Quotes of the Day:
“A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.”
- Robert A. Heinlein, Friday
“The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is on the contrary born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life. When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else--we are the busiest people in the world.”
- Eric Hoffer
“Second we find in our prerevolutionary society definite and indeed very bitter class antagonisms, though these antagonisms seem rather more complicated than the cruder Marxists will allow.”
- Crane Brinton
1. Navy nuclear engineer and his wife charged with trying to share submarine secrets with a foreign country
2. Sea Power Makes Great Powers
3. To Counter China, U.S. Policy toward Taiwan Must Change
4. Blind to History, Facebook Is in the Trustbusters’ Crosshairs
5. We've left Afghanistan — but its consequences are just starting to arrive
6. Does Taiwan Need Nuclear Weapons to Deter China?
7. America's veterans hold a reserve of national security strength we should tap
8. Wanna Fight? (advise and assist)
9. What’s Next for U.S.-China Relations Amid Rising Tensions Over Taiwan
10. The Essence of Special Operations – What You Need to Know About Special Operations while Serving at the Joint Operational Level
11. Post-Afghanistan, the US Army wants to carve out its role in the Pacific
12. US Army insists next year’s Defender Europe is not canceled
13. SFAB troops and an aviation brigade will rotate to Europe next
14. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops have not yet complied with vaccine mandate as deadlines near
15. Taliban says US will provide humanitarian aid to Afghanistan
16. Cyberattacks concerning to most in US: Pearson/AP-NORC poll
17. Fiona Hill, a nobody to Trump and Putin, saw into them both
1. Navy nuclear engineer and his wife charged with trying to share submarine secrets with a foreign country
Since the foreign country does not appear to be named in any of the reports I have seen, I wonder if that country is a friend, partner, or ally?
Excerpts:
The court papers do not identify the foreign country that Toebbe allegedly thought was buying the secrets, nor do they explain how the FBI came to possess in December 2020 the package Toebbe first sent to the foreign country, but the filing notes the postmark on the package was many months earlier — April 1, 2020.
Navy nuclear engineer and his wife charged with trying to share submarine secrets with a foreign country
The Washington Post · by Devlin Barrett and Martin Weil Today at 4:26 p.m. EDT · October 10, 2021
A Navy nuclear engineer and his wife have been charged with repeatedly trying to pass secrets about U.S. nuclear submarines to a foreign country, in an alleged espionage plot discovered by the FBI, according to court documents.
Authorities say Jonathan Toebbe, who has a top-secret clearance, “has passed, and continues to pass, Restricted Data as defined by the Atomic Energy Act . . . to a foreign government . . . with the witting assistance of his spouse, Diana Toebbe,” according to a criminal complaint filed in West Virginia and unsealed Sunday.
The court papers say that in December 2020, an FBI official received a package that had been sent to the foreign country containing U.S. Navy documents, a letter and instructions for how to conduct encrypted communications with the person offering the information.
The letter in the package said: “I apologize for this poor translation into your language. Please forward this letter to your military intelligence agency. I believe this information will be of great value to your nation. This is not a hoax.”
FBI agents then posed as spies for the foreign country and began communicating by email with the person, suggesting a meeting, but the person said that was too risky, noting that they were risking their life in offering the information to the foreign government.
The court papers show an email conversation that began nearly a year ago in which Toebbe allegedly discussed espionage tradecraft and payments with someone he thought was a foreign spy but was in fact an undercover FBI agent.
“Your thoughtful plans indicate you are not amateur,” the FBI wrote to Toebbe. “This relationship requires mutual comfort.”
The emails show that at first Toebbe remained cautious but that he came to trust the undercover agent in part because of the money he was paid and because the FBI arranged to “signal” Toebbe from the country’s embassy in Washington over the Memorial Day weekend. The papers do not describe how the FBI was able to arrange such a signal.
Toebbe allegedly asked for $100,000 in cryptocurrency, saying, “I understand this is a large request. However, please remember I am risking my life for your benefit and I have taken the first step. Please help me trust you fully.”
The undercover FBI agent persuaded Toebbe to conduct a “dead drop” of information in late June in West Virginia’s Jefferson County after Toebbe received about $10,000 worth of cryptocurrency, according to the charging papers.
The FBI later recovered the package Toebbe left behind and inside found a 16-gigabyte data card. The card, authorities said, “was wrapped in plastic and placed between two slices of bread on a half of a peanut butter sandwich. The half sandwich was housed inside of a plastic bag.”
Authorities said another payment of $20,000 followed, and the dead drops continued, with data cards hidden in a Band-Aid wrapper and a chewing gum package.
His wife, Diana Toebbe, appeared to be “acting as a lookout” when he dropped off the material, according to the court filing.
After receiving $70,000 in cryptocurrency, Toebbe provided a decryption key to read the contents of one of the data cards, officials said.
Toebbe and his wife were charged with conspiracy to communicate restricted data and communication of restricted data. The couple were arrested Saturday in West Virginia and are due to make their first court appearance on Tuesday.
The information Toebbe turned over included details of the design, operations and performance of Virginia-class nuclear submarine reactors, according to court papers. Virginia-class subs carry cruise missiles and incorporate “the latest in stealth, intelligence-gathering, and weapons system technology,” according to court papers. Each costs about $3 billion to build.
The court papers note that Toebbe, who was on active duty in the Navy until 2017, had worked on nuclear propulsion for submarines, a technology that the United States recently agreed to provide to Australia. Previously, the United States had only shared the technology with Britain, also a partner in the deal with Australia. The agreement scuttled an Australian deal with France, igniting a diplomatic row between Washington and Paris.
The court papers do not identify the foreign country that Toebbe allegedly thought was buying the secrets, nor do they explain how the FBI came to possess in December 2020 the package Toebbe first sent to the foreign country, but the filing notes the postmark on the package was many months earlier — April 1, 2020.
Toebbe, 42, has worked since 2012 for the Navy. He and his wife, 45, live in Annapolis, Md., where she works as a high school humanities teacher. They were arrested after they allegedly placed another data card at a secret dead-drop site. After the arrest, their home was searched by FBI agents and Navy investigators, according to officials.
In total, Toebbe allegedly provided thousands of pages of documents, and officials said his espionage ambitions had been building for years.
“The information was slowly and carefully collected over several years in the normal course of my job to avoid attracting attention and smuggled past security checkpoints a few pages at a time,” Toebbe allegedly wrote to the foreign country, adding that he no longer had access to classified data but could answer any technical questions the foreign country might have.
He also allegedly wrote that he hoped the foreign government would be able to extract him and his family if he was ever discovered, adding “we have passports and cash set aside for this purpose.”
Alice Crites contributed to this report.
The Washington Post · by Devlin Barrett and Martin Weil Today at 4:26 p.m. EDT · October 10, 2021
2.
Important but depressing analysis. We will not have an effective military instrument of power without dominance in sea power.
Not even a fleet of 355 ships, the number advanced by the Obama administration in its closing days, will be sufficient to reestablish conventional deterrence on the high seas. Instead, the United States should seek a fleet of 456 ships, comprising a balance between high-end, high-tech ships such as nuclear attack submarines and low-end, cheaper small surface combatants that can be added to numbers quickly. It should also seek to extend the lives of the ships it has now in its inventory to cover the short-term threat. The United States can do this by scheduling these ships for service life extensions of their hulls and power plants and for modernization of their combat systems and associated sensors within the constellation of the nation’s civilian ship repair yards.
This endeavor will be expensive. Each Ticonderoga-class cruiser or Arleigh Burke-class destroyer could cost as much as half a billion dollars to repair and modernize, but replacing each cruiser and destroyer with a new ship would cost $3.5 billion and $1.9 billion, respectively, and such repair and modernization efforts would have the additional effect of rejuvenating the nation’s ship repair capacity that has lain fallow for too long.
The United States began the 20th century as a peripheral power. First, Theodore Roosevelt’s work to upbuild the Navy, followed by the efforts of the Wilson administration to meet the demands of a world war by tripling the size of the fleet, helped place the United States in a strong position at sea. This position was strengthened during the late 1930s, when Rep. Carl Vinson worked with FDR to expand the size of the Navy prior to World War II through three shipbuilding bills that culminated in the 1940 Two-Ocean Navy Act. It was those efforts, taken in times of peace, that allowed the U.S. Navy at the end of World War II to seize center stage.
Now, in this third decade of the 21st century, the United States must not ignore the rhymes of history, repeating the mistakes of the sea power that came before it—Britain—by lulling itself into the false belief that it can divest to invest in a brighter future while China maneuvers to overtake it. It must have larger defense budgets that will allow for a sea power-focused national security strategy in the face of rising threats. The United States must recognize yet again—as others have before it—that on the world’s oceans, quantity has a quality all its own.
Recall when the CJCS said this:
CJCS Milley Predicts DoD Budget ‘Bloodletting’ To Fund Navy
"Look, I'm an Army guy,” Milley said. "And I love the Army...but the fundamental defense of the United States and the ability to project power forward will always be for America naval and air and space power."
https://breakingdefense.com/2020/12/cjcs-milley-predicts-dod-bloodletting-to-fund-navy-priorities/
Sea Power Makes Great Powers
History reveals a country’s rise and decline are directly related to the heft of its navy. So why is the United States intent on downsizing?
The number of ships a country possesses has never been the sole measure of its power at sea. Other factors, of course, play a role: The types of ships it has—submarines, aircraft carriers, destroyers—the manner in which they are deployed, the sophistication of their sensors, and the range and lethality of their weapons all make a difference. Still, on the high seas, quantity has a quality all its own. And over the past several decades, U.S. ship numbers have seen a dramatic overall decline.
The 1980s and 1990s marked the beginning of this downward trend. The U.S. government at the time cut subsidies for the nation’s commercial shipbuilding industry, eventually hobbling the shipyards it would need to build a bigger fleet. With the end of the Cold War, policymakers went a step further, slashing funding to the U.S. Navy to create a shortsighted peace dividend.
Now, with defense budgets flat or declining, leading Defense Department officials are pushing a “divest to invest” strategy—whereby the Navy must decommission a large number of older ships to free up funds to buy fewer, more sophisticated, and presumably more lethal platforms.
China, meanwhile, is aggressively expanding its naval footprint and is estimated to have the largest fleet in the world. Leading voices simultaneously recognize the rising China threat while also arguing that the United States must shrink its present fleet in order to modernize. Adm. Philip Davidson, who led U.S. Indo-Pacific Command until he retired this spring, observed in March that China could invade Taiwan in the next six years—presumably setting the stage for a major military showdown with the United States—while Adm. Michael Gilday, the chief of naval operations, has argued that the Navy needs to accelerate the decommissioning of its older cruisers and littoral combat ships to free up money for vessels and weapons that will be critical in the future.
Taken together, these views add up to strategic confusion and an obliviousness to history.
Centuries of global rivalry show how a country’s power—and its decline—is directly related to the size and capability of its naval and maritime forces. The ability to ship goods in bulk from places where they are produced to places where they are scarce has long represented an expression of national power. Athens had a robust navy as well as a large merchant fleet. Carthage in the third century B.C., Venice in the 13th and 14th centuries, and the Dutch republic in the 16th and 17th centuries also fielded merchant and naval fleets to pursue and protect their interests. In this way, they were able to transform their small- and medium-sized nations into great powers.
A country’s ability to ship goods in bulk has long represented an expression of national power.
Following the Napoleonic wars in the early 19th century, a large Royal Navy effectively knitted together the British Empire upon which “the sun never set.” By the latter half of that century, the British maintained a “two-power standard,” whereby the size of the Royal Navy had to meet or exceed the next two navies combined. That ultimately proved unsustainable. It was the doubling of the U.S. Navy battle force under President Theodore Roosevelt that catapulted the United States to global power and prominence. Most historians view the 14-month world cruise of new U.S. battleships—Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet—as the birth of what would come to be known as the American Century.
The dramatic expansion of the U.S. fleet through two world wars—finishing the later conflict with more than 6,000 vessels, by far the largest navy ever afloat—set the country on its superpower path. Finally, Ronald Reagan’s 600-ship Navy, as much a public relations campaign as it was a shipbuilding plan, helped convince the Soviet Union that it would not win the Cold War.
Throughout history, large naval and merchant fleets represented not just a power multiplier but an exponential growth factor in terms of national influence. All historical sea powers recognized this—until they didn’t.
In October 1904, Adm. John “Jackie” Fisher was appointed first sea lord of the Royal Navy. He arrived in office certain who the enemy was—Germany—but also with clear direction from civilian leadership to tighten his belt and accept declining naval budgets. Fisher’s solution to this strategic dilemma was to dramatically shrink the fleet in order to pay for modernization while also concentrating the remaining ships closer to Great Britain. His investments in modernization were breathtaking—most notably the introduction of a steam-turbine, all-big-gun battleship, the HMS Dreadnought, which would lend its name to all subsequent battleships that followed, transforming global naval competition.
But Fisher paid for his modernized vessels by massively culling the 600-ship Royal Navy he inherited from his predecessor. “With one courageous stroke of the pen,” then-Prime Minister Arthur Balfour approvingly stated, Fisher slashed 154 ships from the Royal Navy’s active list. Fisher classified some of these ships as “sheep,” which were sent to the slaughter in the breakers’ yards; others as “llamas,” downgraded but retained in the reserves; and still others as “goats,” which retained their guns with the stipulation that no further maintenance funds would be allocated to them.
The cull, however, wasn’t cost-free. Most of the cuts were taken from gunboats and cruisers assigned to nine distant stations where Britain had national interests, such as in Asia or Africa. The cuts generated great criticism not only from within the Royal Navy, which was manned by officers with long experience and strong views regarding the importance of a naval presence overseas, but also from the British Colonial and Foreign Offices, which instantly recognized that they would no longer be able to call on readily available Royal Navy ships to support the nation’s diplomatic interests.
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Ultimately, Fisher did modernize his fleet in the short term. Both the Dreadnought class battleships as well as their consorts, the smaller Invincible-class battle cruisers, rendered all previous designs instantly obsolete. What Fisher did not anticipate was that his contraction and modernization of the Royal Navy would create two simultaneous effects: It destabilized the international environment, and it triggered a global naval arms race.
Britain had already been under pressure in the Far East and had asked Japan for assistance protecting its interests there, but now it found itself without a fleet of sufficient size to defend its interests in other geostrategic locations like the Caribbean and Africa. It had to trust a new partner, the United States, to take on that job. The only alternative would have been for Britain to simply forgo its colonial interests in order to focus on what it viewed as the preponderant German threat in the Baltic, North Sea, and northern Atlantic Ocean.
There were other knock-on effects. Having surrendered its dominant lead in overall ship numbers, Britain found itself in a new naval arms race in which its previous, sunk-cost investments in older ships offered no benefit. To its dismay, Britain began this new arms race from nearly the same position as its geostrategic rivals. Soon every European power, as well as the United States and Japan, was building modern dreadnoughts, and Fisher and his navy were unable to maintain or reestablish their previous two-power standard.
Today, Fisher’s strategy would be recognized as a divest-to-invest modernization plan. And the lesson is clear: Britain found that it was unable to preserve even the facade of being a global power; it was quickly reduced to being a regional maritime power on the periphery of Europe.
The ensuing conditions of international instability, shifting alliance structures, and the global arms race contributed to the outbreak of World War I and the end of empires, including Britain’s.
The United States currently faces many of the same strategic challenges that Britain confronted just over a century ago. Much as the Balfour ministry faced strategic strain from the distant Boer War—as well as expanding domestic social instability and the rise of Germany—the United States is dealing with the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, domestic civil unrest, and a rising China. Additionally, the White House Office of Management and Budget has attempted to impose on the Defense Department similar fiscal strictures to those that Balfour levied on Fisher’s Admiralty: flat to declining budgets and demands to be more efficient. As a result, the Pentagon has made the decision to cut back on its shipbuilding plans, starting construction of only eight new ships in the next year, half of them auxiliaries, while accelerating the decommissioning of seven cruisers, dropping the fleet to an estimated 294 ships. Congress has indicated that it will seek to expand these numbers, but the future is increasingly murky.
The U.S. naval strategy will produce a fleet too small to protect the United States’ global interests or win its wars.
Given that even the most capable ship can only be in one place at a time and that the world’s oceans are vast, the fleet as planned will not meet the demand for a naval presence detailed by the various four-star regional combatant commanders around the world. On average, their requests equate to approximately 130 ships at sea on any given day, nearly half of the present fleet. Today the Navy deploys, on average, fewer than 90 ships per day, creating gaps in key regions where America’s interests are not being upheld. The Navy previously sought efficiencies that would allow it to “do more with less,” by curbing training or the time ships spent in maintenance. The result, however, was an uptick in serious accidents at sea and a decline in the material readiness of the battle fleet.
Still, the overarching U.S. naval strategy, stated repeatedly by defense leaders during this spring’s round of congressional hearings, is to “divest” of older platforms in order to “invest” in newer platforms that, although fewer in number, would possess a qualitative edge over those fielded by competitors. As history reveals, this strategy will produce a fleet too small to protect the United States’ global interests or win its wars. Ultimately, the U.S. shipbuilding base and repair yards will atrophy to a point where they will not be able to meet the demand for new ships nor provide repairs when war almost inevitably comes.
To avoid the mistakes of the past, Congress should follow its constitutional charge in Article 1 and allocate funds sufficient to both provide for a newer, more modern fleet in the long run and to maintain the Navy that it has today as a hedge against the real and proximate threat from China. Such an allocation requires a 3 to 5 percent annual increase in the Navy’s budget for the foreseeable future, as was recommended by the bipartisan 2018 National Defense Strategy Commission.
Both steps are crucial. Weapons like hypersonic missiles and directed energy mounts like the much-hyped railgun are changing the face of warfare, although not its nature, and the United States must invest to keep up with its competitors in China and Russia, which are already fielding some of these systems in large numbers. However, the Navy, as the day-to-day patroller facing these two rival great powers, cannot shrink the size of its battle force. As both Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt and later Ronald Reagan all understood: Great powers possess large, robust, and resilient navies. Conversely, shrinking fleets historically suggest nations that are overstretched, overtasked, and in retreat. Such revelations invite expansion and challenge from would-be rivals. To meet the demands of the current strategic environment, the U.S. Navy must grow—and quickly.
Not even a fleet of 355 ships, the number advanced by the Obama administration in its closing days, will be sufficient to reestablish conventional deterrence on the high seas. Instead, the United States should seek a fleet of 456 ships, comprising a balance between high-end, high-tech ships such as nuclear attack submarines and low-end, cheaper small surface combatants that can be added to numbers quickly. It should also seek to extend the lives of the ships it has now in its inventory to cover the short-term threat. The United States can do this by scheduling these ships for service life extensions of their hulls and power plants and for modernization of their combat systems and associated sensors within the constellation of the nation’s civilian ship repair yards.
This endeavor will be expensive. Each Ticonderoga-class cruiser or Arleigh Burke-class destroyer could cost as much as half a billion dollars to repair and modernize, but replacing each cruiser and destroyer with a new ship would cost $3.5 billion and $1.9 billion, respectively, and such repair and modernization efforts would have the additional effect of rejuvenating the nation’s ship repair capacity that has lain fallow for too long.
