Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners


Quotes of the Day:


“When we are under attack, the temptation is to get emotional, to tell the aggressors to stop, to make threats as to what we’ll do if they keep going. That puts us in a weak position: we’ve revealed both our fears and our plans, and words rarely deter aggressors. Sending them a message through a third party or revealing it indirectly through action is much more effective. That way you signal that you are already maneuvering against them.”
- Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War

"Nothing shows a man's character more than what he laughs at."
- Goethe

"To acquire the habit of reading is to contrsuct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life."
- W. Somerst Maughm




1. Statement From Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III (CHinese Balloon shootdown)

2. F-22 Safely Shoots Down Chinese Spy Balloon Off South Carolina Coast

3. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 4, 2023

4. China Aids Russia’s War in Ukraine, Trade Data Shows

5. A Chinese balloon exposes a massive vulnerability

6. Ties to Kabul Bombing Put ISIS Leader in Somalia in U.S. Cross Hairs

7. A balloon upended Blinken’s trip to China. That could be a good thing.

8. War preparation needed: experts (Taiwan)

9. ‘Spy’ balloon sparks concern in Taipei

10. What the War in Ukraine Tells Us About Deterring China

11. China says it 'reserves the right' to deal with 'similar situations' after US jets shoot down suspected spy balloon

12. China urges calm over 'spy' balloon in US airspace

13. Washington weighing deploying medium-range missiles to U.S. forces in Japan, Sankei reports

14. INTERVIEW: 'We have been oppressed by unfreedom for a long time in China'

15. Xi Jinping’s Power Grab Is Paying Off

16. When It Comes to Building Its Own Defense, Europe Has Blinked

17. Critics see Chinese spy balloon as Biden's latest policy blunder

18. The Pentagon Saw a Warship Boondoggle. Congress Saw Jobs.

19. ISO Hearing: The Role of Special Operations Forces in Great Power Competition

20. China blames U.S. politics for ‘overreaction’ to suspected spy balloon







1. Statement From Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III (Chinese Balloon shootdown)


RELEASE

IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Statement From Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III


https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3288535/statement-from-secretary-of-defense-lloyd-j-austin-iii/

Feb. 4, 2023 |

https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3288535/statement-from-secretary-of-defense-lloyd-j-austin-iii/

This afternoon, at the direction of President Biden, U.S. fighter aircraft assigned to U.S. Northern Command successfully brought down the high altitude surveillance balloon launched by and belonging to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) over the water off the coast of South Carolina in U.S. airspace. The balloon, which was being used by the PRC in an attempt to surveil strategic sites in the continental United States, was brought down above U.S. territorial waters. On Wednesday, President Biden gave his authorization to take down the surveillance balloon as soon as the mission could be accomplished without undue risk to American lives under the balloon’s path. After careful analysis, U.S. military commanders had determined downing the balloon while over land posed an undue risk to people across a wide area due to the size and altitude of the balloon and its surveillance payload. In accordance with the President’s direction, the Department of Defense developed options to take down the balloon safely over our territorial waters, while closely monitoring its path and intelligence collection activities. This action was taken in coordination, and with the full support, of the Canadian government. And we thank Canada for its contribution to tracking and analysis of the balloon through NORAD as it transited North America. Today’s deliberate and lawful action demonstrates that President Biden and his national security team will always put the safety and security of the American people first while responding effectively to the PRC’s unacceptable violation of our sovereignty.



2. F-22 Safely Shoots Down Chinese Spy Balloon Off South Carolina Coast


I am sure he pundits and armchair quarterbacks will challege the account and find fault with it to support their agendas.


Excerpts:


U.S. officials first detected the balloon and its payload on January 28 when it entered U.S. airspace near the Aleutian Islands. The balloon traversed Alaska, Canada and re-entered U.S. airspace over Idaho. "President Biden asked the military to present options and on Wednesday President Biden gave his authorization to take down the Chinese surveillance balloon as soon as the mission could be accomplished without undue risk to us civilians under the balloon's path," said a senior defense official speaking on background. "Military commanders determined that there was undue risk of debris causing harm to civilians while the balloon was overland."
...
Long before the shoot down, U.S. officials took steps to protect against the balloon's collection of sensitive information, mitigating its intelligence value to the Chinese. The senior defense official said the recovery of the balloon will enable U.S. analysts to examine sensitive Chinese equipment. "I would also note that while we took all necessary steps to protect against the PRC surveillance balloon's collection of sensitive information, the surveillance balloon's overflight of U.S. territory was of intelligence value to us," the official said. "I can't go into more detail, but we were able to study and scrutinize the balloon and its equipment, which has been valuable."
...
The mission now transitions to one of recovery. There are a number of U.S. Navy and Coast Guard vessels establishing a security perimeter around the area where the balloon came to Earth. They are searching for debris, said a senior military official also speaking on background.
There is no estimate for how long the recovery mission will take, the military official said, but the fact that it came down in such a shallow area should make recovery "fairly easy".



F-22 Safely Shoots Down Chinese Spy Balloon Off South Carolina Coast

defense.gov · by Jim Garamone

A U.S. Air Force fighter safely shot down a Chinese high-altitude surveillance balloon today, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said in a written statement.



F-22 Maneuver

Air Force Capt. Samuel “RaZZ” Larson, F-22 Raptor Demonstration Team commander and pilot, performs an aerial maneuver during the team’s certification flight at Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia, Dec. 9, 2022.

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VIRIN: 221209-F-DP387-1130A

President Joe Biden ordered the action on Wednesday, but it was delayed until the balloon was over water off the coast of South Carolina to ensure no Americans on the ground were harmed.

"The balloon, which was being used by the PRC in an attempt to surveil strategic sites in the continental United States, was brought down above U.S. territorial waters," Austin said.

The action was taken in coordination and support of the Canadian government. "We thank Canada for its contribution to tracking and analysis of the balloon through [North American Aerospace Defense Command] as it transited North America," Austin said. "Today's deliberate and lawful action demonstrates that President Biden and his national security team will always put the safety and security of the American people first while responding effectively to the PRC's unacceptable violation of our sovereignty," Austin said referring to the Peoples Republic of China.

U.S. officials first detected the balloon and its payload on January 28 when it entered U.S. airspace near the Aleutian Islands. The balloon traversed Alaska, Canada and re-entered U.S. airspace over Idaho. "President Biden asked the military to present options and on Wednesday President Biden gave his authorization to take down the Chinese surveillance balloon as soon as the mission could be accomplished without undue risk to us civilians under the balloon's path," said a senior defense official speaking on background. "Military commanders determined that there was undue risk of debris causing harm to civilians while the balloon was overland."

An F-22 Raptor fighter from the 1st Fighter Wing at Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, fired one AIM-9X Sidewinder missile at the balloon.

The balloon fell approximately six miles off the coast in about 47 feet of water. No one was hurt.

Long before the shoot down, U.S. officials took steps to protect against the balloon's collection of sensitive information, mitigating its intelligence value to the Chinese. The senior defense official said the recovery of the balloon will enable U.S. analysts to examine sensitive Chinese equipment. "I would also note that while we took all necessary steps to protect against the PRC surveillance balloon's collection of sensitive information, the surveillance balloon's overflight of U.S. territory was of intelligence value to us," the official said. "I can't go into more detail, but we were able to study and scrutinize the balloon and its equipment, which has been valuable."



Pentagon Aerial

An aerial view of the Pentagon.

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Photo By: Air Force Staff Sgt. Brittany A. Chase, DOD

VIRIN: 210512-D-BM568-1269C

The balloon did not pose a military or physical threat. Still its intrusion into American airspace over several days was an unacceptable violation of U.S. sovereignty. The official said Chinese balloons briefly transited the continental United States at least three times during the prior administration.

While Chinese officials admitted that the balloon was theirs, they said it was a runaway weather balloon. "The PRC has claimed publicly that the high-altitude balloon operating above the United States is a weather balloon that was blown off course. This is false," the official said. "This was a PRC surveillance balloon. This surveillance balloon purposely traversed the United States and Canada, and we are confident it was seeking to monitor sensitive military sites."

The mission now transitions to one of recovery. There are a number of U.S. Navy and Coast Guard vessels establishing a security perimeter around the area where the balloon came to Earth. They are searching for debris, said a senior military official also speaking on background.

There is no estimate for how long the recovery mission will take, the military official said, but the fact that it came down in such a shallow area should make recovery "fairly easy".

The military official gave some detail of the engagement. The F-22 fired the Sidewinder at the balloon from an altitude of 58,000 feet. The balloon at the time was between 60,000 and 65,000 feet.

F-15 Eagles flying from Barnes Air National Guard Base, Massachusetts, supported the F-22, as did tankers from multiple states including Oregon, Montana, South Carolina and North Carolina. Canadian forces also helped track the overflight of the balloon.

The Navy has deployed the destroyer USS Oscar Austin, the cruiser USS Philippine Sea and the USS Carter Hall, an amphibious landing ship in support of the effort.

defense.gov · by Jim Garamone



3. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 4, 2023


Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-february-4-2023


Key Takeaways

  • A Russian decisive offensive operation is unlikely to target Zaporizhia City from the western Donetsk–Zaporizhia frontline.
  • Russian forces have not shown the capacity to sustain the multiple simultaneous large-scale offensive operations that would be necessary to reach the administrative borders of Donetsk Oblast and seize Zaporizhia City.
  • The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) has launched a series of efforts to restructure and consolidate the mismatched blend of irregular forces supporting Russia’s war in Ukraine into Russia’s conventional military forces.
  • The Russian MoD’s decision to undertake significant structural reform while preparing for a major offensive in eastern Ukraine likely represents an effort by Russian Chief of the General Staff Army General Valery Gerasimov to complete reforms while he has Russian President Vladimir Putin’s often fleeting favor.
  • Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin is overcompensating for his declining influence by continuing to frame himself as the sole victor in the Bakhmut area.
  • Russian and Ukrainian officials exchanged 63 Russian POWs for 116 Ukrainian POWs.
  • Russian forces conducted limited offensive operations northwest of Svatove and continued offensive operations around Kreminna.
  • Russian forces continued offensive operations around Bakhmut and Vuhledar but have slowed the pace of their offensives along the western outskirts of Donetsk City.
  • Ukrainian forces continue to target Russian military assets in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast.
  • Russian authorities are attempting to reinvigorate force generation efforts by drawing from broader pools of manpower.


RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 4, 2023

Feb 4, 2023 - Press ISW


Download the PDF

understandingwar.org

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, February 4, 2023

Kateryna Stepanenko, Riley Bailey, Grace Mappes, Angela Howard, and Frederick W. Kagan

February 4, 7:15 pm ET

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

Russian decisive offensive operations are unlikely to target Zaporizhia City from the western Donetsk–Zaporizhia frontline as the Russian military continues to prepare for an offensive in western Luhansk Oblast. Advisor to the exiled Ukrainian mayor of Mariupol, Petro Andryushenko, stated that Russian soldiers in Mariupol are telling residents that the Russian military ordered offensive operations against Vuhledar, areas southwest of Bakhmut, Zaporizhia City and Zaporizhia Oblast.[1] Andryushenko added that Russia is also building up forces at barracks and settlements on roads leading to frontline positions, and that Russia had brought an extra 10,000–15,000 troops to Mariupol and its outskirts.[2] Andryushenko noted the Russian forces reportedly have 30,000 troops in the greater Mariupol area. ISW continues to assess that Russia is concentrating troops and military equipment to stage a decisive offensive on the western Luhansk Oblast and Bakhmut areas.

Western and Ukrainian military officials have repeatedly noted that Russian forces are likely setting conditions to reach the Luhansk and Donetsk oblast borders — an objective that Russian Chief of General Staff Army General Valery Gerasimov had also outlined on December 22.[3] ISW continues to observe Russian transfers of military equipment and elite units and the preparations of logistics in occupied Luhansk Oblast that support Western, Ukrainian, and Russian forecasts for the western Luhansk Oblast–Bakhmut offensive.[4] Russian forces are also intensifying attacks on Bakhmut while neglecting frontlines around Donetsk City.[5] The Ukrainian military has reported that Russian forces have not massed a powerful enough strike group to conduct an offensive in the Zaporizhia direction.[6]

Russian sources have been claiming Russian forces have been making territorial gains in Zaporizhia Oblast in late January, claims that ISW assesses were likely an information operation aimed at dispersing Ukrainian forces ahead of the decisive offensive in the east.[7] Andryushenko had previously stated that Russian officials were restricting Mariupol residents from accessing non-Russian information and were misrepresenting the situation on the frontlines, so Russian forces spreading rumors about an attack on Zaporizhia City may be a continuation of such information operations.[8] Andryushenko has also consistently reported increases of Russian forces in Mariupol throughout different stages of the war and noted that Russian forces are using the city as a military base due to its proximity to Russia.[9]

Russia has not shown the capacity to sustain the multiple major offensive operations that would be necessary to simultaneously reach the Donetsk Oblast administrative borders and take Zaporizhia City. Andryushenko’s reported Russian troop concentration of 30,000 servicemen in the Mariupol area is not sufficient to attack Zaporizhia, a city of roughly three-quarters of a million people, while continuing offensive operations to encircle Bakhmut and launching a new major attack in Luhansk Oblast. Russian conventional forces, reserves, and Wagner forces have committed tens of thousands of troops to the effort to seize Bakhmut already, reportedly suffering many thousands of casualties in that effort.[10] Bakhmut had a pre-war population of slightly over 70,000.

The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) has launched a series of efforts to restructure and consolidate the mismatched blend of irregular forces supporting Russia’s war in Ukraine into Russia’s conventional military forces. A Russian MoD map published on February 3 included occupied Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia oblasts in the Southern Military District’s (SMD) area of responsibility.[11] The SMD press service also announced that the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Militias are integrating into the Russian Armed Forces.[12] The UK MoD assessed on February 4 that integration of occupied Ukrainian territories into the SMD zone likely follows Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu‘s January 17 reform announcement about the formation of “self-sufficient force groupings” in Ukraine.[13] The UK MoD further assessed that these integration efforts aim to integrate occupied territories into Russia's long-term strategic posture but are unlikely to generate an impact on combat operations in the near term. ISW has also previously assessed that the Kremlin’s effort to reconstitute the Russian Armed Forces is a long-term commitment in its preparations both for a protracted war and to rebuild Russia’s conventional military might generally.[14]

The Russian MoD might be taking some steps to integrate volunteer battalions into its framework. A prominent Russian milblogger stated on February 4 that the Union of Volunteers of Donbas military units elected to create a single Russian Armed Forces Volunteer Corps from Russian Armed Forces volunteer units.[15] A DNR Telegram channel claimed on February 2 that Russian officials coerced mobilized miners into taking military oaths to Russia despite months of prior service.[16] Russian media outlet TASS also reported on February 4 that the Russian government expanded military medical commissions’ mandate to provide care for volunteer formations as well.[17]

The Russian MoD may be rushing to integrate and professionalize irregular forces into its conventional structure while Chief of the Russian General Staff Army General Valery Gerasimov has the favor of Russian President Vladimir Putin.[18] Russian irregular forces in Ukraine include contract soldiers, mobilized soldiers, the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics‘ (DNR and LNR) forces, volunteer battalions, Russian Combat Army Reserve (BARS) forces, Cossack and Chechen units, and Wagner Group mercenaries. These formations have different objectives, limitations, pre-requisites, hierarchies, and legal statuses. The Russian MoD has initiated several professionalization efforts since Gerasimov’s appointment as the Commander of the Joint Grouping of Forces in Ukraine on January 11, and it is logical that the Russian MoD would seek to cohere the current odd mix of forces into a more traditional structure.[19] These integration efforts coincide with the launching of decisive offensive operations, however, and will likely generate short-term disruptions and pushback among units needed for those operations. Undertaking complex structural and administrative changes while launching major offensive operations is an unusual step, however appropriate the changes. Gerasimov likely feels that he has a limited window to make changes to Russian forces before the impossibility of achieving the grandiose objectives he has apparently been set causes him to lose Putin’s favor once again.

Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin is likely overcompensating for his declining influence by continuing to frame himself as the sole victor in the Bakhmut area and attempting to leverage his remaining influence online. Prigozhin responded to a question on February 4 about rumors of a new Russian offensive by comparing Wagner Group forces’ battle strategy to a chess game in which players must “hit [their opponents’] head with a chessboard.”[20] Prigozhin also called for Russian authorities to investigate US-based Russian-language international media outlet RTVI for disseminating “slanderous information,” one of many recent calls for Russian officials to take action based on his demands alone.[21] Select Russian milbloggers no longer flock to Prigozhin’s defense, however. One Russian milblogger, for example, characterized Prigozhin as a “brilliant troll” and claimed that DNR and LNR mobilized forces suffer significant casualties on the entire Donbas frontline without sufficient support while Wagner Group forces concentrated their efforts around Bakhmut.[22]

Russia and Ukraine conducted a prisoner of war (POW) exchange on February 4, exchanging 63 Russian POWs for 116 Ukrainian POWs.[23] The Russian MoD claimed that the Russian POWs included personnel of an unspecified “sensitive category,” and the MoD credited the United Arab Emirates leadership for mediating the exchange. A Russian milblogger expressed continued frustration at uneven Russo–Ukrainian POW exchanges.[24]

Key Takeaways

  • A Russian decisive offensive operation is unlikely to target Zaporizhia City from the western Donetsk–Zaporizhia frontline.
  • Russian forces have not shown the capacity to sustain the multiple simultaneous large-scale offensive operations that would be necessary to reach the administrative borders of Donetsk Oblast and seize Zaporizhia City.
  • The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) has launched a series of efforts to restructure and consolidate the mismatched blend of irregular forces supporting Russia’s war in Ukraine into Russia’s conventional military forces.
  • The Russian MoD’s decision to undertake significant structural reform while preparing for a major offensive in eastern Ukraine likely represents an effort by Russian Chief of the General Staff Army General Valery Gerasimov to complete reforms while he has Russian President Vladimir Putin’s often fleeting favor.
  • Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin is overcompensating for his declining influence by continuing to frame himself as the sole victor in the Bakhmut area.
  • Russian and Ukrainian officials exchanged 63 Russian POWs for 116 Ukrainian POWs.
  • Russian forces conducted limited offensive operations northwest of Svatove and continued offensive operations around Kreminna.
  • Russian forces continued offensive operations around Bakhmut and Vuhledar but have slowed the pace of their offensives along the western outskirts of Donetsk City.
  • Ukrainian forces continue to target Russian military assets in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast.
  • Russian authorities are attempting to reinvigorate force generation efforts by drawing from broader pools of manpower.


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

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

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

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

Russian sources reported that Russian forces conducted limited offensives northwest of Svatove on February 4. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces conducted successful offensive actions near Dvorichne, Kharkiv Oblast (53km northwest of Svatove) and pushed Ukrainian forces out of the western outskirts of the settlement.[25] Other Russian sources amplified the claim, although ISW has not observed any visual confirmation that Russian forces have advanced in the area.[26] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces also conducted an attack in the direction of Stelmakhivka (15km west of Svatove).[27]

Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Kreminna area on February 4. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Kreminna itself and Hrekivka (27km northwest of Kreminna), Nevske (18km northwest of Kreminna), and Dibrova (5km southwest of Kreminna).[28] Russian milbloggers claimed that elements of the 144th Motorized Rifle Division of the 20th Guards Combined Arms Army of the Western Military District launched an offensive along the Chervonopopivka-Kreminna line a few days ago and advanced close to Yampolivka, Donetsk Oblast (16km west of Kreminna), where fighting is reportedly ongoing.[29] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces pushed Ukrainian forces out of positions south and southwest of Dibrova and advanced closer to Hryhorivka (11km south of Kreminna).[30] Russian milbloggers continue to make contradictory claims about Bilohorivka (12km south of Kreminna), with one milblogger claiming that Russian forces captured the settlement and are currently clearing it and another claiming that Russian forces are still fighting to capture Bilohorivka.[31]

Ukrainian forces reportedly continue to strike Russian logistics in Luhansk Oblast. Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces struck an industrial facility in Svatove with HIMARS rockets on February 4.[32]

A fire at an industrial facility in Belgorod Oblast may further disrupt Russian logistics in Ukraine. Russian, Ukrainian, and social media sources posted footage on February 4 showing an oil depot burning at a facility in Borsivka, Belgorod Oblast that reportedly produces metal structures for the repair of the Kerch Strait Bridge in Crimea.[33] Belgorod Oblast Governor Vyacheslav Vladimirovich claimed that Ukrainian forces struck an industrial facility in Borisvka Raion in Belgorod Oblast.[34] The fire may have damaged the industrial facility and could disrupt ongoing Russian repair efforts for the Kerch Strait Bridge, a critical ground line of communication (GLOC) for Russian forces in southern Ukraine.


Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine

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

Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Bakhmut area on February 4. Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar stated that Russian forces have committed a substantial portion of their forces to offensive operations in the direction of Bakhmut intending to break through Ukrainian defenses in the past week but that they have been unsuccessful.[35] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Bakhmut itself, within 31km northeast of Bakhmut near Verkhokamianske, Krasna Hora, and Paraskoviivka; and 6km west of Bakhmut near Ivanivske.[36] Geolocated footage published on February 4 indicates that Russian forces likely advanced west of Sil (13km north of Bakhmut).[37] Russian sources claimed that Wagner Group fighters continued assaults near Rozdolivka (17km northeast of Bakhmut) and Vasyukivka (15km north of Bakhmut), and that Russian forces attempted to advance in the direction of Spirne (28km northeast of Bakhmut).[38]Russian sources claimed that Russian forces continue offensive operations southwest of Bakhmut attempting to reach the T0504 Highway between Chasiv Yar and Bakhmut.[39] Former Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) Minister Vitaly Kiselyov claimed that Russian forces between Ivanivske and Stupochky (12km southwest of Bakhmut) advanced to within a kilometer of the highway, although other Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces were still several kilometers away from the highway.[40] ISW has not observed visual confirmation of Russian forces being closer than 2.5km to the T0504 highway.

Russian milbloggers are attempting to portray Russian offensives northeast of Bakhmut and south of Kreminna as being a complementary effort to encircle Siversk. A prominent milblogger claimed that the simultaneous advances of the Wagner Group from the direction of Soledar and Russian forces claimed advances in the direction of Lyman and around Bilohorivka, Luhansk Oblast create the prerequisites for encircling Siversk from the south, north, and east.[41] Another Russian milblogger claimed that renewed Russian offensive operations south of Kreminna indicate that Russian forces plan to encircle Siversk.[42] These Russian milbloggers may believe that Russian forces only need to cut off sections of the T0513 highway north and south of Siversk to operationally encircle the settlement, but Ukrainian forces would still be able to supply forces in the settlement from country roads leading west. Russian forces would need to advance upwards of 15km to come close to cutting off all the ground lines of communication (GLOCs) likely required to encircle Siversk. That level of advance would require a substantially more concerted Russian offensive effort in the direction of Siversk from the north, east, and south than ISW has hitherto observed.

Russian offensive operations along the western outskirts of Donetsk City appear to have slowed in recent days. The Ukrainian General Staff has reported that Russian forces have not conducted assaults on specified settlements in the Donetsk City-Avdiivka area for the previous three days.[43] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces conducted an assault near Paraskoviivka (34km southwest of Avdiivka) and amplified footage claiming to show elements of the 150th Motorized Rifle Division of the 8th Guards Combined Arms Army of the Southern Military District clearing a captured Ukrainian fortified position in the western part of Marinka (27km southwest of Avdiivka).[44] The slowed pace of Russian assaults in the Avdiivka–Donetsk City area may support ISW’s assessment that Russian forces likely lack the combat power to sustain multiple large offensive operations in Ukraine, and thus, Russian forces may have slowed their pace of assaults in this area to prioritize their offensive to capture Bakhmut and their likely imminent offensive in Luhansk Oblast.

Russian forces reportedly continued offensive operations around Vuhledar (30km southwest of Donetsk City) on February 4. Geolocated footage published on February 4 shows Russian forces with armored vehicles attempting to advance north of Mykilske (27km southwest of Donetsk City) towards the T0524 highway leading into Vuhledar from the northeast.[45] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces continued offensive operations near the dacha areas south and west of Vuhledar and unsuccessfully attempted to bypass the settlement in an unspecified direction.[46] One Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces have denied Russian forces the opportunity to gain a foothold on the outskirts of the settlement.[47] Russian milbloggers amplified footage purporting to show units of the 40th and 155th Naval Infantry Brigades of the Pacific Fleet conducting assaults near Vuhledar.[48] A Ukrainian military officer reported that Russian forces continue to bring in artillery and infantry personnel into the Vuhledar area and are likely preparing for the slow grinding assaults characteristic of Russian offensives in the rest of eastern Ukraine.[49] Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian personnel transfers and probing of Russian defenses in the area may suggest that Ukrainian forces intend to launch a localized counteroffensive around Vuhledar, although ISW does not make assessments about specific future Ukrainian operations.[50]


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

Ukrainian forces continue to target Russian military assets in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast. Geolocated footage shows Ukrainian forces striking a Russian Tor M2DT air defense system 12km southwest of Nova Kakhovka, Kherson Oblast and 8km from the east (left) bank of the Dnipro River on February 3, the second instance in two days.[51] The presence of these short-range air defense systems optimized for Arctic warfare near the riverbank suggests that the Russian 80th Separate Arctic Motorized Rifle Brigade of the Northern Fleet is operating close to the riverbank and has brought its own air defense systems.[52] The Tor M2DT was clearly unable to defend itself against whatever system Ukraine used to destroy it in a single shot.

Russian forces continued to conduct routine fire west of Hulyaipole and in Dnipropetrovsk, Kherson, and Mykolaiv oblasts on February 4.[53] A Ukrainian source claimed that Russian forces shelled Kherson City with incendiary munitions.[54]



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

Russian authorities are attempting to reinvigorate force generation efforts by drawing from broader personnel pools. The Ukrainian General Staff stated on February 4 that Russian forces have expanded convict recruitment efforts to target women, reportedly recruiting about 50 women from a women’s correctional colony in occupied Snizhne, Donetsk Oblast over the course of a week.[55] Russian State Duma parliamentarian (and a member of the Russian Mobilization Working Group) Dmitry Gusev proposed that Russian authorities mobilize scientists, engineers, and IT specialists in an interview with a state-affiliated outlet on February 2.[56] Gusev advocated that Russian officials deploy these professionals within specialized units but acknowledged that such a framework would require increased subtlety within the Russian “mobilization machine.”[57] Russian State Duma parliamentarian Maksim Ivanov stated on February 3 that he supports the mobilization of unemployed Russians in place of valuable specialists and engineers.[58] Kremlin-affiliated outlet reported that the Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights criticized Ivanov’s suggestion and that a council member claimed that every Russian is valuable.[59]

The war in Ukraine has likely created a domestic shortage of Russian medical professionals, fueling limited protests. A Russian source stated on February 3 that Russian residents in Volchikha, Altai Krai demanded the resignation of a head physician and held a rally to show their dissatisfaction with local healthcare after the death of a local child at a hospital with no doctor on site.[60] A separate source reported that the regional minister of health heard complaints from local residents and an investigative committee opened a case investigating criminal negligence following the death of a child in Gorny, Zabaykalsky Krai.[61] The child was discharged from a hospital and died while waiting for an ambulance after her condition deteriorated.[62] The sources reporting on both instances attributed the personnel shortages, deaths, and publicized dissatisfaction to heavy Russian military recruitment of medical specialists.[63]

Russian authorities continue to frame limited Russian efforts to sabotage military infrastructure as terrorism in an effort to crack down on sources of resistance. A Russian news source from Chita, Zabaykalsky Krai reported on February 2 that Russian authorities opened a criminal case under laws prohibiting the public justification of terrorism against leaders of an unregistered regional youth organization. The organization allegedly justified the sabotage of Russian railways and the arson of military registration and enlistment offices.[64] A Russian opposition news source reported on February 3 that Russian authorities are investigating a blogger from Moscow Oblast for preparing a sabotage attack on a Russian railway because the man maintained a microblog on Instagram (an illegal platform in Russia) and demonstrated an “unhealthy interest” in rail transit items including military cargo.[65] An independent Russian news outlet reported on February 3 that a court in Podolsk, Moscow Oblast ordered a 70-year-old pensioner who committed an arson attack on a military enlistment office to receive psychiatric treatment.[66]

The Russian Armed Forces continue to struggle with desertion and disorder among soldiers. Several Russian sources reported on February 3 and 4 that Russian authorities apprehended a deserter who fled his unit near Volnovakha, Donetsk Oblast and two soldiers who left their positions in Russia without proper authorization.[67] An Ulyanovsk Oblast news source reported on February 3 that an Ulyanovsk court sentenced two mobilized soldiers to 5.5 and 5 years in a correctional colony for committing “violent acts” against their commanders.[68]

Russian State Duma Deputy from Novosibirsk Dmitry Savelyev quietly went to Moscow after publicizing his decision leave Novosibirsk to join the Vega battalion in Ukraine.[69] Savelyev’s apparent ruse that he would serve on the front lines in Ukraine was likely an effort to deflect criticism that Russian officials avoid mobilization, ignore the challenges of ordinary Russians, and do not contribute to the war effort.

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

The Ukrainian General Staff reported on February 4 that occupation authorities and their families are preparing to leave Troitskyi Raion, in northwestern Luhansk Oblast.[70]

Russian authorities continue to forcibly deport Ukrainian children from occupied Ukraine to Russia. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) and Republic of Karelia officials discussed a scheme to send Ukrainian children from occupied Luhansk Oblast to Karelia under a scheme for “rest and rehabilitation.”[71] The Resistance Center reported that Russian regional authorities aim to import certain quotas of Ukrainian children under the rest and rehabilitation scheme to improperly write off budget funds. The Resistance Center also noted that there is evidence that some Russian officials may be using these efforts to engage in human trafficking.

Advisor to the exiled Ukrainian Mariupol Mayoral, Petro Andryushenko, reported that Russian occupation officials banned all Protestant and non-Orthodox churches from operating in Mariupol and began nationalizing the assets of these churches.[72] Russian officials have notably run an information operation falsely claiming that Ukrainian officials discriminate against certain religions, including the Kremlin-affiliated Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate.[73] ISW previously reported that Russian occupation officials in Zaporizhia Oblast reportedly nationalized and closed places of worship belonging to the Ukrainian Evangelical Baptist Christian communities.[74] Mariupol occupation officials may have banned and nationalized these churches as part of a larger Russian effort to establish the Kremlin-affiliated Moscow Patriarchate Orthodox Church as the dominant faith in the occupied territories.[75]

An unspecified actor shot Russian soldier Igor “Bereg” Mangushev at close range in the back of the head at a checkpoint in occupied Kadiivka, Luhansk Oblast on February 4.[76] Russian authorities declined to release more information about the attack, but Russian milbloggers condemned the attack and speculated that Mangushev may have been on his knees and shot from behind.[77] Mangushev previously called for the destruction of the Ukrainian population while holding a skull, which he claimed belonged to a Ukrainian defender of the Azovstal Plant in Mariupol.[78] One Western expert noted that Mangushev has ties to Wagner Group and that an attack against Mangushev may have indirectly targeted Wagner Group and its financier, Yevgeny Prigozhin.[79]

Significant activity in Belarus (ISW assesses that a Russian or Belarusian attack into northern Ukraine in early 2023 is extraordinarily unlikely and has thus restructured this section of the update. It will no longer include counter-indicators for such an offensive.

ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarusian military activity in Belarus, but these are not indicators that Russian and Belarusian forces are preparing for an imminent attack on Ukraine from Belarus. ISW will revise this text and its assessment if it observes any unambiguous indicators that Russia or Belarus is preparing to attack northern Ukraine.)

Nothing significant to report.

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

[11] https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/16953133; https://structure.mil dot ru/structure/okruga/south/news.htm

[12] https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/16953133

[13] https://twitter.com/DefenceHQ/status/1621756279726145536; https://www.u... https://don24 dot ru/rubric/specoperaciya-na-ukraine/shoygu-budut-sozdany-samodostatochnye-gruppirovki-voysk-v-novyh-subektah-rf.html

[23] https://t.me/rybar/43261; https://t.me/mod_russia/23949 ; https://t.me/mod_russia/23950; https://t.me/readovkanews/51953; https://t.me/readovkanews/51957; https://gur.gov dot ua/content/vidbuvsia-cherhovyi-velykyi-obmin-polonenymy.html

[35] https://armyinform dot com.ua/2023/02/04/rosijski-vijska-kynuly-vsi-syly-na-proryv-nashoyi-oborony-ta-otochennya-bahmuta-ale-uspihu-ne-dosyagly-ganna-malyar/

[59] https://lenta dot ru/news/2023/02/03/react/

[68] https://ulnovosti dot ru/i-lenta-novostej-i/strong-v-ulyanovske-mobilizovannye-poluchili-sroki-za-izbienie-svoih-komandirov-strong/; https://notes.citeam.org/mobilization-feb-2-3

[69] https://theins dot ru/news/259128; https://t.me/m0sc0wcalling/19215; https://tayga ot info/180603; https://t.me/theinsider/16999

[71] https://sprotyv.mod dot gov.ua/2023/02/04/ditej-z-luganshhyny-gotuyut-do-vidpravky-u-kareliyu/

understandingwar.org



4. China Aids Russia’s War in Ukraine, Trade Data Shows


C4ADS is a real treasure and aguably one of the best non-governmental organiztions that makes substantitive contributions to national security.


China Aids Russia’s War in Ukraine, Trade Data Shows

Despite sanctions, Moscow equips its jet fighters, submarines and soldiers with help of Chinese companies

By Ian TalleyFollow

 and Anthony DeBarrosFollow

Feb. 4, 2023 9:00 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-aids-russias-war-in-ukraine-trade-data-shows-11675466360?st=z6hd5o0q4zouu0f


WASHINGTON—China is providing technology that Moscow’s military needs to prosecute the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine despite an international cordon of sanctions and export controls, according to a Wall Street Journal review of Russian customs data.

The customs records show Chinese state-owned defense companies shipping navigation equipment, jamming technology and fighter-jet parts to sanctioned Russian government-owned defense companies.

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Those are but a handful of tens of thousands of shipments of dual-use goods—products that have both commercial and military applications—that Russia imported following its invasion last year, according to the customs records provided to the Journal by C4ADS, a Washington-based nonprofit that specializes in identifying national-security threats. Most of the dual-use shipments were from China, the records show.

China’s backing for Russia while it wages war on Ukraine was supposed to be on the agenda for discussion during Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s travels to Beijing this weekend. That trip was indefinitely postponed Friday after the Pentagon said that it had tracked a Chinese reconnaissance balloon over the continental U.S. earlier in the week.


Chinese state-owned defense companies have shipped navigation equipment and other military gear to sanctioned Russian companies, customs records show. The Yangshan deep-water port in Shanghai.

PHOTO: CFOTO/DDP/ZUMA PRESS

Russia’s foreign, defense and economic ministries didn’t respond to requests for comment. “Russia has enough technological potential to ensure its security and conduct the special military operation. This potential is constantly being improved,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

While Russia has the capability to produce much of its basic military needs domestically, it relies heavily on imports for dual-use technology, such as semiconductors, that is essential for modern warfare.

Western officials said their economic pressure campaign launched last February would cripple Moscow’s war machine by targeting those exports to Russia, including computer chips, infrared cameras and radar equipment.

But customs and corporate records show Russia is still able to import that technology through countries that haven’t joined the U.S.-led efforts to cut off Moscow from global markets. Many of the export-controlled products are still flowing through nations such as Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, whose governments are accused by Western officials of flouting the sanctions and controls. Turkish officials have said the sanctions are ineffective and that Ankara is playing an important role as an interlocutor with Russia. Under pressure from the U.S., Turkey has moved to halt some financial and business ties.

The U.A.E. embassy in Washington, D.C., didn’t comment.

The records reviewed by the Journal, however, show Chinese companies—both state-owned and private—as the dominant exporters of dual-use goods that U.S. officials say are of particular concern.

The Journal analyzed more than 84,000 shipments recorded by Russia’s customs office in the period after the West launched the economic pressure campaign that focused on commodities the Biden administration red-flagged as critical to the Russian military. The official Russian customs records, which C4ADS said might not include all records, detail each shipment into the country, providing dates, shippers, recipients, purchasers, addresses and product descriptions.

The Journal also identified from the records more than a dozen Russian and Chinese companies targeted by the U.S. under the Russia pressure campaign, as well as all other sanctions programs. 

Industry and government officials said the data offers substantial evidence of how Russia is able to sidestep the centerpiece of the West’s response to Russia’s war against Ukraine.

“Despite international scrutiny and sanctions protocols, reliable global trade data shows that Chinese state-owned defense companies continue to send military-applicable parts to sanctioned Russian defense companies,” said Naomi Garcia, an analyst at C4ADS. “These Russian companies have been recorded using these same types of parts directly in Russia’s war in Ukraine.”

To tighten the enforcement of the international pressure campaign, U.S. officials have said they are investigating the export of banned products and business dealings, trying to wrangle compliance through diplomatic outreach around the world, and have said they are preparing sanctions against new targets thought to be facilitating the Kremlin’s war. 

On Wednesday, the U.S. Treasury Department added to its sanction rolls nearly two dozen individuals and the companies they are allegedly using to procure weapons and other goods for Russian state defense firms. 


Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping declared a ‘no limits’ partnership last February.

PHOTO: MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/SPUTNIK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Just before Russia’s full-scale assault on Ukraine last February, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping declared a “no limits” partnership aimed at countering the U.S. Since the invasion, Beijing has attempted to strike a cautious balance, saying it is opposed to the war in Ukraine while keeping its diplomatic, financial and trade ties open to Russia. 

“The allegation that China provides ‘aid’ to Russia has no factual basis, but is purely speculative and deliberately hyped up,” Liu Pengyu, China’s spokesman at its Washington embassy told the Journal. Mr. Liu reiterated the long-held view by Beijing that China opposes what it calls unilateral sanctions that have no basis under international law.

The customs records include examples of exports of parts for the type of weapons used by Russian forces in Ukraine. 

China’s state-owned defense company Poly Technologies on Aug. 31, 2022, shipped navigation equipment to Russia’s state-owned military export firm JSC Rosoboronexport for M-17 military transport helicopters. Earlier that month, Chinese electronics firm Fujian Nanan Baofeng Electronic Co. supplied to Rosoboronexport—through an Uzbek state-owned defense firm—a telescoping antenna for the RB-531BE military vehicle, which is used for communications jamming. On Oct. 24, Chinese state-owned aircraft firm AVIC International Holding Corp. shipped to AO Kret, a subsidiary of sanctioned government-owned defense giant Rostec, $1.2 million worth of parts for Su-35 jet fighters. 

Wang Shaofeng, general manager of Fujian Baofeng Electronics Co., said in an emailed response that a third party may be illegally using his firm’s name, and that it doesn’t include “Nanan.” He also said his company doesn’t produce telescoping antennas and doesn’t have a record of shipping to any Uzbek state-owned defense firm. “This report lacks factual basis and is inconsistent with the facts,” Mr. Wang said.

U.S. Federal Communications Commission documents filed by Fujian Nanan Baofeng Electronic Co. for U.S. sales of two-way radios records matching contact details and is signed by a “Wang Shao Feng.”

The other Chinese and Russian firms didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In the past, Russian officials have said they would adapt to the Western sanctions campaign by turning to Asia, including China. 

Other foreign-government suppliers found in the customs data include China Taly Aviation Technologies Corp., a procurement unit of China’s Air Force Equipment Department. The Chinese aviation company didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Among that firm’s shipments were parts sent on Oct. 4 to Russia’s sanctioned state-owned missile-manufacturer Almaz Antey for use on the 96L6E mobile radar unit. Russia uses the radar to detect enemy jet fighter, missiles and drones as part of its S-400 antiaircraft missile system being used in Ukraine, according to arms analysts. The Russian firm didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Kret and a host of other Russian companies that contract with the government’s intelligence, military and security services also used privately held Chinese firms. Sinno Electronics, sanctioned late last year by the U.S. Treasury Department for allegedly procuring banned goods for Russia’s defense sector, was one of the most prolific exporters of dual-use goods, sending more than 1,300 shipments between April and October worth more than $2 million, according to customs data. Neither Kret nor Sinno Electronics responded to requests for comment. 


