Quotes of the Day:
"The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil."
- Marcus Tullius Cicero
"Stick to what’s in front of you – idea, action, utterance."
- Marcus Aurelius
"The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world - and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end - is being destroyed."
- Hannah Arendt
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 17 (PUTIN'S WAR)
2. Atrocities in Ukraine War Have Deep Roots in Russian Military
3. Why Russia gave up on urban war in Kyiv and turned to big battles in the east
4. 'Wolverines' graffiti straight out of 'Red Dawn' showing up all over battlefields in Ukraine
5. A Most Reliable Ally: How Corruption in the Russian Military Could Save Ukraine
6. Putin's War - April 18, 2022 Update | SOF News
7. What the New Vision for US Special Operations Gets Right—and Wrong
8. The Tank Is Dead: Long Live the Javelin, the Switchblade, the … ?
9. U.S. Army Options to Regain Land Power Dominance
10. The CCP’s Ukraine War Propaganda
11. Defense Department Sets Out to Build Miniature Nuclear Reactor, Again
12. How China Would Wage War Against the 'Great Wall In Reverse'
13. Shortwave radio: can you hear me now?
14. The Dangers of China’s Decline
15. Eight New Points on the Porcupine: More Ukrainian Lessons for Taiwan
16. Russians at War – Putin’s Aggression Has Turned a Nation Against Itself
17. How to Seek Justice for Rape in the Ukraine War
18. New American Lend-Lease Program Sends Powerful Signal To Russians – OpEd
19. Column: U.S. Special Forces Have Unique Input With Ukraine
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 17 (PUTIN'S WAR)
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 17 (PUTIN'S WAR)
Mason Clark and George Barros
April 17, 3pm ET
Russian forces likely captured the Port of Mariupol on April 16 despite Ukrainian General Staff denials, reducing organized Ukrainian resistance in the city to the Azovstal factory in eastern Mariupol. Russian and DNR forces released footage on April 16 confirming their presence in several key locations in southwestern Mariupol, including the port itself. Isolated groups of Ukrainian troops may remain active in Mariupol outside of the Azovstal factory, but they will likely be cleared out by Russian forces in the coming days. Russian forces likely seek to force the remaining defenders of the Azovstal factory to capitulate through overwhelming firepower to avoid costly clearing operations, but remaining Ukrainian defenders appear intent on staging a final stand. Russian forces will likely complete the capture of Mariupol in the coming week, but final assaults will likely continue to cost them dearly.
Russian forces continued to amass on the Izyum axis and in eastern Ukraine, increasingly including low-quality proxy conscripts, in parallel with continuous – and unsuccessful – small-scale attacks. Russian forces did not take any territory on the Izyum axis or in Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts in the past 24 hours. Russian forces deploying to eastern Ukraine reportedly continue to face significant morale and supply issues and appear unlikely to intend, or be able to, conduct a major offensive surge in the coming days.[1] Deputy Ukrainian Minister of Defense Anna Malyar stated on April 17 that the Russian military is in no hurry to launch an offensive in eastern Ukraine, having learned from their experience from Kyiv – but Russian forces continue localized attacks and are likely unable to amass the cohesive combat power necessary for a major breakthrough.[2]
Key Takeaways
- Russian forces likely captured the Port of Mariupol on April 16 despite Ukrainian General Staff denials.
- Russian forces likely seek to force the remaining defenders of the Azovstal factory to capitulate through overwhelming firepower to avoid costly clearing operations, but remaining Ukrainian defenders appear intent on staging a final stand.
- Evgeny Prigozhin, financier of the Wagner Group, is likely active on the ground in eastern Ukraine to coordinate Wagner Group recruitment and funding.
- Russian forces continued their build up around Izyum but did not conduct any offensive operations.
The Ukrainian Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported on April 16 that the Kremlin is increasingly arresting Russian and proxy officers for failures in Ukraine.[3] The GUR reported Russian military authorities established a commission intended to run from March 2 to April 24 in occupied Horlivka to identify the reasons for personnel shortages among Russian forces. The GUR reported that Russian investigators discovered the commanders of Russia’s 3rd Motor Rifle Brigade was 100% staffed at the beginning of the invasion when it in fact only had 55% of its personnel and arrested two battalion commanders in the brigade. The GUR also reported the FSB arrested DNR Defense Spokesperson Eduard Basurin for his ”careless statement” on April 11 revealing Russian intent to use chemical weapons in Mariupol, though there is still no independent confirmation of the Ukrainian claim of Russian chemical weapons use.
We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
ISW has updated its assessment of the four primary efforts Russian forces are engaged in at this time:
- Main effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate supporting efforts);
- Supporting effort 1—Kharkiv and Izyum;
- Supporting effort 2—Southern axis;
- Supporting effort 3—Sumy and northeastern Ukraine.
Main effort—Eastern Ukraine
Subordinate main effort – Mariupol (Russian objective: Capture Mariupol and reduce the Ukrainian defenders)
Russian forces likely captured the Port of Mariupol on April 16 despite Ukrainian General Staff denials on April 17, and Russian forces have reduced Ukrainian positions in the city to the Azovstal factory and a few isolated pockets. Russian and DNR forces released footage on April 16 confirming their presence in several key locations in southwestern Mariupol – including the traffic control center of the port, the prosecutors building, and the Main Directorate of the National Police in Donetsk region – and have likely reduced the center of Ukrainian defense in southwestern Mariupol.[4] The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed on April 16 that Russian forces cleared the entirety of urban Mariupol and that “the remnants of the Ukrainian group are currently completely blocked on the territory of the Azovstal metallurgical plant."[5] Isolated groups of Ukrainian troops may remain active in Mariupol outside of the Azovstal factory, but they will likely be cleared out by Russian forces in the coming days and the Ukrainian General Staff’s claim at 6pm local time on April 17 that Ukrainian forces repelled a Russian assault on the port is likely false.[6]
Russian forces likely seek to force the remaining defenders of the Azovstal factory to capitulate through overwhelming firepower to avoid costly clearing operations, but remaining Ukrainian defenders appear intent on staging a final stand. Russian forces conducted heavy air strikes in Mariupol, including by Tu-22M3 strategic bombers, in the past 24 hours.[7] Ukrainian forces in the Azovstal factory refused a Russian ultimatum to surrender by 1pm local time on April 17.[8] The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed Kyiv denied Ukrainian forces the option to surrender and ordered Azov Regiment troops to shoot surrendering Ukrainian personnel, part of the Kremlin’s ongoing information operation to falsely portray the Ukrainian military as a minority of ”nationalists” forcing the rest of the military to fight on.[9] Russian forces will likely complete the capture of Mariupol in the coming week, but final assaults will likely continue to cost them dearly.
Subordinate main effort – Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Russian troops continued attacks against Rubizhne Popasna, and Severodonetsk on April 17 without success.[10] Russian forces did not make any significant territorial gains in the last 24 hours.
Russian State Duma deputy Vitaly Milonov published a photo on VKontakte (a Russian social network) with Putin's close ally and financier of the Wagner Group Evgeney Prigozhin on April 17.[11] While ISW cannot verify the exact location of the photo of Milonov and Prigozhin, Milonov has shared photos of himself in Donbas in the past several days, and he presumably met Prigozhin somewhere in Donbas or near the Russian border. Prigozhin, who has no military experience and is the financier and organizer of Wagner Group rather than its military commander, is likely in Donbas to coordinate recruitment and financing of Wagner Group operations rather than to command combat operations.
Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv and Izyum: (Russian objective: Advance southeast to support Russian operations in Luhansk Oblast; and fix Ukrainian forces around Kharkiv in place)
Russian forces continued their build up around Izyum on April 17 but did not conduct any offensive operations.[12] Russian forces are increasingly attempting to leverage conscripts and proxy units in Izyum, indicating continuing challenges generating the forces necessary to encircle Ukrainian forces in eastern Ukraine. Social media users shared photos on April 16 of LNR personnel in Izyum, the first confirmed use of proxy troops (as opposed to the conventional Russian military) on the Izyum axis.[13] The Ukrainian General Staff reported on April 17 that Russian forces are attempting to mobilize Ukrainian civilians in Izyum (likely for manual labor rather than combat operations, as they have done elsewhere in occupied Ukraine), though ISW cannot independently confirm this report.[14] Russian forces continued to shell Kharkiv city in the past 24 hours, and Ukrainian forces did not conduct any counterattacks.[15]
Supporting Effort #2—Southern axis: (Objective: Defend Kherson against Ukrainian counterattacks)
The Ukrainian Resistance Center (the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense’s headquarters to coordinate operations within Russian-occupied territory) reported on April 16 that Ukrainian artillery targeted and destroyed ten railcars of Russian ammunition in Tomak using intelligence provided by Ukrainian civilians.[16] ISW cannot independently confirm this claim, and will be unlikely to be able to confirm similar Ukrainian claims of partisan activity in the future, but increasing Ukrainian reporting on partisan actions in southern Ukraine at minimum indicates increasing Ukrainian attention to these operations.
There has been no significant change around Kherson in the past 24 hours, though minor fighting is reportedly ongoing in Oleksandrivka.[17]
Supporting Effort #3—Sumy and Northeastern Ukraine: (Russian objective: Withdraw combat power in good order for redeployment to eastern Ukraine)
There was no significant change in this area in the past 24 hours.
Immediate items to watch
- Russian forces concentrating around Izyum will continue small-scale offensive operations to the southeast and southwest and may begin larger scale offensives.
- Russia and its proxies may declare victory in the Battle of Mariupol.
- Russian forces could launch a new offensive operation from Donetsk City to the north through Avdiivka toward Kramatorsk.
- Russian attacks on Severodonetsk, Popasna, and Rubizhne will continue.
[2] https://t dot me/stranaua/37038.
[3] https://gur.gov dot ua/content/okupanty-represuiut-komandyriv-iaki-ne-vypravdaly-ochikuvan-u-viini-z-ukrainoiu.html.
[5] https://ria dot ru/20220416/mariupol-1783914274.html.
[8] https://lenta dot ru/news/2022/04/17/mariup/; https://telegra dot ph/Srochnoe-zayavlenie-Mezhvedomstvennogo-koordinacionnogo-shtaba-Rossijskoj-Federacii-po-gumanitarnomu-reagirovaniyu-ot-16-aprelya-04-16.
[16] https://t dot me/savelifeua/737; https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2022/04/17/nevidomi-patrioty-uspishno-skoryguvaly-vogon-po-okupantah-v-zaporizkij-oblasti/.
2. Atrocities in Ukraine War Have Deep Roots in Russian Military
In the Russian military's DNA?
Excerpts:
“I am having the most severe flashbacks,” Ms. Chad, who now lives in New York, said in a phone interview. “I see exactly what’s going on: I see the same military, the same Russian tactics they use, dehumanizing the people.”
The brutality of Moscow’s war on Ukraine takes two distinct forms, familiar to those who have seen Russia’s military in action elsewhere.
There is the programmatic violence meted out by Russian bombs and missiles against civilians as well as military targets, meant to demoralize as much as defeat. These attacks recall the aerial destruction in 1999 and 2000 of the Chechen capital of Grozny and, in 2016, of the Syrian rebel stronghold of Aleppo.
And then there is the cruelty of individual soldiers and units, the horrors of Bucha appearing to have descended directly from the slaughter a generation ago in Ms. Chad’s village, Novye Aldi.
Atrocities in Ukraine War Have Deep Roots in Russian Military
April 17, 2022, 1:25 p.m. ET
Tetiana Petrovna reacted in horror in a garden where Roman Havryliuk, his brother Serhiy Dukhli and an unidentified victim were found on April 4 in Bucha, Ukraine.Credit...Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times
In a photograph from the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, Ukraine, a woman stands in the yard of a house, her hand covering her mouth in horror, the bodies of three dead civilians scattered before her. When Aset Chad saw that picture, she started shaking and hurtled 22 years back in time.
In February 2000, she walked into her neighbor’s yard in Chechnya and glimpsed the bodies of three men and a woman who had been shot repeatedly in front of her 8-year-old daughter. Russian soldiers had swept their village and murdered at least 60 people, raped at least six women and plundered the victims’ gold teeth, human rights observers found.
“I am having the most severe flashbacks,” Ms. Chad, who now lives in New York, said in a phone interview. “I see exactly what’s going on: I see the same military, the same Russian tactics they use, dehumanizing the people.”
The brutality of Moscow’s war on Ukraine takes two distinct forms, familiar to those who have seen Russia’s military in action elsewhere.
There is the programmatic violence meted out by Russian bombs and missiles against civilians as well as military targets, meant to demoralize as much as defeat. These attacks recall the aerial destruction in 1999 and 2000 of the Chechen capital of Grozny and, in 2016, of the Syrian rebel stronghold of Aleppo.
And then there is the cruelty of individual soldiers and units, the horrors of Bucha appearing to have descended directly from the slaughter a generation ago in Ms. Chad’s village, Novye Aldi.
Chechens gathering after a market was struck by a Russian missile the day before in Grozny, the capital, in 1999. Much like in Ukraine, the killing of civilians and targeting of civilian areas were common tactics of Russia during the second Chechen war.
Civilian deaths and crimes committed by soldiers figure into every war, not least those fought by the United States in recent decades in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. It has always been difficult to explain why soldiers commit atrocities, or to describe how the orders of commanders, military culture, national propaganda, battlefield frustration and individual malice can come together to produce such horrors.
In Russia, however, such acts are rarely investigated or even acknowledged, let alone punished. That leaves it unclear how much the low-level brutality stems from the intent of those in charge or whether commanders failed to control their troops. Combined with the apparent strategy of bombing civilian targets, many observers conclude that the Russian government — and, perhaps, a part of Russian society — in reality condones violence against civilians.
Some analysts see the problem as a structural and political one, with the lack of accountability of the Russian armed forces magnified by the absence of independent institutions in Vladimir V. Putin’s authoritarian system or the Soviet Union before it. Compared with the West, fewer people harbor any illusions of individual rights trumping raw power.
“I think there is this kind of culture of violence,” said Volodymyr Yermolenko, a Ukrainian philosopher. “Either you are dominating, or you are dominated.”
In Ukraine, Russian soldiers, by all appearances, can continue to kill civilians with impunity, as underscored by the fact that virtually none of the perpetrators of war crimes in Chechnya, where the Kremlin crushed an independence movement at the cost of tens of thousands of civilian lives, were ever prosecuted in Russia.
Back then, Russian investigators told Ms. Chad that the killings in Novye Aldi might have been perpetrated by Chechens dressed up as Russian troops, she recalls. Now, the Kremlin says any atrocities in Ukraine are either staged or carried out by the Ukrainians and their Western “patrons,” while denouncing as a “Nazi” anyone who resists the Russian advance.
Many Russians believe those lies, while those who do not are left wrestling with how such crimes could be carried out in their name.
Russian soldiers rolling through the bombed city of Grozny after intense fighting in the second Chechen war, in 2000. In Russia, crimes committed by soldiers are rarely investigated or even acknowledged.
Violence remains commonplace within the Russian military, where more senior soldiers routinely abuse junior ones. Despite two decades of attempts at trying to make the army a more professional force, it has never developed a strong middle tier akin to the noncommissioned officers who bridge the gap between commanders and lower-ranking soldiers in the American military. In 2019, a conscript in Siberia opened fire and killed eight at his military base, later asserting that he had carried out the shooting spree because other soldiers had made his life “hell.”
Experts say that the severity of hazing in the Russian military has been reduced compared with the early 2000s, when it killed dozens of conscripts yearly. But they say that order in many units is still maintained through informal systems similar to the abusive hierarchies in Russian prisons.
To Sergei Krivenko, who leads a rights group that provides legal aid to Russian soldiers, that violence, coupled with a lack of independent oversight, makes war crimes more possible. Russian soldiers are just as capable of cruelty against fellow Russians, he says, as they are against Ukrainians.
“It is the state of the Russian army, this impunity, aggression and internal violence, that is expressed in these conditions,” Mr. Krivenko said in a phone interview. “If there were to be an uprising in Voronezh” — a city in western Russia — “and the army were called in, the soldiers would behave exactly the same way.”
But the crimes in Ukraine may also stem from the Kremlin’s years of dehumanizing propaganda against Ukrainians, which soldiers consume in required viewings. Russian conscripts, a sample schedule available on the Russian Defense Ministry’s website shows, must sit through “informational television programs” from 9 to 9:40 p.m. every day but Sunday. The message that they are fighting “Nazis” — as their forefathers did in World War II — is now being spread through the military, Russian news reports show.
In one video distributed by the Defense Ministry, a marine commander, Maj. Aleksei Shabulin, says his grandfather “chased fascist scum through the forests” during and after World War II, referring to Ukrainian independence fighters who at one point collaborated with Nazi Germany.
A patriotic mural in December on a building in Moscow showing Soviet pilots from World War II. The sign in Russian reads, “The saved world remembers you!” echoing Kremlin attempts to paint “Mother Russia” as a savior.Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
“Now I am gloriously continuing this tradition; now my time has come,” Major Shabulin says. “I will not disgrace my great-grandfather and will go to the end.”
That propaganda also primed Russian soldiers not to expect much resistance to the invasion — after all, the Kremlin’s narrative went, people in Ukraine had been subjugated by the West and were awaiting liberation by their Russian brethren. Mr. Krivenko, the soldiers’ rights advocate, said he had spoken directly to a Russian soldier who called his group’s hotline and recounted that even when his unit was ordered into Ukraine from Belarus, it was not made clear that the soldiers were about to enter a war zone.
Russia-Ukraine War: Key Developments
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A boost to NATO. Finland and Sweden are considering applying for membership in the alliance. Dmitri A. Medvedev, Russia’s former president and prime minister, said Moscow would be forced to “seriously strengthen” its defenses in the Baltics if the two countries were to join.
Military commanders’ “attitude to the army is, basically, like to cattle,” Mr. Krivenko said. Mr. Putin has said that only contract soldiers will fight in Ukraine, but his Defense Ministry was forced to admit last month that conscripts — serving the one-year term in the military required of Russian men 18 to 27 — had been sent to the front, as well.
Ukrainians did fight back, even though Mr. Putin called them part of “one nation” with Russians in an essay published last year that the Defense Ministry made required reading for its soldiers. The fierce resistance of a people considered to be part of one’s own contributed to the sense that Ukrainians were worse than a typical battlefield adversary, said Mark Galeotti, who studies Russian security affairs.
“The fact that ordinary Ukrainians are now taking up arms against you — there is this sense that these aren’t just enemies, these are traitors,” he said.
Volunteers with the Territorial Defense Forces receiving weapons training in March, before being deployed to fight against Russian forces near Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
And treason, Mr. Putin has said, “is the gravest crime possible.”
To some extent, the Russian military’s violence against civilians is a feature, not a bug. In Syria, Russia targeted hospitals to crush the last pockets of resistance to President Bashar al-Assad, a “brutally pragmatic approach to warfare” that has “its own, ghastly” logic, Mr. Galeotti said. It was an echo of Russia’s aerial destruction of Grozny in 1999 and 2000, and a prelude to the fierce siege of the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol in the current invasion.
The killings of civilians at close range and sexual violence by individual soldiers are a separate matter. In Bucha, civilians told The New York Times that the moods and behaviors of the Russian troops grew uglier as the war progressed, and that the first soldiers to arrive were relatively peaceful.
“You have a bunch of sleep-deprived young men with guns for whom, they feel, none of the rules apply,” Mr. Galeotti said.
The violence has caused scholars to reassess their understanding of the Russian army. In a military operation that seemed — at least at first — to be aimed at winning over Ukrainians’ allegiance to Moscow, atrocities against civilians seem grotesquely counterproductive. Russia already experienced that in Chechnya, where Russian violence against civilians fueled the Chechen resistance.
“Every dead civilian meant a bullet into a Russian soldier,” said Kirill Shamiev, who studies Russian civil-military relations at the Central European University in Vienna. “I thought that they had learned some lessons.”
Kafr Nabl Surgical Hospital in Idlib, Syria, after a Russian strike in May 2019. The hospital was repeatedly hit during the war.
But Stanislav Gushchenko, a journalist who served as a psychologist in the Russian military in the early 2000s, said he was not surprised by the reports of Russian atrocities in Ukraine. He recalled the quotidian violence in his unit and the banal mistreatment of Russian civilians, like the time that a group of soldiers he was traveling with by long-distance train stole a cooked chicken that an older woman in their carriage had brought along for sustenance.
In a phone interview from the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, Mr. Gushchenko marveled at the Russians who now express shock.
“I say, ‘Guys, things were about the same 20 years ago,’” he said. “You lived in your own, closed world, in some kind of bubble, or as psychologists say, in a comfort zone, and didn’t want to notice this or truly didn’t notice.”
Alina Lobzina contributed reporting from Istanbul, and Milana Mazaeva from Phoenix, Ariz.
3. Why Russia gave up on urban war in Kyiv and turned to big battles in the east
Excerpts:
Satellite images taken by Maxar Technologies have in recent days shown multiple convoys of Russian vehicles, weapons, troops and equipment moving in and around Ukraine’s east. Experts say Russia may try to besiege Ukrainian forces by linking its troops in the north and the south. It is an effort that analysts warn could include the blockade or capture of more eastern cities.
Local officials have told The Washington Post that Russia was attempting a “scorched earth” tactic to gain full control of Donetsk and Luhansk, two regions that make up the broader region of Donbas.
To achieve that, analysts say, Russia is likely to try to encircle Ukrainian troops in the east by connecting their troops in the north with their troops in the south.
Why Russia gave up on urban war in Kyiv and turned to big battles in the east
Just weeks into its war in Ukraine, Russia has shifted its focus to the country’s east, redeploying weapons and troops and increasing attacks on key towns and cities.
The sudden pivot to friendlier territory — where pro-Moscow separatists have fought for years — comes after Russian forces failed to capture Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv.
At the start of the invasion, the Kremlin appeared confident that the city would fall without a fight, cowed by the speed and strength of Russia’s advance.
“They’re going to do this in a fast-moving, Hollywood style,” Jim Townsend, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Europe and NATO during the Obama administration, recalled thinking at the time.
But almost immediately, Russian forces stalled outside the city, hobbled by poor planning and critical supply shortages.
They also lacked the sheer manpower to occupy Kyiv, a metropolis of nearly 3 million people.
Its surface area — more than 300 square miles — is more than twice that of Washington D.C.’s. “There’s just a lot of terrain [Russia] would need to cover, and Russian combat forces are actually somewhat light on infantry,” said Scott Boston, a senior defense analyst at the Rand Corp.
Kyiv is bisected by the Dnieper River, “like two large cities that can mutually support one another across the river,” Boston said. Ukrainians seized on that geography, destroying bridges near the city. Flooded areas also may have impeded a Russian advance.
Russian forces also failed to quickly capture Antonov Airport, which would have allowed them to establish a base to bring in more equipment and supplies. They eventually captured the area, but by then, they were bogged down with intense battles.
Russia’s delay allowed Kyiv to build up its defenses and prepare for an urban battle — one that Moscow wasn’t prepared to fight.
BEFORE THE INVASION
As the conflict began, Kyiv was not ready, but the city environment meant Ukrainians had an edge.
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Urban areas are a three-dimensional terrain in which attackers must consider a 360-degree sphere of potential threat. Defenders have an advantage, but they must worry about limiting harm to civilians and the city itself.
