted and remain effective in areas protected by extensive jamming. At this point in the war, there are around ten Ukrainian companies competing in state procurements to offer AI products.
Ukrainian officials have stated that in 2025, more autonomous drones with AI targeting will arrive on the battlefield, potentially making way for “real drone swarm uses.” Ukraine’s efforts to use AI on the battlefield are aided by willing partners, such as the Germany-based Helsing AI firm. In December 2024, Helsing announced that the first few hundred of almost four thousand of its AI-equipped HX-2 Karma unmanned aerial vehicles earmarked for Ukraine were set to be delivered to the Ukrainian front. Apparently, HX-2 is immune to electronic warfare countermeasures via its ability to search for, reidentify, and engage targets without a signal or a continuous data connection, while allowing a human operator to stay in or on the loop for critical decisions.
Russian technical experts already acknowledge that “autonomous flying robots”—drones with artificial intelligence that determine their own targets—are already used in combat and apparently “kill” people, though they usually don’t provide technical specifications for such claims. It is likely that such developments indicate a more limited AI role in aerial drones, such as the terminal guidance and image recognition that allow drones to fly autonomously to designated targets once the human operator has approved strikes on said targets.
While on the receiving end of Ukraine’s increasing AI and autonomy use, many Russian experts express concerns that the pace of AI-enabled military developments could get out of control, thus requiring global regulation “in the interests of all humanity,” while also noting the difficulty of banning the development of AI for military purposes while the outcomes of wars hang in the balance and national interests are at stake. Still, Russian military experts, such as those writing in key military publications like Arsenal Otechestva, believe in AI’s potential in military applications. These experts highlight its ability to enhance system autonomy, improve tactical decision-making, enable real-time operational support in combat zones, reduce crew risks, and decrease uncertainty through rapid processing of large, unstructured data.
With Russia determined to fight until Ukraine is conquered, and Ukraine resolute in defending its freedom, the technological arms race in this war continues to accelerate. Each month in this protracted war brings new technological developments and achievements, with the innovation cycle continuously driven forward by new technologies that are either copied or countered by the adversary, sparking a fresh round of innovation to achieve the next breakthrough.
Ukraine’s Western supporters are closely monitoring how such technologies are developed and fielded in combat. Retired Army General Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has predicted that within the next ten to fifteen years, up to one-third of the US military could consist of robotic systems, an assessment likely informed by observations of technologies fielded in the Ukraine war. To be sure, certain systems in use by both Ukrainian and Russian forces can function more effectively than others on a battlefield teeming with countermeasures, but the sum total of different autonomous, robotic, and unmanned technologies used in the past three years demonstrates the potential for rapid, large-scale fielding. Both Ukraine and Russia are continuously accelerating their development of different types of battlefield drones and robotic systems, driven by the need for precision, mass employment to overwhelm the adversary, resilience against countermeasures, and reducing risks to human lives. These advancements are impacting the battlefield at the tactical and operational levels and are shaping how future warfare may be conducted.
Samuel Bendett is an adjunct senior fellow with the Center for a New American Security’s Technology and National Security Program.
David Kirichenko is an associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society. He can be found on X/Twitter @DVKirichenko.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Iryna Supruniuk25
Share on LinkedIn
Send email
mwi.westpoint.edu · by Samuel Bendett · January 10, 2025
21. The Battle for Brilliant Minds: From the Nuclear Age to AI
Excerpts:
Of course, there is also the possibility that as the United States appears to move toward artificial general intelligence, an increasingly desperate foreign adversary such as China might seek to abduct or harm star American or U.S.-based AI scientists, regardless of the exact nature of their work. After all, the arguments regarding the dual use of AI research could also be advanced for a number of assassinated Iranian scientists whose work had civilian as well as military applications. And if lead American AI scientists and developers come to be viewed as “fair game” by authoritarian powers, what can be done to both identify those few key individuals most vital to the artificial general intelligence enterprise, and then ensure their protection from physical harm or extortion? Somewhat ominously, Beijing has already begun developing a cyclopean AI-powered platform called “Supermind” to continuously track millions of information technology specialists and AI scientists around the world.
Conversely, if it appears that a foreign adversarial power is clearly taking the lead in developing a technology as hugely consequential as artificial general intelligence, U.S. security managers may need to reluctantly reacquaint themselves with some of the more shadowy and morally fraught chapters of their nation’s past — from the plot against Heisenberg to Operation Paperclip. Indeed, the stakes of the competition may demand no less. As one particularly sophisticated treatment of the ethics of civilian assassinations in times of war reminds us,
Contemporary theories of just war allow for the partial extension of combatant status to civilians who are either threatening or responsible for unjust threats. Weapons manufacturers, their factories and employees are accorded less than absolute protection within just war theory, and even less under international law … . The various moral arguments against assassinations on the one hand and the complex status of munitions workers on the other suggest that scientists involved in weapon manufacturing may in some cases be morally liable to direct harm, as well as being legally liable to proportionate collateral damage.
In short, this is something of a miasmic moral issue — and as the lines between AI’s civilian and military applications continue to fade, so will governments’ perceptions of the physical inviolability of lead AI scientists.
In 1946, during the vanishingly brief period of U.S. nuclear monopoly, Winston Churchill famously cautioned that it would be “criminal madness” to cast the “secret knowledge or experience of the atomic bomb … adrift in this still agitated and un-united world.” Close to eight decades later, as we now find ourselves potentially on the cusp of unleashing another, even more transformative technology into our own fractured world, it would be just as foolhardy for Washington to cede its increasingly wafer-thin advantage in the field of AI. In order to prevent such a dread outcome, however, America’s leaders will need to come to terms with one overarching truth: For all its algorithmic complexity and technological intricacy, the race toward artificial general intelligence remains, above all, part of an age-old series of battles for human talent and ingenuity. It is time, perhaps, to begin planning accordingly.
The Battle for Brilliant Minds: From the Nuclear Age to AI - War on the Rocks
warontherocks.com · by Iskander Rehman · January 13, 2025
On December 18, 1944, Moe Berg — a Princeton graduate, Major League baseball star, and Office of Strategic Services operative — discreetly took his seat in a cramped conference room in Zurich. Masquerading as a studious physics graduate, the hulking Harlem-born Jew listened attentively to the keynote speaker, the Nobel-prize winning German physicist Werner Heisenberg. His instructions were straightforward. Should Heisenberg say anything indicative of the success of the covert Nazi nuclear program with which he was intimately involved, Berg was to whip out his carefully concealed .45 caliber pistol and summarily execute him in the midst of the auditorium.
As Berg sat in the audience and patiently listened to Heisenberg lecture, the American detected no note of triumphalism. Nor did he pick up on any allusion, however cryptic, to some mysterious new Wunderwaffe that might change the course of the war. Sidling up to Heisenberg after the conference, the New Yorker made small talk as they strolled through Zurich’s darkened, ice-rimed streets. As they spoke, Heisenberg voiced defeatist sentiments, glumly opining that the war was all but lost for Germany. Berg decided to spare Heisenberg’s life. This choice was proven correct: the Allies would later discover that, due to a host of bureaucratic pathologies and scientific shortcomings, Germany was nowhere close to developing a nuclear bomb.
Close to eight decades later, another leading nuclear scientist suffered a grimmer fate. In November 2020, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a revered figure in his native Iran and sometimes described as “Iran’s Oppenheimer,” was ambushed and slain on a country road outside Tehran. The mode of execution — via an AI-assisted, remote-controlled machine gun — was especially ingenious, and although Israeli security services made no public claim of responsibility, their involvement was in little doubt. Indeed, Fakhrizadeh was simply the latest victim in a long list of Mossad-planned assassinations of Iranian atomic scientists over the years. Israel, long surrounded by hostile states and with little strategic depth, has often relied on assassination as a means of delaying or forestalling adversarial scientific developments — particularly (but not only) with regard to nuclear weapons technology.
In both these cases, the assassination of lead scientists was considered a worthwhile and morally defensible policy option for one simple, overarching reason. Security managers in both countries understood that throughout history certain key, talented individuals have played a disproportionate role in driving technological change. Indeed, barely a few months after the Zurich conference, Washington, under the aegis of Operation Paperclip, had already begun its highly classified — and deeply morally controversial — process of feverishly exfiltrating more than 1600 of Adolf Hitler’s most accomplished technologists. This imported intellectual firepower would then go on to play a lead role in advancing U.S. space and rocketry technology, along with its chemical and biological weapons programs. The Soviet Union was equally, if not more, aggressive in its efforts to capture former Nazi talent. Thus, during one characteristically sweeping operation, notes a historian of the period, “Soviet troops rounded up about three thousand German scientists, engineers, craftsmen, and other technical specialists, along with their families and possessions, and placed them on trains heading east. No explanations were given nor were excuses or objections allowed.” By the late 1940s, hundreds of German scientists had been dragooned into working at Institut A — a secret facility near Sukhumi in the Soviet republic of Georgia — on Moscow’s nuclear program.
As we enter a new, and potentially equally consequential arms race, fueled by rapid advances in the field of AI, this troubled history serves as a useful reminder of the importance of the human dimension of military-technological rivalry. In the global competition to develop artificial general intelligence, keeping close track of compute clusters, semi-conductor export controls, and large language models will prove critical. Far more consequential, however, will be developing a carefully tailored and ruthlessly pragmatic approach toward AI talent management.
This strategy can be structured along three axes — which are not so much distinct as deeply interactive and mutually reinforcing in nature: preserving homegrown AI talent, capturing foreign AI talent, and targeting adversarial AI talent.
Become a Member
Preserving Homegrown AI Talent
The first overriding priority should be to preserve, strengthen, and safeguard a domestic reservoir of AI talent. While America continues to exert a strong gravitational pull on foreign talent, its domestic bench of skilled or highly specialized workers has become too shallow to properly compete with its most formidable rival, China. In international assessments, American’s K-12 education system continues to lag behind those of many other industrialized nations, especially in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. As the U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence observed in its 2021 report, Washington is confronted with a daunting workforce deficit, and “AI and digital talent is simply too scarce in the United States.” Although software engineers are in less high demand than two or three years ago, they are still sorely needed across the national security enterprise, with some describing the current science, technology, engineering, and mathematics shortage in the defense-industrial base as “another Sputnik moment we can’t afford to ignore.” Meanwhile, the domestic talent gap with China continues to widen, especially in the field of AI. Having invested massively in undergraduate and graduate AI programs, it is estimated that Chinese universities now churn out approximately 50 percent of the world’s top AI researchers, whereas the United States only produces about 18 percent. It is worth noting, in passing, that this phenomenon is hardly confined to the field of artificial intelligence — indeed by next year China should be generating twice as many Ph.D.s in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics as the United States.