Russia relies heavily on imports for products that have both commercial and military applications—including semiconductors. A chip factory in Nantong, China, in 2021.

PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

The data also shows shipments of Chinese DJI quadcopters to Russia after the sanctions and export controls were imposed. Military analysts say the drones are being used by the Russian forces to locate and surveil Ukrainian forces, then target them with artillery.

Some of these drones are delivered directly by a Chinese retailer to Russian distributors, according to customs records, but other DJI quadcopters transit through the United Arab Emirates. The emirates’ embassy in Washington, D.C., didn’t respond to requests for comment.

DJI said the company opposes military use of its drones, suspended its operations in Russia in April and requires global agents to comply. The company added, however, “We cannot stop users or organizations from buying in countries or regions other than Russia and Ukraine, and then transporting or giving them to Russia and Ukraine.”

Among the supplies critical to Moscow’s war efforts, U.S. officials say, are the computer chips that are used in weapons that target Ukrainian forces and infrastructure, and in electronic circuitry that makes possible satellite geolocating, radio communication, surveillance and navigation systems.

Exports of such chips and associated components were more than cut in half after the U.S. and its allies first imposed strict export restrictions, according to the customs records. But those levels quickly began to rise, and by October hit nearly $33 million, just shy of the $35 million monthly level Russia averaged since the U.S. started targeting Russia with sanctions in 2014 after Putin’s army occupied Crimea, according to the Journal’s analysis of the Russian custom records and the United Nations’ Comtrade database.

Unlike previous export-control regimes that banned the direct provision of certain dual use goods, Western authorities in February said they were targeting the entire supply chain. That means transshipments—goods produced in third countries using U.S. dual-use items, such as chips, that are then shipped to Russia—are also targeted.

Silverado Policy Accelerator, a Washington-based think tank that seeks to bolster U.S. competitiveness, said in a report published this month that Russia is increasingly relying on transshipments of dual-use goods through China, and especially Hong Kong, to meet its military needs.

“These measures have had a pretty significant impact on Russia’s capabilities,” said Sarah Stewart, chief executive of Silverado, referring to the allied sanctions and export controls, “but they have not yet delivered a death blow.”

Write to Ian Talley at Ian.Talley@wsj.com and Anthony DeBarros at anthony.debarros@wsj.com




5. A Chinese balloon exposes a massive vulnerability


A lot of speculation going on about this. A lot of armchair quarterbacking second quessing every decision and aaction without having full access to all relavent inforation, including by some who might know better. I saw a report the the balloon was detected a week ago. It will be interesting to someday know the whole story.



A Chinese balloon exposes a massive vulnerability

Raises the question: Are US air defenses useless? – but the Pentagon is surprisingly sanguine

asiatimes.com · by Stephen Bryen and Shoshana Bryen · February 3, 2023

On February 2, a high-altitude Chinese balloon assumed to be loaded with sensitive surveillance gear traveled over Alaska, Canada, and the northern United States. It turns out to have been one of several over time – and the Pentagon watched it travel over Montana, home of one the US military’s land-based, nuclear-tipped Minuteman III missile fields.

Are you concerned? The Pentagon is surprisingly sanguine.

The Pentagon has confirmed that the balloon is Chinese, and that China has asked for “calm” about the incident. Pentagon spokesperson Brigadier General Pat Ryder said, “Instances of this activity have been observed over the past several years.… We acted immediately to protect against the collection of sensitive information.”


Three questions:

  • If they knew about the balloons, why were they permitted to continue flight?
  • What weight does China’s call for “calm” carry with the administration in light of a military violation of our borders?
  • What if it wasn’t “surveillance equipment” at all?

The administration wants us to agree that a Chinese intrusion into US airspace is not a big deal. And a high-altitude balloon can, indeed, be used for surveillance. But it can also carry weapons – for example, a nuclear EMP (electromagnetic pulse) weapon intended to create a crisis over an American nuclear site.

The Pentagon made three points of its own. First, that the balloon was operating well above the altitude of commercial aviation, but the incident only became public because it was, in fact, spotted by a passenger on a commercial flight.

Second, the military opposed shooting down the balloon because there might be debris that could injure civilians, but the population density of Montana undermines the point.

Third, the administration had determined that the balloon didn’t give China any additional surveillance capability beyond what it already had through spy satellites orbiting the Earth.


This leaves the EMP question aside. It also leaves aside the possibility that China wasn’t looking for additional surveillance information but was checking out how well America’s continental air defenses actually work. The answer would be, “Not well, apparently.” That is both a military and a strategic comment.

On the military side, the only air defense system the US has deployed in Alaska is the Ground Based Interceptor (GBI). The Pentagon says it was tracking the balloon over Alaska, Canada, and Montana, but how far beyond America’s land border was it first sighted? Could it have been destroyed over the Pacific before it transited Alaska?

America’s newest fighter, the F-35 has a service ceiling of only 50,000 feet (15,240 meters) so it probably would have no chance against the Chinese balloon perhaps operating at 75,000 feet (22,860 meters).

US F-35, F-16, F-18, F-22, and F-15 jets flying in formation. Photo: Facebook / Popular Mechanics

But either the F-22 or the F-15 could potentially have been used to intercept it, depending on its operational altitude. The service ceiling of both planes is approximately 65,000 feet (19,810 meters). Firing at an upward angle an air launched missile might have been able to hit the intruder. An intercept is not a sure thing, but nothing is.

A US AEGIS warship in the Pacific, equipped with interceptor missiles, might also have taken out the balloon, but whether any AEGIS cruiser was in the right place at the right time isn’t known.


On the political side, the fact that the US launched no weapons against the balloon suggests two things: first, maybe the GBI system doesn’t work against slow-flying balloons, which would certainly be something China would want to know. Or that the administration made a decision to allow an adversarial and increasingly aggressive country to enter our airspace, which would also be something Beijing might find interesting.

The Pentagon apparently had not planned on having this discussion. The security establishment would have stayed mum had not a passenger on a civilian airliner exposed what is now understood to be one Chinese incursion among others. The Biden administration needs to explain the political rationale for keeping China’s intrusions secret as well as why there was no official American protest.

China has exposed a massive security vulnerability over US territory, and whether that vulnerability is military or political or both, the American people deserve better answers.

Stephen Bryen is a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy and the Yorktown Institute. Follow him on Twitter @stevebryen.

Shoshana Bryen is senior director of The Jewish Policy Center and Editor of inFOCUS Quarterly. She has more than 30 years experience as an analyst of US defense policy and Middle East affairs, and has run programs and conferences with American military personnel in a variety of countries.


asiatimes.com · by Stephen Bryen and Shoshana Bryen · February 3, 2023





6. Ties to Kabul Bombing Put ISIS Leader in Somalia in U.S. Cross Hairs



Ties to Kabul Bombing Put ISIS Leader in Somalia in U.S. Cross Hairs

The New York Times · by Eric Schmitt · February 4, 2023

Bilal al-Sudani’s financing of the ISIS branch in Afghanistan that killed 13 U.S. troops in 2021 elevated him on U.S. kill-or-capture lists.

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Victims of a suicide attack at the Kabul airport on Aug. 26, 2021. The double bombing killed nearly 200 people, including 13 U.S. service members.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times


By

Feb. 4, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON — Bilal al-Sudani was no stranger to American counterterrorism officials.

Before joining the Islamic State affiliate in Somalia, Mr. al-Sudani was subjected to punitive sanctions by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2012 for his involvement with Al Shabab, Al Qaeda’s branch in the East African country.

But it wasn’t until American officials started digging deeper into the background of another Islamic State branch, the one in Afghanistan that had carried out the deadly bombing at Kabul’s international airport in August 2021, that analysts fully realized Mr. al-Sudani oversaw a sprawling ISIS financial and logistical network across Africa, Europe and Afghanistan.

Mr. al-Sudani’s newly revealed role as the financier for the ISIS branch responsible for the death of 13 U.S. service members in Kabul rocketed him to the top ranks of U.S. counterterrorism kill-or-capture lists, senior American officials said. Last week, commandos from the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 killed him in an early-morning helicopter-to-ground raid in a remote cave complex in northern Somalia.

“Al-Sudani helped to put money in the pockets of the same elements of ISIS-K responsible for Abbey Gate,” said a senior U.S. official, referring to ISIS-Khorasan and the Kabul airport location of the bombing.

The death of Mr. al-Sudani, whose Somalia-based headquarters coordinated trainers and funding for Islamic State affiliates in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique and South Africa, underscores the group’s global connections and support structure, analysts say.

Despite his killing, analysts point to ISIS’ resiliency nearly four years since the end of its so-called caliphate, or religious state, in Iraq and Syria as it leverages terrorist networks to sustain new and established affiliates.

“Sudani’s death may temporarily disrupt this administrative network and the support reaching these affiliates, but is unlikely to dampen this support permanently,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project said in an assessment this week.

Under intense military pressure by the United States and its local allies, the Islamic State’s leadership in Iraq and Syria has faced significant resource constraints in recent years, a sharp decline from the group’s peak as one of the best-financed terrorist organizations in the world.

This led the Islamic State to direct its affiliates to pursue financial self-sufficiency, as several “offices” coordinate revenue generation and money laundering between affiliates and networks within regions, rather than money flowing from Iraq and Syria to branches around the world, according to a recent analysis in the Long War Journal, a website run by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies that tracks military strikes against militant groups.

ISIS has attempted to expand its influence in Africa through large-scale operations in areas where government control is limited. In announcing sanctions against four South African-based financiers for the group, the Treasury Department said last March that ISIS branches in Africa were relying on local fund-raising schemes such as theft, extortion and kidnapping for ransom, as well as financial support from the ISIS hierarchy.

Somalia is better known as a sanctuary for Al Shabab, the terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda, than for the Islamic State. But the ISIS branch in the country has played an outsized role for the global terrorist organization despite having only 200 to 280 fighters.

The Islamic State’s Somalia wing includes a regional office called Al Karrar, which serves as a coordination hub for operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, South Africa and the networks between them, Caleb Weiss and Ryan O’Farrell wrote in the Long War Journal analysis.

With counterparts in West Africa, South Asia, Syria and elsewhere, the Al Karrar office oversees substantial fund-raising operations through extortion rackets and criminal activity in Somalia and South Africa, the analysis concluded.

But U.S. and other Western intelligence services have in the past year detected increasing ties between Al Karrar and ISIS Khorasan in Afghanistan. A United Nations report last July concluded that Al Karrar facilitated the flow of money to the Afghan affiliate through cells in Yemen, Kenya and Britain.

The U.N. report said that ISIS Khorasan “uses these funds in the acquisition of weapons and to pay the salaries of fighters.”

Before his death, Mr. al-Sudani was thought to play a key role in, or even direct, the Al Karrar office, officials said. “There’s evidence he was pulling the strings from East Africa,” said Heather Nicell, an Africa analyst with Janes, the London-based defense intelligence firm.

One senior administration official said that no one else in the Islamic State rivaled Mr. al-Sudani in his ability to receive and distribute illicit funds — as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars at any given time — to far-flung ISIS affiliates on at least three continents through a network of clandestine contacts he had built over more than a decade.

As Mr. al-Sudani’s role in supporting ISIS fighters in Afghanistan — including the Kabul airport bomber — came into sharper focus, the military’s secretive Joint Special Operations Command ramped up its planning to kill or capture him, officials said.

The Special Operations raid on Jan. 25 took place in a remote mountainous cave complex in the Puntland region of northern Somalia, months after American spy networks first detected Mr. al-Sudani’s hidden headquarters and began using spy satellites and other surveillance aircraft to study his movements.

The American commandos had been prepared to capture Mr. al-Sudani, but he and 10 other Sudanese associates were killed in a gun battle after they resisted, a senior administration official told reporters after the raid was disclosed.

A model for these kinds of operations took place in May 2015, when two dozen Delta Force commandos entered Syria aboard Black Hawk helicopters and V-22 Ospreys from Iraq and killed Abu Sayyaf, whom American officials described as the Islamic State’s “emir of oil and gas.”

The information harvested from the laptops, cellphones and other materials recovered in that raid yielded the first important insights about the Islamic State’s leadership structure, financial operations and security measures.

The fact that the Pentagon sent commandos to kill or capture Mr. al-Sudani — a decision that required President Biden’s approval — rather than using a less risky drone operation indicated his significance.

In another sign of Mr. al-Sudani’s importance, the commandos rehearsed their secret mission at an undisclosed location in the region with similar terrain. The Navy SEAL Team 6 forces that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 in Pakistan had practiced their mission on a mock-up of the bin Laden compound in much the same way.

For the raid against Mr. al-Sudani’s hide-out, American officials said about two dozen members of SEAL Team 6 flew in Army MH-47 Chinook helicopters, operated by the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known as the Night Stalkers, from a small, unassuming Navy vessel sailing off the Somali coast.

The commandos landed some distance from the cave complex to avoid detection, and made their way by foot to Mr. al-Sudani’s cave complex. There, an hourlong firefight ensued with Mr. al-Sudani and his associates holed up in the caves until they were killed, officials said.

A senior U.S. military official said the commandos recovered a trove of material — including laptop computers and hard drives, cellphones and other information — from Mr. al-Sudani’s hide-out that could provide tips for future counterterrorism operations.

The New York Times · by Eric Schmitt · February 4, 2023



7. A balloon upended Blinken’s trip to China. That could be a good thing.


A balloon upended Blinken’s trip to China. That could be a good thing.

By PHELIM KINE and NAHAL TOOSI

02/03/2023 07:02 PM EST

Politico

As one former official puts it, China’s “a little bit on the back foot.”


Secretary of State Antony Blinken attends a meeting with China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Nusa Dua on the Indonesian resort island of Bali, July 9, 2022. | Stefani Reynolds/Pool photo via AP

02/03/2023 07:02 PM EST

Not everyone in Washington is freaking out about the suspected Chinese spy balloon flying high over the United States. Some former officials say it’s giving U.S. diplomats exactly what they need: more leverage over Beijing.

The Chinese airship forced the U.S. military to scramble fighter jets, prompted lawmakers to demand answers from the Biden administration and led Secretary of State Antony Blinken to indefinitely postpone his trip to Beijing this weekend.


But Blinken was going to China without much hope of getting concessions on major issues such as Beijing’s support for Russia’s war on Ukraine, its human rights abuses or its threats to Taiwan. Now, some former officials who’ve worked on international negotiations say he may be in a stronger position, though that advantage may fade over time.


“This event definitely strengthens the hands of the United States,” said Heather McMahon, a former senior director at the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board. “Anytime an espionage operation is exposed, [it] gives the advantage to the targeted nation.”

Blinken was preparing to see top officials in China on Sunday and Monday in a follow-up to President Joe Biden’s meeting with Chinese paramount leader Xi Jinping in Bali in November. At the time, Biden pledged to “maintain open lines of communication” with Beijing amid worsening bilateral tensions.

The Pentagon’s announcement Thursday of an alleged Chinese surveillance balloon hovering over Montana changed that plan. In canceling Blinken’s trip, at least for now, the State Department said the incident “would have narrowed the agenda in a way that would have been unhelpful and unconstructive.”

Beijing admitted Friday that the balloon was Chinese, reversing its initial claims of ignorance, and said it was a civilian airship used primarily for meteorological purposes that had been blown into U.S. airspace by high winds.

That admission and the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s rare expression of “regrets” for the incident in a statement published on Friday suggests Beijing is in damage control mode at a time when it’s trying to stabilize ties with the U.S.

The revelation “has pushed China a little bit on the back foot,” said Zack Cooper, former assistant to the deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism at the National Security Council and now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

And that could give Blinken an edge in his efforts to prod Beijing to deliver meaningful results when he eventually travels to China.

John Kamm, who has decades of experience negotiating with Chinese officials in his role as founder of the Dui Hua prisoner advocacy organization, said “it puts pressure on China to do something as a goodwill gesture in response to what they’ve done.”

Much of Blinken’s planned two days with Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang — and a possible meeting with Xi — would have been lost to ritual recitations of respective U.S.-China positions on issues ranging from Taiwan and trade tensions to concerns about Beijing’s human rights record, its growing nuclear arsenal and its alignment with Russia’s war on Ukraine.

In an interview before the balloon was reported, David R. Stilwell, former assistant secretary of State for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, said the meeting was unlikely to produce movement on any of those issues. “Beijing uses ‘talks’ to reduce pressure — while giving nothing of significance — and to humiliate the other side,” Stillwell said.

Still, some say Blinken could have seized the opportunity to make heavier demands in person.

“If Tony went now, Xi and the Chinese would be deeply embarrassed, grateful that he came, wanting to put it behind him,” said Danny Russel, a former senior Asia hand in the Obama administration. The balloon incident could have become “a teachable moment,” he said.

Delaying the trip risks the Chinese becoming more defensive over time, and less inclined to come to a meeting of the minds, said Russel, who nonetheless stressed that he understood the Biden administration’s calculations.

The Chinese government had recently shifted to a softer diplomatic tone — an effort by Beijing to reduce U.S.-China tensions while it grapples with a disastrous Covid outbreak and an economic downturn.

Blinken’s indefinite postponement of his Beijing trip until “the conditions are right” has won him measured praise from GOP lawmakers.

Delaying the trip is “a right call for now,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) chair of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the U.S. and the Chinese Communist Party, said in a video he tweeted on Friday.

The trip postponement “is an appropriate step to underscore the seriousness” of the balloon’s intrusion, Rep. Darin LaHood (R-Ill.) said in a statement.

Blinken can now see if Beijing’s eagerness for even symbolic gestures of reduced bilateral rancor produces Chinese diplomatic sweeteners for a rapid rescheduling of Blinken’s China travel plans.

But time may not be on Blinken’s side given the crowded Chinese political calendar.

“The Chinese have their national legislative session in early March, and House Speaker [Kevin] McCarthy is projected to visit Taiwan around Easter, so the trip may not happen until the late spring, where the bilateral atmosphere arguably will be even more challenging,” said Chris Johnson, president and chief executive of the China Strategies Group, a risk consultancy.

Regardless of the spy balloon’s short-term diplomatic fallout and the possible short-term advantage Blinken could reap from it, the longer-term prospects for U.S.-China relations remain grim.

“Beijing is hoping talks provide a timeout from bilateral friction that allows it to focus on domestic issues; the U.S. wants China to agree to guardrails that allow relations to remain abrasive without getting too hot,” said Robert Daly, director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Wilson Center. “Those goals are probably irreconcilable.”


POLITICO



Politico


8. War preparation needed: experts (Taiwan)


Excerpt:


Taiwan’s development of an “asymmetrical warfare” doctrine and extending mandatory conscription to one year is a good start to preparation of defense against a possible Chinese invasion, he said.



War preparation needed: experts

https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2023/02/05/2003793756

SELF-RELIANCE: Taiwan would struggle to receive aid in the event of an invasion, so it must prepare to ‘hold its own’ for the first 70 days of a war, a defense expert said

  • By Aaron Tu and Jake Chung / Staff reporter, with staff writer

  •  
  •  

Taiwan should strengthen infrastructure, stock up on reserves and step up efforts to encourage Taiwanese to fight against an enemy, legislators and experts said on Tuesday last week.

The comments sought to summarize what the nation should learn from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has exceeded 300 days, since Feb. 24 last year.

Institute of National Defense and Security Research fellow Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲) said that the war in Ukraine highlighted the importance of being ready for war.


Institute of National Defense and Security Research research fellow Su Tzu-yun, right, speaks during a news conference on Aug. 4 last year.

Photo: CNA

Taiwan’s development of an “asymmetrical warfare” doctrine and extending mandatory conscription to one year is a good start to preparation of defense against a possible Chinese invasion, he said.

War games simulated by the Washington-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) showed that while Chinese success in landing operations in Taiwan would be extremely low, as it is an island, it would be unable to receive aid like Ukraine, Su said.

The nation needs to inventory supplies, strengthen infrastructure such as underground railways, and repurpose abandoned tunnels for arms stockpiles, Su said.

