Quotes of the Day:
“The single biggest thing I learned was from an indigenous elder of Cherokee descent, Stan Rushworth, who reminded me of the difference between a western settler mindset of “I have rights” and an indigenous mindset of “I have obligations.” Instead of thinking that I am torn with rights, I choose to think that I am born with obligations to serve the past, present, and future generations, and the planet herself.”
- from a Lion's Roar interview with avid mountaineer and former war reporter Dahr Jamail about his new book The End of Ice
“You come home, make some tea, sit down in your armchair, and all around there’s silence. Everyone decides for themselves whether that’s loneliness or freedom.”
- Unknown
"All you need are these: certainty of judgment in the present moment; action for the common good in the present moment; and an attitude of gratitude in the present moment for anything that comes your way."
- Marcus Aurelius
1. Russia’s Military Buildup Near Ukraine Is an Open Secret
2. America’s Wars and Failures
3. Don’t Let China Weaponize the 2022 Winter Olympics
4. Low-cost warfare: US military battles with ‘Costco drones’
5. Russia and China will threaten the peace in 2022
6. Taiwan should destroy chip infrastructure if China invades: paper
7. Taiwan air force stages drill to intercept Chinese planes amid tensions
8. RCEP solidifies China as center of Asia’s trade
9. The Two-Headed Fight for Ukraine and Taiwan
10. The Return of Battlefield Nuclear Weapons
11. It's time to end CNN's license for CNN Turk's hate content
12. With simulations and more information-sharing, Biden administration tries to prevent another Jan. 6
13. The New, More Dangerous Massive Attacks of Disruption
14. Why the U.S. Military Isn’t Ready for Civil War
15. Another Far-Right Group Is Scrutinized About Its Efforts to Aid Trump
16. War Books, Special Edition: Building Your 2022 Reading List
1. Russia’s Military Buildup Near Ukraine Is an Open Secret
Excerpts:
“Open-source satellite imagery has helped shine a spotlight on Russia’s troop movements,” a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council said. “We have also sought to leverage the unique analytic expertise of the intelligence community” to share information and insights with allies, partners and the broader public.
Open-source intelligence once largely referred to the monitoring of press reports around the world by the U.S. and other governments. The term now encompasses a wider array of material including social media, posts on web forums, satellite imagery and commercially available data culled from smartphones that can divulge reams of personal information, including precise location details.
Russia is gathering a force that the U.S. government says already numbers about 100,000 troops and might grow to as many as 175,000. The private analysts have compiled videos from social media and other sources of Russian military road convoys and trains, and used satellite images to watch as individual units gather in encampments.
Russia’s Military Buildup Near Ukraine Is an Open Secret
Satellite images, social media posts and flight-tracking data allow private analysts to track details governments once classified
WSJ · by Warren P. Strobel and Michael R. Gordon
Satellite photos taken by commercial satellite and imaging company Maxar Technologies Inc., for example, have turned up an array of new units in western Russia and Crimea. In December, images revealed more than 350 vehicles parked at an abandoned ammunition storage facility near the Russian town of Klintsy just north of the Ukraine border.
“It is almost like they are freeze-dried units,” said a Maxar analyst. “Just add troops and the units are ready to move!”
The use of open-source intelligence, or OSINT, isn’t new. What has changed, according to former officials and analysts, is wider and cheaper access to more data, allowing private citizens to track the Russia-Ukraine confrontation and provide the public with details that once would have been classified. That, in turn, has allowed the Biden administration to speak in greater detail publicly about the buildup, they said.
In response, Russia’s military, which is practiced in the use of camouflage and deception, has taken steps to try to disguise its ultimate intentions by removing license plates from military vehicles, painting over insignia and operating in smaller units, the analysts and former officials said.
For all the details about the buildup, analysts both in the U.S. government and outside it don’t know whether Russia will attack, and if so, how and where.
“The Russian military is conducting a buildup that is inherently visible, but it is doing it deliberately and slowly in a way that is intended to retain operational surprise,” said Michael Kofman, an authority on Russia’s armed forces at CNA Corp.
“They move forces back and forth so you can’t know for certain where these troops will end up until very late in the game when there’s precious little time to react,” Mr. Kofman said. “Ukraine would not necessarily know where they plan to attack, which is the feint and which is the real vector.”
Officials with Russia’s Defense Ministry and presidential administration didn’t respond to a request for comment.
“Open-source satellite imagery has helped shine a spotlight on Russia’s troop movements,” a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council said. “We have also sought to leverage the unique analytic expertise of the intelligence community” to share information and insights with allies, partners and the broader public.
Open-source intelligence once largely referred to the monitoring of press reports around the world by the U.S. and other governments. The term now encompasses a wider array of material including social media, posts on web forums, satellite imagery and commercially available data culled from smartphones that can divulge reams of personal information, including precise location details.
Russia is gathering a force that the U.S. government says already numbers about 100,000 troops and might grow to as many as 175,000. The private analysts have compiled videos from social media and other sources of Russian military road convoys and trains, and used satellite images to watch as individual units gather in encampments.
The ability to monitor the current buildup is much greater than it was in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and invaded parts of eastern Ukraine, said Jeffrey Edmonds, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst who was the senior Ukraine specialist at the National Security Council early that year.
Combining commercial satellite images and Twitter posts allows private experts to be “roughly on the same page” as the U.S. intelligence community, said Mr. Edmonds, also at CNA Corp. “It’s impressive how close someone can be on the outside.”
U.S. officials said in late December that Russia has deployed 53 battalion tactical groups, each with about 800 troops, near its border with Ukraine.
Konrad Muzyka, president of Rochan Consulting, a Gdansk, Poland-based firm that conducts open-source intelligence assessments focused on Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, said he has identified and located about 48 Russian battalion tactical groups. “I’m just five behind. And I’m doing only open source,” Mr. Muzyka said.
Armchair sleuths using flight-tracking data last week followed the flight paths of U.S. RC-135 and E-8 reconnaissance planes over Ukraine.
For the E-8 aircraft, which use powerful radar to monitor enemy ground movements, the Dec. 27 flight was the first time the plane had operated in Ukrainian airspace, Navy Lt. Cdr. Russ Wolfkiel, a U.S. European Command spokesman, said. A second E-8 flight took place three days later.
“Of course, we are aware of the various technology that allows our activities to be publicly monitored,” Lt Cdr. Wolfkiel said. “We are transparent about the fact that we conduct these types of flights with European allies and partners routinely.”
Ground forces’ equipment near Yelnya, Russia, on Nov. 9. Images show a sizable buildup of forces from Russia’s 41st Army, far from its home garrison in Siberia, analysts say.
Photo: Maxar
Russian officials have denied plans to invade Ukraine and said that the government has the right to deploy forces on Russian territory. Russian President Vladimir Putin has also said that he is prepared to carry out “military technical measures,” if the West continues what he called its “aggressive line.”
Open-source intelligence analysts said Russian deployments north of Ukraine appear to be significant, as they are not positioned for a response to attacks the Russian military says Ukrainian forces are preparing to carry out in the Donbas region in southeastern Ukraine. Moscow-backed separatists have been fighting Ukrainian forces in that area since 2014.
In addition to the “freeze-dried units” near Klintsy, Maxar photos show new deployments near the Russian towns of Kursk, Valuyki and Dorogobuzh, and the central Crimean town of Bakhchysarai. Near the town of Yelnya, north of the Ukraine border, images show a sizable buildup of forces from Russia’s 41st Army, far from its home garrison in Siberia, analysts said.
The Russians were less vigilant in trying to conceal their activities when they moved into Crimea in 2014 and during an earlier buildup of forces near Ukraine in spring 2021, the analysts and former officials said.
“What we’re seeing is maybe the Russians have learned from some of the operational security mistakes they made in the spring,” said Thomas Bullock, an open-source intelligence specialist at defense analyst Janes.
Mr. Bullock said the Russian armed forces have started removing from vehicles license plates that can identify their region of origin and painting over tactical insignia on military equipment. That practice was also documented by the Conflict Intelligence Team, or CIT, a group of Russian bloggers.
Mr. Muzyka said that his and some other analysts’ access to a Russian website used to track the movement of train cars has apparently been blocked by Russia and, in the last two weeks, the site has begun reporting bogus data about train movements. “It’s becoming worse and worse,” he said of efforts to gather open-source intelligence.
The large-scale exercise that Russian forces conducted near Ukraine in the spring, analysts said, may have been an effort to inure observers to the presence of Russian troops in the region so they would have trouble telling the difference between training and war preparations.
Dara Massicot, an expert on the Russian military at Rand Corp., said the spring exercise gave Russia an opportunity to practice deployment, gauge the response and leave forces near Ukraine for use later.
Mr. Putin in May 2020 issued a decree banning members of Russia’s armed forces from carrying devices such as smartphones and tablets that can transmit locations and photographs while on duty.
While observers detected some social media and smartphone activities from service members in the spring, “We are not seeing as much of that right now,” Ms. Massicot said.
WSJ · by Warren P. Strobel and Michael R. Gordon
2. America’s Wars and Failures
Interesting analysis.
I could add a broader comment - failure to understand the nature of irregular warfare.
Excerpts:
To understand American strategy between 1962 and now, we have to understand what John F. Kennedy was seeing and thinking when he made the first major commitment. Kennedy was crafted by World War II, and the senior military men were as well. In World War II, America understood its enemy.
...
The United States outstripped North Vietnam and the Viet Cong in every measure that won World War II. We did not realize that we didn’t understand our enemy.
...
The Americans made three mistakes. The first was that they thought that, as in Belgium, their arrival in Vietnam would be met with universal joy. They didn’t know that because the leadership didn’t listen to the intelligence.
Second, they did not understand the communist enemy.
...
Finally, they fought the war from the standpoint of perception, particularly of the U.S. public’s perception.
...
Wars are necessary and will happen, but they should begin as World War II did: with fear and awe of your enemy. Anything else makes you careless. As Thucydides noted, war cannot be waged from a divided and frightened city. This proved true in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The most important question was never asked: How would the United States benefit from victory, and what would defeat cost? Defeat was never imagined, and the benefit of success was vastly overrated. The world did not end, nor did American power. But fearing the consequences of defeat, we put the inevitable off. Today, the U.S. cooperates with Vietnam against China. What was unthinkable and unbearable then is neither today. Wars, therefore, should be rare and utterly necessary.
America’s Wars and Failures - Geopolitical Futures
America’s Wars and Failures
January 4, 2022
Sixty years ago, in 1962, the United States made the decision to go to war in Vietnam, deploying major ground and air forces to the battle for the first time. This was a fraction of the men and aircraft that would serve there over the years to come. It was a line that the Kennedy administration realized it was crossing. It saw U.S. involvement as a minor, even experimental, move. But when a nation sends its soldiers to war, a logic takes hold. As men die, the nation assumes it is for a vital interest. Leaders cannot declare the experiment a failure because they cannot admit they experimented with the lives of soldiers. A death requires a worthy reason, and establishing that the death was not in vain is incompatible with “cutting and running,” in Lyndon B. Johnson’s words. Intervention is difficult. Withdrawal under fire is agony.
To understand American strategy between 1962 and now, we have to understand what John F. Kennedy was seeing and thinking when he made the first major commitment. Kennedy was crafted by World War II, and the senior military men were as well. In World War II, America understood its enemy. Germany was ruled by Hitler, and Hitler and his subordinates were clever, ruthless and like us in that they fought a war of engines and industry. We understood that Hitler was an unprincipled tyrant. Japan was an empire ruled by a brutal government and, as we saw in China, merciless fighters. We also knew that like the Germans and Americans, they were fighting an industrial war. We knew the enemy, we never underestimated its strength, and we timed our war to coincide with industrial production. We knew the value of allies, the uses of aircraft carriers and tanks, and how to train men for war. We mastered this and more. And we would fight to the end, no quarter asked nor given.
The United States outstripped North Vietnam and the Viet Cong in every measure that won World War II. We did not realize that we didn’t understand our enemy. They were not industrial, nor were they divided between communists and a range of factions. Clearly the non-communists in the south hated the tyranny of the north. The anti-communist population had to be mobilized and armed with the best equipment, and the U.S. flag, along with the Vietnamese, would fly over Hanoi. Crowds in the south would line the roads welcoming the Americans even if the United States didn’t take Hanoi. The purpose of intelligence is to predict what others will do, and just as the CIA failed to understand the consequence of the Bay of Pigs, it didn’t understand Vietnam. It, too, was stuck in World War II.
Vietnam was not the SS fighting against the Maquis (French Resistance fighters). Vietnam was divided by treaty, but it was one country. The communists had seized the north and the non-communists ruled the south. The non-communists came in many forms, but the one thing they shared with the communists in the north was that they were Vietnamese. They were not shocked by a repressive communist regime as much as by the thought of a Vietnamese civil war, which is what the Americans were selling, whether they called it that or not. They did not want to fight other Vietnamese. What they wanted was to be left alone. The Vietnamese did not see the Americans as liberators and protectors. They saw them as delivering the terrors of industrial war. After enduring French occupation and oppression by Vietnamese whom the French had elevated to puppet rulers, they were not going to choose between a new imperialism and a communist dictatorship. This did not mean that anti-communism wasn’t present, nor that many did not view the Americans as a friendly force. It did mean that the passions of the Vietnamese were divided, complex and volatile.
The Americans made three mistakes. The first was that they thought that, as in Belgium, their arrival in Vietnam would be met with universal joy. They didn’t know that because the leadership didn’t listen to the intelligence.
Second, they did not understand the communist enemy. The communists drew much of their legitimacy from having driven the French out. Their communism and nationalism were bound up. This was also true of Mao’s Chinese Communism and Stalin’s Defend the Motherland speech. There are those who fight for abstract beliefs, but many more who fight for their homeland. I am not sure how many Americans in World War II fought for liberal democracy or America, but I suspect protection of the homeland resonated more. Vietnam had been ruled by many brutes, but the communists at least were Vietnamese brutes. They were understandable.
Finally, they fought the war from the standpoint of perception, particularly of the U.S. public’s perception. Rather than do what was done in World War II, which was to make clear that this would be a long and bloody war and thus bind the public to the truth, the government sought to align strategy with the idea that victory was approaching and casualties would decline. This meant that the Tet Offensive shattered all trust. Lying hopefully works best when reality cooperates.
The U.S. did not understand its enemy or its friends. It feared the communists less than American public opinion. In wars, the darkest moment might be just before success. Think of the Battle of the Bulge. The darkest moment could not be a moment like this because preposterous claims of success had not prepared the American public for it.
When we think of not understanding one’s enemy, of shaping a war to not upset the untruths of the conflict, and of trying to overwhelm through industrial warfare an enemy that is fighting a very different war, we can also think of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The enemy might or might not have hated the government, but enough people hated the Americans because they were not Iraqis or Afghans. Ideology and religion played a part but were not the key. A stranger was in their house, and they had to drive him out.
Americans should be aware of this, because our revolution was designed to drive out the haughty British, with their rules and regulations. The revolution was committed to the Declaration of Independence, but the real enemy was the Brits. They were a stranger in our house, and they had to be expelled. The moral principle is there, but men die for the love of their own.
There are few wars like World War I and II, thank God. Reasoning from how we won those conflicts is usually going to bring failure in other wars. The surge in American wars after World War II and their unsatisfactory outcomes should be a testament to this. Going to war and failing represents leadership without discernment, with irrational belief in one’s own strength and foolish dismissal of the motivation and intelligence of the enemy. Even if many welcome us as liberators, it will be these factors that determine our fate. Fortunately for America, it is too wealthy and strong to be brought down by failure. But it’s important not to push your luck.
