Quotes of the Day:

“So far as I know. It's not enough to be able to lie with a straight face; anybody, with enough gall to raise on a busted flush can do that. The first way to lie artistically is to tell the truth – but not all of it. The second way involves telling the truth, too, but is harder: tell the exact truth, and maybe all of it …but tell it so unconvincingly that your listener is sure you are lying.”

- Robert A. Heinlein. Time Enough For Love

“Laws can embody standards; government can enforce laws – but the final task is not a task for government. It is a task for each and everyone of us. Every time we turn our heads, the other way, when we see the law flouted – when we tolerate what we know to be wrong – when we close our eyes and ears to the corrupt, because we are too busy, or to frightened – when we failed to speak up and speak out – we strike a blow against freedom and decency and Justice.” 

- Robert F Kennedy.

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread, winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’ ”

- Isaac Asimov

1. Why So Many Are Buying What Xi and Putin Are Selling

2. Hollow Warriors (and use of the Joint Concept for Competing)

3. AI May Be Good for Humanity But Very Bad for Warfare By Hal Brands

4. Sorry, wrong number: Army, FBI agents detain innocent pilot in training exercise gone bad

5. The U.S. Needs an Economic War Council for China

6. Analysis | Twitter’s labeling of NPR a boon for foreign propagandists, critics say

7. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 6, 2023

8. GAO Upholds Army Choice of Bell V-280 to Replace Black Hawk Helicopter

9. Biden White House largely blames Trump admin for troubled U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan

10.  Elite troops died being sucked out of planes. Critics blame their parachutes.

11. Pentagon should experiment with AIs like ChatGPT — but don’t trust them yet: DoD’s ex-AI chiefs

12. China sanctions Reagan library, others over Tsai's US trip

13. China sanctions US figures after Taiwan president’s talks with House speaker

14. China’s military aims to launch 13,000 satellites to rival Elon Musk’s Starlink

15. China moves warships after US hosts Taiwan's Tsai

16. Is Taiwan in danger of being loved to death?

17. The United States’ Proposal on Prosecuting Russians for the Crime of Aggression Against Ukraine is a Step in the Right Direction

18. Marine Raiders - History and Legacy | SOF News

19. Will Finland’s NATO Accession Make a Difference?

20. Ukraine War Plans Leak Prompts Pentagon Investigation

21. Zelensky strikes back

22. The dollar is dead, long live the dollar

23. How the Anti-Woke Campaign Against the U.S. Military Damages National Security

24. The Coming Age of AI-Powered Propaganda

25. Putin’s Second Front

26. 1st Multi-Domain Task Force deploys the Army’s first Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon system

1. Why So Many Are Buying What Xi and Putin Are Selling

Reflect on the excerpt below (and the entire article). Actions speak louder than words. And when words can exploit actions, it makes the messaging more powerful.

Excerpts:

To non-Westerners, Western nations appear to have responded by abandoning their promises of universal peace and prosperity. The US has retreated into economic protectionism while NATO, an institution designed for the Cold War, keeps expanding to Russia’s borders. With the formation of the AUKUS bloc, China finds itself confronting the same alliance of white-majority nations that in the mid-20th century tried, disastrously, to contain another rising Asian country: Japan. 

Such actions, which Xi and Putin can easily portray as aimed at maintaining Western hegemony, appear to risk a third world war. Rising tensions can only dismay nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America that have broadly benefited from two decades of globalization and China’s rise in general, and are now resentfully anxious.

In their eyes, the “vaccine apartheid” practiced by rich Western nations during the Covid-19 pandemic confirmed yet again that the West will always protect its own interests, regardless of its rhetoric about human rights. They can see, too, the great contrast between the West’s generous hospitality to Ukrainian refugees and the walls and fences it builds to keep out darker-skinned victims of its own policies.

Why So Many Are Buying What Xi and Putin Are Selling

In their ideological struggle with the US and Europe, the Chinese and Russian autocrats can tap into a still-rich vein of anti-Westernism around the world. 

ByPankaj Mishra

April 6, 2023 at 4:00 PM EDT

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-04-06/anti-westernism-is-secret-weapon-for-xi-jinping-and-vladimir-putin?sref=hhjZtX76

After months of listening to US President Joe Biden declare democracy to be in mortal conflict with autocracy, China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin are launching an ideological counterattack. Last month, Xi explicitly denounced the US and its Western allies for pursuing “containment from all directions, encirclement and suppression against us.” Putin signed a 42-page document outlining a foreign policy aimed at curbing Western “dominance.”

Theirs hardly matches the ardor and eloquence of Mao Zedong’s speech inaugurating the People’s Republic of China in 1949: “Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation.” Nikita Khrushchev was punchier in insisting that communism was more resilient than capitalism: “We will bury you.”

But then, Putin and Xi have none of the ideological gravitas and appeal of their predecessors. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and China claimed to offer a new model of organizing society, politics, economy, and the world order. Communism was especially seductive to new nations struggling to overcome decades of exploitation by capitalist Western powers.

Any alternative communist model of modernization disappeared in 1989 together with the Berlin Wall. Russia, the kleptocratic successor state of the Soviet Union, and post-Mao China embody little more than a nationalist will to power.

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Still, Western nations should not underestimate the anti-Western passions Putin and Xi are exploiting today.

Westerners might find baffling and tiresome the “century of humiliation” phraseology relentlessly invoked by the Chinese. And it is easy to scoff at Putin’s supposed resolve to “create the conditions for any state to reject neo-colonialist and hegemonic aims.”

But such rhetoric echoes the historical experience of much of the world’s population. It resonates in countries that were exposed to the degradations of imperialism and colonialism, and, even when formally sovereign, suffered decades of proxy wars, coups organized by Western intelligence agencies, embargoes, and harsh economic programs imposed by Western-dominated financial institutions.

The manifold grievances of weaker nations against the West were largely muted between the collapse of communism and the financial crisis of 2008. Proxy wars and coups then seemed a thing of the past amid widespread hopes that the rising tide of globalization would lift all boats. Even Russia and China seemed to have embraced what Western leaders called a “rules-based international order.” 

That consensus now lies shattered. China abruptly rose, faster than anticipated, due to its cannily selective use of the rules of globalization. And Russia, humiliated and diminished throughout the 1990s, was transformed under Putin into a commodities giant and revanchist military power.

To non-Westerners, Western nations appear to have responded by abandoning their promises of universal peace and prosperity. The US has retreated into economic protectionism while NATO, an institution designed for the Cold War, keeps expanding to Russia’s borders. With the formation of the AUKUS bloc, China finds itself confronting the same alliance of white-majority nations that in the mid-20th century tried, disastrously, to contain another rising Asian country: Japan. 

Such actions, which Xi and Putin can easily portray as aimed at maintaining Western hegemony, appear to risk a third world war. Rising tensions can only dismay nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America that have broadly benefited from two decades of globalization and China’s rise in general, and are now resentfully anxious.

In their eyes, the “vaccine apartheid” practiced by rich Western nations during the Covid-19 pandemic confirmed yet again that the West will always protect its own interests, regardless of its rhetoric about human rights. They can see, too, the great contrast between the West’s generous hospitality to Ukrainian refugees and the walls and fences it builds to keep out darker-skinned victims of its own policies.

The signs of a resurgent anti-Westernism are everywhere: a viral video of Namibia’s president educating a visiting German politician in the facts of European racism, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva blaming the US and NATO for the war in Ukraine and seeing China as an impartial mediator, Putin’s popularity rising in Indonesia, and Indians in an opinion poll identifying the US as a bigger military threat than Pakistan (although still less of one than China).

As an ideology, anti-Westernism has little substantive or positive content. For geopolitical opportunists, however, it can be devastatingly useful: It should not be forgotten how much Japan once profited from its anti-Western stance, and how many influential collaborators it enjoyed even while brutally invading and exploiting Asian countries in World War Two.

Passions demonstrably play a larger role in geopolitics than rational interests and abstract ideas. Putin and Xi are playing shrewdly on the political unconscious of the non-Western world in this new Cold War. The West needs to respond with more than some tired phrases from the old one about democracy and autocracy.

More From Bloomberg Opinion:

• Putin’s Paranoia Deviates from Soviet Roots: Leonid Bershidsky
• Beating Russia Is the Best Way to Defend Taiwan: Hal Brands
• Don’t Dismiss China’s Peacemaking Bid. Harness It: Editorial

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

To contact the author of this story:

Pankaj Mishra at pmishra24@bloomberg.net

2. Hollow Warriors (and use of the Joint Concept for Competing)

Interesting to see this author use the Joint Concept for Competing (JCC) to support his agenda. I hope the JCC does not become politicized any further than this article because it is a useful document.

Hollow Warriors

By Richard Morse

americanthinker.com

“If the United States does not compete effectively against adversaries, it could ‘lose without fighting.’” — Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley; in the Executive Summary of Joint Concept for Competing.

In mid-March, the Joint Chiefs issued a 91-page press release titled JOINT CONCEPT FOR COMPETING (JCFC) which announces the Pentagon’s shift in the way it views warfare and its intent to proactively counter the CCP’s long-range strategy to conquer the United States. The CCP’s strategy is traced to a treatise, published in 1999, by two CCP coronels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, under the title Unrestricted Warfare. The goal, in unrestricted warfare, is to weaken the United States into submission, through an array of corrosive tactics, over a long period of time. Essentially, to “win without fighting.” “The first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden.” The Joint Chiefs summarize:

“Adversaries are employing cohesive combinations of military and civil power to expand the competitive space. Adversaries aim to achieve their strategic objectives through a myriad of ways and means, including statecraft and economic power as well as subversion, coercion, disinformation, and deception. They are investing in key technologies designed to offset U.S. strategic and conventional military capabilities (e.g., nuclear weapons, anti-access and area denial systems, offensive cyberspace, artificial intelligence, hypersonic delivery systems, electromagnetic spectrum)

Simply put, our adversaries intend to “win without fighting,”

But they are also building military forces that strengthen their ability to “fight and win” an armed conflict against the United States.”

“This really is a big deal.” Casey Fleming, CEO of the firm Blackops Partners, stresses the significance of the Pentagon’s press release in an interview with NTD’s Tiffany Meier. “Every American needs to understand what this really means. This press release is something very serious for every American to get knowledge on and pass it among their families, peers, colleagues, and so on.” He explains that the target of the CCP’s silent war on America is every American citizen — every man, woman, and child…literally.

Fleming regrets the Joint Chiefs’ watered-down terminology that they use in this document — terms like “competition” and “adversary” — when the Chinese are using “war” and “enemy,” respectively.” In his conversation with Tiffany Meier, Fleming is explicit: “The military still likes to call it ‘competition.’” He shakes his head in disapproval. “Let me tell you, it is absolutely war! When the Communist party refers to it as ‘war’ then, by golly, it’s war! Make no mistake. And when the Chinese Communists say that we are their ‘number one enemy’ …then, by God, we are their enemy! There’s no mistake on that.”

While the Joint Chiefs are more diplomatic in their language, they are declaring the same thing: WAR!

“The Joint Force will conduct irregular warfare operations and activities proactively to subvert, create dilemmas for adversaries, and impose costs on an adversary’s strategic interests, including its economy, civil society, institutional processes, and critical infrastructure. Irregular warfare favors indirect and asymmetric approaches, though it may employ the full range of military and other capabilities, in order to erode an adversary’s power, influence, and political will.”

Though, in the context of the real world, it would not be unreasonable for the average American to doubt the sincerity of the Joint Chiefs. It’s not like the CCP’s covert war on Americanism is a recent revelation for them. In March of 2015, for example, The United States Army Special Operations Command submitted a document called the White Paper to U.S. leaders and policymakers, which conveys much of the same information found in JCFC. 

Further, The book, Unrestricted Warfare, by the Colonels Qiao and Wang, really represents a fine tuning of the 74-year-old objective of the Chinese Communists to bring the United States to its knees within a century. That important history is detailed in a three-hour documentary, The Final War, produced by the Epoch Times. China’s slow war on America began the day the Communists seized power in Beijing — October 01, 1949.

It is not particularly reassuring to think that this perpetual war on America could have escaped the notice of the Department of Defense intelligence agencies all this time. Even if we give The Chiefs the full benefit of the doubt and say ‘“better late than never,” it would still be fair to ask if they are sincere when:

a) they do not immediately block and prohibit projects like the planned CCP battery company in Michigan, which will host up to 300 Chinese nationals who are scheduled to live and work there to serve as CCP operatives.

b) they allow the CCP to buy up vast tracts of U.S. agriculture land — often in the proximity of military installations.

c) they know that the invasion at our southern border (and now northern border), utilizing Mexican drug cartels as proxies for human and drug smuggling, is a tactic right out of the Unrestricted Warfare playbook, yet they don’t lift a finger to put a stop to it.

d) they allow the likes of the United Front Work Department, and Chinese-U.S.. Exchange Foundation and all their CCP agents to operate freely within our nation, exerting their Marxist influence across our national institutions — from our children’s classrooms to the halls of Congress; into the White House and perhaps even the Pentagon itself.

These and a string of other infringements on United States’ sovereignty by the CCP, on American soil, would never be tolerated by Red China, if Americans tried these antics on their turf. So, no person can be blamed for being skeptical about the Pentagon’s commitment to counter China’s persistent war on Americans.

What is the point of a military if it does not defend our borders from invasion in times of war?

Seizing all CCP properties in the U.S. and rounding up all “the enemy” operatives within our borders and sending them back to Red China, where they belong, would be well within the rules of engagement of unrestricted warfare, where the first rule is: “there are no rules, with nothing forbidden.” Doing so would send a clear message to Mr. Xi that ‘two can play this game;’ and send a loud message to Americans that “YES, WE ARE AT WAR!”

The idea of passing the word along the grapevine to family and friends, as Casy Flemming suggests, while well intended, will not go far.

Until the Joint Chiefs do these obvious things to fight this war, their document, Joint Concept For Competing will mean little to nothing to the average American citizen. If they do not take these actions, in a way that is visible to everyone, General Milley’s tentative prediction of “losing without fighting” will surely go down in history as self-fulfilled prophecy.

Photo credit: C-SPAN video screengrab

americanthinker.com

3. AI May Be Good for Humanity But Very Bad for Warfare By Hal Brands

As an aside I have not seen any discussion of AI as a revolution in military affairs. (though the term "revolutionize" is used). I think there is a lot of baggage with the RMA phrase.

Excerpts:

Now, the balance of power is more fluid and ambiguous. The US is ahead in overall AI development, but China is making major investments — and, according to some observers, significant gains. Experts on all sides believe that the country that harnesses AI most effectively will reap outsized economic and military rewards. Neither Beijing nor Washington will want to slow down in a race they can’t afford to lose.

Finally, arms control is most promising within a larger framework of détente: Moscow and Washington had decided, for various reasons, to de-escalate their rivalry on many fronts in the 1970s. But today’s US-China rivalry is still accelerating; tensions get worse every year.

Someday, America and China may conclude that the risks of cooperation are less than the risks of unconstrained competition. Until then, the prospects for meaningful AI arms control will probably be dismal.  

AI May Be Good for Humanity But Very Bad for Warfare

An artificial intelligence arms race between China and the US could be far harder to control than nuclear proliferation was during the Cold War.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-04-05/ai-weapons-will-cause-artificial-arms-race-between-us-and-china?sref=hhjZtX76

ByHal Brands

April 5, 2023 at 4:20 PM EDT

Like it or not, the artificial intelligence arms race is coming. The rise of disruptive new technologies always creates vast possibilities and grave apprehensions of peril. In an ideal world, the great powers might be able to constrain the military uses of technology that could revolutionize conflict in the coming decades. In our imperfect world, such efforts are almost certain to fail.

The implications of AI are already ubiquitous: This family of technologies is changing how doctors treat diseases, politicians raise money, and tyrants control their citizens. And as one might expect from a technology that has been deemed as transformative as electricity or even fire, AI is affecting not just how societies function, but how they fight.

US Central Command is using AI to quickly detect targets in the congested spaces of the Persian Gulf. Ukraine has employed AI-enabled technology to predict and prepare for Russian airstrikes. China is reportedly harnessing AI for everything from shipbuilding design to electronic warfare.

AI “will be the most important tool in generations,” National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence declared in 2021. It may well improve the lot of humanity; it will surely turbocharge the struggle for military dominance.

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AI has the potential to accelerate decision-making by sorting through large quantities of data more efficiently than ever before. AI-enabled weapons will be delivered with tremendous precision. Militaries will marry manned and autonomous systems to conduct complex operations, such as drone swarms, with devastating effect. AI will allow operators to better identify vulnerabilities in computer networks, helping them defend against — or perpetrate — cyberattacks. The sophistication and complexity of warfare will increase dramatically.

Not everyone is excited. ChatGPT helps students outfox their professors today; perhaps, some observers fear, artificial intelligence will overtake human intelligence tomorrow. In the military realm, the acceleration or automation of decision-making processes could lead to accidents or unwanted escalation. Or the proliferation of AI-enabled technologies could benefit less scrupulous, autocratic militaries at the expense of more scrupulous, democratic ones.

Last month, a group of tech industry heavyweights, including Elon Musk, called for a moratorium on advanced AI development. In February, the Netherlands hosted a summit on responsible military uses of AI. Talks about restricting lethal autonomous weapon systems have been happening for years.

There are precedents for controlling powerful technologies. In the 1920s, the great powers agreed to slash the size of their navies. During the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union erected an impressive arms control architecture that capped the size and composition of their nuclear arsenals. The US has already set out its own approach to the military uses of AI, stressing, among other principles, respect for the laws of war.

But don’t expect the foremost rivals of this century — America and China — to create an AI arms-control framework anytime soon. The history of the Cold War, paradoxically, helps us see why.

For one thing, arms control works best when compliance is easily verified: Washington and Moscow monitored adherence to early arms control deals simply by flying spy satellites over each other’s territory and counting missile silos and long-range bombers.

It’s not so simple now: Military applications of AI aren’t typically visible from outer space. The fact that China has repeatedly cheated on other arms control commitments doesn’t inspire confidence, either.

Second, arms control flourishes when coordination problems are few because the number of actors is small. There were two Cold War superpowers, whose nuclear weapons complexes were firmly under government control.

Today, dozens of countries are exploring military uses of AI. Most research and development happens within the private sector and, critically, many of the most exciting breakthroughs are “dual use” — they have civilian and military applications. Good luck setting up a monitoring and control regime in these circumstances.

Third, multilateral restraint is attractive when prospects for unilateral advantage are modest. Cold War arms control took off in the 1970s, once Washington and Moscow felt the next missile in the stockpile didn’t matter as much because they had reached a rough strategic stalemate.

Now, the balance of power is more fluid and ambiguous. The US is ahead in overall AI development, but China is making major investments — and, according to some observers, significant gains. Experts on all sides believe that the country that harnesses AI most effectively will reap outsized economic and military rewards. Neither Beijing nor Washington will want to slow down in a race they can’t afford to lose.

Finally, arms control is most promising within a larger framework of détente: Moscow and Washington had decided, for various reasons, to de-escalate their rivalry on many fronts in the 1970s. But today’s US-China rivalry is still accelerating; tensions get worse every year.

Someday, America and China may conclude that the risks of cooperation are less than the risks of unconstrained competition. Until then, the prospects for meaningful AI arms control will probably be dismal. 

More From Bloomberg Opinion:

• Pause AI? It’s Too Late for That: Parmy Olson
• Regulating AI Will Be Essential — and Complicated: Noah Feldman
• Is ChatGPT the Start of the AI Revolution?: The Editors

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

To contact the author of this story:

Hal Brands at Hal.Brands@jhu.edu

To contact the editor responsible for this story:

Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net

4. Sorry, wrong number: Army, FBI agents detain innocent pilot in training exercise gone bad

Oops. Of course this is why we train. Mistakes are made in training so that we can conduct actual operations successfully. I am sure the military unit and the FBI discovered a defect in their processes that they can now correct. And this defect most likely only could have been discovered during realistic urban training and might not have been discovered in a sterile training exercise on a military base. But the poor airline pilot probably does not appreciate his "contribution" to national security.

Sorry, wrong number: Army, FBI agents detain innocent pilot in training exercise gone bad

FBI agent holding a gun in his hand, rear view. File photo credit: Shutterstock more >

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/apr/6/army-fbi-agents-detain-innocent-pilot-training-exe/

By Mike Glenn - The Washington Times - Thursday, April 6, 2023

Army special operations soldiers and FBI agents stormed a hotel suite in Boston earlier this week, nabbing a man they believed was the “suspect” in a training exercise. They quickly handcuffed the man and interrogated him for about 30 minutes.

But there was a slight problem. They were in the wrong room: Local media said the unidentified guest was an airline pilot resting in his room between flights.

“The training was meant to enhance soldiers’ skills to operate in realistic and unfamiliar environments. The training team, unfortunately, entered the wrong room and detained an individual unaffiliated with the exercise,” Lt. Col. Mike Burns, a spokesman for the Army’s Special Operations Command, said in a statement.

Hotel security notified the Boston police, whose investigation determined it was a training exercise gone awry, officials said.

Boston FBI officials told local media the soldiers and agents went to the wrong room based on faulty information they had been given in their briefing. The off-duty airline pilot wasn’t injured and reportedly refused medical treatment by paramedics who responded to the scene. The Army is reviewing the incident and declined to provide further details about what happened.

“The safety of civilians in the vicinity of our training is always our number one concern,” Lt. Col. Burns said. “We’d like to extend our deepest apologies to the individual who was affected by the training exercise.”

• Mike Glenn can be reached at mglenn@washingtontimes.com.

5. The U.S. Needs an Economic War Council for China

Excerpts:

It would be a tragedy if Xi, like Putin, underestimates the United States and its allies’ readiness to impose economic costs on China if he moves to seize Taiwan. That’s why policymakers must urgently move to ensure that Xi fully appreciates the costs of such a reckless gamble. The greater the resolve to impose costs on China, and the more tightly coordinated the mechanisms are for doing so, the larger the chances that Beijing will determine such a move is not worth the costs it would incur. And it is critical that all of this is done as soon as possible, as time would be an even more important factor in a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan than it has been in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Taiwan is an island, so once an invasion begins, it will be very hard to arm and resupply. An iterative, learn-on-the-fly approach may well be impossible.

This is no easy task. China’s economy is much larger, much deeper, and considerably more diversified than Russia’s. China imports $3 trillion in goods and services each year and is the largest trading partner of some 120 countries, whereas Russia imports about $400 billion in goods and services each year and is the largest trading partner of only a handful of smaller economies, such as Belarus, Armenia, and Kazakhstan. But if China’s economic strength is much larger than Russia’s, it is hardly infinite. Taken together, the United States and its democratic allies in Asia and Europe account for well over half of global GDP. The collective weight of the world’s advanced economies working together is sufficiently large and strong to give Beijing pause.

That collective strength only matters, however, if those countries can act together. Converting raw economic muscle into collective deterrence will only occur if the correct internal bureaucratic and external coordination mechanisms are put in place now.

The time to deter Russia was before it invaded Ukraine. The time to punish it was after. For China, the time for action is now.

The U.S. Needs an Economic War Council for China

If Washington wants peace in Asia, it must prepare for financial war.

By Edward Fishman, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, and Charles Edel, the Australia chair and a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Foreign Policy · by Edward Fishman, Charles Edel · April 6, 2023

This week, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen met with U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Southern California. It’s the second time in less than a year that Taiwan’s leader has sat down with a speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives—and it’s the second time Beijing is saber-rattling and threatening significant retaliation.

This week, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen met with U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Southern California. It’s the second time in less than a year that Taiwan’s leader has sat down with a speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives—and it’s the second time Beijing is saber-rattling and threatening significant retaliation.

Tensions in Asia are nearing a high point. Across Washington, there is a sense that, left unchecked, Beijing is likely to try to seize Taiwan by force. There’s much debate about Chinese President Xi Jinping’s precise timeline as well as what domestic and foreign factors might shorten or extend it. What is clear, however, is that we are now entering a critical phase in efforts to deter Chinese military aggression in the Indo-Pacific.

A Chinese decision to launch an invasion of Taiwan would disrupt global trade, wreak havoc on supply chains, imperil a vibrant Asian democracy, exert extreme pressure on America’s closest allies, and almost definitely bring the United States and China into direct confrontation.

The most important U.S. policy goal must be to deter Beijing from making such a costly choice.

Military planning together with Taiwan and other regional partners is necessary but not sufficient to give deterrence the best chance to succeed. Economic contingency planning is essential, too. Unfortunately, the U.S. government doesn’t do this as a matter of course. There are barely enough officials working on sanctions and economic statecraft at the State Department and Treasury to administer the more than 30 sanctions programs currently in place, much less plan for future contingencies.

This urgently needs to change. Using lessons from the template it developed in advance of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Washington should rapidly start preparing to use economic statecraft to defend its allies in the Indo-Pacific from Chinese aggression.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin made his fateful decision to invade Ukraine last February, he was not just met with more determined resistance from the Ukrainian military than he anticipated. He also confronted a grand coalition of the world’s democracies, which rapidly came together to sever Russia’s links to the global economy. Aside from the Ukrainian military’s unexpectedly effective battlefield performance against a much larger Russian invading force, the unity of the United States and its democratic allies in waging an economic war against Putin has been the biggest surprise of the Russia-Ukraine war.

