Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners


Quotes of the Day:

"Only by decisions of national policy based upon accurate information can we have the chance that peace will endure."
- William J. Donovan

"The essential thing is action. Action has three stages: the decision born of thought, the order or preparation for execution, and the execution itself. All three stages are governed by the will. The will is rooted in character, and for the man of action character is of more critical importance than intellect. Intellect without will is worthless, will without intellect is dangerous."
- Hans von Seeckt

"Diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments." 
-Frederick the Great




1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 31 (PUTIN'S WAR)
2. RUSSIA MOBILIZES REINFORCEMENTS FROM SYRIA AND AFRICA TO UKRAINE
3. Special Operations News Update - March 31, 2022 | SOF News
4. There Is No Liberal World Order
5. Francis Fukuyama: We could be facing the end of “the end of history”.
6. How Bill Clinton’s Foreign Policy Led to the War in Ukraine
7. Russia's Military Was Great Until It Wasn't
8. Opinion | Ukraine needs better air defense systems, not more excuses
9. French intelligence chief Vidaud fired over Russian war failings
10. U.S. says China's pressure on Taiwan a threat to all democracies
11. The case for Taiwan’s statehood
12. Putin’s Soldiers Caught on Tape Lamenting Losses and Blasting His Army of ‘Stupid Morons’
13.  Clash between Japan and Russia looms as Tokyo steps up Kuril Island claims: 'Russian Army is illegal occupier'
14. In Iniochos Exercise, Israel Rehearses Iran Strikes as Saudis Observe
15.The Challenge of Containing a Nuclear Iran
16. Biden Administration Failing to Reform U.N.’s Palestinian Refugee Agency
17. Biden struggles to tell his Russia story
18. Let Ukraine Go on Offense Against Russia
19. Opinion | Biden sends Putin a muddled nuclear message
20. Gen. Kellogg: Russia 'on the edge' of losing the war in Ukraine
21. Russia’s War Lacks a Battlefield Commander, U.S. Officials Say
22. The war makes China uncomfortable. European leaders don’t care
23. Western spy agencies weaponize intelligence in attempt to undermine Putin
24. The double standard with Hunter Biden's laptop is worse than you think
25. Opinion | Koch Industries’ valentine to Vladimir Putin




1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 31 (PUTIN'S WAR)


RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 31 (PUTIN'S WAR)
Mar 31, 2022 - Press ISW
Mason Clark, George Barros, and Karolina Hird
March 31, 6:00 pm ET
Ukrainian forces conducted several local counterattacks around Kyiv, in northeastern Ukraine, and toward Kherson on March 31, successfully pressuring Russian forces and seeking to disrupt ongoing Russian troop rotations. Ukrainian forces northwest of Kyiv pushed Russian forces north of the E-40 highway and will likely assault Russian-held Bucha and Hostomel in the coming days. Ukrainian forces exploited limited Russian withdrawals east of Brovary to retake territory across Kyiv and Chernihiv Oblasts. Ukrainian forces likely conducted counterattacks toward Sumy in the past 24 hours as well, though ISW cannot independently confirm these reports. Finally, Ukrainian forces conducted limited counterattacks in northern Kherson Oblast. Russian forces only conducted offensive operations in Donbas and against Mariupol in the last 24 hours and did not make any major advances.
Russian efforts to redeploy damaged units from the Kyiv and Sumy axes to eastern Ukraine are unlikely to enable Russian forces to conduct major gains. Russia continued to withdraw elements of the 35th and 36th Combined Arms Armies and 76 Air Assault Division from their positions northwest of Kyiv into Belarus for refit and likely further redeployment to eastern Ukraine. However, these units are likely heavily damaged and demoralized. Feeding damaged Eastern Military District units directly into operations in eastern Ukraine—predominantly conducted by the Southern Military District—will likely prove ineffective and additionally introduce further command-and-control challenges for the Russian military. Russian forces will likely attempt to retain their current front lines around Kyiv and in northeastern Ukraine and will continue to dig in on these fronts; ISW has not seen any indicators of Russian forces fully relinquishing captured territory. However, Ukrainian counterattacks are likely disrupting Russian efforts to redeploy and refit their forces and will continue in the coming days.
Key Takeaways
  • Ukrainian forces successfully conducted local counterattacks around Kyiv, towards Sumy, and in Kherson Oblast and will likely take further territory—particularly northwest and east of Kyiv—in the coming days.
  • Russia is withdrawing elements of its damaged forces around Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Sumy for redeployment to eastern Ukraine, but these units are unlikely to provide a decisive shift in Russian combat power.
  • Ukrainian forces continued to repel Russian assaults throughout Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, and Russian forces failed to take territory in the past 24 hours.
  • Russian forces continue to steadily advance in Mariupol.
  • Russia’s preplanned spring draft will begin on April 1 and does not appear abnormal from Russia’s typical conscription cycle. Newly drafted conscripts will not provide Russia with additional combat power for many months.
  • The Kremlin is likely accelerating efforts to establish quasi-state entities to govern occupied Ukrainian territory.

Putin signed a decree on March 31 beginning Russia’s preplanned spring draft, conscripting 134,500 Russians.[1] Russia conducts two prescheduled drafts a year, typically running from April 1 to July 15 and October 1 to December 31.[2] The number of Russian conscripts called up is relatively consistent, including 127,000 in fall 2021 and 134,000 in Spring 2021.[3] New conscripts typically undergo one or two months of basic training followed by three to sixth months of advanced training prior to assignment to specific units, and are precluded by law from deploying to combat with less than four months of training—though the Kremlin could bypass this restriction by announcing a general mobilization.[4] Russia’s Spring 2022 draft does not as of yet appear abnormal from Russia’s typical conscription cycle, but ISW will closely monitor any developments throughout the April 1-July 15 call-up period. Newly drafted conscripts will not provide Russia additional combat power for many months.
The Ukrainian General Staff reported on March 31 that 200 “mercenaries from the Middle East,” likely Syrian troops, arrived at the Gomel military airfield in Belarus on March 29.[5] ISW published an assessment of Russia’s mobilization of reinforcements from Syria and elsewhere to Ukraine earlier on March 31.[6]
The Kremlin is likely accelerating efforts to establish quasi-state entities to govern occupied Ukrainian territory. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on March 30 that Russia is attempting to set up military-civilian administrations and is preparing to create a “Kherson’s Peoples Republic” to administer occupied southern Ukraine. The General Staff later reported on March 31 that Russia's FSB, the 652nd Group of Information and Psychological Operations, and officers of the 12th Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Federation are currently overseeing the occupation around Kherson, and the Kremlin is “curating” Russian law enforcement personnel and court officials for deployment to Ukraine at an unspecified future date.[7]
We do not report in detail on the deliberate Russian targeting of civilian infrastructure and attacks on unarmed civilians, which are war crimes, because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
Russian forces are engaged in four primary efforts at this time:
  • Main effort—Kyiv (comprised of three subordinate supporting efforts);
  • Supporting effort 1—Kharkiv;
  • Supporting effort 1a—Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts;
  • Supporting effort 2—Mariupol; and
  • Supporting effort 3—Kherson and advances northward and westward.
Main effort—Kyiv axis: Russian operations on the Kyiv axis were aimed at encircling the city from the northwest, west, and east. It is unclear if forces on this axis have been given a new mission and, if so, what it might be.
Subordinate main effort along the west bank of the Dnipro
The Ukrainian General Staff reported on March 31 that elements of Russia’s 35th Combined Arms Army (CAA), 36th CAA, and 76th Air Assault Division withdrew from positions northwest of Kyiv into Belarus to restore combat capabilities and possible redeployment to other axes of advance.[8] Belarusian social media users additionally observed a large column of Russian Naval Infantry (vehicles marked with a “V”) moving through Gomel, Belarus towards the Russian border on March 30.[9] These units – particularly the 76th Air Assault Division—have likely suffered extensive damage since February 24 and are highly unlikely to quickly reconstitute their combat power. Russia may seek to redeploy these damaged units to Donbas or into the fighting around Izyum, but they will likely be of limited utility in the short term and face growing morale problems.
Ukrainian counterattacks west of Kyiv since March 29 have reportedly pushed Russian forces north of the critical E-40 highway, the southernmost extent of Russian advances around Kyiv.[10] Local media and social media users reported that Ukrainian forces have recaptured Lisovo, Kapitanivka, Dmytrivka, Kopiliv, and Buzova since March 29. Fighting continued throughout Bucha, Makariv, and Hostomel in the past 24 hours.[11] Ukrainian counterattacks will likely continue to steadily roll back Russian-occupied territory northwest of Kyiv in the coming days, but a sustained Ukrainian offensive to drive Russian forces out of artillery range of Kyiv would likely require a greater concentration of forces.
Subordinate supporting effort — Chernihiv and Sumy axis
Ukrainian forces are taking advantage of Russian force withdrawals of damaged units around Brovary to conduct successful counterattacks. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on March 31 that Russia continues to withdraw elements of its forces around Brovary for redeployment elsewhere, and the Kyiv Oblast administration stated its observed Russian forces withdrawing from Baryshivska, Kalityanska, and Velykodymerska on March 31.[12] Social media users reported that Ukrainian forces recaptured Ploske, Svitylnya, and Hrebelky (all east of Brovary) on March 30 and entered Nova Basan on March 31.[13]
A separate Ukrainian counterattack reportedly recaptured Sloboda, just south of Chernihiv city, on March 30.[14] The Ukrainian General Staff stated on March 31 that elements of Russia’s 2nd CAA, 41st CAA, and 90th Tank Division are operating around Chernihiv and concentrated on reinforcing their defensive positions around Chernihiv in the last 24 hours.[15] The General Staff additionally stated that it expects Russian forces to intensify their fire against Ukrainian forces in the coming days to cover the redeployment of Russian forces.[16]
Ukrainian forces are likely conducting successful counterattacks in Sumy Oblast but the advances claimed by local authorities are likely false. Sumy Regional State Administration head Dmytro Zhyvytskyi claimed on March 31 that all of Sumy Oblast except the Konotop area has been liberated from Russian forces.[17] This claim is highly likely to be false, as we have observed no evidence of Ukrainian forces pushing the Russian military back to the international border or completely relieving Sumy. However, Ukrainian forces are likely successfully conducting counterattacks toward Sumy, supporting similar operations in Chernihiv Oblast. ISW will update this assessment as more information is available.

Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv:
The Ukrainian General Staff reported on March 30-31 that Russian forces are assembling forces previously withdrawn from other lines of Russian advance to form “strike groups” reinforced with artillery to the Izyum area.[18] Russian forces likely intend to advance southeast from existing positions around Izyum to link up with Russian forces advancing west in Luhansk Oblast, but damaged Russian units redeployed from northeastern Ukraine will likely be of limited utility in the near future.
The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed that Russian aircraft and loitering munitions targeted four Ukrainian command posts and an S-300 air defense system south of Izyum on March 31, though ISW cannot independently confirm this claim.[19] Russian forces continued to shell Kharkiv but did not conduct any assaults on the city in the past 24 hours.[20]
Supporting Effort #1a—Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts:
Ukrainian forces continued to repel Russian assaults throughout Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, particularly concentrated on Popasna and Rubizhne, in the past 24 hours.[21] The Ukrainian General Staff reported at 6:00 am local time on March 31 that Ukrainian forces repelled five enemy attacks over the previous 24 hours and claimed to have destroyed 10 tanks, 18 armored and 13 unarmored vehicles, and 15 artillery systems.[22] The General Staff additionally stated that the Russian air force intensified its operational tempo in the Donbas region in the past 24 hours.[23] The Russian General Staff claimed that LNR forces captured Zhytlivka (northwest of Severodonetsk) and Zolota Nyva (southwest of Donetsk) on March 31, but ISW cannot verify this claim.[24]

Supporting Effort #2—Mariupol:
Russian forces likely continued to advance in Mariupol on March 31.[25] DNR and LNR officials claimed that DNR forces are involved in Russian operations in Mariupol alongside Russian forces.[26]

Supporting Effort #3—Kherson and advances northward and westwards:
Ukrainian forces conducted successful counterattacks in several areas along the southern front on March 31. Ukrainian forces recaptured Orlove, Zagradivka, and Kochubeyevka in northern Kherson Oblast.[27] Ukrainian Air Assault Forces additionally claimed to recapture Zatyshshya, Malynivka, Vesele, Zelenyi Hai, and Chervone in Zaporizhia Oblast on March 31.[28] The Ukrainian General Staff reported Russian forces concentrated their efforts on maintaining their current positions.[29]
Immediate items to watch
  • Russian forces will likely capture Mariupol or force the city to capitulate within the coming days;
  • Russian reinforcements may enable a renewed Russian offensive through Slovyansk to link up with Russian forces in Luhansk Oblast;
  • Russian withdrawals from near Kyiv and Chernihiv will become significant if Russian troops begin to pull back from front-line positions around either city.
[1] https://iz dot ru/1313474/2022-03-31/prezident-rossii-vladimir-putin-podpisal-ukaz-o-prizyve-134-500-chelovek-na-srochnuiu-sluzhbu.
[17] https://tsn dot ua/exclusive/u-zvilnenih-vid-okupantiv-gromadah-schodnya-znahodyat-trupi-lyudey-yaka-situaciya-u-sumah-ta-oblasti-31-bereznya-2025298.html; https://censor dot net/ua/news/3330162/u_zvilnenyh_vid_okupantiv_gromadah_sumschyny_pratsyuyut_sapery_tryvaye_zachystka_vid_drg_jyvytskyyi.
[27] https://www.slovoidilo dot ua/2022/03/31/novyna/suspilstvo/zsu-zvilnyly-okupantiv-try-sela-xersonshhyni; https://nv dot ua/ukr/dnipro/zsu-zvilnyayut-sela-hersonskoji-oblasti-ta-vidganyayut-voroga-podali-vid-krivogo-rogu-novini-dnipra-50229865.html; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/284290707217348;https://w... dot ua/rubric-ato/3444325-sili-oboroni-vidnovili-kontrol-nad-troma-naselenimi-punktami.html; https://vesti dot ua/uk/strana-uk/hronologiya-vojny-v-ukraine-chetverg-31-marta-obnovlyaetsya; https://www dot pravda.com.ua/news/2022/03/31/7335933/https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=5283518798345616&id=100000... https://t.me/mykola_lukashuk/207.
[28] https://zolochiv dot net/ukrainski-viyskovi-zvilnyly-5-naselenykh-punktiv-na-zaporizhzhi/; https://www.facebook.com/www.dshv.mil.gov.ua/posts/34159063134826.


2. RUSSIA MOBILIZES REINFORCEMENTS FROM SYRIA AND AFRICA TO UKRAINE

RUSSIA MOBILIZES REINFORCEMENTS FROM SYRIA AND AFRICA TO UKRAINE
Mar 31, 2022 - Press ISW
Jennifer Cafarella, Ezgi Yazici, and Zach Coles
Key Takeaways:
  • Russia began redeploying Russian private military contractors (PMCs) and their Syrian proxies from Africa and Syria to Ukraine in approximately the second week of the war. These forces have not had an observable effect within Ukraine. Their redeployment has created security gaps in the places they have left that Russia is attempting to mitigate at least partially.
  • A reported decrease in Russian air sorties in Syria could indicate the withdrawal of some Russian assets, but ISW cannot confirm any redeployment of Russian military forces or equipment from Syria.
  • Russian forces are redeploying within Syria. It is possible that this redeployment indicates preparation for a future partial withdrawal from parts of Syria. However, it is also possible that Russia is merely changing its posture in order to support the recruitment and training of Syrian fighters.
  • Russia’s attempt to generate Syrian recruits appears to focus on individual replacements for Russian fighters rather than the redeployment of existing Syrian militias as coherent units. Russia is prioritizing Syrians with combat experience who have fought in units with close relationships with Russian forces, including the Tiger Forces, 5th Corps, Liwa al Quds, and others. However, even fighters from these units are unlikely to significantly alter the situation in Ukraine. The number of fighters Russia has recruited and/or already deployed to Ukraine is unclear from available sourcing at this time.
  • Any change in the posture of Russian forces or pro-regime militias creates security gaps that anti-regime actors including Turkey, ISIS, al Qaeda, and Syrian opposition groups can exploit. It also affects core Iranian interests. ISW has already observed early indications of changes in the posture of Iranian proxy militia forces in Syria in reaction to recent developments and will publish an assessment in the coming days.
Russia is attempting to redeploy Syrian units with experience working under Russian commanders to Ukraine to mitigate high Russian casualties. ISW previously assessed that Russian conscription efforts at home are unlikely to provide Russian forces around Ukraine sufficient combat power to replenish casualties and restart major offensive operations in the near term.[1] A redeployment of Syrians is unlikely to significantly alter the situation in Ukraine and will incur risks to core Russian interests in Syria by exacerbating the vulnerabilities of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime that Turkey, ISIS, and anti-Assad groups can exploit. Any change to the disposition or deployment of pro-regime forces in Syria also has major consequences for Iranian interests. ISW has observed early indications of changes in the posture of Iranian proxy militia forces in reaction to recent developments and will publish an assessment in the coming days.
Syria represents the largest single pool of experienced foreign fighters that Russia can draw from to generate additional combat power relatively quickly. The pool includes Syrians currently serving alongside Russian PMCs like the Wagner group, including abroad, or in Russian-backed Syrian militias. It also includes Syrians with prior experience in such units that could be remobilized. Initial reporting indicates Russia is likely taking a phased approach to mobilizing Russian and Syrian reinforcements from the Middle East and Africa in order to generate multiple waves of reinforcements.
Russia began a redeployment of Wagner units and their Syrian proxies from Africa and Syria to Ukraine in early February. Libyan media sources began reporting the redeployment of Wager Group units along with their Pantsir air-defense systems and Syrian proxies in early February, with later reports appearing to corroborate this redeployment in early March.[2] Unconfirmed Syrian sources reported that 500 Wagner fighters had already deployed to Ukraine from Syria by March 8 alongside fighters from the pro-regime “ISIS hunters” militia, which works closely with Russian forces in Syria.[3] Ukrainian forces first reported on March 8 that they discovered Wagner dog tags with Syrian phone numbers on killed Russian soldiers and later stated on March 20 that Wagner personnel were arriving in Ukraine. British military intelligence said on March 28 that more than 1,000 Wagner militants and senior leaders will deploy to eastern Ukraine.[4] Russia has likely also pulled Wagner forces from other deployments, including the Central African Republic. Wagner Group is also recruiting actively in Syria.[5] Syrian sources reported as early as March 9 that Russian officers offered Syrians fighting in Libya new contracts to fight in the Central African Republic, likely in order to backfill Wagner forces.[6]
At the time of publication, there is little evidence that Russia has begun to move military assets out of Syria, although such movement could have occurred without revealing open-source indicators. Reports by anti-regime sources of an observed decrease in Russian air operations and ground patrols beginning in early March could indicate that Russia has reduced its air posture in Syria. However, the change could also simply reflect the change in Russia’s immediate prioritization of efforts in Syria. On March 28, Russia conducted its first airstrikes in Idlib since Russian forces invaded Ukraine, indicating Russia likely seeks to maintain at least a minimum level of capability in Syria even if it is freeing up assets to shift to Ukraine.[7]
Russian forces are redeploying within Syria in order to recruit and mobilize additional Syrian fighters for a second wave of reinforcements. The Kremlin announced on March 11 that it would welcome “16,000 Middle Eastern” fighters to deploy to Ukraine alongside Russian forces and published footage of Syrian combatants preparing to deploy to Ukraine.[8] Ukrainian military intelligence claimed on March 20 that the Russian military ordered its base in Hmeimim, Syria, to send up to 300 fighters from Syria to Ukraine daily.[9] Syrian sources corroborate that the Hmeimim airbase is the hub for Russia’s effort to redeploy Syrians to Ukraine.[10] Numerous Syrian news outlets and social media users attest since then that Russian forces are identifying and recruiting Syrian fighters interested to fight in Ukraine in exchange for salaries and a six-month contract.[11] This recruitment effort appears to prioritize individual replacements for Russian soldiers rather than the redeployment of existing pro-regime militia groups as coherent units.
The Russian Reconciliation Center in Syria, which maintains headquarters in multiple Syrian provinces, is leading the recruitment effort and has likely refocused away from other missions at least temporarily.[12] Major recruitment pushes are occurring in at least Hama, Aleppo, Damascus, and Deir ez Zour. Ukrainian Intelligence claims and several unconfirmed reports refer to as many as 12-14 recruitment centers across Syria’s M5 highway, which connects Aleppo to Damascus.[13] Russia is likely organizing most if not all of these centers with support from Syrian elements (more below).
Some reports indicate that Russia pulled back Russian forces stationed near front lines in Aleppo and in Aleppo City on March 19, reportedly in order to relocate to Hmeimim airbase.[14] These forces are presumably military police and/or Spetznaz and could be relocating to Hmeimim airbase or onward to recruitment centers elsewhere in Syria to support the mobilization of Syrian fighters. New recruits from the 5th Corps reportedly replaced these Russian forces. Similar Russian redeployments may also have occurred in other areas including Dera’a, Suwayda, Homs, Deir ez Zour, and Hasaka provinces, but ISW has not collected evidence of further Russian withdrawals from key areas or front lines.
Some Russian forces may be preparing to redeploy to Ukraine. Unconfirmed reports of Russian reinforcements to key bases in Syria could reflect a troop surge necessary to tear down Russian basing or, alternatively, that Russia is committing resources to continued recruitment and possibly the mitigation of resulting risks in Syria. Some reports indicate that Russian Military Police and Wagner Group reinforcements arrived at Qamishli airbase in Hasaka and Tabqa airbase in Raqqa on March 8 and March 23, respectively.[15] Unidentified Regime and Russian-backed forces also reportedly deployed to reinforce 5th Corps positions near Kobani on the Turkish border on March 27. The purpose of these reinforcements is unclear and could include deterring a Turkish attack or supporting a recruitment drive in Eastern Syria. Reported resistance to Russian recruitment in southern Syria could have caused Russia to reprioritize recruits from the east.[16] It is also possible that these Russian forces are supporting the decommissioning of these Russian bases in order to redeploy assets to Ukraine, however. Some unconfirmed reports state that Russian soldiers and Wagner militants withdrew from Syria’s second-largest military storage facility in southeastern Homs on March 29 before redeploying to the Palmyra military airport.[17] ISW will publish further updates on the movement of Russian forces within or out of Syria as more information becomes available.
Russia is leveraging its pre-existing relationships with multiple pro-regime units to coordinate the recruitment and select individuals from these units with combat experience.[18] These units include the Tiger Forces (aka 25th Division), “ISIS Hunters” militia, Liwa al Quds, and reconciled opposition forces who joined the Russian-commanded 5th Corps.[19] Syrian regime security structures including Syrian Military intelligence and Syrian translators who have worked with the Russians are also recruiting, likely in coordination with Russian forces.[20] Some reports state that Russia has denied applicants who do not possess combat experience.[21] Other unconfirmed reports indicate Russian commanders have expressed a desire for Syrian fighters with experience in urban combat.[22] Key Russian-backed Syrian units including the Tiger Forces and Liwa al Quds do have urban experience and have conducted urban training with Russian forces in Aleppo.[23] However, the likely effectiveness of these Syrian forces should not be overstated. The urban defense that Ukraine’s armed forces and Ukrainian civilians are preparing in Kyiv is significantly more robust than what pro-Assad regime militias faced in Syria’s Aleppo.[24] Moreover, the fierce fighting underway in Kharkiv, Kherson, and Mariupol indicates that Syrian replacements are likely to have a marginal effect at best.
Finally, Russia is attempting to recruit and train a wider range of pro-regime Syrian fighters who do not have prior experience working with Russian forces, likely as a contingency for the upcoming months to replace combat losses and set conditions for a longer war. Syrian fighters who have not worked under direct Russian command can offer an alternative source of recruits to Russia’s ineffective reserves but will likely need a months-long training process for Russia to effectively integrate them into the Ukrainian battlefield. The Kremlin faces a trade-off between a shorter training process that would result in a relatively quick low-quality reinforcement that is unlikely to generate additional combat power and a longer training effort that would significantly delay battlefield results. Pro-Assad regime militia units with less established relationships with Russian forces also have been conducting recruitment efforts since as early as March 15. It is possible that Assad aims to offer Russia additional recruits in order to mitigate the scale of Russia’s redeployment of more capable Syrian units. Russian forces began providing public attention to these recruitment efforts on March 27, especially the pro-regime National Defense Forces militias.[25]
Any change in the extent or focus of Russian support to the Assad regime’s military posture can significantly affect the status quo in Syria. To date, Russian airpower has allowed Russia to set the pace of fighting, deny rivals similar opportunities, and stabilize frontlines (relatively). The efforts of Russian officers to supply and coordinate a wide range of pro-regime stakeholders and perform other stabilization functions receive less attention but are a major contributor to the status quo. The combined effects of Russian airpower and Russia’s physical presence across Syria provide a minimum level of security for core Russian interests: the air and naval bases on Syria’s Mediterranean coast and Syrian oil and natural gas fields which Russian companies have secured contracts to operate. The refocus of Russian forces in Syria on a recruitment drive can itself jeopardize these effects and create friction within the pro-regime coalition. The potential redeployment of Russian forces or major elements of pro-regime forces in key areas or frontlines could create major security gaps and indicate that Russia is willing to take significant risks in Syria to support a long war in Ukraine.
The Kremlin’s decision regarding the scale of redeployments of Russians and Syrians from Syria to Ukraine will determine the gaps and opportunities that pro-regime partners and rivals alike can selectively exploit. ISIS is the most likely to move fast in Syria and is already waging an aggressive campaign against pro-Assad regime forces in central Syria that has sustained pressure on regime supply lines and oil and natural gas fields since 2019.[26] Turkey is balancing its role and seeks opportunities to serve as a mediator in Ukraine but could still escalate in Syria if it perceives a need or opportunity to gain additional leverage against the Kremlin. ISW is evaluating how other actors, including Iran’s proxies, are recalibrating in Syria as the Kremlin refocuses and will provide updates in future publications.

