Quotes of the Day:
“I read old books because I would rather learn from those who built civilization than those who tore it down.”
- The Wisdom Warrior
"There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words."
- Thomas Reid
“Only a very small number of people are truly evil. But a very large number of people are conformists. To prevent evil on a mass scale it’s more important for us to ward against our own instinct to conform with the crowd than it is to worry about anything else.”
- Claire Lehman, founding editor of Quillette
1. Australia, Japan sign defense pact as China concerns loom
2. Taiwan and Six Potential New Year’s Resolutions for the U.S.-Japanese Alliance
3. Deeper Australia–Japan defence ties send strong message to China
4. US-China relations to settle into zone of 'mutually tolerable friction' in 2022: Forum
5. Sweden Launches Psychological Defense Agency To Counter Disinformation
6. US military presence abroad faces more opposition in 2022
7. The Danger Of Technological Surprise: Expect The Unexpected Or Suffer The Consequences
8. Irregular Warfare Initiative Monthly Newsletter
9. The Military’s New Challenge: Defeating Cheap Hobbyist Drones
10. U.S. adversaries are becoming South American conquistadores
11. North Korea restricts its people’s movement even further in 2022
12. If China is a developing country, a dragon is a dragonfly waiting to grow wings
13. Hard power and conventional deterrence still matter, just ask Putin
14. Taiwan Troops Simulate Urban Warfare With China
15. 20,000 Afghan commandos left behind, lawmakers and veterans urge Biden to rescue them
16. Controversial Chinese Tech Billionaire Gives Millions to Elite American Universities
17. FDD | China’s Sharp Economic Slowdown Threatens to Constrain Xi in 2022
18. Maricopa Co. releases new report on 2020 election, deems many claims misleading; here's what you need to know
19. The Value of a Well-Placed Spy in Moscow
20. Panel: New National Defense Strategy Needs More Substance, Clear Goals
21. The Capitol Riot: A Chronology (GWU National Security Archive)
1. Australia, Japan sign defense pact as China concerns loom
Australia, Japan sign defense pact as China concerns loom | AP News
AP · by HARUKA NUGA and STEVE McMORRAN · January 6, 2022
SYDNEY (AP) — The leaders of Japan and Australia signed a “landmark” defense agreement Thursday that allows closer cooperation between their militaries and stands as a rebuke to China’s growing assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific region.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida met in a virtual summit to sign the Reciprocal Access Agreement, the first such defense pact signed by Japan with any country other than the United States.
The agreement follows more than a year of talks between Japan and Australia aimed at breaking down legal barriers to allow the troops of one country to enter the other for training and other purposes.
“Japan is our closest partner in Asia as demonstrated by our special strategic partnership — Australia’s only such partnership,” Morrison said. “An equal partnership, shared trust between two great democracies committed to the rule of law, human rights, free trade and a free and open Indo-Pacific.”
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Kishida hailed the agreement as “a landmark instrument which will elevate security cooperation between the nations to new heights.”
While China wasn’t mentioned, its significance at the signing was implicit.
Japan’s ambassador to Australia, Shingo Yamagami, said that “in light of the deteriorating security environment, what Japan and Australia can do together is first of all to increase deterrence.”
Morrison said the agreement “will form an important part of Australia and Japan’s response to the uncertainty we now face and will underpin greater and more complex engagement in operability between the Australia Defense Force and Japan Self-Defense Forces.”
He called the pact a “pivotal moment for Australia and Japan and (for) the security of our two nations and our people.”
Malcolm Davis, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said the agreement recognized the importance of establishing firm defense partnerships to deter an increasingly aggressive China.
“Japan is breaking away from its post-war constitutional constraints on the use of military force because Tokyo recognizes the challenges it is facing from China,” he told Sky News. “There is a territorial dispute between China and Japan ... and more significantly there is a growing concern China will make a move over Taiwan in the next few years.”
The pact builds on the strategic dialogue known as “the Quad,” which includes Japan, Australia, the United States and India. Australia last year also signed the Aukus agreement with the United States and Britain, both of which have pledged to help Australia acquire nuclear-powered submarines.
AP · by HARUKA NUGA and STEVE McMORRAN · January 6, 2022
2. Taiwan and Six Potential New Year’s Resolutions for the U.S.-Japanese Alliance
Conclusion:
It is true that the United States enjoys one advantage that China lacks: capable allies. Japan is no exception. But for the United States to enjoy the benefits that come from such a capable ally like Japan — be it base access, rear-area support, or front-line combat support — the alliance could benefit from greater clarity to be cultivated during peacetime. It could very well be that many of the issues examined above have been discussed and agreed upon privately ex ante. In the chance they have not, as the world begins 2022 and the U.S.-Japanese alliance turns its attention to summitry, 2+2 visits, and revisions of strategic documents, alliance managers have a host of practical conversations they could engage in to make a better and stronger alliance in the new year.
Taiwan and Six Potential New Year’s Resolutions for the U.S.-Japanese Alliance - War on the Rocks
The message from U.S. senior military leaders has been very clear recently: They are very, very worried about a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. For example, retired U.S. Indo-Pacific Command commander Adm. Phil Davidson, his successor, Adm. John Aquilino, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley have all said that China is developing the ability to invade and hold Taiwan in the near future. In turn, debates have emerged over whether it is in America’s interest to defend Taiwan and whether any U.S. ally would assist the United States in such operations. Japan has received a lot of attention because of the importance it plays from an operational standpoint. Not only is it home to the largest U.S. forward presence in the region, it is geographically the closest U.S. ally to Taiwan and possesses the most capable armed forces of any regional ally.
And yet, because Japan has not engaged in combat since 1945 and faces several legal constraints that limit what its Self-Defense Forces can do — as well as a public that is historically pacifist in orientation — one cannot assume that Japan will automatically support any U.S.-led military operation against China in Taiwan’s defense. At the same time, as a trusted U.S. ally that harbors similar strategic concerns of an increasingly aggressive China, the United States should not assume that Japan will do nothing.
The alliance should consider several steps to prepare for possible conflict with China over Taiwan, and ensure its forces are postured to operate together — even for Japan’s defense. Although it is natural to gravitate toward weapon platforms and the best mix of capabilities the allies should have, there may be important discussions to be had in the areas of logistics, decision-making processes, and preparedness. As the allies gear up for a new year filled with senior-level meetings and military exercises, there are six topics that might benefit from extra attention: developing a shared understanding of the alliance’s prior consultation process, clarifying what Japan’s Self-Defense Forces will do to support U.S.-led operations, addressing potential challenges in logistics activities, firming up potential munitions issues, addressing passive defenses and base resiliency, and addressing Japan’s possible role in a Taiwan non-combatant evacuation operation.
Consider them (late) possible New Year’s resolutions: practical means to make a better and stronger alliance in the year ahead.
Developing a Shared Understanding of the Intricacies of Prior Consultation
Should the United States decide to defend Taiwan from China, it will be extremely difficult — if not outright impossible — to prosecute a conflict without access to its bases in Japan. Even delayed access could result in the United States not engaging, or not being positioned in time to successfully engage. Access to U.S. bases — but not Japanese bases — could leave U.S. forces concentrated and vulnerable to devastating attacks.
The issue of access is directly tied to an agreement based on a 1960 exchange of notes that refers to both governments needing to engage in “prior consultation” should the U.S. wish to use its bases in Japan for combat operations not tied to Japan’s defense. Per this agreement, if China does not attack Japan, but the United States wishes to defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion from its Japanese bases, the United States would need to consult with Japan before initiating any activities. Although there is little disagreement about this requirement, do the allies have a shared agreement (likely not in the public domain) about how the process is expected to play out? In other words, is there a consensus on who is involved in both countries, what decision-making structures must be used to have these conversations, who needs to sign off, and, importantly, how much time the process could take? And are those procedures, processes, and mechanisms practiced not just for a contingency, but for both the transition from steady-state to a contingency and for slow-boil gray zone activities? Or are the allies counting on simplistic assumptions, such as Japan will say “yes” to any U.S. request at a moment’s notice, or that the United States will sit down and engage in lengthy consultations over the issue? Granted, the characterization of these assumptions is overly simplistic, but if Japan is in a situation where it has not been attacked, the prior consultation process could cause tremendous stress on the alliance because it is largely political. As such, the allies could benefit from ensuring they have a shared understanding that results in Japan’s political timelines being in synch with U.S. operational timelines.
Clarifying What Japan’s Armed Forces Will Do to Support U.S.-Led Operations
Beyond issues of base access are questions of Japan’s possible level of involvement. Comments on Taiwan by Japanese politicians have garnered a lot of attention over the past year, leading many to believe Japan will defend Taiwan. For example, much attention was given to then-State Minister for Defense Nakayama Yasuhide referring to Taiwan as a “red line” in December 2020. And in 2021, following a joint statement by senior officials that included a reference to the “importance of peace and stability” in the Taiwan Strait (marking the first such reference to the Taiwan issue in a joint statement since 2011), another joint statement by Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide and President Joe Biden included, for the first time in a summit statement since 1969, bilateral agreement on “the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait” and “peaceful resolution of cross-strait issues.” Also gaining considerable attention was then-Deputy Prime Minister Asō Tarō who, in his private capacity at a July 2021 political fundraiser, said that “If a major problem occurred on Taiwan, it is not too much to say that it would unmistakably relate to a situation threatening [Japan’s] survival. Japan and the U.S. must defend Taiwan together.” And most recently former prime minister Abe Shinzō said a Taiwan contingency is a Japanese contingency, and therefore a contingency for the alliance.
Comments like these have led some to argue that there has been a fundamental shift in Japan’s Taiwan policy. But as Indiana University’s Adam Liff has argued, these developments do not indicate any major change in Japan’s official posture toward the Taiwan Strait — which has long been ambiguous. While prominent Japanese politicians have become more vocal on the issue, Japan’s position today is not different than it has been previously. Namely, Tokyo wants a peaceful resolution of cross-Strait issues because the peace and stability of the Taiwan Strait matters for Japan’s security. Official government statements are remarkably consistent. Japan is not committed, nor has it ever pledged, to defend Taiwan. Importantly, and often forgotten, Japan has not pledged its commitment for any possible U.S. military operation, including a contingency over Taiwan.
It is understandable that the United States would want Japan’s support in a Taiwan conflict, and there are numerous areas where it may want Japan to assist. As I argued in a 2020 RAND report examining Japan’s potential contributions to an East China Sea contingency, the operational parameters for what Japan can do in specific situations is defined by a suite of Japanese laws passed in 2015. In its most basic terms, if Japan is not attacked and conflict appears somewhat limited, Tokyo may define the situation as only having an “important influence” on Japan’s security. This would limit Japan’s involvement to noncombat, rear-area support roles. If, however, Japan is directly attacked — including attacks on U.S. bases on Japanese territory — or if Tokyo defines the situation as being a threat to Japan’s survival, Japanese involvement could include combat and the use of force.
Contrary to recent commentary that reminded readers of the nuance of these authorities, officials in both countries do have a solid understanding of what is legally permissible in different situations, as well as the range of possible Japanese responses to Chinese aggression. Where the real lack of understanding may exist is the delta between those legal permissions and what Japan is willing to do. Are leaders in both countries confident that there is a shared understanding of what Japan is willing to do, and what the United States wants Japan to do, based on its laws? There are conversations to be had on issues like conducting intelligence, surveillance, and renconaissance; logistical support; air and sea escorts; minesweeping and minelaying; offensive and defensive counter air operations; hunting of submarines and high-value airborne assets; and utilizing Japanese stand-off missiles against an invading force. Despite the existence of the defense guidelines that outline expected roles and missions, it is not clear whether or how Japan will involve itself in a conflict with China, the United States, and Taiwan. If Japan decides that it will get involved, a conversation needs to clarify whether Japan’s support will remain largely tied to Japan’s defense or extend into other objectives. In other words, how far away from Japanese airspace and waters would the Self-Defense Forces operate? What missions will it engage in? And to what extent will those missions connect directly to Japan’s defense? If China’s operational plans are much more developed, defined, and detailed than those of the alliance, the allies may find themselves at a serious disadvantage when conflict starts.
Addressing Potential Challenges in Activities Related to Reception, Staging, Onward Movement, and Integration
Operational support questions tie directly into responsibilities of logistical support in Japan. An often-overlooked but/yet critical fact regarding a regional contingency is that there would be a tremendous amount of movement of U.S. and Japanese forces — not just within Japan, but U.S. forces flowing into Japan from abroad. This, in turn, sets in motion reception, staging, onward movement, and integration activities. Such activities are critical to the successful execution of any operation, as they ensure that forces and supplies move and aggregate on time where needed.
Given their importance, the allies need to ask themselves what organic logistic capabilities are present in Japan if reception, staging, onward movement, and integration activities happened today, where they might fall short, and what civilian capabilities would be required to improve the response. For example, if both U.S. and Japanese forces rely on similar Japanese commercial companies to help transport equipment and supplies throughout the archipelago, have they deconflicted the potential challenges that may arise if both forces make requests on the same companies at the same time? And are these private companies prepared to support complex land transportation movements to support the air and seaport terminal operations that reception, staging, onward movement, and integration activities will require for forces flowing into and through Japan? There are also requirements and timelines the U.S. military need to follow to notify Japanese stakeholders of road movements of military assets. While these are exercised in peacetime, are the allies ready to handle these requests with very little notice in an emergency? For example, given that local officials have a role to play in transportation approvals, have Japanese central government officials and representatives from U.S. Forces Japan engaged in discussions on this issue at the prefectural and municipal levels? And given that any conflict involving Taiwan will largely be over air and sea and require lots of moving parts across the Japanese island chain, are the allies confident their current airlift and sealift capacity is in sufficient quantity and state of readiness relative to the requirements? Finally, are the alliance’s legal documents (i.e., acquisition and cross-servicing agreements) and certifications (i.e., aerial refueling) current to enable the allies to help one another logistically? These documents are, arguably, the glue that ties discussions about reception, staging, onward movement, and integration activities together.
Firming Up Munitions Issues
If Japan does support a U.S.-led operation, even limited to Japan’s defense, one of the most pressing conversations that needs to be had involves munitions. Japan has made significant changes in its posture over the past decade, investing in the development of stand-off missiles and fielding units in the southwest island chain. Recently, Tokyo decided to extend the ranges of its Type 12 anti-ship cruise missile from 200 km to 900 km. During this same time, the United States has been seeking partners to host ground fires. Both activities support the basic fact that in any conflict involving China, munitions of various ranges will play a pivotal role. Regardless of whether we are talking about Japanese or American fires, whether it be for the defense of Japan or for disrupting Chinese operations, a critical question for the alliance will be whether there are sufficient stockpiles of precision guided munitions that will enable Japan to maintain an active defense and permit the United States to prosecute an operation capable of pushing back, or at least withstanding, an onslaught long-enough for follow-on forces to arrive. In other words, do the allies have enough precision guided munitionss in Japan for their respective operations considering China’s capabilities and capacities? This is a critical question: In the United States, budget cuts, along with executing years of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and battling groups like the Islamic State, have led to a shortage of munitions. This is not limited to any one service, as evident by shortages in the Army, Navy, and Air Force. And while the munitions used in those wars are not likely the ones needed in a fight over Taiwan, the lack of funding for, and shortage of, munitions remains true.
Current inventory is not the only issue. In a contingency, the United States and Japan would have to be able to rapidly replenish stockpiles through increased production capacity. Yet, as others have noted, in some cases, the lead time for munitions production can be as long as 18 months. While raiding the stockpiles of other combatant commands may be a necessary short-term solution for the United States in a crisis, establishing sufficient production lines should be a priority for both Japan and the United States to ensure they are not overburdening single suppliers of critical weapons. They should also examine whether current replenishment agreements are realistic to meet request and delivery timelines in a crisis. Importantly, if the United States and Japan will be competing for the same precision guided munitions suppliers, is there agreement on how to prioritize? Finally, and perhaps most critically, are the precision guided munitions stockpiles located where the allies need them? Understanding that a Taiwan operation would be heavily reliant on access to supplies in Japan, there is a need to ensure that stockpiles are established to support not just the initial onset of operations, but the subsequent forces flowing into Japan from the continental United States and Hawaii.