Moreover, in a marked departure from relatively recent workflow patterns, many of these domestically educated Chinese AI scientists are now choosing to remain in China rather than seek opportunities overseas — thus further contributing to the dynamism of China’s flourishing domestic AI industry. Some of this can clearly be attributed to Beijing’s sedulous efforts to court and lure Chinese expatriate talent back to the home country, with returning scientists, colloquially known as “sea turtles,” offered hefty bonuses and research grants in exchange for establishing their labs within China.
American security managers are clearly aware of this troubling and growing imbalance. The recently issued National Defense Industrial Strategy thus emphasizes the importance of sizably investing in recruitment and upskilling programs, and of developing new forms of public-private partnership. Meanwhile, there have been intensified efforts in some quarters to launch a new nationwide science and technology talent strategy named after the National Defense Education Act of 1958, an Eisenhower administration initiative launched in response to the Sputnik satellite launch of 1957. This is all for the good, as are various calls to improve the quality of America’s K-12 education system. All of these proposed initiatives and reforms, however, will inevitably take years, if not decades, to fully bear fruit and will therefore provide no short- to medium-term solution to America’s widening AI talent gap with China.
Two immediate lines of effort should therefore be pursued.
The first consists in more aggressively shielding America’s domestic AI talent from what can best be described as adversarial predation. In the current context, this means working to prevent Chinese technology groups entrenched in Silicon Valley from poaching lead generative AI experts from companies such as OpenAI, Meta, or Google. After all, it makes little sense to restrict high-end chip exports to China, or to limit U.S. venture capital flows into Chinese firms, while turning a blind eye to Beijing’s increasingly transparent attempts to acquire an intellectual backdoor to U.S. technology through the recruitment of its best engineers. In recent years, revelations that the Chinese air force has been intensifying its efforts to recruit former Western fighter pilots to better train its airmen have generated substantial controversy, with many (rightly) questioning the moral judgment of retired U.S. and allied military personnel willing to actively enhance an adversary’s warfighting capabilities in exchange for a fat paycheck. In an era of revived Sino-American competition in which cutting edge AI research has immediate and evident military ramifications, a similar form of public opprobrium should be attached to those willing to advance Beijing’s strategy of civil-military fusion by working for Chinese technology groups such as ByteDance, Alibaba, or Meituan. Indeed, it is not inconceivable that sometime in the future, a new executive order may need to be issued — one that formally bans any U.S. citizen from working for a Chinese AI company. Given the stakes of the competition, and the degree of methodical deliberateness with which the Chinese state has been engaging in such foreign talent-poaching, this author would be in favor of such a ban. Other countries currently grappling with this challenge — such as South Korea — may eventually need to follow suit.
In addition to better monitoring and blunting these targeted recruitment efforts, U.S. government agencies may also need to consider — as we shall discuss in more depth later — preparing for bleaker scenarios, ones in which they need to guarantee the physical safety of the nation’s most brilliant minds in the field of AI. Indeed, in the not-too-distant future, much like nuclear scientists, lead AI developers may come to be seen as legitimate targets within the context of an increasingly existential struggle to attain artificial general intelligence.
The second main answer to America’s AI deficit resides in refining a more effective strategy for talent importation — principally through the design of a tailored and bipartisan immigration policy. Indeed, the United States needs large numbers of highly skilled immigrants — and preferably large numbers of naturalized highly skilled immigrants who can take the oath of allegiance and serve the U.S. government — to compete and prevail in the 21st-century artificial general intelligence race.
Capturing Foreign AI Talent
In 1955, one of the world’s most talented experts in rocketry and jet propulsion was unceremoniously expelled from the United States. The Chinese-born Caltech prodigy had played a vital role during World War II and served his host nation with pride and distinction — taking part in the Manhattan Project, serving on the U.S. government’s Scientific Advisory Board, and then deploying to Germany to interrogate lead Nazi scientists such as Werner Von Braun. Falsely accused of espionage during the paranoia-drenched period of the Great Red Scare, the lab director sailed out of the port of Los Angeles for the country of his birth, his wife and two U.S.-born children in tow, bitterly vowing that he would never again set foot in the United States. That man was Qian Xuesen, who would then go on to become the founding father of communist China’s ballistic missile and space programs. And while his story is not, perhaps, as well-known as it should be, it has come to be seen as a textbook example of how overly exclusionary immigration policies can prove eminently counterproductive, with former Secretary of the U.S. Navy Dan Kimball later griping that deporting Qian “was the stupidest thing this country ever did.”
And indeed, at first glance, it might seem superfluous, or even unnecessary, to remind policymakers of the enormous technological, economic, and national security advantages the United States has reaped from more enlightened immigration policies in the decades since its rise to superpowerdom. From the refugee scientists who spearheaded the Manhattan Project, to the extraordinary proportion (44.8 percent) of Fortune 500 companies founded by either first- or second-generation immigrants, the lasting dividends drawn from these influxes of foreign talent appear self-evident. No other industrialized country can boast such a distinguished roster of foreign-born naturalized citizens having played such a central role in the formulation of its national security policy — from Henry Kissinger to Zbigniew Brzezinski to Madeleine Albright. This influence extends well beyond policymaking to the groves of academia. Consider, for example, one of the most historically influential volumes in the field of strategic studies, the initial edition of Makers of Modern Strategy. First published in 1943, the edited volume, which exerted a deep and lasting influence over American intellectual approaches to grand strategy, included a remarkably high proportion of German refugees among its illustrious contributors.
From the Bulgarian-born aeronautical engineering genius Assen “Jerry” Jordanoff to Hyman Rickover, the Polish-American “father of the nuclear navy,” the American military innovation enterprise has also benefited from the drive, ingenuity, and patriotism of naturalized immigrants. Indeed, freshly minted citizens — having made the deeply personal and active decision to integrate into their host nation — often approach public service with a unique brand of reverence and dedication. For one example, look to Enrico Fermi, who fled Mussolini’s Italy for America and then went on to play a lead role in the development of the Manhattan Project. His daughter wrote that it was her father’s immigrant background that had instilled in him and his fellow European refugees such a remarkable strength of purpose in the defense of their new homeland:
The determination to defend America at all costs spurred the newcomers no less than the Americans, and the European-born may have come to this determination somewhat earlier than the native-born, driven by stronger personal emotions. The picture of their country under Nazi power in the event of a German victory was something the Americans could imagine only with difficulty … And if America failed them, where would they go? It was not only gratitude to the country that had offered them asylum or pride in their new citizenship but also the fear of dictators that drove them to the limit of their physical and mental endurance.
In recognition of this longstanding tradition in U.S. innovation and statecraft, the Biden administration’s most recent executive order on AI openly advocates “attracting the world’s AI talent to our shores … not just to study, but to stay.” And indeed, on the issue of skill-based immigration reform, there may be room for bipartisan compromise and legislative action, particularly if the broader defense community works to raise awareness of its criticality to U.S. interests and security. A recent, comprehensive report aptly points out that only Congress has the authority to create a new category of lawful permanent residents specifically chosen for their advanced expertise in critical and emerging technology fields, along with the power to allocate the necessary green card quotas that provide a pathway to naturalization. Despite the commonsensical nature of implementing more effective forms of foreign talent capture, this will still prove challenging, given our current political climate. Somewhat dispiritingly, an otherwise comprehensive—and bipartisan—recent congressional report on AI chose to elide the issue of immigration entirely, notwithstanding the fact that America’s economic and societal attractiveness remains, perhaps, one of its most enduring competitive advantages.
Indeed, unlike China or Russia, the United States — with its high white-collar wages, deep and liquid capital markets, world-class universities, and reliable legal system — remains a country with enormous appeal to foreign scientists, engineers, academics and entrepreneurs. America has traditionally captured 40-to-50 percent of the global inflow of college-educated migrants to nations that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and more than half of all Nobel prize winners moved to the US for professional reasons. Some 42 percent of all doctoral students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in American universities are foreign-born, as is approximately 69 percent of Silicon Valley’s tech workforce, with the largest shares coming from India (26 percent), and China (16 percent). Meanwhile, according to a 2020 report, around 40 percent of high-skilled semiconductor workers in the United States were born abroad. It is essential to find creative ways to retain this wellspring of talent within the United States, rather than allow it to be redirected overseas. As one excellent analysis mordantly noted in these same pages only a few months ago, “locking bright minds out of the U.S. national security innovation base ecosystem because of immigration reform deadlock,” is fundamentally self-defeating, and can perhaps best be equated to a form of “strategic seppuku.”
Exempting foreign citizens with doctoral degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics from annual green card limits would constitute a step in the right direction. So would the creation of a new start-up visa category for foreign-born entrepreneurs. These legislative proposals, however, still fall far short of the mark. The urgency of the situation is such that more drastic measures are needed. For example, the United States should follow the National Security Commission on AI’s recommendation to grant green cards to all students graduating with these doctoral degrees from accredited American universities. Washington should also consider expanding the Fulbright Foreign Student Program, which currently provides approximately 4,000 outstanding foreign students with the ability to study and conduct research in the United States. Establishing an effective international talent pipeline also requires facilitating the sponsorship of those foreign students whose families may not have the means to send them overseas.
As one group of national security grandees has aptly noted, however, these efforts to attract and retain foreign talent, while laudable and commonsensical, must be carefully calibrated with efforts to stem intellectual property theft and espionage. This, in turn, implies “strengthening security standards to ensure that sensitive information and intellectual property remains secure.” This is especially true when contending with the large numbers of U.S.-based talent originating from adversarial powers such as Russia or China, two nation-states with a longstanding habit of both brutalizing their diasporas, and weaponizing them as conduits for large-scale industrial espionage. At the same time, US lawmakers and security managers should ensure that any (legitimately) enhanced screening procedures of Russian or Chinese-born engineers are conducted in a legally structured and bounded fashion, rather than used as an excuse in some quarters for blanket racial profiling or discrimination. Finally, the United States should think more creatively about preemptively draining or weakening adversarial foreign talent in addition to building up its own, and about leveraging a key dimension of its soft power — its economic, cultural, and intellectual attractiveness — against its principal competitors. Conflict is a fundamentally interactive endeavor, and this includes the accelerating global competition for talent.
