Quotes of the Day:

“The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.” 

- Baruch Spinoza

And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.

- John Steinbeck, “The Grapes of Wrath”

"Simplicity is the glory of expression"

- Walt Whitman

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 6, 2023

2. U.S. had intelligence of detailed Ukrainian plan to attack Nord Stream pipeline

3. US, Japanese, Philippine coast guard ships stage drills

4. House Armed Services chair wants China spending bill, less Ukraine aid

5. Opinion | D-Day dawns for Ukraine

6. Nazi Symbols on Ukraine’s Front Lines Highlight Thorny Issues of History

7. We’re WEIRD and Our Adversaries Know It: Psychological Biases Leave the United States Vulnerable to Cognitive Domain Operations

8. The 82nd Airborne Division just announced its newest unit. Here's what it will do

9. How the West Can Secure Ukraine’s Future

10. Why the UN Still Matters

11. Maybe the Ukrainians blew up the Kakhovka Dam?

12. Navy SEAL training commander says no one person accountable after candidate death

13. Revising Public-Private Collaboration to Protect U.S. Critical Infrastructure

14. Opinion | An Endgame for Ukraine

15. Special Forces Association Convention 2023 | SOF News

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 6, 2023

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

Key Takeaways

• Damage to the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant (KHPP) dam in the early hours of June 6 caused massive flooding of the Dnipro River delta, river wetlands, estuaries, and shoreline settlements in Kherson Oblast.
• The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Ukrainian officials stated that the drop in the water level at the Kakhovka Reservoir should not affect the safety of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP).
• Ukrainian officials stated that Russian forces intentionally destroyed the KHPP dam and suggested that the Russian military did not prepare for subsequent flooding.
• Russian officials accused Ukrainian forces of destroying the KHPP dam and used the allegations to bolster ongoing efforts to portray Ukrainian assaults elsewhere in Ukraine as immediate failures.
• ISW has not yet observed clear evidence of what transpired at the KHPP on June 6 and is therefore unable to offer an independent assessment of responsibility at the time of this publication.
• Russian forces conducted another large-scale missile strike across Ukraine on the night of June 5-6.
• Russian sources claimed that the pro-Ukrainian all-Russian Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK) and the Freedom of Russian Legion (LSR) are gone from a border settlement in Belgorod Oblast as of June 6.
• Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin continued to directly threaten the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) and the Russian military command if they do not fulfill his demands for a larger independent army and political influence in Russia.
• Ukrainian officials offered assurances that the damage to the dam and subsequent flooding will not impede Ukrainian counteroffensive preparations.
• Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks along the Svatove-Kreminna line.
• Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued ground attacks north and southwest of Bakhmut, and Russian forces continued limited offensive operations along the Avdiivka-Donetsk line.
• Ukrainian forces continued ground attacks in southwestern Donetsk and in eastern Zaporizhia oblasts.
• Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin claimed that the Russian 72nd Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade is part of the irregular 6th Division.
• Russian officials and occupation authorities continue efforts to use infrastructure projects to integrate occupied territories into Russia.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JUNE 6, 2023

Jun 6, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 6, 2023

Karolina Hird, Riley Bailey, Kateryna Stepanenko, Nicole Wolkov, George Barros, and Fredrick W. Kagan

June 6, 2023, 8:30 pm ET

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

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

Note: The data cutoff for this product was 3pm ET on June 6. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the June 7 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Damage to the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant (KHPP) dam in the early hours of June 6 caused massive flooding of the Dnipro River delta, river wetlands, estuaries, and shoreline settlements in Kherson Oblast. Russian and Ukrainian sources began reporting loud noises resembling explosions emanating from the KHPP (across the Dnipro River in the Nova Kakhovka area about 55km northeast of Kherson City) between 0200 and 0230 local time on June 6, followed by reports of rushing water and an overall increase in the water level of the Dnipro.[1] Ukraine’s Kherson Oblast Administration announced the evacuation of several raions (districts) of the west (right) bank of Kherson Oblast as of 0730 local time and reported that the Tyahinka, Odradokamianka, Beryslav, Ivanivka, Mykilske, Tokarivka, Ponyativka, Bilozerka, and Ostriv areas had been partially or completely flooded.[2] Russian Kherson Oblast occupation officials announced the evacuation of the Nova Kakhovka, Hola Prystan, and Oleshky raions.[3] Ukrainian officials noted that over 80 settlements are within the flood zone in Kherson Oblast.[4] General Director of Ukraine’s hydroelectric power plant regulator Ukrhydroenergo Ihor Syrota said that water is draining from the Kakhovka Reservoir at a rate of 15-20cm an hour, which Syrota stated means that the reservoir will be entirely dry in the next four days.[5] A researcher at the Ukrainian Department of Water Bioresources at the Kherson Oblast Agrarian and Economic University, Yevhen Korzhov, noted that the rate of water discharge from the dam may lead to flooding as far downstream as Kizomys, about 120km southwest from the KHPP.[6] A Russian milblogger claimed that the water level in Nova Kakhovka, immediately adjacent to the KHPP, reached as high as 11m.[7] Various Russian sources additionally highlighted footage showing that several east (left) bank settlements, including Oleshky, Korsunka, and Dnipryany, are entirely or nearly entirely underwater.[8]

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Ukrainian officials stated that the drop in the water level at the Kakhovka Reservoir should not affect the safety of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP). IAEA Director Rafael Grossi reported that the drop in the water level at the Kakhovka Reservoir poses “no immediate risk to the safety of the plant” and that IAEA personnel at the ZNPP are closely monitoring the situation.[9] Grossi stated that the ZNPP is pumping water into its cooling channels and related systems, and that the large cooling pond next to the ZNPP will be ”sufficient to provide water for cooling for some months.”[10] Ukrainian nuclear energy operator Energoatom’s President Petro Kotin stated that the fall in the water level at the Kakhovka Reservoir does not directly impact the water level in the ZNPP cooling pond and noted that the ZNPP pool basins are still at the same water level.[11] Ukrainian Chief Inspector for Nuclear and Radiation Safety Oleh Korikov stated that the decrease in water level at the Kakhovka Reservoir will not affect the condition of the ZNPP provided that ZNPP personnel implement established safety measures.[12]

Ukrainian officials stated that Russian forces intentionally destroyed the KHPP dam and suggested that the Russian military did not prepare for subsequent flooding. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated that Ukrainian intelligence indicates that Russian forces conducted an intentional premediated explosion at the dam but did so in a “chaotic” manner that allowed Russian military equipment to be flooded downstream.[13] Zelensky added that the only way to destroy the dam is through mining and emphasized that Russian forces have now occupied the dam for over a year.[14] The Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) stated that Russian forces mined the dam shortly after its capture early in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and later planted additional mines on the locks and supports of the dam in April 2022.[15] Ukhrhydroenergo stated that Russian forces destroyed the KHPP dam by detonating an explosive within the KHPP engine room.[16] The Ukrainian Resistance Center amplified reporting from the Crimean-based Ukrainian Atesh partisan movement alleging that the Russian 1st Battalion of the 205th Motorized Rifle Brigade (49thCombined Arms Army, Southern Military District) was responsible for the detonation at the KHPP dam.[17] Other Ukrainian officials accused Russia of intentionally destroying the dam out of concerns about potential Ukrainian advances and counterattacks.[18] Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Natalia Humenyuk stated that Russian forces are having to evacuate their forces on the east (left) bank of the Dnipro River because subsequent flooding has disproportionately impacted the Russian-occupied bank of the river.[19] Footage published on June 6 purports to show Russian forces withdrawing from flooded positions, suggesting that these forces were not prepared for the flooding that resulted from the destruction of the KHPP dam.[20]

Russian officials accused Ukrainian forces of destroying the KHPP dam and used the allegations to bolster ongoing efforts to portray Ukrainian assaults elsewhere in Ukraine as immediate failures. Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated that Ukrainian forces conducted a sabotage attack at the KHPP dam because “Ukrainian armed forces are not achieving their goals” in large-scale offensive operations.[21] This explanation is implausible because Ukrainian forces have not yet conducted large-scale offensive operations. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu claimed that Ukrainian forces intend to send forces from the Kherson direction to support ”failing” offensive operations elsewhere and thus destroyed the dam to disrupt Russian forces‘ ability to take advantage of weakened Ukrainian defenses on the west (right) bank of Kherson Oblast.[22] This explanation is also implausible because the limited Russian forces on the east (left) bank of the river pose no meaningful threat to the west (right) bank that would require extensive Ukrainian forces to defend against. Russian officials appear to be increasingly trying to immediately characterize Ukrainian offensive efforts as failures and have likely decided to use their accusations against Ukraine concerning the KHPP dam to bolster this informational effort. Shoigu also claimed on June 6 that Russian forces - specifically elements of the Eastern Military District’s (EMD) 433rd Motorized Rifle Regiment of the 127th Motorized Rifle Division (5th Combined Arms Army), the 37th Separate Guards Motorized Rifle Brigade (36th Combined Arms Army), and the 60th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade (5th Combined Arms Army) - repelled Ukrainian offensives in five different directions in the last three days.[23] Shoigu preposterously claimed that Russian forces have killed and wounded 3,175 Ukrainian servicemembers and destroyed 205 armored combat vehicles and 52 tanks in the previous three days of fighting in Ukraine.[24] Russian sources have previously attempted to paint Ukrainian counteroffensive actions as immediate failures and Russian sources are likely attempting to do the same with what they view as the start of the announced Ukrainian counteroffensive.[25]

ISW has not yet observed clear evidence of what transpired at the KHPP on June 6 and is therefore unable to offer an independent assessment of responsibility at the time of this publication. White House spokesperson John Kirby noted that the US still cannot say conclusively what caused the destruction of the dam but is assessing reports that “the blast was caused by Russia.”[26] NBC additionally reported that the US has intelligence indicating Russia’s responsibility for the dam’s destruction but is currently working to declassify relevant information.[27] Various European officials made statements indicating that they believe Russia is involved and underlining the resulting humanitarian impacts of the flooding.[28]

Statements by US and European officials are generally consistent with ISW’s October 2022 forecast that the Russians have a greater and clearer interest in flooding the lower Dnipro despite the damage to their own prepared defensive positions and forces than the Ukrainians.[29] ISW previously assessed on October 21, 2022, that Ukraine has no material interest in blowing the dam and pointed out that 80 settlements would risk flooding.[30] Ukrainian officials confirmed on June 6, 2023, that 80 settlements risk flooding as a result of the damage.[31] ISW further assessed that by contrast, Russia may use the flooding to widen the Dnipro River and complicate Ukrainian counteroffensive attempts across the already-challenging water feature.[32] Russian sources have expressed intense and explicit concern over the possibility that Ukraine has been preparing to cross the river and counterattack into east bank Kherson Oblast.[33] Available footage from June 6, corroborated by claims made by Russian milbloggers, suggests that the flooding washed away Ukrainian positions near the Dnipro shoreline and forced Ukrainian formations to evacuate while under Russian artillery fire.[34]

Ukrainian officials acknowledged that Russian formations and positions on the east bank may have been caught off guard and threatened by the flooding due to the topography of the area, some Ukrainian officials suggested that this was a result of the chaotic handling of the intentional detonation of the dam by Russian forces.[35] Some Russian sources indicated that the damage to the dam could threaten the water supply to occupied Crimea, but ISW previously noted that Crimea survived without water from the Dnipro River in the years between Russia‘s initial illegal annexation in 2014 and when water access was restored following the 2022 full-scale invasion.[36] There is also the possibility, of course, that pre-existing structural damage to the dam eventually caused breakage and flooding, as some sources have additionally suggested, although reports of noises like explosions are not necessarily consistent with this notion.[37] ISW cannot offer a definitive assessment of responsibility for the June 6 incident at this time but finds that the balance of evidence, reasoning, and rhetoric suggests that the Russians deliberately damaged the dam.

Ukrainian officials offered assurances that the damage to the dam and subsequent flooding will not impede Ukrainian counteroffensive preparations. Zelensky emphasized that the “detonation of the dam did not affect Ukraine’s ability to de-occupy its own territories.”[38] Ukrainian Joint Forces Commander Lieutenant General Serhiy Nayev noted that the Ukrainian command has already taken into account Russia’s propensity for ”insidious actions” and that as a result any potential planned counteroffensive actions will not be impacted in areas where there is flooding.[39] It is additionally noteworthy that the areas of the theater that are impacted by the flooding (those within a 120km flood radius between Nova Kakhovka and Kizomys) are geographically very far removed from areas of the frontline where ISW has observed recent combat activity in the past few days.[40] The flooding of the lower Dnipro will not likely have any impact on the areas that have seen active fighting recently.

Russian forces conducted another large-scale missile strike across Ukraine on the night of June 5-6. Ukrainian military sources reported that Russian forces launched 35 Kh-101/555 cruise missiles from six Tu-95 bombers over the Caspian Sea and that Ukrainian air defense shot down all 35 missiles.[41] The Ukrainian General Staff also reported that Russian forces targeted Kharkiv City with S-300 surface-to-air missiles.[42] Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Natalia Humenyuk noted that the fact that Russia only launched Kh-101/555-type missiles and returned all sea-based Kalibr missile carriers to their base points before the strike may suggest that Russia is running out of Kalibrs to launch.[43] Humenyuk’s comments are consistent with periodic Ukrainian tallies of the numbers of Kalibrs remaining and Russia’s capacity to produce them. [44] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian aerospace forces conducted the strike with long-range air-launched missiles against Ukrainian ”decision-making centers” and struck all intended targets.[45] The UK MoD reported on June 5 that Russian forces have recently heavily relied on Iranian drones to try to attrit Ukrainian air defense missile capabilities, but the fact that Ukraine is still managing to employ air defense systems against cruise missiles to such high effect suggests that these Russian efforts have been largely unsuccessful.[46]

Russian sources claimed that the pro-Ukrainian all-Russian Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK) and the Freedom of Russian Legion (LSR) are gone from a border settlement in Belgorod Oblast as of June 6. Russian sources published footage of Russian forces stating that they are in control of Novaya Tavolzhanka (a small village about 3km from the Kharkiv-Belgorod Oblast border) and that RDK and LSR elements are no longer present in the settlement.[47] The Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported that a senior Russian officer of the Belgorod Operational Group, Colonel Andrey Stesev, was killed in action in Novaya Tavolzhanka overnight on June 4-5.[48] The Freedom of Russia Legion (LSR) claimed on June 6 that its forces killed Stesev.[49]

Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin continued to directly threaten the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) and the Russian military command if they do not fulfill his demands for a larger independent army and political influence in Russia. Prigozhin threatened on June 5 that Wagner forces will “go to Belgorod” without explicit permission from the Russian MoD if the Russian military command does not “liberate” Belgorod Oblast border areas from various all-Russian pro-Ukrainian groups operating on Russian soil and improve the situation in Shebekino (a settlement 6km from the international border).[50] Prigozhin presented letters that he reportedly received from Shebekino residents who complained that the Russian military is neglecting their safety and called on Wagner to defend them. Prigozhin also sarcastically stated that the Russian MoD might be considering “using a nuclear weapon on their own territory” when discussing the Russian military command’s unwillingness to defend Belgorod Oblast as part of his attempt to exaggerate the Russian MoD’s disinterest in defending its own citizens. Prigozhin’s comments about such nuclear use, like much of his heavier sarcasm, were not meant to be taken literally. Prigozhin also reiterated that he had requested 200,000 troops and ammunition to seize Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, and this demand may be reflective of his efforts to blackmail the Kremlin into giving Wagner forces additional resources and expanding its influence over the Russian MoD. Prigozhin also noted that Russia will not be able to fix its long-standing military incompetency at this time without executing Russian military officials responsible for military failures in Ukraine – and noted that failure to do so might upset Russian society.

