Quotes of the Day:
"We'll start the war from right here."
--Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., son of the former president, who landed with his troops in the wrong place on Utah Beach
"If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone."
--General Dwight Eisenhower, future president, in a draft of remarks he'd made in case the invasion was a failure
"They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate."
-- President Franklin D. Roosevelt's official address announcing the invasion
Recommended video for reflection on this D-Day anniversary:
Operation Overlord: OSS and the Battle for France https://vimeo.com/485603696
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JUNE 5 (PUTIN'S WAR)
2. China winning entropic warfare in Pacific Islands
3. West Point superintendent slated to lead US Army Europe and Africa
4. Opinion | This is no time to hesitate in Ukraine
5. Russian General Reported Killed in Ukraine
6. Putin Can’t Keep Russian Mothers Silent Forever
7. How the Air Force Plans to Kill the A-10 Warthog
8. With US distracted, Tehran and Beijing tighten embrace in the Middle East
9. What If Ukraine Wins?
10. US re-entry into Somalia aims at Russia, China
11. How the West miscalculated its ability to punish Russia
12. DoD-commissioned study finds major shortcomings in civilian talent management
13. Why China Threads the Needle on Ukraine
14. Beyond Weapons: Time for a New U.S. Strategy on Taiwan
15. FDD | Iraq Attacks Israel; What Should Happen Next?
16. Special forces pick Black Cape for platform-agnostic artificial intelligence (AI)-driven military data storage
17. Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy
18. Russia strikes Kyiv, promises more attacks if U.S. supplies long-range missiles to Ukraine
19. Chinese Influencer’s Ice-Cream Pitch Inadvertently Introduces Fans to Tiananmen Square Massacre
20. Opinion: Here's the reason people tell me they want to buy an AR-15. And it's simply ludicrous
21. Dust Off That Dirty Word Detente and Engage With China
22. A flare up in China’s deliberate pattern of aggression
23. Romanian Special Operations Forces In UF PRO MultiCam
24. Has the Tide Turned in Ukraine?
25. Cornel West’s pragmatic America
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JUNE 5 (PUTIN'S WAR)
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JUNE 5
Karolina Hird, Mason Clark, and George Barros
June 5, 5:15 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.
Ukrainian forces continued to conduct limited and localized but successful counterattacks against Russian positions throughout Ukraine on June 5, including retaking large areas of Severodonetsk—the city in Luhansk Oblast the Kremlin has concentrated the majority of its forces on capturing. A Russian Telegram channel claimed that Ukrainian troops launched a counterattack north of Kharkiv City, indicating that Ukrainian forces continue to pressure Russian defensive lines near the Russian border.[1] Ukrainian forces are likely seeking to leverage the continued Russian focus on Severodonetsk to conduct counterattacks on other axes of advance. Even as Russian forces continue to pour equipment and troops into the Severodonetsk-Lysychansk area, Ukrainian forces have conducted a successful counterattack in Severodonetsk in the last 48 hours and pushed Russian troops back to the eastern outskirts of the city and out of southern settlements.[2] Ukrainian counteroffensive pressure will likely continue to draw the attention of Russian forces to Luhansk Oblast and therefore leave vulnerabilities in Russian defensive efforts in Kharkiv Oblast and along the Southern Axis. The ability of Ukrainian forces to successfully counterattack in Severodonetsk, the Kremlin’s current priority area of operations, further indicates the declining combat power of Russian forces in Ukraine.
Ukrainian forces reportedly killed Russian Major General Roman Kutuzov on June 5. Russian Telegram channels reported that Kutuzov was killed near Mykolaivka, Luhansk Oblast (near Popasna) on June 5.[3] Kutuzov likely commanded the Donetsk People’s Republic’s 1st Army Corps at the time of his death, though ISW cannot confirm his exact position.[4] Some sources reported that Kutuzov commanded the 5th Combined Arms Army (CAA) at the time of his death, but we assess this is likely incorrect—Kutuzov served as acting commander of the 5th CAA from 2017 to 2019, and Major General Alexei Vladimirovich Podilov currently commands the 5th CAA.[5] High-level Russian commanders have taken remarkably high losses during combat in Ukraine, and will likely continue to do so as the Russian command continues to deploy military leadership directly to the frontline. Kutuzov’s death has not yet been confirmed but would be at least the seventh death of a general in Ukraine since the beginning of the war.[6]
Russian forces conducted their first missile strike against Kyiv in over a month on June 5. Advisor to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense Vadym Denysenko stated that Russian forces fired five X-22 cruise missiles from a Tu-95 aircraft at Kyiv from the direction of the Caspian Sea that hit the Darnytsia Rail Car Repair Plant on the outskirts of Kyiv.[7] The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed that this strike targeted T-72 tanks supplied to Ukraine by other Eastern European countries, but images of the target area confirm that the missiles hit the Darnytsia plant.[8] It is unclear if Russian forces intended to strike foreign-provided Ukrainian tanks and missed, or if the Kremlin is attempting to obfuscate its intended target. This attack on Kyiv likely indicates that Russian forces are continuing to target Ukrainian infrastructure in non-critical areas of Ukraine in order to disrupt Ukrainian logistics as Russian forces take considerable losses in Donbas.
Russian military bloggers continued to reckon with overarching struggles in Russian force generation on June 5. Russian milblogger Alexander Khodakovsky accused “screamers in the guise of patriots” of hypocritically calling for general mobilization while at the same time discrediting the Russian military leadership and driving away those who would voluntarily take up arms for Russia.[9] Khodakovsky blamed the pervasive public discourse on general mobilization for making people overthink and subsequently become less willing to enter military service, thereby forcing Russian military command closer to actually needing to announce general mobilization. Khodakovsky suggested that this discourse is setting Russia up for a long war in Ukraine and that Russian authorities have been positioned to take the blame for losses. Russian war journalist Alexander Sladkov claimed that the Russian grouping in Ukraine is an ”exclusively professional army” not staffed by conscripts, while simultaneously calling for the removal of health requirements for rear and combat specialties in order to mobilize those who should be medically disqualified.[10] These and other comments by Russian military specialists indicate the Russian military community is increasingly aware of issues in sustaining mobilization efforts and different actors are seeking to apportion blame as Russian operations continue to stall.
Key Takeaways
- Ukrainian counterattacks in Severodonetsk recaptured large parts of the city and forced Russian troops out of the southern suburbs of the city.
- Russian forces continued efforts to converge on Slovyansk from the southeast of Izyum and west of Lyman but remain unlikely to make notable advances around Slovyansk due to their continued prioritization of Severodonetsk.
- Ukrainian troops reportedly conducted limited and localized counterattacks north of Kharkiv City.
- Russian forces continued to hold their defensive lines and fire at Ukrainian positions along the Southern Axis.
- Ukrainian forces likely killed Russian Major General Roman Kutuzov near Popasna.
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.
ISW has updated its assessment of the four primary efforts Russian forces are engaged in at this time. We have stopped coverage of Mariupol as a separate effort since the city’s fall. We had added a new section on activities in Russian-occupied areas:
- Main effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and three supporting efforts);
- Subordinate main effort- Encirclement of Ukrainian troops in the cauldron between Izyum and Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts
- Supporting effort 1—Kharkiv City;
- Supporting effort 2—Southern Axis;
- Activities in Russian-occupied Areas
Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine
Subordinate Main Effort—Southern Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk Oblasts (Russian objective: Encircle Ukrainian forces in eastern Ukraine and capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Russian forces continued efforts to advance toward Slovyansk from Izyum and made limited, unsuccessful attacks on June 5. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful ground assaults on Bohorodychne and Dovhenke, 35 and 25 km southeast of Izyum, respectively.[11] Russian forces are additionally making incremental advances to the northwest of Lyman around Svyatohirsk, about 30 kilometers directly north of Slovyansk, and reportedly advanced to within 15 km of Slovyansk.[12] The Russian effort in this area is likely intended to link advances southeast of Izyum with Russian operations to the north and west of Lyman, with both axes converging on Slovyansk. However, Russian forces remain unlikely to make notable advances on this front as Russian troops continue to prioritize Severodonetsk at the expense of other lines of effort.
Ukrainian forces conducted further counterattacks in Severodonetsk on June 5, halting Russian advances and recapturing large areas of the city. Head of the Luhansk Regional State Administration Serhiy Haidai stated that Ukrainian forces have recaptured 70% of Severodonetsk from Russian forces in the last two days and that Russian forces now only control the eastern outskirts of the city.[13] A Russian Telegram channel additionally stated that a limited Ukrainian counterattack pushed Russian troops out of Syrotne and Lisna Dacha, villages on the southern outskirts of Severodonetsk.[14] Russian forces continued to carry out artillery, mortar, and MLRS strikes to support operations in Severodonetsk, Lysychansk, Toshkivka, and Ustynivka.[15] Ukrainian counterattacks in Severodonetsk will likely force Russian commanders to commit additional degraded units and equipment to the area to halt successful Ukrainian efforts to roll back gains Russian forces took over a week to secure.[16]
Russian forces continued air, artillery, and ground attacks to the east of Bakhmut but did not make any confirmed advances on June 5.[17] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces transferred 20 units of unspecified weapons and military equipment to replenish losses in the Bakhmut area, indicating that Russian forces are sustaining casualties in their continued efforts to gain control of ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to the northeast of Bakhmut.[18] Russian forces continued ground assaults on the eastern arc of Bakhmut in Bilohorivka, Mykailivka, and Dolomitne.[19] The Russian grouping in the Donetsk City-Avdiivka area did not engage in any confirmed advances on June 5.[20]
Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Withdraw forces to the north and defend ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum)
Russian forces are reportedly fighting to hold their occupied positions north of Kharkiv City following limited Ukrainian counterattacks on June 5. A Russian Telegram channel claimed that Ukrainian forces launched a counterattack against Russian positions in northern Kharkiv Oblast and that Ukrainian forces are attempting to advance in Tsupivka, Turove, Velyki Prokhody, Ternova, Rubizhne (the Rubizhne in Kharkiv Oblast, not in Luhansk) and Staryi Saltiv.[21] ISW cannot independently confirm if Ukrainian forces recaptured these locations or are currently contesting them. However, Ukrainian forces likely seek to take advantage of the Russian focus on Severodonetsk to make prudent counterattacks in other sectors. Russian forces continued artillery strikes against Kharkiv City and its environs and fired on Tsyrkuny, Derhachi, Ruski and Cherkasy Tyshky, Staryi Saltiv, and Kozacha Lopan.[22]
Supporting Effort #2—Southern Axis (Objective: Defend Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblasts against Ukrainian counterattacks)
Russian forces continued to hold their defensive lines and fire on Ukrainian positions along the Southern Axis on June 5.[23] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces mined the bank of the Inhulets River in anticipation of Ukrainian counteroffensives in Kherson Oblast, indicating that Russian troops are feeling the pressure of recent localized Ukrainian counterattacks along the Kherson-Mykolaiv Oblast border.[24] Russian troops continued unsuccessful ground assaults in northern Kherson around Vysokopillya and Kochubeivka and intensively fired on the line of contact in Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk, and Mykolaiv Oblasts.[25]
Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of occupied areas; set conditions for potential annexation into the Russian Federation or some other future political arrangement of Moscow’s choosing)
Russian occupation authorities continued efforts to strengthen bureaucratic, societal, and economic control of occupied areas but did not make any major changes on June 5. Advisor to the Mayor of Mariupol Petro Andryushchenko claimed that the occupation administration in Mariupol continues to fail to provide basic social services for citizens and that the city is still facing widespread restrictions on water access.[26]
[16] https://suspilne dot media/246901-vibiti-rosian-iz-severodonecka-mozlivo-ale-ce-ne-mae-velikogo-strategicnogo-znacenna-blicintervu-z-gajdaem/
2. China winning entropic warfare in Pacific Islands
I nominate Cleo for the Pulitzer equivalent for naming terminology of warfare. Entropic Warfare is a new one for me.
The definition of entropy is: “a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder.” Political warfare is the tactic (using for example media warfare to create social division, lawfare to arrest critics, and psychological warfare to damage a target country’s relationship with other potential sources of support). That political warfare supports an “entropic warfare” win—paralyzing a target country’s ability to respond or defend itself, and so allowing Beijing to “win without fighting”.
We’ve seen Chinese entropic warfare in various stages in Maldives, Nepal, Sri Lanka and elsewhere.
The best reference I could find on it is from a gaming system
From publisher blurb:
When a simple skirmish won’t resolve the conflict, it’s time to pull out the big guns and declare WAR! Entropic Guides: Warfare is an all-crunch supplement for the Entropic Gaming System, adding a new layer to conflict resolution by detailing mechanics for various types of large-scale combat situations.
Entropic Guides: Warfare includes:
- Dogfights
- Mass Combat
- Mecha
- Sea Combat
- Siege Warfare
- Space Combat
- Vehicle Combat
- ... and more!
But what is really important is that Cleo has used a term that is NOT found in China's Unrestricted Warfare nor used in the various lists of terms the US has been using over time. Here is China's terminology chart I created from Unrestricted Warfare and some historical charts from the US (not all inclusive of course).
I think her definition and use would be appreciated by the two PLA Colonels who wrote Unrestricted Warfare. I think it synthesizes a number of their concepts.
In my exchange with Cleo she responded to the lists of terms I provided in the charts above that "the unrestricted warfare chart is largely about methods, while 'entropic warfare' is about outcomes, and 'winning (ideally but not necessarily) without fighting' is about goals."
And this is my response:
Excellent points. And I think our two PLA Colonels would highlight this passage (which is why the nature of war is enduring) as a way to respond and reinforce your point:
The goal of this kind of warfare will encompass more than merely "using means that involve the force of arms to force the enemy to accept one's own will." Rather, the goal should be "to use all means whatsoever--means that involve the force of arms and means that do not involve the force of arms, means that involve military power and means that do not involve military power, means that entail casualties and means that do not entail casualties--to force the enemy to serve one's own interests."
And I think they mean for the enemy to serve China's interests (Note the above is from the first FBIS translation of Unrestricted Warfare in 1999 but it is the same translation in the commercial version in 2002)
The entire book is really about the ways and means or means and methods, kinetic, non-kinetic, and cognitive the enemy to serve one's (or China's) interests.
As an aside for those interested, the following is a narrative that explains the non-military methods of the chart I provided. (note these two Colonels wrote very long paragraphs!)
Aside from what we have discussed above, we can point out a number of other means and methods used to fight a non-military war, some of which already exist and some of which may exist in the future. Such means and methods include psychological warfare (spreading rumors to intimidate the enemy and break down his will); smuggling warfare (throwing markets into confusion and attacking economic order); media warfare (manipulating what people see and hear in order to lead public opinion along); drug warfare (obtaining sudden and huge illicit profits by spreading disaster in other countries); network warfare (venturing out in secret and concealing one's identity in a type of warfare that is virtually impossible to guard against); technological warfare (creating monopolies by setting standards independently); fabrication warfare (presenting a counterfeit appearance of real strength before the eyes of the enemy); resources warfare (grabbing riches by plundering stores of resources); economic aid warfare (bestowing favor in the open and contriving to control matters in secret); cultural warfare (leading cultural trends along in order to assimilate those with different views); and international law warfare (seizing the earliest opportunity to set up regulations), etc., etc In addition, there are other types of non-military warfare which are too numerous to mention. In this age, when the plethora of new technologies can in turn give rise to a plethora of new means and methods of fighting war, (not to mention the cross-combining and creative use of these means and methods), it would simply be senseless and a waste of effort to list all of the means and methods one by one. What is significant is that all of these warfighting means, along with their corresponding applications, that have entered, are entering, or will enter, the ranks of warfighting means in the service of war, have already begun to quietly change the view of warfare held by all of mankind. Faced with a nearly infinitely diverse array of options to choose from, why do people want to enmesh themselves in a web of their own making and select and use means of warfare that are limited to the realm of the force of arms and military power? Methods that are not characterized by the use of the force of arms, nor by the use of military power, nor even by the presence of casualties and bloodshed, are just as likely to facilitate the successful realization of the war's goals, if not more so. As a matter of course, this prospect has led to revision of the statement that "war is politics with bloodshed," and in turn has also led to a change in the hitherto set view that warfare prosecuted through force of arms is the ultimate means of resolving conflict. Clearly, it is precisely the diversity of the means employed that has enlarged the concept of warfare. Moreover, the enlargement of the concept of warfare has, in turn, resulted in enlargement of the realm of war-related activities. If we confine ourselves to warfare in the narrow sense on the traditional battlefield now, it will very difficult for us to regain our foothold in the future. Any war that breaks out tomorrow or further down the road will be characterized by warfare in the broad sense--a cocktail mixture of warfare prosecuted through the force of arms and warfare that is prosecuted by means other than the force of arms.
Lastly I would conclude with my thesis about China: China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, and displace democratic institutions. We must conduct a superior form of political warfare.
China winning entropic warfare in Pacific Islands - The Sunday Guardian Live
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Published : June 4, 2022, 5:45 pm | Updated : June 4, 2022, 8:01 PM
We’ve seen Chinese entropic warfare in various stages in Maldives, Nepal, Sri Lanka and elsewhere. And the contagion seems to be spreading in the Pacific.
Alexandria, VA.: Make no mistake, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s tour of eight Pacific Island Countries (PICs) has been a success.
No, they didn’t sign his “China-Pacific Island Countries Common Development Vision” but it’s doubtful Beijing even thought that was on the cards. Otherwise, Wang would have held his group meeting with the PIC foreign ministers at the end of his trip, after he had a chance to speak to more of them individually, rather than in the middle. Remember the draft document was leaked, not trumpeted by China, and negotiations are to be expected.
Also, four of the countries in the region recognize Taiwan. Those signing up to Beijing’s deal would have been striking a sudden blow by proxy against their neighbours. It’s not the ways things are usually done in the Pacific. Just look at the regional consternation in response to the China-Solomon Islands security deal.
China would know that. It has half-a-dozen think tanks dedicated to studying the region, has trained hundreds (if not by now thousands) of Pacific Islands bureaucrats, and has generational, focused, intelligence on key leaders and their families.
Within the countries, China has large footprints, including often the largest embassy (with staff that speak the local language), financial relationships with key business leaders, favourite members of the media, and control of large sections of the retail sector, including in the relatively remote areas, and more.
It’s worth remembering that China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law reads: “Any organization or citizen shall support, assist or cooperate with the state intelligence work…The state protects individuals and organizations that support, assist and cooperate with national intelligence work… The State commends and rewards individuals and organizations that have made significant contributions to national intelligence work.”
China has put in the effort to know the region. Bold individual action—such as the influential letter questioning the wisdom of the deals written by Federated States of Micronesia President David Panuelo—may have been a surprise, but the Chinese delegation would have deep files on the region and known before leaving Beijing this is a diverse and complicated area, with many leaders who value their nations’ sovereignty. They would have known the chances of getting the Vision agreed to as is, was slim.
So to better gauge if the trip was a success or not by Beijing’s metrics, let’s look at what some of the real goals might be.
KINETIC WARFARE
There was a lot of discussion about implications for kinetic warfare. In this context, kinetic broadly means “of or relating to the motion of material bodies”. Or a shooting war. You know, the Chinese “base” question.
No, China didn’t get a “base”, however, given China’s doctrines of unrestricted warfare and civil-military fusion, China may put kinetic elements in place in ways designed to bypass Western trip wires.
For example, the Vision proposes to “establish China-Pacific Island Countries Disaster Management Cooperation Mechanism”, that includes prepositioned “China-Pacific Island Countries Reserve of Emergency Supplies”. Those can easily be dual use.
And, while the multilateral Vision wasn’t signed, Wang did sign a series of bilateral deals, some of which echoed elements of the Vision, in most of the countries he visited. Some were formalizations or expansions of existing areas of cooperation, including blue economy, disaster management and more. Some were new, such as MoUs on fingerprint laboratories.
There also seemed to be a focus on gaining access in agriculture (land), fisheries (seas), aviation (air), and disaster response (amphibious, prepositioning). I’d like to be more precise, but the contents of most of the deals are secret. Which in itself is a win for Wang, on the political warfare front.
POLITICAL WARFARE
While strategic positioning is taking place, the primary battlefield now is not kinetic warfare, but political warfare. Political warfare can be defined as anything short of kinetic, including media warfare, lawfare and psychological warfare, also known in China as the Three Warfares.
But what is the goal of that political warfare? From what we’ve seen on this trip, and from decades of Chinese operations, one of the main goals might be winning “entropic warfare”.