[2] libyaobserver dot ly/news/wagner-withdraws-hundreds-syrian-mercenaries-through-benghazi-airport; libyaalahrar dot tv/2022/02/06/%d9%85%d9%88%d9%82%d8%b9-%d8%b3%d9%88%d8%b1%d9%8a-%d8%b1%d9%88%d8%b3%d9%8a%d8%a7-%d8%b3%d8%ad%d8%a8%d8%aa-300-%d9%85%d9%82%d8%a7%d8%aa%d9%84-%d8%b3%d9%88%d8%b1%d9%8a-%d9%85%d9%86-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%ac/; marsad dot ly/en/2022/03/08/russia-withdraws-syrian-fighters-from-libya-without-sending-in-new-groups/; eanlibya dot com/%d9%85%d9%88%d9%82%d8%b9-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b3%d9%88%d9%8a%d8%af%d8%a7%d8%a1-24-%d9%88%d8%b5%d9%88%d9%84-%d8%af%d9%81%d8%b9%d8%a9-%d9%85%d9%86-%d8%a7%d9%84%d9%85%d8%b1%d8%aa%d8%b2%d9%82%d8%a9-%d8%a7/; eanlibya dot com/%d9%85%d9%88%d9%82%d8%b9-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b3%d9%88%d9%8a%d8%af%d8%a7%d8%a1-24-%d9%88%d8%b5%d9%88%d9%84-%d8%af%d9%81%d8%b9%d8%a9-%d9%85%d9%86-%d8%a7%d9%84%d9%85%d8%b1%d8%aa%d8%b2%d9%82%d8%a9-%d8%a7/; libyaalahrar dot tv/2022/03/08/%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b3%d9%88%d9%8a%d8%af%d8%a7%d8%a1-24-%d8%b1%d9%88%d8%b3%d9%8a%d8%a7-%d8%aa%d8%b3%d8%ad%d8%a8-%d9%85%d8%a6%d8%a7%d8%aa-%d8%a7%d9%84%d9%85%d9%82%d8%a7%d8%aa%d9%84%d9%8a%d9%86-%d9%85/; marsad dot ly/en/2022/03/08/russia-withdraws-syrian-fighters-from-libya-without-sending-in-new-groups/; eanlibya dot com/%d9%85%d9%88%d9%82%d8%b9-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b3%d9%88%d9%8a%d8%af%d8%a7%d8%a1-24-%d9%88%d8%b5%d9%88%d9%84-%d8%af%d9%81%d8%b9%d8%a9-%d9%85%d9%86-%d8%a7%d9%84%d9%85%d8%b1%d8%aa%d8%b2%d9%82%d8%a9-%d8%a7/; libyasecuritymonitor dot com/wagner-operatives-withdrawn-from-sokna/; libyaalahrar dot tv/2022/02/20/%d9%81%d8%a7%d8%ba%d9%86%d8%b1-%d8%aa%d8%b9%d9%8a%d8%af-%d8%aa%d9%85%d8%b1%d9%83%d8%b2%d8%a7%d8%aa%d9%87%d8%a7-%d8%a8%d8%a7%d8%aa%d8%ac%d8%a7%d9%87-%d9%82%d8%a7%d8%b9%d8%af%d8%a9-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%ac/; marsad dot ly/ar/2022/02/20/%d9%85%d8%b1%d8%aa%d8%b2%d9%82%d8%a9-%d9%81%d8%a7%d8%ba%d9%86%d8%b1-%d9%8a%d9%86%d8%b3%d8%ad%d8%a8%d9%88%d9%86-%d9%85%d9%86-%d9%85%d8%af%d9%8a%d9%86%d8%a9-%d8%b3%d9%88%d9%83%d9%86%d8%a9-%d9%88%d9%8a/; stj-sy dot org/en/ukraine-wagner-group-begins-relocating-syrian-fighters-from-libya-to-russia/; libyaobserver dot ly/news/syrian-org-russia-redeploys-syrian-fighters-libya-ukraine
[3] https://twitter.com/Najdat567/status/1499012996756127744?s=20&t=sW8E6_2P...; alaraby dot co dot uk/politics/%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%A7-%D8%AA%D9%86%D9%82%D9%84-%D9%85%D9%84%D9%8A%D8%B4%D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%AA%D9%87%D8%A7-%D9%85%D9%86-%D8%B3%D9%88%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D9%84%D9%84%D9%82%D8%AA%D8%A7%D9%84-%D9%81%D9%8A-%D8%A3%D9%88%D9%83%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%8A%D8%A7; qasioun-news dot com/ar/articles/249550/%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%A7-%D8%AA%D8%B3%D8%AD%D8%A8-%D8%A8%D8%B9%D8%B6-%D9%85%D8%AC%D9%85%D9%88%D8%B9%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D9%81%D8%A7%D8%BA%D9%86%D8%B1-%D9%88%D9%82%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D8%A3%D8%AE%D8%B1%D9%89%D9%85%D9%86-%D8%B3%D9%88%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%A7-%D8%A5%D9%84%D9%89-%D8%A3%D9%88%D9%83%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%8A%D8%A7
[5] https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/explainer-russia-bring-sy... deirezzor24 dot net/en/russia-has-opened-the-door-to-volunteering-in-eastern-syria-to-recruit-mercenaries-and-send-them-to-ukraine/; syriahr dot com/en/242662/
[6] middleeastmonitor dot com/20220309-russia-withdraws-hundreds-of-syrian-fighters-from-libya/; 7al dot net/2022/03/26/%d9%85%d9%82%d8%a7%d8%aa%d9%84%d9%88%d9%86-%d8%b3%d9%88%d8%b1%d9%8a%d9%88%d9%86-%d9%81%d9%8a-%d8%a5%d9%81%d8%b1%d9%8a%d9%82%d9%8a%d8%a7-%d8%a7%d9%84%d9%88%d8%b3%d8%b7%d9%89-%d9%85%d8%a7-%d8%b9%d9%84/ramez-h/news/

[9] gur dot gov dot ua/content/okupanty-perekydaiut-v-ukrainu-cherhovi-terorystychni-hrupy-z-metoiu-likvidatsii-kerivnytstva-ukrainy dot html; https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-recruiting-syrians-for-urban-combat-...
[10] syria dot tv/%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D8%AA%D9%83%D8%B1%D9%85-%D9%85%D9%8A%D9%84%D9%8A%D8%B4%D9%8A%D8%A7-%D8%A8%D8%AD%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%A9-%D8%A3%D8%B9%D9%84%D9%86%D8%AA-%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%AA%D8%B9%D8%AF%D8%A7%D8%AF%D9%87%D8%A7-%D9%84%D9%84%D9%82%D8%AA%D8%A7%D9%84-%D9%81%D9%8A-%D8%A3%D9%88%D9%83%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%8A%D8%A7-%D8%B5%D9%88%D8%B1; libyaalahrar dot tv/2022/03/08/%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b3%d9%88%d9%8a%d8%af%d8%a7%d8%a1-24-%d8%b1%d9%88%d8%b3%d9%8a%d8%a7-%d8%aa%d8%b3%d8%ad%d8%a8-%d9%85%d8%a6%d8%a7%d8%aa-%d8%a7%d9%84%d9%85%d9%82%d8%a7%d8%aa%d9%84%d9%8a%d9%86-%d9%85/; eanlibya dot com/%d9%85%d9%88%d9%82%d8%b9-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b3%d9%88%d9%8a%d8%af%d8%a7%d8%a1-24-%d9%88%d8%b5%d9%88%d9%84-%d8%af%d9%81%d8%b9%d8%a9-%d9%85%d9%86-%d8%a7%d9%84%d9%85%d8%b1%d8%aa%d8%b2%d9%82%d8%a9-%d8%a7/
[12] deirezzor24 dot net/en/volunteers-and-mercenaries-official-parties-and-loyal-personalities-dedicate-their-efforts-to-recruit-in-the-ranks-of-the-russian-forces/; stj-sy dot org/en/syria-has-the-recruitment-of-syrian-fighters-towards-ukraine-begun/
[13]https://twitter.com/merBora93095056/status/1502279095454998531?s=20&t=Y5...; aawsat dot com/home/article/3521986/%D9%85%D9%86-%D9%87%D9%85-%C2%AB%D8%B1%D8%AC%D8%A7%D9%84-%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%A7%C2%BB-%D9%81%D9%8A-%D8%B3%D9%88%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%A7-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B0%D9%8A%D9%86-%D9%8A%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%AC%D9%88%D9%86-%D9%84%D9%84%D9%82%D8%AA%D8%A7%D9%84-%D9%81%D9%8A-%D8%A3%D9%88%D9%83%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%9F; thelenspost dot com/97109-2/; https://twitter.com/spriter99880/status/1500609787100381186; alaraby dot co dot uk/politics/%D8%B6%D8%AC%D9%8A%D8%AC-%D8%AF%D8%B9%D9%85-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%86%D8%B8%D8%A7%D9%85-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B3%D9%88%D8%B1%D9%8A-%D9%84%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%A7-%D8%AA%D8%B8%D8%A7%D9%87%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D8%A8%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A5%D9%83%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%87-%D9%88%D8%AA%D8%B3%D9%87%D9%8A%D9%84-%D8%AA%D8%AC%D9%86%D9%8A%D8%AF-%D9%85%D8%B1%D8%AA%D8%B2%D9%82%D8%A9; deirezzor24 dot net/en/russian-forces-distribute-ridiculous-aid-to-murat-and-hatlah-in-deir-ezzor-province/ https://www.facebook.com/DefenceIntelligenceofUkraine/posts/269855898659171
[14] qasioun-news dot com/ar/articles/249943/%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%A7-%D8%AA%D9%82%D9%84%D8%B5-%D8%B9%D8%AF%D8%AF-%D8%B9%D9%86%D8%A7%D8%B5%D8%B1%D9%87%D8%A7-%D9%81%D9%8A-%D8%AD%D9%84%D8%A8-%D9%88%D8%AA%D9%86%D9%82%D9%84-%D8%AC%D8%B2%D8%A1%D9%8B%D8%A7-%D9%85%D9%86%D9%87%D9%85-%D8%A5%D9%84%D9%89-%D8%AD%D9%85%D9%8A%D9%85%D9%8A%D9%85
; syria dot tv/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AE%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%B3%D8%A9-%D8%AE%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%84-2022-%D8%AA%D8%B9%D8%B2%D9%8A%D8%B2%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D8%B9%D8%B3%D9%83%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D8%AA%D8%B5%D9%84-%D8%A5%D9%84%D9%89-%D9%85%D8%B7%D8%A7%D8%B1-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%B4%D9%84%D9%8A; syria dot tv/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AE%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%B3%D8%A9-%D8%AE%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%84-2022-%D8%AA%D8%B9%D8%B2%D9%8A%D8%B2%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D8%B9%D8%B3%D9%83%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D8%AA%D8%B5%D9%84-%D8%A5%D9%84%D9%89-%D9%85%D8%B7%D8%A7%D8%B1-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%B4%D9%84%D9%8A; syria dot tv/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AE%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%B3%D8%A9-%D8%AE%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%84-2022-%D8%AA%D8%B9%D8%B2%D9%8A%D8%B2%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D8%B9%D8%B3%D9%83%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D8%AA%D8%B5%D9%84-%D8%A5%D9%84%D9%89-%D9%85%D8%B7%D8%A7%D8%B1-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%B4%D9%84%D9%8A; eyeofeuphrates dot com/ar/news/2022/02/24/4538; syria dot tv/%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%A7-%D8%AA%D8%B9%D8%B2%D8%B2-%D9%82%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%AA%D9%87%D8%A7-%D9%81%D9%8A-%D9%85%D8%B7%D8%A7%D8%B1%D9%8A-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B7%D8%A8%D9%82%D8%A9-%D8%A8%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B1%D9%82%D8%A9-%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%B4%D9%84%D9%8A-%D8%A8%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AD%D8%B3%D9%83%D8%A9
[16] 7al dot net/2022/03/27/%d9%87%d9%84-%d8%aa%d8%aa%d8%ae%d9%84%d9%89-%d8%b1%d9%88%d8%b3%d9%8a%d8%a7-%d8%b9%d9%86-%d8%af%d8%b9%d9%85-%d8%a7%d9%84%d9%84%d9%88%d8%a7%d8%a1-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%ab%d8%a7%d9%85%d9%86/ramez-h/news/
[18] Damascusv dot com/archives/42676;
[19] horanfree dot com/?p=10985; stj-sy dot org/en/syria-has-the-recruitment-of-syrian-fighters-towards-ukraine-begun/; deirezzor24 dot net/en/volunteers-and-mercenaries-official-parties-and-loyal-personalities-dedicate-their-efforts-to-recruit-in-the-ranks-of-the-russian-forces/; https://twitter.com/merBora93095056/status/1502279097132752903?s=20&t=Y5... https://twitter.com/soldier2017kg/status/1502266867934810112
[20] stj-sy dot org/en/ukraine-wagner-group-begins-relocating-syrian-fighters-from-libya-to-russia/; syriahr dot com/en/242672/
[21] stj-sy dot org/en/ukraine-wagner-group-begins-relocating-syrian-fighters-from-libya-to-russia/
[22] stj-sy dot org/en/syria-has-the-recruitment-of-syrian-fighters-towards-ukraine-begun/
[25] Syria dot tv/%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D8%AA%D9%83%D8%B1%D9%85-%D9%85%D9%8A%D9%84%D9%8A%D8%B4%D9%8A%D8%A7-%D8%A8%D8%AD%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%A9-%D8%A3%D8%B9%D9%84%D9%86%D8%AA-%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%AA%D8%B9%D8%AF%D8%A7%D8%AF%D9%87%D8%A7-%D9%84%D9%84%D9%82%D8%AA%D8%A7%D9%84-%D9%81%D9%8A-%D8%A3%D9%88%D9%83%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%8A%D8%A7-%D8%B5%D9%88%D8%B1
[26] https://www.npr.org/2022/03/10/1085845332/al-qurayshi-islamic-state-new-...; rudaw dot net/english/middleeast/syria/06032022



3. Special Operations News Update - March 31, 2022 | SOF News


Special Operations News Update - March 31, 2022 | SOF News
sof.news · by SOF News · March 31, 2022
Curated news, analysis, and commentary about special operations, national security, and conflicts around the world.
Photo: A Green Beret from 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) readies to conduct an ice dive on Fort Carson, Colorado, 18th February, 2021. The training is part of a wide range of training conducted by the Green Berets on Fort Carson to help maintain their proficiency in Arctic warfare. (U.S. Army photo by SSG Eliverto V Larios)
Do you receive our daily newsletter? If not, you can sign up here and enjoy it five (almost) days a week with your morning coffee (or afternoon tea depending on where in the world you are).
We will be back on Friday with our usual coverage of the Ukraine War. For now, here are some highlights from the past 24 hours. The Russians have withdrawn some (20%?) of the forces arrayed around Kyiv and they are now reorganizing and refitting in Belarus. They will likely be committed to the Donbas region. The Ukrainians are conducting limited counterattacks with some success in the north and in the south. Mariupol is being devastated by Russian aerial attacks. The Russians are slowly advancing in Mariupol and may capture the citys in a few days. More Russian units are arriving in Ukraine from the country of Georgia and Russia.
Two Retired Green Berets Heading to Ukraine. Two U.S. Special Forces veterans are going to Ukraine to provide some emergency medical care to the Ukrainian people. One is a physician’s assistant and the other a nurse practitioner. They are self-funding their trip with a little help from a GoFundMe effort. “Vail area man on a mission to Ukraine”, Vail Daily, March 30, 2022.
U.S. SF, UW, and Ukraine. Behind the scenes and not widely known is the fact that Army Green Berets have been engaged in training Ukrainian forces in resistance and unconventional warfare since 2014. Read about it in “U.S. Special Forces’ training boosts Ukraine in fight against Russian invasion”, The Fayetteville Observer, March 31, 2022.
SOF News
USASOC’s Sniper Competition. The Army Special Operations Command hosted its international sniper competition at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina in March. The event featured teams from the U.S. military, law enforcement organizations, and military teams from around the world. Some of the foreign countries participating included Germany, France, The Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Ireland, and Italy. The top three teams were from the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, France, and the 20th Special Forces Group. “Here are the results of Army special operations’ annual sniper competition”, Army Times, March 29, 2022.
Improvements for SOF’s CV-22. The Osprey has been in the air since 1989 and U.S. special operations forces has been using the tilt rotor aircraft for a variety of missions around the world to include the infiltration, resupply, and extracting of U.S. SOF ground units. The aircraft is scheduled for $81 million worth of improvements for the tilt rotor. (ABC 7 News, Mar 30, 2022).
Ghostrider Training Leaving Hurlburt. The formal training for the AC-130J “Ghostrider” gunship will be moving from Hurlburt Field, Florida to Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico. The move is expected to take place this summer and take several years to complete. At least seven AC-130J aircraft and about 370 personnel will make the move from AFSOC to AETC. Kirkland AFB is the home to the 150th Special Operations Wing, a New Mexico National Guard unit that provides training for AFSOC units. “Ghostrider gunship training to leave Hurlburt Field beginning this summer”, NWF Daily News, March 30, 2022.
MARSOC Cdr Asked to Drop Charges. U.S. Representative Brian Mast (R-Fla) has called on the U.S. Marine Forces Special Operations Command (MARSO) to drop the manslaughter charges against Marine special operators who accidently killed a retired Green Beret contractor in Iraq in 2019. (Florida Daily, Mar 30, 2022).
123rd ST Squadron Trains in Sweden. Member of the 123rd Special Tactics Squadron of the Kentucky Air National Guard participated in an arctic warfare training course for two weeks at the Swedish Subarctic Warfare Center in January 2022. “Kentucky Air Guard trains in Sweden for arctic warfare”, National Guard, March 29, 2022.
USASOC Officer Found Dead. A member of the United States Army Special Operations Command was found unresponsive in a parked vehicle on Fort Bragg on Friday. He was pronounced dead at the base hospital. (Yahoo! News, Mar 29, 2022).
20 Year Legacy of SEAL Team 7. A series of events took place in Coronado, California to mark the 20th year since the establishment of SEAL Team 7 just six months after 9/11 in March 2022. Over the years the SEAL team has deployed numerous times to the CENTCOM and PACOM areas of responsibility. “Looking to the Past: SEAL Team 7 Celebrates 20 Year Legacy”, DVIDS, March 17, 2022.

