Quotes of the Day:
"Early in life, I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change."
- Frank Lloyd Wright
"The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people."
- President Teddy Roosevelt
“Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back.”
— Heraclitus
1. Facebook is changing its name to Meta as it focuses on the virtual world
2. Don’t Assume the US Will Fight China and Russia One at a Time
3. Vulnerabilities Grow as Utilities Link Control Systems to the Internet
4. Army Expects Fierce, Close Combat In Next War Despite Advanced Tech
5. The Fight for Taiwan Could Come Soon
6. Four U.S. Intelligence Agencies Produced Extensive Reports on Afghanistan, but All Failed to Predict Kabul’s Rapid Collapse
7. Nuclear-Powered Submarines for Australia? Maybe Not So Fast.
8. ‘How would we know when it was over?’ – Perspective is power in forever wars
9. Pentagon Reexamining How It Addresses Chem-Bio Threats
10. Exclusive Front-Line Report: Modern Trench Warfare in Eastern Ukraine
11. Tajikistan Approves Construction Of New Chinese-Funded Base As Beijing's Security Presence In Central Asia Grows
12. Guarding Against an Exclusive Warrior Class
13. How China spreads misinformation around the world
14. China's Hypersonic Weapons Tests Don't Have to Be a Sputnik Moment
15. How Facebook Failed the World
16. FDD | The joystick intifada
17. 'Lightning Carriers' Could Be Lightweights in an Asian War
18. For First Time in Public, a Detainee Describes Torture at C.I.A. Black Sites
1. Facebook is changing its name to Meta as it focuses on the virtual world
The "Prince" Platform (the singer not the SEAL): The social media company formerly known as Facebook.
But as I understand it Facebook will still be called Faccebook but it will have a parent company called Meta. I wonder if Zuck consulted with Eric Prince and if Meta will go the way of Xe and Academi.
Facebook is changing its name to Meta as it focuses on the virtual world
Facebook on Thursday announced it changed its name to Meta, part of a strategic shift to emphasize the development of its virtual world while its main social network business is in crisis.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement at Connect, the company’s annual hardware event where it talks about products like the Portal video devices and Oculus headsets.
The rebranding — pegged to a virtual world and hardware known as the “metaverse” — comes amid a broader effort to shift attention away from revelations that it knew its platform was causing a litany of social harms. The Facebook social network is not changing its name.
A whistleblower has came forward with tens of thousands of documents demonstrating how the company was aware that it caused polarization in numerous countries, led people down misinformation rabbit holes, and failed to stop a violent network that led to the January 6 insurrection. In response, lawmakers around the world have threatened new regulation for the tech industry, as well as demanding more information from Facebook on what it knew and when.
The documents were obtained by a consortium of news organizations, including The Washington Post, and were provided to Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission in response to a whistleblower lawsuit.
Facebook has said that the Facebook Papers are a “coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false picture of our company.”
Facebook was already trying to change the subject even before The Wall Street Journal first reported on the documents. Zuckerberg has told colleagues that he no longer wants to be the face of the company’s headaches in Washington and elsewhere, according to reporting by The Post, and is focused on transitioning Facebook to become a “metaverse.”
The term, which is derived from science fiction but has become popular among some venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, refers to tech services as virtual interconnected worlds.
Facebook started as a social network in a college dorm room 17 years ago, but has become a conglomerate encompassing Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, as well as a nascent online payments and hardware businesses. That has led some in the tech industry, as well as employees, to speculate that the company was long overdue for a name change.
Facebook also isn’t the first Silicon Valley company to rebrand itself. Google changed its parent company name to Alphabet in 2015 in an attempt to unify a corporate behemoth that encompassed not only search and display advertising but also driverless cars and a life sciences division. Snapchat changed its name to Snap Inc. in an attempt to rebrand itself as a camera company.
Zuckerberg said this summer that the company would eventually become known as a metaverse, and then subsequently announced a smart glasses partnership with Ray-Ban and a plan to use its virtual reality headsets for work-related videoconferencing. He promoted a longtime friend who heads the hardware division, Andrew Bosworth, to become the company’s new Chief Technology Officer.
Later, the company announced it would create 10,000 new “metaverse-related” jobs. Zuckerberg said on the company’s earnings call this week that the hardware division would become a new line item in the company’s financial reports, and that investments in it would shave $10 billion from its profits in 2020.
2. Don’t Assume the US Will Fight China and Russia One at a Time
Flashbacks to the pre-GWOT days of illustrative planning scenarios and QDRs that gave us such concepts as Two MTWs (major theater war), 1 MTW and 2 LRCs (lesser regional contingencies), and Win-Hold-Win, among others.
Don’t Assume the US Will Fight China and Russia One at a Time
Beijing and Moscow are boosting their strategic coordination along with their militaries.
China and Russia last week conducted their first-ever joint naval patrol in the western Pacific following a combined exercise in the Sea of Japan, highlighting the deepening defense cooperation between America’s preeminent competitors. While U.S. military planners have long hoped and often assumed that any conflicts with China and Russia might come one at a time, that assumption is increasingly questionable and even dangerous.
If the Biden administration is to develop an effective 2022 National Defense Strategy and build the U.S. defense capacity and capability that American interests require, the administration must jettison outdated assumptions and recognize that the United States could confront Chinese and Russian military forces simultaneously.
Anyone skeptical of this claim should consider Joint Sea 2021, an annual combined naval exercise that China and Russia conducted on October 14-17. The Russians contributed an Udaloy-class antisubmarine destroyer, two Steregushchy-class corvettes, two coastal-type minesweepers, a Kilo-class diesel-electric attack submarine, and a missile boat. China sent a Type 055 large destroyer, which reportedly served as the command ship, plus a Type 052D destroyer, two Type 054A frigates, a diesel submarine, and a supply ship. A naval aviation contingent comprising 12 Chinese and Russian fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters also participated. The exercise apparently marked the first time a Chinese heavy destroyer and anti-submarine warfare aircraft have participated in an exercise abroad.
During the exercise’s first stage, the Russian minesweepers escorted the Russian and Chinese warships in the Sea of Japan. The warships then fired artillery at mock floating mines and at a towed target simulating a surface warship. They also practiced air defense, with the opposing force played by Russian Su-30SM multirole fighters and naval helicopters. In a clear indication that both militaries view American submarine capabilities as a leading concern, Russian and Chinese vessels, supported by anti-submarine aircraft, also hunted down and trapped a simulated enemy submarine.
After the exercise was over, the Chinese and Russian warships sailed through the Tsugaru Strait together — another first — before heading down Japan’s eastern coast and back toward China via the Osumi Strait. They were joined by Russia’s Udaloy-class destroyer Admiral Tributs, which Moscow claimed days earlier had chased off the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Chafee for allegedly breaching Russian waters closed for Joint Sea 2021 (an assertion the U.S. Navy disputed). Chinese state media said the combined patrol “sends a warning to Japan as well as the US, which have been rallying allies to confront China and Russia.”
These developments follow another combined exercise this summer that underscored China and Russia’s growing trust and military interoperability. That exercise, Sibu/Interaction-2021, held in north-central China in August, included more than 10,000 troops and marked the first time that Russian forces have participated in a Chinese strategic exercise.
Chinese and Russian forces reportedly operated under a joint command for the first time, using a specially designed “joint command information system.” Russian Su-30SM multirole fighters, motor-rifle troops, and a special forces unit integrated into Chinese formations, training to improve their “joint reconnaissance, search and early warning, electronic information attack, and joint strike” capabilities, per China’s defense ministry. China’s J-20 fifth-generation stealth fighter reportedly made its first appearance in an international exercise. Russian forces operated modern Chinese equipment (ZTL-11 infantry support vehicles and ZBL-08 armored personnel carriers) for the first time, according to the Russian and Chinese defense ministries, after Chinese forces reportedly did the same with Russian equipment at Russia’s Kavkaz-2020 exercise last year.
In addition to building operational and tactical interoperability, Sibu/Interaction-2021 allowed the two militaries to share valuable lessons. Beijing’s relatively untested military had an opportunity to learn from Russia’s combat experience in Syria and elsewhere. Russia’s MoD noted that Chinese and Russian officers drew on “experience [from] modern armed conflicts” while jointly planning the exercise’s mock counterterrorism operation.
Even if the Chinese and Russian militaries have more work to do in terms of capability and combined operations, the increasing frequency of the military exercises suggests a disturbing level of strategic coordination between America’s great-power adversaries. Contrary to claims by some scholars and policymakers that China and Russia’s relationship is merely superficial or tactical in nature, their strategic alignment appears to be deepening. That’s especially concerning given both militaries’ massive modernization efforts, which are eroding the U.S. advantage.
Chinese defense spending has exploded as Beijing races to complete military modernization by 2035 and field what Xi Jinping called a “world-class forces” that can dominate the Asia-Pacific and “fight and win” global wars by 2049. China has constructed at least 12 nuclear-powered submarines and commissioned its first domestically built aircraft carrier in 2019, with a second expected to enter service by 2023.
While a formal alliance remains unlikely, Beijing and Moscow share many common security interests, burgeoning energy and economic ties, and a longstanding disdain for the U.S.-led rules-based international order.
The fallout with the West following Russia’s 2014 aggression against Ukraine led Moscow to accelerate its pivot toward Beijing. China participated in Russia’s capstone strategic exercises in 2018, 2019, and 2020, and they conducted joint strategic air patrols in Northeast Asia in 2019 and 2020.
The governments have also been engaging in increased arms sales. From 2016 to 2020, Russia provided 77 percent of China’s total arms imports, including equipment such as Su-35 advanced fourth-generation fighters and S-400 SAM systems. As China’s defense industry advances, Beijing and Moscow may move toward co-development of certain systems. In 2019, Putin said Russia is helping China build a missile early warning system.
In fact, the U.S. intelligence community assessed in 2019 that “China and Russia are more aligned than at any point since the mid-1950s, and the relationship is likely to strengthen.”
So, what’s to be done?
At the grand strategic level, Americans should note that Beijing and Moscow value military partners. The United States should, too. As China and Russia become more aligned, America will need its allies and partners more than ever.
At the strategic and operational levels, the Pentagon should urgently assess relevant war and contingency plans. Even without advance coordination, it is entirely plausible that Beijing or Moscow could exploit a military crisis involving the other power to pursue its own aims in the Taiwan Strait or Eastern Europe, respectively.
Any plans that assume the United States will confront only one great power adversary at a time should be revised and updated without delay. Any additional capacity and forward basing requirements identified should inform ongoing program and budget discussions.
Such an assessment would almost certainly indicate the need for more U.S. military capacity, requiring at least 3 to 5 percent real annual growth in the defense budget. It’s worth noting that this is just what the bipartisan 2018 National Defense Strategy Commission recommended.
Whether the Pentagon actually receives the money to fund its updated war plans is ultimately, of course, a decision for Congress. Regardless, the Pentagon has a responsibility to inform political leaders and decision makers if war plans are increasingly disconnected from reality and based on questionable assumptions.
Evolving realities should inform not only U.S. war plans, but also the Biden administration’s 2022 National Defense Strategy, the administration’s fiscal year 2023 defense budget request, assessments of the capacity the U.S. military needs, and forward-positioned U.S. military posture in the Indo-Pacific and Europe.
After all, in light of growing Chinese and Russian anti-access and area denial capabilities, it was already unsafe to assume that the U.S. military could surge forces in an uncontested and expeditious manner from the continental United States to the Baltics or Taiwan Strait. If those U.S.-based surge forces were needed simultaneously in both places, then the U.S. military has an even bigger problem.
Such a potential scenario puts a premium on building additional U.S. and allied military capability and capacity that is forward-positioned in both Eastern Europe and the Indo-Pacific.
Beijing and Moscow are dramatically increasing the power of their militaries as well as their strategic coordination. Americans and our allies would be wise to pay attention and act accordingly.
Bradley Bowman is the senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
John Hardie is the research manager at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Zane Zovak is a research analyst with Foundation for Defense of Democracies’s China Program and Center on Military and Political Power.
3. Vulnerabilities Grow as Utilities Link Control Systems to the Internet
(as an aside note the author's name- I wonder if she has a hard time meeting deadlines!)
On a serious note, compare this assessment with the book by the two PLA Colonels: Unrestricted Warfare in which utilities are targets )among all the other "unrestricted" targets).
Vulnerabilities Grow as Utilities Link Control Systems to the Internet
The Biden administration and utility companies are trying to reduce the risks, but at least 15 well-equipped groups are hunting for ways in.
The global electric utility sector is facing an increasingly dangerous cyberthreat landscape, even though there hasn’t been a publicly witnessed disruptive attack over the past five years. Utilities worldwide have been strengthening their security against threats to their IT networks but have not paid enough attention to their industrial control systems, or ICS, and operational technology, or OT, systems.
Those are two of the high-level conclusions of a new report, “Global Electric Cyber Threat Perspective,” released by Dragos Inc., a Maryland company that specializes in industrial cybersecurity. The company held a web briefing Oct. 26 to share its findings.
Historically, utilities’ ICS were “islanded,” said Jason Christopher, principal cyber risk adviser at Dragos, but over time the connections to the internet have been growing.
The trend “comes with business justifications,” Christopher said. “It’s all for business cases—to get real-time data, and to be able to send it back to the operators. [And] now it’s blending itself into more edge cases, the cloud, for instance, or how to get more data into our networks. Oftentimes, security is left in the lurch.”
He commended the Biden administration for releasing a 100-day plan in April specifically aimed at strengthening the security of utilities’ ICS and the energy sector supply chain. It’s a positive development that the government recognizes the fact that future threats will be based on the growing connectivity between ICS and the internet, he said.
“This is one of the things that caught me off guard: It’s the first time I’ve seen an administration call out OT systems” for improved security, he said. “Always [before] it was a disguised conversation … As of August 16, at least 150 electric utilities serving almost 90 million Americans have adopted or committed to adopting technologies” to improve security.
Dragos currently is tracking 15 “activity groups” of hostile or potentially hostile actors, said Pasquale Stirparo, principal adversary hunter at Dragos and author of the report. An activity group is identified “based on observable elements that include an adversary’s methods of operation, infrastructure used to execute actions and the targets they focus on. The goal…is to delineate an adversary by their observed actions, capabilities and demonstrated impact—not implied or assumed intentions. These attributes combine to create a construct around which defensive plans can be built,” the report states.
Of those 15 activity groups, 11 are targeting utilities, and two of those possess enough ICS-specific capabilities and tools to cause disruptive events, Stirparo said.
In terms of the threat environment, there are three operational segments within the utility industry: generation, transmission and distribution. “Each of these segments has its own characteristics,” Stirparo said. “Taking down generation would have a bigger impact than distribution, for instance, [but] it’s not something that can be done easily.”
The recent trend in power generation resources moving from very large facilities to a number of smaller ones does not have an impact on the magnitude of the threat.
“It depends on what the final mission of the [activity group] is. Smaller entities are being targeted because they share a specific technology with a more interesting target, so they could be a test bed,” Stirparo said. “We’ve seen more activities in the U.S., [but] there’s bigger visibility in the U.S. so that’s why we see more. But we’re definitely seeing more in Europe and the Asia-Pacific. We’re seeing it across every region—no region is immune.”
In the transmission segment, there have been two attacks in Europe. For instance, an attack in December 2016 in Kiev, Ukraine, snarled the transmission system. “The adversaries tailored malware to de-energize a transmission-level substation by opening and closing numerous circuit breakers used in the delivery of power in the electric system and ensuring operator, power line and equipment safety,” the Dragos report stated.
“Why this attack is important is because it demonstrated a deep understanding of the transmission environment, which allowed the targeted customization of malware,” Stirparo said. “While the attack took place in Europe, similar attacks could happen in other parts of the world.”
The attack targeted breaker operations controlled by a specific manufacturer’s devices adhering to the IEC 6185029 standard. It communicated using the Manufacturing Message Specification (MMS) protocol. “Dragos assesses with moderate confidence the attack can be leveraged to other equipment that adheres to these standards,” the report noted.
The distribution segment is what delivers electricity into homes and businesses. While there has only been one identified attack, also in Ukraine in 2015, rather than using customized malware, “here they just controlled operations remotely,” Stirparo said. They used malware to gain remote access to three electric power distribution companies, then used the companies’ own distribution management systems to disrupt electricity to more than 200,000 people.
The good news—“good” being a relative term—is that activity groups generally need to be present in the target environment for some time before they can act. What makes that good news, Stirparo said, is that system defenses in all three segments have time and multiple points of opportunity to detect and potentially eliminate the threat. “But it requires proper visibility” into those systems, he said.
Ransomware, of course, is another kind of threat, since a ransomware attack can cause industrial activity to pause. Information stolen in a ransomware attack, such as schematics and diagrams, could be sold or shared with other bad actors. “Between 2018 and 2020, 10% of ransomware attacks that occurred on industrial and related entities targeted electric utilities, according to data tracked by Dragos and IBM Security X-Force,” the report said.
“It’s financial, not ICS-threat-specific. But it shouldn’t let anyone lower their attention,” Stirparo warned.
One potentially vast threat is the supply chain. “It’s not just about your vendors, it’s your integrators, your contractors—there’s a lot of things to consider,” Stirparo said. “I understand your pain. [In the U.S.] there are companies that have been around for more than a hundred years, [with] tens of thousands of contracts. It’s an obvious pain point.” But cybersecurity professionals have seen threat actors make their way into major corporations through third parties that had access to their networks, he added.
Connectivity is one final class of threat specifically for ICS and OT systems that the report identified.
“We’re increasing our connectivity, but not in a responsible fashion,” Stirparo said. “What are the things that are able to connect directly to the internet? Utilities have actual assets facing the internet that are not as secure as they would like to think.”
Christopher called out “transient” cyber assets as part of this. “You’re walking in with different electronic devices to connect to the system—it’s one of those more difficult things for organizations to manage, particularly in the pandemic … You’re walking directly into some facility that may have no internet access” until that device arrives.
Stirparo reviewed the recommendations made in the report, among them:
- Access restrictions and account management, including making sure all devices and services do not use default credentials. Implement “least privilege” access across all applications, services and devices, including properly segmenting application layer services, like file shares and cloud storage services.
- Accessibility: identifying and categorizing ingress and egress routes into control system networks, limiting them as much as possible through firewall rules or other methods to ensure a minimized attack surface.
- Response plans: develop, review, and practice them. Stirparo stressed that IT cybersecurity professionals need to be communicating with OT and ICS managers and engineers: “Don’t introduce yourself the first time you have an incident. If you have an IT response plan and try to roll into an OT facility, you’re going to have a difficult conversation.”
- Segmentation: Have very strong perimeters in place to limit lateral movement.
- “Make sure you’re not having a lot of [traffic] coming into the OT environment from the IT network. Understand why things are connected and talking back and forth.”
- Third-parties: Ensure that third-party connections and ICS interactions are monitored and logged, from a “trust, but verify” mindset, the report states.
- Visibility: Protection is ideal, but detection is a must.
The danger to ICS and OT systems is “almost like splash damage,” Christopher said. “What is your dependency on GIS? For example, would you still be able to run out your trucks? What about VoIP phones?”
In the end, no matter what governments try to do in order to combat cyber threats, it’s up to the individual companies to know their risks and where those risks are in their systems. They then must be responsible for taking the preventive and defensive measures needed to protect their assets and their operations, Christopher added, because ultimately the safety of their facilities and networks falls on them.
4. Army Expects Fierce, Close Combat In Next War Despite Advanced Tech
The war may start out with push buttons and high tech systems but eventually it will result in close combat.
Excerpts:
Martin, who commands the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, said the next war won't just be "about pushing buttons," and that U.S. forces on the ground are going to have to quickly close in and destroy enemy forces who will come to battle equipped with artillery and aircraft.
Speed and mobility will be critical to evading enemy munitions, and getting close to an enemy quickly makes it harder for them to drop bombs due to the risk of hitting their own troops, or other collateral damage. Long gone will be the days of Afghanistan warfare, which often had troops in shoddy forward operating bases standing their ground against Taliban fighters with radios and basic rifles shooting down from ridgelines.
"We aren't going to be doing the type of fighting we were doing in 2003, when we had air superiority and dominated, and cyber wasn't as big of a player," Martin said. "What we are looking at is what weapons [adversaries] are investing in, what their doctrine says ... our competitors' ability to operate freely ... use satellites ... gives them surveillance on us and potentially subjects [American troops] to precision fires from long range. We need to rapidly close in and destroy."
Army Expects Fierce, Close Combat In Next War Despite Advanced Tech
While the Army recovers from decades of fighting guerrilla forces in the Middle East, leaders are setting their eyes on the wars of tomorrow. And despite rapid advances in cyberweapons, drones and artificial intelligence, they're stressing the next war will still feature bloody, close quarters combat
"All this technology is awesome, but it's going to come down to city fighting chucking grenades, and being able to do that over and over," Lt. Gen. Ted Martin told Military.com in an interview Thursday.
The U.S. has spent its last several campaigns mostly fighting enemies without much in the way of advanced technology. That wouldn't be true in a conflict with Russia or China, the two potential adversaries military planners continue to focus on in their preparations.
Martin, who commands the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, said the next war won't just be "about pushing buttons," and that U.S. forces on the ground are going to have to quickly close in and destroy enemy forces who will come to battle equipped with artillery and aircraft.
