Quotes of the Day:
"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world."
- Nelson Mandela
"Always do your very best. Even when no one else is looking, you always are. Don't disappoint yourself."
- Colin Powell
"The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls."
- Pablo Picasso
1. Taiwan Emerges as a ‘Pre-eminent Issue’ For CIA’s New China Directorate
2. Does Taiwan’s Military Stand a Chance Against China? Few Think So
3. The West Must Act to Stop Iran’s Nuclear Program
4. Marine Corps announces career-ending consequences for Marines refusing to get COVID vaccine
5. Learning All the Wrong Lessons: Why an Over-the-Horizon Approach to Counterterrorism Won’t Work
6. What the Military Can Learn From 'Dune'
7. 30 Afghan orphans are Colorado bound after traumatic escape
8. A Pentagon definition for extremism is imminent
9. U.S. National Security Advisor met representatives of Myanmar's shadow government
10. Isis-K insurgency jeopardises Taliban’s grip on Afghanistan
11. State Department to Form New Cyber Office to Face Proliferating Global Challenges
12. The Pentagon’s Office Culture Is Stuck in 1968
13. Opinion | Even Colin Powell Ignored the Powell Doctrine. Now, America Is Starting to Listen.
14. Moving more TRICARE patients to civilian care would cause ‘significant harm,’ study finds
15. U.S. MC-130J Lands On Highway In Sweden To Unload HIMARS Artillery System During Special Ops Exercise
16. US Green Berets who've trained Taiwanese troops explain how they could fight China and why the US keeps their mission secret
17. Biden, Taiwan, and Strategic Ambiguity
18. A Fitting 2021 Sequel to James Fallows’ 1981 “National Defense”
19. China has long upheld spirit, principles of UN Charter
20. FDD | Time To Wedge The E-7A Wedgetail Into The US Air Force Fleet
21. The Taiwan issue will fade away – literally
22. Which Greeks in the Western Way of War?
23. Why America Lost the War in Afghanistan - A Requiem Essay
1. Taiwan Emerges as a ‘Pre-eminent Issue’ For CIA’s New China Directorate
Excerpts:
One of the key features of Russia’s continued aggression toward Ukraine is cyber operations against civilian and military targets.
Intelligence and military officials often refer to China as a key cyber threat actor. Rob Joyce, who leads the National Security Agency’s cybersecurity directorate, said China is becoming more aggressive and even overt in its effort to develop vulnerabilities in government and consumer devices and software. He pointed to a June cybersecurity contest in China, the Tianfu Cup, which paid cash prizes for hackers who found vulnerabilities in deployed software. Such “bug bounties” have become increasingly common sponsored events to find and fix vulnerabilities in their software. But such a contest takes on a malicious tone when undertaken by the Chinese government.
“They created an effort for their actors, vulnerability analysts, their researchers to go in and try and find holes in the latest hardware, [operating systems], Windows 10, Chrome, Safari, find hacks in iPhone, Bluetooth, Linux operating systems,” Joyce said. “all of these things that are just Western commercial market guiding capabilities. They found exploits for all of them. Every single one. That tells me...China is investing in that to develop that as a capability.”
Taiwan Emerges as a ‘Pre-eminent Issue’ For CIA’s New China Directorate
A takeover might look like Russia’s takeover of Crimea and might be coordinated with the Kremlin.
SEA ISLAND, Georgia—A possible Chinese takeover of Taiwan is “one of the No. 1 issues” occupying the new China Mission Center, CIA deputy director David Cohen said on Sunday at an intelligence community conference in Georgia.
In March, then-INDOPACOM commander Adm. Philip Davidson told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Chinese threat toward Taiwan could “manifest...in the next six years.” Davidson has since left the command but other senior military officials have since reiterated that estimate Defense One on background.
Cohen, who appeared virtually at the Cipher Brief conference here, declined to comment specifically on Davidson’s six-year figure but did say that Taiwan has emerged “as one of the pre-eminent issues in our kind of analysis, trying to understand precisely how [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping is thinking about Taiwan, how is he thinking about it in relation to the [20th Chinese Communist Party Congress] that's coming up [in 2022], extended in relation to that comparative strength of Chinese military and U.S. military.”
The new center is focused on providing the policy community with “indicators” that reveal Chinese military intentions related to Taiwan and other factors that might drive Xi’s thinking on the subject, Cohen said, so “the policy community can figure out which levers they want to pull here.”
“Taiwan is going to be the test” of U.S. resolve and credibility, said Norman Roule, a former National Intelligence Manager for Iran at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Roule said the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan has made it harder to credibly threaten China with retaliation should it invade Taiwan.
“Historically, people have forgotten where we talked about using nuclear weapons against China [over military action against] Taiwan. And, no, we're not in that role right now, but our resolve on China on Taiwan shouldn’t be in question. People shouldn’t say, ‘If you didn't stand for Afghanistan will you do staff work for other countries?’”
Mark Kelton, a former CIA deputy director, said that the Chinese play for Taiwan will likely resemble the hybrid and non-overt warfare tactics that Russia used as part of its illegal annexation of Crimea and assault on Ukraine in 2014, a kind of creeping takeover occurring, at first, beyond the parameters of regular war as opposed to a large and obvious military assault that might instigate a coordinated multi-nation response.
Kelton cast the likelihood of a Chinese move on Taiwan as a near certainty and Russia would likely help. He said Xi has “undoubtedly concluded that it will be to his advantage, when he decides to move on Taiwa,n to coordinate that activity with the Russians to complicate the United States problem of dealing with [multiple] crises.”
One of the key features of Russia’s continued aggression toward Ukraine is cyber operations against civilian and military targets.
Intelligence and military officials often refer to China as a key cyber threat actor. Rob Joyce, who leads the National Security Agency’s cybersecurity directorate, said China is becoming more aggressive and even overt in its effort to develop vulnerabilities in government and consumer devices and software. He pointed to a June cybersecurity contest in China, the Tianfu Cup, which paid cash prizes for hackers who found vulnerabilities in deployed software. Such “bug bounties” have become increasingly common sponsored events to find and fix vulnerabilities in their software. But such a contest takes on a malicious tone when undertaken by the Chinese government.
“They created an effort for their actors, vulnerability analysts, their researchers to go in and try and find holes in the latest hardware, [operating systems], Windows 10, Chrome, Safari, find hacks in iPhone, Bluetooth, Linux operating systems,” Joyce said. “all of these things that are just Western commercial market guiding capabilities. They found exploits for all of them. Every single one. That tells me...China is investing in that to develop that as a capability.”
2. Does Taiwan’s Military Stand a Chance Against China? Few Think So
But are they picking up pine cones?? (if you know you know)
I hope there would be more than sanctions but sanctions are not a strategy. And note the need for a resistance operating concept.
Excerpts:
“If China dares to make any trouble, wouldn’t the rest of the world issue sanctions against it?” said Ian Su, a 25-year-old insurance broker from the central county of Changhua who trained as a signal operator last year.
Some Taiwanese and American military officials and analysts say Taiwan needs to develop a commitment to civil self-defense, such as in Finland and Switzerland.
Enoch Wu, a former Taiwanese corporal who now heads the ruling party’s Taipei chapter, is leading an effort to promote civil defense through speeches and workshops. He said there needs to be more acceptance that Taiwan must prepare for a Chinese attack.
During annual military exercises last month, Charley Su and his girlfriend, Lucia Chang, both 29, came to watch jet fighters landing on a provincial highway as part of a contingency exercise if airport runways were destroyed.
“Our hard-fought freedom is not for granted,” said Mr. Su, who works in construction. Many in Taiwan don’t realize how fragile its liberty is, he said, because “the military is so far away from the people.”
Does Taiwan’s Military Stand a Chance Against China? Few Think So
Poor preparation and low morale are pressing concerns; sweeping leaves and pulling weeds in basic training
WSJ · by Joyu Wang and Alastair Gale
Among the most pressing concerns are poor preparation and low morale among the roughly 80,000 Taiwanese who are conscripted each year and the nearly 2.2 million reservists.
Xiao Cheng-zhi, a 26-year-old from central Taiwan, said his four months of basic training that ended last year mainly involved sweeping leaves, moving spare tires and pulling weeds. Aside from some marksmanship training, he said, his classes were meaningless.
Mr. Xiao dismissed his cohorts as strawberry soldiers, a term used in Taiwan to describe young people raised by overprotective parents who bruise easily. While he said he is willing to serve, he doubted the island would stand much chance against China’s People’s Liberation Army.
China’s Communist Party considers Taiwan part of its territory despite never having ruled it. Although there is no sign of imminent conflict, Beijing has made clear it intends to bring Taiwan under its control eventually.
In interviews, Taiwanese soldiers and reservists expressed concerns about training and readiness. One said he watched American war movies during training after running out of useful things to do. Another said he spent a lot of time reading and drawing, and that there wasn’t much to worry about anyway. Public opinion polls and interviews suggest many Taiwanese expect the U.S. to take charge if serious danger arises.
Taiwanese soldiers on a contingency runway constructed on a highway in the southern county of Pingtung.
Photo: Joyu Wang/The Wall Street Journal
Two young men described how they had put on extra weight to get disqualified from military conscription, a practice some Taiwanese youths say is common. One said he stuffed himself with large meals every four hours for a month, including McDonald’s combo meals, to gain enough pounds to be exempted.
Grant Newsham, a retired U.S. Marines colonel who spent 2019 in Taiwan studying the island’s defenses, said Taiwan has a solid core of well-trained troops and “superb officers that are ready to fight.” Other military experts compare Taiwan’s top pilots and officers to the world’s best.
But the Taiwanese military is underfunded, and its reserves system is a shambles, Mr. Newsham said. It needs improved pay packages, and it could become far more effective by training with the U.S. and its allies, he said.
Taiwan’s government acknowledges many of the weaknesses and says it is working to fix them. A government watchdog agency said in a July report that some reservists have a “ ‘just passing through’ mentality,” and called for better training using technology such as virtual reality.
An unpublished government report commissioned by Taiwan’s defense ministry, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, found a culture of paperwork that cut into combat training. It said “endless misconduct and mismanagement” had weakened young people’s willingness to join the forces.
At a news conference on Tuesday after this article was published, a spokesman for Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense said the military is working to strengthen its forces to prevent wars and maintain national security. “Military buildup and war preparations are long-term tasks and missions,” he said. “We ask for support from our fellow citizens.”
Last month, Taiwan’s defense ministry made changes to its mandatory military training, saying all incoming conscripts will be sent to combat units for more hands-on experience.
Adding to unease among Taiwanese and U.S. officials are major investments by China’s armed forces. With a military budget 13 times the size of Taiwan’s, China now has more than one million ground troops, according to Pentagon estimates. Taiwan’s military has shrunk to 187,660 active-duty soldiers, from 275,000 in 2011.
This year, China put into service its first ship capable of launching armored troop-carriers, hovercraft and helicopters for amphibious assaults. It held drills simulating sea crossings and beach landings, and has fielded rocket artillery systems with the range to strike Taiwanese targets, according to Pentagon reports.
Taiwan still has some advantages, including a tricky coastline that would be hard for PLA forces to swarm. Also, there are doubts about battle-readiness in China, which hasn’t fought a war since a brief conflict with Vietnam in 1979.
An annual Taiwanese defense ministry assessment of China’s military, reviewed by the Journal, warns that Beijing could use cyberattacks to paralyze Taiwan’s command centers. A crippling of defense infrastructure could increase the reliance on Taiwanese soldiers to prevent a rapid takeover.
U.S. dilemma
The U.S. hasn’t committed to defend Taiwan, but most military analysts assume it would.
Currently, the U.S. maintains a policy of “strategic ambiguity,” in which it aims to prevent conflict by declining to say what it would do if clashes break out. Some U.S. foreign-policy experts want the U.S. to explicitly commit to intervene if China attacks Taiwan. Others worry that even small gestures by Washington could provoke Beijing and entangle the U.S. in foreign trouble.
A photo released by U.S. Navy shows American and allied vessels in the Bay of Bengal earlier this month.
Photo: Russel Lindsey/US Navy/Associated Press
Some military strategists have suggested Taiwan needs to become more like Israel. Despite having less than half of Taiwan’s population, Israel spends nearly $22 billion on defense annually, compared with $13 billion by Taiwan last year. Young Israeli men are required to serve 2½ years, while women must spend nearly two years.
Taiwan used to require about two years of mandatory service for men. It now requires four months. After that, they become reservists, with some, though not all, called up again every one or two years for a refresher course that usually lasts five to seven days. The period will be extended to two weeks beginning next year. Plans to phase out conscription entirely have been stalled by difficulties in attracting volunteers.
Current and former U.S. officials and military analysts say Taiwan must spend more on weapons such as sea mines and coastal cruise missiles that would better deter an amphibious invasion. That might allow it to beat back an invasion for a few days, providing time for the U.S. to come to its defense or for it to impose enough casualties to force a rethink in Beijing.
Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen has tried to rally the public behind improving the military, while pushing initiatives such as building more naval ships and missiles in Taiwan. A new agency to oversee a revamp of military reserve forces is launching in early 2022.
Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen delivering a speech earlier this month following Chinese President Xi Jinping’s vow to unify Taiwan by peaceful means.
Photo: Daniel Ceng Shou-Yi/Zuma Press
Military spending has risen, though it remains unpopular with some Taiwanese. Last month, the government proposed an $8.7 billion special budget for missiles, naval ships and other weapon systems, on top of annual spending set to grow 4% in 2022 to a record $15.1 billion.
Chiang Kai-shek’s legacy
Ronan Fu, a former second lieutenant at the Taiwanese Reserve Command and assistant research fellow at the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica, a state-funded think tank, questions whether young people have a strong enough sense of duty. While training has improved somewhat recently, he said, “adult men in Taiwan don’t actually want to fight.”
A 2019 survey found around half of Taiwanese would be willing to fight to defend the island, but polls also show most don’t expect they will ever have to.
Many young Taiwanese view the military as a legacy of Taiwan’s authoritarian past. The island’s military grew out of the armed forces led by former Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek, who lost to Mao Zedong’s Communist forces in the Chinese Civil War. In the late 1940s, Chiang’s forces fled to Taiwan, where his party imposed martial law.
After Taiwan became a democracy, its military began recruiting volunteers to replace conscripts. With better salaries available in the corporate sector, recruiting proved challenging. In 2018, the defense ministry said it would adopt a hybrid model combining volunteers with the conscripts now obligated to serve four months.
“There is no profession or any professional knowledge that you could master within four months,” said Wang Yi, an officer in Taiwan’s Army Aviation and Special Forces Command.
Harry Goo, a 31-year-old film producer in Taipei, said he was willing to fight to prevent “Taiwan becoming like Hong Kong.” When called up for military service in 2012, though, he took what he said was a local government officer’s advice to rapidly gain weight to avoid conscription. His father told him to get a job rather than wasting time in the military, he said.
Recruitment also has been undermined by the view that China wouldn’t invade because it would be too damaging for its international standing, or because nations such as the U.S. would intervene.
“If China dares to make any trouble, wouldn’t the rest of the world issue sanctions against it?” said Ian Su, a 25-year-old insurance broker from the central county of Changhua who trained as a signal operator last year.
Some Taiwanese and American military officials and analysts say Taiwan needs to develop a commitment to civil self-defense, such as in Finland and Switzerland.
Enoch Wu, a former Taiwanese corporal who now heads the ruling party’s Taipei chapter, is leading an effort to promote civil defense through speeches and workshops. He said there needs to be more acceptance that Taiwan must prepare for a Chinese attack.
During annual military exercises last month, Charley Su and his girlfriend, Lucia Chang, both 29, came to watch jet fighters landing on a provincial highway as part of a contingency exercise if airport runways were destroyed.
“Our hard-fought freedom is not for granted,” said Mr. Su, who works in construction. Many in Taiwan don’t realize how fragile its liberty is, he said, because “the military is so far away from the people.”
Taiwan honor guards took part in a National Day parade in Taipei on Oct. 10.
Photo: RITCHIE B. TONGO/EPA/shutterstock
WSJ · by Joyu Wang and Alastair Gale
3. The West Must Act to Stop Iran’s Nuclear Program
Excerpts:
Where does that leave the United States? Ultimately, for lack of better nonmilitary options, Biden may have no choice but to embrace the maximum pressure strategy he once renounced — the only peaceful avenue to compel a change in Iran’s malign behavior. And if Israel attacks the Islamic Republic, Washington would probably denounce the Jewish state in public — but would quickly find itself in Israel’s corner as Tehran falsely blames Washington for the assault and retaliates by attacking Israel and U.S. assets in the Middle East.
But the United States must act quickly. Iran’s nuclear advances continue in earnest, with a current breakout time — that is, the amount of time needed to produce enough weapon-grade fissile material for one nuclear weapon — of merely weeks. While Tehran may then need a year or more to weaponize the material, the regime’s progress means that any future negotiations will take place under the shadow of an imminent Iranian bomb.
The West must stop waiting. Time is running short.
The West Must Act to Stop Iran’s Nuclear Program | National Newswatch
“Time is running short.”
So declared U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this month, and so it is. Since June, the Islamic Republic of Iran has refused to return to the bargaining table for negotiations on the revival of the 2015 nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Instead, Tehran has steadily advanced its nuclear activities, deliberately stalling talks in order to accumulate leverage for the extraction of further concessions from Washington. If Iran fails to act soon, Blinken warned, it would lose the opportunity to rejoin the agreement, thereby denying the country billions of dollars in sanctions relief.
Then again, Blinken’s statement hardly constitutes the Biden administration’s first admonition of Iran’s delaying tactics. “We are committed to diplomacy, but this process cannot go on indefinitely,” Blinken said on July 29. U.S. Special Representative for Iran Robert Malley commented on September 3 that America “can’t wait forever” but is “prepared to be patient.” On September 8, Blinken asserted that Washington’s ability to rejoin the JCPOA “is not indefinite.”