Key Takeaways

• Damage to the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant (KHPP) dam in the early hours of June 6 caused massive flooding of the Dnipro River delta, river wetlands, estuaries, and shoreline settlements in Kherson Oblast.
• The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Ukrainian officials stated that the drop in the water level at the Kakhovka Reservoir should not affect the safety of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP).
• Ukrainian officials stated that Russian forces intentionally destroyed the KHPP dam and suggested that the Russian military did not prepare for subsequent flooding.
• Russian officials accused Ukrainian forces of destroying the KHPP dam and used the allegations to bolster ongoing efforts to portray Ukrainian assaults elsewhere in Ukraine as immediate failures.
• ISW has not yet observed clear evidence of what transpired at the KHPP on June 6 and is therefore unable to offer an independent assessment of responsibility at the time of this publication.
• Russian forces conducted another large-scale missile strike across Ukraine on the night of June 5-6.
• Russian sources claimed that the pro-Ukrainian all-Russian Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK) and the Freedom of Russian Legion (LSR) are gone from a border settlement in Belgorod Oblast as of June 6.
• Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin continued to directly threaten the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) and the Russian military command if they do not fulfill his demands for a larger independent army and political influence in Russia.
• Ukrainian officials offered assurances that the damage to the dam and subsequent flooding will not impede Ukrainian counteroffensive preparations.
• Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks along the Svatove-Kreminna line.
• Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued ground attacks north and southwest of Bakhmut, and Russian forces continued limited offensive operations along the Avdiivka-Donetsk line.
• Ukrainian forces continued ground attacks in southwestern Donetsk and in eastern Zaporizhia oblasts.
• Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin claimed that the Russian 72nd Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade is part of the irregular 6th Division.
• Russian officials and occupation authorities continue efforts to use infrastructure projects to integrate occupied territories into Russia.

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

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

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

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

Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks along the Svatove-Kreminna line on June 6. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful ground attacks near Kreminna, Bilohorivka (10km south of Kreminna), and Berestove (30km south of Kreminna).[51] A Russian milblogger claimed that unspecified elements of the 6th Combined Arms Army (Western Military District) repelled Ukrainian attacks in the Kupyansk direction.[52]

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

Click here to read ISW’s retrospective analysis on the Battle for Bakhmut.

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued ground attacks north and southwest of Bakhmut. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that elements of the Southern Grouping of Forces (Southern Military District) repelled four Ukrainian assaults near Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut) and Berkhivka (6km north of Bakhmut).[53] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces entered Berkhivka and that fighting was ongoing in the settlement as of the afternoon of June 6.[54] Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin previously claimed on June 5 that Ukrainian forces had captured an unspecified part of Berkhivka.[55] Other Russian sources claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian assaults near Berkhivka and that Ukrainian assaults occurred at least two kilometers away from the settlement.[56] Another milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces advanced from Orikhovo-Vasylivka (11km northwest of Bakhmut) and captured elevated positions along the E-40 (Bakhmut to Slovyansk) highway.[57] Prigozhin also claimed that Russian forces lost unspecified positions near Rozdolivka (18km northeast of Bakhmut).[58] Russian milbloggers claimed that fierce fighting is ongoing on the southwestern outskirts of Bakhmut and that Ukrainian forces pushed Russian forces out of positions west of Klishchiivka.[59] A milblogger claimed that Russian Special Forces (Spetsnaz) units are attempting to prevent Ukrainian forces from making a breakthrough near Klishchiivka.[60] Another milblogger claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian assaults near Mayorsk (21km southwest of Bakhmut) and that fighting is ongoing near Ozaryanivka (16km southwest of Bakhmut).[61] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Klishchiivka and Ivanivske (6km west of Bakhmut).[62]

Russian forces continued limited offensive operations along the Avdiivka-Donetsk front on June 6 amid continued claims of Ukrainian counterattacks in the area. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Avdiivka, Sieverne (6km west of Avdiivka), Neveslke (13km southwest of Avdiivka), and Marinka (27km southwest of Avdiivka).[63] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled 12 Russian assaults in the Marinka area.[64] Ukrainian Tavriisk Defense Forces Spokesperson Captain Valeriy Shershen reported that Chechen forces replaced ”Storm Z” assault elements in the Marinka area roughly a week ago and have since lost their initial enthusiasm for offensive operations after encountering heavy Ukrainian resistance in the area.[65] Shershen reported that Chechen Russian National Guard (Rosgvardia) forces are attacking one flank in the Marinka area while regular Russian forces attack another.[66] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces continued probing Russian positions near Vodyane (8km southwest of Avdiivka) and advanced near Nevelske.[67]

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

Ukrainian forces continued ground attacks in southwestern Donetsk and in eastern Zaporizhia oblasts on June 6. A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger reported that Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in the area of Novodarivka (15km southwest of Velyka Novosilka), Rivnopil (11km southwest of Velyka Novosilka), and Neskuchne (2km south of Velyka Novosilka).[68] Russian “Vostok“ volunteer battalion commander Alexander Khodakovsky claimed that Russian forces recaptured Novodonetske (12km southeast of Velyka Novosilka) on June 6 after Ukrainian forces nearly liberated the entire settlement on June 5.[69] Russian milbloggers later claimed that Ukrainian forces regained positions on the northern outskirts of Novodonetske.[70] Some milbloggers claimed that Russian forces have not yet recaptured Neskuchne and that Ukrainian forces established a foothold in the area of Novodarivka.[71] A Russian source also claimed that Ukrainian forces unsuccessfully attempted to conduct offensive operations on the northern outskirts of Urozhaine (9km south of Velyka Novosilka).[72] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces unsuccessfully attacked in the direction of Novosilka (10km west of Velyka Novosilka).[73] Ukrainian Defense Forces Tavriisk Direction Spokesperson Captain Valeriy Shershen stated that Russian forces are continuing defensive operations in the Novopavlivka and Orikhiv operational directions in Zaporizhia and western Donetsk oblasts.[74]

Ukrainian Mariupol Mayoral Advisor Petro Andryushenko published footage on June 6 showing smoke plumes in Mariupol.[75]

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

Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin claimed that the Russian 72nd Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade is part of the irregular 6th Division. ISW previously reported that the 72nd Separate Motorized Rifle Division is part of the 3rd Army Corps, which suggests that the 6th Division is part of the 3rd Army Corps.[76] Prigozhin claimed that Wagner forces had helped conventional Russian personnel operating in the Lyman direction and blamed the 72nd Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade for abandoning Wagner forces’ flanks.[77] Prigozhin did not specify what timeframe he was referring to, but likely referenced Ukraine’s counteroffensive in Kharkiv in fall 2022 when Russian forces were routed. ISW previously reported that the Russian military is likely attempting to introduce doctrinal organization to improve command and control over irregular forces by using division-level organizations, such as the 6th Division.[78]

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

Russian officials and occupation authorities continue efforts to use infrastructure projects to integrate occupied territories into Russia. Kherson Oblast Occupation Administration Head Vladimir Saldo met with Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak on June 5 to discuss the development of energy systems aimed at providing gas to the east (left) bank of Kherson Oblast since the energy flow comes from Russian-occupied Crimea instead of Ukrainian-controlled territory.[79] ISW has previously reported on Russian attempts to use infrastructure projects to integrate occupied territories into Russia.[80] This announcement, of course, predated the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam.

Significant activity in Belarus (ISW assesses that a Russian or Belarusian attack into northern Ukraine is extraordinarily unlikely).

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

The Belarusian Ministry of Defense (MoD) announced on June 6 that representatives of the armed forces of Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) member states as well as the CSTO Joint Staff and secretariat will meet in Brest Oblast from June 6 to June 8 to discuss organizing several joint CSTO military exercises in 2023.[81]

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

2. U.S. had intelligence of detailed Ukrainian plan to attack Nord Stream pipeline

The Discord Leaks is a gift that seems to keep on giving.

U.S. had intelligence of detailed Ukrainian plan to attack Nord Stream pipeline

THE DISCORD LEAKS | The CIA learned last June, via a European spy agency, that a six-person team of Ukrainian special operations forces intended to sabotage the Russia-to-Germany natural gas project

By Shane Harris and Souad Mekhennet

June 6, 2023 at 10:52 a.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Shane Harris · June 6, 2023

Three months before saboteurs bombed the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline, the Biden administration learned from a close ally that the Ukrainian military had planned a covert attack on the undersea network, using a small team of divers who reported directly to the commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces.

Details about the plan, which have not been previously reported, were collected by a European intelligence service and shared with the CIA in June 2022. They provide some of the most specific evidence to date linking the government of Ukraine to the eventual attack in the Baltic Sea, which U.S. and Western officials have called a brazen and dangerous act of sabotage on Europe’s energy infrastructure.

The European intelligence report was shared on the chat platform Discord, allegedly by Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira. The Washington Post obtained a copy from one of Teixeira’s online friends.

The intelligence report was based on information obtained from an individual in Ukraine. The source’s information could not immediately be corroborated, but the CIA shared the report with Germany and other European countries last June, according to multiple officials familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence operations and diplomatic discussions.

The Discord Leaks

Dozens of highly classified documents have been leaked online, revealing sensitive information intended for senior military and intelligence leaders. In an exclusive investigation, The Post also reviewed scores of additional secret documents, most of which have not been made public.

Who leaked the documents? Jack Teixeira, a young member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, was charged in the investigation into leaks of hundreds of pages of classified military intelligence. The Post reported that the individual who leaked the information shared documents with a small circle of online friends on the Discord chat platform.

What do the leaked documents reveal about Ukraine? The documents reveal profound concerns about the war’s trajectory and Kyiv’s capacity to wage a successful offensive against Russian forces. According to a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment among the leaked documents, “Negotiations to end the conflict are unlikely during 2023.”

What else do they show? The files include summaries of human intelligence on high-level conversations between world leaders, as well as information about advanced satellite technology the United States uses to spy. They also include intelligence on both allies and adversaries, including Iran and North Korea, as well as Britain, Canada, South Korea and Israel.

What happens now? The leak has far-reaching implications for the United States and its allies. In addition to the Justice Department investigation, officials in several countries said they were assessing the damage from the leaks.

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The highly specific details, which include numbers of operatives and methods of attack, show that for nearly a year, Western allies have had a basis to suspect Kyiv in the sabotage. That assessment has only strengthened in recent months as German law enforcement investigators uncovered evidence about the bombing that bears striking similarities to what the European service said Ukraine was planning.

Officials in multiple countries confirmed that the intelligence summary posted on Discord accurately stated what the European service told the CIA. The Post agreed to withhold the name of the European country as well as some aspects of the suspected plan at the request of government officials, who said exposing the information would threaten sources and operations.

Ukrainian officials, who have previously denied the country was involved in the Nord Stream attack, did not respond to requests for comment.

The White House declined to comment on a detailed set of questions about the European report and the alleged Ukrainian military plot, including whether U.S. officials tried to stop the mission from proceeding.

The CIA also declined to comment.

On Sept. 26, three underwater explosions caused massive leaks on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, leaving only one of the four gas links in the network intact. Some Biden administration officials initially suggested that Russia was to blame for what President Biden called “a deliberate act of sabotage,” promising that the United States would work with its allies “to get to the bottom of exactly what ... happened.” With winter approaching, it appeared the Kremlin might have intended to strangle the flow of energy, an act of “blackmail,” some leaders said, designed to intimidate European countries into withdrawing their financial and military support for Ukraine, and refraining from further sanctions.

Biden administration officials now privately concede there is no evidence that conclusively points to Moscow’s involvement. But publicly they have deflected questions about who might be responsible. European officials in several countries have quietly suggested that Ukraine was behind the attack but have resisted publicly saying so over fears that blaming Kyiv could fracture the alliance against Russia. At gatherings of European and NATO policymakers, officials have settled into a rhythm; as one senior European diplomat said recently, “Don’t talk about Nord Stream.”

The European intelligence made clear that the would-be attackers were not rogue operatives. All those involved reported directly to Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s highest-ranking military officer, who was put in charge so that the nation’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, wouldn’t know about the operation, the intelligence report said.

Keeping Zelensky out of the loop would have given the Ukrainian leader a plausible way to deny involvement in an audacious attack on civilian infrastructure that could ignite public outrage and jeopardize Western support for Ukraine — particularly in Germany, which before the war got half its natural gas from Russia and had long championed the Nord Stream project in the face of opposition from other European allies.

While Gazprom, the Russian state-owned gas conglomerate, owns 51 percent of Nord Stream, Western energy companies, including from Germany, France and the Netherlands, are partners and invested billions in the pipelines. Ukraine had long complained that Nord Stream would allow Russia to bypass Ukrainian pipes, depriving Kyiv of huge transit revenue.

The intelligence summary says that the Ukrainian military operation was “put on hold,” for reasons that remain unclear. The Ukrainians had planned to attack the pipeline on the heels of a major allied naval exercise, known as BALTOPS, that ran from June 5 to 17, 2022, according to the report.

But according to German law enforcement officials investigating September’s Nord Stream bombing, key details emerging of that operation line up with the earlier plot.

For instance, the Ukrainian individual who informed the European intelligence service in June said that six members of Ukraine’s special operations forces using false identities intended to rent a boat and, using a submersible vehicle, dive to the floor of the Baltic Sea and then damage or destroy the pipeline and escape undetected. In addition to oxygen, the team planned to bring helium, which is recommended for especially deep dives.

German investigators now believe that six individuals using fake passports rented a sailing yacht in September, embarked from Germany and planted explosives that severed the pipelines, according to officials familiar with that investigation. They believe the operatives were skilled divers, given that the explosives were planted at a depth of about 240 feet, in the range that experts say helium would be helpful for maintaining mental focus.

Investigators have matched explosive residue found on the pipeline to traces found inside the cabin of the yacht, called Andromeda. And they have linked Ukrainian individuals to the rental of the boat via an apparent front company in Poland. Investigators also suspect that at least one individual who serves in the Ukrainian military was involved in the sabotage operation.

A collaboration of German media organizations previously reported the suspected involvement of the Ukrainian military service member.

The June plot differs from the September attack in some respects. The European intelligence report notes that the Ukrainian operatives planned to attack the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, but it makes no mention of Nord Stream 2, a newer line. The intelligence report also says that the saboteurs would embark from a different location in Europe, not Warnemünde, a German port town on the Baltic, where the Andromeda was rented.

The CIA initially questioned the credibility of the information, in part because the source in Ukraine who provided the details had not yet established a track record of producing reliable information, according to officials familiar with the matter. The European service, a trusted U.S. partner, felt that the source was reliable.

But despite any reservations the CIA might have had, the agency communicated the June intelligence to counterparts in Germany and other European countries, officials said. The European service also shared it with Germany, one person said. German intelligence personnel briefed lawmakers in Berlin in late June before they left for their summer break, according to an official with knowledge of the closed-door presentation.

