Quotes of the Day:
"Civilization has been thrust upon me… and it has not added one whit to my love for truth, honesty, and generosity."
- The Great Sioux Indian Chief known as Standing Bear
"Put from you the belief that ‘I have been wronged’, and with it will go the feeling. Reject your sense of injury, and the injury itself disappears."
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
"Psychological Warfare has always rested as an uneasy activity in democracies, even in wartime. It is partly to do with the suspicion that using the mind to influence the mind is somehow unacceptable. But is it more unacceptable to shoot someone's brains out rather than to persuade that brain to drop down their weapon and live?"
- Dr. Phillip M. Taylor, Author of "Munitions of the Mind", Manchester University Press, 1995
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 4 (PUTIN'S WAR)
2. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield’s Interview with Michel Martin of NPR (US seeks ouster of Russia from UN Human Rights Council)
3. 'Integrated deterrence': GOP charges Pentagon's new buzzy strategy is broken
4. Top Marine Defends Corps’ Lighter Direction
5. Public approval: Biden loses to Zelenskyy
6. Ukraine War Update - April 5, 2022 | SOF News
7. The Consequences of War Crimes
8. Release of Ukraine Intelligence Represents New Front in U.S. Information War With Russia
9. Head of MI6 says mass executions seen in Bucha, Ukraine, were part of Putin's invasion plan
10. John Bolton: Putin's 30 or 100 Year War For Ukraine
11. FDD | Priority #1 for NATO: Upgrading Air and Missile Defense in Eastern Europe
12. FDD | The Kremlin’s Latin American Echo Chamber
13. FDD | Corporate Transparency Would Reduce Systemic Cyber Risks
14. In pictures: Bodies and tanks mark path as Russia moves troops from Kyiv
15. Biden urges Putin war crimes trial after Bucha killings
16. Orde Kittrie on “How to Include Far More Lawfare Ammunition in Next UN General Assembly Resolution on Russian Invasion”
17. Leaderless, Cut Off, and Alone: The Risks to Taiwan in the Wake of Ukraine
18. Rebalancing the Army for Military Competition
19. Russia was caught red-handed lying about war crimes in Ukraine
20. Ukrainian Nuclear Disaster Expert Talks Worst Case Scenarios Due To Russian Invasion
21. Analysis | The unique, damaging role Fox News plays in American media
22. Putin’s Doomsday Threat
23. America Must Spend More on Defense
24. The Next Sino-Russian Split?
25. China’s New Focus on US Cyber Activities
26. US deployment of missiles to Philippines would be dangerous
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 4 (PUTIN'S WAR)
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 4 (PUTIN'S WAR)
Mason Clark, George Barros, and Karolina Hird
April 4, 5:30 pm ET
Russian forces continue to make little to no progress in frontal assaults to capture Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, their current main effort of the war. Russian units in Donbas face growing morale and supply issues. Additionally, the Ukrainian defenders of Mariupol have outperformed ISW’s previous estimates and continue to hold the city. Russian efforts to generate replacements from reservists and feed damaged units from northeastern Ukraine into frontal assaults in eastern Ukraine are unlikely to increase their chances of success.
However, Russian forces advancing from the Kharkiv axis are setting conditions to resume offensive operations through the city of Slovyansk to link up with other Russian forces in Donbas and encircle Ukrainian defenders. Russian forces captured Izyum (southeast of Kharkiv) on April 1 and have conducted active preparations to resume offensive operations for the past three days—stockpiling supplies, refitting damaged units, repairing the damaged bridge in Izyum, and conducting reconnaissance in force missions toward the southeast. Russian forces will likely begin offensive operations towards Slovyansk, 50km southeast of Izyum, in the coming days.
Efforts by Russian forces advancing from Izyum to capture Slovyansk will likely prove to be the next pivotal battle of the war in Ukraine. Russian forces likely intend to cut off Ukrainian forces in eastern Ukraine and will need to take Slovyansk as their minimum step to do so. If Russian forces take Slovyansk, they will then have the option to advance directly east to link up with Russian forces fighting in Rubizhne—a shorter drive that will not isolate many Ukrainian forces—or advance toward Horlivka and Donetsk to attempt a wider encirclement of Ukrainian forces. Both options could enable at least limited Russian breakthroughs in Luhansk Oblast. If Russian forces are unable to take Slovyansk at all, Russian frontal assaults in Donbas are unlikely to independently breakthrough Ukrainian defenses and Russia’s campaign to capture the entirety of Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts will likely fail.
Degraded Russian forces in northeastern Ukraine continued to withdraw to Russia and are unlikely to be effective elsewhere, despite ongoing Russian efforts to redeploy them to eastern Ukraine. Ukrainian forces are conducting operations to clear Russians left behind in the withdrawal, and Russian forces are unlikely to hold any cohesive defensive positions. The Ukrainian military reported that elements of Russian VDV (Airborne) units withdrawn from northern Kyiv flew to Belgorod, Russia, on April 4. These units are understrength, missing equipment, and likely highly demoralized. Russian servicemen from the Kyiv axis ordered to renter combat operations may desert or refuse orders, which has occurred in several Russian units throughout the war—including several units that had not yet entered combat.
Key Takeaways
- Russian forces in Izyum are setting conditions to begin offensive operations southeast toward Slovyansk in the coming days to link up with other Russian forces in Donbas and encircle Ukrainian defenders.
- Russian forces in Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts continue to make little to no progress and face mounting casualties and declining morale. Replacements and reinforcements from northeastern Ukraine are highly unlikely to meaningfully change the balance of forces.
- Efforts by Russian forces advancing from Izyum to capture Slovyansk and threaten Ukrainian forces in Donbas with encirclement will likely prove to be the next pivotal battle of the war in Ukraine. If Russian forces are unable to take Slovyansk, Russia’s campaign to capture the entirety of Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts will likely fail.
- The defenders of Mariupol have outperformed ISW’s previous estimates, and Russian forces are likely taking heavy casualties in ongoing efforts to capture the city.
- Ukrainian forces likely conducted successful counterattacks in Kherson Oblast in the last 24 hours.
- Russian forces have almost completely withdrawn from Chernihiv and Sumy oblasts and will likely completely vacate these regions in the coming days.
- Russian forces withdrawn from the Kyiv axis are highly unlikely to be effectively deployed elsewhere in Ukraine and are likely a spent force.
Russian forces already deployed to the Kremlin’s main effort in eastern Ukraine are highly demoralized and do not have a cohesive command structure. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on April 4 that Russian forces are attempting to create an operational group and expand control structures to “prepare for an offensive operation in eastern Ukraine” and are continuing to deploy additional forces to eastern Ukraine.[1] Russian officers will struggle to develop a new command structure from highly damaged units while simultaneously attempting to continue offensive operations. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on April 4 that losses of the 33rd, 255th, and 294th Motor Rifle Regiments of the 20th Motor Rifle Division (part of the 8th Combined Arms Army and likely active in fighting in Donbas or Mariupol) amounted to up to 40% of equipment and personnel, and surviving servicemen are attempting to leave the military.[2] Ukraine’s Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) separately reported that it acquired a document signed by Deputy Southern Military District commander Pyotr Gibert indicating that Russian officers are compensating their troops with the promise of additional leave days due to the inability to pay promised monthly salaries in cash.[3]
Russian efforts to generate reserves and replace officer casualties continue to face serious challenges. The Ukrainian General Staff stated that the Russian military is deploying students and educators at higher military educational institutions directly to Ukraine to replace mounting officer casualties.[4] The deployment of untrained officers—and more crucially educational staff—to the war in Ukraine will impede the Russian military’s ability to develop its next generation of officers for years to come. The General Staff additionally reported on April 4 that the Kremlin began “hidden mobilization” measures to send approximately 60,000 personnel to Ukraine.[5] The General Staff stated the Kremlin is prioritizing reservists of all ranks who already have combat experience, particularly in Krasnodar Krai, Perm Oblast, the Dagestan Republic, Ingushetia, and Kalmykia.
We do not report in detail on the deliberate Russian targeting of civilian infrastructure and attacks on unarmed civilians, which are war crimes, because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
ISW has updated its assessment of the four primary efforts Russian forces are engaged in at this time:
- Main effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate supporting efforts);
- Supporting effort 1—Kharkiv and Izyum;
- Supporting effort 2—Southern axis;
- Supporting effort 3—Sumy and northeastern Ukraine.
Main effort—Eastern Ukraine
Subordinate main effort—Mariupol (Russian objective: Capture Mariupol and reduce the Ukrainian defenders)
The defenders of Mariupol have outperformed ISW’s previous estimates, and Russian forces are likely taking heavy casualties in ongoing efforts to capture the city. The Ukrainian General Staff reported Russian forces continued efforts to take Mariupol with heavy air and artillery support on April 2.[6] The information environment in Mariupol remains poor and ISW cannot independently verify any territorial changes in the last 24 hours.
Subordinate main effort—Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Ukrainian forces continued to repel Russian assaults in Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts on April 3. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled seven Russian attacks in the past 24 hours.[7] Russian operations in Luhansk Oblast remain concentrated on Popasna and Rubizhne.[8] Local Ukrainian authorities and Russian forces shared footage confirming ongoing urban fighting in Rubizhne, which the LNR previously falsely claimed to have captured on April 3.[9] Russian forces likely intend to capture Rubizhne before driving west to link up with planned Russian advances southeast from Izyum, discussed below.
Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv and Izyum: (Russian objective: Advance southeast to support Russian operations in Luhansk Oblast; and fix Ukrainian forces around Kharkiv in place)
Russian forces around Kharkiv continued to shell the city and attempt to fix Ukrainian forces in place.[10] The Ukrainian General Staff stated on April 4 Russian forces additionally prioritized strengthening air defenses around Belgorod, Russia—the main Russian logistics base for the Kharkiv/Izyum axis.[11] Russian forces withdrawn from the Sumy axis are currently reconstituting in Belgorod prior to redeployment to the Izyum or Donbas axes. Russian forces will likely fully withdraw from Sumy Oblast in the coming days, exposing the western flank of Russian positions around Kharkiv. Ukrainian forces will likely increasingly conduct counterattacks in the Kharkiv area, forcing Russian forces to switch their objective from fixing Ukrainian forces in place to defending their lines of communication in the area.
Russian forces in Izyum continued to set conditions on April 4 to resume major offensive operations southeast toward Slovyansk, 50km southeast of Izyum. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces in Izyum, including the Russian 237th Tank Regiment and 752nd Motor Rifle Regiment (of the 3rd Motor Rifle Division) are restoring combat capabilities and repairing the bridge across the Siverskyi Donets River, which runs through the center of Izyum.[12] The Ukrainian General Staff reported a Russian tank company conducted a reconnaissance in force in Brazhivka (south of Izyum) on April 4.[13] Social media users additionally observed a column of Russian equipment redeploying from Kupyansk to Izyum on April 4.[14]
Russian forces likely intend to cut off Ukrainian forces in eastern Ukraine and will need to take Slovyansk as their minimum step to do so. Local Slovyansk and Donetsk authorities called on Slovyansk residents to leave the region on April 4 and stated Russian forces will likely approach the city from Izyum.[15] If Russian forces take Slovyansk, they will then have the option to advance directly east to link up with Russian forces fighting in Rubizhne—a shorter drive that will not isolate many Ukrainian forces—or advance toward Horlivka and Donetsk to attempt a wider encirclement of Ukrainian forces.
Supporting Effort #2—Southern axis: (Objective: Defend Kherson against Ukrainian counterattacks)
The Ukrainian General Staff claimed Ukrainian forces conducted successful counterattacks and retook territory in Kherson Oblast on April 4, though ISW cannot independently verify these attacks or their possible gains.[16] The Ukrainian General Staff previously reported at midnight local time on April 3 that Russian forces prioritized strengthening defensive positions around Kherson and sought to resume offensive operations to capture the entire oblast.[17] Russian attacks in Kherson Oblast in late March and early April were likely intended to regain favorable defensive terrain around Kherson, rather than being attempts to restart major offensive operations toward Mykolayiv.[18] Russian forces in northern Kherson Oblast shelled Ukrainian positions in Novovorontsovka and Maryanske on April 4 but did not conduct any offensive operations towards Kryvyi Rih.[19]
Supporting Effort #3—Sumy and Northeastern Ukraine: (Russian objective: Withdraw combat power in good order for redeployment to eastern Ukraine)
The disorderly withdrawal of Russian forces from northeastern Ukraine makes precise assessments of the situation in Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Sumy oblasts difficult. There are likely no organized Russian defensive positions in those oblasts, and Ukrainian forces are conducting operations to clear Russians left behind in the withdrawal. We will not attempt to map those clearing operations or track their precise locations. Ukrainian forces may already have regained control of more of Chernihiv and Sumy oblasts than we depict, but we do not yet have sufficient evidence to adjust our assessed areas of advance beyond those shown in the accompanying maps. The situation will likely clarify over the next few days, and we will adjust our maps and written assessments accordingly.
Russian forces withdrawn from the Kyiv axis are highly unlikely to be effectively deployed elsewhere in Ukraine and are likely a spent force. Ukrainian forces control the entirety of Kyiv and Zhytomyr oblasts as of April 4, though the Ukrainian General Staff warned that Russian aircraft based in Belarus will likely continue to strike targets around Kyiv.[20] The Ukrainian General Staff reported at midnight local time on April 3 that Russian forces are regrouping in Belarus, and several VDV units, likely from the 76th Airborne Division, are deploying to Belgorod via transport aircraft.[21] These units are understrength, missing equipment, and likely highly demoralized. Russian servicemen from the Kyiv axis ordered to renter combat operations may desert or refuse orders, which has occurred in several Russian units throughout the war—including several units that had not yet entered combat. Russian efforts to use this spent force in combat operations will likely fail.
Russian forces have almost completely withdrawn from Chernihiv and Sumy Oblasts and will likely completely vacate these regions in the coming days. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on April 4 that Russian units from the Central Military District continued to withdraw from Chernihiv city, and Ukrainian forces recaptured several towns in Chernihiv Oblast.[22] The head of Sumy’s regional administration stated on April 4 that there are “almost no [Russian] troops in the Sumy region” and Ukrainian forces are clearing the region of ”single units [and] small groups of Russian forces,” but ISW cannot independently confirm full Ukrainian control of these oblasts to the Russian border.[23]
Immediate items to watch
- Russian forces will likely complete their withdrawal from Kyiv along the Sumy axis in the coming days and will probably abandon their remaining positions around Konotop and Sumy thereafter.
- Russian troops around Kharkiv will likely continue to focus on supporting the shift of the main effort via Izyum toward the southeast and may pull back from the immediate environs of the city.
- Russian and proxy forces will attempt to increase the scope and scale of offensive operations to complete the linkup between the Kharkiv-Izyum axis and occupied Luhansk.
- Russian forces will likely secure Mariupol in coming days, and may attempt to launch renewed offensive operations northwest from the city in an effort to seize Donetsk Oblast.
[3] https://gur.gov dot ua/content/vykhidni-zamist-hroshei-ta-zaborona-skarzhytys-otrymano-cherhovi-pidtverdzhennia-problem-v-armii-okupanta.html.
[10] Facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/287562393556846;
[23] https://24tv dot ua/govoriti-shho-sumshhinu-zvilnili-povnistyu-shhe-rano-zhivitskiy_n1936664; https://www.segodnya dot ua/ua/strana/podrobnosti/v-sumskoy-oblasti-idet-zachistka-ot-okkupantov-glava-ova-1612770.html.
2. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield’s Interview with Michel Martin of NPR (US seeks ouster of Russia from UN Human Rights Council)
It is good to see this. I hope this is the beginning of a US (and freedom loving countries) campaign to rid UN organizations of the hypocrisy of having human rights abusers sit on such committees and even lead such organizations.
Getting Russia removed from the UN Human Rights Council will be good if we can make it happen.
Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield’s Interview with Michel Martin of NPR
Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield
U.S. Representative to the United Nations
Bucharest, Romania
April 4, 2022
AS DELIVERED
QUESTION: Ambassador, thank you so much for visiting with us.
AMBASSADOR THOMAS-GREENFIELD: Thank you very much for having me.
QUESTION: Just a few minutes ago, you announced you’ll be seeking Russia’s suspension from the UN Human Rights Council. You said that Russia’s presence on the Human Rights Council is a farce. You said you’ll be taking this to the Security Council as soon as you get back. When do you expect the vote?
AMBASSADOR THOMAS-GREENFIELD: I’m going to be back in New York tonight, in fact, and we have a meeting of the Security Council tomorrow. But this has to be handled in the General Assembly, and our expectation is to do it as soon as possible – this week, and possibly as early as Thursday.
QUESTION: What force will this have? I mean, is this a mainly symbolic gesture to express the world’s disgust of Russia’s actions? Does it have any force beyond that?
AMBASSADOR THOMAS-GREENFIELD: It’s more than symbolic, and it does have force because it continues what we have started, and that is to isolate Russia and to call them out for what they’re doing. They have a narrative that what they’re doing is normal. This is not normal. They will hear from the entire world that we will not continue to allow their misinformation, their propaganda to be used in – on a UN platform.
QUESTION: There are other members of the Human Rights Council that have records of – human rights records that other parts of the world deem questionable. I’m thinking specifically of China, Venezuela, some might argue Eritrea, Sudan. You can anticipate Russia will argue that Russia is being held to a higher standard and that they will argue that this is all made up. I mean, how does the U.S. intend to respond?
AMBASSADOR THOMAS-GREENFIELD: Russia should be held to a higher standard. They are a permanent member of the Security Council. They have a responsibility to behave and comport themselves like a country that cares about the UN Charter, that cares about UN values. And it’s clear that they do not.
QUESTION: I mean, how do you respond to that when Russia has been saying that this is all fake, that these are crisis actors, that it’s just all made up? I mean, how do you penetrate that?
AMBASSADOR THOMAS-GREENFIELD: You keep exposing them. And we know that this is Russia’s propaganda. We know it’s misinformation. But we know the truth and we have to make sure that everyone else knows the truth as well.
QUESTION: Is there anything else the U.S. can do unilaterally or with – in partnership with allies apart from the steps that you’re taking at the United Nations?
AMBASSADOR THOMAS-GREENFIELD: We are continuing to look at every option we have on the table to call Russia out, to isolate Russia, to unify the world against Russia. And in fact, I think we’ve been extraordinarily successful in unifying the world. I don’t think he expected that NATO would unify in the face of his extraordinary atrocities. But he’s seen that he has – he actually has succeeded in unifying us, something I don’t think he wanted to do.
QUESTION: I just want to point out that we are conducting this conversation at the train station, where some refugee services have been set up, because many people are coming across. So, what you’re hearing now is literally train announcements.
Let’s go to the main purpose of your visit, which is to thank these two countries who have become both destinations and transit centers for refugees. You announced in the course of your visit here, earlier in Moldova, a large, $50 million aid package for Moldova. What is that for? Why is it necessary?
AMBASSADOR THOMAS-GREENFIELD: Well, it’s necessary to support the government and the people of Moldova. Moldova is one of the poorest countries in Europe. It’s a small country. Having thousands of refugees pour into their border has had a tremendous impact, and it’s been challenging for them both in terms of their economy and their budget. And that $50 million is intended to provide them with support – for example, support at the border in receiving refugees.
QUESTION: What is – are they seeing a different group of people coming across now? I know in both countries what had been a flood has become something of a trickle. There’s still like a couple hundred people coming across every day. Are you seeing different kinds of people from earlier? What are you seeing?
AMBASSADOR THOMAS-GREENFIELD: Yeah, I’m hearing it’s still in the thousand-a-day in both countries. What I’m hearing is that the initial move where people who were moving before the situation got worse, they were in their cars, they were with their families – they were not as traumatized. What we’re seeing now are people who are truly traumatized. I talked to a young woman yesterday and she said her apartment was destroyed in front of her eyes. And I’m told that as I met with some of the medical personnel today, that they’re seeing people who require a lot of psychological support.
QUESTION: What’s it been like for you if you don’t mind my asking?
AMBASSADOR THOMAS-GREENFIELD: It’s been emotional. It’s been painful. It’s been painful to see how horrific one man’s actions can have on these refugees. And we have seen the pictures of the buildings that have been completely destroyed, but what you and I have seen here in Romania and in Moldova are people – we’re seeing people whose lives have been destroyed.
QUESTION: Madam Ambassador, thank you for speaking with us. I’m sorry about the circumstances but thank you for spending this time with us today.
AMBASSADOR THOMAS-GREENFIELD: And thank you so much for all of your reporting.
###
3. 'Integrated deterrence': GOP charges Pentagon's new buzzy strategy is broken
Sigh.... Easy to criticize. Where were you when the page was blank? As a former planner I find the concepts more than sufficient to conduct campaign planning. as long as DOD is going to press for the other elements of power to be fully integrated iI think this is good Andas I have written, I think the way to describe integrated deterrence is on three levels, nuclear deterrence, conventional deterrence, and unconventional deterrence.
Sure deterrence "failed" in Ukraine. The enemy has a vote. As Sir Lawrence Freedman said, deterrence works, until it doesn't." Deterrence is not a silver bullet. We have to be ready to fight and in the case of Ukraine help others to fight.
I just spent a week with some warfighters from across the services (my first COVID trip) and from NCO to senior field grade ranks and they debunked a lot of the accusations of the woke influence and undue political influence (recognizing that the military will always be directed by political leaders) . That is a small sample size so it may not be representative but when I read criticism of strategy based on the remarks below I find political leaders uniformed and unhelpful (despite the fact some have military experience - I see partisan views and not strategic critical thinking).
'Integrated deterrence': GOP charges Pentagon's new buzzy strategy is broken
A leading House Republican believes the Biden administration’s defense policy of “integrated deterrence” is deeply flawed after it failed to deter Russia from invading Ukraine as the Pentagon touts the strategy to deal with China.
Rep. Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican who got the top U.S. general in Europe to admit this week that Western efforts to deter Russian leader Vladimir Putin failed, has leveled repeated criticism at the concept of integrated deterrence, which has been touted by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin for a year and which is at the core of the administration’s 2022 National Defense Strategy.
Gen. Tod Wolters of U.S. European Command told Gallagher during House testimony Wednesday that he considered it part of his mission to deter Putin from invading and that he considered himself part of an interagency effort to “deter and dissuade” Russia. Gallagher asked if the general agreed that deterrence had failed, and Wolter replied, “I can’t argue with your conclusion.”
“So deterrence failed in Ukraine — specifically, integrated deterrence failed in Ukraine,” Gallagher said. “Now, it may be true that right now, NATO is as unified as it’s been in decades — I celebrate that fact — and the fact that Russia has not expanded its war into NATO territory is a good thing. But it is also a low bar for geopolitical success, and the fact remains, as you have just confirmed, that we attempted to deter an invasion of Ukraine, largely using nonmilitary instruments of national power, and that attempt failed. … Integrated deterrence as conceptualized by the Pentagon and as implemented in the specific case of Ukraine, as a matter of fact, failed.”
The Pentagon released a fact sheet this week on the National Defense Strategy.
“The Department will advance our goals through three primary ways: integrated deterrence, campaigning, and actions that build enduring advantages,” the Pentagon said. “Integrated deterrence entails developing and combining our strengths to maximum effect, by working seamlessly across warfighting domains, theaters, the spectrum of conflict, other instruments of U.S. national power, and our unmatched network of Alliances and partnerships.”
Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks stressed the importance of integrated deterrence Tuesday, saying the goal is to ensure the United States "makes the folly and costs of aggression very clear.”
Hicks said, “As we confront Russia’s malign activities, the defense strategy describes how the department will act urgently to sustain and strengthen deterrence, with the People's Republic of China as our most consequential strategic competitor."
Pentagon comptroller Michael McCord also touted integrated deterrence Tuesday. He said Putin is an "adversary” but that China "has the economic power and the military power to really be our primary challenge.” McCord claimed integrated deterrence is "exemplified by what NATO is doing today."
Gallagher told Fox News on Friday that he believes “generals are under pressure from their political bosses, and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party does not want to invest in defense.” He added, “The same people that brought you 'defund the police' want to defund the military, and integrated deterrence is a fancy phrase that covers for that fact."
Austin began touting integrated deterrence early last year, while a host of top Pentagon officials have also repeatedly pushed the strategy.
In an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal this week, Gallagher argued, “The administration’s embrace of integrated deterrence is an abandonment of the Pentagon’s previous strategy of deterrence by denial. That required the U.S. to maintain enough military strength to turn back an adversary’s aggression, particularly in Taiwan and Eastern Europe.”
“Defending Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion would require the U.S. to engage directly a nuclear-armed state,” Gallagher wrote. “Deterring such an invasion in the first place, which the destruction on display in Ukraine reminds us is a far preferable outcome, will require America to integrate more conventional hard power into deterrence as quickly as possible.”
The invasion of Ukraine came after weeks of warnings by the U.S. intelligence community. President Joe Biden argued in March that U.S. sanctions against Russia were not meant to deter Putin despite numerous high-ranking Biden administration officials arguing the sanctions were meant to do so.
An anonymous senior Pentagon official touted U.S. successes against Russia, according to the Washington Post this week, saying the last few weeks proved the U.S. can use its “primacy in the global financial system” and its global alliances “in ways that can absolutely pummel aggressors.” The official claimed, “I don’t think there’s any doubt that the model of integrated deterrence comes out smelling pretty good from this.”
Gallagher said in response, “That the Biden Pentagon is spiking the football on the so-called success of integrated deterrence in Ukraine is a stunning show of hubris.