Getting Serious About Passive Defenses and Base Resiliency
An often overlooked (and under-funded) issue is that of passive defense capabilities. There is no shortage of analysis that examines what mix of capabilities the United States and/or Japan will need to prevail in a fight against China. Yet, passive defense efforts at U.S. and Japanese bases are vital to sustaining any alliance effort. Given that importance, these capabilities are not always the priority in defense budgets that they could be.
The allies could ask themselves whether their current passive defenses are sufficient to withstand a Chinese attack. This could begin with an examination of whether both allies have sufficiently hardened their defense facilities, such as air bases, munition depots and fuel lines or shelters for their aircraft, like the 20 South Korean-funded, third generation hardened aircraft shelters recently completed on Kunsan Air Base. Relatedly, have the allies proliferated their use of camouflage, concealment and deception capabilities, as China has, to make adversary operations more difficult? They could also examine whether they have sufficient resiliency and redundancy in key elements like communications, satellites, and radars to leverage multiple communication paths, enabling them to function in disruptive operating environments. Similarly, assuming their bases and ports will be made inoperable within the first minutes of an attack, have the allies prepared alternative facilities or dual-use facilities throughout Japan, where they can preposition non-weapons support — such as parts, non-kinetic equipment, or even fuel — in peacetime? And while access to these alternative facilities is granted in the Status of Forces Agreement, understanding that local opposition to military use will be strong, is there consensus on the process for requesting access to these items? None will win the war, but collectively they position the United States and Japan to remain in the fight, thereby not only preventing China from making easy gains, but ensuring support for forces flowing into the theater.
Addressing Japan’s Role in a Taiwan Non-Evacuation Operation
A final issue that could deserve extra attention has to do with Japan’s support for a noncombatant evacuation operation (i.e., a military-assisted departure of civilian noncombatants and nonessential personnel from danger in an overseas country to a designated safe haven). In this situation, the Self-Defense Forces helping to handle flows of civilians fleeing a conflict in Taiwan and entering Japan seems like a natural responsibility, given its non-combat focus. Even if Japan is not involved in supporting U.S. forces, any contingency involving Taiwan will almost certainly demand a noncombatant evacuation operation of some sort. And given Japan’s proximity, the need to have Japan engaged seems apparent.
Noncombatant evacuation operations are extremely challenging — one in Taiwan could be a nightmare given the massive numbers of civilians that may want to evacuate. The allies will need to have clarity on whether they are prepared to assist. At the most foundational level, does Japan have its own established noncombatant evacuation operation doctrine, or do the allies have joint doctrine on this issue, so that they can promote interoperability with their doctrines, terminologies, and rules of engagement? Then there are questions about capacity and capability. In a hypothetical situation, where the United States is helping civilians flee Taiwan, and Japan is tasked with receiving those civilians in a non-combat environment, and where there are no attacks being conducted against Japanese territory, is Japan willing to accept citizens of all countries? What about from Taiwan? And how ready are potential Japanese air ports of debarkation and sea ports of debarkation to handle large influxes of people? Have the allies identified most likely air and sea ports of debarkation, and are they prepositioning critical supplies there? What happens if China initiates kinetic activity against these same targets? Is the Self-Defense Forces ready to conduct a noncombatant evacuation operation in a contested environment? Such a situation also risks Japan having to divert Self-Defense Forces resources away from assisting the noncombatant evacuation operation to defending against the attack. It also raises questions on whether Japan is prepared to accept aircraft or ships that may possibly have been contaminated from weapons of mass destruction.
It is true that the United States enjoys one advantage that China lacks: capable allies. Japan is no exception. But for the United States to enjoy the benefits that come from such a capable ally like Japan — be it base access, rear-area support, or front-line combat support — the alliance could benefit from greater clarity to be cultivated during peacetime. It could very well be that many of the issues examined above have been discussed and agreed upon privately ex ante. In the chance they have not, as the world begins 2022 and the U.S.-Japanese alliance turns its attention to summitry, 2+2 visits, and revisions of strategic documents, alliance managers have a host of practical conversations they could engage in to make a better and stronger alliance in the new year.
Jeffrey W. Hornung is a senior political scientist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation He specializes in Japanese security and foreign policies, East Asian security issues, and U.S. foreign and defense policies in the Indo-Pacific region, including its alliances.
3. Deeper Australia–Japan defence ties send strong message to China
Excerpts:
Japan, Australia and the US are not seeking confrontation with China. Last Saturday, the trade agreement known as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership came into force.
RCEP includes China, Japan and Australia but not the US. The agreement’s 15 members produce about 30% of the world’s GDP. The potential for all countries in the region to benefit from trade cooperation remains enormous, but Beijing’s economic coercion of Australia hardly suggests that China is looking to cooperate.
In the face of such threatening behaviour, Australia and Japan will continue deepening security cooperation, as will others in the region.
Deeper Australia–Japan defence ties send strong message to China | The Strategist
One of the strengths in Australia’s relationship with Japan is our shared ability to deliver substance as opposed to verbal bombast unmoored to practical outcomes.
Australia claims to have strategic partnerships with many countries, usually linked to detailed plans for deepening cooperation—but, looking under the bonnet, often the longer the ministerial communiqué, the fewer the results.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s virtual meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida this week will show the opposite is true for Australia and Japan. There is deep substance to the relationship based on a shared strategic outlook and values and a platform of trust built across decades.
On the face of it, the reciprocal access agreement designed to enable closer defence cooperation may seem as if it’s just tidying away practical details of how our forces interact but, to two countries that take the rule of law seriously, these details matter.
With the specifics agreed on how we can access each other’s military facilities, secure port access, landing rights, logistic support, security arrangements and legal regimes, we should expect that there will be an expansion of practical military cooperation.
That could mean we’ll see Japan Self-Defense Forces personnel in significant numbers exercising and training with their Australian counterparts and the US marines out of Darwin.
Japanese F-35s could access our training ranges to practise missions over land, Australian submarines and warships could operate out of Japanese military bases, our special forces could build expertise together working with Southeast Asian partners.
This is a powerful expression of how two like-minded democracies can cooperate to shape regional security outcomes. The message to the region is that we have better options than simply trembling and obeying Beijing’s wishes.
Why is this a priority for Japan? First, like Canberra, Tokyo realises we can exercise a stronger influence on regional security by working together rather than separately.
Southeast Asia is a vital strategic zone for both Australia and Japan. China is engaged in a full-on but thus far unsuccessful effort to break ASEAN members away from the world’s democracies and to weaken their regional cooperation. By aligning our diplomatic efforts in Southeast Asia, we strengthen our chances to stop Beijing turning the region into a series of isolated client states.
A second shared Australian and Japanese interest is to make sure we keep the US engaged in the Indo-Pacific. President Joe Biden is clear that Washington wants its allies to step up their own security efforts.
In this case, Australia and Japan are choosing self-help over alliance free riding. The more we can shape an aligned diplomatic and security approach, the more likely it is that the US will stay engaged.
While the aim is to keep the US active in the Indo-Pacific, Australian and Japanese policymakers are alive to the risk that Washington’s isolationist mood might deepen. If that happens, the Australia–Japan relationship becomes the linchpin of security against authoritarianism.
For those critical of deeper Australia–Japan ties (surprisingly, such people exist), the idea of a bilateral pushback against Beijing’s regional domination is simply absurd because nothing can stop Chinese power.
Remarkably, though, the creation of the AUKUS security pact between Australia, Britain and the US, the strengthening of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, the emergence of US–Australia–Japan trilateral cooperation, South Korea’s closer engagement with Canberra and the deeper linking of European countries to the Indo-Pacific all show that countries will not bow to Chinese domination.
This is the one unambiguously positive outcome from last year. Through Covid-19 and lockdowns and unrelentingly threatening rhetoric from Beijing, the world’s consequential democracies increasingly are resisting the Chinese Communist Party’s demand that their global leadership come at the price of our subordination.
Could this year be a turning point in Xi Jinping’s political future? He is the architect of the party’s turn to ‘wolf warrior’ aggression, which has done China immense damage globally.
A third Japanese interest in Australia is its need for long-term assured energy supplies. When Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister at the time, visited Darwin in November 2018, media reporting emphasised the symbolic importance of acknowledging the anniversary of the bombing of the city in February 1942, rather obliquely noted in the visit communiqué as ‘the loss and sacrifices of World War II’.
Perhaps just as important to Abe’s visit was ‘the first gas production and LNG shipment from the Inpex-operated Ichthys Project which illustrates the development of bilateral energy cooperation’.
By 2019–20, liquefied natural gas was Australia’s largest export to Japan at just over $19 billion. Coal exports, although planned to reduce across time, were $14.3 billon, while Australian-produced hydrogen remains a future energy possibility. LNG, now accounting for about 40% of Japan’s electricity generation, will remain critical to Japan in coming decades. Australian planners should understand that what is clearly essential to Japan’s energy security is something we need to protect. It escapes no one in Tokyo that the Inpex LNG facility is adjacent to the Port of Darwin, leased for 99 years by Chinese company Landbridge.
The reciprocal access agreement is a treaty-level agreement but doesn’t offer mutual security responses like the ANZUS Treaty of 1951 if either country is threatened. Should Japan be invited to be a formal ANZUS ally? That probably won’t happen soon. It’s unclear that the US Congress and the always unpredictable Japanese Diet would agree on a new formal alliance arrangement.
The ANZUS Treaty does allow the allies (now the US and Australia after New Zealand’s anti-nuclear sidelining from the treaty in the 1980s) ‘to maintain a consultative relationship with states … in the Pacific area in a position to further the purposes of this treaty and to contribute to the security of that area’.
It would be valuable for Canberra and Washington to agree to a formal ANZUS consultative relationship with Japan—meaning, for example, that after the annual Australia–US ministerial consultations, a trilateral Australia–US–Japan meeting would follow.
Japan, Australia and the US are not seeking confrontation with China. Last Saturday, the trade agreement known as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership came into force.
RCEP includes China, Japan and Australia but not the US. The agreement’s 15 members produce about 30% of the world’s GDP. The potential for all countries in the region to benefit from trade cooperation remains enormous, but Beijing’s economic coercion of Australia hardly suggests that China is looking to cooperate.
In the face of such threatening behaviour, Australia and Japan will continue deepening security cooperation, as will others in the region.
4. US-China relations to settle into zone of 'mutually tolerable friction' in 2022: Forum
A new acronym - MTF - "mutually tolerable friction."
US-China relations to settle into zone of 'mutually tolerable friction' in 2022: Forum
By Goh Yan Han The Straits Times3 min
With China closing in on the US' power in Asia, this will cause the two major powers to vie for power and influence in the region. PHOTO: REUTERS
SINGAPORE - The world is in for a decade-long geopolitical contest that could prove more intense and dangerous than the Cold War, an eminent political scientist said on the topic of US-China relations at a forum on Thursday (Dec 6).
With China closing in on the US' power in Asia, this will cause the two major powers to compete in the region in a "full spectrum contest" that will touch every facet from the military to trade, technology and people-to-people exchanges, said Professor Khong Yuen Foong, who is the Li Ka Shing Professor in Political Science at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.
Exclusive security arrangements like the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, Aukus, and Five Eyes alliance comprising Asutralia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the US will also make Asean less central to the security architecture of Asia, he added.
Asean can still play a pivotal role in economic terms, given the role of its member countries in multilteral free trade agreements such as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) that took effect this week, and initiatives such as the Asean digital masterplan - one way for the grouping to exercise agency by building digital rules for the region.
Prof Khong was one of three panellists who spoke at a session on US-China relations at the two-day virtual Regional Outlook Forum organised by ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. The other two panellists were US and China experts that provided their respective perspectives.
The panellists agreed broadly that the US-China relationship has stabilised compared to when former US president Donald Trump was in office, although neither side has high expectations of any breakthroughs in cooperation.
Mr Ryan Hass, a senior fellow at US-based think tank Brookings Institution, said the two countries now see direct engagement or dialogue more as "a pressure release valve" to manage the tension in the relationship, rather than to try to advance a concrete agenda.
Following a virtual meeting between US president Joe Biden and Chinese president Xi Jinping on Nov 15 last year, both countries appeared to be settling into a zone of "mutually tolerable friction", said Mr Hass, who was a White House advisor for China, Taiwan and Mongolia under President Obama.
Barring an unforeseen event, this is the zone that both sides will stay in for the upcoming year while navigating heightened but manageable levels of tension, he said.
Professor Chen Dongxiao, who is president of Chinese think tank Shanghai Institutes of International Studies, agreed that 2022 will be another year of uncertainty for both countries, as both need to overcome Covid-19 for economic recovery, seek better mutual trading terms, and more jobs and stability, among other issues.
"The domestic agenda for both sides means that both sides need a more stable bilateral relationship, but...China is still not so certain whether 2022 will be a year for more calming down or an even more explosive period of time," said Prof Chen, who also advises China's foreign ministry on economic diplomacy.
He urged both the US and China to strengthen communication at all levels - from leaders to the working level - to foster mutual understanding and prevent conflicts, especially on sensitive issues such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and the South China Sea.
While Southeast Asia has seen some benefit from the competition between the US and China, such as the "one-upmanship" in providing countries in the region with Covid-19 vaccines, Southeast Asia prefers a more predictable environment for economic investment and pandemic recovery, said Prof Khong.
Otherwise, the intensification of geopolitical competition in the region will test the solidarity of the region and may "pull different members of Asean apart in a strategic sense".
"So there's this silver lining (but) you know it's something temporary, and I think the Asean countries would prefer to go back to some Asean modalities...where the two superpowers can come in and continue with their constructive habits of dialogue and confidence-building mechanisms," he said.
5. Sweden Launches Psychological Defense Agency To Counter Disinformation
Sweden Launches Psychological Defense Agency To Counter Disinformation
Forbes · by Emma Woollacott · January 5, 2022
Red House in Sweden
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Sweden has created a new government agency dedicated to fighting disinformation, particularly from foreign governments such as Russia, China and Iran.
The Swedish Psychological Defense Agency, based in Karlsbad and with an office in Solna, will be headed by director general Henrik Landerholm, a former ambassador, and will have 45 staff. It will work with academics, the military and the media, and will offer support to regions, companies and organisations within the country.
The aim is to identify, analyze and respond to 'inappropriate influences' and other misleading information.
"It can be disinformation aimed at weakening the country’s resilience and the population’s will to defend itself or unduly influencing people’s perceptions, behaviours and decision making," the agency explains on its website.
"Psychological defence must also strengthen the population’s ability to detect and resist influence campaigns and disinformation. Psychological defence contributes to creating resistance and willingness to defend among our population and in society as a whole."
Swedish officials have in the past cited Russia, China and Iran as sources of disinformation campaigns, with Landerholm pointing to Russian attempts to interfere with the US presidential elections.
And it was concern over interference with Sweden's own election in 2018 that led to the creation of the new agency. Around ten per cent of Swedes are said to read Russian news site Sputnik, commonly described as a propaganda service, which is frequently critical of Sweden's liberal attitudes and is, according to Landerholm, aimed at destabilizing or undermining trust in government agencies.
MORE FOR YOU
Meanwhile, a recent report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has found that disinformation about Covid remains rife in Sweden.
However, most is spread through social media, particularly TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, and is in fact largely driven domestically rather than internationally.
"Disinformation about the virus in Sweden has mirrored the global ‘infodemic’ including stories of the intentional spread of a ‘plandemic’ by foreign actors (China, the US, global elites or corporate interests such as big pharma)," the authors say.
"The 5G conspiracy theory gained some traction in Sweden and a number of incidents of sabotaged antennas have been reported. There has also been a number of disinformation narratives related to the spread of the disease, its ‘actual’ mortality, and strategies to avoid getting infected."
