Quotes of the Day:

Happy birthday to the U.S. Army, June 14, 1775

“Discipline is the soul of an Army. It makes small numbers formidable; procures success to all of the weak, and esteem to all.” 

– George Washington

“The soldier is the Army. No Army is better than its soldiers. The soldier is also a citizen. In fact, the highest obligation and privilege of citizenship is that of bearing arms for one’s country.” 

– George S Patton

"What can we do to support the troops? Give them a nation that is worthy of protection."

- Two-tour Army veteran who emailed me when I was writing an article for The Atlantic in 2007

1. Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: Happy Birthday, Army.

2. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 13, 2023

3. Pentagon pitches six steps to speed up foreign arms sales

4. Department of Defense Unveils Comprehensive Recommendations to Strengthen Foreign Military Sales

5. Tiger Team Recommendations Aim to Optimize Foreign Military Sales

6. Information Operations against the United States: Defensive Actions are Needed

7. How Might Ukraine’s Counter-Offensive End, and What Comes After?

8. Mick Ryan assesses Ukraine’s counter-offensive

9. National security officials make case for keeping surveillance powers

10. We’re Still Arguing Over Women in the Military?

11. Female Army enlistments down after Vanessa Guillen’s death, data shows

12. In the Dark: How the Pentagon’s Limited Supplier Visibility Risks U.S. National Security

13. Dumb and cheap: When facing electronic warfare in Ukraine, small drones' quantity is quality

14. Philippine lawmakers demand US pays for bases to fund cash-strapped military pension scheme

15. GOP senator blocks arms sale to Hungary for stalling Sweden’s NATO bid

16. Taiwan needs European friends to keep China at bay, minister says on tour

17. How Not to Help Ukraine: A muddled U.S. strategy is making it harder for Kyiv to win.

18. Let Ukraine Into NATO Right Now

19. U.S. Warned Ukraine Not to Attack Nord Stream

20. ISLAND BLITZ: A CAMPAIGN ANALYSIS OF A TAIWAN TAKEOVER BY THE PLA

21. Global Democracy is in Trouble. The U.S. Intelligence Community Can Help

1. Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: Happy Birthday, Army.

To think it all started with this order – when we would write simple direct orders, when less was more.  

This covers everything from personnel (numbers and rank structure) and pay, oath of enlistment, UCMJ, readiness and training (expert rifleman), equipping (find their own rifles and "cloaths"), and the deployment order  with command relationship (under the command of the chief

Officer in that army​)​

Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: Happy Birthday, Army.

http://www.constitution.org/uslaw/cont-cong/02_journals_continental_congress.pdf

Journal of the Second Continental Congress

Wednesday, June 14, 1775

The Congress met and agreeable to the order of the day, resolved itself into a

committee of the whole, to take into consideration &c. After some time spent

thereon, the president resumed the chair, and Mr. [Samuel] Ward reported, that not

having yet come to a conclusion they desired him to move for leave to sit again. At

the same time they desired him to report some resolutions which they had come

into.

The resolutions being read, were adopted as follows:

Resolved, that six companies of expert riflemen, be immediately raised in

Pennsylvania, two in Maryland, and two in Virginia; that each company consist of a

captain, three lieutenants, four serjeants, four corporals, a drummer or trumpeter,

and sixty-eight privates.

That each company, as soon as compleated, shall march and join the army near

Boston, to be there employed as light infantry, under the command of the chief

Officer in that army.

That the pay of the Officers and privates be as follows, viz, a captain @ 20 dollars

per month; a lieutenant @ 13 ½ dollars; a serjeant @ 8 dollars; a corporal @ 7 1/3

dollars; drummer or [trumpeter] @ 7 1/3 doll.; privates @ 6 2/3 dollars; to find

their own arms and cloaths.

That the form of the enlistment be in the following words:

I, ___________________ have, this day, voluntarily enlisted myself, as a soldier, in the

American continental army, for one year, unless sooner discharged: And I do bind

myself to conform, in all instances, to such rules and regulations, as are, or shall be,

established for the government of the said Army.

Upon motion, Resolved, That Mr. [George] Washington, Mr. [Phillip] Schuyler, Mr.

[Silas] Deane, Mr. [Thomas] Cushing, and Mr. [Joseph] Hewes be a committee to

bring in a dra’t of Rules and regulations for the government of the army.

2. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 13, 2023

Maps/graphics/citations: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-13-2023

Key Takeaways

• Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations in at least three directions and made further limited territorial gains on June 13.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin met with 18 prominent Russian milbloggers and war correspondents to discuss the progress of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on June 13.
• Putin discussed the progress of the Ukrainian counteroffensive and signaled that he believes Russia can outlast Western military support for Ukraine.
• Putin indicated that he is unwilling to announce a second wave of mobilization or declare martial law, despite maintaining his maximalist objectives in Ukraine.
• Putin aimed to assuage widespread discontent in the Russian information space about limited cross-border raids by pro-Ukraine forces into Belgorod Oblast, drone strikes across Russia, and border security in general.
• Putin discussed the importance of formalizing volunteer formations, supporting the Russian MoD’s measures to centralize its control over operations in Ukraine.
• Putin is likely continuing to publicly engage with, and platform select pro-Kremlin milbloggers to further leverage the community to expand his support among Russian ultranationalists.
• Russian sources claimed that a Ukrainian missile strike killed Chief of Staff of the 35th Combined Arms Army (Eastern Military District) Major General Sergei Goryachev in Zaporizhia Oblast.
• Russian forces conducted missile and drone strikes across Ukraine on June 13.
• Russian authorities continue to express increasing concern over information related to Russia’s defense industrial base (DIB).
• Russian forces continued ground attacks on the Kreminna frontline but did not conduct offensive operations on the Kupyansk-Svatove line.
• Ukrainian forces continued to advance on Bakhmut’s northern and southern flanks, while Russian forces launched counterattacks in the vicinity of Bakhmut.
• Russian forces continued offensive operations on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line and are transferring additional forces from east (left) bank Kherson Oblast to reinforce the direction.
• Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks near the administrative border of Donetsk and Zaporizhia oblasts.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that the Russian military has recruited 150,000 contract servicemembers as well as over 6,000 volunteers since January 2023.
• Russian occupation officials in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast are reportedly continuing evacuation efforts, although are likely continuing to deny services to some residents in flooded areas.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JUNE 13, 2023

Jun 13, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 13, 2023

Kateryna Stepanenko, Riley Bailey, Nicole Wolkov, George Barros, and Mason Clark

 June 13, 2023, 8:35pm 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 2:30 pm ET on June 13. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the June 14 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations in at least three directions and made further limited territorial gains on June 13. Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported that Ukrainian forces advanced by 250 meters northeast of Bakhmut and by 200 meters south of Bakhmut.[1] Malyar also reported that Ukrainian forces advanced 500-1,000m in the past 24 hours around the administrative border between Zaporizhia and Donetsk oblasts, liberating around three square kilometers of territory in the area.[2] Ukrainian General Staff Spokesperson Andriy Kovalev reported that Ukrainian forces have liberated over 100 square kilometers of territory since beginning counteroffensive operations.[3] Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin claimed on June 13 that he assesses that Ukrainian forces have likely liberated more than 100 square kilometers.[4] Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued ground assaults southwest of Orikhiv and south of Hulyaipole in western Zaporizhia Oblast on the night of June 12 to 13.[5] Russian sources widely reported that the tempo of Ukrainian operations in the Orikhiv area has declined in recent days.[6]Ukrainian Ministry of Defense Environmental Safety Department and Mine Action representative Major Vladyslav Dudar reported on June 13 that Russian forces are regularly destroying small dams in localized areas of southern Ukraine to disrupt Ukrainian counteroffensive operations.[7]

Russian President Vladimir Putin met with 18 prominent Russian milbloggers and war correspondents to discuss the progress of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on June 13.[8] Putin largely met with milbloggers closely associated with the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company and other state-owned outlets, notably excluding milbloggers who have been more critical of Putin’s war effort.[9] Putin addressed several key milblogger concerns relating to the Ukrainian counteroffensive, Russian objectives in Ukraine, Russian mobilization and the possibility of imposing martial law, the formalization of private military companies (PMCs), and hostile incursions into Belgorod Oblast.

Putin discussed the progress of the Ukrainian counteroffensive and signaled that he believes Russia can outlast Western military support for Ukraine. Putin stated that Russian objectives have not fundamentally changed, reiterating boilerplate rhetoric and false narratives accusing Ukraine and NATO of initiating the war.[10] Putin added that the West can push Ukraine into negotiations with Russia by stopping the supplies of military aid to Ukraine.[11] Putin noted that Ukrainian forces launched a ”massive” counteroffensive on June 4 and noted that Ukrainian forces attacked in southwestern Donetsk and Zaporizhia oblasts, claiming they suffered significant losses. Putin claimed that Ukraine has lost 160 tanks and claimed that 30 percent of Ukraine’s casualties are killed in action, whereas Russian forces have lost only 54 tanks. Putin may be attempting to systematically amplify and misrepresent Ukrainian losses of Western military equipment to portray Ukraine’s counteroffensive as failed and discourage the West from continuing to support Ukraine. Former Russian officer and ardent ultranationalist Igor Girkin observed that Putin’s comments indicate that the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) continues to misinform him about the true situation on the battlefield.[12]

Putin indicated that he is unwilling to announce a second wave of mobilization or declare martial law, despite maintaining his maximalist objectives in Ukraine. Putin acknowledged that some Russian “public figures” are discussing the urgent need for mobilization but noted that there “is currently no need today” for mobilization. Putin boasted about Russian contract service recruitment efforts using rhetoric consistent with ISW’s previous assessments that Putin is disinterested in announcing another mobilization wave and is instead prioritizing volunteer recruitment.[13] Putin also downplayed milbloggers’ concern over the Kremlin’s decision to not declare full-scale martial law throughout Russia, stating that Russia needs to expand its law enforcement rather than declare martial law. ISW continues to assess that Putin is a risk-averse actor who is hesitant to upset Russian society by ordering another mobilization wave or establishing martial law throughout Russia, indicating that Putin has not yet decided to fully commit to fighting a total war. Putin’s statements likely aim to reassure his constituencies that he does not intend to expand the “special military operation” further.

Putin aimed to assuage widespread discontent in the Russian information space about limited cross border raids by pro-Ukraine forces into Belgorod Oblast, drone strikes across Russia, and border security in general. Putin stated that Russian forces do not plan to divert forces from other sectors of the frontline in Ukraine to Belgorod and other border oblasts in response to border incursions and drone strikes on Russian territory.[14] Putin stated that Russian leadership is considering creating a buffer zone within Ukraine to prevent Ukrainian forces from reaching Russian territory, but caveated the suggestion by saying that Russian officials will not immediately create a buffer zone and will examine how the situation develops.[15] Russian officials have previously responded to limited tactical activity in Belgorod Oblast and other border oblasts by calling for a Russian offensive to push Ukrainian forces away from the international border with Russia in Kharkiv Oblast.[16] Putin’s comments indicate that the Kremlin does not intend to react to cross-border operations in an effort to preserve forces for combat in Ukraine, despite growing discontent within Russia prompted by the raids. Putin also confirmed that Russian conscripts are serving in Belgorod Oblast and that Colonel General Alexander Lapin commanded conscripts to repel the pro-Ukrainian all-Russian limited raids in Belgorod Oblast. Russian forces are likely deploying conscripts to serve in border oblasts due to a lack of reserves and an unwillingness to transfer forces away from the frontline elsewhere in Ukraine. ISW previously assessed that limited raids and border shelling in Belgorod Oblast have become a notable focal point for criticism against the Russian military leadership, and Putin is likely attempting to address critiques that he has ignored the situation there in order to insulate himself from further criticism.[17] 

Putin discussed the importance of formalizing volunteer formations, supporting the Russian MoD’s measures to centralize its control over operations in Ukraine. Putin claimed that all volunteer formations serving in Ukraine must sign military contracts with the Russian MoD to “bring everything in line with common sense, established practice, and the law” and to ensure that individual volunteers can legally receive state social benefits.[18] Putin emphasized that the Russian government cannot provide social guarantees to volunteer structures without signed contracts.[19] Putin’s emphasis on the legality of volunteer formations suggests that Putin may be intending to either assert direct control over or set conditions to ban state assistance to select private military organizations (PMCs) such as the Wagner Group, which are technically illegal under the Russian law.

Putin is likely continuing to publicly engage with, and platform select pro-Kremlin milbloggers to further leverage the community to expand his support among Russian ultranationalists. Putin previously held a closed-door meeting with milbloggers on June 17, 2022, to defuse growing discontent about Russian setbacks in Ukraine, and has occasionally interacted with the pro-Kremlin milblogger community since.[20] ISW previously assessed that the milblogger community rose to prominence likely as a direct result of the Kremlin’s failure to establish an effective social media presence as well as its general failure to prepare the Russian public for a serious and protracted war.[21] The Kremlin has protected Russian milbloggers from criticism and calls for censorship and has rewarded select milbloggers with official positions to co-opt their audience and gain access to their close ties to prominent nationalist and pro-war groups.[22] Putin’s highly publicized meeting with the milbloggers is reflective of the Kremlin’s promotion of this group in the previous year and suggests that Putin intends to further elevate their standing. Putin is likely setting information conditions to prevent potential lines of attack against the Kremlin in the event of Russian failure. Putin may also be increasingly aware that committed pro-war figures are his key constituency as he calls on the Russian public to prepare for a protracted war in Ukraine. The Kremlin is likely aware that key pro-war figures will be crucial to rallying the rest of society to that effort, and Putin’s engagement with these milbloggers may suggest that the Kremlin will increasingly rely on the wider ultranationalist community to maintain support for the war effort.               

Russian sources claimed that a Ukrainian missile strike killed Chief of Staff of the 35th Combined Arms Army (Eastern Military District) Major General Sergei Goryachev in Zaporizhia Oblast.[23] ISW has observed other elements of the Eastern Military District including elements of the 58th Combined Arms Army and 5th Combined Arms Army operating in western Zaporizhia Oblast.[24] Goryachev’s reported death in Zaporizhia Oblast could suggest that Russian forces have dedicated elements of the 35th Combined Arms Army to operations in Zaporizhia Oblast and that some Russian senior military command officials continue to operate close to the frontline and remain exposed to accurate Ukrainian strikes.[25]

Russian forces conducted missile and drone strikes across Ukraine on June 13. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces launched 16 Kh-101/555 cruise missiles and four Shahed 131/136 drones that targeted infrastructure facilities in Kharkiv Oblast and residential buildings in Kryvyi Rih.[26] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces destroyed 11 Kh101/555 missiles and one Shahed drone.[27]

Russian authorities continue to express increasing concern over information related to Russia’s defense industrial base (DIB). The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) reportedly arrested two defense sector employees for allegedly collaborating with Ukraine and Germany.[28] A Russian milblogger claimed that the FSB arrested an engineer at the end of May who worked in the defense industry and collaborated with the Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR).[29] Russian opposition news outlet SOTA reported that the FSB arrested a former employee of a defense enterprise for allegedly providing information to Germany about the Russian defense industry.[30] ISW has previously reported on Russian authorities arresting individuals with reported access to DIB-related information.[31]

Key Takeaways

• Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations in at least three directions and made further limited territorial gains on June 13.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin met with 18 prominent Russian milbloggers and war correspondents to discuss the progress of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on June 13.
• Putin discussed the progress of the Ukrainian counteroffensive and signaled that he believes Russia can outlast Western military support for Ukraine.
• Putin indicated that he is unwilling to announce a second wave of mobilization or declare martial law, despite maintaining his maximalist objectives in Ukraine.
• Putin aimed to assuage widespread discontent in the Russian information space about limited cross-border raids by pro-Ukraine forces into Belgorod Oblast, drone strikes across Russia, and border security in general.
• Putin discussed the importance of formalizing volunteer formations, supporting the Russian MoD’s measures to centralize its control over operations in Ukraine.
• Putin is likely continuing to publicly engage with, and platform select pro-Kremlin milbloggers to further leverage the community to expand his support among Russian ultranationalists.
• Russian sources claimed that a Ukrainian missile strike killed Chief of Staff of the 35th Combined Arms Army (Eastern Military District) Major General Sergei Goryachev in Zaporizhia Oblast.
• Russian forces conducted missile and drone strikes across Ukraine on June 13.
• Russian authorities continue to express increasing concern over information related to Russia’s defense industrial base (DIB).
• Russian forces continued ground attacks on the Kreminna frontline but did not conduct offensive operations on the Kupyansk-Svatove line.
• Ukrainian forces continued to advance on Bakhmut’s northern and southern flanks, while Russian forces launched counterattacks in the vicinity of Bakhmut.
• Russian forces continued offensive operations on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line and are transferring additional forces from east (left) bank Kherson Oblast to reinforce the direction.
• Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks near the administrative border of Donetsk and Zaporizhia oblasts.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that the Russian military has recruited 150,000 contract servicemembers as well as over 6,000 volunteers since January 2023.
• Russian occupation officials in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast are reportedly continuing evacuation efforts, although are likely continuing to deny services to some residents in flooded areas.

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 continued ground attacks on the Kreminna frontline but did not conduct offensive operations on the Kupyansk-Svatove line.[32] A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that Russian forces continued to hold bridgeheads southwest and northeast of Dvorichna (17km northeast of Kupyansk) but ISW had not observed visual confirmation of these claims as of this publication.[33] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks on Bilohorivka (13km south of Kreminna), and Rozdolivka and Vesele (both 33km southwest of Kreminna).[34] A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that Russian forces unsuccessfully attacked Ukrainian positions in Bilohorivka, and another Russian source claimed that Russian forces repelled a Ukrainian attack on the settlement.[35] Russian forces indicated that elements of the Russian 98th Guards Airborne Division are continuing to operate on the Svatove-Kreminna line, and that elements of the 3rd Separate Special Purpose (Spetsnaz) Brigade are operating in the Kreminna area.[36]

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

Ukrainian forces continued to advance on Bakhmut’s northern and southern flanks, while Russian forces launched counterattacks in the vicinity of Bakhmut on June 13. Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported that Ukrainian forces advanced 250m in the Berkhivka Reservoir area (6km northwest of Bakhmut) and 200m in the Toretsk direction (about 20km southwest of Bakhmut).[37] Malyar added that fighting is ongoing in the Yahidne area (5km north of Bakhmut).[38] The Ukrainian General Staff also reported that Russian forces launched unsuccessful ground attacks in the direction of Orikhovo-Vasylivka (13km northwest of Bakhmut) and Bila Hora (15km southwest of Bakhmut).[39] A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that Russian forces unsuccessfully counterattacked in the direction of Bila Hora and Ivanivske (6km west of Bakhmut) and claimed that Ukrainian forces were not successful in conducting assault operations in the Berkhivka area.[40] Another Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces unsuccessfully attempted to break through Russian defenses in Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut).[41] Russian sources also indicated that elements of the “Nevsky” volunteer detachment are continuing to operate on Bakhmut’s northern flanks.[42] Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Colonel Serhiy Cherevaty stated that Russian forces are continuing to deploy additional elite airborne and infantry forces to Bakhmut.[43]

Russian forces continued offensive operations on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line and are transferring additional forces from east (left) bank Kherson Oblast to reinforce the direction. Ukrainian military officials reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks on Avdiivka and Marinka (southwestern outskirts of Donetsk City).[44] Ukrainian Tavriisk Defense Forces Spokesperson Capitan Valeriy Shershen stated that the Russian military command is transferring personnel from Kherson Oblast and noted the arrival of Chechen “South-Akhmat” and “North-Akhmat” units on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line.[45] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces advanced on the northern and southern approaches to Avdiivka and continued assaults in western Marinka.[46] A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger contrarily claimed that Russian forces attacked on the northwestern approaches to Avdiivka but did not make any territorial gains.[47]

Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed offensive ground operations in the Vuhledar area. A Russian source claimed that elements of the Russian 68th Army Corps of the Eastern Military District are engaged in artillery fire in the vicinity of Vuhledar.[48]

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

Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks near the administrative border of Donetsk and Zaporizhia oblasts on June 13. Ukrainian Tavriisk Defense Forces Spokesperson Captain Valeriy Shershen reported that Russian forces continued attempts to recapture Makarivka (7km south of Velyka Novosilka) and conducted unsuccessful operations in the Vremivka salient (immediately west of Velyka Novosilka) and Blahodatne (5km south of Velyka Novosilka) directions.[49] Ukrainian and some Russian sources reported that Ukrainian forces maintained their positions in Makarivka as of June 13.[50] Some Russian milbloggers reported that Russian and Ukrainian forces continued fighting over the settlement on the night of June 12 to 13 and that the settlement continues to be in a contested ”grey zone.”[51] Russian sources claimed that fighting is ongoing near Staromayorske (7km south of Velyka Novosilka) and Urozhaine (9km south of Velyka Novosilka).[52] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces repelled two Ukrainian attacks near Rivnopil (9km southwest of Velyka Novosilka).[53] Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported on June 13 that Ukrainian forces advanced from 500-1,000 meters and liberated up to 3 square km of territory in the Berdyansk direction over the past 24 hours.[54]

Ukrainian forces conducted ground attacks in western Zaporizhia Oblast on June 13. Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations near Pyatykhatky (23km southwest of Orikhiv) and Dorozhyanka (34km southeast of Hulyaipole) and that fighting is ongoing south of Orikhiv and near Lobkove (24km southwest of Orikhiv).[55] Russian sources claimed that volunteer formations including the ”Crimea,” ”Storm Ossetia,” ”Alania,” and ”Sarmat” battalions are operating in Zaporizhia Oblast.[56] Russian sources reported that elements of 58th Combined Arms Army (Southern Military District) including the 291st Motorized Rifle Regiment and 72nd Motorized Rifle Regiment (42nd Motorized Rifle Division) and the 429th Motorized Rifle Regiment (19th Motorized Rifle Division) continue to operate in Zaporizhia Oblast.[57]

Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that Russian forces did not observe large explosions at the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant (KHPP) dam on June 5.[58] Putin claimed that Ukrainian forces previously struck the dam in repeated HIMARS strikes and that it is possible that some “insignificant” Ukrainian strike that Russian forces did not notice caused the destruction. Putin asserted that Ukrainian forces intentionally destroyed the dam, although the extent of the damage at the dam could not have been achieved with a HIMARS rocket let alone munitions that would have created such a small explosion that Russian forces did not notice it. ISW previously reported that several independent sources reported that an internal explosion likely destroyed the KHPP dam.[59] ISW assesses that the balance of evidence, reasoning, and rhetoric suggests that Russian forces deliberately damaged the KHPP dam.[60]

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

Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that the Russian military has recruited 150,000 contract servicemembers as well as over 6,000 volunteers since January 2023.[61] Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev previously claimed on May 19, 2023, that the Russian military has recruited 117,400 contract personnel into volunteer formations since January 1, 2023.[62] It is unclear if Putin misreported the number of contract servicemen with the total number of Russian personnel who have signed contracts with the Ministry of Defense (MoD) since January or if Medvedev previously misreported the number of those recruited into volunteer formations.

The Russian MoD continues efforts to formalize volunteer formations. The MoD claimed on June 13 that three volunteer brigades and four separate volunteer detachments signed contracts with the MoD as part of Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s order for all Russian volunteer personnel to sign contracts directly with the MoD by July 1.[63] ISW assesses that the MoD’s ongoing formalization efforts aim to centralize control over Russian irregular personnel and supplies to respond to Ukrainian counteroffensive operations while also restricting the influence of figures outside of the MoD, primarily Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin.[64]

Putin confirmed that he is signing decrees to pardon convict recruits serving with Russian forces in Ukraine.[65] Putin ludicrously claimed that convict recruits have a recidivism rate of 0.4 percent as compared to the regular recidivism rate of 40 percent.[66] Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov previously stated that Putin has been issuing preemptive pardons for convicts who serve in Russian operations in Ukraine.[67] ISW has previously assessed that preemptive presidential pardons may be driving further recruitment within Russian penal colonies.[68]

Putin signed a law on June 13 permitting Russian authorities to seize the passports of Russian citizens who receive summonses for military service.[69] The State Duma adopted the law in May 2023 and the Federation Council approved it on June 7.[70] The Kremlin previously passed legislation that would allow Russian officials to prevent those who receive military summonses from leaving the country within 20 days of being summoned to crack down on Russian draft dodgers.[71] The new law likely aims to further expand Russian authorities’ ability to prevent Russian citizens from fleeing military service.

Russian officials proposed a draft bill on June 13 that would set conditions to exempt individuals who have signed a contract for military service from criminal liabilities. Russian Senator Andrey Klishas and State Duma deputies Pavel Krasheninnikov and Irina Pankina proposed the bill to exempt mobilized and contract Russian servicemembers from liabilities of crimes of a “small and medium gravity.”[72] The proposed bill does not specify what crimes constitute as being of a ”small and medium gravity” and the bill would reportedly apply to the entirety of a contract period including during partial mobilization, martial law, or war.[73] The measures may be an effort to shield Russian servicemembers from punishments stipulated by Russian law for crimes they commit in occupied territories in Ukraine.

Prigozhin visited the Muromteplovoz factory in Murom, Vladimir Oblast on June 13, likely in an effort to expand Wagner Group’s access to supplies and equipment.[74] The Muromteplovoz factory produces armored personnel carriers, armored fighting vehicles, and infantry fighting vehicles.[75]

A Russian commander reportedly complained that the Russian military does not give smaller supply vehicles to units in advanced positions on the frontline. A Russian milblogger amplified a critique from a Russian commander in which the commander argued that the delivery of supplies and goods to the front is fraught with equipment losses and that smaller vehicles would be harder for Ukrainian forces to detect.[76] The milblogger claimed that individual units purchase these smaller vehicles as well as night vision devices for the vehicles at their own expense or with the help of volunteers.[77]

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 occupation officials in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast are reportedly continuing evacuation efforts, although are likely continuing to deny services to some residents in flooded areas. Kherson Oblast occupation administration head Vladimir Saldo claimed that Russian occupation officials have evacuated 7,200 residents from flooded areas in left bank Kherson Oblast as of June 13 and that 1,700 residents are staying at temporary accommodation centers.[78] The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that Russian forces have prevented hundreds of people from leaving flooded areas in left bank Kherson Oblast, particularly in Oleshky Hromada.[79] Advisor to the Kherson Oblast Military Administration Head Serhiy Khlan reported that Russian occupation officials did not conduct evacuations in Nova Kakhovka and have instead massively looted the flooded settlement.[80]

Russian officials are reportedly trying to streamline checkpoints between occupied Kherson Oblast and Crimea. The Kherson Oblast Occupation Administration reported on June 12 that Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin visited the Chonhar checkpoint in Kherson Oblast on the border with Crimea and set deadlines for its reorganization.[81] Khusnullin reportedly set the deadlines in accordance with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s instructions to modernize checkpoints between occupied territories and Russian-occupied Crimea as well as Russia itself.[82] Russian officials are likely trying to lift stringent security measures and expand facilities at checkpoints to diminish delays along important ground lines of communication (GLOC) and better supply the Russian grouping in southern Ukraine.

