Korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the Second World War. Men have fought and died in Malaya, in Greece, in the Philippines, in Algeria and Cuba and Cyprus, and almost continuously on the Indo-Chinese Peninsula. No nuclear weapons have been fired. No massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate. This is another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origin--war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration, instead of aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him. It is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what has been strangely called "wars of liberation," to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved. It preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts. It requires in those situations where we must counter it, and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved, a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force, and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training.

John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the U.S.

Remarks at West Point to the Graduating Class of the U.S. Military Academy, June 06, 1962

Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"Professional discourse will shape the direction the Army is headed, even if it is only a minor adjustment."

- Major Brennan Deveraux at The United States Army War College's Parameters Quarterly.

"The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason."

– Thomas Paine

“It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones. There are things in life that we need to always have plenty of supplies, even if we will only use a small portion. If, for example, we consider books as medicine, we understand that it is good to have many at home rather than a few: when you want to feel better, then you go to the 'medicine closet' and choose a book. Not a random one, but the right book for that moment. That's why you should always have a nutrition choice! Those who buy only one book, read only that one and then get rid of it. They simply apply the consumer mentality to books, that is, they consider them a consumer product, a good. Those who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity.”

– Umberto Eco

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 10, 2024

2. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, June 10, 2024

3. Gaza Chief’s Brutal Calculation: Civilian Bloodshed Will Help Hamas

4. How a Shadow Fleet of Ancient Tankers Keeps Russian Oil Flowing

5. Ukraine’s Plan to Make Itself Indispensable

6. Four American college educators attacked in park in China

7. Sophisticated Army training goes mobile to knit a farflung Pacific coalition

8. Bush-era national security officials warn against politicizing civil service

9. Russia losing artillery at record pace, Kyiv's figures show

10. What the USS Pueblo Incident Can Teach Marines about the LSM

11. The US military's confidence in smart bombs may have a fatal flaw

12. America Can’t Wait for a Sputnik Moment To Have a Sputnik Response

13. SOFWERX to help special operations forces tackle contested logistics challenges

14. Opinion | The U.S. military plans a ‘Hellscape’ to deter China from attacking Taiwan

15. US and Israel Would Conduct Annual Tunnel Exercises Under House Plan

16. U.S. Defenses Are Faltering, but Japan Can Help

17. Denial Is the Worst Except for All the Others: Getting the U.S. Theory of Victory Right for a War with China

18. What Does European Union Advising of Ukrainian Troops Mean for the Bloc’s Security Policies? An Inside Look at the Training Mission

19. America Is Losing the Arab World

20. Israel Is Losing the United States

21. Twelve Essential Irregular Warfare Books to Add to Your Summer Reading List

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 10, 2024

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 10, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-10-2024

Key Takeaways:

Ukrainian forces conducted a strike against Russian air defense assets in occupied Crimea overnight on June 9 to 10, likely with ATACMS.
Ukraine's Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Captain Third Rank Dmytro Pletenchuk denied on June 10 a Sky News report that Ukrainian forces struck a Russian Ropucha-class landing ship in the Sea of Azov on the night of June 8 to 9.
New Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov met with a select group of Russian milbloggers and military commentators on June 10, suggesting that the Kremlin seeks to partially use Belousov's replacement of widely unpopular former Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to build bridges and cultivate ties with a broader milblogger community via a cadre of coopted and loyal military commentators.
Officials from Russia, Iran, and the People's Republic of China (PRC) held bilateral meetings on the sidelines of the BRICS foreign ministers meeting in Nizhny Novgorod on June 10.
The Armenian National Assembly will likely hold an emergency session by June 17 during which the Armenian opposition parties will demand Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan's and his cabinet's resignation.
The US Department of State announced on June 10 that the US and Poland jointly launched the Ukraine Communications Group (UCG) in Warsaw to counter Russian disinformation by offering fact-based reporting about the war in Ukraine.
Finnish authorities reported that a Russian military aircraft temporarily violated Finnish airspace on June 10 amid continued Russian efforts to undermine Finnish sovereignty.
Russian forces recently advanced southwest of Donetsk City and in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area.
Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov appears to be focusing on healthcare programs for Russian servicemembers in his new role.

2. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, June 10, 2024

Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, June 10, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-june-10-2024

Key Takeaways:

Iranian Presidential Elections: The Iranian Guardian Council approved six candidates including one reformist and five hardliners for the upcoming 2024 presidential election. The participation of five hardliners risks splitting the hardline vote, though some hardliners will probably withdraw from the election to prevent splitting the vote. The Guardian Council did not approve some top politicians, including former Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani.
Iran: Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf’s advisers have spoken to Western diplomats in recent weeks, possibly to set conditions for the resumption of nuclear negotiations if he becomes president.
Iraq: An Iranian-backed Iraqi militia warned on June 8 that it will resume attacks targeting US forces if US forces do not leave Iraq. Unspecified Iranian-backed militias in Iraq reportedly plan to renew attacks if the Iraqi prime minister does not set a deadline for a full US military withdrawal by May 15.
Lebanon: An Israeli Army Radio correspondent highlighted some of the challenges that Israeli forces face intercepting drones targeting northern Israel in an X (Twitter) post on June 10. These challenges are particularly salient given the increased risk of a major war between Israel and Hezbollah in northern Israel. Hezbollah would likely use the lessons it is learning in its attacks on Israel to penetrate Israeli air defenses and strike critical infrastructure and civilian areas, including Haifa port.
Ceasefire Negotiations: The United States is reportedly considering bilateral hostage talks with Hamas to free Americans from the Gaza Strip.
Gaza Strip: Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip Yahya Sinwar is likely hiding in a “vast” tunnel system beneath Khan Younis, according to unspecified US officials speaking to the New York Times.

3. Gaza Chief’s Brutal Calculation: Civilian Bloodshed Will Help Hamas

There should be no doubt about the brutality of Hamas. Anyone who supports Hamas is complicit in civilian casualties. Its intentions are clear and any reasonable person could see that Hamas is deliberately causing civilian casualties to support its strategy. How could any rational person justify and support such a strategy (and Hamas)?

Gaza Chief’s Brutal Calculation: Civilian Bloodshed Will Help Hamas

Yahya Sinwar’s correspondence with compatriots and mediators shows he is confident that Hamas can outlast Israel

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/gaza-chiefs-brutal-calculation-civilian-bloodshed-will-help-hamas-626720e7?mod=hp_lead_pos1

By Summer SaidFollow and Rory JonesFollow

June 10, 2024 9:00 pm ET

For months, Yahya Sinwar has resisted pressure to cut a ceasefire-and-hostages deal with Israel. Behind his decision, messages the Hamas military leader in Gaza has sent to mediators show, is a calculation that more fighting—and more Palestinian civilian deaths—work to his advantage.

“We have the Israelis right where we want them,” Sinwar said in a recent message to Hamas officials seeking to broker an agreement with Qatari and Egyptian officials.

Fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas units in the Gaza Strip’s south has disrupted humanitarian-aid shipments, caused mounting civilian casualties and intensified international criticism of Israel’s efforts to eradicate the Islamist extremist group.

For much of Sinwar’s political life, shaped by bloody conflict with an Israeli state that he says has no right to exist, he has stuck to a simple playbook. Backed into a corner, he looks to violence for a way out. The current fight in Gaza is no exception.

Relatives carry the bodies of children who were killed in Israeli strikes on Rafah in southern Gaza. PHOTO: SAID KHATIB/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

In dozens of messages—reviewed by The Wall Street Journal—that Sinwar has transmitted to cease-fire negotiators, Hamas compatriots outside Gaza and others, he’s shown a cold disregard for human life and made clear he believes Israel has more to lose from the war than Hamas. The messages were shared by multiple people with differing views of Sinwar.

More than 37,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, most of them civilians, Palestinian officials say. The figure doesn’t specify how many were combatants. Health authorities said almost 300 Palestinians were killed Saturday in an Israeli raid that rescued four hostages kept in captivity in homes surrounded by civilians—driving home for some Palestinians their role as pawns for Hamas.

In one message to Hamas leaders in Doha, Sinwar cited civilian losses in national-liberation conflicts in places such as Algeria, where hundreds of thousands of people died fighting for independence from France, saying, “these are necessary sacrifices.”

Sinwar in his own words

“We have the Israelis right where we want them.”

-On who’s winning the war
SAID KHATIB/AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

“Necessary sacrifices.”

-On Palestinian civilian casualties

“For Netanyahu, a victory would be even worse than a defeat.”

-On the Israeli prime minister

“Israel's journey in Rafah won't be a walk in the park."

-On Israel’s Rafah offensive

In an April 11 letter to Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh after three of Haniyeh’s adult sons were killed by an Israeli airstrike, Sinwar wrote that their deaths and those of other Palestinians would “infuse life into the veins of this nation, prompting it to rise to its glory and honor.”

Sinwar isn’t the first Palestinian leader to embrace bloodshed as a means to pressure Israel. But the scale of the collateral damage in this war—civilians killed and destruction wrought—is unprecedented between Israelis and Palestinians.

Despite Israel’s ferocious effort to kill him, Sinwar has survived and micromanaged Hamas’s war effort, drafting letters, sending messages to cease-fire negotiators and deciding when the U.S.-designated terrorist group ramps up or dials back its attacks. His ultimate goal appears to be to win a permanent cease-fire that allows Hamas to declare a historic victory by outlasting Israel and claim leadership of the Palestinian national cause.

President Biden is trying to force Israel and Hamas to halt the war. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is opposed to permanently ending the fight before what he calls “total victory” over Hamas.

Even without a lasting truce, Sinwar believes Netanyahu has few options other than occupying Gaza and getting bogged down fighting a Hamas-led insurgency for months or years.

It is an outcome that Sinwar foreshadowed six years ago when he first became leader in the Gaza Strip. Hamas might lose a war with Israel, but it would cause an Israeli occupation of more than two million Palestinians.

“For Netanyahu, a victory would be even worse than a defeat,” Sinwar told an Italian journalist writing in 2018 in an Israeli daily, Yedioth Ahronoth.

The 1967 war, which took place when Sinwar was a child, reordered the Middle East. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS

Sinwar, now in his early 60s, was roughly 5 years old when the 1967 war brought him his first experience of significant violence between Israelis and Arabs. That brief fight reordered the Middle East. Israel took control of the Golan Heights from Syria and the West Bank from Jordan. It also captured the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, as well as the Gaza Strip, where Sinwar grew up in a United Nations-run refugee camp.

The conflict was a constant presence. Sinwar published a novel in 2004 while in Israeli prison and wrote in the preface that it was based on his own experiences. In the book, a father digs a deep hole in the yard of the refugee camp during the 1967 war, covering it with wood and metal to make a shelter.

A young son waits in the hole with his family, crying and hearing the sounds of explosions grow louder as the Israeli army approaches. The boy tries to climb out, only for his mother to yell: “It’s war out there! Don’t you know what war means?”

Sinwar joined the movement that eventually became Hamas in the 1980s, becoming close to founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and setting up an internal-security police that hunted and killed suspected informants, according to the transcript of his confession to Israeli interrogators in 1988.

Sheikh Ahmed Yassin (center, in 2003) was close to Sinwar. MAHMUD HAMS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

He received multiple life sentences for murder and spent 22 years in prison before being freed in a swap along with a thousand other Palestinians in 2011 for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

During the negotiations between Israel and Hamas over the Shalit swap, Sinwar was influential in pushing for the freedom of Palestinians who were jailed for murdering Israelis.

He wanted to release even those who were involved in bombings that had killed large numbers of Israelis and was so maximalist in his demands that Israel put him in solitary confinement so he wouldn’t disrupt progress.

When he became leader of Hamas in Gaza in 2017, violence was a constant in his repertoire. Hamas had wrested control of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in a bloody conflict a decade earlier, and while Sinwar moved early in his tenure to reconcile Hamas with other Palestinian factions, he warned that he would “break the neck” of anyone who stood in the way.

In 2018, Sinwar supported weekly protests at the fence between Gaza and Israeli territory. Fearful of a breach in the barrier, the Israeli military fired on Palestinians and agitators who came too close. It was all part of the plan.

An injured Palestinian protester is carried by fellow demonstrators during clashes with Israeli security forces in Gaza in 2018. PHOTO: SAID KHATIB/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

“We make the headlines only with blood,” Sinwar said in the interview at the time with an Italian journalist. “No blood, no news.”

In 2021, reconciliation talks between Hamas and Palestinian factions appeared to be progressing toward legislative and presidential elections for the Palestinian Authority, the first in 15 years. But at the last moment, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas canceled polls. With the political track closed, Sinwar days later turned to bloodshed to change the status quo, firing rockets on Jerusalem amid tensions between Israelis and Palestinians in the city. The ensuing 11-day conflict killed 242 Palestinians and 12 people in Israel.

Israeli airstrikes caused such damage that Israeli officials believed Sinwar would be deterred from again attacking Israelis.

But the opposite happened: Israeli officials now believe Sinwar then began planning the Oct. 7 attacks. One aim was to end the paralysis in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and revive its global diplomatic importance, said Arab and Hamas officials familiar with Sinwar’s thinking.

Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories had lasted more than half a century, and Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners were talking about annexing land in the West Bank that Palestinians wanted for a future state. Saudi Arabia, once a champion of the Palestinian cause, was in talks to normalize relations with Israel.

Though Sinwar planned and greenlighted the Oct. 7 attacks, early messages to cease-fire negotiators show he seemed surprised by the brutality of Hamas’s armed wing and other Palestinians, and how easily they committed civilian atrocities.

“Things went out of control,” Sinwar said in one of his messages, referring to gangs taking civilian women and children as hostages. “People got caught up in this, and that should not have happened.”

Palestinians transported a captured Israeli civilian from Kfar Aza kibbutz into Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023. PHOTO: HATEM ALI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

This became a talking point for Hamas to explain away the Oct. 7 civilian toll.

Early in the war, Sinwar focused on using the hostages as a bargaining chip to delay an Israeli ground operation in Gaza. A day after Israeli soldiers entered the strip, Sinwar said Hamas was ready for an immediate deal to exchange its hostages for the release of all Palestinian prisoners held in Israel.

But Sinwar had misread how Israel would react to Oct. 7. Netanyahu declared Israel was going to destroy Hamas and said the only way to force the group to release hostages was through military pressure.

Sinwar appears to have also misinterpreted the support that Iran and Lebanese militia Hezbollah were willing to offer.

When Hamas political chief Haniyeh and deputy Saleh al-Arouri traveled to Tehran in November for a meeting with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, they were told that Tehran backed Hamas but wouldn’t be entering the conflict.

“He was partly misled by them and partly misled himself,” said Ehud Yaari, an Israeli commentator who has known Sinwar since his days in prison. “He was extremely disappointed.”

By November, Hamas’s political leadership privately began distancing themselves from Sinwar, saying he launched the Oct. 7 attacks without telling them, Arab officials who spoke to Hamas said.

At the end of November, Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire and the release of some hostages held by the militants. But the deal collapsed after a week.

As Israel’s army quickly dismantled Hamas’s military structures, the group’s political leadership began meeting other Palestinian factions in early December to discuss reconciliation and a postwar plan. Sinwar wasn’t consulted.

Sinwar in a message sent to the political leaders blasted the end-around as “shameful and outrageous.”

“As long as fighters are still standing and we have not lost the war, such contacts should be immediately terminated,” he said. “We have the capabilities to continue fighting for months.”

On Jan. 2, Arouri was killed in a suspected Israeli strike in Beirut, and Sinwar began to change the way he communicated, said Arab officials. He used aliases and relayed notes only through a handful of trusted aides and via codes, switching between audio, messages spoken to intermediaries and written messages, they said.

The coffin of Hamas deputy chief Saleh al-Arouri is carried during his funeral in January. PHOTO: MARWAN TAHTAH/GETTY IMAGES

Still, his communications indicate he began to feel things were turning Hamas’s way.

By the end of that month, Israel’s military advance had slowed to a grueling battle in the city of Khan Younis, Sinwar’s hometown. Israel began to lose more troops. On Jan. 23, about two dozen Israeli troops were killed in central and southern Gaza, the invasion’s deadliest day for the military.

Arab mediators hastened to speed up talks about a cease-fire, and on Feb. 19, Israel set a deadline of Ramadan—a month later—for Hamas to return the hostages or face a ground offensive in Rafah, what Israeli officials described as the militant group’s last stronghold.

Sinwar in a message urged his comrades in Hamas’s political leadership outside Gaza not to make concessions and instead to push for a permanent end to the war. High civilian casualties would create worldwide pressure on Israel, Sinwar said. The group’s armed wing was ready for the onslaught, Sinwar’s messages said.

“Israel’s journey in Rafah won’t be a walk in the park,” Sinwar told Hamas leaders in Doha in a message.

At the end of February, an aid delivery in Gaza turned deadly as Israeli forces fired on Palestinian civilians crowding trucks, adding U.S. pressure on Israel to limit casualties.

People mourn over the body of a Palestinian killed when Israeli forces fired on people crowding aid trucks. PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Disagreements among Israel’s wartime leaders erupted into public view, as Netanyahu failed to articulate a postwar governance plan for Gaza and his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, privately warned against reoccupying the strip. Israelis grew concerned the country was losing the war.

In May, Israel again threatened to attack Rafah if cease-fire talks remained deadlocked, a move Hamas viewed as purely a negotiating tactic.

Netanyahu said Israel needed to expand into Rafah to destroy Hamas’s military structure there and disrupt smuggling from Egypt.

Sinwar’s response: Hamas fired on Kerem Shalom crossing May 5, killing four soldiers. Hamas officials outside Gaza began to echo Sinwar’s confident posture.

Israel has since launched its Rafah operation. But as Sinwar predicted, it has come at a humanitarian and diplomatic cost.

Sinwar’s messages, meanwhile, indicate he’s willing to die in the fighting.

In a recent message to allies, the Hamas leader likened the war to a 7th-century battle in Karbala, Iraq, where the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad was controversially slain.

“We have to move forward on the same path we started,” Sinwar wrote. “Or let it be a new Karbala.”

In his messages, Sinwar has indicated he’s willing to die in the fighting. PHOTO: AHMED DEEB FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Write to Summer Said at summer.said@wsj.com and Rory Jones at Rory.Jones@wsj.com

4. How a Shadow Fleet of Ancient Tankers Keeps Russian Oil Flowing

How a Shadow Fleet of Ancient Tankers Keeps Russian Oil Flowing

Gabon’s ship registry has ballooned to more than 100 vessels, industry participants estimate

https://www.wsj.com/world/how-a-shadow-fleet-of-ancient-tankers-keeps-russian-oil-flowing-e667b395?mod=hp_lead_pos4

By Costas Paris

Follow in Athens and Joe Wallace

Follow in London

June 11, 2024 5:30 am ET

The tanker Pablo caught fire off the coast of Malaysia last year. PHOTO: MALAYSIAN MARITIME ENFORCEMENT AGENCY/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

An armada of old tanker ships has sprung up to move sanctioned Russian and Iranian oil, putting sailors in peril and threatening environmental catastrophes.

At the center of this trade is a surprising new player in global shipping: Gabon, a nation better known for its dense rainforest and a recent coup than maritime acumen.

The Gabonese ship registry has ballooned to hold more than 100 tankers, according to ship brokers and owners, and an official at an established rival registry. Lloyd’s List Intelligence estimates more than 70 of those vessels have obscure ownership and form part of a shadow fleet of tankers dedicated to sanctioned oil trades.

