Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“Irregular war was far more intellectual than a bayonet charge, far more exhausting than service in the comfortable imitative obedience of an ordered army.”
- T.E. Lawrence

"A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost."
- Jean-Paul Sartre

"The most effective indirect approach is one that lures or startles the opponent into a false move -- so that, as in ju-jitsu, his own effort is turned into the lever of his overthrow."
-Sir Basil H. Liddel-Hart (Strategy, 1954)




1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 18 (PUTIN'S WAR)
2. Raising the Flag at U.S. Embassy Kyiv
3. How China uses global media to spread its views — and misinformation
4.  How the Biden administration let right-wing attacks derail its disinformation efforts
5. Military briefing: why Russia and Ukraine are fighting over a Black Sea outcrop
6. Military Assistance to Ukraine: Rediscovering the Virtue of Courage
7. The Strongman Cometh
8. Incredible Success Of Ukraine’s Bayraktar TB2: The Ghost Of Snake Island
9. US troops are going back to Somalia, but not for ‘combat’
10. Special operators need counter-drone, counter-IED tech in a smaller package
11. Military Assistance to Ukraine: Rediscovering the Virtue of Courage
12. Special ops force calls for ‘untethered’ tool for recon and resupply
13. Spec ops optics: US forces seek new sights and ways to defeat fog
14. Murder on the Beach (Paraguay)
15. Russian Political Warfare Is a Rising Menace
16. Red Cross registers hundreds of Ukrainian POWs from Mariupol
17. Spy agencies urged to fix open secret: A lack of diversity
18. Indo-Pacific Economic Framework is not an FTA: 5 things to know
19. Helmet cam footage triggers medal upgrade for soldier killed in Niger ambush
20. Green Berets, weaponized robots team up for offensive operations
21.  US intel shows Russians fear Mariupol abuse will backfire
22. Ukrainians kill "high-ranking" soldiers, blow up Russian train: Reports
23. Opinion | To counter Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, look to Ronald Reagan
24. Understanding Russia’s War: The Strange Philosophy Of Aleksandr Dugin – Analysis
25. The Quad Needs a Harder Edge
26.  Report: Collapse of Afghan Military in 2021 - SOF News
27. On this Day in History: Lawrence of Arabia dies



1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 18 (PUTIN'S WAR)
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 18
May 18, 2022 - Press ISW

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 18
Kateryna Stepanenko and Karolina Hird
May 18, 6:15 pm ET
Russian occupation authorities announced plans to destroy the Azovstal Steel Plant and turn Mariupol into a resort city, depriving Russia of some of the most important economic benefits it hoped to reap by taking the city in the first place. Head of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Denis Pushilin stated that DNR authorities are planning to level Azovstal after completing its capture.[1] Azovstal was a major element of Mariupol’s economy before the war because of its unique function as a full-cycle metallurgical complex, the 10,000 jobs associated with production at the plant, the billions of dollars of foreign exchange earnings and taxes it generated, and its production output of 7,000 tons of steel, 6 million tons of iron, and 4.5 million tons of rolled metal, according to the Mariupol City Council.[2] Pushilin stated that the DNR intends to rebuild Mariupol to be a “resort city,” while admitting that 60% of the structures in Mariupol have been destroyed to the point where they cannot be rebuilt.[3] The announced plan to turn Mariupol into a center of tourism and leisure following the complete destruction of a major center of economic activity in Mariupol, is indicative of the damage that Russian troops have inflicted on themselves through the destruction of Mariupol. Russia does not need another resort town on the Black Sea. It does need the kind of hard currency that a plant like Azovstal had generated. This announcement epitomizes the kind of Pyrrhic victories Russian forces have won in Ukraine, to the extent that they have won victories at all.
The Kremlin may hope to offset the loss of revenues from Azovstal and other destroyed infrastructure in Ukraine by profiting from the Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant that is forces have seized. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin announced that he will allocate maximum integration assistance for Zaporizhia Oblast to work in a “friendly Russian family” during his visit to Melitopol on May 18.[4] Khusnullin added that the Zaporihia Nuclear Power Plant will exclusively work for Russia and will sell electricity to Ukraine. This statement is a clear Russian recognition that there will be an independent Ukraine at the end of this war and that Russia seeks to restore its energy leverage over Ukraine and possibly the West more broadly that has been reduced by sanctions and efforts to reduce reliance on Russian energy. It also reinforces the urgency of helping Ukraine regain control of Enerhodar City and the rest of its occupied territory to forestall this renewed economic thralldom. ISW previously reported that Russian forces started digging trenches and blocking highways to Enerhodar City.[5] The Zaporizhia Oblast Military Administration reported that Russian occupation authorities continued to prepare for a referendum in Enerhodar City on May 18.[6]
Ukrainian officials reported protests in Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR) over forced mobilizations on May 16-17. The Ukrainian Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported that relatives of the forcefully mobilized LNR servicemen demanded an immediate return of their family members from combat in Luhansk City and Rovenky approximately 50 kilometers west of Russian border.[7] The GUR noted that perceptions of war and resentment of mobilization in LNR worsened because of the high casualties Russian forces have suffered and the fact that Russian authorities are reportedly evading payments to the families of wounded and killed servicemen. Mariupol Mayor’s Advisor Petro Andryushenko had previously reported that a protest against mobilization had occurred in Donetsk City on May 16.[8]
Key Takeaways
  • Russian forces are continuing to inflict air and artillery strikes on the Azovstal Steel Plant, indicating that a remnant of Ukrainian defense is still in the plant despite evacuations over the last few days.
  • Russian occupying authorities are reportedly planning to level the Azovstal Steel Plant after completing its capture, which directly undermines the large strategic economic importance of capturing the plant.
  • Russian forces continued to prepare for an assault on Severodonetsk and intensified operations around Lyman.
  • Russian forces continued to prioritize holding positions around the Russian border to prevent further Ukrainian advances north of Kharkiv City and will likely continue to do so at the expense of deploying additional reinforcements to other axes of advance.
  • Russian troops focused on maintaining their positions on the Southern Axis and on conducting rocket, missile, and artillery strikes along the frontline.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
ISW has updated its assessment of the four primary efforts Russian forces are engaged in at this time. We have stopped coverage of supporting effort 4, “Sumy and northeastern Ukraine,” because it is no longer an active effort.
  • Main effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and three supporting efforts);
  • Subordinate main effort- Encirclement of Ukrainian troops in the cauldron between Izyum and Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts
  • Supporting effort 1—Mariupol;
  • Supporting effort 2—Kharkiv City;
  • Supporting effort 3—Southern axis.
Main effort—Eastern Ukraine
Subordinate Main Effort—Southern Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk Oblasts (Russian objective: Encircle Ukrainian forces in Eastern Ukraine and capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Russian forces did not advance south of Izyum on May 18. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces used drones, rockets, and artillery units to support an unsuccessful offensive on Dovhenke - a settlement approximately 30 kilometers south of Izyum.[9] Russian forces are likely aiming to secure access to the Izyum-Slovyansk highway east of the settlement to resume the offensive on Donbas. A satellite image from May 12 released yesterday showed a sunken Russian pontoon bridge approximately seven kilometers southwest of Izyum, which had been previously used by Russian forces to transport heavy artillery in April.[10] Ukrainian forces could have damaged the pontoon bridge given that they had previously destroyed two bridges in the same location on March 27.[11] Damage to the bridge may be hindering Russian drives on Barvinkove southwest of Izyum, although Russian possession of the major highways in the area might be sufficient to support their current level of operations. Russian forces intensified offensive operations in the area of Lyman, likely to gain foothold west of the Siverskyi Donets river.[12]
Russian forces intensified shelling and conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Popasna in preparation for the Battle of Severodonetsk.[13] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces attempted to advance southwest and north of Popasna, but could not seize access to highways to Bahmut and Lysychansk.[14] Luhansk Oblast Administration Head Serhiy Haidai said that Russian forces are increasing aviation support for ground troops in Luhansk Oblast.[15]
Russian forces continued a line of unsuccessful ground assaults in an effort to advance to Slovyansk and Zaporizhia City.[16] Russian forces and artillery were the most active in the settlements east of Avdiivka, but did not secure any territorial gains.[17] Russian military Telegram channels criticized the functioning of the Russian reconnaissance-strike complex (used to identify and attack targets), on the grounds that its centralized approval system hinders Russian artillery from striking Ukrainian positions in time because of delays in securing approval to fire from higher command echelons.[18]

Supporting Effort #1—Mariupol (Russian objective: Capture Mariupol and reduce the Ukrainian defenders)
Russian forces continued to conduct air and artillery strikes against the remaining Ukrainian defenders in the Azovstal Steel Plant on May 18.[19] The Russian Ministry of Defense stated that 694 Ukrainian servicemen surrendered to Russian forces between May 17 to 18 and claimed that nearly 1,000 had surrendered in all since evacuations began.[20] Leader of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Denis Pushilin claimed that all the high-ranking Ukrainian commanders have not yet left the plant. ISW cannot independently confirm that Ukrainian servicemen remain in Azovstal, but continued Russian air and artillery strikes make it highly likely that there are still some Ukrainian troops in the plant.[21]
Russian authorities continued occupation activities in Mariupol. DNR head Pushilin held a press tour in Mariupol and stated that the DNR intends to fully restore Mariupol and turn it into a “resort town.”[22] The Mariupol City Council notably stated that DNR authorities are planning to destroy the Azovstal Plant.[23] Occupation authorities also hosted a “high delegation” from Chechnya and promised close cooperation with the Chechen Republic, possibly in recognition of the role Chechen forces played in seizing the city, since there is no other obvious reason why Mariupol should cooperate closely with Chechnya.[24] Port authorities continued to prepare the Port of Mariupol for grain, metal, and clay exports under the supervision of a former head of the Russian Yeisk seaport, indicating administrative focus on continued integration into the Russian economy of such portions of the Mariupol economy as Russia has not yet completely destroyed or announced its intention of destroying.[25]

Supporting Effort #2—Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Withdraw forces to the north and defend ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum)
Russian forces continued efforts to prevent a further northward advance of the on-going Ukrainian counteroffensive around Kharkiv City on May 18. The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Ukrainian troops took control of Dementievka, about 10 kilometers south of Russian border, and that Russian forces are fighting in Ternova, 5 kilometers south of the Russian border.[26] Russian forces additionally shelled the northern part of Kharkiv City, indicating that they still have control of the highway to Belgorod in a manner than allows them to inflict artillery damage on the northern suburbs of Kharkiv despite pressure generated by the Ukrainian counteroffensive.[27] Russian troops north of Kharkiv City will likely continue to prioritize holding positions in Ukraine away from the international border at the expense of deploying additional reinforcements to Donbas.

Supporting Effort #3—Southern Axis (Objective: Defend Kherson against Ukrainian counterattacks)
Russian forces did not conduct any ground assaults in southern Ukraine and carried out shelling and reconnaissance of Ukrainian positions.[28] The Zaporizhia Oblast Military Administration noted that Russian forces began reinforcing troops for an offensive from the southeast on Orikhiv—a settlement approximately 80 kilometers from Zaporizhia City.[29] The Ukrainian Southern Operational Command reported that Russian forces are fortifying in depth in Kherson and Mykolaiv Oblasts.[30] Ukrainian forces reportedly destroyed two Russian ammunition depots in northern Kherson Oblast on May 17, including one near Chornobaivka just north of Kherson City, according to the Ukrainian Southern Operational Command.[31] Russian forces launched missile strikes on Odesa and Mykolaiv Oblasts on May 18.[32] The situation in Transnistria did not change.[33]

Immediate items to watch
  • Russian forces will likely complete their withdrawal from the vicinity of Kharkiv City but attempt to hold a line west of Vovchansk to defend their GLOCs from Belgorod to Izyum. It is unclear if they will succeed.
  • The Russians will continue efforts to encircle Severodonetsk and Lysychansk at least from the south, possibly by focusing on cutting off the last highway connecting Severodonetsk-Lysychansk with the rest of Ukraine.
  • Russia might attempt to annex part of Zaporizhia Oblast to profit off the Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant.
  • The Russians will continue to launch artillery and missile strikes on the Azovstal Steel Plant to target Mariupol defenders that refused to surrender.

[4] https://m dot business-gazeta.ru/news/550416; https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/36486
[22] https://t.me/andriyshTime/939https://t.me/andriyshTime/941; https://ria dot ru/20220518/mariupol-1789214329.html?utm_source=yxnews&utm_medium=desktop; https://t.me/stranaua/42763 ; https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/36472


2. Raising the Flag at U.S. Embassy Kyiv

Good news.


Raising the Flag at U.S. Embassy Kyiv - United States Department of State
state.gov · by Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State
HomeOffice of the SpokespersonPress Releases...Raising the Flag at U.S. Embassy Kyiv
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Raising the Flag at U.S. Embassy Kyiv
Press Statement
May 18, 2022
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Three months ago, we lowered our flag over the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, Ukraine, just days before Russian forces streamed across Ukraine’s border to carry out President Putin’s unprovoked, unjustified war of choice. When we suspended operations at the embassy, we made the point clear: while we would relocate U.S. embassy personnel for their safety and security, this would in no way prevent our engagement with, and support for, the Ukrainian people, government, and civil society as well as our allies and partners. We underscored our commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, pledged to continue our assistance, and started working toward the day we could return to Kyiv.
Now, that day has come. Today we are officially resuming operations at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv. The Ukrainian people, with our security assistance, have defended their homeland in the face of Russia’s unconscionable invasion, and, as a result, the Stars and Stripes are flying over the Embassy once again. We stand proudly with, and continue to support, the government and people of Ukraine as they defend their country from the Kremlin’s brutal war of aggression.
As we take this momentous step, we have put forward additional measures to increase the safety of our colleagues who are returning to Kyiv and have enhanced our security measures and protocols.
We are committed to confronting the challenges ahead. The war rages on. Russia’s forces inflict death and destruction on Ukrainian soil every day. Millions of Ukrainians are displaced from their homes and mourn the loss of their loved ones. With strength of purpose, we reaffirm our commitment to the people and government of Ukraine, and we look forward to carrying out our mission from the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv.
state.gov · by Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State


3. How China uses global media to spread its views — and misinformation

Excerpts:
Over the past two years, China has put its international media network to work shaping public opinion on covid-19, the war in Ukraine, and its foreign policies and image more broadly. In many parts of the world, China is competing against more well-established European, American and local outlets, but Chinese media has already become a dominant news source in several countries.
That has raised red flags on many fronts. Recent examples of Chinese state media “reporting” for global audiences have been thinly veiled expressions of official Chinese policies regarding Taiwan, Hong Kong and other controversial areas. Other examples have involved blatant cases of misinformation — vis-à-vis Ukraine and the pandemic in particular. There are also concerns that China, which is ranked in the bottom 10 countries for press freedom, is spreading its restrictive approach to journalism.
“If Chinese media is going to gain some form of hegemony in Africa, it will have negative consequences for freedom of information and democracy in Africa,” said Emeka Umejei, a lecturer in communications at the University of Ghana.
How China uses global media to spread its views — and misinformation
From covid to the war in Ukraine, China has ramped up its efforts to influence public opinion across the world.

China Reporter
May 18, 2022
grid.news · by Lili Pike
A small news website in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A popular South African digital media platform. A Spanish language newswire service. Over the past year, all three far-flung news organizations have run similar stories claiming that a U.S.-run lab had created covid-19 or, more recently, articles that said the U.S. was operating a secret bioweapons program in Ukraine.
That these theories have also been simultaneously promoted by Chinese government officials is no coincidence — all three of those media outlets have ties to the Chinese government.
Over the past couple of decades, China has built an international media empire: opening state media bureaus overseas, investing in foreign media companies and forging partnerships with others. It’s part of a broader campaign to build its global influence, especially in developing countries, as laid out in a recent report from the Atlantic Council.
“We see a lot about China’s financing and economic investment in these regions, but that’s only one side of the story of Chinese influence,” said Kenton Thibaut, a resident China fellow at the Atlantic Council and one of the report’s authors. China’s use of global media outlets and other forms of soft power to spread its views, Thibaut said, is underappreciated.
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Over the past two years, China has put its international media network to work shaping public opinion on covid-19, the war in Ukraine, and its foreign policies and image more broadly. In many parts of the world, China is competing against more well-established European, American and local outlets, but Chinese media has already become a dominant news source in several countries.
That has raised red flags on many fronts. Recent examples of Chinese state media “reporting” for global audiences have been thinly veiled expressions of official Chinese policies regarding Taiwan, Hong Kong and other controversial areas. Other examples have involved blatant cases of misinformation — vis-à-vis Ukraine and the pandemic in particular. There are also concerns that China, which is ranked in the bottom 10 countries for press freedom, is spreading its restrictive approach to journalism.
“If Chinese media is going to gain some form of hegemony in Africa, it will have negative consequences for freedom of information and democracy in Africa,” said Emeka Umejei, a lecturer in communications at the University of Ghana.
The messages: What Chinese-backed media is saying
One side of China’s overseas media campaign is purely promotional. Chinese media outlets and their local partners around the world often highlight the successes of China’s diplomats and the latest megaprojects in the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s high-profile global infrastructure campaign. Readers of China Daily Africa, for example, might find these stories: “Ghana’s students enjoy benefits of Chinese language”; “Marathon staged on Chinese-built expressway, reviving Kenyans’ hope for economic vitality”; and “Liberian official hails China for helping vulnerable groups.” Such articles are a staple of the Chinese approach, blended in with more typical examples of global news stories.
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People stand outside the Idu train station during the official test run of the newly completed Abuja-Kaduna night railway line in Abuja, Nigeria, on July 21, 2016. (STRINGER/AFP via Getty Images)
After the outbreak of the pandemic in Wuhan, Chinese media outlets around the world also played a prominent role as China sought to restore its global image, touting its response to the crisis. Coverage during this period included stories about China’s donation of critical medical equipment to poorer nations. For readers of Xinhua Español in Latin America, there were stories about China’s largesse in sharing its vaccines: “Sinovac supplies 260 million COVID-19 vaccines globally,” one headline read.
Another side of China’s global coverage veers from these promotional, PR-style stories to cases of flat-out misinformation. After the March 2021 release of a World Health Organization report on covid’s origins, China made a concerted effort to spread a false narrative. The Atlantic Council documented how China-backed media outlets in multiple countries helped push the theory that covid had originated from Fort Detrick, a U.S. military base in Maryland.
Independent Online (IOL), a partially Chinese-owned South African outlet, joined the chorus. In September 2021, the publication’s foreign editor wrote an op-ed that repeated messaging from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “China has made a request for the WHO to investigate Fort Detrick,” she wrote. “Given the many questions that still exist around the origins of Covid-19, such investigations are imperative in order to make proper and accurate findings.” In a tactic the Atlantic Council’s Thibaut described as “information laundering,” the Chinese Embassy in South Africa and Chinese media then used the editor’s piece to amplify its own point. The headline in China’s People’s Daily read, “Investigation of US labs necessary for COVID-19 origins tracing: S. African media.”
“It’s using this veneer of local reporting to pretend that there’s this preponderance of evidence for China’s conspiracy when it’s really all coming from Chinese media,” Thibaut told Grid.
Similar articles appeared in many outlets across the world, and the theory also ricocheted on social media. In one instance, a Chinese diplomat in Iran translated a People’s Daily article on the topic into Persian and shared it on Twitter.
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“Normally they aren’t huge peddlers of conspiracy theories, they mostly focus on positive messages of China, preventing criticism and criticizing geopolitical rivals,” said Thibaut. “They’re usually not like, as Russia is, these active disseminators of disinformation. But this was in response to a crisis where they saw they really had to try to move public opinion quickly and really diffuse the issue quickly.”
The Ukraine war has been another case in point. China has backed the Kremlin line on the war in its own state media around the world, including the repetition of clearly false narratives about the conflict.
In late March, a South African student leader penned an op-ed in IOL titled, “We should all be concerned about U.S. biolabs in Ukraine.” The piece echoed Russian and Chinese government talking points, falsely accusing the U.S. of running bioweapons labs in Ukraine. “Over the years, there have been deadly leaks linked to US military biolabs in Ukraine, South Korea, Kazakhstan and Georgia,” the article said. “All this seems to indicate an aggressive ‘biological appetite’ from the US and the development of bio-weaponry.” Once again, it wasn’t just that the article appeared in a media outlet backed by China; Chinese media took the additional step of “information laundering” — using the story to create the illusion of global support for the theory. On April 1, Chinese news agency Xinhua ran an article citing the original essay under the heading: “U.S. biolabs in Ukraine raise worldwide concerns: S. African youth leader.”
An op-ed in the partially Chinese-owned South African media site IOL was cited in a subsequent article on the same topic in Xinhua, an example of what experts call China's "information laundering."
Recently, Dani Madrid-Morales, a lecturer in journalism at the University of Sheffield, identified several other cases in which China spread this misinformation. In April, Interfax, a Russian media outlet, published an article stating that Ukraine had tried to hide a U.S.-funded military biolab program. The Chinese news agency Xinhua translated that piece into French, and it appeared word for word on a small news website in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Chinese misinformation that targets the West may hold more appeal in the Global South. Maria Repnikova, an assistant professor of global communication at Georgia State University, said recently that “a lot of these countries, including their leaders and publics, have preexisting skepticism toward the West and preexisting critiques of kind of this positioning of this war as this good vs. evil. They take a stance where they also critique the United States and its own unaccountable wars, and as a result, they may echo some of these Chinese messages.”
How China spreads the word
China’s overseas media push began several decades ago as an accessory to its booming international business deals. It is only recently, since the ascension of Xi Jinping as president in 2012, that these efforts have taken on a more aggressively political flavor.
In 2013, Xi said in a speech, “[We] must meticulously and properly conduct external propaganda, innovating external propaganda methods, working hard to create new concepts, new categories and new expressions that integrate the Chinese and the foreign, telling China’s story well, communicating China’s voice well.”
China has set out to “tell its story well” in several ways.
One method simply involves setting up shop overseas. As other global news organizations have downsized, China’s biggest state-owned media companies have established bureaus and hired correspondents all over the world. Xinhua, for instance, set up an Africa bureau in Nairobi in 2004, and CCTV (now CGTN) followed suit in 2012. These outlets and other state media radio stations and newspapers publish in dozens of languages worldwide.
Other methods have been more innovative. StarTimes, a Chinese television company, provides cheap cable TV packages in Africa that come with Chinese state-run TV channels. Their service now reaches more than 10 million customers across 30 African countries. Influence has also been purchased: In 2012, Chinese state-owned companies bought a 20 percent stake in IOL, the South African media platform that has since published several pieces toeing the Chinese party line — including the Fort Detrick theory. Researchers at Freedom House also found that GBTimes, a Chinese news organization, has acquired stakes in radio stations in Europe through which it spreads pro-China content.
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These acquisitions are representative of what the government describes as “borrowing a boat out to sea” — in other words, China using established local media organizations to disseminate its messages. Another version of the practice involves Chinese state media allowing local publications to republish their content for a steep discount — or even for free. Xinhua has led the way: Its articles are syndicated throughout the world, including via the African News Agency. That’s how a small newspaper in the Democratic Republic of the Congo came to publish a story on the supposed U.S. bioweapons labs in Ukraine. Chinese outlets also piggyback on local media by buying ad inserts that blend in with the local content.
China isn’t alone in establishing a worldwide media presence. Russia famously spreads state messages — and disinformation. Under a different umbrella — to support democracy and freedom of the press — Western countries have long backed media development initiatives in foreign countries along with funding their own media outlets such as Voice of America, which are editorially independent by charter. But China is unique. “I don’t think you can find any country that has this breadth of activities and diversity” that China does, said Madrid-Morales. The range of activities, he added, from media trainings for foreign journalists to content production abroad, hasn’t been seen since the Cold War.
Who is reading?
Of course, China’s global media push — no matter its scope — is influential only if it can find an audience.
Madrid-Morales and Herman Wasserman, a professor of media studies at the University of Cape Town, have observed a range of responses to Chinese-sponsored media in Africa. Some South African and Kenyan students they interviewed were glad to see more positive coverage of the continent compared with Western coverage, which many feel has a negative bias. But the researchers say they’ve seen limited uptake. Just 2 percent of South Africans and Kenyans tune into China Radio International and read the China Daily Africa edition, they found.
“There’s a stigma and the fact that [they are] so heavily censored … you just think to yourself: ‘It’s biased reporting, I’m going somewhere else,’” one student at the University of Cape Town told the researchers, echoing a sentiment held by others.
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In some parts of the world, Chinese media has made significant inroads. Madrid-Morales found that Xinhua was responsible for more than 80 percent of the newswire content on covid-19 and China in Congo and 80 percent in Sierra Leone. In the case of Russia’s war in Ukraine, his research showed that 75 percent of the coverage in the Ugandan magazine the Independent was from Xinhua, likely because the free content was appealing for a publication with a tight budget.
Readers of the publication have seen the war through the lens of the Chinese government, which has tacitly supported Russia. They would have read about the financial consequences of the war — which are blamed on Western sanctions — but not the death, crimes or the flow of refugees, which are all due to the Russian invasion. “None of that appears in this coverage,” he said in a recent lecture.
It is through these content partnerships, where republication of Chinese sources often goes unlabeled, that Umejie believes China is gaining the most traction. “There’s some level of acceptance happening here, because they are not coming through a Chinese platform,” he said. “Most likely, they’re coming through a local platform.” This was true in Nigeria and Ghana, he said, which have partnerships with Xinhua.
Researchers worry that poorer countries, which are less able to support independent journalism, and those that already have a restricted media space due to authoritarian regimes, may be the most susceptible to China’s media influence.
And China’s global media ambitions are growing. “If you look at this longitudinally, definitely, China has made huge progress over the last 10 years, from being a marginal actor in the media space to being part of the media space — in some countries, a very small presence; in some countries, a larger presence,” said Madrid-Morales. “So in that sense, there is progress, and if we look at the future, that presence is likely to grow.”
Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.
grid.news · by Lili Pike