Forbes · by Emma Woollacott · January 5, 2022
6. US military presence abroad faces more opposition in 2022
Beware:
Opposition movements built upon grievances with the US presence have fueled national movements to remove US bases in South Korea and Japan.
In some cases, like the Philippines, such movements have been successful. Over time, formerly autocratic host countries have become democratic, like South Korea, and have made public support by the civilians of host states critical if the US desires to maintain its troops overseas.
...
The scope of the US global military footprint has become increasingly contentious in Congress in recent decades and in some of the countries hosting US personnel.
...
Both increasing external competition and growing domestic political pressures may lead to reduced opportunities for the US as it navigates new and existing host relationships.
US military presence abroad faces more opposition in 2022
Rising external competition and growing domestic political pressure may lead to reduced numbers of US troops overseas
In addition to Afghanistan, the US has reduced its military presence in several other conflict zones in recent years. It has lowered troop levels in Iraq from 170,000 in 2007 to 2,500 in 2021, and in Syria from 1,700 in 2018 to around 900 today.
While these reductions may seem like a US military withdrawal from the world stage, its presence overseas remains vast.
Domestically, pressures to reduce the defense budget make overseas deployments an attractive target to cut. Internationally, opposition to hosting the US military can also increase the cost of maintaining bases.
For the US to maintain its influence, it will have to adapt to these increasing international and domestic pressures against its foreign military presence. Alternatively, the gradual withdrawal from its overseas commitments will make it harder for the US to maintain its alliances and the international institutions it has crafted.
American soldiers on the tarmac of the Bargam airbase. Photo: AFP / Jimin Lai
A history of deployments
US military deployments and bases reassure allies, deter rivals and support humanitarian missions and military training. They also act as a command center for varied operations, including drug interdiction and counterterrorism. A base gives the US the ability to credibly respond to emerging threats and crises in a region.
They can range from small listening posts with a handful of people to a virtual city like Camp Humphreys in South Korea, which hosts more than 35,000 military and civilian personnel.
We recently published updated data on the number of US troops deployed overseas, based on reports published by the Department of Defense’s Defense Manpower Data Center. The data shows that in 2021 the US had 171,477 service members located overseas, a small decease from 177,571 in 2020.
Beyond personnel, the US owns over 600 locations used by the military in countries and territories. These sites range from larger bases and training ranges to smaller sites, including petroleum product storage stations in Turkey and Portugal and Army golf courses in Germany and South Korea.
The US established its first permanent overseas military facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in 1898 at the end of the Spanish-American War. The US Platt Amendment stipulated the legal option for the US to buy or lease land from Cuba in perpetuity.
The Second World War saw the US expand its base network through aid agreements and the military occupation of Germany and Japan. More than 16 million service members were mobilized for the war, and about 7.6 million were deployed to conflicts in Europe, Asia and Africa.
Bases in this period were established or leased in areas like Canada, France, Germany, Japan and Guam.
After the war, the number of US personnel overseas declined globally. Yet new engagements in North Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan were accompanied by rapid and large deployments to Asia and the Middle East.
A shifting presence
While the US has maintained a global military presence for the last 70 years, its approach has changed over time.
Deployments from 1950-2021 by country, using data from Allen, Flynn, Machain Martinez (2021). Michael A Allen
Recently, US military deployments, many without a formal US military base, have been used to help counter China’s expanding influence in Africa.
Though China’s involvement in Africa has generally been economic, the establishment of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Support Base in Djibouti in 2017, coupled with recent news of China’s plans to build its first Atlantic base in Equatorial Guinea, suggest that China may seek increased military influence in Africa in the future.
Comparing the US military presence in Africa between 2001 and 2021, we can see an increased number of African states with US forces present. Notably, in 2007, the US established Africa Command, a regional Defense Department command, based in Germany, specifically responsible for operations in and relations with all countries in Africa.
Djibouti is particularly notable, as the US, China, France and the United Kingdom all have military facilities there.
Between 2001 and 2021, the US significantly grew its deployments in Africa.
Reducing the US military footprint
The scope of the US global military footprint has become increasingly contentious in Congress in recent decades and in some of the countries hosting US personnel.
The Trump administration sought to reduce the number of troops in countries that failed to increase their share of the cost for hosting US troops.
Yet the Biden administration also continues to explore ways the US could adjust its military footprint. The Defense Department, in November 2021, announced the completion of its Global Posture Review, examining the US military’s presence overseas.
Both administrations’ preference to cut the number of overseas personnel is rooted in the political and financial costs of maintaining deployments. The ability to use new technologies, such as drones, rather than people in combat operations, has also allowed US policymakers to shift away from larger bases.
Instead of a massive complex like Ramstein Air Base in Germany that the Defense Department values at $12.6 billion, it can spend just over $100 million to build small sites for drone operations like Niger Air Base 201.
However, if the US wishes to continue to influence regional politics and use its military as a credible deterrent to rival powers, technology alone is unlikely to be sufficient.
US and South Korean soldiers in Yeoncheon-gun, South Korea. Photo: AFP / Chung Sung-Jun / Getty Images
Shared opportunities and pitfalls
We have discussed previously how the US gains influence and ease of operating in exchange for the defense of other nations. But this American gain comes with several costs for host states.
Opposition movements built upon grievances with the US presence have fueled national movements to remove US bases in South Korea and Japan.
In some cases, like the Philippines, such movements have been successful. Over time, formerly autocratic host countries have become democratic, like South Korea, and have made public support by the civilians of host states critical if the US desires to maintain its troops overseas.
Both increasing external competition and growing domestic political pressures may lead to reduced opportunities for the US as it navigates new and existing host relationships.
7. The Danger Of Technological Surprise: Expect The Unexpected Or Suffer The Consequences
Conclusion:
I have often been quoted for emphasizing that there are two kinds of warfare, asymmetric and stupid. Our most dangerous potential adversaries today are not stupid. They will be diligently trying to counter our advantages in combat while creating their own. Rather than believing our own or others’ hype about what we can do, we must expect the unexpected in future war.
The Danger Of Technological Surprise: Expect The Unexpected Or Suffer The Consequences
Within a year, Soviet MiGs drove B-29 and B-26 bombers of the U.S. Far East Air Forces out of the daytime skies.
I am always uneasy with planning based on wargaming results without combat experience to validate them. Early in the millennium, I was a witness to an Army exercise at the Center for Strategic Leadership at Carlisle Barracks, designed to justify the course of Army Transformation. The scenario created a complex crisis with American forces in great peril, but then new Future Combat Systems (FCS) arrived and saved the day. It was assumed to have all the capabilities touted by contractors and force managers who were developing the system, and the service was already changing its organizational structure and tactics to incorporate it. However, the capabilities demonstrated in that wargame never became reality, and the FCS program was cancelled in 2009. We cannot allow hype from defense contractors to become operational assumptions. Neither can we underestimate the technological capabilities of our potential adversaries.
In late October of 1950, rumors of mysterious swept-wing jet aircraft reached United Nations Command in Korea. On November 1st, the MiG-15s attacked UN aircraft across the Yalu River. Their Soviet pilots blinded aerial intelligence-gathering along the Chinese border with North Korea, facilitating the passage of Chinese Communist armies. They would soon force the longest retreat of an American Army in history, after a massive onslaught, later that month. Within a year, Soviet MiGs drove B-29 and B-26 bombers of the U.S. Far East Air Forces out of the daytime skies. Meanwhile, America scrambled to get F-86 Sabres, its only aircraft capable of combatting the new foe, into theater as it cranked up production and reclaimed the 60 it had sold to Canada.
The MiG-15s’ capabilities shocked American leaders and the U.S. Air Force (USAF). No one thought the Soviet Union and its allies had the knowledge and skills to build such jets. American technical intelligence had failed. Congressional hearings cited captured German scientists and imported British jet engines as possible explanations for the quick Soviet advances in aeronautical engineering, but the result remained that the rest of the air war over Korea would be radically different than what had been expected, entailing greater challenges and much higher costs.
We again have operational plans for aerial warfare based on sanguine assumptions about American technological superiority. Glowing praise for the F-35 emerges from wargames that predict it can destroy at least 20 enemy aircraft for every one of its losses, as it exploits its stealth and network capabilities.
Recent USAF complaints about the unnecessary redundancy of Army long-range fires tout the existing long ranges and low observability stealth aircraft provide, that will allow them to carry out such missions more cheaply and at low risk. It is worth noting that while much of the rest of the world plans to overwhelm air defense networks with swarms of missiles and drones, we still continue to have faith in our aircraft to penetrate such defenses mostly on their own.
What if such assumptions are wrong? Potential adversaries are not going to reveal all their capabilities in peacetime, though some have hinted that they have counters to our advantages. What happens if detection means can reduce the cloaking of stealth, or cyber counters can degrade networks? Are we prepared to slug out a war of attrition such as historian Cathal Nolan argues any peer-to-peer conflict always becomes?
According to their official history, in nine days of battle over the Dunkirk beachhead, the Royal Air Force lost at least 106 Hurricane and Spitfire air superiority fighters. We only have a few more F-22 Raptors in the whole USAF.
Obviously, technological surprise is not just restricted to the aerial realm. It comes in two forms, either with unexpected capabilities from adversaries, or with unpredicted failures of our own technology. In World War II, the U.S. Navy was caught unaware by the performance of the Japanese Long Lance torpedo, and by the deficiencies of the firing mechanisms of its own. Torpedo failures plagued the U.S. service well into 1943. The Marines paid a heavy price at Tarawa for inadequacies in Higgins Boats and naval shore bombardments, and had to procure more Amtracs and change tactics. The U.S. Army was unprepared for deadly German 88-millimeter guns. American tanks like the Stuart and Lee and early antitank guns were sadly deficient in combat against the best German armored vehicles. Again, it took time to field adequate replacements.
More so than the other services, the Air Force tends to go into every war with something new to employ that is fundamental to its warfighting concept.
How does one prepare for technological surprise? The first step is just to acknowledge that it will happen. The USAF has been very vulnerable to it because of the Service’s heavy reliance on new and rapidly changing technology, along with the need to predict its capabilities without combat experience. More so than the other services, the Air Force tends to go into every war with something new to employ that is fundamental to its warfighting concept. In World War II, assumptions that the new bombers could achieve decisive results with acceptable losses without fighter-cover proved wrong. The Korean experience discussed above forced the service to relearn how to perform neglected tactical missions such as close air support and escort duties. Many adjustments were required in Vietnam to adapt to conditions there, including to the unexpected sophistication of enemy air defenses. Even in contemporary experiences such as Kosovo, Serbian passive air defense capabilities were a surprise.
Generally, the USAF has been very adept at making necessary changes, but they always take time and resources, and cost early blood and treasure. A readiness for technological surprise will require the service to retain a robust capacity to suppress enemy air defenses and to continue to emphasize traditional air-to-air dogfighting capabilities.
One buffer is having redundant capabilities. Army long range fires are a fine hedge if enemy counterair capabilities prove surprisingly effective, or stealth is less so. Maintaining air superiority in the current environment of complex multi-domain operations will be challenging. Budget cutters are always looking for dollars to save by eliminating redundancies to be more efficient, but effectiveness is much more important for the American military. General Eric Shinseki often explained that we do not want to win wars by a close score of 51-49; instead, we desire a 100-0 shutout that is over quickly, with minimum bloodshed.
Services must also be prepared to develop systemic responses to such surprise. It is never enough just to introduce some newer technology; changes in doctrine, training, tactics, and organization may be required as well. And the cooperation of other government agencies and private industry might also be important, depending upon the sophistication of required technological innovations. The contemporary information environment, including cyberspace, provides potential adversaries many new avenues for unexpected mischief, and most American capabilities in that realm exist outside of the Department of Defense.
Perhaps most important, we must avoid hubris about our own capabilities that magnifies the impact of technological surprise. During the Cold War, we Americans tended to envision our Soviet enemy as ‘ten feet tall.’ We built a strong defense establishment to defeat an adversary who eventually proved much less capable than we thought. For Operation DESERT STORM, we massed a large force to deal with a presumed experienced and battle-hardened Iraqi army, from its long war with Iran. After our overwhelming victory, we now see ourselves as ten feet tall, with unmatched technology and professional military forces, and a hubris that has cost us in more recent and persistent conflicts. We are returning to the atmosphere that existed at the beginning of the Korean War, when we did not believe that our enemies could replicate our technology, and we expected the appearance of American ground troops to easily intimidate and outmatch their North Korean opponents.
I have often been quoted for emphasizing that there are two kinds of warfare, asymmetric and stupid. Our most dangerous potential adversaries today are not stupid. They will be diligently trying to counter our advantages in combat while creating their own. Rather than believing our own or others’ hype about what we can do, we must expect the unexpected in future war.
Con Crane is a military historian with the Army Heritage and Education Center who is transitioning to the Strategic Studies Institute.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Army, or the Department of Defense.
Image Description: Sabre Dance
Artist: Harley Copic via The U.S. National Archives
8. Irregular Warfare Initiative Monthly Newsletter
A new resource from the Irregular Warfare Initiative. I will be using this.
Issue 1, December 2021
Irregular Warfare Initiative
Newsletter
Supporting the community of irregular warfare scholars, practitioners, and policymakers.
Subscribe to receive this newsletter once a month.
New Articles from IWI
Dr. Patricia Sullivan (UNC Chapel Hill)
Over the past two decades, the US has increasingly turned to security assistance as a solution to a wide range of problems in weak and conflict-affected states. Policymakers should recognize that providing military aid and arms transfers to fragile states could undermine long-term stability and good governance.
Michael Poznansky (US Naval War College)
If decision-makers wish to insulate the policymaking process from cognitive biases—and to understand what drives rival states to launch different types of operations against the US and its allies—they would do well to understand the psychological drivers of covert action.
Jack Watling (RUSI)
In great power competition, policymakers need to realize the extent to which SOF have been optimized for a narrow mission set. They have fallen into predictable patterns, become overly reliant on technological solutions, and grown accustomed to short operations enabled by overwhelming support.
David Knoll, Kevin Pollpeter, and Sam Plapinger (CNA)
In a future, large-scale conflict, Chinese forces will likely employ a modern and unique irregular warfare concept, focused on information and influence, tightly integrated with conventional capabilities. Great power competition does not portend a shift away from irregular to conventional warfare, but rather an amalgamation of the two.
Jeffrey Clemens (UC San Diego)
As the postmortem of America’s longest war begins, one mistake remains underappreciated: the stunning failure of US attempts to suppress opium production in Afghanistan—a policy that squandered billions of dollars, strengthened the Taliban, and destabilized the democratic government in Kabul.
Dr. Melissa Lee (Princeton University)
The fundamental mistake in Afghanistan was to allow the intervention to transform from a narrowly defined counterterrorism mission to an expansive, ill-defined liberal state-building mission. This pivot set the stage for failure, and subsequent decisions and a lack of preparation made the mission even harder than it had to be.
Michael Mazarr (RAND Corporation)
As US competition with China intensifies, conflicts in developing nations may again constitute a battleground for influence. The US should tread carefully. The benefits of covert interventions and proxy wars rarely outweigh their costs.
Dr. Jared Edgerton (Stanford University)
Why do suicide bombers sign up for their deadly missions? Thousands of leaked ISIS documents show that the decision is driven less by individual factors such as education, religiosity, and unemployment, and more by social ties.
Jason Warner (CTC) and Stephanie Lizzo (Sciences Po)
Boko Haram long ago split into distinct factions which pose unique threats—but the US still treats it as a unified actor. US policymakers need to pay much more attention to the internal politics of violent extremist organizations.
Rachel Tecott (US Naval War College)
The effectiveness of large-scale US SFA projects depends less on the amount of assistance the US pours into recipient nations than on the decisions of recipient leaders about what to do with US assistance. The United States builds better militaries when it successfully influences recipient leaders.
