Quotes of the Day:

"Certain things catch your eye, but pursue only those that capture the heart." 

– Ancient Indian Proverb

"A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car." 

– Kenneth Tynan

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."

– Henry David Thoreau

Happy Birthday to US Army Special Forces: 

GENERALORDERS }

No.35

0035

HEADQUARTERS DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY WASHINGTON, DC, 19June 1987

ARMY SPECIAL FORCES BRANCH. Pursuant to the authority con­ tained in Title 10, United States Code, section 3063(a)(13), the Special Forces Branch is established as a basic branch of the Army effective 9 April 1987. 

[DAPE-MP0]

By Order of the Secretary of the Army:

Official:

R. L. DILWORTH

Brigadier General, United States Army The Adjutant General 

JOHN A. WICKHAM, JR.

General, United States Army Chief of Staf

DISTRIBUTION:

Active Army, USAR, ARNG: To be distributed jn accordance with DA Form 12-4 requirements for Department of the Army General Orders.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220605125521/https://history.army.mil/html/faq/branches/DA_GO_1987-35.pdf

One of my tweets from this morning's SASC hearing for USSOCOM, ASD SO/LIC and USCYBERCOM:

@DavidMaxwell161

CDR, USSOCOM (my paraphrase): A SOF renaissance is taking place - tied to its history from the OSS - to create advantages and options for the US and allies and dilemmas for adversaries as it has always done- this is in SOF's DNA. #USSOCOM

1. Antony Blinken’s Ahistorical Advice for Israel By John Spencer and Liam Collins

2. Army PSYOP training to be unified under new school

3. The South China Sea Is the World’s Next Flashpoint

4. How Patriot proved itself in Ukraine and secured a fresh future

5. Don’t Just Bring a Gun to a Drone Fight! The Joint Force and Drone Warfare By Monte Erfourth

6. Elon Musk and Jamie Dimon’s AI Predictions and What They Mean for the Future of Humanity

7. Veteran Narratives of Support for Extremist Groups and Beliefs

8. Forward Presence, Partnership, and Deterrence: The US Army in the Indo-Pacific

9. The Marines’ Pacific allies are copying its littoral regiment moves

10. High time for real US-Japan defense cooperation by Grant Newsham

11. Myanmar: is the junta’s grip on power weakening and what next for its leadership?

12. Ukraine needs America’s planes, guns and tanks

13. Ex-Officials Urge Curbing Presidential Power to Deploy Troops on U.S. Soil

14. House intelligence chair says Republicans are ‘absolutely’ repeating Russian propaganda

15. First Space Force Ranger hopes guardians follow in his footsteps

16. Report: Veterans with extremist views had bad experiences in military

17. How Annie Jacobsen mapped out 'Nuclear War: A Scenario'

18. Amid lawmaker scrutiny, DoD assessing operational joint force HQ in Indo-Pacific, Austin says

19. Terrorists are relocating rapidly due to climate change

20. US has seen no evidence that Israel has committed genocide, Austin says

21. There is more to NATO burden sharing than the 2% spending dogma

22. Two-Theater Tragedy: A Reluctant Europe Cannot Easily Escape a Sino-American War Over Taiwan

23. America’s Best Friend in Asia: The Case for Elevating the U.S. Alliance With Japan

24. No Substitute for Victory: America’s Competition With China Must Be Won, Not Managed

25. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 9, 2024

26. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, April 9, 2024

1. Antony Blinken’s Ahistorical Advice for Israel By John Spencer and Liam Collins

Excerpts:

There is no historical evidence that commando raids or a series of precision strikes have defeated a deeply entrenched urban defender. Gen. McMaster argues that “like precision strikes, raids often embolden rather than dissuade the enemy.” Short-lived raids also place the raiding force in a vulnerable position, especially when their mission is their dominant strategic tactic. The U.S. realized this firsthand after its seventh raid into Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993, which led to the death of 18 service members. Israel knows the best way to mitigate this risk is to employ raids in concert with a large conventional force.

The same applies to targeted airstrikes, which require time to gather actionable intelligence on key leaders. Recommending that Israel rely on this tactic ignores that the ammunition necessary to destroy the enemy could cause more collateral damage than a ground invasion would. Israel has already killed aid workers with errant strikes. Urging its forces to depend on raids and airstrikes is likely to exacerbate this problem, not reduce it.

Antony Blinken’s Ahistorical Advice for Israel

Raids and airstrikes can be tactically effective, but they don’t amount to a strategy for winning a war.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/antony-blinkens-ahistorical-advice-for-israel-war-strategy-7f1ed80f?st=yt6dv5d1qodqhtt&utm

By John Spencer and Liam Collins

April 9, 2024 3:24 pm ET

Israeli soldiers work on their tanks near Gaza, April 8. PHOTO: TSAFRIR ABAYOV/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The Biden administration is keeping the pressure on Israel not to invade Hamas’s final stronghold, in Rafah. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last month that such an assault would be “a mistake” and “not necessary.” Three months earlier he claimed that Israel could defeat Hamas by using “targeted operations with a smaller number of forces.”

But could it? A strategy dependent on raids and airstrikes alone has never been effective in defeating a large enemy. If Israel believes a military response is the only way it can defeat Hamas, it should ignore Washington and pursue a ground invasion supported by targeted raids and airstrikes.

U.S. thinking about the war is plagued by what former White House national security adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster called the “Zero Dark Thirty” fallacy. The term—named for the 2012 film about the operation that killed Osama bin Laden—refers to the mistaken belief that raiding alone can constitute a military strategy. Gen. McMaster described the thinking: “The capability to conduct raids against networked terrorist or insurgent organizations is portrayed as a substitute for, rather than a complement to, conventional joint force capability.” In other words, we can’t expect strategic outcomes from tactical missions.

America’s military efforts reflect that axiom. In the Iraq war, the U.S. quickly ousted Saddam Hussein’s Baath party and fought multiyear counterterror and counterinsurgency campaigns against enemy forces. The U.S. was successful through the combination of a small number of special operations using intelligence-driven raids to target terrorist leaders and a large number of conventional forces working to secure the local population, gather intelligence and help build institutions for governance.

In their new book, “Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine,” Gen. David Petraeus and historian Andrew Roberts argue that intelligence-driven special-ops raids aren’t enough to wage successful counterinsurgency campaigns. Such efforts must be combined with a population-centric strategy, requiring sizable conventional forces to “clear, hold, build” in insurgent sanctuaries.

The same goes for counterterrorism campaigns that involve drone strikes and precision bombing. President Obama conducted hundreds of drone strikes against terrorist networks between 2009 and 2017. In many cases, those strikes may have been the only prudent or politically viable option. The fallacy emerges, however, when policymakers believe that raids and precision attacks are the best options simply because they’re popular.

Hamas isn’t a typical terrorist group. It governs Gaza with significant military capability, including prepared defenses, hundreds of miles of defensive tunnels, and thousands of rockets. Its fighters were believed to number 30,000 to 40,000 at the start of the war, and most of them hide among the civilian population. This makes a strategy reliant on targeted raids extremely difficult. Whereas so-called decapitation strikes may be an effective strategy against small terrorist groups, their success would be dubious against an enemy of Hamas’s size.

There is no historical evidence that commando raids or a series of precision strikes have defeated a deeply entrenched urban defender. Gen. McMaster argues that “like precision strikes, raids often embolden rather than dissuade the enemy.” Short-lived raids also place the raiding force in a vulnerable position, especially when their mission is their dominant strategic tactic. The U.S. realized this firsthand after its seventh raid into Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993, which led to the death of 18 service members. Israel knows the best way to mitigate this risk is to employ raids in concert with a large conventional force.

The same applies to targeted airstrikes, which require time to gather actionable intelligence on key leaders. Recommending that Israel rely on this tactic ignores that the ammunition necessary to destroy the enemy could cause more collateral damage than a ground invasion would. Israel has already killed aid workers with errant strikes. Urging its forces to depend on raids and airstrikes is likely to exacerbate this problem, not reduce it.

America’s record of fighting in enemy-held cities underscores how a raid-and-strike approach is ineffective. When U.S. forces prematurely terminated the First Battle of Fallujah in the spring of 2004, they were left to conduct only strikes and occasional raids against al Qaeda targets within the city. This approach was so fruitless that the coalition was forced to conduct the Second Battle of Fallujah six months later, involving a large conventional force that had months to prepare against a much smaller force than Hamas is today. When coalition forces cleared Ramadi and other Iraqi cities between 2004 and 2006, they used a combination of precision strikes and a large coalition presence. Ditto for the Battle of Mosul in 2016-17, when the U.S.-backed Iraqis employed conventional land and air power against a much smaller force in a less defensive posture than Israel faces in Gaza.

Recent history has proved that commando raids and precision strikes are a tactic, not a strategy to win a war. No matter how much Washington argues to the contrary, Israel understands the fallacy.

Mr. Spencer is chair of urban warfare studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute. Mr. Collins is executive director of the Madison Policy forum and a fellow at New America Foundation. They are the co-authors of “Understanding Urban Warfare.”

2. Army PSYOP training to be unified under new school

I know most do not want to hear this and I will stand by for incoming fires, but PSYOP is one of the most important military capabilities we need.

We have to be effective in employing the full range of PSYOP capabilities.

I am also heartened to see the revival of the name, PSYWAR, psychological warfare. In our quest to chase shiny things (and shiny new terms) we should not be afraid to embrace our history and more importantly to embrace what has worked in the past that has relevance for the present and future.

Army PSYOP training to be unified under new school

The school will standardize training for PSYOP soldiers in the conventional force and special operations community.

BY JEFF SCHOGOL | PUBLISHED APR 9, 2024 6:01 PM EDT

taskandpurpose.com · by Jeff Schogol · April 9, 2024

The U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, or SWCS, is beginning an overhaul that will bring back a formal schoolhouse for psychological warfare operators with an eye toward standardizing the training for that active-duty and Reserve PSYOP soldiers receive, SWCS’ commanding general told reporters on Tuesday.

Since 2006, PSYOP soldiers have been assigned to units in either U.S. Army Special Operations Command and Army Reserve Command, causing a split on how active-duty and Reserve PSYOP soldiers are trained. Now SWCS is reorganizing and unifying PSYOP training under a single schoolhouse.

“One of the challenges that we have in the branch right now is the lack of equitable level of training between the Reserves and the active component, said Army Brig. Gen. Guillaume “Will” Beaurpere. “I think the PSYWAR [psychological warfare] school can help solve that problem.”

Special operations PSYOP soldiers receive training on how to work with a partner that conventional PSYOP soldiers do not go through, Beaurpere said on Tuesday. There are also five different paths in the Army Reserves to become a PSYOP soldier, each with its own distinct program of instruction.

Subscribe to Task & Purpose today. Get the latest military news and culture in your inbox daily.

“From my perspective, that’s inefficient and it creates risk in the ability to just doctrinally work from the same starting point as a PSYOP force,” Beaurpere said. “We have to fix that and create a core-level basic capability of psychological operations so we can work together downrange.”

Beaurpere noted that SWCS was originally conceived as a psychological warfare, or PSYWAR, center in 1952, but the school eventually changed its focus to counterinsurgency during the Vietnam War. For more than a generation, SWCS has been the home of nearly all formal training for Special Forces soldiers, from the selection and initial qualification courses that create Green Berets, to advanced skills like Combat Diver, Military Freefall and advanced shooting and combat schools.

“I think from a joint perspective, having a PSYWAR also messages that this is truly the center of excellence for information advantage and influencing foreign audiences to change behavior,” Beaurpere said.

The PSYWAR school has already stood up, and now the Special Operations Center of Excellence will ask the commanding general of U.S. Army Special Operations Command for the school to have provisional status so that it can be manned and its functions laid out, an Army official said. The school is expected to hold its first classes by the end of this fiscal year.

Standing up the PSYWAR School center is a key aspect of SWCS 2030 strategy, which involves adapting the training, and education, and doctrine for Army special operators to meet the challenges posed by adversaries such as China and Russia.

The strategy also involves having a commandant in charge of PSYOP training for the first time since 2019, Beaurpere said during a media roundtable. The commandant’s role would include serving as the proponent for doctrine, writing programs of instruction, and overseeing training development.

“Without a commandant and without a school to drive information advantage forward, I thought we were behind the power curve,” Beaurpere said. “I’ve got a commandant now that we drew from the Reserve component.”

Beaurpere’s comments come after the Defense Department Inspector General’s Office released a report last month that found the Army is not recruiting, training, and retaining enough PSYOP soldiers to meet the U.S. military’s growing need for them at the tactical, operational, and strategic level.

“The resulting operational tempo required of this under-resourced force risks burnout of these specialized Soldiers, which only serves to worsen the underlying conditions,” the report found.

The latest on Task & Purpose

• Former Army base warns of grenades on local trails
• ‘Black Hawk Down’ Ranger veteran awarded Silver Star
• The Air Force’s new $60 million Special Warfare center honors a fallen pararescueman
• Former Air National Guardsman may have defected to Russia
• Marine battalion commander fired for “loss of trust and confidence”

taskandpurpose.com · by Jeff Schogol · April 9, 2024

3. The South China Sea Is the World’s Next Flashpoint

Or the West Philippines Sea.

Excerpts:

The summit involving US President Joe Biden, Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Philippines’ leader Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in Washington this week should be seen as a response to China’s actions, says Eleanor Shiori Hughes, non-resident fellow at EconVue, a Chicago-based think tank that focuses on geopolitical developments. “Beijing will decry the closer alignment between the three countries, and the outcomes of this meeting,” she told me. “It will frame this as the Philippines and Japan pulling closer to the US, and trying to counter China, augmenting the relationship because of China’s growing assertiveness in the South China Sea.”

Nowhere have Beijing’s bellicose actions been felt more acutely than in the Philippines, where the government has had to contend with Chinese water cannon firing at Philippines vessels and trying to stop resupply missions to the Sierra Madre, a rusty old ship stationed in the waters. It is becoming an increasingly tense situation, with several Filipino sailors injured. Manila has shone a spotlight on China’s actions, but the potential for an accident is increasing by the day.

That’s dangerous for the two sides, and for the wider region, not least because the US and the Philippines have signed a mutual defense treaty that could be triggered if China were to attack a Filipino ship or military forces. Undoubtedly Beijing will want to avoid this, but it may be testing the limits of the relationship between Manila and Washington, notes Aaron Connelly, senior fellow for Southeast Asian politics and foreign policy at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in Singapore.

The South China Sea Is the World’s Next Flashpoint

Beijing will push back against deepening ties between the US, Japan and the Philippines. Washington should respond by increasing its presence in these troubled waters.

April 9, 2024 at 4:00 PM EDT

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-04-09/us-china-south-china-sea-is-the-world-s-next-flashpoint?srnd=opinion&sref=hhjZtX76

By Karishma Vaswani

Karishma Vaswani is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Asia politics with a special focus on China. Previously, she was the BBC's lead Asia presenter and worked for the BBC across Asia and South Asia for two decades.

Where could the US and China find themselves in a direct confrontation? Taiwan is the obvious answer: President Xi Jinping has said the island will eventually be unified with the mainland, either through peaceful means or by force. In fact, there was so much concern about the possibility of a conflict that The Economist called Taiwan “the most dangerous place on earth” in 2021. For now, though, military experts agree that an invasion is not imminent as Beijing still needs to boost its military capabilities. This is a fight Xi will not want to lose.

Instead, the world’s most dangerous place moniker belongs to the South China Sea.

Right now, the risk of conflict between Beijing and Washington is highest in the troubled waterway. It is why the US, Japan, Australia and the Philippines have been holding naval and air exercises this week, and on Thursday, leaders of three of the four countries will cement their ties even further. The closer partnership has already resulted an open discussion about Japan joining part of the Aukus security pact (which includes the UK) specifically on advanced technology projects like artificial intelligence and hypersonic weapons. These moves will no doubt anger China, and it will do whatever it can to combat what it views as the US’s direct interference in its backyard. It is essential that Washington continue with efforts to ensure that freedom of navigation in the contested sea is upheld.

China’s historical claims in the South China Sea date back decades. Beijing says it controls more than 80%, backing up its demands with a 1947 map that indicates it has ownership of the sea’s estimated 11 billion barrels of untapped oil and 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. It wants the other nations involved — Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam — to acknowledge its sovereignty and simply walk away and has consistently pushed back at the idea that countries, under the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea, should have freedom of navigation in the area. When the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague Tribunal found in the Philippines’ favor in 2016 on a claim it bought against China, Beijing simply ignored the ruling and escalated its attempts at control.

The summit involving US President Joe Biden, Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Philippines’ leader Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in Washington this week should be seen as a response to China’s actions, says Eleanor Shiori Hughes, non-resident fellow at EconVue, a Chicago-based think tank that focuses on geopolitical developments. “Beijing will decry the closer alignment between the three countries, and the outcomes of this meeting,” she told me. “It will frame this as the Philippines and Japan pulling closer to the US, and trying to counter China, augmenting the relationship because of China’s growing assertiveness in the South China Sea.”

Nowhere have Beijing’s bellicose actions been felt more acutely than in the Philippines, where the government has had to contend with Chinese water cannon firing at Philippines vessels and trying to stop resupply missions to the Sierra Madre, a rusty old ship stationed in the waters. It is becoming an increasingly tense situation, with several Filipino sailors injured. Manila has shone a spotlight on China’s actions, but the potential for an accident is increasing by the day.

That’s dangerous for the two sides, and for the wider region, not least because the US and the Philippines have signed a mutual defense treaty that could be triggered if China were to attack a Filipino ship or military forces. Undoubtedly Beijing will want to avoid this, but it may be testing the limits of the relationship between Manila and Washington, notes Aaron Connelly, senior fellow for Southeast Asian politics and foreign policy at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in Singapore.

The Biden administration’s rushed and chaotic abandonment of Afghanistan displayed the capriciousness of American foreign policy, something the Chinese have been keen to highlight. Showing the US as an unreliable partner would help Beijing break the American hold over the Philippines, and also highlight to other nations that perhaps siding with the US is not in their best interests, he says. “If the Philippines feels that the US is not a reliable ally, than other allies may be willing to think that it is unreliable,” he told me.

Which is why this trilateral summit is so important. It is an opportunity for Washington to show to Asian partners that its commitments are ironclad. The problem of course, is that this year is an election year in the US, and a new president in the White House could mean a different approach in the South China Sea. That would be a mistake.

Previous US administrations have talked about the American commitment to Asia, but haven’t followed through as actively as many countries would have liked. Freedom of navigation is not just a trade or maritime issue, it is a vital part of how nations respect and interact with one another, honoring international law. Failing to adequately defend the waterway from China’s claims would only confirm Beijing’s view that the US won’t follow through with its Indo-Pacific rhetoric and is preoccupied with domestic problems. It is not just American credibility at stake: The South China Sea is emblematic of how much control China will be able to exert in this part of the world. Ignoring that would allow Beijing’s narrative to persist unchallenged.

More From Bloomberg Opinion:

• China Is Losing Friends and Influence in Asia: Karishma Vaswani
• The South China Sea Is the Next Test of US Resolve: Andreas Kluth
• America’s Return to the Philippines Makes Sense: James Stavridis

Want more Bloomberg Opinion? OPIN  . Or you can subscribe to our daily newsletter.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:

Karishma Vaswani at kvaswani6@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:

Ruth Pollard at rpollard2@bloomberg.net

Karishma Vaswani is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Asia politics with a special focus on China. Previously, she was the BBC's lead Asia presenter and worked for the BBC across Asia and South Asia for two decades.

4. How Patriot proved itself in Ukraine and secured a fresh future

Who would have thought they would do so well without Tom Brady.  Go Patriots...er....I mean... Patriot. (note my attempt at humor).

How Patriot proved itself in Ukraine and secured a fresh future

armytimes.com · by Jen Judson · April 9, 2024

In the dead of night in May, Russia launched a Kinzhal hypersonic missile at the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv.

The air-launched weapon can reach speeds up to Mach 10, which equates to about 7,700 mph.

Less than a month earlier, the U.S. had sent a Patriot air defense system to Ukraine to help it fend off the barrage of complex missiles Russia was using. But the system had never proved itself against a missile like the Kinzhal.

Even so, the Patriot system blocked the incoming missile, defusing the weapon and several others, according to U.S. officials.

Since then, the Patriot system has continued to successfully intercept a wide range of Russian weaponry. It has shot down Russian aircraft like Su-34 fighters flying nearly 100 miles away, and intercepted missiles as far as 130 miles away, according to Oleksandr Musiienko, head of the Kyiv-based nongovernmental organization the Center for Military and Legal Studies.

A Russian Air Force MiG-31K jet carries the high-precision hypersonic missile Kh-47M2 Kinzhal during the Victory Day military parade. (Pavel Golovkin/AP)

The success of the RTX-made Patriot system in Ukraine comes as the U.S. Army aims to replace the Patriot with an integrated air and missile defense system better able to connect with other equipment on the battlefield and equipped with a more capable radar.

But the Patriot system’s dominance in Ukraine has attracted fresh attention and potential customers from around the world. What might have looked like an aging system not long ago now appears to be a workhorse that could be used for years to come.

“Patriot has prove[d] to be a very reliable system,” said Ben Hodges, a retired three-star general who commanded U.S. Army forces in Europe following Russia’s annexation of Crimea. “The Ukrainians learned very quickly how to operate it, and even more impressively they learned very quickly how to employ it to great effect.”

“Nations are much more alive to the [air and missile defense] threat,” he added.

The successor

The Patriot system was first introduced to counter threats to the United States during the Cold War. But it faced significant battle when forces deployed the system in the Middle East during the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War.

In those early years, the Patriot experienced major failures. In 1991, for example, the system failed to intercept an Iraqi Al Hussein Scud missile, which hit barracks in Saudi Arabia and killed 28 U.S. soldiers. The system was then involved in three friendly fire incidents in 2003 during the Iraq War; in one case, a Patriot shot down a British Royal Air Force Tornado jet, killing its two crew members.

Despite these failures, the U.S. Army has long relied on the system. Indeed, its Patriot units for years maintained the highest operational tempo across any units in the service with the longest deployments. Despite the incidents in Iraq, it was heavily used there and successfully countered ballistic missile threats.

And plenty of other countries also use the system, which is made up of eight truck-mounted launchers, a ground radar, a control station and a power generator. The launchers can each hold four interceptors.

A U.S. Army Patriot missile fires to engage a target at the Shoalwater Bay Training Area in Queensland, Australia, during the 2021 Talisman Sabre exercise. (Cpl. Jarrod McAneney/Australian Defence Department)

According to Raytheon, an RTX company that manufactures the Patriot system, 19 countries have purchased the weapon and there are more than 250 Patriot fire units around the world. Tom Laliberty, Raytheon’s president of land and air defense systems, told Defense News in a recent interview the U.S. owns 85-90 of those, with the rest distributed among the other 18 customer countries.

“The system has just been continually improved based on feedback we get from the now 19 countries that use Patriot,” he said.

Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea led to a sales burst. Eastern European countries jumped to buy Patriot systems to enhance their own defenses. Romania, Poland and Sweden signed on as new customers in the years between Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

But during the same time, the U.S. Army started making plans to replace the Patriot, seeking a capability with a more flexible command-and-control system and a radar capable of full coverage. The Patriot radar’s existing configuration creates blind spots for the system.

The Army is slated to build a new Patriot battery to replace the one sent to Ukraine and to secure one more battalion’s worth of systems. But the service will gradually replace individual elements of the Patriot system over the next several decades. Eventually, all of those upgraded elements will become a new system known as Integrated Air and Missile Defense.

The first piece to be replaced will be the Patriot’s command-and-control system, which will be swapped out with the Northrop Grumman-developed Integrated Battle Command System. IBCS, approved for full-rate production last year, will enable the system to connect with a variety of other sensors and shooters on the battlefield.

Next, the Patriot system’s radar is slated to be replaced with the Raytheon-developed Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor, or LTAMDS. The first set of prototype radars is undergoing tests with the Army; they are expected to offer 360-degree coverage.

The Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor, shown here, is slated to replace the Patriot system’s radar. (Darrell Ames/U.S. Army)

In recent months, the sensor completed four successful live-fire demonstrations at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico.

The Army’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense system will be designed to tie into a broader air defense architecture using IBCS. The service is also expected to be able to easily improve the technology through software updates.

Patriot heats up

But the system’s success in Ukraine has made clear there remains interest for the Patriot in its current state.

Switzerland purchased five batteries and 75 missiles in November 2022, and Romania plans to buy additional fire units. At least two other European countries are close to announcing plans to buy Patriot, according to Laliberty, who declined to identify them.

Germany announced in March it would buy more Patriot systems to augment its air defense capabilities. Raytheon won a $1.2 billion contract that buys radars, launchers, command-and-control stations, spares and support, according to a company statement.

Slovakia has publicly expressed interest in buying Patriot systems following a NATO-owned Patriot system’s deployment to the country in 2022.

A Romanian Patriot system fires a missile during a drill at the Capu Midia shooting range next to the Black Sea on Nov. 15, 2023. (Daniel Mihailescu/AFP via Getty Images)

Raytheon’s production lines are churning out five fire units for the contract with Switzerland, Laliberty said, and the company anticipates an additional 12 will be under contract within the next 18 months.

“Given that our capacity supports the production of 12 fire units a year, there is sufficient capacity to support current as well as future contracts as they materialize,” he noted.

Raytheon also received a contract in January to replace the U.S. Patriot battery donated to Ukraine. That was paid for with fiscal 2023 supplemental funding approved by Congress.

Now, the company is focused on boosting production of the missiles the Patriot system uses as interceptors. The PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement weapons, made by Lockheed Martin, are the most capable missile variant used by the system.

In 2018, Lockheed’s annual rate of building those missiles was 350. The company planned to increase that to 500 annually. But Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has put new pressure on this effort, and the U.S. Army has provided funding to get Lockheed to 550 missiles per year. In December, the firm said it reached a rate of 500 per year.

The company built an 85,000-square-foot facility equipped with automated systems to build PAC-3 MSE missiles and is now preparing to produce 650 a year by 2027.

Boeing, which supplies the seeker for the PAC-3 MSE, is also planning to accelerate production, according to Jim Bryan, the company’s director of integrated air and missile defense.

Bryan said Boeing last year added 35,000 square feet to its factory, enabling a 30% production increase.

Many of the expansion efforts by Lockheed and its suppliers preceded government funding. The companies are banking on both an increase in U.S. government spending in the coming years as well as a rise in orders from international customers.

“From a demand future, we continue to see it. We meet with customers all the time, and we think we’ll be adding new customers to the MSE line,” Brenda Davidson, Lockheed’s vice president of PAC-3 programs, told Defense News. “The areas of Asia-Pacific and the Middle East continue to be very, very important to us.”

‘Patriot has a place’

Indeed, those two regions have existing Patriot customers that continue to rely on the system. And geopolitical hot spots, such as the Taiwan Strait and the Red Sea, are driving demand for air defense more broadly — regardless of which system is available.

Increasingly savvy ballistic missiles and emerging hypersonic missiles are creating new challenges for air defense systems. The U.S. Army has named air defense one of its highest priorities, and is adjusting its funding accordingly.

In the fiscal 2025 budget released in March, the Army asked for $602 million in research and development efforts for Integrated Air and Missile Defense and $2.8 billion in procurement, which covers modernized capabilities beyond the Patriot system.

For Patriot modifications alone, the Army planned to spend $1.7 billion between FY24 and FY28, according to FY24 budget documents. Now, the Army is requesting an additional $2.29 billion across the same time period to modify and upgrade its Patriot capability, according to FY25 documents.

The head of U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command, Lt. Gen. Sean Gainey, said the service has sought to reduce pressure on Patriot air defense units, but has been stymied by today’s demands.

In its fiscal 2025 budget request to Congress, the Army asked for $602 million in research and development efforts for Integrated Air and Missile Defense and $2.8 billion in procurement, which covers modernized capabilities beyond the Patriot system. (Andrew Harnik/AP)

“Prior to the recent increase in deployments, we were continuing to move along a path to regain some of that readiness,” he told Defense News in March. The “demand has limited our ability to regain a lot of that readiness back.”

He said the Army hopes international allies will help as they increasingly buy air defense capabilities.

“It’s going to be a challenge as long as we have the high demand moving forward on our soldiers. But leveraging our partners and leveraging our modernization goals are the ways that we can eventually, sometime in the future, start alleviating some of that pressure,” Gainey added.

Hodges, however, said there remains just one U.S. Patriot battalion committed to Europe.

“I have seen and heard a lot more conversation about” air and missile defense integration among allies and partners in Europe, he noted, “but I have not seen marked increases in capabilities, nor have I seen a large-scale, theaterwide, joint, multinational air [and] missile defense exercise that presents the same sort of challenge a Russian attack would bring.”

“None of us has enough capacity to defend much of what must be protected. So integration and regional approaches are necessary,” Hodges added.

For his part, Gainey said some European countries are interested in adopting the U.S. Army’s modernized capability, including the Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor as well as the Integrated Battle Command System. Poland, for example, is the first country to field the latter.

“Patriot has a place,” Gainey said. “They will still operate out there hand in hand until we fully modernize the air and missile defense force.”

About Jen Judson

Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.