The United States began the 20th century as a peripheral power. First, Theodore Roosevelt’s work to upbuild the Navy, followed by the efforts of the Wilson administration to meet the demands of a world war by tripling the size of the fleet, helped place the United States in a strong position at sea. This position was strengthened during the late 1930s, when Rep. Carl Vinson worked with FDR to expand the size of the Navy prior to World War II through three shipbuilding bills that culminated in the 1940 Two-Ocean Navy Act. It was those efforts, taken in times of peace, that allowed the U.S. Navy at the end of World War II to seize center stage.
Now, in this third decade of the 21st century, the United States must not ignore the rhymes of history, repeating the mistakes of the sea power that came before it—Britain—by lulling itself into the false belief that it can divest to invest in a brighter future while China maneuvers to overtake it. It must have larger defense budgets that will allow for a sea power-focused national security strategy in the face of rising threats. The United States must recognize yet again—as others have before it—that on the world’s oceans, quantity has a quality all its own.
This story appears in the Fall 2021 print issue.
3. To Counter China, U.S. Policy toward Taiwan Must Change
Excerpts:
A better approach to PRC–Taiwan policy is one of “strategic coherence,” based on transparency about what is at stake. This begins by acknowledging and speaking to these realities: Taiwan is a friend of democratic, free-market countries, and the PRC is not. These inconvenient truths have been ignored by successive U.S. governments for decades. That should end. The U.S. president and other leaders should be at least as expressive about the value of Taiwan’s democratic capitalism to the world as prior leaders were in encouraging Beijing’s market-opening periods.
In practical terms, this should be accompanied by further opening of engagement with the Taiwanese government. The Trump administration upgraded U.S. diplomatic and political relations with Taiwan. President Trump spoke with President Tsai during his transition to office in 2016. This was the first and only direct discussion between a U.S. president or president-elect and a Taiwanese leader. If the United States can engage the Taliban in its role as head of government in Afghanistan, surely we can regularize presidential calls with the democratically elected leader of Taiwan. This opening should include continuing Trump-era cabinet-level and senior military engagement with Taiwan. Biden’s team has sustained some of the practices of its predecessor. It should continue them and build on them.
To Counter China, U.S. Policy toward Taiwan Must Change
The U.S. should move from strategic ambiguity to strategic coherence.
Taiwanese soldiers take part in a drill in a military base in Hsinchu, Taiwan, January 19, 2021. (Ann Wang/Reuters)
The U.S. should move from strategic ambiguity to strategic coherence.
The ignominious U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan punctuated a feckless policy based on a false premise of opposition to “forever wars” promoted by the Trump and Biden administrations. The implications of that doctrine — that a commitment of U.S. troops overseas without a specified duration constitutes an endless war and “nation-building” — will ripple across U.S. relationships around the world for some time. The Biden administration has been explicit that the U.S. will not support extended military commitments for partners unwilling or unable to fight for themselves.
The lesson of the U.S. withdrawal was not lost on Taiwan, with which the U.S. has an important, long-standing relationship. President Tsai Ing-wen took to social media to acknowledge that the situation shows “that Taiwan’s only option is to make ourselves stronger, more united and more resolute in our determination to protect ourselves.”
Just the same, even applying the Biden worldview, Taiwan comes out pretty well. After all, Taiwan is one of the wealthiest, most vibrant democracies in the world. Nation-building? Not a problem; a nation has been built without a U.S. military presence and despite decades-long determination by the People’s Republic China and, in some ways by the United States, to blunt or ignore it.
Is Taiwan willing to defend itself? The PRC seems to be putting Tsai to the test. Marking the occasion of its National Day, October 1, China over several days sent nearly 150 military aircraft into Taiwan’s air-defense identification zones to remind Taiwan and the world that it has no intention of leaving the island nation to its own future. For its part, the U.S. has stepped up military operations in the region. Recent reports that U.S. special-operations teams are in Taiwan providing training suggest that the PRC’s provocations will not be ignored.
President Tsai’s comments indicate her resolve. And she’s putting actions behind the words. After several years of declining defense spending by previous governments, Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has committed to increase the spending to 3 percent of GDP, which the U.S. has long encouraged. This year’s budget reflects a rise of about 10 percent in defense spending, with additional increases projected in coming years. While even more is needed, including smarter acquisitions of the right capabilities, at 3 percent, Taiwan’s percentage of GDP spent on defense would be more than double that of Germany and Japan, where the U.S. has about 35,000 and 55,000 troops, respectively.
This emerging resolve is taking place against a backdrop of an ongoing debate about how the U.S. and other supportive countries should characterize the nature of their commitment to foster Taiwan’s freedom from control by Beijing. For decades, the policy has been characterized as “strategic ambiguity.” This means that the United States has no explicit commitment to defend Taiwan in the event of an attack by the PRC. U.S. policy has been to provide Taiwan military support but not to support by force any effort by either Beijing or Taipei to change the status quo.
Ambiguity has been embedded in U.S. policy since the 1979 passage of the Taiwan Relations Act, which Congress passed (with the support of Biden, a senator at the time) after President Jimmy Carter abrogated a mutual-defense treaty that the United States had signed with Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China government on Taiwan in 1954.
The 1954 pact had been ratified by the U.S. Senate. Congress passed the 1979 Act to counter Carter’s decision to recognize the PRC as “the sole legal government of China.” Congress, in a bipartisan consensus, always has seen itself as the defender of Taiwan’s status even as presidents of both parties over the years treated the PRC with kid gloves in an attempt to modulate Beijing’s behavior. That approach has failed. The PRC has become more emboldened and aggressive on every front, including Taiwan.
Some analysts and many in Congress would like to see a shift in U.S. policy from “strategic ambiguity” to “strategic clarity.” The Taiwan Protection Act, the Taiwan Invasion Prevention Act (TIPA), and other legislation has been introduced to provide that clarity. TIPA provides the president the authority to use military force “to secure and protect Taiwan against . . . direct armed attack by the military forces of the People’s Republic of China.”
In fact, that kind of clarity is not the most appropriate alternative to the current policy. As a superpower, the United States should preserve flexibility in its global security relationships. It also is not even obvious that Taiwan’s body politic would welcome an explicit security guarantee from the United States. Both major political parties in Taiwan — the ruling DPP and the opposition KMT — over many years have shaped how they refer to the current reality. They are not stuck in the rhetoric of 1979 even if the United States is. It could be problematic for the U.S. to be seen as upsetting their characterizations of cross-strait reality.
Even from the U.S. perspective alone, a security guarantee for Taiwan is not the most obvious response to the failure of strategic ambiguity. The U.S. is bound by treaty to respond to an attack on any NATO ally, and lackluster defense spending by NATO national governments is one apparent outcome of that guarantee. A commitment to come to Taiwan’s defense in the event of a PRC attack could affect the policies of other countries in the region that are aligned with U.S. policy and concerned about Beijing’s posturing and defense buildups. As the superpower, the U.S. has marshaled the support of South Korea, Japan, Australia, India, and others. A security pact with Taiwan would give a propaganda wedge to the PRC, which could declare that the U.S. has upset the balance and created a potential casus belli.
Just because “strategic clarity” about a security guarantee for Taiwan is the wrong approach doesn’t mean that the status quo is preferable. Everything about the PRC and Taiwan has changed, in fundamental ways, since the policy was adopted more than four decades ago. A different approach is in order. Despite being coddled and cajoled by the world since 1979, the PRC has emerged as a totalitarian, human-rights-abusing, anti-market belligerent actor in the region and globally. And despite being isolated by the world, Taiwan has become a vibrant, democratic, free-market, progressive nation. To cite just one indicator: Taiwan’s per capita income on a purchasing-power basis is more than three times that of the PRC, where nearly half the population lives on $5 per day.
A better approach to PRC–Taiwan policy is one of “strategic coherence,” based on transparency about what is at stake. This begins by acknowledging and speaking to these realities: Taiwan is a friend of democratic, free-market countries, and the PRC is not. These inconvenient truths have been ignored by successive U.S. governments for decades. That should end. The U.S. president and other leaders should be at least as expressive about the value of Taiwan’s democratic capitalism to the world as prior leaders were in encouraging Beijing’s market-opening periods.
In practical terms, this should be accompanied by further opening of engagement with the Taiwanese government. The Trump administration upgraded U.S. diplomatic and political relations with Taiwan. President Trump spoke with President Tsai during his transition to office in 2016. This was the first and only direct discussion between a U.S. president or president-elect and a Taiwanese leader. If the United States can engage the Taliban in its role as head of government in Afghanistan, surely we can regularize presidential calls with the democratically elected leader of Taiwan. This opening should include continuing Trump-era cabinet-level and senior military engagement with Taiwan. Biden’s team has sustained some of the practices of its predecessor. It should continue them and build on them.
During the Cold War, Ronald Reagan reoriented U.S. policy toward the USSR through the simple recognition that the U.S. no longer accepted that Soviet power was inevitable, either within Russia or around the world. That initially rattled U.S. allies and much of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment. Both groups had grown comfortable in accepting that the USSR was an expansionist power that had to be reckoned with, provided space, and not pressured. Once it became obvious even within the Soviet politburo that Reagan was right, the U.S. foreign-policy elite and European allies soon found themselves recognizing that, if the Soviet Union itself knew it was in trouble, Western leaders should probably acknowledge it themselves.
A policy of strategic coherence toward the PRC and Taiwan would include the adoption of an analogous posture toward Beijing. The current global consensus is that the PRC is ascendant and taking bold steps to consolidate its emerging power. There are ample reasons to challenge that presumption by focusing on profound underlying structural fractures:
- The population is aging and shrinking.
- The one-child policy created crushing burdens on those who must support four grandparents and two parents.
- The education system has failed to anticipate the needs of new entrants to this smaller workforce. Rural workers are poorly educated, with inadequate elementary and secondary education, leaving them unable to fill skilled-labor positions that are crucial to the PRC’s role in the global supply chain. In the cities, a burgeoning number of college-educated only children are overqualified for the jobs that are available. Urban college-educated unemployment is a serious problem.
- The economy is burdened by a profound debt level, upward of 300 percent of GDP.
- Real-estate speculation has led to bubbles that will create havoc when they burst. See the collapse of the developer Evergrande. While extreme, it may be just the beginning. Heavily leveraged urban middle-class homeowners are panicking at the prospect that their life savings may dissolve. Most of the rest of the world went through a period of economic contraction and financial crisis in 2008–10. The PRC avoided that through massive government action to inflate the economy and paper over underlying weaknesses. Whether or not Evergrande is a harbinger of the inevitable reckoning, a reckoning is coming.
- The Chinese Communist Party has devastated China’s environment in its quest for development.
President Xi and the CCP understand that all of this creates a cauldron for social unrest. Xi, in his own words, has lowered expectations of what the CCP can deliver. Now it is simply “modest prosperity.” Recent actions of his — e.g., cracking down on ostentatious wealth, breaking up big companies — that prop up his own power also reflect his grave concerns that the promise of modest prosperity is at risk and that the public will not stand for the regime’s failure to meet that low bar. Chinese citizens generally are not agitated by the lack of democracy, freedom, and rule of law. The one commitment they understand is the one to modest prosperity, and now the prospect of that is uncertain.
The communist government knows that its hold on society is tenuous. Attempts by the party to maintain control are reflected in the totalitarian use of data, artificial intelligence, and facial-recognition technology as well as in the internment of religious minorities, the crackdown on Western values, the leaning into Chinese nationalism, and efforts to control of all media, especially social media. These are the actions not of a confident regime but of one that knows it is at risk.
These domestic challenges, and the CCP’s intensified nationalism, will be reflected in external actions. Most notably, we will see continued smothering of dissent in Hong Kong and attempts to stifle Taiwan through threats and military posturing.
A U.S. policy of strategic coherence is not intended to cheer on such disequilibrium. But without question the U.S. should speak truth about the actual situation on the mainland and about what is at stake in Taiwan. The PRC is not on a path to dominate the world. It is a fragile, unconfident power that will continue to take extreme measures to control its citizens, all the while blustering to be seen as projecting power and self-assuredness. As Reagan did with the Soviet Union, we should be honest and forthright in our own recognition of the truth. We should speak that truth clearly and, in so doing, express our conviction that the CCP is a malignant force in global relations and that it must be checked and confronted without fear or accommodation.
This should include other practical elements. The U.S. should continue to support Taiwan in improving its military capabilities. We should continue to work with like-minded allies to improve strategic readiness in the region. The recent meeting by President Biden with the so-called Quad Group is an important and healthy step in that direction, as is the superb decision by the administration to join with Australia and the United Kingdom to bolster Australia’s strategic naval forces. Whether that could have been handled with more aplomb vis-à-vis France is an academic question. France is an important ally and well positioned in the region. The United States must work with her and across the European Union to continue to accelerate strategic alignment to isolate and call out the PRC.
By the early to mid 1970s, the U.S. government and foreign-policy cognoscenti had concluded that the USSR was a rising hegemony and that the best the U.S. could do was accommodate it and establish a global consensus that it was possible to manage the decline of Western power in the face of rising Soviet communism. Reagan changed that through the simple act of exposing the lie and then developing a coherent policy to check that outcome. Core to that policy was the encouragement of countries, in Eastern Europe and around the world, that found themselves in the Soviet sights and then turning up the pressure. The Reagan Doctrine called for strengthening the U.S. itself and standing by those countries, in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere, that were willing to challenge the Soviet perception of expansionism.
Nigh on half a century later, we face another faux rising power. We have it within ourselves to check that and reverse what has seemed inevitable for too long. Taiwan stands in the way of the PRC narrative of inevitability, and a policy of strategic coherence toward both the PRC and Taiwan could be the way to begin to roll that back. It is time.
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Therese Shaheen is a businesswoman and CEO of US Asia International. She was the chairman of the State Department’s American Institute in Taiwan from 2002 to 2004.
4. Blind to History, Facebook Is in the Trustbusters’ Crosshairs
Excerpts:
The other piece of advice I gave Mark Zuckerberg in 2017 was to give up portraying Facebook as a “global community” and instead to make a virtue out of being an American company. When they come after you, I suggested, you want to be able to tell them to be careful, as you’re Big Tech USA, and you’ve got your work cut out competing with Big Tech PRC. To date, however, Zuckerberg has made this argument only half-heartedly. “Break Up FB?” read one of his talking points when he was testifying in Congress in April 2018. “U.S. tech companies’ key asset for America; breakup strengthens Chinese companies.”
“We still need to make it so that American companies can innovate,” he told senators at that time, “or else we’re going to fall behind Chinese competitors.” And: “Chinese Internet companies [are] … a real strategic and competitive threat that, in American technology policy we … should be thinking about.” In July last year, he described Facebook as “a proudly American company” that believes in “values — democracy, competition, inclusion and free expression.”
Yet somehow, “What’s good for Facebook is good for America” doesn’t have the same ring as it did for General Motors. Right now, U.S. legislators and a rising proportion of American voters think, with some justification, that “What’s bad for Facebook is good for America.” If the ultimate beneficiary of that disenchantment with the world’s biggest social network turns out to be China, the blame will lie squarely with Mark Zuckerberg. And he can’t say I didn’t warn him.
Blind to History, Facebook Is in the Trustbusters’ Crosshairs
I tried to warn Mark Zuckerberg that he risked becoming part Rockefeller, part Hearst. But the rest of us don’t have a good solution for what his platform has become.
October 10, 2021, 3:00 AM EDT
I have met Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg only once and it did not go well. It was at a dinner in July 2017, in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s presidential election victory, and controversy was raging about Facebook’s political role. I had the temerity to warn him that he increasingly resembled a cross between John D. Rockefeller and William Randolph Hearst. By that I meant that Facebook was in danger not only of going the way of Standard Oil, the favorite target of the trustbusters of the Progressive Era, but also of becoming as politically toxic as the Hearst newspaper group became in the heyday of yellow journalism.
He did not click “Like.” I wasn’t surprised. He hadn’t taken any of my classes when he was at Harvard, either. Though he recently professed an admiration for Augustus Caesar, the Facebook founder has never struck me as seriously interested in history.
Here’s the history that’s relevant to Facebook. Standard Oil was originally cheered for raising industrial efficiency and lowering the price of kerosene as its share of the U.S. oil market rose to 90%. But muckraking investigative journalism, especially Ida Tarbell’s “History of the Standard Oil Company,” stirred up public outrage.
Antitrust actions were a response to what Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis termed “the curse of bigness.” Outsized firms, Brandeis argued, were bound to treat employees and business competitors unfairly. This was the basis for the 1911 landmark judgment in Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. U.S., which broke Standard Oil up into 34 separate companies.
Hearst’s newspaper group suffered a worse fate. A Harvard dropout like Zuckerberg, Hearst was given the San Francisco Examiner in 1887 as a gift from his wealthy father. Hearst invested in superior printing technology and hired star writers such as Mark Twain to transform the paper into “The Monarch of the Dailies.” In all, he founded or acquired 42 newspapers, including at least one in every major American city. At their peak in the mid-1930s, Hearst’s papers reached 20 million readers a day — one in four Americans.
Hearst papers appealed to the urban working class, mixing populist and progressive politics with nationalism, xenophobia and later isolationism. In the 1890s, Hearst backed the populist Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. But his methods in pressing for the Spanish-American War (“the Journal’s War”) were unscrupulous: Yellow journalism was the fake news of those days. Orson Welles’s film “Citizen Kane,” released in 1941, immortalized Hearst’s rise and fall. (Welles’s screenwriter, Herman J. Mankiewicz, had fallen out with Hearst earlier in his career.)
Contrary to popular belief, Mark Twain never said: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” What he wrote was: “History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.” Zuckerberg today is Rockefeller plus Hearst seen through Twain’s kaleidoscope.
Facebook Inc. is very, very big and it makes a ton of money. According to a Pew Research poll of U.S. adults in February, 69% are Facebook users. Worldwide, Facebook has 2.8 billion users, 60% of all people on Earth with an internet connection. Counting Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger — all Facebook apps — a staggering 3.14 billion people use Facebook, close to half of humanity.
Small wonder its market capitalization is just short of a trillion dollars. It offers the biggest reach and highest precision in the history of advertising. (As Mark Zuckerberg once had to explain to Senator Orrin Hatch, Facebook’s service is free because “We sell ads.”)
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Economies of scale are a key feature of capitalism. These are especially powerful in the case of network-based businesses. Perhaps the real curse of bigness is the negative press that “scaling” inevitably attracts.
For the past five years, raking Facebook’s muck has been a path to prominence for many an ambitious journalist, for the obvious reason that traditional media companies loathe Facebook for eating their lunches. (Once upon a time, all those ad dollars went to them.) The Guardian’s Carole Cadwalladr made her name by revealing that Facebook had released data on tens of millions of users to the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica. Last month, it was the turn of Jeff Horwitz of the Wall Street Journal.