Wars are necessary and will happen, but they should begin as World War II did: with fear and awe of your enemy. Anything else makes you careless. As Thucydides noted, war cannot be waged from a divided and frightened city. This proved true in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The most important question was never asked: How would the United States benefit from victory, and what would defeat cost? Defeat was never imagined, and the benefit of success was vastly overrated. The world did not end, nor did American power. But fearing the consequences of defeat, we put the inevitable off. Today, the U.S. cooperates with Vietnam against China. What was unthinkable and unbearable then is neither today. Wars, therefore, should be rare and utterly necessary.
George Friedman is an internationally recognized geopolitical forecaster and strategist on international affairs and the founder and chairman of Geopolitical Futures.
Dr. Friedman is also a New York Times bestselling author. His most recent book, THE STORM BEFORE THE CALM: America’s Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond, published February 25, 2020 describes how “the United States periodically reaches a point of crisis in which it appears to be at war with itself, yet after an extended period it reinvents itself, in a form both faithful to its founding and radically different from what it had been.” The decade 2020-2030 is such a period which will bring dramatic upheaval and reshaping of American government, foreign policy, economics, and culture.
His most popular book, The Next 100 Years, is kept alive by the prescience of its predictions. Other best-selling books include Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe, The Next Decade, America’s Secret War, The Future of War and The Intelligence Edge. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Dr. Friedman has briefed numerous military and government organizations in the United States and overseas and appears regularly as an expert on international affairs, foreign policy and intelligence in major media. For almost 20 years before resigning in May 2015, Dr. Friedman was CEO and then chairman of Stratfor, a company he founded in 1996. Friedman received his bachelor’s degree from the City College of the City University of New York and holds a doctorate in government from Cornell University.
3. Don’t Let China Weaponize the 2022 Winter Olympics
Excerpts:
While a full boycott would unfairly punish American athletes, there are other measures Washington should take. The Biden administration should begin by urging other American allies to join the United States in a diplomatic boycott of the Games. UN high commissioner for human rights Michelle Bachelet has stated that her office will soon publish its findings of human rights abuses in Xinjiang. The White House should trumpet this report to encourage others to boycott the Games—particularly the UN secretary-general, who plans to attend the event.
In addition, American broadcasters should not shy away from using the Games as a chance to educate their audiences on the realities of China’s repressive system. To prevent China from controlling the public narrative, U.S. networks should highlight the CCP’s abuses in Xinjiang.
It may be too late to relocate the Winter Olympics, but there’s still time to ensure they are forever remembered as what many critics have called the “Genocide Games.”
Don’t Let China Weaponize the 2022 Winter Olympics
While a full boycott would unfairly punish American athletes, there are other measures Washington should take.
The Olympics are supposed to represent the very best of human achievement. But this year, they will also represent the very worst, as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seeks to exploit the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing to whitewash its human rights abuses.
Citing China’s state-directed genocide of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada earlier last month announced they won’t send diplomats to the Beijing Games. That’s a good first step, but Washington, its allies, and the private sector should do more to hold the CCP accountable for its human rights violations and counter Beijing’s increasingly belligerent politicization of sports.
Under Xi Jinping, the CCP has attempted to silence critical sports figures and to strongarm sports institutions into legitimizing the regime’s authoritarian rule. For example, when Boston Celtics center Enes Freedom criticized Xi on social media in October and then tweeted that China shouldn’t be allowed to host the Winter Olympics, Chinese streaming partners ceased their coverage of Celtics games. In 2019, when then-general manager of the Houston Rockets Daryl Morey tweeted in support of Hong Kong protesters, Beijing similarly pulled national broadcasts of NBA games and even asked the NBA to fire Morey.
But Xi’s coercive use of sports institutions doesn’t just target foreigners. It’s also used to clean up the CCP’s domestic messes.
In November, after Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai accused former Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli of sexual assault on social media, her post promptly disappeared and she vanished for several weeks. #WhereIsPengShuai soon began trending on Twitter. Numerous tennis stars, including Roger Federer and Naomi Osaka, echoed calls of concern over Shuai’s whereabouts.
Sensing that Peng’s disappearance had ignited a firestorm, Beijing turned to its longtime supporters at the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which has previously faced criticism for turning a blind eye toward China’s human rights record. Beijing rejected external inquiries concerning Peng’s safety and invited only IOC president Thomas Bach to a monitored video call with Peng and other IOC officials. Following the call, the IOC released a statement saying Peng is “safe and well,” but didn’t make the video or transcript available.
Rightly dissatisfied with the IOC’s inquiry, Washington and the Women’s Tennis Association called for further investigations. In response, Beijing has returned to a tried-and-true tactic: painting itself as the victim of unfair politicization of sports—the precise inverse of the truth.
Of course, Xi is not the first Chinese leader to harness sports for national goals, though his approach has been much more combative than that of his predecessors.
After a serendipitous encounter between Chinese and American table tennis players at the 1971 World Table Tennis Championships, Chairman Mao Zedong invited the U.S. team to China for a series of exhibition matches. This sequence of events became known as “Ping Pong Diplomacy” and is often credited with reviving diplomatic relations between the two countries, culminating in President Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing the following year.
More recently, President Hu Jintao treated the 2008 Summer Olympics as an opportunity to demonstrate China’s economic and political maturation to the rest of the world. Though Beijing still faced international criticism for its human rights record, Hu pledged to loosen control of the media and sought to use the Olympics to showcase China’s rise and present the regime as a global leader.
Fast forward to the present, and Beijing is once again poised to host the Olympics, even as the CCP continues its genocide in Xinjiang. The CCP surely hopes the pomp and circumstance will drown out growing international criticism over its rampant abuses, such as forced sterilization of Uighur women.
This time, however, China will host the Games while facing a U.S. diplomatic boycott. But the Biden administration should not congratulate itself yet. The White House sat on its hands for almost a year, limiting current options for recourse. Had it acted sooner, the administration could have placed more pressure on the IOC to consider relocating the 2022 Games over China’s human rights violations. The Biden administration missed another opportunity to hold the CCP accountable when it declined to ask Olympic sponsors to reconsider their business agreements with China.
The White House’s inaction has elicited bipartisan concern. Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) called the diplomatic boycott a “weak choice” and said that the president ignored his repeated calls to select an alternate location for the Games. Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) argued the president did “not go far enough,” claiming that Beijing’s misbehavior does not earn China the honor of hosting the Olympics in any capacity.
While a full boycott would unfairly punish American athletes, there are other measures Washington should take. The Biden administration should begin by urging other American allies to join the United States in a diplomatic boycott of the Games. UN high commissioner for human rights Michelle Bachelet has stated that her office will soon publish its findings of human rights abuses in Xinjiang. The White House should trumpet this report to encourage others to boycott the Games—particularly the UN secretary-general, who plans to attend the event.
In addition, American broadcasters should not shy away from using the Games as a chance to educate their audiences on the realities of China’s repressive system. To prevent China from controlling the public narrative, U.S. networks should highlight the CCP’s abuses in Xinjiang.
It may be too late to relocate the Winter Olympics, but there’s still time to ensure they are forever remembered as what many critics have called the “Genocide Games.”
Zane Zovak is a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he focuses on the diplomatic and military actions of the People’s Republic of China. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
Image: Reuters.
4. Low-cost warfare: US military battles with ‘Costco drones’
Excerpts:
The future may look far less “soft”, however. Military futurists worry leaps in artificial intelligence will help create drone “swarms” — not just multiple numbers of armed drones operated by a single person at any one time, but drones that work together as collaborative teams run by a computer and which make targeting decisions powered by machine learning.
Alexander Kott, chief scientist for the Army Research Laboratory, which develops new combat technologies, says drones amount to a “whole new class of weapons” which can fly in “very unusual ways that no other military munitions can fly”, such as hiding in trees or in grass close to the ground and changing speed and direction at will. He adds: “This is kind of a new military technology that, I would say, almost compares in its novelty with the appearance of the first aeroplanes or first tanks.”
For Kott, the answer to overcoming swarms of intelligent, automated, armed drones is a head-on match. “The best defence against a tank is another tank,” he says.
Low-cost warfare: US military battles with ‘Costco drones’
Late in 2019, American military equipment detected an incoming enemy drone over an Iraqi base hosting US forces. The troops were jumpy; their base was vulnerable and exposed.
The detection system gave a grainy picture but indicated the object was getting closer, according to people familiar with events. US forces launched an expensive counter drone missile, which circled the target, missing twice, before being detonated mid-air to avoid a ground explosion. On closer inspection, defence officials later determined the incoming threat was not, after all, a lethally armed drone designed to kill US troops. It was a balloon.
The US has been the pioneer in the use of large killer drones for its global war on terror. Today, much of the conversation about warfare is dominated by extremely sophisticated weapons such as hypersonic, lasers or missile defences that push at the boundaries of the possible.
But the balloon episode illustrated the inadequacy of US capabilities to defend against, or even identify, smaller weaponised drones. It is these cheap, small, low-tech enemy drones that are fast becoming one of the most significant threats facing America’s military.
Frank McKenzie, the four-star Marine Corps general who commands US troops in the Middle East, says that despite a big push the US still remains under equipped for the drone threat, which first emerged as a serious concern in 2016.
US general Frank McKenzie tours Hamid Karzai airport in Afghanistan in August 2021. McKenzie says that with drone warfare, ‘Right now, generally, the advantage lies with the attackers’ © 1st Lt Mark Andries/US Marine Corps/Reuters
“Right now, generally, the advantage lies with the attackers,” McKenzie told the Financial Times in an interview in December, saying cheap, small drones were easy to modify into lethal weapons and hard to distinguish from other airborne objects.
McKenzie says incidents such as the errant missile attack on the balloon are rare but that “they do happen”, adding that US forces sometimes err on the side of caution. “We would like to find a cheaper way to solve that problem than by having to fire a missile at it,” he adds.
Like other senior US defence officials, McKenzie sees drone warfare as America’s new “IED moment”. Homemade roadside bombs known as improvised explosive devices have killed more than 2,000 US personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq, accounting for 45 per cent of all US deaths in warzones since 2006.
So serious is the impact of weapons that can cost as little as $1,000 and which McKenzie dubs “Costco drones” after the discount store, that he argues that the US has lost the “complete” upper hand in the skies for the first time since the Korean war in the 1950s.
In October, lethal drones attacked al-Tanf base in Syria where about 200 US personnel are stationed in an offensive McKenzie says was carried out by entities associated with Iran and “was a deliberate attempt to kill Americans”. The US received advance warning and moved the troops. In November, drones dropped explosives on the home of Iraqi prime minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, wounding his bodyguards. On Tuesday, US military officials said that in recent days two attacks by armed drones on bases in Iraq hosting US troops had been foiled.
“Air superiority is something that we no longer have all the time in the theatre [military area of operations],” he says. “If you have a drone overfly your base and you’re not able to bring it down, you don’t have air superiority. That doesn’t happen often. But it does happen more than I would like it to happen, and it’s very worrying.”
A wrecked vehicle outside the home of Iraqi prime minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi after drones dropped explosives in an attempted assassination © Prime Minister Media Office/Reuters
Flying under the radar
US military commanders first woke up to the threat cheap drones represent to their troops in late 2016. In an incident that later became known as “the day of the drones”, Isis flew more than 70 small, $1,000 drones — each affixed with explosives — in an attack on Iraqi troops.
“They released them almost like a game, except that [it] was a 40mm grenade that was coming down on top of you,” says Tony Thomas, the four-star retired army general who was at the time commander of America’s special operations forces.
On another occasion, he says members of a US Ranger mortar platoon in Syria were wounded in a drone-launched grenade attack. US officials discovered some drones had been booby-trapped, so that if someone attempted to remove the SIM card it would explode. “It’s not like it’s sci-fi, it’s actual,” says Thomas.
“We flooded the zone. We started bringing in all sorts of technical responses to the challenge — mostly electronic and cyber-related efforts to knock down or disrupt these quadcopters,” he adds. “There was a big flurry to try and get something in the field that was better than what we had.”
There are several parts to the drone problem. While America’s well-established integrated air missile defences can, if necessary, tackle the largest drones, the US has struggled to stop smaller categories. These smaller, “group one” drones weigh under 20 pounds and often fly too low and slow for traditional detection and response methods.
Although radar picks up most objects, sophisticated filters are needed to positively identify and distinguish an enemy drone.
Iraqi special forces troops use a drone to look for Islamic State fighters. During ‘the day of the drones’, Isis flew more than 70 small, inexpensive drones — each affixed with explosives — in attacks against Iraqi troops © Thomas Coex/AFP/Getty
Stopping attack drones once correctly identified is also hard. Countermeasures developed to tackle smaller drones over the past five years range from jamming or taking over signals, targeting drones with directed energy such as microwaves and lasers, shooting them down with rifle bullets or missile fire, colliding into them with kamikaze drone attacks, and even netting them or otherwise physically interfering with their propellers. But more than two years on from the mistaken missile attack on the balloon, the drone threat is only growing.
By 2026 the global commercial drone market is expected to reach $41bn — up 57 per cent from today — and surpass 1.4m sales a year, according to an annual report from Research and Markets, a source of industry data. Shenzhen-based drone maker DJI — which makes a range of small quadcopters — has three-quarters of the world market, according to Skylogic Research. Before Christmas, US president Joe Biden added DJI to an investment blacklist over its alleged involvement in the surveillance of China’s Uyghur ethnic minority.
Russia, Iran, Israel and Turkey are also mass producing cheap drones, including for sale abroad. Non-state actors including Isis jihadis in Iraq and Syria have also turned to arming commercial drones as weapons of choice.
Armed drones helped Azerbaijan emerge victorious in its conflict with Armenia in 2020; Ukraine and Russia have used them in their dispute over Donbas; and they have become a mainstay of attacks in the Middle East, including a September 2019 drone and missile attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities that wiped out more than half its supplies — equivalent to 5 per cent of global supply — which some US officials blamed at the time on Iran.
Smoke rises from an oil facility in Saudi Arabia after drone and missile attacks in 2019, which wiped out more than half the country’s supplies © Planet Labs Inc/AP
Very small drones can also play a key role in larger lethal attacks. In late December 2019, multiple people on the K1 air base in Kirkuk in Iraq saw a small quadcopter drone going directly over the flight refuelling point on the helicopter air strip, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The base was armed with five different types of drone detect-and-defeat equipment but “not a single one of them picked it up”, says one of the people.
“They saw it, but nothing they could do; just report it,” says the second person.
A few days later, the base was attacked by more than 30 rockets, leading some military officials to conclude the initial flyover had come from a small spy drone used as surveillance for target “bracketing” — to determine how to land a rocket at the base from afar. A small drone was again spotted over the damage-hit areas, as if surveying its success.
One US contractor, a linguist, was killed in the attack, leading to a series of dramatic developments in Washington that culminated in then president Donald Trump’s decision to target and kill Iran’s top military commander, Qassem Soleimani, at the start of 2020. The incident brought Washington and Tehran the closest they have been to outright conflict in decades.
‘Constantly bombarded’
At the start of 2020, then defence secretary Mark Esper convened a meeting with senior officials to discuss an urgent solution to the drone crisis. And put Major General Sean Gainey in charge of 60 people at the top of a new department-wide effort known as the JCO to fix America’s drone defences with what the Pentagon calls “layered” defence — multiple overlapping solutions.
Over several months Gainey, a career air and missile defence officer, whittled more than 40 counter-drone systems — that were already deployed — down by three-quarters. He now intends to build the country’s first counter-drone academy in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, by 2024.