Speed and mobility will be critical to evading enemy munitions, and getting close to an enemy quickly makes it harder for them to drop bombs due to the risk of hitting their own troops, or other collateral damage. Long gone will be the days of Afghanistan warfare, which often had troops in shoddy forward operating bases standing their ground against Taliban fighters with radios and basic rifles shooting down from ridgelines.
"We aren't going to be doing the type of fighting we were doing in 2003, when we had air superiority and dominated, and cyber wasn't as big of a player," Martin said. "What we are looking at is what weapons [adversaries] are investing in, what their doctrine says ... our competitors' ability to operate freely ... use satellites ... gives them surveillance on us and potentially subjects [American troops] to precision fires from long range. We need to rapidly close in and destroy."
After the peak of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in the 2000s, the Pentagon has pursued a vast effort to modernize the force. A major culminating point of that effort was the establishment of the Space Force, given expectations the next major conflict will largely involve electronic warfare that could include attacks on electronic grids, financial institutions, elections and communications.
The Pentagon's so-called Third Offset Strategy, a plan to move military technology ahead by a generational leap, meant that the services focused on investing in emerging technologies. That meant establishing new offices focused on innovation and developing abilities in AI, hypersonic missiles and cyberwarfare.
A report to lawmakers from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service last week highlighted that the U.S. is still more technologically advanced than China and Russia, but urged that competitive advantage could quickly shrink.
"Although the United States is the leader in developing many of these technologies, China and Russia -- key strategic competitors -- are making steady progress in developing advanced military technologies," the report said. "As they are integrated into foreign and domestic military forces and deployed, these technologies could hold significant implications for congressional considerations and the future of international security writ large."
This summer, China tested a hypersonic missile that has set off alarms among national security planners about a potentially waning U.S. military advantage. Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Bloomberg on Wednesday the missile tests took the Pentagon by surprise, calling it "very close" to a "Sputnik moment," which spurred the space race during the Cold War.
But there's a dichotomy the Army is trying to balance. While new technology will likely be a key factor in the next war, Army leaders are urging that traditional ground combat will still be a major player.
"I hear the same conversations that the future of warfare will be some dude sitting down in his basement at his mom's house cyber hacking everyone, drinking a Monster [energy drink], and I push back on that hard," Brig.Gen. John Kline said during an Army webinar Thursday.
Part of preparing for chaotic ground warfare was the Army's move to extend basic training for some of the key combat jobs. Last year, training for tankers and cavalry scouts were extended to 22 weeks, from 15 and 17 weeks, respectively. That move, Martin said, will hopefully have better prepared privates, mostly with more trigger time behind weapons, showing up to their units that may be deploying overseas soon, or are already on the battlefield and unable to bring new soldiers up to speed.
-- Steve Beynon can be reached at Steve.Beynon@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @StevenBeynon.
5. The Fight for Taiwan Could Come Soon
"All warfare is based on deception." What if the PRC has no intention of conducting a conventional attack and invasion of Taiwan? What if the PRC wants us to focus on invasion while it creates more favorable conditions to "win without fighting" through subversion of the Taiwanese political system. And for today's Sun Tzu trifecta, we must also remember to "never assume the enemy will not attack, make yourself invincible."
But what I would like to know is what does the PRC think that it would achieve through an invasion of Taiwan? And in the context of Taiwan, what is the dominant element of the "paradoxical trinity:" is it the reason that should constrain the movement toward war (and total war) ? Is it chance - could there be inadvertent conflict due to miscalculation and misunderstanding as military forces face off in the region? Or is it passion in which emotions (hate, enmity, and primordial violence) that will trump reason and feed into chance?
Then again I am reminded of Thucydides: “When one is deprived of one's liberty, one is right in blaming not so much the man who puts the shackles on as the one who had the power to prevent him, but did not use it.”
And as Colin Gray said, if Thucydides, Clausewitz, and Sun Tzu did not say it, it is probably not worth saying.
The Fight for Taiwan Could Come Soon
Beijing may think it has an opening to seize the island before the West’s military investments pay off.
What makes China an urgent military threat? First, Beijing has made clear it is willing to use force to take Taiwan. Subordinating the island isn’t only about incorporating a putative lost province—it would be a vital step toward establishing Chinese hegemony in Asia. And this isn’t mere talk. The Chinese military has rehearsed amphibious attacks, and commercial satellite imagery shows that China practices large-scale attacks on U.S. forces in the region.
Second, China doesn’t merely have the will to invade Taiwan, it increasingly may have the ability to pull it off. China has spent 25 years building a modern military in large part to bring Taiwan to heel. China now has the largest navy in the world and an enormous and advanced air force, missile arsenal and network of satellites. This isn’t to say China could manage a successful invasion of Taiwan tomorrow—but Beijing could be very close. It will be “fully able” to invade by 2025, Taiwan’s defense minister said recently. China’s military power is improving every month.
Third, China may think its window of opportunity is closing. Many wars have started because one side thought it had a time-limited opening to exploit. Certainly this was a principal factor in the outbreaks of the two world wars. Beijing may reasonably judge this to be the case today.
The U.S. is finally, if too slowly and fitfully, waking up to the China challenge and reorienting its military efforts toward Asia. But these investments won’t really start to pay off until later this decade. Meanwhile, coalitions like the Quad (the U.S., Australia, Japan and India) are coalescing to deny China the ability to dominate the region. From Beijing’s view, if it waits too long, America’s military investments will yield a much more formidable opponent, while an international coalition works to frustrate Chinese ambitions.
This all adds up to a situation in which Beijing may reckon it would be better to use force sooner rather than later. To avoid a conflict, and possible defeat, the U.S. must act quickly to deter Beijing. Repeatedly declaring our “rock solid” commitment to Taiwan is fine but insufficient.
The most urgent priority: Taiwan must radically upgrade its defenses. The island’s own efforts in this regard will decide whether it survives as a free society. Taipei must multiply its defense budget, grossly neglected in recent decades, and focus its expenditures and efforts on two things: degrading a Chinese invasion with the help of the U.S. and making the island resilient to a blockade and bombardment by Beijing. This will require antiship missiles, sea mines and air defenses, as well as stockpiles of supplies to ride out a blockade. The U.S. will need to use every lever to prod or force Taipei to make this shift.
Washington should also bring comparable pressure on Japan, America’s single most important ally. If Taiwan falls, Japan will be under direct military threat from Beijing. And Japan would play a critical role in any defense of Taiwan. Japan should at least double its defense budget (now merely 1% of gross domestic product) immediately.
Meanwhile, the U.S. needs to strengthen its military position west of the international date line. A potent forward-deployed force of Marines, submarines and other survivable forces would ensure America and its allies could blunt any attack against Taiwan. The U.S. must buy and rapidly field systems like antiship missiles and unmanned reconnaissance platforms that would be essential to defeating a Chinese invasion.
Averting war against a superpower will require being ruthless about American priorities, though. Holding the line in Asia will mean the U.S. military will have to stop doing almost everything else other than nuclear deterrence and counterterrorism. The U.S. military will have to scale down in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and even Europe. America had a chance to make a more evolutionary and balanced shift to Asia, but we blew it. Now we need to focus, even if it means the military must effectively drop everything else.
China will surely pose a long-term challenge to the U.S. in areas outside the realm of military power. But the most pressing risk is that Beijing may see an advantage in resorting to war. Convincing Beijing it won’t gain from aggression must be the overriding priority.
Mr. Colby is a principal at the Marathon Initiative and author of “The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict.” He served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, 2017-18.
6. Four U.S. Intelligence Agencies Produced Extensive Reports on Afghanistan, but All Failed to Predict Kabul’s Rapid Collapse
If you think intelligence is prediction then that is part of the problem. Do you plan against a "prediction?" Or do you look at the most dangerous course of action and most likely course of actions and plan for contingencies.
it seems, based on the article, all seemed to assess the likelihood of Afghan military and government collapse. They assessed the history and actions up to the summer of 2021. The one variable they could not assess based on past history was the immediate withdrawal of US support and how quickly tings would deteriorate. Did they have HUMINT about what actions the Afghan president would take? Did they know his leadership would "collapse" so quickly? Did we have intelligence about "deals" (and coercion) the Taliban were brokering with the Afghan security forces? Did we understand how the Taliban conducted preparation of the environment to set favorable conditions for when the US withdrew support? I wonder if the Taliban were just as surprised by the speed of the Afghan collapse.
Was this an intelligence failure or was this an operational and political failure? I think the latter two but we will blame the intelligence.
Four U.S. Intelligence Agencies Produced Extensive Reports on Afghanistan, but All Failed to Predict Kabul’s Rapid Collapse
Summaries of intelligence reports show how agencies diverged over the strength of the Afghan government and military
WSJ · by Vivian Salama and Warren P. Strobel
The nearly two dozen intelligence assessments from four different agencies haven’t been previously reported. The assessments charted Taliban advances from spring 2020 through this July, forecasting that the group would continue to gain ground and that the U.S.-backed government in Kabul was unlikely to survive absent U.S. support.
The analyses, however, differed over how long the Afghan government and military could hold on, the summaries show, with none foreseeing the group’s lightning sweep into the Afghan capital by Aug. 15 while U.S. forces remained on the ground.
A month after President Biden announced his decision to withdraw all U.S. troops, for instance, the Central Intelligence Agency issued a May 17 report titled “Government at Risk of Collapse Following U.S. Withdrawal.” The report estimated that the government of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani would fall by year’s end, according to a summary.
Less than a month later, the agency issued another analysis titled: “Afghanistan: Assessing Prospects for a Complete Taliban Takeover Within Two Years,” according to a summary.
A June 4 Defense Intelligence Agency report, meanwhile, said the Taliban would pursue an incremental strategy of isolating rural areas from Kabul over the next 12 months, according to a summary. In an “Executive Memorandum” on July 7, the DIA said the Afghan government would hold Kabul, according to a person familiar with the report.
Afghan security personnel patrolled the streets on Aug. 8 after they took control of parts of Herat following fighting with the Taliban.
Photo: Hamed Sarfarazi/Associated Press
The intelligence shortfalls underpinned some of the policy failures that resulted in chaotic mass civilian evacuations in the deadly final weeks of the U.S.’s 20-year Afghan war.
The summaries of the reports, which start in April 2020, provide the most detailed picture to date of what the U.S. intelligence community was telling Mr. Biden, and President Donald Trump before him, as each president sought to end the war that killed 2,400 U.S. military personnel and by some estimates cost more than $2 trillion.
Policy makers across the national-security apparatus rely on such intelligence reports to shape their decisions and planning. While varied and conflicting assessments are common, the disparities may complicate efforts among decision makers to reach consensus. For the Afghan withdrawal, contingency planning, including the evacuation operations, relied heavily on the intelligence assessments, U.S. officials with knowledge of the policy planning said.
Members of Congress have been scrutinizing many aspects of the tumultuous exit from Afghanistan, including the performance of the intelligence community, after the administration was blindsided by the Taliban’s rapid advance.
Assumptions that the Afghan security forces and government could hold out for some time were central to the administration’s withdrawal plans. Those called for the U.S. military to draw down rapidly while the embassy remained well-staffed to provide visas and other support to Afghan allies weeks and months after American troops left.
When the Afghan government cratered, the U.S. military—much of which had left the country by August—reversed course, sending thousands of troops to evacuate the embassy and Afghans. In the ensuing rush, a suicide bombing and other violence killed scores more Afghans and 13 U.S. service members. Tens of thousands of Afghan allies and about 200 Americans were left behind.
The Journal reviewed titles, dates and summaries of reports from the CIA, the DIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the State Department’s intelligence bureau. The documents represent a portion of the intelligence produced by those and other agencies on the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan.
Representatives of the CIA, the DIA, the State Department and the Office of Director of National Intelligence, which coordinates all U.S. intelligence agencies, declined to comment.
“Directionally, they were all correct that things were going to deteriorate,” a senior administration official said, while acknowledging that the agencies provided a “mixed picture.” “They’re not oracles,” he said.
Mr. Biden promised to withdraw from Afghanistan when he ran for president, and the U.S. officials with knowledge of the policy planning said the varying intelligence assessments had little impact on his decision to withdraw.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan said in August that the administration would conduct a “hotwash” of the withdrawal to determine “where we can do better, where we can find holes or weaknesses and plug them, as we go forward.”
An administration official said various agencies have begun or will soon begin their reviews.
CIA Director William Burns, among others, has defended the intelligence agencies’ overall performance while acknowledging that events unfolded faster than predicted.
“There’s a very sobering picture that we painted of some very troubling trend lines” in Afghanistan, he said at a Stanford University appearance last week. “So does that mean that we, with mathematical precision, can say that, you know, former President Ghani in Afghanistan is going to flee his office and not tell his senior-most aides on the 15th of August? No.”
Mr. Ghani fled the country as the Taliban entered Kabul.
Current and former officials said that intelligence agencies’ ability to track the course of the war outside Kabul eroded rapidly as U.S. troops began withdrawing from Afghanistan under Mr. Trump and closing far-flung bases used as collection platforms. That diminishing intelligence-collection capacity became a growing concern among lawmakers in the months leading up to the fall of Kabul, a Senate aide said.
Afghans gathered outside the airport in Kabul as they sought to flee the country on Aug. 26.
Photo: akhter gulfam/Shutterstock
“As you pull troops back, you’re not able to have collectors forward,” said Army Col. Thomas Spahr, who helped manage the drawdown of military intelligence assets in Afghanistan from summer 2019 to summer 2020. The CIA, he said, ceased to conduct annual district-by-district assessments in the country.
Sen. Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that after reviewing intelligence reports leading up to the evacuation and holding classified hearings, “the intelligence was fundamentally accurate and on-point in predicting the trajectory of the Taliban takeover.” That a rapid withdrawal would be chaotic “should have come as no surprise,” he said in a statement.
Bill Roggio, a senior fellow who follows Afghanistan at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish think tank in Washington, said intelligence agencies and policy makers bear responsibility for being blindsided by the Taliban’s swift battlefield success.
Mr. Roggio said individual analysts at several agencies he was in touch with foresaw a rapid Taliban takeover, “and for whatever reason that didn’t make it to the top.”
“The intelligence community needs to take a long, hard look at how it provides assessments to senior leadership,” Mr. Roggio said. The White House, he said, seemed intent on the troop withdrawal.
After then-President Trump in February 2020 agreed with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan by May 2021, a CIA report warned that the U.S.-supported government in Kabul was unlikely to survive.
The April 13, 2020, report titled, “How Afghanistan Collapses After U.S. Pullout” came from the CIA’s “Red Cell,” whose mission is to conduct alternative assessments. It projected the demise of Mr. Ghani’s government once U.S. troops and funding were gone.
Another report, “Implications of Full US Troop Withdrawal,” was published on Dec. 14, 2020, by the National Intelligence Council, which conducts long-range strategic analysis for the Director of National Intelligence. The NIC foresaw a rapid Taliban takeover but said the group’s gains would accelerate after a U.S. troop withdrawal.
In April, Mr. Biden announced the full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan no later than Sept. 11, 2021. Former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell said that announcement—and not the departure of the last U.S. soldier in August—started the clock ticking on how long the Afghan government could survive.
“That’s when the psychology changed for everybody in Afghanistan,” he told an event at George Mason University’s Hayden Center in September. “It was the moment the Taliban knew it was going to win.”
Mr. Morell said: “Throughout the history of the 20 years, CIA was by far—by far—the most pessimistic agency about how the war was going.”
Intelligence from the CIA and DIA diverged in part, officials said, due to their differing missions. Overall, CIA assessments focused more on long-term and policy implications of the withdrawal, while the DIA, which serves the Pentagon, focused on military intelligence and tactical assessment and didn’t explore collapse scenarios, said an official familiar with the intelligence.
The senior administration official said the DIA “bought into some of the myths” about the capability of the Afghan military, which had been trained by the U.S.
In late April, DIA said that the Afghan National Defense and Security forces are “likely to hold Kabul while Taliban focuses elsewhere,” according to one summary. A week later, the agency raised the potential for the Afghan government to splinter but said it would keep control of Kabul.
A June 8 report noted the potential for Afghan security forces to collapse in key provinces, but still Kabul would hold.
The CIA, by contrast, consistently warned of potential collapse after a U.S. pullout, the summaries show. During the last year of the Trump administration, the CIA reported that it saw three different scenarios after a U.S. military withdrawal: a garrison state, where Mr. Ghani’s military would control Kabul and its environs; a divided country with the government and Taliban each controlling parts of Afghanistan; or a complete Taliban takeover.
By April 2021, the CIA was warning of isolated highways, which jeopardized the Afghan government’s tenuous grip on power, and that Afghanistan would pose a terrorism threat outside its borders once the U.S. exited.
A month later, the CIA predicted the government’s collapse without U.S. support, but saw that occurring a short time after the U.S. withdrawal.
Members of the Afghan government also foresaw a short time frame, according to a July 23, 2021, DIA report titled, “Afghanistan stability update - senior officials fear govt collapse.” The report said Afghan Vice President Amrullah Saleh thought his own government would fall in October, while the country’s foreign minister believed it would be in September.
WSJ · by Vivian Salama and Warren P. Strobel
7. Nuclear-Powered Submarines for Australia? Maybe Not So Fast.
If the obstacles are too great and this does not happen it will be quite a diplomatic and military failure. It will be an "own goal" and shooting ourselves in the feet. I would think we would have worked through the obstacles before we announced the agreement (and maybe and hopefully we have).
Nuclear-Powered Submarines for Australia? Maybe Not So Fast.
Australia’s plan to build the submarines with U.S. and British help faces big hurdles. Supporters say they can be overcome. Critics say they may be too much.
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A Royal Australian Navy submarine in September in Darwin, Australia. For Australia, nuclear-powered submarines offer a powerful means to counter China’s growing naval reach.
By
Oct. 29, 2021, 12:15 a.m. ET
SYDNEY, Australia — When Australia made its trumpet-blast announcement that it would build nuclear-powered submarines with the help of the United States and Britain, the three allies said they would spend the next 18 months sorting out the details of a security collaboration that President Biden celebrated as “historic.”
Now, a month into their timetable, the partners are quietly coming to grips with the proposal’s immense complexities. Even supporters say the hurdles are formidable. Skeptics say they could be insurmountable.
Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, has laid out an ambitious vision, saying that at least eight nuclear-propelled submarines using American or British technology will be built in Australia and enter the water starting in the late 2030s, replacing its squadron of six aging diesel-powered submarines.
For Australia, nuclear-powered submarines offer a powerful means to counter China’s growing naval reach and an escape hatch from a faltering agreement with a French firm to build diesel submarines. For the Biden administration, the plan demonstrates support for a beleaguered ally and shows that it means business in countering Chinese power. And for Britain, the plan could shore up its international standing and military industry after the upheaval of Brexit.
But the Rubik’s Cube of interlocking complications that pervades the initiative could slow delivery of the submarines — or, critics say, sunder the whole endeavor — leaving a dangerous gap in Australia’s defenses and calling into question the partnership’s ability to live up to its security promises.
“It’s a dangerous pathway we’re treading down,” said Rex Patrick, an independent member of Australia’s Senate who served as a submariner in the Australian Navy for a decade.
“What’s at stake is national security,” Mr. Patrick said in an interview. Given the decades-long wait for a squadron of new submarines, he added, Australia risked “buying a parachute for after the plane has crashed.”
To pull off the plan, Australia must make major advances. It has a limited industrial base and built its last submarine over 20 years ago. It produces a few graduates in nuclear engineering each year. Its spending on science research as a share of the economy has lagged the average for wealthy economies. Its past two plans to build submarines fell apart before any were made.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia has said that at least eight nuclear-propelled submarines will be built and enter the water starting in the late 2030s.
As well, the United States and Britain face hurdles to expanding production of submarines and their high-precision parts for Australia, and to diverting expert labor to South Australia, where, Mr. Morrison has said, the boats will be assembled. Washington and London have heavy schedules to build submarines for their own navies, including hulking vessels to carry nuclear missiles.
“I don’t think this is a done deal in any way, shape or form,” said Marcus Hellyer, an expert on naval policy at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
“We sometimes use the term nation-building lightly, but this will be a whole-of-nation task,” he said. “The decision to go down this path while burning all of our bridges behind us was quite a brave decision.”
American officials have already spent hundreds of hours in talks with their Australian counterparts and have no illusions about the complexities, said officials involved. Mr. Morrison “has said this is a high-risk program; he was upfront when he announced it,” Greg Moriarty, the secretary of the Australian Department of Defense, told a Senate committee this week.
Failure or serious delays would ripple beyond Australia. The Biden administration has staked American credibility on building up Australia’s military as part of an “integrated deterrence” policy that will knit the United States closer to its allies in offsetting China.
“Success would be tremendous for Australia and the U.S., assuming open access to each other’s facilities and what it means in deterring China,” said Brent Sadler, a former U.S. Navy officer who is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “Failure would be doubly damaging — an alliance that cannot deliver, loss of undersea capacity by a trusted ally and a turn to isolationism on Australia’s part.”
Australia is hoping for a reversal of fortune after more than a decade of misadventures in its submarine-modernization efforts. The plan for French-designed diesel submarines that Mr. Morrison abandoned had succeeded a deal for Japanese-designed submarines that a predecessor championed.
“No living Australian prime minister has commissioned a sub that actually got built,” Greg Sheridan, a columnist for The Australian newspaper, wrote in a recent article critical of Mr. Morrison’s plan.