International SOF
NATO SOF Maritime Conference. The first NATO Special Operations Forces Maritime Conference took place in Italy on March 29-30, 2022. It was hosted by the Italian Joint Command for Special Operations in collaboration with NATO Special Operations Headquarters, Belgium. Read more in “First NATO Special Operations Forces Maritime Conference Held in Italy”, SHAPE NATO, March 30, 2022.
French Desert Commando Course. A few times a year, select US troops get to attend a very special course in the deserts of Africa. The French Desert Commando Course is run by the French Foreign Legion for French soldiers heading to fight Islamist extremists in the Sahel region of Africa. The two-week course is conducted in Djibouti where the French have a military base. “Inside the French Foreign Legion commando course that puts US troops to the test in the African desert”, Business Insider, March 28, 2022.
Balikatan Friendship Jump. Philippine and U.S. special operations personnel conducted a series of static line and freefall parachute drops in the Philippines in the past few days. The event took place as part of a larger annual exercise. Two MC-130 aircraft performed the airdrops. “PH, US troops join ‘Balikatan’ free-fall drills”, Philippine News Agency, March 30, 2022.
Dutch Divers and O2 Rebreathers. The Royal Netherlands Navy performs yearly medical assessments of its military divers. U.S. Dive Medical Officers (DMOs) and Dive Medical Technicians (DMTs) could find the medical findings of this academic paper informative. The paper, published in March 2022, can be read online or downloaded.
Navy Special Warfare History. One of the first members of the special operations community began his service in World War II as a Navy officer. In the early 1960s he was put in charge of Naval Special Warfare Group One and Underwater Demolition Teams (UDT) 11 and 12. “Here’s why Phil H. Bucklew is the father of special warfare”, We are the Mighty, March 30, 2022.

National Security
2022 NDS. The Department of Defense has sent the classified 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS) to Congress (28 Mar 2022). The NDS is the capstone strategic guidance document for the DoD. It translates national security priorities into guidance for military planning and activities. The 2022 NDS is consistent with President’s Interim National Security Strategic Guidance that was released in March 2021. The unclassified version of the NDS will be coming out shortly and sequenced with the release of the unclassified National Security Strategy. Learn more about the 2022 NDS in this DoD fact sheet (DoD, 28 Mar 2022, PDF, 2 pages).
2023 MI Program Budget Request. On March 28, 2022 the Department of Defense released the Military Intelligence Program (MIP) top line budget request for fiscal year 2023. The total is $26.6 billion. And if you follow the link you will find very few details . . . as it is classified.
The High North Gap. Should the current conflict in Ukraine escalate into a limited or bigger shooting match between the West and Russia a number of strategic areas of the world will be contested. One will be the North Cape of Scandinavia where Russian submarines will need to transit to stop the forward movement of NATO naval forces. Read more in “Plugging the High North Gap with Expeditionary Advance Base Operations”, Small Wars Journal, March 29, 2022.
New Sniper Rifle. By 2023 each Army infantry squad will have a new sniper-like capability when it receives the squad designated marksman rifles (SDMR). The M1101A1 is a semi-automatic, 7.62mm rifle based on the Heckler and Koch G28/HK417 system. Most sniper rifles have a 20-inch barrel, this one has a 16.5 inch barrel. The rifle will mount the Sig Sauer TANG06 scope. “Squad-level sniper rifle to complete fielding by next year”, Army Times, March 30, 2022.
Benning Jump Towers Upgrade. The 250-foot towers at Fort Benning, Georgia where Army paratroopers undergo airborne training are getting a new parachute system that more closely mimics those used to jump from airplanes. The rate of descent of the new tower chutes will be faster – more closely aligned with the rate of descent of the actual parachutes used in airborne training. “New gear headed to Army paratroopers and air crews”, Army Times, March 30, 2022.
Upcoming Events
Online Event – Civil Affairs Roundtable. The panel participants with provide organizationally related updates and review what their initiatives are to foster an expanded civil-military learning network. The event, sponsored by the Civil Affairs Association, takes place on Zoom on Tuesday, April 5, 2022.
SOF News welcomes the submission of articles for publication. If it is related to special operations, current conflicts, national security, or defense then we are interested. And of course, any guest articles about Putin’s War are welcomed as well.

Books, Podcasts, and Videos
Movie Trailer – Top Gun: Maverick. Paramount Pictures has released another movie trailer for the long-awaited sequel to the original Top Gun. Tom Cruise comes back as a ‘special instructor’ for a group of young, hot naval aviators and a special mission. The movie hits theaters in May.
Video – Cold Response 22: Allies & Partners. While the U.S. has been trying to refocus its attention to the Indo-Pacific region, it still recognizes the need to be prepared for crisis or war in Europe. A variety of exercises are conducted each year with NATO and other partner nations. One of these in Cold Response – an exercise hosted by the Norwegians, a NATO country. DVIDS, March 30, 2022, 7 minutes.
**********
sof.news · by SOF News · March 31, 2022


4. There Is No Liberal World Order

We have the opportunity to learn a lot from the Ukrainians.'

Conclusion:

Perhaps, in the aftermath of this crisis, we can learn something from the Ukrainians. For decades now, we’ve been fighting a culture war between liberal values on the one hand and muscular forms of patriotism on the other. The Ukrainians are showing us a way to have both. As soon as the attacks began, they overcame their many political divisions, which are no less bitter than ours, and they picked up weapons to fight for their sovereignty and their democracy. They demonstrated that it is possible to be a patriot and a believer in an open society, that a democracy can be stronger and fiercer than its opponents. Precisely because there is no liberal world order, no norms and no rules, we must fight ferociously for the values and the hopes of liberalism if we want our open societies to continue to exist.
There Is No Liberal World Order
Unless democracies defend themselves, the forces of autocracy will destroy them.
The Atlantic · by Anne Applebaum · March 31, 2022
In February 1994, in the grand ballroom of the town hall in Hamburg, Germany, the president of Estonia gave a remarkable speech. Standing before an audience in evening dress, Lennart Meri praised the values of the democratic world that Estonia then aspired to join. “The freedom of every individual, the freedom of the economy and trade, as well as the freedom of the mind, of culture and science, are inseparably interconnected,” he told the burghers of Hamburg. “They form the prerequisite of a viable democracy.” His country, having regained its independence from the Soviet Union three years earlier, believed in these values: “The Estonian people never abandoned their faith in this freedom during the decades of totalitarian oppression.”
But Meri had also come to deliver a warning: Freedom in Estonia, and in Europe, could soon be under threat. Russian President Boris Yeltsin and the circles around him were returning to the language of imperialism, speaking of Russia as primus inter pares—the first among equals—in the former Soviet empire. In 1994, Moscow was already seething with the language of resentment, aggression, and imperial nostalgia; the Russian state was developing an illiberal vision of the world, and even then was preparing to enforce it. Meri called on the democratic world to push back: The West should “make it emphatically clear to the Russian leadership that another imperialist expansion will not stand a chance.”
At that, the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin, got up and walked out of the hall.
Explore the May 2022 Issue
Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
Meri’s fears were at that time shared in all of the formerly captive nations of Central and Eastern Europe, and they were strong enough to persuade governments in Estonia, Poland, and elsewhere to campaign for admission to NATO. They succeeded because nobody in Washington, London, or Berlin believed that the new members mattered. The Soviet Union was gone, the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg was not an important person, and Estonia would never need to be defended. That was why neither Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush made much attempt to arm or reinforce the new NATO members. Only in 2014 did the Obama administration finally place a small number of American troops in the region, largely in an effort to reassure allies after the first Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Nobody else anywhere in the Western world felt any threat at all. For 30 years, Western oil and gas companies piled into Russia, partnering with Russian oligarchs who had openly stolen the assets they controlled. Western financial institutions did lucrative business in Russia too, setting up systems to allow those same Russian kleptocrats to export their stolen money and keep it parked, anonymously, in Western property and banks. We convinced ourselves that there was no harm in enriching dictators and their cronies. Trade, we imagined, would transform our trading partners. Wealth would bring liberalism. Capitalism would bring democracy—and democracy would bring peace.
After all, it had happened before. Following the cataclysm of 1939–45, Europeans had indeed collectively abandoned wars of imperial, territorial conquest. They stopped dreaming of eliminating one another. Instead, the continent that had been the source of the two worst wars the world had ever known created the European Union, an organization designed to find negotiated solutions to conflicts and promote cooperation, commerce, and trade. Because of Europe’s metamorphosis—and especially because of the extraordinary transformation of Germany from a Nazi dictatorship into the engine of the continent’s integration and prosperity—Europeans and Americans alike believed that they had created a set of rules that would preserve peace not only on their own continents, but eventually in the whole world.
This liberal world order relied on the mantra of “Never again.” Never again would there be genocide. Never again would large nations erase smaller nations from the map. Never again would we be taken in by dictators who used the language of mass murder. At least in Europe, we would know how to react when we heard it.
But while we were happily living under the illusion that “Never again” meant something real, the leaders of Russia, owners of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, were reconstructing an army and a propaganda machine designed to facilitate mass murder, as well as a mafia state controlled by a tiny number of men and bearing no resemblance to Western capitalism. For a long time—too long—the custodians of the liberal world order refused to understand these changes. They looked away when Russia “pacified” Chechnya by murdering tens of thousands of people. When Russia bombed schools and hospitals in Syria, Western leaders decided that that wasn’t their problem. When Russia invaded Ukraine the first time, they found reasons not to worry. Surely Putin would be satisfied by the annexation of Crimea. When Russia invaded Ukraine the second time, occupying part of the Donbas, they were sure he would be sensible enough to stop.
Even when the Russians, having grown rich on the kleptocracy we facilitated, bought Western politicians, funded far-right extremist movements, and ran disinformation campaigns during American and European democratic elections, the leaders of America and Europe still refused to take them seriously. It was just some posts on Facebook; so what? We didn’t believe that we were at war with Russia. We believed, instead, that we were safe and free, protected by treaties, by border guarantees, and by the norms and rules of the liberal world order.
With the third, more brutal invasion of Ukraine, the vacuity of those beliefs was revealed. The Russian president openly denied the existence of a legitimate Ukrainian state: “Russians and Ukrainians,” he said, “were one people—a single whole.” His army targeted civilians, hospitals, and schools. His policies aimed to create refugees so as to destabilize Western Europe. “Never again” was exposed as an empty slogan while a genocidal plan took shape in front of our eyes, right along the European Union’s eastern border. Other autocracies watched to see what we would do about it, for Russia is not the only nation in the world that covets its neighbors’ territory, that seeks to destroy entire populations, that has no qualms about the use of mass violence. North Korea can attack South Korea at any time, and has nuclear weapons that can hit Japan. China seeks to eliminate the Uyghurs as a distinct ethnic group, and has imperial designs on Taiwan.
We can’t turn the clock back to 1994, to see what would have happened had we heeded Lennart Meri’s warning. But we can face the future with honesty. We can name the challenges and prepare to meet them.
There is no natural liberal world order, and there are no rules without someone to enforce them. Unless democracies defend themselves together, the forces of autocracy will destroy them. I am using the word forces, in the plural, deliberately. Many American politicians would understandably prefer to focus on the long-term competition with China. But as long as Russia is ruled by Putin, then Russia is at war with us too. So are Belarus, North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, Nicaragua, Hungary, and potentially many others. We might not want to compete with them, or even care very much about them. But they care about us. They understand that the language of democracy, anti-corruption, and justice is dangerous to their form of autocratic power—and they know that that language originates in the democratic world, our world.
Perhaps we can learn something from the Ukrainians. They are showing us how to have both patriotism and liberal values.
This fight is not theoretical. It requires armies, strategies, weapons, and long-term plans. It requires much closer allied cooperation, not only in Europe but in the Pacific, Africa, and Latin America. NATO can no longer operate as if it might someday be required to defend itself; it needs to start operating as it did during the Cold War, on the assumption that an invasion could happen at any time. Germany’s decision to raise defense spending by 100 billion euros is a good start; so is Denmark’s declaration that it too will boost defense spending. But deeper military and intelligence coordination might require new institutions—perhaps a voluntary European Legion, connected to the European Union, or a Baltic alliance that includes Sweden and Finland—and different thinking about where and how we invest in European and Pacific defense.
If we don’t have any means to deliver our messages to the autocratic world, then no one will hear them. Much as we assembled the Department of Homeland Security out of disparate agencies after 9/11, we now need to pull together the disparate parts of the U.S. government that think about communication, not to do propaganda but to reach more people around the world with better information and to stop autocracies from distorting that knowledge. Why haven’t we built a Russian-language television station to compete with Putin’s propaganda? Why can’t we produce more programming in Mandarin—or Uyghur? Our foreign-language broadcasters—Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Radio Martí in Cuba—need not only money for programming but a major investment in research. We know very little about Russian audiences—what they read, what they might be eager to learn.
Funding for education and culture needs rethinking too. Shouldn’t there be a Russian-language university, in Vilnius or Warsaw, to house all the intellectuals and thinkers who have just left Moscow? Don’t we need to spend more on education in Arabic, Hindi, Persian? So much of what passes for cultural diplomacy runs on autopilot. Programs should be recast for a different era, one in which, though the world is more knowable than ever before, dictatorships seek to hide that knowledge from their citizens.
Trading with autocrats promotes autocracy, not democracy. Congress has made some progress in recent months in the fight against global kleptocracy, and the Biden administration was right to put the fight against corruption at the heart of its political strategy. But we can go much further, because there is no reason for any company, property, or trust ever to be held anonymously. Every U.S. state, and every democratic country, should immediately make all ownership transparent. Tax havens should be illegal. The only people who need to keep their houses, businesses, and income secret are crooks and tax cheats.
We need a dramatic and profound shift in our energy consumption, and not only because of climate change. The billions of dollars we have sent to Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia have promoted some of the worst and most corrupt dictators in the world. The transition from oil and gas to other energy sources needs to happen with far greater speed and decisiveness. Every dollar spent on Russian oil helps fund the artillery that fires on Ukrainian civilians.
Take democracy seriously. Teach it, debate it, improve it, defend it. Maybe there is no natural liberal world order, but there are liberal societies, open and free countries that offer a better chance for people to live useful lives than closed dictatorships do. They are hardly perfect; our own has deep flaws, profound divisions, terrible historical scars. But that’s all the more reason to defend and protect them. Few of them have existed across human history; many have existed for a time and then failed. They can be destroyed from the outside, but from the inside, too, by divisions and demagogues.
Perhaps, in the aftermath of this crisis, we can learn something from the Ukrainians. For decades now, we’ve been fighting a culture war between liberal values on the one hand and muscular forms of patriotism on the other. The Ukrainians are showing us a way to have both. As soon as the attacks began, they overcame their many political divisions, which are no less bitter than ours, and they picked up weapons to fight for their sovereignty and their democracy. They demonstrated that it is possible to be a patriot and a believer in an open society, that a democracy can be stronger and fiercer than its opponents. Precisely because there is no liberal world order, no norms and no rules, we must fight ferociously for the values and the hopes of liberalism if we want our open societies to continue to exist.
This article appears in the May 2022 print edition with the headline “There Is No Liberal World Order.”
The Atlantic · by Anne Applebaum · March 31, 2022



5. Francis Fukuyama: We could be facing the end of “the end of history”

Just a reminder:

He’s quick to point out how most people claiming his theory is incorrect have misinterpreted the original premise. Fukuyama didn’t envision the end of history to be a utopian state or predict that “the whole world is going to be democratic” with a “straightforward, linear movement in that direction”. He also didn’t suggest that “nothing would happen from now on”. Indeed, Fukuyama has long maintained that events – another way of saying more history – would continue to take place.

Francis Fukuyama: We could be facing the end of “the end of history”
NewStatesman · by Megan Gibson · March 30, 2022
Photo by Charlie Forgham-Bailey for the New Statesman
Spare a thought for Francis Fukuyama’s Twitter mentions. In the weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February, the American political theorist has been routinely told by gleeful critics that his career-defining thesis about liberal democracy being “the final form of human government” is obsolete.
“It usually comes up two or three times a day on my Twitter account,” Fukuyama said over Earl Grey tea at a central London hotel in late March. But the frequency has increased recently. While he described the jibes as “annoying” he didn’t seem overly bothered by them. “I actually have a policy of not reading the comments and not responding to it.”

Fukuyama admits that he’s used to the accusation. It has been a constant since his landmark book, The End of History and the Last Man, was published three decades ago. In the text, adapted and expanded from a 1989 journal article titled “The End of History?”, he outlined his theory that liberal democracy is greatly preferable to any other form of government and, crucially, that no liberal democracy could progress to a better alternative.
[See also: The Zelensky myth]
He’s quick to point out how most people claiming his theory is incorrect have misinterpreted the original premise. Fukuyama didn’t envision the end of history to be a utopian state or predict that “the whole world is going to be democratic” with a “straightforward, linear movement in that direction”. He also didn’t suggest that “nothing would happen from now on”. Indeed, Fukuyama has long maintained that events – another way of saying more history – would continue to take place.
Content from our partners
Yet at 69, Fukuyama is willing to admit mistakes. He said that when he wrote his thesis he perhaps didn’t fully appreciate the concept of “political decay: the idea that once you became a modern democracy, you could also go backwards”. It’s a subject he wrestles with in his latest book, Liberalism and Its Discontents. Fukuyama explores the ways in which both the left and the right have worked to undermine liberalism (the right by embracing free-market principles, which have widened economic inequality; the left by prioritising identity politics over individual autonomy). While the book was written prior to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the war doesn’t invalidate his arguments. Instead, it explains how the fight to preserve liberalism is about more than a battle between autocracies and democracies.
This is something that Fukuyama, as an American, has observed closely in recent years. He watched with alarm the divisions deepen between the right and the left throughout Donald Trump’s presidency and during its aftermath. “I’ve never seen the situation as serious, really, since the American Civil War,” he said of the US’s current political polarisation. “There’s a significant chance we’re going to be in a major constitutional crisis at the time of the next presidential election.” Though he emphasised that much is likely to change before the 2024 contest, Fukuyama struggles to imagine how Trump could win the White House again following Putin’s invasion. “Trump is really out of line with the major part of his party” in his public admiration of Russia’s leader, Fukuyama argued. “I just don’t see how that’s not going to hurt him.”
Fukuyama has also been willing to, as he put it in a recent essay, “stick [his] neck out” over the likely geopolitical consequences of the war in Ukraine. Chief among his predictions: Russia will lose the war, perhaps spectacularly, and this defeat will help the West get out of “our funk about the declining state of global democracy. The spirit of 1989 will live on, thanks to a bunch of brave Ukrainians.” For those interested in the stability of the international order, it’s an optimistic, even reassuring, vision of the war’s potential outcome.
Fukuyama knows Ukraine well, having visited the country many times as part of the Leadership Academy for Development, a programme he runs through Stanford University, where he’s a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. The programme develops leadership training in various emerging democracies.
His impression of Ukraine has evolved over subsequent visits. “Beginning in 2014, it really did seem to me that this was the front line of a broader struggle for democracy,” he said, pointing to the rife corruption and the significant power oligarchs continued to hold. But after working with a younger generation of Ukrainians who were pro-European, he found “it was actually quite inspiring, because a lot of these people were very dedicated to trying to stop corruption and make the country’s institutions work better”.
In recent weeks, being inspired by Ukrainians has almost become a sport in the West, as speeches made by President Volodymyr Zelensky go viral and photos of ordinary Ukrainians preparing to join the fight are widely shared online. Fukuyama sympathises with and even shares this urge to support the Ukrainian plight, but warns that it’s hardly a universal phenomenon, even among ostensibly democratic countries. He cites India and South Africa as two countries that have so far refused to condemn Russia’s invasion.
“I think there are many places where the memory of injustices committed by Western countries is very vivid,” he said. In contrast, the Soviet Union’s support of the ANC’s fight against apartheid still looms in many South Africans’ recollections of that era. “There’s no inevitable solidarity among countries that would qualify in some ways [as] being a liberal democracy. You know, that’s OK; a country’s historical experience is different. So they’re going to have different preferences, particularly [regarding] foreign policy.”
Yet while different opinions might be tolerable, they have also once again highlighted the dysfunction of certain multilateral bodies. Namely, the United Nations Security Council, which rejected a draft resolution on 25 February on ending Russia’s war on Ukraine; the Russian Federation, a permanent member, vetoed the draft, while China, India and the UAE abstained.
“It doesn’t work now,” Fukuyama said bluntly of the Security Council. “I think that you can’t put all your eggs in the basket of one global organisation, because there just isn’t enough consensus among countries the world over, especially when you get to political issues.” Did the body ever work? “The only period where it looked like it might be useful was in the early 1990s, after the collapse of the former Soviet Union, when it appeared that you actually could get all five permanent members to actually agree on something.” But now, he warned: “Don’t have any expectations about what it can do.”
He may be tired of being incorrectly accused of being wrong, but does Fukuyama ever worry about being proved wrong? Of course, he said, but not out of interest for his work. Instead, because of what the implications would be for the world. His “ultimate nightmare”, he said, is a world in which China and Russia work in harness with one another, perhaps with China bolstering Russia’s war and Beijing launching its own invasion – of Taiwan. If that were to happen, and be successful, Fukuyama said, “then you would really be living in a world that was being dominated by these non-democratic powers. If the United States and the rest of the West couldn’t stop that from happening, then that really is the end of the end of history.”
NewStatesman · by Megan Gibson · March 30, 2022


6. How Bill Clinton’s Foreign Policy Led to the War in Ukraine

Interesting historical analysis.