Share:

armytimes.com · by Jen Judson · April 9, 2024

5. Don’t Just Bring a Gun to a Drone Fight! The Joint Force and Drone Warfare By Monte Erfourth

Excerpts:

CONCLUSION

The United States military's approach to drone warfare and the adoption of AI to direct drone swarms must evolve quickly as a matter of great urgency. The historical instances of technological unpreparedness, from the devastating losses in a French wheat field in 1918 to the recent drone attack in Jordan, illustrate a pattern of failure to adapt that cannot continue. The U.S. and NATO must match and exceed our adversaries' advancements and fundamentally rethink warfare in the age of AI-directed drone swarms. The technological gap highlighted by drones' low-cost, high-impact potential demands a holistic reevaluation of military strategy, procurement, and operational doctrine. The future of military dominance hinges on embracing AI and drone technologies, decentralizing drone deployment, and fostering a culture of innovation and adaptability. Failure to do so risks repeating past mistakes on evolving battlefields, where technological superiority has defined strategic advantage.

The call to action is clear. The Joint Force and its supporting bureaucracy must adapt to rapidly evolving warfare technologies, with drones and AI playing a pivotal role. In WWII, the U.S. outproduced every country in the world in war-related material. Drones that are reliable, expendable, and capable of AI guidance at a low price should be our mantra to industry and within the DoD. The U.S. should own the market and dominate the battlefield. This is how to compete and win in Great Power Competition.

Don’t Just Bring a Gun to a Drone Fight!

strategycentral.io · April 9, 2024

The Joint Force and Drone Warfare

By Monte Erfourth

INTRODUCTION

Early morning, June 6, 1918. Marines of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, crouched along the expanse of a French wheat field, preparing to attack Hill 142. The hill is located on a ridge overlooking Torcy and Belleau Wood. Taking the hill and Belleau Wood would prevent flanking fire against the French as they maneuvered to prevent a German advance at Château-Thierry, just 59 miles from Paris. The German infantry and machine gunners were well dug in and gaining momentum on their planned push towards Paris.

On order, the Marines stood and, in perfect formations, began their movement across the waist-high wheat field. German machine guns almost completely destroyed the first wave and mercilessly ripped through the waves that followed. The Marines marched out as Civil War-era doctrine directed. Tight, disciplined formations were to be kept, but technology had made mass formations hopeless and fatal. It became the deadliest day in Marine Corps history. More Marines were lost on that June 6th morning than in all the battles the Corps had fought since its founding in 1775. Technology had changed, and Americans were needlessly killed because leadership failed to adapt to technology.

On January 28 of this year, three U.S. soldiers were killed in Jordan, and more than 40 other service members were injured following an uncrewed aerial system attack at a military base near the Syrian border. Those service members were in Jordan to support Operation Inherent Resolve, which is the U.S. and coalition mission to ensure the defeat of ISIS. For a casualty-sensitive nation, this is a legitimate blow to the forces deployed to defend the homeland from a resurgent ISIS.

Much like the Marines in that French wheatfield, this loss of life highlights a growing concern about the United States Military's preparedness for a new technology on the battlefield: drones. Historical shifts in military technology, from the introduction of tanks, submarines, and machine guns, emphasize the transformative impact drones could have on modern warfare. The attack in Jordan exposed a vulnerability: U.S. forces mistook the attacking drone for one of their own aircraft returning from a training exercise. This incident illustrates the challenges in detecting and identifying drones and the efficacy of current defense systems against such threats.

Warfare is evolving, and there is an urgent need for advancements in offensive and counter-drone technologies. The drone technology market is becoming increasingly competitive, with countries like China and Turkey challenging the United States and Israel for dominance. These countries are making significant progress in drone capabilities, offering more affordable solutions to the global market. This adds further complexity to the security dynamics of the United States and NATO. The development and proliferation of drone technology provide state and non-state rivals with a significant strategic advantage that could not previously have been attained. The effects of a traditional air force can now be had on the cheap. This poses a considerable challenge to the United States military, which is not fully prepared for a new era of combat in which low-cost, AI-controlled drones could fundamentally change military tactics, strategy, and global power dynamics.

THE SITUATION

Federico Borsari, a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, highlighted disparities in readiness within the NATO alliance, indicating some members are ill-equipped to counter enemy drones. The United States, despite its technological advancements, faces challenges in developing effective offensive small drones, detection, and countermeasure systems against drones. This vulnerability is exacerbated by the tactics of Iran’s militant proxies and possibly informed by lessons learned from conflicts like the war in Ukraine, where drone usage has been prolific and informative in terms of exposing defense gaps.

The Joint Force and NATO are thought to have insufficient numbers of small drones and delayed modernization of forces, leaving U.S. military personnel unprepared for modern battlefields where drones play a crucial role. Despite the global proliferation of small drones and their demonstrated effectiveness in conflicts, such as the ongoing war in Ukraine, the U.S. military has not equipped its infantry with adequate numbers of drones, nor has it decentralized their ownership to the extent necessary to impact operations significantly. The U.S. military is facing a failure of vision, traditionalism, and bureaucratic resistance that is hindering the effective integration of small unmanned aerial systems (UAS). This is at least the consensus in the media; there are signs that the DoD is aware of the problem and is attempting to build a capable drone system and capability.

SIGNS OF LIFE

There are some signs that UAS innovations are happening. The Defense Department is launching the Replicator initiative, aimed at deterring a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan by deploying a fleet of small, unmanned systems, including surface drones and overhead loitering munitions. The initiative, costing approximately $1 billion, is designed to quickly field swarms of unmanned systems to address military challenges, specifically the threat of an amphibious invasion of Taiwan. This funding is split across two fiscal years, with $500 million allocated in FY 2024 and another $500 million in FY 2025.

Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks emphasizes the Replicator initiative as a pioneering effort to reduce internal barriers and test autonomy in unmanned systems, suggesting it could lead to further investments in autonomous capabilities within the military services. The initiative also includes developing software to enable these unmanned systems to autonomously identify threats while allowing human operators to make final strike decisions.

The first set of Replicator vehicles has been selected. However, details have not been publicly disclosed as part of a strategic decision to conceal and reveal information carefully. Additionally, the U.S. Navy will establish a new squadron for small unmanned vessels in May, indicating the military's commitment to integrating unmanned technologies into its operational strategies.

The Replicator initiative could significantly enhance the U.S. military's capabilities to deter and, if necessary, counter a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan through the deployment of advanced unmanned systems. This effort represents a strategic pivot towards utilizing swarming, attritable drones for immediate defensive needs while laying the groundwork for future advancements in military autonomy. The Navy is not alone, as each service requests funds for Drone research and development. The DoD remains the largest customer for unmanned systems technologies, with an estimated budget of $7.5 billion for FY 2021.

Money is being earmarked, but the frustration comes from the system built for high-end platforms that stymies the quick pace of drone development, testing, and fielding. Too much reliance on expensive and technologically advanced systems, coming at the expense of cheap but effective systems, looks like the probable outcome. The taxpayer and the U.S. military both lose in this scenario.

THE SOLUTION

The solution seems simple and attainable, given the efforts of the services and the amount of money being applied to the world of unmanned requirements. However, the procurement and requirements process can be complicated to navigate. NATO and the U.S. military must remove bureaucratic obstacles and empower the right organizations to proliferate, decentralize, and familiarize combat units with drone technologies. Failure to adapt quickly risks repeating historical mistakes. It could leave the U.S. military at a significant disadvantage in future conflicts where drones are expected to play an increasingly dominant role.

Traditionalists within the military question the disruptiveness and effectiveness of small drones, preferring instead to invest in more traditional forms of military power. This viewpoint, combined with an adherence to legacy constructs for controlling and managing drones, leads to a centralization of control and a reluctance to accept the operational risks associated with deploying drones more freely within operational units.

This reluctance seems unfounded given the experiences in Ukraine, as the growing importance of drones in modern warfare has become a significant lesson learned. Indeed, Iranian proxies and the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) are learning at a faster rate than the Joint Force or NATO can match. Israel, Ukraine, Russia, Iranian proxy groups, China, and others have shown that small drones are becoming a defining technology. Some friends and even more foes invest heavily in drone development and deployment. The U.S. military's current approach to drone integration—marked by incremental fielding and excessive bureaucracy—contrasts sharply with the urgent and widespread adoption seen in Ukraine and the Middle East.

A cost-benefit analysis should clarify that we can invest in drones and continue with legacy investments. The DoD spent around $13 billion on the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier, while Iran spent about $20,000 per unit on its Shahed-model drone. This is not an apple and dump truck analogy. U.S. and NATO adversaries can deploy vast numbers of low-cost drones that are individually manageable threats but, deployed in large numbers and directed by advanced AI, could overwhelm and possibly defeat even the most sophisticated and expensive defense systems. This shift suggests that future military dominance may not rest on superior weaponry but on superior AI-directed weapons systems in coordinated, large-scale operations. For example, if fifty AI-directed Shahid Drones could defeat the USS Ford, that’s a $1 million system beating a $13 Billion system. Even the U.S. cannot sustain that kind of fiscal imbalance.

AI is central to this story. Small drones alone are not all that is required. When guided by AI, the effectiveness of drones truly comes into its own. The looming transformation in warfare, driven by the integration of AI and drone swarms, could challenge traditional concepts of military power and require urgent attention to ensure preparedness. The future of military dominance may well hinge on the ability to adapt to and innovate within this new paradigm of AI-directed systems of weapons.

The nature of both NATO and the Joint Force being unprepared is multi-faceted, involving a combination of bureaucratic inertia, regulatory hurdles, and a lack of tactical innovation at all levels. At the most senior level, the Office of Secretary of Defense (OSD) must embrace and direct the Joint Force to drive innovation by experimenting with the following:

• Revised Procurement Systems: Legacy procurement evolved intentionally as the nation expanded beyond an isolationist bent to become and then sustain being a global superpower. Well-intentioned or not, the current system is a Kafkaesque nightmare of red tape and dense legal requirements. OSD and Congress must work to streamline the process for AI adaptation, small drone purchase and use, and other rapidly developing technologies that will dominate the present or near future battlespace.
• New Warfare Technologies Adaptation: Historically, military advancements have often come from not just new technologies but new concepts of their application. The potential impact of drone swarms compares to the revolutionary use of machine guns in the Great War. The integration of machine guns with indirect fires and in-depth defense has allowed for unprecedented destruction of infantry forces, and AI-driven drone swarms are redefining what it takes for battlefield success today. Adapt quickly in R&D or face expensive defeat on the battlefield.
• AI and Decision-Management: AI's efficiency in managing complex, large-scale drone operations—processing what is known as the OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) far more rapidly than human commanders—could provide decisive advantages in conflict. The U.S. military's current decision-making structures and processes may be ill-suited to counter such AI-driven threats effectively. It’s not just the kill chain; it’s decision-making in imperative and mundane matters. The DoD must test the incorporation of AI into the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of competition and conflict.
• Ethical and Strategic Dilemmas: The United States faces ethical and strategic dilemmas in integrating AI into military operations, particularly regarding autonomous lethal decision-making. While the U.S. emphasizes keeping a human in the loop for such decisions, adversaries might not share these ethical standards, potentially putting the U.S. at a strategic disadvantage. Conversely, the killing of World Central Kitchen aid workers by Israel shows the strategic impact of targeting mistakes. Practice is required to reduce unintended consequences.

Innovation will not simply be a top-down-driven transformation; it must also be driven from the bottom up. Despite the clear tactical advantages of small drones in reconnaissance, target acquisition, and direct action, the Joint Forces” current doctrines, procurement processes, and training regimens have not fully capitalized on these technologies. Reports have repeatedly cited criticism from Ukrainian soldiers about the inadequacy of U.S. understanding and preparedness for adaptive drone warfare. These Ukrainians deserve both respect and our attention, as they have been on the front lines against a technologically savvy adversary for two years. This criticism underscores a crucial shortfall in the US military's preparedness and adaptability in drone warfare at a unit level.

The U.S. Army and Marine Corps must foster a culture of experimentation and innovation, particularly among junior leaders and operational units. The following are concrete steps the services can take to enable a bottom-up drone innovation transformation.

To harness the full potential of small drone technology within military operations, the services can initiate a transformative approach by introducing expendable off-the-shelf drones to operational units. This approach facilitates bottom-up experimentation, enabling units to develop tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) finely tuned to their unique operational needs. To further bolster this innovation, services must create formal pathways for sharing these invaluable lessons and successful TTPs, incorporating them into broader military doctrine and training programs. However, to truly capitalize on these technological advances, it's necessary to address and streamline the bureaucratic and regulatory barriers that currently impede these assets' rapid procurement and deployment. This would involve reimagining small drones as expendable tools, thereby encouraging their extensive use in training and operations without the constraints of financial or administrative penalties.

Looking to the future, investing in modular, upgradable drone technologies is crucial for maintaining a competitive edge, ensuring that military drone capabilities can advance in lockstep with the fast-paced developments in civilian and military drone markets. Additionally, by leveraging 3D printing technologies and promoting a culture of soldier-driven innovation, the Joint Force can significantly expedite the prototyping and fielding of drone accessories, modifications, and even entirely new systems, dramatically enhancing small drones' operational effectiveness and versatility in military applications.

Technological advancements demand a paradigm shift in how the Joint Force approaches AI and drone warfare. By embracing experimentation, innovation, and adaptability, the Joint Force and our NATO allies can close the growing AI and small drone gap and ensure both remain prepared for the evolving challenges of modern combat.

CONCLUSION

The United States military's approach to drone warfare and the adoption of AI to direct drone swarms must evolve quickly as a matter of great urgency. The historical instances of technological unpreparedness, from the devastating losses in a French wheat field in 1918 to the recent drone attack in Jordan, illustrate a pattern of failure to adapt that cannot continue. The U.S. and NATO must match and exceed our adversaries' advancements and fundamentally rethink warfare in the age of AI-directed drone swarms. The technological gap highlighted by drones' low-cost, high-impact potential demands a holistic reevaluation of military strategy, procurement, and operational doctrine. The future of military dominance hinges on embracing AI and drone technologies, decentralizing drone deployment, and fostering a culture of innovation and adaptability. Failure to do so risks repeating past mistakes on evolving battlefields, where technological superiority has defined strategic advantage.

The call to action is clear. The Joint Force and its supporting bureaucracy must adapt to rapidly evolving warfare technologies, with drones and AI playing a pivotal role. In WWII, the U.S. outproduced every country in the world in war-related material. Drones that are reliable, expendable, and capable of AI guidance at a low price should be our mantra to industry and within the DoD. The U.S. should own the market and dominate the battlefield. This is how to compete and win in Great Power Competition.

strategycentral.io · April 9, 2024

6. Elon Musk and Jamie Dimon’s AI Predictions and What They Mean for the Future of Humanity

Excerpts:

“My guess is that we’ll have AI that is smarter than any one human probably around the end of next year,” Musk said in an interview Monday with Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management, Norway’s $1.6 trillion sovereign fund and one of the largest investors in 

...

“Think the printing press, the steam engine, electricity, computing and the Internet, among others,” Dimon wrote in his annual letter to shareholders Monday. Dimon’s letter to shareholders is highly anticipated every year and read widely in the financial-service industry. He has said AI might lead future generations to only work 3½ days a week.

...

Still, some experts say predictions of AI’s transformative powers have been overblown.

Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist who sold an AI startup to 

Uber in 2016, said generative AI may one day approach a level where it can transform society. But there has to be vast improvements to approach the level of change produced by the internet or even smartphones, he said. 

“It’s possible as we make new discoveries and build better AI, much better than we have right now, that eventually AI could be transformative for the good,” Marcus said in an interview. 

...

Dimon said JPMorgan now employs more than 2,000 AI and machine-learning experts after first experimenting with the technology more than a decade ago. 

He said he envisions AI will help reimagine business workflows throughout the bank.

“While we do not know the full effect or the precise rate at which AI will change our business—or how it will affect society at large—we are completely convinced the consequences will be extraordinary,” Dimon said in his letter to shareholders.

Elon Musk and Jamie Dimon’s AI Predictions and What They Mean for the Future of Humanity

One of the world’s richest people and the head of the nation’s largest bank join a chorus of business executives making bold prognostications about the technology’s potential

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/elon-musk-and-jamie-dimons-ai-predictions-and-what-they-mean-for-the-future-of-humanity-d100b0c8?mod=hp_lead_pos3

By Joseph De AvilaFollow

Updated April 10, 2024 8:19 am ET

Elon Musk and Jamie Dimon say artificial intelligence will be smarter than humans and transform society. 

The question now is whether the prognostications of one of the world’s richest people and the head of the nation’s largest bank will come to fruition, or turn out to be overstated. 

In remarks this week, both Musk and Dimon joined a chorus of business executives making bold predictions about AI’s potential for dramatic change. 

“My guess is that we’ll have AI that is smarter than any one human probably around the end of next year,” Musk said in an interview Monday with Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management, Norway’s $1.6 trillion sovereign fund and one of the largest investors in 

Tesla. The interview was broadcast on Musk’s social-media platform X. Musk, who is chief executive of Tesla and also runs his own AI company, said AI was the fastest-advancing technology he’s ever seen. He predicted it will probably surpass the collective intelligence of humans in five years. 

Dimon, chief executive of 

JPMorgan Chase

, told investors Monday that AI could be as transformative as some of the major technological inventions over the past several hundred years. 

“Think the printing press, the steam engine, electricity, computing and the Internet, among others,” Dimon wrote in his annual letter to shareholders Monday. Dimon’s letter to shareholders is highly anticipated every year and read widely in the financial-service industry. He has said AI might lead future generations to only work 3½ days a week. 

In his letter to shareholders, AI was the first issue facing JPMorgan that Dimon highlighted in his letter. 

A spokesman for Dimon declined to comment. A representative for Musk didn’t respond to a request for comment. 

A talent war

Sundar Pichai at a Stanford Graduate School of Business event this April. PHOTO: CARLOS BARRIA/REUTERS

The AI race to build the next big thing has sparked a talent war in Silicon Valley. Tech companies have poured cash into AI at a breakneck pace, with investors and analysts increasingly believing the boom is sustainable. And the technology has supercharged the stock performances of many tech and chip companies aiming to cash in on it. 

Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai has said AI could be more profound than the invention of fire or electricity. Vinod Khosla, founder of venture-capital firm Khosla Ventures, declared last year that within 10 years, AI will take on “80% of 80% of the jobs that exist today.” 

“The need to work in society will disappear within 25 years for those countries that adapt these technologies,” Khosla said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

And yet, the technology has also led to stark warnings about the future of humanity. Earlier this week, Japan’s largest telecommunications company and the country’s biggest newspaper cautioned in a manifesto that unless AI is restrained, “in the worst-case scenario, democracy and social order could collapse, resulting in wars.”

They called on Japanese lawmakers to pass legislation to restrain AI, pointing to rising concern about the AI programs U.S.-based companies have been developing.

In the U.S., the Biden administration last year invoked emergency federal powers to compel major AI companies to notify the government when developing systems that pose a serious risk to national security.

Is it all overblown?

Gary Marcus has cast doubt on Musk’s belief that AI will quickly outsmart humans. PHOTO: MATTHIAS BALK/ZUMA PRESS

Still, some experts say predictions of AI’s transformative powers have been overblown.

Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist who sold an AI startup to 

Uber in 2016, said generative AI may one day approach a level where it can transform society. But there has to be vast improvements to approach the level of change produced by the internet or even smartphones, he said. “It’s possible as we make new discoveries and build better AI, much better than we have right now, that eventually AI could be transformative for the good,” Marcus said in an interview. 

Generative AI programs currently make too many mistakes, are unreliable and have a superficial understanding of the world, Marcus said. 

In the short term, he said it is implausible that AI will approach human intelligence by the end of next year, like Musk predicted. Surpassing all of human intelligence in the next five years is also far-fetched, he said. 

“There are many foundational problems in understanding the physical and psychological world that these machines have not yet solved,” Marcus said. 

Marcus offered to wager $1 million with Musk that his prediction of AI becoming smarter than a human by next year turns out to be wrong. A representative for Musk didn’t respond to a request for a comment about the wager. 

‘A lot of hype’

Rene Haas at a Wall Street Journal event in 2023. PHOTO: NIKKI RITCHER FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

“There’s a lot of hype in AI right now,” says Angel Vossough, the co-founder and chief executive of BetterAI, which is working on an AI wine-recommendation tool. 

She says AI systems are good at analyzing large data sets, and can make predictions or speed up productivity. But they are nowhere near being as intelligent as humans, she said, as a big part of human intelligence is emotional intelligence. 

“It needs to connect, understand and respond to human emotions in a way that actually feels authentic and meaningful,” she said. “I don’t think we’re anywhere close.”

Another issue with the AI boom: It is straining resources like electricity. Chip-design company 

Arm is funding efforts studying how to make AI applications more energy efficient. 

Rene Haas, chief executive of Arm, said Tuesday that AI data centers could consume as much as 20% to 25% of U.S. power requirements by the end of the decade, up from about 4% or less today.

Dimon said JPMorgan now employs more than 2,000 AI and machine-learning experts after first experimenting with the technology more than a decade ago. 

He said he envisions AI will help reimagine business workflows throughout the bank.

“While we do not know the full effect or the precise rate at which AI will change our business—or how it will affect society at large—we are completely convinced the consequences will be extraordinary,” Dimon said in his letter to shareholders.

Joseph Pisani contributed to this article.

Write to Joseph De Avila at joseph.deavila@wsj.com

7. Veteran Narratives of Support for Extremist Groups and Beliefs

Download the 45 page report at this link: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RRA1000/RRA1071-4/RAND_RRA1071-4.pdf

Veteran Narratives of Support for Extremist Groups and Beliefs

Results from Interviews with Members of a Nationally Representative Survey of the U.S. Veteran Community

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1071-4.html??cutoff=true&utm

Published Apr 9, 2024

by Ryan Andrew Brown, Todd C. Helmus, Rajeev Ramchand

• Related Topics:
• Military Veterans,
• Violent Extremism
• CitationSynopsis
• (print-friendly)
• View related products
• Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on LinkedIn
• 
  

The report examines how U.S. military veterans describe their endorsement of extremist beliefs, their experiences in the military and in transition to veteran status, and their narratives of the path to their current political and ideological beliefs and perspectives. The authors conducted follow-up interviews in 2023 with military veterans who had previously indicated support for one or more extremist groups or beliefs on a 2022 survey to understand the drivers and patterns of extremism among veterans based on their experiences in and out of the service. The purpose of this effort was to better understand the ideology that undergirded their original support and to use their responses as a means of further exploring their political viewpoints. This report details the findings from these interviews, which revealed the considerable presence of negative and traumatic life events for interviewees while in the military and afterward while adapting to civilian life. Coupled with narratives of becoming involved in extremist ideas and groups, these narratives point to several possible implications for policy and practice, which in turn will require further research to design, test, and calibrate.

Research Questions

1. How do veterans describe their support for extremist groups or causes and detail their military experiences, civilian experiences, and political beliefs?How many of the survey participants who had previously expressed support for one or more extremist groups continued to endorse such groups?How might veterans' experiences in the military and then transitioning to civilian life shape their political and social beliefs?

Key Findings

• Almost all participants who had supported the Proud Boys in the 2022 survey denied such support in the 2023 interviews, while nearly all the participants who affirmed support for the Great Replacement on the survey believed that the Democratic Party was attempting to purchase votes through lax immigration policies.
• Many participants affirmed support for the potential need for political violence, although the responses suggested that none was intent on acting on such support.
• Roughly three-quarters of interviewees reported a negative or traumatic life event while in the military, including from interpersonal conflict (often leading to discharge), combat trauma, and physical or sexual abuse.
• Some respondents described difficulties with the transition from military to civilian life, including missing the pace and camaraderie of military life, having no resources, not knowing where to turn for help or support, struggling with posttraumatic stress disorder or depression, and even experiencing homelessness and becoming imprisoned.
• Some respondents provided narratives of life experiences that helped push them toward more-extreme political viewpoints, although drawing causal connections in the current interview-based study is difficult.
• Some interviewees explained how they were socialized into their current ideological viewpoints through friends or family and/or how their social circles provide support and encouragement for radical beliefs and support of radical groups.
• Many respondents mentioned specific media sources, social media platforms, and podcasters or political influencers that helped shape their viewpoints.

Recommendations

• Further survey and interview-based research should draw more conclusive links between military and veteran transition experiences and outcomes related to extremism.
• Support for veteran transition programs and services should continue and be prioritized.

8. Forward Presence, Partnership, and Deterrence: The US Army in the Indo-Pacific

Excerpts:

The first two components of strong deterrence, capability and posture, are closely linked to one another and best explored in tandem. The US Army’s posture and positions of advantage in theater must be understood relative to the capabilities of the pacing threat. Strategic standoff, once a concept related purely to kinetic fires, has taken on a new definition with the PRC’s continued development and integration of enhanced intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and nonkinetic (primarily space and cyber) capabilities. As the PRC expands the range and reach of its operational capabilities, it continues to increase its positions of advantage and the likelihood that it can “win without fighting.”

...

There is one final observation from the war in Ukraine with direct relevance to security in the Indo-Pacific region. Prior to February 2022, the three Baltic states and Poland provided the greatest percentage of their gross domestic product to Ukraine and were among those who warned most vocally of the impending Russian invasion. Following the invasion, these states were also the most impacted socially, economically, and with respect to security considerations. Why? Proximity. Amid growing geopolitical tension and efforts in the Japanese southwest islands and Philippine islands in the Luzon strait to prepare for the prospect of Chinese aggression, it is evident that the closest geographic neighbors to Taiwan are heeding the actions of their European counterparts.

The United States must do everything within its power in the Indo-Pacific to thicken cooperation among regional allies and partners. The PRC recognized that the Ukraine war has unified NATO rather than fracturing the alliance. While the Indo-Pacific region does not enjoy the same alliance structure, it is important for like-minded states to demonstrate solidarity in opposing PRC efforts to unilaterally change the status quo. The trilateral partnership involving two of the nations—Japan and the Philippines—with the most at stake has the potential to lead these efforts for the entire region.

Forward Presence, Partnership, and Deterrence: The US Army in the Indo-Pacific - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Ben Blane, Christopher Lee · April 10, 2024

Share on LinkedIn

Send email

Almost immediately after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, observers began exploring how it would affect regional stability halfway around the world. The People’s Republic of China (PRC), it was said, was watching the war unfold. And Beijing was learning lessons from it. Would Taiwan be the next state targeted by an aggressive neighbor? Or, as some analysis concluded, would Russia’s struggles in Ukraine serve as a cautionary tale, discouraging military action to forcefully seize Taiwan?

More than two years into the war in Ukraine, there is little evidence that the grinding, attritional character it has taken on has diminished Beijing’s determination to bring Taipei under its control. In fact, as Admiral John C. Aquilino, the senior US military commander in the Indo-Pacific, recently told the Senate Armed Services Committee, the PRC’s increased military buildup and modernization efforts indicate readiness for an invasion of Taiwan as early as 2027. Given that assessment, it is crucial that the United States is able to achieve integrated deterrence against the PRC. But what enables effective deterrence? As General Charles A. Flynn, commander of US Army Pacific, has described, deterrence has four components—capability, posture, signaling, and will. An examination of these four components, informed by an appreciation of the lessons on display in the war in Ukraine, reveals the keys to achieving integrated deterrence in the Indo-Pacific region—and how the US Army can best contribute to it.

Capabilities and Forward Posture: The Keys to All-Domain Advantage

The first two components of strong deterrence, capability and posture, are closely linked to one another and best explored in tandem. The US Army’s posture and positions of advantage in theater must be understood relative to the capabilities of the pacing threat. Strategic standoff, once a concept related purely to kinetic fires, has taken on a new definition with the PRC’s continued development and integration of enhanced intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and nonkinetic (primarily space and cyber) capabilities. As the PRC expands the range and reach of its operational capabilities, it continues to increase its positions of advantage and the likelihood that it can “win without fighting.”

President Xi Jinping and the PRC’s leadership were likely shocked that Russia’s military, with extensive recent operational experience, failed to secure a decisive victory in Ukraine—particularly that it has been unable to achieve air superiority and has ineffectively conducted combined armed maneuver. To keep a similar challenge from emerging in its own invasion of Taiwan, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will continue to rehearse joint operations and logistics and likely intensify its focus on integrating its land, sea, and airpower and improve its joint warfighting capabilities. What is more, the PRC has found a partner in Russia, conducting combined drills focused on air defense, antimissile, antisubmarine, and antiship rehearsals. The PLA fields a significant amount of Russian military equipment and has sought to integrate elements of Russia’s military reforms. Therefore, Russia’s struggles will likely prompt the PLA to question its own readiness to conduct the operations necessary for a Taiwan invasion in the next few years.