Asfandyar Mir (US Institute of Peace)
The nature of the relationship between al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and the Afghan Taliban remains one of the most important questions about the country’s future. The US government needs to be clear-eyed about the challenge at hand: there are no signs that the Taliban is planning any major crackdown on al-Qaeda.
What We're Writing
Andrew Milburn and Kyle Atwell
Lieutenant General Douglas Lute and Ambassador Duncan Lewis discuss why nations join coalitions, share how to lead a coalition to achieve its collective objectives while providing value to each member, and argue that to compete effectively in irregular warfare contexts the US and Australia will be dependent on building partnerships with like-minded nations.
Kyle Atwell and Shawna Sinnott
General Richard Clarke and Linda Robinson discuss the SOF competencies that are likely to be most relevant to future conflict, with an emphasis on information operations and the importance of working with partner forces.
Shawna Sinnott and Abigail Gage
Dr. Jacquelyn Schneider and Admiral Mike Rogers examine the character of cyber warfare, both in its relationship to irregular warfare and in its applicability to broader national security approaches. They explain how the United States leverages cyberspace to achieve effects from the tactical to the strategic levels.
Kyle Atwell and Andrew Milburn
Wesley Morgan and Retired Colonel Bill Ostlund discuss counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, the limits of technology and over-the-horizon counter-terrorism, how the integration of conventional and special operations forces evolved over the duration of the war, and the need to ensure that the US military captures and remembers the hard-earned lessons following twenty years of irregular warfare in Afghanistan.
Shawna Sinnott and Laura Jones
Ambassador David Shear and Dr. Zack Cooper characterize the manner in which China engages in a strategically irregular approach and address China’s weaknesses relative to the United States. They then discuss what these efforts mean for other Asian nations, and how those effects matter in the US competition for influence.
Upcoming Events for the IW Community
Upcoming events
Mid-Jan 2022 - Inaugural 2022 Non-Resident Fellowship Cohort announcement. These fellows will be comprised of practitioners, researchers, and policymakers.
25 Feb 2022 - IWI Indo-Pacific Conference. Discuss the role irregular warfare has within this contested region. Registration and more information are forthcoming in future newsletters.
Recent Events
09 Nov 2021 - Security Force Assistance Panel. A joint event between IWI and the West Point International Affairs Forum. Panelists included Major General Scott Jackson, Dr. Renanah Miles Joyce, and Dr. Jahara Matisek. Moderated by Dr. Max Margulies. See video recording from the event here, and read a follow on commentary on the state of SFA by Dr. Joyce, Dr. Margulies, and Cadet Tucker Chase here.
09-10 Sep 2021 - IWI Inaugural Conference. Included multiple panels and breakout sessions. Listen to the main policy panel featuring Ambassador Doug Lute, Dr. David Kilcullen, Dr. Audrey Kurth Cronin, and Major General Richard Angle, moderated by Dr. Jacob Shapiro, here. Also read the breakout session read-outs, compiled by Andrew Maher, here.
IWI Team Spotlight
IWI is above all a community of researchers, practitioners, and policymakers committed to advancing our understanding of irregular warfare. If you would like to get involved with IWI, reach out to any members of the team or engage with us on social media.
Colonel Tobias Switzer
IWI Fellow
Tobias Switzer is an active-duty Air Force officer with expertise as a special operations helicopter pilot, combat aviation advisor, and foreign area officer for Latin America. His operational experience includes tours to Iraq, Central America, and Afghanistan. He was most recently a military fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and at National Defense University. A former Olmsted Scholar, he holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago and a master's degree from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.
Sam Winter-Levy
IWI Editorial Director
Sam Winter-Levy is a Ph.D. candidate in politics at Princeton University and a fellow at the Princeton Center for International Security Studies. Before joining the doctoral program, he was a staff editor at Foreign Affairs and a reporter at The Economist. He has published academic work in the Journal of Politics, received Princeton’s George Kateb Preceptor Award for teaching, and written for publications including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Lawfare, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the LA Times, the Boston Globe, and Scientific American. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Oxford and was the Michael Von Clemm Fellow at Harvard in 2014-15.
Major Shawna Sinnott
IWI Executive Director
Shawna Sinnott is an active-duty Marine Corps Officer who has served in operational, staff, policy, and leadership roles across I Marine Expeditionary Force, Special Operations Command, and Headquarters Marine Corps. Her operational deployments have taken her across Afghanistan, the Arabian Gulf, and East Africa. Shawna holds an A.B. from Harvard College and an MLitt from the University of St Andrews in the study of Terrorism and Political Violence. She is currently a doctoral student in Political Science at Stanford University under the Commandant of the Marine Corps Strategist Program and is a 2021 McCain Institute National Security and Counterterrorism Fellow.
Message from the Board of Directors
Welcome to our inaugural newsletter, intended to be a resource to help researchers, practitioners, and policymakers navigate relevant content on topics related to irregular warfare. IWI began as an idea between two Army officers -- discussed during a break in class -- while attending graduate school at Princeton University. As they began socializing the concept with others at Princeton as well as their peers in the operational force, they were connected with a Marine officer just beginning her own graduate school work at Stanford. The trio solidified a vision: their nascent project would seek to bridge the gap between scholars and practitioners and support the community of IW professionals. This would happen through three lines of effort: generating original podcast and written content, providing engagement events for the community, and facilitating professional development opportunities.
In the two years since these initial conceptual conversations on IWI began, it has grown quickly. At the time of this newsletter, we have produced 43 podcast episodes, published more than 45 written articles from guest contributors, planned multiple virtual events with participants from acround the world (including an annual conference with over 900 registrations), and built a team of over 25 committed volunteers. This month we will also announce the inaugural cohort of IWI Non-Resident Fellows, after having received an overwhelming number of highly qualified applications from across the community.
IWI content is now followed by a broad array of professionals. They range from mid-grade to the most senior military leaders in the United States and abroad, their interagency counterparts, policymakers and lawmakers, and academic researchers at think tanks and universities around the world. It is no longer the product of a niche community: IWI is now relevant to anyone in the national security community who must understand and apply IW principles.
While IWI is growing quickly in its outputs, all indicators are that we are still not meeting the demand signal for this content. This newsletter is an attempt to consolidate all content generated each month to make it easily accessible. It will also serve as a medium to list upcoming events, both those planned by IWI as well as events planned by various partner organizations.
Please help us build the community and drive public discourse on irregular warfare. Subscribe to this newsletter and share it with your colleagues; submit your own written commentaries to IWI; engage with us on social media or leave a positive rating for the Irregular Warfare Podcast on Apple Podcasts; send us a note if you are interested in volunteering with IWI; or reach out if you are interested in supporting IWI in other ways.
Thank you for following IWI and helping us build this community.
Sincerely,
Kyle Atwell & Shawna Sinnott
Co-Founders, Irregular Warfare Initiative
This newsletter was drafted by Cadet Tucker Chase, IWI research and communications assistant.
The views expressed herein represent those of individual members and contributors, and do not represent the views of West Point, the US Government, or any other military or government.
9. The Military’s New Challenge: Defeating Cheap Hobbyist Drones
As Con Crane says, there are only two types of warfare, asymmetric and studpid and our adversaries are not stupid.
The Military’s New Challenge: Defeating Cheap Hobbyist Drones
Small armed devices, often bought for a few hundred dollars online, are a big battlefield problem for the U.S. military, and developing a defense that is cost-effective against swarms of them is a conundrum
WSJ · by James Marson and Stephen Kalin
Small, cheap drones are the most-concerning new tactical threat to face the U.S. military since the rise of improvised explosive devices in Iraq some 15 years ago, according to the head of U.S. Central Command, Marine Gen. Kenneth McKenzie.
The rapid development of inexpensive unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, has enabled irregular forces, terrorist groups and national armies to attack high-value targets at low cost.
“I am very concerned about it,” Gen. McKenzie told the House Armed Services Committee in April. “We still have a ways to go to get on the right side of the curve with this, because right now you can go out and buy one at Walmart or some other location, you can weaponize it very readily.”
Insurgent groups such as Islamic State and Yemen’s Houthi rebels have rigged commercial, off-the-shelf drones with explosives to attack expensive armored vehicles and military installations as well as oil refineries, ports and civilian airports. The UAVs are often bought on the internet or assembled from parts bought online.
Wreckage of an armed drone brought down near an air base housing U.S. troops in Iraq on Tuesday.
Photo: International Coalition/Associated Press
The bargain-basement weapon is a particular challenge for the U.S., which is focused on the threat of potential war with high-end militaries in China or Russia, and is plowing billions into advanced systems, from sophisticated missiles to giant aircraft carriers. The high quantities of drones mean traditional defenses against aerial attacks, such as million-dollar missiles, don’t make sense.
The U.S. is racing to develop defenses that meet the technology at a more-equivalent cost. It is focusing on lasers and microwaves because they are powered by electricity, which gives more bang for the buck and can quickly target large numbers of small drones.
The U.S. has fielded a variety of systems across the armed services, from hand-held signal jammers that look like a weapon from Ghostbusters or Star Wars to laser shooters mounted on trucks.
The military has been unable to deploy the systems in large numbers, and no single one has integrated the abilities to track and target several types of drones with the most suitable weapon. Recognizing the urgency and need to consolidate efforts, the Army in 2020 took charge of a new office to lead and direct the search for solutions.
Small drones fly low, slowly and can sharply change course, confusing radar that is scanning for large, fast, highflying aircraft or missiles. If drones are laden with explosives, simply forcing them out of the sky can endanger people and facilities on the ground. And when deployed in large groups, drones could overwhelm even sophisticated defenses.
To better identify and track drones, militaries are seeking to fuse data from various sensors including radar, cameras and radio-frequency scanners.
Marine Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, said small, cheap drones are a major new tactical threat to the U.S. military. He is shown testifying in Congress in September.
Photo: Olivier Doulier/Reuters
U.S. forces first encountered small attack drones in large numbers in Iraq in 2016, fielded by Islamic State militants. The Pentagon quickly equipped its forces with dozens of hand-held antidrone weapons that jam the signal between aerial vehicles and their base stations.
The downing of an Iranian drone in 2019 in the Strait of Hormuz by a radio-frequency jammer mounted on a Marine utility vehicle aboard the USS Boxer was a turning point. The downing by the electric-powered weapon, its first in the field, was a cheaper option than firing one of the ship’s missiles.
But jamming quickly became outmoded. Drones’ anti-jamming capabilities improved, and attackers adapted by putting drones on autopilot, which curtailed communications and rendered jamming ineffective. Jamming has other drawbacks, because it can interfere with the signals of friendly military or civilian equipment.
The USS Boxer, shown in the Arabian Gulf in 2016, downed an Iranian drone in 2019 with a radio-frequency jammer.
Photo: craig z rodarte/U.S. Navy/Shutterstock
The most promising systems, military leaders and defense contractors say, intercept drones by firing microwaves to fry their electronics or lasers to burn holes in their motors or other critical parts.
A big reason for the focus on these tactics, known as directed-energy weapons, is the cost. Initial investments can be high, in the millions of dollars, but once operational the cost per shot is about the price of electricity: “A cup of diesel,” says Ron Dauk, program manager for laser and electro-optical systems at Boeing Co.
Compared with missiles, “your cost goes down substantially, and you’ve got enough munitions that you can fire again and again and again at however many UAVs are coming,” said Air Force Major Gen. Alexus A. Grynkewich, U.S. Central Command’s operations director.
The systems vary in power and size. A 300-kilowatt laser under development by Boeing and General Atomics is aimed at shooting down missiles and manned aircraft as well as drones. Kord Technologies, a unit of KBR Inc., and Raytheon Technologies Corp. won an Army contract to deliver 50-kilowatt lasers mounted on Stryker armored fighting vehicles.
A laser system developed by Raytheon.
Photo: Raytheon Intelligence & Space
The Marines and Air Force have already fielded laser systems from Boeing and Raytheon that can be fixed to tripods to provide area security, for example around a forward operating base, or deployed on tactical vehicles for greater mobility, including near the front lines of battle.
The Navy began trying out laser prototypes in 2009, on land and later at sea. In December, it tested a high-energy laser weapon aboard a ship sailing off the coast of Yemen, where Houthi rebels backed by Iran have weaponized bomb-laden drone boats in addition to unmanned aircraft. The Navy said the system “successfully engaged” its target, without providing more details.
High-powered microwave weapons use bursts of intense radio waves that can cook electronics—just like food—and drop small unmanned aircraft out of the sky.
An antidrone weapon that uses microwaves called THOR at the Air Force Research Lab.
Photo: Roberto E. Rosales/Albuquerque Journal/Zuma Press
The Air Force is developing a high-powered microwave weapon to defeat groups of drones with a system made up of a radar dish and microwave cannon mounted atop a 20-foot shipping container. In a recent field assessment, the system zapped down 90% of its targets, and officials say they can edge toward 100%.
Lockheed Martin Corp. has developed an interceptor that can fit in a backpack and be launched from a six-inch tube to target other drones with microwaves. The weapon can be recovered, charged and reused.
Epirus Inc., a Silicon Valley startup, is collaborating with General Dynamics Corp. to integrate a microwave weapon on Stryker vehicles.
Still, microwaves can interfere with other systems, so they are less effective in urban environments. Even in open fields they can produce “friendly fire,” damaging other weapons systems. Their impact on birds and other animals isn’t known.
Lasers can be impaired by rain, snow, fog or smoke, and they can bounce off reflective surfaces or miss their target and carry on farther, potentially causing collateral damage. Compared with microwaves, which can target a broad area, they can engage only one drone at a time and must focus on each one for a longer period.
Boeing’s Compact Laser Weapon System.
Photo: Boeing
Because no single system is capable of defending against the full and growing range of drone threats across the various environments where they operate, the challenge for counterdrone strategists is how to stitch together multiple weapons.
Most U.S. bases in the Middle East have layered their defenses with a variety of systems, which are each designed to confront different threats with varying degrees of effectiveness. The proliferation of systems—each with a specific capability for a specific drone and in various stages of development—complicates operators’ ability to respond to attacks.
“Everything evolved piecemeal. We’ve frankensteined it together a bit,” said Gen. Grynkewich.
The Pentagon is now working toward a unified system that can give early warning, identify a drone’s origin and altitude, and provide options for engagement, according to Gen. McKenzie. “We do not yet have a single system that can do all that,” he said. “That’s part of the problem: We’re not integrated.”
The target for military planners is evolving as drone technology rapidly evolves.
A destroyed vehicle in front of Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi’s residence following an assassination attempt by an armed drone in Baghdad in November.
Photo: iraq PRIME MINISTER MEDIA OFFICE/REUTERS
One growing concern is swarms, where dozens of small drones controlled by artificial intelligence attack a target simultaneously. The problem is compounded if the drones are of various sizes and capabilities, requiring different weapons to counter them.
Epirus is testing a high-powered microwave system it developed for the military. The company says artificial intelligence enables quick targeting of individual aircraft or swarms.
Advancements in counterdrone technology won’t fully address the problem without regular adjustments, said Austin Doctor, a political scientist and counterterrorism researcher at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. As the Pentagon and others invest in new technology, armed groups will keep innovating as well.
“This is the dance—the back and forth of adaptation,” said Mr. Doctor. “In many ways, the battle between governments and militants is about creativity and anticipating the next move.”
WSJ · by James Marson and Stephen Kalin
10. U.S. adversaries are becoming South American conquistadores
Excerpts:
Chinese influence “is everywhere in this hemisphere and moving forward in alarming ways,” Adm. Craig Faller, the head of U.S. Southern Command, recently told NBC News. The goal, he said, appears to be both a substantial military presence and economic dominance within the next decade.
I could give you additional examples, but I think you get the point. Mr. Kerry and Mr. Obama believed they were smarter and more virtuous than their predecessors, that U.S. leadership — call it hegemony if you like — in the Western Hemisphere was worse than the alternatives, that if we Yanquis would only stay our hand, surely peace, freedom, democracy, prosperity and social justice would flower.