Other ships sport banners from Comoros—a tiny island nation on the other side of Africa off the coast of Mozambique—or Cameroon.

In opting for these obscure “flag states,” the shadow fleet is sidestepping a system that has long helped keep the oceans safe, by ensuring ships are properly insured and seaworthy, and that sailors are well treated.

“It’s a major problem for all of us. Many of these ships are beyond the inspection and oversight regime that the world has constructed since the big tanker disasters of the ’80s and ‘90s,” said William MacLachlan, partner at shipping-focused law firm HFW.

“It is an accident waiting to happen.”

Last year, the Gabon-flagged Pablo burst into flames off the coast of Malaysia, killing three crew members, according to Malaysian officials. The empty tanker was 26 years old, according to a public maritime database. Malaysian authorities are still trying to figure out who owned Pablo, the officials said.

At least 17 crew members have died in three accidents involving Comoros-flagged ships since 2022, according to a Wall Street Journal tally of incidents reported in shipping-industry publications, including on a boxship from Russia that split in two.

Old vessels are prone to major accidents and many ships in the shadow fleet lack reliable insurance, said Harry Theochari, a senior consultant at law firm Norton Rose Fulbright.

The Gabon embassy in Paris didn’t respond to requests for comment, and an official at its Rome embassy hung up when asked for comment. The Cameroon embassy in Washington and the Comoros U.N. mission didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The flag-state system grew up after World War II, when international maritime law made these countries responsible for ensuring ships followed rules on safety, fuel quality, recycling and working conditions.

Flag states maintain registries recording ship ownership and loans secured against vessels, and help investigate accidents. Some labor-intensive functions, like ship inspections, are outsourced to private-sector groups such as DNV and Bureau Veritas, sometimes known as classification societies.

A torn campaign billboard of ousted Gabon President Ali Bongo Ondimba in Libreville last year. PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Small states have long offered sweeteners to shipowners, such as cheaper registration fees, lower taxes and less stringent checks. But over time, the reputation of some traditional “flags of convenience” has improved. Two of the largest, Liberia and the Marshall Islands, are on a whitelist whose boats don’t need regular checks by European ports.

The new flags of convenience pose a greater danger, according to shipping executives. Ships flying the Gabonese flag—which is made up of three horizontal stripes, in green, yellow and blue—have called so rarely at European ports that they aren’t even on the blacklist, although Comoros and Cameroon are.

The shift took off last year, when Russia’s tanker fleet needed new flags to skirt U.S. sanctions enforcers. The migration from flags such as Liberia helped Russia move crude to buyers in India and China—and keep funding the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine.

Now, ships carrying these new flags or simply sailing under false flags make up as much as 15% of all tankers at sea, shipowners and brokers estimate. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Gabon’s registry has grown six times to become Africa’s second-largest, according to data from Clarksons, a shipbroker.

Gabon-flagged vessels have been involved in ship-to-ship transfers of Russian petroleum in international waters off the coast of Kalamata in southern Greece since the war began, according to Greek maritime officials.

Gabon was one of France’s closest allies in Africa, until the army ousted its president in September. The U.S. is jostling for influence there with China, which is seeking to station forces on the country’s Atlantic coast.

Gabon’s government outsources the shipping registry to outsiders—a firm called Intershipping Services LLC.

Intershipping is based in Ajman, the smallest member of the United Arab Emirates, and has representatives in Greece and India. It says that with the Gabonese flag it aims to offer “a high-level registry at a very competitive fee.” Intershipping has been the authorized representative of the Gabon maritime administration since 2018, its website says.

Representatives for the Gabonese ship registry and Intershipping Services didn’t respond to requests for comment. A person who answered the phone at a U.A.E. office for Intershipping said the firm ran the Gabon registry and was owned by Akram Shaikh.

Shaikh is also linked to the shipping industry of Comoros, where he was made commissioner for maritime affairs in 1999, according to the website of Comoros Shipping Services. That company says it is the authorized maritime representative for Comoros in India.

The ships Gabon has taken on include around 50 owned by Russia-controlled Sovcomflot, which had previously used Liberian flags, according to people familiar with the matter. Russian state tankers may have increased their vulnerability to sanctions because the company behind Liberia’s ship registry is incorporated in the U.S.

Gabon also gained dozens more vessels linked to the shadow fleet, the maritime database shows.

Crew safety onboard the shadow fleet is a particular concern.

Umar Bello said he has done two round-trip voyages on a 24-year-old Gabon-flagged tanker moving Russian oil cargoes from the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk to India.

Bello, a Nigerian mechanic, said sailors bring aboard their own first-aid kits and medicine like antibiotics. If a sailor gets sick and can’t work, he doesn’t get paid. The crew work 12-hour shifts, eat canned food and are cut off from home, with no internet at sea.

“They pay a third in front when you get on the ship and the rest when the trip is complete. It’s all in cash and it’s twice what you get on other ships,” said Bello.

Aarvi Herath, a 19-year-old from Colombo, joined a Comoros-flagged ship bound for China as a deckhand when it refueled in Sri Lanka in January. He said the journey was “a nightmare,” though he earned more a day than he would in a month on land.

The tanker was 22 years old, Herath said—well past the point at which tankers used to go to scrap. “There were big waves, a lot of wind and the ship made noises like it would break up. I threw up all the time,” Herath said.

Write to Costas Paris at costas.paris@wsj.com and Joe Wallace at joe.wallace@wsj.com

5. Ukraine’s Plan to Make Itself Indispensable

Excerpts:

“When he’s conquered us,” says a young Ukrainian employee of a nongovernmental organization, “he’ll draft us into his slave army to keep driving west.”

My young friend is basically right. Mr. Putin doesn’t want Ukraine as a trophy. He wants it as a base—demographic, economic, geographic—for further expansion.

...

So, what is Ukraine’s Plan B? You won’t hear a lot of speeches about it in Ukraine, but if you look at the country’s actions, a new war-fighting plan appears to be taking shape. It isn’t unlike Winston Churchill’s Plan B after Germany’s smashing blitzkrieg victories in 1940. Britain, Churchill told the world, would fight on with everything it had, until “in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.”

Churchill didn’t expect an American rescue out of pity or principle. He had things to offer, and he had threats to make. Churchill wasn’t above gently reminding Franklin D. Roosevelt that some future British prime minister—Churchill himself would never consider it—might turn the British navy over to Hitler to gain better terms for a defeated and starving island. Churchill knew that Roosevelt couldn’t let that happen, and he believed, with reason, that the increased arrogance and aggression of the Axis powers would ultimately force America into full participation in the war.

Ukraine’s Plan to Make Itself Indispensable

As Putin tries to grind out a win, Kyiv is taking a page from Churchill’s playbook.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ukraines-plan-to-make-itself-indispensable-9074a4d9?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1

By Walter Russell Mead

June 10, 2024 5:18 pm ET

Ukrainian soldiers with the 57th Motorized Brigade near Vovchansk, Ukraine, June 9. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES

On a long road trip from the Moldovan frontier through Odesa to Kyiv, Kharkiv and back, I heard overwhelmingly that Ukrainians are determined to fight on. That isn’t always because they love President Volodymyr Zelensky, trust their generals, or see a path to victory. The bottom line in Ukraine is that they must keep fighting because Vladimir Putin gives them no choice.

Mr. Putin isn’t looking for compromise, they say. It isn’t about moving the border posts a few miles to the west. He believes he needs all or almost all of Ukraine, and he won’t stop until he gets it.

Worse, they say, Mr. Putin doesn’t only want to raise the Russian flag over the country and redistribute its wealth to his favored oligarchs. He wants to crush Ukrainian nationality, marginalize the language and culture, impose totalitarian rule over the country, and enlist Ukraine in his project of rebuilding the Russian Empire.

“When he’s conquered us,” says a young Ukrainian employee of a nongovernmental organization, “he’ll draft us into his slave army to keep driving west.”

My young friend is basically right. Mr. Putin doesn’t want Ukraine as a trophy. He wants it as a base—demographic, economic, geographic—for further expansion.

But if Ukraine can’t afford to stop fighting the war, what’s the plan to win? Last year Ukrainians and their supporters believed that superior Western weapons were going to give Ukraine dominance on the battlefield, while Western economic sanctions would drive Russia’s economy toward collapse.

The plan failed. The counteroffensive led to heavy casualties on the Ukrainian side without compensating setbacks for Moscow, and Russia’s economy so far has survived Western sanctions. Ukraine is trapped in a war of attrition with a larger, richer country, and Mr. Putin thinks he can grind out a win.

So, what is Ukraine’s Plan B? You won’t hear a lot of speeches about it in Ukraine, but if you look at the country’s actions, a new war-fighting plan appears to be taking shape. It isn’t unlike Winston Churchill’s Plan B after Germany’s smashing blitzkrieg victories in 1940. Britain, Churchill told the world, would fight on with everything it had, until “in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.”

Churchill didn’t expect an American rescue out of pity or principle. He had things to offer, and he had threats to make. Churchill wasn’t above gently reminding Franklin D. Roosevelt that some future British prime minister—Churchill himself would never consider it—might turn the British navy over to Hitler to gain better terms for a defeated and starving island. Churchill knew that Roosevelt couldn’t let that happen, and he believed, with reason, that the increased arrogance and aggression of the Axis powers would ultimately force America into full participation in the war.

Mr. Zelensky seems to be developing a similar plan. Ukraine seeks to make itself indispensable to the West and the U.S., not merely as a geographical barrier to Russian expansion but with capabilities that make the country valuable for its own sake. I visited the workshops where Ukraine is developing cutting-edge battle technologies. Ukrainian special forces are engaged in missions against Russian and Russian-backed forces in Syria and Africa. Ukraine’s cyber capabilities are significant and growing. Few countries match Ukraine’s ability to understand Russia and to cultivate an intelligence network inside it.

Ukraine’s bet is that as these capabilities grow, and as the confrontation between the China-Russia-Iran-North Korea axis of revisionists and the West deepens, two things will happen: Ukraine’s ability to resist Russia will grow, and Ukraine’s allies will do what they must to keep this valuable asset from falling into Mr. Putin’s hands.

Churchill and Roosevelt also used smart financing to get aid flowing to Britain fast enough to make a difference. Ukraine can do something similar. It could, for example, issue bonds backed by the value of future oil and gas resources from the Black Sea. Countries (including perhaps the U.S. under a President Trump) would be more forthcoming with funding if they saw some value attached. In addition, since those bonds would be worthless unless Ukraine wins the war and can exploit the Black Sea resources, there would be a stronger political constituency in some countries for a Ukrainian victory.

I once asked one of my interns if he’d figured out what his job was. “Yes,” he said, “it’s to become indispensable. If you have to have me, you’ll find the money to keep me around.”

That was a smart kid, and he’s gone on to great things. Mr. Zelensky seems to be learning the same lesson. Let’s all hope he succeeds.

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Journal Editorial Report: The week's best and worst from Bill McGurn, Allysia Finley, Mene Ukueberuwa and Dan Henninger. Image: Cristobal Herrera-Ulashkevich/Shutterstock

Appeared in the June 11, 2024, print edition as 'Ukraine’s Plan to Make Itself Indispensable'.

6. Four American college educators attacked in park in China

Four American college educators attacked in park in China

Educators from Cornell College in Iowa were visiting Beihua University in Jilin when they were attacked. The State Department said it was aware of reports of a stabbing.

By Adela Suliman

Updated June 11, 2024 at 6:08 a.m. EDT|Published June 11, 2024 at 4:10 a.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Adela Suliman · June 11, 2024

Four instructors from Cornell College in Iowa were attacked during a teaching trip in China, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

The American educators, who were teaching at Beihua University in the northeastern city of Jilin, were attacked in a park, the ministry said.

The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but told the Associated Press it was aware of reports of a stabbing and was monitoring the situation.

“We learned that on the morning of June 10, four foreign teachers from Beihua University … were attacked when touring the city’s Beishan Park,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian told reporters Tuesday. “All of the injured were rushed to hospital … none of them are in a critical condition.”

Chinese police believe the event to be an “isolated incident,” said Lin, adding that “cultural and people-to-people exchanges between China and the United States serve the common interests of both sides, and have been positively supported by various sectors of the two countries.”

“China is widely considered one of the safest countries in the world,” he said.

Cornell College President Jonathan Brand told the AP the instructors were attacked while with a faculty member from Beihua.

Details on the four instructors’ identities and injuries have not been publicly released. Cornell College, a private college in Mount Vernon, Iowa, said it was still gathering information about the incident.

Mainstream news outlets in China did not appear to cover the news, but social media posts referencing “Jilin” and “Jilin Beishan Park” were among the top trending topics on the microblogging site Weibo on Tuesday and posts with the hashtag “Jilin Beishan Park” had over 4 million views.

Relations between Beijing and Washington remain strained, with tensions over trade and security in the Indo-Pacific.

Shibani Mahtani and Pei-Lin Wu contributed to this report.

The Washington Post · by Adela Suliman · June 11, 2024

7. Sophisticated Army training goes mobile to knit a farflung Pacific coalition

Excerpts:

Land forces will be critical in crisis or war, Adm. Stephen Koehler, commander of Pacific Fleet, said at LANPAC.

“We’re in this together,” Koehler said. “If the fight goes down, it will require a team effort with everyone and all of their skills in all domains to succeed”—including the land-based fires that “are an absolute imperative for supporting the Indo-Pacific.”

“The first and second island chains are no longer simply terrain for land forces to defend. They are now terrain from which land forces, along with those allies and partners, can project decisive combat power,” Koehler said. “It takes all of us to maintain a safe, stable, and secure Indo-Pacific.…To prevail, we will continue to innovate, refine our joint and combined capabilities and integration, and ensure regional stability through persistent and combined joint operations.”

Sophisticated Army training goes mobile to knit a farflung Pacific coalition

The service took its Hawaii-based center to the Philippines, part of a regional campaign of joint and combined training.

BY JENNIFER HLAD

SENIOR NEWS EDITOR, DEFENSE ONE

JUNE 10, 2024 04:50 PM ET

defenseone.com · by Jennifer Hlad

HONOLULU—The wargames began with a series of air assaults: a “forcible entry” by U.S. and Philippine soldiers swooping in on a dozen U.S. Army helicopters to seize a piece of land and “build up combat power.” Then the soldiers from both nations began moving across the jungle to find and attack the enemy, before consolidating forces, defending themselves against an attack, and going back on the offensive. All along the way, trainers kept a close eye on what went well—and what could have gone better.

The exercise, which ends June 10, is similar to one conducted last fall by soldiers from the U.S. and Philippines armies in Hawaii. But this time, it’s all taking place 5,000 miles away, at a military base north of Manila. And it’s as much about the trainers—a unit that U.S. Army Pacific calls the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center-Exportable—as it is the training.

“This is the first time that we’ve taken the fully instrumented capability to this scale forward into the region, west of the International Dateline, and this is really an opportunity for us to continue to train side by side with our Philippine army partners,” Maj. Gen. Marcus Evans, commander of the 25th Infantry Division, told Defense One in a phone call from Ft. Magsaysay.

Evans said “continue” because while this is the first JPMRC-X exercise in the Philippines, soldiers from the 25th ID have been in the country since March, participating in an army-to-army exercise called Salaknib, then the joint Balitakan wargames before the current exercise. And those three events are part of a longer chain that began in April, and will continue in Brunei, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

Indeed, U.S. Army Pacific has been tying together its exercises into “a logical and sequential framework” called Operation Pathways for a decade, U.S. Army Pacific commander Gen. Charles Flynn said in remarks at LANPAC 2024. Since 2014, when Flynn was commander of the 25th ID, the effort has grown to include more than 40 exercises in “a campaign for good,” Flynn said.

That campaign has “clear goals promoting our unity and collective commitment, and all of this is tied together by a…strategic land power network,” he said. “Land power is the security architecture that binds this region together.”

Evans said that the Philippines training environment presented a number of challenges—not just because of the hot and humid weather and jungle vegetation, but also because unlike the established JPMRC locations in Hawaii and Alaska, the Philippines lacked the set-up and support for this type of training.

“We have literally had to go in, with the support from the Philippine army, and establish helicopter landing zones. We’ve had to improve roads to be able to get in supplies and to be able to conduct emergency medical evacuation,” he said. “Have literally had to carve portions of the training area to be able to support this level of a collective training exercise.”

The preparation and training will eventually help the Philippine army establish its own training center and evaluate its readiness as it shifts to what Evans called a “territorial defense focus.”

And, Flynn said, the U.S. military benefits from practicing to overcome the logistics and sustainment challenges inherent in moving troops and equipment from Hawaii or Alaska or Washington to the Philippines and onward to other countries.

“I say that we’re the service without a ride. So we need lift, and when you move the U.S. Army, you actually exercise the logistical and transportation enterprise of the Department of Defense,” Flynn said. “And when you move the Army from nation to nation or within the region, and then out of [the continental United States]…just the activity of creating the logistics backbone has to happen in each one of these countries. …It took a lot of work to get there.”

Evans echoed those comments, saying the JPMRC-X exercise is building the division’s “overall readiness,” from the division’s sustainment enterprise to the fact that soldiers are “training on unfamiliar ground, working side by side with Philippine army teammates, and being able to leverage each other's fires assets, being able to leverage sustainment assets,” as well as establishing personal relationships between individual soldiers.

That all takes “constant practice” and “constant rehearsing,” Flynn said, illustrating “why this land power network is so darn important to the safety, security, peace, and stability of what’s going on out here.”

Still, as the USARPAC commander frequently notes, the Army is not the first service to come to mind when people think about the Indo-Pacific, a theater named after two oceans.

“While all forms of military power are important in this region, land power is often overlooked. It tends to be discounted,” Flynn said.

But the Indo-Pacific “has the largest armies in the world,” he said.

Land forces will be critical in crisis or war, Adm. Stephen Koehler, commander of Pacific Fleet, said at LANPAC.

“We’re in this together,” Koehler said. “If the fight goes down, it will require a team effort with everyone and all of their skills in all domains to succeed”—including the land-based fires that “are an absolute imperative for supporting the Indo-Pacific.”

“The first and second island chains are no longer simply terrain for land forces to defend. They are now terrain from which land forces, along with those allies and partners, can project decisive combat power,” Koehler said. “It takes all of us to maintain a safe, stable, and secure Indo-Pacific.…To prevail, we will continue to innovate, refine our joint and combined capabilities and integration, and ensure regional stability through persistent and combined joint operations.”

defenseone.com · by Jennifer Hlad

8. Bush-era national security officials warn against politicizing civil service

Excerpts:

“Frankly, we’ve been talking with lots of groups who say, ‘A: we agree with you and want a politically neutral but also accountable civil service, and the one we have now falls short of that,’” Sanders said in an interview. “But so many have told us that they were afraid to be public about it. So the only group willing to stand up and be counted now are former national security leaders, but there are many more where that came from.”

Sanders said that if you take the argument that Schedule F is needed to weed out poor performing and malfeasant federal employees, it’s simply bad policy.

“Trying to be as charitable as I can be, I think Schedule F is just inartful,” he said. “The authors will say that [under the proposal], you can’t hire somebody or reassign them under Schedule F for partisan political purposes and there are protections to preclude that. And I don’t necessarily disagree. There are simply other, better ways if accountability is the goal and not politicization.”