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Buildings provide high angles from which to shoot as well as cover from observation and attacks. Robust concrete structures, such as banks or government buildings, may be used as a strongpoint from which to defend.
Underground spaces, such as maintenance tunnels and subways, offer areas to depot supplies, protect from aerial attacks and conceal movement from the enemy.
AFTER THE FIRST SHOTS
Within days of Russia’s initial attacks, the streets of Kyiv transformed.
Caches of supplies and weapons, such as armored personnel carriers and antitank rockets, were placed throughout the city, and antiaircraft guns were deployed around buildings.
Barricades and checkpoints formed around the city. Trucks, buses, large concrete blocks, tires and sandbags formed barriers to protect Ukrainian defenders and block the advance of enemy troops and armor down city streets.
Barricades also redirect the enemy to areas that defenders have pre-targeted with artillery and explosives.
The time the capital had to prepare made Kyiv even harder for Russia to seize.
“A prepared defense is the worst-case scenario for an attacker,” Boston said.
CHALLENGES OF URBAN WARFARE
In late March, Russia appeared to change its strategy, shifting resources from around the city to the eastern part of the country. Occupying Kyiv would have meant urban warfare, a scenario experts say favored Ukrainian fighters.
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To take a city by force, an attacking army may often use infantry and armor. Each support the other in what is known as combined arms operations as they advance street by street.
Staying in buildings can limit an adversary’s use of aerial surveillance, though unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can dissuade defenders from congregating openly on rooftops.
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Defenders take advantage of their reinforced positions to degrade the enemy. Short-range antitank weapons such as NLAWs and RPGs could be used to eliminate tanks which infantry use for cover.
Without protection from armor, attacking troops are more vulnerable to small-arms fire from behind barricades and windows above.
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Defenders may also make openings in interior walls, called mouse holes, that allow them to attack from one spot and then quickly move to another location in the building. Holes in exterior walls may be made by an assault force to surprise an enemy inside a building.
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The urban terrain favors those who are defending. An attacking force needs to commit a large number of troops and resources to not only take a city street-by-street, but also hold those areas.
Once it became clear that this was a losing battle for Russia, the shift toward the east began in earnest.
“They decided [to withdraw] because they had no other decision to make,“ said Jeffrey Edmonds, the former director for Russia on the National Security Council.
“It wasn’t like, ‘Well, we can take the city, but it’s going to cost us too much,’ " said Edmonds, who also served with the U.S. Army in Iraq. “They just couldn’t do it.
Russia began pulling its troops from Kyiv in late March, sending some north to Belarus and others to the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. The energy-rich region on Russia’s western border is held in part by allied separatists, offering Moscow safer territory from which to launch attacks and resupply its forces.
The open terrain is better for Russian armored units, experts say. Near Kyiv, they were forced to use roads, putting forces on a predictable route vulnerable to ambushes and attacks from the air.
Satellite images taken by Maxar Technologies have in recent days shown multiple convoys of Russian vehicles, weapons, troops and equipment moving in and around Ukraine’s east. Experts say Russia may try to besiege Ukrainian forces by linking its troops in the north and the south. It is an effort that analysts warn could include the blockade or capture of more eastern cities.
Local officials have told The Washington Post that Russia was attempting a “scorched earth” tactic to gain full control of Donetsk and Luhansk, two regions that make up the broader region of Donbas.
To achieve that, analysts say, Russia is likely to try to encircle Ukrainian troops in the east by connecting their troops in the north with their troops in the south.
To do so, they would probably need to capture or surround key eastern cities such as Izyum. Local officials announced last week that Izyum, a city of roughly 40,000, was taken by Russian forces after three weeks of artillery fire and airstrikes.
If Sloviansk, a city of more than 100,000, were to fall, it could allow Russia to encircle Ukrainian troops in the east, cutting them off from supply lines.
Other nearby cities, such as Kramatorsk to the south or Severodonetsk to the east, could also become surrounded by Russian troops.
Russia has already used siege tactics in Ukraine, surrounding and bombarding the port city of Mariupol, as well as Chernihiv in the north. Encircling, isolating and then pummeling a city requires less manpower and equipment than an urban war for control of a major capital.
So far, no large eastern city has surrendered to Russian forces — but their defense has come at an enormous cost. The mayor of Mariupol said this week that Russia’s siege may have killed more than 20,000 civilians, a figure The Post could not independently verify.
The devastation itself can make it hard for the aggressor to hold a city, alienating the local population and breeding further resistance.
“The encirclement and siege of key towns and cities is very destructive and imposes huge costs on the local population,” said Tracey German, a professor in conflict and security at King’s College London.
“Even if Russia achieves a military victory — which is not a given — it is not clear how it can achieve a longer-term political victory after its destructive and indiscriminate use of force,” she said.
4. 'Wolverines' graffiti straight out of 'Red Dawn' showing up all over battlefields in Ukraine
Who is the target audience for this PSYOP? Probably not the Russians.
'Wolverines' graffiti straight out of 'Red Dawn' showing up all over battlefields in Ukraine
Avenge me!
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The message seems to be spreading.
A photo posted to Twitter on Friday morning by journalist Nolan Peterson showed a burned-out Russian T-72 tank on a roadside supposedly near western Kyiv. Along the barrel, scrawled in white spray paint, was the word “Wolverines,” another seeming homage to the 1984 Cold War-era movie “Red Dawn.
— Nolan Peterson (@nolanwpeterson) April 15, 2022
Other videos showed civilians walking around the same tank, along with other charred wreckage.
— Rob Lee (@RALee85) April 15, 2022
Last week, a photo surfaced on Twitter showing a disabled Russian BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicle marked with the “Wolverines” tag. And now, much like the insurgency carried out by Patrick Swayze, Thomas Howell, and a collection of high school students from the town of Calumet, Colorado against a fictional Soviet invasion of the United States, the Wolverines tag is showing up more and more.
There is what looks like a burned-out BTR-80 armored personnel carrier, supposedly destroyed near Brovary, a suburb of Kyiv.
— тотальна зневага (@CrimsonMaverick) April 14, 2022
And then there is this photo of another destroyed T-72 with “Wolverines” painted in white on the side of the turret which, in this case, had not blown off.
— 𝐂𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐞𝐝 𝐔𝐤𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐈𝐧𝐟𝐨 (@UkraineWarPosts) April 8, 2022
And from Thursday, the wreckage of another BTR-82 seen by a French journalist in Nova Basan, again with “Wolverines” spray-painted across the front of the armored personnel carrier.
— Guillaume Ptak (@guillaume_ptak) April 14, 2022
As we saw in the original movie — and we won’t be talking about the critically panned 2012 remake — the occupation of Colorado ends in disaster for the Soviet and Cuban occupiers. Taking their name from their old high school football team, the teenaged insurgents, among them Charlie Sheen, Lea Thompson and Jennifer Grey, are soon waging a guerilla campaign, leaving behind the “Wolverines” tag whenever they strike.
The invasion of Ukraine has seen an impressive proliferation of information warfare. There have been the memes. There have been tales of bravery that have ranged from muddled to almost certainly apocryphal, such as the “Ghost of Kyiv.”
How a 1980s movie reference made its way to the battlefields of Ukraine is unclear. But it certainly seems as if there will be plenty of more tanks and armored vehicles bearing the tag: “Wolverines.”
What’s new on Task & Purpose
Max Hauptman has been covering breaking news at Task & Purpose since December 2021. He previously worked at The Washington Post as a Military Veterans in Journalism Fellow, as well as covering local news in New England. Contact the author here.
5. A Most Reliable Ally: How Corruption in the Russian Military Could Save Ukraine
Interesting thesis and analysis.
Excerpts:
With this second stage of Russia’s campaign underway, it is also unlikely that senior officials will be tackling the root issue of corruption any time soon, experts and military sources said.
“They won’t change horses at the crossing, but I’m sure that heads will roll later,” the researcher specialized in military production said, adding that “we won’t hear anything about this, most likely.”
The researcher recalled that the last high-profile military corruption case was the accusation that 300 tons of fuel disappeared at the Kapustin Yar training ground. The head of the landfill was charged with taking a two-million-ruble bribe, and put under house arrest.
The high-ranking officer said that while many of these cases were “little things,” that collectively “such little things form the picture that we see in Ukraine now.”
“How to fix it?” he said. “I think it’s not for us to decide.”
A Most Reliable Ally: How Corruption in the Russian Military Could Save Ukraine
The Russian army, considered one of the strongest in the world, has suddenly found itself bogged down in Ukraine. How can corruption, which Moscow has been fighting for decades, help explain the quagmire?
A ZIL-130 truck after the destruction of a convoy of Russian vehicles in the Kharkiv region at the end of March 2022 (Photo: Twitter / @UAWeapons)
At the start of its invasion of Ukraine, the Russian army was considered one of the strongest in the world. In 2022, the force consisted of 900,000 military personnel — the world’s fifth largest, surpassed only by the United States, China, India, and possibly North Korea, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).
In terms of materiel, Russia possessed more than 12,000 tanks, 6,000 self-propelled artillery vehicles, 3,000 multiple-launch rocket systems, and about 7,000 towed artillery pieces. Its stockpile of nuclear warheads is larger than those of all NATO countries combined.
By these indicators, drawn from a 2022 IISS study, Russia surpassed every other military on the planet.
How did this formidable military machine end up almost literally bogged down in what was supposed to be a “short, victorious war” (to borrow a phrase attributed to Tsar Nicholas II)?
Some sources say President Vladimir Putin was misled, both before and during the operation. Others point out that soldiers and junior officers were not ready for actual combat, given the secrecy in which preparations were made. Experts and military officers interviewed by OCCRP both mentioned these considerations.
However, most agreed that the campaign’s failures were also rooted in another key factor: Corruption.
The problem isn’t just that in the army — to put it simply — people steal, be that equipment, fuel, or uniforms. There is also a lack of transparency in key data, such as rearmament numbers and costs, which opens opportunities for graft. Nepotism, theft, and embezzlement also affect the training process, both in peacetime and during other “special operations” in Ukraine and Syria. Corruption undermines communication and supply lines just as much as enemy mines do.
Ultimately, experts say, it is corruption in the Russian military that may save Kyiv.
New Hardware
The Russian army has been preparing for a possible operation in Ukraine for over a decade. In 2007, Anatoly Serdyukov was appointed defense minister with a mandate to reform the armed forces. That process was accelerated by the eight-day war with Georgia, which showed that Russian troops were not ready to fight protracted, modern conflicts.
“Before Serdyukov, we had, in actuality, the Soviet army — huge, clumsy, with outdated equipment, a lack of personnel,” one senior military officer told OCCRP.
Although Serdyukov “stole everything that wasn’t nailed down,” he did in fact carry out a substantial reorganization, the officer said. Previously, the Russian army had used so-called “cadre brigades,” many of which were composed of reservists and therefore not able to quickly mobilize into an effective fighting force. Serdyukov replaced these “paper troops” with battle-ready tactical groups, which were first deployed in eastern Ukraine in 2014.
Former Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov (left) with former Moscow Region Governor Boris Gromov (center) and Dmitry Medvedev, at that time President of the Russian Federation, 2011 (Photo): kremlin.ru, CC BY 3.0)
Serdyukov's term ended in scandal, although numerous criminal cases and investigations over corruption and other charges against him led nowhere in the end.
His successor, Sergei Shoigu, pressed forward with the reforms. However, Shoigu’s focus was less on reorganizing the army’s structure and more on building up its armaments, experts say.
Starting in 2013, Shoigu began to issue regular public reports on the implementation of defense procurement. As of January 2022, the ministry reported the “percentage of rearmament” — in theory an indicator of what portion of the military’s materiel was new — to be more than 70 percent.
But this figure was “absolutely fictitious,” one military expert told OCCRP. “You can’t check it independently, and we all know how well they can draw it up,” he said.
A military researcher said Shoigu's numbers "don’t correspond to reality."
“We see new models of equipment — missiles, tanks, submarines — but in individual instances,” he said.
The senior military officer told OCCRP that the scale of the Russian army made rearmament an inherently difficult task.
“This task, to put it mildly, was not fulfilled,” he said. “At least, it was not executed in the way that was reported to the president every year.”
Scandals and Theft
The “massaged numbers” reported by the Defense Ministry may have made Moscow overconfident in a lightning victory over Ukraine, experts and military sources said.
“We have dozens of exercises every year — parades, demonstration launches. How can one not believe in the invincibility of the army?” the military expert said.
The expert did not think that Shoigu was creating “Potemkin villages” for Putin — that is, weapons really were delivered to the army. But the lack of transparent data made it almost impossible to estimate the proportions, which in any case seemed to fall well shy of the 70 percent the ministry described.
But a second expert said that while these were “impressive numbers,” most observers
“don’t understand at all what this money is spent on. We don’t have any opportunities to control, check these expenses.”
Military parade on Red Square on May 9, 2018 (Photo: kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0)
One sign of troubles behind the ministry’s rosy reports is the criminal cases involving manufacturers of armaments and other military equipment. Over the past year alone, several arrests have been made related to the disruption of supplies and imports being substituted in the defense industry, according to media reports.
According to a second researcher, specialized in military production, this is likely just “the tip of the iceberg,” since cases are usually only brought when “someone somewhere has become impudent, someone somewhere has crossed the path of someone higher up,” he told OCCRP.
“They steal everywhere over there,” he said, pointing to a 2020 case in which retired officers working for the Defense Ministry allegedly attempted to extract millions of rubles in bribes to help a company win a state contract to supply inflatable mock-up tanks.
Despite such volumes of theft, the equipment displayed at “high-profile events” was still high-quality, the high-ranking military officer told OCCRP.
“We can still pull that off,” he said.
In the Field
The main theaters in which the Russian military has been recently tested in practice were eastern Ukraine in 2014 and Syria in 2015.
In both cases, however, the intervention was either limited in scope or not even publicly acknowledged. Officially, Moscow still says its regular army did not take part in the 2014 fighting between regional separatists and the Ukrainian army.
Tens of thousands of Russian soldiers passed through Syria, but on an ongoing basis. Those who took part in combat were mostly military pilots and aircraft crews. Russian soldiers "on the ground" were mainly limited to guarding facilities, ensuring the operation of airfields, and reconnaissance.
That experience “cannot be compared with what is happening in Ukraine now,” where the army is using “real manpower against the real manpower of the enemy,” the first military expert told OCCRP.
The first military researcher pointed out that, although Russia carried out missile launches and fleet exercises in Syria, the conflict did not give a strong indication of how ready the military was for a major ground operation: “The Islamic State does not have any fleet or air force,” he said.
“It’s one thing to level some underground passages and tents in the desert with rockets every day, it’s another thing to fight on the ground after these air strikes.”
Vladimir Putin with military pilots of the Russian Aerospace Forces at the Khmeimim airfield in Syria, 2017 (Photo: kremlin.ru, CC BY 3.0)
Experts said that the high number of air sorties, attempted high-precision strikes, and even the content of the Defense Ministry’s daily media briefings, all suggest the military was relying on the Syria experience in the invasion’s early days.
But that campaign did little to prepare ground troops for “a thousand things that you couldn’t think about so much in Syria,” the second expert said.
One retired soldier who fought in eastern Ukraine in 2014 put it this way: “Money was still found for machinery, equipment, some developments, but for equipping the army itself, and training it after Serdyukov’s reforms, they somehow forgot.”
The Human Factor
Poor training and low morale also appear to be factors, experts and soldiers said.
A lawyer for an army-related human rights project told OCCRP that “conscripts are not prepared normally at all.”
“Contract soldiers are getting worse and worse. Exercises are canceled, live fire training, too,” he said. “People seem to join the army, but they do chores — repair the barracks, mow the grass.”
A junior officer with a unit taking part in the Ukraine war said that only the unit’s reconnaissance company — who had served in Syria and eastern Ukraine — did regular exercises.
Another soldier who drove a tank in a unit in eastern Russia said there was no diesel available for their training runs.
Virtual simulators should have helped make up for this, but “something happened” to them, the soldier said. Describing the simulators used in his unit, he referenced an old Soviet joke about a soldier asking to watch TV: “You can watch it, but don’t turn it on.”
A T-80BVM tank at the military parade on May 9, 2021 (Photo: kremlin.ru, CC BY 3.0)
One teacher also described problems in training higher-level officers. Instructors were not always of the best quality: “If there’s some kind of retired major not from the first cohort, then that’s it, consider the training totally screwed,” he told OCCRP.
While the problems were never “too harsh,” such an instructor might “bring cognac to a test, shout at everyone in formation, put everyone in plank position — this is the norm,” the teacher said.
The lawyer for the human rights project said they were “constantly being contacted” over hazing issues. While egregious cases may have declined, “petty bribes, psychological pressure, light beatings ‘for educational purposes’ and other seeming relics of the Soviet army still persist.”
These practices can create distrust and an unwillingness to serve, he said. In one recent example, the Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT), a Russian analyst group, published a video from March 3 showing soldiers complaining that commanders had “thrown them stupidly like cannon fodder."
“The orders of commanders and chiefs, as it is written in the oath, are sacred. But usually no one believes them,” one soldier fighting in Ukraine told OCCRP. “It’s every man in the army for himself.”
Natural Result
Supply problems are also reportedly rife.
In the video shared by CIT, one voice claims that the soldiers there had not “eaten normally” in three or four days.
Another video, published by the Ukrainian military, claims to show captured dry rations that expired in 2015. The veracity of the video could not be confirmed, but the high-ranking military officer said that expired rations were common in the army: “They lie in warehouses for years, no one needs them. Why throw them away now? It’s canned food, what’s going to happen to it?”
Three soldiers participating in the Ukraine campaign also told OCCRP that their units had problems with warm clothes, fuel, and spare parts for military equipment, mainly trucks.
“March was cold, and we even had nothing to heat the stove with. It’s good that they brought the stoves themselves, otherwise I heard that many didn’t even have them,” one said.
Another recalled: “They gave me a raincoat, but in the company about a quarter of the boys were left without them … they promised to bring more of them, but of course they didn’t, and then everyone found a way to share somehow.”
Russian soldiers at a railway station on the border with Ukraine (Photo: Twitter / @RALee85)
The clothing and fuel shortages have also been confirmed by intercepted conversations and Western intelligence data — leaks ironically made possible by another shortage, this time of communication means. In place of secure channels, the Russian military has reportedly used ordinary phones and Chinese household radios.
One serviceman complained that even though proper military radios were available, they were not distributed properly. “For me, this is a complete mystery,” he said.
What’s Next?
The forces that participated in the battles near Kyiv have returned to Russia and are preparing for a new attack focused on the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
The second military expert expected that the new, more limited focus would likely ease some supply and logistical problems. But he added that this would not eliminate questions about the readiness of equipment and the lack of important items, such as radios.
With this second stage of Russia’s campaign underway, it is also unlikely that senior officials will be tackling the root issue of corruption any time soon, experts and military sources said.
“They won’t change horses at the crossing, but I’m sure that heads will roll later,” the researcher specialized in military production said, adding that “we won’t hear anything about this, most likely.”
The researcher recalled that the last high-profile military corruption case was the accusation that 300 tons of fuel disappeared at the Kapustin Yar training ground. The head of the landfill was charged with taking a two-million-ruble bribe, and put under house arrest.
The high-ranking officer said that while many of these cases were “little things,” that collectively “such little things form the picture that we see in Ukraine now.”
“How to fix it?” he said. “I think it’s not for us to decide.”
6. Putin's War - April 18, 2022 Update | SOF News
Putin's War - April 18, 2022 Update | SOF News
Curated news, analysis, and commentary about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, tactical situation on the ground, Ukrainian defense, and NATO. Additional topics include refugees, internally displaced personnel, humanitarian efforts, cyber, and information operations.
Photo: Senior Airman Jansen Esteves, a 436th Aerial Port Squadron special handler, verifies shipment information for supplies bound for Ukraine at Dover Air Force Base, Del., March 20, 2022. Photo by Air Force Staff Sgt. Marco A. Gomez.
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Big Picture of the Conflict
The Ukrainian War may last through the remainder of the year; U.S. Secretary of State Blinken shared this assessment with European allies. Most military analysts believe that this second phase of the war (after the Russian failure to take Kyiv) will be just as important as the first. The Donbas region and southern Ukraine will be the focus of Russia’s ground campaign. If the future battles do not go well for Ukraine it may face the prospect of being threatened by Russia from three sides in the coming years. The threat will come from Belarus in the north, from the east – Russia and the Donbas region, and from the south – Crimea and the shoreline of the Black Sea. Should Russia take Odessa on the Black Sea then Ukraine will have difficulty maintaining its economy in the future and will need to make significant concessions to Russia in the months and years to come.
Ukraine and the Future of Air Warfare. The events of the past two months have shown that the nature of air warfare is changing. At the beginning of the war, military analysts predicted that Russia would gain air superiority quickly due to the quantitative and qualitative advantage of its aircraft. Russia’s number of aircraft was ten times larger than that of Ukraine. Dr. Grieco, an assistant professor at the U.S. Air University, explains the poor performance of the Russian air force. This includes poor training and shortage of pilots, deconfliction in large-scale operations, and the Russian emphasis on land-centric doctrine. The Russians assumed that their blitzkrieg strategy would succeed quickly without the need for a dedicated air campaign to suppress enemy air defenses. Griecon examines the air fight over Ukraine and comes up with some conclusions on air warfare. Read more in “Ukraine, the U.S., and the Future of Air Warfare”, Georgetown Security Studies Review, April 15, 2022.
Air Actions. The Ukrainian military says that a number of missiles hit major populated areas over the weekend. Some of the missiles were shot down by Ukraine’s air defense systems. The western city of Lviv was hit by four (or five) missiles on Monday morning (Apr 18) killing six and injuring eleven. The attack appears to be on military targets at a location near the city’s train station. (The Washington Post, Apr 18, 2022).
Maritime Activities. The U.S. Department of Defense has concluded that the Flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet was sunk by two Neptune anti-ship missiles launched by Ukraine on Thursday (Apr 14). The Russians maintain that a fire broke out near ammunition stores on the ship that caused an explosion and that it sank in stormy seas while being towed to port. The Russian navy has not been a significant factor thus far in the conflict and will likely remain in a supporting role. Post-conflict, the Black Sea fleet will increase in importance due to its ability to blockade any seaports remaining in Ukrainian hands and to interdict maritime traffic.
Mariupol – Days are Numbered? Located on the Sea of Azov, the coastal city of Mariupol is under siege by the Russians. Many analysts have predicted its fall to the Russians in terms of days. As of Sunday evening (Apr 17) there were still Ukrainian forces in the city holding out in defensive positions. The Russians say that they have captured the city. Ukraine says a small band of Ukrainian fighters are fighting on – remnants of the 36th Marine Brigade and the Azov battalion. They are fighting from a network of bunkers and tunnels beneath the devastated city. There are about 100,000 civilians trapped in Mariupol; many of them suffering from hunger. The Russians have not allowed any humanitarian convoys with food and medicine from Ukraine to enter the city.