Our authoritarian and neo-imperialist adversaries heard a different message: that the U.S. is in retreat and that the nations, peoples and resources of Central and South America are theirs for the taking.
U.S. adversaries are becoming South American conquistadores
OPINION:
In November 2013, then-Secretary of State John Kerry, addressing the Organization of American States, made news by announcing: “The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.”
He was referring, of course, to the policy declared by President James Monroe in 1823 that the U.S. would oppose foreign intervention in the western hemisphere and, as Mr. Kerry put it, “act as protector of the region.”
Mr. Kerry added that “throughout our nation’s history, successive presidents have reinforced that doctrine and made a similar choice.” He and former President Barack Obama, however, had decided not to dictate “a policy that defined the hemisphere.” Instead, they would build “a stronger foundation for the future based on our common democratic values and beliefs.”
Eight years later, I think it’s clear: What Mr. Kerry and Mr. Obama saw as enlightened restraint, adversaries of the U.S. took as an invitation to replace Washington’s influence and power in Central and South America.
In 2015, Mr. Obama followed up by visiting Cuba, where he restored diplomatic relations with the Castroite regime. “I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas,” he triumphantly declared.
He then had his picture taken in the Plaza de la Revolucion before a giant mural of Che Guevara, a communist totalitarian and what today we might call a “violent extremist.”
Mr. Obama’s concessions were not reciprocated. On the contrary, the regime has continued imprisoning dissenters and peaceful protesters (more than 150 last month) while strengthening its relations with the People’s Republic of China, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Russia and Turkey.
This partnership has provided crucial support to Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, a country once free and prosperous, now decidedly un-free and so impoverished that one out of five Venezuelans has fled.
Nevertheless, far-left rulers with close ties to Cuba and Venezuela were elected last year in Peru, Honduras and Chile.
Venezuela has become “Iran’s forward operating base in South America,” my FDD colleague, Emanuele Ottolenghi, wrote last month. “Tehran’s agents benefit from access to genuine Venezuelan identity documents and passports, which enable them to travel freely in the entire region. Meanwhile, Iran has established cultural centers and mosques across Venezuela, recruiting and radicalizing locals.”
A more immediate concern: Iranian-made unmanned aerial vehicles, capable of carrying precision armaments, have been positioned in Venezuela just over 1,200 miles from Miami. There’s more to come: Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian recently announced that Tehran and Caracas would soon sign a 20-year strategic agreement.
Not just coincidently, Venezuela has become a refuge for foreign terrorists and drug lords. Tareck El Aissami, in 2017 appointed by Mr. Maduro as vice president and head of intelligence, has been tied to Hezbollah, Tehran’s most effective proxy.
The son of Middle Eastern immigrants, Mr. El Aissami currently holds the position of petroleum minister despite having been put on a U.S. government Most Wanted List in 2019. A year later, the U.S. State Department offered $10 million for information on him related to drug trafficking and narco-terrorism.
Tehran has launched a Spanish-language television channel “to spread its propaganda in the Western Hemisphere,” Mr. Ottolenghi noted, and has been recruiting “activists, journalists, and academics.”
“Iran’s influence ops through cultural centers thrive in virtually every Latin American country, from Mexico to Chile, regardless of the political leanings of local governments,” he added. “And Shiite mosques, whether serving Lebanese and Iranian Shiite expatriates or Latin American converts to Shiite Islam, are overwhelmingly under the control of Iranian and Hezbollah-friendly clerics.”
At the same time, Hezbollah “has become the contractor of choice for mafia activities abroad.” Sen. Bill Cassidy recently wrote. “Through networks of shell companies, courier systems and friendly relationships with adversarial nations like Venezuela and Nicaragua, they are carrying out the money-laundering operation for a significant portion of the region’s illicit trade in drugs, weapons and human trafficking. The service they provide drug cartels involves hijacking international trade markets to mask their illicit transactions — a process called Trade-Based Money Laundering.”
China’s rulers also have developed strong ties with Nicaragua. Last month, President Daniel Ortega broke off relations with Taiwan and ordered Taiwanese diplomats to leave the country within two weeks. The diplomats attempted to donate their land and buildings to the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Managua. Mr. Ortega seized the properties and gave them to Beijing.
Panama, long closely tied to the U.S., dumped Taipei in favor of Beijing in 2017. The following year, El Salvador followed suit. China’s rulers have reportedly bribed officials in that country and are now moving forward to build a deep-water port and manufacturing zone from which U.S. companies will be excluded. Throughout Central and South American, Beijing is financing infrastructure projects through its Belt and Road Initiative — loading countries with debts they may be unable to repay.
Chinese influence “is everywhere in this hemisphere and moving forward in alarming ways,” Adm. Craig Faller, the head of U.S. Southern Command, recently told NBC News. The goal, he said, appears to be both a substantial military presence and economic dominance within the next decade.
I could give you additional examples, but I think you get the point. Mr. Kerry and Mr. Obama believed they were smarter and more virtuous than their predecessors, that U.S. leadership — call it hegemony if you like — in the Western Hemisphere was worse than the alternatives, that if we Yanquis would only stay our hand, surely peace, freedom, democracy, prosperity and social justice would flower.
Our authoritarian and neo-imperialist adversaries heard a different message: that the U.S. is in retreat and that the nations, peoples and resources of Central and South America are theirs for the taking.
• Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a columnist for The Washington Times.
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11. North Korea restricts its people’s movement even further in 2022
Another example of the COVID paradox in north Korea. While it tries to defend against COVID the regime has realized the opportunity COVID has provided to help the regime defend itself from its existential threat -the Korean people living in the north. Limiting movement to this extent is another example of the draconian population and resources control measures which are necessary to keep the people under the iron tfist of the regime.
North Korea restricts its people’s movement even further in 2022
The travel certification process has grown considerably more difficult, with even more signatures required from local officials
North Korea has recently strengthened barriers to movement inside the country by making the travel certification process more complicated.
This appears to be a New Year’s follow-up measure to North Korea’s designation of emergency quarantine efforts against COVID-19 as the state’s top priority during the Fourth Plenary Meeting of the Eighth Central Committee late last year.
According to a Daily NK source in North Hamgyong Province on Wednesday, the authorities in Hoeryong issued an order through the city’s inminban (people’s units) declaring new changes to the process for issuing the certificates residents need to travel to other regions.
Accordingly, movement has grown even more difficult.
In principle, North Korea has banned movement outside your city or county of residence. To travel, you need either a “business trip certificate” or a “travel certificate.”
Business trip certificates are issued by your workplace or neighborhood office, while travel certificates are issued only when there are marriages or deaths in your immediate lineage.
From the 2000s, however, North Koreans had been able to obtain certificates pretty easily with a small bribe. This was due to the growing marketization of the country.
Disease control officials testing drivers for COVID-19 symptoms in Pyongyang’s Manggyongdae District last year. / Image: Rodong Sinmun
But things began to change after the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in 2020. This is when the authorities began requiring administrators to sign the certificates.
For example, if a resident of Hoeryong wanted to travel to Hamhung, South Hamgyong Province, he needed to provide a specific reason and get signatures from the head of the inminban, head of the neighborhood office, the police officer in charge, and the security official in charge, and finally his people’s committee and relevant branches of the Ministry of Social Security and Ministry of State Security.
You also needed a “check up verification” that proved you carry no diseases. However, there were cracks even in this quarantine system. Reportedly, a bribe could still get you a certificate on the sly without the complicated hassle.
However, from this year, the certification process has grown considerably more difficult, now requiring signatures from the deputy chiefs of the relevant branches of the Ministry of Social Security and Ministry of State Security, the deputy head of the Political Department, the head of the Political Department, and finally the director of the local Emergency Anti-epidemic Division.
Accordingly, some North Koreans worry that travel to other regions has grown even more difficult than in years past. Others worry that getting a certificate will now require bigger bribes.
The source said some people even believe the measure is a tactic to control the people, complaining that the authorities issue only violent and coercive policies focused on blocking what people see and hear.
Please direct any comments or questions about this article to dailynkenglish@uni-media.net.
12. If China is a developing country, a dragon is a dragonfly waiting to grow wings
Shouldn't the second largest economy in the world no longer be considered "developing?"
If China is a developing country, a dragon is a dragonfly waiting to grow wings
Livemint · by Mint SnapView · January 6, 2022
Home / Opinion / Views / If China is a developing country, a dragon is a dragonfly waiting to grow wings
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China is today a superpower that competes with the US for global hegemony. (Photo: Reuters)
- The chief benefit, in terms of duty-free access under the Generalised System of Preferences, is not available to a country just because it calls itself developing. It is up to the country providing that duty-free access to determine whether a trading partner deserves that concession or not
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At the latest trade policy review for China at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), India objected to China continuing to classify itself as a developing country. Now, the WTO does not have its own criteria for determining whether a country is developing or developed. It allows a country to decide its own classification, much as liberal societies allow people to decide what gender they belong to.
Being a developing country does not get a great deal of automatic benefits, under WTO rules. The chief benefit, in terms of duty-free access under the Generalised System of Preferences, is not available to a country just because it calls itself developing. It is up to the country providing that duty-free access to determine whether a trading partner deserves that concession or not. While there can be little doubt on India’s continuing status as a relatively low-income developing country, the United States decided, under President Trump, to withdraw GST benefits previously accorded to India.
However, there are 155 special and differential measures tailored to assist developing countries, of which the least developed countries are a subset. These fall under six baskets: seeking to expand trade opportunities, seeking to safeguard the interests of developing countries, flexibility on agreements, commitments and use of policy instruments, relaxed transition time periods, technical assistance and special measures for the least developed.
The latest comprehensive trade data available is for 2020, which put China as the world’s largest exporter, accounting for 14.7% of global exports, way ahead of the US (8.1% of global exports) and Germany (7.8%). China clearly does not need any assistance to expand its trade opportunities. It has embarked on a massive belt and road programme to expand trade opportunities for itself.
Rather than China, it is China’s trading partners who need help to safeguard their interests. Sri Lanka recently saw China take over its Hambantota port, because it fell into China’s debt trap. Using the massive foreign exchange surpluses it has built up (China’s foreign exchange reserves are $3.4 trillion, 2.42 times as much as that of the reserves of Japan, the country with the second-largest reserves), China extends massive loans to developing countries that have no hope in hell of repaying them and takes over vital assets when the inevitable debt servicing default happens.
Does such an economically powerful nation need flexibility on agreements or relaxed transition periods? The final area of developing country concession is technical assistance. Which country in the world is today in a position to extend technical assistance to China? It publishes more patents than any country other than the US. It leads the world in quantum communications, is probably on par with the US in quantum computing and assorted space technologies. In hypersonic missile technology, it beats the US as well. Only in the manufacture of advanced semiconductor chips does China lag any other part of the world. And that is not going to be met by any technical assistance.
China is today a superpower that competes with the US for global hegemony. It has landed a craft on the dark side of the moon, retrieved moonrocks, shot down a satellite, perfected facial recognition software, has cornered the world’s supplies of rare earths and a goodly chunk of lithium and cobalt. It has the world’s largest naval fleet and is rapidly expanding all other wings of the People’s Liberation Army: the Air Force and assorted infantry and artillery forces, the Rocket Force and the Strategic Support Force, which houses cyber warfare capability and all emerging technologies and dirty tricks.
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China’s per capita income is $10,435, qualifying it as an upper middle-income country. Incomes above $12,496 make countries eligible to enter the rich country club. But that is a technical classification based on income alone. A country’s status, in relation to other countries of the world, is not determined by income alone. For China to continue to claim developing country status is nothing short of absurd.
Livemint · by Mint SnapView · January 6, 2022
13. Hard power and conventional deterrence still matter, just ask Putin
This is why integrated deterrence must include nuclear deterrence, conventional deterrence, and unconventional deterrence.
Hard power and conventional deterrence still matter, just ask Putin - Breaking Defense
What is needed is fewer new slogans like “Integrated Deterrence” and more, serious conversations about America’s strategy toward Moscow and Beijing.
Ukrainian soldiers who left Debaltseve yesterday prepare to return to support the further withdrawal of troops on February 19, 2015 in Artemivsk, Ukraine. (Photo by Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images)
While fears that Vladimir Putin would order a Christmastime invasion of Ukraine appear to have been misplaced, Western consternation over Russia’s plans have hardly gone away. In the op-ed below, Joshua Huminski of the Mike Rogers Center for Intelligence & Global Affairs argues that the forward positioning of Russian forces proves that in the digital age, the raw power of conventional arms remains a military (and political) force to be reckoned with.
Russia’s mobilization on the border of Ukraine should signal to observers that the utility of conventional forces and the realities of hard power have never left the geopolitical discourse. For much of recent history, many pundits, politicians and policymakers alike have fixated on cyberspace as a new domain, and the possibilities of space and the information space as battlefields, often to the exclusion of investment of critical conventional assets.
On the extreme end of the scale, there are those that have argued that warfare will simply be a function of ones and zeroes, conducted neatly behind keyboards or, at worst, via drone proxy. To be sure, cyberspace, space and the information domains will be areas in which battles will be fought and through which campaigns will be waged. But as Russia is demonstrating, raw, hard power and conventional assets still matter, not only as lethal warfighting materiel, but as powerful chips in the poker game of geostrategic politics.
Russia’s present behavior is, at least thus far, a return to coercive diplomacy. While it remains to be seen whether or not Moscow will in fact expand its invasion of Ukraine (having seized Crimea in 2014), President Vladimir Putin is using the mass mobilization of tens of thousands of troops in an attempt to drive the United States, NATO and Kyiv to the negotiating table – already prompting a series of diplomatic calls, including more than one between US President Joe Biden and Putin. Were Putin to simply make the same demands without the backing of the 41st and 58th Armies, he would undoubtedly receive considerably less attention than he is now.
Moreover, Russia’s aggressive non-military activities—poisoning spies, killing dissidents, bombing arms depots, waging cyber warfare, interfering in elections and more—are not a sign of weakness. Quite the opposite. Why? Moscow is confident that it can carry out these operations with little, if any repercussions, because they wield a substantial conventional deterrent force. Russia can continue its campaign of political warfare not only because these efforts are below the threshold of war but also because it has the conventional forces to ensure that NATO and the United States are sufficiently wary of provoking Moscow or contributing to politically driven escalatory behaviors.
While we may wish to see that this is an aberration, it is, in fact, more “normal” conduct on the international stage than we would like to think. The West has largely adopted an attitude where conventional hard power no longer matters, expecting technology to be a panacea, globalization to prevent future conflict and believing that modern nation-states do not use the threat of force to pursue political goals.
This is particularly acute in Western Europe, which believed (and believes) that the European Union eliminated the likelihood of future war, and which presently enjoys the security guarantees of the United States. But it stands in sharp contrast with the fears of the Baltic States, Finland, Poland and others that face the bellicosity of Russia in tangible ways on a daily basis and have responded through the reintroduction of conscription, increased military investment in conventional assets and efforts to increase societal resiliency.
For European security, much closer conventional integration and coordination with these states is now more important than ever before, albeit perhaps too late to dissuade the Kremlin’s short-term ambitions. This is not a return to the Cold War or a prelude to a new REFORGER plan.
In Europe, the United States must leverage its NATO and non-NATO allies, demonstrating to their capitals Washington’s seriousness, while continuing to push them to meet their spending commitments, holding regular joint exercises and rotating appropriately postured and structured units through Central and Eastern Europe. The last task is something the allies can only do if the Pentagon fields the necessary conventional assets to support it.
While Russia has understood the value and utility of a robust conventional force, it only appears to have dawned on Congress with the most recent National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) [PDF]. To Congress’ credit, the latest NDAA does increase spending on ships, tanks, munitions and other assets. But even this realization is well behind the power curve when compared to Beijing and Moscow, and it doesn’t reflect some hard choices about inter-service spending priorities and strategic alignment (to say nothing of the long-lead time for ship building).