ENTROPIC WARFARE
Take a look at the chain of events that has garnered Beijing its closest PIC ally to date—one that did sign an overt security document with Beijing that has overt kinetic elements—Solomon Islands.
Solomons had some longstanding domestic political fractures, and when the government of Prime Minster Manasseh Sogavare switched the country from Taiwan to China in 2019 without public consultation, those fractures were aggravated.
Leaders within the country who objected to the switch, for example the Premier of Malaita Province, Daniel Suidani, were targeted by Sogavare with backing from the Chinese Embassy. That inflamed the situation even more, leading to unrest. That unrest created the justification for Sogavare to say he needed the security deal with China to handle the civil unrest.
It took around two years for a Solomons Prime Minister complicit with (if not compliant to) China, to dangerously destabilize the country. That destabilization suits the increasingly autocratic Prime Minister as it gives him the justification to go after his opposition in the name of “stability” and potentially to postpone elections—elections he is likely to lose.
Sogavare’s government is even acting in ways that are starting to have distinct “Chinese characteristics”, such as suppression of opposition and free speech. The Media Association of Solomon Islands boycotted covering Wang Yi’s visit because of restrictions placed on them by Sogavare’s government at the behest of the Chinese. And the Solomon Islands Christian Association issued a statement saying there “must be transparency for any international MOU’s and MOA’s with the Solomon Islands. These international documents should be made public before the actual signing.”
There is widespread and growing discontent in Solomons as the fragile social contract breaks down. Which China can consider a win. Solomons is weakened from within, making opposition less effective, and the leadership more dependent on Beijing.
The definition of entropy is: “a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder.” Political warfare is the tactic (using for example media warfare to create social division, lawfare to arrest critics, and psychological warfare to damage a target country’s relationship with other potential sources of support). That political warfare supports an “entropic warfare” win—paralyzing a target country’s ability to respond or defend itself, and so allowing Beijing to “win without fighting”.
We’ve seen Chinese entropic warfare in various stages in Maldives, Nepal, Sri Lanka and elsewhere.
And the contagion seems to be spreading in the Pacific. Everywhere Wang Yi went, governments kept deals secret, restricted their own journalists, and blithely waived quarantine regulations that have been keeping families apart for over two years. In what are normally very tight-knit societies, that has sown seeds of social discord that are still nascent, but that have the potential to grow into the strangling vines of entropy.
INDIA VERSUS ENTROPY
Because India has an understanding of a broad range of Chinese political warfare tactics (as shown for example by the banning of Chinese apps, including TikTok and WeChat), India has proven successful at helping to blunt entropic warfare attacks in Maldives and Nepal, and is now trying in Sri Lanka.
China knows this, and that is likely why its proxy, the government of Prime Minister Sogavare, is stalling the entry of India’s High Commissioner to Solomon Islands.
The entropic “degradation” of the social contract in the region has come as a wake-up call to many, including Australia. John Blaxland, Professor of International Security & Intelligence Studies at Australian National University said: “What has happened in Timor L’este [one of the countries to sign multiple deals with China] reflects a sad and cynical mishandling of the bilateral relationship by Australia. Australian goodwill has been squandered, after the remarkable circumstances in September 1999, when, under Major General Peter Cosgrove, the Australian-led and UN-endorsed International Force in East Timor (INTERFET) was the handmaiden of Timorese independence. The level of trust and goodwill back then was sky high. Now it’s in the toilet. How Australia could have played its hand so badly should be the subject of a hard-nosed review. Perhaps too clever by half, we thought we could play the role of dominant regional benefactor without thinking through the limits of our own power.”
Australia’s new government seems to be trying to right the boat, but there is likely to be a steep learning curve—and that review can’t come soon enough.
On news of Wang Yi’s plans, Australia’s new Foreign Minister Penny Wong quickly travelled to the region and gave speeches about Australia being a member of the “Pacific family”. But given the problems Pacific Islanders often have getting visas to Australia, many were likely thinking “you are the sort of family member who shows up in our house whenever you want and demands attention, but if we want to visit you, good luck getting in the door.”
Australia still has a lot to learn about its neighbours, and itself. But it doesn’t have much time. Entropy is spreading, with the active help of Beijing. While Canberra and others get up to speed, countries like India, and leaders like FSM President Panuelo, could be encouraged to engage more broadly on political warfare education and defence across the region—helping to knit together like-minded journalists, community leaders, business sectors, democracy-minded political leaders, and more.
For example, President Panuelo and Premier Suidani could be assured their economies won’t be penalized for their principled leadership, their analyses could be shared personally with other Pacific leaders (ideally in a low key, bilateral manner, without Australian or New Zealand intervention), and investigating could be launched into the “agents of entropy” laundering their ill-gotten Chinese money via, for example, Australian and New Zealand real estate. It would also be good to see Australia and others asking Solomons why Quad partner India wasn’t being allowed in.
Wang Yi’s trip was a win in China’s protracted entropic warfare strategy. That needs to be acknowledged, reviewed and understood. Australia just announced a new patrol boat for Samoa and recently opened a new military training facility in Fiji.
You can give a country as many patrol boats as you like, build whatever military training facilities you want, but if the country’s society weakens, fragments and is captured by Beijing, all you’ve done is given China and its proxies a nice new boat and barracks with which to suppress local opposition and project power.
3. West Point superintendent slated to lead US Army Europe and Africa
I have already seen comments on social media panning this saying the Superintendent's job should be terminal and apolitical??
Comment on social media: "Hot Take: Selecting the USMA Supe to get a 4th star sets a bad precedent for a role that should be terminal & apolitical."
My response on social media: Not unprecedented. Maxwell Taylor and William Westmoreland went on to 4 star jobs. Donald Bennett went on to DIA and USARPAC after being Superintendent. Andrew Goodpaster came out of retirement after being CINCEUR and SACEUR to be Superintendent.
West Point superintendent slated to lead US Army Europe and Africa
Williams has served as West Point’s superintendent since 2018.
Politico first reported the Army’s plan to nominate Williams, but several sources confirmed to Defense News that the three-star will pin on his fourth star and head to Europe to lead the command.
Williams would be the first Black general officer to serve as commander.
Williams also served as deputy chief of staff G-3/5/7 of U.S. Army Europe.
He began his career as a field artillery officer, but also has the unique experience of leading Operation United Assistance, which sought to combat the Ebola outbreak in Liberia.
Williams is a rare Washington, D.C., local, born in Alexandria, Virginia.
Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts from Kenyon College.
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4. Opinion | This is no time to hesitate in Ukraine
Excerpts:
President Biden has generally done an excellent job of supporting Ukraine. He has expertly marshaled allies and persuaded Congress to provide $54 billion in aid since the invasion began. And he has been right to avoid getting embroiled in direct combat with the Russians; hence his refusal to declare a no-fly zone. But he is still hobbled by excessive caution in the provision of aid.
For months, the Ukrainians have been begging for multiple launch rocket systems that would allow them to neutralize Russian artillery. Finally, last week, Biden agreed to supply M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems — but only four of them. Sorry, that won’t cut it. While allies are plugging some gaps (Germany is promising to send its IRIS-T air defenses), Biden still refuses to supply the Patriot long-range air-defense systems or the fighter aircraft (MiG-29s or, better, F-16s) that Ukraine desperately needs. He also refuses to do anything about the Russian naval blockade of the Black Sea, which is strangling Ukraine’s economy.
Biden would do well to remember the Powell Doctrine, formulated by the late secretary of state Colin L. Powell. He counseled against getting involved in “halfhearted half-wars” and argued that when the United States uses force, it should do so with overwhelming might to win. The same doctrine should apply to military assistance: Instead of offering Ukraine just enough aid to avoid being defeated, we should be providing such overwhelming support that it can win the war (meaning, liberate most of the territory lost since Feb. 24). Ukraine shows no sign of tiring of the struggle. Neither should we.
Opinion | This is no time to hesitate in Ukraine
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June 5, 2022 at 2:51 p.m. EDT
History is littered with nations that launched wars in the expectation of a quick and painless victory, only to bog down in a conflict far more protracted and far less successful than anticipated. Think of Napoleon in Spain and Russia, Germany in World War I and II, North Korea in the Korean War, Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War, the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq. Once the initial spasm of optimism faded, these conflicts all turned into wars of attrition in which the side that could endure and inflict the most punishment prevailed.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, now more than 100 days old, has followed this pattern. Russian dictator Vladimir Putin gambled on a bungled blitzkrieg toward Kyiv that failed. In those heady, early days, the world marveled at Ukrainian heroism, symbolized by the troops who responded to a Russian demand for surrender with the immortal words: “Russian warship, go f--- yourself.” Pictures of Ukrainian tractors dragging captured Russian tanks become an Internet sensation.
But despite suffering heavy losses of men and material — the Pentagon has estimated that Russia has lost about 1,000 tanks — Putin has not ended his evil invasion. He merely downsized it. In mid-April, he redirected his forces to focus on the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. By massing their artillery, the Russians have made life “hell” for Ukrainian troops in this sector. President Volodymyr Zelensky says the Russians are killing as many as 100 Ukrainian troops a day and wounding up to 500 more. The invaders control about 20 percent of Ukraine — an area larger than the Netherlands.
Putin reportedly calculates that he can still win the war by waiting for the will of the West to erode, and there are many in the West who have given him encouragement. Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger suggests that Ukraine must cede territory for peace, and French President Emmanuel Macron insists that Russia must not be “humiliated.” Meaning Putin should be rewarded for his unlawful aggression?
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This is the counsel of despair, and it is divorced from the facts on the ground. A recent poll finds that nearly 80 percent of Ukrainians say their country is moving in the right direction, and many Ukrainian refugees are returning home.
The battlefield picture is grimmer than a month ago but far brighter than three months ago. Yes, the Ukrainians have lost some ground — but they have also regained ground. They have driven the “orcs,” as they call the invaders, out of northern Ukraine and are retaking villages in the south. Ukrainian troops have even reclaimed part of Severodonetsk, a city in the far east that had looked lost a week ago.
While the Russians continue “to make incremental, grinding, and costly progress in eastern Ukraine” (to quote the Institute for the Study of War), they have not come close to encircling Ukrainian troops or breaking their will to fight. Russian forces, by contrast, continue to suffer from incompetent leadership and low morale — which helps to explain why they don’t advance until artillery has pulverized everything in their path. Ukraine still has far more forces, with 700,000 troops facing fewer than 200,000 invaders, and its arsenal continues to improve with deliveries of Western weapons.
During the past 100 days, we have swung from excessive pessimism to excessive optimism and now to excessive pessimism again. This is not the moment to lose faith in Ukraine. This is the moment to redouble our support for its freedom fighters.
President Biden has generally done an excellent job of supporting Ukraine. He has expertly marshaled allies and persuaded Congress to provide $54 billion in aid since the invasion began. And he has been right to avoid getting embroiled in direct combat with the Russians; hence his refusal to declare a no-fly zone. But he is still hobbled by excessive caution in the provision of aid.
For months, the Ukrainians have been begging for multiple launch rocket systems that would allow them to neutralize Russian artillery. Finally, last week, Biden agreed to supply M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems — but only four of them. Sorry, that won’t cut it. While allies are plugging some gaps (Germany is promising to send its IRIS-T air defenses), Biden still refuses to supply the Patriot long-range air-defense systems or the fighter aircraft (MiG-29s or, better, F-16s) that Ukraine desperately needs. He also refuses to do anything about the Russian naval blockade of the Black Sea, which is strangling Ukraine’s economy.
Biden would do well to remember the Powell Doctrine, formulated by the late secretary of state Colin L. Powell. He counseled against getting involved in “halfhearted half-wars” and argued that when the United States uses force, it should do so with overwhelming might to win. The same doctrine should apply to military assistance: Instead of offering Ukraine just enough aid to avoid being defeated, we should be providing such overwhelming support that it can win the war (meaning, liberate most of the territory lost since Feb. 24). Ukraine shows no sign of tiring of the struggle. Neither should we.
5. Russian General Reported Killed in Ukraine
I hear the music in the background... "Another one bites the dust."
Excerpts:
Russian media has reported on three deaths among its generals in more than three months of fighting.
Ukraine’s General Staff claims at least 12 Russian generals killed.
Russian General Reported Killed in Ukraine - The Moscow Times
Russian General Roman Kutuzov has been killed on the battlefield in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, state media reported Sunday.
If confirmed by the Russian military, Kutuzov would be at least the fourth Russian general killed in more than three months of fighting in Ukraine.
“On the one hand, the general had led soldiers into attack, as if there are not enough colonels,” Alexander Sladkov, the Rossia state broadcaster’s war correspondent, reported.
“On the other hand, Roman was a commander like everyone else, albeit with a higher rank,” Sladkov wrote on his Telegram channel.
Kutuzov had commanded the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic 1st Army Corps, according to Ukrainian naval infantry officer Dmitry Ivanov.
Kutuzov had ordered his troops to storm a Donetsk region settlement Sunday and “was forced to lead the assault, arriving on the front line,” Ivanov wrote on Facebook.
Russian media has reported on three deaths among its generals in more than three months of fighting.
Ukraine’s General Staff claims at least 12 Russian generals killed.
At least 317 Russian officers have been killed in Ukraine, a third of whom are majors, lieutenant colonels and colonels, independent Russian media reported in April, citing publicly available data.
The senior Russian officers’ reported deaths have reduced the army’s capacity to plan and execute military operations and delivered a blow to morale on the frontline, analysts have told The Moscow Times.
Other investigative outlets have identified and verified the deaths of more than 3,000 Russian soldiers, a figure that outstrips official Russian Defense Ministry estimates.
6. Putin Can’t Keep Russian Mothers Silent Forever
Will we see the power and wrath of the Russian mother?
Putin Can’t Keep Russian Mothers Silent Forever
Families’ anger over mounting casualties is hard to contain once it bubbles over, as it has before.
The mother of a Russian soldier killed during the war in Chechnya.Photographer: Hector Mata/AFP/Getty Images
June 6, 2022, 12:05 AM EDT
Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine has built up the image of a powerful nation with an indomitable leader and a disciplined army, encircled by enemies and fighting for the future of the motherland. Never mind that it was Russia that invaded Ukraine, that there has been plentiful evidence of Russian soldiers looting and raping, or that what was supposed to be a bloodless blitzkrieg has turned into a costly war of attrition. Roadside billboards with portraits of fallen soldiers carry the tagline “hero of victory,” though there’s no actual triumph. A popular slogan roughly translates as “we leave none of our people behind,” though the armed forces routinely do just that, abandoning bodies in the mud or in makeshift Ukrainian morgues.
The Kremlin sustains its official narrative with a tight grip. But as the war drags on, campaign aims shifting, there’s one inconvenient truth that even President Vladimir Putin will increasingly struggle to muffle: the men who fail to come home. No constituency is as hard for him to dismiss as the mothers, wives and daughters of soldiers, especially if tempers rise along with widespread economic hardship. Their anger and grief has helped to galvanize public opinion in the past, tarnishing the image of the military and the state. It can do so again.
Russia’s losses in Ukraine have already been staggering, even if the pace has slowed since the disastrous early days. It’s hard to be precise because official Defense Ministry figures have not been released since March 25, and even then inevitably undercounted, with 1,351 Russian service members reported to have been killed. Ukraine calculates around 30,000 Russian deaths, an overestimate. But even half that, as Britain’s defense secretary reckoned in April, would not be far off the number the Soviet Union officially lost in its decade-long conflict in Afghanistan. And the number is rising.
We’ve seen the power of mothers before. During the 1980s bodies were returned from Afghanistan in sealed zinc coffins and headstones carved only with “killed fulfilling his internationalist duty.” Aided by the freedoms of glasnost, angry mothers began to demand information on deaths and injuries. They campaigned actively against dedovshchina, the brutal hazing of young conscripts, and forced the Soviet military to provide answers for the first time.
The Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers remained front and center during the first Chechen war, when they marched to the capital Grozny, negotiated to bring their sons home and gathered evidence on the killed and wounded. Mothers’ fury put Putin on the spot over his desultory response to the sinking of the nuclear submarine Kursk in 2000, with 118 on board. “They earn $50 a month and now they’re stuck in that tin can! What did I raise him for? Do you have children?” one pained mother shouted at Kremlin officials. She was silenced — television footage showed her being injected with a substance and collapsing, though she later denied being tranquilized — but public anger was harder to soothe.
It will play out differently in 2022.
The ability to press the military for transparency in the late 1980s, mothers’ influence during the Chechen war in the 1990s, and even the outbursts over Kursk, were possible in a context of relative media and political freedom, thanks to perestroika’s reforms and the chaos that followed. It’s no accident the mothers had far less success during the second Chechen campaign, as Putin’s time in office got underway. Today, there’s wall-to-wall propaganda glorifying the fallen, control of the media and little tolerance for protest of any kind.
As Gulnaz Sharafutdinova of King’s College London pointed out to me, there’s also the fact that unlike in either Afghanistan or the first war in Chechnya, when society was more equal and families of all kinds were affected, those involved in this conflict are by and large not conscripts but contracted soldiers, young men seeking a way out of poverty, coming from ethnic minorities and distant regions — with little political clout.
It’s telling that a list of nearly 1,100 fatalities analyzed by the BBC Russian Service in early April did not include a single man from Moscow, a city of roughly 13 million. There were only five from the wider Moscow region and one from St Petersburg. Buryatia, a republic with fewer than a million people, had 52 fallen servicemen. Dagestan, in the Caucasus and with some three million inhabitants, had 93.
And there’s the simple reality that a death is easier for families to handle if it is heroic, making them more likely to accept the official line, even when it flies in the face of their experience. When Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich wrote her polyphonic book on the soldiers of the Soviet war in Afghanistan and their families — “Boys in Zinc”, after their coffins — she was threatened, and eventually sued by several of her subjects for libel and defamation. “Mothers of sons who had died in Afghanistan came to the trial with portraits of their children, with their medals and insignia,” she later wrote. “And, to me, the mothers said, ‘We do not need your truth, we have our own truth.’”
But with every casualty, the fiction is harder to sustain, and the questions more pressing. It’s a risk that grows with every sunk cruiser or badly hit parachute regiment. Especially when the war’s goals remain murky.
Ukraine has spotted the opportunity. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has appealed directly to Russian mothers. The government in Kyiv set up a hotline and runs a Telegram channel and website with pictures of those captured, for families searching for loved ones — to spread the word.
It’s a danger Putin recognizes and has struggled with since his plans for a three-day war went wrong in late February. He has repeatedly said there are no conscripts on the front in Ukraine — the use of conscripts in battle remains a highly sensitive issue — and has resisted mass mobilization. But his Defense Ministry has had to acknowledge that some conscripts have been deployed, and some captured. And facing heavy losses of troops and equipment, Putin has just removed the upper age limit for contract soldiers. As the fight drags on, he will have to pull in reserves, or more of those doing their compulsory military service. (Though most likely not women, who make up a tiny portion of the armed forces and are not generally permitted in frontline roles.)
As Ben Noble, who studies Russian domestic politics at University College London, points out, casualties, like economic hardship, will test the limits of the regime’s propaganda and repression because both are directly experienced by ordinary Russians, whatever television talk shows say. And there will be a tipping point for both.
Three factors make matters worse for Putin. One is that even by the standards of autocrats, he struggles with empathy that might help navigate a public crisis. He only found time to visit injured servicemen three months after the invasion of Ukraine, and the Kremlin’s idea of presidential compassion was footage of wooden handshakes distributed in a spotless Moscow hospital where no one actually appeared to be particularly ill. As Noble put it to me, it’s a personalist regime without a human face.
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Then, there’s the fact that unlike around the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the patriotic surge in Russian opinion shown in surveys after the fighting began also shows significant anxiety. Asked in March what they felt about the war, most did first mention pride in Russia — but then it was fear, anxiety and horror. For younger respondents, fear, anxiety and horror came first. There are already disgruntled relatives speaking up and attacks on draft offices.
Finally, there’s Putin’s emphasis on women as mothers, as he grapples with Russia’s dismal demographics and leans on traditionalist views to rein in society. He has, for example, sought to restore the Soviet title of “Heroine Mother” for women with large families. It’s hard to glorify, then silence.
Moms and wives can’t topple Putin or end the fight, just as their distress didn’t force troops out of Afghanistan or end the Soviet Union. But their grief and growing numbers of casualties — which state media cannot airbrush away with laudatory coverage alone — tarnishes the military and the state with unpredictable consequences.