“Deterrence, specifically integrated deterrence, failed in Ukraine," he continued. "The same brave senior Pentagon official speaking on the condition of anonymity … should go to Kyiv or Mariupol and smell the rotting flesh of Putin’s innocent victims."
Gallagher brought up integrated deterrence last month, asking Adm. William Lescher what the West had deterred in Ukraine. After a nine-second pause, the admiral replied, “Excellent question, I suppose. So we’re deterring any expansion into the NATO territories that we’re committed to defend.” When asked if it is fair to say the U.S. failed to deter Putin in Ukraine, Lescher said, “Oh, absolutely.”
The Wisconsin Republican questioned deputy undersecretary of defense for policy Sasha Baker during a mid-March hearing, asking if the Pentagon was rethinking the assumptions underlying the National Defense Strategy following Putin’s invasion.
“We believe that the strategy, in fact, took into consideration some of the behavior that we’ve now seen Russia exhibit and that it’s resilient to what we’re seeing from the Russians at this time,” Baker replied.
Gallagher asked if she believed integrated deterrence had succeeded in Ukraine, and Baker contended that “what you’re seeing right now is integrated deterrence in action, bringing together the sanctions, the allies and partners, all of,” but the congressman cut her off and said, “What you’re effectively saying is your entire theory of deterrence requires on a country getting invaded and pillaged in order to galvanize the West into action. And I just don’t want to put our eggs in that basket.”
4. Top Marine Defends Corps’ Lighter Direction
Was there this pind of pushback when Major Ellis was advocating for amphibious warfare in the interwar years?
Excerpts:
On Monday, Berger was asked about the criticisms at the Navy League’s conference outside Washington, D.C. He responded by saying it is too early to judge whether his Force Design 2030 plan is working.
“I think you can't really grade a service chief’s homework, the second half, until years down the road. And then you'll know whether they organized, trained, and equipped that force to do what it needed to do in the future. Because the future is—there's a lot of unknowns there. We have to make a lot of assumptions and make hard decisions.”
Top Marine Defends Corps’ Lighter Direction
Gen. Berger responded to retired four-stars’ critiques by saying he’s building the right force to deter China.
By CAITLIN M. KENNEY and BRADLEY PENISTON
The Marine Corps commandant pushed back against criticisms of his drive toward a lighter Corps, arguing that the reshaped force would better dissuade China from aggression in the Pacific region.
“This is the second time in my career we've had a pacing challenge,” he said at the Sea-Air-Space conference outside Washington, D.C. “In terms of campaigning, you need-the nation needs a force forward persistently, I would argue, that is also expeditionary and has a forcible entry capability. Why? Because that's your first opportunity to deter.”
Berger’s arguments were co-signed by his U.S. Navy counterpart.
“The deterrence piece is really important, fundamentally important, because it's a cornerstone in the [defense] secretary’s strategy,” said Adm. Mike Gilday, chief of naval operations, who joined the commandant on the conference’s opening panel.
Berger, who stepped into the Marines’ top job in 2019, launched the most aggressive rethinking of the Corps in a generation. Concurring with his predecessor that the Marines were “not organized, trained, equipped, or postured to meet the demands of the rapidly evolving future operating environment,” Berger set about reorienting the Corps toward a lighter, more adaptable force that would be more effective in the Pacific theater in particular.
With approval from Congress and Pentagon leaders, the Corps soon shed its several hundred tanks and two of its five attack helicopter squadrons and began running experiments intended to reshape its infantry battalions.
But in recent months, a group of former four-star Marines and others have slammed Berger’s moves as dangerous or ill-informed. “The group of retired generals includes former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, former Joint Chiefs Chair Joe Dunford and John Kelly, a former Homeland Security chief and White House chief of staff,” Politico wrote last week.
On Monday, Berger was asked about the criticisms at the Navy League’s conference outside Washington, D.C. He responded by saying it is too early to judge whether his Force Design 2030 plan is working.
“I think you can't really grade a service chief’s homework, the second half, until years down the road. And then you'll know whether they organized, trained, and equipped that force to do what it needed to do in the future. Because the future is—there's a lot of unknowns there. We have to make a lot of assumptions and make hard decisions.”
5. Public approval: Biden loses to Zelenskyy
Clickbait headline. However, there is a lot of interesting data from these survey.
It looks to me that if the 76% of the people from this data should be able to work together to compromise and do wha is best for the country rather than their party.
• 13% of U.S. adults describe their political viewpoint as “very conservative.”
• 21% describe their views as “conservative.”
• 31% describe themselves as “moderate.”
• 15% call themselves “liberal.”
• 11% say they are “very liberal.”
• 10% are “not sure” what their political viewpoint is.
SOURCE: An Economist/YouGov poll of 1,500 U.S. adults conducted March 26-29.
Public approval: Biden loses to Zelenskyy
NEWS AND OPINION:
World leaders are subject to the highs and lows of public opinion polls even in complex, critical times.
“Weeks after Russia invaded his country, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy draws overwhelmingly positive ratings from the American public for his handling of international affairs. Around seven-in-ten Americans (72%) have a lot or some confidence in Zelenskyy, higher than any other international leader,” advises a new Pew Research Center survey.
It asked respondents for reviews of a half-dozen leaders.
French President Emmanuel Macron weighed in with 55% approval rating followed by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz with 53%.
“Americans are closely divided over their own president’s handling of international affairs: 48% say they have confidence in President Joe Biden in this respect, while 52% say they have not too much or no confidence at all,” the poll analysis said.
Only 15% of Americans expressed confidence in Chinese President Xi Jinping, but he wasn’t the lowest-scoring world leader.
“Russian President Vladimir Putin receives dismal ratings, with only 6% of U.S. adults expressing confidence in him following his decision to invade Ukraine – an all-time low in surveys going back nearly two decades,” the analysis noted.
The survey of 3,581 U.S. adults was conducted March 21-27.
NOW THERE’S A THOUGHT
A certain Florida Republican offers a handy summary of President Biden’s cancellation of the Title 42 border policy, which previously blocked migrants from entering the southern U.S. border during the pandemic. The policy ends May 23.
“Based on what I am being told by officials in South and Central America, expect Biden’s decision to end Title 42 to lead to the biggest migration crisis in U.S. history. It’s not just what Title 42 technically does, it’s what migrants think getting rid of it means,” Sen. Marco Rubio tweeted on Monday.
ANOTHER NEWS BLACKOUT
Major broadcast news reports on ABC, CBS and NBC continue to be skittish about providing basic coverage of the ongoing immigration challenges on the southern U.S. border.
Those challenges could escalate now that the Biden administration announced it would be ending the aforementioned Title 42.
“Considering that the February border crossings were already 63% higher than the same time last year, get ready for a dangerous situation to get even worse,” predicts Scott Whitlock, research director for Newsbusters.org, a conservative press watchdog.
“But you wouldn’t know how bad the situation at the border is if you watched the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts over the last two months. In February, these shows allowed zero minutes and zero seconds of coverage to the shockingly high border numbers. In March, they were only slightly better, amounting to nine minutes and four seconds,” Mr. Whitlock writes in an analysis released Monday.
Much of even that coverage — over 8 minutes of it — was devoted to Ukrainians trying to cross the U.S. southern border after fleeing war in Europe. The remaining 49 seconds was related to Title 42.
The analysis found that NBC offered the most coverage of all in March, at 6 minutes and 31 seconds. ABC came in second with 2 minutes, and CBS had just a scant 30 seconds.
“Crime at the border and violence by illegal immigrants within the United States are what have been fueling the crisis at the border over the last year. Yet, these topics were ignored over the last two months,” Mr. Whitlock concluded.
HELP ON THE FRONT LINES
A round of applause, please, for the Arlington Restaurant Initiative — or ARI — a partnership between the hospitality industry, law enforcement and Arlington County, Virginia, agencies to discourage alcohol use among underage people, among many other things.
The organization recently cited a pair of popular local restaurants — Don Tito and Bar Bao — for their vigilance in spotting fake IDs and discouraging would-be drinkers. Both establishments were recognized during Arlington County police’s sixth annual “Fake ID awards” on March 31.
“We want to make sure that everyone in our establishment is allowed to have a great time both responsibly and legally,” said Joe McDevitt, general manager of Don Tito — this according to WTOP, an all-news radio station covering the Washington area.
“Arlington’s ARI program is now being replicated in other cities, and businesses like Don Tito and Bar Bao are national models for going the extra mile to detect Fake IDs and prevent underage drinking,” said Brandy Axdahl, senior vice president for responsibility initiatives at Responsibility.org, a nonprofit focused on the persistent challenges of irresponsible alcohol use.
And speaking of fake IDs, they are a national concern. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers recently discovered 47 inbound shipments containing counterfeit U.S. driver’s licenses at the Port of Cincinnati. But this is a regular occurrence.
In 2020, officers seized 14,504 fraudulent identification items — including licenses, Social Security cards, passports, visas and other types of identification. Over 97% originated in China and Hong Kong, according to the federal agency.
“Fake IDs are used to facilitate underage drinking, which is dangerous in and of itself,” said Cincinnati Port Director Richard Gillespie in a written statement.
“The story can get even darker, however. Fake documents are associated with identity theft, public benefit fraud, and human trafficking, and terrorists use them to evade travel screening measures. Our officers and specialists are trained to recognize fake identification documents and they are dedicated to protecting innocent civilians,” Mr. Gillespie said.
POLL DU JOUR
• 13% of U.S. adults describe their political viewpoint as “very conservative.”
• 21% describe their views as “conservative.”
• 31% describe themselves as “moderate.”
• 15% call themselves “liberal.”
• 11% say they are “very liberal.”
• 10% are “not sure” what their political viewpoint is.
SOURCE: An Economist/YouGov poll of 1,500 U.S. adults conducted March 26-29.
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6. Ukraine War Update - April 5, 2022 | SOF News
Ukraine War Update - April 5, 2022 | SOF News
Curated news, analysis, and commentary about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, tactical situation on the ground, Ukrainian defense, and NATO. Additional topics include refugees, internally displaced personnel, humanitarian efforts, cyber, and information operations.
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Russian Campaign Update
Russian Withdrawal. The retreat of Russian troops from areas in northern Ukraine (Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, etc.) is welcome news for the civilians that live in those areas. It is estimated that roughly 2/3s of the Russian forces in this area have departed and are in Belarus. Many of the Russian battalion tactical groups (BTGs) will reorganize, resupply, and refit in either Belarus or Russia before being committed to the fight for the Donbas region in the eastern part of Ukraine. Some BTGs are in better shape than others – the reorganization will distribute weapons, equipment, vehicles, and personnel to bring BTGs back up to strength. Some BTGs may be combined to reconstitute fully manned and operational fighting units. Russia invaded Ukraine with more than 125 battalion tactical groups on February 24, and many are still in Ukraine or refitting in Belarus.
Donbas Region. The main objective of Putin’s War is now the Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts in eastern Ukraine, sometimes called the Donbas region. However, Ukrainian forces continue to defend this territory and any Russian gains are incremental at best. Some Russian forces are advancing south from the outskirts of Kharkiv into this region – there may be an attempt to encircle Ukrainian forces in the east, cutting them off from their supply lines coming from the interior of Ukraine.
Devastation. As the Russian withdraw the extent of the devastation of much of the occupied area is now being revealed. For instance, the city of Irpin located northwest of Kyiv had a pre-war population of 60,000. Now just 3,500 residents are there and many of the homes and business are destroyed. Throughout the region the Russians are leaving behind mines and boobytraps that pose a danger.
Bucha Massacre. Satellite imagery provided by Mazar Technologies is showing a number of dead bodies in the streets of Bucha since March 11, while Russia occupied the town. The images debunk Russia’s claim that Ukrainian soldiers were responsible for the killings of civilians.
Ukrainian Defense
President Zelensky will address the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday (Apr 5). He is predicting the reporting of more instances of mass killings of civilians by Russians as Ukrainian forces push forward in the formerly Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine. The United States plans to ask the United Nations General Assembly to suspend Russia from the UN Human Rights Council. A vote may take place this week on the proposal.
Tactical Situation
Kyiv. The capital city of Ukraine was once considered the primary objective of the Russians. However, the Russians are now denying that they wanted to take the capital. Missile strikes continue to hit Kyiv although most Russian artillery is now out of range of the city. It is unlikely the Russians will make another attempt to capture Kyiv with ground troops.
Kharkiv. The Russians may still attempt to capture Kharkiv located in the northeast of the country. Ukrainian defense officials say that the Russians are concentrating their forces in the Donbas region and around Kharkiv. The city is the second largest in Ukraine with a pre-war population of 1.4 million people. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is assisting in the delivery of safe drinking water – to the Kharkiv Vodokanal water system with the provision of liquefied chlorine for water purification.
Mariupol. Located on the Sea of Azov, the coastal city of Mariupol is under siege by the Russians. This city is situated along the coastal road network that would provide Russia with a land bridge between Russia and the Crimea. There are numerous reports that the city will ‘fall in days’, however, the Ukrainian forces still are in control of parts of the city.
Mykolayiv and Then Odessa. Reports by Ukrainian officials says that the Russians recently used cluster bombs in Mykolayiv, killing a number of civilians. The bombardment of this city is continuing. The Russians consider the capture of this city a key to being able to attack and capture Odessa located further west along the coast of the Black Sea. The Russians are hitting some of the Ukrainian fuel depots. One fuel supply point was hit in Odessa over the weekend.
General Information
Refugees, IDPs, and Humanitarian Crisis. More than 3,000 people were evacuated from the areas around Mariupol, Zaporizhia, and Berdyansk on Monday (Apr 4). Some Ukrainians are having difficulty in accessing food, water, medicine, and other basic necessities. The World Food Programme (WFP) has assisted one million people in the eastern, northern, and southern oblasts of Ukraine since the start of the Ukraine War. Read the Office of the Commissioner of Humanitarian Assistance (OCHA) report published on Monday (Apr 4).
UNHCR Operational Data Portal – Ukraine Refugee Situation (Updated daily).
Diplomacy. Forty Russian diplomats are no longer welcome in Germany. They have been given five days to pack their bags and leave. Lithuania has also taken diplomatic action – downgrading its ties with Russia and closing the Russian consulate in Klaipeda. China continues to be allied with Russia – although publicly it says it is not picking sides. The New York Times (subscription) says that the Chinese Communist Party is pushing a campaign that paints Russia as a long-suffering victim rather than as an aggressor. China says that its strong ties with Russia is vital to deterring Western dominance.
U.S. Weapons for Ukraine. The United States has committed to providing more than $1.6 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since the Russian invasion in February 2022. Javelins, Stingers, UAVs and more continue to flow to Ukraine. A new development is the news that the U.S. is sending limited quantaties of a more robust version of the Switchblade drone, in addition to the 100 that are supposedly on the way to Ukraine in a previous shipment. The U.S. is continuing its robust schedule of exercises in Europe in conjunction with its NATO partners. The biannual exercise Northern Viking will begin that includes the U.S. 6th Fleet in the Iceland area. This exercise demonstrates the U.S. commitment to the defense of Iceland and the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom gap – sometimes referred to as the GIUK gap.
Report – Foreign Fights, Mercenaries, and Others. A recently published report examines the non-state actors fighting for Ukraine and Russia. Foreign Fighters, Volunteers, and Mercenaries: Non-State Actors and Narratives in Ukraine, The Soufan Center, April 2022, PDF, 39 pages.
Commentary
Sanctions – Will They Work? Comprehensive sanctions against a country do hurt the target countries economy. It also can damage the economy of the countries imposing the sanctions. For instance, Russian oil is being sanctioned, but that is putting European nations in an energy crunch. Putting aside America’s untouched energy resources, Iran and Venezuela both can pick up the slack in oil shipments. But both of these countries are also under a sanction regime of sorts. Read more in an article by David Uren – a senior fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. “History shows the West’s sanctions on Russia could backfire”, The Strategist, ASPI, April 5, 2022.
India and Putin’s War. India is taking some hits on its neutral stance on the Ukrainian conflict. However, observers shouldn’t be surprised with the country’s hesitancy to criticize Russia for its aggression towards Ukraine. India depends on Russia for its supply of weapons for India’s armed forces – especially needed to counter the ambitions of Pakistan and China in the South Asian and Indo-Pacific region. India and Russia have a long history of friendship going back to the Cold War. It may be time for India to diversify the sources of its weapons fielded to its military forces. “The Ukraine-Russia War: An Uncertain Future for Indian Defense Modernization”, Georgetown Security Studies Review, April 4, 2022.
SOF News welcomes the submission of articles for publication. If it is related to special operations, current conflicts, national security, defense, or the current conflict in Ukraine then we are interested.
Maps and Other Resources
UNCN. The Ukraine NGO Coordination Network is an organization that ties together U.S.-based 501c3 organizations and non-profit humanitarian organizations that are working to evacuate and support those in need affected by the Ukraine crisis. https://uncn.one
Maps of Ukraine
Ukraine Conflict Info. The Ukrainians have launched a new website that will provide information about the war. It is entitled Russia Invaded Ukraine and can be found at https://war.ukraine.ua/.
Ukrainian Think Tanks – Brussels. Consolidated information on how to help Ukraine from abroad and stay up to date on events.
Weapons of the Ukraine War.
7. The Consequences of War Crimes
More than name and shame: Arrest, prosecute, convict, and punish.
The Consequences of War Crimes
Russian officers should be named, starting with the general staff.
WSJ · by The Editorial Board
Graves are seen in front of a residential building in Bucha city, Ukraine, April 4.
Photo: oleg petrasyuk/Shutterstock
The scenes of murder and mass graves from Bucha and other towns and cities in Ukraine are shocking the world, and we hope they linger in memory for longer than a TikTok video. The war crimes on prima facie display should underscore the West’s resolve that they can’t go unpunished.
President Biden added his outrage on Monday by repeating his charge that Vladimir Putin is “a war criminal” who should be put on trial. He called for an investigation, which is already underway at the U.S. State Department and the International Criminal Court in the Hague. But now that Mr. Biden and other leaders are calling out the crimes, they have to do something or the world will see that such brutality leads to momentary outrage but nothing more.
The scenes are widespread enough that they suggest more than the acts of a few renegade soldiers or a rogue squad or company. Bodies are strewn up and down streets, some shot in the head with their hands tied. Reports of rape are widespread.
Survivors say that Ukrainian officials who refused to cooperate with Russians occupying their towns were shot. Russians reportedly kidnapped the mayor of the village of Motyzhyn on March 23, along with her husband and son, and all three bodies were discovered in a well on Saturday. Graves in Bucha hold dozens of bodies of civilian non-combatants, and aerial photos show evidence from before the Russian departure from Bucha.
These are all clear violations of the laws of war as understood by longtime custom. The investigations should pinpoint responsibility as much as is possible given the wartime exigencies. That doesn’t mean only looking to see if certain soldiers carried out the acts or if individual officers gave the commands.
The widespread marauding suggests a general breakdown in military order that is the responsibility of officers whose men are under their command. That means holding Russian defense officials and officers responsible from the general staff down to company commanders.
In a famous case from World War II, Japanese general Tomoyuki Yamashita was tried by an American military tribunal for war crimes committed by troops under his command in the Philippines. His defense was that he didn’t order his troops to commit such acts and wasn’t aware they were committed. The court nonetheless held him responsible for the war crimes of his subordinates. His appeals for clemency were rejected all the way up to President Harry Truman, and Yamashita was hanged.
A war crimes investigation needn’t start with Mr. Putin, and it might be better if it didn’t. The war is continuing, and the impact might be more significant on Russian morale if Russian officers know they will be held accountable. Start at the top with Sergei Shoigu, the Army general who has been minister of defense for a decade. Then move down through the ranks of officers who have served in Ukraine, starting with those who commanded troops in the regions where war crimes were committed.
The indictments should name individuals and the specific crimes that occurred in the areas under their command. The names and charges, once announced, are sure to become known to the Russian forces. Perhaps it will concentrate minds about the dirty war they have been asked to prosecute and the trouble Mr. Putin has put them in.
This may also be a prosecution better done by Europeans than by the U.S. They are the people most acutely threatened by the war, and Mr. Putin would only be too happy to turn this into a Russo-U.S. fight. What matters is that the war crimes in Ukraine are investigated and, no matter the difficulty in prosecuting them, at least a diligent, determined effort is made to render justice so the world can see that Mr. Putin’s brand of war can’t be tolerated.
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WSJ · by The Editorial Board
8. Release of Ukraine Intelligence Represents New Front in U.S. Information War With Russia
This should be one of the positive lessons of the Ukraine crisis and Putin's war.
The US conducted "strategic influence through information advantage" (I just spent last week at the Joint Special Operations University evaluating the pilot course of the same name. There is no other program of instruction in DOD like the JSOU course.)
Release of Ukraine Intelligence Represents New Front in U.S. Information War With Russia
To fight Kremlin, Biden authorized initiative to declassify and share information with the public and allies
Updated Apr. 4, 2022 10:17 am ET
WASHINGTON—As Russian troops amassed at Ukraine’s border in early December, White House officials pored over multiple versions of a highly classified map that detailed Moscow’s burgeoning military presence.
The administration provided a version of the map and accompanying text to the Washington Post, which published it online Dec. 3, just days before a tense phone call between President Biden and Russian leader Vladimir Putin. The release of the map—a blend of secrets gathered by U.S. spy agencies and commercially available satellite images—kicked off a virtually unprecedented effort by the Biden administration to use U.S. intelligence to shape the battlefield of Europe’s bloodiest conflict in decades.
The new approach to public intelligence sharing has involved declassifying a cascade of secrets normally reserved for top policy makers: updates on Russian troop movements; detailed allegations that Moscow would stage a pretext for its invasion; even, last week, reports of growing tension between Mr. Putin and his generals. White House officials call the strategy “downgrade and share”—with “downgrade” referring to lowering the classification level of U.S. documents or data.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
How effective was the Biden administration’s campaign of releasing intelligence on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? Join the conversation below.
U.S. officials say that although the tactic didn’t prevent the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they have evidence the public deployment of intelligence has been effective in other ways. It did, they say, stymie Mr. Putin’s plans to use a “false flag” operation, essentially a staged attack Moscow would blame on Ukraine, as a pretext for war, and might have delayed the invasion itself, giving Kyiv more time to prepare.
Citing those successes, some see “downgrade and share” as foreshadowing future uses of intelligence in international crises.
“I really think this is a harbinger,” said Glenn Gerstell, former general counsel at the National Security Agency. “Future conflicts are going to be shaped, instigated and deterred by releases of information beforehand.”
The plan to declassify and share intelligence dates to the fall of last year, when Mr. Biden signed off on it. His national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, was a prime architect and oversaw execution of the initiative, U.S. officials said, with support from Secretary of State Antony Blinken, CIA Director William Burns and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines.
The U.S. recently released intelligence reports about tension between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his military generals; virtual talks in December between President Biden and other U.S. officials and Mr. Putin.
PHOTO: HANDOUT/REUTERS
The initiative Mr. Biden approved in November, a senior official said, was an outgrowth of expanded U.S. intelligence-sharing with European allies. That trans-Atlantic effort was aimed at ensuring Washington and its partners had a common picture of Russia’s gathering military might around Ukraine, and at bolstering resolve to act, U.S. officials said.
In terms of convincing allies of the threat, however, the information sharing yielded mixed results. European allies, except Britain, greeted American predictions of an invasion with skepticism, U.S. officials said. The chief of Germany’s BND foreign intelligence service was caught in Kyiv when the invasion began and had to be evacuated overland.
And France, a senior European official said, thought Russia was using threats but wouldn’t invade. France’s military intelligence chief resigned last week.
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A Nov. 1 satellite picture showing ground forces deployment in Yelnya, Russia.
PHOTO: SATELLITE IMAGE ©2021 MAXAR TEC/VIA REUTERS
The Biden administration has also had to tread a fine line between warning of Russia’s plans and being painted as too alarmist.
For example, one version of the map made public in early December had bright red arrows pointing from Russian military encampments into Ukraine, showing where troops would breach the border. Some officials looking at that depiction realized it might erroneously suggest a Russian invasion was imminent. It was decided, “No, we’re not going to use that one,” a senior U.S. official involved in the process said.
It was set aside in favor of a map that denoted the location of Russian units with circles, the official said.
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The support from senior intelligence leaders for sharing so much information publicly represents a major shift, a second senior U.S. official said. The official recalled how in 2014, Washington was unable to effectively counteract Moscow’s information operations surrounding its annexation of Crimea and incursions into eastern Ukraine. “Getting the intelligence community to declassify anything, even for public messaging, was like pulling teeth,” the official said.
While lawmakers on the House and Senate intelligence committees are regularly briefed privately on Russia intelligence, the White House hasn’t given Congress a heads-up before the public releases, according to Sen. Mark Warner, Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Mr. Warner says he is an enthusiastic supporter of the policy. “It puts some of the intel leadership outside their comfort zone, but I think it’s been very, very effective in terms of rallying support and keeping Putin off guard,” he said.
Sen. Mark Warner (D., Va.) says he supports the public releases of U.S. intelligence during the Russia-Ukraine war.
PHOTO: ALEX BRANDON/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The flurry of declassification moves has been a relief for some lawmakers, who have watched as the U.S. has been stung by Moscow’s elaborate, multipronged disinformation operations, including during the 2016 presidential election. “My gosh, maybe the West is finally winning the information war,” Mr. Warner said.