Targeting Adversarial AI Talent
While no contemporary U.S. policymaker would want to be confronted with the same anfractuous ethical quandaries as the architects of Operation Paperclip, one should aspire to at least a partial reintroduction of this spirit of competitive ruthlessness. For example, it is estimated that in the immediate aftermath of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, over 100,000 information technology specialists left Russia. In the months following the invasion, the Biden administration proposed eliminating some visa requirements for Russians with a masters or doctoral degree in “science, technology, engineering, or mathematics, including but not limiting to degrees relevant to artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, semiconductors, and robotics.” This was shrewd thinking, but over two years later the data shows that the vast majority of these skilled emigrants chose to relocate either in Central Asia or in neighboring post-Soviet countries such as Georgia or Armenia — largely because of European and American unwillingness to provide them with visas. Since then, Russia has proven remarkably effective at enticing its wayward specialists back to the home country, where they are offered draft deferments and low mortgage rates in exchange for contributing to Moscow’s military research and development efforts.
Meanwhile, there was a time, only a few years ago, when a growing number of China’s most highly educated scientists were feverishly seeking ways to escape their increasingly stagnant and dystopic society to find opportunity — and freedom — overseas. Over the past year, however, as mentioned earlier, a “reverse brain drain” has been in effect, with many returning to China with now little intention of leaving. In both cases, there was perhaps a missed opportunity for Washington to durably affect the trajectory of U.S. technological competition with its most formidable foes.
Obviously, any strategy for long-term talent capture should also be fused with one that maximizes operational safety, along with the defense of U.S. intellectual property. No Chinese or Russian-born AI scientist should be allowed to remain in the United States, work for the U.S. government, or work on U.S. government-adjacent contracts without undergoing a draconian naturalization and security clearance process. Moreover, given that most revisionist nations have developed the unsavory habit of targeting the families of emigrants — and especially those of expatriated political opponents — a generous policy of family reunification would have to be offered to a select number of high-value foreign AI luminaries. This would blunt Chinese or Russian intelligence services’ efforts to extort said scientists by threatening their extended families.
Of course, there is also the possibility that as the United States appears to move toward artificial general intelligence, an increasingly desperate foreign adversary such as China might seek to abduct or harm star American or U.S.-based AI scientists, regardless of the exact nature of their work. After all, the arguments regarding the dual use of AI research could also be advanced for a number of assassinated Iranian scientists whose work had civilian as well as military applications. And if lead American AI scientists and developers come to be viewed as “fair game” by authoritarian powers, what can be done to both identify those few key individuals most vital to the artificial general intelligence enterprise, and then ensure their protection from physical harm or extortion? Somewhat ominously, Beijing has already begun developing a cyclopean AI-powered platform called “Supermind” to continuously track millions of information technology specialists and AI scientists around the world.
Conversely, if it appears that a foreign adversarial power is clearly taking the lead in developing a technology as hugely consequential as artificial general intelligence, U.S. security managers may need to reluctantly reacquaint themselves with some of the more shadowy and morally fraught chapters of their nation’s past — from the plot against Heisenberg to Operation Paperclip. Indeed, the stakes of the competition may demand no less. As one particularly sophisticated treatment of the ethics of civilian assassinations in times of war reminds us,
Contemporary theories of just war allow for the partial extension of combatant status to civilians who are either threatening or responsible for unjust threats. Weapons manufacturers, their factories and employees are accorded less than absolute protection within just war theory, and even less under international law … . The various moral arguments against assassinations on the one hand and the complex status of munitions workers on the other suggest that scientists involved in weapon manufacturing may in some cases be morally liable to direct harm, as well as being legally liable to proportionate collateral damage.
In short, this is something of a miasmic moral issue — and as the lines between AI’s civilian and military applications continue to fade, so will governments’ perceptions of the physical inviolability of lead AI scientists.
In 1946, during the vanishingly brief period of U.S. nuclear monopoly, Winston Churchill famously cautioned that it would be “criminal madness” to cast the “secret knowledge or experience of the atomic bomb … adrift in this still agitated and un-united world.” Close to eight decades later, as we now find ourselves potentially on the cusp of unleashing another, even more transformative technology into our own fractured world, it would be just as foolhardy for Washington to cede its increasingly wafer-thin advantage in the field of AI. In order to prevent such a dread outcome, however, America’s leaders will need to come to terms with one overarching truth: For all its algorithmic complexity and technological intricacy, the race toward artificial general intelligence remains, above all, part of an age-old series of battles for human talent and ingenuity. It is time, perhaps, to begin planning accordingly.
Become a Member
Iskander Rehman is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation and can be followed on X @IskanderRehman. He would like to thank his RAND colleague Nathan Waechter for pointing him toward the sorry tale of Qian Xuesen.
Image: Greg Gerken via Department of Defense
Special Series, Applied History
warontherocks.com · by Iskander Rehman · January 13, 2025
22. The Ghosts of Bud Dajo: How an American Massacre Shaped the Philippines
All US military personnel who have served on Jolo in recent years still hear about this massacre from the local population.
And people should recall that in 1906 we were not conducting counterinsurgency (perhaps in name only), we were conducting pacification. There is an important difference.
Excerpts:
Scarred by colonial and postcolonial violence, Muslim Mindanao remains a volatile region. Most Filipinos do not learn in school about Bud Dajo and other American atrocities or about many of the abuses of the postcolonial era, so they do not understand the Moros’ deep-seated animosity toward American power or their desire for autonomy from the central Philippine state. And the governments in Manila and Washington, close allies in a contest with China, have little interest in digging up the past.
Scarred by violence, Muslim Mindanao remains a volatile region.
The national blindness to the depth of Moro resentment has led Philippine politicians and policymakers to treat Moros as wayward children who can be set right through minor concessions, or if those fail, through force. And the perception of Moro recalcitrance has been reinforced by predatory Moro elites who have thrived in the decades of persistent conflict, amassing land and wealth, monopolizing elected posts, and controlling the illicit economy of firearms, drugs, and goods smuggled from the southern border.
In recent years, however, there have been some signs of uneven progress. In 2014, the Philippine government signed a peace agreement with the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front that, for the first time, recognized “the legitimate grievances and claims” of the Moro people and paved the way for greater autonomy. In 2019, former members of the organization began to govern the new autonomous Bangsamoro region in central Mindanao, and the new region’s first elections are scheduled for May 2025.
The agreement stipulates that the group’s fighters be decommissioned and integrated into the national military and police. But that process has stalled; the rebels fear that if they give up their arms, they will lose their leverage over the national government and be unable to demand that it follow through on the agreement’s other provisions, including amnesty for combatants. The Philippine government has also not yet managed to disband all the private armed groups in Bangsamoro, which are supported by local politicians and powerful clans and have been linked to a spate of killings in the region in recent years.
The elections in May will test the stability of the newly autonomous Bangsamoro region. But looking further into the future, a lasting, long-term peace will take root only if the Moros feel safe in their homeland and heard by their political leaders.
The Ghosts of Bud Dajo
Foreign Affairs · by More by Sheila S. Coronel · January 7, 2025
Review Essay
How an American Massacre Shaped the Philippines
Sheila S. Coronel
January/February 2025 Published on January 7, 2025
John Lee
Sheila S. Coronel is Toni Stabile Professor of Practice in Investigative Journalism at Columbia University and Co-Founder of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism in Manila.
In This Review
- Massacre in the Clouds: An American Atrocity and the Erasure of History
- By Kim A. Wagner
- Loading...
Subscribe to unlock this feature or Sign in.
Subscribe to unlock this feature or Sign in.
Save Sign in and save to read later
During a sweltering week in March 1906, American soldiers ascended Bud Dajo, a 2,000-foot volcano on the island of Jolo in the southern Philippines. At the time, the Philippines was ruled by the United States, and Major General Leonard Wood, the American governor and military chief of the province, had ordered his forces to “capture and destroy” a number of fortified encampments on the mountain. The encampments belonged to Muslim residents, known as Moros, who had fled their villages in Jolo, an island in the traditional Moro homeland of Mindanao, after the U.S. military took control in 1899.
Wood, a Harvard-educated former army surgeon, had staked his career and reputation on Moro subjugation, and pacifying the province was a matter of personal pride. U.S. troops bombarded the volcano with artillery, targeting the crater around which hundreds of families had resettled. American commanders had told their soldiers to shoot on sight, and they fired at anything that moved. The Moros fought back with whatever they could muster—obsolete cannons, old rifles, spears, knives, and conch shells filled with gunpowder. As their ammunition dwindled, some even hurled their bodies against the attackers. But they stood little chance. When the battle ended, “the whole crest of the mountain was covered with corpses,” wrote Captain Edward Lawton, who led a column of the 19th Infantry from the eastern side of the volcano. The bodies, he recalled, were “filled with wounds of every description,” with “headless and dismembered trunks” and with “skulls crushed in and brains scattered about.” The most heartrending sight, Lawton added, was that of “little helpless babies, some with a number of wounds, groping amid the mass of dead for the mother’s breast.”
In Massacre in the Clouds, the historian Kim Wagner provides a vivid account of the events that led up to the carnage at Bud Dajo, as well as of the massacre itself and its aftermath. Wagner draws extensively from colonial archives to tell a harrowing tale. He quotes from letters written by U.S. soldiers that describe the suffocating heat, the stench of blood, and their relentless fighting, shooting “everything in reach . . . regardless of age or sex,” as one young private wrote to his mother.
In recounting this war crime, Wagner contends that the massacre of up to 1,000 men, women, and children at Bud Dajo by U.S. troops was not an aberration; although the death toll that week might have been unusually high, the violence at Bud Dajo revealed the essential character of the American regime. He also argues that the slaughter at Bud Dajo forms part of a brutal history of U.S. atrocities that includes the massacres at Wounded Knee in South Dakota in 1890, where U.S. soldiers killed more than 150 Native Americans, and at My Lai in southern Vietnam in 1968, where U.S. soldiers killed over 350 Vietnamese civilians. In Wagner’s telling, Bud Dajo also established a template for future American war crimes: gross abuse leading to a cursory investigation, a coverup, impunity, and, finally, erasure.
But the echoes of Bud Dajo can still be heard in the Philippines. The event remains deeply etched in Moro memory, its story passed down through kissa, traditional song epics. And it animates the ongoing tensions between Moros and the Philippine state, with the south of the country, including Mindanao, periodically racked by extremist violence and ruthless government crackdowns. More broadly, independence in 1946 did not free the Philippines from the legacy of colonial violence. On the contrary, the postcolonial state carried on with many of the practices and institutions of its colonial predecessors.
AMERICAN HORROR STORY
Wagner, a scholar of colonial India and the British Empire, draws on his deep knowledge of British imperialism to explore its American counterpart. Wagner sees the U.S. conduct in Bud Dajo as rooted in lessons the Americans had learned from British colonialists, some of whom saw their subjects as savages who responded only to violence. In a previous book, Wagner examines the 1919 Amritsar massacre, in which British troops killed hundreds of Indian protesters. According to an 1896 manual on colonial warfare by the British officer C. E. Callwell, the British achieved dominance by “overawing the enemy”—providing a show of overwhelming force followed by swift, merciless action.