The Biden administration stitched together a coalition of major U.S. allies in Europe and Asia to impose rising costs on Russia’s economy, starting with a frontal assault on the country’s banking system and escalating to the more recent campaign to squeeze the Kremlin’s oil revenues—the lifeblood of Russia’s economy. The sanctions have gone much further and intensified much faster than anyone expected. This success was the product of almost a decade of collaboration between the United States and its allies on Russia sanctions. After Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014, Washington assembled a contact group of key allies in the G-7 and beyond to align policies on Russia sanctions. The group remained intact even during the Donald Trump years, though it was much less productive. As a result, when the United States first grew worried in late 2021 that Putin may have been planning another invasion, it had a ready-made group of allies to call on to coordinate fresh sanctions options.

Despite this impressive work, the initial goal of the sanctions—deterring Putin from invading Ukraine—failed. The fact that the strength of the sanctions was a surprise may help explain this failure. There is evidence that Putin did not believe the United States and its allies would go as far as they did on sanctions. For instance, when the United States and others imposed sanctions on Russia’s central bank less than a week after Putin ordered the invasion, the bank held well over half of its foreign exchange reserves in dollars, euros, pounds, and yen. Had Putin expected the United States and its allies to impose such sanctions, Russia’s central bank would have surely done more to diversify its holdings away from assets denominated in these currencies. Consequently, a huge chunk of Putin’s war chest was immobilized just days into the war.

This miscalculation carries a key lesson for U.S. policymakers seeking to deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. For sanctions to contribute to deterrence, the United States and its allies must be crystal clear about their red lines and the costs they stand ready to impose if Beijing crosses them. In observing the response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Xi can hardly doubt that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would lead to serious economic consequences for his country. But given that China has much greater economic clout than Russia, he may well doubt that the United States and its allies would slap penalties on Beijing as strong as those they have wielded against Moscow. Just as Putin calculated that the costs of sanctions would not outweigh the benefits of invading Ukraine, Xi could make a similar calculation about invading Taiwan. One of the highest priorities of U.S. policy toward China, therefore, should be to tip Xi’s calculus in the other direction.

After Biden’s threat of “swift and severe consequences” failed to deter Putin from invading Ukraine, the goal of the sanctions campaign shifted. As Russia’s tanks barreled toward Kyiv, Washington correctly calculated that sanctions could no longer be expected to change Putin’s calculus. There was no way that Putin was going to simply pull back from Ukraine in hopes of obtaining sanctions relief. The conflict would be decided on the battlefield. This explains why the leading edge of U.S. policy in the last year has been to provide military assistance to Ukraine.

The goal of sanctions became attrition—not to change Putin’s mind but to constrain his material resources and thus curtail his ability to inflict further harm in Ukraine and elsewhere. In just a year, the attritional effects of sanctions are already visible. Russia’s economy contracted by around 3 percent in 2022, and it has struggled to resupply its army with precision-guided munitions and equipment. Domestic auto production has collapsed, forcing the Kremlin to relax regulations and allow cars to be manufactured without air bags and anti-lock brakes. And in the starkest illustration of the attritional effect of sanctions, Putin has had to go hat-in-hand to Iran’s supreme leader to beg for drones and other military hardware.

These sanctions are probably influencing Russia’s military performance in Ukraine, but the effect is far from decisive. The sad reality is that the sanctions came too late to make a big difference in the current war, though they will undoubtedly constrain Putin’s ability to fulfill his imperial dreams moving forward. Attritional sanctions would have been far more useful before Putin decided to invade Ukraine, throwing a wrench into Russia’s military modernization program years before Putin ordered the tanks to cross Ukraine’s border.

The lesson for China policy is that it will be too late to apply attritional sanctions after Xi has decided to invade Taiwan. The Biden administration seems to understand this, based on the sweeping export controls it imposed on China’s semiconductor industry last October. But despite their ambitions, these moves were limited to a single foundational technology. The hard reality is that if Washington is serious about degrading China’s military capacity, it will need to widen its aim beyond a handful of high-tech components—painful as that might be for U.S. investors and businesses that have grown accustomed to reliance on China.

No doubt, China is a hard target for economic warfare. Its economy is 10 times bigger than Russia’s, and its banks hold more than 30 times as many assets as Russian banks do. The People’s Bank of China holds more than $3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves—a stash five times larger than Putin’s war chest at the outset of the Russia-Ukraine war. Hard-hitting sanctions on China would lead to massive spillovers into the global economy, making life more difficult not just for Beijing but for Americans and people all over the world.

Yet there is a flip side to China’s central role in the global economy—it makes China deeply vulnerable to sanctions, especially in the financial and technology sectors. The challenge for Washington and its allies is to carefully design measures that will impose more costs on China than they do on themselves, to develop contingency plans to mitigate the potential economic aftershocks, and to align on these complicated steps before Beijing decides to attempt to retake Taiwan by force.

For all these reasons, it is imperative for the United States and its allies to prepare in advance. Within the U.S. government, policy officials at the State, Treasury, and Commerce departments and other key agencies must come together to develop a list of sanctions options that could be deployed in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. But a list is not enough. U.S. officials must rigorously analyze these options, model potential consequences, and sketch out policy responses to address ramifications that run contrary to U.S. interests.

Such detailed contingency planning is routine for the Defense Department. But the economic agencies of the U.S. government lack the resources or institutional processes to carry out similar exercises. This must change. If China were to begin an invasion of Taiwan tomorrow, economic warfare would inevitably be a key part of the U.S. response. Absent advanced planning, however, it is also inevitable that the United States and its allies would scramble to put together a response, resigning their sanctions campaign to incrementalism and possibly emboldening Xi to push forward.

To avoid this bad outcome, the United States should immediately establish an Economic Contingency Planning Committee (ECPC), which would be charged with planning for the economic battles of the future. Its first task should be to create and vet sanctions options that could be deployed in response to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The ECPC should possess a dedicated budget and staff, seconded from the State, Treasury, and Commerce departments as well as agencies such as the CIA. Ideally, Congress would create the ECPC via statute, ensuring that it is appropriately resourced and supported. This was one of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission’s top recommendations to Congress in 2022. Yet if Congress does not act quickly, the Biden administration can and should set up the ECPC via an executive order.

The ECPC’s remit should go beyond internal contingency planning to include collaboration with allies. When Putin began amassing troops close to Ukraine’s border, the Biden administration benefited from the preexisting Russia sanctions contact group. Washington should form a similar “coalition of the willing” focused on China and empower the ECPC to socialize its sanctions options and analysis with members of the coalition. Over time, the coalition could even issue joint declaratory policies. For instance, the members could lay out the economic consequences that they stand ready to impose if China invades Taiwan.

It would be a tragedy if Xi, like Putin, underestimates the United States and its allies’ readiness to impose economic costs on China if he moves to seize Taiwan. That’s why policymakers must urgently move to ensure that Xi fully appreciates the costs of such a reckless gamble. The greater the resolve to impose costs on China, and the more tightly coordinated the mechanisms are for doing so, the larger the chances that Beijing will determine such a move is not worth the costs it would incur. And it is critical that all of this is done as soon as possible, as time would be an even more important factor in a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan than it has been in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Taiwan is an island, so once an invasion begins, it will be very hard to arm and resupply. An iterative, learn-on-the-fly approach may well be impossible.

This is no easy task. China’s economy is much larger, much deeper, and considerably more diversified than Russia’s. China imports $3 trillion in goods and services each year and is the largest trading partner of some 120 countries, whereas Russia imports about $400 billion in goods and services each year and is the largest trading partner of only a handful of smaller economies, such as Belarus, Armenia, and Kazakhstan. But if China’s economic strength is much larger than Russia’s, it is hardly infinite. Taken together, the United States and its democratic allies in Asia and Europe account for well over half of global GDP. The collective weight of the world’s advanced economies working together is sufficiently large and strong to give Beijing pause.

That collective strength only matters, however, if those countries can act together. Converting raw economic muscle into collective deterrence will only occur if the correct internal bureaucratic and external coordination mechanisms are put in place now.

The time to deter Russia was before it invaded Ukraine. The time to punish it was after. For China, the time for action is now.

Foreign Policy · by Edward Fishman, Charles Edel · April 6, 2023

6. Analysis | Twitter’s labeling of NPR a boon for foreign propagandists, critics say

Playing right into our adversaries hands.

The strongest critics of NPR are those who do not listen to it daily. They cherry pick reports or comments to support their preconceived notions.

The irony is that the US government actually supports some of the best journalism in the world on public radio and public television as well as Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.  

Analysis | Twitter’s labeling of NPR a boon for foreign propagandists, critics say

Analysis by Cristiano Lima

with research by David DiMolfetta

April 6, 2023 at 9:00 a.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Cristiano Lima · April 6, 2023

Happy Thursday! The newsletter is taking another break until Tuesday. In the meantime, send news tips to: cristiano.lima@washpost.com.

Below: Germany tees up antitrust curbs against Apple, and chatbots could shake the status quo on libel claims. First:

Twitter’s labeling of NPR a boon for foreign propagandists, critics say

Former Twitter staffers, Democratic lawmakers and social media researchers said the company’s decision to label NPR as “state-affiliated media” dealt a blow to its standing on press freedom — and could give state media overseas an undue veneer of legitimacy.

The platform took the unusual step of adding the designation, typically reserved for publications editorially controlled by a government, to the independent news outlet’s profile on Tuesday, as my colleague Paul Farhi reported.

NPR chief executive John Lansing called it “unacceptable” and said the outlet was “disturbed” by the move.

NPR and the local member stations that license its content rely on federal funding through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but the newsroom has long said that it is editorially independent — and that a vast majority of its funding comes from sponsorship deals and membership fees. Twitter did not provide any evidence to the contrary after making the change on Tuesday.

(Disclosure: I previously participated in two unpaid internships with NPR member station WHYY and anchored programs on a volunteer basis for another member station, WDIY.)

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) criticized Twitter over the change, the latest action under new owner Elon Musk targeting major news publications and reporters covering the site.

“Elon Musk is embarrassing himself with his transparent attempts to curry favor with far-right influencers,” Wyden told The Technology 202.

Nu Wexler, a former Twitter spokesman and tech industry veteran, said social media companies made conscious decisions in recent years not to apply the same state media labels for government-funded outlets that maintained editorial independence.

“Rolling back that policy is unfair to NPR, and a boost to notorious state-controlled propaganda outlets like RT in Russia and Xinhua in China,” he said. RT is a Russian state media outlet and Xinhua is China’s official state news agency. Both have been accused of spreading propaganda.

“This change seeks to legitimize state-controlled media outlets like RT and China Daily by equating them to public broadcasters like NPR,” Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of safety, told my colleague Cat Zakrzewski. “They aren’t the same.”

Wyden called it “an insult to the notion of a free press to conflate an editorially independent nonprofit organization like NPR with state-controlled propaganda mills” in Russia and China.

Republicans, who for years have pushed to defund NPR in part over allegations that it harbors a liberal bias, cheered the outlet’s new label on Twitter.

“I applaud Twitter for officially labeling the National Public Radio as a U.S. state-affiliated media entity,” said Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.), who has proposed legislation to defund NPR.

“Elon Musk’s label is accurate,” said Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio). “I support the easy solution: Immediately defund NPR.”

In response to a conservative commentator’s tweet applauding the move — which read, “GET REKT @NPR” — Musk posted part of Twitter’s policy, which says: “State-affiliated media is defined as outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.”

“Seems accurate,” Musk added. Up until early Wednesday, the policy explicitly cited NPR as an exception to the rule due to it being a state-financed media organization “with editorial independence,” archival data shows. But it was later updated to remove the NPR reference.

Twitter replied to a request for comment with an automated message showing a poop emoji, which Musk said last month is the company’s new default response to press inquiries.

The shift could have a direct impact on NPR’s reach: Twitter’s policy states it “will not recommend or amplify” accounts that receive the state media label.

“Twitter is still a critical place for people to find and understand the news, and if they can’t find NPR, then that's a problem,” Joe Bodnar, a research analyst at the German Marshall Fund who studies Russian disinformation and foreign state media, told me.

Although NPR’s visibility may now be limited under Musk, Bodnar said there’s some anecdotal evidence suggesting foreign state media accounts are gaining more traction.

“In the past, these accounts were really hard to find … but now … they’re actually popping up in my personalized ‘For You’ page, being amplified by Twitter to me,” he said.

Our top tabs

German regulators tee up Apple antitrust curbs

German authorities set the stage for possible antitrust regulations against Apple, Rachel Moore reports for Reuters, citing an announcement Wednesday from Bundeskartellamt, the nation’s antitrust regulator.

Apple was designated as a “company of paramount significance for competition across markets,” Moore writes. Germany made the decision to prop up potential antitrust measures against the consumer electronics giant due to its significance in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Bundeskartellamt President Andreas Mundt said the company operates “a comprehensive digital ecosystem with a high significance for competition not only in Germany, but also in Europe and worldwide.”

Apple plans to appeal the decision.

“The (cartel office’s) designation misrepresents the fierce competition Apple faces in Germany, and it discounts the value of a business model that puts user privacy and security at its core,” an Apple spokesperson told Reuters.

U.K. regulators probe Microsoft, Amazon over cloud competition concerns

The United Kingdom on Wednesday accused Microsoft and Amazon of stifling competition in the cloud computing industry, Ryan Browne reports for CNBC.

Britain’s telecom watchdog Ofcom published findings saying Microsoft and Amazon set their data transfer fees higher than other providers, created interoperability restrictions and designed cost structures to incentivize consumers to use only their services for cloud-related needs. The provisional findings follow a September inquiry into the country’s cloud marketplace.

“The regulator proposed referring the case for further investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority, the U.K. regulator tasked with ensuring markets are healthily competitive,” Browne writes.

Microsoft said it will continue to engage with Ofcom following the published study. Amazon said that the results of the findings are “interim” and that the company will continue to work with the regulator ahead of the release of a final report.

ChatGPT falsehoods highlight a legal gray area on AI

Generative AI language models have gained immense popularity from their ability to craft legitimate-sounding answers to almost anything they are asked, but the unregulated tools risk shaking the status quo for legal rulings when it comes to chatbot-produced misinformation, our colleagues Pranshu Verma and Will Oremus write.

It’s unclear whether Generative AI tools have legal protections under Section 230, the liability shield that protects platforms from being sued for content posted by a third party on their sites. “From a legal perspective, ‘we just don’t know’ how judges might rule when someone tries to sue the makers of an AI chatbot over something it says,” Jeff Kosseff, a professor at the Naval Academy and an expert on online speech, told Pranshu and Will.

“Tech companies’ attempts to moderate their language models and chatbots might be used against them in a liability case to argue that they bear more responsibility,” Pranshu and Will write.

Agency scanner

EU Chips Act likely to get green light on April 18 -sources (Reuters)

Hill happenings

Jim Jordan threatens to subpoena FTC over failure to provide agency records (FedScoop)

7. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 6, 2023

Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-april-6-2023

Key Takeaways

• Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in Moscow on April 5 and 6 to discuss further Union State integration, with Putin likely focused on strengthening Russian economic control over Belarus.
• Lukashenko delivered boilerplate rhetoric that continues to indicate that he has no intention of involving Belarus further in Russia’s war effort.
• Russian commanders are reportedly constructing specialized company-size units within key frontline formations engaged in urban combat to reinforce the diminished combat effectiveness of most Russian units.
• Russian forces will likely deploy these “Storm Z” units along the Avdiivka–Donetsk City frontline.
• China continues to rhetorically downplay its support for Russia and demonstrate that there are limits to the declared “no limits” Russian–Chinese partnership, but it will not be a true neutral arbiter in the war.
• Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line.
• Russian forces continued ground attacks in and around Bakhmut and along the Avdiivka–Donetsk City line.
• Ukrainian officials indicated that Russian forces are able to maintain a suitable rate of artillery fire in prioritized areas of the front at the expense of other sectors.
• Russian forces may have withdrawn equipment from occupied Crimea for redeployment elsewhere in southern Ukraine out of fear of a Ukrainian counteroffensive.
• Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu visited Russian Defense Industrial Base (DIB) enterprises in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast to monitor the implementation of state defense orders.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin held one-on-one meetings with Russian occupation authorities.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 6, 2023

Apr 6, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 6, 2023

Karolina Hird, Riley Bailey, Angela Howard, Grace Mappes, Layne Philipson, and Mason Clark

April 6, 4:30pm ET

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

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

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in Moscow on April 5 and 6 to discuss further Union State integration, with Putin likely focused on strengthening Russian economic control over Belarus. Putin and Lukashenko held a one-on-one meeting on April 5 and attended a meeting of the Supreme State Council of the Union State on April 6 to address Union State integration efforts on security, economic, defense, cultural, and humanitarian topics.[1] Putin claimed that Russian and Belarusian officials have fulfilled 74 percent of 28 Union State programs and highlighted the creation of a joint system for indirect taxes, measures to form general standards for Russian and Belarusian industrial enterprises, and efforts to unify Belarusian and Russian trade legislation.[2] Putin and Lukashenko both noted that Russian and Belarusian officials are focused on import substitution measures (likely to mitigate Western sanctions) and supporting microelectronic industries.[3] Putin stated that Russian and Belarusian officials are continuing the process of creating a joint oil and gas market and are working on drafting an agreement for the formation of a single electricity market.[4] The Kremlin is likely advancing longstanding efforts to subsume elements of Belarus’ defense industrial base (DIB), and both states are likely using Union State economic integration efforts to augment their ongoing sanctions evasion measures.[5] Putin and Lukashenko also likely highlighted strengthening economic cooperation to support their ongoing efforts to falsely reassure the Russian and Belarusian publics that Western sanctions regimes will not have long-term consequences.[6]

Putin and Lukashenko also discussed bilateral security issues during their one-on-one meeting and at the Supreme State Council meeting, but official Kremlin and Belarusian readouts offered little concrete details on these discussions. Putin and Lukashenko stated that Russian and Belarusian officials began work on a Security Concept for the Union State, but offered no details for what the joint security document would include.[7] Lukashenko stated that a single joint Russian–Belarusian regional air defense system is already operating, likely referring to the recent deployment of Russian S-400 air defense systems to Belarus.[8] Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated on April 6 that Lukashenko and Putin did not discuss the placement of Russian strategic nuclear weapons in Belarus following Putin’s March 25 announcement that Russia will deploy tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus.[9]

Lukashenko delivered boilerplate rhetoric that continues to indicate that he has no intention of involving Belarus further in Russia’s war effort. Lukashenko stated that NATO is conducting a purposeful buildup of forces along the borders of the Union State and that the West has unleashed an informational, political, and economic war against Belarus and Russia.[10] Lukashenko has previously employed such rhetoric in an attempt to justify resisting Kremlin pressure to further support the Russian war effort in Ukraine by arguing that Belarus needs to protect the western flank of the Union State.[11] ISW has written at length about why Lukashenko is extraordinarily unlikely to further involve Belarus in the war in Ukraine.[12] ISW has previously assessed that Lukashenko is increasingly losing maneuvering room with the Kremlin amid the Kremlin’s steady pressure campaign to formalize the Russian-Belarusian Union State, and Lukashenko may be acquiescing to further integration measures while rejecting Putin’s likely larger demand for the direct participation of Belarusian forces in Russia’s war against Ukraine.[13]

Russian commanders are reportedly constructing specialized company-size units within key frontline formations engaged in urban combat to reinforce the diminished combat effectiveness of most Russian units. A reliable Ukrainian reserve officer released a reportedly captured document on April 6 detailing the recruitment of personnel (who receive the status of BARS reservists) to form new “Storm Z” companies within elements of the 8th Combined Arms Army (Southern Military District) and the 1st Army Corps, the armed forces of the Donetsk People’s Republic.[14] Each “Storm Z” company is created outside of conventional army unit structure and apparently is formed of newly recruited reservists and attached in some manner to existing Russian regiments and brigades, rather than adding additional assets or providing specialized training to existing frontline companies. It is unclear at this time how these “Storm Z” units fit into Russian command structures at the battalion level and above and why Russian units are forming new companies, continuing a standing Russian tendency throughout the war in Ukraine to break down doctrinal unit structures. Each company is comprised of 100 personnel, broken into four capture squads (10 personnel each), four fire support squads (10 personnel each), a 2-person company command element, a 5-person combat engineering group, an 8-person reconnaissance group, a three-person medevac group, and a 2-person UAV crew.[15] ”Storm Z” companies are intended to conduct urban combat operations or operations in complicated geographic areas to capture important and strategic objects such as strongholds, command posts, and communication centers.[16] The Ukrainian reserve officer noted that the personnel that staff these companies receive 10 to 15 days of refresher training, a remarkably short amount of time to adequately train personnel (even reservists with some experience) to perform complex combat tasks and create unit cohesion.

The “Storm Z” companies will likely primarily deploy along the Avdiivka–Donetsk City frontline, where Southern Military District (SMD) units are heavily committed to continuously unsuccessful offensive operations. The Ukrainian reserve officer stated that the document requires the establishment of “Storm Z” companies in various separate motorized rifle brigades of the 1st Army Corps (forces of the Donetsk People’s Republic) and motorized rifle regiments, tank regiments, and separate motorized rifle brigades of the 150th Motorized Rifle Division (part of the 8th Combined Arms Army).[17] ISW has observed the heavy commitment of DNR forces along the entire Avdiivka–Donetsk City frontline and noted that the 150th Motorized Rifle Division has been particularly active in Marinka, on the southwestern outskirts of Donetsk City.[18] Russian offensive operations along this frontline remain largely unsuccessful and have failed to secure more than tactical advances in the area.[19] Russian military command likely seeks to create ”Storm Z” companies and attach them to already-committed elements in order to reinforce minor tactical success and encourage further offensive operations and gains. However, due to the ramshackle construction of yet more ad hoc Russian units, as well as the already degraded quality and poor morale that is pervasive within DNR units in this area, it is unlikely that the use of these formations will lend Russian forces on this frontline a significant offensive edge.

China continues to rhetorically downplay its support for Russia and demonstrate that there are limits to the declared “no limits” Russian–Chinese partnership, but it will not be a true neutral arbiter in the war. French President Emmanuel Macron met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on April 6 and urged Xi to “bring Russia to its senses” and “bring everyone back to the negotiating table.”[20] Xi stated that China “advocates for peace talks and seeks a political solution” without going into significant detail or assigning blame.[21] China’s maintained neutral status and ongoing talks with Western leaders, refusal to blatantly condemn the West, and minimization of relations with and withholding of concrete support to Russia are likely a source of ongoing frustration for Russian President Vladimir Putin, as ISW has previously assessed.[22] However, Xi’s equivocating comments do not indicate any serious intent by Beijing to overtly pressure Russia to end the invasion of Ukraine, as would be necessary for serious peace talks.

Key Takeaways

• Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in Moscow on April 5 and 6 to discuss further Union State integration, with Putin likely focused on strengthening Russian economic control over Belarus.
• Lukashenko delivered boilerplate rhetoric that continues to indicate that he has no intention of involving Belarus further in Russia’s war effort.
• Russian commanders are reportedly constructing specialized company-size units within key frontline formations engaged in urban combat to reinforce the diminished combat effectiveness of most Russian units.
• Russian forces will likely deploy these “Storm Z” units along the Avdiivka–Donetsk City frontline.
• China continues to rhetorically downplay its support for Russia and demonstrate that there are limits to the declared “no limits” Russian–Chinese partnership, but it will not be a true neutral arbiter in the war.
• Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line.
• Russian forces continued ground attacks in and around Bakhmut and along the Avdiivka–Donetsk City line.
• Ukrainian officials indicated that Russian forces are able to maintain a suitable rate of artillery fire in prioritized areas of the front at the expense of other sectors.
• Russian forces may have withdrawn equipment from occupied Crimea for redeployment elsewhere in southern Ukraine out of fear of a Ukrainian counteroffensive.
• Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu visited Russian Defense Industrial Base (DIB) enterprises in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast to monitor the implementation of state defense orders.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin held one-on-one meetings with Russian occupation authorities.

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

• Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis
• Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Activities in Russian-occupied areas

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

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

Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on April 6. Geolocated footage published on April 2 indicates that Russian forces likely made marginal gains northwest of Kuzemivka (15km northwest of Svatove).[23] Russian Western Grouping of Forces (Western Military District) Spokesperson Sergey Zybinsky claimed on April 6 that Russian forces destroyed three Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups and disrupted Ukrainian rotations near Dvorichna (15km northeast of Kupyansk), Pishchane (25km northwest of Svatove), and Stelmakhivka (15km west of Svatove).[24] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces resumed offensive operations near Novoselivske (15km northwest of Svatove).[25] Russian Central Grouping of Forces (Central Military District) Spokesperson Alexander Savchuk claimed that Russian forces thwarted a Ukrainian attempt to regain lost positions near Dibrova (5km southwest of Kreminna).[26] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Nevske (18km northwest of Kreminna), Hryhorivka (11km south of Kreminna), and Spirne (25km south of Kreminna).[27]

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

Russian forces continued ground attacks in and around Bakhmut on April 6. Geolocated footage posted on April 6 shows that Russian forces made a marginal advance in central Bakhmut north of the T0504 highway.[28] More geolocated footage posted on April 6 shows that Ukrainian forces repelled Wagner Group ground attacks south of Ivanivske (6km west of Bakhmut).[29] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful ground attacks in Bakhmut and northwest of Bakhmut near Bohdanivka (6km northwest) and Orikhovo-Vasylivka (11km northwest), and west of Bakhmut near Ivanivske.[30] Russian milbloggers claimed that Wagner forces made marginal advances in northwestern Bakhmut and gained an unspecified foothold near the Metallurg Stadium in central Bakhmut.[31] Another Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces are advancing in northern, eastern, and southern Bakhmut but failed to advance near Bohdanivka.[32]

Russian forces continued ground attacks along the Avdiivka–Donetsk City frontline on April 6. Ukrainian Tavriisk Direction Forces Joint Press Center Spokesperson Colonel Oleksiy Dmytrashkivskyi reported that Russian forces sustained 4,000 losses near Avdiivka in the past week and are sending an unspecified amount of the 4,000-personnel contingent that previously undertook training in Belarus to reinforce the Avdiivka-Marinka line.[33] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful ground attacks near Avdiivka, Novokalynove (7km north of Avdiivka), Sieverne (5km west of Avdiivka), Pervomaiske (10km southwest of Avdiivka), and Marinka.[34] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces made unspecified gains towards Avdiivka, Keramik (8km north of Avdiivka), and Pervomaiske.[35]

Ukrainian officials indicated that Russian forces are able to maintain a suitable rate of artillery fire in prioritized areas of the front at the expense of other sectors. Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Colonel Serhiy Cherevaty stated on April 5 that Russian forces do not suffer artillery ammunition shortages in areas where Russian forces prioritize offensive operations, such as in the Bakhmut direction.[36] The Ukrainian State Border Guard Service stated on April 5 that Wagner Group forces still suffer from artillery shell shortages, however.[37] Dmytrashkivskyi stated on April 6 that Russian forces on the Avdiivka-Marinka line experience shell shortages closer to the weekend, suggesting that these forces burn through their allocated artillery shells too quickly and are resupplied at least partially on a weekly basis.[38]

The Kremlin appears to be perpetuating an information operation to discredit certain Ukrainian forces. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that a squad commander of the Ukrainian 53rd Mechanized Brigade near Avdiivka surrendered his squad to Russian forces, but that other Ukrainian forces intentionally fired on and killed the surrendering personnel before Russian forces could transport them to rear areas.[39] The Russian MoD made this claim in an unusually late daily report, and Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated this claim during a meeting on April 6.[40] ISW is unable to confirm this Russian claim.