More than six weeks later, U.S. officials, along with most of the international community, apparently remain willing to wait. And wait.
To be sure, the Biden administration seems to grasp that Tehran is deliberately exploiting Washington’s patience for its own malign ends. However, America has failed to draw the proper conclusion: Ultimately, Iran has no intention of reaching a deal consistent with Western interests, including Canada’s. Rather, the clerical regime seeks to recover billions of dollars in lost assets while simultaneously preserving as much of its nuclear project as it can.
To achieve this goal, Tehran may seek to negotiate a “less for less” agreement, whereby Washington supplies “partial” sanctions relief in exchange for “partial” nuclear concessions. As Jacob Nagel and Richard Goldberg, my colleagues at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, explained in a recent essay, this approach would essentially enable Iran to pocket America’s “partial” nuclear concessions, thereby establishing a new baseline for future nuclear talks. Concurrently, Tehran would use its fresh infusion of cash to continue financing its regional aggression and domestic repression.
Thus, even if the regime fails to receive everything it wants in prospective negotiations, Iran only benefits from this strategy, allowing the mullahs to move the nuclear and economic dials in their favor while effectively leaving the United States in the position of supplicant.
The Biden administration, for its part, would likely accept a “less for less” agreement as an intermediate win for its diplomacy, treating any Iranian concession, no matter how modest, as a constructive development worthy of U.S. sanctions relief. The Biden team would hope that it could build upon this putative progress in later rounds of negotiations, with the eventual goal of resuscitating the JCPOA in full.
Still, Washington has begun to prepare for the possibility that negotiations with Iran will fail. Tehran may change its mind and abscond with the “less for less” strategy, adopting a maximalist position that seeks to elicit even more U.S. concessions. Alternatively, the regime may opt to abandon talks permanently, confident that it can withstand any retaliatory U.S. pressure.
Consequently, in conjunction with Israeli leaders, the Biden administration has begun to prepare a “Plan B.” However, the elements of this alternative remain unclear.
On the one hand, the plan could include crippling sanctions against Iran resembling the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign, which denied Tehran billions of dollars it could use for terrorism — but Biden has long rejected his predecessor’s strategy as ineffective and dangerous. On the other hand, as Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid suggested during a recent meeting with Blinken, Iran’s nuclear escalations may require military action — but it strains credulity to believe that Biden, who campaigned on a policy of de-escalation with Iran, would support a politically dubious strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. That task would fall to Israel, and to Israel alone.
Where does that leave the United States? Ultimately, for lack of better nonmilitary options, Biden may have no choice but to embrace the maximum pressure strategy he once renounced — the only peaceful avenue to compel a change in Iran’s malign behavior. And if Israel attacks the Islamic Republic, Washington would probably denounce the Jewish state in public — but would quickly find itself in Israel’s corner as Tehran falsely blames Washington for the assault and retaliates by attacking Israel and U.S. assets in the Middle East.
But the United States must act quickly. Iran’s nuclear advances continue in earnest, with a current breakout time — that is, the amount of time needed to produce enough weapon-grade fissile material for one nuclear weapon — of merely weeks. While Tehran may then need a year or more to weaponize the material, the regime’s progress means that any future negotiations will take place under the shadow of an imminent Iranian bomb.
The West must stop waiting. Time is running short.
Tzvi Kahn is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy. Follow him on Twitter @TzviKahn.
4. Marine Corps announces career-ending consequences for Marines refusing to get COVID vaccine
Seems like USMC is an abbreviation that lends itself to more variations than any other in the US military.
Marine Corps announces career-ending consequences for Marines refusing to get COVID vaccine
USMC: You Signed the Motherf—king Contract
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The Marine Corps’ list of consequences for Marines who fail to get vaccinated for the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is a reminder that USMC stands for “You Signed the Motherf—king Contract!”
Active-duty Marines have to get vaccinated by Nov. 28 and Reserve Marines must be immunized by Dec. 28, according to Marine Corps Administrative Message (MARADMIN) 612/21. For any Marines who think that these deadlines are no big deal, the MARADMIN is a rude awakening.
“Marines refusing the COVID-19 vaccination, absent an approved administrative or medical exemption, religious accommodation, or pending appeal shall be processed for administrative separation IAW (in accordance with) this MARADMIN and supporting references,” the MARADMIN says. “General Court-Martial Convening Authorities (GCMCA) retain authority to take any additional adverse administrative or disciplinary action they deem appropriate.”
According to the message, the severe consequences are because Marines who are not vaccinated by the deadlines and do not have an exemption approved or pending will have “willfully disobeyed a lawful order from a superior commissioned officer.”
As such, any Marines who refuse to get vaccinated will not deploy; they will not be allowed to reenlist; and they will not be promoted, in addition to being involuntarily separated, the MARADMIN says.
U.S. Marines with 11th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, wait to receive the COVID-19 vaccination on Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, California, Jan. 15, 2021. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Quince Bisard)
“Marines separated for vaccination refusal will not be eligible for involuntary separation pay and will be subject to recoupment of any unearned special or incentive pays and advance educational assistance,” MARADMIN 612/21 says. “Marines who do not complete their service obligation for Transfer of Education Benefits will lose their eligibility to retain transferred Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits and may be subject to recoupment if the Veterans Affairs has already processed a payment for transferred benefits.”
As of Oct. 21, a total of 83% of active-duty Marines have been fully vaccinated for COVID-19 and 92% were partially vaccinated, according to the Marine Corps. But only 47% of Reserve Marines were completely immunized with 58% partially vaccinated.
By way of comparison: The Department of the Air Force is reporting that 92% of active-duty airmen and Space Force Guardians and 86.5% of all airmen and Guardians are fully vaccinated; In the Navy, 93% of active-duty sailors and 78% of Reserve sailors are fully immunized while 98% of active-duty sailors and 83% of Reserve sailors have received at least one dose of the vaccine; and in the Army, 87% of active-duty soldiers and 47% of Reserve soldiers are fully vaccinated while 93% of active-duty soldiers and 51% of Reserve soldiers have had at least one dose, service officials said.
FILE PHOTO: A Marine receives the COVID-19 vaccination on Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, California, Jan. 15, 2021. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Quince Bisard)
Meanwhile, 76.15% of Air National Guardsmen and 41.59% of Army National Guardsmen were fully vaccinated as of Oct. 18, said Christina Mundy, a spokeswoman for the National Guard Bureau. A total of 48.69% of Army National Guardsmen and 85.78% of Air National Guardsmen have had at least one dose of the vaccine.
If any Marines are waiting for the last minute to get vaccinated, that time is now. Marines will not be considered fully vaccinated until 14 days after their final shot, including the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine, said Capt. Andrew Wood.
At this point, active-duty Marines who are not vaccinated no longer have the option to take the Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, per an Oct. 7 Marine Corps-wide message. That’s because the vaccines involve two shots that are 21 and 28 days apart respectively.
Under (MARADMIN) 533/21, active-duty Marines were required to get their first dose of the Moderna vaccine by Oct. 17 or the first Pfizer shot by Oct. 24. Active-duty Marines have until Nov. 14 to get the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, the MARADMIN says. That’s just 20 days from now.
For any Marines who are still debating whether or not to get vaccinated: The clock is ticking, and time is not on your side.
UPDATE: This story was updated on Oct. 25 with information on how many Army and Air National Guardsmen are vaccinated.
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is the senior Pentagon reporter for Task & Purpose. He has covered the military for 15 years. You can email him at schogol@taskandpurpose.com, direct message @JeffSchogol on Twitter, or reach him on WhatsApp and Signal at 703-909-6488. Contact the author here.
5. Learning All the Wrong Lessons: Why an Over-the-Horizon Approach to Counterterrorism Won’t Work
Excerpts:
The lesson for US policymakers is clear. Even if they choose to reject the mantle of global leadership, they should not misjudge the tremendous moral weight that US presence confers on any mission. Furthermore, the United States does not have to go it alone; there are usually plenty of other nations willing to participate in a US-led coalition. As a senior diplomat from a North African embassy told me recently, “My country is eager to follow the United States’ lead—but we are still trying to figure out what that is.”
If nation building means implementing country plans aimed at mitigating the conditions that create regional instability and extremism, then surely this is preferable to an over-the-horizon counterterrorism strategy that risks empowering extremist organizations while turning local civilian populations against the United States.
Already, the threat from al-Qaeda and the Islamic State is growing in Afghanistan. Sirajuddin Haqqani—the leader of the Haqqani Network (a US-designated terrorist organization) and a key interlocutor between the Taliban and al-Qaeda—was named interior minister in the transition government, signaling ongoing coordination with the extremist group. Meanwhile, the regional branch of the Islamic State has claimed a string of attacks on civilian targets in a challenge to Taliban control. Time is of the essence to counter these terrorist threats without forces on the ground; reverting to a decapitation strategy that has proven to be inefficient or even counterproductive is unlikely to help.
Learning All the Wrong Lessons: Why an Over-the-Horizon Approach to Counterterrorism Won’t Work - Modern War Institute
President Joe Biden’s speech in the wake of the US withdrawal from Kabul was intended to put a seal on a painful chapter in the nation’s history.
“I was not going to extend this forever war,” Biden said, while attributing the chaotic departure of US forces from Kabul and the two decades of war that preceded it to a misguided focus on nation building. “We’ve developed a counterterrorism over-the-horizon capability,” Biden insisted, “that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on the direct threats to the United States in the region and act quickly and decisively if needed.”
It was a narrative well suited for an American public jaded by US involvement in wars that many see as a tiresome distraction from domestic issues. But the assumption underlying this narrative—that technology now offers the opportunity to keep extremism at bay without the messiness of commitment—is fundamentally flawed. The idea that the United States can destroy its enemies and restore stability from a distance, without risk, is naturally an appealing prospect for any administration. But it remains, in reality, a tantalizing chimera. Now that the imbroglio of Afghanistan is over, it is time to set the record straight—before US foreign policy loses its way yet again.
Decapitation Strategies May Backfire
Despite the president’s suggestion that the over-the-horizon capability is a new one, the United States has employed remote airstrikes for almost two decades in pursuit of a strategy of decapitation. Unlike close air support for a partner-nation force, the US military has used decapitation strikes to kill terrorist leaders in order to weaken extremist groups’ cohesion. Unfortunately, organizations are composed of human beings whose reactions to such events are seldom linear and predictable. Drone strikes intended to debilitate an organization by removing its leadership can instead have the opposite effect.
The United States waged what was perhaps its most effective decapitation campaign in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan from 2003 to 2013. Although ostensibly successful, the long-term consequences of this campaign should serve as a cautionary tale for proponents of an over-the-horizon strategy.
The first significant achievement of the campaign was the 2004 US drone strike that killed Nek Mohammed Wazir—a prominent al-Qaeda fighter and leader of the largest insurgent group in the region. Although the 2004 strike was a success on the surface, it triggered a chain of events among local insurgent groups that was ultimately counterproductive. Nek Mohammed was replaced by Beitullah Mehsud, who unified five of the largest tribal militias to create the Pakistani Taliban (Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP). Beitullah—a more sophisticated commander than Nek Mohammed—widened TTP’s sphere of attacks throughout Pakistan, including orchestrating the assassination of presidential candidate Benazir Bhutto in 2007, before being killed by a US drone strike in 2009.
He was succeeded by Hakimullah Mehsud, under whose leadership TTP expanded its attacks outside Pakistan. These included a deadly suicide bombing against the CIA base at Camp Chapman in 2009, an attack on the US consulate in Peshawar in 2010, and an attempted bombing in New York’s Times Square the same year. Hakimullah was killed by a drone strike in 2013. The subsequent leadership struggle led to the emergence of the Islamic State wilayat, or province, of Afghanistan and Pakistan. This group in turn spawned ISIS-K, which became a significant threat to the US military in Afghanistan, launching a series of lethal attacks, including the August 2021 Kabul airport bombing that killed thirteen US servicemembers and approximately 170 Afghan civilians.
Thus, a campaign of successful drone strikes that began with the assassination of a bush-league tribal insurgent led to a succession of leaders, each of whom was more influential than the last, and ultimately to a vastly more capable organization that continues to threaten regional stability.
The Hydra Syndrome
Killing leaders of an organization like al-Qaeda or the Islamic State, while viscerally satisfying, achieves little in the long run—and often makes things worse. Even if the deceased’s successor is not more capable, he is often unknown to security services and motivated by a desire to avenge his predecessor while proving himself worthy of succession.
The pattern seen in Pakistan was no anomaly; it has repeated time and again elsewhere. For example, the greatest period of bloodletting in Iraq occurred after the 2006 death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who commanded al-Qaeda in Iraq. The leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was third in line after Zarqawi, the two intervening leaders having been killed by US drone strikes. As the founder of a caliphate that seized a third of Syria and Iraq and attracted an army of some forty thousand foreign fighters, Baghdadi’s malign influence eclipsed that of his predecessors.
The Islamic State, like al-Qaeda before it, has clear lines of succession and redundant methods of command and control to minimize disruption after decapitation. And now, with multiple affiliates and the emergent phenomenon of remote radicalization, it is less dependent than ever on a single leader.
This is the problem with decapitation. Unlike Hercules, the United States cannot simply move on to the next task—fighting the Hydra becomes an endless mission.
What Happens Over the Horizon Doesn’t Stay There
The TTP example illustrates why US policymakers should care about international extremist groups. Isolationists should take note of this basic rule of counterinsurgency: a force that hunkers down behind the wire cedes initiative to an aggressive enemy—who sooner or later will strike inside that wire. This rule applies at any level, from the tactical to the strategic.
Thanks to global integration, disruptive events in distant corners of the world can hurt US interests. Conflict has spillover effects that extend far beyond the national boundaries of the country directly affected. The Syrian civil war, for example, led to the rise of extremist groups, including the Islamic State, and created one of the world’s largest refugee crises. The civil war in Yemen has led to Houthi rebels launching missiles and drones at commercial shipping in the Bab al-Mandab Strait.
Reliance on an over-the-horizon model carries indirect risks as well. Drone strikes tend to alienate entire populations, thus threatening US interests in the long run. Such an approach only serves to make terrorist organizations more violent and resilient while ensuring that they have no shortage of recruits from a populace whose only knowledge of the United States is the occasional bolt from the blue that too often claims innocent lives. Most recently, a drone strike intended to stop a second attack on US troops at the Kabul airport instead killed ten Afghan civilians. As Mullah Omari, a Taliban military commander, recounted: “At first, there was no support for the Taliban. . . . It was when the Americans started killing civilians that people started supporting us, giving us food, bullets, and offering men.” These incidents are well known among the local population: allegations of civilian deaths from drone strikes are widely covered by regional media outlets and have become a rallying cry for US enemies. The Pentagon’s figures of civilian deaths fall far below those of the leading reputable nonprofit organizations that track such numbers, which does nothing for US credibility among even our closest allies.
The Biden administration’s emphasis on the over-the-horizon concept reveals a lack of understanding about what causes extremist groups to gain traction among a population that does not necessarily share their views. Such groups derive their strength not from ideology but from their ability to close the gap between local needs and the government’s ability or willingness to meet those needs. In areas such as Syria, the Sahel, or Somalia, young people flock to join extremist organizations in response to the remorseless effects of climate change, extreme poverty, and a perception that the Islamists offer terms under a social contract that are more reliable than those of the local government. No amount of remote killing can solve that problem—it can only make it worse.
Is There a Better Way?
There may be a better approach: recent examples illustrate that intelligent use of the military as part of a comprehensive approach can help partner nations to end conflict and restore stability. Such an approach takes time, however, and requires real determination to understand the nuances of the problem and to subsequently design solutions tailored to fit local circumstances.
In late 1999, for example, the Clinton administration launched a diplomatic and military initiative, Plan Colombia, to end armed conflict and eradicate coca cultivation in Colombia while simultaneously implementing political reform and enabling economic viability. By ensuring that US and Colombian objectives overlapped and were clearly defined, Plan Colombia created unity of effort without putting the US military in the lead. Instead, a light footprint of mostly special operations forces supported diplomatic and political efforts by advising and assisting their Colombian counterparts. The plan took over fifteen years to run its course, but by 2017 Colombia’s main insurgent group, the FARC, had disarmed and cocaine production had dropped by 72 percent.
The plan required strategic patience but not intolerable cost, and it thus escaped the derisive sobriquet of “nation building.” It was, however, designed to enable just that. Of course, Plan Colombia didn’t achieve utopia—drug production remains a problem in Colombia today—but overall, the results were impressive.
When it comes to military action in support of a partner nation, the lesson of Colombia is one that has been repeated since in other places, such as in Syria and Iraq during the counter-ISIS campaign. For US policymakers, these campaigns demonstrate how small units, comprising the right people with responsive air support, can have strategic effect at low cost. But for that effect to have longevity, the military effort needs to be integrated into an overall plan.
A Light Military Footprint Carries Heavy Moral Weight
An influential school of thought argues that any long-term attempt by a Western nation to lead another nation’s counterinsurgency efforts is doomed to failure, and therefore US military efforts should focus on advising and assisting local partners and leading them to success without sapping their sense of responsibility. Both Afghanistan and Iraq are examples of counterinsurgency by saturation achieving only short-term objectives. The French experience in Mali bears testament to the same. After initial successes, Operation Barkhane devolved to stalemate, and extremist attacks in Mali have now escalated beyond the levels of 2013 when the French first intervened.
On the other hand, a light military footprint is vastly better than none. Washington failed to realize until too late that even its small residual force in Afghanistan—some 2,500 troops—was essential. Not only were they providing security for a NATO force of some 8,500, who left as soon as this guarantee was removed, but more importantly, they represented US resolve—thus providing an anchor of assurance for Afghan partners. US policymakers failed to understand this dynamic and too easily criticized the Afghan army for its collapse. Afghanistan is just one example of this phenomenon. In Somalia, an even smaller troop presence—roughly seven hundred special operations personnel—kept a large coalition civilian-military effort in the game. The withdrawal of US troops in January had a stultifying effect on missions from the European and African Unions, as well as the United Nations, and halted the efforts of numerous international aid groups. The result was a resurgence of the world’s largest, wealthiest, and most violent al-Qaeda affiliate and the nullification of almost a decade of progress.