By the time the United States seized the Philippines from Spain in 1898, Washington had already subdued “the Wild West” of North America by decimating native populations through slaughter and disease. The Philippines became a new frontier, another wilderness to conquer. In an account of a meeting with Methodist ministers at the White House in 1899, President William McKinley said that the Philippines were “a gift from the gods” that “had dropped into our laps,” and there was “nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.”
Echoes of Bud Dajo can still be heard in the Philippines.
To American expansionists, the conquest of the Philippines was a continuation of the United States’ westward drive and a fulfillment of its civilizing and democratizing mission. At the same time, like officials of other imperial powers, American authorities believed that their treatment of people they saw as uncivilized was exempt from the rules of war as laid out in international conventions. Wagner argues that U.S. abuses in the Philippines were comparable in brutality to contemporaneous massacres carried out by other colonial powers: the British in South Africa, the Dutch in Bali, and the Germans in South West Africa.
But the kind of atrocities that took place at Bud Dajo are hardly a relic of the imperial era. In 2005, U.S. Marines killed 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha, including a three-year-old girl and a 76-year-old man, in retaliation for the killing of a marine. As noted in a recent New Yorker podcast, In the Dark, the Haditha massacre was one of 781 potential war crimes committed by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan during “the war on terror.” More than half of those cases were dismissed by investigators, and even those prosecuted had a limited scope.
During the Iraq war, “soldiers would return to the United States and confess—to women, health-care workers, job interviewers—that they’d murdered civilians or prisoners,” wrote Parker Yesko, a reporter for In the Dark, “but military investigators would find that the allegations couldn’t be substantiated.”
A hundred years earlier, the same pattern had emerged after Bud Dajo. Returning troops told journalists about the massacre. Soldiers wrote about it in letters home, some of which were published in local papers. Commanding officers told military investigators about the carnage. Postcards showing a trench filled with hundreds of Moro bodies were peddled as souvenirs on the streets of Jolo. Yet both civilian and military authorities concluded that the violence had been unavoidable. They believed the lie that Moro women and children had fought as fiercely as the men. No soldiers were punished, and many earned commendations for their valor. Four years after Bud Dajo, Wood, the general who ordered the assault, was named the army chief of staff; in 1921, he was appointed governor general of the Philippines.
HIDDEN HISTORY
Between 1899 and 1902, Filipinos fought the invading U.S. military for their independence. Violence, hunger, and disease claimed the lives of somewhere between 200,000 and one million people in the archipelago. Yet today, few Filipinos or Americans know much about this war. Many Americans do not even know that the Philippines was once a U.S. colony. Even McKinley, who served as president during the war, had trouble finding the country on a map.
And yet U.S. involvement in the Philippines helped determine the kind of global power the United States would become in the decades that followed. As the historian Alfred McCoy and others have shown, the Philippines was where the United States pioneered techniques of counterinsurgency that it would later use in its series of military interventions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. After their victories on the battlefield, American forces prevented a Filipino rebellion through psychological warfare, infiltration, surveillance, torture, extrajudicial executions, and the formation of native militias tasked with suppressing dissent. U.S. soldiers first used waterboarding, often associated with the “war on terror” in the twenty-first century, in its fight against Filipino insurgents (though the practice was controversial even then). To prevent ordinary Filipinos from aiding rebels, the United States fortified small villages that isolated noncombatants, mimicking the reconcentrado system that the Spaniards had used against rebels in Cuba. The United States and its South Vietnamese allies would revive the tactic during the Vietnam War, dubbing it the “strategic hamlet program.”
When the Philippines gained independence in 1946, it inherited a police force and a military trained in U.S.-style counterinsurgency. In the 1950s, CIA operatives helped the Philippine military crush a communist-led peasant rebellion, a campaign from which the United States later drew inspiration for counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam, Latin America, and the Middle East. During the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled the Philippines from 1972 to 1986, the United States trained and funded a Philippine army that tortured, jailed, and disappeared thousands of dissidents. Soldiers terrorized the countryside as they pursued communist guerrillas and Moro separatists.
In September 1981, paramilitary troops gunned down 45 men, women, and children in the town of Las Navas in the central Philippines. The following September, Marcos and his wife, Imelda, began a triumphal state visit to the United States that included a star-studded banquet hosted at the White House. Days before the visit, The New York Times published an article dedicated to the Las Navas massacre, but the issue of human rights hardly made a dent in the proceedings; the United States was eager to ensure that it could use and maintain military bases in the Philippines, no matter the conduct of the Marcos regime.
The kind of atrocities that took place at Bud Dajo are hardly a relic of the imperial era.
Post-Marcos governments inherited security forces that continued to rely on American support and on brutal methods of suppressing dissent. In the late 1980s, the military attempted coups against Marcos’s successor, Corazon Aquino, who had restored democratic institutions and competitive elections. The coups failed, but when the military demanded harsher counterinsurgency measures and impunity for its Marcos-era abuses, the Aquino government acquiesced.
In the decade that followed, successive Philippine governments made deals with the United States for military assistance and signed truces with Moro separatist groups. But lasting peace remained elusive. Jihadi organizations, including a chapter of the Islamic State, have found fertile ground for recruitment in Mindanao, the country’s poorest region. After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the Philippines pledged itself as an ally in Washington’s war on terrorism, and in 2002, U.S. forces returned to Mindanao, 100 years after their colonial occupation of the island. The United States advised the Philippine army and joined in jungle patrols to hunt down Islamist extremists. The two countries conducted joint military exercises and exchanged intelligence.
When Rodrigo Duterte became president of the Philippines, in 2016, he unleashed a bloody war on drugs, reviving the death squads and the surveillance and psychological warfare machinery of the Marcos era. Human rights groups have estimated that the police and death squads killed as many as 30,000 people suspected of drug use or involvement in drug trafficking. Some death squads left dead bodies, with their heads wrapped in tape, on Manila’s streets with signs declaring, “drug lord.” (Today, with Marcos’s son, Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., as president, the police continue to execute unarmed people suspected of drug crimes.) When U.S. President Barack Obama criticized this approach, however, Duterte accused Obama of hypocrisy, referring to the hundreds of Moros killed during the U.S. occupation and saying, “As a matter of fact, we inherited this problem from the United States. Why? Because they invaded this country and made us their subjugated people.”
In 2017, hundreds of militants linked to the Islamic State seized Marawi, a city in central Mindanao, holding it for five months. In response, the Philippine army carried out a campaign to retake the city; in military operations that received support from the United States and other countries, around 1,000 militants were killed. But ground and aerial assaults reduced the city, a hub of Islamic education and culture, to rubble, and thousands were displaced. Residents resented both the militants’ terror tactics and the government’s excessive response.
LOST GROUND
The violence that the Philippines has suffered in the last several decades, as well as its remaining ethnic and social tensions, can be traced to the legacy of imperial oppression. By the time of the Bud Dajo massacre, most Filipinos in the rest of the country had already grown weary of battle and surrendered to the United States. They paid taxes, learned English in public schools, and were introduced to U.S.-style elections. Rebel leaders, tempted by the rewards of colonial office, shifted from fighting for independence to campaigning for votes. Many Filipinos conveniently forgot the past as they sought to accommodate to colonial rule. U.S.-style public schools taught generations of Filipinos about the superiority of American democracy and way of life, while the colonial bureaucracy employed the nascent middle class.
The Moros were the last holdouts. Wagner describes how, in early 1905, many of them who lived on the island of Jolo fled to Bud Dajo, refusing to pay the poll tax or send their children to public schools out of fear that doing so would erode their religion and introduce unwanted American values. Moro leaders, Wagner points out, also had other motives: they were concerned about losing their authority, and the United States had banned the form of debt-servitude slavery practiced in Mindanao, a critical source of wealth for the Moros.
Most of all, according to the Canadian Filipino scholar Cesar Andres-Miguel Suva, those who held out on Bud Dajo objected to the “bewildering and inconsistent justice” dispensed by the colonizers, which only worsened, rather than resolved, local conflicts over issues such as cattle thefts. They preferred the mediation of the datus, their traditional leaders, who understood their people’s notions of honor and morality. They considered the Americans unjust and immoral and, therefore, unfit to rule.
Despite American claims that the attack on Bud Dajo would pacify the restive Moros, the unrest continued. In 1913, U.S. troops killed 400 Moros who had entrenched themselves on Bud Bagsak, another mountain on Jolo. Many U.S. soldiers continued to believe myths about their adversaries. They claimed that .38-caliber revolvers were ineffective against the “unstoppable” Moros, prompting the army to issue .45-caliber pistols. Wagner notes that Americans viewed the Moros as “irredeemable fanatics” who would run amok at the slightest provocation. This belief justified, in their eyes, the use of indiscriminate violence against the Muslim minority—presaging, in Wagner’s view, the abuses of the post-9/11 era.
During the near 50-year U.S. colonial regime, American officials in Manila encouraged landless farmers from Christian provinces to settle in Mindanao. The government gave these settlers the right to occupy land previously ruled by Moros and other indigenous tribes, intensifying local resentment. After World War II, the independent Philippine government promoted even larger-scale migration to Mindanao to alleviate land pressures elsewhere in the country. By the late 1960s, the Moros had become a poor and displaced minority in their ancestral land.
NOT EVEN PAST
Today, Moros constitute somewhere between six and ten percent of the population of the Philippines. They maintain that their unique history and religion set them apart from the colonized, Christianized Filipinos. During Spain’s colonial rule of the Philippines, which lasted from the mid-sixteenth century until 1898, Spanish priests staged folk dramas in town plazas; called moro-moro, the performances featured Christian soldiers dramatically capturing Islamic strongholds. Among Catholic Filipinos, the stereotype of the Moros as dangerous heathens lingers, and discrimination against them remains widespread.
Scarred by colonial and postcolonial violence, Muslim Mindanao remains a volatile region. Most Filipinos do not learn in school about Bud Dajo and other American atrocities or about many of the abuses of the postcolonial era, so they do not understand the Moros’ deep-seated animosity toward American power or their desire for autonomy from the central Philippine state. And the governments in Manila and Washington, close allies in a contest with China, have little interest in digging up the past.
Scarred by violence, Muslim Mindanao remains a volatile region.
The national blindness to the depth of Moro resentment has led Philippine politicians and policymakers to treat Moros as wayward children who can be set right through minor concessions, or if those fail, through force. And the perception of Moro recalcitrance has been reinforced by predatory Moro elites who have thrived in the decades of persistent conflict, amassing land and wealth, monopolizing elected posts, and controlling the illicit economy of firearms, drugs, and goods smuggled from the southern border.