Mykolayiv and Odessa. James Barnett, a research fellow with the Hudson Institute, describes life in the city that is an obstacle to Russia’s conquest of the Black Sea coastline heading to Odessa. “No Respite on Ukraine’s Bloody Southern Front”, Hudson Institute, April 6, 2022. Watch a discussion with James Barnett and his two weeks observing the war on the southern front in Ukraine. “Reporting from the Frontline of the War in Ukraine”, Hudson Institute, April 11, 2022, YouTube, 40 minutes.
Situation Reports and Maps. War in Ukraine by Scribble Maps. Read an assessment and view a map (Apr 17) of the Russian offensive campaign by the Institute for the Study of War. View more Ukraine SITMAPs that provide updates on the disposition of Russian forces. View the latest SITMAP from the UK Ministry of Defence (Apr 18). According to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence the total combat losses of the Russians are (as of Apr 18) approximately 20,600 personnel, 790 tanks, 2041 APVs, 381 artillery systems, and 67 anti-aircraft systems. NATO estimates of Russian losses tend to be a bit lower, yet still significant.
General Information
Former Acting SecDef Miller Visits Ukraine. Chris Miller, the former acting Secretary of Defense in the Trump administration recently returned from a visit to Ukraine. He says that the Ukrainians want five types of equipment from the West: long-range rocket systems, air-defense systems that will reach high altitudes, fighter jets, combat aviation, and tanks. National Security Daily, Politico, April 15, 2022.
Formal Russian Diplomatic Protest. The Kremlin has sent multiple warnings to the Biden administration about the weapons and support that the United States is providing to Ukraine. The Russians have threatened the U.S. with “unpredictable consequences” upon hearing recent announcements by the Department of Defense of additional weapons flowing to Ukraine.
Negotiations. The talks in Istanbul, Turkey between Ukrainian and Russia representatives have yielded very little. The Russians have advanced the narrative that their withdrawal from the Kyiv region and other areas in northern Ukraine area are a ‘confidence building measure’ for future talks. In reality, the withdrawal is the result of a solid defeat of Russian forces along that axis of advance. Despite what Putin and his negotiating representatives may say, one of Russia’s objectives is to cut Ukraine off from any access to seaports along the Sea of Azov (pretty much done as of now) and also along the Black Sea (Odessa). The talks are looked at by many analysts as a stalling tactic for Russia until the securing of all of the southern coastline of Ukraine and the Donbas region.
Mozart Group – SOF Vets Helping in Ukraine. A private organization is assisting Ukraine with personnel that have some specialty skills – among them medical, information operations, training, logistics, open source intelligence, and emergency ordnance disposal. The Mozart Group is providing training, equipment, and advise to Ukraine SOF and resistance units. The founder of the group is Andy Milburn, a retired Marine Corps officer rich in special operations and combat experience. Read a 16-page PDF describing the organization’s mission and capabilities.
Ukrainians and U.S. Southern Border. Over 7,000 Ukrainians have arrived in Mexico since the beginning of the war. Apparently, the word has gotten out that our southern border is somewhat ‘open’. Probably due to the fact that about 100,000 illegal aliens are crossing the border every month.
Syrian Fighters. Up to now, only a small amount of fighters from Syria have been flown to Russia. They are currently undergoing a training course before being introduced to the Ukraine theater of operations. So far, over 40,000 Syrians have registered to fight for Russia. 22,000 with the Russian military and 18,000 with the Russian private contractor firm – the Wagner Group. It is reported that about 700 members of the 25th Special Missions Forces Division (“Tiger Force”) have departed Syria for the fighting in Ukraine. The Russians are looking for experienced fighters – of which there are plenty in Syria. “Syrian fighters ready to join next phase of Ukraine war”, AP News, April 18, 2022.
Demining. Ukrainian officials say that they plan to finish demining towns and road in the Kyiv area by the end of May. However, other areas may take many more months to clear the thousands of mines that have been emplaced since February.
Russian Soldiers Resisting. Some Russians are refusing to fight any further in the Ukraine War. An unknown number of soldiers have been discharged from military service for refusing to fight in Ukraine. (Radio Free Europe, Apr 16, 2022).
Cyber and Information Operations
Russian Conscripts – And the Stories They Will Tell. Putin has a strangle-hold on the Russian media. The deluge of disinformation provided by the Putin regime has solidified the Russian public’s support for Putin and his ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine. However, the regime’s narrative may soon be challenged with the thousands of Russian conscripts whose tour of duty will be complete in the next few months. They will carry home the stories of what is really happening in Ukraine. Read more in “Russia’s Draftee Ticking Time Bomb”, SpyTalk, April 16, 2022.
Short Wave Radio – Maybe Not. There have been recent calls for the re-establishment of short-wave radio broadcasts into Russia by Radio Free Europe to undermine Moscow’s domestic censorship. The BBC News Service has recently brought back a four-hour block of short-wave radio broadcasts. Is this an idea that should be implemented? Matt Armstrong says that “. . . hundred year old shortwave is cool, but today is not like yesterday.” A report was conducted in 2014 entitled “To Be Where the Audience is” that says shortwave is a platform of the past. Read some history on shortwave radio and the “Voice of America” in “Shortwave radio: can you hear me now?”, Mountain Runner, April 15, 2022.
PSYOP and Ukraine. Social media disinformation and manipulation are causing confusion, fueling hostilities, and amplifying atrocities around the world. In the 21st century, much of today’s conflicts takes place online. Although the Russian disinformation effort is immense, the Ukrainians are fighting back. Read more in “The role of psychological warfare in the battle for Ukraine”, American Psychological Association, April 11, 2022.
Commentary
Russian Hybrid Warfare. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have been constantly under threat by Russia since they re-gained their independence from Russia (Soviet Union). This threat is in the form of Russian hybrid warfare – and the use of non-kinetic means of military actions (border incursions and large-scale exercises) as well as non-military activities. Read more in “Hybrid threats: the Baltic experience with Russian aggressive behavior”, Latvian Television, April 10, 2022.
Taking the Fight to Russia. The Russians seem intent on the capture of Mariupol (likely in the coming days) and the capture of Izyum (giving Russia much of the Donbas region). The Ukrainian military will need to shift from defensive operations to more offensive operations to counter a Russian offensive in the Donbas region and to be able to conduct counter attacks. The fight for the Donbas region will be a bloody war of attrition with limited territorial gains by either side. To win this fight, Ukraine needs more offensive weapons such as artillery, rocket systems, mortars, armored vehicles, and tanks. “Russia Crisis Military Assessment: How Ukraine can take the fight to Russia”, Atlantic Council, April 13, 2022.
SOF News welcomes the submission of articles for publication. If it is related to special operations, current conflicts, national security, defense, or the current conflict in Ukraine then we are interested.
Maps and Other Resources
Maps of Ukraine
Weapons of the Ukraine War.
7. What the New Vision for US Special Operations Gets Right—and Wrong
Thoughtful analysis and review from Dr. Schroden.
My concern is in what is omitted, most particularly, unconventional warfare and resistance. In general SOF needs to focus on its foundational missions and concepts which are enduring. It is good to add on all the other enabling and emerging capabilities from AI to Space but the purpose of these should be how to enable the force to conduct modern and advanced UW, FID, etc and focus on enhancing the comparative advantages of SOF: influence, governance, and support to indigenous forces and populations. I wish they had taken the opportunity to talk about a very substantive contribution to integrated deterrence in the form of resistance and resilience and unconventional deterrence.
That said the new vision is a good document that I could work with (just like the NDS) if I were still a planner.
What the New Vision for US Special Operations Gets Right—and Wrong - Modern War Institute
Last week, Christopher Maier, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, and General Richard Clarke, the commander of US Special Operations Command (SOCOM), released a new “Vision and Strategy” for the future of US special operations forces (SOF). Coming in the wake of the announcement by the Department of Defense of its classified National Defense Strategy (NDS), this new document bears examining for what it says about the future role special operations forces are likely to play amid a renewal of great power competition. The bottom line is that these leaders envision substantial changes for SOF. Whether the changes they outline will be significant enough to transform the SOF enterprise from its two-decade focus on terrorist groups into a more balanced force that is aligned with the NDS’s emphasis on China and Russia, however, remains to be seen.
To What End?
In the words of Maier and Clarke, the purpose of the new strategy is to provide “a framework to guide [SOF’s] evolution from the world’s premier Counter Terrorism (CT) force into one optimally suited to support the Joint Force and the Nation as part of integrated deterrence.” (Integrated deterrence refers to the integration of military and other capabilities—including those of US allies and partners—across geography, domains, and the spectrum of conflict to prevent major attacks by US adversaries.) As these leaders acknowledge, for the past two decades, US special operations forces have been “primarily focused on countering terrorists, while our state adversaries sought to counter our capabilities and national interests.” Going forward, in their view, SOF need to adapt to this new reality.
This acknowledged need for US special operations forces to evolve is in part a response to external pressure on SOCOM dating back at least as far as 2018. In that year, President Donald Trump’s administration published its NDS, which declared that the “central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security is the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition” by “revisionist powers.” The 2018 NDS marked the first time since 2001 that DoD deemed something other than counterterrorism to be its top priority.
In the wake of the 2018 NDS, Congress pressured SOCOM to adapt its force structure and capabilities to this new guidance, first in the form of a comprehensive review of its capabilities to counter a range of anticipated future threats and then via a requirement for an independent assessment of special operations forces’ structure, roles, and responsibilities (a study that I led).
President Joe Biden’s administration, for its part, has continued to press SOF to evolve. This new strategy formally signifies Maier and Clarke’s acknowledgement of this guidance and articulates their response to it.
What’s New?
The strategy declares that the vision for special operations forces over the next ten years is to “create strategic, asymmetric advantages for the Nation in integrated deterrence, crisis, and conflict.” It articulates four components to this vision: a balanced force employment and readiness for integrated deterrence, crisis, and conflict; a sustainable counterterrorism approach; modernized formations, concepts, and capabilities that leverage emerging technologies; and a resilient enterprise capable of conducting integrated all-domain special operations.
There are many unsurprising aspects of the strategy. These include a continued goal that special operations forces should be the premier force within DoD; the maintenance of a substantial global posture; an emphasis on relationships with partners, allies, the intelligence community, and the State Department; and a renewed focus on the care of special operators and their families. Stated areas of increased investment—for example, data management, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing—are in keeping with previous statements from SOF leaders.
There are, however, five aspects of the strategy that are new, noteworthy, and already making waves across the SOF enterprise.
The first of these is the strategy’s mention of “retaining Deploy for Purpose forces to provide flexibility and agility in support of emerging requirements” and SOCOM’s intent to “discipline our force employment and allocation processes.” For at least the past fifteen years, SOF units have been operating in a near-continuous cycle—prepare to deploy, deploy, redeploy, rest, and prepare to deploy again—often with additional short- or no-notice deployments being squeezed into the rest-and-refit portion of this cycle. The idea that, going forward, some SOF units will perform their individual and unit training and then not immediately deploy, or—barring any emergent requirement—not deploy at all, marks a notable shift in SOF’s force employment practices. Anecdotally, this shift has received mixed reviews from special operators. While it may allow more time at home with families, it also portends fewer of the deployment opportunities that many special operators sought when they joined the force. A similar dynamic exists for support personnel: the strategy envisions that more of them will provide operational support from within the continental United States, as opposed to deploying forward.
Second is the strategy’s focus on developing a “sustainable approach” to counterterrorism. While SOCOM was tasked with developing such an approach as part of the 2018 NDS, its initial response was lethargic. The new strategy clearly downgrades the goals of counterterrorism efforts to disrupting groups “capable of conducting external operations” while leveraging the capabilities of partner forces to reduce the burden on US SOF. This guidance has substantial implications for those parts of the SOF enterprise that have been dedicated to global counterterrorism missions for the past two decades. For example, it likely presages a lower operational tempo for those units, which may create retention issues for those operators who want to be in the fight against terrorist groups. It may also, however, allow those units to exercise and experiment with capabilities more suited to competition and conflict with state adversaries.
Third, the strategy emphasizes strengthening capabilities that SOF leaders believe will contribute to the 2022 NDS’s goal of integrated deterrence. Specifically, the new strategy calls out “foreign internal defense, security force assistance, and counter-threat finance,” as well as electromagnetic warfare, information, cyber, and space capabilities, as areas for SOF expansion. And it clearly places SOF as a supporting element to the joint conventional force in the context of major combat operations against the likes of China or Russia—a sharp departure from the past two decades in which SOF have either been the supported force or one that operates largely in parallel to conventional forces. In line with this emphasis, the strategy also states an intent to reinvigorate SOF participation in training and exercises with conventional forces and to integrate its modernization efforts with the military services.
Fourth, the strategy acknowledges that—unlike the past two decades of sharply increasing SOCOM budgets and personnel numbers—the future is likely to see budget reductions. In light of this, the strategy states that SOCOM “will seek divestiture opportunities across the enterprise with emphasis on legacy equipment, platforms designed solely for permissive environments, and capabilities that conventional forces can provide in lieu of SOF.” The idea that SOF will be divesting capabilities represents one of the sharpest departures of the strategy from prior trends.
Finally, the strategy incorporates elements from SOCOM’s Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan, stating a desire to increase “the diversity of ethnicities, races, beliefs, perspectives, and experiences in our formation to meet the complex challenges facing the nation.” And it refers to the findings and ongoing efforts of SOCOM’s 2020 Comprehensive Review—initiated in the wake of a series of episodes of misconduct, including allegations of sexual assault and unlawful killings—committing to “correcting lapses in leadership, accountability, and discipline” across the SOF enterprise.
A Step in the Right Direction?
The strategy represents public acknowledgement by Maier and Clarke that SOF must definitively move past two decades of counterterrorism and into a new era of balanced capabilities for competition, crisis, and conflict. And the five aspects described above represent notable shifts designed to effect this change. Whether they will prove to be sufficient, however, remains to be seen. Several areas of concern stand out.
First, the strategy describes these changes as an “evolution,” when what is needed is revolutionary change. The 2018 NDS did not articulate nor represent an evolutionary change; rather, it was a step change in the trajectory of strategic defense guidance. While the new SOF strategy arguably represents the starkest departure from SOCOM’s prior guidance since the 2018 NDS was published, its tone and tenor remains aligned with something less than a step change in the future direction of SOF.
Second, the strategy aims to align itself closely with the 2022 NDS’s concept of integrated deterrence—this term, for example, appears seventeen times in the sixteen-page document. Absent, however, is any mention of the NDS’s other central concepts: campaigning and building enduring advantages. The focus of the former idea is on undermining the coercive activities of state competitors; the focus of the latter is on accelerating the development of forces and technology. Both lie squarely in the wheelhouse of the SOF enterprise. It is, therefore, odd that the SOF strategy did not fulsomely embrace these elements of the NDS and offer clear guidance for how SOF intend to support them.
Third, how well SOCOM’s resourcing strategy aligns with this new vision remains unclear. As President Biden recently stated during his 2023 budget rollout, “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” As one example, for several years, those on Capitol Hill have been questioning SOCOM’s Armed Overwatch program, which would procure a multi-role airplane to provide intelligence and limited air support to special operators conducting counterterrorism missions in austere environments. The new strategy’s stated intent to divest of platforms solely designed for permissive environments appears to run headlong into that program.
Fourth, SOCOM’s stated intent to increase diversity in its formations is a step in the right direction, but the absence of any acknowledgement of shortfalls in leader diversity is notable. By my count, of all the former and present commanders of SOCOM, its four service components, and the Joint Special Operations Command, only one of seventy-one leaders was an individual of color. President Biden’s administration has made clear its intent for US government leaders to reflect the diversity of the nation; the strategy would have done well to state a similar intent for the future of SOF leadership.
Those criticisms notwithstanding, the strategy outlines notable changes for the future of US special operations forces, and it will no doubt continue to evolve in the years to come. Maier and Clarke deserve credit for pushing the SOF enterprise forward. But much work remains to be done.
Dr. Jonathan Schroden directs the Countering Threats and Challenges Program at the CNA Corporation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and analysis organization based in Arlington, Virginia. He is also an adjunct scholar at the Modern War Institute at West Point. You can find him on Twitter at @jjschroden.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense, or that of any organization the author is affiliated with, including CNA.
Image credit: Sgt Patrik Orcutt, US Army
8. The Tank Is Dead: Long Live the Javelin, the Switchblade, the … ?
Ever since I served as the Range OIC for Tank Tables VIII and XII at Grafenwoehr in 1985 for all the tanks in the 3d Infantry Division, I have been a true believer in the M1 Tank.
It is the "dinner jacket" we need (though I think we will need it more often than a dinner jacket).
Conclusion:
Before the rush to the funeral, however, the first question that must be addressed before one buries the tank is this: Is there a continued role for mobile, protected lethality on the battlefields of the future? If the answer is yes, or even maybe, then the next act in the ongoing drama of how to protect the tank is to enable it to do what only it can do. And, given the events of the day, this question must be addressed objectively and urgently.
We should all recall the words of Australian Maj. Gen. Kathryn Toohey in 2019: “Tanks are like dinner jackets. You don’t need them very often, but when you do, nothing else will do.” The general’s caution explains why the tank has endured and why it is perhaps not time for its funeral, unless he can be proven wrong.
The Tank Is Dead: Long Live the Javelin, the Switchblade, the … ? - War on the Rocks
The U.S. Navy was able to accommodate both the battleship and aircraft carrier in World War II, although the battleship mostly was relied upon to provide fire support, rather than crossing the T against an enemy battleline. The horse, however, was a different kind of problem for the Army. Herr was an obstacle to modernizing the Army with tanks, insisting that he would accept no increase in armor at the expense of horse-cavalry strength. There could be no accommodation. Accordingly, Army chief of staff Gen. George C. Marshall used his executive-order authority, given after Pearl Harbor, to get rid of all the horses in the Army — and Herr.
What is the point to these anecdotes? There are two. In the case of the battleship, the platform may change, but not the function. The last U.S. Navy battleships were in active service until 1990, when the costs to maintain them clearly outweighed their utility. The naval gunfire mission persisted, however, albeit from smaller vessels. In the case of the horse cavalry, the role has ended. And the weapon needs to be retired, perhaps to a nice stud farm where it can recall the glories of the past. The question before us now is whether the tank is the modern equivalent of the battleship or the horse. Or, perhaps, neither.
Why the Tank?
Tanks first appeared in World War I as a means of providing a survivable maneuver option on the deadly battlefields of the Great War. Even at this early date, there were differing opinions about its utility. Some, most notably British tank advocate J.F.C. Fuller, viewed it as revolutionary. They imagined it would easily rumble through enemy defenses and press into his rear areas, causing chaos. Most others thought of the tank as a solution to the problem of how to move infantry forward on a fire-swept battlefield. This is how France and the United States used tanks — taking on entrenched machine guns to allow forward movement by conquering infantry. In short, the tank was an infantry support weapon. Germany, on the defensive during most of the war, paid little attention to fielding its armor.
After World War I, the German General Staff, led by Gen. Hans von Seeckt, studied what had happened to them in the Great War. What caused the failures of the initial offensive in 1914 — the much heralded von Schlieffen Plan — and the Spring Offensives of 1918, was the absence of operational mobility. Although the German Army was initially very successful in 1914 and 1918 at the tactical and operational levels, they failed strategically. Why is that? What the officers of the German General Staff eventually realized was that man and animal power could not negotiate the distances required for strategic victory before France, Britain, and the United States, blessed with interior lines, could bolster their defenses and thwart the strategic objectives of the German plans. Quite simply, an army cannot walk to Paris fast enough to keep the enemy off balance.
The solution to this mobility-at-distance problem was the internal combustion engine. Tanks would provide lethal and protected mobility that would give the German army longer reach. To solve the problem of fire support to support the blitzkrieg, Germany looked to the airplane. To connect the two weapons, it employed new radio technology. Although history has frequently credited this innovation to Gen. Heinz Guderian, in reality, the blitzkrieg was an institutional response to solving the strategic problems encountered during World War I.
Only Germany took this approach of combining the tank and the airplane into a combined arms force between the two world wars, even though all the combatants on the Western Front had direct experience with these technologies. This provided Germany with an elegant potential solution to the vexing problem Germany had faced since unification: how to avoid a two-front war in the west and in the east? Rapidly defeating the adversary in the west, before turning east had always been the objective. The blitzkrieg, enabled by mechanization and motorization, provided the means to achieve the strategy. Others (the U.S. and French armies) continued to view the tank largely as an infantry support weapon or alienated their militaries with demands for ascendancy (British Army).
The Heyday of the Tank
World War II and the 1967 Arab-Israeli War were the glory days of the tank. Tanks became the centerpiece of every “real” army. Development efforts focused on the reality that the best defense against a tank was another tank. There had been some improvements in anti-tank weapons for the infantry — the German Panzerfaust and the American bazooka were the most famous. These were, however, close-in weapons used in ambushes and or in desperation as soldiers faced tanks.
In the 1950s, recoilless rifles began to appear in armies. These were anti-tank weapons that could use large-caliber ammunition (e.g., 106-millimeter), rather than via weapon recoil. Before the advent of the recoilless rifle, anti-tank guns were much like howitzers, requiring an energy-absorbing recoil system that made the systems much larger than a recoilless rifle. These new weapons gave soldiers a tank-killing capability at a greater range that was, in many cases, man portable. But even though the range had grown, it could still be too close for comfort.
The 1967 Arab-Israeli War was the first conflict since World War II that saw the large-scale employment of tank formations on a mobile battlefield. The resounding Israeli victory in this conflict solidified the view in most state militaries that the tank was the dominant force on the battlefield.
The 1967 Arab-Israeli War was of particular importance as it validated the warfighting concepts in other state militaries. There had not been a large state-on-state war between similarly equipped adversaries since World War II in Europe. This was particularly important during the Cold War, when Allied and Warsaw Pact forces stood toe-to-toe along the inter-German border. What the Israelis demonstrated was that the principles of combined arms maneuver — which the United States and others had adopted during World War II to defeat Nazi Germany — were sound. Furthermore, although outnumbered, the Israel Defense Forces showed that well-led, trained, and equipped militaries could defeat numerically larger forces. Additionally, given that the weapons and tactics employed by the Israel Defense Forces and the Arab armies largely mirrored those in use by the United States and the Soviet Union, each looked to the wars to improve their own weapons and tactics — and to better understand those of each other. Thus, the wars in the Middle East became surrogates for what might happen in NATO.
Enter the Sagger
In less than ten years, the same battlefields in the Middle East that had validated the main battle tank as the dominant force in modern combat betrayed the tank’s first major vulnerabilities. Between 1967 and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, two technologies appeared that seemingly changed everything. The development of the Sagger and other anti-tank guided missiles (ATGM) gave infantry the capability to destroy a tank at long range for the first time. Similarly, the other key component of the Israeli defense establishment — air power — was put at risk by mobile surface-to-air missiles. For the first time ever, the ascendancy of the air-armor team was in doubt. The two key components that were the basis of the blitzkrieg and combined arms maneuver warfare — tanks and airplanes — had failed dramatically.
In aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War the first obituaries for the tank were published. The Sagger showed vulnerabilities in the tank that many believed at the time cast it onto the trash heap of failed weapons and ideas, like the death knell of the armored knight at Agincourt. These expensive, high-technology systems were depicted as lumbering prey to cheap, easy-to-use ATGMs. For the price of a tank, armies could field hundreds of ATGMs.
So, why didn’t they?
What to Do About Anti-Tank Guided Missiles?