How Bill Clinton’s Foreign Policy Led to the War in Ukraine
Putin’s conflict with the West is rooted in the history of NATO.
Slate · by Mary Harris · March 31, 2022

A destroyed Russian tank in Malaya Rohan, Ukraine, on Thursday. Chris McGrath/Getty Images

President Joe Biden’s recent remark that Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power” raised plenty of eyebrows internationally. Some wondered: Is Biden calling for regime change here? But historian Mary Elise Sarotte saw it as Biden’s attempt at being realistic—acknowledging that Russia and a newly united NATO “are enemies once again.” On Thursday’s episode of What Next, I spoke with Sarotte, author of the new book Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post–Cold War Stalemate, about what led to this sea change and what it means for the future of relations between Russia and the West. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Mary Harris: In World War II, Soviets fought alongside the Allied Powers to defeat the Nazis. And when Germany surrendered unconditionally, all of the allies occupied the country, dividing it into Western zones run by the U.S., Britain, and France and an Eastern zone run by the USSR. The city of Berlin was divvied up like this, too. But cooperation between the West and the Soviets was short-lived. The Western allies wanted to put in place democratic structures; the USSR did not. The Western allies were concerned about revving up a market economy; the USSR was not.
Mary Elise Sarotte: Not only are the allies now failing to cooperate, but there’s actually new hostility arising between what is increasingly becoming the Soviet zone and the Western zone, and things just keep going from bad to worse. …
George Kennan, the American diplomat in Moscow, sends what is known as the long telegram, saying there can be no modus vivendi, there can be no live and let live with Moscow. And so you have this profound sea change in American thinking—kind of like the sea change we’re seeing now in European thinking—that in fact we don’t have an old ally, we have a new enemy. And despite the fact that World War II is over, despite the fact that we actually took our troops home, we Americans are actually going to have to go back to Europe and set up this new alliance together with Europeans to defend Western Europe from the Soviet Union.
And the idea is we’re stronger together, right?
You’re going to be stronger together, and you’re going to give each other Article 5. That’s a guarantee that an attack on one member state will be treated as an attack on all. And that will deter the Soviet Union from entering Western Europe.
After the Berlin Wall fell, NATO went through this rapid evolution. Can you explain what happened?
Yes. So NATO starts out at 12 countries in 1949. But by the end of the Cold War, it’s already enlarged to 16. But once the Berlin Wall comes down and once the Soviet Union collapses, obviously you’re in a new geopolitical situation. And so the big question was, what happens now to European security? Do we give up NATO entirely, since NATO was designed to protect Western Europe from the Soviet Union basically? Can we just say “mission accomplished” and disband?
Was that ever on the table, like, just get rid of it?
It was never on the table for the Americans or for the West Germans who were driving the process. But there were dissidents from Eastern European countries who proposed that. For example, Vaclav Havel, the leader of Czechoslovakia, proposed dissolving all military blocs, NATO and the Soviet Union. Many of these brave dissidents in the peaceful revolution of 1989 in Poland and Czechoslovakia and East Germany, the people who had bravely overthrown Soviet control, many of them were committed pacifists who wanted no military blocs. And there was actually a serious proposal launched by basically people who had gone from prisons to presidencies, when they overthrew Soviet control, to turn all of central and Eastern Europe into a perpetual neutral zone of peace. To dissolve the borders between places like Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, demilitarize and denuclearize it, and make it a bridge of peace between East and West forever.
That’s so radical!
Exactly. You can say that’s crazy, but that would have been a new world order.
But didn’t Havel change his mind?
That’s why this is forgotten, because when it becomes apparent that George H.W. Bush feels strongly that the West needs not only to retain NATO, but also to retain its ability to enlarge, there’s going to be a NATO line. So, given that our alternate vision is not going to work, given that another alternate vision for a pan-European security organization is not going to work either, then we want to be on the right side of the line this time. So then the name of the game is to get into NATO, and so Havel changes his mind, and he and the leaders of Poland and of many states then begin actively pressing for membership in NATO.
You say there’s a type of cycle that begins to play out after the Berlin Wall falls: Eastern bloc countries want to join NATO for protection. The Russian government bristles, and then the U.S. offers financial inducements, and Russia resentfully capitulates. All this started pretty much right away, with the unification of Germany.
So in order for Germany to unify, Moscow had to be convinced to give up both its troops and its legal rights in divided Germany. And so, as part of a speculative early conversation about what it might take to get Moscow to agree to that, James Baker, the American secretary of state, had said—speculatively—to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union: How about you let your half of Germany go, and we say that NATO will move not one inch eastward?
This offer has become part of Kremlin lore. Vladimir Putin describes what happens next as a “betrayal.” Because while the American secretary of state saw this deal as an excellent compromise, his boss, then-President George H.W. Bush, disagreed.
If NATO moves not one inch eastward, that means it’ll stay frozen in the middle of divided Germany, because the NATO front line was the front border of West Germany, the eastern border of West Germany, which is in the middle of what’s going to be united Germany. And so Baker has to hurriedly send around a letter to various colleagues saying, “Sorry I said that, causing confusion, not gonna say that anymore.”
The problem is that it takes Moscow a while to notice, and Gorbachev later tries to get that in writing, but can’t. And finally, in the end, he gets really frustrated, but he agrees instead to give up his hold on East Germany for financial inducements. And this is the important punchline, which Putin ignores: There is a formal, legally binding treaty to this effect, and that treaty explicitly allows NATO to extend Article 5 eastward beyond the Cold War line, and Gorbachev authorized a signature of that document.
But Vladimir Putin tells this story as if “we were offered that NATO would not move one inch and you took it back from us,” even though Gorbachev signed on to this.
So even though in February 1990, there’s a speculative discussion that NATO move not one inch eastward, by the time push comes to shove and you’re actually inking a treaty in September 1990, not only has that language disappeared, but the opposite language goes into the treaty, explicitly allowing Article 5 to extend eastward across the Cold War line. And to repeat, Moscow authorized a signature of this treaty and then ratifies it. But Putin doesn’t want to talk about that.
Once the Nazi threat was gone, you don’t have that Nazi threat forcing the West and Moscow to work together. And then it becomes apparent that Moscow has a very different idea of what security order it wants in Europe. It wants a buffer zone. And there, I think, we do have a parallel to today, because I think a lot of what is going on is Vladimir Putin is saying, I do not like the post–Cold War security order. I want more of a buffer. I want control over lands where Slavs live.
Three years after the Berlin Wall fell, President Bill Clinton is in office. He and his European allies faced this choice: what to do about NATO? Eastern bloc countries were clamoring for Article 5 protection, but everyone knew that expanding the alliance would make Russia defensive. Workarounds were considered.
The British, for example, at one point said we should expand NATO once in the post–Cold War world, just once, because any more is going to just increase friction with Russia to the point where it’s going to have unpredictable consequences. Let’s just pick a large set of countries that we think would make good allies, let them in, and be done with it. No further rounds of enlargement.
And Washington pushed back very, very hard against London. In particular, Clinton’s Russia adviser Strobe Talbott said that is exactly the wrong thing to do. We need to make clear that NATO has an open door, that it will not stop expanding.
But this open-door policy had a downside, and everyone knew it: Ukraine.
Basically as early as coming into office, Clinton is saying things like Ukraine is the linchpin of peace in Europe. If we basically just give Article 5 to a few countries, we’re going to draw a new line across Europe, and Ukraine is going to be on the wrong side of that line. And that’s not right.
Ukraine is a big country. At that point, it had over 50 million people, so it’s on the size of England or France. It’s geographically enormous. It’s becoming a democracy. It’s becoming a market economy. Why should we draw a new line and leave Ukraine in the lurch?
Another workaround was offered up: the “Partnership for Peace.” It was a way for NATO to work together with Russia while keeping it at a safe distance. Other non-NATO countries were encouraged to join, along with Russia. It provided structure for Ukraine, Moscow, and the West to all work together without moving the Article 5 line.
It’s actually referred to as the NATO waiting room. And Russia agreed with this. It didn’t love it—nobody loved it—but at least everyone could be in it. It provided options for managing contingency—which, by the way, would be really useful right now.
So what happened with the Partnership for Peace?
Because of some tragic Russian choices and also American domestic politics, Clinton essentially changes his mind. Boris Yeltsin—who is on the one hand trying to democratize Russia, but on the other hand struggling with alcoholism, facing a huge number of domestic enemies, some of whom are fascists, some of whom are really extreme—makes a fateful decision in October 1993 to start shedding the blood of his political opponents, in other words to not keep things on a peaceful level.
He has army tanks fire on his own parliament. Even worse, in 1994, he decides to invade Chechnya, which he does brutally. Those decisions are game changers, because suddenly places like Poland and Hungary say, you know, we said we’d put up with the Partnership for Peace, but now that Moscow is shedding blood again, that’s not enough. A partnership is not enough. So all this changes Clinton’s calculus. And having said, I don’t want to draw a new Article 5 line across Europe, he decides in the end to do that anyway.
Was enlarging NATO beneficial for Western allies? Or did it push Russia closer to the war that’s happening in Ukraine right now?
There’s no way to answer that question without first saying, good for who? …
There were a spectrum of possibilities for enlarging NATO. My argument is that NATO enlargement made sense. The people who wanted it were brave new democracies like the Baltics, like Poland. They had every right to want to be in NATO. NATO had every right to take them on. The problem with the enlargement was how it happened. And I think if we’d stuck with this Partnership for Peace, which gave us useful ambiguity, which gave us the ability to manage contingency, that would have created less frictions and importantly would have given a berth to Ukraine.
This week, there’s been a little bit of an indication that maybe Russia’s changing strategy in Ukraine, by floating the idea that maybe our mission is accomplished and we want to focus on Donetsk and Luhansk, these two regions where Russia had already been engaged in warfare since 2014. I wonder what you make of this shift in tone.
Hard to know what is real and what is not with regard to Russia. Russia, of course, was saying for months it was not going to invade Ukraine, and then it invaded Ukraine. But that is a positive development in a truly awful situation, because there may be an endgame coming into sight.
I’m speculating here, but it seems that you could start to see an endgame where Russia says, “What we really wanted all along was to secure an eastern area that included a land bridge to Crimea,” and Ukraine decides it can better live with that than with continuing to watch maternity hospitals get bombed.
But just because the conflict in Ukraine could have a foreseeable end doesn’t mean that this geopolitical tangle is going to go away. You see this moment, this war, as having irrevocably shifted the world order for years to come.
If Russia ceased military activity today, it’s not as if in the West we’d say, OK, that’s fine, let’s go back to the way we were before. That’s just not going to happen. The shift in attitude towards Russia is too profound.
This new division between Russia and the West is going to last, and I think will increasingly have many characteristics of the previous Cold War. Now I should caveat that and say, for example, Putin does not want to re-create communism. He also does not want to re-create the entire Soviet Union. He has more this idea of Russia as the head of what he refers to as Russkiy Mir, a sort of Russian or Slavic world. And that I think is going to endure beyond him.
It’s going to take a long time to move beyond this new division that’s now happened between a Moscow-centric bloc and a Washington-centric bloc. And this is in a more complicated context than the Cold War because of course we have China’s power, we have Iran, we have North Korea. So I think we are genuinely in a new and lasting phase of geopolitics.
You’ve said that this new Cold War will be far worse than the first. I’m wondering why.
I fear that it could be worse, and the reason I fear that it could be worse is that we are missing many of the guardrails that we had during the previous Cold War. During the previous Cold War, which evolved over years and decades, we developed, for example, a whole set of arms control agreements. What’s scary about now is we seem to have spun back up to Cold War–like conditions in a matter of weeks, and we don’t have those guardrails. We also don’t have a popular awareness of the risks of a Cold War confrontation. And so that, I fear, could be more dangerous than before.

Slate · by Mary Harris · March 31, 2022



7. Russia's Military Was Great Until It Wasn't


Excerpts:

To truly understand a military’s effectiveness, analysts must investigate not only how it looks on a spreadsheet but also how it may function in the chaos and pressure of a battlefield. War is an extremely difficult and complex business. Western strategists cannot go back in time and alter their earlier assessments. Any system with a widespread consensus that an excellent and modernized Russian military would conquer Ukraine in a matter of days is a system in crisis. We can, and must, try to do better next time. If world leaders have a better understanding of the potential difficulties of any war in East Asia, for example, perhaps they will realize how hard the outcome of such a confrontation is to predict. If the Chinese tried an amphibious landing on Taiwan, for instance, they would be undertaking maybe the most complex wartime operation, and one that their military has never attempted before. I can’t tell you what would happen, but I know it would not go according to plan. War never does.

Russia's Military Was Great Until It Wasn't
How the West Got Russia’s Military So, So Wrong
Good equipment and clever doctrine reveal little about how an army will perform in a war.
The Atlantic · by Phillips Payson O’Brien · March 31, 2022
Let me tell you a story about a military that was supposedly one of the best in the world. This military had some of the best equipment: the heaviest and most modern tanks, next-generation aircraft, and advanced naval vessels. It had invested in modernization, and made what were considered some of Europe’s most sophisticated plans for conflict. Moreover, it had planned and trained specifically for a war it was about to fight, a war it seemed extremely well prepared for and that many, perhaps most, people believed it would win.
All of these descriptions could apply to the Russian army that invaded Ukraine last month. But I’m talking about the French army of the 1930s. That French force was considered one of the finest on the planet. Winston Churchill believed that it represented the world’s best hope for keeping Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany at bay. As he said famously in 1933, and repeated a number of times afterward, “Thank God for the French army.”
Of course, when this French army was actually tested in battle, it was found wanting. Germany conquered France in less than two months in 1940. All of the French military’s supposed excellence in equipment and doctrine was useless. A range of problems, including poor logistics, terrible communications, and low morale, beset an army in which soldiers and junior officers complained of inflexible, top-down leadership. In 1940, the French had the “best” tank, the Char B-1. With its 75-mm gun, the Char B-1 was better armed than any German tank, and it outclassed the Germans in terms of armor protection as well. But when the Battle of France started, the Char B-1 exhibited a number of major handicaps, such as a gas-guzzling engine and mechanical unreliability.
Having good equipment and good doctrine reveals little about how an army will perform in a war. To predict that, you must analyze not only its equipment and doctrine but also its ability to undertake complex operations, its unglamorous but crucial logistical needs and structure, and the commitment of its soldiers to fight and die in the specific war being waged. Most important, you have to think about how it will perform when a competent enemy fires back. As Mike Tyson so eloquently put it, “Everyone has a plan until they are punched in the mouth.”
What we are seeing today in Ukraine is the result of a purportedly great military being punched in the mouth. The resilience of Ukrainian resistance is embarrassing for a Western think-tank and military community that had confidently predicted that the Russians would conquer Ukraine in a matter of days. For years, Western “experts” prattled on about the Russian military’s expensive, high-tech “modernization.” The Russians, we were told, had the better tanks and aircraft, including cutting-edge SU-34 fighter bombers and T-90 tanks, with some of the finest technical specifications in the world. The Russians had also ostensibly reorganized their army into a more professional, mostly voluntary force. They had rethought their offensive doctrine and created battalion tactical groups, flexible, heavily armored formations that were meant to be key to overwhelming the Ukrainians. Basically, many people had relied on the glamour of war, a sort of war pornography, to predict the outcome of Russia’s invasion of its neighbor.
Those predictions, based on alluring but fundamentally flawed criteria, have now proved false. Western analysts took basic metrics (such as numbers and types of tanks and aircraft), imagined those measured forces executing Russian military doctrine, then concluded that the Ukrainians had no chance. But counting tanks and planes and rhapsodizing over their technical specifications is not a useful way to analyze modern militaries. As The Atlantic’s Eliot Cohen has argued, the systems that the West used to evaluate the Russian military have failed nearly as comprehensively as that military has.
Though analysts and historians will spend years arguing about exactly why prewar assessments of the Russian military proved so flawed, two reasons are immediately apparent. First, Western analysts misunderstood the Russian military’s ability to undertake the most complex operations and the robustness of its logistical capabilities. And second, prognosticators paid too little attention to the basic motivations and morale of the soldiers who would be asked to use the Russian military’s allegedly excellent doctrine and equipment.
Russia’s problems executing complex operations became obvious almost immediately after its army crossed the border into Ukraine. For instance, many observers believed that the large, advanced Russian air force would quickly gain air dominance over Ukraine, providing the Russian land forces with support while severely limiting the Ukrainians’ movement. Instead, the Ukrainians have put in place a far more sophisticated than expected air-defense system that stymied Russian air efforts from the start. By challenging the Russians in the air, the Ukrainians have shown that Russia’s army cannot efficiently conduct the complex air operations needed to seize air supremacy from a much smaller enemy. Russia’s logistical system has been, if anything, even worse. Russian trucks are poorly maintained, poorly led, and too few in number. Once the Russian forces advanced, they found that bringing up the supplies needed to keep them moving forward became more and more difficult. Many advances, most famously the 40-mile column of vehicles stretching down to Kyiv from Belarus, simply stopped.
At the same time, the supposedly professional volunteer Russian soldiers were confused as to what they were doing, totally unprepared to meet stiff Ukrainian resistance, and, from photo evidence, surprisingly willing to abandon even the most advanced Russian equipment almost untouched. As the war has gone on, and Russian casualties have mounted, Russian soldiers have fallen victim to frostbite, refused to follow orders, and, in at least one episode, tried to kill their superior officers.
More of the Western experts who study Russia’s armed forces could and should have anticipated these problems. The Russian military has not been asked to undertake complex technological or logistical operations for at least three decades. Its more recent military actions, such as the bombing of Syria, were quite straightforward operations, in which aircraft could be used to terrorize an enemy that could not efficiently fire back.
To truly understand a military’s effectiveness, analysts must investigate not only how it looks on a spreadsheet but also how it may function in the chaos and pressure of a battlefield. War is an extremely difficult and complex business. Western strategists cannot go back in time and alter their earlier assessments. Any system with a widespread consensus that an excellent and modernized Russian military would conquer Ukraine in a matter of days is a system in crisis. We can, and must, try to do better next time. If world leaders have a better understanding of the potential difficulties of any war in East Asia, for example, perhaps they will realize how hard the outcome of such a confrontation is to predict. If the Chinese tried an amphibious landing on Taiwan, for instance, they would be undertaking maybe the most complex wartime operation, and one that their military has never attempted before. I can’t tell you what would happen, but I know it would not go according to plan. War never does.
The Atlantic · by Phillips Payson O’Brien · March 31, 2022

8. Opinion | Ukraine needs better air defense systems, not more excuses

Conclusion:

Of course, the United States should be mindful of needlessly escalating the crisis. But the best way to prevent the war from spilling over is to give the Ukrainians what they need to win. The more the United States drags its feet on things such as the S-300, the more people will die and the longer the fighting will continue. And if Ukraine falls, the risk of a greater conflict will only increase.

Opinion | Ukraine needs better air defense systems, not more excuses
The Washington Post · by Josh RoginColumnist Today at 6:00 a.m. EDT · March 31, 2022
More than two weeks have passed since Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin traveled to NATO ally Slovakia, where he discussed transferring that country’s most advanced air defense system to Ukraine. But as Russian missiles continue to rain down on Ukrainian hospitalsschools and apartment buildings, there’s no visible progress. As a result, Congress is losing patience and Ukrainians are losing their lives.
Standing next to Austin in Bratislava on March 17, Slovakian Defense Minister Jaroslav Nad’ said his country was ready to transfer the Russian-made S-300 missile defense system, which the Ukrainians know how to operate, “immediately.” Compared to what Ukrainian forces have now, the S-300 could cover more ground and intercept more advanced incoming aircraft and missiles, potentially saving a lot of civilians. Nad’s one condition was that the United States should replace Slovakia’s S-300 with another missile defense system at least as capable. Austin made no firm commitments, other than to continue discussions with NATO partners.
Two weeks later, U.S. lawmakers and Ukrainians are wondering why there’s no movement. The other two NATO countries that have S-300 systems, Bulgaria and Greece, have been cool to the idea of sending direct military assistance on Ukraine. Slovakia is ready to go. So, what’s the holdup?
“Slovakia has offered S-300s, which are desperately needed in Ukraine. But all they’ve asked from us is to backfill,” House Armed Services Committee ranking Republican Mike D. Rogers (Ala.) said at a hearing Wednesday morning with top Pentagon officials. “Why is it taking two weeks?”
Although we don’t know why, Russian ground troops appear to be regrouping in some places. Meanwhile, the Russian military continues to bombard cities all over Ukraine with hypersonic missiles, rockets and artillery shells. So far, the United States and its partners have only delivered shorter-range missile defense systems.
“The time to double down is now,” Rogers said.
Congressional aides told me that the Pentagon is preparing a proposal for the Slovakian government on a possible way to bolster its air defense capability if Slovakia transfers its S-300 system to Ukraine. The easiest fix would be to give Slovakia its own U.S.-made Patriot missile defense system. Germany and Denmark are already sending Patriot systems to Slovakia on a temporary basis, but Bratislava wants the comfort of a permanent solution.
To many in Congress, the delay fits a pattern of the Biden administration bungling a chance to work with NATO allies on giving Ukraine emergency military assistance. In February, a similar dynamic played out when the Polish government publicly said it was willing to transfer Russian fighter planes to Ukraine via a U.S. base in Germany. After a couple weeks of back and forth, the Biden team declared the idea unworkable, claiming that the fighters would provoke Russian President Vladimir Putin and wouldn’t have a significant battlefield impact anyway.
“The transfer of any system is being closely scrutinized by the White House and National Security Council as to whether or not it meets their test of what’s escalatory and what’s not,” a senior congressional aide told me. “That’s causing the system to be constipated.”
Celeste Wallander, the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, testified Wednesday that the Biden administration was working with Slovakia to determine exactly what it needs to replace its S-300 system. She also said that the Pentagon was already sourcing parts of the S-300 system from other countries and sending those parts to the Ukrainians.
“So, we’ve not simply been waiting for resolution of that offer, but have been working on getting the Ukrainians what they need right now,” she said.
Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. government was sending Ukraine parts of Soviet-era missile defense systems that had been acquired over decades as part of a secret U.S. government program. Wallander said she would only discuss the details of current efforts in a classified setting.
At the hearing, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said the Biden administration was trying to “balance between giving Ukraine the help it needs without spreading the wider war.”
But Air Force Gen. Tod Wolters, the head of U.S. European Command, testified that there’s always risk in whatever military assistance is provided. The fact is, Wolters said, Ukrainians will likely be dealing with incoming Russian missiles for a long time to come.
“Surface-to-air missiles are very important,” he said. “They have been effective in the campaign [against the Russians], and I predict they will continue to be effective in the coming months.”
The Biden administration is doing a lot to arm Ukrainian forces and deserves credit. At the same time, the bureaucratic and policy bottlenecks delaying the S-300 transfer are costing lives each day. If Austin can’t find one Patriot missile system to put on a plane and send to Slovakia, what message does that send to Ukrainians — or Putin, for that matter — about our commitment to the fight?
Of course, the United States should be mindful of needlessly escalating the crisis. But the best way to prevent the war from spilling over is to give the Ukrainians what they need to win. The more the United States drags its feet on things such as the S-300, the more people will die and the longer the fighting will continue. And if Ukraine falls, the risk of a greater conflict will only increase.
The Washington Post · by Josh RoginColumnist Today at 6:00 a.m. EDT · March 31, 2022


9. French intelligence chief Vidaud fired over Russian war failings


Accountability. I wonder about our intelligence liaison operations? I am sure we were sharing intelligence long before it was publicly released. I suppose the French disagreed with the US intelligence community's assessment.