Significant activity in Belarus (Russian efforts to increase its military presence in Belarus and further integrate Belarus into Russian-favorable frameworks).

ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarusian military activity in Belarus, as part of ongoing Kremlin efforts to increase their control over Belarus and other Russian actions in Belarus.

The Belarusian Ministry of Defense announced that the Belarusian military’s logistics head will conduct a command-staff exercise on command and control for logistics support on June 13-16.[83] ISW previously assessed that similar Belarusian logistics exercises can support a permanent Russian military presence in Belarus.[84]  

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.

3. Pentagon pitches six steps to speed up foreign arms sales

This has long been needed.  

There should be a simple test for each FMS case: how does this sale support the Combatant Commander's strategy? If it is important to support the strategy that should drive speed of execution. If it is not in support of the theater strategy we should question the efficacy of these sales (yes it may be in support of other priorities - e.g., sale to keep the industrial base operating) but if it is in support a theater strategy that should drive prioritization and timing as well as giving the bureaucracy a reason to execute the case without delay.

The bottomline is if it is not in support of a theater strategy then we should question the priority.

Excerpts:

The Pentagon already has the ability to prioritize sales to certain nations, Baker said, but the panel reviewing the FMS process concluded the Pentagon must pay more attention to combatant commanders’ perspectives.

Combatant commanders often hear from partner nations more frequently about the challenges or timing issues they face, and what would most help them, Baker said. But that information can take a while to get back to Washington.

To fix this, the Pentagon has created a monthly meeting on FMS issues, in which combatant commanders can highlight cases that need more attention from senior leaders, or have gone wrong and need to be fixed.

Pentagon pitches six steps to speed up foreign arms sales

Defense News · by Stephen Losey · June 13, 2023

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon aims to speed up its lagging Foreign Military Sales process, in part by fostering better discussions with other nations about their defense needs as well as expanding industry’s capacity to build more military equipment.

Defense officials at the Pentagon on Tuesday announced six recommendations on how the department plans to speed up foreign military sales, which also include streamlining the processes for reviewing and releasing technology to allies and partner nations; finding ways to speed up the approval of non-programs of record cases; better mapping out the process for prioritizing and awarding foreign sales; and working with the State Department, lawmakers and other parts of the government to find more ways to improve the process.

“Our allies and partners are a center of gravity and the greatest strategic advantage for the U.S. military” as it prepares for a possible conflict against an advanced nation, according to Sasha Baker, deputy undersecretary of defense for policy.

“The [National Defense Strategy] is a call to action for the defense enterprise to incorporate our allies and partners across the board at every stage of defense planning, and obviously FMS has a big role to play in that process,” Baker said in a briefing with reporters.

The United States typically sells tens of billions of dollars of weapons to foreign governments each year, reaching a recent high of $83.5 billion in 2020, before dropping to nearly $35 billion the next year and then growing again to nearly $52 billion in 2022.

But the government’s pace of approving and delivering weapons to nations such as Taiwan has been consistently sluggish, often languishing for months or years, and has drawn the ire of lawmakers and partner nations who want the U.S. to move faster.

Baker said the Pentagon’s panel reviewing the FMS process knew it must change how the military does business, noting the department frequently heard from customers that such sales “can be a pain point for them.”

But, she cautioned, there was no single “silver bullet” to fix the process, and the panel settled on an assortment of smaller improvements.

The top change Baker highlighted was to improve how the department talks with ally and partner nations about their military sales needs. To do this, and to cut down on delays in the process, the department plans to set up a new Defense Security Cooperation Service, similar to the existing Defense Attaché Service, as well as make other changes to how it organizes its security cooperation processes.

This new service will ensure security cooperation officers receive training and professional development to “make good choices and decisions” while working with customers, Baker said. Details on the establishment of this new service are not yet determined.

Having a stronger understanding of what foreign customers need will also help expand the capacity of the defense-industrial base, Baker said, by giving defense firms a better idea of what ally and partner nations require in the years to come.

Baker said the industrial base expansion strategy will include a greater use of multiyear contracts, the Special Defense Acquisition Fund and five-year analyses that predict what customers’ needs.

The Pentagon has already moved to make multiyear purchases of key munitions, for example, as efforts to arm Ukraine and other partner nations have in many cases stretched America’s supply of munitions thin and maxed out the industrial base’s production capacity.

“We can’t produce things on cold lines, where we just don’t have the production capacity,” said Radha Plumb, deputy undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment.

Plumb said the Pentagon’s effort to encourage the defense-industrial base to expand production capacity — such as building surge capacity for high-demand, low-supply systems and munitions — will complement its goal of improving the FMS process and creating a greater supply for foreign customers.

This “will also allow us to provide a clear demand signal for industry as they plan for production expansions and work with us on systems of interest for foreign partners, as well as for our own systems,” Plumb said.

While the weapons and supplies the United States has provided to Ukraine are not foreign military sales, Plumb noted, several of the same issues have cropped up in discussions about how to speed up that nation’s security assistance.

Baker also said the Pentagon must create more ways for customers to clearly communicate with the U.S. about the status of their FMS requests. Too often, she explained, foreign nations don’t hear anything from the Pentagon for months after submitting a request and are left “in limbo.”

The Pentagon already has the ability to prioritize sales to certain nations, Baker said, but the panel reviewing the FMS process concluded the Pentagon must pay more attention to combatant commanders’ perspectives.

Combatant commanders often hear from partner nations more frequently about the challenges or timing issues they face, and what would most help them, Baker said. But that information can take a while to get back to Washington.

To fix this, the Pentagon has created a monthly meeting on FMS issues, in which combatant commanders can highlight cases that need more attention from senior leaders, or have gone wrong and need to be fixed.

Plumb said the Pentagon plans to map out the FMS prioritization and award process using consistent metrics, so both the government and industry have a clearer picture of what is going on and where potential problems exist.

The Pentagon also has acquisition tools — such as indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contracts, as well as undefinitized contract actions — that could allow it to move faster, Plumb said, and the department will look for FMS cases that could benefit from quicker strategies.

The Pentagon also plans to set up a board, headed by Baker and Plumb, to continually look at the highest-priority FMS cases and process improvements to avoid stalled requests.

Baker said this board will also provide senior leaders a better, data-driven view of where logjams are occurring.

“Where is the system blinking red?” Baker said. “Is it a particular region? Is it a type of capability? Is it on the production side? Is it on the precontracting side? … A lot of the data exists, but it’s not particularly easy for senior leaders to get … their hands on it.”

About Stephen Losey

Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.

4. Department of Defense Unveils Comprehensive Recommendations to Strengthen Foreign Military Sales

Defense Security Cooperation Service on par with Defense Attache Service? I am interested in understanding what that means.

Excerpt:

• Improve the Department's understanding of ally and partner requirements. To accelerate discussions with allies and partner nations about FMS requirements and reduce delays during the FMS case lifecycle, the Department will change the way it organizes, trains, and equips for security cooperation, including by establishing a Defense Security Cooperation Service on par with the Defense Attaché Service.

Department of Defense Unveils Comprehensive Recommendations to Strengthen Foreign Military Sales

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Today, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III approved a tasking memo from the Department of Defense (DoD) Foreign Military Sales (FMS) Tiger Team that highlights six key FMS pressure points and directs implementation of recommendations to improve and accelerate the Department's institutional processes to execute FMS cases. The efforts of the Tiger Team and the Department's commitment to improve the FMS system advance the direction of the 2022 National Defense Strategy to break down barriers to working with allies and partners.

The Tiger Team analyzed representative case studies at all phases of the FMS process, illuminated best practices to benchmark, and identified systemic challenges endemic in DoD's FMS ecosystem. The team reviewed the findings of historical reform efforts, and also solicited and incorporated feedback from allies and partner nations and U.S. industry on ways to improve the efficiency of DoD's implementation of the FMS process.

Secretary Austin instructed FMS-implementing agencies to:

• Improve the Department's understanding of ally and partner requirements. To accelerate discussions with allies and partner nations about FMS requirements and reduce delays during the FMS case lifecycle, the Department will change the way it organizes, trains, and equips for security cooperation, including by establishing a Defense Security Cooperation Service on par with the Defense Attaché Service.

• Enable efficient reviews for release of technology. To reduce barriers to the export of key capabilities, the Department will review and update relevant policies and empower accountable officials to improve the efficiency of the review and release of technology to allies and partner nations. The Department will also continue to support interagency efforts focused on technology review and release.

• Provide allies and partner nations relevant priority capabilities. To better enable allies and partner nations to support their own national security needs, the Department of Defense will develop methodology to facilitate Non-Programs of Record.

• Accelerate acquisition and contracting support. To advance FMS acquisition prioritization and award timelines for allies and partner nations, the Department will establish contract award standards and metrics as well as develop associated process maps to monitor the FMS prioritization and award process.

• Expand Defense Industrial Base (DIB) capacity. To reduce production timelines, the Department will incorporate ally and partner requirements into ongoing efforts to expand DIB production capacity. This will include developing a comprehensive study to incentivize DIB investment in production capacity and building surge capability for high-demand, low-supply platforms, systems, and services. The strategy will include use of multi-year contracts; enhanced use of the Special Defense Acquisition Fund; five-year predictive analyses of partner demand; and sustained engagement with the DIB.

• Ensure broad U.S. Government support. Recognizing that DoD is part of the broader U.S. Government FMS ecosystem, the Department will work with the Department of State and other stakeholders, including Congress, to identify opportunities to improve the FMS process.

To implement these recommendations and ensure elevation of emergent FMS issues to senior leadership, the Department established an FMS Continuous Process Improvement Board (CPIB), which will act as an enduring governance structure within the Department. The Board, which reports to the Secretary of Defense, will provide accountability in implementing the recommendations, measuring impact, and continually pursuing areas to improve the overall process.

FMS is a fundamental tool of U.S. foreign policy and national security and strengthens the United States' unmatched network of allies and partners. Under the FMS program, the U.S. Government uses DoD's acquisition system to procure defense articles and services on behalf of U.S. allies and partner nations. The program is administered by the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) and is authorized by the Arms Export Control Act (AECA), as overseen by the Department of State.

The Secretary established the FMS Tiger Team in August 2022 to address historical inefficiencies in the United States' transfer of defense articles and services to foreign allies and partners. The team, comprised of senior representatives from across the Department of Defense, is co-led by Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Dr. Radha Plumb and Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Sasha Baker.

defense.gov

5. Tiger Team Recommendations Aim to Optimize Foreign Military Sales

It is great to see this kind of priority put on FMS.

We were very frustrated in the Philippines when we were conducting Title 10 operations but were depending on FMS for host nation equipment being provided under the authority of Title 22 which was not at all response in a timely way to the needs of the host nation nor the combatant commander's strategy.

I see that they recommend a Defense Security Cooperation Suffice (thus the meaning of being "on par" with the Defense Attache Service).  

Or maybe we should consider establishing an Institute for Military Assistance. Oh wait. We once had something like that conducting MTTs around the world.

Excerpts:

Chief among those is improving the department's understanding of ally and partner requirements.

"In other words," Baker said, "if we put good information into the system at the front, we know it's more likely to result in a positive outcome on the back end."

Recommendations that fall into this category include changing the way DOD organizes, trains and equips for security cooperation. Here, Baker said, the department plans, for instance, to establish a Defense Security Cooperation Service which is on par with the Defense Attache Service.

"One of the recommendations of the tiger team that the secretary has approved is that we are going to establish a defense security cooperation service," said Baker. "[It's] focused on security cooperation officers to make sure that they get the training and the professional development that they need to make good choices and decisions."

Tiger Team Recommendations Aim to Optimize Foreign Military Sales

defense.gov · by C. Todd Lopez

The process by which the United States sells military hardware and services to foreign nations has frequently been cited as a "pain point" by American partners and allies. But recommendations from a recently concluded tiger team aim to fix that and other issues with the foreign military sales process.

Last year, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III tasked a tiger team to look into how to improve the FMS process, said Sasha Baker, the deputy undersecretary of defense for policy. Now that team has concluded its work and has delivered a variety of recommendations, which Baker said fall into six broad categories.

Media Roundtable

Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Sasha N. Baker and Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Radha Iyengar Plumb hold an off-camera, on-the-record media roundtable on Foreign Military Sales Tiger Team outcomes and continuous process improvement efforts at the Pentagon, Washington, D.C., June 13, 2023.

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Photo By: Air Force Staff Sgt. John Wright

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Chief among those is improving the department's understanding of ally and partner requirements.

"In other words," Baker said, "if we put good information into the system at the front, we know it's more likely to result in a positive outcome on the back end."

Recommendations that fall into this category include changing the way DOD organizes, trains and equips for security cooperation. Here, Baker said, the department plans, for instance, to establish a Defense Security Cooperation Service which is on par with the Defense Attache Service.

"One of the recommendations of the tiger team that the secretary has approved is that we are going to establish a defense security cooperation service," said Baker. "[It's] focused on security cooperation officers to make sure that they get the training and the professional development that they need to make good choices and decisions."

Enabling more efficient reviews for the release of technology is another broad area where the tiger team found opportunities for improvement, Baker said.

"There are oftentimes technology disclosure concerns that can hold up the process if we're not careful," she said.

Spotlight: Science & Tech

That effort involves, in part, reviewing and updating relevant department policies to create more effective, repeatable systems and processes for technology foreign disclosure and communications security release decisions.

The department also needs to focus on providing allies and partners with "relevant priority capabilities," Baker said.

This involves, among other things, developing a methodology to facilitate non-programs of record; developing enterprise standards and timelines for non-programs of record FMS cases; and the development of prioritization schedules for the delivery of high demand/low supply munitions for the U.S. and partner nations.

Baker also said that what the tiger team recommends, and what is implemented, must be sustained — and going forward, the FMS program must undergo continuous process improvement to keep it relevant and efficient.

"We very much envision this process not as having been a sprint that then goes away, but that there will actually be a tail to this in terms of continuous process improvement and looking to ensure that the recommendations that we're making are implemented over time," she said.

Part of that continuous process improvement involves establishment of an FMS "continuous process improvement board," which Baker said would act as an enduring governance structure within the department. The department will also establish clearer business processes and metrics for each stage of the FMS process.

"We're committing ... to a continuous process improvement initiative," Baker said. "It will involve using modern technology to collect data to establish metrics. We are, I think, collectively committed to embracing a more data-driven approach to FMS, and we're establishing a governance board that [Radha Plum, who has a doctorate in economics], and I will chair that regularly checks in on our priority cases to ensure that we're making progress and that looks at the recommendations from the tiger team to ensure that we're making progress there as well."

Spotlight: Engineering in the DOD

Two additional areas tiger team recommendations focused on include accelerating acquisition, contracting support and expanding defense industrial base capacity.

"To advance FMS acquisition prioritization and award timelines for allies and partners, the department's going to do a couple of things," said Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Radha Plumb. "The first is ... we need to establish contract award standards and metrics. That allows us to internally have accountability and track progress on the timelines and delivery, and then work with our partners in industry to meet those standards with clear data-driven acquisition processes."

Plumb also said the department would develop process maps to monitor the FMS prioritization and award process, including for non-program of records cases.

Finally, she said, the department is looking at how it can better enable and support exportability.

"There's a part of this that is production and the part that we would do regardless of where it's going and the part that we need to look at in terms of how we transfer to allies and partners," she said. "We want to compress both sets of timelines."

A big part of expanding defense industrial base capacity, Plumb said, involves incorporating ally and partner requirements into the demand signal for the industrial base, so that both can be considered together rather than separately.

"We're also working to develop a comprehensive strategy to expand and incentivize defense industrial base investments in production capacity," she said. "That includes building surge capability for high-demand/low-supply platforms, systems and munitions and services. To do that we're making use of multi-year contracts and a range of special authorities that Congress has given us that allow us to accelerate acquisition pathways."

Baker added that improvement of the FMS process is not just a DOD effort, because the department is not alone in implementing FMS. The State Department is also heavily involved in foreign military sales.

"We are also planning to continue to partner with our Department of State colleagues, recognizing that we own a piece of the FMS system, but ultimately we work together with the State Department to execute the entirety of it," she said. "And I think we are well aligned in that we all want to deliver a faster and more efficient FMS system."

defense.gov · by C. Todd Lopez

6. Information Operations against the United States: Defensive Actions are Needed

You may download the 10 page PDF at this link: https://nipp.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/556.pdf​

​The recommendations are excerpted here. I am a great believer in exposing​ the adversary's strategy, especially his or her influence strategy to inoculate the population. (recognize the adversary's strategy, understand it, EXPOSE it, and attack it with a superior political warfare strategy. 

Defensive steps that make much sense include:

• Exposing adversaries’ influence operations—one of the Swedish agency’s tasks—thereby enabling better popular understanding of the threat and better enabling the development of socially acceptable defensive and counter-measures.
• Trying again to create a disinformation-identifying unit and educational units within or outside of government that can gain the support of most of the American electorate, avoiding the apparent error of bias evidently displayed by the short-lived Disinformation Governance Board of the Department of Homeland Security.
• Prohibiting establishment of intrusive institutions in the United States, such as the Confucius Institutes and Russian Centers at American universities, which clearly are not what they claim to be.
• Prohibiting lobbying, public relations, and related companies from advising or producing media campaigns in support of adversary nations. This should not affect friendly countries. Legislation that enables the president or State Department to specify such countries may be needed.
• Adding reporting requirements or special taxes or other mechanisms that make foreign investment in adversary countries unattractive, thereby reducing business incentives to help adversaries conduct influence operations in the United States.
• Strengthening foreign investment laws to prohibit known information manipulators from owning domestic media of all sorts including print, electronic, and social media. These are strategic assets to influence peddlers and should be treated as such.
• Eliminating federal funding to universities that do not strictly enforce U.S. laws and regulations on espionage, technology transfers, and visa controls.
• Tightening campaign financing laws to prohibit contributions by all foreign nationals.
• Improving public communications, or public diplomacy, capabilities. This has been a long-time U.S. weakness, and other democracies have also had a hard time developing coherent, consistent national messages.
• Building capacities to go on the offensive against adversary information operations. NATO countries surprisingly effectively attacked Russian information operations at the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—an effort that may provide useful lessons more generally.
• Supporting independent journalists in adversary countries, where they exist, to provide domestic alternatives to influence themes. While this is not likely to be possible in China or Russia, it may well be effective in third countries vis-à-vis the diaspora communities the CCP and Putin have sought to harness to their will.

These are first steps. The United States has a long way to go to both defend itself and to make the predatory influence operations of Russia, China, and the Soviet Union transparent, at home and globally.

John A. Gentry, Information Operations against the United States: Defensive Actions are Needed, No. 556, June 12, 2023 – Nipp

nipp.org

Information Operations against the United States: Defensive Actions are Needed

John A. Gentry

John A. Gentry is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. He is a former CIA analyst and a retired U.S. Army Reserve officer. He writes frequently on intelligence-related topics.

Countries long have tried to influence important foreign audiences, often by using their intelligence services. They have had different targets and goals, used various methods, and experienced different degrees of success. Communist countries have been especially prominent users of such methods. Soviet intelligence services conducted “disinformation” operations as part of lengthy “active measures” campaigns that largely were information-oriented. Many such efforts became institutionalized, meaning they continue to influence targeted groups long after the demise of the Soviet Union. More recently, information operations have attracted popular attention as Russian intelligence services tried to influence elections in Western countries and the “hybrid warfare” campaigns Russia waged in Ukraine in 2014 and elsewhere had appreciable information components. Also recently, Chinese “influence” operations have generated increased scholarly and government attention globally. China prominently uses legal techniques designed to avoid politically embarrassing flaps over illegal actions.

The United States, as a major world power, an open democracy, and a land of immigrants, is a lucrative and relatively easy target of influence operators. While friendly countries such as Norway seek innocuously to inform Americans of issues of interest to them, adversary states have insidious goals, including the literal destruction of the United States. Hence, this paper focuses on U.S. vulnerabilities that the influence operations of China and Russia, including previous Soviet operations that remain on-going, seek to exploit and suggests ways to ameliorate and counter them, respectfully.

While the three programs share some characteristics, they have appreciably different strategies, tactics, and key targets. The Soviets aimed to defeat and destroy their capitalist adversaries, uniting the world under Moscow-led socialism. Russia has lesser but still substantial goals, mainly in Europe. In contrast, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to remake world institutions in its image by co-opting, rather than defeating, its enemies. All these influence campaigns focus on Americans who can influence large numbers of other persons—especially politicians, journalists, and educators. Each has sought, in different ways, to manipulate foreign elections. Consistent with their substantial ambitions, China and Russia now target a wide range of institutions, including businesses and think tanks.

The influence operations of all three countries, i.e., including the Soviet campaigns that remain on-going, are large, expensive, and are designed to work over long periods of time. The Soviets expected their efforts to destabilize the United States to take “decades” to accomplish. China’s program initially had an even longer time horizon—a century from victory in 1949 in the most recent Chinese civil war to 2049—although in recent years President Xi Jinping has shown impatience and seems to want to achieve major strategic goals more quickly. Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to have the shortest time horizon of the three, but one that is considerably longer than those of most Western politicians.

We know little about the specifics of how Russia and China measure the performance of their influence operations, but each clearly believes its activities have been successful in aggregate. Russian and China, and the Soviet Union earlier, would not have devoted the massive resources they have committed unless they felt the efforts were achieving their strategic objectives. Some programs have failed, but most appear to have achieved what they were designed to do. Moreover, most efforts complement other operations, generating complex webs of influence.

All three influence campaigns have indeed been successful in many ways. The Soviet long-term efforts to destabilize the United States appear to be nearing success, although long after it would help Soviet leaders. The fissures in U.S. society appear to be starker now than at any time since the Civil War. Among many indicators, the Greater Idaho Movement seeks to have conservative eastern Oregon join the state of Idaho and some in Texas want to secede entirely from the United States. Russia’s program, rejuvenated about a decade ago, has generated many successes but has been damaged by recent Russian aggression, especially against Ukraine since 2022. Chinese influence operations appear to be both the most ambitious and to have had the greatest success to date, although President Xi’s recent aggressiveness has damaged their credibility and produced growing global skepticism about China’s “peaceful rise” meme. China’s influence operations pose the greatest contemporary threat to the world at large, but Western countries have just begun to respond to them. Large and well-considered responses are long overdue.

Recognizing Exploitable Vulnerabilities

Malign foreign influence operations identify and exploit psychological, societal, and political vulnerabilities in their targets. In the U.S. case, identification of vulnerabilities is relatively easy: there are few obstacles to free flows of information and many Americans are obsessed with real and imagined deficiencies of the United States, sometimes talking about them nearly incessantly. Malign states use their intelligence officers, diplomats, journalists, scholars, businesspeople, and visitors to generate insights and advance domestic unrest. They hire Americans willing to advise them and to push their story lines at other Americans. Even imaginary American deficiencies are helpful to influencers—they identify useful groups to target and goals to be achieved. Once vulnerabilities are identified, attackers build exploitation mechanisms to generate desired objectives.

Deflecting malign foreign influence operations requires recognition of both American vulnerabilities and the influence mechanisms adversaries use to exploit them. This requires a considerable degree of collective introspection about the extent to which traditionally highly-valued, core American institutions—such as freedom of speech—are key avenues of malicious influence operations. And, given that many such operations are longstanding in nature and have achieved considerable successes, an additional challenge is identifying ways to persuade Americans who have become agents of foreign influence, knowingly and not, to change their belief patterns and their activities. This latter task may be the most difficult of all, especially if core American institutional freedoms are not to be trampled upon. There is a non-trivial danger that excessive reaction may be worse than the disease. But foreign influence operations, a nuisance when they were weaker and unifying American societal strengths were greater, now may pose unprecedented, existential threats to the United States, raising uncomfortable questions and suggesting that unprecedented defensive actions may be needed.

What are key American vulnerabilities? What are their causes? And what obstacles do they present to coherent remedial action? At an aggregate level, these can be lumped into three categories: ideology, gullibility, and interests. The first two are toughest to identify and to address. The third, while potentially addressable, also is largely ignored by the U.S. government.

A key challenge is addressing the many communities in the United States that have ideological or ethnic connections to malign actors. From the 1920s, the Soviet Union tried by many means to wreak political havoc in the United States. Its initial subversion element, the Communist International, or Comintern, was formally abolished in 1943 in deference to its Western wartime allies, but Soviet leader Josef Stalin simply reassigned the subversion mission to his intelligence services. From the 1920s, the Soviets also directed and financially supported the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), which still conducts Soviet-like information campaigns long after the demise of the Soviet Union. It has been especially active in the union movement and in Hollywood—a great place to influence many people. CPUSA members Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie played major roles in popularizing folk music, whose lyrics frequently contain political messages.