Russian sources are likely exaggerating claims of offensive activity around Vuhledar. A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces conducted a significant MLRS strike against Vuhledar to pre-empt a ground attack, but ISW has seen no indications of either a large series of strikes or an attack.[41] Another milblogger claimed that Russian forces are using unguided aerial FAB-500 bombs modified for long range precision strikes near Vuhledar.[42] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces did not conduct offensive operations in western Donetsk Oblast.[43]

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

Russian forces may have withdrawn equipment from occupied Crimea for redeployment elsewhere in southern Ukraine out of fear of a Ukrainian counteroffensive. Satellite imagery shows the withdrawal of a significant amount of armored fighting vehicles, tanks, and towed artillery systems from a depot in Medvedivka (20km northeast of Dzhankoy along the M18 highway) between March 17 and April 5, though ISW cannot confirm their destination at this time.[44]

Russian forces continued defensive operations and routine shelling in southern Ukraine on April 6.[45] Ukrainian Tavriisk Direction Forces Joint Press Center Spokesperson Colonel Oleksiy Dmytrashkivskyi noted that Russian forces in Zaporizhia Oblast are not trying to storm Ukrainian positions and are instead focusing on artillery strikes and preparing defensive fortifications.[46]

Ukrainian forces continue efforts to strike Russian rear positions and logistic nodes in southern Ukraine. Russian sources claimed on April 6 that Ukrainian forces launched six HIMARS rockets at Melitopol, occupied Zaporizhia Oblast, and claimed that Russian air defense intercepted all six of the rockets.[47] Ukrainian Mayor of Melitopol Ivan Fedorov reported the sound of explosions in the Melitopol area and noted that Russian forces sent ambulances to the Aviamistechka airfield despite claiming that air defenses successfully intercepted all of the rockets.[48] Ukrainian Joint Coordination Press Center of the Southern Forces Head Nataliya Humenyuk also noted on April 6 that effective Ukrainian strikes on Russian positions on the east (left) bank of Kherson Oblast have reduced the number of artillery positions from which Russian force can strike the west (right) bank of Kherson Oblast.[49]

Russian sources continue to frame Russia as the sole guarantor of the safety of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP). A prominent Russian milblogger and Putin-appointment member of the Russian Human Rights Council published a long article on April 6 lauding the Russian national guard (Rosgvardia) for guarding the ZNPP and accusing Ukraine of trying to strike the plant and exert pressure on employees to create an unsafe situation.[50] Russian sources have continuously framed Ukraine as acting irresponsibly near the plant to consolidate Russia’s control of Ukrainian energy and nuclear assets.[51]

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

Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu visited Russian defense industrial base (DIB) enterprises in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast — including the Arzamas Machine Building Plant — on April 6 to monitor the implementation of state defense orders.[52] Shoigu’s visits are likely part of an ongoing effort to investigate roadblocks within, reinvigorate, and restore the reputation of Russia’s underperforming DIB. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) amplified the DIB enterprises‘ reports that they increased ammunition production volume several times over and implemented a program to expand further weapons production capacity.[53]

Different sectors of the Russian war effort are almost certainly competing for manpower due to extreme Russian personnel shortages in all sectors caused by prior recruitment waves. Russia’s DIB, contract armed forces, private military companies (PMCs), Combat Reserve of the Country (BARS) units, and conscription authorities have all launched increasingly aggressive recruitment efforts over recent weeks to target an ever-diminishing, overlapping pool of suitable recruits.[54] Chuvashia Republic Head Oleg Nikolaev tentatively proposed on April 5 that Russian authorities equate five years of work at a defense plant with military service.[55] Implementation of such a measure would further drain Russian benefits programs for those affiliated with the war effort and could also force defense industries to compete in benefits offerings or directly enable Russians to forgo military service in favor of work in Russia’s DIB.

Russian authorities are taking further steps to prosecute Russians for avoiding service. Russian opposition outlet Important Stories amplified reports from several Omsk Oblast residents on April 6 that a small number of Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officers are questioning Omsk Oblast residents who temporarily left Russia following the announcement of “partial” mobilization as to their reasons for going abroad.[56]

Zaporizhia Oblast occupation head Yevgeny Balitsky remarked after meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on April 6 that the Russian MoD subordinated Balitsky’s volunteer battalion, the Sudaplatov Battalion, to the BARS-32 formation.[57] BARS formations appear to play an increasing role in volunteer recruitment and supporting irregular Russian volunteer formations, as ISW has previously reported.[58]

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

Russian President Vladimir Putin held one-on-one meetings with Russian occupation authorities on April 6. Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Head Denis Pushilin stated on April 6 that he and Putin discussed issues with water supply, constructing roads, and expanding railway infrastructure to ensure greater connectivity to Russia.[59] Luhansk People’s Republic (DNR) Head Leonid Pasechnik stated that he and Putin discussed several issues concerning social, housing, and communal services, as well as education and medicine.[60] Zaporizhia Oblast Occupation Head Yevgeny Balitsky reported that he and Putin discussed restoring transport infrastructure throughout occupied Zaporizhia Oblast.[61] Balitsky also thanked Putin for supporting the maternity capital initiative, which he claims has already started operating in occupied territories.[62] Kherson Occupation Administration Head Vladimir Saldo and Putin discussed issues with gas supply in occupied Kherson Oblast .[63]

Significant activity in Belarus (ISW assesses that a Russian or Belarusian attack into northern Ukraine in early 2023 is extraordinarily unlikely and has thus restructured this section of the update. It will no longer include counter-indicators for such an offensive.)

ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarusian military activity in Belarus, but these are not indicators that Russian and Belarusian forces are preparing for an imminent attack on Ukraine from Belarus. ISW will revise this text and its assessment if it observes any unambiguous indicators that Russia or Belarus is preparing to attack northern Ukraine.

Belarusian military officials provided an update on the joint Russian-Belarusian Regional Grouping of Forces (RGV) on April 6. Belarusian Head of the Combat Training Directorate Major General Alexander Bas stated that over 500 Belarusian instructors are engaged in the training of RGV troops and that Belarusian trainers seek to apply Russian lessons from Ukraine to the education of the RGV.[64] Bas emphasized the role of the RGV in upholding the security of the Union State.[65]

Belarusian forces continued combat exercises throughout Belarus on April 6. The Belarusian Ministry of Defense stated that elements of the 115th Anti-Aircraft Missile Regiment, 38th Brest Separate Guard Airborne Assault Brigade, and the 86th Communication Brigade conducted various tactical exercises.[66]

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

[1] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70883 ; https://president.gov dot by/ru/events/zasedanie-vysshego-gosudarstvennogo-soveta-soyuznogo-gosudarstva ; http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70874;

[2] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70883

[3] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70883 ; https://president.gov dot by/ru/events/zasedanie-vysshego-gosudarstvennogo-soveta-soyuznogo-gosudarstva ; http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70874;

[4] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70883

[5] https://isw.pub/UkrWar021723 ; https://www.understandingwar.org/backgr...

[6] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[7] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70883 ; https://president.gov dot by/ru/events/zasedanie-vysshego-gosudarstvennogo-soveta-soyuznogo-gosudarstva

[8] https://president.gov dot by/ru/events/zasedanie-vysshego-gosudarstvennogo-soveta-soyuznogo-gosudarstva

[9] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/kremlin-putin-lukashenko-did-not-di...

[10] https://president.gov dot by/ru/events/zasedanie-vysshego-gosudarstvennogo-soveta-soyuznogo-gosudarstva

[11] https://isw.pub/UkrWar120122

[12] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-ass...

[13] https://isw.pub/UkrWar021723 ; https://isw.pub/UkrWar122022

[14] https://twitter.com/Tatarigami_UA/status/1643832673872363520?s=20; http...

[15] https://twitter.com/Tatarigami_UA/status/1643832673872363520?s=20; http...

[16] https://twitter.com/Tatarigami_UA/status/1643832673872363520?s=20; http...

[17] https://twitter.com/Tatarigami_UA/status/1643832673872363520?s=20; http...

[18] https://t.me/nm_dnr/10101; https://t.me/nm_dnr/10108; https://t.me/mil...

[19] https://isw.pub/UkrWar032723; https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder... https://isw.pub/UkrWar032023

[20] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-65198757; https://www.reuters... com/world/high-hopes-china-eu-leaders-prepare-xi-talks-2023-04-06/

[21] https://www.reuters dot com/world/ukraine-pushes-western-warplane-coalition-2023-04-06/; https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-65198757; https://www.reuters...

[22] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-ass...

[23] https://t.me/rian_ru/198674 ; https://twitter.com/auditor_ya/status/16...

[24] https://t.me/mod_russia/25433

[25] https://t.me/wargonzo/11794

[26] https://t.me/mod_russia/25409

[27] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid023n71k3dYk3R9xsGgma...

[28] https://twitter.com/operativno_ZSU/status/1643926270793613313?s=20; https://twitter.com/auditor_ya/status/1643947158641549318?s=20

[29] https://twitter.com/Danspiun/status/1644007138723864576?s=20; https://twitter.com/SerDer_Daniels/status/1643939792109940736?s=20; https://twitter.com/666_mancer/status/1643955860459122689; https://t.me/volodymyrzolkin/8087

[30] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0foQPeWN6pDsqEb1cSuV... https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid023n71k3dYk3R9xsGgma...

[31] https://t.me/z_arhiv/20112; https://t.me/readovkanews/56310

[32] https://t.me/wargonzo/11794

[33] https://armyinform.com dot ua/2023/04/06/vorog-prodovzhuye-obstrilyuvaty-donechchynu-ta-zaporizhzhya-oleksij-dmytrashkivskyj/

[34] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid023n71k3dYk3R9xsGgma... https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0foQPeWN6pDsqEb1cSuV...

[35] https://t.me/wargonzo/11794; https://t.me/readovkanews/56310

[36] https://suspilne dot media/435603-v-oon-prodovzat-rozsliduvati-zlocini-rosian-ssa-nadaut-boepripasi-406-den-vijni-onlajn/

[37] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=210526464933477

[38] https://armyinform.com dot ua/2023/04/06/vorog-prodovzhuye-obstrilyuvaty-donechchynu-ta-zaporizhzhya-oleksij-dmytrashkivskyj/

[39] https://t.me/mod_russia/25435

[40] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70879

[41] https://t.me/russkiy_opolchenec/36262; https://t.me/russkiy_opolchenec/36257

[42] https://t.me/milchronicles/1740; https://t.me/NeoficialniyBeZsonoV/23975; https://t.me/sashakots/39193

[43] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid023n71k3dYk3R9xsGgma...

[44] https://twitter.com/bradyafr/status/1643755617683644418?s=20; https://t...

[45] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid023n71k3dYk3R9xsGgma... ua/2023/04/06/vorog-prodovzhuye-obstrilyuvaty-donechchynu-ta-zaporizhzhya-oleksij-dmytrashkivskyj/

[46] https://armyinform.com dot ua/2023/04/06/vorog-prodovzhuye-obstrilyuvaty-donechchynu-ta-zaporizhzhya-oleksij-dmytrashkivskyj/

[47] https://t.me/kommunist/16798; https://t.me/basurin_e/575; https://t.me...

[48] https://t.me/ivan_fedorov_melitopol/1659

[49] https://suspilne dot media/436764-oboronna-dopomoga-polsi-vijska-rf-atakuut-na-4-napramkah-407-den-vijni-onlajn/?anchor=live_1680765775&utm_source=copylink&utm_medium=ps; https://armyinform.com dot ua/2023/04/06/zastosuvannya-vorogom-aviacziyi-z-kerovanymy-aviaczijnymy-bombamy-cze-krok-vidchayu-nataliya-gumenyuk/

[50] https://ria dot ru/20230406/zaporozhe-1863236820.html; https://t.me/sashakots/39208

[51] https://isw.pub/UkrWar030323; https://isw.pub/UkrWar012723; https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[52] https://t.me/mod_russia/25423; https://t.me/mod_russia/25432; https://...

[53] https://t.me/mod_russia/25423; https://t.me/mod_russia/25432; https://...

[54] https://ircity dot ru/text/society/2023/04/05/72192860/; https://trk7 dot ru/news/155426.html; https://www.e1 dot ru/text/gorod/2023/04/05/72194627/?utm_source=telegram&utm_medium=messenger&utm_campaign=e1; https://t.me/vashdozor/4163; https://t.me/Baikal_People/2261; https://news dot vtomske.ru/news/197843-vozmojno-kto-to-popal-v-finansovuyu-yamu-v-tomskoi-oblasti-usililas-agitaciya-na-slujbu-po-kontraktu; https://t.me/Govorit_NeMoskva/6908

[55] https://t.me/ChuvashiaDream/6707

[56] https://storage dot googleapis.com/istories/news/2023/04/05/fsb-nachala-vizivat-na-besedu-rossiyan-uezzhavshikh-ot-mobilizatsii-za-granitsu/index.html; https://meduza dot io/news/2023/04/06/omskoe-upravlenie-fsb-nachalo-vyzyvat-na-doprosy-teh-kto-uezzhal-iz-rossii-ot-mobilizatsii

[57] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70881

[58] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-ass...

[59] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70879

[60] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70880

[61] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70881

[62] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70881

[63] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70882

[64] https://t.me/modmilby/25263; https://t.me/modmilby/25272

[65] https://t.me/modmilby/25263; https://t.me/modmilby/25272

[66] https://t.me/modmilby/25249; https://t.me/modmilby/25229; https://t.me...

Tags

Ukraine Project

File Attachments: 

DraftUkraineCOTApril6,2023.png

Kharkiv Battle Map Draft April 6,2023.png

Donetsk Battle Map Draft April 6,2023.png

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Zaporizhia Battle Map Draft April 6,2023.png

Bakhmut Battle Map Draft April 6,2023 (3).png

8. GAO Upholds Army Choice of Bell V-280 to Replace Black Hawk Helicopter

The US Army is likely the largest single buyer of helicopters in the world. If it no longer buys helicopters on the current scale​ how will the helicopter industry turn out? Surely we need rotary wing aircraft for many commercial activities, rescue, and police functions but if the Army is not buying helicopters at scale will helicopter manufacturers drop that part of their business or will they have to raise the prices of helicopters to such a level that it will become cost prohibitive for many consumers. It is unlikely the Bell V-280 will be able to replace all the functions of helicopters in the commercial and non-military environments.

I also remember hearing a briefing in the 1990s that one of the reasons for building the Osprey (CV-22/MV-22) is because it would revolutionize the commercial transportation industry and because the military procured the Osprey the commercial sector would buy it and radically change the way commercial transportation is conducted. It does not seem to have turned out that way.

GAO Upholds Army Choice of Bell V-280 to Replace Black Hawk Helicopter

Sikorsky and Boeing had protested the service’s decision.

defenseone.com · by Marcus Weisgerber

The U.S. Army properly awarded Bell a contract for its V-280 tiltrotor aircraft over a rival bid from Sikorsky and Boeing, government auditors said Thursday.

The Government Accountability Office rejected Sikorsky and Boeing’s claims that the Army incorrectly evaluated proposals for an aircraft intended to replace the H-60 Black Hawk helicopter.

“[T]he Army reasonably evaluated Sikorsky’s proposal as technically unacceptable because Sikorsky failed to provide the level of architectural detail required by the [request for proposals],” GAO wrote in a statement posted on its website. “GAO also denied Sikorsky’s various allegations about the acceptability of Bell’s proposal, including the assertion that the agency’s evaluation violated the terms of the solicitation or applicable procurement law or regulation.”

The decision did not assess the merits of the proposal, GAO said.

“The FLRAA Source Selection Board followed a deliberate, rigorous process,” an Army spokesman said in an emailed statement. “GAO's decision demonstrates that we determined the proposal that represented the best value to the Army and taxpayer, and we look forward to reviewing the full GAO report.

“We are ready to work with Bell, execute this contract and deliver transformational increases in speed, range, payload and endurance for Army tactical assault and MEDEVAC missions to support the Joint force, strengthen deterrence and win in multi-domain operations,” the spokesman added.

Sikorsky, which is owned by defense giant Lockheed Martin, teamed up with Boeing to pitch Defiant X, a newly designed compound helicopter. The technology does away with the need for a tail rotor, replacing it with a pusher propeller that allows the helicopter to fly at higher speeds. The Bell V-280 is a tiltrotor, an aircraft with fixed wings and movable rotors on the tips. It can take off and land like a helicopter, but fly fast like a traditional plane.

The nonpartisan GAO did not release the detailed decision document because it contains proprietary corporate information. The agency plans to release a redacted version after lawyers from the respective companies review it. That process could take several weeks, according to an industry official.

Lockheed and Boeing, in a joint statement, said the companies would “review the GAO’s decision and determine our next steps.”

“We remain confident the Lockheed Martin Sikorsky and Boeing team submitted the most capable, affordable, and lowest-risk Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft solution,” they said in an emailed statement.

The companies have multiple options. They could challenge the decision in court, which would likely lead to a lengthy delay in fielding a new aircraft for the Army. Or, they could turn to their advocates in Congress.

Ultimately the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft, or FLRAA, effort to replace the Sikorsky-made Black Hawk could be worth $70 billion over several decades.

A Bell spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

defenseone.com · by Marcus Weisgerber

9.  Biden White House largely blames Trump admin for troubled U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan

I do not recall the NSC actually writing an after action report of this magnitude. Usually this is done by an IG, the GAO, or an independent commission.

As I wrote in 2021 one of the contributing factors to the failure was our flawed assumptions.

Flawed assumptions led to tragic outcomes in Afghanistan

https://www.militarytimes.com/opinion/commentary/2021/08/21/flawed-assumptions-led-to-tragic-outcomes-in-afghanistan/

Many Afghanistan post-mortems will be written. All will identify many problems. But two major flaws in U.S. policy are readily apparent and warrant immediate attention. Although it is too soon to draw definitive conclusions, the current tragedy likely stems in part from false assumptions — embraced by the White House —about the Afghan military and the recently ousted Afghan government. Assumptions may seem like a mundane aspect of military planning, but they are critical for the success of any military operation.

​We now have have the highest level post-mortem from the Afghan withdrawal and NEO.​

​The 12 page report can be accessed at the White House website here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/US-Withdrawal-from-Afghanistan.pdf

I think this is a key excerpt from the report.

​

As the security situation in Afghanistan worsened over the summer, the Administration grappled with the tension between highlighting growing warning signs of potential collapse and undermining confidence in the Government of Afghanistan and Afghan forces’ will to fight. Whenever a government is threatened by the prospect of collapse— whether in Afghanistan or elsewhere—there is an obvious tension between signaling confidence in the capabilities of the current government and providing warning of the risks that it might fail. 

Ultimately, the Administration made a decision to engage in unprecedently extensive targeted outreach to Americans and Afghan partners about the risk of collapse, including numerous security alerts and tens of thousands of direct phone calls and messages to U.S. citizens in particular to leave Afghanistan, but to not broadcast loudly and publicly about a potential worst-case scenario unfolding in order to avoid signaling a lack of confidence in the ANDSF or the Afghan government’s position. This calculus was made based on the prevailing intelligence and military view throughout the early weeks of August that Kabul would hold beyond the end of the withdrawal. As Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines stated on August 18, 2021, “[the collapse] unfolded more quickly than [the Intelligence Community] anticipated.” In fact, the collapse was more rapid than either the Taliban or the Afghan government expected. 

In a destabilizing security environment, we now err on the side of aggressive communication about risks. We did this in advance of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Months before the invasion, we proactively released intelligence with trusted partners. That engagement broadened—and grew louder and more public—in the weeks leading up to Russia’s invasion. This approach met strong objections from senior officials in the Ukrainian government who were concerned such warnings would spark panic and precipitate capital flight, damaging the Ukrainian economy. However, our clear and unvarnished warnings enabled the United States to take advantage of a critical window before the invasion to organize with our allies, plan the swift execution of our response, and enable Americans in Ukraine to depart safely. 

Biden White House largely blames Trump admin for troubled U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan

A new report from the National Security Council largely blamed former President Donald Trump's administration for the breakdown that occurred after U.S. troops withdrew.

NBC News · by Rebecca Shabad and Courtney Kube

WASHINGTON — The White House on Thursday released a report about the decisions made regarding the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, including the bombing at the Kabul airport that killed 13 U.S. service members.

A different classified report will be shared with members of Congress, which comes in response to requests from congressional committees, the White House said.

The 12-page report released to the public summarizes the "perspectives" of the White House and largely blamed former President Donald Trump's administration for the chaos that unfolded as U.S. troops were leaving and as Americans and Afghans evacuated from the country. The Taliban took over the country's government and have remained in power.

"President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor," said the summary.

When Trump took office in 2017, more than 10,000 U.S. troops remained in Afghanistan, the summary said, and he continued to order drawdowns over his final year in office, bringing the total down to about 2,500.

Taliban fighters secure the outer perimeter of the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 29, 2021.Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images file

But the Trump administration "provided no plans for how to conduct the final withdrawal or to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies," the White House said. "President Biden had committed to ending the war in Afghanistan, but when he came into office he was confronted with difficult realities left to him by the Trump Administration."

The White House said that the lack of communication from the Trump administration underscores why effective coordination for the transition process is critical "especially when it comes to complex military operations," the summary stated. The Trump administration, fueled by the former president's false claims that had been denied re-election by rampant fraud, largely refused to conduct traditional transition communications ahead of Biden taking office.

Biden and his team were "well aware of the challenges posed by withdrawing from a warzone" after 20 years, the White House said, and while the Trump administration left a target date for leaving Afghanistan, it provided "no plan for executing it."

NBC News · by Rebecca Shabad and Courtney Kube

10. Elite troops died being sucked out of planes. Critics blame their parachutes.

We didn't have these new reserves when I was a current jumpmaster.

Elite troops died being sucked out of planes. Critics blame their parachutes.

The Washington Post · by Kyle Rempfer · April 6, 2023

A Navy SEAL was killed in 2014, an Air Force commando went missing over the ocean in 2019 and an Army Green Beret will likely lose an arm in 2023. Each experienced a rare but catastrophic accident after their parachutes unexpectedly deployed when hit by wind gusts, violently ripping them out aircraft doors and prompting lawsuits questioning the safety of their gear.

All three were wearing the T-11 reserve parachute, which sits on a jumper’s chest and is pulled if their main canopy fails. Critics argue that the parachute’s fabric ripcord is more sensitive to strong winds than the 50-year-old rig with a metal ripcord that it replaced a decade ago.

While the number of accidents is small, the consequences can be dire. The military knows of the concerns. Evaluators altered the parachute as recently as 2021 to prevent openings from wind blast. Still, critics say small changes haven’t stopped the problems, and the product should be replaced.

Army Staff Sgt. Brycen Erdody, a Green Beret medic, nearly died last year 1,250 feet over Fort Bragg, N.C., when his T-11 reserve opened after a wind gust came through an aircraft door. The parachute inflated and sucked him out, slamming him against the door frame, ripping off his helmet and partially severing his arm. An Army investigation cleared him of negligence in the accident.

Erdody has undergone five surgeries since then.

“Both my first ribs were fractured, my sternum was caved in, my bicep was cut in half, my nerves were pulled from my spine,” Erdody told The Washington Post. “They’ll probably end up having to amputate my arm because there’s no nerve activity and never will be again.”

Erdody and his wife Cassidy filed a federal lawsuit Monday in the Eastern District of North Carolina against the T-11’s manufacturer — Airborne Systems of North America — accusing the company of designing a faulty parachute and failing to warn service members about its issues. The danger is greatest for jumpmasters, experienced parachutists who lean out of planes to spot drop zones, a role most victims were performing at the time of their accidents.

Airborne Systems did not return requests for comment made by phone and email Monday.