In a series of stories billed as “The Facebook Files,” Horwitz and his colleagues revealed, first, that Facebook had a secret, two-tier system of enforcing its rules, cutting slack to celebrities like the Brazilian soccer star Neymar and Trump, who were just two of 5.8 million users who were granted “XCheck” status. “Unlike the rest of our community,” an internal review stated, “these people can violate our standards without any consequences.” This appears to have been concealed from Facebook’s internal oversight board.
Second, Facebook knew Instagram was worsening "body image issues" among teenagers. According to the company’s research in March 2020, 32% percent of teenage girls “said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.” Among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the desire to kill themselves back to Instagram.
Third, Facebook’s decision in 2018 to change its News Feed algorithm to emphasize “meaningful social interactions,” or MSI, had the perverse effect of driving a spike in online outrage and anger. Zuckerberg had claimed it was a sacrifice to shift from helping people find relevant content to helping them interact with friends and family, but the company soon realized that “publishers and political parties were reorienting their posts toward outrage and sensationalism” — and not only in the U.S. However, the company pressed on because — according to Kevin Roose of the New York Times, another raker of Facemuck — MSI was all along “an attempt to reverse a yearslong decline in user engagement.”
Finally, Facebook turned out to be playing a key part in spreading misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines. More than two-fifths of comments on English-language vaccine-related posts risked discouraging vaccinations. One post that had 53,000 reshares and three million views said vaccines “are all experimental & you are in the experiment.”
For all this, it turns out that the Journal had a single source: Frances Haugen, a Facebook product manager who left the company in May after working on democracy, misinformation and counterespionage issues. Whereas Ida Tarbell was an outsider — her father had been a victim of Standard Oil’s rapacious expansion — Haugen is an insider, whose position gave her access to tens of thousands of pages of internal documents. Not content with passing them to the Journal, she also gave “60 Minutes” an interview (Sunday), testified before a Senate Commerce subcommittee (Tuesday), and fired off a succession of letters to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s whistleblower office.
In her own words, Haugen is saying nothing new. As she told Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes”:
Facebook makes more money when you consume more content. People enjoy engaging with things that elicit an emotional reaction. And the more anger that they get exposed to, the more they interact and the more they consume … Mark has never set out to make a hateful platform. But he has allowed choices to be made where the side-effects of those choices are that hateful, polarizing content gets more distribution and more reach.
If you read Antonio Garcia Martinez’s seminal “Chaos Monkeys,” you’ve known this for five years.
But the letters to the SEC go further, because they explicitly accuse Zuckerberg of “misrepresenting” Facebook’s research on the platform’s impact on teenagers in his sworn testimony before Congress; misrepresenting “core metrics to investors and advertisers”; “materially misstating” the extent to which it “proactively removes … hate speech”; and — though this isn’t really a matter for the SEC — overstating its efforts “to combat misinformation and violent extremism relating to the 2020 election” and the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.
Money quote: “Facebook knew its algorithms and platforms promoted this type of harmful content, and it failed to deploy internally recommended or lasting countermeasures.” These are serious charges, and some of them must be giving Facebook’s lawyers sleepless nights.
Well, I never. On Monday, at 11:39 a.m. EDT, just as this great tsunami of muck was breaking over Hacker Way — what a coincidence! — Facebook suddenly crashed and stayed down for six hours. And not just Facebook. Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp services were also down, as was the virtual reality service Oculus.
“It was as if someone had ‘pulled the cables’ from their data centers all at once and disconnected them from the internet,” according to the website security company Cloudflare. The disruption also hit the company’s internal tools and systems, including Workplace, hampering recovery efforts.
Facebook blamed a “faulty configuration change” that had interrupted traffic flowing between its data centers and caused a “cascading effect.” (For incomprehensible details see here and here.) According to one respected internet security analyst, “someone at Facebook [had] caused an update to be made to the company’s Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) records,” the mechanism by which internet service providers share information about routing traffic. Evidently this update went a wee bit wrong.
There are two possible interpretations. Either this illustrates the extreme folly of centralizing a large part of the internet in the hands of a single company that has inadequate operating procedures, or it illustrates the extreme folly of centralizing a large part of the internet in the hands of a single company that tells fibs.
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Consider the facts. On Sunday, Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president for policy and global affairs, appeared on CNN to defend the company, saying the platform reflected “the good, the bad and ugly of humanity” and that it was trying to “mitigate the bad, reduce it and amplify the good.” To call his defense feeble would be an understatement. Clegg was an ineffectual politician who almost destroyed Britain’s Liberal Democrats by taking them into coalition with the Conservatives. Was this his attempt to destroy Facebook?
Then, on Tuesday, came a more combative defense from Zuckerberg himself. The massive outage, he said, was “a reminder of how much our work matters to people. The deeper concern … isn’t how many people switch to competitive services or how much money we lose, but what it means for the people who rely on our services to communicate with loved ones, run their businesses, or support their communities.”
Did it not occur to him that this was like a line from Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone? “A reminder of how much our work matters to people”? Shows our importance to “the people who rely on our services to communicate with loved ones”? And you wouldn’t want that to happen to your loved ones again, would you? Remind me: What’s “Move fast and break things” in Italian?
The contrarian position, to which I am often attracted, is to side with Facebook. I have a certain admiration for those who have taken Zuckerberg’s side in the last week, notably Robby Soave, author of “Tech Panic: Why We Shouldn’t Fear Facebook and the Future.” He writes: “We’ve been here before, a thousand times over, with video games, pinball machines, the television, the radio, the telephone, the printing press, and even the written word. Each of these technologies forced society to confront some very real problems, but they also dramatically improved the lives of the average human being.”
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The problem is that not one of the innovations on this list achieved the kind of central warehousing and mining of personal data that Facebook has. And not one of them sought to monetize data by selling ads targeted on the basis of that data. And, consequently, not one of them had Facebook’s incentive to maximize user engagement, regardless of the adverse social consequences.
In his brilliant and influential book, “The Revolt of the Public,” which I missed when it was first published by Amazon in 2014, Martin Gurri argued that Facebook was a key vehicle for populist uprisings against the old elites of the world, from the Arab Spring to the Ukrainian “Euromaidan” revolution. We were witnessing, he argued, the “collision of two modes of organizing life: one hierarchical, industrial, and top-down, the other networked, egalitarian, bottom-up.”
The best historical analogy was with the impact of the printing press on Europe after the 15th century. Unbeknown to him, I was making the same argument at that time, too. and it became the basis of “The Square and the Tower.”
As Antonio Garcia Martinez noted on Substack last week:
The printing press analogy (unlike lots of these big-picture analogies) actually gets better the more you dig into the history of 15th and 16th century Europe. There are so many parallels with that time in history, it’s almost like there’s a one-to-one mapping from Gutenberg to Zuckerberg, the monks in the scriptoria to the New York Times, and the Church to the US Congress … If you’d asked a Bohemian burgher in 1618 — the first year of the Thirty Years’ War, and the bloodiest European conflict until WWII — if the printing press was a good idea, what would he have said? Very likely, he’d have replied with a thundering “no!” Before the Enlightenment, science, liberal democracy, human rights, antibiotics, and all the rest of it, that invention seemed as big a threat to the social order then as Facebook seems now.
Yet Gurri and I both missed a fundamental difference between the printing press and the internet. The former stayed, to a remarkable extent, decentralized; the latter did not. Even the likes of Hearst never had a share of the global public sphere remotely comparable to the one that Zuckerberg has achieved, much less a knowledge of his readers’ every reaction.
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Here are some more examples of why Facebook is so different from the printing press, from sources other than Haugen and from this year alone:
According to the Washington Post, Facebook “disproportionately amplified vaccine-hesitant voices over experts,” and then, in a quarterly report about its most-viewed posts in the U.S., sought to conceal that its most popular link had been an article from the Chicago Tribute on the death of a doctor who had been vaccinated.
According to MIT Technology Review, Facebook’s most popular pages for Christian and African American content in the run-up to the 2020 election were run by Eastern European “troll farms.” To quote Facebook’s internal report, troll-farmed “content was reaching 140 million U.S. users per month — 75% of whom had never followed any of the pages. They were seeing the content because Facebook’s content-recommendation system had pushed it into their news feeds. In October 2019, all 15 of the top pages targeting Christian Americans and ten of the top 15 Facebook pages targeting African Americans were being run by troll farms.”
According to Brian Boland, who left Facebook last November after 11 years, “the most senior leadership in the company does not want to invest in understanding the impact of its core products.” Moreover, he told the Times’s Roose, “it doesn’t want to make the data available for others to do the hard work and hold them accountable.” His role had been at CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned search engine that allowed users to analyze Facebook user engagement. Facebook management rapidly soured on CrowdTangle when its results showed that conservative commentators like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino were getting much more engagement on their Facebook pages than mainstream news outlets. (Last week, according to The Verge, CrowdTangle CEO Brandon Silverman announced that he was leaving Facebook.)
According to Cody Buntain, an assistant professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology interviewed by the New York Times, Facebook “undermined trust researchers may have” in the company by omitting the interactions of about half of Facebook’s U.S. users in the dataset it made available to him and his colleagues.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Mark Weinstein, the founder of the ad-free social network MeWe, has “changed his mind” and is now prepared to tell the Federal Trade Commission — which is leading a 46-state antitrust investigation of Facebook — that the company is a monopoly.
I could go on and on, because (as you may have guessed) I collect this stuff. To my mind, the most shocking of all the recent Facebook stories has been the evidence of its role in amplifying the malign influence of the antivaccine conspiracy theorists — in particular, members of the so-called Disinformation Dozen (such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.), who have accounted for a staggering proportion of the antivax content shared online. By the time NPR caught up with this story in May, Facebook had removed 16 accounts from Facebook or Instagram and placed restrictions on 22 others. But we have known about Facebook’s antivax problem since before Covid. In May of last year, Neil Johnson and Rhys Leahy published a study in Nature showing that, during the 2019 measles outbreak, the antivax communities on Facebook outnumbered the pro-vaxers three to one. h
That same month, the Wall Street Journal revealed that in January 2017 Facebook had hired Carlos Gomez Uribe, the former head of Netflix’s recommendation system, to lead its news feed integrity team. One proposal Uribe’s group came up with, “Sparing Sharing,” was designed to reduce the influence of hyperactive Facebook users — super spreaders of viral content, analogous to the super spreaders who disproportionately passed on the Covid virus. However, Facebook policy chief Joel Kaplan opposed the idea, which was internally nicknamed “Eat Your Veggies.” Zuckerberg’s decision was, according to the Journal, “Do it, but cut the weighting by 80%” — and don’t bring me any more ideas like that. Uribe left Facebook within a year.
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See what happens when a virus gets an assist from viral content arguing against vaccines against the virus? How many Americans have died prematurely this year because they believed the magical thinking promoted on one of Facebook’s apps? As nearly all the Covid deaths that have occurred since vaccines became generally available were of unvaccinated people, the number could be in the tens of thousands.
So it’s not quite enough to say, as Ben Thompson tweeted last week, that “the menace comes from frictionlessly connecting all of humanity,” or that Facebook simply “refracts our entire view of the world and provides a warped look at ourselves” (Garcia Martinez again). Johannes Gutenberg didn’t connect all the printing presses, harvest readers’ likes and dislikes, and then monetize them in a way that incentivized him to spread the theory that bubonic plague was airborne or that Europe was full of witches.
Yet in one important respect I agree with Facebook’s defenders. The company’s critics have got no credible reform proposal. Clearly, the FTC aspires to break up Facebook, and I can well imagine that, many months from now, Zuckerberg will be ordered to restore the independence of Instagram and WhatsApp (and that he’ll say it’s technically impossible). For the other big tech companies, Facebook would perform a valuable service as the sacrificial victim of the “antitrust hipsters” led by FTC chairwoman Lina Khan, just as Standard Oil took the hit for an entire class of robber barons in 1911.
But there is a reason that Haugen did not send her documents to the FTC. In a video posted last Sunday, she said she did not believe breaking up Facebook would solve the problems her leaked documents revealed. This is also the view of Mark Weinstein. And, as I have argued elsewhere, I agree.
So what’s the alternative? Those, like Haugen, who argue that Facebook needs to be more tightly regulated appear not to have noticed that investing ever-more power in federal regulators has rarely had the intended outcome. Turning Facebook into a utility, with federally mandated powers to censor hate speech, sounds like a disaster. You either end up with Orwell’s Ministry of Truth or with the social media equivalent of Amtrak or, best case, regulatory capture and the status quo (see banking, Big Pharma).
The third option, which I’ve proposed in this column before, is to repeal or significantly edit section 230 of the 1934 Communications Act, as amended by the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which is the Catch-22 of internet regulation, allowing Facebook to be a mere platform when it’s caught hosting harmful content and a publisher when it’s limiting free speech. The catch is that, unless you simultaneously created some kind of First Amendment for (non-curated) cyberspace, you would simply increase censorship if you scrapped 230, because the tech companies would suddenly face the same liabilities for their content as traditional media companies.
In short: We know there’s a problem with Facebook, but we really haven’t figured out how to fix it. The twist in the tale is that maybe the market takes care of this problem for us. After all, as former Alphabet Inc. chairman Eric Schmidt used to say when defending Google’s near-monopoly on search, “competition is just a click away.”
The irony of Haugen’s charge-sheet against Facebook is that one half alleges excessive power, while the other half alleges concealed decline. As Roose noted in September, “Facebook is in trouble.” It is in fact suffering the “kind of slow, steady decline that anyone who has ever seen a dying company up close can recognize.” Facebook use among teenagers in the U.S. has been declining for years. Now Instagram is losing market share to faster-growing rivals. “Facebook is for old people,” as one 11-year-old put it.
Trailing Big in Big Tech
Stock prices normalized (October 10, 2016=100)
Source: Bloomberg
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The other piece of advice I gave Mark Zuckerberg in 2017 was to give up portraying Facebook as a “global community” and instead to make a virtue out of being an American company. When they come after you, I suggested, you want to be able to tell them to be careful, as you’re Big Tech USA, and you’ve got your work cut out competing with Big Tech PRC. To date, however, Zuckerberg has made this argument only half-heartedly. “Break Up FB?” read one of his talking points when he was testifying in Congress in April 2018. “U.S. tech companies’ key asset for America; breakup strengthens Chinese companies.”
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“We still need to make it so that American companies can innovate,” he told senators at that time, “or else we’re going to fall behind Chinese competitors.” And: “Chinese Internet companies [are] … a real strategic and competitive threat that, in American technology policy we … should be thinking about.” In July last year, he described Facebook as “a proudly American company” that believes in “values — democracy, competition, inclusion and free expression.”
Yet somehow, “What’s good for Facebook is good for America” doesn’t have the same ring as it did for General Motors. Right now, U.S. legislators and a rising proportion of American voters think, with some justification, that “What’s bad for Facebook is good for America.” If the ultimate beneficiary of that disenchantment with the world’s biggest social network turns out to be China, the blame will lie squarely with Mark Zuckerberg. And he can’t say I didn’t warn him.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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5. We've left Afghanistan — but its consequences are just starting to arrive
Excerpts:
Asked whether pulling out our forces made the United States more or less safe from terrorism, 52 percent said, “less safe,” 6 percent said “safer” and 37 percent said “no difference.” By more than a two-to-one majority (56 percent to 26 percent), Americans agreed that “withdrawal from Afghanistan wasn’t a good idea that was botched, it was a bad idea” because the Taliban could provide al Qaeda and other terrorists with bases of operations. A 52 percent majority believed we should have left some troops behind or not withdrawn any at all, compared to 33 percent who said all troops should have been withdrawn. And 61 percent believed our failure in Afghanistan would encourage jihadists around the world, making them more likely to attack the United States, compared to 29 percent who disagreed.
These are sobering numbers and, if sustained, represent a thorough rejection of the previous conventional wisdom. Trump himself seemed to grasp this new direction of public opinion; at a Sept. 25 rally in Perry, Ga., referring to his own “plans” had he been reelected, Trump said “we were going to occupy Bagram [air force base] for a long time to come, and it would’ve been so good.” Typically, Trump either ignored or did not understand that staying at Bagram “for a long time” meant not fully withdrawing. But Bagram was a good applause line at the Perry rally.
The key conclusion today is that the consequences of the Afghanistan withdrawal are far from over, and events there and in the miasma of global terrorism will continue to command our attention. Biden will not be able to take a victory lap in the 2022 or 2024 elections for having ended one of the endless wars; instead, he will be explaining why America is once again more vulnerable to terrorism.
We may have left Afghanistan, but it has not left us. And neither have the terrorists.
We've left Afghanistan — but its consequences are just starting to arrive
The Hill · by John Bolton, Opinion Contributor · October 10, 2021
Washington’s conventional wisdom held in recent years that Americans wanted to “end endless wars” around the world, particularly in Afghanistan. Public-opinion polling repeatedly found at least plurality support for withdrawing U.S. forces from “our longest war,” seconded by Presidents Trump and Biden, among others.
It was hardly a subject of debate among media commentators and Washington insiders. Who could disagree, except a few irreconcilables? Democrats certainly didn’t question this received truth, nor did many Republicans, bending to Trump’s influence.
The conventional wisdom and its arguments were simple: Why did we invade 20 years ago, wasting lives and treasure? The Afghans should defend themselves. The Taliban has moderated, craving acceptance by “the international community.” The global terrorist threat has receded. Our obsession with the Middle East should end so we can “pivot” to Asia. Time to focus on “nation building” at home, and on climate change.
Then came the actual withdrawal. The swift collapse of the Afghan government and its national army, the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul and riveting scenes of death and terror amid frantic efforts to evacuate U.S. citizens and Afghans who had worked with us for two decades were too stunning to ignore. Washington’s conventional wisdom encountered reality — and dissolved as quickly as the Afghan military.
But conventional wisdom is nothing if not resilient. It quickly concluded that while Americans overwhelming disapproved of how the withdrawal was executed, they nonetheless still concurred with Biden and Trump on the underlying withdrawal decision.
There is, however, strong reason to believe that conventional wisdom has stumbled again, as Americans begin to realize that withdrawal has more profound strategic consequences than simply removing U.S. troops.
Recent congressional hearings, with more coming, have informed the rethinking prompted by millions of television screens portraying our withdrawal’s fully predictable results. For starters, the Taliban provided ample evidence that it had neither modernized nor moderated, naming no women to its new government. Al Qaeda proved to be more numerous and more integrated into the Taliban than even the worst-case United Nations and other studies indicated. Terrorists across the Middle East took heart from the Taliban’s “victory,” and foreign jihadists began returning to Afghanistan. Reports of retaliation and barbarism by Taliban fighters emerged from the few Western journalists still in-country.
For years, presidents in both parties (Obama, Trump, Biden) failed to make the case for remaining in Afghanistan. They apparently did not believe we were safer deploying forces there rather than merely defending against renewed terrorist attacks in the streets and skies over America.
It stands to reason that when citizens weren’t hearing leaders advocate and adequately explain “forward defense,” they didn’t support it. Yet this was the basic logic underlying the Pentagon’s long-standing view that America’s military presence in Afghanistan was a critical insurance policy for sustained protection of the homeland. It was not just the military capabilities deployed there – and NATO’s complementary train-and-assist mission – but the intelligence-gathering program that relied upon the military’s infrastructure and protective capacity to do critical work on terrorism in Afghanistan and the dangers emanating from Pakistan and Iran on its borders.