Two critical questions had to be answered with the advent of ATGMs on the battlefield. First, why did armies need tanks? Second, if tanks were needed, what could be done to mitigate the ATGM threat? The answers to these two questions mattered a great deal to all militaries, but particularly to the Israel Defense Forces and the U.S. Armed Forces. Again, there were two domains being contested, air and ground, by the fielding of ATGMs and mobile surface-to-air missiles. The solutions to restoring their survivability would be similar for both the tank and the airplane.
The principal role of the tank had remained basically unchanged since World War II. On the offense, the tank provided mobile, protected lethality on the battlefield to enable ground-force maneuver. On the defense, the tank was the best weapon against another tank: your gun against the enemy’s in a gunfight. For the Israel Defense Forces, the tank was the basis for their ground ability to defend their country against numerically superior adversaries on multiple fronts. For the United States, the tank was a key component of land power in Europe to deter a numerically superior Warsaw Pact. Solving the vulnerability of the tank was key to both nations’ ground deterrent.
Furthermore, there was no other technology that could provide the mobile, protected lethality of the tank. Dismounted forces with ATGMs were not the vanguards of maneuver, neither in the offense nor in a defense that required rapid movement to survive on an artillery-swept battlefield and to conduct counterattacks to thwart the adversary’s maneuver schemes.
The solution to the ATGM, as would be the case in the ongoing lethal competition between the tank and future threats, looking back to World War II for tactical solutions, with the addition of technical improvements to the tank. During World War II, all armies learned what German forces had practiced: combined arms fire and maneuver that included air support. In the U.S. Army, this approach was more difficult to implement because of the intra-service competition between the ground Army and the air Army (the Army Air Forces were part of the Army until the creation of the U.S. Air Force after World War II). I talk about these challenges, and how they were resolved, in Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers. Suffice it here to say that air-ground integration was not driven by the institutions in Washington, but by commanders on the battlefield trying to figure out how to survive and win on the battlefield. What eventually evolved was an air-armor team, supported by field artillery, that devastated the vaunted German army. Air took on German formations, whose defenses were suppressed by artillery fire. The same artillery also fired on dismounted infantry with Panzerfausts and other anti-tank weapons.
Both the Israel Defense Forces and the U.S. Army eventually realized that, given the continued importance of mobile, protected lethality (the tank), the imperative to neutralize the Sagger and other ATGMs was the first order of business. The solution was mainly tactical: combined arms operations, with particular attention paid to suppressing these ATGMs. The Israel Defense Forces also made a technical improvement, installing mortars on their tanks, a practice that continues to this day with the Merkava main battle-tank series. Finally, smoke-cannister dischargers were mounted on the combat vehicles in every army to screen them from fire. This was not a new practice, having been used on German tanks during World War II.
In combat, when a tank crew detected a Sagger, it immediately began suppressing it with mortar fire. That fire would soon be joined by larger mortars and field artillery. Furthermore, a practice evolved in the Israel Defense Forces and the U.S. Army where artillery units would have guns laid on potential Sagger locations so they could rapidly engage them with immediate suppression missions. This technique was particularly effective against the Sagger, which required the dismounted gunner to track the missile all the way to the target. Making him flinch — which high explosive rounds near one’s position tend to do — would break his lock on the target and cause the ATGM to miss.
The most important technical improvement in response to ATGMs was, however, the development of improved armor to replace the World War II-era rolled homogenous steel that was used on tanks. The demand was for a new armor that would protect the tank against the shaped warheads of the Sagger and other anti-tank weapons. Here, the British led the way, developing and fielding Chobham armor that protected against both shaped warheads and kinetic energy penetrators. Other solutions soon followed, e.g., explosive reactive armor.
Furthermore, given that the Israel Defense Forces relied heavily on air-ground operations, it had to solve the SAM challenge to air superiority. It learned that suppression by artillery fire was the tactical solution to neutralizing enemy missiles as well.
The U.S. Army also studied the 1973 Yom Kippur War, realizing that the Arab armies the Israel Defense Forces had faced were largely equipped with Soviet weapons and practiced Soviet doctrine. If the Syrians and Egyptians could almost defeat the heretofore thought invincible Israeli forces, what would the Warsaw Pact be able to do against NATO? Here, as with the Israeli military, combined arms provided the solution. The U.S. Army and the U.S. Air Force also came together around their shared problem — one that neither could solve independently — to develop solutions. But, basically, the core lesson was that tightly integrated air and ground forces that relied upon each other would prevail. The tank and the airplane regained their ascendancy on the battlefield.
No Human in the Loop
The next indication that the tank faced a significant, and perhaps mortal, new challenge came during the 2006 Second Lebanon War. Again, the challenge was the ATGM. But, the 9M133 Kornet had a much longer range than the Sagger (5,000 meters vs. 3,000 meters), a tandem warhead that can defeat all known armor, even frontal, and — most importantly — it has a laser-beam guidance system that is simple to operate.
Almost immediately, the end of the tank was proclaimed, but this time at the hands of even sub-state actors. Cheap weapons were once again the nemesis of expensive main battle tanks. Nevertheless, the Israeli military realized that only the tank had the potential to survive on the battlefield, even against hybrid adversaries like Hezbollah. If tanks were vulnerable, then dismounted infantry were meat.
Part of the solution for the Israeli military was to realize that Hezbollah was a competent adversary armed with very capable standoff weapons and demanded combined arms tactics. Tank crews had to again be trained in battle drills for high-intensity combat and air-ground integration and artillery suppression again came to the fore as capability requirements. Adversary weapons had to be suppressed to enable armored formations to get infantry into the close battle — the last 100-meter fight. Nevertheless, the Kornet, given its range and guidance system, needed a technical solution as well as a doctrinal/tactical approach. Even one ATGM surviving to engage meant the likely loss of an expensive system and casualties.
The technical solution the IDF fielded in response to the new generation of ATGM was the Trophy active protection system. Briefly, the Trophy uses a sophisticated radar-directed weapon, mounted on the tank, to shoot down an incoming ATGM. It also has the benefit of providing the crew and other networked systems with the location of the ATGM launcher.
Trophy soon proved its worth in Israel’s operations against Hamas in Gaza, essentially neutralizing the ATGM and rocket-propelled grenade threats to vehicles equipped with the system. The United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom have all fielded Trophy. Other states have developed both soft- and hard-kill active protections systems, e.g., the Russian Arena and Afghanit and the German MUSS.
If You Can’t Go Through, Go Over
Most active protection systems were designed to defeat ATGMs attacking the front or sides of a vehicle. This was the plane in which ATGMS like the Sagger, Kornet, and the U.S. TOW were employed because the front and sides are the most heavily armored areas of a tank, given that is generally where enemy weapons hit. Top-attack weapons aim at the much more lightly armored tops of vehicles. These include ATGMs, e.g., the U.S. FGM-148 Javelin, an increasingly wide variety of artillery projectiles, and drones. These weapons have all complicated the active defense challenge that Trophy originally addressed.
Additionally, the Javelin is a fire-and-forget missile with lock-on before launch and automatic self-guidance, which enables the crew to displace to survive after firing. Again, a relatively cheap, easy-to-operate weapon that kills the expensive prime jewel of an adversary army.
Images of Javelins have captured the public imagination because of their use in the hands of heroic Ukrainian fighters: a veritable slingshot for the Ukrainian David against the Russian Goliath. And the videos showing its devastating effects on hapless Russian armored columns are compelling. The Javelin’s effectiveness is already being used by some to justify ongoing controversial force-design decisions, e.g., the decision by the U.S. Marine Corps to get rid of its M1 Abrams tanks, that have recently appeared in War on the Rocks.
Tim Barrick and Noel Williams have responded to the important questions that are being posed by those who dissent about the current Marine Corps approach embodied in the concept of expeditionary advanced base operations being championed by its commandant, Gen. David H. Berger. Barrick writes that these senior retired Marine officers are concerned that:
The elimination of tanks, cuts to suppressive cannon artillery fires, smaller infantry battalions, and the focus on building Marine littoral regiments fundamentally alters the service’s expeditionary combined arms capability to perform any mission.
Barrick notes that “these concerns persist despite multiple attempts by the commandant and others to communicate the applicability of the force to other missions and theaters.” He continues, using the early lessons from the ongoing war as a response to the commandant’s critics:
Directly related to the above question is the role of tanks, artillery, and infantry in contemporary combined arms warfare. Everyone has witnessed the annihilation of Russian mechanized formations in Ukraine where the power of the defense and the lethality of light infantry armed with modern anti-tank weapons defeated Russia’s assaults.
It is too early for such conclusions, other than to try to understand why Russian armored forces have proven so vulnerable to the Javelin, as well as to the Ukrainian Stugna-P and other ATGMs.
My sense is that Russian forces are facing the same difficulties Israeli forces faced in Lebanon, albeit at a vastly larger scale. The Russian Army has shown that it is not competent in combined arms fire and maneuver. Where is the accompanying infantry with the tank formations, who are supposed to bust the ambushes executed by Ukrainian forces? Where are the suppressive mortar, artillery, and close air support fires? If the Russian Army was tactically skilled, then the Javelin and other ATGMs would be suppressed by artillery or air support and their surviving crews would be swept up by Russian infantry. Thus far, these key competencies seem to be lacking and Russian soldiers are paying a high price for their unpreparedness.
Again, the ATGM threat in Ukraine is different than that encountered in earlier conflicts, in that the weapon uses top attack to penetrate the thin top armor of targeted tanks and to avoid interception by active protection systems that do not provide top cover. This is a technical problem whose solution, when coupled with effective combined arms and suppression, will likely enable the tank to continue to do what tanks do best: provide decisive shock action through the skillful application of mobile, protected, lethality as part of a proficient combined arms team.
Drones, however, are a different matter.
Drones Über Alles
Unmanned aerial systems came into their own during the “Global War on Terror.” Predators and Reapers were invaluable in providing long-duration theater intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance coverage, as well as long-range precision strike capability against critical targets. These platforms are, however, complex and expensive, with massive supporting infrastructures. And, given their relatively high costs and competition with human-piloted systems, they have not been fielded in large numbers. There have not been, nor will there likely be, Predator or Reaper swarms. What has, however, proved a shock to the system is the arrival of smaller, cheaper, expendable drones: the dreaded “swarm.”
These expendable, weaponized drones first gained public notice in the war against the self-proclaimed Islamic State. What were previously considered hobby shop toys all of a sudden appeared on the battlefield with grenades. Although the threat these Rube Goldberg weapons posed was largely inconsequential, for anyone paying attention it was clearly a harbinger of things to come.
In the past decade the growing ubiquity of unmanned aerial systems on the battlefield has been stunning. Be they Predators, Reapers, Switchblades, Turkish YB2s, loitering munitions, or weaponized toys, unmanned aerial systems are a capability with which to be reckoned. As already noted, many existing armored ground systems are vulnerable to top-down attacks. This type of attack can also be delivered by drones. Other uses that have shown great utility include intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; geolocating targets; communications relays; and jamming, to mention but a few.
The potential use of unmanned systems is only limited by the imagination and the cultures of the militaries trying to integrate them into their forces. The fact that they are comparatively inexpensive, hard to target, and do not require (in most cases) highly trained pilots to fly them makes unmanned aerial systems attractive for many reasons: cost, reducing risks to pilots in cockpits, low training burdens, etc. The principal constraint, as it has always been for unmanned aerial systems, is cultural. “Aircraft must have pilots” is a theological statement that often goes unchallenged. Absent the demonstrated effectiveness of the Predator over the wide expanses of Afghanistan and elsewhere, it is doubtful that the U.S. Armed Forces would have progressed as far as they have to this point with unmanned systems.
Barrick raises these important questions in his discussion of Marine Corps force-design efforts, both from a Marine capability and the defense against enemy drones perspective. First, he asks if drones, manned aircraft, loitering munitions, and rockets can effectively replace Marine Corps tanks and artillery. Second, he warns that there is currently no effective counter to adversary loitering munitions and drone swarms. No matter what weapons and force design the service eventually settles upon, marines will be at risk until there is a solution to “the thousand-foot air battle against drones.” This advice is well worth heeding, by both the Marine Corps and the Army.
Thus, once could reasonably ask whether or not cheap, swarming drones could be the final stake in the heart of the tank vampire. The 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war and the ongoing war in Ukraine both seem to prove this to many. An article in Foreign Policy proclaiming that “off-the-shelf air power changes the battlefield of the future,” is representative.
In that article, Scott Shaw, the then-director of the U.S. Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group, is quoted noting that in Nagorno-Karabakh, “You can see video of tanks being hit by an unmanned aerial system, artillery positions being hit by an unmanned aerial system, troops being hit by an unmanned aerial system.” Thus, in Shaw’s estimation, the implications are enormous:
What’s clear in that conflict is that a less funded nation can do combined arms warfare. … You don’t have to be the United States or Russia. The price point to entry into combined arms warfare is lower than initially thought. You don’t need something like the United States Air Force, a superbly trained, spectacular capability, in order to conduct potentially a local air-to-ground or air-to-air activity. In this view, the challenge posed by drones, be they unmanned aerial systems, naval vessels, or ground robots are profound. They do not just sound the death knell for the tank, but potentially everything about combined arms warfare as we know it.
Or they don’t.
First Order Questions First
The first order question that needs to be asked and answered is how does a military conduct successful ground combat operations in the face of the threat posed by unmanned systems. Some have offered unmanned ground vehicles as a solution. This approach is attractive principally important because it protects soldiers; it does not preclude the destruction of the vehicle. Unfortunately, not losing soldiers is not the key measure of success in war. Attaining objectives at the least cost in your soldiers’ lives is.
Furthermore, the state of ground combat robots has not progressed to a point where they have the agility of manned platforms. I realize that this is the same argument that has been used for decades by advocates for manned aircraft and that this view retarded the development of unmanned aerial systems for way too long. The reality is that the ground environment is much different and more cluttered than the skies. Robots may eventually supplant manned ground systems; they will certainly augment them. But at some point, the objective of ground warfare is to negotiate complex terrain to defeat the enemy and occupy his territory. This is something that human soldiers will likely have to do for some time in the future.
As to the utility of the tank versus the robot, the standard should be that both should provide decisive shock action through mobile, protected lethality to defeat the enemy, be they manned by soldiers or robots. Again, it is important to understand that, in all likelihood, the robot will be just as vulnerable to ATGMs and drones as manned systems. To be able to maneuver on the battlefields of the future, a solution that enables ground maneuver against enemy weapons is the key requirement.
Is the Era of the Tank Over?
Are the headlines coming from the Russo-Ukrainian War the final obituary for the tank as a viable instrument of war correct or — as with the Chicago Daily Tribute banner declaring Truman’s loss to Dewey in the 1948 presidential election — premature? Is the tank the horse cavalry of the 21st century? Or is it a useful supporting system, like the battleship in World War II? Or is it still, with adaptation, the weapon of choice for ground combat?
As with every other move in the never-ending wrestling match between offense and defense, unmanned systems and top-attack weapons pose heretofore unencountered challenges that must be met, or you will have to conduct a Monty Python reassessment of your military: And now for something completely different.
Before the rush to the funeral, however, the first question that must be addressed before one buries the tank is this: Is there a continued role for mobile, protected lethality on the battlefields of the future? If the answer is yes, or even maybe, then the next act in the ongoing drama of how to protect the tank is to enable it to do what only it can do. And, given the events of the day, this question must be addressed objectively and urgently.
We should all recall the words of Australian Maj. Gen. Kathryn Toohey in 2019: “Tanks are like dinner jackets. You don’t need them very often, but when you do, nothing else will do.” The general’s caution explains why the tank has endured and why it is perhaps not time for its funeral, unless he can be proven wrong.
9. U.S. Army Options to Regain Land Power Dominance
A proposal for some "blasts" from the past: ALBF, AOE, AAN (see below options for acronym definitions)
Excerpt:
The U.S. Army’s strategy defines a land power dominant force by 2028[17]. Under the current Army Chief of Staff, beginning in 2020, the U.S. Army is trying to more closely link readiness, modernization, posture, and force structure under a broad plan for “transformation”[18]. To focus force transformation, the American Army could revive past work on nonlinear warfare, corps battle command, and technologically-enabled, globally integrated operations.
U.S. Army Options to Regain Land Power Dominance
Marco J. Lyons is a U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel who has served in tactical and operational Army, Joint, and interagency organizations in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Afghanistan, and in the Western Pacific. He is currently a national security fellow at Harvard Kennedy School where he is researching strategy and force planning for war in the Indo-Pacific. He may be contacted at marco_lyons@hks.harvard.edu. Although the analysis presented here is the author’s alone, he has benefitted extensively from discussions with Dr. Ron Sega of U.S. Army Futures Command and Dr. Anthony “Tony” Tether a former Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Divergent Options’ content does not contain information of an official nature, nor does the content represent the official position of any government, any organization, or any group.
National Security Situation: The U.S. Army has a modernization enterprise that is second-to-none but facing the highly capable militaries of China and Russia is an unprecedented challenge. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army planned to have a Taiwan invasion capability no later than the early 2020s[1]. The Russian military will probably have substantially increased its missile-based stand-off capabilities by the mid-2020s[2]. More alarmingly, Russia has succeeded in modernizing approximately 82 percent of its nuclear forces[3]. Russian conventional and nuclear modernization have both been factors in Moscow’s recent three-pronged invasion of Ukraine.
Date Originally Written: April 5, 2022.
Date Originally Published: April 18, 2022.
Author and / or Article Point of View: The author has researched future operational concept development through the Army Science Board. The author believes that U.S. Army decision makers and analysts can more aggressively leverage past future force initiatives to address emerging threats from China and Russia.
Background: The ability to operate directly against adversary centers of gravity defines dominance. Dominant land power refers here to the ability of a land force to operate directly against the most decisive points that sustain an adversary force[4]. In land operations, a final decision requires control – through seizure, occupation, or retention – of terrain, people and resources using actual or threatened destruction or presence, or both[5]. America’s position as a global leader rests on its dominant land power[6].
Significance: The character of warfare, the increasing interaction between the levels of war, and a concomitant need for higher echelon commanders to exercise military art on a broader scale and wider scope than earlier in history, all demand the U.S. Army refocus on the operational level[7]. The planning and command challenges at the operational level are more demanding than current doctrine would suggest. Moreover, the consequences of failure in major operations are difficult to overcome[8]. What has been called the theater-strategic level of war, or higher operational art, is poorly understood[9]. Three decades of post-Cold War stability and support operations, and two decades of counterinsurgency have helped the U.S. Army lose touch with the art of major operations.
In only a few years China will have a trained, equipped, and cohesive invasion force and Russia will have a combat-capable force with recent experience in cross-domain operations. U.S. Army strategic leaders are already pressing for force transformation against these large-scale threats[10]. The Army can build on more than five years of modernization, the 2018 multi-domain operations concept, and a new global posture strategy to maintain the momentum needed to break the mold of the Brigade Combat Team-centric, Unified Land Operations-based force[11]. Importantly, U.S. Army planners can rapidly harvest important work done since the end of the Vietnam era. In competition, crisis, and armed conflict – in war – the United States needs a ready land force to deter unwanted escalation, assure allies and key partners, and compel beneficial geostrategic outcomes through force, if necessary.
Option #1: The U.S. Army revives and updates AirLand Battle–Future (ALBF). ALBF was meant to be a follow-on doctrine to AirLand Battle but was interrupted by the end of the Cold War and breakup of the Soviet Union. ALBF took the fundamentals of AirLand Battle and applied them to nonlinear battlefields and to advanced-technology capabilities – the same dynamics seen in the emerging operational environment. Additionally, ALBF extended operational concepts to operations short of war – like the competition short of armed conflict idea today[12].
Risk: Major additions to the U.S. Army’s current doctrine development projects run the risk of delaying progress. Adding ALBF to the current Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) doctrine development may impose additional testing and validation demands.
Gain: An updated ALBF would provide a ready road map for the U.S. Army to move from the narrowly conceived 2018 Army in MDO concept to a published MDO doctrine which would replace Unified Land Operations. With the incorporation of a detailed view of multi-domain battle – still the heart of the MDO concept – an updated ALBF would provide the broad-based, low- to high-intensity doctrinal framework for the coming decades.
Option #2: The U.S. Army reinstitutes an updated Army of Excellence (AOE). The AOE was the last organization designed against a specified threat force – the Soviet Army and similarly-equipped enemy forces. The original rationale for the AOE was to reduce force “hollowness” by bringing personnel and materiel requirements within the limits of Army resources, enhance U.S. Army Corps-level capabilities to influence battle, and improve strategic mobility for immediate crisis response in regional conflicts[13]. This rationale is still relevant. Building on this rationale and using the Chinese People’s Liberation Army as a specified threat force, the Army could update the AOE (Light) Division to a “hybrid warfare” force and the AOE (Heavy) Division to a “high-technology, cross-domain maneuver” force. Echelons above division, with a reinstitution of corps-directed battle, could focus on layering advanced technology with multi-domain operations capabilities to conduct nonlinear and deep operations.
Risk: AOE was resource-intensive and a new AOE might also demand resources that may not materialize when needed.
Gain: An updated AOE organization would provide a familiar blueprint for fielding the land force for a more fully developed MDO doctrine. A new AOE would quickly restore robust and more survivable formations.
Option #3: The U.S. Army restarts the Army After Next (AAN). AAN locked on to technological maturation timelines that turned out to be wildly optimistic[14]. But many of the concepts, not least information dominance, precision fires, and focused logistics, were valid in the mid-1990s and remain so – the challenges are in testing, validation, and integration. Today, some of the early-envisioned AAN capabilities will soon be fielded. Various new fires systems, including Extended Range Cannon Artillery and Long-Range Precision Fire missiles, will provide the greatly extended range and higher accuracy needed to destroy enemy anti-access, area denial systems. As part of MDO, these new fires systems can be linked with forward operating F-35 multirole combat aircraft and ideally a constellation of low earth orbiting sensor platforms to achieve unprecedented responsiveness and lethality. The first battery of tactical directed energy weapons are in development, and even the combat cloud imagined by AAN planners, now called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (or an alternative capability solution), is a near-term reality[15].
Risk: AAN may not have focused enough on lethality at the operational level of war, and so in reviving the effort, it is possible this same shortcoming could hamper MDO against near-peer enemy forces.
Gain: What AAN provided that is missing today is a comprehensive blueprint to channel the Army’s genuine and ‘unifying’ modernization campaign under Army Futures Command[16].
Other Comments: The U.S. Army’s strategy defines a land power dominant force by 2028[17]. Under the current Army Chief of Staff, beginning in 2020, the U.S. Army is trying to more closely link readiness, modernization, posture, and force structure under a broad plan for “transformation”[18]. To focus force transformation, the American Army could revive past work on nonlinear warfare, corps battle command, and technologically-enabled, globally integrated operations.
Recommendation: None.
Endnotes:
[11] Billy Fabian, “Back to the Future: Transforming the U.S. Army for High-Intensity Warfare in the 21st Century,” Center for a New American Security, November 19, 2020, https://www.cnas.org/publications/commentary/back-to-the-future-transforming-the-u-s-army-for-high-intensity-warfare-in-the-21st-century. One recent study concluded that Unified Land Operations does not sufficiently focus on large-scale war against an enemy force. See Alan P. Hastings, Coping with Complexity: Analyzing Unified Land Operations Through the Lens of Complex Adaptive Systems Theory (Fort Leavenworth, KS: School of Advanced Military Studies, United States Army Command and General Staff College, 2019), https://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/api/collection/p4013coll3/id/3894/download.