France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, second from left, and Malcolm Turnbull, center, then Australia’s prime minister, in Sydney in 2018. Mr. Morrison ended a deal with a French firm to build diesel submarines. Credit...Pool photo by Brendan Esposito
Australia’s latest proposal contains many potential pitfalls.
It could turn to the United States to help build something like its Virginia class attack submarine. (Such submarines are nuclear-powered, allowing them to travel faster and stay underwater much longer than diesel ones, but they do not carry nuclear missiles.)
But the two American shipyards that make nuclear submarines, as well as their suppliers, are straining to keep up with orders for the U.S. Navy. The shipyards complete about two Virginia class boats a year for the Navy and are ramping up to build Columbia class submarines, 21,000-ton vessels that carry nuclear missiles as a roving deterrent — a priority for any administration.
A report to the Senate Armed Services Committee last month warned that the “nuclear shipbuilding industrial base continues to struggle to support the increased demand” from U.S. orders. That report was prepared too late to take into account the Australian proposal.
“They are working at 95-98 percent on Virginia and Columbia,” Richard V. Spencer, a Navy secretary in the Trump administration, said of the two American submarine shipyards. He supports Australia’s plan and said his preferred path on the first submarines was to galvanize specialized suppliers to ship parts, or whole segments of the submarines, to assemble in Australia.
“Let us all be perfectly aware and wide-eyed that the nuclear program is a massive resource consumer and time consumer, and that’s the given,” he said in a telephone interview.
Other experts have said Australia should choose Britain’s Astute class submarine, which is less expensive and uses a smaller crew than the big American boats. The head of Australia’s nuclear submarine task force, Vice Adm. Jonathan Mead, said this week that his team was considering mature, “in-production designs” from Britain, as well as the United States.
Submarine-launched ballistic missiles in China in 2019. The Biden administration has staked U.S. credibility on building up Australia’s military as part of an “integrated deterrence” to offset China.Credit...Thomas Peter/Reuters
But Britain’s submarines have come relatively slowly off its production line, and often behind schedule. Britain’s submarine maker, BAE Systems, is also busy building Dreadnought submarines to carry the country’s nuclear deterrent.
“Spare capacity is very limited,” Trevor Taylor, a professorial research fellow in defense management at the Royal United Services Institute, a research institute, wrote in an email. “The U.K. cannot afford to impose delay on its Dreadnought program in order to divert effort to Australia.”
Adding to the complications, Britain has been phasing out the PWR2 reactor that powers the Astute, after officials agreed that the model would “not be acceptable going forward,” an audit report said in 2018. The Astute is not designed to fit the next-generation reactor, and that issue could make it difficult to restart building the submarine for Australia, Mr. Taylor and other experts said.
Britain’s successor to the Astute is still on the drawing board; the government said last month that it would spend three years on design work for it. A naval official in the British Ministry of Defense said that the planned new submarine could fit Australia’s timetable well. Several experts were less sure.
“Waiting for the next-generation U.K. or U.S. attack submarine would mean an extended capability gap” for Australia, Mr. Taylor wrote in an assessment.
The challenge does not stop with building the submarines. Safeguards to protect sailors and populations, and meet nonproliferation obligations, will require a big buildup of Australia’s nuclear safety expertise.
Residents in some parts of Barrow-in-Furness, the town of 67,000 that is home to Britain’s submarine-building shipyard, are handed iodine tablets as a precaution against possible leaks when reactors are tested. The Osborne shipyard in South Australia, where Mr. Morrison wants to build the nuclear submarines, sits on the edge of Adelaide, a city of 1.4 million.
Australia operates one small nuclear reactor. Its sole university program dedicated to nuclear engineering produces about five graduates every year, said Edward Obbard, the leader of the program at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Australia would need many thousands more people with nuclear training and experience if it wants the submarines, he said.
“The ramp-up has to start now,” he said.
Michael Crowley and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.
8. ‘How would we know when it was over?’ – Perspective is power in forever wars
Excerpts:
History is repeating itself in Afghanistan, and Gen. Petraeus is again making the rounds on cable news explaining it’s a mistake to leave Afghanistan even if the war has no definitive mission or execution. For a former general, the only answer is “more war.” Combat’s not personal to career bureaucrats and generals; it’s the circle of life. Hakuna Matata.
Maybe I’m bitter? Bitter I lost friends to wars we didn’t win — couldn’t win. I’m bitter watching Afghanistan crumble because it reminds me of Iraq. I try not to think about it because there’s only so much soul-searching a person can do with a ground perspective of the wars. Maybe, just maybe, a flag officer or career diplomat will read this and do a bit of soul searching. How they failed at defining success. How they failed at winning wars. How they failed their junior enlisted and officers tasked with executing their trivial policies. I doubt it. They seem busy making their rounds on cable news.
‘How would we know when it was over?’ – Perspective is power in forever wars
I sat with a retired Marine Corps major, Scott Huesing, who led Marines in combat in Ramadi and wrote the book “Echo in Ramadi” about it. The first chapter is about the loss of one of his Marines, and it ripped out my guts when I read it. For guys like us, war is personal, visceral, and dirty. We executed what the war career bureaucrats and military leadership sent us to do.
After swapping war stories, something tugged at me. I had to ask.
“Did you ever know what ‘success’ in Iraq was?” I asked. “Not from the ground but from a strategic perspective. Did anyone ever tell you, ‘Success is …’” I raised my palms and shoulders like I was hoping he would lay the answer in my hands.
“We knew what we wanted to accomplish in Ramadi,” he said.
“Yes, but that was the execution,” I countered. “What was the mission? In World War II, it was to beat the Nazis and Germany. What was it in Iraq? I heard a lot of hyperbole like, ‘build the government,’ but I never heard how. Hell, I was there as an enlisted man, as a contractor, and as an officer.”
A rainbow hovers over the Victory Arch in Baghdad, which was created for Saddam Hussein after the Iran-Iraq War. (Photo courtesy Morgan Lerette)
“Aside from knowing we had cleared Ramadi,” he said, “I don’t think I ever heard what success in Iraq consisted of.”
As two former military officers who have written books about their time in Iraq, neither of us could articulate what a successful completion of the mission would look like. Was there one? How would we know when it was over? It weighed on us for a few seconds until we snapped out of it and started eating our California rolls.
Since leaving the military, I’ve searched my soul for answers. Was it worth the lives of Luke, Steve, and Faith? Did I spend three years of my life fighting a lost cause? Like all wars, the people who plan them and the ones who execute them are in different castes. I get to wrestle with PTSD and the loss of friends while the people who started the chaos cheer from the sidelines and critique. I think I know how Vietnam veterans feel.
Career politicians and general officers “fought” in Iraq from the comfort of a palace or a nice condo in Washington. I see them opining on cable news. When battles are won, they take the credit, and when they don’t, they deflect blame. As I wrestle with growing up in a combat zone, they armchair-quarterback from the comfort of their couch — angry their fantasy combat team is not winning them the game.
As I watch the Taliban retake territories we fought over for two decades, I’m livid. Thirteen service members lost at Kabul’s airport. The Taliban makes promises — “We’ll secure the country” — but Oct. 8, it’s early days all over again: A suicide bomber executed himself in a Shiite mosque, killing as many as 80, and there’s the Islamic State to claim it. Sunni-on-Shiite violence. We could have left 10 years ago, saved a lot of lives and money, and gotten the same results. Paradoxically, we could stay 10 more years, losing more lives and cash, to get the same result. In summation: The mission is and was a political talking point agnostic to the sacrifices of the men and women who executed it.
I shouldn’t be shocked, because the same happened in Iraq, but it opens old wounds that I’ve worked to heal: anger, frustration, and loss. I’ve tried to find peace in the violence of my past. That peace turns to rage when I see a former flag officer or career diplomat paraded on television to give their assessment of why it’s happening while promoting their new book on leadership. It’s disgraceful.
A congressman Lerette’s unit protected gets off a Blackhawk prior to his tour of the Green Zone. (Photo courtesy Morgan Lerette)
I try to give them the benefit of the doubt. They didn’t experience the war like I did. In 2004, I worked for Blackwater ferrying diplomats to random locations to “build the government” of Iraq. In 2004, I was driving a delegation of congressmen and their general officer sycophants around the Green Zone. We drove them to highly secured government buildings and then took them on a tour of the infamous Crossed Swords monument. Unknown to them, we’d cleared every location with a bomb dog, set security around the perimeters with snipers, and restricted all access to the area. The congressmen and generals marveled at the monument and took pictures like it was a sightseeing tour. They left before sunset because the rockets and mortar arrived shortly after the evening call to prayer each night. We wouldn’t want them thinking this was an active war zone.
With this security, how could they know a real war was happening? Within days of them leaving, they talked on television about the great progress of the war. At the same time, 2003′s Coalition Provisional Authority Order Five was allowing the new Iraq government to facilitate de-Ba’athification using Shiite kill squads to slaughter Sunnis in Baghdad. Sadr City erupted with anti-occupation fighting targeting U.S. service members. That didn’t stop Paul Bremer from making his rounds on the news networks declaring the fallacy of hope for Iraq while my buddies Luke and Steve were shot down over Baghdad in April 2005.
I left Blackwater and joined the Army ROTC, where the five-paragraph operation order was drilled into us daily. Situation, mission, execution, sustainment, command, and control. As I commissioned as a fresh butter bar, I learned the Army revolved around the operations order. I quickly learned the Army was mission-centric and execution-lacking. I knew the mission in Iraq was to “stabilize the government,” but how were we supposed to execute it?
I was at a small joint security station in northern Baghdad across from Sadr City. Executing our mission consisted of collecting intel no one would use as we surreptitiously exited Iraq. We lived a quaint life in a no-salute zone supporting an infantry company. I woke to an email from my commanding officer stating we needed to do mandatory training on bicycle safety. Someone on a large base was hit by a vehicle while riding a bike. It was the fault of the bicyclist because they were not wearing a reflective belt. The commander of Iraq, wanting to ensure this snafu wouldn’t hinder his career progression, mandated every soldier in theater take online bicycle training. I called my commanding officer.
“Sir, our internet connection sucks and we don’t have bikes. Do we really need to complete this training?”
“I know,” he said. “I know. You’re my third call today. I get it, but this came down from I Corps and to the brigade.”
We both sounded dejected because he knew I would have to relay the same stupid order he gave me to my soldiers.
“This is what generals worry about?”
“Just make it happen, LT.”
As my soldiers and I clicked through the training, constantly refreshing the screen due to the terrible internet connection, I wondered how this fit into executing the “mission.” I didn’t have to ponder long because one of the soldiers in my battalion was killed by a rocket on a base south of Baghdad. One of my soldiers was close to the deceased, and I had to break the news to her. No training could’ve prepared me for this.
Morgan Lerette holds a puppy after giving it its first bath in Iraq. (Photo courtesy Morgan Lerette)
Prior to our nightly meeting, I asked to speak with her. We sat on a wooden step. I took my hat off and held it as I looked at her and told her about the death of her friend, her sister-in-arms. She began to cry. I put my arm over her shoulder and tried to console her. She leaned into me and I felt the tears push through my ACUs as I told her we were making arrangements for her to attend the funeral at Camp Liberty in 48 hours.
I would have cried myself if I didn’t have to inform the rest of my team. I let her know we were on a communications blackout so she couldn’t call or post about it until we had confirmation the family was alerted. I asked her to skip the meeting and told her I’d check on her soon. She stood and walked toward her room as tears streamed down her cheeks.
I entered the office and told the team. Anyone who wanted to attend the memorial was welcome, but no one was to use the phone or internet until we received word the family had been contacted. This was nonnegotiable because the family should never know about a death via Facebook. Some cried and others stared in stunned silence. For the first time, the burden of war became personal.
Before they went to Camp Liberty for the memorial, I briefed them on the rules: They were entering a salute area, had to wear reflective belts at all times, had to be clean prior to entering the chow hall, and the military police would pull them over if officers caught them speeding. This was the dissonance of war — an obsession to mandate inane rules for officer evaluation reports to justify handing out Bronze Star Medals to officers even as others were mourning the loss of a friend.
By now Gen. Petraeus was on the news talking about how to win an insurgency, which led to the surge in Afghanistan. Robert Gates was starting to write a book applauding himself for his work as secretary of defense. Six months after it published, Mosul, Iraq was taken over by ISIS.
History is repeating itself in Afghanistan, and Gen. Petraeus is again making the rounds on cable news explaining it’s a mistake to leave Afghanistan even if the war has no definitive mission or execution. For a former general, the only answer is “more war.” Combat’s not personal to career bureaucrats and generals; it’s the circle of life. Hakuna Matata.
Maybe I’m bitter? Bitter I lost friends to wars we didn’t win — couldn’t win. I’m bitter watching Afghanistan crumble because it reminds me of Iraq. I try not to think about it because there’s only so much soul-searching a person can do with a ground perspective of the wars. Maybe, just maybe, a flag officer or career diplomat will read this and do a bit of soul searching. How they failed at defining success. How they failed at winning wars. How they failed their junior enlisted and officers tasked with executing their trivial policies. I doubt it. They seem busy making their rounds on cable news.
Morgan Lerette worked for Blackwater for 18 months, from 2004 to 2005. Upon his return to the United States, he completed his undergraduate degree at Northern Arizona University and commissioned as a U.S. Army intelligence officer. From 2009 to 2010, Lerette deployed back to Iraq. He left the Army as a captain, moved to Boston, and attended The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He received a master of international business degree in international banking and finance. Lerette wrote the just-released book “Welcome to Blackwater: Mercenaries, Money and Mayhem in Iraq.”
Editor’s note: This piece was first published in The War Horse. This is an Op-Ed and as such, the opinions expressed are those of the author. If you would like to respond, or have an editorial of your own you would like to submit, please contact Military Times managing editor Howard Altman, haltman@militarytimes.com.
9. Pentagon Reexamining How It Addresses Chem-Bio Threats
Excerpts:
Maj. Gen. Bradley Gericke, director of strategy, plans and policy within the office of the deputy chief of staff for the Army, said the service’s strategy is the first of its kind.
“Everybody has watched the damage and disarray that COVID has inflicted upon states and … armed forces around the world,” he said.
If a bad actor is seeking to disrupt international order and does not mind indiscriminate harm to various populations, then a biological weapon becomes an attractive choice whether it is through the manipulation of a naturally occurring pathogen or something made in a lab, Gericke said.
The service has an “urgent problem that is going to require a combination of unit design, it’s going to require technical expertise, and it’s going to require different kinds of training and readiness than we’ve experienced to date,” he said.
Contagious, endemic and emerging diseases present a challenge that is qualitatively different from biological warfare yet one that can be commensurate in impact, Gericke said. “We are not ready today, and we’ve got a lot of work to do to make ourselves ready.”
For example, Gericke said the Army needs to conduct credible, large-scale wargames to simulate biological incidents and threats. “There are gaps in our understanding of future warfighting that I think we need to pursue,” he said.
Pentagon Reexamining How It Addresses Chem-Bio Threats
10/27/2021
By
Photo-illustration - iStock, Defense Dept. photos
BALTIMORE — The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic — which has killed more than 700,000 Americans — quickly and ferociously brought home the dangers and perils posed by biological threats and has prompted the Defense Department to bolster its ability to combat them in the future.
While not new — history books remind readers of the Plague and Spanish influenza — bio threats, along with chemical, radiological and nuclear hazards, have been thrust into the spotlight due to the crisis.
To address these evolving perils, the Pentagon is revamping how it tackles CBRN defense and is working to inject new technologies — such as artificial intelligence and machine learning — into its portfolio. Officials hope the move will put the United States in a better position should the unthinkable happen — again.
Those working in the CBRN field find themselves in a unique time, said Army Col. Chris Hoffman, principal director in the office of the deputy assistant secretary of defense for chemical and biological defense.
“We’ve seen smaller pieces of this in 2001 in the wake of the anthrax mailings and in 2014 and 2015 with the Ebola outbreak in West Africa,” he said in August during the National Defense Industrial Association’s Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defense Conference and Exhibition in Baltimore. “However, we’ve never found ourselves with the audience that we currently have.”
“We’re seizing that opportunity,” he added.
Officials must execute necessary changes to honor the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have died of COVID-19, he said. “We can honor that sacrifice and that loss by ensuring that their descendants don’t suffer the same fate,” he said.
The pandemic has revealed gaps in the nation’s information-sharing processes when it comes to biodefense, Hoffman said.
“We’ve got lots of information, but … we don’t necessarily have all the nodes connected well,” he said. “That network and backbone is not quite there yet.”
The Pentagon is working with its international and interagency partners to improve its integrated early warning systems to close that gap, he noted.
In that same vein, it is also working more closely with the intelligence community. Much of the information about CBRN threats has traditionally been held at a high classification level, which is not accessible to some relevant parties, Hoffman added.
“We’ve been working very hard with our intelligence partners to … digest that and operationalize it so that we’ve got clear assessments that we can share with our service and combatant command partners,” he said.
The Pentagon is also shaking up how it acquires chem-bio defense equipment, said Brandi Vann, deputy assistant secretary of defense for chemical and biological defense programs.
“The administration has directed us to do a number of things, including relooking at our legacy processes, our legacy systems and really reinvesting our focus and our funding into capabilities for the future,” she said.
There are new opportunities to leverage emerging technologies such as AI and quantum computing, Vann said.
“These are buzzwords we’ve heard before, but as we start enveloping these into the CBRN community, … this begins to transform how we think about CBRN defense,” she said.
Dr. Jason Roos, joint program executive officer for chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear defense, said there is a need for autonomy, AI, machine learning and robotics for integrated early warning. “I believe there is space in our industry where we can apply AI and ML,” he said.
However, transforming CBRN technology will require the Pentagon to transition away from its traditional methods of requirements development, R&D investment and acquisition, Vann said.
“Bluntly, we need to not only embrace industry, but we need to start thinking like you,” she told conference attendees.
The Defense Department needs to leverage commercial technology so it can remain more competitive against the nation’s adversaries, Vann said.
Decades ago, the government drove much of the innovation in the United States, but that paradigm has shifted, Hoffman said. “We don’t have the investment capital in our government R&D to drive all the innovation that’s necessary.”
While defense only makes up a small portion of the market for commercial products, Hoffman encouraged industry to partner with the Pentagon on CBRN technologies and noted that they are inherently dual use.
“We’ve got efforts trying to figure out how to decontaminate transportation vehicles,” he said. “It absolutely has applications to the transportation sector.”
Technology used to decontaminate Defense Department facilities can also be applied to the medical sector and hospitals, he noted.
As the CBRN community continues to work with industry, it is embracing new contracting methods, Roos said. “There is certainly a better way for us to be able to work with you and engage with you,” he told the crowd.
Roos touted a new contracting tool called commercial solutions opening, which facilitates the acquisition of commercial-off-the-shelf technology.
“You can rapidly go out and get COTS capability or modify COTS capability,” he said. “We’ve been leveraging that tool very much in the context of COVID.”
The Pentagon wants to modernize its CBRN equipment and is looking at an array of new technologies, including threat-agnostic sensing capabilities and wearables.
Soldier-worn devices show great promise for the future, Roos said. “We can understand the health of the warfighter, hopefully, even before symptoms” appear.
His office is also examining medical countermeasure capabilities to take advantage of existing drugs and therapeutics that could apply to military missions.
Meanwhile, retired Army Brig. Gen. William King, chair of NDIA’s CBRN division, said the United States must be prepared for a wide range of chem-bio threats in the future, regardless of how or where they arise. This includes both naturally occurring infectious disease outbreaks and the accidental or deliberate release of biological threat agents.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that biological threats do not respect national borders, treaties or social/economic status,” he said in prepared remarks for the conference. “An infectious disease threat anywhere is a threat everywhere.”
The pandemic has illustrated the danger that pathogens pose to economic growth, social programs, political stability and global security, he noted.
“While emerging technologies — biotechnologies, in particular — provide unbelievable potential for our economy and global health, they also pose a significant challenge,” King added. “Like gene editing and synthetic biology, emerging biotechnologies could reduce the barrier to biological weapon development as they become more readily accessible by the general public.”
For example, technologies such as 3D printing could enable lower cost manufacturing of complex equipment necessary to creating biological agents, he noted.
“The inherently dual-use nature of biological and some pharmaceutical chemical capabilities make countering the proliferation of these novel threat-related technologies, materiel and expertise even more challenging,” he said.
Facing new and emerging threats, officials are working to revamp a number of strategies — including the National Defense Strategy and the counter-WMD strategy — during the pandemic, Vann said.
“All of these are actually converging at the same time,” she said. “There is actually a really interesting, really nice cross-department initiative now to cross walk and cross talk all of these types of issues.”
The U.S. government is also working on updating its National Biodefense Strategy, which was last released in 2018, said Chris Hassell, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for chemical and biological defense, who is now a senior science advisor for the Department of Health and Human Services. The effort — which is being led by the National Security Council — emphasizes both manmade threats and naturally occurring hazards, he said.
“COVID still remains a tragedy, … but we can’t lose the fact that it’s an opportunity,” he said. “It’s an opportunity to exercise that National Biodefense Strategy, and to see what did we get right and what do we need to change?”
The strategy is currently in the process of being updated with lessons learned from the pandemic, he said.