These were arguments repeatedly put to both Trump and Biden. Contrary to Biden’s glib assertions, senior U.S. military leaders almost unanimously opposed withdrawing all American forces. Equally important, the destructive consequences of the Trump administration’s negotiations with the Taliban, producing the February 2020 Doha agreement, were not well-understood among even Washington policymakers, let alone the general public.
Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley and CENTCOM Commander Gen. Frank McKenzie have now testified before Congress that the U.S.-Taliban agreement had a devastating impact on the spirit of both the Afghan military and the civilian government. Trump’s policy, adopted by Biden, over time demoralized and delegitimized the very Afghan government which America had been instrumental in creating two decades ago. By effectively de-recognizing that government, we caused the collapse in morale that swept away years of training and equipping of Afghan forces.
Thus, while many withdrawal advocates point to the rapid collapse of Afghanistan’s government as buttressing their argument to leave, the collapse was, in fact, a self-inflicted wound by American presidents desperate to reap the perceived political benefits of pulling out.
Looking ahead, now that America’s military departure from Afghanistan is a fact and not just a hypothetical, the key political question is whether public opinion grasps the renewed threats from terrorism thereby created. To be sure, U.S. national-security policy must be based on our fundamental interests, not on domestic U.S. politics, and certainly not on the vagaries of public-opinion polling. Polling commissioned by my Super PAC, however, points to significant shifts in public attitudes after watching and debating the withdrawal and its aftermath in real time. (The polling was conducted September 16-18, covering 1,000 likely voters, with a margin of error of +/- 3.1% at a 95 percent confidence level.)
Asked whether pulling out our forces made the United States more or less safe from terrorism, 52 percent said, “less safe,” 6 percent said “safer” and 37 percent said “no difference.” By more than a two-to-one majority (56 percent to 26 percent), Americans agreed that “withdrawal from Afghanistan wasn’t a good idea that was botched, it was a bad idea” because the Taliban could provide al Qaeda and other terrorists with bases of operations. A 52 percent majority believed we should have left some troops behind or not withdrawn any at all, compared to 33 percent who said all troops should have been withdrawn. And 61 percent believed our failure in Afghanistan would encourage jihadists around the world, making them more likely to attack the United States, compared to 29 percent who disagreed.
These are sobering numbers and, if sustained, represent a thorough rejection of the previous conventional wisdom. Trump himself seemed to grasp this new direction of public opinion; at a Sept. 25 rally in Perry, Ga., referring to his own “plans” had he been reelected, Trump said “we were going to occupy Bagram [air force base] for a long time to come, and it would’ve been so good.” Typically, Trump either ignored or did not understand that staying at Bagram “for a long time” meant not fully withdrawing. But Bagram was a good applause line at the Perry rally.
The key conclusion today is that the consequences of the Afghanistan withdrawal are far from over, and events there and in the miasma of global terrorism will continue to command our attention. Biden will not be able to take a victory lap in the 2022 or 2024 elections for having ended one of the endless wars; instead, he will be explaining why America is once again more vulnerable to terrorism.
We may have left Afghanistan, but it has not left us. And neither have the terrorists.
John Bolton was national security adviser to President Trump from 2018 to 2019, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006 and held senior State Department posts in 2001-2005 and 1985-1989. His most recent book is “The Room Where It Happened" (2020). He is the founder of John Bolton Super PAC, a political action committee supporting candidates who believe in a strong U.S. foreign policy.
The Hill · by John Bolton, Opinion Contributor · October 10, 2021
6. Does Taiwan Need Nuclear Weapons to Deter China?
Excerpts:
The gist of such statements: nuclear threats cannot dissuade China from undertaking actions that serve the vital interest as the CCP leadership construes it.
Again, though, nuclear deterrence ought to be a peripheral concern for Taipei. Beijing is unlikely to order doomsday strikes against real estate it prizes, regardless of whether the occupants of that real estate brandish nuclear arms or not. Far better for the island’s leadership to refuse to pay the opportunity costs of going nuclear and instead concentrate finite militarily relevant resources to girding for more probable contingencies.
Contingencies such as repulsing a conventional cross-strait assault.
Wiser investment will go to armaments that make the island a prickly “porcupine” bristling with “quills” in the form of shore-based anti-ship and anti-air missiles along with sea-based systems such as minefields, surface patrol craft armed to the teeth with missiles, and, once Taiwan’s shipbuilding industry gears up, silent diesel-electric submarines prowling the island’s environs. These are armaments that could make Taiwan indigestible for the PLA. And Beijing could harbor little doubt Taipei would use them.
Capability, resolve, belief. Deterrence through denial.
So Michael Rubin is correct to urge Taiwan not to entrust its national survival to outsiders. But it can take a pass on nuclear weapons—and husband defenses better suited to the strategic surroundings.
Does Taiwan Need Nuclear Weapons to Deter China?
QED.
Set aside Rubin’s claim that the Afghan denouement wrought irreparable harm to America’s standing vis-à-vis allies. He could be right, but I personally doubt it. The United States gave Afghanistan—a secondary cause by any standard—twenty years, substantial resources, and many military lives. That’s a commitment of serious heft, and one that gave Afghans a chance to come together as a society. That they failed reflects more on them than the United States. I suspect Taiwan would be grateful for a commitment of that magnitude and duration.
Yet Rubin’s larger point stands. One nation depends on another for salvation at its peril. Wise statesmen welcome allies . . . without betting everything on them. Taiwan should found its diplomacy and military strategy on deterring Chinese aggression if possible—alone if need be—and on stymieing a cross-strait assault if forced to it. This is bleak advice to be sure, but who will stand by Taiwan if the United States fails to? Japan or Australia might intercede alongside America, but not without it. Nor can Taipei look for succor to the UN Security Council or any other international body where Beijing wields serious clout. These are feeble bulwarks against aggression.
Deterrence, then, is elemental. But does a deterrent strategy demand atomic deterrence? Not necessarily. It’s far from clear that nuclear weapons deter much apart from nuclear bombardment—the type of aggression least likely to befall Taiwan. After all, the mainland longs to possess the island, with all the strategic value it commands. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has little use for a radioactive wasteland.
CCP overseers are vastly more likely to resort to military measures short of nuclear arms. China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could launch a naval blockade or a conventional air campaign against Taiwan in a bid to starve out the populace or bludgeon them into submission. And even a direct cross-strait amphibious offensive—the PLA’s surest way to seize prime real estate on a tight timetable—would preserve most of Taiwan’s value to China.
So, it seems, a nonnuclear onslaught is what Taipei mainly needs to deter. History has shown that nuclear weapons stand little chance of deterring nonnuclear aggression. A threat to visit a Hiroshima or Nagasaki on, say, Shanghai in retaliation for low-level aggression would be implausible. Breaching the nuclear threshold would do little good strategically while painting the islanders as amoral—and hurting their prospects of winning international support in a cross-strait war.
An implausible threat stands little chance of deterring. Think about Henry Kissinger’s classic formula for deterrence, namely that it’s a product of multiplying three variables: capability, resolve, and belief. Capability and resolve are the components of strength. Capability means physical power, chiefly usable military might. Resolve means the willpower to use the capabilities on hand to carry out a deterrent threat. A deterrent threat generally involves denying a hostile contender what it wants or meting out punishment afterward should the contender defy the threat.
Statesmen essaying deterrence are in charge of capability and resolution. They can amass formidable martial power and steel themselves to use it. That doesn’t mean their efforts at deterrence will automatically succeed, though. Belief is Kissinger’s other crucial determinant. It’s up to the antagonist whether it believes in their combined capability and willpower.
Taiwan could field a nuclear arsenal, that is, and its leadership could summon the determination to use the arsenal under specific circumstances such as a nuclear or conventional attack on the island. In other words, it could accumulate the capacity to thwart acts the leadership deems unacceptable or punish them should they occur. But would Chinese Communist magnates find the island’s atomic arsenal and displays of willpower convincing?
Against a nuclear attack, maybe. If Taipei maintained an armory that could inflict damage on China that CCP leaders found unbearable, then Beijing ought to desist from a nuclear attack under the familiar Cold War logic of mutual assured destruction. The two opponents would reach a nuclear impasse.
Kissinger appends a coda to his formula for deterrence, namely that deterrence is a product of multiplication, not a sum. If any one variable is zero, so is deterrence. What that means is that Taiwan could muster all the military might and fortitude in the world and fail anyway if China disbelieved in its capability, resolve, or both. And it might: Chinese Communist leaders have a history of making statements breezily disparaging the impact of the ultimate weapon if used against China. Founding CCP chairman Mao Zedong once derided nukes as a “paper tiger.” A quarter-century ago a PLA general (apparently) joked that Washington would never trade Los Angeles for Taipei.
The gist of such statements: nuclear threats cannot dissuade China from undertaking actions that serve the vital interest as the CCP leadership construes it.
Again, though, nuclear deterrence ought to be a peripheral concern for Taipei. Beijing is unlikely to order doomsday strikes against real estate it prizes, regardless of whether the occupants of that real estate brandish nuclear arms or not. Far better for the island’s leadership to refuse to pay the opportunity costs of going nuclear and instead concentrate finite militarily relevant resources to girding for more probable contingencies.
Contingencies such as repulsing a conventional cross-strait assault.
Wiser investment will go to armaments that make the island a prickly “porcupine” bristling with “quills” in the form of shore-based anti-ship and anti-air missiles along with sea-based systems such as minefields, surface patrol craft armed to the teeth with missiles, and, once Taiwan’s shipbuilding industry gears up, silent diesel-electric submarines prowling the island’s environs. These are armaments that could make Taiwan indigestible for the PLA. And Beijing could harbor little doubt Taipei would use them.
Capability, resolve, belief. Deterrence through denial.
So Michael Rubin is correct to urge Taiwan not to entrust its national survival to outsiders. But it can take a pass on nuclear weapons—and husband defenses better suited to the strategic surroundings.
Dr. James Holmes, a 1945 Contributing Editor, is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and a Nonresident Fellow at the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs. The views voiced here are his alone.
7. America's veterans hold a reserve of national security strength we should tap
Interesting concept/proposals.
Excerpts:
This is not a call, however, for more military spending. The U.S. military is already too expensive for what we’re getting. Absent a global war, the spending necessary to appreciably expand the force is unaffordable. Yes, we can grow key capabilities selectively — and should, while reforming acquisition.
Recently at the Army and Navy Club in Washington, a friend — an Army Ranger with too many combat tours and a faithful service black Labrador — suggested what we, over lunch, dubbed a “Veterans Ready Reserve.”
A Veterans Ready Reserve would constitute a reservoir of veterans who volunteer to be called on in time of national need. These volunteers could be used depending on the need and their abilities. For those less fit than in youth, one could envision non-physically demanding “admin” jobs.
Already, a praiseworthy bipartisan bill in Congress, H.R. 4343, sponsored by Reps. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) and Jimmy Panetta (D-Calif.), both veterans, would enable the Department of Defense (DOD) to place some military retirees with special skills that address a critical shortage into the Ready Reserve.
America's veterans hold a reserve of national security strength we should tap
The Hill · by Jeffrey E. Phillips, opinion contributor · October 10, 2021
War, pestilence and natural disaster — the past two decades have brought into terrifying focus the massive resources needed to adequately respond to crises, especially when any of them occur in parallel. Relying as we have on uniformed military resources likely will prove inadequate in the future. A solution can be found among America’s 18 million veterans.
The U.S. has emerged from a two-decade conflict in Afghanistan that, in simpler times, might be called a “guerilla war.” It was not a “big” war, yet at its height a decade ago, it badly strained the nation’s land forces. Units deployed, returned home for the minimal interval, and then redeployed. Families were strained and some broke. Patriotic employers of employees in the Reserve and National Guard in some cases chafed and jobs were endangered.
Generals nervously considered the implications should something else, perhaps something bigger, arise. The Pentagon spent hundreds of millions of dollars (and still is doing so) to attract and retain young men and women. Meeting recruiting goals frequently has proved impossible in a country where less than a third of military-age youths are qualified for military service — and among that fraction, just 15 percent are interested in doing so.
Will parents, clergy, educators and peers encourage young Americans to serve under leaders whose ability to win a war they could arguably question?
History tells us in stark terms that disasters occur usually when preparation is not optimal. History tells us that big wars happen. We are not immune from history. While becoming too tolerant of lesser war, we have fooled ourselves into thinking a “big one” is impossible. But war is a product of human nature, and human nature does not change.
On Aug. 1, 1990, the theme was the superfluity of big armies: the Soviets were gone and tank battles a thing of the past. On Aug. 2, Iraq invaded Kuwait. Less than seven months later, as a captain in a U.S. armored division, I coursed into Iraq amid a sea of tanks that stretched to the horizon in every direction. Tank battles were fought; fortunately, our enemy used their Soviet-built machines — many of which survived weeks of aerial bombardment — with neither skill nor determination. It could have been very different.
So, here is the creep to war in the Pacific. No, it may not happen, or it may be muted by a sharp clash and then a drawing back of parties. There is a resurgent Russia intent on reclaiming its former glory and territory. And in between, the “smoking” trouble spots that could ignite — or be ignited by — the big ones.
Add the effects of climate change, natural disaster and population dislocations among millions, the specter of other pandemics, civil disorder among a populace increasingly polarized. In the U.S., of necessity, the go-to has been the military, from troops deployed overseas in small but exhaustive wars, to military nurses staffing civilian hospitals, to the National Guard saving lives in the states and on guard in Washington. These massive resource demands, with near simultaneity, have left us in some cases exhausted.
This is not a call, however, for more military spending. The U.S. military is already too expensive for what we’re getting. Absent a global war, the spending necessary to appreciably expand the force is unaffordable. Yes, we can grow key capabilities selectively — and should, while reforming acquisition.
Recently at the Army and Navy Club in Washington, a friend — an Army Ranger with too many combat tours and a faithful service black Labrador — suggested what we, over lunch, dubbed a “Veterans Ready Reserve.”
A Veterans Ready Reserve would constitute a reservoir of veterans who volunteer to be called on in time of national need. These volunteers could be used depending on the need and their abilities. For those less fit than in youth, one could envision non-physically demanding “admin” jobs.
Already, a praiseworthy bipartisan bill in Congress, H.R. 4343, sponsored by Reps. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) and Jimmy Panetta (D-Calif.), both veterans, would enable the Department of Defense (DOD) to place some military retirees with special skills that address a critical shortage into the Ready Reserve.
Our idea of a Veterans Ready Reserve goes further. Such a “reserve” constitutes capability. Even if a million veterans “registered” and only 10,000 were used, that is 10,000 fewer personnel demands. The reserve could be activated by the president and managed by the Pentagon. Beyond that, until activation, little taxpayer expense would be necessary.
Such a “reserve” also offers intangible benefits. These volunteers, who have declared their willingness to again serve their nation, would derive pride and a sense of re-engagement. One can even envision a lapel pin, etc. One can also envision fitness and health improving on the part of some volunteers, who decide they must be ready if called.
Volunteering would not entail benefits, although actual service might. Volunteers would agree that they may never be called upon, or that if the reserve were called upon, they may not be selected for service, based on need and capability. Further, volunteering for this service would not affect any existing veterans or retiree benefits. (Only actual service might affect those benefits.)
We can be certain that America will face crises that create historic demands. Engaging willing veterans in readiness for the call to service is one way to increase capacity and tap into a patriotic spirit that runs deep — for the benefit of us all.
The Hill · by Jeffrey E. Phillips, opinion contributor · October 10, 2021
8. Wanna Fight? (advise and assist)
A useful critique on advising. My comment is that I wish they had addressed how to advise indigenous militaries and forces in sovereign nations and the important considerations that must be addressed.
Wanna Fight? - War on the Rocks
“Remember when we kept saying that we were on ‘Afghan-led’ missions? We were lying every time.” This July 2021 tweet by Robert O’Neill, the Navy SEAL who claims to have killed Osama bin Laden, kicked up a Twitter frenzy. It was posted in the same week that the United States announced it had officially left Bagram Air Base, one of the final and most symbolic steps in ending the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The tweet captures a key disconnect between strategic intent in Afghanistan and tactical implementation, ultimately suggesting that large-footprint troop surges in expeditionary counterinsurgencies are doomed to fail.
Despite senior leaders’ guidance to advise and assist, tactical units across Afghanistan showed a clear preference for unilateral combat operations, often cutting Afghan partners out of mission planning and only grabbing enough Afghans on the way out of the wire to put an Afghan face on thinly veiled U.S. operations. Our respective Marine and Army experiences in-theater and our academic research suggest a prevalent preference to fight throughout Afghanistan, as well as in other theaters. We argue that this preference occurs under conditions in which tactical units possess the capabilities to conduct unilateral operations and working with partner forces is relatively difficult, dangerous, disappointing, and downright contradictory to the warrior ethos in the U.S. military. In other words, when U.S. units can fight alone, they will choose to do so.
To incentivize advising over fighting in future expeditionary counter-insurgency operations, large footprints of ground troops should be avoided. Instead, small and tailored units of advisors with substantive enabling packages should support partner forces without crowding them out from ownership of security operations. Counter-insurgency in Afghanistan resulted in, at best, short-term and highly localized security, and ultimately resulted in a partner force ill-prepared to fill the security vacuum once U.S. forces withdrew. While the failure manifested at the tactical level, the policy implications are strategic in nature and hold important lessons for how to conduct counter-insurgency and partner warfare in the future.
Strategic Guidance to Advise, Tactical Preference to Fight
A brilliant strategy is irrelevant if not embraced by the tactical units that implement it. Put another way by counter-insurgency theorist David Kilcullen, when fighting insurgencies “tactics are reality.” In Afghanistan, the reality was that despite the efforts of senior military leaders to educate, guide, and mandate tactical units to work through their Afghan partners, these efforts failed to change counter-insurgency implementation on the ground. Education for the advise and assist mission was instilled through both a rewriting of counter-insurgency doctrine (FM 3-24) and efforts to train forces in pre-deployment on how to be advisors. By 2009, the mission in Afghanistan morphed into winning the hearts and minds of the population.
The strategy hinged on population-centric counter-insurgency and building the capacity of the Afghan National Security Forces to conduct independent security operations. U.S. forces would advise and assist Afghan units so that they could sustain security advances once U.S. forces withdrew. The model was inspired by the perceived success of large-footprint counter-insurgency during the 2006-2008 Iraq surge — though when the Afghan surge was being devised in 2009 the long-term (un)sustainability of peace in Iraq once U.S. forces withdrew was as yet unrealized. The impetus to build capable Afghan forces was proved even more critical by President Barack Obama’s declaration that the surge would last only 18 months, providing a deadline for continued U.S. resources.
