Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos."

- Stephen Jay Gould

“Clark wrote to friends, “Had you seen Rosa Parks (the Montgomery sparkplug) when she [first] came to Highlander, you would understand just how much guts she got while being here.” Parks took page upon page of notes during the sessions. She was struck by the idea that the goal of protest was not to influence attitudes, but to force change. “Desegregation prove[ s] itself by being put in action,” she wrote in her notes. “Not changing attitudes, attitudes will change.” In other words, don’t try to begin by changing the way people think. Rather, change the way they actually live, and their thinking will follow.”

- Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 by Thomas E. Ricks

“In a national insurrection the center of gravity to be destroyed lies in the person of the chief leader and in public opinion; against these points the blow must be directed.”

- Clausewitz, 1832.

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, DECEMBER 16

2. The Sleeping Japanese Giant Awakes

3. Volodymyr Zelensky and his generals explain why the war hangs in the balance

4. Opinion | Japan is building up its military. Good.

5. CPP founder Joma Sison dies (Communist Party of the Philippines)

6. Secretary Blinken Launches the Office of China Coordination

7. Biden State Department launches 'China House' initiative, says Beijing is 'most complex' challenge

8. The Saudi-China Deal Tells Us What Autocracies Want From Each Other

9. A Wireless Intelligence Community ‘On The Horizon,' Official Says

10. Why Congress Can’t Stop the CIA From Working With Forces That Commit Abuses

11. Ukrainians Focus on Resilience a Day After Major Russian Strikes

12. Seoul protests Tokyo's new security strategy, claim to Dokdo

13. A mass exodus from Christianity is underway in America

14. War Logistics in a Globalized Economy

15. Is COVID a Common Cold Yet?

16. Where Brittney Griner spent the week: A military program for ex-hostages

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, DECEMBER 16

Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-december-16

Key Takeaways

Russian forces conducted another set of large-scale missile strikes throughout Ukraine and one of the largest missile attacks against Kyiv to date.
Russian strikes continue to pose a significant threat to Ukrainian civilians despite generating no improvement in the Russian ability to conduct offensive operations.
Dmitry Medvedev made inflammatory but irrelevant comments in support of ongoing information operations that aim to weaken Western support for Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin will likely pressure Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to support the Russian war in Ukraine further at a December 19 meeting in Minsk.
Lukashenko is already setting information conditions to deflect Russian integration demands.
Putin’s upcoming visit to Minsk could indicate that he is setting conditions for a new offensive from Belarusian territory.
Putin and Lukashenko’s meeting will likely advance a separate Russian information operation that seeks to break Ukrainian will and Western willingness to support Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly ignored worst-case scenario assessments of potential damage to the Russian economy prior to launching his full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Russia is continuing to face economic challenges as a direct result of the war in Ukraine.
Russian forces conducted counterattacks in the Svatove and Kreminna areas.
Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Bakhmut and Avdiivka-Donetsk City areas.
Russian forces continued to undertake defensive measures on the left (east) bank of the Dnipro River.
Russian officials will likely struggle to recruit additional contract servicemembers despite ongoing efforts to do so.
Russian occupation authorities continued seizing civilian infrastructure to treat wounded Russian servicemen and aid Russian forces operating in occupied territories.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, DECEMBER 16

Dec 16, 2022 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

understandingwar.org

Kateryna Stepanenko, George Barros, Riley Bailey, Katherine Lawlor, Layne Phillipson, and Frederick W. Kagan

December 16, 6:00 pm ET

Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.

Russian forces conducted their ninth large-scale missile campaign against critical Ukrainian energy infrastructure on December 16 and carried out one of the largest missile attacks on Kyiv to date. Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief General Valery Zaluzhny stated that Ukrainian air defenses shot down 60 of 76 Russian missiles, of which 72 were cruise missiles of the Kh-101, Kalibr, and Kh-22 types, and four guided missiles of the Kh-59 and Kh-31P types.[1] The Kyiv City Military Administration reported that Ukrainian forces destroyed 37 of 40 missiles targeting Kyiv.[2] Ukrainian officials also reported that Russian missiles struck nine energy infrastructure facilities and some residential buildings in Zhytomyr, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and Zaporizhia oblasts.[3] Ukrainian military officials noted that Russian forces launched most of their missiles from the Black and Caspian seas and the Engels airfield in Saratov Oblast.[4] Russian forces are likely intensifying their strikes on Kyiv to stir up societal discontent in the capital, but these missile attacks are unlikely to break Ukrainian will.

Russian strikes continue to pose a significant threat to Ukrainian civilians but are not improving the ability of Russian forces to conduct offensive operations in Ukraine. Ukraine’s state electricity transmission system operator Ukrenergo stated that restoration of electricity may be delayed by the December 16 strikes and announced a state of emergency aimed at electricity market suppliers.[5] Ukrenergo added that Ukraine’s United Energy System had to cut more than 50% of energy consumption as a result of the strikes.[6]

Russian National Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev made inflammatory but irrelevant comments in support of ongoing information operations that aim to weaken Western support for Ukraine. Medvedev published on December 16 a list of what he described as legitimate military targets, which included "the armed forces of other countries that have officially entered the war" in Ukraine.[7] Medvedev rhetorically questioned whether Western military aid to Ukraine means that NATO members have entered the war against Russia.[8] Medvedev did not explicitly state that the armed forces of NATO members are legitimate military targets nor that he was stating an official Russian position on legitimate targets in the war in Ukraine.[9] Medvedev likely made the comments in coordination with the large-scale Russian missile strikes in an attempt to weaken Western support for Ukraine by stoking fears of escalation between the West and Russia. Medvedev has previously made purposefully inflammatory comments in support of other information operations with the same aims.[10] Medvedev's past and current inflammatory rhetoric continues to be out of touch with actual Kremlin positions regarding the war in Ukraine. Russian forces have and will likely continue to target Western military equipment that Ukrainian forces have deployed in Ukraine, of course, but there is nothing surprising or remarkable in that fact.

Russian President Vladimir Putin will likely pressure Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko for Russian-Belarusian integration concessions at an upcoming December 19 meeting in Minsk—Putin’s first meeting with Lukashenko in Minsk since 2019.[11] Lukashenko and Putin reportedly will discuss Russian-Belarusian integration issues, unspecified military-political issues, and implementing Union State programs.[12] The Union State is a supranational agreement from 1997 with the stated goal of the federal integration of Russia and Belarus under a joint structure. The Kremlin seeks to use the Union State to establish Russian suzerainty (control) over Belarus.[13]

Lukashenko is already setting information conditions to deflect Russian integration demands as he has done for decades.[14] Lukashenko stressed that "nobody but us is ruling Belarus," and that Belarus is ready to build relations with Russia but that their ties "should always proceed from the premise that we are a sovereign and independent state."[15] It is unclear whether Putin will be successful in extracting his desired concessions from Lukashenko. Lukashenko has so far largely resisted intensified Russian integration demands and has refused to commit Belarusian forces to join Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Putin’s visit to Minsk could indicate that Putin is trying to set conditions for the newly assessed most dangerous course of action (MDCOA) that ISW reported on December 15: a renewed offensive against Ukraine—possibly against northern Ukraine or Kyiv—in winter 2023.[16] Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Belarusian Defense Minister Viktor Khrenin signed an unspecified document to further strengthen bilateral security ties—likely in the context of the Russian-Belarusian Union State—and increase Russian pressure on Belarus to further support the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in Minsk on December 3.[17] ISW’s December 15 MDCOA warning forecast about a potential Russian offensive against northern Ukraine in winter 2023 remains a worst-case scenario within the forecast cone. ISW currently assesses a Russian invasion of Ukraine from Belarus as low, but possible. Belarusian forces remain extremely unlikely to invade Ukraine without a Russian strike force. It is far from clear that Lukashenko would commit Belarusian forces to fight in Ukraine even alongside Russian troops. There are still no indicators that Russian forces are forming a strike force in Belarus.[18]

Putin and Lukashenko’s meeting will—at a minimum—advance a separate Russian information operation that seeks to break Ukrainian will and Western willingness to support Ukraine, however. This meeting will reinforce the Russian information operation designed to convince Ukrainians and Westerners that Russia may attack Ukraine from Belarus. Russia’s continued strikes against Kyiv, constant troop deployments to Belarus, and continued bellicose rhetoric are part of (and mutually reinforce) this information operation. The Kremlin is unlikely to break the Ukrainian will to fight. The Kremlin likely seeks to convince the West to accept a false fait accompli that Ukraine cannot materially alter the current front lines and that the war is effectively stalemated. ISW assesses that such a conclusion is inaccurate and that Ukraine stands a good chance of regaining considerable critical terrain in the coming months.

Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly ignored warnings about worst-case economic scenario assessments from senior Kremlin financial advisors prior to launching his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Unnamed sources told the Financial Times (FT) that the head of the Russian Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, and the head of Sberbank, German Gref, briefed a 39-page assessment to Putin outlining the long-term damage to the Russian economy if Russia recognized the independence of proxy republics in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts a month prior to the full-scale invasion.[19] FT sources noted that both Nabiullina and Gref spoke to Putin of their own initiative but were not brave enough to tell Putin that Russia risked a geopolitical disaster when he interrupted the brief to ask how Russia can prevent a worst-case scenario. Nabiullina and Gref specifically warned Putin that Western sanctions would set the Russian economy back by decades and negatively impact the Russian quality of life. Both Nabiullina and Gref reportedly were shocked when Putin launched the invasion on February 24 and indirectly expressed some discontent to their inner circles, despite implementing provisions to mitigate some negative impacts of sanctions during the first weeks of the war.

The report, if true, indicates that Putin had received some prognosis of the war’s risks and costs but decided to ignore them in favor of his maximalist goal of seizing Ukraine. It is unclear if Putin received and subsequently ignored similar reports from the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), but his engagement with Nabiullina and Gref shows that he had some awareness of the potential long-term risks of the war. Nabiullina's and Gref's reported hesitance to dissuade Putin also demonstrates the unbalanced power dynamic that may have prompted some Russian officials to play along with Putin’s bad decisions rather than remonstrating with him.

Russia is continuing to endure some economic challenges as a direct result of Putin’s war in Ukraine. FT reported that Nabiullina was able to protect the Russian economy from the worst-case scenario by undertaking provisions such as regulation of the exchange control during the first day of the war, but some war costs are likely catching up to the Kremlin. Russia’s Central Bank announced on December 16 that mobilization had sparked increasing manpower shortages across several industries in Russia.[20] The Central Bank report added that Russia has limited possibilities to expand its production as a result of shortages in the state labor market and noted that "unemployment hit a historic low." The costs of Putin’s war, including the human and labor cost of his force generation efforts, will continue to have a long-term effect on Russia’s economy, as ISW has previously assessed.[21]

Key Takeaways

Russian forces conducted another set of large-scale missile strikes throughout Ukraine and one of the largest missile attacks against Kyiv to date.
Russian strikes continue to pose a significant threat to Ukrainian civilians despite generating no improvement in the Russian ability to conduct offensive operations.
Dmitry Medvedev made inflammatory but irrelevant comments in support of ongoing information operations that aim to weaken Western support for Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin will likely pressure Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to support the Russian war in Ukraine further at a December 19 meeting in Minsk.
Lukashenko is already setting information conditions to deflect Russian integration demands.
Putin’s upcoming visit to Minsk could indicate that he is setting conditions for a new offensive from Belarusian territory.
Putin and Lukashenko’s meeting will likely advance a separate Russian information operation that seeks to break Ukrainian will and Western willingness to support Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly ignored worst-case scenario assessments of potential damage to the Russian economy prior to launching his full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Russia is continuing to face economic challenges as a direct result of the war in Ukraine.
Russian forces conducted counterattacks in the Svatove and Kreminna areas.
Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Bakhmut and Avdiivka-Donetsk City areas.
Russian forces continued to undertake defensive measures on the left (east) bank of the Dnipro River.
Russian officials will likely struggle to recruit additional contract servicemembers despite ongoing efforts to do so.
Russian occupation authorities continued seizing civilian infrastructure to treat wounded Russian servicemen and aid Russian forces operating in occupied territories.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

Ukrainian Counteroffensives—Eastern Ukraine
Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and one supporting effort);
Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
Russian Supporting Effort—Southern Axis
Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
Activities in Russian-occupied Areas

Ukrainian Counteroffensives (Ukrainian efforts to liberate Russian-occupied territories)

Eastern Ukraine: (Eastern Kharkiv Oblast-Western Luhansk Oblast)

Russian forces conducted counterattacks in the Svatove and Kreminna areas on December 16. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Novoselivske (14km northwest of Svatove) and Stelmakhivka (16km northwest of Svatove).[22] The Ukrainian General Staff also reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults within 17km north of Kreminna near Ploshchanka and Chervonopopivka and within 12km south of Kreminna near Bilohorivka, Luhansk Oblast.[23] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian and Russian forces continued fighting in positional battles on the western outskirts of Bilohorivka.[24] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces also destroyed Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups southwest of Kreminna near Terny, Donetsk Oblast, and Dibrova, Luhansk Oblast.[25] ISW previously assessed that Russian forces are likely conducting spoiling counterattacks in eastern Kharkiv and western Luhansk oblasts to preempt Ukrainian forces from increasing the pace of their eastern counteroffensive as conditions become more conducive for mechanized maneuver warfare in the winter.[26]

Russian forces continue to build defensive fortifications along the Svatove-Kreminna line as of December 16. The United Kingdom Ministry of Defense (UK MoD) reported on December 16 that Russian forces have continued to construct extensive defensive lines along the front line in eastern Ukraine, particularly around Svatove.[27] The UK MoD reported that the Russian defensive lines follow traditional entrenchment methods, which are likely to be vulnerable to modern, precision indirect strikes.[28]