“We got so used to living on two levels, one according to what we read in books and the press, and the other — totally different — according to our own experience,” one woman told Alexievich, after extracts from her book were published.
“Everything you wrote was true, except that reality was even more terrible.”
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7. How the Air Force Plans to Kill the A-10 Warthog
Oh no! Not our beloved A-10. Loved by everyone except the USAF. Imagine what they would do to Russian armor in Ukraine?
How the Air Force Plans to Kill the A-10 Warthog
Yes, the A-10 Warthog is one amazing plane built to mow down any enemy forces on the ground – clearly the ultimate Cold War air support plane of its day. However, the A-10 is getting old and many in the U.S. Air Force want to see it head into retirement for good. Will it happen? The warthog is the only pig species that has adapted to grazing and savanna habitats, and its diet consists of grasses, bark, berries and at times carrion. Even in droughts, the hardy animals can subsist on bulbs, rhizomes and nutritious roots.
In other words, the warthog is a hard animal to starve.
That bit of background on the creature is noteworthy as the United States Air Force is now in essence trying to starve out its fleet of Warthog aircraft.
According to a report this week from Stars & Stripes, the service’s fleet of A-10 Thunderbolt aircraft – fondly known as the Warthog – isn’t deployable overseas because the Air Force is “starving” it of critical maintenance and upgrades. The Pentagon has also sought to retire 21 A-10s from the Indiana Air National Guard, according to its recent fiscal 2023 (FY23) budget request.
Air Force officials have maintained that it needs to send the aging close air support workhorse out to pasture so that it can invest in weapons that can meet modern-day threats posed by near-peer adversaries including China and Russia. However, the retirement ban in the fiscal year 2022 (FY22) National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) had marked the fifth time since 2014 that the United States Congress rejected all or part of the Air Force’s A-10 retirement efforts.
Just last year, lawmakers had blocked an Air Force plan to divest 42 A-10s, including 35 that were stationed at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base (AFB), which is located outside of Tucson, Arizona. The base is currently home to the largest contingent of A-10s in the fleet, with 83 Warthogs flown by two active-duty squadrons under the host 355th Wing and one Air Force Reserve A-10 squadron.
A-10 – Culling the Herd?
The Air Force had announced plans last year to keep just 218 combat-capable A-10s flying into the 2030s. Yet, most of those remain “non-deployable” as the aircraft don’t have enough flying hours left before significant maintenance is required to serve a six-month overseas rotation.
According to a September 2021 report by the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight (POGO), the United States Air Force has essentially hollowed out the A-10 fleet by starving it of critical maintenance including new wings and upgrades to a central computer system.
“The iconic A-10 is the first, and so far only, aircraft designed from the very beginning specifically for the close air support mission. Air Force leaders generally prefer aircraft that fly high and fast to bomb targets deep within enemy territory in the mistaken belief that doing so can win wars independent of ground forces,” the report stated.
“Over one hundred years of military history has shown that military forces are much more effective when working in close cooperation, which is the exact purpose of the A-10,” the report continued.
Yet, by not maintaining the fleet as lawmakers have called for – the Air Force is essentially forcing the aircraft into retirement. Some believe that is a mistake.
Dan Grazier, senior defense policy fellow at the Center for Defense Information at POGO called the Air Force’s actions “demolition by neglect.”
Grazier, a former Marine Corps tank captain who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, told Stars & Stripes that the United States military has no other platform dedicated to the close air support of ground troops and there is no reason why the A-10 cannot continue to serve in that capacity.
“There’s nothing inherently wrong with old aircraft — if an aircraft was well-designed originally and then maintained properly throughout the years, you can get a lot of use out of it,” Grazier explained, and then cited upgrades to the 1950s-era B-52 bomber that are expected to keep the bomber flying into the 2050s.
Even worse, Grazier added is that the Air Force hasn’t followed up with more advanced versions of the A-10.
“We shouldn’t be talking about retiring the A-10, we should be talking about retiring the A-30 now,” he added. “We should be two or three generations beyond the A-10 by now.”
Now a Senior Editor for 1945, Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. He regularly writes about military hardware, and is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com. Peter is also a Contributing Writer for Forbes.
8. With US distracted, Tehran and Beijing tighten embrace in the Middle East
Excerpts:
Indeed, when America leaves, its worst enemies usually fill the vacuum and gather strength. That’s exactly why Tehran is eager to evict US forces from the region. With the stabilizing American presence gone, Tehran would enjoy a freer hand to export terrorism and dominate its neighbors. An empowered Iran, in turn, would stoke Sunni Islamist radicalization and terrorist group recruitment.
Meanwhile, Arab states see the United States as an increasingly unreliable security partner, one they perceive as simultaneously withdrawing its forces and refusing even to sell weapons that address genuine security threats. Arab partners may come to believe they have little choice but to strengthen ties with Beijing, a dynamic which has already started to happen and could further increase China’s influence and footprint in the region.
Many Americans may be done with the Middle East, but the region is not done with us. US-China competition is playing out in the Middle East and if the United States fails to recognize that and retain sufficient forces in the region, Chinese diplomats and troops will be among the adversaries happily waving goodbye as Americans depart.
With US distracted, Tehran and Beijing tighten embrace in the Middle East - Breaking Defense
The US pivot to the Pacific may be all about China, but it misses Beijing’s moves to fill a US void elsewhere, write a team from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
on June 03, 2022 at 8:29 AM
China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi shakes hands with Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif during a meeting at the Diaoyutai state guest house on December 31, 2019 in Beijing, China. (Photo by Noel Celis – Pool/Getty Images)
The US appeared to have been caught flat-footed when it was revealed China had signed a security pact with the Solomon Islands, part of a broader initiative by the Asian behemoth to spread its influence in the South Pacific. But that’s not the only region in which Beijing is making moves while everyone else watches Europe. In the op-ed below, the FDD’s Bradley Bowman and his colleagues argue the US must respond to China’s tightening relationship with another US adversary: Iran.
With attention focused on the ongoing war in Ukraine, some may have missed that Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe visited Tehran recently in an effort to deepen Sino-Iranian security ties. It is the most recent, but hardly the first, public demonstration of the evolving political, economic and security partnership between China and Iran that presents genuine challenges for the United States and its partners.
The growing Chinese-Iranian embrace in the Middle East underscores the short-sighted nature of the popular sentiment in Washington that the United States should “pivot” away from the Middle East to more effectively compete with China. Instead, Washington should compete by expanding combined military exercises with Israel and Arab partners; fast-tracking regional arms sales [PDF] focused on intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, interdiction, and air and missile defense capabilities; and scrutinizing the impacts of any proposals for additional US military withdrawals from the Middle East.
Wei said his April trip to Tehran was aimed at “improving the strategic defense cooperation” between Iran and China and “push[ing] the relationship between the two militaries to a higher level.” The commander of Iran’s Armed Forces General Staff echoed those goals and announced that the two countries would hold more military drills and exchanges in the future. In January, China, Iran, and Russia conducted a trilateral naval exercise in the Gulf of Oman and northern Indian Ocean, building on a previous drill in December 2019.
When meeting with Wei, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi left little doubt regarding the primary target of Sino-Iranian cooperation, stressing the need to confront “unilateralism,” a phrase China and Iran both employ when referring to the United States.
But the growing Sino-Iranian relationship is not only a problem for the United States. It also creates an array of security problems for Arab states in the Persian Gulf, Israel, and Europe. The increasing economic partnership between China and Iran will provide the Islamic Republic with more resources to proliferate weapons to its terrorist proxies and partners, expand its missile and drone arsenals, threaten shipping, undermine international sanctions, and advance its nuclear program. From the Chinese Communist Party’s perspective, the growing security partnership undercuts US interests in the Middle East and helps secure Beijing’s access to much-needed Middle Eastern oil.
With these motives in mind, following implementation of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, Tehran and Beijing signed a military cooperation agreement in 2016 to boost defense ties between the countries. In March 2021, as it was clear Washington was angling to resurrect the nuclear deal, China and Iran signed a 25-year strategic partnership. The agreement reportedly calls for expanded Sino-Iranian military and intelligence cooperation and will see Beijing invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Iranian energy development and infrastructure. Then, in September 2021, the China- and Russia-dominated Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) unanimously agreed to elevate Iran to full membership.
The United States and its partners are right to worry that Tehran may acquire advanced Chinese military capabilities. Beijing was a significant source of Tehran’s anti-ship missile capabilities during and after the Iran-Iraq War, as well as an early supporter of its solid-propellant missile program through transfers. China remains a key jurisdiction for procurement of goods for Tehran’s ballistic missile arsenal, which US intelligence assesses [PDF] to be the largest in the region. The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission recently found [PDF] that at least one of the ballistic missiles that Iran claimed it used to attack US forces in Iraq was “very likely to have been developed with Chinese ballistic missile technology.”
With a UN arms embargo on Iran already in the rearview mirror and UN prohibitions on Iranian missile tests and transfers slated to lapse next year, the Islamic Republic may look to China to provide anti-access/area-denial capabilities that could threaten US and partner forces and embolden Tehran. That should cause particular concern in Israel, knowing that advanced weapons from China could make a strike against Iran’s nuclear program even more difficult.
Some might argue that Beijing’s desire to not ruffle feathers in Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates might prevent the transfer of such weapons. But such concerns have not prevented China from conducting military exercises with Iran, nor have they dissuaded top Chinese defense officials from visiting Iran. Plus, Beijing has already signaled its willingness jointly develop weapons with the Islamic Republic. In response to any concerns, Beijing might remind Riyadh and Abu Dhabi that they are also recipients of Chinese weapons.
Unlike many in Washington, Beijing understands the strategic significance of the wider Middle East and clearly plans to compete there. Afterall, China established its first overseas military base in Djibouti, just across the Bab al-Mandab Strait from Yemen. Beijing knows the Bab al-Mandab is one of the world’s most important commercial and military maritime routes, enabling vessels to travel from the Mediterranean via the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean and beyond.
Growing Chinese activity in the Middle East stands in stark contrast to the calls of many in Washington who view the Middle East as a wasteful distraction to be jettisoned as quickly as possible. It is true that the United States must scrutinize Middle East deployments and urgently strengthen its military posture in the Indo-Pacific. But before further reducing US posture in the Middle East, leaders should consider the persistent threats in the region. They should also appreciate that the US military posture in the Middle East stands at roughly 45,000 troops, down drastically from 2008, when nearly 300,000 troops were in the region supporting the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan alone [PDF].
Those inclined to brush aside such arguments should consider the fact that problems in the Middle East tend not to stay there, and that those problems often get worse when Americans leave or lose interest. The US withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, which ignored conditions on the ground, catalyzed a series of events that resulted in the rise of ISIS and forced the return of US forces at greater cost in 2014.
Indeed, when America leaves, its worst enemies usually fill the vacuum and gather strength. That’s exactly why Tehran is eager to evict US forces from the region. With the stabilizing American presence gone, Tehran would enjoy a freer hand to export terrorism and dominate its neighbors. An empowered Iran, in turn, would stoke Sunni Islamist radicalization and terrorist group recruitment.
Meanwhile, Arab states see the United States as an increasingly unreliable security partner, one they perceive as simultaneously withdrawing its forces and refusing even to sell weapons that address genuine security threats. Arab partners may come to believe they have little choice but to strengthen ties with Beijing, a dynamic which has already started to happen and could further increase China’s influence and footprint in the region.
Many Americans may be done with the Middle East, but the region is not done with us. US-China competition is playing out in the Middle East and if the United States fails to recognize that and retain sufficient forces in the region, Chinese diplomats and troops will be among the adversaries happily waving goodbye as Americans depart.
Bradley Bowman is senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where Zane Zovak and Ryan Brobst are research analysts and Behnam Ben Taleblu is a senior fellow.
Middle East firms seek to produce their own long-range drones using satellite links, company officials and experts told Breaking Defense.
9. What If Ukraine Wins?
I like to see the questions asked: what happens when it wins?
Excepts:
Ukraine winning small is the more realistic and achievable goal. Aiming for that outcome is smarter than dreaming of Russian surrender—but also smarter than floating unformed ideas of a negotiated settlement that might leave Kherson and Mariupol under permanent Russian control, rewarding Putin for his aggression.
The goal of Ukrainian and Western strategy must be sustainable security for Ukraine. Kyiv’s partners have rightly refused to compromise on Ukrainian sovereignty and independence. But they also must think through “the day after” Ukraine wins. Rather than quixotic expectations of Russia bowing to a Ukrainian victory or simply exiting the international stage, sustainable security for Ukraine will demand painstaking effort and carefully calibrated increases in political, financial, and military investment. This is true even – or perhaps especially – if Ukraine wins. When the U.S. diplomat George Kennan, pondering the sources of Soviet conduct, stared into the future in 1947, he did not think in years. He thought in decades. To persevere and prevail in Ukraine, today’s Western leaders must do so, as well. As Tolstoy put it, “the strongest of all warriors are these two—time and patience.”
What If Ukraine Wins?
Victory in the War Would Not End the Conflict With Russia
June 6, 2022
In recent days, many Western observers of the war in Ukraine have begun to worry that the tide is turning in Russia’s favor. Massive artillery fire is yielding incremental Russian gains in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, and Russia is bringing in new forces. Ukrainian troops are drained and exhausted. Russia is trying to create a fait accompli and to make reality conform to its imperial ambitions through “passportization”—the quick provision of Russian passports to Ukrainian citizens in Russian-occupied areas—and the forced introduction of Russian administrative structures in Ukrainian territory. The Kremlin likely intends to occupy eastern and southern Ukraine indefinitely and to eventually move on Odessa, a major port city in southern Ukraine and a hub of commerce that connects Ukraine to the outside world.
Looking at the big picture, however, things look less than rosy for Moscow. The list of Ukraine’s military achievements is long and getting longer. Ukrainian forces won the battle of Kyiv; successfully defended the southern city of Mykolaiv, keeping Odessa out of reach for the invading armies, at least for the time being; and prevailed in the battle of Kharkiv, a city right across from the Russian border. Russia’s recent gains pale in comparison. And unlike the Kremlin, the government in Kyiv has a clear strategic purpose, buttressed by excellent morale and widening assistance from abroad.
This momentum could outline a virtuous cycle for Ukraine. Should Ukrainian forces gain territory this summer, Kyiv’s power will continue to grow. The truth is that despite the setbacks endemic to all wars, Ukraine could still win—although the scope and scale of its victory would most likely be limited.
The most plausible Ukrainian victory would be “winning small.” Ukraine could expel Russia from the western side of the Dnieper River, establish perimeters of defense around the areas Russia controls in Ukraine’s east and south and secure its access to the Black Sea. Over time, Ukrainian forces could move forward, breaking up the land bridge that Russia has established to Crimea, the territory in southeastern Ukraine that Russia seized and annexed back in 2014. Essentially, Ukraine could restore the status quo ante that existed before Russia launched its attack in February.
The most plausible Ukrainian victory would be “winning small.”
This would not be the world-changing victory about which some Western pundits dream. But a smaller and militarily weaker state repelling an imperial power would nevertheless have ripple effects in the region and the rest of the world—by demonstrating that successful resistance against powerful aggressors is possible.
There is, of course, a “winning big” scenario, as well, in which the war ends entirely on Ukraine’s terms. That would mean the full reclamation of Ukrainian sovereignty, including Crimea and the parts of the Donbas occupied by Russia in the years before it fully invaded in February. This seems far less likely than a more limited victory: attacking is harder than defending, and the territory in question is substantial and heavily fortified. At the very least, Russia would hold on to Crimea tenaciously. The region is home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and a symbol of Russia’s return to great-power status after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russian President Vladimir Putin is unlikely to let Crimea go without a tremendous fight.
No matter the scope of a Ukrainian victory, all such scenarios entail a nebulous “day after.” Russia will not acquiesce to its defeat nor to a noncoercive negotiated outcome. Any Ukrainian victory will only spur more Russian intransigence in its wake. As soon as it can rebuild its military capacity, Russia will use a narrative of humiliation to stir domestic support for a renewed effort to control Ukraine. Even if he loses the war, Putin will not let go of Ukraine. Nor will he simply sit by as it becomes fully integrated into the West. A Ukrainian victory, then, would require not a relaxation of Western support for Ukraine but an even stronger commitment.
WINNING SMALL
To win small and restore the pre-invasion status quo, Ukraine would have to translate its victories in the north into victories in the east and south. In Kyiv and Kharkiv, Ukrainian forces pushed Russian ones into a tactical retreat. That outcome would be more difficult to replicate in places such as Kherson and in Mariupol, which are on territory that Russia controls and where it is presumably becoming entrenched. But Ukraine has the advantage of large manpower reserves, its army is well organized and well led, and there is no doubt about Ukrainian willingness to fight. The nature of Russia’s invasion has generated all the will to fight that Ukraine will ever need. The capable leadership of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has further solidified the war effort.
Ukraine also has the assistance of many of the world’s premier militaries — in particular, that of the United States. Kyiv has access to first-rate intelligence about the Russian military’s planning and force posture. The Ukrainian military has imposed staggeringly high costs on Russia, including heavy casualties and the loss and destruction of materiel. If Ukraine can combine its firepower and its manpower this summer, it could conduct a counteroffensive in the Donbas and penetrate Russia’s land bridge to Crimea.
It has not been an easy war for Russia.
Russia, by contrast, has already expended many of its available military assets, including much of its hardware and ammunition (although it still has resources in reserve that it could put into theater). The Russian military’s exhaustion is most easily witnessed among its soldiers. Many units have endured losses that render them ineffective. Morale may be higher than many non-Russian observers believe; it is hard to assess. But for obvious reasons, Russian morale is lower than Ukrainian morale. Russia is fighting a war of choice. Corruption and the top-down nature of the Russian military have hampered its troops. It has not been an easy war for Russia.
Still, Russia has started to mobilize, step by step, drawing up reservists and specialists while still avoiding mass conscription. These actions will have an effect on the war. Putin retains the option of mass mobilization, formally declaring an outright war and bringing to bear Russia’s full military might. But mobilization, training, and moving materiel all take time. The key to Ukrainian strategy should be to establish facts on the ground and to make the costs of changing these facts too high for Russia. That would require a major Ukrainian offensive in the next two to three months.
THE WAR AFTER THE WAR
The combination of military setbacks and punishing sanctions might eventually induce Moscow to moderate its goals, and a meaningful ceasefire might become achievable. But a more far-reaching negotiated settlement is probably out of the question for Putin. Russia is already treating the locations it has occupied not as bargaining chips for an eventual settlement but as Russian territory. And according to the Russian intelligence experts Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, Kremlin hardliners want more war—not less.
Ukraine and the West should thus assume that Russia will not accept any defeat. A small Ukrainian victory in, say, the fall of this year might well be followed by another Russian invasion in 2023. Russia would need to regroup its forces, which would be challenging under sanctions. Even more important for Putin than imperial conquest, however, is the preservation of his own power, since autocrats who lose wars often end up in dire straits. Putin might have to temporarily accept being pushed back to his pre-invasion starting point, but he could not countenance the permanent loss of Ukraine. He might continue small-scale fighting, missile strikes, and aerial bombardment until reinforcements – gathered through partial or full mobilization – arrived. Alternatively, Putin could cynically use a ceasefire to buy time for bad-faith negotiations, much as he did before the February invasion.
Meanwhile, to deter future Russian attacks, Ukraine would likely have to ask for more weaponry than ever. Assenting to this would be difficult for Western powers, as Russia would be seeking relief from sanctions and taking its usual divide-and-conquer approach to Washington and its allies. For the Western powers, a theoretical solution would be to offer Ukraine security guarantees in exchange for Ukrainian neutrality. But Russia could put those promises to the test in a renewed attack—and sanctions relief, if it ever came to pass, would have to be slow. With Putin’s Russia, the approach must be “distrust and verify.”
The West can do little to influence Russia from within.
Another risk is that even a small Ukrainian victory might be preceded or followed by nuclear threats from Putin. Putin has departed from Cold War precedent by instrumentalizing nuclear weapons for political reasons rather than just for ones related to national security. His menacing statements have come across as bluster. But Putin could up the ante. To scare his adversaries, he could order technical preparations for the potential use of nuclear weapons. The West should react to such threats with deterrence, signaling clearly that Putin would achieve nothing through the use of nuclear weapons. If that does not work, and Putin acts on his threats, then NATO should consider carrying out a limited conventional response, either against Russian forces in Ukraine or within Russia itself. In the meantime, the West needs to build a broad coalition to condemn and deter nuclear saber rattling by linking sanctions and threats of retaliation to Putin’s nuclear brinkmanship. China might not join in, but out of fear of nuclear instability, it might approve of the idea.