Taiwan is prone to having its supply routes cut off, and it should acquire all supplies and equipment it needs before any war begins, Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Wang Ting-yu (王定宇) said.

Taiwan should attempt to improve its military hardware, and learn how to use its anti-ship and anti-air missiles better, Wang said, adding that the nation could also seek assistance from the US in bolstering its stockpile of precision munitions, as well as help in increasing missile range and accuracy.

As per the CSIS war games, if Taiwan were without US or Japanese aid at the start of an invasion, it is possible that it would have to hold its own for at least 70 days, Wang said.






9. ‘Spy’ balloon sparks concern in Taipei



I would bet that the PLA has already flown balloons over Taiwan.



Sun, Feb 05, 2023 page1

https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2023/02/05/2003793745

‘Spy’ balloon sparks concern in Taipei

‘UNACCEPTABLE’: The foreign ministry said that China’s behavior broke international law, while Johnny Chiang was worried such balloons could be used against Taiwan

  • By Jonathan Chin / Staff writer, with CNA

  •  
  •  
  • A suspected Chinese surveillance balloon flying over the US was yesterday condemned by officials in Taipei and sparked calls for the government to plan countermeasures.
  • The Pentagon on Thursday said it had detected a Chinese surveillance balloon flying over the country.
  • Beijing has said the balloon is a civilian meteorological device that drifted into US territory after being blown off course.

A huge, high-altitude balloon is pictured over Taipei in 2021.

  • Photo courtesy of the Central Weather Bureau
  • The National Security Bureau and Ministry of National Defense should investigate whether surveillance balloons could be used against Taiwan and prepare to respond to such acts, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) said.
  • US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s postponement of his visit to China as a result of the incident was a foreseeable consequence arising from the competition for power between the two countries, he added.
  • The Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned China in a statement, saying that Beijing’s behavior breached international laws and was “unacceptable to the community of civilized nations.”

Central Weather Bureau Director-General Cheng Ming-dean, front right, speaks during a news conference in Taipei on Sept. 2 last year.

  • Photo: Cheng Wei-chi, Taipei Times
  • China should cease all activities that infringe on the sovereignty of other nations or cause instability in the region, it said.
  • Premier Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁) urged China to respect the sovereign airspace of other countries, as that would facilitate peace, mutual aid and cooperation between nations.
  • Lu Yeh-chung (盧業中), a professor in National Chengchi University’s Department of Diplomacy, said the balloon incident showed the “extreme lack of trust” between the US and China.
  • The two countries are likely to remain locked in competition for some time, Lu added.
  • That Blinken would delay a long-planned visit to Beijing over the incident hinted at other under-the-table disputes that might have occurred between the US and China while they were preparing for the visit, he said.
  • The strong response the incident elicited from Washington was diplomatically appropriate, as national security is an issue of utmost importance to the US, Lu said, adding that failing to send a clear signal could embolden China.
  • Similar balloons were first spotted in Japan’s Miyagi Prefecture in June 2020, although no country claimed ownership of the craft at the time, Central Weather Bureau Director-General Cheng Ming-dean (鄭明典) said.
  • Bureau personnel observed a balloon of the same type hovering over Taipei in September 2021, and members of the public reported seeing another in March last year, this time above Taipei International Airport (Songshan airport), he said.
  • The objects were in the two areas for about three hours and photographs were taken of them, Cheng said.
  • Civilian weather balloons — typically 2m wide and made of rubber — usually hover close to the launch site and at a height of no more than 30km, he said.
  • The Chinese balloons observed in the Taiwan incidents were no less than 20m wide, and their range and altitude suggest different materials were used to construct them, he said.
  • Additional reporting by Chou Ming-hung



10. What the War in Ukraine Tells Us About Deterring China


Excertps:


Yet more important even than weapons is will. Many people, sometimes including myself, have doubted and continue to doubt whether, if China does invade Taiwan, the US and its allies will undertake military action in response. This is a reprise of the 1950 Korean uncertainty, with one important difference: 73 years ago, there was nothing in South Korea of material value to the West; its armies fought instead to defend a principle. In modern Taiwan, by contrast, advanced semiconductors represent an industry of towering importance both to China and ourselves.
Despite unscripted lunges by US President Joe Biden declaring a commitment to Taiwan, the US position on the island remains equivocal. The intention is to avoid provoking Beijing, yet the consequence is to weaken deterrence. It seems possible, arguably essential, for the US to become more explicit. Washington can assert a determination to support Taiwan’s autonomy by all necessary means, so long as that remains the will of the island’s people.
But the Biden administration can also be clear that should this change — if the Taiwan’s people assert a desire for reunification with the mainland — then the US would raise no obstacle to the imposition of Beijing’s hegemony. Support for the will of a society’s people seems a fundamental democratic principle that the West is entitled to promise to uphold in any context, including of course Ukraine.
Such a comprehensive declaration of deterrence should be no barrier to sustaining a carrot-and-stick approach to Beijing, seeking to negotiate and compromise wherever possible. It is the Chinese who have chosen to adopt a confrontational posture, and seem increasingly unwilling either to accept civilized standards at home or to behave with restraint abroad.
The rhetoric and saber-rattling of the Chinese demand that the West should be ready to meet them in arms should they decide to fight us, or indeed to invade Taiwan. If we allow Beijing to doubt our willingness to do this, then deterrence must fail. We shall then deserve the war we get, in a way neither we nor the Ukrainian people did anything to deserve the one in which we are already committed to preserve their country.




What the War in Ukraine Tells Us About Deterring China

Putin invaded because he thought the West would back down, so it’s vital to make sure Beijing knows it would pay a huge price for its aggression.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-02-05/russia-ukraine-war-china-must-know-us-would-protect-taiwan?sref=hhjZtX76


ByMax Hastings


February 5, 2023 at 12:00 AM EST


The war in Ukraine is a year old this month, and only those who believe in Santa Claus will bet on its ending by this date in 2024. It represents one of the most terrible tragedies to befall Europe, and indeed the world, since 1945.

What follows, however, is not a reflection on the conflict itself, but on two closely related issues: Could Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion have been prevented? And what steps can the West take to deter other aggressors from similar courses, most notably China toward Taiwan?

Deterrence demands will, means and — an element often forgotten — a political climate in which to make preemptive measures acceptable. Many assert that the US and its European allies made a fatal error by failing long ago to extend the North Atlantic Treaty Organization umbrella to Ukraine. Only such a guarantee, they say, could have dissuaded Putin from launching his onslaught. They further argue that it reflects a pitiful weakness of will to have allowed fear of the Kremlin’s wrath to dissuade us from extending our support to a society eager to embrace democracy and freedom.

Russia is now so deeply committed to terroristic courses that it is hard to anticipate an early reconciliation with the West. At the outset, some pundits argued that this was Putin’s personal war, which ordinary Russians want no part of. A year on, however, we find most of Putin’s people still acquiescing in his monstrous deeds, accepting the Kremlin’s fantasy narrative that NATO is conspiring to humble their country.

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Perhaps this was inevitable. Maybe there was never a path to making proud, chronically angry, grievance-burdened Russians recognize the realities of their national failure, and of Western success. Yet it was surely right, in the wake of the Cold War, to attempt to welcome the Russian Federation into the family of nations. Some of us think the West should have tried harder; that the US should have held back from its 1990s triumphalism, rubbing Russian noses in their defeat.

There is also a case that it was mistaken to admit Poland and the Baltic States to NATO, fueling a Russian paranoia that dates back centuries. Had Ukraine also been admitted to the alliance, this line of thinking goes, it would have accelerated a showdown between the Kremlin and the West.

You may say: But that is what we have now got anyway. So what was there to lose by offering a shield to Ukraine before Russia attacked? Here I shall cite the precedent of the Anglo-French 1938 deal with Hitler, which dismembered Czechoslovakia. Munich has today become a byword for cowardice in the face of aggression. It is cited again and again, not least by American politicians, as a term of abuse for alleged appeasers, whether in the context of Ukraine, Taiwan or Iran.

As a historian, however, I see Munich differently. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was a weak and deluded man. But no democratic government can prudently take great decisions ahead of the will of its voters. In 1938, many of the British people still had no stomach for a second bloody showdown with Germany just 20 years after the first, and their view was shared across the British Empire. If Chamberlain had then committed Britain to fight, he would have led a divided nation and almost certainly forfeited support from Canada, Australia and the rest of the so-called dominions.

A year later, by contrast, in September 1939, the political picture was transformed. Following Hitler’s rape of Poland, coming atop his contemptuous repudiation of the Munich deal for partition of Czechoslovakia, every supporter of freedom and democracy in Britain understood that he must be fought. The ensuing struggle commanded overwhelming popular consent.

Much the same was true of the US in 1940-41. Had Winston Churchill succeeded in his efforts to persuade President Franklin Roosevelt to join the war, America would have been divided. Many members of Congress, perhaps a majority, would have declined to endorse such a decision. Only the unprovoked Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor and subsequent German declaration of war unified the American people, empowering Roosevelt to lead a nation of one mind, one purpose, through the global conflict.

To dissuade an aggressor, it is necessary that the defender and its allies should possess the military power capable of frustrating an assault. But it is also indispensable that they should be believed to have the determination to do so.

In the 1930s, the European dictators knew that the democracies possessed the paper might to mount a credible defense against Germany — some French tanks and aircraft were better than those the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe could deploy in quantity. But Hitler was convinced that the decadent French and British lacked the moral fiber to resist him effectively, and events proved him almost right. Thus, belated attempts at deterrence failed. The bloodiest war in human history proved necessary.

An example of successful deterrence on the margins of that struggle also deserves notice: Spain’s dictator General Francisco Franco was willing, even eager, to make his country a belligerent alongside Hitler, partly because of ideological compatibility and partly because he saw Germany and Italy as winners. He wished to share the spoils of victory.

He held back, however, because Spain was dependent on imported food and commodities. He was unwilling to face a naval blockade, which Britain threatened and had means to implement. Franco declined to fight in the West — he sent only a token division to support Hitler in the Soviet Union — so long as the Royal Navy remained capable of dominating Spain’s shores and ports.

In the Cold War, few modern historians doubt that deterrence prevented Armageddon: Both sides recognized that there could be no meaningful winner of a clash between nuclear-armed superpowers. There were hawks in Washington and Moscow who clamored to accept that risk but, thankfully, they were overborne by the voices of sanity.

Nonetheless, within that global framework there was a conspicuous failure of deterrence — on the Korean Peninsula in 1950, when North Korean leader Kim Il Sung and his Soviet sponsor Josef Stalin convinced themselves that the US lacked means and will to resist an invasion of South Korea. This was partly because the US Army, and explicitly its formations in the Far East, had been disastrously run down in the wake of World War II.

The Kremlin also misread confused signals from Washington about US willingness to fight to save the South. Over the ensuing three years, Western forces proved able to check and then to reverse communist aggression, but it was a near thing. Even after America and its allies rearmed, it was difficult to sustain popular will in the US for the protracted struggle, and its casualties.

The message of Korea was that it is easier and cheaper to avert an attack through precautionary measures, as the US has continued to do in the peninsula for the past seven decades, than to reverse aggression once it has taken place, on the battlefield.

But here a chicken/egg problem rears its head, which is conspicuous in today’s Ukraine, and in addressing tomorrow’s possible Taiwan invasion: how to mount effective deterrence until the political conditions exist for doing so; and how to counter charges of escalation or risk the precipitation of armed conflict. Both friends and foes are bound to advance such allegations, if a major ally arms a threatened nation ahead of aggression taking place.

Consider the crisis that would almost certainly have burst upon Europe had the US embarked on massive weapons shipments to Ukraine in the winter of 2021, in response to Russian troop movements around its borders. The Kremlin would have denounced it as an intolerable provocation, perhaps claiming that it justified a preemptive assault. Most US allies in Europe would have taken fright.

Today, among the most important reasons it has proved possible, against expectations, to sustain a coalition of the US and its allies in support of Ukraine and against Russia, is that the Western powers are seen to have acted only in response to aggression, and not in mere anticipation of it. Putin was granted every possible benefit of doubt until he dispelled it in a storm of missiles and shells.

I suggest that the West was right to be seen to hold back, just as the democracies were morally much stronger in engaging Hitler in 1939 than they would have been a year earlier. Roosevelt was wise to await the dictators’ attack on the US.

Does my argument mean that I oppose reinforcing Taiwan ahead of an alarmingly plausible Chinese assault? The island’s government today deploys only a small fraction of the men and weapons available to Beijing.

The easiest part of the answer to this hard question is that the US must strengthen its own armed forces ahead of such an event. As the balance stands today, most strategic gurus believe that the US Navy would struggle to frustrate an invasion, given that Taiwan is just 100 miles from China’s home bases.

Putin and President Xi Jinping of China appear to accept the logic of mutually assured destruction. Even if the nuclear threshold is not breached, however, the Ukraine conflict demonstrates how devastating a conflict can become. Every prudent nation must be ready to defend its vital interests by conventional means. The great British historian and strategist Michael Howard wrote in 1979, while the Cold War was still pretty chilly, that the price we must expect to pay for our continuing independence is to sustain credible armies, navies and air forces: “Only if adequate conventional forces are maintained will statesmen be spared the agonizing dilemma” of choosing between surrender and going nuclear.

In modern times, too many Western nations have flinched from accepting the logic of this imperative, and even now remain slow to accept its budgetary consequences.

There is much that Taiwan and the US can do to strengthen the former’s defensive capability, without offering explicit provocation to Beijing. The island’s current fuel stocks, perhaps as little as seven days’ worth, could be increased; munition stockpiles for US forces can be pre-positioned in the region; Taiwan can invest in new-wave drones and subsurface unmanned naval craft. It can purchase data from commercial Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites such as Ukraine is using to good effect, to improve its early warning and surveillance.

Leaders go to war because they believe they can win, as did Putin in Ukraine. It is entirely feasible to reinforce both Taiwanese and US capabilities in the region, to a point at which Beijing must doubt its ability to prevail in the necessary amphibious assault, a perilous and difficult undertaking.

The Ukraine experience has rewritten in lights a towering lesson of history: To deter aggression, there is no substitute for credible armed forces. We in the UK and the rest of the West are supremely fortunate that America still possesses these, despite the caveats about the Navy’s vulnerabilities in the Pacific.

Yet more important even than weapons is will. Many people, sometimes including myself, have doubted and continue to doubt whether, if China does invade Taiwan, the US and its allies will undertake military action in response. This is a reprise of the 1950 Korean uncertainty, with one important difference: 73 years ago, there was nothing in South Korea of material value to the West; its armies fought instead to defend a principle. In modern Taiwan, by contrast, advanced semiconductors represent an industry of towering importance both to China and ourselves.

Despite unscripted lunges by US President Joe Biden declaring a commitment to Taiwan, the US position on the island remains equivocal. The intention is to avoid provoking Beijing, yet the consequence is to weaken deterrence. It seems possible, arguably essential, for the US to become more explicit. Washington can assert a determination to support Taiwan’s autonomy by all necessary means, so long as that remains the will of the island’s people.

But the Biden administration can also be clear that should this change — if the Taiwan’s people assert a desire for reunification with the mainland — then the US would raise no obstacle to the imposition of Beijing’s hegemony. Support for the will of a society’s people seems a fundamental democratic principle that the West is entitled to promise to uphold in any context, including of course Ukraine.

Such a comprehensive declaration of deterrence should be no barrier to sustaining a carrot-and-stick approach to Beijing, seeking to negotiate and compromise wherever possible. It is the Chinese who have chosen to adopt a confrontational posture, and seem increasingly unwilling either to accept civilized standards at home or to behave with restraint abroad.


The rhetoric and saber-rattling of the Chinese demand that the West should be ready to meet them in arms should they decide to fight us, or indeed to invade Taiwan. If we allow Beijing to doubt our willingness to do this, then deterrence must fail. We shall then deserve the war we get, in a way neither we nor the Ukrainian people did anything to deserve the one in which we are already committed to preserve their country.

To contact the author of this story:

Max Hastings at mhastings32@bloomberg.net


Excertps:


Yet more important even than weapons is will. Many people, sometimes including myself, have doubted and continue to doubt whether, if China does invade Taiwan, the US and its allies will undertake military action in response. This is a reprise of the 1950 Korean uncertainty, with one important difference: 73 years ago, there was nothing in South Korea of material value to the West; its armies fought instead to defend a principle. In modern Taiwan, by contrast, advanced semiconductors represent an industry of towering importance both to China and ourselves.
Despite unscripted lunges by US President Joe Biden declaring a commitment to Taiwan, the US position on the island remains equivocal. The intention is to avoid provoking Beijing, yet the consequence is to weaken deterrence. It seems possible, arguably essential, for the US to become more explicit. Washington can assert a determination to support Taiwan’s autonomy by all necessary means, so long as that remains the will of the island’s people.
But the Biden administration can also be clear that should this change — if the Taiwan’s people assert a desire for reunification with the mainland — then the US would raise no obstacle to the imposition of Beijing’s hegemony. Support for the will of a society’s people seems a fundamental democratic principle that the West is entitled to promise to uphold in any context, including of course Ukraine.
Such a comprehensive declaration of deterrence should be no barrier to sustaining a carrot-and-stick approach to Beijing, seeking to negotiate and compromise wherever possible. It is the Chinese who have chosen to adopt a confrontational posture, and seem increasingly unwilling either to accept civilized standards at home or to behave with restraint abroad.
The rhetoric and saber-rattling of the Chinese demand that the West should be ready to meet them in arms should they decide to fight us, or indeed to invade Taiwan. If we allow Beijing to doubt our willingness to do this, then deterrence must fail. We shall then deserve the war we get, in a way neither we nor the Ukrainian people did anything to deserve the one in which we are already committed to preserve their country.




What the War in Ukraine Tells Us About Deterring China

Putin invaded because he thought the West would back down, so it’s vital to make sure Beijing knows it would pay a huge price for its aggression.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-02-05/russia-ukraine-war-china-must-know-us-would-protect-taiwan?sref=hhjZtX76


ByMax Hastings


February 5, 2023 at 12:00 AM EST


The war in Ukraine is a year old this month, and only those who believe in Santa Claus will bet on its ending by this date in 2024. It represents one of the most terrible tragedies to befall Europe, and indeed the world, since 1945.

What follows, however, is not a reflection on the conflict itself, but on two closely related issues: Could Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion have been prevented? And what steps can the West take to deter other aggressors from similar courses, most notably China toward Taiwan?

Deterrence demands will, means and — an element often forgotten — a political climate in which to make preemptive measures acceptable. Many assert that the US and its European allies made a fatal error by failing long ago to extend the North Atlantic Treaty Organization umbrella to Ukraine. Only such a guarantee, they say, could have dissuaded Putin from launching his onslaught. They further argue that it reflects a pitiful weakness of will to have allowed fear of the Kremlin’s wrath to dissuade us from extending our support to a society eager to embrace democracy and freedom.

Russia is now so deeply committed to terroristic courses that it is hard to anticipate an early reconciliation with the West. At the outset, some pundits argued that this was Putin’s personal war, which ordinary Russians want no part of. A year on, however, we find most of Putin’s people still acquiescing in his monstrous deeds, accepting the Kremlin’s fantasy narrative that NATO is conspiring to humble their country.

More from

Bloomberg

Opinion

What Does an Endgame Look Like in Ukraine?

The Colorado River Is Disappearing. Here’s How to Replenish It.

For Effective Police Reform, Start Small

Fake Meat’s Beyond Impossible Quest to Win Over Americans

Perhaps this was inevitable. Maybe there was never a path to making proud, chronically angry, grievance-burdened Russians recognize the realities of their national failure, and of Western success. Yet it was surely right, in the wake of the Cold War, to attempt to welcome the Russian Federation into the family of nations. Some of us think the West should have tried harder; that the US should have held back from its 1990s triumphalism, rubbing Russian noses in their defeat.

There is also a case that it was mistaken to admit Poland and the Baltic States to NATO, fueling a Russian paranoia that dates back centuries. Had Ukraine also been admitted to the alliance, this line of thinking goes, it would have accelerated a showdown between the Kremlin and the West.