The CPUSA and unaffiliated Marxists established a major presence at many American universities. A large body of evidence indicates that Marxian ideas, which had of course existed on campuses for many years, took deep root in the 1960s, the result of several factors including a heightened Soviet disinformation campaign targeting the American war in Vietnam and the rise of the New Left. Prominent influences on American universities include the “critical” thinking of the so-called Frankfurt School of German Marxists, who cooperated with the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow and who criticized existing bourgeois society in ways designed to develop action programs that could foment and win Marxian revolutions. Prominent legacies of Frankfurt School thinking are “critical legal studies,” which argued that the law should become a tool of social change, and critical race theory. Of special importance for the spread of malign ideas is the development of “critical pedagogy,” which teaches teachers how to indoctrinate their students with Marxian ideas. This line of Marxian practice, or praxis, stems from teachings of Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire. Marxists also wrote widely-used textbooks. A prominent example is A People’s History of the United States, first published in 1980 by Howard Zinn, an overtly Marxian re-framing of American history that has sold more than two million copies in five editions. Many others, often more subtle, were written decades ago.

But while most CPUSA members are true believers, their ideology-generated faith occasionally is shattered. Two events cost the CPUSA dearly. Stalin’s 1939 pact with Nazi Germany blatantly contradicted the CPUSA’s previous anti-fascist position, which was a Soviet line. Many CPUSA members were unable to reconcile the apparent contradiction and left the party, although some returned to the fold after Germany invaded the USSR in 1941. The second event led to more permanent disillusionment. In February 1956, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev delivered a long speech to the 20th Communist Party Congress that denounced Stalin’s “crimes.” Historians of American communism Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes report that the CPUSA lost over three-quarters of its membership in the two years after Khrushchev’s speech was published in the West. Hence, a core challenge for defenders of the American way of life is to find new versions of Khrushchev’s speech that will change the course of modern American Marxists who still seek the Soviet goal of revolution in America. Their views are protected by the First Amendment, even when they rhetorically advocate revolution, so long as they do not specifically plan or commit violence—security against sedition in practice—meaning they will have to be persuaded to abandon the goal of Marxian revolution.

A similar challenge is to find ways to disabuse the evidently growing number of Americans who believe that Putin’s Russia is wonderful and that his war against Ukraine is a legitimate response to allegedly aggressive American/NATO pressure. The war and its brutality surely have damaged Putin and Russia in the eyes of many people, but influence operations designed to generate Russian “soft power,” which Putin rejuvenated and accelerated about a decade ago, have achieved notable successes in generating apologists for Russia on the political Right in Europe and the United States. Defeating Russian influence mechanisms, like the religion-like faith of Marxists, will require deep understanding of thought processes as well as of political beliefs.

Other instruments of foreign influence include persons in the United States on temporary visas, including students. Of these, students from China arguably are the most important. They have been indoctrinated extensively on the CCP’s version of Marxism-Leninism in public schools by the “Patriotic Education Campaign,” which was created in 1991 and features strong doses of revisionist history and ideological orthodoxy; it is a legacy of the trauma of the large-scale student unrest that culminated with the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 1989. In 2015, President Xi pointedly identified Chinese students studying abroad as valuable agents of influence. Students sometimes pressure university administrators to squelch speech inconsistent with CCP interests; Chinese diplomats in host countries often trigger planned outbursts. Chinese owned, Chinese-language media provide ideological guidance. The CCP believes the large ethnic Chinese diaspora, wherever they may be and whatever their current citizenship, owe allegiance to the CCP as the legitimate ruler of China. The CCP Central Committee’s United Front Work Department works diligently to entrench and exploit this loyalty.

Many people are influenced unknowingly by ideologically-driven influencers. These groups prominently include students and readers of, and listeners to, “journalists” who have abandoned traditional journalistic standards in favor of advocacy. China, Russia (and the Soviet Union earlier), target American universities and the press, knowing their power to amplify their messages and increase adherents of beliefs consistent with their interests. For example, the Soviets were convinced that demographic diversity was the single greatest political vulnerability of the United States, and they worked hard to stoke racial tensions in the United States. Former Soviet intelligence agent and CPUSA member Louis Budenz, who renounced communism in 1945, said the Soviets and the CPUSA long had two race-based goals: 1) exacerbating racial tensions to the point of generating race-based civil war; and/or (2) creation of a geographically large black separatist state in what is now the American south as a way to literally fragment the United States. The modern “diversity, equity, and inclusion” agenda, which is indisputably divisive in the United States, appears to serve past Soviet (and now Russian) interests, but is not remotely consistent with past Soviet or current Russian domestic policies.

Many Americans appear to have vested, pecuniary interests in catering directly or indirectly to adversary influence operations—consciously or not. These include public relations firms, corporations, politicians, and universities. Public relations or lobbying firms make good livings providing advisory services and influencing American policymakers in Congress and the executive branch of government, and they often prepare messages designed to advance adversary goals using their knowledge of American culture and the ways of Washington to generate entre and credibility. Examples include Ketchum Inc., a Washington-based firm that reportedly has for years provided Russia with a variety of consulting and promotional services. Even former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s firm apparently has worked for the Russians. Businesses, especially banks such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase, have become de facto influence organs for China, especially, as they appear to tout China and its policies to keep in the good graces of the CCP to maintain lucrative business arrangements in China. Politicians receive campaign contributions.

U.S. universities, like many others in Europe and Australia, have been highly vulnerable to Chinese influence operations on grounds of both ideas and interests. Indeed, Chinese influence operations aimed at scholars may be more intense and effective than on any other major group. Researchers Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg believe many academics display “extraordinary naivety” about China, but their actions are easily explained. Virtually all major Western universities are collectively leftist in political orientation and sympathetic to the CCP’s “liberal” facade. Professors and university administrators often appear to believe the CCP’s “peaceful rise” meme, displaying often severe cases of confirmation bias. And many appear motivated transparently by money, which China dispenses in large quantities in many ways. Since the early 2000s, for example, China has paid to establish Confucius Institutes at American universities that supposedly teach Americans about Chinese culture but appear more to be influence peddlers and venues for intelligence activities. More recently created Russian Centers operate similarly. University administrators are able easily to rationalize actions that may compromise principles of academic integrity and freedom of expression to avoid offending China—like denying talks by the Dalai Lama on campuses. And, while generating cash by paying full tuition and promoting politically correct variants of demographic “diversity” on campus, students from China are especially welcome!

Countering Influence Operations

Two types of counters to such activities are needed. First, the federal government should change laws and regulations that enable adversary influence operations by pointedly damaging key influence mechanisms. Second, amelioration of exploitable vulnerabilities is essential. Both are needed because even successful attacks on specific adversary influence operations will be fruitless if underlying vulnerabilities remain and can be exploited in other ways.

Sweden’s Psychological Defence Agency offers a potential model for doing both of these things. The agency has two missions. The first is identifying (mainly) Russian information operations aimed at Sweden—a function that involves monitoring Russian information-related activities, some of which are clandestine in nature. Second, it has an educational mission; it briefs key elements of Swedish society, including the press, on the nature of information operations that target them, helping them to understand the techniques of information warfare and thereby be less susceptible to them. This agency is an excellent example of defensive operations by a country whose citizens trust their government to do the right thing for them. Not all peoples, perhaps including many Americans, are so trusting.

Countering influence operations rarely requires law enforcement capacities. Indeed, according to Darren Tromblay, an expert on the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the primary U.S. domestic counterintelligence and federal law enforcement agency, the FBI is poorly equipped to address influence operations. It focuses on enforcing the law, which is rarely at issue in the overt influence operations of America’s major adversaries. Moreover, according to former Attorney General William Barr, the FBI prefers to avoid investigations of seditious left-wing groups, a legacy of its negative experience investigating such groups in the 1960s. And, because institutional fixes available to the federal government under current law and practice do not address significant vulnerabilities, the best ideational counters to adversary influence operations likely are widely-trusted nongovernment institutions—which generally do not now exist.

Past Soviet and contemporary Russian information operations remain potent influences on the United States and much of the world. But the CCP’s influence campaign is global in scope and greater in potential impact. At some point the Chinese will have to be confronted, a major step that should be the result of much internal government and international deliberation and planning. The confrontation is likely to be difficult even if war is avoided, but it will be less bad than the alternative of letting the CCP win its hundred-year marathon of influence operations. Defensive steps that make much sense include:

• Exposing adversaries’ influence operations—one of the Swedish agency’s tasks—thereby enabling better popular understanding of the threat and better enabling the development of socially acceptable defensive and counter-measures.
• Trying again to create a disinformation-identifying unit and educational units within or outside of government that can gain the support of most of the American electorate, avoiding the apparent error of bias evidently displayed by the short-lived Disinformation Governance Board of the Department of Homeland Security.
• Prohibiting establishment of intrusive institutions in the United States, such as the Confucius Institutes and Russian Centers at American universities, which clearly are not what they claim to be.
• Prohibiting lobbying, public relations, and related companies from advising or producing media campaigns in support of adversary nations. This should not affect friendly countries. Legislation that enables the president or State Department to specify such countries may be needed.
• Adding reporting requirements or special taxes or other mechanisms that make foreign investment in adversary countries unattractive, thereby reducing business incentives to help adversaries conduct influence operations in the United States.
• Strengthening foreign investment laws to prohibit known information manipulators from owning domestic media of all sorts including print, electronic, and social media. These are strategic assets to influence peddlers and should be treated as such.
• Eliminating federal funding to universities that do not strictly enforce U.S. laws and regulations on espionage, technology transfers, and visa controls.
• Tightening campaign financing laws to prohibit contributions by all foreign nationals.
• Improving public communications, or public diplomacy, capabilities. This has been a long-time U.S. weakness, and other democracies have also had a hard time developing coherent, consistent national messages.
• Building capacities to go on the offensive against adversary information operations. NATO countries surprisingly effectively attacked Russian information operations at the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—an effort that may provide useful lessons more generally.
• Supporting independent journalists in adversary countries, where they exist, to provide domestic alternatives to influence themes. While this is not likely to be possible in China or Russia, it may well be effective in third countries vis-à-vis the diaspora communities the CCP and Putin have sought to harness to their will.

These are first steps. The United States has a long way to go to both defend itself and to make the predatory influence operations of Russia, China, and the Soviet Union transparent, at home and globally.

Thomas Rid, Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020); John A. Gentry, “Belated Success: Soviet Active Measures against the United States,” American Intelligence Journal 39:2 (2022): 151-170.

Marcel H. Van Herpen, Putin’s Propaganda Machine: Soft Power and Russian Foreign Policy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).

Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg, Hidden Hand: How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World (London: Oneworld, 2021); Alex Joske, Spies and Lies: How China’s Greatest Covert Operations Fool the World (Hardie Grant: Richmond, Victoria, Australia); Michael Pillsbury, The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2016).

Darren E. Tromblay, Political Influence Operations: How Foreign Actors Seek to Shape U.S. Policy Making (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

John A. Gentry, Influence Operations of China, Russia, and the Soviet Union: A Comparison, Occasional Paper, Vol. 3, No. 5 (Fairfax, VA: National Institute Press, May 2023), available at https://nipp.org/papers/influence-operations-of-china-russia-and-the-soviet-union-a-comparison/.

Hamilton and Ohlberg, Hidden Hand, 259-260; Pillsbury, The Hundred-Year Marathon, 29.

Ladislav Bittman, The KGB and Soviet Disinformation: An Insider’s View (Washington: Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1985), 2; Rid, Active Measures, 160.

Kyung Lah and Jack Hannah, “Partisan rancor in Oregon spills over into Idaho effort to absorb its rural neighbors,” CNN Politics, March 15, 2023, https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/15/politics/oregon-secession-idaho-partisan-divides/index.htm; Mychael Schnell, “Texas lawmaker files ’TEXIT’ bill to spur vote of secession from US,” The Hill, March 6, 2023, https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/3886527-texas-lawmaker-files-texit-bill-to-spur-vote-on-exploring-secession-from-us/.

Pillsbury, Hundred-Year Marathon, 162-163, 165; Clive Hamilton, Silent Invasion: China’s Influence in Australia (Richmond, Victoria, Australia: Hardie Grant, 2018), 18.

Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, The American Communist Movement (New York: Twayne, 1992), 25-27, 30-34, 64-65, 82, 96, 101, 122, 134-135.

Ibid., 90; Ronald Radosh, “The Communist Party’s Role in the Folk Revival: From Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan,” American Communist History 14:3 (2015): 3-19.

For example, Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008).

For example, Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950 (Boston: Little, Brown), 41-85; Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon, 1964).

Jonathan Butcher and Mike Gonzalez, “Critical Race Theory, the New Intolerance, and Its Grip on America,” Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 3567, December 7, 2020, https://www.heritage.org/civil-rights/report/critical-race-theory-the-new-intolerance-and-its-grip-america.

For example, Antonia Darder et al., ed., The Critical Pedagogy Reader, 3rd ed. (Milton Park, UK: Routledge, 2017).

For example, Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Penguin, 1968).

Evita Duffy-Alonzo, “High School History Teacher Throws Out Textbooks For Radical Marxist ‘History’ Book,” The Federalist, June 19, 2020, https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/19/high-school-history-teacher-throws-out-textbooks-for-radical-marxist-history-book/.

Louis Francis Budenz, The Techniques of Communism (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1954), 208-249.

Klehr and Haynes, The American Communist Movement, 182.

Van Herpen, Putin’s Propaganda Machine.

Hamilton, Silent Invasion, 9-11, 38; Joshua Kurlantzick, Beijing’s Global Media Offensive: China’s Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), 92.

Hamilton and Ohlberg, Hidden Hand, 119.

Ibid., 231-234.

Ibid., 122.

Oleg Kalugin, Spymaster: My Thirty-two Years in Intelligence and Espionage against the West (New York: Basic, 2009), 35, 53-55, 103-104, 117, 297-298.

Budenz, The Techniques of Communism, 254-261.

Van Herpen, Putin’s Propaganda Machine, 48, 51, 53-54.

Ibid, 48-50.

Hamilton and Ohlberg, Hidden Hand, 100, 103-106, 110.

Joske, Spies and Lies, 130; Kurlantzick, Beijing’s Global Media Offensive, 117-124.

Hamilton and Ohlberg, Hidden Hand, 157-158; Hamilton, Silent Invasion, 199, 229; Larry Diamond and Orville Schell, ed., China’s Influence & American Interests: Promoting Constructive Vigilance (Stanford CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2019), 51-70.

Hamilton and Ohlberg, Hidden Hand, 152,196, 226, 228-231, 237, 243.

Van Herpen, Putin’s Propaganda Machine, 122.

Hamilton and Ohlberg, Hidden Hand, 226-243.

See the agency’s website, https://www.mpf.se/en/.

Tromblay, Political Influence Operations.

William P. Barr, One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General (New York: William Morrow, 2022), 485-486.

For other ideas, see Marcel H. Van Herpen, “The Many Faces of the New Information Warfare,” in Olga Bertelsen, ed., Russian Active Measures: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 55-56; Michaela Dodge, Russia’s Influence Operations in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Romania, Occasional Paper, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Fairfax, VA: National Institute Press, April 2022), 127-133, available at https://nipp.org/papers/russias-influence-operations-in-the-czech-republic-poland-and-romania/; Bradley A. Thayer, The PRC’s New Strategic Narrative as Political Warfare: Causes and Implications for the United States, Occasional Paper, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Fairfax, VA: National Institute Press, March 2021), 21-29, available at https://nipp.org/papers/the-prcs-new-strategic-narrative-as-political-warfare-causes-implications-for-the-united-states/.

The National Institute for Public Policy’s Information Series is a periodic publication focusing on contemporary strategic issues affecting U.S. foreign and defense policy. It is a forum for promoting critical thinking on the evolving international security environment and how the dynamic geostrategic landscape affects U.S. national security. Contributors are recognized experts in the field of national security. National Institute for Public Policy would like to thank the Sarah Scaife Foundation for the generous support that made this Information Series possible.

The views in this Information Series are those of the author(s) and should not be construed as official U.S. Government policy, the official policy of the National Institute for Public Policy or any of its sponsors. For additional information about this publication or other publications by the National Institute Press, contact: Editor, National Institute Press, 9302 Lee Highway, Suite 750 |Fairfax, VA 22031 | (703) 293- 9181 |www.nipp.org. For access to previous issues of the National Institute Press Information Series, please visit http://www.nipp.org/national-institutepress/informationseries/.

© National Institute Press, 2023

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7. How Might Ukraine’s Counter-Offensive End, and What Comes After?

Excerpts:

On multiple occasions, China has warned Russia not to go nuclear in Ukraine. Furthermore, China seems not to be supplying Russia with substantial lethal weaponry. Vladimir Putin’s and his ex-KGB cohort’s grip on power—visibly challenged by hardliners such as Yevgeny Prigozhin—could be weakening. Russian leaders likely worry about the risks of military humiliation in Ukraine, which could lead to the “loss” of its largest East Slavic neighbor. Putin could be obsessed by such anxiety.

In this context, we consider three ways Ukraine’s counter-offensive might end and their implications for the future.

1. Ukrainian forces score great success. They punch through key Russian fortifications, retake most occupied territory, and sever Russia’s land bridge from the Donbas along the Azov Sea coast down to Crimea. Major parts of Russia’s fighting force break, are captured, or retreat. Ukrainian forces put the Kerch Strait rail and road bridges out of action. Fearing Ukraine’s ground-based air defenses, Russia’s air force may continue to stay mostly on the sidelines.

...

 2. Ukrainian forces score partial success. They penetrate selected Russian fortifications and retake some occupied territory, but not enough to sever the land bridge to Crimea.

...

3. Ukrainian forces are blunted. Like the recent Russian offensive, the Ukrainian counter-offensive stalls, taking little or no territory.

...

What might happen in the aftermath of the three scenarios?

...

Armistice.

...

Follow-on fighting.

...

Further military support.

...

NATO and security guarantees.

....

NATO force presence.

...

Nuclear.

...

Reconstruction. 

...

Beyond military outcomes, the level and nature of reconstruction assistance may vary. It could depend on Ukrainian reforms and the extent to which a simmering conflict threatened the viability of some reconstruction projects. To reduce the latter risks, Ukraine could disperse or otherwise make projects less vulnerable to drone attacks. Solar energy, in which Ukraine is investing, offers an example of dispersed and thus more resilient energy sourcing.

Neutralizing threats from mines and unexploded ordnance, especially in eastern and southern Ukraine, may merit early Western support, especially if Ukraine’s forces make timely progress. The West may also help support the return of perhaps millions of refugees and medical assistance for the treatment of wounds and post-traumatic stress among fighters and others in Ukraine.

How Might Ukraine’s Counter-Offensive End, and What Comes After?

By William Courtney & Terrence K. Kelly , Howard J. Shatz , Gian Gentile

June 14, 2023

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/06/14/how_might_ukraines_counter-offensive_end_and_what_comes_after_940466.html?mc_cid=2204acafd0&mc_eid=70bf478f36

Ukraine may soon launch a counter-offensive against Russian forces entrenched in its east and south. The West has provided substantial military assistance for it and appears committed to providing support for the long haul. The West is likely to assist Ukraine with reconstruction on a scale that could rival the post-World War II Marshall Plan.

Deterring Russian aggression in Europe and securing Ukraine are important, even vital, Western interests. This is underlined by the huge scale of Western support to Ukraine. Russia’s naked aggression, including shocking atrocities, has hardened Western determination to confront it. Arguably, the West has become more unified than at any time since the end of the Cold War three decades ago.

Russia’s circumstances are less sanguine. Fighting this summer is likely to put Ukrainian forces in a stronger position. Even though many Russians back the war, large numbers of the better educated are fleeing. Battlefield casualties and declining living standards may erode confidence in Kremlin leadership, as they did in the 1980s when the USSR lost a smaller and more distant war in Afghanistan.

On multiple occasions, China has warned Russia not to go nuclear in Ukraine. Furthermore, China seems not to be supplying Russia with substantial lethal weaponry. Vladimir Putin’s and his ex-KGB cohort’s grip on power—visibly challenged by hardliners such as Yevgeny Prigozhin—could be weakening. Russian leaders likely worry about the risks of military humiliation in Ukraine, which could lead to the “loss” of its largest East Slavic neighbor. Putin could be obsessed by such anxiety.

In this context, we consider three ways Ukraine’s counter-offensive might end and their implications for the future.

1. Ukrainian forces score great success. They punch through key Russian fortifications, retake most occupied territory, and sever Russia’s land bridge from the Donbas along the Azov Sea coast down to Crimea. Major parts of Russia’s fighting force break, are captured, or retreat. Ukrainian forces put the Kerch Strait rail and road bridges out of action. Fearing Ukraine’s ground-based air defenses, Russia’s air force may continue to stay mostly on the sidelines.

Relying on combinations of modern technologies, including uncrewed surface vehicles, Ukraine could blockade and barrage Crimea, penning in Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Risks of Russian nuclear use might rise if Ukrainian forces appeared to be preparing for a frontal assault Crimea.

Troop-to-task analyses and current fighting conditions, taken together, suggest that Ukrainian forces could prevail. Russian forces may be unable to conduct close air-to-ground support for operations larger than small tactical units. Earlier this year, Russia’s brigade-sized mechanized and armor attack against Vuheledar suffered catastrophic losses.

Any major Russian attempt to take back even modest amounts of previously occupied territories would likely fail. Were Russia’s air force to suffer substantial losses, this could weaken the defense of Moscow or other Russian strategic assets.

Ukrainian forces appear not to be using Western arms to attack targets in Russia. But with their own weapons they are increasing indirect and direct fire strikes against headquarters and logistical sites, transportation nodes, and troop formations in Russia. Even early in the war, a Ukrainian Neptune missile sank the Moskva, Russia’s Black Sea flagship.

2. Ukrainian forces score partial success. They penetrate selected Russian fortifications and retake some occupied territory, but not enough to sever the land bridge to Crimea. Russia maintains control of the Kerch Strait bridges. Augmented by additional albeit poorly trained draftees, Russian forces stabilize the front. Ukrainian forces culminate short of regaining most occupied territory.

Ukrainian forces’ communications and weapons delivery systems are impaired by Russian electronic warfare, causing Ukrainian forces to lose situational awareness and effective command and control. Ukrainian logistics, adequate for static defensive operations, prove unable to support large numbers of advancing heavy units.

3. Ukrainian forces are blunted. Like the recent Russian offensive, the Ukrainian counter-offensive stalls, taking little or no territory. Command and control of a major combined arms offensive might be beyond what Ukraine can accomplish. Not since WWII has any country conducted a corps-level offensive against a major power.

While a Ukrainian counter-offensive might accomplish little, it would be unlikely to lose much ground. Russian forces, badly damaged from a year-and-a-half of devastating losses, lack the ability to push Ukrainian forces back to the lines they held in July 2022, before the Ukrainian seizure of most of the Kharkiv region or the city of Kherson on the west bank of the Dnipro River.

If the Kremlin deemed conditions adequate and risks acceptable, Russia could commit its largely intact air force and take a heavy toll on Ukrainian command centers and armored forces. This may be more likely if Ukraine is seen to run short of ground-based air defense ammunition or if Russia’s air force manages to decimate Ukraine’s older combat air fleet. There is a risk that Russian air and missile forces could suppress large parts of Ukraine’s air defenses. They might prove less adept at supporting forces in broad mechanized offensive operations than in protecting static defenses.

What might happen in the aftermath of the three scenarios?

Armistice. In all cases, an armistice or truce of some kind might result. No Ukrainian government could stay in power if it negotiated a political settlement that formally ceded to Russia control of any Ukrainian territory, including Crimea. The outcomes of the counteroffensive and any future fighting may influence bargaining positions for armistice arrangements.

Follow-on fighting. Especially if Russia continued to occupy some Ukrainian land or was expelled from most of Ukraine but built up significant forces in Russia across the border, a simmering conflict could ensue. This happened in the Donbas after battle lines stabilized in 2014. Armed drones and artillery duels might keep tensions alive without offensive operations which risked many soldiers’ lives. Ukraine could also mount an insurgency against any Russian occupying forces. These options may be more likely in the latter two scenarios than the first.

Further military support. In all cases, NATO allies are likely to maintain robust military support for Ukraine. It might be greater to the extent Ukraine is seen as effectively using military assistance and achieving battlefield results, or to the extent that Russian forces or Kremlin political will to wage war are weakening. The allies may continue to strengthen and train Ukraine’s forces, including in combined arms operations involving F-16s and in larger-scale operations. A challenge for Ukraine’s Western supporters could be to maintain unity of effort should the counteroffensive be less successful than hoped (the last two scenarios).

NATO and security guarantees. NATO membership for Ukraine might at some point be more likely if it defeated Russia’s forces or they withdraw. Prior to such action -- which could be uncertain even if the U.S. backed it -- the U.S. might seek to develop a bilateral security relationship with Ukraine somewhat akin to those with other non-treaty allies, such as Israel or Taiwan. A bilateral guarantee of the type in the 1953 Mutual Defense Treaty with South Korea or the 1960 Security Treaty with Japan might be possible. But Ukraine’s centrality to European security makes its joining NATO militarily more sensible.

Prior to the current war, U.S. military ties with Ukraine were less intensive than with those countries. This might be changing in light of Ukraine’s inspiring performance in the war and its critical role in challenging Russia’s military aggression and helping to protect European security.

NATO force presence. Allies benefit from Article 5 in the NATO Treaty, which considers that an attack on one ally is an attack on all allies. The alliance is buttressing this guarantee by moving more forces into its eastern flank. Any security guarantees, whether bilateral or NATO, may need to be coupled with a militarily significant presence in Ukraine after an armistice or cease-fire. A revitalized U.S. Army V Corps, including an armored division in Ukraine and air wings in Eastern Europe, might be necessary for guarantees to be credible.

Nuclear. If Russia were to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine or continue to threaten their use, eastern allies might seek enhanced NATO nuclear protection. Poland or others could even seek deployment of U.S. tactical nuclear bombs (B-61s) and associated delivery air systems, akin to those present in five other European allies. Another possibility could be fielding of a new U.S. nuclear-armed intermediate-range sea-launched cruise missile or land-based missile. The latter was the U.S. and NATO response in the 1980s when the USSR secretly deployed SS-20 land-based ballistic missiles against Europe.

Reconstruction. In all cases, the West will surely support large-scale reconstruction in Ukraine. In the event of the first scenario – great success by Ukrainian forces – Ukraine and the international community would likely need soon to start implementing reconstruction. This could be according to Ukraine’s plan or plans being devised multinationally. Rapid action would boost morale and signal that Ukraine’s supporters plan to sustain a longer-term commitment, Early battlefield success could accelerate pressure for reconstruction aid but also create new potential targets for Russian attacks. In the event of the latter two scenarios, reconstruction planning would continue but some projects would begin prior to the end of active fighting. This is already happening.