Finally, even if Ukraine wins small, Kyiv and its partners would have to prepare for years of continued conflict. Zelensky has indicated as much by saying that postwar Ukraine will resemble Israel in its full-time orientation toward self-defense. Putin, meanwhile, would continue to probe for Western vulnerabilities: much as he responded to Western sanctions in 2014 by meddling in the U.S. presidential election in 2016, he would likely mix cyberattacks, disinformation, and “active measures,” such as operations that would damage political parties and leaders Russia dislikes, undermine the internal stability of “anti-Russian” countries, and degrade the integrity of the transatlantic alliance and similar such alliances in the Indo-Pacific. The West would be forced to contain Russia for the foreseeable future. After all, the West can do little to influence Russia from within other than to hope for the emergence of less combative Russian leadership.
THE DAY AFTER
Given the tribulations of “winning small,” Ukraine’s “winning big”—reclaiming Crimea and all of Donbas—might seem like a shortcut to a better future. Although not entirely impossible, the stars would truly have to align for a wholesale defeat of Russia: a lightning victory for Ukraine, one battle building upon another, Russian supply lines disintegrating and Ukrainian morale driving its soldiers unstoppably forward. At the same time, the Russian army would have to collapse in retreat. Strategy would give way to the emotions of individual soldiers as panic took hold. No one has ever described this better than Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace, a meditation on the anarchy of war. “A battle is won by the side that is absolutely determined to win,” Tolstoy wrote about Napoleon’s 1805 defeat of the Russian army. Russian casualties, he wrote, “were about the same as those of the French, but we told ourselves early in the day that the battle was lost, so it was lost.”
But a full-scale Ukrainian military defeat of Russia, including the retaking of Crimea, verges on fantasy. It would be far too optimistic to base either Ukrainian or Western strategy on such an outcome. Pursuing it would also send the war into a new phase. Having poured billions of dollars into Crimea’s development, a symbol of Russian renewal, Moscow would interpret a Ukrainian offensive in Crimea as an assault on Russian territory, something Moscow would try to prevent by all available means. The hypothesis that Russia’s full-scale defeat would excise the cancer of imperialism from the Russian leadership and body politic rests on a clumsy analogy to Germany’s unconditional surrender in World War II, and stems from a desire not just to end this war but to foreclose the possibility of Russia starting any future war in Europe. It is an intoxicating vision, but one unconnected to reality.
Ukraine winning small is the more realistic and achievable goal. Aiming for that outcome is smarter than dreaming of Russian surrender—but also smarter than floating unformed ideas of a negotiated settlement that might leave Kherson and Mariupol under permanent Russian control, rewarding Putin for his aggression.
The goal of Ukrainian and Western strategy must be sustainable security for Ukraine. Kyiv’s partners have rightly refused to compromise on Ukrainian sovereignty and independence. But they also must think through “the day after” Ukraine wins. Rather than quixotic expectations of Russia bowing to a Ukrainian victory or simply exiting the international stage, sustainable security for Ukraine will demand painstaking effort and carefully calibrated increases in political, financial, and military investment. This is true even – or perhaps especially – if Ukraine wins. When the U.S. diplomat George Kennan, pondering the sources of Soviet conduct, stared into the future in 1947, he did not think in years. He thought in decades. To persevere and prevail in Ukraine, today’s Western leaders must do so, as well. As Tolstoy put it, “the strongest of all warriors are these two—time and patience.”
10. US re-entry into Somalia aims at Russia, China
Excerpts:
The timing of the American redeployment in Somalia has two possible explanations in my view. It might have been delayed until after the recent elections in order to insulate it from local politics.
Or one could see it as the US way to shore up a president with the will and potential to withstand the Russian-backed alliance of Eritrea and Ethiopia in the Horn. That would in turn shore up the US and its allies against Russia.
The latter point will be an outcome of the deployment anyway. It may well turn out to be the most important outcome, given that US engagement over 13 years has failed to bring about the end of al-Shabaab.
The insurgents remain strong and rich but short of the ability to overrun the Somali government.
US re-entry into Somalia aims at Russia, China
Surprise US troop redeployment will stoke new US-Russian rivalry in African region while also putting China on notice
The United States has announced it will resume a limited military presence in Somalia. The former administration withdrew troops from the country in 2020. The mission of the American soldiers is still what it has been for the last 15 years: to advise and assist Somali forces.
US troops will not be directly involved in conflict. Their number, 450 to 500, is smaller than the last deployment.
The decision to redeploy in Somalia might appear to be surprising, for two important reasons. First, US President Joe Biden promised during his campaign to avoid the “forever wars” against terror lasting since 2002.
What better explains this decision, however, is the renewed emphasis on the old rivalry with Russia since Russia’s Ukrainian intervention.
Announcing the redeployment, the Pentagon claimed it was partly for operational security. After their withdrawal in 2020, American special forces continued to train Somali soldiers outside Somalia, and at times traveled in and out of the country.
The Pentagon said the redeployment would end the ad hoc support by creating bases inside Somalia.
Unofficially, American officials have claimed that the redeployment is due to worsening security conditions in Somalia. This argument is open to question: the security situation is in reality relatively stable.
What is without doubt is that the deployment will have a direct influence on US-Russian rivalries in the region.
A roadblock is set up after al-Qaeda affiliated al-Shabaab militants stormed the Ballidogle American special forces military base on September, 2019. Photo: AFP
Military situation in Somalia
Somalia’s security landscape has not changed much since the US pullout over the previous year. The frontlines between the al-Qaeda affiliated Harakat al-Shabaab, the Somali government and the Forces of the African Union in Somalia have remained largely the same during the American absence.
So has the rate of terror attacks. Al-Shabaab has not expanded its territories, although it does exercise control in areas supposedly under government control.
Several researchers have reported that al-Shabaab is booming economically and is able to infiltrate the Somali security services. But this was also the case before the American withdrawal from Somalia.
What has changed is the international setting. Over the past few years, China-US rivalry has intensified. And over the past year, US-Russia rivalry has exploded, partly influenced by the outbreak of the Ukraine war.
These rivalries have large-scale impacts on the Horn of Africa.
It is notable that the American redeployment announcement came days after the electoral defeat of Somali President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed (“Farmaajo”). The former Somali president was a close ally of Russia’s new friends in the Horn of Africa – Ethiopia and Eritrea.
The newly-elected Somali president is much cooler towards Ethiopia and Eritrea. He has also pointedly welcomed the US redeployment.
Former Somali leader Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed ‘Farmaajo.’
Post-Ukrainian reality in the Horn of Africa
Farmaajo enjoyed a close alliance with Ethiopian president Abiy Ahmed and Eritrea’s President Issayas Afeworki. Ethiopian forces helped Farmaajo insert his candidates in states hostile to him by, for example, suppressing his opponents.
This was the case in Somalia’s southwest regional state during the election there in 2018. They also backed Farmaajo against his political rival President Ahmed “Madobe” of the Somali Jubaland regional state in 2019.
The Ethiopian civil war and the Ukrainian war increasingly saw the United States at odds with this tripartite alliance. First, the US criticized the Ethiopian government for its actions in Tigray, which the United States saw as heavy-handed and filled with human rights transgressions.
The US special envoy to the Horn of Africa stated:
As the war approaches its one-year anniversary, the United States and others cannot continue ‘business as usual’ relations with the government of Ethiopia.
The worsening US-Ethiopian relations were also fuelled by a Russian military cooperation agreement with Ethiopia. This came in a period when Ethiopia had lost a lot of Russian-produced materials in the battlefields of Tigray.
Anti-American demonstrations took place in Addis Ababa, with Russian flags and pro-Russian slogans. And the US imposed sanctions on Eritrean and Ethiopian leaders.
The relationship between the US and Eritrea and Ethiopia was worsening before the Ukrainian war. When the Ukrainian war broke out, Eritrea fully supported Russia at the United Nations, while Ethiopia abstained from a vote condemning the action.
That’s not all. The US was also worried about Chinese investments to secure a naval base in Eritrea.
New buildings of the Eritrea Institute of Technology built with Chinese help between 2014 and 2016. Photo: WikiCommons
US deployment timing
The timing of the American redeployment in Somalia has two possible explanations in my view. It might have been delayed until after the recent elections in order to insulate it from local politics.
Or one could see it as the US way to shore up a president with the will and potential to withstand the Russian-backed alliance of Eritrea and Ethiopia in the Horn. That would in turn shore up the US and its allies against Russia.
The latter point will be an outcome of the deployment anyway. It may well turn out to be the most important outcome, given that US engagement over 13 years has failed to bring about the end of al-Shabaab.
The insurgents remain strong and rich but short of the ability to overrun the Somali government.
11. How the West miscalculated its ability to punish Russia
Excerpts:
AK: According to International Monetary Fund deputy managing director Kenji Okamura, the priority for the global economy is to end the war in Ukraine. Adding the fact that the conflict imposes a high environmental cost and Western leaders have stressed the importance of ecological awareness, is it possible that they will finally come to their senses by scrapping sanctions and seeking a peace deal?
SH: Unfortunately, the answer is “No.” Policymakers have shown no interest in the scholarly literature and empirical evidence that unambiguously show that sanctions do not achieve their stated goals and often create very negative unintended consequences.
How the West miscalculated its ability to punish Russia
A professor of applied economics explains how sanctions are no free lunch
Steve H Hanke is a professor of applied economics and founder and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise in Baltimore, Maryland.
He is a senior fellow and director of the Troubled Currencies Project at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC, a senior adviser at the Renmin University of China’s International Monetary Research Institute in Beijing, and a special counselor to the Center for Financial Stability in New York.
Hanke is a well-known currency-reform advocate, and a currency and commodity trader. He served on the late US president Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, has been an adviser to five foreign heads of state and five foreign cabinet ministers, and has held a cabinet-level rank as a state counselor in both Lithuania and Montenegro.
He has been awarded seven honorary doctorate degrees and is an honorary professor at four foreign institutions.
He was president of Toronto Trust Argentina in Buenos Aires in 1995, when it was the world’s best-performing mutual fund.
Currently, he serves as chairman of the supervisory board of Advanced Metallurgical Group NV in Amsterdam.
In 2020, Hanke was named a Knight of the Order of the Flag by the Republic of Albania.
Excerpts of an interview with Professor Hanke follow.
Adriel Kasonta: After failing to prevent the conflict in Ukraine by refusing to rule out the country’s admission to NATO, the collective West has decided to punish Russia with sanctions after the war has broken out. As we are entering the third month of the conflict, what is your assessment of the sanctions’ effectiveness so far?
Steve Hanke: Like all sanctions, those being imposed on Russia are economic weapons that are being deployed in what is, in fact, an undeclared war against Russia. And like all sanctions, they have proved to be totally ineffective in accomplishing their stated goal of changing Russia’s behavior.
Sanctions have never won a war. And if that’s not bad enough, sanctions have been, as economic sanctions often are, counterproductive. Indeed, instead of toppling Vladimir Putin’s regime, the sanctions have done what they typically do: they have created a “rally ’round the flag effect,” which has further entrenched Putin and his associates.
AK: Since you like to say that sanctions are not a free lunch, what is their cost for the US, the European Union, and the world?
SH: We don’t have any official total cost estimates, and we will never receive any official accounting, either. When politicians introduce policies that are not budgeted but impose costs, they prefer to hide them under a shroud of secrecy.
That said, we do have a scattering of cost estimates on the Russian sanctions from investment banks, central banks, international organizations like the IMF, and NGOs. Those estimates, which are somewhat ad hoc and partial – just the tip of the iceberg – indicate that the costs of sanctions will be eye-popping.
While the humanitarian and economic costs imposed on Russia will be massive, they will pale in comparison to the costs imposed on those outside of Russia. In terms of incidence, the EU will bear [a huge] cost, much greater than the US. But the costs and disruptions caused by sanctions won’t be limited to the EU and the US. They will spread throughout the world, putting significant burdens on poor countries and poor peoples.
AK: While the EU is in the process of reducing its dependence on energy from Russia, US President Joe Biden has promised Brussels to help in achieving this goal. Does the US have the capacity to replace Russian gas?
SH: In a word, “No.” President Biden and Vice-President [Kamala] Harris have been busy promising oil and gas to every cat and dog who indicates a need. The problem is that private companies produce oil and gas in the US, and they, not the president or vice-president, will decide who to sell their wares to. Furthermore, those US companies don’t have the capacity to fill the voids that will be created by Brussels’ bans on the purchase of Russian oil and gas.
AK: What is the rationale behind Russia’s demand to pay for its oil and gas in rubles – the currency that was supposed to be reduced to “rubble” but has recently strengthened against the US dollar?
SH: The rationale is largely symbolic, designed to motivate a “rally ’round the flag” effect. Before the “pay in rubles” order, dollars or euros would be sent to Gazprom and then Gazprom would exchange most, but not all, of that foreign exchange into rubles because its expenses are incurred in rubles.
Now, the rubles must be sent directly to Gazprom, so the nexus for the exchange of dollars and euros for rubles takes place before the payment for oil and gas is made to Gazprom instead of after the payment.
As for the ruble, it is very strong, stronger than before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The governor of the Central Bank of Russia, Elvira Nabiullina, unlike most central-bank governors, has shown that she is a very capable crisis manager.
AK: What will be the impact of the Russian oil ban in the US and EU?
SH: The impact on the EU countries, with perhaps the exception of Hungary, of the ban on Russian oil and gas and the blocking of insurers from covering Russian cargoes will be very negative and severe.
The US will not escape unharmed. The global oil and gas markets will become politicized and balkanized, with oil not flowing as freely as it has for the past four decades. As a result, everyone will end up paying more than would have otherwise been the case.
AK: Americans are currently coping with the highest inflation in 40 years. What is the root cause of the current situation? Is it really, as President Joe Biden argues, the fault of Putin?
SH: The US inflation has been made in the good old USA. Contrary to propaganda and spin coming out of the Biden White House, Vladimir Putin is not the culprit. The White House, under both [former] president [Donald] Trump and Biden, spent money during the Covid pandemic like drunken sailors and the Fed ran the printing presses at a high speed to finance the spending spree. Inflation always and everywhere only has one cause: the excess production of money.
AK: Can you tell our readers what will be the short-term and long-term consequences of the weaponization of the US dollar?
SH: In the short run, the US dollar, which is the world’s international currency, has been extremely strong, benefiting from its safe-haven status, among other things. In the long run, the weaponization of the dollar and the international dollar-based system will invite challengers. Whether any of those challengers will be successful, I don’t know. The one thing that I do know is that it’s very difficult to challenge a great international currency.
AK: While the US is the top supplier of weapons and arms to Ukraine, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has been confirmed to be in a proxy war against Russia. What is the logic behind this policy move? Is it benefiting anyone else apart from defense contractors?
SH: To understand geopolitics, one must follow the money. While NATO has 30 members, the US has historically contributed more to NATO’s budget than any other country. As a result, the US runs the NATO show. So it should be as clear as the nose on your face just who was behind NATO’s involvement in Ukraine both before and after Russia’s invasion.
AK: According to International Monetary Fund deputy managing director Kenji Okamura, the priority for the global economy is to end the war in Ukraine. Adding the fact that the conflict imposes a high environmental cost and Western leaders have stressed the importance of ecological awareness, is it possible that they will finally come to their senses by scrapping sanctions and seeking a peace deal?
SH: Unfortunately, the answer is “No.” Policymakers have shown no interest in the scholarly literature and empirical evidence that unambiguously show that sanctions do not achieve their stated goals and often create very negative unintended consequences.
12. DoD-commissioned study finds major shortcomings in civilian talent management
DoD-commissioned study finds major shortcomings in civilian talent management | Federal News Network
The Defense Department’s non-uniformed workforce is comprised of some of the smartest people in the world. That might not be true forever.
DoD’s current policies and practices for managing its civilian cadre are far behind the times, and the department isn’t doing nearly enough to plan its future workforce and find ways to make sure those plans come true, according to a new study by an influential advisory group.
The Defense Business Board review found...
The Defense Department’s non-uniformed workforce is comprised of some of the smartest people in the world. That might not be true forever.
DoD’s current policies and practices for managing its civilian cadre are far behind the times, and the department isn’t doing nearly enough to plan its future workforce and find ways to make sure those plans come true, according to a new study by an influential advisory group.
The Defense Business Board review found that DoD doesn’t have the structures or tools to manage its civilian talent as a “strategic asset.” Almost all of its important H.R. functions are handled by individual military services and agencies. DoD’s nominal chief human capital officer is a relatively junior official with no real access to meaningful workforce data. And across the board, training dollars and career-broadening opportunities for civilians are relatively scarce.
While the study found there are some exceptions and bright spots — such as in the department’s acquisition workforce — in general, civilian employees’ chances for training, upskilling and gaining new experiences in other parts of the government are few and far between once they’ve been hired into a particular job.
“Only 500 civilians will graduate from the department’s civilian leader development programs in any given year,” the board wrote. “We could not find a talent exchange program that averaged higher than 20 civilian participants a year. In Academic Year 2023, the Air Force will send just 2% of all its GS-9 civilians (just over 1,500) through professional military education and leadership seminars.”
The study, commissioned by Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, spanned six months during which board members and staff spoke with officials from DoD, the military services, the Office of Personnel Management, and private firms. The board’s leadership did not respond to a Federal News Network request, submitted via its staff, for an interview about the findings.
The written report noted a large gap in what DoD is willing to spend on training its career civilians compared to its military workforce. The starkest difference the study found was in the Navy: $6,010 in annual training costs for sailors compared to $319 for civilians. The gap was much smaller in the Air Force, but there too, the service spends $5,885, on average, to train a uniformed airman each year versus $2,213 for a GS-13 employee.
But the study stressed the department’s inattention to civilian employee development isn’t just about money. The problems, the board said, are cultural as well.
Throughout the department, the mindset has tended toward hiring someone to fill a specific role whenever a vacancy arises, and assuming they’ll do roughly the same thing until they’re ready to retire or quit. By contrast, the board noted, the private sector has moved toward models in which they assume every new employee will gain new skills and move to new positions throughout their careers.
“This talent management is essential to meeting current and future requirements for the workforce, particularly to realize technology-related initiatives and boost employee retention. Faster changing technology means employee skills must evolve while employed, and companies realize the need to support, incentivize, and manage that skill evolution and development,” according to the report. “Many of the private sector’s largest and most successful companies have announced investments in talent management: Accenture is spending nearly $1 billion annually to retrain its workers and committed to retraining almost every employee at risk of losing a job to automation; PwC committed $3 billion to upskill all 275,000 of its employees, and Amazon has invested $700 million in retraining one-third of its U.S. workforce to help employees in non-technical roles move into more technical IT roles.”
But the board thinks some of the biggest challenges are organizational ones. Since DoD’s hiring and management practices are highly decentralized — spread throughout the Defense agencies and military services — it’s one of the few public or private sector organizations that does not have a Chief Human Capital Officer helping to guide workforce decisions within the C suite.
DoD does have a “de facto” CHCO for civilians: the deputy assistant secretary of Defense for civilian personnel policy. But the study argues that person — no matter how hard he or she tries — does not have sufficient stature in the Pentagon bureaucracy to make real change. And while DoD does have an undersecretary position for overall personnel and readiness matters, civilian career management issues tend to get crowded out by the undersecretary’s other priorities.
“[The board] observes and appreciates the arduous task of USD(P&R) to oversee an organization of approximately 25 subordinate organizations with diverse and distinct problem sets. Delegation of responsibility is understandable given the basket of HR and readiness functions to oversee, from voting, to health care, to language training, to the commissaries,” the board wrote. “However, that delegation has left the de facto CHCO too junior to participate in the deputy secretary of Defense’s corporate decision-making forums.”
And even the existing undersecretary position, with all of its other responsibilities, doesn’t have a stellar record of consistent leadership. There have been 20 different officials serving in the job over the past dozen years — almost all of them on a short-term, acting basis.
As one way to solve the organizational problems, the board suggests that Congress create a new undersecretary position dedicated exclusively to civilian talent management.
“Through our interviews, when asked what they would change if they were ‘SECDEF for a day,’ one senior [P&R] official summed up the sentiment from OSD’s perspective, stating, ‘I just want someone to listen to me. We need leadership and the services to respect our office.’ This was not a slam against DoD leadership, rather, it was an acknowledgment that without strong support from the top, nothing was likely to change. But everyone understood senior leaders have large issues on their plates,” the board wrote.