“Shooting a high-dollar-figure missile at a relatively cheap [drone] is not where we want to be on the cost curve,” he said.
The US Department of Defense has invested billions of dollars in counter-drone equipment in the years since drones emerged as a significant threat on the battlefield. Yet, fewer than 40 per cent of drones are successfully detected, according to people familiar with internal Pentagon reporting. Before Gainey’s team was established, operators and officials with first-hand knowledge of drones had become exasperated by expensive systems that did not work. Some machines simply would not turn on, they say; others failed to detect or stop a drone.
Major General Sean Gainey, who leads a US Department of Defense group tasked with fixing America’s drone defences, intends to build the country’s first counter-drone academy in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, by 2024 © Audrey McAvoy/AP
Counter-drone systems are tested at Arizona’s Yuma Proving Ground, a US military installation, before deploying them to the field, and Gainey wants counter-drone training to become part of basic training for the Army, Air Force and US Marine Corps.
The effort to ramp up the US counter-drone response has continued under the Biden administration. This year, the Department of Defense plans to spend $636m on counter-drone research and development plus $75m on procurement, up a total of $134m in 2021. But the effort is still moving too slowly for some elements of the US defence system.
Katie Olson, acting director of the Defense Digital Service (DDS), a group of engineers and scientists within the Pentagon that works on near-term technology issues, says more immediate solutions are needed than the JCO can offer, adding that it is “operating at the speed of a bureaucracy and going down this very slow path”.
“That doesn’t work because we’re getting just constantly bombarded [with new drones],” says Olson, whose team reports to the office of the secretary of defence. “We can’t afford that kind of timeline . . . We are being attacked right now; we need solutions for now.”
Olson says her team — working with the JCO — has developed sensors that can detect new drones as soon as they are launched.
Jamming the electronic signal between the drone and the controller can be too slow because it takes months and sometimes years to determine the communication signal used by new drones in order to disrupt them, and risks interrupting allied communications. Observers say that has made direct “kinetic” attacks — inflicting physical damage — on enemy drones increasingly preferable.
An Islamic State drone, which was shot down by Iraqi security forces outside Fallujah in 2016. Sensing and successfully identifying smaller drones regularly gets the better of a range of expensive equipment © AP
At a counter-drone conference held last month in Virginia, a host of companies advertised their wares. Ohio-based Fortem Technologies has developed the DroneHunter, which relies on automation to detect drones and capture them in a net jettisoned from its own drone mid-air. D-Fend Solutions, a company started by Israeli cyber experts, executes a cyber takeover of the target drone and then safely lands it. The technology, which is fielded in the Middle East, has been used at the G7 summit and to protect Pope Francis during open-air mass.
For its part, DDS has developed a way of defeating individual drones using another drone that the team likens to fighting fire with fire. Another part of the Pentagon, the Defense Innovation Unit, is working with commercial companies such as Fortem and defence tech start-up Anduril, to fix detection problems in particular.
Darpa, a US military research agency, has recently developed a more eye-catching solution: shooting pink stringy spray at drones to entangle their propellers.
“The most threatening thing that should happen is that the threat drone falls out of the sky,” says Darpa’s Gregory Avicola of his team’s invention, which he says was intended to deliver a “soft kinetic” response that avoided collateral damage.
A new class of weapon
The future may look far less “soft”, however. Military futurists worry leaps in artificial intelligence will help create drone “swarms” — not just multiple numbers of armed drones operated by a single person at any one time, but drones that work together as collaborative teams run by a computer and which make targeting decisions powered by machine learning.
Alexander Kott, chief scientist for the Army Research Laboratory, which develops new combat technologies, says drones amount to a “whole new class of weapons” which can fly in “very unusual ways that no other military munitions can fly”, such as hiding in trees or in grass close to the ground and changing speed and direction at will. He adds: “This is kind of a new military technology that, I would say, almost compares in its novelty with the appearance of the first aeroplanes or first tanks.”
For Kott, the answer to overcoming swarms of intelligent, automated, armed drones is a head-on match. “The best defence against a tank is another tank,” he says.
5. Russia and China will threaten the peace in 2022
Russia and China will threaten the peace in 2022 | The Strategist
As 2021 dragged to an exhausting end, the international strategic outlook remained bleak.
Authoritarian regimes are threatening conflict in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The key democracies look distracted, internally riven and unwilling to defend the global order they originally designed.
It wasn’t meant to be this way. The formal dissolution of the Soviet Union on 26 December 1991 was supposed to usher in an era where liberal democracies would flourish. Instead, 2022 may be the year in which democracies operating in a rules-based international order will face their toughest test.
After several decades where Western military forces focused their efforts on largely unsuccessful counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations in the Middle East, we face the alarming prospect of state-on-state conventional conflict in several regional trouble spots.
Russia’s massive build-up of military forces on the borders with Ukraine and Belarus creates the potential for serious conflict during the next few months. A full-scale invasion of Ukraine past the contested eastern provinces would be the most catastrophic but perhaps least likely outcome.
More likely scenarios include Russia overtly moving forces into Ukraine’s Donbas region, which has been controlled by Moscow since the 2014 invasion using local proxy forces and covert Russian military.
Russian President Vladimir Putin then might seek to establish a land bridge between Donbas and Russian-occupied Crimea, widening a front from which Russia could attack deeper into Ukraine.
Putin also could also deploy forces into client-state Belarus, threatening the Ukrainian capital Kyiv from the north, but also putting Russian forces directly on the border with Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.
At this stage, the US and NATO have no appetite for a military response. In early December, US President Joe Biden told Putin in a virtual meeting that, ‘if Russia further invades Ukraine, the United States and our European allies would respond with strong economic measures’.
Beyond that, there were vague promises to provide ‘additional defensive materiel to the Ukrainians’ and fortify eastern NATO allies. Putin has largely been given a green light for military operations and Biden has kept a low profile on the issue for weeks.
This month, the US, NATO and Russia will negotiate on demands from Putin that, if agreed, would severely constrain America’s capacity to defend Europe and would strengthen the position of Russia’s more proximate forces. The US can’t accept Putin’s demands but also won’t offer more than token military support to Ukraine. February may be the month when Russian military operations commence.
What lessons could Chinese leader Xi Jinping take from Putin’s high-risk military posturing? The Beijing Winter Olympics will end in late February. With that charm offensive over, we should expect that Xi will redouble the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to assert its control over Taiwan and its longer-term goal for strategic dominance in Asia.
China and Russia have become increasingly close since the Russian takeover of Crimea in 2014 and Beijing’s annexation of much of the South China Sea by island building to establish military bases in the same year.
Xi is copying Putin’s international playbook. Both leaders take big international risks—consider Russia’s military intervention in Syria and China’s authoritarian crackdown in Hong Kong—both have championed vast and rapid military build-ups, and both threaten the use of military force to press for Western acquiescence.
Frankly, the strategy is working. Ukraine matters more to Russia than it does to the US and Western Europe. The South China Sea matters more to Beijing than it did to Washington, at least in 2014. Autocratic bluff and brinkmanship can and do produce democratic backdowns.
Imagine a 2022 scenario where Beijing closes the Taiwan Strait to sea traffic and declares the East and South China seas no-fly zones because they are ‘sovereign Chinese territory’. Xi could then build up a huge air and amphibious assault force on the Chinese coast adjacent to Taiwan.
Beijing could activate a propaganda campaign and its own agents in Taiwan, calling for the ‘reunification’ of the rebel province under CCP control and claiming that the US is threatening China’s security by providing military assistance to Taipei.
This would be a Chinese replay of Putin’s tactics over the Ukraine. What would Biden do? If the US response was to threaten economic sanctions but leave military action off the table, Xi could well conclude that ‘reunification’ of Taiwan with China by bluff and coercion is worth trying.
The analogy breaks down because Taiwan is more central to the core of Asian security than Ukraine is to Western Europe. Taiwan under CCP control is an existential threat to the security of Japan and to America’s military dominance of the Pacific. By contrast, Russian control of Belarus and eastern Ukraine adds to NATO’s problems but is not a strategic game-changer.
Here are two more strategic woes likely to unfold this year. North Korea is facing a crisis of domestic economic collapse brought on by international sanctions because of its nuclear-weapon and missile development.
Kim Jong-un’s erratic leadership was marked last year by unexplained disappearances and weight loss that could be linked to serious health issues. A challenge to his leadership would have profound consequences for the stability of the regime.
North Korea manages crises by trying to export them. Expect further missile and nuclear tests designed to extract sanctions softening from the US.
In our nearer region, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare will continue to lead his country to the brink of disaster by building ties of dependence with Beijing. The proposed Chinese police presence won’t be the last concession China will seek from Sogavare in return for bankrolling his government.
You know Canberra has a real problem on its hands when the political leadership goes quiet. Of course, this is a matter for the Solomons government, but Australia will have no intention of allowing a Chinese proxy to emerge in the Coral Sea. Think back to 1941. This is a game-changer to our security.
Peace on earth? Not in 2022.
6. Taiwan should destroy chip infrastructure if China invades: paper
A couple of things here. One is I wonder how many weapons systems in both the US military and the PLA are dependent upon semiconductors from TSMC.Consider that the "hot spot" of Taiwan is key to weapons development in both countries.
Second, it is good to see the influence of our PME institutions. I think we too often overlook the students, the researchers, professors, and journals at our PME institutions and the critical thinking they can provide.
Here is the key excerpt from the Parameters article:
To start, the United States and Taiwan should lay plans for a targeted scorched-earth strategy that would render Taiwan not just unattractive if ever seized by force, but positively costly to maintain. This could be done most effectively by threatening to destroy facilities belonging to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the most important chipmaker in the world and China’s most important supplier. Samsung based in South Korea (a US ally) is the only alternative for cutting-edge designs. Despite a huge Chinese effort for a “Made in China” chip industry, only 6 percent of semiconductors used in China were produced domestically in 2020.27 If Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s facilities went offline, companies around the globe would find it difficult to continue operations.28 This development would mean China’s high-tech industries would be immobilized at precisely the same time the nation was embroiled in a massive war effort. Even when the formal war ended, the economic costs would persist for years. This problem would be a dangerous cocktail from the perspective of the Chinese Communist Party, the legitimacy of which is predicated on promises of domestic tranquility, national resilience, and sustained economic growth.
The challenge, of course, is to make such a threat credible to Chinese decisionmakers. They must absolutely believe Taiwan’s semiconductor industry would be destroyed in the event of an invasion. If China suspects Taipei would not follow through on such a threat, then deterrence will fail. An automatic mechanism might be designed, which would be triggered once an invasion was confirmed. In addition, Taiwan’s leaders could make it known now they will not allow these industries to fall into the hands of an adversary.29 The United States and its allies could support this endeavor by announcing plans to give refuge to highly skilled Taiwanese working in this sector, creating contingency plans with Taipei for the rapid evacuation and processing of the human capital that operates the physical semiconductor foundries.
My concern would be what happens to South Korea and its semiconductor industry if there is a war between Taiwan and the PRC and Taiwan's semiconductor infrastructure is destroyed? Could there be a fight over the control of the semiconductor production capabilities. Are semiconductors to the PRC what oil and natural resources were to Japan in the first half of the 20th Century?
Another question is why aren't we all thinking about diversifying semiconductor production and developing multiple sources of supply? (especially beginning at home).
Taiwan should destroy chip infrastructure if China invades: paper
KEN MORIYASU, Nikkei Asia chief desk editor
January 5, 2022 03:08 JST
NEW YORK -- In the most-downloaded paper published by the U.S. Army War College in 2021, two American scholars propose a Taiwan deterrence strategy to render the island so "unwantable" that it would make no logical sense for China to seize it by force.
One key recommendation is for the U.S. and Taiwan to threaten to destroy facilities of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. -- the world's most important chipmaker and China's most important supplier -- if Beijing invades.
Samsung, based in U.S. ally South Korea, would be the only alternative for cutting-edge designs. If TSMC went offline, "China's high-tech industries would be immobilized at precisely the same time the nation was embroiled in a massive war effort," the authors note. "Even when the formal war ended, the economic costs would persist for years," the paper suggests, adding that such a scenario could hurt the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party.
The challenge, the authors argue, is to make such a threat credible. "An automatic mechanism might be designed, which would be triggered once an invasion was confirmed," they write.
"Despite a huge Chinese effort for a 'Made in China' chip industry, only 6% of semiconductors used in China were produced domestically in 2020," the paper notes.
"Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan" was written by Jared McKinney, chair of the Department of Strategy and Security Studies at the School of Graduate Professional Military Education, Air University, and Peter Harris, associate professor of political science at Colorado State University. The views do not necessarily represent those of Air University or the U.S. Air Force, McKinney said.
China has responded strongly to the report. On Dec. 23, the website of the Chinese State Council's Taiwan Affairs Office posted an article noting that "the mainland's pursuit of cross-strait reunification is definitely not for TSMC."
The controversial approach stems from an acknowledgement that traditional deterrence strategies -- such as forward-deploying American warships in Taiwan's vicinity -- may not be enough to discourage Beijing from taking action in the Taiwan Strait.
The People's Liberation Army's goal for a successful invasion is 14 hours, a Chinese analyst with connections in the PLA Navy told the authors, while the PLA projects the U.S. and Japan to need 24 hours to respond.
"If this scenario is close to being accurate, China's government might well be inclined to attempt a fait accompli as soon as it is confident in its relative capabilities," McKinney and Harris write.
While ensuring that key chip-producing facilities do not fall into Beijing's hands, the U.S. and allies could also form contingency plans to quickly evacuate highly skilled Taiwanese working in this sector and give them refuge, the paper proposes.
The authors acknowledge that this "scorched-earth" strategy will be unappealing to the Taiwanese. But the costs "will be far less devastating to the people of Taiwan than the U.S. threat of great power war, which would see massive and prolonged fighting in, above, and beside Taiwan," they continue.
McKinney told Nikkei Asia that the plan brings the economic instrument of power into the deterrence argument and that it offers "an alternative to fighting a great power war at a location 5,000 miles west of Hawaii, a prohibitively difficult proposition."
Harris said: "If the U.S. and Taiwan wish to deter China from invading, then they should look for means of doing so that do not rely on the threat of U.S. military reprisals. Relying exclusively on military threats is becoming less credible and thus more dangerous."
Meanwhile, the paper proposes making efforts to convince Beijing of the "considerable advantages" to maintaining the status quo.
"Washington must restate in unambiguous terms the status of Taiwan is undetermined, that the United States has no plans to support independent statehood for Taiwan, and it will not seek to shift the status quo using gray-zone tactics that violate the spirit of Sino-American rapprochement," the authors write.
7. Taiwan air force stages drill to intercept Chinese planes amid tensions
Taiwan air force stages drill to intercept Chinese planes amid tensions
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12 F-16V fighter jets perform an elephant walk during an annual New Year's drill in Chiayi, Taiwan, January 5, 2022. REUTERS/Ann Wang
CHIAYI, Taiwan, Jan 5 (Reuters) - Taiwan air force jets screamed into the sky on Wednesday in a drill simulating a war scenario, showing its combat readiness amid heightened military tensions with China, which claims the island as its own.
Before takeoff, flight crews at a base in the southern city of Chiayi - home to U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets that are frequently scrambled to intercept Chinese warplanes - rushed to ready aircraft as an alarm sounded.
The exercises were part of a three-day drill to show Taiwan's battle readiness ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday at the end of this month.
Tensions across the sensitive Taiwan Strait have been rising in the past few years, with Taiwan complaining of repeated missions by China's air force near the democratic island.