[12] Terry M. Peck, AirLand Battle Imperatives: Do They Apply to Future Contingency Operations? (Fort Leavenworth, KS: School of Advanced Military Studies, United States Army Command and General Staff College, 1990), https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a234151.pdf.
[13] Pat Ford, Edwin H. Burba, Jr., and Richard E. Christ, Review of Division Structure Initiatives, Research Product 95-02 (Alexandria, VA: Human Resources Research Organization, 1994), https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA297578.
[17] The United States Army, “The Army’s Vision and Strategy,” Army.mil, no date, https://www.army.mil/about/. The Army’s “WayPoint 2028” focused on concepts and modernization. The United States Army, “Gen. Michael Garrett Visit,” U.S. Army Combined Arms Center, August 18, 2020, https://usacac.army.mil/node/2739. The Army’s “AimPoint Force” structure plan was meant to revive capable warfighting echelons above brigade. Andrew Feickert, “In Focus: The Army’s AimPoint Force Structure Initiative,” Congressional Research Service, May 8, 2020, https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/IF11542.pdf. The “AimPoint Force” was about designing networked capabilities for overmatch. Devon Suits, “Futures and Concepts Center evaluates new force structure,” Army.mil, April 22, 2020, https://www.army.mil/article/234845/futures_and_concepts_center_evaluates_new_force_structure.
10. The CCP’s Ukraine War Propaganda
Excerpts:
Given the opacity of the Chinese leadership, it is difficult to determine the exact motivations driving the regime’s support for Putin’s war. It could be part of an effort to tilt the international balance of power, to weaken the United States, to set the stage for a future CCP takeover of Taiwan, or simply to save Xi Jinping from embarrassment over the very public partnership with Putin that he trumpeted in early February, before the invasion. What is clear is that the domestic media narrative is much more reflective of CCP leaders’ views than the superficially more neutral and mild public comments of Chinese diplomats. Once Xi and his cohort decided that it was strategically beneficial to the CCP, if not to China, to throw their weight behind Putin, the party’s information control apparatus was jolted into action.
As the war in Ukraine continues, much is at stake for the cause of freedom, peace, and international order. But regardless of the outcome on the battlefield, the conflict has already resulted in a reinforced CCP propaganda structure and a wider information gap between many in China and the rest of the world.
The CCP’s Ukraine War Propaganda
The party-state is using its extensive information control toolbox to artificially amplify its version of Russia’s invasion.
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China’s massive information control apparatus is typically focused on distorting the information that Chinese citizens are able to access about their own country, with foreign affairs relegated to a secondary level of importance. Yet over the past seven weeks, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership’s apparent decision to side with Russian President Vladimir Putin in his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine has fueled a full-blown campaign to shape public opinion and internet chatter about events unfolding thousands of miles away.
Within the deep toolbox of controls available to the CCP regime, three tactics appear to be playing an outsized role in this campaign: flagship state media echoing Russian state disinformation, manipulation of social media hashtags and trending topics, and censorship of alternative viewpoints and information sources.
The effort has effectively built an isolating wall around China, leaving Chinese news consumers with an image of one of this century’s most significant geopolitical events that is drastically different from the version presented to other populations around the world.
A Three-Pronged Strategy for Distorting Reality
In the weeks since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, three of China’s state media outlets – the CCP mouthpiece People’s Daily, the national broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV), and the nationalistic tabloid Global Times – have been particularly active in feeding Russian state propaganda to Chinese news consumers. Rather than simply promoting Moscow’s official views or statements, they have disseminated content that includes multiple outright falsehoods. For example, they have aired claims that Ukrainian soldiers surrendered their weapons, that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy fled Kyiv, and that Russian forces have struck only military targets.
Almost as notable as the lies that have been propagated are the basic facts that are missing. There is no acknowledgment that Moscow initiated the war by invading a sovereign neighbor in blatant violation of international law. No airtime is granted to Zelenskyy’s charismatic daily video appearances, which have gone viral among global audiences. Also absent are the detailed accounts of atrocities in the Kyiv region that emerged after the retreat of occupying Russian troops. Multiple CCTV news broadcasts – including the prime-time program that is still watched by tens of millions of Chinese each evening – made almost no mention of the civilian deaths reported in the town of Bucha in early April, for example. Instead, they focused on topics like successful Russian military strikes and U.S. weapons shipments to Ukraine.
The CCP regime has aided the dissemination of pro-Kremlin propaganda by manipulating hashtags and trending topics on domestic social media platforms. There have been numerous examples of Chinese state outlets creating hashtags linked to disinformation narratives that are then aggressively amplified. In the early days of the war, CCTV created a hashtag asserting that Zelenskyy had fled Kyiv, which was reportedly viewed 510 million times. More recently, after the Russian government announced that it would host an anti-fascism conference in August – part of its disinformation narrative that the invasion was necessary to rid Ukraine of Nazis – CCTV posted a related story and created a hashtag on the Weibo social media platform. Within 24 hours, it had reportedly garnered 650 million views and 90 media citations.
Even as they keep their algorithms and trending topics aligned with the government’s priorities, staff at Chinese social media platforms have been busy deleting content that departs from the official line. Among other targets, they have removed posts and open letters by prominent individuals within China who directly questioned the government’s support for Moscow, criticized Putin, voiced support for Ukraine, or decried nationalist netizens’ disregard for China’s own historical suffering at the hands of foreign invaders. In at least two cases, celebrities who called Putin “crazy,” urged followers to pray for peace, or posted photos of anti-war protests in Russia had their Weibo accounts suspended or restricted. The two individuals, former talk-show host Jin Xing and actress Ke Lan, consequently lost their ability to reach 13.6 million and 2.9 million followers, respectively. Some militantly pro-Moscow posts have also been taken down, but the predominant narrative on the censored and distorted Chinese internet is pro-Kremlin, anti-U.S., and anti-NATO.
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Censors have similarly moved to suppress first-hand reporting by Chinese residents in Ukraine, including complaints related to the government’s delayed assistance with their evacuation from the war zone. Wang Jixian, a technology worker posting videos from the city of Odesa, found that his social media accounts across multiple platforms, including WeChat, had been shut down. In an emotional video posted to YouTube, Wang angrily lamented the fact that he no longer had a way to communicate directly with his parents, asking friends to alert them that he was still alive. Individual netizen posts and videos on Jinri Toutiao, a widely used content aggregator owned by ByteDance, have been deleted for depicting Russian anti-war protests.
These information-control tactics closely match a leaked set of official media directives from March 3. One directive specifically indicates that foreign news reports cannot be republished, and that social media platforms must “strictly control” commentary that challenges official statements, involves “incitement of Sino-Russian antagonism,” references historical invasions of China, or involves “public anti-war declarations.” This and another directive both enforce a state media monopoly on war-related hashtags and trending topics, noting for instance that “without exception, existing hashtags started by individuals, self-published media, and commercial platforms must not be included in trending topics, and new hashtags are strictly prohibited.”
Voices of Dissent and Resistance
While the space for alternative perspectives on the war in Ukraine is clearly under heavy pressure, some examples of both vocal and quiet resistance have emerged.
Among traditional media, a small number of outlets have referred fairly explicitly to Moscow’s responsibility for the invasion. Xinmin Weekly, a commercial publication in Shanghai, published a March 7 human interest story about a Chinese student’s escape from Ukraine that described how Russian forces had suddenly “launched a war” against Ukraine. Caixin, a financial publication that is widely recognized for its investigative journalism, ran a cover-story analysis that framed the war as a full-scale Russian invasion and published photo galleries showing destroyed buildings.
On February 26, five Chinese historians published an open letter condemning the war and directly challenging the Chinese government’s position. They declared that “as a country that was once also ravaged by war … we sympathize with the suffering of the Ukrainian people.” The authors also bluntly rejected efforts to justify the invasion: “Regardless of Russia’s myriad reasons and all kinds of excuses, the use of force to invade a sovereign country is trampling on the norms of international relations based on the U.N. Charter.”
In early March, the Carter Center’s U.S.-China Perceptions Monitor published a commentary in English and Chinese by Hu Wei, a scholar at several state-affiliated institutions in China. The piece analyzed the long-term implications of the war for China and the world, warning that “China cannot be tied to Putin” and should “choose the mainstream position in the world.” Both commentaries were censored in China, and the website of the U.S.-China Perceptions Monitor was subsequently blocked, but not before its original Chinese post received over 185,000 views.
More subtle expressions of skepticism about the official line and support for Ukraine have also appeared. Journalist Xifan Yang discovered that four out of the top five brooch pins on e-commerce site Taobao had a Ukrainian flag theme. Users’ comments on the items included statements like “Long live the people of Ukraine!” Researcher Ling Li collected multiple examples of Chinese netizen commentary that departed from the official narrative, including comments like “one can be indifferent to wars but should at the very least not advocate wars, or worse, praise invaders,” which received over 6,900 likes. Even a video by Hollywood star and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, aimed at countering the Kremlin’s propaganda among Russian audiences, was spotted circulating on WeChat with subtitles in Chinese.
A Window on Leaders’ Views, a Barrier Against the World
Given the opacity of the Chinese leadership, it is difficult to determine the exact motivations driving the regime’s support for Putin’s war. It could be part of an effort to tilt the international balance of power, to weaken the United States, to set the stage for a future CCP takeover of Taiwan, or simply to save Xi Jinping from embarrassment over the very public partnership with Putin that he trumpeted in early February, before the invasion. What is clear is that the domestic media narrative is much more reflective of CCP leaders’ views than the superficially more neutral and mild public comments of Chinese diplomats. Once Xi and his cohort decided that it was strategically beneficial to the CCP, if not to China, to throw their weight behind Putin, the party’s information control apparatus was jolted into action.
As the war in Ukraine continues, much is at stake for the cause of freedom, peace, and international order. But regardless of the outcome on the battlefield, the conflict has already resulted in a reinforced CCP propaganda structure and a wider information gap between many in China and the rest of the world.
11. Defense Department Sets Out to Build Miniature Nuclear Reactor, Again
Excerpts:
But perhaps the biggest reason Roege believes the concept could have widespread appeal is the significant shift among governments in their willingness to consider new nuclear power, particularly as leaders see how . autocratic states like Russia can energy as a coercion tool.
“Romania has quite a bit of nuclear power. The Czech Republic and a couple others have become quite interested over the last few years because, you know, they want an alternative [to Russian oil and gas],” he said. Those countries are concerned about climate change, “and they're also not convinced that they want to be under the thumb of Russia as an energy source. Last year, a number of the EU countries’ leaders wrote to the leadership of the EU and said ‘We want nuclear to be considered one of the clean energy options.’”
The politics around nuclear power have also changed in the United States and among U.S. leadership. He recalled opposition he encountered during the Obama Administration to the idea. Republican officials during the Trump Administration were more receptive. Among Biden Administration officials, he says that there’s even more interest as the administration looks at ambitious carbon reduction goals particularly for the United States military.
Defense Department Sets Out to Build Miniature Nuclear Reactor, Again
Changing politics and military goals suggest that this time, mobile nuclear power could go mainstream.
Small, deployable nuclear reactors, an idea that the United States military has been experimenting with for decades, will receive new life under a program the Defense Department announced Thursday.
And unlike previous efforts to deploy alternatives to diesel and other fossil-fuel generators, which were stalled by high costs and little political support, this new effort may succeed in helping the military, and eventually commercial energy providers, wean themselves off carbon-intensive power. As one expert explained, while the physics haven’t changed, increasing concerns about the geopolitics of fossil fuels coupled with growing concerns about climate change have made the effort more critical.
Under the new program, the Defense Department will build a 1-5 MegaWatts nuclear microreactor at Idaho National Laboratory for a three-year (minimum) test operational period. It will be “the first electricity-generating Generation IV nuclear reactor built in the United States,” the Defense Department said in a statement. “The first electricity-generating Generation IV nuclear reactor demonstrated in the world was the HTR-PM, a Chinese reactor, which first reached criticality in September 2021.”
The announcement makes clear that it’s not only competition with China that’s pushing a reconsideration, but also growing attention to the Defense Department’s massive carbon footprint.
“The DOD uses approximately 30 terawatt-hours of electricity per year and more than 10 million gallons of fuel per day—levels that are only expected to increase due to anticipated electrification of the non-tactical vehicle fleet and maturation of future energy-intensive capabilities,” it reads. “A safe, small, transportable nuclear reactor would address this growing demand with a resilient, carbon-free energy source that would not add to the DOD’s fuel needs, while supporting mission-critical operations in remote and austere environments.”
Project Pele, as it’s called, won’t be the first microreactor the U.S. military has produced. In 1954, the joint chiefs of staff launched a program to look at military use of nuclear power. That effort produced three reactors: one that powered an air and missile defense radar station near Sundance, Wyoming, one for Greenland, and another that powered the McMurdo Station in Antarctica for a decade.
In 1963, the effort produced a reactor that could fit on a large truck bed, the ML-1. But the costs were deemed too high at the time, compared to diesel generators, so the program died in 1977.
A few decades later, in the early 2000s, the U.S. military looked at the concept again as a means to power remote bases in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, alarmed by the number of troops killed while trying to deliver and retrieve diesel fuel in those environments. DARPA launched a new program in 2011 to consider the costs and benefits of mobile nuclear reactors for remote forward operating bases.
The idea, it turned out, didn’t work well for the types of bases the United States inhabited in Afghanistan and Iraq. As University of Texas professor Alan J. Kuperman argued in an April 2021 paper, “Significant doubt remains about the need, advisability, and plausibility of this initiative. The original rationale—to reduce U.S. casualties from attacks on shipments of diesel fuel for electricity generation on foreign military bases—is a vestige because such casualties have dwindled virtually to zero.”
There are safety concerns as well. Mobile nuclear reactors today shouldn’t be compared to Chernobyl or other big nuclear disasters from decades past. But, in a battlefield context, they could still be dangerous. As Kuperman argued, a missile targeting a mobile microreactor could result in radioactive material getting out. And the reactor can’t be buried, because it needs passive cooling in the event of a temperature buildup.
But the idea has taken on new relevance and is finding renewed support, said Paul Roege, a retired Army colonel who managed a $150 million program for DARPA examining the concept.
There’s a new appreciation in the United States government that small nuclear reactors could help the United States maintain a long-term presence in the Asia- Pacific region, where the military must operate in much greater numbers to deter China from launching an invasion of Taiwan.
“It's quite public that the United States is building some radar systems in Palau. You would need to have some amount of energy, but you know, not tens of megawatts, maybe a few megawatts to one radar systems to run radios, to run the internet,” he said.
The United States is looking to establish a presence in the Asia-Pacific region, and plans to maintain that presence for much longer than the military was in Afghanistan or Iraq. And the longer a nuclear plant is expected to be in operation, the more economically attractive nuclear power becomes, he said. Additionally, if the U.S. military could bring an energy surplus with them, that could help local governments insulate themselves economically from Chinese influence, he said.
And, while nuclear power is not a good choice to power a tank, it could be used to run servers or other technology as the military moves toward information-heavy future operations, he said.
But perhaps the biggest reason Roege believes the concept could have widespread appeal is the significant shift among governments in their willingness to consider new nuclear power, particularly as leaders see how . autocratic states like Russia can energy as a coercion tool.
“Romania has quite a bit of nuclear power. The Czech Republic and a couple others have become quite interested over the last few years because, you know, they want an alternative [to Russian oil and gas],” he said. Those countries are concerned about climate change, “and they're also not convinced that they want to be under the thumb of Russia as an energy source. Last year, a number of the EU countries’ leaders wrote to the leadership of the EU and said ‘We want nuclear to be considered one of the clean energy options.’”
The politics around nuclear power have also changed in the United States and among U.S. leadership. He recalled opposition he encountered during the Obama Administration to the idea. Republican officials during the Trump Administration were more receptive. Among Biden Administration officials, he says that there’s even more interest as the administration looks at ambitious carbon reduction goals particularly for the United States military.
12. How China Would Wage War Against the 'Great Wall In Reverse'
Excerpts:
“Great Wall in reverse”—a barricade against sea and air movement between the China seas and the Western Pacific.
...
In any of these contingencies, on the other hand, the PLA would risk seeing soldiers stranded on Pacific isles should U.S. and allied forces reclaim command of the waters and skies along the first island chain. The specter of such a humiliating turn of events could deter Beijing from acting. It would call Xi Jinping’s leadership into question in the court of public opinion, a dangerous thing for any authoritarian ruler. And it would call into question the PLA’s image of competence, an image built up and carefully husbanded over the past quarter-century. Rank-and-file Chinese citizens might rally to the flag amid such a crisis; or they might turn against the Chinese Communist regime, potentially with fatal results for Xi & Co.
Attempting a breakout into the Western Pacific, then, promises China the greatest of rewards, but it could have mortal consequences should operations go badly. It’s up to allied militaries to design forces, tactics, and operations to ensure that PLA operations would go badly, and to convince Beijing they would. The allies can start by exercising foresight—and looking at the problem through Chinese eyes.
Therein lies wisdom.
How China Would Wage War Against the 'Great Wall In Reverse'
Could China defeat a “Great Wall in Reverse”? Suppose General David Berger, the commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, gets his way and transforms the corps into an island-hopping, missile-toting force able to transmute the first island chain into a “Great Wall in reverse”—a barricade against sea and air movement between the China seas and the Western Pacific. Chinese Communist Party magnates might be deterred for a time from misadventures in the South China Sea, Taiwan Strait, or East China Sea, but they would not meekly acquiesce in their imprisonment within coastal waters. After all, China must take to the high seas to make its “dream” of national rejuvenation come true. The leadership sees compelling economic, military, and diplomatic reasons to make China’s weight felt in world affairs.
All of these demand access to the high seas. All demand that People’s Liberation Army (PLA) commanders devise some way to rupture the allied Great Wall.
What are Beijing’s options? Well, military overseers must first decide whether to undertake a broad or narrow offensive against the east wall. According to strategist Edward Luttwak, the choice between a broad or narrow offensive is the pivotal choice in theater strategy. In other words, PLA forces could act all along the first island chain more or less simultaneously in hopes of battering down what could be a thinly guarded perimeter. They could disperse forces in space while concentrating multiple offensives at the same time in hopes of scoring a breakthrough somewhere along the line. Coordination among these offensives would be at a premium to ensure they took place at once, preventing island defenders from shifting from side to side to reinforce one another at points of impact.
Or China’s commanders could leave token forces along the line to fix allied defenders in place, then, probably after feinting somewhere else along the island chain, mass combat power to launch a single massive blow at the wall. They could take advantage of what Carl von Clausewitz calls “cordon-warfare,” meaning trying to hold a distended line against a foe that enjoys the option of hurling most or all of its might against one sector of the line. Mathematicians describe a line as infinitely many points arranged in succession. That conveys the scope of the problem. It’s hard to be stronger than an antagonist at infinitely many points on the map. The attempt stretches and thins out the defense, potentially leaving it inferior to an antagonist at any one point.
That being the case, Clausewitz warns against trying to guard long perimeters. Commanders should keep the line as short as possible—although that’s not really an option along the first island chain. After all, the islands are where the islands are. If forced to mount such a defense, Clausewitz counsels defenders to make sure they can supply fire support all along the line. This constitutes the difference-maker for sentries patrolling the ramparts. For him fire support meant cannon artillery; today it means ordnance delivered from sea, air, and ground forces, chiefly by guided missiles and other precision armaments.
So the first and paramount decision before PLA commanders and their political masters is: broad or narrow?
Suppose the verdict is to launch a narrow-front offensive while holding elsewhere. The hammer could fall at a number of candidate sites. PLA commanders would need to decide whether to force the straits that allow egress into the Western Pacific, confining the effort to water, or to overrun an island or two overlooking one of the straits. In the ideal case they would opt to seize ground, assuming Beijing were confident in its as-yet-untried capability for amphibious warfare. That would let the PLA harness the logic of island-chain defense, emplacing its own missile-armed forces on the islands to help clear nearby waters and skies of defenders and threaten allied forces elsewhere along the island chain. It would break the chain at least temporarily.
But, as is commonly the case in martial affairs, the circumstances are far from ideal. Two favorite PLA Navy avenues into the Western Pacific are Miyako Strait, flanked by Okinawa to the north, and the Luzon Strait, flanked by Taiwan to the north and the Philippine island of Luzon to the south. It’s hard to envision PLA marines’ storming the beaches of Okinawa, an island that plays home to powerful U.S. and Japanese forces. Invading Okinawa has been tried before, at sanguinary cost to the invaders and defenders. It’s also hard to imagine their assaulting Luzon, an island of major dimensions that has witnessed its share of bitter insurgencies over the past century-plus. So Chinese commanders might satisfice by grabbing one island adjoining one of these waterways, or settle for some more distant position that still lies within missile reach of contested waters.
If PLA amphibian forces could punch through the island barrier, they could create what the English soldier B. H. Liddell Hart called an “expanding torrent” through an enemy defense-in-depth. In other words, the PLA would spill through a breach into the Western Pacific en masse. The danger of expanding-torrent operations for China would be that the allies might close the breach behind PLA sea and air forces—preventing them from returning home to refuel, resupply, and rearm. The prospect of seeing precious assets waste away could give China pause.
Or China could go big, trying to accomplish some of its cherished political aspirations that also carry immense military value. In particular, conquering Taiwan would solve a multitude of problems, including military problems. It would grant the PLA a position overshadowing the Luzon Strait, helping guarantee access to the Pacific for PLA Navy submarines and surface forces, and overshadowing the southern tip of the Ryukyu island chain to Taiwan’s north. Wresting the Senkaku Islands from Japan would be a distant next-best alternative for Beijing. Still, it would provide the PLA a foothold on the allied Great Wall, bestowing the military benefits of such a redoubt.
In any of these contingencies, on the other hand, the PLA would risk seeing soldiers stranded on Pacific isles should U.S. and allied forces reclaim command of the waters and skies along the first island chain. The specter of such a humiliating turn of events could deter Beijing from acting. It would call Xi Jinping’s leadership into question in the court of public opinion, a dangerous thing for any authoritarian ruler. And it would call into question the PLA’s image of competence, an image built up and carefully husbanded over the past quarter-century. Rank-and-file Chinese citizens might rally to the flag amid such a crisis; or they might turn against the Chinese Communist regime, potentially with fatal results for Xi & Co.
Attempting a breakout into the Western Pacific, then, promises China the greatest of rewards, but it could have mortal consequences should operations go badly. It’s up to allied militaries to design forces, tactics, and operations to ensure that PLA operations would go badly, and to convince Beijing they would. The allies can start by exercising foresight—and looking at the problem through Chinese eyes.
Therein lies wisdom.
A 1945 Contributing Editor, Dr. James Holmes holds the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and served on the faculty of the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs. A former U.S. Navy surface warfare officer, he was the last gunnery officer in history to fire a battleship’s big guns in anger, during the first Gulf War in 1991. He earned the Naval War College Foundation Award in 1994, signifying the top graduate in his class. His books include Red Star over the Pacific, an Atlantic Monthly Best Book of 2010 and a fixture on the Navy Professional Reading List. General James Mattis deems him “troublesome.” The views voiced here are his alone.