Beyond military outcomes, the level and nature of reconstruction assistance may vary. It could depend on Ukrainian reforms and the extent to which a simmering conflict threatened the viability of some reconstruction projects. To reduce the latter risks, Ukraine could disperse or otherwise make projects less vulnerable to drone attacks. Solar energy, in which Ukraine is investing, offers an example of dispersed and thus more resilient energy sourcing.

Neutralizing threats from mines and unexploded ordnance, especially in eastern and southern Ukraine, may merit early Western support, especially if Ukraine’s forces make timely progress. The West may also help support the return of perhaps millions of refugees and medical assistance for the treatment of wounds and post-traumatic stress among fighters and others in Ukraine.

William Courtney is an adjunct senior fellow, Terrence K. Kelly is a principal mathematician, Howard J. Shatz is a senior economist and Gian Gentile is the associate director of RAND Arroyo Center at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation.

8. Mick Ryan assesses Ukraine’s counter-offensive

Conclusion:

But just as the Ukrainians have held their nerve, prepared well and patiently waited to strike a massive blow, so too must the citizens and politicians of the West watch and be prepared to provide more assistance where needed. In June 1944, as the massive Allied invasion force crossed the English Channel, General Dwight Eisenhower wrote that “the eyes of the world are upon you.” The Ukrainians, having fought, suffered and sacrificed over the past 16 months, know full well that the world is watching as they start the next phase of the attempt to liberate their nation.

Mick Ryan assesses Ukraine’s counter-offensive

The retired Australian major-general on the likeliest outcome of the fighting

The Economist

THIS WEEK there have been frequent comparisons between D-Day in 1944 and the Ukrainian military offensive that is currently unfolding. Although both were launched in the month of June, a better comparison may be to Operation Cobra, a large ground operation launched by the United States First Army almost two months after the Normandy landings. While starting inauspiciously, with the accidental killing of Leslie McNair, an American lieutenant-general, and unfolding slowly at first, once the operation gathered pace it was highly effective. It was Cobra that broke open German defences for the Allies to exploit in subsequent offensives.

President Volodymyr Zelensky, his armed forces and their supporters in the West will be hoping for something similar. They need a decisive campaign that not only recaptures swathes of Ukrainian territory but also destroys a significant part of the Russian armed forces in Ukraine so they cannot conduct offensive operations again in 2023. The best case would see all of Ukraine liberated this year. The most likely is that large parts of the east and south of the country are liberated, placing Ukraine in a good strategic position to regain Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.

Since last year Ukrainian planners have worked with NATO and war-gamed options for their offensives in 2023. Training institutions in Ukraine and beyond have worked until the last moment to prepare soldiers. Ukrainian formations have trained together to rehearse obstacle-breaching, the penetration of enemy defences and the exploitation of Russian withdrawals.

For months a reconnaissance battle has been taking place along the frontline. Ukrainian and Russian forces have fought for information on the ground, using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), electronic warfare and satellite imagery, while also seeking to deny information to their adversary. Both have been stockpiling logistical items, from food and fuel to ammunition. Ukraine’s armed forces have taken on masses of new equipment and issued it to units.

Ukraine stepped up its long-range strikes on Russian targets in recent weeks. The first kind of target was operational. These strikes hit Russian headquarters, supply locations and troop concentrations, and aimed to break down the cohesion of Russian defences and the ability to respond to Ukrainian thrusts. The second kind of strike was political. These included a drone attack on Moscow and incursions into Belgorod, a Russian region on the border with Ukraine. The aim was to cause unease among leaders in Moscow and make them reconsider where to deploy Russian forces.

The new Ukrainian advances around Bakhmut and in southern Ukraine appear to confirm that H-Hour—the time a military operation commences—has arrived. The wily Ukrainians, having conducted offensives in Kharkiv and Kherson, learned from the planning and execution of these operations. As their training and planning have improved, so has their ability to deceive the enemy and to synchronise complex arms operations on multiple axes.

The Ukrainians will open up other axes of advance as they attempt to mislead the Russians about the true main effort of their campaign. As they conduct attacks, they will also be observing the Russian counter-actions: how the Russians respond to these attacks, shift reserves and reinforce key areas will provide further opportunities for the Ukrainians to exploit. Ukraine’s military leaders have a knack for sniffing out Russian weakness and deceiving the enemy about their intentions; they did this superbly before the offensive that liberated most of the north-eastern Kharkiv province last September. No one understands the Russian military mind better than they do.

As the different phases of the campaign unfold, it will be the drive, professionalism and inspiration of Ukraine’s military leaders—who are a mix of professional soldiers and mobilised citizens—that will determine its success or failure. The campaign will be complex, bloody and almost always confusing to outside observers. It will be a massive undertaking that unfolds over months, not days. There will be times when it will be difficult to see an end—or a purpose—to the destruction. And there will be many surprises, such as the collapse this week of the Kakhovka dam, which will have impacts large and small, good and bad, on the Ukrainian campaign.

But just as the Ukrainians have held their nerve, prepared well and patiently waited to strike a massive blow, so too must the citizens and politicians of the West watch and be prepared to provide more assistance where needed. In June 1944, as the massive Allied invasion force crossed the English Channel, General Dwight Eisenhower wrote that “the eyes of the world are upon you.” The Ukrainians, having fought, suffered and sacrificed over the past 16 months, know full well that the world is watching as they start the next phase of the attempt to liberate their nation.■

Mick Ryan served for more than 30 years in various roles in Australia’s army and the US Joint Staff. He is now an adjunct fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, an American think-tank, and the Lowy Institute, an Australian one.

The Economist

9. National security officials make case for keeping surveillance powers

To surveil or not to surveil, that is the question.

National security officials make case for keeping surveillance powers

With Section 702 set to expire, administration claims that warrantless wiretapping powers have resulted in intelligence successes and that new procedures have limited abuses

By Tim Starks

June 13, 2023 at 4:37 p.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Tim Starks · June 13, 2023

Congress will not renew powerful, expiring surveillance authorities without substantial changes to shield Americans from warrantless eavesdropping, senators in both parties warned Biden administration officials Tuesday.

That message came during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing where national security officials pressed their case for reauthorizing the surveillance powers, known as Section 702, in part by revealing previously classified details about how spy agencies have used those authorities to combat threats such as fentanyl trafficking and prominent ransomware attacks.

Section 702 permits warrantless surveillance against foreign targets but occasionally collects communications with Americans, which go into a database. The law allows investigators to search that database by using U.S. phone numbers, email addresses and other identifiers. One of the chief sticking points raised by legislators is whether Section 702 should be amended to require a warrant to access information about Americans.

The FBI can search the database when they have evidence of crimes or for foreign intelligence purposes. But that process has been far from perfect: A recently unsealed court document revealed that the FBI had misused the database more than 278,000 times between 2020 and early 2021, including against thousands of donors to a congressional candidate and people protesting the police killing of George Floyd.

“I will only support the reauthorization of Section 702 if there are significant, significant reforms,” said Senate Judiciary Chairman Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.). “And that means first and foremost, addressing the warrantless surveillance of Americans in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Moreover, the reforms must also include safeguards to prevent future abuses and ensure effective oversight by Congress and the courts.”

Section 702 is set to expire at the end of this year, and the Judiciary Committee shares jurisdiction in steering the law’s fate alongside the Senate Intelligence Committee and their House counterparts. Durbin said he would work to bridge the gap between deep skeptics of Section 702 and those who favor only small changes.

The top Republican on the committee, Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), said that in the United States broadly, “there’s a warrant requirement to investigate an American citizen for wrongdoing. And we don’t want this to be used to get around that requirement. So bottom line is, let’s reauthorize this program and build in some safeguards.”

Biden administration officials argued that expiration of the surveillance powers, conceived as a counterterrorism tool in the aftermath of 9/11, would be devastating. They also warned that the kind of warrant requirement that some senators and civil liberties groups are seeking would clog the courts and slow the government response to security threats.

“We must not forget the lessons of 9/11,” said Matt Olsen, the assistant attorney general for national security. “Unduly limiting the FBI’s ability to access lawfully collected information … will set us back decades. It will put our nation at grave risk.”

Biden administration officials highlighted what they claimed were Section 702 successes Tuesday following the declassification of partial details. Using the surveillance authorities, they were able to identify the hacker behind the 2021 Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack that sparked a fuel panic on the East Coast, said George Barnes, deputy director of the National Security Agency.

They’ve also used the authorities to combat the spread of the drug fentanyl, which kills nearly 100,000 Americans every year, he said. Section 702 provided insights into the Chinese origins of precursor chemicals and allowed the U.S. government to learn more about how foreign narcotics traffickers are smuggling the drug into the United States, Barnes said.

But Democratic and Republican senators alike remained skeptical about the Biden administration’s case for renewing Section 702, which falls under a law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

“Why should we ever trust the FBI and DOJ again to police themselves under FISA when they’ve shown us repeatedly over more than a decade that they cannot be trusted to do so?” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said.

Biden administration officials sought to calm congressional worries about the use of Section 702 and the potential for abuse. Procedural changes at the FBI in 2021 and 2022 have cut the number of searches of U.S. individuals by 94 percent, said FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate, and improved compliance with the rules. The administration would not oppose Congress codifying those procedural changes so they were a matter of law rather than agency policy, he said.

The “compliance errors” such as those highlighted in the recently unsealed court document are “entirely unacceptable,” he said. “It is difficult to express strongly enough in words how disappointed I am in these failures.”

The Washington Post · by Tim Starks · June 13, 2023

10. We’re Still Arguing Over Women in the Military?

Excerpts:

As the number of qualified people with a propensity to serve continues to dwindle, the military needs women, who make up half the candidate pool. Reducing the size of that pool because women don’t feel welcome will hurt military readiness.

For proof that women don’t hurt readiness but instead contribute to a military that wins wars, look at the current fight in Europe. The Ukrainian military, made up of 22 percent women, 5,000 of whom serve on the front lines, are pounding the Russia military, made up of 96 percent men. It’s not manliness that matters; it’s readiness.

The Defense Department recognizes that women are part of the team, and I applaud the unequivocal signal of support sent by recent efforts to remove barriers to service, such as the maternity flight suits and increased maternity (and paternity) leave. I hope that celebrating the trifecta of milestones for women in the military this year helps achieve that same level of acceptance and support from all Americans.

We’re Still Arguing Over Women in the Military?

BY EILEEN BJORKMAN

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, AIR FORCE TEST CENTER

JUNE 12, 2023

defenseone.com · by Eileen Bjorkman

The author, now the executive director of the Air Force Test Center, poses on an RF-4C tactical reconnaissance jet at Edwards Air Force Base, California, in 1988. Courtesy photo / U.S. Air Force

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Ideas

The U.S. armed forces need women, and suggestions to the contrary hurt recruiting and readiness.

Executive Director, Air Force Test Center

June 12, 2023 06:38 PM ET

• Commentary
• Personnel
• Air Force
• Pentagon

Women in the military, especially aviators, have a lot to celebrate this year. It’s the 75th anniversary of the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, which established a permanent presence for women in the U.S. military. It’s been three decades since female pilots, long limited to flying support aircraft, began training for combat roles. The Navy marked a half-century of female naval aviators with an all-woman flyover at the Super Bowl.

Women may now serve in all military career fields, both support and combat specialties, and they make up about 17.4 percent of the active-duty force, up seven-fold from 1973.

But even with opportunities for women in the military at an all-time high, I’m disheartened by the way some civilians, especially those who have never served, treat military women. For example, in March 2021, when the services debuted body armor sized for women and maternity flight suits to help women fly longer during pregnancy, Tucker Carlson mocked the new equipment that allowed women to do their jobs. Within hours, Carlson’s rant filled my Twitter feed, along with misogynistic comments—almost all of them from civilian men. More recently, Maj. Gen. Patrick Donahue ignited a Twitter feud that delayed his planned retirement from the army after he defended women in the military. These battles send a revolting message to young women who might be thinking about the military: You’re a joke.

This attitude towards women is compounded by a larger movement that would have us believe military classes in diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, are driving away recruits. It’s true that the Army missed their 2022 recruiting goal of 60,000 by 15,000, but DEI isn’t to blame. Military recruiting often drops during times of high employment, such as that currently in the U.S. Another current factor cited by the Army is a narrowing of benefits between the military and the private sector, along with outreach difficulties created by the pandemic.

Assigning blame to DEI is ludicrous. The Army’s senior enlisted leader, Sgt. Maj. Michael Grinston, pointed out in recent Congressional testimony that recruits receive 92 hours of rifle marksmanship training in boot camp, but only one hour of equal-opportunity training. During the same testimony, Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force Joanne S. Bass pushed back on assertions that the military has “gone woke,” dismissing a suggestion that the Air Force conducts “pronoun training.”

If anything, the anti-DEI movement may be creating problems for the military by further reducing the propensity of women to serve. According to a 2017 Joint Advertising Market Research and Studies survey, women are already only about half as confident as men that they can be successful in a military career. JAMRS also reports that young people rely heavily on their perceptions about the military in forming their propensity to serve.

From my own experience, I understand the impact of negative reporting on women. After joining the Air Force in 1980, for the next decade I read about a continuous stream of studies commissioned that seemed determined to prove that the presence of women undermined readiness, with the goal to reduce the number of women in the military. In essence, the studies were attacks that caused me, from time to time, to question my own commitment to the military.

As the number of qualified people with a propensity to serve continues to dwindle, the military needs women, who make up half the candidate pool. Reducing the size of that pool because women don’t feel welcome will hurt military readiness.

For proof that women don’t hurt readiness but instead contribute to a military that wins wars, look at the current fight in Europe. The Ukrainian military, made up of 22 percent women, 5,000 of whom serve on the front lines, are pounding the Russia military, made up of 96 percent men. It’s not manliness that matters; it’s readiness.

The Defense Department recognizes that women are part of the team, and I applaud the unequivocal signal of support sent by recent efforts to remove barriers to service, such as the maternity flight suits and increased maternity (and paternity) leave. I hope that celebrating the trifecta of milestones for women in the military this year helps achieve that same level of acceptance and support from all Americans.

The opinions in this article are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the Air Force Test Center, the Air Force, or the U.S. government.

Eileen Bjorkman is the executive director of the Air Force Test Center. A retired U.S. Air Force colonel, she has more than 700 hours as a Flight Test Engineer in more than 25 different aircraft, primarily the F-4 Phantom II, F-16 Fighting Falcon, C-130 Hercules, and C-141 Starlifter. She is also the author of The Fly Girls Revolt: The Story of the Women Who Kicked Open the Door to Fly in Combat, to be published in May by Knox Press.

11. Female Army enlistments down after Vanessa Guillen’s death, data shows

With these types of tragic incidents I do not balem young women for not enlisting. We have a lot of work to do.

Excerpt:

A women’s initiative team, similar to those already established in the Air Force and Marine Corps, is also being established, she said, as an advocacy entity. Made up of female soldiers, the team “will provide an important mechanism for the Army to evaluate the way it measures and identifies issues of gender bias,” Bonzo said.

Even as it launches these new efforts, however, the Army may be hard-pressed to alter negative public perception from events that dominate headlines. Guillen, who disappeared after reporting sexual harassment by a fellow soldier and was allegedly killed by another soldier, continues to be a symbol for many of the service’s perceived failure to do all it can to protect women in uniform. The March death of another Fort Cavazos soldier, 20-year-old Pvt. Ana Basaldua Ruiz, once again returned Guillen to the national conversation, even though preliminary findings indicated Ruiz’s death was not the result of foul play.

Female Army enlistments down after Vanessa Guillen’s death, data shows

armytimes.com · by Hope Hodge Seck · June 13, 2023

The 2020 disappearance and murder of a young Army specialist that prompted service-wide reckoning and reform may still be affecting efforts to recruit female soldiers, a revealing new slide presentation indicates.

A six-page Army PowerPoint presentation created for the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services shows a marked drop in the Army’s female enlistments for every year since fiscal 2019. The presentation does not mention 20-year-old Spc. Vanessa Guillen, who disappeared from Fort Cavazos (then Fort Hood) in Texas in April 2020, and whose remains were only discovered months later after calls for an intensified search. It does, however, point to another jarring statistic: a dramatic spike in the percentage of young prospective female recruits citing fears of sexual harassment or assault as reasons not to join the Army.

What’s more, the presentation states that the Army failed to allay women’s fears even as those concerns hindered recruiting efforts.

“The biggest factor is the perception among the target market and US Army’s issues with Sexual Harassment, Sexual Assault and discrimination,” the presentation, delivered by Command Sgt. Maj. Scott A. Wolfe, top enlisted leader of the Army’s 1st Recruiting Brigade, states. “We never tried to counter the narrative.”

Wolfe’s presentation, delivered to the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services in March, offers a rare specific look at Army efforts to attract women amid broader, military-wide struggles to recruit within a young generation less predisposed to service than its predecessors. According to the presentation, the Army got 15,907 female enlistment contracts in 2020, down from 19,137 in 2019. Contracts fell to 13,320 in 2021, and tumbled again, to 10,751 in 2022. In terms of female representation in enlistments, the slides show female enlistments made up 20.8% of the total in 2019, falling to 20.5% in 2020, and dropping again to 18.6% in 2021. Female representation in enlistments increased to 19.3% in 2022, but has yet to fully recover.

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which kept recruiters out of high schools and restricted opportunities to meet prospective recruits face-to-face, was a factor in the drop in enlistment contracts, according to the presentation. But negative perceptions, it concludes, were a greater factor.

“Female Prospects view the Army as an inferior employer — neither aligned with their aspirations nor providing desired outcomes,” the presentation states, with jarring candor.

U.S. Army Recruiting Command declined to make Wolfe available for an interview, but did provide written responses to questions about the presentation and its findings. An Army spokeswoman, Madison Bonzo, said the service did not explicitly link the downward enlistment trend with the widespread furor and outrage over Guillen’s death.

RELATED

Fort Hood crisis didn’t hurt Army’s Hispanic recruiting, data shows

The proportion of Hispanic accessions relative to total Army accessions has actually increased since July 2020.

“A decrease in enlistment for this specific reason would be difficult to determine,” she said, “however the Army is working to counter several misperceptions the public has about military service through awareness about the opportunities it provides and the programs we currently offer to combat sexual assault in the Army.”

Demographic-specific recruiting data included in the presentation does show more nuance, and some positive trends. While recruitment of white women fell to a five-year low in 2022, making up 6% of enlistments, down from 7.9% in 2020, representation of women from other racial backgrounds increased even as overall enlistments fell.

The number of Hispanic women who signed enlistment contracts dropped from 4,500 in 2019 to 2,923 in 2022, but representation in the population increased from 4.9% to a five-year high of 5.2% in the same timeframe, the presentation shows. African American female enlistees dropped from 6,085 in 2019 to 3,550, but representation remained relatively strong, dipping from 6.6% in 2019 to 5.7% in 2021, but climbing back to 5.7% last year.

Female production — or the annual number of enlistment contracts — is down 31% overall since the pandemic, according to the presentation, but overall production is down 29.2% as all Army elements contend with historic recruiting difficulties. Bonzo pointed to another statistic, the 13% of female enlistees in 2022 who opted for combat arms jobs once off-limits to women, as another positive sign.

“Overall female representation has not dropped, active component female representation has increased each year since 2011,” she said. “For example, in 2016, women became eligible for all jobs within the Army’s combat arms branch, since then, the Army has increased overall representation of females in those roles to approximately 5% as of FEB 2023.”

But as the stark language of Wolfe’s presentation makes clear, the misgivings of women ages 16 to 28 about Army service, especially if not effectively addressed in outreach and communication, may be a harbinger of greater recruiting struggles to come.

In that age group, the presented data shows, 64% of respondents believe they would be sexually harassed, and 61% believe they’d be sexually assaulted, if they joined the Army. Among respondents from Gen Z, those born after 1997, almost half said that they think their lives would be worse off if they joined the Army, and 43% said they believe they’d experience some form of discrimination.

Bonzo acknowledged the service sees challenges in reaching Gen Z, and said the Army’s recruitment machine is working to push out social media content highlighting female soldiers in traditionally male-dominated roles, as well as “in leadership positions, fulfilling their passions, balancing work and family and other success stories.”

“Army Marketing research tells us that Gen Z does not know their Army,” she said. “Research also tells us that youth seek out paths filled with possibilities of purpose, passion, community, and connection; however, they don’t see the Army as an organization that can set them on those paths. Army marketing campaigns are designed to close these gaps.”

Bonzo pointed to new and upcoming Army initiatives that aim to communicate positive aspects of Army service and highlight opportunities for women to advance and thrive. The Army’s Enterprise Marketing Office, she said, is partnering with media company IGN to produce a mini-documentary series called “Women Warriors,” focused on telling the stories of real service members who pursue their passions while serving in the Army.

RELATED

Senators press Fort Hood leaders on investigation into soldier’s death

Private Ana Basaldua Ruiz was found dead on base one month ago.

A women’s initiative team, similar to those already established in the Air Force and Marine Corps, is also being established, she said, as an advocacy entity. Made up of female soldiers, the team “will provide an important mechanism for the Army to evaluate the way it measures and identifies issues of gender bias,” Bonzo said.

Even as it launches these new efforts, however, the Army may be hard-pressed to alter negative public perception from events that dominate headlines. Guillen, who disappeared after reporting sexual harassment by a fellow soldier and was allegedly killed by another soldier, continues to be a symbol for many of the service’s perceived failure to do all it can to protect women in uniform. The March death of another Fort Cavazos soldier, 20-year-old Pvt. Ana Basaldua Ruiz, once again returned Guillen to the national conversation, even though preliminary findings indicated Ruiz’s death was not the result of foul play.

12. In the Dark: How the Pentagon’s Limited Supplier Visibility Risks U.S. National Security

Conclusion:

It is time for the Department of Defense to act swiftly. The CIA has said they are aware of Chinese intentions: General Secretary Xi Jinping told his army to “be ready by 2027” to invade Taiwan. One thing is certain today: Department of Defense supply chains lack the resiliency for a large-scale protracted conflict and they are not on track to be better positioned in 2027. The Department of Defense’s approach toward strengthening the defense industrial base and securing its supply chains is failing to move at the speed of relevance. As many Department of Defense leaders remain hyper-focused on exquisite technology, they should not forget that “none of this technical overmatch matters if America can’t build enough of it, sustain it, or get it to the fight in the first place.” Defense supply chains are under assault and the United States is losing. It is time for the Department of Defense to stop the studies and take immediate and real action to identify “kill shots” at risk for exploitation. Supply chain visibility across the defense industrial base is foundational for national security, and it requires a united implementation strategy.

In the Dark: How the Pentagon’s Limited Supplier Visibility Risks U.S. National Security - War on the Rocks

NICHOLAS JORDAN AND JENNIFER MAPP

warontherocks.com · by Nicholas Jordan · June 14, 2023

If logistics wins or loses wars, what wins or loses logistics? U.S. military doctrine has the answer: “The U.S. military supply chain (to include the defense industrial base) represents a major competitive advantage that underpins deterrence and allows the United States to project power.” Despite being established in doctrine, it took a global pandemic for the Department of Defense to take notice of the fragility of its supply chains and the full impact of China’s global economic expansion. However, acknowledging vulnerability, understanding it, and doing something about it are not mutually inclusive. While awareness in the Department of Defense is rising, the lack of visibility into defense supply chains makes easy targets for adversaries seeking to insert undetected risks into supply chains — silently biding time until they choose to exploit them. It is difficult to fix what you can’t see. It is time for the Department of Defense to take bold steps to gain full visibility into defense supply chains to help mitigate the risk of acquiring U.S. equipment from foreign adversaries and/or shoddy suppliers.

Supply chains underpin the global market. Every product has a network of interconnected companies that must come together at the right time and place to deliver a timely product. The more complex the product, the more nodes the network has. Each node has its own material, logistics, personnel, processes and stakeholder challenges. A disruption in one node will sweep quickly throughout the entire system and upend the supply chain.

Become a Member

The military supply chain is a complex system comprised of a network of suppliers, expanding beyond the known large defense contractors out to thousands of low-tier suppliers. Each tier of the network is critical to the success of the tiers above and below it. Within these networks, there are nexus suppliers critical to the success of the entire system. We argue that it is not too hard and not too expensive to gain full visibility over all of these supply chain nodes. To do so, the Department of Defense should capitalize on proven commercial supply chain software suites, work with Congress to set visibility mandates and reimagine its approach to supply chain management in the 21st century.

The Department of Defense’s Supply Chain Crisis

The Department of Defense has an incentive to map and fully understand its supply chain — and the suppliers that support it. It is currently facing two issues. The first, and most critical, is that the department does not know who provides parts for suppliers below a certain supplier threshold. An example from the private sector is illustrative of the supply chain and its nodes. The Center for Advanced Purchasing Studies mapped the American Honda Motor Company’s supply network. The supply chain included 10,832 suppliers: 245 first tier, 1,643 second tier, 4,605 third tier and 4,330 fourth tier. For Honda, over 97 percent of its suppliers were below tier one. This is the level of supplier visibility the Department of Defense admitted it was unable to attain in a 2022 report to the president.

The second challenge is that the suppliers the Department of Defense depends on may be clustered together in similar geographic regions. This makes them vulnerable to “kill shots,” a metaphor used for military targets that, if attacked, can render an adversary crippled and unable to respond. For example, the Living Supply Chain, a 2017 book on supply chain management written by Robert Handfield and Tom Linton, offers an illustration. Elementum mapped a client’s revenue streams to supplier locations, determining that 86 percent of the company’s revenues were tied to suppliers in one small geographic area. A single major disaster could ultimately impact 86 percent of the company’s revenues. Imagine if a similar geographic risk resides within the U.S. defense supply chain and how the clustering of a vital industry makes the United States vulnerable to attack.

The 2022 National Defense Strategy directs the Department of Defense to “fortify the defense industrial base, logistical systems, and relevant global supply chains” in response to the observed rise in supply chain impacts. For example, COVID-19-related supply chain disruptions caused delays in 48 major defense acquisition programs. Of those, 22 programs continue to experience delays, suggesting that things have not improved even as COVID-19-related concerns have subsided.