Chinese military aircraft frequently fly into the southwestern part of its air defence identification zone (ADIZ), airspace around the island that Taiwan monitors and patrols.
"With the very high frequency of Communist planes entering our ADIZ, pilots from our wing are very experienced and have dealt with almost all types of their aircraft," Major Yen Hsiang-sheng told reporters, recalling a mission in which he was dispatched to intercept Chinese J-16 fighters late last year.
China has not ruled out using force to bring Taiwan under its control.
Taiwan has termed China's activities as "grey zone" warfare, designed to both wear out Taiwan's forces by making them repeatedly scramble, and also to test its responses.
In a new year message for China last week, Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen said military conflict is not the answer. Beijing responded with a stern warning that if Taiwan crossed any red line it would lead to "profound catastrophe".
Reporting by Fabian Hamacher and Ann Wang; Writing by Yimou Lee; Editing by Gerry Doyle
8. RCEP solidifies China as center of Asia’s trade
A "Sinocentric economic zone."
Excerpts:
But China has opened the floodgates for Asian imports. The aggregate numbers are inflated somewhat by the past year’s rise in raw materials prices, but the most impressive gain in China’s imports came from Taiwan, which sells electronics to China.
Taiwan’s exports to China more than doubled since 2016, with most of the growth occurring over the past two years. Part of China’s purchases from Taiwan include components that China assembles into electronics goods for the US and European markets, and part reflects China’s increasing demand for semiconductors.
China has also outsourced some of its more labor-intensive industries to Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries. China’s industrial integration with the rest of Asia is balanced by a jump in exports to Europe and the United States.
Germany, once the world’s top industrial exporter, has become the fastest-growing customer for Chinese goods. At US$11 billion a month, Germany’s imports from China have nearly doubled from pre-pandemic levels. To a great extent, this reflects the shift in German firms’ production facilities to China.
But you would think all this economic connectedness could help prevent war (the golden arches theory). Of course it will as long as the PRC dominates that interconnectedness and no one resists its domination.
RCEP solidifies China as center of Asia’s trade
China’s Asia imports nearly tripled in the past five years, building a Sinocentric economic zone the new trade deal will consolidate
The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), described as “a coup for China” by France 24, ratifies a grand realignment of Asian economies around China’s import market.
Exports to China from the rest of Asia rose by 260% between 2016 and 2021, the biggest margin of trade expansion in any major market. Asia’s recovery from the pandemic recession and its prospects for future growth depend increasingly on China.
China’s willingness and capacity to absorb imports from other Asian countries presented its Asian neighbors with an offer they couldn’t refuse. Import tariffs within the 15-nation trading bloc will fall by 90% over time under the RCEP, giving the other Asian economies more access to China’s market.
By opening its economy to the rest of Asia, China made the deal attractive to countries such as Australia whose trade and diplomatic relations with Beijing have been tense since 2020.
Among the 15 members, China was the first to ratify RCEP, as Chinese President Xi Jinping noted in a November 5 speech. Xi also said that China would do its utmost to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), originally launched by the US as an anti-China trade club.
President Donald Trump took the US out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2017, and the Biden administration has indicated no interest in reversing the decision.
China has emerged as the center of gravity in a triangular relationship with the United States and Europe on one side, and the rest of Asia on the other.
Chinese exports to the industrial world surged in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, as China met the demand generated by government stimulus programs in the West. Asia provided parts and raw materials for China’s export industry.
Some American political leaders viewed the inauguration of RCEP with dismay. Fifteen Republican members of the Senate Finance Committee signed a November 8 letter urging the White House to “begin digital trade negotiations with our allies and partners in Asia.”
“China is quickly seizing the initiative for trade policy in the East—to the detriment of United States interests. Fifteen countries—comprising 30 percent of global Gross Domestic Product—have signed on to a trade deal that China backs: the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), an agreement that comports with China’s interests, including weak rules on intellectual property rights, and none whatsoever on state-owned enterprises,” they wrote.
“Meanwhile, while the United States continues to disparage the Comprehensive and Progressive Transpacific Partnership (CP-TPP), the agreement that it helped negotiate, China now wants to join it. That China could someday become an outsized member of both major trade blocs in Asia while the United States is party to neither, is a strategically unfavorable position to be in for the United States. If this challenge is left unanswered, China will continue to make headway in its strategy to build a China-centric economic order and displace the United States from its pre-eminent position in international affairs,” the letter said.
There is little chance that the Biden administration will return to Asian trade diplomacy, however. Trump made trade a toxic issue, and the Democrats do not want to expose a flank ahead of the 2022 Congressional elections.
China’s enormous internal market, meanwhile, has become a magnet for the rest of Asia. In the past, China has used non-tariff barriers to protect its domestic industries from foreign competition, a source of recurring complaints from Washington.
“Significant barriers for US companies” selling to China “still exist,” the US Special Trade Representative (USTR) wrote in February 2021. “The US government has demanded that the Chinese government address these barriers and vigorously enforced US and international trade laws and obligations,” the USTR said.
But China has opened the floodgates for Asian imports. The aggregate numbers are inflated somewhat by the past year’s rise in raw materials prices, but the most impressive gain in China’s imports came from Taiwan, which sells electronics to China.
Taiwan’s exports to China more than doubled since 2016, with most of the growth occurring over the past two years. Part of China’s purchases from Taiwan include components that China assembles into electronics goods for the US and European markets, and part reflects China’s increasing demand for semiconductors.
China has also outsourced some of its more labor-intensive industries to Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries. China’s industrial integration with the rest of Asia is balanced by a jump in exports to Europe and the United States.
Germany, once the world’s top industrial exporter, has become the fastest-growing customer for Chinese goods. At US$11 billion a month, Germany’s imports from China have nearly doubled from pre-pandemic levels. To a great extent, this reflects the shift in German firms’ production facilities to China.
Germans are still buying the products of German companies, but they are produced in China. With a declining workforce and limited access to the skilled European immigrants who sustained the German economy during the past decade, Germany is transferring productive capacity to China.
9. The Two-Headed Fight for Ukraine and Taiwan
And of course my biased view would consider north Korea as a spoiler in strategic competition and how its actions could further complicate the very complicated geopolitical conditions.
The Two-Headed Fight for Ukraine and Taiwan
These aren’t mere regional hot spots, as Russia and China work together to upend world order.
Whether Mr. Putin is seriously considering action against Ukraine is an open question. But Mr. Putin has achieved three objectives simply by posing a credible threat. First, he has gained President Biden’s attention, and the two had teleconferences on Dec. 7 and 30. Russia views itself as a great power and wants to deal with other great powers directly, not via the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, an execrable reminder of Russian weakness and Soviet collapse.
Second, Mr. Biden hasn’t committed to a military deployment in support of Ukraine, instead emphasizing an economic response, such as sanctions, to a Russian offensive. This is a signal that Mr. Biden is reluctant to intervene militarily. Third, and most important, Mr. Putin has mobilized the Russian military to allow almost immediate combat operations against Belarus, allowing him to swallow Minsk. Internationally, Mr. Putin still hopes to achieve the Soviet dream of dismantling the American-led European security system. This is similar to his objective in the Middle East: replacing the U.S. as the prime external force in the region.
Although separated by geography, Ukraine and Taiwan occupy similar positions in the Russian and Chinese strategic experience and historical imagination. Capturing each is essential to all other strategic objectives. For Russia, taking Ukraine would secure its hold on the Black Sea and open other pressure points against vulnerable NATO members Romania and Bulgaria. For the Chinese Communist Party, seizing Taiwan would allow the country to break out of the First Island Chain and conduct offensive operations against Japan, the Philippines and even U.S. territories in the Central Pacific.
Historically, post-Soviet Russia’s ruling oligarchy has cultivated intense grievances against independent Ukraine. It is a living reminder that Slavic peoples need not live under one flag. Taiwan is proof that Chinese-speaking peoples are fully capable of governing themselves. The modern Communist Party stems from a brutal revolutionary regime that savaged the Chinese people, murdering millions through its messianic ambitions and sheer incompetence. Only by consuming Taiwan can China confirm its superiority. Given the political capital the Communist Party has invested in subduing Taiwan, it may no longer have a way to de-escalate even if it wanted to.
The clearest obstacle to Russian and Chinese escalation is Ukraine’s and Taiwan’s affiliations with the U.S. and its allies. Mr. Putin understands that a spiraling conflict with NATO would overwhelm the Russian military. Unable to hide casualty counts as he did in Syria, Libya and Ukraine in 2014, he would face domestic opposition. Mr. Putin has an incentive to isolate Ukraine militarily and separate the issue from NATO, striking only when the time is right.
Similarly, a Sino-American conflict involving a broader Pacific coalition would prove dangerous for the Communist Party’s survival: A blockade against Chinese Middle Eastern resource imports could destroy the regime in weeks to months.
Yet a fait accompli against Taiwan is more viable than a similar strike against Ukraine. Russia’s likely strategic objective would be the capture of a land corridor between Donbas and Crimea. Yet in 2014, the Ukrainian armed forces, reeling from Russia’s annexation of Crimea and relying upon paramilitaries for additional combat power, repulsed a Russian offensive against Mariupol and drove Russian and separatist forces back to their current salient.
Seven years of warfare have given the Ukrainian military valuable combat experience. Ukrainian society, even in the east, is increasingly hostile to Russia. The Ukrainian public seems willing to accept casualties. While Russia may be able to strike deep into Ukrainian territory and pressure Kyiv from the north as it penetrates south, a Ukrainian political collapse is unlikely. And expect an insurgency against Russian occupation. Ukraine’s willingness and ability to fight hard, no less than NATO’s potential intervention, helps deter Russian action.
By contrast, Taiwan is small and densely populated. Its military isn’t equipped to sustain air and sea control around the island, a prerequisite for defending against amphibious invasion. And it is highly likely that the Communist Party has positioned intelligence assets on Taiwan ready to sow discord throughout Taiwanese society and disrupt civilian communications. The question for the People’s Liberation Army is less whether it can take Taiwan, but whether it can succeed before a potential American and allied coalition can respond.
With China and Russia in strategic cooperation, this is a very dangerous situation. The margin of force between potential enemies in the Western Pacific is far thinner than in Eastern Europe, given China’s increasingly capable military. Russia wouldn’t have to deploy major ground or naval units to the Asia-Pacific, nor time its offensives with China’s. The Russian Pacific Fleet has enough submarines to bog down Japanese and U.S. units needed to defend Taiwan in shielding the Japanese home islands. That would make China’s mission much more likely to succeed.
Roughly concurrent offensive operations in two hemispheres would overstress American and allied resources. Taiwan must become capable of defending itself. But more broadly, the U.S. must begin thinking about its strategic challenges globally, not in regional segments. This is a contest for Eurasia—and thus for the world.
Mr. Cropsey is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and director of Hudson’s Center for American Seapower. He served as a naval officer and as a deputy undersecretary of the Navy.
10. The Return of Battlefield Nuclear Weapons
The Return of Battlefield Nuclear Weapons
January 05, 2022
Evidence of the growing relevance of what are interchangeably called non-strategic, tactical, or battlefield nuclear weapons became apparent in 2014 when Russia violated the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF). Given its economic and strategic limitations, Russia has pursued battlefield nuclear weapons as an asymmetric advantage against the United States. It has developed short- and medium-range nuclear missiles that can rapidly strike North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member-states—primarily with low-yield (0.1 to 10 kiloton) warheads.
Russian Approach
Although there is some debate over Russia’s approach to nuclear weapons use, it appears Russia may have an “escalate to deescalate” strategy that relies on the use of what we call battlefield nuclear weapons to win a possible war against a superior conventional NATO force maneuvering to defend a member of the alliance.
What makes such an approach highly attractive to Russia is that NATO’s dual-cable aircraft (DCA)—fighters armed with B61 nuclear bombs—are not a combat-ready force that can quickly and effectively counter Russian nuclear use on a European battlefield. Lest we forget, the Russians maintain an estimated 3,000-6,000 intra-theater nuclear weapons that vary from low to high yield and short to intermediate range. A 2017 Defense Intelligence Agency report analyzed Russia’s tactical nuclear warfare commitment revealing delivery systems that include air-to-surface missiles; short-range ballistic missiles; gravity bombs; depth charges for tactical- and medium-range bombers and naval aviation; as well as anti-ship, anti-submarine, and anti-aircraft missiles and torpedoes for surface ships and submarines.
What Russia does not maintain is a conventional force sufficient to defeat a fully mobilized NATO force. In short, Russia may seek a fait accompli using one or a small number of low-yield nuclear weapons in a limited capacity on the battlefield, for which NATO has no equivalent response.
For American forces, it is undoubtedly more difficult to deter Russia from using battlefield nuclear weapons when the United States does not have effective counters. There are approximately 150 B61 nuclear gravity bombs in NATO, but the dual-capable aircraft tasked with delivering the weapons are maintained at a low operational readiness rate and lack adequate support to reach likely targets. The United States also developed the W76-2 low-yield warhead for submarine-launched ballistic missiles, but their use risks leading to miscalculation by the Russians.
Signaling amid nuclear conflict is difficult. Nuance is rarely understood as intended. This means both deterrence, escalation, and de-escalation are more readily achieved when both sides can see and understand parity of capabilities. While it is easy to suggest that “all nuclear weapons are strategic” and there is “no such thing as a winnable nuclear war,” we cannot dismiss the reality that the use of nuclear weapons on the battlefield is a real possibility.
Two points are important to keep in mind.
First, Russia neither believes all nuclear weapons are strategic nor does it believe all nuclear war is inherently a losing proposition. President Putin understands that the United States lacks a similar capability to his own and is reluctant to respond to Russian use of low-yield battlefield nuclear weapons with strategic nuclear weapons. This creates a seam where Russia can operate.
Nuclear Weapons Effects
For example, a hypothetical 10-kiloton Russian nuclear weapon detonated at approximately 600 feet above a flat plain, like in northeastern Poland, produces no local fall-out. If detonated in a rural area ahead of advancing NATO troops, the blast wave will topple farmhouses within a one-thousand-yard radius. Thermal radiation could catch dry fields or trees on fire. Farmers and their livestock within a one-thousand-yard radius are also likely to suffer harm from prompt ionizing radiation within six hours.
However, American troops outside this radius would be unharmed and could move through the detonation zone within 63 hours without any harmful radiological effects. Should a commander urgently need to mobilize troops post-detonation, they would have access to land 3,000 feet away from ground zero within one hour.
Contrary to the perception many Americans hold about nuclear weapons, the United States, Russia, and China can tailor effects to achieve widespread destruction or limited destruction. The ability to achieve discreet effects is what makes Russia’s large and varied arsenal of battlefield nuclear weapons so dangerous and usable.
The American failure to field equivalent capabilities does not signal benign United States intent to the Russians. It signals weakness to an authoritarian, Vladimir Putin, who values strength above almost all else.
American policymakers must understand that Russia and China see the utility of battlefield nuclear weapons. The widening gap between their capabilities and our own must be closed. Too few Americans understand that we are not entering a new Cold War like that between the United States and the Soviet Union. The present is much more dangerous.
At a time of such danger and uncertainty, we must close the battlefield nuclear weapons gap by developing and fielding short- and medium-range nuclear weapons that prevent our adversaries from forcing the United States into a position where capitulation or nuclear Armageddon are our only two options. Now is the time to reject old tropes about nuclear weapons and take a cold hard look at how best to deter America’s nuclear-armed adversaries.