That didn’t necessarily seem the case in early February, when the administration said Russia was planning to stage a fake attack on its own forces that it would blame on Ukraine, complete with a “very graphic propaganda video” depicting corpses and mourners played by actors. The allegation drew skepticism, demands for more evidence, and comparisons to the George W. Bush administration’s manipulation of intelligence to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
“We had a lot of, ‘Why should we trust you after Iraq, after…’—name your perceived intelligence failure,” said the second senior U.S. official.
“The best antidote to that suspicion is that we have been proven right,” the official said.
Related
Russia’s Striped Z: Why the Kremlin Added Stripes to the Pro-War Symbol
Russia’s Striped Z: Why the Kremlin Added Stripes to the Pro-War Symbol
Play video: Russia’s Striped Z: Why the Kremlin Added Stripes to the Pro-War Symbol
The Russian government has been adding orange and black stripes to the pro-war symbol Z. WSJ’s Shelby Holliday looks into the history of the stripes, and why the Kremlin is using the pattern to drum up domestic support for its invasion of Ukraine. Illustration: Sebastian Vega/WSJ
U.S. officials declined to discuss some aspects of “downgrade and share,” including the sources of the intelligence and details of the interaction between the White House and U.S. spy agencies.
Current and former intelligence officials suggested the declassified information is drawn mostly from communication intercepts, satellite images and other technical means. Current officials declined to say whether the CIA’s human source network is involved.
“My sense is, it isn’t, otherwise they wouldn’t have done it” because of the risks to precious human spies, said Mark Lowenthal, a former CIA and State Department intelligence official.
So far as is known, no sources of U.S. intelligence have been compromised as a result of the disclosure of sanitized spy reports, said one U.S. official with access to such information.
The material prepared for release goes through standard declassification channels, a U.S. intelligence official said, rather than some special task force created to handle it. The latter might have raised concerns that the White House was manipulating or politicizing the intelligence flow.
Ms. Haines’s office has coordinated with declassification experts across U.S. intelligence agencies to make declassification decisions, said Nicole de Haay, a spokeswoman for the Director of National Intelligence. “The intelligence community surged personnel and resources to support classification reviews,” Ms. de Haay said.
Since the fall, national security adviser Jake Sullivan has been a prime shaper of the U.S. effort to declassify and share intelligence.
PHOTO: YURI GRIPAS/ZUMA PRESS
When information comes in and spy agencies object to releasing it, an intramural negotiation sometimes ensues, current and former officials said. White House officials will ask intelligence agency representatives if there’s another way to present the information without jeopardizing sources and methods, the first senior official said.
“Sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes the answer is no,” the official said. “You want to have a conversation about what the concern is.”
The process is made easier, the officials said, by the proliferation of commercial satellite imagery, videos, flight tracking and other data on social-media websites that has charted the Russian buildup and invasion. U.S. government releases often confirm and expand on open-source intelligence, giving it the patina of authority.
Mr. Lowenthal, who is also an intelligence historian, said that other than the Iraq example, U.S. presidents have usually released intelligence in the aftermath of an event, not before. President Ronald Reagan in 1983 sent his U.N. ambassador to the Security Council with tape of an intercepted conversation showing that Soviet pilots shot down a civilian Korean airliner without firing warning shots.
While there has been grumbling among some former CIA officers about the Biden administration approach, “I have no problem personally with them doing it,” Mr. Lowenthal said. “Otherwise, why have the intelligence?”
Dustin Volz and Vivian Salama contributed to this article.
9. Head of MI6 says mass executions seen in Bucha, Ukraine, were part of Putin's invasion plan
Excerpts:
Richard Moore, the head of MI6, said in a tweet that "we knew" organized mass killing formed part of "Putin's invasion plans."
The comments appear to tie Putin directly to the atrocities alleged by Ukraine in the cities of Bucha and elsewhere.
Imagery showed several civilians lying dead on the streets as well as mass graves. Local residents said the victims were killed by Russian soldiers without provocation.
Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky, said that some victims were shot in the head with their hands tied behind their back, and that women were raped before they were killed. Children are among those killed, he said.
Head of MI6 says mass executions seen in Bucha, Ukraine, were part of Putin's invasion plan
Communal workers carry a civilian in a body bag in the town of Bucha, not far from the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv
Sergei Supinksy/AFP
- The head of MI6 said the mass killings of civilians in Ukraine is part of "Putin's invasion plans".
- Richard Moore said reports coming out of Bucha, a town near Kyiv, were "horrifying and chilling".
- It appears part of a strategy of making intelligence about Russia public to counter any denials.
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Vladimir Putin planned the "summary executions" being uncovered in parts of Ukraine that were occupied by Russian forces, according to the head of UK secret intelligence.
Richard Moore, the head of MI6, said in a tweet that "we knew" organized mass killing formed part of "Putin's invasion plans."
The comments appear to tie Putin directly to the atrocities alleged by Ukraine in the cities of Bucha and elsewhere.
Imagery showed several civilians lying dead on the streets as well as mass graves. Local residents said the victims were killed by Russian soldiers without provocation.
Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky, said that some victims were shot in the head with their hands tied behind their back, and that women were raped before they were killed. Children are among those killed, he said.
Following the attack, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a speech said: "Concentrated evil has come to our land. Murderers. Torturers. Rapists. Looters, who call themselves the army, and who deserve only death after what they did."
—Zoya Sheftalovich (@zoyashef) April 4, 2022
As the allegations emerged, Moore wrote on Twitter: "We knew Putin's invasion plans included summary executions by his military and intelligence services.
"The reports of execution-style killings of civilians emerging from liberated areas are horrifying and chilling."
High-ranking intelligence officials from the UK, US, and other Western countries have been unusually public in their commentary on what it says are Russia's invasion plans.
The strategy, which began with predicting Russia's invasion of Ukraine as it built up more than 100,000 troops near the country's borders, is said to be designed to pre-empt attempts by Russia to disguise its intentions or shift blame.
Speaking from Australia, he branded the invasion a "strategic miscalculation", sand said: "Even though we believe Putin's advisers are afraid to tell him the truth, what's going on and the extent of these misjudgements must be crystal clear to the regime."
Events in Bucha prompted condemnation from British politicians, with Foreign Secretary Liz Truss reiterating the UK's support the International Criminal Court as it investigates and prosecutes war crimes.
She said: "We will not rest until those responsible for atrocities, including military commanders and individuals in the Putin regime, have faced justice."
Prime Minister Boris Johnson said: "Russia's despicable attacks against innocent civilians in Irpin and Bucha are yet more evidence that Putin and his army are committing war crimes in Ukraine."
He vowed to "do everything in my power to starve Putin's war machine", with the promise of further sanctions and military support, as well as humanitarian aid.
Truss was due to meet her Ukrainian counterpart, minister of foreign affairs Dmytro Kuleba, in Warsaw Monday evening, and her Polish counterpart Zbigniew Rau in the Polish capital Tuesday.
"Putin is yet to show he is serious about diplomacy," she said ahead of her trip. "A tough approach from the UK and our allies is vital to strengthen Ukraine's hand in negotiations."
"We will continue to support those who are suffering as a result of Putin's illegal invasion of Ukraine, including the victims of sexual violence and those in need of humanitarian support."
10. John Bolton: Putin's 30 or 100 Year War For Ukraine
I still think we should call this "Putin's War."
Excerpts:
This is not Putin’s war, it’s Russia’s war: Western leaders are deluding themselves to think that Putin alone is responsible for the invasion. As Russia’s president, he obviously makes the final decisions, but he is far from alone in believing passionately that Ukraine (not to mention Belarus and other once-Soviet republics) should be returned to the rodina, Mother Russia.
This is certainly true for the siloviki, the “men of power” forming the core of Putin’s advisors, from several of whom I once heard personally their message that Ukraine is a failed, illegitimate state.
...
The Alliance’s biggest test will be maintaining diplomatic unity at the inevitable moment when Moscow decides on serious negotiations. The siloviki see the West’s weakness for money not for the ideological reasons of their Communist predecessors, but with at last equal clarity. Already, France and Germany are searching for ways to end military hostilities before one side or the other scores a decisive victory, thus freezing the conflict without materially resolving it. This would certainly be the typical European approach. If, however, Russia emerges from its current military debacle with anything even remotely smacking of victory, the reverberations in Europe and worldwide, especially in Beijing, will be enormous. Nattering on about NATO unity may warm hearts in elite Washington circles, but all that talk is worth what you pay for it. American leadership and NATO performance to date have been inadequate. Face up to it.
The clear lesson is that Americans should not bliss out prematurely. This is a European conflict. Think Thirty Years War or Hundred Years War. Putin is.
John Bolton: Putin's 30 or 100 Year War For Ukraine
Six weeks into Russia’s second invasion of modern Ukraine, Moscow’s stunning military failures dominate the West’s attention. Unsurprisingly, therefore, basic misperceptions are becoming conventional wisdom, thereby potentially distorting future U.S. policy, making it even less effective than at present. The following corrective effort is only illustrative, not exhaustive.
This is not Putin’s war, it’s Russia’s war: Western leaders are deluding themselves to think that Putin alone is responsible for the invasion. As Russia’s president, he obviously makes the final decisions, but he is far from alone in believing passionately that Ukraine (not to mention Belarus and other once-Soviet republics) should be returned to the rodina, Mother Russia.
This is certainly true for the siloviki, the “men of power” forming the core of Putin’s advisors, from several of whom I once heard personally their message that Ukraine is a failed, illegitimate state.
Kremlin leaders have a thirty-year obsession with reabsorbing their lost empire. News reports on today’s war often read eerily and confusingly like 2014 news accounts of the Crimea annexation and Donbas invasion, reflecting the West’s historical ignorance and short attention span. The siloviki have many egregious, bloody faults, but short attention is not one of them.
No wonder America’s media and the Biden Administration are surprised by independent polls showing increasing Russian public support for Putin, even in the face of Western sanctions and Moscow’s flagging war effort. Not all Russians feel Putin’s irredentism as deeply as he does. A sufficient number do, however, so that whatever else endangers Putin’s regime, public opinion is not only not a threat, it is for now a pillar of regime strength.
Putin does not have a screw loose, nor does he suffer from insufficient, inaccurate information: Not all of Putin’s advisors grovel and snivel, fearing telling him the truth.
Contrary analysis by unnamed Biden administration sources may be elements of our information war against Russia, but they do not describe Kremlin reality.
Even in autocratic regimes, there are always advisors more than happy to point out their rivals’ failures and to provide fulsome evidence to put them in a bad light.
Like America, Russia has multiple intelligence agencies that vie bureaucratically for influence and attention. Besides, Soviet embassies don’t need the SVR to communicate back to Moscow what Western media are reporting. There is no upside for every fawning Putin advisor to cover for those who can easily be blamed for evident failures.
The Pentagon offered the most absurd lyrics for the “Putin is uninformed and a little nuts” mantra, speculating that his lack of information could impede ongoing Ukrainian-Russian peace negotiations. For Moscow, these negotiations are merely a propaganda exercise, something affording a patina of reasonableness to its belligerent position. Ironically, it was President Biden who brushed this chatter aside, saying “I don’t want to put too much stock in that at this time because we don’t have that much hard evidence.”
Westerners may not understand how much Putin and company value Ukraine, but that is our problem, not his. We heard this same psychoanalysis in 2014. Angela Merkel among others reportedly believed Putin was “out of touch with reality.” Andrei Illarionov, a former close Putin advisor now in the U.S., corrected her: “People in the West think Putin is irrational or crazy. In fact, he’s very rationale according to his own logic, and very well-prepared. It is not Putin who is out of touch with reality — it is the West.”
This rings true. More than once, Putin has said to me, “you have your logic, we have ours; we will see which prevails.”
Part of the problem may be Putin himself. not his advisors. He may have dismissed hard facts contrary to his preconceptions, a common human failing. It would be an equally grievous mistake, however, for America to think Putin has not by now recovered. Moreover, Russia’s battlefield failures may result from still-endemic corruption and incompetence throughout its military. “Ghost soldiers” whose salaries, weapons, rations, and supplies found their way into black markets, as lower-ranking officers submitted false reports on unit strength and readiness up the chain, have now been laid bare. Despite twenty years of trying to reform and modernize Russia’s military, the Ukraine conflict demonstrates that these efforts were far from successful.
Russia’s strategic mistakes have cost it dearly, but it has not yet lost the war: Russia did not launch this invasion with only one goal. The Kremlin was likely considering several options, depending on how the war unfolded. With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, the top-line strategic objective seems to have been capturing Kyiv, overthrowing Zelensky’s government, and replacing it with a Quisling regime under Moscow’s control. This strategic blunder cost Russia numerous opportunities elsewhere in Ukraine that might already have been achieved, in turn enabling Moscow to pursue additional priority objectives. By trying too much at once, however, Moscow’s reach substantially exceeded its grasp, and it failed broadly.
Broadly, but not fatally.
The cliché tells us generals always fight the last war. In 2014, Russia seized Crimea almost without firing a shot. Indeed, significant portions of Ukraine’s navy defected to Russia’s side. Fighting in the Donbas region was not so successful for Russia, but neither were the military costs high nor subsequent Western sanctions effective. One can easily imagine Moscow’s leaders envisaging a similar scenario in 2022. They were obviously wrong.
Even more importantly, on and after February 24, Russia violated the fundamental military doctrine of force concentration. Instead of aiming at a small number of key targets with overwhelming forces, Moscow attacked broadly with inadequate manpower, firepower, and logistics. Ukraine’s heroic resistance was totally unanticipated. The result was a failure to win most key objectives: Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and more. Russian arms have had relatively greater success in southern and eastern Ukraine, but even these advances are far from overwhelming.
Now, Russia is belatedly trying to get its act together, withdrawing from areas around Kyiv and other northern cities of Ukraine, perhaps back into Belarus and Russia, to regroup, reinforce and resupply. Moscow will either try again in the north or redeploy these forces to the east and south, where reinforcements are arriving from existing deployments in Georgia, the Middle East, and elsewhere. The media report Syrian soldiers returning Russia’s earlier favors to Assad’s regime by coming to Ukraine, likely without crash courses on the Geneva Conventions.
The Kremlin’s goal now will likely be maximizing its military and political control throughout southern and eastern Ukraine. Russia’s overarching goal of fully conquering Ukraine is almost certainly out of reach for now, but there are many alternatives, subsidiary objectives. If Putin could accomplish significant elements of these lesser goals, he would be well-placed to persuade Russia’s public that the war was worthwhile and to induce all-too-many Westerners to turn the page and return to “normal” economic and political relations.
Almost certainly the critical second-tier objective is control over Ukraine’s substantially Russophile areas, effectively splitting the country in two. The Kremlin’s targets are southern Ukraine, particularly control over the Black Sea’s strategically important northern coast, and eastern Ukraine, east of the Dnieper River to the city of Dnipropetrovsk and then north to the Russian border. Broadly speaking, eight Ukrainian oblasts (in addition to Crimea) are involved: Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Mykolaiv, and Odesa.
These oblasts are predominantly or substantially Russian-speaking and Russian Orthodox, as compared to areas more Ukrainian-speaking, Ukrainian Orthodox, or Catholic. This, of course, is the Kremlin’s view, not an exercise in Wilsonian self-determination. Because Ukraine’s demographic distribution looks like a bad case of measles, and citizens are often ambivalent or conflicted in their religious loyalties, these characterizations are not bright lines. Russia may well fail to conquer all this territory, but the more it seizes, the stronger its bargaining position when negotiations actually turn serious.
For now, Russia’s military position in eastern Ukraine is relatively strong, and “victory” is entirely possible. Along the Black Sea, however, Moscow had been blocked, and Odesa seems beyond its grasp at the moment. Nonetheless, if Moscow reconstitutes its forces, coordinates its land, sea, and air efforts, and Western support for Ukraine’s military is insufficient, taking Odesa is still feasible. With the east and much of the south secure, Russia could make territorial “concessions” by withdrawing from areas it still holds in the north, but which are no longer tenable long-term. Putin is counting on flagging Western interest and unity. This would make it difficult and costly if not impossible to push Russia from what it holds near its current borders and Crimea. Uti possidetis remains a powerful form of diplomatic inertia.
Washington needs to step up its leadership, and NATO its performance. Let’s be clear: NATO is not fully united.
The West must do better in tightening the economic noose around Russia and increasing and speeding its military assistance to Ukraine. Performance to date is mixed. Despite incessant hosannas about Alliance unity, the West is already fraying. The United Kingdom and the United States have led in supplying hardware and intelligence, but others, like France and Germany, have lagged, starting with Berlin’s pre-war offer of 5,000 military helmets, and continuing later by supplying former East German Strela missiles, over thirty years old, that did not work. Time and again, President Biden has responded to pressure from Congress and the Allies rather than leading himself, acting either belatedly or not at all, as in his refusal to authorize transferring the Polish MiGs.
Remember, every day the war grinds on is further evidence of NATO’s fundamental, unalterable shame: failing to deter Russia in the first place because of shredded credibility (see Georgia, 2008, Ukraine, 2014, and the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal); grossly inadequate threats of future punishment through selective, inadequate sanctions; and Biden’s early December unforced error, rejecting even the possibility of U.S. force, in exchange for exactly nothing.
This pattern must be reversed, and quickly. Given Russia’s mistakes so far, it would be a fool’s errand to bet it can successfully reculer pour mieux saute, but it is at least possible. We are likely therefore in a slow-motion race to see whether Moscow can get off its back before Ukraine’s military breaks under the strains (incompletely reported by Western media) it has felt. Time is on Moscow’s side, so slow or inadequate Western resupply efforts could be ruinous.
The Western is not unified on sanctions. Europe’s purchases of Russian oil and gas continue, and China, India, and others are providing financial lifelines keeping Russia’s economy afloat. Looking ahead, the real efficacy of sanctions turns on rigorous enforcement and enhancement to close loopholes as Russia creates them. The best day for any sanctions regime is the day it is announced, dropping rapidly if the sanctioning powers are not as least as creative as their target. Historically, U.S. sanctions enforcement and enhancement have been decidedly mixed, and the Europeans are, to be polite, far from diligent. Modern history’s most effective and comprehensive sanctions were imposed on Iraq after it invaded Kuwait in 1990. Enforced by the U.S. and allied militaries, even these were not enough to oust Saddam’s invading forces.
The Alliance’s biggest test will be maintaining diplomatic unity at the inevitable moment when Moscow decides on serious negotiations. The siloviki see the West’s weakness for money not for the ideological reasons of their Communist predecessors, but with at last equal clarity. Already, France and Germany are searching for ways to end military hostilities before one side or the other scores a decisive victory, thus freezing the conflict without materially resolving it. This would certainly be the typical European approach. If, however, Russia emerges from its current military debacle with anything even remotely smacking of victory, the reverberations in Europe and worldwide, especially in Beijing, will be enormous. Nattering on about NATO unity may warm hearts in elite Washington circles, but all that talk is worth what you pay for it. American leadership and NATO performance to date have been inadequate. Face up to it.
The clear lesson is that Americans should not bliss out prematurely. This is a European conflict. Think Thirty Years War or Hundred Years War. Putin is.
11. FDD | Priority #1 for NATO: Upgrading Air and Missile Defense in Eastern Europe
Conclusion:
As the confrontation between Russia and the West intensifies, Vladimir Putin will surely continue to probe NATO defenses for weaknesses. He should not find any. That will require NATO to continually upgrade its air and missile defense posture, starting right now.
FDD | Priority #1 for NATO: Upgrading Air and Missile Defense in Eastern Europe
RADM (Ret) Mark Montgomery
CCTI Senior Director and Senior Fellow
Jack Sullivan
Communications and Research Associate
fdd.org · by RADM (Ret) Mark Montgomery CCTI Senior Director and Senior Fellow · April 4, 2022
Current NATO air defense capacity in Eastern Europe includes 48 combat-capable F-16 fighter jets operated by Poland, which as of last month, also hosts several forward-deployed U.S. F-15 fighters. Romania has 17 older but capable F-16s previously owned by Portugal. Additionally, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania operate a joint radar network known as the Baltic Air Surveillance Network and Control System, or BALTNET. NATO relies on this system to assist its aircraft during Baltic Air Policing missions, in which small numbers of fighter aircraft from NATO nations with sufficient airpower (such as the Netherlands, France, Germany) patrol the skies of more vulnerable allies. These aircraft have already been buttressed by the deployment of two U.S. Patriot missile batteries in Poland and will be further strengthened by the impending deployment of German Patriot missile batteries in Slovakia.
The deployment of Patriots reflects transatlantic concern that NATO’s Eastern European member states may soon need more advanced surface-to-air missile systems to deal with the growing Russian threat. In fact, Polish defense planners have long anticipated the need for additional forces beyond the latest Patriot deployments to improve or replace its existing, Soviet-era equipment.
For years, Warsaw has worked to field air and missile defense systems known as Wisła and Narew. Based on the Patriot system, Wisła will upgrade Poland’s air defense network by linking sensors that can detect aerial threats to medium-range missile launchers that shoot those threats out of the sky. Recent estimates predict the program’s first phase, during which Poland is slated to obtain two of its own Patriot batteries, will be completed by the end of this year. Full integration, culminating in Poland accumulating eight Patriot batteries, will take until 2025.
The new U.S. Patriot deployment seems intended to bridge the gap until phase one is complete, but it still represents just a quarter of Poland’s ultimate goal — a target set before Russia invaded Ukraine. Likewise, the Narew system, a shorter-range air defense system of which Warsaw intends to procure 23 batteries, has been delayed by six years and is not expected to be completed until 2025.
Estonian and Latvian air defenses are even more inadequate. Both countries maintain only very short-range and man-portable systems, like the Stinger. As recently as last November, Estonia’s legislature was noncommittal about borrowing funds to procure a medium-range air defense system. For its part, Tallinn did not expect such a system to be in place until 2025. Latvia’s most recent State Defense Concept ruled out the near-term procurement of a new air defense system, due to budgetary shortfalls.
Since these programs take years to put in place, NATO must reinforce eastern flank countries with additional firepower — now. Fortunately, wealthier NATO nations have capable missile defense systems. Norway, Spain, and the Netherlands all possess multiple NASAMS batteries. The French and Italians have a capable SAMP/T missile defense system. And the British are replacing their aging Rapier system with the Sky Saber air defense system.
NATO or U.S. European Command could coordinate deployment of these various medium-range air defense systems to supplement the longer-range Patriot systems already deployed. These additional systems could be deployed to Poland, Estonia, and Latvia, then replaced as quickly as possible by newly manufactured systems or alternative capabilities. This would represent a temporary sacrifice for the donating countries, but it would significantly reduce the cruise missile threat to NATO’s Eastern flank. On Thursday, the British government announced just such a move, it will send the new Sky Saber system to Poland.
Furthermore, NATO allies must continue to forward-deploy aircraft to the region. While NATO nations have committed up to 130 fighter aircraft to Eastern Europe if the crisis expands, only a fraction are currently deployed. And even the full 130 would likely not decisively defeat a concerted attack by Russia’s Air Force.
NATO should also continue to commit elements of its fleet of 14 Boeing E-3A Airborne Warning & Control System aircraft to patrol the skies while the heightened threat from Russia persists. Efforts to modernize this fleet in the medium-term, including upgrades to engines, communications, and networking equipment, must be expedited as well.
These steps would provide a credible air defense over NATO territory and demonstrate commitment in the face of Russian aggression. And it can all be done relatively quickly.
Looking further into the future, the alliance must prioritize upgrading air defenses in Eastern Europe. They should resemble the quantity and exceed the quality of weapons stationed in West Germany and its NATO neighbors during the Cold War. If Russian forces continue to occupy even part of Ukraine or operate their aircraft out of Belarus, the de facto border between NATO and Russia will expand, and NATO air defenses will have to adjust to cover more territory. Similar efforts helped deter Soviet aggression in the 1970s and 1980s. They can do the same today.
As the confrontation between Russia and the West intensifies, Vladimir Putin will surely continue to probe NATO defenses for weaknesses. He should not find any. That will require NATO to continually upgrade its air and missile defense posture, starting right now.
RADM Mark Montgomery (U.S. Navy Ret.) is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). He previously served as policy director of the Senate Armed Services Committee under Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. and as Director for Plans and Policy at US European Command. Jack Sullivan is a research associate at FDD. Follow Mark on Twitter @MarkCMontgomery. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by RADM (Ret) Mark Montgomery CCTI Senior Director and Senior Fellow · April 4, 2022
12. FDD | The Kremlin’s Latin American Echo Chamber
Excerpts:
With much of the region’s political winds blowing leftward, and a string of presidential elections coming up in allied countries (Colombia in May, Brazil in October, Paraguay in early 2023), the echo-chamber triad of Russia, Iran and the Maduro regime should draw the urgent attention of the White House and State Department.
If Washington does wake up to the threat, there are three initial steps it can take to address it. First, it can renew sanctions against Iran’s broadcasting authority, IRIB, which owns both the English-language Press TV and HispanTV. Second, it can lobby the telecom private sector to have many of these outlets deplatformed. Third, it can appeal to U.S.-based social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, to ensure that they do not restrict pro-Russia disinformation in English only, but move to limit the reach and shut down Spanish-language channels, too.
In an essay titled “The Art of Political Lying,” published in the early 1700s at the dawn of the liberal age, Jonathan Swift wrote that “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over and the tale hath had its effect.” For far too long, Russia and its echo chamber allies have been spreading falsehoods among captive Latin American audiences. The jest may not be over yet; its effects are real. Washington should follow the cue from its Canadian and European allies and use its diplomatic clout to ensure that Russian disinformation and its accomplices are permanently removed from the ether.