The U.S. Air Force’s acquisition chief has said: “Ongoing supply chain issues affecting subcontractors [sic] were largely responsible for the more than year-and-a-half delay” to the KC-46’s remote vision system. And the U.S. Navy’s Columbia-class submarine is already struggling to meet current program demands, highlighting that the “supply chain is the number 1 risk.” Beyond delays, the lack of visibility into all elements of the supply chain prevents the Department of Defense from identifying disruptions early — and planning for them proactively.

The second, and ongoing concern, is about quality control. There is a real risk of inferior or counterfeit components being injected into the Department of Defense’s supply chain. In June 2020, 1st Lt. David Schmitz was killed in an F-16 accident. In a related federal civil lawsuit, it was revealed that the Air Force identified several transistors and microchips that failed. The lawsuit alleges some of these components were counterfeit. Separately, in 2022, the Department of Justice filed criminal charges against an individual for selling approximately $1 billion of Chinese-made counterfeit Cisco components to companies within the United States and an undisclosed list of government agencies, including the Department of Defense.

Supply Chain Risk Management: The Department of Defense’s History of Neglect

Unfortunately, the fragility of the Department of Defense’s supply chain is not a new issue. Over five years ago, a Government Accountability Office report highlighted that the information required to effectively manage supply chain risks within the defense sector was lacking. In response to this report, the Department of Defense “completed a detailed assessment of key sectors … and identified major risks … and included discussion of gaps or vulnerabilities and mitigation strategies.” However, the growing trend of supply chain disruptions suggests the Department of Defense’s mitigation steps were either never fully implemented or that they have failed to mitigate the problems.

The F-35’s supply chain is a good example. The United States is 100 percent import-reliant on 16 minerals deemed “critical” to national security. China accounts for “63 percent of the world’s rare earth mining, 85 percent of rare earth processing, and 92 percent of rare earth magnet production.” Yet, it still took the Department of Defense 12 years to recognize “every one of the more than 825 F-35[s] … delivered contains a component made with a Chinese alloy that is prohibited by both U.S. law and Pentagon regulations.”

To address this lack of visibility, President Biden issued an executive order directing the Department of Defense to “submit a report identifying risks in the supply chain [sic] and policy recommendations to address these risks.” In response, the department admitted it had limited visibility, stating it “[does] not track these vulnerabilities … As supply chains have become more global in scale, prime contractors have lost some visibility into the sub-tiers of their supply chains, especially below third-tier levels.” The Department of Defense is currently reviewing these impacts. If history repeats, the department might see measurable progress in about 10 years.

Supply Chain Risk Management: A Tale of Two Industries

Supply chain risk management is not unique to the defense sector and the need for speed, agility and resilience is just as critical to profit margins as it is to national security. While private industry has evolved, the Department of Defense continues to view it through a very logistics-focused lens. Decades ago, industry began consolidating responsibility for the end-to-end value stream, establishing senior managerial positions for procurement and supply officers. In contrast, the Department of Defense continues to silo its functions of procurement, logistics, and operations. Each functional area assesses its lens of supply chain risk (e.g., cyber, acquisition, logistics, etc.), but no one organization is considering the inherent collective risks to the entire defense industrial base.

Private industry has also embraced the importance of proactive supply chain risk management and integrated it as a critical part of operations. Handfield and Linton offer that global supply chains are living systems “subject to biological rules.” And rule number one is that firms survive by adapting to changes in the ecosystem by “embracing real-time data, velocity, transparency, and rapid response.” Certain firms utilize commercial software solutions using big data, AI and machine learning to map supply chains. Others have implemented flow-down requirements mandating the use of commercial software solutions that rely on data directly from suppliers to create verified supply chain maps. In both cases, many then employ additional software to conduct real-time monitoring of the mapped network using publicly available information. Everstream, Resilinc, Craft, BlueVoyant, Deloitte CentralSight and many more offer software solutions in this space. Becton Dickenson, one of the world’s largest medical technology firms, utilized Everstream to map a product line in three days with over 90 percent accuracy. Previous internal attempts took Becton Dickenson four years to accomplish. Using Resilinc’s software to build a validated supplier map, IBM received real-time supplier updates during the COVID-19 pandemic. This allowed IBM to proactively mitigate issues, resulting in zero missed product deliveries due to pandemic-related disruptions.

Despite the leaps made in the commercial sector, the defense sector has barely taken its first steps toward gaining real visibility into its supply chains. It has been over a year since the Department of Defense said it would apply analytical tools to identify vulnerabilities. To date, nothing of significant value has been fielded. The organic solutions being explored are not only costly but also directly conflict with the department’s own call to action to “act as a fast-follower” with regard to commercial technologies.

Recommendation and Conclusion

U.S. national security relies on the strength and resilience of its defense supply chains, and failing to understand their limits will be catastrophic in conflict with a near-peer adversary. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has already resulted in the United States struggling to meet munition needs for Ukrainian forces for a regionalized conflict. In the Pacific, the United States faces a $19-billion backlog of planned weapon transfers to the Taiwanese military, while delaying 66 new F-16V aircraft deliveries due to supply chain disruptions. In Taiwan Strait conflict wargames, the Center for Strategic and International Studies determined that “the United States would likely run out of some munitions — such as long-range, precision-guided munitions — in less than one week.” The report also stated: “The U.S. defense industrial base is not adequately prepared for the international security environment that now exists.”

This stark performance and assessment of the U.S. industrial base should alarm policymakers in the Department of Defense and Congress. While there is growing awareness of this crisis within the Pentagon, it appears the Department is trending toward historical patterns of organizational change versus accountability. Dr. William LaPlante, the Department of Defense’s top procurement official, issued a memo in March 2023 establishing a Joint Production Accelerator Cell. It will be responsible for “building enduring industrial production capacity, resiliency, and surge capability for key defense weapon systems and supplies.” This initiative calls into question the broader effectiveness of the Department of Defense’s existing Industrial Base Policy office and should be a pause for strategic reflection. Why create a new organization when the Department of Defense has an established office already charged with sustaining “a robust, secure, and resilient industrial base”?

To drive more enduring impacts in fortifying the defense industrial base, the Department of Defense should first understand the scope of the problem it is trying to fix. We recommend the Department of Defense immediately execute an experimentation plan to test widely available commercial supply chain visibility solutions and select a common suite for the department. The Department of Defense should avoid replicating commercial applications, seeing that previous attempts by the department struggled to reach the field or later were scrapped after spending millions of dollars. Custom solutions also fail to leverage proven commercial applications already deployed at scale. Additionally, a common suite ensures the department is able to gain visibility across programs. Allowing each program to address supply chain visibility individually will answer program-specific questions, but it will not answer the broader question of the “kill shots” within the defense industrial base.

The Department of Dense should also work with Congress to implement visibility mandates for industry. This mandate should include a standard of visibility and government data access for all government contractors to give the Department of Defense the authority to hold industry accountable for supply chain risk management. This legislation already exists for rare earth elements for permanent magnets (10 U.S. Code § 857) and sensitive materials from non-allied foreign nations (10 U.S. Code § 4872). To imply the government is not able to gain visibility due to contract or cost constraints neglects to acknowledge the myriad standards the government already levies on industry. National security depends on resilient supply chains and visibility is the first step in fortifying them.

More broadly, the Pentagon should reconsider how it thinks about supply chain management. The majority of the focus on supply chain management and supply chain risk management is through the lens of logistics. This approach completely ignores what is happening in the supply chains as a system is in development or production. Too often, Department of Defense program offices relegate weapon system supply chain monitoring and oversight to logistics or to the contractor, often with little oversight or attention from program leadership until there is a problem. This is a dated approach. Supply chains impact almost every aspect of a system. The risk exposure to the defense ecosystem from horizontal integration and global diversification remains unknown.

Therefore, supply chain accountability must garner proactive attention from the earliest stages of weapon system development. For example, the full network of suppliers should be evaluated by the Department of Defense prior to codifying a weapon system design. The acquisition community must reimagine how “cost, schedule, performance” is defined. Rather than focus on obligation rates and updating baselines to bring programs back on schedule, program leaders must recognize the integrated impacts of the supply chain to all three areas if they are to remain relevant in the 21st century.

It is time for the Department of Defense to act swiftly. The CIA has said they are aware of Chinese intentions: General Secretary Xi Jinping told his army to “be ready by 2027” to invade Taiwan. One thing is certain today: Department of Defense supply chains lack the resiliency for a large-scale protracted conflict and they are not on track to be better positioned in 2027. The Department of Defense’s approach toward strengthening the defense industrial base and securing its supply chains is failing to move at the speed of relevance. As many Department of Defense leaders remain hyper-focused on exquisite technology, they should not forget that “none of this technical overmatch matters if America can’t build enough of it, sustain it, or get it to the fight in the first place.” Defense supply chains are under assault and the United States is losing. It is time for the Department of Defense to stop the studies and take immediate and real action to identify “kill shots” at risk for exploitation. Supply chain visibility across the defense industrial base is foundational for national security, and it requires a united implementation strategy.

Become a Member

Lt. Col. Nicholas Jordan has over 18 years of Air Force program management and acquisition experience. He is a student at the Eisenhower School of National Security and Resource Strategy at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C.

Lt. Col. Jennifer Mapp has over 22 years of Air Force contracting and acquisition experience. She is a national defense fellow at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the United States Air Force, National Defense University, Department of Defense, or U.S. government.

Image: Capt. Travis Mueller

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Nicholas Jordan · June 14, 2023

13.  Dumb and cheap: When facing electronic warfare in Ukraine, small drones' quantity is quality

Dumb and cheap: When facing electronic warfare in Ukraine, small drones' quantity is quality - Breaking Defense

With Ukraine losing up to 10,000 drones a month, mostly to Russian electronic warfare, it’s tempting to invest in anti-EW protection – but, experts agreed, it’s probably more cost-effective to accept high losses and just buy more bare-bones drones.

breakingdefense.com · by Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. · June 13, 2023

Ukrainians train with handheld drones. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — Ukraine is on the march with a motley mix of weapons, from 70-ton Leopard II tanks to two-pound mini-drones. And while the war has been a brutal proving ground for a wide range of technology and tactics, arguably nothing has defined the Ukrainian conflict more than the ubiquity of drones.

Cheap flying robots, like the Chinese DJI Mavic, with even high-end models costing just a couple thousand dollars, can pinpoint targets for artillery, alert troops to lurking ambushes, drop improvised bombs like a flying IED, and even capture video for online propaganda.

These drones are too small, slow, and low for jet fighters or anti-aircraft missiles to take out, but Ukraine is still losing an estimated 5-10,000 a month — over 160 every day. While gunfire from the ground accounts for some, they’re going down in droves to electronic warfare (EW), which can scramble their GPS navigation systems or jam the radio-control links to their distant operators. Without constant human guidance, the drones’ tiny computer brains may crash them into trees, or just hover safely in mid-air, awaiting new commands, until the batteries run out and they fall to the ground.

In place like Bakhmut, which saw some of the fiercest fighting of the war, Russian jamming became so intense that DJI Mavics and similar off-the-shelf drones could only venture a few hundred yards from their operators without losing the link. “In December, we were able to fly three kilometers [1.8 miles],” a Ukrainian drone operator told the Guardian in April. “Now the guys are saying they cannot fly further than 500 meters.”

It might seem that the logical next step in this mini-drone arms race is to harden the drones against electronic warfare attacks — but several experts told Breaking Defense it’s probably not worth it. Instead, the answer is just to buy and fly more.

Once again, in war quantity has a quality all its own. In particular, as an asset gets cheaper and more numerous, you can use it for more and riskier missions, because losing one, or thousands, doesn’t hurt the way losing a more expensive system does.

“You can use them in more aggressive ways because you don’t care if they get lost,” said Zachary Kallenborn, a policy fellow at George Mason University. And, he laid out in an interview, it’s a great return on investment to sacrifice a couple thousand dollars’ worth of drone to save a soldier from walking into an ambush, or even to avoid firing a few dumb artillery shells — worth a couple thousand bucks apiece — at the wrong target.

In Ukraine today, “commercial quadcopter and FPV [First Person View] drones are treated as expendable munitions,” said Samuel Bendett of CNA in an interview with Breaking Defense. “Both sides recognize that the adversary EW is having a massive effect on such drones, but it’s not cost-effective to proof them against EW. It’s just cheaper and easier to get large quantities of COTS [Commercial Off-The-Shelf] UAVs and replace lost drones.”

That’s a lesson the US military has struggled to learn, with its long and unhappy history of “gold-plated” acquisition programs that pile on esoteric but well-intentioned technical requirements until cost, weight, and development time spiral out of control.

‘It’s Got To Be Expendable’

“In this desire for an exquisite capability, we are losing out on the requirement to get these systems into the hands of soldiers at every echelon,” said Patrick Donahoe, who recently retired from the US Army as a two-star general. “It’s got to be expendable, [so] if the link gets broken and it crashes, we don’t have to go look for it.”

“As a young captain in Bosnia, I spent… a day and a half tracking units looking for what became of a Predator,” he told Breaking Defense. “In Iraq, as a battalion commander, I spent two days with guys out looking for a Raven that crashed in the Euphrates river. Why are we doing that?”

Recently, however, even the US Army showed signs of coming round. In May, it released a Broad Agency Announcement [PDF] that asks small businesses to submit proposals by June 27 for dropping bombs from mini-drones. Emphasizing simplicity, the Army mandates use of munitions already in its supply system, asks that they be at least as lethal as a grenade-dropping drone already in development in-house at DEVCOM’s Armaments Center, and says they should be safely attachable (and detachable!) “by soldiers in the field.”

Most importantly, the service requires companies to use drones already approved by the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) “blue list.” Those are all relatively small and, by US Army standards, inexpensive commercial options, such as the Skydio X2D, starting at about $10,000 retail, about the cost of five Chinese Mavic Pros. The X2D is already in use, though unarmed, by Army platoons as part of the RQ-28A Short-Range Reconnaissance system.

A soldier tests a candidate for the Army’s Short-Range Reconnaissance (SRR) drone in 2020 (photo by Mr. Tad Browning, US Army Operational Test Command)

In fact, many experts and even some Ukrainian combat vets argue that military Medium-Altitude, Long-Endurance (MALE) drones like the famous Predator or the Turkish-built Bayraktar TB2 are just too big and fly too high, making them easy prey for radar-guided anti-aircraft weapons that cannot spot the smaller, lower-flying quadcopters. “Knowing the Russian air defense right now… I’ll give you a 90 percent chance that it will be shot down,” one Ukrainian Air Force officer said last year about the US Army variant of the Predator, the Gray Eagle. “Bayraktar is much cheaper, so it’s okay to lose Bayraktars.”

But even the cheapest model of Bayraktar costs at least $1 million, less than a Predator/Gray Eagle, but about as much as a hundred Skydio X2Ds or 500 Mavic Pros. Of course, these drones have radically different capabilities, with the big MALEs having much longer range and larger payloads. The purpose-built military drones also tend to have some built-in protection against electronic warfare, such as jamming-resistant antennas, alternatives navigation systems for when GPS goes down, or even autonomy software that can fly them without human oversight.

Adding such EW defenses to a much smaller mini-drone, however, runs quickly into limits on weight, power consumption, and cost.

“A DJI drone [is] meant for taking photographs of your pool or filming snowboarders going down the slopes; that’s not meant for fighting sophisticated electronic warfare, [and] at least some of the traditional approaches that you use to overcome jamming, electronic warfare, aren’t going to work very well with these small drones,” said Kallenborn. Better antennas weigh more and take more space, which quadcopters cannot spare; stronger transmitters need more power and drain a quadcopter’s battery faster, reducing already limited flight time.

AI For Drones?

Future advances could let you cram more capability onto a small, cheap platform — especially when it comes to computing power and artificial intelligence. In theory, an AI drone could fly without a live link to a human operator: It could get its instructions before launch, fly itself around the designated area, use object-recognition software to recognize potential targets, and send back brief, compressed and encrypted reports instead of live video.

Even some of today’s DJI drones can already track a designated target, Kallenborn said. But high-end AI currently runs on big, powerful computers — server farms so expensive that ChatGPT loses money with every answer — and wouldn’t fit into a quadcopter-sized digital brain. “Any sophisticated automated intelligence processing would require significant compute that wouldn’t be available on a small drone,” he said, “Autonomy and AI absolutely can help, but given the limits of that capability at the moment, it’s not a silver bullet.”

“AI is unlikely to impact the EW offense vs. drone defense balance in the short term, [and] anything beyond the short term is difficult to speculate on,” agreed Kyle Miller, research analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security & Emerging Technologies. “Firstly, the AI, particularly computer vision, models are not at a level of performance… to operate without a constant link to an operator. Secondly, most COTS drones used in Ukraine don’t have enough onboard processing power to effectively run state-of-the-art computer vision models in the first place.”

In fact, while an AI drone would be more resilient against jamming of its control links, it would be just as vulnerable to EW that blinded its sensors — and arguably more vulnerable to hacking, since it would be controlled entirely by complex software. “You would be much more resistant to some types of EW — jamming of [your] datalink — but not necessarily to others,” said Mauro Gilli, a senior research at the Center for Security Studies in Zurich. “As to EW-delivered malicious software… an autonomous system could be more vulnerable than a remotely-controlled one.”

“Definitely, COTS drones are particularly vulnerable to electronic warfare, but any platform that relies on the electromagnetic spectrum for its operation is by definition vulnerable to EW,” Gilli told Breaking Defense. “Effective counter EW is technologically demanding and hence expensive, so it is really a big question as to whether it makes economic sense to make a cheap platform less vulnerable… My sense is that for most COTS drones, the cost is not worth the benefit.”

breakingdefense.com · by Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. · June 13, 2023

14.  Philippine lawmakers demand US pays for bases to fund cash-strapped military pension scheme

Philippine lawmakers demand US pays for bases to fund cash-strapped military pension scheme

• They have been using our land but don’t pay, the alliance is ‘one-sided’ in favour of Washington, according to legislator Ronald dela Rosa
• US has five bases in the Philippines, with four more agreed; Manila does not have enough money to pay for all its troops’ pensions, with a massive funding gap

SCMP’s Asia desk

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Published: 5:08pm, 14 Jun, 2023

By SCMP’s Asia South China Morning Post3 min

June 14, 2023

View Original

A Filipino soldier practices holding a weapon as part of the annual US-Philippines joint military exercises in the Philippines in April. Photo: Reuters

Philippine lawmakers have pushed the Marcos administration to amend two defence treaties with the US and make the long-time security ally cough up for using Manila’s military bases to fund a cash-strapped armed forces pension scheme that is staring at “financial collapse”.

Senator Francis Escudero said he backed fellow legislator Ronald dela Rosa’s proposal seeking to make American troops pay for their presence in the country to revitalise the pension funds of military and other uniformed personnel (MUP).

Escudero, a lawyer, said the United States “usually pays host countries for its foreign bases to cover the expenses of building, maintaining the sites and paying rent or other financial compensation to the host country”.

“These agreements are usually established through formal diplomatic channels and can be revised or renegotiated over time,” he added.

In April the Philippines announced the locations of four more military bases, including near the Taiwan Strait and the disputed South China Sea, that it is allowing the US military to use on top of the five agreed under the 2014 Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement (EDCA).

China has warned the expanded deal could endanger regional peace.

01:58

US, Japan and Philippines hold first joint coastguard exercise in the South China Sea

In 2021 Manila renewed the long-standing Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) with Washington after Rodrigo Duterte, who was president at the time, threatened to scrap the pact allowing US troops to operate and train in the Philippines.

There are currently around 500 US military personnel in the Southeast Asian nation.

Dela Rosa last week accused the US of not paying anything for its presence in the Philippines and suggested the government collect money from Washington to prop up the MUP (military and uniformed personnel) pension system that President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr has warned will run out of cash within six years if it does not become self-sustaining.

“We have to amend the VFA and tell [the US] to pay. They have been using our land, but they don’t pay for anything,” the former national police chief was quoted as saying by the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

He added “there was no reciprocity at all” in the Philippine-US relations and described the alliance as “one-sided” in favour of Washington.

A bill to overhaul the retirement corpus, which is currently fully funded by the government without contribution from its members, has been tabled in the Senate.

According to the finance ministry’s estimates, the pension system faced a funding gap of 9.6 trillion pesos (US$171 billion) as of 2020.

Former defence chief Carlito Galvez Jnr told senators last month that about 70 to 80 per cent of enlisted personnel could opt for retirement to make use of the present pension scheme if the proposed changes go ahead.

Senator dela Rosa echoed that view and urged the government not to clear the bill in a haste.

“If they all will file for early retirement, the government would pay trillions of pesos in retirement benefits. That would really lead to a fiscal collapse,” he said.

Newly appointed defence secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jnr said last week that reforming the MUP system is a key priority for him, calling on members to contribute to their “secured future” and make the pension fund financially sustainable.

Meanwhile, a Chinese navy training vessel berthed in the Philippines on Wednesday for a rare port visit, as the two countries contest reefs and waters in the South China Sea.

Dragon dances and a brass band greeted the 165-metre (542-foot) Qi Jiguang in Manila to mark its final stop on a Southeast Asian tour through Vietnam, Thailand and Brunei.

“It’s a goodwill visit,” Chinese ambassador to the Philippines Huang Xilian told reporters.

The ship “conveys the concept of mutual trust concerning China’s peaceful development”, read a leaflet distributed by its crew to visitors.

Beijing claims most of the strategic South China Sea including waters close to Philippine shores, ignoring a 2016 international tribunal ruling that voided its claims.

Chinese coastguard or navy vessels routinely block or shadow Philippine ships carrying out supply missions to islands in the disputed sea that host Philippine garrisons, Manila says.

15. GOP senator blocks arms sale to Hungary for stalling Sweden’s NATO bid

Connect this with the recommendations of the DOD Tiger team on FMS. This is something that DOD cannot prevent - actions by congress. But they do not to factor this in to possibilities with especially sensitive FMS cases (though it will be hard to anticipate Congressional intervention.

​

GOP senator blocks arms sale to Hungary for stalling Sweden’s NATO bid

The rare move by Sen. James E. Risch comes as relations between the U.S. and Hungary have become increasingly combative as Budapest complicates the Western response to Russia’s war in Ukraine

By John Hudson and Loveday Morris

June 14, 2023 at 2:00 a.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by John Hudson · June 14, 2023

Sen. James E. Risch, the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, is halting a $735 million U.S. arms sale to Hungary as punishment for the country’s refusal to approve NATO membership for Sweden, a rare move aimed at pressuring Budapest into greenlighting the military alliance’s expansion ahead of a major summit next month.

In a statement to The Washington Post, Risch (Idaho) said Hungary must allow Sweden into NATO if it wants the arms package, which includes 24 HIMARS rocket launcher batteries and more than 100 rockets and pods along with associated parts and support.

The decision to slam the brakes on new arms sales to Budapest demonstrates the growing anger toward Hungary by NATO backers like Risch, who rarely holds up arms sales to countries in any part of the world.

“For some time now, I have directly expressed my concerns to the Hungarian government regarding its refusal to move forward a vote for Sweden to join NATO,” he said.

“The fact that it is now June and still not done, I decided that the sale of new U.S. military equipment to Hungary will be on hold,” he added.

All significant arms sales require the chair and ranking members of the Senate and House foreign affairs committees to give clearance and approval before the sale is publicly noticed by the State Department. Risch’s objection prevents the State Department from being able to move forward in the sales process.

A State Department spokesperson declined to comment on the matter, saying the department does not comment on “pending arms sales.”

A spokesman for the Hungarian government did not respond to a request for comment.

Risch’s maneuvering comes as NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg visited the White House on Tuesday in an effort to coordinate strategies for the NATO summit this summer in Lithuania, where President Biden and Stoltenberg hope to announce progress on Sweden’s bid to join the military alliance.

Sweden and Finland’s decision to apply for NATO membership has been widely viewed as a blow to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who justified his invasion of Ukraine by underscoring the threat the military alliance poses to his country.

U.S. officials say Putin did not anticipate the West would hold together in support of Ukraine as it has, but they worry that the decision by Hungary and Turkey to delay ratification for Sweden’s bid, which requires the support of all of the alliance’s existing members, risks exposing it as divided and ineffective.

The U.S. ambassador to Hungary, David Pressman, said “The United States will continue to work tirelessly towards closer collaboration with our ally. However, we have real concerns about strategic decisions Hungary is making — and those concerns are shared broadly.”

Relations between the United States and Hungary have become increasingly combative in recent months, as Budapest delays and complicates the Western response to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

As a veto-wielding member of both NATO and the 27-member European Union, Hungary holds outsize international influence. Prime Minister Viktor Orban has blocked European defense funding for Ukraine, stymied sanctions packages and deepened energy ties to Russia, leading to accusations that Budapest is working as Putin’s Trojan horse.

Hungary’s continued blocking of Sweden’s NATO membership bid has caused exasperation among allies. Speaking in Qatar last month, Orban said relations between Hungary and Sweden must improve before Stockholm’s bid for membership is improved.

Washington has also expressed alarm over Budapest’s willingness to expand and deepen ties with Moscow, taking a harder line in April when the U.S. Treasury sanctioned officials at the Hungary-based International Investment Bank, an unusual move against an entity linked to an ally.

At the time, Pressman, the U.S. ambassador, expressed exasperation that the Hungarian government had “dismissed the concerns of the United States government” regarding the bank that Washington said was being used as a base for Russian espionage.

Orban struck a more conciliatory tone following the public censure describing the United States as a “friend and ally.”

Risch’s move against the Orban government stands in contrast to the embrace the far-right prime minister has received from some U.S. conservatives, in particular, those who hosted him at last year’s Conservative Political Action Conference. At the event, Orban received loud applause as he singled out liberals as a common enemy. “They hate me and slander me and my country, as they hate you and slander you for the America you stand for,” he said.