Robyn Hutchins is a Ph.D. candidate in the Nuclear Engineering Department at Kansas State University and a former intern at the Kansas City National Security Complex and Idaho National Lab. Dr. Adam Lowther is Director of Multidomain Operations and Professor at the Army Management Staff College. He has spent more than two decades working nuclear issues with the Navy, Air Force, and Army.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Department of the Army, DoD, or US Government.
11. It's time to end CNN's license for CNN Turk's hate content
Excerpt:
The downward trajectory of CNN Turk's editorial policies, along with its hate content, show that CNN's sister network is now a platform that engages in conspiracy theories, antisemitic tropes and racist rhetoric. On its website, CNN states that CNN Turk "licenses the CNN brand and has access to CNN content, training and services as part of the licensing agreement." Given that CNN's training and services have failed to remedy CNN Turk's racist content targeting Jews and Black people, CNN should disassociate itself from its Turkish partner and its hate content. This would be the right step from not only a moral but also a business perspective, and would prevent further tarnishing of a company that prides itself for being "the most honored brand in news," committed to a "mission to inform, engage and empower the world."
It's time to end CNN's license for CNN Turk's hate content | Opinion
AYKAN ERDEMIR AND TOBY DERSHOWITZ , FOUNDATION FOR DEFENSE OF DEMOCRACIES
ON 1/4/22 AT 8:00 AM EST
Turkish media recently reported that CNN International is sending a team to Turkey to "look into its Turkish branch's broadcasting policy," which has been "under fire for its one-sided reports." This belated move gives CNN an opportunity to disassociate its brand from one of the leading propaganda outlets of Turkey's increasingly authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It is long overdue for CNN to revoke its license for CNN Turk and its hate content.
CNN's "sister network" CNN Turk started broadcasting in Turkey in 1999 and was a leading news outlet in its early years. The channel became synonymous with self-censorship when it aired a documentary on penguins in 2013 instead of reporting the Gezi Park protests, which witnessed countrywide demonstrations against the Erdogan government's authoritarianism. Back then, even CNN mocked its sister network in Turkey for broadcasting the penguin documentary; it aired footage of a Turkish guest, during a live interview with CNN Turk, taking off his shirt to reveal a penguin T-shirt underneath in protest of the broadcaster's editorial policies.
These policies have taken a turn for the worse following CNN Turk's forced sale to a pro-government conglomerate in 2018. When asked whether the sale would cause CNN to reconsider licensing its name to CNN Turk, CNN's worldwide executive vice president was noncommittal, saying, "If ... we have any reason whatsoever to believe the journalistic integrity of the channel could be compromised by the new owners, we will revoke the license." The spike in antisemitic, racist and conspiratorial content on CNN Turk's platforms since then shows that that time has arrived and passed.
A retired Turkish ambassador on a talk show CNN Turk aired in April erroneously claimed, "Jews rule the world. They control 27 percent of the U.S. economy." A senior adviser to Erdogan joined him with his incorrect, dangerous and antisemitic rants: "They also rule the military, politics, media and more importantly the movie industry." During this exchange, the CNN Turk anchor intervened only once to note that although there are only 7 million Jews in the United States, "their influence is very high."
This was not a one-off episode. The previous year, Brooklyn College associate professor Louis Fishman criticized CNN Turk for another talk show, where a guest known for his antisemitic conspiracy theories claimed that an Israeli professor at Harvard University had developed the COVID-19 virus as a biological weapon in partnership with a Wuhan lab. This antisemitic trope came at a sensitive time when a spike in coronavirus cases in Turkey also exacerbated antisemitic narratives, triggering accusations that Jews were responsible for the pandemic. When one of the other guests tried to push back against such a conspiracy theory, the CNN Turk moderator intervened in defense, "But can his theory be disproved?"
The accusations against CNN Turk are not limited to antisemitism. The network has also come under fire for racist content targeting Black people on its Twitter feed and online news platform.
A Turkish national flag flies near the logos of Kanal D television station and CNN Turk at Dogan Media Group complex in Istanbul on March 22, 2018. OZAN KOSE/AFP via Getty Images
In 2019, in a now-deleted tweet, the network accused British lawmaker David Lammy of spreading "black propaganda" for his criticism of former President Donald Trump's decision to withdraw U.S. troops from northern Syria. CNN Turk doctored the accompanying photo to give Lammy darker skin, who was the first Black Briton to attend Harvard Law School. Lammy responded on Twitter, "Why have @cnnturk darkened my image in this picture to accuse me of spreading propaganda? I am raising important issues about Trump's decision to abandon the Kurds to Erdogan's forces in north eastern Syria." As The Independent noted, "Many commentators online noted that both the terminology and the photo appeared to be making reference to Mr Lammy's race."
Less than a year later, following worldwide protests against racism in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder, CNN Turk published an article on Afro-Turks syndicated by Turkey's semi-official Anadolu Agency. The piece, which quotes Turkish citizens of Sudanese descent criticizing racism in the United States and celebrating the claim that there is no racism in Turkey, failed to mention that the ancestors of Afro-Turks came to the region as slaves two centuries earlier. CNN Turk's piece whitewashed the Ottoman practice of slavery by referring to Afro-Turks as "grandchildren of Afro-Turks who came from Sudan in the 1800s for agricultural work." Although the video report embedded in the original piece in Anadolu Agency's website included multiple interviews where Afro-Turks complained about everyday discrimination and name calling in Turkey, this detail did not appear in CNN Turk's version.
Piotr Zalewski, The Economist's Turkey correspondent, commented on Twitter, "This piece is a disgrace. No, the ancestors of the Afro-Turks did not 'come' to the Ottoman Empire in the 1800s 'for agricultural work.'" Istanbul-based critic and writer Arie Amaya-Akkermans agreed: "This article should be a required reading in race theory syllabus; it's hard to get it more wrong (other than outright lying of course)." Despite similar criticism by academics, CNN Turk has not issued an apology or correction. The article is still on its website.
The downward trajectory of CNN Turk's editorial policies, along with its hate content, show that CNN's sister network is now a platform that engages in conspiracy theories, antisemitic tropes and racist rhetoric. On its website, CNN states that CNN Turk "licenses the CNN brand and has access to CNN content, training and services as part of the licensing agreement." Given that CNN's training and services have failed to remedy CNN Turk's racist content targeting Jews and Black people, CNN should disassociate itself from its Turkish partner and its hate content. This would be the right step from not only a moral but also a business perspective, and would prevent further tarnishing of a company that prides itself for being "the most honored brand in news," committed to a "mission to inform, engage and empower the world."
Aykan Erdemir is senior director of the Turkey Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former member of the Turkish parliament. @aykan_erdemir
Toby Dershowitz is senior vice president for government relations and strategy at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. @TobyDersh
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
12. With simulations and more information-sharing, Biden administration tries to prevent another Jan. 6
I hope we doing this for all the major strategic problems from invasions of Taiwan and Ukraine to loss of semi conductors to instability or conflict in north Korea and more.
With simulations and more information-sharing, Biden administration tries to prevent another Jan. 6
The Washington Post · by Devlin Barrett, Ashley Parker and Aaron C. Davis Today at 5:00 a.m. EST · January 5, 2022
Senior Biden administration officials have concluded that the government’s Jan. 6 preparations were hampered by a lack of high-level information-sharing and a failure to anticipate how bad the day could be — lessons they say they are applying today in an effort to prevent another such attack.
Those conclusions, shared by people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss how the federal government is trying to improve security a year after the insurrection, are not formal findings, the officials said. But they offer a kind of road map for how the Biden White House is attempting to prevent similar assaults on the democratic functions of government.
“The bottom line, we concluded, was there was insufficient information-sharing and coordination that was raised up to higher levels, and that needed to change,” said one senior administration official. There was also “insufficient anticipation of the kinds of things that could happen,” the official added.
Officials said they conducted the analysis not as a form of “finger-pointing” at the U.S. Capitol Police or the FBI — each of which has been faulted for failing to understand the threat they were facing on Jan. 6 — but to be better prepared to prevent future violence or unrest.
While inspectors general at multiple agencies have launched exhaustive autopsies of what the government did wrong and right in the lead-up to Jan. 6, most of those reviews are not complete, and some may take many months more to finish.
In the meantime, the Biden administration has to make decisions about how to better guard the country against spasms of politically motivated violence, a year after a mob seeking to overturn Joe Biden’s defeat of Donald Trump breached the walls of the Capitol and assaulted hundreds of police.
Liz Sherwood-Randall, President Biden’s homeland security adviser, said that since the inauguration, “we have worked hard to improve coordination, information-sharing, planning and preparation for a range of events and contingencies to ensure public safety. We are stronger today than we were a year ago — though we can never be complacent about the threats that we face from abroad and at home.”
Experts caution that the next such crises may not be in Washington, or involve organized groups.
A year later, officials say the threat picture for the area is much less alarming.
In a statement, the FBI said the agency “currently does not have any information indicating specific or credible threats regarding the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. As always, we remind members of the public to be vigilant and to report any suspicious activity to law enforcement.”
In an effort to keep senior officials on top of security threats in Washington, Biden’s National Security Council oversees weekly discussions among federal law enforcement agencies to discuss planned events such as protests and any related information that points to possible violence.
At those meetings, officials discuss what permits have been granted, as well as threat reports within the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security and any indicators of concern — such as travel reservations or hotel bookings — “to see if there might be a surge of people coming to town and how to adequately posture for that,” a second senior administration official said.
The officials insisted that the administration aims to encourage free speech, while also being prepared for the possibility that such events can devolve into violence or attract people intent on perpetrating violence against protesters.
“We certainly invite First Amendment activity and welcome it,” one official said. “The challenge that we have is that, yes, sometimes these activities turn violent, either because the protesters themselves seek violence or because there are counterprotests.”
Colin P. Clarke, a senior researcher at the security consulting firm the Soufan Group, said the Biden administration was generally correct in its conclusions about what to change to better secure the nation’s capital and the rest of the country — including by acknowledging the threat posed by domestic extremists.
“The biggest change between the Trump administration and the Biden administration is that the Biden administration actually acknowledged there is such a thing as far-right terrorism and hired people who know the issue,” Clarke said.
“If you look at the forensics of all the things that went wrong that day, I think it is right to focus on the information-sharing part, and that’s one of the most important strategies to prevent it from repeating.”
After Jan. 6, Clarke said, he feared “far worse” violence would occur in 2021, and was pleasantly surprised when that did not happen.
Biden administration officials said they conducted tabletop exercises and simulations — one in May and another in late September — designed to stress-test the ability of federal, state and local law enforcement to respond effectively to crises in the capital region.
For the two decades after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, such exercises and drills often focused on the possibility of an internationally inspired terrorist attack. But the scenarios practiced by the Biden administration last year, one of which involved roughly 80 agencies, envisioned scenarios far closer to what happened on Jan. 6.
In a May exercise, a protest on the National Mall became violent and worsened when social media drew more people into the sprawling, fast-moving conflict. The September scenario involved simulated protests around the steps of the Supreme Court, followed by clashes that spread through the area, crossing the jurisdictional lines of various law enforcement agencies.
The first exercise was a tabletop simulation held at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, a military base in Virginia, hosted by the Defense Department. It included the threat of a homemade bomb — another echo of Jan. 6. On that day, an unidentified person planted pipe bombs outside the national Democratic and Republican party headquarters. FBI investigators are still trying to identify and arrest the would-be bomber.
The second effort, conducted this fall in McLean, Va., was a virtual reality exercise stretched out over a week in which clashes outside the Supreme Court spread to other jurisdictions, requiring different agencies to communicate quickly and respond effectively to stem the violence, officials said.
The second senior official said the Biden administration drew a number of lessons from the simulations: among them that agencies need to improve their communications technology to deal with rapidly changing events, and that it is crucial to have a unified command structure to manage law enforcement responses to major incidents.
Security experts in and outside government said one area of ongoing concern is that despite all the efforts to improve security in the nation’s capital, the next outbreak of violence may occur elsewhere.
Clarke, the security researcher, said organizations such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are well aware that they are now the subject of intense FBI investigation since Jan. 6.
“I think we’re far more concerned about the far-right ecosystem producing the next Timothy McVeigh,” he said, referring to the ex-soldier and security guard responsible for the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people. “Lone wolf types, who may be waiting for their opportunity to act.”
The Washington Post · by Devlin Barrett, Ashley Parker and Aaron C. Davis Today at 5:00 a.m. EST · January 5, 2022
13. The New, More Dangerous Massive Attacks of Disruption
Excerpts:
Massive attacks of disruption pose the most profound consequences for national security. Understanding how to deal with them can open up new business opportunities for industry to exploit.
Because of the powerful bureaucratic inertia in government, unless the private sector acts, it will be the new MAD and not a near-peer adversary that may prove to be the greater threat to the nation and its friends and allies.
The New, More Dangerous Massive Attacks of Disruption
DEFENSE DEPARTMENT
Viewpoint: The New, More Dangerous Massive Attacks of Disruption
1/5/2022
By Harlan Ullman
iStock illustrations
To paraphrase Karl Marx: A specter is haunting the globe. It is the specter of the new MAD — not the Cold War’s “mutual assured destruction” that could have erupted into a thermonuclear holocaust eviscerating much of society. The new MAD stands for “massive attacks of disruption.” Unlike the old MAD, the newer version has already wreaked havoc across the planet and will continue to do so with greater intensity unless it is checked.
Massive attacks of disruption induced by acts of nature, from pandemics to extreme weather conditions, threaten society at large. So do manmade acts of disruption. China, Russia and non-state actors understand the potency and force of this concept. Beijing and Moscow are developing kinetic and non-kinetic strategies based on disrupting military forces, the U.S. system of government, the homeland, and allies and alliances.
COVID-19 was the most obvious precursor of the new MAD. More Americans have died of the novel coronavirus than in every conflict the United States has fought since the Civil War ended. Unlike the Spanish flu of 1918-1920, COVID-19 massively disrupted international trade and finance. And unlike nuclear war, much of the new MAD is not deterrable, including climate change and certain types of cyber attacks from state and non-state actors. And these trends may not be preventable or containable absent unified global action.
In December 2019, who foresaw the arrival of a pandemic; Russian cyber attacks and storms that would shut down the U.S northeast for lack of gasoline supplies; a ship grounding in the Suez Canal creating a global supply chain bottleneck for days; and the overrunning of the Capitol by Americans upset about the outcome of a presidential election?
Massive attacks of disruption should provoke public demand for action. So far, that has not happened.
What created this new MAD? A combination of globalization and the diffusion of power is responsible for undoing the 350-year-old Westphalian system of state-centric international politics. Ironically, one unintended consequence was that as societies became more advanced largely through technological revolutions, greater dependencies and vulnerabilities were created domestically and internationally. It is these dependencies and vulnerabilities that MAD exploits to disrupt society at large, whether through natural or manmade causes.
Consider what senior managers and CEOs of defense companies could face under the new MAD. There may be long-term disruptions to internet, cell phones and information-technology systems. There may be loss of access to electrical power, natural gas and diesel fuel to run generators due to violent weather, and permanent shortages arising from disruptions.
Supply chain delays may cause incompletion of most contracts — some for more than a year. There could be extended deferral of government payments because of defense budget cuts. Look out for spates of ransomware attacks affecting companies and their suppliers and subcontractors.
Finally, suppose that some or many of these disruptions were imposed by adversaries or other entities wishing us ill? How might contractors respond — or not?
Beyond COVID and state and non-state actors, seven major disruptors can be identified.
The first is failed and failing governments, which applies to many countries and particularly the United States. Congress cannot pass a budget on time, forcing federal agencies to operate on continuing resolutions. That makes effective management impossible.