13. Shortwave radio: can you hear me now?
Good analysis and insights from Matt Armstrong.
Conclusion:
Modern alternatives to shortwave vis a vis Russia include FM stations along the borders with the Baltic states and elsewhere, and these can be replicated relatively easily (radio broadcast facilities can more than easily fit into a cargo container, and these are whole suites for content creation and not just broadcast). There are also options to deploy information within the Russian “sovereign” (ie behind the firewalls) network, or to provide access to the “outside” internet through satellite gateways (there are several options here), deploying Mi-Fi-style hubs (done before), tools facilitate easy domestic content creation and sharing which can be through traditional channels or through alternative wireless options (Bluetooth sharing on the subway or sidewalk, for example), and many more existing (and adapted to the unique needs of these users and environment) and yet to be developed and deployed. And this doesn’t even include USB devices, like the business card USB I saved for show and tell from an Office of Cuba Broadcasting effort. Lastly, I don’t even know if the USAGM still has any shortwave capacity. The hardware was many decades old and replacement parts had to be custom made as the manufacturer either closed up or moved on long ago. Even the skillset to manage these sites was literally fading as the experienced and capable retired or passed away. (Shortwave was so important that one site on the US east coast had to separate broadcast sites for redundancy and a third control site for security.)
In other words, shortwave was great but it’s not the option you’re looking for. The audience won’t be there.
Shortwave radio: can you hear me now?
Several weeks ago when Russia launched its war against Ukraine (and by proxy the West, which I’ll get to later), there was a cacophony of calls for the re-establishment of shortwave broadcasting to undermine (not “counter,” a word used too often) Moscow’s domestic censorship. A second, and quite distant, reason was to get information into Ukraine following Russia’s initial targeting of Ukrainian communications infrastructure (which proved to be a really bad idea for Russia’s military). Though the shortwave discussion has mostly (but not completely) disappeared (for good reason), below are some facts that will hopefully get in the way of future calls and focus energies on more productive options. The bottom line upfront, as the idea of relaunching shortwave may have sounded on paper, the nostalgia does not fit with modern realities.
To start, back in 2014 when I was a Governor on the formerly-named Broadcasting Board of Governors, now the US Agency for Global Media, I led an effort to look at the viability of shortwave as a means for the agency to fulfill its mission of providing information to select audiences abroad either living under regimes of censorship or lacking the infrastructure to access news and information. The agency had been under pressure for years, partly by the White House, to shut down the admittedly expensive broadcast platform wholesale. The research by my committee and the subsequent report provided a nuanced view of shortwave’s value to the agency and, by extension, to US foreign policy.
The objective was to better understand target audiences’ choices, preferences, trends, and utility of shortwave. In developing this report, we surveyed State Department posts where BBG shortwave was received (thank you to Dan Sreebny for invaluable footwork that resulted in a nearly 100% response rate), interagency partners, and the public at home and abroad (many of the vocal and ardent domestic proponents of keeping if not expanding BBG’s shortwave failed to respond despite numerous personal requests). Virtually by definition, in-depth and reliable usage data was not available in these markets, they are, after all, challenging environments with limited access, often security concerns, and, again virtually by definition, audiences likely wary about questions about their media consumption the wrong answer may result in punishment or possibly death.
The report “To Be Where the Audience Is” was published in August 2014. An overview is available here, my comments (as prepared) introducing the report that includes details that couldn’t fit into the report can be read here, and the report itself may be downloaded here. While many, if not all of the details remain important today, the bottom line from that now-8-year-old research is that once people leave shortwave, they do not come back when alternative platforms are available. Further, even when those alternatives are shut down, and we had several contemporary examples to analyze, they do not return to shortwave. Audiences left shortwave as soon as possible and never looked back.
The nostalgia for shortwave remains. A recent article by Jeff Stein at his SpyTalk substack is one such example. I will leave aside his statement that Voice of America was “launched in 1947” as the (ironic) misinformation around VOA and US international information programs is pervasive and horrendous. Some assert VOA was launched in 1942 under the Office of War Information, but that was a pure propaganda operation, in the modern sense. I argue the VOA’s proper launch was when the radio broadcast operation, as it was commonly referred to, was moved from OWI to the State Department following an Executive Order on August 31, 1945, as it was then its mission reflected that of a truthful news operation. Maybe Stein was thinking of February 1947 when Russian was added to VOA’s language operations, in response to increasing Russian propaganda following the announcement of the European Recovery Program (aka the Marshall Plan) in 1946. The 1947 year is the least of Stein’s unintentional misinformation in this passage:
In concert with the Voice of America, launched in 1947, the campaign “burnished America‘s image and trashed the Soviet Union 2,500 hours a week with a 'tower of babble' comprised of more than 70 languages…," a former U.S. Information Agency director recalled in a 1995 memoir.
Working background, we are to understand his source is a Director of USIA, when in fact, Alvin Snyder was a director of television and film at VOA, not the Director. But, let’s also leave that aside, and also the fact that Snyder’s book – Warriors of Disinformation – is a truly terrible source (Snyder’s take on the Smith-Mundt Act is particularly bad). Let’s look at Stein’s selection of Snyder’s words of VOA’s purpose to “trash” with gobs of hours in scores of languages that we are to imagine went on since maybe soon after 1947, if not starting then.
By the end of 1947, the State Department eventually got VOA’s Russian service up to 90 minutes a day. A day. And this was not on a repeating loop. Listeners had to know what frequency, which would change with the seasons, and when to receive the broadcast. Interestingly, while the department was still experimenting and trying to select which frequencies to transmit to the Soviet Union, the broadcasts from Munich were sabotaged with the two transmitters aimed at Russia affected while six others at the same site, all broadcasting to the Balkans, were not. In their budget request for 1948, the State Department sought to increase the transmissions to 120 minutes a day. The volume was not what modern readers might assume. In 1950, VOA’s worldwide broadcasts (in all languages) amounted to 497 hours a week. In 1972, in a big push to increase activities, VOA was doing 931 hours a week, up from 830 in 1970. Further, the leadership at the State Department, which owned VOA 1945-1953, and at least in the early decades of USIA, launched in 1953, would vehemently argue against the use of “trashing.”
VOA, which broadcast news, literary programs and jazz into the USSR and its successor alike, shut down its Russian-language radio service and a 30-minute Russian weekly television program in July 2008, long after social media and email had eclipsed radio and the Obama administration was trying to “reset” frayed relations with Russia, and shifted to sending “text, audio, and video content to Russia's fast-growing Internet market.” Now, with the Kremlin blocking Internet service, criminalizing criticism, shutting down independent news organizations, and stifling access to Western media outlets including Facebook and Instagram, it may be time to haul the old Wurlitzer out of storage and upgrade it with cutting edge software.
Besides the point the Obama administration was not in office in 2008, shortwave was not a platform with impact in Russia. The same was true for television. Russians did not consume satellite TV like many in the Middle East did, for comparison. Russians had services, like the US, and did not just point a dish at a satellite for one channel and redirect the dish to another satellite. There were radio stations, and for a time if I recall correctly a tv station or two, that did carry VOA programming. More often, the station would have a VOA presenter on the air for question & answer discussion, until the Russian authorities pressured these outlets with never-ending fire inspections and other pressures on the broadcast licenses.
As for the “old Wurlitzer,” there are modern means to get information in that are more reliable, more desirable, and more cost-effective than the hurl-and-forget shortwave of decades past. That’s not to say shortwave wasn’t awesome, the US took to shortwave as a new media alternative to the British-dominated cables that included heavy British censorship and costs on the US ability to move information into and out of the US. In 1912, for example, the New York Times claimed to be receiving 30,000 words each week from Europe through its wireless contract with Marconi, which was not only faster than cable, with an average transmission of 30 minutes, but cheaper at four cents a word, half the rate of cable. Later, the Marconi operation in the US was subject to a forced sale to General Electric, resulting in the Radio Corporation of America. The perception of radio’s relationship to national security would find its way into RCA’s 1919 articles of incorporation which contained stipulations to protect the medium from foreign domination: only US citizens could be directors or officers; a government representative may attend meetings and participate in the management of the company; no more than 20% of the stock could be owned by foreigners and such shares were to be marked “Foreign Share Certificate”; and the remaining shared carried a clause restricting ownership to loyal U.S. citizens. The following clause remained on RCA stock certificates through the 1980s: “The voting rights represented by this certificate shall be transferable only to loyal citizens of the United States and/or corporations formed under the laws of the United States or for and under the laws of one of the states of the United States free from foreign control or dominate and not in any foreign interest.”
Modern alternatives to shortwave vis a vis Russia include FM stations along the borders with the Baltic states and elsewhere, and these can be replicated relatively easily (radio broadcast facilities can more than easily fit into a cargo container, and these are whole suites for content creation and not just broadcast). There are also options to deploy information within the Russian “sovereign” (ie behind the firewalls) network, or to provide access to the “outside” internet through satellite gateways (there are several options here), deploying Mi-Fi-style hubs (done before), tools facilitate easy domestic content creation and sharing which can be through traditional channels or through alternative wireless options (Bluetooth sharing on the subway or sidewalk, for example), and many more existing (and adapted to the unique needs of these users and environment) and yet to be developed and deployed. And this doesn’t even include USB devices, like the business card USB I saved for show and tell from an Office of Cuba Broadcasting effort. Lastly, I don’t even know if the USAGM still has any shortwave capacity. The hardware was many decades old and replacement parts had to be custom made as the manufacturer either closed up or moved on long ago. Even the skillset to manage these sites was literally fading as the experienced and capable retired or passed away. (Shortwave was so important that one site on the US east coast had to separate broadcast sites for redundancy and a third control site for security.)
In other words, shortwave was great but it’s not the option you’re looking for. The audience won’t be there.
14. The Dangers of China’s Decline
Excerpts:
This China is unlikely to be benign or peaceful. History has seen many once ascendant countries lash out violently rather than accept a disappointing future as a second-tier power. This fear is what led Germany to take the risks that helped ignite World War I. It prompted Japan to undertake the expansionist rampage that helped bring on World War II.
Xi has grand ambitions, from capturing Taiwan to establishing China’s primacy in Asia and, eventually, the world. If he loses faith that the patient accumulation of economic power will bring Beijing these rewards, he may become more inclined to take risks and use China’s coercive tools to secure them instead. This means that the task of dealing with China could prove quite ticklish in the years ahead.
The United States can’t simply rest easy, confident that a peaking China will fade away. Instead, it will have to rapidly firm up its defenses in places where an impatient Beijing might lunge for advantage, such as the Western Pacific. The United States and its allies will have to join forces to prevent China from weaponizing its still considerable economic and technological leverage to fracture the anti-Beijing coalitions now taking shape. And they will have to ensure, through multilateral control measures as well as investments in their own capabilities, that the democratic world maintains its edge in semiconductors and other critical technologies that will shape the future balance of economic and military power. Yet Washington and its friends will also have to do all this while keeping channels of communication open and not unnecessarily provoking an anxious China that may lash out as its predicament worsens.
After all, power and pessimism can make a deadly mix. The hardest sort of China to handle may be one that is strong and weak at the same time.
The Dangers of China’s Decline
As China’s economic miracle fades, its leaders may become more inclined to take risks.
Decline is a tricky concept. The term makes us think of a country that is falling like a rock—one whose power and capabilities are dropping across the board. But a country can be in relative decline vis-à-vis a fast-growing adversary even if its own power is still increasing. It can be surging forward in some areas, such as military might, even as its underlying economic strength starts to wither. And decline doesn’t always lead a country to scale back its objectives—the sense of urgency it creates can cause ambitious powers to grab what they can before the clock runs out.
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Xi Jinping’s China is about to give the world an education in the nuances of decline. Since the onset of its economic reforms in the 1970s, China has long defied predictions that it would soon stumble or collapse. Its spectacular growth challenged prevailing views about the sources of national success in the modern world. In some ways, China is still soaring: Its military power grows more formidable every year. When Xi declares that “the East is rising and the West is declining,” he gives voice to this sense that China is a country on the make.
Yet military power is often a lagging indicator of a country’s trajectory: It takes time to turn money into military muscle, and massive buildups often persist even after a country’s economic fortunes begin to flag. And today, for reasons including demographic disaster and the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, China is facing the end of the stunning economic growth that made it possible for Xi to assert that the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” was at hand. The China of the 2020s will be a country whose coercive capabilities are more intimidating than ever as its economic dynamism fades. That could be the worst possible combination for the world.
Any country that rises as impressively as China is bound to make fools of some prophets of decline along the way. In recent decades, Beijing has repeatedly confounded those who predicted it was about to hit the wall.
In the aftermath of Mao Zedong’s death, some Western observers were skeptical that China—a country that U.S. diplomat George Kennan once called a “vast poorhouse”—could put together the policies necessary for sustained growth. After the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, it was common to wonder whether the resulting political crackdown would stifle the country’s prosperity. Through the early 2000s, social scientists and U.S. officials predicted that China could be rich or autocratic—but not both. A few prominent analysts made careers for themselves by heralding China’s collapse.
It hasn’t happened—yet. From 1978 to the onset of the global financial crisis three decades later, China’s constant-dollar GDP grew by a factor of 17, without the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) losing control. That growth enabled the decades-long military buildup and sprawling economic influence that made China a force to be feared on the global stage.
As Tufts University’s Michael Beckley and I argue in our forthcoming book, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict With China, this economic miracle required good luck and good policy. China seemed to have hit the demographic jackpot in the 1980s and 1990s; the unlikely combination of warfare and famine in the 1930s and 1940s, a regime-sponsored baby boom after the CCP took power, and then the institution of the one-child policy in 1980 left the country with a huge working-age population unencumbered by lots of young or old dependents. China was nearly self-sufficient in food, water, and other resources. And it had the fortuitous timing to start its reforms as globalization went into overdrive, making it easier to integrate the country into complex supply chains and thereby make China the workshop of the world.
Good policies were also crucial. Mao’s one-man rule and economic illiteracy had condemned China to serial, self-created disasters. Once he died, Deng Xiaoping and his successors moved toward a “socialist market economy.” They opened China to trade and investment, overhauled the tax and regulatory systems, shrank bloated state-owned enterprises, and encouraged private business. Accompanying political reforms limited the power of China’s rulers and enlarged the space for nonideological competence within the regime. The CCP relaxed its grip enough to permit economic spontaneity—and reaped the benefits in the form of prosperity that reinforced its political control.
China’s ascendance shook the world intellectually as well as geopolitically: It undermined post-Cold War Western beliefs that prosperity would lead inevitably to political liberalization, that democracies produced higher rates of growth than autocracies, and that tyranny was incompatible with sound economic management. As China became a global heavyweight, a new orthodoxy solidified—that a hegemonic transition was approaching as Beijing surpassed the United States.
One dissenter was the political scientist David Shambaugh. In 2015, Shambaugh argued that China was suffering from a deep internal malaise and that Xi’s increasingly repressive rule was a sign of insecurity, not confidence. “[F]or all the Western views of it as an unstoppable juggernaut,” he wrote, China’s economy “is stuck in a series of systemic traps from which there is no easy exit.”
Shambaugh struck a discordant note at a time when Beijing was tightening its control of the South China Sea and spreading its influence across multiple continents. He also happened to be right. Not least of the oddities surrounding contemporary China is that much of the world deemed its ascent inevitable just as its prospects started to dim.
Security officers direct a line of people at a COVID-19 mass testing site in Beijing on Jan. 24. Waves of lockdowns amid the country’s zero-COVID policy have disrupted life and work in major Chinese cities.Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
This may sound absurd, given all the hype surrounding China’s rise. After all, that country is supposedly destined, as the Harvard University political scientist Graham Allison (channeling legendary Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew) has written, to become “the biggest player in the history of the world.”
It’s true that China does boast many apparent advantages. It has an enormous domestic market and is the leading trade partner of roughly 130 countries around the world. It is making concerted investments in artificial intelligence (AI), semiconductors, and other critical technologies. If the United States doesn’t up its game, a national commission chaired by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt warned in 2021, China could become the premier “AI superpower.” But look closer, and China’s trajectory starts to seem more tenuous.
For one thing, many of China’s technological achievements are narrower and less impressive than they first appear. For example, Beijing has made great strides in AI applications focused on surveillance (no surprise there), but the United States still leads significantly across the wider expanse of AI subfields and uses. Despite vast state subsidies, China’s Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. is years behind in the creation of cutting-edge semiconductors that make up the foundation of advanced economies in the information age.
Just this year, Peking University published a candid assessment—which the CCP then predictably censored—of China’s progress in science and technology. The verdict was that China is “following [the United States] in most fields, running side by side in a few, and leading in very few.” And while China’s other strengths are not illusory, neither can they hide a reality that Beckley and I discussed last year: The magic that made China’s economic miracle is unmistakably fizzling.
While China’s other strengths are not illusory, neither can they hide reality: The magic that made China’s economic miracle is unmistakably fizzling.
The country’s resource abundance is old news: Overuse devastated much of China’s arable land; industrialization and pollution left the country with severe water scarcity. More damaging still, China’s abundance of human resources is also a thing of the past.
The one-child policy was a devil’s bargain that is now causing demographic implosion. China’s total population is set to peak by 2028 (or perhaps as soon as this year, by some estimates) and then plummet by as much as half by century’s end. Its working population crested in 2015; it will fall by 70 million between 2020 and 2035 and even faster after that. China will soon combine an enormous geriatric population with a rapidly shrinking workforce. It will experience one of the worst peacetime demographic crunches on record, a formula for stagnation at best and catastrophic economic contraction at worst.
Making matters worse, the era of enlightened economic policy is over. The reform agenda has been stalled for more than a decade because further liberalization—necessary to make the leap to a more innovative, knowledge-based economy—would threaten the privileges of entrenched elites. If anything, Xi has thrown the country into reverse. Politically, he is taking China into neototalitarianism through pervasive repression and indoctrination. And economically, his policies have a decidedly retrograde feel.
Xi’s agenda has featured a preference for state-owned enterprises at the expense of the more vibrant private sector; the imposition of severe, politically motivated restrictions on wide swaths of the economy; attacks on the autonomy of relatively technocratic institutions such as the central bank; and the empowerment of political minders in companies of nearly all sizes. China’s leaders may talk about the need to transition to a high-tech, services-based economy, but Xi’s policies are stifling the competence, creativity, and spontaneity necessary to make that shift. It all constitutes a “great leap backward”—a reversion to pre-Deng-era policies that condemned China to stagnation.
There is also the question of what Xi’s consolidation of power means for the country’s long-term resilience. As the political theorist Francis Fukuyama has written, for nearly 40 years after Mao’s death China avoided the “bad emperor” problem—the worst pathologies that accompany authoritarian rule—by imposing term limits on its rulers and making them more accountable to other CCP elites. Yet Xi has systematically disassembled this system by purging rivals, sidelining potential successors, and entrenching himself in power. By doing so, he is enabling China to move faster and more decisively. But he is also leaving the country vulnerable to impulsive or unwise decision-making—a perpetual problem of one-man rule—and creating the potential for terrible instability when his reign finally ends. Xi’s centralization of authority, while seemingly impressive, is setting the country up for a fall.
Finally, it doesn’t help that a more assertive China is now facing more international resistance. Trade barriers against Chinese companies and products proliferated in the decade after the global financial crisis. Washington has waged a technological cold war against Huawei, seeking to deprive that Chinese firm of high-end semiconductors and keep it out of the world’s 5G networks. Dozens of countries are more carefully scrutinizing their economic, financial, and technological ties with Beijing; the Japanese government is offering to pay companies to reduce their China exposure. China is still central to the global economy, but the days when the United States and other powerful countries eagerly abetted its ascent are over. Indeed, Xi’s effort to cultivate the domestic market is an implicit admission that China, which rose on the strength of an export-focused economy, now confronts a very different world.
People walk past a military propaganda sign that reads “Have spirit! Raise a new generation of spirited, capable, courageous, and morally upright revolutionary soldiers” on a giant screen in Beijing on May 18, 2021.NOEL CELIS/AFP via Getty Images
China’s predicament has been thrown into relief, ironically, by COVID-19. Early on, the pandemic seemed to herald an epochal global shift. Prominent U.S. analysts saw it as a “Suez moment,” the terminal crisis of the U.S. empire. Xi touted his regime’s success in containing COVID-19 at home (albeit after allowing it to escape to the world) as an advertisement for Chinese authoritarianism. Two years later, it’s clear that COVID-19 was a turning point but not in the way that Xi hoped.
The pandemic hypercharged global anti-China sentiment, after Beijing concealed the initial outbreak and then exploited the resulting chaos to bully nations from Australia to Germany and the United Kingdom. It thereby encouraged a host of efforts—through multilateral institutions such as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, AUKUS, and the G-7, as well as the United States’ bilateral alliances in the Pacific—to counter Chinese power. “A Cold War mentality” had reemerged, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry complained, as the United States and its friends pursued “anti-China encirclement.”
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Chinese President Xi Jinping leaves after making a toast during a welcome banquet for the Belt and Road Forum at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on May 14, 2017. Wu Hong/Getty Images
The United States needs to prepare for a major war, not because its rival is rising but because of the opposite.
COVID-19 also confirmed how patchy China’s rise had been: The country’s biotechnology sector couldn’t produce anything like the revolutionary vaccines that democratic innovation economies in the United States and Europe churned out. Even China’s heavy-handed success in containing COVID-19 at home became a trap: The combination of “zero-COVID” policies, low levels of natural immunity, and vaccines that proved weak or worthless against highly contagious variants condemned the country to recurring lockdowns of major cities, with all the accompanying disruptions.
Even before COVID-19, in fact, China’s economic vital signs were worrying. The government claimed a growth rate of 6 percent, but Chinese insiders and academic research indicate that the true number is considerably lower—and even that growth is inflated by the relentless injection of capital into a less and less efficient economy. As a result, overall debt grew eightfold between 2008 and the end of 2020, reaching 335 percent of GDP. In other countries, this combination of slumping productivity and growing debt usually presages sharp crises that turn into lasting economic quagmires.
Xi’s Chinese dream involves catching up to the United States. In reality, his country is slowing down.
China is not, however, slowing down in all areas at once. This isn’t unusual: The Soviet Union hit the apex of its military power in the 1980s, when its economy was in a death spiral. In the early 20th century, Britain ruled a global empire at a time when its economic supremacy had already slipped away. Today, China is stagnating economically, but its drive for world power is accelerating.
Chinese leaders and propaganda organs now openly tout the country’s designs: In the coming decades, the official state news agency Xinhua proclaimed, China will “re-ascend to the top of the world.” Beijing is creating new international organizations and co-opting others. Its marquee projects, namely the Belt and Road Initiative and the Digital Silk Road, aim to project economic and political influence across Eurasia and beyond. China also fashions itself as an ideological role model for other countries: Its style of governance, Xi has said, offers a “new option for other countries and nations that want to speed up their development while preserving their independence.”
Most notably, China is building and wielding the tools of geopolitical coercion. Countries such as Australia, Lithuania, Norway, and South Korea have felt China’s economic bite after they opposed its policies or criticized its internal practices. Chinese military spending—having already grown tenfold in real terms between 1990 and 2016—continues to rise, funding a dramatic expansion of the capabilities needed to conquer Taiwan, overawe Beijing’s neighbors, and perhaps even take on the United States in the Western Pacific.