The PRC has taken note of regional and Taiwanese preparations to deter forceful reunification, such as acquisition of capabilities that accelerate Taipei’s adoption of an asymmetric defense strategy. Similarly, Taipei’s close partners have adopted new strategies—Japan’s initiatives to shift from a territorial defense to a force capable of in-depth interdiction, for example, and the Philippines’ shift of focus to territorial defense and a strengthened alliance with Tokyo. The United States supports these efforts and the establishment of interior lines for the joint force through Operation Pathways, which enables the theater army to campaign in the first island chain while positioning combat-credible forces alongside partners and allies. An example is the set of organic capabilities the US Army’s new multi-domain tasks forces bring to the region. In parallel, Army senior leaders continue dialogue with partnered states to host formations and expand access to training sites. The PRC’s assessments of these activities will influence Beijing’s political calculus, which makes the next few years critical from a deterrence standpoint.

For the US Army, leadership remains an essential, unifying element of combat power and determinant of success in combined arms operations. In recent years, leaders from the tactical to the theater-strategic level have introduced new concepts, capabilities, and formations to the Indo-Pacific theater that can deter adversary aggression and provide response options in a crisis. As an example, while live-fire tests receive much publicity in the open media, the Army’s long-range hypersonic and mid-range capabilities have quietly participated in a number of joint and multinational exercises in the Indo-Pacific under the control of a combatant command since the fielding of the systems to tactical units. The value of these fires’ capabilities is that by operating alongside space, cyber, and electronic warfare capabilities (also organic to multi-domain task forces), they create regular and iterative opportunities for experimentation with both kinetic and nonkinetic effects. This experimentation helps further realize Army senior leaders’ vision to open up windows for the joint force in an antiaccess, area-denial environment. Executed forward and underneath a combatant commander, this experimentation ensures the capabilities are not overlooked and are positioned appropriately, ahead of any crisis, for employment in a time of need. Thus, exercising forward in the environment as part of a larger joint and multinational rehearsal not only enhances the deterrent effect while signaling commitment to partners, but also increases the chance that leaders can appropriately respond to adversary aggression across all domains in a meaningful way.

Signaling Commitment: A New Trilateral Opportunity

The third component of integrated deterrence is signaling, which is fundamentally about communicating—both to allies and partners and to potential aggressors. On April 11, US President Joe Biden will hold the first three-way summit with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. at the White House. This summit—with the two pivotal allies in the Indo-Pacific—may be one of the most important diplomatic events for the United States in 2024 and is an opportunity to firmly signal its commitment in the region. President Biden’s agenda at the talks may be aimed at successfully tilting the security posture in the Indo-Pacific with increased activities already being discussed by the three governments.

At this historic summit, Washington will likely reaffirm the steadfast alliance with Manila, its oldest ally in the Indo-Pacific, and reassure its unwavering commitment amid rising tensions and increased confrontations between Philippine and Chinese vessels in the South China Sea. Nevertheless, whatever form the talks take, promoting this new trilateral partnership is crucial for the United States and its other allies and partners, in the region and beyond. Japan and the Philippines are the two most reliable US partners in western Indo-Pacific, outside of Australia and New Zealand. This strengthening cooperation, along with enhanced interoperability and defense capabilities positioned in these island nations, signals a strong commitment among the three partners. Tokyo and Manila both echo the principle of the free and open Indo-Pacific and share their concerns about Beijing’s growing maritime forces within their territorial waters.

The Will to Fight: Deterrence’s Key Element

The fourth component of strong deterrence is will. For allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region, the will to fight in the event of a conflict is best gauged before a crisis by the will to prepare. Demonstrated will to fight can galvanize international support, as it has done for Ukraine. The PRC has observed President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s ability to rally the Ukrainian people and international public. It is likely that Taiwanese leaders would also take extreme measures to convince allies and partners to support Taiwan in a similar manner during a conflict triggered by a PRC invasion.

Here, too, lessons from the war in Ukraine are instructive. Russia was targeted by international sanctions after its 2014 annexation of Crimea. After its 2022 large-scale invasion, a coalition of countries grouped together and imposed more wide-ranging and severe sanctions against Russia, but these efforts have been marginally effective. The PRC has taken note of Russia’s transition away from SWIFT international payment system to its own Mir national credit system to sanctions-proof its economy and is already taking measures to decrease its own vulnerability and increase its economic resilience.

Ahead of Russia’s invasion, intelligence diplomacy was key to shaping the narrative in the information dimension. Despite the unambiguous warnings of Russian preparations and intent to invade Ukraine, though, President Vladimir Putin was not deterred. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that we will have the same indications and warnings for a Taiwan invasion. However, the forward presence of capabilities, enabled by the new trilateral partnership in the Indo-Pacific region, will meaningfully contribute to deterring an invasion by the PRC.

A Vision to Challenge the Status Quo

There is one final observation from the war in Ukraine with direct relevance to security in the Indo-Pacific region. Prior to February 2022, the three Baltic states and Poland provided the greatest percentage of their gross domestic product to Ukraine and were among those who warned most vocally of the impending Russian invasion. Following the invasion, these states were also the most impacted socially, economically, and with respect to security considerations. Why? Proximity. Amid growing geopolitical tension and efforts in the Japanese southwest islands and Philippine islands in the Luzon strait to prepare for the prospect of Chinese aggression, it is evident that the closest geographic neighbors to Taiwan are heeding the actions of their European counterparts.

The United States must do everything within its power in the Indo-Pacific to thicken cooperation among regional allies and partners. The PRC recognized that the Ukraine war has unified NATO rather than fracturing the alliance. While the Indo-Pacific region does not enjoy the same alliance structure, it is important for like-minded states to demonstrate solidarity in opposing PRC efforts to unilaterally change the status quo. The trilateral partnership involving two of the nations—Japan and the Philippines—with the most at stake has the potential to lead these efforts for the entire region.

Lieutenant Colonel Ben Blane is a field artillery officer and commands the Army’s first long-range fires battalion as part of the 1st Multi-Domain Task Force at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington. He holds an undergraduate degree from the United States Military Academy and graduate degrees from Columbia University and John Jay College.

Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Lee is an Indo-Pacific foreign area officer for US Army Japan. He holds an undergraduate degree from the United States Military Academy and graduate degrees from Columbia University and UCLA.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image: Mid-Range Capability (MRC) Launcher from Charlie Battery, 5th Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment, is loaded into a US Air Force C-17 Globemaster III as part of the capability’s first deployment into theater on Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, August 4, 2024. The historic deployment, undertaken in part with the pilots and flight crew of the US Air Force’s 62nd Airlift Wing from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, marks the first time the service has flown the exquisite capability. (credit: Capt. Ryan DeBooy, US Army)

Share on LinkedIn

Send email

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Ben Blane, Christopher Lee · April 10, 2024

9. The Marines’ Pacific allies are copying its littoral regiment moves

Over the last few decades in Asia I have noticed what a tremendous influence the USMC has had over their counterpart Marines in Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand to include doctrine, jargon, and even uniforms. This is not a surprise to me.

The Marines’ Pacific allies are copying its littoral regiment moves

marinecorpstimes.com · by Todd South · April 9, 2024

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The Corps’ top operations general is seeing Pacific allies copy some of the new littoral-based war-fighting concepts that the service’s has developed to counter China in the region.

Speaking at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space conference here on Monday, Lt. Gen. James Bierman, deputy commandant for plans, policies and operations, laid out challenges the U.S. military faces in the Western Pacific and moves the Marines are making to address those gaps.

The three key challenges are “time, space and access,” Bierman said.

“Much as they might like to think so, the (People’s Republic of China) is not 10-feet tall,” Bierman said. “That’s not to say they’re not worthy of respect, and we do respect them, they’re working very hard, they’re building lots of capacity, but they struggle with doubt and uncertainty and we’re purposefully campaigning and posturing to maintain and magnify their doubt and unease.”

RELATED

New in 2024: Marines build 3rd Littoral Regiment to fight peer threats

Another littoral regiment is planned for Guam in 2025.

To meet those challenges, Bierman said, the Corps has focused efforts on its units both already within the U.S. Navy fleet and those inside of the first island chain and “weapons engagement zone.”

The island chain refers to a string of islands from the Kuril Islands in the north, sweeping south through Okinawa, Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines, paralleling Russian, North Korean and Chinese shores.

Partner and allied nations in that same chain are training alongside Marines in new ways, focused on detecting, targeting and striking enemy naval vessels.

“They’re very much seeing the problem the same way,” Bierman said. “Which is how in distributed naval terrain do you sense and make sense; do you synchronize and coordinate in combined operations. How do you establish the right linkages for command and control?”

The Marines think they have the answer: the Marine littoral regiment.

In recent years, the Corps has developed the littoral regiment as purpose-built for littoral combat, or fighting in the shallower reaches where land, islands and archipelagos meet ocean.

The 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment operates out of Hawaii. The 12th Marine Littoral Regiment was redesignated in 2023 in Okinawa, Japan, and another regiment is planned to form in Guam in 2027.

Mortarman Cpl. Renato Ortiz, left, familiarizes Philippine marine Sgt. Jomelan Marinas with an M224 60 mm mortar system at Paredes Air Station, Philippines, in 2023. (Sgt. Jacqueline C. Parsons/Marine Corps)

The regiments hold 2,000 Marines each, about the size of a Marine expeditionary unit, but with different capabilities. They have fewer infantry but contain their own air control and air defense units, a medium missile battery instead of conventional artillery and more advanced logistics capabilities.

Bierman said that military partners and allies in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines are either copying elements of the littoral combat concept or were working toward these moves even as the Corps began developing it.

Following the panel discussion, he told Marine Corps Times that each nation is taking its own approach, some weighting the units more toward sensing capabilities, others toward lethal strike capabilities. He declined to discuss specific equipment, platforms or capabilities by country.

The three-star stressed that success in any potential conflict will involve a combination of Marine littoral regiment assets and more traditional formations, such as the Marine expeditionary unit or other capabilities from the Marine expeditionary force.

The 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment has been participating in various exercises, chiefly with the Philippines’ armed forces, since 2022. The 12th Marine Littoral Regiment, still under construction, will primarily work with the Japanese military.

The Japanese military developed its first amphibious rapid deployment brigade in 2018. In March, it activated the 3rd Regiment within the brigade for defense of its southwest region, U.S. Naval Institute reported. It also formed and deployed an electronic warfare unit to Yonaguni Island, Japan, in March.

Bierman previously served as commanding general of III Marine Expeditionary Force, the only forward-deployed Marine expeditionary force, and lead force in the Pacific.

“Our allies and partners are all in,” Bierman said. “They are feeling the heat, they’re tired of getting pushed around in their own backyards.”

In January, the Philippines announced its Comprehensive Archipelagic Defense Concept, a shift to join its army, air force and navy in an external security focus instead of its previous concentration on external security. The move has been described as a move to counter Chinese military aggression and incursion into the nation’s territorial waters.

Bierman noted an uptick in various military exercises. The large-scale, multinational naval exercise Rim of the Pacific, the U.S.-Australia annual Talisman Sabre exercise and the U.S.-Philippines exercise Balikatan have grown steadily in size and scope in recent years.

And those exercises are not simple live fires. The Marine littoral regiment is working sensing and ship targeting, passing data and conducting command and control alongside host nation partners.

Bierman emphasized the realism of the exercises and their effect on adversaries.

“The exercise the operations we’re doing, everything we walk back from an existing war plan,” Bierman said. “It is a rehearsal of an existing war plan with the actual joint partners, allies and partners we will fight with more often than not on the terrain we will operate with at the specific high risk time of year.”

Using these exercises to highlight how the U.S. and its partners are working on shared aims for another target ― deterrence.

“Everything we do in INDOPACOM is done with an eye toward cognitive impact on potential adversaries,” Bierman said. “Nothing sends a message of deterrence and unsettles our adversaries like true interoperability.”

About Todd South

Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.

10. High time for real US-Japan defense cooperation by Grant Newsham

​I missed this last week. We should learn today or tomorrow about what is the real future US-Japan defense cooperation.

High time for real US-Japan defense cooperation - Asia Times

US and Japanese forces would be hard-pressed to fight and win a war with China, underscoring the urgent need for a joint headquarters in Japan

asiatimes.com · by Grant Newsham · April 5, 2024

The Financial Times recently reported that when US President Joseph Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida meet in April they will announce a plan to restructure the relationship between US and Japanese forces in Japan.

The objective is to make for more effective operational planning and exercises – with an eye to better handle the threat from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Such articles produce a flurry of excitement, if not hope, as the basic idea is a good one and decades overdue.

Despite a six-decade-old defense relationship, US and Japanese forces (except for the two navies and also in the area of missile defense) still can’t work together very well and would be hard-pressed to fight a joint war, including in the event Taiwan is attacked by China.

Together, US and Japanese forces are less than the sum of their parts.

So, talk of a restructuring conjures up images of finally having a joint headquarters in Japan where American and Japanese officers get on with the business of defending Japan. Such an HQ could coordinate training, exercises and patrols as well as plan and do what’s necessary for peacetime and wartime operations.

You mean there isn’t such a headquarters? No, there isn’t. And this really is a prerequisite for any sort of serious Japan-US defense strategy. Otherwise, everything is done on a haphazard ad hoc basis.

Is this about to be solved? Read the Financial Times article a few times and the excitement wears off.

It seems the idea is to rejigger US Forces Japan by installing a four-star general in command (currently it’s a three-star) and letting it plan some exercises and share more information with the new Japan Self-Defense Force (JSDF) joint operational headquarters set to come on-line next year.

But, for the foreseeable future, the ultimate “command” of all US forces in Japan will remain in Hawaii at US Indo-Pacific Command headquarters.

The article does suggest that some thought will be given to a more effective operational tie-up with the JSDF sometime in the future.

But, for now, nothing reported in the Financial Times piece will do much, if anything, to improve the ability of US and Japanese forces to operate together – and, if push comes to shove, to fight together.

First, assigning a four-star general to USFJ isn’t exactly salvation on the wings. Four-star generals ran the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for over 20 years. How did they do? Winning wars does not appear to be a requirement for generals who get promoted to the top rank.

There are exceptions to everything, of course. If they were to recall retired Admiral Robert Willard and his team which from 2009 to 2012 ran the US Pacific Command (as it was called before the 2018 name change) and send them to Japan with proper marching orders and authority, I’d change my mind.

US Admiral Robert F Willard. Photo: US Navy / James E Foehl

Second, without any operational control over anything, USFJ looks likely to continue its principal role as the “designated apologists” (said only half tongue-in-cheek) when Japan complains about something the American military has done.

A four-star commander’s apologies might have more clout but USFJ will still seem irrelevant when it comes to Japanese and US forces doing actual operations and fighting.

Japanese forces now coordinate with USINDOPACOM in Hawaii, an arrangement that is inefficient to say the least. It would be better to set up a headquarters (or something serving that function) in Japan to handle the bilateral relationship and emplace a commander with real operational authority, as in able to conduct a war.

This requires a mindset and a structure entirely different from what currently exists. And, of course, the Japanese would also have to be fully invested, devoting the necessary attention and resources.

It is not apparent this is in the works on either side. Several have pointed out these shortcomings over the years, and there have been some good ideas. But there has never been interest at levels – either civilian or military – where it matters.

Indeed, US alliance managers told us for decades: “The relationship has never been stronger,” adding that every exercise held with the Japanese was a “great success” that “strengthened interoperability.”

And the commanders in Hawaii since, say, early 2012 onwards could not be bothered to push for bringing Japan and the US closer together in a meaningful, spelled operational, way. Not that the Japanese ever really pushed for it either.

The Financial Times article quotes now-retired Admiral Philip Davidson, who was USINDOPACOM commander from 2018-2021, as saying:

Admiral Philip Davidson. Photo: INDOPACOM

Japan’s new national security policy is the most positive security development in East Asia in this century. The recognition that our two nations’ defense strategies have converged makes improvement in our day-to-day command and control the logical next step.

One might fairly say it was a logical next step years ago – and for the entire period of the Davidson tenure. Every top leader of that command at least since Admiral Samuel Locklear (who arrived in 2012) should have had this as priority number one – and ought to have been judged accordingly.

Without a capable JSDF that’s solidly linked to US forces and able to operate together, the US will be hard-pressed to maintain its position in the Indo-Pacific or to prevail in a potential conflict. And it was obvious back then.

Too much time was wasted – by people in Washington and Hawaii who had position and title (and presumably responsibility) – while China built into a powerful military and a serious threat.

Even now, it’s not clear that there is a sense of urgency to improve the US-Japan military relationship so that it can fight a war properly. Making superficial modifications and installing a four-star at USFJ with a slightly expanded role – to “send a message” to China – does not indicate urgency.

Japanese sailors aboard the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) ship JS Hyuga direct a US Marines MV-22 Osprey to land during the Dawn Blitz 2015 exercise off the coast of Southern California. Photo: Asia Times Files / AFP / Mark Ralston

As if the Chinese weren’t smart enough to understand US-Japan actual operational capabilities. But let’s see what is announced at the Biden-Kishida meeting. Maybe we’ll be surprised and maybe we won’t.

It is nonetheless astonishing that after 60-plus years the Americans and Japanese are such strangers and the military-to-military relationship is so superficial – if not downright Potemkin – in too many respects. Again, the exceptions of the two navies and missile defense show that it can be done if tried

Sign up for one of our free newsletters

But there is some good news: much good work is being done at lower levels between Japanese and American forces. If Biden and Kishida issued the order to “do the necessary so we can fight together (and go down to Yokosuka Naval Base if you need some ideas)” they would be surprised how quickly things could come together.

But, Newsham, enough with the complaining. What’s your advice for getting a joint/combined US-Japan headquarters in Japan? Here’s one idea: Establish a “Joint Task Force Nansei Shoto.”

This would have an immediate real-world mission: defending Japan’s southern islands (also known as the Ryukyu Islands) and nearby areas. That requires real day-to-day coordination, specifically assigned forces and command and control to carry out the joint patrols, exercises and planning needed to defend an area that’s already under Chinese pressure.

Put the actual headquarters on Okinawa. But, if necessary, you could run it out of Kyushu. This approach would also have considerable political and psychological effects – on Japan, on the US and on partners such as South Korea and Taiwan. But even more on the PRC.

Get this right and later expand to the entire US-Japan military relationship. How hard is it? As hard as you want to make it.

Grant Newsham is a retired US Marine officer and former US diplomat. He is the author of the book When China Attacks: A Warning To America.

Thank you for registering!

An account was already registered with this email. Please check your inbox for an authentication link.

asiatimes.com · by Grant Newsham · April 5, 2024

11. Myanmar: is the junta’s grip on power weakening and what next for its leadership?

How about a loss to the resistance? What is the potential?

Excerpt:

The military has lost control of many important border areas and it appears unlikely it will be able to regain much territory soon. It still retains control of the centre of the country, including the big cities of Yangon, Mandalay and Naypyidaw.

“The military has been humiliated time after time after time and suffered significant losses. Clearly, there’s a very deep rot at the heart of the institution and its ability to project power,” says Richard Horsey, Myanmar adviser to Crisis Group, a non-profit that produces analysis of conflicts around the world. “It isn’t, at the moment, collapsing as an institution. This isn’t the fall of Kabul.”

Myanmar: is the junta’s grip on power weakening and what next for its leadership? | Myanmar | The Guardian

After a string of high-profile and embarrassing battlefield losses, questions have been raised about how long military chief Min Aung Hlaing can survive

• Blow for Myanmar’s military as rebels say hundreds have surrendered at key border town

Rebecca Ratcliffe South-east Asia correspondent

Tue 9 Apr 2024 20.41 EDT

amp.theguardian.com · by {{text}}

Myanmar’s military junta is on the brink of losing control of a major trading town, Myawaddy, on its eastern border with Thailand, after soldiers defending the position surrendered in recent days, according to opposition groups.

This is the latest in a series of defeats for the junta, which has also lost crucial territory along its border with China and India, as well as areas of Rakhine state, in the west of the country.

These defeats aren’t just economic or strategic blows for the junta – they’re also a humiliation for the generals. Such developments have been celebrated by the wider pro-democracy movement, and provoked anger among the military ranks, raising questions about how long the junta chief, Min Aung Hlaing, can survive.

Who is fighting against the Myanmar military and why?

The military seized power in a coup three years ago, ousting the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi and causing outrage among the public, who took to the streets to protest. The military responded with brutal crackdowns and many civilians took up arms and joined people’s defence forces to fight against junta rule – often with little weaponry or resources.

Myanmar opposition carries out drone attack on capital

Some of these groups have received support from older, more experienced ethnic armed organisations that have fought with the military for decades to achieve independence for their people. These group’s specific goals, and the extent to which they are coordinated, varies.

However, the sheer number of different groups fighting the military, across various parts of the country, has left the generals severely overstretched. In a sign of how lacking in manpower the military is, it recently imposed mandatory conscription – a policy that has caused young people to flee military-controlled areas.

Is the military losing its grip on power?

The military has lost control of many important border areas and it appears unlikely it will be able to regain much territory soon. It still retains control of the centre of the country, including the big cities of Yangon, Mandalay and Naypyidaw.

“The military has been humiliated time after time after time and suffered significant losses. Clearly, there’s a very deep rot at the heart of the institution and its ability to project power,” says Richard Horsey, Myanmar adviser to Crisis Group, a non-profit that produces analysis of conflicts around the world. “It isn’t, at the moment, collapsing as an institution. This isn’t the fall of Kabul.”

Sr Gen Min Aung Hlaing, Myanmar’s junta chief. Photograph: Reuters

However, what happens next isn’t simply a matter of how much ground the military has lost on the battlefield, says Horsey – it’s also about the psychological impact such relentless defeats are having on the institution, and the political ramifications in the capital, Naypyidaw.

There is a possibility of “regime implosion of some kind, or the implosion of [junta chief] Min Aung Hlaing’s leadership,” he says. “It just seems that it can’t go on like this forever.”

There is no clear protocol for changing leadership within the military, and any new leader may be even more brutal than Min Aung Hlaing, whose military has been repeatedly accused of indiscriminate shelling and airstrikes, torching homes and mass killings.

Any new military leader would face an uphill battle: morale is extremely low, thousands have defected and it is fighting a multitude of opponents.

How are regional countries responding?

The regional bloc, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, has led international efforts to resolve the crisis in Myanmar, but with no success.

The Thai prime minister, Srettha Thavisin, told Reuters this week that now was a good time to open talks with Myanmar as the military regime was weakening.

Blow for Myanmar’s military as rebels say hundreds have surrendered at key border town

But military generals, who are loathed by the public and accused of war crimes, appear highly unlikely to negotiate. The National Unity Government, which was set up to oppose the junta, “has made it very clear that they’re open to talks only on the condition of the military’s willing to surrender control. So it seems like a non starter,” says Hunter Marston, adjunct research fellow at La Trobe Asia in Melbourne.

China is considered the country most likely to be able to influence events in Myanmar – though there are limits to this, and relations between China and the military are complex.

China was displeased by the coup, which came at a time when it had established warm relations with Aung San Suu Kyi’s government and had investments in the country. The coup has brought chaos and instability.

China has also grown increasingly frustrated about the proliferation of online scam centres in Myanmar that target Chinese nationals, a lucrative criminal activity the military has failed to halt. Anger over this issue apparently led China to give its tacit approval to a powerful bloc of ethnic armed groups to launch a coordinated offensive against the military in northern Shan state late last year, leading to a major defeat for the military. China has since mediated ceasefire agreements in the area.

China has long been cultivating ties with all stakeholders in Myanmar, Marston says. Ultimately, it “does still see a divided and weak subservient Myanmar as ideal, even if it undermines China’s business interests in the country”.

“It doesn’t want to have sort of a western-leaning, liberal democracy on its border.”

View on theguardian.com

amp.theguardian.com · by {{text}}

12. Ukraine needs America’s planes, guns and tanks

Excerpts;

In no recent war since the U.S. pushed Iraq out of Kuwait have we witnessed naked aggression like that of Russia seizing Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, followed by Russia’s invasion of the country in 2022. The Russian invasion of Ukraine threatens the international order today as seriously as Nazi Germany’s unjustified invasion of Poland did in 1939. Even then, Russia was complicit, invading eastern Poland 16 days later.

Therefore, as he faces being removed by the far right, Mr. Johnson must not take the wrong lessons from America’s so-called forever wars. The lessons from those conflicts are miscalculation and mission creep. The facts of the war in Ukraine are quite different and, if ignored, portend a wider conflict in Europe involving the U.S. It is utter folly to allow Russia to win because, as surely as it is, it will then turn toward a wider conflict with NATO, likely beginning in the Baltic states, which they covet for reincorporation into the Russian bloc.

Congress should not hesitate to fund Ukraine with the $60 billion to sustain that nation’s fight. Republicans would do well to recall the words of President Franklin Roosevelt in his fireside chat on Dec. 29, 1940: “The people of Europe who are defending themselves do not ask us to do their fighting. They ask us for the implements of war, the planes, the guns, the tanks.”

We must not allow our weariness from “forever wars” to set the stage for something far worse.

Ukraine needs America’s planes, guns and tanks

washingtontimes.com · by The Washington Times https://www.washingtontimes.com

By L. Scott Lingamfelter - - Tuesday, April 9, 2024

OPINION:

Some would say that House Speaker Mike Johnson — third in line for the presidency — is an accidental leader.

Elected to Congress in 2016, the Louisiana Republican had no expectation that seven years later, he would be speaker in these troubling times. A faithful Christian who believes in God’s providence in our lives, Mr. Johnson must wonder whether his being selected speaker was providence or punishment, particularly as he struggles to keep his position.

He rose to power when “my way or the highway” Republicans ousted former Speaker Kevin McCarthy in a fit of anger. It was an entirely unnecessary public tantrum by publicity-addicted partisans who claimed that Mr. McCarthy mishandled issues important to them. One of those issues was Mr. McCarthy’s declared support for financial assistance to Ukraine, a thorny dispute haunting Mr. Johnson now.

Seizing on waning public support for U.S. aid to Ukraine — $75 billion thus far, the size of Virginia’s annual budget — far-right House Republicans resorted to comparing that aid to the lack of funding for U.S. border security. Coupling that with the bourgeoning national debt and disgust over continuing resolutions to keep the government afloat, the anti-McCarthy cabal successfully ensconced him in the pantheon of former speakers. Mr. Johnson must wonder if his plinth in that hall is being placed today.

This week, the speaker faces pressure to fund Ukraine with a much-needed $60 billion aid package for ammunition and other materiel. That funding is essential if Ukraine continues to successfully resist Russia and retake territory lost over recent months. Republican isolationists complain the war amounts to what they call a “forever war.” This is how they characterized the two decades of counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan and Iraq following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

There were lessons to be learned from the global war on terror, as it was officially known. The war in Afghanistan continued well beyond a rational point. The mission should have been clear: Track down and punish the terror network that instigated 9/11.

The mission creep toward nation-building for a country locked in the seventh century was a profound mistake. The U.S. would have found it easier to force France to drop the French language in favor of German than to democratize a tribal country like Afghanistan. That forever war should have been quite limited.

The war in Iraq was not required at all. While it is fair to suggest that the U.S. coalition could have dispatched Saddam Hussein after the 1990-1991 Gulf War, he was more of a pain than a problem by 2003. Moreover, the claim that he had engaged in building a nuclear program was never proved.

That war was, therefore, predicated on a false premise. While it did not last as long as the Afghanistan quagmire, it spun off yet another vexing problem. The rise of the Islamic State is rooted in disaffected Sunni Iraqis who hated America’s Middle East presence. Compelled to remain in western Iraq and eastern Syria to crush the ISIS threat, we are still there now to blunt any resurgence. The charge that this is a “forever war” is partly true, but to interpret Ukraine similarly is to draw the wrong lessons and misapply them to a very different scenario.

In no recent war since the U.S. pushed Iraq out of Kuwait have we witnessed naked aggression like that of Russia seizing Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, followed by Russia’s invasion of the country in 2022. The Russian invasion of Ukraine threatens the international order today as seriously as Nazi Germany’s unjustified invasion of Poland did in 1939. Even then, Russia was complicit, invading eastern Poland 16 days later.

Therefore, as he faces being removed by the far right, Mr. Johnson must not take the wrong lessons from America’s so-called forever wars. The lessons from those conflicts are miscalculation and mission creep. The facts of the war in Ukraine are quite different and, if ignored, portend a wider conflict in Europe involving the U.S. It is utter folly to allow Russia to win because, as surely as it is, it will then turn toward a wider conflict with NATO, likely beginning in the Baltic states, which they covet for reincorporation into the Russian bloc.

Congress should not hesitate to fund Ukraine with the $60 billion to sustain that nation’s fight. Republicans would do well to recall the words of President Franklin Roosevelt in his fireside chat on Dec. 29, 1940: “The people of Europe who are defending themselves do not ask us to do their fighting. They ask us for the implements of war, the planes, the guns, the tanks.”

We must not allow our weariness from “forever wars” to set the stage for something far worse.

• L. Scott Lingamfelter is a retired Army colonel and combat veteran (1973-2001) and former member of the Virginia House of Delegates (2002-2018). He is the author of “Desert Redleg: Artillery Warfare in the First Gulf War” (University Press of Kentucky, 2020) and “Yanks in Blue Berets: American UN Peacekeepers in the Middle East” (UPK, 2023).

Copyright © 2024 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

Click to Read More and View Comments

Click to Hide

washingtontimes.com · by The Washington Times https://www.washingtontimes.com

13.

​Power in government should always be limited and restrained, especially presidential power which I believe was the internet of our founding fathers.