4. How the Biden administration let right-wing attacks derail its disinformation efforts
How ironic.

This is a case study in disinformation.

Here are my public comments on this situation a couple of weeks ago:

“If the government intends to expose disinformation, one of the most important counters to that is providing legitimate information,” said David Maxwell, ... “The announcement, without complete transparency about the organization and its activities and authorities and intent … really undermines their [DHS’s] own credibility and legitimacy.”
https://www.cyberscoop.com/backlash-dhs-disinformation-governance-board/
How the Biden administration let right-wing attacks derail its disinformation efforts
The Washington Post · by Taylor Lorenz · May 18, 2022
On the morning of April 27, the Department of Homeland Security announced the creation of the first Disinformation Governance Board with the stated goal to “coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security.” The Biden administration tapped Nina Jankowicz, a well-known figure in the field of fighting disinformation and extremism, as the board’s executive director.
In naming the 33-year-old Jankowicz to run the newly created board, the administration chose someone with extensive experience in the field of disinformation, which has emerged as an urgent and important issue. The author of the books “How to Be a Woman Online” and “How to Lose the Information War,” her career also featured stints at multiple nonpartisan think tanks and nonprofits and included work that focused on strengthening democratic institutions. Within the small community of disinformation researchers, her work was well-regarded.
But within hours of news of her appointment, Jankowicz was thrust into the spotlight by the very forces she dedicated her career to combating. The board itself and DHS received criticism for both its somewhat ominous name and scant details of specific mission (Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said it “could have done a better job of communicating what it is and what it isn’t”), but Jankowicz was on the receiving end of the harshest attacks, with her role mischaracterized as she became a primary target on the right-wing Internet. She has been subject to an unrelenting barrage of harassment and abuse while unchecked misrepresentations of her work continue to go viral.
Now, just three weeks after its announcement, the Disinformation Governance Board is being “paused,” according to multiple employees at DHS, capping a back-and-forth week of decisions that changed during the course of reporting of this story. On Monday, DHS decided to shut down the board, according to multiple people with knowledge of the situation. By Tuesday morning, Jankowicz had drafted a resignation letter in response to the board’s dissolution.
But Tuesday night, Jankowicz was pulled into an urgent call with DHS officials who gave her the choice to stay on, even as the department’s work was put on hold because of the backlash it faced, according to multiple people with knowledge of the call. Working groups within DHS focused on mis-, dis- and mal-information have been suspended. The board could still be shut down pending a review from the Homeland Security Advisory Council. On Wednesday morning, Jankowicz officially resigned from her role within the department.
“Nina Jankowicz has been subjected to unjustified and vile personal attacks and physical threats,” a DHS spokesperson told The Washington Post in a statement. “In congressional hearings and in media interviews, the Secretary has repeatedly defended her as eminently qualified and underscored the importance of the Department’s disinformation work, and he will continue to do so.”
Jankowicz has not spoken publicly about her position since the day it was announced.
Jankowicz’s experience is a prime example of how the right-wing Internet apparatus operates, where far-right influencers attempt to identify a target, present a narrative and then repeat mischaracterizations across social media and websites with the aim of discrediting and attacking anyone who seeks to challenge them. It also shows what happens when institutions, when confronted with these attacks, don’t respond effectively.
Those familiar with the board’s inner workings, including DHS employees and Capitol Hill staffers, along with experts on disinformation, say Jankowicz was set up to fail by an administration that was unsure of its messaging and unprepared to counteract a coordinated online campaign against her.
A disastrous rollout
Just hours after Jankowicz tweeted about her new job, far-right influencer Jack Posobiec posted tweets accusing the Biden administration of creating a “Ministry of Truth.” Posobiec’s 1.7 million followers quickly sprung into action. By the end of the day, there were at least 53,235 posts on Twitter mentioning “Disinformation Governance Board,” many referencing Jankowicz by name, according to a report by Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that conducts public-interest research. In the days following, that number skyrocketed.
Cat's out of the bag: here's what I've been up to the past two months, and why I've been a bit quiet on here.

Honored to be serving in the Biden Administration @DHSgov and helping shape our counter-disinformation efforts. https://t.co/uN20vl7qqV pic.twitter.com/JEn4FqLdck
— Nina Jankowicz (@wiczipedia) April 27, 2022
The board was created to study best practices in combating the harmful effects of disinformation and to help DHS counter viral lies and propaganda that could threaten domestic security. Unlike the “Ministry of Truth” in George Orwell’s “1984” that became a derogatory comparison point, neither the board nor Jankowicz had any power or ability to declare what is true or false, or compel Internet providers, social media platforms or public schools to take action against certain types of speech. In fact, the board itself had no power or authority to make any operational decisions.
“The Board’s purpose has been grossly mischaracterized; it will not police speech,” the DHS spokesperson said. “Quite the opposite, its focus is to ensure that freedom of speech is protected.”
Posobiec’s early tweets shaped the narrative and Jankowicz was positioned as the primary target. Republican lawmakers echoed Posobiec’s framing and amplified it to their audiences. Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who is a U.S. Senate hopeful, and Rep. Andrew S. Clyde (R-Ga.) both posted tweets similar to Posobiec’s. Former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) also posted a video repeating Posobiec’s statements.
The week following the announcement, approximately 70 percent of Fox News’s one-hour segments mentioned either Jankowicz or the board, with correspondents frequently deriding the board as a “Ministry of Truth,” according to Advance Democracy. The Fox News coverage was referenced in some of the most popular posts on Facebook and Twitter criticizing Jankowicz.
Dozens of websites including Breitbart, the Post Millennial, the Daily Caller and the New York Post began mining Jankowicz’s past social media posts and publishing articles to generate controversy. Some were simply mocking, making fun of her for parodying a song from “Mary Poppins” to talk about misinformation. In another instance, a performance where Jankowicz sings a popular musical theater song about a person’s desire to become rich and powerful was misrepresented to imply that Jankowicz herself was after money and power and would sleep with men to get it.
As this online campaign played out, DHS and the Biden administration struggled to counter the repeated attacks.
The weekend after her hiring was announced, Mayorkas attempted to clarify the board’s mission and defended Jankowicz’s credentials. He did a round of TV news interviews and testified about the board during House and Senate committee hearings. A forceful defense of Jankowicz was noticeably absent online, where the attacks against her were concentrated. White House press secretary Jen Psaki debunked false claims about the board during two news briefings and touted Jankowicz as “an expert on online disinformation,” but it had little effect on the growing campaign against her.
“These smears leveled by bad-faith, right-wing actors against a deeply qualified expert and against efforts to better combat human smuggling and domestic terrorism are disgusting,” deputy White House press secretary Andrew Bates told The Post on Tuesday.
As she endured the attacks, Jankowicz was told to stay silent. After attempting to defend herself on Twitter April 27, she was told by DHS officials to not issue any further public statements, according to multiple people close to her.
Democratic lawmakers, legislative staff and other administration employees who sought to defend Jankowicz were caught flat-footed. Administration officials did not brief the relevant congressional staff and committees ahead of the board’s launch, and members of Congress who had expressed interest in disinformation weren’t given a detailed explanation about how it would operate. A fact sheet released by DHS on May 2 did nothing to quell the outrage that had been building on the Internet, nor did it clarify much of what the board would actually be doing or Jankowicz’s role in it.
DHS staffers have also grown frustrated. With the department’s suspension of intra-departmental working groups focused on mis-, dis- and mal-information, some officials said it was an overreaction that gave too much credence to bad-faith actors. A 15-year veteran of the department, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly, called the DHS response to the controversy “mind-boggling.” “I’ve never seen the department react like this before,” he said.
A textbook disinformation campaign
Experts say that right-wing disinformation and smear campaigns regularly follow the same playbook and that it’s crucial that the public and leaders of institutions, especially in the government, the media and educational bodies, understand more fully how these cycles operate.
The campaigns invariably start with identifying a person to characterize as a villain. Attacking faceless institutions is difficult, so a figurehead (almost always a woman or person of color) is found to serve as its face. Whether that person has actual power within that institution is often immaterial. By discrediting those made to represent institutions they seek to bring down, they discredit the institution itself.
Harassment and reputational harm is core to the attack strategy. Institutions often treat reputational harm and online attacks as a personnel matter, one that unlucky employees should simply endure quietly.
Jankowicz’s case is a perfect example of this system at work, said Emerson T. Brooking, a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. “They try to define people by these single, decontextualized moments,” Brooking said. “In Nina’s case it’s a few TikTok videos, or one or two comments out of thousands of public appearances. They fixate on these small instances and they define this villain.”
The worst thing any institution can do in the face of such attacks is remain quiet, several disinformation researchers said.
“You never want to be silent, because then the people putting out the disinformation own the narrative,” said Mark Jacobson, assistant dean at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, who has researched propaganda, political warfare and disinformation for over 30 years. “You need to have a factual and equally emotional counternarrative. A fact sheet is not a narrative.”
Not responding with a highly compelling counternarrative, or not getting out ahead of these campaigns to begin with, Jacobson explained, can “give them an air of legitimacy.” He said he was frustrated by the Biden administration’s lack of a loud and vocal response to what Jankowicz was going through. “Saying it’s amateur hour is cliche, but it’s amateur hour,” he said of the administration’s inaction.
The fallout from the campaign against Jankowicz can be seen in the escalating attacks. Violent threats against her are flourishing online, according to Advance Democracy. Users on far-right social media platforms continue to use misogynistic and bigoted language in posts about Jankowicz, with many users calling for violence.
In response to one post on Gab featuring a video of Tucker Carlson discussing Jankowicz, users commented: “Time to kill them all.” Another post featuring Carlson’s coverage of Jankowicz was shared to a right-wing forum with the caption “This is the point where we have to draw the line.” Comments said Jankowicz should be “greeted with Mr. 12 Gauge Slugs.” An April 30 post on Gab featuring a tweet by Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) telling her followers “this is the hill to die on” sparked replies that were flooded with threats to Jankowicz’s life. “It’d be easier if we had a large group of trained assassins to take a lot of the [government] bastards out first,” one user wrote.
“The irony is that Nina’s role was to come up with strategies for the department to counter this type of campaign, and now they’ve just succumbed to it themselves,” said one Hill staffer with knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the issue. “They didn’t even fight, they just rolled over.”
DHS staffers worried that the way Jankowicz’s situation was mishandled could hurt their ability to recruit talent at a time when white nationalist violence is thriving and the midterm elections are approaching.
“We’re going to need another Nina down the road,” said one DHS staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not at liberty to comment. “And anyone who takes that position is going to be vulnerable to a disinformation campaign or attack.”
The Washington Post · by Taylor Lorenz · May 18, 2022


5. Military briefing: why Russia and Ukraine are fighting over a Black Sea outcrop

Snake island.

Excerpts:
Militarily, analysts say Snake Island’s size and lack of cover make it all but indefensible. Unless Moscow manages to install air defence systems, or place a battleship with similar systems nearby, “Russian positions on the island are unsustainable,” said Rochan Consulting, a military analysis group, wrote in a May 15 briefing. “Neither option looks currently viable.”
Ukraine’s immediate aim is not to physically control Snake Island, as its own troops would be as vulnerable as those of Russia. Rather, it wants to stop Moscow from fortifying its position and installing long-range air defence systems that could protect the area and allow for naval operations.
Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defence minister who advises the government on security, said Russia’s de facto control of Snake Island “becomes less critical if we destroy everything that arrives”.
Zagorodnyuk said two nearby oil rigs — now under Russian control — are also being used by Russia as military platforms to control and blockade maritime shipping.
“We need to deny their access to our territorial waters,” said Zagorodnyuk. “It’s very much pressing from an economic survival perspective should the war drag on.”



Military briefing: why Russia and Ukraine are fighting over a Black Sea outcrop
Financial Times · by Roman Olearchyk · May 17, 2022
Snake Island leapt to international attention early in Russia’s war against Ukraine when its tiny garrison was told to surrender or face naval bombardment and certain death. “Russian warship, go fuck yourself,” came the now celebrated response from one of its guardsmen, Roman Hrybov.
Three months on, the 0.2 square kilometre island — barely more than an outcrop of rock — remains at the centre of a bitter fight as Ukraine and Russia vie for control of the Black Sea and the conflict’s broader propaganda battle.
Moscow has been unable to reinforce its position there to secure control against Ukrainian drone and air strikes. But nor can Ukraine, which has limited naval capacity, muster sufficient power to regain and hold the island.
The to-ing and fro-ing over the island is in many ways a microcosm of the war itself. Snake Island has strategic significance, as a military base there could dominate an area spanning hundreds of miles. But the fight has also taken on a totemic significance, spun by both sides to bolster morale.
Despite Hrybov’s valiant refusal to surrender, Snake Island’s garrison did lay down their arms and were later released by the Russians in a prisoner swap.
Snake Island “is strategically useful”, said a western official. “But it also has a symbolism that is possibly even more important.”

According to Greek mythology, Poseidon created Snake Island as a haven for Achilles and Helen. Today, with no trees or fresh water but boasting a helipad and two deep-water piers, the X-shaped rocky protrusion lies in the middle of Ukraine’s crucial shipping lanes. It is also just 35km from the coast of Nato member Romania. (Bucharest’s own claims to the island were dismissed by the International Court of Justice in 2009).
For Ukraine, preventing Moscow from using the island as a missile and naval base would help break Russia’s Black Sea economic blockade of maritime exports, including grain, of which Ukraine is a top global supplier.
Russia could also use the island as a base to attack Odesa and expand the conflict into Moldova and its Moscow-allied breakaway state of Transnistria. It could even potentially hinder the deployment of Nato weapons and troops from Romania.
Limited-edition Snake Island stamps, commemorating the moment when a Ukrainian soldier defiantly responded to a Russian warship when ordered to surrender © Leon Neal/Getty Images
“The one who controls the island can at any time block the movement of commercial vessels in all directions to the south of Ukraine,” Kyrylo Budanov, chief of Ukraine’s military intelligence, said on Friday.
So far, Ukraine has frustrated Russian attempts to turn Snake Island into a secure base, hitting Russian air defence systems and resupply vessels with air strikes and the Turkish Bayraktar drones that have led to some of Ukraine’s most spectacular military successes.
video of aerial footage posted by Ukraine’s armed services on May 8 claims to show a drone strike taking down a Russian helicopter hovering over the island. Two days earlier, another video boasted that drone strikes had sunk a Russian patrol boat and destroyed a short-range missile system.
“This is what happens when you weren’t invited to Snake Island,” the post reads as techno music plays.
Moscow has its own version of events. During the attack, according to the Ministry of Defence, Russia shot down four Ukrainian aircraft, almost 30 unmanned aerial vehicles and at least three helicopters. Two dozen Ukrainian “saboteurs” were also purportedly killed, as was the deputy commander of Ukraine’s navy, Colonel Ihor Bedzai. Ukraine has confirmed Bedzai’s death but not the battle in which he died.
“This adventure ended in disaster for Ukraine,” said spokesman Igor Konashenkov.
Michael Kofman, director of Russia studies at the CNA military think-tank, is less convinced, however.
“You can tell from the Russian operation, it’s still unclear what they’re trying to do there,” he told a War on the Rocks podcast. “The Russian military has been the king of not well-co-ordinated efforts . . . sending in units without air support, then getting those lost and sending units to recover them . . . then sending a special forces unit with a helicopter and getting that killed by” Turkish drones.
The Russian army has similarly struggled to mount co-ordinated military operations in the battle for the Donbas, where the bulk of the fighting is now concentrated.
Militarily, analysts say Snake Island’s size and lack of cover make it all but indefensible. Unless Moscow manages to install air defence systems, or place a battleship with similar systems nearby, “Russian positions on the island are unsustainable,” said Rochan Consulting, a military analysis group, wrote in a May 15 briefing. “Neither option looks currently viable.”
Ukraine’s immediate aim is not to physically control Snake Island, as its own troops would be as vulnerable as those of Russia. Rather, it wants to stop Moscow from fortifying its position and installing long-range air defence systems that could protect the area and allow for naval operations.
Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defence minister who advises the government on security, said Russia’s de facto control of Snake Island “becomes less critical if we destroy everything that arrives”.
Zagorodnyuk said two nearby oil rigs — now under Russian control — are also being used by Russia as military platforms to control and blockade maritime shipping.
“We need to deny their access to our territorial waters,” said Zagorodnyuk. “It’s very much pressing from an economic survival perspective should the war drag on.”
Financial Times · by Roman Olearchyk · May 17, 2022

6. Military Assistance to Ukraine: Rediscovering the Virtue of Courage
Conclusion:

So what is courage in the current context? It is the fact of doing more for the team in the face of danger than others currently do. It is the act of walking up to the boundary of what feels safe – and moving it. It took courage for CEE allies to supply ammunition when no one else would; for Turkey to supply combat drones; for the UK to fly in NLAWs in January; and for CEE allies to be the first to supply tanks and heavy weapons. Courage is what makes alliances strong and the states within them secure. And it is the lack of it that breaks them both. It took the attempted destruction of a European country for the West to relearn this most foundational virtue. Let us not forget it again.