French intelligence chief Vidaud fired over Russian war failings
BBC · by Menu
Published
59 minutes ago
Gen Eric Vidaud was commander of special forces until he took on the military intelligence role seven months ago
The head of French military intelligence, Gen Eric Vidaud, is losing his job after failing to predict Russia's war in Ukraine, reports say.
Seven months after he took on the role, one report said he was blamed for "inadequate briefings" and a "lack of mastery of subjects".
The US correctly assessed that Russia was planning a large-scale invasion, while France concluded it was unlikely.
Gen Vidaud was blamed for that by France's military chief, a source said.
However, the military source told AFP news agency that his job was to provide "military intelligence on operations, not on premeditation". As Gen Vidaud's service concluded that Russia had the means to invade Ukraine, the source said that "what happened proves him right".
Early in March the head of French armed forces, Gen Thierry Burkhard acknowledged that French intelligence had not been up to the level of US or UK briefings, which were publicised to pile pressure on Russia's Vladimir Putin. "The Americans said that the Russians were going to attack, they were right," he told Le Monde newspaper.
"Our services thought instead that the cost of conquering Ukraine would have been monstrous and the Russians had other options" to bring down the government of Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky, he added.
France's misreading of President Putin was all the more embarrassing because President Emmanuel Macron had spoken to him regularly in the days leading up to the invasion on 24 February.
Intelligence specialist Prof Alexandre Papaemmanuel told AFP it was too easy to blame military intelligence for the failure, which lay with France's entire intelligence community.
But Gen Vidaud, France's former special forces commander, appears to have been squeezed out for other reasons too.
Weeks after he took charge of military intelligence, his service came in for criticism when Australia scrapped a multi-billion dollar submarine contract with France in favour of a security pact with the US and UK. The Aukus pact came out of the blue in France and prompted a diplomatic spat.
BBC · by Menu



10.  U.S. says China's pressure on Taiwan a threat to all democracies


All democracies. We are in an ideological war.


​​


U.S. says China's pressure on Taiwan a threat to all democracies
Reuters · by Reuters
TAIPEI, March 31 (Reuters) - China's diplomatic and military pressure on Taiwan represents a threat to all democracies and the United States is committed to helping the island defend itself, the top U.S. diplomat in Taipei said.
Speaking at an American Chamber of Commerce in Taiwan event late on Wednesday, Sandra Oudkirk, director of the American Institute in Taiwan which handles relations in the absence of formal diplomatic ties, said managing U.S. differences with China faces "distinct challenges".
"The PRC's increasingly aggressive behaviour is nowhere more evident than in relation to Taiwan, where the PRC has continued to exert military, diplomatic, and economic pressure," she said, referring to the People's Republic of China, in remarks released by her office on Thursday.
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com
"The PRC's provocative military activities near Taiwan are destabilising, risk miscalculation, and undermine regional peace and stability," Oudkirk added, at the event also attended by Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen.
"Continued efforts by Beijing to choke Taiwan's international space, pressure its friends, and interfere in Taiwan's democratic system represent a threat to all democracies."
China claims democratically-governed Taiwan as its own territory, and has over the past two years or so ramped up military and diplomatic pressure to assert those claims.
The United States is Taiwan's most important international supporter and arms supplier, a source of constant friction between Washington and Beijing.
Oudkirk said that in order to strengthen Taiwan's role as a regional security partner, the United States remains committed to helping Taiwan "maintain its ability to deter aggression and to defend itself".
"We have a shared and abiding interest in peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. We consider this central to the security and stability of the broader Indo-Pacific region and are deeply concerned by ongoing PRC efforts to undermine that stability."
Taiwan rejects China's sovereignty claims and says only the island's people can decide their own future.
The United States has also been working with Taiwan on supply chains, the island being a major producer of semiconductors.
Oudkirk said both sides were working on diversifying supply chains and to facilitate investment in sectors like chips, electric vehicles, cybersecurity, 5G and renewable energy.
"AIT's commercial section is now organising visits by robust industry-focused delegations to many parts of the United States this summer," she added, without giving details.
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com
Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Michael Perry
Reuters · by Reuters



11. The case for Taiwan’s statehood

Wow. This is radical and "out-of-the -box" thinking.

The case for Taiwan’s statehood
notesonliberty.com · by Brandon Christensen · March 31, 2022
When Russia invaded Ukraine a few short weeks ago, some people began to worry that China might try to do the same thing with Taiwan. I didn’t worry about this myself, as China is mostly a paper tiger, but also because the US has close military ties with Taiwan. Taiwan has close economic relationships with several wealthy democratic states in East Asia, too. Contrast this geopolitical context with Ukraine, and the parallels, while tempting, do not add up.
The whole debate and worry over Taiwan got me thinking again about federation as a libertarian foreign policy. Why shouldn’t Taiwan just join the United States? Here are the most common objections to such a federation:
Geography. This is probably one of the strongest cases against Taiwan joining the US, since it’s so far away from not only the mainland but Hawaii, too. Aaaand it’s just off the coast of China, which would likely cause friction with the regional power were Beijing to suddenly find itself neighboring a transoceanic republic.
(Source)
This is all much ado about nothing. A plane ride from Dallas to Taipei is 14 hours if you take out the layovers. Somebody living in Kaohsiung could send me an email after reading this essay and I could access it within minutes. Geography still matters, but its not an insurmountable barrier to a freer, more open world via the federative principles of the United States constitution.
Culture. A big complaint I see about adding “states” to the American republic is “culture.” Fellow Notewriter Edwin does this all the time, and it can make sense, on the surface, in some cases, but not in Taiwan’s, and not in the Indo-Pacific more generally.
Look at Taiwan’s 2020 presidential election results:
(Source)
Look familiar? There’s only two colors. It’s a contest between a left-wing and right-wing, and both wings are committed to, and bound by, liberty and democracy. There are no “ethnic” parties, no “religious” parties, and no radical parties, mostly because Taiwan has the same electoral system as the US does: a “first-past-the post” one. So the cultural angle is even weaker than first imagined. Taiwan started out as a nationalist holdout against the Communist Party, but today nationalism doesn’t carry a whole lot of weight. Adding Taiwan to the republic would be like adding another California or Hawaii, albeit with more conservative votes. It’s plausible that adding Taiwan would give Democrats two more reliable seats in the senate, but this is merely cause to invite a polity that would reliably vote Republican to also join the United States.
Self-determination / cultural autonomy. There’s an argument in some circles that joining the US would be akin to losing self-determination and even cultural autonomy. I don’t see how any of this could be true. Even today, people in American states retain a “state-centric” identity when it comes to thinking about their place in the US. That Taiwanese would be able to add “American” to a plethora of other identities already at their disposal could only be a good thing.
China. Would China fight a war against the US over Taiwan statehood? Maybe, but given Russia’s poor showing in Ukraine, the war would end quickly, at least from a Taiwanese statehood perspective. The CCP’s military has no fighting experience, unproven tech, unproven hardware, and…no fighting experience. The worst that would happen, I think, is that the CCP threatens war, maybe sends some warships to the strait, maybe fires some rockets over the island and flies some fighter jets over the island, but that’s about it. The CCP just doesn’t have the muster to fight a war against the United States over Taiwan.
These four objections are so common that I can’t help but be exasperated by their banality, especially given the rich tradition of republican security theory and federalist thought over the past three or four thousand years. There are two reasons for Americans, and especially libertarians, to support Taiwan’s federation with the US:
The free riding problem. The first thing that all libertarians complain about when it comes to “foreign policy” is the free riding problem. This is a problem in political economy where agents will enjoy the benefits of a policy at the expense of other agents who are required to bear the costs. Libertarians aren’t wrong to complain about the free riding problem. It’s a big problem. Think of a Russian attack on NATO ally Lithuania.
Taiwan has a fairly hard guarantee of US military support were the Communist Party of China to attack it. This, the argument goes, allows Taiwan to be a bit more reckless than it otherwise would be when dealing with Beijing. Therefore, according to non-interventionists, the US should simply stop guaranteeing Taiwan’s military security and just trade with the people of the island instead. It would be an awful scenario to face were Taiwan to goad China into attacking it and thus draw the US into a war with China.
Federating would end the free riding problem once and for all. Taiwan’s citizens would be American citizens. They would benefit, and pay the costs, associated with such citizenship.
Sovereignty. Taiwan is not a sovereign nation-state, as China has blocked all of the island’s attempts to become so, and it never will be so long as nation-state status depends upon recognition by large states such as Russia and China (as well as the US). This actually makes it easier for Taiwan to join the republic. The American senate is a tool of international diplomacy that was utilized to bind independent states together in a federal union by trading their sovereignty for seats in a powerful upper house of Congress. Taiwan wouldn’t have to go through the arduous process of debating whether or not its sovereignty is worth the price of admission into a North American federal order, because its status as a Westphalian sovereign nation-state is non-existent.
By incorporating Taiwan into its federal order, the US could revamp the liberal world order, and it could do so by adhering to the principles which made it a beacon for liberty in the first place.
notesonliberty.com · by Brandon Christensen · March 31, 2022




12. Putin’s Soldiers Caught on Tape Lamenting Losses and Blasting His Army of ‘Stupid Morons’

Soldiers will be soldiers and it is the soldiers place in life to complain about "higher."

But note this buried lede. Russia is planning for occupation of occupied areas.

Excerpts:

Perhaps as part of a long game, the Kremlin has now reportedly begun implementing plans to send psychologists from the FSB into Kherson, a city in the south of Ukraine where residents continue to resist the Russian forces who took over after the Feb. 24 invasion.

...
Russian law enforcement officials, prosecutors, and judges are also said to be on their way to occupied territories in Ukraine, with reports of Russian police officers being asked to take “business trips” to parts of the Donbas in Ukraine’s east.


Putin’s Soldiers Caught on Tape Lamenting Losses and Blasting His Army of ‘Stupid Morons’
The Daily Beast · March 31, 2022
Reuters
Russia’s Vladimir Putin is calling up another 134,500 conscripts even as more and more of his own soldiers appear to be turning on him over humiliating losses in Ukraine.
According to a decree published on a Russian government portal Thursday, the troops will be called to begin service on April 1 until July 15. The Defense Ministry promised earlier this week that they “will not be sent to any hot spots,” and that all those called up in last spring’s draft will be sent home.
But those assurances seem likely to be overshadowed by a multitude of reports that say Russia’s senseless war against Ukraine has been marred by lies from the top down, with Russian troops claiming they were misled into the war and Putin’s own advisers said to be shielding him from the extent of the devastating losses.
Even as Putin signed the decree on Thursday, Ukraine’s Security Service released an intercepted call said to capture a Russian soldier railing against the incompetence of his own army.
“Our brigade has totally shit themselves. There are losses, many wounded,” he tells his wife.
Asked if the losses are a result of someone screwing up, he offers a blunt response: “The whole army with us is stupid morons.”
“It’s unclear why we are even here,” he says.
Another recording shared by Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, captures a man identified as a Russian soldier named Maksim asking his mother what is being shown on Russian television, and if there are reports “they’re saying they will change anything.”
“Everything’s bad, almost no one among us is left. They said we will keep going until the very end, until everyone is killed,” he tells his mother.
Asked if his senior officer was still with the unit, he replies: “No, he dumped us yesterday. We’re all dead in the water if he left.”
The new recordings come just hours after Western officials said there was growing evidence of disarray and disillusionment among Russian troops, with Britain’s spy chief citing reports of troops “refusing to carry out orders, sabotaging their own equipment and even accidentally shooting down their own aircraft.”
Reporting by Meduza on Thursday largely aligned with Western assessments. Citing three sources close to the presidential administration, the news outlet reported that Russian military officials finally came to terms with the fact that they wouldn’t be able to seize control of Kyiv by late March. (Just a month earlier, according to Meduza, they were all but certain that the “special operation” would be quick, and the biggest headache would be organizing work by the “new administrations” put in place by Russia).
But they decided to shift their focus to the Donbas in the country’s east after realizing the full scale of military setbacks—and the damage wrought on the economy by Western sanctions.
Putin was personally presented with the reality of the sanctions only at the end of March, when officials showed him “the country will not be able to live normally under such sanctions,” one source was quoted telling Meduza.
The Russian leader has still not made a final decision on what he’s going to do next, and plenty of those close to him are reportedly pressuring him to go full steam ahead with the onslaught against Ukraine.
But the presidential administration is said to be concerned about how “a possible truce with Ukraine will hit Putin’s [approval] ratings.”
“The citizens were riled up by propaganda. Suppose a decision is made to stop at the territory of the Donbas. What about the Nazis then? Are we no longer fighting them? This word has been hammered into people so much that I can’t imagine how one can stop in Donbas without losing approval ratings,” one source told Meduza.
Perhaps as part of a long game, the Kremlin has now reportedly begun implementing plans to send psychologists from the FSB into Kherson, a city in the south of Ukraine where residents continue to resist the Russian forces who took over after the Feb. 24 invasion.
“To implement a scenario for the creation of another pseudo-republic in the territory of the Kherson region, there is work underway by employees of the FSB, 652 groups of information and psychological operations and officers of the 12th Main Directorate of the [Russian] General Staff,” the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said in a statement Thursday.
Ukrainian officials said the FSB effort is an attempt to brainwash residents into supporting their new Russian authorities.
Russian law enforcement officials, prosecutors, and judges are also said to be on their way to occupied territories in Ukraine, with reports of Russian police officers being asked to take “business trips” to parts of the Donbas in Ukraine’s east.
The Daily Beast · March 31, 2022




13. Clash between Japan and Russia looms as Tokyo steps up Kuril Island claims: 'Russian Army is illegal occupier'

We forget about this land/island dispute.

Clash between Japan and Russia looms as Tokyo steps up Kuril Island claims: 'Russian Army is illegal occupier'
cityam.com · by Michiel Willems · April 1, 2022
Friday 01 April 2022 9:24 am
Clash between Japan and Russia looms as Tokyo steps up Kuril Island claims: ‘Russian Army is illegal occupier’
By:
The Kuril Islands, currently under control by Russia
After several Japanese politicians recently stated the disputed Kuril Islands are part of Japan’s territory, Tokyo has now moved to officially declare that the entire Kuril Island chain is Japanese sovereign territory.
In fact, Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has said the islands are illegally occupied by the Russian Army.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan will now call the Kuril Islands a part of Japan occupied by the Russian Federation, Kyodo, the Japanese media informs.
— Svidomi (@Svidomi_En) March 31, 2022
Over the last few decades, the Japanese Government has refrained from such bold claims, largely not to damage Japanese-Russian relations, but following the Invasion of Ukraine and Japanese sanctions on Russia, diplomatic relations between the two countries have reached a low point.
Last week the Russian government told Japan it is ending negotiations to sign a formal World War II peace treaty because of Tokyo’s efforts to exploit the Ukraine war to claim the Kuril Islands belong to Japan.
“The Russian side, in the current conditions, does not intend to continue talks with Japan on the peace treaty,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
Russia and Japan have never formally signed a peace treaty to end World War II.
Northern territories
One of the key issues is competing claims over territorial rights to the Kuril Islands, which Tokyo calls its Northern Territories. Soviet troops seized them from Japan at the end of the war, and Russia still occupies the island group.
However, in March Fumio Kishida, Japan’s prime minister, said that southern Kuril Islands are a sovereign part of his country, and not part of Russia, which has controlled the group of islands since 1945.
Speaking in the Diet earlier, Kishida told lawmakers the Kuril Islands are “original territories of Japan”.
The islands have been a point of controversy between Japan and the Russia for decades. Moscow took control of the islands after World War II in 1945.
Certainly, Japan is anticipating a challenge while is following closer what is happening in Ukraine.

Here is a thread about Kuril. https://t.co/2Wu5bUN9bC
— 4n4lisis (@4n4lisis) April 1, 2022
In recent years, the Japanese government had refrained from referring to the islands as its “original territories” in order to avoid upsetting the Russian government.
However, following the global anti-Moscow sentiment since the invasion of Ukraine, the Japanese government has reinstated its historic claim on the silands.
“The Northern Territories belong to Japan. They are the territory on which Japan has sovereignty,” Kishida said.
In fact, on 29 February, on the second day of the Russian invasion, Japan’s foreign minister, Hideki Uyama, even went so far to say that Russia had “occupied” the southern part of the Kuril Islands, thereby violating international law.
Share this article
Similarly tagged content:
Sections
Categories
Related Topics
cityam.com · by Michiel Willems · April 1, 2022

14. In Iniochos Exercise, Israel Rehearses Iran Strikes as Saudis Observe


In Iniochos Exercise, Israel Rehearses Iran Strikes as Saudis Observe
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2022/03/31/in_iniochos_exercise_israel_rehearses_iran_strikes_as_saudis_observe_824725.html

The Greek-hosted Iniochos 2022 military exercise began this week, with Athens welcoming military contingents from the United States, Israel, Cyprus, France, Italy, and Slovenia. The exercise, which also includes observers from more than 10 other countries, will provide participants with an opportunity to work with partner forces and hone their ability to detect and strike air, ground, and maritime targets.
While this year’s exercise is largely similar to last year’s, two elements stand out. First, Saudi Arabia is sending observers for the first time publicly to the exercise. Second, Israel is using Inochios 2022 to rehearse some of the combat capabilities it would need to conduct strikes against Iran’s nuclear program.

The Inochios annual military exercise, led by the Hellenic Air Force, runs from March 28 to April 7 this year. The exercise provides participating air forces with an opportunity to practice advanced air-ground-maritime integration in what the Hellenic Air Force calls “one of the largest exercise areas in Europe.”
That is one of the reasons the United States Air Forces Europe (USAFE) sent F-15E Strike Eagles from the 48th Fighter Wing based at the United Kingdom’s Lakenheath airbase. The Iniochos exercise’s sophistication and large training area enable the American pilots to fulfill important annual training requirements.
In addition to the F-15Es, USAFE sent joint terminal attack controllers, or JTACs, from the 4th Air Support Operations Group and an element of the 52nd Fighter Wing Intelligence stationed at Spangdahlem Air Base in Germany. USAFE also sent an MQ-9 Reaper stationed in Italy.
The exercise will also feature the French Rafale fighter aircraft and airborne early warning system, the Italian Tornado fighter aircraft, the Slovenian PC-9 training aircraft, and the Cypriot AW139 helicopter. Israel, for its part, sent the F-16, G550 surveillance plane, and Boeing 707 air refueler.
The list of countries that sent observers is equally robust. They include Albania, Austria, Canada, Croatia, Egypt, India, Kuwait, Morocco, North Macedonia, the United Kingdom — and Saudi Arabia.
Unlike Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, which established diplomatic relations with Israel in 2020 as part of the U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords, Saudi Arabia still does not have formal diplomatic relations with Israel. That makes Riyadh’s decision to observe the Iniochos exercise publicly noteworthy, given that Israeli forces are participating again this year.
Saudi Arabia increasingly acknowledges in public what it has long understood in private: Tehran and its terror proxies — not Israel — represent the real threat to regional peace and security.
Perhaps that is why Riyadh was willing to have Israeli and Saudi fighter jets escort (albeit at different times) a U.S. Air Force B-1B Lancer Bomber on a patrol mission that circumnavigated the Arabian Peninsula in October 2021. Earlier this year, a common Saudi-Israeli perception of the Iranian threat may have also motivated both Israel and Saudi Arabia to participate in the U.S.-led International Maritime Exercise, the Middle East's largest maritime exercise.
The more Israel, the United States, and its Arab partners conduct military exercises together, the more they can strengthen the readiness of their individual forces, share intelligence on threats, and develop common best practices for countering Tehran-supported terrorist groups that endanger Israelis, Americans, and Arabs alike. This is especially important as Iran and its proxies have stepped up attacks in recent months, from drones targeting Israel to strikes on Saudi energy infrastructure to attacks on ships at sea. In fact, the Iranian-backed Houthis just conducted a three-week-long assault against Saudi Arabia, demonstrating the danger Tehran poses to regional stability.
The second noteworthy feature of the Iniochos exercise also relates to Iran. As Washington and Tehran appear close to a new nuclear deal that many worry would provide Iran with a patient pathway to a nuclear weapons capability, the Israel Defense Forces remain focused on building the capability to successfully strike against Iran’s nuclear program if necessary.
Iniochos provide an opportunity to do just that. The distance from Israel to Greece is roughly equivalent to the distance from Israel to Iran. By sending the F-16, G550 surveillance plane, and 707 air refueler to Iniochos 2022, Israel gains a valuable opportunity to practice conducting long-range airstrikes that require air refueling support.



When Israel hones and demonstrates that capability, it sends a positive deterrent message to Tehran that supports U.S. interests and promotes regional security.
So, while this year’s Iniochos exercise may look relatively mundane on the surface, a careful examination reveals growing Saudi and Israeli concern regarding Iran, as well as a renewed determination to maintain military readiness.
Bradley Bowman is the senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Ryan Brobst is a research analyst. Seth Frantzman has been covering conflict in the Middle East since 2010 as a researcher, analyst, and correspondent for various publications.