Meanwhile, earlier this year the Army released its own biological defense strategy. Biodefense must be broadly integrated and routinely applied throughout the service to fight and win in future battlefields, the document said.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed shortfalls in Army biological defense planning, preparation and material capabilities,” it said. “It has become clear: the Army’s ability to deploy, fight and win the nation’s wars is at risk as long as the Army cannot sufficiently gain and maintain situational awareness, protect its people, mitigate impact, project force and maneuver freely within a biological hazard or threat environment.”
Maj. Gen. Bradley Gericke, director of strategy, plans and policy within the office of the deputy chief of staff for the Army, said the service’s strategy is the first of its kind.
“Everybody has watched the damage and disarray that COVID has inflicted upon states and … armed forces around the world,” he said.
If a bad actor is seeking to disrupt international order and does not mind indiscriminate harm to various populations, then a biological weapon becomes an attractive choice whether it is through the manipulation of a naturally occurring pathogen or something made in a lab, Gericke said.
The service has an “urgent problem that is going to require a combination of unit design, it’s going to require technical expertise, and it’s going to require different kinds of training and readiness than we’ve experienced to date,” he said.
Contagious, endemic and emerging diseases present a challenge that is qualitatively different from biological warfare yet one that can be commensurate in impact, Gericke said. “We are not ready today, and we’ve got a lot of work to do to make ourselves ready.”
For example, Gericke said the Army needs to conduct credible, large-scale wargames to simulate biological incidents and threats. “There are gaps in our understanding of future warfighting that I think we need to pursue,” he said.
10. Exclusive Front-Line Report: Modern Trench Warfare in Eastern Ukraine
Excerpts:
“We are thankful for all the help the USA provides us, because we needed it, especially at the beginning of the war,” Pavliuk says. “[The American military aid] affected our ability to defend while also keeping our people alive.”
Inside a front-line observation post of Ukraine’s 79th Air Assault Brigade near the town of Stanytsia Luhanska. Photo by Nolan Peterson/Coffee or Die Magazine.
The American military hardware that has actually filtered to front-line Ukrainian units for daily combat use includes night vision goggles, counterbattery radars, encrypted radios, and sniper systems. Ukrainian troops invariably mention night vision goggles as the most useful American gear they’ve received. A number of US Javelin anti-tank missiles are also deployed to the war zone, but they are subject to strict restrictions and have not been used in combat.
Earlier this year, Russia massed thousands of troops along Ukraine’s borders, sparking fears of a wider war and prompting US forces in Europe to go on heightened alert. While that crisis seems to have passed, tensions remain elevated, and there’s little expectation that the conflict in the Donbas will end anytime soon. And with two of Europe’s largest land armies trading fire every day in the Donbas, there’s always the chance that this static, stalemated conflict will escalate into a far bigger and deadlier disaster.
“If we persevere, there is a chance of us being in the civilized world. If we lose — Russia won’t leave it at that,” Pavliuk says. “[Russia] thinks that they are a new world leader. … But, so far, they’re losing their teeth in Ukraine and cannot go any farther. Ukraine has potential, but it’s hard to take the punch alone.”
Exclusive Front-Line Report: Modern Trench Warfare in Eastern Ukraine
The Ukrainian soldier warns me to speak no louder than a whisper. The enemy lines are less than 50 meters away, he tells me, and my voice — if too loud — can easily carry across no man’s land and invite gunfire from the other side.
“We see each other, and we shoot at each other every day,” says the soldier, whose name is Mykhailo. “Everyone is afraid … we are afraid, and the Russians are afraid of us.”
We’re standing at one end of a ruined factory on the outskirts of the city of Avdiivka in Ukraine’s eastern war zone. Ukrainian soldiers seized the building in a bloody 2017 battle that involved close-quarters combat. On this day in October, the war-ravaged structure clearly evidences its violent history. The factory floor is a wasteland of blasted concrete and twisted metal. The inanimate detritus of urban combat covers the ground — shattered glass, crumbled concrete, bullet casings, shrapnel shards. There’s graffiti on the walls, including the words, spray-painted in English: “God bless us.”
The “Promka” front-line position near Avdiivka, Ukraine. Photo by Nolan Peterson/Coffee or Die Magazine.
The position, known as Promka, is now controlled by Ukraine’s 25th Air Assault Brigade. The unit’s commander, Mykhailo, is a 24-year-old first lieutenant who has been at war since 2014 — practically his entire adult life.
“[The cease-fire] doesn’t work, since the enemy wants to make it look like we break it,” Mykhailo tells me at the edge of no man’s land. “They want to provoke us to shoot back with bigger weapons for all the international observers to observe and to say that we broke the cease-fire and not our enemies.”
Like many Ukrainian soldiers, Mykhailo asks that his full name not be published due to security concerns.
Opposite the narrow no man’s land at the factory’s far end, the Ukrainians have built a fortified barricade out of stacked rubble. The barrier seems more fitting for a Mad Max movie than a modern battlefield. At one spot, there sits a heated mannequin clad in military kit — a ploy to fool any Russian snipers using thermal scopes. “They see it as an alive human being,” Mykhailo says with a grin.
Inside the factory at the Promka front-line position, seven years of war in Ukraine have taken their toll — the destruction is extensive. Photo by Nolan Peterson/Coffee or Die Magazine.
The fortified wall also contains an array of peek-holes — small trapdoors about the size of basketballs through which the Ukrainians steal quick glances at their enemies about 160 feet away. A 32-year-old Ukrainian soldier who goes by the nom de guerre “Warman” waves me up to one of these apertures. “There’s a tree in that direction,” he says, denoting the vector with his hand. “The Russians are there.”
I swallow my anxiety and raise my head to the opening. I look in the prescribed direction and see the tree. It seems so close that I could easily hit it with a tossed football, in other circumstances. Although I see no signs of movement, a chill runs down my spine. My mind flashes with an image of my head snapping back from a sniper’s bullet. Heeding the instinctive warning, I duck away.
“The ones who are not afraid are fools. We are all afraid,” Warman says.
A native Russian speaker from the city of Donetsk, which remains under de facto Russian occupation, Warman volunteered to fight in 2014 against what he describes as a Russian invasion. He’s been at war ever since.
“I saw for myself, military soldiers of the Russian Federation,” Warman says. “I am from the Donetsk region, so I am fighting for my motherland.”
“Warman,” a 32-year-old soldier from Ukraine’s 25th Air Assault Brigade deployed on the front line near Avdiivka. Photo by Nolan Peterson/Coffee or Die Magazine.
After more than seven years, the war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region is far from over. Along a fortified front line about 160 miles in length — spanning a southwesterly arc from the Russian border to the Sea of Azov — Ukraine’s military continues to fight against a combined force of Russian regulars and pro-Russian separatists.
In October I undertook a weeklong trip to the Donbas war zone to observe Ukraine’s Joint Forces Operation, or JFO — Kyiv’s official name for the Donbas military campaign. I visited three key locations. Starting at the northern limit of the war zone near the occupied city of Luhansk, I continued onward to positions near the city of Avdiivka and then ended at the southern terminus of the front lines in the town of Shyrokyne, on the Sea of Azov coastline. Along the way, I interviewed Lt. Gen. Oleksandr Pavliuk, the commander of Ukraine’s Joint Forces Operation, at his headquarters in the city of Kramatorsk.
Europe’s only ongoing land war has killed some 14,000 people, and another 1.7 million have been displaced because of the fighting. The February 2015 Minsk II cease-fire froze the conflict along its current boundaries and generally limited its intensity by banning certain heavy weapons. But combat never ended. Daily shelling and sniper fire continue to take lives. So do small, weaponized Russian drones, which patrol high overhead and drop lethal explosives. Sixty-one Ukrainian soldiers have died since July 27, 2020, including five deaths in September.
The war has no sense of urgency. From what I observed, the Ukrainian side is not fighting to achieve a breakthrough or take back territory. Rather, they’re simply holding their ground, under daily fire, against what they say is a Russian invasion of their homeland. In conversation, the Ukrainians (both front-line troops and their commanders) uniformly refer to their enemies as “Russians” and scoff at the notion that they’re fighting in a civil war.
“The provocation can happen any minute,” says Pavliuk, the Joint Forces Operation commander. “We understand who is in front of us, understand how Russia wages war, and we are ready for an escalation, ready for new combat.”
The author visits the front line with Ukraine’s 79th Air Assault Brigade near Shchastya, Ukraine. Photo by Volodymyr Yurchenko.
According to Ukrainian military intelligence estimates, combined Russian-separatist forces include about 2,100 Russian military personnel who primarily serve as advisers and instructors. Those Russian troops reportedly serve within a larger force of 35,167 irregular soldiers drawn mostly from the two breakaway territories in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions. That combined force, according to Ukrainian intelligence officials, controls 484 tanks — more than twice the number of the British Army. While the lion’s share of fighting is not done by Russian soldiers these days, the campaign is sustained by Russian cash and armaments. For its part, Moscow denies having a hand in the war.
Altogether, the conflict blends modern weapons and technology with battlefield conditions similar to those of the World War I trenches. At some places, such as a Ukrainian forest redoubt near Stanytsia Luhanska, no man’s land can be several miles wide and ill defined. At others, such as the Promka position outside of Avdiivka, the Ukrainians and their enemies are close enough to trade shouted insults.
The static, stalemated war in the Donbas has effectively become a training ground for some of Russia’s newest combat technologies — especially small drones and electronic warfare assets. Additionally, the Russian side uses anti-tank guided missiles and drones to send POM-2 land mines across no man’s land. Each day, Ukrainian explosive ordnance disposal teams patrol the war zone for whatever weapons the Russians may have covertly sent over. The Donbas war zone has also become a finishing school for specialized Russian military personnel, such as snipers, who come to gain combat experience.
This has become a psychological battle in which soldiers deal with the daily threat of random death by snipers and shelling and drone strikes. Although no man’s land is measured in yards or miles, the gulf between life and death is never more distant than a few inches. Or seconds. Such is the reality of trench warfare. It doesn’t matter how good of a soldier you are, how much you’ve trained, or how many years of combat experience you may possess. In this kind of war, your chances of survival usually just boil down to raw luck.
Mykhailo, 24, the first lieutenant in command of the 25th Air Assault Brigade detachment at the Promka position near Avdiivka. Photo by Nolan Peterson/Coffee or Die Magazine.
The Donbas trenches have now existed for twice as many years as those of World War I. Although the intensity is low, the war’s longevity exacts unique demands on the soldiers who fight in it. This is a war of attrition — but not in the physical sense. The Ukrainians’ overall objective, at this point, is not to exhaust their enemies’ reserves of men and materiel. Rather, they aim to exhaust their enemies’ resolve. The name of this objective is “stabilization operation.”
“[The war] is already here, and we must do some work to stop it. That’s all,” says Ivan, a 30-year-old first lieutenant serving with the 25th Air Assault Brigade at the Promka position near Avdiivka.
Ivan, who is married, has served in the war since it began in 2014. He’s approaching eight straight years of nonstop combat service, including harrowing battles that claimed the lives of 25 of his friends within the war’s first year. After all the friends he’s lost, and after so much missed time with his wife, Ivan’s hopes for peace have begun to wane. “Now I can’t see where this finishes,” he says. “Because it’s continuous already [for] seven years, and I don’t see where is it, the end.”
A soldier with Ukraine’s 79th Air Assault Brigade peers across no man’s land. Photo by Nolan Peterson/Coffee or Die Magazine.
At the northern limit of the war zone outside of Luhansk, Ukraine’s 79th Air Assault Brigade is entrenched in a position near the town of Shchastya. To reach the lines, I embark with a squad of the brigade’s soldiers aboard a military transport truck. We jostle and snake through the woods to reach a rear echelon staging area, where we disembark and start our hike to the bank of the Seversky Donets River. Along the way, we pass a concealed encampment where Ukrainian soldiers are chopping wood in preparation for the coming winter. Their dugouts are built into the earth, embedded within a sloped hillside as protection against shelling. The soldiers have also constructed an outdoor grill, as well as a makeshift gym comprising dip and pullup bars. There’s even a trash can for collecting plastic water bottles. They’ve clearly dug in for the long haul.
After a few minutes on foot, we reach the river. Along with several soldiers, I board a small rubber raft. We keep our voices down while one soldier stands on the bow with a single oar and pulls us ahead. The scene reminds me of the Greek myth of Charon the boatman ferrying departed souls across the River Styx. It truly feels as if we are crossing from one realm to another. This war is a destination. Once you’re at it, you’re in it.
Crossing the Seversky Donets River to reach the front line of the war in Ukraine. Photo by Volodymyr Yurchenko.
We land on the opposite bank and advance up a sharp rise. At the top, we enter the brigade’s front-line dugouts. Beyond this fortified line of underground tunnels, the Ukrainians are separated from their enemies by a mined strip only a few hundred meters wide. Inside the labyrinthine stronghold, it is dark and cold. Wooden beams buttress the earthen walls and ceilings. After a few twists and turns we emerge at a forward observation post. Beams of dull light from the overcast day come in through several crude openings. The Ukrainians advise me to stay away from the aperture that faces no man’s land. Just in case of snipers, they say.
From this space, the Ukrainians keep watch over their enemies through a binocular periscope. Through the glass, I’m able to observe the Russian lines for myself. Struck by the absurd proximity of the opposing camps, I ask the Ukrainian soldiers around me if it’s difficult to live so close to their enemies for so long.
“It just sounds strange,” says Volodymyr, a 40-year-old sergeant who is standing nearby. “But actually, nothing is strange. This is war.”
Later, I stand outside among several soldiers. A 38-year-old first lieutenant named Illia says they rarely gather in groups like this — such clusters offer armed drones an easy target. Nevertheless, Illia casually lights a cigarette and rests against a low wall. In between drags he holds his hands clasped in front. The day is cloudy and windy, and he seems to believe we’re in relative safety standing together in the open at this spot — about half the distance of a par-3 golf hole from the Ukrainians’ enemies.
“It puts you under constant pressure when you always expect something from the air,” Illia says of the drone threat. “It’s very hard to fight against it.”
Illia, 38, a first lieutenant with Ukraine’s 79th Air Assault Brigade. Photo by Nolan Peterson/Coffee or Die Magazine.
When the war began in 2014, Ukraine’s army was depleted by decades of corruption and able to field only a few thousand combat-ready personnel. Today, the Ukrainian army is a professional, disciplined fighting force. Its young officers are battle-hardened by years of conventional and unconventional warfare; they’re used to perpetual combat against a technologically capable enemy armed with tanks, rockets, and artillery.
The constant dangers keep soldiers on edge. Yet, one of the most demanding aspects of the war, from the Ukrainians’ perspective, is their restricted ability to retaliate while under fire.
“It is hard. We respond when we feel a threat, but we try not to react on their provocative shootings,” says Mykhailo, the Promka position commander.
If a Ukrainian unit comes under attack, the on-scene commander — such as Mykhailo — has the authority, on his own and without direct chain of command approval, to return fire with the Minsk II-approved weapons he has on hand.
The seaside town of Shyrokyne, Ukraine, is a wasteland from seven years of war. Photo by Nolan Peterson/Coffee or Die Magazine.
Currently, the Ukrainians return fire at about half the rate at which they are fired upon. In September, for example, Ukrainian forces fired back 107 times in response to 207 attacks from the combined Russian-separatist side. The Ukrainians are reluctant to shoot back for two key reasons. First, they understand that the Russians are looking to bait them into overreacting, which would give Moscow a pretense to escalate the conflict, should it so desire. Secondly, many attacks from the Russian side are likely designed to lure the Ukrainians into exposing their positions.
“Sometimes [the Russians] shoot in order to draw fire. In those cases, we do not react and stay cool; commanders ascertain the situation themselves,” Pavliuk says. “When [Ukrainian commanders] see danger, they respond to minimize the danger. If there is no danger, there is no need to waste ammunition. Moreover, there are a lot of situations when the enemy creates a provocation, wanting us to shoot back. First of all, to accuse us. And secondly, to put our soldiers under the bullets of their snipers.”
Soldiers from Ukraine’s 79th Air Assault Brigade at a front-line trench position near the town of Stanytsia Luhanska. Photo by Nolan Peterson/Coffee or Die Magazine.
The Ukrainians have withdrawn the heavy weapons proscribed by the Minsk II cease-fire. Those weapons, however, are kept in reserve at rear echelon positions, ready to be rapidly employed in case of an enemy offensive.
If a unit sustains a particularly heavy attack, the on-scene commander can call up the chain of command and request the use of those heavier weapons kept away from the front lines. However, with retaliation decisions often hinging on the judgments of lieutenants in their early 20s like Mykhailo, and therefore subject to the passions of combat, an unscripted escalation remains a possibility. Nevertheless, the Ukrainian military balances that risk against the need to give its front-line forces the necessary latitude to defend themselves.
“Every unit has a right to use weapons on their own, on the order of their commander at the location, when the shooting endangers human lives. The priority is human life,” Pavliuk says, adding: “We have professional military personnel who have eight years of combat experience. We respond with dignity, hold our positions with dignity, and fulfill all the [cease-fire] agreements.”
The decentralized rules of engagement highlight a major cultural shift within the Ukrainian military, which mirrors the entire country’s ongoing cultural divorce from Russia and its Soviet heritage. Notably, the Ukrainian military is ridding itself of the Soviet chain of command model, in which decision-making was concentrated at the top and left junior officers and front-line troops with little flexibility to exercise their own initiative while under fire.
Today, front-line officers have the autonomy to make their own decisions in combat based solely on a higher commander’s pre-stated intent. Likewise, in another departure from the Soviet system, the role of sergeants is now the backbone of front-line forces. In sum, these changes have made Ukraine’s combat units much more adaptable to battlefield realities and less reliant on centralized directives from rear echelon headquarters.
A soldier from Ukraine’s 25th Air Assault Brigade, deployed near Avdiivka. Photo by Nolan Peterson/Coffee or Die Magazine.
“During the Soviet Union the standard was mindless subordination to the chain of command,” Pavliuk says. “In contrast, we now have trust in every commander, with much less direct oversight compared with the Soviet chain of command rules. Every commander trusts his subordinates. And [combat operations] are most effective when each commander understands his responsibilities and makes decisions independently, apropos of the situation at hand.”
The Ukrainians have also adopted a preference for limited, precision weapons, thereby placing a decidedly un-Soviet premium on the preservation of human life — both military and civilian. “According to Soviet standards, the main thing was to complete the mission, and no one cared about the amount of human losses,” says Pavliuk, who began his military career in 1987 in the Soviet army.
“Our [NATO] partners have a completely different approach,” Pavliuk says. “And we took that perspective — that human life is a priority.”
From 2014 to 2015, front-line Ukrainian forces depended on civilian volunteers for most of their basic kit, as well as food and water. Today, the military meets its own basic needs without civilian help. Soldiers still complain about outdated weaponry and an overly bureaucratic process for requesting equipment. Overall, however, it’s a night and day difference from the war’s early years.
Looking back, it’s clear that Ukraine’s civil society volunteer movement spared the country from disaster and gave the regular army time to regroup and dig in for the long haul.
“We understood in 2014, when we entered the war, that there were many moments for which we weren’t prepared,” Pavliuk says. “But because of our Ukrainian spirit, spirit of a free nation, and the support of its people, the army could grow and be restored.”
Soldiers from Ukraine’s 79th Air Assault Brigade improve a front-line trench position. Photo by Nolan Peterson/Coffee or Die Magazine.
Since the war’s outset, the Ukrainians’ fortified positions have significantly improved. And their investments in intelligence have produced a comprehensive understanding of their enemy’s battlefield disposition. In both Shyrokyne and at the Promka position in Avdiivka, I visited tactical operations centers where Ukrainian specialists monitor video feeds from an array of cameras they’ve installed along the edges of no man’s land. These sensors have night vision capability, permitting 24/7 overwatch of the Russian side. And thanks to a computer program developed by a civilian volunteer, those battlefield cameras can also give precise GPS coordinates of what the user is viewing.
The Ukrainians are notably adept at enterprising innovative solutions to some of Russia’s modern military tactics and technologies. For example, to combat the threat of Russian electronic warfare units jamming or intercepting radio communications, front-line units typically rely on land-line communications — complete with old-school rotary phones, in places. The Ukrainians have learned to not rely on modern technological crutches like GPS, which the Russians also jam. Also, because the Russians can target their artillery on radio and cellular signals, Ukrainian soldiers only use radios in emergencies and maintain strict rules against cell phone use while on the front lines.
Years of shelling have left an industrial area near the city of Avdiivka in ruins. Photo by Nolan Peterson/Coffee or Die Magazine.
The most significant change in the war has been the prevalence of small drones, which carry out targeted strikes with dropped hand grenades and land mines. Russian drones, such as the Orlan UAV, have reportedly been dropping weapons from a height of about 4 kilometers, roughly 2.5 miles. At such an altitude, the drones are extremely difficult to detect. Resultantly, the Ukrainians have become significantly more “drone conscious.” They avoid gathering outside, especially in clear weather, and they now make a serious effort to camouflage their trenches and dugouts from aerial reconnaissance. During winter, after the leaves have fallen and there’s less natural concealment, Ukrainian troops pay particular attention to camouflaging their movements and positions.
If an enemy drone is detected by Ukrainian air defense systems or human spotters, the chain of command alerts the proximate front-line positions. Those troops then conceal their position from aerial observation. The Ukrainians also employ conventional weapons and electronic warfare tools to destroy drones, or interrupt their control signals.