In recent years, however, there have been some signs of uneven progress. In 2014, the Philippine government signed a peace agreement with the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front that, for the first time, recognized “the legitimate grievances and claims” of the Moro people and paved the way for greater autonomy. In 2019, former members of the organization began to govern the new autonomous Bangsamoro region in central Mindanao, and the new region’s first elections are scheduled for May 2025.
The agreement stipulates that the group’s fighters be decommissioned and integrated into the national military and police. But that process has stalled; the rebels fear that if they give up their arms, they will lose their leverage over the national government and be unable to demand that it follow through on the agreement’s other provisions, including amnesty for combatants. The Philippine government has also not yet managed to disband all the private armed groups in Bangsamoro, which are supported by local politicians and powerful clans and have been linked to a spate of killings in the region in recent years.
The elections in May will test the stability of the newly autonomous Bangsamoro region. But looking further into the future, a lasting, long-term peace will take root only if the Moros feel safe in their homeland and heard by their political leaders.
Sheila S. Coronel is Toni Stabile Professor of Practice in Investigative Journalism at Columbia University and Co-Founder of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism in Manila.
Foreign Affairs · by More by Sheila S. Coronel · January 7, 2025
23. Rise of the Nonaligned: Who Wins in a Multipolar World?
Excerpts:
At the same time, Trump’s foreign policy could have some curious consequences. Instead of reasserting American primacy, Washington could come to see that the world has shifted under its feet. If Trump follows through on his campaign pledge to lower tensions with Russia while still seeking to pressure China, he may unintentionally accelerate the drift toward a multipolar world. By easing hostilities with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump would tacitly acknowledge that Russia cannot be subdued and that Moscow’s quest for regional hegemony is legitimate—that Russia is entitled to strive to maintain a sphere of influence. This would vindicate many countries in the global South that have argued for years that the international system is no longer defined by unchallenged American hegemony but by a more balanced order, in which the United States must increasingly eschew the impulsive foreign policy of unipolarity for calculated restraint. Developing countries will continue treating both China and Russia as pivotal centers of power, seizing opportunities to extract economic, security, and technological concessions through platforms such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a China-led multilateral group. In a fragmented global order marked by competition and pragmatic transactionalism, Trump’s policies could increase the global South’s leverage, enabling it to play great powers off one another.
To be sure, the global South lacks the unity and resources to fully blunt the sharper edges of Trump’s foreign policy. The United States under Trump will still wield unmatched influence, setting agendas and shaping international rules. Washington retains the capacity to employ economic coercion, diplomatic isolation, and even military force to quash serious efforts by developing countries to challenge U.S. preferences. But the rising agency of the global South and the expanding geopolitical consciousness among its peoples have fundamentally altered the dynamics of global power. The U.S. government, whether under Trump or his successors, will find it increasingly difficult to ignore the growing political relevance of those countries once consigned to the margins. Trump’s bid to reassert American hegemony will run into a world that is far less pliant than he imagines it to be.
Rise of the Nonaligned
Foreign Affairs · by More by Matias Spektor · January 7, 2025
Who Wins in a Multipolar World?
Matias Spektor
January/February 2025 Published on January 7, 2025
Illustration by Tyler Comrie; Photo source: Reuters
Matias Spektor is Professor of Politics and International Relations at Fundação Getulio Vargas in São Paulo.
Subscribe to unlock this feature or Sign in.
Subscribe to unlock this feature or Sign in.
Save Sign in and save to read later
The global South has been a net winner from the shifts in global power over the last two decades. The growing influence of emerging economies, the rise of China as a great power, tensions between the United States and its European allies, and increasing great-power competition have given these countries new leverage in global affairs. They have taken advantage of these shifts by building new coalitions, such as BRICS (whose first members were Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa); strengthening regional alliances, such as the African Union; and pursuing a more assertive agenda at the UN General Assembly. From championing the Paris agreement on climate change to taking Israel to the International Court of Justice, the global South—the broad grouping of largely postcolonial countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East—has shown a greater willingness to challenge Western dominance and redefine the rules of the global order.
An “America first” foreign policy would seem to put those gains at risk. During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to hit developing countries where it hurts most: raising tariffs that will throttle exporters in developing countries; normalizing the mass deportation of migrants, whose remittances are essential for the economies of many countries in the global South; and withdrawing from global environmental agreements that provide crucial support to those people disproportionately affected by the climate crisis. His proposed economic policies will probably lead to inflation at home, with devastating knock-on effects for developing countries as interest rates rise globally and credit becomes more expensive for economies already burdened by debt. His commitment to targeting China may make it harder for Beijing to continue serving as an alternative market and source of investment for much of the world.
But even if Trump follows through on his promises (and he may not), the bigger story for the global South should be one of opportunity. Trump has exhibited little interest in, and often contempt for, the non-Western world, but his return could paradoxically help countries in the global South advance their own interests. His hostility to certain international norms will push these countries to work together more effectively, while his transactional approach will give them the chance to play the great powers off one another.
And if Trump winds up accommodating Russia to pry it away from China, that would indicate that the United States must now navigate a multipolar world—exactly the understanding of geopolitics that the global South has come to embrace. Indeed, many governments in the global South welcome his departure from the U.S. foreign policy tradition of liberal internationalism that purports to make the world “safe for democracy” but has, since its inception under President Woodrow Wilson, applied one standard to Europeans and another to everyone else. By contrast, Trump borrows from another tradition, that of the likes of President William Taft, whose “dollar diplomacy” used economic influence to extend American power abroad without moral pretense. Both approaches are forms of hegemonic reassertion—attempts to cement U.S. primacy on the world stage—but one cloaks itself in moral superiority, and the other does not. Some developing countries will feel Trump’s amoral pragmatism as a breath of fresh air, as well as an opening to promote their own interests, whatever the declared aims of Washington.
THE PENDULUM SWINGS
The global South is a capacious category, encompassing a wide variety of countries that have differing levels of wealth, influence, and aspiration. The interests and needs of a country with the economic heft of Brazil are very different from those of a poorer one such as Niger. Not all countries in the global South pull in the same direction: Indonesia, for instance, increasingly resists taking sides in the competition between China and the United States, while Argentina, under its Trump-admiring president, Javier Milei, has reoriented its foreign policy to hew more closely to American positions. Meanwhile, India is balancing its traditional solidarity with postcolonial countries against its desire to become a major military player loosely in the U.S. camp—a shift that has elevated its global standing as a counterweight to China.
Yet despite its diversity, the global South has over the decades managed to form effective coalitions to reshape those international rules long crafted to serve the interests of the powerful. Its countries have united on occasion to make international norms more equitable. In the mid-twentieth century, under the banner of the Non-Aligned Movement, the global South coalition aimed to dismantle Western imperial legacies—fighting for sovereignty, racial equality, economic justice, and what it saw as cultural liberation from Western influence. By the 1970s, the global South had organized under various groupings, including the G-77 at the UN, to achieve significant victories: decolonization became enshrined in international law and the principle of nonintervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states emerged as a global norm. Organizations such as the oil-trading cartel OPEC used economic leverage to assert greater non-Western control over natural resources. Crucially, the advocacy of countries in the global South began influencing rules on nuclear proliferation, trade, energy, and the environment, codifying in international law the need for forms of redistributive justice to compensate countries that had emerged from the ravages of colonialism.
Consider the global nonproliferation regime: in the 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union colluded to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and technological know-how, aiming to curb proliferation. That rankled many countries in the global South that sought greater access to peaceful nuclear technology and feared that an agreement between the superpowers would effectively entrench nuclear weapons, making it virtually impossible to eliminate them in the future. These countries banded together and, through years of hard-nosed negotiations, secured a compromise with the superpowers. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, signed in 1968, still favored states that already possessed nuclear weapons, but it included provisions that encouraged disarmament in powerful countries and incentives for weaker countries to develop peaceful nuclear energy.
There were reverses, too. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the United States dismissed the global South as obsolete, insisting that all countries embrace domestic reforms to align with a liberal order under American primacy. Structural adjustment programs from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank enforced financial deregulation and austerity, while the United States used the extraterritorial application of domestic law—notably through the stipulations of Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act—to pressure countries to dismantle protective tariffs and subsidies. Yet globalization unfolded in unexpected ways. It generated new wealth for many postcolonial countries, propelled China into a position of rising power, and fueled potent transnational movements such as political Islam. Although globalization also encouraged a wave of democratization across the developing world, that outcome did not always benefit the United States and its Western allies.
Some countries will feel Trump’s amoral pragmatism as a breath of fresh air.
U.S. President Bill Clinton reopened opportunities for the global South. Rhetoric about the so-called liberal international order appealed to the notion of an interconnected world where prosperity could be more evenly distributed, including to developing countries. Clinton was not immune to violating these norms, such as when he bypassed the UN Security Council to launch NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999. The Helms-Burton Act in 1996 penalized foreign companies engaged in business with Cuba, even when such activities were legal in their own countries and lawful in the eyes of the World Trade Organization.
But Clinton’s emphasis on a “rules-based order” allowed countries in the global South to use international institutions to their own advantage. The World Trade Organization provided a platform for developing countries to negotiate favorable deals, including the ability to legally challenge stronger economies, helping level the playing field in international trade. The 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing spotlighted gender issues, unleashing an era of progressive change across the developing world by galvanizing international support for gender equality initiatives and pressuring governments to better secure women’s rights. The Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change provided a mechanism through which developing countries could receive financial and technological support for environmental policies while taking industrialized countries to task for failing to curb carbon emissions. The World Bank reformed to prioritize programs that reduced poverty and promoted sustainable development across the global South. A world of institutionalized global norms, despite its imperfections, allowed developing countries to hold great powers accountable and extract meaningful concessions through multilateral mechanisms.
The pendulum swung after the 9/11 attacks, in whose aftermath U.S. President George W. Bush insisted, “There are no rules.” This proclamation heralded an era of unrestrained use of force in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, resulting in the direct and indirect deaths of millions of people across the global South. The United States tortured detainees from developing countries in clandestine facilities. In many Western countries, Muslims and their religion in general became the subjects of racialized scrutiny. The humanitarian doctrine of “responsibility to protect”—that sanctioned intervention to prevent crimes such as genocide—facilitated invasions and violations of national sovereignty, such as the NATO-led attack on Libya in 2011, that seemed motivated more by strategic interests than concerns about the welfare of people. U.S. President Barack Obama challenged international law by turning Yemen into a proving ground for drone warfare, causing a fragile state to spiral into chaos. This interventionism bred instability and triggered mass migration from Africa and the Middle East to Europe, especially during the Syrian civil war in the 2010s.