15. The Challenge of Containing a Nuclear Iran

Excerpts:

Once Iran has a nuke, the theocracy might let hubris get the better of it. America’s willpower and capacity may change. In the 1970s, when the United States was in a profound funk and the fall of Saigon and Henry Kissinger’s détente defined Washington’s declining capacity, an American resurgence seemed far-fetched. And yet, Reagan flipped the switch.
Such a change today vis-à-vis the clerical regime would require the theocracy to demonstrate that it’s a big league threat to America’s well-being or that it’s just too troublesome, with too much American blood on its hands, for a recharged liberal hegemon to tolerate. If the Islamic Republic were bigger and more dangerous or smaller and with fewer hopeful Westerners making excuses for it, then Washington would likely be much more forceful. The Islamic Republic is a talented, nefarious, oil-rich middleweight whose lethal machinations rarely get punished. Secretary Shultz was right: The United States should punish the theocracy routinely, harshly, and without exception. Malevolent habits will only grow worse with nukes to fuel the mullahs’ pride and mission civilisatrice.
The Challenge of Containing a Nuclear Iran
Barring a great surprise, the Islamic Republic will get its nuke. How will the U.S. respond?
Reuel Marc Gerecht
Mar 31
thedispatch.com · by Reuel Marc Gerecht
Ayatollah Ali Khamanei. (Photograph by Iranian Leader's Press Office /Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.)
Start with a probable assumption: The Islamic Republic will soon be able to produce a nuclear weapon whenever the supreme leader decides to do so. A new atomic accord, currently being negotiated in Vienna, won’t change the fundamental atomic fact: Biden’s deal undoubtedly will leave in place Tehran’s progress with high-speed centrifuges and a loose inspection regime that doesn’t account for, let alone eliminate, Iran’s ample stockpile of the high-tech components and maraging steel needed for the production of advanced centrifuges. Removing Iranian surpluses of highly enriched uranium by allowing its export abroad to Russia—an embarrassing destination now for the White House and the Europeans—or to China doesn’t really matter so long as advanced centrifuges can produce bomb fuel quickly. Iran’s nuclear engineers have shown that they can build high-speed, sufficiently reliable, machines rapidly.
Barring a great, felicitous surprise, the theocracy, which has clandestinely and overtly striven at great expense to develop the bomb since the 1980s, will have its nuke. Which brings up the question of what a post-nuke Iran policy would look like—assuming those who still want America to confront the clerical regime are in power with sufficient will and means to do something more than sanctions. Let us take preventive war out of the equation since that’s certainly not happening with a Democratic president—even a hawkish Republican president likely wouldn’t strike, assuming Tehran doesn’t have the bomb by 2025 (would Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley want to start their term with another Middle Eastern war?). And the Israelis, too, are clearly not riding to the rescue: The current government of Naftali Bennett doesn’t nearly have the determination of Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, who tried and failed to get his cabinet to approve air raids against the Islamic Republic’s nuclear sites. Existential threat or not, senior commanders of the Israeli Defense Forces just don’t want to undertake this mission. The doctrine of mutually assured destruction is, by default, what Jerusalem will henceforth reluctantly accept.
So what’s actually left for those who oppose the Biden administration’s approach? It’s a conundrum since anything likely to prove effective would risk conflict. Most things that might matter, for example, in an aggressive containment/regime-change strategy, would oblige Republicans either to bluff or bring the military to bear. And if you bluff in the Middle East repeatedly, you’re likely to get called. A fresh round of Iranian terrorism—say a successful version of what could have happened in the exurbs of Paris in 2018, when the clerical regime tried to bomb an opposition rally that likely would have killed many Americans—might reignite an awareness that the Islamic Republic is irredeemable, possibly building the requisite volition for military action. When thinking about the ramifications of Iran’s long embrace of terrorism, however, it’s always worthwhile (and depressing) to remember the first mass-casualty event aimed at Americans: the Beirut barracks bombings in 1983.
That act was then extraordinary: 241 Americans died. Intercepts at the time and later writings by Iran’s ambassador in Syria, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi-pur, and the theocracy’s major domo, Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, showed Iran to be proudly culpable. Although Secretary of State George Shultz strongly advocated for a military response, Ronald Reagan declined. A few years later, Reagan was trading arms for hostages. And to move forward: In Iraq, George W. Bush didn’t do anything serious against the Islamic Republic when it was killing American soldiers, even though we knew through Iraqi prisoners an impressive amount about its lethal operations. Military action against Iran, for its nuclear ambitions, terrorism, or imperialist designs, just seems unlikely. Covert action, however, like sanctions, offers the possibility of doing something for those who can’t countenance war.
Most large-scale anti-Iranian covert action would cost too much money and likely need to last too long for the programs to operate without bipartisan support. The history of non-lethal American covert action during the Cold War, against the Soviets, Communist Chinese, or on the periphery, against the Islamic Republic, isn’t particularly inspiring; the big programs that endured all had bipartisan buy-in, at least among senior members of Congress. Central Intelligence Agency funds that the head of the Directorate of Operations can use with presidential approval, which aren’t subject to a congressional veto or even, if the president wants to push it, congressional oversight, aren’t large. And any president today has to be aware that Langley will leak if it strongly disapproves of what a president is doing. Ditto the congressional oversight committees. Some programs collapse with leaks, others don’t. Given how much both political parties hate each other, it’s not inconceivable that a president who didn’t have sufficient support on the Hill could find himself facing impeachment if a significant, controversial covert action were undertaken without congressional support.
To get sufficient funds to run significant operations lasting a few years requires the support of Democrats on the intelligence oversight committees. It’s a good guess that most Democrats are unalterably opposed to a regime-change policy aimed at the Iranian theocracy—unless the ruling mullahs and the Revolutionary Guards do something truly atrocious, worse than anything they have done so far. America-cocks-things-up-in-the-Third World is deeply rooted among progressives, who appear to have the party’s moral high ground. This has particular impact with Iran given the canonical role the CIA-supported 1953 coup has in the American left’s understanding of modern history (simply put: The coup, which supposedly aborted democracy, gave us the 1979 Islamic revolution). Many Republicans, both Trumpian and more establishmentarian, might also subscribe to this view, though there is a larger chance that some of them might be fibbing, proscribing regime change in public but willing to be a bit bolder in closed chambers.
It’s certainly possible to imagine more American support for Iranian human-rights organizations outside of Iran, provided these groups would accept official U.S. aid. Such efforts haven’t so far proven convulsive inside Iran, which is why many of these groups are located in Europe and receive some assistance from the European Union—they are considered non-threatening to the EU’s long-standing policy of engaging the clerical regime, commercially and diplomatically (France and Germany started their outreach in the early 1990s). They offer a means for European officials to feel a bit better about all that trade.
The Democrats, following the European example, could also likely find ways to support Iranian dissidents so long as serious sanctions weren’t used, which would undermine any nuclear agreement. Most Republicans would also support such dissident/human-rights aid since it’s morally compelling, doesn’t commit the United States to do anything on the ground, and doesn’t cost much. The rub would come with the CIA. Most Democrats would likely oppose having Langley involved; the operations directorate, which doesn’t much care for covert action owing to possible political blowback and because most case officers lack the background and languages to even pretend to do the work, would detail to Congress its reservations. The experiment during the George W. Bush administration, where aid to Iranian dissidents was open and administered through the State Department, wasn’t a resounding success, leading to the arrest of Iranians who briefly associated with these efforts. The Islamic Republic is much nastier internally today than it was then.
However, the dissidents themselves—at least many of them—might not have a big problem with CIA subventions. There has been something close to a sea change among many oppositionists, especially among the expatriates: They have realized that the Western left is unreliable owing to its almost monomaniacal preference for arms control over human rights. That doesn’t necessarily mean they would welcome association with the agency. It does mean, however, that they are less scared of American right-wingers who, not long ago, would have been socially unacceptable.
There might be some room for Langley to maneuver if a program developed to better organize the expatriate opposition in the United States and Europe. It’s remotely conceivable that Democrats might join Republicans in growing and organizing this opposition. Expatriates certainly need help: Their capacity to splinter remains profound. Secular liberal democrats, monarchists, fallen left-wing Islamic revolutionaries, Iranian-Americans, who are now more American than they are Iranian, Iranians in Europe, who have acquired all the pluses and minuses that come with Europe’s cultural and political diversity, the non-Persian ethnic minorities who want greater autonomy or outright freedom from Tehran—they all have a lot of things they all don’t like about each other and few personalities whom they all trust. Patient support from outsiders, either clandestine or open, could prove crucial in turning the overseas opposition into a more coherent, cohesive, influential voice against the theocracy. The same might be true in Lebanon, where a big slice of the Lebanese Shiite community, at home and abroad, seems to want distance from Hezbollah, Iran’s favorite Arab child of the Islamic revolution. Soft-power covert action might have a small but important role to play in advancing more Lebanese Shiite criticism of the clerical regime’s malevolent role in the Levant.
Although the Iranian opposition has become technically pretty savvy about secure communications, the opposition isn’t cash rich. The eye-popping success of many Iranians abroad, especially in the United States, hasn’t yet led to a reliable donor class willing to give tens of millions of dollars to support innovative ways to bring opposition groups and the Iranian people closer together. All of these things are easier to do if a foreign intelligence service helps. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is absolutely paranoid about an Iranian fifth column, which depending on the day, the cleric sees as a small, cancerous minority or a vast legion who’ve fallen irretrievably into the grip of Western culture. The echo effect inside Iran of a better organized expatriate opposition might be substantial.
Although Iranian expatriates love to focus on the deficiencies of the Persian services of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty, and some of these deficiencies are serious, America’s official broadcasting in Persian probably doesn’t warrant much further attention—beyond giving it more money. Neither service by statute can become a vehicle for activists, outside of Iran or within, which is often what frustrated expatriates understandably want.
A lot of information gets into the Islamic Republic via all the Western news services broadcasting in Persian, through radio, the Internet, and TV; private services also have some influence and a following. The problem inside Iran isn’t the rapid conveyance of accurate information—that happens sufficiently. What doesn’t happen is what the human-rights activists and oppositionists want: reliable vehicles, with secure communications, to publicize immediately the human-rights outrages and help organize protests and other activities that confront the regime. Tech-savvy Westerners with a lot of money and desire—this would probably have to be sponsored by, or via, an intelligence service—might provide serious aid and comfort to those inside who are willing to risk imprisonment, torture, and death.
Hard Containment
When it comes to the use of hard power against the clerical regime, the situation is more challenging. It is by no means clear that American military pressure, at least what might be remotely plausible, would now put that much strain on the theocracy. The Islamic Republic has deployed, at least since the Israeli Air Force, with its relentless bombing campaign, made a heavier footprint in Syria too costly, a light, coercive approach in Mesopotamia and the Levant. In Iraq, Iran’s lethal reach is executed almost exclusively through Arab Shiite allies. They are too insulated in the country’s complex matrix of domestic politics for the United States to actually hurt Iran through greater military pressure on those allies. And our presence there, which still has some significance for the country’s future, can no longer be increased without that country’s democratic, nationalist politics working against us.
If we borrowed a page from the clerical regime’s machinations against us in Iraq, then the CIA would develop a plan for American-led foreign assassination teams to take out Iranian personnel, especially Islamic Revolutionary Guard officers in Syria. Israel is already killing IRGC personnel routinely there. The agency probably can’t add that much to that effort, perhaps better targeting information coming from America’s unrivaled intercept capabilities, plus more lethal drones and cruise missiles. If we were willing to station CIA officers in greater numbers in a wider area in Syria, or work through the Turks or the Jordanians, Langley might be able to develop small operational Syrian cadres that would have the sole mission to find and eliminate IRGC staff. Langley’s paramilitary efforts with the Syrian opposition during Barack Obama’s years were nothing to write home about, but they would have provided some basic familiarity with possible players and their liabilities. Such operations likely wouldn’t have a shortage of Syrian volunteers. It would take time to get this up and running, but less time than non-military covert action, which is always, by definition, less concrete.
Syria is still the Wild West: The regime doesn’t have tight control over much of its territory. We just might discover opportunities to amplify significantly the damage the Israeli Air Force brings. These efforts certainly wouldn’t reignite the civil strife/civil war that our European allies, who fear new waves of Muslim refugees, dread. Obviously, no such program could develop under Democrats, and it would be a bold Republican president to take this on. And this is likely one of those clandestine efforts that leaks could kill.
Plus, the clerical regime has shown that it can absorb fairly significant IRGC losses and adapt. The only event that might bleed Iran dry, à la the Soviets in Afghanistan, would be the re-ignition of nationwide strife between the majority Sunni Syrian population and the Shiite Alawite dictatorship. It’s unlikely that there would be much political appetite in Washington, even among the most hawkish Republicans, for turning the Syrian civil war back on given the near certainty that it would restart refugees moving toward Europe.
In the southern Middle East, Washington could restore some of its support to the Saudis and Emirates in Yemen, but this isn’t going to rise to the level that could hurt Iran since the clerical regime risks little in its support to the Shiite Houthis. Playing on decades of internecine strife, the Islamic Republic and Hezbollah have encouraged the Houthis’ radicalization. Yemen is a low-cost blackjack game for Iran, one where it’s the dealer. Over time, it will always win. Probably not a lot but enough to be satisfying and easily worth the cost. Terrifying the Saudis and Emirates with missiles launched from over the border probably makes the Iranian elite just giddy.
Although we lack good information on exactly what transpires in Yemen, it certainly doesn’t appear that Tehran has a significant, perhaps not even a permanent, IRGC presence in the country. And the Sunni Gulf Arabs aren’t going to commit more to this cause than they already have; even without American pressure, Riyadh had been reducing its commitment; “Little Sparta,” a truly generous sobriquet for Abu Dhabi, keeps financing local proxies, with varying effectiveness, but is no longer deploying its own troops into harm’s way. The Saudi and Emirati militaries, not without their successes since the intervention began in 2015, certainly don’t evince any confidence now that they can win in Yemen. For cause: the Houthis are militarily too strong, geographically well-positioned, and represent the most organized religious and tribal groups in the country. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi now know they can’t possibly win the propaganda war since their bombing campaigns, which unavoidably are going to fall way short of First World standards, and impoverishing naval blockades play poorly.
Washington’s military aid to the Gulf States should focus on providing more and better means for intercepting medium and short-range missiles. Finding, let alone killing, IRGC and Lebanese Hezbollah operatives, who serve as the IRGC’s vanguard among the Arabs, would be extremely difficult. Yemen is just a perfect arena for Tehran to win at little cost; there’s little that the United States can do about it.
Northwest of Yemen, in the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Oman, and the Persian Gulf, a Republican White House could make it crystal clear that the pre-Trump understanding about American naval intervention is back in force: We will protect all shipping that transits these waters and all ports and oil facilities along the littoral. That isn’t going to put much new pressure on Tehran, but it will check its appetite. And Washington can do this at relatively low cost and avoid the unhelpful, possibly dangerous, illusion that the Saudis and Emirates can do much on their own.
Certainly selling more advanced weaponry to these two states shouldn’t be part of any anti-Iran containment strategy. They can’t absorb and properly use the armaments that they already have. Both kingdoms are probably fragile—something their rulers likely know. Hence the “secret” messengers from Saudi Arabia and the Emirates to Tehran whenever they are scared, which is often. Donald Trump had many bad foreign-policy ideas; imagining the Gulfies as America’s tribunes against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was among his worst.
The hostility that many Democrats have toward Saudi Arabia and the Jamal Kashoggi-butchering Saudi crown prince is overwrought, but it does keep Washington today from assigning Saudi Arabia and the Emirates destabilizing roles. The kingdom has enough to handle with Mohammad bin Salman’s modernizing, dictatorial ambitions—they could easily be too much for a deeply religious society in rapid transition. The Abraham Accords shouldn’t be viewed as the glue for a new Gulf-Israel-U.S. alliance; they are, first and foremost, the product of American weakness and a bipartisan desire to retrench in the region. Gulfie self-confidence and a final acceptance of the Zionist dream didn’t produce the accords; fear of Shiites did.
That fear is primarily and most easily countered by the U.S. Navy—always the cutting edge of America’s containment of the Islamic Republic. And the more present the U.S. Navy is in the Persian Gulf, the greater the opportunity for the clerical regime to do something stupid that might lead to a U.S.–Iranian confrontation that could seriously diminish the Islamic Republic’s armed forces. Any sensible containment strategy would increase substantially America’s intrusive presence there, reminding the Revolutionary Guards that the waterway is Persian in name only. Any nuclear accord with the mullahs ought to oblige the United States to “pivot to the Middle East” since Washington should want to reassure Israel, the Sunni Arab states, and Turkey, the most likely state to next go nuclear. It should want to show Tehran that America can quickly and decisively punish it.
Nuclear diplomacy should have meant, by definition, that the United States was gearing up for at least an expanded military containment of the Islamic Republic. The nuclear negotiations in Vienna are quite close to achieving their end if Washington can find work-arounds for Russia’s contributions and sanctions-avoiding trade with the Islamic Republic (certainly doable) and diplomatic legerdemain that neutralizes the Trump administration’s foreign-terrorist designation of the Revolutionary Guards (trickier but surmountable). A new deal will undoubtedly leave the Iranian theocracy with the means to produce the bomb and a lot of cash to buy conventional weapons.
The clerical regime has, however, survived American collisions before (see Operation Praying Mantis that left much of Iranian navy in flames in 1988). Outside of Syria, American hard power, if Washington can muster it, isn’t likely to add the kind of pressure that could fray Iran’s writ anywhere in the region.
By default, the American “containment” of Iran may remain limited to U.S. ground forces in Syria at Dayr uz-Zohr, the U.S. Navy and the Air Force in the Persian Gulf, and sanctions—whatever Republicans may reinstitute after they return to power. That’s not a particularly vigorous approach to constraining the clerical regime, but it’s helpful. In an utterly polarized Washington, where Obama’s nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, and its imminent successor have become litmus tests for most Democrats, this may be all that Washington can do.
Once Iran has a nuke, the theocracy might let hubris get the better of it. America’s willpower and capacity may change. In the 1970s, when the United States was in a profound funk and the fall of Saigon and Henry Kissinger’s détente defined Washington’s declining capacity, an American resurgence seemed far-fetched. And yet, Reagan flipped the switch.
Such a change today vis-à-vis the clerical regime would require the theocracy to demonstrate that it’s a big league threat to America’s well-being or that it’s just too troublesome, with too much American blood on its hands, for a recharged liberal hegemon to tolerate. If the Islamic Republic were bigger and more dangerous or smaller and with fewer hopeful Westerners making excuses for it, then Washington would likely be much more forceful. The Islamic Republic is a talented, nefarious, oil-rich middleweight whose lethal machinations rarely get punished. Secretary Shultz was right: The United States should punish the theocracy routinely, harshly, and without exception. Malevolent habits will only grow worse with nukes to fuel the mullahs’ pride and mission civilisatrice.
Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Iranian-targets officer in the CIA, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
thedispatch.com · by Reuel Marc Gerecht


16. Biden Administration Failing to Reform U.N.’s Palestinian Refugee Agency


Biden Administration Failing to Reform U.N.’s Palestinian Refugee Agency
No signs yet of the promised “neutrality, accountability, and transparency” from UNRWA.
by DAVID MAY  MARCH 31, 2022 5:30 AM
thebulwark.com · by David May · March 31, 2022
Its textbooks promote anti-Semitism and violence. Its previous leader resigned amid allegations of “misconduct, nepotism, retaliation . . . and other abuses of authority.” There is no question that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is in need of drastic reform.
Yet the Biden administration just appointed a former top UNRWA official to the State Department bureau that oversees hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. funding for her previous employer. Elizabeth Campbell, a new deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, worked for UNRWA from 2017 until earlier this year, representing its interests in Washington. UNRWA currently faces a serious financial shortfall, presenting the Biden administration with an opportunity to push for much-needed reform and accountability. However, it seems unlikely that Campbell—who just weeks ago was paid to publicly defend UNRWA and its budget—would now clamp down on her former employer.

Podcast · March 31 2022
Georgia is the new epicenter of American politics after flipping the Senate and helping give…
The Trump administration cut off all U.S. funding for UNRWA in 2018, concluding that UNRWA needed to be reformed completely, if not dismantled. With a mandate to care for refugees, providing basic services like health care and education, but not resettle them, UNRWA has perpetuated the problem it exists to deal with. By conferring refugee status on multiple generations of Palestinians—a departure from U.N. practice in other conflicts—an initial refugee population of approximately 750,000 in 1948 has ballooned to 5.7 million. This expansive definition of who is a refugee, coupled with UNRWA’s support for the “right of return,” the Palestinian claim that all these millions of Palestinians have a right to resettle inside Israel, makes the agency a vehicle for prolonging the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To boot, UNRWA has also had serious issues of waste, fraud, and abuse.
When the Trump administration zeroed out aid to the U.N. agency in August 2018 after it resisted making changes, a State Department spokesperson announced, “The United States will no longer commit further funding to this irredeemably flawed operation.”
The Biden administration opted to restore funding to the agency before securing structural changes in UNRWA’s mandate or operations—all but ensuring no change would occur. When announcing the decision last April, Secretary of State Antony Blinken vowed U.S. taxpayer money would promote “neutrality, accountability, and transparency.” Since then, the United States has donated or pledged some $416.8 million to UNRWA, including more than $32 million contributed in the wake of the May 2021 Hamas-Israel war.
The Biden administration would likely defend its decision by pointing to the framework for cooperation with the State Department that UNRWA signed on July 14, 2021, in which it committed to stopping incitement against Jews and Israel in its education system and ensuring it does not support or provide assistance to terrorist groups. Days later, the United States announced another $135.8 million for the cash-strapped agency. On December 30, 2021, the State Department pledged an additional $99 million, again stressing the need for UNRWA to focus on “accountability, transparency, neutrality, and stability.”
But America’s return on investment appears to be negative. A report published in January 2022 by the Jerusalem- and London-based watchdog group IMPACT-se shows that UNRWA has continued to distribute teaching materials that glorify and promote violence. (Previous reports from the group, which pre-date the agreement with the Biden State Department, showed the same thing, as did an EU-funded report released in June 2021. Even the UNRWA commissioner-general, Philippe Lazzarini, admitted last September that textbooks distributed by his agency promote anti-Semitism, hatred, and violence.)
UNRWA has frequently hidden behind a claim that it merely uses the curriculum of its “host country.” With this approach, UNRWA has deflected accusations that the Palestinian Authority textbooks it uses in the West Bank and Gaza incite Palestinians to violence, even though UNRWA is under no obligation to use these materials.
Beyond teaching materials, UNRWA personnel are also part of the problem. In August 2021, another watchdog group, UN Watch, issued a report detailing 113 UNRWA staffers who promoted terrorism, violence, and anti-Semitism, mainly on social media. For example, multiple teachers praised Hitler, espoused conspiracy theories of global Jewish domination, and shared Hamas propaganda videos. Following the report, UNRWA suspended at least six employees. What happened to the other 107 remains unclear.
UNRWA has also failed to demonstrate its neutrality. During the latest Hamas-Israel war, then-UNRWA Gaza chief Matthias Schmale drew Hamas’s ire and earned himself a one-way ticket out of Gaza for merely acknowledging that Israel’s strikes in Gaza were precise and largely avoided civilian casualties. Schmale is no longer with UNRWA. His replacement quickly met with Hamas and thanked the terrorist group for its “positivity and desire to continue cooperation.”
UNRWA also appears to be failing in its commitment not to support terrorists, having contracted with at least two organizations tied to terrorist groups in 2021. In both cases, the contracts were with health-care related institutions, but the connections to terrorist entities are troubling. UNRWA spent over $366,000 at Rassoul al-Azam, a Hezbollah-owned and -operated hospital in Beirut. UNRWA also paid over $1.2 million to the Union of Health Work Committees (UHWC), reportedly the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s (PFLP) Gaza-based health organization. (The U.S. government designated the PFLP as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 1997.) The August 2019 murder of an Israeli teenager perpetrated by members of several PFLP-linked nongovernmental organizations elevated concerns regarding the PFLP’s use of NGOs as fronts.
With the Biden administration’s inability or unwillingness to force sorely needed change at UNRWA, there are several ways for Congress to intervene. Appropriators should consider tying any further assistance to UNRWA to key reforms: zero tolerance for anti-Semitism and incitement to violence; vetting all UNRWA beneficiaries, employees, and contractors according to U.S. terrorist designations; and a change in UNRWA’s mandate to support a durable solution to the refugee issue and help Palestinians achieve economic independence.
The United States should halt its contributions to this flawed organization until it cleans up its act, demonstrating the accountability, transparency, and neutrality it promised.
thebulwark.com · by David May · March 31, 2022

17. Biden struggles to tell his Russia story


Biden struggles to tell his Russia story
Politico · by Alexander Ward · March 30, 2022

With help from Connor O'Brien
Every time President JOE BIDEN steps up to the podium, he’s given a chance to highlight his leadership against a classic villain in Russia’s VLADIMIR PUTIN. So far, he’s got a good story to tell: Western weapons have helped Ukraine fend off a stronger force, and the United States and its allies are more united than ever — while Russia reels from economic sanctions.
But instead there’s an odd defensiveness, where the president often stomps on that message as soon as reporters ask him tough questions about the imperfections of his Russia policy.
NatSec Daily has spoken to reporters who cover Biden’s foreign policy over recent days, prompted by a gathering this evening to bid NSC spokesperson EMILY HORNE farewell. What they’ve told us — almost unanimously — is that Biden has long had a temper and hates when his views are questioned. This happens most notably on global affairs since Biden dealt with complex issues as Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair and vice president. He reasonably considers himself an expert, and experts tend not to like when their expertise is challenged.
That tension becomes apparent the moment he calls on reporters about Russia policy.
On Monday, a journalist asked Biden if he understood why many viewed his comment that Putin “cannot remain in power” as a new policy of regime change. “No,” Biden replied. “[I]t’s ridiculous. Nobody believes” that’s what he meant, noting his aversion to sparking World War III.
It was reminiscent of other times the president brusquely waved off pointed critiques or questions. Last summer, Biden berated a reporter in Geneva for asking if he was confident engagement with Putin would change the autocrat’s behavior. He later apologized on the tarmac before heading back to the U.S. while still managing to work in a dig at journalists.
“[T]o be a good reporter, you got to be negative,” he said. “You got to have a negative view of life — okay? — it seems to me, the way you all — you never ask a positive question.”
Last week, Biden denied that he or his team said sanctions could deter Putin from invading Ukraine, even though officials did so explicitly multiple times. That was odd, considering on Feb. 24, hours after Russia’s invasion began, Biden said to give him a month before judging whether the financial penalties worked.
The day a reporter insinuated to Biden that the sanctions didn’t appear to have had the intended deterrent effect was March 24 — the one-month mark. And yet, after accusing the reporter of misunderstanding his position, he concluded by saying “You’re playing a game with me.”
Some Democrats explain this behavior away. “There are shortcomings for sure, but I understand why it would be upsetting to be accused of anything when compared to [former President DONALD] TRUMP,” a senior Senate Democratic aide told NatSec Daily. Others also note that, even when Biden makes serious gaffes, he’s wearing his heart on his sleeve.
“He’s just a man who feels passionately about things,” a White House official said.
Biden often is “making a complex point that is more insightful than the toplines of our talking points, or making a point that is important to him personally. He answers candidly with what he believes in,” a senior administration official added.
Experts also are quick to point out that the partisan atmosphere in Washington, D.C., has poisoned debate.
“There are so many bad-faith criticisms of Biden’s foreign policy that it’s reasonable that even good-faith criticisms are coming from a place of bad faith,” said KYLE HAYNES, a professor of U.S. foreign policy at Purdue University. “Maybe it’s a defense mechanism — he’s used to swatting things away as if they’re ill-willed criticisms, even though sometimes people are just quoting him.”
Biden’s plainspoken demeanor is central to his political persona. But it’s odd that Biden remains so abrasive when confronted with tough questions about his foreign policy — a pattern that seems to be winning him fewer easy wins in the press than he might otherwise have.