Ex-Officials Urge Curbing Presidential Power to Deploy Troops on U.S. Soil

The bipartisan group says the point is not about Donald J. Trump’s desire to invoke the Insurrection Act, but rather that current law gives all presidents too much unfettered power.

• https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/08/us/trump-president-troops-riots-protests.html?referringSource=articleShare&smid=nytcore-ios-share&utm
• 
  

National Guard soldiers on Crenshaw Boulevard in South Central Los Angeles during the 1992 riots.Credit...Ted Soqui/Corbis, via Getty Images

By Charlie Savage

Charlie Savage has been writing about national security and executive power for more than two decades. He reported from Washington.

April 8, 2024

A bipartisan group of former senior national security and legal officials, including veterans of the Trump administration, are urging lawmakers to impose new limits on a president’s power to deploy federal troops on domestic soil.

While it is generally illegal to use the U.S. military for domestic law enforcement purposes, a law called the Insurrection Act grants presidents emergency power to use troops to restore order when they decide a situation warrants it.

Legal analysts for decades have proposed overhauling the act, which President George Bush, at the request of California’s governor, last invoked in 1992 to suppress riots in Los Angeles. But the weakness of existing constraints has taken on new salience in the era of former President Donald J. Trump, who has vowed to unilaterally send troops into Democratic cities if he wins the 2024 election.

PRESIDENTIAL POWERRead the proposed principles for Insurrection Act reform.

Many other proposed reforms to executive power after Mr. Trump’s turbulent term were blocked by Republicans in Congress, who portrayed them as unnecessary partisan swipes. Seeking to avoid that fate, the proponents of imposing new limits on the Insurrection Act said their point was not about Mr. Trump in particular, but rather that current law gives all presidents too much unfettered power.

The set of principles unveiled on Monday are ones that the group hopes lawmakers of both parties could endorse. Republican signatories included Courtney Simmons Elwood, the general counsel of the C.I.A. under Mr. Trump; Michael Mukasey, a former federal judge who was attorney general in the Bush administration; and John Eisenberg, the top lawyer at the National Security Council in the Trump White House.

More on U.S. Armed Forces

• A Belated Funeral: Pvt. Albert King, a Black soldier killed by a white military police officer in 1941, was blamed for his own death and buried in an unmarked grave. Eight decades later, the Army gave him a full military funeral.
• Troops in Niger:  A top Pentagon official said the United States was “seeking clarification” after Niger’s decision to revoke its military cooperation deal with the United States, which would upend the Biden administration’s security strategy in a volatile swath of Africa.
• At Long Last: Three members of America’s World War II “Ghost Army,” the precursor to the Army’s current psychological warfare units, were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal on Capitol Hill.
• No Alien Activity: A congressionally mandated Pentagon report found no evidence that the government was covering up knowledge of extraterrestrial technology and said there was no evidence that any U.F.O. sightings represented alien visitation to Earth.

Mr. Eisenberg, who also worked on issues involving presidential emergency power in the Bush administration after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, said he saw the project as a matter of good government.

“This is something of great importance regardless of what party you are in because, obviously, it is an area that can abused,” Mr. Eisenberg said. “If the triggers, for example, are too vague, the risk is that it can be used in circumstances that do not really warrant it. So it is important to tighten up the language to reduce that risk.”

The recommendations include tightening the circumstances in which a president may invoke the Insurrection Act by eliminating vague, antiquated terms and clarifying that for domestic violence to warrant calling in federal troops, it must rise to a level that overwhelms local law enforcement.

The group also said there should be a statutory limit on how long such a deployment could last, after which a president would have to remove troops unless Congress had voted to renew authority to continue the operation. It suggested a maximum of 30 days.

Some of those principles align with aspects of legislation introduced in 2020 by Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut. Congress did not pass that bill, but Mr. Blumenthal said in an interview last week that he was revising a version with Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, which they hope to unveil soon and to attach to the annual must-pass defense bill.

“Right now, the law gives the president a blank check on the use of military power, which is a tool of tyranny,” Mr. Blumenthal said. “It gives the president virtually unchecked and unlimited power to use it against lawful dissent or other expression of opinion in ways that violate our basic rights. And so whoever is president, Republican or Democrat, should be compelled to come to Congress after a specific defined period of time.”

The principles were developed by a working group hosted by the American Law Institute, a nonpartisan group that proposes improvements to the law, guided by Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former top Justice Department lawyer in the Bush administration, and Bob Bauer, a New York University law professor and former White House counsel in the Obama administration. (He is also President Biden’s personal lawyer, but said in an interview that he was weighing in on the act only on his own behalf.)

Also under the banner of the institute, Mr. Goldsmith and Mr. Bauer — along with Mr. Mukasey and Ms. Elwood — advised a bipartisan group of lawmakers who in 2022 pushed through an update to another old law, the Electoral Count Act, that governs how Congress counts Electoral College votes.

In 2022, New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice proposed changes to the Insurrection Act to the House committee investigating the Capitol riot.

While Mr. Blumenthal’s 2020 bill and the Brennan Center’s proposal both also called for establishing a new court process assessing whether a president’s invocation of the Insurrection Act was legally justified, the principles unveiled on Monday say a reform bill should not include that step. They note instead that judicial review is likely already available under existing law, and that the Supreme Court has said judges should show deference to a president’s determination that the conditions are met.

Professor Goldsmith, emphasizing he was speaking only for himself, noted that during the push to reform the Electoral Count Act, an initial proposal included a provision centered on judicial review. It prompted Republican opposition and was essentially dropped. Adding such a provision to any Insurrection Act reform bill raised similar risks, he argued.

“We’re trying to accomplish achievable Insurrection Act reform, and judicial review in my view might be a serious sticking point to reform, which might not be worth the fight since it is already available to some extent and might not accomplish much anyway,” he said.

After some demonstrations against police violence in 2020 degenerated into riots, Mr. Trump had an Insurrection Act order drafted to crack down on protesters in Washington. Military leaders resisted putting active-duty troops on the streets, and Mr. Trump did not sign the order.

But as the presumptive Republican nominee in the 2024 election, Mr. Trump has raised anew the prospect of using federal troops on American soil. His top immigration policy adviser has suggested that his administration would invoke the act to use soldiers as immigration agents near the border. And at a rally in Iowa last year, Mr. Trump said he would unilaterally send troops into the streets of Democratic-run cities.

“You look at any Democrat-run state, and it’s just not the same — it doesn’t work,” Mr. Trump said, calling cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco crime dens. “We cannot let it happen any longer. And one of the other things I’ll do — because you’re supposed to not be involved in that, you just have to be asked by the governor or the mayor to come in — the next time, I’m not waiting.”

The group endorsing an overhaul of the Insurrection Act also includes three retired top military lawyers: Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, the former chief prosecutor of the Guantánamo military commissions; Vice Adm. James Crawford, a former top legal adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Vice Adm. Bruce MacDonald, a former top naval judge advocate general.

It also included two former Democratic national security lawyers from the Obama administration: Mary DeRosa, a former National Security Council legal adviser, and Jeh Johnson, a former Pentagon general counsel and Homeland Security secretary.

Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy. More about Charlie Savage

A version of this article appears in print on April 9, 2024, Section A, Page 15 of the New York edition with the headline: Former Officials Seek Limits on Power to Deploy Troops on U.S. Soil. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

14. House intelligence chair says Republicans are ‘absolutely’ repeating Russian propaganda

Sigh... (and shaking my head in disbelief).

POGO - we have met the enemy and ... (which is anyone who repeats anime propaganda).

House intelligence chair says Republicans are ‘absolutely’ repeating Russian propaganda | Republicans | The Guardian​

Mike Turner, the Ohio Republican, echoes a similar claim made recently by another rightwing American lawmaker

Ramon Antonio Vargas

Mon 8 Apr 2024 09.41 EDT

amp.theguardian.com · by {{text}}

Mike Turner, the chairperson of the US House intelligence committee, says some of his fellow Republicans are “absolutely” repeating Russian propaganda on the chamber floor, echoing a similar claim made recently by another rightwing American lawmaker.

“It is absolutely true we see, directly coming from Russia, attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor,” the Ohio congressman told CNN’s State of the Union show.

Turner maintained that one high-profile instance of such misinformation centered on cases where federal lawmakers have sought to portray Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine as a war between Nato and Vladimir Putin’s forces.

“Of course it is not,” Turner said. “To the extent that this propaganda takes hold, it makes it more difficult for us to really see this as an authoritarian versus democracy battle.”

Turner has openly advocated for continuing to provide US aid to Ukraine in its efforts to fend off Russia’s invasion. His comments Sunday came days after Michael McCaul, chairman of the House foreign affairs committee, told Puck News that misinformation in favor of Russian interests had found a foothold among his fellow Republicans.

“Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base,” McCaul said to Puck.

Both Turner and McCaul in their respective interviews suggested that pro-Putin propaganda was as hostile to the US’s position on the world stage as the threats posed by the regimes of Xi Jinping, China’s president, and Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader.

Though Turner did not single out any members of Congress or his party Sunday, his remarks came after Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Georgia representative, recently filed a motion to oust Mike Johnson from his role as House speaker if the Louisiana Republican moved forward with a Ukraine aid bill.

She was also upset that he relied on Democratic aid to pass a $1.2tn spending bill aimed at avoiding a federal government shutdown.

The US Senate in February authorized a $95bn foreign aid bill, which included assistance for Ukraine. But Johnson has not brought the package for a vote in the House. And in turn Greene as of Monday had not forced a vote on her motion calling for Johnson’s removal.

Turner on Sunday expressed his belief that Johnson was not at “any risk” of having the speaker’s gavel wrested from him by what he called members of the “chaos caucus … who are seeking attention for themselves and trying to stop all of the important work in Congress”.

A member of Congress since 2003, Turner advanced from a Republican primary in March and is seeking another term in a November general election that is not among those the Cook Political Report considers to be competitive.

View on theguardian.com

amp.theguardian.com · by {{text}}

15. First Space Force Ranger hopes guardians follow in his footsteps

I have great respect for anyone who graduates from Ranger School so BZ to Capt. Reynolds. I also believe that anyone who attends Ranger School personally benefits in whatever service or branch he or she serves. Those who complete Ranger School do become a better version of themselves (I like to believe that happened to me some four decades ago).

But does this rationale justify sending Space Force personnel to Ranger School?

Excerpt:

Unlike other Ranger School graduates, Reynolds won’t necessarily use those newfound skills in a firefight or to gather intelligence behind enemy lines. But he expressed that gaining firsthand knowledge of how elite field units work can improve how the Space Force supports them, and that the Ranger mindset can be useful in any job.

The Space Force pioneer encouraged others in his service to follow in his footsteps and attend the course to develop the creative thinking, empathy and resiliency that he argued all troops need to succeed.

“We have to be well-equipped to tackle complex challenges, and to apply decisive and bold leadership,” Reynolds said. “It’s so critically important that we continue to develop and fine-tune those leadership traits that are so necessary in the space domain and in the air domain.”

He was recently accepted as an instructor at the Air Force Security Forces Center’s Ranger Assessment Course — which coaches and evaluates airmen and guardians for nomination to the grueling Ranger School — where he hopes to further motivate the next generation of Ranger-qualified leaders.

First Space Force Ranger hopes guardians follow in his footsteps

militarytimes.com · by Jonathan Lehrfeld · April 2, 2024

Last fall, a Space Force guardian went where no one from the newest military branch had gone before: Army Ranger School.

Space Force Capt. Daniel Reynolds in October became the first in his service to graduate from the prestigious training program, setting a precedent for other guardians and further cementing the service’s place in the joint force. That trailblazing accomplishment earned Reynolds Military Times’ 2024 Guardian of the Year award.

“When I first arrived at Ranger School, I was nervous,” Reynolds, 29, told Military Times. “But what I also realized, as I checked in, was that everyone around me was feeling the exact same way.”

The Army’s premier tactics and leadership course — a three-part, 62-day gauntlet through mountains and swamps that prepares an elite infantry force for tasks like raids, airfield seizures and special reconnaissance — is among the military’s most rigorous mental and physical tests.

While there were times Reynolds said he hit a wall, he knew that he wanted to become the best possible version of himself. When he succeeded, his father, a fellow Ranger School graduate, pinned on the new tab.

Space Force Capt. Daniel Reynolds, pictured on the right in front of the flag, recently graduated from the military’s demanding Ranger School. (Airborne and Ranger Training Brigade/Facebook)

Unlike other Ranger School graduates, Reynolds won’t necessarily use those newfound skills in a firefight or to gather intelligence behind enemy lines. But he expressed that gaining firsthand knowledge of how elite field units work can improve how the Space Force supports them, and that the Ranger mindset can be useful in any job.

The Space Force pioneer encouraged others in his service to follow in his footsteps and attend the course to develop the creative thinking, empathy and resiliency that he argued all troops need to succeed.

“We have to be well-equipped to tackle complex challenges, and to apply decisive and bold leadership,” Reynolds said. “It’s so critically important that we continue to develop and fine-tune those leadership traits that are so necessary in the space domain and in the air domain.”

He was recently accepted as an instructor at the Air Force Security Forces Center’s Ranger Assessment Course — which coaches and evaluates airmen and guardians for nomination to the grueling Ranger School — where he hopes to further motivate the next generation of Ranger-qualified leaders.

Only a few airmen and guardians are given the opportunity to attempt to attend the course each year. Over 350 airmen have graduated since the service first began sending troops to Ranger School in 1955, the service said, and the Department of the Air Force continues to look for those ready to take on the challenge.

Now the assistant director of operations for the 4th Test and Evaluation Squadron at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado, Reynolds helps manage a team of more than 100 guardians with a multibillion-dollar portfolio of Space Force capabilities. In his role, he helps ensure that new space systems, like missile-warning technologies, meet the needs of troops who rely on them in daily operations.

U.S. Space Force Capt. Daniel C. Reynolds works at a desk at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado, April 22, 2022. (Ethan Johnson / Space Force)

Demand for and interest in protecting American space assets — which allow U.S. troops to communicate, maneuver and attack in missions around the globe — from competitors like China and Russia continues to grow, more than four years after the Space Force was established. For instance, the White House publicly confirmed in February that Russia was pursuing a “troubling” anti-satellite weapon that allegedly would violate the international Outer Space Treaty, which bans the deployment of conventional and nuclear weapons in space.

The work of Reynolds’ team helps ensure new hardware and software can reach the field as new missions and threats arise.

Originally from Aschaffenburg, Germany, the U.S. Air Force Academy graduate earned his commission in 2017. He received his master’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2019, where he simultaneously worked as a research fellow at a laboratory that tested flight control strategies for Gateway, NASA’s cutting-edge lunar space station.

In November 2020, Reynolds joined a space-focused Air Force unit that later evolved into his current squadron as the Space Force took on missions from the other services. He formally transferred from the Air Force to the Space Force in February 2021.

16. Report: Veterans with extremist views had bad experiences in military

Also reporting on the RAND report.

Report: Veterans with extremist views had bad experiences in military

militarytimes.com · by Nikki Wentling · April 9, 2024

Most veterans recently interviewed by the RAND Corporation about their extreme political views told researchers they had negative and even traumatic experiences while serving in the U.S. military, ranging from combat trauma and sexual abuse to interpersonal conflicts that led to their discharge.

The findings, released in a report Tuesday, add to other evidence that suggests negative experiences in the military could be a risk factor for people becoming radicalized into extremist ideologies, according to Todd Helmus, a co-author on the report. Data compiled last year by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism revealed a pattern of failed military recruits who were later charged with extremist-driven plots and crimes.

“A number of folks in our study had problematic experiences,” Helmus said. “We and other scholars have suggested before that those problematic experiences in the military could lead people to be vulnerable to these groups. So, we think that’s a significant finding.”

Helmus and his co-author, Ryan Brown, aren’t sure on the broader significance of their findings, and they said more studies would need to be done to understand the connection.

To compile the report, Brown and Helmus interviewed 21 veterans who had indicated in a RAND survey last year that they held extremist views. The veterans had either expressed support for specific groups, such as Antifa and the Proud Boys, endorsed political violence, black nationalism or white supremacy or supported conspiracy theories like QAnon or the Great Replacement theory.

RELATED

Extremism stand-down checked a box with no lasting result, critics say

While some saw no reason for the training and believed it ignited division among the ranks, others thought it didn’t go far enough.

Three-quarters of the veterans interviewed were forthcoming about negative life events during their military service, Brown said. One veteran described developing post-traumatic stress disorder after recovering casualties from the bombing in Beirut, Lebanon, which killed 241 US service members in 1983, the report states.

Another veteran said he developed a substance-abuse problem while serving and drank because he disliked the routine of the military and being told what to do. Two women veterans described physical, psychological and sexual abuse they experienced at the hands of fellow service members.

Some of the veterans said they faced problems while transitioning into civilian life. They experienced financial issues or severed romantic relationships and others become homeless or were arrested and imprisoned.

“I was surprised how clear the descriptions were of some extremely negative events, and the extent of how negative life experiences compound each other,” Brown said. “There’s a lot of hardship. You start to get a sense for how and why these beliefs develop.”

When asked about how they came to believe in their extreme viewpoints, most of the veterans said they became highly interested in politics after historic events. They cited Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency in 2016, the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the 2020 riots following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the coronavirus pandemic and the U.S. Supreme Court decision that settled a recount dispute in Florida’s 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore.

Six of the 21 veterans said they developed their current beliefs while in the military or afterward while working in law enforcement.

“When I got into the military, I started to get into conspiracy theories because of conversations with my peers,” one veteran is quoted as saying. “That’s when I learned about the Illuminati... a bunch of Satanists that run the world. Now I’m a full tin hat.”

​17. How Annie Jacobsen mapped out 'Nuclear War: A Scenario'

Excerpts:

She said the style of her book, telling the scenario in a direct, dramatic narrative way, was meant to help get the public engaged and be a part of the conversation. That, and art that can illustrate the severity of the issue, like “The Day After,” are important in preventing the worst-case scenario. As her research showed, it doesn’t take long for the world to spiral into nuclear destruction.

“What I was most puzzled by [while working on the book] was how much money has been spent and continues to be spent to make sure we never have a nuclear war by spending enormous amounts on nuclear weapons,” Jacobsen said. “It seems the Reagan reversal is a far wiser way to go.”

How Annie Jacobsen mapped out 'Nuclear War: A Scenario'

“There are new players, new nuclear armed nations that are far more unpredictable than those who have had nuclear weapons in the past.”

BY NICHOLAS SLAYTON | PUBLISHED APR 8, 2024 4:36 PM EDT

taskandpurpose.com · by Nicholas Slayton · April 8, 2024

It starts with a sudden attack. North Korea, out of paranoia and fear, launches a nuclear strike on the United States, hitting its targets. The United States retaliates with a salvo of its own nuclear missiles. However, in order to hit North Korea, the missiles must pass over Russia. Attempts to communicate with the Russian president fail and Russia’s nuclear warning system makes him think it’s an attack on his country. So he launches his nuclear bombs, this time at the United States.

It’s a global nuclear war. And it happens in minutes.

That’s the setup at the heart of “Nuclear War: A Scenario,” a new book by investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen. The book, released at the end of March, outlines how one attack from an isolated state can set off a chain reaction of nuclear policy, with poor communication and split-second decisions triggering widespread nuclear war. It’s a fictional scenario, but one built on the very real mechanics and policies the United States has around its nuclear arsenal.

This past week it was reported that Legendary Pictures had optioned the book to adapt into a film. Trade publications say that Denis Villeneuve, the director behind the two recent “Dune” films as well as thrillers such as “Sicario” and “Prisoners,” plans to adapt the nonfiction book after he finishes the third “Dune” film, “Dune Messiah.”

For Jacobsen, a journalist who has written extensively about the Pentagon, DARPA, paramilitary operations, and other elements of war and national defense, the decision to focus on how a nuclear war could play out came out of surprise at how little the public seemed to be aware of the real mechanisms in place around the nuclear arsenal. She told Task & Purpose that during the Trump administration, when the former president was using his “fire and fury” rhetoric when warning North Korea against nuclear tests, she started to wonder what would happen if nuclear deterrence failed. There was also serious talk inside the Trump administration about the dangers of sole presidential authority concerning nuclear weapons: a president has sole authority to decide whether or not to launch. The general public was also suspicious if that was a real policy, Jacobsen said.

It is.

But despite all of that, it still felt like people weren’t talking about the risk of nuclear war.

“Then when the Ukraine war happened and there was a moment of fundamental shift in perception,” Jacobsen said. “Then things became even more dangerous.”

“Nuclear War: A Scenario” itself takes a very direct, narrative approach to the issue. As dread-inducing as it is, during the play-by-play of each minute leading to mass destruction, Jacobsen introduces and quickly explains much of the technology and security infrastructure behind the nuclear arsenal, never getting bogged down by acronyms or inside baseball terminology.

Indeed, Jacobsen writes, the United States government has been preparing for and outlining expected scenarios for a General Nuclear War since the 1960s. Warning systems, launch mechanics, and a massive infrastructure for housing, maintaining, and potentially firing nuclear weapons built up, with their own secrecy and specific terms. For “Nuclear War: A Scenario,” Jacobsen talked with dozens of experts, from nuclear weapons designers to former military commanders, who helped peel back the curtain and secrecy. That included fresh interviews with former heads of U.S. Strategic Command, nuclear submarine forces, top scientists for the military, and other people directly engaged with nuclear policy. In cases where there are gaps from direct interviews, Jacobsen drew on declassified documents or written memoirs from those who were there.

“One of the reasons people who are now in their 80s and 90s talked to me is that they feel we are at a time where [the danger of Global Nuclear War] is as great as the Cold War,” she said. “There are new players, new nuclear-armed nations that are far more unpredictable than those who have had nuclear weapons in the past.”

Subscribe to Task & Purpose Today. Get the latest military news and culture in your inbox daily.

To come up with the book’s fictional scenario, Jacobsen looked at how the United States trains and games for potential nuclear attacks. The idea for using North Korea as the instigator came from interviews with Dr. Richard Garwin, the nuclear physicist who designed the Ivy-Mike thermonuclear bomb and became an advisor to several administrations on nuclear weapons. Garwin told her that his biggest worry was “one nihilistic madman with a nuclear arsenal.” From there, she started looking at how an attack from North Korea might unfold, including the real issue of American missiles on target for the country having to pass over Russia.

“The nuclear war scenario proposed in this book could happen tomorrow. Or later today,” Jacobsen notes early in the book.

There have been several near misses throughout the Cold War, where a global nuclear war was averted. Those include Stanislav Petrov’s actions in 1983, when the Soviet air defense officer went against protocol and judged an early warning alert of a nuclear attack as a false alarm, preventing a Soviet strike in perceived retaliation.

Jacobsen told Task & Purpose that nuclear war, however, is a sequence — a fast-moving one where it would be hard to stop things spiraling out of control. When asked if there was a chance where the escalating series of events could be stopped, by officials or a Petrov-like figure, Jacobsen pointed to the events of the Proud Prophet exercise. The 1983 exercise, one of the few nuclear war games to be declassified (although most details are still heavily redacted), tested various nuclear scenarios, including the possibility of conducting “limited” nuclear strikes against the Soviets. One participant, Paul Bracken, has written about it since the declassification, shedding light on how those scenarios all ended in disaster.

“What Bracken said in his book was that everyone came away from Proud Prophet depressed,” Jacobsen said. “No matter how nuclear war begins, if NATO’s involved or not, if tactical nuclear weapons are used or not, if China is involved or not, it still ends in nuclear armageddon. That was my north star.”

Despite that, she is not nihilistic about nuclear doom. Greater awareness of the actual danger, such as in movies and television, can help leaders and the public take the threat of nuclear war more seriously. Jacobsen pointed to the 1983 miniseries “The Day After,” which depicts — in detail — the aftermath of nuclear strikes on the United States. Millions watched, including Ronald Reagan, who went from a hawk on defense to working with the Soviet Union toward de-escalation and disarmament. Jacobsen said that the “Reagan reversal” helped the world’s arsenal go from more than 70,000 nuclear weapons in stock to approximately 12,500 across nine nations. “That is progress. You have to be able to communicate.”

She said the style of her book, telling the scenario in a direct, dramatic narrative way, was meant to help get the public engaged and be a part of the conversation. That, and art that can illustrate the severity of the issue, like “The Day After,” are important in preventing the worst-case scenario. As her research showed, it doesn’t take long for the world to spiral into nuclear destruction.

“What I was most puzzled by [while working on the book] was how much money has been spent and continues to be spent to make sure we never have a nuclear war by spending enormous amounts on nuclear weapons,” Jacobsen said. “It seems the Reagan reversal is a far wiser way to go.”

“Nuclear War: A Scenario” is available now.

The latest on Task & Purpose

• Former Army base warns of grenades on local trails
• ‘Black Hawk Down’ Ranger veteran awarded Silver Star
• The Air Force’s new $60 million Special Warfare center honors a fallen pararescueman
• Former Air National Guardsman may have defected to Russia
• Marine battalion commander fired for “loss of trust and confidence”

taskandpurpose.com · by Nicholas Slayton · April 8, 2024

​18. Amid lawmaker scrutiny, DoD assessing operational joint force HQ in Indo-Pacific, Austin says

How about a Far East Command?  Is anyone asking the question: is this an indicator that INDOPACOM is too big and its scope of responsibilities too broad to be effective?

Amid lawmaker scrutiny, DoD assessing operational joint force HQ in Indo-Pacific, Austin says - Breaking Defense

“What I've asked my team to do is look at this and do an assessment to make sure that we get it right, and we understand the operational and cost issues associated with this,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told senators.

breakingdefense.com · by Ashley Roque · April 9, 2024

Rear Adm. Greg Huffman (left) recites the oath of office during a ceremony administered by Adm. Samuel Paparo, currently the commander of US Pacific Fleet on April 3. Huffman will assume a new role to lead the activation of Joint Task Force-Micronesia. (US Navy/2nd Class Jeremy R. Boan)

WASHINGTON — While the Pentagon is standing up a new Joint Task Force-Micronesia under the direction of a two-star admiral, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told lawmakers his team is still studying the pros and cons of a regional, operational joint force headquarters.

“What I’ve asked my team to do is look at this and do an assessment to make sure that we get it right, and we understand the operational and cost issues,” Austin told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee today.

“They are doing that, and they’ll come back to me shortly on that … in a couple of weeks,” he later added.

As the Biden administration eyes China as its top military competitor and crafts contingency plans for that region, lawmakers have been drawing attention to a divide over the Pentagon’s new Joint Task Force-Micronesia and a Congressional mandate for an operational joint force headquarters.

The spilt stems, in part, from a provision in the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), mandating Pentagon leaders to establish a joint force headquarters inside the Indo-Pacific Command area of operations. That headquarters was to be a sub-unified command, or similar entity, assuming the command-and-control responsibility for contingency responses throughout the region [PDF].

But since then, the Pentagon has greenlit the creation of the Joint Task Force-Micronesia, and earlier this month, Rear Adm. Greg Huffman was named to lead the new outfit from Guam. While the department didn’t respond to questions about Huffman’s mandate, the photo press release said his task force is responsible for the homeland defense of Guam, the US Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, Federated States of Micronesia and the Republic of Palau. The new task force, it added, will also provide defense support to civil authorities, along with humanitarian assistance.

But lawmakers have said that’s not what they had in mind when they penned the FY23 NDAA.

Senate authorizers, for example, previously said they were concerned the Joint Task Force-Micronesia is too narrowly focused on providing mission support and will not satisfy the requirement for an operational joint force headquarters [PDF]. On the other hand, the proposed operational joint force headquarters would integrate Joint All-Domain Command and Control efforts with mission command and control, as well as new capabilities like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA’s) Assault Breaker II designed to create a common data layer.

When Congress approved its final version of the FY24 NDAA in December 2023, they directed Austin to provide oversight committees with an update the implementation plan to include: the personnel, supporting infrastructure, and operational chain of command relationships; address what is needed for the “potential establishment” of an additional, fully equipped and persistent joint force headquarters; and identify just what rank the commander should be. (Today Austin did not disclose if the ongoing analysis is tackling all of those topics.)

Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, including its top ranking Republican, Sen. Roger Wicker, continue to raise the issue including in today’s hearing on the department’s FY25 budget request. The divide was also raised in February when Adm. Samuel Paparo headed to Capitol Hill for his nomination hearing to take the reins as the next head of the Indo-Pacific Command.

In written questions given to the four-star flag officer ahead of his hearing, lawmakers asked about his understanding of the operational joint force headquarters mandate and how it relates to the Joint Task Force-Micronesia.

“My understanding is that the… National Defense Authorization Act required the creation of an operational Joint Task Force to integrate joint, all-domain command and control effects in the Indo-Pacific theater, to deter aggression, and, if necessary, to fight and win in conflict,” Paparo wrote.

“If confirmed, I will assess all options and make appropriate recommendations to meet the intent of the NDAA as informed by the capabilities and actions of our adversaries, the strategic and operational environments, and our own strengths, weaknesses, and posture,” he later added.

The Senate has since confirmed his nomination.

breakingdefense.com · by Ashley Roque · April 9, 2024

19. Terrorists are relocating rapidly due to climate change

​

This might make some people's heads hurt.