Military Assistance to Ukraine: Rediscovering the Virtue of Courage
Edward Hunter Christie17 May 2022



Since 2014, the story of Western military assistance to Ukraine has been one of halting progress and self-imposed thresholds, transcended by acts of resolve. This is a story about courage.
As the Donbas War unfolded in 2014, the correlation of forces seemed clear to all. The Battle of Ilovaisk in September 2014 and the Battle of Debaltseve in January–February 2015 appeared to validate the notion of ‘escalation dominance’. Regardless of what Ukraine did, Russia could always pour in additional capabilities and prevail. This same notion was used to argue against arming Ukraine. Relatedly, the notion that there was ‘no military solution’ had already been used by President Barack Obama on 26 March 2014, before becoming Chancellor Angela Merkel’s signature statement about Ukraine. These interrelated notions provided the backdrop for the provision of only non-lethal assistance. The first wave of shipments to Ukraine, between July 2014 and March 2015, was limited to humanitarian aid and non-lethal military goods such as helmets and body armour.
From March 2015, with conflict intensity having fallen markedly, allies focused on longer-term non-lethal assistance, most notably training for the Ukrainian armed forces. The main allied efforts were the US-led Joint Multinational Training Group-Ukraine (JMTG-U), Canada’s Operation Unifier, and the UK’s Operation Orbital, all launched in 2015. Poland and Lithuania made substantial contributions to these training efforts, mainly through the JMTG-U, as well as bilaterally. Between 2015 and January 2022, the US-led JMTG-U trained more than 27,000 Ukrainian personnel, Canada’s Operation Unifier 33,346 personnel, and the UK’s Operation Orbital over 22,000 personnel.
Arms Transfers up to 2021
Over the 2014–2021 period, arms transfers to Ukraine were very limited. According to SIPRI’s arms transfer database, not a single country transferred major armaments prior to 2018. Exports of military goods – which include armaments, as well as ammunition and technical and non-lethal equipment – were also low. According to the EU Arms Export database, from 2014 to 2020, the largest EU exporters were Poland with 129 million euros’ worth of exports and Czechia with 52 million euros’ worth. Contrary to claims made in a 9 April article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, which used data on licenses rather than actual deliveries, France’s exports were worth 27 million euros, and likely did not include lethal equipment. Polish, Czech and Lithuanian exports, on the other hand, included lethal equipment, notably ammunition.
In 2018, the US crossed its self-imposed limitation to providing ‘non-lethal’ assistance with its first deliveries of Javelin anti-tank missiles (further deliveries occurred in 2019 and 2021). Also starting in 2018, Czechia exported self-propelled artillery and infantry fighting vehicles, and Poland exported MT-LB armoured track vehicles. Importantly, Turkey agreed to the export of Bayraktar TB2 combat drones, with deliveries commencing in 2019. By November 2021, the only countries that had supplied complete systems to Ukraine were Czechia, Poland, Turkey and the US.
The Race to Support Insurgency Warfare
From December 2021, with the realisation that a full-scale Russian invasion was imminent, the race was on to prepare assistance focused on asymmetric or insurgency warfare. The US prepared a $200 million package, with a focus on ‘additional Javelin and other anti-armor systems, grenade launchers, munitions, and non-lethal equipment’. The package was approved in late December, with shipments arriving in late January 2022.
Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia supplied weapons to Ukraine from late January, including US-origin Javelin anti-tank weapons and Stinger MANPADs, with the US accelerating the export licensing required for such third-party transfers. Czechia and Poland both supplied artillery ammunition and, in the case of Poland, GROM MANPADs and light mortars.
The UK made a pivotal contribution in the same period with the delivery by 20 January of 2,000 next-generation light anti-tank weapons (NLAWs), together with a team of trainers. The widely viewed images of British C-17 flights flying weapons into Ukraine at the eleventh hour, while avoiding German airspace, resonated powerfully across Europe. Germany, at that time, was not only refusing to transfer arms to Ukraine, but also blocking third-party transfers. The rising pressure helped nudge the Netherlands to approve and Canada to deliver lethal assistance shortly before the invasion. France, acting with deliberate discretion, also delivered Milan and Javelin anti-tank systems and Mistral MANPADs, together with trainers, prior to the invasion.
Russia initiated its new war of aggression on 24 February 2022. On 26 February, a first wave of European governments announced supplies of lethal equipment to Ukraine: Slovakia came first, followed by Belgium and later in the day by GermanyCommitments followed the next day from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Greece, Spain, Portugal and Romania; on 28 February from Finland, Italy, Croatia, Slovenia, Luxembourg and North Macedonia; and on 1 March from Australia. The UK played a key coordinating role by organising donor conferences and setting up an International Donor Coordination Centre.
By 25 April, focusing just on man-portable systems, the US had delivered or committed more than 1,400 Stinger missiles, 5,500 Javelin missiles, and 14,000 other anti-armour systems. The UK had delivered 5,361 NLAWs, over 200 Stinger missiles, 360 anti-structural munitions, as well as Starstreak anti-air systems. Other allies combined had delivered or committed at least 700 Stinger missiles, hundreds of other MANPADs, 100 NLAWs, and over 20,000 other anti-tank weapons.
The Race to Support Peer-on-Peer Warfare
From early April, attention shifted to heavier and longer-range armaments for large-scale combat in Ukraine’s east and south.
Over the course of April, Ukraine received supplies of Soviet-standard systems, with Poland and Czechia each supplying self-propelled artillery, infantry fighting vehicles, multiple rocket launchers, and T-72 main battle tanks. Estonia also supplied towed artillery systems. Additionally, the Czech defence industry started to provide repair services for Ukrainian land systems, while unspecified allies, most likely in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and supported by the US, provided ‘spare parts and components’ for Ukrainian combat aircraft.
Allies further west faced two options: backfill CEE allies to allow them to supply greater numbers of Soviet-standard systems, or supply Ukraine with NATO-standard systems. Both options are being pursued out of necessity. Important pledges were secured at a US-convened donor conference on 26 April. US pledges include 90 M777 howitzers with ammunition and training, which were almost fully delivered as of 10 May. Australia, Canada and the UK also pledged towed artillery, and France, the Netherlands, Germany and Norway self-propelled artillery. To date, however, German deliveries seem subject to struggles between slow-moving Social Democrats and more forward-leaning elements. In the maritime domain, the UK pledged ground-fired Brimstone anti-ship missiles.
A US bill authorising $24.1 billion of additional military assistance – over six times more than the $3.7 billion spent in the first two months of the war – seemed certain, pending slight delays, as of 12 May. With this development, the US contribution is set to become substantially larger than all European contributions combined.
As fighting continues in Ukraine, Western governments may already take stock of a few lessons.
First, the US has proven once again that it is Europe’s indispensable ally. Europe’s inability to do more raises the need for higher defence spending to ensure not just the right capabilities, but also sufficient inventories of a range of weapons systems.
Second, CEE allies – notably Poland, the Baltic States and Czechia – thought, spoke and acted earlier, better and more courageously. Larger allies further West should create new mechanisms within their national systems to give voice to experts from the CEE region.
Third, the current war is the culmination of a long process of mounting danger, as well as self-paralysis in the face of it. In finally unlocking lethal assistance to a victim of armed aggression, Western capitals rediscovered – belatedly – the virtue of courage.
So what is courage in the current context? It is the fact of doing more for the team in the face of danger than others currently do. It is the act of walking up to the boundary of what feels safe – and moving it. It took courage for CEE allies to supply ammunition when no one else would; for Turkey to supply combat drones; for the UK to fly in NLAWs in January; and for CEE allies to be the first to supply tanks and heavy weapons. Courage is what makes alliances strong and the states within them secure. And it is the lack of it that breaks them both. It took the attempted destruction of a European country for the West to relearn this most foundational virtue. Let us not forget it again.
The views expressed in this Commentary are the author’s, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.
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7. The Strongman Cometh

Excerpts:
Finally, Erdoğan may also calculate that creating a ruckus in NATO serves the purpose of endearing him to Putin and may redirect Russia's attention away from the ongoing supply of TB2 Bayraktar drones to Ukraine (one of the most effective weapons in Kyiv’s arsenal in destroying Russia’s invasion force), thus helping Erdoğan manage the complicated minuet he has been dancing with Putin—his closest “competimate”—for several years now.
It is almost certainly the case that Erdoğan and Turkey eventually will yield in the face of both blandishments and pressures from the other 29 allies in NATO and allow Finland and Sweden to take their place as capable and responsible allies, but not before he has reminded the rest of the alliance—once again—that an authoritarian Turkey remains an unpredictable and unreliable ally in a crucial geo-strategic location in the midst of Europe’s most serious crisis since the end of the Cold War.

The Strongman Cometh
Why Erdoğan suddenly has a problem with Finland and Sweden joining NATO.
16 hr ago
thedispatch.com · by Eric Edelman
(Photograph by Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP/Getty Images.)
Despite the fulminations of the Kremlin’s television propagandists and Russian bureaucrats seeking to anticipate the dictator’s views, it appears that Vladimir Putin has “no problem” with Finland and Sweden joining NATO. Despite earlier threats by a variety of Russian officials that the Nordic neutrals joining NATO would provoke “military-technical” reactions, including the possible deployment of nuclear weapons, it seems that Putin has bowed to the inevitable after a calm, respectful phone call with Finland’s impressive and statesmanlike President Sauli Niinisto. Despite Putin’s retreat, Turkey’s authoritarian boss Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has suddenly interposed his own objections, saying at first that Turkey was “not favorable” to Finland and Sweden’s membership in NATO and subsequently doubling down, arguing that, “We will not say ‘yes’ to those [countries] who apply sanctions to Turkey.”
Erdoğan’s view seems to represent a change of heart from earlier Turkish support for Finnish membership, conveyed to Niinisto in an April 4 phone call and in bilateral diplomatic contacts, not to mention Turkey’s traditional support for NATO’s enlargement since the end of the Cold War. The Turkish volte face reportedly has left diplomats at NATO headquarters in Brussels furious with the Turks, despite the public statements that all is well and the clear expectation that the alliance ultimately will move forward with Finnish and Swedish membership.
In this regard, the Turkish authoritarian and kleptocrat seems to resemble no one more than former Illinois governor and convicted felon Rod Blagojevich who, when he found out he could appoint Barack Obama's successor to the U.S. Senate, famously said, “I've got this thing and it's f---ing golden. I'm not just giving it up for f---ing nothing.” Erdoğan sees the Finnish and Swedish application for membership as an opportunity to accomplish multiple objectives—burnishing his domestic position by highlighting the important international role he plays and gaining leverage with both the West and his difficult and complicated Russian neighbor.
In the first instance, we should recall that Erdoğan and the Turks have done this before in the NATO context. First in 2009, when then-Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen was on the verge of being appointed NATO secretary general and then again in 2019 when Turkish diplomats blocked NATO defense plans for the Baltic states and Poland. The pretext for threatening to veto Rasmussen was the “scandal” over the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten four years earlier. President Barack Obama’s first NATO summit ended up almost entirely consumed by negotiations with Erdoğan over measures to placate the Turkish leader’s alleged rage over Rasmussen’s insult to Muslims worldwide because of his defense of free expression. It turned out that Erdoğan’s concerns were perhaps more prosaic than principled: He later told Turkish television that he had relented after President Obama had promised that Rasmussen would have a Turkish deputy and that Turkish general officers would be better represented at NATO headquarters.
In the second instance, NATO had drawn up defense plans for Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland at the latter’s request in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and destabilization of eastern Ukraine in 2014. The alliance approved the plans at the December 2018 NATO London Summit, but Turkey blocked implementation, demanding that NATO recognize the Kurdish YPG militia in Syria as a terrorist group. After six months of intransigence Turkey finally lifted its objection under pressure from the rest of the allies.
Erdoğan's “strongman” need for constant attention and his failure, so far, to secure a bilateral meeting with Biden or to establish the kind of access he enjoyed to the U.S. president under both Obama and Trump undoubtedly explain the Turkish leader’s initial reaction. Just as it took Obama’s persuasive efforts in 2009 to talk Erdoğan off the ledge regarding Rasmussen, I suspect President Biden will have to spend a disproportionate amount of time sweet-talking and jaw-boning Erdoğan to drop his opposition to Finland and Sweden. The opportunity cost will be high since the NATO summit in June should be focused on responding to Russian aggression and NATO’s new strategic concept in the light of rapidly changing security conditions in Europe.
Recognition by foreign leaders of Erdoğan’s international role serves more than to stroke his ego: It also serves an important domestic political need. As Turkey approaches elections in 2023, Erdoğan’s poll numbers have been sagging. He is undoubtedly calculating that the NATO spotlight will not just reinforce his international importance to the Turkish public the but tying the issue to Sweden’s support for Kurdish nationalists will predictably whip up Turkish nationalism. That can handily also serve as a distraction from the economic management disaster that Erdoğan has created in Turkey by his insistence on keeping interest rates low. The result has been a 70 percent inflation rate and enormous hardship for the Turkish public and businesses.
Erdoğan, however, is also looking for international leverage with both the U.S. and Russia and not just personal recognition. As is well known, Turkey’s purchase of the Russian S-400 air and missile defense system created a crisis in Turkey’s bilateral relationship with the U.S. and NATO. It led to Turkey’s expulsion from the F-35 program and the imposition of sanctions under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA). In the wake of the F-35 cancellation, Turkey has recently approached the Biden administration seeking both upgrades to its existing F-16s and a request to purchase new, more advanced F-16s and associated weapons packages. A preliminary sale of upgrade kits and missiles worth about $300 million was recently informally notified to the Congress. Erdoğan may think that holding Finland and Sweden hostage will provide the Biden team with arguments on the Hill to proceed with these arms sales packages (both the preliminary package and the larger F-16 package that the Turks have requested). Erdoğan needs to proceed with caution, however, because as Mitch McConnell indicated in Helsinki on May 16, there is broad support for Finland and Sweden in Congress, and many members would like nothing better than to trade Turkey as a member for the two Nordic states. (There is no mechanism for kicking member states out of NATO, but this sentiment reflects Turkey’s loss of any real backing on Capitol Hill—which represents the toll that Erdoğan’s creeping authoritarianism and reflexive anti-Americanism has taken on Turkey’s much more robust support in the past).
Finally, Erdoğan may also calculate that creating a ruckus in NATO serves the purpose of endearing him to Putin and may redirect Russia's attention away from the ongoing supply of TB2 Bayraktar drones to Ukraine (one of the most effective weapons in Kyiv’s arsenal in destroying Russia’s invasion force), thus helping Erdoğan manage the complicated minuet he has been dancing with Putin—his closest “competimate”—for several years now.
It is almost certainly the case that Erdoğan and Turkey eventually will yield in the face of both blandishments and pressures from the other 29 allies in NATO and allow Finland and Sweden to take their place as capable and responsible allies, but not before he has reminded the rest of the alliance—once again—that an authoritarian Turkey remains an unpredictable and unreliable ally in a crucial geo-strategic location in the midst of Europe’s most serious crisis since the end of the Cold War.
Eric S. Edelman is a former U.S. ambassador to both Finland (1998-2001) and Turkey (2003-2005) and was undersecretary of defense for policy (2005-2009).
thedispatch.com · by Eric Edelman

8. Incredible Success Of Ukraine’s Bayraktar TB2: The Ghost Of Snake Island

Excerpts:

The success of mid-sized UAVs like the Bayraktar against leading navies was far from certain. Facing off against the Russian Navy, with its warships armed with sophisticated air defenses, was not the same as operating against terrorists. These drones are, on paper, vulnerable. And their weapons load is limited against warships. But the realities of war have shown otherwise.

Defense analyst Tayfun Ozberk, a retired naval officer, thinks that there are several reasons for this success. Although not fully stealthy, the Bayraktar features a low radar cross-section (RCS). Together with its relatively low altitude and slow speed, this makes it difficult for classical radars to track. “It is a low-slow-flyer (LSF), and you know it is a challenge for classical radars to detect LSFs already. And its RCS makes it even harder.”

Another factor which Ozberk points to is the high level of automation. “The drone is powered with deep learning algorithms, so it becomes better after every missions it conducted.”

The Bayraktar TB2 drone system is modular. Although Russia hit Ukrainian air bases and in the first days of the war, the drones remained operable. Ozberk notes “You can take the drone and flight equipment to a highway, it takes only 15-20 minutes to make it operational”.

Lastly the Bayraktar has proven resilient in a complex electronic warfare environment. Meanwhile Russian ships have been observed minimizing their own radar and electronic signatures by switching equipment off. This is a match made in heaven for the Ukrainian UAV operators.

Incredible Success Of Ukraine’s Bayraktar TB2: The Ghost Of Snake Island - Naval News
navalnews.com · by H I Sutton · May 18, 2022
Ukraine’s surprising answer to the Russia’s total naval dominance in the Black Sea is a drone. Armed UAVs (uncrewed air vehicles) have become an expected part of land warfare. And thanks to the videos they record, a larger-than-life part of the public’s perception of the modern fighting. But their utility in a naval conflict was, until now, open to speculation.
Ukraine has shown that they are more potent than many analysts would have dared to imagine. The waters near Odesa are being stalked by the Ukraine’s Bayraktar TB2 armed UAV.
The Ukrainian Navy operates late-production TB2s. These can be visually distinguished from the Air Force’s earlier examples by a three-bladed propeller and large cormorant’s head motive on the fuselage. But there are other more subtle differences. The Navy TB2s have an additional infrared camera for night operations. And they appear, based on analysis of photos, to be equipped with a GPS-GNSS Anti-Jammer antenna. This allows it to operate in a contested electronic warfare environment where some other drones might fall out of the sky.
Ukrainian Bayraktars have been observed with two Turkish made weapon systems. The ultra-lightweight MAM-C is a smart micro munition specifically developed for UAVs. Although its cylindrical body and two sets of fins give it a missile appearance, it is actually a laser guided glide bomb. It has a range of 8 km (4.3 nautical miles) and can carry blast fragmentation or armor piercing warheads. The heavier MAM-L has a longer range and larger warhead.
Since the removal of the Russian Navy’s flagship, the Slava Class cruiser Moskva, by Neptune anti-ship missiles on April 13, they have inflicted a significant toll on the Russian Navy. In particular over Snake Island, a small but strategic rock at the southwest tip of Ukraine.
Armed Drones Redefining Warfare
Armed UAVs are playing an ever-increasing role in conflict. The Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 fits into the category of an armed MALE (medium altitude, long endurance) drone. This space was pioneered and shaped by America’s successful MQ-9 Reaper (aka Predator-B).
The Bayraktar is much smaller than the U.S. designs. It has about half the wingspan of the Reaper and much less than half the payload. It also lacks the satellite communications which give the American system its global reach.
But none of that has stopped the Bayraktar from racking up an impressive combat record. Turkish forces employed them against Kurdish separatists and in Syria. They were then deployed to Libya where they gained a reputation stalking sophisticated Russian air defense systems. Systems like Pantsir are designed to take down drones, but proved vulnerable to the Bayraktar.
The first Bayraktar TB2 drone was delivered to the Ukrainian Navy in July 2021. Photo: Ukrainian Ministry of Defense
Bayraktar: The Ghost Of Snake Island
This plays out in the Black Sea also. The of the Bayraktar TB2’s first documented kill near Snake Island were two Raptor assault boats on May 2. This was followed on May 6 by a Tor (SA-15 GAUNTLET) air defense system on the island itself. This system was perceived to be a drone killer, but the slow moving TB2 turned the tables.
Killing the SA-15 left Russian forces on the island exposed to more air strikes, and the Bayraktar obliged. Buildings were bombed and a TB2 oversaw at least one air raid by Ukrainian Su-27 FLANKER fighters. Most of the buildings on the island were razed, making the barren rock even more bare.
Loitering TB2s proved devastatingly effective at stopping the Russians from replenishing the air defenses on the island. On May 7 one hit a replacement SA-15 while it was still on the landing craft about to be unloaded at the island’s only operable boat ramp. The SA-15’s search radar could be seen scanning even as it was hit.
Russia attempted to reinforce the island by helicopter on May 8. A TB2 was on hand to drop a bomb on a Mi-8 HIP transport helicopter as it unloaded troops. The prominent scorch mark from the wreckage is still visible. 2 more assault boats were also hit in a separate incident near the island.
The Serna Class landing craft hit on May 7 sunk and had to be pulled into deeper water to even partially clear the landing. The Russian navy had to bring in a floating crane and based on the activity witnessed, had to have several attempts. At least two of the large tug boats used had Pantsir air defense units hastily added to their stern decks. Replacement air defense units were eventually landed on May 12, following a complex multi-day effort.
Turkish manufacturer Baykar is planning the Bayraktar TB3 design which will be more navalized. It is shown in this company graphic carried aboard a Turkish Navy assault carrier. Note the folding wings.
Why Is The Bayraktar So Successful?
The success of mid-sized UAVs like the Bayraktar against leading navies was far from certain. Facing off against the Russian Navy, with its warships armed with sophisticated air defenses, was not the same as operating against terrorists. These drones are, on paper, vulnerable. And their weapons load is limited against warships. But the realities of war have shown otherwise.
Defense analyst Tayfun Ozberk, a retired naval officer, thinks that there are several reasons for this success. Although not fully stealthy, the Bayraktar features a low radar cross-section (RCS). Together with its relatively low altitude and slow speed, this makes it difficult for classical radars to track. “It is a low-slow-flyer (LSF), and you know it is a challenge for classical radars to detect LSFs already. And its RCS makes it even harder.”
Another factor which Ozberk points to is the high level of automation. “The drone is powered with deep learning algorithms, so it becomes better after every missions it conducted.”
The Bayraktar TB2 drone system is modular. Although Russia hit Ukrainian air bases and in the first days of the war, the drones remained operable. Ozberk notes “You can take the drone and flight equipment to a highway, it takes only 15-20 minutes to make it operational”.
Lastly the Bayraktar has proven resilient in a complex electronic warfare environment. Meanwhile Russian ships have been observed minimizing their own radar and electronic signatures by switching equipment off. This is a match made in heaven for the Ukrainian UAV operators.
navalnews.com · by H I Sutton · May 18, 2022


9. US troops are going back to Somalia, but not for ‘combat’


Unless they are attacked. The right of self defense is never denied. But I hate to read these kind of statements when we are sending forces into conflict areas. Rather than emphasizing the negative, why can't we simply say that they are there to train, advise, and assist partner forces in a conflict area but they will not conduct any unilateral US operations. We are there to enable effective combat operations by our partner force.