Ukrainian forces continue to strike Russian rear areas in Luhansk Oblast. Russian and social media sources claimed that Ukrainian forces struck Russian rear areas in Kadiivka, Lantrativka, and Irmino in Luhansk Oblast on December 15 and 16.[29] A social media source claimed that there was an explosion at a weapons depot in Kadiivka.[30] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces struck a Russian ammunition depot in Irmino.[31]

Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine

Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Russian forces continued offensive operations around Bakhmut on December 16. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Bakhmut; within 26km northeast of Bakhmut near Vyimka, Yakovlivka , Soledar, and Bakhmutske; and within 21km south of Bakhmut near Klishchiivka, Andriivka, Kurdyumivka, Opytne, Ozarianivka, and Druzhba.[32] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces completely cleared Yakovlivka, which will help Russian forces to conduct assaults in the direction of Soledar.[33] Geolocated footage posted on December 16 shows Wagner Group units operating in central Yakovlivka, supporting this Russian claim.[34] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces consider holding Bakhmut a priority task over fears that losing the settlement would damage the current image of Ukrainian forces.[35] Geolocated footage posted on December 16 shows that Russian forces have made marginal advances west of Ozaranivka.[36]

Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area on December 16. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults within 17km north of Avdiivka near Novobakhmutivka and Oleksandropil, and within 37km south of Avdiivka near Nevelske, Marinka, Pobieda, and Novomykhailiivka.[37] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces conducted an assault near Vesele intending to cut a section of the N-20 highway.[38] Another Russian milblogger claimed that the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Peoples Militia's "Somali" and "Sparta" battalions and the 11th Regiment of the 1st Army Corps conducted assaults southwest of Avdiivka in the direction of Nataylove and Karlivka.[39] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces are focusing their efforts on capturing Ukrainian-held territory around Marinka.[40]

Russian forces reportedly continued defensive operations in western Donetsk Oblast on December 16. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) reported that Russian forces repelled a Ukrainian assault near Solodke, Donetsk Oblast (33km southwest of Donetsk City), and destroyed Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups near Novomayorske and Shevchenko in western Donetsk oblast.[41] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces continued routine indirect fire along the line of contact in Donetsk and eastern Zaporizhia oblasts.[42]

Supporting Effort—Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)

Russian forces continued to undertake defensive measures on the left (east) bank of the Dnipro River. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces deployed personnel from Krasnodar Krai to strengthen defensive lines and security for water supply facilities in Kherson Oblast and Crimea, such as the North Crimean Canal.[43] Sentinel-1 imagery also showed that Russian forces have accumulated a large amount of military equipment in Medvedivka in northeastern Crimea.[44] The Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Militia claimed to hold defensive positions in the area of the Kakhovka reservoir in Zaporizhia Oblast.[45]

Russian forces continued to shell Kherson, Dnipropetrovsk, and Zaporizhia oblasts.[46] Social media footage showed the aftermath of Russian artillery fire on residential buildings in Kherson City, and geolocated footage showed Russian forces mistakenly striking their former air-defense positions near the T2207 highway that Ukrainian forces previously destroyed in August.[47] Zaporizhia Oblast Office of General Prosecutor reported that Russian forces launched 21 missiles from S-300 air-defense systems at Zaporizhzhia City and surrounding settlements, which damaged the premises of an unspecified piece of critical infrastructure.[48]

Ukrainian forces continued to target Russian logistics in Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian strikes on December 14 wounded about 180 servicemen and destroyed up to 10 pieces of equipment in Tokmak, Zaporizhia Oblast.[49] The Ukrainian General Staff noted that Russian forces are operating mobile crematoria in Tokmak and that Ukrainian forces eliminated up to 30 Russian servicemen in Lazurne on the left bank of the Dnipro River.[50] Geolocated footage published on December 16 also reportedly showed the aftermath of a Ukrainian strike on Skadovsk.[51]

Note: ISW will report on activities in Kherson Oblast as part of the Southern Axis in this and subsequent updates. Ukraine’s counteroffensive in right-bank Kherson Oblast has accomplished its stated objectives, so ISW will not present a Southern Ukraine counteroffensive section until Ukrainian forces resume counteroffensives in southern Ukraine.

Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)

Russian officials will likely struggle to recruit additional contract servicemembers despite ongoing efforts and will likely continue to rely largely on conscripted and mobilized personnel. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on December 16 that Russian forces are continuing recruitment campaigns for contract servicemembers, particularly to fill positions in the once-elite 1st Guards Tank Army.[52] The 1st Guards Tank Army has been heavily degraded during the war and likely can no longer function in the elite strike force role that it once played in the Russian military; all maneuver elements of the 1st Guards Tank Army have taken heavy losses near Kharkiv, Sumy, and eastern Kyiv Oblast since February 2022.

Russian mobilized forces in Ukraine are likely showing an increased interest in surrendering to Ukrainian forces as they face winter weather without winter equipment. Russian opposition outlet Verstka reported on December 14 that searches in the Russian search engine Yandex related to surrender have increased dramatically since mid-November.[53] Verstka reported that users searched for phrases relating to surrender more than 121,000 times between November 14 and December 4, a period that coincides with reports of large-scale Russian losses and the arrival of additional mobilized personnel to the frontlines. By comparison, Yandex recorded around 19,000 surrender-related searches from October 24 to November 13.

St. Petersburg officials reportedly refused to allow the burial of Wagner Group servicemembers in cemeteries designated for Russian servicemembers, highlighting the disparities in the treatment of unofficial military formations in Russia. Wagner financier Yevgeniy Prigozhin commented on the burial scandal, noting that a deceased Wagner servicemember, Dmitry Menshikov, fought for his motherland as a volunteer in Donbas while St. Petersburg officials were "cowardly" hiding in their offices.[54] Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Defense Andrey Kartapolov also commented on the incident, noting that Wagner fighters are full-fledged participants of the "special military operation" and urging anyone debating this topic to "come to their senses."[55] Kartapolov’s statement may reflect some internal pushes in the Kremlin to officially legalize Wagner, given that Russian law prohibits private military companies in Russia.

Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of and annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian civilians into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)

Ukrainian sources reported on December 16 that Russian forces and occupation officials continued to seize and redirect civilian infrastructure to support Russian forces. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on December 16 that Russian occupation officials in occupied Donetsk Oblast have allocated all utility equipment and resources to the Russian military, leaving civilians without electricity and water.[56] The Ukrainian Resistance Center added that a hospital in Kreminna, Luhansk Oblast, has fully transitioned to only treating wounded Russian servicemen and that the Luhansk City Multidisciplinary Hospital No. 15 refuses to accept civilian patients, planning to fully transition to a military hospital by the end of December, 2022.[57]

Russian-backed Zaporizhia Oblast officials announced measures designed to eliminate Ukrainian cultural heritage on December 16. The head of the Zaporizhia Oblast occupation administration, Yevheny Balitsky, stated on December 16 that Russian occupation authorities will rename all streets, alleys, and parks in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast by the end of the year. Balitsky also stated that Russian-backed Zaporizhia Oblast authorities will restore more than 100 monuments dedicated to Russia’s "Great Heroes" that Ukrainian officials removed from 2014-2022.[58] Mariupol mayoral advisor Petro Andryushenko stated on December 16 that Russian occupation authorities have conducted a "diagnostic examination" in Mariupol schools to assess how well Mariupol students have learned the Russian language, the history of Moscow, general knowledge of Russia, and mathematics in the Russian language.[59]

Russian occupation authorities are continuing to intensify filtration measures to eliminate alleged political dissidents from occupied territories. Ukrainian publication Graty reported on December 16 that Russian occupation authorities are forcibly transferring Ukrainian political prisoners from Crimea to penal colonies in Russia.[60] Graty noted that Russian occupation officials are transferring Ukrainian activists and seven members of the "Crimean Solidarity" movement to prisons in the Republics of Dagestan and Mordovia, and Tambov, Tula, Novgorod, Ryazan, and Kostroma oblasts.

Ukrainian partisans continued to undermine the Russian occupation by helping Ukrainian forces destroy valuable Russian targets. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on December 16 that Ukrainian partisans helped to correct indirect fire (IDF) to destroy an unspecified Russian military base in occupied Luhansk Oblast, killing 20 Russian servicemembers and destroying eight pieces of Russian military equipment on December 13.[61]

Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.

[3] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02SEbDVNTxnqhiQB1XSQ... https://t.me/energoatom_ua/11136; https://t.me/energoatom_ua/11135; https://t.me/energoatom_ua/11133; https://suspilne dot media/339628-rf-moze-gotuvati-novij-nastup-es-pogodiv-devatij-paket-sankcij-proti-rosii-296-den-vijni-onlajn/; https://suspilne dot media/339628-rf-moze-gotuvati-novij-nastup-es-pogodiv-devatij-paket-sankcij-proti-rosii-296-den-vijni-onlajn/

[5] https://suspilne dot media/339628-rf-moze-gotuvati-novij-nastup-es-pogodiv-devatij-paket-sankcij-proti-rosii-296-den-vijni-onlajn/

[6] https://suspilne dot media/339628-rf-moze-gotuvati-novij-nastup-es-pogodiv-devatij-paket-sankcij-proti-rosii-296-den-vijni-onlajn/

[11] https://sputnik dot by/20190701/S-utra-i-do-samoy-nochi-kak-proshel-dolgozhdannyy-vizit-Putina-v-Minsk-1041838366.html; https://president.gov dot by/ru/events/aleksandr-lukashenko-19-dekabrya-provedet-peregovory-s-prezidentom-rossiyskoy-federacii-vladimirom-putinym

[12] https://president.gov dot by/ru/events/aleksandr-lukashenko-19-dekabrya-provedet-peregovory-s-prezidentom-rossiyskoy-federacii-vladimirom-putinym; https://news.zerkalo dot io/economics/28479.html

[15] https://tass dot com/world/1551691; http://www.business-gazeta dot ru/news/576390; https://www.belta dot by/president/view/lukashenko-suverenitet-i-nezavisimost-nezyblemy-a-belarus-nikogda-ne-budet-vragom-rossii-540411-2022/

[19] https://meduza dot io/feature/2022/12/16/oni-byli-dostatochno-hrabrymi-chtoby-poprosit-nachalnika-o-vstreche-no-im-vse-ravno-ne-udalos-otgovorit-ego; https://www.ft.com/content/fe5fe0ed-e5d4-474e-bb5a-10c9657285d2

[20] https://cbr dot ru/press/pr/?file=16122022_133000Key.htm

[56] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2022/12/16/na-donechchyni-gumanitarna-kryza-okupanty-napravlyayut-vsi-resursy-na-zabezpechennya-rosijskyh-vijskovyh/

[57] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2022/12/16/okupanty-perevodyat-usi-likarni-luganshhyny-na-obslugovuvannya-vijskovyh-rf/

[60] https://meduza dot io/news/2022/12/16/grati-osuzhdennyh-zhiteley-kryma-etapiruyut-za-predely-poluostrova;

[61] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2022/12/16/pidpillya-dopomoglo-znyzyty-bazu-okupantiv-na-luganshhyni/

understandingwar.org

2. The Sleeping Japanese Giant Awakes

""History is on speed dial." I think I will borrow that line.

The Sleeping Japanese Giant Awakes

Tokyo rolls out the most important shift in defense strategy and spending since World War II.

By The Editorial BoardFollow

Dec. 16, 2022 6:38 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-sleeping-japanese-giant-awakes-tokyo-defense-strategy-fumio-kishida-11671227810?mod=flipboard

History is on speed-dial these days, and the latest seismic shift is Japan’s announcement Friday of a new defense strategy and the spending to implement it. This is an historic change, and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida deserves credit for taking the political risk to educate his country about the growing threats from China and North Korea and how to deter them.

Tokyo said it will increase defense spending to 2% of the economy by 2027, double the roughly 1% now. The accompanying strategy documents are right to call the current moment “the most severe and complex security environment” since the end of World War II.

The strategy explicitly mentions the “challenge” from Beijing. Recall that five Chinese ballistic missiles landed in Japan’s nearby waters in August. North Korea routinely lobs missiles over the islands. Tokyo says it will prepare “for the worst-case scenario.”

Notably, the strategy calls for acquiring longer-range missiles that can strike enemy launch-sites and ships, perhaps including the purchase of some 500 U.S.-made Tomahawk cruise missiles. This is the kind of capability that forces other countries to think twice before attacking a sovereign neighbor.

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Also welcome is the focus on the vulnerability of East Asia’s first island chain, from southern Japan to Taiwan. China is intensifying “military activities around Taiwan,” the strategy says, and “the overall military balance between China and Taiwan” is moving rapidly in China’s favor. The fate of Taiwan matters enormously to Japan’s ability to defend itself, especially its peripheral islands.

The documents promise to procure more naval vessels and fighter aircraft, as well as more investment in cyber. All of this will complement American efforts to rearm, assuming the U.S. can follow through on priorities such as expanding the Navy’s attack submarine inventory, building more long-range munitions, and putting these assets in the Pacific. One start would be restoring permanent U.S. fighters at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa.

Beijing predictably railed against Japan’s new strategy, but it has itself to blame. It hasn’t controlled its proxy North Korea’s missile launches and nuclear program. Neighbors are alarmed by its aggressive moves in the East and South China seas, border skirmishes with India, bullying of Australia and others, and especially threats against Taiwan. As the world’s third-largest economy, Japan has the wealth to do something to counter China.