For their part, the Ukrainians maintain strict rules about their own use of drones to avoid inadvertently escalating the conflict. For now, front-line units are reportedly not allowed to fly drones past the contact line and over enemy territory. Ukraine has amassed a fleet of the Turkish-designed Bayraktar TB2 drones, some of which are deployed to the Joint Forces Operation area. An unconfirmed Ukrainian news report stated that Ukrainian forces used the Bayraktar for the first time in combat on Oct. 26.
Soldiers on patrol near Avdiivka from Ukraine’s 25th Air Assault Brigade. Photo by Nolan Peterson/Coffee or Die Magazine.
At a flat and forested position near the town of Stanytsia Luhanska, a detachment of troops from Ukraine’s 79th Air Assault Brigade have dug their shelters below ground level as protection against shrapnel. One stretch of the surrounding forest remains devastated by earlier shelling. Many tree trunks are felled and burnt like used matchsticks. If you’ve ever seen the Band of Brothers TV series about the Battle of Bastogne in World War II, this location visually resembles that battle space.
The Ukrainian soldiers burn wood for cooking and heat; solar panels provide some of their electricity. They travel between positions on foot or in Soviet-era, BMP-1 infantry fighting vehicles. Despite the MacGyvered look of their campsites, the troops all wear matching multicam uniforms and modern personal protective equipment, including new body armor plate carriers and helmets with night vision goggle mounts. Every soldier wears an individual first-aid kit, or IFAC, on his or her person.
Two weeks earlier, this area’s soldiers began building a new observation post atop a small rise facing Russian positions on a hillside about 2 kilometers away. Immediately after construction commenced, the Russians fired two anti-tank rockets at the spot. One missed widely; the other struck about 100 meters away from the Ukrainians’ new dugouts, leaving a crater in the sandy soil. Undeterred, the Ukrainian troops have continued their work.
Pavlo, a 23-year-old private first class from Ukraine’s 79th Air Assault Brigade, deployed near the town of Stanytsia Luhanska. Photo by Nolan Peterson/Coffee or Die Magazine.
On this day, the new observation post has already been built and is linked by a trench to a cluster of underground shelters. A 23-year-old private first class named Pavlo leads me around the site. Short and solidly built, Pavlo moves purposefully around the encampment, pointing out where the soldiers sleep and eat. It’s unusual to have a foreign journalist out here, yet he willingly obliges my questions.
“Everyone feels fear,” says Pavlo, who is on his second combat tour. “The one who is not afraid has problems with his mental health. How can you not be afraid? Everyone is afraid.”
Typically, Ukrainian units rotate in for front-line deployments that last about nine months. These days, the entrenched, positional warfare they endure in the Donbas is less acute in its immediate dangers than the dynamic maneuvers of the war’s opening years. Even so, the static nature of the war frustrates some of the soldiers.
“It is hard to sit and observe when there is nothing is going on. It is hard,” Pavlo says. “If there is shelling, you know that no one is going to come here for you while the weapons are working and the missiles are flying…But when it is quiet, then it is really stressful to sit here and observe, making sure no one is trying to sneak up on you.”
The erstwhile industrial heartland of the Soviet Union, Ukraine’s Donbas region is where Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev once worked as a coal miner and began his ascent in the Communist Party. Most Ukrainians living in the Donbas primarily speak Russian. According to some, that makes them Russian-leaning in their political persuasions, too. But that’s not actually the case. Within government-controlled territory in the Donbas, it’s common to see Ukraine’s yellow and blue flag on display. Along the roads, billboards display recruitment advertisements for Ukraine’s armed forces. And no one seems to mind using the Ukrainian language, if asked.
The coastline in Mariupol, an industrial city in Ukraine’s Donbas region. Photo by Nolan Peterson/Coffee or Die Magazine.
Most of this region changed hands several times during the early years of the war. And many structures still bear the scars of combat — irregular shrapnel patterns and collapsed roofs and shrapnel-shorn tree trunks. The treads of tank convoys cleaved the asphalt on one particular stretch of highway. Now, tires spinning over the indentations produce a high-frequency hum. Locals have nicknamed it “the singing road.”
The war has also scarred the people living here. Some lost their homes. Some lost their jobs. Some lost friends and family to the fighting. Teenagers today were only children when the tanks and artillery cut back and forth across this embattled land in 2014 and 2015. They’ve spent the formative years of their life within earshot of the artillery. They can hardly remember life without war.
The most jarring part of any war is its intersection with normal life, and the war in Ukraine is no different. In some ways, the geographically quarantined nature of the conflict makes the parallel existence of war and peace so much more absurd. It can leave your head spinning to observe sunbathers lounging on a beach, or children attending elementary school, within a few hundred meters of the front lines.
Despite the war, life goes on in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region not far from the front line. Photo by Nolan Peterson/Coffee or Die Magazine.
Many Ukrainian commanders and soldiers freely admit that there’s likely no military solution to the conflict. An all-out Ukrainian offensive to take back its occupied territories would likely result in massive civilian casualties and catastrophic infrastructure damage (which Ukraine would then have to pay to repair). And with Moscow freely distributing Russian passports within the occupied portion of the Donbas, a Ukrainian offensive would almost certainly spur Moscow to openly invade under the pretense of protecting its citizens.
Although the physical effects of combat extend only as far as the range of the weapons used, the unconventional edges of the Russo-Ukrainian war reach well beyond the Donbas battlefields. There is another ongoing battle to defend the sovereignty of Ukrainian citizens’ minds. “Military victory is just one component of the whole picture,” Pavliuk says.
“Yes, the war is a hybrid war, and it’s fought in multiple domains, especially information war,” the JFO commander continues. “Yes, all of our soldiers can retake any territory by force, but if the local people do not support them, it will be hard to stay there. That is why we work with the local people for them to support and understand the situation. But it is hard to do because the Russian propaganda machine is working hard…As far as I know, this propaganda works not only in Ukraine but in the whole world.”
Shrapnel damage near the Promka position outside of Avdiivka. Photo by Nolan Peterson/Coffee or Die Magazine.
Ukraine’s 128th Mountain Assault Brigade controls the former resort town of Shyrokyne, which marks the southern terminus of the front lines on the Sea of Azov coast. This used to be a popular vacation spot for residents in the nearby cities of Mariupol and Donetsk. On this day, hardly a window isn’t shattered, and shrapnel scars pockmark practically every vertical surface. In places, years of shelling have carved and cratered the ground — occasionally, you see the fins of unexploded mortars protruding from the earth. Some trees are discolored by all the metal shrapnel embedded within their trunks.
“Every day our enemy violates the agreements, they violate the cease-fire. The shelling is constant,” says a soldier from 128th Mountain Assault Brigade who goes by the nom de guerre “Fast.”
“Drones, grenade launchers — every day we see the use of some new weapon,” the soldier says.
The local Ukrainian commander has the authority to order return fire with the weapons he has on hand. Adequate manpower is not an issue. In fact, the brigade has enough troops to periodically rotate some personnel off the lines for training.
The fins of unexploded mortars dot the earth in Shyrokyne, Ukraine. Photo by Nolan Peterson/Coffee or Die.
Shyrokyne is flanked by broad sand beaches — opportune terrain for an amphibious assault. Consequently, the Ukrainians have mined the area’s shallow waters and beaches and erected beach obstacles. They also maintain coastal artillery batteries and anti-aircraft defenses. According to the brigade, there’s never been a serious attempt by either side to outflank the other by sea. Still, the Ukrainians are on guard against the possibility of a Russian landing force. They maintain a database of the cargo capacities, technical capabilities, and drafts of Russian naval and merchant vessels. When spotters detect a ship offshore in the Sea of Azov, they cross-check this intelligence to gauge the potential threat.
Shyrokyne has changed hands several times throughout the course of the war. When they retreated, combined Russian-separatist forces reportedly left behind mines and booby traps. Consequently, Ukrainian soldiers generally stick to the pavement and avoid unnecessarily wandering through destroyed buildings or overgrown plots. Because of the threat of shelling, however, the Ukrainians still prefer to travel between positions in Shyrokyne on foot — the use of vehicles, especially trucks, is often too risky.
The Ukrainians estimate that about 100 to 150 enemy personnel are currently deployed in Shyrokyne’s immediate vicinity. There is a high amount of Russian drone activity in the area, and Russian electronic warfare vehicles are frequently observed arriving from the east, the direction of Russia’s border. As at other positions, the Russian side has demonstrated an ability to jam GPS, radio, and cellular signals. Communication is conducted via land lines. Radios are only used in emergencies, and cell phone use is forbidden.
Once a resort town, Shyrokyne is a wasteland. Photo by Nolan Peterson/Coffee or Die Magazine.
Today, there are no civilians left living in Shyrokyne. Inside many of the buildings, you see evidence of the lives of the people who used to live there and had to flee at a moment’s notice when the war began in 2014. Things like children’s toys, dishes, clothes, books. Stray dogs limp around town; they were wounded by shrapnel after their owners abandoned them in the mad rush to evacuate. Nature has reclaimed many of Shyrokyne’s buildings. Vines climb over shrapnel-speckled walls. Shoots of grass emerge from craters. The encroaching entropy resembles the abandoned town of Pripyat within the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
Yet, soldiers say it’s still common to see sunbathers on the beach a few miles to the west. And about 12 miles away, Mariupol is emerging from its post-Soviet doldrums — the industrial city is now home to hip craft cocktail bars and startup IT companies and trendy coworking spaces. The rumble of shelling in Shyrokyne is sometimes audible in the city center. But after more than seven years of war, Mariupol’s half-million civilians treat those far-off storms of steel as casually as a Floridian might register the threat of lightning from a distant thunderstorm. Yes, there’s lethal danger in the distance. But you don’t really take it seriously.
“I think that no one would have thought that the war would last for so long,” says the soldier nicknamed Fast. “Almost eight years and no one knows when it is going to end.”
Warman, a 32-year-old soldier from Ukraine’s 25th Air Assault Brigade, on patrol near Avdiivka. Photo by Nolan Peterson/Coffee or Die Magazine.
Russia is the country’s paramount threat, according to Ukraine’s national security strategy. However, the demands of combat operations in the Donbas have slow-rolled plans to modernize all branches of the armed forces to resist a Russian invasion.
“Unfortunately, in my opinion, the pace of replacing old equipment is very slow,” Pavliuk says. “We still fight with Soviet equipment. But it’s because of our country’s economy. Because we need to support our armed forces that fight right now, and to repair the equipment that is constantly in the war.”
Despite its need to modernize, the Ukrainian military is able to sustain its campaign in the Donbas without US military aid. Even so, US military technology has markedly improved the survivability of Ukraine’s combat forces. Notably, units equipped with US counterbattery radar systems have seen sharp decreases in casualties from Russian shelling.
“We are thankful for all the help the USA provides us, because we needed it, especially at the beginning of the war,” Pavliuk says. “[The American military aid] affected our ability to defend while also keeping our people alive.”
Inside a front-line observation post of Ukraine’s 79th Air Assault Brigade near the town of Stanytsia Luhanska. Photo by Nolan Peterson/Coffee or Die Magazine.
The American military hardware that has actually filtered to front-line Ukrainian units for daily combat use includes night vision goggles, counterbattery radars, encrypted radios, and sniper systems. Ukrainian troops invariably mention night vision goggles as the most useful American gear they’ve received. A number of US Javelin anti-tank missiles are also deployed to the war zone, but they are subject to strict restrictions and have not been used in combat.
Earlier this year, Russia massed thousands of troops along Ukraine’s borders, sparking fears of a wider war and prompting US forces in Europe to go on heightened alert. While that crisis seems to have passed, tensions remain elevated, and there’s little expectation that the conflict in the Donbas will end anytime soon. And with two of Europe’s largest land armies trading fire every day in the Donbas, there’s always the chance that this static, stalemated conflict will escalate into a far bigger and deadlier disaster.
“If we persevere, there is a chance of us being in the civilized world. If we lose — Russia won’t leave it at that,” Pavliuk says. “[Russia] thinks that they are a new world leader. … But, so far, they’re losing their teeth in Ukraine and cannot go any farther. Ukraine has potential, but it’s hard to take the punch alone.”
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11. Tajikistan Approves Construction Of New Chinese-Funded Base As Beijing's Security Presence In Central Asia Grows
China is placing its stones strategically on the Go board.
Tajikistan Approves Construction Of New Chinese-Funded Base As Beijing's Security Presence In Central Asia Grows
DUSHANBE -- Tajikistan has approved the construction of a new Chinese-funded base near the country’s border with Afghanistan as Tajik officials warn of growing threats emanating from its southern neighbor.*
In a separate development, the Tajik government has offered to transfer full control of a preexisting Chinese military base in the country to Beijing and waive any future rent in exchange for military aid from China, according to a communique sent from the Chinese Embassy in Dushanbe to Tajikistan’s Foreign Ministry and seen by RFE/RL’s Tajik Service.
The two developments paint a picture of a growing Chinese military footprint in the Central Asian country as Beijing and its neighbors in the region turn their attention toward an increasingly tenuous security situation in Afghanistan since the Taliban's mid-August takeover.
"This decision to build such a facility is one of only a few known examples for China around the world," Raffaello Pantucci, a senior associate fellow at London's Royal United Services Institute, told RFE/RL. "The fact that we keep seeing this activity in Tajikistan shows the level of Chinese concern towards Afghanistan and the region."
China already operates a military base in Tajikistan in the Murghab region near the Afghan border in a remote stretch close to the Wakhan Corridor. The collection of facilities and outposts is believed to have been in operation for at least five years and was the subject of a recent investigation by RFE/RL that showed Chinese personnel taking on a growing role in the area.
Both the Chinese and Tajik governments have officially denied the base’s existence and few details about its ownership and operation are known. The documents seen by RFE/RL's Tajik Service say that Chinese personnel are operating at the base in Tajikistan, but that it currently is owned by Dushanbe.
According to the documents, the proposal to transfer ownership of the base to China was presented by Tajik President Emomali Rahmon to Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe when he visited the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, in July.
"This highlights how Central Asia is going to be a major focus of Chinese attention," said Pantucci. "Going forward, Beijing may struggle to avoid getting itself entangled in regional security problems."
The documents do not state if Beijing has agreed to the proposal put forward by the Tajik side, but they summarize an offer put forward by Rahmon in which China would provide increased funding to build up Tajik military points along the border with Afghanistan in exchange for Dushanbe transferring full control of the existing facilities to China and not charging any basing fees.
“For China, security on its border is crucial and is part of its core interests in Central Asia,” Temur Umarov, an expert on China in Central Asia at the Carnegie Moscow Center, told RFE/RL. “Expanding its security presence in Tajikistan is the most effective tool that it possesses right now.”
Construction of the new facility was approved in Tajikistan's lower house of parliament on October 27 as lawmakers voted on the agreement reached between Tajikistan’s Interior Ministry and China’s Public Security Ministry.
Tajik First Deputy Interior Minister Abdurahmon Alamshozoda said the facility would be located in the village of Vakhon in the country’s remote Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Province and that the base would be owned by the country’s Rapid Reaction Group -- special forces that operate under the purview of the Interior Ministry. Lawmakers said regular Tajik troops would also be present at the facility.
Vakhon, Tajikistan
Tajik lawmaker Tolibkhon Azimzoda said in parliament that the new base would be built with Chinese funding and that the total cost would be about $10 million, which he tied to a worsening security situation in Afghanistan since the Taliban toppled the Western-backed government.
“The construction comes amid the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan and growing security threats along the country's border,” Azimzoda said.
The exact function of the new base is unknown, although lawmakers said it would carry out policing duties focused on combating organized crime and that the facility would have “special equipment for the Interpol information system” installed from China.
Beijing is navigating a delicate security situation in the region since the Taliban takeover. China has a pragmatic working relationship with the group, but it remains to be seen how closely the Taliban will cooperate on counterterrorism issues with Chinese authorities.
For years, China has sounded the alarm about Uyghur extremists potentially using Afghanistan as a staging ground for attacks on Chinese targets in the region or in its western Xinjiang Province.
While the full scope of the threat posed by Uyghur militants is disputed, with many analysts saying the fighters lack coordination and numbers to launch attacks, the prospect of terrorist threats spreading from Afghanistan are a central concern for Chinese policymakers.
“Developments like this were coming, but the instability in Afghanistan has accelerated things,” Umarov said. “In the future, we might see Chinese military and intelligence cooperation intensify across the region.”
The Chinese Embassy in Dushanbe did not respond to a request by RFE/RL’s Tajik Service for comment about the proposal allegedly put forward by Rahmon.
*CLARIFICATION: This story has been amended to clarify that Tajik officials say only Tajik troops will be stationed at the Chinese-funded base.
Written and reported by Reid Standish in Prague based on reporting by RFE/RL’s Tajik Service in Dushanbe.
12. Guarding Against an Exclusive Warrior Class
Excerpt:
Military service has been a remarkably enriching experience for me and my family. Yet, my school-age children have had nearly as many homes as birthdays, and I continue to see families struggling to have their voices heard. While the above challenges are often dismissed in military circles with a Mandalorian “this-is-the-way” quip, it might not be the best way to attract and retain the kind of talent the Pentagon needs to remain competitive against a sophisticated peer adversary. Washington’s priorities must reflect that understanding if it is serious about putting its ambitious strategic theories into practice for the 21st century.
Guarding Against an Exclusive Warrior Class
Time to check in on the American military tradition.
Words: Michael P. Ferguson
Pictures: Killi Mcclintock
Date: October 28th, 2021
Since abolishing the draft in 1973, the United States has relied heavily on its military families to replenish the ranks of its all-volunteer force. Despite the disproportionate toll that recent wars have extracted from this small community, evidence suggests that American defense is still remarkably dependent upon the families that have already sacrificed the most.
America’s ability to bounce back from its long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be determined by the health of its military families as much as foreign policy debates on Capitol Hill and strategic buzzwords. The effects of protracted war on the national psyche did not simply evaporate in August when the United States withdrew its remaining forces from Kabul. Taking time to reflect on the status of service members’ families will allow the defense community to approach its reliance on the American military tradition with clear eyes as it shifts its gaze from worldwide counterterrorism to an intensifying rivalry with state competitors.
CRACKS IN THE FOUNDATION?
On average, about one in every three active service members come from a military family. The numbers across all components and the veteran community are even higher. Ninety-seven percent of active, reserve, and veteran respondents to the comprehensive 2015 Annual Military Lifestyle Survey had at least one immediate family member in the military. Half of them had more than one. These data are consistent over time. An October 2021 survey conducted by Bloom and the National Military Family Association found that 65% of teenagers in military families would consider serving.
To put this in perspective, a 2019 Pentagon study indicated that only 13% of young Americans from a similar age demographic (16–24) saw the military as a viable option. Few would be shocked if those national numbers dwindle even further during the interwar period, especially after the inglorious end to America’s experience in Afghanistan. The evidence is rather conclusive that the personal relationships of service members and veterans have by far the most influence on military end strength.
America’s ability to bounce back from its long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be determined by the health of its military families as much as foreign policy debates on Capitol Hill and strategic buzzwords.
These findings would not be so alarming if American troops were enthusiastic about the prospect of their kids following in their footsteps — but most are not. A 2017 poll revealed that 60% of the active military would not encourage their children to serve, yet they were likely to recommend service to others. As combat deployments and wartime casualties reached record lows between 2015 and 2017, the number of military parents advocating for their children to serve actually decreased. These indicators deserve more attention.
A mere 5% reduction in matriculation from military families could equate to around 60,000 fewer recruits, or the equivalent of roughly the entire active force assigned to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Meanwhile, in Russia, enthusiasm for military service reached a 22-year high in 2019, with 60% of those surveyed saying “real men” must wear the nation’s uniform. Quite plainly, there needs to be a much more prominent national discussion taking place surrounding these trends.
A COSTLY BUSINESS
As of 2019, a third of America’s 1.3 million active-duty service members were parents to roughly 977,000 children. Of those “military brats,” as they are affectionately called, 96% of them were 18 years of age or younger. Most of these children have known nothing but deployments and prolonged absences of at least one parent.
During the early phases of America’s wars, many US Army units alternated between a year of training at their home station and a year away in a combat zone. This led to the Army Force Generation cycle designed to give troops a 1:2 ratio of time away and time at home. As anyone who served during that era knows, there were gaps between theory and practice.
Escalated operational tempo during the Global War on Terrorism normalized these frequent and extensive absences, which certainly did little to help the 42% of military teens who exhibit signs of emotional duress. In 2010, when many of those teens were much younger, 83% of military families admitted that deployments had a somewhat negative effect on their children, while 30% claimed the effects were mostly negative.
The seemingly insurmountable active-duty suicide problem continues to impact families as well. From 2015 to 2020, active-duty suicides increased by nearly 50% to the highest levels seen since the Pentagon began tracking data comprehensively in 2008. Along with 580 active servicemembers, 202 military family members took their lives in 2019 alone. Half of those family members were veterans. Combat experience and duty position had marginal influence, proving that the problem goes much deeper than war-related trauma.
Perhaps most concerning is that the reserve force and National Guard, who spend far less time deployed or embedded with their units, saw almost no change in their suicide rates during the same period. Not only do these tragedies remove troops from their formations now, but they also erode the stability of military families in general and dissuade highly qualified candidates from military service in the future.
WITHER THE WARRIOR CLASS?