US troops are going back to Somalia, but not for ‘combat’
“Our forces are not now, nor will they be directly engaged in combat operations.”
BY JEFF SCHOGOL | PUBLISHED MAY 18, 2022 12:52 PM
taskandpurpose.com · by Jeff Schogol · May 18, 2022
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Hundreds of U.S. troops returning to Somalia to help local security forces fight the al-Shabab terrorist group, but their mission is not considered a combat deployment, military and senior administration officials said.
Instead, the deployment is “an advise and assist and training mission,” said Army Lt. Col. Patrick Husted, a spokesman for U.S. Africa Command.
“This is a repositioning of forces that are already in the area to continue an advise and assist and training mission, with the purpose of enabling a more effective fight against Al-Shabaab,” Husted told Task & Purpose. “Al-Shabaab continues to conduct attacks in Somalia and are capable of conducting attacks in the region.”
But as the U.S. military’s previous experiences in Somalia and elsewhere on the African continent have shown, any mission can become a combat deployment.
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In his final days in office, former President Donald Trump ordered about 750 U.S. service members to withdraw from Somalia, although a small footprint of American troops remained in the country and others would fly into Somalia to train and advise Somali security forces, Brian W. Everstine of Air Force Magazine reported.
A U.S. soldier seen through a night-vision device, provides security for a C-130J Super Hercules during unloading and loading operations Friday, June 12, 2020 at an unidentified location in Somalia. (Tech. Sgt. Christopher Ruano/Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa via AP)
But earlier this week, President Joe Biden approved Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s request for the U.S. military to reestablish a persistent presence in Somalia to “enable our partners to conduct a more effective fight against al-Shabaab, which is al-Qa‘ida’s largest, wealthiest, and deadliest affiliate,” National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said on Monday.
“The decision to reintroduce a persistent presence was made to maximize the safety and effectiveness of our forces and enable them to provide more efficient support to our partners,” Watson said in a statement.
Fewer than 500 U.S. troops will be deploying to Somalia said a senior administration official, who declined to say exactly how many service members will be involved with the mission.
The U.S. troops will train Somali security forces and help “with turning intelligence into operations,” the senior administration official told reporters on Monday.
“That means assisting with how to defend oneself when undertaking especially the more difficult operations, sometimes called the offensive or the clearing operations, but ultimately the operations to try to dislodge Shabab from what is a significant amount of territory that it at least purports to govern and hold,” the official said.
Al-Shabaab islamist fighters sit on a truck as they patrol to provide security for Somali demonstrators in Mogadishu, Somalia Friday, Oct. 30, 2009. Demonstrators gathered in an open square north east of the capital Mogadishu to show their support for the Palestinian people. (AP Photo/Mohamed Sheikh Nor)
The threat posed by al-Shabab is very real, said Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), who is also an Army colonel and Special Forces officer.
“Al-Shabab has long declared its loyalty to Al Qaeda, and reporting indicates they fully intend and are developing the capability to conduct external terrorist attacks,” Waltz told Task & Purpose. “I look forward to receiving briefings from the Administration on the operational need to help Somalia contain this threat.”
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby has been adamant that the U.S. military’s mission in Somalia will not involve American troops taking part in combat against al-Shabab.
“Our forces are not now, nor will they be directly engaged in combat operations,” Kirby told reporters on Monday. “The purpose here is to enable a more effective fight against al-Shabab, by local forces.”
Yet the U.S. military’s experience in Somalia also provides a cautionary tale about the dangers of mission creep. When the first U.S. troops were deployed to Somalia in December 1992, they were on a humanitarian mission to help the United Nations distribute food to the starving population. By October 1993, the mission had morphed to include capturing Somali warlord General Mohammed Aidid, leading to the Battle of Mogadishu.
That battle, which was later chronicled in the book Black Hawk Down, resembled the fight for Iwo Jima during World War II, where once again, “Uncommon valor was a common virtue.” Delta snipers, Master Sgt. Gary Gordon and Sfc. Randy Shughart were both posthumously awarded the first Medals of Honor since the Vietnam War for giving their lives to protect Chief Warrant Officer-3 Michael Durant, the pilot of one of the two Black Hawk helicopters that had been shot down. Nearly 30 years later, 60 other Army special operators who took part in the fighting had their awards upgraded to Silver Stars and Distinguished Flying Crosses.
A Marine waves his boarding pass as 202 members of 3rd Battalion, 9th Regiment board their chartered jet for home at Mogadishu Airport , Jan. 19, 1993. (AP Photo/Mark Duncan)
Unfortunately, the warnings from nearly 30 years ago have largely gone unheeded. The U.S. military’s mission to Niger was also not supposed to be a combat deployment, but in October 2017 U.S. troops advising and assisting Nigerien forces were ambushed near the village of Tongo Tongo. Four U.S. soldiers were killed: Sgt. 1st Class Jeremiah Johnson, Sgt. LaDavid Johnson, Staff Sgt. Bryan Black, and Staff Sgt. Dustin Wright.
An ABC documentary later detailed how U.S. military leaders told the families of the fallen that their loved ones had gone on a rogue mission to capture a commander with the Islamic State group, when in fact the team had been ordered to track the commander even though they did not have any support from another Special Forces operational detachment.
More recently, Army Spc. Henry Mayfield Jr. and American defense contractors Dustin Harrison and Bruce Triplett were killed in January 2020 when al-Shabab fighters attacked U.S. troops at Manda Bay, Kenya.
An investigation later found that U.S. military officials had failed to appreciate potential threats to Manda Bay and the base’s defense plans had been inadequate at the time of the attack.
Army Gen. Stephen Townsend, head of Africa Command, also tacitly acknowledged that the goal posts for the U.S. military’s mission in Kenya had moved over time when he told reporters in March, “There were problems with mission command, including poor unity of command at the tactical level and flawed staff processes that failed to account for the growth of CSL (Cooperative Security Location) Manda Bay from a training base to a counter-terrorism support and air base.”
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Jeff Schogol is the senior Pentagon reporter for Task & Purpose. He has covered the military for 15 years. You can email him at schogol@taskandpurpose.com, direct message @JeffSchogol on Twitter, or reach him on WhatsApp and Signal at 703-909-6488. Contact the author here.

taskandpurpose.com · by Jeff Schogol · May 18, 2022

10. Special operators need counter-drone, counter-IED tech in a smaller package
Excerpts:

The office stood up the counter-UAS program this past fall, he noted, and although the current focus is on aerial threats, the office is looking for ground and maritime counter-drone options, too.
His team wants to find portable, dismounted and fixed expeditionary site options for the next-generation multimission electronic countermeasure gear. The Marine Corps and SOCOM have an existing system called Modi, made by the Sierra Nevada Corporation and used by the Army and Marines.
The next-gen version needs to hit those other domains and be more portable. The current dismounted system weighs 40 pounds.
The program manager said “ideally” the office expects to select a system by fiscal 2024 and begin production in fiscal 2025. And SOCOM would like to run these systems as smoothly as they can in order to “reduce burden to our operators and incentivize autonomy as much as possible,” the O5 said.

Special operators need counter-drone, counter-IED tech in a smaller package
Defense News · by Todd South · May 18, 2022
TAMPA, Fla. — U.S. special operations forces need a tool that can both jam radio frequencies to stop roadside bombs from exploding as well as neutralize drone threats by land, air and sea — and it has to be small.
That’s what Special Operations Command officials said Tuesday at the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference, hosted in Florida by the National Defense Industrial Association. A lieutenant colonel who serves as the command’s program manager for counterproliferation said SOCOM is seeking a next-generation multimission electronic countermeasure device. (Under rules of the conference, individuals at the paygrade of O-5 and below were not to be identified in press reports.)
But an O-6, Army Col. Anh Ha, who leads the command’s warrior-focused office, said a major initiative is ensuring an operator working in an isolated area — far from command infrastructure and with limited resources and power — can still have a shared, common operating picture with higher headquarters.
“Contested comms, this one always scares everyone,” Ha said. “What happens when we can’t talk?”

Marine Cpl. Emilio Vasquez, an electronic warfare operator, uses a Modi II electronic warfare system to disrupt radio signals during a communications field testing exercise at Naval Air Station Point Mugu, Calif., on Apr. 22, 2021. (Cpl. Thomas Spencer/U.S. Marine Corps)
For its part, the Army’s research budget last year emphasized tactical architecture for electronic warfare, C4ISRNET reported. That included a request to increase spending for the Multi-Function Electronic Warfare effort, the Terrestrial Layer System—Brigade Combat Team program, the Electronic Warfare Planning and Management Tool, and the Terrestrial Layer System—Echelons Above Brigade effort.
Big Army also pumped up its budget request last year to nearly triple its EW personnel.
The counterproliferation Army lieutenant colonel at SOFIC is focused on a smaller package. “Counter-unmanned systems: This consumes the bulk of our energy in the program office,” the O5 said.
The office stood up the counter-UAS program this past fall, he noted, and although the current focus is on aerial threats, the office is looking for ground and maritime counter-drone options, too.
His team wants to find portable, dismounted and fixed expeditionary site options for the next-generation multimission electronic countermeasure gear. The Marine Corps and SOCOM have an existing system called Modi, made by the Sierra Nevada Corporation and used by the Army and Marines.
The next-gen version needs to hit those other domains and be more portable. The current dismounted system weighs 40 pounds.
The program manager said “ideally” the office expects to select a system by fiscal 2024 and begin production in fiscal 2025. And SOCOM would like to run these systems as smoothly as they can in order to “reduce burden to our operators and incentivize autonomy as much as possible,” the O5 said.
About Todd South
Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.



11. Military Assistance to Ukraine: Rediscovering the Virtue of Courage

Conclusion:

So what is courage in the current context? It is the fact of doing more for the team in the face of danger than others currently do. It is the act of walking up to the boundary of what feels safe – and moving it. It took courage for CEE allies to supply ammunition when no one else would; for Turkey to supply combat drones; for the UK to fly in NLAWs in January; and for CEE allies to be the first to supply tanks and heavy weapons. Courage is what makes alliances strong and the states within them secure. And it is the lack of it that breaks them both. It took the attempted destruction of a European country for the West to relearn this most foundational virtue. Let us not forget it again.

Military Assistance to Ukraine: Rediscovering the Virtue of Courage
Edward Hunter Christie17 May 2022



Since 2014, the story of Western military assistance to Ukraine has been one of halting progress and self-imposed thresholds, transcended by acts of resolve. This is a story about courage.
As the Donbas War unfolded in 2014, the correlation of forces seemed clear to all. The Battle of Ilovaisk in September 2014 and the Battle of Debaltseve in January–February 2015 appeared to validate the notion of ‘escalation dominance’. Regardless of what Ukraine did, Russia could always pour in additional capabilities and prevail. This same notion was used to argue against arming Ukraine. Relatedly, the notion that there was ‘no military solution’ had already been used by President Barack Obama on 26 March 2014, before becoming Chancellor Angela Merkel’s signature statement about Ukraine. These interrelated notions provided the backdrop for the provision of only non-lethal assistance. The first wave of shipments to Ukraine, between July 2014 and March 2015, was limited to humanitarian aid and non-lethal military goods such as helmets and body armour.
From March 2015, with conflict intensity having fallen markedly, allies focused on longer-term non-lethal assistance, most notably training for the Ukrainian armed forces. The main allied efforts were the US-led Joint Multinational Training Group-Ukraine (JMTG-U), Canada’s Operation Unifier, and the UK’s Operation Orbital, all launched in 2015. Poland and Lithuania made substantial contributions to these training efforts, mainly through the JMTG-U, as well as bilaterally. Between 2015 and January 2022, the US-led JMTG-U trained more than 27,000 Ukrainian personnel, Canada’s Operation Unifier 33,346 personnel, and the UK’s Operation Orbital over 22,000 personnel.
Arms Transfers up to 2021
Over the 2014–2021 period, arms transfers to Ukraine were very limited. According to SIPRI’s arms transfer database, not a single country transferred major armaments prior to 2018. Exports of military goods – which include armaments, as well as ammunition and technical and non-lethal equipment – were also low. According to the EU Arms Export database, from 2014 to 2020, the largest EU exporters were Poland with 129 million euros’ worth of exports and Czechia with 52 million euros’ worth. Contrary to claims made in a 9 April article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, which used data on licenses rather than actual deliveries, France’s exports were worth 27 million euros, and likely did not include lethal equipment. Polish, Czech and Lithuanian exports, on the other hand, included lethal equipment, notably ammunition.
In 2018, the US crossed its self-imposed limitation to providing ‘non-lethal’ assistance with its first deliveries of Javelin anti-tank missiles (further deliveries occurred in 2019 and 2021). Also starting in 2018, Czechia exported self-propelled artillery and infantry fighting vehicles, and Poland exported MT-LB armoured track vehicles. Importantly, Turkey agreed to the export of Bayraktar TB2 combat drones, with deliveries commencing in 2019. By November 2021, the only countries that had supplied complete systems to Ukraine were Czechia, Poland, Turkey and the US.
The Race to Support Insurgency Warfare
From December 2021, with the realisation that a full-scale Russian invasion was imminent, the race was on to prepare assistance focused on asymmetric or insurgency warfare. The US prepared a $200 million package, with a focus on ‘additional Javelin and other anti-armor systems, grenade launchers, munitions, and non-lethal equipment’. The package was approved in late December, with shipments arriving in late January 2022.
Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia supplied weapons to Ukraine from late January, including US-origin Javelin anti-tank weapons and Stinger MANPADs, with the US accelerating the export licensing required for such third-party transfers. Czechia and Poland both supplied artillery ammunition and, in the case of Poland, GROM MANPADs and light mortars.
The UK made a pivotal contribution in the same period with the delivery by 20 January of 2,000 next-generation light anti-tank weapons (NLAWs), together with a team of trainers. The widely viewed images of British C-17 flights flying weapons into Ukraine at the eleventh hour, while avoiding German airspace, resonated powerfully across Europe. Germany, at that time, was not only refusing to transfer arms to Ukraine, but also blocking third-party transfers. The rising pressure helped nudge the Netherlands to approve and Canada to deliver lethal assistance shortly before the invasion. France, acting with deliberate discretion, also delivered Milan and Javelin anti-tank systems and Mistral MANPADs, together with trainers, prior to the invasion.
Russia initiated its new war of aggression on 24 February 2022. On 26 February, a first wave of European governments announced supplies of lethal equipment to Ukraine: Slovakia came first, followed by Belgium and later in the day by GermanyCommitments followed the next day from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Greece, Spain, Portugal and Romania; on 28 February from Finland, Italy, Croatia, Slovenia, Luxembourg and North Macedonia; and on 1 March from Australia. The UK played a key coordinating role by organising donor conferences and setting up an International Donor Coordination Centre.
By 25 April, focusing just on man-portable systems, the US had delivered or committed more than 1,400 Stinger missiles, 5,500 Javelin missiles, and 14,000 other anti-armour systems. The UK had delivered 5,361 NLAWs, over 200 Stinger missiles, 360 anti-structural munitions, as well as Starstreak anti-air systems. Other allies combined had delivered or committed at least 700 Stinger missiles, hundreds of other MANPADs, 100 NLAWs, and over 20,000 other anti-tank weapons.
The Race to Support Peer-on-Peer Warfare
From early April, attention shifted to heavier and longer-range armaments for large-scale combat in Ukraine’s east and south.
Over the course of April, Ukraine received supplies of Soviet-standard systems, with Poland and Czechia each supplying self-propelled artillery, infantry fighting vehicles, multiple rocket launchers, and T-72 main battle tanks. Estonia also supplied towed artillery systems. Additionally, the Czech defence industry started to provide repair services for Ukrainian land systems, while unspecified allies, most likely in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and supported by the US, provided ‘spare parts and components’ for Ukrainian combat aircraft.
Allies further west faced two options: backfill CEE allies to allow them to supply greater numbers of Soviet-standard systems, or supply Ukraine with NATO-standard systems. Both options are being pursued out of necessity. Important pledges were secured at a US-convened donor conference on 26 April. US pledges include 90 M777 howitzers with ammunition and training, which were almost fully delivered as of 10 May. Australia, Canada and the UK also pledged towed artillery, and France, the Netherlands, Germany and Norway self-propelled artillery. To date, however, German deliveries seem subject to struggles between slow-moving Social Democrats and more forward-leaning elements. In the maritime domain, the UK pledged ground-fired Brimstone anti-ship missiles.
A US bill authorising $24.1 billion of additional military assistance – over six times more than the $3.7 billion spent in the first two months of the war – seemed certain, pending slight delays, as of 12 May. With this development, the US contribution is set to become substantially larger than all European contributions combined.
As fighting continues in Ukraine, Western governments may already take stock of a few lessons.
First, the US has proven once again that it is Europe’s indispensable ally. Europe’s inability to do more raises the need for higher defence spending to ensure not just the right capabilities, but also sufficient inventories of a range of weapons systems.
Second, CEE allies – notably Poland, the Baltic States and Czechia – thought, spoke and acted earlier, better and more courageously. Larger allies further West should create new mechanisms within their national systems to give voice to experts from the CEE region.
Third, the current war is the culmination of a long process of mounting danger, as well as self-paralysis in the face of it. In finally unlocking lethal assistance to a victim of armed aggression, Western capitals rediscovered – belatedly – the virtue of courage.
So what is courage in the current context? It is the fact of doing more for the team in the face of danger than others currently do. It is the act of walking up to the boundary of what feels safe – and moving it. It took courage for CEE allies to supply ammunition when no one else would; for Turkey to supply combat drones; for the UK to fly in NLAWs in January; and for CEE allies to be the first to supply tanks and heavy weapons. Courage is what makes alliances strong and the states within them secure. And it is the lack of it that breaks them both. It took the attempted destruction of a European country for the West to relearn this most foundational virtue. Let us not forget it again.
The views expressed in this Commentary are the author’s, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.
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12. Special ops force calls for ‘untethered’ tool for recon and resupply


Excerpts:

Army Col. Joseph Blanton, program executive officer for the command’s support activity office, echoed Breede’s untethered theme while talking to reporter, saying his team is looking at untethered logistics.
And they’re not reinventing the wheel. While Blanton did not specify specific communications, he did say providing key gear, equipment, materials and resupply in austere locations has been done before.
“So historically you think you have a rucksack, some days of supply on your back; and in some days when that’s gone, you have to get resupplied,” Blanton said.
And that resupply has to come from somewhere. “How do you extend that initial period of time so operators stay forward, untethered from a larger resupply network?” Blanton said.
The colonel said looking at outer space and operations that other agencies do could provide lessons.
“We’re trying to understand that space, untethered logistics, a limited class of supply at the tactical edge,” Blanton said.

Special ops force calls for ‘untethered’ tool for recon and resupply
Defense News · by Todd South · May 18, 2022
TAMPA, Fla. — Special operations experts are looking for ways to untether much of their gear, from moving beyond radio frequencies to looking at institutions such as NASA for logistics lessons in austere locations.
Those were some of the priorities laid out by program managers for various portfolios of U.S. Special Operations Command this week at the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference, hosted by the National Defense Industrial Association in Florida.
In a session with reporters Monday, David Breede, program executive officer for the command’s special reconnaissance office, said SOCOM wants to untether itself from radio frequencies. That move will allow systems to operate on their own in contested communications environments.
“From GPS satellites to command and control, how do I operate completely in an untethered way?” Breede said.
For the past two decades, radio frequencies were open, and it was uncommon for those deployed to encounter extensive jamming or interception. That’s not the case when facing more advanced adversaries like Russia or China, as opposed to terrorist organizations.
Media reports and official statements in recent years noted extensive jamming in Syria near Russian forces.
“It’s tough, it’s hard, it’s not something we can do right now,” Breede said of the untethered concept.
The special reconnaissance group also focuses on adding autonomy to its systems, especially its aerial drones. Those systems are small in order to avoid detection. Breede and his team are looking to at “portable autonomy” to give operators software and control algorithms for a variety of devices; that way, even if jammed through traditional radio frequency channels, they can still function.
But there are trade-offs on small drones.
“It becomes tougher and tougher when you get down to the really small stuff,” Breede said. If designers add more capability on top of what’s already on the platform, he added, then something else usually has to go.
“Whether that’s time on station, whether that’s speed or the other payload onboard,” he explained.
And that’s a major initiative of the head of SOCOM, Gen. Richard Clarke, who said in a separate event Tuesday that the command will divest single-use drones.
The force needed drones for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions throughout the past two decades. But the next generation of drones must do more, he said.
Getting artificial intelligence on platforms will help, Breede noted, which is in line with Clark’s other major goal: a SOCOM data strategy.
“This absolutely goes back to data,” Clark said. “The No. 1 thing. [Artificial intelligence] is great, but if we don’t get the data and pull that in and [are] able to search it, it’s not worthwhile.”
That goes a long way in helping battlefield commanders see, sense and shoot with the right information, he added.
Certainly the sensing and shooting is key, but what about operators on the ground?
Army Col. Joseph Blanton, program executive officer for the command’s support activity office, echoed Breede’s untethered theme while talking to reporter, saying his team is looking at untethered logistics.
And they’re not reinventing the wheel. While Blanton did not specify specific communications, he did say providing key gear, equipment, materials and resupply in austere locations has been done before.
“So historically you think you have a rucksack, some days of supply on your back; and in some days when that’s gone, you have to get resupplied,” Blanton said.
And that resupply has to come from somewhere. “How do you extend that initial period of time so operators stay forward, untethered from a larger resupply network?” Blanton said.
The colonel said looking at outer space and operations that other agencies do could provide lessons.
“We’re trying to understand that space, untethered logistics, a limited class of supply at the tactical edge,” Blanton said.
About Todd South
Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.

13. Spec ops optics: US forces seek new sights and ways to defeat fog

Excerpts:
The command is also looking to add visual augmentation in a clear glass during daytime. Current and forthcoming night vision as well as items such as the Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System offer a lot of digital data in the sight at night.
The command also wants it thin enough to fit under existing night vision tech. That’s because SOCOM just bought a lot of night vision devices, and its personnel won’t be getting anymore for at least a few years, the officer said.
That “Google Glass”-type proposal is going out to industry by the end of this year or early next year, he added.
Another representative from the command’s survival, support and equipment systems office, said they’re looking for a lens solution of a different kind. That individual cited a perennial problem: fogging.
“There’s been no real gamechanger in anti-fog,” he said. “Every lens, every coating that we’ve ever tested at some point always fogs.”
The representative did not share a specific request for proposals item or schedule, but did ask for industry solutions in open submission.

Spec ops optics: US forces seek new sights and ways to defeat fog
Defense News · by Todd South · May 18, 2022
TAMPA, Fla. — Having eyes on the battlefield can mean the difference between hitting the right or wrong target, or even hitting the target at all, which is why U.S. special operators are looking to upgrade a host of optics items.
Those include a new close-quarters scope, clear glass that can display data and a solution to the vexing problem of fogged-up lens. More specifically, Special Operations Command wants to replace its SU-231 and SU-231A enhanced close-quarters weapon sights, a lieutenant colonel with the command’s lethality office said Tuesday at the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference in Florida.
Per media coverage rules at this conference, names of representatives at or below the rank of O-5 cannot be identified due to the sensitive nature of their work.
The Su-231 technology is a holographic sight that projects a dot into the shooter’s field of view on the weapon’s sight glass, but it’s not visible on the actual target. The sight is a quick-target and aiming-point device, and it’s a substantial improvement on open sights and traditional scopes.
But the bearded door kickers want more, and they’re going to release details to industry in either July or August. For now, the command is willing to publicly say it wants to “incorporate some of the visual augmentation, being able to display data in a see-through screen,” the O-5 said.
The officer added that SOCOM wants the shooter to be able to see relevant data such as range to target or an azimuth for better situational awareness. “You won’t have to raise your eyes from your reticle to get the range to your target,” he said.
“And it will obviously have to be configurable because not every operator wants stuff in his glass,” the officer added. “Lots of operators hate that.”