The new strategy amounts to a revolution in Japanese domestic politics, essentially transcending its postwar pacifist constitution. It builds on the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s vision of a Japan that sheds its postwar reluctance to build a strong military. Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, says a political shift of this magnitude might normally take a decade to accomplish. But the public mood changed rapidly amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s increasing aggression.

The new strategy anchors Japan firmly in the U.S. alliance. Tokyo is America’s most important ally, and a militarily stronger Japan will enhance deterrence in the Pacific.

WSJ Opinion: Wokeism in the Military

Volodymyr Zelensky and his generals explain why the war hangs in the balance

Our interviews with the men shaping Ukraine’s response to Russia’s aggression

The Economist

TWO BOOKS stand out in the stacks resting on the desk of Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president. One is a collection of essays on Ukrainian history by Mykhailo Hrushevsky, a 19th-century thinker who helped forge the country’s national identity. The second is “Hitler and Stalin: the Tyrants and the Second World War”, by Laurence Rees, an English historian. The books hint not only at the president’s outlook, but also his changed circumstances.

When The Economist last spoke to Mr Zelensky, in March, the conversation took place in a situation room. He was living in a secret bunker full of instant noodles and a sense of existential peril. Now he is back in his old wood-panelled office in central Kyiv. An Oscar statuette, lent for good luck by Sean Penn, a Hollywood actor, stands on a shelf. Though sandbags and tank traps remain, gone is the adrenalin of those early weeks. Mr Zelensky’s routine typifies the change. At 6am each morning he dons his reading glasses and flicks through 20 or so pages of each book.

Mr Rees’s study of Hitler and Stalin, two men who swallowed swathes of Europe, hints at how Mr Zelensky views Vladimir Putin, his Russian counterpart. Hrushevsky’s writing emphasises the importance of popular forces in Ukrainian history. Mr Zelensky’s war aims reflect both thoughts. “People do not want to compromise on territory,” he says, warning that allowing the conflict to be “frozen” with any Ukrainian land in Russian hands would simply embolden Mr Putin. “And that is why it is very important…to go to our borders from 1991.” That includes not just the territory grabbed by Russia this year, but also Crimea, which it seized and annexed in 2014, and the parts of the Donbas region overrun by Russian proxies at the same time.

In recent days The Economist has interviewed the three men at the crux of Ukraine’s war effort. One is Mr Zelensky. The second is General Valery Zaluzhny, who has served as the country’s top soldier for the past year and a half. The third is Colonel-General Oleksandr Syrsky, the head of Ukraine’s ground forces, who masterminded the defence of Kyiv in the spring and Ukraine’s spectacular counter-offensive in Kharkiv province in September. All three men emphasised that the outcome of the war hinges on the next few months. They are convinced that Russia is readying another big offensive, to begin as soon as January. Whether Ukraine launches a pre-emptive strike of its own or waits to counter-attack, how it garners and distributes its forces, how much ammunition and equipment it amasses in the coming weeks and months—these looming decisions will determine their country’s future.

Ukraine enjoyed a triumphant autumn. General Syrsky’s lightning advance through Kharkiv prompted Mr Putin to appoint a new commander and conscript 300,000 soldiers. So precarious was Russia’s position in October that its generals began discussing nuclear options. In November Ukrainian forces walked into Kherson city. “This is the beginning of the end of the war,” declared Mr Zelensky as he strolled through the newly liberated city. “We are step by step coming to all the temporarily occupied territories.”

But neither General Zaluzhny nor General Syrsky sounds triumphant. One reason is the escalating air war. Russia has been pounding Ukraine’s power stations and grid with drones and missiles almost every week since October, causing long and frequent blackouts. Though Russia is running short of precision-guided missiles, in recent weeks it is thought to have offered Iran fighter jets and helicopters in exchange for thousands of drones and, perhaps, ballistic missiles.

“It seems to me we are on the edge,” warns General Zaluzhny. More big attacks could completely disable the grid. “That is when soldiers’ wives and children start freezing,” he says. “What kind of mood will the fighters be in? Without water, light and heat, can we talk about preparing reserves to keep fighting?” On December 13th American officials said that they were nearing a decision to give Patriot air-defence batteries to Ukraine, which, unlike the systems sent so far, are capable of shooting down ballistic missiles.

A second challenge is the fighting currently under way in Donbas, most notably around the town of Bakhmut. General Syrsky, who arrives at the interview in eastern Ukraine in fatigues, his face puffy from sleep deprivation, says that Russia’s tactics there have changed under the command of Sergei Surovikin, who took charge in October. The Wagner group, a mercenary outfit that is better equipped than Russia’s regular army, fights in the first echelon. Troops from the Russian republic of Chechnya and other regulars are in the rear. But whereas these forces once fought separately, today they co-operate in detachments of 900 soldiers or more, moving largely on foot.

Bakhmut is not an especially strategic location. Although it lies on the road to Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, two biggish cities (see map), Ukraine has several more defensive lines to fall back on in that direction. What is more, Russia lacks the manpower to exploit a breakthrough. The point of its relentless onslaught on Bakhmut, the generals believe, is to pin down or “fix” Ukrainian units so that they cannot be used to bolster offensives in Luhansk province to the north. “Now the enemy is trying to seize the initiative from us,” says General Syrsky. “He is trying to force us to go completely on the defensive.”

Ukraine also faces a renewed threat from Belarus, which began big military exercises in the summer and more recently updated its draft register. On December 3rd Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s defence minister, visited Minsk, the Belarusian capital, to discuss military co-operation. Western officials say that Belarus has probably given too much material support to Russian units to enter the fray itself, but the aim of this activity is probably to fix Ukrainian forces in the north, in case Kyiv is attacked again, and so prevent them from being used in any new offensive.

The third challenge is the most serious. Russia’s mobilisation effort has been widely disparaged, with countless stories of inadequate kit and disgruntled conscripts. Ukraine’s general staff and its Western partners are more wary. “We all know that the quality is poor and that they lack equipment,” says Kusti Salm of Estonia’s defence ministry. “But the fact that they can mobilise so fast is an early-warning dilemma for Ukraine and ultimately for NATO.” Schemes run by Britain and the European Union can train around 30,000 Ukrainian troops in 18 months, he says. Russia has been able to conjure up five times as many new soldiers in a fraction of the time.

“Russian mobilisation has worked,” says General Zaluzhny. “A tsar tells them to go to war, and they go to war.” General Syrsky agrees: “The enemy shouldn’t be discounted. They are not weak…and they have very great potential in terms of manpower.” He gives the example of how Russian recruits, equipped only with small arms, successfully slowed down Ukrainian attacks in Kreminna and Svatove in Luhansk province—though the autumn mud helped. Mobilisation has also allowed Russia to rotate its forces on and off the front lines more frequently, he says, allowing them to rest and recuperate. “In this regard, they have an advantage.”

But the main reason Russia has dragooned so many young men, the generals believe, is to go back on the offensive for the first time since its bid to overrun Donbas fizzled out in the summer. “Just as in [the second world war]…somewhere beyond the Urals they are preparing new resources,” says General Zaluzhny, referring to the Soviet decision to move the defence industry east, beyond the range of Nazi bombers. “They are 100% being prepared.” A major Russian attack could come “in February, at best in March and at worst at the end of January”, he says. And it could come anywhere, he warns: in Donbas, where Mr Putin is eager to capture the remainder of Donetsk province; in the south, towards the city of Dnipro; even towards Kyiv itself. In fact a fresh assault on the capital is inevitable, he reckons: “I have no doubt they will have another go at Kyiv.”

That means that the war has become a race to re-arm. For Ukraine, that sets up a painful trade-off between the present and the future. Fighting will slow down over winter, but it will not stop. A rocket attack on barracks used by the Wagner group in the city of Melitopol on December 10th was a reminder of how Ukraine can use HIMARS launchers supplied by America to wear down Russian forces in the coming months. But in Donbas the war remains one of muddy trenches, relentless shelling and bloody infantry combat.

The temptation is to send in reserves. A wiser strategy is to hold them back. “I know how many combat units I have right now, how many combat units I have to create by the end of the year—and, most important, not to touch them in any way now. No matter how hard it is,” says General Zaluzhny. His agonising decision is redolent of the British commanders who held back Spitfire fighter planes as France suffered a German onslaught in 1940. “May the soldiers in the trenches forgive me,” says General Zaluzhny. “It’s more important to focus on the accumulation of resources right now for the more protracted and heavier battles that may begin next year.”

Ukraine has enough men under arms—more than 700,000 in uniform, in one form or another, of whom more than 200,000 are trained for combat. But materiel is in short supply. Ammunition is crucial, says General Syrsky. “Artillery plays a decisive role in this war,” he notes. “Therefore, everything really depends on the amount of supplies, and this determines the success of the battle in many cases.” General Zaluzhny, who is raising a new army corps, reels off a wishlist. “I know that I can beat this enemy,” he says. “But I need resources. I need 300 tanks, 600-700 IFVs [infantry fighting vehicles], 500 Howitzers.” The incremental arsenal he is seeking is bigger than the total armoured forces of most European armies.

Ukraine’s partners are speeding up efforts to repair and refurbish old and damaged equipment to return it to the field faster, in part by teaching Ukraine to fix it as close to the front lines as possible. They are also accelerating the manufacture of weapons to meet growing demand from Ukraine and their own armed forces.

On December 6th America’s Congress agreed in principle to let the Pentagon buy 864,000 rounds of 155mm artillery shells, more than 12,000 GPS-guided Excalibur shells and 106,000 GPS-guided GMLRS rockets for HIMARS—theoretically enough to sustain Ukraine’s most intense rate of fire for five months non-stop. But this will be produced over a number of years, not in time for a spring offensive.

Russia has similar problems. It will run out of “fully serviceable” munitions early next year, says an American official, forcing it to use badly maintained stocks and suppliers like North Korea. Its shell shortages are “critical”, said Admiral Tony Radakin, Britain’s defence chief, on September 14th. “Their ability to conduct successful offensive ground operations is rapidly diminishing.” But Mr Putin’s gamble is that he can churn out sub-par shells longer than America and Europe can provide Ukraine with shiny new ones. Ukraine’s allies are struggling to keep it well supplied, acknowledges General Zaluzhny. He recalls telling Admiral Radakin that the British Army fired a million shells in the first world war (in fact Britain fired 1.5m at the Somme alone). “We will lose Europe,” came the reply. “We will have nothing to live on if you fire that many shells.”

Supply also affects strategy. The choices vexing Mr Zelensky and his generals carry an echo of those that arise in every protracted conflict. In 1943, for instance, Germany was on the defensive, but the Allies disagreed over where and when to press their advantage. Britain wanted to strike in Italy and the Mediterranean. America and the Soviet Union preferred an invasion of France. Post-war considerations played a role, too. Britain wanted to attack the Balkans to forestall Soviet domination of the area. Ukraine’s high command is grappling with the same sort of questions today, but from a much more parlous position.

Not out of the woods

Timing is crucial. Feeding in reserves piecemeal is a good way to destroy lots of manpower slowly, much as Russia did in Donbas over the summer. Attack too early and Ukraine will not have enough trained and equipped units. “With this kind of resource I can’t conduct new big operations, even though we are working on one right now,” says General Zaluzhny. But leave it too late, and Russia may strike first, pinning down Ukrainian forces.

Long-term occupation is already poisoning Ukrainian minds, warns Mr Zelensky: “I must admit that this propaganda model of the Kremlin—it works.” Ukrainians in the occupied territories, he says, are like astronauts who cannot take off heavy helmets—limiting what they can see to unrelenting disinformation. “It’s a little scary to see how the de-occupied cities have changed when we go to some of these towns,” he says. A strategy to bleed Russia slowly is therefore off the table. “The main thing is not to be afraid of this enemy,” says General Zaluzhny. “It can be fought, it must be fought today, here and now. And in no way should it be postponed till tomorrow, because there will be problems.”

Another question is where to strike. The most tempting option for Ukraine is to build up a big force to drive south towards the Sea of Azov. That would rupture the “land bridge” of occupied territory that connects Russia to Crimea. Advancing 84km south through Zaporizhia province to Melitopol would suffice, says General Zaluzhny, because it would put HIMARS launchers within range of Russian supply lines to the peninsula, making the enemy’s positions untenable. Ukrainian officials say that this approach was discussed and war-gamed earlier in the year with General Mark Milley, America’s top soldier, and Lieutenant-General Chris Donahue, commander of America’s 18th Airborne Corps, which co-ordinated Western training and equipment for Ukraine until recently.

Ukraine ruled out an offensive in Zaporizhia province in the summer, preferring to focus on the city of Kherson because of a lack of resources. Such an attack would have other drawbacks, too. Russia has strengthened its position in the south since November, digging new trenches, building multiple lines of defence and redeploying forces that retreated from Kherson that month. It is also the most predictable course of action.

“All of our successes are due to the fact that we never go head-on,” notes General Syrsky. His gains in Kharkiv owed much to deception and surprise. During the Kherson offensive, commanders were told to plan diversionary action. That drew his attention to weak points in the Russian line around Izyum. He collected reserves by withdrawing individual battalions from different brigades, and assembling them quietly without being spotted. Repeating that trick might require identifying Russian vulnerabilities in less strategic parts of the front, such as around Svatove or south of Donetsk. Another option is to conduct big raids: quick thrusts intended to harass, damage and destroy, rather than hold ground. “There is an antidote for every poison,” notes General Syrsky.