Long-term security outcomes hinged on Afghans taking the lead, as explained by Wes Morgan: “Unless it planned to occupy a country until the end of time, the eventual end point of any foreign army’s counter-insurgency campaign had to be the handover of security from outsiders to local forces.” This approach of accomplishing U.S. national security objectives through the efforts of others is common, with U.S. special operations forces deployed in over 80 countries around the world often working alongside indigenous partner forces — in these circumstances, the winning approach is the one where U.S. objectives are pursued at minimal cost to the U.S. taxpayer. It is in America’s interests to not own the costs of war directly, but rather indirectly accomplish its objectives through supporting local partners.
Recognizing this, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, as commander of the NATO International Security Assistance Force, issued a “Partnering Directive” in August 2009 directing his forces to partner down to the platoon level:
ISAF cannot independently defeat the insurgency; a well-trained and competent ANSF is necessary to achieve this endstate and to ensure GIRoA’s long-term survival. To rapidly expand the capabilities of the ANSF, ISAF will change the manner in which we partner. Embedded partnering will integrate ISAF and ANSF units together to form a more coherent relationship: we will live, train, plan, control, and execute operations together at all command echelons. The synergy created through embedded partnering will increase the likelihood of accomplishing the mission.
Even as the strategy hinged on advising and assisting the Afghan National Security Forces, senior leaders anticipated that tactical units were disinclined to execute partner warfare. This manifested through directives mandating partnered operations. For example, for U.S. forces to conduct operations, units had a minimum ratio of Afghans to U.S. forces required for any patrol. Without being forced to partner (since missions would not be approved without minimum partner force ratios being met), many U.S. units would only conduct unilateral operations. Instead of adapting to implement the strategy, tactical U.S. units instead typically manipulated the directives to continue fighting. The minimum-force requirements led to operations that were technically but not substantively partnered. U.S. forces would plan patrols unilaterally, inform the partner force at the last minute to be prepared for a mission, and then grab the required number of ill-informed Afghans on the way out of the gate. Afghans would be placed within the patrol where they could have the least influence on the mission, or in some cases at the front of the patrol to provide an Afghan veneer during interactions with the local population.
While scholars and practitioners have argued that some militaries are more effective at advising than others, our respective experiences with the Marines and the Army, in both conventional and special operations, suggest that the preference to fight was universal in Afghanistan. Even among purpose-built Army Special Forces advisor teams there was often a proclivity to conduct kinetic operations rather than work through the partner force. Our anecdotal observations are supported by our own academic research, which includes dozens of interviews with U.S. advisors and acclaimed books on the war by Jessica Donati, Wes Morgan, and Emile Simpson.
Why U.S. Forces Prefer Fighting to Advising
Why do troops prefer unilateral operations over working through partners? It is not out of apathy or tactical incompetence. Instead, a preference for unilateral combat operations is the rational response under conditions in which working with partners is difficult, dangerous, disappointing, and downright contradictory to the warrior culture. Combat is dangerous and exhausting work — but is a walk in the park compared to combat by, with, and through partners.
First, working with partners who do not share a common language, both literally and professionally, is difficult. U.S. troops rarely spoke the same language as their Afghan counterparts and relied on a small number of interpreters to relay critical information. Even Afghans who spoke some English were not familiar with U.S. operational concepts and jargon. This meant that any individual task took longer, often much longer, through partner forces. This is frustrating in mission planning and deadly when coordinating battlefield maneuvers under fire, where quick and effective communication can mean the difference between life and death.
The threat of insider attacks also made working with partners more dangerous than cutting them out of mission planning. Tactical units faced a dilemma of following far-off strategic guidance to plan with their partners, and the immediate reality that their partner might pass sensitive intelligence about upcoming patrols to the enemy. The result was that Afghan units rarely participated in mission planning, boding poorly for their readiness to assume security operations once U.S. forces withdrew.
Even for troops willing to assume the extra work and risk of working with partners, they were often disappointed by their lack of value added to the mission, especially based on U.S. deployment timelines. U.S. forces could execute military tasks more effectively than their Afghan counterparts — and the military is a results-oriented organization. While some argue that indigenous forces provide advantage through knowledge of local culture, it was common for Afghan National Security Forces to work in regions where they did not speak the same language as locals, or even held antagonism against the population. The drive to make-mission is much stronger than the tolerance to let weaker partners quasi-address threats in their own way — Afghan good enough was not good enough for tactical units under the gun.
Even as U.S. units endured the practical challenges of partner warfare, they were also fighting against their own warrior culture — it is in the DNA of U.S. forces to fight rather than advise. U.S. forces across branches and services are selected, indoctrinated, and trained to fight. For troops like us, deploying to Afghanistan is like training for the Super Bowl — once you get there you do not want to sit on the sidelines so partner forces can play the game for you. Simply put, combat arms forces want to “get their gun on.” Some units, both conventional and special operations, planned and prioritized operations around the odds of getting into a gunfight. Movement to contact was the tactical objective even as the strategy espoused building competent partner forces and engaging with and protecting the population. What is more, while combat credibility is career enhancing, there is no real career enhancement to partnering — these assignments are typically out of the mainstream career paths and success is difficult to quantify.
Altogether, tactical units were incentivized to own the fight rather than help Afghan forces to lead. Strategic guidance ensured that an Afghan face was put on mission paperwork, but the brains and brawn behind each patrol — and faces that the Afghan population saw — were American. Guidance from higher up, combined with constraints such as minimum force ratios, did not change behavior among tactical units who could parrot guidance and grab a few Afghans on the way out of the wire. The result was that the Americans both became the face of security while setting forward an unsustainable security apparatus that failed once U.S. troops withdrew.
Incentivizing Advising Over Fighting
T.E. Lawrence based on working closely with Arab partner forces during World War I, to “not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them.” In other words, embrace an Arab-good-enough approach to partner warfare. However, Lawrence was operating as a singleton advisor with a large Arab force, able to provide British-furnished enabling capabilities and sustainment resources. He was unable to conduct unilateral British operations even if he wanted to, and so he worked by, with, and through his local partner forces to accomplish military objectives.
In Afghanistan, strategic leaders sought a by, with, and through strategy during the surge but failed to induce or coerce tactical units to implement it. How can future leaders incentivize U.S. troops to focus on advising and putting the costs of combat on the partner force rather than owning security themselves? One answer lies in removing the physical capability of tactical units to conduct unilateral operations.
As one example in Afghanistan, Tom Schueman deployed to Helmand Province as a Marine infantry platoon commander from 2010–2011 during the surge and then again in 2012–2013 to the same area as an advisor with only a handful of Marines. During both rotations he was the same leader, in the same (highly kinetic) area of operations — but his approach to working through partners dramatically changed. During a research interview he identified that though his unit was nominally supposed to partner with Afghans in 2010, it was very much an afterthought as he was focused on a dangerous and difficult fight that tragically claimed the lives of 25 Marines from his battalion. His platoon, like both of ours during this same period (though in different locations) and probably many others across Afghanistan, often brought Afghans on patrol simply to “check the box” for mission approval.
Only a year later, as the overall Marine footprint declined in Helmand Province during the surge drawdown, he took a very different operational approach as the leader of a small advisory team of five Marines. His Afghan partners took the lead in mission planning and fighting but could be incentivized to action through the reassurance of U.S. intelligence, air strike, and medical evacuation capabilities. Tom now was able to leverage U.S. enabling capabilities to induce and persuade his Afghan partner forces to conduct security operations, all while mitigating risk to force by reducing the exposure of U.S. forces to conflict. While the challenges of working with an Afghan partner force remained, the only way to get into the fight was through his partners.
Tom’s story is not an isolated case. The same shift in advisor approach was seen across Afghanistan as troop numbers drew down, as well as in the counter-Islamic State fight in Iraq where there was a need for U.S. military action but little domestic political support to replicate the surge. Through small advisory teams who could act as liaisons to broader U.S. enabling capabilities, the United States was able to assist the Iraqi Security Forces in their effort to take back Mosul and other key terrain in Iraq. Similarly, a relatively small U.S. commitment that included fewer than 5000 troops and zero casualties from March 2020 to July 2021 was able to prevent the overthrow of Afghanistan by the Taliban until removed, although it should be recognized that the success of this mission may have been due in part to the Taliban limiting the strength of their efforts in the wake of the February 2020 Doha agreement.
Policy to Strategy to Tactical Implementation
A strategy that hinges on working by, with, and through partners with a large footprint of external U.S. military forces is doomed to fail. When tactical units can conduct unilateral operations, they will. Time and scope do not allow comparative analysis of the U.S. military approach in Vietnam, but similar military approaches ultimately ended in the same result as Afghanistan. The very action of placing large numbers of combat arms soldiers on the ground ensures that the United States will take a lead role in security rather than focus on advising partner forces and building sustainable indigenous security postures. The implication for future leaders is to design incentive structures for tactical units to align with strategic guidance to advise and enable rather than fight. For military leaders this requires the recognition that educating, guiding, and mandating partnering activities will not ensure change in tactical unit behavior — the best immediate way to ensure a by, with, and through approach is to remove the unilateral option for tactical units, while also educating leaders on why indirect approaches are critical to strategic success.
However, there may be bureaucratic incentives for military leaders at the highest levels to push for troop surges even as they promulgate an advisory approach. This suggests that there may be a role for civilian leadership to impose troop limits. Two successful examples of U.S. partnering efforts, in El Salvador and Colombia, both had troop caps imposed by Congress — 55 in El Salvador and 800 in Colombia. Will Wechsler, who participated in the policy design of Plan Colombia, argues that the congressionally mandated troop cap was a positive development because it prevented the type of high-profile debate over troop numbers seen during the 2009 Afghanistan surge debate that divided the military and the White House, and focused the executive branch on strategies given the fixed means. For the military, the strategy became enabling partner forces with small teams of advisors who in turn had no option to get into the fight other than by, with, and through their partner forces.
In counter-insurgency, tactics are reality. While war is hard, war with partner forces is harder. However, given the unmistakable and overwhelming abundance of irregular conflict short of conventional state-on-state war, the United States will continue to pursue its national security objectives through the guided efforts of others. Success in future partner-warfare endeavors will require removing the capability of tactical units to get their gun on and incentivizing tactical leaders to drive their partner forces to fight harder in line with U.S. interests.
Kyle Atwell is an instructor in the Social Sciences Department at West Point, co-director of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, and a Ph.D. candidate in Security Studies at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. His operational experience includes assignments in North and West Africa, South Korea, Germany, and 20 months in Afghanistan.
These views are those of the authors and do not reflect the position of the United States Military Academy, the Department of the Army, the United States Marine Corps, or the Department of Defense.
9. What’s Next for U.S.-China Relations Amid Rising Tensions Over Taiwan
Excerpts:
What has been the immediate outcome of the meeting? Could we expect follow-up talks in the near future?
Freeman: Despite the frosty tenor of these meetings, several indications, not least the October 6 meeting between Sullivan and Yang, affirm there is an appetite in both countries for stabilizing the relationship. U.S. trade representative Katherine Tai conveyed in recent remarks an interest in “recoupling” the U.S. and Chinese economies ahead of planned meetings with her counterpart. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael Chase has held a number of virtual exchanges with the deputy director of the PLA’s Office for International Military Cooperation. Further talks between the two sides are a likely outcome of the Sullivan-Yang meeting, including a possible virtual meeting between U.S. and Chinese heads of state before the end of the year.
Scobell: While the outlook for U.S.-China relations is far from sunny and bright, recent high-level meetings suggest the two countries can, for the foreseeable future, look forward to an extended forecast of dreary and overcast weather punctuated by periodic thunderstorms. But Washington and Beijing also need to constantly scan the skies for looming storm clouds and be ever alert for the potential of severe weather systems forming over the horizon.
What’s Next for U.S.-China Relations Amid Rising Tensions Over Taiwan
What’s the context surrounding the recent meeting between U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Chinese Communist Party Politburo member Yang Jiechi? What did they discuss and what did they hope to accomplish?
Scobell: The October 6 meeting between U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Chinese Communist Party Politburo member Yang Jiechi occurred within the context of the most fraught period in U.S.-China relations in decades. The degree of turmoil in bilateral relations is evident from the fact that this meeting took place on neutral ground in Switzerland rather than allow either side to claim the home-field advantage. Yet, that this dialogue was held at all stands as testament to an abiding desire in both Washington and Beijing to manage bilateral disputes and limit tensions. Indeed, both sides characterized the session in subdued but generally positive terms and pledged to continue to keep the channels of communication open. Both sides have a strong pragmatic interest in maintaining a stable relationship, a desire to avoid military conflict and to see mutual benefit in addressing contentious economic issues.
However, a major stumbling block is in the tendency for each set of leaders to perceive that the other side is at fault and hence insist that it must be the one to make concessions. This is compounded by the reality that leaders, whether in Washington or Beijing, do not want to look weak by appearing to “blink first” by offering compromises or concessions. Additionally, Chinese leaders are preoccupied with status and appearances: a desire to stage high-profile events intended to showcase themselves as global statesmen. Hence, for months Beijing has been pushing for an in-person summit or at least a face-to-face meeting between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and President Joe Biden this year, independent of whether this top-level interaction is merited by a real improvement in relations and/or concrete deliverables.
Relations between the United States and China are beset by a minefield of disputes across a wide range of issue areas, including not just security, but also trade and technology. While it is not clear whether all these issues were discussed, we do know that among those covered were human rights, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and the South China Sea, as well as Taiwan.
There are a number of current flash points between the United States and China. With relations currently at a low point, what’s the biggest risk for escalation?
Scobell: The range of contentious issues is so extensive and the sensitivity of many so extreme that it is difficult to identify a single policy issue or geographic location as being most susceptible to escalation. There are so-called flash points located in the western Pacific that could trigger political-military crises leading to confrontation and spiraling into armed conflict. These include not just the Taiwan Strait, but also the South China and East China Seas. These locales have each proven to be chronic hot spots in U.S.-China relations across decades. While tensions in these locations have fluctuated considerably over the years between edgy confrontation, slow boil and relative calm, each remains an enduring flash point with the potential to escalate into war and complicated by the involvement of third parties, including one or more U.S. allies and partners.
There is also an array of diplomatic, legal, technological and economic issues that are quite volatile and prone to escalation. Prime examples include a “trade war” and a “hostage standoff.” While the former is well known, the latter is not and emerged in late 2018 when Canada arrested Meng Wanzhou, the CFO of Chinese telecom giant Huawei, at the request of the U.S. government. Shortly thereafter, Beijing detained two Canadian citizens — Michael Spavor, a businessman, and Michael Kovrig, a former diplomat — in China on what appear to be trumped up charges. Officially, these detentions were completely unrelated but the manner in which the standoff was resolved on September 24, 2021, suggests otherwise: within hours of Canada allowing Meng to board a flight to China following her plea deal with the U.S. Department of Justice, Spavor and Kovrig were allowed to depart China and return to Canada. While this de-escalation of this “hostage standoff” is arguably a positive development in the short run, its outcome might incentivize China to consider similar tactics in the future, which could set the stage for future escalation.
Where does Taiwan rank in terms of a flash point and how serious are the current tensions in the Taiwan Strait?
Freeman: For many decades, Taiwan has been the most serious political-military flash point in U.S.-China relations, and in recent weeks and months the Taiwan Strait has experienced rising tensions with dramatic increases in the frequency and seriousness of provocations by Chinese military aircraft within Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ). Tensions between Beijing and Taipei have been acute since Taiwan’s 2016 election of president of Tsai Ing-wen, whose Democratic Progressive Party was founded on a platform favoring independence for the island. Tsai’s Kuomintang predecessor rejected the idea of Taiwan’s independence and pursued growing political interactions across the Taiwan Strait, which were suspended after Tsai became president. Tsai’s effective diplomacy with liberal democracies has frustrated Beijing, including her message that a successful takeover of Taiwan by Beijing will not only impact regional peace but also the democratic alliance system.
Washington has offered more muscular support for Taipei on a number of fronts in recent years. The Trump administration integrated the island into its Indo-Pacific strategy, expanded arms sales to Taiwan and took other steps that expanded official contacts between Washington and Taipei. The Biden administration has affirmed its own commitment to Taiwan, making clear that it not only supports strengthening Taiwan’s defense capabilities but would like to see Taiwan play a larger international role.
As Beijing signals its resolve to “unify” Taiwan by sending unprecedented numbers of warplanes, including bombers, well into Taiwan’s ADIZ, there are rising risks of an accidental collision with Taiwan’s fighter jets monitoring China’s incursions that could spark wider conflict.
Sullivan and Yang haven’t met face-to-face since March, when a pre-summit press conference grew contentious. Has that event had any lingering effects on their relations?
Scobell: The high-level March meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, was most memorable for its in-front-of-the camera theatrics. Yet, both sides took this public face-off in stride — each side was playing to their respective domestic audiences. As noted above, neither side wants to look weak vis-à-vis the other or appear hesitant to stand up for the honor and interests of their countries. Moreover, this public posturing did not prevent these senior U.S. and Chinese foreign policy officials from holding forthright and substantive discussions behind closed doors. Along with the outward histrionics, the most significant indication of the poor state of bilateral relations was the absence of a joint statement or communique at the conclusion of the March talks.
Freeman: Since the March summit in Alaska, subsequent high-level exchanges between Washington and Beijing have had a confrontational tone. A July visit to China by Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman was full of tension as the United States raised concerns about a range of China’s policies as well as the sensitive topic of the World Health Organization’s investigation into the origins of COVID-19. Beijing met Sherman with lists of actions it insisted the United States must address before it would consider working cooperatively with Washington in areas where common interest is clear. During a subsequent trip to China by U.S. climate envoy John Kerry, Chinese officials made clear that Beijing would not consider joint efforts on climate action until it was satisfied with the broader bilateral relationship.
What has been the immediate outcome of the meeting? Could we expect follow-up talks in the near future?
Freeman: Despite the frosty tenor of these meetings, several indications, not least the October 6 meeting between Sullivan and Yang, affirm there is an appetite in both countries for stabilizing the relationship. U.S. trade representative Katherine Tai conveyed in recent remarks an interest in “recoupling” the U.S. and Chinese economies ahead of planned meetings with her counterpart. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael Chase has held a number of virtual exchanges with the deputy director of the PLA’s Office for International Military Cooperation. Further talks between the two sides are a likely outcome of the Sullivan-Yang meeting, including a possible virtual meeting between U.S. and Chinese heads of state before the end of the year.
Scobell: While the outlook for U.S.-China relations is far from sunny and bright, recent high-level meetings suggest the two countries can, for the foreseeable future, look forward to an extended forecast of dreary and overcast weather punctuated by periodic thunderstorms. But Washington and Beijing also need to constantly scan the skies for looming storm clouds and be ever alert for the potential of severe weather systems forming over the horizon.
10. The Essence of Special Operations – What You Need to Know About Special Operations while Serving at the Joint Operational Level
NATO special operations and its three tasks. Also note this about unconventional warfare.
Special operations described up to this point retains a level of ambiguity. This can be challenging, as it does not provide a precise understanding. But it is a necessity for special operations not to be limited by rigid definitions or perceptions. As mentioned, in theory, the next special operations mission can be unique and require unrestricted creativity in planning and execution. However, one of the more tangible consequences of the last century's evolution is a generally accepted consensus of three principal tasks within the concept of special operations:
I. Direct Action (DA): Kinetic action distinguished by the level of risk, precision and techniques utilized.
II. Special Reconnaissance (SR): Creating a state of relative certainty from operations conducted in a hostile, contested, or denied environment with potentially political or diplomatic sensitivities.