A Marine goes through a close-quarters marksmanship circuit aboard the dock landing ship Pearl Harbor. (Cpl. Frank Cordoba/U.S. Marine Corps)
In other words, the user must be able to turn that feature on and off.
The sight would hopefully be available in the near term. The Army recently contracted with Vortex Optics and Sheltered Wings to provide the Next Generation Squad Weapon-Fire Control, Army Times reported.
That weapon sight will feed ballistics calculator data, directions and networking to other devices on the Army’s newest rifle and machine gun combo, the NGSW.
The command is also looking to add visual augmentation in a clear glass during daytime. Current and forthcoming night vision as well as items such as the Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System offer a lot of digital data in the sight at night.
The command also wants it thin enough to fit under existing night vision tech. That’s because SOCOM just bought a lot of night vision devices, and its personnel won’t be getting anymore for at least a few years, the officer said.
That “Google Glass”-type proposal is going out to industry by the end of this year or early next year, he added.
Another representative from the command’s survival, support and equipment systems office, said they’re looking for a lens solution of a different kind. That individual cited a perennial problem: fogging.
“There’s been no real gamechanger in anti-fog,” he said. “Every lens, every coating that we’ve ever tested at some point always fogs.”
The representative did not share a specific request for proposals item or schedule, but did ask for industry solutions in open submission.
About Todd South
Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.


14. Murder on the Beach (Paraguay)



Murder on the Beach
Paraguay’s slain criminal prosecutor Marcelo Pecci made many enemies in his lifelong effort to protect the rule of law. One of them was Hezbollah.
BY
Tablet · by Emanuele Ottolenghi · May 18, 2022
Paraguay’s criminal prosecutor Marcelo Pecci was a quiet man with a humble demeanor. He spoke sparingly and did not seek the limelight. He was also courageous. As a high-profile member of the Office of Public Prosecution, he led Paraguay’s anti-narcotics, corruption, organized crime, and terrorism finance investigations, prosecuting the most powerful criminal networks in his country. He believed in what he did, and he did it well.
In recent years, Paraguay has become a key transit hub for increasingly larger quantities of cocaine. Foreign crime syndicates have moved in, both to work with and compete against local networks. As if that were not enough, much of Paraguay’s political class is in bed with the narcos—Paraguay ranks among the most corrupt in the region. Politicians who do not take corruption money from foreign crime syndicates often run their own illicit businesses, such as large-scale cigarette smuggling and local marijuana production. Their crime generates more crime. Proceeds from the illicit economy are estimated to be between a quarter and half of the country’s GDP.
At age 45, Marcelo was a rising star and a serious contender to become the next attorney general of Paraguay. That made him even more dangerous to all whose interests he threatened with his investigations. And they were many. Marcelo’s cases put jacks of all illicit trade under lock and key, making powerful enemies along the way. He inhabited a cruel world. His enemies were the enemies of the rule of law, transparency, good governance, and public integrity: mafias, terror finance networks, and the corrupt politicians who sold their souls and the future of their country to transnational crime. Marcelo must have known the risks, but rejected the lure of a lavish life bought at the price of cowardice. He was incorruptible.
Eventually, last week, they came for him.
Marcelo had flown to Colombia a few days earlier with his newly wedded wife, to spend their honeymoon at the Isla Barú Decameron Hotel, an exclusive, secluded resort on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, near Cartagena. There, the happy couple announced on social media that they were expecting. But their child will never meet his father. On May 10, the last day of their honeymoon, as the couple was lounging on a private beach, two assassins rode a rented jet ski to the shore, dismounted, approached Marcelo, and shot him three times in front of his wife. The first shot was to the mouth—a clear message that he was being punished for not keeping it shut, and the signature of a skilled marksman, even at close range. Within seconds, as Marcelo lay dying on the sand, the hitmen took off, returned their rental, and vanished into thin air, likely aided by accomplices who were waiting to extract them by land. It reportedly took 16 minutes from the moment they rented the jet ski to the time they returned it. By the time police cordoned off the area, Marcelo’s murderers were long gone.
Marcelo’s enemies all had the means and the motives to kill him in Paraguay. Going after him in a foreign country is a different story. That required a high level of intelligence, logistical planning, and execution. Murdering Marcelo required significant amounts of planning, intelligence gathering, and monitoring before the hitmen hired for the job could carry out an operation as swiftly and accurately as they did. By Colombian standards, Isla Barú is a very safe place. Knowing where he was and when—at a precise spot on the beach, rather than in his room, the gym, the pool, the restaurant, or the bar—required local, real-time, human intelligence.
And while details are still emerging, only three categories of suspects fit the bill for such a complex operation: a state actor, a transnational criminal organization, or a terrorist organization. In the words of Colombia’s Director of National Police, Jorge Luis Vargas, those who ordered Marcelo’s murder are linked to either “international radical terrorism” or narcotraffic. Yet those categories are not mutually exclusive.

Prosecutors react while paying tribute to Marcelo Pecci during a march in Asuncion, Paraguay to demand justice over his murder, March 13, 2022.Norberto Duarte/AFP via Getty Images
Marcelo was murdered by an assassin who likely wanted to derail his efforts, grant impunity to those who hired him, and ensure no one would pick up the pieces he left behind. His death made front page news across the globe, in ways he might not have expected when he was still alive. He did not see himself as a larger-than-life hero—just a civil servant, performing his duty. The outcry is well-deserved, because every one of the cases he investigated and prosecuted has global repercussions. The dramatic spike in cocaine flows transiting Paraguay is heading to Europe. The money laundered for Hezbollah fuels conflict in the Middle East. The weapons smuggled into Paraguay arm regional gangs and cartels inside and beyond its borders. The spiral of violence fed by the increasing presence of criminal syndicates in the country spills over to neighbors, in a downward spiral that is corroding the rule of law, governance, and public safety across the entire Latin American continent.
Marcelo disrupted operations of transnational criminal organizations operating inside his country, which include Latin American, European, Asian, and Middle Eastern crime syndicates. And he poked terror finance networks linked to Hezbollah, whose agents have used Paraguay for decades to self-fund through criminal joint ventures with the cartels. All bad actors in Paraguay have bought influence and impunity from the local political cupola, with lavish bribes. Any one of them, or a joint venture between them, could very well be the culprit.
Where there is organized crime there is money laundering, and for decades, Hezbollah has been a key financial service provider to crime syndicates across Latin America. It operates in multiple locations, with Colombia being a historic hub of cooperation with organized crime. But its facilitators also operate along all of Paraguay’s frontiers, mostly in the Tri-Border Area, or TBA, a riverine junction of the Parana and Iguazu Rivers, which naturally separates the countries of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. Hezbollah’s regional headquarters are in the large metropolitan area that sits astride the frontier. The TBA is a magnet for all criminals: More than a pirate island offering a haven to fugitives, it is a global hub for money laundering. Money has no political connotation—criminals need to launder it and shop for the best service providers. Hezbollah financiers are the best in the trade, and have an ecumenical approach to working with infidels. Money, after all, has no odor, as the old Latin proverb says.
Marcelo’s targets in recent years were increasingly located in the TBA, Paraguay’s criminal hotspot. Historically, the TBA has been the regional hub of contraband and money laundering on a large scale for organized crime as well as for terror groups, especially Hezbollah. That is what makes it a key suspect.
Hezbollah and Iranian agents have been in Colombia for years. Iran’s influence networks have an established presence not only in Bogotá, but also in other parts of the country, where they recruit and radicalize locals through Iranian-controlled mosques and cultural centers. Their influence operation is run by a proxy of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, the U.S.-sanctioned Al Mustafa International University. Hezbollah has also been there for a long time, leveraging local Lebanese Shi’a expatriates to launder money on behalf of drug cartels. Their proceeds help Hezbollah self-fund over and above Iranian direct contributions. The combination of Iranian and Hezbollah networks creates a perfect environment to plan and carry out an attack. Not only do these networks have the capability to gather intelligence while seamlessly blending into the local environment; their connections to Colombia’s underworld can give them access to informants and contract killers.
Last year, Iran already tried to carry out an assassination in Colombia against an Israeli citizen by contracting locals. That they failed says nothing about Iran and Hezbollah’s capabilities to assassinate a man like Marcelo Pecci. After all, he was a Paraguayan on holiday—the level of security afforded to him was undoubtedly lower than that enjoyed by an Israeli target in Bogotá, and the intelligence gathering Paraguayan authorities might have done to ensure his safety while out of the country was likely minimal, even assuming they tried.
The case against Hezbollah is hardly airtight. Marcelo also investigated corruption at the highest levels of political power in Paraguay; he went after the growing menace of transnational criminal networks taking over his country. His murderers could have been acting on behalf of any of these groups, which could have used their own assassins, or subcontracted the hit to other parties, Hezbollah included. It is too early to tell whether Hezbollah was behind the order, its execution, both, or neither. But Hezbollah had both the means and also the motives to kill a man who had announced himself as its enemy.
In three distinct but interconnected cases, Marcelo took down key Hezbollah financiers in the TBA, dealing a hard blow to the terror group’s illicit finance infrastructure there. He arrested two of them, Mahmoud Ali Barakat and Nader Mohamad Farhat, in April and May 2018, and raided their offices and homes. The evidence seized in those raids likely assisted U.S. prosecutors in their efforts to identify other members of their international network. In Farhat’s case, two separate prosecutions (in New York and Miami) led to the indictment of nine additional people and possibly the identification of a third TBA-based Hezbollah financier, Kassem Mohamad Hijazi. Marcelo not only led the raids personally—he later worked tirelessly to have Barakat and Farhat extradited to the United States.
Barakat was a smaller pawn in Farhat’s scheme, but Farhat, now in jail in Miami awaiting trial, is a big fish. In court documents filed for his trial, U.S. prosecutors accuse him of running one of the largest drug trafficking and money laundering networks in Latin America. In 2018, the Lebanese Ambassador to Paraguay tried to intimidate Paraguay’s attorney general into blocking Farhat’s extradition. It didn’t work, and Marcelo doubled down. In August 2021, Marcelo handcuffed Hijazi. Hours later, the U.S. Department of Treasury and the U.S. Department of State announced sanctions against him, his cousin Khalil Ahmad Hijazi, a Paraguayan businesswoman named Liz Paula Doldan, and five Paraguayan companies they used in a money laundering scheme worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
For months, Hijazi remained in a Paraguayan cell alongside other captives from the Colombian and Brazilian criminal underworld, his extradition proceedings delayed by procedural gimmicks. If Hezbollah is behind the murder, this could be an attempt to block his extradition by sending a message to Marcelo’s colleagues: Keep Hijazi in Paraguay, where we can buy you all up and orchestrate a sham trial, or face Marcelo’s fate. It took Marcelo’s murder, and an unprecedented outcry, for Paraguayan authorities to hastily approve Hijazi’s extradition on Monday night, likely under international pressure.
Those who ordered this crime must pay the price. And those who seek justice must know they are not alone. They owe it to Marcelo Pecci’s memory. May he rest in peace.
Tablet · by Emanuele Ottolenghi · May 18, 2022

15. Russian Political Warfare Is a Rising Menace

Important perspective and summary of hybrid warfare, gray zone and political warfare.

Excerpts:

At roughly the same time that Hoffman was conceptualizing hybrid warfare, security thinkers conceptualized operations in the Gray Zone. Mike Mazarr credits Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work with mentioning the concept at an April 2015 US Army War College conference. Mazarr went on to identify those operating in the zone as “revisionist or dissatisfied powers that appear to be in the market for options to transform the status quo”. The Gray Zone can be conceptualized as the area below the threshold for “use of force” or “armed attack,” as referred to in the Charter of the United Nations. If an offending state crosses that threshold (generally accepted as damaging or destroying property, or injuring or killing people) then the target state can use all elements of national power including armed force to defend themselves, as displayed in Figure 1.

Here is a summary of the major gray zone writings and references. Interestingly the use of "gray" in the modern era began with the 2010 QDR and then was fully embraced by USSOCOM. But I also have references to gray area phenomena going back to the Low Intensity Conflict era of the 1980s/1990s. What is old is new again.

2010 QDR, page 73 – “gray area phenomena”
Gen Votel March 2015 Congressional testimony
DEPSECDEF Robert Work April 2015 Army War College
USSOCOM White Paper September 2015
Mike Mazarr December 2015 7 Hypotheses of the Gray Zone
Hal Brands February 2016 Paradoxes of the Gray Zone
Frank Hoffman 2016 The Contemporary Spectrum of Conflict
Joseph L. Votel, Charles T. Cleveland, Charles T. Connett, and Will Irwin January 2016 UW in the Gray Zone
Autilio Echevarrio April 2016 Operating in the Gray Zone
Nathan Freier, et el, Army War College, June 2016, Outplayed Regaining the Strategic Initiative in the Gray Zone
Adam Elkus December 2015 You Cannot Save the Gray Zone Concept

Russian Political Warfare Is a Rising Menace | CEPA

Alexander Crowther
cepa.org · May 18, 2022
Russia’s military may have been badly damaged but that will mean other tactics will come back into play.
There is good news and bad news. Given its well-cataloged military failures in Ukraine, Russia will be lucky to describe anything there as a victory, and may also be unable to mount conventional operations against other neighbors for years.
But this does not suggest that Vladimir Putin has given up on his political goals in Central and Eastern Europe, or the rest of the world. Indeed, failure to achieve its Ukraine objectives will likely drive Putin to seek success elsewhere (assuming he is not deposed.)
If conventional warfare is off the table, and diplomacy will not work because no one trusts him anymore, he will have to resort to political warfare. This needs our attention, even as we continue to ensure Ukrainians win their conventional fight.
Hybrid warfare and the so-called gray zone join a variety of time-tested concepts that describe this arena of competition — it is known as political warfare. The US diplomat George Kennan (who developed the concept of “containment” and described the approach in the “Long Telegram” of February 22, 1946) codified how he thought the US should conceptualize political warfare:
“Political warfare is the logical application of [the military theorist Claus von] Clausewitz’s doctrine in time of peace. In the broadest definition, political warfare is the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives.”
This form of warfare is more recently described as “a form of strategy that leverages all of the diplomatic, informational, military, and economic capabilities at a nation's disposal to achieve its strategic objectives.” Both the Soviet Union and the United States used political warfare as an organizing principle during the Cold War, with the former employing it from the very beginning of their regime. Dickey et al quote Stephen Blank as saying:
“The legendary tactical flexibility of the Soviet regime derives from their conceptualization of conflict as being waged on all fronts or across the board — whence the internal structure of the protagonists becomes the center of gravity. The Bolshevik vision of politics as another form of warfare endowed its practitioners with the maximum feasible number of instruments with which to wage their struggle even in the face of superior enemy military power.”
Its use by the Russians and Chinese against the United States, NATO, and the European Union continues to this day. Many individuals and organizations recognize this; however, they lack a framework for response. That needs to change.
If political warfare is the “what” they are doing, hybrid warfare is the “how” to organize and operate and the gray zone is “where” they operate.
Both hybrid warfare and the gray zone are subsets of political warfare. This can be summarized as the use of all elements of national power to achieve goals without triggering kinetic combat. Hybrid warfare is an organizational approach to political warfare that combines military and non-military, violent and non-violent, as well as criminal approaches. The gray zone is where these operations occur on the spectrum of competition, above peaceful means of competition and below the threshold of an armed attack which would allow the victim to respond with military force.
In 2007, the American Dr. Frank Hoffman developed the concept of Hybrid Warfare. He was trying to codify changes that he saw in global competition. He wrote:
“Hybrid threats incorporate a full range of different modes of warfare including conventional capabilities, irregular tactics and formations, terrorist acts including indiscriminate violence and coercion, and criminal disorder. Hybrid Wars can be conducted by both states and a variety of non-state actors. These multi-modal activities can be conducted by separate units, or even by the same unit, but are generally operations tactically directed and coordinated within the main battlespace to achieve synergistic effects in the physical and psychological dimensions of conflict. The effects can be gained at all levels of war.”
The Russians conceived of hybrid warfare starting with Hoffman’s writing. They then looked at this through the lens of what they thought that the US was doing to them during the “Color Revolutions”, which began with the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia. They then added significant amounts of information operations to the mix for two reasons. First, Russians have used information as a weapon for centuries. Second, they believe that the USSR collapsed due to a concerted, hostile information campaign aimed at them and their allies.
The mix of these three concepts resulted in what could be called “Hybrid warfare with Russian characteristics”, although one label the Russians use is “New Generation Warfare.” Phillip Karber from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) described it as “differ(ing) from Western views of hybrid warfare — a blend of conventional, irregular and cyber warfare — in that it combines both low-end hidden state involvement with high-end direct, even braggadocio, superpower involvement.”
At roughly the same time that Hoffman was conceptualizing hybrid warfare, security thinkers conceptualized operations in the Gray Zone. Mike Mazarr credits Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work with mentioning the concept at an April 2015 US Army War College conference. Mazarr went on to identify those operating in the zone as “revisionist or dissatisfied powers that appear to be in the market for options to transform the status quo”. The Gray Zone can be conceptualized as the area below the threshold for “use of force” or “armed attack,” as referred to in the Charter of the United Nations. If an offending state crosses that threshold (generally accepted as damaging or destroying property, or injuring or killing people) then the target state can use all elements of national power including armed force to defend themselves, as displayed in Figure 1.

Figure 1: The Spectrum of Competition and the Grey Zone.
The Russian Federation under Vladimir Putin will be desperately seeking some success to counterbalance its failures in Ukraine and seek to gain his political objectives. It will employ political warfare to do this. It will combine a variety of organizations and approaches using the concepts of hybrid warfare and will return to operating under the threshold of an armed attack. It is essential therefore that we do not take our “eyes off the ball” and stop paying attention to Russian political warfare around the globe while totally focused on conventional military operations in Ukraine.
Alexander (Alex) Crowther is a Nonresident Senior Fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis, is a Professor of Practice for Cyber Issues at Florida International University, and does research for the Swedish Defense University.


16. Red Cross registers hundreds of Ukrainian POWs from Mariupol


I hope the Red Cross can monitor POWs to protect them.

Red Cross registers hundreds of Ukrainian POWs from Mariupol
AP · by OLEKSANDR STASHEVSKYI and CIARAN McQUILLAN · May 19, 2022
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — The Russian military said Thursday that more Ukrainian fighters who were making a last stand in Mariupol have surrendered, bringing the total who have left their stronghold to 1,730, while the Red Cross said it had registered hundreds of them as prisoners of war.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said that the registrations of Ukrainian prisoners of war, which included wounded fighters, began Tuesday under an agreement between Russia and Ukraine.
The Geneva-based humanitarian agency, which has experience in dealing with prisoners of war and prisoner exchanges, said however that its team did not transport the fighters to “the places where they are held” — which was not specified.
Ukrainian fighters who emerged from the ruined Azovstal steelworks after being ordered by their military to abandon the last stronghold of resistance in the now-flattened port city face an uncertain fate. Some were taken by the Russians to a former penal colony in territory controlled by Moscow-backed separatists.
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While Ukraine said it hopes to get the soldiers back in a prisoner swap, Russia threatened to put some of them on trial for war crimes.
The Red Cross cited rules under the Geneva Conventions that should allow the organization to interview prisoners of war “without witnesses” and that visits with them should not be “unduly restricted.”
The organization did not specify how many prisoners of war were involved.
It’s also not clear how many fighters are left at the plant. Russia previously estimated that it had been battling some 2,000 troops in the waterside plant.
Denis Pushilin, a senior Russia-backed separatist official in a region that includes Mariupol, said that those Ukrainian soldiers who needed medical assistance were hospitalized while others were put in a detention facility. He also claimed that Red Cross representatives were allowed to inspect the detention facility, but that could not be immediately verified.
Amnesty International said earlier that the Red Cross should be given immediate access to the Mariupol fighters who surrendered. Denis Krivosheev, Amnesty’s deputy director for the region, cited lawless executions allegedly carried out by Russian forces in Ukraine and said the Azovstal defenders “must not meet the same fate.”