Officials familiar with the European report conceded that it is possible that the suspected Ukrainian plotters might have been apprised that the intelligence was shared with several countries and that they may have changed some elements of the plan.

But the report from the European intelligence service isn’t the only piece of evidence pointing to Kyiv’s role in the pipeline bombing.

The Post previously reported that governments investigating the explosions uncovered communications that showed pro-Ukrainian individuals or entities discussed the possibility of carrying out an attack on the Nord Stream pipelines. Those conversations took place before the attack, but were only discovered in its aftermath, when spy agencies scoured data for possible clues, a senior Western security official said.

Despite waiving Trump-era sanctions on the Russia-to-Germany natural gas pipeline as an attempt to mend fences with Berlin, the Biden administration had long harbored concerns about Nord Stream and did not shed tears over its September demise.

After months of pressure from Washington, the German government halted final authorization of Nord Stream 2 just days before Russian forces invaded Ukraine in February 2022, surprising many U.S. and European officials who had worried that Berlin would find Russia too important an energy source to sever ties. At the time of the attack, the pipeline was intact and had already been pumped full with 300 million cubic meters of natural gas to ready it for operations.

Nearly a month before the rupture, the Russian energy giant Gazprom stopped flows on Nord Stream 1, hours after the Group of Seven industrialized nations announced a forthcoming price cap on Russian oil, a move intended to put a dent in the Kremlin’s treasury.

Officials have said that the cost of repairing the pipelines would run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

While U.S. intelligence officials were initially skeptical of the European reporting, they have long been concerned about aggressive operations by Ukraine that could escalate the war into a direct conflict between Russia and the United States and its NATO allies.

In February of this year, on the eve of the war’s first anniversary, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency agreed, “at Washington’s request,” to postpone planned strikes on Moscow, according to another intelligence document leaked on Discord. That incident illustrated a broader tension that has existed throughout the war: Ukraine, eager to bring the fight to Russia’s home turf, is sometimes restrained by the United States.

Officials in Washington and Europe have admonished Ukraine for attacks outside its territory that they felt went too far. After a car bomb near Moscow in August killed Daria Dugina, in an attack that appeared intended for her father — a prominent Russian nationalist whose writing had helped shape a Kremlin narrative about Ukraine — Western officials said they made clear to Zelensky that they held operatives in his government responsible. The attack was seen as provocative and risked a severe Russian response, officials said.

Ukraine has persisted with strikes inside Russia, including drone strikes on an airfield and on targets in Moscow that U.S. officials have linked to Kyiv.

Samuel Oakford, Isabelle Khurshudyan, Michael Birnbaum and Greg Miller contributed to this report.

The Washington Post · by Shane Harris · June 6, 2023

3. US, Japanese, Philippine coast guard ships stage drills

Another variation of "trilateral cooperation."

US, Japanese, Philippine coast guard ships stage drills

militarytimes.com · by Aaron Favila · June 6, 2023

ABOARD BRP CABRA, Philippines — U.S., Japanese and Philippine coast guard ships staged law enforcement drills in waters near the disputed South China Sea on Tuesday as Washington presses efforts to reinforce alliances in Asia amid an increasingly tense rivalry with China.

Witnessed by journalists onboard a Philippine coast guard patrol boat, the BRP Cabra, the drills focused on a scenario involving the interdiction and boarding of a vessel suspected of carrying weapons of mass destruction off the Bataan Peninsula, Philippine coast guard spokesperson Commodore Armand Balilo said.

Shots rang out as heavily armed coast guard personnel rapidly boarded the vessel from a speedboat and herded the crew members toward the stern. A helicopter hovered as U.S. and Japanese coast guard ships helped rescue crew members who jumped off the target vessel during the mock assault.

“We are not just all display,” Philippine coast guard deputy spokesperson John Ybanez said. “All these exercises that we do will help us help each other in possible scenarios in the future.”

The U.S. Coast Guard deployed one of its most advanced cutters, the 418-foot (127-meter) Stratton, in the June 1-7 exercises hosted by the Philippines, Washington’s oldest treaty ally in Asia. The Stratton has been conducting exercises in the region to share expertise in search and rescue and law enforcement, the U.S. Coast Guard said.

“This first trilateral engagement between the coast guards of these nations will provide invaluable opportunities to strengthen global maritime governance though professional exchanges and combined operations,” the Stratton’s commanding officer, Capt. Brian Krautler, said at the start of the exercises. “Together we’ll demonstrate professional, rules-based standards of maritime operations with our steadfast partners to ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific.”

Japan deployed a large coast guard ship, the Akitsushima, while four Philippine coast guard vessels joined the exercises.

The Biden administration has been strengthening an arc of military alliances in the Indo-Pacific to better counter China, including in the South China Sea and in any future confrontation over Taiwan, the self-governing island which Beijing regards as a Chinese province.

Washington lays no claims to the strategic South China Sea, where China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysian, Taiwan and Brunei have been locked in tense territorial stand-offs for decades. But the U.S. says freedom of navigation and overflight and the peaceful resolution of disputes in the busy waterway are in its national interest.

Philippine officials say such joint exercises with U.S. forces do not target any country. But China has warned that increased U.S. security deployments in Asia target Beijing’s interests and undermine regional stability.

The U.S. Pacific Command said over the weekend that a U.S. guided-missile destroyer and a Canadian frigate were intercepted by a Chinese warship in the Taiwan Strait. The Chinese vessel overtook the American ship and veered across its bow at a distance of 150 yards (about 140 meters) in an “unsafe manner,” it said.

Last month, the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said a Chinese J-16 fighter aircraft flew directly in front of a U.S. Air Force RC-135 plane in an “an unnecessarily aggressive maneuver” while the American reconnaissance plane “was conducting safe and routine operations over the South China Sea in international airspace, in accordance with international law.”

In April, Japan adopted a new five-year ocean policy that calls for stronger maritime security, including bolstering its coast guard’s capability and cooperation with the military. It cited a list of threats, including repeated intrusions by Chinese coast guard ships into Japanese territorial waters.

The Philippine coast guard, meanwhile, has intensified patrols in the South China Sea and taken extra efforts to document and publicize assertive Chinese behavior in the waterway following a Feb. 6 incident in which a Chinese coast guard ship aimed a military-grade laser that briefly blinded some crew members on a Philippine patrol boat off a disputed reef.

Associated Press writer Jim Gomez in Manila contributed to this report.

4. House Armed Services chair wants China spending bill, less Ukraine aid

House Armed Services chair wants China spending bill, less Ukraine aid

Defense News · by Bryant Harris · June 6, 2023

WASHINGTON — The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee wants to pass a supplemental spending bill this year to address threats from China, he told reporters Tuesday, while also suggesting the next Ukraine aid package would come in “at a much smaller level” than before.

The proposition from Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., comes amid a flurry of proposals from defense hawks on Capitol Hill to bypass the $886 billion military spending top line laid out in the debt ceiling deal that President Joe Biden signed into law over the weekend. But House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., appeared to throw cold water on additional defense spending bills on Monday.

Rogers said once Congress completes work on the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act and defense appropriations bill, “then it’s time for us to look and see if we actually address China. If we did, fine. If we didn’t, we’ll go ahead and drop more funding. It’s all about China for me.”

The House was initially slated to mark up the FY24 defense authorization bill in May, but Republican leaders asked Rogers to postpone it amid the debt ceiling negotiations. That markup is now scheduled for later this month.

For his part, McCarthy resisted efforts to circumvent military spending caps in the debt ceiling bill, which locks in Biden’s proposed defense budget — a 3.3% increase over this fiscal year.

“What we really need to do, we need to get the efficiencies in the Pentagon,” McCarthy said, according to CNN. “Think about it, $886 billion. You don’t think there’s waste? They failed the last five audits. I consider myself a hawk, but I don’t want to waste money. So I think we’ve got to find efficiencies.”

In response, Rogers said McCarthy is “right.”

“It is premature to be talking about a supplemental right now, but we will need a supplemental later this year — for China specifically,” Rogers said.

Rogers, who previously hammered the Biden administration for refusing to deliver Ukraine certain weapons like long-range missiles, also struck a less bullish note on aid to the country currently fighting a Russian invasion.

“Based on how effective the counteroffensive is this summer, and if there is a ceasefire or some resolution by the end of September, I’ll probably have to revisit Ukraine then, at a much smaller level than anything we’ve done before,” Rogers told Defense News.

The Pentagon did not include additional Ukraine aid in its FY24 budget request, noting that it would request future aid packages through supplemental spending that Congress would have to approve. The Defense Department expects to run out of Ukraine aid funds by the end of the fiscal year in September.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jack Reed, D-R.I., last week floated the idea of adding additional Pentagon spending in the next Ukraine aid supplemental. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., endorsed additional supplemental spending packages Thursday on the Senate floor in order to ease concerns over the debt ceiling deal from defense hawks, primarily Republicans who argued the defense top line increase falls below the rate of inflation.

Further complicating matters, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has testified that the Pentagon is preparing a package to transfer weapons to Taiwan, but that he would require congressional appropriations to backfill U.S. military stockpiles.

However, the appetite for additional defense supplemental spending in the House — be that to counter China or to support Ukraine or Taiwan — remains unclear.

“Unless there is a willingness to increase domestic spending at the same time, we have a law that is a guide,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, told reporters Tuesday.

Still, DeLauro did not rule out additional Ukraine aid spending, noting she funded four supplementals for Kyiv last year as the top appropriator.

“I will wait to hear from [the Defense Department] about what we need for Ukraine,” DeLauro told Defense News.

Total defense spending for FY23 — which ends Sept. 30 — will come to $893 billion after accounting for $35.4 billion in emergency Ukraine aid. Total FY22 defense spending came to $794 billion after Congress allocated an additional $26 billion in Ukraine aid.

Rep. Betty McCollum of Minnesota, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee’s defense panel, has also supported Ukraine aid but voiced concern about whether the House could pass it given opposition from a vocal minority of Republican lawmakers.

“It’s a chaos caucus, so I don’t know if they’ll be able to bring it to the floor,” McCollum told Defense News.

About Bryant Harris

Bryant Harris is the Congress reporter for Defense News. He has covered U.S. foreign policy, national security, international affairs and politics in Washington since 2014. He has also written for Foreign Policy, Al-Monitor, Al Jazeera English and IPS News.

5. Opinion | D-Day dawns for Ukraine

What is the real assessment on Russian forces? Are they in significant disarray? Will such disarray be sufficient for Ukrainian victory?

Excerpts:aasss

Biden administration officials believe the offensive began on Monday with a Ukrainian thrust south along multiple axes. A major goal is to cut the land bridge across southeastern Ukraine that connects Russia with its occupation forces in Crimea, U.S. officials believe. Part of Ukraine’s strategy appears to be an attack along several lanes, so they can move forces among them to hit targets of greatest opportunity.

On the eve of the Ukrainian offensive, one notable development was the growing disarray of Russian forces. Yevgeniy Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner militia that did much of the fighting in Bakhmut, has been issuing almost daily tirades against the Russian army. He argued, for example, that its claims of routing Ukrainian forces this week in the Donetsk region were “simply wild and absurd science fiction.”

Opinion | D-Day dawns for Ukraine

The Washington Post · by David Ignatius · June 6, 2023

It was bracing that Ukraine launched its counteroffensive against Russian invaders as we celebrate the anniversary of the 1944 D-Day landings this week. This assault could turn the tide of the battle for Ukraine, just as the Allied assault on the Normandy beaches altered the trajectory of World War II.

Military campaigns are rarely all or nothing, but this one comes close. If Ukraine can drive back an already shaky Russian army, it stands a chance of forcing Moscow to bargain for an end of its failed invasion. But if Ukraine fails, it would be a bitter blow to the country’s weary population and could endanger continued support from some restless NATO members.

Biden administration officials believe the offensive began on Monday with a Ukrainian thrust south along multiple axes. A major goal is to cut the land bridge across southeastern Ukraine that connects Russia with its occupation forces in Crimea, U.S. officials believe. Part of Ukraine’s strategy appears to be an attack along several lanes, so they can move forces among them to hit targets of greatest opportunity.

Administration officials were encouraged by better-than-expected progress Monday, as Ukrainian units pushed through heavily mined areas to advance between five and 10 kilometers in some areas of the long front. That raised hopes that Ukrainian forces can keep thrusting toward Mariupol, Melitopol and other Russian-held places along the coast — severing the land bridge.

Tuesday brought a potentially devastating new trauma to the battle area — an apparent sabotage attack that burst the Kakhovka reservoir dam and sent a torrent down the Dnieper River toward occupied Crimea, which depends on the reservoir for much of its water supply. Russia and Ukraine traded blame for the attack, which NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg called “an outrageous act.”

It might take weeks before the results of the Ukrainian campaign are clear, but Kyiv has already succeeded in expanding the stalemated fighting in Bakhmut, the bitterly contested eastern city that was ground zero through the winter. This is now a campaign with multiple military and political fronts — and aftershocks that reach to Moscow, Beijing and Washington.

On the eve of the Ukrainian offensive, one notable development was the growing disarray of Russian forces. Yevgeniy Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner militia that did much of the fighting in Bakhmut, has been issuing almost daily tirades against the Russian army. He argued, for example, that its claims of routing Ukrainian forces this week in the Donetsk region were “simply wild and absurd science fiction.”

In a bizarre incident this week, Wagner fighters captured Russian Lt. Col. Roman Venevitin, after some of his soldiers allegedly fired on Wagner’s forces. The Moscow Times quoted Venevitin’s explanation: “I acted in a state of alcoholic intoxication out of personal animosity.”

The mystery has been why Vladimir Putin tolerates this growing disorder. Some experts view this passivity as characteristic. The Russian leader allowed Dmitry Medvedev to conduct foreign policy experiments Putin disliked while Medvedev was president from 2008 to 2012; he allowed subordinates to push a 2018 plan for pension reform, only to soften it when the public protested. Putin doesn’t like to get his hands dirty, it seems, even in the bloody Ukraine war he personally launched.

Ukraine’s willingness to gamble on its summer offensive is a measure of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s confidence, but also his need to show results. Such big wagers have mixed results in military history.

Historian Rick Atkinson, who is drafting the second volume of a trilogy about the Revolutionary War, points out that British Lt. Gen. John Burgoyne’s failure at Freeman’s Farm and Bemis Heights near the Hudson River in 1777 forced him to surrender, “in one of the decisive pivot points not only of the Revolution but in American history,” Atkinson explained in an email.

Atkinson recalled that the American commander, Major Gen. Horatio Gates, wrote about Burgoyne just before Freeman’s Farm: “It is evident the general designs to risk all upon one rash stroke.”

Similarly, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, sensing eventual defeat in a war of attrition, rolled the dice in 1863 with his massive offensive at Gettysburg. It, too, failed. German dictator Adolf Hitler sought to reverse defeat with his Ardennes offensive in December 1944, which led to the Battle of the Bulge. “Six weeks after it began, the offensive was in ruins and the Third Reich was doomed,” Atkinson noted in his message.