The military choices—spring or summer, Zaporizhia or Donbas—depend on many factors, from supplies of Western arms, to weather, to Russia’s own choices. Perhaps most important, it depends on Ukraine’s strategy to end the war. Mr Zelensky insists that the only way to conclude it is a complete Russian retreat, both from land seized this year and from territory occupied since 2014. “The only difference I talk about is the one between us driving them out or them withdrawing,” says Mr Zelensky. “If he [Mr Putin] now withdraws to the 1991 borders then the possible path of diplomats will begin. That is who can really turn the war from a military path to a diplomatic one. Only he can do it.”

In private, however, Ukrainian and Western officials admit there may be other outcomes. “We can and should take a lot more territory,” General Zaluzhny insists. But he obliquely acknowledges the possibility that Russian advances might prove stronger than expected, or Ukrainian ones weaker, by saying, “It is not yet time to appeal to Ukrainian soldiers in the way that Mannerheim appealed to Finnish soldiers.” He is referring to a speech which Finland’s top general delivered to troops in 1940 after a harsh peace deal which ceded land to the Soviet Union.

Even steady Ukrainian advances are likely to culminate in diplomacy. Some Ukrainian generals think that the aim of an offensive should not just be liberating territory, but doing so in a way that induces Mr Putin to cut a deal. A European official familiar with Ukrainian planning says that the ideal operation would be one that persuaded Mr Putin that the war was unwinnable, and that prolonging it would risk even his pre-war holdings—Crimea and a third of Donbas. Like all coercive strategies, such an attack would rely on restraint as much as aggression, by threatening Crimea, but also possibly forgoing it.

Indeed, as Ukraine advances, its partners may worry increasingly about the risk of nuclear escalation and limit their support accordingly. On December 5th Antony Blinken, America’s secretary of state, said that America’s goal was to give Ukraine the means to “take back territory that’s been seized from it since February 24th”.

But a war which revolves around Ukraine’s identity as much as its territory—indeed one which has forged that identity anew, far more strongly than before—has unleashed forces beyond the control of even Mr Zelensky, perhaps the most popular leader in the world today. Over 95% of his citizens want to liberate the entirety of Ukraine, he notes. Hatred of Russia runs deep. “It is a tragedy for families who lost children…That’s why people hate. They don’t want compromises.” ■

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis.

The Economist

4. Opinion | Japan is building up its military. Good.

The times they are a changing.

Opinion | Japan is building up its military. Good.

The Washington Post · by Henry Olsen · December 16, 2022

Japan announced on Friday that it plans to double its defense spending by 2027. That’s good. We will need it if the United States and its democratic allies are to contain China’s aggression.

Japan has long punched below its weight in global affairs. Despite its massive economy, still the world’s third largest, its tiny military has hobbled its ability to project power.

This was by design. Due to Japan’s humiliating defeat in World War II, combined with its neighbors’ resentment stemming from its aggressive war of conquest, the island nation adopted a pacifist sentiment that persists to this day. Even during the Cold War, Japan spent only about 1 percent of its gross domestic product on self-defense forces.

That’s now going to change. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida says Japan will raise that to 2 percent of GDP in five years. This will fund items such as increased cyberdefense capabilities and the conversion of two ships into small aircraft carriers, Japan’s first since World War II. It will also include the purchase of U.S. Tomahawk missiles and the upgrading of Japanese-produced missiles so they can strike targets as far away as China. Together, these weapons will give Japan its first truly offensive military capability in nearly 80 years.

It’s clear why Japan is making such a radical shift: the de facto alliance among Russia, China and North Korea. Each nation has either invaded a peaceful neighbor or engaged in military buildups and saber-rattling in recent years. China has often implicitly threatened Japan should it move to defend Taiwan, including airing a video on the Chinese platform Xigua that threatened to launch a nuclear war. The since-deleted video was clearly intended to frighten Japan, which remains the only nation to have suffered a nuclear attack. Instead, the bullying caused the opposite reaction.

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Americans should applaud Japan’s courage. While the United States remains the backbone of any effective pan-Asian defense scheme, it cannot shoulder the burden alone. The United States has global commitments — and cannot abandon them to put all of its might in the Pacific.

The sheer size of the potential theater of operations also works against a purely U.S. defense shield. China will possess the strategic initiative if it attacks, and it could move against U.S. allies in any direction in the Western Pacific. Nearly 3,400 miles separate Japan, our northernmost ally, from Australia in the south. That means the United States must rely on those nations’ defenses if a containment strategy has any hope of working.

Some have long feared that a revitalized Japanese military would empower a return to aggressive behavior. That’s not likely, and the small risk that might arise in the long run pales in comparison to the risk of ignoring China’s current militant behavior. Plus, Japan relies on the United States for most of its most sophisticated weapons, as the purchase of Tomahawks shows. It will also purchase U.S.-made F-35 aircraft to supply its air force rather than produce its own. No nation so dependent on another would dare act against its ally’s interests.

Japan is also working with its allies to develop trust and fighting capacity. Its navy engaged in drills this year with ships from the United States and Britain. It also signed a military cooperation agreement with Australia this October, the first such treaty it has ever entered aside from the mutual defense pact it has with the United States. Japan and Australia will now hold joint military drills, allowing them to learn how to fight alongside one another in any future conflict with China. This also enhances U.S. security, as Japanese-Australian joint capability could help counter any Chinese assault if the United States is distracted elsewhere.

China will be upset about Japan’s announcement, but it has no one to blame but itself. Fifteen years ago, the world watched China’s rapid economic development believing that a richer China meant a richer world. Most in the West hoped that China would join the democratic world as it progressed. Instead, China chose to reassert its traditional claim of hegemony as the world’s “Middle Kingdom” — the center of civilization to which all other nations must bow. That claim is in direct conflict with the rules-based global order the United States and its democratic allies desire. Japan’s move is simply another indication that members of that order are willing to fight to preserve it.

Chinese aggression has forced the world into interesting times. That’s unfortunate, but better to recognize that reality and prepare to fight than blind oneself to the threat and surrender. We should welcome Japan’s commitment with open arms.

The Washington Post · by Henry Olsen · December 16, 2022

5. CPP founder Joma Sison dies (Communist Party of the Philippines)

The end of (communist) history in the Philippines? Doubtful. I am sure his legacy will live on.

CPP founder Joma Sison dies

DEC 17, 2022 9:58 AM PHT

RAPPLER.COM

rappler.com · by Eriberto, T. · December 17, 2022

MANILA, Philippines – Jose Maria “Joma” Sison, founding chair of the Communist Party of the Philippines, has died, the CPP announcement on Saturday, December 17. He was 83.

CPP spokesperson Marco Valbuena said in a statement that Sison died around 8:40 pm (Philippine time) on Friday, December 16, after two weeks of hospital confinement in Utrecht, the Netherlands. His death came barely 10 days before the 54th founding anniversary of the CPP on December 26.

“The entire Communist Party of the Philippines gives the highest possible tribute to its founding chairman, great Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thinker, patriot, internationalist, and revolutionary leader,” Valbuena said.

“Even as we mourn, we vow continue to give all our strength and determination to carry the revolution forward guided by the memory and teachings of the people’s beloved Ka Joma,” he added.

Sison lived in the Netherlands as a political refugee since 1987.

Sison founded the Maoist CPP in 1969, becoming one of the most significant political figures in the Philippines. The anti-subversion law, passed in 1957, declared the CPP and any affiliation to it illegal. Then-president Fidel Ramos repealed the law around four decades later, as peace talks with the National Democratic Front (NDF) began.

From prison to self-exile

Sison was among the political prisoners released by then-president Corazon Aquino in 1986, after the EDSA People Power Revolution that ousted dictator Ferdinand Marcos. He then left Manila for a lecture tour of Asia and Europe but was relentless in his attacks against Aquino, prompting her government to cancel his passport while he was in the Netherlands.

Retired general Jose T. Almonte said in a 2002 Newsbreak magazine interview that Sison at the time had asked him to convey his message to Aquino, “He asked me to tell Cory – as a matter of courtesy because she was the one who released him – that he was not returning to the Philippines and that he would lead the revolution from abroad.”

While he led one of the world’s longest running insurgencies, Sison also played a key role in its bitter split in the early 1990s that turned the communist movement into several factions, a shadow of its old self.

Must Read

Joma Sison: Mao in Utrecht

In a party document, he ordered the cadres and guerrillas to return to basics and scoffed at the “military adventurism” that saw the expansion of the New People’s Army in the mid-1980s to early 1990s, such as the execution of high-profile attacks against government officials, military officers, government installations, including the assassination of an US Colonel James Rowe in 1989.

When then-retired general Fidel Ramos got elected president in 1992, he waved the olive branch of peace to Sison and his party through his key ally then, Speaker Jose de Venecia Jr.

Sison told Newsbreak in a 2002 interview from Utrecht that it was when De Venecia ran for president in 1998 that he started to seriously consider coming home to sign a peace pact with the government. “I was already issued a Philippine passport,” he recalled, adding however that the “hawks” in the Ramos government managed to “sabotage” the plan.

While dangling peace, Ramos also mounted a massive intelligence operation against the guerrillas from 1992 to 1998, which exploited their internal squabbles and infiltrated their top units – leading to the arrests of nearly the entire leadership of the CPP and what Ramos would then describe as the “irreversible decline” of the communist movement.

But the NPA managed to bounce back during the watch of of then-president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, taking advantage of public discontent toward her through rapid organizing among the youth. (READ: War with the NPA, war without end)

Sison and Duterte

Sison broached the possibility of coming home following the election of Rodrigo Duterte in 2016, saying at the time, “The prospects (for peace talks) seem to be bright at the moment.” Sison was Duterte’s teacher at Lyceum University in the 1960s.

During the 2016 campaign, Sison and Duterte even had a video call and the two agreed to a ceasefire between government and communist rebels if Duterte won the presidency. The first few months of the Duterte presidency saw NDF consultants released from detention to join the peace negotiations in Oslo, Norway.

Duterte’s seeming romance with communist rebels was short-lived. By his second year in office, his government started the formal process of declaring the CPP-NPA as a “terrorist organization” (which a Manila court junked in September 2022). Later, he would ridicule Sison in public addresses, while Sison would call Duterte the “No. 1 terrorist” in the Philippines.

Vilification against the CPP-NPA was particularly revived during the administrations of Rodrigo Duterte and Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The Duterte administration had created the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, which led the crackdown on progressive groups by red-tagging them mostly on social media.

Human rights activists, students, journalists, and other critical voices have been red-tagged by the government in its anti-insurgency campaign, leading to killings of such individuals and a chilling effect on opposing forces. – With reports from Michelle Abad/Rappler.com

rappler.com · by Eriberto, T. · December 17, 2022

6. Secretary Blinken Launches the Office of China Coordination

Secretary Blinken Launches the Office of China Coordination - United States Department of State

state.gov · by Office of the Spokesperson

Home Office of the Spokesperson Press Releases...Secretary Blinken Launches the Office of China Coordination

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Secretary Blinken Launches the Office of China Coordination

Media Note

December 16, 2022

Today Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken presided over the launch of the new Office of China Coordination, informally known as China House.

China House will ensure the U.S. government is able to responsibly manage our competition with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and advance our vision for an open, inclusive international system. Our goal in creating China House is to help deliver on elements of the Administration’s approach to the PRC.

China House is a key component of the Secretary’s modernization agenda, which is focused on equipping the Department to meet the challenges and seize the opportunities of the decade ahead. The Secretary and Department leadership are committed to ensuring we have the talent, tools, and resources to successfully execute U.S. policy and strategy towards the PRC as the most complex and consequential geopolitical challenge we face.

As the Secretary noted in his remarks this morning, China House brings together a group of China experts from throughout the Department and beyond it to work shoulder to shoulder with colleagues from every regional bureau and experts in international security, economics, technology, multilateral diplomacy, and strategic communications. It will serve the entire Department.

Improved coordination means nimbler and more consistent policy from the State Department. It means we are better positioned to work with our allies and partners and to engage even more deeply with every country with which the Department works.

For inquiries on this new office, please contact: EAP-Press@state.gov

state.gov · by Office of the Spokesperson

7. Biden State Department launches 'China House' initiative, says Beijing is 'most complex' challenge

CHINA Published December 16, 2022 5:24pm EST

Biden State Department launches 'China House' initiative, says Beijing is 'most complex' challenge

foxnews.com · by Brooke Singman | Fox News

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The Biden administration on Friday launched the "China House," a new office of coordination to ensure the federal government is able to "responsibly manage" competition between the U.S. and China, which the State Department said is the "most complex and consequential geopolitical challenge we face."

Secretary of State Antony Blinken presided over the launch of the new Office of China Coordination — informally known as "China House" — which is set to advance the Biden administration’s "vision for an open, inclusive international system."

The State Department said the goal of the initiative is to "help deliver on elements of the administration’s approach to the PRC (People's Republic of China)."

WHITE HOUSE SAYS US, CHINA DIPLOMATIC CHANNELS MAY 'EXPAND' FOLLOWING BIDEN, XI MEETING

The State Department described "China House" as a key component in Blinken’s "modernization agenda," which is focused on ensuring the agency is prepared to meet challenges of the next decade.

"The Secretary and Department leadership are committed to ensuring we have the talent, tools, and resources to successfully execute U.S. policy and strategy towards the PRC as the most complex and consequential geopolitical challenge we face," the State Department said Friday.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the new China policy office will help manage the U.S.' most "complex" foreign relations. (Kevin Lamarque, Pool via AP)

The office will bring together China experts from throughout the State Department and security officials.

The creation of the office comes after President Biden met with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G-20 summit last month.