The financial crisis of 2008 would force the pendulum back in the other direction. It delivered a devastating blow to the West, exposing the rot within the pillars of the liberal international order. For the first time in decades, the West found itself needing the global South. The G-20, which brought emerging economies such as Brazil, China, India, and South Africa to the table alongside traditional Western powers, replaced the G-7 as the primary forum for global economic governance. Non-Western countries won a greater say in crafting global recovery plans, such as coordinated stimulus measures and reforms to financial governance. For example, the G-20 oversaw the expansion of representation in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to include more voices from emerging economies. Concurrently, a range of non-Western institutions—including the African Union, BRICS, OPEC+ (the expanded version of the cartel), and the Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank—became vibrant arenas of collective action for the global South.
Trump at a G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, June 2019 Kim Kyung-Hoon / Reuters
Trump’s arrival in the White House in 2017 slowed the global South’s progress. His sidelining of the World Health Organization during the COVID-19 pandemic, withdrawal from the Paris agreement, and disregard for trade rules by unilaterally imposing tariffs outside the World Trade Organization framework had devastating effects. International institutions had offered the global South some modest protections—without them, weaker states were left vulnerable to the law of the jungle. In 2020, he announced his administration’s intention to withdraw from the World Health Organization, for instance, temporarily freezing U.S. funding for key programs in Africa, undermining efforts to combat polio and malaria. Trump’s disregard for international institutions also weakened the extent to which global South countries could influence global governance. Trump’s demonization of nonwhite migrants from global South countries further deepened the divide, promoting xenophobia and racist hostility that has reverberated far beyond U.S. borders.
Not much changed under U.S. President Joe Biden. His stance on trade largely mirrored Trump’s. Although Biden initially rolled back some of Trump’s hard-line positions on immigration, he would tack back toward them in the second half of his presidency. He returned the United States to the Paris agreement, but his legislation devised to combat climate change—including the Inflation Reduction Act—risks becoming a tool for protectionism, making it harder, not easier, for global South countries to transition to green economies.
It is unsurprising that many developing countries have turned to China in recent years. China’s transformation from a relatively poor country to a much more powerful and prosperous one in just a half century helps it speak to governments and publics in the global South. It has been a major financier for these countries, trading loans and investment for commodities, raw materials, energy, and port access to fuel its rapid growth. Beijing capitalized on Washington’s self-inflicted wounds—such as its calamitous invasion of Iraq in 2003 and Trump’s disdain for international agreements and institutions—to become a major player in multilateral organizations, in which it often claims to represent the interests of the developing world.
But there are growing signs of trouble. As China becomes more powerful, it increasingly treats other countries not as a partner might, but as a great power would. Many see its actions as neocolonial, including its imposition of draconian conditions on trade and investment deals and its heavy-handed diplomacy across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. In Southeast Asia, China has shifted from partner to aspiring hegemon, pressuring countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Even within BRICS—which is now expanding beyond its founding members—some worry that China sees the grouping as a vehicle to project influence rather than a shared platform for collective action benefiting developing countries. Trump’s return to the White House will not make it any easier for the global South to balance China with the United States; his trade protectionism will hurt developing countries across the board.
DELUSIONS OF HEGEMONY
Trump’s campaign pledges on trade, climate, migration, and taxation are often understood as a retreat from the world. From the perspective of the global South, however, these commitments suggest the opposite: they augur an attempt to reassert U.S. hegemony. When Trump threatens to withdraw from international agreements, he is actually insisting that the United States can go it alone—and that others should just fall in line if they know what’s good for them. By sowing uncertainty about the credibility of American commitments, Trump incentivizes countries to align more closely with the United States or risk losing out. His proposed tax cuts and tariffs will fuel inflation, leading to higher U.S. interest rates. This, in turn, will raise borrowing costs globally, especially for countries with significant debt, and will drive investors away from emerging markets toward safer returns in the United States. The resulting currency depreciation will make imports more expensive, increasing inflation while reducing productivity in many developing countries. Rather than signaling isolation, Trump’s campaign pledges are interpreted in the global South as a calculated strategy of revisionism—a bid to restore U.S. primacy by making other countries pay heed, align with Washington, or be left vulnerable in an increasingly uncertain order.
Leaders across the global South will have little option but to find ways to shield their countries from the consequences of Trump’s policies. Domestic publics in many developing countries are far more politically mobilized and technologically empowered than they were in previous eras, making their demands louder and harder to ignore. The poor and middle classes in much of the global South benefited significantly from the economic opportunities that came with globalization and that Trump threatens. They will expect their leaders to hold the line.
Many governments will, for instance, continue to explore alternatives to the U.S. currency, experimenting with nondollar payment systems, digital currencies, and trade mechanisms in local denominations to blunt the White House’s capacity to coerce rivals through sanctions and other restrictions. They may seek new, creative strategies to maintain international trade flows and sidestep the restrictions imposed by the incoming U.S. administration. Anticipating such moves, Trump posted to social media in November threatening to impose 100 percent tariffs on BRICS countries should they pursue an alternative currency “to replace the mighty U.S. dollar.”
If Trump does indeed conduct mass deportations, they will hurt his country’s standing in much of the global South because they vindicate the belief that Trump holds profound disdain for the non-Western world. This will deepen the divide between the global North and South on issues of race and cultural difference, straining the West’s diplomatic relations with countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America while provoking broader resentment toward Western countries seen as perpetuating racial hierarchies. Such actions could exacerbate tensions within the United States, widening the gap between communities over issues of race and immigration and further undermining the country’s moral authority on the global stage.
Trump’s promised retrenchment is an attempt to reassert U.S. hegemony.
One subject that has won broad solidarity among the countries of the global South is the Palestinian cause. South Africa, for example, has taken steps to challenge Israel’s actions in Gaza at the International Court of Justice, accusing it of committing acts of genocide. Many governments across the global South view this as emblematic of broader Western hypocrisy, pointing to how the West largely tolerates the killing of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians by Israel, even as it vociferously condemns Russian aggression and the killing of Ukrainian civilians. This double standard has deepened skepticism in the global South about the impartiality of the liberal international order. The plight of the Palestinians will serve as a flash point, a symbol of inequities in the prevailing international order and, in the eyes of many across the developing world, the unfinished work of decolonization. The issue will continue to underscore the persistent tensions between Western and non-Western countries. Even as Trump gives freer rein to Israeli ambitions, developing countries will keep using the UN General Assembly and international law to challenge not only Israel but also the United States.
On climate action, Trump’s approach promises to embolden interest groups within the global South that are dedicated to high-carbon industries and the extraction of fossil fuels. That will shift the domestic balance of power away from proponents of the green transition. High-carbon interest groups are bound to resist necessary reforms and make it costlier and slower to effect the green transition globally. Trump’s relative indifference to climate action could embolden loggers, ranchers, and miners around the world, leading to further deforestation and unsustainable agricultural expansions that will exacerbate climate change, threatening global food security by disrupting ecosystems and reducing crop yields in both the global South and the global North.
At the same time, Trump’s foreign policy could have some curious consequences. Instead of reasserting American primacy, Washington could come to see that the world has shifted under its feet. If Trump follows through on his campaign pledge to lower tensions with Russia while still seeking to pressure China, he may unintentionally accelerate the drift toward a multipolar world. By easing hostilities with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump would tacitly acknowledge that Russia cannot be subdued and that Moscow’s quest for regional hegemony is legitimate—that Russia is entitled to strive to maintain a sphere of influence. This would vindicate many countries in the global South that have argued for years that the international system is no longer defined by unchallenged American hegemony but by a more balanced order, in which the United States must increasingly eschew the impulsive foreign policy of unipolarity for calculated restraint. Developing countries will continue treating both China and Russia as pivotal centers of power, seizing opportunities to extract economic, security, and technological concessions through platforms such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a China-led multilateral group. In a fragmented global order marked by competition and pragmatic transactionalism, Trump’s policies could increase the global South’s leverage, enabling it to play great powers off one another.
To be sure, the global South lacks the unity and resources to fully blunt the sharper edges of Trump’s foreign policy. The United States under Trump will still wield unmatched influence, setting agendas and shaping international rules. Washington retains the capacity to employ economic coercion, diplomatic isolation, and even military force to quash serious efforts by developing countries to challenge U.S. preferences. But the rising agency of the global South and the expanding geopolitical consciousness among its peoples have fundamentally altered the dynamics of global power. The U.S. government, whether under Trump or his successors, will find it increasingly difficult to ignore the growing political relevance of those countries once consigned to the margins. Trump’s bid to reassert American hegemony will run into a world that is far less pliant than he imagines it to be.
Matias Spektor is Professor of Politics and International Relations at Fundação Getulio Vargas in São Paulo.
Foreign Affairs · by More by Matias Spektor · January 7, 2025
24. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 12, 2025
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 12, 2025
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-january-12-2025
The Ukrainian General staff reported on January 12 that Ukrainian forces conducted a high-precision airstrike on the command post of Russia's 2nd Combined Arms Army [CAA] (Central Military District) in Novohrodivka, Donetsk Oblast. The Ukrainian General Staff noted that the operation is part of a broader series of Ukrainian strikes targeting command posts of Russian forces operating in the Donetsk direction. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on January 8 and 10 that Ukrainian forces struck the command posts of the Russian 8th CAA (Southern Military District) in occupied Khartsyzk, Donetsk Oblast, and the 3rd Army Corps [AC] (Central Military District) in occupied Svitlodarsk, Donetsk Oblast, respectively. Ukrainian strikes on tactical command posts and positions located near the frontline, such as the strike against Novohrodivka, are likely intended to disrupt Russian tactical activity and directly complicate Russian command and control (C2) on the battlefield. Ukrainian strikes against main command posts further in the Russian rear, such as the January 8 strike on the Russian 8th CAA post, are likely aimed at degrading broader Russian logistics and operational planning efforts, which could have impacts on Russia's ability to conduct its military operations in western Donetsk Oblast. ISW has observed that the 2nd CAA is currently leading Russian operations south of Pokrovsk, that the 3rd AC is operating near Chasiv Yar, and that the 8th CAA is leading Russian efforts near Kurakhove.
South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS) confirmed that Ukrainian forces captured two North Korean soldiers during combat operations in Kursk Oblast on January 9. The NIS told Agence-France-Presse (AFP) on January 12 that one of the captured North Korean soldiers initially believed that North Korean authorities had sent him to Russia for training but that he realized upon arrival that he would be engaged in combat - in line with recent statements from Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. One of the captured North Korean soldiers also stated that they suffered food and water shortages for several days before their capture and that North Korean forces have suffered significant losses.
Key Takeaways:
- The Ukrainian General staff reported on January 12 that Ukrainian forces conducted a high-precision airstrike on the command post of Russia's 2nd Combined Arms Army [CAA] (Central Military District) in Novohrodivka, Donetsk Oblast.