The complaint filed by Erdody’s lawyers argues that the T-11 reserve was originally tested with safety pins installed, which provided more resistance and prevented accidental openings. Those pins aren’t used in the rig given to troops, the complaint alleges, leading to deaths and, in Erdody’s case, life-changing injuries.

Victims of these accidents can’t sue the Defense Department due to the Feres doctrine, which prevents service members injured on duty from collecting damages from the federal government. But Erdody’s attorney, Natalie Khawam, is still hopeful the lawsuit against the manufacturer will put the military in the spotlight, too.

“This is not going to bring back Brycen’s arm, but hopefully it’ll stop this from ever happening again to one of our service members,” Khawam said. “When I talked to a subject matter expert, he said, ‘In the military, we keep using gear until someone dies.’ But several people have died from this product and they’re still using it.”

It is the second time Airborne Systems has been sued over problems with its T-11 reserve parachute.

Navy SEAL Chief Petty Officer Bradley Cavner was killed over El Centro, Calif., when his T-11 reserve was activated by a wind gust and his head struck the aircraft’s door frame as he was swept out. A lawsuit filed by Cavner’s parents ended in a confidential settlement in 2017, according to court records.

Air Force Special Operator Staff Sgt. Cole Condiff also died when his T-11 reserve opened from a wind gust, pulling him from an aircraft flying over the Gulf of Mexico. His body was never recovered.

An Air Force investigation blamed Condiff and his teammates for not noticing that a protective fabric insert — added to the ripcord flap after Cavner’s death to prevent another accident — was extended one inch too far, so it couldn’t stop the wind from deploying the parachute as intended.

A military parachute instructor with 20 years of experience who is not a plaintiff in Erdody’s lawsuit said the fabric inserts were a “Band-Aid.”

“They keep trying to find small solutions without actually doing what they’re supposed to do and say ‘the system’s unsafe’ and take it out of service,” said the instructor, who still works for the military and asked that his name not be used to protect his career. “The old (reserve parachute) was a metal handle that was tucked away and wasn’t affected by wind. With this new system, just the way the wind gets under it, that can deploy it from either direction.”

Erdody’s 2022 accident happened despite the fabric inserts being used. An Army investigation shared with The Washington Post stated that Erdody and his fellow jumpers performed all actions, including pre-jump inspections, properly. His jump rig was even inspected twice before the accident by different soldiers, the investigation stated.

“One of them would have caught an issue with the reserve,” an unnamed witness cited in the investigation said.

It’s not clear how many of these accidents there have been. The Army’s parachute malfunction review board at Fort Lee, Va., only knew of three incidents in the last 10 years. Meanwhile, the Air Force investigation into Condiff’s death tallied seven by 2019. And an Army Infantry School bulletin said there had been reports of “more than a dozen” before the first death in 2014. Regardless of the number, the consequences are stark.

“Although the number may seem statistically minute, the Airborne community responded by implementing increased safety measures to reduce the likelihood of any such incidents in the future,” said Army spokeswoman Onyx Taylor-Catterson. She pointed to the fabric inserts as one important change, as well as efforts in 2021 to change the shape of the T-11 reserve ripcord handle to prevent the risk of wind blast.

Taylor-Catterson said the review board audits safety measures four times a year. More changes could always come. But critics hope for a larger overhaul.

“They’re still jumping the same system I used when I got sucked outside of the airplane,” Erdody said. “There’s been nothing, no fixes.”

The Washington Post · by Kyle Rempfer · April 6, 2023​

11. Pentagon should experiment with AIs like ChatGPT — but don’t trust them yet: DoD’s ex-AI chiefs

Excerpts:

“What’s different with ChatGPT, suddenly you have this interface, [where] using the English language, you can ask it questions,” Groen said. “It democratizes AI [for] large communities of people.”

That’s transformative for the vast majority of users who lack the technical training to translate their queries into specialized search terms. What’s more, because the AI can suck up written information about any subject, it can make connections across different disciplines in a way a more specialized AI cannot.

“What makes generative AI special is it can understand multiple narrow spaces and start to make integrative conclusions across those,” Groen said. “It’s… able to bridge.”

But first, Groen said, you want the strong foundations to build the bridge across, like pilings in the river. So while experimenting with ChatGPT and co., Groen said, he would put the near-term emphasis on training and perfecting traditional, specialist AIs, then layer generative AI over top of them when it’s ready.

“There are so many places today in the department where it’s screaming for narrow AI solutions to logistics inventories or distribution optimizers, or threat identification … like office automation, not like killer robots,” Groen said. “Getting all these narrow AIs in place and building these data environments actually really prepares us for — at some point — integrating generative AI.”

Pentagon should experiment with AIs like ChatGPT — but don’t trust them yet: DoD’s ex-AI chiefs

The potential of “generative AI” is too big to ignore, say retired generals Jack Shanahan and Mike Groen, who each led the Pentagon's Joint AI Center — but for now, its tendency to “hallucinate” and make up information is “a showstopper.”

breakingdefense.com · by Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.

Pentagon grapples with growth of artificial intelligence. (Graphic by Breaking Defense, original brain graphic via Getty)

WASHINGTON — Imagine a militarized version of ChatGPT, trained on secret intelligence. Instead of painstakingly piecing together scattered database entries, intercepted transmissions and news reports, an analyst types in a quick query in plain English and get back, in seconds, a concise summary — a prediction of hostile action, for example, or a profile of a terrorist.

But is that output true? With today’s technology, you can’t count on it, at all.

That’s the potential and the peril of “generative” AI, which can create entirely new text, code or images rather than just categorizing and highlighting existing ones. Agencies like the CIA and State Department have already expressed interest. But for now, at least, generative AI has a fatal flaw: It makes stuff up.

“I’m excited about the potential,” said Lt. Gen. (ret.) Jack Shanahan, founding director of the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) from 2018 to 2020. “I play around with Bing AI, I use ChatGPT pretty regularly — [but] there is no intelligence analyst right now that would use these systems in any way other than with a hefty grain of salt.”

“This idea of hallucinations is a major problem,” he told Breaking Defense, using the term of art for AI answers with no foundation in reality. “It is a showstopper for intelligence.”

Shanahan’s successor at JAIC, recently retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Michael Groen, agreed. “We can experiment with it, [but] practically it’s still years away,” he said.

Instead, Shahanan and Groen told Breaking Defense that, at this point, the Pentagon should swiftly start experimenting with generative AI — with abundant caution and careful training for would-be users — with an eye to seriously using the systems when and if the hallucination problem can be fixed.

RELATED: Say goodbye to JAIC and DDS, as offices cease to exist as independent bodies June 1

Who Am I?

To see the current issues with popular generative AI models, just ask the AI about Shanahan and Groen themselves, public figures mentioned in Wikipedia and many news reports.

Then-Lt. Gen. John “Jack” Shanahan

On its first attempt, ChatGPT 3.5 correctly identified Shanahan as a retired Air Force officer, AI expert, and former director of both the groundbreaking Project Maven and the JAIC. But it also said he was a graduate of the Air Force Academy, a fighter pilot, and an advisor to AI startup DeepMind — none of which is true. And almost every date in the AI-generated bio was off, some by nearly a decade.

“Wow,” Shanahan said of the bot’s output. “Many things are not only wrong, but seemingly out of left field… I’ve never had any association with DeepMind.”

What about the upgraded ChatGPT 4.0? “Almost as bad!” he said. This time, in addition to a different set of wrong jobs and fake dates, he was given two children that did not exist. Weirder yet, when you enter the same question into either version a second time, it generates a new and different set of errors.

Nor is the problem unique to ChatGPT. Google’s Bard AI, built on a different AI engine, did somewhat better, but it still said Shanahan was a pilot and made up assignments he never had.

“The irony is that it could pull my official AF bio and get everything right the first time,” Shanahan said.

And Groen? “The answers about my views on AI are pretty good,” the retired Marine told Breaking Defense after reviewing ChatGPT 3.5’s first effort, which emphasized his enthusiasm for military AI tempered by stringent concern for ethics. “I suspect that is because there are not too many people with my name that have publicly articulated their thoughts on this topic.”

On the other hand, Groen went on, “many of the facts of my biography are incorrect, [e.g.] it got place of birth, college attended, year entered service wrong. It also struggled with units I have commanded or was a part of.”

How could generative AI get the big picture right but mess up so many details? It’s not that the data isn’t out there: As with Shanahan, Groen’s official military bio is online.

But so is a lot of other information, he pointed out. “I suspect that there are so many ‘Michaels’ and ‘Marine Michaels’ on the global internet that the ‘pattern’ that emerged contains elements that are credible, but mostly incorrect,” Groen said.

Then-Lt. Gen. Michael Groen, director of the Joint AI Center, briefs reporters in 2020. (screenshot of DoD video)

This tendency to conflate general patterns and specific facts might explain the AIs’ insistence that Shanahan is an Air Force Academy grad and fighter pilot. Neither of those things is true of him as an individual, but they are commonly mentioned attributes of Air Force officers as a group. It’s not true, but it’s plausible — and this kind of AI doesn’t remember a database of specific facts, only a set of statistical correlations between different words.

“The system does not know facts,” Shanahan said. “It really is a sophisticated word predictor.”

The companies behind the tech each acknowledge and warn that their AI apps may produce incorrect information and urge user caution. The missteps in AI chatbots are not dissimilar to those of generative AI artists, like Stable Diffusion, which produced the image of a mutant Abrams below.

Output from a generative AI, Stable Diffusion, when prompted by Breaking Defense with “M1 Abrams tank.”

What Goes Wrong

In the cutting-edge Large Language Models that drive ChatGPT, Bard, and their ilk, “each time it generates a new word, it is assigning a sort of likelihood score to every single word that it knows,” explained Micah Musser, a research analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. “Then, from that probability distribution, it will select — somewhat at random – one of the more likely words.”

That’s why asking the same question more than once gets subtly or even starkly different answers every time. And while training the AI on larger datasets can help, Musser told Breaking Defense, “even if it does have sufficient data, it does have sufficient context, if you ask a hyper-specific question and it hasn’t memorized the [specific] example, it may just make something up.” Hence the plausible but invented dates of birth, graduation, and so on for Shanahan and Groen.

Now, it’s understandable when human brains misremember facts and even invent details that don’t exist. But surely a machine can record the data perfectly?

Not these machines, said Dimitry Fisher, head of data science and applied research at AI company Aicadium. “They don’t have memory in the same sense that we do,” he told Breaking Defense. “They cannot quote sources… They cannot show what their output has been inspired by.”

Ironically, Fisher told Breaking Defense, earlier attempts to teach AIs natural language did have distinct mechanisms for memorizing specific facts and inferring general patterns, much like the human brains that inspired them. But such software ran too slowly on any practical hardware to be of much use, he said. So instead the industry shifted to a type of AI called a transformer — that’s the “T” in “ChatGPT” — which only encodes the probable correlations between words or other data points.

“It just predicts the most likely next word, one word at a time,” Fisher said. “You can’t have language generation on the industrial scale without having to take this architectural shortcut, but this is where it comes back and bites you.”

These issues should be fixable, Fisher said. “There are many good ideas of how to try to and solve them – but that’ll take probably a few years.”

Shanahan, likewise, was guardedly optimistic, if only because of the financial incentives to get it right.

“These flaws are so serious that the big companies are going to spend a lot of money and a lot of time trying to fix things,” he said. “How well those fixes will work remains the unanswered question.”

The Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, (US Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Alexander W. Riedel)

If It Works…

If generative AI can be made reliable — and that’s a significant if — the applications for the Pentagon, as for the private sector, are extensive, Groen and Shanahan agreed.

“Probably the places that make the most sense in the near term… are those back-office business from personnel management to budgeting to logistics,” Shanahan said. But in longer term, “there is an imperative to use them to help deal with … the entire intelligence cycle.”

So while the hallucinations have to be fixed, Shanahan said, “what I’m more worried about, in the immediate term, is just the fact that I don’t see a whole lot of action in the government about using these systems.” (He did note that the Pentagon Chief Digital & AI Office, which absorbed the JAIC, has announced an upcoming conference on generative AI: “That’s good.”). Instead of waiting for others to perfect the algorithms, he said, “I’d rather get them in the hands of users, put some boundaries in place about how they can be used… and then focus really heavy on the education, the training, and the feedback” from users on how they can be improved.

Groen was likewise skeptical about the near term. “We don’t want to be in the cutting edge here in generative AI,” he said, saying near-term implementation should focus on tech “that we know and that we trust and that we understand.” But he was even more enthused about the long term than Shanahan.

“What’s different with ChatGPT, suddenly you have this interface, [where] using the English language, you can ask it questions,” Groen said. “It democratizes AI [for] large communities of people.”

That’s transformative for the vast majority of users who lack the technical training to translate their queries into specialized search terms. What’s more, because the AI can suck up written information about any subject, it can make connections across different disciplines in a way a more specialized AI cannot.

“What makes generative AI special is it can understand multiple narrow spaces and start to make integrative conclusions across those,” Groen said. “It’s… able to bridge.”

But first, Groen said, you want the strong foundations to build the bridge across, like pilings in the river. So while experimenting with ChatGPT and co., Groen said, he would put the near-term emphasis on training and perfecting traditional, specialist AIs, then layer generative AI over top of them when it’s ready.

“There are so many places today in the department where it’s screaming for narrow AI solutions to logistics inventories or distribution optimizers, or threat identification … like office automation, not like killer robots,” Groen said. “Getting all these narrow AIs in place and building these data environments actually really prepares us for — at some point — integrating generative AI.”

breakingdefense.com · by Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.

12. China sanctions Reagan library, others over Tsai's US trip

China "fighting back." But does the CCP really think this will somehow "hurt" us? What effect do they hope to achieve by sanctioning the library? Does this indicate they really do not understand the US (as much as we do not understand China)?

I bet President Reagan did not foresee this. But I am sure he would wear the sanction from the Communist Party in China as a badge of honor.

China sanctions Reagan library, others over Tsai's US trip

AP · by HUIZHONG WU · April 7, 2023

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — China retaliated for the United States House speaker’s meeting with the Taiwanese president by announcing sanctions Friday against the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and other organizations, adding to strains over the self-ruled island democracy Beijing claims as part of its territory.

Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy held talks Wednesday with President Tsai Ing-wen at the Reagan library in Simi Valley, California, in defiance of Chinese warnings. McCarthy joined a growing series of foreign legislators who have met Tsai in a show of support for Taiwan in the face of Chinese intimidation.

U.S.-Chinese relations have sunk to their lowest level in decades due to disputes over the status of Taiwan, which split with China in 1949 after a civil war, as well as security, technology and Beijing’s treatment of Hong Kong and Muslim ethnic minorities.

The mainland’s ruling Communist Party says Taiwan is destined to reunite with China, by force if necessary, and has no right to conduct foreign relations. President Xi Jinping’s government says contact with foreign officials will encourage Taiwanese who want formal independence, a step Beijing says would lead to war.

Taiwan

China vows 'forceful' measures after US-Taiwan meeting

US House leader and Taiwan president meet as China protests

US House Leader Marks Historic Visit Supoorting Taiwan

For McCarthy and Taiwan's leader, visit marks historic first

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China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced the Reagan library and the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank, were sanctioned for “providing a platform and convenience to Taiwan separatist activities.” It said Chinese institutions were prohibited from having any cooperation or contact with them.

An email seeking comment from the library wasn’t immediately answered Thursday night.

Tsai accepted a leadership award from the Hudson Institute as part of her U.S. trip and gave a speech about Taiwan’s challenges in regional security.

The ministry also cited Sarah May Stern, chair of the Hudson Institute board of directors; John P. Walters, the institute’s director; John Heubusch, former executive director of the Reagan Foundation, and Joanne M. Drake, the foundation’s chief administrator.

The ministry said they were barred from visiting China and any property or financial assets belonging to them in China would be frozen.

“We will take resolute measures to punish the ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist forces and their actions, and resolutely safeguard our country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” the Chinese Cabinet’s Taiwan Affairs Office said in a statement Thursday.

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China has stepped up efforts to intimidate Taiwan by flying fighter jets and firing missiles into the sea nearby on a near-daily basis. The pressure campaign has left many concerned about the possibility of an invasion.

On Friday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that “in recent years, we have seen: For the Chinese leadership, the status quo that brought peace and stability to the Taiwan Strait for decades is no longer acceptable. This has led China to increase pressure and coercive means against Taiwan.”

The United States government has no official relations with Taiwan but maintains extensive informal and commercial ties. Washington is required by federal law to ensure the island has the means to defend itself if attacked by China.

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“We are sticking to our ‘One China’ policy. But we are equipping Taiwan with what it needs to defend itself against any form of aggression. We are taking that very seriously,” Blinken told German newspaper group Funke Mediengruppe and French newspaper Ouest-France in remarks published Friday that have been retranslated back to English.

McCarthy’s predecessor as speaker, Nancy Pelosi, flew to Taiwan in August and met Tsai. Legislators from European parliaments have also visited the island. Meanwhile, another Congressional delegation landed Thursday in Taiwan and will meet with Tsai on Saturday.

Additionally, two groups in Asia — the Prospect Foundation and the Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats — were sanctioned for their involvement in promoting Taiwan independence “under the guise of academic and research exchanges,” said Taiwan Affairs Office spokesperson Zhu Fenglian.

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The Prospect Foundation is a Taiwanese think tank that works on dialogue and cooperation on issues related to Taiwan’s security, economy and social development. The Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats is a regional organization established in Thailand that promotes exchanges among liberal and democratic political parties in Asia, including Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party, which is a member.

Separately, the Taiwan Affairs Office also announced further sanctions on Hsiao Bi-khim, Taiwan’s representative in the United States.

The ban on Hsiao does not appear to be substantively different from the ban enacted on her when Pelosi visited Taiwan. China had announced sanctions on a list of individuals from the DPP and ruling administration, including Hsiao. Then it banned the individuals, their family members and related organizations from traveling or operating in China, including Hong Kong. Friday’s announcement said any financial sponsors of Hsiao are also included.

___

AP writer Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin contributed to this report.

AP · by HUIZHONG WU · April 7, 2023

13. China sanctions US figures after Taiwan president’s talks with House speaker

More on Chinese sanctions after the Tsai-McCarthy meeting. 

The Hudson institute leadership is also targeted.

China sanctions US figures after Taiwan president’s talks with House speaker

US thinktank and Reagan Foundation targeted, as well as Taiwan’s de facto ambassador to the US, in row over President Tsai Ing-wen’s trip

The Guardian · by Helen Davidson · April 7, 2023

China has imposed sanctions on US figures linked to the Taiwan president’s visit to the US this week, as well as further restrictions on Taiwan’s de facto ambassador to the United States.

The sanctions targeted the Ronald Reagan library which hosted the meeting between Tsai and US House speak Kevin McCarthy, and the Hudson Institute which hosted Tsai in New York and presented her with an award.

Four US nationals were listed, including the chair and director of the Hudson Institute, and the current head and former director of the Reagan Foundation.

A second round of sanctions was also unveiled against Hsiao Bi-khim, Taiwan’s de facto ambassador to the US.

The moves come after Tsai met the US House speaker during a stopover in LA.

The sanctions prohibit the targets and their family members from entering the mainland, Hong Kong and Macau, state media reported on Friday. They also prohibit investors and firms related to the targets from cooperating with mainland organisations and individuals.

Taiwan monitoring Chinese strike group off the coast after president meets US speaker

Read more

In August last year, China imposed sanctions on seven Taiwanese officials and lawmakers including Hsiao whom it accused of being “independence diehards” after then-US House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.

Beijing considers Taiwan to be Chinese territory, to be “reunified” by force if necessary. Tsai has said Taiwan is a sovereign nation and its future is up to its people to decide.

On Friday China’s Taiwan affairs office accused the US institutions and executives of “provid[ing] a platform and convenience for Tsai Ing-wen to engage in ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist activities”.

Hsiao Bi-khim, Taiwan’s de factor ambassador to the US. Photograph: Tyrone Siu/Reuters

It also announced “punishments” on a Taiwanese organisation, the Prospect Foundation, which counts former Taiwanese ministers and executives on its board, and the regional Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats, accusing them of having “gone all out to ingratiate themselves with anti-China forces”.

Chinese sanctions will have little practical impact on Hsiao as senior Taiwanese officials do not visit China, and Chinese courts do not have jurisdiction in Taiwan.

Wow, the PRC just sanctioned me again, for the second time. pic.twitter.com/vojvhFB5RK

— Bi-khim Hsiao 蕭美琴 (@bikhim) April 7, 2023

It is the latest move after China deployed People’s Liberation Army (PLA) warships through waters around Taiwan and vowed a “firm and forceful” response to Tsai meeting McCarthy.

China had repeatedly warned both sides that the meeting should not take place, and deployed an aircraft carrier strike group through waters south-east of Taiwan hours before the talks.

Asia’s arms race: potential flashpoints from Taiwan to the South China Sea

Read more

Three additional PLA warships, one fighter jet, and one ship-launched anti-submarine helicopter were detected near Taiwan inside its air defence identification zone on Thursday, Taiwan’s defence ministry said. A spokesman told the Guardian the ships were ones “that are normally around the Taiwan Strait”.

Japan’s ministry of defence also reported a Chinese intelligence gathering ship on Thursday, sailing between Japan’s Okinawa and Miyakojima islands, northeast of Taiwan. It also reported the return journey of a PLA Navy guided-missile frigate detected about 100km off Taiwan’s coast on Wednesday.

China also deployed coastguard vessels for unusual “board and inspect” patrols that triggered a protest from Taiwan. Taiwan’s defence ministry instructed Taiwanese vessels, including cargo and ferry services, not to cooperate with attempts by the patrol to board and inspect them.

The US called on China “to cease its military, diplomatic and economic pressure against Taiwan and instead engage in meaningful diplomacy”.

“We remain committed to maintaining open channels of communication so as to prevent the risk of any kind of miscalculation,” a state department spokesman, Vedant Patel, said on Thursday.

Tensions flared around the island last August, following a visit to the island by Pelosi. China then deployed warships, missiles and fighter jets into the waters and skies around Taiwan, its largest show of force in years.

Its response to the McCarthy meeting has so far been on a much lower level, but still left Taiwan on high alert.

Tsai said face-to-face meetings with US officials were important for “regional peace” and called on Beijing to remain calm.

“I also hope the Chinese side can exercise self-restraint and don’t overreact,” she said at a pre-departure press briefing in Los Angeles.

With Agence France-Presse and Reuters

The Guardian · by Helen Davidson · April 7, 2023

14. China’s military aims to launch 13,000 satellites to rival Elon Musk’s Starlink

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery....

China certainly sees the value of a Starlink like system. Do we?

China’s military aims to launch 13,000 satellites to rival Elon Musk’s Starlink

In the race for low-earth orbit dominance, Beijing is years behind SpaceX and worried about the threat to its national security

The Washington Post · by Cate Cadell · April 6, 2023

Chinese military researchers are calling for the rapid deployment of a national satellite network project to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink, over concerns that Elon Musk’s internet-beaming satellites pose a major national security threat to Beijing following their successful use in the Ukraine war.

Recent Chinese research papers and people familiar with the program say plans are underway to deploy a national mega-constellation of almost 13,000 low-orbit satellites, while military scientists are pursuing research on how to “suppress” or even damage Starlink satellites in wartime scenarios.

An opaque state-backed project — referred to in China’s satellite industry as “GW” or “Guowang,” which translates as “State Network” — first gained momentum in 2021 as a rival to the United States and other civilian internet satellite networks. But Chinese researchers in recent months have shared concerns in public research and privately with military officials that the project is lagging too far behind Starlink and should be fast-tracked after the SpaceX communications technology withstood practical tests in Ukraine.

“The Starlink constellation has finally shown its military colors in the Russia-Ukraine conflict,” said one Beijing academic familiar with the Chinese project.

“The focus now is to accelerate the development of China’s own constellation … and explore defensive measures against Starlink-type foreign satellites,” said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Chinese national security concerns over Starlink come amid an increasingly heated space race between Beijing and Washington, with both countries investing heavily in cutting-edge defensive technology and exploration missions — including competing efforts to put the first human on Mars.

Large low-earth internet satellite networks like Starlink and rival projects from Amazon and Boeing — which orbit between 300 and 1,200 miles above the Earth’s surface — are commercial ventures designed to provide broadband internet to areas that have low connectivity.

Musk’s SpaceX has more than 3,000 satellites currently in operation, with plans to eventually deploy about 42,000. The company has sent thousands of its Starlink terminals to Ukraine since the war began, and the service has become a critical tool for military communications.

But Starlink’s technological success on the battlefield has been dampened by its CEO’s political brinkmanship, including threats to stop providing communications services and a warning in February that Ukrainian troops were using the system for unauthorized offensive purposes. The company says its internet service was “never intended to be weaponized” and has taken steps to stop Ukraine from using it to power drones.

Over the past decade, the Pentagon has become increasingly reliant on the commercial space sector, using Musk’s reusable SpaceX launch vehicles to deploy top-secret defense satellites. In December, SpaceX announced an expansion of this work, unveiling a project called Starshield — separate from Starlink — that is oriented toward governments’ national security purposes. The announcement caused anxiety in Beijing, where researchers feared it could undermine the secrecy of China’s military programs.

“Once the Starshield is completed, it will be tantamount to installing networked surveillance cameras all over the world. At that time, military operations including the launch of ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles and fighter jets will hardly escape the monitoring of the United States,” said researchers from China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Space Engineering University in an article published on China’s official military news website in December.

SpaceX has not released any information suggesting the project will include these capabilities. Its public-facing website says the project will provide earth observation capabilities, communications and equipment to host unspecified payloads on its satellites.

SpaceX and the Chinese Embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.