"We are encouraged that diplomatic channels of communication not only will stay open, but potentially expand," White House National Security Council strategic communications coordinator John Kirby said last week, noting that there are plans for Blinken to travel to Beijing.

Blinken said last month he will travel to China early next year to discuss bilateral issues and maintain open lines of communication following Biden and Xi's meeting, the first time the two leaders met in person since Biden became president.

VP HARRIS, CHINA'S XI MEET TO 'KEEP LINES OF COMMUNICATION OPEN'

Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Biden shake hands as they meet on the sidelines of the G20 leaders' summit in Bali, Indonesia, on Nov. 14, 2022. (REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)

A readout from the White House after the meeting said the two "exchanged views on key regional and global challenges," such as Russia’s aggression and threats of nuclear warfare. However, neither Beijing nor Washington made mention of whether any developments were made regarding their differences of opinion when it comes to the war in Ukraine.

China had suspended communications with the U.S. on key international issues over the summer in retaliation for the congressional delegation visit to Taiwan led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. At the time, the Chinese Communist Party announced it canceled all discussions of climate change, drug networks and military action with the U.S.

The meeting in Indonesia between the two leaders, while reopening communications, did not amount to a "reset" in U.S.-China relations, Kirby said last month.

US-AFRICA LEADERS SUMMIT: WASHINGTON ‘PLAYING CATCH-UP’ WITH RUSSIA AND CHINA

"There are still tensions. There are still things we do not agree with the Chinese about," Kirby said at the time, noting that the U.S. and China need to "balance" their competing agendas.

Biden administration officials have warned of the national security threat China poses to the U.S.

Chinese President Xi Jinping met with President Biden in Indonesia after China had suspended talks with the U.S. over Taiwan. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

FBI Director Christopher Wray has said China poses "the biggest long-term threat" to U.S. economic and national security.

Intelligence community officials have warned that state and local leaders are at "risk" of being "manipulated" to support "hidden" agendas by the Chinese Communist Party as China seeks to target officials outside of Washington to lobby for Beijing-friendly policies at the federal level.

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CIA Director William Burns has also warned that China is "the most profound test the CIA has ever faced," calling Beijing a "formidable competitor lacking in neither ambition nor capability."

Last year, the CIA created the China Mission Center in order to counter Beijing and "best position" the agency to address current and future national security challenges posed by China.

Brooke Singman is a Fox News Digital politics reporter. You can reach her at Brooke.Singman@Fox.com or @BrookeSingman on Twitter.

foxnews.com · by Brooke Singman | Fox News

8. The Saudi-China Deal Tells Us What Autocracies Want From Each Other

Excerpts:

More broadly, he said, “While the democracy-vs.-autocracy framework makes for a good bumper sticker and does distinguish the United States and its closest allies from revisionist autocracies like Russia and China, there is a gray area concerning other autocracies like the Gulf monarchies. It’s possible that the Biden administration’s blunt democracy-vs.-autocracy rhetoric may have helped push Saudi Arabia toward China.”

Not every U.S. ally is a democracy, CSIS’ Allen said.

“The United States has to balance emphasizing issues that help draw it closer to European and other allies vs. emphasizing issues that might help reduce the risk of China increasing its influence among some U.S. allies and partners.”

The U.S. has taken some steps to better manage that messiness. Said Kroenig, the new National Security Strategy released in October provided “helpful clarity and nuance regarding the administration’s democracy-vs.-autocracy framing, saying that the real problem is revisionist autocracies like Russia, China, and Iran, rather than all autocracies.”

The Saudi-China Deal Tells Us What Autocracies Want From Each Other

Biden’s blunt democracy-vs.-autocracy rhetoric may be pushing U.S. security partners toward Beijing.

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

The new strategic-partnership agreement between China and Saudi Arabia illustrates how autocracies are finding common cause in resisting Western pressure on human rights, even if they sometimes find themselves on opposite sides of a conflict.

The agreement—between China, which is aligned with Russia, and Saudi Arabia, a bitter rival of Iran—was signed the same week that White House and Pentagon officials warned of growing military ties between Moscow and Tehran.

But Beijing and Riyadh’s mutual interest can be seen in the memorandum of understanding that will lead Chinese telecom giant Huawei to provide the Saudi Arabian government with cloud computing capabilities and other IT services. The United States has long warned that Huawei products could enable the Chinese government to steal information from their users. But the Saudi government has few other options for technology, which it uses to track dissent inside and outside of the country. It’s the sort of thing that Western technology companies try to avoid, out of fear of public backlash. China meanwhile sees Saudi Arabia as a potential source of funding and fuel.

But China wants more than IT purchase orders; it wants venture capital, said Greg Allen, the director of the Artificial Intelligence Governance Project and a senior fellow in the Strategic Technologies Program at CSIS.

“One important aspect of China’s overtures toward Saudi Arabia is China’s concern that United States venture capital investments—which have been important sources of capital and expertise for China’s technology sector—are drying up. The U.S. is currently considering new restrictions on outbound investments toward China. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund has been plowing massive investments into technology companies in an attempt to diversify the Saudi economy away from fossil fuels, and China likely is exploring whether Saudi Arabia can help replace the U.S. as an investor. However, Saudi technology investments have a mixed track record at best.”

U.S. President Joe Biden and other administration officials have framed the future of foreign policy as a competition between democratic and nondemocratic governments. While the Biden administration and Western leaders have shunned both Russia and China, Biden has been more coy in his dealings with Saudi Arabia, alternatively warm and critical, an awkward approach epitomized by the “fist bump” he shared in July with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

As last month’s G-20 meeting in Bali, Indonesia, the Saudi prince and China’s leader Xi Jinping “chatted nonstop through interpreters throughout the dinner,” recalled Matt Kroenig, deputy director of the Atlantic Council's Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

Still, Kroenig said, the China-Saudi partnership will be limited by the very nature of autocracy.

“While authoritarian leaders are working more closely together, there will be limits to their ability to cooperate,” he said. “Dictators are not reliable allies and none of the recent arrangements are likely to become as deep or trusting as, for example, the U.S.-UK relationship.”

Kroenig added that U.S. statements have helped push China and Saudi Arabia together.

“The Biden administration wanted to punish Saudi Arabia for Khashoggi’s death and the war in Yemen, so they tried to isolate it and characterize it as a pariah state. It is understandable that the Saudis are trying to diversify partnerships if they see the United States as unreliable,” he said.

More broadly, he said, “While the democracy-vs.-autocracy framework makes for a good bumper sticker and does distinguish the United States and its closest allies from revisionist autocracies like Russia and China, there is a gray area concerning other autocracies like the Gulf monarchies. It’s possible that the Biden administration’s blunt democracy-vs.-autocracy rhetoric may have helped push Saudi Arabia toward China.”

Not every U.S. ally is a democracy, CSIS’ Allen said.

“The United States has to balance emphasizing issues that help draw it closer to European and other allies vs. emphasizing issues that might help reduce the risk of China increasing its influence among some U.S. allies and partners.”

The U.S. has taken some steps to better manage that messiness. Said Kroenig, the new National Security Strategy released in October provided “helpful clarity and nuance regarding the administration’s democracy-vs.-autocracy framing, saying that the real problem is revisionist autocracies like Russia, China, and Iran, rather than all autocracies.”

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

9. A Wireless Intelligence Community ‘On The Horizon,' Official Says

Excerpts:

The defense and intelligence communities have been starting to embrace remote and wireless capabilities in recent years, largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the push for maximized telework policies, which meant some workers had to access secret networks remotely.

“We had people that were at home and we had this mass situation where people needed access to SIPRNet and they needed remote access capabilities,” said Roger Greenwell, the Defense Information Systems Agency’s CIO and director of Ithe Enterprise Integration and Innovation Center.

The agency worked with the National Security Agency to get commercial devices built for classified systems, and to provide mobile phones, tablets, and laptops to employees who need them.

Additionally, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has been working to incorporate wireless devices into its new St. Louis campus that is slated to be completed by the end of 2025.

Mark Chatelain, the associate chief information officer for the NGA’s CIO and IT services directorate, said the new facility will have wireless networks for unclassified, secret, and top secret information throughout the building.

A Wireless Intelligence Community ‘On The Horizon,' Official Says

Getting there is a matter of appropriately protecting data and tweaking policies to allow for wireless secret- and top-secret networks.

defenseone.com · by Lauren C. Williams

Some wireless devices—phones, tablets, or maybe even smart watches—could soon be welcome inside secure facilities, according to an intel official.

“I think it's inevitable, in terms of the incorporation of wireless, into our community, into our facilities,” Douglas Cossa, the chief information officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency said Thursday. “I mean, when you look at it, look at all the technology you're driving in with through the gate, even what's on your car, your key fob, it's just inevitable that we're going to have to face that.”

And because companies aren’t going to develop technology just for the intelligence community, “we're going to have to adjust our posture and our policies to incorporate that in, and that includes wireless,” Cossa said during a panel at the Department of Defense Intelligence Information System, or DoDIIS, Worldwide Conference in San Antonio, Texas.

Ultimately, he said, the challenge is in securing data, e.g. encryption, and “tearing down the walls” of command centers and offices built in response to crises.

“I think we're there. I think this is really just over the horizon where we're going to start incorporating this more as the norm as opposed to the exception,” Cossa said of allowing wireless tech into secure facilities. “But when I think about the power of wireless, I often think about the watch floors that we set up when we have a crisis within DIA.”

Cossa said the agency stood up a center dedicated to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That involves creating floor plans and layouts, plus installing new computers and equipment “that we have to physically tie into that floor” in a process that could take weeks.

“I would love the scenario where we could just do that on the fly through a wireless type capability,” he said.

The defense and intelligence communities have been starting to embrace remote and wireless capabilities in recent years, largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the push for maximized telework policies, which meant some workers had to access secret networks remotely.

“We had people that were at home and we had this mass situation where people needed access to SIPRNet and they needed remote access capabilities,” said Roger Greenwell, the Defense Information Systems Agency’s CIO and director of Ithe Enterprise Integration and Innovation Center.

The agency worked with the National Security Agency to get commercial devices built for classified systems, and to provide mobile phones, tablets, and laptops to employees who need them.

Additionally, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has been working to incorporate wireless devices into its new St. Louis campus that is slated to be completed by the end of 2025.

Mark Chatelain, the associate chief information officer for the NGA’s CIO and IT services directorate, said the new facility will have wireless networks for unclassified, secret, and top secret information throughout the building.

“Again, this is going to be able to allow us to configure our IT in that building, to have analysts bring their portable devices and go from area to area to be able to collaborate, to be able to share information,” he said during the panel discussion of intel and defense CIOs. “They'll be able to use their wireless device to cast up on the screen their thoughts, their processes, and be able to collaborate and things like that.”

Chatelain said this is possible largely because of the enormity of the facility—a 700,000 sq. ft. building in the middle of 100 acres.

“Between that and a number of other measures we put into place, we're very much on our way to having that full wireless capability implemented there.”

There’s also a push within the intelligence community to make computer systems more accessible.

Jennifer Kron, the deputy CIO for the National Security Agency, said because one in four U.S. workers are considered to have a disability, vendors must take accessibility for IT products and services as seriously as they take cybersecurity.

“That's a major issue for us,” Kron said, and change is needed “to be fully inclusive of our entire workforce, to work to focus on our diversity and our retention of our workforce, and to be able to make the most and to leverage the capabilities of all of our folks.”

The agency previously took advantage of a loophole for national security systems in federal legislation that required employees to make IT systems accessible to people with disabilities. But the NSA wants to change that, Kron said during the panel.

“We are going to be compliant and we have strong support from across the entire IC from the leadership on down now. And we're going to look to you all to help us do that and to make sure that we're baking in our accessibility from the beginning the same way that we've learned to do for security,” she said.

defenseone.com · by Lauren C. Williams

10. Why Congress Can’t Stop the CIA From Working With Forces That Commit Abuses

Title 50 is not (or should not be) a license to turn a blind eye to human rights abuse.

Congressional officials said the two oversight committees are ill-equipped to monitor the complexities of paramilitary operations in foreign countries. The Pentagon and State Department have created entire bureaucracies to make sure foreign units meet the requirements of the Leahy Law. The intelligence oversight committees, with their relatively small staffs, are not set up to track what’s happening on the ground when U.S. military officers on loan to the CIA work with elite units in the hinterlands of Afghanistan, Somalia or Syria.

“The sense I get from former operators is they don’t give a shit,” said one congressional source. “Their attitude is, the world’s dangerous and you partner with bad people, that’s why we have Title 50.”

Congressional staffers said they believed the failure of Congress to extend the Leahy Law to intelligence agencies was no coincidence.

“I mean, it’s a huge and intentional gap,” one said. “It’s designed to not have oversight; it is meant to not be under the public view.”

In his email, Leahy said an amendment to the Leahy Law, which would expand the scope to certain counter-terrorism operations, is now in the works.

The lack of consequences for blatant human rights violations, he said, “foments anger and resentment toward the U.S., undermines our mission in these countries where we need the support of the local population, and weakens our credibility as a country that supports the rule of law and accountability.”

Why Congress Can’t Stop the CIA From Working With Forces That Commit Abuses

The Leahy Law prohibits the U.S. military from providing training and equipment to foreign security forces that commit human rights abuses, but it does not apply to U.S. intelligence agencies.

defenseone.com · by Lynzy Billing

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

For more than two decades, the U.S. military has been barred from providing training and equipment to foreign security forces that commit “gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.”

The law, named for its author, Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, applies to military assistance for foreign units funded through the Defense or State departments. Lawmakers including Leahy, a Democrat, acknowledged that it does not cover commando outfits like Afghanistan’s Zero Units.