FDD | The Kremlin’s Latin American Echo Chamber
A trio of Spanish language media networks controlled by Iran, Russia, and Venezuela push out propaganda and disinformation to demonize the West.
fdd.org · by Emanuele Ottolenghi Senior Fellow · April 4, 2022
On March 6, a ceasefire agreement between Russia and Ukraine collapsed, as Russian forces shelled humanitarian corridors for Ukrainian civilians fleeing their besieged cities. But not according to TeleSur, the propaganda network of Nicolás Maduro’s regime in Venezuela, nor according to HispanTV, Iran’s Spanish-language news channel. Within hours of each other, the two networks blamed “Ukrainian extremist forces” for blocking Russian humanitarian assistance and using civilians as human shields, amplifying the Kremlin’s fake news. This was not a one-off, but part of a pattern of deception where Russia invents a lie and its allied networks amplify it. When Russia, for example, accused the U.S. of having established bioweapons labs in Ukraine and then implicated President Biden’s son, Hunter, in the plot, both HispanTV and TeleSur peddled the same conspiracies on their platforms.
To be sure, Russia’s main conduit for propaganda in Spanish is Russia Today’s Spanish language channel, Actualidad RT. But Vladimir Putin’s Ministry of Truth can also count on TeleSur and HispanTV, whose broadcasts to Spanish-speaking audiences are closely intertwined with Russia’s. They are the Kremlin’s Spanish-speaking echo-chamber. Western media have (correctly) exposed far-right Russian proxies in Europe and North America. In Latin America, the useful idiots occupy the opposite end of the political spectrum: They fancy themselves an anti-imperialist “resistance” front led by Caracas and Tehran.
The trio of Spanish language media networks controlled by Iran, Russia, and Venezuela push out conspiracy theories, fake news, whataboutism, and disinformation that serve a common agenda: demonize the West, undermine the credibility of Western news outlets, paint Western leaders as hypocrites, and promote a narrative of global resistance against America and its allies. Aware that a global audience of 500 million Spanish speakers—including almost 60 million in the U.S. — would be receptive to their anti-imperialist spin, these propaganda outlets entered the Spanish language arena relatively early—TeleSur in 2005, Russia Today (RT) in 2009, and HispanTV in 2012. They package their imperialism as resistance, their terrorism as anti-terrorism, and their authoritarianism as democracy.
Latin America has always been a fertile ground for conspiratorial worldviews, radical causes, romanticized views of resistance to imperialism, and anti-Americanism. Russia’s propaganda, and its Iranian and Venezuelan counterparts, is potentially more damaging than their English-language counterparts in a region where many countries still have a tenuous democratic tradition, mistrust in the media is widespread, and many outlets are owned by tycoons-turned-politicians whose news production serves their masters, not the public. In this environment, the Iran-Russia-Venezuela echo chamber is offering 24/7 news that appears independent. Local audiences are receptive to their vehemently anti-American counternarrative, no doubt, thanks in part to Washington’s checkered past in the region as an imperial power that often prioritized anti-Communism over democracy and human rights. But the echo chamber goes beyond reminding their viewers of bad “gringos” and their past misdeeds. After all, it uses anti-imperialist rhetoric to justify the much darker imperialism of China, Iran, and Russia.
It is difficult to gauge the influence of propaganda, yet the numbers suggest the echo chamber is having a measure of success. RT’s Spanish Twitter account has 3.5 million followers. TeleSur has 3 million. Inna Afigenova, the host of RT’s talk show has almost 360,000 Twitter followers. The show itself had 1.1 million subscribers before YouTube took it down. Patricia Villegas Marin, TeleSur’s president, has almost 200,000 Twitter followers. TeleSur’s YouTube account has almost 1.5 million subscribers—60,000 of whom signed up after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. HispanTV’s recently launched YouTube account, Nexo Latino, has 44,000 subscribers. Its old account, which YouTube has repeatedly suspended, had more than 300,000 subscribers as of January 2020, with 93,000 unique views per day. These are not CNN statistics, for sure, but they indicate these outlets are gaining ground among Spanish-speaking viewers.
The three networks’ coordination is not limited to message-sharing. Venezuelan, Iranian, and Russian outlets also pool journalists, analysts, and commentators—super spreaders of disinformation, as Douglas Farah and Alexa Tavarez christened them last June—who seamlessly cross over from one outlet to the other, amplifying the same message through multiple platforms that end up being a unified echo chamber. Pablo Jofre Leal in Chile, for example, is a prolific writer and talk show host. He is a regular guest on Actualidad RT, and contributes to TeleSur and Islam Oriente, the Spanish language department of Iran’s sanctioned Al Mustafa University, a propaganda outlet under the direct supervision of Iran’s supreme leader in charge of exporting Iran’s revolution to Latin America. He also regularly appears on HispanTV. In a January 2022 blogpost republished by TeleSur, for example, Jofre eulogized Qassem Suleimani, the slain commander (and war criminal) of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force, evoking Che Guevara’s words: “The highest level which the human race can aspire to is to be revolutionary.” Suleimani, he added, was “an authentic revolutionary.” Earlier this year, Jofre told HispanTV the Russian threat to Ukraine was an invention of the Western media. Once Russia invaded, Jofre promoted the new party line on TeleSur’s pages: Russia is conducting a special military operation to defend Russian minorities in the Donbas, who are victims of a genocide, while minimizing civilian casualties.
Laila Tajeldine is another cross-pollinator. The daughter of the Maduro regime’s former ambassador to Tunisia and a news host for Venezuela News, she regularly appears on RT’s Spanish service, is a contributor to Hezbollah’s Al Mayadeen news in Spanish and was a one-time talk show host for HispanTV’s program, Análisis Global. Her recent take on the cause of conflict in Ukraine: a U.S.-backed coup in 2014 empowered Ukrainian nationalists, who fomented mass atrocities in the Donbas region against dissenters, leading Russia to intervene to protect human rights.
So far, Washington is in no rush to counter the spread of Spanish-language misinformation, even against the background of a looming new cold war, in which winning hearts and minds in America’s backyard should be a top priority. And not for want of knowledge. Earlier this month, in her annual posture statement to Congress, Southern Command’s Gen. Laura J. Richardson stated that Iran “leverages Iranian state-sponsored and non-state media outlets to generate empathy for Iran and Shia Islam and diminish Western influence in the hemisphere.” Tehran, she added, “continues to maintain a Spanish language channel that reaches 17 countries in the region, spreading disinformation and attempting to sow mistrust of the U.S.” She was referring to HispanTV.
To be fair, Washington and its allies have taken notice that RT is a propaganda platform, not a news channel, and have finally begun to ban it. Since Russia’s invasion began, on February 24, the European Union sanctioned RT and Sputnik News, on March 2. Both outlets, said the EU, “are part of a coordinated information manipulation effort, including disinformation.” The day after the EU took RT and Sputnik off the air, RT announced it was ceasing production and laying off its staff in the U.S., likely because of Washington’s financial sanctions, blocking RT’s ability to pay for its U.S. operations. The United Kingdom’s telecoms authority, OFCOM, revoked RT’s license on March 18. Canada’s telecom authority, CTRC, banned RT on March 16. Canadian telecom firms didn’t even wait for CTRC’s announcement, and removed RT from their platforms at the end of February. So did DirectTV in the U.S. Social media such as YouTube have also removed RT content.
But while Western sanctions largely curbed Russia’s misinformation channels in the anglosphere, Spanish language propaganda by Iran, Russia, and Maduro’s Venezuela, continues to shape public opinion in Latin America, directly through Kremlin-funded channels and thanks to the active support of Iran’s and Venezuela’s propaganda networks. Their content is still available through internet and satellite. Russian media platforms continue to broadcast and have already moved their transmissions to a Russian satellite to avoid any further disruption. RT’s Spanish language journalists have posted instructions on how to bypass the sanctions’ blackout on social media, including a how-to video made by the aforementioned talk show host, Inna Afinogenova. Actualidad RT has also publicized ways to bypass sanctions and blackouts, using social media platforms such as Twitter and YouTube. HispanTV, for its part, has opened new social media channels to replace the ones shut down.
Downplaying the importance of the battle of ideas in Spanish will have long-term implications, especially in Latin America, where Iran, Russia, and the Maduro regime can all leverage a long history of anti-Americanism to their advantage. Commenting on RT’s impact on Latin America, SouthCom’s Gen.Richardson said, “In 2020, Russia Today (RT)’s Spanish-language media outlets more than doubled their social media followers from 7 million to over 18 million. These disinformation campaigns are just one part of Russia’s broader efforts to influence national elections throughout the region this year.” Many influencers in the region consider RT a legitimate news source. When in late February, Antel, Uruguay’s government-owned cable platform, removed RT from its menu, Uruguay’s president, Luis Lacalle Pou—hardly a leftist—publicly lamented the decision, adding that he himself followed RT on Twitter.
With much of the region’s political winds blowing leftward, and a string of presidential elections coming up in allied countries (Colombia in May, Brazil in October, Paraguay in early 2023), the echo-chamber triad of Russia, Iran and the Maduro regime should draw the urgent attention of the White House and State Department.
If Washington does wake up to the threat, there are three initial steps it can take to address it. First, it can renew sanctions against Iran’s broadcasting authority, IRIB, which owns both the English-language Press TV and HispanTV. Second, it can lobby the telecom private sector to have many of these outlets deplatformed. Third, it can appeal to U.S.-based social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, to ensure that they do not restrict pro-Russia disinformation in English only, but move to limit the reach and shut down Spanish-language channels, too.
In an essay titled “The Art of Political Lying,” published in the early 1700s at the dawn of the liberal age, Jonathan Swift wrote that “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over and the tale hath had its effect.” For far too long, Russia and its echo chamber allies have been spreading falsehoods among captive Latin American audiences. The jest may not be over yet; its effects are real. Washington should follow the cue from its Canadian and European allies and use its diplomatic clout to ensure that Russian disinformation and its accomplices are permanently removed from the ether.
Emanuele Ottolenghi is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington, D.C. non-partisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy. Follow him on Twitter @eottolenghi.
fdd.org · by Emanuele Ottolenghi Senior Fellow · April 4, 2022
13. FDD | Corporate Transparency Would Reduce Systemic Cyber Risks
Excerpts:
One way the SEC could improve upon the proposal following the 60-day public comment period would be to expand the required metrics that companies provide to assess cyber risk.
“What really needs to happen is for public companies to disclose how they have determined the likely and potential financial impact of cyber risks and attacks and how effectively they are mitigating and transferring risk.” Chris Hetner, a former senior cybersecurity adviser to multiple SEC chairs and now a cyber-risk adviser to the National Association of Corporate Directors, told the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
The SEC’s proposed rule can do just that. It provides clear guidance on cybersecurity disclosures and governance, motivating companies to better protect their networks, maintain cybersecurity records, and assess risks.
Simply put, standardizing cyber-incident reports, making them publicly accessible, and increasing corporate governance transparency can strengthen the resilience of American companies. This will benefit investors, everyday Americans, and the national security practitioners who defend America’s cyberspace every day.
FDD | Corporate Transparency Would Reduce Systemic Cyber Risks
fdd.org · by Jiwon Ma Program Analyst · April 4, 2022
After a year of headline-grabbing ransomware attacks on U.S. critical infrastructure, Americans have grown impatient with the lack of transparency from corporations.
“Investors want to know more,” Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler said March 9, noting intensified efforts by companies to manage their “growing” cybersecurity risk.
Recognizing these trends, the SEC issued a proposed rule March 9 that would impose four requirements on publicly traded companies aimed at increasing the transparency of their cybersecurity governance. These requirements—now subject to a 60-day public comment period—would obligate companies to provide a holistic assessment of the cybersecurity risks they face. The measures are clearly designed to mitigate the systemic risk created by a lack of sufficient corporate cyber-hygiene.
The first requirement would obligate companies to report to the SEC “a material cybersecurity incident” within four business days. The requirement effectively revises the SEC’s 2018 cyber-disclosure guidance by specifying a clear timeline for companies to notify the SEC of incidents. According to the SEC, this requirement is necessary because public companies are not reporting 90% of known cyber incidents for fear of rattling investor confidence, among other reasons.
The second requirement would build on the first one by obligating companies to detail in their quarterly and annual reports to the SEC all previously disclosed cybersecurity incidents, as well as previously undisclosed incidents that have had a significant impact on the company’s performance and security.
The third requirement would mandate that companies disclose to the SEC what policies and procedures they have in place to manage cyber risks in public filings. Much like the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act which was designed to encourage corporations to increase the information available to investors by overhauling accounting and disclosure standards, the proposed SEC requirement aims to create incentives for companies to implement policies that help prevent cyber threats.
The fourth requirement obligates companies to report the cybersecurity expertise of board members and C-suite executives to the SEC. In so doing, the requirement is likely to create public and investor pressure on companies to include individuals with more formidable cybersecurity expertise within their leadership.
Without these four requirements, the information gap between companies and the public will almost certainly persist. The lack of disclosure is not only preventing investors from assessing the risks associated with their portfolios, but it is also leading cyber-insurance providers to develop inaccurate risk models.
Thus, until recently, insurance providers have been accepting much higher risks than they can afford. As they begin to grapple with this problem, the providers are cutting coverage and increasing premiums, leaving companies with fewer options to offset risks.
In March 2020, the congressionally mandated Cyberspace Solarium Commission issued a comprehensive report on how to strengthen national cyber resilience.
Among its more than 80 recommendations to Congress, the commission argued for increased cybersecurity accountability among publicly traded companies. The commission also recognized the insurance industry’s need for comprehensive cybersecurity incident data that would enable it to develop more accurate risk models. With one proposal, the SEC is beginning to address both problems.
How the SEC Could Improve on Its Proposal
One way the SEC could improve upon the proposal following the 60-day public comment period would be to expand the required metrics that companies provide to assess cyber risk.
“What really needs to happen is for public companies to disclose how they have determined the likely and potential financial impact of cyber risks and attacks and how effectively they are mitigating and transferring risk.” Chris Hetner, a former senior cybersecurity adviser to multiple SEC chairs and now a cyber-risk adviser to the National Association of Corporate Directors, told the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
The SEC’s proposed rule can do just that. It provides clear guidance on cybersecurity disclosures and governance, motivating companies to better protect their networks, maintain cybersecurity records, and assess risks.
Simply put, standardizing cyber-incident reports, making them publicly accessible, and increasing corporate governance transparency can strengthen the resilience of American companies. This will benefit investors, everyday Americans, and the national security practitioners who defend America’s cyberspace every day.
Jiwon Ma is a program analyst at the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where she contributes to the CSC 2.0 project, which works to implement the recommendations of the congressionally mandated Cyberspace Solarium Commission. Rear Adm. (Ret.) Mark Montgomery is CCTI’s senior director and an FDD senior fellow. He directs CSC 2.0 and previously served as executive director of the first CSC. Follow him on Twitter @MarkCMontgomery. FDD is a Washington, D.C.-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Jiwon Ma Program Analyst · April 4, 2022
14. In pictures: Bodies and tanks mark path as Russia moves troops from Kyiv
In pictures: Bodies and tanks mark path as Russia moves troops from Kyiv
15. Biden urges Putin war crimes trial after Bucha killings
There is no other description than a war crime. It is an action that must be taken, even though the likelihood of a trial is low or for sure far off, we need to call out these actions by Putin and his brutal military.
This cannot be justified. There is no "whataboutism." and "pro-Putinists" cannot rationalize these crimes.
Biden urges Putin war crimes trial after Bucha killings
WASHINGTON, April 4 (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of war crimes and called for a trial, adding to the global outcry over civilian killings in the Ukrainian town of Bucha as more graphic images of their deaths emerged.
"You saw what happened in Bucha," Biden told reporters after landing in Washington from Delaware, where he had spent the weekend. "This warrants him - he is a war criminal."
The discovery of a mass grave and tied bodies shot at close range in Bucha, outside Kyiv, a town Ukrainian forces reclaimed from Russian troops, looked set to galvanize the United States and Europe into imposing additional sanctions against Moscow. read more
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"We have to gather the information. We have to continue to provide Ukraine with the weapons they need to continue the fight. And we have to get all the detail so this can be an actual, have a war crimes trial," Biden said.
The Kremlin categorically denied any accusations related to the murder of civilians, including in Bucha, where it said the graves and corpses had been staged by Ukraine to tarnish Russia.
Biden's National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters that the United States will seek information from four sources to build a case for war crimes: the U.S. and its allies, including intelligence services; Ukrainian observations on the ground; international organizations including the United Nations; and interviews from global independent media.
He said the United States would build a case at the International Criminal Court or another venue. The United States is not a party to the ICC.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting on the development of air transportation and aircraft manufacturing, via a video link at the Novo-Ogaryovo state residence outside Moscow, Russia March 31, 2022. Sputnik/Mikhail Klimentyev/Kremlin via REUTERS
Russia's permanent membership in the United Nations Security Council means any war crimes accountability could be blocked by Moscow in that body, Sullivan said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called the killings "genocide" in a speech from Bucha on Monday as journalists entered the city and documented its destruction. read more
U.S. defense officials said the Pentagon could not independently confirm the atrocities. read more
Sullivan said the United States has yet to see evidence that killings reached the level of genocide.
It is not the first time Biden has called Putin a war criminal since he invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24 in what Moscow calls a "special operation." That designation has damaged U.S.-Russian ties, the Kremlin has said.
Citing what he called "horrifying" images, Jim Risch, the leading Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said in a statement: "The international community must also take concrete steps to hold Putin and his cronies accountable for their war crimes."
Democrat Bob Menendez, committee chairman, said: "Putin must be held accountable for this tragic and barbaric assault on innocent civilians."
Biden's U.N. envoy announced that Washington would also seek Russia's suspension from the U.N. Human Rights Council. read more
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Reporting by Nandita Bose; Writing by Susan Heavey; Editing by Howard Goller and Rosalba O'Brien
16. Orde Kittrie on “How to Include Far More Lawfare Ammunition in Next UN General Assembly Resolution on Russian Invasion”
Excerpts:
Reaffirming Opposition to Crimea Invasion
Yet another surprising absence from the two resolutions is any reference to the Russian occupation of Crimea which began in 2014. A provision condemning that occupation and demanding its end would have made clear that Russia’s illegal occupation of Crimea is not somehow rendered less of a priority by the new invasion. The failure to reference it comes across as an unearned concession to Russian aggression.
Such a provision would importantly contribute to mitigating the damage done by the UNGA’s embarrassing December 16, 2021 vote on a resolution — condemning the occupation of Crimea and Russian abuses there — which passed by a vote of only 65 in favor to 25 against, with 85 abstentions. That failure, by a majority of the UN member states, to condemn the flagrantly illegal Russian occupation of Crimea may have helped encourage Putin’s decision, just three months later, to attempt to seize more Ukrainian territory.
Concluding Thoughts
While the March 2 and March 24 Russia-Ukraine resolutions have sent an important symbolic message of opposition to this year’s Russian invasion, precedent shows that the General Assembly could be doing much more to help mobilize member states, and especially their economies and legal systems, in the fight against Russian aggression. The U.S. and its allies should take the lead in advocating for a third, more robust resolution.
Orde Kittrie on “How to Include Far More Lawfare Ammunition in Next UN General Assembly Resolution on Russian Invasion”
Today’s post is by Professor Orde Kittrie, and he makes a very interesting addition to our essays related to the war in the Ukraine by examining the UN General Assembly (UNGA) resolutions addressing the conflict. These resolutions “are considered to be recommendations and are not legally binding on the Member States,” but are still influential.
Professor Kittrie unpacks the two UNGA resolutions about the war, identifies some deficiencies, and advocates a third resolution to correct them. What makes his discussion especially interesting is that he puts them in the context of lawfare–a topic of particular interest to me, and one that several Lawfire® writers have examined recently, including with respect to Ukraine (see e.g., here).
Orde’s observations on lawfare merit special consideration because he is the author of Lawfare: Law as a Weapon of War and is clearly one of the world’s top experts. I found his in-depth dive into the UNGA resolutions to be fascinating and enlightening (especially regarding the scope of the sanctions “gaps’”).. I urge you to take a look!
How to Include Far More Lawfare Ammunition in Next UN General Assembly Resolution on Russian Invasion
by Orde Kittrie
On March 24, the UN General Assembly (UNGA) adopted its second resolution addressing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Both this and the first resolution, adopted on March 2, symbolically demonstrated wide opposition to the invasion. However, a comparison with UNGA resolutions about other conflicts reveals these Russia-Ukraine resolutions could have done far more to encourage and assist UN members to impose economic sanctions and other lawfare-type accountability on Moscow.
The gaps in the two UNGA resolutions addressing the Russian invasion are particularly surprising because Ukraine and its allies have in general worked exceptionally systematically and creatively to harness international laws and organizations to their cause. Many of these efforts are reflected in an official Ukrainian government website detailing the country’s lawfare strategy against Russia.
The West should quickly spearhead another UNGA resolution, drawing on the repertoire of member state action recommendations contained in past resolutions against other targets. Such a resolution could significantly increase the cost to Russia of its invasion.
UNGA Resolution Can Create Action Hooks
While UNGA resolutions are not legally binding on UN member states, such resolutions can “call” for, “urge,” or otherwise recommend that all member states impose sanctions or other legal measures against the target.
Such recommendations are important because some UN member states find it difficult or impossible legally, or from a domestic political perspective, to promulgate sanctions or other legal measures against a foreign government or entity unless the UN has called upon member states to do so. A legally binding requirement in a UN Security Council resolution can of course obligate a member state to impose specified sanctions.
However, in many member states, a non-binding provision in a Security Council or General Assembly resolution that recommends a particular measure can be a pivotal hook for action if the government chooses to use it. For example, the non-binding “calls-upon” provisions in Security Council resolutions provided hooks for many UN member states to impose their own legally binding restrictions on transactions with Iran.
In addition, a sanctions recommendation in a UN resolution provides countries choosing to impose sanctions with an important rhetorical tool to shame or otherwise pressure sanctions laggard countries (and companies based in them).
UNGA Sanctions Recommendation Precedents
There is clear precedent for the General Assembly recommending that member states impose sanctions. For example, in response to the Korean War, General Assembly resolution 500 recommended that “every State . . . [a]pply an embargo on the shipment to areas under the control of the . . . People’s Republic of China and of the North Korean authorities of arms, ammunition . . . petroleum, transportation materials of strategic value, and items useful in the production of arms, ammunition and implements of war.”
In 1965, General Assembly resolution 2107, supporting independence movements in several Portuguese colonies, went even further. It urged UN member states to: a) “break off diplomatic and consular relations” with Portugal; b) “close their ports to all vessels flying the Portuguese flag or in the service of Portugal”; c) “refuse landing and transit facilities to all aircraft belonging to or in the service of the Government of Portugal and to companies registered under the law of Portugal”; d) “To boycott all trade with Portugal”.
In contrast, neither UNGA resolution addressing the Russian invasion of Ukraine includes any sanctions recommendations whatsoever.
Many Major Economies Still Lack Russia Sanctions
One tangible reflection of the Russia-Ukraine resolutions’ failure to request member state sanctions is that of the 193 UN member states, only about 40 (including the 27 EU members) have thus far imposed sanctions in response to the invasion. While the 40 sanctions-imposing countries represent over half of the global economy, the size and sophistication of many of the 153 non-sanctioning economies makes it relatively easy for Russia to undercut the sanctions which have been imposed.
Of the world’s twenty largest economies, the following reportedly have no such sanctions on Russia: China (the second largest), India (the sixth largest), Brazil (the 12th largest), Mexico (the 15th largest), Indonesia (the 16th largest), Turkey (the 19th largest), and Saudi Arabia (the 20th largest).
Sanctions Laggards Pose Evasion Risk
Several of those are amongst Russia’s principal trading partners (including China which was Russia’s top pre-war trading partner and Turkey which was fifth). Both China and Turkey have developed considerable sanctions evasion expertise over years of participation in Iranian efforts to evade Western sanctions.
Some of the 153 countries refraining from Russia sanctions could provide their own replacements for imports previously obtained by Russia from the 40 boycotting nations, and all of them pose a risk of serving as locations through which Western goods could be illicitly diverted to Russia. A resolution recommending sanctions would have facilitated pressuring those countries (and their companies) to refrain from doing so.
The U.S. and its allies have, and should use, far-reaching jurisdictional tools to impose penalties on countries and companies which engage in transactions with Russia which skirt U.S. and allied unilateral sanctions. But in light of widespread international antipathy towards U.S. deployment of what many countries consider to be “extraterritorial” jurisdiction, U.S. pressure would almost certainly be more effective if it were multilaterally grounded in a UN resolution.
Some UN member states which supported (or abstained from) the two Russia-Ukraine resolutions might have shifted their votes in Russia’s direction if the resolutions had recommended economic sanctions. That could have mitigated against including such a recommendation in the symbolically imperative first resolution.
But the relatively duplicative second resolution provided far less added value. China and India anyway abstained from both the second resolution (which received 140 votes in favor, five against, and 38 abstentions) and the first resolution (which received a similar 141 votes in favor, five against, and 35 abstentions).
Non-Recognition of Russian Occupation
The two Russia-Ukraine resolutions are also missing several other non-binding hooks which have strengthened UNGA resolutions addressing other conflicts. For example, neither resolution calls on member states to refrain from recognizing or assisting in the Russian occupation of Donbas, Luhansk, or any other part of Ukraine.
Drawing on the General Assembly’s own resolutions regarding the Russian occupation of Crimea, and prior resolutions regarding other disputed territories, such a provision could read something like: “Calls upon all States, consistent with their obligations under international law, not to recognize, and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining, the occupation by Russia of any part of Ukraine.”