Cyber warfare, space dominance, and the information battlespace all matter, but conventional forces signal seriousness and commitment, both of which are necessary to convince America’s allies on the borders of Russia and China that Washington will be there for them should the need emerge. What is needed is fewer new slogans like “Integrated Deterrence” and more, serious conversations about America’s strategy toward Moscow and Beijing, and the signals Washington’s investment in tangible assets sends to allies and adversaries alike.
From Moscow, and indeed Beijing’s perspective, this delayed seriousness has demonstrable and visible effects. The aggressive deployment schedule of the US Navy is leading to sub-par performance, poor maintenance and has put our presence in critical areas at risk. The absence of an aggressive and sustained long-term shipbuilding program would suggest to the Chinese Communist Party that America isn’t serious about projecting American power and protecting American interests in the Indo-Pacific.
The absence of procurement programs that ensure sufficient quantities of munitions—bombs, missiles, and more—demonstrates a lack of seriousness about the threats both Russia and China present today, tomorrow, and next year. We’ve already seen how much a short-term conflict can strain the stores of ordnance, something that almost certainly enters into Moscow and Beijing’s calculus.
Such a realistic investment and acquisition program for the Department of Defense does not discount the other aspects of American power or its pursuit in next generation technologies. Far from it. Soft power, diplomacy, and other tools of statecraft still matter, but they only matter when they are backed by a realistic, sustained, and supported conventional hard power deterrent.
Were Putin not deploying upwards of 175,000 troops by the Spring of this year (if forecasts are to be believed), few would be paying as much attention to the present situation in Ukraine as they are today. Like it or not, conventional hard power matters and never went away, something Putin clearly recognizes. The sooner Washington comes to terms with this reality, the sooner we can get on with the business of proper hard power geopolitics.
Joshua C. Huminski is Director of the Mike Rogers Center for Intelligence & Global Affairs at the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress, and a George Mason University National Security Institute Visiting Fellow. He can be found on Twitter @joshuachuminski.
14. Taiwan Troops Simulate Urban Warfare With China
Taiwan Troops Simulate Urban Warfare With China
Barron's · by AFP - Agence France Presse
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Taiwanese troops and armoured vehicles were deployed Thursday for a mock urban street battle in the latest drill preparing forces against China, which has long vowed to take the island.
Democratic Taiwan lives under constant threat of an invasion by authoritarian China, which claims the self-ruled island as part of its territory to be seized one day -- by force if necessary.
Beijing has ramped up military drills and diplomatic pressure on Taiwan since President Tsai Ing-wen came to power in 2016, as she regards the island as a sovereign nation.
On Thursday, soldiers from two platoons faced off in a simulated battle, firing at each other from houses and sandbag barricades as tanks rolled down a street in a mock-up town complete with signs for pharmacies and beer brands.
Urban warfare has become an increasingly key training subject for the military.
"Any future battle to protect Taiwan will be an urban warfare," Kiwi Yang, an instructor at Army Infantry School, told reporters, noting most of Taiwan's 23 million people live in cities.
"The Chinese communist troops' battle plans will be invading and landing firstly from coastal towns, then the fighting will progress into more populated residential and commercial areas and lastly push into mountainous villages," he added.
With mountain ranges, changeable weather and limited beach landings, invading Taiwan would be a Herculean challenge for any military.
For decades analysts largely concurred that China simply could not pull it off but Beijing has dramatically closed the gap in recent years.
Sabre-rattling towards Taiwan has increased considerably under President Xi Jinping, China's most authoritarian leader in a generation unafraid to flex the country's geopolitical muscle.
Chinese warplanes are making historically high levels of incursions into Taiwan's air defence zone and fears among Western allies are growing that Beijing could order an invasion, even if they consider it unlikely for now.
Taiwan recorded incursions by around 970 Chinese military aircraft last year, according to a database compiled by AFP, more than double some 380 carried out in 2020.
China has also publicised multiple military drills simulating an invasion of the island.
Last month, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) deployed hundreds of troops and dozens of tanks in a mock street combat to seize Taiwan, according to Chinese state television CCTV.
A team representing the PLA took the city in just under three hours after removing landmines, roadblocks and other obstacles posed by the opposing team, the report said.
aw/jta/dhc/ssy
Barron's · by AFP - Agence France Presse
15. 20,000 Afghan commandos left behind, lawmakers and veterans urge Biden to rescue them
Think of the resistance potential and future proxy force should one be desired.
20,000 Afghan commandos left behind, lawmakers and veterans urge Biden to rescue them
Correspondent Lucas Tomlinson describes the ongoing criticism President Biden faces over his botched withdrawal from Afghanistan on 'Special Report.'
It’s been four months since the United States left Afghanistan, leaving behind thousands of allies who worked side-by-side with the American military for 20 years.
While the administration boasts it evacuated over 120,000 Afghans—a majority were not Afghan interpreters or their families, officials say. The Biden administration has pledged to help vulnerable Afghans escape, but some lawmakers and veterans say the government has no plans to rescue perhaps the most critical ally: Afghan commandos. A group built from scratch by U.S. Special Operations Forces.
An U.S. soldier plays with recently evacuated Afghan children. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader)
Those that served alongside them say the Afghan commandos did the lion’s share of the fighting and endured horrific casualties all the way until the final U.S. evacuation flight departed.
U.S. officials say over 20,000 Afghan commandos have been abandoned.
"The Taliban are hunting them down," Rep. Mike Waltz, R-Fla, the first Green Beret elected to Congress, said in an interview with Fox News.
"The administration just wants this to go away. They just want to turn the page. It's one of the most heartless things I've ever encountered," he added.
Critics of the administration think nobody has been held accountable for leaving Afghanistan. At one point last summer, the plan was to leave 650 American troops at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and maintain a diplomatic presence.
Taliban fighters stand guard next to a Taliban flag during a gathering where Afghan Hazara elders pledged their support to the country's new Taliban rulers, in Kabul on November 25, 2021. (AREF KARIMI/AFP via Getty Images)
Today, the embassy is abandoned. The Taliban control Afghanistan for the first time in 20 years.
"I think a lot of people should have been fired over the handling of Afghanistan and not just in this administration," said Scott Mann, a former Green Beret and veteran of the Afghan war who founded Task Force Pineapple in order to rescue those left behind.
Task Force Pineapple rescued an estimated 1,000 Afghans during the fall of Kabul, helping Afghan allies escape on U.S. Air Force transport planes and through other means. Today, Mann estimates that 6,000 Afghan commandos and their families are being kept alive thanks to the tireless effort of veterans and through private donations.
Mann said 20 babies have been born in safe houses funded by Task Force Pineapple.
"When you build a partner force, invest in it, and wholesale abandon them—you have created a national security risk," Mann says because he thinks potential allies will think twice about helping the United States in the future.
Last month, lawmakers on Capitol Hill, including Waltz sent a letter to President Biden’s defense secretary and top diplomat demanding the Afghan commandos be given Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) status, which they currently do not have.
"Their plight deserves urgent attention as they cannot safely return home," the letter says, signed along with a group of 11 bi-partisan lawmakers.
US President Joe Biden delivers remarks about the situation in Afghanistan in the East Room of the White House on August 16, 2021 in Washington,DC. (Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
Outside the Department of Homeland Security in the nation’s capital Wednesday, in freezing temperatures, dozens of Afghans demanded more attention be given to the plight of the Afghan commandos by the Biden administration.
"There are videos coming out now on social media that the Taliban are rounding up people not for working with American forces or foreign forces, but for having a picture with a soldier from the national army," said one Afghan who could not be immediately identified.
Mann predicted the U.S. military will one day have to return to Afghanistan to fight terrorist groups such as ISIS, but the job will be much more difficult for the next wave of Americans.
"They're going to be facing potentially 25,000 commandos, who have had to starve through a winter," said Mann. "Now they're looking through crosshairs of optics of our weapons that we abandoned and night vision goggles that we left behind at our troops as they come in."
The U.S. military left behind $85 billion worth of weapons, according to estimates.
Other veterans groups have teamed up with Task Force Pineapple to help evacuate other vulnerable Afghans. A representative from Save Our Allies says it has information about "dozens" of American citizens left behind in Afghanistan, likely dual citizens. There are also hundreds family members of current active-duty U.S. military service members desperately trying to escape. The group says it is in touch with 27,000 Afghans who want to flee.
In October, Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke about the decision to leave Afghanistan.
"President Biden ended the longest war. He made sure that another generation of Americans would not have to go to fight and die in Afghanistan. And I think when all of this settles, that's profoundly what the American people want."
That same month, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was asked at a news conference at NATO headquarters in Brussels about the Afghan commandos.
"We’ll work as hard and as long as we need to take care of as many people as we possibly can," Austin replied. (A spokesman later clarified that the U.S. military’s role in Afghanistan had concluded and the secretary was referring to the "U.S. government role.")
Mann, the former Green Beret, is concerned about all of his fellow veterans exhausting, not only their time, but their life savings as well. Mann admitted he has struggled with his own mental health and wants people to know about the heroic efforts being made to rescue the Afghan commandos and other vulnerable Afghans.
"I wonder what's going to happen with so many of these volunteers, these veterans who have given so much to have to hang up the phone or have to tell a family that they can no longer afford to pay for their safe house," Mann said visibly emotional.
"Or when no one picks up when they call, and they learned that the commando they're helping has been executed--after four months, this is happening now."
16. Controversial Chinese Tech Billionaire Gives Millions to Elite American Universities
Controversial Chinese Tech Billionaire Gives Millions to Elite American Universities - Washington Free Beacon
A Chinese tech billionaire whose company censors the internet in China has donated millions of dollars to MIT and Princeton University and advises two Ivy League schools on expanding their presence in China.
Ma Huateng, the founder of Tencent, has given at least $5 million to Princeton through his personal charity since 2017 and $5 million since 2018 to MIT, according to previously unreported Department of Education records. Ma also serves on the advisory boards for the Yale Center Beijing and the Cornell China Center, where he and other Chinese business leaders advise the schools on developing partnerships in China. Tencent's charity contributed $900,000 to Columbia University in 2017, according to the Department of Education records.
As Ma forged ties to the schools, the Chinese government enlisted Tencent and other tech firms as part of an ambitious plan to dominate the field of artificial intelligence by 2030. The Defense Department said in a report last year that China plans to use technology developed by the firms for both commercial and military purposes.
In addition to national security concerns, the schools' ties to Tencent are also at odds with their purported liberal values. Tencent, which Ma founded in 1998, has censored criticism of the government on its platforms and snoops on users of its text message service, WeChat. The company reportedly surveilled foreign users of WeChat in order to refine its censorship capabilities in China. Tencent censored National Basketball Association games in 2019 after an executive for the Houston Rockets franchise expressed support for pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. The company pulled Boston Celtics games in October after one of the franchise's players, Enes Kanter Freedom, accused the Chinese Communist Party and leader Xi Jinping of human rights abuses.
There are numerous examples of China buying access to American universities. The Chinese government has given millions of dollars to hundreds of U.S. schools to host Confucius Institutes, which Beijing allegedly uses to push pro-regime propaganda. The Department of Education has investigated several universities that received donations from Chinese tech firms such as Huawei and ZTE. And Chinese military-linked entities funneled $88 million to American schools over a six-year period, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis.
The Ma Huateng Foundation gave $5 million in grants in 2017 to fund the Princeton Center on Contemporary China's China Impact Project, which studies how American news media has shaped public perception of China. Ma and the Princeton center sponsored a special issue in the Journal of Contemporary China last year on the topic.
The Washington Free Beacon reported that the founder of a Communist Party-linked think tank, the China-U.S. Exchange Foundation, is a major funder of the Princeton center. The Ma Huateng Foundation also funded a study by Princeton researchers last year on cybersecurity.
The foundation gave $5 million to MIT on June 11, 2018, according to Department of Education records. It is unclear how MIT used the money, but Tencent in 2019 formed a partnership with the MIT Media Lab to develop computer coding skills for children. Chinese state-run media outlet Global Times reported that the endeavor echoed Beijing's plan to expand AI education to meet future demand for tech talent.
While Ma's donations are listed in a Department of Education database, the schools have not publicized the gifts, which have not been previously reported. Princeton mentions the donations from the Ma Huateng Foundation in the center's annual reports and on one of its web pages, but Ma's affiliation with Tencent is not disclosed. Ma is more popularly known as "Pony Ma," making the link to Tencent more difficult to decipher. MIT has not publicized the donation from the foundation.
It is unclear whether Ma has also given money to Yale and Cornell. Both universities have disclosed dozens of anonymous donations from China over the years to the Department of Education. Schools are required to disclose foreign gifts of over $250,000, but the U.S. government only loosely enforced the law until last year. The Department of Education opened investigations in 2019 and 2020 into whether Yale, Cornell, Harvard, and other prestigious schools failed to disclose donations from China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. The department asked Yale and Cornell to disclose records of any donations from Huawei and ZTE, two other Chinese tech firms with close ties to the government.
Ma, who is China's richest man, joined the advisory board of the Yale Center Beijing in 2015 and the Cornell China Center in 2016. Both schools have held recruitment and tech events with Ma and Tencent.
In November 2017, Ma spoke at an event for Cornell's technology school about the future of AI. The Cornell Center and Tencent hosted a "Tencent Open Day for Cornell" at the company's Beijing headquarters on May 27. Cornell said the event was "a career exploration opportunity for students to learn and experience corporate culture, understand corporate development and talents needs, and talk with Cornell alumni working in a variety of Tencent departments."
The Yale Beijing Center has hosted Ma twice and held events where Tencent executives and Chinese government officials discussed the future of AI. Ma and Ted Snyder, the dean of Yale's School of Management, met in 2017 and 2018 to discuss "future opportunities for collaboration," according to the school's annual reports. In March 2018, Yale hosted an event with officials from Tencent Research Institute and China's Development Research Center of the State Council entitled "Artificial Intelligence Developments and Policy in the United States and China."
A year earlier, the State Council, the highest administrative body in the Chinese government, released its national AI plan, which called for the development of "high-end AI talent." The State Council plan called for the development of technology for use in the civilian and military sectors and a "highly efficient new pattern of civil-military integration." It also encouraged "domestic innovative talents and the teams to strengthen cooperation with the world's top AI research institutions." In 2017, the Chinese government designated Tencent and four other tech companies as "AI national champions" tasked with fulfilling the country's AI goals.
China's AI ambitions have worried some American officials, as Beijing has taken more aggressive military action in recent years. The Defense Department said in a November report to Congress that the Chinese government uses Tencent and other tech companies to develop "force modernization plans" for the People's Liberation Army. The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, an independent commission formed by Congress, said the Chinese government is operating a "centrally directed systematic plan to extract AI knowledge from abroad through espionage, talent recruitment, technology transfer, and investments." The commission said Tencent helps "feed [China's] military and security programs."
China's plan to dominate AI will require hundreds of thousands of tech workers, according to the State Council. The need for so much manpower means China has had to recruit from abroad. While the United States also recruits tech workers from foreign countries, including China, the FBI has warned that the Chinese government uses a talent recruitment initiative, the "Thousand Talents" plan, to covertly steal technology from Western companies and universities. Beijing has increasingly targeted American schools as ripe grounds for recruitment. FBI director Christopher Wray warned of China's increased use of "nontraditional collectors [of intelligence], especially in the academic setting."
While Tencent has not been accused of exploiting American schools, the company has employed a "Thousand Talents" expert at its AI Lab. Tencent in 2016 hired renowned AI researcher Tong Zhang to lead its lab. Zhang is also an expert in the "Thousand Talents" initiative.
None of the schools who have received money from Ma responded to requests for comment. Tencent also did not respond to a request for comment.
freebeacon.com · by Chuck Ross · January 6, 2022 - Washington Free Beacon
17. FDD | China’s Sharp Economic Slowdown Threatens to Constrain Xi in 2022
Excerpts:
Faced with the prospect of a hard economic landing, Xi finds himself in unfamiliar territory, as neither crackdowns nor stimulus have stabilized China’s economy. While Xi is unlikely to completely retreat from his regulatory crackdown, these latest crises necessitate that he put his grand international ambitions on hold and shift his focus toward more pressing domestic matters. With the Party’s very legitimacy in question, China’s leaders will be forced to embrace the age-old adage of “crossing the river by feeling the stones” (摸着石头过河). Experimenting with both market and Marxist policies will likely yield differing and often contradictory approaches as Xi pivots from crisis to crisis.