- South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS) confirmed that Ukrainian forces captured two North Korean soldiers during combat operations in Kursk Oblast on January 9.
- Russian forces recently advanced in the Kupyansk, Toretsk, Pokrovsk, and Kurakhove directions.
25. Iran Update, January 12, 2025
Iran Update, January 12, 2025
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-january-12-2025
Iran conducted an air defense exercise for the second time in recent days. This activity reflects Iranian concerns about possible airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, as Tehran has continued to expand its nuclear program. The Artesh—the conventional Iranian military—conducted the latest air defense exercise across northern and western Iran on January 12. This exercise notably covered the Iranian nuclear facilities around Arak and Fordow. Though Iran typically conducts air defense exercises around this time of year, this activity nonetheless probably reflects Iranian leaders’ assumption that they will face airstrikes against their nuclear program in the near term. This assumption has no bearing on the likelihood that the United States or Israel would actually conduct such a strike, however.
The Artesh exercises tested the manned and unmanned aircraft as well as the following air defense systems, according to Iranian state media:
- Rad missile. An Iranian-made, short-range, anti-tank missile designed for T-72 tanks, fired from a 125 millimeters (mm) caliber barrel, and with a target distance of four kilometers (km).
- Majid missile. An Iranian-made, short-range, shoulder-fired, electro-optical-guided missile with a maximum target range of 15 km.
- Talash missile. An Iranian-made, long-range, mobile surface-to-air air defense missile system, capable of hitting all altitude targets with at a maximum range of 200km.
- Misagh-3 missile. An Iranian-made, short-range, shoulder-fired system with a laser fuse and maximum range of five km and flight altitude of 3,500 meters (m).
- Khordad-15 system. An Iranian-made, long-range air defense system with a detection range of 85 km and target range of 45 km.
- Shahid Jalilvand radar system. An Iranian-made, medium-range, phased array radar system able to detect small flying targets with low cross-sections in three dimensions and a 24-hour operational continuity.
- Samavat radar-controlled artillery system. A short-range Iranian version of the Swiss low-altitude Skyguard radar system with a range of 4 km and uses an anti-aircraft 35mm Oerlikon caliber barrel gun.
- Seraj radar-controlled air defense artillery system. Iranian-made artillery system with a 35mm caliber barrel gun, radar, and a new optical system.
This activity comes after the IRGC Aerospace Force conducted an air defense exercise around the other major Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz on January 7. This flurry of air defense activity is part of the larger military exercise that the Iranian armed forces are holding across Iran until March 2025. This exercise includes the Artesh and Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). It is unlikely that Iran could repel a US or Israeli airstrike given the inferiority of the Iranian systems that have been used in these exercises relative to the modern US and Israeli capabilities. This is especially the case given that Israel neutralized Iran’s S-300s—its most advanced air defense platform—in October 2024.
Iran could use part of its exercises to prepare for an attack on US or Israeli targets, though CTP-ISW assesses that this possibility is relatively unlikely at this time. Iran previously conducted exercises ahead of its Operation True Promise and Operation True Promise II attacks on Israel in April and October 2024 respectively.[14] And Iranian officials have yet to fulfill their vow to conduct a third missile attack on Israel.
Fatah released a statement on January 11 affirming that the PA will prevent any Hamas effort to stoke conflict in the West Bank. Fatah stated that Hamas is responsible for the destruction of the Gaza Strip because Hamas ”gambled with the interests and resources of the Palestinian people for Iran’s benefit.” PA forces have been operating in Jenin Governorate, northern West Bank, since early December 2024 to degrade Palestinian militia networks there.
Key Takeaways:
-
Iran: Iran conducted an air defense exercise for the second time in recent days. This activity reflects Iranian concerns about a possible US or Israeli airstrike on Iranian nuclear facilities.
-
West Bank: Fatah released a statement affirming that it will prevent any Hamas effort to stoke conflict against Israel in the West Bank.
-
Syria: Turkey attacked SDF elements along the eastern frontline amid indications of a possible Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) offensive against the SDF.
-
Yemen: The Houthis claimed that they conducted a drone and missile attack targeting the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier in the northern Red Sea on January 11.
-
Gaza Strip: Senior Israel Defense Forces (IDF) officials said that the IDF clearing operations in Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip are aimed at preventing Palestinian militias from conducting indirect fire attacks toward southern Israel.
26. Pete Hegseth's Battle Scars Are His Strength
Pete Hegseth's Battle Scars Are His Strength
The Federalist · by Michael Dakduk and Daniel Elkins · January 3, 2025
It’s no surprise that more than 100 Navy SEALs reportedly plan to march on Washington alongside other veterans to support Pete Hegseth’s nomination for secretary of defense. This show of force isn’t just about loyalty, it’s about recognizing a leader who embodies what our warfighters truly need: a man forged in battle, dedicated to lethal excellence, and unafraid of the scars earned in the hardest fights.
There’s been a lot of talk about Hegseth’s past indiscretions. Some critics frame him as unfit for leadership because of personal struggles — failed marriages, rough patches, and choices made in moments of pain. But to those who have known war and felt the sting of loss and the weight of duty, these aren’t disqualifications. They’re marks of a man who has truly lived the warrior’s life, paid its price, and emerged stronger.
When warriors come home, they don’t always come back whole. Combat leaves marks on the soul. Warfighters spend months or years in the crucible of asymmetric warfare, in places like Iraq and Afghanistan where the stakes are life and death. The brotherhood forged on the battlefield contrasts sharply with the isolation many face at home. The coping mechanisms that sustained troops overseas can fail veterans stateside.
Sometimes combat veterans turn to the wrong outlets, such as alcohol or other vices, to deal with things not easily expressed. For too many in combat roles, personal demons lead to impulsive behavior, and divorce rates climb. These are not excuses, but they are truths known too well in the military ranks. Pete Hegseth has lived that reality. He’s not a perfect man, but he’s an honest one. Instead of letting his experiences define him as broken, he has used them to refine his commitment to the men and women who serve this nation.
From the outside, Hegseth’s journey might seem alien to someone who never had to fight in battle. But it’s the story shared by many who served: The scars aren’t signs of weakness, they’re reminders of sacrifice. As secretary of defense, Hegseth would carry with him those scars. He understands that the military’s mission is about winning wars and maintaining lethal forces capable of destroying our enemies. He knows that when we ask service members to stand in the line of fire, we owe them leaders who comprehend the gravity of that demand, not just the theory.
His track record proves it. Since 2019 and most years thereafter, Hegseth dove into the Hudson River alongside Navy SEALs to raise awareness for veterans’ struggles in transitioning home. He championed the cause of those “in the arena,” a tribute to those who actually dare greatly.
Moreover, Hegseth is laser-focused on positioning our military for decisive victory. In recent interviews, he has stressed the importance of “lethality” and the duty to maintain high standards so we can “close with and destroy” our nation’s enemies. He speaks from the vantage point of someone who wore the uniform and earned the Combat Infantryman’s Badge — a decoration that, to those who know, outweighs the Beltway’s fixation on polished credentials or lofty academic achievements, like his degrees from Princeton and Harvard.
Contrast that with the last several secretaries of defense. Some were four-star generals and others PhDs. They brought pedigrees but often seemed distant from the warfighters’ experience at a tactical level. Hegseth does not claim an air of untouchable perfection. He is not a career politician, a cloistered academic, or a general shaped by the top-down traditions of the Pentagon. He’s a man who understands war is brutal, unforgiving, and personal. His failures and recoveries make him more relatable to the troops on the ground and to a commander-in-chief who values toughness, authenticity, and loyalty.
Donald Trump built his brand on strength and success earned through adversity. He prizes leaders who refuse to stay down when knocked to the mat. Hegseth’s journey is one of resilience, not fragility. He’s taken the blows that life and war dealt him and gotten back up. That’s the kind of leader who can inspire trust from the warfighters he’ll command — someone who has been tested in the arena, stumbled, and risen again, more lethal and more steadfast than before.
The critics will still take their shots, but as Teddy Roosevelt said, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.”
Pete Hegseth is that man. He’s earned his scars honestly, and he will fight for America’s warfighters and maintain our military’s lethal edge.
Michael Dakduk deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, including as a member of 1st Marine Special Operations Battalion (now 1st Marine Raiders). Daniel Elkins is a former Green Beret, Special Operations combat veteran, and currently attending the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not represent the positions of the United States government or the Department of Defense.
The Federalist · by Michael Dakduk and Daniel Elkins · January 3, 2025
27. Why Senate Republicans Should Reject Pete Hegseth
Note the author's biography (Served in Bush II and Trump administrations)
Excerpts:
Hegseth lacks the maturity, experience, and character to make decisions like these. Frankly, he lacks the experience and knowledge to hold his own in simple National Security Council meetings against his counterparts from the State Department, Treasury Department, and CIA.
Trump’s decision to nominate Hegseth was understandable, especially after a first term in which both of his confirmed defense secretaries were disloyal and, as we have learned, actively worked against his expressed directions. It’s an understandable view, but the wrong one. Republican senators should reject Hegseth and insist on another nominee. They would not only be doing Trump a favor but also performing their duty in defending this nation.
Why Senate Republicans Should Reject Pete Hegseth
The Defense Department will face many herculean challenges over the next four years, and Pete Hegseth is simply not up to the task.
The National Interest · by Christian Whiton · January 12, 2025
Every president makes at least one mistaken appointment to his cabinet, and President-elect Donald Trump is no exception. Nominating TV weekend personality Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense was a rash error, and Senate Republicans should spare Trump from the potential consequences by rejecting his nomination.
Let me hasten to say that I support Trump’s other nominees. I was honored to have served at the beginning of Trump’s first term, including during his 2016 transition, helping to secure Senate confirmation of cabinet-level and other nominees.
Second presidential terms are often lackluster—a wise man once quipped that every administration leaves town as a parody of itself. However, Trump’s could be very different; it has the potential to usher in sweeping changes of a magnitude unseen since the arrival of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Dealers in 1933. Regardless of magnitude, Trump’s comeback and coattails on Capitol Hill present the most transformational opportunity for the GOP in decades.
But this exciting potential and Trump’s loyalist personnel criteria do not justify nominating a lightweight man-boy to lead the Department of Defense—the largest and most powerful organization responsible for securing the free world—and serve as the only civilian other than the president in the military chain of command.
The gathering Democrat-led opposition to Hegseth has focused on his alleged personal flaws, including whisper allegations of sexual assault and excessive alcohol intake. My view of such allegations is that they must be ignored unless attested to publicly by credible eyewitnesses under oath. We’ll see what happens at Hegseth’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee on January 14 and after.