The other disruptors are climate change, cyber, social media, terrorism, debt and drones.
While the existential nature of climate change has been hotly debated, there is no serious debate over the symptoms, from significant increases in extreme weather to shrinking polar ice caps.
Many Americans are intimately familiar with cyber challenges and the disruptions they can impose. Social media has become a preferred vehicle for disruptive amounts of disinformation, misinformation and distortions of truth, fact and reality.
The FBI and CIA have concluded that the main threat of terror-imposed disruption is domestic. Yet ISIS and al-Qaida are not gone.
Debt is a ticking time bomb as every chief financial officer knows. When interest rates and payments rise, as they will, severe cuts on the discretionary parts of the federal budget, namely defense, will follow.
The role of drones will increasingly expand to replace many current functions undertaken by humans. However, like the internet and dynamite, drones have serious disruptive downsides. Cheap and easy to assemble, suppose the Jan. 6, 2021, protestors flew dozens of drones armed with explosives and programmed them to strike the Capitol. Unopposed, they could have destroyed the building.
Compounding the effects of MAD are harsh budget realities for the defense sector. The Ever-Shrinking Fighting Force, by retired Marine Maj. Gen. Arnold Punaro, chairman of NDIA, is a textbook case study that describes in detail how the system has deteriorated to the point where spending more has resulted in a smaller military.
The villain behind this trend is uncontrolled real annual cost growth of about 5 to 7 percent for everything from people to precision weapons to pencils, which is one factor shrinking the force. Defense budget increases will never cover that gap absent a disaster or a universally perceived existential danger to the nation.
If the United States is to be kept safe, secure and prosperous, the new MAD must gain a national security priority equivalent to that of China and Russia. Here, NDIA could play an important role by pursuing three ideas that concentrate on the consequences of MAD for the nation’s defense and its defense industries.
First, the association can determine where and how MAD — whether caused by man or nature — will most significantly affect how we provide for national defense; what can be done to deal with MAD in the context of defense; and why these actions are vital and will benefit the nation’s well-being, the Defense Department and the defense industrial sector.
Second, the government, despite major attempts to empower creativity, has not fully succeeded. Many companies decline to do business with the Defense Department to avoid subjecting themselves to regulatory, oversight and intellectual property issues as well as modest profit margins. Establishing a means for defense companies to act as intermediaries with these firms to bring new technologies into hardware and software products on a rapid basis, could be a vital mission for NDIA focusing on how to prevent, contain and mitigate MAD.
Third, supply chain disruptions are likely to worsen before improving because of these disruptions. The supply chain has been organized around efficiency and not resilience. Can this be reversed?
Massive attacks of disruption pose the most profound consequences for national security. Understanding how to deal with them can open up new business opportunities for industry to exploit.
Because of the powerful bureaucratic inertia in government, unless the private sector acts, it will be the new MAD and not a near-peer adversary that may prove to be the greater threat to the nation and its friends and allies.
Harlan Ullman is a senior advisor at the Atlantic Council. His latest book is The Fifth Horseman and the New MAD: How Massive Attacks of Disruption Became the Looming Existential Danger to a Divided Nation and the World at Large.
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14. Why the U.S. Military Isn’t Ready for Civil War
We must have these painful discussions since this seems to be on the minds of so many.
Excerpts:
The typical conclusion of insurgency conflicts is not victory by either side but exhaustion by all.
The United States does not have a history of coups, but it does have a history of radical political violence, both in its extensive history of political assassination and its history of civil war and insurgency under occupation. The typical conclusion of insurgency conflicts is not victory by either side but exhaustion by all. Exhaustion would reshape the U.S. political landscape. “What bargains or deals would be struck with local authorities to stop the violence?” Bolger said. A devolution of power wouldn’t even require any formal legislation. The transition could be quite surreptitious. It’s a question of what laws the federal government would choose to enforce. There are precedents. Some states have allowed the sale and consumption of marijuana, for example, although the drug remains illegal under federal law. “Would what resulted look much like the America we know today? I don’t know. The question is, at what point does it cause the society as a whole to fracture? At what point does it go too far, and you say, ‘OK, this is no longer a country. We’re all just pretending it’s the same thing.’” That question is not just for future Americans. It is impinging on the present. With or without a civil war, Americans are going to face an existential question: Are they part of the same country anymore? Or are they just pretending? The American experiment is coming to an end.
To put the matter as simply as possible, the country possesses no effective way for processing or mollifying or even slowing political violence. While there is still some room to negotiate, policymakers should at the very least clarify, or modestly untangle, the bureaucratic quagmire that inevitably faces any future use of military force on U.S. soil. Currently, any attempt by the military to do so would only exacerbate underlying tensions. The systems for dealing with breakdowns in the system are themselves broken. The question now is how long and how far the fall will be.
Why the U.S. Military Isn’t Ready for Civil War
A significant portion of Americans seek the destruction of political authority. What if they succeed?
The unimaginable has become reality in the United States. Buffoonish mobs desecrating the U.S. Capitol building, tanks parading down the streets of Washington, running battles between protesters and militias, armed rebels attempting to kidnap sitting governors, uncertainty about the peaceful transition of power—if you read about them in another country, you would think a civil war had already begun. The basic truth is the United States might be on the brink of such a war today. Americans must now take the proposition seriously, not just as a political warning but as a probable military scenario—and a potential catastrophe.
The United States, of course, is not just any country—it is the world’s most enduring democracy and largest economy. But ever fewer Americans believe its size and power are going to save it anymore. In the aftermath of former President Donald Trump’s election, Thomas E. Ricks for Foreign Policy asked a group of national security experts to assess the chances of a civil war over the next 10 to 15 years. The consensus stood at 35 percent. A 2019 poll from Georgetown University asked registered voters how close to the “edge of a civil war” the country was, on a scale from 0 to 100. The mean of their answers was 67.23, so almost exactly two-thirds of the way.
There are plenty of reasons to trust this assessment. The United States, as is stands, is a textbook case of a country on the brink of civil conflict. The political system has been completely overwhelmed by hyperpartisanship that renders each political decision, at best, representative of the will of only half the country. The legal system is increasingly a spoil of political infighting. The Oath Keepers, one of the largest anti-government militias, have effectively infiltrated police forces and the Republican Party. Elected officials have opened the doors to vandals who desecrate their own legislatures. It has now become perfectly normal for political representatives to call for acts of violence against their political opponents. “When do we get to use the guns?” is an acceptable question at right-wing rallies. Political violence is on the rise, and the response of the courts has been to legitimize vigilantism—see the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse.
This essay is adapted from The Next Civil War: Dispatches From the American Future by Stephen Marche (Simon & Schuster, 256 pp., $27, January 2022).
Only a spark is needed, one major domestic terrorist event that shifts the perception of the country—an anti-government patriot who takes his rage against the federal authority and finds expression in flying a drone loaded with explosives into the Capitol dome or a sheriff who decides to take up arms to defend the doctrine of interposition. It’s even possible, though unlikely, that a left-wing rejection of the police, like the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle, might force military action. Retired U.S. Army Col. Peter Mansoor, a professor of military history at the Ohio State University, is a veteran of the Iraq War who now studies the insurgencies of the past. He doesn’t have any difficulty picturing a contemporary U.S. equivalent to civil wars elsewhere. “It would not be like the first Civil War, with armies maneuvering on the battlefield,” he said. “I think it would very much be a free-for-all, neighbor on neighbor, based on beliefs and skin colors and religion. And it would be horrific.”
For the U.S. government, an outbreak of widespread political violence inside the country’s borders would necessarily become a military operation. U.S. militias are significant enough that the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security would simply be insufficient to deal with them. Only the U.S. military could be capable of dealing with insurgent forces. And from a tactical point of view, any engagement between U.S. forces and a militia (or any insurgent force of any kind for that matter) would be entirely one-sided. Despite the preparations of right-wing militias, and despite the sheer number of weapons available in the United States, the U.S. Marines are still the U.S. Marines. No militia or organized group of militias could compete with them in battle.
The real problems would be legal and bureaucratic, and these problems, in turn, would quickly take on a military character. The U.S. military isn’t culturally or institutionally designed to be an adequate domestic actor—rather, the opposite. Its role in American life has been specifically designed to make it ineffective in domestic operations. The use of the military would not be, in itself, a constitutional crisis; there are legal precedents and explicit executive orders governing the use of military force on U.S. soil. But any military response to civil unrest is highly likely to spin out of control into extended insurgency. And for all the U.S. military’s prowess, the outcome would be entirely uncertain.
Occupying forces in foreign countries are, almost without exception, seen as illegitimate by local populations. Would a U.S. force on U.S. soil face the same fundamental resistance? American forces would, after all, be American. But the United States is not like other countries. It was born in resistance to government. Its history has been filled with state resistance to federal authority. And it has experienced resistance to occupation by its own forces before.
The United States currently contains a diverse assortment of anti-government movements, from groups that are little more than survivalist hobbyists to neo-Nazi accelerationists and sovereign citizens. They are armed; several members of these groups have been caught with the materials needed to build low-grade nuclear weapons. A significant portion of the American public is actively pursuing the destruction of political authority as such. What happens if they continue to enact their stated goals of overthrowing the federal government and imposing their vision of liberty by force of arms, as the events of Jan. 6, 2021, have shown they are already beginning to do?
Joint Publication 3-27 defines the armed forces’ role in homeland defense as protecting U.S. “sovereignty, territory, domestic population, and critical infrastructure against external threats and aggression or other threats, as directed by the President.” So which is it? Is the Army there to protect against “external threats”? Or is the category of “other threats” broad enough to include rebel militias?
The Insurrection Act stipulates the latter. Originally enacted in 1807, it provides for the suppression of an insurrection against a state government at the request of the governor. There is also Section 253 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which allows the president to use the armed forces to suppress insurrection or domestic violence if it (1) hinders the execution of the laws to the extent that a part or class of citizens are deprived of constitutional rights and the state is unable or refuses to protect those rights or (2) obstructs the execution of any federal law or impedes the course of justice under federal laws. There is precedent for such direct engagement: Reconstruction of the South after the Civil War; President Dwight D. Eisenhower calling troops into Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 to enforce desegregation; the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
But the rules of force issued to the 7th Infantry Division during the Los Angeles riots specified minimum levels of force in response to levels of civilian violence. Today’s political violence threatens to be far more organized. The question is, what would happen if the U.S. military were obliged to respond in kind?
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The U.S. Constitution is breaking down in ways that its designers recognized from history—and thought they had guarded against.
Under the conditions of the Insurrection Act, the Justice Department is the lead federal agency in cases of homeland pacification. In practice, this means the president would appoint a senior civilian representative of the attorney general to oversee military operations. The two-tier authority that results—inherent in the double role of police action and military action—would crush intelligence-gathering efforts. The Reagan administration explicitly decreed in Executive Order 12333 that the military is only allowed, in the case of U.S. citizens, to gather enough information for situational awareness. The nub of the problem is coming up with an effective definition of the phrase “essential to meet operational requirements,” as the Defense Department terms it. Any failure to uphold the constitutional rights of the rebels would justify their claim that the government is illegitimate.
The struggle would take place under conditions of greater scrutiny than any U.S. military operation in history. Information operations are the great weakness of the U.S. military; control over the subtle but all-powerful narratives that give governments legitimacy have always eluded even the most brilliant American soldiers. Four-star Army Gen. John Galvin, back in 1986, described the military mind as “uncomfortable with warfare’s societal dimension.” Every general who has written a new counterinsurgency operating manual—or reported on the reasons for the failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, including retired Army Gens. David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal—has mentioned the same weakness in understanding the interplay of culture and conflict. Military leaders are, by nature, technicians rather than humanists. They are deliberately not politicians. The Joint Chiefs of Staff’s failure to address the informational nature of conflict in the 21st century is another example of the oldest crisis in warfare. The generals are always preparing for the last war.
During a domestic operation, the military information support officer would be more important than anyone in the intelligence preparation of the battlefield process or any of the engineering officers. Whatever actions are undertaken will be in the context of a highly active and highly polarized media and in the context of a highly polarized legal system with diminishing legitimacy. For half the country, the military engagement against insurrectionists or terrorists will be necessary to preserve democracy and the rule of law. For the other half, it will be the desecration of individual liberty. The beginning of any action, of any sort, by a U.S. military force against U.S. citizens would create an automatic sense of illegitimacy. The already incipient legitimacy crisis would be exacerbated.
Sixty years of U.S. experience has taught the same lesson about counterinsurgency: If you lose, you lose. If you win, you still lose. At present, the official U.S. counterinsurgency, or COIN, strategy remains a version of Petraeus’s 2006 “clear, hold, and build” strategy. In the current edition of Joint Publication 3-24, which provides the U.S. military with a doctrine for counterinsurgency operations, it is outlined as “shape, clear, hold, build, and transition,” part of a suite of COIN strategies that include the generational approach (engaging with youth who are most likely to join insurgencies) and network engagement (through social media). All of these strategies have the smack of desperation in their operating modes. The military holds on to these strategies because at least they are strategies, not because they work. For decades, the U.S. military has been defined by its ineffectiveness against insurgencies in foreign countries. Why would it do any better at home?
The central problem is that it is impossible to build legitimacy as an occupier; the process of holding, even with the best of intentions, is humiliating and disruptive. The illegitimacy of any occupying force—the French in Algeria and Indochina, the Russians in Afghanistan, the British everywhere—would meet greater opposition than ever in an American-on-American context. The defiance begins in a claim to the illegitimacy of federal authority. If you are occupying an anti-government patriot stronghold, any state-building, of any kind, will be forced. The locals don’t want government. That’s the point. But how could any force “address the underlying causes of violence,” as JP 3-24 states, without the machinery of legitimization?
You don’t have to look very far to find an example of a failed occupation on U.S. soil. The South, under Reconstruction, spawned the Ku Klux Klan, Red Shirts, and White League—terrorist organizations that beleaguered the Northern administration until it abandoned the project of reconciliation. The resentment of the occupation after the Civil War survives to this day. Many in the South have not forgotten the abuses of Sherman’s March to the Sea, nor forgiven the Northern authorities for the humiliation of subjugation. The occupied Americans hated the occupying Americans. That hatred endures.
“If that’s what you’re reduced to, just going in and killing people, you’re not solving the insurrection. In fact, you’re spreading it. You’re guaranteeing more of it.”
It’s in the nature of insurgent conflict that violence builds on itself. Symbolic horrors echo. Resonance compounds. The most recent COIN manual has digested, or at least acknowledged, the problem of perception. Insurgencies and counterinsurgencies are engaged in competitive storytelling. “Insurgent groups harness narratives to communicate grievances, goals, and justifications for actions to both internal and external audiences,” JP 3-24 reads. “Insurgency narratives have three elements or components: actors and the environments in which they operate, events along a temporal continuum, and causality—cause and effect relative to the first two elements.” The key word here is “audiences.” And how good can any military force be at playing to audiences?
The tactical considerations of battles between the U.S. military and any domestic militia forces would be completely irrelevant. No one with any tactical expertise can imagine anything other than a one-sided engagement. Professional military forces are professional.
By the same token, no one with any political expertise in counterinsurgency could imagine that any of those victories would matter. For retired Army Lt. Gen. Daniel Bolger, who teaches history at North Carolina State University, the problem of counterinsurgency is fundamentally not a military one. “A succession of winning firefights makes exactly no difference,” he says. When you read Bolger’s book Why We Lost, an on-the-ground report on the failures of two decades of U.S. counterinsurgency, you keep waiting for the losses. The Americans win nearly every engagement—and totally. They have excellent plans that are well executed. Their collection of victories is irrelevant. “By definition, you’re the occupier, and everything you do just proves to the local population that their ‘local government’ is nothing but a proxy or a tool,” he said.