You may say: But that is what we have now got anyway. So what was there to lose by offering a shield to Ukraine before Russia attacked? Here I shall cite the precedent of the Anglo-French 1938 deal with Hitler, which dismembered Czechoslovakia. Munich has today become a byword for cowardice in the face of aggression. It is cited again and again, not least by American politicians, as a term of abuse for alleged appeasers, whether in the context of Ukraine, Taiwan or Iran.

As a historian, however, I see Munich differently. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was a weak and deluded man. But no democratic government can prudently take great decisions ahead of the will of its voters. In 1938, many of the British people still had no stomach for a second bloody showdown with Germany just 20 years after the first, and their view was shared across the British Empire. If Chamberlain had then committed Britain to fight, he would have led a divided nation and almost certainly forfeited support from Canada, Australia and the rest of the so-called dominions.

A year later, by contrast, in September 1939, the political picture was transformed. Following Hitler’s rape of Poland, coming atop his contemptuous repudiation of the Munich deal for partition of Czechoslovakia, every supporter of freedom and democracy in Britain understood that he must be fought. The ensuing struggle commanded overwhelming popular consent.

Much the same was true of the US in 1940-41. Had Winston Churchill succeeded in his efforts to persuade President Franklin Roosevelt to join the war, America would have been divided. Many members of Congress, perhaps a majority, would have declined to endorse such a decision. Only the unprovoked Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor and subsequent German declaration of war unified the American people, empowering Roosevelt to lead a nation of one mind, one purpose, through the global conflict.

To dissuade an aggressor, it is necessary that the defender and its allies should possess the military power capable of frustrating an assault. But it is also indispensable that they should be believed to have the determination to do so.

In the 1930s, the European dictators knew that the democracies possessed the paper might to mount a credible defense against Germany — some French tanks and aircraft were better than those the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe could deploy in quantity. But Hitler was convinced that the decadent French and British lacked the moral fiber to resist him effectively, and events proved him almost right. Thus, belated attempts at deterrence failed. The bloodiest war in human history proved necessary.

An example of successful deterrence on the margins of that struggle also deserves notice: Spain’s dictator General Francisco Franco was willing, even eager, to make his country a belligerent alongside Hitler, partly because of ideological compatibility and partly because he saw Germany and Italy as winners. He wished to share the spoils of victory.

He held back, however, because Spain was dependent on imported food and commodities. He was unwilling to face a naval blockade, which Britain threatened and had means to implement. Franco declined to fight in the West — he sent only a token division to support Hitler in the Soviet Union — so long as the Royal Navy remained capable of dominating Spain’s shores and ports.

In the Cold War, few modern historians doubt that deterrence prevented Armageddon: Both sides recognized that there could be no meaningful winner of a clash between nuclear-armed superpowers. There were hawks in Washington and Moscow who clamored to accept that risk but, thankfully, they were overborne by the voices of sanity.

Nonetheless, within that global framework there was a conspicuous failure of deterrence — on the Korean Peninsula in 1950, when North Korean leader Kim Il Sung and his Soviet sponsor Josef Stalin convinced themselves that the US lacked means and will to resist an invasion of South Korea. This was partly because the US Army, and explicitly its formations in the Far East, had been disastrously run down in the wake of World War II.

The Kremlin also misread confused signals from Washington about US willingness to fight to save the South. Over the ensuing three years, Western forces proved able to check and then to reverse communist aggression, but it was a near thing. Even after America and its allies rearmed, it was difficult to sustain popular will in the US for the protracted struggle, and its casualties.

The message of Korea was that it is easier and cheaper to avert an attack through precautionary measures, as the US has continued to do in the peninsula for the past seven decades, than to reverse aggression once it has taken place, on the battlefield.

But here a chicken/egg problem rears its head, which is conspicuous in today’s Ukraine, and in addressing tomorrow’s possible Taiwan invasion: how to mount effective deterrence until the political conditions exist for doing so; and how to counter charges of escalation or risk the precipitation of armed conflict. Both friends and foes are bound to advance such allegations, if a major ally arms a threatened nation ahead of aggression taking place.

Consider the crisis that would almost certainly have burst upon Europe had the US embarked on massive weapons shipments to Ukraine in the winter of 2021, in response to Russian troop movements around its borders. The Kremlin would have denounced it as an intolerable provocation, perhaps claiming that it justified a preemptive assault. Most US allies in Europe would have taken fright.

Today, among the most important reasons it has proved possible, against expectations, to sustain a coalition of the US and its allies in support of Ukraine and against Russia, is that the Western powers are seen to have acted only in response to aggression, and not in mere anticipation of it. Putin was granted every possible benefit of doubt until he dispelled it in a storm of missiles and shells.

I suggest that the West was right to be seen to hold back, just as the democracies were morally much stronger in engaging Hitler in 1939 than they would have been a year earlier. Roosevelt was wise to await the dictators’ attack on the US.

Does my argument mean that I oppose reinforcing Taiwan ahead of an alarmingly plausible Chinese assault? The island’s government today deploys only a small fraction of the men and weapons available to Beijing.

The easiest part of the answer to this hard question is that the US must strengthen its own armed forces ahead of such an event. As the balance stands today, most strategic gurus believe that the US Navy would struggle to frustrate an invasion, given that Taiwan is just 100 miles from China’s home bases.

Putin and President Xi Jinping of China appear to accept the logic of mutually assured destruction. Even if the nuclear threshold is not breached, however, the Ukraine conflict demonstrates how devastating a conflict can become. Every prudent nation must be ready to defend its vital interests by conventional means. The great British historian and strategist Michael Howard wrote in 1979, while the Cold War was still pretty chilly, that the price we must expect to pay for our continuing independence is to sustain credible armies, navies and air forces: “Only if adequate conventional forces are maintained will statesmen be spared the agonizing dilemma” of choosing between surrender and going nuclear.

In modern times, too many Western nations have flinched from accepting the logic of this imperative, and even now remain slow to accept its budgetary consequences.

There is much that Taiwan and the US can do to strengthen the former’s defensive capability, without offering explicit provocation to Beijing. The island’s current fuel stocks, perhaps as little as seven days’ worth, could be increased; munition stockpiles for US forces can be pre-positioned in the region; Taiwan can invest in new-wave drones and subsurface unmanned naval craft. It can purchase data from commercial Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites such as Ukraine is using to good effect, to improve its early warning and surveillance.

Leaders go to war because they believe they can win, as did Putin in Ukraine. It is entirely feasible to reinforce both Taiwanese and US capabilities in the region, to a point at which Beijing must doubt its ability to prevail in the necessary amphibious assault, a perilous and difficult undertaking.

The Ukraine experience has rewritten in lights a towering lesson of history: To deter aggression, there is no substitute for credible armed forces. We in the UK and the rest of the West are supremely fortunate that America still possesses these, despite the caveats about the Navy’s vulnerabilities in the Pacific.

Yet more important even than weapons is will. Many people, sometimes including myself, have doubted and continue to doubt whether, if China does invade Taiwan, the US and its allies will undertake military action in response. This is a reprise of the 1950 Korean uncertainty, with one important difference: 73 years ago, there was nothing in South Korea of material value to the West; its armies fought instead to defend a principle. In modern Taiwan, by contrast, advanced semiconductors represent an industry of towering importance both to China and ourselves.

Despite unscripted lunges by US President Joe Biden declaring a commitment to Taiwan, the US position on the island remains equivocal. The intention is to avoid provoking Beijing, yet the consequence is to weaken deterrence. It seems possible, arguably essential, for the US to become more explicit. Washington can assert a determination to support Taiwan’s autonomy by all necessary means, so long as that remains the will of the island’s people.

But the Biden administration can also be clear that should this change — if the Taiwan’s people assert a desire for reunification with the mainland — then the US would raise no obstacle to the imposition of Beijing’s hegemony. Support for the will of a society’s people seems a fundamental democratic principle that the West is entitled to promise to uphold in any context, including of course Ukraine.

Such a comprehensive declaration of deterrence should be no barrier to sustaining a carrot-and-stick approach to Beijing, seeking to negotiate and compromise wherever possible. It is the Chinese who have chosen to adopt a confrontational posture, and seem increasingly unwilling either to accept civilized standards at home or to behave with restraint abroad.


The rhetoric and saber-rattling of the Chinese demand that the West should be ready to meet them in arms should they decide to fight us, or indeed to invade Taiwan. If we allow Beijing to doubt our willingness to do this, then deterrence must fail. We shall then deserve the war we get, in a way neither we nor the Ukrainian people did anything to deserve the one in which we are already committed to preserve their country.

To contact the author of this story:

Max Hastings at mhastings32@bloomberg.net



11. China says it 'reserves the right' to deal with 'similar situations' after US jets shoot down suspected spy balloon


 Hopefully when the remains of the surveillance equipment is receovered we can exploit that. But the fact that needs to be emphasized that the balloon spent 8 days in US airspace, it was detected and tracked, the risk was mititgated, and then it was shot down in a sfae area. We ened to exploit this entire infcident in a way to undermine the crediblility and legtimacy of the PRC/CCP. But instead it is just a political football within dmoestic politics. Who is the enemy: China, Xi, and the CCP or your opposition political party that you hate with your entire being? Perhaps we need to consider our priroities. We fight the wrong kind of political warfare - domestic partisan political warfare versus the international political warfare that is necessary for success in strategic competition. As Kennan said: 


 Political warfare is the logical application of Clausewitz's doctrine in time of peace. In broadest definition, political warfare is the employment of all the means at a nation's command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives. Such operations are both overt and covert. They range from such overt actions as political alliances, economic measures (as ERP--the Marshall Plan), and "white" propaganda to such covert operations as clandestine support of "friendly" foreign elements, "black" psychological warfare and even encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states. 
- George Kennan, 1948 Policy Planing Memo, 
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/history/johnson/65ciafounding3.htm


China says it 'reserves the right' to deal with 'similar situations' after US jets shoot down suspected spy balloon | CNN

CNN · by Heather Chen,Wayne Chang · February 5, 2023


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Video shows moment US missile hits suspected Chinese spy balloon

00:58 - Source: CNN

Hong Kong CNN —

China says it “reserves the right” to deal with “similar situations” following the United States’ decision to shoot down its high-altitude balloon.

“The US used force to attack our civilian unmanned airship, which is an obvious overreaction. We express solemn protest against this move by the US side,” China’s Defense Ministry spokesperson Tan Kefei said in a statement on Sunday afternoon local time.

China “reserves the right to use necessary means to deal with similar situations,” he added.

China’s Foreign Ministry had earlier on Sunday accused the US of “overreacting” and “seriously violating international practice,” after US military fighter jets on Saturday shot down the balloon over the Atlantic Ocean in a mission President Joe Biden hailed as a success.

The United States believes the balloon was involved in espionage, but China has refuted this, insisting it was a civilian research vessel blown off course.

“The Chinese side has repeatedly informed the US side after verification that the airship is for civilian use and entered the US due to force majeure – it was completely an accident,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s statement said.

“Force Majeure” is a legal term which means “greater force”. It excuses a party from liability if an unforeseen event, such as a natural catastrophe, prevents it from performing its obligations under the contract.

“China clearly asked the US to handle it properly in a calm, professional and restrained manner. A spokesman for the US Department of Defense also stated that the balloon will not pose a military or personal threat to ground personnel,” the ministry’s statement continued.


A jet flies by a suspected Chinese spy balloon after shooting it down off the coast in Surfside Beach, South Carolina, U.S. February 4, 2023. REUTERS/Randall Hill

Randall Hill/Reuters

US fighter jets shoot down Chinese spy balloon off East Coast

“China will resolutely safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of relevant companies, while reserving the right to make further necessary reaction,” the foreign ministry added.

Chinese state media on Saturday announced that the head of the country’s weather service was relieved of his duty, in a move seen by some analysts as an attempt to shore up Beijing’s position that the high-altitude balloon was of civilian nature mainly for meteorological purposes.

Zhuang Guotai was the head of China Meteorological Administration until Friday, but his departure from that post was not unexpected. In late January, Zhuang was elected the head of the western Gansu province’s People’s Political Consultative Committee, the provincial political advisory body.

US officials have pushed back on China’s repeated claims the downed balloon was simply for civilian use and had made its way into American airspace by “accident.”

“This was a PRC (People’s Republic of China) surveillance balloon. This surveillance balloon purposely traversed the United States and Canada and we are confident it was seeking to monitor sensitive military sites,” a senior US administration official said.

The official said a second balloon, spotted over Central and South America, was “another PRC surveillance balloon” and bore similar technical characteristics to the one that flew over the US.

“Both balloons also carry surveillance equipment not usually associated with standard meteorological activities or civilian research,” the official said. “Collection pod equipment and solar panels located on the metal truss suspended below the balloon are a prominent feature of both balloons.”

Pentagon officials earlier this week said the balloon posed no “military or physical” threat. The US decided against shooting down the balloon while it remained over land due to the risk of falling debris hurting a civilian and instead waited until it was over the ocean.

The US military will now focus on debris recovery efforts.

The incident is the latest in a series of spying cases and has fueled a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Washington.

Taiwan weighs in

Meanwhile Taiwan authorities on Sunday said that the Chinese balloon incident “should not be tolerated by the civilized international community.”

The self-governed island, which China claims as part of its territory despite never having controlled it, has experience of similar balloons overflying its territory.

“Such actions by the Chinese Communist Party government contravene international law, breach the airspace of other countries, and violate their sovereignty,” Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement, calling on China’s government to “immediately cease conduct of this kind that encroaches on other countries and causes regional instability.”


Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images

A look at China's history of spying in the US

Balloons believed to be used for “meteorological observations” flew over the island In September 2021 and in February 2022, according to Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense.

But it remains unclear if those balloons were the same type as the one downed by US fighter jets on Saturday.

CNN · by Heather Chen,Wayne Chang · February 5, 2023



12. China urges calm over 'spy' balloon in US airspace


China is Kevin Bacon in Animal House - "remain calm - all is well."  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDAmPIq29ro



China urges calm over 'spy' balloon in US airspace

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Watch: BBC security correspondent Gordon Corera explains the US/China row

China has urged "cool-headed" handling of a dispute over a giant Chinese balloon heading for the eastern US.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier called off a visit to Beijing, saying the "surveillance" balloon's presence was "an irresponsible act".

Later the US reported a second Chinese balloon floating over Latin America.

China expressed regret over the balloon over the US, saying it was a weather airship that had been blown astray. It was last spotted over Missouri.

It is expected to reach America's east coast near the Carolinas this weekend.

The US has decided not to shoot down the high-altitude airship due to the danger of falling debris.

The incident comes amid fraying tensions between the US and China.

In a statement on Saturday, the Chinese foreign ministry said Beijing "never violated the territory and airspace of any sovereign country".

It said it had discussed the incident with Mr Blinken, stressing that maintaining communication channels at all levels was important, "especially in dealing with some unexpected situations in a calm and reliable manner".

And it added that "some politicians and media in the United States used the incident as a pretext to attack and smear China."

According to US officials, the airship floated over Alaska and Canada before appearing over the US state of Montana, which is home to a number of sensitive nuclear missile sites.

The incident angered top US officials, with Mr Blinken saying he had told Beijing the balloon's presence was "a clear violation of US sovereignty and international law" and "an irresponsible act". He called it "unacceptable" and "even more irresponsible coming on the eve of a long-planned visit".

America's top diplomat had been set to visit Beijing from 5 to 6 February to hold talks on a wide range of issues, including security, Taiwan and Covid-19. It would have been the first high-level US-China meeting there in years.

But on Thursday, US defence officials announced they were tracking a giant surveillance balloon over the US.

Media caption,

Watch: 'At first I thought it was a star'

While the balloon was, the Pentagon said, "travelling at an altitude well above commercial air traffic" and did "not present a military or physical threat to people on the ground", its presence sparked outrage.

On Friday, China finally acknowledged the balloon was its property, saying that it was a civilian airship used for meteorological research, which deviated from its route because of bad weather.

And late on Friday, the Pentagon said a second Chinese spy balloon had been spotted - this time over Latin America.

"We are seeing reports of a balloon transiting Latin America. We now assess it is another Chinese surveillance balloon," said Pentagon press secretary Brig Gen Patrick Ryder. He provided no further details about its location.

China has so far made no public comments on the reported second balloon.


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13. Washington weighing deploying medium-range missiles to U.S. forces in Japan, Sankei reports


Very significant.


Washington weighing deploying medium-range missiles to U.S. forces in Japan, Sankei reports

Reuters · by Reuters

TOKYO, Feb 5 (Reuters) - Washington has suggested deploying medium-range missiles in Japan as part of a plan to bolster defences against China along the East and South China Seas, the Sankei newspaper reported on Saturday citing unidentified people involved with U.S.-Japan relations.

The deployment to U.S. forces in Japan may include long-range hypersonic weapons and Tomahawks, the newspaper reported, adding without citing sources that Tokyo is poised to start serious discussion toward accepting the deployment.

Though the location is undecided, the Sankei said Japan was considering the southern island of Kyushu as a possibility. It was not clear from the report whether the Sankei was citing one or multiple sources.

Japan and the United States want to reinforce islands separating the East China Sea from the Western Pacific because they are close to Taiwan - a democratically governed island which China claims as its own territory - and form part of what military planners refer to as the 'First Island Chain' extending down to Indonesia that hems in China's forces.

Reporting by Sakura Murakami; Editing by Christopher Cushing

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Reuters · by Reuters


14. INTERVIEW: 'We have been oppressed by unfreedom for a long time in China'


There is no frreedom in China - only "unfreedom."


INTERVIEW: 'We have been oppressed by unfreedom for a long time in China'

americanmilitarynews.com · by Radio Free Asia · February 5, 2023

This article was originally published by Radio Free Asia and is reprinted with permission.

Nearly three years ago, former state TV host Kcriss Li was live streaming his arrest by state security police in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, where he had gone to report as a citizen journalist on the emergence of the pandemic in 2020.

“I’m suddenly being chased down by the state security police. The car they’re driving isn’t a police car,” Li tells the camera after being hassled and obstructed for days by local officials and security guards as he traveled around Wuhan reporting on the epidemic, including the round-the-clock operation of crematoriums in the city.

“They’re chasing me, so I can’t live stream any more. I will just have to leave you with this clip,” Li says in a video shot in February 2022, not long after he tried to film the P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which some rumors claimed was the source of the COVID-19 virus.

“It’s hard to describe the feeling I had then, in Wuhan … sometimes I was reminded of a trip I made to North Korea in 2019, staying at the Yanggakdo Hotel, which is a place where foreign tourists stay in Pyongyang,” recalls Li, now a student in Rochester, New York. “We were able to move freely around the hotel, but under a state of total control, so that we felt we could be arrested at any time if we left the hotel.”

“The fear, the threat of existing under the threat of totalitarianism was what I felt most keenly in Wuhan back then,” says Li in an exclusive interview with Radio Free Asia, speaking to the public for the first time since disappearing about two years ago.

But Li, whose story has been written up as a book by exiled writer Liao Yiwu, dismisses the fear of totalitarian power as “tragic,” especially for young people.

“We should be worrying about what kind of practical action we can take, not about the so-called power of those who make the rules,” he says while strolling around a lake near his dormitory.

“Rumors were flying around”

Li, whose Chinese name is Li Zehua, said he was drawn to Wuhan by the disconnect between the official narrative, which claimed the ruling Chinese Communist Party had the newly emerging pandemic under control, and the cries for help from healthcare workers and ordinary people on the ground.

“Frontline medical staff were crying out over the lack of protective equipment, saying patients were dying in large numbers both in and outside of hospitals,” he says. “Rumors were flying around about the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

At the start, cutting-edge private media like Caixin, Caijing, Freezing Point and Southern Weekend were publishing front-line reporting out of Wuhan. But President Xi Jinping gave a Feb. 3, 2022, speech calling for “the strengthening of public opinion management.”

Citizen journalists had been quick to step into the breach, despite the banning of a number of key blogging platforms including Tencent’s “Daija” in the wake of Xi’s speech.

But their days were numbered too, given the strength of Xi’s directive to control the public narrative.

Suddenly went quiet

Citizen journalist Chen Qiushi, one of the first to arrive in the city, suddenly went quiet after interviewing people around the new mega hospitals being thrown up at great speed in Wuhan, with blogger Fang Bin taken away by police just a few days later.