Elevating civilian talent management in the leadership structure could also have the side benefit of helping DoD collect and analyze data about its existing civilian workforce and its future needs. In the aggregate, those kinds of datasets simply don’t exist today, the board found, at least not with the sort of granularity the department needs to conduct effective workforce planning.
That’s largely because none of the military services and Defense agencies’ existing personnel systems communicate with one another.
Sometime in the next year-and-a-half, the department plans to finally stand up a central database called the Defense Civilian Human Resources Management System. But even DCHRMS won’t hold information about employees’ skills or other key elements of personnel data.
The board said the absence of a “data lake” about DoD’s existing talent and future workforce demands is a giant blind spot.
“How many artificial intelligence engineers will we need in 2032? How many do we have today? How many vacancies do we have for AI engineers? Will we meet our fill-rate goal? Who do we have with project management experience and a logistics and machine-learning background? Does anyone have similar skills that we should target for opportunities to develop? How are we ensuring a steady supply of employees ready to lead our toughest positions? What impact would result from an increase in budget allocations to programs that incentivize participation in upskilling? These talent management questions are impossible to answer right now,” the board wrote.
13. Why China Threads the Needle on Ukraine
Excerpts::
These complex calculations explain why China has threaded a middle position in both its rhetoric and its actions. It blames the United States for putting Putin in a position where he needed to defend Russian security, but it asks for an end to the war and respect for Ukraine’s territorial integrity. It trades with Russia (and will get some good deals on oil and gas), only to the extent that it does not run afoul of international sanctions.
U.S. policymakers seem to understand this careful strategy and are willing to accept it. In his video conference with Xi on March 18, Biden tacitly gave room for China to pursue this middle position by limiting U.S. threats to China’s provision of what Biden called “material support” for Russia. The term is ambiguous but probably refers to supplying Moscow with weapons or backfilling against sanctions without banning normal commerce. China will remain on the sidelines as the drama in Europe unfolds, and when the dust settles, it hopes to resume its long march toward preeminence in Asia.
Why China Threads the Needle on Ukraine
Beijing is confident in the United States’ decline and unwilling to rock the boat.
As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine falters, Moscow has many opponents and few backers. Even China, Moscow’s closest diplomatic partner other than Belarus, maintains a studied distance—on the one hand blaming the West for its supposed threat to Russian security and condemning the United States for imposing sanctions while on the other hand reaffirming its principled support for the territorial integrity of sovereign states and calling for a negotiated resolution of what it calls “the Ukraine crisis.” Why does China neither endorse nor condemn Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war?
The answer lies in what has become the first principle of Chinese foreign policy: distrust of the United States. For decades, China has embarked on a quest to assume what it regards as its historically mandated position as the dominant power in Asia. As strategic realists, Chinese leaders always expected the United States to push back, seeking to protect its legacy status as the region’s dominant power. And in Beijing’s view, the United States has done just that. As China’s power and ambitions have burgeoned, Beijing assesses that Washington has assaulted the Chinese Communist Party on ideological and human rights grounds; sought to undermine Chinese control of peripheral territories like Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong; perpetuated the division of Taiwan from the mainland; opposed China’s assertion of its rights in the South China Sea; colluded with U.S. allies and partners in thinly disguised coalitions to contain China, such as the U.S.-India-Japan-Australia Quadrilateral Security Dialogue; and used tariffs to try to force China to open its economy and change what the Communist Party views as its successful economic model.
But China remains steadily on course. Despite a host of challenges—exacerbated by recent draconian COVID-19 lockdowns in Shanghai and other cities—the ruling party remains confident that it can build a “great modern socialist country [that is] prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious, and beautiful” by the 100th anniversary of China’s founding in 2049.
They are equally sure that the United States is locked in an irreversible process of decline that will gradually eliminate it as a serious rival in Asia. Their confidence is based partly in Marxist theory, which says that a mature capitalist economy like that of the United States must encounter financial crises and class conflicts that will drag it down from the heights of prosperity. And it is based partly in their understanding of recent history, as events in the United States seem to unfold in the ways that theory predicts. Chinese confidence was boosted by the U.S. financial crisis of 2008, when Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan famously told then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry “Hank” Paulson, “[Y]ou were our teacher—and our teacher doesn’t look very smart!” Next came what Beijing viewed as an indecisive Obama administration; the vicious 2016 presidential election, when then-Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton responded to electoral pressures by abandoning a prime strategic asset against China, the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal; the Trump administration’s trashing of U.S. relations with its allies; the disastrous mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic; the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on Capitol Hill; the catastrophic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan; and the political paralysis and widening polarization of the Biden era—all while the U.S. Navy in the Pacific Ocean complained that it did not have enough ships to deter China, and the American share of global GDP declined from 30 percent in 2000 to 24 percent in 2019.
Putin’s attack on Ukraine might have contributed to this decline by exposing U.S. indecision and the fragility of its alliances. Instead, it reversed the process—though, China believes, temporarily. The war created a rare consensus in U.S. domestic politics, strengthened the U.S. alliance system, and consolidated Washington’s view of relations with Russia and China as an existential conflict of values and systems. Putin’s war has given the United States an excuse to put increased pressure on China, demand more cooperation from its Asian allies, and pressure India to reduce economic ties with Russia. Worst of all, it has strengthened the U.S. defense commitment to Taiwan.
In this context, China’s strategic priority is to avoid doing anything that would interrupt the process of U.S. decline. China deeply resents American moral posturing, claiming to stand up for what is right and lawful, telling Beijing what is in China’s interest and how it will be punished if it does not comply. Although the American side is sincere about these attitudes, to China, they look like hypocrisy or (at best) self-delusion because it believes that American actions always reflect hard interests. As Beijing sees it, moral posturing is the way in which the United States has always legitimized its numerous political dominations and military interventions—what Beijing calls U.S. hegemony. Now, the United States would like to harvest additional benefits from Putin’s war by splitting China from Russia.
Beijing is not about to fall into that trap. Instead, it seeks to preserve whatever remains of its only substantial partner (aside from North Korea) in its efforts to check U.S. arrogance. The tie that binds China and Russia is antagonism to the United States. The two leaders exaggerated the state of their relationship at their last face-to-face meeting before the war, when they described the partnership as one with “no limits.” In fact, Russia has no interest in China’s primary security issues in Taiwan and the South China Sea, and China has no interest in Russia’s primary security issue of Western encroachment in Eastern Europe. Even though the last of the two countries’ border disputes was settled in 2008, China has not forgotten what it regards as Russian historical aggression, and Russia remains chronically anxious about the influx of Chinese workers into the lightly populated Russian Far East. The two countries forged cooperative security policies through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, founded in 2001, but continue to compete for influence over the four Central Asian members of that organization. China buys oil and gas from Russia but drives a hard bargain on price. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s ideology is a version of atheist socialism; Putin’s is a form of Christian kleptocratic capitalism.
Despite all these differences, Chinese strategists live in the world as they find it, not as they wish it to be. No doubt Putin has rendered Russia a much-diminished strategic asset. Its military is degraded, its leverage over Western Europe through energy sales is disappearing, and its diplomatic credibility is bankrupt. China does not appreciate Moscow’s mishandling of the situation, its misestimation of Ukrainian resistance, Euro-American determination, and its own military prowess. Nor do they like that Russia is wrecking a valued trade partner of China: Ukraine. Yet barring a collapse of the Putin regime, even a diminished Russia will remain an asset in China’s resistance to U.S. hegemony. China is not about to throw away its main strategic partner.
But neither does China want Putin to drag it into a premature confrontation with the West. China prefers to let history take its predetermined course, with China gradually rising and the United States gradually declining, without the United States taking flight and adopting an outright containment policy toward China. For all the boilerplate flavor of his remarks, Xi was not misrepresenting Chinese views when he told then-U.S. President Donald Trump in April 2017, “There are a thousand reasons to make the China-U.S. relationship a success,” or when he told U.S. President Joe Biden in November 2021, “A sound and steady China-U.S. relationship is required for advancing our two countries’ respective development and for safeguarding a peaceful and stable international environment. … China and the United States should respect each other, coexist in peace, and pursue win-win cooperation.” Keeping the United States and its allies calm has been a hard enough strategy to pursue as China’s reach for influence has generated inevitable backlash not only in Washington but even in many of its client countries. But for Beijing now to fall in line with Putin’s failing war would only harden resistance to Chinese influence and reduce Chinese access to Western markets, capital, and technology.
These complex calculations explain why China has threaded a middle position in both its rhetoric and its actions. It blames the United States for putting Putin in a position where he needed to defend Russian security, but it asks for an end to the war and respect for Ukraine’s territorial integrity. It trades with Russia (and will get some good deals on oil and gas), only to the extent that it does not run afoul of international sanctions.
U.S. policymakers seem to understand this careful strategy and are willing to accept it. In his video conference with Xi on March 18, Biden tacitly gave room for China to pursue this middle position by limiting U.S. threats to China’s provision of what Biden called “material support” for Russia. The term is ambiguous but probably refers to supplying Moscow with weapons or backfilling against sanctions without banning normal commerce. China will remain on the sidelines as the drama in Europe unfolds, and when the dust settles, it hopes to resume its long march toward preeminence in Asia.
14. Beyond Weapons: Time for a New U.S. Strategy on Taiwan
But the US and Taiwan strategies need to be in synch. Pretty aggressive recommendations from Ambassador Bolton:
Taiwan’s broader, entirely appropriate regional roles cannot be fulfilled merely with “defensive” weapons against potential Chinese amphibious assaults, whether in traditional or asymmetric capabilities, which Biden’s advisors are pressing. Their focus is too narrow. It undercuts effective U.S. regional strategy, including their own initiatives like IPMDA and IPEF. Properly providing for an expanded, coalition-based military role for Taiwan requires assigning responsibilities to coalition-of-the-willing members and equipping them accordingly. We will then have a realistic context to assess specific weapons systems that will assist not just Taiwan, but the larger regional program to counter Beijing’s belligerence.
Beyond Weapons: Time for a New U.S. Strategy on Taiwan
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the most recent, but far from only, incident highlighting Taiwan’s vulnerability to Chinese attack. Western assistance to Ukraine, particularly sharing intelligence, has contributed significantly to its defense, but the underlying failure of deterrence was tragic. Prior to Moscow’s attack, Washington and its allies lacked credibility, unity, and adequate appreciation for larger geostrategic issues. The consequences are evident daily.
China and Taiwan are watching closely, and debate has accelerated over the military capabilities Taipei needs to maximize deterrence and defense against Beijing. Unfortunately, as with Ukraine, this debate lacks a broader politico-military foundation, which threatens Taiwan whatever its military arsenal. Biden administration myopia is missing critical opportunities to strengthen not just Taiwan, but the entire Indo-Pacific’s resistance to Chinese belligerence.
For the United States, implementing more effective deterrence for Taiwan is not simply a tactical case study. “Defending” Taiwan (or whether it has the right weaponry) is far too narrow a politico-military framework. Taiwan is not some isolated problem, but a strategically critical component of an Indo-Pacific, indeed global, counter-China strategy. Nonetheless, too many still view Taipei as an irritant to Beijing, an unnecessary burden we are protecting.
This misperception persists despite fundamental changes in Taiwan. It is no longer just the “losing side” in China’s Communist-Nationalist civil war, but a functionally independent country that intends to remain so. Its successful, growing economy is critical to America and the world, and its robust democracy has no appetite for anschluss with China. These are not just fun facts, but are integral to Taipei’s strategic position and its relationship with Washington.
Given its dramatic social, political, and economic changes since 1949, Taiwan has little doubt the “one China” concept, like “strategic ambiguity,” is past retirement age. Thirty years of surveys have asked residents how they identify themselves. Those identifying as “Taiwanese” rose from 18% to 62%; “Chinese” fell from 26% to 3%; “both Taiwanese and Chinese” fell from 46% to 32%; and non-responses fell from 11% to 3%. Taiwan’s people have rejected the Shanghai Communique language of “all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait” as archaic. Perhaps more than any other reason, this is why “Taiwan” is Asia’s synonym for “Ukraine.”
President Biden has said three times that America would defend Taiwan if it were attacked, and three times his staff has tried to pretend he didn’t. Such confusion has not been limited to Taiwan. So, if Biden intended to reinforce “strategic ambiguity,” he and his administration have done a masterful job. In April, 2021, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines testified that:
“[if] we were to see a U.S. shift from strategic ambiguity…,to clarify our willingness to intervene in a Taiwan contingency, the Chinese would find this deeply destabilizing….It would solidify Chinese perceptions that the U.S. is bent on constraining China’s rise, including through military force, and would probably cause Beijing to aggressively undermine U.S. interests worldwide. That is our assessment.”
If Biden disagrees with Haines’s assessment, which counsels against a “shift from strategic ambiguity,” he needs to say so. Rather than press-question answers followed by cleanup patrols, Biden must speak comprehensively, bury “strategic ambiguity” unambiguously, and establish plainly that Washington sees Taipei as an ally. Being explicit would benefit both countries, and everyone in the Indo-Pacific who assess China’s menace similarly.
Enlarging Taipei’s military cooperation throughout the Indo-Pacific is today potentially the most effective way to break Beijing’s heavy-handed efforts to quarantine Taiwan politically. Deciding what military assets America should provide Taiwan is crucial, but the bigger picture is to interweave Taiwan into the emerging alliances and coalitions forming to deal with the Chinese threat. That would be real “integrated defense.”
Taiwan’s critical geographic position in the “first island chain” between China and the broader Pacific alone explains why. Beyond the East China Sea, Taiwan has inherited territorial claims in the South China Sea; its air and naval assets could play vital roles, alongside other navies, ensuring freedom of navigation and refuting Beijing’s unfounded sovereignty claims across that critical space.
Many such duties for Taiwan come readily to mind. The recent Tokyo meeting of Quad heads of state (India, Japan, Australia, and the United States) launched the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA), an excellent initiative in which Taiwan could play a vital part. Intended to “build a faster, wider, and more accurate maritime picture of near-real-time activities in partners’ waters”, the IPMDA contemplates “immediate consultations” with others, which should obviously include Taiwan.
The AUKUS (Australia, UK, US) initiative to produce nuclear-powered submarines for Australia provides another template for mutual cooperation on sophisticated, interoperable defense capabilities in which Taiwan could be seamlessly integrated into larger Indo-Pacific coalitions. There is no imminent need, or potential, to have one comprehensive alliance structure like NATO, which itself grew and evolved over decades. But Taiwan should be a part of whatever steps are being taken in the Indo-Pacific.
It was, therefore, a significant disappointment, and a significant error, not to include Taipei in the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), unveiled the same day as IPMDA. Taiwan (under the outdated name “Chinese Taipei”) is, after all a WTO member; it is manifestly insufficient to say the U.S. will continue enhancing bilateral economic relations with Taiwan as if that is a substitute for participation in initiatives like IPEF. If other IPEF members feared Beijing’s reaction to including Taiwan, it shows they still gravely underestimate China’s threat and will fear other necessary and appropriate steps in the near future. Such timidity augurs poorly for IPEF’s prospects.
New Taiwan F-16V fighter jet. Image Credit: ROC government.
Taiwan’s broader, entirely appropriate regional roles cannot be fulfilled merely with “defensive” weapons against potential Chinese amphibious assaults, whether in traditional or asymmetric capabilities, which Biden’s advisors are pressing. Their focus is too narrow. It undercuts effective U.S. regional strategy, including their own initiatives like IPMDA and IPEF. Properly providing for an expanded, coalition-based military role for Taiwan requires assigning responsibilities to coalition-of-the-willing members and equipping them accordingly. We will then have a realistic context to assess specific weapons systems that will assist not just Taiwan, but the larger regional program to counter Beijing’s belligerence.
15. FDD | Iraq Attacks Israel; What Should Happen Next?
Excerpts:
Perhaps populist Iraqi legislators thought that they could get away with enacting the harshest anti-normalization law in the world. But such laws will not hurt Israel, which has little or no ties with Iraq. The law will endanger the lives and properties of Iraqis and Americans. To protect these Americans, Washington should impress on the Iraqi state that it cannot tolerate a law that hurts its national interests, as well as those of one of its allies.
Should Iraqi officials dig in their heels, Washington might want to consider imposing sanctions on Iraqi officials who legislated the law, in addition to those who plan to enforce it. The Iraqi economy is in shambles and is heavily reliant on oil exports. The last thing that Iraqis need is to let populism push them off the global economic grid. From their days under Saddam Hussein, Iraqis know best how much misery sanctions can bring.
FDD | Iraq Attacks Israel; What Should Happen Next?
fdd.org · by Hussain Abdul-Hussain Research Fellow · June 2, 2022
On May 26, Iraq approved a poorly thought out authoritarian law; its implications will hurt Iraqis in the diaspora, Iraqis in Iraq, and the Iraqi economy. The law criminalizes non-existent ties with Israel, but also prohibits Free Masonry, reflecting the ignorance of lawmakers and their focus on irrelevant politicking rather than addressing the real problems that Iraq faces.
Under penalty of death or life in prison, the law prohibits Iraqis and alien residents of Iraq from normalizing any ties with or contacting “the Zionist entity.” It also forbids promoting “any ideas, principles, ideologies or behavior[s] that are Zionist or Free Mason, using any tools, including over social media.”
Regulating ideas is an oppressive measure that belongs in totalitarian and authoritarian states, not in a country like Iraq that holds free and fair elections every four years. When parliaments, like Iraq’s Council of Deputies, do regulate ideas, they infringe on liberty and practice tyranny of the majority.
The new Iraqi law, which goes into effect on June 10, has global jurisdiction. Iraqi Americans, for example, will risk their lives if they ever talk to fellow Americans who might happen to be Israeli nationals. Tens of thousands of Iraqi expats in the UAE might face a similar risk if their employers instruct them to deal with Israelis.
Meanwhile, Americans who live in Iraq are unlikely to face execution or imprisonment if they communicate with Israelis, but are likely be deported or have their assets confiscated.
American companies in Iraq will not be spared either. Energy giant Exxon, for example, has two affiliates: ExxonMobil Iraq and ExxonMobil Iraqi Kurdistan Region. If Exxon bids for any business in Israel, it will risk termination of business and the loss of assets in Iraq.
The new Iraqi legislation will thus force an exodus of foreign investments and human capital. Iraqi legislators have clearly not thought out the law’s implications, and have most likely drafted and approved it in a hurry, probably for politicking reasons. Had Iraqi lawmakers done their homework, they would have at least learned the difference between Zionism and Free Masonry.
Why Free Masonry? Because that is the extent of knowledge of most Iraqi legislators on most issues outside Iraq. Qais al-Khazaali, a cleric whose pro-Iran militia won three out of parliament’s 329 seats in October, once said that “the goal of Israel is to occupy Iraq as indicated by the two blue lines on the entity’s flag and per the Torah’s prophecy — from the Euphrates to the Nile is your country, Sons of Israel.”
Iraqi pundits peddle similar antisemitism, writing that Zionism’s goal is to spread vice and homosexuality across the Middle East, and that a global prostitution network has its headquarters in Tel Aviv.
When delusions replace reality, laws become absurd. Iraq and Israel never had diplomatic ties, and yet, Iraqi lawmakers found it urgent to legislate a law criminalizing those non-existent ties.
The law becomes even more absurd when realizing that, since its elections were held in October, the Iraqi parliament has failed to elect a president and designate a new prime minister. While the state is run by an interim executive authority, and Iraq teeters on the brink of becoming a failed state, Iraqi parliamentarians see taking a swipe at Israel as a priority over all other pressing issues.
By legislating the anti-Israel law, Iraq’s parliament violated a constitutional mandate that restricts its role at this period to electing its top three officials — the speaker, the president, and the prime minister. Until those officials are elected, parliament cannot legislate, and yet it did.
Using Israel as a bogeyman is a known tactic in many Arab countries. This time, the biggest bloc in Iraq’s parliament, instructed by Shiite firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, is using Israel as a stand-in for America.
After the October election, al-Sadr formed a 200-MP majority coalition that promised to disarm and disband pro-Iran Iraqi militias. The militias countered by accusing al-Sadr of doing America’s bidding. To brandish his anti-Western credentials, al-Sadr took out his anger on Israel. His bloc, the biggest in parliament with 73 seats, introduced the law that was approved by consensus. Even the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the fourth biggest in parliament and known for its friendly position toward the US and Israel, was scared to go against consensus and hence voted for the law.