In the next decade, this pool of potential recruits might continue to narrow as the private industry offers more lucrative salaries and less rigid career paths to a tech-savvy generation jaded by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and increasingly disconnected from its military. Polling shows that the under-30 age group contributed most significantly to a recent steep decline in America’s trust in its armed forces. These trends have the potential to exacerbate what is already a disquieting civil-military divide, as the number of veterans in Congress decreased by 60% between the end of the Vietnam War and now. Astute observers saw this coming.
As far back as the early 19th century, French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of the potential for America’s democratic army to evolve into an isolated warrior class that has little in common with the civilian population. He even proposed that all democratic militaries would eventually resort to conscription to meet their defense needs. This is not to say that the United States should reconsider the draft, only that its massive all-volunteer military is unique in world history and increasingly bound to an exceptional demographic to sustain.
A TALE OF THREE OPTIONS
To field its active force in the coming decades, the Pentagon must either lower its standards for enlistment, maintain high levels of interest from its military offspring, or find ways to extend that interest into previously untapped non-military communities. Lowering standards would be the least preferred method. Many officers tasked with cleaning up the services after the Vietnam-era draft could attest to this. Admittedly, there are particular enrollment standards that do little to promote good order and discipline that the Pentagon could certainly revisit. Among these are its tattoo policies and stance on minor disabilities that denies applicants with critical skills.
In terms of casting a wider net, some have suggested exploring ways of generating greater interest from underrepresented communities, such as women, minorities, and students at technical colleges. But when two thirds of the active force do not consider military service a favorable option for their own children, the Department of Defense can hardly make a compelling argument to families far removed from the realities of military life. There exists an important distinction between incentives to serve and service as an incentive.
If the Pentagon becomes desperate to incentivize recruits from historically disinterested segments of the population, it could end up attracting the right talent for the wrong reasons. This could give way to a slew of additional problems related to discipline, retention, and security. The allure of incentives, such as enlistment bonuses, has a shelf life equal to that of the potential recruit’s desire to serve in the first place. Any outreach programs will have to find ways around these hurdles. As a result, the Pentagon may be forced to continue relying on its pool of multi-generational military families to sustain its end strength. To do this properly, the department must look inward as much as outward.
WHAT TO DO?
The most effective long-term strategy for building a resilient future force is to invest more appropriately in the present one. There is simply no way the defense enterprise can compete for talent with its current skyrocketing suicide rates. Suicide prevention — not simply awareness — rooted in expedited clinical trials of emerging treatments should be as much a cornerstone of defense innovation as any weapon. These are the real “hard conversations” the joint force should be having: What does the end of the war in Afghanistan mean to service members who spent years of their life fighting there, and are we doing enough for Gold Star families?
In addition to caring for service members, quality of life for their dependents is also an area in which there is much room for progress. Despite legislation in various National Defense Authorization Acts (2015, 2017) meant to improve family stability, military moves remain frequent, expensive, and disruptive. A 2018 RAND report concluded that these moves are “negatively correlated with service member retention intentions.”
Getting the right people in uniform will not be easy, but considering the breadth of security challenges facing the United States, it cannot afford to get this wrong.
Chief concerns plaguing military families have remained surprisingly consistent since the first annual Military Family Lifestyle Survey in 2010. Scarcity of spousal employment opportunities, quality of children’s education, and a lack of stability top off those lists. The majority of these challenges could be solved or at least improved by modifying the frequency with which military families are moved or separated from each other.
Congress could direct a review of the personnel policies that obligate time-on-station requirements, which are often based on rigid career tracks or outdated promotion board criteria. Certain talent management initiatives are already looking to revise these practices. From toxic senior leadership and rampant sexual assault claims; to decrepit military housing and peacetime training schedules that needlessly separate families, there is no shortage of work to be done. These headlines impact not only the active force, but they also shape the perceptions of the civilian communities that the Pentagon is trying to reach. The United States still needs the best and brightest to defend its interests — perhaps now more than ever. Getting the right people in uniform will not be easy, but considering the breadth of security challenges facing the United States, it cannot afford to get this wrong.
Military service has been a remarkably enriching experience for me and my family. Yet, my school-age children have had nearly as many homes as birthdays, and I continue to see families struggling to have their voices heard. While the above challenges are often dismissed in military circles with a Mandalorian “this-is-the-way” quip, it might not be the best way to attract and retain the kind of talent the Pentagon needs to remain competitive against a sophisticated peer adversary. Washington’s priorities must reflect that understanding if it is serious about putting its ambitious strategic theories into practice for the 21st century.
Michael P. Ferguson, M.S., is a US Army officer with operational experience throughout Europe, Africa, and Southwest Asia. He is a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and frequent contributor of national security content. His work appeared most recently in The Hill, Strategic Studies Quarterly, and Small Wars Journal. You can find him on LinkedIn.
*The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect official positions or policies of the US Army, US Department of Defense, or US Government.
13. How China spreads misinformation around the world
How China spreads misinformation around the world
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October 25, 2021
A smartphone records Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying as she speaks during a daily briefing at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing. "I'd like to stress that if the United States truly respects facts, it should open the biological lab at Fort Detrick, give more transparency to issues like its 200-plus overseas bio-labs, invite WHO experts to conduct origin-tracing in the United States," she said at a January 2021 MOFA press conference that went viral in China. (Andy Wong/AP)
Early last year when U.S. health experts looked into the possibility that COVID-19 leaked from a lab in China — either accidentally or on purpose — Chinese propaganda-makers responded.
They amplified rumors that the virus came from the United States, specifically from an Army research lab called Fort Detrick in Maryland. And Chinese state media has succeeded with the help of search engines like Google and YouTube.
Fort Detrick, a bioresearch lab about 60 miles from Washington, D.C., that researches issues related to bio-defense, has long been connected to conspiracy theories, says Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy. The Soviet KGB connected the lab to the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s.
“[Fort Detrick] has often played this sort of central role in conspiracy theories,” Schafer says. “But this one, of course, has tried to connect the origins of COVID-19 to the lab by essentially saying that the outbreak jumped from Fort Detrick to Wuhan brought over by members of the U.S. military.”
A Google search of Fort Detrick pulls up articles like one from a Chinese state media outlet called the Global Times titled “Why Fort Detrick lab should be investigated for global COVID-19 origins tracing.”
“Often what we see with searches, particularly conspiracy-related topics, is there is a bit of a void in the sort of search results that you will get,” he says, “because mainstream media outlets are not going to amplify sort of random crazy conspiracy theories. They may cover it once or twice, but then they move on.”
It’s a good thing that legitimate media outlets don’t amplify such rumors, he says, but it gives conspiracy theorists the advantage. Conspiracy theorists can post about the same topic over and over again so their perspective shows up when people search certain keywords.
Vloggers and citizen journalists will publish many videos on one conspiracy theory on YouTube, while most reputable news outlets produce multiple pieces on the topic, he says.
“YouTube has always been a problematic space for conspiracy theories to flourish,” Schafer says. “Especially around Fort Detrick, where China has many, many, many global outlets with large follower numbers. And so they've really dominated YouTube search results.”
Part of Google’s success stems from giving users relevant results, he says. For example, a search for ‘Major League Baseball playoffs’ will show results about the scores from last night’s games rather than one from 1985.
The algorithm ranks content based on how new it is, he says. NPR or The Washington Post may cover a conspiracy once, but Chinese state media can game the algorithm by posting newer content on the same topic and shoot to the top of the feed.
“Without question, if you're talking about the Chinese or the Russians, others, there's an understanding of search engine optimization,” he says. “They know how to get their content in front of targeted audiences.”
Chinese state media isn’t manipulating the system, Schafer says, but rather working the algorithm to its advantage.
“They certainly have that understanding that if you repeat a lie enough from enough different sources, you're just more likely to have that show up in front of the audience who you want to see it,” he says.
The biggest success of conspiracy spreaders is making it harder for people to figure out what’s true — and whether truth exists at all, Schafer says.
Most Americans aren’t buying into the Fort Detrick conspiracy theory, but in the last two weeks a new story arose that the virus was brought to Wuhan by frozen lobster imported from Maine, he says.
“These are ridiculous on the surface,” he says. “But if you push enough of these sort of competing narratives out there, people just become confused and sort of overwhelmed by the amount of competing stories and competing narratives that the truth becomes less attainable.”
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Americans might not believe this theory, but Fort Detrick has been a top search result at times in China, Schafer says.
To make sure credible information surfaces above rumors, search engines like Google use certain techniques to adjust the algorithm around topics often at the center of conspiracy theories such as 9/11 or the moon landing, he says. On topics like the Holocaust, for example, the algorithm puts credible information higher than it normally would.
“If you're talking about just the sort of normal, operational, run a business of a search engine,” he says, “there is not much they can do when there's a lack of credible competing information to fill that void.”
This segment aired on October 25, 2021.
14. China's Hypersonic Weapons Tests Don't Have to Be a Sputnik Moment
Conclusion
China’s recent tests with hypersonic weapons systems — and the added layer of fractional orbital bombardment systems — are not a Sputnik moment. The technology is far less dangerous than it is often portrayed. However, these hypersonic tests fit in a broader pattern of the nuclear powers advancing their nuclear arsenals in ways that make the world less safe. Rather than trying to outbid China in a costly arms race, U.S. policymakers should start a conversation around the strategic implications of missile defense and rein in the ever-expanding U.S. missile defense mission.
China's Hypersonic Weapons Tests Don't Have to Be a Sputnik Moment - War on the Rocks
I don’t know if it’s quite a Sputnik moment, but I think it’s very close to that. It has all of our attention.
This summer, China conducted a series of tests with nuclear-capable hypersonic weapons systems that have clearly gotten the attention of officials across the U.S. government. The tests included a hypersonic glide vehicle — a delivery mechanism that can maneuver through the Earth’s atmosphere towards its target — and also incorporated a fractional orbital bombardment system. Because a fractional orbital bombardment system can deliver its payload by entering into lower orbit and then “dropping” it on the target, it could reach the U.S. homeland via the South Pole, bypassing U.S. early warning systems and missile defenses, which are primarily geared towards the interception of ballistic missiles from the north.
Although China has denied the test, many American policymakers have sounded the alarm about the dangers posed by China’s use of hypersonic missiles. Even though America’s missile defense systems are only designed to shoot down unsophisticated ballistic missiles from rogue actors like North Korea, some commentators claim that hypersonic weapons systems would be harder to detect and destroy due to their speed, maneuverability, and flight at low altitudes. Unlike hypersonics, ballistic missiles move through outer space for most of their flight along a predictable parabolic trajectory. Observers fear that China’s recent tests signal a new ability to threaten the U.S. homeland with nuclear and conventional strikes. Rep. Mike Gallagher, member of the House Armed Services Committee, concluded in a recent statement: “This test should serve as a call to action.”
But do the tests that China conducted this summer constitute a Sputnik moment, as Milley suggested? Are hypersonic weapons a “game changer”? The United States should indeed be worried about hypersonics — but perhaps not for the reasons that many policymakers seem to think. China’s tests of nuclear-capable hypersonic weapon do not change the United States’ strategic calculus. China already has a sufficiently large arsenal of long-range ballistic missiles that threatens the United States with nuclear catastrophe in case of an attack. However, Chinese investments in hypersonics are part of a new arms race, driven in large part by America’s unabating pursuit of missile defenses. As a result, the United States should embark on a conversation around the strategic implications of missile defense, take seriously the downsides of U.S. missile defenses in their current form, and rein in the ever-expanding missile defense mission.
Reasons Why China’s New System Isn’t a Problem
Even if China is ahead of the United States in the race to hypersonics, these missiles do not provide a definitive advantage. Hypersonic missiles are said to be incredibly fast, traveling at least five times the speed of sound. Yet, they are slower than ballistic missiles, which travel 20 times the speed of sound for most of their trajectories. In fact, the average speed of hypersonics over the entirety of the flight is lower than that of ballistic missiles. This is due to the fact that hypersonics face air resistance within the relatively dense atmosphere — and they slow down even further when maneuvering during flight.
Hypersonics fly at low altitudes relative to ballistic missiles, which means that the curvature of the earth blocks them from view of radars until they are quite close (with the exception of over-the-horizon radars). Additionally, fractional orbital bombardment systems could approach the U.S. homeland from the south, rather than the north, where the United States has less radar coverage. This, however, does not mean that hypersonic missiles will be “unseen.” Despite these challenges, hypersonics are still trackable. The United States possesses space-based infrared sensors. These would observe the engines of hypersonics burning during launch and then, in the case of fractional orbital bombardment systems, deorbit. That would give the United States ample time to determine where the missiles came from and the direction in which they are heading.
While hypersonic missiles may be less susceptible to current missile defenses due to their maneuverability, intercontinental ballistic missiles are also likely to evade existing missile defense systems. Current missile defense systems are designed to intercept a small salvo of relatively unsophisticated ballistic missiles — but only those without countermeasures. Even the 2019 Missile Defense Review recognized this, stating that the United States is primarily effective against rogue states, such as North Korea. This may still be too optimistic. Missile defense systems like the ground-based midcourse defense system have, even in the most ideal circumstances (such as during a test), not worked optimally.
Reasons Why China’s New System Is Actually a Problem
While the pursuit of hypersonic missiles as such is unlikely to change the strategic calculus, China’s tests are worrisome for a different reason. Hypersonic missiles are part of a broader move among the nuclear powers to modernize their nuclear arsenals and add all sorts of new, potentially destabilizing capabilities to their military toolkits.
After decades of sticking with a minimal deterrent, China is engaging in both nuclear expansion by building new missile silos and qualitative improvements in terms of investing in more diversified platforms to deliver nuclear payloads. The latter includes hypersonics, nuclear submarines, long-range missiles with multiple warheads, and air-launched ballistic missiles. And China is not the only one. All nuclear weapon states are currently modernizing their nuclear arsenals. The United States is planning to upgrade each element of its nuclear force posture, plus investing in a nuclear-armed sea-launch cruise missile and a low-yield warhead for the system. Russia, meanwhile, proposed a whole range of exotic weapon systems along its nuclear modernization plans, including long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles, a nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed cruise missile; a nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed underwater drone; a hypersonic air-to-ground missile; and a hypersonic boost-glide missile. Even smaller nuclear powers are taking steps to develop new systems. The United Kingdom’s integrated review reversed the country’s policy of reducing its nuclear capabilities. Both India and Pakistan also appear to be expanding their nuclear arsenals. North Korea has continued to advance its nuclear weapons program.
This new arms race — one almost entirely unconstrained by arms control measures — is troublesome for at least two reasons. First, states are increasingly seeking technologies and doctrines that straddle the boundaries between nuclear and conventional capabilities. While the United States, for example, is developing conventionally-armed long-range hypersonic missiles, China and Russia have opted for nuclear-capable versions. With the surge in dual-capable technology, one can imagine a situation in which states do not know whether an incoming missile has a nuclear or conventional payload. Moreover, a country may decide to co-locate nuclear and conventionally armed missiles. All of this increases the risk for strategic confusion and miscalculation.
U.S. Missile Defense Is Driving China’s Strategic Weapons Development
China’s nuclear modernization efforts are driven in large part by U.S. investments in missile defense. According to analyst Tong Zhao, “Beijing worries that, in a conflict, the United States might attack China’s nuclear forces and then use its defenses to block China’s few surviving weapons.”
For decades, scholars and analysts predicted that adversaries would develop novel capabilities, particularly those aimed at evading defenses, in response to U.S. efforts to construct missile defenses. Still, U.S. investments in missile defense persisted — and were significantly accelerated under President George W. Bush, who withdrew the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia. Though proponents of missile defense have argued that the U.S. missile defense architecture is limited to dealing with the threat from North Korea and Iran — and would thus not threaten the Chinese and Russian nuclear deterrent, both of whom have a larger and more sophisticated arsenal of nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles — this is not necessarily how these countries have perceived it.
Across these investments, the ever-expanding nature of the U.S. missile defense program has proven particularly problematic. Though the 2019 Missile Defense Review stated that “the United States relies on nuclear deterrence to address the large and more sophisticated Russian and Chinese intercontinental ballistic missile capabilities,” U.S. officials have repeatedly expressed their desire to expand the U.S. missile defense mission to include tackling threats from China and Russia. In fact, the 2019 Missile Defense Review hinted at such long-term ambitions — as did President Donald Trump’s remarks.
Beyond these declarations, U.S. missile defense capabilities have continued to sprawl. The United States has kept pursuing novel capabilities, with the latest iteration revolving around a return to space-based interceptors. The United States has also continuously redesigned existing technology to fit into new missions, particularly those aimed at addressing more complex threats. This was demonstrated by the recent test of the Aegis SM-3 Block IIA missile against an intercontinental ballistic missile-type target. Lastly, the United States has proliferated its missile defense systems around the globe, creating regional architectures in Europe, the Asia-Pacific, and, to some extent, in the Middle East. In fact, missile defense has even been elevated into one of the core missions within NATO.
These developments have not gone unnoticed. Russian and Chinese decision-makers have feared that U.S. missile defenses, even if they do not yet challenge the effectiveness of their nuclear arsenals, are “unstoppable.” Leaders in Russia and China have said as much. When announcing the aforementioned exotic systems in March 2018, President Vladimir Putin, for instance, said that they were a “response to the unilateral withdrawal of the United States of America from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the practical deployment of their missile defense systems both in the US and beyond their national borders.” These fears have motivated new investments in more advanced delivery capabilities, particularly those that could evade U.S. missile defense as evidenced by the hypersonic features in China’s latest tests. That is, the continued expansion of U.S. missile defense capabilities — although they have likely provided little tangible strategic value to the United States to date — nonetheless undermined Russian and Chinese confidence in their nuclear deterrents. In this way, U.S. missile defense policy has been an important driver in the nuclear weapons developments that we see today.
What the United States Should Do Next
Chinese — and Russian — investments in new nuclear technologies offer U.S. policymakers an opportunity to reconsider current approaches to deterrence and missile defense. Rather than advancing the status quo, the United States should critically examine its missile defense mission, as well as reflect upon possible limitations to impose upon its programs.
Over the last 20 years, the strategic implications of missile defense, particularly as it relates to the relationship with China and Russia, have been overlooked or downplayed in the U.S. national security debate. Especially in the U.S. Congress, the missile defense debate has been predominantly inwards-looking — often involving emotional appeals around the protection of citizens. Opposition, though limited, has been primarily framed in terms of financial cost and technological feasibility. In fact, ever since the Bush administration ramped up investments in missile defense, members of Congress have generally accepted the idea that missile defenses are beneficial for nuclear deterrence. Indeed, strategic arguments have been largely absent from the debate. Along the same lines, past administrations have refused to take the complaints from China and Russia seriously. For example, driven by the belief that missile defense investments were key to gain support from Republicans in Congress, the Obama administration pushed hard to ensure that the New START agreement did not constrain U.S. missile defense programs, even though the Russians wanted to discuss the matter further.
In order to break with this track record, policymakers should reopen the debate around U.S. missile defense, especially as it relates to the consequences of missile defense for strategic stability. Congress could, for instance, hold hearings that address not just the technical and financial feasibility of missile defense, but also its strategic effects. Reinvigorating such discussions would open up the possibility to critically examine the U.S. missile defense mission. This could then be taken up by President Joe Biden — who gave a strong rebuttal against the development of homeland missile defenses in the early 2000s. More specifically, the Biden administration should take the following steps: build sufficient linkages between the nuclear posture review and the missile defense review, reflect upon the ways in which missile defenses are counterproductive, and come up with ways to limit the ever-expanding missile defense mission. The latter could, for example, be realized through clear declaratory policy regarding the purpose of missile defenses, as well as restrictions on the development of missile defense capabilities. On the international stage, the United States should bring missile defense to the negotiating table. Indeed, missile defense is likely to be an integral part of any talks around strategic stability and arms control going forward. In doing so, the United States should put forward realistic proposals, ranging from joint technical studies and transparency measures to actual limits on missile defense capabilities. While the politics around missile defense in Washington can be brutal, the administration ought to make the case for a more restrained missile defense posture to Congress and the American people.
Conclusion
China’s recent tests with hypersonic weapons systems — and the added layer of fractional orbital bombardment systems — are not a Sputnik moment. The technology is far less dangerous than it is often portrayed. However, these hypersonic tests fit in a broader pattern of the nuclear powers advancing their nuclear arsenals in ways that make the world less safe. Rather than trying to outbid China in a costly arms race, U.S. policymakers should start a conversation around the strategic implications of missile defense and rein in the ever-expanding U.S. missile defense mission.
Sanne Cornelia J. Verschuren is a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Her research interests include the development of military technology, shifts in military strategy and tactics, and the role of ideas and norms therein. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Brown University in August 2021.
15. How Facebook Failed the World
Will Meta save Facebook?
Excerpts:
“I have blood on my hands,” Zhang wrote in the memo. By the time she left Facebook, she was having trouble sleeping at night. “I consider myself to have been put in an impossible spot—caught between my loyalties to the company and my loyalties to the world as a whole.”
In February, just over a year after Facebook’s high-profile sweep for Middle Eastern and North African domestic-servant trafficking, an internal report identified a web of similar activity, in which women were being trafficked from the Philippines to the Persian Gulf, where they were locked in their homes, denied pay, starved, and abused. This report found that content “should have been detected” for violating Facebook’s policies but had not been, because the mechanism that would have detected much of it had recently been made inactive. The title of the memo is “Domestic Servitude: This Shouldn’t Happen on FB and How We Can Fix It.”
What happened in the Philippines—and in Honduras, and Azerbaijan, and India, and Bolivia—wasn’t just that a very large company lacked a handle on the content posted to its platform. It was that, in many cases, a very large company knew what was happening and failed to meaningfully intervene.