Every time the Marines demolished another outpost of domestic resistance, it would only exacerbate the underlying crises. “You will occasionally hear people say, ‘I’m not worried about an insurrection because the Army’s got all the tanks and the Air Force has bombers,’” Bolger said. “Look, if that’s what you’re reduced to, just going in and killing people, you’re not solving the insurrection. In fact, you’re spreading it. You’re guaranteeing more of it.” You cannot punish people out of hating you. The military is an instrument of punishment. Its very function makes it useless.
For Bolger, who has seen this futility from every angle, counterinsurgency strategy is a contradiction in terms. It is a game in which the only winning strategy is not to play. But not everyone has the luxury of not playing.
Mansoor, the retired Army colonel, has a different perspective. For Mansoor, a successful counterinsurgency is next to—but not quite—impossible, a vital distinction. For one thing, insurgencies fail when they are unpopular with the local population, as in the case of the Shining Path in Peru or Che Guevara in Bolivia. “The most important thing is to get the politics right, and if you get the politics right, you’re going to be able to win a counterinsurgency,” Mansoor said while acknowledging that “the reason these insurgencies occur in the first place is because of politics.”
The role of the military, in Mansoor’s view, is to clamp down on violence so that political progress can be made. “If you have so much violence going on, the politics is frozen,” he said. That need for stability to promote dialogue was the assumption behind the 2007 surge in Iraq. And there, an expanded counterinsurgency strategy did make politics possible. It’s just that the parties found themselves exactly where they started before the violence.
The solution to the next U.S. civil war would be the solution to the crises America already faces. The military at best could provide the space that the United States currently possesses to negotiate its problems. If America cannot solve these problems now, why would it be able to solve them after widespread violence?
Once counterinsurgency starts, it’s nearly impossible to extricate your forces. How can anyone manage to maintain perspective in the middle of a fight for survival? “You get focused because it’s life or death on patrols, ambushes, night raids, because your life is on the line,” Bolger said. “You’re hopeful, as you’re doing that, that somebody way up the chain is thinking, ‘Hey, I’m making these guys do this because this is getting us towards whatever we want.’ My experience was that they were making us do it because that’s what we did. I don’t think they had an overall plan that I could detect. When you’re talking about your own country, the stakes would be much higher.”
For Mansoor, the sheer scale of the United States in terms of geography and population would present a massive military problem. “You need a troop ratio where you have a lot of security forces to clamp down on violence. The United States is a very large continent with a large population. I’m not sure we could ever have that many people in uniform to make it happen. What you would see is the rise of militias on both sides.” The military’s role would be to suppress violence. The only way to suppress violence would be to put the country on lockdown.
“We had an unblinking eye over the city taking 24/7 surveillance. It’s very invasive for civil rights.”
“You have to control the population,” Mansoor said. “In Baghdad, we did that by segmenting off the city with cement barriers, by instituting martial law and censuses. There was a curfew. There were checkpoints all over the place. We went into people’s homes in cordon-and-search operations looking for arms and munitions. We had a full-scale intelligence operation to ferret out the terrorist and insurgent leaders. We had an unblinking eye over the city taking 24/7 surveillance. It’s very invasive for civil rights. It became essentially impossible for the terrorists and insurgents to move or communicate.” Areas of population were broken down by ethnicity and by 12-foot steel-reinforced blast walls. Citizens were interrogated every time they left or entered their neighborhood. Anyone suspicious was arrested. “This is the other thing that would occur. Massive detention centers across the United States where people who were suspected of being disloyal or who were disloyal would be warehoused on a massive scale,” Mansoor said. The United States is already the most incarcerated society in the world. An attempt to clamp down on domestic terrorism would make it vastly more so.
How long could such repression last? “We’re talking about a future civil war in the United States, so the effort would extend indefinitely because of the passions that would invoke,” Mansoor said. For Bolger, as a historian as well as a retired officer, what is extraordinary is how little the United States has learned from even the insurgencies on its own soil. The British Army won nearly every pitched battle in the Revolutionary War. Yet the British could not hold the country against the will of its inhabitants. The failure of Reconstruction after the Civil War reveals the near impossibility of holding Americans under a political regime they won’t tolerate. The North won the war but couldn’t stomach occupation. “What really happens? The Northern forces struggle, undergunned, undermanned, with provisional support from the government, a very small occupying force up to 1877, and every year everybody’s looking at their watch saying, ‘Are we done yet?’” Bolger said. “So what happens? The African American population that’s nominally free becomes peons with almost no rights by 1877, basically disenfranchised in every practical sense, and the people in the North accepted it because they knew they couldn’t do anything about it. They weren’t going to kill every single Southerner.” The Compromise of 1877 was ultimately the retreat of federal power. “The South got essentially home rule,” Bolger said. Reconstruction was in a sense the first failed U.S. occupation.
To ordinary people, to Americans trying to live their lives caught between the random violence of terrorists and the grinding repression of the state, victory and defeat would look much the same. “If you’re in a situation where you’re using armed force to try to quell a population, you’re either going to have to kill a bunch of them or you’re going to pull out and let them have local control,” Bolger said. “You’re never going to talk them into seeing it your way.” The United States, as an entity, survived one civil war. The question for the next civil war is not necessarily would the United States survive but would it be recognizable after?
Both the right and the left would come to another civil war with structural advantages. The right would benefit from the ferocity and militarization of its base, significant infiltration of the radical right into institutional life, and the legacy of the Senate and the electoral college, which would provide a constitutional basis for a takeover of the military despite their smaller numbers. The left, for its part, makes up the majority of the country, and they have the money. The counties that voted for Joe Biden in 2020 accounted for 70 percent of the national GDP. With each side’s respective strengths, there would be no overwhelming force or clear winner from the outset.
A coup would hardly be unprecedented in global terms: In Chile, in 1973, a constitutional democracy in place for nearly 48 years devolved into winner-take-all, zero-sum partisan politics until the military imposed tranquilidad. Other countries, even established democracies such as Canada, have imposed martial law in the middle of severe political upheaval. But a hard coup in the United States—tanks rolling up Pennsylvania Avenue to impose military control over the country—is unlikely. The deep-seated causes of almost every coup, anywhere, are “poverty, economic activities based mostly on land, and hybrid political regimes,” according to Taeko Hiroi, a professor of political science at the University of Texas at El Paso. Countries that are neither authoritarian nor democratic are most vulnerable. The immediate triggers of coups tend to be “social instability, anti-government protests, economic crisis, and regime transitions.” It’s not that these conditions are inconceivable for the United States, but the real reason why a hard coup is unlikely is simply that it hasn’t happened before. “One of the most important factors in a country’s propensity to experience coups is its history,” Hiroi said. “Coups are more likely to happen to countries that have experienced coups.”
The typical conclusion of insurgency conflicts is not victory by either side but exhaustion by all.
The United States does not have a history of coups, but it does have a history of radical political violence, both in its extensive history of political assassination and its history of civil war and insurgency under occupation. The typical conclusion of insurgency conflicts is not victory by either side but exhaustion by all. Exhaustion would reshape the U.S. political landscape. “What bargains or deals would be struck with local authorities to stop the violence?” Bolger said. A devolution of power wouldn’t even require any formal legislation. The transition could be quite surreptitious. It’s a question of what laws the federal government would choose to enforce. There are precedents. Some states have allowed the sale and consumption of marijuana, for example, although the drug remains illegal under federal law. “Would what resulted look much like the America we know today? I don’t know. The question is, at what point does it cause the society as a whole to fracture? At what point does it go too far, and you say, ‘OK, this is no longer a country. We’re all just pretending it’s the same thing.’” That question is not just for future Americans. It is impinging on the present. With or without a civil war, Americans are going to face an existential question: Are they part of the same country anymore? Or are they just pretending? The American experiment is coming to an end.
To put the matter as simply as possible, the country possesses no effective way for processing or mollifying or even slowing political violence. While there is still some room to negotiate, policymakers should at the very least clarify, or modestly untangle, the bureaucratic quagmire that inevitably faces any future use of military force on U.S. soil. Currently, any attempt by the military to do so would only exacerbate underlying tensions. The systems for dealing with breakdowns in the system are themselves broken. The question now is how long and how far the fall will be.
15. Another Far-Right Group Is Scrutinized About Its Efforts to Aid Trump
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Excerpts:
Made up largely of Special Forces veterans and former intelligence officials, 1AP was founded in September 2020 to protect Trump supporters from harassment at rallies and to safeguard free speech rights from “tyrannical, Marxist subversive groups,” Mr. Lewis wrote in a thread of tweets announcing the creation of the group. In a video attached to the thread, he said it would be “a tactical mistake” to discuss how many members 1AP had, noting only that it was several times more than the dozen in a standard Special Forces operational unit.
By the time he founded 1st Amendment Praetorian, Mr. Lewis, who once served as a medic for a Special Forces team, had been out of the Army for a decade and reinvented himself as an author and commentator with an interest in military issues and right-wing politics. Among his works were two action novels describing how the Green Berets saved the American homeland from a fictional invasion and a memoir depicting his rise from poverty and adoption to success in the 10th Special Forces Group, an elite unit stationed in Germany.
1AP’s first “mission” — protecting conservative V.I.P.s — came in October 2020, when the group provided security at a march in Washington led by the Walk Away Foundation, an organization that seeks to persuade Democratic voters to leave the party, Mr. Lewis said in a YouTube video posted that December. The foundation’s leader, Brandon Straka, a former hairstylist in New York, was among those arrested in the Capitol attack. Court papers suggest that he recently began to cooperate with the government.
Another Far-Right Group Is Scrutinized About Its Efforts to Aid Trump
The organization, called 1st Amendment Praetorian, is not as well known as the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys, but it worked closely with pro-Trump forces in the months after the 2020 election.
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Michael T. Flynn, center, the former national security adviser. Members of the 1st Amendment Praetorian at times guarded him and other allies of President Donald J. Trump.Credit...Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
By
Jan. 3, 2022
Days after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 last year, federal law enforcement officials pursued two high-profile extremist groups: the far-right nationalist Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers militia. Members of both organizations were quickly arrested on attention-grabbing charges, accused of plotting to interfere with the certification of the 2020 vote count.
Now congressional investigators are examining the role of another right-wing paramilitary group that was involved in a less publicly visible yet still expansive effort to keep President Donald J. Trump in power: the 1st Amendment Praetorian.
Known in shorthand as 1AP, the group spent much of the postelection period working in the shadows with pro-Trump lawyers, activists, business executives and military veterans to undermine public confidence in the election and to bolster Mr. Trump’s hopes of remaining in the White House.
By their own account, members of the 1st Amendment Praetorian helped to funnel data on purported election fraud to lawyers suing to overturn the vote count. They guarded celebrities like Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, at “Stop the Steal” rallies, where huge crowds gathered to demand that Mr. Trump remain in office. And they supported an explosive proposal to persuade the president to declare an emergency and seize the country’s voting machines in a bid to stay in power.
None of 1AP’s top operatives have been arrested in connection with the Capitol riot, and it remains unclear how much influence they exerted or how seriously criminal investigators are focused on them. Still, the group had men on the ground outside the building on Jan. 6 and others at the Willard Hotel, near some of Mr. Trump’s chief allies. And in the days leading up to the assault, 1AP’s Twitter account posted messages suggesting that the group knew violence was imminent.
“There may be some young National Guard captains facing some very, very tough choices in the next 48 hours,” read one message posted by the group on Jan. 4.
Last month, citing some of these concerns, the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack issued a subpoena to Robert Patrick Lewis, the leader of 1AP. On the same day, it sent similar requests to Enrique Tarrio, the chairman of the Proud Boys, and Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers.
As part of their inquiry, congressional investigators have obtained numerous audio recordings of 1AP members and are trying to determine how they fit into the broader investigation. Mr. Lewis did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but in recent months he has told parts of his story in online videos and podcasts.
Made up largely of Special Forces veterans and former intelligence officials, 1AP was founded in September 2020 to protect Trump supporters from harassment at rallies and to safeguard free speech rights from “tyrannical, Marxist subversive groups,” Mr. Lewis wrote in a thread of tweets announcing the creation of the group. In a video attached to the thread, he said it would be “a tactical mistake” to discuss how many members 1AP had, noting only that it was several times more than the dozen in a standard Special Forces operational unit.
By the time he founded 1st Amendment Praetorian, Mr. Lewis, who once served as a medic for a Special Forces team, had been out of the Army for a decade and reinvented himself as an author and commentator with an interest in military issues and right-wing politics. Among his works were two action novels describing how the Green Berets saved the American homeland from a fictional invasion and a memoir depicting his rise from poverty and adoption to success in the 10th Special Forces Group, an elite unit stationed in Germany.
1AP’s first “mission” — protecting conservative V.I.P.s — came in October 2020, when the group provided security at a march in Washington led by the Walk Away Foundation, an organization that seeks to persuade Democratic voters to leave the party, Mr. Lewis said in a YouTube video posted that December. The foundation’s leader, Brandon Straka, a former hairstylist in New York, was among those arrested in the Capitol attack. Court papers suggest that he recently began to cooperate with the government.
At least one member of the 1st Amendment Praetorian was on the ground outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, while the group’s leader said he was at the Willard Hotel.Credit...Jason Andrew for The New York Times
At that event and others, 1AP provided more than bodyguards, Mr. Lewis said. Its protective detail also included “low-viz operators” dressed in plainclothes moving in the crowd. “We had eyes and ears everywhere,” he added.
As the presidential election drew closer, Mr. Lewis branched out beyond personal protection and started giving interviews, casting himself as a security expert, to right-wing news outlets, including those connected to the QAnon conspiracy theory. Among his claims — so far unsubstantiated — was that “professional analysts” working for 1AP had infiltrated “encrypted forums” visited by members of the loose left-wing collective known as antifa and had discovered plans for a nationwide attack.
“Our intelligence shows that no matter who wins the election, they are planning a massive ‘antifa Tet offensive’ bent on destroying the global order,” he told Fox News two days before Election Day.
Around the same time, 1AP became involved in another project connected to challenging the election. Members of the group, as Mr. Lewis put it in his video in December, began to scour the internet for “OSINT” — or open source intelligence — about allegations of election fraud. Whatever evidence they found, he said, they sent to Sidney Powell, a Dallas-based lawyer who filed four federal lawsuits in late 2020 contesting the results of the presidential vote.
Key Figures in the Jan. 6 Inquiry
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Mark Meadows. Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, who initially provided the panel with a trove of documents that showed the extent of his role in the efforts to overturn the election, is now refusing to cooperate. The House voted to recommend holding Mr. Meadows in criminal contempt of Congress.
Phil Waldron. The retired Army colonel has been under scrutiny since a 38-page PowerPoint document he circulated on Capitol Hill was turned over to the panel by Mr. Meadows. The document contained extreme plans to overturn the election.
Fox News anchors. Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and Brian Kilmeade texted Mr. Meadows during the Jan. 6 riot urging him to persuade Mr. Trump to make an effort to stop it. The texts were part of the material that Mr. Meadows had turned over to the panel.
Michael Flynn. Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser attended an Oval Office meeting on Dec. 18 in which participants discussed seizing voting machines and invoking certain national security emergency powers. Mr. Flynn has filed a lawsuit to block the panel’s subpoenas.