Such a provision could be accompanied by a General Assembly determination such as the following, drawn from prior resolutions regarding other disputed territories: “Determines that all legislative and administrative measures and actions taken or to be taken by Russia, the occupying Power, that purport to alter the character and legal status of any part of Ukraine are null and void, constitute a flagrant violation of international law and of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, of 12 August 1949, and have no legal effect, and calls upon Russia to rescind such measures and actions.”
The UNGA’s resolutions on other conflicts have sometimes been opposed by the West. This includes especially those on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, about which the UNGA and other UN bodies have issued an egregious number and variety of unfair, unhelpful, and inaccurate resolutions. However, even resolutions which are wrong from a policy perspective can provide a useful menu of the types of provisions which the UN believes the General Assembly has the legal authority to promulgate.
Accountability for War Crimes
Another type of non-binding hook missing from the Ukraine-invasion response resolutions is a call for accountability for Russian war crimes and crimes against humanity. Such a provision could emphasize to Putin and his henchmen, to the UN system, and to the International Criminal Court (ICC) that accountability for Russia’s violations is a global priority. While 39 ICC states parties have already formally urged the ICC prosecutor to investigate the Russian invasion, one line in a UNGA resolution could add scores of additional countries to the call for accountability.
A UNGA call for accountability could also prove useful to the national courts of countries including Germany whose laws enable them to prosecute certain heinous crimes no matter where they are committed, under the principle of universal jurisdiction. For example, in January a German court sentenced a Syrian former intelligence officer to life in prison for crimes against humanity committed in the Middle Eastern country’s civil war. In 2015, again in Germany, two Rwandan men accused of leading a rebel group in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo were jailed for war crimes.
Reaffirming Opposition to Crimea Invasion
Yet another surprising absence from the two resolutions is any reference to the Russian occupation of Crimea which began in 2014. A provision condemning that occupation and demanding its end would have made clear that Russia’s illegal occupation of Crimea is not somehow rendered less of a priority by the new invasion. The failure to reference it comes across as an unearned concession to Russian aggression.
Such a provision would importantly contribute to mitigating the damage done by the UNGA’s embarrassing December 16, 2021 vote on a resolution — condemning the occupation of Crimea and Russian abuses there — which passed by a vote of only 65 in favor to 25 against, with 85 abstentions. That failure, by a majority of the UN member states, to condemn the flagrantly illegal Russian occupation of Crimea may have helped encourage Putin’s decision, just three months later, to attempt to seize more Ukrainian territory.
Concluding Thoughts
While the March 2 and March 24 Russia-Ukraine resolutions have sent an important symbolic message of opposition to this year’s Russian invasion, precedent shows that the General Assembly could be doing much more to help mobilize member states, and especially their economies and legal systems, in the fight against Russian aggression. The U.S. and its allies should take the lead in advocating for a third, more robust resolution.
About the author
Orde F. Kittrie is a law professor at Arizona State University and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He previously served for over a decade at the U.S. State Department, including as Special Assistant to the Under Secretary for Economic and Business Affairs and as lead attorney for strategic trade controls. FDD is a Washington, DC-based nonpartisan research institute focused on national security and foreign policy. Follow him on Twitter @OrdeFK
The views expressed by guest authors do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security, or Duke University.
Remember what we like to say on Lawfire®: gather the facts, examine the law, evaluate the arguments – and then decide for yourself!
17. Leaderless, Cut Off, and Alone: The Risks to Taiwan in the Wake of Ukraine
Interesting scenario. I would like to see this wargamed with Taiwanese and American leaders but it would be far too controversial to conduct.
A series of early blows that left Taiwan leaderless, cut off, and alone could be psychologically devastating to the defenders, shattering their will to resist. China could then more easily maneuver the island into submission without prolonged fighting, an ideal outcome for Chinese policymakers and commanders. Even if the Taiwanese proved to be more resilient than anticipated and refused to buckle under intense pressure, Beijing would still be able to fall back on its military might to impose its will on the island.
Brinkmanship, blockade, and decapitation are well documented in PLA writings, so they are hardly new to U.S. planners watching the Chinese military. However, the timing and sequencing of these actions would likely put U.S. officials in a difficult bind on several fronts from the get-go. China could frontload its coercive efforts to maximize its first-mover advantage, keep the United States off balance, and force U.S. officials to react rapidly to fast-moving events. Moreover, Beijing would put the onus on Washington to make the next escalatory moves. American policymakers would have to match or outdo Chinese demonstrations of resolve and run a blockade in the opening phases of a Chinese campaign against Taiwan. More troubling, they would have little recourse should the PLA successfully decapitate the Taiwanese leadership.
To keep pace with these earlier-than-expected political and military challenges, U.S. leaders would have to assume much greater risks at the outset and make weighty decisions sooner and faster than they would otherwise prefer. Conversely, inaction, indecision, or tepid responses could help China set the conditions of the conflict while foreclosing American options.
Leaderless, Cut Off, and Alone: The Risks to Taiwan in the Wake of Ukraine - War on the Rocks
EVAN MONTGOMERY AND TOSHI YOSHIHARA APRIL 5, 2022
As policymakers and analysts evaluate the war in Europe for insights that might be applicable to Asia, they are reaching three early conclusions: It should serve as a cautionary tale for China, a model for Taiwan, and a playbook for the United States. But what if the conflict yields a more ominous set of lessons — lessons that Beijing could use to seize the island democracy?
Many observers have become more skeptical that China would launch an assault on its “wayward province” after seeing Russia struggle on the battlefield and suffer an economic backlash. Some have become more optimistic that Taiwan could defend its de facto sovereignty as Ukraine imposes heavy costs on invading forces. And others have become more confident that the United States can rely on “integrated deterrence” to manage the threat of Chinese aggression, which was beginning to appear close at hand.
Yet the war in Europe might instead convince Chinese leaders to double down on efforts to shatter Taiwan’s will to resist should deterrence break down. Indeed, Russian failures and Ukrainian successes to date might incentivize China to issue threats and use force earlier to make U.S. military intervention less likely and Taiwanese capitulation more so.
Specifically, during a war over Taiwan, Chinese leaders could emphasize three courses of action from the very start: First, issue nuclear threats to keep U.S. counter-invasion forces on the sidelines and keep the conflict contained. Second, impose a blockade to physically isolate the island and raise the escalatory risk of any resupply efforts. Third, attempt to decapitate Taiwan’s political and military leadership to cripple its near-term defenses and undermine longer-term resistance to occupation.
Although each course of action was already plausible before Russia’s invasion, all of them seem more likely in its aftermath. At a minimum, they could sharpen the political, diplomatic, and military dilemmas that would accompany any prospective U.S. intervention; erode Taiwan’s willingness and ability to hold out against an assault; and perhaps convince Chinese leaders that they can compensate for deficiencies in their untested armed forces with adjustments in strategy. In the worst case, they might even persuade those leaders that a war over Taiwan would be far easier than the conflict in Ukraine would seem to indicate.
Brinkmanship From the Beginning
One of the most worrisome aspects of the war in Ukraine has been Vladimir Putin’s willingness to rattle the nuclear sabre, both implicitly and explicitly, as a way of deterring outside intervention. From the moment the conflict began, the Russian president warned audiences in other capitals that if they interfered with his “special military operation,” Moscow would “respond immediately, and the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history.” Just days later, as the invasion suffered early setbacks, Putin directed his senior defense officials to place Russian strategic forces on “special combat readiness.”
Although these actions have not prevented the United States and its allies from providing arms and intelligence to Ukraine, they have induced caution and colored debates over how to respond. Notably, Washington postponed a planned Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile test flight following Russia’s increased alert level. More importantly, U.S. officials have repeatedly equated deploying American troops to Ukraine or enforcing a no-fly zone over the besieged nation with World War III.
Any confrontation between major powers will take place under the nuclear shadow. Yet nuclear weapons are expected to play a major role mainly when a clash is well underway. In the case of Russia, analysts concerned about its escalation threshold — a longstanding topic of debate — have emphasized the possibility that Moscow might resort to nuclear threats, nuclear demonstrations, or limited nuclear employment after its conventional forces fail to deliver a victory on their own. Indeed, these concerns have only increased as Russia’s losses in Ukraine have continued to mount. In the case of China, analysts have similarly suggested that it could be pushed to the nuclear brink should its conventional forces falter, especially if U.S. strikes on dual-use delivery vehicles, surveillance assets, and command-and-control systems are perceived by Beijing as an attempt to degrade its nuclear deterrent.
By contrast, the war in Ukraine seems to increase the likelihood that China might engage in nuclear signaling and nuclear brinkmanship at the very start of a coercive campaign against Taiwan, not just in the later stages of a losing effort. Beijing could engage in what analysts have called “integrated strategic deterrence” to demonstrate its resolve and to shape the risk calculus of its opponents. Such signaling could involve increasing readiness levels, deploying forces, simulating operational preparations, and conducting exercises and tests. The goals of these steps would be to instill fear, apply psychological pressure, and create uncertainty.
Doing so could induce greater restraint on the part of the United States, particularly when it comes to direct military intervention, and drive a wedge between Washington and frontline allies like Japan that might find themselves in the immediate crosshairs. Beijing’s growing arsenal of strategic and theater nuclear capabilities only makes this type of scenario more plausible, insofar as a more survivable nuclear deterrent and more limited nuclear options mean that escalatory threats will appear more credible.
Early nuclear threats could also help to resolve a core strategic dilemma that China would confront during a Taiwan contingency: Strike at the United States early and undermine its ability to intervene or forgo an attack on the United States and undercut its willingness to intervene. On the one hand, Beijing could launch conventional attacks on forward-operating U.S. forces at the beginning of a conflict. Although a first strike would degrade Washington’s ability to respond, it would almost certainly guarantee that a military response would be forthcoming. On the other hand, Beijing could leave U.S. forces intact, at least initially, and focus its military campaign on its main target. Although restraint would leave the effectiveness of those forces undiminished, it might also convince Washington to curtail its involvement.
Watching the difficulties that Russia has experienced in Ukraine might tip the scales toward the latter option. After all, a fight against Taiwan could be difficult enough without taking on the United States at the same time. Playing the nuclear card early might make this option even more tempting, though, by further increasing the prospect that the United States would stay out and that the war against Taiwan would stay contained.
First Strangle, Then Strike
The war in Ukraine also serves as a stark reminder that a smaller but better motivated defender can fend off a quantitatively and qualitatively superior attacker, particularly when that defender receives critical support from outside parties — and even more so when the attacker is guilty of poor planning and execution. Armed with man-portable air defense and anti-tank weapons supplied by Western nations, along with real-time intelligence from the United States, Ukrainian forces have inflicted a heavy toll on Russia in both personnel and equipment.
These developments are already spurring calls for Washington to accelerate weapons shipments to Taiwan, and for Taipei to stockpile those weapons in advance of a conflict. During a war, moreover, the United States would have strong incentives to replenish Taiwan’s inventory of weapons and help to keep it in the fight. This is especially the case given an emerging consensus among analysts that the ability to conduct a protracted and irregular campaign of resistance should be a key element of Taiwan’s defense strategy.
Ukraine, of course, has the advantage of sharing land borders with NATO members, making resupply of matériel relatively easy, albeit not without risk. As an island nation, however, Taiwan is inherently easier to isolate, especially by an aggressor with considerable air and maritime capabilities. Moreover, the island has only two major ports to the north and south in Keelung and Kaohsiung, respectively, with few alternative locations on its Pacific coast to offload large quantities of goods.
What might this mean for China? The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has several options should it try to establish control over Taiwan by force, including amphibious assault, air and missile bombardment, and air and maritime blockade. In reality, a campaign against the island would probably include elements of all three. But the lessons of Ukraine could influence the sequencing and level of effort put into them. Simply put, there would be a powerful rationale for China to seal off Taiwan as quickly and completely as possible, making a blockade the tip of the spear — an approach consistent with PLA doctrine.
Taiwan’s defense ministry recently reported that the PLA could conduct a joint blockade campaign to sever the island’s lines of communication, thereby stemming the flow of “military supplies and logistics resources.” To implement a blockade, the PLA could lay mines by sea and air, scuttle ships at key chokepoints, deploy warships and submarines to cordon off Taiwan, and declare air and maritime exclusion zones. It could even engage in a “firepower blockade,” using missiles and air-delivered munitions to bombard shore facilities and ships, either tied up at pierside or in transit.
In this scenario, a blockade would not be aimed primarily at starving out the Taiwanese. Instead, the immediate goal would be to preclude the substantial inflow of supplies, such as air-defense and anti-ship missiles, that could shift the tactical balance toward the defender. The longer-term goals would be to prevent outside parties from sustaining any resistance movement that might emerge if the PLA is able to defeat counter-invasion forces. In either case, moreover, efforts to run a blockade would be extremely risky if the cordon were accompanied by clear nuclear threats.
Leading with a blockade in a prelude to a larger air and missile campaign and an all-out invasion would offer an added benefit for China. Mobilizing for an assault, especially an amphibious operation, would be difficult to disguise (another potential lesson from the war in Ukraine). A blockade, by contrast, could probably be implemented more rapidly under the guise of fleet or missile exercises; air, maritime, or undersea incursions; civilian or paramilitary fleet deployments; or some combination of these tactics. Beijing could thus begin to coerce Taiwan across localized offshore and inshore areas with comparatively little warning.
The United States and its allies might struggle to formulate effective diplomatic and military countermeasures against such calibrated, lower-intensity coercion, buying time for China to build up its invasion force and allowing Beijing to retain the initiative. Meanwhile, the wider mobilization would still pose a menacing threat in the background, as its expected completion would give China the hammer to bring down on Taiwan and furnish Beijing with more coercive leverage.
Aiming for the Head
A final aspect of the war in Ukraine that stands out, and that could reshape how China approaches a conflict with Taiwan, is the importance of leadership. Most importantly, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has, from humble beginnings, emerged as an impressive wartime leader who refused to flee the country or its capital and continues to motivate his people and marshal international support for their cause. Likewise, local leaders have been lauded for their steadfastness and bravery. Russia, it seems, clearly recognizes the significance of these individuals, as evidenced by alleged assassination attempts against Zelenskyy and the kidnapping of Melitopol’s mayor. For its part, China might learn a similar lesson.
Indeed, PLA writings have held up “decapitation operations” as an important element of a larger campaign to subdue Taiwan. The Chinese National Defense University’s 2020 Science of Military Strategy calls for delivering “heavy blows” against “military and political leaders,” command and control networks, politically symbolic sites, and so forth as major targets of “system destruction warfare.” Eliminating political and military leaders through the use of fifth column saboteurs, special operations units, and missile bombardment against key sites would, at a minimum, disrupt Taiwanese command and control, making it more difficult to mount an effective defense.
Taiwanese defense officials have warned about this threat. In fact, they take the danger so seriously that they have stood up a joint unit dedicated to countering attempts at eliminating the leadership. Taipei has good reason to fear such high-value targeting. Through decapitation, the PLA would kill or capture national and local leaders who could otherwise maintain command and control of forces, serve as a symbol of organized resistance, galvanize international support, and lead the transition from conventional conflict to insurgency, should it become necessary. If successful, a decapitation operation could snuff out an incipient national movement that girds the Taiwanese for a long fight, brightening the PLA’s prospects for a quick victory.
Learning a Dangerous Set of Lessons
The violence that Russia has unleashed upon Ukraine is hard to fathom, but the difficulties it has encountered so far have raised hopes in some corners that similar acts of aggression might be avoided elsewhere, particularly Northeast Asia. Unfortunately, there are reasons to doubt that China will suddenly embrace restraint when it comes to its dealings with Taiwan. Given their apparent determination to absorb the island, Chinese leaders might instead learn a dangerous set of lessons from the war in Eastern Europe, even if they judge that a military assault might be harder than they had anticipated, and that the international backlash to aggression might be more severe than they had hoped.
Rather than set their aims aside, Chinese leaders might opt to adjust their methods or even double down on their preferred strategies. That could involve making nuclear threats right from the start to put the United States on the back foot and give allies like Japan cold feet. It could also entail imposing an air and maritime blockade against Taiwan to seal off the island at the outset and ensure that Washington would need to put its own forces in harm’s way to provide Taiwan with material assistance. And it could require early decapitation attacks on national and local leaders to disrupt Taiwan’s defenses and remove key figures that the international community could work with and rally behind.
A series of early blows that left Taiwan leaderless, cut off, and alone could be psychologically devastating to the defenders, shattering their will to resist. China could then more easily maneuver the island into submission without prolonged fighting, an ideal outcome for Chinese policymakers and commanders. Even if the Taiwanese proved to be more resilient than anticipated and refused to buckle under intense pressure, Beijing would still be able to fall back on its military might to impose its will on the island.
Brinkmanship, blockade, and decapitation are well documented in PLA writings, so they are hardly new to U.S. planners watching the Chinese military. However, the timing and sequencing of these actions would likely put U.S. officials in a difficult bind on several fronts from the get-go. China could frontload its coercive efforts to maximize its first-mover advantage, keep the United States off balance, and force U.S. officials to react rapidly to fast-moving events. Moreover, Beijing would put the onus on Washington to make the next escalatory moves. American policymakers would have to match or outdo Chinese demonstrations of resolve and run a blockade in the opening phases of a Chinese campaign against Taiwan. More troubling, they would have little recourse should the PLA successfully decapitate the Taiwanese leadership.
To keep pace with these earlier-than-expected political and military challenges, U.S. leaders would have to assume much greater risks at the outset and make weighty decisions sooner and faster than they would otherwise prefer. Conversely, inaction, indecision, or tepid responses could help China set the conditions of the conflict while foreclosing American options.
Evan Braden Montgomery is the director of Research and Studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA).
Toshi Yoshihara is a Senior Fellow at CSBA.
18. Rebalancing the Army for Military Competition
Excerpts:
There is no denying that the Army must remain fully prepared to fight and win the nation’s wars, especially large-scale ones. However, the Army cannot only focus on large-scale combat as it did after Korea and Vietnam. Partly because of this proclivity, the Army often finds itself underprepared for irregular and small-scale missions, even though policymakers use the Army most frequently in these types of missions. Furthermore, by keeping a majority of its active force focused on large-scale combat, the Army has put itself through multiple onerous and expensive transformations—shifting from counterinsurgency in Vietnam to conventional deterrence under AirLand Battle to nation building in Iraq back to conventional warfare under its latest operating concept.
Undertaking demonstrable steps to enhance its ability to operate across the competition continuum does not detract from or inhibit the Army’s ability to win in large-scale combat. If anything, adjustments to force structure, education, training, and doctrine would only improve the Army’s ability to succeed in competition activities, limited or small-scale conflicts, and large-scale combat. By maintaining what General Joseph Dunford referred to as a “boxer’s stance,” the Army places itself in an optimum position to thwart its adversaries in competition and defeat them in war if needed.
Rebalancing the Army for Military Competition - Modern War Institute
This article is part of the contribution made by the US Army War College to the series “Compete and Win: Envisioning a Competitive Strategy for the Twenty-First Century.” The series endeavors to present expert commentary on diverse issues surrounding US competitive strategy and irregular warfare with peer and near-peer competitors in the physical, cyber, and information spaces. The series is part of the Competition in Cyberspace Project (C2P), a joint initiative by the Army Cyber Institute and the Modern War Institute. Read all articles in the series here.
Special thanks to series editors Capt. Maggie Smith, PhD, C2P director, and Dr. Barnett S. Koven.
Americans don’t like losing wars and especially not small wars with unclear objectives. Since World War II, the United States has spent over $9 trillion and incurred over one hundred thousand casualties during wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, only to walk away without achieving strategic success in any of them. After twenty years of operations in Afghanistan, the chaotic American withdrawal highlighted America’s difficulty in winning its recent wars. General Mark Milley even referred to the evacuation as a “strategic failure.” This track record might lead observors to wonder if there are ways for the US military, and particularly for the Army, to improve its performance in wars that fall short of large-scale combat operations.
Following most wars, the US Army faces difficult decisions about how to reorganize its doctrine and force structure to meet budgetary constraints and address current and future threats. After undesirable results in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the Army refocused on fighting a conventional, large-scale conflict against the Soviet Union in Europe and neglected many of its hard-earned combat lessons from those wars. The United States most often deploys the Army in operations below the threshold of large-scale combat. However, whether due to mission biases, interservice budgetary battles, or other reasons, the Army usually refocuses on preparing for the “big one” after fighting wars that fall short of that construct.
Despite this tendency, the nation requires the Army to do more than win large wars. Current national guidance directs the military services to counter adversaries in the gray zone, negate their “win without fighting” tactics, and advance America’s national interests using tactics short of armed conflict. The Army now finds itself in the early stages of another post-war rebalancing effort following the post-9/11 wars, and, so far, the Army seems to be repeating its previous postwar alterations. If it shifts too far to refocus on large-scale combat operations, the Army might once again find itself out of balance to accomplish its myriad missions across the competition continuum.
Instead, the Army must now turn its competition concepts into reality to meet national and service guidance. It should create a force that can win in competition and in limited forms of warfare, and shape conditions ahead of armed conflict. Army leaders can draw lessons from prior postwar trends and current national guidance and service concepts to help them craft an Army that is more prepared for operations short of war. These changes will create an Army that affords policymakers a valuable means to pursue national interests, not just one designed to win large, conventional wars. Given the importance of the military instrument of power in US foreign and security policy, these changes will play a critical role in the future.
Regardless of what measures the Army takes, predicting the future will remain an elusive challenge. As Robert Gates said in a 2011 address to the West Point corps of cadets, “When it comes to predicting the nature and location of our next military engagements, since Vietnam, our record has been perfect. We have never once gotten it right.” Today, the Army recognizes that the future will see increased competition between America and its adversaries. Army Futures Command predicts a future where Russia, China, and other actors challenge the United States for strategic and economic resources and influence. An Army balanced to meet this unpredictable future will give the United States an enhanced ability to win in competition and prevent competition from turning into conflict.
Prior Postwar Rebalancing
After the Vietnam War, the Army did everything in its power to purge its experience there. Senior leaders like Generals Donn Starry and William DePuy developed new doctrine to fight Soviet forces in Europe. This new doctrine, known as AirLand Battle, put little emphasis on operations beyond large-scale war. Field Manual 100-5, Operations, only dedicated three of its 195 pages to contingency operations. Moreover, the Army allocated significant resources to develop its “Big 5” weapons systems—new game-changing, high-tech systems that would give it a qualitative advantage over the Warsaw Pact’s quantitative superiority.
Learning Lessons from Recent Small Wars
The Army can draw at least three main lessons from its past seven decades of war that can help inform its current modernization and rebalancing plans. First, the service cannot jettison its combat experiences. More importantly, it must learn from those experiences, institute change, and revisit those lessons periodically. The Army needs to extract all lessons, not just the ones it wants like it did after Vietnam when it blamed civilian leaders for failure yet overlooked many of its own shortcomings. Today, the Army might be tempted to turn its back on missions like security force assistance, given its lack of success in Afghanistan, even though this mission might prove effective during strategic competition. Just because a technique did not work in one instance does not mean that the Army should disregard its efficacy in other situations.
Second, lethal technology cannot solve every problem. While high-end, lethal tech designed to destroy or kill the enemy can undoubtedly give the Army a comparative advantage over an adversary’s conventional military, these technological advantages cannot guarantee success in all situations. Even so, the Army heavily relies upon the role of technology in planning and waging war. As General William Westmoreland discovered in Vietnam and Army leaders found yet again in Iraq and Afghanistan, firepower and body counts alone cannot achieve victory. Even though technology has limitations in many operations, such as irregular warfare and counterinsurgency, the Army’s modernization plan heavily invests in technology designed for lethal action. As others have stated before, technology is not a panacea that can replace effective strategy.
Lastly, an overwhelming focus on large-scale combat leaves the Army underprepared for missions that fall below that level. As Russell Weigley argued in The American Way of War, the Army prefers to win decisive battles and fight wars of annihilation rather than fight prolonged wars for limited objectives. Unfortunately, the Army does not get to pick its conflicts. The nation has deployed the Army for competition or limited warfare missions almost ten times more frequently than it has for large-scale combat operations in the past century.
Despite this historical trend, General DePuy’s viewpoint about Vietnam sums up a view held by many Army leaders about small-scale conflict or competition: “[Dupuy] feared that Vietnam had been an aberration in the historical trend of warfare and that the Army had lost a generation’s worth of technical modernization there while gaining a generation of nearly irrelevant combat experience.” The Army has repeatedly discovered that conventional forces are not optimally designed for many small-scale operations, and even limited contingencies require significant resources.
As it disengages intellectually from the types of wars it has fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army is once again glossing over recent combat lessons, refining its doctrine and future concepts with a focus on lethal technology, and preparing to fight a conventional war. However, national strategies indicate that policymakers expect the Army to play a lead role in strategic competition.
Strategic Guidance for Competition
Recent strategic and service guidance has placed a renewed emphasis on military competition. For example, the 2017 National Security Strategy outlined the threats that China, Russia, and other actors pose to the United States below the “threshold of military conflict” and called for a renewed US effort to counter these threats. The 2018 National Defense Strategy reiterated this view by stating that inter-state strategic competition is “the primary concern in U.S. national security.”
The current administration’s Interim National Security Strategic Guidance advanced these ideas by highlighting the myriad threats—state and nonstate actors, climate change, economic disruptions, extremism, and many others—that affect America’s security interests. Furthermore, this document gave clear guidance that the United States will reinvigorate its alliances and partnerships around the globe to contain this growing list of challenges.