III. Military Assistance (MA): Potentially several types of support provided to a broad spectrum of local recipients. Ranging from sub-tactical units to national leadership.
That being said, special operations are defined and articulated differently by "big nations", "small nations", and in NATO. Where the U.S. divide special operations into 12 core tasks, smaller countries, and NATO divide special operations into three areas. Generally speaking, special operations is perceived beyond the scope of NATO on national level, while the "big nations" also tend to have a larger and more specialized SOF arsenal. A notable difference is the U.S. Army Special Forces' concept of unconventional warfare, which is long-term, high risk, and low footprint operations conducted in a denied area in order to serve a long-term strategic goal that opposes a local government or occupying power. However, at the operational level, it is beneficial not to exclusively focus on the tactical nature of these tasks, but rather to see them as how special operations give operational or strategic effects.
The Essence of Special Operations – What You Need to Know About Special Operations while Serving at the Joint Operational Level
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This article is written to articulate the general knowledge needed to gain a general understanding of special operations for everyone serving at the joint operational level. The first section of the article illustrates the importance of knowledge at the operational level. The second section briefly explains the core elements of special operations. Finally, the article provides a basic understanding of applicability of special operations. All in all, the essence of special operations.
The apex god of Northern Mythology Odin sacrificed his right eye in exchange for access to the well of wisdom. Yet, this was not enough for him to become all-knowing. He hung himself half-dead from Yggdrasil, the tree of life, where he pierced his own flesh with a spear. After nine nights of torture, he had sacrificed enough, and endured enough pain, to gain all knowledge. This myth illustrates how the path to becoming all-knowing requires sacrifice beyond human capability. From a humble human perspective, it is therefore necessary to prioritize what you want to learn, and which knowledge to keep. The need for prioritizing and evenly distributing knowledge becomes even greater in complex warfare systems like the joint force commands (JFCs). Ideally, everyone should have general knowledge of all areas of joint operations, and it is reasonable to think that general perception of special operations is at an unfavourable low level, which can "inhibit sound planning and operations".
During a Joint Warfare Centre (JWC) directed exercise, an officer described his own prejudice in a VTC by saying: "I guess it's my bias against special operations forces (SOF), but I thought you guys just wanted to kill them all." This kind of prejudice is not a fault of the officer, but a symptom of a greater problem for the special operations community. A combination of prudent operational security that creates mystery on the one hand, and the glorification of the action representing only a small percentage of the special operations portfolio by Hollywood and authors, on the other hand, are to blame. An additional reputational challenge is created by the acts conducted by a very few "bad apples". This is why it is so important that the special operations community itself actively works towards informing general purpose forces and counter the misleading Hollywood narrative and occasional bad publicity.
There is a myriad of perspectives, descriptions, and definitions of special operations. Not all are of equal quality, precision, or, more importantly, relevance for all joint officers. They do share several general commonalities that make up a relevant core for a satisfactory understanding of special operations. For brevity of this article, I will only list the following: distinction from conventional operations, the scope and level of risk, and operational and strategic effects.
Distinction from Conventional Forces
Historically, SOF, as we know it today, is relatively new, but the phenomenon of special operations has probably existed for ages. Stories, such as that of the Trojan Horse can be described as a "special operation" at its time. During the 20th century, special operations cemented themselves as a distinct form of warfare apart from the traditional land, maritime, and air operations. It is important to see special operations in its historical context as it has evolved both in terms of tasks and missions. In other words, what constituted special operations once may now be considered conventional. During this evolution, one factor has remained more or less the same: special operations have been used to solve missions that conventional forces were either not able to; or, not able to solve with an acceptable level of risk. Special operations are therefore conducted independently, or as a supplement to conventional operations, in a comprehensive joint operations campaign. Understanding the limits of conventional operations is a prerequisite to fully understand and appreciate the utility of special operations. Generally, if the mission can be solved by conventional forces, conventional forces should be used. There is little desire within SOF to be "conventionalized", and thereby lose their core characteristics.If conventionalized, SOF could become redundant on the basis of not having the required manning, being specialized enough, or able to match conventional forces in conducting conventional operations. Special operations are different compared to the conventional operations, where the latter tend to be more specialized.
A relevant but simple example can be drawn from a recent JWC-directed exercise. Based on the fictitious scenario, a weapons system that posed a threat to NATO's air superiority was transported in the joint operations area. During a VTC with the joint force command leadership and the component commands, the situation was discussed. Upon hearing the conversation, the special operations component command took the initiative to assess if there could be a special operations solution to the problem. Preferably, the joint force command should promptly have addressed the special operations component command and tasked them to assess if SOF could solve the problem when a conventional component could not. In this case, a special operations component command initiated partnered-joint special operations, supported by the maritime component command, neutralized the threat, gained valuable intelligence, and enabled host nation forces to arrest smugglers that could be exploited in the exercise information environment.
ABOVE: Enhanced joint operational reach. The reach of each field of operations is illustrated by the coverage of its depicted area. The areas for special operations are used to illustrate how they can contribute to potentially increase the operational reach of joint force commands by building on the other fields of operations, and thereby generating complementary effects. (Graphic is authors' own)
SOF complement the conventional forces as an agile, creative force multiplier that are not as affected by, or that to some extent can overcome or circumvent, the main challenges faced by large conventional forces, such as the Clausewitzian concept of the friction of war.
The Scope and Level of Risk
Risk is a key component in considering if a special operation is warranted or not. When assessing risk related to military activities one must always analyse the possible outcomes, that is, weighting the desired achievements against the severities of potential adverse consequences given the associated uncertainties. If the stakes are high, in that the potential adverse consequences can have operational, strategic, or political impact, special operations might be the only acceptable option. This is particularly the case if the severity of the potential impact will be difficult, or impossible to mitigate. Special operations have comparative advantages related to risk mitigation. Factors of risk mitigation exclusive to special operations include the following five examples:
- A favourable ratio of support and enabling personnel to the ground forces: It is not uncommon for 30 special forces operators "on the ground" to be supported by more than a hundred dedicated personnel on the tactical level alone. A considerable part of this support is to enable cross service cooperation in order to achieve joint effort.
- Pre-emptive effort in selection/training of SOF operators and support personnel: The selection process of SOF operators is generally very demanding, in order to meet some of the highest standards in the military. The same goes for the following education and day-to-day training. For support personnel, the requirements vary specific to the functional areas, but are generally very thorough.
- Relative superiority: Admiral William McRavens' theory of special operations explains how small SOF teams, given the right circumstances, can compensate for, and, to some extent, overcome many of the challenges conventional forces are burdened with through the concept of relative superiority.
- Strict operational security: Many special operations are executed with a narrow margin of error. Operational security can be paramount in order to enable and maintain the desired outcomes of special operations.This is one of the reasons why SOF can be perceived to "out loop" standardized staff processes by gaining access to the commanders outside of the regular chain of command.
- Unconventional creativity: In theory, every special operation is unique, or at least, it can be conducted in a unique manner. SOF operators are, amongst other things, selected based on their problem-solving skills. SOF culture fosters and appreciates creativity in a bottom-up driven planning process. Thus, combined with SOF's training in unconventional techniques, procedures and methods, special operations are inherently unpredictable for an opponent.
Relevant Levels of Risk. The full spectrum risk matrix is relevant for conventional operations. For special operations, on the other hand, the limited risk matrix displays the relevant levels of risk. The primary factor is the severity of and not the assumed likelihood of impact of potential outcomes. (Graphic is authors' own)
Operational and Strategic Effects
As previously noted, special operations represent an alternative, or a supplement, to conventional operations. The decision makers that choose between conventional and special operations are serving at the operational level or higher. This has contributed to shaping SOF, as their development and ambitions are heavily influenced by the operational and strategic levels of war. SOF operate in small teams and, unlike conventional forces, are not suited for enduring or large-scale combat engagements. They are, however, suitable for kinetic strikes with precise use of lethal forces in order to reduce the potential of collateral damage, and alternatively, for non-kinetic covert operations over longer periods of time. Combined with the aforementioned ability to mitigate risk, special operations remain viable options for operational and strategic decision makers and are particularly suited for high-risk missions that do not require the volume and certain specialized warfighting capabilities that only conventional forces can provide.
History has proven a few particularly valuable lessons when it comes to conducting special operations and generating the ability to do so. Attempting to generate forces capable of conducting special operations as the need arises have proven to be challenging at best. There are several examples where the hasty establishment of SOF have resulted in significant shortfalls.Additionally, conventional leaders given command over SOF have struggled to utilize them effectively. Misuse of SOF has cost lives, and in certain examples, almost eradicated whole SOF units on the battlefield.
This illustrates two distinct lessons. Limited resources must be utilized where they can provide the biggest payoff. For this reason, special operations should be aimed towards operational and strategic goals and effects. The force generation and application of most special operations require strategic patience and early implementation in order to reach its full potential. This is partly the reason why the United States created its Joint Special Operations Command, and NATO members, like Denmark and Norway, have extracted their SOF units from their respective services and placed them under a joint leadership.Additionally, this requires direction and prioritization from senior leadership. For this reason, special operations should be aimed towards operational and strategic goals and effects. Linking the small-scale tactical actions of SOF to desired operational and strategic effects remains the principal challenge for the operational level leadership.
Operation Gunnerside, the Allied sabotage of Nazi Regime's efforts to build an atomic bomb in Norway in 1943,and Operation Neptune Spear, the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, demonstrate how special operations can have significant strategic effect.Additionally, the examples illustrate how special operations can both solve problems of strategic importance that could not be conducted by conventional forces, and how the following presentations of the operations are skewed towards the action-filled culmination of several special operations towards the same end state. The lesser known, but equally significant, Operation Grouse was a prerequisite for Operation Gunnerside starting five months earlier. Operation Grouse was the collection and analyses of the intelligence that enabled the detailed planning of Gunnerside's raid.Similarly, the extensive work that enabled Neptune Spear has not been given more than a fraction of the attention that has been given to the raid on the Al Qaida compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. This is creating a limited appreciation for what actually transpired and its complexity. Similarly, the decade-long Trojan War of Greek Mythology for the majority is only known for its Trojan Horse.
The Generic View of Special Operations
Special operations described up to this point retains a level of ambiguity. This can be challenging, as it does not provide a precise understanding. But it is a necessity for special operations not to be limited by rigid definitions or perceptions. As mentioned, in theory, the next special operations mission can be unique and require unrestricted creativity in planning and execution. However, one of the more tangible consequences of the last century's evolution is a generally accepted consensus of three principal tasks within the concept of special operations:
I. Direct Action (DA): Kinetic action distinguished by the level of risk, precision and techniques utilized.
II. Special Reconnaissance (SR): Creating a state of relative certainty from operations conducted in a hostile, contested, or denied environment with potentially political or diplomatic sensitivities.
III. Military Assistance (MA): Potentially several types of support provided to a broad spectrum of local recipients. Ranging from sub-tactical units to national leadership.
There is also a group of additional tasks, such as counter insurgency, counter terrorism, and hostage release operations to mention a few.For elaborations of these tasks NATO's Allied Joint Doctrine for Special Operations provide a good overview for NATO personnel.
That being said, special operations are defined and articulated differently by "big nations", "small nations", and in NATO. Where the U.S. divide special operations into 12 core tasks, smaller countries, and NATO divide special operations into three areas. Generally speaking, special operations is perceived beyond the scope of NATO on national level, while the "big nations" also tend to have a larger and more specialized SOF arsenal. A notable difference is the U.S. Army Special Forces' concept of unconventional warfare, which is long-term, high risk, and low footprint operations conducted in a denied area in order to serve a long-term strategic goal that opposes a local government or occupying power. However, at the operational level, it is beneficial not to exclusively focus on the tactical nature of these tasks, but rather to see them as how special operations give operational or strategic effects.
Generating a generic description of special operations: This process can be illustrated by funnelling the full spectrum of possibilities through a funnel of national and Alliance limitations. At the same time, SOF will always look beyond the perceived limitations in the pursuit of possibilities. (Graphic is author's own)
Conclusion
For personnel at the operational level that do not have basic knowledge of special operations, dealing with them can feel as ominous as having to deal with Mjølner, the god wielded weapon of Thor from Norse mythology. It is even more challenging for the operational level leadership whom themselves, as mere mortals, will have to wield such potent and ambiguous powers with a demanding level of precision. In order to pierce through bias and mythology, sober knowledge is key. The more one can expect to interact with special operations, the more crucial the level of knowledge becomes. This is especially applicable for operational and strategic level leadership. This article contains an extensive reference list to provide the curious and motivated readers with detailed information from authoritative and valid sources in order to further develop their knowledge of special operations. For NATO personnel, the natural starting point is NATO's Allied Joint Doctrine for Special Operations. In closing, the general perception of special operations suffers from unclassified sources that present historical examples, and the skewed "Hollywood narrative", which creates a simplified and less than representative impression. Many relevant special operations are still classified and thereby remain hidden from general military perception. Special operations are not in competition with, but an agile supplement to, the capabilities of within conventional operations. Special operations forces do not intend to, and most often are not able to, take the missions conventional forces can conduct themselves.
Foto: Soldatar fra Forsvarets spesialkommando i ett C-17 transportfly på Kabul flyplass under evakueringen (Politiet)
This article was first published in NATO JWCs Three Swords Magazine
References
- NATO - Allied Joint Doctrine for Special Operations.
- McRaven, SPEC OPS: Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare: In theory and practice.
- Searle - Outside the Box: A New General Theory of Special Operations.
- Lamb & Tucker - United States Special Operations Forces – Second Edition.
Northern Mythology: https://www.norron-mytologi.info/gudene/odin.htm
Jensen, Lars H. E. (2014). Special Operations —Myth and Facts. København: Royal Danish Defence Collage Publishing House3 Collins, John M. (1986). United States and Soviet Special Operations Study. Michigan: University of Michigan Library
Collins, John M. (1986). United States and Soviet Special Operations Study. Michigan: University of Michigan Library
Jensen, Lars H.E.
Ljøterud, Ståle. (2012). Spesialoperasjoner med kløkt og mot (Special Operations with smartness and Courage). In "Krigens Vitenskap en introduksjon I militærteori" (The Science of War an Introduction to Military Theory) Oslo: Abstrakt Forlag
Moyar, Mark. (2017). Oppose Any Foe —The Rise ofAmerica's Special Operation Forces. Basic Books
Melien, Tor Jørgen. (2012). Våre hemmelige soldater — Norske spesialstyrker 1940-2012 (Our Secret Soldiers — Norwegian Special Operations Forces 1940–2012) Oslo: Spartacus Forlag.
Lamb, Christopher J. & David Tucker (2007). United States Special Operations Forces — Second Edition.New York: Columbia University Press.
Ljøterud, Ståle.
Marquis, Susan L. (1997). Unconventional Warfare — Rebuilding U.S. Special Operations Forces.Washington DC: The Brookings Institution.
Ljøterud, Ståle.
NATO Standard. (2019). AJP-3,5 — Allied Joint Doctrine for Special Operations—Edition B Version 1.
Spulak, Robert G. (2007). A Theory of Special Operations; The Origin, Qualities and use of SOF. Florida: Joint Special Operations Forces University
Ljøterud, Ståle.
Ljøterud, Ståle & NATO Standard
Searle, Tom. (2017). Outside the Box: A New General Theory of Special Operations. Tampa: Joint Special Operations University.
McRaven, William. (1995). Spec Ops: Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare: In Theory and Practice.New York: Ballentine Books.
Spulak, Robert G.
McRaven, William. (1995), Searle, Tom & Robert G- Spulak.
NATO Special Operations Headquarters. (2014). Special Operations Component Command Manual. Belgium: NATO
Collins, John M. & NATO Standard
Colins, John M. Christopher Lamb, Tor Jørgen Melien, Susan L. Marquis, Mark Moyar & Robert G. Spulak.
McRaven, William. (1995).
Collins, John M. & William McRaven (1995).
Ljøterud, Ståle Tom Searle & Robert G. Spulak.
Collins, John M.
Marquis, Susan L. & Moyer, Mark.
Moyar, Mark.
Lamb, Christopher, Susan L. Marquis & Mark Moyar.
McRaven, William. (2019). Sea Stories: My life in Special Operations. New York: Grand Central Publishing
Moyer, Mark.
Melien, Tor Jørgen & Norwegian Lexicon (2020b).
Ljøterud, Ståle, NATO Standard, William McRaven and Tom Searle
Westberg, Anders. (2016). To See and Not to Be Seen: Emerging Principles and Theory of Special Reconnaissance and Surveillance Missions for Special Operations Forces, Special Operations Journal, 2:2, 124-134.
Ljøterud, Ståle, NATO Standard
Ljøterud, Ståle, NATO Standard
Ljøterud, Ståle, NATO Standard
Kristiansen, Marius & Andreas Hedenstrøm. (2016). Defense Capstone Project Report: NORSOF Military Assistance Capability Development. Monteray: Naval Postgraduate School.
Ljøterud, Ståle.
Colins, John M. Christopher Lamb, Tor Jørgen Melien & Mark Moyar.
Lamb, Christopher & Tom Searle
U.S. Army Special Operations Command (2016) Unconventional Warfare Pocket Guide Fort Bragg: U.S. Army Special Operations Command.
11. Post-Afghanistan, the US Army wants to carve out its role in the Pacific
“You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is to never get involved in a land war in Asia.”
On a more serious note.
Excerpts:
Now, Wormuth said the Army must turn its focus to China.
“We need to be focusing on how does the Army contribute to enhancing our deterrent posture in the Indo-[Pacific Command] theater, because I see the China challenge as a now problem, in addition to a future challenge for us,” she said.
She acknowledged relationship-building in the region, which is key to the Army’s strategy to deter China, is more complicated than in Europe.
Post-Afghanistan, the US Army wants to carve out its role in the Pacific
WASHINGTON — For two decades, the Army led the U.S. military’s war in Afghanistan and, in the process, operations there and in Iraq transformed the service. It led to the purchase of billions of dollars of new weapons, the development of doctrine and adjustments to training.
But while the Army was focused on counterinsurgency, the Pentagon began to turn it attention to so-called near-peer adversaries. For the past decade, national security experts have warned the U.S. was at risk of losing its advantage, and as a result the Pentagon started new initiatives, from the Third Offset strategy to the Defense Innovation Unit, to help it stay ahead technologically.
Now, with the military out of Afghanistan and operations in the Middle East no longer competing for resources and attention, the Army must chart its path in a great-power conflict and do so after decades of struggling to push modernization programs across the finish line.
The withdrawal from Afghanistan “furthers the opportunity for the Army to shift our mindset more fully to the great power competition, near-peer competitor challenge,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told Defense News in a Sept. 30 interview.
A ‘now problem’
In a November 2011 speech, then-President Barack Obama said he had directed his national security team “to make our presence and mission in the Asia Pacific a top priority.”