That Facebook has repeatedly prioritized solving problems for Facebook over solving problems for users should not be surprising. The company is under the constant threat of regulation and bad press. Facebook is doing what companies do, triaging and acting in its own self-interest.
But Facebook is not like other companies. It is bigger, and the stakes of its decisions are higher. In North America, we have recently become acutely aware of the risks and harms of social media. But the Facebook we see is the platform at its best. Any solutions will need to apply not only to the problems we still encounter here, but also to those with which the other 90 percent of Facebook’s users struggle every day.
How Facebook Failed the World
Company officials know that their products facilitate violent cartels, ethnic cleansing, and extremist rhetoric. They also know they are not doing enough to stop this.
In the fall of 2019, Facebook launched a massive effort to combat the use of its platforms for human trafficking. Working around the clock, its employees searched Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram for keywords and hashtags that promoted domestic servitude in the Middle East and elsewhere. Over the course of a few weeks, the company took down 129,191 pieces of content, disabled more than 1,000 accounts, tightened its policies, and added new ways to detect this kind of behavior. After they were through, employees congratulated one another on a job well done.
It was a job well done. It just came a little late. In fact, a group of Facebook researchers focused on the Middle East and North Africa had found numerous Instagram profiles being used as advertisements for trafficked domestic servants as early as March 2018. “Indonesian brought with Tourist Visa,” one photo caption on a picture of a woman reads, in Arabic. “We have more of them.” But these profiles weren’t “actioned”—disabled or taken down—an internal report would explain, because Facebook’s policies “did not acknowledge the violation.” A year and a half later, an undercover BBC investigation revealed the full scope of the problem: a broad network that illegally trafficked domestic workers, facilitated by internet platforms and aided by algorithmically boosted hashtags. In response, Facebook banned one hashtag and took down some 700 Instagram profiles. But according to another internal report, “domestic servitude content remained on the platform.”
Not until October 23, 2019, did the hammer drop: Apple threatened to pull Facebook and Instagram from its App Store because of the BBC report. Motivated by what employees describe in an internal document as “potentially severe consequences to the business” that would result from an App Store ban, Facebook finally kicked into high gear. The document makes clear that the decision to act was not the result of new information: “Was this issue known to Facebook before BBC enquiry and Apple escalation? Yes.”
The document was part of the disclosure made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by Frances Haugen, the whistleblower and former Facebook data scientist. A consortium of more than a dozen news organizations, including The Atlantic, has reviewed the redacted versions.
Reading these documents is a little like going to the eye doctor and seeing the world suddenly sharpen into focus. In the United States, Facebook has facilitated the spread of misinformation, hate speech, and political polarization. It has algorithmically surfaced false information about conspiracy theories and vaccines, and was instrumental in the ability of an extremist mob to attempt a violent coup at the Capitol. That much is now painfully familiar.
But these documents show that the Facebook we have in the United States is actually the platform at its best. It’s the version made by people who speak our language and understand our customs, who take our civic problems seriously because those problems are theirs too. It’s the version that exists on a free internet, under a relatively stable government, in a wealthy democracy. It’s also the version to which Facebook dedicates the most moderation resources. Elsewhere, the documents show, things are different. In the most vulnerable parts of the world—places with limited internet access, where smaller user numbers mean bad actors have undue influence—the trade-offs and mistakes that Facebook makes can have deadly consequences.
According to the documents, Facebook is aware that its products are being used to facilitate hate speech in the Middle East, violent cartels in Mexico, ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia, extremist anti-Muslim rhetoric in India, and sex trafficking in Dubai. It is also aware that its efforts to combat these things are insufficient. A March 2021 report notes, “We frequently observe highly coordinated, intentional activity … by problematic actors” that is “particularly prevalent—and problematic—in At-Risk Countries and Contexts”; the report later acknowledges, “Current mitigation strategies are not enough.”
In some cases, employees have successfully taken steps to address these problems, but in many others, the company response has been slow and incomplete. As recently as late 2020, an internal Facebook report found that only 6 percent of Arabic-language hate content on Instagram was detected by Facebook’s systems. Another report that circulated last winter found that, of material posted in Afghanistan that was classified as hate speech within a 30-day range, only 0.23 percent was taken down automatically by Facebook’s tools. In both instances, employees blamed company leadership for insufficient investment.
In many of the world’s most fragile nations, a company worth hundreds of billions of dollars hasn’t invested enough in the language- and dialect-specific artificial intelligence and staffing it needs to address these problems. Indeed, last year, according to the documents, only 13 percent of Facebook’s misinformation-moderation staff hours were devoted to the non-U.S. countries in which it operates, whose populations comprise more than 90 percent of Facebook’s users. (Facebook declined to tell me how many countries it has users in.) And although Facebook users post in at least 160 languages, the company has built robust AI detection in only a fraction of those languages, the ones spoken in large, high-profile markets such as the U.S. and Europe—a choice, the documents show, that means problematic content is seldom detected.
The granular, procedural, sometimes banal back-and-forth exchanges recorded in the documents reveal, in unprecedented detail, how the most powerful company on Earth makes its decisions. And they suggest that, all over the world, Facebook’s choices are consistently driven by public perception, business risk, the threat of regulation, and the specter of “PR fires,” a phrase that appears over and over in the documents. In many cases, Facebook has been slow to respond to developing crises outside the United States and Europe until its hand is forced. “It’s an open secret … that Facebook’s short-term decisions are largely motivated by PR and the potential for negative attention,” an employee named Sophie Zhang wrote in a September 2020 internal memo about Facebook’s failure to act on global misinformation threats. (Most employee names have been redacted for privacy reasons in these documents, but Zhang left the company and came forward as a whistleblower after she wrote this memo.)
Sometimes, even negative attention isn’t enough. In 2019, the human-rights group Avaaz found that Bengali Muslims in India’s Assam state were “facing an extraordinary chorus of abuse and hate” on Facebook: Posts calling Muslims “pigs,” rapists,” and “terrorists” were shared tens of thousands of times and left on the platform because Facebook’s artificial-intelligence systems weren’t built to automatically detect hate speech in Assamese, which is spoken by 23 million people. Facebook removed 96 of the 213 “clearest examples” of hate speech Avaaz flagged for the company before publishing its report. Facebook still does not have technology in place to automatically detect Assamese hate speech.
In a memo dated December 2020 and posted to Workplace, Facebook’s very Facebooklike internal message board, an employee argued that “Facebook’s decision-making on content policy is routinely influenced by political considerations.” To hear this employee tell it, the problem was structural: Employees who are primarily tasked with negotiating with governments over regulation and national security, and with the press over stories, were empowered to weigh in on conversations about building and enforcing Facebook’s rules regarding questionable content around the world. “Time and again,” the memo quotes a Facebook researcher saying, “I’ve seen promising interventions … be prematurely stifled or severely constrained by key decisionmakers—often based on fears of public and policy stakeholder responses.”
Among the consequences of that pattern, according to the memo: The Hindu-nationalist politician T. Raja Singh, who posted to hundreds of thousands of followers on Facebook calling for India’s Rohingya Muslims to be shot—in direct violation of Facebook’s hate-speech guidelines—was allowed to remain on the platform despite repeated requests to ban him, including from the very Facebook employees tasked with monitoring hate speech. A 2020 Wall Street Journal article reported that Facebook’s top public-policy executive in India had raised concerns about backlash if the company were to do so, saying that cracking down on leaders from the ruling party might make running the business more difficult. The company eventually did ban Singh, but not before his posts ping-ponged through the Hindi-speaking world.
In a Workplace thread apparently intended to address employee frustration after the Journal article was published, a leader explained that Facebook’s public-policy teams “are important to the escalations process in that they provide input on a range of issues, including translation, socio-political context, and regulatory risks of different enforcement options.”
Employees weren’t placated. In dozens and dozens of comments, they questioned the decisions Facebook had made regarding which parts of the company to involve in content moderation, and raised doubts about its ability to moderate hate speech in India. They called the situation “sad” and Facebook’s response “inadequate,” and wondered about the “propriety of considering regulatory risk” when it comes to violent speech.
“I have a very basic question,” wrote one worker. “Despite having such strong processes around hate speech, how come there are so many instances that we have failed? It does speak on the efficacy of the process.”
Two other employees said that they had personally reported certain Indian accounts for posting hate speech. Even so, one of the employees wrote, “they still continue to thrive on our platform spewing hateful content.”
We “cannot be proud as a company,” yet another wrote, “if we continue to let such barbarism flourish on our network.”
Taken together, Frances Haugen’s leaked documents show Facebook for what it is: a platform racked by misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy thinking, extremism, hate speech, bullying, abuse, human trafficking, revenge porn, and incitements to violence. It is a company that has pursued worldwide growth since its inception—and then, when called upon by regulators, the press, and the public to quell the problems its sheer size has created, it has claimed that its scale makes completely addressing those problems impossible. Instead, Facebook’s 60,000-person global workforce is engaged in a borderless, endless, ever-bigger game of whack-a-mole, one with no winners and a lot of sore arms.
Sophie Zhang was one of the people playing that game. Despite being a junior-level data scientist, she had a knack for identifying “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” Facebook’s term for the fake accounts that have exploited its platforms to undermine global democracy, defraud users, and spread false information. In her memo, which is included in the Facebook Papers but was previously leaked to BuzzFeed News, Zhang details what she found in her nearly three years at Facebook: coordinated disinformation campaigns in dozens of countries, including India, Brazil, Mexico, Afghanistan, South Korea, Bolivia, Spain, and Ukraine. In some cases, such as in Honduras and Azerbaijan, Zhang was able to tie accounts involved in these campaigns directly to ruling political parties. In the memo, posted to Workplace the day Zhang was fired from Facebook for what the company alleged was poor performance, she says that she made decisions about these accounts with minimal oversight or support, despite repeated entreaties to senior leadership. On multiple occasions, she said, she was told to prioritize other work.
Facebook has not disputed Zhang’s factual assertions about her time at the company, though it maintains that controlling abuse of its platform is a top priority. A Facebook spokesperson said that the company tries “to keep people safe even if it impacts our bottom line,” adding that the company has spent $13 billion on safety since 2016. “Our track record shows that we crack down on abuse abroad with the same intensity that we apply in the U.S.”
Zhang's memo, though, paints a different picture. “We focus upon harm and priority regions like the United States and Western Europe,” she wrote. But eventually, “it became impossible to read the news and monitor world events without feeling the weight of my own responsibility.” Indeed, Facebook explicitly prioritizes certain countries for intervention by sorting them into tiers, the documents show. Zhang “chose not to prioritize” Bolivia, despite credible evidence of inauthentic activity in the run-up to the country’s 2019 election. That election was marred by claims of fraud, which fueled widespread protests; more than 30 people were killed and more than 800 were injured.
“I have blood on my hands,” Zhang wrote in the memo. By the time she left Facebook, she was having trouble sleeping at night. “I consider myself to have been put in an impossible spot—caught between my loyalties to the company and my loyalties to the world as a whole.”
In February, just over a year after Facebook’s high-profile sweep for Middle Eastern and North African domestic-servant trafficking, an internal report identified a web of similar activity, in which women were being trafficked from the Philippines to the Persian Gulf, where they were locked in their homes, denied pay, starved, and abused. This report found that content “should have been detected” for violating Facebook’s policies but had not been, because the mechanism that would have detected much of it had recently been made inactive. The title of the memo is “Domestic Servitude: This Shouldn’t Happen on FB and How We Can Fix It.”
What happened in the Philippines—and in Honduras, and Azerbaijan, and India, and Bolivia—wasn’t just that a very large company lacked a handle on the content posted to its platform. It was that, in many cases, a very large company knew what was happening and failed to meaningfully intervene.
That Facebook has repeatedly prioritized solving problems for Facebook over solving problems for users should not be surprising. The company is under the constant threat of regulation and bad press. Facebook is doing what companies do, triaging and acting in its own self-interest.
But Facebook is not like other companies. It is bigger, and the stakes of its decisions are higher. In North America, we have recently become acutely aware of the risks and harms of social media. But the Facebook we see is the platform at its best. Any solutions will need to apply not only to the problems we still encounter here, but also to those with which the other 90 percent of Facebook’s users struggle every day.
This story was originally published by The Atlantic. Sign up for their newsletter.
16. FDD | The joystick intifada
Excerpts:
Such incitement to violence helped inspire the “Stabbing Intifada” in 2015, a series of lone-wolf attacks that left 42 Israelis dead . Just last month, Palestinians carried out several stabbing attacks in Israel . Echoing Nijm’s sentiment, a spokesperson for the U.S.-designated terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad said , “Acts of resistance are the legitimate right of the Palestinian people.”
The estimated average age of attackers during the stabbing intifada was between 19 and 20 years old. A 2018 study across several Arab countries found that 55% of those in the 18-24 demographic play video games, while 45% of Arabs aged 25-34 play. Fursan al-Aqsa may inspire some of these gamers to live out their video game fantasies and murder Israelis.
But the danger will not be limited to Israel. During the latest round of Israel-Hamas fighting in May 2021, thugs in Los Angeles, New York, and elsewhere attacked Jews in retribution. If Steam or others provide a platform for this game, they will be complicit in putting a target on the backs of Israelis and Jews in Israel and abroad.
FDD | The joystick intifada
fdd.org · by David May Senior Research Analyst · Jack Gibson Intern October 28, 2021
Fursan al-Aqsa: The Knights of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, a new game in which players murder Israeli soldiers in an attempt to “free Palestine,” disappeared from Facebook and video game distribution service Steam last week. Nidal Nijm, the game’s developer, tweeted that he removed the game from Steam due to copyright and technical issues.
Nijm tweeted his frustration: “For ALL ZIONISTs… YOU WILL NEVER STOP #FursanAqsaGame.” Steam, Facebook, and other platforms should not readmit this glorification of violence, which sets back the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace and might even inspire actual attacks.
The game, which was slated for release in December 2021, “addresses the Israel x Palestine conflict from a Palestinian perspective, breaking the cliché of representing Muslim and Arabs as Terrorists, Bandits, Villains and the Americans/Israelis as the ‘Good Guys’ and ‘Heroes’ of History,” according to Nijm, a Brazilian of Palestinian descent. Nijm explained that the recollections of his father, a former Fatah fighter, inspired the video game.
The game’s storyline follows Ahmad al Falastini, a recently freed prisoner and Palestinian student who, according to the game’s website , was “unjustly imprisoned and tortured for five years, had all his family killed by an Israeli airstrike, and now, after getting out from the prison, seeks revenge against those who wronged him, killed his family and stolen [sic] his homeland, by joining a new Palestinian Resistance Movement.”
The game’s trailer declares: “We Never Surrender,” “We Resist Until Death,” and “Resistance is not Terrorism.” Nijm tweeted last month, “My game is not about murdering Israelis,” though that is the central focus of the game. In fact, Nijm goes to great lengths to claim his video game does not promote terrorism.
But Nijm’s attempts to defend his game have taken an antisemitic turn. In June 2020, he wrote on Twitter, “I am against the crimes Israel Army does against Palestinian Civilians, just like what nazist did against jews [sic].” According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, by drawing “comparisons to contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis,” Nijm meets the working definition of antisemitism. IHRA is a joint initiative of dozens of governments, mainly European, committed to Holocaust education and combating antisemitism.
Nijm has also advocated ethnic cleansing. This month on Twitter, he used the common pro-Palestinian battle cry “FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA PALESTINE WILL BE FREE.” This chant , found in Hamas’s 2017 policy document , calls for replacing the Jewish state of Israel with an Arab one. In case there was any uncertainty about what this would entail, Hamas clarified such an outcome in a recent conference titled “Promise of the Hereafter — Post-Liberation Palestine.”
The conference recommended creating rules delineating which Jews Hamas should kill and which Jews Hamas should keep as slaves. Hamas, the conference suggested, should kill anyone considered a “fighter,” while the terrorist group should force “educated Jews and experts” in certain fields to remain and transfer their knowledge to the new Palestinian state.
Fursan al-Aqsa’s gore is part of a Palestinian penchant for promoting attacks on Israelis. Palestinian textbooks distributed for grades 1-12 glorify violence , according to the monitoring group IMPACT-se. The European Parliament recently moved to condition aid to the Palestinians on removing such incitement.
Sources of invective even include senior Palestinian leaders such as Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who stated in 2015, “We welcome every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem.” Abbas’s Fatah party celebrated its anniversary in 2016 by having children wear suicide belts, carry mock RPGs, brandish Molotov cocktails, and bear firearms.
Such incitement to violence helped inspire the “Stabbing Intifada” in 2015, a series of lone-wolf attacks that left 42 Israelis dead . Just last month, Palestinians carried out several stabbing attacks in Israel . Echoing Nijm’s sentiment, a spokesperson for the U.S.-designated terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad said , “Acts of resistance are the legitimate right of the Palestinian people.”
The estimated average age of attackers during the stabbing intifada was between 19 and 20 years old. A 2018 study across several Arab countries found that 55% of those in the 18-24 demographic play video games, while 45% of Arabs aged 25-34 play. Fursan al-Aqsa may inspire some of these gamers to live out their video game fantasies and murder Israelis.
But the danger will not be limited to Israel. During the latest round of Israel-Hamas fighting in May 2021, thugs in Los Angeles, New York, and elsewhere attacked Jews in retribution. If Steam or others provide a platform for this game, they will be complicit in putting a target on the backs of Israelis and Jews in Israel and abroad.
David May is a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Jack Gibson is an intern. Follow David May on Twitter at @DavidSamuelMay. FDD is a Washington, D.C.-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by David May Senior Research Analyst · October 28, 2021
17. 'Lightning Carriers' Could Be Lightweights in an Asian War
Excerpts:
The other Asian navy with a defined Lightning carrier program is South Korea. Seoul originally planned for its Lightning carriers to be part of its amphibious force, but its revised plan involves a bigger ship, dubbed the CVX program, of 30,000-40,000 tons with a 265-meter flight deck. Of all the nations set to operate light carriers in the Indo-Pacific, South Korea’s strategic rationale seems least clear. Certainly, a cadre within the South Korean navy envisions an active blue-water force commensurate with the country’s status as a major trading nation and one of the world’s top three shipbuilders. However, those strategists also recognize that South Korea’s most immediate threat remains North Korea.
A South Korean carrier’s near- to mid-term operational function would be focused on providing a highly survivable airfield that could also provide an additional axis of attack to strike targets well within North Korea. However, given the Korean Peninsula’s constrained geography, options like improving airbase defenses and resilience and investing in larger payload and longer endurance-strike aircraft could do the same at significantly lower cost. Recognizing these trade-offs, South Korea’s maritime strategists may be more focused on the CVX as a preparation for an increasingly competitive future where both China and Japan are operating carrier forces. While this decision certainly reflects some element of prestige-oriented contests, it also makes sense that South Korea wants to develop similar capabilities to the larger states that surround it.
Just two years ago, only two aircraft carriers, USS Ronald Reagan and China’s Liaoning, were permanently based in East Asia. Today, the Chinese navy operates two carriers and plans to add another two full-sized carriers and develop a class of light carriers of its own. By the end of the decade, three Lightning carriers, USS America, JS Izumo, and JS Kaga, will operate from Japan. South Korea plans to field one light carrier sometime in the early 2030s. The region will also receive visits from the Royal Navy’s two Lightning carriers. This is an incredible plus-up in terms of resource investments and a double-down in these states’ navalist visions. They are powerful symbols of intent that will deliver new capabilities to national governments seeking to influence the region’s strategic direction. Relative to their huge costs, however, they will do little to change the anticipated outcomes of the region’s most likely maritime combat scenarios.
'Lightning Carriers' Could Be Lightweights in an Asian War - War on the Rocks
Earlier this month, U.S. Marine Corps F-35B Lightning II fighters embarked on the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force ship JS Izumo as a capability validation. The event marked an important step in the Izumo’s metamorphosis from a flat-deck helicopter carrier (called a “helicopter destroyer” in Japanese nomenclature) into a light aircraft carrier operating advanced fifth-generation short take-off and vertical landing fighters. This is a landmark event for the Japanese navy and Japan’s defense posture more generally, giving Tokyo an aircraft carrier for the first time since World War II. It is also a milestone on a path that is establishing smaller aircraft carriers equipped with the F-35B Lightning II, or “Lightning carriers,” as the new capital ships of Asia.
The U.S. Navy forward-deployed its own Lightning carrier, the USS America, to Sasebo, Japan in 2019. In 2021, the United Kingdom dispatched HMS Queen Elizabeth to the Indo-Pacific on her maiden voyage. South Korea also plans to launch a Lightning carrier by the end of this decade. Procurement of F-35 variants also cracks the door for Singapore or Australia to similarly appoint their large-deck ship programs with carrier-aviation capabilities should they choose to do so. Asia’s Lightning carriers will boost national prestige, but will also come at high cost.
The new capital ships will certainly provide significant additional capabilities for the invested navies, as each navy’s Lightning carriers will have unique roles and configurations that address each nation’s requirements. Resourcing these large ships, state-of-the-art aircraft, and the training and maintenance programs needed to reliably deploy carrier-based aviation capabilities also represents a huge strategic investment by each of the nations involved. Therefore, these procurement decisions signify a strong rebuke of the increasing skepticism regarding the value of aircraft carriers in an age where they face long-range precision strike capabilities and increasingly capable submarines. Examining the Lightning carriers within the context of national defense postures, strategies, and operational doctrines suggests what roles these platforms will likely play in regional naval dynamics.