In short, these documents show an increased Department of Defense commitment toward military competition and operations below large-scale conflict. However, what remains to be seen is how the Army will turn these nascent concepts into reality.
Moving from Concepts to Reality
To meet the demands of national-level guidance, the Army must bring sufficient capabilities to bear, whether in competition or conflict and regardless of the size and scope of future engagements. Doing so means that the Army would need to alter its modernization efforts, currently focused on large-scale combat operations, under its AimPoint Force 2035 initiative.
First, the Army should dedicate a portion of its force to focus on competition and limited conflicts. It would need to rebalance forces between its active and reserve components and between its combat and “competition” forces. Competition forces like cyber, information, protection, theater sustainment, psychological operations, and civil affairs units would still have significant roles in large-scale combat. However, many of these forces reside in the Army Reserve or have limited active duty personnel, constraining their ability to conduct daily theater-wide missions like information and influence operations or establish distribution and sustainment networks.
In addition to adjusting its competition force structure, the Army can also modify its current organizations that compete daily, particularly its cyber forces and theater armies and enablers. Army Cyber Command conducts information operations to gain and maintain dominance in cyberspace. At the same time, theater armies serve as the Army’s primary headquarters to oversee forces and competition activities as part of the geographic combatant commands’ campaign plans. These changes will require moving tactical combat troops, perhaps up to one division, to the Army Reserve to improve active duty competition capabilities. Having competition-focused units operating under the appropriate command structures allows the Army to effectively campaign in competition and quickly transition to conflict if needed.
Second, the Army should place its personnel training, education, and experience on par with its technological modernization efforts. It can increase education and training focused on competition and give personnel more operational exposure beyond tactical organizations. The Army can use competition-focused wargames or unit training rotations to bolster skills in these areas. For instance, the Army can incorporate more competition training scenarios focused above the tactical level in its Global Defender exercises. Professional military education institutions could amend their curriculums so that students understand how to build long-term campaigns to win in strategic competition. These changes would also meet the chairman’s military education policy. Likewise, the Army could adjust career paths so that personnel frequently serve in organizations that compete daily, like security force assistance brigades or combatant command headquarters. With these adjustments, the Army would create future leaders who are well versed in competing below armed conflict.
Third, the Army should reduce the separation between irregular and traditional warfare. The Irregular Warfare Annex to the National Defense Strategy states that irregular warfare is an integral part of US competition strategies and dispels the myth that conventional forces do not have a role in irregular warfare. Special operations forces and conventional organizations are most effective when working in tandem toward a common purpose. When campaigning together, these forces provide complementary capabilities that better deter adversaries from pursuing their objectives, either directly or indirectly. Russia and China prefer irregular approaches, and by combining its operational forces in a unified approach, the Army can deny its enemies’ continued success in the gray zone.
There is no denying that the Army must remain fully prepared to fight and win the nation’s wars, especially large-scale ones. However, the Army cannot only focus on large-scale combat as it did after Korea and Vietnam. Partly because of this proclivity, the Army often finds itself underprepared for irregular and small-scale missions, even though policymakers use the Army most frequently in these types of missions. Furthermore, by keeping a majority of its active force focused on large-scale combat, the Army has put itself through multiple onerous and expensive transformations—shifting from counterinsurgency in Vietnam to conventional deterrence under AirLand Battle to nation building in Iraq back to conventional warfare under its latest operating concept.
Undertaking demonstrable steps to enhance its ability to operate across the competition continuum does not detract from or inhibit the Army’s ability to win in large-scale combat. If anything, adjustments to force structure, education, training, and doctrine would only improve the Army’s ability to succeed in competition activities, limited or small-scale conflicts, and large-scale combat. By maintaining what General Joseph Dunford referred to as a “boxer’s stance,” the Army places itself in an optimum position to thwart its adversaries in competition and defeat them in war if needed.
Major Justin Magula (@JustinMagula) is an Army strategist serving in the Strategic Landpower and Futures Group at the US Army War College. He holds a master’s degree from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Staff Sgt. Thomas Calver, US Army
19. Russia was caught red-handed lying about war crimes in Ukraine
Russia was caught red-handed lying about war crimes in Ukraine
"I think it’s fairly obvious – not just to us, but to the world – that Russian forces are responsible for the atrocities in Bucha."
BY JEFF SCHOGOL | PUBLISHED APR 4, 2022 6:29 PM
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Commercially available satellite images confirm that numerous bodies were lying in the streets of Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv — killed while the city was occupied by Russian forces, The New York Times first revealed on Monday.
The satellite images provided to the New York Times by Maxar Technologies rebut Russia’s claim that the bodies discovered when Ukrainian forces liberated Bucha over the weekend had been placed there after Russian forces left the area.
Roughly 300 civilians are believed to have been killed in Bucha during the Russian occupation. Many of the victims were dumped in an open mass grave “with hands and feet poking through the red clay heaped on top,” Reuters reported. Other bodies were found with their hands tied behind their backs and with bullet wounds to their heads.
BREAKING: bodies in Bucha were visible in satellite imagery for weeks.
Directly rebuts Russia's claim that bodies only appeared after they left.
— John Scott-Railton (@jsrailton) April 4, 2022
President Joe Biden told reporters on Monday that the killings in Bucha were “a war crime.”
“You may remember I got criticized for calling Putin a war criminal,” Biden told reporters. “Well, the truth of the matter — you saw what happened in Bucha. This warrants him — he is a war criminal.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has accused Ukraine and its western backers of staging the massacre after Russian forces withdrew from Bucha, according to The Washington Post.
But the New York Times’ analysis of the satellite imagery revealed the first bodies appeared in the open between March 9 and 11, long before the Russians were forced to retreat.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby did not equivocate when he was asked on Monday if the Defense Department believes that Russian forces carried out the killings in Bucha.
“I think it’s fairly obvious – not just to us, but to the world — that Russian forces are responsible for the atrocities in Bucha,” Kirby said during a Pentagon news briefing. “Now, exactly who, what units — whether they are contractors or Chechens — I don’t think we are able to say right now. But we’re certainly not refuting that these atrocities occurred and they occurred at the hands of Russians.”
Kirby said the Defense Department would help to document alleged war crimes in Ukraine, but he declined to elaborate exactly how other than to stress that U.S. troops will not deploy to Ukraine to collect evidence of atrocities. He did not answer directly when he was asked if the Defense Department has seen evidence linking the Russians to the killings in Bucha.
“We’ve seen much of the same imagery that you have,” Kirby said. “Obviously, we’re in touch with our Ukrainian counterparts. We’re certainly in no position to refute that these atrocities occurred, that they occurred on the scale that the Ukrainians have said they’ve occurred and that Russians are responsible for that.”
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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.
20. Ukrainian Nuclear Disaster Expert Talks Worst Case Scenarios Due To Russian Invasion
I worry about this if there is war in Northeast Asia. The nuclear power plants in South Korea and Japan must be defended. Defense plans must consider the defense of this potentially vulnerable infrastructure.
Ukrainian Nuclear Disaster Expert Talks Worst Case Scenarios Due To Russian Invasion
Ukrainian nuclear expert discusses the challenges of keeping the country's nuclear facilities safe during a Russian invasion.
BY HOWARD ALTMAN APRIL 4, 2022
Russian MOD
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Amid the horrors of the past 39 days of Russia’s all-out war on Ukraine, Olena Pareniuk finds a rare moment of absurd humor.
“I wanted to be the expert in radiation safety, but I didn't want that much experience,” Pareniuk says, laughing at the thought.
Unfortunately, Pareniuk, 35, has no choice.
As a senior researcher for Ukraine’s Institute for Safety Problems of Nuclear Power Plants, it’s Pareniuk’s job to investigate what happens after a disaster at a nuclear power plant. She’s spent years researching the aftermath of both the 1986 explosion and fires at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and the extensive damage to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan in the wake of a tsunami in 2011.
But after Feb. 24, when Russia launched its massive assault on Ukraine and subsequently took over Chernobyl and shelled Europe’s largest nuclear power plant in the southern Zaporizhzhya region, she’s had new nightmares to ponder along with ceaseless questions about worst-case scenarios that she is tired of thinking about.
Satellite image (c) 2022 Maxar Technologies.
MARCH 10, 2022: Maxar satellite imagery closeup of Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine.
All this has occurred while Pareniuk has had to also worry about the safety of her family, which includes her husband serving in the Ukrainian military, and her three-year-old son, who has been terrified by the shockwaves of Russian bombardment.
“What is the worst-case scenario for Chernobyl?” she says, repeating a question she is often asked. “What's the worst-case scenario for Zaporizhzhya and also, Kharkiv? There is a research facility in Kharkiv and Kharkiv is constantly being bombed by the Russians and it's also a nuclear facility. So people are also asking what is the worst-case scenario for that facility? I don't want to do that. I don't want to imagine the worst-case scenarios.”
Pareniuk lost the luxury of not considering future worst-case scenarios on the morning of Feb. 24.
She was at home in Kyiv and, by the time she woke up, Ukraine was abandoning the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant ahead of advancing Russian troops.
“I woke up by 7 a.m.,” she said. “There are people who should maintain laboratories and they were over there. So, early in the morning, they were waking up and then they were forced by the Ukrainian army to get on buses, and then they were evacuated from the exclusion zone.”
Volodymyr Tarasov/ Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images
APRIL 15, 2021 - Employees stay in front of the monitors at the central control panel of the New Safe Confinement at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant (ChNPP), Kyiv Region, northern Ukraine.
The ensuing Russian occupation of the plant, the site of the world’s worst nuclear power plant disaster where massive amounts of radioactive materials are still stored, “was really, really, scary because it was obvious they were not following the rules for visiting the exclusion zone,” said Pareniuk.
Russian troops were not wearing protective gear to prevent contamination from radioactive dust. The trucks and tanks and other vehicles they drove through the exclusion zone kicked up so much of the contaminated dust, said Pareniuk, “that our detectors were actually detecting the increase of the dose rate and it was because the Russian machines were lifting up the radioactive dust.”
They cut off the electrical supply needed to cool the water chilling spent nuclear fuel rods and, Ukrainian officials have said, stored vehicles, ammunition, and rocket-launching systems at the site that could have contributed to spreading radioactivity in the event of an accident or conflict. A large amount of the remaining radioactive material is stored in three buildings.
“If the integrity of these three buildings is injured,” said Pareniuk, “that means that radioactivity may leak into the environment. It might contaminate the soil. There is quite a lot of really highly radioactive dust inside the new system.”
The radioactivity, she said, could also leak into the air, and, depending on the wind direction, contaminate either Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, or Russia. Perhaps even more dangerous for Ukraine, she said, is the potential to contaminate Ukraine’s drinking water supply.
The site sits along the Pripyat River, which runs into the Dnipro River, the main source of drinking water for Ukraine.
“So if it gets into the water, it could cause an ecological catastrophe,” she said.
CIA handbook via Wikicommons
This map showing the radioactive contamination in the region a decade after the catastrophe at Chernobyl also shows how the plant sits along the main waterway that runs through Ukraine and provides drinking water for millions of people.
There was also the human and infrastructural toll that took place while Russians, who have since left, occupied both the Chernobyl plant and the nearby town, the site of nuclear research facilities.
The April 1986 accident at Chernobyl was, Pareniuk pointed out, largely the result of a lack of safety culture in the old USSR and mistakes made by employees under duress.
While a normal working shift for those maintaining the plant, now undergoing decommissioning, is about 12 hours, Pareniuk said that Russian occupiers kept about 150 workers in the plant for weeks on end, at gunpoint, in dire conditions. They were forced to sleep on floors and fed poor quality food with no ability to leave.
About 10 kilometers to the east, in the town of Chernobyl, Russians looted research labs, stealing radioactive material and other equipment, smashing much of what was left behind.
“My colleagues spent quite a lot of time and effort in equipping and buying everything for the lab, and they just destroyed it,” Pareniuk said. “So it's really painful.”
Meanwhile, some soldiers of the National Guard of Ukraine, who were captured by Russian forces during the opening stage of the invasion on Feb. 24, are now believed to be held captive in Russia and Belarus, according to Lyudmyla Denisova, the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights. In a statement published on her Facebook page, Denisova said that according to the wife of one of those troops, “the prisoners are starving and not given water. At present, nothing is known about their health.”
Such actions, said Denisova, “grossly violates the conditions of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war, in particular Article 26 of the Convention, which guarantees proper food for prisoners of war.”
Before the Russians left, reports about their troops experiencing acute radiation sickness after digging trenches in the Red Forest rocketed around the world. Pareniuk said she is in the camp of those who don’t buy into that story.
“I would say because they were digging the trenches in the Red Forest, it will pose a danger because if you would do it without protective gear and without a respirator, you would inhale radioactive dust, and it will really increase the probability of the person having cancer,” she said. “It's not enough to cause acute radiation syndrome.”
While the Russians have left, and the plant is back in the hands of Ukraine and safely operating, there are lingering concerns, said Pareniuk.
In addition to the fear that Russia might launch missile attacks against the facility, Pareniuk said their retreating troops left behind mines in the exclusion zone, making her job of analyzing the lasting fallout of the Chernobyl disaster impossible.
Tiia Monto/wikiommons
A map of the exclusion zone at a checkpoint near Chernobyl.
“I'm just a scientist,” she said. “I'm doing my research. I'm minding my own business and I have quite a lot of sampling points all over the exclusion zone. It's the beginning of spring, the beginning of the vegetation season. So I would normally start my experiments by now in the forest of the exclusion zone. But the territory is mined and we don't know how to take care of all of those mines on the territory.”
The Ukrainian military, she said, has issued warnings.
“They said please don't go to the forests. You can use this route. And that's it. So just please be very careful. And we were warned and my colleagues who work in the territories that were mined probably will have to wait for military professionals to get there.”
Pareniuk said she likely won’t take any chances.
“Probably I will skip the season,” she said.
As troubling as the Russian occupation of Chernobyl was, Pareniuk said the attack on the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant, the largest in Europe, presented an even greater danger.
“I was woken up at 1 a.m. by my friend who's also the official and she was calling me and she said ‘you know, they're shooting a missile at a working nuclear power plant.’ So it was probably the most terrible couple of minutes in my life,” said Pareniuk. “Nuclear power is not just a toy, and it's not something that you use for nuclear terrorism. So we shouldn't play with this because we were already trying to take care of the Chernobyl accident and also to take care of the Fukushima accident. We don't want people to cause another nuclear accident.”
After that call, “I was just sitting in the armchair shaking and reading the news and also reading some messages from my friends for a little bit more,” she said.
Luckily, she said, the Russians hit the first unit at Zaporizhzhya, which was a maintenance building, not any of the reactors or fuel rod storage facilities.
Still, the idea that Russians would fire into a nuclear power plant was impossible to fathom, especially given the history of Chernobyl.
“They were shooting at a working nuclear power plant with a cannon,” she said. “I wouldn't believe it. If aliens landed on my lawn, It would be okay for me, but I would never, ever believe if someone would tell me that here in Ukraine, in the former Soviet Union, someone would just shoot. We'll just take a tank and shoot into the working nuclear power plant because, you know, here in the former Soviet Union, we have this history of Chernobyl. All of us are affected by Chernobyl. All of us know people who got the sickness, who died because they were affected by Chernobyl and I have no idea how can you even imagine doing something like that?”
Pareniuk, who was born a year after the Chernobyl disaster and spent two years researching the effects of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant disaster, said her training quickly kicked in.
“My friend was asking me can you please estimate the consequences if we will have the explosion in Zaporizhzhya,” she said. “So I was just sitting there and trying you know, to calculate the consequences. I was checking the wind direction. I was checking the weather because it's really affecting the distribution of the radioactive material. Yeah, I was trying to prepare for a nuclear accident.”
Though there was no damage to the nuclear power facilities, and no radiation leaks, Pareniuk said she is breathing no sighs of relief. As long as Russian troops occupy the facility, the dangers at Zaporizhzhya will not go away.
“Russian troops are still there and we are still expecting that nuclear accident,” she said.
Dmytro Smolyenko/Future Publishing via Getty Images
Six power units generate 40-42 billion kWh of electricity making the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the largest nuclear power plant not only in Ukraine, but also in Europe, Enerhodar, Zaporizhzhia Region, southeastern Ukraine, July 9, 2019.
While Russians claim they are not interfering and are even letting workers take normal shifts, Pareniuk says the same concerns about overwhelming pressure increasing the chances for a deadly mishap still exist.
“People are working under constant psychological pressure, because it's impossible again, to work in a normal way when you know that there are armed people in the facility and that there are some people with guns who might be shooting into your family,” she said.
There are other nuclear power plants in Ukraine. All told, six of them are now under Russian control and nine others are still in Ukrainian hands. Pareniuk worries that those facilities could come under attack. There is also concern about the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology, which Ukraine officials say contains nuclear materials and an experimental reactor. Russian troops fired on that facility three times last month, according to authorities in Ukraine.
“They bomb our cities,” she said. “They could easily bomb a nuclear power plant. I mean, even if it's not Zaporizhzhya, they could bomb South Ukrainian Nuclear Power Plant. They could bomb Rivne. Even here in Chernivsty is about almost near the border with Romania and we have constant air raids here, so we have to hide in the basement.”
Despite not wanting to think about worst-case scenarios, Pareniuk said she can’t help it.
“Of course I do,” she says with a laugh. “It’s my job.”
Then she ran down some of those scenarios.
“The worst-case scenario for the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant is a nuclear explosion,” she said. “In that case, all of Europe will be contaminated. We will have an exclusion zone, in Europe. In Turkey. Everywhere."
JOE KLAMAR/AFP via Getty Images
Rafael Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), points on a map of the Ukrainian Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant as he informs the press about the situation of nuclear power plants in Ukraine during a special press conference at the IAEA headquarters in Vienna, Austria on March 4, 2022.
While “highly unlikely” to occur, such a disaster could be touched off by a couple of factors, she said. One is if the Russians shot a missile at one of the working units. Another is if a nuclear operator makes a mistake because of the psychological pressure.
“If this guy would push the wrong button, it might, you know, bring us the Chernobyl scenario,” she said. “Of course, the reactors we have at Zaporizhzhya are much, much safer than Chernobyl, but I mean, it's a nuclear reactor.”
And the worst case in Chernobyl, should the facility be hit by a Russian missile?
“I will be greedy now,” she said. “Ukraine was building the new safe environment for like 15 years. It's a really complicated building. And it costs like a couple of billions of dollars. And we don't really want anyone to destroy it.”
But, if it were destroyed, “there will be dust in the air and then it will depend on the wind direction. It can take it to the territory of Ukraine, it can take it to the territory of Russia. So it depends on the wind.”
And then there is concern about the radioactive dust contaminating the Pripyat River and contaminating the Dnipro River.
The difference in the worst-case scenarios for Zaporizhzhya and Chernobyl is one of timing and intensity, said Pareniuk.
“In the case of Zaporizhzhya, the worst-case scenario will be immediate,” she said. “There would be an explosion and then, in a couple of days, we will have the contamination of large territories in the northern hemisphere.”
A disaster at Chernobyl would take longer to wreak havoc.
“In Chernobyl, in a really worst-case scenario, we will have the contamination of Dnipro and this contamination will be distributed. Not that fast. It will be quite slow, but then again, it's radiation. You cannot smell it. You cannot see it. It would be really difficult even to detect this distribution of contamination. If our drinking water will be contaminated, the disease rate and the amount of cancer cases in our population will of course increase.”
ANS.org
Map of nuclear reactor sites in Ukraine.
Pareniuk’s work to assess the ongoing fallout of the Chernobyl disaster and the potential of future ones comes as she tries to comfort a toddler deeply frightened by the sights and sounds of war.
After Russia launched its attacks, Pareniuk said the family packed up and moved out of Kyiv, to her parent’s home in Zhytomyr.
“It was very scary,” she said. “We packed everything. We took our cat. We took our friends. And usually, it takes us about like one and a half hours from our house in Kyiv to our house in Zhytomyr, but that time, it took us about eight hours to drive. And I was trying to give some food and some water to my son and then we just realized that we didn't eat and we didn't drink anything. And then we decided that you know, it's healthy to drink water. so we should drink.”
It took a while, said Pareniuk, for the shock of escaping from Russia’s attack on Kyiv to wear off.
“It was very difficult to speak to each other,” she said. “You are not speaking. I mean, of course, you need to communicate with people. You're like asking, ‘can I have a glass of water?’ Or ‘we should go to sleep now.’”
The stay in Zhytomyr, however, was short-lived.
“I felt the house shaking,” she said. “The windows were shaking. So I took my son, and he was so scared. He was just, you know, holding me and he wasn't speaking. He just started to speak. And he was asking me, ‘just please, hold me and don't let me go.’ So I was hugging him for a night and then in the morning, we decided that we needed to go to Chernivsty. So of course it's not that scary as living in Kyiv or living in Mariupol or living in Kharkiv, but I got enough of it. My son started laughing only after probably a couple of days after we came here.”
Contact the author: Howard.Altman@recurrent.io
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21. Analysis | The unique, damaging role Fox News plays in American media
Of course this will be panned by those with a particular perspective. But an objective read of this provides some interesting insights.
Analysis | The unique, damaging role Fox News plays in American media
The Washington Post · by Philip BumpNational correspondent Yesterday at 11:23 a.m. EDT · April 4, 2022
Sometimes news is newsworthy not because it is particularly revelatory but because it confirms something obvious that lacked confirmation or because it provides something broadly understood with a sense of scale. This certainly applies to the revelation — uncovered by the New York Times’s Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns and reported by CNN’s Brian Stelter — that President Biden views Rupert Murdoch, founder of Fox News, as “the most dangerous man in the world.”
Obvious in broad strokes but now confirmed and with a sense of scale.
But this top-line assessment of the face most associated with the right-wing cable network misses an important secondary assessment included in the Martin-Burns reporting. Fox News, the president feels, is “one of the most destructive forces in the United States,” as the reporters put it. This is the more important revelation as it recognizes the breadth of Fox News’s influence even beyond the elder Murdoch.
There are four elements outside of Murdoch that make Fox News a uniquely damaging part of the American news landscape: its strength on the political right, the demonstrated way in which it shapes its viewers’ beliefs, its grip on Republican power and the views of its leadership.
Fox News has a unique partisan power
In December, The Washington Post and University of Maryland conducted a national poll that included an assessment of where people get their news about politics and government. Among Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents, a variety of sources — CNN, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, NPR, the Times, The Post — were identified as a main source of news by at least 3 in 10. Among Republicans, though, only two were: local television and Fox News.
This has always been the reason that Fox News wins the ratings battle. Cable-news viewership skews toward demographics that are more Republican in the first place, and CNN and MSNBC are fighting for a similar base of viewers — viewers who also partake of news from other outlets. Fox News’s strength with 43 percent of the country (the percentage that is Republican or Republican-leaning independent, according to Gallup) gives it a distinct advantage in ratings.
Most Americans don’t care about ratings, of course. So it’s important to put this in a more useful context: Fox News has a larger audience than its competitors — an audience that is largely politically homogeneous. And new research reinforces that this homogeneity is not solely a function of Republicans choosing Fox News but of the network filtering what it shows its viewers.
The network shapes how its viewers see the world
On Sunday, David E. Broockman of the University of California at Berkeley and Joshua L. Kalla of Yale University published a paper documenting a years-long experiment focused on measuring the effects of cable-news coverage and Fox News in particular. In September 2020, the researchers paid Fox News viewers to watch CNN, measuring compliance with a series of quizzes about what they’d seen. At the end of the month, they measured the difference in how those viewers understood news events with how a control group of Fox News viewers did.
The experiment “found evidence of manifold effects on viewers’ attitudes about current events, policy preferences, and evaluations of key political figures and parties,” Broockman and Kalla write. “For example, we found large effects on attitudes and policy preferences about COVID-19. We also found changes in evaluations of Donald Trump and Republican candidates and elected officials.” Participants in the experiment even grew to recognize the way in which Fox News presents reality: “group participants became more likely to agree that if Donald Trump made a mistake, Fox News would not cover it — i.e., that Fox News engages in partisan coverage filtering.”
The thrust of the paper is to introduce a different understanding for how the media shapes understanding of the world. It’s not just about framing (how news is presented) but also filtering (what news is shown).
It was an interesting month in which to conduct the experiment. The researchers found that what CNN viewers saw was largely coverage about the coronavirus pandemic and Trump’s failures on limiting the virus’s spread. It also covered the security of mail-in voting, in contrast to what Trump was touting as he prepared for his likely reelection defeat. On Fox, the main coverage was about how the left embraced an “extreme” racial ideology and downplaying the pandemic. There was also a chunk of programming centered on the purported risks of mail balloting. Much of what Fox News showed, in other words, was exaggerated or untrue.
CNN didn’t escape criticism; the researchers found that “Fox News was far more likely to report facts favorable to Republicans while CNN was far more likely to do the same for Democrats.” But they also found that exposing Fox News viewers to an alternate viewpoint, while promoting recognition about Fox’s bias, was nonetheless short-lived. The impacts of the experiment “largely receded as treated participants primarily returned to their prior viewership habits.” This is a particular skill of Fox News: When reality intrudes, the network quickly neutralizes it.
Fox News has a grip on political leaders that has no peer elsewhere
Because so many Republicans watch Fox News and because the network is assiduous about shaping its viewers’ understanding of events, it’s a necessarily powerful force in Republican politics. A Democratic official can go on Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC or be interviewed for NPR and reach a lot of Democrats, but it’s not the same. Go on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show and you are guaranteed not only a large group of heavily Republican viewers but also a chance to shape the network’s and the right’s narrative for the next 24 hours. Maddow does this for the left on occasion; Carlson and his colleagues do so regularly.