Against these failed breakouts, D-Day stands as a reminder that an army must sometimes take huge risks to position itself for eventual victory. Any visitor to Omaha Beach in Normandy will recall the steep cliffs at Pointe du Hoc that American Rangers had to scale to dislodge German forces. The grave markers for the soldiers who died on D-Day seem to stretch almost to the horizon. But they won the battle — and the war.

The Washington Post · by David Ignatius · June 6, 2023

6. Nazi Symbols on Ukraine’s Front Lines Highlight Thorny Issues of History

​Even the lowest ranking soldier or low level units can create strategic effects (positive and negative).

​

Nazi Symbols on Ukraine’s Front Lines Highlight Thorny Issues of History

The New York Times · by Thomas Gibbons-Neff · June 7, 2023

Troops’ use of patches bearing Nazi emblems risks fueling Russian propaganda and spreading imagery that the West has spent a half-century trying to eliminate.

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An image of a Ukrainian soldier wearing a patch containing the Totenkopf symbol, an example of Nazi iconography, that was posted on the Twitter account of Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, then deleted.Credit...Vlad Novak, via Ukraine MOD Twitter account

By

Published June 5, 2023Updated June 6, 2023

KYIV, Ukraine — Since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine last year, the Ukrainian government and NATO allies have posted, then quietly deleted, three seemingly innocuous photographs from their social media feeds: a soldier standing in a group, another resting in a trench and an emergency worker posing in front of a truck.

In each photograph, Ukrainians in uniform wore patches featuring symbols that were made notorious by Nazi Germany and have since become part of the iconography of far-right hate groups.

The photographs, and their deletions, highlight the Ukrainian military’s complicated relationship with Nazi imagery, a relationship forged under both Soviet and German occupation during World War II.

That relationship has become especially delicate because President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has falsely declared Ukraine to be a Nazi state, a claim he has used to justify his illegal invasion.

Ukraine has worked for years through legislation and military restructuring to contain a fringe far-right movement whose members proudly wear symbols steeped in Nazi history and espouse views hostile to leftists, L.G.B.T.Q. movements and ethnic minorities. But some members of these groups have been fighting Russia since the Kremlin illegally annexed part of the Crimea region of Ukraine in 2014 and are now part of the broader military structure. Some are regarded as national heroes, even as the far-right remains marginalized politically.

The iconography of these groups, including a skull-and-crossbones patch worn by concentration camp guards and a symbol known as the Black Sun, now appears with some regularity on the uniforms of soldiers fighting on the front line, including soldiers who say the imagery symbolizes Ukrainian sovereignty and pride, not Nazism.

In the short term, that threatens to reinforce Mr. Putin’s propaganda and give fuel to his false claims that Ukraine must be “de-Nazified” — a position that ignores the fact that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish. More broadly, Ukraine’s ambivalence about these symbols, and sometimes even its acceptance of them, risks giving new, mainstream life to icons that the West has spent more than a half-century trying to eliminate.

“What worries me, in the Ukrainian context, is that people in Ukraine who are in leadership positions, either they don’t or they’re not willing to acknowledge and understand how these symbols are viewed outside of Ukraine,” said Michael Colborne, a researcher at the investigative group Bellingcat who studies the international far right. “I think Ukrainians need to increasingly realize that these images undermine support for the country.”

In a statement, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said that, as a country that suffered greatly under German occupation, “We emphasize that Ukraine categorically condemns any manifestations of Nazism.”

So far, the imagery has not eroded international support for the war. It has, however, left diplomats, Western journalists and advocacy groups in a difficult position: Calling attention to the iconography risks playing into Russian propaganda. Saying nothing allows it to spread.

Even Jewish groups and anti-hate organizations that have traditionally called out hateful symbols have stayed largely silent. Privately, some leaders have worried about being seen as embracing Russian propaganda talking points.

Questions over how to interpret such symbols are as divisive as they are persistent, and not just in Ukraine. In the American South, some have insisted that today, the Confederate flag symbolizes pride, not its history of racism and secession. The swastika was an important Hindu symbol before it was co-opted by the Nazis.

In April, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry posted a photograph on its Twitter account of a soldier wearing a patch featuring a skull and crossbones known as the Totenkopf, or Death’s Head. The specific symbol in the picture was made notorious by a Nazi unit that committed war crimes and guarded concentration camps during World War II.

The patch in the photograph sets the Totenkopf atop a Ukrainian flag with a small No. 6 below. That patch is the official merchandise of Death in June, a British neo-folk band that the Southern Poverty Law Center has said produces “hate speech” that “exploits themes and images of fascism and Nazism.”

The Anti-Defamation League considers the Totenkopf “a common hate symbol.” But Jake Hyman, a spokesman for the group, said it was impossible to “make an inference about the wearer or the Ukrainian Army” based on the patch.

“The image, while offensive, is that of a musical band,” Mr. Hyman said.

The band now uses the photograph posted by the Ukrainian military to market the Totenkopf patch.

The New York Times asked the Ukrainian Defense Ministry on April 27 about the tweet. Several hours later, the post was deleted. “After studying this case, we came to the conclusion that this logo can be interpreted ambiguously,” the ministry said in a statement.

The soldier in the photograph was part of a volunteer unit called the Da Vinci Wolves, which started as part of the paramilitary wing of Ukraine’s Right Sector, a coalition of right-wing organizations and political parties that militarized after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea.

At least five other photographs on the Wolves’ Instagram and Facebook pages feature their soldiers wearing Nazi-style patches, including the Totenkopf.

NATO militaries, an alliance that Ukraine hopes to join, do not tolerate such patches. When such symbols have appeared, groups like the Anti-Defamation League have spoken out, and military leaders have reacted swiftly.

Last month, Ukraine’s state emergency services agency posted on Instagram a photograph of an emergency worker wearing a Black Sun symbol, also known as a Sonnenrad, that appeared in the castle of Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi general and SS director. The Black Sun is popular among neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

In March 2022, NATO’s Twitter account posted a photograph of a Ukrainian soldier wearing a similar patch.

A Ukrainian service member is wearing what appears to be a Black Sun on the chest of her uniform in this photograph published by the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on Feb. 14 and on the NATO Twitter account before being deleted.Credit...General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine

Both photographs were quickly removed.

In November, during a meeting with Times reporters near the front line, a Ukrainian press officer wore a Totenkopf variation made by a company called R3ICH (pronounced “Reich”). He said he did not believe the patch was affiliated with the Nazis. A second press officer present said other journalists had asked soldiers to remove the patch before taking photographs.

Ihor Kozlovskyi, a Ukrainian historian and religious scholar, said that the symbols had meanings that were unique to Ukraine and should be interpreted by how Ukrainians viewed them, not by how they had been used elsewhere.

“The symbol can live in any community or any history independently of how it is used in other parts of Earth,” Mr. Kozlovskyi said.

Russian soldiers in Ukraine have also been seen wearing Nazi-style patches, underscoring how complicated interpreting these symbols can be in a region steeped in Soviet and German history.

The Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with Germany in 1939, so it was caught by surprise two years later when the Nazis invaded Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union. Ukraine had suffered greatly under a Soviet government that engineered a famine that killed millions. Many Ukrainians initially viewed the Nazis as liberators.

Factions from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its insurgent army fought alongside the Nazis in what they viewed as a struggle for Ukrainian sovereignty. Members of those groups also took part in atrocities against Jewish and Polish civilians. Later in the war, though, some of the groups fought against the Nazis.

Some Ukrainians joined Nazi military units like the Waffen-SS Galizien. The emblem of the group, which was led by German officers, was a sky-blue patch showing a lion and three crowns. The unit took part in a massacre of hundreds of Polish civilians in 1944. In December, after a yearslong legal battle, Ukraine’s highest court ruled that a government-funded research institute could continue to list the unit’s insignia as excluded from the Nazi symbols banned under a 2015 law.

Today, as a new generation fights against Russian occupation, many Ukrainians see the war as a continuation of the struggle for independence during and immediately after World War II. Symbols like the flag associated with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Galizien patch have become emblems of anti-Russian resistance and national pride.

A Russian volunteer fighter for the Ukrainian Army, center, wearing a Galizien patch and another featuring a Totenkopf in southern Ukraine in 2022.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

That makes it difficult to easily separate, on the basis of icons alone, the Ukrainians enraged by the Russian invasion from those who support the country’s far-right groups.

Units like the Da Vinci Wolves, the better-known Azov regiment and others that began with far-right members have been folded into the Ukrainian military, and have been instrumental in defending Ukraine from Russian troops.

The Azov regiment was celebrated after holding out during the siege of the southern city of Mariupol last year. After the commander of the Da Vinci Wolves was killed in March, he received a hero’s funeral, which Mr. Zelensky attended.

“I think some of these far-right units mix a fair bit of their own mythmaking into the public discourse on them,” said Mr. Colborne, the researcher. “But I think the least that can and should be done everywhere, not just Ukraine, is not allowing the far right’s symbols, rhetoric and ideas to seep into public discourse.”

Kitty Bennett and Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

Thomas Gibbons-Neff is a Ukraine correspondent and a former Marine infantryman. @tmgneff

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Kyiv Walks Fine Line As Fighters Embrace Use of Nazi Symbols

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The New York Times · by Thomas Gibbons-Neff · June 7, 2023

7. We’re WEIRD and Our Adversaries Know It: Psychological Biases Leave the United States Vulnerable to Cognitive Domain Operations

The human domain should be ....well... a domain. Or you can call it the cognitive domain if you want. But what the hell - we are WEIRD. (western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) and we need to focus on the battlefield of human terrain.

Not just "US researchers and decisionmakers [need to] better understand the ways their friends and near-allies think and behave," but everyone who deals with our friends, partners, near-allies, and allies must better understand how they think about us and our "WEIRDness" - I would argue even our WEIRD allies do not think like WEIRD Americans and we should not make the assumption that they do.

Conclusion:

Lastly, researchers should take inventory of, and remedy, the gaps in psychology research about non-WEIRD populations, including allies and partners. If US researchers and decisionmakers better understand the ways their friends and near-allies think and behave, the US government can better leverage existing capacity-building programs to help them build defenses against the kind of existential undermining that adversaries are implementing across the globe. In the meantime, researchers might be able to lean on existing field data of humanities and social sciences scholars—such as sociolinguists, ethnographers and cultural anthropologists, and behavioral interviewers—to begin remedying this gap.

We’re WEIRD and Our Adversaries Know It: Psychological Biases Leave the United States Vulnerable to Cognitive Domain Operations - Irregular Warfare Initiative

irregularwarfare.org · by Julia M. McClenon · June 7, 2023

The US Department of Defense originated the concept of a cognitive warfare domain, but the United States is already well behind on defending against others’ cognitive operations and campaigns—let alone effectively countering them or conducting offensive activities. To succeed in the cognitive domain, one must understand the psychological weaknesses, patterns, behaviors, and motivations of the target population in order to effectively disrupt decision-making and other activities in one’s own favor—or at least, against the target’s interests. Not all societies are easy to understand, and by extension, target. Unfortunately, the United States is.

In recent decades, developments in the field of psychology have created a bias toward studying western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) populations—and particularly their college students—even though they are not representative of most of the global population. This bias leaves the United States and other psychologically similar nations significantly more vulnerable to targeted cognitive operations than their adversaries. In response, US researchers and decisionmakers must better understand and form defenses around their own population’s psychological weaknesses while simultaneously expanding the scope of psychology research to better defend non-WEIRD partners and allies and to counter non-WEIRD adversaries such as China.

Defining the Threat through an Adversary’s Eyes

To unpack the nature of the threat, we must first consider what the terms cognition and cognitive domain mean from the perspective of the people we are interacting with. Because China poses the most urgent adversarial threat to the United States and openly seeks to exploit its enemies’ vulnerabilities and weaknesses, this analysis will focus on the threat of Chinese cognitive warfare.

Josh Baughman’s recent translation brief provides important insights on how the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) understands cognitive operations. An article in the PLA Daily—the PLA’s official publication—titled “A Perspective on the Evolving Trend of Cognitive Warfare” defines cognition as “the process by which people acquire, process, and apply information and knowledge.” According to a Chinese definition published in the PLA Daily in September 2022, cognitive domain operations “take the human brain as the main combat space, and focus on striking, weakening, and dismantling the enemy’s will to fight, using human psychological weaknesses […] and increasing their internal friction and decision-making doubts.”

The original document Baughman summarizes was produced in China’s Academy of Military Sciences—one of China’s premiere defense-thinking incubators—and contains a few important points for the present discussion. The document openly declares that cognitive domain operations “blur the lines between wartime and peace, across battlefields and national boundaries, and widely permeate political, economic, diplomatic, and other social fields.” Chinese cognitive domain operations thus run the gamut across societal sectors, and they do so regardless of whether or not one is “at war” with China. According to Chinese security analysts, the time for cognitive domain operations is always now.

Next, the ultimate aims of the cognitive domain are made plain. According to the document, in cognitive warfare the PLA seeks to gain and maintain “a superior cognitive capability” in order to “shape how an adversary acts and the decisions they make.” Shaping actions and decisions requires a basic understanding of human behavior and can be more effective when it is culturally informed.

The totality of the PLA’s intentions behind the cognitive domain is clear. Baughman’s translation shows that for China, “At a deeper level, no matter the type of war or its purpose, [conflict] is ‘ultimately a contest of human will.’” Human will is generated and affected by various psychological and cultural factors. Since human will is the “ultimate contest,” for the PLA, all roads run through the cognitive domain.

The Field of Psychology Has a WEIRD Bias

Success in the cognitive domain requires close study and analysis of the target population’s psychological make-up. To increase a target’s decision-making doubts, one needs to understand how its decision-making processes function and maintain confidence. To leverage psychological weaknesses, one needs to identify and assess vulnerabilities for exploitation or exacerbation. Likewise, “dismantling the enemy’s will to fight” requires a deep understanding of the psychological and cultural factors that coalesce to form and reinforce its “will to fight.” Psychology and its sister fields in the social sciences and humanities produce surveys, experiments, close observations, questionnaires, and other methods designed to reveal the specific psychological data—including patterns of thought, behavior, and cognition—required to design successful cognitive operations against an enemy or to understand one’s own psychological vulnerabilities.

However, the way the fields of psychology and cognitive science have developed explanations of “human” psychology over the past 50 years potentially represents a massive vulnerability in the cognitive domain of warfare. This is because experts have not studied the psychology of “humans,” per se; largely, they have examined the psychology of western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic people: WEIRD populations. This demographic makes up a mere five to six percent of the world’s population—hardly a universal representation of humans.

While there are some debates as to how severely the field is impacted by this bias and whether this bias even is a bias, it is nonetheless the case that most experimental, empirical research data in the fields of psychology and cognitive science concern WEIRD populations, and especially college students from those populations. From these same fields and from the bits of non-WEIRD data that exist, we know that cognition is uniquely shaped by our culturally informed belief systems and that human psychology is often not universal, either over time or across cultural boundaries.

Because of the biased history of the field, non-WEIRD populations have access to at least several generations of specific, validated, and verified psychological research on WEIRD populations’ emotions, habits, motivations, and behaviors. In other words, the field of psychology has laid bare the desires, cognitive processes, and social psychology that inform decision-making and both individual and group behavior in the United States and similar countries. The United States’ non-WEIRD adversaries are thus extremely well equipped to build and act upon predictive models of US behavior and decision-making and apparently successfully so. They are also better equipped to develop psychological operations profiles and plans that will continue to be effective at influencing and co-opting US behavior.