But as a good friend and longtime Special Forces brother would ask: is it climate change or is it how the industrial countries in the world are responding to climate change with policies that harm underdeveloped or developing countries and which from those countries' perspectives appear to be designed to hold them back.

Terrorists are relocating rapidly due to climate change

earth.com

Climate change is casting a long shadow over global security, as new research reveals a significant correlation between environmental changes and shifts in terrorist activity.

This exploratory study, led by Dr. Jared Dmello from the University of Adelaide‘s School of Social Sciences, underscores the complex ways in which climate change directly impacts patterns of terrorism.

Consequently, this marks a critical advancement in our understanding of global security dynamics.

Climate change and terrorists

The study carefully examined how weather factors like temperature, rainfall, and altitude relate to terrorism in India.

Dr. Dmello explains, “Our suitability analyses show a clear connection between all tested climatological variables and the changing patterns of terrorist activity.”

The findings indicate that as cities become more crowded, especially those with better climates, extremists are forced to leave their traditional areas. These places have become less livable because of changing weather conditions.

Furthermore, the research extends beyond the sites of attacks, indicating that climate change likely impacts other aspects of extremist behavior. Consequently, environmental changes also affect the choice of locations where they train.

“The average temperatures in India hit record highs during our study, providing a comprehensive backdrop to assess the intersection of climate change and extremism,” Dr. Dmello remarks.

Terrorist relocation due to climate change

The intensity of climate change contributed to terrorists relocating to new areas. Additionally, this shift in terrorist activity also followed a seasonal pattern.

Dr. Dmello stresses the broader implications of this correlation: “This research shows that stopping the damaging effects of climate change is not just an environmental issue but one that is directly tied to national security and defense.”

Global security and social equity

This research is crucial for grasping the complex factors like climate change driving terrorist activity. It also plays a key role in shaping global security strategies, including those of Australia.

Despite experiencing lower levels of terrorism compared to India, Australia faces its challenges with radicalization.

Dr. Dmello points out, “Addressing radicalization in Australia necessitates tackling broader societal issues such as homelessness, food and water security, and social equity to create a safer environment.”

Linking climate change and terrorism

Recently joining the University of Adelaide in early 2024, Dr. Dmello has achieved significant milestones. He has co-edited a book on security in the Arctic and plans to delve deeper into how resource inequities affect radicalization.

“My recent projects aim to dissect the factors influencing radicalization in Australia, aiming to foster collaboration with the government and law enforcement to deter extremist ideologies,” he shares. This statement signals his commitment to expanding this vital research on a global scale.

Dr. Dmello’s work illuminates the complex link between climate change and terrorist activity. It advocates for a comprehensive approach to national security, one that encompasses environmental stewardship, social equity, and international cooperation.

Consequently, this is a call to action for governments worldwide to rethink their strategies for the dual challenges of climate change and terrorism. It highlights the importance of integrated approaches to secure a safer future for everyone.

Implications of climate change and terrorism link

The study led by Dr. Dmello on the interconnection between climate change and terrorist activity offers several crucial implications:

National security planning

It highlights the need for security strategies to incorporate climate change as a significant factor influencing terrorism, suggesting that traditional counter-terrorism approaches might need reevaluation and adaptation.

Policy development

The findings advocate for policies that address both climate change and terrorism together, rather than in isolation, emphasizing integrated approaches that can tackle the root causes of both issues.

International cooperation

The global nature of climate change and its impact on terrorism underline the importance of international collaboration. Countries can share intelligence, strategies, and technologies to combat these intertwined challenges effectively.

Environmental policies

The research underscores the role of environmental stewardship in preventing radicalization and terrorism. This could lead to increased investment in sustainable development, renewable energy, and climate resilience efforts.

Public awareness and education

By establishing a link between climate change and terrorist activity, the study calls for increased public awareness and education. Understanding these connections can drive public support for policies that address both environmental protection and security.

Research and innovation

The implications for future research are significant, encouraging further investigation into how climate-related factors influence other forms of conflict and security issues. It also opens avenues for developing new technologies and methodologies to predict and mitigate the impacts of climate change on global security.

Societal well-being

Addressing the societal issues that lead to radicalization, such as homelessness, food and water security, and social equity, as mentioned by Dr. Dmello, is crucial. This holistic approach can lead to a more stable and peaceful society by tackling the underlying issues that fuel discontent and extremism.

Overall, the study calls for a rethinking of how societies view and deal with the challenges of climate change and terrorism, advocating for integrated solutions that address the environmental, social, and political dimensions of these global issues.

The full study was published in the journal Applied Security Research.

—–

Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.

Check us out on EarthSnap, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls and Earth.com.

—–

earth.com

20. US has seen no evidence that Israel has committed genocide, Austin says

I concur with the SECDEF. I would also argue that political leaders who make such allegations not only harm Israel but also US national security because of our alliance with Israel. I think allegations of genocide are at best the resullt of ignorance or intellectual dishonesty or at worst deliberate siding with terrorists. That is not to say that there have not been tragic mistakes and tragic collateral damage as Israel works to defend itself from any future attacks by the terrorists of Hamas. It seems that we have forgotten how the war started or what are the objectives of the aggressor, Hamas. 

US has seen no evidence that Israel has committed genocide, Austin says

The Pentagon chief’s comments come as pressure builds on the Biden administration and Democrats over U.S. support for the conflict.

Politico

The Pentagon chief’s comments come as pressure builds on the Biden administration and Democrats over U.S. support for the conflict.

04/09/2024 11:03 AM EDT

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Tuesday rebuffed arguments that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, saying he’s seen no evidence to suggest it.

“We don’t have any evidence of genocide being [committed]” by Israel in Gaza, Austin told the Senate Armed Services Committee during a budget hearing, where his testimony was interrupted several times by protesters.

Austin’s comments come as pressure builds on the Biden administration and Democrats over U.S. support for the conflict.

They also come after a committee member, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), said last week that international officials could determine that the war in Gaza legally constitutes genocide.

Pressed by the panel’s top Republican, Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, Austin stopped short of labeling the Oct. 7 attacks against Israel by Hamas a genocide, though he called it a “horrific terrorist attack” and said it “certainly is a war crime.”

Austin made the case for a foreign aid package — stalled in the House — that would unlock billions in military aid for Israel, along with Ukraine and Pacific allies. At the same time, the Pentagon chief underscored efforts to free up humanitarian aid to Palestinians.

“I really do believe … that if they want to create a lasting effect in terms of stability, then I think that something needs to help the Palestinian people,” Austin said in an exchange with Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.).

Austin also said a military operation to establish a pier in Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid by sea will be up and running by late April.

“It is something that we have the ability to do and we should do,” Austin said of the pier operation.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) faulted the Israeli government for “collectively punishing” Gazans by throttling access to water and humanitarian aid. He pointed to recent comments from World Food Programme Director Cindy McCain that a famine is imminent.

When asked by Kaine about the issue, Austin said a lack of food and medicine “will accelerate violence, and it will have the effect of ensuring that there is a long term conflict because the Palestinian people will have been disadvantaged to such a great degree. This doesn’t have to happen.”

“We are doing everything we can to encourage the Israelis to open more land routes [for aid] and to separate the Palestinian people from Hamas,” Austin added. “Failure to do so will create more terrorists.”

POLITICO

Politico

21. There is more to NATO burden sharing than the 2% spending dogma

There is more to NATO burden sharing than the 2% spending dogma

Defense News · by Collin Meisel · April 9, 2024

As the NATO alliance prepares to gather this summer to celebrate its 75th birthday, rhetoric around “burden sharing” – specifically whether member countries are paying enough, where “enough” is typically defined as military spending equal to 2% of GDP – is likely to heat up. With a war raging just off NATO’s eastern flank as Ukraine defends itself against an aggressor that has become NATO’s raison d’etre, it’s a fair question: Are NATO member countries doing enough?

Although many NATO member countries’ militaries need work, obsession with the 2% of GDP metric belies a fundamental misunderstanding of military capabilities and national preparedness for conflict. Spending is important, but there is much more that matters.

Rather than serving as a long-standing foundation of the NATO alliance, after years of serving as an unofficial benchmark, the metric that 2% of each member country’s GDP should be dedicated to military spending was only officially agreed upon by NATO members at a summit in 2014 – and it was a target that was to be met “within a decade,” or by 2024. At the time of the summit, in the wake of Russia’s occupation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, NATO leaders were worried about their militaries’ readiness, and several NATO countries reported having low – even negative for Croatia and Italy – defense expenditures as a percent of GDP.

Many politicians and analysts have used continued low levels of defense spending in Europe as a cudgel against NATO “free-riders.” And while free-riding in NATO is certainly a problem for some countries, military spending as a percent of GDP is a poor metric of which countries are the free-riders. With U.S. defense spending hovering around 4% of GDP in recent years, it would appear that the U.S. is contributing more than twice as much to NATO’s defense as, say, Denmark with defense spending at 1.4% of GDP as of 2022. But this fails to account for the geographic distribution of such spending. In one analysis, about 25% of U.S. military spending goes toward Europe, with a much smaller share going toward U.S. homeland and North American security. From this perspective, there is not much daylight between the U.S. and Danish contributions to NATO as a share of their respective GDPs.

Moreover, spending does not necessarily equal capabilities. It depends on how that money is spent. Among the top defense spenders in NATO in relative terms, Greece spent 3% of its GDP on its military in 2023, and yet arguably much of that spending has been focused on countering Turkey – a NATO ally. Meanwhile, the Netherlands, with 2023 defense spending at 1.7%, has played a leading role in providing support to Ukraine as it fights back against aggression from NATO’s main adversary, Russia.

In some respects, European NATO member countries are far ahead of the U.S. in terms of contributions to national and international security, assuming we take a broader perspective than military spending alone. If we have a narrow interpretation of what type of spending contributions toward national and international security, there is much we will fail to consider, including spending that improves human capital and supports the creation of unique technological advantages. While the U.S. spends extraordinary amounts on health care, it does so inefficiently, leading to much poorer health outcomes – and thus degraded human capital – relative to several European NATO member countries like Germany. Another example involves the opportunity cost born by high-tech manufacturing company ASML in the Netherlands, which – for reasons important to NATO’s security – will not sell to China its extreme ultraviolet lithography equipment for advanced semiconductor manufacturing despite substantial Chinese demand.

This is not to give Europeans a free pass. Continent-wide, there has been a substantial underproduction of artillery shells and other munitions across Europe, whether countries have met the 2% target or not. While it is true that Poland, for example, is beginning to step up in this respect, it is doing so nearly two years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine when the threat that Russia poses to Europe became blindingly obvious.

Several European militaries still need to substantially improve their readiness, including Germany. By its own defense minister’s admission, the German military “will not be able to hold its own in high-intensity combat and will also be able to fulfill its obligations to NATO to a limited extent,” projecting that the Bundeswehr will “not be sufficiently equipped with large-scale equipment in 2027.” But whether Germany or any other NATO member’s military spending is adequate must be measured by outputs – or capabilities – rather than inputs – or spending as a percentage of GDP. Otherwise, NATO’s 2% target may become a fig leaf rather than an indicator of sufficient preparation.

Collin Meisel is the associate director of geopolitical analysis at the University of Denver’s Frederick S. Pardee Center for International Futures, a geopolitics and modeling expert at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, and a nonresident fellow at The Henry L. Stimson Center.

22. Two-Theater Tragedy: A Reluctant Europe Cannot Easily Escape a Sino-American War Over Taiwan

​Excerpts:

Europe is short of capabilities across the board, but key capabilities needed would be command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, particularly in the realm of space, heavy lift and transports to reinforce the eastern states, as well as long-range conventional precision strike. These capabilities are not financially or technologically impossible to acquire, but their near-absence now reflects the uneven political will across the NATO alliance, with some member states clearly pulling more weight relative to the others. In a grand strategic sense, to support the U.S. effort in the Indo-Pacific, Europeans would ironically be better off doing hard work closer to home, shoring up European defense, and, in maritime security, protecting the approaches to Europe, as well as its unimpeded access to energy in the Persian Gulf. Maritime security from a European perspective would thus extend in any real military sense to the western Indian Ocean.

The Thucydides Trap is not preordained, and there is nothing inevitable about a Sino-American confrontation. European states should continue to underline to their American and Chinese counterparts that it is time to cool down the rising temperature of the great power relationship; two world wars were more than enough.

Two-Theater Tragedy: A Reluctant Europe Cannot Easily Escape a Sino-American War Over Taiwan - War on the Rocks

TIM SWEIJS AND PAUL VAN HOOFT

warontherocks.com · by Tim Sweijs · April 10, 2024

It is a trope in superhero stories that the hero must try and be in two places at once. Europe is trying to do the same by splitting its military capabilities between the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific. But neither European states individually nor Europe collectively are or have been superpowers for a very long time. Rather than dilute the fragile sense of purpose and growing power they have built in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, European powers should prioritize their home region. Backfilling maritime security in the Euro-Atlantic up to the western Indian Ocean is a more valuable distribution of tasks with the United States than sending limiting capabilities that are unfit for the deterrence of China.

Despite expressing a growing interest in the Indo-Pacific, Europeans have not seriously considered acting on behalf of Taiwan in case of a war between the United States and China. In any case, European countries lack the capacity to do so. A conflict over Taiwan could play out in any number of ways. We assume a conflict in which both superpowers use the full range of their conventional capabilities.

Even if enough European states would reach a consensus to respond with military means, all of the countries, including Europe’s two premier military powers, France and the United Kingdom, lack the capability to make a sustained effort in such a scenario.

Yet a war over Taiwan between China and the United States would have a profound impact on Europe’s prosperity and security, even if they avert worst-case scenarios — including nuclear escalation. The economic and security costs for all of Europe would be extensive. The breakdown of supply chains would disrupt European economies, leading to recession and, potentially, a significant contraction of gross domestic product.

De-risking will then evolve into sudden de-coupling across sectors with outsized negative effects on de-industrialized Europe. The security effects will be equally sizeable. Systemic wars, those wars concerning “the international [or regional] system as it existed prior to the outbreak of war,” tend to spread geographically, invite external intervention, and spur system-wide polarization. As a result, staying on the sidelines and insulating themselves, as European statesattempted to do with varying success a century ago, is unlikely to succeed in a war between the great powers of the 21st century. Even if the two majors manage to keep a war over Taiwan “local,” it will definitively draw U.S. resources from Europe to the western Pacific, severely curtailing Washington’s bandwidth for a conventional fight in Europe.

The result would be a forced U.S. pivot to the Pacific. Moreover, any conflict will lead to a vacuum that will upset deterrence in the European theater and expose European vulnerabilities and dependencies on the United States.

European leaders seem reluctant to accept this inconvenient reality partly because they still hope to maintain a mutually beneficial relationship with China in other domains — specifically trade — and partly because of a tendency toward risk avoidance that has become engrained in many European states’ approaches to international security over the past decades. This puts Europe at risk. European leaders should, therefore, prepare to help deter China through economic means, to strengthen the resilience of regional powers, and to gear up to defend Europe to relieve pressure on the United States should war break out.

Become a Member

European Position: Long on International Law, Short on Concrete Military Support

Leaders of the principal European powers such as Germany, France, and the United Kingdom have refrained from taking a strong position on Taiwan, as has the European Union itself. If asked about a Taiwan scenario, the tendency in Europe is to reiterate support for international law and condemn any potential violation of the status quo. Last April, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock stated that “a unilateral and violent change in the status quo would not be acceptable to us as Europeans,” in a joint conference with Chinese counterpart Qin Gang in Beijing. French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna echoed that statement and expressed French support for the “shared principles of regulation of an international order based on the rule of law.” U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak argued that his government “is completely aligned in substance and in language with all our allies,” with Britain’s Integrated Review Refresh of 2023 expressing opposition to “any unilateral change in the status quo” in the Taiwan Strait and in the East and South China Seas. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen emphasized Europe’s call “for peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait” in an address to the European Parliament, as did European Union chief diplomat Josep Borrell.

While European leaders pay lip service to the wider economic impact of a war in Taiwan, very few of them have articulated more concrete responses while in office. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, for instance, former NATO secretary-general and former Danish prime minister, suggested that a message be sent to China that an attack on Taiwan will “provoke profound and comprehensive economic sanctions.” In a report from the foreign affairs committee in August, the British parliament referred to Taiwan as an “independent country” whose right to self-determination merits full British support in an official document for the first time. During a visit to Taiwan, one of the European Parliament’s vice presidents affirmed that Europe “won’t turn a blind eye to China’s threats to Taiwan.” Meanwhile, other European parliament statements expressed support for “initiatives aimed at dialogue and confidence-building,” in response to China’s live-fire military exercises after former U.S. Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi’s August 2022 visit to Taiwan.

European Reluctance

European leaders’ reluctance toward taking a clear stance on Taiwan partially derives from the desire to avoid alienating China entirely. This is not just because Europe has huge economic interests in China’s massive markets, but also because European leaders still retain hope that they can maintain a “dialogue” and redirect Chinese behavior toward more productive ends such as shared interests on the climate, biodiversity, and AI. The E.U. Commission’s 2019 E.U.-China strategic outlook statement that China is an economic “competitor” and a systemic “rival” but also a “partner” reflects this conflicted inner monologue that continues to reverberate in European minds.

Moreover, there is also a clear awareness among European leaders that Europe as of yet lacks the capabilities to credibly deter China, though vague allusions to European aspirations can be found in references to “deterrence diplomacy.” French President Emmanuel Macron was crystal-clear about Europe’s limited capabilities, noting that since “Europeans cannot resolve the crisis in Ukraine,” it would be difficult to credibly say they would act on Taiwan, adding that “if you really want to increase tensions that’s the way to do it.” The growing European naval presence in the region is therefore intended to keep the sea routes open and secure and prevent “might makes right” from becoming a fact. The goal is to maintain dialogue and “cooperation not confrontation,” with freedom of navigation operations ostensibly not being directed at “a specific country.” In this spirit, European reluctance also contains another kind of calculation: By not giving Beijing the sense that U.S. allies both in the region and in Europe are ganging up on it, they hope to prevent China from seeing the situation as one in which it has been presented with a dichotomous choice to either invade Taiwan or beat a humiliating retreat.

Sleepwalkers

Despite this clear reluctance, European states — individually and as a collective — are at risk of sleepwalking into picking sides. Awakening to China’s rise, in the economic realm they have joined U.S. export controls on advanced technologies exports to China after cutting off Huawei from supplying technology for the core of European 5G critical infrastructure. Tellingly, alongside Japan’s export controls, the Netherlands has acquiesced to American demands to prevent the Dutch company ASML from selling its most advanced lithography systems to China, which are necessary to produce the chips for advanced AI applications. Also in the military realm, Europeans risk stumbling into taking a position. Crucially, the inclusion of China in the 2022 NATO Strategic Concept as one of the “authoritarian actors [that] challenge our interests, values and democratic way of life” has made it difficult to claim that the European allies of the United States are not picking sides.

Unsurprisingly, the Chinese government has not taken kindly to this perceived shift either, with party-affiliated outfits warning Europeans not to give in to U.S. pressure to jump on its bandwagon and gang up on China. Europeans are attempting to carefully walk the line between deterring China, reassuring regional states, and signaling support for the United States, on the one hand, and avoiding damaging their own interests with China or exacerbating the spiral, on the other. But while, in the view of the authors of this piece, Europeans are right in their intention to attempt this balance, they are wrong to believe it will suffice or be sufficiently convincing to either Washington or Beijing, let alone decisively shape the calculations of either. Whatever Europeans desire, the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific regions are linked economically, and both theaters are linked militarily by virtue of the central role the United States plays in both.

The Problem with Firewalls

The issue is that separation of two regions and two theaters is historically fraught with problems. The argument here is not that in case of a war over Taiwan, the world will inevitably fall into two blocs. Instead, we note that, historically speaking, the demarcation of conflict dynamics from one geographical theater to another has very seldom held. Only if the principal protagonists explicitly agreed to contain their conflict to one theater did such a demarcation stand a chance, but such occasions have been rare.

For example, during the Cold War, there was a moratorium on direct contact between the United States and the Soviet Union in the core (Europe) but allowance for proxy wars in the periphery (outside of Europe), which the superpowers only adhered to after the Berlin Deadline and Cuban Missile Crises. That said, even then many of the proxy wars were driven by fears of loss of credibility to allies and adversaries in the core. Such demarcations were instrumental in avoiding direct contact and staving off disaster.

However, most of the time, extraregional spillover of conflicts and their consequences was the rule rather than the exception. For example, the 1853–1856 Crimean War was arguably settled in the Baltics and the prospect of a naval blockade of Russia. Moreover, when conflicts escalate into war, firewalls have tended to collapse quickly, with conflict dynamics spreading from one theater to the next. “Localized wars” (between original belligerents) thus become “expanded wars” (with more actors becoming involved) and then “enlarged wars” (which have at least one major power joining on either side). Worryingly, in the past, wars between major and minor powers have had the largest risk of going down this route. Examples include the Crimean War and the two world wars.

For Europe: Too Few, Too Far

Should war over Taiwan break out, Europe can do very little in the maritime realm militarily speaking simply because European naval capabilities are in dire straits. As noted, a conflict between the United States and China over Taiwan could take various forms, be it of very short or longer duration with varying levels of intensity, ranging from a successful fait accompli, to a prevented fait accompli, to a failed fait accompli, which can then turn into a prolonged conflict and/or a slow strangle. We consider it likely that the military-technological nature of the conflict leads to perceptions of first-mover advantages that would push both superpowers to rapidly escalate, but our assessment applies to all these different scenarios.

In a paper published earlier this year, we showed that even the largest European naval powers, France and the United Kingdom, will be hard-pressed to make any real contribution for a sustained period of time in a scenario of high-intensity conflict. This does not hinge on a lack of strategic or operational skills or on qualitative shortcomings in the platforms of ships, though these are relatively weak on offensive and defensive capabilities, but on basic ship numbers and logistics.During peacetime, approximately three ships are in maintenance or repair, while their crews are training or resting. Assuming a ratio of one to four, in terms of surface vessels, France can only deploy one-quarter of an aircraft carrier at any time and three quarters of a destroyer, and the United Kingdom can only deploy one-half of a carrier and one and a half destroyers. While articulating the﷟ capabilities of Europe’s two premier military powers in fractions might seem silly, it serves to underline the extremely limited capacity and limited sustainability of a European military role in the western Pacific. Small numbers are amplified by serious distances. Given the limited European naval port infrastructure in the region and the vast distances between the Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific, with travel time measured in weeks rather than in days, their contribution will be extremely limited.

European surface ships and submarines will have some limited access to partner bases and depots for munitions, repairs, and supplies, but these are likely to be both under attack by China and in high demand by the United States and regional allies during a war over Taiwan. This will not resemble the military operations that were part of the so-called war on terror where all the major logistical nodes were largely safe from attack. Western military and civilian leaders have not yet come to terms with the theater-wide ferocity of a peer-to-peer great power conflict. Crucially, European surface ships do not have the means to survive a serious onslaught in an age of denial.

There are European assets that are useful in such a confrontation, however, and that have highly offensive capabilities and mobility, and are fungible. Very specific denial and land attack capabilities provided by the nuclear-powered attack submarines possessed by France (five in service currently with a sixth soon) and the United Kingdom (six in service currently) may be an exception, as well as fifth-generation fighter jets possessed by NATO allies, particularly the F-35s. Beside taking part in the underwater fight during a war over Taiwan, French and British attack submarines could be armed with cruise missiles to target land-based Chinese anti-access/air denial capabilities. However, French and British submarines would also be expected to play a critical role in ensuring NATO conventional deterrence in the Euro-Atlantic, where they would be involved in anti-submarine warfare activities against Russian attack submarines (18 in service), as well as provide protection for the British and French nuclear deterrents. During a western Pacific contingency, we expect a simultaneous heightened threat from Russia to take advantage of the situation as a result of which these limited French and British assets would be in high demand. Splitting capabilities between opposites of the planet would leave Europe even more underdefended.

Equally, NATO Europe’s fifth-generation air assets would be needed in any European scenario; airpower is both NATO’s clearest conventional advantage over Russia as well as a U.S. capability that is likely to be entirely absorbed by a war in the western Pacific, thereby further drawing away capabilities from Europe. This will undermine NATO’s deterrence posture vis-á-vis Russia back in Europe. Moreover, China’s own submarine fleet is growing, while its anti-submarine capabilities are improving.

Even if Europeans decide to remain on the sidelines, U.S. involvement in a war over Taiwan will leave behind a considerable power vacuum in Europe and create conventional deterrence gaps. It will create multiple windows of opportunity not just for Russia but also for smaller and middle powers to exploit whether by means of faits accompli or otherwise. Despite Europe’s much heralded Zeitenwende, European military power is still less than the sum of its parts simply due to its “lack of an integrated command structure and its deficient [command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] capacity.” European land forces face significant challenges in overcoming three decades of decay, as the International Institute for Strategic Studies reports, in terms of not just platforms but also of sheer numbers and readiness, alongside overall capability gaps in air and missile defense, long-range artillery systems and deep-fire systems, and munition supplies, amongst other things. Consequently, should a Sino-American war over Taiwan turn into a protracted conflict à la Ukraine, European defense industry would be extremely limited in terms of scaling up to meet U.S. demand; it is already falling behind on earlier promises made to Ukraine for munition supplies.

If No Superhero, What Then? Policy Options for Europeans

European leaders should realize that they are no superheroes and will remain far from being in the driver’s seat in case of a Sino-American confrontation over Taiwan. That does not mean they have no agency to act to prevent China from invading Taiwan, to insulate themselves, or to prepare for such an eventuality. To the contrary, there are three options that Europe should pursue.

First, European states — and specifically the European Union – could send a deterrent message to China through the threat of cutting off Chinese access to European markets: essentially mutually assured economic destruction. Though cutting off Russian access to the European Union was difficult and incomplete, it also underlined the credibility of European resolve. Though China is preparing for such a scenario, the risk that the European states would follow suit should give the Chinese Communist Party leadership, deeply concerned with domestic stability, another reason to doubt the desirability of a war over Taiwan. To bolster the credibility of this threat, Europeans should diversify their supply chains in the Indo-Pacific toward states less directly threatened in the case of a Sino-American war, as well as to Europe itself. This does not mean decoupling from China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, or other regional states. But it does mean increasing the overall resiliency of Europe’s economy and thereby its political will when the going gets tough.

Second, while seeking to dampen tensions between China and America, Europeans should try to strengthen the resiliency of regional powers, including a military and an institutional component. Europeans can supply military capabilities to small and middle powers to raise the costs of aggression and furnish them with active denial capabilities to defend against revisionist aggression. In parallel, Europe should try and strengthen multilateral frameworks. Europe should put the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea front and center to push China to cease its incremental but aggressive expansion in the region. At the same time, they should also put more pressure on the United States to ratify the convention. While such a dual-track strategy is unlikely to offer definitive solutions, it may help prop up the status quo and slow developments down sufficiently for the United States and China to find a new modus vivendi rather than end up in a disastrous war.

Third, European states should ramp up their capability investments further — as they have since the first Crimean crisis of 2014, Donald Trump’s 2016 election, and Russia’s 2022 invasion — to ensure they can defend themselves. They should do so in light of a possible U.S. absence, whether due to U.S. domestic turmoil or the increasing likelihood that an Asian war will fully absorb U.S. attention and resources.

Europe is short of capabilities across the board, but key capabilities needed would be command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, particularly in the realm of space, heavy lift and transports to reinforce the eastern states, as well as long-range conventional precision strike. These capabilities are not financially or technologically impossible to acquire, but their near-absence now reflects the uneven political will across the NATO alliance, with some member states clearly pulling more weight relative to the others. In a grand strategic sense, to support the U.S. effort in the Indo-Pacific, Europeans would ironically be better off doing hard work closer to home, shoring up European defense, and, in maritime security, protecting the approaches to Europe, as well as its unimpeded access to energy in the Persian Gulf. Maritime security from a European perspective would thus extend in any real military sense to the western Indian Ocean.

The Thucydides Trap is not preordained, and there is nothing inevitable about a Sino-American confrontation. European states should continue to underline to their American and Chinese counterparts that it is time to cool down the rising temperature of the great power relationship; two world wars were more than enough.

Become a Member

Tim Sweijs is the director of research at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies and a senior research fellow at the War Studies Research Centre of the Netherlands Defence Academy.

Paul van Hooft is a senior analyst at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, where he heads the Europe in the Indo-Pacific and the Future of Transatlantic Relations programs.

This Policy Brief was developed as part of the Bridging Allies initiative, led by the Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The Bridging Allies initiative is supported by the Australian Government through a grant by the Australian Department of Defence. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government or the Australian Department of Defence.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Tim Sweijs · April 10, 2024

23. America’s Best Friend in Asia: The Case for Elevating the U.S. Alliance With Japan

Some might want to compete with this headline. (but there should not be competition within the web of alliances) 

America’s Best Friend in Asia

The Case for Elevating the U.S. Alliance With Japan

By Jeffrey W. Hornung

April 10, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Jeffrey W. Hornung · April 10, 2024

Alliances are a bit like families: you may not have a favorite member, but there is always one you depend on most. Throughout the Cold War, NATO was the collective ally that the United States depended on most in its global effort to stop Soviet expansionism. But in the twenty-first century, with the growing slate of traditional and nontraditional security issues, many of which center on China, the United States’ new go-to ally is Japan.