Perhaps populist Iraqi legislators thought that they could get away with enacting the harshest anti-normalization law in the world. But such laws will not hurt Israel, which has little or no ties with Iraq. The law will endanger the lives and properties of Iraqis and Americans. To protect these Americans, Washington should impress on the Iraqi state that it cannot tolerate a law that hurts its national interests, as well as those of one of its allies.
Should Iraqi officials dig in their heels, Washington might want to consider imposing sanctions on Iraqi officials who legislated the law, in addition to those who plan to enforce it. The Iraqi economy is in shambles and is heavily reliant on oil exports. The last thing that Iraqis need is to let populism push them off the global economic grid. From their days under Saddam Hussein, Iraqis know best how much misery sanctions can bring.
Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy. Follow Hussain on Twitter @hahussain.
fdd.org · by Hussain Abdul-Hussain Research Fellow · June 2, 2022
16. Special forces pick Black Cape for platform-agnostic artificial intelligence (AI)-driven military data storage
Special forces pick Black Cape for platform-agnostic artificial intelligence (AI)-driven military data storage
MacDILL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. – U.S. Special Operations Command data analytics experts needed platform-agnostic data storage that uses a common data standard for intelligence analysis. They found their solution from Black Cape Inc. in Arlington, Va.
Officials of the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) at MacDill Air Force Base, Fla., have announced a potential $49 million Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) III contract to Black Cape for the Platform Agnostic Data Storage Infrastructure (PADSI) program.
The PADSI program provides technologies for data management, data processing, data analytics, and visualization on common user interfaces to support SOCOM.
The project seeks to develop a scalable platform-agnostic data storage system that will enable cross indexing of layered data using a common data standard for big data analytics. Standard data will enable machine-to-machine communication using artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning.
The data repository will be able to support several tool suites to reduce or eliminate the data's reliance on specific computing systems. This will enable special forces analysts to reduce the costs of replicating data storage in different tool suites.
At full capacity, this system will enable analysts to identify and extract useful information rapidly across all available data sources to reduce the computer resources allocated to data mining.
The systems architecture will process data from several sources, identify the data type, and label information according to a common data standard for storage in the database. Key military applications will be multi-intelligence processing, and large scale AI-assisted analytics.
The project will consider reusable open-source software code for fielded systems, and then develop a prototype for use in realistic environments, including a government test bed.
This data storage infrastructure could serve a broad range of military applications where special forces and general-purpose forces require large scale common standards data storage.
This capability also could be adopted by first responders, federal law enforcement, and for organizations that must geospatially depict big data sets in common standard format, experts say.
On this contract Black Cape will do the work at MacDill Air Force Base, Fla. For more information contact Black Cape Inc. online at https://blackcape.io, or U.S. Special Operations Command at www.socom.mil.
17. Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy
Excerpt:
There is no secret government silo of advanced technology that will save us if war breaks out: You must build it. Whether you are an engineer looking for a higher purpose than building photo filters, a government leader who wants to make a difference, or an entrepreneur founding a company — if you have read this far, you care about the future of our collective defense. Help us to reboot the arsenal of democracy and make that future safe, prosperous, and free.
Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy - War on the Rocks
As war rages in Europe, citizens of the world’s democracies would be forgiven for wondering what went wrong.
Just about three decades ago, the Soviet Union fell, and some proclaimed an “end of history.” Former Soviet states appeared to be on the path to liberalization. The Chinese Communist Party would, with economic growth and globalization, become a responsible stakeholder of world order — or so leaders assured us.
But things took a different direction. Today, the world’s leading democracies do not have the technology they need to deter revisionist powers that, as Russia has shown, are willing to launch major wars to achieve their aims.
America’s defense industrial base, which once produced technology straight out of science fiction, all but stopped innovating. China and Russia aggressively modernized their armed forces, building weapons specifically designed to neutralize America’s. The results are sobering: Today, in U.S. Defense Department wargames that model conflicts with China, China wins.
Only superior military technology can credibly deter war — but our defense companies are losing the ability to build it. In decades past, the West’s greatest scientific minds dedicated their careers to national security. John von Neumann, Alan Turing, and Kelly Johnson worked on cutting-edge science and engineering in the national interest. War research and development turned futuristic dreams into household staples: personal computing, GPS, the Internet, commercial air travel, and much more.
Today, there is more AI in a Tesla than in any U.S. military vehicle and better computer vision in your Snapchat app than in any system the Department of Defense owns. Until 2019, America’s nuclear arsenal operated off of floppy disks.
How did it come to this? Starting in the 1960s and building steadily in the decades that followed, our defense industry and government leaders became more interested in process than progress. Unlike other industries, defense companies are not asked to innovate — they await painstaking specifications instructing them what to build. Defense firms are also reimbursed by taxpayers for every hour they work, well before they’ve built a working product. And if delivery schedules slip, what is the government to do? Cancel the contract, wasting billions of taxpayer dollars and potentially bankrupting the company in the process? Or salvage the program with even more money? The infamous city planner Robert Moses knew the answer: “Once you sink that first stake,” he said, “they’ll never make you pull it up.”
The result is a defense industry that spends a measly 1 to 4 percent of revenue on internal research and development, compared to 10 to 20 percent at major tech companies and 40 percent or higher at technology startups. Why innovate when you have no competition? The 10 largest defense companies account for upwards of 80 percent of the industry’s revenue. Nearly two-thirds of major weapons-systems contracts in the United States have just one bidder. Those who take on the defense giants must fight the bureaucracy tooth and claw. Both SpaceX and Palantir, arguably the only two defense-technology success stories in recent decades, had to sue their customers for a fair shot at winning large contracts.
It’s time to reboot the arsenal of democracy. My company Anduril is just one of a slew of new companies building technology for our warfighters based on a few simple principles.
Outpacing the Threat
In 2018, Under Secretary for Research and Engineering Mike Griffin noted that, on average, it takes the United States 16 years to deliver an idea to operational capability, compared to under seven years for China. In the Middle East, well-financed terrorist organizations and militias iterate monthly on their armed drones. Simply put, we need defense companies that are fast, that build off their own dime, and sell their products “off the shelf.”
Build to Mission, Not to Spec
Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and other great tech entrepreneurs had distinct images of the future and how their products would shape it — images independent of, and often directly contradicted by, the opinions of those around them. The next great defense companies will behave exactly like this — listening to customers, working closely, and then coming up with solutions of their own, without recourse to onerous program specifications.
Software First
Software is finally eating the battlefield, whether the defense industry likes it or not. Autonomous systems, networked weapons, cyberweapons, and more are enabled in part or in total by software — and new companies must build it. The prime contractors are used to slowly developing large, exquisite hardware systems like fighter jets. Software, by contrast, is developed by shipping a minimum viable product out the door as quickly as possible and seeing where it fails. The next generation of software-defined defense companies will respond rapidly and continuously to the performance of their products, to such an extent that deployment and iteration will be elements of the development process itself.
Controlling Defense Budgets
The biggest lie of the political debate surrounding defense spending is that we are stuck in a dichotomy between doing “more with more” or “less with less.” This is a false choice: The essence of technology is doing more with less. With unmanned systems performing the dull, dirty, dangerous jobs of defense work, companies privately funding research and development and cutting costs, and a swell of competitive new entrants into the defense industry, we can rejuvenate our military’s technology while saving taxpayers billions of dollars.
There is no secret government silo of advanced technology that will save us if war breaks out: You must build it. Whether you are an engineer looking for a higher purpose than building photo filters, a government leader who wants to make a difference, or an entrepreneur founding a company — if you have read this far, you care about the future of our collective defense. Help us to reboot the arsenal of democracy and make that future safe, prosperous, and free.
Trae Stephens is co-founder and executive chairman of Anduril Industries, a cutting-edge defense technology company, and a partner at venture capital firm Founders Fund, where he invests across sectors with a particular interest in startups operating in the government space.
Previously, Trae was an early employee at Palantir Technologies, where he led teams focused on growth in the intelligence/defense space as well as international expansion. Prior to Palantir, Trae served as a computational linguist within the United States intelligence community.
Read Anduril’s full mission document here.
18. Russia strikes Kyiv, promises more attacks if U.S. supplies long-range missiles to Ukraine
Will these threats lead to more self deterrence and restraint?
Russia strikes Kyiv, promises more attacks if U.S. supplies long-range missiles to Ukraine
The strike on the capital targeted Western-supplied tanks.
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For the first time in more than a month, Russia launched airstrikes on Ukraine’s capital. Explosions rocked Kyiv’s eastern suburbs early this morning, filling the city’s skies with smoke. Russia’s military announced that the strikes were going after new tanks given to Ukraine by Western nations. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said that only one person was injured and was taken to the hospital.
It was the first major Russian attack on the capital since Ukrainian forces pushed Russian troops back from Kyiv in late April. Since then the war had shifted to the eastern regions while the invading forces regrouped and focused on smaller targets. Although some Russian incursions have been toward the west, the capital has been safe, while the Donbas and Luhansk regions have been devastated by major artillery strikes.
Several Western nations have provided a variety of armaments to Ukraine. Those include multiple T-72 tanks, which were the apparent target in today’s strike on Kyiv. However, Ukraine’s government claims none were hit. Other weapons sent to the country have included Javelin and Stinger missiles to counter tanks and planes, plus several large long-range howitzers. Over the last several weeks, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had pleaded for the United States to send more weapons, including the long-range High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS. The weapons platforms are important both because of how far they can strike, but also how mobile they are. Biden agreed this past week, on the condition that the HIMARS (which can strike as far as 43 miles away) are not used to target Russia itself.
In an interview with Rossiya-1 state television channel after the strike on Kyiv, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that “we will strike at those targets which we have not yet been hitting” if the American HIMARS platforms are supplied, Russian state news agency TASS reported. However, Putin also downplayed what impact new Western rockets could have on the war, saying they wouldn’t drastically alter Ukraine’s capabilities.
The strike on Kyiv marks a shift in how the war has been progressing in recent weeks. With fighting focused on the east, life in the country’s west and capital had started to ease. There was even a new exhibition that debuted in Kyiv, collecting destroyed Russian machinery and abandoned gear (some salvageable tanks are being repaired and redeployed against Russians in the east). The Ukrainian defense ministry set up the exhibit as a morale boost for the capital, one of several efforts over the last 100 days, such as the Ghost of Kyiv myth, to boost the country’s spirits.
After capturing the port city of Mariupol last month, Russian forces have been trying to take the city of Sievierodonetsk, the capital of the eastern Luhansk region which Russia has tried to annex. Luhansk’s governor claimed that Ukraine controls half of the city. The artillery fight around Sievierodonetsk has ravaged the metropolitan area.
Also this morning Ukraine’s nuclear energy firm Energoatom claimed that a Russian missile flying toward Kyiv “flew critically low” over the southern Ukrainian Pivdennoukrainsk nuclear plant, putting the facility at risk.
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19. Chinese Influencer’s Ice-Cream Pitch Inadvertently Introduces Fans to Tiananmen Square Massacre
Strategic influence comes in many flavors and forms.
Chinese Influencer’s Ice-Cream Pitch Inadvertently Introduces Fans to Tiananmen Square Massacre
Many of Li Jiaqi’s 170 million followers were watching when his live-streamed video was cut off after he displayed a dessert that looked like a tank
Updated June 5, 2022 10:56 pm ET
HONG KONG—One of China’s biggest online influencers stepped on a political land mine while promoting an ice-cream product on Friday. In the process, he set off a wave of curiosity about the government’s bloody 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square protesters among hordes of fans too young to remember it.
The discovery was the product of the marketing creativity of Li Jiaqi, an e-commerce live streamer known as the “Lipstick King,” colliding with the hair-trigger reflexes of China’s vigilant internet censors.
Mr. Li was promoting Viennetta, a British brand of ice cream made by Unilever, around 9 p.m. on Friday. He and a co-host presented a layered ice cream decorated with round cookies placed along its sides, and topped off with what appeared to be a chocolate stick. Almost immediately, the live show went offline.
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To some viewers, the reason for the cutoff was obvious: The dessert sculpture resembled a tank—a sensitive symbol of the Chinese military’s killing of pro-democracy protesters on June 4, 1989, made all the more potent by the iconic image of an anonymous Beijing man facing down a line of them in the wake of the massacre. Chinese censors have routinely zapped images of tanks posted on the Chinese internet around June 4.
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“He has gone too far,” said a user on China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform, who speculated that Mr. Li would be summoned for interrogation by the authorities. The user, who went by the handle Wafer, didn’t explicitly mention the reason.
To large numbers of Mr. Li’s other 170 million followers, many of whom were born after 1989 and talk vastly more about shopping than politics, the show’s suspension was puzzling.
“What could possibly be the wrong thing to say selling snacks?” said a Weibo user posting under the name Margaret and listing her birth year as 1992, the same year in which Mr. Li was born.
25 Years Later: ‘Tank Man’ Photographer Reflects on Tiananmen
25 Years Later: ‘Tank Man’ Photographer Reflects on Tiananmen
Play video: 25 Years Later: ‘Tank Man’ Photographer Reflects on Tiananmen
On June 5, 1989, Associated Press photographer Jeff Widener snapped the ‘Tank Man’ photo during the crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square which became one of the most iconic photos of the 20th century. The photographer, on a visit to Hong Kong, talks about some of the lesser-known images he took during the tumultuous period.
Mr. Li and his team weren’t helpful in filling the gaps. Immediately after the live stream was halted on Friday evening, the influencer wrote in a post on Weibo that the show was cut due to a technical glitch that was being fixed. Two hours later, Mr. Li sent an update and told fans to go to bed.
His next live promotion, scheduled for Sunday late afternoon, didn’t air. Mr. Li’s marketing agency, Meione (Shanghai) Network Technology Co., didn’t respond to a request for comment. Unilever’s China office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Thirty-three years after it happened, the Tiananmen Square massacre remains the most hushed of political taboos in China. Most of its details, including the deployment of tanks against civilians in the heart of the nation’s capital, are beginning to fade from public memory as younger generations grow up without learning about them.
Sensitivity around the event is now enveloping Hong Kong, which for decades hosted an annual vigil to remember those killed. Authorities in the former British colony banned this year’s vigil for the third time in a row and stopped and searched citizens who came to a downtown park to pay tribute on Saturday.
After Mr. Li’s show went offline, early speculation among fans centered on the possibility that he was being punished for tax evasion, a common stumbling block for Chinese celebrities. But gradually, the tank theory began to gain traction.
Curious fans reported launching fact-finding endeavors, with some writing that they learned about the sensitivity around tanks from family members. Several noted that the answers weren’t to be found in China’s textbooks, which typically give the 1989 protests glancing mention as an episode of political turmoil that was put down for the good of the nation.
Some of Mr. Li’s fans stumbled upon a 1989 document posted on the central government’s website describing the event as a violent riot that caused the deaths of many soldiers, and posted a link to it online. Many ended their posts with an endorsement of the Communist Party.
Hong Kong police moved people away from Victoria Park on Friday ahead of Saturday’s 33rd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
PHOTO: ANTHONY KWAN/GETTY IMAGES
Several fans complained that their Weibo accounts were frozen after they posted information that they had dug up about Tiananmen Square.
Weibo didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Despite heavy censorship, references to the massacre occasionally do slip through. In 2007, a dissident businessman named Chen Yunfei slipped a one-line classified ad expressing support for the parents of victims slain on June 4 into a local newspaper after the young staff member in charge of the page failed to understand its significance. Nearly a decade later, a group of activists produced a Chinese liquor and branded it with the June 4 theme with a picture of tanks on the label. In both cases, the activists were arrested and jailed for years.
Few commentators online appeared to believe Mr. Li’s ice-cream presentation was an intentional nod to Tiananmen Square. Known initially for his enormous success in selling lipstick, the marketing star has partnerships with 1,600 businesses and sometimes taps patriotic themes when selling domestic brands.
But even accidental references to the Tiananmen incident can lead to punishment in China. Last month, Sailei, a Chinese blogger who rose to popularity for nationalistic contents, had his Weibo account shut down after a program he launched attacking the business strategy of American cable news network CNN briefly showed news footage that included the famous “Tank Man” image.
One Weibo user appeared amused by the possibility that Mr. Li’s program was suspended because his generation has been kept in the dark about the country’s most sensitive historical event.
“Those who don’t know are punished because they wouldn’t know what to avoid,” the person wrote. “So do they want the public to know or not?”
Corrections & Amplifications
Unilever is the maker of the ice-cream product. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said the company’s name is Unliver.
Appeared in the June 6, 2022, print edition as 'Ice Cream Sets Off China’s Censors'.
20. Opinion: Here's the reason people tell me they want to buy an AR-15. And it's simply ludicrous
I would like to see a rational debate from both sides over this article.
Opinion: Here's the reason people tell me they want to buy an AR-15. And it's simply ludicrous
CNN · by Opinion by Michael Fanone
Michael Fanone is a CNN law enforcement analyst who served for 20 years with the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department. The views expressed here are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.
(CNN)No weapon has been more in the public eye in America of late than the AR-15, in large part because of its tragic role in some of this country's deadliest shootings.
The AR-15 has the dubious distinction of being America's most popular semi-automatic rifle. I'm more familiar with the gun than most people: I own one. And one thing I know for sure is that this weapon doesn't belong in the hands of the average civilian.
Officer Michael Fanone attends The 15th Annual CNN Heroes: All-Star Tribute at American Museum of Natural History on December 12, 2021, in New York.
I've owned multiple firearms for most of my life. I spent two decades in the Washington Metropolitan Police Department in a number of different roles, as a street cop walking the beat and on various special mission units.
I'm also a card-carrying member of the National Rifle Association. And when I wasn't at my job doing police work, I worked part-time for several years in firearm sales as well as training law enforcement officers, members of the military and civilians.
I purchased my different guns over the years for the same reason that you might purchase a flathead screwdriver along with a Phillips screwdriver: Each one serves a different purpose. As an avid hunter, I've got a gun that I use for turkey hunting, one that I use for waterfowl and one I use to hunt deer and larger game like elk.
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I purchased my AR-15 because I was assigned one as part of my police duties. But officers weren't allowed to take our department-issued weapons home. I felt it was my responsibility to become proficient with any weapon I'd been assigned, so I bought one. And I've spent hundreds of hours training so that I could properly use it.
I've sold guns at big box retailers and I've also sold firearms at a small retail gun store. Some gun buyers have been misled into thinking that the AR-15 is somehow practical for self-defense. But frankly, it's the last gun that I would recommend for that purpose.
Gunman posted images of guns days earlier on social media 01:15
Usually, the motivation for purchasing the AR-15 is simple: People want one because they want one. Most times, the person who buys an AR-15 comes into the store already knowing that they intend to purchase one.
I've pressed some customers about why they want an AR-15, but no one could ever come up with a legitimate justification for needing that particular weapon.
Some members of the tinfoil hat brigade have come up with the reply, "We need these weapons because we want to be effective against the government if it becomes tyrannical. That's part of our Second Amendment right." Personally, I think that's ludicrous, but it has become an increasingly popular justification for purchasing a semi-automatic rifle.
The AR-15 was given to law enforcement because more and more frequently police officers were encountering these types of weapons on the street and finding that they were outgunned. One example that springs to mind is the famous 1997 North Hollywood, California, shootout at the Bank of America.
In that incident, two individuals clad in body armor held up a bank in the Los Angeles neighborhood. Police who responded at the scene literally had to run to a nearby gun store to purchase more powerful weapons, because they were using 9 mm pistols, while the bad guys were armed with semi-automatic rifles.
The standoff was one of the most infamous gun battles in American history, with 11 officers wounded -- luckily, none fatally -- and both robbery suspects shot dead. While it's an extreme example, it is in many ways the situation encountered by officers all across this country: Police simply are outgunned against semi- and fully automatic firearms.
The bullet that comes out of the barrel of an AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle can easily penetrate the target -- the intruder or whatever person you are using deadly force to defend yourself or others from.
Pallbearers carry the casket of Nevaeh Bravo during a funeral service at Sacred Heart Catholic Church on June 2 in Uvalde, Texas. Bravo was killed in the shooting at Robb Elementary School.
But it also will go through the wall behind that person, and potentially through that room and into the next wall. That power and accuracy are useful for military purposes, which is obviously what they were designed for. But it's far more power than should ever be in the hands of the average civilian.
The bullet fired by the AR-15 is capable of defeating the average police officer's body armor, like a knife slicing through butter. SWAT teams and some of the more specialized units typically are equipped with level IV Kevlar or steel-plated armor, which would stop maybe two or three direct hits, but eventually body armor breaks down after being hit with multiple rounds.