By contrast, there is very little non-WEIRD psychological research data, and such populations are less well understood by those outside of their culture groups. As a result, the United States is not only more vulnerable to cognitive domain operations, but is also disadvantaged in planning such operations of its own.

Separating WEIRDness from Weakness

While the WEIRD bias in psychological understanding is cause for concern, it is also a call to action. This analysis yields three key recommendations for US defense thinkers and decision makers, which may also be individualized for anyone concerned about their own susceptibility to foreign influence.

First, it is imperative that we take stock of the serious vulnerabilities represented by WEIRD psychology data and research. What exactly has been validated about how the US population thinks, and how well? Areas to inventory could be selected based on the PLA’s stated target areas and should include:

• Behavior modification and decision-making influence, which can be used to influence publics and the decisions of policy makers;
• Social identity, belonging, and disenfranchisement, which can be used to better divide a population in pursuit of any number of malign ends;
• Cross-cultural understanding, rejection, and acceptance, which can be leveraged to prevent cross-cultural unity or to design narratives that paint a dishonestly rosy picture of the would-be adversary, thus gaining unwitting supporters;
• Motivators of guilt and shame, which can be weaponized to induce malign disillusionment with one’s own country or culture; and
• Motivation in general, which can be leveraged toward any number of malign ends.

US defense analysts should take stock of what validated and replicated (that is, reliable) data already exist about US cognition to strengthen the weaknesses that could benefit adversaries. Categories of immediate concern include strong desires that override rational thought, the psychology of group identity and rejection, decision-making processes of organizational leaders, and sources of individual agency in one’s life, social groups, and professional position. These represent some of the most easily exploitable areas of cognition within the United States.

Second, security-focused decision makers should build preemptive defenses around identified hotspots of accumulated, replicated psychological data. Chinese defense thinkers have made plain that they seek to undermine US group cohesion and political will to even exist. It is not a matter of naïve peace-seeking to look for ways to drive the cognitively diverse US population to common understanding, or at least towards respectful compassion, as a bulwark against malign cognitive operations. Given the recent increase in political polarization in previously stable countries, including the United States, one should pay special attention to repairing damages to US social ties and to both the critical histories and hypothetical futures that stand to drive the nation apart without appropriate acknowledgment.

Lastly, researchers should take inventory of, and remedy, the gaps in psychology research about non-WEIRD populations, including allies and partners. If US researchers and decisionmakers better understand the ways their friends and near-allies think and behave, the US government can better leverage existing capacity-building programs to help them build defenses against the kind of existential undermining that adversaries are implementing across the globe. In the meantime, researchers might be able to lean on existing field data of humanities and social sciences scholars—such as sociolinguists, ethnographers and cultural anthropologists, and behavioral interviewers—to begin remedying this gap.

Julia M. McClenon is a faculty researcher in the Defense Analysis Department at the US Naval Postgraduate School. She is a 2023 nonresident fellow of the Irregular Warfare Initiative.

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.

8. The 82nd Airborne Division just announced its newest unit. Here's what it will do

The 82nd Airborne Division just announced its newest unit. Here's what it will do

fayobserver.com · by Rachael Riley

The Fayetteville Observer

Paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division are innovators, the command team of the division said.

To capitalize on that innovation, the division created a new company that was formally activated at the end of March, said Maj. Gen. Christopher LaNeve, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division.

“As we switch to large-scale combat operations, we're taking a look at what do we have to build to be able to harness the technology and the ideas, so we created the Gainey Company,” LaNeve said.

Capt. Adam Johnson, the commander of the company, said the company’s namesake is William Joe Gainey, who served in the division and was the first senior enlisted advisor to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff..

Who is in Gainey Company

The company currently has 28 soldiers, comprised of permanent soldiers and paratroopers who join the company on a rotational basis

“We’re continually bringing new blood into the Gainey Company, and we’re pumping them out back into the brigades, the knowledge base of what they just did inside the Gainey Company,” LaNeve said.

Command Sgt. Maj. Randolph Delapena, the senior enlisted leader for the division, said a soldier’s military occupational specialty “doesn’t withhold them” from joining the company.

“Soldiers want to make something to help the formations, and all those little things that they kind of work through, what they talk about in a barracks and in their company, that's where you got to draw that energy from,” Delapena said.

Rotational soldiers from the 2nd Brigade Combat Team were radio operators who were able to train fellow paratroopers on the newest technology before they return to their brigade at the end of June.

The radio operators were able to breach information technology equipment that was previously difficult to use, said 1st Sgt. Allen Addison, the senior enlisted leader for the company.

What the Gainey Company Does

Within the company are three platoons and an Airborne Innovation Lab.

LaNeve said one platoon in the company focuses on the division’s integrated tactical network, which is how the division communicates when using computer-enabled radios.

A second platoon in the company only focuses on robotics and unmanned aerial systems and is currently testing out robotic dogs, LaNeve said.

Johnson said the second platoon has also tested drones that have 3D mapping software usually used by surveyors or framers in the civilian sector.

A third platoon in the company specializes in technical effects, or battlefield decoys and shaping the information space, Johnson and LaNeve said.

Airborne Innovation Lab

The company is also in charge of the division's Airborne Innovation Lab, which opened in October and is staffed with two soldiers and three civilian contractors.

“Any active-duty service member can walk in and present them a problem, and their only job is to help them find solutions,” Johnson said.

The lab, LaNeve said, is equipped with 3D printing, textiles and tools.

Johnson said the lab is connected to Army Research Labs and connected to academic partners, with paratroopers working with Eastern Carolina University, North Carolina State and Fayetteville State University for classes and projects.

Addison said the lab has also added a manufacturing course.

“It may be intimidating for someone who says they want to get into the innovation lab, 'But, I don’t know how to 3D print, or I don’t know anything about the equipment,’” Addison said. “Teaching those courses gives people the baseline knowledge of all the equipment we have out there.”

Innovation, Johnson said, could mean electrical engineering, computer coding or manufacturing in 3D printing.

“Most people are focused on doing their job. So, if it’s hard to do their job, they just say, ‘Well it’s going to be hard today,’” he said. “This reframes it to, ‘It’s really hard to do my job this way, but what if I did it in this other way or what if I had this resource?’”

In March, the division collaborated with the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command to host the first Innovation Drop Zone Competition at the lab.

During the competition, paratroopers presented ideas about 3D printing, new ways to hold gear and a new database for financial planners.

“A couple of paratroopers designed a new way to carry our missiles, whether it's a Stinger or Javelin, or an AT4 for those systems that normally they're very awkward to carry on your back,” LaNeve said.

The paratroopers designed a system to attach to modular rucksacks, which makes it “more efficient,” to carry the missiles, LaNeve said.

LaNeve said the division will host its next innovation competition Sept. 6 in the innovation lab.

“We have to change, and change is continual,” he said. “We've got to continue to make ourselves better in every aspect of warfighting, every realm of it, and these guys are having a huge part in it. “

Staff writer Rachael Riley can be reached at rriley@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3528.

fayobserver.com · by Rachael Riley

9. How the West Can Secure Ukraine’s Future

Excerpts:

Eventually, both the EU and NATO will have to decide whether to admit Ukraine. Membership in either organization confers security guarantees. The EU’s mutual defense provisions, codified in its treaties, should not be dismissed as inferior to NATO’s Article 5 simply because the United States is not a signatory to them. The chances that Putin or a successor would attack the EU are slim, and most EU member states are also in NATO. A security arrangement for Ukraine must therefore be closely linked to its EU accession process, which should begin as soon as possible.

Opening formal EU accession talks would give Ukraine a strong incentive to accelerate rule-of-law and economic reforms. The EU will no doubt insist that Ukraine adhere to its strict standards for admission. But it must avoid an onerous, decades-long accession timetable that squanders a unique opportunity to bind Ukraine to Europe. Rather, a staged process in which Kyiv becomes more involved in EU decision-making structures as the country passes certain benchmarks might offer a way to sidestep the “in or out” binary that has caused other aspiring members to lose faith in Brussels.

Ukraine’s long-term security relationship with the West must be decided without Russian input. Crucially, however, the arrangement leaves open the possibility of a future confidence-building dialogue with Moscow along the lines of the prewar proposals floated by the United States and its allies. In late 2021 and early 2022, NATO allies were prepared to give Russia assurances that they would not deploy offensive ground-based missile systems or station permanent combat forces in Ukraine. Moscow rejected these proposals and invaded anyway. In the future, the arrangement’s political framework and consultative mechanisms would lay the groundwork for the United States, Europe, and Ukraine to negotiate these issues jointly with Russia if the Kremlin changed course and accepted Ukraine’s independence and borders.

The return to a Cold War–like security order in Europe is now a fact of life. Ukraine has become the fulcrum of this new order. NATO membership might not yet be in the cards for Kyiv, but leaving Ukraine without a reliable security arrangement would be a grave mistake. The United States and Europe must begin now to devise a workable plan, even as the war rages on.

How the West Can Secure Ukraine’s Future

Kyiv Needs a Binding Commitment Before NATO Membership

By Eric Ciaramella

June 7, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Eric Ciaramella · June 7, 2023

Although Ukraine’s long-planned offensive operation is still in its initial phases, it is not too early to begin mapping out what comes next. In the short term, the answer is obvious: the United States and its allies must continue to surge weapons and training to Ukraine to enable Kyiv to liberate as much of its territory as possible this year. But planning for the long term is also needed, and that is far more difficult. As the past 15 months have shown, Russian President Vladimir Putin is not likely to abandon his goal of dominating Ukraine, even in the face of military setbacks. Still, the war will eventually enter a lower-intensity phase, and when it does, security arrangements will need to be firmly in place to protect Ukraine and bind it more closely to Europe.

In the run-up to July’s NATO summit in Vilnius, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been pressing for his country to be admitted to the alliance, although he acknowledges that this is “impossible” until the war ends. Ukraine also faces a long road ahead in its quest to gain membership in the EU, which offers its own security guarantee. A solution in the meantime would be the creation of interlocking multilateral agreements that can sustain a well-trained and well-equipped Ukrainian military. The West can bolster this arrangement, modeled in part after the U.S. defense relationship with Israel, by making clear, codified, long-term commitments to Ukraine to ensure that Kyiv can plan for its future security needs. This approach would give Ukraine security until it becomes a member of the EU and—perhaps one day—NATO, without closing the door to an eventual détente with Russia.

Washington and its allies will need to forge a strong coalition of like-minded countries to support such a framework to make clear that Kyiv has the West’s long-term support. There are encouraging signs that this process has already begun: the Pentagon has been working with Ukraine to plan its future defense forces, and a portion of U.S. assistance has been earmarked for this purpose. The announcement in May that Ukrainian pilots will begin training on F-16 aircraft in anticipation of the eventual delivery of those planes signals the desire of Ukraine’s partners to build the country’s military capabilities beyond what it requires in the here and now. This must continue. But more is needed to create certainty about the West’s staying power and disabuse Putin of the notion that time is on his side. Legally binding commitments from Ukraine’s partners, especially the United States, would go a long way toward shattering Putin’s war optimism and forcing him to reckon with the fact that Ukraine will never belong to Russia.

THE ISRAELI MODEL

Ukraine’s future security depends on effective planning and credible commitments from its partners. To that end, its leaders have begun studying arrangements in foreign countries for clues on how their own country can protect itself. They have wisely alighted on Israel as a model. Israel’s capable army and intelligence services, its strong defense industry, and its deep military relationship with the United States show how a country without formal alliances can defend itself and deter hostile neighbors. Last September, the Ukrainian government unveiled the Kyiv Security Compact, a concept aimed at turning Ukraine into a European Israel. It envisions a “multi-decade effort” by Kyiv’s partners to help Ukraine build a “robust territorial defense posture” by training and equipping its military, providing intelligence support, and bolstering defense industrial cooperation. The strategy is shaped around deterrence by denial—making it impossible for Russia to achieve its objectives in Ukraine by military force—rather than around threats of future punishment. Recent speeches by French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen suggest that Western leaders are discussing how to make this work in practice.

Ukraine and its partners might find a useful template in the United States’ long-standing statutory commitment to Israel’s qualitative military edge, meaning its ability to deter and, if necessary, defeat a larger adversary by possessing superior technologies and tactics. But the situations are not exactly analogous. Ukraine’s opponent has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, whereas Israel’s adversaries, for the moment at least, have no such weapons. Moreover, Kyiv, unlike Tel Aviv, does not possess nuclear weapons. On the other hand, Ukraine is a much larger country than Israel. It can field a substantial, well-equipped, and quick reaction force that is capable of inflicting serious losses on a formidable invader, as its military has demonstrated against Russia since the war began.

The West should adopt a new term, such as “qualitative deterrent balance,” that fits Ukraine’s unique case. In doing so, it should commit to ensuring that Kyiv has a mixture of superior equipment, training, and technology geared toward matching or offsetting Russia’s numerical battlefield advantages in the long term. For example, Russia’s edge in air power is substantial. Ukraine need not, and indeed cannot, maintain a massive and costly air force that can rival or surpass Russia’s. The Ukrainian Air Force can, however, protect its skies through a well-considered combination of layered and integrated ground-based air defenses, supplemented by a nimble air force and other capabilities that can hold strategic military targets inside Russia at risk

A future security arrangement for Ukraine must be built on solid legal and political foundations.

A credible future force of this sort requires long-term funding. In determining its levels and sustainability, Western leaders should, again, look to Israel as an example. Since 1999, U.S. and Israeli leaders have signed a series of ten-year memorandums of understanding that lay out U.S. security assistance levels. The most recent MOU, signed in 2016, was worth $38 billion. Congress has largely appropriated funds according to the levels set by these agreements. In the case of Ukraine, a transparent vision for long-term financing, as set out in a series of bilateral MOUs, would provide cost efficiencies by enabling sound long-term planning and the acquisition of major defense systems. It would also address concerns in Congress about giving Ukraine a “blank check” through repeated supplemental budgets outside the regular appropriations process. Over time, a multiyear funding framework would also serve to balance out U.S. and European support for Ukraine, insofar as European leaders will be more willing to make significant pledges if they are confident in Washington’s enduring commitment.

Developing a cost model for Ukraine’s future force will be a complex task. Uncertainty about the conflict’s trajectory complicates firm planning assumptions. If the war continues at a high intensity, the need to sustain Ukraine’s immediate battlefield needs will supersede those of its future force. But as soon as the war enters a less intensive phase, perhaps after this year’s counteroffensive, Ukraine’s military reconstitution should get underway. An initial round of MOUs from the United States and European powers should finance rearmament, which should be planned to unfold over a span of several years. Later on, Ukraine and its partners can look to a country such as Poland, with its similar population size and proximity to Russia, for clues for sustaining a modern, well-trained armed force in peacetime.

DON’T FOOL ME TWICE

A future security arrangement for Ukraine must be built on solid legal and political foundations. Ukrainian officials bitterly remember signing the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. In this agreement, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States provided Ukraine with security assurances in exchange for the dismantling of its nuclear arsenal. Ukraine honored its side of the deal, but Russia has repeatedly ignored its pledges to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity, annexing Crimea and sending undeclared military units into eastern Ukraine in 2014 and then invading the rest of the country in 2022. The Ukrainians are naturally wary of basing their future security on any agreement that is not binding on all parties.