Today, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will arrive at the White House for a state visit with U.S. President Joe Biden—the first such visit by a Japanese leader since 2015. The relationship has changed over the past decade but in ways that most Japan analysts could not have envisioned. Japan is now committed to spending close to two percent of its GDP on defense. This increase in funding is helping the country beef up its cybersecurity and acquire counterstrike capabilities to respond to enemy attacks. Japan has authorized the transfer of Patriot missiles to the United States and the export of advanced fighter jets abroad, and it is focusing on areas of national security that the country has long neglected. Altogether, these efforts demonstrate Japan’s determination to do more for its own defense and for the U.S.-Japanese alliance.

Meanwhile, the U.S.-Japanese relationship continues to change and deepen, including by expanding outside Northeast Asia—for example, aligning their foreign policy strategies to not just support a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” but to support what both countries now call a free and open international order based on the rule of law. The Biden administration should build on this momentum by elevating the U.S.-Japanese alliance to an even more central status in U.S. strategy. Unlike Europe, where the United States is one country in the multinational NATO alliance, U.S. alliances in the Indo-Pacific are separate, bilateral partnerships. Historically, this has been referred to as a hub-and-spoke system, in which the United States is the hub to each of its five treaty alliances (Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand), but those alliances, in turn, do not interact.

This structure no longer reflects reality and is a suboptimal way to deal with today’s security landscape. Given the central role Japan plays in U.S. thinking, Washington should seek out new methods of not just cooperating with Japan but leveraging its centrality to U.S. strategy to help promote the security and stability of the greater Indo-Pacific region. It is time to make the U.S.-Japanese alliance the hub of a growing confederation of regional groupings.

FROM PACIFICSM TO POWER

Just ten years ago, there was still an active debate over Japan’s strategic significance. Its economy was struggling, and its defense budget was limited. But developments over the past decade have laid these concerns to rest. After the United States abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation trade deal negotiated under President Barack Obama, Japan took the lead on the successor agreement, called the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. Tokyo has also promoted the rules and norms underpinning the international order through its Free and Open Indo-Pacific strategy, which other countries—including the United States—later adopted as their own. In these ways, Japan has not only picked a side in the geopolitical competition unfolding between China and the United States; it has put itself front and center.

Japan also started spending more on its own defense and focusing on areas it had ignored, such as munitions stockpiles, long-range missiles, and active cyber defense. It also began to exercise with militaries other than the United States’ and transfer military equipment abroad. In addition to signing bilateral security agreements with Australia and the United Kingdom—which enable these countries to conduct military exercises on each other’s soil—Japan also exported an advanced radar system to the Philippines and relaxed its defense export rules to allow the stealth fighter jet it is developing with the United Kingdom and Italy to be sold to other countries. Japanese leaders now talk more publicly about security issues far outside their own region, including Ukraine, but they also talk openly about possible roles Japan could play in a conflict brought about by a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

This Japan, one much more willing to involve itself in security affairs beyond its own defense, is exactly the kind of ally the United States needs in this moment of geopolitical competition. That reality is reflected in the U.S. Indo-Pacific Strategy, released in 2022, which says that the United States “will support and empower allies and partners as they take on regional leadership roles themselves.”

THE SPOKES

The United States says it is focusing on “three pillars” in its alliance with Japan. First, it plans to modernize the alliance’s roles, missions, and capabilities by working with Japan to acquire the most modern equipment possible and train alongside U.S. forces to ensure greater interoperability. Second, it will optimize U.S. force posture in the region as each military service implements changes based on new operational concepts it has been developing. Third, it will emphasize multilateral networking in the region. It is that last item that arguably needs the most attention from Washington.

There is nothing equivalent to NATO in the Indo-Pacific, but the United States has successfully established several “mini-lateral” agreements in the region that are rooted in U.S. treaty alliances and a shared concern about China. None of these deals are collective security agreements like NATO’s North Atlantic Treaty; instead, they include diplomatic groupings such as the Quad (composed of Australia, India, Japan, and the United States) and technological partnerships such as AUKUS (Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States). There are also economic arrangements such as the Chip 4 semiconductor grouping, which links Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States. Washington and Tokyo together also belong to trilateral groups with Australia, the Philippines, and South Korea, respectively, as the third party. The benefit of these groupings is their agility and adaptability, which allow like-minded countries to address a specific issue quickly if needed.

Japan is central to all these relationships in ways that other Indo-Pacific countries are not. For example, Japan is the only country that can boast economic prowess on a global scale, varying degrees of defense ties with all other U.S. mini-lateral partners, widespread diplomatic influence, and advanced capabilities for all three services of the Self-Defense Forces (Ground, Maritime, and Air) that are now enjoying increased funding. And as Kishida’s visit to Washington shows, although Japan is not a formal member of AUKUS, it is now poised to take part in the second pillar of the agreement, which focuses on advanced capability development, by promising closer ties with Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States on developing a variety of advanced capabilities and sharing technology. Japan is also one of NATO’s “partners across the globe,” which means it participates in the alliance’s discussions of mutual security concerns and cooperates in numerous security areas, such as arms control, maritime security, and space. No other U.S. Indo-Pacific ally plays such a key role in so many groupings of allies.

REINVENT THE WHEEL

It makes sense that the next evolutionary step in U.S. strategy should be to formalize this central role that Japan plays in the broader U.S. global network of like-minded partners. In lieu of an Asian NATO, networking existing mini-lateral relationships built around the U.S.-Japanese alliance offers a possible way forward. In other words, the U.S.-Japanese alliance should be the hub, and the rest of the Indo-Pacific countries and their many mini-laterals should be the spokes.

The U.S.-Japanese alliance hub could provide a focal point to discuss current security challenges—such as China, North Korea, and Russia—with U.S. allies and partners to help coordinate policies to deal with these actors, both in the Indo-Pacific and beyond. Although the growing patchwork of mini-laterals is convenient for the United States, it does not lend itself to coordination. To avoid disjointed approaches that could result in fragmented action or diluted outcomes, the United States should encourage other allies toward greater alignment in their regional strategies through reinforcing the main pillars of a Free and Open Indo-Pacific. And to avoid duplication and inefficiency in countries’ security and development assistance programs, like-minded countries should coordinate more fully with the United States and Japan to make the most of their collective efforts.

Members in this network of relationships can also do a better job of sharing information to boost everyone’s situational awareness. The United States and Japan are the only two allies capable of providing regular regional reach with their defense capabilities without detriment to their own national defenses. But other allies could share relevant information from their intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets with the U.S.-Japanese alliance to ensure greater situational awareness among the collective whole. Improved coordination can also help partners address concerns in emerging domains such as space and cyberspace. The U.S.-Japanese efforts in these domains are already advanced and therefore provide a good road map for other allies. Over the long term, the United States and Japan could also work to weave today’s separate trilateral military exercises into bigger multinational exercises.

This new “super grouping” should not jump into collective security arrangements or form a NATO-like defense pact. And other countries wouldn’t need to subordinate their independent foreign policy strategies or bilateral alliance relationships to the U.S.-Japanese alliance hub. A confederated approach would complement bilateral alliances, not replace them. The goal of this new alignment would be to better rationalize and align strategies to collectively cope with the challenges brought on by state and nonstate actors. Someday, there could be a joint security declaration, an agreement among like-minded partners that defines, in a nonbinding manner, broad areas of common interests and cooperation. But there are too many political and diplomatic issues that would have to be resolved to get to that step.

Many describe NATO as the United States’ indispensable alliance—and it remains a top priority. But given the geopolitical shift to the Indo-Pacific, it is time to make the U.S.-Japanese alliance far more central to American grand strategy.

• JEFFREY W. HORNUNG is the Japan Lead for the National Security Research Division and a Senior Political Scientist at RAND. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University.

Foreign Affairs · by Jeffrey W. Hornung · April 10, 2024

24. No Substitute for Victory: America’s Competition With China Must Be Won, Not Managed

So tell us what winning looks like.

Excerpts:

Generations of American leaders understood that it would have been unacceptable for the Cold War to end through war or U.S. capitulation. If the 1970s taught Washington anything, it is that trying to achieve a stable and durable balance of power—a détente—with a powerful and ambitious Leninist dictatorship is also doomed to backfire on the United States. The best strategy, which found its ultimate synthesis in the Reagan years, was to convince the Soviets that they were on a path to lose, which in turn fueled doubts about their whole system.

Washington is allowing the aim of its China policy to become process.

The U.S. victory wasn’t Reagan’s alone, of course. It was built on strategies forged by presidents of both parties and manifested in documents such as NSC-68, the 1950 Truman administration policy paper that argued that the United States’ “policy and actions must be such as to foster a fundamental change in the nature of the Soviet system.” One can draw a straight line from that document to National Security Decision Directive 75, the 1983 Reagan administration order that called for “internal pressure on the USSR to weaken the sources of Soviet imperialism.” In some ways, it was the détente years, not the Reagan years, that were an aberration in Cold War strategy.

Ironically, Reagan would end up pursuing a more fulsome and productive engagement with the Soviets than perhaps any of his predecessors—but only after he had strengthened Washington’s economic, military, and moral standing relative to Moscow and only after the Soviet Union produced a leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, with whom Reagan could make real progress. Reagan understood that sequencing was everything. He also knew that the confrontational first phase wouldn’t be easy or comfortable. His first directive on national security strategy, in May 1982, predicted, “The decade of the eighties will likely pose the greatest challenge to our survival and well-being since World War II.” It was a tense and unsettling period, to be sure, during which Reagan called out the Soviet Union as “the focus of evil in the modern world” and deliberately sought to weaken its economy and contest its destabilizing activities around the world. Yet it paid off.

Xi, who has vilified Gorbachev and fashioned his own leadership style after that of Joseph Stalin, has proved time and again that he is not a leader with whom Americans can solve problems. He is an agent of chaos. Washington should seek to weaken the sources of CCP imperialism and hold out for a Chinese leader who behaves less like an unrelenting foe. This does not mean forcible regime change, subversion, or war. But it does mean seeking truth from facts, as Chinese leaders are fond of saying, and understanding that the CCP has no desire to coexist indefinitely with great powers that promote liberal values and thus represent a fundamental threat to its rule.

The current mass exodus of Chinese people from their homeland is evidence they want to live in nations that respect human rights, honor the rule of law, and offer a wide choice of opportunities. As Taiwan’s example makes plain, China could be such a place, too. The road to get there might be long. But for the United States’ own security, as well as the rights and aspirations of all those in China, it is the only workable destination.

No Substitute for Victory

America’s Competition With China Must Be Won, Not Managed

By Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher

May/June 2024

Published on April 10, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher · April 10, 2024

Amid a presidency beset by failures of deterrence—in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and the Middle East—the Biden administration’s China policy has stood out as a relative bright spot. The administration has strengthened U.S. alliances in Asia, restricted Chinese access to critical U.S. technologies, and endorsed the bipartisan mood for competition. Yet the administration is squandering these early gains by falling into a familiar trap: prioritizing a short-term thaw with China’s leaders at the expense of a long-term victory over their malevolent strategy. The Biden team’s policy of “managing competition” with Beijing risks emphasizing processes over outcomes, bilateral stability at the expense of global security, and diplomatic initiatives that aim for cooperation but generate only complacency.

The United States shouldn’t manage the competition with China; it should win it. Beijing is pursuing a raft of global initiatives designed to disintegrate the West and usher in an antidemocratic order. It is underwriting expansionist dictatorships in Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela. It has more than doubled its nuclear arsenal since 2020 and is building up its conventional forces faster than any country has since World War II. These actions show that China isn’t aiming for a stalemate. Neither should America.

What would winning look like? China’s communist rulers would give up trying to prevail in a hot or cold conflict with the United States and its friends. And the Chinese people—from ruling elites to everyday citizens—would find inspiration to explore new models of development and governance that don’t rely on repression at home and compulsive hostility abroad.

In addition to having greater clarity about its end goal, the United States needs to accept that achieving it will require greater friction in U.S.-Chinese relations. Washington will need to adopt rhetoric and policies that may feel uncomfortably confrontational but in fact are necessary to reestablish boundaries that Beijing and its acolytes are violating. That means imposing costs on Chinese leader Xi Jinping for his policy of fostering global chaos. It means speaking with candor about the ways China is hurting U.S. interests. It means rapidly increasing U.S. defense capabilities to achieve unmistakable qualitative advantages over Beijing. It means severing China’s access to Western technology and frustrating Xi’s efforts to convert his country’s wealth into military power. And it means pursuing intensive diplomacy with Beijing only from a position of American strength, as perceived by both Washington and Beijing.

No country should relish waging another cold war. Yet a cold war is already being waged against the United States by China’s leaders. Rather than denying the existence of this struggle, Washington should own it and win it. Lukewarm statements that pretend as if there is no cold war perversely court a hot war; they signal complacency to the American people and conciliation to Chinese leaders. Like the original Cold War, the new cold war will not be won through half measures or timid rhetoric. Victory requires openly admitting that a totalitarian regime that commits genocide, fuels conflict, and threatens war will never be a reliable partner. Like the discredited détente policies that Washington adopted in the 1970s to deal with the Soviet Union, the current approach will yield little cooperation from Chinese leaders while fortifying their conviction that they can destabilize the world with impunity.

BIDEN’S NEW BASELINE

The administration’s China policy initially showed promise. President Joe Biden maintained the tariffs that President Donald Trump had imposed on Chinese exports in response to the rampant theft of U.S. intellectual property. He renewed, with some adjustments, the executive orders Trump had issued to restrict investment in certain companies affiliated with the Chinese military and to block the import of Chinese technologies deemed a national security threat. In a particularly important step, in October 2022, Biden significantly expanded the Trump administration’s controls on the export of high-end semiconductors and the equipment used to make them, slowing Beijing’s plans to dominate the manufacturing of advanced microchips. Across Asia, Biden’s diplomats pulled longtime allies and newer partners closer together. They organized the first summits of the Quad, or Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, bringing together the leaders of Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, and convened high-profile trilateral summits with the leaders of Japan and South Korea. Biden also unveiled AUKUS, a defense pact among Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

As it turned out, however, aggression would come from the opposite direction, in Europe. Less than three weeks before invading Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin had signed a “no limits” security pact with Xi in Beijing. In a prudent step after the invasion, Biden drew a redline by warning Xi in a video call that the U.S. government would impose sweeping sanctions if China provided “material support” to Moscow. Xi nonetheless found plenty of ways to support the Russian war machine, sending semiconductors, unarmed drones, gunpowder, and other wares. China also supplied Moscow with badly needed money in exchange for major shipments of Russian oil. Chinese officials, according to the U.S. State Department, even spent more money on pro-Russian propaganda worldwide than Russia itself was spending.

Beijing was also coordinating more closely with Iran and North Korea, even as those regimes sent weapons to help Moscow wage war in Europe. Yet Washington was pursuing siloed policies—simultaneously resisting Russia, appeasing Iran, containing North Korea, and pursuing a mix of rivalry and engagement with China—that added up to something manifestly incoherent. Indeed, the situation that Xi had forecast at the start of the Biden administration was becoming a reality: “The most important characteristic of the world is, in a word, ‘chaos,’ and this trend appears likely to continue,” Xi told a seminar of high-level Communist Party officials in January 2021. Xi made clear that this was a useful development for China. “The times and trends are on our side,” he said, adding, “Overall, the opportunities outweigh the challenges.” By March 2023, Xi had revealed that he saw himself not just as a beneficiary of worldwide turmoil but also as one of its architects. “Right now, there are changes, the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years,” he said to Putin on camera while wrapping up a visit to the Kremlin. “And we are the ones driving these changes together.”

If ever the time was ripe to call out Beijing for fomenting chaos and to start systematically imposing costs on the country in response, it was early 2023. Biden, inexplicably, was doing the opposite. On February 1, residents of Montana spotted a massive, white sphere drifting eastward. The administration was already tracking the Chinese spy balloon but had been planning to let it pass overhead without notifying the public. Under political pressure, Biden ordered the balloon shot down once it reached the Atlantic Ocean, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed a scheduled trip to Beijing to protest the intrusion. Press reports suggested the administration had kept quiet about the balloon in order to gather intelligence about it. But a troubling pattern of downplaying affronts by Beijing would persist in other contexts.

Lukewarm statements that pretend as if there is no cold war perversely court a hot war.

In June 2023, leaks to the press revealed that Beijing, in a remarkable echo of the Cold War, was planning to build a joint military training base in Cuba and had already developed a signals intelligence facility there targeting the United States. After a National Security Council spokesperson called reports about the spy facility inaccurate, a White House official speaking anonymously to the press minimized them by suggesting that Chinese spying from Cuba was “not a new development.” The administration also greeted with a shrug new evidence suggesting that COVID-19 may have initially spread after it accidentally leaked from a Chinese laboratory. If the virus, which has led to the deaths of an estimated 27 million people worldwide, turns out to have been artificially enhanced before it escaped, the revelation would mark a turning point in human history on par with the advent of nuclear weapons—a situation that already cries out for U.S. leadership to govern dangerous biological research worldwide.

In the spring of 2023, as Beijing’s actions grew bolder, Biden initiated what the White House termed an “all hands on deck” diplomatic campaign—not to impose costs on Beijing but to flatter it by dispatching five cabinet-level U.S. officials to China from May to August. Blinken’s June meeting with Xi symbolized the dynamic. Whereas Xi had sat amiably alongside the billionaire Bill Gates just days earlier, the U.S. secretary of state was seated off to the side as Xi held forth from the head of a table at the Great Hall of the People. For the first time in years, Xi appeared to have successfully positioned the United States as supplicant in the bilateral relationship.

What did the United States get in return for all this diplomacy? In the Biden administration’s tally, the benefits included a promise by Beijing to resume military-to-military talks (which Beijing had unilaterally suspended), a new dialogue on the responsible use of artificial intelligence (technology that Beijing is already weaponizing against the American people by spreading fake images and other propaganda on social media), and tentative cooperation to stem the flood of precursor chemicals fueling the fentanyl crisis in the United States (chemicals that are supplied mainly by Chinese companies).

Any doubts that Xi saw the American posture as one of weakness were dispelled after Hamas’s October 7 massacre in Israel. Beijing exploited the attack by serving up endless anti-Israeli and anti-American propaganda through TikTok, whose algorithms are subject to control by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Chinese diplomats, like Russian ones, met with Hamas’s leaders and provided diplomatic cover for the terrorist group, vetoing UN Security Council resolutions that would have condemned Hamas. And there is little sign Beijing has done anything, despite Washington’s requests, to help rein in attacks carried out by the Houthis on commercial vessels and U.S. warships in the Red Sea—attacks conducted by the Yemeni rebel group using Iranian missiles, including ones with technology pioneered by China. (Chinese ships, unsurprisingly, are usually granted free passage through the kill zone.)

Whether Xi is acting opportunistically or according to a grand design—or, almost certainly, both—it is clear he sees advantage in stoking crises that he hopes will exhaust the United States and its allies. In a sobering Oval Office address in mid-October, Biden seemed to grasp the severity of the situation. “We’re facing an inflection point in history—one of those moments where the decisions we make today are going to determine the future for decades to come,” he said. Yet bizarrely—indeed, provocatively—he made no mention of China, the chief sponsor of the aggressors he did call out in the speech: Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Through omission, Biden gave Beijing a pass.

THAT ’70S SHOW

The current moment bears an uncanny resemblance to the 1970s. The Soviet Union was undermining U.S. interests across the world, offering no warning of its ally Egypt’s 1973 surprise attack on Israel; aiding communists in Angola, Portugal, and Vietnam; and rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal and investing heavily in its conventional military. These were the bitter fruits of détente—a set of policies pioneered by President Richard Nixon and his top foreign policy adviser, Henry Kissinger, who stayed on and continued the approach under President Gerald Ford. By using pressure and inducement, as well as downplaying ideological differences, the United States tried to lure the Russians into a stable equilibrium of global power. Under détente, Washington slashed defense spending and soft-pedaled Moscow’s human rights affronts. The working assumption was that the Soviet Union’s appetite for destabilizing actions abroad would somehow be self-limiting.

But the Russians had their own ideas about the utility of détente. As the historian John Lewis Gaddis observed, the Soviets “might have viewed détente as their own instrument for inducing complacency in the West while they finished assembling the ultimate means of applying pressure—their emergence as a full-scale military rival of the United States.” Nixon and Kissinger thought détente would secure Soviet help in managing crises around the world and, as Gaddis put it, “enmesh the U.S.S.R. in a network of economic relationships that would make it difficult, if not impossible, for the Russians to take actions in the future detrimental to Western interests.” But the policy failed to achieve its goals.

President Jimmy Carter came into office in 1977 intending to keep détente in place, but the policy didn’t work for him either. His attempt to “de-link” Soviet actions that hurt U.S. interests from Soviet cooperation on arms control ultimately yielded setbacks in both categories. The Soviets became more aggressive globally, and a wary U.S. Congress, having lost faith in Moscow’s sincerity, declined to ratify SALT II, the arms control treaty that Carter’s team had painstakingly negotiated. Meanwhile, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, had grown increasingly skeptical of détente. Brzezinski felt that a turning point had come in 1978, after the Soviets sponsored thousands of Cuban soldiers to wage violent revolution in the Horn of Africa, supporting Ethiopia in its war with Somalia. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the following year was “the final nail in the coffin” for arms control talks, Brzezinski wrote in his journal—and for the broader policy of détente.

By the time President Ronald Reagan entered the White House, in 1981, Nixon and Kissinger’s invention was on its last legs. “Détente’s been a one-way street that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its aims,” Reagan stated flatly in his first press conference as president, effectively burying the concept.

Reagan sought to win, not merely manage, the Cold War. In a sharp departure from his immediate predecessors, he spoke candidly about the nature of the Soviet threat, recognizing that autocrats often bully democracies into silence by depicting honesty as a form of aggression. In 1987, when Reagan was preparing to give a speech within sight of the Berlin Wall, some of his aides begged him to remove a phrase they found gratuitously provocative. Wisely, he overruled them and delivered the most iconic line of his presidency: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

THE SMOKELESS WAR

Washington must adopt a similar attitude today and try harder to disseminate truthful information within China itself and to make it possible for Chinese citizens to communicate securely with one another. Tearing down—or at least blowing holes in—the “Great Firewall” of China must become as central to Washington’s approach today as removing the Berlin Wall was for Reagan’s.

Beijing is waging a bitter information war against the United States—which is losing, despite its natural advantages. Xi and his inner circle see themselves as fighting an existential ideological campaign against the West, as Xi’s words from an official publication in 2014 make clear:

The battle for “mind control” happens on a smokeless battlefield. It happens inside the domain of ideology. Whoever controls this battlefield can win hearts. They will have the initiative throughout the competition and combat. . . . When it comes to combat in the ideology domain, we don’t have any room for compromise or retreat. We must achieve total victory.

For Xi, the Internet is the “main battlefield” of this smokeless war. In 2020, the scholar Yuan Peng, writing before he resurfaced under a new name as a vice minister of China’s premier spy agency, also recognized the power of controlling speech online: “In the Internet era . . . what is truth and what is a lie is already unimportant; what’s important is who controls discourse power.” Xi has poured billions of dollars into building and harnessing what he calls “external discourse mechanisms,” and other Chinese leaders have specifically highlighted short-video platforms such as TikTok as the “megaphones” of discourse power. They aren’t afraid to use those megaphones. According to a February 2024 report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, TikTok accounts run by Chinese propaganda outfits “reportedly targeted candidates from both political parties during the U.S. midterm election cycle in 2022.”

As the CCP seeks to set the terms of global discourse, what it wants more than anything from the United States and the rest of the West is silence—silence about China’s human rights abuses, silence about its aggression toward Taiwan, and silence about the West’s own deeply held beliefs, which contrast irreconcilably with the party’s. It is no surprise, then, that so much of the CCP’s strategy on the smokeless battlefield is about drowning out speech it doesn’t like—both inside and outside China. It is American silence—not candor—that is truly provocative, for it signals to the CCP that China is advancing and the United States is retreating.

REARM, REDUCE, RECRUIT

What U.S. officials need first is clarity about the contest with China. They have to recognize that rising tensions are inevitable in the short run if the United States is to deter war and win the contest in the long run. Once they have faced these facts, they need to put in place a better policy: one that rearms the U.S. military, reduces China’s economic leverage, and recruits a broader coalition to confront China.

Xi is preparing his country for a war over Taiwan. On its current trajectory, the United States risks failing to deter that war, one that could kill tens of thousands of U.S. service members, inflict trillions of dollars in economic damage, and bring about the end of the global order as we know it. The only path to avoid this future is for Washington to immediately build and surge enough hard power to deny Xi a successful invasion of Taiwan. Yet the Biden administration’s latest budget request sheds badly needed combat power, proposing the retirement of ten ships and 250 aircraft and a drop in the production goal for Virginia-class submarines from two per year to just one. It replenishes only half the $1 billion that Congress authorized for the president to furnish military aid to Taiwan. And in its 2023 supplemental request, the White House asked for just over $5 billion in weapons and industrial base spending earmarked for the Indo-Pacific—barely five percent of the entire supplemental request. Looking at the budget trend line, one would think it was 1994, not 2024.

The Biden administration should immediately change course, reversing what are, in inflation-adjusted terms, cuts to defense spending. Instead of spending about three percent of GDP on defense, Washington should spend four or even five percent, a level that would still be at the low end of Cold War spending. For near-term deterrence in the Taiwan Strait, it should spend an additional $20 billion per year for the next five years, the rough amount needed to surge and disperse sufficient combat power in Asia. Ideally, this money would be held in a dedicated “deterrence fund” overseen by the secretary of defense, who would award resources to projects that best align with the defense of Taiwan.

The deterrence fund should headline a generational effort directed by the president to restore U.S. primacy in Asia. The priority should be to maximize existing production lines and build new production capacity for critical munitions for Asia, such as antiship and antiaircraft missiles that can destroy enemy targets at great distances. The Pentagon should also draw on the deterrence fund to adapt existing military systems or even civilian technology such as commercially available drones that could be useful for defending Taiwan. Complementing its Replicator Initiative, which tasks the services to field thousands of low-cost drones to turn the Taiwan Strait into what some have called “a boiling moat,” the Pentagon should quickly embrace other creative solutions. It could, for example, disperse missile launchers concealed in commercial container boxes or field the Powered Joint Direct Attack Munition, a low-cost kit that turns standard 500-pound bombs into precision-guided cruise missiles.

What China wants more than anything from the United States and the rest of the West is silence.

For U.S. forces to actually deter China, they need to be able to move within striking range. Given the maritime geography of the Indo-Pacific and the threat that China’s vast missile arsenal poses to U.S. bases, the State Department will need to expand hosting and access agreements with allies and partners to extend the U.S. military’s footprint in the region. The Pentagon, meanwhile, will need to harden U.S. military installations across the region and pre-position critical supplies such as fuel, ammunition, and equipment throughout the Pacific.

But the United States could keep the Chinese military contained and still lose the new cold war if China held the West hostage economically. Beijing is bent on weaponizing its stranglehold over global supply chains and its dominance of critical emerging technologies. To reduce Chinese leverage and ensure that the United States, not China, develops the key technologies of the future, Washington needs to reset the terms of the bilateral economic relationship. It should start by repealing China’s permanent normal trade relations status, which provides China access to U.S. markets on generous terms, and moving China to a new tariff column that features gradually increasing rates on products critical to U.S. national security and economic competitiveness. The revenue raised from increased tariffs could be spent on offsetting the costs that U.S. exporters will incur as a result of China’s inevitable retaliatory measures and on bolstering U.S. supply chains for strategically important products.

Washington must also halt the flow of American money and technology to Chinese companies that support Beijing’s military buildup and high-tech surveillance system. The Biden administration’s August 2023 executive order restricting a subset of outbound investment to China was an important step in the right direction, but it doesn’t go far enough. Washington must expand investment restrictions to include critical and emerging technologies such as hypersonics, space systems, and new biotechnologies. It must also put an end to U.S. financial firms’ disturbing practice of offering publicly traded financial products, such as exchange-traded funds and mutual funds, that invest in Chinese companies that are on U.S. government blacklists. Using the current export controls on advanced semiconductors as a model, the Department of Commerce should reduce the flow of critical technology to China by introducing similar export bans on other key areas of U.S. innovation, such as quantum computing and biotechnology.

The Chinese spy balloon falling into the ocean near Surfside Beach, South Carolina, February 2023

Randall Hill / Reuters

As China doubles down on economic self-reliance and phases out imports of industrial goods from the West, the United States needs to recruit a coalition of friendly partners to deepen mutual trade. Washington should strike a bilateral trade agreement with the United Kingdom. It should upgrade its bilateral trade agreement with Japan and establish a new one with Taiwan, agreements that could be joined by other eligible economies in the region. It should forge an Indo-Pacific digital trade agreement that would facilitate the free flow of data between like-minded economies, using as a baseline the high standards set by the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

To overhaul its dilapidated defense industrial base, the United States should turbocharge innovation in the defense industry by recruiting talented workers from allied countries. Every year, the U.S. government authorizes roughly 10,000 visas through the EB-5 program, which allows immigrants to obtain a green card if they invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in American businesses. The program is rife with fraud and has deviated far from its intended purpose as a job-creation program, becoming mostly a method for millionaires from China and other places to become permanent residents. These visas should be repurposed as work authorizations for citizens of partner countries who hold advanced degrees in fields critical to defense.