18. Let Ukraine Go on Offense Against Russia
Excerpts:
One idea that deserves to be considered is a mutual-defense pact of the kind the U.S. has in the Pacific with Australia and Japan. After all that Ukraine has sacrificed, Mr. Zelensky won’t settle for Mr. Putin’s nonaggression promises, and President Biden shouldn’t lean on him to do so.
Throughout this conflict, the Biden Administration has been slow and reluctant to give Ukraine the weapons and intelligence support it needs. Pressure from the public and Capitol Hill has forced its hand. Now, with Russia on the defensive, is the time to keep the pressure on to truly achieve a strategic victory for Ukraine and NATO.

Let Ukraine Go on Offense Against Russia
The U.S. is still not providing all of the weapons it needs to retake territory from Vladimir Putin.
WSJ · by The Editorial Board

Ukrainian soldiers pass on top of armored vehicles next to a destroyed Russian tank in the outskirts of Kyiv, March 31.
Photo: Rodrigo Abd/Associated Press

As Russia’s war on Ukraine enters its sixth week, the script has flipped. Russia’s advance has stalled, and Ukraine now wants to go on offense to push back Russian forces from the land they’ve taken. But the country needs U.S. and NATO help to do it, and it seems the Biden Administration is reluctant to provide those weapons and intelligence.

In her Wednesday press briefing, White House communications director Kate Bedingfield said no fewer than eight times that Vladimir Putin had committed a “strategic blunder” or “mistake” or “error” by invading. That’s the White House line to suggest that the West is winning against the Russians.
But that sure sounds like a premature declaration of victory. His forces are still bombing Ukraine’s cities and they have grabbed more territory. Mr. Putin could still emerge with a strategic advantage in the medium- to long-term if he strikes a truce that leaves Russia in control of a large chunk of Ukraine.
The peace terms Russia is demanding in negotiations suggest that such a consolidation in Ukraine’s east and a long-term occupation is now Russia’s goal. He’ll have won the long-sought “land bridge” between the Crimea and the Donbas. Mr. Putin could claim victory, pause for some years while he re-arms, continue trying to assassinate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and otherwise make political, cyber and other trouble for a Western-leaning Ukraine government.
That’s why Mr. Zelensky now wants to go on the offensive. The more territory his forces can win back, the stronger position his country will have at the bargaining table. The experience of Russia’s behavior in Georgia in 2008 and eastern Ukraine in 2014-15 is that Mr. Putin doesn’t give up territory once his troops occupy it. The result is another “frozen conflict,” with the country he has invaded weaker than before and more vulnerable to more Russian mayhem.
The Ukrainians need heavier weapons to go on offense, including tanks and fighter aircraft like the MiG-29s that Poland wants to provide under the political cover of NATO. It also needs intelligence on Russian troop movements and vulnerabilities in the east. Now is the time to help Ukraine take the offensive. Reports of demoralized Russian forces are more frequent, including defectors who have taken equipment with them.
But in a private briefing on Capitol Hill this week, Administration officials continued to resist bipartisan pressure to provide heavier weapons. The claim is that they won’t make much difference to the conflict, but the Ukrainians are a better judge of that. It’s much harder to dislodge dug-in tank battalions with infantry armed with hand-held Javelin antitank missiles than it is with tanks or aircraft that can strike from above.
The concern among Ukraine’s supporters on Capitol Hill and the Pentagon is that the Biden Administration doesn’t want Ukraine to go on offense. It wants a negotiated settlement as soon as possible. France and Germany, the doves in the NATO coalition, are in a similar place. They worry that if Russia suffers even greater losses, Mr. Putin might escalate again and perhaps in more dangerous ways that drag NATO directly into the war. In a sense, Mr. Putin with his threats is defining the limits of U.S. assistance to Ukraine.
But the U.S. and at least some NATO countries won’t be able to ignore Ukraine even if there’s a truce or frozen conflict. Mr. Zelensky will have to sell any agreement to the Ukrainian public, who won’t be eager to concede territory after thousands of innocents have been killed. The Ukrainians are going to want security guarantees from the West, lest they be vulnerable to future Russian attacks.
One idea that deserves to be considered is a mutual-defense pact of the kind the U.S. has in the Pacific with Australia and Japan. After all that Ukraine has sacrificed, Mr. Zelensky won’t settle for Mr. Putin’s nonaggression promises, and President Biden shouldn’t lean on him to do so.
Throughout this conflict, the Biden Administration has been slow and reluctant to give Ukraine the weapons and intelligence support it needs. Pressure from the public and Capitol Hill has forced its hand. Now, with Russia on the defensive, is the time to keep the pressure on to truly achieve a strategic victory for Ukraine and NATO.
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
WSJ · by The Editorial Board

19. Opinion | Biden sends Putin a muddled nuclear message


Opinion | Biden sends Putin a muddled nuclear message
The Washington Post · by Jason WillickColumnist Today at 6:21 p.m. EDT · March 31, 2022
Joe Biden campaigned in 2020 as a nuclear arms-control enthusiast, declaring that “the United States does not need new nuclear weapons” and embracing a “sole purpose” policy that would narrow the circumstances in which he might direct the military to use one. Fourteen months into his presidency, he has been forced to abandon both commitments.
Two intervening events explain the change. First, in 2021, satellite images made public the construction of as many as 300 silos, apparently for intercontinental ballistic missiles, in western China. The extent of Beijing’s nuclear ambitions could no longer be ignored.
Then Russia invaded Ukraine while rattling its nuclear saber. Nuclear weapons haven’t been used, but they’ve already set the terms for the conflict: It’s only because of these weapons that Russia’s military can fight a conventional war in Ukraine without a credible threat of direct Western intervention.
Specifically, Vladimir Putin’s war has highlighted Russia’s yawning advantage over the United States in nonstrategic, or “tactical,” nuclear weapons, which have shorter ranges and smaller yields. Moscow’s military doctrine exploits its roughly 10-to-1 advantage in the smaller weapons, and greater diversity of delivery systems, by contemplating their use on the European battlefield in a conventional war with NATO.
If an American president has fewer options for a proportionate response to a limited, tactical nuclear strike, such a strike might look more attractive to Russia. It could gamble that the president (no matter America’s official policy) would back down rather than risk escalating toward a full-fledged, or “strategic,” nuclear exchange.
The administration has responded to the changed circumstances. Biden reportedly told European heads of state last week that he would not formally weaken the United States’ nuclear-use policy, as some of them feared. Meanwhile, his fiscal 2023 defense budget released this week funds several nuclear weapons programs initiated in the Trump administration that are under attack from disarmament advocates.
Unfortunately, it may not be enough. The budget still terminates the Pentagon’s development of a tactical nuclear weapon delivered by a sea-launched cruise missile (or SLCM, sometimes pronounced “slick-em”). This decision, announced in the middle of Putin’s war on NATO’s doorstep, could needlessly create doubt in Moscow about Washington’s will in a nuclear standoff.
The commander of U.S. forces in Europe is already sounding the alarm. In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday, Gen. Tod Wolters said the United States should continue developing the SLCM. “Having multiple options,” Walters said, “exacerbates the challenge for the potential enemies” probing for ways to circumvent our nuclear deterrent.
Multiple options means more than one type of low-yield weapon for a president to choose from to respond to a limited Russian nuclear strike on a NATO ally. The aim would be to restore deterrence without unduly escalating. The defense budget wisely doesn’t seek to dismantle the W76-2, a submarine-launched low-yield weapon that Biden opposed when it was first deployed in 2019.
In an email, a senior Pentagon official cited “the deterrence contribution of the W76-2,” as well as cost constraints, to explain the cancelation of the SLCM. But the W76-2 is delivered by a long-range ballistic missile, which means it can’t be carried on most Navy submarines and would look like a “strategic” weapon on enemy radar. The Pentagon fielded it as a second-best alternative to the SLCM only because it could be ready earlier.
To Biden’s credit, the budget maintains funding to develop the planned Long-Range Standoff Weapon, a nuclear cruise missile launched from an Air Force bomber. But planes are easier to detect than submarines and might take longer to get into position. The SLCM — which was also deployed late in the Cold War — is a powerful complement to the Air Force’s planned weapon.
It’s true that NATO’s conventional firepower could overwhelm Russia’s military. But consider that early in the Cold War, the roles were reversed. The Soviet Union had the more powerful land army in Europe, while the United States, under its doctrine of “massive retaliation,” planned to use nuclear weapons to meet a conventional attack.
There is nothing especially irrational, then, about Russian threats of nuclear force in a conventional war against a superior opponent. The solution is to show Moscow that it has no hope of victory from a limited nuclear escalation because of NATO’s ability to match it at every step.
Nuclear deterrence can be debated endlessly because there’s mercifully little empirical evidence against which to test theories of how it works (or doesn’t). But China’s nuclear rise and the simultaneous return of war in Europe have shattered, at least for the foreseeable future, any claim that unreciprocated American nuclear disarmament is a realistic path to peace.
If the SLCM could create even marginally more certainty in the minds of adversaries that the United States could — and would — respond in kind to any use of nuclear force against allied territory, it’s worth funding. In a destabilizing world, even perceived gaps in America’s guarantee of deterrence make the unthinkable more likely.
The Washington Post · by Jason WillickColumnist Today at 6:21 p.m. EDT · March 31, 2022

20. Gen. Kellogg: Russia 'on the edge' of losing the war in Ukraine


Gen. Kellogg: Russia 'on the edge' of losing the war in Ukraine
It has been over a month since Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
foxnews.com · by Joshua Q. Nelson | Fox News
Fox News contributor Gen. Keith Kellogg on the Russia-Ukraine war.
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
Fox News contributor Gen. Keith Kellogg said on Thursday it's not surprising that Russia is not successful in their war on Ukraine because Vladimir Putin does not have good input from his top advisers.
"When you look at Putin’s primary staff, they’re not well versed in combat. His secretary of defense [Sergei Shoigu] is really a politician. [Valery Gerasimov], the equivalent of our [Mark Milley], their chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, he wrote the doctrine they’re fighting under. It’s a defensive, not offensive doctrine," Kellogg told "America’s Newsroom."

Gutted cars following a night air raid in the village of Bushiv, 40 kilometers west of Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, March 4, 2022. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
The former national security adviser to VP Mike Pence said Russia did not concentrate their efforts on their primary mission to take Kyiv and decapitate and eliminate the Ukrainian government.
"That’s why I said weeks ago, he did not have the troops to task with a plan to even go far to the west past the Dnieper River. They just didn’t do it."
It has been over a month since Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Kellogg's comments came after United Kingdom Military Chief Tony Radakin and Defense Secretary Ben Wallace tore into Putin on Thursday, describing him as a self-imploding authoritarian at the helm of an army that has proved itself to be an embarrassment on the world stage.
"In many ways Putin has already lost. Far from being the far-sighted manipulator of events that he would have us believe, Putin has damaged himself through a series of catastrophic misjudgments," Radakin said.
Kellogg explained further that Putin has gotten "bad advice" and his staff has been afraid to talk to him. He also added that Russia underestimated Ukraine forces and their opponent Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
"It adds up together. I’m not surprised at all that they have failed and they will continue to fail and they are on the very edge of losing this battle and losing this war."
foxnews.com · by Joshua Q. Nelson | Fox News


21. Russia’s War Lacks a Battlefield Commander, U.S. Officials Say

Well that would explain a lot.

Russia’s War Lacks a Battlefield Commander, U.S. Officials Say
The New York Times · by Eric Schmitt · March 31, 2022
March 31, 2022, 7:02 p.m. ET

An image provided by the Russian government showed Sergei K. Shoigu, the Russian defense minister, center, and Gen. Valery Gerasimov, to his left, holding a meeting with ministry leaders in March.Credit...Russian Defense Ministry, via EPA/Shutterstock
WASHINGTON — Russia is running its military campaign against Ukraine out of Moscow, with no central war commander on the ground to call the shots, according to American officials who have studied the five-week-old war.
That centralized approach may go a long way to explain why the Russian war effort has struggled in the face of stiffer-than-expected Ukrainian resistance, the officials said.
The lack of a unifying military leader in Ukraine has meant that Russian air, ground and sea units are not in sync. Their disjointed battlefield campaigns have been plagued by poor logistics, flagging morale and between 7,000 and 15,000 military deaths, senior U.S. officials and independent analysts say.
It has also contributed to the deaths of at least seven Russian generals as high-ranking officers are pushed to the front lines to untangle tactical problems that Western militaries would leave to more junior officers or senior enlisted personnel.
A senior American official said that NATO officials and the intelligence community had spent weeks waiting for a Russian war commander to emerge. No one has, leaving Western officials to conclude that the men making decisions are far from the fight, back in Moscow: Defense Minister Sergei K. Shoigu; Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff of the Russian military; and even President Vladimir V. Putin.
On Wednesday, Biden administration officials, citing declassified U.S. intelligence, said that Mr. Putin had been misinformed by his advisers about the Russian military’s problems in Ukraine. The intelligence, American officials said, also showed what appeared to be growing tension between Mr. Putin and Mr. Shoigu, who was once among the most trusted members of the Kremlin’s inner circle.
Russian officials have disputed the American intelligence assertion, with the Kremlin on Thursday calling it a “complete misunderstanding” of the situation that could have “bad consequences.”
But it is hard to run a military campaign from 500 miles away, U.S. military officials said. The distance alone, they said, can lead to a disconnect between the troops who are doing the fighting and the war plans being drawn up in Moscow. Instead of streamlining the process, they said, Russia has created a military machine that is unable to adapt to a quick and nimble Ukrainian resistance.
A second senior American official said that Russian soldiers, who have been taught not to make a single move without explicit instructions from superiors, had been left frustrated on the battlefield, while Mr. Putin, Mr. Shoigu and General Gerasimov continued to plot increasingly out-of-touch strategy.
This top-down approach means that Moscow transmits instructions to generals in the field, who then transmit them to troops, who are told to follow those instructions no matter the situation on the ground.
“It shows up in the mistakes that are being made,” said retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark, who served as NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe during the Kosovo war.
Last week, Ukrainian forces blew up the Russian warship Orsk, which had docked in southern Ukraine. Describing the incident, General Clark asked: “Who would be crazy enough to dock a ship in a port” before first securing the area?
That the Russian planners who sent the Orsk into the port were inattentive to the potential danger shows that no one is questioning decisions coming from the top, officials said. The troops at the bottom are not empowered to point out flaws in strategy that should be obvious, they said.
Ukrainian soldiers inspecting a destroyed Russian tank in Irpin, Ukraine, this week.Credit...Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times
Military analysts said a complex chain of events, originating with a broken-down command structure that begins in Moscow, had led to the deaths of the Russian generals.
“I do not see the kind of coherent organizational architecture that one would have expected given the months of exercises and presumably even longer period of planning in advance of the invasion,” retired Gen. David H. Petraeus, who served as the head of the military’s Central Command and as the top commander in Iraq and Afghanistan, said in an email.
In an American war command structure, a four-star field commander would coordinate and synchronize all subordinate air, land and naval forces, as well as special operations and cyberoperations. The campaign would have a main objective, a center of gravity, with operations supporting that goal.
In the case of the deaths of some of the Russian generals, for instance, the problem originated far away from the battlefield, when Moscow did not respond quickly enough after Ukraine jammed Russian communications, the analysts said.
Russia-Ukraine War: Key Developments
Card 1 of 4
The state of peace talks. Pessimism about Russia’s willingness to tame its attacks in Ukraine is growing amid mixed signals from Kremlin officials on peace talks and reports of new strikes near Kyiv and Chernihiv, where Russia had vowed to sharply reduce combat operations.
A humanitarian corridor. A humanitarian corridor to allow people to leave the besieged city of Mariupol, and let aid inside, appeared to be close to being implemented. The International Red Cross said the corridor could begin on April 1.
Rising energy prices. OPEC and its allies, including Russia, decided to stick with its plan of modest monthly increases in oil input. In response to rising oil prices, President Biden announced he would release up to 180 million barrels of oil from emergency reserves over the next six months.
Putin’s advisers. U.S. intelligence suggested that President Vladimir V. Putin had been misinformed by his advisers about the Russian military’s struggles in Ukraine. The Kremlin later dismissed the assessment as a “complete misunderstanding” of the situation in Moscow.
Mr. Putin’s own dishonest portrayal of the mission of the Russian military may have hurt the ability to prosecute the effort, which the Russian president initially presented publicly as a limited military operation. General Clark said that was standard Russian military practice.
He recalled teaching a class of Ukrainian generals in 2016 in Kyiv and trying to explain what an American military “after-action review” was. He told them that after a battle involving American troops, “everybody got together and broke down what happened.”
“The colonel has to confess his mistakes in front of the captain,” General Clark said. “He says, ‘Maybe I took too long to give an order.’”
After hearing him out, the Ukrainians, General Clark said, told him that could not work. “They said, ‘We’ve been taught in the Soviet system that information has to be guarded and we lie to each other,’” he recalled.
Mr. Putin’s decision to send the Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov to the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol this week for a victory lap despite the fact that Mariupol has not fallen yet demonstrates the Russian president’s continued belief that the biggest battle is the information one, said Andrei Soldatov, a Russian security services expert.
The feared Chechen “is a general, not a real military commander,” he said, adding, “This shows that what Putin still believes is that propaganda is the most important thing here.”
Russian officials are now signaling that Mr. Putin might be lowering his war ambitions and focusing on the eastern Donbas region, though military analysts said it remained to be seen whether that would constitute a meaningful shift or a maneuver to distract attention ahead of another offensive.
The Russian army has already committed more than half of its total combat forces to the fight, including its most elite units. Moscow is now tapping reinforcements from outside Russia, including Georgia, as well as rushing mercenaries from the Wagner Group, a private military company, to eastern Ukraine.
Mr. Putin has also signed a decree calling up 134,000 conscripts.
“They seem to have no coherent concept of the amount of force it will take to defeat the Ukrainian regular and territorial forces in urban terrain, and to retain what they destroy or overrun,” said Jeffrey J. Schloesser, a retired two-star Army general who commanded U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan. “Hundreds of thousands of more Russian or allied troops will be necessary to do so.”
The New York Times · by Eric Schmitt · March 31, 2022


22. The war makes China uncomfortable. European leaders don’t care

Excerpts:

Europe is not used to talking war and peace with China. “Our relations are based on trade and the economy, which makes us very opportunistic,” says a European diplomat in Beijing. Arguably, China is doing Europe a favour by explaining how it expects the West to be a loser from the conflict in Ukraine. Chinese officials boast to ambassadors in Beijing that they see the EU dividing between old and newer members. Those Chinese also predict that transatlantic unity between Europe and America will crumble and that sanctions will fail to break Russia’s will, not least as European voters protest against high energy prices and flows of refugees from Ukraine.
Chinese glee about Western disunity is useful: proving it wrong is a good starting point for an EU strategy towards China. As a second diplomat puts it: “China is watching our Russia policy closely: how much pain we are willing to suffer. Europe is demonstrating that it is united and willing to pay a price.” The stakes are high, he adds. Deterring a potential Chinese attack on Taiwan requires demonstrating that the West is capable of unity and resolve.
Other voices urge calm. China needs Europe as a market, and as a source of technology and investments, they note, especially when China’s ties with America are in dire shape. Some of Europe’s largest companies have lucrative China operations which they are not about to abandon. According to diplomats, there is no sign of China circumventing sanctions on Russia. But Mr Putin is trying to redraw Europe’s borders by force, and Mr Xi will not condemn him. That is a direct challenge to the EU’s founding principles. It cannot be business as usual. Mr Putin has shown Europe that it needs a new China policy. 
The war makes China uncomfortable. European leaders don’t care
Get ready for a tense summit
Apr 2nd 2022
BEIJING
CHINESE LEADERS wanted the mood to be “business as usual”. But the summit between China and the European Union on April 1st will be anything but normal. That is because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and China’s cold-blooded response to it, have exposed the limitations of Europe’s old trade-first China policies.
EU leaders approached the summit, which is being held by video-link, with low expectations. They hoped at least to send a message to China’s leader, Xi Jinping, that the Ukraine war is a defining moment for relations, and for China’s image if it refuses to use its influence to end the killing.
In a sense Europe’s representatives at the summit, Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, and Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, will be overshadowed by two figures who will not be there: Germany’s former chancellor, Angela Merkel, and President Vladimir Putin of Russia. No leader is more closely associated with Europe’s old China policy than Mrs Merkel. In 16 years as chancellor, she promoted an accommodating approach that treated China as an invaluable source of economic opportunity and a potential partner on such issues as climate change, albeit one prone to disappointing lapses on human rights.
Mr Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24th was a disaster for advocates of this approach. For Russia’s use of force has enjoyed Mr Xi’s tacit support. Though China claims to be impartial, its true stance is anything but neutral. China blames the war on America, for supposedly trampling on Russia’s legitimate security interests by expanding the NATO alliance to take in former Soviet satellite states. Europeans know that NATO’s expansion was actually driven by demand from former communist-bloc countries that feared Russian aggression (for good reason). EU governments are horrified by China’s refusal to urge Russia to stop the war. They see this foot-dragging as unworthy of a self-proclaimed global power, with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
It took Chinese diplomats a while to realise that European leaders would not agree to a conventional, trade-focused, summit. China’s first offer was an online meeting with its prime minister, Li Keqiang, a technocrat with an essentially economic portfolio. China’s preferred agenda involved the signing of memorandums, and talks about reviving the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI), a trade pact heavily backed by Mrs Merkel. That deal has been frozen since China imposed sweeping sanctions on members of the European Parliament and European diplomats in 2021. It was a lopsided retaliation against narrow EU sanctions on three Chinese officials and one ex-official accused of rights abuses in the north-western region of Xinjiang. Several governments have told China that the CAI cannot return to life until the sanctions are lifted and concerns about forced labour in Xinjiang and other abuses are tackled.
An early idea involved preceding the summit with a long-delayed high-level dialogue on human rights. China’s price for resuming those dialogues was high, diplomats say. The EU and members must stop supporting multinational, co-ordinated statements about Chinese rights abuses in such global forums as the UN Human Rights Council, China demanded. That was rejected. Instead Mr Michel and Ms von der Leyen were due to raise human rights at the summit, touching on such thorny topics as China’s iron-fisted rule over Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong. The pair were also expected to raise Chinese threats towards Taiwan, the democratic island that China claims as its own.
China’s hope to mark the summit with a flurry of document signings were also dashed. That would involve progress on various customs and trade rules. And that cannot happen as long as an EU member state, Lithuania, is being subjected to a Chinese trade boycott as punishment for forging quasi-official ties with Taiwan, other governments agree. Indeed, Mr Michel and Ms von der Leyen were expected to express the EU’s horror over Chinese fondness for economic coercion.
But first and foremost, the summit was seen as a chance to deliver messages about Ukraine. That involved seeking and securing a video call with Mr Xi, the ultimate decision-maker in matters of foreign policy. Pre-summit negotiations were tense. Europeans explained that Mr Xi would hear a warning: that China will face a serious cost if it helps Mr Putin circumvent Western sanctions on Russia, or provides military aid. Chinese officials pre-emptively instructed the Europeans not to threaten their leader.
Divisive predictions
Europe is not used to talking war and peace with China. “Our relations are based on trade and the economy, which makes us very opportunistic,” says a European diplomat in Beijing. Arguably, China is doing Europe a favour by explaining how it expects the West to be a loser from the conflict in Ukraine. Chinese officials boast to ambassadors in Beijing that they see the EU dividing between old and newer members. Those Chinese also predict that transatlantic unity between Europe and America will crumble and that sanctions will fail to break Russia’s will, not least as European voters protest against high energy prices and flows of refugees from Ukraine.
Chinese glee about Western disunity is useful: proving it wrong is a good starting point for an EU strategy towards China. As a second diplomat puts it: “China is watching our Russia policy closely: how much pain we are willing to suffer. Europe is demonstrating that it is united and willing to pay a price.” The stakes are high, he adds. Deterring a potential Chinese attack on Taiwan requires demonstrating that the West is capable of unity and resolve.
Other voices urge calm. China needs Europe as a market, and as a source of technology and investments, they note, especially when China’s ties with America are in dire shape. Some of Europe’s largest companies have lucrative China operations which they are not about to abandon. According to diplomats, there is no sign of China circumventing sanctions on Russia. But Mr Putin is trying to redraw Europe’s borders by force, and Mr Xi will not condemn him. That is a direct challenge to the EU’s founding principles. It cannot be business as usual. Mr Putin has shown Europe that it needs a new China policy. ■
This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline "We need to talk about Ukraine"

23. Western spy agencies weaponize intelligence in attempt to undermine Putin

This is good to see. We have to use all tools necessary for strategic influence and information advantage.

Western spy agencies weaponize intelligence in attempt to undermine Putin
CNN · by Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN
(CNN)Western intelligence agencies are waging a psychological war over Ukraine directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin, an expert at the genre, who is now effectively taking a dose of his own medicine.
The United States and its allies are painting a picture of a bogged down, demoralized and dysfunctional Russian military taking disastrous losses on the battlefield, and are simultaneously conjuring a vision of growing political tension inside the Kremlin. They claim the Russian leader is isolated, poorly advised and lacking real intelligence on just how badly the war is going.
Western governments are preventing Putin from defining the narrative of the war -- just as they did before it began, when their declassified intelligence correctly called an invasion many geopolitical experts thought was unlikely.

It is a tough position for a Russian leader who has often deployed information warfare himself, notably while meddling in US and European elections. The remarkable detail of the declassified intelligence assessments must also be especially galling to Putin, a former KGB officer and intelligence chief. And they leave open the possibility that Western intelligence agencies have the capacity to see deep into the Kremlin's war effort and internal politics, which is likely to infuriate the Russian leader and could open further cracks in his regime.
The willingness of Western governments to be so open about what they are seeing inside Ukraine and Moscow has surprised even some veteran spies.
Read More
"It makes intelligence professionals, even former ones like me, nervous, because, of course, it's so ingrained in us to protect sources and methods," Steve Hall, former chief of Russia operations for the CIA, told CNN's Ana Cabrera Thursday.
Part of the intrigue about the US showdown with Putin and the intelligence angle is being fed by the nature of the covert community itself. Outsiders have no way of independently assessing the full accuracy of the information being pushed into the public view by their leaders. So we don't know where it's all coming from or from whom. But of course, that's the point, and it's keeping the Russians guessing too.
The attempt to portray the war in Ukraine as a disaster for Russia is coming at a moment when Western officials are discounting Moscow's claims that it is deescalating the conflict in Kyiv and elsewhere. Instead, they say, Putin's forces are "repositioning" -- possibly for an intensified assault in eastern Ukrainian regions where Moscow has been pummeling civilians and razing cities. Such a tactic could be designed to unite Russian-held areas with Crimea, which Putin seized in 2014, and to give Moscow a direct corridor to the Black Sea through Ukraine.
The inside story of the war
In recent days, Western officials have sketched a remarkable portrait of the war.
In Australia on Monday, one of Britain's top spy chiefs, Jeremy Fleming, said that Putin had "massively misjudged" the war, the resistance of the Ukrainian people and his own military's capacity, and had been poorly served by his subordinates.
"We've seen Russian soldiers -- short of weapons and morale -- refusing to carry out orders, sabotaging their own equipment and even accidentally shooting down their own aircraft," said Fleming, who heads GCHQ, the UK's equivalent of the National Security Agency. Fleming's frankness was extraordinary coming from a leading espionage agency chief. But it is being mirrored in the United States where there were new reports on Wednesday that opened a window into the war and Putin's inner circle.
An official told CNN's Jeremy Diamond that Putin is being "misinformed" by advisers about how badly the Russian military is performing and the impact of sanctions on the Russian economy. \White House communications director Kate Bedingfield then said on camera that the Russian leader's advisers were "too afraid to tell him the truth." She said there was now a "persistent tension" between Putin and his military leadership.

On Wednesday, this new stream of declassified assessments made headlines. On Thursday, President Joe Biden was asked about them in a public setting, as officials presumably knew he would be. The sequence gave the President the chance to further amplify the US narrative.
"There's a lot of speculation," Biden said, though of course that speculation had been driven by information that the White House had allowed into the public domain. Asked how badly Putin was being misinformed by his advisers, Biden replied, "I'm not saying this with a certainty -- he seems to be self-isolating, and there's some indication that he has fired or put under house arrest some of his advisers." While Biden said that the US didn't have that much hard evidence, his comments unleashed a whole new torrent of attention on Putin's current situation.
So what exactly are Western governments trying to do with this novel use of declassified intelligence assessments? Especially given that in many previous geopolitical crises, intelligence was kept secret by routine?
As with the pre-invasion messaging, it's clear that the US does not want the Russians to be able to create a dominant narrative of their own about the war through disinformation. Creating a picture of a failing war also helps maintain support for the tough Western stand against Putin. It may also improve morale among Ukrainians who are resisting Russia's onslaught. And it gives Western leaders a political opening to argue their policies are working as they manage public opinion on the war.
By providing a look into the disarray among Russian troops, the allies may be able to build internal political pressure on the Kremlin. Given the Moscow government's crushing of independent media, there will be few illusions that the Russian people will hear the US version of events, though tech-savvy younger Russians with VPN passwords allowing access to foreign internet services might.
But a drumbeat of humiliation for Russia could further sow discord inside the military, political and intelligence elites. In recent days, it has almost seemed as though Western officials, by discussing the situation in the war so openly, have been trying to address Putin and his advisers directly.
The complications of an intelligence-driven strategy
It's unlikely the intelligence stream will dry up any time soon. That's because it seems to be rooted in a morale problem inside Russian armed forces, which became obvious thanks to eavesdropping.
"They're whipping out their cell phones and trying to communicate with each other, both tactically, 'Where are you? Where's your unit?' and perhaps also back home in Moscow. That makes it really easy to collect," Hall said.
"And then, it's an interesting political decision to say, look, it's worth perhaps showing the Russians how good we are at collecting this stuff, in order to get the word out to citizens of both countries, citizens of the world, as to what's really going on in the Russian military right now," Hall added.
"It's an interesting decision, but it's been very illuminating."
Still there is reason for caution in interpreting the war solely based on the West's declassified assessments.
Intelligence, by definition, is a murky business. The information about the Russian operations in Ukraine and the apparent isolation of Putin in Moscow only tell the outside world what the Western intelligence services want to release. There is, therefore, no way for outsiders to know whether these snapshots give the full picture or a more selective one.

And the information that does filter out is still limited. An official cited by CNN's Diamond and Kevin Liptak on Wednesday declined to provide additional details of Putin being misinformed by his advisers other than what was reported. The intelligence community declassified and downgraded a summary of their findings but not the material itself.
As always, intelligence agencies are taking strenuous steps to avoid identifying their sources and the methods that were used to collect the intelligence.
There have been multiple times in recent American history -- for example, before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, when US intelligence assessments have proven to be faulty. In this crisis, however, the covert community has repaired some of its reputation. For weeks, the US warned that Putin was getting ready to send his forces across the Ukrainian border. Even the Ukrainians were skeptical.
Then hours before the invasion actually happened, the US issued a warning that the incursion was imminent -- and was proven correct.
Still, the problems encountered by the Russian invading force have surprised Western intelligence agencies and have caused a reassessment of assumptions about the supposed might of Russia's military forces and leadership.
The head of US European Command, Gen. Tod Wolters, said at a Senate hearing this week that there could be an intelligence gap that led the US to overestimate Russia's strength and underestimate Ukrainian defenses.
But even that oversight only underscores the surprisingly poor performance of Russia's forces, and draws attention to it, further advancing the West's goals.
CNN · by Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN


24. The double standard with Hunter Biden's laptop is worse than you think


The double standard with Hunter Biden's laptop is worse than you think
CNN · by Opinion by Dean Obeidallah
Dean Obeidallah, a former attorney, is the host of SiriusXM radio's daily program "The Dean Obeidallah Show" and a columnist for The Daily Beast. Follow him @DeanObeidallah. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles on CNN.
(CNN)"Attorney General Garland, do your job -- so that we can do ours," declared an exasperated Democratic Rep. Elaine Luria of Virginia on Monday night as part of her work as a member of the January 6 House select committee. Luria and others on the committee expressed frustration with Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice still not acting on the December 14, 2021, vote by the House recommending criminal charges against former Donald Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows for defying a congressional subpoena.
But the frustration many have with Garland goes far beyond simply the over three-month silence on Meadows. As I hear frequently from listeners to my SiriusXM show, the fact that we don't hear a peep about Garland investigating Trump for his attempted coup to overturn the 2020 election and potential crimes in connection with the January 6 attack on the Capitol is beyond frustrating. And those voices demanding Garland to act will be growing louder given a federal court decision Monday where the judge wrote that it was "more likely than not that" Trump committed crimes given his efforts to prevent the certification of Joe Biden's victory.
Dean Obeidallah
While the focus of this case was a request by Trump's former lawyer John Eastman to withhold certain documents requested by the January 6 committee based on claims they are protected by attorney-client privilege, US District Court Judge David Carter laid out a damning case against Trump for his conduct surrounding January 6 -- including potential crime.
Read More
As the judge wrote, Trump and his lawyer had "launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history," adding, "it was a coup in search of a legal theory." And in a bone-chilling passage, the judge explained that if Trump and Eastman's "plan had worked, it would have permanently ended the peaceful transition of power, undermining American democracy and the Constitution."
Judge Carter reminded us that Trump had been informed by people in his inner circle, including his then-Attorney General William Barr, that there was no evidence of election fraud. Yet, Trump continued his unjustified efforts to overturn the election results by pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to not allow Congress to certify the election results on January 6.
The court then, while addressing what is known as the "crime-fraud exception" to attorney-client privilege, analyzed two federal crimes that the January 6 committee alleges Trump may have committed: "Obstruction of an official proceeding" and "Conspiracy to defraud the United States." After a detailed recitation of Trump and Eastman's conduct as applied to these federal crimes, the judge bluntly concluded: "The illegality of the plan was obvious."
Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich responded to the judge's ruling stating "This absurd and baseless ruling by a Clinton-appointed Judge in California is just another example of how the left is weaponizing every branch of government against President Trump." Eastman's lawyer stated his client "respectfully disagrees with the judge's findings" but will comply with the order.

Yes, it's obvious to all of us that what Trump did was wrong -- and potentially illegal -- which begs the question: Where is Garland's DOJ investigation into Trump? Could there be a super secret investigation of Trump? Sure, but common sense says we would have heard something, the same way we hear about the testimony of witnesses after they appear before the House select committee on January 6. Lawyers talk, court clerks see witnesses showing up for a grand jury, etc. All you need is one person to talk to break a story.
Add to that, history tells us that the longer a DOJ investigation continues, the more likely there will be leaks to the media.
On Wednesday, CNN reported that the Justice Department investigation into the business activities of the President's son, Hunter Biden, "has gained steam in recent months, with a flurry of witnesses providing testimony to federal investigators and more expected to provide interviews in the coming weeks, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter."
Investigators are looking into the younger Biden's business dealings internationally during Biden's term as vice president. Hunter Biden has denied wrongdoing and his father is not being investigated as part of this probe, CNN reported, citing sources. The DOJ's investigation, which began in 2018, became known in December 2020 when Hunter Biden revealed it.
And, of course, when the DOJ investigated Hillary Clinton in connection with her emails, the nation first learned about it in August 2015, based on information from two unnamed government officials. While the DOJ refused to comment on the investigation, the media were filled with stories of developments in the investigation -- via leaks -- such as in March 2016 when the DOJ granted immunity to a former Clinton staffer. Clinton eventually was cleared in the investigation. When it comes to Trump, however, we hear nothing.
Garland recently said that he was intent on ensuring the DOJ's decisions about prosecutions "are made on the merits ... the facts and the law," and "they're not based on any kind of partisan considerations." I couldn't agree more. If there's credible evidence that Hunter Biden -- or anyone for that matter, Democrat or Republican -- may have committed a federal crime, there should be a DOJ investigation.
Yet the sense many have is that this DOJ has no problem investigating people named Biden and Clinton but we have seen no signs of investigating Trump despite Garland's promise in January that "The Justice Department remains committed to holding all January 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law." And the longer that apparent double standard continues, the more Americans will question if in fact "partisan considerations" are driving the DOJ's decisions when it comes to Trump.
Get our free weekly newsletter
Sign up for CNN Opinion's newsletter.
Join us on Twitter and Facebook
Judge Carter concluded his opinion with a sentiment I'm sure many agree with, "More than a year after the attack on our Capitol, the public is still searching for accountability." He then added ominously, "If the country does not commit to investigating and pursuing accountability for those responsible, the Court fears January 6 will repeat itself."
You don't need a law degree to understand that if Trump is not held accountable for both his attempted coup and the January 6 attack, why would Trump -- or any future president for that matter -- think that they can't do the same? The stakes are too high for timidity given our democratic Republic hangs in the balance. The demand must be made by all who seek to preserve it is this: "Attorney General Garland, do your job."
CNN · by Opinion by Dean Obeidallah
25. Opinion | Koch Industries’ valentine to Vladimir Putin


Opinion | Koch Industries’ valentine to Vladimir Putin
The Washington Post · by Dana MilbankColumnist |AddFollowMarch 30, 2022 at 8:00 a.m. EDT · March 30, 2022
Give Koch Industries credit for consistency: It’s aiding the foes of democracy at home and abroad.
In the two weeks since I wrote about U.S. companies that remained in Russia despite Vladimir Putin’s savage invasion of Ukraine, corporations have, admirably, continued stampeding to the exits.
More than 450 multinational companies have withdrawn from Russia in some form, according to the list maintained by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and his team at the Yale School of Management, sending a clear message to Russians that Putin’s actions are beyond the pale.
Some of the pullbacks from Russia have been little more than a “smokescreen,” Sonnenfeld says, including candy makers Nestlé and Mondelez; sandwich-chain Subway; hoteliers Hilton and Hyatt; agricultural giants Cargill and ADM; and oil servicers Schlumberger, Halliburton and Baker Hughes. But these firms at least made symbolic gestures.
Then there’s the worst of the worst, in Sonnenfeld’s lowest category — those corporations “Digging In” and refusing to reduce activities in Russia. Only eight U.S. companies have this dubious distinction, Sonnenfeld’s team tells me: medical-device maker Align Technology, Internet company Cloudflare, International Paper, tire manufacturer Titan International, insurer FM Global, crane maker Manitowoc, laser producer IPG Photonics — and that recidivist corporate offender, Koch Industries.
Koch chairman Charles Koch (brother David died in 2019) is a top funder of right-wing candidates and causes, notably efforts to roll back voting rights. Now the maker of Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups and many other household brands is aiding Russia as it rolls back democracy in Ukraine rather less subtly.
Follow Dana Milbank‘s opinionsFollow
Koch, keeping two glass manufacturing plants running in Russia, says it “will not walk away from our employees there or hand over these manufacturing facilities to the Russian government,” arguing that doing so would “do more harm than good.”
Sonnenfeld called those claims “absolutely ludicrous,” “arrogant” and “such a tortured logic it’s beyond absurd.” Koch’s website indicates that its software business Infor, its electronics business Molex and its industrial products business Koch Engineered Solutions also continue to do business in Russia. Their imports, exports and taxes help prop up the Russian economy, and therefore Putin’s war effort.
At the same time, various Koch-funded groups have been arguing against sanctions imposed on Russia by the United States. As Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby of the newsletter Popular Information reported, Dan Caldwell, vice president for foreign policy at Stand Together, an umbrella group for the Koch network, said the “Stand Together community” believes that “broad-based economic sanctions rarely achieve their desired policy outcomes.” Caldwell previously suggested “neutrality” between Russia and Ukraine. Similar criticism of sanctions came from people affiliated with the American Institute for Economic Research, Defense Priorities and Concerned Veterans for America, all groups with Koch ties.
The Koch posture toward Russia is consistent with longtime efforts by Koch interests to fight democratic protections in the United States. The Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council has promoted voting restrictions in states. Various Koch arms have funded initiatives and candidates that would limit voting access. Stand Together played a key role in defeating an election-reform and voting-rights package in Congress, as the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reported.
Americans concerned about the Koch threats to democracy can keep their shopping carts free of Mardi Gras and Vanity Fair napkins, Quilted Northern and Angel Soft, Brawny and Sparkle, Georgia-Pacific office products, and Cordura fabrics, all goods produced by the oil, chemical and industrial conglomerate.
Among the “featured investments” on Koch’s website is an (apparently outdated) boast about an ownership stake in American Greetings. That’s felicitous, because the maker of greeting cards offers all kinds of ways to put in words the sentiments Koch Industries has, through its actions, been sending to the world.
To the more than 40 million innocent Ukrainians attacked and bombarded by Putin: “So doggone sorry. Forgive me?”
To the families of the thousands killed by Putin: “Tonight, when you look up, don’t think of them as stars. Think of them as porch lights, welcoming your loved one safely home.”
To the 10 million Ukrainians displaced from their homes: “Toodle-oo, hasta la vista, sayonara. … Just to say goodbye and to wish you a world of happy new beginnings!”
Alas, a Koch spokesman, Rob Carlton, tells me Koch ditched its investment in American Greetings (but not in Russia) and that its website is “a bit out of date.” Sad! Now, the only American greeting Koch sends Putin is a most unfortunate one: “Hang in there.”
The Washington Post · by Dana MilbankColumnist |AddFollowMarch 30, 2022 at 8:00 a.m. EDT · March 30, 2022






V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Personal Email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
Web Site: www.fdd.org
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
VIDEO "WHEREBY" Link: https://whereby.com/david-maxwell
Subscribe to FDD’s new podcast, Foreign Podicy
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

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

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

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