Instead, the United States and European countries should work with Kyiv on a new framework agreement to define their strategic goals and collective commitments. These should include the financial and practical parameters of long-term support for Ukraine’s self-defense, as well as mechanisms for consultation and support for Ukraine’s defense industry. Choosing which countries to invite to the negotiating table will be a tricky task. Ukraine should avoid casting too wide a net, as too broad a coalition might result in a watered-down accord. But the country’s primary military and economic backers, including France, Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, must be signatories. Once the agreement has been negotiated and signed, other countries should be eligible to join.

This agreement should provide the guiding principles for the signatories’ MOUs, in which their specific commitments should be enumerated. To make these actionable and compatible, the framework text should empower a high-level steering group, akin to NATO’s North Atlantic Council, with the mandate to develop joint threat assessments, share intelligence, coordinate policy responses, and ensure that all signatories meet their obligations. If Ukraine believes it is threatened, it must be guaranteed the right to convene the member parties to request additional emergency support.

Support for Ukraine cannot depend on electoral cycles or leadership changes.

Crucially, the signatories’ commitments must be codified in law, with clear cross-party backing. Support for Ukraine cannot depend on electoral cycles or leadership changes. This is especially important for the United States, where the possibility of a major policy reversal after the 2024 presidential election has frayed Ukrainian nerves and fueled Putin’s confidence in the future. That is why the Biden administration must immediately begin working with Congress on a solution. Congressional action could take many forms. Ideally, the framework text would be a formal international treaty, ratified by each signatory. For the United States, this would require a two-thirds majority in the Senate, which would be difficult but not impossible to achieve.

If that threshold proves too high, Congress could instead pass a new law similar to the Taiwan Relations Act, which has stood as a central pillar of U.S. defensive support for Taiwan for more than four decades. This would enshrine the U.S. commitments to Ukraine laid out in the MOU and multilateral framework text. Congress could alternatively consider replicating its commitments to Israel. This would require the president to consult Congress regularly and furnish it with reports certifying that Kyiv is receiving sufficient support from its partners to match or offset Russian military advantages. This legal framework would ensure that a security arrangement has broad political buy-in, regardless of who occupies the White House.

Daily management of the new arrangement for Ukraine could take place through dedicated working groups of the signatories’ defense policy officials, planners, and procurement specialists. These working groups should have the mandate to conduct capabilities planning and move the country toward interoperability with NATO forces. The process of building Ukraine’s armed forces will mean that partner countries will inevitably compete for big-ticket contracts, and strong multinational coordination mechanisms will be needed to referee that process. These mechanisms must, in concert with policies set out in the framework text and bilateral MOUs, ensure that Ukraine reforms its defense sector, including by making its contracts transparent and by mitigating against the risk of weapons and sensitive technology making their way into Russia’s hands or onto the black market.

MADE IN UKRAINE

A defense industrial component will also be critical to the success of a new security arrangement for Ukraine. Very high consumption rates of munitions on the battlefield have left U.S. and European defense firms struggling to keep up with demand. Clear multiyear funding pledges from signatory countries would signal to firms that they can safely scale up production of the key systems and munitions that are desperately needed. Dedicated partner-country support for Ukraine’s defense industry would also reduce the cost of the arrangement over time, as indigenous production capacity grows to meet an increasing share of the country’s requirements.

This will not require a wholesale realignment of the West’s defense industrial base. Rather, the United States and the EU should ramp up their production of critical systems and munitions with smart, targeted investments. A recent deal between EU member states and Norway to supply Ukraine with one billion euros in ammunition shells and jointly procure another one billion euros’ worth is a good start. Successful European-level joint procurement could turn the heavily fragmented EU defense industrial base into a major asset for Ukraine’s long-term security, not to mention for Europe’s own strategic autonomy.

Western aid must include provisions to support the revitalization of Ukraine’s own defense firms, which were once the pride of the Soviet military-industrial complex. A robust Ukrainian defense industry integrated into the European supply chain will, over time, reduce the country’s dependence on Western aid. The West’s strategy in this regard should mirror what the United States has done for Israel. Washington has long permitted Tel Aviv to use a portion of its military aid to procure capabilities from domestic firms. The policy, known as “off-shore procurement,” turned Israel’s defense sector into one of the world’s strongest. The same must now be done for Ukraine. German arms giant Rheinmetall’s recent move to form a joint venture with Ukraine’s state-owned defense conglomerate is a step in the right direction. Kyiv must also introduce transparent corporate governance practices and partner with Ukrainian entrepreneurs, whose tenacious wartime innovations have contributed to the country’s battlefield successes.

CLUBBING TOGETHER

Eventually, both the EU and NATO will have to decide whether to admit Ukraine. Membership in either organization confers security guarantees. The EU’s mutual defense provisions, codified in its treaties, should not be dismissed as inferior to NATO’s Article 5 simply because the United States is not a signatory to them. The chances that Putin or a successor would attack the EU are slim, and most EU member states are also in NATO. A security arrangement for Ukraine must therefore be closely linked to its EU accession process, which should begin as soon as possible.

Opening formal EU accession talks would give Ukraine a strong incentive to accelerate rule-of-law and economic reforms. The EU will no doubt insist that Ukraine adhere to its strict standards for admission. But it must avoid an onerous, decades-long accession timetable that squanders a unique opportunity to bind Ukraine to Europe. Rather, a staged process in which Kyiv becomes more involved in EU decision-making structures as the country passes certain benchmarks might offer a way to sidestep the “in or out” binary that has caused other aspiring members to lose faith in Brussels.

Ukraine’s long-term security relationship with the West must be decided without Russian input. Crucially, however, the arrangement leaves open the possibility of a future confidence-building dialogue with Moscow along the lines of the prewar proposals floated by the United States and its allies. In late 2021 and early 2022, NATO allies were prepared to give Russia assurances that they would not deploy offensive ground-based missile systems or station permanent combat forces in Ukraine. Moscow rejected these proposals and invaded anyway. In the future, the arrangement’s political framework and consultative mechanisms would lay the groundwork for the United States, Europe, and Ukraine to negotiate these issues jointly with Russia if the Kremlin changed course and accepted Ukraine’s independence and borders.

The return to a Cold War–like security order in Europe is now a fact of life. Ukraine has become the fulcrum of this new order. NATO membership might not yet be in the cards for Kyiv, but leaving Ukraine without a reliable security arrangement would be a grave mistake. The United States and Europe must begin now to devise a workable plan, even as the war rages on.

• ERIC CIARAMELLA is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and was previously Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council. This essay is adapted from a forthcoming Carnegie report on potential long-term security arrangements for Ukraine.

Foreign Affairs · by Eric Ciaramella · June 7, 2023

10. Why the UN Still Matters

Excerpts:

The United States and China are likely to be increasingly adversarial in the decade ahead. But politics makes strange bedfellows. Although there is substantial scope for disagreement and division at the UN, the history of the Cold War suggests that there are also powerful incentives to cooperate.

As always, the organization will remain unable to tackle issues that directly implicate core interests of the great powers. That is not a bug in the system, but a feature. It was Roosevelt’s belief—one shared by Churchill and Stalin—that the great powers would only participate in the institution if they possessed the added protection of a veto over Security Council actions. By embedding the leading powers in a body with the unprecedented capacity to impose its will on others, the framers of the UN ensured that the UN would not suffer the fate of its predecessor, the League of Nations, which proved unable to halt the outbreak of a major conflict in the 1930s.

As a result, serving as a venue for great-power cooperation remains the chief way the UN maintains its relevance. There are currently a dozen active peacekeeping missions in the field and 15 ongoing sanctions regimes against member states. The cooperation of the United States and China was required to set up and sustain each of these. Together, these actions make an important difference on the ground. But they also permit the Security Council, collectively, to command and control a wide variety of global actors.

Discord in Turtle Bay is likely—indeed, inevitable—as China and the United States jostle for supremacy in the twenty-first century. But as long as the UN remains the primary institution of global governance, those who dominate the organization will find compelling reasons to preserve it. The UN continues to be the best tool for achieving a rules-based international order—at least one in which the leading powers set the rules.

Why the UN Still Matters

Great-Power Competition Makes It More Relevant—Not Less

By Kal Raustiala and Viva Iemanjá Jerónimo

June 7, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Kal Raustiala and Viva Iemanjá Jerónimo · June 7, 2023

At the Crimean resort town of Yalta in the winter of 1945, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt met with the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to plan for a “United Nations organization.” Roosevelt’s health was in steep decline, and the grueling journey to Crimea may well have hastened his death weeks later. That he undertook the trip at all showed how central he believed great-power cooperation would be in the coming postwar order. The United Nations, as Roosevelt imagined it, would be the “Four Policemen,” a consortium of the victorious wartime powers: the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and China. This group, with the addition of France, ultimately became the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, the centerpiece of the new order that Roosevelt sought to construct.

Just three years later, however, in response to the revelation of Western plans to unify their zones of occupied Germany, Soviet forces blockaded roads and railways into Berlin. The dramatic move marked a turning point in what was increasingly called a “Cold War” between the Soviet Union and its former allies, principally the United States. By the time of the Berlin crisis, relations between the great powers at the nascent United Nations were already frosty. The vision at Yalta of a cooperative postwar order seemed to have swiftly faded.

Many believe the Cold War scuppered Roosevelt’s dream of a UN that restrained conflict and produced constructive collective action. As the international relations scholar John Mearsheimer has argued, the superpower rivalry made it “almost impossible” for the UN to adopt and enforce meaningful resolutions. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama has insisted that the Cold War “emasculated” the Security Council. In this line of thinking, it was only with the end of the Cold War that the UN could finally engage in the muscular joint action imagined at Yalta. Madeleine Albright, a former U.S. secretary of state and U.S. ambassador to the UN, summed up this view years later when she stated that, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, ”the barrier to coordinated Security Council action had come down.”

Today, great-power rivalry is again intensifying. Many analysts perceive a new cold war brewing between the United States and China. Observers of the UN fear that its past will be prologue. Superpower competition could once again paralyze the organization. The UN’s inability, after all, to end the war raging in Ukraine makes it easy to jump to the conclusion that it is incapable of managing the defining events of the age.

Mounting competition between the United States and China need not doom the organization to irrelevance, however. Indeed, that competition may even result in more cooperation at the UN, not less. Both China and the United States share an interest in preserving—and ideally extending—the powers of the Security Council, the UN’s core body, and one they dominate. To do so, however, they must rein in zero-sum thinking and find areas of common ground that serve their shared interest: retaining power over others. As was true during the Cold War, the UN remains in the twenty-first century a unique venue for great-power coordination and cooperation on many issues of global order. The UN may never completely fulfill Roosevelt’s vision. Yet history suggests that the institution, now approaching its 80th birthday, still has legs.

THE UN IN THE COLD WAR

Contrary to the conventional wisdom that the Cold War rendered the UN impotent, the postwar Security Council was in fact surprisingly active. To be sure, Soviet vetoes poured forth in the early years, blocking a host of measures from the admission of Ireland in 1946 to an attempt by the Security Council to intervene in the conflict between India and Pakistan over Jammu and Kashmir in 1957. The first 50 vetoes wielded at the Security Council were all Soviet. (By the 1970s, the United States was following suit, vetoing resolutions censuring Israel and South Africa.) The UN proved powerless in major crises involving Soviet and American interventions, such as the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the Vietnam War. The veto had been designed in Yalta to ensure that the interests of the Security Council’s permanent members were always protected, and the superpowers were only too willing to exercise this privilege.

But Moscow and Washington also came to recognize that paralysis at the United Nations ultimately did them no favors. In an era of bipolar competition, in which a win for one was seen as a loss for the other, both the Soviet Union and the United States appeared to realize that if they failed to find ways to cooperate at the UN, their special powers and privileges would be deeply diminished. A Security Council that could not act placed itself on the sidelines of world politics. After a rocky start, the pace of successful resolutions in the Security Council began to grow. By the end of the Cold War, the average number of resolutions passed each year had more than doubled that of the 1950s.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Cold War did not render the United Nations impotent.

Many of these successful resolutions involved the complex process of postwar decolonization, which both superpowers sought to manage. These joint decisions often led to the creation of peacekeeping missions in postcolonial states. When Congo gained independence from Belgium in 1960, for instance, it swiftly disintegrated into civil war. But the UN acted concertedly to control the spreading chaos. Within days of the eruption of the crisis, the Security Council authorized a massive peacekeeping force, one that remained in place for several years and even engaged in combat using armored vehicles and airpower. Each Cold War antagonist also found the UN to be a useful tool to limit the influence of the other. This was especially true when it came to the Congo. As a U.S. official later put it, once the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba sought closer ties with Moscow, the UN’s presence “sort of buffaloed the Soviets. …They knew how to have a con­frontation with us, but they didn’t know how to have a confrontation with the UN.”

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the UN was involved in a wide range of crises—not only in Congo but also in Angola, Cyprus, the Dominican Republic, India and Pakistan, Senegal, South Africa, Zambia, and elsewhere. The Soviets and the Americans did not always concur on exactly how to handle these myriad challenges. But their frequent agreement—and the Security Council’s many actions in this period—belie the notion that great-power competition left the organization frozen. Moreover, the historical record shows that this growing cooperation was not the result of merely cherry-picking less important crises. The council often tackled serious issues, and it did so with resolutions that were, on average, stricter than those that were vetoed or failed to garner the requisite majority. In 1970, for instance, in response to what it strikingly termed the “usurpation of power by a racist settler minority” in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), the Security Council required all UN members to sever diplomatic ties with the regime, ordered the withdrawal of South African troops, and suspended Southern Rhodesia from all international organizations.

The rising levels of cooperation in the Security Council also reflected growing competition within the organization. As empires dissolved in the decades after World War II, a huge array of formerly colonized countries streamed into the UN. The General Assembly, the UN body that includes all member states, was soon dominated by the countries of the Nonaligned Movement, which increasingly used the UN as a platform to amplify their disagreements with the superpowers. As a more assertive General Assembly threatened to seize the initiative, both the Soviet Union and the United States saw advantage in demonstrating the Security Council’s primacy through decisive action. The “great power pact” Roosevelt forged at Yalta granted them unprecedented powers, but to deploy those powers, they had to cooperate.

A NEW ERA

The end of the Cold War augured the advent of what Charles Krauthammer dubbed in Foreign Affairs “the unipolar moment,” with the United States now the world’s undisputed superpower. The UN was increasingly active in this new political landscape; though there were major missteps, such as with the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, the organization was often a central player in the geopolitics of the era, from the Gulf War of 1990-91 through crises in the Balkans, Cambodia, East Timor, and elsewhere. Peacekeeping operations expanded further, especially in Africa, as the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that many regimes lost external support and began to crumble. The UN also became deeply engaged in tackling a host of newer issues, including the environment, public health, and international criminal justice.

With the dramatic rise of China in the twenty-first century, the world has entered a new era of great-power competition. Under the Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Beijing is increasingly powerful, nationalistic, and bellicose. In a fractious Washington, one of the few areas of bipartisan consensus is a heightened, often hawkish opposition to China. Many analysts have already described this growing rivalry as equivalent to a “new Cold War.”