While there is no evidence that commercial networks like Starlink are currently being used for the advanced surveillance purposes claimed by Chinese academics, they have proved their potential on the battlefield. Services such as Starlink have the ability to provide cheap, portable high-speed internet communications where other infrastructure has failed.

Analysts say that — in concert with commercial satellite imagery services such as Planet Labs and Maxar — Starlink can give troops near-instant information about what’s happening on the battlefield.

Troops in Ukraine say they have used it to live-stream drone feeds and to improve the accuracy of artillery fire, saving them ammunition. It has also allowed soldiers to stay in contact with friends and family.

“Like it or not, [Musk] helped us survive the most critical moments of war,” said Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in a tweet in October.

Meanwhile, China’s ambitions are hindered by technological hurdles and launch capacity. Researchers in Xian in central China last year conducted a successful test of a reusable rocket engine, but the technology lags behind SpaceX. A Chinese official told state media they expect to have their first reusable launch vehicle capable of taking off and landing vertically — similar to SpaceX rockets — by around 2025.

In 2021, Beijing announced a new firm, led by figures plucked from the country’s top state-owned aerospace groups, to oversee its low-earth orbit mega-constellation. The enterprise, called China Satellite Network Group Co. Ltd., is designed to consolidate early state and civilian satellite programs and speed up deployment of the national project, analysts and people familiar with the plans said.

A year earlier, China submitted a filing to the International Telecommunication Union — a U.N. agency responsible for setting standards in communication — outlining its intention to launch an initial 12,992 satellites on certain frequencies within an unspecified time frame.

It’s difficult to pinpoint how many satellites linked to the national project are currently in orbit because analysts say it’s likely that earlier efforts have been subsumed into the national plan, but various Chinese state and civilian programs have together launched a relatively small number — within the range of dozens. It’s also unlikely that they have the operational abilities of the newer models being deployed by Starlink.

But the Chinese trajectory is exponential.

“This year, there’s a fairly good chance China will launch a couple dozen low-earth orbit communications satellites. And next year they might launch a couple hundred,” said Blaine Curcio, founder of Orbital Gateway Consulting, which tracks the development of China’s satellite industry. “In five years, if you were to tell me that China has 2,000 low-earth orbit communications satellites in orbit, I would say that’s probably about the baseline.”

But China’s late entry to the market could also limit its access to open frequencies in low orbit. “In 2015 and 2016, when there was this kind of the low-earth orbit satellite spectrum gold rush, the Chinese just weren’t there,” Curcio said. “And so I think that’s going to be a hindrance to them. It creates a certain level of urgency.”

In a paper released in February, a research team at the PLA’s Space Engineering University accused the United States of seizing low-orbit resources, including frequencies, and said the rapid deployment of Starlink was a not just a commercial project, but a “competitive and strategic interest plan” by the U.S. government.

The researchers also described potential methods to disable Starlink satellites, should they be used in future U.S. military operations. “It is difficult to physically damage the Starlink constellation,” the article said, pointing to a potentially huge debris fields that an attack on satellites would create.

“Therefore, lasers, high-power microwaves … can be used to damage the reconnaissance payloads that may be carried by the Starlink satellites,” said the researchers, referring to what is known as “soft killing” a satellite by disabling its equipment without causing harmful debris. The Chinese military researchers also suggested “taking advantage” of potential weaknesses in Starlink’s internet services to conduct cyberattacks to “paralyze its communication network.”

The Beijing-based person familiar with the program said this sort of research is already “at a relatively sophisticated level. The bigger challenge is monitoring the operations of Starlink,” the person said. “The size of the constellation makes it difficult to understand its true purpose.”

While the program is relatively nascent, Beijing’s anxiety over Starlink offers insight into the tense China-U.S. space competition.

“If they’re talking about vulnerabilities of Starlink or Starshield, it’s because they know there are vulnerabilities that they’ve studied within their own systems,” said Martin Whelan, senior vice president of the Defense Systems Group at the Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded national nonprofit research and development center that provides analysis and technical expertise to U.S. space programs. “It does tell me, though, that they’re actively thinking about attacking a capability and denying a capability, which always makes our U.S. military nervous.”

Whelan said one of the biggest concerns in dealing with China’s growing space programs is its lack of communication. “The U.S. registers its satellites; the budgets are out there. You can read it all, but it’s less transparent on the Chinese side.”

It’s not the first time China has balked at the rapid deployment of Starlink satellites. In 2021, Beijing submitted a complaint to the United Nations, claiming it was forced to conduct evasive maneuvers on two occasions to avoid a collision between its space station and Starlink satellites, which led to fierce criticism of SpaceX and Elon Musk in China.

Musk is reportedly planning a visit to China this month to meet with top officials.

The Washington Post · by Cate Cadell · April 6, 2023

15. China moves warships after US hosts Taiwan's Tsai

​I am sure the 7th Fleet expected this. ​

China moves warships after US hosts Taiwan's Tsai

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-65160872

By Rupert Wingfield-Hayes

BBC News

China has launched military drills in response to a much-anticipated meeting between Taiwan's president Tsai Ing-wen and US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

They met in California on Wednesday, a week after President Tsai was feted in New York with a leadership award.

Ms Tsai hailed their "strong and unique partnership", and Mr McCarthy said that arms sales to Taiwan must continue.

Beijing, in turn, has vowed a "resolute response" and sent warships into the waters around the self-governed island.

Taiwan, it appears, is caught in the middle of a dangerous love triangle.

The timing of Ms Tsai's visit is hardly a coincidence. In the US there is deep and growing hostility to China. And this is driving ever more open displays of support for Taiwan, with Democrats and Republicans competing to out-do each other.

It's a big reason former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was so keen on landing in Taipei last summer, despite the fact that it set off a furious reaction from China. The self-governed island, which Beijing claims as part of its territory, is arguably the biggest flashpoint between the US and China.

"I was personally very opposed to the Pelosi visit," says professor William Stanton, former director of the American Institute in Taiwan. "For a high-level politician from the US to make a visit to the island was just poking China without much reward. And the consequences were quite scary."

Chinese missiles flew over the island as Beijing made blood-curdling threats. In capitals around the region governments began talking seriously about the timetable for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

Despite that, as soon as he was elected house speaker this January, Mr McCarthy, a Republican, declared his intention to follow Ms Pelosi's example. But President Tsai decided that was not a good idea, Prof Stanton says.

"I think it was quite clear that Kevin McCarthy wanted to pull a Pelosi," he says. "But Tsai Ing-wen said, 'no thank you, how about we have tea together in California instead'."

• China and Taiwan: A really simple guide
• Why young people in Taiwan are learning to fight
• Defiant Taiwan's identity is moving away from China

President Tsai may not want another contentious visit by a US leader to Taiwan just yet - but she also needs to show China that it will not succeed in shutting down contact between a democratically-elected government in Taipei and its most powerful ally in Washington.

And so, the meeting in California. Mr McCarthy has far from downplayed it, calling the meeting "bipartisan", despite China's warning that the US was "playing with fire on the Taiwan question".

Afterwards the White House said there was no need for Beijing to "overreact" to the meeting.

This so-called "transit diplomacy" is crucial for Taiwan, says Wen-Ti Sung, a political scientist at the Australian National University.

Over the years, China has successfully poached many of Taiwan's formal allies, whittling down the number of governments that recognise Taipei to just 13.

"These international visits match Taiwan society's needs for international recognition," Mr Sung says. "When there's an absence of international recognition, these other proxy indicators of international support are important to [the] Taiwanese."

IMAGE SOURCE,REUTERS

Image caption,

A small plane flew over the California venue towing a pro-Beijing banner

Meanwhile the Communist Party of China has mounted its own charm offensive, by inviting President Tsai's predecessor, Ma Ying-jeou, to tour the mainland.

Mr Ma went on an unprecedented five-city tour, ostensibly to pay homage to his ancestors. He has indeed visited their graves in central China. But the trip is also political. In fact, it's the first time a former president of Taiwan has ever been invited to the People's Republic of China since its founding in 1949.

"Beijing is trying to soften the tone towards Taiwan... winning more hearts and minds, and also avoiding a surge of Taiwanese nationalism during the [2024] presidential campaign," Mr Sung says.

Mr Ma's visit, he adds, provided the necessary "political cover" to do that.

When he landed in Nanjing last week, Mr Ma made a strikingly political speech: "The people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are Chinese. And both are descendants of the Yan and Yellow Emperors."

"Beijing is being nice to Ma Ying-jeou because he represents capitulation," Prof Stanton says. "He says 'we are all Chinese'. That's something he and the Chinese agree on, but it's not something the Taiwanese agree on."

The risk in Mr Ma's strategy is that more than 60% of Taiwan's residents, according to surveys, describe themselves as Taiwanese, and not Chinese.

But there could also be a reward waiting in the wings. Surveys show that more than half of Taiwan believes war with China is now likely. And Mr Ma's aim is to convince Taiwanese voters that only his party - the Kuomintang (KMT) - can avoid that war, Mr Sung says.

"It's about cementing his legacy as the bridge between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. And on a domestic political level Taiwan is starting its presidential campaign. The KMT argument is that we can bring peace with China."

IMAGE SOURCE,GETTY IMAGES

Image caption,

Mr Ma and his sisters visited the tomb of their grandfather during his trip to mainland China

But the elephant in the room is the deteriorating relationship between Taiwan's two suitors - Washington and Beijing. That relationship is worse today than at any time since the US and China officially recognised each other in 1979, says Bonnie Glaser, head of the Asia programme at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

"They [Beijing] are not taking calls from President Biden or the Pentagon. Congress has declared China an existential threat," she says.

For decades Washington has managed a rather delicate status quo, acknowledging, if not supporting, Beijing's position that there is only one Chinese government - the one on the mainland. It has maintained official ties with that government, and not Taiwan, since 1979. But it has also remained a steadfast ally to Taipei, guaranteeing to help the island defend itself.

But the fear is that China now believes that the US is set on changing the status quo which has helped keep the peace in the Taiwan Strait for the last 40-odd years.

"President Biden told Xi Jinping he is not using Taiwan as a weapon, that he does not support the separation of Taiwan from China," Ms Glaser says.

But such assurances are unlikely to amount to much in the wake of contentious state visits or official meetings with Taiwan's leaders, she adds.

So while Mr Ma tours China and Ms Tsai has tea in California, what Taiwan also needs is for Mr Xi to pick up the phone.

16. Is Taiwan in danger of being loved to death?

A charm offensive from Beijing?

Excerpts:

Meanwhile the Communist Party of China has mounted its own charm offensive, by inviting President Tsai's predecessor, Ma Ying-jeou, to tour the mainland.

Mr Ma went on an unprecedented five-city tour, ostensibly to pay homage to his ancestors. He has indeed visited their graves in central China. But the trip is also political. In fact, it's the first time a former president of Taiwan has ever been invited to the People's Republic of China since its founding in 1949.

"Beijing is trying to soften the tone towards Taiwan... winning more hearts and minds, and also avoiding a surge of Taiwanese nationalism during the [2024] presidential campaign," Mr Sung says.

Mr Ma's visit, he adds, provided the necessary "political cover" to do that.

Is Taiwan in danger of being loved to death?

BBC · by Menu

• Published
• 4 hours ago

Image source, Reuters,

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen was in New York to receive a leadership award

By Rupert Wingfield-Hayes

BBC News

Taiwan is caught in the middle of a dangerous love triangle.

Last week Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen was welcomed to New York. Now she's about to land in California, where she will be feted with a face-to-face meeting with the speaker of the US House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy.

The timing is hardly a coincidence. In the US there is deep and growing hostility to China. And this is driving ever more open displays of support for Taiwan, with Democrats and Republicans competing to out-do each other.

It's a big reason former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was so keen on landing in Taipei last summer, despite the fact that it set off a furious reaction from China. The self-governed island, which Beijing claims as part of its territory, is arguably the biggest flashpoint between the US and China.

"I was personally very opposed to the Pelosi visit," says professor William Stanton, former director of the American Institute in Taiwan. "For a high-level politician from the US to make a visit to the island was just poking China without much reward. And the consequences were quite scary."

Chinese missiles flew over the island as Beijing made blood-curdling threats. In capitals around the region governments began talking seriously about the timetable for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

Despite that, as soon as he was elected house speaker this January, Mr McCarthy, a Republican, declared his intention to follow Ms Pelosi's example. But President Tsai decided that was not a good idea, Prof Stanton says.

"I think it was quite clear that Kevin McCarthy wanted to pull a Pelosi," he says. "But Tsai Ing-wen said, 'no thank you, how about we have tea together in California instead'."

• Why young people in Taiwan are learning to fight
• Defiant Taiwan's identity is moving away from China

President Tsai may not want another contentious visit by a US leader to Taiwan just yet - but she also needs to show China that it will not succeed in shutting down contact between a democratically-elected government in Taipei and its most powerful ally in Washington.

And so, the meeting in California. Mr McCarthy has far from downplayed it, calling the meeting "bipartisan", despite China's warning that the US was "playing with fire on the Taiwan question".

This so-called "transit diplomacy" is crucial for Taiwan, says Wen-Ti Sung, a political scientist at the Australian National University.

Over the years, China has successfully poached many of Taiwan's formal allies, whittling down the number of governments that recognise Taipei to just 13.

"These international visits match Taiwan society's needs for international recognition," Mr Sung says. "When there's an absence of international recognition, these other proxy indicators of international support are important to [the] Taiwanese."

Image source, Getty Images

Image caption,

Former US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan enraged Beijing

Meanwhile the Communist Party of China has mounted its own charm offensive, by inviting President Tsai's predecessor, Ma Ying-jeou, to tour the mainland.

Mr Ma went on an unprecedented five-city tour, ostensibly to pay homage to his ancestors. He has indeed visited their graves in central China. But the trip is also political. In fact, it's the first time a former president of Taiwan has ever been invited to the People's Republic of China since its founding in 1949.

"Beijing is trying to soften the tone towards Taiwan... winning more hearts and minds, and also avoiding a surge of Taiwanese nationalism during the [2024] presidential campaign," Mr Sung says.

Mr Ma's visit, he adds, provided the necessary "political cover" to do that.

When he landed in Nanjing last week, Mr Ma made a strikingly political speech: "The people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are Chinese. And both are descendants of the Yan and Yellow Emperors."

"Beijing is being nice to Ma Ying-jeou because he represents capitulation," Prof Stanton says. "He says 'we are all Chinese'. That's something he and the Chinese agree on, but it's not something the Taiwanese agree on."

The risk in Mr Ma's strategy is that more than 60% of Taiwan's residents, according to surveys, describe themselves as Taiwanese, and not Chinese.

But there could also be a reward waiting in the wings. Surveys show that more than half of Taiwan believes war with China is now likely. And Mr Ma's aim is to convince Taiwanese voters that only his party - the Kuomintang (KMT) - can avoid that war, Mr Sung says.

"It's about cementing his legacy as the bridge between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. And on a domestic political level Taiwan is starting its presidential campaign. The KMT argument is that we can bring peace with China."

Image source, Getty Images

Image caption,

Mr Ma and his sisters visited the tomb of their grandfather during his trip to mainland China

But the elephant in the room is the deteriorating relationship between Taiwan's two suitors - Washington and Beijing. That relationship is worse today than at any time since the US and China officially recognised each other in 1979, says Bonnie Glaser, head of the Asia programme at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

"They [Beijing] are not taking calls from President Biden or the Pentagon. Congress has declared China an existential threat," she says.

For decades Washington has managed a rather delicate status quo, acknowledging, if not supporting, Beijing's position that there is only one Chinese government - the one on the mainland. It has maintained official ties with that government, and not Taiwan, since 1979. But it has also remained a steadfast ally to Taipei, guaranteeing to help the island defend itself.

But the fear is that China now believes that the US is set on changing the status quo which has helped keep the peace in the Taiwan Strait for the last 40-odd years.

"President Biden told Xi Jinping he is not using Taiwan as a weapon, that he does not support the separation of Taiwan from China," Ms Glaser says.

But such assurances are unlikely to amount to much in the wake of contentious state visits or official meetings with Taiwan's leaders, she adds.

So while Mr Ma tours China and Ms Tsai has tea in California, what Taiwan also needs is for Mr Xi to pick up the phone.

BBC · by Menu

17. The United States’ Proposal on Prosecuting Russians for the Crime of Aggression Against Ukraine is a Step in the Right Direction

The United States’ Proposal on Prosecuting Russians for the Crime of Aggression Against Ukraine is a Step in the Right Direction

justsecurity.org · by Michael Scharf, Paul R. Williams, Yvonne Dutton, Milena Sterio · April 6, 2023

April 6, 2023

The International Criminal Court (ICC) recently issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes committed in the abduction of Ukrainian children and their transfer to Russia for adoption by Russian parents. Unfortunately, because of the way the 2010 Aggression Amendment to the Rome Statute is drafted, the ICC cannot prosecute Putin for the crime of aggression. The European Parliament, nongovernmental organizations, academics, and members of the United Nations have made various proposals to create a tribunal to prosecute Russian aggression to fill the gap in the ICC’s jurisdiction. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he favors a hybrid tribunal established by a vote of the U.N. General Assembly.

Last July, the Public International Law and Policy Group (PILPG) made one such proposal in the form of model legislation to establish a Ukraine High Court for War Crimes, which we discussed in Opinio Juris. The model legislation – which PILPG developed in partnership with Ukrainian and international experts, including the law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges – would create an “internationalized” domestic court modelled on the existing High Anti-Corruption Court of Ukraine to prosecute high-level cases of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and aggression.

For over a year, the United States appeared skeptical about efforts to address the crime of aggression. But on Mar. 27, U.S. Ambassador for Global Criminal Justice, Beth Van Schaack, announced that the United States supports the creation of an internationalized domestic court in Ukraine to prosecute the Russian crime of aggression. The U.S. proposal hues closely to the model set forth last summer by PILPG and its partners.

Following Ambassador Van Schaack’s announcement, Professor Rebecca Hamilton wrote an essay critiquing the U.S. plan in Just Security. The essay described two downsides to an internationalized domestic tribunal, which we would like to specifically address here.

The Ukrainian Constitution is Not an Insurmountable Obstacle

First, Article 125 of the Ukraine Constitution prohibits the establishment of “special and extraordinary tribunals.” Ukraine judicial experts have explained to us that this provision is intended to prohibit temporary courts created by executive authority. The prohibition would not likely apply to an internationalized domestic court like the United States is suggesting if created through the normal legislative processes. In 2018, Ukraine established the High Anti-Corruption Court, which includes international advisers of the type envisioned by internationalized tribunal dedicated to prosecuting the crime of aggression against Ukraine. Ukraine could presumably use the same model and legal pathway to create an internationalized tribunal without running afoul of its Constitution.

While Ukraine is fairly unique in its prohibition of special and extraordinary tribunals, it is worth noting there are ample comparative state practice precedents for creating internationalized domestic courts throughout the globe, including the Regulation 64 Panels of Kosovo, the War Crimes Chamber of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Special Department for Adjudicating Trials Against Perpetrators of War Crimes of the Belgrade District Court, and the Iraqi High Court, whose prosecutors were assisted by U.S. Department of Justice attorneys, whose defense counsel were foreign attorneys, and whose judges were assisted by foreign judges associated with the International Bar Association.

Head of State Immunity Would Not Block All Prosecutions for Those Responsible for the Crime of Aggression

Second, there is concern that, unlike a hybrid tribunal created through an agreement between Ukraine and the United Nations General Assembly, an internationalized domestic tribunal would not be able to prosecute the two Russian leaders who may be most responsible for the Russian Aggression – President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov – under existing International Court of Justice (ICJ) precedent regarding domestic prosecution of heads of state and foreign affairs ministers. But in announcing the new U.S. policy, Ambassador Van Schaack pointed out that an internationalized domestic court could nevertheless prosecute others responsible for the planning and execution of the crime of aggression against Ukraine. Such persons might include certain members of the Russian parliament, the Minister of Defense, and the Chiefs of the General Staff. Even if Putin and Lavrov are out of reach, an indictment of such persons for the crime of aggression could be an important symbolic and strategic development.

Moreover, head of state immunity is a complex legal doctrine and its contours have never been fully tested against a sitting head of state. In the Belgium Arrest Warrant case, the ICJ stated that head of state immunity does not apply to proceedings before international courts. What makes a court international enough for this purpose remains an open question. While Ambassador Van Schaack said the United States did not favor an effort to obtain an initial authorization from the United Nations General Assembly because of difficulties in obtaining a sufficiently large majority vote, in response to evolving events on the ground it is plausible that U.N. politics will make it possible to get a General Assembly endorsement after the Court is established, which along with imbedded international advisers might render the institution international enough to pierce head of state immunity under the precedent of the Special Court for Sierra Leone.

In addition, if Putin and Lavrov one day relinquish their positions, they could potentially be tried by an internationalized domestic court since their personal immunity (ratione personae) ends when they leave office, and functional immunity (ratione materiae) may not apply to the crime of aggression. In 1999, the U.K. House of Lords ruled that former Chilian President Augusto Pinochet was not immune from prosecution for the international crime of torture. With no precedent on the application of head of state immunity to former leaders accused of the crime of aggression, it is possible that a former President Putin or a former Foreign Minister Lavrov could be prosecuted in an internationalized domestic court once out of office.

Ambassador Van Schaak’s announcement was a game changer. As documented in Michael Scharf’s article in the Harvard Journal of International Law, since the conclusion of the Nuremberg trials, the United States had opposed the creation of an international court with jurisdiction over the crime of aggression as well as the use of universal jurisdiction to prosecute the crime in domestic courts. Whatever shape an aggression tribunal ultimately takes, we applaud the new U.S. position which is likely to generate momentum for the prosecution of Russia’s crime of aggression against Ukraine.

IMAGE: From left, Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice Beth Van Schaack, State Department interim spokesman Vedant Patel, Acting Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, and Coordinator for Global Democratic Renewal Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights Erin Barclay, listens as Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks at a briefing on the 2022 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices at the State Department in Washington, Monday, March 20, 2023. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

justsecurity.org · by Michael Scharf, Paul R. Williams, Yvonne Dutton, Milena Sterio · April 6, 2023

18. Marine Raiders - History and Legacy | SOF News

Marine Raiders - History and Legacy | SOF News

sof.news · by DVIDS · April 7, 2023

Story by Cpl. Henry Rodriguez II.

During its 17th anniversary on Feb. 24, 2023, Marine Forces Special Operations Command and the Marine Raiders that fill its ranks celebrated a history and legacy that extends beyond the most recent years as a service component under U.S. Special Operations Command.

Dating back to Feb. 16, 1942, with the establishment of 1st Raider Battalion in World War II, Marines consistently participated in and shaped special operations. 1st Raider Battalion, along with 2nd, 3rd and 4th Raider Battalions, proved essential in the Pacific theater providing a unique skillset and operational capability that differed from conventional Marine units at the time. Even with the success of the Marine Raiders during WWII, 4th Marines, 6th Marine Division assumed command of the four Raider battalions and aligned them to a more conventional mission in February 1944.

While Marines assisted or participated in special operations in various capacities throughout the next 60 years, the Marine Corps would not establish a dedicated special operations unit until after 9/11. Up until that time though, Marine Force Reconnaissance and the innovations of units such as Marine Corps Test Unit 1, which developed specialized tactics and techniques including employment concepts for relatively new rotary-wing aviation, carried on the legacy of the Marine Raiders.

Once the Global War on Terrorism began, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld directed the creation of a Marine Corps component in SOCOM. This began with Detachment One, a pilot program made up of predominately Force Reconnaissance Marines and support staff who operated alongside Navy SEALs from Naval Special Warfare Group One.

Following Det One’s successes in Iraq, the Marine Corps officially activated MARSOC on Feb. 24, 2006. The 2,500-person command, pulled largely from Force Reconnaissance units on both coasts and deployed its first units within six months of its creation. MARSOC would later expand and redesignate its units as Marine Raiders in honor of its WWII heritage.

“The unconquerable spirit of our people builds on the foundation and legacy of Marines throughout our history,” said Maj. Gen. Matthew Trollinger, MARSOC Commander. “Our Marine Corps and Marine Raider heritage shapes the way we attack unique problems with novel and innovative approaches grounded in our ties to the littorals and expeditionary, amphibious operations.”

Moving forward while honoring the legacy of the Marine Raiders of the past, MARSOC remains focused on achieving success. As the 21st century battlefield rapidly evolves and the need for multi-domain special operations capabilities increases in an ever-changing global landscape, the command continues to adapt to meet new threats.

“Looking to the future,” stated Trollinger, “MARSOC will pursue strategic shaping and reconnaissance in the littorals; experiment, innovate, and evolve faster than adversary comprehension and adaptation; and create a more capable, professional, and effective force to fight and win around the globe if required.”

Prioritizing SSR in the littorals will ensure that MARSOC achieves success across the joint, interagency, intergovernmental, and multinational environment. By developing

special operations elements to conduct activities to gain awareness of adversary intentions and capabilities, Marine Raiders will deter, disrupt, or increase current and future adversary risk.

At the core of MARSOC’s SSR focus stands capable Marine Raiders able to outmaneuver adversary forces by employing a range of skillsets. These skillsets, when employed by special operations officers, critical skills operators, special operations capability specialists, and the many servicemembers and civilians which comprise the command, exponentially increase unit performance as the demands of SSR transform MARSOC into a littoral special operations force of the future.

“Each and every person in MARSOC contributes to our Marine Raider legacy by bringing diverse experiences and skillsets that contribute to solving today’s challenges and tomorrow’s problems,” concluded Trollinger. “We remain focused on our role in shaping that future as a highly motivated team committed to providing high-performing Marine special operations forces to achieve global mission success.”