“As a result, reductions in U.S. defense spending will not — I repeat, will not — come at the expense of the Asia-Pacific,” he added.
In his remarks, he argued the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were wrapping up, but instead, operations in Afghanistan continued, requiring the service’s attention.
Now, Wormuth said the Army must turn its focus to China.
“We need to be focusing on how does the Army contribute to enhancing our deterrent posture in the Indo-[Pacific Command] theater, because I see the China challenge as a now problem, in addition to a future challenge for us,” she said.
She acknowledged relationship-building in the region, which is key to the Army’s strategy to deter China, is more complicated than in Europe.
China's aircraft carrier Liaoning is accompanied by frigates and submarines on April 12, 2018, conducting exercises in the South China Sea. (Li Gang/Xinhua via AP)
“Most of the countries in [the Indo-Pacific] are fairly army-centric, land-force centric, so I think we do play an important role in terms of establishing those relationships, whether it’s with India, whether it’s in the Philippines, whether it’s with Thailand,” she said.
“We need to be looking at how can we continue to do more with those countries? How can we exercise more with them and develop interoperability and show that we’re able to work with our allies and partners on tangible operational things in theater that would be useful to us in a crisis for example, or in a conflict if that was required?”
While the Army already has a “robust set of exercises and exchanges with countries in the region,” Wormuth said, Army leaders want the service to be “more present” in the region.
The Army, she added, is well positioned to build strong relationships with countries through army-to-army partnering and dialogue.
About three-quarters of those in uniform in the world today are in armies, Michael O’Hanlon, the Brookings Institution’s director of research for foreign policy, told Defense News in an Oct. 6 interview.
“Most of these countries ... have some ability to fend off a hypothetical Chinese assault or other regional security issues that they should have good ground forces and want to have a partnership with the world’s best army,” he said.
Using units like Security Force Assistance Brigades in the Pacific is “to some extent under-appreciated,” Wormuth said. “We can really use the SFABs to help us develop and deepen those relationships, create opportunities for greater access, create opportunities for interoperability.”
SFABs were designed initially to advise troops in Afghanistan, but they are now available to go elsewhere, she noted.
The Pacific has one such team, which has deployed to 10 different countries, including Mongolia, South Korea, Japan, Philippines and Indonesia, Gen. Charles Flynn, U.S. Army Pacific Command commander, told Defense News in a Sept. 30 interview.
The SFAB in the Pacific is “doing everything from warfighting skills to command-and-control … to advise, assist and to enable our allies and partners in the region,” Flynn said, and they “give us some persistent presence in these countries that previously, we were not able to do.”
Sgt. David Knack, right, feeds blank ammunition into a 240B machine gun that Spc. Zachary Parady fires during a demonstration in Napuka Village, Fiji, on Aug. 7, 2019. (U.S. Army)
The Army already has a “pretty extensive exercise program,” as well, Flynn said. Some are joint, but many are bilateral army-to-army, he added.
Exercises like Operation Pathways, which has emerged from existing training events Pacific Pathways and Defender Pacific, bolster the readiness of the U.S. Army, but also increase the confidence of allies and partners, Flynn said. The training is now slated to be held annually.
Indonesia, for instance, wants to create its own Combat Training Centers, no easy task considering it’s a country made up of 15,000 islands, Flynn said. The Army is now helping the country develop those training centers.
In addition, the U.S. Army is using Indo-Pacific scenarios for the vast majority of its big exercises and experiments, including U.S.-based Project Convergence at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona. Project Convergence is a chance for the service to try out technology and concepts related to its aggressive force modernization plan.
The service’s No. 1 modernization priority, which is developing Long-Range Precision Fires (LRPF) capability, is aimed specifically at overcoming the vast distances a missile must travel in the Pacific fired from a safe stand-off range.
Even so, questions about the service’s role in the Indo-Pacific remain.
The Pentagon, for the first time, included a Pacific Deterrence Initiative in its fiscal 2022 budget request and is seeking $5.1 billion in funding — but none of the money would go to the Army directly.
“The Army is fundamentally a supporting service in the Indo-Pacific,” Brookings’ O’Hanlon said. “From a grand strategy point of view, that’s good, and we should not want to change it.”
Instead, the service should focus on providing air and missile defense, particularly base defense capabilities in the region, O’Hanlon said, and should continue to work on developing its long-range surface-to-surface fires capabilities, though it’s not obvious where those capabilities will be based.
The bases the Navy and Air Force are going to need and already possess in the Indo-Pacific “are absolutely crucial and absolutely vulnerable,” O’Hanlon said, and “I question whether the Army typically takes seriously enough the mission of base defense.”
Critics of the Army’s efforts to develop and field long-range precision fires have argued the mission is better carried out by the other services in that region.
But for Wormuth, “there is more than enough work to be done in the INDOPACOM theater for everyone.”
A Green Beret clears a room in a shoot house alongside Royal Thai Army soldiers Camp Erawan in Lopburi, Thailand, on Aug. 6, 2021. This photo was altered for security purposes. (U.S. Army)
“Having turf battles about what a particular service should be doing is a bit of distraction to sort of just getting on with strengthening our deterrent posture, and I think the Army can contribute in a number of ways,” she said.
In a potential conflict, the Army has “always been particularly strong at setting the theater and providing that overarching command-and-control at scale and being able to sort of be the backbone that allows the joint force to operate together to sustain itself,” Wormuth said. “That’s a really important role for the Army.”
In 2017, the service deployed its first Multi-Domain Task Force to the Pacific to experiment with multidomain operations as a concept in that theater. Officials focused on adapting the Army’s doctrine and modernization toward what’s needed in the region.
The Pacific will be the only theater to receive two MDTF units. Europe will get one, the Arctic will get another and a fifth MDTF will be set up to flexibly deploy where needed, according to Army strategy.
MDTFs in the Pacific will be able to help prepare the operational environment for the Army to bring in its Long-Range Precision Fires capability as well as capabilities from other services, Wormuth noted.
Flynn said Army leadership is still working on the timing and details of the second team.
“We’re still in sort of preliminary stages of where we land it, how we land it and its configuration, but there’s a need for two in the Pacific,” he said.
Russia remains
At the same time, the Army is trying to balance its focus on the Pacific with its presence in Europe, which is aimed at deterring Russia.
Wormuth pointed to the reestablishment of V Corps with a forward element in Poland, the creation of Enhanced Forward Presence Battalions and the deployment of a rotational Armored Brigade Combat Team, which was first sent to Europe in that capacity in January 2017.
She also noted the elevation of U.S. Army Europe as a four-star headquarters, which was merged with U.S. Army Africa, as another evidence of the Army’s commitment in Europe.
“There’s a wide range of exercises we are participating in all of the time,” Wormuth said. “If there ever were to be a conflict with Russia, the Army is going to be front and center to that.”
Russia reemerged as a top threat in 2014 when it invaded and annexed Crimea. At the time, Army personnel in Europe had declined from roughly 200,000 — with two Army Corps of heavy armored forces — during the Cold War to around 33,0000 in 2015 — with only two permanently stationed brigade combat teams.
The military quickly reversed course. The fiscal year 2017 budget request more than four times the amount of funding for what was called the European Reassurance Initiative, or ERI, as a way to slow Russia’s military aggression in Eastern Europe and bolster allies’ defense capabilities. Roughly $2.8 billion of the $3.4 billion in ERI funding was for the Army.
The Army spent $2 billion putting a “heel-to-toe” ABCT in theater 24/7 on a rotational basis on top of the Stryker brigade and infantry brigade already in Europe and also funded more aviation capability in theater.
The European Deterrence Initiative, formerly known as ERI, peaked at $6.5 billion in FY19. That top line has seen a steady decline from FY20 through FY22, after a large number of infrastructure projects were completed. The Pentagon’s FY22 request for EDI totals $3.7 billion.
A joint, multinational airborne operation at Boboc Air Base, Romania, takes plan May 10, 2021, as part of Swift Response 21, a drill that falls under the purview of Defender Europe 21. (Sgt. Catessa Palone/U.S. Army)
The Army also made plans in 2019 to embark on a division-sized exercise called Defender Europe in 2020 to challenge the service’s capability to rapidly deploy from U.S. installations to U.S. ports then to ports in Europe and across the theater.
Former U.S. Army Europe Commander Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges said that while the Army is focusing on the Pacific region, it’s not “turning away from Europe.”
In fact, Hodges told Defense News, “Army capabilities have continued to grow in Europe.”
The service has added the V Corps in Poland to act “as the controlling headquarters for specific operations, activities and initiatives,” according to a U.S. Army Europe and Africa statement sent to Defense News.
“Overall, the Corps is not considered fully operational capable,” but is expected to achieve this status by November, following a certification exercise which began last month and continues this month.
The Army announced earlier this year that it would stand up a Multi-Domain Task Force in Europe. The MDTF was activated last month and is already actively participating in exercises in the theater. The Army also is standing up a new Theater Fires Command.
“Still, there continues to be a need in Europe for more air and missile defense, engineers and logistical capabilities, especially transport,” Hodges said.
In its budget request for FY22, the Army seeks funding for increased persistent ballistic and cruise missile capabilities for U.S. and NATO facilities and an integrated air-and-missile defense architecture for the European theater.
To combat Russia’s information warfare capabilities, the European Deterrence Initiative would also support the Army’s Operational Influence Platform, which uses social media and “advanced online publicizing techniques” to counter propaganda and misinformation, according to budget documents.
Wormuth said many of the modernization programs that are nearly ready to field were originally focused on the European theater. “I think that just speaks to the fact that it’s a bit of a home base,” she said.
The Army this year, fielded Short-Range Air Defense Strykers in Europe, filling a gap first identified by Hodges when he commanded the Army in Europe in 2016.
But Wormuth said the Army will have to rely more on its allies in Europe to allow it to shift attention to the Pacific region.
If the Army can lean harder on its allies, “they can help us carry more load in that theater and allow us to maybe focus a little more on INDOPACOM,” she said.
Jen Judson is the land warfare reporter for Defense News. She has covered defense in the Washington area for 10 years. She was previously a reporter at Politico and Inside Defense. She won the National Press Club's best analytical reporting award in 2014 and was named the Defense Media Awards' best young defense journalist in 2018.
12. US Army insists next year’s Defender Europe is not canceled
We remain a global power with global responsibilities.
US Army insists next year’s Defender Europe is not canceled
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army is pushing back on claims made in congressional language that the Defender Europe exercise is canceled and will be replaced by smaller drills in 2022. However, the exercise will not be the division-level event it was originally intended to be.
“The committee notes that the Department of Defense cancelled the largescale theater level Defender Europe exercise for fiscal year 2022 at a time of increased escalatory Russian military activity and replaced it with smaller-scale activities,” the House Armed Services Committee chairman’s markup of the fiscal 2022 defense policy bill stated.
The committee directed the defense secretary to provide a report by Jan. 5, 2022, detailing a strategy to “mitigate the impacts on readiness, deterrence, and interoperability of the modifications made to this exercise.”
Additionally, the committee said the decision to modify the exercise was “made years ago but was not shared with Congress until the fiscal year 2022 President’s Budget request.”
“The committee urges the Department of Defense to review this decision and the benefits of conducting a theater-level European exercise to deter Russia in future years,” the markup read.
The Army began in 2020 what was to be an annual exercise series in Europe. It was set to be the third-largest military exercise on the continent since the Cold War as a division-scale exercise that would test the Army’s ability to deliver a force from “fort in the United States to port in the United States,” and then to ports in Europe, and from there to operational areas throughout Europe, including Germany, Poland, the Baltic states, other Eastern European nations, Nordic countries and Georgia, U.S. Army Europe and Africa Commander Gen. Chris Cavoli told Defense News in late 2019.
At the same time, the Army established a smaller Defender exercise in the Pacific. In 2021, the service planned to make the Defender Pacific exercise bigger, while limiting the size of Defender Europe. The countries would subsequently trade off being the bigger or smaller exercise each year.
But the big division-level exercise in Europe has yet to materialize due to the coronavirus pandemic. The Army hit pause on its first stab at the exercise in March 2020 and picked up again in June with a smaller associated exercise. The service ultimately deployed a combined arms battalion to Europe in summer 2020.
The Defender Europe 2021 exercise focused on the Black Sea and the Balkans. Serbia and Russia launched joint military exercises near Serbia’s capital at the same time.
The exercise hosted 26 different countries and more than 28,000 U.S. and allied troops in 30 different training areas, “doing everything from joint forcible entry operation to theater opening exercises,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told Defense News at its conference last month.
“We always gain tactical lessons from those kinds of exercises, but I think one of the things that is really powerful is not just building the relationships with our allies and partners with that interoperability, but also, frankly, signaling that those exercises provide of what we can do with our allies and partners,” she said.
The U.S. Army’s goal for the Defender series in 2022 “is to focus on modernization efforts and implementation in the United States, which will be done through various combat training center rotations and Project Convergence,” according to a U.S. Army Europe and Africa statement sent to Defense News last month. Project Convergence is an annual stateside campaign where the Army focuses on experimenting with emerging technology to develop future capability.
Cavoli was unavailable for an interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.
The European-based exercise, dubbed Defender Europe 22, is still happening, according to the statement, and “is scaled and scoped to facilitate this effort, not necessarily scaled back or cancelled.”
The exercise will continue to “demonstrate the U.S. Army’s ability to aggregate combat power on the European continent in support of European stability,” the statement added.
The exercise will focus on building strategic and operational readiness. Units will draw from Army pre-positioned stock and deploy through five different ports in the northern Atlantic Ocean, Baltic Sea and Mediterranean Sea, using new logistical lines to send equipment to locations in Europe by convoy, rail and barge to “key areas” throughout the continent, the command said.
At the Defense News Conference, Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville acknowledged the service had to scale back its exercises because of the pandemic.
“Strength comes from working very closely and bringing together and converging our allies’ and partners’ systems, and if we don’t have a good command-and-control system to do that, we don’t get the benefit of that,” he said.
The only way to accomplish interoperability between nations is to exercise, practice, and “get out there and talk to each other and work through the friction that goes along with these exercises in different parts of Europe and different parts of the Pacific,” McConville said.
“So that’s what we are trying to achieve, given the resources we have, given the COVID environment that we live in. And I’m very, very pleased with, quite frankly, how everyone’s working through these challenges that we see and still getting the job done.”
Jen Judson is the land warfare reporter for Defense News. She has covered defense in the Washington area for 10 years. She was previously a reporter at Politico and Inside Defense. She won the National Press Club's best analytical reporting award in 2014 and was named the Defense Media Awards' best young defense journalist in 2018.
13. SFAB troops and an aviation brigade will rotate to Europe next
Excerpts:
“We’re very excited about them being here just to advise, support, liaison, assess military capabilities [and] to help train our partners,” the general added.
Early SFAB rotations focused on training and building up security forces in Afghanistan, where that country’s military faced the Taliban insurgency.
But as the Army shifted its focus to competing against Russia and China, teams of SFAB soldiers have started deploying to Africa and the Indo-Pacific region, as well.
As part of that realignment, each SFAB was paired with a specific combatant command region.
SFAB troops and an aviation brigade will rotate to Europe next
The units deploying to Europe are:
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The 1st Cavalry Division Combat Aviation Brigade from Fort Hood, Texas, more commonly known as the 1st Air Cavalry Brigade.
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Advisor teams from the 4th Security Force Assistance Brigade, headquartered at Fort Carson, Colorado.
The 1st Air Cavalry Brigade will serve as the rotational aviation brigade in support of Atlantic Resolve, a NATO operation intended to deter Russian aggression in the region
“Training to fight and win with our European partners builds confidence across the globe in NATO’s combined lethality,” said Col. Reggie Harper, 1st Air Cavalry Brigade commander, in the release. “Our team is comprised of the finest combat aviators on the planet. We are trained and ready for this rotation.”
The 4th SFAB rotation is one of the first competition-focused deployments for the still relatively new advising units, and the first of its kind to Europe.
“We are excited to have them rotate in for the first time,” Maj. Gen. Joe Jarrard, deputy commanding general of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, told Defense News. “The first...six months’ rotation is going to focus with the [countries] of Georgia, Latvia, North Macedonia, Poland and Romania.”
“We’re very excited about them being here just to advise, support, liaison, assess military capabilities [and] to help train our partners,” the general added.
Early SFAB rotations focused on training and building up security forces in Afghanistan, where that country’s military faced the Taliban insurgency.
But as the Army shifted its focus to competing against Russia and China, teams of SFAB soldiers have started deploying to Africa and the Indo-Pacific region, as well.
As part of that realignment, each SFAB was paired with a specific combatant command region.
Defense News land warfare reporter Jen Judson contributed to this story.
Davis Winkie is a staff reporter covering the Army. He originally joined Military Times as a reporting intern in 2020. Before journalism, Davis worked as a military historian. He is also a human resources officer in the Army National Guard.
14. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops have not yet complied with vaccine mandate as deadlines near
Will this be an example of issuing an order you cannot enforce? Will we or can we enforce it? This is not the same as units managing MEDPROs statistics for medical readiness.
Our adversaries are observing this and assessing the effects of their disinformation campaign on the readiness of the US military. They have been conducting a dissent and discord program based on national political divisions and influencing military personnel to take a side in the same divide. We should think about that.
Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops have not yet complied with vaccine mandate as deadlines near
Hundreds of thousands of U.S. service members remain unvaccinated or only partially vaccinated against the coronavirus as the Pentagon’s first compliance deadlines near, with lopsided rates across the individual services and a spike in deaths among military reservists illustrating how political division over the shots has seeped into a nonpartisan force with unambiguous orders.
Overall, the military’s vaccination rate has climbed since August, when Defense Department leaders, acting on a directive from President Biden, informed the nation’s 2.1 million troops that immunization would become mandatory, exemptions would be rare and those who refuse would be punished. Yet troops’ response has been scattershot, according to data assessed by The Washington Post.
For instance, 90 percent of the active-duty Navy is fully vaccinated, whereas just 72 percent of the Marine Corps is, the data show, even though both services share a Nov. 28 deadline. In the Air Force, more than 60,000 personnel have just three weeks to meet the Defense Department’s most ambitious deadline.
Deaths attributed to covid-19 have soared in parts of the force as some services struggle to inoculate their troops. In September, more military personnel died of coronavirus infections than in all of 2020. None of those who died were fully vaccinated, Pentagon spokesman Maj. Charlie Dietz said.
Military officials explain the variance in vaccination rates, in part, by pointing to the staggered deadlines each of the services set for personnel to comply while expressing optimism that, as those dates approach, numbers will quickly rise and a vast majority of troops will carry out their orders. Thousands of troops already have begun their two-shot regimens, like in the Navy, where 98 percent of active-duty sailors have received at least one dose, officials said.
But other services are not on such a steady path, and critics say the large gaps between vaccination deadlines jeopardize how ready the military can be in a moment of crisis. They point specifically to the reserves and National Guard, which over the last two years have been called upon in numerous emergencies — at home and overseas — and yet large numbers of their personnel have so far refused to get vaccinated.