Yet, as many have argued, the competition between China and the United States is different from that of the Cold War witnessed decades ago. China is deeply integrated into the global economy, and U.S. firms and consumers depend on the Chinese market. China’s interest in participating in multilateral institutions to advance its policy preferences has also grown markedly over the past two decades. Indeed, in recent years, Xi has directly called on Chinese diplomats to learn more about international law and to “participate in global governance, make rules, set agendas.”

In line with these precepts, China has become far more active at the UN. China traditionally played a muted role in the organization. (Until 1971, its UN seat was held by Taiwan.) China frequently abstained in the Security Council. But beginning in the 1990s, it began to vote—and exercise its veto—far more often. Indeed, since 2011, China has wielded its veto a dozen times. (By comparison, the United States has vetoed only four resolutions in that time period.) In the General Assembly, China recently proposed a global development initiative, a comprehensive plan for economic progress, and at the Boao Forum for Asia, a global security Initiative that purports to address “complex and intertwined security challenges” with a “win-win mindset.” Both proposals seek to reorient global governance and ensure that China is in the driver’s seat.

China is convinced of the importance of the United Nations.

Today, China is the second-largest financial contributor to the UN (after the United States) and has stocked the organization’s bureaucracy with its nationals. Indeed, it is currently the only member state whose citizens lead more than one specialized agency. China now has far more peacekeepers participating in UN missions than any other permanent member—double the other four combined. It is often depicted as a revisionist power, eager to overturn the U.S.-led international order. Yet far from seeing the UN as irrelevant or replaceable, China appears increasingly convinced of the organization’s importance.

China’s commitment to building its influence within the UN comes at a time when the United States is often ambivalent about the institution. The United States and its allies dominated the UN’s early years. Since at least the 1980s, however, Republicans have exhibited substantial hostility toward the UN; indeed, many conservatives never trusted the organization to begin with, viewing it as a repository of revolutionaries and Russian spies. But even as the halcyon early years have receded into the distance, American officials (especially those serving in Democratic administrations) continue to see the UN as a crucial tool for diplomacy. And the Security Council, reflecting the balance of power of the mid-twentieth century, affords the United States enormous advantages in a rapidly changing world.

Both the United States and China, in short, benefit from the status quo enshrined in the UN. The institution’s highly unequal allocation of power works to their advantage, even if it often frustrates other member states. (Indeed, one reason for the diffidence of many African states toward Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is, as Tim Murithi wrote recently in Foreign Affairs, that it is merely a “continuation of the reign of the powerful over the less powerful.”) Working with other Security Council members, the United States and China have authorized recent peacekeeping or “stabilization” missions in the Central African Republic, Mali, and South Sudan and have imposed sanctions, arms embargoes, and other restrictions on Haiti. In 2023 alone, resolutions addressing the threat from North Korea, censuring the Taliban in Afghanistan, and extending support for reform in Iraq were passed. The White House and Zhongnanhai do not see eye to eye on all details, but when it comes to dominating smaller states—whether through imposing sanctions or extending support—they often find ground for agreement.

As the Security Council’s ambit has grown in recent years, encompassing topics as disparate as climate change, HIV, and food insecurity, so, too, have the structural advantages enjoyed by the permanent members. Although discussed for decades, the reform of the Security Council to make it more inclusive seems a distant prospect. For the time being, then, the UN remains an organization designed by, and still dominated by, the great powers.

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

The United States and China are likely to be increasingly adversarial in the decade ahead. But politics makes strange bedfellows. Although there is substantial scope for disagreement and division at the UN, the history of the Cold War suggests that there are also powerful incentives to cooperate.

As always, the organization will remain unable to tackle issues that directly implicate core interests of the great powers. That is not a bug in the system, but a feature. It was Roosevelt’s belief—one shared by Churchill and Stalin—that the great powers would only participate in the institution if they possessed the added protection of a veto over Security Council actions. By embedding the leading powers in a body with the unprecedented capacity to impose its will on others, the framers of the UN ensured that the UN would not suffer the fate of its predecessor, the League of Nations, which proved unable to halt the outbreak of a major conflict in the 1930s.

As a result, serving as a venue for great-power cooperation remains the chief way the UN maintains its relevance. There are currently a dozen active peacekeeping missions in the field and 15 ongoing sanctions regimes against member states. The cooperation of the United States and China was required to set up and sustain each of these. Together, these actions make an important difference on the ground. But they also permit the Security Council, collectively, to command and control a wide variety of global actors.

Discord in Turtle Bay is likely—indeed, inevitable—as China and the United States jostle for supremacy in the twenty-first century. But as long as the UN remains the primary institution of global governance, those who dominate the organization will find compelling reasons to preserve it. The UN continues to be the best tool for achieving a rules-based international order—at least one in which the leading powers set the rules.

• KAL RAUSTIALA is Promise Distinguished Professor of Comparative and International Law and Director of the Ronald W. Burkle Center for International Relations at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Absolutely Indispensable Man: Ralph Bunche, the United Nations, and the Fight to End Empire.
• VIVA IEMANJÁ JERÓNIMO recently completed her Ph.D. in political science at Yale University.

Foreign Affairs · by Kal Raustiala and Viva Iemanjá Jerónimo · June 7, 2023

11. Maybe the Ukrainians blew up the Kakhovka Dam?

I certainly hope not. I hesitate forwarding this because it could very well be disinformation but it is out there in the wild and therefore the best way to deal with this may be to expose it and bring the light of day on it. or it could be. clickbait and I fell for that as well.

Maybe the Ukrainians blew up the Kakhovka Dam?

If so, did they act alone or get permission? To blame it on Russia we’d need arguments supporting that theory

asiatimes.com · by Stephen Bryen · June 6, 2023

For the Russians to have blown up the Kakhovka dam they would have needed to move tons of explosives using boats or underwater equipment, put explosives on the dam facing the reservoir and set off a massive explosion. From the video posted by the Ukrainian government, it looks like the explosions happened below the waterline.

The Kakhovka Hydroelectric Dam before the blast

The Kakhovka Dam is a hydroelectric power station. When operating it provided 357 mw of power and cooling water for the 5.7 gigawatt Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. It also supplied water for agriculture in southern Ukraine and northern Crimea.

When the Crimean Kerch Strait bridge was blown, there was a truck that blew up on the bridge and an attempt to blow the supporting pillars of the bridge using an underwater vehicle. The main bridge pillar did not fall, meaning the explosive power from the underwater explosion was not sufficient to do the job. The bridge was not bombed by aircraft, glide bombs or missiles.

There are few if any weapons that could break the dam. Moreover, it is unlikely that a large bomb could cause the sort of damage we are seeing on video.

It should be noted that in May and June the Ukrainians were firing missiles and artillery shells at the dam. It is claimed these attacks caused some cracks in the dam.

Zelensky may have sort of given away the game about the dam when he said it was an inside job. He meant by the Russians – and indeed there is a precedent: Stalin’s forces bombed what was then the world’s third largest dam on the same river in 1941 to try to slow the German advance through Ukraine.

Does history repeat itself? The Soviet Union suppressed information about events in Zaporizhia, following the August 18, 1941, dynamiting of DniproHES – the largest hydroelectric power station on the Dnieper River. The strategically important dam and plant was dynamited by retreating Red Army troops in 1941 after Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. More than 20 tons of explosives were used for that purpose. As a result, according to different sources, about 100,000 people, mostly civilians from neighboring villages and towns, were killed. The Soviet military also fell victim to that operation. Additionally, the blast paralyzed the work of the city’s industrial enterprises. Photo: Censor.net/en/ https://censor.net / Channel 5

But it’s hard to see what the Russians might have expected to gain this time. And it’s remarkable that one of the earliest pieces of news to emerge from the Kakhovka Dam blast is that the Ukrainians sent dozens of boats to pick up personnel from islands, downstream from the dam, that were being flooded out.

Organizing such a rescue so quickly suggests these relief assets were prepared and ready for action – and indeed the Ukrainians say they had prepared for just such an eventuality.

Who had the motive?

Motive can be imputed to the Ukrainians: Blow up the dam in order to lower the water level upstream and allow them to cross the river there with greater ease in their offensive operations. Indeed, most of the water in Kherson province ended up on the Russian side, so the Ukrainians protected their flank and the city of Kherson.

That fits in with reports that the Ukrainians wanted to transfer units to the east from the Kherson area because their offensive is failing.

The Russians say they did not blast the dam and had no reason to do so.

They know that striking the dam could cause severe problems for the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, which needs great amounts of cooling water. This power plant is the largest one in Europe and is under Russian control. It still isn’t clear whether the power plant is any longer safe.

The dam break also threatened Russians’ defensive works in the areas that they hold near the river below the dam, territory that Ukraine has been trying to take back.

The Russian news source Sputnik Global has put out a long article in the form of a “fact check” saying that the dam was hit by the Ukrainians.

No doubt the Russians felt compelled to push back as the Western press swallowed Zelensky’s claim that Russia did it, headlining the claim on virtually all wire services and major newspapers. Following the initial trove of articles blaming Russia, papers like the New York Post are saying Putin is trying to destroy the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant:

It is hard to see how the dam explosion benefits Russia.

It is true that Ukrainian military folks on the small islands in the river had to leave, but when the water subsides they will come back.

The only seemingly unexpected result is that it was the top section of the dam that was destroyed. The lower portion is still in place meaning that not all the water in the reservoir behind the dam will escape and cause more inundation. It is possible this was planned to work that way, but setting off tons of explosives is not a good way to test such an engineering hypothesis.

A Panoramic View of the Dam and the Reservoir behind it before the blast

There may yet be enough water to take care of the nuclear plant on the one hand, and most of the Russian fortifications probably survived. The Russians have not said otherwise.

It will take time to get a full accounting if we ever get one. We still don’t have one for the Nord Stream pipeline or for Crimea’s Kerch Strait Bridge.

If the idea behind this was to cause a major nuclear accident that could be blamed on the Russians, it is an outrageous act that threatens Ukraine and Europe, maybe the world.

If it was Ukraine that did it, did they act on their own or did they get permission from outside? If it was Russia, then someone had better come up with arguments supporting that proposition.

Stephen Bryen is a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy and the Yorktown Institute. This article was originally published on his Substack, Weapons and Strategy. Asia Times is republishing it with permission.

asiatimes.com · by Stephen Bryen · June 6, 2023

12. Navy SEAL training commander says no one person accountable after candidate death

Navy SEAL training commander says no one person accountable after candidate death

ABCNews.com · by ABC News

The Navy commander in charge of the "Hell Week" training when a SEAL candidate died spoke out on ABC's "Good Morning America" after an investigation found multiple problems with the program.

Capt. Brad Geary told ABC News' Stephanie Ramos that the death of Kyle Mullen in 2022 was a "tragedy" but defended himself and the program against the probe, which outlined ways the selection progress for SEAL candidates had become dangerous.

"That entire report mischaracterizes, misrepresents and misquotes our organization and Naval special warfare," Geary said. "Because it was built off of a bias that was inappropriate and regurgitated untruths that simply didn't exist."

Brady Geary, the Navy SEAL captain in charge of "Hell Week" training when Kyle Mullen died in 2022, appears on ABC's "Good Morning America," June 6, 2023.

ABC News

MORE: Investigation finds multiple problems with 'Hell Week' after SEAL candidate training death

Mullen, a 24-year-old former Yale football team captain, collapsed and died just hours after completing the program. His death, and the hospitalization of three others from his class, shined a light on the intense, non-stop physical Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL course candidates undergo to become elite SEALs.

A nearly 200-page report the Naval Education and Training Command released last month identified "failures across multiple systems that led to a number of candidates being at a high risk of serious injury."

Poor leadership, inadequately organized medical care and other factors increased the risks for SEAL candidates, according to the report.

MORE: Mom of Navy SEAL candidate reflects on son's unexplained death

Three Navy officers, including Geary, received "non-punitive" letters as a result of Mullen's death.

"There's a weight on the shoulders of every commanding officer that has served," Geary said when asked if he felt responsibility for Mullen's death. "And I don't think that weight can be reduced down to one term-like responsibility. I will always carry the weight of Kyle's death on my shoulders. What I feel responsible for is speaking truth to ensure that it never happens again."

Geary said there was no one he held accountable for Mullen's death.

"His death was a tragedy," Geary said. "And this is one thing I agree with the report on. It was a perfect storm of factors that all combined at the wrong possible moment in time and resulted in the tragic loss of Kyle."

Mullen's mother, Regina Mullen, expressed frustration with what she said was a lack of accountability for her son's death.

"The Navy SEAL code item four says take responsibility for your actions and the actions of your teammates," she said. "He's the commander, the commander's supposed to command. Four people almost died that day. My son, unfortunately, died. He's responsible. I don't know how he could say he's not."

ABCNews.com · by ABC News

13. Revising Public-Private Collaboration to Protect U.S. Critical Infrastructure

​The full report can be downloaded here: https://cybersolarium.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/CSC2.0_Report_SRMA.pdf​

Revising Public-Private Collaboration to Protect U.S. Critical Infrastructure

https://cybersolarium.org/csc-2-0-reports/revising-public-private-collaboration-to-protect-u-s-critical-infrastructure/

June 7, 2023

By Mary Brooks, Annie Fixler, Mark Montgomery

The current systems for designating sectors as critical and for mitigating cross-sector risks are inadequate.

FULL REPORT

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

GUIDELINES FOR PPD-21

Executive Summary

Few things more directly impact Americans’ security and well-being than the reliability, availability, and safety of critical infrastructure. The security of this critical infrastructure relies, in turn, on the strength of the relationship between the government and the private sector, which owns and operates the majority of the infrastructure. Thus, the federal government has endeavored for decades to build a strong relationship with the private sector.

Nevertheless, the policy underpinning this public-private sector relationship has become outdated and incapable of meeting today’s demands. Similarly, the implementation of this policy — and the organization, funding, and focus of the federal agencies that execute it — is inadequate. This report will evaluate the state of the public-private sector relationship and offer recommendations to reshape it to improve national security going forward.

The timing could not be better. In late 2022, the Biden administration announced its intention to rewrite the Obama-era Presidential Policy Directive 21 (PPD-21), which established the current iteration of the critical infrastructure protection framework. This decision followed congressional intervention two years earlier to clarify and expand the role of federal agencies responsible for interfacing with the private sector. Congress designated these organizations as Sector Risk Management Agencies (SRMAs) — there is at least one for each of the 16 sectors of U.S. critical infrastructure. It also ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to review the SRMAs’ performance and recommend improvements.

Before deciding to revamp PPD-21, the Biden administration conducted assessments of the federal government’s authorities to regulate security standards for critical infrastructure and launched a number of targeted, high-visibility efforts to address sector-specific problems and draw attention to cybersecurity issues. Additionally, the Biden administration has issued executive orders and national security memoranda intended to strengthen federal cybersecurity and lay out voluntary cybersecurity performance goals for critical infrastructure providers. The administration also established congressionally mandated public advisory committees to evaluate critical infrastructure protection. The creation of the Office of the National Cyber Director, meanwhile, has provided improved strategic coordination across the interagency and with private sector stakeholders.