The U.S. government also needs to recruit the next generation of cold warriors to apply their talents to the contest with China. It should start by reversing the crisis in military recruitment—not by lowering standards, promising easy pay, or infusing the force with diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology but by unapologetically touting the virtues of an elite, colorblind, all-volunteer force and challenging young Americans to step up. The intelligence community also needs to recruit experts in emerging technology, finance, and open-source research and make it easier to temporarily leave the private sector for a stint in government. National security agencies need to cultivate deep expertise in Asia and in the history and ideology of the CCP. The curricula of the service academies and war colleges, as well as ongoing professional military education, should reflect this shift.

Finally, U.S. officials need to recruit everyday Americans to contribute to the fight. For all the differences between the Soviet Union yesterday and China today, U.S. policymakers’ squeamishness about the term “cold war” causes them to overlook the way it can mobilize society. A cold war offers a relatable framework that Americans can use to guide their own decisions—such as a company’s choice whether to set up a sensitive research and development center in China or an individual’s choice whether to download TikTok. Too often, however, elected officials on the left and the right give the impression that the competition with China is so narrow in scope that Americans can take such steps without worry. The contest with Beijing, they would have people believe, shouldn’t much concern ordinary citizens but will be handled through surgically precise White House policies and congressional legislation.

CHINA AS A NORMAL COUNTRY

It is a peculiar feature of U.S. foreign policy today that the elephant in the room—the end state Washington desires in its competition with Beijing—is such a taboo subject that administrations come and go without ever articulating a clear goal for how the competition ends. The Biden administration offers up managing competition as a goal, but that is not a goal; it is a method, and a counterproductive one at that. Washington is allowing the aim of its China policy to become process: meetings that should be instruments through which the United States advances its interests become core objectives in and of themselves.

Washington should not fear the end state desired by a growing number of Chinese: a China that is able to chart its own course free from communist dictatorship. Xi’s draconian rule has persuaded even many CCP members that the system that produced China’s recent precipitous decline in prosperity, status, and individual happiness is one that deserves reexamination. The system that produced an all-encompassing surveillance state, forced-labor colonies, and the genocide of minority groups inside its borders is one that likewise desecrates Chinese philosophy and religion—the fountainheads from which a better model will eventually spring.

Generations of American leaders understood that it would have been unacceptable for the Cold War to end through war or U.S. capitulation. If the 1970s taught Washington anything, it is that trying to achieve a stable and durable balance of power—a détente—with a powerful and ambitious Leninist dictatorship is also doomed to backfire on the United States. The best strategy, which found its ultimate synthesis in the Reagan years, was to convince the Soviets that they were on a path to lose, which in turn fueled doubts about their whole system.

Washington is allowing the aim of its China policy to become process.

The U.S. victory wasn’t Reagan’s alone, of course. It was built on strategies forged by presidents of both parties and manifested in documents such as NSC-68, the 1950 Truman administration policy paper that argued that the United States’ “policy and actions must be such as to foster a fundamental change in the nature of the Soviet system.” One can draw a straight line from that document to National Security Decision Directive 75, the 1983 Reagan administration order that called for “internal pressure on the USSR to weaken the sources of Soviet imperialism.” In some ways, it was the détente years, not the Reagan years, that were an aberration in Cold War strategy.

Ironically, Reagan would end up pursuing a more fulsome and productive engagement with the Soviets than perhaps any of his predecessors—but only after he had strengthened Washington’s economic, military, and moral standing relative to Moscow and only after the Soviet Union produced a leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, with whom Reagan could make real progress. Reagan understood that sequencing was everything. He also knew that the confrontational first phase wouldn’t be easy or comfortable. His first directive on national security strategy, in May 1982, predicted, “The decade of the eighties will likely pose the greatest challenge to our survival and well-being since World War II.” It was a tense and unsettling period, to be sure, during which Reagan called out the Soviet Union as “the focus of evil in the modern world” and deliberately sought to weaken its economy and contest its destabilizing activities around the world. Yet it paid off.

Xi, who has vilified Gorbachev and fashioned his own leadership style after that of Joseph Stalin, has proved time and again that he is not a leader with whom Americans can solve problems. He is an agent of chaos. Washington should seek to weaken the sources of CCP imperialism and hold out for a Chinese leader who behaves less like an unrelenting foe. This does not mean forcible regime change, subversion, or war. But it does mean seeking truth from facts, as Chinese leaders are fond of saying, and understanding that the CCP has no desire to coexist indefinitely with great powers that promote liberal values and thus represent a fundamental threat to its rule.

The current mass exodus of Chinese people from their homeland is evidence they want to live in nations that respect human rights, honor the rule of law, and offer a wide choice of opportunities. As Taiwan’s example makes plain, China could be such a place, too. The road to get there might be long. But for the United States’ own security, as well as the rights and aspirations of all those in China, it is the only workable destination.

• MATT POTTINGER served as U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser from 2019 to 2021 and as Senior Director for Asia on the National Security Council from 2017 to 2019. He is a co-author and editor of the forthcoming book The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan.
• MIKE GALLAGHER served as U.S. Representative from Wisconsin from 2017 to 2024 and chaired the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.

Foreign Affairs · by Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher · April 10, 2024

25. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 9, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-april-9-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Russian state media highlighted Russia and China’s joint effort to combat perceived Western “dual containment” targeting Russia and China during Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing on April 9.
• US Central Command (CENTCOM) announced on April 9 that it transferred roughly a brigade’s worth of small arms and ammunition seized from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to Ukraine on April 4.
• The Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) is likely responsible for a drone strike against the Borisoglebsk Airbase in Voronezh Oblast overnight on April 8 to 9.
• Russian ultranationalist milbloggers continue to employ virulently anti-migrant rhetoric and calls for xenophobic domestic policies, but in doing so are exposing the inherent hypocrisy in Russia’s treatment of its own indigenous ethnic minority communities.
• The Kremlin will likely be able to leverage a new agreement signed by the Kremlin-affiliated governor of the pro-Russian Moldovan autonomous region of Gagauzia, Yevgenia Gutsul, and a state-owned Russian bank to further its efforts to destabilize Moldovan society, attack Moldova’s democratic government, and prevent Moldova’s accession to the European Union (EU).
• Russia is reportedly considering creating a new ministry for youth policy and patriotic education, likely as part of an ongoing attempt to instill pro-Kremlin and Kremlin-approved ideology in Russia’s next generation.
• Russian military authorities in Armenia detained another Russian citizen in Armenia, likely in an effort to assert military and political power over Armenia and to challenge Armenia’s sovereignty amid a continued deterioration of Armenian–Russian relations.
• Russian forces recently made confirmed advances near Kreminna, west of Avdiivka, and south and southwest of Donetsk City on April 9.
• Kremlin officials continue efforts to ease public fears about another possible wave of partial mobilization.
• The Russian occupation regime in Crimea is systematically persecuting clergy and parishes affiliated with the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) in occupied Crimea.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 9, 2024

Apr 9, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 9, 2024

Nicole Wolkov, Karolina Hird, Christina Harward, Grace Mappes, and George Barros

April 9, 2024, 8pm ET

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

Click here to see ISW’s 3D control of terrain topographic map of Ukraine. Use of a computer (not a mobile device) is strongly recommended for using this data-heavy tool.

Click here to access ISW’s archive of interactive time-lapse maps of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These maps complement the static control-of-terrain map that ISW produces daily by showing a dynamic frontline. ISW will update this time-lapse map archive monthly.

Note: The data cut-off for this product was 1:30 pm ET on April 9. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the April 10 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Russian state media highlighted Russia and China’s joint effort to combat perceived Western “dual containment” targeting Russia and China during Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing on April 9. Kremlin newswire TASS reported that Wang suggested that China and Russia engage in “dual counteraction” in response to alleged Western attempts at “dual containment” targeting Russia and China.[1] Lavrov claimed that the Russian–Chinese “comprehensive partnership and strategic interaction” have reached an “unprecedented level,” and that Russia and China have mutual international interests and will coordinate to solve internal and external problems.[2] Lavrov claimed that Russian–Chinese relations extend beyond a “military-political alliance of the Cold War” and that both countries are working to create a “multipolar world order” through multilateral formats that include BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).[3] Russia has consistently pushed the idea of a Russian-led “multipolar world order” that imagines Russia as the leader of a coalition of non-Western states in opposition to the US and West.[4] Lavrov claimed that Russia and China will continue to cooperate on anti-terrorism measures and that Russia and China signed another plan for inter-Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) consultations in 2024.[5] The Russian MFA stated that China and Russia “exchanged views” on possible ways to resolve the war in Ukraine, that both sides called international meetings that discuss an end to the war without Russia “futile,” and that Russia “positively” assesses China’s suggestions for an end to the war, likely in reference to the 12-point peace plan that China released in February 2023.[6] The Russian MFA notably did not mention bilateral military or technological cooperation, possibly due to recent reports that China is increasingly helping Russia’s defense industrial base (DIB) and even providing Russia with geospatial intelligence that Russia likely uses to support military operations in Ukraine.[7] ISW continues to assess that the Kremlin continues to be concerned with China’s reticence to participate fully in the Kremlin's desired no-limits partnership, and that China continues to hold the upper hand in the Russian–Chinese relationship despite recent reports suggesting that China is increasingly willing to assist Russia’s war efforts in Ukraine.[8]

US Central Command (CENTCOM) announced on April 9 that it transferred roughly a brigade’s worth of small arms and ammunition seized from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to Ukraine on April 4. CENTCOM reported that the US government transferred over 5,000 AK-47s, machine guns, sniper rifles, RPG-7s and over 500,000 rounds of 7.62mm ammunition to the Ukrainian military.[9] CENTCOM stated that it obtained these munitions on December 1, 2023 through a Department of Justice (DoJ) civil forfeiture claim opened against the IRGC in July 2023.[10] CNN reported that CENTCOM had already transferred over one million rounds of seized IRGC ammunition to Ukraine as of October 2023.[11]

The Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) is likely responsible for a drone strike against the Borisoglebsk Airbase in Voronezh Oblast overnight on April 8 to 9. GUR Spokesperson Andriy Yusov told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) that two unspecified drones struck the aviation center in Borisoglebsk, which reportedly trains Russian frontline bomber and attack aviation flight crews, and that preliminary information suggests that the strike damaged unspecified production facilities at the airbase.[12] Ukrainian outlet RBK-Ukraine cited its own source within GUR as confirming that the Borisoglebsk strike was a GUR operation.[13] Geolocated footage published on April 9 shows one drone striking the airbase.[14] Russian sources reported that one Ukrainian drone struck the facade of the Chlakov aviation training center near the airbase and another drone struck the same spot an hour later, only damaging the outside of the building.[15] ISW has not yet observed visual confirmation of the type and extent of damage from the drone strike.

Russian ultranationalist milbloggers continue to employ virulently anti-migrant rhetoric and call for xenophobic domestic policies, but in doing so are exposing the inherent hypocrisy in Russia’s treatment of its own indigenous ethnic minority communities. Several ultranationalist milbloggers seized on an April 5 post by the Leningrad Oblast House of Friendship cultural center for awarding the local “Khorezm” Uzbek cultural organization with a grant for its work in “harmonization of interethnic relations and support for small indigenous peoples of Leningrad Oblast.”[16] Several milbloggers retorted that Uzbeks are not indigenous to Leningrad Oblast and questioned why an Uzbek cultural organization received an award from the Leningrad Oblast budget.[17] One milblogger emphasized that Leningrad Oblast has formally defined Vepsians, Vods, and Izhorians as the ethnic groups indigenous to Leningrad Oblast.[18] Another Russian milblogger published a post on April 9, which was later amplified by a Telegram channel affiliated with imprisoned Russian former officer and ultranationalist commentator Igor Girkin, calling the domestic situation in Russia a “migration catastrophe,” accusing migrants of attacking the Russian domestic rear and of “unleashing ethnic, economic, and religious terror against indigenous citizens of the Russian Federation of all ethnicities.”[19] The milbloggers who criticized the Leningrad Oblast authorities and the post amplified by the Girkin-affiliated channel all narrowly define Muslim migrants from Central Asian countries as an explicit threat to “indigenous Russians.”[20]

This same ultranationalist community, however, has been inconsistent and hypocritical in selectively defining who it believes to be an “indigenous Russian,” and the actual indigenous populations of Russia’s ethnic minority republics have faced discrimination and poor treatment at the hands of ethnic Russians, particularly against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine. Russian milbloggers have criticized Tuvans, an ethnic minority group indigenous to Siberia, for using indigenous Tuvan orthography on road signs, while accusing Tuvan activist groups of inciting “ethnic discord” in Russia.[21] The Kremlin has also heavily relied on the more geographically remote and economically disenfranchised Russian federal subjects, many of which are indigenous ethnic minority republics, to disproportionately bear the brunt of mobilization for the war in Ukraine to protect ethnic Russians in major population centers such as Moscow and St. Petersburg from high casualties and the realities of the war.[22] Indigenous Buryat, Kalmyk, Tuvan, and Sakha activist organizations have spoken out against the Kremlin’s heavy reliance on ethnic minority indigenous populations for force generation purposes.[23] Russian authorities have also been trying to undermine cultural identity in the Republic of Tatarstan through amendments to state national policy that remove provisions on “strengthening Tatarstan’s identity.”[24]

Russian ultranationalists’ anti-migrant rhetoric, which has increased exponentially following the March 22 Crocus City Hall terror attack, has exposed gaps in the Kremlin’s already strained relationship with migrant communities within Russia. The Kremlin is likely struggling to balance appeasing the anti-migrant calls of ultranationalist commentators, who comprise a major Kremlin support base, with its reliance on migrants and ethnic minority communities to fill roles both on the battlefield and in the domestic labor economy, as ISW has previously assessed.[25]

The Kremlin will likely be able to leverage a new agreement signed by the Kremlin-affiliated governor of the pro-Russian Moldovan autonomous region of Gagauzia, Yevgenia Gutsul, and a state-owned Russian bank to further its efforts to destabilize Moldovan society, attack Moldova’s democratic government, and prevent Moldova’s accession to the European Union (EU). Gutsul met with Petr Fradkov, the chairman and CEO of Russian state-owned bank Promsvyazbank (PSB), in Moscow on April 9.[26] Petr Fradkov is the son of Mikhail Fradkov, the former long-time director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and current director of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies.[27] PSB will reportedly open accounts for an estimated 5,000 government employees and 20,000 pensioners in Gagauzia, who will reportedly receive cards for Russia’s Mir payment system, whose operator the US sanctioned in February 2024.[28] Gutsul asked PBS to provide “humanitarian aid” and “additional funding” to Gagauzian pension payments and public sector salaries.[29] Gutsul claimed that Moldovan authorities may detain her upon her return to Chisinau, echoing previous claims by pro-Russian Moldovan actors that Moldovan authorities were going to detain Gutsul in Chisinau following her visit to Moscow in March 2024, though authorities did not detain Gutsul.[30] It is unclear if Gagauzia will be able to implement the agreement with PSB, however. Gagauzian outlet Notka reported that the head of the Gagauzian Department of Justice Petr Manol noted that the governor of Gagauzia does not have the power to independently sign international agreements under Moldovan law.[31] The Mir system also does not work in Moldova except in the breakaway republic of Transnistria, the other pro-Russian region of Moldova.[32] Fradkov mentioned that PSB will give “special services at PSB at a separate tariff” to Gagauzian residents’ relatives who live in Russia, but it is unclear if PSB payments to Gagauzian pensioners and public sector employees will only go through the Gagauzian diaspora in Russia.[33]

The current pro-Russian Gagauzian government previously attempted to use Russian money to finance increased pension payments that were part of a campaign promise from a Kremlin-affiliated political candidate, and the new Gagauzia-PSB deal may be part of propaganda efforts to portray Russia as the sole benefactor of the autonomous region. Ilan Shor, a US-sanctioned, pro-Kremlin Moldovan politician who founded the Kremlin-affiliated Shor Party under which Gutsul ran for governor of Gagauzia, promised to increase pensions in Gagauzia and other Shor Party-affiliated Moldovan regions in October 2023 in the lead up to the November 2023 local elections.[34] Moldovan outlet NewsMaker reported that a Russian citizen living in Israel, whose name repeatedly appears in documents related to Shor’s various promised deals, transferred 15 million Moldovan lei (about $850,000) to the Gagauzian regional pension payments account.[35] Gutsul claimed that the Moldovan federal government blocked this money, and a spokesperson for leading Moldovan political Party of Solidarity and Action stated that the money came illegally from an organized crime group and that law enforcement agencies should investigate its origins.[36] The April 9 Gagauzia–PSB deal is noteworthy because Kremlin-affiliated actors are now directly and openly linked to Gagauzian government financial promises. Gutsul highlighted this relationship on April 9, claiming that Russia is the “friend” and “protector” who “saved” Gagauzia.[37] Gutsul also claimed that the Moldovan central government is enacting an “economic blockade” on Gagauzia — similar to language used by Kremlin and Transnistrian actors to promote Kremlin information operations about Tiraspol–Chisinau relations in recent months.[38] The Kremlin may be able to exploit the PSB deal regardless of the deal’s legality or how Moldovan authorities react. If Moldovan authorities prevent the deal from moving forward, pro-Russian Moldovan actors and the Kremlin will likely use the situation to promote the Kremlin’s ongoing narratives targeting the current Moldovan government and to stir up anger in Gagauzia. If the Gagauzian government is able to somehow enact the agreement, however, the Kremlin could use the payments to economically capture a segment of Gagauzia to do the Kremlin’s bidding, or could cut off the payments at a future time of Moscow’s choosing to foment a crisis.

The Kremlin may also hope to use the Gagauzia–PSB deal to recreate the way in which Kremlin-affiliated Moldovan political parties previously influenced Moldovan elections and public opinion. Shor reportedly paid demonstrators to protest against Moldovan President Maia Sandu in 2022, and Moldovan authorities raided Shor Party offices following the Gagauzia gubernatorial election in the summer of 2023 as part of investigations into voter bribery.[39] The Kremlin may hope to use pro-Russian political parties in Moldova and the PSB payments to Gagauzia in similar tactics to influence Moldova’s upcoming elections, particularly the presidential election in late 2024 and parliamentary elections in the summer of 2025.

Russia is reportedly considering creating a new ministry for youth policy and patriotic education, likely as part of an ongoing attempt to instill pro-Kremlin and Kremlin-approved ideology in Russia’s next generation. Russian outlet Vedemosti reported on April 9 that four unnamed sources close to the Russian presidential administration stated that Russian authorities are considering creating a new ministry for youth policy and patriotic education that would be formed on the basis of the Russian Federal Agency of Youth Affairs (Rosmolodezh), which would then take over some patriotic education functions from the Ministry of Education.[40] The sources also claimed that the Russian government is considering merging the Ministry of Science and Higher Education with the Ministry of Education (also known as the ”Ministry of Enlightenment” in its literal Russian translation), which the Russian government divided in 2018. Russian opposition outlet Verstka reported in October 2023 that the Russian federal budget significantly increased its allocations for funds promoting patriotic education. Verstka reported that Russia allocated 43.8 billion rubles for patriotic education in 2023, almost four times the number of funds that Russia allocated to patriotic education in 2022.[41] Verstka also noted that Russia increased funding in 2023 to patriotic youth projects including the World Youth Festival and Yunarmia, a military-patriotic movement that instills pro-Russian and militarized ideals in youth in Russia and occupied Ukraine. Russia is likely trying to expand efforts to disseminate pro-Kremlin and Kremlin-approved ideology to create a generation of Russians pliant to the Kremlin’s goals, especially as Russia sets domestic information conditions for a long war effort in Ukraine and increasingly postures against the West.

Russian military authorities in Armenia detained another Russian citizen in Armenia, likely in an effort to assert military and political power over Armenia and to challenge Armenia’s sovereignty amid a continued deterioration of Armenian–Russian relations. The Armenian branch of the international human rights organization Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly in Vanadzor reported on April 9 that Russian military police at the Russian 102nd Military Base in Gyumri, Armenia, detained Russian citizen Anatoly Shchetin in Armenia for desertion and intend to forcibly transfer him to Russia.[42] Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly’s lawyer Ani Chatinyan told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Armenian service Radio Azatutyun that the organization sent a report of the crime to the Armenian Prosecutor General’s Office and that Russian law enforcement agencies do not have the right to detain people in Armenia and instead should transfer operations to Armenian law enforcement.[43] The Armenian Prosecutor General’s office told Radio Azatutyun that it has processed the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly’s report in accordance with its procedures. Russian military police at the 102nd Military Base previously detained a Russian citizen in Armenia for desertion in December 2023.[44] Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan responded to the December 2023 arrest in February 2024 and stated that Armenian authorities are investigating the incident and that Armenia “cannot tolerate illegal actions on [its] territory.”[45]

Key Takeaways:

• Russian state media highlighted Russia and China’s joint effort to combat perceived Western “dual containment” targeting Russia and China during Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing on April 9.
• US Central Command (CENTCOM) announced on April 9 that it transferred roughly a brigade’s worth of small arms and ammunition seized from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to Ukraine on April 4.
• The Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) is likely responsible for a drone strike against the Borisoglebsk Airbase in Voronezh Oblast overnight on April 8 to 9.
• Russian ultranationalist milbloggers continue to employ virulently anti-migrant rhetoric and calls for xenophobic domestic policies, but in doing so are exposing the inherent hypocrisy in Russia’s treatment of its own indigenous ethnic minority communities.
• The Kremlin will likely be able to leverage a new agreement signed by the Kremlin-affiliated governor of the pro-Russian Moldovan autonomous region of Gagauzia, Yevgenia Gutsul, and a state-owned Russian bank to further its efforts to destabilize Moldovan society, attack Moldova’s democratic government, and prevent Moldova’s accession to the European Union (EU).
• Russia is reportedly considering creating a new ministry for youth policy and patriotic education, likely as part of an ongoing attempt to instill pro-Kremlin and Kremlin-approved ideology in Russia’s next generation.
• Russian military authorities in Armenia detained another Russian citizen in Armenia, likely in an effort to assert military and political power over Armenia and to challenge Armenia’s sovereignty amid a continued deterioration of Armenian–Russian relations.
• Russian forces recently made confirmed advances near Kreminna, west of Avdiivka, and south and southwest of Donetsk City on April 9.
• Kremlin officials continue efforts to ease public fears about another possible wave of partial mobilization.
• The Russian occupation regime in Crimea is systematically persecuting clergy and parishes affiliated with the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) in occupied Crimea.

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

• Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis
• Russian Air, Missile, and Drone Campaign
• Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Russian Technological Adaptations
• Activities in Russian-occupied areas
• Ukrainian Defense Industrial Base Efforts
• Russian Information Operations and Narratives
• Significant Activity in Belarus

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Luhansk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)

Russian forces recently advanced south of Kreminna. Geolocated footage published on April 8 shows that Russian forces made marginal gains in the chalk quarry area south of Bilohorivka (south of Kreminna).[46] A Russian milblogger claimed on April 9 that Russian forces are fighting for tactical heights in the quarry area and managed to capture limited positions in this area — claims consistent with available geolocated footage.[47] Russian sources also claimed that there was heavy fighting near Terny (west of Kreminna), but that Russian forces are losing limited positions to constant Ukrainian counterattacks.[48] The Ukrainian General Staff reported continued unsuccessful Russian attacks southeast of Kupyansk near Kyslivka; west of Svatove near Andriivka; and near Terny.[49] Elements of the Russian 20th Combined Arms Army (formerly of the Western Military District and now of the newly reformed Moscow Military District) reportedly continue to operate in the Lyman direction (west of Kreminna).[50]

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Positional fighting continued near Bakhmut on April 9, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline. Some Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces completed the capture of Bohdanivka (northwest of Bakhmut) and are advancing towards Kalynivka (west of Bohdanivka), while other milbloggers claimed that some Ukrainian forces still remain in Bohdanivka.[51] Russian milbloggers also claimed that Russian forces advanced south and southeast of Chasiv Yar, including up to one kilometer in depth and 1.5 kilometers in width in the Stupcky-Holubovskyi 2 nature reserve to the southeast of Chasiv Yar, and further into Kanal Microraion directly east of Chasiv Yar.[52] ISW has not observed visual confirmation of these Russian claims, however. The Ukrainian Khortysia Group of Forces Spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Nazar Voloshyn stated that Russian forces continue high numbers of infantry assaults east of Chasiv Yar and that Russian forces transport infantry on infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) to conduct dismounted assaults on Ukrainian positions with artillery and air support.[53] Positional fighting continued northeast of Bakhmut near Verkhnokamyanske, Spirne, and Rozdolivka; west of Bakhmut near Novyi (immediately east of Chasiv Yar); and southwest of Bakhmut near Stupochky, Klishchiivka and Andriivka.[54] Elements of the Russian 11th Airborne (VDV) Brigade are reportedly fighting south of Chasiv Yar, and elements of the 98th VDV Division and either the “Hispaniola” Volunteer Assault Brigade (Russian Volunteer Corps) or the “Hispaniola” private military company (PMC) are reportedly fighting east of Chasiv Yar.[55] Elements of the Russian 150th Motorized Rifle Division (8th Combined Arms Army [CAA], Southern Military District [SMD]) are reportedly operating in the general Bakhmut direction.[56]

Russian forces appear to be conducting heavy glide bomb strikes against Ukrainian positions to enable further advances towards Chasiv Yar, similar to the way that Russian forces conducted glide bomb strikes against Avdiivka leading to its capture in February 2024.[57] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian Aerospace Forces [VKS] Su-25 attack aircraft are conducting heavy FAB-250 guided glide bomb strikes against Ukrainian fortifications in Chasiv Yar and are also using S-8 and S-13 missiles to support ground elements of the 98th VDV Division in assault operations.[58] Other milbloggers widely amplified footage of Russian glide bomb strikes on Chasiv Yar and of Russian fixed-wing aircraft dropping bombs near Russian infantry positions west of Bakhmut while flying at a low altitude.[59] Another milblogger claimed that Russian rotary-wing aircraft conducted strikes southwest of Bakhmut near Kurdyumivka and Klishchiivka on April 9.[60]

Russian forces recently advanced west of Avdiivka and likely captured Pervomaiske (southwest of Avdiivka) as of April 9. Geolocated footage published on April 9 shows elements of the Russian 9th Motorized Rifle Brigade (1st Donetsk People’s Republic [DNR] Army Corps [AC]) raising a flag in western Pervomaiske, and Russian sources claimed that Russian forces captured the settlement after Ukrainian forces withdrew.[61] Other milbloggers claimed that Russian forces have not yet fully captured Pervomaiske, however.[62] Additional geolocated footage published on April 9 shows that Russian forces advanced in fields northeast of Netaylove (immediately west of Pervomaiske).[63] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces advanced northward along Tsentralna Street in Semenivka and in fields west of Tonenke (both west of Avdiivka), as well as southeast of and in Novokalynove (northwest of Avdiivka).[64] Fighting also continued northwest of Avdiivka near Novobakhmutivka and Berdychi; west of Avdiivka near Umanske; and southwest of Avdiivka near Nevelske.[65] A Ukrainian soldier operating in the Avdiivka direction stated that Russian forces are attempting to take Semenivka by attacking in groups of five to seven infantrymen both from the east and from the north.[66] The soldier stated that Russian forces have not conducted a mechanized attack near Semenivka in recent days and usually use IFVs to transport small infantry groups to the frontline for infantry-led ground assaults. The soldier also stated that the Russian VKS conducts 25-30 KAB glide bomb strikes per day in the Avdiivka direction. Elements of the Russian 15th Motorized Rifle Brigade (2nd CAA, Central Military District [CMD]) are reportedly fighting in Berdychi; elements of the 30th Motorized Rifle Brigade (2nd CAA, CMD) are reportedly fighting in Semenivka and to the south near Orlivka; elements of the Russian 1st Motorized Rifle Brigade (1st DNR AC) supported by elements of the 428th Motorized Rifle Regiment, which is reportedly attached to the 90th Tank Division, and 6th Tank Regiment ( 90th Tank Division, 41st CAA, CMD) are reportedly fighting in the Tonenke-Umanske and Orlivka-Umanske directions; and elements of the 110th Motorized Rifle Brigade (1st DNR AC) are reportedly fighting in Nevelske.[67]