Bush-era national security officials warn against politicizing civil service

In a letter to congressional committee staff directors, a cadre of former Republican appointees urged lawmakers to pursue a “middle ground” of federal employee accountability that preserves merit systems principles.

defenseone.com · by Erich Wagner

A cadre of Republican former national security officials on Thursday urged lawmakers to abandon the GOP’s growing embrace of Schedule F, arguing there are better ways to hold poor performing or malfeasant federal workers accountable than politicizing the civil service.

Since the rise of Schedule F—the Trump administration’s abortive effort to convert tens of thousands of federal workers in “policy-related” positions out of the competitive service, effectively making them at-will employees—proponents have described it in one of two ways: as a tool for quickly removing feds who “resist” the policy direction of political leaders, or as a more general need to make it easier to fire poor performers.

But in a letter to congressional leaders, former CIA Director Mike Hayden, former Deputy Homeland Security Secretary James Loy, former Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, former Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte and former Navy Secretary and NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe, rejected the former president’s approach. Trump, who will again be the Republican nominee for president this fall, has campaigned in part on reviving Schedule F.

“We believe that our career federal civil servants must be accountable to the American people and those that are elected to represent them, but while that core principle is essential to the effective functioning of our democratic system of government, it is simply too hard to hold our civil servants accountable for meeting reasonable standards of performance or conduct,” they wrote. “However, some would establish the political loyalty of those career civil servants as the best way of reassuring that accountability. We strongly disagree.”

The former leaders, all veterans of the George W. Bush administration, said that no matter the motive, creating an opportunity for a president or his politically appointed subordinates to retaliate against federal workers for their political views poses “too great a risk to our national and homeland security.”

“Public service, whether in uniform or otherwise, ought to be based exclusively on qualifications and merit,” they wrote. “Nothing else matters, and in our view, political fealty—however it may be operationalized—does not equate to accountability.”

Ron Sanders has been serving as a technical advisor to the as-yet unnamed group of former officials. Sanders, who himself resigned from his post as chairman of the Federal Salary Council in protest of Schedule F’s implementation, said that although the letter was signed only by former Republican leaders, the group itself is bipartisan.

“Frankly, we’ve been talking with lots of groups who say, ‘A: we agree with you and want a politically neutral but also accountable civil service, and the one we have now falls short of that,’” Sanders said in an interview. “But so many have told us that they were afraid to be public about it. So the only group willing to stand up and be counted now are former national security leaders, but there are many more where that came from.”

Sanders said that if you take the argument that Schedule F is needed to weed out poor performing and malfeasant federal employees, it’s simply bad policy.

“Trying to be as charitable as I can be, I think Schedule F is just inartful,” he said. “The authors will say that [under the proposal], you can’t hire somebody or reassign them under Schedule F for partisan political purposes and there are protections to preclude that. And I don’t necessarily disagree. There are simply other, better ways if accountability is the goal and not politicization.”

The former officials’ letter spells out a three-point plan to try to shore up accountability within the existing civil service system, without infringing on guard rails against politicization. First, they propose “modernizing” the parts of the U.S. Code dealing with federal employee performance appraisals and adverse actions to streamline the firing process.

“You could simply implement time limits for taking and then adjudicating an adverse action,” Sanders said. “Take the VA Accountability Act for example—though not precisely, because its overall legality is in doubt—but the principle is that people should prepared to act quickly, take action, appeal it and get it adjudicated. What the actual time limits are I don’t particularly care about, but just create some time limits.”

Second, the leaders called for a statutory ban on efforts that could undermine merit systems principles, particularly for national security, intelligence community and other law enforcement positions. And finally, they suggested creating a periodic review process to ensure a balance of political and career leaders atop national security and law enforcement agencies.

Sanders said the letter serves as the opening of a conversation he and the other former leaders hope will eventually culminate in language in the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act.

“We can help and are at your disposal,” the officials wrote. “However, let us be clear. We believe that our career civil servants, our civilian employees, are a national resource, and they must be protected by due process,” the letter states. “In our decades of experience overseeing large, complex national security organizations under both Democratic and Republican presidents, these individuals have always brought unrivalled technical expertise, institutional memory, and the ability to navigate complex bureaucracies that are truly priceless.”

defenseone.com · by Erich Wagner

9. Russia losing artillery at record pace, Kyiv's figures show

Could be an opportunity for north Korea to sell artillery systems to Russia now. They might hold up better than the north Korean artillery and missile rounds (which are failing around 50% according to some reports) because these systems have hardly ever been used (note sarcasm).

Russia losing artillery at record pace, Kyiv's figures show

Newsweek · by Brendan Cole · June 10, 2024

Published Jun 10, 2024 at 11:35 AM EDTBySenior News Reporter

✓ Link copied to clipboard!

Russia continues to lose equipment at a vast rate in its full-scale invasion, according to Ukraine whose latest figures suggest that June is on track for its biggest monthly losses of artillery systems for the whole war.

Data from Ukraine's defense ministry showed that in May, Russia had lost 1,160 artillery systems, the highest total for a month since Vladimir Putin started the invasion on February 24, 2022. It was the first time the figure had breached four figures and was well clear of the previous highest of 947 from September 2023.

But so far it looks like June will surpass that monthly record, with artillery losses in the first nine days already reaching 453, a rate if extrapolated over the month would equal 1,510.

This illustrative image from June 9, 2024, shows a Ukrainian soldier with the 57th Motorized Brigade operates at an artillery position near Vovchansk, Kharkiv Region. Ukraine's estimates have shown that Russian forces are on course... This illustrative image from June 9, 2024, shows a Ukrainian soldier with the 57th Motorized Brigade operates at an artillery position near Vovchansk, Kharkiv Region. Ukraine's estimates have shown that Russian forces are on course to lose its highest monthly amount of artillery in June. Nikoletta Stoyanova/Getty Images

As of Monday, the total Russian artillery losses for the war had reached 13,644, closing in on the milestone of 15,000. The tracker website Oryx, which draws on verifiable imagery, has counted losses of towed artillery of 372 and self-propelled artillery losses of 757, although the amount of equipment destroyed "is significantly higher than recorded."

Russian troop losses continue to climb, reaching 519,750 troops on Monday after Kyiv reported there had been 1,190 Russian casualties the previous day in figures which include both the dead and wounded.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces attacked Russian S-400 and S-300 anti-aircraft missile systems across Crimea overnight Sunday, according to Ukraine's General Staff. The radars of the systems reportedly stopped working "immediately" in the strikes near Dzhankoi, Chornomorske and Yevpatoria on the occupied peninsula.

"None of our missiles fired were intercepted by the enemy's 'highly effective' air defense," the General Staff said without specifying the consequences of the attack or what weapons were used.

It follows unconfirmed reports that Ukrainian drones targeted Russian vessels in the Sea of Azov where a sizable part of Moscow's Black Sea has been transferred following repeated strikes on ships and infrastructure in Sevastopol.

Dmytro Pletenchuk, spokesperson for Ukraine's Southern Defense Forces and the Navy told Ukrainian television Monday that Russia has started using submarines to patrol the Black Sea and Sea of Azov, the Kyiv Independent reported.

A day earlier, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Russia's advance in the Kharkiv region "has stalled." Moscow's momentum in the northeast of the region bordering Russia focused Washington's mind on allowing American weapons to strike Russian territory.

Sullivan said the region was "still under threat but Russians have not been able to make material progress on the ground in recent days."

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Brendan Cole is a Newsweek Senior News Reporter based in London, UK. His focus is Russia and Ukraine, in particular the war started by Moscow. He also covers other areas of geopolitics including China.

Brendan joined Newsweek in 2018 from the International Business Times and well as English, knows Russian and French.

You can get in touch with Brendan by emailing b.cole@newsweek.com or follow on him on his X account @brendanmarkcole.

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10. What the USS Pueblo Incident Can Teach Marines about the LSM

I did not expect this type of article that makes an interesting historical comparison.

Excerpts:

Finally, these vulnerabilities make the LSM “easy game’ for any state or non-state actor willing to venture into the Indo-Pacific to create an incident during the LSM’s 20-year life cycle. Recently, the Russian and PRC ships have begun operating together. North Korea is always a wild card, and who can accurately forecast Iranian-sponsored activities in its increasingly volatile nearby sea space?

The LSM, rather than “complicating PRC targeting efforts” might actually act to complicate and constrain joint/naval commanders tasked with providing constant alert and quick response capabilities to protect it. Worse, it may “tether” mobile striking forces to LSM operating areas, creating more sea-space gaps to be exploited by adversaries.

Unlike so many war games, wars don’t just start. The eminent historian Barbara Tuchman once wrote, “History is the unfolding of miscalculations” … a phrase that was later modified to read, “War is the unfolding of miscalculations.”

The LSM as envisaged is a disastrous accident/incident waiting to happen. Rather than being the means by which the Marine Corps may deter future conflict, it is just as likely to precipitate the war we don’t want.

What the USS Pueblo Incident Can Teach Marines about the LSM

By Keith T. Holcomb & Carl O. Schuster

June 11, 2024

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/06/11/what_the_uss_pueblo_incident_can_teach_marines_about_the_lsm_1037268.html?mc_cid=3fb0994c35&mc_eid=70bf478f36

Photo: In this Wednesday, Jan. 24, 2018, photo, a North Korean military security guard keeps watch over the USS Pueblo in Pyongyang, North Korea. The Pueblo, an American spy ship, was attacked and captured by North Korea 50 years ago this week. The iconic spy ship, on display in Pyongyang, is the only commissioned US Navy ship held by a foreign government. (AP Photo/Eric Talmadge)

What the USS Pueblo Incident Can Teach Marines about the LSM (formerly LAW)

Much ink has been spilled over the survivability of the proposed Landing Ship Medium (LSM) in the event of armed conflict with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the Pacific. Much less consideration has been given to the potential vulnerability of the LSM during “gray zone” activities—when the LSM is envisioned to be actively involved in shuttling Marine stand-in forces around the theater to complicate PRC intelligence collection and targeting efforts. Here the 1968 case of the USS Pueblo may be instructive, especially in light of the increasing sea-space volatility probable during the LSM’s 20-year service life.

Marine Corps officers advocating that the LSM be a commercial-style ship designed to blend in with commercial ships and to run and hide once the shooting starts would do well to study this long-forgotten incident. Should they choose to do so, they might discover that this cautionary tale has much to teach them. What they might term a relic of the Cold War could help ground their operational concepts and ship design to the harsh realities arising from peer competitor “gray zone” competition.

First, a quick overview for those not familiar with the USS Pueblo incident.

The USS Pueblo, formerly a light cargo ship (FS-344) converted to signals intelligence gathering, was seized off the coast of North Korea on 23 January 1968. The lightly armed ship was located and seized by the combined action of two North Korean fishing trawlers, two SO-1 Soviet-style submarine chasers, four torpedo boats, and two MIG-21 fighters. In the ensuing engagement, Fireman Duane Hodges was killed while destroying classified material, and the remaining 82 sailors, Marines, and civilians were taken captive along with significant amounts of highly classified material. The crew’s imprisonment and brutal treatment became a major international incident increasing Cold War tensions between the United States and Soviet Union. The 11-month ordeal ended after two signed confessions by the Pueblo’s skipper, Lieutenant Commander Lloyd M. Bucher, and a written apology by the US government. The USS Pueblo remains held by North Korea and is located in a canal adjacent to Fatherland Liberation War Museum.

Detailed study of the Pueblo Incident can provide a variety of insights ranging from intelligence gathering to Cold War gray zone operations. Since our interest is ship design as it impacts employment, we’ll confine our points to those areas relevant to the current LSM program. The Navy and Marine Corps want LSMs to be relatively simple and inexpensive ships with the following design features, as cited in the Congressional Research Service report (comparable Pueblo data in parentheses):

Length of 200 to 400 feet (Pueblo: 177 feet)
Draft of 12 feet (Pueblo: 9 feet)
Crew of about 70 sailors (Pueblo: 83)
Capacity for carrying 50 Marines and 648 short tons (about 579 long tons) of equipment
Transit speed of 14 knots (Pueblo: 12.7 knots)
Cruising range of 3,500 nautical miles
Two 30mm guns and six .50-caliber guns for self-defense (Pueblo: two M2 Browning .50 caliber guns)
20-year service life.

Let’s turn now to those characteristics that the envisaged LSM shares with the Pueblo, characteristics that led to its tragic seizure. We begin by considering three interrelated factors relevant to the survivability of single-ship operations in potentially hostile waters: Speed, armament, and signature.

From an operational perspective, speed is relative: it is relative to the speeds of natural elements (storms/tides), friendly forces (naval task forces), and enemy forces.

The Russian built, modified SO-1 class submarine chaser that chased the USS Pueblo down was capable of approximately 20 knots. The Pueblo, capable of only 12.7 knots, was quickly overtaken. And as it became clear that North Koreans intended to seize the ship, it was outmaneuvered. The slow speed of the Pueblo relative to arriving North Korean assets had two fatal consequences: first, the Pueblo was unable to break contact and escape, and second, friendly air support, woefully unprepared, did not have time to respond.

At 14 knots, the envisaged LSM is about as slow as the decades-old Pueblo. It is posited to operate in the First Island Chain in an area that includes many PRC systems capable of greater speed. Chinese Coast Guard vessels sent to patrol contested islands in the South China Sea include the Zhaotou-class patrol cutter and Type 056 corvettes capable of 25 knots. People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) ships range from conventional attack submarines (e.g., Type 39 at 22 knots) to a multitude of submarine chasers (e.g., Type 0371S at 28 knots) and gun boats (e.g., Type 062I at 25 knots).

The inevitable conclusion is that the envisioned LSM’s speed relative to PRC surface and sub-surface ships makes it every bit as vulnerable to seizure as the Pueblo was to North Korean assets over 56 years ago.

Armament provides the means to counter relevant enemy capabilities; it is essential to self-defense. Moreover, it is similar to speed in that it can buy time to break contact or time to enable alert forces to respond.

The Pueblo was armed with two M2 Browning .50 caliber machine guns. Her crew was largely unfamiliar with the weapons. Both guns were secured under canvas in locations exposed to enemy view and fire. In the lead-up to enemy fire and seizure, they were not put into action, in part due to Commander Bucher’s interpretation of higher command’s guidance to avoid provocative actions. (More on this gray zone issue below).

The North Korean SO-1 submarine chasers were armed with 57mm guns and machine guns; the four torpedo boats were armed with machine guns. Commander Bucher, himself wounded in legs by 57mm shell splinters, reported multiple engagement by the 57mm automatic cannon, torpedo boat machine guns, and one missile from a MIG-21.

The LSM is envisaged to have two 30mm guns and six .50 caliber machine guns for armament. While that weapons suite is much more capable than the Pueblo’s and hopefully the crews will be much better trained, it is significantly out-gunned and out-ranged by PRC ships cited above. It is highly probable that any engagement would end quite quickly and as a decisive PRC victory.

We now turn to the issue of signature. Marine advocates have trumpeted that the envisaged LSM would “look like commercial a ship,” implying that it would be difficult to find and track. PRC’s considerable and capable overhead capabilities make that assertion highly questionable.

Further, while beyond the scope of this short paper, the PRC’s Maritime Militia and Fishing Fleet, the world’s largest fishing fleet, has the capability to not only track the very limited numbers of LSMs but to accompany and harass them throughout their deployments. For much greater depth and detail, see Oceana’s “China Fishing Footprint CIMSEC’s “No Ordinary Boats: Cracking the Code on China’s Spratly Maritime Militias”; and the Military Review’s “China’s Maritime Militia and Fishing Fleets: A Primer for Operational Staffs and Tactical Leaders”

Bottom Line: The PRC possesses the capabilities to find, track, neutralize, seize, and/or destroy the envisaged LSM whenever they choose. The assertion that LSMs will be able to operate throughout the theater without Chinese knowledge of their movements is wishful thinking.

The Pueblo Incident provides much-needed context for “grey zone” operations conducted either during Cold War scenarios or in the lead-up to open peer war. Pueblo’s belated and ineffectual response to North Korea’s actions to seize it were the result of several factors: (1) higher command guidance to avoid provoking North Korea, (2) a previously established pattern of North Korean nonviolent harassment, and (3) a similar pattern of nonviolent harassment of sister ship Banner in the Atlantic by the Soviets.

It takes no great effort to imagine US forces either becoming similarly conditioned to harassing behaviors or being constrained by rules of engagement that provide decisive advantages to PRC forces, their many surrogates, or other emergent adversaries. One need only consider the factors and constraints attendant to the multitude of drone attacks on US ships.

Finally, these vulnerabilities make the LSM “easy game’ for any state or non-state actor willing to venture into the Indo-Pacific to create an incident during the LSM’s 20-year life cycle. Recently, the Russian and PRC ships have begun operating together. North Korea is always a wild card, and who can accurately forecast Iranian-sponsored activities in its increasingly volatile nearby sea space?

The LSM, rather than “complicating PRC targeting efforts” might actually act to complicate and constrain joint/naval commanders tasked with providing constant alert and quick response capabilities to protect it. Worse, it may “tether” mobile striking forces to LSM operating areas, creating more sea-space gaps to be exploited by adversaries.

Unlike so many war games, wars don’t just start. The eminent historian Barbara Tuchman once wrote, “History is the unfolding of miscalculations” … a phrase that was later modified to read, “War is the unfolding of miscalculations.”

The LSM as envisaged is a disastrous accident/incident waiting to happen. Rather than being the means by which the Marine Corps may deter future conflict, it is just as likely to precipitate the war we don’t want.

Brigadier General Keith T. Holcomb (USMC, ret.) is a former USMC Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. His last assignment was as Director of the Training and Education Division, U.S. Marine Corps Combat Development Command.

Captain Carl O. Schuster (U.S. Navy, ret.) is a career naval officer who served on a variety of US and allied warships before transferring to intelligence at mid-career. He has extensive experience as a planner at the amphibious group to theater command level and finished his career as the director of operations at then US Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center.

11. The US military's confidence in smart bombs may have a fatal flaw

Excerpts:

Fox points to the extensive use of American PGMs during the ferocious battles of Raqqa and Mosul in 2016-2017. In trying to root out heavily fortified Islamic State positions dug into civilian neighborhoods, many buildings were destroyed and thousands killed. Israel faces a similar situation today as it hunts Hamas in Gaza.

Thus the paradox: an individual PGM may be more accurate than a dumb bomb. But if a PGM fails to knock out a target — whether due to poor intelligence or the pure chance that reigns on battlefields — more guided weapons have to be launched, thus defeating the whole purpose of precision.

"Accurate strikes do not inherently mean effective," Fox told Business Insider. "Therefore, more strikes are required when a strike does not effectively accomplish its intended purpose. Thus, in the aggregate, if a PGM isn't 100 percent effective, it can often result in similar outcomes to ballistic artillery, or other non-precision munition employment."

Fox doesn't believe that smarter bombs will solve the paradox. "Better PGMs isn't really the problem," he said. "PGMs are currently about as accurate as can be. For that matter, although artillery is an area fire weapon, it is still very accurate."

The US military's confidence in smart bombs may have a fatal flaw

Business Insider · by Michael Peck

Military & Defense

Michael Peck

2024-06-08T09:00:01Z

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A US Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle maneuvers during a 2023 bombing exercise. Markus Rauchenberger/US Army

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Precision warfare has been a central tenet of American strategy.
But perceptions that precision weapons are effective is a myth, a retired Army officer argues.
"Accurate strikes do not inherently mean effective," the officer told BI.