John Eastman. The lawyer has been the subject of intense scrutiny since writing a memo that laid out how Mr. Trump could stay in power. Mr. Eastman was present at a meeting of Trump allies at the Willard Hotel that has become a prime focus of the panel.
By mid-December 2020, 1AP took a job protecting one of Ms. Powell’s former clients, Mr. Flynn, at a second large pro-Trump rally in Washington. The rally was put together, public permits say, by Cindy Chafian, an organizer for the pro-Trump group Women for America First, which arranged for caravans of the president’s supporters to rally across the country after the election. (Ms. Chafian has also been subpoenaed by the House select committee.)
This rally — on Dec. 12, 2020 — helped to solidify 1AP’s relationship with Mr. Flynn and Ms. Chafian. It also brought the group into contact with the Oath Keepers, who joined their protective detail, according to a television interview that the militia’s leader, Mr. Rhodes, gave that day.
In the interview, Mr. Rhodes described how the two groups worked together at the rally. He then urged Mr. Trump to “wage war” against “traitors” at home by imposing martial law. That was the same message that Ms. Powell, Mr. Flynn and others in their orbit were advising at the time.
Mr. Lewis says he played his own small part in the effort to persuade Mr. Trump to declare martial law. On Dec. 18, he said on a podcast last year, he drove Ms. Powell and Mr. Flynn to the White House to meet with Mr. Trump. It is not clear whether Mr. Lewis attended the meeting, where Ms. Powell and Mr. Flynn urged the president to declare a national emergency and demand a recount of key swing states on live TV, according to the business executive Patrick M. Byrne, who was also there.
It was not long after the White House meeting that Mr. Lewis, like others, turned his attention toward Jan. 6, which was widely seen as the final opportunity for Mr. Trump and his allies to stop the certification of the presidential vote.
On Jan. 5, Mr. Lewis gave a speech at an event organized by Ms. Chafian at Freedom Plaza in Washington, telling the crowd that they should not be “intimidated” by the “enemy at the gates.” Another organizer of events that day, Dustin Stockton, said that he saw Mr. Lewis and Ms. Chafian with other members of 1AP in a room at the Willard Hotel, not far from the “war room” where some of Mr. Trump’s top allies had gathered.
On the day of the Capitol attack, at least one of Mr. Lewis’s lieutenants, Geoffrey Flohr, a former Michigan police officer, was outside the building walking the grounds and talking on his cellphone just before the riot erupted, according to public videos. (Mr. Flohr did not respond to messages seeking comment.) Ms. Chafian and her husband, Scott Chafian, were also in the mob outside the building.
Another member of 1AP posted on Twitter that afternoon, claiming he was in an “overwatch position” in Arlington County, Va., where prosecutors say the Oath Keepers had placed at a hotel an armed “quick reaction force” that was prepared to move into Washington if needed.
As for Mr. Lewis, he told The Daily Beast last year that he was at the Willard again on Jan. 6, away from the chaos at the Capitol.
“Today is the day the true battles begin,” he wrote on Twitter just as the Capitol was breached.
Luke Broadwater contributed reporting.
16. War Books, Special Edition: Building Your 2022 Reading List
War Books, Special Edition: Building Your 2022 Reading List - Modern War Institute
It’s a new year, which means resolutions aplenty. At the top of the list for many across the military and national security community is a commitment to continuing or expanding their professional reading. So for those of you looking for the first few books you’ll read in 2022, we asked members of the Modern War Institute team to share some of the books they have recently read, enjoyed, and learned from.
Just as the US military is undergoing the fitful transformation from the post-9/11 wars to strategic competition with China and Russia, people across the US defense enterprise who got smart on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency are working to learn as much as possible about America’s pacing threats. This book won’t make a reader an expert on Russia, but it will give an important foundational understanding. And it serves as a gateway leading interested readers to other works by Galeotti, inarguably one of the most insightful analysts of Russia.
This book has almost nothing to do with war—at least directly. But it’s also impossible to read its description of how blockchain technology has the potential to massively change the way almost everything is done and not think about the ways it will disrupt the conduct of war, as well.
For the first time in its nearly one-hundred-year history, the world’s largest and most watched sporting event is coming to the Arabian Peninsula when the tiny country of Qatar hosts the FIFA World Cup in November 2022. This global soccer spectacle is significant to the United States as Qatar is currently home to the forward headquarters of both US Central Command and Special Operations Command–Central, with over ten thousand military personnel stationed at al-Udeid Air Base, located on the outskirts of its capital city of Doha. With 3.5 million tourists expected, the US military has an opportunity to leverage the event’s popularity to build trust and confidence throughout the Middle East and further our strategic interests in the region. This book, named by Sports Illustrated as one of the five most influential sport books of the decade, looks at soccer’s impact on historical issues, from the clash of civilizations to the global economy.
This book is slightly older but still apropos. Janet was the outside reader for my dissertation and this book is the culmination of years of very hard work by her. She is a fantastic scholar and the theory she proposes in this book is excellent.
Elizabeth Buchanan, codirector of Project 6633 and lecturer of strategic studies at the Australian War College, Canberra
I am dusting off an oldie (but apparently a goodie). Teaching at Staff College here at the Australian War College I am always looking for engaging and new ways to contextualize and explore Sun Tzu’s classic. Visualization is an awesome tool for bridging the existing academia and defense policy or practitioner “divide.” War isn’t just interested in the warfighter, or the soldier; war is interested in us all. I think finding engaging ways to teach Sun Tzu’s thousands-of-years-old military literature is a win for everyone.
Nearly twenty years old, Mearsheimer’s classic remains an influential read for those seeking to better understand international politics through the realist lens. He argues that the world is condemned to strategic competition in perpetual anarchy, marked by states’ insatiable thirst for military power, motivated by uncertainty of others’ intent and the necessity of survival. We need more in the international security community to think like a realist and see the world for what it is, not what we hope it to be—and to make security and defense policy according to these edicts. Mearsheimer sets the tone.
Nancy Collins, MWI senior fellow, chair of defense and security studies at Columbia University, and author of Grey Wars
This citizen’s guide meets the fight of the moment, asking how we will confront today’s infections. John Fabian Witt’s scholarship offers essential insights into this new national conflict, exploring the impact of a novel pathogen on American security and our collective good, rendering visible our public limitations, and analyzing how this recurrent disease may shift our country’s equities and responsibilities.
Essential reading for a new generation of practitioners and scholars. Providing vibrant firsthand accounts from experts in counterterrorism and irregular warfare, from 9/11 until the present, the contributors offer a blueprint of recent efforts and impending challenges. Collectively, they provide a vital path forward in irregular warfare.
I like this book because it challenges some of our preconceived notions about what makes for successful capacity building with partners. Rather than focusing on the volume of training, equipment, advisors, etc., Karlin argues that the nature of US involvement and the role of unhelpful external actors are most determinative of a successful or unsuccessful capacity-building endeavor.
Austin Doctor, MWI nonresident fellow and assistant professor of political science at the University of Nebraska Omaha
I highly recommend Nonstate Warfare, in which Biddle presents a novel and parsimonious framework for understanding how armed nonstate actors fight. A growing number of militant organizations are today engaging in the type of conventional methods traditionally assumed to be the exclusive purview of state forces. Speaking to this dynamic and the broader landscape of modern warfare, Biddle adeptly explains how militants’ internal politics shape their choice of military method.
Revolutionary vision about the future of war (how to fight and win) in a context where nation-states will have less power while nonstate actors such as corporations, mercenaries, terrorists, and multinational criminal organizations will have more. Fascinating and disturbing argument against fighting wars in the “old ways” and overreliance on technology.
Similar to the previous book this one also discusses the future of war, specifically who will fight, for what these actors will fight, and why and how fighting will happen. It is a cautionary tale warning traditional military institutions to adapt and innovate to avoid future impotence and even irrelevance. The author argues that from a military perspective we must resist the temptation to think about our age as the best of all time and continue to struggle to become better and understand what the future brings.
Ryan Grauer, MWI nonresident fellow and associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public and International Affairs
This trilogy masterfully mixes advanced physics, military strategy, and the foibles of human nature. As we begin to expand humanity’s reach into space, Liu considers what might await. His vision of the future is sobering as both prognostication and commentary on the relationship between emerging technologies and military strategy today.
A revision to the classic narrative of strategic defeat within sight of the Kremlin, Stahel examines German efforts to maintain unit integrity, equipment, and end-strength against the Red Army’s onslaught. Stahel’s examination of the operational impact and ability to retain the initiative, as well as examining cohesion amid chaos, is a reminder that retreat does not mean defeat.
While a book that covers the approximately twenty-year time period from the outbreak of the US-Mexican War to the end of the Civil War seems to have nothing related to modern war at face value, it does show that, even when a country is engaged in existential large-scale combat operations (such as during the US Civil War) that seem to exclusively focus on the “M” instrument of national power, the other elements of the “DIME” model still play critical roles.
Although this book was written to give tactical advice and insights to young lieutenants based on the author’s experiences from the Boer War, and some of that advice is just as applicable on the modern battlefield, I’m not recommending this book for tactical-level leaders. Instead, this book could be of value to leaders at all levels by demonstrating the importance of critical and creative thinking to understanding the situation and then visualizing how to succeed.
Michael Kelvington, MWI nonresident fellow and professor of military science at the Ohio State University
Written by the Ohio State head wrestling coach, this book shares incredible insight into what makes those in their field elite. We all face tough circumstances in life that include unchosen suffering outside our control, but it’s those who opt into chosen suffering that makes people elite in their fields. Those who are willing to put in the extra effort, go the extra mile, and carry a heavier load set conditions to succeed—this applies to leadership in the military just as much as on the wrestling mat.
Cole Livieratos, MWI nonresident fellow and concept developer at Army Futures Command
As land warfare becomes more complex due to the introduction of new technologies and domains that impact Army operations, the character of military leadership must adapt. Anthony King provides historical context and offers evidence from the tactical level of war to explain how Western military command has evolved over time to account for increasing battlefield complexity. This detailed work serves as a reminder that the Army cannot rely solely on new technology and tactics, but must continue to evolve its approach to leadership to prepare for future wars.
Though reading doctrine is usually neither stimulating nor fun, ATP 7-100.3 is as well written as it is informative. The publication offers an excellent overview of the People’s Liberation Army, including China’s strategic and operational context, the PLA’s organizational structure, and how the PLA prefers to fight. After being optimized for conventional operations in Europe and then for counterinsurgency, the US Army must now prepare for a near peer with excellent strategic capabilities and weapons systems designed to keep land forces at a distance.
Justin Lynch, MWI nonresident fellow and term member at the Council on Foreign Relations
Given the importance of cyber operations, it is helpful for military leaders to understand zero-day exploits and how they are sold on the market. Perlroth provides a narrative that differs from most accounts, and shows how smaller states and nonstate actors can quickly acquire cyber weapons.
There are a number of competing narratives about the Chinese Communist Party’s intent and strategy, and they are difficult to disentangle. Doshi relies on official party documents and Chinese resources more heavily than usual to lay out a clear and accurate portrayal of the evolution of CCP strategy across military, economic, and diplomatic elements of power.
Despite my service as an active duty Army officer, I found that scholar and retired Navy Captain Henry Hendrix’s work provided a compelling case for why US naval primacy is both a historic and contemporary strategic imperative now facing serious challenges against a rising China and revanchist Russia. Readers of different service backgrounds may find themselves quite surprised to learn about the dramatic post–Cold War decline in the quantity of frontline naval ships, shipbuilding facilities, and ship repair yards, and the potential consequences for today’s strategic competition. As DoD faces potentially flattening budgets in the coming years, readers will better understand the importance of making difficult service tradeoffs to provide and maintain a powerful Navy as America’s “first, best” military strategy.
While there seems to be no shortage of scholarly works on how wars begin, retired Army Colonel Christopher Kolenda’s publication stands unique as one that carefully examines how wars end. He explores American military practitioners’ and policymakers’ historical fixation on “zero-sum victory”—where the United States completely defeats its opponent on the battlefield and dictates nearly absolute terms of surrender—and how this fixation proved unrealistic and ultimately doomed the counterinsurgency campaigns of Afghanistan and Iraq. When one considers how a US military conflict with a nuclear-armed state power such as Russia or China would evolve, negotiated outcomes broader than zero-sum victory can help policymakers and military practitioners develop a more realistic array of options for war termination.
An accessible but in-depth study of President Andrew Jackson’s use of, and imprint on, a young Navy and Marine Corps, and how the country’s attitudes and self- perception were manifested in its sea services.
An exploration of the non-warfare uses of early American seapower and its contributions to national wealth, prestige, and identity. Recommended as good background on the growth of America’s empire in the nineteenth century, and prompts speculation on seapower’s role during that empire’s (potential? inevitable?) contraction.
The USMA International Affairs Forum hosted Dr. Lyall for a talk in the fall and I dug into his book shortly after—it’s a dense but valuable read. In Divided Armies, Dr. Lyall tests the hypothesis that ethnic inequality within a country’s polity and society undermines its military effectiveness in wartime. This type of study has been done before, but what distinguishes Divided Armies is that Dr. Lyall looked at the composition of the belligerent armies and was able to show causality between the levels of equality within a military and its effectiveness on the battlefield.
My brainiac friend recommended this book to me and I’m so glad she did. The book changed how I think about American grand strategy by arguing that the United States must pursue openness to protect American security and prosperity in the modern era. Only a disciplined grand strategy of openness—a naturally forward-looking lens—can counter the emergence of closed spheres of influence that our authoritarian competitors seek to create.
Dr. Anthony King’s book is the most detailed and relevant book to be published on the topic of urban warfare (arguably the most frequent type of conflict in the last few decades and what we predict will be the future of warfare) in a long while. King provides analysis and criticism of popular urban warfare theories and makes a strong case that because of the small size of modern armies, urban warfare is unavoidable. It is a must read for any national security student or practitioner.
Andrew Szarejko, MWI nonresident fellow and Donald R. Beall defense fellow at the US Naval Postgraduate School
Adler persuasively argues that the US military, despite its relatively small size, was central to antebellum American political development. Of particular interest for its contemporary implications, however, is the discussion of civil-military relations. Engineering Expansion portrays civilian control of the military as having been relatively weak, especially on America’s shifting periphery, and Adler draws our attention to the prospects for civilian and military officials alike to reconstitute this relationship for good or for ill.
Christian Tripodi, MWI adjunct scholar and postgraduate and research committee chair in the Defence Studies Department at King’s College London’s School of Security Studies
Johnson, professor of international relations at Oxford University, draws upon his background in the natural sciences to illustrate the way in which cognitive adaptions shape international relations. In his latest book he identifies the way in which cognitive biases, far from being detrimental to policymaking, lend significant benefits and advantages.
Buchanan provides a masterful, fluent, and highly informed analysis of the way in which cyber capabilities, in the hands of both state and nonstate actors, shapes modern geopolitics.
A comprehensive historical overview, this book discusses the influences of weapons and technology on operational art—multidisciplinary and multi-domain.
Joe does a great job with a critique of contemporary schools of thought on Chinese politics. The books focuses on the Leninist influences in Chinese politics and the formation of cliques and factions.
Diane Zorri, MWI nonresident fellow and assistant professor of security studies and international affairs at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Oxford historian Peter Frankopan weaves an alternative to the Western-centric history of the Middle East. In doing so, he illuminates the vacillating importance of raw goods, commodities, religion, and the protection of the supply chain. His account gives depth beyond classical histories and showcases the complexity of how events unfold throughout time.
Editor’s note: This list was updated with additional entries after it was first published.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