Great Nations Act Commensurately
The lesson for US policymakers is clear. Even if they choose to reject the mantle of global leadership, they should not misjudge the tremendous moral weight that US presence confers on any mission. Furthermore, the United States does not have to go it alone; there are usually plenty of other nations willing to participate in a US-led coalition. As a senior diplomat from a North African embassy told me recently, “My country is eager to follow the United States’ lead—but we are still trying to figure out what that is.”
If nation building means implementing country plans aimed at mitigating the conditions that create regional instability and extremism, then surely this is preferable to an over-the-horizon counterterrorism strategy that risks empowering extremist organizations while turning local civilian populations against the United States.
Already, the threat from al-Qaeda and the Islamic State is growing in Afghanistan. Sirajuddin Haqqani—the leader of the Haqqani Network (a US-designated terrorist organization) and a key interlocutor between the Taliban and al-Qaeda—was named interior minister in the transition government, signaling ongoing coordination with the extremist group. Meanwhile, the regional branch of the Islamic State has claimed a string of attacks on civilian targets in a challenge to Taliban control. Time is of the essence to counter these terrorist threats without forces on the ground; reverting to a decapitation strategy that has proven to be inefficient or even counterproductive is unlikely to help.
Andrew Milburn retired from the Marine Corps as a colonel in 2019 after a thirty-one-year career. His last position in uniform was as deputy commander of Special Operations Central, and prior to that, commanding officer of the Marine Raider Regiment and Combined Special Operations Task Force – Iraq. Since retiring, he has written a critically acclaimed memoir, When the Tempest Gathers, and articles for The Atlantic, USA Today, Joint Forces Quarterly, and War on the Rocks, in addition to the Military Times. He is on the adjunct faculty of the Joint Special Operations University and teaches classes on leadership, planning, ethics, command and control, mission command, risk, special operations, and irregular warfare at US military schools. He is a cohost of the Irregular Warfare Podcast.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Staff Sgt. Vernon Young Jr., US Air Force
6. What the Military Can Learn From 'Dune'
Now that Dune is out here is an article to accompany it.
What the Military Can Learn From 'Dune'
Wired · by Condé Nast · September 28, 2021
09.28.2021 07:00 AM
What the Military Can Learn From Dune
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures
Spice World
Denis Villeneuve's Dune adaptation is just the latest chapter in the complex history of Frank Herbert's novel.
The story's hero, Paul Atreides, understood how to find a conflict's center of gravity better than most military wonks.
Carl von Clausewitz and Frank Herbert both understood the power of schwerpunkt. A 19th-century theorist revered among military geeks the way Paul Brown is revered among football coaches, Clausewitz wrote that each war has a center of gravity—which is how schwerpunkt is usually translated—and that victory often flows to the strategist who identifies and seizes it. Depending on the type of conflict, the center of gravity might be an enemy’s logistics base or field army, a nation’s capital, or even an individual (see: Osama bin Laden in the war with al Qaeda). Whatever form it takes, a schwerpunkt is “the hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends,” Clausewitz wrote.
In Dune, it’s the spice.
In a world where computers and artificial intelligence have been banned, the spice, or “melange,” enables pilots to fold space, traversing galaxies and time. The drug comes only from the planet Arrakis, and when Duke Leto Atreides ventures there to secure it, he’s quickly overthrown by Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. The Baron, though, understands spice only as a commodity. In a classic case of colonial shortsightedness, he exploits it to fund his empire, upsetting the Fremen locals in the process. But Paul Atreides, the Duke’s exiled son, knows a schwerpunkt when he sees it. Following his father’s ouster, he befriends the Fremen, becomes their messiah, gains control of spice production, reclaims Arrakis, and becomes emperor of the known universe.
Military heads don’t consult Herbert nearly as often as they do Clausewitz, but sci-fi still influences those in the military. In the 2000s, cadets who picked up Dune might’ve found insight into wars in the Middle East; in 2021, the book warns them not to rely too much on technology.
In the age of digital warfare, combatants with the right gadgets can almost fold space. But when everything from GPS to power grids to comms systems is subject to being jammed, spoofed, hacked, or blacked out, relying on tech will get your ass blown up. This has caused the US military to adopt back-to-basics methods, relearning, as Paul did, how to fight analog. Maintaining log books. Using runners and field phones. Fighting off of handwritten orders rather than electronically transmitted ones. It’s a painful process for many, but it’s necessary. Because today, the schwerpunkt in most conflicts—the spice—is digital information itself.
Jonathan Bratten is a military historian and an officer in the US Army.
Read next
Wired · by Condé Nast · September 28, 2021
7. 30 Afghan orphans are Colorado bound after traumatic escape
30 Afghan orphans are Colorado bound after traumatic escape
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Thirty Afghan orphans who somehow survived the chaotic exit from Kabul airport, in addition to months of uncertainty traveling alone, are headed to Colorado.
Denver Human Services says it's the biggest influx of parentless kids the organization has seen in recent memory.
"We aren't sure of the details as to how they became unaccompanied," said DHS Unaccompanied Refugee Minors Program Manager Tamara Smith. "Some parents sent their kids to the U.S. and stayed. Some of the children's parents are dead. A lot of them come with significant trauma."
Smith said that the best-case scenario for the young refugees would be for them to be cared for by people in the Afghan community. If DHS can't find enough Afghans to take the children in, she advises any non-Afghan potential foster parent to be aware of cultural differences like religion, food and language.
She acknowledges that DHS is entering the situation blindly, as the organization doesn't know if the children speak English and is unaware of the male-to-female ratio and how badly the youth have been traumatized by the war.
"Most of them are teenagers," she told The Denver Gazette. "There aren't many 2-year-olds."
The most recent numbers show that 360 unaccompanied and separated Afghan children have been registered in Doha and Ramstein, Germany air bases, UNICEF's Nina Marie Costa told The Gazette. Of those, 150 children have left for other countries, including the 30 headed for Colorado. UNICEF reports that it is currently working to reunite any children with their parents if they are still alive.
The orphaned child evacuees will have refugee status, and DHS has been told they may be coming sooner rather than later, Smith said.
Though many of the up to 2,000 Afghan evacuees expected to resettle in Colorado are intact families with a mom and dad, there are also heartbreaking cases, The Gazette has learned, including displaced pregnant women and elderly. In addition, the city and county of Denver is working with state and federal partners, as well as local resettlement agencies, to fill the gaps, including locating permanent housing, job placement and medical care.
After months of living on borrowed time, one Afghan family’s first taste of freedom was peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in a 15-passenger van, courtesy of his American sponsor and former battle buddy.
Matiulah, his wife, Aziza, their seven children, ages 2 to 11, and his brother are headed to Lafayette in Boulder County after a five-week vetting period at Holloman Air Force Base near White Sands Missile Range in Southern New Mexico. (The Gazette has agreed to not to use the family's last name for security reasons.)
Matt, as soldiers called the interpreter during wartime, hid in a water tower as the Taliban looked for him, intent on punishing him and those he loved for his work with the U.S. He began working on his special immigrant visa last year with a former Army lieutenant when COVID forced him to close a cellphone store he owned on an Army base in the Eastern Province. That lieutenant —now Maj. Chris Liggett — personally drove the family via a 15-passenger van from Southern New Mexico to El Paso, where they caught a flight to Denver Thursday.
The special visa that enabled Matt, his wife and children to enter the U.S. was created for hundreds of thousands of Afghans who assisted the U.S. military effort in the 20 year Afghan War.
His brother has a different type of visa based on humanitarian parole, created as part of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Humanitarian parole allows immigrants to temporarily enter the U.S. either because of an urgency or because their being here offers a special benefit to society.
Refugees hoping for humanitarian parole must have an American sponsor in order to be eligible. Recently, The Gazette highlighted the generosity of a Colorado Springs veteran who opened his home to a stranded Afghan woman, offering to be her sponsor.
This week, however, Paul Studdard told the newspaper that he has changed his mind about sponsoring 30-year-old Fahemeh Amini.
"As much as I would like to help, I will not sign that form," wrote Studdard in an email. "This is what happens when good intentions collide with bureaucracy."
The bureaucracy Studdard referred to is a requirement to deposit a bond if the immigrant becomes a public charge. Further, signing the form gives the government the right to sue the sponsor if the immigrant applies for and receives government benefits like food stamps.
Several immigration experts who spoke with The Gazette said Studdard’s hesitance is not uncommon; however, a law just three weeks old may warm more sponsors to the notion of coming forward.
On Sept. 30, when President Joe Biden signed a continuing resolution that extends fiscal year 2021 government funding levels through Dec. 3., he included a provision that gives humanitarian parolees refugee status, which no longer makes it illegal for them apply for government benefits.
Denver immigration attorney James Land says that this development nearly guarantees that there is no chance the government will make sponsors subject to lawsuits or bond deposits.
“The concern that people like Paul might have has been greatly reduced by this new eligibility for refugee benefits. It’s huge," Land said. “There’s legal liability, but is there a hook for that to become a reality? Probably not.”
Land has been working pro bono untangling legal problems for Afghan refugees since the fall of Afghanistan because many of them don’t have money.
“My perception is, whether or not we needed to get out of Afghanistan, we pulled the rug out from under people and that’s on us," he said. "I felt like we have a duty to help in some small way.”
Wahid Omar, an Afghan American volunteer, said sponsorship is a commitment some people are not prepared for.
“Sponsorship should come from the heart, and people must be willing to do whatever it takes. If you don’t have commitment, then don’t come forward,” he said.
Maj. Chris Liggett, who met Matt in 2014 when he was a 24-year-old lieutenant, has been the catalyst for his former interpreter’s evacuation, arranging for special immigrant visas and organizing an escape route that involved an Alabama Marine he didn’t know, mysterious WhatsApp messages and secret airport gates. He has no reservations about sponsoring a war buddy who got him through the many dangerous scrapes that came with his job guarding gates at an American base in Afghanistan's Eastern Province.
"I'm so deep down the rabbit hole, I'm not hesitant at all," said the CU Boulder English graduate student. “When we saw Afghanistan falling to the Taliban, veterans felt helpless because we’d been invested for so long and we were watching it crumble."
This weekend, Matt and his family will rearrange the pieces of an abandoned life to begin a new one. One Boulder resident donated a $600,000 home, and the kids will enroll in school with notebooks, new backpacks and winter clothes, all courtesy of the generosity of hundreds of people who watch a Facebook page called “Boulder For Afghanistan.”
In response to the need, Liggett formed the OEF Resettlement Project, an all-volunteer, mostly veteran team committed to help Afghan refugees.
”The way this story ends is we did the best we could when the government fell," Liggett told The Gazette as he assessed the peanut butter shelves at a New Mexico Walmart ahead of the reunion with Matt. “But in true American fashion, we figured out things we could do and we did it.”
———
©#YR Colorado Springs Gazette. Visit at gazette.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
8. A Pentagon definition for extremism is imminent
These are some interesting photos. He is cultivating quite the look.
Excerpts:
However, according to the report, “the military could better leverage existing violence prevention programs to prevent service members from becoming involved with extremist groups.”
That same sentiment is reflected in another, privately-funded Rand report released Monday.
Recommendations include exploring existing anti-extremism education, from groups like Life After Hate and Beyond Barriers, both created by former extremists.
Further down the road, Rand’s Monday report suggests, there will need to be a clear framework for dealing with troops who are found to fall under the new definition of extremism.
“Ultimately, DoD will need to craft policies that govern the consequences for service members who are shown to have joined an extremist organization,” which could include discharge, the report continues, but could also involve interventions “designed to help individuals walk away from extremism.”
A Pentagon definition for extremism is imminent
The report, originally due in July, is supposed to include a list of mid- and long-term efforts for the working group, as well as an update on their first three tasks, as laid out by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin back in April.
“The report is nearing completion,” Kirby said, though there is no date nailed down for briefing the secretary and then announcing the results publicly, adding, “And it will, as we’ve talked about, it will include a new definition set of what extremist activity comprises.”
Previously, the DoD definition of extremist activity focused on planning, fundraising or other “active” participation in extremism groups, though membership was not banned.
The new definition is expected to more specifically identify extremist behaviors, outside of a group setting, as several recent examples of extremist service members have been unaffiliated with an organization.
Though the report is running behind, Kirby said that the working group has continued ahead with its tasks in the meantime.
“They have set up processes, interdepartmental processes, to continue to work on this, Kirby said. “And one of the things that they already said they were going to try to do was another study on extremism, so the work continues.”
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Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, 30, was employed as a security contractor at a Navy base when he was alleged to have breached the Capitol on Jan. 6, authorities said.
In addition to the definition and a prevalence study, the working group will update procedures to screen for extremist sympathies in recruits and to educate transitioning service members about the possibility of being recruited by an extremist group after separation.
In the meantime, DoD has funded outside research into best practices for dealing with extremism in the military.
A Rand Corp. report published in September recommended a handful of things the Pentagon is already looking at, including research into the current state of extremist views in the services, as well as means to handle the issue when it comes up.
However, according to the report, “the military could better leverage existing violence prevention programs to prevent service members from becoming involved with extremist groups.”
That same sentiment is reflected in another, privately-funded Rand report released Monday.
Recommendations include exploring existing anti-extremism education, from groups like Life After Hate and Beyond Barriers, both created by former extremists.
Further down the road, Rand’s Monday report suggests, there will need to be a clear framework for dealing with troops who are found to fall under the new definition of extremism.
“Ultimately, DoD will need to craft policies that govern the consequences for service members who are shown to have joined an extremist organization,” which could include discharge, the report continues, but could also involve interventions “designed to help individuals walk away from extremism.”
Meghann Myers is the Pentagon bureau chief at Military Times. She covers operations, policy, personnel, leadership and other issues affecting service members. Follow on Twitter @Meghann_MT
9. U.S. National Security Advisor met representatives of Myanmar's shadow government
Is there resistance potential indicated by a shadow government? Will there be support for such resistance?
U.S. National Security Advisor met representatives of Myanmar's shadow government
Reuters · by Reuters Staff · October 26, 2021
By Reuters Staff
2 Min Read
Slideshow ( 2 images )
(Reuters) - U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan met on Monday with representatives of Myanmar’s National Unity Government (NUG), set up by opponents of army rule, the White House said late on Monday.
In the virtual meeting, Sullivan reiterated continued U.S. support for the pro-democracy movement in Myanmar and discussed ongoing efforts to restore the country’s path to democracy with NUG representatives Duwa Lashi La and Zin Mar Aung, the White House said in a statement.
Sullivan expressed concern over the military’s violence and said “the U.S. will continue to promote accountability for the coup”, according to the White House.
Protests and unrest have paralyzed Myanmar since the Feb. 1 coup, with the military accused of atrocities and excessive force against civilians. The junta blames the unrest on “terrorists” allied with the shadow government.
Recognizing Myanmar’s junta as the country’s government would not stop growing violence, the outgoing United Nations special envoy on Myanmar said earlier on Monday.
Sullivan expressed particular concern over the recent arrest of pro-democracy activist Ko Jimmy and noted the United States will continue to advocate for his release, according to the statement.
Sullivan and the NUG officials also discussed the COVID-19 pandemic in Myanmar and ongoing U.S. efforts to provide humanitarian assistance directly to the people of Myanmar, the statement added.
Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Lincoln Feast.
Reuters · by Reuters Staff · October 26, 2021
10. Isis-K insurgency jeopardises Taliban’s grip on Afghanistan
A complex situation.
Excerpts:
Despite the enmity, the lines between the movements have often blurred. Isis-K’s ranks have long included Taliban defectors as well as erstwhile members of the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani network, which was described by a US-based expert as a “criminal enterprise masquerading as a jihadist group”. Sirajuddin Haqqani, a senior Haqqani leader, is Afghanistan’s new interior minister.
Many Afghans, and some foreign analysts, believe Isis-K is being supported by foreign forces, such as Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence. The ISI wants leverage to persuade the Taliban to co-operate in suppressing Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, a jihadist insurgency that has targeted the Pakistan government.
Others suspect US intelligence agencies, anti-Taliban warlords and even former members of the Afghan army of collaborating with Isis-K. “We know there are intelligence agencies and networks supporting Isis-K to challenge and create problems for the Taliban government,” Haqpal said.
In India, government and intelligence officials have suggested that inter-Taliban rivalry — between the Haqqani network and a powerful Kandahar faction led by Mullah Baradar, the deputy prime minister — is stoking the violence.
Isis-K insurgency jeopardises Taliban’s grip on Afghanistan
Two months after the Taliban seized power, violence, death and fear still stalk Afghanistan. US troops might have departed but the new Islamist rulers in Kabul are now threatened by an insurgency launched by Islamic State-Khorasan Province, an Isis-inspired jihadi movement that has deep ideological differences with the Taliban.
Since the Taliban takeover in August, Isis-K has mounted a series of suicide bomb attacks, including at the Kabul airport and at two Shia mosques, as well as assaults on Taliban convoys, which have killed hundreds. Analysts have warned of further violence as Isis-K tries to prevent the Taliban from consolidating their grip on Afghanistan.
Isis-K’s more hardline stance has proved attractive to disgruntled Taliban fighters. Dismayed at the new regime’s reluctance to impose tougher restrictions on women and its diplomatic overtures to countries such as the US, China and Russia, former Taliban members have switched allegiance to Isis-K.
“The American war is over, but the Afghan wars are not,” said Avinash Paliwal, deputy director of the Soas South Asia Institute, and author of My Enemy’s Enemy, a book about Afghanistan.