**********

This story by Cpl Henry Rodriguez II of Maraine Forces, Special Operations Command was first published on March 30, 2023 by the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service. DVIDS content is in the public domain.

Photo: Marine Raiders rehearse advanced military free fall jumps at Camp Lejeune, N.C., Sept. 1, 2021. Military free fall sustainment training is necessary for a Marine special operations team to stay proficient and ready at all times for future operations. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Ethan Green)

sof.news · by DVIDS · April 7, 2023

19. Will Finland’s NATO Accession Make a Difference?

:-) 

Will Finland’s NATO Accession Make a Difference?

One of the alliance’s long-awaited new members has joined, but it won’t necessarily bring Europe closer to strategic autonomy.

By Emma Ashford, a columnist at Foreign Policy and a senior fellow with the Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy program at the Stimson Center, and Matthew Kroenig, a columnist at Foreign Policy and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

Foreign Policy · by Emma Ashford, Matthew Kroenig · April 7, 2023

Emma Ashford: Hey, Matt! So, I have a delicate question for you: Have you ever been found naked in the basement of a European embassy?

Matthew Kroenig: Not the way I was expecting to start today’s column! Please say more.

EA: Well, based on this story about the Finnish Embassy’s sauna diplomacy, I’m beginning to wonder if a certain Finnish tradition may have contributed to their newly minted NATO membership.

MK: I have not been to that one (still waiting for my invitation, Ambassador Hautala), but I did go to one in Helsinki where the practice was to go back and forth between the steamy hot room and then jump in the Baltic Sea—in November. The transition was a true shock to the system.

I also learned there are more saunas than people in Finland, they pronounce it sa-oo-na, and that there is a new one just installed in NATO’s headquarters. I can’t think of a better way to jolt the body to attention in order to defend the free world!

So, maybe it is their secret diplomatic weapon.

EA: Sounds delightful! So, I guess we should start the column by welcoming new allies—and their relaxing sauna facilities—to the NATO alliance. That has to be the fastest accession on record; they only applied to join following last year’s Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Is Finnish accession a win for NATO? Or just another example of the alliance’s already dysfunctional decision-making? After all, it hasn’t been a smooth process. It was originally a joint accession plan by Finland and Sweden, but the Swedes have been unable to get across the finish line. Maybe it was just sauna diplomacy that did the trick again; after all, the Turks are also famous for their hammam baths. But it sure seems as if this is at best a partial success.

MK: I think it is clearly a major win. As my colleague John Deni wrote, this is the biggest boost to NATO capacity since West Germany joined the alliance in 1955. Finland has a capable military and effectively fought Russia to a draw in its Winter War of 1939-40. It has a military force that can rise to more than 280,000 personnel with reservists called up. It recently purchased 64 F-35 fighters. It is one of the world’s technology leaders, including in 5G.

The geography is also critical. Defending the Baltic countries in the past would have required flowing forces through the narrow Suwalki corridor. Now, the alliance can also project power south from Finland. Once Sweden joins, which should happen soon, the Baltic Sea becomes a NATO lake.

Finally, there is the broader strategic message. Russian President Vladimir Putin went to war to keep a country out of NATO and to divide the alliance. Instead, the alliance is stronger than ever with a very capable new member and another one likely on the way.

What is not to like?

EA: It’s certainly a black eye for Putin, who has wasted so much military strength and political capital in his invasion of Ukraine that he cannot even prevent his nearest neighbor from joining NATO. But the purpose of NATO is not to annoy Putin, as enjoyable as that might be.

And you’re right that the Finns are militarily capable; they have long prioritized territorial self-defense as a key component of their policy of neutrality. Although I don’t think I’d call the Winter War a draw between Finland and the Soviets—since it required the country to adopt a stance of neutrality during the Cold War—Finland did hold off the much larger Soviet army and saved itself from annexation.

The Finns spend a reasonable amount on defense and appear to be focused on maintaining that self-reliant defense within NATO. Honestly, the rest of Eastern Europe could learn a lot from the Finns about how to defend themselves without outsourcing their security to the United States.

Finland has never had significant allies. No one intervened to help the country during the Winter War, and it spent the entirety of the Cold War with active conscription, a heavily armed and trained population, and a strong focus on civil defense to deter the Soviets. If more of Eastern Europe embraced that philosophy rather than just relying on Uncle Sam to protect them, it would be a windfall for allied security.

But that doesn’t mean Finnish membership in NATO is a slam dunk. What about the border issue? NATO has just doubled the length of its land border with Russia. That’s not a strategic win.

Read More

Finnish President Sauli Niinisto signs Finland's national NATO legislation in Helsinki.

Finland’s ‘NATO Option’ Set to Become Reality

Putin’s war in Ukraine is about to add 800 miles to his headaches.

Latvian President Egils Levits, Slovakian President Zuzana Caputova, U.S. President Joe Biden, Polish President Andrzej Duda, and other participants leave the podium after posing for a group photo in Warsaw.

Ukraine Has Shifted Europe’s East-West Fault Line

Eastern Europe is in the driver’s seat. The West should buckle up.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping make a toast at the Kremlin in Moscow on March 21.

China’s ‘Peace Plan’ for Ukraine Isn’t About Peace

Beijing’s diplomatic overture has three ulterior motives.

MK: Admittedly, the alliance will need to defend NATO’s new, longer border with Russia. But Finland has basically demonstrated the ability to do that largely on its own. I understand that NATO is already incorporating Finland into the alliance’s new regional military plans. Moreover, with Putin’s difficulties in Ukraine, I don’t think he is looking to attack a NATO ally anytime soon. If you need further evidence, just look at the different responses to the news: NATO leaders were celebrating this week, while Putin was complaining.

So, on balance, I think this is a good thing. Do you disagree?

EA: As I wrote last year, I’m honestly ambivalent about adding Finland to NATO, given how militarily capable the nation is—and how integrated it already was with other European states through the European Union and through various Scandinavian and Baltic initiatives. I oppose further NATO expansion in general. The alliance is already too large and unwieldy, too dependent on U.S. resources, and the remaining potential candidates for membership all have serious problems, like territorial disputes within their borders. But Finland is not Ukraine or Georgia, and there are far fewer downsides. By far the biggest of those is the territorial issue.

But I think you’re highlighting another problem here. NATO leaders were celebrating this week, but as usual, they were celebrating expansion and not actually focusing on solving the alliance’s real problems.

No one should expect Finland to show up and fix all of NATO’s issues; that would be pretty unfair to the Finns! But it’s obvious that this expansion is mostly a distraction from NATO’s broader problems: internal dissension on key issues, an overreliance on U.S. forces, and increasingly tenuous extended deterrent commitments in Eastern Europe. It doesn’t seem as if leaders have a good plan to address any of those.

MK: Well, we should debate Ukraine in NATO in a future column. What the alliance says about that topic will be an issue at the upcoming NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania.

The alliance is more unified now than in recent memory; a major war in Europe clarifies the mind.

But I don’t agree that NATO has so many problems. The alliance is more unified now than in recent memory; a major war in Europe clarifies the mind. Non-U.S. NATO allies do need to do more, but they are moving in that direction, with Germany, Poland, and other large member states announcing defense spending increases. The new regional military plans announced after the Madrid summit last summer will apparently carve out more concrete roles for each member to play in the defense of Europe.

And what do you mean that the extended deterrence commitments are tenuous? If you look at the list of countries banging down the door to get in, it seems that they are not too worried about the credibility of the alliance’s commitments.

EA: As you know, NATO’s Cold War strategy was based on extended nuclear deterrence: the idea that if the Soviets invaded Western Europe, the United States would use nuclear weapons in response. The problem, of course, was the credibility of that commitment and whether the United States would be willing to suffer the consequences. As French leader Charles de Gaulle once memorably put it, would American voters be willing to trade New York for Paris?

During the Cold War, with Europe divided and with the risk that the Soviets could entirely overrun the continent with conventional forces, it was a mostly credible commitment, one that thankfully was never called into question. But today, NATO has expanded thousands of miles farther east to countries that have no concrete strategic value to the United States. Would U.S. voters be willing to risk nuclear war over Helsinki or Estonia’s capital of Tallinn? I think that’s a much more tenuous commitment. You’re not concerned about that?

MK: Well, it was always tenuous, as you point out. But extended deterrence has basically worked without a major failure for 70 years. I wish I could say the same about other aspects of U.S. security policy.

So, I am not too worried, but I do think the West needs to adapt NATO’s nuclear deterrence posture for a new era. NATO’s current nuclear posture (about 200 U.S. gravity bombs in Europe with several allies possessing dual-capable aircraft) was designed at the end of the Cold War. The world is in a very different strategic environment today, and the posture should adapt.

I am always happy to discuss nukes, but I am also interested in your take on the elections in Finland. Will the change of government affect Helsinki’s foreign policy?

EA: Nope. Large majorities of Finns supported the NATO decision; outgoing Prime Minister Sanna Marin lost primarily on domestic issues. Her key opponent ran mostly on economic issues like taxation and cuts to welfare benefits. The only real surprise is that Finland’s far-right anti-immigration and anti-EU party may be included in the final coalition government—and that just mirrors a trend we’ve been seeing across Europe.

But I’m not letting you off this easily. We need to talk about the other big problem with NATO: The major European defense reforms that were promised in the last year have stalled. The policy divisions in Europe—particularly between Eastern and Western Europe—have only gotten worse. And many policymakers in Europe almost seem to have given up on defense reform or building up Europe’s defense industrial base. A year after Germany’s so-called Zeitenwende, it’s just the same old, same old in European security, while the United States foots the bill.

MK: Europe is a big place. Let’s get specific. The center of gravity in NATO has moved to the North and the East, and the Nordic and Baltic countries are serious about the threats the world faces, and—

EA: What does that mean, though? I keep hearing people say “the center of gravity has shifted” in Europe, and it honestly just seems as if the Eastern European states are now louder and more insistent. It certainly doesn’t mean actual military power has shifted.

MK: I mean it in the Clausewitzian sense. During the Cold War, Germany was the center of gravity for any major war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. That is no longer true. If there is going to be a major fight between NATO and Russia, which countries matter most? I would say Sweden, Finland, Poland, Lithuania, Romania, etc.

Moreover, look at some of the other major economic powers in NATO. The U.K. and Italy’s conservative government also seem to be on the same page in terms of supporting Ukraine and defeating Russia. Even though some wrongly assumed Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (in a coalition that includes Silvio Berlusconi and Matteo Salvini) would have an affinity for Putin, she has turned out to be a strong supporter of the trans-Atlantic alliance.

So, I would love it if France and Germany played a more active role in the defense of Europe. But if you want to understand European defense policy today, Paris and Berlin simply do not matter as much as they used to.

EA: That’s true geographically. But European defense policy, sadly, is not made between smaller groupings of states but rather between NATO members or under the auspices of the European Union. And reforms on things like joint procurement, improvements to the defense industrial base, or Europe’s excessive reliance on U.S. arms and equipment have all gone nowhere. Eastern European countries are going around French and German arms manufacturers to the United States, arguing that they need to restock sooner, and the United States is enabling them by lobbying for U.S. companies to play a bigger role in these purchases.

If you want to reform any of those things, you need the United States to get out of the way, and you need Europe’s biggest economies on board. That means support in Berlin and Paris.

States in Eastern Europe are now leading on defense, but it’s only because the United States continues to carry most of the practical burden for them.

The end result of expansion and a lack of reform in NATO is this: We may say that the center of gravity has shifted in Europe and that states in Eastern Europe are now leading on defense, but it’s only because the United States continues to carry most of the practical burden for them. Without U.S. forces on the ground, I suspect those states wouldn’t be nearly as dismissive of German or French leaders. The United States is reinforcing Europe’s defense pathologies—and doing so at the expense of its own security needs elsewhere.

MK: I was about to debate you on the specifics because I do think NATO is reforming on many of the areas you mentioned, but I now see this really comes down to first principles.

My vision for the future of European defense is a strong trans-Atlantic alliance, with European allies doing more, led by an engaged and present United States.

I believe your vision is “strategic autonomy”: Europe doing more so the United States can exit. If that is correct, then I agree that recent developments have not gone your way.

EA: Yes, it’s very depressing. I don’t necessarily think that Europe needs strategic autonomy as much as it needs to dramatically increase its military capacity and capabilities (although the two are likely to go hand in hand). But it seems as if there has been little progress on either, despite the events of the last year.

OK, one more thing before we wrap up: We haven’t mentioned Sweden at all, even though the initial membership application was a joint application from Finland and Sweden. I think we need to address the Turkey factor in all of this. It seems as if this process has really highlighted that there are some big internal divisions within the alliance, and Turkey (and to a lesser extent Hungary) is the most blatant case.

MK: We’ll see. I think this is more about domestic politics for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Sweden’s freedoms allow the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to operate there, and bashing the PKK and its perceived protectors in Stockholm is understandably good politics in Turkey. But the best Turkey experts I know still think Erdogan (or his successor, if he loses and concedes the presidential election in May) will approve Sweden’s membership after the election.

I hope they are right.

EA: We’ll see! I hope the Swedes have thought about what they’ll bring to the NATO welcoming party. Finland’s new NATO sauna will be a tough act to follow.

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Foreign Policy · by Emma Ashford, Matthew Kroenig · April 7, 2023

20. Ukraine War Plans Leak Prompts Pentagon Investigation

Whoa.

A lot to parse here. Who leaked them? But also note the possible modifications for disinformation.

I doubt that getting them taken down is going to have any effect. The documents are out in the wild and what has been seen cannot be unseen.

Excerpts:

The Pentagon is investigating who may have been behind the leak of the documents, which appeared on Twitter and on Telegram, a platform with more than half a billion users that is widely available in Russia.

Military analysts said the documents appear to have been modified in certain parts from their original format, overstating American estimates of Ukrainian war dead and understating estimates of Russian troops killed.

The modifications could point to an effort of disinformation by Moscow, the analysts said. But the disclosures in the original documents, which appear as photographs of charts of anticipated weapons deliveries, troop and battalion strengths, and plans, represents a significant breach of American intelligence in the effort to aid Ukraine.

Biden officials were working to get them deleted but had not, as of Thursday evening, succeeded.

Ukraine War Plans Leak Prompts Pentagon Investigation

By Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt

April 6, 2023

The New York Times · by Eric Schmitt · April 6, 2023

Classified documents detailing secret American and NATO plans have appeared on Twitter and Telegram.

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The leak documents do not provide specific battle plans but they offer a snapshot of time — the American and Ukrainian view, as of March 1, of what Ukrainian troops might need for the campaign.Credit...Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times

April 6, 2023, 6:23 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON — Classified war documents detailing secret American and NATO plans for building up the Ukrainian military ahead of a planned offensive against Russia were posted this week on social media channels, senior Biden administration officials said.

The Pentagon is investigating who may have been behind the leak of the documents, which appeared on Twitter and on Telegram, a platform with more than half a billion users that is widely available in Russia.

Military analysts said the documents appear to have been modified in certain parts from their original format, overstating American estimates of Ukrainian war dead and understating estimates of Russian troops killed.

The modifications could point to an effort of disinformation by Moscow, the analysts said. But the disclosures in the original documents, which appear as photographs of charts of anticipated weapons deliveries, troop and battalion strengths, and plans, represents a significant breach of American intelligence in the effort to aid Ukraine.

Biden officials were working to get them deleted but had not, as of Thursday evening, succeeded.

“We are aware of the reports of social media posts and the department is reviewing the matter,” said Sabrina Singh, the deputy press secretary at the Pentagon.

The State of the War

• China Under the Spotlight: Beijing’s role in pressing Russia to end the war in Ukraine was expected to be a main topic of discussion during a three-day trip to China by Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission.
• Zelensky in Poland: On his first official visit to Poland, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine won strong backing from Polish leaders for his country’s rapid entry into NATO and signed a deal paving the way for the joint production of arms and ammunition.
• Finland’s Entry to NATO: The Nordic country officially became the military alliance’s 31st member, in what amounts to a strategic defeat for President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
• Drone Warfare: Using aerial drones to spot the enemy and direct artillery fire has become a staple of war for Ukraine and Russia, especially in the fiercely contested city of Bakhmut.

The documents do not provide specific battle plans, like how, when, and where Ukraine intends to launch its offensive. And because the documents are five weeks old, they offer a snapshot of time — the American and Ukrainian view, as of March 1, of what Ukrainian troops might need for the campaign.

To the trained eye of a Russian war planner, field general or intelligence analyst, however, the documents no doubt offer many tantalizing clues. The documents mention, for instance, the expenditure rate of HIMARS — American-supplied high mobility artillery rocket systems, which can launch attacks against targets like ammunition dumps, infrastructure and concentrations of troops, from a distance. The Pentagon has not said publicly how fast Ukrainian troops are using the HIMARs munitions; the documents do.

It was unclear how the documents ended up on social media. But pro-Russian government channels have been sharing and circulating the briefing slides, military analysts said.

The analysts warned that documents released by Russian sources could be selectively altered to present the Kremlin’s disinformation.

“Whether these documents are authentic or not, people should take care with anything released by Russian sources,” said Michael Kofman, the director of Russian studies at CNA, a research institute in Arlington, Va.

One of the slides said 16,000 to 17,500 Russian soldiers had been killed while Ukraine had suffered as many as 71,500 troop deaths. The Pentagon and other analysts have estimated that Russia has suffered far more casualties, and that closer to 200,000 soldiers on each side had been killed or wounded.

Nonetheless, analysts said parts of the documents appeared authentic and provide Russia with valuable information such as the timetables for the delivery of weapons and troops, Ukrainian troop buildup numbers and other military details.

A document labeled “top secret” offers the “Status of the Conflict as of 1 Mar.” On that day, Ukrainian officials were at an American base in Weisbaden, Germany, for war game sessions, and a day later, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Christopher Cavoli, the supreme allied commander for Europe, visited the sessions.

Another document includes columns that list Ukrainian troop units, equipment and training, with schedules for January through April. The document contains a summary of 12 combat brigades that are being assembled, with nine of them apparently being trained and supplied by the United States and other NATO allies. Of those nine brigades, the documents said that six would be ready by March 31 and the rest by April 30. A Ukrainian brigade has about 4,000 to 5,000 soldiers, analysts said.

The document said that equipment delivery times would impact training and readiness in order to meet the timeline. Total equipment needed for nine brigades, the document said, was more than 250 tanks and more than 350 mechanized vehicles.

The leak is the first Russian intelligence breakthrough that has been made public since the war began. Throughout the war, the United States has provided Ukraine with information on command posts, ammunition depots and other key nodes in the Russian military lines. Such real-time intelligence has allowed the Ukrainians to target Russian forces, kill senior generals and force ammunition supplies to be moved farther from the Russian front lines, though U.S. officials say Ukraine has played the decisive role in planning and execution of those strikes.

But early on during the war, Ukrainian officials were hesitant about sharing their battle plans with the United States, for fear of leaks, American and European officials said. As recently as last summer, American intelligence officials said they often had a better understanding of Russia’s military plans than of Ukraine’s.

The intelligence sharing between Ukraine and the United States loosened up considerably last fall, and the two countries have been working closely on options for a Ukrainian offensive.

Thomas Gibbons-Neff contributed reporting.

The New York Times · by Eric Schmitt · April 6, 2023​

21. Zelensky strikes back

Channeling Colin Powell. His was one of the best operational briefs of all time.

Note this first line of the excerpt, We should reflect on that.

“The Ukraine General Staff is more creative than the Pentagon,” Hodges argues. “Liberate Crimea, the decisive terrain, and watch Russian defenses collapse elsewhere.”

Russia has concentrated much of its defensive forces in areas where a Ukrainian strike could cut supply lines and isolate its forces, such as the city of Melitopol in Kherson province, which sits along a crucial railway route and is bisected by two major highways.

But Russia can’t know exactly where Ukraine will strike, and it can’t perfectly defend an almost 800-mile front.

“Ukraine’s Army will regain additional ground, but the spring offensive won't be a 'war winner,’” predicts Hertling, who says he has a few ideas of specific things Ukraine could do to increase its chances for success. But he said, “I ain't sharing.” At least not on Twitter.

Zelensky strikes back

by Jamie McIntyre, Senior Writer |  April 06, 2023 11:42 PM

Washington Examiner · April 7, 2023

''Our strategy to go after this army is very, very simple. First, we're going to cut it off, and then we're going to kill it.”

The words of Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell one week into the 1991 Iraq War, dubbed Operation Desert Storm.

PENTAGON ANNOUNCES $2.6 BILLION UKRAINE MILITARY AID PACKAGE

Ukraine’s strategy for its planned counteroffensive against the Russian invasion force might be similarly summarized as: “First, we're going to cut it off, and then we'll watch it die.”

Ukraine faces a daunting task, dislodging and defeating several hundred thousand entrenched Russian troops who have spent six months digging hundreds of miles of trenches and erecting all manner of tank traps along more than 745 miles of front lines.

In more than a year of war, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military has suffered a series of battlefield humiliations and lost more than 200,000 troops, either killed or wounded.

Russian troops are downtrodden and dispirited, poorly led, treated, trained, and equipped, but they will be on defense, and Putin need only hold the territory he now occupies to eke out the semblance of a win.

On the other hand, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky believes only total victory, defined as the expulsion of Russian forces from every inch of Ukraine, will ensure his nation’s security in the short term. And more permanently by securing membership in NATO, which can’t happen while the country is divided.

It’s no secret Ukraine will soon strike back. But while its broad objectives are clear, the Ukrainian General Staff hopes its war plan will take Russia by surprise.

Most Western military experts agree that, at the minimum, Ukraine needs to break through Russian lines and cut the so-called land bridge between the eastern Donbas region and Russian-occupied Crimea to the south, isolating pockets of Russian troops and cutting supply lines.

There are some who believe the capture of Crimea, illegally annexed by Russia in 2014, is also a real possibility.

Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, is not among them.

“I think that's a very high bar,” Milley said earlier this year. “I think, from a military standpoint only, that would be extraordinarily difficult to achieve militarily this year. What is achievable, I think, is significant liberation of Ukrainian territory.”

While a mercenary army of the Russian Wagner Group has been bogged down for months trying to take the eastern Donbas town of Bakhmut and taking horrific losses of up to 30,000 troops, Ukraine, with Western help, has been slowly building its counterstrike force.

“Our focus is on supporting the Ukrainians to change the dynamic on the ground,” said a senior defense official briefing Pentagon reporters this month. “We have marshaled commitments of important armor capabilities to enhance Ukraine's ability to conduct complex maneuvers.”

But the dogged defense of Bakhmut has also come at the cost of heavy casualties among its war-weary fighters, including the loss of some of its most battle-tested soldiers and experienced commanders.

Some in the West have urged Zelensky to give up defending what is left of the bombed-out mining town to save his forces for the coming showdown. But the former comedian has proven to be a wily wartime commander who judged the need to attrit Russian forces and deny Putin a symbolic victory as an equal priority.

“I actually think it was the right decision,” said retired Adm. William McRaven, the former head of the U.S. Special Operations Command, on CNN.

“What Zelensky looked at was, look, if we lose Bakhmut, it plays into Putin's narrative that the Russians are winning," McRaven said. "It will bolster Russian morale; it will probably unduly affect Ukrainian morale. It could also affect support from Europe and the United States. So, while it is just a small tactical piece of ground, I think it has huge strategic implications.”

While the front lines have been static the last few months, thousands of fresh Ukrainian troops have been returning from training in the West on everything from Patriot missile batteries in the United States and Challenger 2 tanks in the United Kingdom to Leopard tanks and Marder and American Bradley fighting vehicles in Germany.

“To achieve victory, Kyiv will have to cut deep into Russian defenses and rapidly outflank disorganized Russian combat formations,” said Can Kasapoglu, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute. “To its credit, Ukraine’s tank arsenal is fast becoming the most diversified armor deterrent of the 21st century.”

The Ukrainian offensive will have two priorities: regaining lost ground and killing Russians, according to retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe.

“They will need to execute very tough offensive missions,” Hertling tweeted last month. They will have to "retake and secure lost territory, penetrate and cause chaos and destruction in Russian security zones and rear areas, while also keeping nascent supply lines for new types of equipment secure and operational. Really tough tasks for a force that's already been fighting a year.”

Meanwhile, the Russians, Hertling says, “will defend in depth from prepared positions, willingly sacrifice soldiers, reorient artillery from civilians to Ukrainian Army troops, use electronic warfare to thwart drones, and reconnaissance tools to thwart penetration.”

While the Russian defenses look formidable from satellite imagery that shows hundreds of miles of zig-zagged trenches, they could turn out to be a modern-day Maginot line, the vast border fortifications built by France that proved utterly useless in stopping the German blitzkrieg in 1940.

“Trenches will be filled with the same unhappy, poorly-led, poorly-equipped Russian troops that have failed to win elsewhere,” argues retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, another former U.S. Army Europe commander active on Twitter. “No need to assault these trenches. Long-range precision against HQs and logistics sites defeats mass.”

Hodges is one of the few retired U.S. commanders who believes Ukraine could drive Russia out of Crimea, not with a full-frontal assault but by pushing close enough to take out Russian supply lines that could make defending it “untenable.”

But that would require longer-range ATACMS missiles that, so far, the Biden administration has refused to provide, deeming them to be too escalatory.

One prime target would be the 11-mile bridge over the Kerch Strait, linking Crimea to the Russian mainland, which has been under repair since it was severely damaged by a truck explosion last October.