A person wielding an AR-15 has a range beyond 300 yards. For an officer armed with a 9 mm pistol, hitting a target beyond 50 yards is going to be difficult, even for the most accomplished marksman. A bullet fired by an AR-15 travels at three times the velocity as one fired by a 9 mm handgun. And magazines that can feed dozens of rounds into the weapon in the space of minutes clearly were meant for use only on the battlefield.
The prevalence of these weapons means police sometimes are overmatched, as we saw with the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, last month. In a situation where you have small children near the shooter, you want to remove the threat as quickly as possible.
I have no doubt that police in Uvalde wish they had had weapons as powerful as the one carried by the shooter who snuffed out the lives of the victims in that school. But a far better outcome would have been if the shooter didn't have an AR-15 in the first place.
Now that I'm no longer on the police force, my AR-15 collects dust in my gun safe. Rifle ranges that permit the type of training required to use this weapon system effectively are few and far between and the cost of ammunition exceeding a dollar per round is more than this guy can afford. I no longer need it. But neither, to be honest, do most of the people flocking to guns stores to buy one.
Banning these powerful weapons from the civilian marketplace is a no-brainer, as are universal background checks. Neither move is going to solve all the gun problems that we have, but it would be a start.
And outlawing these AR-15s would not require confiscating them from people who already have them. Once you've made these weapons illegal, anyone found with one would be subject to arrest, since possession of these weapons would be a crime. I think it's likely that you would see a lot of people opting to turn them in.
A makeshift memorial surrounds the Robb Elementary School sign following the mass shooting at the Uvalde, Texas, school on May 26.
If banning them outright seems like too extreme a solution to be politically palatable, here's another option: Reclassify semi-automatic rifles as Class 3 firearms.
That would mean that someone wanting to purchase an AR-15 would have to go through a background check, fingerprinting and review by an official from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives -- a process that takes anywhere from 12 to 16 months. And since Class 3 weapons can't be purchased by anyone younger than 21, it would solve the issue of emotionally unstable 18-year-olds buying them.
A Class 3 firearm reclassification would also make those who are approved to purchase these weapons subject to an annual check that they are complying with federal regulations regarding secure storage of the firearm, and to confirm their licensing and other paperwork is up to date. All of these hoops and hurdles are sure to reduce the civilian demand for these weapons.
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I can't overstate how dangerous it is to have semi-automatic weapons like the AR-15 in the hands of civilians. Our public officials have it within their power to help make it harder for people who shouldn't have these weapons to get them.
A police officer should never have to worry about being outgunned by the bad guy they're protecting the public against.
CNN · by Opinion by Michael Fanone
21. Dust Off That Dirty Word Detente and Engage With China
Can there be sufficient trust for detente if this is the Chinese intent? My thesis: China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, and displace democratic institutions.
Dust Off That Dirty Word Detente and Engage With China
Joe Biden's grand strategy is setting the US and Beijing on a collision course. It's bad foreign policy and terrible domestic politics.
June 5, 2022, 8:00 AM EDT
Is detente still a dirty word? I hope not. We may soon need it.
Back in the 1970s, that little French duosyllable was almost synonymous with “Kissinger.” Despite turning 99 last month, the former secretary of state has not lost his ability to infuriate people on both the right and the left — witness the reaction to his suggestion at the World Economic Forum that “the dividing line [between Russia and Ukraine] should return to the status quo ante” because “pursuing the war beyond that point could turn it into a war not about the freedom of Ukraine … but into a war against Russia itself.”
Nearly half a century ago, when he was in office, his efforts to achieve detente with the Soviet Union were no less controversial. It is sometimes forgotten how much Ronald Reagan’s rise to prominence in national politics owed to his critique of detente as a policy and of Kissinger as a statesman. Throughout the 1970s, Reagan’s radio broadcasts regularly taunted Kissinger for failing to save South Vietnam from Communism and acquiescing as the Soviet Union cynically exploited detente to extend its power.
In 1976 Reagan repeatedly pledged to fire Kissinger as secretary of state if his campaign for the Republican nomination and the presidency were successful. “Under Messrs. Kissinger and Ford,” he declared in March of that year, “this nation has become number two in military power in a world where it is dangerous — if not fatal — to be second best. … Our nation is in danger. Peace does not come from weakness or from retreat. It comes from restoration of American military superiority.” In a televised speech, Reagan defined detente as “negotiat[ing] the most acceptable second-best position available.” The neoconservative Norman Podhoretz went further, accusing Kissinger of “making the world safe for Communism.”
Few academic historians today are neocons. They are more likely to attack Kissinger from the left, for the slack he cut right-wing dictatorships in pursuit of his grand strategy. Yet they, too, have little positive to say about detente. A little like appeasement, which started life a respectable term in the diplomatic lexicon, detente is now disreputable.
And yet detente in the 1970s was not like appeasement in the 1930s: It successfully avoided a world war. The more I ponder that troubled, turbulent decade, the more I see detente as a smart solution to the mess the United States was in by the beginning of 1969, when Richard Nixon took up residence in the White House, with Kissinger down in the basement of the West Wing as his national security adviser.
Unable to win its war against North Vietnam, deeply divided over that and a host of other issues, the US was in no position to play hardball with the Soviet Union, as John Kennedy had and as Reagan would. Moreover, with a mounting inflation problem, the US economy was in no fit state to increase spending on defense.
The architect of detente had no illusions about the Soviets, whose cynicism and opportunism Kissinger understood only too well. Under Nixon and Gerald Ford, he pursued detente for two main reasons: to avoid World War III and to play for time, exploring the possibilities of an increasingly multipolar, interdependent world. And, as it turned out, that worked.
Detente could not deliver “peace with honor” in Vietnam. The interval between peace and conquest that it bought for South Vietnam was less than decent. Yet Armageddon was averted. And precious time was bought.
Emboldened, the Soviets mounted a series of ill-judged and costly interventions in what was then called the Third World, culminating in Afghanistan in 1979. Meanwhile, as my colleague Adrian Wooldridge has smartly pointed out, the US economy took advantage of America’s retreat from Cold War confrontation to innovate in ways that would leave the Soviets in the dust, creating the financial and technological resources that made Reagan’s (and George H.W. Bush’s) Cold War victory possible. Apple, Charles Schwab, Microsoft, Oracle, Visa — the list of world-beating companies founded in the 1970s speaks for itself.
There is a lesson here.
In purely foreign-policy terms, the grand strategy of Joe Biden’s administration is open to criticism. “What began as an effort to make sure Russia did not have an easy victory over Ukraine,” wrote David Sanger and his New York Times colleagues on May 26, “shifted as soon as the Russian military began to make error after error, failing to take Kyiv. The administration now sees a chance to punish Russian aggression, weaken Mr. Putin, shore up NATO and the trans-Atlantic alliance and send a message to China, too.” That is a well-grounded assessment, in line with numerous statements by President Biden, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, the US ambassador to NATO, Julianne Smith, and other American officials.
But what exactly does Russian “strategic failure” look like? And how much assistance will the United States have to give Ukraine to achieve it? On May 25, Newsweek alluded to “a report that stated the U.S. was preparing to target the Russian fleet to free up paths for Ukraine to export grain.” That was almost certainly an incorrect inference from a tweet by a Ukrainian government adviser.
Still, some influential figures in and around Washington seem eager to ramp up American support for Ukraine in remarkable ways. Last month, my old friend James Stavridis wrote that “an escort system for Ukrainian (and other national) merchant ships that want to go in and out of Odesa” was “worth considering” by the US and its NATO allies. The Black Sea should become “the next major front in the Ukraine war.”
Another commentator I respect, Eliot Cohen, wrote on May 11 that Ukraine was “winning the war” and that Kyiv now had the option of not merely restoring the pre-Feb. 24 line of contact, but “recovering portions of Donbas lost in the 2010s, or recovering everything, including Crimea, that was part of Ukraine in 2013.” The soon-to-be-victorious Ukrainians, he added, would also have to decide “whether to seek reparations and reconstruction aid, and whether freedom to join the European Union and the possibility of joining NATO have to be part of the eventual peace settlement.”
To his credit, Biden dialed back his administration’s goals in a measured op-ed for the New York Times on May 31. “We do not seek a war between NATO and Russia. … [T]he United States will not try to bring about [Putin’s] ouster in Moscow. So long as the United States or our allies are not attacked, we will not be directly engaged in this conflict. We are not encouraging or enabling Ukraine to strike beyond its borders. We do not want to prolong the war just to inflict pain on Russia.” But the reality is that the administration has become the arsenal of Ukraine’s democracy, not the broker of a peace that it is leaving to Ukraine to define.
Three of Europe’s most important leaders — French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi — are distinctly uneasy about this. They would much prefer to see an imminent ceasefire and the start of peace negotiations. But to speak of compromise in the current febrile atmosphere of Ukrainophilia is to invite charges of appeasement. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy reacted angrily to Kissinger’s argument for a peace based on the status quo ante. “I get the sense that instead of the year 2022,” Zelenskiy snapped, “Mr. Kissinger has 1938 on his calendar.”
Yet Zelenskiy himself has said repeatedly — most recently in an interview on May 21 — that he would regard as “victory” a return to the territorial position on Feb. 23, which was what Kissinger plainly meant by the status quo ante. That would mean Ukraine taking back Kherson and the ravaged city of Mariupol. It would mean pushing Russia out of its “land bridge” from Crimea to Russia. And it would mean completely reversing all the gains the Russians have made in the eastern Donbas region.
Zelenskiy knows, and so should we, what a daunting task that represents. In a speech last week, he acknowledged that Russia has seized around a fifth of Ukraine’s territory. In an interview with Newsmax, he admitted that Ukraine was losing “60 to 100 soldiers per day as killed in action and something around 500 people as wounded in action.”
Even with an open-ended commitment from the US to supply them with weapons, do the Ukrainians have the trained manpower to drive Russia out of all the territory it has occupied since Feb. 24? And if this brutal war continues through the summer, and is still being fought as the year wanes and the temperatures begin to fall in Europe, what then? Vladimir Putin is surely counting on the usual divisions within the Western alliance and within American politics to resurface sooner or later.
The most remarkable thing about the foreign policy of the Biden administration is that helping Ukraine defeat Russia is not even its top priority. “Even as President Putin’s war continues,” declared Secretary of State Antony Blinken in a speech at George Washington University on May 26, “we will remain focused on the most serious long-term challenge to the international order — and that’s posed by the People’s Republic of China.”
Blinken’s speech repays close study. About one-tenth of it was conciliatory. “We are not looking for conflict or a new Cold War,” he declared. “We do not seek to transform China’s political system. … We will engage constructively with China wherever we can.”
But the rest was as hawkish a speech on China as the one delivered by then Vice President Mike Pence in October 2018, which for me was the moment Cold War II got going in earnest. In Blinken’s words:
Under President Xi, the ruling Chinese Communist Party has become more repressive at home and more aggressive abroad. We see that in how Beijing has perfected mass surveillance within China and exported that technology to more than 80 countries; how its advancing unlawful maritime claims in the South China Sea, undermining peace and security, freedom of navigation, and commerce; how it’s circumventing or breaking trade rules … and how it purports to champion sovereignty and territorial integrity while standing with governments that brazenly violate them.
Blinken spelled out how the US intends to “shape the strategic environment around Beijing,” citing the new Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity, announced by Biden on his recent Asia tour, and the Quad of the US, Australia, India and Japan, with its new Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness, not forgetting AUKUS, the US deal on nuclear submarines with Australia and the UK.
But the most startling lines in Blinken’s speech were the ones on “the genocide and crimes against humanity happening in the Xinjiang region”; on US support for “Tibet, where the authorities continue to wage a brutal campaign against Tibetans and their culture, language, and religious traditions”; on Hong Kong, “where the Chinese Communist Party has imposed harsh anti-democratic measures under the guise of national security”; on “Beijing’s aggressive and unlawful activities in the South and East China Seas”; and — the coup de grace from a Chinese vantage point — on “Beijing’s growing coercion” and “increasingly provocative rhetoric and activity” toward Taiwan.
Taiwan is, of course, the key issue. As if to confirm Xi Jinping’s darkest suspicions, Biden went off script again at a press conference in Tokyo with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on May 23. A reporter asked if the United States would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack. “Yes,” the president answered. “That’s the commitment we made. We agree with a one-China policy. We've signed on to it and all the intended agreements made from there. But the idea that, that it (Taiwan) can be taken by force, just taken by force, is just not, is just not appropriate.”
Almost immediately, US officials, led by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, walked this latest gaffe back. But when is a gaffe not a gaffe? When the president of the United States says it three times. By my count, that is the number of occasions Biden has pledged to come to Taiwan’s defense since August last year.
What are the practical implications of ditching the half-century-old policy of “strategic ambiguity” on Taiwan, which dates to Kissinger’s compromise with Zhou Enlai in 1972? In his book “The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict,” Elbridge Colby argues that the US can and must prioritize the defense of Taiwan. Colby was deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development under Donald Trump. His book has been a hit with China hawks precisely because it gets specific about how the US could cope with a Chinese attempt to seize Taiwan.
“Defending forces operating from a distributed, resilient force posture and across all the war-fighting domains,” Colby writes, “might use a variety of methods to blunt the Chinese invasion in the air and seas surrounding Taiwan.” The US and its allies might “seek to disable or destroy Chinese transport ships and aircraft before they left Chinese ports or airstrips. The defenders might also try to obstruct key ports; neutralize key elements of Chinese command and control … And once Chinese forces entered the Strait, US and defending forces could use a variety of methods to disable or destroy Chinese transport ships and aircraft.”
“There’s a very real chance of a major war with China in the coming years,” Colby tweeted last month. “Everyone with influence should be asking themselves: Did I do *everything* I could to deter it? And make it less costly for Americans if it does happen? … China has the will, the way, and increasingly a sense of urgency to take us on over stakes that are genuinely decisive for us (and the world, for that matter).”
Yet it is far from clear, as retired Taiwanese Admiral Lee Hsi-Min has argued, that Taiwan would be capable of putting up as tenacious a fight as Ukraine has against Russia in the event of an invasion by the People’s Liberation Army. Moreover, in all recent Pentagon war games on Taiwan, the US team consistently loses to the Chinese team. To quote Graham Allison and Jonah Glick-Unterman, my colleagues at Harvard’s Belfer Center, “If in the near future there is a ‘limited war’ over Taiwan or along China’s periphery, the US would likely lose — or have to choose between losing and stepping up the escalation ladder to a wider war.”
Meanwhile, according to the head of the US Strategic Command, Admiral Charles Richard, “We are facing a crisis deterrence dynamic right now that we have only seen a few times in our nation’s history. The war in Ukraine and China’s nuclear trajectory — their strategic breakout —demonstrates that we have a deterrence and assurance gap based on the threat of limited nuclear employment.”
A month ago, Richard told the Senate’s strategic forces panel that China is “watching the war in Ukraine closely and will likely use nuclear coercion to their advantage in the future. Their intent is to achieve the military capability to reunify Taiwan by 2027 if not sooner.” China has doubled its nuclear stockpile within two years, increasing the number if its solid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missile silos from zero to at least 360.
For its part, the Biden administration is proposing to cancel the sea-launched cruise missile nuclear development program, as part of a package of military cuts that are projected by the Congressional Budget Office to reduce the defense budget as a share of gross domestic product from 3.3% in 2021 to 2.7% in 2032.
If all this adds up to a coherent grand strategy, then I’m Sun Tzu.
The truly amazing thing is that Biden’s foreign policy not only fails the basic tests of strategic coherence and credibility. It also seems exceptionally poorly designed to serve the Democrats’ domestic interests.
The Biden administration’s number one problem is inflation. The polling is clear on that, and we are five months away from midterms that are set to hand both chambers of Congress back to the Republicans. (The public is interested in only one thing more than inflation, and that is Depp v. Heard.) The Fed has the job of bringing inflation back down, but most monetary economists know that it will be very hard to do this through raising interest rates and shrinking the balance sheet without causing a recession at some point.
Currently, however, the administration's foreign policy isn’t helping fight inflation — quite the reverse. Large-scale support for Ukraine is not only expensive (the total thus far is $53 billion, according to economist Larry Lindsey). It also restricts supply via sanctions on Russia, and further restricts supply by prolonging the war, cutting off Ukrainian exports of wheat and other goods. Continuing Trump’s trade war and ramping up the support for Taiwan add a further inflationary pressure by keeping Chinese imports more expensive than they otherwise would be, and also encourage the process of “decoupling” China’s economy from ours.
Remember the old days, when foreign policy was supposed to serve a domestic political purpose? That was the era that produced the 1997 movie “Wag the Dog,” in which Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro fake a war in Albania to salvage a presidential re-election campaign. Well, Joe Biden is a very, very long way from wagging the dog. We seem to confront here a classic case of what the old German historians called the “primacy of foreign policy.” Despite the likely political cost to the president’s party, the dog is wagging the tail.
If a competent Democratic strategist were to rethink Biden's foreign policy, what might she come up with? Well, how about detente 2.0 (or deuxieme, if you prefer)? If — as I’ve argued for the past four years — we’re already in Cold War II, then Ukraine is Korea. It’s the early-innings phase of the superpower struggle, the time when the US still has military superiority but can’t help getting dragged into peripheral conflicts. We now clearly have the option to proceed from the 1950s to the 1960s, with the Taiwan Semiconductor Crisis substituting for the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Alternatively — and a lot less terrifyingly — we could take a historical shortcut and proceed straight to the 1970s.
Detente has a lousy reputation, as we have seen. Neoconservatives continue to argue that it was a misconceived strategy that mainly benefited the Soviet Union and that Reagan was right to ditch it in favor of a more confrontational strategy.
But this is misleading. First, Reagan ended up doing his own version of detente with Mikhail Gorbachev — involving more radical disarmament than Kissinger himself thought prudent! Second, detente in the 1970s made a good deal of sense at a time when the US was struggling with inflation, deep domestic division, and a war that grew steadily less popular the longer it lasted.
If that sounds familiar, then consider how detente might be helping Joe Biden today if, instead of talking tough on Taiwan in Tokyo, he had taken a trip to Beijing — fittingly, on the 50th anniversary of Nixon's trip there in 1972. He could have:
1. Ended the trade war with China.
2. Begun the process of ending the war in Ukraine with a little Chinese pressure on Putin.
3. Applied joint US-China pressure on the Arab oil producers to step up production in a serious way (last week’s announcement was unserious), instead of letting them play Washington and Beijing off against one another.
Would Xi Jinping take detente if Biden offered it? Like Mao in 1972, the Chinese leader is in enough of a mess himself that he might well. Zero Covid has become Xi’s version of the Cultural Revolution, a policy that is ultimately destabilizing China, whatever the original intent was. As for China’s international position, the decision to back Putin has surely weakened it.
Last week, for example, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi signally failed to persuade 10 countries in the Pacific to sign a regional agreement on trade and security. Mao’s problem in 1972 was that he had quarreled bitterly with Moscow. Half a century later, as Kissinger pointed out at Davos, Xi Jinping’s problem is that he is too close to Moscow for comfort.
Do I think detente stands a chance of being revived? No, I don’t, because I think the Biden administration is deeply committed to the containment of China as the keystone of its foreign policy. But it is worth remembering that their hawkishness had its origins in domestic politics. This time two years ago, Biden’s handlers decided he had to be tougher on China than Trump in order to win the presidency. Well, maybe they were right about that as a matter of electoral tactics. But does the same logic apply today, with a midterm shellacking fast approaching? I think not.
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It is conventional to argue that partisan polarization is the curse of modern American politics. There is only one thing that scares me more, however, and that is bipartisan consensus. Democrats and Republicans agree on almost nothing nowadays. But they do agree that resisting China’s rise should be the foundation of American foreign policy. I, too, would loathe to live in a world where China called the shots. But is Joe Biden’s deeply flawed grand strategy making such a world less likely? Or more?
If the choice is between war over Taiwan and a decade of detente, I’ll take the dirty French word.
More From Bloomberg Opinion:
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Putin’s Unconditional Surrender Isn't the Right Goal: Ian Buruma
-
America, China, Russia and the Avalanche of History: Niall Ferguson
-
The 1970s Had a Bright Side, Too: Adrian Wooldridge
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22. A flare up in China’s deliberate pattern of aggression
A flare up in China’s deliberate pattern of aggression
The intercept of an Australian patrol over the South China
Sea escalates a “grey zone” conflict to a dangerous level.