Russian forces recently advanced west and southwest of Donetsk City. Geolocated footage published on April 8 shows that Russian forces made gains along Vatutin Street in southeastern Krasnohorivka (west of Donetsk City) following a mechanized assault with roughly two platoons.[68] Geolocated footage published on April 9 shows Ukrainian forces counterattacking in the same area on Vatutin Street, indicating that Ukrainian forces regained their positions following the initial Russian mechanized assault.[69] A Ukrainian officer fighting in a brigade deployed near Krasnohorivka noted that Russian forces conducted a total of seven assaults in this between April 8 and 9 and that by the morning of April 9, the Ukrainian counterattack had destroyed seven pieces of unspecified Russian equipment.[70] Geolocated footage published on April 9 shows that Russian forces have also advanced westward along Tsentralna Street in Novomykhailivka (southwest of Donetsk City).[71] Ukraine’s Airborne Assault Forces Command noted that Ukrainian forces have destroyed over 18 Russian vehicles of varying types in Novomykhailivka in the past three days, including three tanks and eight combat vehicles.[72] Ukrainian and Russian sources reported continued positional engagements west of Donetsk City near Heorhiivka and southwest of Donetsk City near Novomykhailivka and Pobieda.[73]

Limited positional engagements continued in the Donetsk–Zaporizhia Oblast border area on April 9, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline. Ukrainian military sources reported continued positional engagements near Urozhaine and Staromayorske (both south of Velyka Novosilka).[74] Elements of the 11th Air Force and Air Defense Army (Russian Aerospace Forces [VKS] and Eastern Military District [EMD]) reportedly continue conducting unguided glide bomb strikes against Ukrainian positions near Vuhledar.[75] Elements of the 14th Spetsnaz Brigade are reportedly operating near Pryyutne (southwest of Velyka Novosilka).[76]

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

Positional engagements continued in western Donetsk Oblast on April 9, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline. Positional engagements continued near Robotyne; Mala Tokmachka (northeast of Robotyne); and northwest of Verbove (east of Robotyne).[77] Elements of the Russian 7th Airborne (VDV) Division reportedly continue operating near Verbove; and elements of the Russian 42nd Motrized Rifle Division (58th Combined Arms Army [CAA], Southern Military District [SMD]) reportedly continue operating near Robotyne.[78] 

Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Spokesperson Andriy Yusov reiterated on April 9 that Ukraine is not involved in any military strikes or operations against the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) in Enerhodar, Zaporizhia Oblast, and stated that this renewed wave of accusations against Ukraine is a Russian provocation.[79] Ukrainian nuclear energy operator Energoatom stated on April 8 that Russia has accused Ukraine of conducting drone attacks against the ZNPP to obfuscate an incident that may have already occurred at the hands of Russian personnel or to conceal Russian intentions to conduct an operation at the ZNPP.[80] ZNPP occupation authorities claimed on April 9 that Ukrainian forces conducted a drone strike on the ZNPP's training center, adjacent to the ZNPP, marking the third consecutive day of accusations that Ukrainian forces conducted a drone strike against the ZNPP.[81] Kremlin newswire TASS reported that Russia called for a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors to discuss the alleged Ukrainian drone strikes and later confirmed that the meeting will convene on April 11.[82] TASS also reported that Russian Presidential Administration Deputy Head Sergei Kiriyenko visited the ZNPP on April 9 to meet with ZNPP occupation officials and assess the current state of the ZNPP.[83]

Positional engagements continued in the east (left) bank of Kherson Oblast on April 9, including near Krynky, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline.[84] 

The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian air defense destroyed a Ukrainian Neptune anti-ship missile over the Black Sea off the coast of occupied Crimea on the night of April 8 to 9.[85]

Russian Air, Missile, and Drone Campaign (Russian Objective: Target Ukrainian military and civilian infrastructure in the rear and on the frontline)

Russian forces conducted a series of missile and drone strikes against Ukraine on April 8, overnight on April 8 to 9, and on April 9. Ukrainian Zaporizhia Oblast Head Ivan Fedorov reported that Russian forces struck an industrial facility in Zaporizhzhia City with an unspecified missile on April 8.[86] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed on April 8 that Russian forces destroyed a warehouse and production workshop for heavy drones in Zaporizhzhia City with an Iskander missile.[87] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces launched 20 Shahed-136/131 drones from occupied Cape Chauda, Crimea and Primorsko-Akhtarsk, Krasnodar Krai and four S-300 missiles from occupied Donetsk Oblast on the night of April 8 to 9.[88] Ukrainian forces reportedly shot down all of the drones over Mykolaiv, Odesa, Kherson, Dnipropetrovsk, Poltava, Vinnytsia, and Lviv oblasts. Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command stated that Russian drones targeted critical infrastructure in southern Ukraine, and the Ukrainian Energy Ministry stated that Russian struck energy infrastructure in Poltava and Lviv oblasts.[89] Ukrainian officials reported that Russian unspecified missiles struck civilian infrastructure in Poltava Oblast.[90] The Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs stated that four Russian S-400 missiles struck and damaged civilian infrastructure in Druzhkivka, Donetsk Oblast overnight, and Donetsk Oblast Head Vadym Filashkin reported that Russian forces conducted airstrikes on Kostyantynivka, Donetsk Oblast with unspecified projectiles.[91] Kharkiv Oblast Head Oleh Synehubov reported that Russian forces struck civilian enterprises near Kharkiv City with KAB bombs.[92]

Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command reported that Russia conducted a missile strike, likely with an Iskander-M missile, against a coastal area of Odesa Oblast on the afternoon of April 9.[93]

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

Kremlin officials continue efforts to ease public fears about another possible wave of partial mobilization. Russian State Duma Defense Committee Chairperson Andrei Kartapolov claimed on April 9 that there will be no mobilization in May 2024 under any circumstances and that the set period of time for mobilization callups has “passed.”[94] Kartapolov claimed that current Russian recruiting efforts are sufficient, likely in reference to Russia’s various ongoing crypto-mobilization schemes, which reportedly generate between 20,000–30,000 troops per month.[95] Kartapolov may have been responding to an April 9 claim by a Russian milblogger that Russians should prepare for another wave of mobilization in May.[96] ISW continues to assess that Russia appears to have successfully leveraged its ongoing crypto-mobilization efforts to make up for increased manpower losses.[97]

Russian Technological Adaptations (Russian objective: Introduce technological innovations to optimize systems for use in Ukraine) 

Russian forces are reportedly using tanks reinforced with large metal sheets to protect against Ukrainian drone strikes. The Ukrainian Khortytsia Group of Forces posted footage on April 8 of a Russian mechanized assault with roughly two platoons near Krasnohorivka, Donetsk Oblast, and Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces used a “turtle tank” — a tank covered in metal sheets on all sides — during the assault.[98] Some Russian sources claimed that it was a T-72 tank upon which Russian forces had welded KMT-4 or KMT-6 mine trawls (plough).[99] Russian forces reportedly added the metal sheets to protect the tank from Ukrainian drone strikes, but the metal sheets severely limited the movement of the tank’s turret and the tank’s general mobility.[100] 

Ukrainian Defense Industrial Efforts (Ukrainian objective: Develop its defense industrial base to become more self-sufficient in cooperation with US, European, and international partners)

ISW is not publishing coverage of Ukrainian defense industrial efforts today.

Activities in Russian-occupied areas (Russian objective: Consolidate administrative control of annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian citizens into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)

The Russian occupation regime in Crimea is systematically persecuting clergy and parishes affiliated with the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) in occupied Crimea. Ukraine’s Permanent Presidential Representative in Crimea reported on April 9 that Russian occupation authorities dismantled the dome of the Cathedral of the Holy and Equal-to-the Apostles Prince Volodymyr and Princess Olga in occupied Simferopol on April 8.[101] This cathedral is the Cathedral of the Crimean Diocese of the OCU, and the Ukrainian government attempted to transfer rights for the diocese to the Ukrainian representative of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea in October 2022 to protect the rights of OCU minorities in occupied Crimea.[102] Ukraine’s Permanent Presidential Representative in Crimea noted that between the first Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014 and the full-scale invasion in 2022, the number of OCU religious communities in occupied Crimea, including parishes, missions, and monasteries, decreased from 49 to seven.[103] Russian occupation authorities have also reportedly illegally mobilized OCU clergy to fight in the Russian Armed Forces. ISW has previously written at length about Russia’s persecution of religious minorities in occupied Ukraine and assessed in 2023 that the Kremlin particularly views the OCU as schismatic from the Kremlin-controlled Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), seeking to eradicate it from occupied areas.[104]

Russian occupation authorities are likely capitalizing on recent increased anti-migrant sentiment following the March 22 Moscow terror attack to increase law enforcement crackdowns against migrants in occupied Ukraine. The Russian Federal Security Service’s (FSB) Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) directorate reported on April 9 that Russian law enforcement detained 20 migrants in occupied Mariupol for the “failure to comply with the rules of entry” that require documentation for migrants to work in Russia and Russian-occupied territories.[105] Russian authorities will reportedly deport eight of the detained migrants. Russian occupation authorities have relied largely on migrant workers to restore the infrastructure that Russian forces destroyed during combat operations in occupied Ukraine, including by actively recruiting them to work in occupied Ukraine. Raids on migrant communities in occupied Ukraine are symptomatic of the migrant worker dynamic, as well as recent Russian law enforcement efforts to more harshly police communities considered vulnerable to extremist activity.[106]

Russian occupation authorities continue efforts to Russify occupied areas by gradually asserting legal and physical control over occupied Ukraine and eradicating access to Ukrainian language and culture. Kherson Oblast occupation governor Vladimir Saldo stated on April 7 that the Russian State Budgetary Institution “Kherson Avtodor” plans to replace 80 Ukrainian-language road signs in occupied Kherson Oblast with Russian-language road signs by the end of 2024.[107] The Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) militia also reported on April 9 that Luhansk Oblast occupation authorities are working to remove Ukrainian satellite dishes to remove access to Ukrainian language news and gain further control over the information space in occupied areas.[108] The removal of Ukrainian satellite dishes and their replacement with the “Russkiy Mir” television satellite will further allow Russian occupation authorities to disseminate anti-Ukrainian and pro-Russian propaganda throughout occupied areas of Ukraine.[109]        

Russian Information Operations and Narratives

The Kremlin continues to baselessly accuse Ukraine of involvement in terrorist acts in order to discredit the Ukrainian government and military and undermine Western support for Ukraine. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov claimed that Russian occupation authorities allowed International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) access to the ZNPP because Russian officials knew that Ukrainian forces would attempt to conduct “provocations” against the ZNPP.[110] Russian Ministry Foreign Affairs (MFA) Second Department of Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) Director Alexei Polishchuk stated that Russia does not have a statute of limitations on alleged Ukrainian terrorist attacks committed in Russia since 2022 and reiterated demands that Ukrainian authorities arrest and extradite people allegedly involved in these acts.[111]

Russian officials continue to falsely implicate the West as sponsoring terrorism following the Kremlin’s intelligence and law enforcement failure to prevent the March 22 Crocus City Hall terrorist attack. The Russian Investigative Committee announced on April 9 that it opened a criminal case against unspecified senior US and NATO officials for allegedly financing unspecified terrorism.[112] The Russian Investigative Committee claimed that US and NATO officials have been financing terrorist attacks in Russia and against Russian assets abroad “in recent years.” ISW remains confident that Islamic State (IS) conducted the Crocus City Hall attack and has yet to observe independent reporting or evidence to suggest that an actor other than IS was responsible for or aided the attack.[113] Russian law enforcement and intelligence responses in the North Caucasus — such as a counterterrorism raid in the Republic of Dagestan on March 31 — and intensified measures targeting Central Asian migrants in Russia are further evidence that Russian authorities actually assess that the terrorist threat emanates from Russia’s Central Asian and Muslim minority communities instead of Ukraine.[114]

Russian authorities continue to make false claims about US initiatives supporting Ukraine to undermine continued US military support for Ukraine. The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) claimed on April 9 that US authorities are recruiting several hundred Mexican and Columbian citizens from US prisons to fight in Ukraine and that US officials plan to continue recruiting foreign citizens for the Ukrainian military.[115]

Significant activity in Belarus (Russian efforts to increase its military presence in Belarus and further integrate Belarus into Russian-favorable frameworks and Wagner Group activity in Belarus)

Nothing significant to report.

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

26. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, April 9, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-april-9-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Iran: IRGC Navy Commander Rear Adm. Ali Reza Tangsiri implicitly threatened the United Arab Emirates (UAE) during an interview with Lebanese Hezbollah-controlled media, likely to pressure the UAE to sever ties with Israel.
• Tangsiri separately endorsed the strategy of “strategic patience” in response to the April 1 Israeli airstrike that killed seven IRGC officials in Damascus.
• West Bank: US, Israeli, and Iranian officials told the New York Times that Iran is operating a smuggling network through Jordan to arm Palestinian fighters in the West Bank.
• The Iranian effort to build its capabilities and networks in the West Bank is part of a larger effort to encircle Israel militarily.
• Northern Gaza Strip: Palestinian militias conducted several indirect fire attacks targeting Israeli forces in the northern Gaza Strip.
• Central Gaza Strip: The IDF Air Force killed the Maghazi mayor, whom Israel says was a member in Hamas’ military wing in the central Gaza Strip.
• Political Negotiations: Hamas said on April 8 that the latest Israeli ceasefire proposal does not meet its demands.
• Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights: Lebanese Hezbollah has conducted at least nine attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel.
• Syria: The IDF and local Syrian sources reported that unspecified Iranian-backed militants launched a rocket from Syria targeting the Yonatan region of the Golan Heights.
• Iraq: The Islamic Resistance in Iraq—a coalition of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias—claimed that it conducted five attacks into Israel using “appropriate weapons” over the previous 72 hours.
• Iran: Jaish al Adl—a Baloch, Salafi-jihadi militia group—conducted an attack killing at least five Iranian Law Enforcement Command (LEC) officers in Sib and Soran county, Sistan and Baluchistan Province.
• Yemen: US CENTCOM reported that it targeted Houthi air defense systems in Houthi-controlled Yemen. CENTCOM separately intercepted a Houthi drone over the Red Sea.

IRAN UPDATE, APRIL 9, 2024

Apr 9, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Iran Update, April 9, 2024

Annika Ganzeveld, Andie Parry, Ashka Jhaveri, Kathryn Tyson, Johanna Moore, Alexandra Braverman, Peter Mills, and Nicholas Carl

Information Cutoff: 2:00 pm ET

The Iran Update provides insights into Iranian and Iranian-sponsored activities abroad that undermine regional stability and threaten US forces and interests. It also covers events and trends that affect the stability and decision-making of the Iranian regime. The Critical Threats Project (CTP) at the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) provides these updates regularly based on regional events. Click here to see CTP and ISW’s interactive map of Israeli ground operations. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report. Click here to subscribe to the Iran Update.

CTP-ISW defines the “Axis of Resistance” as the unconventional alliance that Iran has cultivated in the Middle East since the Islamic Republic came to power in 1979. This transnational coalition is comprised of state, semi-state, and non-state actors that cooperate with one another to secure their collective interests. Tehran considers itself to be both part of the alliance and its leader. Iran furnishes these groups with varying levels of financial, military, and political support in exchange for some degree of influence or control over their actions. Some are traditional proxies that are highly responsive to Iranian direction, while others are partners over which Iran exerts more limited influence. Members of the Axis of Resistance are united by their grand strategic objectives, which include eroding and eventually expelling American influence from the Middle East, destroying the Israeli state, or both. Pursuing these objectives and supporting the Axis of Resistance to those ends have become cornerstones of Iranian regional strategy.

We do not report in detail on war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We utterly condemn violations of the laws of armed conflict and the Geneva Conventions and crimes against humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

IRGC Navy Commander Rear Adm. Ali Reza Tangsiri implicitly threatened the United Arab Emirates (UAE) during an interview with Lebanese Hezbollah-controlled media on April 9, likely to pressure the UAE to sever ties with Israel.[1] Tangsiri issued a series of threatening messages, all of which appear aimed at the UAE, during the interview. Tangsiri reiterated the long-standing Iranian threat to close the Strait of Hormuz and furthermore suggested that Israel is cooperating with the UAE against Iran. Tangsiri claimed that Israel is present in the UAE under the pretext of “economic work” but actually engages in security and military activities there that threaten Iran.[2] Tangsiri’s decision to conduct the interview with an Arabic-language outlet further suggests that he intended to message to an Arabic-speaking audience.

Tangsiri’s comments are part of a larger Iranian effort to impose an unofficial blockade on Israel. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has urged regional states to cut trade ties with Israel and institute a blockade in response to the Israel-Hamas war. The Houthis have conducted over 40 attacks targeting commercial vessels in the Red Sea since November 2023, as part of this Iranian-led call effort, causing maritime traffic through the Red Sea to decline by approximately 50 percent since January 2024.[3] Israel has increasingly relied on overland trade with the Gulf States in recent months to compensate for reduced trade activity at the Port of Eilat due to the Houthis’ anti-shipping campaign.[4] Tehran and its regional allies have focused in more recent weeks on disrupting the Israeli ground connection to the Arabian Peninsula. Iranian state media and Iranian-backed Iraqi militias recently criticized the UAE for allowing Israel to conduct trade through its territory.[5] Iranian-backed Iraqi militias have, moreover, called for the dismantlement of Israel’s “land bridge” through Jordan, as CTP-ISW previously noted.[6]

Tangsiri separately endorsed the strategy of “strategic patience” in response to the April 1 Israeli airstrike that killed seven IRGC officials in Damascus. “Strategic patience” is a long-standing Iranian regime policy that involves not immediately conducting a major response to Israeli attacks. Tangsiri claimed that Iran will “strike [Israel] hard at the right time,” but emphasized that Iran will not act “emotionally” or “hastily.”[7] Tangsiri added that “it is not the case that [Iran] will not give a response.”[8] Numerous senior Iranian military officials, including Armed Forces General Staff Chief Maj. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri and Supreme Leader Military Affairs Adviser Maj. Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi, have similarly stated in recent days that Iran will respond to the April 1 airstrike “at the right time.”[9]

US, Israeli, and Iranian officials told the New York Times that Iran is operating a smuggling network through Jordan to arm Palestinian fighters in the West Bank.[10] The Iranian officials described this effort as meant to ”foment unrest against Israel.” They added that Tehran is not trying to arm any particular Palestinian militias and is using Bedouin smuggling networks in Jordan and Iranian-backed militias in Syria to facilitate the transfer of materiel into the West Bank. US and Israeli officials said that the Iranian-backed networks are specifically involved in moving small arms, anti-tank missiles, and rocket-propelled grenades. Iran’s smuggling network in Jordan could enable already motivated militias in the West Bank to attacks on Israeli targets.

The Iranian effort to build its capabilities and networks in the West Bank is part of a larger effort to encircle Israel militarily. IRGC Commander Maj. Gen. Hossein Salami presented in August 2022 the clearest articulation yet from an Iranian official on how they plan to destroy Israel, and he placed special emphasis on growing anti-Israel militancy around the West Bank[11] Afshon Ostovar, a well-know analyst on Iran, suggested to the New York Times that Iran may be focusing on arming the West Bank because it anticipates having more limited access to militias in the Gaza Strip in the future.[12] Tehran has sought to develop the capabilities and infrastructure of its militia network in the West Bank in recent years, but the Israel-Hamas war has highlighted the shortcomings of its networks there.[13]

Key Takeaways:

• Iran: IRGC Navy Commander Rear Adm. Ali Reza Tangsiri implicitly threatened the United Arab Emirates (UAE) during an interview with Lebanese Hezbollah-controlled media, likely to pressure the UAE to sever ties with Israel.
• Tangsiri separately endorsed the strategy of “strategic patience” in response to the April 1 Israeli airstrike that killed seven IRGC officials in Damascus.
• West Bank: US, Israeli, and Iranian officials told the New York Times that Iran is operating a smuggling network through Jordan to arm Palestinian fighters in the West Bank.
• The Iranian effort to build its capabilities and networks in the West Bank is part of a larger effort to encircle Israel militarily.
• Northern Gaza Strip: Palestinian militias conducted several indirect fire attacks targeting Israeli forces in the northern Gaza Strip.
• Central Gaza Strip: The IDF Air Force killed the Maghazi mayor, whom Israel says was a member in Hamas’ military wing in the central Gaza Strip.
• Political Negotiations: Hamas said on April 8 that the latest Israeli ceasefire proposal does not meet its demands.
• Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights: Lebanese Hezbollah has conducted at least nine attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel.
• Syria: The IDF and local Syrian sources reported that unspecified Iranian-backed militants launched a rocket from Syria targeting the Yonatan region of the Golan Heights.
• Iraq: The Islamic Resistance in Iraq—a coalition of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias—claimed that it conducted five attacks into Israel using “appropriate weapons” over the previous 72 hours.
• Iran: Jaish al Adl—a Baloch, Salafi-jihadi militia group—conducted an attack killing at least five Iranian Law Enforcement Command (LEC) officers in Sib and Soran county, Sistan and Baluchistan Province.
• Yemen: US CENTCOM reported that it targeted Houthi air defense systems in Houthi-controlled Yemen. CENTCOM separately intercepted a Houthi drone over the Red Sea.

Gaza Strip

Axis of Resistance objectives:

• Erode the will of the Israeli political establishment and public to sustain clearing operations in the Gaza Strip
• Reestablish Hamas as the governing authority in the Gaza Strip

Palestinian militias conducted several indirect fire attacks targeting Israeli forces in the northern Gaza Strip on April 9. Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) claimed that it mortared an Israeli command site southwest of Gaza City.[14] Hamas separately claimed that it mortared Israeli forces near Shujaiya neighborhood in eastern Gaza City as well as an Israeli command site near where the IDF is constructing a highway in southern Gaza City.[15]

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Nahal Brigade (162nd Division) continued to conduct clearing operations in the central Gaza Strip on April 9. The Nahal Brigade killed and directed an airstrike targeting several Palestinian fighters.[16] The Nahal Brigade is operating around the border of the central and northern strip to secure the Israeli highway and bases nearby.

The IDF Air Force conducted several airstrikes targeting Palestinian military infrastructure in the Gaza Strip on April 9.[17] The IDF destroyed the site from which PIJ launched rockets into southern Israel on April 8.[18] The IDF separately conducted an airstrike in Khan Younis, killing a Palestinian fighter, who was involved in the October 7 attack.[19]

The IDF Air Force killed the Maghazi mayor, whom Israel says was a member in Hamas’ military wing in the central Gaza Strip on April 8.[20] The IDF said that the mayor, Hatem Saleh al Ghamri, was part of Hamas’ Emergency Committees, which is responsible for maintaining public order and civil control.[21] Ghamri was also reportedly a fighter in Hamas’ Maghazi Battalion.[22] CNN reported that Hamas condemned the strike and said that Ghamri was the mayor of the Maghazi refugee camp.[23] The IDF previously killed five members of Hamas’ Emergency Committees in Rafah in March 2024.[24]

Israeli media close to the IDF reported on April 9 that the Israeli forces withdrawn from Khan Younis will prepare for fighting in other areas and carry out large, unspecified humanitarian operations.[25] The IDF withdrew most of its forces from the Gaza Strip on April 7, including the IDF 98th Division, which had been operating around Khan Younis for four months.[26] The report noted that Israeli forces are preparing for fighting in Rafah, among other unspecified places.[27]

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on April 8 that Israel has not yet set a date for a clearing operation into Rafah, according to an unidentified source with direct knowledge.[28] Gallant’s comments follow Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying that Israel has set a date for the offensive.[29] US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Israel has not informed the United States on the date of the operation.[30]

Hamas said on April 8 that the latest Israeli ceasefire proposal does not meet its demands.[31] The group is currently reviewing the proposal and will soon inform international mediators of its response. The Wall Street Journal, citing officials' part of the negotiations, reported that Israel and Hamas still disagree over key aspects of a deal, including the return of displaced Palestinians to the northern Gaza Strip, the identities of Palestinian prisoners set to be released under the deal, and the future of Israeli military operations in the strip.[32] The officials noted that Hamas has demanded the free movement of displaced Palestinians to the north, while Israel has rejected the unconditional return of Palestinians there. Unspecified Egyptian officials reported that Israel wants to inspect Palestinians moving from the south to the north to stop potential Hamas fighters from returning alongside civilians.[33] CTP-ISW previously reported how Hamas could use the return of civilians to the north to bring its own fighters back to the area amid Hamas attempts to reassert its authority there.[34]

Israel reported that it has increased the amount of aid moving into the Gaza Strip.[35] The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT)—a department within the Israeli Defense Ministry—announced that Israel has expanded the scope of aid and doubled the daily number of civilian trucks that can move through the Kerem Shalom crossing.[36] COGAT claimed that UN aid agencies are not using the full capacity of the Kerem Shalom route.[37] Israel said 468 trucks entered the Gaza Strip on April 9, which is the highest rate since the war began.[38] The United Nations reports much lower numbers, noting that many trucks are only half full because of Israeli inspection rules.[39] US State Departments spokesperson Matthew Miller said on April 8 that the high number of trucks entering the Gaza Strip “represents a significant improvement, but it is important not just that we see the daily number continue to grow, but that it be sustained over time.”[40]

Palestinian fighters did not conduct any indirect fire attacks from the Gaza Strip into Israel on April 9.

West Bank

Axis of Resistance objectives:

• Establish the West Bank as a viable front against Israel

Israeli forces have engaged Palestinian fighters in at least three locations in the West Bank since CTP-ISW's last data cut off on April 8.[41] Israeli forces detained nine wanted Palestinians, including one Hamas member, in the West Bank during the operations there.[42] The al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade fired small arms and detonated improvised explosive devices in two separate attacks targeting Israeli forces around Nablus and Tulkarm.[43] Israeli forces separately engaged Palestinian fighters in Jayyus, east of Qalqilya.[44]

A PIJ cell in Jenin claimed a shooting attack on April 9 targeting Gan Ner, which is in northern Israel near the border with the West Bank.[45]

This map is not an exhaustive depiction of clashes and demonstrations in the West Bank.

Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights

Axis of Resistance objectives:

• Deter Israel from conducting a ground operation into Lebanon
• Prepare for an expanded and protracted conflict with Israel in the near term
• Expel the United States from Syria

Lebanese Hezbollah has conducted at least nine attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel since CTP-ISW's last data cutoff on April 8.[46] Hezbollah fighters launched a one-way attack drone targeting an Israeli counter-drone electronic jamming device south of Kiryat Shmona.[47]

The IDF and local Syrian sources reported that unspecified Iranian-backed militants launched a rocket from Syria targeting the Yonatan region of the Golan Heights on April 8.[48] Israeli forces targeted the launch site in Daraa Province with artillery fire.[49] The IDF also said that it conducted strikes on Syrian Arab Army infrastructure in Mahaja region, Daraa Province, in a separate attack.[50]

Recorded reports of attacks; CTP-ISW cannot independently verify impact.

Iran and Axis of Resistance

The Islamic Resistance in Iraq—a coalition of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias—claimed on April 8 that it conducted five attacks into Israel using “appropriate weapons” over the previous 72 hours.[51] The Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed that its targets included the Ashkelon oil terminal and the Hatzerim airbase near Beer Sheva, among other unspecified ”vital targets.” CTP-ISW cannot verify these attacks. Western analysts reported that the Islamic Resistance in Iraq used Paveh cruise missiles in most of the attacks, according to footage that the group published.[52] The IDF intercepted a drone that entered Israeli airspace from the east and was headed toward Eilat on April 8.[53]

US Ambassador to Iraq Alina Romanowski met with Iraqi National Security Adviser Qasim al Araji ahead of Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammad Shia al Sudani’s visit to Washington, DC, on April 15.[54] Romanowski stated that the United States and Iraq are moving toward a “bilateral security agreement.” Iraqi officials previously stated that Sudani’s visit to Washington will focus on the status of the US-led international coalition in Iraq and the “transition to a comprehensive partnership."[55] Washington and Baghdad began talks to evaluate the status of the US-led international coalition in Iraq in late January 2024.[56] US and Iraqi officials held the latest round of Higher Military Commission talks on April 8.[57]

Iranian Foreign Affairs Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian warned that the “coming days will be difficult days for Israel” during a joint press conference with his Syrian counterpart, Faisal Mekdad, on

 April 8.[58] Abdollahian reiterated that the United States should be held responsible for the Israeli airstrike that killed several senior IRGC officers in Syria on April 1. Abdollahian emphasized that Syria is at the ”frontline” of the Axis of Resistance. Abdollahian’s comments follow several senior Iranian military officials suggesting that they will carefully calibrate Iran’s response.[59]

US CENTCOM reported that it targeted Houthi air defense systems in Houthi-controlled Yemen on April 8. CENTCOM separately intercepted a Houthi drone over the Red Sea on April 8.[60]

CENTCOM reported that the Houthis have launched five anti-ship ballistic missiles targeting the UK-owned, Italian-operated commercial vessel MV Hope Island.[61]

Jaish al Adl—a Baloch, Salafi-jihadi militia group—conducted an attack on April 9 killing at least five Iranian Law Enforcement Command (LEC) officers in Sib and Soran county, Sistan and Baluchistan Province.[62] Jaish al Adl claimed that it “completely destroyed” three LEC vehicles during the attack.[63] There has been a significant uptick in anti-regime militancy in southeastern Iran since December 2023. Jaish al Adl most recently conducted a series of unprecedently complex and sophisticated attacks targeting Iranian security forces in Sistan and Baluchistan on April 4.[64] The uptick in Jaish al Adl attacks, and the complexity of the April 4 attack, illustrate the increasingly precarious state of Iranian internal security, especially in Sistan and Baluchistan province.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com