Hungary has not publicly announced its request to purchase HIMARS, but Hungarian newspaper Szabad Europa reported in January that Budapest was mulling a purchase, citing defense ministry officials. The rocket systems, credited with elevating Ukraine’s ability to thwart Russia’s advance, are already in possession or on order for many of the countries on NATO’s eastern flank. Poland took it’s first delivery of M142 HIMARS last month and is aiming to buy around 500 more.

Morris reported from Berlin.

The Washington Post · by John Hudson · June 14, 2023

16. Taiwan needs European friends to keep China at bay, minister says on tour

Taiwan needs European friends to keep China at bay, minister says on tour

Reuters · by Jan Lopatka

PRAGUE, June 14 (Reuters) - Taiwan wants to secure peace and stability by maintaining the status quo in its relationship with neighbouring China and needs the support of European states to do so, Taiwan Foreign Minister Joseph Wu said on Wednesday.

"In order for Taiwan to stay strong and resilient and to have the courage to continue the policy of maintaining the status quo, we do need support from European friends," Wu said in a speech at a conference in the Czech capital, Prague.

China claims self-ruled Taiwan as its territory and has never renounced the use of force to bring it under its control. Taiwan strongly objects to China's sovereignty claims and says only the island's people can decide their future.

Wu said Taiwan was drawing lessons from Russia's invasion of Ukraine to strengthen its resilience towards China, which he referred to by the initials of its official name, the People's Republic of China.

"For many observers around the world, the (Chinese army) invasion may not be imminent or unavoidable and Taiwan and partners are trying to prevent it from happening," Wu said.

"But the PRC is following Sun Tzu's 'Art of War', trying to crush the enemy without going to war. As we speak, the PRC is continuing to flex its muscle to intimidate Taiwan, including sending its war planes and vessels across the medium line of the Taiwan Strait."

Taiwan has no formal diplomatic ties with any European country except the Vatican. But it maintains extensive informal relations, and Central and Eastern European countries have been particularly keen to show support for Taiwan, defying Beijing's anger about such contacts and reducing Taiwan's diplomatic isolation.

Wu spoke at a think tank event immediately after an opening speech by Czech President Petr Pavel, which Wu watched from the front row. Pavel left the room after speaking.

Wu, in speaking about the global impacts of the conflict in Ukraine, said war in the Taiwan Strait, the waterway separating Taiwan from China, could be a "shockwave" for Europe if supply chains were disrupted.

"It will be the same or even worse if war is to break out in the Taiwan Strait where roughly half of the world's container ships sail through and more than 90% of the most advanced computer or semiconductor chips are produced," he said.

He also warned that Russia and China were cooperating more in military exercises in the western Pacific, the latest just last week, and that Russia's "military might in the Far East seems to have remained relatively intact".

"The Chinese leaders may have stopped talking about the limitless partnership with Russia, but their joint military exercises speak volumes," said Wu, who is on his second trip to the central European NATO and European Union member after a 2021 visit.

On Tuesday, he met Czech Senate speaker Milos Vystrcil, who has been at the forefront of Czech efforts to build closer relationship with Taiwan and visited the island in 2020.

He was due to meet Czech lower house speaker Marketa Pekarova-Adamova, who visited Taiwan in March, for an informal dinner on Wednesday.

Two sources briefed on Wu's trip, who spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorised to speak with the media, said Wu was also expected to visit Brussels, headquarters of the European Union.

Wu declined to comment on any stops while in Europe, saying that he was "under the condition" that he would stay quiet. "I need to observe that in order to make my visit to those places a success," Wu told reporters.

China's Foreign Ministry urged Europe last Friday not to have any official exchanges with Taiwan or support any "independence forces".

The Chinese embassy in Prague did not reply to separate requests for comment on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Reporting by Jan Lopatka and Robert Muller; Additional reporting by Jason Hovet in Prague and Ben Blanchard in Taipei; editing by Robert Birsel and Nick Macfie

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Reuters · by Jan Lopatka

17. How Not to Help Ukraine: A muddled U.S. strategy is making it harder for Kyiv to win.

A strong critique. There is important analysis and insight in this piece.

Excerpts:

Had the West acted more decisively and strategically, Ukraine would be in a better shape to undertake its counteroffensive and reach a more durable postwar settlement.

The preoccupation with escalation—another common line deployed when refusing weapons—is even more flawed. For starters, the idea that withholding weapons will somehow limit escalation and keep the war more contained and less deadly is questionable. True, Russia has not used nuclear weapons, but there are plenty of reasons Russia would not want to resort to them. And Western restraint has produced little Russian response in kind. Russia still tried to freeze, and then flood, Ukrainian civilians into submission; it has also engaged in widespread torture and shown no willingness to negotiate about anything other than Ukraine’s capitulation.

At the same time, when, after much hemming and hawing, the United States did provide Patriot missiles, M1 Abrams tanks, and now F-16 training to the Ukrainians, such actions did not spark the uncontrollable escalation cycle some had feared. As one might expect, Russia targeted these systems, like it would any valuable piece of military hardware, but so far its targeting has been unsuccessful. For the most part, the war has continued much the same as before—as a grinding war of attrition.

What’s more, the strategy of doling out weapons systems one at a time and with much delay has never made logical sense. If the idea was to prevent Ukraine from attacking Russia itself, Ukraine has never needed sophisticated Western equipment to do that. Ukraine has already, allegedly, conducted strikes inside Russia with old Soviet helicopters, non-U.S. drones, and cross-border raids. And why should the United States and its Western allies be so concerned about Ukraine attacking in Russia, anyhow? Russia may indeed retaliate. But the costs of any such retaliation would likely be borne by Ukraine—not by the United States and its allies. And it’s noteworthy that countries far closer to Russia and more vulnerable to Russian retaliation—such as Poland, Finland, or the Baltics—are all doubling down on their military commitments to Ukraine.

...

Judged collectively, however, these decisions add up to a suboptimal, messy U.S. strategy for supporting a war. The vagueness of the ends, the indecisiveness of the ways, and the uncertainty in the means have produced a U.S. effort that is not as robust, quick, or forward-looking as it could or should be. This lack of strategic optimization has delayed needed support to Ukraine, and it may have even prolonged the conflict.

The challenge was foreseeable a year or more ago: Ukraine will survive as an independent state, continue to face a long-term threat from Russia, and run out of Soviet-era equipment—be it air defenses, tanks, or planes. Had the West acted more decisively and strategically, Ukraine would not only be in a better shape to undertake the counteroffensive it recently launched in southern and eastern Ukraine, but also be better-positioned for a more durable postwar settlement.

Thankfully, Ukrainian bravery and Russian missteps mean that the war remains winnable for Kyiv. The United States just needs the will and strategy to embrace that victory.

How Not to Help Ukraine

A muddled U.S. strategy is making it harder for Kyiv to win.

By Raphael S. Cohen, the director of the Strategy and Doctrine Program at the Rand Corporation’s Project Air Force, and Gian Gentile, the deputy director of the Rand Corporation’s Army Research Division.

Foreign Policy · by Raphael S. Cohen, Gian Gentile · June 14, 2023

Over the past 16 months, perhaps the most discussed aspect of Washington’s policy toward Ukraine has been whether or not the U.S. Congress will continue providing Kyiv with weapons. The question has dominated the news and opinion pages for good reason: There is a loud but vocal minority, particularly among Republicans, that has promised either to increase scrutiny of Ukraine aid or to cut it off entirely. After this month’s deal on the debt limit, these calls have only intensified. The threat of an end to aid has raised the stakes for Ukraine’s nascent counteroffensive, too. Given that the United States is far and away the largest and most important military donor to Ukraine, any move to curtail military supplies would have profound consequences for the war.

And yet, the intense focus on the congressional political dimension overshadows several other, arguably more important aspects of Washington’s Ukraine strategy. As any war college student can rattle off, good strategy comes down to the alignment of ends, ways, and means. Put another way, good strategy involves clearly defining your objectives (ends), developing practical methods to accomplish them (ways), and then allocating sufficient resources (means) to turn these objectives and methods into reality. The debate over congressional support for Ukraine aid largely revolves around means. But what of the other two legs of the strategic triad?

Almost a year and a half into the war, the United States’ objectives—its ends—in Ukraine remain nebulous. While President Joe Biden is fond of saying that the United States will back Ukraine “as long as it takes,” he and his administration have been notably mute on defining what, exactly, “it” is. Instead, Biden has framed the outcome only in the negative: “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia.” More often, the United States publicly defers to Ukraine about its ultimate goals in its war. As Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said, “In terms of the goals and objectives of Ukraine’s campaign, we’ll let the Ukrainians decide … what that will be.”

While this deference is understandable, perhaps even admirable—the Ukrainians, after all, are the ones dying, and should therefore set the terms for peace—the lack of the full-throated commitment to an outright Ukrainian victory over Russia has led to a tepid and, at times, even counterproductive approach to the second element of a sound strategy: the ways for reaching the ultimate objective. Whenever Ukraine asks for a weapons system, for example, a similar narrative has played out, time and time again. At first, the United States refuses, citing a mixture of operational and escalation concerns. Then, public pressure builds. Eventually, the United States changes course, but only after much delay. The most recent example was whether or not to supply Ukraine with F-16 fighter aircraft, but the decisions about everything from M1 Abrams tanks to Patriot missile defense systems have followed a similar pattern.

Some degree of U.S. foot-dragging during the first few weeks of the war was, perhaps, understandable—back then, policymakers were still figuring out how the Ukrainians would fight. But slow-rolling deliveries has become less defensible the longer the conflict has gone on. Many of the initial, operational reasons for withholding certain weapons—like the idea that Ukrainian forces couldn’t be trained quickly enough on those systems—have been repeatedly disproved. Ukraine has shown that it can both rapidly master complex systems, like Patriot missiles, and also use them to great effect.

Had the West acted more decisively and strategically, Ukraine would be in a better shape to undertake its counteroffensive and reach a more durable postwar settlement.

The preoccupation with escalation—another common line deployed when refusing weapons—is even more flawed. For starters, the idea that withholding weapons will somehow limit escalation and keep the war more contained and less deadly is questionable. True, Russia has not used nuclear weapons, but there are plenty of reasons Russia would not want to resort to them. And Western restraint has produced little Russian response in kind. Russia still tried to freeze, and then flood, Ukrainian civilians into submission; it has also engaged in widespread torture and shown no willingness to negotiate about anything other than Ukraine’s capitulation.

At the same time, when, after much hemming and hawing, the United States did provide Patriot missiles, M1 Abrams tanks, and now F-16 training to the Ukrainians, such actions did not spark the uncontrollable escalation cycle some had feared. As one might expect, Russia targeted these systems, like it would any valuable piece of military hardware, but so far its targeting has been unsuccessful. For the most part, the war has continued much the same as before—as a grinding war of attrition.

What’s more, the strategy of doling out weapons systems one at a time and with much delay has never made logical sense. If the idea was to prevent Ukraine from attacking Russia itself, Ukraine has never needed sophisticated Western equipment to do that. Ukraine has already, allegedly, conducted strikes inside Russia with old Soviet helicopters, non-U.S. drones, and cross-border raids. And why should the United States and its Western allies be so concerned about Ukraine attacking in Russia, anyhow? Russia may indeed retaliate. But the costs of any such retaliation would likely be borne by Ukraine—not by the United States and its allies. And it’s noteworthy that countries far closer to Russia and more vulnerable to Russian retaliation—such as Poland, Finland, or the Baltics—are all doubling down on their military commitments to Ukraine.

Moreover, if Washington wants to put Ukraine in the “best possible position” to negotiate an end to the war, then there is a need to reestablish deterrence. Russia must be convinced not only that further aggression is futile, but that continuing aggression would come at a cost. In political science jargon, this means establishing both deterrence by denial, which prevents an adversary from successfully accomplishing its war aims, and deterrence by punishment, which credibly threatens further costs should aggression continue.

In both respects, more powerful weapons help. The better equipped Ukrainian forces are, the more likely they are to blunt further Russian aggression and prevent Russia from achieving its war aims. Longer-range weapons—be they aircraft like F-16s, which several European allies have agreed to supply, or Army Tactical Missile System (ATACM) missiles in the future—allow Ukraine to strike at Russian targets behind the lines. These systems, in particular, can hit Russian positions in their supply lines all the way down into the Crimean Peninsula, a crucial aspect to the Ukrainian offensive.

Equally important, though, is the fact that the better equipped the Ukrainians are, the more they can impose costs on Russia and the more Russia will need to weigh the benefits of future aggression. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling once noted, deterrence is also predicated on the “power to hurt.” Giving Ukraine the power to hurt Russia may be an escalation risk, but it is also a necessary precondition to restoring mutual deterrence at the border. In other words, the United States’ cautious approach may be having precisely the opposite effect of what it intended to achieve: a longer, bloodier, costlier conflict.

Stepping back, then, the United States’ strategy in the war in Ukraine so far is a case in which the whole is less than the sum of its parts. Viewed individually, most decisions the United States has made in the war make sense. It is logical for the Biden administration to be opaque about its goals in the conflict and hesitant about providing high-end weaponry to a country engaged in an indirect conflict with a nuclear-armed major power. Similarly, it is understandable for Congress to want accountability for how Americans’ taxes are being spent.

Judged collectively, however, these decisions add up to a suboptimal, messy U.S. strategy for supporting a war. The vagueness of the ends, the indecisiveness of the ways, and the uncertainty in the means have produced a U.S. effort that is not as robust, quick, or forward-looking as it could or should be. This lack of strategic optimization has delayed needed support to Ukraine, and it may have even prolonged the conflict.

The challenge was foreseeable a year or more ago: Ukraine will survive as an independent state, continue to face a long-term threat from Russia, and run out of Soviet-era equipment—be it air defenses, tanks, or planes. Had the West acted more decisively and strategically, Ukraine would not only be in a better shape to undertake the counteroffensive it recently launched in southern and eastern Ukraine, but also be better-positioned for a more durable postwar settlement.

Thankfully, Ukrainian bravery and Russian missteps mean that the war remains winnable for Kyiv. The United States just needs the will and strategy to embrace that victory.

Foreign Policy · by Raphael S. Cohen, Gian Gentile · June 14, 2023

18. Let Ukraine Into NATO Right Now

Excerpts:

For those worried that Ukraine might take dangerous escalatory actions, NATO membership also would provide some insurance. Article 4 of the NATO treaty would require Ukraine and its new allies to “consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence, or security of any of the Parties is threatened.” Ukraine would have more security; it would also be more embedded in NATO’s military and political institutions, with less freedom to act independently. It would be far better to bring Ukraine into such a structure than to let it remain an extremely well-armed free agent.

Of course, there is still fighting to be done before Ukraine can fully join the alliance. All of NATO’s members will have to be convinced. And Ukraine will have to ensure it is politically and militarily ready. But that is all the more reason to start the formal process now. A democratic Ukraine joining the West is a big part of how this war ends. And Ukrainians should know what they must do to make it happen.

Let Ukraine Into NATO Right Now

The country’s ongoing war isn’t a reason not to bring it into the West’s security alliance.

By Tom Malinowski, the former Congressman from New Jersey's 7th district.

Foreign Policy · by Tom Malinowski · June 14, 2023

Twenty-five years ago, as a State Department speechwriter, I worked with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to secure ratification by the U.S. Senate of NATO’s first enlargement since the 1950s. Like all of us who advised Albright, I felt passionately that bringing Central Europe’s new democracies into NATO was morally right and in America’s interest. But we also believed it was vital to set the highest possible bar for aspiring members. The United States insisted on admitting only Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to NATO during that round—rejecting calls by some European allies to add more countries.

“NATO is a military alliance, not a social club,” Albright told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. New members had to be ready to contribute to its military missions and committed to its democratic values. They could not bring unresolved internal or border conflicts into NATO—the whole point of the process was to induce them to solve these problems before joining. Back in 1998, for example, we had to be confident that Hungary wouldn’t make territorial claims on neighboring countries with Hungarian minorities.

NATO kept its door open to more members after that first expansion. We expected the biggest test would be bringing in the Baltic States—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—because that would mean bringing states that had once been Soviet republics into the alliance. That Rubicon was crossed in 2004, without any serious harm to NATO-Russia relations. But I didn’t think Ukraine would ever join them. When NATO declared in 2008 that Ukraine “will become” a member, without offering a pathway for membership, I worried it was making a promise that might prove impossible to keep, even if Ukraine fixed its then-profound problems with corruption and democratic governance.

Russia’s full-scale invasion, and Ukraine’s heroic defense of NATO’s founding values, has changed all that.

At the coming NATO summit this July, NATO should offer Ukraine a Membership Action Plan—the first formal step toward membership. It should make clear that Ukraine’s ultimate accession depends solely on actions within its control, not on what Russia does or on the ultimate resolution of the war.

One reason to be serious about Ukrainian membership is that experience has validated the original argument for bringing new members into NATO. In 1997, Albright predicted NATO enlargement would “expand the area of Europe where wars do not happen,” and that turned out to be true. Since then, Russia has only attacked countries not yet protected by the alliance—Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova.

Experience has also disproved the belief that nations could gain security from Russia by foregoing their aspirations for NATO membership in deference to its concerns. It’s often forgotten that Ukraine adopted a law prohibiting joining military alliances in 2010. Russia invaded anyway in 2014, stealing Ukrainian territory and giving Ukraine’s neighbors reason to fear that their borders were no longer secure, either.

So the old reasons for Ukrainian NATO membership have become stronger; the old fears of provoking Russia have become moot. But there is also a new argument for Ukrainian membership, one that stems naturally from a question that every American and European government is now asking: How do we define Ukrainian victory and Russian defeat?

If the current war were solely about sovereignty—about upholding the principle that borders can’t be erased by tanks—then there could be only one good answer to that question. Ukraine would have to regain all of its territory. And that should remain our common goal.

But Russian President Vladimir Putin’s goal in Ukraine is clearly not just to grab land; nor is land the only thing Ukrainians are defending. U.S. President Joe Biden has said that Ukraine’s “brave resistance is part of a larger fight for democratic principles,” and if that is true—if this war is partly about preserving Ukraine’s freedom to build a democratic society and to align itself with countries that share its values—then Ukraine joining NATO as a strong, pluralistic democracy would also count as victory. It would arguably be as huge a blow to Putin as Ukraine regaining Crimea. It might thus relieve the political pressure Ukraine’s leaders feel to complete that military task more quickly than realities on the ground might allow, and focus them, constructively, on the work required to integrate seamlessly with the Western alliance.

The alternative some have proposed—offering Ukraine security “guarantees” that fall short of NATO membership, as the United States does for Israel, might help until full membership is achieved. But they are no substitute. The United States and Israel don’t have a mutual defense treaty because Israel doesn’t want one—in part because it fears a formal alliance would limit its freedom of action. Ukraine, in contrast, has been asking to assume the responsibilities of joining our alliance. It is a European country suffering exactly the kind of attack NATO was created to prevent, and it’s proving that it is ready and willing to interpose itself between the attacking nation and NATO’s other members—to defend their freedom as well as its own. How can NATO say no to such a country’s aspirations for membership without signaling hesitation to actually guarantee its security, and without validating Putin’s claim that Ukraine is part of a special Russian sphere of influence? There really is only one security guarantee that is taken seriously in Europe, and that is NATO.

That still leaves the question we posed 25 years ago: Can we bring into NATO a country with an unresolved conflict, without obligating the U.S. military to join that conflict? That is a serious and legitimate concern, especially since it is in the nature of an active conflict to expand unpredictably. But the answer cannot be to wait to admit Ukraine until the current war definitively ends. That would give Russia an incentive to never end the war—the very opposite of what NATO’s original enlargement conditions were designed to achieve.

Article 5 of the NATO treaty says that if a member is attacked, each ally must take “such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain” security. That is a serious legal obligation, even if it does not require going to war in response to every small provocation. But we would still get to define its contours in advance of Ukrainian accession.

If, for example, Russian troops were to still occupy some Ukrainian soil when Ukraine is ready for membership, allies could reach an understanding that Article 5 would not oblige them to take direct part in Ukraine’s operations to regain those remaining territories, but that they would take all feasible measures to stop a further Russian invasion. This would guarantee the security of that large part of Ukraine that its troops have protected and liberated, without committing American Marines to storm Crimea.

For those worried that Ukraine might take dangerous escalatory actions, NATO membership also would provide some insurance. Article 4 of the NATO treaty would require Ukraine and its new allies to “consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence, or security of any of the Parties is threatened.” Ukraine would have more security; it would also be more embedded in NATO’s military and political institutions, with less freedom to act independently. It would be far better to bring Ukraine into such a structure than to let it remain an extremely well-armed free agent.

Of course, there is still fighting to be done before Ukraine can fully join the alliance. All of NATO’s members will have to be convinced. And Ukraine will have to ensure it is politically and militarily ready. But that is all the more reason to start the formal process now. A democratic Ukraine joining the West is a big part of how this war ends. And Ukrainians should know what they must do to make it happen.

Foreign Policy · by Tom Malinowski · June 14, 2023

​19. U.S. Warned Ukraine Not to Attack Nord Stream

​

Excerpt:

The CIA and other allies had questions over whether Ukraine had the capacity to carry out such an attack, which would require placing explosive charges deep beneath the Baltic Sea. Some European governments still struggle to believe that Ukraine, using a single 50-foot yacht, was able to do so. 

U.S. Warned Ukraine Not to Attack Nord Stream

CIA pressed Kyiv weeks before explosions sabotaged the natural-gas pipelines bringing Russian gas to Europe

By Bojan Pancevski, Drew Hinshaw, Joe Parkinson and Warren P. Strobel

Updated June 14, 2023 4:49 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-warned-ukraine-not-to-attack-nord-stream-7777939b?mod=hp_lead_pos4&utm

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency warned the Ukrainian government not to attack the Nord Stream gas pipelines last summer after it obtained detailed information about a Ukrainian plot to destroy a main energy connection between Russia and Europe, officials familiar with the exchange said.

Weeks later, in August, the CIA informed at least seven different NATO allies that Ukraine no longer appeared to be plotting to sabotage the pipelines and that the threat had diminished, European officials said. Those officials now believe Ukraine hadn’t canceled the original plan but had modified it, selecting a new point of departure and tapping an alternative military officer to lead it.

The message, delivered by CIA officials to Ukraine in June, followed a tip the CIA received from the military intelligence service of the Netherlands, these officials said.

The CIA and other allies had questions over whether Ukraine had the capacity to carry out such an attack, which would require placing explosive charges deep beneath the Baltic Sea. Some European governments still struggle to believe that Ukraine, using a single 50-foot yacht, was able to do so. 

Weeks later, on Sept. 26, the pipelines were hit. Ukraine has vehemently denied that it had anything to do with the attack on the pipelines.

The exchange of information began in June, when Dutch military intelligence officials told the CIA that a Ukrainian sabotage team was looking to rent a yacht on the Baltic coastline and use a team of divers to plant explosives along the four pipes of the Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 pipelines.

Initial intelligence suggested that the sabotage team was answering to Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhniy, the commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, according to people familiar with it. This hypothesis was later played down by investigators in at least two European countries who have considered that a different Ukrainian commander might have ultimately helmed the operation. Zaluzhniy’s office didn’t return requests for comment.

The plan was to stage the attack after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s exercise called Baltic Ops that took place in the area above the pipelines and ended on June 17, European intelligence officials said.

The CIA quickly notified a group of allied countries, including Germany, the landing site of the pipelines, via a secure cable sometime in June 2022. Other countries along the Baltic coastline were also warned, though not necessarily in the same detail.

CIA officials asked their counterparts in Kyiv if they were mounting an attack. It couldn’t be determined how the Ukrainians responded.

Nord Stream Explosions: What to Know About the Investigations

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Nord Stream Explosions: What to Know About the Investigations

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Investigators searching for answers behind explosions on the Nord Stream pipelines last year said a rental yacht may be linked to the incident, while some officials have ruled out Russian involvement. WSJ explores what we know so far. Photo composite: Danish Defence Command via Reuters/Uwe Driest

The CIA then received information that Ukraine had called off the original plan, according to a U.S. official.

In late summer, the CIA told Germany and other allied nations that the threat level from such an operation had diminished because the U.S. no longer believed Kyiv would undertake such an attack, said European officials who received or were briefed on that assessment.

The following month, a series of powerful underwater explosions tore apart three of the four main Nord Stream pipes.

Andriy Chernyak, spokesman for Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, denied that Ukraine was involved in the blasts when asked Tuesday about the CIA’s inquiry.

In a recent interview with the German newspaper Bild, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said, “I believe that our military and our intelligence did not do it, and when anyone claims the opposite, I would like them to show us the evidence.”

Maritime territorial claims

Nord Stream 1

Nord Stream 2

Exclusive Economic Zones

FINLAND

RUSSIA

ESTONIA

Sweden

LATVIA

SWEDEN

LITHUANIA

DEN.

Blast sites

Denmark

RUSSIA

POLAND

GERMANY

Sources: S&P Global Commodity Insights (pipelines); European Space Agency (blast sites); Marine Regions (claims, zones)

The revelation appears to show that the U.S. intelligence agency—along with several Western governments—believed for months that the Ukrainian government had planned to sabotage the pipeline, a notion that these governments kept under wraps after the attack itself.

At a meeting with a European counterpart in October, CIA Director William Burns told his counterpart that available evidence didn’t point to Russia. When asked if it was Ukraine, he said, “I hope not,” according to an official present at the meeting.

Western officials, including in the U.S. and Germany, have said they suspect a “pro-Ukrainian group” orchestrated and executed the sabotage. Some details of the CIA’s warning, including disclosing the role of the Dutch military intelligence in tipping off the CIA, were published earlier on Tuesday by a media consortium led by Germany’s Zeit newspaper.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that German investigators were examining evidence that suggested a Ukrainian sabotage team had used Poland, a European Union neighbor and NATO ally, as a hub for the logistics and financing of last year’s attack. Investigators haven’t accused Poland’s government or any Polish individuals of involvement.

Previously, the Journal reported that German investigators believe those responsible rented the Andromeda, a 50-foot-long sailing yacht, using a Warsaw-based travel agency, to plant bombs along the pipelines.

Its passengers returned the boat unwashed, allowing investigators to recover fingerprints, and traces of explosives—as well as DNA that they have tried to match to at least one Ukrainian soldier, through his son, who lives in Germany.