America loves smart bombs. Ever since World War II, precision warfare has appealed to what America sees as its strengths: High technology, efficiency and the ability to strike down its enemies with a minimum of harm to innocents.

But that's actually a myth argues Amos Fox, a retired US Army lieutenant colonel. Precision-guided munitions, or PGMs, are no more effective than conventional munitions in limiting collateral damage, and in some cases can make the damage worse.

This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now.

Fox calls this the "precision paradox." Or, "the incongruence between precision strike theory and the fervent enthusiasm of precision ideologues," he wrote in an essay for the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank.

Precision warfare is associated today with guided missiles, but the concept dates back to the 1930s, when the US began to embrace high-altitude daylight bombing by heavy bombers such as the B-17 Flying Fortress. Swayed by Italian airpower theorist Giulio Douhet, American planners were convinced they could cripple an adversary by bombing its factories, without the need for a costly ground war.

This contrasted with Britain's night area-bombing strategy in World War II that targeted entire German cities. Even if factories weren't hit, residential neighborhoods would be destroyed and workers "de-housed," which was expected to collapse the public's morale. In practice, the distinction between precision and area bombardment proved blurry: bombing through cloudy European skies that obscured targets, while under fighter and flak attack and relying on pencil-on-paper navigation plotting and rudimentary bomb sights meant the majority of American bombs failed to hit their target.

PGMs were supposed to solve this problem. Why drop a dozen bombs when a single GPS-guided missile can destroy a bridge or a command post? Fox sees several flaws in modern precision strike theory. For one, "decapitation" strikes intended to defeat an enemy by eliminating its leaders and command posts have not worked. Nor does Fox believe that the precision strike strategy has actually shortened wars.

SOFWERX to help special operations forces tackle contested logistics challenges

The innovation foundry event will bring together officials, technology developers and other subject matter experts to brainstorm high-tech capabilities and their potential applications.

JON HARPER

JUNE 10, 2024

defensescoop.com · by Jon Harper · June 10, 2024

SOFWERX — a hub focused on solving U.S. Special Operations Command’s toughest problems — is gearing up for a confab to address a major impediment that commandos are expected to face in future wars: contested logistics.

The gathering, which will be the next round in SOFWERX’s “innovation foundry” series, is being organized as the Defense Department worries that its supply lines could be interrupted by advanced adversaries armed with precision guided munitions and other weapons capable of taking out ships, aircraft and other logistics platforms.

During the post-9/11 counterinsurgency wars, American forces had air and maritime supremacy and were able to maintain large bases in the areas where they were fighting, which made it easier to get troops the gear they needed. But tomorrow’s conflicts are expected to play out differently, as the Pentagon views China as its top threat and the Indo-Pacific as the key theater.

“The future of warfare demands innovation in supply and sustainment capability to keep pace with large-scale, multidomain combat against peer adversaries. The intensity of future conflicts may lead to rapid depletion of stockpiles and resources, and deployments to remote locations far from established supply hubs will necessitate unconventional solutions for resupply, local procurement, and point-of-need production. This presents new challenges and opportunities for SOF in addressing strategic-to-tactical distribution and supply gaps for the untethered operator,” according to a special notice posted June 7 on Sam.gov.

“Predictive logistics, real-time needs assessment, advanced manufacturing, energy independence, maneuverability, standardization, safety, and quality assurance will all require novel approaches. The confluence of domains and environments — and the speed and precision demanded of SOF operations — further amplify these challenges,” it added.

The upcoming innovation foundry event, dubbed IF16, will bring together SOCOM officials, technology developers, futurists and other subject matter experts to brainstorm high-tech capabilities and their potential applications, with an eye toward what the operating environment might look like in 2030.

Officials want to identify operating concepts and the investments that SOCOM needs to make in the near term to position itself for success in contested logistics scenarios.

Experts in artificial intelligence, machine learning, autonomous systems, robotics, additive manufacturing, and “large-scale, multi-material and smart 3D printing,” among other categories, can apply to attend the three-day event.

Officials from the command’s science and technology directorate will evaluate applicants’ CV submissions, which are due July 5, to determine who will be invited. The gathering will be held in August in Tampa, Florida — where SOFWERX and SOCOM are headquartered — or another location, according to the notice.

After the event, a follow-on “rapid capability assessment” and “integrated technology sprints” may be conducted to demonstrate proofs of concept.

Officials from the SOCOM S&T directorate could also help facilitate business-to-business R&D agreements as sub-awards through the SOFWERX Partnership Intermediary Agreement; other transaction agreements; procurement for experimental purposes; cooperative research and development agreements; prizes; or FAR-based procurement contracts, according to the notice.

She has a great command of her coverage areas, especially aerospace topics. I think the more she covers IT, the more expert she’ll be in that area.

Written by Jon Harper

Jon Harper is Managing Editor of DefenseScoop, the Scoop News Group’s online publication focused on the Pentagon and its pursuit of new capabilities. He leads an award-winning team of journalists in providing breaking news and in-depth analysis on military technology and the ways in which it is shaping how the Defense Department operates and modernizes. You can also follow him on X (the social media platform formerly known as Twitter) @Jon_Harper_

defensescoop.com · by Jon Harper · June 10, 2024

14. Opinion | The U.S. military plans a ‘Hellscape’ to deter China from attacking Taiwan

Excerpts:

As a military official, Paparo has no official role in international diplomacy, but he does have strong opinions on what he calls China’s “revanchist, revisionist and expansionist” government. He believes that four decades of the West trying to convince China to liberalize politically has failed, giving way to a new, more dangerous era for Asia.“

The region has got two choices. The first is that they can submit, and as an end result give up some of their freedoms … or they can arm to the teeth,” he told me. “Both cases have direct implications to the security, the freedom and the well-being of the citizens of the United States of America.”

Paparo is right. Nobody thinks an arms race in Asia is an ideal outcome. But if Beijing insists on an arms race, the U.S. and its partners can’t afford to lose it. As George Washington said, “To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.” Absent more action by Washington, Xi may soon conclude Taiwan is his for the taking.

Opinion | The U.S. military plans a ‘Hellscape’ to deter China from attacking Taiwan

But a top U.S. military commander for Asia says time is running out to put the plan in place.

By Josh Rogin

Columnist

Follow author

June 10, 2024 at 8:00 a.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Josh Rogin · June 10, 2024

SINGAPORE — President Xi Jinping has called on China’s People’s Liberation Army to be ready to take Taiwan by force by 2027. The United States, together with regional partners, must ensure a Chinese invasion can’t succeed. That plan hinges on quickly building and deploying thousands of new drones that would swarm the Taiwan Strait and keep China’s military busy until more help can arrive, according to the top U.S. military official in the Pacific. But time is running out to turn these plans into a reality.

Under its long-standing policy of “strategic ambiguity,” the United States has never committed to coming to Taiwan’s defense if China attacks. President Biden has repeatedly said he would send the U.S. military to defend Taiwan, although he added a new caveat in his latest interview with Time, saying, “It would depend on the circumstances.” President Donald Trump seems less likely to intervene on Taiwan’s behalf, having told a GOP senator while in office that if China attacks, “there isn’t a f------ thing we can do about it.”

For any U.S. president, to send American men and women to defend a small democracy on the other side of the world would be a very tough call. That’s why Plan A is to deter Xi from ever attempting an invasion, by making sure that he never looks across the Taiwan Strait and sees an easy victory, Adm. Samuel Paparo, the new head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, told me in an interview.

“They want to offer the world a short, sharp war so that it is a fait accompli before the world can get their act together,” Paparo told me on the sidelines of the annual Shangri-La Dialogue, hosted by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “My job is to ensure that between now and 2027 and beyond, the U.S. military and the allies are capable of prevailing.”

China’s likely strategy is to overwhelm Taiwan with a massive attack with little warning, Paparo said. Xi doesn’t want to repeat Russian President Vladimir Putin’s mistake in Ukraine in 2022, when Russia’s initial full-scale invasion failed and devolved into a long war of attrition.

The key to thwarting Xi’s assumed strategy is a U.S. strategy called “Hellscape,” Paparo told me. The idea is that as soon as China’s invasion fleet begins moving across the 100-mile waterway that separates China and Taiwan, the U.S. military would deploy thousands of unmanned submarines, unmanned surface ships and aerial drones to flood the area and give Taiwanese, U.S. and partner forces time to mount a full response.

“I want to turn the Taiwan Strait into an unmanned hellscape using a number of classified capabilities,” Paparo said. “So that I can make their lives utterly miserable for a month, which buys me the time for the rest of everything.”

“I can’t tell you what’s in it,” he replied when pressed about details. “But it’s real and it’s deliverable.”

There are some public signs the Hellscape plan is making progress. In March, the Defense Department announced it would spend $1 billion on a program called “Replicator” to build swarms of unmanned surface ships and aerial drones for this very mission. Paparo said the Replicator program shows that the United States is also learning lessons from the Russia-Ukraine war, where Ukraine has innovated with drone technology.

The timeline for delivery of these systems is unclear. If the drone swarms aren’t ready when the attack comes, that could raise the prospects of a protracted conflict that would incur heavy losses for U.S. Naval and Air Force assets and would likely expand to include allies such as Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, according to most war game exercises conducted at U.S. think tanks.

Even if “Hellscape” comes together in time, drone swarms alone will not match Beijing’s massive military buildup on its side of the Strait. The PLA is expanding its nuclear, naval, air force, cyber, intelligence and electronic warfare capabilities at record speeds. According to Paparo, China’s military budget is likely three times what Beijing publicly claims, which would put it at about $700 billion annually. Meanwhile, Indo-Pacific Command’s budget is short $11 billion of what it needs this year alone, according to a letter sent to Congress in March by Paparo’s predecessor.

Financing the defense plan is not the only problem. The U.S. military currently has no reliable way to stop China’s hypersonic “carrier killer” cruise missiles. U.S. space assets are also vulnerable to Chinese attack. U.S. military deliveries to Taiwan are way behind schedule. Japanese officials told me the Biden administration is dragging its feet on Tokyo’s request to establish a new joint task force to help prepare for a conflict over Taiwan or in the South China Sea, where China is also getting more aggressive.

Also complicating planning is that a full-scale invasion isn’t Xi’s only option. China might stop short of attacking and simply blockade the island, as it seemed to practice last month after Taiwan inaugurated President Lai Ching-te, who is also referred to as William Lai. Beijing is also using economic coercion, political interference and disinformation to pressure the Taiwanese people into reunification and mess with their minds. Countering these threats falls outside of Indo-Pacific Command’s remit.

As a military official, Paparo has no official role in international diplomacy, but he does have strong opinions on what he calls China’s “revanchist, revisionist and expansionist” government. He believes that four decades of the West trying to convince China to liberalize politically has failed, giving way to a new, more dangerous era for Asia.

“The region has got two choices. The first is that they can submit, and as an end result give up some of their freedoms … or they can arm to the teeth,” he told me. “Both cases have direct implications to the security, the freedom and the well-being of the citizens of the United States of America.”

Paparo is right. Nobody thinks an arms race in Asia is an ideal outcome. But if Beijing insists on an arms race, the U.S. and its partners can’t afford to lose it. As George Washington said, “To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.” Absent more action by Washington, Xi may soon conclude Taiwan is his for the taking.

The Washington Post · by Josh Rogin · June 10, 2024

15. US and Israel Would Conduct Annual Tunnel Exercises Under House Plan

Why not include South Korea too? There are more underground tunnels and facilities in north Korea than anywhere in the world. And that is not just an "irregular warfare" problem. And the tunnels of Namas and Hezbollah were built with north Korean advice and assistance. But we just cannot anticipate the future.

US and Israel Would Conduct Annual Tunnel Exercises Under House Plan

Pending House defense policy bill calls for first-ever drills
House defense bill lauds US technology in Hamas tunnel search

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-10/us-israel-would-conduct-annual-tunnel-exercises-under-house-plan?srnd=true&sref=hhjZtX76

By Anthony Capaccio

June 10, 2024 at 12:16 PM EDT

The latest draft of the House Armed Services Committee’s $895 billion defense spending bill would require the US to conduct joint exercises with Israel aimed at improving the countries’ ability to fight militants and smugglers in underground tunnels, part of a push to counter a key advantage of Hamas and other groups.

Section 1233 of the proposed legislation would “require military exercises in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility to conduct an annual counter-tunneling exercise with Israel.” It would authorize an additional $30 million for research and technology in an ongoing “United States-Israel Anti-Tunnel Cooperation” project.

That’s on top of $323 million Congress has provided since 2016 when the effort started, according to the Congressional Research Service.

According to the pending legislation, US-funded technology initiatives developed by a little-known Pentagon “Irregular Warfare Technical Support Directorate” have enabled Israeli Defense Forces to discover “over 1,500 new tunnel shafts built under community structures including hospitals, schools, and homes in Gaza including 350 to 450 miles of tunnels,” since the war with Hamas that started October 7.

The unit’s international program “has produced technological advances in subterranean capabilities and monitoring, counter-unmanned aerial systems, maritime security, and robotics. Many of these technologies have been applicable to the Israel and Hamas conflict,” it said.

The bill kicks off negotiations on the annual defense policy legislation, considered must-pass because it authorizes Pentagon programs and pay for troops. The House is expected to consider the measure, and likely hundreds of amendments, in the coming days. The Senate Armed Services Committee will consider its version June 12.

16. U.S. Defenses Are Faltering, but Japan Can Help

This is quite an admission. We made a strategic mistake following the end of the Cold War.

U.S. Defenses Are Faltering, but Japan Can Help

America consolidated too much after the Cold War, making the alliance more important than ever.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-defenses-are-faltering-but-japan-can-help-f31c8872?st=e8uvjfgntd43mka&utm

By Rahm Emanuel

June 9, 2024 1:15 pm ET

A member of the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force stands guard in Funabashi, Japan, Jan. 18, 2018. PHOTO: EUGENE HOSHIKO/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Tokyo

At an infamous 1993 dinner in Washington, Defense Secretary Les Aspin warned American defense-industry leaders that they should brace for a reduction in the Pentagon’s budget. The Cold War had ended and the country needed to consolidate.

That was true—to a point. Unfortunately, the U.S. drastically overshot the mark. Since the 1990s, the number of prime defense contractors has shrunk from 51 to five. The sector lost an estimated 17,000 companies between 2018 and 2023, and the number of public naval shipyards plummeted from a World War II-era peak of 11 to four today.

Some degree of streamlining made sense after the Cold War. Today’s security situation, however, requires a fundamental rethinking. Within the first two months of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. had supplied Kyiv with about a third of America’s Stinger anti-air and Javelin antiarmor missile stockpiles. Washington has since strained to keep up with demand for these and other weapons and to fulfill its pledges to allies.

Developing plans to rebuild our capacity is paramount. America’s global security strategy calls for being prepared to fight in 1½ theaters—meaning to defeat one foe while holding another off. At present, we’d struggle to meet our needs in one. As war rages in the Middle East and Europe and tensions flare in the Indo-Pacific, our military industrial complex has been revealed as the weak link in our strategic posture.

I’ve had a front-row seat to much of this dysfunction and deficiency. Defense firms have failed to meet production schedules and budgets, impeding our ability to deter and defend. Japan is ready to double its production of the Patriot PAC-3 surface-to-air missile system, but supply-chain issues and red tape threaten to delay the project by up to five years.

The U.S. doubtless needs to bolster its defense budgets to counter multiple threats. But more money on top of a broken system won’t suffice. Increased spending won’t bring us any closer, say, to building two nuclear submarines a year, up from 1.2. Two subs a year will remain an elusive goal unless we overhaul our outdated attitudes and approaches.

In any such reform, we must consider how trusted allies like Japan can contribute more. Having revised its policy on arms exports and committing itself to doubling defense spending to 2% of gross domestic product, Japan is assuming more responsibility in its alliance with the U.S. With its superior manufacturing capacity, the country has the potential to supercharge our industries and enhance our readiness.

Japanese defense firms have built a well-earned reputation for producing quality work on time and within budget. I saw this in February, when Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro and I toured a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries shipyard building a dozen state-of-the-art Mogami-class frigates, and at a tour of the company’s F-35 fighter-jet factory near Nagoya.

President Biden and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida appreciate the urgency of adopting a new approach. In April, they unveiled the Forum on Defense Industrial Cooperation, Acquisition and Sustainment—a series of meetings in Tokyo this week, dedicated to improving our nations’ collaboration on defense. That this forum is taking place less than two months after it was announced illustrates how serious the task is. Advanced missile co-production, aircraft sustainment and ship repair are only a few items on the agenda.

The last topic, ships, will be especially important. China’s naval fleet, underpinned by the world’s largest shipbuilding industry, is expected to grow from more than 370 to 435 by 2030. Japan is well-positioned to serve as a bulwark. Its shipyards could help the U.S. tackle its maintenance backlog, which was more than 4,000 days between 2015 and 2019, according to a 2020 Government Accountability Office report. Expanding the scope of Japanese shipyards’ repair work would free up American shipyards to focus on new production and enable our warships to remain in the region as a peacetime deterrent or to immediately return to action during conflict.

While the Tokyo forum can’t solve all our defense-industry challenges, it can serve as a blueprint for how to leverage allies’ industrial strengths. Rebuilding America’s readiness for war—and peace—will require determination, adaptability and comprehensive reform.

Patience isn’t my strong suit, but the defense industrial bureaucracy could use a dose of urgency. Business as usual no longer suffices, and there is no time to lose. The credibility of our deterrence and ability to defend our global interests is at stake.

Mr. Emanuel is U.S. ambassador to Japan.

17. Denial Is the Worst Except for All the Others: Getting the U.S. Theory of Victory Right for a War with China

Conclusion

Any war between the United States and China would involve significant costs and risks, including potential nuclear use. These costs and risks are why U.S. policy aims to deter such a war from happening in the first place. But civilian analysts and military officers still need to prepare for the possibility that deterrence might fail. If the United States chooses to intervene in defense of Taiwan, a denial theory of victory focused on narrowly scoped war aims can help reduce but not eliminate escalation risks. While there will be strong temptations to reach for all available tools, including the kinds of cost-imposing measures the U.S. military has used in past conflicts, fighting a nuclear-armed great power requires a fundamentally different mindset. The United States may also have to persuade its allies to adopt similar restraint in their war aims and operations, especially given Taiwan and Japan’s growing long-range strike capabilities that could enable their own punitive strikes against the Chinese mainland. To channel Winston Churchill’s famous quotation about democracy, denial is the worst theory of victory except for all the others. A denial theory of victory does not guarantee success, but it offers the best chance to strike an effective balance between the desire to win the war and the imperative to manage escalation.

Denial Is the Worst Except for All the Others: Getting the U.S. Theory of Victory Right for a War with China - War on the Rocks

JACOB HEIM, NATHAN BEAUCHAMP-MUSTAFAGA, AND ZACHARY BURDETTE

warontherocks.com · by Jacob Heim · June 11, 2024

While Washington continues to debate its Ukraine policy, everyone can be relieved that no side has employed any nuclear weapons yet. When the United States and its partners intervened after Russia’s full-scale invasion, there were serious and well-reasoned concerns about the extent to which the conflict could escalate. These worst-case scenarios never unfolded partly because the United States and its partners calibrated their intervention, rejecting proposals like a no-fly zone that could have brought the U.S. and coalition militaries into direct contact with Russian forces. This proxy warfare strategy helped the United States manage escalation in a similar fashion to various proxy conflicts throughout the Cold War.