“The Ukraine General Staff is more creative than the Pentagon,” Hodges argues. “Liberate Crimea, the decisive terrain, and watch Russian defenses collapse elsewhere.”

Russia has concentrated much of its defensive forces in areas where a Ukrainian strike could cut supply lines and isolate its forces, such as the city of Melitopol in Kherson province, which sits along a crucial railway route and is bisected by two major highways.

But Russia can’t know exactly where Ukraine will strike, and it can’t perfectly defend an almost 800-mile front.

“Ukraine’s Army will regain additional ground, but the spring offensive won't be a 'war winner,’” predicts Hertling, who says he has a few ideas of specific things Ukraine could do to increase its chances for success. But he said, “I ain't sharing.” At least not on Twitter.

Washington Examiner · April 7, 2023

22. The dollar is dead, long live the dollar

Graphics at the link: https://www.gzeromedia.com/by-ian-bremmer/the-dollar-is-dead-long-live-the-dollar

Are we our own worst enemy?

Excerpts:

The most serious threat to dollar dominance might come not from abroad (Europe, China) or from beyond (cyberspace) but from within. The United States is still the most powerful nation on earth, but it’s also the most politically divided and dysfunctional of all the major industrial democracies. The single biggest risk to the dollar’s global status is that growing inequality, tribalism, polarization, and gridlock eventually undermine trust in America’s stability and credibility.

At the end of the day, though, no matter how much the dollar seems to lose its shine, global currency status is about relative – not absolute – advantages. Without a viable challenger, it’s very unlikely that the dollar will lose its special role anytime soon – for better or worse. You can’t replace something with nothing.

The dollar is dead, long live the dollar

gzeromedia.com · by Ian Bremmer · April 5, 2023

Every now and then, a story about some country seeking to diversify away from the US dollar kicks off a frenzy about the inevitable collapse of dollar dominance. Lately, there’s been more than a few such headlines, including:

• Russia embracing the Chinese yuan for much of its global trade
• Saudi Arabia considering invoicing oil exports to China in yuan
• France buying gas from China in yuan
• Brazil and China agreeing to ditch the dollar for bilateral trade
• BRICS countries planning to develop a new reserve currency
• Kenya promising to ditch the dollar for oil purchases
• ASEAN members discussing dropping the dollar for cross-border payments
• India settling some trade in rupees

Naturally, these have provided a fertile ground for gold bugs, crypto shills, hyperinflation truthers, techno-libertarians, anti-imperialists (read: anti-US zealots), and run-of-the-mill grifters to stoke fear about the dollar’s imminent death and its supposedly catastrophic consequences for the United States and the global economy.

But even mainstream media outlets and smart, well-meaning analysts have gotten swept into the current wave of hysteria.

Doomsayers offer numerous reasons for the dollar’s demise. They point to everything from China’s meteoric rise to superpower and the emerging multipolarity of the global system, to America’s stagnant productivity growth, chronic fiscal deficits, monetary expansion, growing debt burden, trade wars, financial fragility, and imperial overreach, to challenges from disruptive technologies like central bank digital currencies and crypto-assets.

Yet rumors of the dollar’s death are greatly exaggerated. Going by most usage measures, the dollar remains incontrovertibly dominant in global trade and finance, if a little less so than at its apex.

Whereas most currencies are only used domestically or in cross-border transactions that directly involve the currency’s issuer, the dollar continues to be widely used for funding, pricing, trade invoicing and settlement, and cross-border borrowing and lending even when the US is not involved.

While the dollar’s share of the central banks’ $12 trillion foreign exchange reserves has indeed declined since 1999, it is still nearly twice that of the euro, yen, pound, and yuan combined – the same as it was a decade ago. Its nearest competitor for global currency status, the euro, accounts for barely 20% of central bank reserves compared to the dollar’s 58%, followed by the Japanese yen at 5%. The much-touted Chinese yuan lags far behind at under 3% of foreign exchange reserves.

Even China, in an environment of intensifying geopolitical competition with the US and having just witnessed Washington’s weaponization of the dollar against Russia, has had no choice but to continue accumulating dollar-denominated assets.

Why has dollar dominance remained so sticky? In large part, it’s because incumbency is self-reinforcing. People use dollars because other people use dollars; dollar dominance begets continued dollar dominance.

But it’s not just turtles all the way down. The dollar has inherently desirable features: It is at once highly stable, liquid, safe, and convertible. And US financial markets are by far the largest, deepest, and most liquid in the world, offering an abundance of attractive dollar-denominated assets foreign investors can trade. No other market comes remotely close. As we saw during the recent banking panic, every time turmoil roils global markets, the dollar strengthens as investors flock to the most plentiful and liquid safe assets in existence. In fact, the dollar emerged from the crisis nearly as strong as it’s been in 20 years relative to other major currencies.

Ultimately, investors want to hold dollar assets because America’s economic, political, and institutional fundamentals inspire credibility and confidence. The US has the world’s strongest military, the best research universities, the most dynamic and innovative private sector, a general openness to trade and capital flows, relatively stable governing institutions, an independent central bank, sound macroeconomic policies, strong property rights, and a robust rule of law. People all over the world trust the US government to safeguard the value of their assets and honor their rights over them, making the dollar the ultimate safe-haven currency and US government bonds the world’s most valued safe assets.

None of this means that the dollar’s advantage can’t slip, of course. After all, every reserve currency that came before the dollar was dominant until the very moment it ceased to be.

For much of the 19th century, the global currency of choice was the British pound, owing to the British Empire’s vast territorial reach, economic supremacy, and advanced banking and legal system. It was only definitively displaced by the US dollar once the US had become an economic superpower. Following World War II, US GDP accounted for roughly half of the world total, so it made sense for the dollar to be the global means of exchange, unit of accounting, and store of value.

America’s economic supremacy has since waned, its share of global output now a fraction of what it was in 1945. This trend has led many to worry that the dollar will soon follow in sterling’s footsteps. But there’s a big difference between now and then: When the pound lost its status, there was another currency on the sidelines ready to take its place. Today, there is no such challenger.

Of the putatively serious candidates to dethrone “King Dollar,” the euro is not a viable alternative because of Europe’s persistent fragmentation. Despite having a sizeable economy, well-developed financial markets, decently free trade and capital openness, and generally robust institutions, Europe lacks true capital markets, banking, fiscal, and political union.

Ever since the 2009 eurozone crisis, European bond markets have been much more fragmented and shallower than America’s, leaving investors with a dearth of high-quality euro-denominated assets. While the pandemic did push the EU to finally issue common debt to fund recovery efforts, that move alone was not sufficient to boost the euro’s international role, as markets know that even if full fiscal and financial integration was on the horizon – a big if – political integration isn’t.

The Chinese yuan, meanwhile, is not a viable alternative because of Beijing’s authoritarian and statist bent. In fact, Xi Jinping’s policy preferences – economic self-reliance, financial stability, common prosperity, and political control of the economy – run directly counter to his global-currency ambitions.

Despite its growing role in the global economy and long-standing desire to unseat the dollar, China lacks the investor protections, institutional quality, and capital market openness required to internationalize a yuan that is still not fully convertible overseas. Persistent currency and capital controls, an opaque banking system with too many non-performing loans, spotty contract enforcement, and often arbitrary and draconian regulations will all continue to undermine Beijing’s efforts to elevate the yuan.

Last and most definitely least, so-called cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are not a viable alternative because they are speculative assets with no intrinsic or legislated value. By contrast, as legal tender, the US dollar is backed by America’s current and future wealth – and by the US government’s ability to tax it.

I say “so-called” cryptocurrencies because these digital tulips are not really currencies or money: they are very expensive and slow to transact in, they can rarely be used to pay taxes or buy groceries, and they are far too volatile to be useful as means of payment, stores of value, or units of account. Nor are they truly decentralized, as the FTX meltdown proved.

To be clear, it’s not completely accepted that losing reserve currency status would be a bad thing for the United States. In the 1960s, France’s then-finance minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing famously claimed that being the issuer of the global reserve currency afforded America an “exorbitant privilege,” allowing it to borrow cheaply from the rest of the world and live beyond its means.

But there’s a downside (or “exorbitant burden”) to USD reserve status: Foreigners’ insatiable appetite for dollar assets pushes up the dollar’s value, making American exports artificially expensive, harming American manufacturers, increasing American unemployment, suppressing American wages, forcing America to run chronic deficits, and widening American inequality. One could argue that the US should welcome – and, indeed, work toward – a smaller role for the dollar, and that contenders like China and Europe should be loath to replace it.

The most serious threat to dollar dominance might come not from abroad (Europe, China) or from beyond (cyberspace) but from within. The United States is still the most powerful nation on earth, but it’s also the most politically divided and dysfunctional of all the major industrial democracies. The single biggest risk to the dollar’s global status is that growing inequality, tribalism, polarization, and gridlock eventually undermine trust in America’s stability and credibility.

At the end of the day, though, no matter how much the dollar seems to lose its shine, global currency status is about relative – not absolute – advantages. Without a viable challenger, it’s very unlikely that the dollar will lose its special role anytime soon – for better or worse. You can’t replace something with nothing.

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gzeromedia.com · by Ian Bremmer · April 5, 2023

23. How the Anti-Woke Campaign Against the U.S. Military Damages National Security

The extreme woke and anti-woke factions are both damaging national security as they are exploiting the military for their own agendas.

How the Anti-Woke Campaign Against the U.S. Military Damages National Security - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Risa Brooks · April 7, 2023

According to critics of the U.S. military, its civilian and military leaders are overly fixated on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at the expense of the military’s warfighting mission and organizational well-being. These commentators and politicians accuse the military of everything from making servicemembers uncomfortable in the ranks by requiring their participation in diversity training to wasting time and money and damaging recruitment through those efforts. As Sen. Ted Cruz puts it, “Perhaps a woke, emasculated military is not the best idea” — a message he once tweeted alongside an image comparing a U.S. recruiting ad featuring a female soldier raised by two mothers with one lauding supposedly more masculine Russian soldiers doing push-ups and firing their weapons.

Anti-woke criticism of this kind has become a rallying cry of the American right, especially among those who use nationalism and appeals to a version of American nostalgia to unite a fervent base to “renew America.” The military has become a political football in this campaign. The term woke is now grounds for a grab-bag of complaints against it, including the Department of Defense’s climate initiatives and efforts to develop zero-emissions non-tactical vehicles, as well as the purported decline of masculinity and revamping of fitness standards in the ranks.

Critics frame these attacks with some truly remarkable rhetoric. Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson has famously mocked the Air Force for providing maternity flight suits for pregnant personnel who seek to stay on the job. Sen. J.D. Vance has in turn complained that the military is ignoring important challenges like its adversaries’ development of hypersonic missiles because military leaders only care about diversity training. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has claimed that the Navy’s supposed obsession with pronouns means that “China is laughing at us.” A glossy brochure sponsored by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Chip Roy even singles out individual civilian and military officials by name as agents of some alleged woke indoctrination initiative within the military.

These attacks are doing serious damage to the U.S. military and, by extension, U.S. national security. They undermine the military’s internal cohesion, politicize oversight, and distract Congress and the American people from serious national security problems — all while addressing a problem that is poorly defined and mostly unsubstantiated. Those who have long seen these attacks for what they are — more performative partisanship than substantive critiques of real problems — should do more to counter them effectively.

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In correcting the record, military leaders have a role to play in providing facts to the public and to their congressional overseers about the organization’s personnel policies. They should not shy away from providing that information while avoiding being baited into joining the partisan gamesmanship.

Even more vital, though, is the role of the military’s civilian leaders in countering the anti-woke camp. They are best positioned to explain to the American people the role of diversity initiatives and related policies, and to counter the flawed arguments and false claims circulating in right-wing rhetoric about personnel issues today. The public itself also needs to do more to scrutinize anti-woke claims about the military.

The Anti-Woke Critique

Anti-woke critics are quick to complain about the military, but the specifics of their critique are as murky as the actual definition of “woke.” Some highlight a handful of anonymous and unverified submissions to their websites or conversations with servicemembers reporting that racial or gender issues were discussed in their units in a manner they found offensive, such as someone commenting positively on the Black Lives Matter movement, or they point to the topics covered during the extremism stand-down that followed the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

At other times, self-described anti-woke activists allude to a misplaced organizational focus on diversity trainings or related initiatives, often claiming without much evidence that they are taking over the military. A recent Heritage Foundation publication, for example, contends that “[The Department of Defense] is promoting philosophies that are divisive, far out of the mainstream of American beliefs, and part of postmodernist theories’ school of thought.” The report’s authors claim that a survey of 301 active-duty military personnel shows that an “overemphasis” on diversity, equity, and inclusion is a dominant “area of concern for active military members.” Meanwhile, a former naval officer, who from 2007–2010 taught at the U.S. Naval Academy, claims that anti-bias and cultural awareness training has displaced other essential coursework at the academy, leaving midshipmen incapable of critical thinking and unprepared for their future jobs.

Even if anti-woke claims are taken at face value, the evidence does not support that there are widespread morale issues in the ranks. There is also scant evidence that supports the claim that intellectual blinders are resulting from diversity training, or that this training is crowding out other priorities. As the sergeant major of the U.S. Army, Michael Grinston, stated in recent congressional testimony: “When I looked at it, there is one hour of equal opportunity training in basic training, and 92 hours of rifle marksmanship training.” He then added, “And if you go to [One Station Unit Training], there is 165 hours of rifle marksmanship training and still only one hour of equal opportunity training.”

As Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger noted last December with respect to servicemembers’ concerns about wokeism in the enlisted ranks, “I don’t see it. I don’t hear it. They’re not talking about it. It’s not a factor for them at all.” Other servicemembers have since echoed that sentiment. It also seems unlikely that the Marine Corps would have exceeded its retention goals this year if this were a concern, as the commandant recently noted. That the Army too surpassed its retention goals belies an argument that diversity training is somehow deterring people from serving.

Nor does the now pervasive claim that diversity and inclusion efforts are a major cause of the services’ recruiting challenges match the evidence. As Maj. Gen. Jonny Davis, the commanding general of U.S. Army Recruiting Command, recently put it, “While there are many things that prevent young Americans from enlisting in the military, including a lack of awareness about military life in general, ‘wokeism’ is not one of them.” Army surveys of young Americans’ attitudes back that up. The surveys reveal broad misconceptions within Generation Z about the military, such as that most jobs in the Army involve combat, and a lack of knowledge about the benefits of military service. There are at the same time obvious alternative explanations for today’s recruitment shortfalls, not least an economy with low unemployment and a shrinking pool of Americans fit to serve.

As a recent analysis notes, “By the raw numbers, there have been over four times more articles, op-eds, cable news interviews, think tank reports, and angry web posts on the issue of wokeness deterring service (87,000 at last count) than the actual number of recruits in the gap.”

To the extent some small number of potential recruits are nonetheless deterred from serving, this may be more due to false perceptions created by anti-woke rhetoric about the climate in the military, as due to any actual widespread problem to that effect. The anti-woke campaign may be generating its own self-fulfilling recruiting challenge.

Undermining Cohesion

Beyond recruitment, the anti-woke cause could damage the military in other ways, potentially by undermining the military’s cohesion.

Maintaining a cohesive military is a building block of an effective armed force. When militaries are riddled with mistrust and perceptions of social disparities, research shows that they perform poorly on the battlefield. Sociologists have demonstrated that on the tactical level, small-unit bonds are a key ingredient of an effective military. More recent research supports that cohesive teams in the military are better capable of unity of effort and maximizing individual performance. More broadly, where divisions arise between military leaders and the personnel who they command, the capacity of that military to execute on the battlefield suffers. In the worst cases, it can yield acts of insubordination, as we have seen most recently in the Russian military.

Armed forces in democratic countries often have the advantage of being able to build cohesive militaries. Unlike autocracies, leaders in democratic militaries do not need to worry about military conspiracies from below and therefore face fewer risks in ceding initiative to junior officers and to fostering small-unit bonds. In the U.S. military, for example, doctrinal concepts such as mission command rely on a foundation of trust and resilience in the chain of command.

Yet, while democracies have advantages, they are not immune to divisiveness in the ranks. This is currently playing out in the Israeli military. It is also a lesson that the U.S. military learned as well in the Vietnam War when political divisions over that conflict at home, combined with racial strife and other problems in the ranks, undermined cohesion.

Today, the anti-woke agenda has the potential to undercut the military’s unity. Rather than merely arguing with other politicians, anti-woke actors are injecting partisanship into the military. To be sure, politicization of the military by civilians is nothing new. Over the last few decades there have been numerous instances in which politicians have used the military either to shield themselves from blame or as a prop to promote their priorities or leadership. But whereas once politicians tried to play off the military’s status to enhance their positions or public stature, anti-woke politicians today are criticizing or undermining it to achieve the same goal.

The problem is also worsened by the tendency of anti-woke politicians to single out for criticism the senior military leadership. Before he lost his bid for a Senate seat in Arizona, for example, Blake Masters called for firing all the country’s generals and replacing them with “conservative colonels.” Vance has also singled out generals as complicit in a woke agenda against the military. Carlson has stooped to calling the chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley “a pig” and “stupid.” Former President Donald Trump has reportedly called the country’s generals “a bunch of dopes and babies.”

The suggestion that military leaders are agents of some conspiracy to indoctrinate the troops, and do not care about readiness or training, is similarly corrosive to trust and confidence in the chain of command. The anti-woke agenda thereby risks undermining the cohesive teams that are a hallmark of the U.S. military.

Anti-woke champions also do not give much credit to the troops they say they are defending. They often decry diversity training in part because they equate it with efforts to make white people feel guilty or dislike the United States, or because it at times may allude to past and present racial and gender disparities in society. In so doing they often misconstrue the content and intent of the initiatives, rather than seeing them as Secretary of Defense Mark Esper put it in June 2020, as growing from a commitment to meritocracy and out of a recognition that “as a military, we succeed by working together, hand in hand, side by side.”

Critics counter that diversity training instead undermines cohesion by unnecessarily drawing attention to differences among servicemembers — but that argument ignores that those differences often exist regardless and that actively trying to bridge any divides that individuals carry with them from civilian society promotes, rather than detracts from, shared bonds within a unit.

Seen in this light, the anti-woke campaign actually poses a two-sided threat to unity within the ranks. On the one hand, critics’ divisive rhetoric can split officers from enlisted personnel and polarize the enlisted ranks internally. On the other, if critics succeed in purging the military of diversity and related training, it might be harder for units comprised of servicemembers with varied backgrounds to work together.

Politicizing Oversight

The anti-woke campaign also erodes the fundamental, if more mundane, foundations of civil-military relations in the United States. In particular, it undermines civilian control and especially the essential oversight role played by members of Congress and the public at large. To start, it absorbs time and resources that might be better devoted to problems that are demonstrably of concern to Congress, including the challenges of peer competition in the international arena.

Take, for example, the recent creation of a new subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee that focuses on “quality of life” concerns in the military. This might seem unremarkable, except, as recently noted by an analyst of military personnel policy, there already exists a Military Personnel subcommittee that is responsible for quality of life and related issues. The latter’s committee head, Rep. Jim Banks, though, is a self-described leader of the “anti-woke caucus.” He aims to focus his efforts in Congress on rooting out the government’s supposed role in “inducing self-hatred through indoctrination, stripping away [the oppressor’s] rights by not enforcing the laws on their behalf, public humiliation, hatred, expropriation, and ultimately violence.” This approach underscores why there is a need for a new subcommittee to deal with substantive personnel issues under Congress’ purview.

This politicization erodes norms of congressional oversight. It encourages members to scrutinize military activity when there is some partisan angle to be had and to pay less attention when there are few political benefits from doing so. At the same time, the anti-woke campaign potentially makes it harder for politicians to ask good faith questions critical of personnel policy or the U.S. military. This undermines Congress’ essential oversight function. While the bulk of oversight continues with little fanfare, these dynamics are not helpful to the job that members of Congress do.

The anti-woke campaign also distracts the military and absorbs precious time and resources from other priorities. When senior military officers or enlisted are called upon to testify in Congress they must be ready to answer many questions, ranging from the alleged effects of wokeism on force readiness to cultural dynamics within the military. Their staffs must also field calls and deal with any number of inquiries from Congress and negative press about the military’s allegedly woke policies, which distract from serious issues that senior leaders have to grapple with on a day-to-day basis.

Finally, all of this circles back around to the public’s relationship to the military, which many observers agree could be healthier. Research shows that the public seems to have little understanding of the conventions of civilian control of the military, or of its nonpartisan status. Perhaps this is unsurprising as civil-military relations is not a common topic in high school civics education, or in higher education. But that lack of awareness of foundational principles means that what the public knows about the military is primarily what they see in curated news commentary or in short snippets in social media feeds. Given the inflammatory rhetoric of the anti-wokeness critics and their widespread coverage, especially in sympathetic news and opinion outlets, the public may come to believe that that the Department of Defense’s leadership is compromising the organizational health of the military, despite the dearth of evidence to support that claim.

What Is to Be Done?

As with most questions of civil-military relations, the military, civilian leadership, and the public can all play a role in ensuring a healthier discussion about the U.S. armed forces and its personnel policies.

For the military, dealing with anti-woke politicians might at first glance seem like a classic no-win situation. If they say nothing when critics attack the institution for its alleged fixation with diversity in the ranks, it enables those claims to fester. At the same time, speaking out also risks feeding the beast. Nevertheless, as we have seen in recent testimony by senior enlisted members or in public commentary by military leaders, it is appropriate for senior leaders to provide the facts and to be as forthcoming as possible when answering questions. At the same time, coming across as overly solicitous of politicians belaboring the anti-woke critique is to be avoided. One should not confuse responding judiciously and forthrightly to critics with seeking to mollify or appease them.

Civilian political leaders and policymakers are much better positioned to fend off unsubstantiated claims that the Department of Defense is so absorbed in diversity and inclusion initiatives that it is neglecting other priorities. That includes marshaling facts that make the case for such initiatives. After all, while critics claim that diversity efforts are alienating people from joining the military, one might ask: Who exactly are they alienating? According to Pew polling from 2017, nearly 43 percent of servicemembers identify with one or another minority group in society.

Despite this diversity though, the presence of minority groups in the military’s senior levels remains limited. While black Americans are overrepresented in the Army’s enlisted ranks, they comprise only 6.5 percent of the service’s general officers and most serve at the one- and two-star level. And while there are some outstanding female leaders in the military’s senior ranks, women overall remain underrepresented at the top. Beyond that, according to Department of Defense figures, across all the services in 2021, women made up just 17.3 percent of the active-duty force.

One thing civilian policymakers therefore should not do is signal a willingness to abandon proven and effective cultural awareness training and other diversity initiatives merely to appease critics. In particular, they should not abandon them out of some misguided notion that it will improve recruitment: There are numerous other options that would better serve that purpose. Indeed, eliminating tools that enable leaders to manage diverse teams could cause significant damage to morale and cohesion.

Finally, the public’s role in countering the false claims of anti-woke actors is straightforward, if more easily recognized than achieved: Rather than get caught up in hyperbole, Americans should listen for the facts. Public scrutiny and skepticism are arguably the best antidote to the anti-woke campaign against the U.S. military.

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Risa Brooks is Allis Chalmers Professor of Political Science at Marquette University.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Risa Brooks · April 7, 2023

24. The Coming Age of AI-Powered Propaganda

Societies need to build resilience - hard to do in very divided societies when each side hates the "other" more than they fear the nation's adversaries who are exploiting those divisions for hostile purposes.

I cannot empshizie this enough. Our 2017 NSS had it right here:

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

Excerpts from the article:

Finally, societies need to build resilience among unsuspecting social media and Internet users. In Finland, media literacy is woven into school curricula; from a young age, Finns learn to analyze news they consume and to check facts in multiple sources. Such efforts can help people tell the difference between real and fake news, so that they are less likely to be swayed by untrustworthy content, whether it is produced by humans or AI. And AI itself could be a defense. As language models become more capable, they could begin to help users contextualize and even make sense of the information they see.

The rise of AI language models requires a broader reckoning. Among the fundamental questions that societies must answer are: Who should control access to these models? Who do they place at risk? And is mimicking human dialogue with AI even desirable? Although the effects of future language models will be hard to predict, it is clear they will be felt far beyond the AI labs that create them. So governments, businesses, civil society, and the public at large should all have a say in how these models are designed and used—and how to manage the potential risks they pose.

The Coming Age of AI-Powered Propaganda

How to Defend Against Supercharged Disinformation

By Josh A. Goldstein and Girish Sastry

April 7, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Josh A. Goldstein and Girish Sastry · April 7, 2023

In the seven years since Russian operatives interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, in part by posing as Americans in thousands of fake social media accounts, another technology with the potential to accelerate the spread of propaganda has taken center stage: artificial intelligence, or AI. Much of the concern has focused on the risks of audio and visual “deepfakes,” which use AI to invent images or events that did not actually occur. But another AI capability is just as worrisome. Researchers have warned for years that generative AI systems trained to produce original language—“language models,” for short—could be used by U.S. adversaries to mount influence operations. And now, these models appear to be on the cusp of enabling users to generate a near limitless supply of original text with limited human effort. This could improve the ability of propagandists to persuade unwitting voters, overwhelm online information environments, and personalize phishing emails. The danger is twofold: not only could language models sway beliefs; they could also corrode public trust in the information people rely on to form judgments and make decisions.