The Taliban’s longtime goal has been to establish an Islamic government in Afghanistan. But Isis-K, which has been active in Afghanistan since 2015, wants to establish an Islamic caliphate across Afghanistan, Pakistan and parts of India and Iran.
Isis-K militants consider the Taliban, who have held talks with regional powers and the US in a quest for diplomatic recognition, as “filthy nationalists” who have betrayed the greater Islamic cause, according to an analyst.
“Isis-K sees the Taliban as just another kind of political outfit — cutting a deal with the Americans — that is ideologically not pure,” Paliwal said. “Their aim is to destabilise an already struggling regime.”
Mourners at the funeral of a victim killed in a bomb attack at a mosque © EPA-EFE via Shutterstock
Isis-K claimed responsibility for the August 26 Kabul airport bombing that killed about 180 people. Daesh, as Isis-K is locally known, is also suspected of bombing Kabul’s Eid Gah Mosque this month, where Taliban leaders were attending funeral prayers for the mother of the movement’s spokesman. Five people were killed.
The Taliban have launched counter operations but Isis-K continues to sow terror. Its bombers have attacked two mosques attended by Afghanistan’s traditionally persecuted Shia minority during Friday prayers, killing more than 100 people and injuring scores more.
Paliwal said the assaults would “exacerbate a sectarian faultline, which is not in the Taliban’s interest to really inflame”. Security analysts also blamed Isis-K for attacks on Taliban convoys in recent weeks.
Nasratullah Haqpal, a Kabul-based political analyst, said the violence was eroding public confidence in the Taliban, which had pledged to deliver peace once they took power.
“These attacks are bringing down the credibility of the Taliban government,” Haqpal said. “They have been claiming for years that ‘we are the only group that can secure and bring stability to Afghanistan’. But Daesh and their supporters are challenging this claim.”
The Taliban have pledged to “exterminate” the perpetrators of the assaults, but local commanders admit that they will struggle.
“Stopping Daesh attacks is difficult even for well-trained forces and governments in the top countries in the world,” said one commander. “They [Daesh] are always after a soft target and defenceless people, where they can make news.”
Despite the enmity, the lines between the movements have often blurred. Isis-K’s ranks have long included Taliban defectors as well as erstwhile members of the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani network, which was described by a US-based expert as a “criminal enterprise masquerading as a jihadist group”. Sirajuddin Haqqani, a senior Haqqani leader, is Afghanistan’s new interior minister.
Many Afghans, and some foreign analysts, believe Isis-K is being supported by foreign forces, such as Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence. The ISI wants leverage to persuade the Taliban to co-operate in suppressing Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, a jihadist insurgency that has targeted the Pakistan government.
Others suspect US intelligence agencies, anti-Taliban warlords and even former members of the Afghan army of collaborating with Isis-K. “We know there are intelligence agencies and networks supporting Isis-K to challenge and create problems for the Taliban government,” Haqpal said.
In India, government and intelligence officials have suggested that inter-Taliban rivalry — between the Haqqani network and a powerful Kandahar faction led by Mullah Baradar, the deputy prime minister — is stoking the violence.
“There is clear factionalism in the Taliban,” an Indian intelligence source said. “It is possible that one faction is supporting the Isis-K to wipe out the dominance of the anti-Haqqani faction.”
The motivations behind the attacks may be murky, but the threat of further bloodshed is overwhelming. “The violence is going to increase,” said Paliwal. “It’s going to be a free-for-all.”
Additional reporting by Fazelminallah Qazizai in Kabul
11. State Department to Form New Cyber Office to Face Proliferating Global Challenges
Excerpts:
Officials recognized there had been previous struggles to address cybersecurity and technology issues at the State Department and that the new structure would also be an adjustment.
“There is no perfect neat organizational solution for an organization of our size,” the senior official said.
The State Department is completing details of the cyberspace and digital policy bureau’s size and budget with lawmakers, officials said. The average State Department bureau has about 550 full-time employees, another official said.
The moves are the latest by the Biden administration seeking to emphasize cybersecurity as a distinct issue that poses vital risks to the future of U.S. national and economic security. Shortly after taking office in January, President Biden named Anne Neuberger, a senior National Security Agency official, to the newly formed role of deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology. The administration also appointed Chris Inglis, the former deputy director of the National Security Agency, to another new position of national cyber director, a post mandated by Congress with a staff up to 75 housed within the executive office of the president.
State Department to Form New Cyber Office to Face Proliferating Global Challenges
Changes are part of Biden administration’s treatment of cybersecurity as a critical national security issue
The restructuring will include the creation of a new bureau of cyberspace and digital policy to be led by a Senate-confirmed ambassador-at-large and a new, separate special envoy for critical and emerging technology, officials said. Both positions will report directly to Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman for at least the first year, the officials said. The administration hasn’t decided who will fill either role.
The changes, which are expected to be announced by Secretary of State Antony Blinken later this week, are the latest in a series of reshufflings at the State Department over at least the past three presidential administrations designed to better respond to proliferating and evolving international cybersecurity problems. Those include state-sponsored intrusions of U.S. government networks, theft of intellectual property by Chinese citizens and interference in U.S. elections from Russia and elsewhere.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to announce the changes that further emphasize cyber threats.
Photo: Luisa Gonzalez/Associated Press
The new structure is meant to reflect Mr. Blinken’s view that the U.S. has entered a “fundamentally new era in global affairs” where 21st-century challenges like climate change and emerging technology are at the forefront of international cooperation and competition with allies and adversaries alike, a senior State Department official said.
Recent ransomware attacks linked to Russian criminal gangs have driven home the challenges of international diplomacy around cyber issues. The Biden administration has sought to engage in bilateral talks with Moscow on ransomware and other issues, but both Russian criminal groups and the Kremlin have largely continued their routine hacking activities, according to officials and private-sector cybersecurity experts. On Monday, Microsoft said the Russian government hackers behind last year’s SolarWinds attack had in recent months targeted and in some cases broken into cloud service providers to steal sensitive information.
Officials recognized there had been previous struggles to address cybersecurity and technology issues at the State Department and that the new structure would also be an adjustment.
“There is no perfect neat organizational solution for an organization of our size,” the senior official said.
The State Department is completing details of the cyberspace and digital policy bureau’s size and budget with lawmakers, officials said. The average State Department bureau has about 550 full-time employees, another official said.
The moves are the latest by the Biden administration seeking to emphasize cybersecurity as a distinct issue that poses vital risks to the future of U.S. national and economic security. Shortly after taking office in January, President Biden named Anne Neuberger, a senior National Security Agency official, to the newly formed role of deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology. The administration also appointed Chris Inglis, the former deputy director of the National Security Agency, to another new position of national cyber director, a post mandated by Congress with a staff up to 75 housed within the executive office of the president.
The new cyber bureau will comprise a division focused on international cybersecurity issues, such as deterrence, policy development, and negotiations with allies and adversaries alike. A second division will be dedicated to digital policy, such as promoting trusted telecom systems abroad. A third division will focus on digital freedom, such as protecting human rights online and working with civil society.
The new special envoy for critical and emerging technology will be responsible for coordinating international policy on artificial intelligence, quantum computing, biotechnology and other fields, officials said. It will be involved in diplomatic efforts around the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council, among other issues, the officials said.
Chris Painter, the former top cybersecurity official at the State Department briefed on the forthcoming changes, said the overhaul “went through an exacting process.”
“It’s better to take a long time to do it right rather than to go fast and do it wrong,” Mr. Painter said. The changes are “a good step forward,” he said, though he cautioned that the breadth of the cyber bureau’s portfolio could present some challenges.
“Everything can’t be a priority at the same time when it’s all in the same group,” he said, but added that the special envoy’s distinct portfolio should alleviate some of those pressures on the new cyber bureau.
12. The Pentagon’s Office Culture Is Stuck in 1968
Excerpts:
There is hope. The fact that other large institutions in the private sector have made impressive organizational transformations proves it can be done, so long as there are incentives to do so. Taking a hard look at talent hiring and retention as well as broader management processes—perhaps through a Defense Science Board study or a dedicated commission—could be a key first step to understanding the scope of the problem. But it will take serious, sustained effort over several years—at all levels of management—to effectively reform the Pentagon’s organizational culture. From there, constant care is required; you can never take your hands off the wheel when it comes to maintaining an inclusive, diverse, and vibrant workforce.
Many individuals who have survived the Defense Department’s bureaucracy—ourselves included—cope with the absurdity of the Pentagon’s vintage business processes by laughing; one of us even wrote a book about it. But while that absurdity can at times be amusing, the global competition the United States as a nation finds itself in is deadly serious.
The United States cannot afford to shrug this problem off any longer. Managing the challenges of an increasingly aggressive China and a stubbornly revanchist Russia, not to mention everything else, requires a Defense Department that runs at the speed of today’s challenges. Until the Pentagon can recruit and retain the nation’s top talent—and change its organizational culture to better allow great ideas to make it to the top—the United States will at best muddle through the challenges it faces. But the stakes are too high; muddling through simply isn’t good enough anymore.
The Pentagon’s Office Culture Is Stuck in 1968
The U.S. national security bureaucracy needs a severe upgrade.
Foreign Policy · by Zachery Tyson Brown, Kathleen J. McInnis · October 25, 2021
The Pentagon is a curious place. It is the heart of a colossal machinery of war and security, a $700 billion-plus behemoth. You might expect, then, that the headquarters of the U.S. Defense Department would be cutting-edge itself, staffed with world-class talent making split-second decisions while working on futuristic projects all to protect the nation. Kind of like Apple, but with lasers.
As anyone who has walked the Pentagon’s musty corridors—or struggled with its paperwork—knows, though, the reality is very different. It is as if former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s Pentagon had been preserved in aspic when he resigned way back in 1968, leaving behind a living museum to the workplace culture and administrative processes of the Mad Men era. And while much has changed in the intervening half-century, much has stayed exactly the same.
The department remains rigidly hierarchical, in sharp contrast to modern organizations that have long embraced flatter organizational structures that facilitate faster—and often, better—decisions. It remains obsessed with protocol, where modern organizations have become not only more casual but more diverse, inclusive, and dynamic—all of which facilitates creativity instead of dampening it. It remains burdened by the strict adherence to slow, sequential processes, while more contemporary workplaces have learned that parallel, simultaneous, and asynchronous methods dramatically speed their delivery of value.
The Pentagon is a curious place. It is the heart of a colossal machinery of war and security, a $700 billion-plus behemoth. You might expect, then, that the headquarters of the U.S. Defense Department would be cutting-edge itself, staffed with world-class talent making split-second decisions while working on futuristic projects all to protect the nation. Kind of like Apple, but with lasers.
As anyone who has walked the Pentagon’s musty corridors—or struggled with its paperwork—knows, though, the reality is very different. It is as if former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s Pentagon had been preserved in aspic when he resigned way back in 1968, leaving behind a living museum to the workplace culture and administrative processes of the Mad Men era. And while much has changed in the intervening half-century, much has stayed exactly the same.
The department remains rigidly hierarchical, in sharp contrast to modern organizations that have long embraced flatter organizational structures that facilitate faster—and often, better—decisions. It remains obsessed with protocol, where modern organizations have become not only more casual but more diverse, inclusive, and dynamic—all of which facilitates creativity instead of dampening it. It remains burdened by the strict adherence to slow, sequential processes, while more contemporary workplaces have learned that parallel, simultaneous, and asynchronous methods dramatically speed their delivery of value.
Yes, the Defense Department develops some amazingly effective weapons—but a frighteningly large amount of the money it spends is frittered away on contract overheads and acquisition programs that take so long that weapons can be nearly obsolete by the time they are fielded. World-class talent? The Pentagon does have sharp minds, but many of them are on the verge of retirement, and hiring someone new requires mastery of the dark arts of both personnel management and massaging egos. Working conditions in the Pentagon and at other executive branch agencies are often so backward and demoralizing that the national security community was in the midst of a workforce crisis even before COVID-19 struck in 2020. Making a decision? Between coordinating horizontally with every office that has an “equity” in whatever decision needs to be made and then working through seven or so vertical layers of approval, bold ideas often either suffer death by a thousand paper cuts or are perhaps more benignly just smothered in boredom.
The bottom line is that while military strategists can argue all day long about whether or not the nature of war is changing, there’s no doubt the nature of work has—and the Pentagon’s turgid bureaucracy is falling further behind every day.
In fact, there is a workplace revolution of sorts underway, one that’s overturning more than a century of management theory and transforming both workplaces and the very way in which work itself gets done. Partisans of this revolution call it by many names—agile, lean, and design-thinking, to name just a few. They can be found in nearly every sector of the knowledge economy—from the usual suspects in Silicon Valley start-ups to newer converts you might not expect, including stalwarts of the manufacturing, finance, information technology, and consumer services industries.
Based on everything we’ve learned in recent decades about human and organizational psychology, these revolutionaries are actively reinventing their organizations—integrating functions that were once siloed, accelerating decision-making by granting more authority and resources to those with the most information and greatest competency, and growing workplace cultures that are more open, transparent, and human-centric.
They’ve recognized that even—perhaps especially—in an era of big data and smart machines, an organization’s people determine whether it will succeed or fail and that people do their best work when their talents are cultivated and coordinated—not commanded and controlled.
Consider the Defense Department in this light. One senior official recently described work at the department as “disconcertingly retrograde,” going on to detail pitiful scenes of employees huddled around those few areas of the Pentagon’s 6.5 million-square-foot building that have even a trace of cellphone reception—forget about Wi-Fi—and enduring day after day of perfunctory, if not outright performative, meetings.
Here, stolid managerialism is the default, and people are too often treated as interchangeable widgets in an immense industrial machine. Founded on a doctrine of hierarchical control informed by both the military traditions and the pseudo-scientific management theories of the 19th century, it has elevated conformity to virtue and excels at stifling dissent; initiative and creativity are just collateral damage. Information flows up—or is “staffed” in defense parlance—and power trickles back down. Important leaders choose less important leaders; everyone else competes within the rigid confines of a civil service system that we’ve known to be fundamentally broken for decades. Compensation is commensurate with status and tenure, not talent or contribution. Tasks are assigned, performance is evaluated, rules are promulgated—forming the basis of a culture of risk aversion that makes the faithful maintenance of the status quo a much safer bet than attempting to challenge it. Pentagon reporter Jeff Schogol perhaps put it best when he compared the Defense Department to a “Sears mail-in catalogue that is struggling to stay relevant in an Amazon Prime world.”
The existing system was designed for an era during which the rate of change was much slower and the centralized management of large bureaucracies by individual leaders much more feasible. It was not designed for an era such as our own, characterized by relentless and accelerating technological progress, growing uncertainty, and the intersection of a host of proliferating global risks. The complexity of today’s competitive space makes it quite impossible for individual leaders, no matter how sharp or experienced, to keep up with every challenge—or even with the scope of work being done by their own organizations.
The evolving character of war and an ongoing reframing of national security require a more complex and adaptive defense enterprise, one whose workforce is empowered to collaborate across functions and regions, at scale. The 4G revolution is already here, but the coming fifth- and sixth-generation telecommunications technologies, along with more capable and widespread artificial intelligence, will together drive both an untethering from fixedness in place and accelerate the pace of data delivery everywhere—allowing the enterprises that modernize effectively to become more distributed, asynchronous, and flexible.
Reaping the speed and efficiency gains that these technologies make possible, however, requires an administrative overhaul that gives more agency and autonomy to individuals and small teams within organizations. In tightly managed hierarchies such as the Defense Department, information is filtered, distorted, or lost at every rung on the organizational ladder before it reaches someone with enough authority to make a decision—and then gets distorted once again as decisions flow back down to those who implement them.
To be fair, there are some promising experiments underway. Newer organizations with departmentwide remits, such as the Defense Digital Service and the Defense Innovation Unit, are working to challenge ingrained habits and question long-held assumptions about software development and procurement. They, along with their service-specific counterparts—outfits such as the Air Force’s Platform One and AFWERX, for example—are already having a noticeable effect on how the Pentagon does business.
Unfortunately, these experiments remain just that, however, and have had little effect on the larger administrative procedures of the department writ large. Despite their real achievements, they are largely disconnected from the bulk of the work the department does on a daily basis—so many, islands of occasional excellence that sometimes make progress in spite of continuous institutional pushback.
Similarly, much has been made of ongoing and troubled efforts to modernize the Pentagon’s information and communications technology infrastructure. The Defense Department and the U.S. intelligence community are making big investments in digital communications, cloud computing, and, of course, AI. But even if they could somehow swap their legacy systems with cutting-edge cloud platforms complete with AI to manage them tomorrow, it would not help as much as you might think. Necessary investments to modernize communications technologies without commensurate investments to modernize organizational and administrative technologies is like building an interstate highway system that’s only meant to be traveled by horse-drawn buggies.
There is hope. The fact that other large institutions in the private sector have made impressive organizational transformations proves it can be done, so long as there are incentives to do so. Taking a hard look at talent hiring and retention as well as broader management processes—perhaps through a Defense Science Board study or a dedicated commission—could be a key first step to understanding the scope of the problem. But it will take serious, sustained effort over several years—at all levels of management—to effectively reform the Pentagon’s organizational culture. From there, constant care is required; you can never take your hands off the wheel when it comes to maintaining an inclusive, diverse, and vibrant workforce.
Many individuals who have survived the Defense Department’s bureaucracy—ourselves included—cope with the absurdity of the Pentagon’s vintage business processes by laughing; one of us even wrote a book about it. But while that absurdity can at times be amusing, the global competition the United States as a nation finds itself in is deadly serious.
The United States cannot afford to shrug this problem off any longer. Managing the challenges of an increasingly aggressive China and a stubbornly revanchist Russia, not to mention everything else, requires a Defense Department that runs at the speed of today’s challenges. Until the Pentagon can recruit and retain the nation’s top talent—and change its organizational culture to better allow great ideas to make it to the top—the United States will at best muddle through the challenges it faces. But the stakes are too high; muddling through simply isn’t good enough anymore.