For the moment, let us skip the alleged character flaws and focus only on what is certain. Hegseth served in the Army National Guard and deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq like millions of others of his generation. He also led a veterans’ advocacy organization. Depending on who the audience is, he is either for or against allowing women and gays to serve in combat roles in the military. Finally, Trump admires his advocacy for veterans’ healthcare and opposition to woke practices that have degraded military culture and impeded recruiting.
Speaking to Sean Hannity about the Senate confirmation process, which has included several awkward meetings with Republican senators, Hegseth remarked:
“And let me tell you, Sean, the founders got this right. This is not a trivial process. This is a real thing: advice and consent of a nominee who the president has chosen. And I’m so grateful that President Trump would have the faith in me to lead the Defense Department, to choose me to do that. But this advice and consent process, meeting with all the members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and they all have great questions, and my answers are for them.”
Golly gosh jeepers, Mr. Smith!
Hegseth was considered for the Veterans Affairs secretary position in Trump’s first term. When he was rejected, he grieved publicly, sharing on social media the tattoo he got as a form of personal therapy for the setback. Hegseth talks today about having been conveniently changed by Jesus.
All fine and good, but the impression one gets is of a forty-four-year-old juvenile on a journey of self-discovery, with nothing achieved or even concluded with each episode.
There is much talk about experience, considering he can boast so little. He has never supervised or run an organization of any magnitude or complexity like that of the Defense Department. He has never reformed an obstinate organization, and this obstinate Pentagon has been in desperate need of change since the Cold War ended thirty years ago. It has lost the ability to win wars and is still configured for a Europe-first foreign policy with counterinsurgency and nation-building as side hustles. It needs a radical transformation to deter war with China. Hegseth is neither a leader of leaders, a deal guy, or even a simple manager. His garish choice of finery is another clue to his future performance. That may sound like a gratuitous comment, but appearances matter—man-boys with tough guy tats won’t move a culture that places exceptionally high value on what the military calls “command presence.”
What all this adds up to is a fundamental lack of gravitas. Even an intern in White House personnel can fire a general at the direction of the president. Still, not just anyone can lead four-star generals with decades of field command experience, much less dozens of them. The same is true for other appointed leaders in the Pentagon, including service secretaries (e.g., secretary of the army, secretary of the navy) who have their own ambition, egos, turf to protect, and allies on Capitol Hill. Leaders of the unified combatant commands often have direct access to the president when situations call for it.
Would Hegseth not only be able to manage senior military and civilian officials but also actually lead them by setting a vision with an accompanying national security strategy? Can he create a dramatically different military that is reoriented toward the Pacific and can learn from the lessons of the Ukraine War and the radical tech transformations we are witnessing? This means a new military based on high-tech communications and sensors, autonomous mesh networks in space, and lower-tech airborne and underwater drones to supplement infantry, plus rebuilding nuclear forces and catching up to the Russians and Chinese on technologies like maneuverable hypersonic missiles. This enormous undertaking and expense will require canceling the acquisition of vulnerable new $13 billion aircraft carriers, $5 billion ballistic missile submarines, $700 million subsonic B-21 bombers, the army’s obsolete deployments (particularly in Italy, Germany, and South Korea), and many other politically sacred cows. Doing so would require a coordinated effort across the national security establishment, defense industry, and members of Congress. Is this a job Hegseth has any chance of accomplishing?
However, that is not the job Trump has in mind. Perhaps Hegseth is meant to be more than a Queen Elizabeth II of the Pentagon—there to set a tone and an example, attend events, and be seen, but not to do the real policy work. This fits with Trump’s announcement of some of the rest of his senior nominees for the Pentagon—presumably to assuage concerns about Hegseth.
The problem is that there are some duties that only the secretary of defense can do by law.
Consider the following scenario. It’s dawn in Pyongyang, and North Korea launches a handful of ballistic missiles at the United States. The duty officer of the fabled North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) in Colorado Springs is alerted by U.S. satellites looking for the heat signature from such missiles. The North Koreans know that alerts from older generations of such satellites were less persuasive at orbital daybreak, which interfered with optical instruments and led to false alarms and hesitations.
Imagine it’s late in the evening in Washington, DC. The NORAD commander begins initiating a Missile Attack Conference by adding the watch commander of Strategic Command in Omaha, which would coordinate nuclear retaliation. The men can go directly to the president but have the option of adding the secretary of defense to the call, which they do. Minutes pass as they wait for Trump, who is on stage delivering remarks. The military officer who accompanies the president with the nuclear “football” confers with the leader of Trump’s Secret Service detail and the deputy White House chief of staff who have accompanied Trump. They hesitate. After all, Trump has only been pulled from the stage once: when he was shot in the head. And there are so many military drills and false alarms.
By now, the missiles have completed powered flight and are moving through space on sub-orbital paths above the Arctic. The satellites have lost them, but radar stations in Alaska, Canada, and Greenland spot the missiles and confirm their trajectory. Strategic Command upgrades confidence in its attack assessment to “high” and informs those on the call that targets include Washington, NORAD, Omaha, and land-based nuclear missile sites in Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming. The military men on the call know they likely have only minutes to live.
Chinese and Russian leaders, whose own satellites detected the launches, use hotlines to call their U.S. counterparts, profess to know nothing in advance of the North Korean attack, and not only urge but also demand U.S. restraint. The trained men at the Missile Attack Conference know this is irrelevant. North Korea is conducting a classic decapitation strike, inevitably to be followed by a massive follow-on attack. Whether Pyongyang planned this with Beijing or Moscow is irrelevant. The Chinese and Russians must expect U.S. retaliation and, therefore, will inevitably begin their own launch preparations immediately.
At this point, with Trump still not on the call, the head of Strategic Command advises a large-scale attack on nuclear forces in North Korea, China, and Russia. Expending all available ground and submarine-based ballistic missiles will hopefully give enough time and operational leeway for America’s modest bomber force to complete the destruction of enemy nuclear bases before too many enemy weapons are fired. The plan will leave millions of Americans dead and tens of millions of enemy dead. But the alternative of riding out the attack to verify that it is nuclear and then decide what to do would lead to a decapitated U.S. government, an ambiguous military chain of command, and a decimated force with which to attempt retaliation. America would lose the nuclear war, and American civilization could effectively pass into history in minutes.
As radar confirms the missile payloads are splitting into Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles—each missile carries several warheads—there are perhaps five minutes left until everyone on the call is dead. NORAD and Strategic Command headquarters are wiped out.
Trump is finally yanked from the stage, but the Secret Service is more focused on getting him into his car and getting him airborne as soon as possible. Since Trump is neither incapacitated nor truly incommunicado, Vice President JD Vance has no authority to act and is not a part of the Missile Attack Conference. By statute and nuclear-release protocol, the decision falls to the secretary of defense.
Will he act? Will he dither, afraid to decide without Trump? Will he panic? Will he even be sober? The probability of the scenario is remote but not nil. Appointing someone who lends ambiguity to the scenario will only encourage it to occur.
Hegseth lacks the maturity, experience, and character to make decisions like these. Frankly, he lacks the experience and knowledge to hold his own in simple National Security Council meetings against his counterparts from the State Department, Treasury Department, and CIA.
Trump’s decision to nominate Hegseth was understandable, especially after a first term in which both of his confirmed defense secretaries were disloyal and, as we have learned, actively worked against his expressed directions. It’s an understandable view, but the wrong one. Republican senators should reject Hegseth and insist on another nominee. They would not only be doing Trump a favor but also performing their duty in defending this nation.
Christian Whiton was a State Department senior advisor in the second Bush and first Trump administrations. He served as a deputy special envoy for North Korean human rights issues and also advised the secretary of state and other senior officials about public affairs and East Asia matters. During the 2016 Trump transition, he aided in the confirmation of the secretary of state and other senior department officials. He is a senior fellow at the Center for the National Interest and a principal at Rockies Aria LLC, a public affairs and government relations firm. The author of “Smart Power: Between Diplomacy and War,” Christian co-hosts the “Domino Theory” podcast and edits “Capitalist Notes” on Substack. He frequently appears on Fox Business and has appeared on Fox News, BBC, GBTV, Newsmax, NHK, Sky News Australia, CNBC, MSNBC, and numerous other outlets. In addition to the National Interest, his articles have been published by Fox News Opinion, Daily Caller, Wall Street Journal, the Australian, and others.
Image: Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons.
The National Interest · by Christian Whiton · January 12, 2025
28. Former NATO Commander Says Trump Annexing Greenland ‘Not a Crazy Idea’
Former NATO Commander Says Trump Annexing Greenland ‘Not a Crazy Idea’
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/former-nato-commander-says-trump-annexing-greenland-not-a-crazy-idea/
By Brittany Bernstein
January 12, 2025 9:49 AM
Former NATO supreme allied commander James Stavridis said Sunday he doesn’t think President-elect Donald Trump’s desire to acquire Greenland is “crazy.”
“It’s not a crazy idea.… We could do an awful lot in terms of business, investment, box out the Russians, box out the Chinese, and work very closely with Greenland,” he said during an appearance on WABC 770 AM’s The Cats Roundtable.
In fact, Stavridis said he thinks Greenland is actually a “strategic goldmine for the United States.”
“It sits at the very top of the North Atlantic. It protects approaches to our own country … It’s geographically very important. It’s full of strategic minerals, rare earth, probably a lot of gold. It’s got a lot of natural resources,” he said.
“It doesn’t have to become the 51st state, but it can certainly be an economic objective for us,” he added.
“I think that’s how it plays out … The Prime Minister of Greenland said, ‘We are not for sale. But we are open for business.’ I think we ought to take him at his word,” he concluded.
The interview comes after the incoming president repeatedly suggested he would like the U.S. to take control of Greenland. Trump did not rule out using military or economic force to take Greenland or the Panama Canal, which he has also talked about taking control of in recent days.
Trump suggested the U.S. needs Greenland for “national security purposes.”
Greenlandic premier Múte Egede said Friday he is prepared to enter negotiations with Trump about the territory’s future. Egede has said the territory would like to pursue independence from Denmark — but does not want to become part of the U.S.
More onGreenland
An Alternative to Buying Greenland That Could Actually Work
Greenland Leader Says ‘We Are Ready to Talk’ with Trump about Territory’s Future
Is Donald Trump the Next James K. Polk?
“We have a desire for independence, a desire to be the master of our own house. . . . This is something everyone should respect,” he added. “Greenland is for the Greenlandic people. We do not want to be Danish, we do not want to be American. We want to be Greenlandic.”
Denmark controlled Greenland as a colony from the early 18th century until 1979, when the sovereign nation granted home rule. Greenland became self-governing in 2009 via referendum. Now, Denmark retains responsibility for Greenland’s defense. The territory would need to hold another referendum to achieve complete independence.
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
|