The progress of generative AI research has outpaced expectations. Last year, language models were used to generate functional proteins, beat human players in strategy games requiring dialogue, and create online assistants. Conversational language models have come into wide use almost overnight: more than 100 million people used OpenAI’s ChatGPT program in the first two months after it was launched, in December 2022, and millions more have likely used the AI tools that Google and Microsoft introduced soon thereafter. As a result, risks that seemed theoretical only a few years ago now appear increasingly realistic. For example, the AI-powered “chatbot” that powers Microsoft’s Bing search engine has shown itself to be capable of attempting to manipulate users—and even threatening them.

As generative AI tools sweep the world, it is hard to imagine that propagandists will not make use of them to lie and mislead. To prepare for this eventuality, governments, businesses, and civil society organizations should develop norms and policies for the use of AI-generated text, as well as techniques for figuring out the origin of a particular piece of text and whether it has been created using AI. Efforts by journalists and researchers to uncover fake social media accounts and fake news websites can also limit the reach of covert propaganda campaigns—regardless of whether the content is human or AI-written.

LANGUAGE FACTORIES

A language model is a type of AI system trained through trial and error to consume and produce text. A large part of the training process involves predicting the next word in a large corpus of text. If the prediction is wrong, the model is penalized; if the prediction is correct, it is rewarded. This simple process has produced surprisingly competent results. Ask a model to rewrite a tweet in different words or compose a blog post including certain points, and it will do so. Language models have learned to do surprising things that even those who trained them did not anticipate, including unscrambling words, performing eight-digit arithmetic, and solving mathematical word problems. Researchers cannot reliably predict what capabilities future language models might achieve.

Of course, today’s models have limitations. Even the most advanced ones struggle to maintain coherence over long passages, make false or absurd statements (a phenomenon dubbed “hallucination” by AI researchers), and fail to make sense of events that occur after the models have been trained. Despite these limitations, the models can produce text that often reads as if it were written by a human. This makes them natural tools for scaling propaganda generation. And propagandists will find them only more attractive as they grow more capable and problems such as hallucinations are fixed—for example, if they are trained to look up information before responding to queries.

With AI-powered chatbots, propagandists could engage targets individually.

Consider what AI could do for existing propaganda outfits. The Russian journalist Ksenia Klochkova has written about her experience going undercover for a day at Cyber Front Z, a St. Petersburg–based “troll farm” that spreads propaganda about Russia’s war in Ukraine. In an investigation published in March 2022, Klochkova writes that she was one of 100 employees on a shift paid to write short posts on designated social media sites pushing Moscow’s agenda. After the first month, employees could go remote, enabling the operation to grow beyond its physical footprint. Language models could be used to augment or replace human writers in generating such content, driving down the number of employees Cyber Front Z and similar troll farms would need to operate. If costs decline, more and more political actors might decide to sponsor or run influence operations. And with smaller staffs, such campaigns are less likely to be discovered, since they would employ fewer potential leakers and moles.

The same things that would make language models useful for operations such as Cyber Front Z—the ability to cheaply generate scalable content that is indistinguishable from human-written text—could make them useful in other domains that were not designed with AI in mind. In 2020, the scholars Sarah Kreps and Douglas Kriner conducted an experiment in which they sent U.S. legislators AI- and human-written letters as if they were from constituents. They found that legislators were only two percentage points less likely to respond to AI-generated letters than to human-written ones. The risk is that language models could be used to abuse and even overwhelm systems that take input from the public, undermining democratic accountability if elected officials struggle to discern the true views of their constituents or simply fail to cope with swamped inboxes.

This is not to say that language models will necessarily overwhelm systems everywhere. In some cases, they have proved inept. The tech news website CNET published dozens of AI-generated news articles, only to discover that many were riddled with factual inaccuracies. Stack Overflow, a platform that enables coders to answer each other’s questions, had to ban users from using ChatGPT because it kept delivering incorrect answers. But as language models improve, their output will be increasingly difficult to spot based on content alone. Institutions as varied as social media platforms and government agencies seeking public comment will have to test whether they are susceptible to being overrun by AI-generated text—and harden their defenses, if so.

JUST FOR YOU

Language models do not just offer the potential to produce more propaganda at a lower cost. They could also enhance the quality of propaganda by tailoring it to specific groups. In 2016, employees of the Russian troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency tried to embed themselves in specific online communities—posing as left-leaning Black Americans and as pro-Trump white Americans, for example—to spread tailored propaganda to those groups. But such impersonation efforts are limited by the bandwidth of the operators and their knowledge of specific target communities: there is only so much propaganda they can write and so many communities they can study.

As language models improve, those barriers could fall. Early research shows that models can draw from the sociocultural experience of a specific demographic group and display the biases of that group. Given access to fine-grained data on U.S. communities from polls, data brokers, or social media platforms, future language models might be able to develop content for a coherent persona, allowing propagandists to build credibility with a target audience without actually knowing that audience. Personalized propaganda could be effective outside of social media as well, through tailored emails or news websites, for instance.

The most extreme form of personalization may be the one-on-one chat. With AI-powered chatbots, propagandists could engage targets individually, addressing their concerns or counterarguments directly and increasing the odds of persuasion (or at least distraction). Right now, it would be enormously resource intensive to wage an influence operation relying on ongoing dialogue between individual propagandists and large populations. In the future, as language models become more persuasive and less expensive, such campaigns could be feasible with AI assistance.

It is already difficult to distinguish between online human interlocutors and machines. One recent research project showed that an AI agent ranked in the top ten percent of participants in an online version of the classic board game Diplomacy, which involves negotiating with real people to form alliances. If today’s language models can be trained to persuade players to partner in a game, future models may be able to persuade people to take actions—joining a Facebook group, signing a petition, or even showing up to a protest.

To get a sense of how quickly language models are improving, consider one of Google’s latest models, called Flan-PaLM. The model can correctly answer nearly nine out of every ten questions on the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination. It can also do arithmetic, answer questions about physics, and write poetry. These AI systems are potentially dangerous tools in the hands of propagandists, and they are only getting more powerful.

TRUST BUSTERS

One might reasonably question the severity of the propaganda threat posed by language models, given how frequently analysts have overhyped new technologies in the national security domain. After all, commentators have warned that previous generations of language models could be abused in this way. Yet there is little public evidence that states have mounted AI-enabled influence operations using these tools.

Still, the absence of evidence of such campaigns is not strong evidence of their absence. Although there is no publicly available proof that language models have been used for influence operations, there is also no proof that they have not been used in this way. Disinformation researchers have only recently begun paying attention to language models.

Even assuming that language models have not been used in past influence campaigns, there is no guarantee they will not be used in future ones. One popular technology for creating AI-generated faces was first developed in 2014, but it was not until 2019 that researchers uncovered AI-generated profile pictures in an influence operation. In 2022, more than two-thirds of the influence operations caught and removed by Meta (the corporate parent of Facebook) included fake faces. It took improvements in the technology and ease of access for propagandists to make their use routine. The same thing could happen with language models. Companies are investing in improving the output from language models and making them easier to use, which will only increase their appeal for propagandists.

A second reason to doubt that language models pose a serious threat concerns the effectiveness of propaganda campaigns in general. One study about the Internet Research Agency’s efforts on Twitter published by Nature Communications found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the [2016] Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.” The cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier has similarly argued that people are less gullible than commonly believed.

But even if propagandists often fail to persuade, they can still succeed in crowding out genuine debate and undermining public trust. For instance, after Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in July 2014, Russia’s Ministry of Defense made contradictory claims about who downed the plane and how they had done so. The goal, it seems, was not to convince audiences of any one narrative but to muddy the waters and divert blame away from Moscow. If propagandists flood online spaces with AI-generated propaganda, they can sow distrust and make it harder to discern the truth. People may begin to distrust even their own observations, corroding their belief in a shared reality.

KEEP IT REAL

Although language models are becoming powerful propaganda tools, they do not have to lead to an information apocalypse. To execute a successful AI-enabled influence campaign, propagandists need at least three things. First, they need access to a serviceable language model, which they could create from scratch, steal, download from open-source sites, or access from an AI service provider. Second, they need infrastructure, such as websites or fake accounts on social media networks, to disseminate their propaganda. And finally, they need real people to be swayed or at least confused or frustrated by the content they broadcast. At every stage in this process, governments, businesses, and technologists have a chance to intervene and mitigate the harm done by such campaigns.

At the access stage, there are a range of options for either controlling the use of language models or limiting their ability to produce dangerous output. Although it is the norm in AI today to distribute open-source models widely in the spirit of science, it may be wise to consider a norm that makes it more difficult to access the capabilities a propagandist would require. One way to do this would be to control models behind an application programming interface, a software layer that acts as a gate between users and language models, which would allow AI service providers (and potentially others) to deter, detect, and respond to potential propagandists. Another option is to develop models that are more accurate and less likely to produce problematic output, which researchers are already doing. Researchers are also exploring the feasibility of creating models with a digital watermark to make it easier to identify the content they produce.

At the infrastructure level, social media companies and search engines could work proactively to identify AI-generated content and require users to do the same. They could also make it possible to apply digital provenance standards to text, which would allow people to know how the text was produced—for example, who authored it and whether it was created by AI. Although such standards currently appear difficult to implement, more research could uncover a path forward.

Finally, societies need to build resilience among unsuspecting social media and Internet users. In Finland, media literacy is woven into school curricula; from a young age, Finns learn to analyze news they consume and to check facts in multiple sources. Such efforts can help people tell the difference between real and fake news, so that they are less likely to be swayed by untrustworthy content, whether it is produced by humans or AI. And AI itself could be a defense. As language models become more capable, they could begin to help users contextualize and even make sense of the information they see.

The rise of AI language models requires a broader reckoning. Among the fundamental questions that societies must answer are: Who should control access to these models? Who do they place at risk? And is mimicking human dialogue with AI even desirable? Although the effects of future language models will be hard to predict, it is clear they will be felt far beyond the AI labs that create them. So governments, businesses, civil society, and the public at large should all have a say in how these models are designed and used—and how to manage the potential risks they pose.

• JOSH A. GOLDSTEIN is a Research Fellow with the CyberAI Project at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
• GIRISH SASTRY is a researcher on the Policy Team at OpenAI.
• They are the co-authors, with Micah Musser, Renée DiResta, Matthew Gentzel, and Katerina Sedova, of a report titled Generative Language Models and Automated Influence Operations: Emerging Threats and Potential Mitigations, from which this essay draws.

Foreign Affairs · by Josh A. Goldstein and Girish Sastry · April 7, 2023

25. Putin’s Second Front

Excerpts;

For now, Putin may be under the impression that there is genuine unity among his people; that the war is becoming—as the Kremlin spin doctor Sergey Kiriyenko puts it—a “people’s war”; that a group of frustrated soldiers and their families is emerging who would like to see vengeance wrought against the West and Ukrainians for everything they have been through. So far, Putin has managed to keep the elites in check. He has also managed to bring back chauvinistic and messianistic ideology and reverse the modernization of a society that had been deideologized and modernized. He has mobilized a lot of people to support the war—in both the social and the military sense. No wonder he considers himself omnipotent.

Putin has managed to concentrate enormous power in his hands. But the more power he accumulates, the harder it will be for him to relax and hand over the reins. He cannot afford to liberalize the system or decrease his dictatorial authority. There is only one way left open to him: to cling to power until the bitter end. Putin is in the same position in which Stalin found himself at the start of the 1950s. It was in those late years that the Soviet dictator had to resort to absurd and irrational measures to shore up his power, from paranoid threats to his own closest companions to combating “rootless cosmopolitans” and supporting obscurantist theories in science. For this reason, Putin needs a permanent war with those he deems “foreign agents” and national enemies—his own “rootless cosmopolitans.” It is a war that has to be carried out at home and abroad, whether hot or cold, direct or hybrid. And Putin has to keep moving all the time: stopping is a luxury he cannot afford.

Recognizing this fact offers little comfort to those hoping for a resolution to the war. But when a train has no brakes, it may crash into a wall. It might also simply run out of fuel and grind to a halt. For now, it is full steam ahead—to nowhere, because no one knows where it is going. That includes the driver.

Putin’s Second Front

The War in Ukraine Has Become a Battle for the Russian Psyche

By Andrei Kolesnikov

April 7, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Andrei Kolesnikov · April 7, 2023

For more than two decades, ordinary people in Vladimir Putin’s Russia could count on at least one fundamental right: the right to remain passive. As long as they were willing to turn a blind eye to corruption at the top and the never-ending rule of the Putin regime, they were not required to demonstrate active support for the government. Whatever Russia was doing in the world need not concern them. Provided that they did not interfere in the affairs of the elite, they were free to live their lives.

Since the Russian government announced its “partial mobilization” in September-October 2022, that right has been taken away. No longer is it possible to stay disengaged. More and more, Russians who are economically dependent on the state are finding that they have to be active Putinists—or, at the very least, pretend to be. Conforming to the regime and showing support for the “special operation” have now become almost essential to good citizenship. It is still possible to avoid showing feality to the autocrat, and Russia is not yet a fully totalitarian system. But a significant stratum of society—teachers, for example—are forced to participate in public acts of support, such as the patriotic lessons that are now mandatory in schools on Mondays. Often these are mere rituals, but sometimes the sentiments are real. Voluntary denunciations have become frequent and are, in fact, encouraged. Consider the infamous case of the teacher who denounced a 13-year-old girl for drawing an antiwar picture: the girl’s father was arrested, and she was placed in an orphanage. In April, former President Dmitry Medvedev called on civilians to denounce those who receive money or jobs from Ukrainian sources.

For Putin, the creation of this new obedient Russia is in some ways as important as what happens in Ukraine. Almost since the start of the invasion, the Kremlin has been fighting a second war in Russia itself, and this war is unlikely to go away even if the conflict in Ukraine becomes frozen. Russian civil society will continue to face systematic suppression. The regime understands that by creating an atmosphere of hatred and mutual distrust, it can make part of society itself more intolerant of those who oppose Putin and the war. Whereas former Soviet heroes were people like Yuri Gagarin, who was the first to conquer space, now the examples of “heroic” behavior are by members of separatist formations or pro-war bloggers with a criminal past—such as the recently murdered blogger with the pseudonym Vladlen Tatarsky. The war has vaulted these people to the top and turned them into “heroes.”

BASIC INSTINCTS

Russia’s war at home was set in motion well before the invasion of Ukraine. Over the past decade, as his hyperauthoritarian model of government matured, Putin was able to awaken in the Russian public a demand for imperial greatness that had long lain dormant. As it slowly replaced bourgeois consumerism with great-power rhetoric and an assault on civil society, the government found a mostly pliant audience in a population that was accustomed to market relations but that did not understand the practical meaning of democracy. But a qualitative leap in public sentiment came with Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. “That's it. We have become great again!” many thought. In turn, this imperial impulse and also Russia’s growing separation from the West encouraged people to embrace a more primitive understanding of the world.

That does not mean that Russians wanted war: they wanted a normal life. But the motherland, represented by Putin, came calling: We were attacked. We responded with a preemptive strike, and must stay united. Those who are against are national traitors. After more than a year of war, these attitudes have become entrenched in the popular consciousness. Yes, there is war fatigue, and more than half of respondents in polls by the independent Levada Center say they want peace—though, as a rule, while still keeping Donbas and Crimea for Russia. But the erosion of public morality has been dramatic.

Amazingly, for ordinary people, Putin’s selling point is no longer modernization and the economic rewards and rising standards of living it promised, but regression to a more brutish past. There is a growing pride in Russia’s reliance on its own resources and its self-image as a uniquely tough country armed with both nuclear weapons and savage mercenaries. Since the war began, a small but highly vocal segment of Russian society—perhaps 15 percent, as some sociologists estimate—has demanded ruthlessness to Russia’s enemies and suspicion toward any fellow citizens who do not toe the party line—and who might turn out to be a threat to the nation or, to use Putin’s term, “scum.” An increasingly arbitrary justice system now hands down hefty prison sentences to dissenters, and a public culture of extrajudicial violence is being normalized by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Wagner, the paramilitary contractor with close ties to the Kremlin.

The erosion of public morality has been dramatic.

But the shift in public attitudes has also coincided with a different and more important change: how Russians relate to the regime. Previously, Russian society was defined by an us-versus-them model. The “us” were ordinary Russians, powerless but mostly left alone; “they” referred to those at the top, in the Kremlin and at other imposing addresses, those who lived in palaces and holidayed on yachts and looked down with contempt on the people. As a result of the war, however, that vertical model has been transformed into a different, much more horizontal one. Now, “us” means all Russians, including Putin and his entourage; “they” refers to the hostile powers—Europe, NATO, and the United States—that are trying to tear away Russia’s historical territory. According to this model, all previous differences between the people and the regime must be forgotten because Russia is under attack. People must come together for the motherland; indeed, they must be ready to give up their lives for it. It is important to emphasize that these dictates are not accepted by all, but their incessant repetition has had a hypnotic effect on many, and some, in order not to stand out, have made a habit of repeating them.

As for the economic damage caused by this confrontation with the West, Russians have learned to cope. Even a fortress under siege has ways to acquire vital necessities, and the regime has proved adept at exporting goods to the east and importing contraband through, for instance, Turkey or some Central Asian countries. So far, relatively effective Central Bank policies and technocratic economic management have saved Putin from accusations of socioeconomic failure (and this is despite the serious state budget revenue problems that are already apparent). As a result, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, who is closely identified with the country’s economic policies and has studiously avoided being portrayed as a war economist, has become increasingly popular. According to the Levada Center, when Russians are asked which politician they trust the most, Mishustin is now named more often than Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and is second only to Putin.

For both active Putin supporters and passive conformists, the war is no longer just a part of everyday existence. It is a way of life. And instead of rationalizing it as a prolonged disruption, they have begun to see it as something more permanent. Sure, everyone understands that victory is the goal. But that goal has been pushed so far into the future that it has become as symbolic and distant as the final stage of communism was for several generations of Soviet people. To enter a permanent state of war, many Russians have had to come to terms with the twisted logic of the person who initiated the conflict and dragged the nation into it. In other words, they have sought psychological comfort in the regime and the idea of national unity it embodies, no matter how damaging that might be to their own lives and the country’s future. You’re either with us, supporters of Putin have learned to think, or you are a national traitor.

DICTATOR WITHOUT BORDERS

How has it been possible for so many Russians to accommodate this extreme situation so readily? First, many feel the compulsion to stay in the social mainstream and go with the flow: this is what twentieth-century psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, writing about the social conditions that contributed to fascism, famously called “escape from freedom.” No one wants to be branded an outcast or enemy of the people. But second and equally important is the ability of ordinary people to accept radically changed circumstances—as long as some elements of normal life can be maintained. Thus, everything about the war has been done only part way: there has been a partial mobilization, a partial wartime economy, a partial mass repression, a partial erosion of living standards. In this form of partial totalitarianism, people have had time to adjust and experience each step in the decline from their previous way of life as a new normal.

Yet another explanation for Russians’ readiness to adapt is that Putin has alternated mobilization—in both its military meaning and emotional sense—with demobilization. Right now, the country is in a demobilization phase: in his speeches and state visits, Putin stresses socioeconomic issues, and to the extent that the government is seeking a further military draft, it avoids calling it that, using instead such bland bureaucratic phrases as “clarification of military record data.” In other words, Russian society has entered another period of getting used to war. And as long as Russians experience the war as partial, rather than total, they are unlikely to feel overly concerned about it. According to the Levada Center, ordinary Russians continue to show declining interest in events in Ukraine. In September, when the partial mobilization was announced, some 66 percent of the population said it was following the war to a greater or lesser degree. By March, however, that figure had dropped to a bare majority of 53 percent, with 47 percent admitting that they were paying little or no attention to the war.

A bare majority of Russians are paying attention to the war.

But Russians have also been helped by the new historical narrative that Putin has given them. Here, a mythologized version of national history has been used to justify hostility to both the West and enemies at home. The Kremlin has conjured a pantheon of true defenders of the motherland, in which the medieval prince Alexander Nevsky, the sixteenth-century despot Ivan the Terrible, and Joseph Stalin sit side by side with the tenth-century Prince Vladimir, the seventeenth-century tsar Peter the Great, and Vladimir Putin. This grandiose, mostly imperial, and always glorious story also helps many Russians come to terms with their current reality: since they were always special, and since they have always been under attack, they have no choice but to keep living in a state of permanent conflict with the West.

It is still possible to choose another path: inner emigration—opting out of the political process—is still an option for many people, as is actual exile. Russian society now inhabits a strange borderline between authoritarianism and totalitarianism, between the obligation to consider the demands of the state in everything and the ability to exercise certain freedoms, however limited, in private life. The country has become a borderline state, in all senses of the word. Russia’s borders are mobile right now. They depend largely on events at the front and, crucially, are not recognized by the rest of the world. Existing in this uncertainty is not exactly comfortable, but it is possible. The post-Soviet era gave rise to the phenomenon of unrecognized states—Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria—and they have existed in limbo for years. Now Crimea and the Donbas find themselves in the same situation. There appears to be no end to that status either—at least not before the end of Putinism.

TRAIN TO NOWHERE

At this point, it is very hard to determine what victory or defeat would look like for Putin and his active or passive supporters. Even if a cease-fire can be negotiated, the conflict seems likely to be doomed to periods of freezing and unfreezing. And no matter what happens in Ukraine, Putin’s regime will continue its repression of anyone who thinks differently or who puts up any resistance—or even just refuses to publicly support it. These policies will continue regardless of whether Russia is actively fighting the war against Ukraine and the West or finds itself in a cold or dormant phase of conflict. And they may well find support from the Putinized public.

In addition to the new hatred directed against those who have retained a conscience and who feel guilt about the disaster wrought by their government, there is the question of the many Russians who come back from the trenches. What do they think, and what will they do? Who are they, and who will they target with their own anger? Will they hold their own political power, or will they become yet another group of outcasts? What impact will their war syndrome have on the public atmosphere? These important questions remain unanswered.

For now, Putin may be under the impression that there is genuine unity among his people; that the war is becoming—as the Kremlin spin doctor Sergey Kiriyenko puts it—a “people’s war”; that a group of frustrated soldiers and their families is emerging who would like to see vengeance wrought against the West and Ukrainians for everything they have been through. So far, Putin has managed to keep the elites in check. He has also managed to bring back chauvinistic and messianistic ideology and reverse the modernization of a society that had been deideologized and modernized. He has mobilized a lot of people to support the war—in both the social and the military sense. No wonder he considers himself omnipotent.

Putin has managed to concentrate enormous power in his hands. But the more power he accumulates, the harder it will be for him to relax and hand over the reins. He cannot afford to liberalize the system or decrease his dictatorial authority. There is only one way left open to him: to cling to power until the bitter end. Putin is in the same position in which Stalin found himself at the start of the 1950s. It was in those late years that the Soviet dictator had to resort to absurd and irrational measures to shore up his power, from paranoid threats to his own closest companions to combating “rootless cosmopolitans” and supporting obscurantist theories in science. For this reason, Putin needs a permanent war with those he deems “foreign agents” and national enemies—his own “rootless cosmopolitans.” It is a war that has to be carried out at home and abroad, whether hot or cold, direct or hybrid. And Putin has to keep moving all the time: stopping is a luxury he cannot afford.

Recognizing this fact offers little comfort to those hoping for a resolution to the war. But when a train has no brakes, it may crash into a wall. It might also simply run out of fuel and grind to a halt. For now, it is full steam ahead—to nowhere, because no one knows where it is going. That includes the driver.

• ANDREI KOLESNIKOV is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Foreign Affairs · by Andrei Kolesnikov · April 7, 2023

26. 1st Multi-Domain Task Force deploys the Army’s first Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon system

I missed this. I did not know we were deploying hypersonic weapons.

1st Multi-Domain Task Force deploys the Army’s first Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon system

https://www.army.mil/article/265349

By 1st Lt. Richard ParlatoMarch 30, 2023

JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, Wash. — In her keynote address at the 2021 annual meeting and exposition of the Association of the United States Army, Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth predicted that “fiscal year 23 will be the year of long-range precision fires.”

In February, the 1st Multi-Domain Task Force long-range fires battalion, 5th Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment, deployed the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon — or LRHW — system over 3,100 miles from Joint Base Lewis-McChord to Cape Canaveral, Florida during Thunderbolt Strike, a full rehearsal of expeditionary hypersonic launch capabilities.

The deployment exercised critical command and control linkages between U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, U.S. Strategic Command, U.S. Army Pacific, Army Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office — known as RCCTO, and 1st MDTF.

Soldiers of the 5th Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment conducted training and practice drills with the LRHW system in Cape Canaveral.

“Our Soldiers processed real missions, with real data, in real time, to produce real effects to learn lessons and generate readiness. We’re training the way we will fight, and our Soldiers are ready to deploy and employ this critical capability forward,” said Brig. Gen. Bernard Harrington, the 1st MDTF commander.

Thunderbolt Strike marks a new milestone between the 1st MDTF, RCCTO, industry and numerous Army partners that generated immediate feedback from stakeholders on the complex system.

Col. Ian Humphrey, RCCTO’s hypersonic weapon integration project manager, highlighted 1st MDTF’s rapid progress in building the technical and procedural capacity to integrate the LRHW system’s capabilities into the Defense Department’s Joint Force. “This unit is fully trained and has proven that they can be deployed away from home station and go right into whatever mission they’re given.”

“Thunderbolt Strike proved the power of interagency cooperation to build the multi-domain force of the future,” said Harrington. “The second half of the Army’s year of long-range precision fires will continue to represent groundbreaking strides toward integrated deterrence in the Pacific.”

“Our first battery of Long-Range Hypersonic Weapons is training with their ground equipment at JBLM, and by this fall we will have our first battery of Long-Range Hypersonic Weapons, and that element will be part of our 1st Multi-Domain Task Force,” Wormuth said recently in an article in Defense Daily.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com