Write to Bojan Pancevski at bojan.pancevski@wsj.com, Drew Hinshaw at drew.hinshaw@wsj.com and Warren P. Strobel at Warren.Strobel@wsj.com

​20. ISLAND BLITZ: A CAMPAIGN ANALYSIS OF A TAIWAN TAKEOVER BY THE PLA

Extensive maps, graphics, and charts at the link: https://cimsec.org/island-blitz-a-campaign-analysis-of-a-taiwan-takeover-by-the-pla/?mc_cid=2204acafd0&mc_eid=70bf478f36

Excerpts:

While U.S. leaders have limited ability to influence the Taiwanese will to fight, as seen in Ukraine, they can indirectly increase it by providing the island nation with the weapons and equipment it needs to conduct an asymmetrical defense in depth. These provisions should include mobile anti-air systems, land and naval mines, as well as the platforms to rapidly emplace them, and additional anti-ship missiles. Critically, the U.S. should also provide Taiwan with additional redundant, survivable, and hardened command and control capabilities to enable the efficacy of their battle networks and directly counter PLA attempts to implement a systems confrontation and destruction approach to the campaign.49 As seen with Starlink in Ukraine, ensuring a reliable command and control ability even in the face of a powerful adversary can prove decisive, and can serve to boost not only operational abilities, but also morale. These capabilities should be furnished either through expedited foreign military sales or the limited use of presidential drawdown authorities. All of these assets will serve to slow the advance of the PLA and thus elongate the decision-making space available to U.S. leaders.

To reduce that decision-making timeline, U.S. political leadership and the interagency must have the discussions and debates now, prior to crisis, about potential U.S. responses to various possible scenarios. These scenarios should include low-end contingencies such as the blockade of Taiwanese-administered islands in the South China Sea to high-end scenarios such as the invasion depicted above. While it is widely reported that the Department of Defense conducts planning and exercises to prepare for these eventualities, it is a dangerous misconception to believe the military can or will operate in isolation during a conflict between the PRC and U.S.

To rectify this, the administration should amend their priorities for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) administered National Exercise Program (NEP) to include preparedness for major state-on-state conflict. The NEP conducts exercises incorporating the interagency, local and state leadership, non-governmental organizations, as well as the private sector and “is the primary national-level mechanism for examining and validating core capabilities across all preparedness mission areas… aligned to the Principals’ Strategic Priorities, which are determined by the Principals Committee of the National Security Council.”50 Per FEMA, the 2021-2022 Principal’s Strategic Priorities for the NEP include such topics as Continuity of Essential Functions, Cybersecurity, Economic Recovery and Resilience, National Security Emergencies and Catastrophic Incidents, and others.51

While all are important topics for the nation’s security, preparation and conduct of war should be added to the list and be the focus of a biennial national level exercise. Though it was recently reported that the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party conducted a wargame on a Taiwan invasion scenario, “the members of Congress took the role of the president’s national-security team” rather than wargaming their own legislative responsibilities.52 Encouraging congress and the interagency to realistically exercise their own expected roles and responsibilities in the lead up to crisis and during conflict will serve to expedite decision-making and will drastically, and perhaps decisively, improve the nation’s ability to respond.

INDO-ASIA-PACIFIC

ISLAND BLITZ: A CAMPAIGN ANALYSIS OF A TAIWAN TAKEOVER BY THE PLA

JUNE 13, 2023 GUEST AUTHOR 1 COMMENT

By Max Stewart

cimsec.org · by Guest Author

By Max Stewart

Introduction

In recent years, there has been an increased and discernable concern surrounding the possibility of an invasion of Taiwan by the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The topic returned to prominence in the wake of the 2018 National Defense Strategy which described a China seeking “Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United States to achieve global preeminence in the future.”1 In the years since, despite the increase in geopolitical tensions, mainstream debate, and the unofficial public statements of U.S. figures, the official policy of the United States remains “strategic ambiguity,” or an unwillingness to firmly commit to the military defense of Taiwan. This is the natural byproduct of the U.S.’s “One China Policy” built upon the Taiwan Relations Act, Three Joint Communiques, and the Six Assurances.2

What this means in practice is that in the event of a PRC attempt at coercive military unification with Taiwan, the Biden Administration would lack the explicit standing legal authorities to intervene that exist with congressionally ratified treaty allies outside the limited War Powers Act. As indications and warnings (I&W) of a possible cross-strait assault emerged, and as the invasion began, a robust and likely time-consuming interagency debate would occur within the White House, Pentagon, and on Capitol Hill.

This campaign analysis seeks to determine how long U.S. decision-makers can realistically have those debates before the PLA seizes Taipei and the window for effective intervention with military force has closed. It does so by employing analytical modeling, informed by historical data, to determine how long the Taiwanese can resist a Chinese invasion absent direct U.S. military intervention given best-case-scenario timelines for the PLA. That is to say in this campaign analysis, tactical and operational chance favors the PLA, and Taiwanese resistance is more similar to that of the brave but desperate 2014 Ukrainian military fighting in the Donbass than the more successful and combat credible 2022 Ukrainian military which halted a Russian invasion. What follows is not meant to be predictive, but rather cautionary, and presents the most stressing timeline for U.S. decision-makers. Any deviations from this scenario would only serve to elongate the timeline for the PLA’s campaign, thereby increasing the decision-making space for U.S. leadership.

Scenario “Road to War”

In the scenario used for this campaign analysis, at the conclusion of the October 2022 20th Party Congress, President Xi orders the PLA to complete the forceful (re)unification with Taiwan in the summer of 2023. PRC and PLA decision-makers view the summer months as the best window to launch a cross-strait invasion. This period encompasses the most favorable tidal conditions in the strait, the highest readiness of its conscript force, and has the ability to partially mask its large-scale force buildup with its normally held annual summer exercises.3,4 However, despite PRC outward messaging as to the normalcy of the summer exercise, certain indicators over time will lead the U.S. Intelligence Community to assess with increasing confidence that an invasion is likely. As reported by John Culver with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, some of these indicators and warnings may include:

• Surging production in munitions.
• Actions to insulate its economy from the impact of sanctions.
• Freezes of foreign assets within China.
• Return of Chinese assets held in foreign states.
• Stockpiling of critical supplies and war-making materials.
• Psychological preparation of the Chinese populace for war.
• Large-scale movement of ships, planes, and armored vehicles.
• General mobilization to include “stop-loss” of conscripts.5

With the combination of factors above, initiated in the wake of the 20th Party Congress, it can be assessed that the U.S. and Taiwan would begin seeing I&W of a possible invasion six months before its execution. For the analysis that follows, the U.S. and Taiwan modify their assessments from “invasion possible” to “invasion likely” one month prior to the cross-strait assault. This is a generous assumption for China, as during the Russian invasion of Ukraine the U.S. had reliable intelligence of a coming invasion nearly five months before its start.6 In this PLA-best-case scenario, a combination of PRC operational security, messaging, misinformation, and military deception enables this surprise.

PRC Concept of Operations and Desired Endstate

The scenario below is broken down into distinct phases roughly corresponding to the anticipated concept of operations envisioned by various PLA scholars.7 The evaluated phases for this analysis will be:

1. Joint Firepower Strike Operation (JFSO), Outlying Island Seizure, and Mine Warfare
2. Strait Crossing and Initial Landing
3. Securing the Lodgment and Building up the Breakout Force
4. Breakout, Advance, and Seizure of Taipei

The desired endstate for the PLA is the complete seizure of Taipei and the inability for Taiwanese forces south of the city to counterattack and liberate the capital. The desired endstate for the PRC is dislocation, dissolution, or capitulation of the Republic of China (ROC) government and successful (re)unification of the island with the mainland before U.S. intervention can occur. While it is conceivable that the PRC may choose to isolate rather than seize the capital city, in this evaluated scenario, the PRC seeks to avoid a prolonged siege and has determined that once they seize Taipei, the credible threat of immediate U.S. intervention will end. In order to achieve this objective, the PRC has placed every emphasis on speed in its invasion, while also opting not to take preemptive action against U.S. bases and stations in the Western Pacific, knowing such an action would likely galvanize the U.S. public and provoke an immediate response.

Joint Firepower Strike Operation, Island Seizures, and Mine Warfare

Campaign Day 0 – Day 15

The PRC campaign against Taiwan will begin with what in PLA doctrine refers to as the JFSO. “According to the PLA textbook Science of Joint Operations, the purpose of the [JFSO] is to intimidate an adversary’s leadership and population, break its will to resist, and force it to abandon or reverse its strategic intentions.”8 These strikes would combine kinetic cruise and ballistic missiles and rocket artillery with non-kinetic cyber and electronic attack to systematically degrade Taiwanese command and control (C2), coastal artillery, ROC naval combatants, air defenses, and destroy much of the ROC Air Force (ROCAF) on the ground. Effective Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD) here would be critical to enable the PLA Air Force (PLAAF) to establish air superiority over the island as well as provide their own strike capabilities in support of the JFSO.9

Because in the scenario the PLA has determined that speed is of the essence to close the window on U.S. intervention, the JFSO assessed will be time-based vice conditions-based, using what some PLA scholars believe to be the desired campaign length of 15 days.10 According to Ian Easton,

“Chinese writings do not at all appear comfortable with the idea of blockading and bombing Taiwan for an extended period of time… the longer China blockaded and bombed Taiwan, the more likely it would be that the United States and other democracies would decide to enter the war. Chinese doctrine calls for short but intense strikes on Taiwan to secure localized control over the airwaves, airspace, and seascapes. Once these were in hand, it is anticipated that the campaign would shift gears to focus on surprise landings.”11

In this evaluation the PLA will commence their cross-strait invasion on Day 15, viewing the risks of incomplete shaping of Taiwanese defense as more acceptable than the risk of providing U.S. decision-makers time to choose intervention and mobilize forces. The following assessment will primarily focus on three areas of the JFSO: Destruction of anti-ship cruise missiles, SEAD, and destruction of the ROCAF. While the PLA’s Strategic Support Force (SSF), in accordance with their Systems Confrontation and Destruction doctrine, will also conduct extensive cyberattacks during this period to “completely destroy the enemy’s command and control network, communication network, and computer systems of weapons and equipment,” these operations are not modeled in this scenario, but do support the overall analysis’s PLA-best-case-scenario timelines by enabling actions in other domains.12

In recent years, Taiwan has significantly increased both its quantity of anti-ship missiles (ASMs) as well as diversified their firing units from ground-based launchers to air- and sea-launched systems. Amongst its ground-based forces, it had roughly 20 Hsiung Feng III missile launchers in 2020, with plans for 70 more in 2023. For this scenario, the ROC fields half of the new launchers by the time of invasion. This brings total ASM launchers to 55. With an average of 490 missiles built a year by 2023, there will be no shortage of munitions to target a PLA invasion fleet.13 Additionally, Taiwan just purchased 100 Harpoon Anti-Ship Cruise Missiles (ASCM) launchers with 400 missiles, bringing the total number of ground-based platforms for the PLA to target up to 155 launchers.14 For this scenario, being a PLA best-case, ASMs on ROC Navy (ROCN) and ROCAF platforms will not be considered. The ROCN’s larger surface combatants, whose locations will be well known to the PLA at the outset of the conflict, are unlikely to survive the initial JFSO and be subject to the PLA’s first mover advantage. As naval battles are often shorter and more decisive than land battles, this will likely present an unrecoverable setback for the ROCN.15

Taiwanese Hsiung Feng III anti-ship missile launchers. (Photo by Simon Liu/Taiwan Presidential Office)

Similarly, as other studies have found, most of the ROCAF will be destroyed either on the ground or in the air after during the bombardment. It is important to note that this can be done with an estimated 60 – 200 Short Range Ballistic Missiles (SRBMs).16 With an assessed SRBM inventory of roughly 1,000 missiles, this estimated expenditure is extreme reasonable even if as much as 50 percent of PLA missiles are kept in reserve for a possible counter-U.S. intervention operation.17 The few remaining ROCAF aircraft, limited to solely those planes operating out of the underground Jiashan Air Base, will likely be loaded for air-to-air combat rather than with air-launched Harpoon missiles.18

The PLA’s SEAD mission to destroy Taiwan’s Integrated Air Defenses (IADs) and hunt for Taiwanese mobile ASCM launchers however will be far more difficult than the strikes against the ROCN and ROCAF. Due to the mobile nature of these launch platforms, the PLA will rely more heavily on aviation-delivered fires rather than their ground-based missile inventory to prosecute these targets. This can be exceedingly difficult. During Desert Storm, despite the U.S. having total air superiority over Iraq and Kuwait, it still had difficulty in identifying, tracking, targeting and destroying mobile forces on ground. In five weeks, the U.S. only managed to degrade 40 percent of Iraqi armor vice almost 95 percent of the largely stationary Iraqi IADs.19, 20 In Serbia by contrast, “NATO aviators sought to neutralize Serbia’s approximately 40 SA-3 and SA-6 area defense SAM launchers but were able to destroy only three launchers and ten air defense radar emitters after several thousand SEAD sorties and the expenditure of more than 1,000 [missiles].”21

Taiwanese mobile anti-ship and air defenses will further be able to utilize the urbanized nature of Taiwan to its advantage, using larger factories, warehouses, and tunnels to conceal themselves while reloading or avoiding detection. With those considerations, it is likely that with a constrained JFSO driven by time vice conditions, the PLA will find a still partially functional IAD network and certainly more than 100 ASM/ASCM launchers operable at the start of their invasion.

During the JFSO, the PRC will set the conditions for the cross-strait invasion by first seizing Taiwan’s outlying islands closest to the Chinese mainland. The PLA will employ Marine brigades already located in the Taiwan Straits Area to quickly seize Kinmen Island.22 This rapid action will not utilize any of the PLA Navy’s (PLAN’s) limited amphibious warfare ships. Rather the PLA Marines will employ their Type 05 amphibious assault vehicles to swim shore-to-shore across the four to nine miles separating Kinmen from mainland China.

Overlay 1: Kinmen Island. (Author graphic via Google Maps)

Similarly, the Matsu Islands, which stretch between 10 and 40 miles from mainland China, will also be seized during the JFSO utilizing airborne brigades supported by a follow-on air assault brigades from the Eastern Theater Command.23 These formations will be of limited utility during the initial assault on Taiwan itself due to the high likelihood of ROC IADs surviving the initial JFSO. However, the PLAAF’s SEAD mission against the smaller Matsu Islands would likely be successful enough to enable the deployment of paratroopers and heliborne forces. Both outlying island seizures can be support by shorter ranged shore-based artillery not otherwise required during the JFSO against Taiwan.

Overlay 2: Matsu Islands. (Author graphic via Google Maps)

Naval mine warfare would also play a critical role in the events leading up to the PLA’s invasion of Taiwan. In this scenario, the ROC government does not begin immediately deploying naval mines into the strait at the determination that invasion is “likely” one month before the campaign begins. Rather, they assess that precipitously closing the Taiwan Strait to commercial maritime traffic via minelaying may incur international condemnation and jeopardize the goodwill they hope to generate amongst the international community. Because of this, only once the ROC government has determined that deterrence has failed and they can observe final PLA preparations that they begin their mining operations. In this scenario, that moment begins 72 hours prior to the start of the JFSO.

Overlay 3: PLAN strait crossing. (Author graphic via Google Maps)

Taiwan has four indigenously build minelaying ships.24 While the mine magazine of each is unknown, these ships are roughly a third of the size of the Finnish Hämeenmaa-class minelayers, each capable of carrying roughly 150 mines.25 As such, for this campaign analysis each Taiwanese minelayer will be capable of carrying 50 mines per sortie. Additionally, Taiwan has four submarines: two Hai Shih-class subs and two Hai Lung-class subs.26 The Hai-Lung subs are roughly the same size as the Type 877 Kilo-class submarines assessed in Caitlin Talmadge’s “Closing Time,” while the Shih-class subs are two thirds of the size of the Kilos.27 With these considerations, the average mine payload for the four submarines will be set at 20 mines each. Each minelaying craft (submarine and surface ship) can conduct one minelaying sortie a day. Tasked with overcoming these explosive obstacles will be the 57 minesweepers of the PLAN. In the modelling conducted below, 50 vessels are available for clearance operations.28

Figure 1: Minelaying and mine clearing abilities of Taiwan vs PRC. Model derived from Talmadge’s “Closing Time.” (Author graphic)

In the scenario, the PLAN begins conducting its mine clearing operations concurrently with the JFSO to allow the invasion force to immediately begin its cross-strait movement on Day 15. The model shows that the 50 minesweepers of the PLAN can clear 80 percent of the mines laid by the Taiwanese within the 15 days of the JFSO, even if they consist of the more difficult influence mines. It is important to note that this model does not depict PLAN minesweeper attrition at the hands of Taiwanese ASM/ASCMs. However, the model is built upon maximalist ends in the clearance of 80 percent of mines. Even with attrition, the PLAN could still clear two Q-routes for the invasion force within the 15 days of the JFSO with as few as 12 remaining minesweeping ships.29

Overlay 4: Taiwanese minefields and PLAN Q routes. (Author graphic via Google Maps)

Figure 2. Click to expand. Minimum required mine clearing abilities for PLAN Q routes. Model derived from Talmadge’s “Closing Time.” (Author graphic)

Furthermore, because in this scenario the PLA has chosen to conduct a massed assault against only a single beachhead, while the Taiwanese will be forced to mine multiple approaches, the area required for clearance will be even smaller than in a larger scale scenario. This demonstrates that naval mine warfare, given Taiwan’s current minelaying capacity, is unlikely to play a critical component in the attrition of amphibs and other maritime lift platforms once the cross-strait invasion begins on Day 15. Furthermore, it shows the PLAN has tremendous flexibility in how it can choose to accomplish its endstate (clear routes for the invasion force) with different courses of action incurring various risk-to-force/risk-to-mission considerations.

Straits Crossing and Initial Landings

Campaign Day 15 – Day 20 (Landings Day 1 – 5)

On Day 15 the PLA initiates the start of its cross-strait invasion of mainland Taiwan. The island has few suitable landing beaches, and the defending Taiwanese forces know them well. Furthermore, each of these beaches has prepared defensive positions, which would be reinforced over the weeks preceding the invasion. With these considerations, in this scenario the PLA has decided that instead of spreading limited amphibious, airborne, and Special Forces capacity across the whole of the island, they will mass their forces on a single beachhead directly adjacent to Taipei at the northernmost Western-facing beaches suitable for amphibious assault.30

Overlay 3: Landing area. (Author graphic via Google Maps)

By focusing their assault on only the northern portion of Taiwan, the PLAN can more easily mass the minesweepers and surface combatants required to protect the AWS and vulnerable Roll-On/Roll-Off (RORO) militarized commercial vessels. Similarly, this plan allows for the rapid buildup of ground combat power in order to avoid a lengthy overland campaign across the entire island. The proximity of the landing beaches to both a major industrial port and large international airport will further expedite the buildup of combat power and supplies, and the removal of casualties, during the invasion. By utilizing speed, intensity, and violence, the PLA hopes to isolate and rapidly seize Taipei and force the dislocation, dissolution, or capitulation of the ROC government.31

Facing this PLA invasion force will be the ROC Army and Marine Corps, comprised of both its active and reserve components. Taiwan’s active ground forces consist of 89,000 troops.32 The bulk of the Taiwanese Army is divided into three Army Corps spread across the northern, central, and southern portions of Taiwan. In the north of the country, the 32,000 soldiers of the 6th Army Corps is under the newly established joint headquarters the Third Combat Theater Command (CTC) and is responsible for the defense of Taipei and its surrounding areas. Their adjacent units are the 20,000 soldiers of the 10th Army Corps in the center of Taiwan under the Fourth CTC and the roughly 20,000 soldiers of the 8th Army Corps in the south under the Fifth CTC.33, 34 For the purposes of this analysis, the two ROC Marine Brigades are spread between the Third CTC co-located with the Army 6th Corps and the Fifth CTC co-located with the Army’s 8th Corps.35 The remaining ROC ground forces are located off mainland-Taiwan defending its various outlying islands.

The active force is furthermore augmented by questionably effective reserve formations. While Taiwan ostensibly has a large reserve force on paper, recent reports have revealed that the readiness, capability, and utility of this force is likely far below what would be required to repel a PLA invasion. As Paul Huang argues:

“They are called up at most once every two years by the Reserve Command to receive refresher training for five to seven days. In practice, such training rarely consists of more than just basic drills and a short practice session at the rifle range… And even if Taiwan somehow manages to muster dozens of fresh reserve infantry brigades before Chinese troops come ashore, Huang said they would be little more than cannon fodder consider how poorly the military has trained them in peacetime and the fact that there is not even a clear plan to fit them into the overall defense strategy… They exist for political, not military, reasons.”36

On paper Taiwan can muster as many as 2.3 million reservists. However, official government sources put the number of combat-ready reservists at closer to 300,000, though it should be noted that these “combat-ready” forces receive only the same limited training described in the quote above. Furthermore, a survey conducted by the Ministry of National Defense found that only 73 percent of Taiwanese would be willing to fight if Taiwan was invaded.37 For the scenario, it is assumed that while all 300,000 capable reservists are equipped and ready to fight, only 73 percent arrive at their muster stations, totaling 219,000 troops. These forces will be spread evenly between the three Army corps, totaling 73,000 additional reservists per corps. Furthermore, for force ratio considerations, and given the low-quality nature of these reserve formations, they are tabulated as .5 per soldier.

This brings the total number of defenders to the following:

Figure 3. Click to expand. Taiwan Ground Forces by CTC. (Author graphic)

To achieve their initial beachhead, the PLAN will deploy its 70 amphibious ships of various types, capable of carrying roughly 20,000 troops in a single lift.38 These ships will depart their respective ports of embarkations, averaging roughly 150 miles from the targeted landing beaches, to aggregate with the minesweepers, cruisers, destroyers, and other surface combatants who will protect them on their 100-mile cross-strait movement. The primary task of these PLAN amphibs will be to land their embarked forces and rapidly return to mainland China to re-embark follow-on waves. Until the PLA secures the Port of Taipei, this will be the only method of building combat power ashore.

Based on the most up-to-date PLA doctrine on amphibious assault, “an individual amphibious combined arms battalion now likely has an expanded landing point width of 1.5 to 2 km, which would make the brigade landing section an approximately 3- to 4-km front.”39 The 20,000-man PLA initial landing force will be comprised of multiple brigades landing abreast. Facing them in the immediate area around the landing beaches will be roughly 20,000 troops from the Third CBT, with the remaining 51,500 troops spread out across the rest of the northern area of responsibility (AOR) to include the megacity of Taipei.

Overlay 4: Initial landings. Unit type, size, and location is approximate. (Author graphic via Google Maps)

As the PLAN amphibs cross the strait, they will succumb to a roughly consistent 10% percent attrition based on the calculations provided in “A Question of Balance” depicting probability of hit based on remaining ASM/ASCMs who will themselves be attrited as their firing positions are revealed.40 PLA personnel casualties for the first wave are similarly depicted as 10 percent, with a sustained 2.2 percent once the fighting transitions inland.41 This results in a model that depicts it will take the PLA five days to meet the requisite force ratio of 3:1 to begin driving inland from their initial beachheads. During those first five days, the initial PLA landing forces will have to contend not only with the static defensive positions along the coast and immediately inland from the landing beaches, but also localized counterattacks from 6th Army Corps and the Marine brigade from the Third CTC. However, in this PLA-favoring scenario, these counterattacks will be severely degraded by the SSF attacks on the Taiwanese command and control networks, as well as massed fires from the mainland, both of which will cause not only the tactical degradation of the defenders, but also create significant psychological effects. Reinforcements from the adjacent Combat Theater Commands will be delayed for reasons that will be explained later in this analysis.

Figure 4. Click to expand. PLAN amphibious landing capacity vs. force attrition. Model derived from Shlapak et al., “A Question of Balance,” Chapter 5. (Author graphic)

Securing the Lodgment and Building up the Breakout Force

Campaign Day 20 – 34 (Landings Day 5 – 19)

After the initial landings occur, the PLA will seek to rapidly expand its initial foothold on the island. This will occur on Day 5 of the invasion. Once the force ratio within the initial landing area reaches a 3:1 in favor of the PLA, the initial assault waves and their immediate reinforcements will push inland. This will allow them to secure key terrain and provide enough secure area to rapidly build up a force capable of breaking out of the initial lodgment and conduct the follow-on ground campaign. In this scenario, the PLA chooses to use the North-South running Highway 1 as their limit of advance tactical control measure and behind which to conduct their buildup. As a part of this operation to secure the lodgment, PLA amphibious forces will conduct a deliberate attack to secure the Port of Taipei located 16 km from the northern-most PLA unit on Day 5. The critical question in this phase will be how long the expected buildup of the breakout force will take given the ongoing attrition of PLA amphibs and other maritime lift vessels.

Overlay 5: Securing the lodgment and Port of Taipei. Unit type, size, and location is approximate. (Author graphic via Google Maps)

The seizure of the Port of Taipei will be a critical enabling action during this phase of the operation, allowing an increased throughput of PLA forces to be unloaded not just via ship-to-shore connectors, but also directly at the industrial dock facilities of the port. To determine how long it will take to secure the port as well as reach the limit of advance at Highway 1, the below chart will be utilized with the following factors. The localized force ratio is 3:1 is in favor of the PLA against Taiwanese forces occupying prepared defenses, with the hilly and urbanized terrain in the lodgment classified as “Slow-Go Terrain.” With these factors considered, it will take the PLA a total of 4 days to seize the port and secure its lodgment along the limit of advance, occurring on Day 9 of the invasion and 24 days after the start of the JFSO.42 It is important to note that this timeline would remain unchanged even if the PLA chose to seize the port with a direct amphibious or airborne assault, as those forces would still require relief from the assault elements landed at the primary landing beaches 16 km away.