Despite the setback in Mariupol, Ukraine’s confidence has been growing after fighting the Russian offensive to an effective standstill and forcing Moscow to withdrawal from around Kyiv and narrow its military goals.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy who was involved in several rounds of talks with Russia, said Thursday in a tweet that at this stage “do not offer us a ceasefire — this is impossible without total Russian troops withdrawal.”
“Until Russia is ready to fully liberate occupied territories, our negotiating team is weapons, sanctions and money,” he tweeted.
Ukraine’s military said in its morning briefing Thursday that Russian forces were still pressing their offensive on various sections of the front in the east, but were being successfully repelled.
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Ukraine’s military made no mention of Mariupol in its early morning briefing Thursday, saying only that Russian forces were still pressing their offensive on various sections of the front in the east, but were being successfully repelled.
In the eastern Donbas region, which has been the center of recent fighting as Russian forces on the offensive have clashed with staunch Ukrainian resistance, four civilians were killed in the town of Sievierodonetsk in a Russian bombardment, Luhansk Gov. Serhiy Haidai said. Three other civilians were wounded in the attack Wednesday, and the shelling continued into early Thursday, Haidai said.
On the Russian side of the border, the governor of Kursk province said a truck driver was killed and several other civilians wounded by shelling from Ukraine. Separatist authorities in the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine said two civilians were killed and five wounded also in Ukrainian shelling over the last 24 hours.
Meanwhile, in the first war-crimes trial held by Ukraine, a captured Russian soldier pleaded guilty on Wednesday of killing a civilian and faces a possible life in prison.
The plant was the only thing standing in the way of Russia declaring the full capture of Mariupol. Its fall would make Mariupol the biggest Ukrainian city to be taken by Moscow’s forces, giving a boost to Putin in a war where many of his plans have gone awry.
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Military analysts, though, said the city’s capture at this point would hold more symbolic importance than anything else, since Mariupol is already effectively under Moscow’s control and most of the Russian forces that were tied down by the drawn-out fighting have already left.
Video showed the Ukrainian fighters carrying out their wounded on stretchers and undergoing pat-down searches before being taken away on buses escorted by military vehicles bearing the pro-Kremlin “Z” sign.
The U.S. has gathered intelligence that shows some Russian officials have become concerned that Kremlin forces in Mariupol are carrying out abuses, including beating city officials, subjecting them to electric shocks and robbing homes, according to a U.S official familiar with the findings.
The Russian officials are concerned that the abuses will further inspire residents to resist the occupation and that the treatment runs counter to Russia’s claims that its military has liberated Russian speakers, according to the official, who was not authorized to comment.
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In the war-crimes case in Kyiv, Russian Sgt. Vadim Shishimarin, a 21-year-old member of a tank unit, pleaded guilty to shooting an unarmed 62-year-old Ukrainian man in the head through a car window in the opening days of the war. Ukraine’s top prosecutor has said some 40 more war-crimes cases are being readied.
On the diplomatic front, Finland and Sweden could become members of NATO in a matter of months, though objections from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threaten to disrupt things. Turkey accuses the two countries of harboring Kurdish militants and others it considers a threat to its security.
Ibrahim Kalin, a foreign policy adviser and spokesman for Erdogan, said there will be “no progress” on the membership applications unless Turkey’s concerns are met. Each of NATO’s 30 countries has an effective veto over new members.
Mariupol’s defenders grimly clung to the steel mill for months and against the odds, preventing Russia from completing its occupation of the city and its port.
Mariupol was a target of the Russians from the outset as Moscow sought to open a land corridor from its territory to the Crimean Peninsula, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014.
The city — its prewar population of about 430,000 now reduced by about three-quarters — has largely been reduced to rubble by relentless bombardment, and Ukraine says over 20,000 civilians have been killed there.
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For Ukraine, the order to the fighters to surrender could leave President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government open to allegations it abandoned the troops he described as heroes.
“Zelenskyy may face unpleasant questions,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, who heads the independent Penta think tank in Kyiv. “There have been voices of discontent and accusations of betraying Ukrainian soldiers.”
A hoped-for prisoner swap could also fall through, he cautioned.
Russia’s main federal investigative body said it intends to interrogate the surrendering troops to “identify the nationalists” and determine whether they were involved in crimes against civilians.
Also, Russia’s top prosecutor asked the country’s Supreme Court to designate Ukraine’s Azov Regiment — among the troops that made up the Azovstal garrison — as a terrorist organization. The regiment has roots in the far right.
The Russian parliament was scheduled to consider a resolution to ban the exchange of any Azov Regiment fighters but didn’t take up the issue Wednesday.
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McQuillan and Yuras Karmanau reported from Lviv, Ukraine. Mstyslav Chernov and Andrea Rosa in Kharkiv, Elena Becatoros in Odesa, Lorne Cook in Brussels, Aamer Madhani in Washington and other AP staffers around the world contributed.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
AP · by OLEKSANDR STASHEVSKYI and CIARAN McQUILLAN · May 19, 2022


17. Spy agencies urged to fix open secret: A lack of diversity


Excerpts:
Additional quiet changes are taking place across the agencies. Officials say the changes were in process before Floyd’s death, though conversations held with employees brought new urgency to diversity issues.
The NSA stopped requiring applicants for internal promotions to disclose the date they were last promoted to the boards considering their application. Officials familiar with the change say it was intended to benefit applicants who take longer to move up the agency ladder, often including working parents or people from underrepresented communities.
The CIA two years ago formally tied yearly bonuses for its senior executives to their performance on diversity goals, measured next to factors such as leadership and intelligence tradecraft. Last year’s class of new senior executives was the most diverse in the agency’s history.
Said CIA spokesperson Tammy Thorp: “We are proud of the Agency’s progress in ensuring our hiring, assignment, and promotion processes do not create barriers to advancement.”
La Rue, the chief diversity officer for the intelligence community, has hired several data analysts and plans for her office to issue annual report cards on diversity for each intelligence agency. She acknowledges advocates have to break through enduring skepticism inside and outside government that diversity goals undermine the intelligence mission or require lower standards.
“The narrative that we have to sacrifice excellence for diversity, or that we are somehow compromising national security to achieve our diversity goals, is ridiculous,” she said.
Spy agencies urged to fix open secret: A lack of diversity
AP · by NOMAAN MERCHANT · May 19, 2022
WASHINGTON (AP) — The peril National Security Agency staff wanted to discuss with their director didn’t involve terrorists or enemy nations. It was something closer to home: the racism and cultural misunderstandings inside America’s largest intelligence service.
The NSA and other intelligence agencies held calls for their staff shortly after the death of George Floyd. As Gen. Paul Nakasone listened, one person described how they would try to speak up in meetings only to have the rest of the group keep talking over them. Another person, a Black man, spoke about how he had been counseled that his voice was too loud and intimidated co-workers. A third described how a co-worker addressed them with a racist slur.
The national reckoning over racial inequality sparked by Floyd’s murder two years ago has gone on behind closed doors inside America’s intelligence agencies. Publicly available data, published studies of its diversity programs, and interviews with retired officers indicate spy agencies have not lived up to years of commitments made by their top leaders, who often say diversity is a national security imperative.
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People of color remain underrepresented across the intelligence community and are less likely to be promoted. Retired officers who spoke to The Associated Press described examples of explicit and implicit bias. People who had served on promotion boards noted non-native English speakers applying for new jobs would sometimes be criticized for being hard to understand — what one person called the “accent card.” Some say they believe minorities are funneled into working on countries or regions based on their ethnicity.
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, the first woman to serve in her role, has appointed diversity officials who say they need to collect better data to study longstanding questions, from whether the process for obtaining a security clearance disadvantages people of color to the reasons for disparities in advancement. Agencies are also implementing reforms they say will promote diversity.
“It’s going to be incremental,” said Stephanie La Rue, who was appointed this year to lead the intelligence community’s efforts on diversity, equity and inclusion. “We’re not going to see immediate change overnight. It’s going to take us a while to get to where we need to go.”
The NSA call following Floyd’s death was described by a participant who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private discussion. The person credited Nakasone for listening to employees and making public and private commitments to diversity. But the person and other former officials said they sometimes felt that their identities as people of color were discounted or not fully appreciated by their employers.
The NSA declined to comment on the call. It said in a statement that agency officials “regularly examine the outcomes of our personnel systems to assess their fairness.”
“Beyond the mission imperative, NSA cultivates diversity and promotes inclusion because we care about our people and know it is the right way to proceed,” the statement said.
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A former NSA contractor alleged this year that racist and misogynistic comments often circulate on classified chatrooms intended for intelligence work. The contractor, Dan Gilmore, wrote in a blog post that he was fired for reporting his complaints to higher-ups. A spokeswoman for Haines, Nicole de Haay, declined to comment on Gilmore’s allegations but said employees who “engage in inappropriate conduct are subject to a variety of accountability mechanisms, including disciplinary action.”
The U.S. intelligence community has evolved over decades from being almost exclusively run by white men — following a stereotype that Rep. Jim Himes, a Connecticut Democrat, referred to in a hearing on diversity last year as “pale, male, Yale.” Intelligence agencies that once denied security clearances to people suspected of being gay now have active resource groups for people of different races and sexual orientation.
Testifying at the same hearing as Himes, CIA Director William Burns said, “Simply put, we can’t be effective and we’re not being true to our nation’s ideals if everyone looks like me, talks like me, and thinks like me.”
But annual charts published by the Office of Director of National Intelligence show a consistent trend: At rising levels of rank, minority representation goes down.
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Latinos make up about 18% of the American population but just 7% of the roughly 100,000-person intelligence community and 3.5% of senior officers. Black officers comprise 12% of the community — the same as the U.S. population — but 6.5% at the most senior level. And while minorities comprise 27% of the total intelligence workforce, just 15% of senior executives are people of color.
A 2015 report commissioned by the CIA said the “underrepresentation of racial/ethnic minority officers and officers with a disability at the senior ranks is not a recent problem and speaks to unresolved cultural, organizational, and unconscious bias issues.” Among the report’s findings: Progress made between 1984 and 2004 in promoting Black officers to senior roles had been lost in the following decade and recruitment efforts at historically Black colleges and universities “have not been effective.”
“Since its founding, the Agency has been unmistakably weak in promoting diverse role models to the executive level,” the report said.
Lenora Peters Gant, a former senior human capital officer for the CIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence, wrote last year that the intelligence community constantly imposes barriers on minorities, women and people with disabilities. Gant, now an adviser at Howard University, called on agencies to release some of their classified data on hiring and retention.
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“The bottom line is the decision making leadership levels are void of credible minority participation,” Gant said.
ODNI is starting an investigation of the slowest 10% of security clearance applications, reviewing delays in the cases for any possible examples of bias. It also intends to review whether polygraph examiners need additional race and ethnicity training.
The intelligence community currently doesn’t report delays in getting a security clearance — required for most agency jobs — based on race, ethnicity or gender. The months or years a clearance can take can push away applicants who can’t wait that long.
The office is implementing annual grant monitoring and assigning additional staff to work with universities in the intelligence community’s Centers for Academic Excellence program, intended to recruit college students from underrepresented groups. A 2019 audit said it was impossible to judge the program due to poor planning and a lack of clear goals.
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The program also got a new logo after ODNI officials heard that the previous “IC CAE” insignia appeared to spell out “ICE,” an unintended reference to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Additional quiet changes are taking place across the agencies. Officials say the changes were in process before Floyd’s death, though conversations held with employees brought new urgency to diversity issues.
The NSA stopped requiring applicants for internal promotions to disclose the date they were last promoted to the boards considering their application. Officials familiar with the change say it was intended to benefit applicants who take longer to move up the agency ladder, often including working parents or people from underrepresented communities.
The CIA two years ago formally tied yearly bonuses for its senior executives to their performance on diversity goals, measured next to factors such as leadership and intelligence tradecraft. Last year’s class of new senior executives was the most diverse in the agency’s history.
Said CIA spokesperson Tammy Thorp: “We are proud of the Agency’s progress in ensuring our hiring, assignment, and promotion processes do not create barriers to advancement.”
La Rue, the chief diversity officer for the intelligence community, has hired several data analysts and plans for her office to issue annual report cards on diversity for each intelligence agency. She acknowledges advocates have to break through enduring skepticism inside and outside government that diversity goals undermine the intelligence mission or require lower standards.
“The narrative that we have to sacrifice excellence for diversity, or that we are somehow compromising national security to achieve our diversity goals, is ridiculous,” she said.
AP · by NOMAAN MERCHANT · May 19, 2022




18. Indo-Pacific Economic Framework is not an FTA: 5 things to know


Indo-Pacific Economic Framework is not an FTA: 5 things to know
Tailored pact seeks to counter China's clout while protecting U.S. workers
KENTARO IWAMOTO, Nikkei staff writer
May 19, 2022 17:20 JST
TOKYO -- U.S. President Joe Biden will launch a new economic framework for the Indo-Pacific during his stay in Tokyo early next week, with Washington hoping to boost its economic presence in the region to counter China's influence.
From strengthening supply chains to setting rules for the digital economy, the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) is designed as a tool to bolster U.S. cooperation with its Asian partners.
It is not, however, a traditional free trade agreement, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai has said. Like the Trump administration before it, the Biden administration takes the position that unfettered trade liberalization hurts American workers. 
While frustrations remain, a number of Asian governments have responded positively to the proposal and several have already expressed interest in joining the IPEF.
Here are the five things to know about the new framework:
Why is the U.S. developing the IPEF?
President Biden unveiled the plan last October during the virtual East Asia Summit, saying that the IPEF will focus on standards for the digital economy, supply chain resiliency, decarbonization, infrastructure and worker standards.
The arrangement also includes measures to establish sustainable food systems and science-based agricultural regulation, as well as good regulatory practices and trade facilitation, Tai told a Senate Finance Committee hearing in late March.
Wendy Cutler, vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute and a former acting deputy U.S. Trade Representative, told Nikkei in a recent interview that the IPEF will be "a vehicle for U.S. economic re-engagement in the Indo-Pacific," adding that she hopes it will "help fill the void that was created when the U.S. left the TPP," referring to the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, from which former President Donald Trump withdrew.
During the American absence, China has gained ground in terms of regional economic integration. Last year it applied to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), the current 11-member version of the TPP.
China is also a member of the world's largest trade bloc, the 15-member Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which entered into force in January. The U.S. is not part of RCEP.
Biden will be accompanied by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, right, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, center, and Trade Representative Katherine Tai on his Japan visit.  © Reuters
Why is the U.S. not rejoining the CPTPP?
While the Biden administration has removed some of Trump's tariffs against America's allies, it has made it clear that the U.S. will not be revisiting the CPTPP. Free trade agreements are "very 20th-century" tools, Tai has said. During the March congressional hearing, Tai said such FTAs have led to a "considerable backlash" from the American people, who are concerned about the offshoring and outsourcing of American jobs and opportunities. 
The undercurrent of the Biden administration's approach is a "foreign policy for the middle class," which it hopes will allow ordinary American citizens to see greater benefits from U.S. trade and diplomacy.
How is the IPEF different from CPTPP and RCEP?
Unlike the CPTPP and RCEP, the two biggest trade blocs in Asia, the new framework will not lower tariffs. Instead, the U.S. is seeking corporation on strategic pillars, such as supply chain resilience and the digital economy. The IPEF is a more tailor-made mechanism that seeks the benefits of trade partnerships while insulating Americans from the downsides of trade liberalization.
The establishment of the IPEF is also likely to look different from traditional free trade agreements, which often take years of negotiation and require ratification by participating countries.
Cutler said in the Nikkei interview that the IPEF was going to be "a step-by-step approach," adding, "I hope it will go a long way in filling the vacuum we created when we left the TPP. Maybe, over time, the United States will realize that more needs to be done and we would get closer to a TPP-like model."
Eleven countries belong to the CPTPP: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. RCEP encompasses the 10 countries of ASEAN, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.
Which Asian countries will likely join?
Japan has welcomed the new framework. The fact that Biden is launching the pact during his visit to Japan reflects the high hopes he has that his Asian ally will take part. Biden will be accompanied by cabinet heavyweights Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Tai. 
Although Japan still maintains that it would be best for the U.S. to join the high-level CPTPP, America's return to the regional trade arena is a welcome development.
South Korea, as well as some Southeast Asian countries, such as Singapore and the Philippines, have also expressed interest in the IPEF.
"The terms of the objectives of the IPEF -- such as advancing resilience, inclusiveness, and competitiveness, as well as technology, innovation, digital economy, energy transition, climate goals, and equitable growth -- are aligned with the Philippines' trade priorities," the Philippines' Trade and Industry Department said in a statement.
Thailand will join, with the Thai cabinet approving a statement on Tuesday notifying the U.S. of its participation in the negotiations.
Meanwhile, Japan's Fuji TV reported on Wednesday that India and Indonesia had expressed reservations about joining. Indonesian President Joko Widodo said during the U.S.-ASEAN Summit last week that cooperation under the IPEF "must be inclusive."
Some countries appear to be questioning the benefits of the framework.
Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh, on May 11, at an event organized by Washington think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the concrete elements of the IPEF were not yet clear. "We are ready to work alongside the U.S. to discuss, to further clarify what these pillars entail."
Jayant Menon, a senior fellow at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, told Nikkei Asia: "IPEF proposes that members abide by binding trade rules and adopt stringent labor, environmental and other standards without receiving anything in return, such as improved market access to the U.S. This would be a major disincentive for the developing countries in ASEAN,"
What is the likely impact of the IPEF on the Asian economy as a whole?
Menon pointed out that there is concern that the IPEF's push to increase supply chain resilience is actually "code for reshoring, trying to push China out of supply chains, which would disrupt the regional network that ASEAN is a part of."
One concern is whether IPEF will survive beyond the Biden administration, he added. "These uncertainties suggest that IPEF is unlikely to have a major impact on the region, as it currently stands, and nowhere near treaty-based agreements like RCEP."
The economic impact will also depend on how many members the framework has. Commerce Secretary Raimondo in November said during her trip to Asia that the new economic framework would be "flexible and inclusive," and thus open to new members.
China, meanwhile, has criticized the plan. When asked about the IPEF during a news conference on May 12, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said that the Asia-Pacific region is "not a chessboard for [a] geopolitical contest," and that China rejects "small circles [that] smack of the Cold War mentality."
Additional reporting by Erwida Maulia in Jakarta.


19. Helmet cam footage triggers medal upgrade for soldier killed in Niger ambush



Helmet cam footage triggers medal upgrade for soldier killed in Niger ambush
armytimes.com · by Kyle Rempfer · May 18, 2022
After viewing new helmet camera footage recovered last year, Army officials have decided to award the Silver Star medal to one of four U.S. troops killed in an ambush by Islamic State-aligned militants in Niger nearly five years ago, Army Times has learned.
Families of those slain soldiers have argued for years that blame for the botched Oct. 4, 2017, mission was unfairly placed on the 11-man Army Special Forces team that fought through the unexpected attack, rather than the senior officers who greenlit the operation.
Sgt. 1st Class Jeremiah Johnson’s mother, Debra Gannon, said helmet camera footage that militants took from the Americans’ kit helped trigger an upgrade for her son’s award, which was previously a Bronze Star with Valor. But the military’s accusation that the team went off-script on the mission still bothers her.
“I still would like to have somebody get up and apologize and tell everybody that [the team] didn’t go rogue and they damn well performed above and beyond what they had to do,” Gannon told Army Times. “But I am honored that they finally decided to upgrade him.”
RELATED

Michelle Black, widow of a Green Beret killed in the 2017 Niger ambush, has interviewed many of the mission’s survivors and questioned inconsistencies in the official report.
By Michelle Black
The new video was quietly recovered during a French operation to kill the leader of the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara this summer. The footage shows Johnson and Staff Sgt. Dustin Wright defending a fatally shot Staff Sgt. Bryan Black as dozens of enemy fighters bound toward them, the mothers of Wright and Johnson told Army Times in November.
Both women were shown the new video by Army officials in the fall. A much shorter, edited version was disseminated by the Islamic State group a year after the ambush outside the village of Tongo Tongo, near the Niger-Mali border.
The new footage “provided a more comprehensive understanding of Johnson’s actions during the ambush, and directly led to the decision for the upgraded award,” Army spokesman Matt Leonard confirmed.
The 2017 ambush pitted the outmanned and outgunned 11 U.S. troops and their 30 Nigerien partners against scores of enemy fighters armed with mortars, truck-mounted heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

From left, Bryan C. Black, 35, of Puyallup, Wash.; Jeremiah W. Johnson, 39, of Springboro, Ohio; La David Johnson of Miami Gardens, Fla.; and Dustin M. Wright, 29, of Lyons, Ga. (Army)
The winding tale of how the lightly armed team wound up in the melee, and why the military’s investigation placed primary blame on the ground force rather than senior leaders, has been covered extensively, including in a recent ABC documentary, 3212 UN-REDACTED.
At a 2018 Pentagon press briefing, the ambushed team was blamed for poor training and reckless mission planning in their attempt to capture Doundou Chefou, a mid-level commander for the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara.
RELATED

“Yes, this is a rare event. It is the only case like this in recent history that [Army Human Resources Command] has in its files,” one official said.
The team leader, Capt. Michael Perozeni, shouldered much of the blame for the ambush until it was revealed that he asked not to continue the mission after the helicopter assault force they were supporting unexpectedly pulled out due to weather issues, according to the redacted investigation.
Perozeni was concerned because his team had been up for 18 hours and still had to travel 25 kilometers through difficult terrain under limited visibility to conduct the raid on their own, the investigation stated. Despite the concerns, the team was directed by their battalion commander in Chad to continue the mission anyway.
Amid the fallout from the ambush, scrutiny placed on U.S. Africa Command highlighted more problems across missions in the region, including poor medical evacuation capabilities and a lack of air support.
In addition to Jeremiah Johnson, Wright and Black, Sgt. La David Johnson was also killed during the 2017 ambush. La David Johnson was separated from his comrades when he and two Nigerien partners were unable to reenter their vehicle due to concentrated enemy fire.
La David Johnson received the Silver Star after firing his weapon until it ran out of ammunition, switching to another gun and making a last stand alone under a tree against an enemy truck and its heavy machine gun.
Wright also received the Silver Star after he “maneuvered multiple times across open terrain through intense and accurate fire from an overwhelming hostile force to protect and recover two of his fallen comrades,” his award citation stated.
Wright was initially recommended for the Medal of Honor in August 2018. But Maj. Gen. Marcus Hicks, who led U.S. Special Operations Command-Africa at the time, downgraded the recommended decoration to a Distinguished Service Cross in September of that year, according to award approval records previously viewed by Army Times.
Gen. Raymond Thomas III, who helmed SOCOM at the time, then downgraded the award again to a Silver Star in December 2018, the records showed.
The team leader, Perozeni, was also initially recommended for a Bronze Star with Valor. That was downgraded to an Army Commendation Medal by Thomas in early 2019.
Jeremiah Johnson’s own Silver Star medal will be presented to his parents in the coming weeks. Johnson’s mother said a new building at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, is also being built for 3rd Special Forces Group — the unit her son was assigned — and that will be dedicated to him as Johnson Hall.
“I’m glad that they’re recognizing him for what he did,” Gannon said, recalling the recently recovered helmet camera footage. “I did watch the head cam. After what I saw him do, yeah, I’m glad they’re recognizing him for that.”
“Jeremiah composed himself after being shot three times and he was still helping Dustin, telling him where the [enemy] shots were coming from, and he was still shooting.”
About Kyle Rempfer
Kyle Rempfer is an editor and reporter who has covered combat operations, criminal cases, foreign military assistance and training accidents. Before entering journalism, Kyle served in U.S. Air Force Special Tactics and deployed in 2014 to Paktika Province, Afghanistan, and Baghdad, Iraq. Follow on Twitter @Kyle_Rempfer


20. Green Berets, weaponized robots team up for offensive operations


I always scratch my head thinking about how this great technology will be employed in long duration unconventional warfare operations in denied areas. How much effort and resources will be expended to sustain these high tech systems?

But I cannot recall Special Forces being accused of being rigid.

Excerpts:

“Special Forces have a very rigid way of how they do things. That’s why they’re so good. They do things in a particular manner,” Willert said. “Now you throw in a robotic platform, they’re like, you know, we’re not really sure where we put this in the formation or how we utilize it.”