In contrast to this indirect defense of Ukraine, President Joe Biden has repeatedly threatened to defend Taiwan directly with U.S. forces. A direct conflict with a nuclear-armed great power like China would push the United States into untested waters that it managed to avoid during the Cold War and create escalation risks comparable to worst-case fears about the war in Ukraine. The protracted conflict in Ukraine should serve as a stark reminder that wars are easier to start than to end and that fighting a nuclear-armed great power requires a fundamentally different mindset than what the United States and its allies became accustomed to over the past three decades.

The United States should enter any conflict with a nuclear-armed great power like China with a theory of victory that outlines how the war will end and how it will manage escalation. Theories of victory are causal stories about how to defeat an adversary. They are the principal tenets of a strategy rather than strategies themselves, and U.S. presidents have historically crated them with their most senior military advisors. Developing a theory of victory requires identifying the conditions under which an enemy will stop fighting and then outlining how to shape the conflict in a way that creates those conditions. China’s burgeoning nuclear arsenal, long-range conventional strike capabilities, and cyber exploits against U.S. critical infrastructure are strengthening its ability to escalate in diverse ways, including striking the U.S. homeland. To avoid a Pyrrhic victory, theories of victory against nuclear powers must consider how to keep the war limited.

This article outlines several potential theories of victory for a U.S.-Chinese war over Taiwan, focusing on denial and military cost imposition because they are the most viable and influential. We argue that a denial theory of victory is the best way to strike the balance between the desire to maximize the chances of U.S. success and the imperative to manage escalation. The U.S.-led coalition should avoid theories of victory that rely on military cost imposition, especially because of the difficulties of finding a “sweet spot” of targets that are valuable enough to influence Beijing’s decision-making but not so valuable that attacking them causes unacceptable escalation. This is a dilemma we call the “Goldilocks challenge.”

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Potential Theories of Victory

Drawing from research on strategy and coercion, we identify five potential military theories of victory that are universal to all countries and all conflicts. The first candidate, dominance, relies on brute force to eliminate the enemy’s physical ability to continue fighting. Like the U.S. defeat of Germany in 1945 and Iraq in 2003, dominance aims to comprehensively defeat the Chinese military and potentially impose far-reaching surrender terms, such as regime change or forcing Beijing to recognize Taiwan’s independence. Despite the emotional and domestic political appeal, dominance is simply not viable against nuclear-armed great powers. A defining feature of the nuclear age is that the nuclear-armed “loser” of a conventional war can still reach out and annihilate the “winner” even after the defeat of its conventional forces. Destroying China’s military and industrial capacity to the point that it could not keep fighting would plausibly cause nuclear escalation by threatening the Chinese Communist Party’s vital interests, if not survival.

The U.S. coalition should therefore rely instead on coercive theories of victory that persuade China to stop fighting even while it retains the ability to continue the conflict. Because the decision to stop fighting is ultimately a cost-benefit calculation, these theories focus on manipulating different aspects of the costs and benefits. Additionally, for coercion to work, the United States and its allies should define their war aims narrowly, such as preserving Taiwan’s de facto independence even without a formal settlement, so that Beijing is less likely to view the costs of accepting defeat as intolerable. Keeping these war aims limited will be a key challenge. There will likely be strong domestic pressure to adopt expansive goals, like “punishing” China for starting the conflict, as seen in the Russian-Ukrainian context, and preventing Beijing from attempting this sort of aggression ever again. The United States and its allies must resist these pressures because they would make war termination more difficult and escalation more likely by putting China in an increasingly desperate position.

The two most viable coercive theories of victory are denial and military cost imposition. Denial focuses on reducing China’s benefits from continuing the war. The storyline for denial is that destroying the power projection capabilities that China is using to seize Taiwan can persuade Beijing that it is unlikely to accomplish its objectives and that it is better off ending the war because further fighting will not change the eventual outcome. This would likely involve interdicting the air- and sealift assets that China needs to transport and sustain forces on Taiwan. While China might pay a high price for the privilege of seizing Taiwan while it seemed feasible, denial aims to provide new information to the Chinese leadership that the benefits needed to justify its war-time losses will not materialize.

Military cost imposition focuses on increasing China’s costs from continuing the war. The storyline is that military measures like a maritime blockade of China’s seaborne trade or strategic air attacks against other pressure points, like war-supporting industry and political leadership, can convince Beijing that the war is too costly to continue. The critical source of leverage is not China’s beliefs about whether it can achieve its war aims but whether the U.S. coalition can make the process so costly and painful that Beijing concludes it is no longer worth trying. Denial and military cost imposition are not mutually exclusive, so the United States can combine them, but doing so creates additional escalatory risks.

The Case Against Military Cost Imposition

Military cost imposition is a viable theory of victory under three conditions. Satisfying all three in a war against China would be very difficult.

The biggest obstacle is navigating the Goldilocks challenge of finding a coercive sweet spot. The central dilemma is finding targets that are sufficiently valuable to persuade Beijing to abandon its military campaign for Taiwan but not so valuable that Beijing risks significant escalation to retaliate and to compel the U.S. coalition to stop attacking those pressure points. The most influential coercive levers to pull are therefore the ones that generate the highest escalation risks. Different U.S. administrations may have a range of views on what constitutes “unacceptable” escalation, but examples include nuclear use and widespread conventional attacks on the U.S. homeland. The primary risk is not an immediate Chinese nuclear use against the U.S. homeland. Rather, it is that limited retaliatory measures, like Chinese conventional strikes on the U.S. homeland or tactical nuclear use, could set in motion an “escalation spiral” where both sides engage in tit-for-tat retaliation that becomes increasingly severe and difficult to control.

Finding targets that provide sufficient coercive leverage is challenging because China values Taiwan so highly. For example, China is unlikely to abandon Taiwan to save its overseas military bases in Africa. While China might currently prioritize economic growth over controlling Taiwan, a scenario in which Beijing has rolled the iron dice might reflect a change in the regime’s priorities and a greater willingness to run risks. Proponents of a blockade argue that it would provide enough leverage because it targets the “Chinese economy and hence the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party,” which could jeopardize the regime’s domestic control. But if strangling China’s economy threatens the regime’s survival, U.S. and coalition leaders cannot be confident Beijing would not resort to significant escalation to compel the United States to stop attacking these targets.

Identifying sensitive targets that would not provoke unacceptable escalation creates its own challenges. Beijing has good reasons to exaggerate its red lines, and escalation is unpredictable. While some targets, such as China’s leadership and nuclear forces, clearly cross the line, others are ambiguous. In fact, Chinese decision-makers themselves may not know how they will react in advance given the emotions and imperfect information of war. Beijing’s red lines might shift unpredictably over time, and escalation spirals could also make it hard to anticipate the ultimate endpoint of retaliation. U.S. and Chinese leaders historically struggled to understand their adversary’s intentions and coercive thresholds during crises such as the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1969 Sino-Soviet border conflict.

The United States has faced this Goldilocks challenge before. In 1980, U.S. officials debated how best to prevent the Soviet Union from seizing Iran and its oil reserves. Because the joint staff doubted that it could militarily defeat an invasion, it proposed a strategy to strike Soviet targets unrelated to the invasion in order to impose coercive pain (cost imposition) and to raise the prospect that further fighting would lead to escalation (brinkmanship). After the undersecretary of defense for policy asked the joint staff to specify exactly “what escalation and where” would accomplish U.S. objectives, the joint staff failed to identify a sweet spot that could change Soviet calculations but avoid escalation: “The only category of ripostes which has the possibility of raising Soviet costs to a level commensurate with the gains of occupying Iran involves major escalation of the conflict,” risking “a worldwide NATO-Warsaw Pact war with the attendant risks of nuclear escalation.”

Recent events also illustrate that the Goldilocks challenge is a recurring dilemma. In Ukraine, Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian population centers and energy infrastructure and Ukraine’s attacks on Russian energy infrastructure have both thus far failed to compel an end to the war. In the Middle East, the United States often faces a challenge in imposing enough costs on Iran to compel it to rein in its proxies but not so much that it provokes a wider war. Iran and Israel have faced similar challenges in calibrating military strikes and retaliatory measures, almost losing control during an escalation spiral in April 2024 that narrowly avoided further escalation.

The second major obstacle for military cost imposition is generating the necessary leverage quickly enough. If the coercive sweet spot does exist, the U.S. military needs to attack the targets fast enough and at a large enough scale to build pressure within an operationally relevant timeframe. If policymakers want to use military cost imposition as an independent theory of victory, the relevant timeframe is how long it takes China to seize Taiwan in a fait accompli. This might take only a few months or even weeks without a direct U.S. denial defense against Chinese invasion forces. Once China holds Taiwan, rolling back its control is extremely risky because endowment effects could make Beijing willing to escalate dramatically (including up to nuclear use) before giving up such a hard-earned prize. The problem with military cost imposition is that blockades are slow-moving and graduated measures that need many months or years to reach their greatest coercive impact. On the other hand, measures that can quickly generate large costs, like widespread air attacks on China’s critical energy and transportation infrastructure, carry much larger up-front escalation risks. History suggests that even strategic air attacks build pressure much more slowly than proponents envision. For example, despite initial optimism of rapid success, the U.S. coercive bombing campaign against Kosovo in 1999 took 78 days to work against a vastly weaker regional power, which capitulated only after its own counter-coercion campaign failed.

The final challenge is providing Beijing credible assurances that the pain will stop if it complies with U.S. and coalition coercive demands. If Beijing does not believe U.S. assurances that compliance will bring relief, it has no incentive to stop fighting. It may even fear that concessions will embolden further coercion and invite harsher demands. This requirement is concerning because China is highly suspicious of U.S. motives, and military measures designed to maximize Beijing’s pain could convince its leaders they were fighting a total war for the regime’s survival. Wartime fog and friction often cause leaders to judge their adversary’s intentions through a worst-case lens, such as interpreting attacks on domestic targets like critical infrastructure or domestic security services as attempts to destabilize Chinese society and thereby facilitate regime change. This could make the costs of accepting defeat appear intolerable or even existential.

The Case for Denial

A denial theory of victory’s core requirement is to convince Beijing that it lacks the ability to seize Taiwan militarily at this time and that further fighting will not change the war’s eventual outcome. While great powers like China will always have the ability to protract or escalate a conflict, denial aims to persuade Beijing that these are bad options that will not solve its core problems. By avoiding broader cost imposition at the start of the war, a denial theory of victory gives Beijing space to decide to stop the war after it realizes that its military operation has failed. A historical example would be Argentina’s decision to end the Falklands War after it realized that it could not hold the islands. Notably, the United Kingdom did not require that Argentina renounce its claims to the islands.

A denial theory of victory requires having a coalition able to defeat a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan, but it does not rest on the assumption that China will immediately stop fighting after the invasion fails. It is certainly possible that China would shift to a blockade or strategic bombing of Taiwan to see if it could still achieve its original political objective of unification. If the United States and its coalition partners succeed in putting China in this position, they have already significantly narrowed China’s plausible pathways to military victory: Taiwan would be the first nation in history to surrender its sovereignty to a blockade or strategic air attack. Faced with mounting losses and without a clear pathway to achieve its original objectives, the ideal scenario is Beijing then claims “victory” by “teaching the enemy a lesson,” as it did with Vietnam in 1979, and stops fighting.

If the war becomes protracted, skeptics may doubt that a denial theory of victory could place enough pressure on Beijing to compel an end to the war, increasing the temptation to turn to military cost imposition. But the United States should at least wait to see if it can first end the war through denial before it deliberately widens the conflict by striking Chinese pressure points unrelated to the defense of Taiwan. Additionally, Beijing would still face strong pressures for war termination even if the United States did not use military strikes to maximize its pain. War is inherently costly, and those costs may look increasingly untenable and risky to Beijing if it lacks a clear pathway to seizing Taiwan. By drawing out the conflict, China could face tens of thousands of casualties and extensive losses of platforms it took decades to build and that it may want to preserve for a future attempt to take Taiwan. The U.S. coalition could also use economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation as non-military sources of pressure. If all these measures still fail to end the war, the United States has the option to use military cost imposition as a last resort, though this would still require navigating the Goldilocks challenge.

There exist scenarios where Beijing’s initial invasion attempt fails and the war turns into a wide and grinding struggle between the two camps. In such scenarios, both sides may prefer to have begun their cost imposition efforts as early as possible to give them maximal time to accumulate. A denial theory of victory accepts the risk of delaying the start of this broader type of conflict (and the escalation danger it creates) in exchange for the opportunity to discover whether Beijing wants to stop fighting before the war turns into a hegemonic cage match. The alternative is to risk turning a limited war into an existential fight from the outset.

Other skeptics may agree that denial would be ideal but argue that China’s growing military power has made it operationally infeasible. The sense that denial is too hard has contributed to growing interest in military cost imposition as an alternative to the hard work of preparing the joint force for denial. This counter-argument is too pessimistic. Denial remains feasible even if it has become more difficult. China is at a structural disadvantage in that amphibious assaults are immensely challenging operations with which China has no real-world experience. While the U.S. military is increasingly at a quantitative disadvantage, it retains a qualitative edge in key areas such as undersea warfare and penetrating long-range strike. The U.S. government assesses that an invasion “would likely strain” the Chinese military and remains “a significant political and military risk.” Unclassified wargames support this assessment.

Conclusion

Become a Member

Jacob Heim is a senior researcher at the RAND Corporation. He served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and holds degrees in international relations and mathematics.

Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga is a policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, where he focuses on Asian security issues. He holds degrees in international affairs and Chinese language.

Zachary Burdette is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a pre-doctoral research fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and an adjunct researcher at RAND.

This article is based on a recent RAND report that assesses alternative theories of victory for a hypothetical war between the United States and China over Taiwan.

Image: IceUnshattered via Wikimedia Commons

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Jacob Heim · June 11, 2024

18. What Does European Union Advising of Ukrainian Troops Mean for the Bloc’s Security Policies? An Inside Look at the Training Mission

Excerpts:

NATO and EU assistance to Ukraine since the 2022 invasion is reshaping Europe’s strategic environment. Europeans who previously did not have to think deeply about either their own countries’ military capacities or strategic ends find these issues unavoidable in the face of growing Russian belligerence and imperialism. Ukrainian assistance missions and collaborations are gateways for addressing these issues in tandem, as they grow out of the long-term NATO and now EU frameworks. At the same time, Ukraine’s partners must learn the right lessons from the Russo-Ukrainian War, which increasingly points to needing more flexible military institutions that can quickly adapt. The training of Ukrainian forces will continue, but the bigger question is when Western militaries will start introducing lessons learned from this experience into their military doctrine, manuals, weapon systems, and tactics.

What Does European Union Advising of Ukrainian Troops Mean for the Bloc’s Security Policies? An Inside Look at the Training Mission - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Jahara Matisek, Sascha E. Ostanina, William Reno · June 11, 2024

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Editor’s Note: Since 2021, the authors have worked as a research team that has visited numerous locations across Europe to observe Ukrainian troops being trained. This article analyzes the European Union’s Training Mission in Support of Ukraine (EUMAM UA) and seeks to identify its impact on the EU’s security policies.

Visiting a German Army base in the vicinity of Berlin, we watch five Ukrainian infantrymen assault a neatly arranged trench, again and again. It’s two o’clock in the afternoon, and they have been practicing this skillset for five hours that day already. Tired and hurried faces, we watch this small group of Ukrainians practice a trench assault, with an energetic German noncommissioned officer shouting out corrections and coaching the troops alongside a German soldier translating it into Ukrainian. We walk around the densely forested training site watching other similar small groups repeat the same trench assault maneuver, seeing signs of exhaustion among some as they move past the halfway mark of the required eight hours of training for the day.

This exercise is part of a forty-day basic infantry course meant to convert Ukrainian soldiers into assault teams capable of confidently taking over Russian trenches. The course constitutes the European Union Military Assistance Mission to Ukraine (EUMAM), the first ever EU training mission organized on EU territories. Since November 2022, the EU has trained over fifty-two thousand Ukrainian troops, with twenty-four EU member states providing military personnel and training modules to Ukrainian forces. EUMAM is one of three multilateral training programs for Ukrainians. Collectively, over 130,000 Ukrainians have been trained by the international community at eighty locations around the world. The US-led Joint Multinational Training Group–Ukraine (JMTG-U), including rotational US forces, has trained over nineteen thousand Ukrainians since 2022. The British-led Operation Interflex and its predecessor Operation Orbital have trained over sixty thousand Ukrainians since 2015. The disparity in the number of trained Ukrainian soldiers between the US training mission and those led by the UK and EU is a function of US prioritization of military readiness requirements, training exercises, and deployments across eastern Europe to deter Russia and reassure NATO allies.

During our travel, we visit several other training locations around Berlin. We arrive at a Bundeswehr urban training ground with modified trench systems to watch an eight-man Ukrainian trench assault team clear fifty meters of trenches. It’s a slow, tough slog, as the lead Ukrainian throws a training grenade about every two to three meters to clear each corner. The observing group of training officers share that each Ukrainian soldier should carry ten grenades for this type of an assault. In the harsh reality of the Russo-Ukrainian war, an experienced Ukrainian soldier laments that they’re lucky to have two grenades for trench clearing operations. The soldier declares they wouldn’t assault a trench without a supporting drone to surveil, allowing them to conserve grenades.

If things weren’t bad enough for Ukrainians assaulting trenches, the trainers mention that the Russians intentionally abandon booby-trapped trenches to wipe out Ukrainian assault teams. They recommend Bangalore torpedo explosives to preemptively clear Russian trenches due to the possibility of booby-trapping. In other cases, Russian forces use tunneling techniques to breach Ukrainian trenches. The trainers shrug about how to adapt their trench warfighting curriculum for these emerging trends. One says, “No doctrine or manual exists in NATO for this type of war.”

Training for a War you Haven’t Experienced

The training we observe near Berlin involves military advisors from various European countries. Training modules include Ukrainians being taught on Leopard 1A5 tanks and various infantry tactics for trench and urban warfare. We meet three US National Guard troops who are helping teach the EUMAM advanced assault sapper course. We see and talk to Ukrainian troops as young as nineteen and as old as sixty-nine. According to one German training officer, the average age of Ukrainians in training cohorts was thirty-four when training began in earnest in 2023, but in 2024 they report that the average age now varies around mid-forties.

With Kyiv recently passing a new mobilization bill, which lowers the draft age from twenty-seven to twenty-five, Ukraine will form four new infantry brigades. The addition of these soldiers couldn’t come at a better time: Russia’s assault on the city of Kharkiv with five battalions forced Ukrainian retreats in some sectors due to a lack of experienced soldiers. These Russian territorial advances and evidence that Russian forces have incorporated organizational changes and new technologies underscore the urgency of deploying more capable Ukrainian troops to counter these heightened threats. These developments have even caused NATO member states to consider sending advisors to provide training inside Ukraine.

The ultimate form and intensity of this assistance will depend upon agreements between NATO members, based on their assessments of the urgency of this mission and the risk of escalation attending the positioning of NATO member states’ personnel on Ukrainian territory. But it is worth noting that Ukraine’s supporters stand at a strategic crossroads. Growing political fatigue and a renewed Russian offensive test the credibility of Western commitments. Ukraine needs the right quantity/quality mix of equipment and properly trained personnel, as it is estimated that the Ukrainians “may have lost over 70% of their combat experienced personnel since 2022.” The American political struggle to approve the $61 billion aid package for Ukraine signals that the long-term US commitment to support Ukraine has become less certain. These developments tested Europeans.