All views expressed are those of the authors alone and not of any organizations with which they are affiliated.
Foreign Policy · by Zachery Tyson Brown, Kathleen J. McInnis · October 25, 2021
13. Opinion | Even Colin Powell Ignored the Powell Doctrine. Now, America Is Starting to Listen.
The doctrine is certainly good in theory. Can it really be strictly applied in reality? Or does it provide a useful guide for critical thinking?
Conclusion:
Yet it seems that just as Powell himself has passed on, we have come full circle on his ideas. The prudent ideas underlying the Powell Doctrine are making a resurgence. As the Biden’s administration’s interim national security strategic guidance, published in March 2021, put it: “the use of military force should be a last resort, not the first… [and] should only be used when the objectives and mission are clear and achievable.” Today’s policymakers seem intent on learning the lessons of the post-9/11 wars, much as Powell learned the lessons of Vietnam. Powell’s life, however, offers a cautionary tale: If we forget the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan too quickly — and shift away from these prudent principles — we may end up repeating his mistakes.
Opinion | Even Colin Powell Ignored the Powell Doctrine. Now, America Is Starting to Listen.
Magazine
Opinion | Even Colin Powell Ignored the Powell Doctrine. Now, America Is Starting to Listen.
Powell fell victim to the expansionist policy that his instincts told him was wrong. But his prudent vision is making a comeback.
Colin Powell, the former secretary of State who died this week, speaks during a news conference at the United Nations headquarters in September 2003. | AP Photo/Mary Altaffer
Opinion by EMMA ASHFORD
10/23/2021 07:00 AM EDT
Emma Ashford is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and a nonresident fellow at the Modern War Institute.
Colin Powell was a paradox: He was a key enabler of perhaps the most tragic example of U.S. foreign policy overreach in recent memory. Yet for most of his career, he struggled mightily — and frequently in vain — against precisely that kind of overreach.
Powell’s career was bookended by two wars in Iraq, a parallel repeatedly highlighted in last week’s obituaries. The 1991 Gulf War was a textbook example of his view that military force should be used sparingly but decisively to safeguard the national interest, while the 2003 Iraq war was the polar opposite: A war fought for murky reasons with no clear end state in mind. But what many obituaries didn’t note is that during the years in between, arguably the apex of Powell’s influence, U.S. foreign policy departed dramatically from — even outright rejected — his restrained theory of American military power.
Powell, who passed away this week, will be forever associated with two things. The first and likely more historically significant is his ill-fated Iraq War advocacy in front of the U.N. Security Council, which paved the way for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and directed the course of U.S. foreign policy for two decades. For those interested in the future of America’s role in the world, however, the second legacy may be as important: His advocacy, particularly during the 1990s, for a set of principles limiting the use of military force that became known as the Powell Doctrine.
The mismatch between these two legacies is the ultimate irony of Colin Powell’s career. His compelling vision of constrained U.S. military power, forged during the Vietnam War, was out of step with a post-Cold War zeitgeist that saw America as the “indispensable nation.” Powell failed to sell the foreign policy establishment on the idea that the military should be used sparingly and prudently. Worse still, after a decade of resisting the missionary impulse in U.S. foreign policy in the Balkans and elsewhere, he himself would fall victim to the zeitgeist, accepting the need for a foreign policy more assertive than his instincts suggested and acting as a trusted proponent of the Bush administration’s flawed case for war in Iraq. Still, Powell may yet have the last laugh: Today, with 20 years of post-9/11 wars evoking the same feelings of regret that inspired the original doctrine, the arc of American foreign policy seems finally to be bending back in the direction of his prudent guidance.
The Powell Doctrine drew on principles first formulated by Reagan’s Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger in the 1980s. In the run-up to the Gulf War, Powell took Weinberger’s principles and ran with them, arguing that war should be rare and limited. He fleshed these ideas out further in a 1992 Foreign Affairs article, in which he said “we must not… send military forces into a crisis with an unclear mission they cannot accomplish.” The doctrine’s emphasis on clear political objectives was largely a legacy of the Vietnam War: Powell, as with many soldiers and policymakers who saw that conflict up close, came to believe the United States had not adequately considered the ramifications of its disastrous involvement in Vietnam.
Thus, the Powell Doctrine argues that the United States shouldn’t enter a conflict unless a vital national security interest is at stake, there is a clear objective, the risks and costs have been assessed and there is a clear exit strategy. At the same time, if the United States does choose war, it shouldn’t pull its punches; Powell contends that any conflict important enough to fight is a conflict important enough for decisive military action, including, if necessary, putting American troops in harm’s way.
It was a good fit for the Gulf War, a fairly clear-cut conflict in which Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, violating international law, threatening Saudi oil fields and — most importantly — threatening to disrupt global oil markets. It was also a good match for the relatively cautious President George H.W. Bush, who accepted the recommendation of Powell — then chairm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — that once the U.S. had pushed Saddam’s military out of Kuwait, it should not pursue him to Baghdad and overthrow his regime. Saddam’s invasion represented a clear threat to U.S. national interests and was dealt with through a decisive yet limited military intervention. It was, in short, the Powell Doctrine in action.
America’s unequivocal victory in the Gulf War only buttressed Powell’s opponents, however, leaving him to try to explain why that success was not likely to be replicated in less clear-cut conflicts. Within a few years, the doctrine was regarded as an increasingly poor fit for the freewheeling, expansive U.S. foreign policy that was taking shape. The early 1990s, after all, was the “unipolar moment,” when the collapse of the Soviet Union left the United States as the only superpower and Washington embraced the idea that American power could reshape the world. In one oft-recounted incident, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is said to have pushed Powell on his resistance to the use of force for humanitarian purposes in the Balkans, asking, “What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?” Powell was appalled, noting that “American GIs were not toy soldiers to be moved around on some sort of global game board.”
Occasional success in campaigns that still violated the Powell Doctrine similarly bolstered his critics. The 1998 Kosovo intervention was ultimately successful in forcing Slobodan Milosevic to negotiate with the Albanian Kosovars, though it took far longer and was far bloodier than initially predicted. Obvious failures like the tragic Clinton-era intervention in Somalia — which saw more than 20 U.S. soldiers killed in action and clearly didn't meet the Powell Doctrine’s standards for intervention — were largely minimized in foreign-policy debates.
By the mid-1990s, the charitable view in Washington was that Powell’s guidance was well-intentioned, but impractical and outmoded, suited only for “a best-case scenario” (as former Secretary of the Navy Jim Webb put it), or for a bygone era of clear-cut conflicts like the Gulf War. Some even argued explicitly that the doctrine was self-defeating, with Powell’s insistence on an exit strategy leaving “the fruits of victory to wither on the vine.”
At the end of the day, it was Powell himself who would put the final nail in the coffin. In the aftermath of 9/11, he seemed to have accepted that his ideas no longer fit the moment. As The Economist put it in January 2003, “there is some evidence that he has abandoned, or at least refined, his doctrine… if there is any inconsistency, it can be attributed to the emergence of the threat of WMD in the hands of violently unpredictable dictators or terrorists.” The 9/11 attacks had changed the world, and even Colin Powell appeared to have lost faith in the idea of clean, effective wars laser-focused on the national interest. Two weeks later, Powell went to the U.N. Security Council and argued in favor of war in Iraq.
History has not vindicated him. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan notably failed to meet the criteria Powell set out in the 1990s. In Iraq — even if one were to accept the faulty intelligence Powell personally sold (and apparently believed) — the United States had at best a moderate national security interest in toppling Saddam. Policymakers failed to adequately plan for an exit strategy or to consider the invasion’s second-order effects on regional security. The Afghanistan war was clearly justified in terms of national security, yet policymakers failed to limit their objectives to the toppling of the Taliban or the killing of Osama bin Laden, leading to a two-decade quagmire of shifting goals. The same could be said for the Obama administration’s 2011 intervention in Libya, which occurred after Powell left public life but offered another example of U.S. policymakers downplaying a military intervention’s risks and potential costs.
Yet just as Vietnam drove Weinberger and Powell to call for limits on the use of U.S. military force, America’s futile efforts to reshape the greater Middle East after 9/11 are now doing something similar. When President Joe Biden announced the end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, he outlined a number of lessons from two decades of the war on terror: “First, we must set missions with clear, achievable goals — not ones we’ll never reach. And second, we must stay clearly focused on the fundamental national security interest of the United States of America.”
This distinctly Powellian justification was even matched with an endorsement from Powell himself, who told the Washington Post in April that withdrawal from Afghanistan “was overdue… we’ve done all we can do.” In fact, Powell had backed withdrawal as early as 2011, citing the Powell Doctrine and the failure to set clear and achievable objectives in the conflict’s opening stages.
At the peak of Colin Powell’s career, the Powell Doctrine could not persuade policymakers who were determined to use American power to reshape the world. Powell was a man of his time: Deeply shaped by America’s failures in Vietnam, he resolved to prevent future policymakers from making similar mistakes. Yet that determination was not enough to overcome the alluring idea of the all-powerful, indispensable nation that dominated during his time shaping American foreign policy. It wasn’t even enough to persuade him personally to oppose the post-9/11 wars.
Yet it seems that just as Powell himself has passed on, we have come full circle on his ideas. The prudent ideas underlying the Powell Doctrine are making a resurgence. As the Biden’s administration’s interim national security strategic guidance, published in March 2021, put it: “the use of military force should be a last resort, not the first… [and] should only be used when the objectives and mission are clear and achievable.” Today’s policymakers seem intent on learning the lessons of the post-9/11 wars, much as Powell learned the lessons of Vietnam. Powell’s life, however, offers a cautionary tale: If we forget the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan too quickly — and shift away from these prudent principles — we may end up repeating his mistakes.
14. Moving more TRICARE patients to civilian care would cause ‘significant harm,’ study finds
My family chooses to receive care at a military hospital. We are not in favor of civilian care.
We have known this intuitively based on our experience:
“On average, Military Health System beneficiaries treated in MTFs experienced better inpatient-quality and improved patient-safety compared to MHS beneficiaries treated in locally-available civilian hospitals,” the study states. “Simulations of proposed changes resulted in consistently worse outcomes for Military Health System patients, whether reducing MTF access by 10%, 20%, or 50% nationwide; limiting MTF access to active-duty beneficiaries; or closing MTFs with the worst performance on patient-safety.”
Moving more TRICARE patients to civilian care would cause ‘significant harm,’ study finds | Federal News Network
The DoD Reporter’s Notebook is a weekly summary of personnel, acquisition, technology and management stories that may have fallen below your radar during the past week, but are nonetheless important. It’s compiled and published each Monday by Federal News Network DoD reporters Jared Serbu and
A new study is casting doubt on the plan to “right size” the Military Health System by moving some TRICARE beneficiaries away from Defense Department facilities for medical care.
The report, funded by the Pentagon and published in Health Services Research journal, said moving patients away from care at military treatment facilities (MTFs) could cause significant harm.
The study goes as far to say that taking 10% of the population away from MTFs could cause significantly worse mortality rates and safety for patients.
“On average, Military Health System beneficiaries treated in MTFs experienced better inpatient-quality and improved patient-safety compared to MHS beneficiaries treated in locally-available civilian hospitals,” the study states. “Simulations of proposed changes resulted in consistently worse outcomes for Military Health System patients, whether reducing MTF access by 10%, 20%, or 50% nationwide; limiting MTF access to active-duty beneficiaries; or closing MTFs with the worst performance on patient-safety.”
The current strategy would close about 50 MTFs and move approximately 200,000 patients from getting care on base to using their TRICARE insurance to get assistance from private providers.
The report is the first look into how TRICARE beneficiaries could be directly impacted by the plan.
DoD sent a report to Congress in February 2020 laid out some issues that the downsizing might create, including making some bases less desirable, forcing troops to take off work to escort family members to health services off base and possible issues in finding standardized care for women.
DoD outlined mitigation strategies in the report like providing alternative transport strategies for family members.
The Defense Health Agency said it would rethink which facilities might be downsized after COVID exposed issues in civilian medical facility capacity.
In the beginning of the pandemic the Government Accountability Office released a report stating that DHA’s original assessment of the civilian marketplaces did not consistently account for provider quality and that inaccurate information was used to calculate how far patients would have to drive to get healthcare.
“MTF officials we interviewed also expressed concerns that the assessments did not account for traffic, including bridges and tunnels that create traffic chokepoints. In other words, they believed that even providers that appeared to be within drive time standards based on mileage could actually exceed the standard depending on their location and time of day,” the report stated. — SM
Senate appropriators ding Pentagon for inadequate transparency on middle-tier, OTA programs
In 2016, Congress gave DoD two new authorities that let it bypass much of the traditional Defense acquisition bureaucracy when it’s building or buying new prototypes. The tradeoff was supposed to be detailed reporting on how the Pentagon used those new authorities, but the Senate said DoD still isn’t living up to its end of the bargain.
The Senate Appropriations Committee’s version of the 2022 Defense appropriations bill, released last week, critiques DoD on transparency grounds on its use of both middle-tier acquisitions (MTAs) and other transaction agreements (OTAs.)
On MTAs, the committee points out the military services are now using the rapid prototyping and rapid fielding avenue — sometimes called “Section 804” authority — for 74 separate weapons programs. In a report accompanying the bill, lawmakers said MTAs look like they’re becoming a “de facto” approach to buying end items.
But at least so far, DoD hasn’t complied with an existing law that requires it to send Congress detailed information on R&D funds used for MTA programs that make their way into operational use. And the committee said there’s reason to be concerned that a lack of detail on MTAs might prompt the military services to make unwise procurement planning decisions.
DoD’s existing approaches “may limit the services’ ability to successfully manage their acquisition programs in the long term by eliminating the complete understanding of full program costs up-front, unnecessarily narrowing the industrial base early in the acquisition process, and eliminating opportunities for future innovation by reducing competition over the life of the acquisition,” senators wrote. “Further, the committee is concerned that budgeting for these de facto end-items incrementally with research and development appropriations instead of fully funding them with procurement appropriations obfuscates costs and limits transparency and visibility into services’ procurement efforts.”
The Senate bill would order DoD to send Congress a list of all its acquisition programs that are using prototyping or rapid acquisition authorities, along with rationales for those decisions and cost estimates and contracting strategies for each one. Though it doesn’t mandate it, the committee report also opines that DoD needs an overarching policy on how the military services should plan and budget sustainment costs for weapons that start out as MTA projects.
Senators have similar complaints when it comes to other transaction agreements.
The same committee report laments that the Federal Procurement Data System still hasn’t been updated to capture important data on DoD’s use of OTAs, forcing the department to fall back to manual data calls to gather basic information.
“This issue is exacerbated when analyzing OTAs awarded through consortiums and provides limited visibility on the industry partners that are executing the work on behalf of the consortium,” according to the report.
The DoD inspector general raised similar concerns in a report earlier this year, noting that government spending databases contain almost no information about individual projects managed by consortiums. Under those circumstances, since the only contractual relationship is between the government and the consortium, official spending records only reflect the large, initial award to the consortium. Data on the actual tasks being done by consortium members is stored on individual spreadsheets that aren’t accessible to Congress or the public, obscuring billions of dollars in annual Defense spending.
Congress has already ordered DoD to improve its data collection and reporting on OTAs. The Senate bill would also require Defense acquisition officials to brief the Congressional defense committees on what they’re doing to improve the Federal Procurement Data System — or possibly use a different data system for OTAs altogether. —JS
Senate pumps brakes on DoD proposal to expand ‘colorless’ software appropriation
DoD’s prospects for moving more of its IT programs into a new, experimental software appropriation are looking dimmer, at least in the near term.
Last month, the House Appropriations Committee voted to allow the military services to expand the colorless money pilot to 12 programs, up from nine in 2021. In general, the approach lets managers fund an entire IT program using solely R&D funds, eliminating the distinctions between R&D, procurement and operations and maintenance funding that are largely irrelevant to modern software development.
But the Senate’s version of the 2022 Defense appropriations bill put the brakes on any expansion of the Software and Digital Technology Pilot Program. It’s not that appropriators necessarily think it’s a bad idea, they say, but they’d like to see some data on how it’s working before it gets any bigger. And DoD still hasn’t delivered information on the pilots that Congress demanded in last year’s appropriations bill.
“Objective quantitative and qualitative evidence is required to evaluate the ongoing approved pilot programs prior to considering an expansion of programs,” according to the committee report. “Reporting requirements … have not been submitted to the congressional defense committees on a timely basis, and have not yet provided a baseline for analyzing the effectiveness of the pilot programs compared to traditional appropriation practices.”
The Senate bill would order DoD to draw up an analysis of how the eight existing pilot programs are performing so far, compared against eight similar IT programs that use the traditional appropriations method. —JS
Congress starting to sweat over space acquisition
One of the biggest selling points of creating a Space Force was to consolidate the Defense Department’s space acquisition efforts.
But, nearly two years after the branch was created, some of the biggest issues around how the Pentagon will buy space assets are still unsolved and Congress is taking notice.
In the 2022 Senate defense appropriations bill, lawmakers said they are worried about how slowly DoD’s new space acquisition process is developing.
“The committee understands that multiple military services and agencies across the Department of Defense retain equities in acquisition programs tied to the space domain and that consolidation of space based acquisition programs is an ongoing endeavor,” the committee report states. “However, the committee is concerned that delaying consolidation of space based acquisition programs under the Space Force may result in inefficiencies across the Department of Defense.”
The bill asks DoD to submit a report identifying space-related development and acquisition programs.
“This report shall include a list of programs for each service or agency and the executing program office; a brief description of the capability provided; a determination of whether the program will be transferred to the Space Force; timeline for transfer; and explanation of the rationale leading to the transfer decision,” the report said.
One of the biggest issues surrounding how DoD buys space systems is the office that will lead the effort.
The creation of a Space Force, Space Development Agency and space acquisition office in the Air Force were meant to address criticisms that the Defense Department’s fragmented leadership on buying space weapons was delaying critical capabilities.