Green Berets, weaponized robots team up for offensive operations - Breaking Defense
The Army's Project Origin tech demonstrator helped clear objectives and mask soldier movements during a two-week experiment at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah
breakingdefense.com · by Andrew Eversden · May 18, 2022
Army Green Berets from the 1st Special Forces Group conducted two weeks of hands-on experimentation with Project Origin unmanned systems at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah. Including Special Operations Forces into technology assessments provides more in-depth understanding of what is needed to mature unmanned systems for the Army’s Operating Force. (Jerome Aliotta/US Army)
SOFIC 2022: A recent experiment with Army special operations forces used robotic vehicles to tackle more dangerous aspects of missions as the service works to further refine how soldiers and robots will fight alongside each other in the future.
Green Berets with the 1st Special Forces Group used the US Army’s Project Origin robotic technology demonstrator vehicle to make initial contact with adversaries and mask operators’ movements towards the objective during a two-week experiment in February at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah.
While the experiment helped to inform requirements for the Army’s Robotic Combat Vehicle (RCV), it also allowed the special operations community to learn more about how SOF personnel would fight alongside unmanned ground vehicles.
“Special forces guys are doing special forces things and thinking for the future of ‘how do we integrate these robots into our formations in the future,’ Maj. Daniel Groller, the military deputy for the robotic combat vehicle development team at the at the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Ground Vehicle Systems Center (GVSC), told Breaking Defense in an interview ahead of the Special Operations Industry Conference.
The GVSC manages the Project Origin robotic combat vehicle surrogate. In a series of experiments over two weeks, soldiers with the 1st Special Forces group used the Project Origin vehicle in long-range reconnaissance, concealment, electronic warfare and autonomous resupply operations. The RCV surrogates were equipped with M240 and M2 machine guns and the MK19 automatic grenade launcher.
Todd Willert, program manager for Project Origin at the GVSC, said that one “unique” aspect of the experiment was that the Green Berets had a “tighter integration” of the robotic platform in the formation than soldiers in previous experiments. In practice, that means that RCV surrogate took on more dangerous missions, such as making the initial contact with the objective and clearing it before special operators entered the area. Two operators — a driver and a gunner — remotely guided the robot toward the objective.
“The operator[s] stayed back … with their vehicles [and] drove the robot forward, and the soldiers got online [and] followed the robots forward to the objective,” Willert said. Then, “the robot swept the objective, you know, cleared outside of the buildings and then the SF soldiers came in, cleared all the buildings, and then they did some live shooting.”
In one experiment, once the building was secured, two sniper teams identified targets downrange and passed the target locations to the robots, which then fired on them. It’s all part of keeping soldiers’ locations concealed, part of the broader goal of using robots to take soldiers out of harms way.
“Soldiers can engage targets all day long,” Willert said. “But as soon as you shoot at a target, you’re creating the signature. Somebody knows that you shot [because] there’s going to be a flash or muzzle flash from where you’re shooting. … Now the signature is on the robot side. Again, you’re putting space between danger and yourself.”
Special operations forces, which undertake extremely complex and challenging missions, are highly trained and have a specific way they conduct operations. Because of this, Willert said it’s important to understand how robots and special forces can work together — a concept known as manned-unmanned teaming — and refine those lessons to prepare for battlefield operations with mature robot technology.
“Special Forces have a very rigid way of how they do things. That’s why they’re so good. They do things in a particular manner,” Willert said. “Now you throw in a robotic platform, they’re like, you know, we’re not really sure where we put this in the formation or how we utilize it.”
The Army is learning a handful of lessons about how robots in combat affect soldiers on the battlefield. The service did its first force-on-force training rotation that included a robot last fall at Fort Polk with the 101st Airborne Division. During that scrimmage, the Project Origin vehicle primarily undertook defense operations, such as blocking an helicopter landing zone and obstructing an intersection, or reconnaissance missions.
“RCVs are good for the extra dangerous and the mundane tasks,” Grolller said.
The RCV surrogate vehicle will head to Germany later this year for soldier operational experiments at the Joint Multi-National Readiness Center. Willert said the Army will conduct both offensive and defense electronic warfare missions with unmanned systems, complete force-on-force operations using the RCV surrogate to better refine TTPs, undergo mobility terrain testing to ensure the vehicle can operate European terrain and carry out live fire operations.
“Our goal right now is getting tight manned-unmanned teaming connection, figuring out those tactics, techniques and procedures,” Willert said.,
breakingdefense.com · by Andrew Eversden · May 18, 2022


21. US intel shows Russians fear Mariupol abuse will backfire

It does not take a rocket scientist to see how this would backfire for Russia.

Excerpts:
The Russian officials are concerned that the abuses will backfire and further inspire Mariupol residents to resist the Russian occupation. The U.S. official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the Russians, who were not identified, also feared that the abuses will undercut Russia’s claim that they’ve liberated the Russian-speaking city.
The abuses include beating and electrocuting city officials and robbing homes, according to the intelligence finding.
US intel shows Russians fear Mariupol abuse will backfire
AP · by AAMER MADHANI · May 19, 2022
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. has gathered intelligence that shows some Russian officials have become concerned that Russian forces in the ravaged port city of Mariupol are carrying out grievous abuses, a U.S official familiar with the findings said Wednesday.
The Russian officials are concerned that the abuses will backfire and further inspire Mariupol residents to resist the Russian occupation. The U.S. official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the Russians, who were not identified, also feared that the abuses will undercut Russia’s claim that they’ve liberated the Russian-speaking city.
The abuses include beating and electrocuting city officials and robbing homes, according to the intelligence finding.
The new intelligence has been declassified and was shared by a U.S. official as some of the last Ukrainian fighters in the devastated city emerged from the ruined Azovstal steelworks. The fighters were ordered by their military to abandon the last stronghold of resistance in the now-flattened port city and face an uncertain fate.
Hundreds of the fighters had held out for months under relentless bombardment in the last bastion of resistance in the devastated city.
The city has been reduced to rubble and has seen some of the most intense fighting of the war.
The seaside city captured worldwide attention after a March 9 Russian airstrike on a maternity hospital, and then after another airstrike a week later on a theater that was serving as the city’s largest bomb shelter. At the theater, the word “CHILDREN” was written in Russian on the pavement outside to deter an attack. Nearly 600 people were killed, inside and outside the theater, by some estimates.
It was unclear the extent of the suspected abuse gleaned in the U.S. intelligence finding, but it comes on the heels of widespread human rights abuses in and around Bucha and the suburbs of Kyiv.
Evidence of the massacre in Bucha emerged early last month after Russian forces withdrew from the city.( Photographs and video from Bucha showed body bags piled in trenches, lifeless limbs protruding from hastily dug graves, and corpses scattered in streets where they fell.
Meanwhile, the first captured Russian soldier to be put on trial by Ukraine on war-crimes charges pleaded guilty on Wednesday to killing a civilian and could face life in prison.
Russian Sgt. Vadim Shishimarin, a 21-year-old member of a tank unit, pleaded guilty to shooting an unarmed 62-year-old Ukrainian man in the head through a car window in the opening days of the war. Ukraine’s top prosecutor has said some 40 more war-crimes cases are being readied.
AP · by AAMER MADHANI · May 19, 2022

22. Ukrainians kill "high-ranking" soldiers, blow up Russian train: Reports

Excerpts:
Both Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser at Ukraine's Ministry of Internal Affairs, and Ivan Fedorov, the elected mayor of Melitopol, posted on social media that Ukrainian forces blew up the armored Russian train.
Gerashchenko said in a Twitter post Wednesday that an explosive charge detonated under a train car carrying Russian personnel.
"The railway track are damaged, a number of casualties and fatalities is now being specified," a translated version of the post read.
Ukrainians kill "high-ranking" soldiers, blow up Russian train: Reports
Newsweek · by Zoe Strozewski · May 18, 2022
Ukrainian forces blew up a Russian armored train that they said was carrying personnel in the occupied city of Melitopol on Wednesday, according to Ukrainian officials.
The day before, guerrillas in Melitopol claimed they "eliminated high-ranking Russian servicemen," according to Ukraine's Zaporizhia Regional Military Administration. The administration, which shared the findings in a Telegram post on Tuesday, did not specify how and how many of the Russian servicemen were purportedly killed. It also did not identify any of the servicemen by name.
Newsweek reached out to Russia's Defense Ministry for confirmation on the Melitopol train explosion and the killed Russian servicemen.
The armored train attack and the deaths of Russian servicemen would be some of the newest indications of the Ukrainian counteroffensive's progress in the Russia-Ukraine War. Ukrainian military officials shared a video Wednesday that they said showed Ukrainian troops destroying a Russian BMP tank and blasting Russian soldiers, while Ukraine's 45th Air Assault Brigade said earlier this week that its soldiers had bombed a Russian ammo depot and armored vehicles.

Ukrainian forces reportedly blew up a Russian armored train that they said was carrying personnel and equipment in the occupied city of Melitopol on Wednesday, according to several Ukrainian officials. Above, Russian servicemen patrol a street in Melitopol, Ukraine, on May 1. Andrey Borodulin/AFP via Getty Images
Both Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser at Ukraine's Ministry of Internal Affairs, and Ivan Fedorov, the elected mayor of Melitopol, posted on social media that Ukrainian forces blew up the armored Russian train.
Gerashchenko said in a Twitter post Wednesday that an explosive charge detonated under a train car carrying Russian personnel.
"The railway track are damaged, a number of casualties and fatalities is now being specified," a translated version of the post read.
Gerashchenko also shared a photo of what appeared to be the targeted train, though no extensive damage was immediately visible in the picture.
— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) May 18, 2022
Fedorov also briefly mentioned the explosion in a Facebook post on Wednesday.
"Melitopol partisans together with Ukrainian special services carried out a remote detonation of an armored train of the Russian occupiers," the post stated, according to a translation.
As for the deaths of the high-ranking Russian servicemen, the Zaporizhia Regional Military Administration alleged in the Telegram post that Russia is now trying to "hide" this development from public view. Members of the Russian military in Melitopol intensified inspections of private vehicles, the administration said, speculating that they were searching for guerrillas.
Melitopol is located in southeastern Ukraine and was captured by Russian forces in the early days of the war. Fedorov, the city's mayor, was captured by Russian forces in March but later returned to his duties after residents of the city and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky demanded his release.
Newsweek reached out to the defense ministries of Russia and Ukraine for comment.
Newsweek · by Zoe Strozewski · May 18, 2022


23. Opinion | To counter Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, look to Ronald Reagan

Excerpt:

The weakness of the Biden administration tempted Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine. So this is a good moment to reflect on some important lessons from Reagan on how to confront and reverse Putin’s unprovoked aggression.

Opinion | To counter Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, look to Ronald Reagan
The Washington Post · by Marc A. Thiessen · May 18, 2022
RANCHO DEL CIELO, Calif. — Arriving at the Reagan Ranch in California’s Santa Ynez mountains is like stepping back in time to the 1980s. The 40th president’s Western White House is privately owned by the Young America’s Foundation, which invites high school and college students to visit and learn about the Reagan legacy. There are no exhibits or velvet ropes. Everything remains as it was when the Reagans lived here, from Nancy’s handwritten instructions for operating the TV remote to the jar of “Brim” freeze-dried coffee in the kitchen.
Returning to the 1980s feels like a relief at a time when our nation appears to be reliving the 1970s. Inflation is at a 40-year high, the economy is contracting, gas prices are skyrocketing, a U.S. ally has been overthrown by Islamist radicals and an expansionist Russia has invaded one of its neighbors. It’s practically the second coming of the Carter administration. So it’s comforting to be in a place, however briefly, where it is always “Morning in America.”
My visit happened to coincide with that of the late president’s son, Michael Reagan, the longtime conservative radio host and author. He brought his grandchildren — President Reagan’s great-grandchildren — on their first visit to the ranch to bury their cat, Sticky, in the family pet cemetery. I ask Michael what his father would have done about Ukraine. “It would never have happened if he were president,” Michael says. He’s right. Not far from here, at the Reagan presidential library, a Reagan quote is emblazoned on a sign: “We know only too well that war comes not when the forces of freedom are strong, but when they are weak. It is then that tyrants are tempted.”
The weakness of the Biden administration tempted Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine. So this is a good moment to reflect on some important lessons from Reagan on how to confront and reverse Putin’s unprovoked aggression.
Reagan assumed the presidency in the wake of our withdrawal from Vietnam. Then, as now, Americans had no appetite for sending U.S. troops to fight in distant lands. He needed to figure out a way to roll back Soviet expansionism without committing American ground forces to every global flash point. So, he forged the Reagan Doctrine, which recognized that there were brave men across the world willing to fight their own wars of liberation. Given American weapons, training and intelligence, as well as financial, diplomatic and humanitarian support, they could free their nations from Russian domination. By providing such assistance, Reagan helped freedom fighters from Central America to South Asia unshackle their countries from the grip of an expansionist Russia. He also worked with Pope John Paul II to funnel millions of dollars to the Solidarity movement in Poland, laying the groundwork for that country’s liberation from Soviet domination.
Now, in Ukraine, a new generation of freedom fighters is defending their land from Russian expansionism. For months, President Biden slow-rolled arms shipments to Kyiv, terrified that stronger U.S. support would be “provocative” and could cause “World War III.” As Putin’s forces committed unspeakable atrocities against Ukrainian civilians, President Volodymyr Zelensky pleaded for arms, asking“What is NATO doing? Is it being run by Russia?” Only after two months and thousands of unnecessary deaths did Biden agree to provide Ukraine with heavy weapons necessary to roll back Russian forces.
Today, Congress is moving forward with a nearly $40 billion package of military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine that would make Reagan proud. The package passed the House 368 to 57, and the Senate voted 81 to 11 to proceed toward final passage. The good news is that the bill has broad bipartisan support. The bad news is that Reagan’s fellow Republicans made up all the “no” votes. Shamefully, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation, one of Reagan’s favorite think tanks, lobbied hard against the aid package, declaring that it “takes money away from the priorities of the American people and recklessly sends our taxpayer dollars to a foreign nation.” This is the same argument the left made against funding the Reagan Doctrine in the 1980s.
In his farewell address to the 1992 GOP convention, Reagan called on his fellow Republicans to reject the “new isolationists” who “insist that our triumph [in the Cold War] is yesterday’s news, part of a past that holds no lessons for the future.” We must never go back, he said, to a world “where our leaders told us that standing up to aggressors was dangerous.”
For many who remember the Reagan years, those words still ring true. We have muscle memory from the Cold War. A Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that majorities of those 40-and-older support increasing military aid to Ukraine. But just 38 percent of young Republicans, who grew up in the post-Cold War era, support boosting military aid, and 52 percent are opposed. Which means the Young America's Foundation has its work cut out reminding a new generation that, in Reagan’s words, “a violation of human rights anywhere is the business of free people everywhere.” Bring them here to the Reagan Ranch.
The Washington Post · by Marc A. Thiessen · May 18, 2022

24. Understanding Russia’s War: The Strange Philosophy Of Aleksandr Dugin – Analysis

Excerpts:

Aleksandr Dugin’s political theory of traditionalism wants to free socialism from its materialist, atheist, and modernist features. He calls his approach “the fourth political theory” (2012) because it is directed against the other ideologies of communism, liberalism, and fascism. Dugin, who teaches sociology and geopolitics at the Lermontov University of Moscow, seeks a new political idea for Russia. He finds it in the region’s traditional identity, which Dugin associates with “religion, hierarchy, and family.” As such, his theory is a “crusade” against postmodernity, the postindustrial society, liberal thought, and globalization.
...
When following the ideological path of Aleksandr Dugin, Russia would commit another tragic error. Instead of following the illusions of an imaginary tradition, the Russian leadership should recognize that other than with free capitalism, there will be neither liberty nor prosperity.
Historically, Russia’s home is not outside of Europe. Petersburg and Moscow are European cities. If, however, the Western powers should fail to integrate Russia into a common security system, Russia will turn towards Asia. With China, India, and Iran, new associations are waiting.
Considering the strategic “pivotal” role of Ukraine, both Russia and the US may be wrong.
Understanding Russia’s War: The Strange Philosophy Of Aleksandr Dugin – Analysis
eurasiareview.com · by MISES · May 19, 2022
By Antony P. Mueller*
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Russians are “eschatologically chosen.” They must stand against the false faith, the pseudoreligion of Western liberalism and the spread of its evil: modernity, scientism, postmodernity, and the new world order. This is the thesis of Aleksandr Dugin, the prominent Russian philosopher, and a mentor of the Russian president Vladimir Putin. As a geographical “pivot area,” Russia must regain its position in the heartland of the Eurasian continent.
Political Philosophy
Aleksandr Dugin’s political theory of traditionalism wants to free socialism from its materialist, atheist, and modernist features. He calls his approach “the fourth political theory” (2012) because it is directed against the other ideologies of communism, liberalism, and fascism. Dugin, who teaches sociology and geopolitics at the Lermontov University of Moscow, seeks a new political idea for Russia. He finds it in the region’s traditional identity, which Dugin associates with “religion, hierarchy, and family.” As such, his theory is a “crusade” against postmodernity, the postindustrial society, liberal thought, and globalization.
In his homeland, Aleksandr Dugin is a well-known geostrategist and a mentor of the current Russian President Vladimir Putin. For Dugin, America is a threat to the Russian culture and to Russia’s identity. He makes his position unmistakably clear when he declares:
I strongly believe that Modernity is absolutely wrong and the Sacred Tradition is absolutely right. USA is the manifestation of all I hate—Modernity, westernization, unipolarity, racism, imperialism, technocracy, individualism, capitalism.
In his eyes, America is “the society of Antichrist.” The United States of America is the ominous and alarming country on the other side of the ocean, “without history, without tradition, without roots … the result of a pure experiment by the European utopian rationalists.” He laments that America is imposing its planetary domination and experiencing the triumph of its lifestyle spreading all over the world. He criticizes that “in herself and only in herself” does America see the norms of progress and civilization.
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According to Dugin, the USA denies everyone else “the right to their own path, their own culture, and their own system of values.” His conclusion thus is that burying America “is our religious duty.” The salvation not only of Russia but of practically all the Eurasian continent is the return to its “Sacred Tradition.” In the eyes of Dugin, Russia must return to its true identity. A return to Russia’s greatness is a moral obligation. America stands in the way of fulfilling Russia’s messianic call.
Geopolitics
In Dugin’s view, the cultural rift has a geopolitical counter piece. His great vision is to create a Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis that would fill the geopolitical black hole that had been left in Eurasia after the demise of the Soviet Union.
Some of Dugin’s basic concepts of geopolitics can be traced back to the English geopolitical geographer Halford J. Mackinder and the German geopolitical theorist Karl Hans Haushofer (1869–1946). Mackinder (1861–1947) presented his thesis that the heartland of Eurasia is the “geographical pivot of history” at a meeting of the Royal Geographic Society as early as in 1904.
Mackinder’s prognosis said that while the vast area of Eurasia has been inaccessible to ships, this disadvantage will end because Russia is about to construct a comprehensive railroad system. Being inaccessible to ships is no longer a disadvantage. With the railway system, the Russian Empire is on its way to put pressure on “Finland, on Scandinavia, on Poland, on Turkey, on Persia, on India, and on China.” In the world at large, a modernized Russia would occupy the central strategical position held by Germany in Europe.”
At the time of Mackinder’s presentation at the beginning of the twentieth century, London was already concerned about the rise of Germany as an industrial powerhouse and if Russia should follow, a new and potentially even greater rival would emerge. The prevention of any alliance between Russia and Germany gained strategic priority in the foreign policy circles of the United Kingdom. The concept of maintaining the balance of power in Europe and adverting the conquest of Russia by Germany or vice versa became a strategic imperative and motivated Britain to enter World War I in 1914.
In the 1920s, Karl Haushofer’s geostrategic vision of an axis from Paris, Berlin, and Moscow to Tokyo gained shape in Germany and also attracted Soviet strategists. Dugin’s geopolitical theory represents the continuation of this line of thought and follows Haushofer as well as Mackinder’s dictum: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland: Who rules the heartland commands the World-Island: Who rules the World-Island commands the World.”
For Dugin, the conflict between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War stands in the same context as the war between Carthage and Rome. With the demise of the Soviet Union and the rise of the United States as the sole superpower, this historical conflict has reached a new stage. Now, Russia stands alone against a widened NATO. With this, the conflict between the Atlantic region and the heartland of Eurasia is moving towards a showdown.
A decade before the Dugin’s geopolitical worldview gained prominence, the American geopolitical strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski had also identified the Eastern European heartland as a pivot region. In his The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (2016), Brzezinski explains that to maintain America’s prime role in the world, it must include both Germany and Japan as its strongholds on the Western and Eastern sides of the Eurasian continent to keep Russia in check.
As to the importance of the geostrategic position of Russia and its neighbors, there would be not much difference between Aleksandr Dugin and Zbigniew Brzezinski. For both, Eurasia is the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played. The fundamental difference, however, between America and Russia is that the collapse of the Soviet Union has left the United States in the unique position having become the first superpower with a global reach.
To establish this hegemony, Brzezinski explains, Eurasia is the “geopolitically axial,” and Ukraine is a geopolitical pivot state. It follows that “without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire…. However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine … Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.”
Critique
It is hard to understand that Dugin claims “tradition” and “identity” when in fact, the Russian history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been a disaster. It was holding on to imaginary traditions that laid the groundwork for the calamities to happen. It was the resistance of the Tsars against liberalism and capitalism that have continued under the Soviets up to the present leadership that have blocked Russia’s progress.
In the twentieth century, Russia experienced one catastrophe after the other. The Russo-Japanese War of 1905 ended in a humiliating defeat and provoked violent uprisings in the country. World War I cost millions of casualties and devasted Russia’s economy. The Bolshevik takeover led to the bloody civil war of 1918–21 followed by the Russo-Polish War of 1919–20. The Soviet Union began its existence parallel to the establishment of the GULAG, the vast network of concentration camps.
The forced industrialization and the collectivization of agricultural land generated the Holodomor, the famines with millions of deaths in Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Stalin’s regime of terror incarcerated millions in labor camps.
World War II of 1941–45 brought horrendous military and civilian casualties and was immediately followed by the Cold War with its arms race and costly engagements in many Third World countries. The tragic war in Afghanistan for over ten years, until 1989, delivered the final blow and led to the breakdown of the Soviet Union. The failed temptation to establish a market economy brought not prosperity but established oligarchical state capitalism.
Likewise problematic is Dugin’s analysis of war and culture as the main conflict between the Atlantic area and the Eurasian heartland. For both aspects, war and culture, his concept of “Atlanticists” against “Eurasians” is fundamentally flawed. Wars among the seafaring Europeans have marked the history since the times of Greece and Rome and they reached new heights after the discovery of America. Likewise, the “land powers” France and Germany invaded Russia and both of them were defeated by Russia with the assistance of the “Atlanticists.”
As to the thesis of a fundamental cultural rift between Western Europe and the Russian lands, one should remember that the Russian Orthodox Church in many aspects is closer to Catholicism than the Catholic Church is to Protestantism in the West. The Russian literature and music of the eighteenth century were deeply influenced by the Western part of Europe and the Russian contributions fed as strongly back to Western Europe. It was not a cultural rift that made Russia adopt Marxism instead of free capitalism and the values of classical liberalism. Russia imported the false ideologies from the West. By opting for Marxism from the West instead of liberal capitalism from the West, Russia made its greatest mistake so far.
With respect to the current war in Ukraine, not only the foreign policy of Russia has made itself a hostage of geopolitics but also America. By losing Ukraine, Russia fears to be bereaved of its identity together with the chance of becoming a global player again. For the US, Ukraine is seen as the pivotal state to maintain and expand its global hegemonic position. In both countries, foreign policy makers look at the geographical map and see a chessboard. Both seem to believe that the authority over Ukraine decides without ifs and buts their own future.
It would not be the first time in history that an “idée fix” like geographical determination of world affairs puts the prosperity and peace across the continents at risk.
Conclusion
When following the ideological path of Aleksandr Dugin, Russia would commit another tragic error. Instead of following the illusions of an imaginary tradition, the Russian leadership should recognize that other than with free capitalism, there will be neither liberty nor prosperity.
Historically, Russia’s home is not outside of Europe. Petersburg and Moscow are European cities. If, however, the Western powers should fail to integrate Russia into a common security system, Russia will turn towards Asia. With China, India, and Iran, new associations are waiting.
Considering the strategic “pivotal” role of Ukraine, both Russia and the US may be wrong.
*About the author: Dr. Antony P. Mueller is a German professor of economics who currently teaches in Brazil. Write an email. See his website and blog.
Source: This article was published by the MISES Institute
eurasiareview.com · by MISES · May 19, 2022



25. The Quad Needs a Harder Edge

Conclusion:

The Quad is not a security alliance, nor will it become one. Unlike NATO, it is not a bloc defined by mutual security guarantees and pooled resources. But as the Quad looks to cooperate and coordinate in the face of mounting global crises, and as China increases its military presence and assertiveness across the Indo-Pacific, the Quad must develop a more robust security agenda if it seeks to sustain itself—and the region—in the coming years.