In an email, Leahy said he believes that the law’s human rights requirements need to be expanded to “cover certain counter-terrorism operations involving U.S. special forces and foreign partners.

“U.S. support for foreign security forces, whether through the Department of Defense, Department of State, CIA or other agencies,” Leahy wrote, “must be subject to effective congressional oversight so when mistakes are made or crimes committed, those responsible are held accountable.”

Leahy called on the Biden administration to apply the law “as a matter of policy” to all overseas military forces that work with any U.S. government agencies.

Tim Rieser, an aide to Leahy, acknowledged that the Leahy Law “is not all-encompassing, as much as we wish it were.” The Leahy Law, he said, applies only to congressional appropriations that fund the State and Defense departments.

“Sen. Leahy’s position has always been that the policy should be consistent, that we should not support units of foreign security forces that commit gross violations of human rights regardless of the source of the funds, but that is not what the law says.”

A source familiar with the Zero Unit program said the CIA’s officers in the field, and special forces soldiers working under their direction, are required to follow the same rules of combat as American service members. The agency does not fall under the Leahy Law.

U.S. military operations fall under the jurisdiction of the Senate and House Armed Services committees. Congressional oversight of the CIA and other intelligence agencies is handled by separate committees in the House and Senate that hold most of their meetings and hearings in secret. By law, the agencies are required to keep Congress “fully and currently informed” of all covert operations. Intelligence committee staffers have the authority to ask the CIA for documents and testimony about classified missions like the support for the Zero Units under the broad national security law known as Title 50.

Congressional officials said the two oversight committees are ill-equipped to monitor the complexities of paramilitary operations in foreign countries. The Pentagon and State Department have created entire bureaucracies to make sure foreign units meet the requirements of the Leahy Law. The intelligence oversight committees, with their relatively small staffs, are not set up to track what’s happening on the ground when U.S. military officers on loan to the CIA work with elite units in the hinterlands of Afghanistan, Somalia or Syria.

“The sense I get from former operators is they don’t give a shit,” said one congressional source. “Their attitude is, the world’s dangerous and you partner with bad people, that’s why we have Title 50.”

Congressional staffers said they believed the failure of Congress to extend the Leahy Law to intelligence agencies was no coincidence.

“I mean, it’s a huge and intentional gap,” one said. “It’s designed to not have oversight; it is meant to not be under the public view.”

In his email, Leahy said an amendment to the Leahy Law, which would expand the scope to certain counter-terrorism operations, is now in the works.

The lack of consequences for blatant human rights violations, he said, “foments anger and resentment toward the U.S., undermines our mission in these countries where we need the support of the local population, and weakens our credibility as a country that supports the rule of law and accountability.”

Stephen Engelberg contributed reporting.

.ProPublicaThis story was originally published by

defenseone.com · by Lynzy Billing

11. Ukrainians Focus on Resilience a Day After Major Russian Strikes

Ukrainians Focus on Resilience a Day After Major Russian Strikes

The mayor of Kyiv said that water was back on and that the city’s subway service had resumed. President Volodymyr Zelensky urged businesses to help set up more “invincibility centers” for the public.

nytimes.com · by Carlotta Gall · December 17, 2022

Ukrainian State Emergency Service firefighters clearing rubble from a building that was destroyed by a Russian attack in Kryvyi Rih on Friday.Credit...Evgeniy Maloletka/Associated Press

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainians raced to repair the damage and restart services on Saturday, a day after one of the heaviest Russian missile assaults on infrastructure killed at least five people and knocked out power and water in many of the country’s main cities.

With Ukrainians already on edge about further strikes, new explosions rang out over the port city of Odesa early Saturday, and air-raid alerts sounded across the country a few hours later. Midmorning, the Ukrainian general command warned that military jets were taking off from neighboring Belarus and that the whole of Ukraine was a potential target.

Early reports from Ukrainian officials on Saturday were of incoming missiles being intercepted. The country’s southern military command said that two incoming Russian missiles had been intercepted by its air defense in Odesa and caused no casualties.

Across the country, Ukrainian rescue and utility workers were working to restore electricity and water supplies knocked out in a large wave of strikes on power plants and electricity networks on Friday.

Ukraine’s general staff said on Saturday that the Russians had launched 98 missiles and 65 rockets fired from multiple-rocket systems aimed at civilian and energy infrastructure targets in that barrage. The military previously had put the figure at 76 missiles, and although it was not immediately clear why the count changed, information in the initial hours after an attack is frequently incomplete.

The War in the Skies: Russia has resumed its drone attacks after a three-week lull, while the United States appears poised to send Ukraine a battery of Patriot missiles, its most advanced ground-based air defense system.
The Next Front?: Using missiles and saboteurs, Ukraine is focusing on the strategically important city of Melitopol, ahead of an expected Ukrainian offensive to drive Russian forces from southern Ukraine.
Aid for Ukraine: World leaders announced more than $1 billion in swift aid for Ukraine to repair vital infrastructure and survive what is already a brutal winter.
Avoiding Questions: President Vladimir V. Putin will not hold his annual December news conference. The move comes as Russia’s economy falters and follows a series of military setbacks in Ukraine.

Ukrainian officials said that 60 missiles were shot down before they could reach their targets, but 14 regions lost power and running water in the hours after the strikes.

In the southern town of Kryvyi Rih, rescue workers pulled the body of an 18-month-old boy from the wreckage of a home in the early hours of Saturday, raising the death toll from a Russian missile strike the previous day to four. As missiles struck a power plant in the town on Friday, knocking out electricity in the city, a missile also hit a residential building. The toddler’s parents and a 64-year-old woman were killed in the strike, which also injured 13 others.

Since Ukraine succeeded in pushing back Russian forces and regaining territory on the battlefield in eastern and southern Ukraine in recent months, Moscow has turned to a strategy of attacking power plants and energy supplies to increase the pressure on the Ukrainian government by causing heightened suffering among the civilian population.

Ukrainians have responded with defiance, and the government has sought to bolster morale by repairing the damage as swiftly as possible.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Friday that workers had begun repairs even before the air-raid warnings were lifted. “Our power engineers and repair crews have already started working during the air alert and are doing everything possible to restore generation and supply,” he said in his overnight speech to the nation. “It takes time. But it will be done.”

He called on the local authorities to partner with businesses to create additional neighborhood gathering points, called “invincibility centers,” where people can congregate to keep warm, share news and recharge their cellphones. Powered by generators or emergency electricity supplies, the centers have been set up in administration buildings, in shopping centers and in tents on streets around the country to provide some respite for people living without heating and power in freezing temperatures.

The city of Kherson, which has come under repeated Russian rocket and shell fire since Ukrainian forces recaptured it last month after Russian forces retreated across the Dnipro River, was hit again in recent days, Halyna Luhova, the head of the city military administration, said on Saturday.

“Part of the population is left without electricity, then our specialists restore it,” she said. “This is an ongoing process: A part is restored, then a part is damaged again.”

Withdrawing Russian troops destroyed much of Kherson city’s energy and utility systems, but the Ukrainian administration has already restored electricity in most areas, and 70 to 80 percent of the population has running water and heating, she said. Still, up to 10,000 people in an area close to the river’s edge have been living under constant attack with no power, heating or water at all, she said. “The situation there is extremely serious,” she said.

By Saturday morning, the Kyiv subway was running again, Mayor Ivan Klitschko said on the Telegram social media app. Water was back on, and electricity had been restored to a large part of the city.

“The water supply has been brought back to all residents of the capital,” he said. “Half of Kyiv citizens already have heating, and we are working to restore it to all residents of the city. Two-thirds of Kyiv residents are currently supplied with power.”

In a particularly defiant gesture, the mayor also announced on Facebook the reopening of a glass-bottomed footbridge in the city that had been damaged by missile strikes in October.

nytimes.com · by Carlotta Gall · December 17, 2022

12. Seoul protests Tokyo's new security strategy, claim to Dokdo

If Japan did not make the Dokdo claim would Souel still protest Japan's new security strategy?

Friday

December 16, 2022

dictionary + A - A

Seoul protests Tokyo's new security strategy, claim to Dokdo

https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2022/12/16/national/diplomacy/KoreaJapan-Dokdo-NSS/20221216184508698.html

Dokdo Island [YONHAP]

The Foreign Ministry summoned a counselor from the Korean Embassy in Japan to protest a National Security Strategy (NSS) released Friday that claimed sovereignty over the Dokdo Islands.

In a statement, the Foreign Ministry demanded that Japan withdraw its sovereignty claim over the islands, which Korea claims and controls.

The ministry warned that repeating such claims will not help build a future-oriented relationship between the two countries.

The cabinet of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Friday approved a revised NSS, guidelines to Japan’s national securities policies, and a National Defense Strategy.

According to NHK, one of the major changes was a new policy about Japan launching a counterstrike if provoked, as well as adding Russia as a potential threat with North Korea and China.

On the counterstrike policy, the Korean government said if Japan plans to do such a thing, it needs to closely discuss and get the consensus of Korea as such an action would affect the Korean Peninsula as well as the interests of the Korean people.

BY ESTHER CHUNG, LEE HO-JEONG [chung.juhee@joongang.co.kr]

13. A mass exodus from Christianity is underway in America

Is this a NatSec issue? Maybe or maybe not. But I recall my last event in the Army before I retired was to accompany 15 National War College students to China for two weeks in 2011. At a social event at the attache's home I spoke at length with a Senior Caption from the Chinese NDU (she was the equivalent of a 1 star). She engaged me in deep questions of Chirstian theology about which I was not knowledgeable enough to provide answers. I asked her why she was so interested in religion and she said that her area of academic focus was crisis action planning and operations. Since she had never been to the US she thought that she should learn about Christianity because America is a Christian country and she felt that if she learned enough about Christianty it would inform her work and help her understand and anticipate US decision making in crisis.

A mass exodus from Christianity is underway in America

It’s less about hot-button topics like abortion and gay marriage and more about the Cold War and the internet.

Suzette Lohmeyer, Senior Editor, and Anna Deen, Data Visualization ReporterDecember 17, 2022

grid.news · by Suzette Lohmeyer, Senior Editor, and Anna Deen, Data Visualization Reporter

While the number of Americans who celebrate Christmas as a cultural holiday is going strong, there has been a shocking rise in the number of people ditching Christianity — what sociologists call “nonverts.”

Pew Research Center estimates that Christians will be a minority of Americans by 2070 if current trends continue.

And it likely will, with the largest percentage of those losing their religion being young adults who are about as old as that REM reference: people around 30 and under.

It’s a kind of “cultural whiplash” from religion to secularism that’s hit the United States much faster than it has other parts of the world, said theology and sociology professor Stephen Bullivant.

Bullivant, a practicing Catholic who teaches at St. Mary’s University in London and the University of Notre Dame in Sydney, spoke to Grid about why Americans are leaving Christianity in droves and the demographics that are seeing the (ahem) ungodliest declines. His new book, “Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America,” came out in the U.S. on Dec. 1.

Young adults are leading the mass exodus

Bullivant made it clear that it’s important not to glom all young adult nonverts as having one big reason for leaving the church. “Each person has a complex story, and we need to recognize the personal journey,” he told Grid. That said, he added, there are larger trends we can examine.

For example, the largest demographic of nonverts, younger adults, will raise their children as “nones” — people from nonreligious families. And while a tiny percentage of nonverts return to religion, nones rarely embrace religion at any point in their lives.

Bullivant noted that it’s not shocking that young adults are the ones leaving at the highest rates. “When people do nonvert,” he said, “they tend to do in their early to mid-20s.”

And to those who dismiss the trend as just young people trying something different who will eventually come back to the church, that is not what the data shows. Not only have the percentages of adults under 30 claiming to have no religion increased dramatically over the past 50 years, other age groups saw rises as well, Bullivant said.

The move toward secularism happened incredibly fast in the U.S.

While the trend toward atheism and agnosticism in Europe has been a slow but steady decline, Bullivant said, the increase in Christians dropping the faith didn’t really take off in the U.S. until the early 2000s, and the decline since then has steep and quick.

For people who study such trends, there was kind of this feeling in the ’90s that if a rise in secularism hadn’t happened yet in America, there was no reason to think it would. “Even the most dramatic historical examples of religious growth or decline tend to occur over many generations,” said Bullivant. “But then it was as if in the early 2000s, something was released.”

It wasn’t so long ago, when you are talking about as big a culturally religious shift as we’re talking about, he added.

And it’s important to note, said Bullivant, that it wasn’t about an influx of secular immigrants or nones raising throngs of nonreligious babies. It was about Americans deciding they were not tied to any religion. Interestingly, while a third of Americans that identify as nones say they are atheist or agnostic, Bullivant notes in his book, the rest have varying degrees of belief in God — Christian or otherwise.

And the big question: Why now?

Bullivant said that if you look at the big picture of American 20th-century culture, you stop asking, “Why is it happening now?” and start asking, “Why didn’t it happen earlier?” You can’t just blame shifting political views.

“It’s about looking at what happened in the 20th century that dampened down the possibility of being nonreligious — and then what changed?” he asked.

Bullivant said there are three main answers to that question: the Cold War, 9/11 and the internet.

If you compare the Cold War in Europe to the Cold War in the U.S., there was one major difference when it comes to religion. In the U.S., it was very much about Christian America vs. godless communism, whereas in Europe there just wasn’t that religious element.

In Europe, it was OK to explore secularism a bit, he said, whereas in America questioning their faith or going so far as to proclaim they were atheist or agnostic was really not socially acceptable on a political, cultural or religious level.