One effect is that Republican officials often clearly target Fox News coverage as a political tactic. When legislators like Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) ask exaggerated questions of President Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, ones of limited applicability to actually serving on the bench, they do so understanding that anything that can be framed as undercutting the president or the left will move into heavy rotation on the network. And since Fox News sets the conversation for half the country, its priorities tend to trickle out to other outlets as well.
When Blackburn asked nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson how she defined “woman” on March 22, she went from an average of one mention on Fox News per day over the previous week to five mentions per day in the week beginning March 22. For elected officials seeking support from Republicans, the incentive to create conflict and amplify the network’s own partisan viewpoints is strong.
It’s not only Rupert Murdoch
Those who don’t pay much attention to the media industry may still understand Rupert Murdoch as the guiding hand for Fox News. These days, though, Murdoch’s son Lachlan oversees Fox News’s parent company. He understands the network’s power, claiming in an interview last month that the channel competes more with network television than with its cable-news peers. This is partly bluster; it is also recognition of the lock his network has on the political right.
So how does the younger Murdoch view politics? He gave a speech last week in which he criticized Americans’ purported unwillingness to fight for our country in the unlikely event of invasion (Murdoch himself is British) and compared the New York Times’s “1619 Project” to Russia’s ongoing effort to stoke division in America.
He had specific criticism for Nikole Hannah-Jones, a lead on the project, and her claim that “all journalism is activism.” When saying that, she pointed to this newspaper’s motto; “democracy dies in darkness” is not a value-neutral statement.
“We have to try to be fair and accurate, and I don’t know how you can be fair and accurate if you pretend, publicly, that you have no feelings about something you clearly do,” she told CBS News. Fox News covered her remarks by contextualizing them with commentary from the right-wing activist organization NewsBusters.
Murdoch didn’t even go into Hannah-Jones’s explanation of her point. He simply elevated the “activism” line and offered his analysis: “That’s wrong. And it has done great damage.”
It is true that activism in the guise of journalism has done and continues to do great damage.
Scott Clement contributed to this report.
The Washington Post · by Philip BumpNational correspondent Yesterday at 11:23 a.m. EDT · April 4, 2022
22. Putin’s Doomsday Threat
Excerpts:
Among the many lessons from the Cuban missile crisis, one may prove particularly important to the Biden administration in the weeks ahead—particularly if Putin finds himself backed into a corner. As JFK said in his most important foreign policy speech, just months after the Cuban missile crisis, “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war.” If those were the only two options between which Putin had to choose, there is no guarantee that he would pick the former. Although Biden has carefully avoided forcing Putin to that point, events are now moving toward what the Russian leader could see as such a crossroad. If the facts of war on the ground leave him with no alternatives other than losing this war or shocking Ukrainians and the world with a tactical nuclear attack, it would be foolish to bet against his selecting the latter.
To prevent this, Biden and his team should review what JFK did as he saw events moving rapidly toward a dead end. Despite the success of the U.S. naval blockade in preventing the Soviets from bringing additional missiles to Cuba, it had done nothing to stop them readying missiles already there for launch against the United States. Thus, on the final Saturday of the crisis, Kennedy’s advisors told him he had only two options: attack or accept a Soviet missile base in Cuba as a fait accompli. Kennedy rejected both. Instead, he crafted an imaginative alternative that consisted of three components: a public deal in which the United States pledged not to invade Cuba if the Soviet Union withdrew its missiles, a private ultimatum threatening to attack Cuba within the next 24 to 48 hours unless Khrushchev accepted that offer, and a secret sweetener that promised the withdrawal of U.S. missiles from Turkey within six months after the crisis was resolved.
In the complicated multilevel negotiations and diplomacy that will be required to create a similar off-ramp for Putin in Ukraine, the United States and its allies will need even more imagination than Kennedy and his advisors did in 1962. But as Biden and his team rise to this challenge, they can find inspiration in JFK’s finest hour.
Putin’s Doomsday Threat
How to Prevent a Repeat of the Cuban Missile Crisis in Ukraine
April 5, 2022
As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has stalled and its forces have pivoted to the battleground in the east, the war is entering a new, darker, and more dangerous phase. Mariupol provides a preview of that future. The Vladimir Putin who bombed the Russian city of Grozny into rubble in order to “liberate” it, and who joined Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in razing Aleppo, certainly has no moral reservations about mass destruction. Moreover, the war in Ukraine is now unambiguously Putin’s war, and the Russian leader knows that he cannot lose—without risking his regime and even his life. So as the fighting continues, if he is pushed to choose between making an ignominious retreat and escalating the level of violence, we should prepare for the worst. In the extreme, this could include nuclear weapons.
With mounting evidence that Russian forces have engaged in horrific killings of innocent civilians, the United States and its European allies are facing increasing pressure to intervene in ways that risk widening the war. U.S. President Joe Biden has mobilized a global coalition that is now imposing on Russia the most comprehensive portfolio of painful sanctions the world has ever seen. He has effectively canceled Putin and his supporters, making them pariahs in much of the Western world. Together with NATO allies, the United States is also supplying extensive quantities of arms to the Ukrainians, who are courageously fighting for their freedom. Many Americans, however, as citizens of the most powerful nation on earth, will be asking what more the Biden administration can do. Already, a chorus of pundits and politicians has been calling on Biden to impose a no-fly zone over regions of Ukraine or to transfer Polish MiG-29 aircraft to Kyiv.
What these demands fail to take into account, however, is a central lesson of the Cold War: if military forces of nuclear superpowers should ever be engaged in a hot war in which each is killing or seriously considering choices that could kill hundreds or thousands of the other, the escalation ladder from there to the ultimate global catastrophe of nuclear war can be surprisingly short. The textbook case is the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.
When a U.S. spy plane caught the Soviet Union attempting to sneak nuclear-tipped missiles into Cuba, President John F. Kennedy determined immediately that it could not stand. He confronted Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in what Secretary of State Dean Rusk famously called an “eyeball-to-eyeball” faceoff, which began with a naval blockade of Cuba and ended with an ultimatum threatening air strikes on the missile sites. Historians agree that this was the most dangerous moment in recorded history. In a quiet moment near the end of those 13 days, Kennedy confided privately to his brother Bobby that he believed the chance that the confrontation would end in nuclear war was “one in three.” Nothing historians have discovered in the decades since has done anything to lengthen those odds. Had that war come, it could have meant the death of 100 million Americans and even more Russians.
Lessons learned in that crisis have informed nuclear statecraft in the decades since. After 60 years without an analogous confrontation, the prospect of nuclear war has become almost inconceivable for many observers. Fortunately, Biden and key members of his administration know better. As they have been crafting their strategy for meeting Putin’s challenge, they know that Russia’s national security strategy includes the use of nuclear weapons in certain circumstances even when the other side has not used or threatened to use them. They have examined Russian military exercises in which Russian forces practice what their doctrine calls “escalate to deescalate,” a doctrine that foresees using tactical nuclear weapons to counter a large-scale conventional threat to Russia and its allies.
Thus, while most observers have dismissed Putin’s dark threat of “consequences you have never experienced in your history” and his putting Russian nuclear forces on “special combat readiness” as mere saber rattling, the Biden team certainly has not. If Putin finds his military suffering a terrible defeat on the conventional battlefield, for example, it cannot be ruled out that he might try to force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to surrender by using a tactical nuclear weapon—a lower-yield bomb with nevertheless devastating consequences—on one of Ukraine’s smaller cities. And if the United States were to respond in kind, we could see a game of nuclear chicken even more dangerous than the confrontation over Cuba.
How Confrontations Go Nuclear
How could the dynamics in 1962 have led to nuclear war? Analysts of this crisis have identified more than a dozen plausible paths that could have led to the incineration of American cities. One of the fastest begins with a fact that was not even known to Kennedy at the time. The core issue for Kennedy and his associates was preventing the Soviets from installing operational medium- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Cuba that could strike the continental United States. They were unaware, however, that the Soviets had already positioned more than 100 tactical nuclear weapons on the island. Moreover, the 40,000 Soviet troops deployed there had both the technical capability and the authorization to use those weapons if they were attacked.
Imagine, for example, that on the twelfth day of that fateful crisis, Khrushchev had flatly rejected Kennedy’s last and final offer to resolve it. Kennedy had proposed a deal in which the United States would pledge never to invade Cuba if the Soviet Union withdrew its missiles, which he paired with a private ultimatum threatening to attack Cuba in 24–48 hours if Khrushchev refused. Anticipating a negative response, Kennedy had already authorized a bombing campaign to destroy all the missiles on the island; this was also to be followed directly by an invasion to ensure that any weapons missed by the strikes were eliminated. But as U.S. troops landed on the island and engaged Soviet troops, U.S. commanders would likely have found themselves targets of the tactical nuclear weapons whose presence was unknown to them. Those weapons would also have sunk the American ships that had transported them to the island, and perhaps even hit ports in Florida from which the invaders were coming.
President John F. Kennedy’s map of Cuba showing Russian missile sites, annotated on October 16, 1962
Brian Snyder/Reuters
At that point, Khrushchev would have ordered the Soviets’ 20 ICBMs capable of delivering warheads to the U.S. homeland to be fueled to prepare for launch. Kennedy would then have faced a damnable dilemma. He could have ordered a preemptive attack on the Soviets’ nuclear arsenal—an attack that would likely still leave the Soviets with enough remaining weapons to kill tens of millions of Americans—or he could have chosen not to strike, knowing that he was leaving the United States vulnerable to an attack by the full Soviet arsenal, which could cause the deaths of more than 100 million Americans.
Fortunately, however horrific Russia’s war against Ukraine has become, the risk that it ends with nuclear bombs destroying American cities is nowhere close to JFK’s one in three. Indeed, in my best judgment, it is less than one in 100—and probably closer to one in 1,000. There are two principal reasons why Putin’s invasion has not become a sequel to the missile crisis of 1962. First, Putin has taken great care not to threaten vital U.S. national interests, including by avoiding crossing such redlines as an incursion or attack in the territory of any NATO country; and second, because Biden has been determined from the outset not to allow what happens in Ukraine to trigger a wider war.
Preemptive Restraint
Biden’s response to Putin’s challenge has demonstrated unblinking strategic clarity about American national interests. He understands the real risks that dynamics in Ukraine, if mishandled, could lead to nuclear war. He also knows that the United States has no vital interest in Ukraine, which is not a member of NATO and consequently has no Article 5 guarantee from Washington to defend an attack against it as if it were an attack upon the United States. Thus, for Biden to stumble into war with Russia over Ukraine could be the worst—and indeed, potentially the last—great error in U.S. foreign policy.
In a determined effort to prevent that, as Russian troops surrounded Ukraine, Biden made clear that sending U.S. troops to fight in Ukraine was “not on the table.” In a December 8 press conference, he declared, “The idea that the United States is going to unilaterally use force to confront Russia [to prevent it from] invading Ukraine is not in the cards right now.” Since then, the Biden team has repeatedly underscored that point. No matter how heart-rending Putin’s crimes, sending U.S. troops to defend Ukrainians would mean war with Russia. That war could escalate to a nuclear Armageddon, in which not just Ukrainians but also their counterparts in Europe, Russia, and the United States would be victims. In sum, as Biden put it: the United States “will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.”
In 2008, no one on Bush’s security team was prepared to go to war with Russia to defend Georgia.
Biden’s critics in Congress now claim that his caution invited Putin’s invasion. According to Republican Senator Tom Cotton, “Biden’s weak-kneed appeasement provoked Putin.” Had the United States had a strong president like George W. Bush, Cotton and his allies assert, the invasion would never have happened. Counterfactuals are complicated. But in this case, a little applied history goes a long way.
Consider Putin’s invasion of Georgia in 2008. Bush was president, and developments in Georgia were broadly similar to those in Ukraine preceding Russia’s invasion. At the time, Georgia’s efforts to confront Russian-backed separatists were seen by Putin as an unacceptable threat. After the NATO summit that year, in which the Bush administration had attempted to rush Georgia and Ukraine into NATO and failed, an emboldened Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili cracked down on the breakaway province of South Ossetia. When Putin responded by ordering Russian troops to invade Georgia, he certainly had no doubts about Bush’s readiness to send U.S. troops to war. After all, he had seen him dispatch 130,000 troops to invade Iraq in 2003 and tens of thousands more to Afghanistan. Rather than deterring Putin, the evidence suggests that Bush’s bravado served mainly to encourage Saakashvili’s recklessness, which in turn provided the pretext for Putin’s invasion.
As Russian invaders approached Georgia’s capital, the Bush administration faced a further choice. Predictably, some members of the administration, particularly aides in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, called for sending U.S. troops to prevent Russia’s seizing Georgia. At a special National Security Council meeting chaired by the president, his national security advisor, Stephen Hadley, posed the question directly: “Are we prepared to go to war with Russia over Georgia?” The president then asked each participant at the meeting to offer his or her own answer. As Hadley put it afterward, “I wanted to make people show their cards about a possible military response”—knowing that otherwise some of them might later claim that they were prepared to fight for Georgia but were overruled. As they went around the table, no one, including Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, was prepared to vote yes. The United States did not come to Georgia’s aid, and the war was over within two weeks.
A Precedent with Many Presidents
Instructively, the choices made by the Biden and Bush administrations are consistent with those made by every other U.S. administration that has faced a similar dilemma. When the Soviets blockaded the highway to Berlin in 1948, President Harry Truman rejected his military commanders’ proposal to have U.S. forces fight their way through. President Dwight Eisenhower chose not to send U.S. troops to defend the 1956 Hungarian uprising—a decision repeated by President Lyndon Johnson in Czechoslovakia during the 1968 Prague Spring. Kennedy refused to attack Soviet troops building the Berlin Wall. And when, in 1983, the Soviets shot down a commercial airliner that had mistakenly strayed into Soviet airspace—an attack that killed 52 Americans, including a sitting member of Congress—President Ronald Reagan likewise refused to escalate. In every case, the man with whom the buck stopped was not prepared to risk the survival of the nation for anything less than a clear vital national interest.
Like their predecessors, Biden, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and others in the administration have not only read about what happened in the Cuban missile crisis but have also participated in simulated war games designed to allow them to vicariously experience nuclear danger. They have played the roles of those who sat around the table with JFK, debating choices that they knew could provoke a nuclear attack that could kill their own families. They have reviewed the SIOP, or Single Integrated Operational Plan—the United States’ general plan for a nuclear war, first devised in the early 1960s, which provides a menu of launch procedures and targeting options for the U.S. nuclear arsenal, should it be necessary. Biden and his senior advisors have reflected on the fact that while U.S. strategic nuclear forces can erase Russia from the map, at the end of any such confrontation, the United States would also be gone. They thus understand the profound truth captured by Ronald Reagan in his famous one-liner: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
For decades, U.S. administrations have consistently avoided military escalation with Russia.
Reagan’s two propositions are easy to recite, but hard to integrate into strategic thinking. Even though the United States has the mightiest military in the world, with nuclear forces that could turn Russia into a graveyard, Reagan’s first point reminds us that at the end of that war, Russia would also have completely destroyed the United States. No one could call that victory. This condition—described by Cold War strategists as MAD (mutually assured destruction)—has made all-out war between enemies with robust nuclear arsenals madness. Technology has, in effect, made the United States and Russia inseparable conjoined twins. While either can kill the other, neither can do so without simultaneously committing suicide.
The second half of Reagan’s warning is even more difficult to internalize: that a nuclear war “must never be fought.” However evil and dangerous Putin’s Russia is today, the United States must find a way to defeat it without going to war. During the Cold War, avoiding war with the Soviet Union meant accepting constraints on U.S. initiatives to combat the Soviets that would otherwise be totally unacceptable. These included living for as far as anyone could see with Soviet occupation of the captive nations of Eastern Europe, even as the United States did what it could to undermine support for those Communist regimes, and reaching compromises in which both nations agreed not to deploy certain weapons systems—for example, intermediate-range nuclear forces—that could increase the risk of miscalculations or accidents that could lead to war.
Particularly in the hot air of Washington today, it may be useful to recall that when Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, Washington Post columnist George Will accused him of “accelerating moral disarmament—actual disarmament will follow.” The leading conservative intellectual of the time, William Buckley, called Reagan’s INF agreement a “suicide pact.” About such criticism, Reagan wrote, “Some of my more radical conservative supporters protested that in negotiating with the Russians I was plotting to trade away our country’s future security. I assured them we wouldn’t sign any agreements that placed us at a disadvantage, but still got lots of flak from them—many of whom, I was convinced, thought we had to prepare for nuclear war because it was ‘inevitable.’”
War by Other Means
Among the many lessons from the Cuban missile crisis, one may prove particularly important to the Biden administration in the weeks ahead—particularly if Putin finds himself backed into a corner. As JFK said in his most important foreign policy speech, just months after the Cuban missile crisis, “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war.” If those were the only two options between which Putin had to choose, there is no guarantee that he would pick the former. Although Biden has carefully avoided forcing Putin to that point, events are now moving toward what the Russian leader could see as such a crossroad. If the facts of war on the ground leave him with no alternatives other than losing this war or shocking Ukrainians and the world with a tactical nuclear attack, it would be foolish to bet against his selecting the latter.
To prevent this, Biden and his team should review what JFK did as he saw events moving rapidly toward a dead end. Despite the success of the U.S. naval blockade in preventing the Soviets from bringing additional missiles to Cuba, it had done nothing to stop them readying missiles already there for launch against the United States. Thus, on the final Saturday of the crisis, Kennedy’s advisors told him he had only two options: attack or accept a Soviet missile base in Cuba as a fait accompli. Kennedy rejected both. Instead, he crafted an imaginative alternative that consisted of three components: a public deal in which the United States pledged not to invade Cuba if the Soviet Union withdrew its missiles, a private ultimatum threatening to attack Cuba within the next 24 to 48 hours unless Khrushchev accepted that offer, and a secret sweetener that promised the withdrawal of U.S. missiles from Turkey within six months after the crisis was resolved.
In the complicated multilevel negotiations and diplomacy that will be required to create a similar off-ramp for Putin in Ukraine, the United States and its allies will need even more imagination than Kennedy and his advisors did in 1962. But as Biden and his team rise to this challenge, they can find inspiration in JFK’s finest hour.
23. America Must Spend More on Defense
Conclusion:
Defense is expensive. It’s inefficient. But it is an essential insurance policy designed to guarantee that the United States can protect itself, its allies, and its interests. Americans have allowed their military to atrophy, and they urgently need to restore both its reach and its punch. U.S. defense spending in 1953 was 11.3 percent of the country’s gross domestic product; this year, it is 3.7 percent. Washington needs to make up the gap before its adversaries gain too much ground. This should be a wake-up call. The United States must drop the excuses that have led it to so perilously underfund its defense.
America Must Spend More on Defense
How Biden Can Align Resources and Strategy
April 5, 2022
During the 2020 presidential race, then candidate Joe Biden complained that U.S. President Donald Trump had “abandoned all fiscal discipline when it comes to defense spending.” Unsurprisingly, Biden’s first budget—announced in 2021—was a dramatic about-face in fiscal priorities. The proposal increased spending for virtually every federal department except the Pentagon. Congress, for its part, considered Biden’s proposal so deficient that it added an additional $29 billion for defense.
Despite congressional pushback and mounting global threats, Biden’s new budget, announced last week, continues down the same dangerous path. Confronting emerging international dangers will require a dramatic increase in Washington’s spending, and the administration’s proposal is insufficient. The longer policymakers wait to make up this shortfall, the greater the risk the United States runs of operating without the forces it needs to win wars, and the more it tempts autocrats into taking advantage of American deficiencies. As Russia’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine demonstrates, wars themselves—not exercises or training—are the real measure of military capabilities. To guarantee victory on the battlefield, the United States must make sure its capacities far outstrip those of its adversaries.
But Washington’s problems are bigger than money. U.S. policymakers face an intellectual crisis. Their approach to determining the military forces they need has become disconnected from the resources the military receives. The United States not only needs to find greater funding for the armed forces but it also must make sure that its strategy matches the resources it is willing to dedicate to the country’s defense.
SLASH AND BURN
The first major downgrade of U.S. military capabilities since the 1950s came at the end of the Cold War. Between 1989 and 1992, the George H. W. Bush administration developed the so-called base force concept—its attempt to reduce defense expenditures without seriously weakening the armed forces. Bush hoped to cut spending by 25 percent over five years by reorienting the military. Planners shifted from preparing for one apocalyptic war with a Soviet peer to smaller wars against regional powers, assumed longer warning times before conflict, and began substituting rotational forces for troops stationed permanently in bases around the world. The objective was to develop a military capable of fighting two independent major regional wars, with additional units available for reinforcement and a separate nuclear force. These changes produced a smaller military composed of 12 active and six reserve army divisions, 15 active and 11 reserve tactical fighter wings, and 451 ships, including 12 carriers.
Although Bush’s base force reduced spending, it also reduced the demands made on the armed forces. The divergence between military strategy and allocated resources really began with the 1993 “bottom up review”—the Clinton administration’s attempt to justify further reductions in defense spending. The review was still marketed as a way of allowing Washington to fight two major wars at the same time, but in practice, its prescriptions actually meant that major elements of the military would need to be used in both wars. The United States would need to rely on a “win-hold-win” approach—essentially fighting a single major regional war while freezing a second until forces could be shuttled from one to the other. And although the Clinton administration aimed to cut more than $100 billion in defense spending, its strategic goals were more expansive than those of its predecessor. U.S. strategy under Clinton accounted for all the threats anticipated by Bush’s base force while also seeking to address the “new dangers” of nuclear proliferation and sub-state conflict and expanding existing U.S. military missions to include peacekeeping. As a result, the United States’ military budget and its armed forces could not keep pace with the ever-expanding scope of its articulated strategy.
Congressional oversight of the military did little to resolve this mismatch of means and ends. Nowhere was this dynamic more evident than in sequestration—the 2011 Budget Control Act’s requirement that, absent congressional budget approval, agencies would have to make across-the-board cuts to discretionary spending. Sequestration dealt a severe blow to defense—generating a gap between strategy and funding that the Defense Department has not yet been able to address.
Washington must make sure that its strategy matches the resources it is willing to dedicate to defense.
Subsequent congressional failures to pass consistent budgets have exacerbated this mismatch. Instead of appropriating funding on time, it has become routine for Congress to pass short-term continuing resolutions that simply maintain funding at current levels. Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island and chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, estimates the cost of such stopgap measures at $34 billion, as the Pentagon cannot start new programs or stop old ones, provide pay raises, or shift funding to higher priorities. The Defense Department has been operating on continuing resolutions for six months of this year and for a total of 1,443 days over the last 12 years. That’s nearly four full years of time and money that Washington can’t get back.
The last National Defense Strategy—produced by the Trump administration in 2018—also depended on future spending that neither the president nor Congress provided. Executing Trump’s strategy would have required a real spending increase of three to five percent annually over that year’s existing $670 billion defense budget. Such an increase has not been forthcoming. Today, taking the middle range of four percent growth over inflation, a rough calculation puts the 2022 Defense Department requirements at $906 billion. The funding just appropriated by Congress, however, amounts to $728 billion, meaning that the gap between Washington’s strategy and its ability to carry out that strategy is a chasm of $178 billion.
Congress, for its part, requires the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to report annually on the dangers associated with executing the National Defense Strategy. The last several chairmen have warned that the risks of not fully carrying out the strategy’s requirements are rising, even if they said so quietly in public while more stridently in classified settings. But the military has also played a part in allowing the budget mismatch. Although then chairman General Martin Dempsey argued in 2013 that budget cuts would necessarily change Defense Department strategy, he went on to support an unaltered strategy when the Obama administration drastically cut the Pentagon’s budget. Last year, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and the current chairman, General Mark Milley, claimed that the budget “is ample to accomplish things the department wants to do in the coming year.” Left unsaid is whether the budget is adequate beyond the current year.
Despite this growing gap, the Biden administration does not seem poised to limit U.S. strategic objectives. In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, policymakers claimed there was no need to change existing strategy since Russia posed only an “acute” threat. But the 82nd Airborne Division is now deployed in Poland, and an aircraft carrier has been dispatched to the Mediterranean—meaning both are unavailable for the so-called pacing threat posed by China. The Biden administration is also incorporating other issues such as global health and climate change into the defense strategy. The Pentagon evidently aspires to square this circle by arguing that so-called integrated deterrence—the Defense Department’s organizing principle for its upcoming strategy—will reduce the demand for military forces by utilizing all elements of national power with exquisite orchestration. In reality, however, such a concept bases Pentagon strategy on forces beyond its control and is no substitute for a well-funded military.
BUILD BACK BETTER?
Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell used to say, “Show me your budget and I’ll tell you your strategy.” The Biden administration’s ability to produce a budget that funds its expansive strategy is a test of its seriousness—and it has been found wanting again. Congress had to step in after Biden’s first attempt last year, and his newly released budget asks for $773 billion, which doesn’t even keep pace with inflation.
Congress, by contrast, seems poised to raise the Defense Department’s budget significantly. Representative Adam Smith, a Democrat from Washington and chair of the House Armed Services Committee, has said that “the Russian invasion of Ukraine fundamentally altered what our national security posture and what our defense posture needs to be.” A strategy that accounts for Russian aggression in Europe will necessitate more forces and different kinds of weaponry than one solely focused on China. The Pentagon’s own accounting of its unfunded needs from the last budget amounts to $22 billion. Addressing that deficit would be a good place to start.