Consequently, Xi will find himself constrained. Still unclear, however, is how exactly he will respond to these newfound pressures. Washington should capitalize on Xi’s misfortune by continuing to wield its legal and regulatory powers to complicate his task. Finally formalizing the Biden administration’s nascent China policy will be key to those efforts.
FDD | China’s Sharp Economic Slowdown Threatens to Constrain Xi in 2022
fdd.org · by Craig Singleton Adjunct Fellow · January 5, 2022
With 10 months until China’s 20th Party Congress, at which Xi Jinping will likely assume a once-unthinkable third term as general secretary, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is grappling with an economic downturn, a burgeoning housing crisis, and rising unemployment. These unforeseen developments raise serious questions about Xi’s stewardship over the country and will likely constrain his geopolitical ambitions in 2022.
In 2021, the CCP issued disruptive, “anti-monopolistic” regulations aimed at “curbing the disorderly expansion of capital” throughout China’s economy. 2021 thus became known as “the year of the crackdown,” as Xi reined in China’s most over-leveraged conglomerates and several of its technology giants, including Alibaba, Didi, and ByteDance.
Xi instituted many of his most controversial policies following the CCP’s centenary in July — an event marked by heightened nationalism and tense relations with Washington. The party geared some initiatives toward addressing structural imbalances in China’s economy. Others, such as incorporating what the party calls “Xi Jinping Thought” into China’s educational curriculum, sought to deepen the CCP’s influence in the lives of China’s citizens.
The CCP’s message was noticeably different following last month’s Central Economic Work Conference, where leaders gathered to codify China’s economic priorities for 2022. Having devoted 2021 to restricting speculative economic behavior, China’s leaders instead flagged “economic stability” as their top priority. CCP officials further noted that unemployment among younger urban workers could threaten social stability.
This shift in messaging largely stems from the sharp economic slowdown resulting from Xi’s fiscal mismanagement and China’s “zero-COVID” strategy, which has crippled industrial activity and supply chains.
China’s historically strong economic performance is a central pillar of Xi’s narrative about the country’s “unstoppable rise” and the West’s decline. However, China’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew at half the rate of the U.S. GDP for much of 2021, and China’s economic growth in 2022 will likely hover at around 4.5 to 5 percent — a dramatic decline from prior years. Nationwide power outages, high raw material prices, and surging labor and freight costs will further hamper China’s recovery. Already, Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao has signaled concern about China’s foreign-exchange risk and Beijing’s ability to maintain stable trade growth.
Looming large is uncertainty throughout China’s hyper-leveraged property market, which accounts for one-third of China’s GDP. After recent defaults by Evergrande and Kaisa, Shimao Group is the latest Chinese developer to see its share price plunge. Shimao’s sudden collapse is concerning given that until recently it enjoyed a strong credit rating and had not breached any of the CCP’s “three red lines” — metrics introduced to restrict borrowing by China’s overleveraged developers.
The outsized role of China’s housing sector in its broader economy suggests that even a minor drop in real estate activity could lead to further declines in Chinese GDP — even if Chinese regulators prevent a wider banking crisis following additional developer defaults.
Faced with the prospect of a hard economic landing, Xi finds himself in unfamiliar territory, as neither crackdowns nor stimulus have stabilized China’s economy. While Xi is unlikely to completely retreat from his regulatory crackdown, these latest crises necessitate that he put his grand international ambitions on hold and shift his focus toward more pressing domestic matters. With the Party’s very legitimacy in question, China’s leaders will be forced to embrace the age-old adage of “crossing the river by feeling the stones” (摸着石头过河). Experimenting with both market and Marxist policies will likely yield differing and often contradictory approaches as Xi pivots from crisis to crisis.
Consequently, Xi will find himself constrained. Still unclear, however, is how exactly he will respond to these newfound pressures. Washington should capitalize on Xi’s misfortune by continuing to wield its legal and regulatory powers to complicate his task. Finally formalizing the Biden administration’s nascent China policy will be key to those efforts.
Craig Singleton, a national security expert and former U.S. diplomat, is an adjunct China fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he contributes to FDD’s China Program and Center on Economic and Financial Power (CEFP). For more analysis from Craig, the China Program, and CEFP, please subscribe HERE. Follow Craig on Twitter @CraigMSingleton. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD and @FDD_CEFP. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Craig Singleton Adjunct Fellow · January 5, 2022
18. Maricopa Co. releases new report on 2020 election, deems many claims misleading; here's what you need to know
Interesting results that will not resonate.
Maricopa Co. releases new report on 2020 election, deems many claims misleading; here's what you need to know
(Earlier Story) Maricopa County officials to deliver point-by-point rebuttal of election audit claims
Some of the top Republicans in Maricopa County will speak out Jan.5 to deliver a point-by-point rebuttal of last year's election audit led by the Arizona Senate.
PHOENIX (AP) - Election officials in Arizona have presented a point-by-point rebuttal of a controversial review of the 2020 election that former President Donald Trump and many of his supporters have used to promote the myth that Trump lost because of fraud.
The report, titled ‘Correcting the Record: Maricopa County’s In-Depth Analysis of the Senate Inquiry,' was released on Jan. 5, and officials say it is the final word to the inquiry on the county's administration of the November 2020 election.
Election administrators and the mostly Republican leaders of Maricopa County have always maintained that the review, conducted by Trump supporters on behalf of state Senate Republicans, was flawed.
Here's what you need to know about the report.
Who authorized the review?
The review was authorized by the Republican-controlled state Senate, which subpoenaed the election records from Maricopa County and selected the inexperienced, pro-Trump auditors.
"The audit will validate every area of the voting process to ensure the integrity of the vote," read a portion of a statement released by Senate Republicans in March 2021.
The review began with a sweeping subpoena issued by Senate Republican leaders in late 2020 as Trump and his allies searched in vain for evidence to support his claim the election was stolen. The subpoena demanded access to all 2.1 million ballots, the machines that counted them and troves of digital election data from Maricopa County, home to the Phoenix metro area and 60% of Arizona voters.
To lead the review, Republican lawmakers hired Cyber Ninjas, a small cybersecurity consultancy with no experience in elections and led by a Trump supporter who shared conspiracy theories about the election on a Twitter account that he later deleted.
What was the result of the review?
The Cyber Ninjas report confirmed Biden’s narrow victory in Maricopa County but claimed a number of shortcomings in election procedures and suggested the final tally still could not be relied upon. Trump has repeatedly pointed to those claims in his rallies and public statements.
Cyber Ninjas and other contractors alleged that election computers were connected to the internet, that there were tens of thousands of potentially illegally cast ballots and that the county purged computer files that could contain evidence of fraud.
What did Maricopa County officials say in their rebuttal?
The detailed response presented in a public meeting of the county Board of Supervisors on Jan. 5 rebutted virtually all the claims made by contractors hired by the state Senate to review its election procedures, equipment, voter registration rolls and ballot tabulation.
The report said that after "an in-depth analysis and review of the reports and presentations issued by the Senate’s contractors, we determined that nearly every finding included faulty analysis, inaccurate claims, misleading conclusions, and a lack of understanding of federal and state election laws."
Specifically, Maricopa County officials say of the claims made by the various entities connected to the audit:
- 22 were found to be misleading. "The claims lead the reader to assume a conclusion that is not supported by the evidence," a portion of the statement read.
- 41 were found to be inaccurate. "The claims include flawed or misstated analysis," a portion of the statement read.
- 13 were found to be false. "The claims are demonstrably false and can be proven false using materials provided to the Senate," a portion of the statement read.
"If you are biased or not using an objective process, you’re likely to come to a faulty conclusion," said Scott Jarrett, director of the county Elections Department.
Did the county find issues when they analyzed the State Senate report?
The county experts did find some issues when they analyzed claims in the Senate report. The county review validated only a handful of the 33,000 ballots that the Senate report said could have been illegally cast because voters had moved prior to the election.
Five voters were identified as having voted in more than one county, and six people may have voted twice in Maricopa County. The county report also found 27 cases where ballots were counted that were cast by people who died before they were returned in the mail; those were referred to the state attorney general for more investigation and possible prosecution.
The county is reviewing another 100 cases involving people who died close to the election but still cast ballots. The Senate report had identified 298 voters who had potentially cast a ballot but died before the election.
In all, the county found 38 instances were a ballot may have been illegally cast, and all have been sent to the attorney general’s office.
The county report also said that election workers had inadvertently double counted a batch of 50 ballots.
Could the findings affect the 2020 election results?
The number of vote counting errors and potential illegal votes would not have affected the outcome of the election. President Joe Biden won Maricopa County by about 45,000 votes, key to his 10,500-vote win of Arizona. Previous reviews of the 2.1 million county ballots by nonpartisan professionals that followed state law have found no significant problem with the vote count in the county, which includes metro Phoenix.
Did the county conduct its own audit?
Yes, according to officials.
"After the November 2020 General Election, the County hired two federally certified Voting System Test Laboratories to conduct an audit of the tabulation equipment used to count ballots for all five of the elections administered in 2020," read a portion of the report.
According to the report, both labs found no anomalies in the tabulation equipment. They also found that:
- Certified software were used for all tested software, systems and equipment
- No malware or malicious hardware were installed
- No evidence of internet connectivity was found
One of the two labs also found the 2020 General Election program and tabulation equipment was accurate, according to county officials. The test was only done by one of that two labs.
Where can the report be found?
The report has been uploaded to the Maricopa County Recorder's Office website, and can be read here.
Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump is scheduled to host a rally Jan. 15 outside Florence, his second in Arizona since his election loss.
The Associated Press (AP) contributed to this report.
Continued Coverage
Tune in to FOX 10 Phoenix for the latest news
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19. The Value of a Well-Placed Spy in Moscow
Excerpts:
Using Putin’s orchestration of the Sochi games prior to seizing Crimea as a model and desirous of staging a Winter Olympics that will provide the propaganda backdrop for a latter-day version of ‘Olympiad’ (Leni Riefenstahl’s artistically brilliant but morally abhorrent cinematic ode to Hitler’s 1936 Berlin games), Xi will almost surely wait until after the closing ceremonies on 20 February 2022, before significantly ramping up pressure on Taiwan. Thereafter, he will be free to act. If Putin has not reached an ‘accommodation’ (as President Biden unfortunately termed it) with the US and NATO on Ukraine by then, a planned meeting between Xi and Putin on the margins of the games – wherein coordination of a range of actions against Ukraine and Taiwan intended to confront Washington with two simultaneous crises a world apart is sure to the chief topic of discussion – will be of critical intelligence interest. That spy had better be busy.
“A man who risks being hanged in our service”, Frederick the Great said, “merits being well paid”. Polyakov was certainly worthy of being paid a fortune for his services. Yet he “did not”, as Grimes’s dear friend and colleague on the team that identified CIA officer Aldrich Ames as a Soviet spy, Jeanne Vertefeuille, said “do this for money”. Polyakov acted out of a sense of patriotic duty, accepting only a nominal amount for expenses as well as fishing and hunting equipment. He asked only that his family be cared for in extremis. It was hoped when Polyakov retired in 1980, that he could put some of that sporting gear to use, quietly living out his life in his dacha outside Moscow. Fate dictated otherwise. Betrayed in 1985, by both Ames and FBI traitor Robert Hanssen, Polyakov was arrested and subjected to two years’ harsh interrogation followed by a drum-head trial for treason. The 15 March 1988, announcement of his execution marked a cruel end for a hero. “It was”, Vertefeuille lamented, “a bad day for (CIA) when we lost him.”
Espionage remains a perilous endeavor. However, as Napoleon said, “one spy in the right place is worth 20,000 men in the field”. The value of the real insights into Putin’s thinking on an agent akin to Polyakov spying for us in Moscow today could deliver, would be incalculably greater.
The Value of a Well-Placed Spy in Moscow
Mark Kelton retired from CIA as a senior executive with 34 years of experience in intelligence operations including serving as CIA’s Deputy Director for Counterintelligence. He is currently a partner at the FiveEyes Group and is Board Chair of Spookstock, a charity that benefits the CIA Memorial Foundation, the Special Operations Warrior Foundation and the Defense Intelligence Memorial Foundation.
EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — I hope CIA has an agent like Dmitry Polyakov operating in Moscow right now. A Major General in Soviet Military Intelligence (the GRU), Polyakov was the highest ranking – and arguably the most valuable – spy run by US intelligence during the Cold War. Known to the Agency as ROAM and to the FBI as TOPHAT, Polyakov was described by former CIA officer Sandy Grimes as the Agency’s “crown jewel”. Highly disciplined and deeply respected by his handlers, he utilized the first two-way encrypted covert communications device ever issued by CIA. Polyakov’s broad access to information on his own service and its ‘neighbors’ in the KGB, allowed him to pass on a huge volume of material to include counterintelligence investigative leads that were used to identify Soviet spies in the West. As a decorated Second World War veteran and member of the Soviet elite with commensurate contacts and influence, Polyakov was also able to provide invaluable intelligence on the plans and intentions of the Soviet General Staff and Communist Party Central Committee.
We need an agent with similar access today, as the US moves toward a denouement with its peer competitor adversaries in Moscow and Beijing. That we have reached such a critical juncture is evident by the recent actions of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinpeng; two men united by a common enemy. Ongoing US domestic turmoil and the disastrous US exit from Afghanistan have engendered an impression in Beijing and Moscow of American weakness and a corresponding lessening of Washington’s ability and willingness to counter actions they might undertake. To paraphrase Victor Davis Hanson, ‘re-establishing deterrence’ that was lost with the Afghan debacle will not be easy, as the US struggles to shift its national security apparatus away from a focus on our two decades-long war against jihadi terror to countering peer competitors. In this environment, ambiguity and a lack of clarity as to US capabilities, policies and intent can easily lead to a disastrous miscalculation by those who are trying to capitalize on the disarray they sense in their chief adversary’s camp. The repercussions of this moment of danger are most immediately evident in Ukraine.
With its public demands that the US and NATO remove military infrastructure that was installed in Eastern Europe after 1997; provide assurances that the alliance will not expand further eastward; eschew the deployment to Ukraine of what Moscow calls “offensive” weapons; and end military ties with Soviet successor states, Russia has seized the initiative in advance of planned January talks between Moscow and Washington and NATO respectively. We should expect Putin will use every diplomatic, military and intelligence lever he has to maintain pressure on the West as the crisis he has fomented roils. As such, perhaps a bit of conjecture (informed by experience) about some of the insights into the Russian leader’s thinking a Polyakov-like spy might be able to provide would be of interest.
First, Putin has now been told – as he undoubtedly anticipated – that some of the demands he made (particularly the roll-back of the NATO alliance to its late-1990’s state) are unacceptable to the West. Putin will, nevertheless, seek to portray himself as reasonable by making ‘concessions’ on such extreme demands at the negotiating table. The most important audience for such theater is not Russia’s US and NATO interlocutors. It is the Russian leader’s own people whose support he will need if he does initiate military operations.
Second, a precipitous announcement that the US will not dispatch troops to Ukraine means that Washington will enter the talks with little real leverage apart from threatened sanctions. The latter alone will not suffice to deter Putin. Although he would prefer to avoid sanctions if possible, Putin is likely not overly bothered by them as he knows his country has existed for some time under sanction regimes. He is likely willing to exchange increased short-term pain engendered by additional sanctions for a re-assertion of Moscow’s primacy in former Soviet space. Putin has, in any case, certainly already priced their possible imposition into his calculations.