This incremental approach, however, is not delivering the necessary improvements to SRMA performance, especially as both physical and — especially — cyber threats to the country’s critical infrastructure continue to escalate.

As the administration begins its review process, it should focus specifically on improving the relationship between the public and private sectors — by making government a better partner to industry and through both voluntary partnerships and regulation, as noted in the new National Cybersecurity Strategy. This report identifies flaws in both the design and implementation of public-private collaboration policy and argues that these flaws are amplified by discrepancies in the structure, resourcing, and capabilities of SRMAs. In short, the performance of SRMAs is inconsistent at best and wholly deficient at worst.

Meanwhile, there are numerous other challenges. The strategy and policy documents governing critical infrastructure have become stale. The current systems for designating sectors as critical and for mitigating cross-sector risks are inadequate. DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is unable to fulfill its responsibilities, and it does not receive the interagency support necessary to act effectively as the national risk manager. Voluntary security relationships are not delivering the necessary results. Additionally, processes for sharing information, responding to emergencies, designating priority infrastructure within sectors, and promoting resilience are insufficient. Despite these challenges, this report concludes that the overall concept underlying the government’s critical infrastructure protection system — anchored in an approach that balances regulation, incentivization, and collaboration — remains the best method to coordinate the public and private sectors. The report offers operational-level recommendations to improve the existing system while addressing broader strategic considerations that require an update to PPD-21. It also offers specific guidelines on how to revise PPD-21 to preserve what is working while also addressing the significant challenges in building effective public-private collaboration.

Recommendations

Rewrite PPD-21 for a New Era

1. Clearly identify strategic changes.

2. Assign responsibilities and ensure accountability for routine updates of key strategic documents.

3. Clarify CISA’s roles and responsibilities as NRMA.

4. Resolve questions around the organization and designation of critical infrastructure sectors and assigned SRMAs.

5. Provide guidance on SRMA organization and operation.

6. Facilitate accountability.

Support the PPD-21 Rewrite With Implementation and Resourcing Efforts

7. Strengthen CISA’s capabilities to execute its NRMA responsibilities.

8. Resource SRMAs for the responsibilities they have.

9. Identify a more effective way to catalog, support, and protect priority infrastructure.

10. Develop functional information-sharing capacity across all sectors.

11. Organize public-private collaboration to mitigate systemic and cross-sector risk.

12. Ensure effective emergency response.

14. Opinion | An Endgame for Ukraine

Excerpts:

Winning comes in two flavors. The first, and riskier, is to provide Kyiv with the weapons it needs — mainly long-range guided missiles, more tanks, Predator drones and F-16s — not only to push Russia out of the territories it seized in this war, but to retake Crimea and the breakaway “republics” in the east. This is what Ukrainians want, and what they are morally and legally entitled to.

But retaking Crimea will be hard, and even success will come with costs, primarily in the form of populations that aren’t necessarily eager to be liberated by Kyiv. Hence the second flavor: To help Ukraine restore its pre-February 2022 borders, but no further — with compensation in the form of membership in the European Union and a bilateral U.S.-Ukraine security treaty modeled on America’s security cooperation with Israel.

Would this increase America’s exposure to Russian aggression? No, it would diminish it, for the same reason Putin didn’t dare attack the NATO-member Baltic States but twice attacked Ukraine: Dictators prey on the weak, not the strong. Would it satisfy Ukraine’s need for security? Yes, both in guaranteed access to Europe’s markets and America’s arms.

And would it humiliate Putin? In the best way possible, by showing him and other despots, within and beyond Russia, that aggression against democracies never pays.

Opinion | An Endgame for Ukraine

The New York Times · by Bret Stephens · June 6, 2023

Bret Stephens

An Endgame for Ukraine

June 6, 2023, 6:47 p.m. ET

Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

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It may be that Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive, which could be in its early stages, will be as fruitless as Russia’s winter offensive. Defenders typically have advantages over attackers in trench warfare, and the Russian Army has had months to dig in.

But it’s also possible that the Ukrainians could achieve breakthroughs that could put the end of the war in sight this year. What then? How should this end?

We can start by listing the ways in which it shouldn’t. The first is the one suggested last year by President Emmanuel Macron of France. “We must not humiliate Russia,” he argued, “so that the day when the fighting stops we can build an exit ramp through diplomatic means.” At the time, to “not humiliate Russia” was code for allowing Russia to preserve its ill-gotten gains while it was on the offensive.

Wrong. A crushing and unmistakable defeat is precisely what is necessary to put an end to Russia’s imperialistic ambition. It’s easy to forget now that last year’s invasion was the third time Vladimir Putin had launched a war of conquest, intimidation and annexation against his neighbors, following the invasion of Georgia in 2008 and the seizure of Ukrainian soil in 2014. And that’s not counting cyberwarfare against Estonia, assassinations on British soil, the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, or the annihilation of Grozny.

Each act of aggression went essentially unpunished, tempting Russia into the next one. If the war in Ukraine ends with Putin having achieved at least some of his goals and suffering no irreparable consequences to his regime, the only “exit ramp” the West will have found is Putin’s on-ramp to his next outrage.

Similarly, if Ukrainian forces break through Russian lines in a way that prompts Putin to seek a settlement — probably through Chinese mediation — there will be those who argue that a cease-fire and armistice on the Korean model is preferable to the risks of a dramatic escalation. The Kremlin may try to encourage this line of thinking by again rattling its nuclear saber, this time even louder.

But while the nuclear threat should never be discounted, it looks empty on close inspection.

The reason Putin hasn’t used tactical nuclear weapons in this war thus far isn’t because of moral scruples that might vanish if he feels cornered. It’s because those weapons, which were originally designed to destroy large concentrations of armor, make little sense on a thinly spread battlefield. And because the Biden administration has threatened unspecified “catastrophic consequences” if Russia uses such weapons — perhaps involving the sinking of Russia’s Black Sea fleet or some other kinetic but non-nuclear NATO response.

The larger problem with the armistice model is that it freezes the conflict in a way that would allow Russia to resume it once it has licked its wounds and regained its strength. As for Ukraine, it would have to become a garrison state even as its economy has been crippled by the war. Those who make the South Korea analogy neglect two things. First, Russia is intrinsically a more powerful state than North Korea. Second, peace on the Korean Peninsula has been preserved by a large and continuous 70-year U.S. military presence — one that relatively few Americans would have an appetite to duplicate in Ukraine.

The alternative is winning. It is what Ukrainians deserve, what the overwhelming majority want and what they demand from their political leadership. The goal has been both hindered and advanced by President Biden’s fluctuating willingness to provide Kyiv with the tools it needs to win. It has also been stymied by his own ambivalence about the outcome he really desires, other than to not let Russia win and to not blow up the world in the process.

Winning comes in two flavors. The first, and riskier, is to provide Kyiv with the weapons it needs — mainly long-range guided missiles, more tanks, Predator drones and F-16s — not only to push Russia out of the territories it seized in this war, but to retake Crimea and the breakaway “republics” in the east. This is what Ukrainians want, and what they are morally and legally entitled to.

But retaking Crimea will be hard, and even success will come with costs, primarily in the form of populations that aren’t necessarily eager to be liberated by Kyiv. Hence the second flavor: To help Ukraine restore its pre-February 2022 borders, but no further — with compensation in the form of membership in the European Union and a bilateral U.S.-Ukraine security treaty modeled on America’s security cooperation with Israel.

Would this increase America’s exposure to Russian aggression? No, it would diminish it, for the same reason Putin didn’t dare attack the NATO-member Baltic States but twice attacked Ukraine: Dictators prey on the weak, not the strong. Would it satisfy Ukraine’s need for security? Yes, both in guaranteed access to Europe’s markets and America’s arms.

And would it humiliate Putin? In the best way possible, by showing him and other despots, within and beyond Russia, that aggression against democracies never pays.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Bret Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook

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The New York Times · by Bret Stephens · June 6, 2023

15. Special Forces Association Convention 2023 | SOF News

Special Forces Association Convention 2023 | SOF News

sof.news · by John Friberg · June 7, 2023

SFACON 2023 was held during May 22-26, 2023 in Indianapolis, Indiana. The Special Forces Association members, past and current, gathered together to renew old friendships and make new friends, listen to an interesting and variety of speakers, and enjoy a number of enjoyable activities. And, of course, thousands of ‘war stories’ were exchanged during the course of the five days.

The speakers at the SFA Symposium (scroll down page for biographies of speakers) provided a mix of information and entertainment. Some were funny, some updated the assembly on the latest news about special operations, some provided an in-depth analysis of current events or historical aspects of Special Forces, while others provided insight into the complex problems confronting Green Berets and their families during and after their service.

The convention took place at the Wyndham Indianposlis West hotel. The hospitality suite, open all week, featured a cash bar, plenty of seating, and the Green Beret Marketplace where vendors displayed coins, books, t-shirts, and other types of GB swag. Indianapolis offers a variety of attractions to include the Indy Monuments & Memorials Tour, Indy 500 Museum, Museum of Art, Dallara IndyCar Factory Tour, and Conner Prairie. The registration desk at the conference was open all day, every day to assist with visits to city attactions and tours.

Monday, May 22nd

This was arrival day for most of the Green Berets. Registration began in the afternoon, followed by a social gathering. Welcoming speeches provided information about the coming week. The cash bar had a brisk business as everyone settled down in the hospitality suite. Old friends met once again and broke into their familiar groups to catch up with each other. A number of vendors were open for business in the Green Beret Marketplace set up in the hospitality suite.

Tuesday, May 23rd

SFA President’s Meeting. Special Forces Association President Kevin Harry provided an update on the current status of the SF association. The membership of the SFA remains strong at over 11,000 current members. There are 94 SFA chapters across the United States and around the world. A chapter will soon be formed in Key West. The quarterly print magazine, The Drop, is seeing some changes. Members will have the option to select a print copy or to view the periodical in digital form; the default will be digital. The association is exploring more ways to leverage technology to manage day-to-day operations. There were also updates by other SFA officers to include the treasurer, secretary, and special projects officer Chris Bell. Jeremy Miller of Chapter 500 welcomed the attendees to SFACON 2023. Pete Tingstrom provided a brief on the October 2024 SFA Caribbean Cruise.

BG Lawrence Ferguson, Deputy Commander of the 1st Special Forces Command, provided an update on the SF command and what is coming in the future. The command has been busy; over 3,000 of its 23,000 members are currently deployed to over 70 countries. He commented on the success of the 18X program, citing its importance to the personnel strength of the SFODAs. He presented two short videos about Special Forces entitled “The Why” and “The How” (YouTube). Colonel Matt Valas, commander of the 20th Special Forces Group, gave the audience a brief on the two National Guard Special Forces groups to include training, deployments, state mission, federal mission, Rep 63 recruitment, and more. Jeff Man, a former employee of the National Security Agency (NSA) and information security expert gave a brief on his career with the NSA and the infamous Special Forces ‘whiz wheel’ used in the past by 18E’s.

Alex Quade, a war reporter with ties to SF units that deployed overseas, presented screenings of her documenties on SF teams deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. MSG (R) John Armezzani, Veterans Services Director of the Green Beret Foundation, spoke to the audience about services available to veterans after separation from the military. SFC (R) Greg Stube, a retired 18D and book author, recounted his struggle to recover from serious wounds suffered in Afghanistan and provided his input on how to overcome adversity in life. Gayle Becwar, a comedian and magician, performed in the evening with some very good magical feats. On Tuesday afternoon a Green Beret motorcycle ride took place around the Indianapolis area.

Wednesday, May 25th

LTG (R) David Fridovich provided a detailed brief on the beginning years of CJSOTF-P; the establishment of the special operations task force in the Philippines that had its origin in the fall of 2001. While serving as the 1st SFG(A) commander, Fridovich conducted an initial site survey of the Philippines with the task of identifying future SOF assistance to that nation in 2001 and for many years after. COL (R) Ken Hurst gave a presentation of the logistical challenges of supporting the 10th Special Forces Group’s entry into Northern Iraq during the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) in early 2003. At the time, Hurst was the 10th SFG(A) Support Battalion commander. COL (R) Dave Maxwell delivered a presentation entitled “An Unconventional Warfare Mindset: The Philosophy of Special Forces Must be Sustained”; later published by Small Wars Journal. He traces the Unconventional Warfare mindset back to the days of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. He made mention of how SOCEUR assisted Ukraine over the past several years with the implementation of the Resistance Operating Concept and how the U.S. should be helping Taiwan with adopting a ‘porcupine defense‘.

Dr. Alice Atalanta gave a presentation where, how, and why Green Berets can study philosophy; citing the works of philosophers like Seneca, Cicereo, and Dante. She is an author and an advocate for the special operations community. LTC (R) Jeff Tiegs, COO of All Things Possible Ministries, provided a motivational speech for the GBs and their wives in attendence. Eric Prince, former Navy SEAL and Blackwater founder, attended the evening VIP Mixer and spoke to the audience. The evening ended with a dinner buffet, an auction, and a live band.

Thursday, May 27th

Thursday kicked off with Kevin Harry convening a general membership meeting for all attendees providing additional information on the status of the association; with several of the association officers providing reports on projects, programs, activities, and finances. The morning ended with a presentation by MSG Geoffry Dardia (3rd SFG) discussing ‘operator syndrome’ and how current and former GBs can take ownership of their health and well-being. Geoff provided information about the effects of trumatic brain injury, sleep deprivation, inflamation, chronic pain, toxic exposure, cancer trends in SOF, and the importance of seeking support for mental and physical health. Bianca Baldwin, a Silver Star spouse, presented a summary of her time as an advocate and spokesperson of injured Green Berets and their spouses. Dr. Erik Won talked about technologies that provide treatment protocols with the aim of restoring optimal neurological function.

RADM (R) Brian Losey spoke about the benefits of psychedelics in treating mental health issues in the special operations community. He serves on the advisory board of Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions (VETS). The SFA Banquet was held on Thursday evening. Speakers included LTC (R) Mitch Utterback (retired SF officer and author) and LTC (R) Scott Mann. A presentation by Scott Man of Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret followed the dinner.

Friday, May 26th

The last day of the conference included a morning session with closing remarks and then attendance at Carb Day at the Indy 500. Following the racetrack visit attendees went to the American Legion 500 Festival Memorial Service and picnic. The conference ended officially on Friday; however, many attendees chose to attend the Festival Day and Parade in downtown Indianapolis on Saturday and the Indy 500 Race on Sunday (free admission).

SFACON 2024

Next year’s Special Forces Association convention will be held in October 2024. This one will be different than past conventions as it will be held on a cruise ship. It was just recently announced in mid-May 2023 and it already has a couple of hundred registrations. The intent is to fully-book the cruise ship with current and former members of Special Forces. The expected trip will last five days, departing from Tampa, Florida with a couple of stops at Caribbean ports. There will be activities such as a visit to Ybor City, motorcycle ride, and golf tournament held in the Tampa area prior to and after the cruise. Should be an excellent time! Registration – https://sfali.org/cruise-pre-registration-page/

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Special Forces Association Convention 2023

Photos: All photos of speakers (except Jeff Man, Mitch Utterback, Scott Mann, and John Amenzzani) by Brian Kanof of Chapter 9, Special Forces Association, El Paso.

sof.news · by John Friberg · June 7, 2023

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com