The Quad Needs a Harder Edge
It’s Time For The Group to Prioritize Its Security Agenda
May 19, 2022
Foreign Affairs · by Dhruva Jaishankar and Tanvi Madan · May 19, 2022
In 2017, when Australia, India, Japan, and the United States restarted their informal, four-way dialogue known as the Quad, many were skeptical. After all, the Quad’s hiatus had been prompted by Australia’s decision in 2008 to withdraw in order to protect its own ties with China, and it was far from clear that the four parties would hold together this time, either. Almost five years later, the Quad has made demonstrable progress. The group has survived major leadership transitions in the United States and Japan, as well as internal differences on topics such as the Russia-Ukraine war. Moreover, the Quad has grown in profile and widened its scope to include critical and emerging technologies, COVID-19 vaccines, and humanitarian assistance. Far from being a marginal body, the White House now describes the Quad as “a premier regional grouping . . . on issues that matter to the Indo-Pacific.”
Nonetheless, as the leaders of the four countries gear up for their second in-person summit in Japan on May 24, the group has much more that it needs to do. Despite the real progress the Quad has made on issues including technology, health, cybersecurity, and climate change, it must do more to deliver on its core security goals. Thus far, the group has prioritized a range of critical non-security or security-adjacent functions, such as technology and public health, over security-related efforts—an emphasis motivated in part by sensitivities in other Indo-Pacific countries about heightened military competition. To have a lasting effect, however, the Quad must ensure that it can adapt to fast-moving crises such as regional military conflicts and natural disasters, and manage expectations regarding what it can achieve.
The group must also do more to cooperate on shared security concerns in the Indo-Pacific. While the Quad has made meaningful progress, China’s growing assertiveness demands that the group move with greater urgency. Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine has only made the Quad more relevant, driving home the possibility of such aggression in the short-to-medium term in Asia, as well—and the need to deter or respond to it. With renewed concerns about China’s possible designs on Taiwan, against India, or in the East or South China Seas, the group’s mission to ensure collective peace and stability in the region will only become more critical. It is past time, then, for the Quad to live up to its potential. While the May summit will have several items on its agenda, including multilateral economic projects such as the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework and regional developments ranging from instability in Sri Lanka to China’s recent agreement with the Solomon Islands, it will also be a crucial opportunity for the group to accelerate cooperation on security.
GAINING GROUND
The Quad has made significant strides since its resurrection in 2017. It has taken on far more of an institutional identity in the 16 months since U.S. President Joe Biden took office. In its previous iteration, the group had only met at a relatively junior bureaucratic level and conducted a one-off naval exercise. Now, the Quad involves meetings of the four members at multiple levels, including leaders, ministers, senior officials, and subject matter experts, and regularly issues joint statements outlining common positions. All of this would have been inconceivable five years ago, when officials even spoke of exploratory and informal gatherings with caution. The group’s consolidation has also accelerated through more frequent meetings: the four countries’ leaders first met virtually in March 2021, and later held their first in-person summit in September 2021—a rare face-to-face encounter of world leaders amid the COVID-19 pandemic. They met again virtually in March 2022, following the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, setting a precedent of conferring on major global developments.
The four governments have also expanded the group’s scope by establishing formal cooperation on a growing range of issues. Initially, they created working groups—meetings of designated working-level officials from relevant agencies in the four countries—to address critical and emerging technologies, COVID-19 vaccines, and climate change. On their own, these three working groups reflected major progress in global cooperation efforts: they recognized the need to consult and coordinate within and across governments and represented a middle ground between informal, periodic meetings and formal bureaucratic infrastructure. But the Quad has since added many more such working groups, and they now encompass such varied issues as supply chain resilience, regional infrastructure, STEM research and innovation, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, clean energy, maritime security, cybersecurity, counterterrorism, and space.

The Quad governments have also sought to use the group to provide solutions on a range of policy issues across the Indo-Pacific—steps that have proven to be popular in the region. These regional initiatives build upon the four countries’ complementary strengths: one ambitious public health initiative, for instance, involves combining U.S. technology, Japanese financing, Indian production capacity, and Australian logistics to deliver COVID-19 vaccines to the Indo-Pacific and has contributed vaccines to countries including Cambodia and Thailand. The Quad recently unveiled a STEM fellowship that aims to build scientific and technological collaboration and capacity. The group has also established a disaster relief and humanitarian assistance mechanism, which will help regional governments respond more rapidly and effectively to emergencies. Other promising initiatives, including some on regional infrastructure mapping and green shipping, are in the early stages of development.
Although it still has a long way to go, the Quad has also made some progress on its security agenda. The group has consulted at the highest levels on the strategic risks posed by China, and it has discussed issues ranging from maritime security in the broader Indo-Pacific to instability in Afghanistan, the military coup in Myanmar, and the nuclear aspirations of North Korea. Quad members have made good faith efforts toward security cooperation and progress: in September 2021, the four countries’ intelligence leaders took part in a Quadrilateral Strategic Intelligence Forum, and senior cybersecurity coordinators from all four countries convened in Australia in early 2022. The Malabar naval exercise that began as a bilateral operation between India and the United States aiming to increase interoperability between the two naval forces now regularly involves the four countries’ navies. Separate antisubmarine warfare exercises often include other partners such as Canada and South Korea. The Quad has also conducted other military exercises with France and the United Kingdom on an ad hoc basis to build additional capacity for military cooperation.
Though not strictly part of the activities of the Quad itself, relations among several of the group’s members have been enhanced through other new agreements over the past two years. Japan and Australia, for instance, concluded a reciprocal access agreement that allows the two countries to station troops on each other’s soil. India and Australia signed an interim free trade agreement—a major breakthrough for New Delhi, which has resisted trade agreements in recent years, most notably withdrawing in 2019 from the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a 15-country trade agreement involving China. Most dramatically, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States entered into the security partnership known as AUKUS to facilitate the exchange of nuclear propulsion technology for submarines and share other critical advanced technologies. The military and geopolitical implications of AUKUS are enormous: the arrangement not only increases the potential range of Australian military operations but also locks in a close U.S.-Australian defense technology relationship for decades to come.
Bilateral security relations have also grown stronger. The four countries now have a dizzying array of bilateral security arrangements and engagements with one another. These include annual leaders’ meetings; so-called 2+2 dialogues involving foreign and defense ministers; military staff talks; military exercises involving ground, air, and maritime forces; logistics sharing agreements; liaisons; intelligence sharing; and dialogues on maritime security, cybersecurity, counterterrorism, and defense technology. But on the whole, the Quad’s progress on security cooperation has not progressed as quickly, in part because the group does not want to create tensions with other countries in the region—such as those in Southeast Asia—which have concerns about regional military competition.
LIVING UP TO THE QUAD’S POTENTIAL
The Quad has faced some headwinds that have complicated its advances on security. The conflict in Ukraine, for instance, has illuminated divergences within the group: Japan and Australia have hewed close to the United States and its NATO allies in condemning Russian aggression and sanctioning Moscow. But India has adopted a more cautious and ambivalent approach to the war because of its continued dependence on Russian military equipment, concerns about pushing Russia over to China’s side on matters of concern to India, and the need to evacuate tens of thousands of Indian citizens from Ukraine. Instead of fueling tensions among the Quad members, however, the Ukraine conflict has provided an opportunity for the group to serve as a platform for the four leaders to discuss their differences. At the Quad virtual summit in March 2022, the four leaders shared perspectives on the crisis and its implications for the Indo-Pacific.
The group has also provided a platform for the four countries to collectively confront the challenge of emerging resource and capability constraints in the region—and not just those of Australia, India, and Japan. Even though the United States has outlined an aggressive regional agenda in key strategic documents such as its National Defense Strategy and Indo-Pacific Strategy, the U.S. government has approved only limited increases in its defense budget, raising concerns about ship-building capacity and adequate military resources in the Indo-Pacific. Other efforts meant to boost the United States’ capacity to compete with China, such as the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, which invests in development projects in lower-income countries, have operated on a smaller scale in the Indo-Pacific than originally envisioned. U.S. foreign military assistance in the region is still modest, with other legacy commitments in the Middle East and Latin America—and a new priority in Ukraine—dominating the bulk of its resources. These constraints have reinforced the need for more burden sharing among Washington, Canberra, Tokyo, and New Delhi: the United States alone cannot underwrite security in the Indo-Pacific.
The Quad’s ability to surmount these limitations is critical, in part because the group’s durability hinges on its ability to deliver on its promises. The Quad must prove that it can be an effective body, both to demonstrate its utility to its own members and to show to the regional community that it is capable of solving regional problems. The alternative is an emboldened China and a region that feels it has little choice but to accede to its terms. Beijing asserts that the United States’ strategy in the Indo-Pacific, including the Quad and AUKUS, has strong parallels with the establishment and expansion of NATO in Europe—and that it must be stopped. But the Quad indeed embodies a different burden-sharing approach to Indo-Pacific security and stability based on looser coalitions and better coordination. And it seeks to offer choices to countries in the region rather than force them to bend to its will.
THE PATH FORWARD
In the months ahead, the Quad will have to focus on consolidating and delivering on its existing initiatives, as well as diversifying its engagement with other like-minded partners and organizations. The Quad does not need to add more members to accomplish this; it could instead involve other countries in existing Quad activities based on their needs and comfort levels, or participate in their initiatives to enhance regional security and resilience.

The four Quad members must also be flexible, and prepare for fast-moving global developments that call for seamless collaboration among them. The emergence of highly contagious COVID-19 variants alongside bigger regulatory hurdles, for instance, are already requiring the Quad to narrow the focus of its global vaccine initiative toward specific countries and vaccine options. The Quad should also take into account that crises may reshape the group’s priorities. For instance, supply chain constraints fueled by China’s ongoing zero-COVID policy and limits on energy, fertilizers, and grain availability due to the Russia-Ukraine war have reinforced preexisting concerns about economic vulnerabilities stemming from overdependence. These overlapping upheavals have highlighted the importance of global supply chains for the Quad, and its efforts to shore them up may have long-term implications for the member states’ economic and strategic relations.
The Quad should also focus on deepening its security engagement. Other states in the Indo-Pacific may harbor concerns regarding Quad security cooperation, namely that closer collaboration within the coalition could exacerbate existing tensions. But without progress on this front, the member states will be less effective in delivering benefits to the region as a whole, including deterrence, freedom of navigation, capacity building, security assistance, and help in tackling challenges such as natural disasters or illegal fishing. Moreover, the Quad itself needs to be prepared, given the urgency of the challenges it faces, particularly when it comes to China. Beijing’s entry into a security agreement with the Solomon Islands, which could allow China to establish naval bases closer to Australian and U.S. territory and expands its reach in the region, is just the latest reminder of its growing military ambitions in the Indo-Pacific, which long predate the Quad’s revival.
The Quad should accelerate cooperation in areas where it currently operates bilaterally, such as maritime security. Although progress on that front is complex and would involve improving awareness of the maritime domain through satellites, reconnaissance aircraft, drones, and submarine sensors, and establishing information and intelligence networks, it is well within the Quad’s power to make significant advances and reposition itself so that it is not caught flat-footed in the event of a maritime crisis. Improved regional security also requires all four countries to expand their operational reach through cross-servicing, resupply, and replenishment at sea; making arrangements for ship repair; and making better use of common equipment such as maritime patrol aircraft and helicopters. The Quad should also do more to jointly address nontraditional security threats such as illegal fishing, piracy, drug smuggling, and proliferation through better information sharing, coordinated operations, and Coast Guard cooperation.
But the Quad’s security cooperation should also extend beyond the maritime sphere. Although the Quad has engaged in significant formal dialogue involving the foreign ministries, national security councils, and armed forces, it must work to build contacts among civilian defense ministry officials, which will help strengthen trust and habits of cooperation. It will also be important for the Quad to discuss potential crises in the region—and to lay out members’ expectations of one another up front. The group should create mechanisms and rapid response units for crisis management, undertake contingency planning, and engage in war-gaming activities. And it will be crucial to strategize about effective responses to coercion and hostile activity in the region. The Quad should also coordinate to step up its foreign military assistance to smaller countries in the Indo-Pacific to ease their burden as it bolsters resilience and security in the region as well as their independent capacities. Finally, the group should enhance engagement with European partners, such as France and the UK, as well as other partners such as Canada, Indonesia, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Korea, Singapore, and Vietnam, which could lay the groundwork for more extensive international collaboration.
The Quad is not a security alliance, nor will it become one. Unlike NATO, it is not a bloc defined by mutual security guarantees and pooled resources. But as the Quad looks to cooperate and coordinate in the face of mounting global crises, and as China increases its military presence and assertiveness across the Indo-Pacific, the Quad must develop a more robust security agenda if it seeks to sustain itself—and the region—in the coming years.

Foreign Affairs · by Dhruva Jaishankar and Tanvi Madan · May 19, 2022

26. Report: Collapse of Afghan Military in 2021 - SOF News

Will we learn our lessons? Or just continue to "encounter" them as Joe Collins and Richard Hooker wrote in their seminal work on Iraq and Afghansitan?

My view here:

 4. Assessment - must conduct continuous assessment to gain understanding - tactical, operational, and strategic.  Assessments are key to developing strategy and campaign plans and anticipating potential conflict. Assessments allow you to challenge assumptions and determine if a rebalance of ways and means with the acceptable, durable, political arrangement  is required. Understand the indigenous way of war and adapt to it.   Do not force the US way of war upon indigenous forces if it is counter to their history, customs, traditions, and abilities. https://maxoki161.blogspot.com/2018/07/eight-points-of-special-warfare.html

Report: Collapse of Afghan Military in 2021 - SOF News
sof.news · by SOF News · May 19, 2022

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has released a report entitled Collapse of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces: An Assessment of the Factors That Led to its Demise. The SIGAR report, published in May 2022, is based in part on interviews with U.S. and Afghan former government officials and military leaders. It details how and why the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) collapsed abruptly in August 2021. This is an interim report, a final version will be released in the Fall of 2022.
One finding will be sure to generate some discussion among political circles; SIGAR states that the decision of the current and previous U.S. presidents to withdraw the U.S. military and contractors from Afghanistan, while Afghan forces remained unable to sustain themselves. One former U.S. commander in Afghanistan told SIGAR:
“We built that army to run on contractor support. Without it, it can’t function. Game over . . . when the contractors pulled out, it was like we pulled all the sticks out of the Jenga pile and expected it to stay up.”
One example of the drastic effect of no contractor support was the vastly diminished Afghan helicopter support provided to Afghan ground troops in remote locations. The majority of the U.S.-made UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters were grounded in ever increasing numbers each day once the U.S. contractors who performed the maintenance were pulled from Afghanistan. As a result, soldiers in isolated posts were running low on ammunition and could not be medically evacuated. Morale of the ANDSF plummeted.
A poor logistics system and corrupt Afghan police and army commanders and staffs resulted in unpaid salaries, lack of food, water, and ammunition, and shortages of fuel. These all contributed to low morale and a less than effective ANDSF.
Two other factors that drove ANDSF morale down was the U.S.-Taliban agreement for the withdrawal of U.S. troops and the announcement by President Biden that the U.S. would withdraw in a matter of months in the spring of 2021. Another important factor was air support by the U.S. to the ANDSF was vastly curtailed after the signing of the withdrawal agreement with the Taliban in February 2020.
The lengthy report has many more detailed observations on how and why the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces collapsed so quickly in the summer of 2021. It argues that it takes years to build a self-sustaining security sector in a poor, impoverished country that has suffered decades of conflict. The U.S. set constantly changing and politically driven milestones which undermined the attainment of a capable and self-sustaining military and police force.
The report concludes that the U.S. approach to reconstructing the ANDSF lacked the political will to dedicate the time and resources necessary. As a result the ANDSF was a force that could not operate independently and had never become a cohesive, substantive military capable of operating on its own. The February 2020 decision to commit to a rapid U.S. military withdrawal sealed the ANDSF’s fate.
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Collapse of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces: An Assessment of the Factors That Led to Its Demise, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), SIGAR 22-22IP, May 2022, PDF, 70 pages.
sof.news · by SOF News · May 19, 2022
27. On this Day in History: Lawrence of Arabia dies

As an aside, Lawrence of Arabia is the first movie my father took me to as a young boy. (that I remember)

1935
May 19
Lawrence of Arabia dies
T.E. Lawrence, known to the world as Lawrence of Arabia, dies as a retired Royal Air Force mechanic living under an assumed name. The legendary war hero, author and archaeological scholar succumbed to injuries suffered in a motorcycle accident six days before.
Thomas Edward Lawrence was born in Tremadog, Wales, in 1888. In 1896, his family moved to Oxford. Lawrence studied architecture and archaeology, for which he made a trip to Ottoman (Turkish)-controlled Syria and Palestine in 1909. In 1911, he won a fellowship to join an expedition excavating an ancient Hittite settlement on the Euphrates River. He worked there for three years and in his free time traveled and learned Arabic. In 1914, he explored the Sinai, near the frontier of Ottoman-controlled Arabia and British-controlled Egypt. The maps Lawrence and his associates made had immediate strategic value upon the outbreak of war between Britain and the Ottoman Empire in October 1914.
Lawrence enlisted in the war and because of his expertise in Arab affairs was assigned to Cairo as an intelligence officer. He spent more than a year in Egypt, processing intelligence information and in 1916 accompanied a British diplomat to Arabia, where Hussein ibn Ali, the emir of Mecca, had proclaimed a revolt against Turkish rule. Lawrence convinced his superiors to aid Hussein’s rebellion, and he was sent to join the Arabian army of Hussein’s son Faisal as a liaison officer.
Under Lawrence’s guidance, the Arabians launched an effective guerrilla war against the Turkish lines. He proved a gifted military strategist and was greatly admired by the Bedouin people of Arabia. In July 1917, Arabian forces captured Aqaba near the Sinai and joined the British march on Jerusalem. Lawrence was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel. In November, he was captured by the Turks while reconnoitering behind enemy lines in Arab dress and was tortured and sexually abused before escaping. He rejoined his army, which slowly worked its way north to Damascus, which fell in October 1918.
Arabia was liberated, but Lawrence’s hope that the peninsula would be united as a single nation was dashed when Arabian factionalism came to the fore after Damascus. Lawrence, exhausted and disillusioned, left for England. Feeling that Britain had exacerbated the rivalries between the Arabian groups, he appeared before King George V and politely refused the medals offered to him.
After the war, he lobbied hard for independence for Arab countries and appeared at the Paris peace conference in Arab robes. He became something of a legendary figure in his own lifetime, and in 1922 he gave up higher-paying appointments to enlist in the Royal Air Force (RAF) under an assumed name, John Hume Ross. He had just completed writing his monumental war memoir, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and he hoped to escape his fame and acquire material for a new book. Found out by the press, he was discharged, but in 1923 he managed to enlist as a private in the Royal Tanks Corps under another assumed name, T.E. Shaw, a reference to his friend, Irish writer George Bernard Shaw. In 1925, Lawrence rejoined the RAF and two years later legally changed his last name to Shaw.
In 1927, an abridged version of his memoir was published and generated tremendous publicity, but the press was unable to locate Lawrence (he was posted to a base in India). In 1929, he returned to England and spent the next six years writing and working as an RAF mechanic. In 1932, his English translation of Homer’s Odyssey was published under the name of T.E. Shaw. The Mint, a fictionalized account of Royal Air Force recruit training, was not published until 1955 because of its explicitness.
In February 1935, Lawrence was discharged from the RAF and returned to his simple cottage at Clouds Hill, Dorset. On May 13, he was critically injured while driving his motorcycle through the Dorset countryside. He had swerved to avoid two boys on bicycles. On May 19, he died at the hospital of his former RAF camp. Britain mourned his passing.




V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Personal Email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
Web Site: www.fdd.org
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
VIDEO "WHEREBY" Link: https://whereby.com/david-maxwell
Subscribe to FDD’s new podcastForeign Podicy
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Personal Email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
Web Site: www.fdd.org
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Subscribe to FDD’s new podcastForeign Podicy
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

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

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