It’s also about who the atheist and agnostic influencers were in both parts of the world. In the U.K., for example, it was respectable establishment intellectual figures — such as the mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell. In the United States, said Bullivant, you had people like Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who “while fascinating for all sorts of reasons was very easy to depict as someone who had been a communist, who had tried to defect to Moscow and was a divorcee” which all made her sort of a social outcast during a religiously overtoned Cold War.

The generation born after the height of the Cold War — in the early to mid ’80s — didn’t grow up with propaganda and blacklist fears, said Bullivant, so there is a safe space for the idea of a nonreligious life to open up.

When 9/11 happened, Bullivant said, then you have the new atheism with many prominent people coming out and publicly questioning faith in a higher being — such as Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins — and it becomes OK to reevaluate what you believe, said Bullivant: “They opened up a nonreligious space.”

And of course the internet, Bullivant added. That was happening at about the same time, and it gave people access to communities of people also questioning their faith. Bullivant particularly saw this when interviewing ex-Mormons and ex-evangelicals.

“If you’re raised in small-town Texas or Idaho and everyone you know is some kind of Christian, you’re in a kind of bubble. And then with the internet, you start getting support groups online with thousands of members and that helps erode those bubbles,” he said.

One thing Bullivant said is overemphasized when it comes to examining why people leave the church: shifting cultural values.

As people’s opinions in the U.S. changed on women’s roles in society, abortion and same-sex marriage, it was absolutely difficult for the churches to deal with, said Bullivant. They thought it meant “alienating large segments of people” who didn’t agree with the church’s stances on issues.

But, if you look at the Episcopal Church, which has changed along with the culture, its numbers are tanking, said Bullivant. Churches shifting with the times doesn’t seem to “fill the pews.”

“When Catholics say, ‘The reason young people are leaving is because they disagree with the church on abortion and contraception,’ they do disagree with the church, and abortion and contraception, and gay marriage and all sorts of stuff,” he said. “But it’s very unlikely that if the church changed those positions, or softened them in a pastoral way, that those people wouldn’t leave or that they’d come back or anything like that.”

The rise of secular, rather than religious, cult figures after covid

Interestingly, said Bullivant, historically cataclysmic events — the Civil War, World War II — often trigger religious revivals on the fringe of the mainstream, such as cults. The fact that that hasn’t been apparent with covid, the most recent cataclysmic event, is more evidence of a waning religious mainstream, he said.

The closest recent group that’s come is perhaps the rise of QAnon, he said, but that’s more a secular than a religious movement.

“In the past, Q would be some kind of angel or Virgin Mary or Native American shaman or religious thinker. Q is meant to be more of a civil servant, functionary,” he said, “and the argument is that, well, you need a strong religious center to have wild fringes popping up.”

Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.

grid.news · by Suzette Lohmeyer, Senior Editor, and Anna Deen, Data Visualization Reporter

14. War Logistics in a Globalized Economy

War Logistics in a Globalized Economy

https://thetriad.thebulwark.com/p/war-logistics-in-a-globalized-economy?r=7i07&utm

A butterfly flaps its wings in China and a German arms manufacturer can't make ammunition.

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1. CDR Salamander

Amateur warriors deal in tactics. Professional soldiers deal in logistics. This newsletter, run by a retired Navy guy deals heavily in logistics and is looking at an under-appreciated question in Ukraine:

There has been discussions about both sides of the war burning through their stockpiles at unsustainable rates while the war seems to be expanding. . . .

The Ukrainians would have run out of weapons and ammunition months ago if the former Warsaw Pact nations in NATO didn't empty what inventory they had left of Soviet Era weaponry and the rest of NATO led by the USA didn't wander the world trying to soak up as much available inventory money could buy. That and the rapid adoption of NATO compatible equipment by the Ukrainians is helping, but that has revealed other problems - who says the West has enough to give?

Salamander goes on to discuss recent open-source reports which demonstrate how complicated supply questions are in a globalized economy.

Russia invades Ukraine. Ukraine needs weapons. America sends weapons. Europe is trying to manufacture weapons. But the Germans need cotton linters (an unsexy component needed for propelling charges) and this cotton comes primarily from China. Which is trying to prop up Russia.

You see the problem, no? Here’s more Salamander:

The Russo-Ukrainian War is sending a clear warning to everyone - you need to ramp up production, capacity, and have a more reliable - if not efficient - supply chain.

This is hard, because unlike sexy things displacing water and making shadows on ramps, ammunition and expendables are hidden away in bunkers out of sight ... and if your peacetime military and diplomats do their job, will never be used. However, when you need them, the need is existential.

The problem with using resources “efficiently” at the level of geostrategy is that you’re involved in a game in which the goal is to have the military resources be “wasted” by not needing to be employed.

Read the whole thing and subscribe.

The United States has used up 13 years worth of Stinger production and 5 years worth of Javelin production in just 10 months of war in Ukraine.

2. Slack Tide

Matt Labash was interviewed in his newsletter, Slack Tide, and he had this to say about writing:

Q: As a fan of your writing, I'm hoping that you could clue me into the way you style your prose because it reminds me heavily of Tom Wolfe. His writing is the closest to comprising a mosaic of the world since it has multiple POVs competing to be the reliable narrator, and intense attention to detail in reconstructing scenes and lampooning materialistic life choices as seen in Radical Chic. If someone asked how anyone could write like you, what would your advice be?

LABASH: Well thank you kindly, but my advice would be not to. I mean, I too, love Tom Wolfe, don’t get me wrong. I’ve read just about every word he’s written and probably wanted to be him when I was 22, minus the ice-cream-man suit and spats. His attention to the telling detail was second to no one’s, and he was a prose pyrotechnician, besides. The dude could write about grass growing and make it interesting. And he had great story sense – as in what made one. But after you read those journalism collections of his, which are all wonderful, and you decide you want to be Tom Wolfe, and start laying it down, you realize how utterly futile it is to imitate him. Because there is and could only ever be one Tom Wolfe, and he died in 2018 (with his spats on, I’m guessing). I can’t pull off onomatopoeia and multiple exclamation points, and wouldn’t want to. Not that that was the meat of his writing – just some of the distracting accents. Kind of like drugs were for Hunter Thompson, whose most interesting writing often had nothing to do with drugs. In fact, drugs were maybe the most boring part, save some chunks of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

But my larger point is that you ultimately have to sound like yourself, or it’s not worth doing. If your voice is worth hearing, write in it. Fully inhabit it. If it’s not worth hearing, then get out of the business and find something more stable to do like BASE jumping or child soldiering, since journalism is in a perpetual state of collapse anyway. Especially the written version of it. But you can’t build a real writing life on imitation. It’ll never work. It might be useful to have good people to steal from when you first get started, just to find your rhythm. But ultimately, you have to find your own rhythm. If you don’t, you’ll be found out as a fraud, and it won’t be very satisfying anyway, to be voicing someone else’s thoughts or mannerisms.

Incidentally, while we’re talking Wolfe – and I wrote this up a few months ago in a piece I did on writing on my site – but I met him once, long ago in my twenties. We were at the same dinner – he was the guest of honor, I, then as now, was just a mope. I promised myself I wouldn’t slobber all over the poor guy if I met him. Wouldn’t want to mess up his suit. But I was pretty deep in my cups once I encountered him. And it just came out, almost involuntarily: “Mr. Wolfe, I need you to know, whenever I have trouble getting it up, writing-wise, I just read something you wrote like ‘The Last American Hero,’ your story about {the stock-car racer/moonshiner} Junior Johnson, and it’s like an adrenaline shot to the ‘nads.” I embarrassed myself. And him, I’m sure. But he was his usual courtly Virginia-gentleman self, and generously offered: “You know, I do the same thing when I’m in that spot. But I read Henry Miller.” I liked that answer a lot, as Henry Miller is a pretty good adrenaline shot, too.

Here’s another entry from Labash On Writing:

Writing is as vast as life itself. It presents infinite choices, and nearly all of them must be decided on a case-by-case basis. Because of such complexity, many try to bury themselves in simplistic books on writing, like Strunk & White’s classic, The Elements of Style. I own it. It’s around here somewhere. But it’s a book I only reach for if I’m all out of fatwood and need more kindling.

I like E.B. White otherwise. I’m not a savage. (His essay “Once More To The Lake,” collected in One Man’s Meat, is one of my all-time favorite essays on aging.) And he and his partner-in-crime’s dictatorial little instruction book is good, I suppose, for stamping the basics into beginners’ heads. You should know the rules before breaking them. Otherwise, I find it oppressive, prim, and fussy: “Make the paragraph the unit of composition: one paragraph to each topic.”

Yeah, whatever.

That said, Labash does have some practical advice:

Read more than you write. I once had a sickeningly prolific friend say that he now writes more than he reads. This made me never want to read him again. It’s your duty, as a writer – any kind of writer – to always keep filling your tank. And you can’t just do that by huffing your own fumes. You have to always be on the hunt for things that inspire, that amuse, that somehow open up the world to your readers.

If you haven’t, go subscribe to Labash. Make it your Festivus present to yourself. You’ll thank me.

One last thing: I worked with Labash for about 20 years at the same magazine. I learned how to write, in large part, by sitting in the corner and watching him; reading him.

And yet, in all those years together I don’t know that we ever talked about writing. I say this to underscore what a gift his newsletter is to anyone who values the written word. He shares the kind of real intimacy that any writer would hope to have with a talent like his.

3. Prefaces

Matt Dinan has a newsletter about writing and teaching:

A few years ago I started joking that university teaching is not difficult, and can be easily accomplished in two steps:

(1) read book

(2) talk about book

At a certain level of abstraction this joke describes how I actually do teach. . . .

My own little act of protest in coming back to teaching after the pandemic and sabbatical was thus to teach a course on a single book: Plato’s Republic. We’ve struggled to place the Republic in our Great Books Program in recent years: it’s not the best introduction to Plato on account of its length and difficulty, so we’ve moved away from teaching it to our first-years. During the pandemic we decided to keep our readings a little bit shorter to accommodate online instruction, and our students’ generalized misery. But this led to an entire cohort about to graduate from our Great Books program who have not read what is surely, if anything is, a very great book indeed. . . .

The experience of reading the Republic is, it seems to me, a synecdoche for education. Its education is not, in other words, either of the educations it depicts, but an education in learning to love images of wholeness while retaining the ability to see them as images. Glaucon is the ideal interlocutor for the dialogue because his love of abstract simplicity leads him to want to know the secrets hiding within our souls—he has no patience for images. The single book course, especially about the Republic, is something sort of elemental because it is an attempt to embody the process of education itself.

It’s a lovely essay. If you’re into books and teaching, you should subscribe.

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15. Is COVID a Common Cold Yet?

Conclusion:

For now, researchers don’t know whether we’re nearing the COVID-severity plateau, and they’re worried it will get only more difficult to tell. Maybe it’s for the best if the mildness asymptote is a ways off. In the U.S. and elsewhere, subvariants are still swirling, bivalent-shot uptake is still stalling, and hospitalizations are once more creeping upward as SARS-CoV-2 plays human musical chairs with RSV and flu. Abroad, inequities in vaccine access and quality—and a zero-COVID policy in China that stuck around too long—have left gaping immunity gaps. To settle into symptom stasis with this many daily deaths, this many off-season waves, this much long COVID, and this pace of viral evolution would be grim. “I don’t think we’re quite there yet,” Gordon told me. “I hope we’re not there yet.”

Is COVID a Common Cold Yet?

Its symptoms have changed a lot.

By Katherine J. Wu

The Atlantic · by Katherine J. Wu · December 15, 2022

At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, one of the worst things about SARS-CoV-2 was that it was so new: The world lacked immunity, treatments, and vaccines. Tests were hard to come by too, making diagnosis a pain—except when it wasn’t. Sometimes, the symptoms of COVID got so odd, so off-book, that telling SARS-CoV-2 from other viruses became “kind of a slam dunk,” says Summer Chavez, an emergency physician at the University of Houston. Patients would turn up with the standard-issue signs of respiratory illness—fever, coughing, and the like—but also less expected ones, such as rashes, diarrhea, shortness of breath, and loss of taste or smell. A strange new virus was colliding with people’s bodies in such unusual ways that it couldn’t help but stand out.

Now, nearly three years into the crisis, the virus is more familiar, and its symptoms are too. Put three sick people in the same room this winter—one with COVID, another with a common cold, and the third with the flu—and “it’s way harder to tell the difference,” Chavez told me. Today’s most common COVID symptoms are mundane: sore throat, runny nose, congestion, sneezing, coughing, headache. And several of the wonkier ones that once hogged headlines have become rare. More people are weathering their infections with their taste and smell intact; many can no longer remember when they last considered the scourge of “COVID toes.” Even fever, a former COVID classic, no longer cracks the top-20 list from the ZOE Health Study, a long-standing symptom-tracking project based in the United Kingdom, according to Tim Spector, an epidemiologist at King’s College London who heads the project. Longer, weirder, more serious illness still manifests, but for most people, SARS-CoV-2’s symptoms are getting “pretty close to other viruses’, and I think that’s reassuring,” Spector told me. “We are moving toward a cold-like illness.”

That trajectory has been forecast by many experts since the pandemic’s early days. Growing immunity against the coronavirus, repeatedly reinforced by vaccines and infections, could eventually tame COVID into a sickness as trifling as the common cold or, at worst, one on par with the seasonal flu. The severity of COVID will continue to be tempered by widespread immunity, or so this thinking goes, like a curve bending toward an asymptote of mildness. A glance at the landscape of American immunity suggests that such a plateau could be near: Hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. have been vaccinated multiple times, some even quite recently with a bivalent shot; many have now logged second, third, and fourth infections with the virus. Maybe, just maybe, we’re nearing the level of cumulative exposure at which COVID gets permanently more chill. Then again? Maybe not—and maybe never.