The EU was able to partially replace US aid to ensure the training and arming of Ukrainian soldiers, but more is needed to stave off Russian offensives this summer. Results of this test are rather disheartening. Earlier this year, the EU failed to deliver a promised one million 155-millimeter artillery shells to Ukraine, failing short by almost 50 percent of the declared target. The Czech initiative to procure eight hundred thousand shells outside the EU is facing similar delays, partially due to an unwillingness of some EU member states to chip in funds. The recently unveiled European Defense Industrial Strategy and its financial leg, the European Defense Industrial Program, aimed at encouraging greater cooperation among European defense manufacturers, are yet to be approved and receive at least minimal funding.

We have found in our field visits there are numerous challenges and adaptations going on across Europe to properly train and equip Ukraine for the emerging “cyberpunk form of warfare” that “is blending old fighting styles with new technology.” Speaking to dozens of different European military advisors, we ask about how trainers keep the curriculum current as battlefield conditions in Ukraine change—something most of the trainers have never experienced firsthand. Some trainers respond that they watch open-source videos on social media on a regular basis to observe Russian and Ukrainian battlefield adaptations. Other advisors visit museums and libraries to dust off old doctrine and tactical manuals from World Wars I and II to understand how to provide appropriate techniques for trench warfare training. Most EUMAM personnel tell us that as teachers, they are now being trained by the trainees when it comes to understanding what modern warfare looks like.

There are other serious challenges in the current efforts to train Ukrainian soldiers. The most consistent among those EUMAM trainers cite are language and culture issues. We find the same is true based on our other visits with American, British, and Canadian military trainers. Some of the older German officers mention that their knowledge of East German military institutions helps them understand most of the organizational and doctrinal issues the Ukrainians face due to their shared Soviet legacies. The other common problem is a lack of Ukrainian transparency. Western trainers and apparently Ukrainian military leaders do not have adequate mechanisms to assess the effectiveness of specific training efforts, in terms of direct battlefield effects or on training efforts inside Ukraine. In other cases, Ukrainian authorities do not send soldiers that are appropriate for training programs across Europe. One Ukrainian soldier enrolled in the sapper course complains about how he was randomly thrown on a bus for this course even though he is a trained FPV (first-person view) drone operator with a year and a half of experience. These conversations are a common feature in all of our visits.

Visiting the training base for Leopard tanks, we are greeted by the Danish commanding officer that tells us all about the twelve Ukrainian tank crews his combined Danish-German unit is training. He shows us across the training compound, to include the virtual tank training facility where we observe dozens of highly motivated Ukrainian soldiers sitting at computers with Leopard gunnery wheels attached. Using an upgraded version of the commercially available Steel Beasts, we watch Ukrainian crewmembers fight enemy tanks on their digital battlefield. Elsewhere, we see the Ukrainian tank drivers receiving basic maintenance training.

As the day with the Danish commanding officer wraps up, he tells us how the Ukrainians want to integrate drones into the Leopard tank training. He laments that the six-week course is about mastering tank maneuver and tactics, and the addition of drones would further complicate Ukrainian training. However, without drones, Ukrainian soldiers, trained in Europe to quickly maneuver these tanks in formation, return home to continue using their tanks mainly as artillery. The Danish commanding officer hopes the Ukrainians will use the Leopard tank for its speed, boasting that “these tanks are meant to purr quickly across the battlefield.” Yet, this degree of maneuver has been absent from battlefields in Ukraine since the end of Ukraine’s fall 2022 counteroffensive and the onset of Russian defense in depth. Those of us who have visited Ukraine can confirm that indeed tanks are used more as fixed artillery: as these expensive pieces of equipment are vulnerable to attack from relatively cheap drones, Ukrainians are seeking to preserve Western military kit to avoid testing their allies’ generosity.

Ramifications of Training the Ukrainians

In speaking with numerous European military personnel, most admit that their own training and readiness has gone way down, as their militaries have made it their highest priority of assisting and equipping the Ukrainians. A British Army officer at Land Operations Command estimated that the UK’s landpower service had sacrificed up to 75 percent of its own training and readiness to assist the Ukrainians. Most European military personnel we speak to mention that their leaders have decided to focus largely on them teaching and equipping the Ukrainians at the expense of their own military preparedness, in part because they believe they are applying their comparative advantages in training and advising to advance the common effort to support Ukraine’s resistance against Russian aggression. In the early months of the Russo-Ukrainian war, some European militaries decided to sacrifice their military readiness, preparedness, training, weapons, and ammunition stocks because they believed that the United States will aid them in a crisis under the NATO Article 5 umbrella. Political uncertainty in the United States, however, is forcing Europeans to develop security policies flexible enough to either leverage US assistance or manage without it.

Several broad policy questions emerge concerning American and European security assistance as the Russo-Ukrainian War is well into its third year. First, is the EU willing to pursue its elevated security ambitions regardless of the continuity and level of US commitment going forward? Surprised with the strength of its own response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Europe is more able than at any time in recent decades able to at least fathom a greater degree of self-reliance on European defense. Yet, European security requires investment in these countries’ defense if the EU seriously plans to fulfill its military ambitions.

Second, what does EU assistance to Ukraine mean for the EU security posture? Formal EU involvement in the conflict has opened new avenues of collaboration, as the non-NATO militaries of Cyprus and Ireland contribute forces to train Ukrainians. Divisions exist: Hungary, a NATO and EU member, partially opposes EUMAM, and Austria, an EU member but non-NATO state, supports the mission but is not actively part of it. The EU parliamentary elections and elections in specific EU countries impact collaboration, a fact that is integral to Russia’s strategic calculations.

Finally, what does European strategic autonomy look like, and how does assistance to Ukraine (re)shape that concept? While visiting the EU Military Planning and Conduct Capability strategic headquarters in Brussels, it became apparent that the politics of the conflict are reshaping European unity and consensus. Some EU member states are more comfortable considering what it means for the EU to exercise strategic autonomy, outside the orbit of NATO, to more forcefully oppose Russia’s imperial ambitions in Ukraine. Other EU military staff and planners reluctantly mention that European strategic autonomy should be unified around consensus in Brussels, and not be as provocative as Paris is with its attempt at steering the EU toward confrontation with Moscow.

NATO and EU assistance to Ukraine since the 2022 invasion is reshaping Europe’s strategic environment. Europeans who previously did not have to think deeply about either their own countries’ military capacities or strategic ends find these issues unavoidable in the face of growing Russian belligerence and imperialism. Ukrainian assistance missions and collaborations are gateways for addressing these issues in tandem, as they grow out of the long-term NATO and now EU frameworks. At the same time, Ukraine’s partners must learn the right lessons from the Russo-Ukrainian War, which increasingly points to needing more flexible military institutions that can quickly adapt. The training of Ukrainian forces will continue, but the bigger question is when Western militaries will start introducing lessons learned from this experience into their military doctrine, manuals, weapon systems, and tactics.

Lieutenant Colonel Jahara “FRANKY” Matisek, PhD, (@JaharaMatisek) is a military professor in the national security affairs department at the United States Naval War College, research fellow with the European Resilience Initiative Center, and United States Department of Defense Minerva co–principal investigator for improving United States security assistance. He has published over one hundred articles and essays in peer-reviewed journals and policy-relevant outlets on strategy, warfare, and security assistance. He is a command pilot that was previously associate professor in the Military and Strategic Studies Department at the United States Air Force Academy.

Sascha E. Ostanina (@SaschaOstanina) is a policy fellow at the Berlin-based Jacques Delors Centre at the Hertie School and the codirector of the European Resilience Initiative Center. She is a political and security risk analyst, specializing in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Moldova, and the South Caucasus. Previously she was an external political and security analyst with the international consulting company S&P Global and a security consultant with the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Dr. William Reno is a professor and chair of the Political Science Department at Northwestern University. He has conducted fieldwork and interviews in conflict zones across Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East for over thirty years, having authored three books: Corruption and State Politics in Sierra Leone, Warlord Politics and African States, and Warfare in Independent Africa. He has published over two hundred articles in peer-reviewed journals and policy-relevant periodicals, and edited volumes on civil wars, rebels, and military assistance. He is the principal investigator for the US Department of Defense Minerva-funded program studying how the United States can improve foreign military training.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, Department of the Air Force, or Department of Defense. This article was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under award number FA9550-20-1-0277.

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Jahara Matisek, Sascha E. Ostanina, William Reno · June 11, 2024

19. America Is Losing the Arab World

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The region is at a pivot point—and the United States is theoretically well positioned to apply the necessary leverage to help secure a cease-fire in Gaza and help move the Israelis and Palestinians toward peace. To restore its regional credibility, however, the United States must lay out concrete, pragmatic steps toward a two-state solution, identifying what effective postwar governance in Gaza will look like and what Israelis and Palestinians must do to ensure that progress is made toward peace. Holding both Israeli and Palestinian leaders accountable is long overdue. The United States must not only sponsor peace talks but also insist on an end to the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

For too long, Arabs have perceived the United States as working to secure its own interests and those of allied Arab leaders ahead of the interests of ordinary citizens—even as Arab citizens seek greater support for democratization and anticorruption efforts. In addition, another Iranian-Israeli confrontation might not be as performative as the one that occurred in April 2024. It might be devastating. The United States must work to win the trust of Arab publics to contain Iran, not only covertly but with public, courageous, and effective policies.

The present situation offers the United States both dangers and opportunities. There is no straightforward equivalent to Morocco’s Western Sahara issue in most Arab countries. But the case of Morocco makes clear that when Arab citizens feel that the United States stands up for their interests, they judge it more favorably. The dangers of failing to address declining Arab support for the United States go beyond Gaza. Without a significant shift in U.S. support for Israel’s war, and without smart changes to U.S. policy to blunt growing Arab anti-Americanism in the longer term, other actors—including China—will continue to try to crowd the United States out of a leadership role in the Middle East.

America Is Losing the Arab World

And China Is Reaping the Benefits

By Michael Robbins, Amaney A. Jamal, and Mark Tessler

June 11, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Michael Robbins, Amaney A. Jamal, and Mark Tessler · June 11, 2024

October 7, 2023, was a watershed moment not just for Israel but for the Arab world. Hamas’s horrific attack occurred just as a new order appeared to be emerging in the region. Three years earlier, four members of the Arab League—Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—had launched processes to normalize their diplomatic relations with Israel. As the summer of 2023 drew to a close, the most important Arab country that still did not recognize Israel, Saudi Arabia, looked poised to do so, too.

Hamas’s assault and Israel’s subsequent devastating military operation in Gaza have curtailed this march toward normalization. Saudi Arabia has stated that it will not proceed with a normalization deal until Israel takes clear steps to facilitate the establishment of a Palestinian state. Jordan recalled its ambassador to Israel in November 2023, and a visit to Morocco by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu planned for late 2023 never materialized. Arab leaders have watched warily as their citizens have grown vocally opposed to the war in Gaza. In many Arab countries, thousands have turned out to protest Israel’s war and the humanitarian crisis it has produced. Protesters in Jordan and Morocco have also called for an end to their countries’ respective peace treaties with Israel, voicing frustration that their governments are not listening to the people.

October 7 may turn out to be a watershed moment for the United States, too. Because of the war in Gaza, Arab public opinion has turned sharply against Israel’s staunchest ally, the United States—a development that could confound U.S. efforts not only to help resolve the crisis in Gaza but also to contain Iran and push back against China’s growing influence in the Middle East. Since 2006, Arab Barometer, the nonpartisan research organization we run, has conducted biannual nationally representative opinion surveys in 16 Arab countries, capturing ordinary citizens’ views in a region that has little opinion polling. After the United States’ 2003 invasion of Iraq, other polls consistently found that few ordinary Arab citizens held positive views of the United States. By 2022, however, their attitudes had improved somewhat, with at least a third of respondents in nearly all countries Arab Barometer surveyed affirming that they held “a very favorable” or “somewhat favorable” opinion of the United States.

But surveys we conducted in five countries in late 2023 and early 2024 show that the United States’ standing among Arab citizens has declined dramatically. A poll in Tunisia conducted partially before and partially after October 7 strongly suggested that this shift occurred in response to the events in Gaza. Perhaps even more surprising, the surveys also made it clear that the United States’ loss has been China’s gain. Arab citizens’ views of China have warmed in our recent surveys, reversing a half-decade trend of weakening support for China in the Arab world. When asked if China has undertaken serious efforts to protect Palestinian rights, however, few respondents agreed. This result suggests that Arab views reflect a profound dissatisfaction with the United States rather than specific support for Chinese policies toward Gaza.

In the coming months and years, U.S. leaders will seek to end the conflict in Gaza and initiate negotiations toward a permanent settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The United States also hopes to safeguard the international economy by protecting the Red Sea from attacks by Iranian proxies and to cement a regional alliance that contains Iranian aggression and limits Chinese engagement in the region. To achieve any of these goals, however, Washington needs the partnership of Arab states, something that will be harder to get if Arab populations remain so skeptical of U.S. aims in the Middle East.

Since October 7, Arab public opinion has turned sharply against the United States.

U.S. analysts and politicians often imply that what they sometimes dismissively call “the Arab street” should be of little concern to American foreign policy. Because most Arab leaders are authoritarian, the argument goes, they do not care much about public opinion, and U.S. policymakers should therefore prioritize making deals with powerbrokers over winning the hearts and minds of Arab citizens. In general, however, the notion that Arab leaders are not constrained by public opinion is a myth. The Arab Spring uprisings toppled governments in four countries, and widespread protests in 2019 led to changes in leadership in four other Arab countries. Authoritarians, too, must consider the views of the people they govern. Few Arab leaders now want to be seen openly cooperating with Washington, given the sharp rise in anti-American sentiment among the populations they rule. Arab citizens’ anger at U.S. foreign policy could also have serious direct consequences for the United States. Our prior research based on data from opinion surveys in Algeria and Jordan has demonstrated that anger at U.S. foreign policy can cause citizens to have greater sympathy for acts of terror directed at the United States.

Some Arab Barometer findings, however, also reveal that Arabs’ growing skepticism about the United States’ role in the Middle East is not irreversible. Variations in opinion between publics in countries that the United States has treated differently indicate that the United States can change the way it is perceived in the Arab world by changing its policies. The survey results also suggest specific shifts in approach that would likely improve Arabs’ perceptions of the United States, including pushing harder for a cease-fire in Gaza, increasing U.S. humanitarian assistance to the territory and the rest of the region, and, in the longer term, working for a two-state solution. Ultimately, to win the trust of Arab citizens in the Middle East, the United States must show the same care for the suffering of the Palestinians that it does for that of the Israelis.

POLL VAULT

Each Arab Barometer survey polls over 1,200 respondents and is conducted in person in the respondent’s place of residence. These surveys question respondents on their views on a wide array of topics, including economic and religious issues, views of their governments, political participation, women’s rights, the environment, and international affairs. Since October 7, Arab Barometer has completed surveys in five diverse Arab countries: Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Mauritania, and Morocco.

Because Arab Barometer’s previous round of surveys in these countries was conducted between 2021 and 2022, factors other than the war in Gaza may have contributed to changes in public opinion between then and now. One additional poll, however, happened to provide an invaluable benchmark, allowing us to deduce that certain key shifts in opinion probably occurred much more recently. Between September 13 and November 4, 2023, we conducted a scheduled survey in Tunisia involving 2,406 interviews. About half these interviews were conducted before October 7 and about half afterward. To understand how Tunisians’ views changed after October 7, we calculated the average responses during the three weeks before Hamas’s attack and then tracked daily changes in the weeks that followed—finding a swift, sharp drop in the percentage of respondents who held favorable views of the United States. The results in most other countries we surveyed in 2021–22 and after October 7 followed a similar pattern: in all but one, views of the United States also declined markedly.

Despite the horror of Hamas’s attack, few Arab Barometer respondents agreed that it ought to be called a “terrorist act.” By contrast, the vast majority agreed that Israel’s campaign in Gaza ought to be classified as terrorism. For the most part, Arab citizens surveyed after October 7 assessed the situation in Gaza as dire. When asked which of seven words, including “war,” “hostilities,” “massacre,” and “genocide,” best described the ongoing events in Gaza, the most common term respondents chose in all but one country was “genocide.” Only in Morocco did a substantial number of respondents—24 percent—call those events a “war,” about the same percentage of Moroccans that called it a “massacre.” Everywhere else, less than 15 percent of respondents chose “war” to characterize what was happening in Gaza.

Furthermore, Arab Barometer surveys found that Arab citizens do not believe that Western actors are standing up for Gazans. Our survey asked, “Among the following parties, which do you believe is committed to defending Palestinian rights?” and allowed respondents to select all that applied from a list of ten countries, the European Union, and the United Nations. No more than 17 percent of respondents in any country agreed that the United Nations is standing up for Palestinian rights. The European Union fared worse, but the United States received the lowest marks: eight percent of respondents in Kuwait, six percent in Morocco and Lebanon, five percent in Mauritania, and two percent in Jordan agreed that it stood up for Palestinians. The results for the United States diverged even more from those of other Western and global actors on the question of protecting Israel. When asked whether the United States was protecting Israeli rights, more than 60 percent of respondents in all five countries agreed that it was doing so. These percentages far exceed the percentages of respondents who agreed that the European Union or the United Nations is protecting Israel.

These perceptions in the Arab world about Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, and about the United States’ approach to it, appear to have had major consequences for the United States’ overall reputation. In nine of the ten countries in which Arab Barometer asked about U.S. favorability in 2021, at least a third of all respondents said that they held a favorable view of the United States. In four out of the five countries surveyed between December 2023 and March 2024, however, fewer than a third viewed the United States favorably. In Jordan, the percentage of respondents that viewed the United States favorably dropped dramatically, from 51 percent in 2022 to 28 percent in a poll conducted in the winter of 2023–24. In Mauritania, the percentage of respondents that viewed the United States favorably fell from 50 percent in a survey conducted in the winter of 2021–22 to 31 percent in the survey conducted in the winter of 2023–24, and in Lebanon, it fell from 42 percent in the winter of 2021–22 to 27 percent in early 2024. Similarly, the percentage of respondents who agreed that U.S. President Joe Biden’s foreign policies were “good” or “very good” dropped by 12 points in Lebanon and nine points in Jordan over the same period.

The timing of our survey in Tunisia strongly suggests that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza drove this overall decline. In the three weeks before October 7, 40 percent of Tunisians said they had a favorable view of the United States. By October 27, not quite three weeks after the start of Israel’s military operations in Gaza, just ten percent of Tunisians said the same.

Although Arabs’ opinion of the United States and Biden declined after October 7, views on different aspects of the United States’ engagement with the Middle East did not all fall equally. Our respondents were just as likely to agree that U.S. foreign aid to their country strengthens education initiatives or that it strengthens civil society as they were before October 7. In fact, respondents in Jordan, Mauritania, and Morocco in our winter of 2023–24 survey were slightly more likely to agree that U.S. foreign aid strengthens civil society than they were in 2021 and 2022. These findings suggest that disagreement with the U.S. government’s policy toward Israel and the war in Gaza, not other elements of U.S. foreign policy, are driving the decline in the United States’ regional reputation.

FRINGE BENEFIT

Despite offering limited material and rhetorical support for Gaza, China has been the primary beneficiary of the United States’ decline in reputation among Arab publics. In its 2021–22 surveys, Arab Barometer demonstrated that Arabs’ support for China was declining. But in recent months, this trend has reversed. In all the countries Arab Barometer surveyed after October 7, at least half the respondents said they held favorable views of China. In both Jordan and Morocco, key U.S. allies, China has benefited from at least a 15-point increase in its favorability ratings.