Li managed to hang in there for a few more weeks until his dramatic, live-streamed chase by police on Feb. 26, while lawyer-turned-reporter Zhang Zhan was detained and taken back to Shanghai, where she is reportedly close to death in prison following months of on-off hunger-striking and forced feeding.

Li said his main concern in live streaming the police chase was self-protection.

“I knew that as long as I had a platform, that would give me some protection against a totalitarian power that was trying to hurt me or suffocate me,” he says, although he ended the broadcast with an impassioned plea to China’s young people to “stand up.”

Now, he finds inspiration in November’s anti-lockdown protests across China, in which people held up blank sheets of paper and called on Xi to step down and call elections, or at least to put an end to three years of grueling lockdowns, mass surveillance and compulsory testing under his zero-COVID policy.

“The most ridiculous thing is that I didn’t do anything,” he says. “We didn’t do anything — so people can’t even hold up a blank sheet of paper now?”

“What are they afraid of?”

Living the Chinese dream

Li was detained by police in February 2020 and held for two months. He came to the United States in 2021 on a student visa to obtain a masters degree in computer science.

That wasn’t his first brush with authority.

A high-school drop-out from the eastern province of Jiangxi, he narrowly escaped being sent to juvenile detention, winding up instead in the shopping malls of Shenzhen as a computer salesman.

Life in that cosmopolitan trading city brought him into contact with the wider world, and he eventually caught up on his studies and got admitted to the Communication University of China as a trainee anchor.

Li eventually got hired as a host and presenter, and lived the Chinese dream for a while, traveling all over and filming for his food shows.

Now, his existence is reduced to a room in a university dorm in Rochester, New York, with a desk crowded with computer monitors displaying code, or papers on artificial intelligence.

“We have been oppressed by unfreedom for a long time in China,” Li told RFA. “This unfreedom, especially the unfreedom of information, has brought about many other unfreedoms.”

“I believe that the digital totalitarianism we see today was brought about by technology, and the problems brought about by technology may only be solved by technology itself,” he explains.

Cultural Revolution 2.0

He likens the last three years of the zero-COVID policy, with white-clad enforcers welding people into their apartments or shipping them off to quarantine camps in the middle of the night, to the political turmoil of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.

“After I left, things got even worse — the guys in white turned into White Guards,” he says. “Nothing has changed since the Cultural Revolution.”

Asked what he thinks China is, or could become, he pauses for a long while to collect his thoughts.

“I think China could become very diverse,” he says. “It’s precisely because of the lack of tolerance and diversity that any talk of China these days is dominated by leftist nationalism and pointless patriotism.”

“I discovered when I got to the United States that freedom … is the result of diversity, or diversity is the premise of freedom, which was a pretty profound feeling,” he says.

Later, asked who Kcriss Li is now, he struggles to find an answer.

“I’m a learner,” he eventually concludes with a laugh. “I’m a person who is constantly learning, and who keeps discovering that he is nothing.”

But he still plans to keep up the fight against totalitarian rule, which he views as a threat anywhere due to the global spread of technology.

“If a totalitarian regime is using (artificial intelligence) technology to control the people, the people want to fight back. But you don’t even have the chance to know the opponent,” he says. “I think it is necessary to tell how the most backward society abuses the most advanced technology to harm. It makes sense to take, inform, and explain the details to people. I think it is meaningful.”

“I will definitely keep fighting those things that I don’t like, like totalitarianism and tyranny, and fight them in my own way,” he says. “I think more people will join me in future … I’m not alone.”

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americanmilitarynews.com · by Radio Free Asia · February 5, 2023



15. Xi Jinping’s Power Grab Is Paying Off



Excertps:


The more consequential lacuna in our understanding of Chinese politics—the length of Xi’s tenure as leader—remains unfilled even after the Congress. His third term, his history resolution, his refusal to anoint a political heir, and his personalization of party ideology all suggest that he may plan to rule for life. And his consolidation of power across multiple fronts of elite politics at the 20th Party Congress suggests that he maintains the political capital necessary to do so.

Indeed, a few days after officially securing a third term, Xi led his new PSC on a visit to the old revolutionary site of Yangjialing in Yan’an, where Mao cemented his absolute authority at the Seventh Party Congress in 1945. Xi hailed that Congress as “marking the party’s political, ideological, and organizational maturity,” which included “forming a group of well-tested politicians who held high the banner of Mao Zedong.” Xi appeared to draw a parallel between Mao in 1945 and his own consolidation of power in 2022, with the implication being that Xi plans to lead the party for decades to come.

Xi’s succession is a “gray rhino” political risk for China: We know it will happen, but we do not know when, we do not know how, and we do not know what comes next. The longer Xi rules, and the older he gets, the more his allies will begin jockeying to succeed him, with competition likely to arise between different factions of loyalists who share vertical ties to Xi but lack horizontal ties with each other. A contested succession could bring policy confusion, economic stasis, or even political chaos.



Xi Jinping’s Power Grab Is Paying Off

The Chinese leader will probably survive a turbulent time.


FEBRUARY 5, 2023, 6:57 AM

HTTPS://FOREIGNPOLICY.COM/2023/02/05/XI-JINPING-POWER-CHINA-COMMUNIST/?UTM_SOURCE=POCKET_SAVES

By Neil Thomas, a senior China analyst at Eurasia Group.

Popular narratives about Chinese leader Xi Jinping are in flux. Just a few months ago, he was widely seen as an unassailable force. But unusually widespread protests in late November, followed by a complete reversal of his zero-COVID policy, have prompted some to question whether Xi is losing his grip. While Xi never possessed godlike powers and could end up facing a bumpier period in state-society relations, this shift in perception makes it worth casting a retrospective eye on the progress he made in strengthening his position at the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. These moves still provide Xi with a strong political base to overcome external and internal threats to his authority despite policy errors and economic headwinds.

The 20th Party Congress remains a watershed event in Chinese politics. Convened in Beijing from Oct. 16 to Oct. 22, the Congress elected the Central Committee that then met for its first plenum on Oct. 23 to approve a precedent-defying third term for Xi as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This coronation capped a remarkable decade of power consolidation by the country’s most dominant ruler since Mao Zedong’s death in 1976.

While this outcome was expected, the Central Committee surprised analysts and shocked markets by selecting a Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) and Politburo stacked almost completely with Xi allies. China watchers generally assumed, based on his actions at the 19th Party Congress in 2017, when he had already established his political command, that Xi would retain some senior leaders and economic moderates from other factions on these bodies.

Popular narratives about Chinese leader Xi Jinping are in flux. Just a few months ago, he was widely seen as an unassailable force. But unusually widespread protests in late November, followed by a complete reversal of his zero-COVID policy, have prompted some to question whether Xi is losing his grip. While Xi never possessed godlike powers and could end up facing a bumpier period in state-society relations, this shift in perception makes it worth casting a retrospective eye on the progress he made in strengthening his position at the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. These moves still provide Xi with a strong political base to overcome external and internal threats to his authority despite policy errors and economic headwinds.

This article was originally published in ChinaFile.

This article was originally published in ChinaFile.

The 20th Party Congress remains a watershed event in Chinese politics. Convened in Beijing from Oct. 16 to Oct. 22, the Congress elected the Central Committee that then met for its first plenum on Oct. 23 to approve a precedent-defying third term for Xi as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This coronation capped a remarkable decade of power consolidation by the country’s most dominant ruler since Mao Zedong’s death in 1976.

While this outcome was expected, the Central Committee surprised analysts and shocked markets by selecting a Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) and Politburo stacked almost completely with Xi allies. China watchers generally assumed, based on his actions at the 19th Party Congress in 2017, when he had already established his political command, that Xi would retain some senior leaders and economic moderates from other factions on these bodies.

Xi also laid out his vision for China’s future. The report he delivered to the opening session of the Congress confirmed a long-term policy agenda focused on political control, economic statism, and global influence. A new amendment to the party’s constitution mandates loyalty to Xi’s leadership. He has maneuvered the people, processes, and institutions of Chinese politics to maximize his ability to rule for life.

From left: Li Xi, Cai Qi, Zhao Leji, President Xi ,Li Qiang, Wang Huning, and Ding Xuexiang attend the meeting between members of the standing committee of the Political Bureau of the 20th CPC Central Committee and Chinese and foreign journalists in Beijing on Oct. 23.

From left: Li Xi, Cai Qi, Zhao Leji, President Xi ,Li Qiang, Wang Huning, and Ding Xuexiang attend the meeting between members of the standing committee of the Political Bureau of the 20th CPC Central Committee and Chinese and foreign journalists in Beijing on Oct. 23. Lintao Zhang/Getty Images

Xi emerged from the Congress and plenum with an unprecedented grip on the CCP. No paramount leader in the post-Mao era managed to assemble a leadership team with a greater proportion of personal allies than Xi now has. He swept all seven positions on the PSC, keeping his longtime associate Zhao Leji and chief ideologue Wang Huning on board and elevating allies Li Qiang, Cai Qi, Ding Xuexiang, and Li Xi. On the broader 24-member Politburo, Xi increased his majority of loyalists—people with personal or professional ties to him or to his top lieutenants—from around 60 percent to over 80 percent. Xi loyalists also now dominate the Central Secretariat, which runs the party’s day-to-day business, and the Central Military Commission (CMC), which leads the armed forces.

Xi’s political grip flows from his control of the selection process for top party bodies. According to state news agency Xinhua, the pre-Congress process of “conversation and investigation” with senior cadres that Xi introduced five years ago included new requirements this time to “put political standards first” and promote officials who are “firm supporters” of his leadership. Compared to 2017, when, according to Xinhua, he interviewed 57 leaders, Xi reportedly spoke with only 30 leaders in 2022, and he did not consult with party elders or with national government leaders who did not hold top party positions. These apparent snubs suggest the political impotency of the State Council compared to party leadership bodies and the political weakness of old factional networks tied to ex-leaders Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.

Xi ignored many decades-old political norms to achieve this degree of dominance. He not only exempted himself from the 20-year norm of Politburo members aged 68 or older retiring (he was 69 at the time of the Congress), but he also retained CMC Vice Chairman Zhang Youxia (72) and promoted current Foreign Minister Wang Yi (69). And he forced 67-year-old Li Keqiang and Wang Yang (also 67) to leave the PSC, the first early retirements from the PSC in two decades. The departure of Li and Wang, along with the demotion from the Politburo of Hu Chunhua (who was only 59), banished the last senior leaders associated with the once-powerful Communist Youth League, a CCP-run youth movement from which Hu Jintao promoted several allies into high officialdom, ending any lingering norms of factional power-sharing. This incoming Politburo was also the first since 1992 without a single female member.

Xi not only prioritizes political loyalty over norms such as retirement ages, power sharing, and collective leadership but also over governance experience and policy expertise. One of his biggest departures from precedent was the elevation of Shanghai Party Secretary Li Qiang, rather than Wang Yang or Hu Chunhua, to succeed Li Keqiang as premier in March. Unlike every premier since 1976, and unlike Wang and Hu, Li Qiang has never served as a vice premier or even in any central government position. Some more optimistic takes portray Li as a pro-business premier, given his track record as a local leader in rich provinces. However, observers used similar evidence a decade ago to argue that Xi himself would advance market reforms when he came to power.

The new era of “maximum Xi” heightens political risk across multiple dimensions. Other leaders are less likely to push back against Xi’s views, as they now know definitively that their careers depend on supporting Xi’s agenda. They and the Chinese public will increasingly see major policy decisions as expressions of Xi’s personal leadership, creating a sticky political dynamic wherein correcting errors becomes more difficult as criticism of policy becomes tantamount to criticism of Xi. When Xi does decide on a new direction, his power renders policymaking susceptible to volatile shifts, as demonstrated by the sudden about-face on zero-COVID, a reversal that is hard to imagine could have happened unless Xi personally decided to change course and could then bring the whole system with him. Xi’s loyalists also have less experience in national or even provincial leadership roles than their predecessors, especially his top economic team of Li Qiang, Ding Xuexiang, and He Lifeng.

To be sure, Xi’s stronger control could lead to better policy implementation. The value of improved implementation, however, depends on the quality of his policies, and Xi unfortunately appears committed to his long-standing political agenda. Recent pragmatic steps, such as the minor détente in U.S.-China diplomacy and the prioritization of economic recovery in 2023, are likely to prove less indicative of Xi’s long-term decision-making than the political undercurrents that necessitated these adjustments in the first place.

Beijing’s constructive efforts appear to be a tactical shift to reduce pressures on the economy at an especially difficult time for China, as the country moves from frequent COVID lockdowns to the virus ripping its way through the population. Next year, if the growth rate recovers to near pre-COVID levels, and if Washington offers little incentive to adopt less confrontational tactics, then a more confident Xi will likely return to a more interventionist regulatory policy and a more assertive foreign policy.

Indeed, in closed-door remarks at the first plenum, which were only published on Dec. 31, Xi informed the new party leadership of his belief that “history has repeatedly proven that using struggle to seek security leads to the survival of security, while using compromise to seek security leads to the death of security; and that using struggle to seek development leads to the flourishing of development, while using compromise to seek development leads to the decline of development.”

A security officer wears a mask as delegates leave the floor after the opening session of the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference.

A security officer wears a mask as delegates leave the floor after the opening session of the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference in Beijing on March 4, 2022. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

Per the party constitution, the Central Committee is formally the CCP’s “highest leading body,” with “the power to make decisions on major national policies.” But the Central Committee holds a plenum only about once a year, in between which times the PSC and the Politburo formally exercise their powers to “direct all party work.” The composition of the new 376-member 20th Central Committee, which includes 205 full members and 171 non-voting alternate members, reflects both political machinations and policy priorities.

Similar to the role he took in selecting the PSC and the Politburo, Xi “personally directed the gatekeeping” of selections to the Central Committee. This allowed him to promote loyalists and retire legacy officials. According to Xinhua reports, the high turnover rate of 65.4 percent, even higher than the 64.9 percent in 2017, was much higher than rates of 48.9 percent in 2012 and 49.3 percent in 2007, before Xi’s leadership. The average age of members also inched up to 57.2 years old from 57 in 2017 and 56.1 in 2012.

While Xi promoted relatively inexperienced allies to top positions, the same was not true lower down the chain of command, where he has cultivated the political loyalty of policy experts. Overall, Xi selected what may be the most educated committee ever—49.5 percent are technocrats, up from 37.2 percent in 2012, and 7.7 percent are senior STEM scholars, up from 4 percent in 2012—reflecting his calls for China to innovate a way out of its flagging growth model and dependencies on Western technology. Female representation inched up to a still dismal 8.8 percent, while ethnic minority representation fell for at least the fourth consecutive time to 8.5 percent, suggesting a challenging road ahead for gender equality and minority rights.

The same Xinhua article that described Xi’s role in the selection process for the Central Committee also hinted at the policy priorities of his new administration. Teams vetting candidates for the Central Committee preferred provincial government officials who had focused on poverty alleviation, cross-regional development, and environmental protection; candidates working in central-level government agencies who had helped China respond to U.S.-led sanctions and overcome critical technology chokepoints; and leaders in state-owned enterprises who had success in upholding party leadership and upgrading domestic value chains. Cadres who want to advance in Xi’s China will now likely further prioritize these objectives.

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Every Party Congress amends the party constitution. Distinct from the state constitution of the People’s Republic of China, the Constitution of the Chinese Communist Party is the supreme law of the CCP, outlining its principles, activities, and structures. It underpins a broader system of intraparty regulations, which Xi is expanding and rewriting to improve his ability to govern the party and the party’s ability to govern the country.

Last year’s amendments to the party constitution strengthened Xi’s personal rule. Party members are now constitutionally obliged to implement the “two upholds”: “uphold Comrade Xi Jinping’s core position on the Party Central Committee and in the Party as a whole” and “uphold the Central Committee’s authority and its centralized, unified leadership.” This mandate is a further step by Xi in entrenching his position by formally equating opposition to his leadership with opposition to the party itself.

Several omissions, however, surprised observers. In the lead-up to the Party Congress, the “two establishments”—establishing Xi as the party’s core and establishing the guiding position of his thought—had dominated party discourse, leading many to think the “two establishments” would also feature in the updated constitution. Similarly, party watchers were on the lookout for phrases that would place Xi on par with Mao. These included formally shortening Xi’s wordy signature ideology from “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” to “Xi Jinping Thought,” or sanctifying the use of Mao-era terms such as “people’s leader” or “helmsman” to refer to Xi. None of these phrases made it into the party constitution.

Some writers believe these omissions show that Xi’s leadership still faces meaningful resistance in the party. But this conclusion seems premature. To accompany the new constitution, Xinhua published a Q&A with an anonymous leading cadre from the 20th Party Congress secretariat—possibly Wang Huning, who headed the body. The cadre said the addition of the “two upholds” would help party members “deeply comprehend the decisive significance of the ‘two establishments.’” More speculatively, the Congress may not have enshrined Xi as the “people’s leader” in the constitution because even Xi himself may believe it inappropriate to equate himself with Chairman Mao, the revolutionary hero and founder of the nation.

A visitor walks by a display showing images of Xi at the Museum of the Communist Party in Beijing.

A visitor walks by a display showing images of Xi at the Museum of the Communist Party in Beijing on Oct. 13, 2022. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

The political report to the 20th Party Congress, a truncated version of which Xi delivered in a speech at the gathering, represents the most authoritative statement of the party’s current worldview and policy priorities. Even small changes in the language used by party leaders in these reports, or tweaks to the rigid format that the reports typically follow, can evince meaningful policy shifts.

Political reports do not go into detail about specific policies (such as zero-COVID), but their high-level messages inform policymaking for the next five years and beyond. Xi said the most recent report constitutes a “grand blueprint” for governing China. Its content signaled continuity rather than change in Xi’s personal leadership and policy agenda, drawing heavily from the most recent Five-Year Plan and the third “history resolution,” both issued in 2021. Overall, it suggests that Xi will keep pushing China in a more authoritarian, statist, and nationalist direction in the coming years and even decades.

This includes the Chinese economy, where the party plans to play a stronger role, such as by taking board seats in major firms and guiding capital toward favored sectors. The political report introduced “systems thinking” as part of Xi’s ideology. According to Xi, “All things are interconnected and interdependent,” as economic, political, and social reforms involve adjusting a balance of interests wherein “pulling one hair moves the whole body.” China’s increasingly complex policy issues therefore require enhanced party oversight and more government systems to manage all aspects of the country’s development.

Xi presents this increase in party control as necessary to counter rising threats. The party previously presented China as in a “period of strategic opportunity,” in which favorable domestic and international environments enabled a focus on economic development. Xi’s latest report shows that he believes China has now entered a period in which “strategic opportunity coexists with risks and challenges, and uncertain and unpredictable factors are increasing.” Moreover, the report continues, “Various ‘black swan’ and ‘gray rhino’ events may occur at any time,” highlighting the party’s rising concern with preparing for both unexpected crises and foreseeable threats, respectively.

Xi wants to balance economic growth with national security. The 2022 political report contained a new section devoted to national security, which should “permeate every aspect and the whole process” of governance. To prepare for “high winds, choppy waves, and even dangerous storms,” Xi’s report called for stronger party leadership, people-centered policymaking, and a spirit of struggle. The report also added a section on science, education, and human capital, priority areas to bolster domestic innovation and address the political risks of lagging productivity growth and Western chokeholds on key technologies.

Even high-single-digit GDP growth targets now seem beyond reach. Development remains the party’s “top priority,” but its “primary task” is now “high-quality development.” This includes elevating Xi’s “new development pattern,” a strategy that unites development and security goals by boosting domestic demand and homegrown technology while increasing global reliance on Chinese supply chains. Xi’s political report identified new growth drivers—AI, IT, biotech, green industries, high-end manufacturing, renewable energy, and new industrial materials (such as those engineered with nanotechnology)—but was notably less enthusiastic about markets, openness, and supply-side structural reform than even his previous report in 2017. The report’s vision of strategic economic management also requires the party to expand oversight of the private sector, by “strengthening party building” in non-state firms and “improving corporate governance” of financial firms and of private wealth by “regulating the mechanism of wealth accumulation.”