Despite their power, the Lightning carriers are unlikely to change the anticipated operational outcomes of the combat scenarios envisioned around hotspots like the Korean Peninsula, the Senkaku islands, the Taiwan Strait, and the South China Sea. As a result, they are unlikely to shift the balance of naval power driving deterrence calculations. Should a war break out in and around the confined waters of the East China Sea and the Sea of Japan, Lightning carriers will offer a marginal additional capability that comes at high cost in comparison to what could be created through investments in long-range land-based aircraft and the development of more flexible, resilient, and distributed land-basing options. In a South China Sea conflict, carriers give both South Korea and Japan new options should they be drawn into the fracas, since those waters are beyond the range within which those nations can assemble combat power. However, if they did make such a decision they would have to run a gauntlet of Chinese anti-access/area-denial capabilities to reach the operational theater. The British carriers will likely be far away, so their value could be understood as assets that augment the U.S. Navy’s global pool of 11 supercarriers and two Lightning carriers.
The key driver behind the emergence of the new light carriers is the F-35B aircraft. The F-35B offers a remarkable advancement in capability over the previous generation of short take-off and vertical landing aircraft, primarily the venerable AV-8B Harrier II, which it replaces in the American and British inventories. The F-35’s low-observable design, highly capable electronic warfare and attack capabilities, and enormous data fusion and sharing functions will give the new light carriers cutting-edge warfighting capabilities. The F-35 can act as a data-sharing hub and use its own sensors to extend the “eyes and ears” of the mother ship, acting as an organic airborne intelligence-gathering and limited early-warning asset. The aircraft offers significant independent “Day 1” offensive options before opponents’ air defenses are diminished, as well as defensive options for a commander.
The first of the new Lightning carriers in the region was the USS America. This 45,000-ton vessel is equipped with a 257-meter flight deck and a large aircraft hangar that can carry about twenty F-35B fighters alongside MV-22B Osprey tiltrotors and conventional helicopters. The USS America is designated as a Landing Helicopter Assault ship and serves as the flagship of Expeditionary Strike Group Seven, an amphibious warfare task group configured to embark more than 2,000 marines and their equipment, and is escorted by destroyers and submarines as necessary.
In this role, the America has been quite active in the region, conducting exercises and presence operations. For example, in 2020, USS America conducted operations regarded as a show of force in the vicinity of Chinese vessels, which were interfering with the operations of Malaysia’s petroleum drillship West Capella. While a conventional big-deck amphibious ship could have done this mission with its less-capable air element, neither the political message nor the military implications would have been as sharp. At the time, the U.S. Navy’s sole forward-deployed supercarrier, USS Ronald Reagan, was undergoing maintenance in Japan while the USS Theodore Roosevelt, another carrier deployed at the time, was hamstrung in Guam by a COVID-19 outbreak. Hence the America provided the Seventh Fleet with bench depth with its organic fifth-generation fighter force.
Going forward, USS America is likely to be frequently “subbed in” for peacetime missions normally assigned to the supercarriers. However, without the integrated organic capabilities for surveillance, mission control, and refueling found in a full-fledged carrier air wing, it should not be considered a substitute, not even a “substitute-lite”, in combat scenarios. The America’s lack of true 360-degree coverage airborne early warning and control and aerial refueling capabilities limit the ship’s overall independent combat value. However, the U.S. Marine Corps has considered various solutions to these capability gaps, including considering aerial refueller and airborne early-warning variants of the trusted MV-22. While these solutions offer benefits, the platform itself is not survivable in contested environments and could thus only operate close to the mother ship.
The Royal Navy’s Queen Elizabeth is a larger and more capable ship than the America, displacing 65,000 tons and featuring a 280-meter flight deck. Unlike USS America, the Queen Elizabeth is fitted with a “ski-jump” ramp, allowing its Lightning IIs to launch with heavier payloads. The ship will typically deploy with around two dozen F-35Bs. Along with her sister-ship, HMS Prince of Wales, the Queen Elizabeth will serve as the vanguard of the Royal Navy’s support to London’s “Global Britain” foreign policy aspirations. As impressive “ambassadors” of defense diplomacy, the carrier strike groups centered around these vessels will demonstrate the United Kingdom’s renewed maritime vigor and help to build global partnerships. This utilization is reflected in the bold decision to set the carrier strike group’s maiden deployment destination as the Indo-Pacific, a high-profile symbol of the United Kingdom’s “tilt” toward the region outlined in its latest policy documents, including the 2021 integrated review and Defence in a Competitive Age.
The Queen Elizabeth’s July transit through the Singapore Strait likely put American strategic planners slightly more at ease with their decision to redeploy the Japan-based Ronald Reagan from the Pacific to support America’s military withdrawal from Afghanistan. While the U.S. Navy will likely appreciate a more globally orientated Britain, questions remain about the sustainability of resources for the United Kingdom’s newly acquired Indo-Pacific aspiration. The carriers themselves are tremendously expensive and complex. So will be recreating the United Kingdom’s carrier aviation training and maintenance programs, though the Royal Air Force is reducing those costs by exclusively purchasing the short take-off and vertical landing-capable F-35Bs rather than going with a mixed force of F-35As and F-35Bs. Moreover, the Royal Navy lacks enough ships to reliably source sufficient escorts without leaning on allies and partners, as was evident during the carrier’s maiden deployment this year. The carrier strike group’s surface escort force was composed of warships from the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Netherlands.
The rule of thumb for surface ships force generation states that investing two parts in training and maintenance yields one part deployable time. Therefore, one carrier deployment to the Indo-Pacific every three years would require the Royal Navy to devote roughly half of its capital ships to that mission. Furthermore, carrier readiness must align with cycles for aircraft and surface escorts, both of which have tasks that will compete with strike group workup and deployment periods. Given the growing concern over a resurgent Russia and other alliance commitments, the Royal Navy will likely be stretched thin. As a result, the Royal Navy’s two carriers may sail to the Indo-Pacific less often than many would hope. We can also expect the British Lightning carrier employment to tie the United Kingdom’s global force posture more deeply to the United States and other allies. While acting in the British national interest, the carriers’ combat operations will most likely take place within coalition contexts.
Like the United Kingdom, Japan is in the process of adding two light carriers to its fleet. JS Izumo and her sister-ship, JS Kaga, are much smaller than the Queen Elizabeth, only about 20,000 tons with 248-meter flat flight decks. These ships are expected to operate around a dozen F-35Bs with a surge capacity to double that. Although the U.S. Marine Corps F-35 demonstrated the Izumo‘s ability to support F-35B operations, it is not expected to reach full operational capability until 2028. Before then, the ship will undergo another industrial refit period and wait for the Japan Air Self Defense Force to introduce the F-35B into service, with the initial operational capability expected only by March 2024.
Like their British counterparts, the Izumo and the Kaga should be considered as assets of both their nation and a tight alliance with the United States. However, the Japanese navy does not share the Royal Navy’s global operational ambitions, despite possessing a much larger fleet. We can expect to see these ships mostly operating closer to home, deterring the potential aggression of immediate neighbors. They will also continue service, along with unconverted flat-deck “helicopter destroyers,” in the rotation of flagships leading the annual “Indo-Pacific Deployments” engaging in presence operations and defense diplomacy in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. The Japanese Lightning carriers’ most likely operational role in a conflict would be to provide mobile airfields for conducting combat around Japan’s southwestern islands. This will certainly be a useful option for planners seeking to conduct distributed operations while contending with the conundrum of having many of their land bases within the range of China’s long-range precision-strike capabilities that hold an overwhelming quantitative advantage over Japanese defenses.
Japan’s economy is about twice the size of that of the United Kingdom and they have elected for carriers that are more modest in terms of size, capabilities, and strategic aspiration. Japanese voters have been generally supportive and the ruling political party has vowed the budget growth need to support this project among other expensive priorities, but there are still questions about its fiscal merits. Japan has not had a fixed-wing carrier aviation program since World War II, so it must go through the costly process of developing training, doctrine, and tactics from the scratch. Surely, like the United Kingdom, Japan will receive a lot of assistance from the United States, but this is still a huge cost for a force facing increasingly severe economic pressures associated with a stagnant economy, shrinking national population, and recruiting challenges.
Japan had other options to achieve similar operational capabilities at lower cost. Japan’s Ryukyu Islands are home to two dozen airfields suitable for operating both the F-35A and F-35B. Moreover, the F-35B helps to turn any smaller commercial airfield into a potential forward base. While the airfields lack a carrier’s inherent mobility and their static location makes them vulnerable to enemy targeting, their quantity and operating units’ inherent ability to rapidly move between them has a meaningful value. Furthermore, unlike a ship, a damaged runway can be repaired and recommence air operations relatively quickly. Japan and its partners regularly rehearse rapid runway repair. For example, during the 2020 COPE North exercise, a combined U.S.-Japanese-Australian force removed 1,200 pieces of unexploded ordnance from 5,000 feet of runway in 2 hours 17 minutes. Therefore, it is highly unlikely that an adversary could keep all useable runways continually out of action. Further investments in distributed and resilient operational posture could arguably offer an alternative to the Japanese light carriers in the First Island Chain. While the use of “immobile aircraft carriers” does not sit well with the U.S. Navy’s outlook, an investment in dozens of “unsinkable aircraft carriers” and highly mobile and distributed force structure makes a lot of sense given Japan’s unique geography and the nature of the threats that it faces.
The other Asian navy with a defined Lightning carrier program is South Korea. Seoul originally planned for its Lightning carriers to be part of its amphibious force, but its revised plan involves a bigger ship, dubbed the CVX program, of 30,000-40,000 tons with a 265-meter flight deck. Of all the nations set to operate light carriers in the Indo-Pacific, South Korea’s strategic rationale seems least clear. Certainly, a cadre within the South Korean navy envisions an active blue-water force commensurate with the country’s status as a major trading nation and one of the world’s top three shipbuilders. However, those strategists also recognize that South Korea’s most immediate threat remains North Korea.
A South Korean carrier’s near- to mid-term operational function would be focused on providing a highly survivable airfield that could also provide an additional axis of attack to strike targets well within North Korea. However, given the Korean Peninsula’s constrained geography, options like improving airbase defenses and resilience and investing in larger payload and longer endurance-strike aircraft could do the same at significantly lower cost. Recognizing these trade-offs, South Korea’s maritime strategists may be more focused on the CVX as a preparation for an increasingly competitive future where both China and Japan are operating carrier forces. While this decision certainly reflects some element of prestige-oriented contests, it also makes sense that South Korea wants to develop similar capabilities to the larger states that surround it.
Just two years ago, only two aircraft carriers, USS Ronald Reagan and China’s Liaoning, were permanently based in East Asia. Today, the Chinese navy operates two carriers and plans to add another two full-sized carriers and develop a class of light carriers of its own. By the end of the decade, three Lightning carriers, USS America, JS Izumo, and JS Kaga, will operate from Japan. South Korea plans to field one light carrier sometime in the early 2030s. The region will also receive visits from the Royal Navy’s two Lightning carriers. This is an incredible plus-up in terms of resource investments and a double-down in these states’ navalist visions. They are powerful symbols of intent that will deliver new capabilities to national governments seeking to influence the region’s strategic direction. Relative to their huge costs, however, they will do little to change the anticipated outcomes of the region’s most likely maritime combat scenarios.
John Frederick Bradford is senior fellow in the Maritime Security Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University. Bradford holds a master’s in in strategic studies from RSIS and a bachelor’s (magna cum laude) in Asian studies from Cornell University. He retired from the U.S. Navy with the rank of commander. His U.S. Navy assignments included service as the deputy director of the 7th Fleet Maritime Headquarters, as country director for Japan in the Office of the Secretary of Defense-Policy, and as commanding officer of a ballistic missile defense-capable Aegis destroyer forward deployed to Japan.
Olli Pekka Suorsa, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Rabdan Academy in the United Arab Emirates. Before joining Rabdan, Suorsa worked as a research fellow in the Maritime Security Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) in Singapore. Dr Suorsa received his Ph.D. from the City University of Hong Kong, master’s from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and bachelor’s from the Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia.
18. For First Time in Public, a Detainee Describes Torture at C.I.A. Black Sites
Excerpts:
Mr. Khan began by telling the jury that he was born in Saudi Arabia and was raised in Pakistan, the youngest son of eight siblings, until his father acquired a gas station in Maryland and moved the family to the United States when he was 16. He went on to graduate from a high school in suburban Baltimore and was working for a telecommunications contractor that managed the Pentagon phone system at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks.
He described the attacks and the death of his mother months earlier in 2001 as a turning point in his life.
Until then, he said, he had straddled two worlds: his traditional Pakistani family life and that of an American teenager who “smoked weed occasionally and had my share of girlfriends,” both of which he hid from his mother. After she died, he said, he was drawn to practicing Islam.
He rejected the explanation that Muslims had carried out the attack, “thinking that this was just another way the universe was kicking me while I was down, making me question my faith in Islam.”
During a family trip to Pakistan in 2002 — in which both he and his sister found spouses in arranged marriages — he encountered relatives, cousins and an uncle who had in earlier years joined the jihad in Afghanistan and had ties to Al Qaeda.
“I was lost and vulnerable, and they went after me,” he said, including by showing him “propaganda videos” about the detention operation at Guantánamo, the base where he would be transferred for trial in 2006.
“I went willingly to Al Qaeda,” he said. “I was stupid, so incredibly stupid. But they promised to relieve my pain and purify my sins. They promised to redeem me, and I believed them.”
For First Time in Public, a Detainee Describes Torture at C.I.A. Black Sites
In a sentencing hearing, Majid Khan, a Pakistani who lived in suburban Baltimore before joining Al Qaeda, detailed dungeonlike conditions and episodes of abuse.
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“The more I cooperated, the more I was tortured,” said Majid Khan, who is now cooperating with the government.Credit...Center for Constitutional Rights
By
Published Oct. 28, 2021Updated Oct. 29, 2021, 12:08 a.m. ET
GUANTÁNAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba — A suburban Baltimore high school graduate turned Al Qaeda courier, speaking to a military jury for the first time, gave a detailed account on Thursday of the brutal forced feedings, crude waterboarding and other physical and sexual abuse he endured during his 2003 to 2006 detention in the C.I.A.’s overseas prison network.
Appearing in open court, Majid Khan, 41, became the first former prisoner of the black sites to openly describe, anywhere, the violent and cruel “enhanced interrogation techniques” that agents used to extract information and confessions from terrorism suspects.
For more than two hours, he spoke about dungeonlike conditions, humiliating stretches of nudity with only a hood on his head, sometimes while his arms were chained in ways that made sleep impossible, and being intentionally nearly drowned in icy cold water in tubs at two sites, once while a C.I.A. interrogator counted down from 10 before water was poured into his nose and mouth.
Soon after his capture in Pakistan in March 2003, Mr. Khan said, he cooperated with his captors, telling them everything he knew, with the hope of release. “Instead, the more I cooperated, the more I was tortured,” he said.
The dramatic accounting capped a day in which eight U.S. military officers were selected to serve on a jury, which will deliberate Friday on his official sentence in the range of 25 to 40 years, starting from his guilty plea in February 2012.
But the sentence is largely symbolic, a military commission requirement.
Unknown to the jurors, Mr. Khan and his lawyers reached a secret deal this year with a senior Pentagon official in which his actual sentence could end as early as February and no later than February 2025 because Mr. Khan had become a government cooperator upon pleading guilty.
Jurors were told that in 2012 Mr. Khan pleaded guilty to terrorism charges, including murder in violation of the law of war, for delivering $50,000 of Al Qaeda money from Pakistan to an Al Qaeda affiliate in early 2003. The money was used in a deadly bombing of a Marriott hotel in August 2003, while Mr. Khan was a prisoner of the C.I.A. He has said he did not know how the money would be used.
He also admitted to plotting a number of other crimes with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, notably by wearing a suicide vest in a failed effort in 2002 to assassinate the president of Pakistan at the time, Pervez Musharraf, a U.S. ally in the war on terrorism.
Sentencing was delayed for nearly a decade to give Mr. Khan time and opportunity to cooperate with federal and military prosecutors, so far behind the scenes, in federal and military terrorism cases. In the intervening years, prosecutors and defense lawyers clashed in court filings over who would be called to testify about Mr. Khan’s abuse in C.I.A. custody, and how.
In court on Thursday, Mr. Khan read from a carefully worded 39-page account that did not identify C.I.A. agents or the countries and foreign intelligence agencies that had a role in his secret detention at black sites — information that is protected at the national security court. He expressed remorse for hurting people through his embrace of radical Islam and Al Qaeda, but also found a way around a labyrinth of U.S. intelligence classifications to realize a decade-long ambition to tell the world what U.S. agents had done to him.
“To those who tortured me, I forgive you,” he said, noting that while he was in custody he had rejected Al Qaeda, terrorism, “violence and hatred.”
“I hope in the day of judgment that Allah will do the same for you and for me. I ask forgiveness from those whom I have wronged and I have hurt.”
It was an emotional day for Mr. Khan. His father, Ali, and a sister, both U.S. citizens, sat behind the court in a gallery, seeing him in person for the first time since he left the United States and joined Al Qaeda after the Sept. 11 attacks. They were 50 feet from him and did not seem to recognize the now balding middle-age man with a gray goatee when he first entered the court.
After many minutes he caught their eyes, then waved. His father looked startled. Mr. Khan craned his neck frequently during the proceedings to see his family — and at one point formed a heart with his hands.
Mr. Khan, soon after his transfer to Guantánamo Bay.Credit...-
He juxtaposed his remarks of contrition with previously unheard details of what happened to him at the hands of the United States, the country his parents and siblings adopted by becoming citizens even as he did not.
His father wept through long stretches of the descriptions, at times hiding his head in his hands, while his sister, also tearful, tried to comfort him. The jury of Marine, Navy and Army officers watched and listened soberly, but displayed no emotion.
He received beatings while nude and spent long stretches in chains — at times shackled to a wall and crouching “like a dog,” he said, or with his arms extended high above his head and chained to a beam inside his cell. He was kept in darkness and dragged, hooded and shackled, his head slamming into floors, walls and stairs as he was moved between cells.
Before the C.I.A. moved him from one prison to another, he said, a medic inserted an enema and then put him in a diaper held in place by duct tape so he would not need a bathroom break during flights. Guards moving him would hood him, aside from the time he had his face duct taped.
While held in a Muslim country, he said, his captors allowed him to pray. But at times the Americans did not.
Earlier accounts released by his lawyers said he was so sleep deprived for a time that he began to hallucinate. He described the experience: images of a cow and a giant lizard advancing on him inside a cell while he was chained to a beam above his head. He tried to kick them away but lost his balance, causing his chains to jerk him.
Mr. Khan gained attention with the release of a 2014 study of the C.I.A. program by the Senate Intelligence Committee that said, after he refused to eat, his captors “infused” a puree of his lunch through his anus. The C.I.A. called it rectal refeeding. Mr. Khan called it rape.
The C.I.A. pumped water up the rectum of prisoners who would not follow a command to drink. Mr. Khan said this was done to him with “green garden hoses. They connected one end to the faucet, put the other in my rectum and they turned on the water.” He said he lost control of his bowels after those episodes and, to this day, has hemorrhoids.
He spoke about failed and sadistic responses to his hunger strikes and other acts of rebellion. Medics would roughly insert a feeding tube up his nose and down the back of his throat. He would try to bite it off and, in at least one instance, he said, a C.I.A. officer used a plunger to force food inside his stomach, a technique that caused stomach cramps and diarrhea.
The intelligence agency declined Thursday to comment on the descriptions offered in the hearing but noted that the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program ended in 2009.
Lawyers sought permission to bring Mr. Khan’s wife and daughter, who was born after his capture, to the court, but the commander of the military’s Southern Command, which oversees prison operations, opposed their attendance. Like Mr. Khan, who acquired permanent resident status as a boy in the United States but never became a U.S. citizen, his wife and daughter are citizens of Pakistan.
Mr. Khan began by telling the jury that he was born in Saudi Arabia and was raised in Pakistan, the youngest son of eight siblings, until his father acquired a gas station in Maryland and moved the family to the United States when he was 16. He went on to graduate from a high school in suburban Baltimore and was working for a telecommunications contractor that managed the Pentagon phone system at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks.
He described the attacks and the death of his mother months earlier in 2001 as a turning point in his life.
Until then, he said, he had straddled two worlds: his traditional Pakistani family life and that of an American teenager who “smoked weed occasionally and had my share of girlfriends,” both of which he hid from his mother. After she died, he said, he was drawn to practicing Islam.
He rejected the explanation that Muslims had carried out the attack, “thinking that this was just another way the universe was kicking me while I was down, making me question my faith in Islam.”
During a family trip to Pakistan in 2002 — in which both he and his sister found spouses in arranged marriages — he encountered relatives, cousins and an uncle who had in earlier years joined the jihad in Afghanistan and had ties to Al Qaeda.
“I was lost and vulnerable, and they went after me,” he said, including by showing him “propaganda videos” about the detention operation at Guantánamo, the base where he would be transferred for trial in 2006.
“I went willingly to Al Qaeda,” he said. “I was stupid, so incredibly stupid. But they promised to relieve my pain and purify my sins. They promised to redeem me, and I believed them.”
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