When asked whether U.S. or Chinese policies are better for their region’s security, respondents in three of the five countries we surveyed after October 7 said they preferred China’s approach. China’s actual presence in the region has, in fact, been minimal, with its engagement focused mostly on economic deals through its Belt and Road Initiative. Arab publics in the Middle East appear to understand that China has played a limited role in the events in Gaza: only 14 percent of Lebanese respondents, 13 percent of Moroccans, nine percent of Kuwaitis, seven percent of Jordanians, and a vanishingly small three percent of Mauritanians agreed that China is committed to defending the rights of Palestinians.

It is likely, then, that respondents’ increasingly favorable views of China reflect their dissatisfaction with U.S. and Western policies. When asked more specific policy questions, our respondents gave more ambivalent answers. Asked if they thought Chinese policies are better at “protecting freedoms and rights,” American policies are better, Chinese and American policies are equally good, or Chinese and American policies are equally bad, a plurality of Kuwaitis, Mauritanians, and Moroccans said U.S. policies are better than Chinese policies. Respondents in two countries that border Israel, however, felt the opposite: in Arab Barometer surveys in Jordan and Lebanon after October 7, substantially more respondents agreed that China’s policies are better than the United States’ at protecting rights and freedoms.

China’s record on protecting rights and freedoms at home and abroad is poor, but the Lebanese and Jordanian populations now consider the United States’ record to be even worse. This finding reflects a larger trend in Arab Barometer’s data: geography matters. People who live closest to the conflict in Gaza and whose countries have historically accommodated large numbers of Palestinian refugees expressed the lowest confidence in specific U.S. Middle East policies.

MINORITY REPORT

Our surveys suggest that the slump in Arab support for the United States is not inevitable and that Arab publics respond sensitively to differences in U.S. policy toward issues key to the region. This indication emerges most powerfully from results in Morocco—the one country in the region that has bucked the trend of growing skepticism about U.S. policy. In 2022, 69 percent of Moroccans held a positive view of the United States, by far the greatest support in the Arab world. This already strong support has actually increased: Arab Barometer’s winter of 2023–24 survey found that 74 percent of Moroccans now view the United States positively. Morocco is also the only country whose population clearly preferred the United States’ Middle East security policies over those of China, by 13 percentage points.

The role the United States has played in supporting Morocco in a territorial dispute is almost certainly the reason Moroccan opinion is an outlier. For decades, the Moroccan government has administered much of Western Sahara, where a movement backed by Algeria seeks to establish an independent state. Until 2020, no UN member state recognized Morocco’s sovereignty. That year, the United States recognized Morocco’s claim over Western Sahara in exchange for Morocco’s formalizing diplomatic ties with Israel. Particularly in the second half of 2023, the Biden administration strongly reaffirmed this policy. Our survey of Moroccan opinion coincided with a heavily publicized visit by Joshua Harris, a senior U.S. diplomat, to both Algiers and Rabat to underscore this policy position.

It appears that its policy on Western Sahara largely immunized the United States from the decline in support that it has suffered in other Arab countries. Other Western countries that did not follow the United States’ lead in recognizing Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara have not retained the Moroccan people’s support. Between 2022 and the winter of 2023–24, the percentage of Moroccans who said they held a favorable view of the United Kingdom fell from 68 percent to 30 percent, a larger decline than that for other countries we surveyed. Moroccans’ opinions of France soured, too, falling by ten points.

China has benefited from the United States’ decline in reputation among Arab publics.

In every country we surveyed, respondents indicated that they believe that states in the Middle East and North Africa, and not global actors, are most committed to protecting Palestinians’ rights. Yet this opinion does not translate into a desire to see the United States adopt neutrality or exit the Middle East. Despite their anger at the United States’ policies toward Gaza, Arab publics made it clear that they want the United States to be involved in solving the Israeli-Palestinian crisis.

One Arab Barometer survey question asked respondents which issue should top the Biden administration’s agenda in the Middle East and North Africa, offering seven options: economic development, education, human rights, infrastructure, stability, combating terrorism, and the Palestinian issue. In three of the four countries where this question was asked in surveys after October 7, a plurality of respondents agreed that Biden should prioritize the Palestinian issue, even over other key concerns facing their countries. In fact, the proportion of Arab citizens who responded that the Biden administration’s top priority in the region should be the Palestinian issue has risen dramatically over the past two years—by 21 points in Jordan, 18 points in Mauritania and Morocco, and 17 points in Lebanon. And our Tunisian data suggest that this rise occurred almost immediately following the start of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

The war in Gaza has reduced Arabs’ support for normalizing ties with Israel from an already low level. Yet this does not mean that the Arab world is turning against a peaceful settlement between Israelis and Palestinians. Our research in Tunisia initially suggested that the outbreak of war in Gaza might drive a decline in support for a two-state solution. In fact, in polls conducted between December 2023 and March 2024 in Jordan, Mauritania, and Morocco, greater percentages of respondents indicated their support for a two-state solution over a one-state solution, a confederation, or an open-ended “other” approach than had supported these options in 2022.

FACE LIFT

Before the events of October 7, it appeared that a new regional order was emerging in the Middle East. As some Arab governments sought to normalize ties with Israel—the first such agreements in nearly 30 years—it seemed that the primary divide in the region might not run between Israel and the Arab states but rather between Tehran and the countries that seek to contain the Islamic Republic’s aggression abroad. A new coalition to contain Iran, including Israel and key Arab states, would have been immensely beneficial for limiting Iran’s influence in the region.

It might still be possible for the United States to midwife such a coalition: the help Jordan gave Israel in repelling Iran’s April 13 drone and missile attack, and decisions by Saudi Arabia and the UAE to give the United States intelligence ahead of that attack, suggested that key Arab leaders still believe that a regional realignment is in their interest. The surveys we conducted after October 7 found that approval of Iran remains low among Arab publics. Thirty-six percent of Lebanese, 25 percent of Jordanians, and only 15 percent of Kuwaitis expressed a favorable view of Iran.

But efforts toward a full realignment will struggle as long as the decline in regional support for the United States persists. Cold peace accords, like those forged between Israel and Egypt and Jordan, are always at risk of rupture. The United States is irreplaceable as a broker for normalization deals. The Egyptian-Israeli and Israeli-Jordanian peace accords were largely held in place by the enormous amount of assistance the United States gave to both Arab countries. The last half decade’s normalization deals have hinged on promises by the United States to address Arab countries’ concerns, including recognizing Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, removing Sudan from its list of state sponsors of terror, and selling F-35 fighter jets to the UAE.

In the post–October 7 context, losing the support of Arab citizens means not only risking the support of Arab leaders but also jeopardizing the domestic stability of the United States’ key Arab allies. Anger about the suffering of Palestinians has already spilled onto the streets. In Jordan, protests have already derailed Project Prosperity, a UAE- and U.S.-backed agreement between Jordan and Israel on water and energy. After cooperating with Israel and the United States to counter Iran’s strike, Arab regimes have remained quiet about their role out of fear of further inflaming the anger of their citizens. The United States needs to try to ease the general pressure Arab governments feel not to work with Israel to counter Iranian influence.

A protest in support of Palestinians in Gaza, Beirut, Lebanon, May 2024

Mohamed Azakir / Reuters

The region is at a pivot point—and the United States is theoretically well positioned to apply the necessary leverage to help secure a cease-fire in Gaza and help move the Israelis and Palestinians toward peace. To restore its regional credibility, however, the United States must lay out concrete, pragmatic steps toward a two-state solution, identifying what effective postwar governance in Gaza will look like and what Israelis and Palestinians must do to ensure that progress is made toward peace. Holding both Israeli and Palestinian leaders accountable is long overdue. The United States must not only sponsor peace talks but also insist on an end to the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

For too long, Arabs have perceived the United States as working to secure its own interests and those of allied Arab leaders ahead of the interests of ordinary citizens—even as Arab citizens seek greater support for democratization and anticorruption efforts. In addition, another Iranian-Israeli confrontation might not be as performative as the one that occurred in April 2024. It might be devastating. The United States must work to win the trust of Arab publics to contain Iran, not only covertly but with public, courageous, and effective policies.

The present situation offers the United States both dangers and opportunities. There is no straightforward equivalent to Morocco’s Western Sahara issue in most Arab countries. But the case of Morocco makes clear that when Arab citizens feel that the United States stands up for their interests, they judge it more favorably. The dangers of failing to address declining Arab support for the United States go beyond Gaza. Without a significant shift in U.S. support for Israel’s war, and without smart changes to U.S. policy to blunt growing Arab anti-Americanism in the longer term, other actors—including China—will continue to try to crowd the United States out of a leadership role in the Middle East.

MICHAEL ROBBINS is Director and Co-Principal Investigator at Arab Barometer.
AMANEY A. JAMAL is Co-Founder and Co-Principal Investigator at Arab Barometer, Dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, and Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University.
MARK TESSLER is Co-Founder and Co-Principal Investigator at Arab Barometer and Samuel J. Eldersveld Professor of Politics at the University of Michigan.

Foreign Affairs · by Michael Robbins, Amaney A. Jamal, and Mark Tessler · June 11, 2024

20.Israel Is Losing the United States

Excerpts:

Israel has shifted its position as the IDF’s incursion into Rafah enters its second month. It has done so conscious of the Biden administration’s message that U.S. backing for this operation is conditional on receiving a “credible and implementable plan” from Israel for protecting civilians. Israeli forces have advanced into the center of the city and seized control of the Philadelphi Corridor along the Egyptian-Gazan border. Dozens of tunnels used by Hamas to smuggle weapons, provisions, cash, and other supplies into Gaza have been uncovered and destroyed. At the same time, the IDF has deployed in other parts of Gaza where Hamas has sought to regroup.

By all indications, Israel is being careful to avoid crossing Biden’s red lines. Nearly one million Gazans have been evacuated from the Rafah area to IDF-designated “humanitarian zones.” Israel has also pivoted away from large offensives to more targeted raids. On May 28, White House spokesperson John Kirby reiterated the administration’s objection to a major ground operation in Rafah, suggesting that it “might make [the president] have to make different decisions in terms of support [for Israel].” But at least for now, the United States believes that Israel has heeded this warning. On June 6, Biden told ABC News that although the Israelis had intended “to go into Rafah full bore . . . they haven’t done that.”

Old habits die hard. The prime minister is scheduled to address a joint session of Congress on July 24, which could spell disaster for Israel. Many Democrats have said that they will boycott the event, making Netanyahu’s appearance seem to be a partisan affair. Should the prime minister use his speech to attack the Biden administration in the same fashion that he lashed out at Obama in 2015, the consequences could be severe. This is precisely the wrong time for Netanyahu to be thinking about his political supporters—many of whom feel that he should stand up to the United States—instead of Israel’s national security. The situation in the Middle East is becoming more dangerous. Israelis are demanding a response to escalating Hezbollah aggression, and there are mounting concerns about hotspots including the West Bank, Yemen and, especially, Iran. To deal with these, Israel will need the United States’ help. If Netanyahu does not tread carefully, the total victory that Israel scores could be over itself.

Israel Is Losing the United States

Netanyahu Should Work With Biden, Not Against Him

By Shalom Lipner

June 11, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Shalom Lipner · June 11, 2024

In a surprise announcement on May 31, U.S. President Joe Biden outlined a road map for “an enduring cease-fire [in the Gaza Strip] and the release of all hostages.” The plan, he declared, had been authored by Israel, and he urged Hamas to acquiesce to its terms. Biden’s speech gave the president the upper hand in his growing rift with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and it caught the prime minister off guard. Biden’s action has put Netanyahu in a difficult bind. If he accepts the deal, then members of his right-wing coalition will likely follow through on their vow to topple him. But if he rejects it, then he will increase tensions with the United States. For the time being, the prime minister has settled for an equivocal endorsement, insisting that Biden has inaccurately characterized the offer and that Israel has not consented to Hamas’s precondition of a full stop to the war. Meanwhile, Hamas’s reaction has been even less positive.

For months, as Israel has intensified its grip over Gaza despite mounting international condemnation, the impasse between Biden and Netanyahu has seemed only to worsen. In the weeks before Biden’s address, recriminations escalated. “We are not a vassal state of the United States,” Netanyahu told his cabinet on May 9. More recently, Biden suggested that observers could legitimately conclude that Netanyahu is prolonging the war to preserve his grip on power. As a consequence of this discord, the U.S.-Israeli relationship is turning from an intimate friendship into a contentious brawl. The ability to resolve differences and coordinate policy behind closed doors is vanishing rapidly, being replaced by animosity and dissent.

Washington continues to dangle a normalization pact with Saudi Arabia in front of Israel as part of a transaction that would include a cessation of hostilities, freedom for the hostages in Hamas’s captivity, and a defined pathway to Palestinian statehood. But on May 19—two days after Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan met to discuss the “nearly final version” of agreements between their countries—Secretary of State Antony Blinken testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “it may well be that Israel isn’t able, [or] willing to proceed” down this route. Motivated by political or personal considerations, Netanyahu—who told the UN last September that peace with Riyadh would “bring the possibility of peace to this entire region”—seems to suddenly have become lukewarm to the idea. His resistance has encouraged the Saudis to explore a bilateral framework with the United States that would leave Israel out in the cold.

In December 2023, I argued in Foreign Affairs that Israel was in danger of losing the United States. Subsequent events—particularly the Israeli government’s persistent aversion to engaging on a credible blueprint for a postconflict Gaza—have only reinforced that argument. Reprising his classic divide-and-conquer ploy, Netanyahu is stoking the flames of polarization within both Israel and the United States in order to fend off criticism of his leadership. In so doing, he is making a grave mistake. The merits of any tactical victory over the Biden administration would be vastly outweighed by the strategic defeat that would result from any larger rupture of Israel’s essential ties with the United States. These ties contribute more fundamentally to Israel’s national security than any rout of Hamas could. The prime minister should change course and work with, not against, the United States.

THE BEST DEFENSE IS A GOOD OFFENSE

Thus far, Israelis have overwhelmingly supported the Gaza campaign and, particularly, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers who are operating in the combat zone. This spirit of unity has stolen some of the thunder from the huge antigovernment protests that preceded October 7, co-opting their enthusiasm. For months, calls for immediate elections to replace Netanyahu’s unpopular coalition have been tempered by genuine doubts over the propriety and feasibility of conducting a vote as the fighting rages. Although a majority of Israelis favor early elections, they differ on the timing and worry that those who might replace Netanyahu share his guilt for the lapses that led to October 7.

This domestic consensus about the war, which the prime minister has sought to exploit to his own advantage, has provided an ironic backdrop for his scheme to sow internal discord among the Israeli public. Invoking an outdated paradigm, Netanyahu has endeavored to rally loyalists against what he considers to be an insidious and defeatist Israeli left that would make irresponsible concessions to the Palestinians. But according to an April poll by the Tel Aviv University Peace Index, only 12 percent of Israeli Jews identify as left wing. Another April survey, conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute, found that only 26 percent of Jewish Israelis would support “the establishment of a Palestinian state in the future” even if Israel were to sign a regional defense treaty with Arab partners. The dominant fault line of Israeli politics straddles the question of whether Netanyahu himself is fit to stay in office.

To shore up Netanyahu’s position, some of the prime minister’s acolytes have given voice to conspiracy theories. They have alleged that Israel’s defense chiefs have been collaborating with Hamas and colluding with the White House to sabotage the war effort and overthrow Netanyahu. The prime minister’s son has been active in this regard, retweeting, before deleting, a video clip featuring an IDF reservist who threatened to circumvent the military chain of command and obey only direct orders issued by Netanyahu. This was a blatant attempt to suggest that the generals are untrustworthy. The prime minister’s reaction, “rejecting outright any refusal [to obey orders] from any side,” was thoroughly evasive.

The military and intelligence services have not been Netanyahu’s only target of reproach. Spokespeople on the right regularly accuse proponents of a hostage deal at all costs of being willing to save Hamas from oblivion and, as such, undermining the sacrifices of Israel’s troops. At the same time, Netanyahu and his allies point the finger at the United States, claiming that the Biden administration has restricted Israel’s capacity to trounce Hamas. The president’s recent decision to pause a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to the IDF and continual U.S. appeals to bolster the flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza have been cited by Israeli politicians and pundits as significant hindrances to Israel’s battlefield performance. For the prime minister, the spread of these beliefs serves to insulate him and his government from blame for, among other failings, October 7, the plight of tens of thousands of still displaced Israelis, and the hit to the country’s credit rating. It also gives cover to his failure, after more than eight months, to bring the war in Gaza to a satisfactory conclusion.

TAKING WASHINGTON BY STORM

Despite Netanyahu’s caustic attitude toward the Biden administration, the United States remains central to the prime minister’s calculus. Although Netanyahu is notorious for declining to grant interviews to Israeli media, it is not accidental that, since the start of 2024, he has appeared on all three major U.S. networks, CNN, Fox News, and even Dr. Phil. At a time when countries around the world are becoming overtly hostile to Israel, Washington’s backing remains second to none. This is, in part, because of the upcoming U.S. elections, which make Democrats and Republicans alike extraordinarily welcoming to the prime minister’s overtures. Notably, on May 31, a bipartisan group of legislators in Washington invited Netanyahu to address Congress in the coming weeks—flying in the face of the administration’s efforts to pressure the Israeli government. Many members of Congress are eager to engage on Israel’s behalf and advance any pieces of Israeli-related legislation that might enhance their electoral prospects. In addition, the mainstream of a well-organized U.S.-Jewish community, together with conservative Christian constituencies and other quarters of the pro-Israeli universe, have fully mobilized to advocate for Israel in its time of extreme need.

Netanyahu hopes to leverage these sources of sympathy within the United States to maximize the military, diplomatic, and economic assistance he can obtain from the Biden administration and minimize its resistance to continuing the war. Although the U.S. public—and particularly Democratic voters—have become more negative toward Israel, a recent poll by the Center for American Political Studies shows that U.S. citizens continue to favor Israel and take its side against Hamas by a four-to-one margin. The prime minister is counting on this plurality to encourage Biden, a self-described Zionist, to continue withstanding pressure to halt Israel’s war in Gaza prematurely.

In implementing this strategy, Netanyahu has a reasonable chance of success in the short term, preventing further White House constraints that could affect the ongoing offensive in Gaza. That outcome could be put in jeopardy, however, if the administration determines that Netanyahu is obstructing progress toward a settlement. But the far greater long-term risk is that open confrontation with a sitting president will further erode what remains of the bipartisan consensus in Washington on Israel, ultimately destroying its working relationship with the United States.

Netanyahu is playing a high-stakes balancing act, gambling that he can flout the Biden administration in his conduct of the war without causing irreparable harm to Israel’s relations with the United States. But this game could fail catastrophically. In May, Biden paused a single shipment of bombs, a measure that the Pentagon attributed to specific qualms about “the impact that they could have in a dense urban setting.” This pause could be only the beginning. Subjected to pushback within his Democratic caucus and amid palpable frustrations over the manner in which Netanyahu has pursued his objectives, Biden could exact supplementary penalties with truly debilitating consequences for Israel. These could include holds on the delivery of additional weapons systems or a decision to not veto UN Security Council resolutions that are harmful to Israel.