The report suggested that Xi is preparing China for long-term strategic competition with the United States. It defined the party’s overarching goal for China as “building a socialist modern great power” by the centenary of the people’s republic in 2049, and to “use Chinese-style modernization to comprehensively advance the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” The party has long wanted to achieve “modernization” by mid-century, but this report stated in the clearest terms yet that Xi wants China to “lead the world in comprehensive national power and international influence.” The new link between “Chinese-style modernization” and “national rejuvenation” emphasizes Xi’s determination to steer China on the party’s own course, one that rejects democratic politics, individual freedoms, and U.S. leadership in global governance. That includes efforts to “actively participate” in global human rights governance and the formulation of global security rules. Xi’s report did not change Taiwan policy, but a new phrase—“resolving the Taiwan question is for the Chinese people themselves to decide”—portends more assertive pushback against U.S. and allied efforts to support Taiwan.

Xi Jinping looks at former President Hu Jintao as he is escorted out early from the closing session of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China

Xi looks at former President Hu Jintao as he is escorted out early from the closing session of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in Beijing on Oct. 22.Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

The most dramatic moment of the Party Congress was also its least insightful. At the closing session on Oct. 22, a few minutes after foreign media had arrived, attendants cajoled former leader Hu Jintao out of his seat and escorted him off the stage. The 79-year-old Hu appeared upset and unwilling to leave.

Xinhua’s English-language Twitter account said Hu “was not feeling well” and went “to a room next to the meeting venue for a rest.” But Hu’s exit sparked speculation that he was ejected after protesting Xi’s new leadership lineup, or that Xi had deliberately humiliated Hu to assert his political dominance. Media outlets scrutinized the brief episode in painstaking detail to try to decipher its hidden meaning.

The only truth so far is that we don’t know what happened. Hu’s age and known infirmity make a health event plausible but not certain. Xi’s obsession with control, perception, and process make it unlikely that he planned a disruptive display of disunity at the party’s biggest set piece, especially as Hu hardly posed a political threat. Hu’s reappearance at a ceremony on Dec. 5 to honor his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, who died on Nov. 30, and presence on a list of retired comrades to whom the Xi administration sent Lunar New Year greetings on Jan. 19, further suggest his Congress exit was not an orchestrated purge. Still, such judgments are educated guesses made in the absence of reliable information.

The more consequential lacuna in our understanding of Chinese politics—the length of Xi’s tenure as leader—remains unfilled even after the Congress. His third term, his history resolution, his refusal to anoint a political heir, and his personalization of party ideology all suggest that he may plan to rule for life. And his consolidation of power across multiple fronts of elite politics at the 20th Party Congress suggests that he maintains the political capital necessary to do so.

Indeed, a few days after officially securing a third term, Xi led his new PSC on a visit to the old revolutionary site of Yangjialing in Yan’an, where Mao cemented his absolute authority at the Seventh Party Congress in 1945. Xi hailed that Congress as “marking the party’s political, ideological, and organizational maturity,” which included “forming a group of well-tested politicians who held high the banner of Mao Zedong.” Xi appeared to draw a parallel between Mao in 1945 and his own consolidation of power in 2022, with the implication being that Xi plans to lead the party for decades to come.

Xi’s succession is a “gray rhino” political risk for China: We know it will happen, but we do not know when, we do not know how, and we do not know what comes next. The longer Xi rules, and the older he gets, the more his allies will begin jockeying to succeed him, with competition likely to arise between different factions of loyalists who share vertical ties to Xi but lack horizontal ties with each other. A contested succession could bring policy confusion, economic stasis, or even political chaos.

Foreign Policy · by Neil Thomas · February 5, 2023



16. When It Comes to Building Its Own Defense, Europe Has Blinked



How does this affect the future of NATO?


Excerpts:


Mr. Macron and Mr. Scholz, whose relations are said to be frosty, have failed to provide necessary leadership, separately or together, analysts said.
France missed an opportunity to “show what strategic autonomy is or could be,” said Bart Szewczyk, a former Obama administration official now with the German Marshall Fund. “Under the surface of the slogan,” he said, “there was not much there in terms of resources or deployment or even in intellectual leadership.”
When it came to reducing dependence on Russian energy imports, Europeans took a big economic hit, quickly built liquefied natural gas terminals, overrode regulations, imposed sanctions and agreed on a price cap for Russian oil. Defense was a different story.
“On security and defense, it has lost credibility,” Ms. Fix said. “France could have used this war an opportunity to invest big into Ukraine and Central Europe and say, ‘You can really rely on us,’ but that didn’t happen.”
Instead, both Paris and Berlin hesitated, hoping for a short war, which this one is shaping up not to be.
For some time to come, then, “strategic autonomy is dead,” Ms. Fix said, “and the French don’t like this at all.”

When It Comes to Building Its Own Defense, Europe Has Blinked

The New York Times · by Steven Erlanger · February 4, 2023

Despite expectations that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would force Europe to bolster its military strength, it has instead reinforced dependency on U.S. leadership, intelligence and might.

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Ukrainian soldiers with an American-made M777 howitzer last year in the Donetsk region.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times


By

Feb. 4, 2023

BRUSSELS — Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the greatest challenge to European security since the end of the Cold War, but the Europeans have missed the opportunity to step up their own defense, diplomats and experts say. Instead, the war has reinforced Europe’s military dependence on the United States.

Washington, they note, has led the response to the war, marshaled allies, organized military aid to Ukraine and contributed by far the largest amount of military equipment and intelligence to Ukraine. It has decided at each step what kind of weapons Kyiv will receive and what it will not.

Its indispensable role was manifest in the recent decision to provide Leopard tanks to Ukraine and allow others to do so — a step Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany refused to take, despite strong pressure from Poland and Britain, unless the United States provided some of its own modern tanks.

American leadership “has almost been too successful for its own good, leaving Europeans with no incentive to develop leadership on their own,” said Liana Fix, a German analyst with the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

“The perception is that there is no real leader in the European Union and the U.S. is doing helicopter parenting with Brussels,” she said. “This is a problem that can come back to haunt the U.S.”

And the Europeans, too.

President Biden announcing his plan to send M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine last month in Washington.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

European Union leaders visited the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, on Friday, but offered President Volodymyr Zelensky little more than promises that his embattled country might join the bloc someday.

In the meantime, the European Union has responded to the invasion with economic sanctions against Russia, significant financial aid and a fund — now at 3.6 billion euros, or about $3.9 billion — to repay member states for their military contributions to Ukraine. Total military contributions to Ukraine from member states is estimated at €12 billion, and overall assistance at nearly €50 billion.

But the goal of President Emmanuel Macron of France for “strategic autonomy” — for the European Union to become a military power that could act independently of the United States, if complementary to it — has proved hollow.

In large part, diplomats and experts say, that is because European nations disagree sharply among themselves about how the war should end and even about their relationship with Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin, both now and in the future.

The State of the War

It is impossible to have a real European defense without a coherent European foreign policy, suggested Charles A. Kupchan, a former Obama administration official and a professor of international studies at Georgetown University. The Ukraine war cuts both ways, he said, prompting a new unity among Europeans, but also new cracks.

“There is very little appetite for autonomy if that means distance from the United States,” he said, “because the war has underscored the importance of the American military presence in Europe and the guarantee it extended to European allies since World War II.”

Central and Eastern Europeans, along with the Baltic nations and Britain, have always mistrusted promises of an autonomous European defense and have worked to keep the United States engaged in European security and in the NATO alliance.

For them, the American nuclear umbrella is considered indispensable to deter a Russia they saw as more of a threat than did other allies like Germany, France, Spain and Italy, especially since the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Empty containers for shoulder-fired, American-made Javelin antitank missiles near the town of Horenka, Ukraine, last year.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

Whether Washington laments it or not, given its desire to pivot toward China, Mr. Kupchan said, “this war extends the shelf-life of the American military presence in Europe for a long time to come.”

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former NATO secretary general who has proposed a plan to bolster Ukraine’s security against Russia, said that Mr. Macron “has undermined his own idea of European autonomy” by “his statements and behavior when it comes to Putin,” arguing that a new European security order must include Russia and that Mr. Putin must not be humiliated.

That “created suspicion in Eastern Europe and made it more or less impossible for Macron to create momentum behind his idea of European autonomy,” Mr. Rasmussen said.

So long as Europe’s major powers “cannot agree on a common approach to Russia, then the rest of the crowd will look across the Atlantic and look for security guarantees from the United States,” he added.

The European dream was always to have two major collective pillars, one fiscal and one defense, said Guntram Wolff, the director of the German Council on Foreign Relations. Germany would anchor the first and France the second.

“But the Ukraine war was a big game-changer for European security,” he said, “and Central and Eastern Europeans immediately understood that they need the U.S. for their security, and Germany quickly decided the same.”

Despite a promise by Mr. Scholz, the German chancellor, for a “Zeitenwende,” or a turning point in German security policy, details were lacking.

Now it turns out the €100 billion set aside to rebuild the paltry post-Cold War German military will be spread out over the life of the Parliament. Bureaucracy has made it difficult to start spending the money, and the government failed to get the German defense industry moving.

From left: Mario Draghi, then the prime minister of Italy, President Emmanuel Macron of France and Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany traveling to Ukraine last year. Diplomats and experts say that the idea of “strategic autonomy” for Europe is failing in part because of disagreements between European leaders.

Rheinmetall, a German arms manufacturer, makes the Leopard tank and has about 200 in storage, and it says it needs up to a year to refurbish them for Ukraine. But Germany could have easily paid the company to get the tanks ready 12 months ago, even for its own military.

“Germany already wasted a year,” Mr. Wolff said.

European countries have tried to catch up with needed defense investment, but in a national and fragmented way, not coordinated by Brussels. That inevitably meant buying off-the-shelf, which mostly meant American weaponry, not European.

Germany annoyed France by immediately buying American F-35 fighter planes, rather than buying European or even waiting for a long-delayed Franco-German-Spanish jet project, the Future Combat Air System, itself in competition with a proposed British-Italian-Japanese one. But neither project expects to have a working fighter until 2035 or 2040.

Similarly, worried about its vulnerability to Russian nuclear-capable, medium-range missiles in Kaliningrad, Berlin shocked Paris by proposing a “European Sky Shield Initiative,” an air and missile defense system, in cooperation with 13 NATO allies and Finland, and later Sweden, too, that would primarily use existing American and Israeli technology, not a European design.

France was not one of the countries involved, and as a sign of displeasure, it postponed an annual Franco-German government meeting.

“In the long run, decisions like these increase European dependence on the United States,” said Ms. Fix, the analyst. “People are placing their bets now on NATO and the U.S., and on equipment that’s already there.”

The fact that Mr. Scholz relented on providing tanks to Ukraine only with the Americans stung in Europe. “It shows that Europeans in the end don’t trust one another, and for Central and Eastern Europeans, trust and credibility is gone,” she said.

American-made Abrams tanks last year at a training ground in Drawsko Pomorskie, Poland. Mr. Scholz had refused to supply Ukraine with German-made tanks unless Washington provided some of its own.Credit...Marcin Bielecki/EPA, via Shutterstock

At the same time, Ms. Fix said, both Germany and France think the Central and Eastern Europeans underestimate the risk of Russian escalation and need Washington to restrain them. “So everyone is looking to Washington as the main arbiter,” she said, “and not to one another.”

Mr. Macron and Mr. Scholz, whose relations are said to be frosty, have failed to provide necessary leadership, separately or together, analysts said.

France missed an opportunity to “show what strategic autonomy is or could be,” said Bart Szewczyk, a former Obama administration official now with the German Marshall Fund. “Under the surface of the slogan,” he said, “there was not much there in terms of resources or deployment or even in intellectual leadership.”

When it came to reducing dependence on Russian energy imports, Europeans took a big economic hit, quickly built liquefied natural gas terminals, overrode regulations, imposed sanctions and agreed on a price cap for Russian oil. Defense was a different story.

“On security and defense, it has lost credibility,” Ms. Fix said. “France could have used this war an opportunity to invest big into Ukraine and Central Europe and say, ‘You can really rely on us,’ but that didn’t happen.”

Instead, both Paris and Berlin hesitated, hoping for a short war, which this one is shaping up not to be.

For some time to come, then, “strategic autonomy is dead,” Ms. Fix said, “and the French don’t like this at all.”

The New York Times · by Steven Erlanger · February 4, 2023




17. Critics see Chinese spy balloon as Biden's latest policy blunder


Is it really a policy blunder? I do tno think we know enough of the details to make that assessment and we may not be able to make a useful judgment for some time to until we see how events play out? Are the criticisms and emotional partisan response or are they based on sound strategic assessment? Who is confducting objective analysis of this event?


Compare the article below with the statements from DOD here. Of course there are those who will automatically discount government statements .


U.S. officials first detected the balloon and its payload on January 28 when it entered U.S. airspace near the Aleutian Islands. The balloon traversed Alaska, Canada and re-entered U.S. airspace over Idaho. "President Biden asked the military to present options and on Wednesday President Biden gave his authorization to take down the Chinese surveillance balloon as soon as the mission could be accomplished without undue risk to us civilians under the balloon's path," said a senior defense official speaking on background. "Military commanders determined that there was undue risk of debris causing harm to civilians while the balloon was overland."
...
Long before the shoot down, U.S. officials took steps to protect against the balloon's collection of sensitive information, mitigating its intelligence value to the Chinese. The senior defense official said the recovery of the balloon will enable U.S. analysts to examine sensitive Chinese equipment. "I would also note that while we took all necessary steps to protect against the PRC surveillance balloon's collection of sensitive information, the surveillance balloon's overflight of U.S. territory was of intelligence value to us," the official said. "I can't go into more detail, but we were able to study and scrutinize the balloon and its equipment, which has been valuable." https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3288543/f-22-safely-shoots-down-chinese-spy-balloon-off-south-carolina-coast/


Critics see Chinese spy balloon as Biden's latest policy blunder

foxnews.com · by Adam Shaw | Fox News

Video

Chinese spy balloon shot down over the Atlantic Ocean

General Jack Keane joined ‘Fox News Live’ to discuss the breaking news that the Chinese spy balloon was shot down.

The Chinese surveillance balloon that drifted across the continental United States before being shot out of the sky off the coast of South Carolina is being seen by the administration’s critics as the latest embarrassment to hit President Biden’s foreign policy.

The balloon, which Chinese officials have claimed is a civilian craft gone adrift but U.S. officials insist is a surveillance vessel, was finally shot down on Saturday afternoon after being allowed to drift across the continental United States for days.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled a planned trip to Beijing due to the incident, while Republicans hammered President Biden for initially failing to shoot down the balloon. On Saturday afternoon, as the balloon tracked over Myrtle Beach, S.C., it was finally deflated by an F-22 pilot.

The White House said that Biden followed the advice of the Pentagon and top military leaders not to shoot the craft down over the U.S. in case it causes civilian casualties and other collateral damage.

BIDEN SAYS HE AUTHORIZED PENTAGON DAYS AGO TO SHOOT DOWN CHINESE SPY BALLOON


Photos taken in Aynor, SC of the Chinese spy balloon shot down. (Fox News)

A senior defense official said Saturday that the decision was made out of an abundance of caution and that "the fundamental calculation was not the intelligence value, but rather the safety to Americans on the ground."

But even after the balloon was downed, the multi-day saga in which a foreign satellite was allowed to enter United States airspace was being spun by Republican critics as the latest blow to U.S. credibility under Biden.

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers said allowing the balloon to cross the U.S. is "another example of weakness by the Biden administration."

"Now, the White House must provide answers about why they decided to allow a CCP spy balloon to cross the United States and what damage to our national security occurred from this decision," he said.

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green said he was pleased that the balloon was down, but said it was "indefensible that this threat was eliminated only after great public outcry and the damage to U.S. national security and American sovereignty was already done."

Green looked to cast the incident as the latest in a number of failures by the administration.

"The fact remains that President Biden, when faced with the opportunity to protect the homeland from our adversaries, chose yet again to demonstrate weakness on the global stage," he said. "From the Southern border to Afghanistan and, now, Chinese surveillance directly above our homes and sensitive military installations, this President shows he is not interested in protecting American interests."

Green made reference to the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, which resulted in a humanitarian catastrophe amid a scramble to get out of the country and evacuate U.S. allies and others as the Taliban closed in on U.S. positions. The chaotic final days included a suicide bomb attack at Kabul Airport -- where Afghans were crowded to try and catch a ride out of the country -- which killed 13 U.S. troops and dozens of Afghans.

The U.S. also abandoned $7 billion of military equipment as it rushed to exit. Meanwhile, it led to concerns that the hasty withdrawal had emboldened China in the months after the evacuation, with increased incursions into Taiwan and the Pentagon finding that the withdrawal was a propaganda gift to the Chinese regime. Additionally, NATO allies were blindsided by the withdrawal, leading to strained relations.

It was not the only foreign policy incident to strain relations. The French erupted in anger when the Biden administration suddenly announced a nuclear submarine deal with Australia, undercutting a prior deal between the French and the Australian military — something President Biden had to admit was "clumsy."

Video

Meanwhile, the Biden administration has been under fire for its handling of the migrant crisis at the southern border, where more than 2.3 million migrants from countries across the globe crossed the border in FY 2022 -- and more than 251,000 in December alone.

While the Biden administration has cast the problem as a hemisphere-wide crisis that requires cooperation with allied countries -- which it has made moves to secure -- to tackle "root causes," critics have said the ongoing crisis shows the failure of the administration’s policies.

BIDEN'S FUMBLED AFGHANISTAN WITHDRAWAL WAS A PROPAGANDA GIFT TO CHINA, PENTAGON FINDS

Republicans repeatedly linked the border crisis to the balloon saga this week, including after it was shot down.

"Joe Biden *finally* shooting down the Chinese spy balloon is like closing the southern border after over 1.2 million illegally escaped into our country," Rep. Ben Cline, R-Va., tweeted. "Waiting this long to take action projects weakness and is too little, too late."

"The CCP spy balloon is the story of the Biden presidency. See problem. Shrug. Rely on spin from MSM to diminish ineptitude," Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., said.

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Ahead of the shooting of the balloon, Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., argued that the incident was "one more example" of a move by Biden that had made the U.S. appear weaker, not stronger on the world stage

"This has been a tremendous embarrassment for the United States of America. It's one more example of the weakness of the Biden administration on the global stage. Their lack of response, the show of weakness...is provoking our adversaries and making America weaker," he said.

Fox News' Jennifer Griffin contributed to this report.

Adam Shaw is a politics reporter for Fox News Digital, primarily covering immigration and border security.

He can be reached at adam.shaw2@fox.com or on Twitter

foxnews.com · by Adam Shaw | Fox News



18. The Pentagon Saw a Warship Boondoggle. Congress Saw Jobs.



Excertps:

In an interview, Mr. Wittman said that the lobbying from the ship repair contractors had played a role in his efforts.
“I can’t tell you whether it’s a predominant factor,” he said in January, while at a conference sponsored by Fincantieri and other shipbuilding companies in Virginia. “But I can tell you it was a factor.”
Fincantieri, the builder of the Freedom-class ships, has not suffered from the squabble over the ships it built.
Its Wisconsin shipyard is still building the Navy’s last Freedom-class littoral combat ship while also starting work on the new $1.1 billion Constellation-class ship that will replace it.
“When you’re a ship builder, your goal is to build the ship that the Navy tells you to build,” Mr. Vandroff, Fincantieri’s chief executive, said in an interview as dozens of Navy commanders, midshipmen and others were assembled in front of him at the Surface Navy Association conference in Virginia to grab a glass of Prosecco and some Wisconsin cheese. “What the Navy chooses to do with it — that is their choice.”

The Pentagon Saw a Warship Boondoggle. Congress Saw Jobs.

The New York Times · by Eric Lipton · February 4, 2023

After years of crippling problems and a changing mission, the Navy pushed to retire nine of its newest ships. Then the lobbying started.

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A group of Freedom-class littoral combat ships tied up at port in Jacksonville, Fla. Eight of the 10 based there were slated for retirement, but the Navy reversed itself on four of them.Credit...Thomas Simonetti for The New York Times

Feb. 4, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET


By

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The 387-foot-long warships tied up at the Jacksonville Navy base were acclaimed as some of the most modern in the United States fleet: nimble, superfast vessels designed to operate in coastal waters and hunt down enemy submarines, destroy anti-ship mines and repel attacks from small boats, like those often operated by Iran.