Figure 5. Click to expand. Division opposed rates of advance (km/day). Model courtesy of MAGTF Planner’s Reference Manual. (Author graphic)

In this PLA-favoring analysis it is assumed the invasion force can capture the port infrastructure intact and it is not sabotaged by its Taiwanese defenders or extensively damaged in the fighting. The seizure of the port will enable the PRC to begin ferrying additional forces across the strait in commercial vessels pressed into military service. These militarized RORO vessels are a key component of any invasion scenario and critical to the success of the land campaign.43 The PRC has spent years conducting the legal and regulatory requirements to ensure these vessels are available during times of war: “The 2003 Regulations on National Defense Mobilization of Civil Transport Resources, the 2010 National Defense Mobilization Law, and, most recently, the 2016 National Defense Transportation Law… allowed for the creation of National Defense Transportation Support Forces.”44 This provides the PLAN with a massive fleet of maritime transports to augment its own amphib inventory. In 2019, there were 3,987 PRC-flagged ships of 1,000 tons or greater in operation, with more than double that number of vessels being PRC-owned but foreign-flagged.45 Capt. Tom Shugart (ret.) evaluated the utility of this civilian maritime capacity during an invasion scenario and found the following:

“China’s military-associated roll-on/roll-off vessels could deliver more than 2,000,000 square feet of vehicles per day — more than four heavy brigades’ worth of equipment. Over time, this roll-on/roll-off civilian shipping alone could deliver seven full Group Armies with their associated brigades — likely more than 300,000 troops and their vehicles — in about 10 days.”46

Without knowing the exact details of the computations used by Shugart (attrition, port availability, etc…) this campaign analysis will conservatively reduce the author’s original number by 25 percent, resulting in a total of 225,000 additional PLA forces arriving on mainland Taiwan 10 days after the seizure of the port on Day 19 of the landings.

Figure 6. Click to expand. Attrition of ROC and PLA forces during buildup. Model derived from of Posen’s “Measuring the European Conventional Balance.” (Author graphic)

In the evaluated scenario, the PLAN suspends amphib lift operations after landing 8 on Day 13 once the amphib force has sustained over 50 percent attrition. With a sustained 2.2 percent attrition rate amongst both the initial forces and the troops landing at the port and driving forward to secure the lodgment, that results in a total of 262,000 PLA troops ashore on Day 19 of the landings, and 34 days since the start of the JFSO. It should be noted that while the Taoyuan International Airport is seized during the initial days of the landing, the air bridge established by the PLAAF will be utilized primarily for supplies and casualty evacuation. The PLA’s heavy ground forces will be brought to the island almost exclusively by ship to maintain unit integrity and avoid mass casualties in the air as a result of the lingering IAD threat.

The PLA cannot break out from their lodgment and seize Taipei until they amass two forces. The first is the city assault force, hereby referred to as Assault Task Force 1 (ATF 1). This is the force whose primary mission will be the intense urban fighting required to conduct the first megacity seizure operation in the history of warfare. Based on a Third CTC defensive force from 6th Army Corps and Marine brigade in and around the city comprising roughly 51,500 troops, ATF 1 will require a force of 206,000 to achieve the desirable 4:1 odds required for this type of heavy urban combat.

Overlay 6: PLA posture prior to breakout. Unit type, size, and location is approximate. (Author graphic via Google Maps)

The second PLA force to amass prior to the breakout is the blocking force, hereby referred to as Assault Task Force 2 (ATF 2). ATF 2’s mission will be to establish blocking positions south to isolate Taipei and prevent Taiwanese reinforcements from entering the city. There are 116,000 Taiwanese active and reserve ground troops in Fourth and Fifth CTCs, responsible for the middle and southern portions of Taiwan, respectively. In this scenario, given the gravity of the situation, the Taiwanese military command chooses to displace two-thirds of those forces north to attempt to defeat the PLA assault on the capital. The remaining third are ordered to stay in place to prevent further landings around the island. Thus ATF 2 be required to defend against 76,500 Taiwanese soldiers in their counterattack towards Taipei. This requires the PLA to amass a blocking force of only 38,225 to deny the Taiwanese from achieving the 3:1 or better force ratio generally required for offensive operations.

This means the total required PLA breakout force, consisting of both the ATF 1 and ATF 2, will require 244,225 troops and is met by the 262,000 troops available from the above-calculated combination of amphib and commercial sealift deliveries by Day 19 of the landings. The remaining 17,750 PLA troops ashore not otherwise assigned to ATF 1 or ATF 2 will form a reserve capable of surging to either objective as required.

Breakout, Advance, and Seizure of Taipei

Campaign Day 34 – 46 (Landings Day 19 – 31)

Overlay 7: ATF 1 and ATF 2 breakout. Unit type, size, and location is approximate. (Author graphic via Google Maps)

Once the PLA amasses the requisite number of forces, on Day 19 ATF 1 and ATF 2 would conduct their breakout from the initial lodgment. ATF 1 would follow Highway 1, which provides the most direct route towards the outskirts of Taipei. This route consists of a multi-lane highway with rolling hills on either side mixed with urbanized terrain. While the route offers an ostensibly high-speed avenue of approach, this will be partially negated by the hilly and urbanized terrain along the roadways which offers opportunities for easy-to-conceal defensive positions. The clearance of these defenses will slow the overall tempo of ATF 1, operating at the division level, as it fights down Highway 1 and adjacent routes for a total of 7 km to reach its assault positions at the outskirts of Taipei. Given the 4:1 forces ratios available, the prepared Taiwanese defenses, and “Slow-Go Terrain,” the likely rate of advance for ATF 1 will be 5 km a day, requiring a total of two days. Once this force arrives in its assault positions on Day 21, it will have to hold in place until ATF 2 has established its blocking position to the south and sets the conditions for the city’s seizure.

Figure 7. Click to expand. Division opposed rates of advance (km/day). Model courtesy of MAGTF Planner’s Reference Manual. (Author graphic)

Simultaneously with ATF 1’s drive towards Taipei to its assault positions, ATF 2 would break out from the lodgment and push south to assume the blocking positions meant to isolate Taipei and prevent a Taiwanese counterattack from interfering with the seizure of the capital. In this PLA-favoring scenario, this ROC counterattack is delayed by a series of factors to include: the mistaken belief that the Third CTC can defend its own AOR, a fear of additional landings elsewhere on the island, the degradation of Taiwanese command and control networks by the Strategic Support Force, damage to the physical road infrastructure by the JFSO, and the mass exodus of Taipei’s millions of residents fleeing south causing both a humanitarian crisis as well as blocking all major routes north.

ATF 2’s drive will be opposed by the remaining Taiwanese forces originally tasked with defending the landing areas, who have been reduced from 20,000 to 8,500 after 2.2 percent attrition daily for 19 days of combat. This force, facing the 38,225 troops of ATF 2, create a better than 4:1 force ratio in favor of the advancing PLA fighting over similar ground as their counterparts in ATF 1. With these calculations, and with ATF 2 attacking at the division level with multiple brigades operating abreast along multiple routes, it will take ATF 2 just over three days to travel the 16 km to reach their blocking positions.

Overlay 8: PLA postured for Taipei seizure. Unit type, size, and location is approximate. (Author graphic via Google Maps)

Once ATF 2 has successfully established its blocking positions and completed the isolation of Taipei on Day 22, and 37 days after the start of the JFSO, conditions will be set for ATF 1 to seize the city. PLA doctrine uses the rapid 2003 seizure of Baghdad and Fallujah in 2004 as the archetypal rapid urban assaults to emulate on Taiwan. This is especially important as during this final stage of the invasion, “time is of the essence—either to counter U.S. intervention or to minimize the window during which the international community might rally to the cause of the defender.”47 However, it should not be lost that Taipei and its surrounding area, comprised of over 10 million residents, is a megacity roughly twice the size (in terms of population) of Baghdad in 2003.48

Overlay 9: PLA seizure of Taipei. Unit type, size, and location is approximate. (Author graphic via Google Maps)

ATF 1 conducted its breakout from the initial lodgment with 206,000 troops on Day 19, arrived at its assault positions outside Taipei on Day 21, and will begin its assault on the city on Day 22. With 2.2 percent of attrition suffered each day, ATF 1 will have 192,500 troops available to conduct their urban advance and will operate along a multi-division wide frontage. Facing them will be the remains of Third CTC’s ground forces, the 6th Army Corps and Marine brigade, originally numbering 51,500. This force has also been fighting since Day 19 with a 2.2 percent attrition rate, and by the time ATF 1 is ready to conduct its assault, will be comprised of 48,100 personnel. That results in a force ratio of or 4:1 in favor of the PLA.

Taipei, easily described as no-go terrain, consists of prepared defenses and is 15 km in distance across. While it is impossible to know the appetite ROC ground forces will have to subject their own capital to destruction, the PLA will seek every opportunity to achieve maximum speed. Whenever able they will attempt to maneuver to bypass and isolate enemy strongpoints in the dense urban terrain, rather than fight a lengthy siege block-by-block, in an attempt rapidly seize the city, close the window on U.S. intervention, and bringing about the end of the ROC government. With these factors considered, ATF 1 will take nine days to seize the entire city moving with multiple divisions abreast at the pace of their infantry advancing.

Figure 8. Click to expand. Division opposed rates of advance (km/day). Model Courtesy of MAGTF Planner’s Reference Manual. (Author graphic)

Policy Implications

While combat operations may continue on the island, the above modeling shows the practical window for U.S. intervention in a Taiwan invasion prior to the seizure of Taipei and the displacement, dissolution, or capitulation of the ROC government effectively closes 31 days after the initial landings. In the scenario, this is 46 days after the start of the JFSO and 76 days after the “invasion likely” assessment, though both of those times were based on educated assumptions vice data-backed models. As stated, this analysis is based on a best-case-scenario timelines for the PLA, in which the Taiwanese resistance they encounter is more akin to that demonstrated by the beleaguered 2014 version of the Ukrainian military vice its more successful 2022 descendant. U.S. policy in the short run must be focused on ensuring Taiwan’s military is not the overwhelmed, underequipped, and unprepared former, but rather the well-equipped, well trained, and motivated latter.

While U.S. leaders have limited ability to influence the Taiwanese will to fight, as seen in Ukraine, they can indirectly increase it by providing the island nation with the weapons and equipment it needs to conduct an asymmetrical defense in depth. These provisions should include mobile anti-air systems, land and naval mines, as well as the platforms to rapidly emplace them, and additional anti-ship missiles. Critically, the U.S. should also provide Taiwan with additional redundant, survivable, and hardened command and control capabilities to enable the efficacy of their battle networks and directly counter PLA attempts to implement a systems confrontation and destruction approach to the campaign.49 As seen with Starlink in Ukraine, ensuring a reliable command and control ability even in the face of a powerful adversary can prove decisive, and can serve to boost not only operational abilities, but also morale. These capabilities should be furnished either through expedited foreign military sales or the limited use of presidential drawdown authorities. All of these assets will serve to slow the advance of the PLA and thus elongate the decision-making space available to U.S. leaders.

To reduce that decision-making timeline, U.S. political leadership and the interagency must have the discussions and debates now, prior to crisis, about potential U.S. responses to various possible scenarios. These scenarios should include low-end contingencies such as the blockade of Taiwanese-administered islands in the South China Sea to high-end scenarios such as the invasion depicted above. While it is widely reported that the Department of Defense conducts planning and exercises to prepare for these eventualities, it is a dangerous misconception to believe the military can or will operate in isolation during a conflict between the PRC and U.S.

To rectify this, the administration should amend their priorities for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) administered National Exercise Program (NEP) to include preparedness for major state-on-state conflict. The NEP conducts exercises incorporating the interagency, local and state leadership, non-governmental organizations, as well as the private sector and “is the primary national-level mechanism for examining and validating core capabilities across all preparedness mission areas… aligned to the Principals’ Strategic Priorities, which are determined by the Principals Committee of the National Security Council.”50 Per FEMA, the 2021-2022 Principal’s Strategic Priorities for the NEP include such topics as Continuity of Essential Functions, Cybersecurity, Economic Recovery and Resilience, National Security Emergencies and Catastrophic Incidents, and others.51

While all are important topics for the nation’s security, preparation and conduct of war should be added to the list and be the focus of a biennial national level exercise. Though it was recently reported that the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party conducted a wargame on a Taiwan invasion scenario, “the members of Congress took the role of the president’s national-security team” rather than wargaming their own legislative responsibilities.52 Encouraging congress and the interagency to realistically exercise their own expected roles and responsibilities in the lead up to crisis and during conflict will serve to expedite decision-making and will drastically, and perhaps decisively, improve the nation’s ability to respond.

Major Maxwell Stewart, USMC, is a Combat Engineer Officer and Northeast Asia Regional Area Officer. He is currently serving as an Action Officer in Operations Division, Plans, Policies and Operations, Headquarters Marine Corps. He holds a master’s degree in security policy studies from the George Washington University’s Elliot School of International Affairs. These views are presented in a personal capacity and do not necessarily reflect the official views of any U.S. government department or agency.

References

1. “Summary of the National Defense Strategy of the United States.” U.S. Department of Defense. 2018. Pg 2

2. Office of the Secretary of Defense. Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2021 Annual Report to Congress.” United States Department of Defense. November 2021. Pg 123

3. Wood, Piers and Charles Ferguson. “How China Might Invade Taiwan.” Naval War College Review; Volume 54. November 2001.

4. Clay, Marcus, Dennis Blasko, and Roderick Lee. “People Win Wars: A 2022 Reality check on PLA Enlisted Force and Related Matters. War on the Rocks. 12 August 2022. https://warontherocks.com/2022/08/people-win-wars-a-2022-reality-check-on-pla-enlisted-force-and-related-matters/

5. Culver, John. “How We Would Know When China Is Preparing to Invade Taiwan.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 3 October 2022. https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/10/03/how-we-would-know-when-china-is-preparing-to-invade-taiwan-pub-88053

6. Harris, Shane, Karen DeYoung, and Isabelle Khurshudyan. “The Post Examined the Lead-Up to The Ukraine War. Here’s What We Learned.” The Washington Post. 16 August 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/16/ukraine-road-to-war-takeaways/

7. Easton, Ian. “The Chinese Invasion Threat: Taiwan’s Defense and American Strategy in Asia.” CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. 3 October 2017. Ch 4

8. Wuthnow, Joel, Derek Grossman, Philip Saunders, Andrew Scobell, and Andrew Yang. “Crossing the Strait: China’s Military Prepares for War with Taiwan.” National Defense University. Washington, DC, 2022. Pg 118

9. Wuthnow, Grossman, Saunders, Scobell, and Yang. “Crossing the Strait.” Pg 121-122

10. Easton. “The Chinese Invasion Threat.” Ch 4

11. Ibid.

12. “In their Own Worlds: Science of Military Strategy 2020.” China Aerospace Studies Institute. Montgomery, AL. January 2022. Pg 153.

13. 1945. “Taiwan has big Plans for its Missiles if China were to Invade.” Sandboxx. 4 August 2022. https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/taiwan-has-big-plans-for-its-missiles-if-china-were-to-invade/

14. Press Release. “Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office In The United States (Tecro) – Rgm-84l-4 Harpoon Surface Launched Block Ii Missiles.” Defense Security Cooperation Agency, United States Department of Defense. 26 October 2020. https://www.dsca.mil/press-media/major-arms-sales/taipei-economic-and-cultural-representative-office-united-states-17

15. Anderson, Nicholas. “Session 6: Introduction to Maritime Operations.” The Analysis of Military Operations. Fall 2022. Slide 55

16. Shlapak, David, David Orletsky, Toy Reid, Murray Tanner, and Barry Wilson. “A Question of Balance: Political Context and Military Aspects of the China-Taiwan Dispute.” The RAND Corporation. 2009. Pg 51.

17. “2021 Annual Report to Congress.” Pg 163

18. Wuthnow, Grossman, Saunders, Scobell, and Yang. “Crossing the Strait.” Pg. 330

19. Press, Daryl. “The Myth of Air Power in the Persian Gulf War and the Future of Warfare.” International Security Volume 26. Pg 31.

20. Heginbotham, Eric. “The US-China Military Scorecard: Forces, Geography, and the Evolving Balance of Power 1996 – 2017. The RAND Corporation. 2015, Pg 128

21. Ibid. Pg 128

22. “2021 Annual Report to Congress.” Pg 161

23. Ibid.

24. “Taiwan Navy Launches Third and Fourth Indigenous Mine-Laying Ships.” Naval Recognition; Naval News December 2021. 17 December 2021. https://navyrecognition.com/index.php/naval-news/naval-news-archive/2021/december/11132-taiwan-navy-launches-third-and-fourth-indigenous-mine-laying-ship.html

25. “Hämeenmaa Class.” Naval Technology. 14 September 2010. https://www.naval-technology.com/projects/hameenmaaclassminela/

26. “The Military Balance. Chapter Six: Asia. Routledge: Taylor and Francis Group. 14 February 2022. Pg 93

27. Talmadge, Caitlin. “Closing Time: Assessing the Iranian Threat to the Strait of Hormuz.” International Security, Vol 33. Summer 2008. Pg 89 – 96

28. Ibid. Pg 259

29. Talmadge. “Closing Time.” Pg 89 – 96

30. “Taiwan’s Best Landing Sites Are Well Defended.” Bloomberg News. https://www.bloomberg.com/toaster/v2/charts/2a1fb12a801548c0971a9eb0c0e43f52.html?brand=politics&webTheme=light&web=true&hideTitles=true

31. Wuthnow, Grossman, Saunders, Scobell, and Yang. “Crossing the Strait.” Pg. 144

32. Office of the Secretary of Defense. “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2022 Annual Report to Congress.” United States Department of Defense. November 2022. Pg 165

33.“Republic of China Army.” GlobalSecurity.org. https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/taiwan/army.htm

34. Yeo, Mike. “Taiwan Unveils Army Restructure Aimed at Decentralizing Military.” Defense News. 17 May 2021. https://www.defensenews.com/global/asia-pacific/2021/05/17/taiwan-unveils-army-restructure-aimed-at-decentralizing-military/

35. Office of the Secretary of Defense. “Military and Security Developments Involving the PRC.”

36. Huang, Paul. “Taiwan’s Military is a Hollow Shell.” Foreign Policy. 15 February 2020. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/02/15/china-threat-invasion-conscription-taiwans-military-is-a-hollow-shell/

37. Huizhhong, Wu. “Army Reserve Worry Taiwan as China Looms.” Taipei Times. 12 September 2022. https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2022/09/12/2003785178

38. Wuthnow, Grossman, Saunders, Scobell, and Yang. “Crossing the Strait.” Pg. 224 – 230

39. Ibid. Pg. 224 – 230

40. Shlapak, Orletsky, Reid, Tanner, and Barry Wilson. “A Question of Balance.” Pg 116

41. Posen, Barry. “Measuring the European Conventional Balance: Coping with Complexity in Threat Assessment.” International Security, Volume 9. 1984.

42. “MAGTF Planner’s Reference Manual.” MAGTF Staff Training Program Division (MSTPD). Training and Education Command; United States Marine Corps. 11 January 2017.

43. Wuthnow, Grossman, Saunders, Scobell, and Yang. “Crossing the Strait.” Pg. 232

44. Ibid. Pg. 231

45. Ibid.

46. Shugart, Thomas. “Mind the Gap, Part 2: The Crossing-Strait Potential of China’s Civilian Shipping has Grown. War on the Rocks. 12 October 2022. https://warontherocks.com/2022/10/mind-the-gap-part-2-the-cross-strait-potential-of-chinas-civilian-shipping-has-grown/

47. Wuthnow, Grossman, Saunders, Scobell, and Yang. “Crossing the Strait.” Pg. 146

48. Ibid.

49. Work, Robert. “A Joint Warfighting Concept for Systems Warfare.” Centers for New American Security. 17 December 2020. https://www.cnas.org/publications/commentary/a-joint-warfighting-concept-for-systems-warfare

50. “National Exercise Program Base Plan.” Federal Emergency Management Agency. Washington, DC. 22 Oct 2018.

51.“NEP Overview Flyer.” Federal Emergency Management Agency. Washington, DC.

52. Quinn, Jimmy. “What a Taiwan War Game Taught Congress.” National Review. 20 April 2023. https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-a-taiwan-war-game-taught-congress/.

Featured Image: Marines assigned to a brigade of the PLA Navy Marine Corps move forward for assault after disembarking from their amphibious armored vehicle during a beach raid training exercise in the west of south China’s Guangdong Province on August 17, 2019. (eng.chinamil.com.cn/Photo by Yan Jialuo and Yao Guanchen)

cimsec.org · by Guest Author

21. Global Democracy is in Trouble. The U.S. Intelligence Community Can Help

Global Democracy is in Trouble. The U.S. Intelligence Community Can Help

thecipherbrief.com

Alternative Perspectives

June 13th, 2023 by Dr. Debora Pfaff, |

Dr. Debora Pfaff is associate professor of research with the Ann Caracristi Institute at National Intelligence University and co-director of NIU’s Center for Truth, Trust and Transparency. Dr. Pfaff holds a Doctorate in Justice, Law and Criminology from American University, a Master’s degree in Forensic Science from George Washington University, and a Bachelor’s in Political Science from Gettysburg College.

View all articles by Dr. Debora Pfaff

OPINION — In February 2023, the Biden Administration rapidly declassified intelligence related to China’s aerial intelligence collection activities to counter Beijing’s false claims that a Chinese spy balloon, shot down after a public flight across part of the United States, was merely collecting weather data. One year earlier, the administration had also declassified intelligence that unearthed Russia’s deception about its plans to invade Ukraine. These two instances have given democracy a sudden advantage in its escalating narrative dogfight with authoritarianism. Providing a glimmer of hope against the last 16 years of declining civil rights and liberties worldwide, this advantage suggests the United States intelligence community can play a critical role in support of global democracy.

Democracy wins by sharing information; authoritarianism wins by quelling it. In the weeks preceding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, conventional measures of warfare and wisdom suggested that Putin and authoritarianism held the upper hand as Russian forces and capabilities outnumbered Ukraine’s by rather compelling arithmetic. But the United States adopted decidedly unconventional methods of warfare, declassifying and disclosing intelligence about Russia’s movement of Special Forces towards Ukraine’s borders, construction of hospitals stocked with blood supplies, and creation of fake videos as part of a false flag campaign to conceal Russia’s true intentions. The Russian advantage was negated: Putin could no longer invade Ukraine under the pretext that Ukraine was the aggressor, and this meant that other countries— particularly NATO countries — couldn’t ignore Ukraine’s plight.

Judiciously declassifying intelligence can neutralize opponents of democracy by using objective truth to counter fabricated disinformation and to dispute the post-truths that are increasingly associated with authoritarian regimes. Objective truths are facts or realities that exist independently of individual perspectives or beliefs. Post-truth, according to the Oxford dictionary, which chose it as the word of the year in 2016, is “relating to circumstances in which people respond more to feelings and beliefs than to facts.” Scholars such as Cunha, Levy, McIntyre, and Snyder suggest that post-truth fuels authoritarianism, which seeks to erode a shared reality, increasing people’s susceptibility to divisiveness and exploitation. Defending the difference between truth and lies is defending the free will to choose reality over political manipulation.

It is important to remember that humans have always relied much more heavily on emotions for decision-making — as much as 90% of the time. The difference in the post-truth world is the blatant disregard for fact, or any need to subscribe to it. Authoritarian regimes used to care about window-dressing oppressive rule to mimic democracy. Most go through some pretense of holding elections, however rigged, and maintaining institutions, however corrupt. But as distrust in democracy and the manipulation of information enables authoritarianism to thrive, pretending matters less and less.

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The decision to declassify information must balance national security interests, protect sensitive information, and promote transparency and accountability. Such transparency does not include unauthorized disclosures, like that of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning or — most recently — Jack Teixeira, who was arrested on April 13th for posting classified documents on social media website Discord. The IC has historically operated on a “demand” basis, revealing its intelligence secrets reluctantly, reactively, and in the face of pressure by parts of the U.S. government, the media, or the public. But this can change. Our democracy depends not just on an open dialogue between the IC and the American public, but also on the national security enterprise’s willingness to fold in private industry and outside experts as part of the security equation. There may come a time that the IC’s secrecy bias places our nation’s security in jeopardy, and it may come sooner than we’re prepared for.

There’s a 400 million-page backlog of documents waiting to be declassified, and the classification system itself costs more than $18 billion a year. We can avoid adding to that backlog by determining what information shouldn’t be classified in the first place — and there’s plenty of it, much of which already has precedent.

1. Specific details on deception by an authoritarian leader. President Biden’s actions weren’t completely unprecedented: the Kennedy Administration also declassified intelligence information during the Cuban Missile Crisis, showing that Soviet leader Khrushchev had lied about not deploying offensive weapons in Cuba. The U.S. also exposed Soviet lies denying the Chernobyl reactor meltdown.

• Public health concerns. In mid-March 2023, Congress sent a bill to the President requiring the declassification of all information related to COVID-19’s origins “with redactions only as necessary to protect sources and methods.”
• Attacks against the private sector. The IC has a duty to warn individuals about threats of physical harm, but does not have to warn about non-violent threats, such as cyberattacks and intellectual property theft. As a RAND study argues, existing policy can be modified to warn commercial and non-governmental targets of persistent attacks from foreign governments.
• High priority cyber threats. NSA has partnered with over 300 private sector companies to identify cybersecurity threats that can have a nation-wide impact on critical infrastructure.
• Safeguarding election security. In 2022, the FBI and Cybersecurity & Infrastructure and Security Agency (CISA) put out a joint statement pre-bunking the false claim that cyber actors would compromise election infrastructure and cause largescale disruptions to voting.
• Environmental security threats. In the 1990’s, the IC released satellite imagery from the Cold War era that scientists are now using to assess the impact of global warming and climate change.
• Correcting the record. Private industry is swiftly developing capabilities that equal or surpass the IC’s. It won’t be long before they begin releasing their own assessments, which may lack the objectivity rigor the IC has employed for decades, but will also be available immediately and to a much broader audience.

The U.S. Intelligence Community is uniquely situated to defend global democracy against authoritarianism. No other entity, private or otherwise, can lay claim to both its objectivity and analytic depth and rigor. But it doesn’t have to stop there. The precedents above suggest that the American people would be the greatest beneficiaries of a national security system truly built with them in mind.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals.

Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to [email protected] for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspectives and analysis in The Cipher Brief because National Security is Everyone’s Business

​

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