Third, Putin does not fear those who will sit across any negotiating table from his side for the simple reason that some of those same people were in office in 2014, when Russia seized the Crimea and launched a war in the Donbas without discernible consequence. The mastery of (his version of) the facts and the confidence displayed by the Russian leader in his recent video meeting with President Biden and at his annual year-end marathon press conference wherein he blamed the US and NATO for the crisis, were performances meant to stand in direct contrast to an American national security decision-making team Putin wants to depict to his countrymen and the world, as enfeebled and inept. Alarmingly, he appears to believe that narrative.
Fourth, a series of recent military exercises conducted by its armed forces within striking distance of the Ukrainian frontier has allowed Moscow to pre-position the materiel needed for an invasion. It has also established the logistical infrastructure needed to support military operations thereafter. This preparation would allow the Russians to move relatively quickly in surging personnel to staging areas to man prepositioned vehicles and equipment immediately prior to an attack, thereby reducing warning time for both Ukrainian forces and NATO.
Fifth, if Putin attacks Ukraine he will, (largely to ensure domestic support for the war) seek a quick and relatively low cost (in terms of lives lost) triumph. By driving directly on Kyiv, he could seek a comprehensive defeat of Ukrainian forces that brings the entirety of the country under his control in one fell swoop. While undoubtedly attractive to Moscow as its successful completion would signify a total victory, such an operation would also take time, could result in significant casualties and would risk a protracted guerilla conflict as Russian forces move into largely ethnically Ukrainian territory. A more militarily reasonable and likely goal would be an operation – or series of operations – aimed at capturing swaths of Eastern Ukraine with significant ethnic Russian populations coupled with the establishment of a land-bridge to Crimea. If successful, Putin would have re-established a security buffer with a weakened rump Ukrainian state on his new western border.
Sixth, unlike Washington and NATO, Moscow does not have to negotiate with numerous allies to formulate policy and initiate military action. And the leader of the one country with which Putin must concern himself, Xi Jinpeng, has reportedly already expressed Chinese support for Russia on Ukraine. This is, however, not to say that the broader strategic goals of Moscow and Beijing vis-a-vis Washington are in complete alignment. The PRC seeks to supplant the US as the world’s pre-eminent power. For his part, as a child of the Soviet Union and man of the KGB, Putin wants to sufficiently diminish US power and influence to allow him to revise the post-Cold War world order to Russia’s benefit. He does not, however, aspire to push the US – which he needs as a counter to the challenge an emerging Chinese superpower will pose for his own country in the future – off the world stage. He must, however, be astounded at the rapidity with which the US is doing this to itself.
Seventh, Putin’s goals in threatening Ukraine probably extend far beyond a favorable – from his perspective – resolution of the present crisis. The Russian leader probably seeks to engender division between the US and NATO and within NATO over the degree to which its member-states are willing to militarily intervene in a “quarrel in a far-away country, between people of whom we know nothing”. He is betting that they, like British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain when he made that statement at the height of the 1938 Sudetenland crisis, will be willing to negotiate away Ukrainian sovereignty rather than risk conflict with a revisionist power determined to assert its influence along its own frontier. Should such a scenario play out, Ukraine could effectively find itself ‘Finlandized’; subject thereafter to increased Russian meddling in its internal affairs with the aim, as is the case with Belarus, of gradually re-incorporating it into Moscow’s orbit.
Eighth, Putin will task Russian intelligence with markedly increasing the pace and intensity of ‘dezinformatia’ (intended to influence both an adversary’s thinking and public opinion) and ‘maskirovka’ (intended to deceive an adversary about one’s own military activities) operations directed at Ukraine and the West over the coming weeks as Moscow moves toward a decision on whether to attack. A principal theme of the already ongoing disinformation campaign is the portrayal of Ukraine, the US and NATO as the instigators of the current crisis as exemplified by Putin’s dismissal of Western fears over an imminent invasion of Ukraine and his assertion that Moscow needs assurances it will not be attacked. Specious claims such as that by Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoygu, that U.S. mercenaries provided Ukrainian forces with a chemical component and were readying them for “active hostilities” and to “commit provocations” are reminiscent of Nazi warnings of Polish provocations culminating in the so-called ‘Gleiwitz Incident’. Undertaken on 31 August 1939, that false-flag operation mounted by the Reichssicherheitsdienst (Reich Security Service) involved a staged attack by SS men in Polish uniforms on a German radio station. It was cited as a casus belli for the German attack on Poland the following day. Should Putin decide to attack Ukraine, we can expect to see a similarly contrived justification for invasion.
Finally, while we must discount some of Putin’s rough language (e.g. ‘NATO can go to Hell’) as posturing, the evident asymmetry in the way the crisis is viewed in Washington and Moscow reflects the risk calculi of each. There is every indication the Russian leader considers the Ukrainian state as illegitimate and rightfully subject to Moscow’s suzerainty. He views the extension of western influence into former Soviet space up to Russia’s borders as an existential threat against which Moscow ‘can do anything at any cost’ to protect itself. Putin sees that threat not only in military terms. Also of great concern to him is the possibility that an economically vibrant, democratic Ukraine could encourage greater domestic opposition to his own regime. We must, therefore, take seriously Putin’s assertion that Russia has “nowhere to retreat” and the possibility he will move militarily against Ukraine should negotiations not result in “agreements that would ensure the security of Russia and its citizens now and in the long-term”.
Should Putin decide to move on Ukraine, we will witness scenes not seen in Europe since the Soviet Army was unleashed on Hungary in 1956 with the significant difference being that the resulting savagery will be captured on cell phones for all the world to see. Confronted with such a horrendous possibility and having signaled that they are unwilling to commit military forces to assist Ukraine, there will be inevitable consideration by the US and NATO of making concessions to Moscow at Ukraine’s expense. Possible discussion of formal NATO membership for Ukraine aside, the US and NATO must resist that temptation. As underscored by Moscow’s frequent citing of its interpretation of the Minsk accords (wherein it fails to mention the requirement that Russian forces leave occupied Ukraine as a pre-condition for talks and preposterously characterizes possible military action by Kyiv to retake its own land as aggression), any acceptance by the US and NATO of Russia’s stated demands as a starting point for discussion in effect, acknowledges Moscow’s 2014 seizures of Ukrainian territory. This would not only reward aggression. It would also, in a manner akin to Germany’s pre-war “Heim ins Reich” campaign, advance Russia’s depiction of itself as the protector of those of Russian heritage living beyond its borders, thereby setting the stage for claims that other territories on which ethnic Russians live – e.g. the Baltic states – should also be brought under Moscow’s ‘protective’ control.
More generally, for the US to be party to any agreement impacting Ukraine without Kyiv’s agreement would evoke echoes of the fait accompli presented to the Czechoslovaks at Munich and feed into already existing doubts about American reliability as a security partner. As was the case with rump Czechoslovakia post-Munich, forcing Ukrainians to accept provisions that compromise their ability to defend themselves from the depredations of a belligerent neighbor would de facto make the US and NATO responsible for that nation’s fate. Beyond that, as the world’s leading democracy, the US ought not, as a matter of principal, be party to any compromise of the sovereignty of a free nation without that country being present at the table. It is simply a question of national honor, however archaic that concept may seem to some.
The most immediately impactful step the US can now take is to significantly increase military assistance to Kyiv including delivery of anti-armor and anti-air systems sufficient to dissuade the Russians from attacking Ukraine or to make them pay as heavy a price as possible should they do so. Russian claims that they are worried that the deployment of anti-air systems could be cover for the deployment of offensive missiles are not to be taken seriously. Their real worry is that such systems could degrade Russia advantages in the air during any operations against Ukraine. That is the point of giving Ukraine such a capability.
The Greatest Threat
Events in the Ukraine are being watched with intense interest in Beijing. And it is there that the greatest threat to the US lies. In contrast with its Russian ally; the ambitions of which are bounded by economic, demographic and military limitations; China’s aspirations are seemingly unbounded and its ability to actualize them is growing. The lengths to which the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will go to attain its goals are also seemingly without limit. By his violation of assurances that the PRC would not militarize the islands of the South China Sea and would rein in cyberattacks on US government and industry targets; and having snuffed out the flame of democracy in Hong Kong in violation of an agreement with Great Britain; CCP leader Xi has demonstrated time and again that for him and his increasingly rogue regime treaties and promises – like pie crusts and fortune cookies – are made to be broken.
This reckless disregard for international norms has both practical and moral effects. Having witnessed the chaos unleashed by a pandemic for which he knows his country is explicitly or implicitly responsible and having seen therein only potential advantage, Xi seems to look with contempt on the unwillingness of the world to hold China accountable for acts of omission or commission resulting in the deaths of at least five million people (to include some 800,000 Americans). The manifest greed of Americans wedded to making money in China, irrespective of the resulting damage to US national security, must only serve to deepen his scorn. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that a regime that has imprisoned at least a million Uighurs in concentration camps under the most brutal conditions reportedly has its scientists working away in labs like so many Dr. Mengeles on biological weapons designed to kill selectively based on ethnicity and to employ genetic engineering to develop ‘super soldiers’. Such ghoulish experiments are not the undertakings of a civilized state.
Using Putin’s orchestration of the Sochi games prior to seizing Crimea as a model and desirous of staging a Winter Olympics that will provide the propaganda backdrop for a latter-day version of ‘Olympiad’ (Leni Riefenstahl’s artistically brilliant but morally abhorrent cinematic ode to Hitler’s 1936 Berlin games), Xi will almost surely wait until after the closing ceremonies on 20 February 2022, before significantly ramping up pressure on Taiwan. Thereafter, he will be free to act. If Putin has not reached an ‘accommodation’ (as President Biden unfortunately termed it) with the US and NATO on Ukraine by then, a planned meeting between Xi and Putin on the margins of the games – wherein coordination of a range of actions against Ukraine and Taiwan intended to confront Washington with two simultaneous crises a world apart is sure to the chief topic of discussion – will be of critical intelligence interest. That spy had better be busy.
“A man who risks being hanged in our service”, Frederick the Great said, “merits being well paid”. Polyakov was certainly worthy of being paid a fortune for his services. Yet he “did not”, as Grimes’s dear friend and colleague on the team that identified CIA officer Aldrich Ames as a Soviet spy, Jeanne Vertefeuille, said “do this for money”. Polyakov acted out of a sense of patriotic duty, accepting only a nominal amount for expenses as well as fishing and hunting equipment. He asked only that his family be cared for in extremis. It was hoped when Polyakov retired in 1980, that he could put some of that sporting gear to use, quietly living out his life in his dacha outside Moscow. Fate dictated otherwise. Betrayed in 1985, by both Ames and FBI traitor Robert Hanssen, Polyakov was arrested and subjected to two years’ harsh interrogation followed by a drum-head trial for treason. The 15 March 1988, announcement of his execution marked a cruel end for a hero. “It was”, Vertefeuille lamented, “a bad day for (CIA) when we lost him.”
Espionage remains a perilous endeavor. However, as Napoleon said, “one spy in the right place is worth 20,000 men in the field”. The value of the real insights into Putin’s thinking on an agent akin to Polyakov spying for us in Moscow today could deliver, would be incalculably greater.
Read more expert-driven national security perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief
20. Panel: New National Defense Strategy Needs More Substance, Clear Goals
The substance must include irregular warfare as well.
Panel: New National Defense Strategy Needs More Substance, Clear Goals - USNI News
The next National Defense Strategy, scheduled for release next month, must spell out “what are we going to do; when are we going to do it; and who’s going to do it,” the former civilian chief of Pentagon acquisition said Wednesday.
Ellen Lord, speaking at an Atlantic Council online forum, said the secretary of defense should say, “these are the types of scorecards I want to see.” This way, the strategy would have set “actual goals … to bring this NDS to life,” she said.
While expecting the strategy to be evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, former CIA Director David Petraeus said he – like Lord – is concerned about implementation. “What happens on Capitol Hill when it comes to procurement” as the NDS goes through the authorization and appropriations processes, the retired Army general asked rhetorically.
Lord added later that while the key is technology in the strategy, the Pentagon itself has to examine how it goes through its Planning, Programming, Budget and Evaluation, or PPBE, process to ensure it’s meeting the NDS’s goals before it sends acquisition requests to Congress.
“There has to be more substance” to the document to make it work with allies, who are asking “where’s the beef,” retired Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright said. He said a “simple thing we can do” is share artificial intelligence advances with them. He suggested devising a tiered metric for AI similar to the one the Society of Automotive Engineers, or SAE International, has for car manufacturers.
Later, he added that by sharing unprocessed AI data with “all our allies, we bring diversity and scale” to counter powers like China and Russia that they cannot match.
“The time is now to lean forward” in sharing technologies with allies, as is being done with the agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, or AUKUS, “so we can build interoperable systems,” said Lord.
But Petraeus offered a word of caution. “There is an enormous gulf between the United States and everyone else” in terms of defense spending and technology “and it has grown” over the last two decades, he said.
Noting several times that the U.S. has encouraged European allies to spend more on their own defenses against an aggressive Russia, the fact is “NATO cannot act without the U.S.,” which was evident in the pullout from Afghanistan, and that would be the case in Ukraine as well if the crisis there escalates. Russia in recent weeks has amassed troops on its border with Ukraine.
The Europeans “are very much on the peacekeeping end of things,” like Bosnia, he said.
As for future agreements like AUKUS, Lord said “it all comes back to capability” in buying systems from allies. Questions that should be posed in these transactions, as is done with domestic suppliers, include “do they have cyber secure networks” and “can those weapons systems not be hacked when in use?”
A former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Cartwright added “we’re going to have legacy systems for the next 30 years” in America’s inventory. If the Pentagon can’t bring these systems to a mid-level tier, “you ought to divest it” to invest in the future.
Lord and Cartwright also emphasized speed down to the millisecond in building defense systems using AI and space-based and cyber platforms and networks. Assessing potential great power enemies, Cartwright said, “they’re not going to give us a geographic place to attack.”
An acquisition goal should be to get a weapons system “in the hands of a warfighter to experiment with,” Lord added, “this isn’t a flight checklist… give everyone a little breathing room.”
All agreed that the strategy has to include allies in a meaningful way.
“Consultation, consultation, consultation,” Petraeus said, as NATO heads into negotiations with Russia. This reflects the variety of approaches among the 30 members as to how to tackle an issue as tricky as Ukraine.
Cartwright said, “consultation is number 1. … Number two is sharing” of knowledge. The U.S. needs to have “the wherewithal to say ‘I can do this, I can’t do that.’”
Related
21. The Capitol Riot: A Chronology (GWU National Security Archive)
This is quite a reference and resources for anyone who wants to follow, research, and write about the events over the past year.
You can access the timeline and all the resources at this link at the George Washington University National Security Archive
The Capitol Riot: A Chronology
National Security Archive Timeline Pieces Together Events of January 6, 2021
Highlights Ongoing, Unresolved Discrepancies Between Official Testimony, Media Reporting, and Pentagon's Sparse Timeline
Washington, D.C., January 6, 2022 - The National Security Archive marks the one-year anniversary of the assault on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, with a meticulously researched timeline of the day's events. The chronology, which will serve as an important tool for investigators, researchers, and the public, is divided into three main parts:
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Events that took place at the Capitol that we know about thanks to stellar reporting from organizations like ProPublica, The New York Times, the AP, The Washington Post, NPR, Politico, and Newsweek, as well as information provided by a host of both local and federal officials in Congressional testimony;
- Activity at the White House, drawn primarily from former President Trump's official statements on Twitter;
- The Department of Defense's official timeline that was published on January 8, 2021.
The chronology, taken together with our three previous sourcebooks, provides a high level of detail about the attempted coup while at the same time underscoring just how much about federal or local government decisions and actions remains unknown to the public. Each entry includes a source, with hyperlink, and a Who's Who of key figures is also provided. The Archive will update the timeline as important new information surfaces.
Reader’s note: Please also be sure to check out our latest Cyber Brief by Cristin J. Monahan reviewing the cyber ramifications of the January 6 riots.
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.