What the United States will face in this decade is a China whose ability to batter its enemies and challenge the global order is growing, even as leaner economic times loom ahead.
The statistics are simply astounding: Beijing put as many ships to sea from 2014 to 2018 as were in the navies of Britain, Germany, India, Spain, and Taiwan combined. And having long avoided a nuclear arms race with Washington, Beijing is now sprinting forward and could be the United States’ nuclear peer by the 2030s. Threats to use force against enemies have also become ubiquitous: Anyone who obstructs China’s plans, Xi warned in 2021, will “have their heads bashed bloody against the Great Wall of Steel.”
It is sometimes hard to believe that such a country is running out of gas. But perhaps China’s strategic urgency is increasing because its economic outlook has turned grim.
China’s “hide and bide” strategy—the approach it followed for a generation under Deng and after—was one of patient confidence. If time was on a rising Beijing’s side, then it made sense to gradually build the country’s power and delay confrontation with the United States. Today, China’s strategic mindset is darker and more insistent.
In many areas, Xi acknowledges, “the West is strong, and the East is weak.” China must race to make itself “invincible” so that “nobody can beat us or choke us to death.” What the United States will face in this decade, then, is a China whose ability to batter its enemies and challenge the global order is growing, even as leaner economic times loom ahead.
This China is unlikely to be benign or peaceful. History has seen many once ascendant countries lash out violently rather than accept a disappointing future as a second-tier power. This fear is what led Germany to take the risks that helped ignite World War I. It prompted Japan to undertake the expansionist rampage that helped bring on World War II.
Xi has grand ambitions, from capturing Taiwan to establishing China’s primacy in Asia and, eventually, the world. If he loses faith that the patient accumulation of economic power will bring Beijing these rewards, he may become more inclined to take risks and use China’s coercive tools to secure them instead. This means that the task of dealing with China could prove quite ticklish in the years ahead.
The United States can’t simply rest easy, confident that a peaking China will fade away. Instead, it will have to rapidly firm up its defenses in places where an impatient Beijing might lunge for advantage, such as the Western Pacific. The United States and its allies will have to join forces to prevent China from weaponizing its still considerable economic and technological leverage to fracture the anti-Beijing coalitions now taking shape. And they will have to ensure, through multilateral control measures as well as investments in their own capabilities, that the democratic world maintains its edge in semiconductors and other critical technologies that will shape the future balance of economic and military power. Yet Washington and its friends will also have to do all this while keeping channels of communication open and not unnecessarily provoking an anxious China that may lash out as its predicament worsens.
After all, power and pessimism can make a deadly mix. The hardest sort of China to handle may be one that is strong and weak at the same time.
This article appears in the Spring 2022 print issue. Subscribe now to support our journalism and get unlimited access to our coverage.
15. Eight New Points on the Porcupine: More Ukrainian Lessons for Taiwan
Excerpts:
Ballistic Missile Defense
Air Defense
Mine Warfare
Sea-Denial Fires
Shore-Denial Fires
Jamming, Decoys, and Deception
Civil Defense and Urban Warfare
Life-Essential Infrastructure
Conclusion
These eight measures arise from a vital lesson of the ongoing war in Ukraine: Each day that a smaller defender stays in the fight, the more constrained the invader’s options become and the dimmer its prospects for success. China seeks to win without fighting, or with minimal fighting. For Taiwan, the best path is trying to avoid the fight by ensuring that if it starts, it will last for months, be bloody, and prevent China from consolidating meaningful gains before American and allied firepower arrives. With rapidly deployable assistance, munitions, and training, Washington can help Taiwan to become a dragon-choking porcupine before it’s too late.
Eight New Points on the Porcupine: More Ukrainian Lessons for Taiwan - War on the Rocks
Watching Russia falter in Ukraine, Chinese President Xi Jinping may conclude that if he decides to invade Taiwan, he cannot hope to achieve victory with little or limited fighting. The risk is that this will lead him to prepare a much bigger assault, deploying far heavier and more concentrated firepower to batter the island into submission.
In response to this possibility, a number of recent assessments have called for Taiwan to pursue an “asymmetric” dragon-choking “porcupine strategy” prioritizing “a large number of small things” for its defense. In short, turn the anti-access/area denial issue on its head and present People’s Liberation Army forces with multiple, numerous, hard-to-counter defenses that specifically target key Chinese military weaknesses. Drawing on Ukraine’s experience, there are eight concrete areas where the United States and Taiwan should now invest to make the island tougher to invade, even harder to subdue, and harder still to occupy and govern: ballistic missile defense, air defense, sea-denial fires, shore-denial fires, mine warfare, information warfare, civil defense, and the resilience of critical infrastructure.
The goal of these measures is to present a robust anti-access/area-denial threat to Beijing’s aspirations in Taiwan, clouding its prospects for military and political success and, ideally, keeping the threat of Chinese invasion hypothetical through this critical decade and beyond.
Ballistic Missile Defense
Dispersion, mobility, and hardening are critical to surviving and staying in the fight. Russia’s initial experiences in Ukraine will likely lead China’s military to conclude that attacking Taiwan would require deploying overwhelming fires up front, instead of holding back like Russia did initially. Ballistic missile defense is thus vital for calling into question the reliability of China’s missile might. Taiwan is scheduled to have its 350 American Patriot Advanced Capability-3 missiles upgraded through the life-extension program and seeks to purchase 300 additional interceptors. For protection against People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force short-range ballistic missiles, Taiwan also needs Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense on mobile units. Beyond the four MQ-9 high-altitude, long-endurance surveillance drones they are currently acquiring from the United States, Taiwanese forces should put GPS/Beidou jammers on additional unmanned air vehicles or, potentially, aerostats, parked at altitude to interfere with missile guidance systems and reduce Chinese ballistic missiles’ accuracy.
Passive hardening, dispersion, and decoys would also function as a form of ballistic missile defense, with at least three benefits. First, they would increase the number of missiles that China’s military must assign per target to achieve the same level of success. Second, they could help turn the math in Taiwan’s favor by forcing Beijing to fire additional expensive ballistic missiles against decoys and thicker concrete often costing several orders of magnitude less. Third, they would help to deplete Chinese missile stocks that could otherwise be fired at regional bases that U.S. forces would rely on to maintain high-sortie rates in response to an attack on Taiwan.
Air Defense
Ukraine’s experience demonstrates the importance of layered ground-based air defenses that, even if imperfect, can deny an attacker air control over key terrain. As Harry Halem and Eyck Freymann explain, “Without air control … China would be incapable of executing almost any military plan against Taiwan.”
For the longest-range, highest-altitude engagements, variants of the Patriot surface-to-air missile discussed above would capitalize upon Taiwanese forces’ existing familiarity with the platform. The missile’s predominantly American supply chain also makes it harder for China to deter or disrupt weapons transfers. At the medium-range level, the Norwegian Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System platform could be ideal given its use of the combat-proven AIM-120 Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile, dispersion of fire control and launch assets, and wheeled mobility compatible with cave/tunnel-sheltered operations. The Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile-Extended Range now under development and the Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile family already in service offer the potential to expand engagement envelopes. For the same cost as Taiwan’s 2019 deal to acquire 66 F-16V fighters, the island’s military could purchase eight Patriot Advanced Capability-2 batteries (48 launchers and 192 missiles in-canister) or more than 150 Norwegian Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System batteries. Smaller expenditures could procure hundreds of replacement missile rounds.
Finally, Taiwan should amass large stocks of man-portable air-defense systems, which have already shown their utility in Ukraine against aircraft with similar performance characteristics to many in China’s air force. As of early April, NATO countries have delivered or promised 25,000 “anti-air” weapons systems to Ukraine, most of them man-portable. Taiwan’s smaller size could mean fewer weapons biased toward higher capability, but the quantity transferred to Ukraine illustrates the sheer munitions mass likely to be required to sustain a high-end fight to contest airspace against a capable, determined invader. Beyond the FIM-92 Stinger missiles that the United States will deliver by 2026, additional man-portable systems should therefore be stockpiled in large numbers for Taiwan’s defense, together with flak traps, advanced infrared and/or mobile active radar surface-to-air missiles, and Surface-Launched Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles (like those from a five-missile carrier on the M1097 Humvee). Taiwanese forces could also likely make use of mobile anti-air guns such as tractor-bed-based Mk15 Block 1B Phalanx close-in weapons systems or even low-cost .50 caliber and 20mm weapons mounted in trucks “technical” style for anti-air and direct fire against ground forces.
Mine Warfare
Washington and Taipei should place greater emphasis on sea mines, whose capacity to deny freedom of movement to Chinese forces in waters near Taiwan and landing access in the surf zone has been insufficiently appreciated. Taiwanese planners already understand this, as evidenced by Drew Thompson’s commentary in these pages more than three years ago. But both the Taiwanese and U.S. militaries should accelerate these efforts.
Taiwan should now urgently build or acquire shallow-water mines akin to the Russian PDM series, which could be rapidly deployed in the tidal zone of likely landing points. Using cheap, rapidly deployable passive obstacles such as steel Czech hedgehogs and concrete Jersey barriers could help to channel incoming landing forces, thereby amplifying the mines’ lethality. Ukraine’s efforts in these areas may have helped to deter a Russian amphibious assault on Odessa, a lesson worth considering for Taiwan.
For its part, America should urgently stockpile Quickstrike-Extended Range standoff air-delivered mines at regional bases and in the continental United States. These underappreciated weapons can glide 40 nautical miles with precision in order to seal off maritime passages, including key landing approaches to Taiwan’s relatively few suitable beaches. Integrated with aircraft such as the B-2 or B-21, they could also be deployed from contested airspace. If necessary, they could also be deployed directly from the continental United States and arrive on target within 15–16 hours. Forward basing out of Northern Australia, Wake Island, or other locations beyond the range of most Chinese fires would potentially allow their deployment within 6–10 hours of takeoff.
Sea-Denial Fires
Taiwanese forces should pursue a three-layered approach to defending Taiwan’s coastline from amphibious attack. The outermost layer would involve munitions capable of striking Chinese staging areas and ports, as well as petroleum, oil, and lubricants tanks to disrupt an invasion force and potential follow-on waves. Taiwan has for more than a decade fielded a 600km-range land-attack cruise missile (the Hsiung Feng IIE) capable of such interdiction missions as well as an air-launched cruise missile (the Wan Chien) with a 240km-range, but only small numbers of rounds.
American assistance should thus be structured to rapidly augment existing Taiwanese indigenous systems and amplify their deterrent effect through the prospect of expanding them. Taiwan plans to double advanced missile production to a total of nearly 500 per year in 2022. But as Ukraine’s example shows, that may only amount to days of supply during a high-end war, making imported weapons an important component of pre-conflict preparation. In 2020, the United States approved the sale of 135 AGM-84H Standoff Land Attack Missile Expanded Response units to Taiwan for approximately $1 billion. These high-precision, 300km-range weapons are air-launched, combat-proven, carry an 800lb warhead, and offer Taipei the ability to interdict Chinese military support infrastructure and vessels in port.
To ensure second-strike capability, Taiwan likely needs several times its current inventory of these missiles, dispersed to highways and other forward-operating points that could survive a surprise ballistic and cruise missile strike by China. Taiwan should attempt to obtain Harop-type long-range loitering munitions as well. U.S. defense contractors could potentially produce the latter under license from Israeli Aircraft Industries to blunt potential Chinese pressure — sales of Spike missiles and other hardware to Taiwan could provide an incentive for the deal.
The second layer entails stockpiling and deploying anti-ship missiles and precision-guided munitions to deny China the ability to reach Taiwanese ports. Again, the intent would be for American-origin systems to amplify Taiwan’s indigenous capabilities, such as the 120–150km-ranged Hsiung Feng III supersonic anti-ship cruise missile. The United States has already approved the sale of 100 Harpoon land-based coastal defense cruise missile launchers, 400 missiles, and 25 associated radars to Taiwan. With a range of 124km, Harpoon Block II missiles could engage Chinese vessels soon after they leave port. If China begins posturing for an invasion, Washington should facilitate Taipei purchasing even more launchers and missile rounds, perhaps even through a lend-lease arrangement.
On April 13, 2022, two Ukrainian Neptune anti-ship cruise missiles struck the cruiser Moskva, Russia’s Black Sea flagship, causing it to catch fire and sink. Moskva’s sundering shows how coastal anti-ship cruise missiles can be hard to see coming in sufficient time to defend against if ships are operating close to land. Losses inflicted on the British Royal Navy by Argentine Exocet missiles during the Falklands War and the near-loss of USS Stark after two Exocet strikes in 1987 suggest that rapidly maximizing the quantity and survivability of Taiwan’s long-range anti-ship missile inventory could seriously challenge People’s Liberation Army Navy operations near the island.
Shore-Denial Fires
The third layer of coastline defense should rely on precision fires to turn Taiwan’s nearshore waters and beaches into kill zones. Taiwanese forces need multiple-launch rocket artillery with submunitions (for example High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems) to target any landing force close to Taiwan’s coast. Furthermore, the High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems platform could employ Saab’s Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bomb, whose 150km-range and high precision would allow rocket systems dispersed throughout Taiwan to target a Chinese landing force. The United States has already agreed to deliver at least 11 High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems by 2027 — a number that should be substantially increased to accommodate combat attrition and ensure sufficient mass of fire against a potential invasion attempt.
Taiwanese forces should also stockpile relatively high-volume, lower-cost precision-guided munitions to overwhelm invaders near or on its beaches. AGM-114 Ground-Launched Hellfire-Light missiles deployed in anti-ship mode from mobile platforms (such as a modified Humvee chassis) offer one option. This Littoral Combat Ship surface module concept could also be fitted to commercial fishing vessels to threaten and destroy small boats, such as amphibious assault craft.
The United States should also help Taiwan to acquire substantial numbers of Javelin missiles and additional advanced versions of the BGM-71 Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided anti-tank missile, with rounds pre-positioned in hardened locations near likely landing areas. Ukraine’s fight thus far suggests that repelling an intense multi-vector invasion attempt can realistically require thousands of anti-armor munitions.
The war in Ukraine has already absorbed a significant portion of U.S. Javelin and Stinger stockpiles. This means supplying Taiwan would require investing in the American munitions industrial base to substantially increase production capacity. Incoming Undersecretary for Acquisition and Sustainment William LaPlante’s recent Senate confirmation hearing testimony suggests that such investments could be forthcoming soon. The White House and Congress should also consider license-manufacturing of certain systems in Taiwan to bolster domestic support on the island and allow U.S. plants to more rapidly replenish America’s own stocks.
Finally, Taiwan should also install North Korean-style tube artillery in tunnels bored into mountainsides, with pre-zeroed aim points for rapid firing on the key beaches near Taipei and Kaohsiung and just offshore. The most lethal combination would involve 155mm guided shells, such as the combat-proven Excalibur, and tunnel-based mobile gun platforms such as the M109 Paladin, already approved for sale to Taiwan, or the rapid-firing BAE/Bofors Archer.
Jamming, Decoys, and Deception
Aircraft should be protected through sensor denial, with radio frequency jamming pods as well as multi-platform-based jamming of satellite navigation and radio communications to insert confusion into China’s battle plan. Inflatable decoys of beach, surface-to-air missile, and coastal battery vehicles and radars should be deployed and moved frequently to undermine the Chinese military’s situational awareness. Decoys and actual vehicles should employ camouflage — multi-spectral camouflage for the real defensive equipment and less-capable concealment for the decoys. This could be amplified through the use of social media. Posting distant photos of camouflaged decoys on social media can add an air of authenticity and make the targets more attractive. Taiwan could also disguise actual armored vehicles as different types of civilian heavy equipment to complicate Chinese targeting efforts.
Lastly, decoys can serve more lethal purposes by distracting sensors and operators on target platforms like warships to open them up for other strikes. Ukrainian officials claim that they used Bayraktar TB2 drones in precisely this way to enable Neptune anti-ship missiles to strike and ultimately sink the Moskva. This suggests that Taiwanese forces could use aerial and aquatic “active decoy” drones to facilitate targeting against a blockading or invading fleet.
Civil Defense and Urban Warfare
Washington and Taipei should help to prepare the island for insurgency. In addition to Taiwan’s just-released Civil Defense Handbook and existing “territorial defense,” this should involve building stocks of shoulder-fired anti-armor weapons with soft launch for urban warfare. These could include Next Generation Light Anti-Tank Weapons and the Panzerfaust 3, together with indigenous Taiwanese production. It also makes sense to cache 5.56 NATO caliber assault weapons and 7.62 NATO/338 Lapua/.50 Browning Machine Gun-caliber sniper rifles, plus ample ammunition stocks. As the achievements of Ukrainian sharpshooters now wreaking havoc on Russian field leadership suggest, sniper training should be expanded immediately in Taiwan’s military. The United States can facilitate such training, and also transfer knowledge on the manufacture and employment of improvised explosive devices.
Life-Essential Infrastructure
Taiwan should prepare for the possibility of siege warfare by Chinese forces. Taiwan’s Petroleum Administration Law currently requires that the government hold petroleum stocks equivalent to 30 days of what consumption was during the prior year, meaning approximately one million barrels per day. It would be better to store 60 days of liquid fuel in hardened, buried, and dispersed locations.
Taiwan should prepare some emergency stockpiles at higher elevations and run buried pipelines to generators and fuel offtake risers downhill so that in the event of total power loss, fuel can be moved by gravity. Fuel suppliers should also practice “over-the-shore” fuel deliveries of the type used to resupply facilities in austere locations, in case ports normally used for fuel deliveries are denied or destroyed by Chinese strikes. Holding a much higher inventory level in a more dispersed fashion entails a significant investment (roughly $3.5 billion at today’s prices) but would reduce vulnerability to precision-guided munitions strikes and increase Taiwan’s ability to withstand a blockade.
Likewise, the experiences of Mariupol and other Ukrainian cities show that the combination of intense shelling and purposeful Russian siege tactics have cut civilians off from food and water supplies. Accordingly, 120 days of basic food stocks should be dispersed to ensure resilience against possible maritime blockade attempts. During the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs estimated that local food and key goods stocks were sufficient for 1–3 months, an amount likely insufficient to weather a prolonged blockade. Every Taiwanese community of 5,000 or more people should have groundwater wells with hardened, high-resiliency backup power to maintain potable water supplies in case Chinese forces strike reservoirs and main aqueduct systems. As the recent Tonga volcanic eruption underscores, Starlink-type satellite internet receivers can also enable continued communication if Chinese attacks disrupt undersea cables.
To ensure basic electricity flow, critical to water supply and communications, multi-fuel turbine electrical power generators should be distributed and installed near fuel-storage locations. Fuel supplies for the generators should be dispersed — and, to the extent possible, tanks should be placed underground, in caves or in subsurface structures resistant to air and missile attack. Dispersion planning should assume that Chinese ballistic and land-attack cruise missiles can achieve circular error probable of 5–10 meters.
Conclusion
These eight measures arise from a vital lesson of the ongoing war in Ukraine: Each day that a smaller defender stays in the fight, the more constrained the invader’s options become and the dimmer its prospects for success. China seeks to win without fighting, or with minimal fighting. For Taiwan, the best path is trying to avoid the fight by ensuring that if it starts, it will last for months, be bloody, and prevent China from consolidating meaningful gains before American and allied firepower arrives. With rapidly deployable assistance, munitions, and training, Washington can help Taiwan to become a dragon-choking porcupine before it’s too late.
Andrew S. Erickson is a professor of strategy in the U.S. Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute.
Gabriel Collins is the Baker Botts Fellow in Energy & Environmental Regulatory Affairs at Rice University’s Baker Institute.
The views expressed here are those of the authors alone.
16. Russians at War – Putin’s Aggression Has Turned a Nation Against Itself
Conclusion:
Putin has hit a dead end, and Ukraine, along with the rest of the world, is suffering as a result. But in the long term, it is a disaster for the Russian people, too. The nation that contributed so much to world culture—that produced so many great novelists and thinkers and three Nobel Peace Prize winners—will now also be for a long time associated with Vladimir Putin. The West has to understand that, as banal as it sounds, Putin’s system and the Russian nation are not one and the same. And this understanding will be crucial for building a post-Putin Russia. Otherwise, the country will continue to be regarded as a hostile enclave, to be shunned by the world. But, ultimately, it will be up to Russians themselves to prove by their own actions that their country is more than Putin and what he has wrought.
Russians at War
Putin’s Aggression Has Turned a Nation Against Itself
April 18, 2022
In early April, the coffin containing the body of 75-year-old Vladimir Zhirinovsky—the ultranationalist and populist who was a crucial pillar of the Russian state for two decades—was taken to the Hall of Columns in central Moscow for people to pay their respects. Sixty-nine years ago, it was there that Stalin had lain in state, in the process killing one last wave of Russians, who were crushed to death in the huge crowds that had gathered to bid farewell to the Soviet dictator.
There was no stampede to see Zhirinovsky, although his funeral recalled a different moment from the Soviet era. His body had been brought to the Hall of Columns in an Aurus Lafet—the strictly limited-edition black hearse made by Aurus Motors, Russia’s much-hyped new luxury car manufacturer. In Russian, lafet means “funeral carriage,” and for Russians like me, who are old enough to remember the early 1980s, the name of the car evokes a darkly comic joke: when the elderly Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko all died in quick succession, it was known as the Race of the Lafets.
Could Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle now be facing a new Race of the Lafets? Certainly, there are many Kremlin figures who are of a similar age to their counterparts in the late Soviet years: Putin will be 70 in October; Alexander Bortnikov, the head of his FSB, and Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of his security council, are both 70 now. Sergei Lavrov, his foreign minister, is 72. Much like Brezhnev’s aging Politburo when it decided to invade Afghanistan, thus demolishing what remained of the moral foundations of the Soviet empire, these gerontocrats’ decision to launch a war in Ukraine has quickly become a disaster for Russia—and especially its youth.
For the moment, the regime has Russian public opinion on its side, and it may continue to delude itself, just as it is deluding the people, that it can turn Russia into a self-sufficient, self-isolating, expansionist rogue state, based on the idea of Russian superiority over other nations. In the medium and long term, however, the “special military operation,” as Putin insists on calling it, seems destined to undermine all of Russia’s political, economic, and moral foundations.
At War With Themselves
The Putin regime seems to regard the Russia people with nearly the same attitude that it does their Ukrainian counterparts. For proof of this, one has to look no further than the public and police pressure now being put on anyone in Russia who dares think differently, the shutting down or purging of almost every independent media outlet and research organization, and the persecution of anyone who protests or even merely disagrees with the patriotic hysteria. Ukrainians are depicted as a faceless, homogenous mass that must be subjugated to the Kremlin by means of denazification, a process that in actual fact means de-Ukrainization, as Putin’s propagandists now openly admit. But Russians are also considered by their leaders as an unthinking mass that must blindly follow their leader. Otherwise, they face administrative or criminal charges and social ostracism. Russian soldiers—a group that includes not only military die-hards but also tens of thousands of very young conscripts who are performing obligatory national service—have become cannon fodder, sent unprepared to the slaughter. Putin’s senseless ideas are costing Russian teenagers their lives.