The 2020 defense authorization act requires DoD to appoint a space acquisition executive.
That position, which must be created by October 2022, would work with the Air Force service acquisition executive on space systems. The position would also be in charge of the Space Development Agency, the Space Rapid Capabilities Office and the Space and Missile Systems Center.
Space News reported that Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall is trying to speed up that nomination process by asking Congress to authorize an assistant secretary for space acquisition before that 2022 deadline.
Kendall is in talks with Congress about amending the 2022 defense authorization bill to do that.
The Air Force has already made some preparations for what the office will look like. At the beginning of the year the Air Force revamped its space acquisition shop by splitting it into three directorates.
“We have gone from an organization that was largely focused on policy and providing advice and counsel to the Air Force secretary to one that is now focused on, or will be focused on, acquisition, architecture, and then policy and integration,” Shawn Barnes, who is performing the duties of Air Force assistant secretary for space acquisition and integration, said when the Air Force undertook the initiative.
The three directorates are each run by a colonel and focus on the three areas Barnes mentioned: Acquisition, architecture, and policy and integration.
“Underlying those three key directorates,” Barnes said. “I have a number of subject matter experts that effectively work for all three of those directorates. They’re set up into different teams based on mission areas. We have a mission area related to precision navigation, timing and communications. We have a team that is focused on space control, a team that is focused on launch in space logistics, and then a team that’s focused on space control.” — SM
15. U.S. MC-130J Lands On Highway In Sweden To Unload HIMARS Artillery System During Special Ops Exercise
the 5th SOF Truth: "most special operations require non-SOF support."
Sometimes conventional operations benefit from SOF support. Was this a special operation or a conventional operation. Does it matter? Perhaps it was a military operation to achieve an operational or strategic objective. Whether it is termed a conventional or special operation is of no importance.
U.S. MC-130J Lands On Highway In Sweden To Unload HIMARS Artillery System During Special Ops Exercise
A screenshot shows the MC-130J Commando II after the highway landing on Gotland, Sweden.
The MC-130J Commando II Special Operations aircraft unloaded an M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System that was then loaded onto a Swedish C-130 during recent drills on Gotland island.
A really interesting training mission was carried out on Saturday Oct. 23, 2021, in Sweden, where a U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command MC-130J Commando II aircraft landed on a highway on Gotland, Sweden’s largest island, strategically located in the the Baltic Sea.
The American Special Operations aircraft arrived over the road segment used for the drills in formation with a Swedish Air Force C-130H (locally designated TP 84) and two Swedish JAS 39 Gripen jets.
Escorted by two JAS 39 Gripen and accompanied by a TP 84 (Swedish C-130H), the MC-130J arrives over Gotland for the highway landing. (Image credit: Swedish MOD)
After the road landing, the MC-130J, belonging to the 67th Special Operation Squadron of the 352d Special Operations Group (352 SOG) from RAF Mildenhall, UK, unloaded an M142 HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System).
The HIMARS rocket artillery system is a light multiple rocket launcher developed in the late 1990s for the United States Army, mounted on a truck frame and carrying six rockets or one MGM-140 ATACMS missile.
The HIMARS system was then loaded onto the Swedish TP 84.
According to the Swedish MOD, the highway landing and M142 unloading/loading operation with the HIMARS was part of a Swedish-led special forces exercise currently underway in southern Sweden and on Gotland, where operational and tactical command and coordination of several parallel combat and intelligence operations are being practiced and developed.
“We have taken further steps in the cooperation with the U.S., where we, with American military transport aircraft, have moved a long-range artillery system to Gotland, reloaded to a Swedish military aircraft for further transport within Sweden. The opportunity to act with this and other types of ground or airborne weapon systems together with our partners, I believe removes any doubts about our common ability to be a guarantor of security in the Baltic Sea area” said Special Forces Command, Brigadier General Anders Löfberg.
The MC-130J on the road runway. (Image credit: Swedish MOD)
Although Sweden has a longstanding policy of political neutrality and is not part of NATO treaty, it is a participant in the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council and regularly takes part in joint exercises with the U.S. and the rest of the western allies. During the Cold War, the Swedish government secretly made preparations to receive military aid from the United States in case of Soviet aggression.
Gotland island, in particular, is considered extremely strategic in the region, so much so it’s considered as “a fixed aircraft carrier in the Baltic”. Last year, The Swedish military had to deploy four naval warships and an unspecified number of ground forces and warplanes in response to a major Russian naval exercise that also included a simulated amphibious landing set off regional alarms. U.S. Special Operations aircraft regularly operate in Sweden and Gotland and it seems more than likely it will be even more the case in the future.
Dealing with the MC-130J Commando II, here are some details about the aircraft we posted in 2017, when some photos released by the U.S. DoD proved that the multimission combat transport/special operations tanker had joined OIR (Operation Inherent Resolve) against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
The MC-130Js mainly operate at low-altitude and at night, conducting clandestine missions with reduced probability of visual acquisition and intercept by airborne threats.
According to the U.S. Air Force, the MC-130J features an advanced two-pilot flight station with fully integrated digital avionics; fully populated Combat Systems Operator (CSO) and auxiliary flight deck stations; 13 color multifunctional liquid crystal displays; head-up displays; fully integrated navigation systems with dual inertial navigation system and global positioning system; integrated defensive systems; low-power color radar; digital moving map display. The aircraft is equipped with new turboprop engines with six-bladed, all-composite propellers; digital auto pilot; improved fuel, environmental and ice-protection systems; enhanced cargo-handling system; Universal Air Refueling Receptacle Slipway Installation (UARRSI), air refueling pods, Electro Optical/Infrared (EO/IR) System; dual SATCOM for voice/data; 60/90 KVA generators; increased DC electrical output, loadmaster/scanner restraint system; and LAIRCM provisions.
David Cenciotti is a freelance journalist based in Rome, Italy. He is the Founder and Editor of “The Aviationist”, one of the world’s most famous and read military aviation blogs. Since 1996, he has written for major worldwide magazines, including Air Forces Monthly, Combat Aircraft, and many others, covering aviation, defense, war, industry, intelligence, crime and cyberwar. He has reported from the U.S., Europe, Australia and Syria, and flown several combat planes with different air forces. He is a former 2nd Lt. of the Italian Air Force, a private pilot and a graduate in Computer Engineering. He has written four books.
16. US Green Berets who've trained Taiwanese troops explain how they could fight China and why the US keeps their mission secret
Former Green Beret. Not active duty ones.
US Green Berets who've trained Taiwanese troops explain how they could fight China and why the US keeps their mission secret
Taiwanese soldiers on an armored vehicle during the National Day Celebration in Taipei, October 10, 2021.
Ceng Shou Yi/NurPhoto via Getty Images
- Amid increased Chinese pressure on Taiwan this month, it was reported that US troops have been Taiwanese forces.
- US special-operations forces have for decades deployed overseas to train partners to better defend themselves.
- The US hasn't had an official military presence in Taiwan since 1979, but that doesn't mean it hasn't been helping them.
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In the first days of October, the Chinese military sent more than 150 aircraft, including bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons, into Taiwan's air-defense identification zone, which isn't territorial airspace but is still seen as a provocative move.
Amid that Chinese aggression, reports emerged that US Army Special Forces soldiers and Marine Raiders have deployed to Taiwan and have been working with their Taiwanese counterparts since at least last year.
The US hasn't had an official military presence in Taiwan since 1979, when the US officially recognized Beijing, but that doesn't mean US commandos haven't been working with Taiwanese troops over the years, though that training has ebbed and flowed with US policy toward Taiwan.
Although training rotations are usually not disclosed, American commandos have deployed to the region before to conduct foreign internal defense — or the training of allied or partner conventional and special-operations forces, including Taiwan's.
The secret weapon of US special-operations
Taiwanese soldiers during a shore-defense operation as part of a military exercise, September 16, 2021.
Ceng Shou Yi/NurPhoto via Getty Images
When people think of special-operations units, they think of door-kickers who can perform the toughest operations under the most arduous conditions. Those units do that, but they have also mastered many other mission sets that are valuable in peacetime, competition, and during war.
Foreign internal defense is one of them, and the Army's Special Forces Regiment has unparalleled expertise.
Foreign internal defense is the bread and butter of Green Berets. During such overseas rotations, Green Beret teams work with and train their local counterparts, using their cultural knowledge and language capabilities to build rapport with their counterparts and ensure a smoother training experience.
By training foreign units, Green Berets form solid professional and personal relationships with the local unit and could capitalize on those relationships in the future.
"FID is one component of US efforts to help our partners prevent lawlessness, insurgency, and war in their own countries. The primary method we use to conduct FID is building the capacity of military and paramilitary partners," Lino Miani, a former Army Special Forces officer and president of the Combat Diver Foundation, told Insider.
Other units within US Special Operations Command, such as Marine Raiders, Navy SEALs, Air Commandos, and Navy Special Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewmen, also have some foreign internal defense capability.
Taiwanese soldiers prepare grenade launchers, machine guns, and tanks for a drill simulating a Chinese invasion, in Tainan, Taiwan, September 16, 2021.
Ceng Shou Yi/NurPhoto via Getty Images
"We're very flexible and can use FID in many ways. For example, dive teams can quite literally stand up brand new units with combat divers, and the next teams that get to rotate in-country can continue that relationship," a former Green Beret told Insider.
Troops specializing in other infiltration methods can do the same thing. "Free-fall teams can train their guys in HALO [High Altitude Low Opening] and HAHO [High Altitude High Opening] ops, mobility teams can work with their vehicle guys, etc.," added the former Green Beret, who requested anonymity because of ongoing work with the US government.
In the Indo-Pacific area of operations, it's the 1st Special Forces Group — one of seven Green Beret groups — that is responsible for working with Taiwanese and other regional partners and allies. Green Berets assigned to the unit learn the cultural and linguistic nuances of the region to be more successful. Many also have ethnic ties to the region, giving them another way to relate to the forces they train.
"It is these partners that will make it increasingly difficult for China to subvert their governments and societies. This serves as both a complicating factor for Chinese designs and a deterrent. In many ways, FID places more capability in more forward locations, more durably, and for less money than USA would be able to do with our own troops," added Miani, who is also CEO of Navisio Global LLC, an international security and business consultancy.
Rotations like the one in Taiwan are sometimes not disclosed to avoid international incidents or diplomatic fallout.
"SOCOM has a presence in over 70 countries. Much of it is standard rotations in friendly countries with which we've had a solid relationship for decades," the former Special Forces operator said. "Other rotations are in countries where our presence would be better not advertised for many different reasons, like domestic opposition or fear of upsetting third countries that are the regional 'top dogs.'"
A war with China
A soldier launches a Javelin missile during a military exercise in southern Taiwan, May 30, 2019.
SAM YEH/AFP via Getty Images
In a war with China, the allied and partner commando units that US special-operations forces have helped stand up or train over the decades would be an advantage for the US military.
"China's strategic geography depends on three rivers and a coastline. This strategic core is constrained by the US 7th Fleet on one side and by ethnic minority regions of varying degrees of historic hostility on the other three," said Miani, who served in the 1st Special Forces Group.
"Any war between the USA and China will take place in this strategic periphery but will ultimately be waged to protect the core and guarantee the Chinese economy has access to the rest of the world," Miani told Insider.
These partners and allies are all united in their desire to avoid an oppressive China on their doorstep that could upend regional peace. But if it came to blows, they would be valuable allies and already prepared to deal with Chinese forces through their decades of training with US special operators.
Green Beret teams already in countries in the region will also have a head start if fighting breaks out and could slow down or distract Chinese forces, buying the US and its allies valuable time to deploy their forces.
"The SF Regiment can be America's most potent tool for drawing Chinese divisions away from that purpose," Miani said. "This will require FID in some regions to impede Chinese conquests and unconventional warfare in areas where China already holds sway."
Stavros Atlamazoglou is a defense journalist specializing in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate.
17. Biden, Taiwan, and Strategic Ambiguity
Excerpts:
Criticisms of U.S. policy hold some merit. But the current policy allows for flexibility that might otherwise be lost: options remain open. For example, the flexibility enables the United States to assist in the defense of Taiwan if it chooses to do so – but a U.S. response is not guaranteed. The TRA also enables Washington to establish a linkage between U.S. policy and the actions of other states. Depending on circumstances, U.S. military support can increase or decrease. Finally – and most important – the TRA encourages both Beijing and Taipei to behave responsibly. In other words, uncertainty breeds restraint.
From time to time, the United States makes some modest adjustments in its relationship with Taiwan. Many of these are largely symbolic. But some are more meaningful, particularly ramping up U.S. support for Taiwan’s drive to gain a voice in the World Health Organization (WHO). This is one initiative that deserves increased American attention. But any change in the U.S. security commitment to Taiwan may very well prove disruptive to the dynamics of the U.S.-China-Taiwan triangle.
It is likely that the current policy – albeit ambiguous and contradictory – will continue to serve American interests. As R. Nicolas Burns, Biden’s pick to be U.S. ambassador to China, observed during his confirmation hearings, strategic ambiguity is “time tested” and “the smartest and most effective way” to prevent a war across the Taiwan Strait.
Biden, Taiwan, and Strategic Ambiguity
Even U.S. presidents apparently need a primer on the U.S. stance on Taiwan’s defense.
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On October 21, U.S. President Joe Biden committed yet another faux pas with respect to the U.S. security commitment to the Republic of China (ROC), more commonly known as Taiwan. When asked whether the United States would defend Taiwan in the case of an attack by China, the president replied, “Yes, we have a commitment.”
It’s not the first time and likely won’t be the last time that a US administration has scrambled to walk back a president’s unscripted comments on the topic. On April 24, 2001, when President George W. Bush was asked if the U.S. had a commitment to defend Taiwan, he replied, “Yes, we do…and the Chinese must understand that.” Just like Biden’s gaffe, officials quickly sought to “clarify” Bush’s comments and insisted that there was no change in U.S. policy.
To state it succinctly, the United States has never had an iron-clad security commitment to defend Taiwan. That policy of “will-they-or-won’t-they” has worked well for over 70 years and should continue to serve American interests. Here is why.
In 1949, China was split by civil war. The ROC government retreated to Taiwan and a few smaller islands, while Mao Zedong’s Communist forces occupied mainland China. After the outbreak of the Korean War, American aid poured into Taiwan and the two sides negotiated a bilateral defense treaty in 1954. But there were limits to U.S. support. The United States insisted on an exchange of letters agreeing that any Taiwan attack on the mainland must first be approved by Washington – its seems President Dwight Eisenhower did not want to be dragged into another messy civil war.
Moreover, the administration deliberately sought to “fuzz up” the security pact in such a way that the territories covered by the document were unclear. This prevented the United States from being treaty-bound to protect the tiny offshore islands (technically a part of Fujian province). Similarly, the so-called “Formosa Resolution,” a Congressional measure authorizing the president to protect the offshore islands in 1955, only permitted the defense of territories like Quemoy or Matsu if such an attack was judged to be a prelude to a full-scale attack on Taiwan.
The U.S. formal defense pact with Taipei, albeit equivocal in key respects, worked well for 25 years. It helped prevent war. In 1979, however, the United States abrogated the treaty as a precondition for establishing full diplomatic relations with Beijing. In its place, the U.S. Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) that President Jimmy Carter signed into law on April 10, 1979.
Today, the TRA, three U.S.-China Communiqués, and a series of presidential statements guide the United States’ relations with Taiwan and China. Legal experts, however, agree that the TRA trumps all other documents and statements of policy. The law promotes the maintenance of economic linkages and “unofficial” political ties. Perhaps most significant, however, are the provisions for Taiwan’s security. Like the “fuzzed up” 1954 defense pact, the TRA provides a U.S. president with the option of going to war to protect Taiwan. It does not contain an iron-clad security guarantee. Unlike the mutual defense treaty, however, the TRA cannot be abrogated by a president – a president must seek Congressional approval to abandon Taiwan. The law also provides a U.S. administration an option to sell arms to Taiwan.
The TRA has successfully promoted peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait for over four decades. But it is not without its detractors. Some fear the law cannot deter Beijing and that Washington must make its intentions clear. Others argue that TRA holds the potential to give a president the “green light” to entangle the United States in yet another foreign conflict – one that might escalate into a cataclysmic nuclear conflict.
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Criticisms of U.S. policy hold some merit. But the current policy allows for flexibility that might otherwise be lost: options remain open. For example, the flexibility enables the United States to assist in the defense of Taiwan if it chooses to do so – but a U.S. response is not guaranteed. The TRA also enables Washington to establish a linkage between U.S. policy and the actions of other states. Depending on circumstances, U.S. military support can increase or decrease. Finally – and most important – the TRA encourages both Beijing and Taipei to behave responsibly. In other words, uncertainty breeds restraint.
From time to time, the United States makes some modest adjustments in its relationship with Taiwan. Many of these are largely symbolic. But some are more meaningful, particularly ramping up U.S. support for Taiwan’s drive to gain a voice in the World Health Organization (WHO). This is one initiative that deserves increased American attention. But any change in the U.S. security commitment to Taiwan may very well prove disruptive to the dynamics of the U.S.-China-Taiwan triangle.
It is likely that the current policy – albeit ambiguous and contradictory – will continue to serve American interests. As R. Nicolas Burns, Biden’s pick to be U.S. ambassador to China, observed during his confirmation hearings, strategic ambiguity is “time tested” and “the smartest and most effective way” to prevent a war across the Taiwan Strait.
18. A Fitting 2021 Sequel to James Fallows’ 1981 “National Defense”
Mr.Wheeler makes quite a critique of the Hill in his conclusion this review:
I regret to say that the current staffing system on Capitol Hill shows little evidence of potential interest in what Cockburn writes in “Spoils of War,” as there was in 1981 with Fallows’ “National Defense.” Overrun with specialists interested only in pushing whatever fluff they are told to push and pseudo-professional national security staffers who think too often of their next job in the Pentagon, industry or think thanks run by industry, Cockburn’s likely target audience on Capitol Hill are individuals poorly disposed to be seen in public with a copy of his book. It is the same for Members of the House and Senate -- if they have any time to read anything between media feedings and fundraising.