Read: What does it mean to care about COVID anymore?

The recent trajectory of COVID, at least, has been peppered with positive signs. On average, symptoms have migrated higher up the airway, sparing several vulnerable organs below; disease has gotten shorter and milder, and rates of long COVID seem to be falling a bit. Many of these changes roughly coincided with the arrival of Omicron in the fall of 2021, and part of the shift is likely attributable to the virus itself: On the whole, Omicron and its offshoots seem to prefer infecting cells in the nose and throat over those in the lungs. But experts told me the accumulation of immune defenses that preceded and then accompanied that variant’s spread are almost certainly doing more of the work. Vaccination and prior infection can both lay down protections that help corral the virus near the nose and mouth, preventing it from spreading to tissues elsewhere. “Disease is really going to differ based on the compartment that’s primarily infected,” says Stacey Schultz-Cherry, a virologist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. As SARS-CoV-2 has found a tighter anatomical niche, our bodies have become better at cornering it.

With the virus largely getting relegated to smaller portions of the body, the pathogen is also purged from the airway faster and may be less likely to be passed to someone else. On the individual level, a sickness that might have once unfurled into pneumonia now gets subdued into barely perceptible sniffles and presents less risk to others; on the population scale, rates of infection, hospitalization, and death go down.

This is how things usually go with respiratory viruses. Repeat tussles with RSV tend to get progressively milder; post-vaccination flu is usually less severe. The few people who catch measles after getting their shots are less likely to transmit the virus, and they tend to experience such a trivial course of sickness that their disease is referred to by a different name, “modified” measles, says Diane Griffin, a virologist and an immunologist at Johns Hopkins University.

It’s good news that the median case of COVID diminished in severity and duration around the turn of 2022, but it’s a bit more sobering to consider that there hasn’t been a comparably major softening of symptoms in the months since. The full range of disease outcomes—from silent infection all the way to long-term disability, serious disease, and death—remains in play as well, for now and the foreseeable future, Schultz-Cherry told me. Vaccination history and immunocompromising conditions can influence where someone falls on that spectrum. So too can age as well as other factors such as sex, genetics, underlying medical conditions, and even the dose of incoming virus, says Patricia García, a global-health expert at the University of Washington.

New antibody-dodging viral variants could still show up to cause more severe disease even among the young and healthy, as occasionally happens with the flu. The BA.2 subvariant of Omicron, which is more immune-evasive than its predecessor BA.1, seemed to accumulate more quickly in the airway, and it sparked more numerous and somewhat gnarlier symptoms. Data on more recent Omicron subvariants are still being gathered, but Shruti Mehta, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, says she’s seen some hints that certain gastrointestinal symptoms, such as vomiting, might be making a small comeback.

Read: Will we get Omicron’d again?

All of this leaves the road ahead rather muddy. If COVID will be tamed one day into a common cold, that future definitely hasn’t been realized yet, says Yonatan Grad, an epidemiologist at Harvard’s School of Public Health. SARS-CoV-2 still seems to spread more efficiently and more quickly than a cold, and it’s more likely to trigger severe disease or long-term illness. Still, previous pandemics could contain clues about what happens next. Each of the past century’s flu pandemics led to a surge in mortality that wobbled back to baseline after about two to seven years, Aubree Gordon, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, told me. But SARS-CoV-2 isn’t a flu virus; it won’t necessarily play by the same epidemiological rules or hew to a comparable timeline. Even with flu, there’s no magic number of shots or past infections that’s known to mollify disease—“and I think we know even less about how you build up immunity to coronaviruses,” Gordon said.

The timing of when and how those defenses manifest could matter too. Almost everyone has been infected by the flu or at least gotten a flu shot by the time they reach grade school; SARS-CoV-2 and COVID vaccines, meanwhile, arrived so recently that most of the world’s population met them in adulthood, when the immune system might be less malleable. These later-in-life encounters could make it tougher for the global population to reach its severity asymptote. If that’s the case, we’ll be in COVID limbo for another generation or two, until most living humans are those who grew up with this coronavirus in their midst.

COVID may yet stabilize at something worse than a nuisance. “I had really thought previously it would be closer to common-cold coronaviruses,” Gordon told me. But severity hasn’t declined quite as dramatically as she’d initially hoped. In Nicaragua, where Gordon has been running studies for years, vaccinated cohorts of people have endured second and third infections with SARS-CoV-2 that have been, to her disappointment, “still more severe than influenza,” she told me. Even if that eventually flips, should the coronavirus continue to transmit this aggressively year-round, it could still end up taking more lives than the flu does—as is the case now.

Wherever, whenever a severity plateau is reached, Gordon told me that our arrival to it can be confirmed only in hindsight, “once we look back and say, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s been about the same for the last five years.’” But the data necessary to make that call are getting harder to collect as public interest in the virus craters and research efforts to monitor COVID’s shifting symptoms hit roadblocks. The ZOE Health Study lost its government funding earlier this year, and its COVID-symptom app, which engaged some 2.4 million regular users at its peak, now has just 400,000—some of whom may have signed up to take advantage of newer features for tracking diet, sleep, exercise, and mood. “I think people just said, ‘I need to move on,’” Spector told me.

Mehta, the Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, has encountered similar hurdles in her COVID research. At the height of the Omicron wave, when Mehta and her colleagues were trying to find people for their community studies, their rosters would immediately fill up past capacity. “Now we’re out there for weeks” and still not hitting the mark, she told me. Even weekly enrollment for their long-COVID study has declined. Sign-ups do increase when cases rise—but they drop off especially quickly as waves ebb. Perhaps, in the view of some potential study volunteers, COVID has, ironically, become like a common cold, and is thus no longer worth their time.

For now, researchers don’t know whether we’re nearing the COVID-severity plateau, and they’re worried it will get only more difficult to tell. Maybe it’s for the best if the mildness asymptote is a ways off. In the U.S. and elsewhere, subvariants are still swirling, bivalent-shot uptake is still stalling, and hospitalizations are once more creeping upward as SARS-CoV-2 plays human musical chairs with RSV and flu. Abroad, inequities in vaccine access and quality—and a zero-COVID policy in China that stuck around too long—have left gaping immunity gaps. To settle into symptom stasis with this many daily deaths, this many off-season waves, this much long COVID, and this pace of viral evolution would be grim. “I don’t think we’re quite there yet,” Gordon told me. “I hope we’re not there yet.”

The Atlantic · by Katherine J. Wu · December 15, 2022

16. Where Brittney Griner spent the week: A military program for ex-hostages

Not addressed is that from these stories we gain information about how our adversaries treat Americans in captivity and this informs the training we provide to high risk personnel. Of course the priority is the welfare of the returning detainees but that does not mean we cannot learn from their experiences.

Excerpts:

They asked Toledo and his fellow detainees to tell their stories from before their imprisonment all the way until their arrival in the United States, in as much detail as possible, over several sessions.

The activity was a way to decompress from their experience, the therapists said, making use of an analogy: If you shake a beer can and suddenly open it, “you’re going to have a sort of explosion,” Toledo said. But if you “let the pressure go out slowly, you’re going to have a better result.”

Where Brittney Griner spent the week: A military program for ex-hostages

The Washington Post · by Joanna Slater · December 16, 2022

In her first public comments since her release from a Russian penal colony, basketball star Brittney Griner expressed gratitude Friday to her family, her legal team, the Biden administration and everyone who had worked to free her.

She also singled out the “PISA” staff at the military base in San Antonio where she spent the past week. “I appreciate the time and care to make sure I was okay and equipped with the tools for this new journey,” Griner wrote on Instagram.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by BG (@brittneyyevettegriner)

PISA refers to “post-isolation support activities.” It’s a program that was developed by the military to address the physical and psychological needs of people who have been detained or held hostage.

The activities include medical checks and repeated counseling sessions, all designed to facilitate “the return of the recovered person to military or civilian life as expeditiously as possible,” according to a manual from the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Griner spent months in a penal colony after being sentenced to 9½ years in prison on minor drug charges. She was convicted of arriving in Russia with vape cartridges containing less than a gram of cannabis oil.

The athlete arrived in Texas on Dec. 9. She was exchanged in a prisoner swap for the arms dealer Viktor Bout, who was serving a 25-year sentence in a special, restrictive unit dubbed “Little Guantánamo” inside a federal prison in Marion, Ill.

Griner was flown to Joint Base San Antonio, a military facility that has served as the first stop for several Americans released from captivity this year. Trevor Reed, an ex-Marine imprisoned in Russia, arrived there in April. So did members of the “Citgo six,” a group of energy executives wrongfully detained by the Nicolás Maduro regime in Venezuela and released in October.

The former detainees, including Griner, were first taken to Brooke Army Medical Center, a major hospital located on the base, where they underwent medical checks.

Jorge Toledo, 61, spent nearly five years in captivity in Venezuela before being freed in October. For the first several days, he said, his group spent time in a restricted area of the base’s hospital where personnel took extra measures to maintain their privacy.

Initially, Toledo thought he would be going straight home. Then he learned that there was a program prepared for the detainees to help them adapt after their long captivity. He described the experience as invaluable.

After the medical checks, Toledo’s group moved to a different part of the base where they participated in individual and group sessions with a team of psychologists.

They asked Toledo and his fellow detainees to tell their stories from before their imprisonment all the way until their arrival in the United States, in as much detail as possible, over several sessions.

The activity was a way to decompress from their experience, the therapists said, making use of an analogy: If you shake a beer can and suddenly open it, “you’re going to have a sort of explosion,” Toledo said. But if you “let the pressure go out slowly, you’re going to have a better result.”

The detainees were also encouraged to discuss any concerns they had about transitioning back to life at home, whether their relationships with their spouses and children or how they were going to approach their careers. The final sessions were for military personnel to gather information from the detainees.

Toledo and his group spent 10 days at the base, where their families were also welcome. He said the program was critical in preparing him for some of the challenges that lay ahead.

“People think it’s a given that you’re going to have a great time when you go back to normal life,” he said. While he was overjoyed to be with his family, he also found that some daily tasks, such as driving a car, suddenly felt like enormous challenges.

Toledo said the days he spent in the PISA program were key to helping him make the transition home, and he hoped the same would be true for Griner.

Griner said Friday that she intends to return to professional basketball when the next WNBA season begins in May 2023.

Toledo was an avid runner before his detention and has begun training again. In January, he plans to run a half-marathon in Houston. It is more than a race. Toledo sees it as a message to his captors. “It’s a matter of telling these guys in prison, ‘You tried, but I’m stronger than your system,’” he said.

The Washington Post · by Joanna Slater · December 16, 2022

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

V/R

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow

Foundation for Defense of DemocracPhone: 202-573-8647

Personal Email: d avid.maxwell161@gmail.com

Web Site: www.fdd.org

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Subscribe to FDD’s new podcast, Foreign Podicy

FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

Access NSS HERE

Company Name | Website

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, DECEMBER 16

Dec 16, 2022 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

The Sleeping Japanese Giant Awakes

Tokyo rolls out the most important shift in defense strategy and spending since World War II.

Volodymyr Zelensky and his generals explain why the war hangs in the balance

Our interviews with the men shaping Ukraine’s response to Russia’s aggression

Opinion | Japan is building up its military. Good.

CPP founder Joma Sison dies

Joma Sison: Mao in Utrecht

Secretary Blinken Launches the Office of China Coordination - United States Department of State

Secretary Blinken Launches the Office of China Coordination

CHINA Published December 16, 2022 5:24pm EST

Biden State Department launches 'China House' initiative, says Beijing is 'most complex' challenge

The Saudi-China Deal Tells Us What Autocracies Want From Each Other

Biden’s blunt democracy-vs.-autocracy rhetoric may be pushing U.S. security partners toward Beijing.

A Wireless Intelligence Community ‘On The Horizon,' Official Says

Getting there is a matter of appropriately protecting data and tweaking policies to allow for wireless secret- and top-secret networks.

Why Congress Can’t Stop the CIA From Working With Forces That Commit Abuses​

The Leahy Law prohibits the U.S. military from providing training and equipment to foreign security forces that commit human rights abuses, but it does not apply to U.S. intelligence agencies.​

Ukrainians Focus on Resilience a Day After Major Russian Strikes

Seoul protests Tokyo's new security strategy, claim to Dokdo​

https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2022/12/16/national/diplomacy/KoreaJapan-Dokdo-NSS/20221216184508698.html​

A mass exodus from Christianity is underway in America

Young adults are leading the mass exodus

The move toward secularism happened incredibly fast in the U.S.

And the big question: Why now?

The rise of secular, rather than religious, cult figures after covid

War Logistics in a Globalized Economy

A butterfly flaps its wings in China and a German arms manufacturer can't make ammunition.

1. CDR Salamander

2. Slack Tide

3. Prefaces

Is COVID a Common Cold Yet?

Where Brittney Griner spent the week: A military program for ex-hostages

Why Congress Can’t Stop the CIA From Working With Forces That Commit Abuses

The Leahy Law prohibits the U.S. military from providing training and equipment to foreign security forces that commit human rights abuses, but it does not apply to U.S. intelligence agencies.

Seoul protests Tokyo's new security strategy, claim to Dokdo

https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2022/12/16/national/diplomacy/KoreaJapan-Dokdo-NSS/20221216184508698.html