It’s time to be alarmed not just alert. On Sunday, Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles revealed a “very dangerous” intercept by a People’s Liberation Army Air Force’s (PLAAF) fighter of an Australian P-8 maritime patrol aircraft took place on 26 May over the South China Sea. The P-8 aircraft was flying in international airspace at the time, well outside territorial waters. Australia has conducted maritime patrols in the area for several decades – the P-8s flight was unremarkable, the J-16 fighter’s aggressive moves anything but.
The 2020 Defence Strategic Update earlier fretted about China’s grey zone activities. This intercept suggests the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is now escalating these, with a possibility of another collision as occurred in 2001 with a US Navy aircraft.
Grey-zone conflicts involve the purposeful pursuit of political objectives through carefully designed operations, a measured movement towards the objectives rather than seeking decisive results within a specified time. By acting to remain below key escalatory thresholds so as to avoid war, the grey zone involves the use of all the instruments of national power, particularly non-military and non-kinetic tools.
Grey-zone actions don’t just happen. They are implemented in a carefully designed campaign plan controlled by the CCP high-level leadership and strategic-level military commanders. Grey-zone actions are not those of tactical commanders freelancing. Instead, they are carefully scripted brinkmanship.
China’s purposeful olive branch media announcement attempting to suggest that Australia needs to respond by adjusting its approach will now be drowned out by global media reaction to Chinese military aggression.
For the Australians, there was a further escalatory twist. The PLAAF fighter ejected flares while alongside the P-8 and then carefully positioned itself to dispense chaff – thin aluminium foil strips – so they would be ingested by the P-8’s engines. This appears the first time such actions have seen or at least been publicly revealed.
The aggressive use of chaff is notable. It could cause some minor damage to the fan blades of the P-8 – in a worst-case scenario, the engine impacted could need to be shut down. The P-8 is a twin-engine, so this should not mean the loss of the aircraft. Instead, chaff ingestion is likely to be treated by the P-8 aircrew as being akin to a bird strike. Accordingly, the P-8 would return to its operating airbase to have the engine checked. The fighter would have caused the patrol to be ended.
RAAF P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft (Defence Department)
There are three significant implications from this event.
First, China is now taking increasingly aggressive actions that are a clear deviation of the pattern of the last several years. China is now “pushing the envelope” and in keeping with being a part of a long-term plan. Other aggressive actions may now be undertaken, possibly including regularly crowding of disputed areas of the South China Sea with massed naval forces, declaring Air Defence Identification Zones across specific grey-zone areas, radar targeting other nation’s naval warships and military aircraft, and periodically electronically jamming civil and military radars and jamming GPS occasionally. Such future possibilities are further discussed in my “China’s Enduring Grey Zone Challenge” published by the Air and Space Power Centre.
China will be hoping that foreign military aircraft faced with an ongoing threat of collision or damage will be gradually forced out of the South China Sea.
Second, the aggressive use of PLAAF aircraft appears aimed to support its sweeping claim to the South China Sea under the so-called “nine-dash line”. The CCP has recently passed laws that apply Chinese domestic law to the area within its nine-dash line gambit, but which is actually international waters and airspace open to all. The PLAAF J-16 aircraft is a long-range, twin-engine fighter and can allow such intercepts to be undertaken by China on a regular basis. China will be hoping that foreign military aircraft faced with an ongoing threat of collision or damage will be gradually forced out of the South China Sea. If so, with China’s activities increasingly less challenged, other countries may gradually come to accept, or at least acquiesce to, China’s extraordinary territorial claims.
Third, China’s timing befits a “wolf warrior” nation with diplomatic norms quite different to the rest of the international system. The Chinese Foreign Minister has just suggested a reset in Chinese-Australia relations to return to earlier times of harmony. Meanwhile, the PLAAF doubles down on aggression. China’s extension of the hand of diplomatic friendship while being hard-nosed elsewhere appears the way China now does business.
There is a measure of carrot-and-stick in all this perhaps intended to influence the new Australian government. However, this game can be played both ways. The Australian government waited ten days before revealing the P-8 intercept. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s purposeful olive branch media announcement attempting to suggest that Australia needs to respond by adjusting its approach will now be drowned out by global media reaction to Chinese military aggression. It now appears China needs to change as it is at fault.
23. Romanian Special Operations Forces In UF PRO MultiCam
Romanian Special Operations Forces In UF PRO MultiCam | Joint Forces News
At the BSDA 2022 defence and security expo in Bucharest we were able to photograph the new Romanian Special Operations Forces camo, reports Bob Morrison.
~
The last time I had the opportunity to photograph Forţele Pentru Operaţii Speciale or FPOS operators, from 164 FNOS during SABER GUARDIAN 2019, they were wearing the new Romanian M2017 Land Forces camo pattern. Roll forward to BSDA 2022 and both this Navy Special Forces unit and operators from its four Army Special Forces sister battalions in the FPOS command were wearing Genuine MultiCam uniforms.
FPOS constituent components ~ shield on left is HQ and on right is the Special Operations Forces school’s shield [© Bob Morrison]
The distinctive cut of the uniforms worn by these operators marked them out as being UF PRO designs, manufactured in Slovenia by a company formed 25 years ago, rather than the more usual Crye Precision uniform designs. If Crye designs are the ‘Rolls Royce’ of SF uniforms, UF PRO designs are probably the ‘Aston Martin’ as these guys really know how to tailor cloth; regrettably, however, they do not make their trousers (or pants, if you speak Bubble Gum English) sized for the vertically-challenged champion pie-eater, so I do not own a pair.
FPOS 51 Battalion operator in UF PRO MultiCam uniform [© Bob Morrison]
Back to FPOS. In 2009 Romanian Special Forces battalions, as part of 6th Special Operations Brigade ‘Mihai Viteazul‘, were structured as:-
- 610th Special Operations Battalion ‘Vulturii’ (Eagles)
- 620th Special Operations Battalion ‘Băneasa–Otopeni’
- 630th Paratroopers Battalion ‘Smaranda Brăescu’
- 640th Logistic Battalion in Târgu Mureș
- plus Unit 164 FNOS Forţe Navale pentru Operaţii Speciale
Romanian FPOS uniforms use Genuine MultiCam [© Bob Morrison]
More recently the four Land Forces battalions have been renumbered 51, 52, 53 and 54 and a fifth (training school) unit has been added. Each battalion, which carries on the often long-standing traditions of its predecessor formation, wears its own distinctive colour of beret and formation badge. Although I was able to photograph all five unit patches, unfortunately the 54th Battalion operator was wearing a MultiCam field cap and not his beret.
Patches of the five Romanian FPOS combat battalions [© Bob Morrison]
FPOS 51, 52 and 53 Battalion berets plus 164 FNOS [© Bob Morrison]
The operator in the three-view sequence is from 51 Special Operations Battalion ‘Vulturii’, as denoted by the dark green beret, and the guys in the blue berets are from 164 FNOS. Thanks for taking the time to pose for us gentlemen.
Romanian 164 FNOS operators wearing UF PRO MultiCam uniforms [© Bob Morrison]
~
24. Has the Tide Turned in Ukraine?
Excerpts:
Ukrainian success, Sokolov stresses, depends on Western military aid. Sanctions are also crucial. Sokolov notes the importance of closing loopholes in sanctions that allow, for example, technology with potential military uses to be shipped to Russian companies that don’t have formal ties to the defense industry but may very well funnel their purchases to companies that do. So far, unfortunately, there isn’t much of a chance of drastically reducing the oil and gas revenues that allow Russia to finance its unholy war.
Sokolov’s article is not starry-eyed cheerleading for Ukraine. But it makes a strong case that, heading into the second 100 days, Ukraine can make impressive gains and hold its own.
Obviously, dancing on Putin’s grave is premature. But so is calling for Ukraine to make concessions to Russia—concessions that will almost inevitably involve leaving hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians under Russian rule. We have seen ample evidence of what Russian rule means in the first 100 days.
Has the Tide Turned in Ukraine?
(Composite by Hannah Yoest / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock)
As Russia’s war in Ukraine hits the 100-day mark, there are many conflicting reports on how it’s going. There’s a view that, as David French puts it, the tide has turned in favor of Russia, which has regrouped after early failures and is gaining ascendancy using its overwhelming firepower.
There’s a more modest view, from Center for a New American Security experts Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Michael Kofman, that “Russia is down but not out” and that Russian forces are making incremental gains in Eastern Ukraine. And there are still many who insist that the war must end in a humiliating defeat for Russia.
What’s been happening recently is Russia concentrating its forces in Donbas and pounding away at everything in sight with heavy and relentless artillery fire, sometimes wearing the Ukrainians down, forcing a retreat, and seizing territory. This is the “win by reducing everything to rubble” strategy that worked in Chechnya twenty years ago.
But is it really working? Hard to say. It appears, for instance, that Ukraine is retaking large parts of Severodonetsk, whose supposedly imminent fall to the Russians was being touted as evidence of Ukrainian failure a couple of days ago when Russia controlled 70 percent of the strategic city. Now that’s down to 50 percent. Predictions that Russia would seize all of the Luhansk region in the next two weeks are also being disputed. The Institute for the Study of War says that Ukrainian defenses, while more degraded than Ukrainian officials admit, “remain strong” and that Russia’s invading force has “concentrated all of its available resources on this single battle to make only modest gains.”
Ukraine is just starting to get new U.S. arms deliveries that should significantly boost its fighting capacity and, some predict, will make a huge difference. That includes advanced HIMARS rocket launchers. Weapons will be arriving from other countries as well, including 15 anti-aircraft “Gepard” (“Cheetah”) tanks from Germany in July.
On the Russian-language website Grani.ru, currently banned in Russia, Russian historian Boris Sokolov (a professor at the Russian State Social University until being forced to retire in 2008 over an article supportive of Georgia) also writes that Russian forces are being depleted by attrition, exhaustion, and losses of technology and machinery. According to Sokolov:
Most likely, in a few days, the Russian offensive in the Donbas will be paused for at least two weeks in order to receive reinforcements of manpower, drawn both from the spring draft and from volunteers recruited among former contractors who previously served in the army. Military equipment will also be supplied. . .
A Ukrainian counteroffensive is likely to follow in late July or August, depending on how soon Western weapons arrive in Ukraine and how quickly Ukrainian soldiers can learn to use them. The Ukrainians will almost certainly advance in the south, with the aim of eliminating the land corridor to Crimea, reconquering the Azov ports and reaching the February 23 line of contact. Current Ukrainian attacks in the Kherson area can be seen as a kind of reconnaissance by combat before a large counteroffensive.
The further course of the war will depend on the results of this counteroffensive. If it has only partial success . . . then the war, in all likelihood, will be positional and protracted, like the Korean War in 1951-1953.
(“Positional warfare” is conducted along permanent and fortified front lines.)
Ukrainian success, Sokolov stresses, depends on Western military aid. Sanctions are also crucial. Sokolov notes the importance of closing loopholes in sanctions that allow, for example, technology with potential military uses to be shipped to Russian companies that don’t have formal ties to the defense industry but may very well funnel their purchases to companies that do. So far, unfortunately, there isn’t much of a chance of drastically reducing the oil and gas revenues that allow Russia to finance its unholy war.
Sokolov’s article is not starry-eyed cheerleading for Ukraine. But it makes a strong case that, heading into the second 100 days, Ukraine can make impressive gains and hold its own.
Obviously, dancing on Putin’s grave is premature. But so is calling for Ukraine to make concessions to Russia—concessions that will almost inevitably involve leaving hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians under Russian rule. We have seen ample evidence of what Russian rule means in the first 100 days.
25. Cornel West’s pragmatic America
Cornel West’s pragmatic America
Pragmatism is America’s homegrown philosophical tradition. Its lessons are as urgent as ever.
Vox · by Sean Illing · June 5, 2022
American philosopher and political activist, Cornel West, at Woodlawn Cemetery, New York City, 24th July 2012.
Steve Pyke via Getty Images
Cornel West is one of the most unique philosophical voices in America. He has written a ton of books and taught for over 40 years at schools like Princeton, Harvard, and now at the Union Theological Seminary.
West is what I’d call a public-facing philosopher, which is to say he’s not a cloistered academic. He’s constantly engaging the public and his thought is always in dialogue with poetry and music and literature. (If you’ve ever seen one of his lectures, you know what I mean.)
That civic-mindedness is a product of his roots in a school of thought called pragmatism. America doesn’t have an especially deep tradition of philosophy, but if we’re known for any one tradition, it’s pragmatism.
Pragmatism emerged in the US in the late 1800s as a response to the Enlightenment push for absolute truth. The pragmatists — people like William James and John Dewey — were less interested in certainty and more concerned with immediate experience. They simply wanted to know what worked for ordinary human beings in everyday life.
For West, pragmatism is really the philosophy of democracy; it’s a way of knowing and doing that puts the average human being at the center. So I reached out to West for a recent episode of Vox Conversations to talk about the story of American pragmatism, how his views are shaped by his devotion to the blues and his Christian faith, and how pragmatism can revitalize our approach to democracy today.
Below is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow Vox Conversations on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Sean Illing
Pragmatism is a child of America and in many ways it feels like it could only have emerged here. Why is that?
Cornel West
I think the positive feature of American pragmatism, just like the positive feature of the American project, was a highly Socratic suspicion of authorities in the past. But the weakness is to think that you’re not going to be somehow connected to tradition, because traditions are inescapable. The question is always: Which tradition? Every novel breakthrough is not wholly novel, because it’s always based on something prior.
But it’s that energy of the new that I want to stress. For pragmatism, it’s about sustaining this energy to creativity because the world is incomplete, it is unfinished and unpredictable. And therefore there’s always possibility.
Now the worst of that is that if you wipe the slate clean, and you have no past, then you’re starting with innocence and you can’t learn from the past. The suspicion of traditions of the past means you have to then create new dynamic traditions with mechanisms of accountability and responsibility. And that’s pragmatism at its best, that’s America at its best.
Sean Illing
One of the things I love about pragmatism is this desire to avoid all of these navel-gazing debates in the history of philosophy and just focus on what works for the ordinary human being in everyday life. The more removed philosophy is from the everyday world, the less relevant it is. And I feel like the pragmatists really understood this. Is that why they focused so much on immediate experience?
Cornel West
Absolutely. There’s a democratizing of voices raised. There’s a democratizing of critical intelligence. There’s a democratizing of philosophia, a love of wisdom. And it’s found, as Emerson says over and over again, in the quotidian, in the every day. That’s the democratizing impulse of pragmatism.
Now when you say pragmatism focuses on “what works,” in some ways that obscures more than it illuminates because the question becomes, How do you determine what we understand “working” to be? Because pragmatism isn’t merely utilitarian or consequentialist. Pragmatism has a very strong moral dimension, and it’s not reducible to just any consequences at all.
We can go all the way back to Plato’s Republic, one of the founding texts of Western philosophy. There we see the battles going on between Thrasymachus and Socrates. Thrasymachus represents power, the idea that “might makes right.” And the younger generation looks to Socrates and says, is this true? Is it true that history is nothing but a slaughterhouse, as Hegel said, is it true that it’s just about might and power and domination? And Socrates says, no. Justice has to do with intellectual integrity. It has to do with philosophical inquiry. It has to do with some moral and even spiritual dimensions that are not reducible to might and power.
And that is the raw stuff for democracy, right? Because democracy says, Of course there is always economic and political and military power, but there’s got to be moral and spiritual dimensions rooted in the consent of everyday people. That’s what self-government is all about.
Sean Illing
Richard Rorty — a great American pragmatist and a former teacher of yours — called pragmatism a philosophy of solidarity. And he actually thought of pragmatism as a check against nihilism. In other words, we don’t have to discard our beliefs about the world, or our moral and political values, just because we realized that we made them up, that they weren’t discovered. But a lot of people draw the opposite conclusion from that realization —
Cornel West
Well, that’s part of that self-fashioning and self-creation that goes back to Emerson. That’s shot through pragmatism and Rorty’s thought. As William James said, pragmatism is a house with many rooms. And there’s a Rortian room. And that Rortian room is that of a Cold War liberal who’s concerned about getting beyond the subjectivism and the solipsism of Descartes. It’s all about a move toward community. And community for him was all about solidarity. We begin with a “we,” not an “I.” That’s pragmatism, that’s community, and that’s how you begin.
Sean Illing
There is something fundamentally democratic about how we get along in the world, and this leads back to John Dewey, the great defender of democracy and one of the most influential American pragmatists. As you know, Dewey was famously engaged in a long debate with Walter Lippmann, a brilliant media theorist and writer in the early 20th century.
Lippmann gave up on democracy. He didn’t believe that ordinary citizens were capable of understanding the world, or at least he didn’t believe they were capable of understanding the world given their circumstances. He thought they had to be managed by a technocratic elite. Why did Dewey reject that so strongly?
Cornel West
The early Walter Lippmann was a democratic socialist, very much like Dewey. After World War I, he loses his faith in the demos. I mean, he almost agrees with Plato that every democracy is eventually shattered by unruly passions and pervasive ignorance, and therefore democracies always lead toward a tyrant and hence the need for the philosopher-king.
So the early Lippmamn had this faith in democracy, and then he loses it. He says we must have the experts. We must have those folks who really know what they’re doing and know something about the world, because the demos will always be ignorant and gullible.
And Dewey comes along and says, “Walter, I understand your pilgrimage and your journey. I understand why you’ve lost faith in the demos.” I mean, Dewey gets that it’s a challenge. He gets that the demos can go fascist. They’re writing in the ’20s, after all. Mussolini’s on the way. That gangster Hitler is emerging as a result of the wounded German empire. But Dewey holds on to his democratic faith and the result is this powerful dialogue between the technocratic Lippmann and the democratic Dewey.
Sean Illing
Is it fair to say that Dewey, in lacking that tragic sensibility, was maybe a little too optimistic?
Cornel West
That’s a good query, man. Dewey’s complicated on this matter. You read his poetry when his wife dies and it’s pretty dim stuff. So it’s not as if he didn’t have any sense of the tragic. It’s just that he believed that human beings had been so obsessed with their limits that they had to be released from that obsession, and recognize those limits being contingent and provisional rather than eternal and universal.
I do resonate with that, because a lot of times what people think are limits are not limits at all. They’ll say, well, there’s no way we could really provide support for the poor because the market-driven economists tell us that this is the only way we can arrange society. But I say no, you just don’t have enough imagination or enough empathy. And we like to rationalize domination and oppression. Dewey’s right about all that.
Sean Illing
As much as I love Dewey, I think even he realized in the end that he never quite offered up a real political strategy for achieving his ideal democratic life. And we live in such a polarized time where the possibilities of dialogue across groups seems fleeting, to put it kindly. How in the world do we move toward the pragmatic democratic community that you and Dewey want to see in the world?
Cornel West
I think Dewey was always able to take seriously that Socratic humility we’ve been talking about. None of us possesses a monopoly on truth or goodness and beauty. But Dewey’s faith was tied to what he called a “natural piety.” And by piety, he didn’t mean uncritical deference to dogma or blind obedience to doctrine. He meant a virtuous acknowledgement of the sources of good in our lives. You are never, in and of yourself, the sole source for good. You’re always dependent on parents. You don’t teach yourself a language. All the talk about being “self-made” in America, as if you gave birth to yourself, as if you cultivated your own virtues — that’s the opposite of Dewey. And realizing this is the raw stuff of democracy.
But I don’t think Dewey would call himself an optimist. I think that he would fall back on hope. He had hope in society. That’s the farthest we can go. And Rorty is the richest, self-styled footnote to John Dewey that we have. He is so original and creative in building on the Deweyan project.
The reason why I hold Dewey a little bit at arm’s length, as much as I’m part of his tradition, is that when you inject the blues and Chekhov into any serious talk about democracy, then you do have the tragicomic. And the tragicomic is not just the limits, but how are you coming to terms with the limits? And of course blues is tragicomic. To. The. Core. Remember the 1937 Robert Johnson song “Hellhound on My Trail”? He says I’ve got to keep moving cause the blues is falling down like H-A-I-L, life worrying me so much, there’s hellhounds on my trail. I got to keep moving. That’s the dynamism. That’s the sense of motion. That’s the blues.
Sean Illing
So you still have faith in America?
Cornel West
Oh yes! It’s not a glib faith, though. It’s an earned faith. Just like that costly grace that the great Dietrich Bonhoeffer talked about. It’s not a cheap grace, it’s an earned faith. And a very, very earned sense of grace.
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Vox · by Sean Illing · June 5, 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