But the Pentagon last year made a startling announcement: Eight of the 10 Freedom-class littoral combat ships now based in Jacksonville and another based in San Diego would be retired, even though they averaged only four years old and had been built to last 25 years.

The decision came after the ships, built in Wisconsin by Fincantieri Marinette Marine in partnership with Lockheed Martin, suffered a series of humiliating breakdowns, including repeated engine failures and technical shortcomings in an anti-submarine system intended to counter China’s growing naval capacity.

“We refused to put an additional dollar against that system that wouldn’t match the Chinese undersea threat,” Adm. Michael M. Gilday, the chief of naval operations, told Senate lawmakers.

The Navy estimated that the move would save $4.3 billion over the next five years, money that Admiral Gilday said he would rather spend on missiles and other firepower needed to prepare for potential wars. Having ships capable of fulfilling the military mission, he argued, was much more important than the Navy’s total ship count.

Then the lobbying started.

A consortium of players with economic ties to the ships — led by a trade association whose members had just secured contracts worth up to $3 billion to do repairs and supply work on them — mobilized to pressure Congress to block the plan, with phone calls, emails and visits to Washington to press lawmakers to intervene.

“Early decommissioning of littoral combat ships at Mayport Naval Station would result in the loss of more than 2,000 direct jobs in Jacksonville,” a coalition of business leaders from the Florida city wrote last summer.

The effort targeted members of Congress who represent communities with large Navy stations and have collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the same military contractors that help maintain and operate these ships. They included Representative Rob Wittman, Republican of Virginia, who represents the Hampton Roads area, home to the world’s largest naval facility.

Within weeks, lawmakers offered amendments to the 2023 Pentagon spending authorization law that prohibited the Navy from retiring four of the eight ships in Jacksonville and the one in San Diego.

“These ships are not perfect — no new class of ship is,” said Representative John Rutherford, Republican of Florida, who represents the Jacksonville area and introduced one of the amendments after a meeting with a delegation of Florida officials who had flown to Washington to protest the Navy’s decision. “But they are fulfilling operational needs as we speak.”

The U.S.S. Minneapolis-St. Paul docked at Fincantieri Marinette Marine’s shipbuilding facility in Marinette, Wis.Credit...Tannen Maury/EPA, via Shutterstock

The first littoral combat ship under construction in 2008. The ship had been conceived in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks as a “street fighter” to confront less sophisticated enemies from rogue states.Credit...Erol Reyal for The New York Times

In December, the amendments were adopted as part of the spending bill passed by Congress and signed into law by President Biden, stymieing the Pentagon’s wishes by allowing only four of the nine targeted ships to be retired.

“Lawmakers are acting like hoarders and forcing the services to keep stuff they don’t want and need,” said Steve Ellis, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a conservative group that seeks to limit government spending. “This is more about parochial concerns than defense priorities.”

More on U.S. Armed Forces

Lobbying campaigns built around the economic impact of strategic decisions about weapons systems are a longstanding tactic, but they have taken on new importance as the United States reshapes the military to defend against an ascendant China and a more aggressive Russia.

The Freedom-class ships were first conceived of after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks as part of an effort to combat nontraditional threats. They ended up costing more than twice what had been expected, about $500 million per ship, compared with an early estimate of $220 million. It had taken a dozen years longer than expected to get them operational, at which point the Navy’s war-fighting needs had shifted back to countering global rivals.

The Navy and Lockheed are still negotiating how much the contractors should have to pay to resolve design flaws in the ships’ propulsion systems.

But having largely won the battle, at least for now, to keep the Freedom-class ships operational, the contractors who built them have already returned to promoting a new class of vessels with an even higher price tag.

Fincantieri has already started work on the first of 20 new ships that will be known as the Constellation-class frigate, a $1.1 billion vessel that will eventually replace the troubled Freedom-class ships.

“Now let’s deliver the frigates,” Robert Tullar, a sales executive at Fincantieri, said during a Navy conference last month.

A Failed Mission

Cmdr. Brad Long was on the bridge of the U.S.S. Little Rock on what was to be its maiden military mission. The Freedom-class ship and its crew of 110 were heading out to help Central and South American nations combat drug trafficking and other illicit activity.

It was a proud moment for him and his crew, a chance to show off the strengths of their new ship. It was designed to travel in shallow, near-shore (littoral) waters, and to go as fast as about 50 miles an hour, an extraordinary speed for a warship.

“You are sitting up there and it was kind of amazing,” said Cmdr. Brad Long of the maiden voyage on a Freedom-class littoral combat ship. “Just how fast you were going and how smooth.”Credit...Thomas Simonetti for The New York Times

The vessel was also equipped with an armed MH-60S Seahawk helicopter and an autonomous helicopter, known as a MQ-8 Fire Scout, which could provide surveillance of any drug traffickers in nearby waters.

“You are sitting up there and it was kind of amazing,” said Commander Long, now retired, recalling the moment they set out on the deployment in early 2020, after more than two years of training and preparation. “Just how fast you were going and how smooth.”

But the dream began to crumble as the ship approached the Panama Canal, Commander Long said in an interview, detailing the sequence of events publicly for the first time since he left the Navy in late 2021.

First, the ship’s diesel generators started to malfunction, and the ship briefly lost electric power. The littoral combat ships were built to be operated by a relatively small crew, and did not carry sailors to fix complicated mechanical issues. So Commander Long decided to head back to the Navy base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where the ship sat for about a month waiting for repairs.

An even more complicated issue had emerged with the ship’s radar system — meaning it could not target its guns or look for incoming air threats. A contractor repair team was flown from Germany to Cuba, but the necessary fix was so complex that the Navy decided to send the U.S.S. Little Rock back to Mayport.

And that is when an even bigger problem surfaced.

Commander Long was in his cabin near the bridge when a crew member brought him a sample of the ship’s engine oil. Instead of the caramel-colored, slippery stuff that lubricates the gears, the oil looked like it had been mixed with silvery glitter. The oil was polluted, it turned out, with specks of metal from high-speed clutch bearings of the gears that had broken into tiny bits.

The ship had lost half its engine power — and it had to limp back home.

The Navy soon confirmed that the gear system failure was a design flaw in the Freedom class, meaning all of the vessels then based at Mayport. (A second version of the littoral ships, known as the Independence class, is also in service but has fewer problems.) Engine failure reports were filed on 10 of the 11 deployments these ships were sent on, according to a report last year by the Government Accountability Office examining both classes of the ships.

An illustration of the U.S.S. Little Rock hangs in Commander Long’s office. It still has not been out for its second deployment since the failed trip in 2020. During sea trials after 19 months of repairs, its engines broke down again.Credit...Thomas Simonetti for The New York Times

The final insult came early last year, when the Navy concluded that a towed sonar system developed for the littoral combat ships by Raytheon Technologies, another major military contractor, was not up to the job.

Raytheon had already produced a promotional video featuring this sonar system, nicknamed DART, as it and a second device tracked down an enemy submarine. “Target acquired, launching torpedo,” the video’s narrator says, before the enemy submarine is shown as it is blowing up and sinking.

But in real life, the Pentagon found that engines on the Freedom-class ships were so loud that they handicapped the ability to detect enemy submarines. The Raytheon sonar system itself also swerved erratically as it was dragged from the ship at high speeds.

As a result, the Pentagon said last year, the ship’s most vital mission — hunting submarines — would be abandoned.

Since the ship had been conceived in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks as a “street fighter” to confront less sophisticated enemies from rogue states, according to an official Pentagon history of the vessel, it was built with less extensive protective armor than typical warships. As a result, it is more vulnerable to anti-ship missiles or mines of the sort that it might confront in a conflict with enemies like China. It also is a “gas hog” at its top speed, limiting its range.

As the threat from China rose, doubts intensified within the Pentagon about the value of the littoral combat ships, with some even giving them a new nickname: little crappy ship.

“We need a capable, lethal-ready Navy more than we need a larger Navy that’s less capable, less lethal, and less ready,” Admiral Gilday told a Senate committee. “Those ships, relative to others, just didn’t bring the war-fighting value to the fight.”

Asked about the ships’ troubles, Mark Vandroff, the chief executive of Fincantieri Marinette Marine and a retired Navy captain who served in the Trump White House, referred questions to Lockheed, the primary contractor on the project.

Patrick W. McNally, a spokesman for Lockheed — when also asked what went wrong — said that the company was “proud of our longstanding partnership with the United States Navy,” and was working with the Navy to “deliver affordable capability improvements.”

Pushing Back

The lobbying campaign to block the retirement of the ships started with a burst of phone calls to Capitol Hill, local officials in Jacksonville, and the Navy’s ship-maintenance division. Orchestrating the appeals was Tim Spratto, the general manager at the sprawling Jacksonville shipyard for BAE Systems, which in 2021 had won part of a Navy contract worth as much as $1.3 billion to do repairs on the troubled Freedom-class vessels.

Mr. Spratto, who joined BAE after a nearly two-decade Navy career, also serves as the president of a local trade group representing the Jacksonville yards. He started his pitch with a call to the office of Mr. Rutherford, Republican of Florida, who serves on the House Appropriations Committee.

“He is a great friend of the shipyard,” Mr. Spratto said in an interview. “He carries the water for us.”

A Navy commander walking through the U.S.S. Cooperstown. It is among the newest of the Freedom-class littoral combat ships, and was not on the retirement list.Credit...Thomas Simonetti for The New York Times

Contractors working on the U.S.S. Cooperstown in Jacksonville, Fla. Lobbyists and business leaders argued that retiring some of these ships would cut jobs at the shipyard.Credit...Thomas Simonetti for The New York Times

A delegation of business leaders from Jacksonville headed to the airport for a “fly-in” to Capitol Hill for a series of meetings with lawmakers including Senator Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, and Representative Jack Bergman, Republican of Michigan, a member of the House Armed Services Committee. Those gatherings were set up by the lobbying firm run by Brian Ballard, a top Republican fund-raiser with close ties to former President Donald J. Trump.

Other industry players joined in, targeting key House lawmakers in Virginia where work on the littoral combat ships is also performed. Letters, emails and other appeals, including opinion pieces in trade magazines, began to pour in.

“Don’t give up the ship,” Tony Parisi, the retired Navy captain, wrote in an opinion piece for Breaking Defense, a trade publication, citing the War of 1812 warning from a Navy captain, James Lawrence, as his ship was sinking.

Mr. Parisi did not mention that he was part of the team at General Dynamics that trains the crews that operate the littoral combat ships at Naval Station Mayport.

One Fincantieri executive, who was not authorized to speak on the record, said he was instructed to be careful not to be too public about the campaign, given that they were also trying to convince the Navy to buy its new class of ships as replacements.

Soon enough, several lawmakers, including Mr. Rutherford and Mr. Wittman, were introducing amendments to block the retirement of all or at least some of the ships, even as other lawmakers, mostly Democrats, pushed to allow the Pentagon to retire all nine ships.

“If the LCS was a car sold in America today, they would be deemed lemons, and the automakers would be sued into oblivion,” Representative Jackie Speier, Democrat of California, told her House colleagues in June. (She has since retired.) “The only winners have been the contractors on which the Navy relies for sustaining these ships.”

.

There remains a great deal of pride in these ships among those who work on and around them, as was apparent during a visit last month to the Mayport base near Jacksonville.

The Little Rock and six other littoral combat ships were tied up there, with teams of Navy sailors working and in some cases living on the ships. The Little Rock — one of the ships now slated for retirement — still has not been out for its second deployment since the failed trip in 2020. During sea trials early last year that followed 19 months of repairs, the Little Rock’s engines broke down again.

But U.S.S. Sioux City, another of the Freedom-class ships that is slated for decommissioning, spent five months last year on a deployment that took it a total of 31,000 miles through waters around Europe and as far as the Gulf of Oman, while it did training exercises with foreign allies. It was proof, Navy officers and backers of the ships said, that the ships should be saved.

“I’d love to see us keep all the ships,” said Captain David Miller, the commander of the Florida-based littoral combat ship squadron, said in an interview. “We have stuff we can do with all the ships.”

Representative Rob Wittman, Republican of Virginia, right, speaking with Carlos Del Toro, the secretary of the Navy, during a conference in Arlington, Va. last month.Credit...T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times

Mr. Wittman, who helped lead the effort to save the ships, is one of the biggest recipients of campaign contributions from military contractors and their employees, including many from companies that help build, equip or maintain these ships, such as Lockheed, Raytheon and General Dynamics.

In an interview, Mr. Wittman said that the lobbying from the ship repair contractors had played a role in his efforts.

“I can’t tell you whether it’s a predominant factor,” he said in January, while at a conference sponsored by Fincantieri and other shipbuilding companies in Virginia. “But I can tell you it was a factor.”

Fincantieri, the builder of the Freedom-class ships, has not suffered from the squabble over the ships it built.

Its Wisconsin shipyard is still building the Navy’s last Freedom-class littoral combat ship while also starting work on the new $1.1 billion Constellation-class ship that will replace it.

“When you’re a ship builder, your goal is to build the ship that the Navy tells you to build,” Mr. Vandroff, Fincantieri’s chief executive, said in an interview as dozens of Navy commanders, midshipmen and others were assembled in front of him at the Surface Navy Association conference in Virginia to grab a glass of Prosecco and some Wisconsin cheese. “What the Navy chooses to do with it — that is their choice.”

John Ismay contributed reporting

The New York Times · by Eric Lipton · February 4, 2023


19. ISO Hearing: The Role of Special Operations Forces in Great Power Competition




ISO Hearing: The Role of Special Operations Forces in Great Power Competition

armedservices.house.gov · February 8, 2023

You are here



Date:

Wednesday, February 8, 2023 - 3:00pm

ISO Hearing: The Role of Special Operations Forces in Great Power Competition

Purpose: The Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations will meet in open session to receive testimony from outside experts on the role of special operations forces (SOF) in great power competition. The hearing will examine the core activities of SOF and how they apply to today’s era of great power competition.

Witnesses:


Seth Jones

Senior Vice President

Center for Strategic and International Studies


Lieutenant General Charles T. Cleveland (ret.) United States Army

Former Commander

U.S. Army Special Operations Command (USASOC)

Dr. David H. Ucko

Professor and Department Chair

College of International Security Affairs

National Defense University


118th Congress


armedservices.house.gov · February 8, 2023



20. China blames U.S. politics for ‘overreaction’ to suspected spy balloon





Yes, but.... Certainly our domestic politics are an embarrassment. However, that does not negate the very treal hreat caused by China's malign activities. As more information is revealed it seams the overreaction is from the political pundit class whereas it looks like the US government and military took prudent actions.


Of course one of the intended effects could simply be to generate the political divides in the US as part of its unrestricted warfare strategy.  We need to think about recognizing the PRC strategy, understanding it, EXPOSING it, and attacking with a superior political warfare strategy. However, we are more like to use Chinese malign activities to attack our domestic political opponents which of course is fine to do and natural given our political system. But I just wish we would spend at least equal effort to opposing (and exposing) our external adversaries.



China blames U.S. politics for ‘overreaction’ to suspected spy balloon

The Washington Post · by Christian Shepherd · February 5, 2023

China accused the United States of an “overreaction” when it used a fighter jet to shoot down a suspected surveillance balloon off the South Carolina coast, as nationalist Chinese commentators blamed runaway political pressure in Washington for escalating the incident.

In a statement on Sunday morning local time, China’s Foreign Ministry reiterated claims that the airship was a civilian vessel that had unexpectedly drifted off course, adding that “the Chinese side has clearly asked the U.S. side to properly handle the matter in a calm, professional and restrained manner.”

“Under such circumstances, the U.S. use of force is a clear overreaction and a serious violation of international practice,” and China will “resolutely safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of the company concerned,” the ministry said.

Later on Sunday, Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Tan Kefei added, without elaborating, that the Chinese military reserved the right to use “necessary means” in response to similar incidents in the future.

Beijing is under increasing pressure to downplay the significance of the balloon and limit diplomatic fallout as videos of an F-22 fighter jet’s missile puncturing it are shared widely on Chinese social media.

The balloon’s highly visible journey across the United States caused a last-minute delay of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to Beijing this weekend, undermining an attempt by Beijing to mend its most important bilateral relationship. China replied that it had never officially announced plans for the visit.

The setback is an embarrassment for Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who began his norm-defying third term in office with a show of diplomatic friendliness that experts interpreted as a pragmatic effort to ease tensions with Western nations, as he deals with internal discontent over a slowing economy and a huge wave of coronavirus infections.

After an initially subdued and jokey reaction on Chinese social media — the craft was dubbed “the wandering balloon,” a pun on Chinese sci-fi blockbuster “The Wandering Earth” — nationalist internet users took a harder tone on Sunday.

Influential commentator Hu Xijin blamed American “politicization” and “hype” for preventing the incident from escalating, saying that competition to look tough on China meant that the United States “has already lost its objectivity.”

Earlier in the week, Chinese commentators had poked fun at the United States for not taking down the balloon immediately, with some highlighting that in 2019, a Chinese J-10C fighter jets used missiles to shoot a “foreign high-altitude reconnaissance balloon” out of the sky over southwestern Yunnan province.

A senior Biden administration official responded to China’s statement by saying that the United States is “confident [the balloon] was seeking to monitor sensitive military sites” and that “its route over the United States near many potentially sensitive sites contradicts the PRC government explanation that it is a weather balloon.” PRC stands for the People’s Republic of China.

China believes the incident was largely caused by domestic political pressure in the United States and therefore will not try to escalate further, said Wu Xinbo, dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai. “Of course we are not happy about the decision to shoot it down,” but statements about taking further action were more “diplomatic posture” rather than threat, he said.

According to Wu, the United States missed an opportunity to frame the balloon as evidence that Blinken’s visit to China was necessary to improve crisis management, whereby Blinken “could have said, ‘this makes clear that I need to go to China to improve communication over unexpected incidents.’”

Mary Gallagher, director of the International Institute and a professor of political science at the University of Michigan, disagreed: “It was impossible for Blinken to go and negotiate really hard issues in the context of a very visible balloon floating over the U.S.”

The fallout for the bilateral relationship will in part depend on whether the U.S. military is able to demonstrate convincingly and publicly that equipment recovered from the balloon was used for espionage. If the balloon is shown to be carrying surveillance equipment, China will have been caught in a brazen attempt to spy on the United States.

But a more complicated question is whether Xi was aware of what has happening before the United States went public. The most powerful Chinese leader in decades has in part justified his firm personal rule by promising to make China safer, arguing that the nation faces an unprecedented level of external threats requiring top-down control. If it was an accident left unresolved, then that may suggest Xi was out of the loop.

“If it was done by the military or a company or the Chinese Academy of Sciences without his knowledge … then that makes me worried about what is happening in China domestically,” Gallagher said.

Beijing’s inability to resolve the incident before it escalated augurs badly for any future accidents involving the Chinese military in highly charged environments like the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea and East China Sea.

Analysts fear that eroded trust and limited communication between Washington and Beijing will allow accidents from regular military exercises or surveillance operations to escalate into international incidents.

In December, the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command accused the People’s Liberation Army of an “unsafe maneuver” that brought a Chinese fighter jet within 20 feet of an RC-135 reconnaissance plane, months after the Pentagon warned of an unprecedented spike in “aggressive” behavior from China in skies above the South China Sea.

The balloon incident shows that China needs to improve transparency when accidents occur, said Wu, the Fudan scholar. But he argued that such failures are mutual, citing an incident in 2021 when the U.S. military waited days before publicly disclosing information about a nuclear-powered Navy submarine that was damaged during a collision in the South China Sea. “Both sides need to work out a way to react more immediately to accidents,” he said.

Yasmeen Abutaleb in Washington, D.C., and Vic Chiang in Taipei, Taiwan, contributed to this report.

The Washington Post · by Christian Shepherd · February 5, 2023







De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com


V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Personal Email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
Web Site: www.fdd.org
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Subscribe to FDD’s new podcastForeign Podicy
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

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

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


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