In another time, the kind of work that Cockburn has done for "Spoils of War" would gather nominations for prizes and placement on bestseller lists. It should have the kind of impact that Fallows' "National Defense" had in its time. That will not be happening in today’s national security culture. But if you see a politician or a defense manager with a copy of “Spoils of War,” pay close attention; they just may give today's national security culture a good ride, and it will be for its money.
A Fitting 2021 Sequel to James Fallows’ 1981 “National Defense”
BIAS ALERT: Andrew Cockburn, the author of “Spoils of War,” is a longtime friend and colleague. While my views on him and his life’s work are heavily biased, the facts, analysis and anecdotes in this commentary should speak for themselves.
In 1981 Random House released James Fallows’ "National Defense” to become both award-winning and bestselling. The book could be found on the desks of many congressional defense staffers, including my own in Senator Nancy L. Kassebaum’s (R-KS) office. “National Defense” was a revelation. Through sources, Fallows readily recognized in his acknowledgments, the book made it clear that much of my own and others’ analysis of the DoD budget and the weapons it bought were poorly, if not mis-, informed. More money did not make our defenses stronger; it made them weaker. The actual facts on various controversial weapons were not that they were more than we needed, too costly (even if effective), or “destabilizing” in the eyes of others. Many weapons were losers designed more for their complexity and resultant cost than for meaningful battlefield performance. In some cases, the Pentagon even perversely undermined effective weapons to keep its preferred systems on track. Had we done it right, we could have a larger, more effective force for less money.
That was forty years ago. The only thing that has changed is that things have gotten worse.
A new book now picks up many of Fallows' threads to tell us what has happened since 1981. Andrew Cockburn's "The Spoils of War: Power, Profit and the American War Machine," tells us, for example, “Overall, despite remorseless growth in spending, the U.S. military continues to shrink, fielding fewer ships, aircraft, and ground combat units with every passing decade. Remarkably, more money apparently produces less defense.” And, those smaller inventories are all too often not improvements but steps backward: compare, for example, as Cockburn shows, the performance of the high-cost F-35 to the older, cheaper A-10 to perform the close support mission (fighting with our troops engaged on the battlefield and hunting down threats coming at them). The new $7 billion-plus per ship Zumwalt class destroyer cannot perform its original mission (gunfire support for troops onshore), and the Navy is now changing it, at even more cost, to try to be a surface combatant with missiles. Just two examples of several cited.
But, it’s worse than that; as Cockburn demonstrates, some of our weapons actually help the enemy. Incompetent designs of equipment and aircraft killed our troops in September 2014 when an ill-suited, ill-equipped B-1B with an ill-trained crew killed five U.S. troops on a hilltop in Afghanistan, a tragedy that the Air Force then tried to pin on U.S. troops on the ground. Worse, Cockburn tells of the likely thousands of innocent civilians killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere by “high tech” drones that literally do not know what they are shooting at, albeit “precisely:” Both morally corrosive for us and a great boon to ISIS and the Taliban. Now the mainstream world has been unavoidably confronted with the problem from the internationally reported September 2021 drone strike in Kabul on a presumed ISIS terrorist, first declared “righteous” by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Milley but then found to be the murder of ten entirely innocent civilians. Cockburn has been following these killings for a decade, arguing not just about their wanton immorality but also the complete failure to prevent the expansion of terrorism.
Throughout "Spoils of War," Cockburn makes painfully clear that the shrinking of U.S. forces, while they age, are less trained and become more and more ill-suited for war-winning combat – all at ever-higher budgets -- comes independent of altering national strategies, constant changes in commanders and civilian leaders in the Pentagon or whether Democrats or Republicans control the White House or Congress.
It is, therefore, with real skepticism that we should view a recent report from the Congressional Budget Office that assures us that $1 trillion can be extracted from future defense budgets if we adopt any one of three military strategies ("deterrence by denial," "deterrence through punishment," or "maintaining the freedom of navigation in sea, air, and space”), each incurring a selected reduction in forces and manpower. Nowhere does CBO address the pathologies, made manifest by Cockburn, that shows our forces being reduced over the decades with deteriorating effectiveness, aging inventories and less training – all at greater cost. CBO applies strategy lipstick to a lower-budget scenario. We know from Cockburn’s book that if CBO’s prescription were to be imposed on the Pentagon that exists, utter chaos would prevail in an organization morally and mentally unequipped to survive – albeit grossly incompetently -- without constantly growing budgets. Some have argued the CBO prescription points the way, but as others have argued, badly needed, massive reductions in Pentagon spending can only be achieved after fundamental reform of its pre-existing cancers. Analysts at CBO are well aware of what has been happening in the DoD budget for decades that the organization would permit itself, even when asked to do so by the Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, to produce this report prompts some serious questions.
Those above-mentioned needed reforms include the following:
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Make sure the weapons testing process remains brutally rigorous, independent and reported to Congress and the public -- something President Biden’s new testing nominee appears to be completely unequipped to do;
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Insist that all acquisition programs are multiple competitive prototype competitions based on empirical testing before major production starts; i.e., real “fly before buy” -- something that most Pentagon managers have detested for decades;
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Not rewriting current acquisition rules but observing existing ones without always exploiting the loopholes, conveniently written by Congress, to avoid audits, “fly before buy” buying, killing off failed programs and much else;
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Stop the revolving door wherein industry and Wall Street shuttle managers in and of DoD -- and the like-minded rotation of congressional staff to and from the Pentagon;
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Demand real financial audits of the Pentagon, not the contractor-run exercises looking at just inventory and where the money is spent -- but how it is spent, especially as corporate overhead and in statements of profits, and
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Relearn how to perform meaningful oversight inside DoD, Congress and think tanks – something that, quite deliberately, has become a lost art.
These ideas are hated and perennially avoided in the Pentagon and by its supplicants in Congress, the media, and many current think tanks. Given how poorly the Pentagon is run, it is a wonder that the opponents of reform have been so successful for so long.
“Spoils of War” is a compilation of Cockburn’s previous work for various publications, such as Harper’s and the London Review of Books. He also updates each chapter with a very short epilogue. But even those written as early as 2014 are painfully and presciently relevant to today’s issues. In Part IV, he adds three chapters on the mindboggling – but too often legal -- corruption on Wall Street and in international finance. This addition at first seems a bit off point – until you consider that the equally mindboggling – and too often legal -- foolishness in the Pentagon, defense corporations, Congress and the White House operate at the same level.
I regret to say that the current staffing system on Capitol Hill shows little evidence of potential interest in what Cockburn writes in “Spoils of War,” as there was in 1981 with Fallows’ “National Defense.” Overrun with specialists interested only in pushing whatever fluff they are told to push and pseudo-professional national security staffers who think too often of their next job in the Pentagon, industry or think thanks run by industry, Cockburn’s likely target audience on Capitol Hill are individuals poorly disposed to be seen in public with a copy of his book. It is the same for Members of the House and Senate -- if they have any time to read anything between media feedings and fundraising.
In another time, the kind of work that Cockburn has done for "Spoils of War" would gather nominations for prizes and placement on bestseller lists. It should have the kind of impact that Fallows' "National Defense" had in its time. That will not be happening in today’s national security culture. But if you see a politician or a defense manager with a copy of “Spoils of War,” pay close attention; they just may give today's national security culture a good ride, and it will be for its money.
Winslow T. Wheeler worked for three decades for Republican and Democratic Senators and GAO on national security issues. He later ran the Center for Defense Information, now at the Project On Government Oversight. He is now semi-retired.
19. China has long upheld spirit, principles of UN Charter
Chinese propaganda froma surrogate.
China has long upheld spirit, principles of UN Charter
By Syed Ali Nawaz Gilani | China Daily Global | Updated: 2021-10-26 08:57
Photo taken on Sept 14, 2020 shows the United Nations (UN) flag flying outside the UN headquarters in New York, the United States. [Photo/Xinhua]
The founding of the United Nations on Oct 24, 1945, was a milestone in humanity's pursuit of peace and development, and China was the first country to put its signature on the UN Charter.
On Oct 25, 1971, the UN General Assembly at its 26th session adopted Resolution 2758 with an overwhelming majority, restoring all rights to the People's Republic of China as the only legitimate representative of China to the United Nations.
The restoration was a victory for New China, for justice and fairness in the world, and for the purposes and principles of the UN Charter.
Over the past 50 years, China has always stayed true to its original aspiration. As the world's largest developing country and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, China honors the UN Charter, vigorously promotes the spirit and approach of multilateralism, and has made tireless efforts and important contributions to peace, development and the progress of mankind.
As Chairman Mao Zedong put it, fellow developing countries "carried" the PRC into the United Nations. The meaningful word "carry" aptly captures the profound friendship between China and other developing countries.
In the five decades since, China has firmly upheld the legitimate rights and interests of fellow developing countries and spoken up for the developing world. China has been standing together with developing countries in the past and at present and will do so in the future, and its vote at the UN has been for the well-being of developing countries and for justice in the world. It is expected that their friendship will "carry" on, so as to lead to a collective rise of developing countries and make it a defining trend of the 21st century.
China has set a good example in upholding the international order, by being strongly committed to democracy, rule of law and equity in international relations. China put forth the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence as early as in the 1950s, and has since faithfully observed them, contributing significantly to the formulation and development of the basic norms governing international relations.
Over the past five decades, China has joined almost all universal intergovernmental organizations, signed more than 600 international conventions, earnestly fulfilled its international obligations, and honored its international commitments. From putting forth the Three Worlds Theory to the proposal for a new international political and economic order, from building a harmonious world to a community with a shared future for mankind, China has shared its wisdom and solutions for world peace and development.
President Xi Jinping's vision for building a community with a shared future for mankind rises above differences in social systems and development stages and rejects the zero-sum mentality and geopolitical calculations. It sets a common goal for different countries, different nations and different civilizations. The initiative is the banner of major-country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics in the new era, and is conducive to improvement of global governance.
China has honored its responsibilities for upholding world peace by having participated in 30-plus UN peacekeeping operations. By sending more than 50,000 peacekeepers in total, China has become the largest contributor of peacekeepers among the permanent members of the UN Security Council and the second-largest funding contributor to the UN and UN peacekeeping operations.
Today, more than 2,400 Chinese peacekeepers are on duty across the globe. China has also set up a standby force of 8,000 troops and a police squad of 300 for UN peacekeeping missions who are ready to go anytime they are needed to safeguard world peace. These showcase China's commitment to the UN Charter.
As a permanent member of the Security Council, China has been actively seeking solutions to hot spot issues in line with the spirit of the UN Charter. It upholds sovereign equality and opposes power politics, hegemony, exclusive blocs and interference in other countries' internal affairs. It has taken the side of peace, stood for political settlement and opposed the use of force and unilateral sanctions.
China was among the first to reach the UN Millennium Development Goals. China has met, 10 years in advance, the poverty eradication goal set out in the UN's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. As a responsible member of the UN Security Council, it has made active contributions to addressing global challenges.
In the global fight against COVID-19, China launched as promptly as possible an emergency humanitarian operation, and has provided medical supplies to over 150 countries and 13 international organizations. President Xi has announced that Chinese vaccines will be made a global public good, and that China will be committed to ensuring accessibility and affordability of vaccines in developing countries.
As China celebrates the 50 years of its presence after resumption of membership at this historic point, it is dedicated to making all-out efforts to participate in UN affairs, meet its duties and promote the purposes and principles of the UN Charter. China is upholding the spirit of extensive consultation, joint contribution and shared benefits and the banner of true multilateralism and, together with the rest of the world, forging ahead for greater peace and development of mankind.
The author is secretary-general of the Pakistan China Friendship Association's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa branch in Pakistan. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
20. FDD | Time To Wedge The E-7A Wedgetail Into The US Air Force Fleet
Excerpts:
Some might argue that the Air Force should transition directly from the E-3 to an unmanned airborne early warning and control capability instead of acquiring the E-7. There are several problems with that approach.
First, to get the necessary radar coverage, you need a radar of significant size and power. That, in turn, requires an aircraft much larger than the Global Hawk and closer to the size of a 737. No such unmanned aircraft exists. Developing and acquiring such an unmanned aircraft would cost time and money — luxuries the Air Force cannot afford.
Moreover, an unmanned aircraft would depend on satellites for communication. That would undermine one of the main advantages of an airborne early warning and control capability: providing a redundant capability not reliant on vulnerable satellites.
With the E-3 on its last legs, the joint force has no time to waste. The Air Force should acquire the E-7A without delay to ensure that American warfighters enter the next conflict with airborne early warning and control capabilities second to none.
FDD | Time To Wedge The E-7A Wedgetail Into The US Air Force Fleet
fdd.org · by Bradley Bowman CMPP Senior Director, Mark Montgomery CCTI Senior Director · October 25, 2021
The success of American joint forces in a potential conflict with China or Russia will depend in part on whether the US Air Force can continue to provide warfighters with advanced airborne early warning and control capabilities. Yet the Air Force’s ability to do so is increasingly in question.
That’s because the E-3 Sentry, the Air Force’s four-decade-old airborne early warning and control aircraft, is in bad shape and will need to be retired soon. This potential capability gap looms just when China and Russia are fielding increasingly advanced air forces and trying to outpace U.S. airborne early warning and control capabilities.
One of us has written in these pages with colleagues that the Air Force needs a “bridge” between the E-3 and a future space-based capability. The E-7A Wedgetail, already flown by our allies, should be that bridge. Even when the space-based platform is available, it will need to be augmented with planes in the sky, and other options like unmanned aircraft currently aren’t built to handle the weighty task.
The Pentagon should direct the Air Force to procure the E-7A as quickly as possible.
Gen. Mark Kelly, the commander of U.S. Air Combat Command, said last month that his top intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance modernization priority is to replace the E-3. “We are in the single-digit number of years before that airplane votes with its wings and votes with its metal structure that it’s just not viable to operate and sustain any longer,” Kelly said.
The E-3 suffers from significant engine and structural challenges and a weakening supply chain that makes solving increasingly frequent maintenance problems more difficult and costly. Meanwhile, the E-3’s older early warning and control capabilities are inferior to those that China and Russia are sprinting to the field.
It’s clear the Air Force must move quickly, but the question is in what direction.
The Air Force hopes eventually to migrate much of the airborne moving-target indicator mission that the E-3 currently performs to space-based platforms. The problem is that the service still lacks an operational capability to perform that mission from space.
Conducting effective airborne moving-target indictor missions, not to mention tactical command and control, requires continuity of tracking, and that means constant updates regarding the location, altitude, and bearing of airborne targets. Additional research and development is needed to prove that satellites can be used to conduct air battle management and control missions.
Even when robust space-based capabilities are available, it will take time and significant resources to get the satellites deployed in sufficient quantity to provide persistent coverage for anticipated operating areas.
Moreover, once a robust space-based capability is there, the Air Force will still want to maintain an airborne sensor capability. That’s because the Air Force wants to pursue a multi-layered (air and space) approach. Such an approach is prudent because adversaries can target both aircraft and satellites. Having both air and space assets provides additional capacity, complementary capability, and essential redundancy that the Air Force will need against great power adversaries.
All these factors, therefore, point in the same direction. The Air Force needs a new airborne early warning & control aircraft as soon as possible to enable the retirement of the E-3, serve as an interim “bridging solution” until satellite capabilities can be deployed, and augment that space-based capability once it is available.
The best short-term solution appears to be the E-7A Wedgetail. The primary reason is that the E-7A is a known and proven aircraft (including engines and avionics) that also hosts an advanced airborne early warning and control suite.
The Royal Australian Air Force flies the E-7A, and the aircraft is widely viewed as the most capable airborne early warning and control aircraft flying today. The Royal Australian Air Force flies six E-7As, and the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force has an order for up to five aircraft. The E-7A is based on a standard Boeing 737-700 airframe, which is currently in production and is already flown by the U.S. Air Force and multiple civilian airlines.
That creates a robust and healthy aircraft supply chain that would reduce maintenance and supply costs for the US Air Force and increase readiness. With the Air Force reporting a 40 percent availability rate for the E-3, these are no small incentives. The E-7A also has extended ranges with in-flight refueling and can fly at least 5,000 feet higher than the E-3.
In addition to an improved airframe, the E-7A also features a highly capable sensor suite built around the Multi-role Electronically Scanned Array L-band radar system. This system gives the E-7A better all-weather performance and long-range detection of small targets relative to the sensors on the E-3. Its radar system can also rapidly revisit and focus on specific targets while still maintaining full 360-degree surveillance capability.
These capabilities allow the E-7A to dramatically reduce track-update times compared to the E-3 as well as to provide much more usable data to weapons employment platforms (aircraft, ships, and land-based). The E-7A can simultaneously perform air and maritime surface searches on hundreds of targets at ranges of up to 250 nautical miles and can control a significant number of aircraft. It also has an integrated electronic support measures suite and robust modernized communication suites and datalink management systems, including the option to upgrade to the Link 22 beyond line-of-sight, high-frequency datalink.
Some might argue that the Air Force should transition directly from the E-3 to an unmanned airborne early warning and control capability instead of acquiring the E-7. There are several problems with that approach.
First, to get the necessary radar coverage, you need a radar of significant size and power. That, in turn, requires an aircraft much larger than the Global Hawk and closer to the size of a 737. No such unmanned aircraft exists. Developing and acquiring such an unmanned aircraft would cost time and money — luxuries the Air Force cannot afford.
Moreover, an unmanned aircraft would depend on satellites for communication. That would undermine one of the main advantages of an airborne early warning and control capability: providing a redundant capability not reliant on vulnerable satellites.