“The Army’s policy is incentivizing inaction until the latest possible date,” said Katherine L. Kuzminski, a military policy expert at the Washington think tank Center for a New American Security, citing plans that require Army Reserve and National Guard personnel to be fully vaccinated more than eight months from now. Coronavirus vaccines have been widely available since the spring.
“The way we’ve seen the virus evolve tells us looking out to June 30 may need to be reconsidered,” Kuzminski said.
Combined, the Army Guard and Reserve comprise approximately 522,000 soldiers, roughly a quarter of the entire U.S. military, and they account for nearly 40 percent of the 62 service-member deaths due to covid-19, according to the data assessed by The Post. Barely 40 percent are fully vaccinated. The active-duty Army, facing a Dec. 15 deadline, stands at 81 percent.
A rise in military infections, hospitalizations and deaths mirrored the catastrophic summer surge across the United States as the virus’s delta variant became the dominant strain and hit younger, unvaccinated people particularly hard, the Pentagon said. Defense officials expect deaths to ebb in coming months.
Since the pandemic began, about a quarter-million service members have been infected with the virus, according to Pentagon data, including more than 2,000 who were hospitalized.
Troops in the National Guard and reserves serve part-time in uniform. But in the last year, as the pandemic, wildfires and civil unrest raged, the Defense Department and governors across the country mobilized more troops for duty than at any time since World War II. Those service members typically are older than their active-duty counterparts, and their civilian jobs or mobilizations may expose them to the virus more often than full-time troops who live and work on insulated military installations, officials have said.
In a statement, the Army defended the June deadline for its Guard and Reserve units, saying the date reflects how large those organizations are relative to other services and military reserve components, as well as the constraints imposed by the geographic dispersal of its members. Pandemic-related restrictions on in-person assemblies, such as drilling weekends, have added to the administrative challenge of processing so many medical records, counseling soldiers who remain skeptical about the vaccine and putting needles into people’s arms, said Lt. Col. Terence M. Kelley, an Army spokesman.
About half of Army reservists don’t live near military health clinics that administer the vaccine, Kelley said. Yet while the Reserve has instructed soldiers on how to upload records documenting any shots they receive from nonmilitary providers, there does not appear to be a clear public push from the Pentagon for soldiers to seek free vaccines from pharmacies or grocery stores when distance is a challenge.
“We expect all unvaccinated soldiers to receive the vaccine as soon as possible. Individual soldiers are required to receive the vaccine when available,” Kelley said. The June deadlines, he said, “allow reserve component units necessary time to update records and process exemption requests.”
Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said the Army’s deadline for its reserve units was “jarring” and could impact the service’s ability to quickly mobilize troops between now and next summer.
“I think the Army needs to take this seriously and their effort to explain away the problem” is irresponsible, he said. “You’re allowing a lot of room for people not to be deployable.”
The Army said Thursday that Guard or Reserve soldiers mobilized on federal orders after Dec. 15, the vaccination deadline for active-duty soldiers, must be immunized when they leave their home station. The order allows commanders to accelerate the June 30 timetable, but it would delay movement of any personnel who had not yet started a vaccine regimen, which takes between two weeks and a month to complete and be in full compliance with Army guidelines.
Military officials may have other concerns that limit how aggressively they push reservists to comply with the vaccine mandate, including lessons learned from past attempts to do so, said Trupti Brahmbhatt, a senior policy researcher and military health expert at the Rand Corporation.
The Air Force experienced significant blowback following Pentagon requirements for anthrax vaccine regimens in the late 1990s. The mandate “adversely” affected the “retention of trained and experienced guard and reserve pilots,” according to a Government Accountability Office sample survey cited in a 2002 report. About 16 percent of pilots and crew members in reserve units either sought a transfer to another unit to delay or avoid the process, switched to an inactive status or left duty altogether, the report found.
“The Army probably does not want to risk those retention problems,” Brahmbhatt said.
Defense officials have been reluctant to predict how many service members may defy the vaccine mandate. Republican lawmakers, including Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Tex.), have suggested the number could be significant. “Question for the SECDEF: are you really willing to allow a huge exodus of experienced service members just because they won’t take the vaccine?” the former Navy SEAL tweeted last month, using an abbreviation for secretary of defense.
“Honestly, Americans deserve to know how you plan on dealing with this blow to force readiness — it’s already causing serious problems,” the tweet said.
Troops’ receptiveness to the vaccine has varied widely, especially in Guard and Reserve units, which are less connected to the rigid top-down environment that governs daily life on active duty. Experts attribute that to broader societal attitudes — millions of American adults remain unvaccinated — as well as cultural traits unique to each service.
Kuzminski, the military policy expert, told The Post in August that one factor likely fueling the Navy’s comparatively high vaccination rate is last year’s outbreak aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt while deployed to the Pacific. The incident exposed how rapidly the virus can spread among those living in tight quarters, and for many leaders it was a wake-up call when the ship was sidelined for two months after about 1,100 crew members were infected, including one sailor who died.
Gallego, a former infantryman in the Marine Corps Reserve, said demographics could explain why its vaccination rates trail the other services.
Marines, on average, are younger, predominantly male and, like many enlisted personnel throughout the armed forces, generally don’t have four-year college degrees, according to 2018 Pentagon data. All of those factors contribute to lower vaccination rates in the broader U.S. population by some degree, according to government data and surveys.
What polls don’t capture, however, is how many Marines and other combat-focused troops, compared to civilians who are the same age, generally are more physically fit and, as a consequence, may doubt the need to be vaccinated.
The Marine Corps declined to address why its vaccine rates lag the other services but said that in the six weeks after the mandate was issued, there was a 292 percent spike in the number of personnel who began a vaccine regimen.
“Marines who refuse the vaccine today,” a spokesperson said, “may choose to be vaccinated tomorrow.”
15. Taliban says US will provide humanitarian aid to Afghanistan
Taliban says US will provide humanitarian aid to Afghanistan
AP · by KATHY GANNON · October 10, 2021
ISLAMABAD (AP) — The U.S. has agreed to provide humanitarian aid to a desperately poor Afghanistan on the brink of an economic disaster, while refusing to give political recognition to the country’s new Taliban rulers, the Taliban said Sunday.
The statement came at the end of the first direct talks between the former foes since the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops at the end of August.
The U.S. statement was less definitive, saying only that the two sides “discussed the United States’ provision of robust humanitarian assistance, directly to the Afghan people.”
The Taliban said the talks held in Doha, Qatar, “went well,” with Washington freeing up humanitarian aid to Afghanistan after agreeing not to link such assistance to formal recognition of the Taliban.
The United States made it clear that the talks were in no way a preamble to recognition of the Taliban, who swept into power Aug. 15 after the U.S.-allied government collapsed.
State Department spokesman Ned Price called the discussions “candid and professional,” with the U.S. side reiterating that the Taliban will be judged on their actions, not only their words.
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“The U.S. delegation focused on security and terrorism concerns and safe passage for U.S. citizens, other foreign nationals and our Afghan partners, as well as on human rights, including the meaningful participation of women and girls in all aspects of Afghan society,” he said in a statement.
Taliban political spokesman Suhail Shaheen also told The Associated Press that the movement’s interim foreign minister assured the U.S. during the talks that the Taliban are committed to seeing that Afghan soil is not used by extremists to launch attacks against other countries.
On Saturday, however, the Taliban ruled out cooperation with Washington on containing the increasingly active Islamic State group in Afghanistan.
IS, an enemy of the Taliban, has claimed responsibility for a number of recent attacks, including Friday’s suicide bombing that killed 46 minority Shiite Muslims. Washington considers IS its greatest terrorist threat emanating from Afghanistan.
“We are able to tackle Daesh independently,” Shaheen said when asked whether the Taliban would work with the U.S. to contain the Islamic State affiliate. He used an Arabic acronym for IS.
Bill Roggio, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who tracks militant groups, agreed the Taliban do not need Washington’s help to hunt down and destroy Afghanistan’s IS affiliate, known as the Islamic State in Khorasan Province, or ISKP.
The Taliban “fought 20 years to eject the U.S., and the last thing it needs is the return of the U.S. It also doesn’t need U.S. help,” said Roggio, who also produces the foundation’s Long War Journal. “The Taliban has to conduct the difficult and time-consuming task of rooting out ISKP cells and its limited infrastructure. It has all the knowledge and tools it needs to do it.”
The IS affiliate doesn’t have the advantage of safe havens in Pakistan and Iran that the Taliban had in its fight against the United States, Roggio said. However, he warned that the Taliban’s longtime support for al-Qaida make them unreliable as counterterrorism partners with the United States.
The Taliban gave refuge to al-Qaida before it carried out the 9/11 attacks. That prompted the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan that drove the Taliban from power.
“It is insane for the U.S. to think the Taliban can be a reliable counterterrorism partner, given the Taliban’s enduring support for al-Qaida,” Roggio said.
During the meeting, U.S. officials were expected to press the Taliban to allow Americans and others to leave Afghanistan. In their statement, the Taliban said without elaborating that they would “facilitate principled movement of foreign nationals.”
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AP Diplomatic Writer Matthew Lee in Washington contributed.
AP · by KATHY GANNON · October 10, 2021
16. Cyberattacks concerning to most in US: Pearson/AP-NORC poll
What is different than nuclear war or other conflicts is that the entire society and each individual citizen has a role in cyber defense, cyber hygiene, and cyber resiliency. This is not theoretical or something only the government has to worry about. All of us have a role in protecting the cyber domain.
Cyberattacks concerning to most in US: Pearson/AP-NORC poll
AP · by ALAN SUDERMAN · October 11, 2021
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Most Americans across party lines have serious concerns about cyberattacks on U.S. computer systems and view China and Russia as major threats, according to a new poll.
The poll by The Pearson Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that about 9 in 10 Americans are at least somewhat concerned about hacking that involves their personal information, financial institutions, government agencies or certain utilities. About two-thirds say they are very or extremely concerned.
Roughly three-quarters say the Chinese and Russian governments are major threats to the cybersecurity of the U.S. government, and at least half also see the Iranian government and non-government bodies as threatening.
The broad consensus highlights the growing impacts of cyberattacks in an increasingly connected world and could boost efforts by President Joe Biden and lawmakers to force critical industries to boost their cyber defenses and impose reporting requirements for companies that get hacked. The poll comes amid a wave of high-profile ransomware attacks and cyber espionage campaigns in the last year that have compromised sensitive government records and led to the shutdown of the operations of energy companies, hospitals, schools and others.
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“It’s pretty uncommon nowadays to find issues that both large majorities of Republicans and Democrats” view as a problem, said David Sterrett, a senior research scientist at The AP-NORC Center.
A new Pearson Institute/AP-NORC poll finds about 7 in 10 Americans consider the Chinese and Russian governments a big threat to U.S. government cybersecurity.
Biden has made cybersecurity a key issue in his young administration and federal lawmakers are considering legislation to strengthen both public and private cyber defenses.
Michael Daniel, CEO of the Cyber Threat Alliance and a former top cybersecurity official during the Obama administration, said the poll shows the public is firmly aware of the kind of threats posed online that cybersecurity experts have been stressing for years.
“We don’t need to do a whole lot more awareness raising,” he said.
The explosion in the last year of ransomware, in which cyber criminals encrypt an organization’s data and then demand payment to unscramble it, has underscored how gangs of extortionist hackers can disrupt the economy and put lives and livelihoods at risk.
One of the cyber incidents with the greatest consequences this year was a ransomware attack in May on the company that owns the nation’s largest fuel pipeline, which led to gas shortages along the East Coast. A few weeks later, a ransomware attack on the world’s largest meat processing company disrupted production around the world.
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Victims of ransomware attacks have ranged from key U.S. agencies and Fortune 500 companies to small entities like Leonardtown, Maryland, which was one of hundreds of organizations affected worldwide when software company Kaseya was hit by ransomware during the Forth of July weekend.
“We ended up being very lucky but it definitely opened our eyes that it could happen to anyone,” said Laschelle McKay, the town administrator. She said Leonardtown’s I.T. provider was able to restore the town’s network and files after several days.
The criminal syndicates that dominate the ransomware business are mostly Russian-speaking and operate with near impunity out of Russia or countries allied with Russia. The U.S. government has also blamed Russian spies for a major breach of U.S. government agencies known as the SolarWinds hack, so named for the U.S. software company whose product was used in the hacking.
China has also been active. In July, the Biden administration formally blamed China for a massive hack of Microsoft Exchange email server software and asserted that criminal hackers associated with the Chinese government have carried out ransomware attacks and other illicit cyber operations.
“The amount of Chinese cyber actors dwarfs the rest of the globe, combined,” Rob Joyce, the director of cybersecurity at the National Security Agency, said at a recent conference. “The elite in that group really are elite. It’s a law of large numbers.”
Both Russia and China have denied any wrongdoing.
Older adults are much more likely to view Russia and China as serious threats. A large majority of adults over 60 say the Russian and the Chinese governments are a big threat, but only about half of those under 30 agree.
Democrats — at 79% — are somewhat more likely than Republicans — at 70% — to say the Russian government is a big threat. Former President Donald Trump, a Republican, has routinely downplayed Russian aggression. In his first comments after the SolarWinds hack was discovered in December, Trump contradicted his secretary of state and other top officials and suggested without evidence that China was behind the campaign.
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The AP-NORC poll of 1,071 adults was conducted Sept. 9-13, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Omnibus, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.
AP · by ALAN SUDERMAN · October 11, 2021
17. Fiona Hill, a nobody to Trump and Putin, saw into them both
She is an impressive scholar and expert. I have been listening to her on various news shows over the past week and she has great insights into Putin and Russia and great personal anecdotes of her experiences on the NSC.
Fiona Hill, a nobody to Trump and Putin, saw into them both
AP · by LYNN BERRY and CALVIN WOODWARD · October 11, 2021
WASHINGTON (AP) — Vladimir Putin paid scant attention to Fiona Hill, a preeminent U.S. expert on Russia, when she was seated next to him at dinners. Putin’s people placed her there by design, choosing a “nondescript woman,” as she put it, so the Russian president would have no competition for attention.
Fluent in Russian, she often carefully took in the conversations of men who seemed to forget she was there and wrote it all down later, she recalled in an Associated Press interview. “Hey, if I was a guy, you wouldn’t be talking like this in front of me,” she remembered thinking. “But go ahead. I’m listening.”
Hill expected not to be similarly invisible when she later went to work for another world leader, Donald Trump, as his Russia adviser in the White House. She could see inside Putin’s head, had co-written an acclaimed book about him, but Trump did not want her counsel, either. He ignored her in meeting after meeting, once mistaking her for a secretary and calling her “darlin’.”
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Again, though, she was listening. She was reading Trump like she had read Putin.
The result is “There Is Nothing for You Here,” her book out last week. Unlike other tell-all authors from the Trump administration, she isn’t obsessed with the scandalous. Much like her measured but riveting testimony in Trump’s first impeachment, the book offers a more sober, and thus perhaps more alarming, portrait of the 45th president.
If Hill’s tone is restrained, it is damning by a thousand cuts. It lays out how a career devoted to understanding and managing the Russian threat crashed into her revelation that the greatest threat to America comes from within.
In fly-on-the-wall detail, she describes a president with a voracious appetite for praise and little to no taste for governing — a man so consumed with what others said about him that U.S. relations with other countries rose or fell according to how flattering foreign leaders were in their remarks.
“From his staff and everyone who came into his orbit, Trump demanded constant attention and adulation,” she writes. Particularly in international affairs, ”The president’s vanity and fragile self-esteem were a point of acute vulnerability.”
Hill describes Putin manipulating Trump by offering or withholding compliments, a maneuver she said was more effective with this president than getting dirt and blackmailing him would have been. At their joint news conference in Finland, when Trump appeared to side with Putin over his own intelligence agencies on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, Hill almost lost it.
“I wanted to end the whole thing,” she writes. “I contemplated throwing a fit or faking a seizure and hurling myself backward into the row of journalists behind me. But it would only have added to the humiliating spectacle.”
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Yet in Trump she saw a rare if ultimately wasted talent. He spoke the language of many average people, disdained the same things, operated without a filter, liked the same food and gleefully shredded the tiresome norms of the elite. While Hillary Clinton sipped champagne with donors, Trump was out there pitching coal and steel jobs — at least that was the impression.
“He clearly had a feel for what people wanted,” she told the AP. “He could talk the talk even if he couldn’t walk the walk in having their experiences. But he understood it.”
Yet that skill was squandered, in her view. Where it could have been used to mobilize people for good, it was instead used only in service of himself — “Me the People” as a chapter title puts it.
Trump’s vanity also doomed his Helsinki meeting with Putin and any chances for a coveted arms control deal with Russia. The questions at the news conference “got right to the heart of his insecurities,” Hill writes. If Trump had agreed that Russia had interfered in the election on his behalf, in his mind he might as well have said “I am illegitimate.”
It was clear to Putin that the resulting backlash would undermine even the vague commitments he and Trump had made. “On his way out the door from the conference,” Hill writes, “he told his press secretary, within earshot of our interpreter, that the press conference was ‘bullshit.’”
Trump admired Putin for his wealth, power and fame, seeing him, in Hill’s words, as the “ultimate badass.” During the course of his presidency, Trump would come to resemble the autocratic and populist Russian leader more than he resembled any recent American presidents, she writes, and “Sometimes even I was startled by how glaringly obvious the similarities were.”
Putin’s ability to manipulate the Russian political system to potentially stay in power indefinitely also made an impression. “Trump sees that and says what’s there not to like about that kind of situation?” Hill told the AP.
Hill had served as the national intelligence officer for Russia from early 2006 until late 2009 and was highly respected in Washington circles, but it was only during the impeachment hearings that she was introduced to the nation. She became one of the most damaging witnesses against the president she had served, undercutting his defense by testifying that he had sent his envoys to Ukraine on a “domestic political errand” that had nothing to do with national security policy.
She began her testimony by describing her improbable journey as the daughter of a coal miner from an impoverished town in northeast England to the White House. She also explained her desire to serve a country that “has offered me opportunities I never would have had in England.”
Much of her new book expands on that personal journey, a story told with self-deprecating humor and kindness. Along the way, Hill the Brookings Institution scholar weaves in a study of the changing societies she witnessed over the decades as a child in Britain, a student and researcher in Russia and finally as a citizen of the United States.
The changes in all three countries are strikingly similar, due in part to the destruction of heavy industry. The result is what she calls a “crisis of opportunity” and the rise of populist leaders like Putin, Trump and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson able to tap into the fears and grievances of those feeling left behind.
She said she went into the White House worried about what Russia was doing and “came out, having realized fully watching all of this, that actually the problem was the United States ... and the Russians were just exploiting everything.”
Hill calls Russia a cautionary tale, “America’s Ghost of Christmas Future,” if the U.S. is unable to heal its political divisions.
Hailing from a more civil form of politics, President Joe Biden is trying to bring the country together and advance its reputation abroad, she said, but “he’s, in a way, a kind of man standing alone and people are not pulling behind him.”
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AP video journalist Nathan Ellgren contributed to this report.
AP · by LYNN BERRY and CALVIN WOODWARD · October 11, 2021
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