In one of his few speeches in recent weeks, Putin declared open season on “national traitors” and on a “fifth column” that was supposedly undermining the unity of the nation. To root out these malefactors, he urged a “self-cleansing of society.” Russians quickly heeded the call: after the speech, there was a wave of denunciations, with students condemning their teachers—and vice versa—and colleagues reporting on each other. The Russian president also encouraged acts of barbarity against his critics. Alexei Venediktov, the editor of Echo of Moscow, the independent radio station that was shut down by Putin’s government soon after the invasion began, had a pig’s head left outside his door, along with anti-Semitic graffiti. On a train out of Moscow, a man attacked Dmitry Muratov, the editor in chief of the newspaper Novaya Gazeta and the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize last year, by dousing him in red paint mixed with the toxic chemical acetone.
After Putin called for “self-cleansing,” Russians rushed to denounce each other.
Putin has divided the nation. Both opponents and supporters of the Russian leader have become more radicalized. Of course, most of those who oppose the war are Putin critics and young people. Some soldiers have refused to fight in Ukraine, and some families of those who have been slain are furious with Putin. Young people have bravely taken to the streets to protest the war, despite facing immediate arrest and the prospect of losing their job or place at university. Yet until now, a clear majority of Russians have rallied around Putin, even though, according to independent polling conducted last year, most Russians were afraid of war and didn’t believe it could actually happen. Today, the public, or at least the broad mass of ordinary Russians, seems in the mood for war.
Of course, it is difficult to measure opinion in a system that has one leader and that for all practical purposes no longer has any free media. But it is clear that Russians feel besieged and, often, just as embittered as Putin himself. Consider the data of the most recent poll by the independent Levada Center. Contrary to what critics claim, respondents did not refuse to answer questions any more than in past surveys, and the study itself was conducted, as usual, by in-person interviews rather than by telephone. The results are telling: 81 percent of respondents said they supported the “special operation,” with a full 53 percent “definitely” supporting it, and 28 percent “rather” supporting it. It is also worth noting another figure: in connection with the special operation, a slight majority—51 percent—of respondents said that they felt “pride in Russia.” Those who did not—many of them young people—described their feelings as “anxiety, fear, horror,” or simply “shock.”
At the same time, Putin’s approval rating, again according to Levada, soared to 83 percent in March, up 12 percent from the previous month. The surge of public support tracks closely with what occurred after the annexation of Crimea in 2014; but back then, the climate was altogether more benign, and those who opposed Putin’s actions did not face humiliation by their peers. (Nevertheless, in a speech at the time, Putin labeled anyone who spoke against his policies as a “national traitor.”) Moreover, in contrast to Russian actions in Ukraine now, the annexation was accomplished without any bloodshed, and many saw the “reunification” of Crimea with Russia, as the Kremlin called it, as restoring and enhancing Russia’s greatness.
Today, the dominant response of ordinary Russians to the war is aggression. It is undergirded by what seems to be an almost subconscious effort to block out any bad news, and with it, any sense that the nation might be in the wrong. Fear of authority not only prevents people from protesting against a barbaric war; it also makes them unable to admit even to themselves that Putin’s Russia has committed something dreadful. It is frightening to be on the side of evil. It is frightening to look at the monstrous photographs and video footage coming out of Ukraine—using a virtual private network to circumvent the Kremlin’s Internet controls—and to discover just how dangerous the truth is. And so, for many, it is easier to imbibe the official propaganda and know that you’re on the good side: the Ukrainians were going to attack us; we just carried out a preventative strike; we are liberating a fraternal people from a Nazi regime supported by the West; all the reports about atrocities supposedly carried out by our army are fake. As one woman in a Levada Center focus group said, “If I watched the BBC, maybe I’d think differently, but I will never watch the BBC, because for me what I watch is enough.”
Moscow Syndrome
Putin is backed into a corner, but so is the nation. Russians are collectively experiencing a version of Stockholm syndrome, sympathizing more with their own captor than with his other victims. The politicians, meanwhile—granted that they, too, are tethered to the Kremlin—are divided over what to do next. Some, such as the Putin’s chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky and the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, say they favor a peace agreement. Others, like the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, advocate “seeing it through to the end”—though what kind of end?—and consider any negotiations a form of betrayal. This range of views is reflected in society at large: for some, victory means a peace agreement that gives Russia significant new territory; for others, victory requires going all the way and conquering all of Ukraine, which, of course, means perpetual war.
Putin’s supporters, intoxicated by what they take to be patriotism, attack anyone who criticizes the war and claim not to understand why some people are protesting against it: 32 percent of respondents in another Levada poll said they believed that protesters were paid to do so. How else to account for the thousands of people who have taken to the streets to oppose the liberation of Ukraine from Nazis? No matter that they cannot explain who and how these thousands of people were paid to risk their freedom and livelihood to protest against the massacre. But such illogical assertions are nothing new: a portion of Russia’s hard-bitten mainstream has often said this about political protesters in recent times.
To Russians, the term “fascism” has long served as a convenient label for almost anything bad. During Soviet times it was common to say that “fascists” and “revanchists” have “raised their heads” in various parts of the world, from the United States to Germany. At times, an even harsher term, “Nazis,” was used. With characteristic lack of irony, Soviet propaganda first used the term in reference to Israel: after the Six-Day War in 1967, when the USSR broke off diplomatic relations with Israel, the Israelis were written off as Nazis. For Putin, the specter of Nazis has provided a way to indoctrinate the nation, to insist that Ukraine has no right to exist. Putin needs the history of World War II to legitimize his regime, but Russians have yet to realize that in doing so he has also destroyed the foundations of the post-Soviet state. Everything was built on the defeat of fascism in the Great Patriotic War, as Russians call World War II. Yet in the eyes of Ukrainians—and much of the rest of the world—Russians themselves are now behaving like fascists. Russians can hardly draw on their country’s experience fighting Hitler to justify their own brutal militarism. On the contrary, they are making themselves in the very image of the Germans in the wake of World War II. This is what Putin has done: Russia is no longer on the winning side of the Great Patriotic War; it is no longer on the right side of history.
Deep down, Russians are beginning to understand that escape may be impossible.
The bulk of the Russian population doesn’t realize this. And of course, this year, during Victory Day celebrations on May 9—one of Russia’s most important state holidays, commemorating the end of World War II—Putin will no doubt equate the Soviet victory in 1945 with his own triumph over the powers of reason. By May 9, Putin will have to find the words to describe the specific parameters of the new victory in Ukraine. And they must be convincing enough to make the triumph resemble 1945. But many Russians already seem to view what Russia is doing now as equivalent to the defeat of Hitler: the letter Z, the symbol of the special operation, is often portrayed as a curved St. George’s ribbon, the symbol of victory over fascism.
In reality, however, most people feel trapped: the West is more hostile toward them than ever, but there is nothing left for them in Russia. They support Putin as the supreme commander of their fabled army, but deep down they are beginning to understand that the president has led them to a place from which escape may be impossible. For Russians, it is an age-old feeling. As far back as 1863, the brilliant revolutionary thinker Alexander Herzen identified the tension: “The Russian’s position is becoming interminably difficult,” he wrote from Italy. “He feels more and more foreign in the West, while his hatred for what is being done at home grows deeper and deeper.” Then, as now, the hatred is secret rather than overt. And Russians cannot admit it to themselves.
Running Away from Reality
Many Russians with a conscience, self-awareness, and a profession—and the means to do so—are voting with their feet and leaving the country. Exact numbers are hard to come by, and in the vast majority of cases, those who go abroad say they are doing so temporarily: they are sitting out the war and waiting for change to come to Russia, but they have no intention of establishing a permanent new life in another country. They are motivated less by a fear of persecution than by a lack of belief in Russia’s prospects and disgust at what the regime has become. As a result, Russia is hemorrhaging its professional class, the people on whom its aspirations for a modern, diversified economy have long rested. If this turns into a long-term trend, the exodus will fundamentally harm the country’s human capital. And the population that is left behind may well be even less open to Western values and liberal ideas.
Faced with looming economic catastrophe, the state seems likely to aim its efforts at those Russians who can be relied on to support the regime provided they are offered enough cash and other basic rewards to do so. These are the broad masses whose loyalty must be bought with social payments and salaries in the state-dependent sectors and who must be fed a steady diet of propaganda in order to stay in line. Yet as the growing effects of sanctions set in, this project has become far more expensive and the resources for supporting these people may begin to dry up. This will be especially true if Russia loses the ability to sell oil and gas.
Over time, the accumulating effects of the war could erode public trust in Putin. As the military campaign and the immense propaganda machine that has gone with it continue to operate at full tilt, social cohesion will begin to break down, and the forces that have traditionally sustained the economy will no longer function. But for now, Russians seem content to project their discontents on the enemy. To the question, Who is to blame? they answer: the United States and Europe.
Putin has hit a dead end, and Ukraine, along with the rest of the world, is suffering as a result. But in the long term, it is a disaster for the Russian people, too. The nation that contributed so much to world culture—that produced so many great novelists and thinkers and three Nobel Peace Prize winners—will now also be for a long time associated with Vladimir Putin. The West has to understand that, as banal as it sounds, Putin’s system and the Russian nation are not one and the same. And this understanding will be crucial for building a post-Putin Russia. Otherwise, the country will continue to be regarded as a hostile enclave, to be shunned by the world. But, ultimately, it will be up to Russians themselves to prove by their own actions that their country is more than Putin and what he has wrought.
17. How to Seek Justice for Rape in the Ukraine War
Russian military brutality and evil.
Excerpts:
It may seem fanciful at this stage—with Russia still hammering Ukrainian territory, and no resolution to this war in sight—to plan for a period in which Russian soldiers might face trial for their abuses. Yet it is not at all out of the realm of possibility: Neither Russia nor Ukraine are subject to International Criminal Court prosecutions, but Ukraine has previously accepted the court’s jurisdiction. Another possibility is that countries that have begun prosecuting war crimes unrelated to their citizens, such as Germany, may begin proceedings on the basis of the concept of universal jurisdiction. This road is a long one, and there is no guarantee of success, but high-quality evidence-gathering in Ukraine now improves the odds considerably.
Though the majority of Ukrainian women may not be fighting on the front lines, they are sacrificing their lives every bit as much as Ukrainian men are. We owe it to them—and to all of humanity—to ensure that the men who violate women’s bodies are not allowed to do so with impunity. For once, we’re not hopeless to help women and investigate war crimes. We’re actually at a place to begin.
“It’s like in 1942: Where do you start investigating the Holocaust?” Patricia Viseur Sellers, the former legal adviser for gender at the tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, told me. “You start where you can.”
How to Seek Justice for Rape in the Ukraine War
On March 13, a Russian soldier broke into a school in Malaya Rohan, a village near the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, which had been relentlessly attacked by Vladimir Putin’s forces for weeks. Locals had congregated in the school’s basement for shelter from the violence. What followed, according to an account from a survivor published by Human Rights Watch, is horrifying but bears detailing.
The soldier ordered a 31-year-old woman to another floor of the building and proceeded to rape her repeatedly. He made her perform oral sex, and while she did, he held a gun at her head, or pointed it directly at her face. Twice, he shot at the ceiling. “He said it was to give me more ‘motivation,’” she told HRW.
When the seemingly endless attack was finally over, the soldier told the woman his name, his age, and declared himself Russian. Perversely, he also brazenly said that she “reminded him of a girl he went to school with.”
The report is among several that have trickled out of Ukraine in the weeks since Russia invaded, incidents of sexualized violence documented by NGOs such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and various organizations within Ukraine. The reality is that these reports are likely only scratching the surface. Over the decade I’ve spent reporting on sexualized violence in conflict globally, multiple experts have told me that for every woman known to have been raped, there are probably eight to 10 more who haven’t been counted, and that even compiling any sense of the extent of sexual assault in such circumstances can take years.
That is what makes the Malaya Rohan story and others like it in Ukraine unusual. We are hearing about these violent acts nearly in real time. We have remarkable detail—sometimes even the name, age, and nationality of the perpetrator. This is unquestionably distressing, yet it also provides a measure of hope: hope that we can get survivors of rape and sexual assault in Ukraine medical and psychological help quickly; hope that we can record their stories so that they may be used in court; hope that, ultimately, however unlikely the possibility may seem now, justice will be served.
Sexualized violence has been used as a tool in conflict for centuries around the world, whether in Sierra Leone, Bangladesh, Colombia, or elsewhere. Sometimes the use of rape is genocidal, as it was in Rwanda, where ethnic Hutus wanted to impregnate Tutsi women to break their bloodlines, or to pass along HIV. At other times, rape is a crime of opportunity, or a means of declaring one side the “winner” of a war: Estimates vary, but according to historians, both Soviet and American soldiers raped massive numbers of German women as World War II ended.
Whether women (and men too) speak out about sexualized violence in any context depends on a number of factors, including culture and religion, the existence of an infrastructure of documentation and investigation, and the extent of medical and psychosocial support for survivors. Even in places with a robust legal system, such as the United States or Western Europe, far too many survivors find no justice, or are afraid to come forward in the first place.
Reporting rape and assault in a live war zone is, predictably, more complex—systems of justice may have broken down, weapons are plentiful, and giving evidence may be impossible in such an insecure environment. As a result, rape in war has been mainly documented after the fact, making both evidence gathering and therefore prosecutions that much harder to carry out.
Consider how experts arrived at the estimate of 250,000 to 500,000 women raped during Rwanda’s genocide. In 1996, two years after the bloodletting, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Rwanda tabulated the number of officially documented cases and then, because of the widespread understanding that rape even in peacetime is significantly underreported, extrapolated to his final estimate based on his assessment of the prevalence of sexual assault.
Various studies have put the count of women sexually assaulted in the so-called rape camps during the Bosnian War of the early 1990s at somewhere between 20,000 and 60,000. Yet most sources have said that truly accurate numbers will probably never be established, as in the majority of conflicts.
Survivors typically have little incentive to pursue justice—if anything, they face an array of obstacles instead. The Syrian civil war offers a case in point. Researchers and journalists such as myself worked hard to unearth reports of rape carried out by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s fighters; survivors feared retribution from not only government forces, but also their own male family members. I’ve met Syrian women divorced by their husbands or beaten for having been the victim of sexual assault, and spoken with many Syrian refugees who say that they know men who have killed their wives for having been raped. Their experience is not unique. I’ve talked with young girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the site of numerous ongoing conflicts, who left their villages to find help after being raped and, upon their return home, were shunned by their own community.
Sexualized violence “seems to be the one remaining form of violence in which the victim is blamed or even said to have invited it,” Gloria Steinem, the feminist journalist and activist, told me in 2012.
Even if a woman pushes forward to pursue a conviction, there is no guarantee she will see one. Though a special tribunal was set up to try war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, for example, I’ve spoken with women who say that they still see their rapists on the bus or the street, that the men have paid their way out of jail—if they were convicted at all. Though numbers on convictions for sexual assault during conflict are hard to come by, I can tell you from more than a decade of reporting on the issue that a perpetrator being found guilty in a court of law is a rare thing. Convictions of those higher up the chain who gave the orders for soldiers to rape are even less common.
Rape in war is both a war crime and a crime against humanity. Historically, though the definition of these crimes has been well understood, bringing such cases to court, let alone proving them, has been another matter. The war in Ukraine offers a chance to rectify these failures.
Thanks to advancements in technology—including more plentiful satellite imagery; smartphones capable of high-resolution photography and video; faster and more easily available internet services; and substantially improved communications platforms—health workers, lawyers, journalists, and human-rights groups can alert the world about what is being perpetrated in Ukraine, and document cases in ways that will help in eventual trials.
These new or more advanced technologies must complement traditional methods of documentation, including gathering information from defectors, taking proper medical evidence in a timely fashion, and obtaining details from the parties themselves about their own crimes, as was done with the Nazis in World War II and with the Bosnian Serb army. With rape in particular, there is often no physical evidence of soft-tissue damage to prove the crime in a courtroom setting. There may, however, be other telltale wounds, such as cigarette marks, scars from ligatures, wood splinters, abrasions, or genital mutilation, which must be clearly and professionally documented. Investigations must be carried out by officials who are “gender competent.” Are they able to effectively ask witnesses and medical professionals the right questions about sexualized violence? Can they gather the right physical evidence, testimonials, and direct as well as circumstantial evidence?
Crucially, all of this evidence gathering can begin immediately, both in areas where Russian forces have withdrawn, and in parts of Ukraine that are still contested but where communication has not been severed. The European Union, the UN, multiple human-rights groups, the secretary-general of NATO, and Ukraine’s prosecutor-general recently have either called for investigations of possible war crimes in Ukraine, including rape, or have offered their help in carrying out the investigations.
It may seem fanciful at this stage—with Russia still hammering Ukrainian territory, and no resolution to this war in sight—to plan for a period in which Russian soldiers might face trial for their abuses. Yet it is not at all out of the realm of possibility: Neither Russia nor Ukraine are subject to International Criminal Court prosecutions, but Ukraine has previously accepted the court’s jurisdiction. Another possibility is that countries that have begun prosecuting war crimes unrelated to their citizens, such as Germany, may begin proceedings on the basis of the concept of universal jurisdiction. This road is a long one, and there is no guarantee of success, but high-quality evidence-gathering in Ukraine now improves the odds considerably.
Though the majority of Ukrainian women may not be fighting on the front lines, they are sacrificing their lives every bit as much as Ukrainian men are. We owe it to them—and to all of humanity—to ensure that the men who violate women’s bodies are not allowed to do so with impunity. For once, we’re not hopeless to help women and investigate war crimes. We’re actually at a place to begin.
“It’s like in 1942: Where do you start investigating the Holocaust?” Patricia Viseur Sellers, the former legal adviser for gender at the tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, told me. “You start where you can.”
18. New American Lend-Lease Program Sends Powerful Signal To Russians – OpEd
New American Lend-Lease Program Sends Powerful Signal To Russians – OpEd
The US decision to establish a lend-lease program for Ukraine not only is “a very strong signal” that it will be supporting Ukraine over the long haul but also that an indication that the West is beginning to appreciate the crimes Putin’s war in Ukraine is committing that that in Russia itself is in deep trouble, Valery Kravchenko says.
Most people have focused on the way in which this new program will help Ukraine, not only by making it far easier for Kyiv to acquire more weapons but to begin training on those it may receive in the future, the director of Kyiv’s Center for International Security says (graniru.org/War/m.284921.html).
Those possibilities have been much discussed in the days since the Americans chose to revive a program they have not used since World War II. But the impact on Russia is broader than just that of the increased military capacity of Ukraine which will allow the latter’s forces to inflict far greater harm on the aggressor.
Even today, Russians remember that “thanks to lend lease, the Soviet Union defeated fascism” in World War II. But now they see lend lease is being used against Russia.” This sends “a strong message” that the war in Ukraine is not going as Moscow claims and that “the whole world” is now united against it and will remain so.
Lend lease is based on the proposition that the conflict will last for some time and that the West has to be in a position to ramp up assistance as needed and not be limited by Ukraine’s own ability to pay. That is perhaps the most important aspect of this program, Kravchenko continues, because it shows that the West will support Ukraine to the end.
“It is possible,” he says, that “the Russian economy will die much sooner. I would like to believe this and then the flow of money for Russia’s war will run out and centrifugal movement in Russia itself among the elites will being, possibly among the second echelon of generals who will end this insane war.”
It is, of course, even possible that things won’t have to go as far as that.
Paul Goble is a longtime specialist on ethnic and religious questions in Eurasia. Most recently, he was director of research and publications at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy. Earlier, he served as vice dean for the social sciences and humanities at Audentes University in Tallinn and a senior research associate at the EuroCollege of the University of Tartu in Estonia. He has served in various capacities in the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Broadcasting Bureau as well as at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mr. Goble maintains the Window on Eurasia blog and can be contacted directly at paul.goble@gmail.com .
19. Column: U.S. Special Forces Have Unique Input With Ukraine
Column: U.S. Special Forces Have Unique Input With Ukraine
Why can’t the Special Forces units such as those at Fort Bragg do something to help the Ukrainians’ use of unconventional warfare strategy and tactics against the invading Russian armed forces?
It turns out they have done a lot more than most of us know about.
Here is a headline from a recent article by Stavros Atlamazoglou, a Greek Army veteran and freelance defense journalist, posted on the website of the Business Insider: “Ukrainian special operators may soon be putting years of secretive training from the U.S. to use against Russia.”
Another headline asserted, “Should the conventional fight in Ukraine end in Russia’s favor, Ukrainians could put those unconventional skills to use.”
Sooner or later, Atlamazoglou writes, “Russian quantitative and qualitative military superiority might give Putin his so-desired victory. But then the unconventional war will begin, and Ukrainians have been preparing for that since Russia’s invasion and seizure of Crimea in 2014.
“U.S. and Western special operations forces have worked extensively with the Ukrainian military in the years since, setting up commando units, training them and preparing them to wage a guerrilla campaign against an occupying force.”
A guerrilla war in Ukraine, Atlamazoglou says, will be “bloody for defenders, insurgents and bystanders.”
Steve Balestrieri, a journalist and retired Army Special Forces warrant officer, said, “The Russians’ logistics chain, which is already in a mess trying to keep their troops supplied, would become a primary target. They are soft-skinned, road-bound and are staffed by conscripts, not professional warriors.”
In the event of a Russian “victory” and takeover of Ukraine, Balestrieri said, “Government buildings, isolated outposts, small groups of Russian soldiers would all be targets. If any high-ranking officers or politicians visit, they would all be likely targets for guerrilla attacks. The Russian battalion tactical groups are ill-prepared for being occupying powers in the cities of Ukraine.”
Atlamazoglou explains, “Unconventional warfare is the bread and butter of the U.S. Army’s Special Forces Regiment — the Green Berets — and members of the 10th Special Forces Group, which has Europe as its area of responsibility, have worked with Ukrainian special operations forces. Reports also indicate that the U.S. intelligence community has provided special operations and intelligence training to Ukraine.”
Meanwhile, at the Army Special Forces Command at Fort Bragg, preparation for challenges such as Ukraine is ongoing and responsive to the changing threats and opportunities.
When some people learn that I served in the Special Forces they ask, “How in the world did they let you in?”
It is a good question.
I was a green second lieutenant without the skills and experience a good Special Forces soldier should have. But in 1961, President John F. Kennedy ordered the expansion of the Special Forces to include an intelligence unit.
Filling that unit was a challenge. Special Forces required airborne training and very few intelligence officers qualified. “Intelligence officers are too smart to jump out of planes,” I heard a thousand times.
But I was not that smart and was proud that I had made it through jump school.
So, I got in. My two-year experience with the Special Forces began in 1963.
I was a freshly trained counter-intelligence second lieutenant reporting to Fort Bragg and the Special Warfare School to learn about unconventional warfare.
Ironically, the focus of training at the school was shifting rapidly from fostering and supporting insurgencies in places such as Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe to counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam.
Today, perhaps, the school will be adjusting again to changing times, renewing its focus on Eastern Europe.
Like other North Carolinians, I am proud of our state’s connections to the school and to the Special Forces and for their contributions to the Ukrainian people’s battle to preserve their independence and freedoms.
D.G. Martin hosted “North Carolina Bookwatch” for more than 20 years.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