Restoring U.S. naval capabilities, which have stagnated in recent decades, should be another major priority as the United States moves to confront China. To start, policymakers should take up the Pentagon’s plan for a 500-ship navy and begin developing the industrial base needed to build it. The Pacific is predominantly a maritime theater, and Beijing’s fleet now surpasses what Washington has to defend its commitments in the region. Investing in shipbuilding could also provide some much-needed substance to the Biden administration’s concept of “a foreign policy for the middle class” by creating more jobs at home. Analysts estimate the cost of attaining a 500-ship navy at $34 billion per year for 30 years, totaling over $1 trillion. Making this investment will also result in a valuable expansion of the defense industrial base—the companies that build U.S. weapons and military systems.
Americans have allowed their military to atrophy.
The United States needs to expand the U.S. military to match Washington’s existing claims. The current U.S. military is sized to fight only a single war, as the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan revealed. Aligning strategy with reality should therefore be the focus of the defense planning process from start to finish. The price tag will be high: personnel costs for the current force comprise about 25 percent of the Defense Department’s base budget. A force capable of fighting two wars would need roughly double the current number of 1.3 million service members, at a cost of about $160 billion per year.
The Defense Department also needs to adequately fund the construction and maintenance of military facilities and equipment, as the Pentagon tends to underfund or defer these problems when budgets are tight. The current figure for the maintenance and construction backlog is in the neighborhood of $140 billion. These delays have real consequences, including reducing the availability of important equipment and facilities. Navy dry docks, for instance, are more than 100 years old and in short supply (only one can hold a Ford-class aircraft carrier). As a result, U.S. shipyards are limited in how well they can service the fleet. U.S. forces are already too small for the existing strategy; Washington only limits them further by underfunding such logistical operations.
Finally, policymakers need to reckon with the impending wave of decisions about the modernization of existing weapons systems. The majority of conventional and nuclear weapons systems are approaching the end of their service lives, even with extension programs that stretched their use well beyond their original retirement date. Many old systems are also bumping up against technological upgrades designed to keep them functional and interoperable with newer platforms. In 2016, defense analyst Todd Harrison estimated the total cost of developing new systems to replace the old ones at $130 billion across five years. That number has only ballooned since then.
STICKER SHOCK
The changes needed to bring the Defense Department’s budget back in line with its strategy involve a hefty price tag: around an additional $384 billion per year, a figure about 50 percent greater than the current Pentagon budget. Spending and program estimates also typically swell to two or three times initial estimates, and all these figures will need to be adjusted to the actual rate of inflation. As the saying goes, “pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”
Defense is expensive. It’s inefficient. But it is an essential insurance policy designed to guarantee that the United States can protect itself, its allies, and its interests. Americans have allowed their military to atrophy, and they urgently need to restore both its reach and its punch. U.S. defense spending in 1953 was 11.3 percent of the country’s gross domestic product; this year, it is 3.7 percent. Washington needs to make up the gap before its adversaries gain too much ground. This should be a wake-up call. The United States must drop the excuses that have led it to so perilously underfund its defense.
24. The Next Sino-Russian Split?
Excerpts:
Given all of this, the broader historical parallel that comes to mind is not so much the Cold War as it is Germany and Austria at the beginning of the twentieth century. Germany then, like China today, was a rising great power with a rapidly increasing industrial and technological potential and a set of complaints about the existing international order. Germany’s ally Austria was, like Russia today, an empire in decline, with plentiful quarrels with its neighbors and lots of internal conflict. Up to the summer of 1914, German leaders believed that they could manage Austria to their own advantage. Instead, what they got was a sequence of events in which Austrian concerns drove Germany toward war. China should be very careful not to repeat that cycle of events. Sometimes looking after your own interests means defining those interests more fully, especially when opportunities arise to link with sizable but troubled empires next door.
While Beijing sizes up its options, what should the West do now? Some actions are obvious. It should arm itself better, as Europe is now beginning to do. It should support the Ukrainian resistance. It should strengthen relations with friends along Russia’s and China’s borders. It should put maximum pressure on the Putin regime, short of engaging his forces in combat. In communicating with Chinese officials, it should underline that Western policymakers see them as at least partly responsible for Putin’s misdeeds.
Appeals to principle will not help with Beijing. Even significant international embarrassment for China, which Putin’s lies and indiscriminate killing produce daily, will not do much. Ramping up pressure against Russia while showing China how its close association with Putin works against stabilization of Sino-American or Sino-European relations is the best we can do. It might not be enough to save Ukraine from further destruction. But it may make great-power war less likely by convincing at least some Chinese policymakers that Putin’s interests and their own are not as easily compatible as both sides now seem to believe.
The Next Sino-Russian Split?
Beijing Will Ultimately Come to Regret Its Support of Moscow
April 5, 2022
From within a war, it is hard to think about what comes next. Rarely has this been more true than for the current Russo-Ukrainian war. Our thinking is necessarily clouded by the suffering that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression has inflicted on the people of Ukraine. It is also hindered by lack of experience with this kind of warfare. Together, these make it hard to imagine where we go from here, especially amid the dangers of the era of great-power rivalry that this invasion has brought into being. It will be a time of intense competition and menace—much less stable than the Cold War and much riskier than any time since that conflict ended. Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling has already shown how high the stakes are in what comes next.
Irrespective of how this war ends, the relationship between Russia and China will determine whether the world can avoid great-power war. If China continues to support the Putin regime in its attempts to subdue its neighbors by force, it is highly likely that the world at some point will stumble into a confrontation between Russia and Europe supported by the United States. If China reins Putin in or abandons its coalition with him altogether, a return to a more stable competition among great powers may be possible. As many observers—including some in China—have pointed out, this could be China’s moment on the international stage to do good for itself and others.
Yet so far, China has failed to seize that opportunity. Instead of trying to prevent the aggression against Ukraine, it gave Putin the green light to invade, asking only that the assault be postponed until after the Beijing Olympics. Right up to the moment of the invasion, China’s Foreign Ministry parroted Russia’s lies about the planned aggressive war being a figment of the West’s febrile imagination. On the eve of the invasion, the Chinese accused the United States of “heightening tensions, creating panic, and even hyping up the possibility of warfare.” The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson added, “The Russian side has said on many occasions that it does not intend to start a war.”
When Russia did invade a few hours later, China stood aside and did nothing, except appeal to high-minded notions of nonintervention and accuse the United States and its European partners of being responsible for Russia’s actions. Ukrainians and other eastern Europeans listened with incredulity as Chinese leaders went on about “Russia’s legitimate concerns on security issues” and the “historical complexities” of their countries’ situation. As Russia’s missiles hit Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Mariupol, causing almost ten million civilians to flee their homes so far, China accused “the U.S.-led NATO” of having “pushed Russia-Ukraine tension to the breaking point.”
Burning Bridges in Europe
The image of China that this rhetoric has created, especially in Europe, is that of an accomplice to Russia’s mass murder in Ukraine. It is not what China has done that has horrified Europeans—most expected Beijing to abstain when Russian actions were condemned in the UN Security Council and General Assembly. It is the callousness of the language China’s diplomats have used that has been so profoundly shocking. If “Russia’s legitimate concerns” can lead China to condone the invasion of a neighbor with whom it has had friendly relations up until the assault happened, who can trust China’s friendship? And the patter about “historical complexities” is even worse: Europe is full of historical complexities, which empires have used in the past to violate treaties and invade smaller neighbors. Is Ukraine so “historically complex” that it does not really deserve its own territorial integrity or even its statehood?
As Putin’s assault rolls on, the image of China in Europe and in the United States is in free fall. Granted, it was in decline before this happened, and tensions were on the rise. But, especially for the Europeans, Ukraine has been a remarkable eye opener. “China’s silence on the Russian atrocities speaks volumes,” says Die Zeit, one of Germany’s leading newspapers. What China says and does about Ukraine from now on will influence Chinese relations with Europe and with other countries for at least the next decade, if not longer.
China is supporting Putin’s war out of self-interest.
Is there a chance that China will pull the plug on Putin or at least facilitate real negotiations between his regime and the Ukrainians, negotiations that start from the premise of recognizing Ukraine’s right to self-determination? At the moment, this seems very unlikely. Putin and China’s leader Xi Jinping noted in their joint statement just before Putin started the Ukraine war “the significance of the efforts taken by the Russian side to establish a just multipolar system of international relations.” Presumably this is what Putin is now doing in Ukraine. There is, of course, the possibility that Xi will get cold feet if the Russians destroy more cities or use weapons of mass destruction. But even that is unlikely given China’s pro-Russian rhetoric since Putin’s attack began.
The main reason for China condoning Putin’s war of aggression is, of course, Chinese self-interest. In standing by its partner in spite of Putin violating most principles of international relations that the Chinese say they believe in, Beijing hopes to tie Russia to China for a long time to come. Xi had, of course, preferred the Russian offensive to succeed smoothly and effectively, but even after the Ukrainian defenders made a mockery of that supposition, Xi seems to believe that Putin’s military problems will in the long run work to China’s advantage. They will create a Russia evermore dependent on China, as will Western sanctions. By saying very little and blaming the West, Beijing expects a positive outcome for itself.
Careful What You Wish For
In terms of Chinese interests, this might not turn out to be quite as successful a strategy as Xi assumes, at least not in the long run. If Putin succeeds in subjugating Ukraine, his appetite might not stop there. If he fails, there will be years of tension on Russia’s southern border. In either case, Russia will be a wild card, rather than a reliable partner for Beijing. It is true that Russia under Putin, a bit like North Korea under Kim Jong Un, will have nowhere else to turn than to China. But that dependency of a weak regime, locked in forever quarrels with its neighbors, might not serve China well, in spite of Russia’s tempting riches in energy and minerals.
There are lessons here, for both China and Russia but also for the West, from the last time Beijing and Moscow tried to set up an alliance that aimed to confront the United States. Back then, in the 1950s, Mao and Stalin were brought together by communist ideology as well as security needs. At that time, China was the weaker partner, just as Russia is now, and that inequality by itself created fissures in the relationship. And even though today’s Sino-Russian alliance will not be driven apart by an ideological split, as happened in the post-Stalin era, there are plenty of other causes of conflict, some of which are strikingly resemblant of the late 1950s.
For China, its relationship with the United States and with Europe will always be more important than relations with Russia. Like the Chinese in the 1950s, Russians will easily get the impression that their partner is negotiating with Washington, Brussels, or Berlin above their heads and will be suspicious and resentful when Moscow’s interests are not fully taken into consideration. China has a powerful position in the global economy, and Russia does not. Financially, China has a lot of lending power, but it will not necessarily lend to a Russian economy in steep decline, even if sanctions are removed. The differences in the two countries’ overall global positions create plentiful causes for acrimony.
Relations with third powers also complicate the picture, just as they did in the 1950s. India is a friend of Russia and, disappointingly for the West, has gone out of its way not to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But India is also an antagonist and a rival of China. In the late 1950s, one key Chinese accusation against the Soviets was Moscow’s continued closeness to India, even after the first Indian border clashes with China. The same power dynamic is problematic today. And it is not just India. Vietnam, Mongolia, and the Central Asian states will come under increasing pressure by China and will look to Russia to back them up.
Russia and China are not natural partners.
Finally, there is the outcome of the war in Ukraine. Just as the Chinese looked to the Soviets for support in the Korean War in the 1950s, Russian leaders today will look to the Chinese to support them in Ukraine, especially if matters get worse for the Russian military. And if Russia loses the war or has to go back to status quo ante, as Mao had to do in the Korean War, resentment at a partner for not having supported the war effort enough to win will simmer. Putin may do what Mao did in Korea: declare the status quo a victory and have enough Russians believe him for nationalist reasons to secure the survival of his regime. But the thought that China did not back Russia to the hilt will gnaw at the relationship.
The biggest lesson from the last Sino-Russian alliance is probably this: the development of the relationship is much more dependent on the domestic dynamics in the two countries and on the relationship between them than on anything the United States can do or say. The best strategy for the United States is to watch and wait but be ready to explore cracks in the alliance as soon as they appear. The West will punish Russia for its war of aggression and will continue to rival China while seeking common-sense arrangements with it, not least in economic terms. As a long-term strategy, this is probably about the best we can do.
For Russia and China are not natural partners. There are just too many issues that drive them apart. Today, Putin’s foreign policy intellectuals hold forth about how Russia has made a fundamental decision on partnering with China now and in the future. But anyone who has spoken with them can sense, underneath, their many concerns about that choice. To them, the alliance with China is there because of a need to spite the West, not because of any natural cohesion between the two powers. Putin himself may think differently, but, if so, given Russia’s increasing weakness, he might get more than he bargains for when linking with a rising power next door.
A Broken Bloc
A significant argument against this interpretation, especially in Washington these days, is that there is more long-term cohesion in the present-day Sino-Russian alliance than meets the eye. Some observers see the current war in Ukraine as the first shot in a new Cold War, which pits two power blocs against each other. Like the original Cold War, this view holds, today there are ideological divides between the two blocs as well as differences in economic systems. The new Cold War battle is therefore between democracy and authoritarianism and between market-oriented and state-centered economics.
But China and Russia today have very different political systems and very different economies. China is a communist state where the party rules in what is claimed to be a meritocratic manner on behalf of the people. Russia is a personalized kleptocratic dictatorship that masquerades as a democracy. Both economies are increasingly controlled by the government, but that does not ensure any commensurability. On the contrary, the Cold War shows that state-directed economies are usually less compatible with each other than are capitalist economies. Moreover, in government-controlled economies, everything becomes political, often complicating bilateral relations further. In the Russian-Chinese case, profound cultural differences add to the picture.
Given all of this, the broader historical parallel that comes to mind is not so much the Cold War as it is Germany and Austria at the beginning of the twentieth century. Germany then, like China today, was a rising great power with a rapidly increasing industrial and technological potential and a set of complaints about the existing international order. Germany’s ally Austria was, like Russia today, an empire in decline, with plentiful quarrels with its neighbors and lots of internal conflict. Up to the summer of 1914, German leaders believed that they could manage Austria to their own advantage. Instead, what they got was a sequence of events in which Austrian concerns drove Germany toward war. China should be very careful not to repeat that cycle of events. Sometimes looking after your own interests means defining those interests more fully, especially when opportunities arise to link with sizable but troubled empires next door.
While Beijing sizes up its options, what should the West do now? Some actions are obvious. It should arm itself better, as Europe is now beginning to do. It should support the Ukrainian resistance. It should strengthen relations with friends along Russia’s and China’s borders. It should put maximum pressure on the Putin regime, short of engaging his forces in combat. In communicating with Chinese officials, it should underline that Western policymakers see them as at least partly responsible for Putin’s misdeeds.
Appeals to principle will not help with Beijing. Even significant international embarrassment for China, which Putin’s lies and indiscriminate killing produce daily, will not do much. Ramping up pressure against Russia while showing China how its close association with Putin works against stabilization of Sino-American or Sino-European relations is the best we can do. It might not be enough to save Ukraine from further destruction. But it may make great-power war less likely by convincing at least some Chinese policymakers that Putin’s interests and their own are not as easily compatible as both sides now seem to believe.
25. China’s New Focus on US Cyber Activities
Admit nothing, deny everything, and make counter accusations.
China’s New Focus on US Cyber Activities
Chinese officials and media are putting more effort into publicizing U.S. cyberattacks as a way of defending against criticisms of China’s cyber behavior.
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In the last few years, Chinese companies have released several reports accusing U.S. agencies of cyberattacks on Chinese infrastructure. Although China has long released data on the numbers of U.S. hacking attempts, detailed reports were not a common occurrence. Recent reports indicate that Beijing is intensifying its efforts at narrative-building by focusing on malicious cyber activities of the United States.
Over the years, various institutes and state-affiliated bodies in the U.S. have exposed China’s cyber espionage activities in the U.S. and in other countries. For example, Mandiant, a U.S.-based cybersecurity firm, has released multiple reports detailing Chinese cyberattacks in the United States. Moreover, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) publishes reports on “Chinese Malicious Cyber Activity.” The United States also holds publicly broadcasted testimony sessions exploring China’s cyber activities and threats. These reports and testimonies have taken discourse on China’s cyber activities to a global audience, making everyone aware of possible cyber threats arising out of China.
Chinese companies, security experts, and leaders believe that these allegations of Chinese cyberattacks are attempts to malign China. For example, the state-owned Global Times quoted views expressed by Chinese companies and experts that these were U.S. attempts to malign China. Similarly, an article published by the China Institute of International Studies (CIIS) in 2020 also called out the United States for “hypocrisy in cybersecurity” after the 2020 Qihoo 360 report.
As a result, many Chinese experts and leaders had called for China to issue similar reports exposing U.S. cyberattacks in China. For example, just a few days before Pangu Lab released its report on U.S. cyber espionage, Hu Xijin, the former editor-in-chief of Global Times, lamented on his personal WeChat blog that from time to time foreign organizations and individuals claim they have been the victim of cyberattacks from China, while China has nothing but dry numbers of U.S. cyberattacks on China.
Another point of frustration was the Chinese government’s silence or lack of coherent response to the U.S. allegations of Chinese state-sponsored cyberattacks. This seems to be changing slowly. In 2020, the Foreign Ministry had renounced the U.S. as a “hacker empire.” The recent media briefings of the ministry have highlighted the reports released by Chinese security companies, and the state-sponsored propaganda machinery is also doing the same.
Moreover, the Foreign Ministry is also releasing the separate remarks for its spokesperson on U.S. cyberattacks. The ministry has released separate spokesperson’s remarks highlighting the findings from all three reports by Qihoo 360, the report from the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team (CNCERT), and the report from Qi An Pangu Lab, respectively. This is Beijing’s new strategy for responding to Washington.
China’s messaging is not aimed only at the U.S., however, but at a broader global audience. Leveraging such reports, Beijing is highlighting that the United States’ cyberattacks threaten even U.S. allies. This was evident from Wang Wenbin’s statement on March 24, where he emphasized: “As we can see from exposed operations such as ‘Dirtbox’, ‘PRISM’, ‘Irritant Horn’ and ‘Telescreen’, the US doesn’t even spare its allies and partners in its global cyber-surveillance and attacks.”
Moreover, the Pangu Lab report was available in Mandarin and English, listing all the other countries NSA has allegedly penetrated. This list included targets from India, the U.K., Australia, Japan, and many other countries, thus highlighting that U.S. partners were also victims of malicious cyber activities.
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As both countries lock horns on a range of issues from technology to diplomacy, such narrative-building efforts are likely to intensify further. Until now, Chinese malicious activities in cyberspace have received the bulk of the attention. Now Beijing is attempting to balance the scale.
26. US deployment of missiles to Philippines would be dangerous
But it would seem a logical location. Think of the dispersion we could have over 7000 islands (yes that is an exaggeration as not all those 7000 are viable locations).
But there will be huge political problems in whatever country we ask to base missiles.
US deployment of missiles to Philippines would be dangerous
The Philippines must avoid becoming a political pawn in the US-China ‘great game’
In August 2019, then-US defense secretary Mark Esper said he wanted to deploy ground-launched, intermediate-range (620-3,420 miles) missiles in Asia relatively soon as a contingency to counter the China threat. These missiles can be used for both defensive and offensive purposes and would bring China’s mainland within range in the event of hostilities.
So far the US has had no takers foolish enough to risk becoming a Chinese target in a war. But now retired Philippine Supreme Court justice Antonio Carpio apparently advocates just that for his country.
He has proposed that the Philippines allow its former colonial master to pre-position weapons in the Philippines to “repel invasion” by China. Presumably this includes intermediate-range missiles. When asked, Carpio was not concerned that his proposal might be “too extreme” and that if implemented could risk damaging relations with China.
Carpio is a distinguished expert on law. But he apparently thinks international law exists in a political vacuum. This is quaint and laudable but it clashes with reality. As the late legal scholar Myres McDougal supposedly quipped, international law is the arms of politics.
When Carpio ventures into foreign policy – as he frequently does – he embarrasses himself. Accepting the placement of US intermediate-range missiles would make it again a puppet of the Americans and damage its conceptual independence. Indeed, it smacks of neocolonialism.
Colonial legacy
The Philippines and Filipinos have a long, sad and sordid history of being colonized physically and ideationally, first by Spain and then by the United States. The US colonization was more sinister and insidious because it Americanized generations through its imposed education system and its indoctrination of elites.
The legacy of American colonialism is still very apparent in the Philippines. Its constitution recognizes English as an official language and its education system is modeled on and oriented toward the US.
Particularly galling is the continuing condescending treatment of Filipinos, especially women, by the US military and American “tourists” and diplomats. Indeed, the US succeeded in creating an Americanophile political and military elite that remains influential to this day – as evidenced by Carpio and his cohorts.
The presence of US forces in the Philippines has long contributed to America’s hegemony in Southeast Asia. But it has always been controversial.
In 1947, the two countries signed the US Military Bases Agreement that allowed the US to establish and operate air and naval bases there. In 1951 the two agreed to a Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT).
But in 1991 the Philippine Senate declined to renew the bases agreement, and most US forces left the country. However, the two continued to have military cooperation under the neocolonialist 1999 Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA).
That onerous agreement allows the US government to retain jurisdiction over US military personnel accused of committing crimes in the Philippines, unless the crimes are “of particular importance to the Philippines.”
In 2014, then-president Benigno Aquino signed a supplement to the VFA, the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), which allows a rotational presence of US troops and assets at Philippine military bases. Reminiscent of colonial rule, under EDCA it is not even clear that the Philippines would even have access to the US occupied military portion of its own territory.
In recent years the MDT and the VFA/EDCA have become key to US military strategy to maintain its dominance in the region in the face of China’s growing challenge. Indeed, the Philippines is geographically integral to the US strategy of controlling the first island chain and encircling China. It also needs bases or “places” there to provide in-theater support for its fleet operations in the South China Sea, including – it hopes – intermediate-range missiles.
But Rodrigo Duterte, who was elected in a 2016 landslide, threatened to withdraw from the MDT. He has also threatened to withdraw from the VFA and has delayed implementation of the EDCA.
Duterte tried to undo his people’s colonial attitude. As he put it, the Philippines is a “sovereign state, and we have long ceased to be a colony.”
His foreign minister, the late Perfecto Yasay Jr, explained the view of the Philippine leadership at that time: “The United States held on to invisible chains that reined us in towards dependence and submission as little brown brothers not capable of true independence and freedom.”
But US and Filipino Americanophiles’ opposition to what they view as Duterte’s pro-China policies has become palpable. A successor to Duterte will be chosen in next month’s elections and the US obviously has major security interests in the outcome.
Indeed, the MDT, the renewal of the VFA/EDCA and the Philippines-China relationship have become election campaign issues. History tells us that US interference in Philippine politics cannot be ruled out.
This is the political context of Carpio’s appeal to allow the US to deploy weapons in the Philippines. It seems that Carpio and his like-minded cohorts are still suffering from a colonial mindset.
Duterte remains hugely popular with his people. He has stood up to the US, and it will be very difficult if not impossible to put the genie of nationalism back in the bottle. He believes he has been freeing his country and people from the ideational and political shackles of America’s neocolonialism.
But there are also solid contemporary reasons for what Duterte has been doing. He thinks American power in the region is waning and that China’s is rising. He is unsure if America will back up the Philippines in a conflict with China. He also believes that the Philippines will have to live with and get along with China for the long term.
‘Victory’ at The Hague
In 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled in favor of the Philippines in a dispute with Beijing over possession of the South China Sea. Duterte apparently foresaw the dire consequences of immediately pressing the issue and decided that the real costs to the Philippines and its people would far outweigh the more theoretical benefits of national pride. So he decided to seek a temporary compromise.
Indeed, Duterte and his like-minded supporters saw the situation as requiring deft hedging and the art of delay until a time more ripe for resolution of the issue within existing international law. They do not see the need for immediate and overt action. They know that the arbitration panel’s ruling is now part of international law and is not likely to change easily or quickly.
So for the time being, Duterte is trying to negotiate shared access to maritime resources. The result so far has been continued access to the fisheries for Filipino fishermen and the possibility of “joint development” of any oil and gas. More important, Philippine-China relations, including economic relations, remain good.
The alternative to Duterte’s policy, trying to implement the arbitration decision, would likely have resulted in no access to the Philippines’ own resources and crippling economic, political and even military retribution by China. With this view, becoming more politically and militarily neutral is understandable.
But now Carpio’s pro-US advocacy plays right into its strategic playbook. Basically he seems willing to sacrifice Philippine ideational independence to enable America’s anti-China strategy. Much worse, it would not only make the Philippines and its people indefinitely beholden to its former colonial master for its defense but would make them a target for China in the outbreak of armed hostilities.
Carpio cites the tragedy of Ukraine as a warning that the Philippines might be invaded by China. The situation is not analogous. The Philippines is not Ukraine. It does not share a land border with China, making an invasion logistically difficult. It is an ally of the US, which should by itself serve as a deterrent – without the deployment of missiles and other weapons.
Moreover, unlike Russia in Ukraine, China has as valid – or invalid – claims to South China Sea high-tide features like Scarborough Shoal as the Philippines does.
The realist lesson the Philippines should learn from the tragedy of Ukraine is that it must maintain its neutrality between the US and China. Otherwise it may become a political pawn in the US-China “great game.”
The Carpio-supported arbitration was a legal success. But the move lacked political foresight, and the result has been a political disaster with ever increasing negative blowback for the Philippines.
Carpio should stick to law and leave international relations to those experienced in and responsible for them.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