A LOSING HAND

Israel stands to lose even if Netanyahu wins his showdown with Biden and gets his way on Gaza. The prime minister’s divisive approach—exemplified by his government’s attempts to ram through a controversial reform of the Israeli judiciary that would significantly limit judicial independence—has damaged Israeli social cohesion. His blessing for a wide exemption from military conscription for Israel’s ultra-Orthodox haredi population—in the face of overwhelming public opposition—is but one trigger that could soon reignite large-scale civil unrest. Beholden to the demands of the right-wing parties keeping his government afloat, Netanyahu has often preferred to embrace paralysis rather than address the urgent questions necessitated by the war and its devastating effects on Israel’s communities and infrastructure.

The prime minister’s penchant for stoking friction with the U.S. government is also not in Israel’s long-term interests. The fallout from his previous clashes with U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama has not been forgotten in Israel or in the United States. Netanyahu’s courtship of Clinton’s political foes in the 1990s and his altercation, two decades later, with Obama over the Iran nuclear deal made Israel toxic within Democratic Party circles, exacerbating trends brought on by the simultaneous rise of the progressive left. Today, unwavering support for Israel has increasingly become an almost exclusively Republican position. Indeed, at present, the White House is under attack from parts of the Democratic base that are contemptuous of U.S. policy vis-à-vis Israel and Gaza. This split could come to mean that Israel will no longer be able to rely upon the United States’ backing irrespective of party.

It would be imprudent, however, for Israel to presume that redemption might come from a second Trump presidency. In February 2017, Netanyahu cautioned the members of his cabinet against excessive enthusiasm about U.S. President Donald Trump, warning that they should take his “personality into account” and not expect to fulfill all their ambitions. In fact, Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from the nuclear deal with Iran—a move inspired by Netanyahu—resulted in a vacuum that, per the International Atomic Energy Agency’s findings released on May 11, 2024, has brought Iran only “a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90 percent.” Israeli leaders would be wrong to anticipate that Trump will give them a blank check on Gaza. “You have to finish up your war,” Trump informed an Israeli newspaper in March.

CAN’T GO IT ALONE

To avoid a broader collapse of the U.S.-Israeli relationship, it is imperative for Netanyahu to shift course quickly and find ways to work more closely with the Biden administration. That is especially true if, as Israeli National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi remarked on May 29, “The fighting in Gaza will continue for at least another seven months.” Going it alone against its adversaries without U.S. support is not a viable strategy for Israel, whose war footing rests on access to foreign munitions and the suppression of international prohibitions on its actions. The United States should be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Despite the Biden administration’s increasing reservations about the war, the White House has been extraordinarily attentive to Israel’s predicament. On April 24, Biden authorized an aid package that earmarked $17 billion to augment Israel’s defense capabilities. The next month, the administration notified Congress of its intention to transfer another $1 billion worth of ammunition and tactical vehicles to Israel to enable the IDF to maintain its posture against Hamas and Israel’s other enemies. That funding is crucial. For although the Netanyahu government has initiated efforts to boost production at Israeli defense industries, the country is fated to remain reliant on U.S. military assistance for the foreseeable future. The importance of that relationship was demonstrated on June 8, when four Israeli hostages were rescued from Gaza, in an operation facilitated by U.S. intelligence and logistics.

Israel also needs the United States for diplomatic relief. Washington’s involvement will be essential to crafting a practical transition that prevents Gaza from descending into anarchy. In addition, support from the United States is vital to Israel’s ability to overcome a daunting series of legal challenges surrounding the war. Judges at the International Court of Justice are weighing appeals to halt IDF maneuvers in Gaza, and, at the same time, the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor is seeking arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his defense minister, Yoav Gallant. Reckless statements made by Israeli officials have figured prominently in these proceedings. Here, too, Washington has Israel’s back, and U.S. policymakers have responded by passing legislation in the House of Representatives to sanction the court.

Netanyahu is stoking the flames of polarization to fend off criticism of his leadership.

The United States is still the only reliable bulwark against a possible wave of UN Security Council sanctions against Israel. Washington is also leading the charge on Israel’s side in multilateral forums to assert that direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians—and not unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state—hold the key to progress between the parties. Furthermore, the United States is central to the delicate network of regional alliances—with countries including Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—that protect Israel. These countries’ assistance in shielding Israel from the onslaught of 300 Iranian drones and missiles on April 14 underscored the value of respecting, not defying, U.S. concerns. That alignment provides an indispensable counterweight to Iran and its proxies—one that could become even more important as Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon threatens to devolve into a full-scale war.

Netanyahu’s window of opportunity for mending ties with Washington could soon close, as troubles at home intensify and inhibit his capacity to govern. The announced resignation in April of Aharon Haliva, the head of IDF intelligence, turned up the heat on the prime minister to accept personal responsibility for October 7. On May 15, Gallant, channeling the criticism of many within Israel’s security establishment, assailed Netanyahu’s dysfunctional management of the war in Gaza. Additionally, Netanyahu’s rejection three days later of an ultimatum by Benny Gantz, a member of the war cabinet, to, amongst other things, adopt concrete goals for ending the war laid the groundwork for the departure of Gantz’s National Unity faction on June 9 and its return to the opposition.

The prime minister is thus left alone with a slim, hard-line parliamentary majority, whose priorities are often anathema to the Biden administration. Coalition members include the hard-right Jewish Power faction, which froze its commitment to vote with the government until Netanyahu shared the text of the deal he submitted to the mediators. The faction has since suspended its pledge, claiming that the deal appears to be defunct. The haredi parties could soon revolt as well, if Israel’s High Court of Justice meets popular expectations and rules that ultra-Orthodox Jews must be subject to the military draft. Netanyahu’s position was further imperiled on June 6 when Israeli Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara called on the prime minister to establish a state commission of inquiry to investigate the war in Gaza. That probe would almost certainly raise serious doubts about the quality of Netanyahu’s leadership.

BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE

Israel has shifted its position as the IDF’s incursion into Rafah enters its second month. It has done so conscious of the Biden administration’s message that U.S. backing for this operation is conditional on receiving a “credible and implementable plan” from Israel for protecting civilians. Israeli forces have advanced into the center of the city and seized control of the Philadelphi Corridor along the Egyptian-Gazan border. Dozens of tunnels used by Hamas to smuggle weapons, provisions, cash, and other supplies into Gaza have been uncovered and destroyed. At the same time, the IDF has deployed in other parts of Gaza where Hamas has sought to regroup.

By all indications, Israel is being careful to avoid crossing Biden’s red lines. Nearly one million Gazans have been evacuated from the Rafah area to IDF-designated “humanitarian zones.” Israel has also pivoted away from large offensives to more targeted raids. On May 28, White House spokesperson John Kirby reiterated the administration’s objection to a major ground operation in Rafah, suggesting that it “might make [the president] have to make different decisions in terms of support [for Israel].” But at least for now, the United States believes that Israel has heeded this warning. On June 6, Biden told ABC News that although the Israelis had intended “to go into Rafah full bore . . . they haven’t done that.”

Old habits die hard. The prime minister is scheduled to address a joint session of Congress on July 24, which could spell disaster for Israel. Many Democrats have said that they will boycott the event, making Netanyahu’s appearance seem to be a partisan affair. Should the prime minister use his speech to attack the Biden administration in the same fashion that he lashed out at Obama in 2015, the consequences could be severe. This is precisely the wrong time for Netanyahu to be thinking about his political supporters—many of whom feel that he should stand up to the United States—instead of Israel’s national security. The situation in the Middle East is becoming more dangerous. Israelis are demanding a response to escalating Hezbollah aggression, and there are mounting concerns about hotspots including the West Bank, Yemen and, especially, Iran. To deal with these, Israel will need the United States’ help. If Netanyahu does not tread carefully, the total victory that Israel scores could be over itself.

SHALOM LIPNER is Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council. From 1990 to 2016, he served seven consecutive premiers at the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office.

Foreign Affairs · by Shalom Lipner · June 11, 2024

21. Twelve Essential Irregular Warfare Books to Add to Your Summer Reading List

Glad to see Steinbeck's Moon is Down on this list. I am still miffed at Seth Jones for his excellent book Three Dangerous Men because he did not include Kim Jong Un.

Twelve Essential Irregular Warfare Books to Add to Your Summer Reading List - Irregular Warfare Initiative

irregularwarfare.org · by Nerea Cal · June 11, 2024

Spring buds may have only just started to sprout, but with Memorial Day behind us, it’s officially summer. As you prepare for some well-deserved R&R, the Irregular Warfare Initiative has you covered with some stellar summer reading recommendations. And what pairs better with relaxation than diving into the complexities of irregular warfare? (Okay, maybe a margarita, too, but who says you can’t have both).

We’ve curated a list of twelve books on irregular warfare sourced from recommendations within the IWI community. From foundational theories of irregular warfare to gripping historical accounts, these books cover it all. We’ve even thrown in a novel as a palate cleanser from some of the more technical or academic selections. Our goal is to appeal to a broad audience, in line with IWI’s mission to bridge the gap between scholars who study irregular warfare and practitioners who implement it on the ground. To that end, all the books listed underscore the case that irregular warfare is a persistent and powerful form of conflict that our adversaries are actively leveraging to undermine US national security interests.

To help you decide where to start, we’ve organized the list into four categories: Theories of Irregular Warfare, Historical Examples, Modern Manifestations, and Irregular Warfare in Great Power Competition. This way, whether you’re lounging on the beach, trekking up a mountain, or stuck in the office, you can find something entertaining and informative.

Theories of Irregular Warfare

On Guerilla Warfare, Mao Tse-Tung (Translated and with an introduction by BG Samuel B. Griffith USMC (Ret.) )

Recommended by: Henderson Chandler

Written in 1937, Mao’s On Guerilla Warfare advocates for an irregular approach to defeating a more powerful enemy. Drawing from Mao’s own experience against the Japanese occupation of China, the book outlines principles of successful guerilla campaigns.

Why Read It: I recommend this book because it’s a foundational text on guerilla warfare and offers a historical perspective on the ideas that helped shape modern China. The book’s principles are still relevant today, influencing China’s modern defense strategy and insurgencies in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, with concepts like “People’s War” and “Protracted War.” Brigadier General Sam Griffith’s introduction also provides valuable historical context and reflections on the book’s implications for US counterinsurgency strategy.

Recommended by: Alex Deep

Invisible Armies offers a sweeping view of the history of warfare, tracing military strategy and tactics from Alexander the Great to modern battlefields. It illustrates that irregular warfare, often executed by informally organized partisans or strappy guerillas, represents the most common form of conflict throughout history.

Why Read It: Practitioners will gain a deeper understanding of how their experiences fit into a long tradition of irregular warfare. It is especially useful for those looking to turn those same experiences into professional writing because the book provides a strong theoretical basis for how states and non-state actors use partisan and guerrilla warfare to achieve political ends. This book also demonstrates how our idea of conflict is distorted by the myth of decisive battles and still influences how the Department of Defense prepares for war today.

The New Rules of War, Sean McFate

Recommended by: Augie Dominguez

The New Rules of War by Sean McFate is a provocative exploration of the evolving nature of warfare in the 21st century. McFate, a seasoned military strategist and former private military contractor, argues that the traditional principles of war are obsolete. Through a series of bold assertions and strategic insights, he outlines the emerging rules that are reshaping global conflicts, emphasizing the rise of unconventional warfare tactics and the shifting power dynamics between state and non-state actors.

Why Read It: McFate’s book is essential reading for military professionals, policymakers, and anyone interested in the future of global security. His analysis challenges conventional wisdom and provides a fresh perspective on how to navigate the unpredictable and often chaotic nature of modern warfare. By understanding these new rules, readers can better anticipate and respond to the challenges posed by hybrid warfare, cyber threats, and other non-traditional forms of conflict.

Historical Examples

Rise and Kill First, Ronen Bergman

Recommended by: Sam Rosenberg

“Rise and Kill First” by Ronen Bergman is a detailed exploration of Israel’s targeted assassination program from the early 20th century to recent times. The book combines extensive interviews and sensitive documents to reveal the tactics and ethical quandaries behind these operations.

Why Read it: This book offers a nuanced portrayal of Israel’s covert operations, blending historical rigor with investigative journalism. It provides eye-opening accounts and never-before-seen details, appealing to those interested in military history, intelligence, and international relations without glorifying the acts it describes.

The Daughters of Kobani: A Story of Rebellion, Courage, and Justice, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

Recommended by: Jacob Ware

The Daughters of Kobani tells the story of the all-woman Kurdish militia that fought and defeated the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria in 2014, earning international support and acclaim for their efforts. As ISIS rose to prominence in the Levant by pushing a brutal agenda against women, these Kurdish heroines fought back, in turn redefining their corner of the world to reflect their egalitarian ideals.

Why Read It: Tzemach Lemmon leverages years of intrepid on-the-ground reporting to offer a personal yet comprehensive account of the women in the Kurdish militia who tenaciously fought on the front lines against the repressive organization seeking their subjugation. Readable and analytical, yet hopeful and optimistic, this book offers an important reminder of the crucial role that openness, diversity, and inclusion can play in national security—not as an added bonus, but as an absolutely essential element of counterterrorism success.

Recommended by: Augie Dominguez

In Brothers at Arms, Ferreiro provides a comprehensive analysis of the political, economic, and military dynamics of the American Revolution to bolster her argument that support from France and Spain were essential to the colonies’ success against the British.

Why Read It: Viewed through a contemporary lens, the American Revolution highlights the 2022 National Defense Strategy’s focus on the strategic advantage that allies and partners provide the United States and the prominence of irregular warfare as the predominant “American Way of War” since the country’s inception. Overall, Brothers at Arms is a thorough and thought-provoking examination of the American Revolution and its international implications, offering useful lessons for the United States and its partners on the use of IW in the current strategic environment.

Modern Manifestations

Recommended by: Alexandra Veyne

Sandworm traces the evolution of Russian cyberwarfare from its genesis through the 2017 NotPetya attacks, considered the worst cyberattack in history with over $10 billion in damages globally. The book details how Ukraine has repeatedly served as a testing ground for Russian cyberwarfare and explains why such capabilities have the potential to be devastating to NATO and the US.

Why Read It: What sets this book apart is that it was written by a journalist for a non-technical audience. As a result, it makes cyber accessible to nonspecialists. Sandworm is especially relevant in light of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War as it highlights the threat that an unchecked Russia poses to the West. As destabilizing and insidious as disinformation campaigns or espionage may be, they do not outweigh the immediate dangers—be they physical, financial, or psychological—of a massive attack on critical infrastructure. If any book ought to keep policymakers up at night, it’s Sandworm.

This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, Peter Pomerantsev

Recommended by: Jacob Ware

This Is Not Propaganda assesses the new age of Russian propaganda, determining how information operations on 21st-century digital communications platforms are changing the disinformation space.

Why Read It: The book is both deeply personal and searingly analytical, providing insights into not just the latest developments in Russian information operations, but how they affect people on the ground. It offers a readable but informative account that will appeal to a broad audience.

Small Wars, Big Data, Eli Berman, Joseph H. Felter, Jacob N. Shapiro

Recommended by: Kyle Atwell

Small Wars, Big Data is a pathbreaking work that melds cutting-edge data analysis with on-the-ground insights to redefine our understanding of modern conflict. By meticulously analyzing data from insurgencies and counterinsurgency operations worldwide, the authors uncover patterns and strategies that can improve the effectiveness of military and humanitarian efforts. The book not only provides a detailed account of how data-driven approaches can improve outcomes in irregular warfare but also offers valuable lessons for policymakers, military leaders, and researchers focused on conflict resolution.

Why Read It: This book is for those interested in understanding the role of data in shaping military strategy. The case studies span the globe and underscore the importance of leveraging data for more informed decision-making. Whether you’re interested in the implications of these findings for current global conflicts or the broader impact on military and civilian policy, Small Wars, Big Data offers a compelling and timely analysis that is both enlightening and actionable.

Irregular Warfare in Great Power Competition

Recommended by: Matt Kuhlman

Cooperating with the Colossus reconstructs the history of US basing in World War II Latin America and considers how local leaders used basing rights as bargaining chips to advance their nation-building agendas.

Why Read It: This book highlights the impacts of local agency at the tactical and strategic levels. It also underscores the herculean effort that the United States organized across multiple agencies to achieve a national objective; in this sense, it offers a contemporary parallel for understanding China’s efforts across several geo-strategic efforts, to include the Belt and Road Initiative.

Recommended by: Jacob Ware

Three Dangerous Men uses case studies to assess the irregular warfare strategies developed and employed by Russia, Iran, and China. The book dives deeply into the authors of those strategies, looking at how their own earlier military experiences impacted their views, and arguing that the United States must prepare to similarly compete in the irregular domain.

Why Read It: At a moment of shifting U.S. national security priorities and strategies, Three Dangerous Men encourages U.S. policymakers to recenter irregular warfare in their strategic thinking. Ignoring irregular warfare in favor of bombs and battleships, the author argues, will prove detrimental to the US’s ability to compete in the new international order.

In part, the book’s focus on people and stories makes it approachable; the author’s deep dives into adversary strategists allow the reader to clearly trace the emergence of irregular warfare in their thinking.

The Moon is Down, John Steinbeck

Recommended by: Sam Rosenberg

The Moon is Down by John Steinbeck, published in 1942, is a powerful novel originally crafted as wartime propaganda to inspire resistance movements in Nazi-occupied Europe. The story depicts a small Northern European town occupied by an unnamed army, echoing the German occupation of Norway. Despite being banned, the book was widely distributed by resistance groups in multiple languages and became a symbol of defiance against Nazi rule.

Why Read It: This novel offers insights into how popular resistance movements can take shape under armed occupation. The story is particularly relevant when considering the potential for a Ukrainian insurgency under Russian occupation. Additionally, when viewed through the lens of the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the book sheds light on how our actions may have inadvertently fueled local opposition. Understanding these dynamics can help us better respect and navigate the will of the people in future conflicts.

Bonus Insight: One of the most compelling aspects of the book for me was the discussions between the villagers and the commander of the occupying army battalion, Colonel Lanser. These dialogues touch on the complexities of human nature and the futility of oppression. For instance, in one powerful exchange, the Mayor tells Colonel Lanser, “You and your government do not understand. In all the world, yours is the only government and people with a record of defeat after defeat for centuries, and every time because you did not understand people.” As Lanser begins to grasp the depth of the villagers’ resentment, he reflects, “We have taken on a job, haven’t we?” To which the Mayor responds, “Yes, the one impossible job in the world, the one thing that can’t be done.” Lanser asks, “And that is?” The Mayor answers, “To break man’s spirit permanently.”

Happy Reading!

We hope these recommendations find a place on your summer reading list. We also welcome any recommendations you may have. IWI is always looking to publish book reviews on publications related to irregular warfare; you can submit them here.

Happy reading and “Keep Warfare Irregular!”

Nerea M. Cal is an active duty Army Blackhawk helicopter pilot with overseas assignments in Iraq, Afghanistan, and South Korea. She previously served as an Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences Department at the United States Military Academy and Resident Fellow at the Modern War Institute, teaching courses on international relations theory and conflict negotiation and settlement. She has published work relating to post-conflict reconstruction in Kosovo and the application of international law in cyberspace. She is currently a doctoral student at Yale University studying international relations and comparative politics with a focus on U.S. security cooperation.

Views expressed in this article solely reflect those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, or the United States Government.

Main Image: USAREC Soldier at his local library. (Photo via DVIDS)

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De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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."

Access NSS HERE

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