With the E-3 on its last legs, the joint force has no time waste. The Air Force should acquire the E-7A without delay to ensure that American warfighters enter the next conflict with airborne early warning and control capabilities second to none.
Bradley Bowman is senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Mark Montgomery is senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation. Follow them on Twitter @Brad_L_Bowman and @MarkCMontgomery. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, non-partisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Bradley Bowman CMPP Senior Director · October 25, 2021
21. The Taiwan issue will fade away – literally
Two strategic considerations: Geography and Demographics. You cannot change geography but can you change the course of demographics?
Excerpts:
As things stand, Taiwan doesn’t have a glorious democratic future. It doesn’t have much of a future at all. Part of the American foreign policy elite, such as Kissinger and Allison, prefer the rise of China to the prospect of war. Other elements of the American elite would rather roll the dice of war than allow China to surpass the United States in military and economic might.
The stench of cultural pessimism pervades the American war party: Like the French in 1914, they believe that if they do not fight now, they may never have the opportunity to do so in the future. Germany had far outstripped France in population and industrial might, and the gap would only widen.
The French diehards of 1914 became the defeatists of 1940 who surrendered to the Germans in six weeks.
By no means should the United States abandon Taiwan. It must raise the cost of a possible Chinese incursion without pushing China into a corner from which it will lash out.
It cannot win a conventional war 80 miles off China’s coast, but China must be made aware that the use of force against Taiwan would have horrendous consequences, including a boycott of foreign trade. The United States may depend on China for imports worth 27% of its manufacturing output, but Americans will go without smartphones and computers in order to punish China for use of force.
The Taiwan issue will fade away – literally
The island has the lowest birth rate of any political entity and will lose its importance over the next 50 years
Relegating Taiwan’s status to the indefinite future has been a matter of tacit agreement between the United States and the People’s Republic of China since Richard Nixon went to Beijing in 1972.
That is less problematic than it might appear, because Taiwan, with the lowest birth rate of any political entity in the world, will literally fade away over the next 50 years.
Its total fertility rate stands at barely one child per female. Taiwan has 23 million people today, fewer than large Mainland cities like Chengdu, Chongqing or Shanghai. Its demographic decline will sap its relative importance over time.
Western commentators have made a great deal out of China’s demographic problems, and with good reason: With a total fertility rate of only 1.69 as of 2020, according to the current United Nations Population Prospects, China will age rapidly and its working-age population will shrink.
Taiwan stands at only 1.15, and its demographic problems are far worse.
Projecting this into the future, the United Nations, in its “medium variant” forecast, has Taiwan’s elderly dependent ratio at about 80 by mid-century – every 100 workers will have to support 80 elderly. That’s almost double the projected ratio for the People’s Republic of China.
Taiwan, to be sure, has higher per capita income than the Mainland, but the projected burden is still daunting. Its GDP per capita is US$33,402, much higher than the Chinese average but about the same as per capita GDP in China’s high-tech city Shenzhen.
A house in Taipei costs 31 times the average wage, far more than in Chengdu, China’s Western high-tech center, where the price-to-income ratio is about 20.
Nonetheless, a war over Taiwan remains a significant risk during the next several years. If Washington stations troops on the island, as former National Security Adviser John Bolton urges, or takes other steps to establish Taiwan’s sovereignty, China probably will seize the island.
What might ensue is depicted in the novel 2034 by former Pacific Command chief John Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman: A nuclear exchange that erases a few Chinese and American cities with no victor.
China has amassed an arsenal of many hundreds of ship- and satellite-killer missiles, not to mention hypersonic glide vehicles that can deliver nuclear weapons anywhere in the world. The late Andrew Marshall, for whom I consulted occasionally when he directed the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, told me in 2015 that the Chinese DF-21D missile could sink any American carrier.
Do the math: Let’s say the US recognizes Taiwan, or begins to station US troops on the island. China responds by sending in 30,000 marines and 60,000 mechanized infantry, while sweeping Taiwan’s aging warplanes out of the skies with its Russian-built S-400 air defense system.
The United States engages China’s forces with aircraft carriers. China rains a few dozen DF-21D missiles and destroys the carriers. What happens next? Does the US bomb Chinese cities while the Chinese bomb American cities?
I reviewed the military balance in my 2020 book You Will Be Assimilated: China’s Plan to Sino-Form the World, and concluded that no one would be crazy enough to start a war on China’s coast.
After reading recent suggestions from John Bolton, Gary Schmitt and Michael Mazza, and Dan Blumenthal, I stand corrected. There are influential folk who are crazy enough. In general, they are the same people who wasted $5 trillion on nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, rather than investing, for example, in ways to protect the US and its assets from hypersonic missiles.
Reining in a breakaway province is a raison d’état for any regime that hopes to rule the ethnic patchwork that is the Chinese Empire. If the outcome of China’s civil war had been reversed, with Chiang Kai Shek’s Nationalists in Beijing and the Communists in Taipei, the Mainland’s demand for reunification would be just as stringent.
The watchword of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms is as pertinent today as it was when China’s national epic was composed in the 14th century: “The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.” From the First Opium War in 1839 to the Communist victory of 1947, China was torn apart by rival warlords, rural insurgencies and foreign invasions.
The cost in human life was double or triple that of World War II.
The Chinese Communist Party will not let this happen again, not, at least, without an all-in fight, and it has drawn the line at Taiwan.
If the US and China each lose a few tens of millions of their citizens over Taiwan, future historians will recall Karl Marx’s bon mot that the great events of history occur first as tragedy and then as farce.
Henry Kissinger, Graham Allison and other American foreign policy sages have warned for years of parallels between today’s Sino-American tensions and the European situation just before 1914.
The source of the casus belli, Serbia, had rapid population growth and an insatiable demand for farmland. At least the Serbs had something to fight over. A war over Taiwan, whose significance will dwindle over time along with its population, would be the biggest war fought over the smallest substance in recorded history.
To be sure, fraternal sentiment in favor of democratic Taiwan is not the driving motivation behind the various proposals to station American combat troops on the island, or mine the Taiwan Straits to hinder a Chinese invasion, or give Taiwan de facto recognition as a sovereign state through a United Nations seat.
As things stand, Taiwan doesn’t have a glorious democratic future. It doesn’t have much of a future at all. Part of the American foreign policy elite, such as Kissinger and Allison, prefer the rise of China to the prospect of war. Other elements of the American elite would rather roll the dice of war than allow China to surpass the United States in military and economic might.
The stench of cultural pessimism pervades the American war party: Like the French in 1914, they believe that if they do not fight now, they may never have the opportunity to do so in the future. Germany had far outstripped France in population and industrial might, and the gap would only widen.
The French diehards of 1914 became the defeatists of 1940 who surrendered to the Germans in six weeks.
By no means should the United States abandon Taiwan. It must raise the cost of a possible Chinese incursion without pushing China into a corner from which it will lash out.
It cannot win a conventional war 80 miles off China’s coast, but China must be made aware that the use of force against Taiwan would have horrendous consequences, including a boycott of foreign trade. The United States may depend on China for imports worth 27% of its manufacturing output, but Americans will go without smartphones and computers in order to punish China for use of force.
22. Which Greeks in the Western Way of War?
For the strategy geeks here:
The idea that the West seeks direct confrontation in an overwhelming show of force may surprise the Ancient Greeks themselves who celebrated legendary heroes, such as Odysseus, for his cunning, sly and manipulative acts which confounded and surprised opponents. The belief that the West refrains from such forms of guile suggests that only Eastern powers are capable of using indirect force and trickery to gain an advantage. TWOW’s claim that the West seeks direct decisive battle then quietly overlooks that the unipolar era has seen the dominance of Western technology with drones and stealth bombers which are explicitly used to surprise an opponent and deceive adversaries. It is far from clear therefore, that there are any distinct cultural differences between a Western or Eastern approach to war.
Orientalist portrayals of Eastern war may focus on Sun Tzu’s masterful strategies of deception, or the honorable style of the Samurai warriors. A clear example of the Eastern way of war could be seen in the kamikaze pilots of the Japanese empire in the Second World War. The calm, measured self-sacrifice of kamikaze pilots to target areas of weakness at the cost of their own lives is seen as antithetical to a Western way of war. Yet, the slow onward march of Western troops across the fields of the First World War suggests interesting parallels of sacrifice, nonsensical acts of bravery and the loss of life against much stronger forms of defence.
Such historical examples challenge the notion of a Western and Eastern way of war as distinct and stable categories. TWOW approach builds upon an idealised history of classical antiquity as the wellspring of a unique Western tradition, but the less glamorous era of late antiquity and the ‘dark ages’ presents a more complicated picture. To understand declining power, the rise of new rivals and technological adaptation perhaps we should look not to the Ancient Greeks, but the Greek speaking Byzantines.
...
TWOW is a framework for myth-making about Western approaches to war which often begins with the Ancient Greeks and valorises an ideal of “the West” as a product of the classical world. The fall of Rome is largely viewed by the West as a cataclysmic event which ushered in a period of dark ages and the continuation of the Eastern empire as the Greek speaking Byzantines is therefore quietly forgotten. The empire of Byzantium does not fit neatly into the canon of “the West” and its historical lessons are neglected. But as this article has tried to briefly show, TWOW builds upon a simplistic approach of essentialist cultural differences. The history of Byzantine warfare presents a more complicated picture which unsettles the idea of a distinct Western approach to war. TWOW is a hubristic and historically flawed concept which needs to be left behind.
Which Greeks in the Western Way of War?
Dr Kevin Blachford, Defence Studies Department. King’s College London
The “Western way of war” (TWOW) is a concept that was most notably defined by the historian Victor Davis Hanson who viewed the Ancient Greeks and their form of decisive infantry battle as the wellspring of a unique Western tradition. It is an ideal of well drilled citizen-soldiers able to defeat the enemy in a decisive battle, with a clear distinction between war and peace in a free society. Central to this tradition of Western warfare is the idea that consensual governments are able to make use of direct force to overcome an adversary in a clear emphatic manner. The “shock and awe” and lethality of TWOW, with its reliance on better technology and decisive overwhelming force stands in contrast to the ambushes, skirmishes, or individual combat that are viewed as uncharacteristic of liberal Western states.
Today, this ideal of waging Western war continues to inspire debates about whether the US has lost the ‘art of killing’, or how the US is constrained by its Western ideals, with even a RUSI podcast dedicated to understanding this term, ‘the Western way of war’. Crucially, there is also increased concern that the ‘dragons and the snakes’ of non-Western powers have learned to overcome the Western advantages and approach to warfare. The British Ministry of Defence even raises concerns that ‘adversaries have studied the Western way of war’ and have learned to adapt with new capabilities. Uniting these concerns of a Western way of war in decline is the fear that the West’s military dominance is under threat and that rival powers will not play by the rules in seeking direct confrontation.
TWOW and its framework of Western exceptionalism stretching back to Ancient Greece is a poor guide to understanding contemporary challenges. Current trends in strategic literature all too often fall into essentialist arguments which focus on cultural differences to explain broad outcomes. This is particularly apparent with the cottage industry which has sprung up to explain hybrid warfare and ‘little green men’ as a uniquely Russian phenomenon based on flaws in the Russian national character and a culture of otherness among Russians. Creating such primordialist reasons to explain strategic behaviour simplifies history and exaggerates difference. Contrasting a rational West with focused overwhelming power against an irrational East reliant on cunning and deception creates ahistorical arguments based on questionable assumptions. The notion that the West fights in a distinct manner also raises troubling stereotypes, cliches, and is open to critiques of orientalism, as the following explains.
TWOW builds upon a mythologised view of a free polis with citizen-soldiers defending the liberal state which dates back to the classical age of antiquity. It therefore develops a moral narrative and ideological view of Western war which is not supported by the history of Ancient Greek warfare. This idealism of citizen-soldiers defending a free polis overlooks that there were often Greek mercenaries used by both the Greek city states and by their eastern Persian adversaries. But this is just one of the many historically problematic beliefs which underlie the concept of the West having a distinct way of war.
The idea that the West seeks direct confrontation in an overwhelming show of force may surprise the Ancient Greeks themselves who celebrated legendary heroes, such as Odysseus, for his cunning, sly and manipulative acts which confounded and surprised opponents. The belief that the West refrains from such forms of guile suggests that only Eastern powers are capable of using indirect force and trickery to gain an advantage. TWOW’s claim that the West seeks direct decisive battle then quietly overlooks that the unipolar era has seen the dominance of Western technology with drones and stealth bombers which are explicitly used to surprise an opponent and deceive adversaries. It is far from clear therefore, that there are any distinct cultural differences between a Western or Eastern approach to war.
Orientalist portrayals of Eastern war may focus on Sun Tzu’s masterful strategies of deception, or the honorable style of the Samurai warriors. A clear example of the Eastern way of war could be seen in the kamikaze pilots of the Japanese empire in the Second World War. The calm, measured self-sacrifice of kamikaze pilots to target areas of weakness at the cost of their own lives is seen as antithetical to a Western way of war. Yet, the slow onward march of Western troops across the fields of the First World War suggests interesting parallels of sacrifice, nonsensical acts of bravery and the loss of life against much stronger forms of defence.
Such historical examples challenge the notion of a Western and Eastern way of war as distinct and stable categories. TWOW approach builds upon an idealised history of classical antiquity as the wellspring of a unique Western tradition, but the less glamorous era of late antiquity and the ‘dark ages’ presents a more complicated picture. To understand declining power, the rise of new rivals and technological adaptation perhaps we should look not to the Ancient Greeks, but the Greek speaking Byzantines.
The history of the Byzantine empire shows that both different cultures and approaches to war can convene on similar tactics and strategies to face similar material and operational constraints. One example of this can be seen with the responses of the Byzantine empire and China’s Tang dynasty to the arrival of nomadic steppe warriors. Byzantium was the east Roman empire centred on Constantinople, which existed over 3,000 miles away from the Tang dynasty in China and yet both powers around the 6-7th centuries A.D faced considerable incursions by steppe nomads.
The large incursions of Türk cavalry forces during this era of late antiquity threatened to overwhelm the sedentary societies of both Byzantium and China. Nomadic warriors who were highly proficient in warfare that utilised horseback archery, fast raids, ambushes and tactics of feigned flight created a similar set of problems for defence despite the considerable distance between these two empires. The Chinese general Li Jing and the Byzantine manual of war, known as the strategikon, developed common themes in response to the nomadic ways of war. Both sought to exploit negotiations in order to attack the camps of the Türks and both saw the importance of defending baggage trains in hostile territory.
Equally, the Byzantines and Li Jing advocated having defensive troops to control positions on the battlefield, with separate troops for assault and moving forward. Most notably however, the Chinese and Byzantines each expressed concern for the order and the control of formations in order not to fall into the trap of the nomad’s feigned flight. The appearance of the nomadic steppe warriors created a new form of warfare which challenged the sedentary empires of China and Byzantium. In response to the tactics of steppe nomads each empire developed similar solutions focused on concentrating mass, protecting logistics and controlling disciplined formations. What this brief example suggests is that similar processes can develop due to material and strategic constraints, rather than explanations based on cultural differences.
Today, the rise of China and Russian revisionism is a reflection that the US and its allies have lost their post-Cold War dominance. Yet, to understand the rise of China, strategic debates continue to look to Ancient Greeks and Thucydides. It is Thucydides’ famous statement on the causes of the Peloponnesian war arising from the growing power of Athens and the fear this causes in Sparta, which has been summarized as the “Thucydides trap”. Ancient Greek history is therefore used to portray the US-China relationship as heading on a railroad to war. But the Greek speaking Byzantines faced their own great power rivalry with the Sasanid Persians. The Byzantine-Sasanid clash of empires was not a story of a rising and declining power leading to a great power war, but a more complicated story of a 400-year-old rivalry that saw the two sides develop a buffer zone between them across Mesopotamia.
The competition between these two empires created a system of two divided spheres of interests, which the Persian King referred to as the “two eyes” of the Earth. The division of the world into two competing visions of international order is a realistic possibility for today. The Thucydides trap presents an air of inevitability, but it is just as possible that the US and China will equally seek to create spheres of interest. Ancient Greek history and Thucydides can be useful guides to strategic debates but recognising the later Greek speaking Byzantines offers a reminder that we should avoid making grand claims and essentialist arguments based on a limited reading of cultural identity.
TWOW is a framework for myth-making about Western approaches to war which often begins with the Ancient Greeks and valorises an ideal of “the West” as a product of the classical world. The fall of Rome is largely viewed by the West as a cataclysmic event which ushered in a period of dark ages and the continuation of the Eastern empire as the Greek speaking Byzantines is therefore quietly forgotten. The empire of Byzantium does not fit neatly into the canon of “the West” and its historical lessons are neglected. But as this article has tried to briefly show, TWOW builds upon a simplistic approach of essentialist cultural differences. The history of Byzantine warfare presents a more complicated picture which unsettles the idea of a distinct Western approach to war. TWOW is a hubristic and historically flawed concept which needs to be left behind.
23. Why America Lost the War in Afghanistan - A Requiem Essay
Read the entire essay at this link:
Why America Lost the War in Afghanistan - A Requiem Essay
By Robert Bruce Adolph
America lost the war in Afghanistan. All the blood and treasure expended was - in the end - largely for naught. I understand why many who fought there might feel differently. It is terribly difficult to walk away from the massive sunk costs. The assertion that US efforts were in vain is a hateful idea to those who lost comrades-in-arms or were horribly scarred physically or psychologically. Tragically, the same was true of those in the US Armed Forces who battled bravely in Vietnam. The national warfighting strategy adopted in Southwest Asia by the Bush Administration clearly failed, leaving his successors with the ultimate recurring foreign policy disaster. Everyone involved is the worse for it, especially the Afghans who supported the US and its allies for more than 20 years. In this special issue of Atlantisch Perspectief on multilateralism Afghanistan is also a recurring topic as America’s lost war is also a lost battle for the international community and multilateral collaboration
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.
